It's been a year and a half since my last post (a portion of which was published in Orion magazine -- how 'bout that?) and tonight I'm surfacing just after election 2012. So the story that I could perhaps stick to could be that I've simply taken time off from blogging during this god-awful election season; and this god-awful election season really is about a year and a half in length. So I'd better write quick before the next one starts -- if my goal is indeed to write about politics but in a manner completely separate from the two-party circus.
Truthfully, though, I've been prompted to write because I've been thinking about memes. Sorry, the truth often isn't as funny or as interesting as the stories well tell ourselves.
I've been thinking about memes for the last week or so, after seeing a post on facebook by a friend of a friend. The friend posted something about hurricane Sandy and possible links to climate change, and the friend of this friend commented on it by saying something like "it's pretty arrogant to believe that we humans can cause these kinds of storms."
On one level I can't resist the temptation to call bullshit when I see it -- though I did resist adding my comments to the thread. So I've been prompted to write simply to respond to this nonsense -- believing that it is arrogant to suspect that human-induced climate change could contribute to stronger storms. I suppose it is arrogant if one has absolutely no idea that climatologists around the world have been warning for the last couple of decades that yes, we humans are altering the atmosphere in a way that will probably lead to warming, and yes, this trend could likely contribute to more frequent and intense storms, and if one has no idea that the vast majority of scientists who study the weather all agree with this warning, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has urged global action to minimize these effects, and most every government on the planet has made some kind of explicit commitment to at least try to curtail emissions that could contribute to global warming. Yes, if one has no idea about any of these things, then I suppose it would be rather arrogant to simply assume that because there's been a few more nasty storms this year than most that we humans must be behind them in some way, shape, or form. As if nature is somehow incapable of whipping up a few nasty storms on her own.
But what if one does know about these things? What if we actually pay attention to what the scientific method is revealing? Is that arrogant? Or is it arrogant to choose to ignore the science? Is it arrogant to know that human civilization is annually pumping some 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the global concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has been steadily increasing at a perhaps unprecedented rate and still believe that our emissions can't possibly have any effect on the actions of the very atmosphere we're demonstrably changing?
Arrogance is a complex thing. It is arrogance, after all, that got us into this mess -- the arrogance that just because there's coal and oil and other burnable substances in the ground and we have technology to extract them then we should do so with utmost haste and assume there will be no negative consequences for this -- ever. And when some people are faced with at least the prospect that our arrogance has caught up with us, then they respond to this by claiming that it is arrogant to stop being arrogant.
Are people really that dumb? Or delusional? This reminds me of Jungian psychology, on a political/social plane. We're pointing to our own shadows as the cause of our distress while remaining totally oblivious that it is our shadows of which we are afraid. What we fear most is ourselves.
My reaction to this facebook comment also stirred something on another level, which is why I've been thinking about memes. I know that the subject comment was not the first time I've heard or read somewhere somebody saying something about it being arrogant to believe that anthropogenic climate change is a real danger. I'm quite sure I've heard it before, several times. Yet I don't know where that thought originated. I'm willing to bet that some Rush Limbaugh-like character made some brief reference to it one day awhile back, without actually putting forth a coherent argument in favor of it (since no possible coherent argument could be made in defense of something so silly -- even by Rush Limbaugh.) But a brief mention of an idea like this -- an idea that is logically ludicrous but carries a powerful emotional wallop -- just might be enough to make it stick in many people's minds. And then they start repeating it, perhaps without even remembering where they first heard it, on facebook and in conversation etc, etc. Next thing you know, we have a meme, and we have people everywhere believing something so utterly senseless yet so powerful. Nobody wants to be arrogant, even though arrogance is a defining characteristic of post-industrial human beings. And since nobody wants to be (consciously) arrogant, we slap and quiet ourselves next time we worry out loud that our actions have consequences that we -- or our ancestors -- did not foresee.
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Friday, November 9, 2012
Friday, June 18, 2010
Seventeen Million Honeybees
The ecologist and the philosopher meet at the question: What is 'natural'? And upon considering this question, also come to the question: Is 'natural' always good, everything else bad? After all, human beings are a part and product of nature, so doesn't it follow that everything human beings create is inherently natural? And if the ecologist and philosopher agree that 'natural' is good, then doesn't that mean that Ayn Rand was right after all, that all human activity, including those that don't seem to be virtuous on the surface, are, in fact, good? Maybe we should all quit complaining and simply celebrate all we have achieved and renew our efforts to do more.
I read in Acres USA of an "accident" on Interstate 35 in Minnesota in May which involved a semitrailer. This particular accident might not have made any news nor ever come into my consciousness had it not been for the rather unique cargo of this truck. It contained about seven thousand honeybee hives and an estimated seventeen million honeybees. That's right -- seventeen million bees on one truck. Apparently, the bees were rather pissed at the whole situation, and began swarming around the scene of the accident, which I imagine made for less than optimal working conditions for the responders who's job it was to clean up. So the bees were doused with fire hoses in an effort to scatter them away from what was left of their homes.
Seventeen million bees on one truck. Yes, that is a rather unique cargo and challenge for an accident, but neither the cargo itself nor the accident are unique. Truth is, there are literally thousands of "accidents" on our highways every year, many involving trucks carrying various loads of "natural" (i.e. man-made and glorious) cargo. And the presence of some seventeen million honeybees on one truck is, unfortunately, not an unheard-of load for one of the thousands of fifty-three foot long boxes that careen across this country at sixty-some miles an hour every day. And while it is not unheard-of, and while I am not in this precise moment going to attempt to define what is natural and what is not, I am going to go out on a limb and say that containing seventeen million honeybees in one box and sending that box hundreds or thousands of miles across the country on highways crowded with lots of other metal boxes of various sizes all going this way and that at sixty-plus miles per hour is definitely not natural. At least not to the bees.
Bees are, naturally, territorial creatures -- they establish themselves in a hive and workers go out and about to what is probably to them distant lands, searching for nectar to bring back home. And in the process of doing this, these "distant lands" become part of the their territory. In this sense, they are not too different from us humans, in an evolutionary sense. That can pretty much describe how humanity has lived for most of our several million years of existence, until perhaps the last two or three hundred. Somewhere along the line, we abandoned our "natural" way of being for something different. One consequence of our adapting this new, non-natural way of living was that on one day last month seventeen million honeybees were suddenly and "accidentally" shaken from their homes in a completely foreign place and then sprayed with water until they "dispersed." Another consequence is that every year millions upon millions of bees are transported thousands of miles away from their own territories to perform a service for us humans, each time having to reacquaint themselves with their new environments. Scientists aren't sure, but many suspect that this is a rather stressful experience for bees, and living with this kind of stress may be one reason that so many bee colonies are disappearing.
I write this reflection so that we may consider one important indicator in attempting to answer those questions about what is natural and what is good. That indicator is scale. Humans have invented a world in which everything, they believe, must grow, must become big; and have at the same time lost some of our capacity to appreciate how nature's scales are often different than our own. Yes, we know there are insect colonies in nature that number into the millions of creatures, and we know that there are animals that routinely migrate thousands of miles. But the scale of our honeybee commerce is anything but natural, and may ultimately cause the collapse of a part of nature on which we depend. When we ask what is natural, and by implication at least a hint of what is good, we should consider scale. We should seek to live and tinker within the bounds of what is natural, that is, what was common before and outside the onslaught of human industrialization.
I read in Acres USA of an "accident" on Interstate 35 in Minnesota in May which involved a semitrailer. This particular accident might not have made any news nor ever come into my consciousness had it not been for the rather unique cargo of this truck. It contained about seven thousand honeybee hives and an estimated seventeen million honeybees. That's right -- seventeen million bees on one truck. Apparently, the bees were rather pissed at the whole situation, and began swarming around the scene of the accident, which I imagine made for less than optimal working conditions for the responders who's job it was to clean up. So the bees were doused with fire hoses in an effort to scatter them away from what was left of their homes.
Seventeen million bees on one truck. Yes, that is a rather unique cargo and challenge for an accident, but neither the cargo itself nor the accident are unique. Truth is, there are literally thousands of "accidents" on our highways every year, many involving trucks carrying various loads of "natural" (i.e. man-made and glorious) cargo. And the presence of some seventeen million honeybees on one truck is, unfortunately, not an unheard-of load for one of the thousands of fifty-three foot long boxes that careen across this country at sixty-some miles an hour every day. And while it is not unheard-of, and while I am not in this precise moment going to attempt to define what is natural and what is not, I am going to go out on a limb and say that containing seventeen million honeybees in one box and sending that box hundreds or thousands of miles across the country on highways crowded with lots of other metal boxes of various sizes all going this way and that at sixty-plus miles per hour is definitely not natural. At least not to the bees.
Bees are, naturally, territorial creatures -- they establish themselves in a hive and workers go out and about to what is probably to them distant lands, searching for nectar to bring back home. And in the process of doing this, these "distant lands" become part of the their territory. In this sense, they are not too different from us humans, in an evolutionary sense. That can pretty much describe how humanity has lived for most of our several million years of existence, until perhaps the last two or three hundred. Somewhere along the line, we abandoned our "natural" way of being for something different. One consequence of our adapting this new, non-natural way of living was that on one day last month seventeen million honeybees were suddenly and "accidentally" shaken from their homes in a completely foreign place and then sprayed with water until they "dispersed." Another consequence is that every year millions upon millions of bees are transported thousands of miles away from their own territories to perform a service for us humans, each time having to reacquaint themselves with their new environments. Scientists aren't sure, but many suspect that this is a rather stressful experience for bees, and living with this kind of stress may be one reason that so many bee colonies are disappearing.
I write this reflection so that we may consider one important indicator in attempting to answer those questions about what is natural and what is good. That indicator is scale. Humans have invented a world in which everything, they believe, must grow, must become big; and have at the same time lost some of our capacity to appreciate how nature's scales are often different than our own. Yes, we know there are insect colonies in nature that number into the millions of creatures, and we know that there are animals that routinely migrate thousands of miles. But the scale of our honeybee commerce is anything but natural, and may ultimately cause the collapse of a part of nature on which we depend. When we ask what is natural, and by implication at least a hint of what is good, we should consider scale. We should seek to live and tinker within the bounds of what is natural, that is, what was common before and outside the onslaught of human industrialization.
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