The scientific method. It’s simple. It’s robust. But it’s not magic. Got bias? It’ll spin like Rafael Nadal’s forehand. Got unconscious or subconscious bias? It’ll spin, but you won’t know it. You’ll lie to yourself, like the memory-ravaged protagonist in a Philip K. Dick nightmare.
The elaborate and intricate protocols needed to eliminate bias make science look complicated. Random sampling, blind and double blind study designs, placebos, and control treatments are all accouterments of bias reduction. The scientific method works because the answers to the greatest questions that can be asked come from the nuts-and-bolts, glue-it-together-and-let-it-fly, tee-it-up-and-give-it-a-whack process of experimentation. Science can only answer questions amenable to this kind of manipulative testing. Unamenable (is that a word? The MS Word writing police certainly don’t like it…I kind of do, though) questions are simply, by definition, beyond the realm of science (because science, by definition, is the nuts-and bolts, glue-it etc. method of inquiry). This is why, despite entertaining clashes along the scrum lines of evolution and intelligent design, science and religion are non-overlapping ways of knowing. The scientific answer to the ultimate question of “why are there things in the universe instead of no things, nothing, emptiness?” is going to be something like “because there is an asymmetry in the ninth decimal place between the quantities of matter and antimatter formed in first moments of the Big Bang”. The religious answer is something like “because there is/are a god, God, or gods”. Far from being mutually exclusive, in this case science and religion are simply complementary. If you want to see your god, God or gods, just look over in the ninth decimal place.
The real beauty of the scientific method is in collective enterprise. In the realm it rules—the elucidation of facts of nature—the scientific method is self-correcting and self-adapting. Even if you set it up so your experimental system lets you lie to yourself, the next three people who test your conclusions will root out your bias.
The controversies that spin up in the wake of the ship of science arise because people bring their bias to the broader meaning of the facts. It is a fact that ingesting too much fresh, potable water in a short period of time causes a lethal syndrome of electrolyte imbalance and neural swelling. Whether this makes fresh, potable water a toxicological hazard depends on your perspective. The scientific method makes the facts themselves robust and mostly idiot-proof. It doesn’t protect us from idiotic application and interpretation of said facts.
When I was in school contemplating a major in (among a depressingly long list of other subjects) anthropology, there was a deep systemic bias afflicting the field. It had become fashionable to dismiss reports of aboriginal peoples headhunting, cannibalizing, and ethnic cleansing as western bigotry. In my sophomore cultural anthro class we read pretty much everything published on the Dani people of highland Papua New Guinea. The Dani population was distributed over the landscape in family-linked groups of a few 100s of people per, each group living in a single large longhouse or village of a few longhouses. The borders of the lands associated with each group were sorted out by ritualized spear-shaking dances nominally replacing actual physical combat at the contact points. Unfortunately for the western investigators anticipating gentle, benign behavior from low-tech peoples, it devolved rather frequently that the ritualized dancing degraded into spear-throwing with the inconvenient outcome of the occasional fatality. Once there was a fatality, the balance-of-power between the groups at issue was inflamed until vengeance in the form of a complementary fatality was administered. Sometimes propagating a chain of reprisal killings worthy of highland clan peoples from Scotland to Appalachia.
To us chuckleheaded undergrads the Dani culture was largely defined by a lengthy legacy of murder and counter-murder. To the academics attempting to shoehorn the culture into a model of benign serenity each death was an aberration requiring convoluted explanation usually invoking forecasts of future Dani culture as benign and serene if not quite there by just a smidgen at the present time.
This “friendly natives” dream continues to plague anthropology. A segment of the community has wandered down a dead-end path of political correctness that refuses to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence for massive environmental impacts of Pleistocene peoples. In particular, about the time meaningful numbers of humans hotfooted it…actually, I’m guessing “coldfooted” was more like it…across the Bering Sea, the entire mammalian megafauna of the Americas (except for a couple of cats, the bison and Andean camelids—guanaco, vicuna, llama) went extinct. Coincidence? I’m guessing not. Similarly, as the Caribbean islands were peopled, the weird insular endemic rodents called hutia were eliminated from most places, and the residue were mopped up when Europeans arrived with rats, cats, pigs and dogs in tow. Same fate befell the giant flightless moa birds of New Zealand.
The book “The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II” (2009 by Judith M. Heimann, Mariner Books) is worth a read regarding the sociology of warfare.
The author pieced together a wonderful account of the surviving crew of a B-24 bomber shot down over Borneo. The locals had mostly been Christianized in the preceding decades, and it had been a good ten years or more since the last formal human head taking in the Borneo highlands. But with Yankee airmen in their midst and the prospect of imperial Japanese death and destruction being unleashed in retaliation, the local folks did what local folks do. That is, they killed a dog in ritual fashion, tasted its blood in a ceremonial cup-passing, and pledged to work together to take the heads of as many Japanese military men as necessary. Mind you, the Japanese soldiers, a long way from home and itchy and uncomfortable in the steamy tropical forests, weren’t making it much of a chore for the locals to revive their decapitative trophy collections. Heimann’s research reveals the almost comical tactical tendency of small units of the Japanese army to “split up and meet later”. You know, like the point in the movie where you’re yelling “don’t you guys go to the movies?!?!?” right before the protagonists separate and subsequently buy the farm? 3 or 4 times, the Japanese command sent squads into the Borneo hinterland where they promptly split up and hired local guides who promptly led them right into the almost-but-not-quite-forgot-how-to-use-‘em head collection stations in the jungle. In fact, the transition from headhunting to Sunday-go-to-meetin’ culture had been smoothed by the formal requirements of the headhunting game. The locals were forbidden to take the heads of humans, they could only take the heads of demons who had possessed human bodies. The Japanese rather short-sightedly pre-adapted themselves for head loss by routinely raping, murdering, and otherwise mistreating the locals, who not irrationally started to view the Japanese occupation as inhuman.
Happy endings all around, then, for everyone except the Japanese. Heimann provides a follow-up “what are they doing now” coda on the protagonists of her story (think last scene in Animal House). She didn’t report as to whether or not the Borneo highland people continued headhunting after the war. But it’s possible. I’m guessing that as long as human beings are human beings, grievances will be settled by violence and Long Pig will be at least an occasional menu item. Despite the best efforts of academic sociologists to make like it never happened.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Ancient Lands and the Costs of War
Bob Marley said “…a hungry mob is an angry mob…a hungry man is an angry man…”. Hard to argue with, although recent events in Africa and elsewhere have shown that such anger may be quite impotent. Of course, hunger and famine have been consistent outcomes of warfare, and often applied deliberately as weapons. In general, perturbation and dysfunction of the relationships between humanity and the trophic web are characteristic of armed conflict.
When Moses and his people left Egypt and slogged north out of the Sinai, the horizon was filled with the intimidating mountains of Edom. The lands east of the Jordan River were occupied by a suite of inter-related tribes, Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Aram from south (near present-day Aqaba) to north (modern Syria). The Israelites were unable to make a deal with the Edomites (Judges 11:17 also reports that Moab refused) to allow peaceful passage, triggering the 40 years of wandering dues they had to do pay before settling down.
Anyway. Remember from earlier lessons that intricate and intimate interactive (alliterative enough for you?) relationship between economics and ecologics that together define, control, and constrain the biosphere in this present Age of Man? Well, it devolves that the foundational nature of oikos nomos and oikos logos were among the key issues that cratered the deal being negotiated between the Israelites and the Edomites, which is one of the pivotal moments in human history.
The Book of Numbers 17 reads (in one English translation): “Let us pass, I pray thee, through thy country: we will not pass through the fields, or through the vineyards, neither will we drink of the water of the wells: we will go by the king's high-way, we will not turn to the right hand nor to the left, until we have passed thy borders…”.
The King’s Highway exists and is an important thoroughfare today. It winds mostly along the top of the ridge of the mountains running north/south along the Jordan Valley. For speedy travel from Amman to Aqaba, a modern, high-speed authobahn has been constructed on the flatlands to the east. But the King’s Highway is as viable now as it was in the time of Edom.
I had the privilege once of seeing the Israelite’s view of Edom, when I was working on the UNCC claim for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Our driver took us north from Aqaba along the roadway in the dry southern riverbed, and as soon as you pass the coastal hills, the mountains are in your path.
This is harsh desert country. Life-support natural resource services are hard to come by. Religion, sociology, and politics (none of which I understand in any useful way) aside, it was ecologically and economically a nontrivial matter to consider adding the stress of a large group of refugees and their livestock to the ecosystem, even for a short time.
Millennia later, the refugee scenario played out in fact in the ancient tribal lands. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 triggered the departure of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them foreign workers. They dispersed primarily west and south, many made their way to Jordan where accommodation was made by adding to the infrastructure of the refugee towns already occupied by Palestinians, or where they could hope for sea passage via Aqaba.
The load on the ecosystem was substantive. Nonreplenishing aquifers were tapped, existing aquifers were further depleted. Surface water supplies were overwhelmed. The simple physical passage of large numbers of people played havoc with the desert soils. In many places, the thin layer of organically active and important surface soil was broken, promoting erosion and exposure of the underlying mineral pavement. Livestock moved with some of the refugees, and the flora of remote areas of the desert was decimated.
In Aqaba, the coastal strand and aquatic ecosystems were impacted in complex ways. Physical damage to the dunes and the beach was still obvious when I visited years later. In addition, the fringing reefs had been fragmented and eroded, grated and scraped by small vessels coming and going and the waves generated by larger vessels passing through to the port. The nearshore use of the thousands of people who spent time in the beachfront camps left visible injury on the landward side of the reef structure. Authorities documented a number of petroleum spills, cleanup at the time was minimal.
Public health is intimately linked to ecosystem health, and the refugee crisis in Jordan reflected that as well. Overall, salt levels in drinking water rose, diet quality fell, and infectious disease rates climbed probably as a result of both importation and increased population densities.
Ecosystem change is slow in the desert. It will be a long time before much recovery takes place, and some of the impacts are essentially permanent. Of course, none of this provides useful quantitative insight into the standoff between the Israelites and the northern tribes. Environmental and social conditions were different, population levels much lower, and the kinds and levels of impacts not comparative. But it does suggest that ecosystem stewardship has been a human concern for a long time, that such concerns are knotted up with our social and religious lives, and that armed conflict has been a factor in our environmental relationships for as long as we’ve been a cogent species.
Notes
“A hungry mob…” From the song “Them Belly Full” by Bob Marley. Many versions available. A particularly good one is on the recent album “Live Forever: The Stanley Theater, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 23, 1980” a recording of Marley’s last concert before his death from cancer in 1981.
Israelites and Edomites. Some of the negotiation is reported in the Bible, in the Book of Numbers. A nice [if a bit difficult for a non-believer…or maybe it’s just THIS non-believer… to follow the complexities of different translations, cross-references, and arcane sources] and rather comprehensive analysis of the various available texts of the incident is available here:
http://biblebrowser.com/numbers/20-21.htm
William Henry’s commentary (same site) reads: “…that they would commit no trespass upon any man's property, either in ground or water, that they would not so much as make use of a well without paying for it…”. And Calvin: “…And the children of Israel said unto him, We will go by the high-way; and if I and my cattle drink of thy water, then I will pay for it: I will only (without doing any thing else) go through on my feet.”
Credibility alert: much of what is reported at this site matches information from other sources, but be aware that I have not done any meaningful quality and accuracy check of the content.
Economics and ecologics. To refresh your memories I include an annotated Power Point presentation on this topic with the week’s upload package. This one may very somewhat from the stuff I provided earlier, but the fundamentals are unchanged).
When Moses and his people left Egypt and slogged north out of the Sinai, the horizon was filled with the intimidating mountains of Edom. The lands east of the Jordan River were occupied by a suite of inter-related tribes, Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Aram from south (near present-day Aqaba) to north (modern Syria). The Israelites were unable to make a deal with the Edomites (Judges 11:17 also reports that Moab refused) to allow peaceful passage, triggering the 40 years of wandering dues they had to do pay before settling down.
Anyway. Remember from earlier lessons that intricate and intimate interactive (alliterative enough for you?) relationship between economics and ecologics that together define, control, and constrain the biosphere in this present Age of Man? Well, it devolves that the foundational nature of oikos nomos and oikos logos were among the key issues that cratered the deal being negotiated between the Israelites and the Edomites, which is one of the pivotal moments in human history.
The Book of Numbers 17 reads (in one English translation): “Let us pass, I pray thee, through thy country: we will not pass through the fields, or through the vineyards, neither will we drink of the water of the wells: we will go by the king's high-way, we will not turn to the right hand nor to the left, until we have passed thy borders…”.
The King’s Highway exists and is an important thoroughfare today. It winds mostly along the top of the ridge of the mountains running north/south along the Jordan Valley. For speedy travel from Amman to Aqaba, a modern, high-speed authobahn has been constructed on the flatlands to the east. But the King’s Highway is as viable now as it was in the time of Edom.
I had the privilege once of seeing the Israelite’s view of Edom, when I was working on the UNCC claim for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Our driver took us north from Aqaba along the roadway in the dry southern riverbed, and as soon as you pass the coastal hills, the mountains are in your path.
This is harsh desert country. Life-support natural resource services are hard to come by. Religion, sociology, and politics (none of which I understand in any useful way) aside, it was ecologically and economically a nontrivial matter to consider adding the stress of a large group of refugees and their livestock to the ecosystem, even for a short time.
Millennia later, the refugee scenario played out in fact in the ancient tribal lands. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 triggered the departure of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them foreign workers. They dispersed primarily west and south, many made their way to Jordan where accommodation was made by adding to the infrastructure of the refugee towns already occupied by Palestinians, or where they could hope for sea passage via Aqaba.
The load on the ecosystem was substantive. Nonreplenishing aquifers were tapped, existing aquifers were further depleted. Surface water supplies were overwhelmed. The simple physical passage of large numbers of people played havoc with the desert soils. In many places, the thin layer of organically active and important surface soil was broken, promoting erosion and exposure of the underlying mineral pavement. Livestock moved with some of the refugees, and the flora of remote areas of the desert was decimated.
In Aqaba, the coastal strand and aquatic ecosystems were impacted in complex ways. Physical damage to the dunes and the beach was still obvious when I visited years later. In addition, the fringing reefs had been fragmented and eroded, grated and scraped by small vessels coming and going and the waves generated by larger vessels passing through to the port. The nearshore use of the thousands of people who spent time in the beachfront camps left visible injury on the landward side of the reef structure. Authorities documented a number of petroleum spills, cleanup at the time was minimal.
Public health is intimately linked to ecosystem health, and the refugee crisis in Jordan reflected that as well. Overall, salt levels in drinking water rose, diet quality fell, and infectious disease rates climbed probably as a result of both importation and increased population densities.
Ecosystem change is slow in the desert. It will be a long time before much recovery takes place, and some of the impacts are essentially permanent. Of course, none of this provides useful quantitative insight into the standoff between the Israelites and the northern tribes. Environmental and social conditions were different, population levels much lower, and the kinds and levels of impacts not comparative. But it does suggest that ecosystem stewardship has been a human concern for a long time, that such concerns are knotted up with our social and religious lives, and that armed conflict has been a factor in our environmental relationships for as long as we’ve been a cogent species.
Notes
“A hungry mob…” From the song “Them Belly Full” by Bob Marley. Many versions available. A particularly good one is on the recent album “Live Forever: The Stanley Theater, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 23, 1980” a recording of Marley’s last concert before his death from cancer in 1981.
Israelites and Edomites. Some of the negotiation is reported in the Bible, in the Book of Numbers. A nice [if a bit difficult for a non-believer…or maybe it’s just THIS non-believer… to follow the complexities of different translations, cross-references, and arcane sources] and rather comprehensive analysis of the various available texts of the incident is available here:
http://biblebrowser.com/numbers/20-21.htm
William Henry’s commentary (same site) reads: “…that they would commit no trespass upon any man's property, either in ground or water, that they would not so much as make use of a well without paying for it…”. And Calvin: “…And the children of Israel said unto him, We will go by the high-way; and if I and my cattle drink of thy water, then I will pay for it: I will only (without doing any thing else) go through on my feet.”
Credibility alert: much of what is reported at this site matches information from other sources, but be aware that I have not done any meaningful quality and accuracy check of the content.
Economics and ecologics. To refresh your memories I include an annotated Power Point presentation on this topic with the week’s upload package. This one may very somewhat from the stuff I provided earlier, but the fundamentals are unchanged).
Sunday, April 17, 2011
War vs. War
When I was a kid, “Mad Magazine” was a classic humor paper published, I believe, monthly. The publisher and driving force, a guy reputed to have a fantastic perspective on life, was William M. Gaines, and he made sure each issue was packed with detail. One of the running gags in the margins was a bit called “Spy vs. Spy” where one clandestine operative in white played dirty tricks on another in black, eternally and to no directed avail. A lot like war in general, if you think it through from the picture of the long sweep of history.
The intense, dramatic, devastating environmental consequences of warfare have played out battle-by-battle for as long as human populations have fought. Salted fields and poisoned wells were environmental weapons of the classical Mediterranean world. Add a couple millennia of technology, and you get the landscapes of Antietam, Virginia:
and Ypres, Belgium:
Both are examples of ecosystems whose recovery from battle took decades to make much headway and which continues today as the devastated landscapes continue to fit their new ecological properties into the larger whole.
But, as you of course suspect, the most important, far-reaching, consequential environmental outcomes of armed conflict are at higher scales in the ecological hierarchy. Millions of hectares, thousands of years, and orderly, or at least consistent and predictable, changes in landscapes and seascapes and the biosphere as a whole have altered the ecological trajectory of the entire planet. Basically, we’ve been conducting large-scale, diverse experiments “designed” (if not INTENDED) to reveal ecological patterns and processes. The best possible outcome of this course, from my perspective and that of humankind in general, would be that one or more of you find ways to develop the field of study of armed conflict and the environment, devise and apply novel methodologies, and teach them to a whole new generation of passionately devoted students.
But while I’m daydreaming, let’s consider some important and interesting sources of information for the large-scale and long-term eco outcomes of armed conflict, whether or not such conflicts are legally and politically defined formally as “war”. The following annotated description of a selection of very eclectic relevant documents will, I hope, stimulate your own thinking, reading, and writing. As a society, humanity has ignored the environmental “externalities” of war and war-related stuff. If time’s we changed that. Let’s rock!
Elephants are a “keystone” species. Much of the pattern and process of landscapes with elephants results directly or indirectly from their presence. The prehistory and especially history of China can be read in the records of its native population of Asian elephants. Lands changed hands and uses over millennia, mostly in ways involving armed conflict or insurrection and often via direct and brutal military confrontation. The historical ecology of elephants, and the importance of armed conflict in that history, is presented impressively and creatively in “The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China” by Mark Elvin, Yale University Press 2004. A unique and wonderful book.
As the evolution of higher primates began to be dominated by intellectual (vs. purely biological) parameters, human and non-human ape species interacted faster, harder, and more frequently. The long-term changes in primate (and human) culture and cultural change altered—indeed, controlled—the biosphere for a long time. The biosphere we have to work with today is the outcome of these (often, in fact, generally) hostile social encounters. “The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal” by Jared Diamond (Harper Perennial 1992) lays it out for you. It is a story that you have not heard presented in this fashion. It will change your thinking and your vision of humanity vs. the environment.
How and why human populations came into conflict at a critical moment in evolution is documented beautifully by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending in “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution”, Basic Books, 2009. This book is about how human beings changed each other biologically and socially over millennia of conflict. However, if you switch your perspective when you read it and think about it from the perspective of the ecosystem (vs. the humans what are nominally its subject) you will find many insights regarding and foundations resulting from the impacts of human societal conflict, you will gain valuable insights that “straight” reading of it would not yield.
Little needs to be said regarding “Gun, Germs and Steel: The State of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond, W.W. Norton & Co. 1997. This is an important—essential—exposition of the the social and ecological outcomes of the meeting—mostly via conflict, almost all involving weapons—of human societies across the biosphere. One of the most important books ever written. And, as a bonus, well-written and readable also!
A classic in the field, covering the most critically important and drastically consequential outcomes of armed conflict of societies at large scales is documented in “The Columbian Exchange—Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.” This is an important and innovative analysis. I strongly suggest that you read it in as much detail as you can muster.
This list could go on for pages and pages and pages. Just to keep you going in your start through this literature, I also recommend:
• “Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World” by Russell Meigs, Oxford University Press 1992 (there are newer editions available)
• “The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its People” by Tim Flannery, Atlantic Monthly Press 2001
• “Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America” by Paul S. Martin, University of California Press 2005
• “Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie” by Richard Manning, Viking 1995
• “America’s Ancient Forests: From the Ice Age to the Age of Discovery” by Thomas M. Bonnicksen, John Wiley & Sons, 2000
• “The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus”, by David Abulafia, Yale University Press 2008
• “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” by Charles L. Redman, University of Arizona Press 1999
• “Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem—and the Threats that Now Put it at Risk”, by Michael Novacek, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008.
Notes
Source for Ypres image: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1306/4688644558_096568da91.jpg
Source for Antietam image:
http://niahd.wm.edu/attachments/34072.jpg
The intense, dramatic, devastating environmental consequences of warfare have played out battle-by-battle for as long as human populations have fought. Salted fields and poisoned wells were environmental weapons of the classical Mediterranean world. Add a couple millennia of technology, and you get the landscapes of Antietam, Virginia:
and Ypres, Belgium:
Both are examples of ecosystems whose recovery from battle took decades to make much headway and which continues today as the devastated landscapes continue to fit their new ecological properties into the larger whole.
But, as you of course suspect, the most important, far-reaching, consequential environmental outcomes of armed conflict are at higher scales in the ecological hierarchy. Millions of hectares, thousands of years, and orderly, or at least consistent and predictable, changes in landscapes and seascapes and the biosphere as a whole have altered the ecological trajectory of the entire planet. Basically, we’ve been conducting large-scale, diverse experiments “designed” (if not INTENDED) to reveal ecological patterns and processes. The best possible outcome of this course, from my perspective and that of humankind in general, would be that one or more of you find ways to develop the field of study of armed conflict and the environment, devise and apply novel methodologies, and teach them to a whole new generation of passionately devoted students.
But while I’m daydreaming, let’s consider some important and interesting sources of information for the large-scale and long-term eco outcomes of armed conflict, whether or not such conflicts are legally and politically defined formally as “war”. The following annotated description of a selection of very eclectic relevant documents will, I hope, stimulate your own thinking, reading, and writing. As a society, humanity has ignored the environmental “externalities” of war and war-related stuff. If time’s we changed that. Let’s rock!
Elephants are a “keystone” species. Much of the pattern and process of landscapes with elephants results directly or indirectly from their presence. The prehistory and especially history of China can be read in the records of its native population of Asian elephants. Lands changed hands and uses over millennia, mostly in ways involving armed conflict or insurrection and often via direct and brutal military confrontation. The historical ecology of elephants, and the importance of armed conflict in that history, is presented impressively and creatively in “The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China” by Mark Elvin, Yale University Press 2004. A unique and wonderful book.
As the evolution of higher primates began to be dominated by intellectual (vs. purely biological) parameters, human and non-human ape species interacted faster, harder, and more frequently. The long-term changes in primate (and human) culture and cultural change altered—indeed, controlled—the biosphere for a long time. The biosphere we have to work with today is the outcome of these (often, in fact, generally) hostile social encounters. “The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal” by Jared Diamond (Harper Perennial 1992) lays it out for you. It is a story that you have not heard presented in this fashion. It will change your thinking and your vision of humanity vs. the environment.
How and why human populations came into conflict at a critical moment in evolution is documented beautifully by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending in “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution”, Basic Books, 2009. This book is about how human beings changed each other biologically and socially over millennia of conflict. However, if you switch your perspective when you read it and think about it from the perspective of the ecosystem (vs. the humans what are nominally its subject) you will find many insights regarding and foundations resulting from the impacts of human societal conflict, you will gain valuable insights that “straight” reading of it would not yield.
Little needs to be said regarding “Gun, Germs and Steel: The State of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond, W.W. Norton & Co. 1997. This is an important—essential—exposition of the the social and ecological outcomes of the meeting—mostly via conflict, almost all involving weapons—of human societies across the biosphere. One of the most important books ever written. And, as a bonus, well-written and readable also!
A classic in the field, covering the most critically important and drastically consequential outcomes of armed conflict of societies at large scales is documented in “The Columbian Exchange—Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.” This is an important and innovative analysis. I strongly suggest that you read it in as much detail as you can muster.
This list could go on for pages and pages and pages. Just to keep you going in your start through this literature, I also recommend:
• “Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World” by Russell Meigs, Oxford University Press 1992 (there are newer editions available)
• “The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its People” by Tim Flannery, Atlantic Monthly Press 2001
• “Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America” by Paul S. Martin, University of California Press 2005
• “Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie” by Richard Manning, Viking 1995
• “America’s Ancient Forests: From the Ice Age to the Age of Discovery” by Thomas M. Bonnicksen, John Wiley & Sons, 2000
• “The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus”, by David Abulafia, Yale University Press 2008
• “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” by Charles L. Redman, University of Arizona Press 1999
• “Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem—and the Threats that Now Put it at Risk”, by Michael Novacek, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008.
Notes
Source for Ypres image: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1306/4688644558_096568da91.jpg
Source for Antietam image:
http://niahd.wm.edu/attachments/34072.jpg
Friday, April 8, 2011
Freebie for CV Building
Following is the lesson from this week's class in Armed Conflict and the Environment. I will make the same offer to you, my enormous audience of global faithful weblog followers, that I made to the class. If you guys do the two-page exercise described here, I'll get you credited as a contributor to the book. So rock the hell on, all!!!!!!!!!!!!
A Field Guide to the Week’s Lesson
Systems: Past and Present. And…?
A “system” is “a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole” [1]. If you say it fast and don’t think deep, it sounds compact and profound. Not much to argue with. In fact, it sounds a whole hell of a lot like “a”, if not “the”, truth.
From my perspective, the concept is, for starters, something of a tautology. If things interact (and often we don’t define “interact” in any useful or applicable way), they’re in our system. Vice versa, they’re not. I’m not sure we’ve learned a whole hell of a lot in getting to that point. Extraplanetary String Theory physicists and the hair-wired biota of the planet from the movie Avatar are all are cranking away in the same academic field of investigation.
However. The fact that I can manufacture arcane intellectual impediments is, to me anyway, more of an opportunity than anything else. Because it suggests we have our hands on a tool that we can use to shovel more stuff in more directions than come immediately to mind.
Let’s start with an obvious one. In the first 50 years of the twentieth century, we developed the technology to identify, compile, and apply the vast amounts of energy otherwise minding its own business at the submolecular borders of space and time in the physical universe. On December 2, 1942, in the chilly concrete hallway under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi sat with a slide rule (a SLIDE RULE!) and told the physicists how to adjust the cadmium rods to keep the pile of carbon and uranium from slipping into a neutron-generating heap of radioactive goo. When the pile achieved critical mass and was doubling neutron production every two minutes, they shut it down.
Now turn your mind back to earlier lessons where we discussed industrially important chemicals like DDT and PCBs. We needed these, lots of these, to do everything from keeping planes in the air to malaria out of mosquito salivary glands. And some of these chemicals—DDT is a good example—are tractably friendly. We can extract them from the environment, purify them, quantify them, and so figure out what the hell they were doing in the interim.
But not all chemicals are like that. Many of the most important chemicals of life itself aren’t that easy. They exist in tiny amounts for tiny moments of time, and they are so enormously complicated that it is the work of more than one chemists career to even figure out what the hell they are. And then they hand the whole file to biologists and toxicologists to now have to put it in the context of the zillions of other chemicals kicking around in cells, organisms, the ecosphere.
In other words, if you give me just a century to play with, here’s what happened:
• Charles Darwin figured out that chemicals and climates mattered to life and could be used to categorize life in meaningful ways
• Albert Einstein realized that chemical matter and climate energy were not different things
• Taxonomists realized that how “meaningful” something was depended on which of Charles Darwin’s categories you put things in and why you put them there
• Eugene P. and Howard T. Odum realized that not only COULD we track chemicals from organism to organism and environment to environment, but that we absolutely needed to if we were to survive as a species [for those of you I can already hear complaining about Rachel Carson not getting a bullet here, I offer in my defense a) Carson had very specific issues in mind and without the Odums was unlikely to go anywhere, and b) this is MY list. See the last paragraph of this essay and the Field Guide to the week’s lesson for how you are going to fix that!]
You can make a rational case for systems analysis—the ability to “do” systems analysis, to solve problems via systems analytic methodologies—as the bright line separating humanity from…well, from everything else. On the other hand, it is clear from the essay above that what we define as a “system” and how we treat its components—and, in fact, why we decided we needed to conceptualize a system in the first place—means this “tool” can yield a loose cannon—oh, say, a high megetonnage fusion warhead—as readily as an eternally benign source of technological power.
OK. Those of you who are willing are about to become part of an experiment and contributing authors to a publication. The exercise played out in the essay above is one I have used in different ways for many different purposes.
This week, I propose to give you NO reading assignments or suggestions. I would like you to take one sheet of paper and title it “Nanotechnology Systems”. On that paper, now start listing ideas, concepts, things, materials, thoughts, anything and everything that comes to your mind regarding “nanotechnology”. Please then for each item on your list which is now a series of one- or-two sentence bullet points regarding each nanotechnology “thing”, write the word “good” or “bad”, then describe in as few words as possible WHY that particular nanotechnology “thing” is “good” or “bad”. Do no be afraid to include the same concept on both the “good” and the “bad” list.
Now take a second sheet of paper. I must warn you that at this point when I have done this as both a classroom and an online exercise, this is the precise moment when catch hell from students. Because what I want you to do now is title your second sheet of paper “Nanotechnology Systems and Armed Conflict”. And then repeat the precise exercise you just completed with sheet one. At this point the students rise up as one to complain about redundancy, stupidity (I encourage the most open and informal communication in my classes) and time wastancy (which, do not not bother to look it up, is not a word).
But I make them go through this exercise with as much intellectual honesty and rigor as I can get them to muster at that point (their hormones tend to be a little out of balance about now). And do you know what? The lists are never the same. And we all—the students as well as me—learn a lot from this exercise.
If you will turn your sheets in to Anina by the middle of next week, I’ll go through them and provide you with detailed comments back and we can discuss. If it works out and you guys like the outcome, I’d like to use the exercise as a chapter in the book I’m working on which will hopefully be useful for future editions of this class. If so, you will each be credited as a contributor and we’ll discuss it in detail. Thanks, and have fun!
Anybody out there with a little time and a little interest, surf on over to
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
Thanks!
Notes
[1] American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin Company.
A Field Guide to the Week’s Lesson
Systems: Past and Present. And…?
A “system” is “a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole” [1]. If you say it fast and don’t think deep, it sounds compact and profound. Not much to argue with. In fact, it sounds a whole hell of a lot like “a”, if not “the”, truth.
From my perspective, the concept is, for starters, something of a tautology. If things interact (and often we don’t define “interact” in any useful or applicable way), they’re in our system. Vice versa, they’re not. I’m not sure we’ve learned a whole hell of a lot in getting to that point. Extraplanetary String Theory physicists and the hair-wired biota of the planet from the movie Avatar are all are cranking away in the same academic field of investigation.
However. The fact that I can manufacture arcane intellectual impediments is, to me anyway, more of an opportunity than anything else. Because it suggests we have our hands on a tool that we can use to shovel more stuff in more directions than come immediately to mind.
Let’s start with an obvious one. In the first 50 years of the twentieth century, we developed the technology to identify, compile, and apply the vast amounts of energy otherwise minding its own business at the submolecular borders of space and time in the physical universe. On December 2, 1942, in the chilly concrete hallway under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi sat with a slide rule (a SLIDE RULE!) and told the physicists how to adjust the cadmium rods to keep the pile of carbon and uranium from slipping into a neutron-generating heap of radioactive goo. When the pile achieved critical mass and was doubling neutron production every two minutes, they shut it down.
Now turn your mind back to earlier lessons where we discussed industrially important chemicals like DDT and PCBs. We needed these, lots of these, to do everything from keeping planes in the air to malaria out of mosquito salivary glands. And some of these chemicals—DDT is a good example—are tractably friendly. We can extract them from the environment, purify them, quantify them, and so figure out what the hell they were doing in the interim.
But not all chemicals are like that. Many of the most important chemicals of life itself aren’t that easy. They exist in tiny amounts for tiny moments of time, and they are so enormously complicated that it is the work of more than one chemists career to even figure out what the hell they are. And then they hand the whole file to biologists and toxicologists to now have to put it in the context of the zillions of other chemicals kicking around in cells, organisms, the ecosphere.
In other words, if you give me just a century to play with, here’s what happened:
• Charles Darwin figured out that chemicals and climates mattered to life and could be used to categorize life in meaningful ways
• Albert Einstein realized that chemical matter and climate energy were not different things
• Taxonomists realized that how “meaningful” something was depended on which of Charles Darwin’s categories you put things in and why you put them there
• Eugene P. and Howard T. Odum realized that not only COULD we track chemicals from organism to organism and environment to environment, but that we absolutely needed to if we were to survive as a species [for those of you I can already hear complaining about Rachel Carson not getting a bullet here, I offer in my defense a) Carson had very specific issues in mind and without the Odums was unlikely to go anywhere, and b) this is MY list. See the last paragraph of this essay and the Field Guide to the week’s lesson for how you are going to fix that!]
You can make a rational case for systems analysis—the ability to “do” systems analysis, to solve problems via systems analytic methodologies—as the bright line separating humanity from…well, from everything else. On the other hand, it is clear from the essay above that what we define as a “system” and how we treat its components—and, in fact, why we decided we needed to conceptualize a system in the first place—means this “tool” can yield a loose cannon—oh, say, a high megetonnage fusion warhead—as readily as an eternally benign source of technological power.
OK. Those of you who are willing are about to become part of an experiment and contributing authors to a publication. The exercise played out in the essay above is one I have used in different ways for many different purposes.
This week, I propose to give you NO reading assignments or suggestions. I would like you to take one sheet of paper and title it “Nanotechnology Systems”. On that paper, now start listing ideas, concepts, things, materials, thoughts, anything and everything that comes to your mind regarding “nanotechnology”. Please then for each item on your list which is now a series of one- or-two sentence bullet points regarding each nanotechnology “thing”, write the word “good” or “bad”, then describe in as few words as possible WHY that particular nanotechnology “thing” is “good” or “bad”. Do no be afraid to include the same concept on both the “good” and the “bad” list.
Now take a second sheet of paper. I must warn you that at this point when I have done this as both a classroom and an online exercise, this is the precise moment when catch hell from students. Because what I want you to do now is title your second sheet of paper “Nanotechnology Systems and Armed Conflict”. And then repeat the precise exercise you just completed with sheet one. At this point the students rise up as one to complain about redundancy, stupidity (I encourage the most open and informal communication in my classes) and time wastancy (which, do not not bother to look it up, is not a word).
But I make them go through this exercise with as much intellectual honesty and rigor as I can get them to muster at that point (their hormones tend to be a little out of balance about now). And do you know what? The lists are never the same. And we all—the students as well as me—learn a lot from this exercise.
If you will turn your sheets in to Anina by the middle of next week, I’ll go through them and provide you with detailed comments back and we can discuss. If it works out and you guys like the outcome, I’d like to use the exercise as a chapter in the book I’m working on which will hopefully be useful for future editions of this class. If so, you will each be credited as a contributor and we’ll discuss it in detail. Thanks, and have fun!
Anybody out there with a little time and a little interest, surf on over to
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
Thanks!
Notes
[1] American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin Company.
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