Discuss: Snap into Action for the Climate

Hi Bob,

Good to hear from you. Thanks for the reply.

Decades ago I taught Foreign Languages at a small boarding school in rural Hawaii. A Stanford classmate of mine taught Marine Biology at the same time I was there. We were motorcycle buddies, and rode our bikes all over Parker Ranch and, on one memorable occasion, up to the summit of Mauna Kea. There were only two observatories on the summit in those days (mid-60s).

As you can imagine, he was well-schooled in science, as I’m sure you also are. One night we had an argument that lasted over two hours. We must have resembled two medieval scholastics arguing points of theological doctrine. The gist of our disagreement was this: He argued that the universe was ultimately knowable in every respect, given, of course, enough equipment, enough colossal budgets, time for experiments, etc.

I found this to be a hideous prospect, outrageous in its arrogance and presumptuousness. It seemed to me that the scientific point of view had lost its moorings and, in some practical sense, had gone crazy—driven from below by some titanic myth. I don‘t mean that my friend was crazy. He was and is a decent, well-respected scientist. He was like a brother, after all. But I felt that the path he advocated, if given the free rein he imagined it warranted, could only lead to disaster.

And what was my contrarian position? Simply that the universe, in ALL its aspects, was ultimately unknowable, that there was a MYSTERY surrounding human consciousness and its artificial constructs, that would ultimately remain UNKNOWN, and this was as it should be.

Of course, looking back on it, my friend and I were just slinging bull, and both of us were full of it. A real bull session. That was forty-two years ago. Looking back on it, and having learned a lot since then, I find that we were both being true to our individual temperaments, and were bound to clash.

A few years ago I tried to engage him, as a scientist and an old friend, in a discussion of global warming. Curiously, he almost dismissed it because, as I understand it, he didn’t want to become “depressed.” He made a joke about his inland house eventually becoming situated on “sea-front property.” I didn’t think it was funny. Our correspondence dwindled to nothing.

What am I supposed to think when a very well-educated, brilliant scientist—a marine biologist, no less—can’t carry on a discussion about the planetary crisis because he doesn’t want to become “depressed”? That we can only engage the “facts” that don’t depress us? Or that we’re not supposed to factor the subtleties of the human psyche into our equations?

The “myth of objectivity” is one of the more lethal aspects of the modern world-view. Somehow we must find a way to take emotion, fantasy, imagination, projections, etc., etc.—in short, the human psyche—into account as we deal with the “facts” that are piling up on our shores like so much jetsam following a tsunami.

I hope you know that I VERY MUCH APPRECIATE your most evident intelligence and caring. I agree with you that attention to both sides of this conundrum is required, that we have to deal with what you called “pragmatics, quantitative and material actualities.” Of course we do.

But we’ve been doing that for centuries now, and it still hasn’t prevented us from piling up an enormous imbalance on the scale of power-to-wisdom. I don’t have to tell you toward which side the scale is overbalanced.

The calm, rational approach—what you called “considered, informed decision-making”—is a tremendous accomplishment in human history, something we would forfeit only with disastrous consequences. But it’s not enough. Something more is needed. And insofar as I can read the symptoms of the day, it is needed FAST. That’s why I appreciated Mike Tidwell’s article (with apologies to Mike F. who considers the article “rubbish”), since it moved the dialogue forward with the image of climate “snap.” Tidwell even saw fit to imagine how the body politic might respond with a snap of its own, something I have been hard-pressed to envision. Any such shift in people’s attitudes, on a widespread basis, can only occur as a result of psychological change, since the attitudes themselves are nothing if not psychological.

Hence my hope. Hence my despair.

Don’t forget, calm rationality is a rather specialized psychic function, underpinned by irrational moods, emotions, motives and fantasies. The scientists at Alamogordo—just like your Mars landing group—also stood back and savored their “well-deserved” pleasure upon seeing the fruit of their labors, with the detonation of the first atom bomb over the New Mexico desert. The pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, avowed decades later that he had “slept like a baby” ever since. But I would like to see his dreams.

Rationality is no proof against unconscious motivations which, as often as not, subvert the conscious aim. Too often, the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Show me the person who doesn’t cast a shadow.

Nor has calm rationality prevented a host of psychopaths from taking control of government in recent years, with who knows what dire consequences still to unfold. In most centers of power, at least in America, it seems that those in control could care less about what we are talking about.

As for the “panic” that you ascribe to Mike Tidwell, I don’t see it. What I see is the s - - t hitting the fan—pragmatically, quantitatively, materially and actually—while most of us seem to be sleepwalking to oblivion. A few years ago—according to an aerial survey—some forty-five million piñon pines in New Mexico alone died as a result of a borer beetle infestation. That was just one year in a three-year die-off. The devastation extended all the way to Alaska. I understand that this year enormous tracts of forest in Canada are succumbing to beetles. Everywhere you look, the evidence is plain, and it is accelerating at a breath-taking place. Given a choice, I have to side with Mike Tidwell and his “rubbish,” and take issue with Mike F. and his fantasy of slow, natural change.

I don’t pretend to have any “answer” to our dilemma, but I am convinced—by temperament, I admit—that no real solution will ever be brought into play without the cooperation of the deep psyche.

Best good wishes, Bob, and thanks again for your reply,

Paco

Dear Paco,

I think we come to a parting of the ways, although I’m not entirely sure why. You seem to move the goalposts with each exchange, in terms of re-framing the discussion. And in mis-quoting, misunderstanding, or just not knowing vital facts. For one, it sounds false to me to say that the Manhattan Project scientists at Alamagordo ‘...stood back and savored their “well-deserved” pleasure upon seeing the fruit of
their labors...’ In fact, in this example, the story I have heard over and over is that those people were well-prepared for something that might go horribly wrong in that instant - and with the anguish, not pleasure at all, that if it did go ‘right’ - that is as planned - then it foretell a future of something that would be - horribly wrong.

For my money that is not at all what goes on in a project like Phoenix. Those men and women, it seems to me, may take genuine pride and pleasure in completing a complex task, and in the further search into those very mysteries of the universe.

Which makes me want to complain that it is you who seem to think that science has a kind of hubris, that it’s goal is knowing ‘everything’. I’m not at all so sure, have never been. There’s plenty of mystery to go around and to keep us all busy - for a very long time. Paul Valery (not a scientist but a humble philosopher): ‘The world is always more interesting than any of our ideas about it.’ You haven’t heard me say we’ll get to the absolute bottom of things through science. But you seem to believe that scientists think so.

Oddly enough I, too had a biologist Stanford classmate from the 60’s. He, too has been discouraged by the state of affairs he observes around him. Maybe this is characteristic of biologists? But I can’t tell. Your exchange was long enough ago that the global climate cycling cards we now have from Greenland weren’t yet on the table. Even so, I can well imagine. There’s ample room for worry.

Tidwell did, actually, speak of panic. Else this discussion never would have been. Right?

I disagree with you, Paco. What we need is MORE science, MORE rational thought. Along with - intuition, dreams. Always have. It’s been a millenial slog to get here, and the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, to say nothing of the Enlightenment, earned their names. I fear we are backsliding.

Hi Bob,

It’s too bad you feel we have reached a parting of the ways. I’ve enjoyed our exchange, in spite of the mutual frustration born of differing points of view. I’ve looked forward to your responses, because at the very least I could count on them to be intelligent, well-crafted and carefully thought out. If you and I can’t agree on an area of solid accord, with all the good will in the world behind us, then how are 6.65 billion souls (or more) supposed to reach anything approaching the necessary consensus?

In the early fifties Lewis Mumford called for “unconditional cooperation” on a global scale Many other contemporary writers have called for something on the order of a “Manhattan Project” to deal with the global environmental crisis. How exactly is that to be achieved—and with the alacrity of a “Tidwell snap”—if large numbers of individuals don’t crank up their sense of urgency, look at the scientific data that exist in abundance, and along the way subject themselves to the criticisms of opposing viewpoints?

Your point of view holds up practical reason as a guiding value—“What we need is MORE science, MORE rational thought.” And though you add, almost parenthetically, that somehow dreams and intuitions are permissible, rather like a “refreshment,” still you worry about a regression to “the malaise of irrationality.”

My point of view, of course, RELIES on dreams and intuitions. I would say “What we need is MORE dreams, MORE intuition. Along with science, rational thought.” Dreams and intuitions constitute my guiding values. But note, my approach to these irrational data requires a very, very careful discernment—not a scientific approach, to be sure, with electrodes and charts, but something more poetic, more visionary. Call it “mystical,” if you must, if by that term you mean a cultivation of inner vision, or a perception of the Other through direct experience, intuition or insight.

I share your worry about the regressive tendencies afoot today, but I see them as much among hard-boiled politicians, Pentagon planners, corporate titans and SOME scientists as I do among the religious “ministries,” New Age “bliss-ninnies, TV pundits, etc. When Dick Cheney said that the American life-style is “non-negotiable,” he proved himself to be a destructively regressive force every bit as dangerous as a cult of rattlesnake handlers in the Deep South. Is he a rational person? You tell me. If the answer is “yes,” then we are in deep trouble indeed. But if the answer is “no,” and you can tell me wherein lies his irrationality and whence it derives, I predict we will find ourselves smack in the midst of “psychology” and all its messy reality.

With many thanks and best wishes.

Your cantankerous friend,

Paco

Dear Paco,

My disagreement with you arose in your dismissal of science, although your latest post confuses me. Now you say dreams and intuitions are - merely - “refreshment. I had understood it that for you they are instead the be all, end all, without which nothing else; and that science and technology are to be rejected or profoundly distrusted. I didn’t sense in your words an understanding of the rigorous testing and questioning - the philosophical basis - that underlie scientific research and intellect. Nor have you acknowledged, in science, the dream-components. Maybe you know the story of the chemist who uncovered the ring structure of benzene, in a dream about snakes?

Life may just have to be so odd. I am a geologist, by training and a career of direct experience; and artist.  (BS - geology 1969; MFA - photography 1986; Stanford.)

We require both parts, sciences and humanities. Eh? Your rejection of technology and of scientific understandings, made explicit in several of your posts, and echoed by others were my prompt to contribute here. I consider that rejection to be a terrible mistake. As citizens we have a moral and practical duty to embrace the sciences, and with vigor. Else how stack firewood for winter, provide gymnasium for acrobat-ist, conservatory for singer?

You, and others, active here and elsewhere, best express and uncover what is important from dreams and intuitions when you focus on that realm. Counsel: leave the other stuff alone along the way, drop the side-trip to bash what you would avoid. This too will deepen focus.

(Aside: I’m profoundly unconvinced that there actually ARE two separate worlds, one of the soul, another of the scientist. I’m not here to make that argument, but to stress that pressing the holy work in every sphere really matters. As does dialogue that connects the one into the other.)

I could be more curious of your journey as you’ve noted it, but your strong term ‘RELIES’, as it appears stressed, in caps, clearly expresses your elevation of the inner realm and your exclusion of science. That worries me. I return to my silly example, upon what do you rely when you cross a busy street?

An artist colleague wrote me from a residency in a colony to marvel at the support and ease she found there to focus her attention completely on her expressive work.

‘It’s as if art were all that mattered.
And perhaps it is,’ she wrote.

Perhaps so.

to paco i did not dismess science and to some of the others who had something to say about my commett i dont know what you guys are talking about

Hello Lathan,

I was intrigued by your post (77), but I have a couple of questions for you, spurred by some of the comments in your earlier post (62):

1. “to paco i did not dismess science”

Excuse me. Did I say you did?

2. “i myself am pagan . . . my religion is about not just magik but also nature”

Perhaps you could tell us more about your religion, Lathan, since “paganism” is a long-abused term and doesn’t have a very reliable definition at present.

I assume you don’t mean that you follow a pre-Christian religious practice, sacrificing to multiple gods, etc., the way an Eyptian, Greek or Roman might have done in the past. My guess is that you have disaffiliated yourself from contemporary Christianity, Judaism, Islam, even atheism, and have chosen to “worship nature” instead.

If this is correct, it certainly would amount to an advance over the exploitative attitudes currently dominant. I am curious what form your worship takes, how many fellow worshippers you are in contact with, whether there is a church or liturgy attached to your religion.

These are not idle questions either, since I believe we are in desperate need of a deep renewal in terms of our feeling about the Earth, the way we imagine our position in and relationship to nature, and so on.

3. “it is embeded in us to perserve nature”

I am very interested in your opinion, and especially your exerience, of how it is embedded in us to preserve nature. Personally, I agree with you, but I would like to hear your version. In fact I hope your opinion prevails, in the long run. But as I look around at how doggedly we humans cling to our destructive habits, I find myself wondering to what extent the will to destroy nature is not also embedded in us, a selfish, careless element that we seem to be scarcely aware of. I cherish the hope that it’s just a cultural residue of the past two or three thousand years—a bad habit of negation—that will be swept away in a massive turnabout soon to happen.

What IS that destructive element? Where does it come from? Why have we grown so complacent when faced with its consequences? How much of it is cultural or historical, how much of it is in-born? To answer these questions requires not just historical knowledge, but self-knowledge as well. That’s perhaps the essence of what I’m trying to say—though apparently not too successfully—to my friend Bob Tyson.

Hope to hear from you, Lathan.

Paco

P.S. Bob, I’m still working on a reply to your last post (76). Apologies for the delay. Many demands on my time lately.

Academics, jeez!  ☺

I am not sure all this parsing is necessary.  Dare I say I see more agreement than disagreement here.  Let’s focus on the common ground.  If Orion readers can’t come together ----we’re truly in trouble. 

We have a left brain and a right brain and the part that connects the two is the source of our creativity.  We need both. 

Science and emotions
Logic and art
Math and dance
Mind and heart
Intellect and feelings
Conscious and subconscious
Waking reality and dream reality

“If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”—Rachel Carson

Joanna Macy, an incredible teacher and mentor (a lifeline for me) wrote in her web letter recently.  She was responding to a question about what was important to her at a gathering of folks at Findhorn.  Her reply “The earnestness and the intention of the people stir me greatly.  The willingness, the sense of unpanicked urgency.  The deep goodwill.  The dancing.  The humour.  That these folks are all doing it for the love of it without seeing the results of their own actions.  That they are freed from continually computing our chances of success.” http://www.joannamacy.net

This is my hope:  I aspire to do my work on behalf of the earth for the love of it, knowing my actions may not bear fruit in my lifetime.  I seek freedom from the self-doubting, guilt-ridden “bargaining” attempts to make my poorly-evolved mind somehow process our predicament.  I embrace humor.  I will spend time each day loving nature and let go of trying to calculate our chances of success. 

That’s my intention.  I will let you know how it goes. 

I find the grief cycle so helpful at this time.  In fact, I joke (not) with friends that I go through the cycle several times a day sometimes.  Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

In acceptance (at the moment), Paca

ahhh, Paca, such eloquence!  Thank you!  “That these folks are all doing it for the love of it without seeing the results of their own actions.  That they are freed from continually computing our chances of success.” - this is to me the very nub of it all.

We simply have to rise to the challenge of greeting each day with as much grace as we can muster in any given moment, and doing the work that must be done because we are in love with the earth.

As a very dear friend once told me, it really doesn’t matter what anyone else does - it only matters what I choose to do, and that I do so from a place of integrity and intention, choosing my actions because they are in alignment with my values and for no other reason.

*This* is the place where we share common ground.  Not that our values are all the same, but in the act of possessing them at all.  If we are true to ourselves, respectful of others, and apply ourselves to the tasks that are required of our own beliefs, that’s really all there is.

It’s akin to Victor Frankl’s realization in the concentration camp that everything - except his attitude of how he met the day - could be taken away from him.  That is always what remains within our control. We don’t need to convince one another that science/logic are better, or that dreams/metaphysics are closer to nature.

We need only hold on to our part - ala’ Barry Lopez’ concept of “keeping that to which we are attracted” - knowing that it is not encumbent on any one of us to have either all or the complete answer.