Global Warming's New Math

[Ian Livingston]

You're right to fear the wild, Laura. I have a policy about young would-be
tree workers who come to me seeking training. If they claim to be unafraid
of climbing trees and working in them, I refuse to have them on my crew.
There is a wide gulf, really, between paralyzing fear and the fear of due
respect. I get nervous sometimes when I have to confront a situation I
haven't met before, but that respect empowers me, too. I've never seen any
animal disappear more quickly than the bear I caught eating the horses'
food one day on the homestead I was caretaking. When she looked up and saw
me walking at her with a sledgehammer in my hand, I'm fairly sure she saw
Thor approaching in thunderous wrath and she bolted like lightning. Each
time I saw her after, she vanished almost quickly as I saw her. One person
said she saw her once, after I'd confronter her, huddled under the window
and quivering, watching in terror down the road she'd run up. And bears are
very smart animals, with good memories. They seem to synthesize memories,
and develop new approaches to established problems. And there's always
something new to learn about bugs. Just last week I learned we have a
voracious beetle native here to the California hills that is much bigger
and uglier than the palmetto bugs of the South. They can draw blood when
they bite, too.

It is not my intention to demean city folk. I'm glad people live in the
cities, there is much I value in cities. My sweetheart is a San Francisco
girl who lived some years in Manhattan, too, and who does not drive. I wish
rural public transportation was better in the USA, so I could drive less
than I do, and I drive as little as possible, walking whenever I have the
option. There are museums in the city, and libraries, universities,
theaters, symphonies, and so on. Ideas thrive where people gather. I do,
however, regret that many town dwellers seem to regard nature by rumor or
synecdoche, or to personify nature as the aggressor in the man v. nature
conflict. There seems commonly to be a disregard or disdain among them for
the conflicts endemic in wilderness. And I grant that when I hear about
city people killing each other, I often fail to differentiate between the
cosmopolitan and the gangster. It's easier to conflate what we do not know.

And, yes, there is no easy way to the ground where all are regarded with
dispassionate equanimity, and each given a fair representation in policy.
But I do believe the realm of intellectual debate is where ideas gain the
impetus necessary to enact positive change. It's a faith of sorts, I
suppose. I believe in the power of ideas.

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 10:05 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

>
> What you say makes a lot of sense, Ian.  I'll admit I'm an urbanist in
> outlook and values.  I don't romanticize the wild - it scares the shit out
> of me.  It's that place with animals that bite you and weird bugs and you
> have to drive everywhere.  Seriously, I need to live in a city because I
> never learned to drive, having always lived within several blocks of the
> subway.  You're absolutely right in saying that our respective habitats
> shape our views on this issue (issue?  debate?).  I think we can both agree
> that we want something between the human-less world where plankton frolic,
> but no human is there to right sonnets or haiku about it; and the foul
> nuclear soup we're making of it, in which no one and nothing will frolic
> ever again.  But as Joseph says, there's no easy route to the middle
> ground.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Livingston **
> Sent: Jul 23, 2012 9:30 PM
> To: kelber at mindspring.com
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>
> > I'm amazed at how many people fall for this easy notion that "we" are
> destroying what would otherwise be a
> > "beautiful" and, somehow, moral planet by our evil human machinations.
>  The tragedy of global warming is that
> > we're fucking ourselves over, not that we're destroying a planet that
> would have no  attributes, positive or
> > negative, if we attribute-applying humans weren't here.
>
> Well, this may be where I part tracks with you on this topic, Laura. I
> don't do Gaian, know nothing or next to nothing about Gaia, except as one
> name of a pagan goddess of primitive tribes. I have, however, lived a
> significant portion of my life studying and living in wilderness and / or
> working in the interface between humans and non-humans, primarily as a
> miner, forester, logger, and arborist. My years living in wild places have
> seen me in camps in Alaska, Wyoming, and Washington, and living in remote
> places off the grid in Wisconsin, Washington, and California. I have spent
> very few of my years within the city limits, and I do not incline to see
> the world through the anthropocentric perspective without considering other
> possible perspectives. I have witnessed the intelligence of wild animals.
> They can exhibit crafty, playful, curious, gentle, fierce, voracious, and a
> whole slew of other qualified attributes. We humans, in this case we
> English-speaking humans, apply those labels, but the behaviors just are
> evident in the animal world. Good and evil are irrelevant, but good and bad
> are not. Most wild animals know good from bad, only not in human terms.
> Some things produce happiness, others do not, and still others cause
> weakness, pain, sickness, or death.
>
> Although I apply the label, the world remains beautiful without me. And
> the tragedy, qua tragedy, in the human decimation of the what is pristine
> in the world is that we in our hubris are destroying not only ourselves and
> our future, but that we are, in fact, destroying scores of species every
> year. It is impossible to know the long-term effects of the human plunder
> of the planet. Hell, there could be some less than devastating results of
> our craving for safety, comfort, and esteemed status, I don't know. But
> from my first-hand observations, we aren't doing the biosphere many favors.
>
> It's a question of values. Do we value humans more than the biosphere? Is
> our comfort more important than the survival of plankton in the Pacific
> Ocean? For my part, because they contribute to the continued diversity and
> health of life on Earth, I think the plankton have a much greater value
> than do humans. We *can* live harmoniously in the biosphere, we have done
> in the past, and there may come a time when humans are able to apply their
> technological genius to harboring rather than harming other species, as we
> do on small scales already, but for that to happen on a large scale will
> require a significant shift in values. Capitalist economics be damned, we
> need restraint, not oil, not fracking, not coal, uranium, or any of the
> other toxins we so eagerly unearth or enearth, to coin a term. City folk
> have a remarkable talent for distancing themselves from these truths, but
> city folk have only romantic associations with the wild, derived from
> media, a few camping or backpacking trips, or a season on somebody's farm.
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 3:27 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> Exactly.  Those judgments don't exist.  I emphasized the negative
>> attributes just to counter the beatific Gaian view of a pristine,
>> human-free Earth.   I'm amazed at how many people fall for this easy notion
>> that "we" are destroying what would otherwise be a "beautiful" and,
>> somehow, moral planet by our evil human machinations.  The tragedy of
>> global warming is that we're fucking ourselves over, not that we're
>> destroying a planet that would have no  attributes, positive or negative,
>> if we attribute-applying humans weren't here.
>>
>> Laura
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: malignd at aol.com
>> Sent: Jul 23, 2012 6:17 PM
>> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>
>> Without us "cold" and "dispassionate" and "ugly" don't exist.  We created
>> the context for understanding those judgements.  Not that I'm voting for my
>> own obliteration ...
>>
>> Nature, without humans, is cold and dispassionate, and just as likely to
>> be ugly.  I vote for us.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: kelber <kelber at mindspring.com>
>> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Sun, Jul 22, 2012 11:38 pm
>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>
>>  You know,  a friend asked me that question once, in a slightly
>> different form:  If you were giving the human race a grade, what would it
>> be?  A month or so earlier,  I might have said D or F.  But I said "A."
>>  Why?  I had just finished reading Gravity's Rainbow for the first time.
>>  And it struck me what a wonderful thing human intelligence is, that it
>> could create such a mind-expanding novel, filled with wit and morality and
>> silliness and fascinating connections.  Why do we consider the Hitlers, the
>> Monsantos, the sadists, the criminally greedy the ultimate shapers of the
>> human legacy?  Why can't the essence of what it is to be human be defined
>> by the Pynchons, the Oscar Wildes, the cruciverbalists, the non-stop party
>> people, the beekeepers, the folklorists, the loving grandmas, and on and
>> on?  Intelligence, even though it sometimes takes an evil turn, is a rarity
>> worth preserving.  Nature, without humans, is cold and dispassionate, and
>> just as likely to be ugly.  I vote for us.
>>
>>  Laura
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Rich
>> Sent: Jul 22, 2012 10:02 PM
>> To: David Morris
>> Cc: Monte Davis , Dave Monroe , pynchon -l
>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>
>> **
>> Is humanity even worth saving? I'm ever wavering
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Jul 22, 2012, at 9:40 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>   We've (are) lost.  New Orleans and the rest of the world's coastal
>> cities are Atlantas's.  And bye bye to countless species.
>>
>>  The 20th/21st Centuries won't be fondly remembered.
>>
>> On Sunday, July 22, 2012, Monte Davis wrote:
>>
>>> The core argument, without caveats and qualifications:
>>>
>>> 1) From Kyoto through Copenhagen, a 2 degree C. global increase has been
>>> widely accepted as a threshold we really don't wanna cross;
>>> 2) We can calculate how much more fossil-fuel burning will get us there;
>>> 3) Current proven reserves held by energy co's and nation/companies are
>>> about *six times* that  amount;
>>> 4) The stock price of energy companies (and the credit-worthiness of
>>> Saudi
>>> Arabia, Venezuela, USA states fracking their shale, et al) is tightly
>>> correlated with their reserves. Ergo, any combination of policies/actions
>>> that would be effective in keeping the increase under 2 degrees would in
>>> effect say to all those parties: "Five-sixths of that collective asset
>>> just
>>> became worthless." (Yeah, I know, coal & oil & gas are also feedstocks
>>> for
>>> polymers, fertilizers etc, but at this level that's a detail. Yeah,  I
>>> know,
>>> CO2 capture & sequestration is possible -- but do the math, and it would
>>> require infrastructure -- and expenditure -- on the same scale as all
>>> today's pipelines and refineries and tankers and coal trains.)
>>>
>>> Some of you are no doubt saying "duhh," but it snapped my head around
>>> even
>>> though I've been reading McKibben & co for a long time. It's the
>>> difference
>>> between a handwaved "the fossil-fuel industry can't keep growing in
>>> future
>>> decades as it has for the last century or two"... and saying to that
>>> industry, the world's largest: "five-sixths of the biggest asset
>>> investors
>>> recognize in you *right now* is a mirage." That makes it much easier to
>>> understand the fervor of denial.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
>>> Behalf
>>> Of Dave Monroe
>>> Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2012 9:35 PM
>>> To: pynchon -l
>>> Subject: Global Warming's New Math
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-mat
>>> h-20120719<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-mat%20h-20120719>
>>>
>>>  **
>>
>>  ** **
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
> the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
> reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
> groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
> urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>  **
>
>


-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
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