The recent development of the branch of philosophy called ‘environmental philosophy’, or as it is sometimes referred to, ‘environmental ethics’, has been characterized by a variety of theoretical disputes about the best way to provide a philosophical basis for engagement with the environmental problems facing us, now and in the future. Many of the early writers hoped that a new environmental ethics would emerge, embodying a set of principles that could help us deal with our relation to animals and the natural world in a way that traditional ethical theories seemed to have overlooked. One of the early contributors to this project was Aldo Leopold, who was not a philosopher but a professor of forestry and land management. His famous essay ‘The Land Ethic’, found in his 1949 book The Sand County Almanac, has stimulated a great deal of discussion about the kind of principles we need to guide us on environmental issues. Leopold argued for the extension of what we see as worthy of our respect from the human community to include animals and the natural world, or what he referred to as ‘the biotic community’. His famous principle, briefly expressed, was, ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.

more from Jim Moran at Philosophy Now here.

Evan Selinger in Slate:

Ubiquitous information and communication technology is a major player in the memory enhancement game. I’m not alluding to products that target impairments, like the iPhone app for combating dementia. Rather, I mean commonplace software that people use to make recall less taxing, more extensive, or easier to visualize.

For instance, Wikipedia’s anti-SOPA protest made 162 million users, accustomed to turning to the site for those idle questions that crop up every day, feel absent-minded. Nobody messed with my hippocampus or your prefrontal cortex. Rather, Wikipedia’s actions were jarring because Internet use affects transactive memory, which is “the capacity to remember who knows what.” If we know information is available online, we’re inclined to remember where it can be found, rather than struggle to retain the facts. This evolutionary tendency to off-load taxing aspects of cognition into the environment—natural or built—extends beyond using devices to recall information we’re already familiar with.

This is called “extended cognition,” and it plays a crucial role in a controversial view called the “extended mind” thesis. Advocates argue that data-management technologies, from low-tech pads to high-tech computers, don’t always function as mere memory-prompting tools. Sometimes, they deserve to be understood as parts of our mind.

More here.

From History.com:

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about? That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full? Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them. Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.

More here. (Note: In honor of African American History Month, we will be linking to at least one related post throughout February. The 2012 theme is Black Women in American Culture and History).

Groundhog Day

Celebrate this unlikely oracle,
this ball of fat and fur,
whom we so mysteriously endow
with the power to predict spring.
Let's hear it for the improbable heroes who,
frightened at their own shadows,
nonetheless unwittingly work miracles.
Why shouldn't we believe
this peculiar rodent holds power
over sun and seasons in his stubby paw?
Who says that God is all grandeur and glory?

From Orion Magazine:

YOU KNOW THE ONE: that tree you first climbed and got stuck in as a kid, the one that you see every morning as you drink your coffee, the one whose leaves always fill your gutters, or even the favorite sought out by your dog on evening walks. Not just any tree. For this project, I ask people to tell me about a tree that holds some importance to them. These really end up being stories about the people, stories of loss and love and a lot in between. After I hear someone’s story, we work out a time to visit the tree together, and I give them a little pad of paper and ask them to draw the tree. Everyone says they can’t draw, but they do. While they are drawing, they share more of their tree story, and I tell them about their tree’s natural history. When they’re finished, I set up the camera and shoot a double exposure, one with their hands holding their drawing kind of lined up with the outline of the tree, and then a second exposure without the drawing. The whole thing usually takes about twenty-five minutes. I started the project with two dozen tree stories from residents of Los Angeles and plan to expand it to other cities across America.

More here.

Evgeny Morozov's piece in the NYT's Sunday Review has received some critical attention.

First, over at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, episode 3 of their podcast has an extensive and interesting discussion of the article.

Second, Jesse Darling in The New Inquiry:

In a recent article for the New York Times, Evgeny Morozov delivered a speculative eulogy for the “cyberflâneur” — who died, or perhaps failed to materialize, in the face of Facebook and Groupon and the totalizing influence of the “app paradigm.” Morozov even waxes lyrical about the golden days of the dial-up connection, as though remembering the swathe of the plough in the field. Where this all once was grass, he laments, the information superhighway now runs through the middle; pity the snotty Tumblr thug who will never know the wholesome pleasure of strolling endless dreaming fields of Euclidean space with his own handmade code as map and compass. There will be no strolling or loitering — either with or without intent — on Morozov’s Web. It’s a bleak place with no boardwalk, where wall-to-wall ads, targeted to our needs and desires, map the perimeter of task-based playbor zones, homogenous and incontravenable. Worst of all, “the tyranny of the social” will prevent us from enjoying seven-hour Bela Tarr flicks with our friends. The good times are gone.

This discourse of virtual antiquity is notable, since so much internet theory has been defined in part by a sense of newness and speculation. Old-school source texts even include several works of fiction (Gibson, Stephenson et al.). “Much of the excitement about the internet and virtual reality is generated by a sense of what it will become,” Nicholas Mirzoeff wrote in 2008, going on to describe Gibson’s hyperurban hyperrealities as “quintessentially modernist.” But 2008 was, like, years ago.

Like Gibson’s dystopias, Morozov’s lament — ironically enough — echoes the malaise of the very moderns to whom he refers, fretting as they did that the new urbanopolis would signal an end to slow pleasures and community spirit.Despite all that Cartesian stuff, the Moderns’ understanding of the self was essentially corporeal, and the spatial anxiety of modern urbanism appears as a crisis of embodiment, or personhood, in the flux of big-city time-space.

Dani Rodrik in Project Syndicate:

One of our era’s foundational myths is that globalization has condemned the nation-state to irrelevance. The revolution in transport and communications, we hear, has vaporized borders and shrunk the world. New modes of governance, ranging from transnational networks of regulators to international civil-society organizations to multilateral institutions, are transcending and supplanting national lawmakers. Domestic policymakers, it is said, are largely powerless in the face of global markets.

The global financial crisis has shattered this myth. Who bailed out the banks, pumped in the liquidity, engaged in fiscal stimulus, and provided the safety nets for the unemployed to thwart an escalating catastrophe? Who is re-writing the rules on financial-market supervision and regulation to prevent another occurrence? Who gets the lion’s share of the blame for everything that goes wrong? The answer is always the same: national governments. The G-20, the International Monetary Fund, and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision have been largely sideshows.

Even in Europe, where regional institutions are comparatively strong, it is national interest and national policymakers, largely in the person of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who have dominated policymaking. Had Merkel been less enamored of austerity for Europe’s debt-distressed countries, and had she managed to convince her domestic electorate of the need for a different approach, the eurozone crisis would have played out quite differently.

John Allen Paulos in the New York Times:

I’ve visited Singapore a few times in recent years and been impressed with its wealth and modernity. I was also quite aware of its world-leading programs in mathematics education and naturally noted that one of the candidates for president was Tony Tan, who has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics. Tan won the very close election and joined the government of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who also has a degree in mathematics.

China has even more scientists in key positions in the government. President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer and Premier Wen Jiabao as a geomechanical engineer. In fact, eight out of the nine top government officials in China have scientific backgrounds. There is a scattering of scientist-politicians in high government positions in other countries as well. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a doctorate in physical chemistry, and, going back a bit, Margaret Thatcher earned a degree in chemistry.

One needn’t endorse the politics of these people or countries to feel that given the complexities of an ever more technologically sophisticated world, the United States could benefit from the participation and example of more scientists in government. This is obviously no panacea — Herbert Hoover was an engineer, after all — but more people with scientific backgrounds would be a welcome counterweight to the vast majority of legislators and other officials in this country who are lawyers.

More here.

Nilanjana S Roy in India's Business Standard:

Among the many things forgotten about the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine’s Day 1989 is that it did not stop at naming Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. The author was condemned to death “along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents”.

In retrospect, this was a fascinating inclusion. There was the minor matter that by including Rushdie’s editors and publishers, the Ayatollah had effectively declared war against the publishing industry in general — the typesetters who laid the book out, the printers and proofreaders, all the innocent foot soldiers caught in a battle that they had not chosen. He had also declared war against those not of the faith — if mere awareness of the contents of the Verses was a crime, then arguing that one was not of the same religion and blasphemy or apostasy did not apply was no longer a defence.

More crucially, the Ayatollah’s argument was both a curiously modern and a vengefully medieval one. His recognition that awareness itself of the contents of a controversial work was a crime was both an acknowledgement that knowledge is dangerous, and stands as an indictment of readers along with writers.

More here.

Jalees Rehman in the Huffington Post:

Last week, the Saudi writer and blogger Hamza Kashgari tweeted about Prophet Muhammad and his tweets caused an unanticipated fire-storm of outrage among many Saudis. They formed an “electronic lynch mob” and responded with hate-filled tweets, Face-book posts, comments, threats and YouTube videos, calling for the arrest and punishment of Kashgari.

A prominent Saudi cleric accused Kashgari of apostasy (“Ridda”), which could be punishable by death under Saudi law. Multiple sites reported that an arrest warrant was issued by the King of Saudi-Arabia, even though Kashgari deleted his tweets and apologized for them. Realizing that his life was in danger, Kashgari escaped from Saudi-Arabia. However, at the request of the Saudi authorities, Kashgari was detained mid-journey by the Malaysian police at the Kuala Lumpur airport, so that he was unable to reach his destination New Zealand, where he had intended to ask for political asylum.

The government of Malaysia is now in the process of deciding whether or not to extradite Kashgari back to Saudi-Arabia.

It is appalling that Saudi clerics and the Saudi government would resort to such measures in response to a few tweets by a 23-year old writer, who was merely expressing his personal views on his faith and Prophet Muhammad.

More here. [Photo shows Hamza Kashgari who has now been deported back to Saudi Arabia.]

Dear Asma, It’s been five years since we last saw each other, but as your country has burned at the hands of your husband over the past year, I, along with the rest of the world, have wondered where you’ve been amid this madness. Then, late last week, I saw that you had finally broken your silence by emailing a British newspaper to express your support for your husband, Bashar al-Assad. As your countrymen are being tortured and murdered by the regime that bears your last name, I imagine the trips we took together are far from your mind. But I am writing to remind you of the experiences we shared—and of the Asma I once knew—when we, along with 300 other women, came together to promote peace in the Middle East by biking across the region. We first met in your palace in Damascus in 2005. You looked beautiful; as always, you were dressed in the most fashionable clothes. The last rays of the September sun streamed in from the balcony and onto your hair, perfectly styled, as you spoke to 300 women who were in Syria to “cycle for peace” on a trip run by a group called Follow the Women.

more from Parvaneh Vahidmanesh at Tablet here.

“Shut up and calculate!” As physics became more mathematical and abstract during the past century, that phrase—first uttered by physicist David Mermin—became its mantra. Indeed, the more that physicists stopped worrying about what their complicated equations meant and simply ran the numbers, the more progress they made. Some of their predictions have now been confirmed by experiments to 10 decimal places or more— the most accurate predictions in history. But the cost of this progress was striking: physics became more and more alienating as fewer and fewer people understood it. As Frank Close explains in The Infinity Puzzle, for a long time even physicists felt discontent at this state of affairs. The book brims with charming anecdotes about particle physics between the 1950s and 1980s, when breakthroughs came almost too fast to be comprehended and every scientist seemed to be maneuvering (and occasionally begging) for Nobel prizes. But the book also plumbs the origins of modern physics, especially troubles with the concept of infinity.

more from Sam Kean at The American Scholar here.

The origins of the short story in different regions of the world – where it came from and when, how it developed – vary from country to country. Although its birth was most often a natural transformation of what was there already, occasionally the change that occurred was more dramatic, coming from nowhere, without a pedigree of tradition or of anything else. The vitality of America’s first stories owes much to such newness, to an untrammelled purity that challenged, without being at odds with, the classicism of Russia’s vast contribution to the same literary development. In Europe – particularly perhaps in France and Germany – the influence of the antique continued, then slowly withered. “A child of our time,” Elizabeth Bowen called the modern story, irrespective of its source, and she was right. At the very heart of modernity, it belonged to a briskly different age and almost perfectly reflected it. Its matter-of-fact brevity did, its sense of urgency, its glimpsing manner, its stab of truth. Troubled Ireland took to it; Italy, too; in England it didn’t much appeal. Overshadowed by the riches and delights of the Victorian novel, it was regarded by literary England as little more than a poor relation living on the crumbs scattered by the popular success of fiction that flourished as fiction never had before. But these humbly gathered crumbs were more wholesome than they might have been. They nourished a modest art, and in modesty the English short story eventually found itself.

more from William Trevor at The New Statesman here.

From Biography:

Physician Mae C. Jemison was born October 17, 1956, in Decatur, Alabama. On June 4, 1987, she became the first African American woman ever admitted into the astronaut training program. On September 12, 1992, Jemison finally flew into space with six other astronauts aboard the Endeavour on mission STS47. In recognition of her accomplishments, Jemison received several awards and honorary doctorates.

When Jemison was chosen on June 4, 1987, she became the first African American woman ever admitted into the astronaut training program. After more than a year of training, she became an astronaut with the title of science mission specialist, a job which would make her responsible for conducting crew related scientific experiments on the space shuttle. On September 12, 1992, Jemison finally flew into space with six other astronauts aboard the Endeavour on mission STS47. During her eight days in space, she conducted experiments on weightlessness and motion sickness on the crew and herself. Altogether, she spent slightly over 190 hours in space before returning to Earth on September 20. Following her historic flight, Jemison noted that society should recognize how much both women and members of other minority groups can contribute if given the opportunity.

More here. (Note: In honor of African American History Month, we will be linking to at least one related post throughout February. The 2012 theme is Black Women in American Culture and History).

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Do you make decisions quickly based on incomplete information? Do you lose your temper quickly? Are you easily bored? Do you thrive in conditions that seem chaotic to others, or do you like everything well organized?

Those are the kinds of questions used to measure novelty-seeking, a personality trait long associated with trouble. As researchers analyzed its genetic roots and relations to the brain’s dopamine system, they linked this trait with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior. Now, though, after extensively tracking novelty-seekers, researchers are seeing the upside. In the right combination with other traits, it’s a crucial predictor of well-being. “Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. The problems with novelty-seeking showed up in his early research in the 1990s; the advantages have become apparent after he and his colleagues tested and tracked thousands of people in the United States, Israel and Finland.

More here.

The Wolf's Postscript to 'Little Red Riding Hood'
.
First, grant me my sense of history: I did it for posterity, for kindergarten teachers and a clear moral: Little girls shouldn't wander off in search of strange flowers, and they mustn't speak to strangers.  And then grant me my generous sense of plot: Couldn't I have gobbled her up right there in the jungle? Why did I ask her where her grandma lived? As if I, a forest-dweller, didn't know of the cottage under the three oak trees and the old woman lived there all alone? As if I couldn't have swallowed her years before?  And you may call me the Big Bad Wolf, now my only reputation. But I was no child-molester though you'll agree she was pretty.  And the huntsman: Was I sleeping while he snipped my thick black fur and filled me with garbage and stones? I ran with that weight and fell down, simply so children could laugh at the noise of the stones cutting through my belly, at the garbage spilling out with a perfect sense of timing, just when the tale should have come to an end. .
by Agha Shahid Ali
from Through the Yellow Pages
publisher: Sun Gemini Press, 1987

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. Reclamation,. 2003.

More here and here.

Glenn Greenwald regularly does us a service by not only reminding us of the ongoing assault on civil liberties and human dignity in the Obama-directed war on terror but also pointing out the hypocisy of liberals and progressives in their support of the policy. Perhaps literature can move us more than reportage. Jacob Silverman on Alex Gilvarry's novel about Guantanamo, in The Daily Beast:

Novelists like to congratulate themselves for their research; time spent in Google’s far-flung quadrants is worn as a badge of authenticity. But some novels leave more to invention than others, often by necessity. Alex Gilvarry’s strange hybrid of a book is one.

“They don’t know allow novelists in Guantánamo Bay,” Gilvarry said, provoking laughter from the capacity crowd attending his book-release party last month at The Strand’s rare-books room.

Gilvarry, who is 30 and a few inches past six feet, is the author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. His debut novel tells the story of Boyet (“Boy”) Hernandez, a five-foot-one-inch Filipino immigrant who, after attaining an evanescent fame as a fashion designer in New York, is shipped off to Guantánamo Bay for his alleged connection to terrorists. The book is, unsurprisingly, a satire—no other genre could encompass two such divergent topics.

Combatant’s peculiar cocktail of themes—immigrant on the make, post-9/11 burlesque, sybaritic send-up of fashion and hipster Brooklyn—goes down smoothly because Gilvarry writes with authority, if often with tongue firmly in cheek. “I did as much research on fashion as I did on Guantánamo, which is ridiculous,” he said.

Indeed, while Boy’s tale runneth over with references to Diane von Furstenberg and Oscar de La Renta (whose “immigrant narratives” the fashion aspirant devoured while growing up in the Philippines), it’s equally replete with touchstones from the war on terrorism and the post-9/11 security state. A publicist named Ben Laden (no relation) is detained by airport police “because of ‘homophonic similarities,’ ” causing him to miss a runway show. The copy of the Quran that Boy receives in “No Man’s Land”—his word for Gitmo—was previously owned by David Hicks, an Australian detainee who was released to his home country in April 2007.

Other references come from forgotten annals of pop culture—there’s a Lou Diamond Phillips sighting—or appear as coded versions of familiar American archetypes. There’s a self-aggrandizing pop star named Chloë, whose music promotes a kind of aggressively sultry chastity (her album is called Blueballer). We encounter familiar political iconography, as when Sheriff Michaels—a Shepard Fairey-like artist—superimposes a leaked photo of the imprisoned Boy with “damp shades of red, white, and blue” and stamps the word “BEHAVE at the foot of the image.” The poster becomes a sensation, emblematizing Boy’s plight.

It’s this facility with pop culture and with deconstructing its avatars that adds a layer of piquancy to Gilvarry’s satire.

Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana in Salon:

Americans are increasingly aware that the ideal of equal opportunity is a false promise, but neither party really seems to get it.

Republicans barely admit the problem exists, or if they do, they think tax cuts are the answer. All facts point in the opposite direction. Despite various tax cuts over the past 30 years, not only have income and wealth inequality dramatically increased, but the ability of individuals to rise out of their own class has declined. Social stagnation is increasingly the norm, with poverty rates the highest in 15 years, real wage gains worse even than during the decade of the Great Depression, average earnings barely above what they were 50 years ago, and more than 80 percent of the income growth of the past 25 years going to the top 1 percent. In fact, since 1983, the bottom 40 percent of households have seen real declines in their income and the same goes for the bottom 60 percent when it comes to wealth. We know what the economic status quo does: It redistributes upwards.

Despite the ambiguity of their goals, the Occupy protests have made one point abundantly clear: The mainstream Democratic alternative is paltry stuff. For the most part, Democrats disagree that tax cuts and deregulation are the solution, and instead argue that the state should be used to guarantee equal opportunity. For instance, cheap, publicly available education, job training and affirmative action are all justified on the grounds that each American should have the skills to compete and the labor market should treat everyone equally.