by Usha Alexander

[This is the seventeenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

The peopling of Polynesia was an epic chapter in world exploration. Stirred by adventure and hungry for land, intrepid pioneers sailed for days or weeks beyond their known horizons to discover landscapes and living things never before seen by human eyes. Survival was never easy or assured, yet they managed to find and colonize nearly every spot of land across the entire southern Pacific Ocean. On each island, they forged new societies based on familiar Polynesian models of ranked patrilineages, family bonds and obligations, social care and cohesion, cooperation and duty. Each culture that arose was unique and changeable, as islanders continually adjusted to altered conditions, new information, and shifting political tides. Through trial and hardship, most of these civilizations—even on some of the tiniest islands, like Anuta and Tikopia, discussed in the preceding essay—persisted for centuries or millennia, up to the present day. But others faltered, failing to thrive or even to maintain continuity.

Most Polynesian societies that met the tragic fate of famine and disintegration were on remote islands measuring but a few square miles. But size alone was not the decisive factor. In fact, the most famous case occurred on a substantially larger island of about sixty square miles, called Rapa Nui^1, widely known as Easter Island. Despite its relatively generous size, Rapa Nui suffered certain drawbacks. Owing to its more southerly latitude, outside the tropics, it was cooler, drier, and windier than most Polynesian islands—suboptimal conditions for some of their primary crops. Freshwater sources were also few, relative to the island’s size, and sometimes difficult to access. And the cooler surrounding ocean didn’t support the shallow reefs more common to tropical seas, making the islanders’ survival dependent on deep-sea fishing.

On the other hand, when the migrants first arrived, almost eleven hundred years ago, the pristine island was crowned with a dense forest of enormous trees, including a colossal species of palm found nowhere else on Earth, as well as other edible and useful plants. Small fish and shellfish could be gathered along the coast. In addition to several species of non-migratory birds inhabiting the forestland, seabird rookeries crowded the surfaces of rocky mounts just offshore. And the island’s three dormant volcanoes provided great quarries of stone suitable for making fine tools. The fate of the Rapanui people was in no way preordained. Read more »

That Came, Not Chosen

7 a.m. sungold flings photons from mountaintop across the river
yesterday’s snow clings to a hedge of arbor vitae’s shadowgreen
just as Mom’s flour dusted the tools of her art upon the table
sifter, spatula, cups and spoons as if a painting of an arctic fable
her baked art emerges from oven fresh in probed corners of recall
warm scents sweet against this day’s elements

the twisted angularity of our apple tree spreads from hoop-house
to the spent purple plum, dead limbs an armature for the reach of Trumpet vine,
plumwood backbone for its thin vine limbs and orange bell-blossoms
which in summer float upon green raft blowing reveille for the garden
here now frozen

….. suddenly
….. unexpected
….. a gift
….. a grace
….. that came
….. ,
….. not
….. chosen

Jim Culleny
2/26/2022

Martin Ramirez. Horse and Rider With Frieze. No date.

Gouache, colored pencil, graphite.

More here, here, and here.

by Rafaël Newman

It’s the final day of February 2022, a month that began with the centenary of the publication, on February 2, 1922, of Ulysses, on what was also the 40^th birthday of its author, James Joyce. Commemorations were held, among other places, in Dublin, where Joyce was born and which plays a central role in the novel, and in Zurich, where Joyce wrote parts of Ulysses, where he died, and where he is buried.

The commemoration in Zurich took the form of an all-day reading of sections of the novel at thematically appropriate locations throughout the city. The marathon was organized by friends of the James Joyce Foundation, a center for the study of the writer’s works under the direction of the eminent Swiss Joyce scholar Fritz Senn; and because I have myself been involved in other events organized by the Foundation, and count among my acquaintances people associated with it, I was asked to take part, on Saturday, February 5, as a reader.

By a happy chance, the section I was invited to read from, alongside Andreas Flückiger and William Brockman, two associates of the Foundation, at the James Joyce Pub in Pelikanstrasse in downtown Zurich, was the Cyclops episode, the 12th of the novel’s 18 chapters. This pleased me because I have cherished the episode for years, in part because my Greek teacher at high school had begun our reading of Homer’s Odyssey with the ninth book of that 24-book poem, in which the Greek hero cunningly escapes death at the hands of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, and which serves as the template for Joyce’s episode; and in part because, when I first came to read Ulysses, at university in the 1980s, it was the Cyclops chapter that appealed to me most, as it contained what I found the most cogently political encounter in Joyce’s novel—and politics was what interested me most at the time. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

I

The boundaries between tectonic plates are where big things happen, lasting geologic things. They are among the most remarkable bits of land on earth. The mid-Atlantic ridge is one of those boundaries, the longest mountain range in the world, separating the diverging Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. Trouble is, it mostly lies undersea, so there aren’t many places you can inspect it.

In the Arctic there’s Jan Mayen Island. Farther south there’s the Azores, Ascension and St. Helena islands and the UK’s Tristan da Cunha way down in the middle of nowhere. And there’s Iceland.

As manifest in Iceland, to the east lies a raised lava ridge, the Eurasian plate, from which the North American plate, to the west, pulls up from the earth and apart.

The width of the point of contact varies. Just here it’s about a three foot deep grass covered crevasse. That’s a term mountain climbers use and it’s too dramatic for where I’m standing, really just in a ditch a little wider than your arms can reach. It’s pretty underwhelming, truth be told, bit it’s a historic ditch. A ditch full of history and portent. An auspicious ditch with worldwide ramifications.

Whatever you call it, it’s a singular place, a patch of grass you can jump down in and stand on a spot where the earth is coming apart. Elsewhere it’s twice the height of a man and filled with icy, transparent-as-the-ether water. Which is where we stop in a kind of Icelandic gulch.

“Now we are on the Eurasian plate,” our guide Sven says.

With a hop, “Now the North American.”

Hop. Europe. Hop. North America. You can change continents in Istanbul too but you have to drive across a bridge. Read more »

Trees from a train window at the station at the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria, three weeks ago.

by William Benzon

I forget just how I came to watch Steven Spielberg’s Jaws several years ago. Most likely I saw it on my Netflix homepage and, noting that I’d not seen it when it came out in 1975, I said to myself, “Why not?” I knew it had made Spielberg’s career and was generally regarded as the first summer blockbuster [1]. And John Williams’ two-note theme was by now as recognizable as the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

I watched it, was shocked at the appropriate times – for example, when the shark first comes up behind the Orca, prompting Sheriff Brody to utter the best-known line in the movie, “You’re gonna’ need a bigger boat.”

And that was that.

Until a couple of months ago.

I decided to revisit Jaws. I watched the film several times, making notes. I watched Jaws 2 as well. It isn’t as good as the original.

“Why,” I asked myself, “is the original so much better than the sequels?” Two things struck me rather quickly: first, Jaws 2 was more diffuse than Jaws, and second, there’s no character in the Jaws 2 comparable to Quint, the Ahab-like shark hunter. On the first, consider the way the last two fifths of Jaws is devoted to the hunt while Jaws 2 wanders from plot strand to plot strand the entire film. As for Quint, I asked myself: “Why did he have to die?” Sure, he’s arrogant and abrasive, but that doesn’t warrant death. Something more is required.

That’s when the light went on: sacrifice. Quint, not the shark, but Quint, is being sacrificed for the good of the community. That in turn suggested the ideas of René Girard, the literary and cultural theorist who has come to see the myth-logic (my term) of sacrifice as being central to human community. I now had a way of thinking about Quint’s death.

Caveat: This runs a bit long. So pour some tea, a single-malt, whatever suits, and settle back. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

After my several visits to Kerala, I wrote up an article, “On Life and Death Questions in India” for EPW, where I highlighted the welfare and demographic achievements of Kerala, the most advanced region in India in terms of many indicators of social democracy. Soon Raj and his colleagues (including my friend, T.N.Krishnan) produced a large, quantitative report for the United Nations Development Program, which brought to international attention the so-called Kerala model of development.

Back to Delhi, I was soon after invited to two conferences which were somewhat different from the usual specialized technical conferences I was used to. One was a conference organized jointly by the World Bank and the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex on the general theme of how to achieve fair distribution and economic equality without sacrificing economic growth in developing countries. The emphasis was not so much on paper presentation with specialized research but more on thinking aloud on big issues. The conference was held in the grand surroundings of Villa Serbelloni, the conference center at Bellagio on a hill facing the beautiful blue Lake Como in Italy (the Villa’s history goes back a few centuries: it is claimed that Leonardo da Vinci was a guest there).

At this conference I met a number of important development economists, who became long-term friends; these included Albert Fishlow and Irma Adelman (both of whom were later my colleagues at Berkeley) and Lance Taylor (later at New School of Social Research), apart from Montek Ahluwalia (later a top economic-bureaucrat in Delhi) and Clive Bell (later a professor at Heidelberg), who were among the conference organizers and the editors of a subsequent volume titled Redistribution with Growth (for which they commissioned me to write a short section). Read more »

by Paul Braterman

When those in authority withhold promised information, we must fear for the worst. That is now the situation at Imperial College. As I write, the President’s Board is considering erasing from public view the role of one of the College’s founders, TH Huxley, despite his distinguished contributions throughout his life to education, science, and the abolition of slavery and other forms of discrimination. It is also considering erasing JBS Haldane’s name because he once discussed eugenics, even though he strongly opposed to this movement in its heyday, on the grounds that it was scientifically unsound and merely a rationalisation for the dominance of the upper classes.

This perverse outcome is the result of a deeply flawed process, as I have discovered by examination of the public record, supplemented by information from within Imperial’s faculty. It may well be too late to change the Board’s decision, but it is never too late to learn from the events that have led to this debacle.

It is by now widely known by now that:

as part of the commendable activity of reviewing its past and encouraging diversity, Imperial College appointed a History Group to make recommendations,

that this Group has recommended the purging of Huxley’s name and bust from the relevant building, on the grounds that he contributed to “scientific” racism and hence to eugenics,

that this recommendation has provoked widespread opposition among Imperial College academic staff and elsewhere,

that 40 distinguished academics have put their signatures to a letter of protest,

that these signatories include 17 members of Imperial’s own Faculty, Faculty at 11 other universities and research institutes, 19 Fellows of the Royal Society as well as several members of comparable overseas bodies, 4 Sirs, a Nobel Prize winner (Sir Paul Nurse), a Breakthrough Prize winner (John Hardy), a McArthur Fellow (Russell Lande), and many of our most distinguished science communicators, including, most relevant in the present context, Adam Rutherford, author of How to Argue with a Racist and Control; the Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics,

that the journal Nature refused to publish this letter, on the grounds that they regarded it as a petition, which they no longer carried (Huxley, of course, was among the founders of Nature),

and that, thanks to the initiative of an alert journalist, the letter eventually appeared, sandwiched between others, in the London Daily Telegraph, together with an article summarising its contents. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

How do we know that the external world exists in anything like the form we think it has? Assuming that we think, therefore we are, and that it’s hard to doubt the existence of our own immediate sensations and sense perceptions, can we prove that our senses give us reasonably reliable access to what the world is really like?

One thing that stands in our way is a variety of “skeptical scenarios” or “undefeated defeaters” (Knowledge is basically justified true belief without any undefeated defeaters.) Here are some well-known skeptical scenarios/defeaters: How do you know that you are not… (i) dreaming, (ii) being fooled by an evil demon; (iii) currently using a really good VR-rig; (iv) on a “holodeck” like the one in “Star Trek”, (v) currently in William Gibson’s immersive, plugged-in version of “cyberspace”, (vi) in “The Matrix” or, anyway, a matrix; (vii) in Nozick’s “experience machine”; (viii) a brain in a vat being electro-chemically stimulated to believe you are not just a brain and the world around you is going on as before; or (ix) part of a computer simulation? (You don’t need to recognize all of these to get the general idea, of course.)

David (“The Hard Problem (of Consciousness)”) Chalmers, in his new book “Reality+”, doesn’t want us to think of these as skeptical scenarios at all. Being a brain in a vat, he says, can be just as good as being a brain in a head. Most of what you believe that you know about, say, where you work, what time the bus comes, or how much is in your checking account is still true, relative to your envattedness, according to Chalmers.

It seems tenuous to me to claim that “most” of your beliefs could be true in such a scenario. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Bey Unvaan. February, 2022.

Digital photograph.

by David Oates

Looking at this photo brings a rush of feeling ­­– complicated, lovely, heartbreaking: a simple still life captured from the churning reality of the sea and the shore, which of course means also the weather, the wind, the atmospheric chemistries and grinding tectonics and magmatic uplifts and erosions and all high things toppling and washing down to the sea, all far things brought to shore, all shores grinded and washed away – all accumulating here, in this moment of randomness.

And . . . that this is beautiful.

Why is this beautiful? What excess of indifferent cosmic love has so arranged our universe, that dead randomness be beautiful?

Can you stand on the shore and not feel it? Or under the starry night?

Our hearts are broken by beauty. And mended by it. And we are undone, truly, in feelings and cycles beyond resolution. All we can do is go mute. Wipe the tear away. Turn our faces to a loved one, to see if these runes might be written there too.

Sometimes they are.

But now, in 2022, how are we to think of natural beauty and solace? When the seas are acidifying, rising, heating up. The whole planetary heat-budget going haywire. Species dying, ecosystems crashing. And worse to come.

This is an essay about lost refuges. Can I still stand on the shore and be restored, spiritually renewed? Yes. But, Reader, it is very hard work. Hard, heavy work. Read more »