Falling
.

Falling's weightlessness is a troubled one
It's not like the airtime of up-drafting hawks
or homosapient gliders hung on wires under
silk billows out of their element
snubbing gravity putting on airs,
nor like the honking camaraderie
of southbound geese chasing solar flares

To know that speeding mass
in collusion with collision brings bereavement
in worlds of muscle blood and bone
is usually enough to keep most breathers
from dancing on edges or diving off ledges

By a wise prescience we understand
that freefall without orbit
must be a heavy weightlessness
no matter how long its freedom lasts
if gravity's die is cast

Bodies are more fragile than stone and steel.
In falling minds minutes are surreal
and time expands as down mind coasts

—as future shortens past grows richer
and now's edge is honed so fine
as to split the hairs of ghosts,
and life 's full-tipped to spill last hours out
which cling to sides of tissue pitchers

Past becomes a fuller world, more here,
which is why old fallers often go there more
than fresh fallers do, who, still green,
in exhilarated falling feel only wind in hair
the sheen of mornings crisp and new
being blessed to not fully grasp
that they are falling too
.
.
by Jim Culleny
10/28/13

by James McGirk

I learned about the MONIAC in my high school marco-economics class: a.k.a. the Financephalograph or the Philips Hydraulic Computer, MONIAC was a massive machine, the size of two grandfather clocks bolted together, only instead of gears there was colored fluid inside, sluicing through tubes, pushing valves open and filling cisterns. Here, fluid was a metaphor for money, and by manipulating how much trickled through the system (pour in investments, drain out expenditures…) MONIAC could model Great Britain’s fiscal policy. Hence its name: the Monitary National Income Analogue Computer. This was absolutely an idea borne of its time (which would be New Zealand circa 1949, when feedback loops and whole systems were to Big Business what networks and disruptive capitalism are today) and as an idea was quickly repurposed from oracle-like pronouncements on fiscal policy to the teaching spotty undergraduates studying intro to Economics. My instructor—I don’t remember her name—mentioned the MONIAC as a way to demonstrate the hubris of economic models. It was inconceivable to her that a bunch of transparent pipes filled with dyed water could model something so complex as a national monetary policy. I think that was the point. But I found the MONIAC quite appealing.

Psychiatrists refer to a patient’s system of belief. This is like a personal philosophy only it goes deeper than that; it refers to how a patient conceives of reality on a granular level. A paranoid schizophrenic might have a system of belief that relies on malevolent imps who undermine his every attempt to function in society. Or if you take enough acid and close your eyes as you peak and glimpse the whirling clocklike machinery undergirding reality and believe it is still there once you come down: well, that too would fit, albeit in a slightly more subtle way. At the time I was thus afflicted. A peculiar fellow, obsessed with control panels, who decorated his jeans and filled notebooks with doodles of speedometers and squignometers and gauges and switches and rows of buttons; a guy who re-read William Gibson’s Neuromancer forty times and gobbled cognitive enhancing Nootropic drugs (and pined for girls who reminded me of the main character Molly, a neo-noir villainess with retractable claws; wan, freckled redheads especially reminded me of her, but thanks to the aforementioned eccentricities, the female of the species was really more of an abstraction at the time).

So MONIAC was delicious concept to me. The idea that there could be a machine explaining everything and allowing you to manipulate reality like engineer manning a locomotive slotted neatly into my personal system of belief[1], and stayed there until I moved to New York City at the age of 22.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Two previous posts on mineral wealth sharing have discussed what should be done, who has done it and where and why it should be done. Now let's sketch how it should be done.

One of the critical decisions in setting up a fund is how much to invest for now, how much to save for current generations (e.g. pensions), and how much to save for future generations (when, presumably, the natural resources have dried up). Examples of such funds include the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APF), the Alberta Heritage Fund, Iran's Citizen Income Scheme, The Future Generations Funds in Kuwait (here and here); Norway's Government Pension Fund Global, the Pula Fund in Botswana and Wyoming's Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund .

Another set of questions are: How would such mineral revenues be managed and distributed to all citizens? And who would manage them and on what basis? What should be the guiding principles for the governance and management structure? The choices in structures for the governance and management of mineral revenues for direct dividend transfers and investments could determine whether the wealth gets transferred to all citizens, changes their lives and grows for future generations or whether it becomes an opportunity lost.

Pointers to what works for good governance and management:

· Decision for setting up an institution which can manage, invest and distribute mineral wealth is ratified by parliament as good economic and social policy. This institution can for the sake of description be called a Citizens' Wealth Fund (CWF).

· Legislation through Parliament for mineral wealth revenues management is based on the principle that it is the right thing to do because mineral wealth revenues are viewed as the property of all of the citizens of a country.

· Management of the CWF is set up on the principle that mineral wealth revenues should be grown through sound money management and capital investments to safeguard and create wealth for current and future generations.

· Citizens are viewed as clients who receive the benefits on their investment and income through Direct Dividend transfers, which they have the right to do with as they choose on the principle that each citizen can invest in their future as they wish.

· Governance of the CWF as a public institution is legislated by Parliament. The operations team of the Fund would be recruited competitively. The fund would have oversight from an independent Board chosen from members of academia, unions, private sector, and civil society. The Board should report to the Parliament. Media provides a watch dog and informative role of close scrutiny. The relatives of the President, Prime Minister and other officials of the Government would be ineligible to become members of the Board or on the staff of the fund.

· Sound economic and social policy underpins the sharing of revenues with all citizens. Policy depending on poverty and demographics could lead to a decision to transfer cash dividends to all citizens regardless of wealth immediately or as savings and pensions; or to target only the poor using mechanisms of poverty targeting; or they could be divided into various streams of investments: cash transfers to the poor, savings and pensions funds for all investments in education, health, agriculture, infrastructure, art and culture for all.

· Demographic targeting leads to choices on whether, if the population is young, direct dividend transfers now would benefit citizens' health, education and income outcomes. An aging population would benefit from pensions.

· Diversification of investments to benefit citizens includes providing a portion of each citizen's share as a monthly direct dividend transfer, while a portion of the dividend for each citizen would be withheld for the purpose of mandatory savings. The mandatory savings portion could be available to each citizen by a certain age and the pension fund would be made available at the retirement age in a country. All of the investment activities: dividend transfers, mandatory savings and pensions would be managed by the same money management team managing the investments for the overall funds so that citizens would benefit from their expertise in growing their wealth.

· Responsibilities and roles for different units in the CWF include: direct dividend transfers and money management; investments in education, health and social protection, investments in infrastructure investments; investments in arts and culture and science. Decisions on allocations to each area of responsibility and management would be approved by the Board and reported to Parliament.

Proposal for what else might work well:

A soundly managed CWF would need to have the attributes outlined above which are based on the experience of existing funds. Here is something that has not been tried and perhaps should be: An experienced and reputable international institution with both Investment Finance and Development experience could be the custodian and manager of such a CWF on behalf of a country. Similarly, philanthropists could contribute funds to such a CWF earmarked to a particular country to be managed on behalf of the poorest citizens of that country and the investment income from the contribution could be distributed as a direct dividend transfers. An ideal manager of CWFs would be an entity which has experience in: managing large trust funds on behalf of development partners; channeling these funds for development on their behalf; designing and supervising, poverty targeted cash transfers and community based investments.

The managing entity of the CWF would earn a fee in order to cover its management and operating costs for supervision and technical assistance on investments. This is normal practice for managing funds or trust funds. A mineral rich country with a high poverty head count could choose to provide a trust fund to such an entity to manage on its behalf. Direct dividend transfers would be made from this CWF to the citizens of the country. The rest of the investment income could be used for projects in health, education, social protection, housing, agriculture and infrastructure in that country. A Citizens Wealth Fund resourced by mineral wealth from so-called poor countries might just be the no strings and no aid attached easiest, fastest and most transparent way to end poverty.

by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Upon winning the Nobel Prize, Peter Higgs expressed a hope that “this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research”. By this, he means curiosity driven research, with no definite goal, no expectation of a practical outcome; research fueled by questions like ‘why is the sky blue?'

That such questions arise naturally is undeniable, but the act of following them through to the answers is some times looked upon as a luxury. Is it intellectually decadent to expend mental and financial resources going down apparently useless paths, in a world where there are so many concrete problems yet to be fixed? This debate has, in one form or another, gone on for centuries. Whenever there is news of a discovery, one of the first questions asked is ‘what can it be used for'? When Faraday displayed his new electric dynamo, this inevitable question was put to him, too. It is said he retorted “Of what use is a new born babe?” A remarkably apt response, that. A baby may grow up to perform spectacular feats, but you cannot predict at birth what these will be. In any case, most people do not bear and raise children because of what they might possibly accomplish in the future.

Any judgement of scientific value depends on your definition of science and what you consider to be of value. According to Nobel Laureate, Erwin Schrodinger, the ‘objective, purpose and value', of science, as of any other branch of knowledge, is simply to “obey the commandment of the Delphic oracle: ‘Know yourself.' That is science, to learn, to know; that is the rising truth of every spiritual human enterprise.”

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Not unlike the stories surrounding my favorite Carpaccio painting, my beloved bronze is surrounded in mystery and romance.

Utterly compelling, whenever I used to come home to LA, one of the first things I would long to do was to pay him a visit. He is so breath-takingly handsome –that truly a lifetime of visits to see him would never be enough. Physically perfect and with the most exquisite patina, it is that hand, pointing toward his victory wreath that always gets me.

(sigh~~~~).

Created between 300–100 BCE, the Getty Bronze is a victory statue celebrating a youth's win in one of the Greek Olympic Games. Perhaps he was the son of a wealthy family who wanted to commemorate their golden boy's athletic achievements. Such a beautiful start. But then several hundred years after his creation, the Romans literally ripped his feet off when dragging him back to Rome as booty (maybe for melting down since so little care was taken to pry him off his pedestal?)

That was not the end of his bad luck either, for he would then to sink to the bottom of the cold waters of the Adriatic when the ship carrying him went down–presumably in a storm.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Logic, as a field of study, is primarily focused on arguments. Logicians ask questions like: What counts as an argument? What counts as a good argument? How does argument go wrong? The overriding objective is to articulate the ways in which good reasoning differs from bad reasoning, and to employ those explanations in extending our capacity to reason.

For the most part, we argue and reason when thinking about things – tigers, taxis, and ties. Logic is an investigation into how we think about these things. So, as we argue in a language, we do logic in a language about that language; logic is a meta-language. Now, we have many other meta-langauges. There is the meta-language of grammar that captures our rules for well-formed sentences. There is the meta-langauge of artistic criticism that articulates rules or norms of the use of language for beauty. And so we may speak of crooks and hooks in our first order language, but it is the meta-languages that permit us to speak of nouns and rhymes. Logic, as a meta-language, then takes what comes natural to us – reasoning and argument – and provides a vocabulary with which we may talk about that reasoning, and hence scrutinize it. But in what way is it useful to have such a meta-language?

Consider the usefulness of the meta-language of grammar. With some basic grammatical concepts, we can identify the infelicity of the sentence My tie are blue or the ambiguity of I met a smart logician's husband. Without grammar, we may correct the first sentence with My tie is blue, or we may clarify the second with a well-placed question: Who was the smart one- the logician or the husband? But the explanation of what had gone wrong is inaccessible in the absence of a vocabulary designed to talk about the language. When developing the skill of making this ascent from first-order talk to the meta-language, we come to possess our thoughts and statements in a more complete fashion. We don't just know how to use the language, we also know why.

Similarly, logic supplies the tools with which to explain why (and not just see that) the reasoning in the following inference is good:

If Penelope is a cat, Penelope is a mammal

Penelope is a cat. So, Penelope is a mammal

Moreover, with logic, we can explain what goes wrong with fallacious reasoning, too:

If Violet is a cat, Violet is a mammal.

Violet is a mammal. So, Violet is a cat.

Logic provides names for good forms of reasoning (the first example above is an instantiation of what's called modus ponens) and we have names for bad forms, too (the second example is an instantiation of the fallacy of asserting the consequent). This attention to the forms of reasoning allows us to distinguish two reasons we may give for taking issue with an argument.

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by Ahsan Akbar

Summer bids farewell. It is the perfect time to long for a dip into warmth of homeland nostalgia aka “immigrant fiction”, though the term is not favoured by Jhumpa Lahiri, whose new book pique my interest. The Lowland (Bloomsbury 2013) is her second novel and fourth work of fiction. Immediately after the announcement of the 2013 Man Booker shortlist, its sales became astronomical. And Lahiri, no stranger to prizes and shortlists, reaffirms her place in the pantheon with yet another bestseller.

London maybe Lahiri's place of birth, but she grew up in the East Coast of America – Rhode Island, finishing college with multiple degrees from Boston. She cannot read Bengali, but she can speak the language and she certainly takes an interest in her roots: Calcutta. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, a slim collection of short stories, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. That surprised many literary establishments, perhaps shook some pillars too. As a fellow Bengali, daft as it may sound, I could not but rejoice in her achievement. Comprised of nine stories, the bestseller offered refreshing insight into the lives of Indians and Indian Americans without pulling punches. Personally, I enjoyed how Lahiri had common components in all the stories, which gave an overarching feel to the collection. Despite a lot that was both admirable and enjoyable about the book, I was also baffled by the fact that she would name a Bengali character 'Pirzada' in her '71 story (When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine). This is especially distressing since she holds a PhD and is presumably skilled in research. Critics in the West, who choose to downplay such mistakes in works about cultures they don't know should just ask themselves this: Could an otherwise perfectly good story about the Civil Rights movement get placed anywhere if the black central character were called, say, Aaron Steinmetz?

In any case, Lahiri got the upper hand of the cultural politics of America-endorsed ethnic fiction: many of the stories from Interpreter of Maladies were about exotic places but written in the context of a safe American suburb, a soft focus also adapted by the Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje in his latest work of fiction, The Cat's Table.

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Getting to Know You
.
I’m getting to know you who came
with the first Archaeon’s spark

Everything was new then, even you, you
parenthetical tail of vital events, you
old telegraphic protoplasmic stop, you
callous caboose bringing up the rear of trains
of eloquent clauses, fertile words,
grunts and final remains, you
small but lethal punctualtional dot

You came on the scene with the first cellknots waiting
You stood in the dark as first hearts began beating
In celebrations of birth you took orchestra seating
At wakes you confirmed your ruthless deleting

Never kind to lovers you roamed the earth like a shade
after light —being its nether side
what it made you unmade

Here it comes! the word went out
when your coughing heralds came through
making it clear you’d arrive to nullify anything new

Alone in your shadow lovers wept
embracing only the smoke they had kept
of the flame you snuffed before you had left
.

by Jim Culleny
10/7/13

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Mughal miniature showing a poetry reading, c. 1640-50

The ghazal entered my consciousness first as music (on Radio Pakistan or my parents’ LPs), accessible only through melody, beat, rhyme, refrain; the poem’s literary heft, of course, utterly lost on me. The ghazal was really a visceral stimulus in my pre-language existence and as such revealed itself as sad, cold, dim, energetic, red, blue or sweet depending on what emotion its sonic synthesis suggested. Later, when I studied the form in school, I was filled with the sense of awe that surrounds the Urdu ghazal in Pakistan.

The ghazal is distinguished as the most elevated of poetic forms, and considered to be the litmus test of a true poet. I learned about the Urdu ghazal’s formal constraints, and how, in the hands of the masters the form has been known to embody in the elegant brevity of a couplet, a vast range of subjects with depth and precision. All this talk was useful in understanding the craft and reach of the ghazal but it created a chasm of sorts and cut me off from my earliest response to the ghazal—hearing in the ghazal a color or temperature of emotion, and falling under its spell. This loss of connection with the spirit of the form became apparent to me after writing and teaching the ghazal in English and reading the Spanish poet Lorca’s lectures on the Duende.

Before I discuss the ghazal and the duende, here is a brief history of the ghazal and how we have come to know and utilize it in English: The ghazal form originated in pre-Islamic, pre-literate Arabia, spreading across parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, soon after the Muslim conquests of these regions. The Persians cultivated and refined this form to the extent that it became a defining feature of Persian poetics and was further transmitted to many other literary traditions, including that of Urdu. The Urdu ghazal took root in the court of the Sultanate of Dehli in the thirteenth century. The foremost ghazal poet Amir Khusrau was a famed scholar, Sufi mystic and musician, and was a poet in the court through the rule of seven emperors of Muslim India. His Persian and Hindavi (early dialect of Urdu) ghazals would later have a significant influence on the Urdu ghazal.

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by Jalees Rehman

Beware of what you share. Employers now routinely utilize internet search engines or social network searches to obtain information about job applicants. A survey of 2,184 hiring managers and human resource professionals conducted by the online employment website CareerBuilder.com revealed that 39% use social networking sites to research job candidates. Of the group who used social networks to evaluate job applicants, 43% found content on a social networking site that caused them to not hire a candidate, whereas only 19% found information that that has caused them to hire a candidate. The top reasons for rejecting a candidate based on information gleaned from social networking sites were provocative or inappropriate photos/information, including information about the job applicants' history of substance abuse. This should not come as a surprise to job applicants in the US. After all, it is not uncommon for employers to invade the privacy of job applicants by conducting extensive background searches, ranging from the applicant's employment history and credit rating to checking up on any history of lawsuits or run-ins with law enforcement agencies. Some employers also require drug testing of job applicants. The internet and social networking websites merely offer employers an additional array of tools to scrutinize their applicants. But how do we feel about digital sleuthing when it comes to relationship that is very different than the employer-applicant relationship – one which is characterized by profound trust, intimacy and respect, such as the relationship between healthcare providers and their patients?

The Hastings Center Report is a peer-reviewed academic bioethics journal which discusses the ethics of “Googling a Patient” in its most recent issue. It first describes a specific case of a twenty-six year old patient who sees a surgeon and requests a prophylactic mastectomy of both breasts. She says that she does not have breast cancer yet, but that her family is at very high risk for cancer. Her mother, sister, aunts, and a cousin have all had breast cancer; a teenage cousin had ovarian cancer at the age of nineteen; and that her brother was treated for esophageal cancer at the age of fifteen. She also says that she herself has suffered from a form of skin cancer (melanoma) at the age of twenty-five and that she wants to undergo the removal of her breasts without further workup because she wants to avoid developing breast cancer. She says that her prior mammogram had already shown abnormalities and she had been told by another surgeon that she needed the mastectomy.

Such prophylactic mastectomies, i.e. removal of both breasts, are indeed performed if young women are considered to be at very high risk for breast cancer based on their genetic profile and family history. The patient's family history – her mother, sister and aunts being diagnosed with breast cancer – are indicative of a very high risk, but other aspects of the history such as her brother developing esophageal cancer at the age of fifteen are rather unusual. The surgeon confers with the patient's primary care physician prior to performing the mastectomy and is puzzled by the fact that the primary care physician cannot confirm many of the claims made by the patient regarding her prior medical history or her family history. The physicians find no evidence of the patient ever having been diagnosed with a melanoma and they also cannot find documentation of the prior workup. The surgeon then asks a genetic counselor to meet with the patient and help resolve the discrepancies. During the evaluation process, the genetic counselor decides to ‘google' the patient.

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by Misha Lepetic

When all is finished, the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
~ Tao Te Ching, Verse 17

What does philosophy in action look like? Casual thoughts about the discipline may be united by the cliché of the philosopher as a loner. From Archimedes berating a Roman soldier to not “disturb my circles” (which subsequently cost him his head), to Kant's famous provinciality, to Wittgenstein's plunging into the Norwegian winter to work on the Logik, the term “armchair philosopher” might seem to be a tautology. But philosophy – or at least the parts that occupy the intersection of the interesting and the accessible – still concerns itself with the world at large, and our place in it.

New Yorkers got to see a particularly odd example of philosophy in action over the summer when artist Thomas Hirschhorn installed his Gramsci Monument in the central courtyard of a Bronx public housing complex known as Forest Houses. I won't dwell much on Antonio Gramsci himself (see here for a start), but suffice to say he was a man of the people, who died in prison after founding the Italian Communist Party. What is more interesting is how Hirschhorn used Gramsci as a jumping-off point, and where he chose to do it. Completed in 1956, Forest Houses is part and parcel of what anyone would recognize as “the projects” – a scattering of 15 buildings in a towers-in-the-park configuration, populated by nearly 3400 residents, most of whom are minorities and low-income. However, Hirschhorn didn't so much choose the site as it chose him – after visiting 47 public housing projects in the city, Forest Houses was the only one that expressed any interest in his proposal.

The arrival of Hirschhorn and his motley architectural assemblage, which seemed to be made mostly of plywood and duct tape, was met with perplexity by both residents and art critics. As far as the critics go – and hey, someone's got to play the straw man to kick things off, right? – at least one was mightily displeased. Writing in the New York Times, Ken Johnson pooh-poohed Hirschhorn as a “canny conceptualist operator” and opined that the installation would ultimately “be preserved in memory mainly by the high-end art world as just a work by Mr. Hirschhorn, another monument to his monumental ego.”

It's difficult for me to comprehend that Johnson and I visited the same place. The first thing to note is the inappropriateness of the term “installation.” The Gramsci Monument is much more of an intervention. Of course, architects and urbanists are not immune to the charms of this term, either – any bland pop-up café seems to constitute an “intervention” of the street, the urban fabric or what have you, with “dramatic” being the accompanying adjective of choice. But what made Hirschhorn's work really an intervention was its sheer physicality, its uncompromising presence in the courtyard. The towers-in-the-park paradigm, one of the baleful legacies of modernism, was introduced to the US in large measure by Le Corbusier, whose reputation is currently the subject of a risible attempt at rehabilitation by MoMA. The result is an environment of hard vertical and horizontal masonry lines, scrawny trees and threadbare lawns. As a pedestrian, you walk among 12-story brick sentinels, and the absence of any place that can provide a moment of semi-privacy, one of the key signifiers of successful public space, is palpable. The point – which was much in keeping with Le Corbusier's design ideals – was to get you to where you were going, and as efficiently as possible. “No Loitering,” as the signs say.

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by Liam Heneghan

Click diagram to enlarge

Context: One of the newer biological conservation strategies, ecological restoration, attempts to reverse the degradation of lands set aside for conservation purposes by reinstating, as closely as possible, the species and environmental conditions that existed before recent and large scale disturbances by human activities. A newly emerging framework within restoration ecology – the novel ecosystem paradigm – points out that with global change we are moving into an era for which there is no historical analogue. As a consequence land must be managed without excessive regard for the past which can no longer serve as our guide. This has generated a lot of controversy within the field. I was asked by Irish journalist Paddy Woodworth to speak on a panel on “The historical reference system: critical appraisal of a cornerstone concept in restoration ecology” at a conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration held in Madison Oct 6 -11th 2013. In recent articles and in his new book “Our Once and Future Planet: Restoring the World in the Climate Change Century” Woodworth had been critical of the novel ecosystem paradigm wondering if it does not undermine the case for restoration. I had not realized how controversial the topic had become. Tensions at the conference were running high, and the room in which this panel convened was over capacity with dozens turned away. What follows is the outline of my remark at this session.

On first glance the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the German philosopher, might not seem especially helpful for restoration ecologists or indeed for anyone contemplating our relationship with the natural world. After all, his work supposedly challenges the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. Nietzsche’s famous locutions concerning the “death of God” and his extensive discussions of nihilism should, however, be seen as his diagnosis rather than his cure. For Nietzsche our real cultural task is to overcome the annihilation of traditional morality, replacing it with something more life-affirming. The failure of our traditional precepts of value stem from the fact these express what Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal. This ideal measures the appropriateness of human actions against edicts coming from beyond our natural and earth-bound life. The highest human values, as we traditionally assess them, came from a denial of our natural selves. Nature, in turn, is regarded as having no intrinsic value.

Thus Nietzsche even when he wrote in areas seemingly distant from traditional environmental concerns has useful things to say to us environmentalists. At times, in fact, his aphorisms are those of a poetic naturalist. In The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880, collected in Human, All too Human) he wrote “One has still to be as close to flowers, the grass and the butterflies as is a child, who is not so very much bigger that they are. We adults, on the other hand, have grown up high above them and have to condescend to them; I believe the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.” This is not, of course, to claim that Nietzsche is a traditional naturalist. His concerns are primarily about the thriving of human life, though in this he seems less like a traditional wilderness defender and closer to a contemporary sustainability advocate who seeks to locate a promising future for humans while simultaneously solving environmental problems.

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by Quinn O'Neill

A warm wind blew over the African grassland and stirred the leaves of empty trees. A long time ago, the faint sounds of a nearby tourist lodge were carried on the breeze and the trees cradled sleeping baboons. These baboons were special. Studied by neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky in the 80s, they would sleep in the trees to gain easy access to garbage from the tourists – half eaten hamburgers and leftover drumsticks.¹

The practice proved lethal for the baboons, who met their demise when a TB outbreak contaminated the food. Those who frequented the garbage site happened to be the most aggressive and least socially affiliated in their troop. The more socially-oriented and peaceful members were spared, and a curious change occured in the dynamics of the troop, with the remaining baboons subsequently enjoying a persistent peaceful culture with relatively little agression and more grooming.

But that was a long time ago and much had changed. Faced with climate change, human pollution, and habitat loss, the baboon's numbers had dwindled dramatically and few places remained on the planet that could attract human tourists with their wild and natural beauty. Our own “alphas”, for too many decades, had put their own immediate interests above everything else, including collective human well being, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability. Our tar ponds and nuclear waste sites were now too widespread to be hidden from our view and the few remaining old trees, still beautiful were too wise to be enjoyed. “There used to be more of us,” you could almost hear them saying. “We were surrounded by life once.”

Over the years, lots of people had objected to what was taking place even as they watched it unfold. Credible authorities like James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard institute for Space Studies, and Canadian geneticist and journalist David Suzuki warned of the need to radically reduce CO2 emissions and make environmental issues a priority. Had they been part of the tiny percentage that wielded awesomely concentrated wealth and power, perhaps they could have done something to stop it sooner.

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Leaving

gust
air once here goes
to fill a vacuum there

dusk
the sun no more,
is behind mañana’s door

I can’t recall my last glimpse of you
you went
imagination is your wake

and here comes Go again blazing her trail of tears
while Gone is close behind
sweeping footprints with a green pine bough
from Going’s dust as I pine now
.

by Jim Culleny
9/12/13