False dichotomies

This morning, I had a wonderful conversation with Ethan about turbulence. He's has been thinking about the contradictions between measurements of various turbulent phenomena, and what is 'accepted' knowledge about those phenomena. So we talked for a while, in the presence of Kristin, a Ph.D. student in English. (Kristin shares my enthusiasm for conceptions of nature and place, and has been lending me her favourite books on the subject.) At the end of the conversation, she, heretofore quiet, said, "It's interesting. The way you two were talking is just the way some conversation would happen in contexts I am in." That was especially interesting coming from someone studying literature, but it further reinforced to me the false dichotomies that exist in our society, our culture, our educations, our colleges, and our minds.

There have been boundaries erected between people and thoughts, a reductionism of the world, that pits one group of people against the other. The scientist might think, "Oh, well, you probably don't understand what I'm talking about because you are and English major." This sort of thinking has led to specialised languages that further reinforce these boundaries, these dichotomies. What it has also done has been to allow people to act within their so-called "disciplines" without a grasp, without an understanding of what goes on outside of those "disciplines." Even within "disciplines" exist "sub-disciplines" that barely have any communication between each other. This can of course be extrapolated out to larger scales and broader contexts that truly have significance on the world. Think about the BP-Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year. The insularity of something like decision-making for oil drilling from the implications on the marine environment is a sort of ethical framework that leads to terrible decisions, and terrible consequences. In the end, however, we must break down the dichotomies, the boundaries, and furthermore live our ethics. We must suffuse our daily activities, our choices, our lives with ethics that we can justify no matter what. There should not be any dichotomies between our lives and our ethical ideals, our moralities.

In that light, I would like to share some words with you by the Powhatan-Renape-Lenape man Jack Forbes, modified slightly by Derrick Jensen in his book What We Leave Behind. (Jensen replaced the word "religion" with "morality," but you can read it any way you please.)

"'Morality, is in reality, 'living.' Our 'morality' is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our 'morality' is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all of these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's morality, then is one's life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived." 'Morality' is not prayer, it is not church, it is not 'theistic,' it is not 'atheistic,' it has little to do what white people call 'morality.' It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our morality. If we experiment on living animals, that is our morality; if we cheat at cards, that is our morality; if we dream of being famous, that is our morality; if we gossip maliciously, that is our morality; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our morality. All that we do, and are, is our morality."

Further thoughts on risk

I have written about risk previously (here, here, here), which stems primarily from our limited mental capacities and a carelessness toward potentially disastrous outcomes. People take risks only if the desirable outcome provides much more "good" for them than "bad." Yet the way we have structured our society is that the potential good, or profit, is always concentrated, and the risks are diffuse and spread out over everyone else. The way corporations and government is set up is that those that make the decisions are furthest away from the non-desirable outcomes of an action, i.e. the risks. For example, after the BP-Macondo Well oil spill, their ex-CEO Tony Hayward, although having been battered in public, got a huge severance package, and millions of shares in BP. What about the risks of oil and exploratory drilling? Well, the Gulf of Mexico and the people and nature there will be bearing the worst outcomes of risk for many years to come. In this case, the risks of drilling exploratory wells were made evident by the spill. But do you know what? Even after the most disastrous oil spill in US history, Transocean, the rig operator, gave bonuses to its top executives for its "best year for safety in the company's history." Here's what an article from The New York Times says...

"Transocean moved on Monday to contain the damage from its description of 2010 as a good safety year, which appeared in a securities filing on Friday disclosing that its top executives received about 45 percent of their targeted performance bonuses for the year. 

Ihab Toma, Transocean’s executive vice president of global business, said in a statement on Monday that 'some of the wording in our 2010 proxy statement may have been insensitive in light of the incident that claimed the lives of 11 exceptional men last year and we deeply regret any pain that it may have caused.'"

When a nation decides to go to war, the risks and non-desirable outcomes of such a decision - potentially increased taxes, deaths of men and women, ecological destruction - are thrust upon the people of the nation, particularly the nation in which the war is being fought in. Those that made the decision to go to war do not ever go to the front lines; they are probably playing golf while others risk their lives for someone else's ego.

We've all heard about the precautionary principle - if an action is potentially dangerous, don't do it. Such is the argument made to stop using the atmosphere, the land and the water as dumping grounds, but to no avail. But it isn't that we aren't implementing the precautionary principle at all. Derrick Jensen argues that the way the precautionary principle is currently implemented is that if any action harms the profits of corporations, that is deemed potentially dangerous, and we don't do it. What if we were to, as Jensen suggests, move the burden of the risk is moved from everyone else to the one who is actually making a profit? People may argue that we have laws in place that "hold people accountable for their actions." Well, it is never the richest or most powerful person that gets into trouble. The less well off does, however. In fact, many leaders have immunity, and that immunity exists because no one would be willing to make decisions that are risky unless the immunity existed.

Some links on the Deepwater Horizon and BP-Macondo well blowout

I just came across some links from the NYTimes website about the oil spill in the Gulf. I wanted to share them before I continued writing about the spill.

Deepwater Horizon's final hours
How the rig crew responded to the blowout

How we undervalue

I am taking a break from writing about boycotts to make sure I can capture in words some fleeting thoughts. Much of what I have been writing about over the past eight months has been about value - how we value objects that have embodied in them tremendous amounts of effort and resources, how we value the resources that provide us the capacity to make these objects, and how we value social interactions (here, here, here, here for starters). Trash lies at the heart of each of these valuations; indeed, trash is the result of our undervaluation of these things. An undervaluation of these things allows us the liberty to treat people and nature as we please, without care and respect.

We have a tendency, almost a knack, to undervalue almost everything that surrounds us - people, place, object, and nature. We undervalue the kindness and love of our parents, we undervalue the smile and eye contact of people we walk blindly by, we undervalue the beauty of a snowy morning, and we undervalue an untamed river. We think of everything in the world as fungible, people included (That is why people deem it fit to kill other people or put other people in harms way, especially in conflict. To such people, a person is just a person, and there is nothing more to him. Not all of the experiences that that person has been through, or the conversations and friendships that that person has had. Nothing. Especially in conflict, people are fungible.) That's the only way we can assign monetary value to all of these things - a well raised child can provide $X more for our economy than one that was raised in the inner city and grew up with gangs, a snowy morning (like the one recently in Seattle) probably caused us to lose a lot of economic value (gosh, if people can't go to work, then, then, gosh, we are losing money!), a mighty river, if tamed, can provide jobs to many hundreds or thousands of people, and generate economic gain. The only reason why Transocean did such a inept job at drilling the BP-Macondo well was because they (and the government) undervalued the impact a blowout would have on the ocean, the fish, the birds, and the people of the Gulf.

 

What is the value of this fish and the water around it? (Photo by Joel Sartore from here.)

Indeed, due to the complexities of systems around us, both natural and man-made, we will never be able to assign any accurate value to anything in this world - we will continue to undervalue everything, because no one is willing to say that a life, or a river, or a rock, or an experience is priceless. What if we had the humility to not assign monetary value to something? What if the only way we could value was through observation, feeling and emotion? I must admit, at times it is overwhelming to me now to see a neatly stacked pile of plastic containers, knowing full well that within the day, they will be on their way to a landfill.

(Speaking of value, here's an article about how much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless.)

A new kind of Pareto optimality

Given any policy or allocation of resources, if one were to make a change to this policy or allocation, making at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off, the change is a Pareto improvement. If we keep making such Pareto improvements, we will reach a point at which no more improvements can be made. This is the point of Pareto optimality. In practice, it is likely that a person that is made worse off through a change in policy will be compensated monetarily, given some quantification of their worse position. This is how a lot of public policy is made. This may make sense from a neoclassical economic perspective, but it is such thinking that leads to people wanting to be compensated for interests that are clearly environmentally and socially harmful, or leads people to compensating other people with money for a harm that is incalculable. For example, monetary profits made from having a landfill close to people's residences might be divided in some part to people at those residences, to compensate for their distress at having the landfill close by.

But given continuing environmental harm, burgeoning populations all over the world, and the ever increasing size of human interventions in nature (larger dams, larger swaths of forest cleared for reaching oil sands, deeper mines), there is a likelihood that any choice that is potentially harmful to the environment and communities may have much larger consequences than in the past. However, it seems as if powerful interests are willing to increase monetary compensations so long as they can function viably. For example, the BP-Macondo Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico led to BP setting aside $20 billion to deal with settlement claims and cleaning the oil.

On an episode of Speaking of Faith (now known as Being), Jean Vanier talked about how it is essential that we lives our lives and make decisions with those most vulnerable among us at the centre of the decisions. Vanier gave the example of a new born child - the child is the most vulnerable member of a family or group, and once it exists, our decision making must accommodate the needs of this being. It is fascinating how this creature, although completely incapable of doing anything on its own, can control an entire group, its minds and hearts. This seems to throw a huge wrench in the Pareto way of thinking. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to how our governments and corporations make decisions today, it is the interests of not the most vulnerable among us, but the interests of the most powerful among us that are front and centre. Indeed, the Pareto condition is centred around those that are already well off compared to most of the rest. And then, there are the silent - nature and other living beings, who are potentially more vulnerable than the most vulnerable humans. What if we were to consider the interests of nature and ecosystems in the Pareto condition? If we are to constantly improve people's lives, can we do so without making the provider worse off?

 

V. Pareto

The Gulf Between Us

It is fair to say that I am pissed for the second time that I can remember. Yesterday, I read Terry Tempest Williams' horrifying essay, The Gulf Between Us, which was published in the current issue of Orion Magazine. Instead of writing about "the facts" and "what we've been told" of the BP-Macondo Gulf Oil Spill, she centres her writing around the personal stories of people affected by the spill, from Louisiana to Florida. Accompanied by stunningly, beautifully sad images by J Henry Fair (you must click on this link and watch and listen to the slideshow), she witnesses and listens to people whose lives have been turned upside down because of the spill. She talks about people being mistreated, bullied and threatened by local government and BP for speaking up, the untold stories of hundreds and thousands of dolphins, whales, birds and sea turtles killed because of the spill - because of oil being set alight on the blue surface of the ocean, and the mainstream media's ineptitude and thoughtlessness in covering the spill. This post is about BP, Corexit (the dispersant used to "get rid of the oil"), perceptions of the problem, and the ineptitude of people we elect to office.

As many of you might be constantly thinking, it is so unfortunate what we are doing to other people, animals, plants, and ecosystems.We would think that environmental disasters and suffering can change human perception of problems, and mobilise people to rid our world of the fundamentals that cause these problems. Unfortunately, maybe only war (the kind in which people use missiles and guns to kill other people) is something that can mobilise people consistently today.

It seemed to me that addressing issues like climate change and sustainability would inherently be a difficult task because of the almost imperceptible changes that point to problems in our society. It seemed that it would take something visceral and explosive to mobilise people. That explosive event, for our generation, was the BP-Macondo Oil Spill (I don't mean to discount the countless environmental+human disasters that take place every day in South America and Africa and Asia, but the BP Spill was one of the only events covered by media from all over the world in which the environmental+human impacts of the spill were focused on. The Chilean miners being trapped underground was portrayed as more of an issue of the bravery and courage of humans, a redemptive story, rather than one of asking the question - Why were they trapped down there anyway?). Unfortunately, it seems to me like the opportunity to truly get people acting has come and gone. The Obama Administration's tepid response along with an almost collusion-like effort between regulatory agencies like the EPA and companies like BP to make it seem like the efforts expended were yielding incredible results, and their success in keeping personal accounts of the Spill out of the minds of people has lost us a chance to forge true change. In the end, issues will be settled in the courts, with Judge Carl Barbier, who will oversee about 300 lawsuits, owning corporate bonds in Halliburton and Transocean, two of the other defendants along with BP. People will be paid off, settlements will be made, and "the most complex litigation" in US history will soon be forgotten.

Yet lives, sentient and non-sentient, torn apart because of the spill cannot be easily mended together by money. Who will be there to defend the dolphins, who are choking at the surface? Apparently, dolphins have been illegally killed and have either been trucked down to Mexico to serve as food or dumped in landfills. Corexit ("corrects it, get it?"), which has been dumped by planes over land and water during the night, will continue to have toxic impacts on people and animals, yet it seems like it fulfilled its intended purpose perfectly - as long as the oil is not on the surface, as long it is spread vertically in the water column, who cares? Corexit contains 2-butoxyethanol (yes, carcinogenic) and a "proprietary organic sulfonate." I guess people have no right to know what they are breathing in and drinking, in the name of intellectual property.

I was talking to Kevin last night about the outcome of the midterm elections. Democrat or Republican, I couldn't care less for most of them in the Congress or White House. All of them need to be kicked out, and some of them need to be sent to jail. Their generation is one of the major contributors to the problems we face today - war, terrorism, environmental disaster and poor healthcare - we need to be the ones that show no mercy for their vested interests, and create what Laura Smith calls "durable change."


 I constantly think back to Graham's comment in September, "We've generated a lot of "knowledge" in the past two hundred years, but we've gained very little wisdom." Our problems are not being effectively addressed by technocrats and lifelong academics. It seems like Margaret agrees - "“We might not be the most educated people schoolwise, but we know more about nature than any PhD. We know. We know what’s goin’ on.”