Friday, April 12, 2002

A Twice Told Tale Elisabet Sartouris writes: Everyone knows that humanity is in crisis, politically, economically, spiritually, ecologically, any way you look at it. Many see humanity as close to suicide by way of our own technology; many others see humans as deserving God's or nature's wrath in retribution for our sins. However we see it, we are deeply afraid that we may not survive much longer. Yet our urge to survival is the strongest urge we have, and we do not cease our search for solutions in the midst of crisis. The proposal made in this book is that we see ourselves in the context of our planet's biological evolution, as a still new, experimental species with developmental stages that parallel the stages of our individual development. From this perspective, humanity is now in adolescent crisis and, just because of that, stands on the brink of maturity in a position to achieve true humanity in the full meaning of that word. Like an adolescent in trouble, we have tended to let our focus on the crisis itself or on our frantic search for particular political, economic, scientific, or spiritual solutions depress us and blind us to the larger picture, to avenues of real assistance. If we humbly seek help instead from the nature that spawned us, we will find biological clues to solving all our biggest problems at once. We will see how to make the healthy transition into maturity. Some of these biological clues are with us daily, all our lives, in our own bodies; others can be found in various ages and stages of the larger living entity of which we are part -- our planet Earth. Once we see these clues, we will wonder how we could have failed to find them for so long. The reason we have missed them is that we have not understood ourselves as living beings within a larger being, in the same sense that our cells are part of each of us.  (04/12/02) Conserving Forest Communities Wendell Berry writes: We have never understood that the only appropriate human response to a diversified forest ecosystem is a diversified local forest economy. We have failed so far to imagine and put in place some sort of small-scale, locally owned logging and wood-products industries that would be the best guarantors of the long-term good use and good care of our forests. ... A good forest economy, like any other good land-based economy, would aim to join the local human community and the local natural community or ecosystem together as conservingly and as healthfully as possible. A good forest economy would therefore be a local economy, and the forest economy of a state or region would therefore be a decentralized economy. The only reason to centralize such an economy is to concentrate its profits into the fewest hands. A good forest economy would be owned locally. It would afford a decent livelihood to local people. And it would propose to serve local needs and fill local demands first, before seeking markets elsewhere. A good forest economy would preserve the local forest in its native diversity, quality, health, abundance, and beauty. It would recognize no distinction between its own prosperity and the prosperity of the forest ecosystem. A good forest economy would function in part as a sort of lobby for the good use of the forest. A good forest economy would be properly scaled. Individual enterprises would be no bigger than necessary to ensure the best work and the best livelihood for workers. The ruling purpose would be to do the work with the least possible disturbance to the local ecosystem and the local human community. Keeping the scale reasonably small is good for the forest. Only a local, small-scale forest economy would permit, for example, the timely and selective logging of small woodlots.  (04/12/02) How Evolution Works Dr. Elizabet Sahtouris writes: If biological evolution is revealing itself to our scientific scrutiny as a holistic and intelligent learning process, what of the universe in which it is embedded? Western science is but a few centuries old -- a very new endeavor on the scale of evolution itself, which is counted in billions of years. The concept of biological evolution and the pursuit of its nature came into this science and into the public eye only little more than a single century ago. Yet in that brief moment we came very far: from the first voyages of the Beagle to identify and catalog a handful of our planet's still countless species in a framework of the first modern theory of their emergence over time to the temporal mapping of an amazing diversity of life, most of it far too small to see with the naked eye, and to the unraveling of the DNA common to them all, the understanding that it is freely traded in a great world wide web, and the capability of shuffling genes among species ourselves, for our own human purposes. Does this indicate that we now know how evolution works? Consider that it is now less than two years ago that we officially revised the entire tree of evolution, displacing the visible species that had made up the bulk of this tree to the tip of a single branch on a new tree made largely of microbes. Consider that the truly detailed study of these microbes and their worlds has only become technologically possible in the past decade and that our newly observable information about them is dramatically changing our views of how DNA works. And consider that the sciences of astronomy and physics, within whose frameworks biological theories exist, are in complex transitions of their own, in both observation and theory. Is it possible to know how biological evolution works without knowing how the physical universe in which it is embedded works? If we believe, as the physicists tell us, that everything in the universe is inseparably interconnected at the most fundamental levels of reality, then I think we can agree that there must be a consistency in the realities of our biological and physical worlds.  (04/11/02) Conserving Communities Professor Wendell Berry writes: I am talking here about the common experience, the common fate, of rural communities in our country for a long time. It has also been, and it will increasingly be, the common fate of rural communities in other countries. The message is plain enough, and we have ignored it for too long: the great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by "creating jobs." They come to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it. They are interested in "job creation" only so long as the jobs can be done more cheaply by humans than by machines. They are not interested in the good health-economic or natural or human-of any place on this earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says, "the buck never stops." The buck is processed up the hierarchy until finally it is passed to "the shareholders," who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too poorly informed, and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything. The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own advantage) anywhere and (in terms of local accountability) nowhere. The message to country people, in other words, is this: Don't expect favors from your enemies. (04/11/02) Mist opportunities: When water is part of the architecture In the realm of outlandish architectural fantasies, a building made out of mist surely has to rank near the top. But this bizarre-sounding concept, dubbed the Blur Building, is no fantasy at all. It's under construction in Switzerland, and is one of five architectural projects featured in "Architecture + Water," a new exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art's Heinz Architectural Center. The vision of Diller + Scofidio, the only architects ever to win a MacArthur "genius" award, the Blur Building is the most fanciful of the five, but each has a unique way of tackling a tricky equation: how to effectively merge function and form when water is a major structural factor. (04/10/02) 7:53:11 AM

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