Category: History

Magic and the Machine

Living in an American Age of Techno-Wonder and Unreason

Introductory note from yours truly!

It’s becoming a regular item in the agenda of Learning from Dogs to republish essays that appear on Tom Engelhardt’s blog, Tom Dispatch.  But as the following was, in turn, a republication by Tom of a very interesting essay by Lewis Lapham, I took the precaution of asking Mr. Lapham’s office for permission to republish.  It showed the standing in which Tom is held by the very prompt reply from Michelle Legro, Associate Editor of Lapham’s Quarterly who confirmed, “If you have permission from Tom Englehart to republish the piece, than it is fine with us.”

So it’s more than important that today I include Tom’s plea that headed up Lewis Lapham’s article, as follows,

[Note for TomDispatch readers: The 30,000 of you who get email notices whenever a new piece is posted, as well as the tens of thousands who bookmark TD or read its pieces reposted elsewhere, can support this site by encouraging new readers to sign on. TomDispatch spreads mainly thanks to word of mouth, a formidable force in the online world. For those of you already hooked, I urge you to lend the site a little more of that word-of-mouth power. I hope you’ll consider putting together a modest list of friends, colleagues, relatives, or, for that matter, people you like to argue with who might benefit from getting TomDispatch regularly. Urge them to go to the “subscribe” window to the right of the main screen, put in their e-mail addresses, hit “submit,” answer the confirmation letter that will quickly arrive in email boxes (or, fair warning, spam folders), and join the TD crew. Many thanks in advance for your efforts. They do matter! Tom] 

So please do subscribe to Tom’s deeply interesting blog.  The home page is here and the ‘subscribe’ window is slightly down on the right-hand side of the ‘home’ page.  You will not be disappointed.

OK, now on to Nick Turse’s introduction to Lewis Lapham’s article.

It is said, Lewis Lapham tells us, that Abbot John Trithemius of Sponheim, a fifteenth-century scholar and mage, devised a set of incantations to carry “messages instantaneously… through the agency of the stars and planets who rule time.”  In 1962, Lapham adds, Bell Labs “converted the thought into Telstar, the communications satellite relaying data, from earth to heaven and back to earth, in less than six-tenths of a second.”  Magic had become science.  Today, the Pentagon is picking up the centuries old gauntlet, asking the brightest minds in academe — through its far-out research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA — to come up with a means for a 20-something-kid-cum-lieutenant or perhaps the military’s much-lauded “strategic corporal” to be wired into unprecedented amounts of information beamed down from the heavens above.

At some level, even the language of DARPA’s solicitation for its SeeMe program seems to conjure up the visions that danced in Trithemius’s head.  Its goal, we are told, “is to provide useful on-demand imagery information directly to the lowest echelon warfighter in the field from a very low cost satellite constellation launched on a schedule that conforms to DoD [Department of Defense] operational tempos.”  Those heavenly-sounding constellations are, however, tempered by the reality of what the Pentagon is really after.

Yesterday’s future of high-tech satellites that would allow our thoughts to slip “the surly bonds of Earth,” while connecting the far reaches of the planet and linking minds globally in ways even Trithemius couldn’t imagine, is now being exchanged for a low-bid, low-rent system of military satellites.  These will be capable of allowing a kid just out of high school to more efficiently target a kid who probably never went to high school — all courtesy of a well-educated university scientist who never bothered to think of the implications of his tenure-producing, tax-payer-funded research.  This can’t be what Trithemius had in mind.  And yet, that’s where we’re at.

If the Pentagon has its way, SeeMe will eventually fill the skies with cheap, disposable “satellites at very low altitudes, networked to existing fielded communications systems and handheld platforms.”   So much for the “the high untrespassed sanctity of space.”  But let Lewis Lapham explore further the borderlands of science and magic that have somehow been fused into the very center of our lives.   The famed former editor of Harper’s Magazine now edits Lapham’s Quarterly, which, four times a year, brilliantly unites some of the most provocative and original voices in history around a single topic. (You can subscribe to it by clicking here.) TomDispatch thanks the editors of that journal for allowing us to offer an exclusive online first look at Lapham’s elegant history of unreason in this techno-age of ours. Nick Turse

oooOOOooo

Magic and the Machine
Living in an American Age of Techno-Wonder and Unreason
By Lewis H. Lapham

[A longer version of this essay appears in “Magic Shows,” the Summer 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

As between the natural and the supernatural, I’ve never been much good at drawing firm distinctions. I know myself to be orbiting the sun at the speed of 65,000 miles per hour, but I can’t shake free of the impression shared by Pope Urban VIII, who in 1633 informed Galileo that the earth doesn’t move. So also the desk over which I bend to write, seemingly a solid mass of wood but in point of fact a restless flux of atoms bubbling in a cauldron equivalent to the one attended by the witches in Macbeth.

Nor do I separate the reality from the virtual reality when conversing with the airy spirits in a cell phone, or while gazing into the wizard’s mirror of a television screen. What once was sorcery maybe now is science, but the wonders technological of which I find myself in full possession, among them indoor plumbing and electric light, I incline to regard as demonstrations magical.

This inclination apparently is what constitutes a proof of being human, a faculty like the possession of language that distinguishes man from insect, guinea hen, and ape. In the beginning was the word, and with it the powers of enchantment. I take my cue from Christopher Marlowe’s tragical drama Doctor Faustus because his dreams of  “profit and delight,/Of power, of honor, of omnipotence,” are the stuff that America is made of, as was both the consequence to be expected and the consummation devoutly to be wished when America was formed in the alembic of the Elizabethan imagination. Marlowe was present at the creation, as were William Shakespeare, the navigators Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake, and the Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon envisioning a utopian New Atlantis on the coast of Virginia.

It was an age that delighted in the experiment with miracles, fiction emerging into fact on the far shores of the world’s oceans, fact eliding into fiction in the Globe Theatre on an embankment of the Thames. London toward the end of the sixteenth century served as the clearinghouse for the currencies of the new learning that during the prior 150 years had been gathering weight and value under the imprints of the Italian Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The Elizabethans had in hand the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli and Martin Luther as well as those of Ovid and Lucretius, maps drawn by Gerardus Mercator and Martin Waldseemüller, the observations of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Paracelsus.

The medieval world was dying an uneasy death, but magic remained an option, a direction, and a technology not yet rendered obsolete. Robert Burton, author ofThe Anatomy of Melancholy, found the air “not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible devils.” To the Puritan dissenters contemplating a departure to a new and better world the devils were all too visible in a land that “aboundeth with murders, slaughters, incests, adulteries, whoredom, drunkenness, oppression, and pride.”

Think Tanks of the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries

In both the skilled and unskilled mind, astronomy and astrology were still inseparable, as were chemistry and alchemy, and so it is no surprise to find Marlowe within the orbit of inquisitive “intelligencers” centered on the wealth and patronage of Henry Percy, “the Wizard Earl” of Northumberland, who attracted to his estate in Sussex the presence of Dr. John Dee, physician to Queen Elizabeth blessed with crystal showstones occupied by angels, as well as that of Walter Raleigh, court poet and venture capitalist outfitting a voyage to Guiana to retrieve the riches of El Dorado.

The earl had amassed a library of nearly 2,000 books and equipped a laboratory for his resident magi, chief among them Thomas Hariot, as an astronomer known for his improvement of the telescope (the “optic tube”), and as a mathematician for his compilation of logarithmic tables. As well versed in the science of the occult as he was practiced in the study of geography, Hariot appears in Charles Nicholl’s book The Reckoning as a likely model for Marlowe’s Faustus.

During the same month last spring in which I was reading Nicholl’s account of the Elizabethan think tank assembled by the Wizard Earl, I came across its twentieth-century analog in Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. As in the sixteenth century, so again in the twentieth: a gathering of forces both natural and supernatural in search of something new under the sun.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company undertook to research and develop the evolving means of telecommunication, and to that end it established an “institute of creative technology” on a 225-acre campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey, by 1942 recruiting nearly 9,000 magi of various description (engineers and chemists, metallurgists, and physicists) set to the task of turning sand into light, the light into gold.

All present were encouraged to learn and borrow from one another, to invent literally fantastic new materials to fit the trajectories of fanciful new hypotheses. Together with the manufacture of the laser and the transistor, the labs derived from Boolean algebra the binary code that allows computers to speak to themselves of more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in the philosophies of either Hamlet or Horatio.

Gertner attributes the epistemological shape-shifting to the mathematician Claude Shannon, who intuited the moving of “written and spoken exchanges ever deeper into the realm of ciphers, symbols, and electronically enhanced puzzles of representation” — i.e., toward the “lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters” that Faustus most desired. The correspondence is exact, as is the one to be drawn from John Crowley’s essay, “A Well Without a Bottom,” that recalls the powers of the Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, a fifteenth-century mage who devised a set of incantations “carrying messages instantaneously… through the agency of the stars and planets who rule time.” Bell Labs in 1962 converted the thought into Telstar, the communications satellite relaying data, from earth to heaven and back to earth, in less than six-tenths of a second.

Between the 1940s and the 1980s, Bell Labs produced so many wonders both military and civilian (the DEW line and the Nike missile as well as the first cellular phone) that AT&T’s senior management was hard put to correct the news media’s tendency to regard the Murray Hill estate as “a house of magic.” The scientists in residence took pains to discount the notion of rabbits being pulled from hats, insisting that the work in hand followed from a patient sequence of trial and error rather than from the silk-hatted magician Eisenheim’s summoning with cape and wand the illusions of “The Magic Kettle” and “The Mysterious Orange Tree” to theater stages in nineteenth-century Paris, London, and Berlin.

The disavowals fell on stony ground. Time passed; the wonders didn’t cease, and by 1973 Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction writer believed by his admirers to be the twentieth-century avatar of Shakespeare’s Prospero, had confirmed the truth apparent to both Ariel and Caliban: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

As chairman of the British Interplanetary Society during the 1950s, Clarke had postulated stationing a communications satellite 22,300 miles above the equator in what is now recognized by the International Astronomical Union as “The Clarke Orbit,” and in 1968 he had co-written the film script for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The opening sequence — during which an ape heaves into thin air a prehistoric bone that becomes a spaceship drifting among the stars — encompasses the spirit of an age that maybe once was Elizabethan but lately has come to be seen as a prefiguration of our own.

The New World’s Magical Beginnings (and Endings)

New philosophies call all in doubt, the more so as the accelerating rates of technological advance — celestial, terrestrial, and subliminal — overrun the frontiers between science, magic, and religion. The inventors of America’s liberties, their sensibilities born of the Enlightenment, understood the new world in America as an experiment with the volatile substance of freedom. Most of them were close students of the natural sciences: Thomas Paine an engineer, Benjamin Rush a physician and chemist, Roger Sherman an astronomer, Thomas Jefferson an architect and agronomist.

Intent upon enlarging the frame of human happiness and possibility, they pursued the joy of discovery in as many spheres of reference as could be crowded onto the shelves of a Philadelphia library or a Boston philosophical society. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, colonist arriving from France in 1755, writes in his Letters from an American Farmer to express gratitude for the spirit in which Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod — “by what magic I know not” — was both given and received: “Would you believe that the great electrical discoveries of Mr. Franklin have not only preserved our barns and our houses from the fire of heaven but have even taught our wives to multiply their chickens?”

A similar approach to the uses of learning informed Jefferson’s best hopes for the new nation’s colleges and schools, and for the better part of the last two centuries it has underwritten the making of America into what the historian Henry Steele Commager named “the empire of reason.” An empire that astonishes the world with the magnificence of its scientific research laboratories, but one never safe from frequent uprisings in the rebel provinces of unreason.

Like England in the late sixteenth century, America in the early twenty-first has in hand a vast store of new learning, much of it seemingly miraculous — the lines and letters that weave the physics and the metaphysics into strands of DNA, Einstein’s equations, Planck’s constant and the Schwarzschild radius, the cloned sheep and artificial heart. America’s scientists come away from Stockholm nearly every year with a well-wrought wreath of Nobel prizes, and no week goes by without the unveiling of a new medical device or weapons system.

The record also suggests that the advancement of our new and marvelous knowledge has been accompanied by a broad and popular retreat into the wilderness of smoke and mirrors. The fear of new wonders technological — nuclear, biochemical, and genetic — gives rise to what John Donne presumably would have recognized as the uneasy reawakening of a medieval belief in magic.

We find our new Atlantis within the heavenly books of necromancy inscribed on walls of silicon and glass, the streaming data on an iPad or a television screen lending itself more readily to the traffic in spells and incantation than to the distribution of reasoned argument.  The less that can be seen and understood of the genies escaping from their bottles at Goldman Sachs and MIT, the more headlong the rush into the various forms of wishful thinking that increasingly have become the stuff of which we make our politics and social networking, our news and entertainment, our foreign policy and gross domestic product.

How else to classify the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq if not as an attempt at alchemy? At both the beginning and end of the effort to transform the whole of the Islamic Middle East into a democratic republic like the one pictured in the ads inviting tourists to Colonial Williamsburg, the White House and the Pentagon issued press releases in the voice of the evil angel counseling Faustus, “Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,/Lord and commander of these elements.”

Charles Krauthammer, neoconservative newspaper columnist and leading soloist in the jingo chorus of the self-glorifying news media, amplified the commandment for the readers of Time magazine in March 2001, pride going before the fall six months later of the World Trade Center: “America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations, and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”

So again four years later, after it had become apparent that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were made of the same stuff as Eisenheim’s projection of “The Vanishing Lady.” The trick had been seen for what it was, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld emerged from the cloud of deluded expectation, unapologetic and implacable, out of which he had spoken to the groundlings at a NATO press conference in 2002: “The message is that there are no ‘knowns.’ There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns… but there are also unknown unknowns… The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“Perform What Desperate Enterprise I Will”

The Rumsfeldian message accounts not only for what was intended as a demonstration magical in Iraq, but also for the Obama administration’s current purpose in Afghanistan, which is to decorate a wilderness of tribal warfare with the potted plant of a civilized and law-abiding government that doesn’t exist. Choosing to believe in what isn’t there accords with the practice adopted on Wall Street that brought forth the collapse of the country’s real-estate and financial markets in 2008.

The magnitude of the losses measured the extent to which America assigns to the fiction of its currency the supernatural powers of a substance manufactured by a compensation committee of sixteenth-century alchemists. The debacle was not without precedent.  Thomas Paine remarked on the uses of paper money (“horrid to see, and hurtful to recollect”) that made a mess of America’s finances during its War of Independence, “It is like putting an apparition in place of a man; it vanishes with looking at, and nothing remains but the air.”

Paine regarded the “emissions” of paper money as toxic, fouling the air with the diseases (vanity, covetousness, and pride) certain to destroy the morals of the country as well as its experiment with freedom. A report entitled “Scientific Integrity in Policy Making,” issued in February 2004 by the Union of Concerned Scientists, advanced Paine’s argument against what it diagnosed as the willed ignorance infecting the organism of the Bush administration.

Signed by more than 60 of the country’s most accomplished scientists honored for their work in many disciplines (molecular biology, superconductivity, particle physics, zoology), the report bore witness to their experience when called upon to present a federal agency or congressional committee with scientific data bearing on a question of the public health and welfare. Time and again in the 40-page report, the respondents mention the refusal on the part of their examiners to listen to, much less accept, any answers that didn’t fit with the administration’s prepaid and prerecorded political agenda.

Whether in regard to the lifespan of a bacteria or the trajectory of a cruise missile, ideological certainty overruled the objections raised by counsel on behalf of logic and deductive reasoning. On topics as various as climate change, military intelligence, and the course of the Missouri River, the reincarnations of Pope Urban VIII reaffirmed their conviction that if the science didn’t prove what it had been told to prove, then the science had been tampered with by Satan.

The report spoke to the disavowal of the principle on which the country was founded, but it didn’t attract much notice in the press or slow down the retreat into the provinces of unreason. The eight years that have passed since its publication have brought with them not only the illusion of “The Magic Kettle” on Wall Street, but also the election of President Barack Obama in the belief that he would enter the White House as the embodiment of Merlin or Christ.

To the extent that more people become more frightened of a future that calls all into doubt, they exchange the force of their own thought for the power they impute to supernatural machines. To wage the war against terror the Pentagon sends forth drones, robots, and surveillance cameras, hard-wired as were the spirits under the command of Faustus, “to fetch me what I please,/Resolve me of all ambiguities,/Perform what desperate enterprise I will.”

Wall Street clerks subcontract the placing of $100 billion bets to the judgment of computer databanks that stand as silent as the stones on Easter Island, while calculating at the speed of light the rates of exchange between the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.  By way of projecting a federal budget deficit into both the near and distant future, the season’s presidential candidates float cloud-capped towers of imaginary numbers destined to leave not a rack behind.

The American body politic meanwhile dissolves into impoverished constituencies of one, stripped of “profit and delight” in the realm of fact, but still sovereign in the land of make-believe. Every once and future king is possessed of a screen like the enchanted mirror that Lady Galadriel shows to Frodo Baggins in the garden at Caras Galadhon; the lost and wounded self adrift in a sea of troubles but equipped with the remote control that once was Prospero’s; blessed, as was the tragical Doctor Faustus, with instant access to the dreams “of power, of honor, of omnipotence.”

Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham’s Quarterly. Formerly editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay, shortened for TomDispatch, introduces “Magic Shows,” the Summer 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch, join us on Facebook, and check out the latest TD book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Copyright 2012 Lewis Lapham

I haven’t a clue as to how to close this post after that – so I will just fade away ……. and leave you with this rather tongue-in-cheek cartoon.

Göbekli Tepe

The most amazing ancient site, possibly in the world.

I know this is a bit of a giant leap from yesterday’s Post but bear with me.  A short while ago, my friend Suzann sent me a link to some information about the archaeological site in Eastern Turkey known as Göbekli Tepe.  Suzann, as many regular readers will know, was the person who caused me to meet Jeannie back in December 2007 when Su invited me to spend Christmas with her and Don, her husband, at their home down in San Carlos, Mexico.

Before I go on to write about Göbekli Tepe let me also muse on another fascinating connection between Suzann and me.  That is that Su and I were sharing the same waters in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1991.  Here’s an extract from a recent email from Su.,

Don’s brother’s boat was Hana Ho.from Honolulu, Hawaii, a Tayana 55…gorgeous thing! They sailed in the Med for years around that time…it is possible you could have run into them…..

When we first flew in to Cyprus June of 1991, Bob’s boat was up on the hard. It took another 5 days to finish, and we had to climb straight up and down a steep, rickety ladder each time we went out, because we slept on the boat every night….was it ever hot and muggy! and no bathroom facilities in use!! But had a lovely time in Cyprus and really got out and saw things there. Delicious food!!

Then we sailed over toward the Turkey/Syrian border area and then gunk-holed west along the coast, ending up at Izmer, after visiting places like Antalya, Kekova Roads,Fethiya and the magnificent Rock Tombs, Marmaris, Bodrum, Kisadasi, Ephesus to name a few….

I, too, was living on a yacht, over-wintering in Cyprus, and cruising the Turkish and Greek coasts during the summer.  Anyway, enough of these musings.

A scene from Gobekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe is old.  I mean seriously old.  For example, I’m very familiar, being an Englishman, with the mystery and antiquity of Stonehenge.  But even the revised estimates of Stonehenge’s age, now believed to be 3,000 B.C., don’t measure up to the age of Göbekli Tepe.

The Smithsonian website explains much in a fascinating article about Gobekli Tepe, (do click on that link as the Smithsonian article is extremely interesting).

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it’s the site of the world’s oldest temple.

[my italics]

Imagine, there are fewer years between today and the building of Stonehenge than there are between the construction of Göbekli Tepe and Stonehenge!  Think about that!

Anyway, enjoy this video,

and if that grabs your interest then there is a longer 25-minute radio broadcast by Klaus Schmidt that is on YouTube, see below:

German archeologist Klaus Schmidt, from the German Archaeological Institute, who has been working as the head archeologist at Göbekli Tepe, a temple site located in southeastern Turkey close to the boarder to Syria. Klaus has been excavating there since 1994 and he joins us to talk about the excavation work, and to give us his impressions and theories about the site and the people who built it and worshiped at this ancient temple site. The temple is believed to have been erected in the 10th millennium BC (about 11,500 years ago). It is believed to be the oldest human-made place of worship, it’s even been called the Garden of Eden. Only about 3-5% of the site has been excavated so far, which has unveiled several stone circle rooms, only one of which has been dug down to the floor. As many as 20 such structures are thought to exist under the ground at the site, these have been detected by radar scans. These stone circles have large T-shaped pillars, some of the heaviest stones weigh up to 50 tons. The monoliths are decorated with carved reliefs of animals, abstract pictograms, sacred symbols and similarities to Neolithic cave paintings have been pointed out. The carefully carved figurative reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, donkeys, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures and water fowl. Göbekli Tepe means “Hill with a potbelly” although there already exists other interpretations of the name, connected to the word “Zep Tepi” or “The First Time” a period in beliefs of a mythological golden age when the gods lived amongst humanity together with half-divine offsprings of gods and humans. Is Göbekli Tepe the Garden of Eden? June 24, 2010

If you want more to read then I can do no better than recommend the article that Suzann linked to in her email.  It’s here and it starts thus,

Gobekli Tepe: 12,000 Years Old and Rewriting Human History

“This time what came first was the temple and then the city.”

– Klaus Schmidt, Ph.D., German Archaeological Institute

12,000-year-old circles of limestone columns weighing from 7 to 15 tons or more have been excavated in Gobekli Tepe, Turkey, about 6 miles northeast of Urfa.

Older than Egypt, Sumeria and Stonehenge, 40 standing T-shaped columns have so far been uncovered in four circles 98 feet (30 meters) in diameter. To date, no metal tools have been found since meticulous digging and dating began in 1994. Only 5% of the temple complex in repeating circles has been uncovered.

Ground-penetrating radar surveys indicate there might be at least 250 more standing stones in 18 still-buried circles. Finely honed reliefs and some 3-dimensional sculptures on the limestone columns depict boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes, scorpions, vultures, reptiles, humans and other figures.

You’ll have to read the rest of the article here.

Sort of puts the history of man into perspective!

Looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

Trying to make sense of the utter nonsense of the Rio+G20 summit.

I share the deep frustration that must be felt by millions around the globe at the outcome of the Rio summit meeting, if outcome is the appropriate word!  Martin Lack summarised his anger in a post last Friday and I’m going to publish an extract from his writings because they so perfectly reflect not only his anger but, I suspect, the anger of millions of others.

Adam Vaughan’s blog from Rio for the Guardian newspaper is not for the faint-hearted.  At 2:07 pm today, [Friday 22 June 2012 12.23 EDT, Ed] he quoted David Nussbaum (WWF-UK) as follows:

“It would have been naïve to pin too many hopes on a single conference, but undeniably we expected more from the outcome document. Entitled ‘The Future We Want’, the text doesn’t live up to the aspirations of the title – it’s more a case of ‘The Future We’ll Get If We Rely On Politicians’. Full of weak phrases, and re-confirmations of previous aspirations which they haven’t realised, the text fails to commit governments to actions, targets, timeframes and finance to which we can hold them accountable….What we have is an agreement within the bounds of what they thought politically possible; what we needed was an agreement to address what is scientifically necessary. This is no way to manage our planet!”

Neither would I recommend George Monbiot’s column today – Rio+20 draft text is 283 paragraphs of fluff; unless you are feeling brave:

“World leaders have spent 20 years bracing themselves to express ‘deep concern’ about the world’s environmental crises, but not to do anything about them…Several of the more outrageous deletions proposed by the United States – such as any mention of rights or equity or of common but differentiated responsibilities – have been rebuffed. In other respects the Obama government’s purge has succeeded, striking out such concepts as “unsustainable consumption and production patterns” and the proposed decoupling of economic growth from the use of natural resources.”

I would like to be able to dismiss this as facile criticism from the liberal left. However, in reality, to do so would be to second-guess the scientists who have been telling us for decades that we need action not words. Our children and grandchildren will not forgive us for failing to act.

BUT a conversation I had with Lew L. here in Payson last Friday afternoon helped crystalise some thoughts that I would like to share with you.

Representative democracy a la British House of Commons

The first is about democracy, or more accurately representative democracy.  Lew pointed out that some US Towns still employ direct democratic processes where all the people who attend a Town meeting vote in person for or against the motion.  The challenge for a representative democratic process is that those elected representatives are vulnerable to a wide range of influences and between elections may be taking decisions that the people would neither support nor approve of.

The idea of direct democracy goes back a very long time, as Wikipedia reveals,

The earliest known direct democracy is said to be the Athenian Democracy in the 5th century BC,

So it could be argued that the fundamental flaw in the Rio+G20 meeting was not the lack of any real progress by our ‘leaders’, but in our expectations, as in the expectations of ‘you and me’, all across the world.  The money and power that must be intertwined in such games of international politics doesn’t bear thinking about.  It was Lord Acton, the British historian, who said: ‘Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely‘.

So rather than expecting our representatives and leaders to do what we what them to do and being bitterly disappointed, time and time again, there is another equally valid way of bringing about change – create the change you desire by changing yourself.

As my friend Jon Lavin expressed in a very recent email,

People like something solid to relate to in such changing and unpredictable times and a dogs view is brilliant because dogs just are because they are in the present. All that matters is the ‘now’. Most of our problems can be traced back to our lack of ability to be in the ‘now’. Driven by regrets about the past, and a fear of what the future holds, we carry on hoping that all our problems can be solved by amassing material possessions.

Oh, well. The best way to save the world is to work on our selves.

So that leads on to my second thought, the urgency in tackling what is happening to the Earth’s climate.  In Martin’s second angry post over at Lack of Environment, he writes,

Here in the UK, the weather is literally unbelievable. 100mm of rain falling in one day. At the end of June. It’s ridiculous. Just one problem: It is exactly what the climate models predicted.

Global average temperatures are rising. Since the 1980s, every decade has been warmer than the last. 1998 was a very warm year, but global warming has not stopped; it has morphed into Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD). Some even suggest we should call it Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating (HIRGO) but I prefer ACD, because that is what we are experiencing: It will be decades before it becomes obvious that HIRGO is happening and, if we wait for it to be obvious, there will be no way to stop it.

We need to accept that ACD is a reality; it is an inevitable consequence of a warming atmosphere; one with more moisture in it more of the time and – as I said – it is exactly what the climate models have being tell us would happen for decades. That being the case, how is it that our politicians – seemingly led by members of a supposedly left-of-centre Democratic Party administration in the USA – can have such monumental tunnel vision as to offer up the planet itself as a sacrifice upon the altar of the god of Growth?

But do you see the fundamental error?  The idea that our leaders have to create change: “.. how is it that our politicians …. can have such monumental tunnel vision as to offer up the planet itself as a sacrifice upon the altar of the god of Growth?”

As Jon Lavin revealed in his email to me, the agency of change is within each of us. It is not a “thing.” There’s a huge amount of information revealed by a simple Google search on change, the change process, change management process, etc., etc., so I’m not going to add to the noise by quoting the experts.  It’s as simple as Jon wrote:

“The best way to save the world is to work on our selves.”

OK, moving on to my second thought, and for this I want to play a little mind-game.

That is what would be the impact if 50% of the combined populations of North America and Europe decided to save the power of one 60-watt lamp, or equivalent, for 36 hours a year, i.e. turning off one 60-watt lamp for less than one hour a day for a year!

Let’s take this a step at a time.

The combined population of the USA, Canada and Europe is 1,090,487,000 people, i.e. a little over 1 billion.

Thus half that population is 545,243,500 persons.

Saving 60 watts for 36 hours a year is 60 X 36 = 2,160 watts.

Thus 545,243,500 people times 2,160 watts = 1,177,725,960,000 watts.  Which is 1.178 trillion watts. (rounded up)

 I say again: 1.178 trillion watts.

How can one get any notion of what that means?  The best I could find from a web search was this:

The U.S. electric power industry’s total installed generating capacity was 1,119,673 megawatts (MW) as of December 31, 2009—a 1.0-percent increase from 2008.

Ergo, in 2009 the USA had the capability of generating 1,119,673 megawatts.  A megawatt is one million watts so 1,119,673 megawatts is 1,119,673,000,000 watts, or 1.119 trillion watts.

Wow! switching off a 60-watt lamp for less than an hour a day would save 1.178 trillion watts, more than the combined generating capacity of the entire USA in 2009 of 1.119 trillion watts.

I suspect that the current USA generating capacity isn’t that much different and, of course, one can’t run away with the idea that all of that is generated by fossil fuels.

But if I have done my mathematics correctly (and do please check my sums), the simple expediency of turning off one 60-watt lamp for 36 hours a year, if done by just half the populations of North America and Europe, would be the equivalent of saving 105% of the total US generating capacity!

So think about the change you want in your life, and  the lives of your children and grandchildren, and get on with it.  Turn out that light!

“The best way to save the world is to work on our selves.”

And I can do no better in terms of reflecting on the power of our minds, than courtesy of this fabulous video which Christine of 350orbust had last Saturday:

Remembering Fred Rogers.

Final thought!  If one thinks of the way that we trust the Internet for so much these days, and the huge number of people that are now ‘wired’, it doesn’t seem to be beyond the wit of man to come up with a reliable, secure method of direct voting electronically.  Wonder why that hasn’t caught on?

An insight into health

What we can learn about healthy lifestyles.

I am indebted to Schalk Cloete who has been leaving some very thoughtful comments on Learning from Dogs.  Schalk writes the blog, One in a Billion and more information about him can be learned here.  One of the very generous aspects of Schalk’s Blog is that his material is free from copyright, so I gratefully offer the following from his blog.

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Perfect health the traditional way

There are a number of very special traditional communities around the world that enjoy amazing health and longevity completely without the help of modern medicine. People still contribute actively to their communities in their 80′s and 90′s and often surpass the magical age of 100 sometimes without ever visiting a doctor.

The most well-documented of these communities is the Okinawa islands in Japan, but a number of other such communities also exist. These include the region of Abkhasia in the Soviet Union, the Symi island in Greece, the Italian village Campodimele, and the mountain communities of Hunza in Pakistan, Vilcabamba in Ecuador and Bama in China.

So, what are the secrets of these amazingly healthy people? Well, I don’t really think we can call them “secrets”, but here they are: these people simply eat a healthy, nutrient dense and predominately plant-based diet (Okinawan food pyramid given below), they never over-eat, they live very active lifestyles and they have a very strong sense of community.  Basically, they live the polar opposite of the modern western lifestyle.

These healthy lifestyle choices have some pretty impressive results. One fun statistic about Okinawa is that they boast 15% of the world’s confirmed super-centenarians (those over 110) while having only 0.0002% of the worlds people, thereby giving them a concentration of super-elders close to 100,000 times greater than the rest of the world. Wow…

In John Robbins’ excellent book “Healthy at 100″, he discloses a lot of well documented research on Okinawa, stating that they are about 15% as likely to die of heart disease and cancer as Americans. They also live 5 years longer on average.

When it comes to healthcare spending, Okinawa has the lowest healthcare costs in all of Japan, which already has a three times smaller per-capita healthcare expense than the USA. Thus, they have about a 7 times smaller chance of dying from degenerative disease and live 5 years longer, all while incurring about 5 times fewer healthcare expenses. Not bad, I’d say.

Unfortunately, the younger generation of Okinawans are rapidly screwing up these awesome stats by succombing to the American lifestyle brought by the US troops stationed on Okinawa.  It really is quite sad how many grandparents have to bury their grandchildren in Okinawa nowadays.

But this just shows how alluring our modern consumerist lifestyle really is. These young Okinawans saw the vibrant health of their parents and grandparents first hand, but still chose to consume their bodies into oblivion. Unthinking consumerism is indeed a very powerful enemy…

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Fascinating article from Schalk, as I’m sure you will agree.

That Diamond Jubilee

A further reflection on what has clearly been a wonderful occasion.

Last Sunday, I published a piece about The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  Today, I wanted to add a couple of perspectives to this glorious and historic event.

The grand perspective

As seen by someone watching the 1,000 boats on the River Thames to mark The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Then in stark contrast …

The local perspective

… as seen by the camera’s eye in the little village of Littlehempston, South Devon with many of the population of some 200 persons in front of Littlehempston Church.

Picture by Neil Kelly, standing to the right of John, see footnote.

Footnote: Not only is Littlehempston just a few miles from the village of Harberton where I used to live, before my new life with Jean here in Arizona, but both my sister and brother-in-law are in this photo; my sister, Corinne, is the first woman in from the right in the front row, and my brother-in-law, John, is standing just behind her (wearing the white hat).

Update:

Neil sent me a further picture below of the village beacon alight for the Jubilee.

Littlehempston’s Jubilee Beacon

 

Congratulations, Ma’am.

A small tribute from two of Her Majesty’s subjects!

Best wishes for many years ahead as our Queen!

Jean and I managed to watch the hour-long tribute by Prince Charles to his mother’s wonderful Diamond Jubilee week-end.

Here’s a small extract of that programme that appeared on ITN News.

Then thanks to Martin Lack’s latest Post, I discovered that You Tube have the full programme as well.  Here it is – do watch it if you can, it is a lovely, personal and intimate reflection by Prince Charles.

At the end of the programme, both Jean and I felt very nostalgic about the long reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.  However much we appreciate the life that we have here in Payson, Arizona, these two old Londoners still feel proud to be British.

There’s a great website here full of all the details of this very special time for Britain.

Finally, the extreme dry conditions of our forest mean that lighting a Jubilee Beacon here at home is out of the question.  The following is our alternative:

Beltane Fire Ritual, Edinburgh, Scotland

It’s what Jean and I do most Sunday evenings anyway!

Civilisations do fail!

Any lessons for today from the Valley of the Pyramids at Tucume in Peru?

The view of Huaca Larga (Photo: Heinz Plege/PromPerú)

Let’s set the scene,

It’s amazing to think that anyone lived here, that this valley was once green. Now it is sun-blasted, scorching hot, and the only life is the circling vultures and the rainbow-colored iguanas, like something out of a desert hallucination, skittering across the rocks.

The reminders of past life rise up around me, however, eroded to look more like drip castles than the pyramids they once were. I am in Túcume, the once-grand capital of the Sican culture, Peru’s mythical Valley of the Pyramids.

I am not far from Chiclayo, and even closer to the city of Lambayeque, where the Royal Tombs of Sipán Museum serves as one of the major tourist attractions on the north coast. Here at Túcume however, there are few visitors.

It is not hard to get to the site. Combis leave regularly from Chiclayo and Lambayeque, dropping passengers in the modern village of Túcume, from which an quick mototaxi ride leads to the ruins. By car or taxi, it is about a 30 minute ride from Chiclayo.

There are two main trails marked out across the desert plain in Túcume. One leads to Cerro Purgatorio, a craggy hill overlooking the 26 pyramids that comprise the site. The trail winds across the scorched valley, between several of the pyramids, before arriving at a staircase leading to different scenic overlooks on the face of Purgatorio.

WikiPedia, too, has a short reference.

Then there’s a long and revealing article on the InkaNatura Travel Site, which I recommend you go to.

So what happened at Túcume to cause the civilisation to fail?  Maybe this 10-minute film gives the answers, but just a note to say that there are some potentially upsetting scenes for the younger or more sensitive among us.

So anyone sufficiently brave to say that history won’t repeat itself.

Wonder which would be the ‘cursed cities’?

The loss of a lovely Uncle

Please indulge me with this purely personal reflection.

My Uncle Peter died in his sleep at 1.30am UK time on Monday, the 21st May, 2012.  He was 91 and had been suffering from declining health for a while.

As my parting gift from across the seas, I just wanted to record the great inspiration that he was to both me and my son, Alex.

Peter was a great gliding fan (sailplane in American speak!).  He must have started gliding not many years after the end of the war in 1945.  Anyway, when I was a young lad, back in the mists of time, my Uncle Peter took me for a glider flight.  That left a memory in me that lay dormant for many years until the late 1970s when a colleague, Roger Davis, introduced me to the Rattlesden Gliding Club and that started a 25-year interest in gliding and later power flying.

My son, Alex, also when he was a young boy was taken up for his first flight in a glider by Uncle Peter and later flew with me many times both in gliders and power aircraft.  Today he is a Senior Captain with a British airline.

So, dear Uncle Peter, what an aviation inspiration you have been for two generations.

Uncle Peter and two generations of pilots.

As it happens, 1.30 am UK time on Monday the 21st was 5.30pm Arizonan time on Sunday the 20th.  At that very moment, well 5.26pm to be precise, Jean and I were watching the solar eclipse and I took the photograph below of what was the partial eclipse here in Payson.

Partial solar eclipse partly hidden by the pine trees.

A tribute to a wonderful family man with a great sense of humour.

A journey of tears.

Day by day we threaten the planet we all live on.

It struck me recently that there is no easy journey of change.  Must have been like that since time immemorial.  Using the phrase ‘no easy journey’, is a safe interpretation!  The reality for all thinking, feeling individuals when we look at the madness of where mankind has arrived and the journey ahead must cause us all to weep; not all that infrequently I suspect.  Hence my choice of title for today’s Post on Learning from Dogs.

Maybe I am drawn to this reflective mood because I have finished James Hansen’s book, Storms of my Grandchildren.  To say it has disturbed me is a massive understatement.  But let me not wander off into some emotional haze but come back to the journey.

The road to hell.

Let’s take coal.  Here are Hansen’s thoughts on “Old King Coal” going back to 2007.  Note: CCS stands for carbon capture and sequestration.

Scientific data reveal that the Earth is close to dangerous climate change, to tipping points that could produce irreversible effects. Global warming of 0.6°C in the past 30 years has brought the Earth’s temperature back to about the peak level of the Holocene, the current period of climate stability, now of nearly 12,000 year duration, and more warming is “in the pipeline” due to human-made greenhouse gases already in the air. The Earth’s history tells us that the world is approaching a dangerous level of greenhouse gases, a level that would produce accelerating sea level rise, extermination of many animal and plant species, and intensification of regional climate extremes, including floods, storms, droughts and forest fires. It is urgent to slow emissions, as another decade of increasing emissions would practically guarantee elimination of Arctic sea ice, accelerating disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and regional climate deterioration during coming decades.

The most important time-critical action needed to avert climate disasters concerns coal. Consider: 1) one-quarter of fossil fuel CO2 emission remains in the air for more than 500 years, 2) conventional oil and gas reserves are sufficient to take atmospheric CO2 at least to the vicinity of the “dangerous” level, and it is impractical to capture their CO2 emission as it is mostly from small sources (vehicles), 3) coal reserves are far greater than oil and gas reserves, and most coal use is at power plants, where it is feasible to capture and permanently sequester the CO2 underground (CCS = carbon capture and sequestration). Clear implication: the only practical way to keep CO2 below or close to the “dangerous level” is to phase out coal use during the next few decades, except where CO2 is captured and sequestered.

The resulting imperative is an immediate moratorium on additional coal-fired power plants without CCS. A surge in global coal use in the last few years has converted a potential slowdown of CO2 emissions into a more rapid increase. But the main reason for the proposed moratorium is that a CO2 molecule from coal, in effect, is more damaging than a CO2 molecule from oil. CO2 in readily available oil almost surely will end up in the atmosphere, it is only a question of when, and when does not matter much, given its long lifetime. CO2 in coal does not need to be released to the atmosphere, but if it is, it cannot be recovered and will make disastrous climate change a near certainty.

The moratorium must begin in the West, which is responsible for three-quarters of climate change (via 75% of the present atmospheric CO2 excess, above the pre-industrial level), despite large present CO2 emissions in developing countries. The moratorium must extend to developing countries within a decade, but that will not happen unless developed countries fulfill their moral obligation to lead this moratorium. If Britain should initiate this moratorium, there is a strong possibility of positive feedback, a domino effect, with Germany, Europe, and the United States following, and then, probably with technical assistance, developing countries.

A spreading moratorium on construction of dirty (no CCS) coal plants is the sine quo non for stabilizing climate and preserving creation. It would need to be followed by phase-out of existing dirty coal plants in the next few decades, but would that be so difficult? Consider the other benefits: cleanup of local pollution, conditions in China and India now that greatly damage human health and agriculture, and present global export of pollution, including mercury that is accumulating in fish stock throughout the ocean.

There are long lists of things that people can do to help mitigate climate change. But for reasons quantified in my most recent publication, “How Can We Avert Dangerous Climate Change?” a moratorium on coal-fired power plants without CCS is by far the most important action that needs to be pursued. It should be the rallying issue for young people. The future of the planet in their lifetime is at stake. This is not an issue for only Bangladesh and the island nations, but for all humanity and other life on the planet. It seems to me that young people, especially, should be doing whatever is necessary to block construction of dirty (no CCS) coal-fired power plants. No doubt our poor communication of the matter deserves much of the blame. Suggestions for how to improve that communication are needed.

OK, before I finish off, enjoy Hansen’s interview on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” which has found it’s way onto YouTube, (I found the sound level pretty low!)

All of us who embrace this beautiful planet and acknowledge the extraordinary set of circumstances that enabled man to achieve so much must now weep.  Weep for what we have unwittingly done to Planet Earth, and hope our tears bring about change.

TomDispatch and Ernest Callenbach

A remarkable insight into our present world and hopes for the future.

As many of you dear readers will know, I am incredibly fond of the essays that Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch fame publishes on a regular basis.  Indeed, it was just a week ago that I published a Tomgram from Bill McKibben.  Had it not been for Tom querying if I had read his Ernest Callenbach last-words piece I might have missed what, for me, has been one of the most profound ‘mind-stretching’ reads for a very long time.

I pondered for most of a morning as to whether to publish Tom’s essay in one piece, as Tom presented it, or to break it down into two.  Our much shorter attention-spans as a result of the world we now live in worked against it being two parts.  But I also wanted to include other materials that give an insight into the late Ernest Callenbach so, in the end, this TomDispatch is republished as two pieces.  I trust that works for you.

So without further ado, here is Tom’s introduction to the last words of Ernest Callenbach.

Tomgram: Ernest Callenbach, Last Words to an America in Decline

Thirty-five years later, it was still on my bookshelf in a little section on utopias (as well it should have been, being a modern classic).  A friend had written his name inside the cover and even dated it: August 1976, the month I returned to New York City from years of R&R on the West Coast.  Whether I borrowed it and never returned it or he gave it to me neither of us now remembers, but Ecotopia, the visionary novel 25 publishers rejected before Ernest Callenbach published it himself in 1975, was still there ready to be read again a lifetime later.

Callenbach once called that book “my bet with the future,” and in publishing terms it would prove a pure winner.  To date it has sold nearly a million copies and been translated into many languages.  On second look, it proved to be a book not only ahead of its time but (sadly) of ours as well.  For me, it was a unique rereading experience, in part because every page of that original edition came off in my hands as I turned it.  How appropriate to finish Ecotopia with a loose-leaf pile of paper in a New York City where paper can now be recycled and so returned to the elements.

Callenbach would have appreciated that.  After all, his novel, about how Washington, Oregon, and Northern California seceded from the union in 1979 in the midst of a terrible economic crisis, creating an environmentally sound, stable-state, eco-sustainable country, hasn’t stumbled at all.  It’s we who have stumbled.  His vision of a land that banned the internal combustion engine and the car culture that went with it, turned in oil for solar power (and other inventive forms of alternative energy), recycled everything, grew its food locally and cleanly, and in the process created clean skies, rivers, and forests (as well as a host of new relationships, political, social, and sexual) remains amazingly lively, and somehow almost imaginable — an approximation, that is, of the country we don’t have but should or even could have.

Callenbach’s imagination was prodigious.  Back in 1975, he conjured up something like C-SPAN and something like the cell phone, among many ingenious inventions on the page.  Ecotopia remains a thoroughly winning book and a remarkable feat of the imagination, even if, in the present American context, the author also dreamed of certain things that do now seem painfully utopian, like a society with relative income equality.

“Chick” — as he was known, thanks, it turns out, to the chickens his father raised in Appalachian central Pennsylvania in his childhood — was, like me, an editor all his life.  He founded the prestigious magazine Film Quarterly in 1958.  In the late 1970s, I worked with him and his wife, Christine Leefeldt, on a book of theirs, The Art of Friendship.  He also wrote a successor volume to Ecotopia (even if billed as a prequel), Ecotopia Emerging.  And as he points out in his last piece, today’s [tomorrow’s, Ed.] TomDispatch post, he, too, has now been recycled.  He died of cancer on April 16th at the age of 83.

Just days later, his long-time literary agent Richard Kahlenberg wrote me that Chick had left a final document on his computer, something he had been preparing in the months before he knew he would die, and asked if TomDispatch would run it.  Indeed, we would.  It’s not often that you hear words almost literally from beyond the grave — and eloquent ones at that, calling on all Ecotopians, converted or prospective, to consider the dark times ahead.  Losing Chick’s voice and his presence is saddening.  His words remain, however, as do his books, as does the possibility of some version of the better world he once imagined for us all. Tom

Let’s find out a bit more about ‘Chick’ ahead of his words tomorrow.

This is the Wikipedia entry from which I quote:

Born April 3, 1929 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he attended the University of Chicago, where he was drawn into the then ‘new wave’ of serious attention to film as an art form. After six months in Paris at the Sorbonne, watching four films a day, he returned to Chicago and earned a Master’s degree in English and Communications.

Callenbach then moved to California. From 1955 to 1991, he was on the staff of the University of California Press (Berkeley). A general copywriter for a number of years, he edited the Press’s Film Quarterly from 1958 until 1991. He also occasionally taught film courses at U.C. and at San Francisco State University.

For many years Callenbach edited the Natural History Guides at the U.C. Press. He began to take environmental issues and their connections to human value systems, social patterns, and lifestyles just as seriously as he had taken film. He was heavily influenced by Edward Abbey. He is therefore known as an author of green books, namely as author of the ecological utopias Ecotopia (1975) and Ecotopia Emerging (1981). (While his novel popularized the term “ecotopia,” it was actually coined by the ethnographer E. L. Anderson.)

In terms of concepts of human involvement with the ecology, as well as some of the economic and social concepts, the Ecotopia books are related to what is known as the sustainability movement. Callenbach’s Ecotopian concept is not “Luddite” — he does not reject high technology, but rather his fictional society shows a conscious selectivity about technology. As an example, with its emphasis on personal rather than impersonal interaction, Callenbach’s Ecotopian society anticipates the development and liberal usage of videoconferencing.

Indeed, for all his involvement with print publications, Callenbach remained quite interested in visual media. Aspects of his book Ecotopia in some ways anticipated “reality TV” — which emerged into recognition, and was given a label as a genre, 20 or more years later — because in the story the daily life of the legislature and some of that of the judicial courts is televised in this fictional society, and televised debates (including technical debates concerning ecological problems) met a need and desire among citizens.

Callenbach has been a part of the circle of West Coast technologists, architects, social thinkers, and scientists which has included such luminaries as Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk (Miriam Simos), Sim Van der Ryn, Peter Calthorpe, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, J. Baldwin, and John Todd. As with a number of these others, he has been a speaker, discussion panellist, and essayist.

Here is Chick’s website which is worth a careful peruse including his biographical details and some of his talks.

Finally, there are a number of good videos featuring Ernest Callenbach’s visionary ideas and one of his longer ones will be included tomorrow.

To close today’s Post let me leave you with this.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MOTHER EARTH
by Ernest Callenbach

I. Thou shall love and honor the Earth for it blesses thy life and governs thy survival.
II. Thou shall keep each day sacred to the Earth and celebrate the turning of its seasons.
III. Thou shall not hold thyself above other living things nor drive them to extinction.
IV. Thou shall give thanks for thy food, to the creatures and plants that nourish thee.
V. Thou shall educate thy offspring for multitudes of people are a blessing unto the Earth when we live in harmony.
VI. Thou shall not kill, nor waste Earth’s riches upon weapons of war.
VII. Thou shall not pursue profit at the Earth’s expense but strive to restore its damaged majesty.
VIII. Thou shall not hide from thyself or others the consequences of thy actions upon the Earth.
IX. Thou shall not steal from future generations by impoverishing or poisoning the Earth.
X. Thou shall consume material goods in moderation so all may share the Earth’s bounty.

Music: Marcome, “All Alone”
http://www.marcome.com