NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND - FIVE

 Nowhere Man’s “Cut & Control”

WHAT WAS, IS GONE FOREVER, WHAT IS, WE CALL  "PROGRESS" WITH ITS OWN NIGHTMARES WITHOUT REPRIEVE.

Journey through Time!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Originally published © April 5, 2016/©August 1, 2021

 Unhappy he, who from the first of joys – society -- cut off, is left alone, amid this world of death.

James Thomson (1700-1748), Scottish poet, and author of The Seasons (1858).

 

THE SHAMAN’S TOOLKIT

 

Nowhere Man has dissected the world’s resources into bits and pieces and reduced its inhabitants to unrealistic appetites. Now people’s cravings can be deftly manipulated economically, politically, and culturally into interchangeable globalized tendencies and dependencies.  Everyone has been made to fit nicely into demographics with quantitative statistical profiles as people have been reduced to numbers and progress has been condensed to pie charts.

 

This didn’t start in the 19^th or 20^th century as everything started to unravel 12,000 years ago when man discovered the nature of fire and invented crude tools for hunting and building, and the all-purpose wheel to aid and speed up man's endeavors.

 

A few hundred years later the nomadic hunting and gathering tribes discovered farming, then they established the first rudiments of “cut & control” policies that have been iterated in an increasingly sophisticated manner to the present day.

 

Moreover, as we have currently a multitude of explainers about what everything means, those thousands of years earlier when someone stepped out of those huddled masses clinging to each other in fear and wonder and explained the mysteries of Mother Nature as he understood her. He would be the shaman priest and would remain the most powerful voice in the community for myriad centuries.

All the great books -- The Bible (Old Testament & New Testament), the Jewish Torah, and Islam’s Koran, among many other books of mystery and wonder – have created stories and personalities with which people could easily identify, and with which they could know the truth about God, and the meaning of life.

These great books written by men are therefore largely the invention of men like themselves, only inspired as was the ancient shaman who started it all off by explaining the meaning of the clap of thunder with its haunting lightning, and other majestic signs of nature.

The divine gift of the shaman was that he figured out the repetitive nature of these phenomena, and cleverly deduced the meaning of these mystical forces that he, alone, understood, forces as repetitive as the rising and setting sun, the brightness of the day, and the darkness of the night, as well as the cause of the lightning that brightened the darkened sky with shattering booms attended by torrential rains as the skies opened up to saturate the earth.

The shaman was in the descriptive business that now has exulted names common to academia and the physical, social, political, behavioral, and biological sciences.

Invariably, after a ravaging cloud burst, a quieting calm would follow, sometimes accompanied by a brilliant rainbow. All these miraculous wonders had to be explained to the conscious man in his troubling doubt and confusion, and the shaman was always equal to the task. 

What modern man might deem a supernatural experience and all the good books are fortified with such stories of the miraculous.  In the age of the shaman, supernatural occurrences were part of the shaman’s everyday ritual and ceremony.

The supernatural implies an irrational conceptual explanation of causation, for what appears miraculous to the rationally oriented man today was commonplace to the shaman as events were infused with nature’s great balancing energy.

The shaman was a healer. He was the first physician and psychiatrist, as well as the first priest. How he divined the connection, that body and soul were intimately involved in health and happiness, and that the body could not be treated at the expense of the soul or the soul at the expense of the body is one of the shaman's divine mysteries.  Today, anthropologists, theologians, and men of medicine, and science ponder these connections when the shaman had no such doubt.

The shaman’s perception of the healing opened the door to cures by the dramatic realignment of man’s energy in matters of degree by the power of suggestion as a healing art. It was the shaman’s belief that mysterious spiritual forces were at work which were impossible to define or explain but nonetheless in possession of boundless healing power.

Fast forward to today, and we find Western medical and psychological practices dependent on verifiable data, documentation, and replication of research hypotheses to prove or disprove data submitted to strict research methodologies and limited to the dogmatic imprimatur: If it cannot be quantified, it does not exist.

Conversely, eons ago, shamanic medicine intuitively transported its patients to new vistas where absolutely anything was possible and the supernatural or the miraculous was allowed to stand unchallenged.

The shaman activated the patient’s inner healer that resides in his soul. Stated another way, the shaman’s task was to remove obstacles to healing, which all too often have proven to be factors in the inflexible culture or the rigidity of the scientific mindset. Neither science nor ancient medicine knows the limitations of the body/mind’s self-correcting capability. In fact, there may not be any.

In the English behavioral biologist Paul Martin’s thesis in The Healing Mind (1997), we are introduced to the biological and psychological links between the mind and the body as perceived by modern science. Martin concurs with novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938): “Most of the time we think we’re sick. It’s all in the mind.”

Strangely, this is consistent with the shaman whose focus was on the spiritual when it came to man’s agony. It was the basis of his power. He had no other means to reconcile what was imagined with what was thought or experienced. And so, in a twisted fashion, the shaman echoes Wolfe’s sentiment.

Professor Martin, aided by scientific evidence has found that the brain and the immune system are inextricably linked biologically and psychologically verifying the mind/body link and implying that “psychosomatic” illnesses are congruent with this thesis.

When these links are frayed or severed, they become the root causes of a menu of complaints and possible diseases. This is not a departure from the shaman but a reinforcement of the idea that conscious man perhaps from nearly the beginning of his existence has had a sense of this intricate connection that has evolved over many millennia to our present understanding.

American medical doctor, psychologist, writer, scientist, teacher, and philosopher Gustav Eckstein’s The Body Has A Head (1969) uses the total retinue of his talents to treat the body's central nervous system as a grand romance but with the dalliance of a novelist.   In a rather ponderous but most readable volume of nearly 800 pages, Eckstein postulates this thesis: “The human mind is the body’s master and (this) book’s destination.”

Eckstein’s success lies in his happy knack of discussing the complexity of bodily functions as an extension of the human personality. His approach is not simplistic, although landing somewhere in the same company of Dr. Martin and the shaman, as he insists, “The awesome intimacy of brain and mind, body and head in the presence of those particles of which we are always more and more, and of which we are finally constructed.”

Reading the impressive research of such men as Martin and Eckstein, against the modest perspective of the shaman, we see that while the shaman had little understanding other than intuitively in knowing how to treat his people, these thousands of years later modern science is confirming many of his instinctive procedures without necessarily acknowledging this connection. It is now common knowledge that psychological and emotional states influence physical health and are in turn affected by them.

For far too long, people with psychosomatic complaints were not taken seriously, claiming it was all in their heads, failing to realize that what is in the head of a damaged nature may contaminate the body with an assortment of maladies.

In our scientific cognitive, rationally dominated world, it is easy to forget how much time and energy that world spends now in confirming the intuitive world that the shaman pondered and dealt with those many millenniums ago. This is not meant to deny the accomplishments of science, but only to point out that man has always drawn his inspiration from the same well.

THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT

Like many writing projects, they gestate in the mind of the author long before they are captured in a book or article. That has been the case for this author with Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land. For decades I committed words to notebooks without uncovering the conceptual essence of what I was thinking and attempting to say.

Then I read James Burke and Robert Ornstein’s The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture (1995), a book that explained how society cuts existence away from the “way it was” into a new sense of reality, a reality that has gained something much desired but at the expense of something lost, possibly forever. The theme throughout these pages will reflect that perspective.

Former Penguin book publisher Jeremy T. Tarcher (1932-2015) opens with this assessment in A Report on The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture (Putnam, 1997):

This book (The Axemaker’s Gift) is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds.  They are the axemakers, whose discoveries and innovations have gifted power in innumerable ways over thousands of years. To emperors, they gave the power of death, to surgeons the power of life. Each time the axemakers offered a new way to make us rich or safe or invincible or knowledgeable, we accepted the gift and used it to change the world. And when we changed the world, we changed our minds, for each gift redefined the way we thought, the values by which we lived, and the truths for which we died.

And because each axemaker’s gift was so attractive, not evil or ugly, we always came back for more, unmindful of the cost. Each time there was no choice but to adapt to the effects of the change that followed. This has been true for every generation of our ancestors since the process began, well over a million years ago. When we used the first tool to cut more food from nature than nature was ready to offer, we changed our future. As a result, there were soon many more of us. And as our numbers grew, so did the power of those who could wield that ax most effectively. They became leaders. Most of the rest of the group followed the ax with a rising standard of living. Only rarely, if ever, did we look back to examine the effect of our passage on the world because progress always led us forward toward the horizon we expected to reach. Unless we can appreciate that axemaker gifts have always unleashed the kind of power that changes minds, we will not recognize that our survival now depends on harnessing the same power to save ourselves.

The axemarkers are those who had the talent to take the pieces of the world and reshape them to make the tools to chop up the world. The precise sequential process that shaped axes would eventually generate language and logic and rules which would formalize and discipline thinking itself. Thanks to their talents and gifts, things have never been the same again.

With ecological and other disasters staring at us, we must appreciate that the gifts have always unleashed the kind of power that changes minds. What we need is a new mind, and we have the means to make a new one. 

So each new tool invented changes existence and represents the latest aspect of the “cut & control” phenomenon. This has become the cultural reality of “Nowhere Man,” for each new tool has shattered or fragmented what was and replaced it with a more convenient tool. No one worries about the cost or the loss, only the promise of the new tool. 

The inventor of each new tool is celebrated, which urges him to invent more new tools. People rush out to buy a new tool to make it part of their daily existence. No one seems concerned about the cost/benefits involved with the new tool as attention is only on the new tool.

Domestic power during the hunting and gathering period shifted to women as the communal atmosphere evolved with the caring of children. This community would grow as the hunters developed better hunting tools. What once could barely feed a few now could feed many. The population of the tribe grew. Better tools were needed by hunters which proved beyond the pale of their ingenuity. Enter agriculture as an alternative to hunting and the answer to growing sustenance demands.

Once agriculture was established, the nomadic lifestyle was replaced with the men tilling the soil and raising crops to feed the community. This made property important with a power shift from matriarchal to patriarchal authority. Men as farmers were now interested in acquiring land and animals.

Whoever took hold of the new tool used it to distance himself from others as the shaman had in establishing his authority and control over others, starting with those in his household.

During the hunting and gathering period, man lived essentially in harmony with Mother Nature and took from her only what he needed to exist. Now with farming, he could store crops and domesticate animals for his purposes. He could cut up the land into plots and till it until it became fallow. Once the land became infertile, he needed more land to maintain his prosperity. Property thus became equated to power.  

New tools were developed in farming, but also there were “land wars” between landowners struggling to dominate and control. Expertise, once the tool of the hunter, now became the weapon of the farmer. The spear that could kill the wild boar now could kill another man over land.

An obsession with advantage changed man’s appetite for the newest tool without a backward glance as to what had been sacrificed for what had been gained with the new tool.

This “cut & control” phenomenon has become a cultural construct and gauge of prosperity as well as a measure of wealth and power from the beginning. It has been spurred on by the rationale of progress. Progress is a mindset that is seldom questioned as to its validity. Prosperity, which is the product of progress, has become society’s most important product. And what is prosperity?

Prosperity is the condition of continuously thriving for more, of always pushing the envelope, of never being bothered by or concerned with assessing limits, much less considering possible unintended consequences. Economic and emotional well­being is the justification for what is cut to better establish control. It is psychological blindness that seems endemic to man’s mind as Paradise (utopia) like the Holy Grail seems just beyond his grasp, but is it?

NOWHERE MAN IN THE DIGITAL AGE!

The newest tool, the Internet, could become a democratizing tool or an intrusive and demoralizing invasion into the sanctity of one’s privacy. That is the two-edged characteristic of this tool. 

Swedish economists Kjell A. Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale, for much of this new century, have gone rogue in asserting a “dark” picture of the Internet’s impact on democracy in their book Funky Business (2002), and upgraded this book to Funky Business Forever (2007). These two authors reason that the “cut & control” world we live in cannot survive without hype, celebrity, and logos for everything. At the same time, they see no evidence to justify the fear that capitalism will take over democracy. We are moving towards one-to-one leadership, what I’ve come to express as we are all leaders or none of us are. So, what do these two economists see coming next?

Nordstrom and Ridderstrale insist we forget about Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx’s class struggle, as we are witnessing the birth of a whole new funky world because of this new tool, the Internet, and they don’t know quite what to make of it. 

The digital revolution, they argue, is changing everything more dramatically than the hype mongers of the Internet could ever imagine, not only the way capitalists and investors hoped but in terms of what it means to be Swedish, American, or Venezuelan. It took millenniums to tectonically shift the continents to what they are today. But allegiances and boundaries, as well as leaders, can shift in an instance.

The transition from a society dominated by print and mass broadcast media to the age in which everyone has a smartphone and is their own media consultant is at least as dramatic as the move from feudalism to capitalism, but at what cost, at what speed?

It took hundreds of years from monarchies and the authority of the church before people took the reins of power in representative democracies. We are now observing the Middle East unshackling itself from the dominance of the West.  In this interlude of this age of the Internet, we have the looming shadow of the jihadists and the terrorists using this technology to rain mayhem and chaos on the infidels of the West. It is such developments this book ponders in its funky way.

These authors call for people to become funky leaders, which means to have direction, demonstrate tolerance, embrace their fears and be attentive.

FROM TECHNOCRATS TO NETOCRATS?

After the demise of capitalism, Nordstrom and Ridderstrale advises, comes the attentional. This is another way of saying those who harness global networks of information and master the new forms of this communication tool control business, finance, and legislatures across the globe forming a new business and government elite. 

This elite may very well control the minds and hearts of society. They will be the inheritors of power in what Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist call Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism (2002). Simply put, networks will make the world go round. So controlling the networks of this world will soon count for more than controlling the capital. The thinking goes: harness the right network and you can do anything anywhere at any time.

Democracy refers to a perceived global upper class that bases its power on technological advantage and networking skills in comparison to what is portrayed as a bourgeoisie of gradually diminishing importance as the technocracy of capitalism. 

Esteemed Spanish sociologist and scholar Manuel Castells has described the Internet as the most extraordinary technological revolution in history, but he suggests it is as underdeveloped socially as it is overdeveloped technologically.

Netocracy envisions where power will reside. The Internet they see lends itself to the idea of funky business gauging it as simply a radical departure from conventional authority and control to a decentralized network governed by these new highly unpredictable netocrats.  This author sees netocrats thriving in NOWHERE LAND beyond the control of the individual, and the authority of corporations and governments.

Bard and Soderqvist in Netocracy insist that the transparent and non-hierarchical society proclaimed by Internet enthusiasts is one of the greatest myths of the information age. Future society, they claim, will be just as hierarchical as the present but divided and not along lines of wealth and academic distinction. Nor will power lie with those who own property or the means of production but with those who sort and provide information. They write:

“It is the people who can create and sustain attention that are the Netocracy, the new holders of power, not those who simply supply capital.”

The netocrats are the inheritors of the future as they are the people who can manipulate networks and the information that runs through them. The netocracy consists of people with excellent social skills and a talent for the adept manipulation of information. The lower classes will be composed of people in this digital age who lack the ability to use the new interactive media technology to their advantage.

The netocrat is a new marvel. He is self-created as is his social identity. The cliché “self-made man” (or woman) applies as well. Even his motivation is different. He has money but money is a means and not an end goal. Put another way, he has finessed the system (capitalism) by ruling the networks that now rule the world. Is this a fantasy, or is this the new definition of power?

Bard and Soderqvist would have us see the netocrat as a leader and an artist, using his guile and political cachet to turn networking into an artistic collage of self-interest. Is this the newest Renaissance man or is this a madman going off the rails? (see The Time Magazine, July 2003).

Everything is happening at such blinding speed that it is easy to forget that this is another iteration of the “cut & control” phenomenon started so long ago, first by the hunters and gatherers, then the farmers, and beyond. Driven by the Internet and ubiquitous mobile communication devices for all, networks were bound to turn living into business and business into living. Why not technocrats into netocrats?

These networks are organizing action, gathering and disseminating knowledge contaminating it with new knowledge, controlling influence and therefore dictating behavior to comply with preconceived netocratic aims. Alas, as euphoria and optimism become the organizing principles of the Information Age, Nowhere Man slides inconspicuously into Nowhere Land with apparently no one ever the wiser.

Meanwhile, network organizers believe they will make the world go around as Manuel Castells predicts, but at what cost, at what loss? Nobody seems to mind or wonder.

Action drives the netocrat as it has driven the technocrat, while reflection seems foreign to both prototypes, as no one has the time to wonder why.  Controlling the networks of this world will soon count for more than controlling economic capital. At once, the man of property and prosperity, who has had the power, now finds himself on the shelf controlling nothing while basking in Nowhere Land or in the thin air of cyberspace. 

The real world has been reduced to redundancy and people to T. S. Eliot’s robots.  Is this the new reality: where the fear of terrorist attacks is on everyone's mind; while gangs in our cities are on the rampage and beyond municipal control; where FBI operatives seemingly are obsessively concerned with ordinary people's lives; while it appears to be open season for hackers on private servers; while  First Amendments Rights are increasingly reduced to Orwellianianisms?  Whatever your sense of things, the societal implications of the communication revolution have already hit.

On December 2, 2015, 14 people were killed and 22 were seriously injured in a terrorist attack at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California during a workgroups Christmas Party.  The attack was the second deadliest mass shooting in California after the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre, and the deadliest in the United States since Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. It was also the deadliest terrorist attack to occur in the United States since the September 11, 2001 downing of the Twin Towers in New York City.

The terrorists were Syed Rizan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple living in the city of Redlands. They targeted a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, a group of about 80 employees, in a rented banquet room.  Farook was an American-born U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, who worked as a health department employee. Malik was a Pakistani-born lawful permanent resident in the United States.

After the shooting, the couple fled in a rented sport utility vehicle (SUV). Four hours later, police pursued their vehicle and killed them in a shootout. On December 3, 20125, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened a counter­terrorism investigation.

In that investigation, the government maintained it was looking for access to one phone, but Apple, Inc. countered that asking for a code that could access the iPhone that would create a backdoor to all such devices exploitable by other entities. The government sued Apple, and Apple countersued the government. This went on into March 2015 when the FBI was able to decode without Apple’s involvement. Suites were dropped, but the issue and what it means to the future regarding privacy and First Amendment Rights remains cloudy.

* * *

Bard and Soderqvist predict what Netocracy will be, and where the power will flow, but not the common sense consequences.  Netocracy draws some remarkable conclusions about the dwindling life of capitalism, and what will follow, but not these aberrations. It might be said that they are more utopian dreamers than Sir Thomas More could ever have imagined. Existence calls to the mind the imagery of a puppet on a string while “cut & control” power resides in a handful of people who have little interest in prosperity or property, much less production of consumer goods, but in all-consuming control of everything else. Is this not Nowhere Land?

Each age has its Nowhere Man who envisions breakthroughs to a new paradise but invariably finds himself in Nowhere Land as he stumbles forward. We saw it when printing was first discovered; when penicillin eradicated such crippling diseases as poliomyelitis; when the birth control pill liberated women from the prison of their sexuality. Each “cut & control” phenomenon changed mankind and therefore changed man, but in the process, it introduced new struggles and problems not likely to have been previously anticipated. It would help if we gave pause as to why this is so.

NEXT

PART SIX: NOWHERE MAN IN THE DYING SENSATE CULTURE

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- FOUR

"GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL!"

 THE FATE OF THE ECHO SYSTEM IS IN YOUR HANDS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Original © March 29, 2016/© July 30, 2021

The planet Earth, though not threatened with destruction by man-made global warming, is by no means indestructible. There are many unpredictable events within our solar system, and still, more outside it that could make Earth uninhabitable by humans.

Paul Johnson, English historian


To prepare adequately for the challenge of global warming, we must acknowledge both the good and the bad that it will bring. If our starting point is to prove that Armageddon is on its way, we will not consider all of the evidence, and will not identify the smartest policy choices.

Bjorn Lomborg, Danish political scientist, and environmentalist


Is global warming creeping upon us in the West? If it is, there are legions of doubters as well as advocates. The doubters claim it is suspect science, and even has the taint of the absolutes of religion, while the advocates point to the shrinking coastlines, melting glaciers of the Arctic Region, and the hurricanes and tsunamis that periodically punctuate the calm.

There was the ten-day Chicago heatwave a few years ago with the temperature never dipping below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It took the lives of 750 people, mainly people without adequate temperature control in their homes with air conditioning or the homeless on the street, then, of course, there were the elderly that best should have stayed indoors and others who didn’t reduce the level of their exercise routine. Deaths were among all of these groups.

Years ago, when I was a boy in the 1950s, spending a summer at my uncle Leonard’s, who was a professor at the University of Detroit, I was there during a similar heatwave of days over one hundred. There was no clamor for restrictions on the use of fossil fuel or gas emissions from automobiles; no environmentalist raging about Armageddon as hot weather was taken more or less in stride.

That said heat waves in Paris, London, Calcutta, and Melbourne have over the past several years taken the lives of tens of thousands of citizens. We as a species seem to always be a day late and a dollar short when it comes to behaving sensibly when it comes to the fragile nature of the planet we inhabit.

Many are skeptical of global warming even though they acknowledge the carbon dioxide levels of pollutants are on the rise, but they say, “So what? What’s the big deal?”

Scientists have come to sound a lot like the authority once heard from the church, temple, or mosque pulpit. They claim irrefutable evidence of a causal correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature increases. For example, in the Arctic Region, they point out there are only 20 major glaciers compared to 500 in 1855. Moreover, the temperature has risen more than 3 degrees over the testing period of the last three-quarters of a century with a severe effect on the animals inhabiting the region.

Does this make an impression on doubters? Not that you could tell. Does it move citizens in general to change their behavior? Again, not that you could tell.

Whatever advocates or doubters believe, there is little doubt that the Louisiana Coastal Marshlands and Wetlands are experiencing drastic changes. It has become the breeding ground for new species of birds, animals, and insects. The rise of the water level of these marshlands has also reduced the Louisiana coastline by more than 25 square miles as this land has disappeared into the Gulf of Mexico.

Where once stood majestic giant oaks on the delta nourished by freshwater now stand naked stumps as weeping sculptures in saltwater. This visual disparity developed long before Hurricane Katrina of 2005, but little attention was paid then, or now.

So, what are we to make of this? Glaciers are melting, sea levels rising, periodic heat waves are suffocating, and coastlines are disappearing as are the species that once inhabited these unchanging sanctuaries. Even scientists can’t agree on what we should do. No wonder everyman is confused.

The escape hatch, especially for Americans, has always been optimism: something will be worked out in the end. But in truth, man’s ingenuity is being tested. Can he have his cake and eat it, too, or does he have to change his diet? Thus far he shows little inclination to either reduce his sugar intact or reduce his carbon emissions. Instead, he dabbles in solutions in search of the problem: from harnessing wind power to solar panels on the roof. Solar energy is the way!

As has been shown, this is a risky business at the moment with many such companies going quickly under. For one, it is expensive to install, and for another, few can afford the initial investment, plus the technology is in its infancy.

It is not a bad idea. The power of the sun is what makes life on earth possible. Efforts to harness solar energy have long been a human pursuit. President Barak Obama has been an enthusiastic supporter of solar energy, but the concept has existed since the 19th century and has received substantial federal government support since at least the 1970s. Yet, today, solar power comprises less than 1 percent of the electrical power generated in the United States. Perhaps a breakthrough in the future will make this energy source more accessible.

The larger problem is that in this postmodern age of the “global village,” the rest of the world, especially Third World countries are hungry to acquire the wealth, luxury, and freedom that the United States enjoys. To catch up they see no other way than to consume masses of fossil fuels, fuels that made the United States rich and dominant.

China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and many other rising countries in Africa, read of climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, and depletion of natural resources, and insist that they will control their emissions when they reach parity with the United States. Justifying this stand, The United Nations Report on Global Warming reports the last place likely to feel global warming to any appreciable extend is North America. Imagine what this does to the incentive of these nations to comply with emission standards.

Two enormous bodies of water the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean protect the United States and Canada, so while the rest of the world is choking in carbon gases or dying from periodic heat waves from the excessive use of fossil fuels, it is difficult to get the attention of Americans.

Mother Nature is out-of-balance, but not yet doomed. The planet can reverse the trend with sensible restrain in the use of fossil fuels, and Americans can show the way, but are they willing? Are they interested?

Whatever the reader thinks, and the reader has a right to think whatever, the subject of global warming is not going to go away. Nearly 1500 scientists from 95 countries compiled a report claiming that two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life (sun, water, soil, plants, climate, and diverse species) is being compromised or degraded by human folly.

People need food, freshwater, timber, fruits and vegetables, and fuel to live. The pressure on the environment of the world's seven billion souls is putting serious strain on these resources. Complicating the picture further, since half of the world’s population now lives in cities, there is little concern or appreciation of the problems of the natural world.

It is not political rhetoric or ecclesiastical pontification that sustains life but ordinary working people. Every child who has had the opportunity to grow up in a rural area knows this. Anyone who has ever hunted knows that white-tailed deer require a certain amount of land to thrive, any less and they perish. If the deer population increases, malnutrition, and disease thin out the herd. A pond that can sustain the waste of 30 ducks with the fish flourishing will die from the lack of oxygen if 1,000 ducks come to inhabit the pond.

ECOLOGY OF THE MIND – GLOBAL WARMING OF THE PERSONAL KIND

The American population is expected to reach 420 million or 100 million more than today by 2066. This will put increased pressure on the economy and the individual’s sense of space and place. Imagine what will happen if the population reaches 470 - 500 million in fifty years. It could happen.

Experimental psychologists have observed laboratory rats in terms of spatial comfort and discomfort. When the rat population reaches a certain level, rats attack and kill each other. We have observed this phenomenon in our metropolitan areas, as they can become killing zones when the population reaches a certain level.

Chicago, Illinois grew from a collection of integrated and mutually supportive ethnic neighborhoods into a metropolitan city of 3 million. It has never lost its small-town ambiance, not even during the infamous days of Al Capone and prohibition in the 1920s. But in the late 1960s, Chicago experienced a spike in violent crime, a shadow that has never lifted.

Murders in the city first peaked in 1974 with 970 when the city population was three million, a murder rate of 29 per 100,000. It peaked again in 1992 with 943 murders when the city had fewer than three million residences, resulting in a murder rate of 34 murders per 100,000 citizens. After 1992, the murder count decreased to 641 murders with a population of 2,799,000 in 1999. In 2002, Chicago had fewer murders but a significantly higher murder rate than New York City and Los Angeles, two much larger cities.

The experimental psychology laboratory rat experiment doesn’t compute with Chicago, as it is a problem indigenous to its subculture of ethnic gangs, a lack of inner-city jobs for young people, and other related metropolitan social problems.

As vital resources dwindle for food, freshwater, timber, and fuel, competition for limited supplies could lead to war. This has already happened in Africa. Another less obvious contributor is one of ethnic and national pride.

In this era of smartphones and 24/7 media surveillance and coverage, there is another kind of global warming. It is personal. People are jealous of what they have and are afraid to lose, while people envy what they don’t have that others have but they want.

It is this murky world between jealousy and envy, love and hate, rigidity and arrogance, pride and vengeance that often fuels the motivation to violence. Is this the rationale of terrorists? Possibly. What I do know is that emotional as well as material resources have to be in some kind of balance for the actions of people to be under some control.

If the world relies on force rather than cooperation, fear rather than goodwill, our children and grandchildren can expect arbitrary violence as a means to redress real or imagined wrongs. That was the policy in the last century, the bloodiest in man’s history.

We cannot experience a sensible ecology of our environment if we don’t have an equal sense of an ecology of the mind. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (1972) covers this subject in a conversation with his daughter.

Here Bateson develops a way of defining thinking in terms of the nature of order and organization in living systems, providing a unified theory encompassing the study of biology and behavior. He doesn’t see man apart from nature but very much a part of nature, subject to the same laws and punishments. Bateson provides this caution:

It appears that the man-environment system has certainly been progressively unstable since the introduction of metals, the wheel, and script. The deforestation of Europe and the man-made deserts of the Middle East and North Africa are evidence for that statement.

Civilizations have risen and fallen. New technology for the exploitation of nature or a new technique for the exploitation of other men permits the rise of civilization. But each civilization, as it reaches the limits of what can be exploited in that particular way, must eventually fall. The new invention gives elbow room or flexibility, but they use up that flexibility is death.


TECHNOLOGY FORGIVES US OUR SINS CREATING NEW ONES!

Science is in the business of unlocking the mysteries of nature, which is an end in itself. Technology translates these discoveries into products that have no designated end other than to saturate the market with tools and “Toys of the Mind.”

The world of technology is not Camelot or utopia; nor is it the Merlin of panaceas for solving our pesky problems. Technologists may wave Merlin’s magic wand and dissolve certain annoyances, but too often it creates new ones. That innocent period of preteens has devolved with smartphones to the troubling discovery that eleven-year-olds, for instance, are surfacing pornographic channels.

While not the intention, the wild promulgation of technology can be retrogressive as well as progressive. On the other hand, science can sometimes prove miraculous in its detective work. As mentioned earlier, physical health, as well as medical science, was advanced when a 19th-century physician discovered that cholera was a problem of public sanitation. Likewise, public health and social education may prove a better route to curing AIDS than a miraculous drug.

The behavior that leads to AIDS, sexual promiscuity, and the exchange of contaminated needles of drug addicts, is not likely to change because the medical profession says the lifestyle can be fatal.

But there is the possibility of reason triumphing if those with AIDS become their therapists by promoting more responsible behavior among the most vulnerable to the disease. With such attention, it ceases to be a moral issue and becomes a public health concern.

In the postmodern world, lifestyle is the key to such persistent diseases as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and strokes, lung and throat cancer. Sanitation was key to eliminating cholera. Malnutrition and unavailable potable drinking water remain chronic problems in many Third World countries. These are external factors; lifestyle is an internal problem.

The difficulty with lifestyle is that few want to change. They want a pill to reduce hunger pangs so they won’t be obese; if they are obese, they want a pill to reduce their weight without exercise. If addicted to cigarettes, they want a cigarette that gives them a buzz but won’t harm their health. Of course, the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry are heavily committed to doing just that as this is a multi-billion dollar business.

The sophistication of science and ingenuity of technology “cut and control” through the established norms of society to create new needs and wants while ignoring the possible consequences of such disruptions. Not surprisingly, the problems high on our agenda to solve are the problems we create with our “cut and control” philosophy.

 

NOWHERE LAND OF EDUCATION

Take education. Ever since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in the late 1950s, educators have been renovating education to be more science-centered at the expense of rather than the complement of liberal arts education and cultural tradition. Not everyone wants to be a scientist or engineer.

If education is made interesting, the interests of students will flow to education. That has not happened. While the United States funds public school education more than any other nation on the planet, it lags considerably with the performance of students of many nations that pay a lot less per student for education: e.g., Finland, China, Japan, and Indonesia.

Since the de-emphasis of traditional education has drifted away from the student’s spiritual side, religious institutions have seemingly lost their way. They once were the center of the community keeping ideas alive for being caring as well as competent.

Education has become job training to create a society of technicians and technocrats who robotically run feverishly helter-skelter here and there chasing the position, promotion, or next raise with little time to enjoy the moment, or to pursue what truly interests them.

We have created this social animal, and now we cannot put him back into Aladdin’s Lamp. Nor can educators turn failed students into scholars or failing schools into character-building factories by acting like storm troopers dispensing tough love.

Education reformer Michelle Rhee stormed into the dysfunctional public school system of Washington, D.C. in 2007 as Chancellor with the promise to turn everything around. She hired thousands of new teachers while firing hundreds of others including principals.  Then she closed scores of schools against a bevy of protests capturing national headlines. Three years later, in 2007, she left with the failed school system still failing in her wake. She was a lightning rod that failed to throw sustaining light.

THE NOWHERE LAND OF EDUCATION

As competent as Ms. Rhee may be believed to be in her profession, the problem was never about her, but she allowed herself to be in the limelight, advocating test-based verifiable education, schools that mirrored high achievement institutions, and teachers and administrators who marched to the same drummer with equal cadence and competence as if a metronomic army.

The problem was beyond the limits of a systemic issue. The problem was about children that often lived in uninspiring homes were making it to school every day was the definitive challenge. You cannot ignore the pathology of a community, as the Washington, D.C. public school system has been for at least the past fifty years, and expect a ramrod approach to change the situation overnight. It will not happen; it did not happen. And Ms. Rhee was unwittingly put in the center of this impossible situation with the faulty hubris she could perform a miracle. Predictably, she couldn't.

This intervention does point out, however, that there are no quick cures to chronic problems, problems that focus on obvious symptoms (poor student performance in the classroom) without a clear definition of why this is so. Systemic chronic issues of a social and societal nature (family home life, outside activities, community assimilation) need addressing before renovating the educational system. Look into the home environments of the students and the challenges they face, then take baby steps towards amelioration.

The public school system is a community problem of organizational development before educational solutions can be entertained. Once again, the cart was put in front of the horse, and everyone wondered why not an inch of progress was made.

Expediency is a national American pastime of a solution-driven culture.  We are intimidated by complex problems too difficult to define much less solve, problems that engineer William L. Livingston, IV carefully addresses in "Design for Prevent"(2010) metaphorically putting the horse in front of the cart.  There are no shortcuts, no rendering of pesky problems without doing the heavy lifting.  Livingston writes:

In the context of institutional ideology, prevention is held as something to be aggressively avoided.  And, so it is.

We want students to behave as students should behave. If they aren’t behaving, aren’t learning, we’re going to commit a ton of money to the problem, bring in a guru to recruit an army of new teachers, close down all failed schools close to the students’ homes as punishment, and play the fear card for all it is worth.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we learned from this and started to look at our problems differently. But when you’re on a technological high, it is pretty difficult to see the entrance ramp from the exit ramp, and so collisions are inevitable.

We can go from the micro (Washington, D. C. Public School System) to the macro (the environment) and see if we are willing to look as to how we might have prevented them in the first place.

 
INUIT AND THE GRASSHOPPER EFFECT

The Arctic Region is not only melting but turning into a toxic sink according to research scientists. All the chemicals that Rachel Carson complained about in Silent Spring (1962) more than fifty years ago – DDT, PCB, dioxin, and mercury – have found their way into this region and are now killing fish, fowl, and other animals common to this refuge.

Toxicity spreads through the food chain. First, the fish are poisoned, then the marine mammals that feed on the fish, then the animals such as polar bears that feed on the seals then even other animals such as the caribou. How do these chemicals kill the caribou?

Scientists call this the grasshopper effect. Chemical pollutants are released into the environment and carried thousands of miles south, then evaporate in the warmer climate, ride the winds back to the frigid Arctic Region where they eventually fall to earth in the acid or poisoned rain. The caribou feed upon the tainted moss and grass of the tundra, fish feed upon the tainted plankton, which then is eaten by the seals who are then eaten by polar bears. Polar bears are showing such high levels of pollutants in their system that they qualify for burial in hazardous waste dumps.

Consider the Inuit, the indigenous people of the Arctic Region who came here from the orient more than 4,000 years ago. Seals provide 65 percent of their protein diet. The seal and the sea are the greatest sources of sustenance, and integral to Inuit culture, spiritually and emotionally as well as biologically.

The Inuit, more than the Eskimo, have adapted to the extreme climatic conditions of the Arctic and maintain to this day remnants of the hunting and trapping lifestyle of prehistoric man.

Agriculture was never a possibility in the millions of square miles of the icy tundra. Therefore, hunting became the core of the Inuit cultural history. Thus the everyday life in modern Inuit settlements, perhaps only established a decade ago, resembles that which existed 5,000 years ago in their long history as skilled hunters dependent on the integrity of that environment.

The extreme cold did not deter this most remarkable human accomplishment, but pollution may. Inuit are dying at an early age, and infant mortality rates and birth defect levels are close to the highest in the world. Why?

The Inuit life expectancy in 2012 was about 67.7 compared to 79.5 for the rest of Canadians while it is 81.3 for Americans. In 1900 it was 48 to 51 for Americans to 26 to 29 for the Inuit. Canadian life expectancy in 1900 was 48.

We have already supplied the answer. Industrial, scientific, and technological progress has taken the natural out of the equation of Mother Nature. Nothing grows today without the aid of a complex of fertilizers and growth additives to increase crop yields. Now hybrids supplant what was once considered corn, wheat, sugarcane, peas, barley, soy, and the list goes on, as these gifts of nature are now on steroids. Small wonder that children who eat these vital food groups are often taller, stronger, faster, and more hyperactive.

Earlier, we discussed the case of toxic metals in the potable water supply of Flint, Michigan. Is it any wonder that industrial pollutants from the United States, Central, and South America, and China find their way into our diet from the Arctic Circle to our dinner table?

The food chain of possible pollutants is only a major problem where due diligence is not maintained. Periodically, restaurant chains are forced to shut down temporarily because of people getting sick or even dying due to food poisoning.

The Inuit don’t have this restaurant problem, but Inuit mothers are forced to breastfeed their babies as they don’t have ready access to formula milk. The high mortality rate for Inuit infants can be traced to breast milk that is full of pollutants as these babies show the highest level of toxins on the planet.

As environmentalists have shown, the Arctic Region is the early warning system for the rest of the planet. Inuit, while contributing little to contaminating their environment, are the innocent victims of industrial pollution that carries the name of “progress.” The only hope is that industrial nations to the south, east, and west find the will as well as the way to halt the production of these pollutants. Not an easy task.

It isn’t that the human community is not trying. We have had a plethora of summits over the past 40 plus years trying to get this global pollution problem under control: United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, 1972; Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992; Rio + 10, 2002; Rio + 20, 2012; and Earth Summit 2015, “Eye on Earth.”

It is not that there is not a will to get this problem under control; there simply hasn’t been found a way that the heaviest polluting nations can agree to follow.

Then there is the Kyoto Protocol, which is an international treaty extending the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as global warming was then called, that committed State Parties to reduce greenhouse gases emissions based on these premises: that global warming exists and that manmade CO2 emissions were the cause.

These protocols were adopted in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and were first enforced in 2005. There are currently 192 parties to the protocols as Canada withdrew effective December 2012.

 
                                   * * *

A few million years ago, there were tsunamis, hurricanes, and mudslides due to torrential rainfall. Craggy mountains split off giant boulders that crashed into the valley, glaciers cracked off icy sculptures and thundered into the sea, and snowcapped mountains produced roaring avalanches. There were earthquakes as the earth’s plates shifted often attended by volcanoes that spewed molten lava into the valley to form rivers of heat. Long periods of drought interrupted by lighting showers led to forest fires that torched millions of acres whilst periodically tornadoes cut through the land as if a menacing knife. Spring floods swelled the banks of massive rivers creating temporary lakes changing the landscape and redefining continents with tectonic shifts.

Then man entered the equation, and over tens of hundreds of years in existential progression, first experiencing these phenomena and then resolving to become Mother Nature's master.

In the process, man settled where nature could do him the most harm: along coastlines, in the shadow of awesome mountains and menacing volcanoes, on the banks of giant rivers to sporadically feel the full wrath of nature. His quest satisfied, he came to poison his adopted home as self-indulgent Nowhere Man turning Paradise into Nowhere Land.


TIJUANA TOXICITY LEGACY

In Tijuana, Mexico, not far from the border of the United States, there is a tariff-free trade zone. More than 300 companies from several nations operate in this zone. It provides jobs for 140,000 people from Tijuana and the surrounding area. The paradox is that these workers are producing pollutants that are threatening their health and that of their children.

In 2006, twelve years after one industrial site was abandoned, cracked battery cases remained piled haphazardly in stacks, baking in the semi-tropical sun. The labels are quite revealing: Sears, Diehard, Delco Freedom II, Wrought Lead Carbon Construction, 60-month limited warranty.

Nothing is uplifting to an abandoned factory. Its crumbling buildings in a landscape of discarded corroding machines and tools not only poisons the environment but creates a visage of man's failure. This is the case with Metales y Derivado, a lead-smelting company, located in Mesa de Otay Industrial Park. It was ordered to clean up its industrial waste at a cost of more than $6 million decades ago. It has not happened.

The history of the region is a narrative of the border’s lawlessness, a tale of the invisible line between Mexico and the United States where toxicity has the face of commerce.

“Metales,” as the firm was called, decided to abandon the plant without securing the waste. Left behind were 40 million pounds of toxic wastes in drums rusting from rainfall, baking in the sun, and leaking into streams, and seeping into the soil and the artesian wells. The winds swirl and stir up clouds of dust along with fumes that pollute the air for miles around.

Colonia Chilpancingo, a community below this towering hillside, largely a shantytown of 10,000 workers and their families worries about the remaining contamination to this day. Rains bring rancid runoff down the hill, and breezes stir anew the toxic dust.

Every time it rains a nearby stream overflows into a creek that provides water for washing and bathing. It is full of lead oxide, sulfites, sulfuric acid, and arsenic. As this highly contaminated waterway weaves its way through the shantytown, everyone and everything in its path are in peril.

Over 90 percent of the children have tested for elevated levels of lead in their blood, which can affect the development of children’s central nervous system. An inordinate number of children have suffered birth defects. For a score of years or more, this small community has petitioned the government to clean up the site, and each time the petitioners have been turned down (re: Rob Davis, Voice Staff Writer, “Taming Tijuana’s Toxic Legacy,” June 12, 2006).

These children are innocent victims. Less than a mile from the United States, these petitioners have no law on their side, as this free trade zone is not subject to compliance with environmental laws of the United States. The parents laboring in these factories for $15 for a ten-hour day have become reluctant accomplices to this tragedy with no sense of communal power.

[The cleanup of the abandoned Tijuana lead smelter plant, Metales y Derivado, was completed in 2008, but to this day the after-effects of years of delay remain with many families in Colonia Chilpancingo. Of one thing you can be certain when it comes to the fallout of toxicity, it is axiomatic that the powerless will suffer its indiscriminate wrath.]


SAN DIEGO’S BARRIO LOGAN

Barrio Logan is a small ethnic community on the coast of San Diego. For forty years, this community saw the region turned into a smorgasbord of industrial factories and then a regional dump and junkyard. The residence complained but nothing happened.

The City Fathers instead cut Barrio Logan off from the rest of San Diego by choosing to build a bridge and an elaborate highway system across its boundaries.

Once again the neighborhood was under attack. Each day hundreds of diesel trucks and tens of thousands of automobiles filled their breathing air with toxic exhaust emissions. Next, scores of industrial plants sprung up around their perimeter further shrinking their breathing space and assaulting the air, land, and water with toxins.

In a minor protest, Barrio Logan community leaders asked the City Fathers to build a park under the bridge for their recreation. The City Fathers promised the park but reneged on the promise citing other more pressing contingencies.

The citizens rebelled. They formed a human chain around the perimeter of the would-be site for the park and drew media attention. The city gave them their park. Chicano Park became a rallying cry for the people of Barrio Logan. Local artists painted the pylons of the bridge with ethnic art in the celebration of their culture.

Studies have shown that communities of color or ethnic groups at the lower end of the economic food chain are more likely than affluent neighborhoods to be exploited with little chance to remedy the situation even when 20 percent of the Barrio Logan residents have asthma or asthmatic symptoms or related medical conditions.

After the success of establishing Chicano Park, the community took on Master Plating, a factory in the heart of Barrio Logan that dumped hexavalent chromium into the ground. This chemical is known as a cancer-causing toxin. Local television got involved and the plant was shut down.

The levels of hexavalent chromium were reduced by 75 percent, another small community victory (see Doug Porter, “Toxic Contaminant Releases in Barrio Logan Confirmed,” San Diego Free Press, April 23, 2014). The bane of exploiters is the forgotten going public with their grievances.


SALTON SEA ND THE COLORADO RIVER

Palm Springs, California is a sparkling clean upwardly mobile society of nearly 50,000. Not far away, however, is a harbinger of possible things to come in the Salton Sea. This is the largest internal body of water in California and a sanctuary for half the species of birds in the United States as they migrate with the seasons in this part of the country. One hundred years ago this was all desert. But in 1905, a violent winter storm caused the Colorado River to go on a rampage. The river jumped its banks and surged into the basin, forming the Salton Sea.

The Colorado River breached a dike and began flooding a basin that today is 35 miles wide and 50 feet deep. The sea was a bustling tourist attraction in the 1950s and 1960s attracting half a million visitors a year. Stars such as The Beach Boys and Sonny Bono drove speedboats there, while yacht clubs sprang up and water skiers delighted in this oasis. The water was clean with children wading or swimming in the Salton Sea.

By the 1970s, overused and under cared for, the Salton Sea became an ecological nightmare. Surrounded by half a million acres of farmland, water containing salt, fertilizers, and pesticides were constantly running into the sea. Telltale evidence of this corruption was the shoreline being littered with carpets of dead fish. These carcasses when combined with the algae bloom made the sea smell so bad that few wanted to be anywhere near this once flourishing Paradise.

During the hottest four months of the year, the Salton Sea loses six feet of its water level due to evaporation with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Today, given these challenges, it still manages to provide 500,000 acres of irrigated farmland producing 85 percent of the winter vegetable crops for the entire United States. Now, we come to the mixed blessing.

The Salton Sea is shrinking. If nothing is done, it is expected to be smaller by a third in the next decade. California drought is only adding to the problem as the sea must compete for water. There have been plans to save the sea at a cost in the billions of dollars, but to date, little has been done. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

The Imperial Valley produces a million-acre feed that runs into the Salton Sea, and there is no way for the water to run off. This keeps it from drying up, but it also feeds the Salton Sea with killing salt and chemicals. To give you a sense of the severity, the Salton Sea is now 25 percent saltier than the Pacific Ocean.

In the 1980s, the contribution of botulism and algae bloom here killed millions of fish. The Salton Sea is a habitat for hundreds of species of birds and has long supported them in their 5,000-mile Pacific migration. These birds began to die from the grasshopper effect as they rested in this sanctuary after their long flight. In three months, conservationists counted 150,000 waterfowl dead from eating tainted fish. This frightened the public. Fear won out.

Once thriving motels, restaurants, resorts, and recreational parks in the area since the 1960s have been abandoned. The rusting, fraying, and naked sculptures of the past now pencil the landscape with dangling illegible signs, boarded windows, empty playgrounds, potholed streets, and stripped bare hotels naked in the sun.

Farmers have agreed to sell off millions of gallons of water originally directed to the Salton Sea to San Diego at the expense of the Salton Sea. Scientists warn that if the Salton Sea gets any saltier or loses any more volume everything will die. Farmers value developers in the city over saving this vital reservoir.

In the age of Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land the self-interests of the shortsighted take precedence over preserving ecological wonders.


NOWHERE MAN TOO LATE SMART

Some forty years ago Samarkand in Uzbekistan was a thriving ancient city, the silk route 2,500 years ago from the orient to Rome, where an exchange of ideas and culture accompanied its products.

Today, Samarkand still has the cultural architecture and scholarship of its illustrious past preserved in its medieval sections. A few miles to the west, the once bountiful lower end of Uzbekistan’s greatest river, the Amu Darya, has been sucked dry. It is no longer connected to the Aural Sea, the world’s fourth-largest internal body of water.

The river basin is littered with abandoned irrigation pump stations and lines, the skeletal hulls of abandoned boats, dried-up ponds, and ghost towns. The Aural Sea has shrunk to half its size in the last half-century for its failure to connect with this river. This is all the result of a misguided Soviet Union agricultural policy.

In the 1960s, Russia made Uzbekistan a cotton-producing country, the second largest in the world, by restructuring 100,000 square miles of desert into irrigated farmland. It did this by redirecting water from the lower Amu Darya River into canals, then into irrigating ditches filled with pesticides and fertilizers to cotton-producing fields along its flanks.

To give you a sense of this disaster, the Amu Darya River in this area was once so wide that it took Alexander the Great and his army five days to cross it. Over the past half-century, the Amu Darya River no longer connects with its source, the Aural Sea, ninety miles away, and has been reduced to a dry wasteland and a veritable dust bowl.

Some observers have called this the greatest ecological disaster on the planet. It could happen to the Salton Sea as its fragile ecosystem is at the mercy of the farmers and the city developers who would prefer to use the Colorado River for irrigation and drinking water for San Diego.

It is an old cliché, but true, there are no easy answers. While hundreds of species of birds and fish are disappearing, people, plants and animals are dying as well. No matter the country, the community, no matter the expediency of the politics, or the social and cultural issues, this small planet is dying and man is snuffing out its life. Alas, the question that must be asked: can planet earth survive self-indulgent man?

NOTE:

Selected ecological statistics: Marilyn Weiner, Hal Weiner “Journey to Planet Earth,” 2005; Al Gore, “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,” 1993; USGS, Emerging Contaminants in the Environment, 2006; Nation Water & Climate Survey, 2010.


NEXT -- PART FIVE -- NOWHERE MAN’S “CUT & CONTROL” JOURNEY THROUGH TIME