VARIOUS notes,
to be expanded, but of interest as is.
Up-date: 3-25-01
NATURE'S PERSISTENCE, AND WHO'S RIGHT!
I was pulling weeds from where they'd found holes in the plastic and rocks. It's a "landscaping" idea that's quite common. I'm impressed with the persistence of grass. Amazing stuff. It seems that the better it is at being fruitful and multiplying, the more we hate it... unless we can eat it. Then I wondered...
Who's right here?! It's me trying to subvert nature! Trying to make it pretty and neat. Well, nature isn't that way. It's profuse and... and... exuberant!
Okay, we do it with crops. We graft Apple trunks on Quince roots, or we'd have really lousy apples. Not to mention how we've genetically modified cereal and animal DNA. (I don't mean just lately, but since we first tamed or fenced an animal, or planted a seed.)
So I feel guilty. I bought the house that way. If I sell it, I'll have to fix it up that way again. I'll probably even have them spray herbicide poisons on the grass to make it pretty.
But then I can opt out! Build an eco-house, or an eco-village.
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My reason to be anti-death-penalty: the horrors that vengeance injects into the hearts of the victim's relatives (etc) who want it--even all those who see it on the news. Look at them! The people who want vengeance are effected so as to seem as bad an example as the criminal him/herself. We all then suffer from the remnant effects from those people.
On a really hot day, when we go to cool off in a shower... what do we do? We let the water run til it's hot!
It's too easy to see a beast chased by a lion, and ask how they could cooperate, but they do. Everything has to stay in balance, and the predator/prey ratio is one means.
Steven Levy: the world at large: "one gigantic natural system that emerged as a collective result of billions of local interactions."
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As regards the generative and balancing powers of the Gaian
mechanism, the creature that is way up there in total power is
the lowly Earthworm.
It's likely that the Earth would be more altered for the worse by the loss of the Earthworm than the loss of Homo Sapiens. The Earth would probably survive, but under unimaginably different conditions. The recent addition of Homo Sap is not only not a benefit--like the worm's work--but an enormous detriment, and one which the Earth may not survive. He is completely on the negative side. He is vastly more destructive than generative or balancing. This definitely puts our species in its place, in the hierarchy of importance. Twain put man somewhere between the angels and the French, but I am stumped to find a lower mark, to put us between that and the worm at the top.
===== An airplane is supported by trees. The trees created the O2 in this exuberant disequalibrium that permits it to burn fuel with that oxygen. The plane uses up energy it took the trees eons to make. If the atmosphere were 100% methane, oxygen would be the fuel pumped into the engine.
===== The simple life does not necessarily mean (in fact, seldom means) giving up technology. What could be more *complicated* than trying to do without a refrigerator?! A washing machine?
David Suzuki says chimp's DNA is 1% different from humans.
Our minds seem built to try to make order out of chaos. (teen-agers excepted, of course!) Is it more psychological than biological? Are our brains "wired" that way? Look at what we do as we play cards. We "randomize" as we shuffle. That's chaos. Then we play them in various ways, and usually wind up with them in four stacks of suits, played in ascending order.
Campbell: (paraphrase) "a priest has a social organization; a shaman has dieties of his own manufacture." Wellll....
Is heliotropism a mere reaction... or consciousness? A "fine-line" definition, and would depend on how you define consciousness. A computer only switches on and off--its only two states--is that thinking? A human brain neuron is also only on or off!
In Brazil, the Kayapo (sp?) have no supreme being. (Discovery Channel program "Portrait of a People) So it is not universal. The Incas worshipped "Patcha Mama": literally "Mother Earth". (curious how the sound "ma" is female or mother in so many unconnected languages! Perhaps baby's first sound is selfishly interpreted as referring to the closest parent.)
*Correlation? Does polytheism tend a culture toward open-mindedness and tolerance? Was it no co-incidence that the polytheistic Greeks were so open-minded that they devised the scientific method that lifted some of us out of superstition? Was that cause or effect?
Mom Nature is the original "tuff lover".
A paraphrase of Margolis: The Gaia system is like a pontilist painting. Each series of dots (like fractals) is made up of smaller ones. Each level is alive.
Around the world, people will organize their charitable efforts in a tribute to their religion... *whatever* it may be... however strange it might seem to outsiders.... Therefore, that religion holds NO credit for their efforts in its behalf. It is simply our natural altruism, subsumed. This does not mean that all these efforts wind up as beneficial.
===============POPULATION
Nature's big reproduction double-bind: "You must do what, if you're very successful at it, will kill you all!"
The thing that'll kill us is that we can do stuff so easily! In every little thing, we give off effluents! In our economy, our CEOs and engineers are driven to make things as easy as possible. The easier we can do things, the easier we can make the world worse with our efforts. Turn on a hot-water tap, and a hundred kilos away, a coal-fired generating plant spews forth a bit more CO2.
We must account for the "human stupidity constant"! --A title for an essay!!
If humanity does not restrain its population, and thinks that we can just use resources more efficiently, what will result? We could act twice as stupidly (and wind up with half the people) or act twice the intelligently (and wind up with twice the population), and we would still have the same population problem.
We can extinct a million species, and still.... we can eliminate all dictators, and still... we can be total vegetarians, scrap all our cars, wipe our butt with leaves, and still...
Why? In all "restrained" scenarios, the bottom X% will suffer or starve to death. On the reckless end, an unrestrained population would expand till food ran out and a percentage of a low number of people died off enough to balance things. On the careful end, an unrestrained population would expand till food ran out and a percentage of a high number of people died off enough to balance things.
Which is better?
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The "broken family", at some point, became the "single parent" family, as we began to accept it as an acceptable mode. At one time, I'm sure that everybody known to any person was in the same area as himself. We'd know that group as a tribe. When their population finally got big enough, they probably split into two or more groups, and the conservatives at the time probably lamented and railed against the "broken tribe." They may have blamed it on those new-fangled inventions like... shoes, that expanded our ability to travel.
When that was accepted, what was the standard mode was the "extended family" of uncles and cousins, etcetera. Eventually, that got broken. I wonder if that was lamented. Then the mode was the "nuclear family", a mere shadow of the integrated tribe.
Now we're talking about how that's broken. There's no much further we can go in breaking things. How do you break one person? (schizophrenia, perhaps.)
Humanity has a need for associations at all these levels. Nuclear, extended, tribe, nation, world. I'd like to see us get back some feeling of all those levels; not only with other humans, but other animals as well.
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Once solved, the former mystery has lost its importance. (& its potency.)
Gaia rituals: go camping, take a hike!
Olin Curtis: Systematic Theology, 1905: "There is, I sometimes think, a secret cosmic force not yet caught by science, that binds us all, from men to rocks, into one vast mystic organism."
Darn good for 1905, if you leave out the "secret cosmic force", and "mystic" parts.
=====DATA =======
We use enough styrofoam peanuts in a year to fill the Empire State Building. A concrete block of styro and fly ash (A combustion "waste" product) looks like it weighs only 2-3K.
A ton of recycled paper saves 4100 KW-hours, 7000 gallons water, 3 cubic meters of landfill, and 60# of pollutants in the air.
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