I finished reading Ed Yong\u2019s An Immense World<\/i> this week. It is a brilliant explanation of the myriad of senses of the animals on this planet. He has talked to so many great scientists doing deep work, and made what they\u2019re doing clear to the rest of us.<\/p>\n
But it left me with \u2014 once again \u2014 the understanding that we have real problems to address on this planet and instead we\u2019re forced to deal with what Rebecca Solnit has taken to calling the \u201cStupid Coup,\u201d a name that becomes more apt with each day.<\/p>\n
In the last pages of the book, Yong talks about the problems posed by light pollution \u2014 which affects the senses of many insects, birds, and bats, not to mention human beings. But he also mentions such things as ships crossing the ocean affecting whales, the damage to the Great Coral Reef, and how such things create a cascade of damage.<\/p>\n
About ten years ago, my partner and I backpacked in the Ventana Wilderness, in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest here in California. I tell many stories about that trip \u2014 how we waded the Carmel River 25 times (not an exaggeration), how bad the trail was in spots \u2014 but one of the real glories of it was that, with the exception of a airplane or two overhead, we didn\u2019t hear any human noises for three days except the ones we made.<\/p>\n
And we could see the stars (through the trees and clouds, at least) because we were surrounded by enough mountains and trees to block light from the nearby cities. One of those nights \u2014 the one where we collapsed into our sleeping bags, completely exhausted \u2014 we heard frogs and crickets for hours. Nothing else.<\/p>\n
Do you know how rare that is?<\/p>\n
I doubt that humans, who have only been living in this overlit and noisy state for about a hundred years \u2013 somewhat longer for noise \u2013 have adapted, even though we know what\u2019s going on. You can be damn sure that the other creatures on the planet have not.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, a whole lot of scientists have ideas on what to do about that for the benefit of both people and all the other creatures.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, what they recommend will not even get discussed these days because of the Stupid Coup. People who aren\u2019t willing to consider the effects of air pollution on human beings (\u201cdrill, baby, drill\u201d) are certainly not going to worry about light pollution reducing the insect population. <\/p>\n
The broligarchs backing the Stupid Coup think democracy is terrible because we the people aren\u2019t interested in having extremely wealthy men decide how to run things. They are the same kind of people who are not going to deal with air pollution (outside or inside), not to mention changing the lights so that we can see the stars (and other creatures can navigate the planet properly).<\/p>\n
Like the grifter in the White House, they are motivated more by greed and a craving for power than by any ability to analyze the real problems on the planet and address them. And they think so narrowly that they apparently believe they can address climate change by building bunkers or going to Mars.<\/p>\n
They are not serious people. They\u2019re just rich. And people get rich because they put money ahead of everything else.<\/p>\n
We cannot let such people run the world.<\/p>\n
Democracy\u2019s messy and oh, so time-consuming, but we don\u2019t really have a choice because there really aren\u2019t any all-knowing philosopher queens (much less kings) who would be good at running everything.<\/p>\n
We need to listen to scientists, but scientists alone certainly shouldn\u2019t be running the world. Neither should lawyers or even science fiction writers or poets. And definitely computer geeks are not the right choice.<\/p>\n
Even people who can integrate many of the forms of knowledge that are necessary won\u2019t be good enough on their own.<\/p>\n
Also, even actual geniuses \u2014 not to mention the people who believe they are geniuses even though they obviously aren\u2019t \u2014 often lack the capacity to compromise when that\u2019s needed. Which is to say, they don\u2019t work\/play well with others.<\/p>\n
(Compromise here means recognizing that other people\u2019s ideas and opinions have to be taken into consideration. It does not mean kowtowing to autocrats. It has more to do with learning how to cooperate.)<\/p>\n
If you look at the big issues of the day, the key ones are climate change and inequality of living conditions (a phrase I am choosing over wealth inequality because I think we need to move away from the idea of individual wealth entirely). To fix those problems, one of the key things we have to learn to do is create the kind of balance Kate Raworth lays out in Doughnut Economics<\/i>, a balance that factors in both environmental and human needs.<\/p>\n
As David Wengrow and the late David Graeber point out in The Dawn of Everything<\/i>, we\u2019ve had a number of societies that were good at that in the past. Nothing about the way we do things now was destined. We can change things.<\/p>\n
The sooner we start doing that, the better off all the creatures on this planet will be. After all, once you look at things carefully, you start to realize that we need those insects and the fungi, not to mention the larger creatures.<\/p>\n
I hope people in other countries are taking some of these steps, but of course the damage done by the Stupid Coup doesn\u2019t stop at the U.S. border. And while we can all hope for some positive change in the next round of elections, it\u2019s clear that once we get the wannabe kings out of here, we have to make some dramatic changes to the United States.<\/p>\n
A good future for all depends on that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I finished reading Ed Yong\u2019s An Immense World this week. It is a brilliant explanation of the myriad of senses of the animals on this planet. He has talked to so many great scientists doing deep work, and made what they\u2019re doing clear to the rest of us. But it left me with \u2014 once […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,17,181],"tags":[142,387,1033,129,516,1034],"class_list":["post-3930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-rants","category-science","tag-david-graeber","tag-david-wengrow","tag-ed-yong","tag-kate-raworth","tag-rebecca-solnit","tag-stupid-coup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3931,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions\/3931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}