The year religion "fought back"

Is this really the year that religion has fought back against secularism? Polly Toynbee believes it is. In a recent Guardian article, "My Christmas message? There's probably no God," she writes,

This has been the year of religion's fightback against secularism - a word made almost synonymous with the spiritual and moral decadence of materialism. Angered by the runaway success of anti-God books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, AC Grayling and others, the different faiths - though each believes it has the one and only divinely revealed truth and often fights to the death to prove it - combine in curious harmony against secularists.

How true it is that lots of religious people have pushed against a resurgent secular humanist movement that has followed the lead of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, and Grayling. We have positively pushed forward with groups like the Center for Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, American Atheists, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Reason Project, and has flooded the blogosphere and made sturdy inroads into mainstream media like Newsweek's feature "On Faith."

I think Toynbee overstates the case though. Many religious people - at least the toxicly faithful whose voices saturate American media bandwidth - have been spewing awful things about secularism for years and now they have to answer for it in America. Before, no one except that "atheist psycho" Madalyn Murray O'Hair would call them out in public about it. Now, we call them out and refuse to be boogey men. When Mitt Romney did his best Ronald Reagan imitation and gave his religion speech, he was openly questioned and surely derided in lots of opinion pieces for saying that "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Lots of people didn't buy it. We have carved a space for ourselves to call statements like that into question. Had George Bush said Romney's words seven years ago or had Ronald Reagan said them 27 years ago, which he nearly did in his "Evil Empire" speech, there would have been much less attention to secularists' retorts. No longer.

The backlash against us? Today a lot of religious people are really doing that much differently. It's not as if they don't have enormous inertia. For them to put out how many anti-Dawkins, anti-Harris, anti-atheism books is a drop in the bucket compared the existing multi-squidzillion selling mega-blockbuster brain-destroying books like the Left Behind series or The Purpose-Driven Life. Now the fundamentalists just have more holes to plug in their ship because there are a lot more people who feel comfortable crying shenanigans on the faith-based initiative the United States has become. Christians are still just shouting along as ever and can just turn their supertanker of a movement and create a deafening blare of nonsense that calls the faithful back to the infancy of our species. To what?

The world over we find believers uniting in one thing - their certainty that God is real, acts in the world, is the fountain of all virtue, and that faith is essential to living a good life.

Never mind that given the chance to disparage other faiths, too many of them will. The Pope condescending to Muslims by calling Islam a religion of violence while ignoring Catholicism's history of or complicity with violence. Fundamentalist heehaw-watching Baptists in the U.S. can't get enough of yammering about Catholics worshiping idols; surely God will roast them all in hell. How many lines in the Koran demand the blood of infidels, especially Jews? Too many.

All of that can be cast aside though: against the evil of secularism, they must unite.

As Toynbee writes:

They blame us for all the evils of modernity, as if they could point to some morally better time when people feared God and sinned less. There is, of course, no evidence that God-fearers ever behaved better than the ungodly. One of the great mysteries of religion is why, even when people believed that heaven awaited the virtuous and everlasting torment was the destiny of sinners, there is no sign it made them any less prone to all the sins flesh is heir to. Yet they turn on atheists for lacking any moral base without a God.

I could say we are mortally offended and demand protection from such insult. But it is the prerogative of religions to be protected from feeling offended. Priests, imams and rabbis reserve for their beliefs a special respect, ringfenced from normal public argument. It is abusive and insulting to suggest that belief in gods and miracles is delusional, or that religions are inherently anti-women and anti-gay. Meanwhile, non-believers suffer the far worse insult that we inhabit a moral vacuum. But we will live with the insult if we are free to reply that there is no inherent virtue in being religious either: it does not make people behave better.

In the aggregate, very little evidence exists that religion simply makes people good. It certainly provides social cohesion and common purpose. People can discover, maintain, and heighten their senses of community and live within those communities. Social animals need to socialize. It is part of their/our condition. Religion accomplishes this goal very well. However, a belief system that unites people is not in itself good. Political, economic, national, ethnic, or racial ideologies also serve these purposes, and too often to horrible ends. That's where Toynbee is right.

But Toynbee is partly wrong. Religion can make people behave better. That is, it can turn you toward those who are like you or who might be able to be converted. Look at all of the money and compassionate action poured into Africa to convert the masses of people made destitute by pilfering politicians and the ravages of disease and war. Surely, preventing suffering is a good in itself and the commandment to love thy neighbor is an aphorism we ought to believe and share. Obviously, though, that is not the end.

Religion can be used as a means to enforce ignorance and drive neighbor against neighbor. We have to question the genocidal negligence of the Catholic Church's opposition to condom use in AIDS-torn places in the world like Central and South Africa. We have to wonder at the power of the Lord's Army that creates a vile cocktail of faith and ethnocentrism to turn children into killers. And secularism is to blame for the woes of the world?

I suppose that if we are created in God's image, we must infer him that God is both incredibly generous and patient, willing to suffer to help others. But it is also willing to delude itself and others to accomplish capriciously malevolent acts for what it has deemed a "greater good." How like us he is. Surely, then, we have made it in our own image.

He is, as Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." It is the worst in us.

So if indeed, the religious are pushing back, I say that we need to push back harder and more effectively. The cartoon on the right says that we have a blank paper as atheists because it is the absence of a belief. But we unchurched or unbelieving people, guided by our empathy and informed moral insight, stand gladly as the faithfuls' challengers. Their days in the U.S. (and I suppose Britain too, though that nation is considerably less toxicly religious than ours) of holding themselves as the champions of virtue, mercy, charity, and justice are over. As people concerned with the human condition, we have much to offer. Offer it.

There is no God. Continue making the world a better place.

Water bottle ban gets attention at Food & Water Watch

My friend and co-founder of 3E-COE (Environment, Ecology, and Education) was invited by Food & Water Watch to write a blogpost on our hope to end wasteful water bottles at Penn State. Check it out.

Orang mommy

What a gorgeous picture. Touching.

The IDEA Center is a shell

Allen McNeill has a great post up on all of the university-based "research centers" William Dembski touted a few years ago. They are dead or non-existent. He looked through all of the posted IDEA Center's affiliates and found them kerplunk. What a bright idea.

Have you tithed to the church of plastic Jesus this year?

Christopher Hitchens has a brilliant piece up at Slate titled "'Tis the Season to be incredulous." Eat this O'Reilly.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events. Originally Christian, this devotional set-aside can now be joined by any other sectarian group with a plausible claim—Hanukkah or Kwanzaa—to a holy day that occurs near enough to the pagan winter solstice.

I enjoy spending time with my family and Christmas lights. Some of the carols are enjoyable - for maybe an hour. But by the end of November - THREE WEEKS AGO - I was already nauseated by the officially sanctioned Christmas brujah inundating me with messages about buying this and loving our savior at the same time. American religion is the pet of consumerism and consumerism serves the dear lord too.

So take this Bill O'Reilly. You're a dupe to the materialist forces you decry. Wrap your Jesus in dollar bills and bless it all.

Amen.

And I missed this how?

You will all now wonder the same thing? How did I not know about Extreme Metal Video Free Downloads? I feel like a sham.

I knew I wouldn't always get what I want with Obama...

...but the last couple of days have really gotten me a little bit steamed. First Tom Vilsack as the Secretaries of Corn & Agribusiness and Ken Salazar as the Secretary of the Great Wide Open Resource Fields of the West. Now Obama is having Rick Warren give the invocation at the swearing-in ceremony. Am I infuriated? Or is it a chance for us to

As I noted here the other day, Vilsack is a schill for agribusiness. Michael Pollan noted yesterday on NPR:

"I was very disappointed in that news conference," he said, "not to hear Vilsack use the word 'food' — or 'eaters.' And the interests of everybody except eaters was discussed: farmers, ranchers, people concerned about the land."

And so, he said, it's difficult not to see the choice of Vilsack as "agribusiness as usual."

Pollution as usual running down the Mississippi making it into the nation's intestine, expelling all the shit we don't use and don't want and depositing it in the Gulf of Mexico. Garbage dumped on the food market as usual from the federally subsidized corn industry to make us fat. And of course, there's the beauty of corn-based ethanol produced so that Americans can further bloat ourselves in the short term at the expense of hungry people, our water, our soil, and our air. The same goes for Salazar and the big sky country of the western U.S. Is this just going to be more pilfering of soils?

Where is the vision for hope and change here? It might be there. I am skeptical. Dazzle me.

And now Rick Warren, the super-sized pastor of the super-sized Saddleback Church, that beacon of religious toleration and good works. That is, they're tolerant if you believe as they do and do the works you do because you long for salvation. At least, that's what some in the media, like Sarah Posner at The Nation would have us believe.

Let me say, I have amazingly little to agree with Warren about. He is a homophobe blinded by his sect's particular notions, so blinded that he, like James Dobson (with whom he only differs in tone), believes that gays are not owed the basic rights: "there are about 2 percent of Americans are homosexual, gay, lesbian people. We should not let 2 percent of the population...change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years." Marriage is a religious institution infected by the government. Being that this is the case, it is owed to every person able to love another and legitimately carry the civil and social contract it entails. To paraphrase Andrew Sullivan, what better way to enhance the social and cultural power of marriage than inviting a population of devoted people to use it? If marriage has been eroded, then strengthen it with new families who model its best aspects - fidelity, strength, courage, devotion, unity.

Warren's stance against abortion is positively antiquated. It is based on a conveniently-termed Biblical principle that says that life begins at conception. I think that the sperm that fertilized the egg before it was actually alive too and was destroyed in the process as its own integral being. Is that murder now? What about all of the tens of millions of sperm who die in their forced march toward death in their absolutely pitiful hopes to be the chosen one? Do they not matter? Did they have souls? How do you know or not? Is a blastocyst more "alive" than a chicken? Why does the particular status of a four-cell blastocyst have precedent over a living Afghan girl, the livelihoods of Amazonian tribes whose lives are seized by IMF and WTO-backed deforestation for agriculture, a kangaroo mother dying of thirst in Australia because of human-induced drought, a tiger in Sumatra whose habitat is sytematically burned out by multi-national corporations, or great apes in Africa and Asia living rich social and emotional lives? How is a blastocyst more imporant than those things?

It is not. It is a phantasm of religious conservatism that positively blinds us to the extensive pattern of abuse that humans really incur on one another and to our environment.

Warren. Warren. Warren. What should we think of Obama's overture? I think that we must point out what I already have. In so many ways, I think you are mistaken and we are angry with you. But I think we have to move on.

Where can we agree? How can we make an alliance built on compassion and intelligence? Perhaps we can do this by fighting AIDS in Africa together. Let's talk. Just know that we are watching and working. And now that Obama has allied himself with you, we watch him with the power of the ballot in our hands. You screw up, he takes the hit too. Actually, you've already hit him. Let me explain.

I think that the Constitution should prohibit you from proclaiming your particular religious notions on inauguration day. In fact, I suspect that Obama's courting you to do this is one of the grossest entanglements of church and state I can imagine. I find it abhorrent. While we might be able to work together to reduce the suffering of the world's people, you are not an elected or appointed official of the secular government and are poised to speak on matters of faith from the podium of the most powerful nation of the world. It is in some sense a real shame that you, a man capable of reaching millions with your own powerful media apparatus to spread the above garbage to the world, is about to use the U.S. president's podium as your pulpit.

We must talk to our enemies. I concur with Obama on this. We have to sit down with those to whom we might become hostile and work out our differences in compassionate and patient dialogue. It is a necessity. Perhaps you and Obama have been doing this all behind the scenes and we are seeing its fruit in this invitation.

Maybe this is just shrewd politics on Obama's part to get the "Obama's a Muslim" people out of his hair. That's politically smart I suppose. He is in a lose-lose situation on that. Who better to get than you?

This is all very confusing. I am mad. I am intrigued. Perplexed. Saddened.

Really, I wish it weren't happening.

Carnival of Evolution #7

This episode of the Carnival of Evolution is a rather small one. I suspect that like me, many of the regulars are swamped with their work at the end of university semesters, running around labs, grading and completing papers, and administering exams. But that hasn’t stopped some pretty cool entries this time around.

Ever wonder about chemical and mineral evolution? Evolving Mind thinks you should. He highlights some recent findings that minerals have co-evolved with life. "Evolution isn't just for living organisms. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found that the mineral kingdom co-evolved with life, and that up to two thirds of the more than 4,000 known types of minerals on Earth can be directly or indirectly linked to biological activity."

In “The Evolution of Avian Clutch Size,” GrrlScientist wants us to wonder why difference bird species “have different clutch sizes, with some species laying only one egg while others produce as many as ten eggs per clutch or more. Why is there such a tremendous difference in clutch size? What evolutionary factors affect the average clutch size that each species produces?" It nicely and neatly explains some peer-reviewed research from PLoS Biology.

Ever wonder who's out there wondering the same things you are about primate evolution, anthropology research, human genetics, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, medical anthropology, and bioethics? You needn't wonder any longer: Fiona King has linked us to the Top 100 Anthropology Blogs. It is quite the resource.

Want to "teach the controversy?" Let's hope not. In a piece titled "Anti-Evolution: It's the new Intelligent Design," Reducibly Complex takes on the Disco 'Tute's media complaints division, the so-called Evolution News and Views. This post argues that "teach the controversy" is quite the sham - mere cover for creationists to fly anti-science garbage into schools by going under the legal radar. Just to show how absurd all of this is, PZ Myers at Pharyngula gives us a brief beauty on why our public schools are so messed up. See according to Texas Board of Education member, the public schools "are unconstitutional because they undermine scriptural authority." If your head nearly exploded reading that, you have read it right. PZ takes it down further.

What's to be done? PLoS Genetics published an interview with Judge John E. Jones III that I posted on earlier this week. Jones has a few words on the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, science, the U.S. Constitution, and judicial independence. Perhaps Dunbar should take note.

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Update: You want to submit for the next Carnival of Evolution? Fill out the submission form and get posted on biochemicalsoul!

Tom Vilsack a "schill for agribusiness."

Obama is about to unveil his selection for Secretary of Agriculture Agribusiness. It's Tom Vilsack, Democratic governor of Iowa, a man that The Organic Consumers Association said "has a glowing reputation as being a schill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto." That's exactly what I don't want to hear.

In principle, I am not opposed to genetically modified organisms. That said, I think that our proclivity at manipulating our environments has led us to think that because we can manipulate the environment that we should. We are ambitious animals gifted with foresight but crippled by impatience and a lack of humility. The unintended ecological consequences of GMOs and agribusiness and agriscience are easily overlooked and ignored.

Consider the blight on monarch butterflies whose fecundity has likely been hammered by Bt genetically modified strains of corn. Pollen from the Bt corn drifts onto milkweed - the only plant on which monarchs lay their eggs -and is consumed by monarch caterpillars. In a 1999 study by Cornell researchers "monarch larvae that ate leaves sprinkled with Bt pollen grew more slowly, ate less, and suffered a mortality rate of nearly 50% as compared to monarchs in the same lab that were fed unsprinkled milkweed." That's alarming. The decline in some places was precipitous, reducing the population by as much as half from 1996 to 2001.

All that is very sad. And here, Obama - the voice and scion of change - has opted for more big business. Vilsack was named governor of the year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, cynically acronymed BIO. Here's what they wrote about him:

"Governor Vilsack has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to raising Iowa's visibility as a center of excellence for agricultural and life science research. His "Iowa 2010" initiative will help improve the economic climate for technology-based industries and illustrates his vision of Iowa as an important thread in the national biotechnology fabric," said Kelly.

"In May 2000 Governor Vilsack helped create the Governors' Biotechnology Partnership, a bi-partisan coalition of governors serving as clearinghouse for biotechnology information. Starting with only 13 members, the group now enjoys participation from more than half of the nation's governors. The success of the coalition is due in part, to Governor Vilsack's dedication to the biotechnology industry," Kelly added.

BIO represents more than 1,000 biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centers and related organizations in all 50 U.S. states and 33 other nations. BIO members are involved in the research and development of health-care, agricultural, industrial and environmental biotechnology products.

Notice that there is nothing in there about sustainable agriculture. Nothing. This is more of the same for big corn to shape us. I encourage everyone to read at least the first chapter of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, Francis Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, David Orr'sEcological Literacy, or Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. Corn owns us. We don't own it. Corn quite literally runs Iowa. All of its possible permutations - corn itself, corn syrup, shelving, cellulose cups, ethanol, etc. - are exported from that monocultural state with disastrous consequences.

American farmers continue to plant much more corn than they need to, hoping to gain short-term profits from ethanol or whatever other boutique use might come from corn. This is a social trap. Ethanol’s long-term prospects are shaky because its greenhouse emissions in total after production are, at best, about .9 of petroleum production. That is a slim margin in the best-case scenario. Worst-case scenarios show that ethanol processing creates more greenhouse gases than does petroleum production. As corn production declines because of lack of profitability, we might expect even less corn on the global food market from American and Asian-American who cannot profit from it. However, corn production will continue on a massive scale that will cause billions of pounds of eroded soil from the American breadbasket, saturated with nitrates and chemical fertilizers, to flow down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. The total soil loss inevitably leads to infertile soil across the Midwest, massive river pollution, and the further spread of the dead zone off the boot of Louisiana where shrimp populations have been plummeting for decades. The pre-industrial Mississippi river landscape was once a great floodplain well-adapted to the Mississippi’s floods. Today, it is massively walled and blocked in, accelerating the rivers speed and erosion. Additionally, the enormous amount of carbon fuels burned in the agricultural process adds considerably to greenhouse gases. All of this Governor Vilsack endorses as the governor of Iowa and the new Secretary of Agriculture Agribusiness.

Though this is only a cursory overview of a massive problem, it shows Garret Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons.” We keep artificially extending short-term solutions such that at the end of the proverbial day, we will be faced with a lack of soil, a lack of energy reserves, a climate whose weather patterns have shifted far from pre-industrial times, and the destruction of untold numbers of species. All for the short-term arms races we precipitate with our desire to manipulate nature so that our appetites are satisfied.

We need to consider where these should lead us. There are some of us, like David Orr, who question whether we are "currently undergoing an explosion of knowledge.” Sure, computers and the internet have created spectacular means by which we can transport and save digital information.

But reconsider the topic: information. Planet Earth is going through the sixth great extinction event in its history. The last was when an astronaut hit the Yucatan peninsula about 65 million years ago and likely precipitated the dinosaurs’ demise. Note though, that extinction was precipitated by the mindless collision of two astronomical objects. Human beings with our appetites, our short-term predictive intelligence, our language, and our technology currently drive tens of thousands of species extinct every year with those animals most closely related to us on the tree of life like gorillas at the greatest risk. The polar bear and walrus suffer and dwindle as the habitats to which they have evolved to fit change drastically. Amphibian species the world over indicate how much industrial humans – homo technologicus – has poisoned ecosystems. The hemlock tree in Appalachia is dying out because of pests that lived farther south in the continental United States and the longpole pines in the west are on their way out too. They will be gone in just a few decades. There seems no technical fix at this point.

At least not a new fix. Instead, multiplot agriculture - not agriculture and agriscience that generate agridollars - that exists within the bounds of its soil needs to return. There are good signs all around us that this is happening. More people are buying local food and growing their own food (will we get our little patch going next year?) and pushing back against the command economy in American agriculture. Talk about corporate welfare. And whose the biggest welfare recipient of them all? Iowa, the home of corn.

We are faced with the very real possibility that humans, as Agent Smith from the movie The Matrix says, “are a virus.” Governor Vilsack is a champion of our environmental and inhumane virulence. Obama is seeming less and less like the change we need to see in the world. How sad.

New evidence for nothing being something

NPR ran a really fun story on dark energy today. It's that strange force in the universe that seems to propel the accelerating expansion of the universe. Or so it seems. The science is fun, but the best part of the story comes at the end of the broadcast: "To put it another way, Einstein didn't get nothing [what we currently think is dark energy] wrong."

A good friend commented on this saying, "Nothing. Isn't what theologians talk about?" Spot on friend. Spot on.

Judge Jones interviewed for PLoS Genetics

In "Taken to School," Judge John E. Jones III is interviewed by Jane Geitschier for PLoS Genetics. It is a nice brief on Jones's personal and intellectual background regarding ID and religion, the law and the reasoning behind Kitzmiller and its ancestor cases, and finally what the decision means for the future of ID and creationist lawsuits. His explanation of the Lemon Test. the "endorsement" test, and Jefferson's "wall of separation" are particularly keen. I like his little bit of nostalgia though.

He closes with a reminiscence about the trial:

It's changed my life forever. You can't go through something like this that has such notoriety without being changed. Federal Judges at any level lead quite cloistered existences, and I was thrust onto the stage in a way that I would never have thought possible. And I have been speaking all around the US, but I don't go and try to say what I did in the opinion.

What I developed was a passion for the concept known as “judicial independence,” meaning that concomitantly with the science education issue that I just raised, I don't think Americans understand how judges operate.

I had a lot of criticism after this decision; a lot, I think, was born out of ignorance about how we do things. People didn't understand there was a Lemon test or an Endorsement test. People thought I made this up as I went along. They think judges rule according to their own philosophical biases or predilections. I thought it was incumbent upon me to get out and talk about that and say, “Well, you don't quite have this right,” and I've been very well received across the country.

But from the NOVA show to the now four books that have been written about the case, to being on the cover of Time magazine, for someone born and raised in a town of 2,000 in upstate PA—all this is fairly miraculous stuff that I never thought I would do. So, it certainly has changed the fabric of my life, that I have had this interval. It will die down, I know.

When I take my last breath and they publish my obituary, the first line will say that I presided over the intelligent design trial. I can't top this, I don't think, and I'm fine with that, if this is what I'm remembered for. I'm proud of what I did. I thought I discharged my obligations and my duties well.

Going forward, has it made me more curious about the issue? Yes, and I think I'll always have that enduring curiosity.

Having been there on the last day, I felt that buzzing excitement from the plaintiffs and the look of proud defeat from the defendants. And Jones presided over it all with poise and integrity. It changed the fabric of many lives I say.

Belatedly, Roger Ebert's takedown of Expelled

I think that Ebert's review is the best review I've read - twice - of Expelled. Leave it to a film critic to review a film.

And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actually did want to title it "From Darwin to Hitler." He finds a Creationist who informs him, "Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism." He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one "result" of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. "As a Jew," he says, "I wanted to see for myself." We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. "It's difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place," he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

Me too.

Press for the H2O bottle ban

The Collegian gave us some coverage.

Members of the newly formed Penn State Environment, Ecology and Education in the College of Education (3E-COE) group and other environmental activists gathered to protest the sale and use of plastic water bottles at Penn State. The activists also delivered a letter to Penn State President Graham Spanier's office asking him to ban the sale of disposable water bottles on campus.

"Eliminating water bottles on campus isn't without precedent," said Alexandra D'Urso, co-founding member of 3E-COE, citing Washington University in St. Louis as a university that prohibits the sale of plastic water bottles on campus. "We're not asking people to make huge cultural changes."

The letter to Spanier spelled out the environmental and health concerns 3E-COE says are associated with the use of plastic water bottles and gave examples of their negative effects, particularly the amount of discarded plastic polluting the oceans.

We already got some great responses from people around the area including someone somehow affiliated with the local minor league baseball team who wants to increase green behavior. Other environmental groups and 3E-COE (Environment, Ecology, and Education in the College of Education) will be working together a lot more as we work in local school gardens, try to get our own teaching garden, get the water bottle ban, develop energy-saving curriculum, and work with others.

Get rid of H2O bottles at Penn State

Today we are protesting Penn State's continued use of plastic water bottles. Join us. They are a waste.

Did you know that there is a raft twice the size of Texas composed of discarded plastic bottles floating in the Pacific Ocean¹?
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Or that Penn State’s recycling programs are ineffective when recycling bins are cross-contaminated²?
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Or that that plastic disposable bottles often leach DEHP - a probable human carcinogen³?
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Want to help the environment & increase the quality of life at PSU?
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Think that environmental awareness should be increased in public schools?

Come to a demonstration organized by Penn State 3E-COE (Environment, Ecology & Education in the College of Education) and supported by Penn State Eco-Action. We will meet at 3:30 pm to display a garland of water bottles gathered from around State College, sing environmental songs to the tune of holiday carols, and will present President Spanier with a letter requesting Penn State ban the sale of disposable plastic water bottles on our campus.

Contact 3ECOE@psu.edu for more information! Even if you can come for 15 minutes, that is amazing! We can do great things in great numbers!

The next Carnival of Evolution

So I just want to put it out there that I am the next host of The Carnival of Evolution.

To paraphrase the Carnival's mastermind, if you care about the science behind evolution, marvel at the biochemical wonderment in life's diversity, if you want creationists to find something else to do, if you want good science education, and hope to stay on top of the dazzling wonderment that is the American controversy over evolution in public schools...then you should send me your stuff and link me to ace posts that will get us all a little bit deeper into the wonderment that is and has been evolution.

To send in a submission, use this handy dandy form. It'll be sent on over!

The unsustainability of globalization

The Editor's Picks in Environment Magazine summarizes a really interesting piece from Geography Compass (subscription required) that argues that the "global economy...exacts huge environmental costs" that will lead to "unpredictability and climate chaos." In short, it is unsustainable. What might smack us most is the following:

Globalization has not reduced poverty but rather shifted it to sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, where absolute poverty rose between 1993 and 2004. This rise has been attributed to the growing global competitiveness of East Asia in general and China in particular, where China’s share of manufacturing value doubled between 1985 and 2000. More contentiously, Kaplinsky links globalization’s success to the rise of global terrorism. With half of the world’s population now living in cities, the author argues that urban politics have moved from class-based allegiances to premodernist, millenarian, and faith-based affiliations.

The rise of modern technology and its use without ample consideration for its ultimate costs have created a massive anti-modern movement. This movement has at least two heads.

The first are those interested in a peaceful transition to a more pastoral society (with whom I am occasionally sympathetic) that is more self-reliant and isolationist. Some of these people are deeply opposed to science because they simplistically view science as a political, economic, and cultural tool used to displace people. Others (like me) view science as a tool to be used by people to understand their surroundings and as a tool it must be used in conjunction with sound ethical and social reasoning. In all cases, we must consider the law of unintended consequences and, at time, not act because we lack the knowledge that could prevent disastrous circumstances. [Yes, I realize this slows down inquiry.]

The second is a full-throated retrograde movement built on antiquated ignorance. This head of the movement comes most easily from religious fundamentalism. It is present in most nations of the world, especially in the United States where great uncertainty about the changes of the world have yielded incredibly retrograde thinking for the last 130 years in fundamentalist churches. In much of the rest of the world, it is Islamic fundamentalism which opposes modernity. Interestingly, these movements exist in some of their most toxic forms in the midst of the most extraordinary expressions of the modern technological world - in metropolises.

The search for bonds among people living among techno-wizardry drives them to simple, pre-existing, and ancient ties like religion. It also happens that those ancient ties contain within them a great distrust of change, no matter what kind of change. The monotheism's are so ossified in some practices that distrust of modern technology is necessarily linked to distrust of modern sexual mores. But these people have to live inside of the great machine of today. It's very confusing. It's confusing for me and I'm pretty well acclimated to it.

Anyway, Environment Magazine wraps up the piece by addressing how we might address poverty:

Greater integration and coherence in governance and regulation of development projects will tackle many of the unsustainable practices caused by global trade. A more equitable representation for developing economies in global institutions will ultimately ensure that decisions are inclusive of those who have been sidelined because they are poor and powerless.

This article deals with two of the three elephants in the room: consumption and representation. We need to use less of what we use and use what we use more efficiently. Those who are must represent themselves and be represented fairly. But the third elephant is not here: population. As more and more of us exist and more of us consume more, we are flying faster and faster towards a collaps, the longer we don't do anything about it.

I think it is genuinely time to consider mandatory population limits. How? I'm not sure.

But if we want humans to be occupants of the planet in the future and we want life as we know it to continue to evolve on this planet, we need to slow everything down pretty fast.

Dumb eco-questions?

Yesterday, I posted something on New Scientist's recent article on hopeful techno fixes for climate change. Today, we have "Dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask."

Do you wonder why your gym doesn't use the power output from stationary bikes to get some electricity for itself? "They could." So can you if with a Pedal-A-Watt (reviewed at re-nest).

How much does unplugging appliances do to save electricity? "It depends on the appliance."

The best way to drive? "Smoothly."

Does buying a carbon offset when you fly really do anything? "Yes. And no."

What's greener, paper/cardboard or plastic packaging? This question is really interesting to me. The real answer should be neither. Use a reusable bag when you go to the grocery, book, or department store or market. Most major chain stores have them now and if they don't, then pressure them to get them or buy canvas bags from an online store or from your favorite philanthropy or non-profit like the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture who sponsors the Buy Fresh * Buy Local program (logo at left). Of course, combining reusable resources with local sustainable agriculture can do a lot to reduce the enormous petroleum use we have currently.

Is buying a new more fuel-efficient car the way to go? It might actually have negligible effects if you aren't swapping out a "thirsty and polluting older car." The real trick here is of course swapping to mass transit or using a bicycle. That, I realize, might be hard for all of us. Me included. Our lives in a car-run world take on their own logic such that our urban centers sprawl and to get from our children's schools to work to the grocery store to the wherever demand a criss-crossed maze for our automobile rat race. If gas were $6 a gallon, we'd be on bikes. So maybe it's time to just all get to it.

It looks like it's time to fix the rim on my single speed cross bike and get a move on. I've been lazy the last few months so I'm no innocent in this.

I've been memed

Christie at Observations of a Nerd tagged me. I'll play.

5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago: I was 22.
Writing a piece of music for bassoon, tuba, and garbage can lid
Considering whether to write editorials for my college paper
Being really annoyed at my girlfriend
Playing string bass in the orchestra
Not telling my girlfriend that I really didn't believe in God

5 Things On My To-Do List Today:
Clean up my gradebook
Play with my son
Eat out with my wife, son, and our best friend
Play guitar
Begin a book review

5 Snacks I Love:
Chips and salsa
Hot peppers
Pretzels and hot mustard
Pickles
Cheese (preferably a very footy Swiss or aged Ghouda) and crackers

5 Things I’d do if I was a Millionaire:
Give a lot of money to Doctors Without Borders
Give a lot of money to OxFam
Give a lot of money to the World Wildlife Fund
Pay off my wife's and my debt
Buy my family some nice gifts

5 Places I’ve Lived:
I have only lived in different addresses in Pennsylvania

5 Jobs I’ve Had:
University lecturer
Composer and music director for a film
Editor
Library assistant
Bookstore clerk

New Scientist tips on greening our lives

There are a bunch of things that we can do. We have two ways of going about this that we must combine. We have the three postmodern or conservational Rs that have been popping up more and more these days: Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Then we have the techno fixes.

New Scientist has recently the techno fixes. Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: They include wind, solar, and tidal power, waste heat, super-efficient homes, electric cars, new biofuels, carbon capture, biochar, and biogas stoves. Some of these are really new and some are well understood but too fresh in the market for them to have a lot of force.

Time will tell but do your best to support them. But as the NRDC has recently said:

The hard fact is that global warming, deforestation and other earthly ills cannot be solved by switching brands.

It takes resources to manufacture and transport all products, even those made from recycled content. At the very least, energy is spent. And spending resources leaves the world poorer, not better off.

So do what you will if you are itching for something new -- there are no environmental police here -- but don't kid yourself. Buying nothing is better for the earth than buying green.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Metal Post! TYR

This is a small metal post.

I can't stop listening to TYR's "Alive" from their album Eric the Red (pictured at right with a youtube entry below). It's beautiful progressive viking metal. Gorgeous vocals, intricate and artful guitar work, nicely layered production, tricky yet flowing meter shifts, and an almost primordial sense of nationalistic evocation. I can't help but feel a great sense of identification with this music. The climbing and steady vocal line of the first verse and the poetic rhythm of the lyrics that spill from line to line. They have really captured some of the traditional poetic sense of a distant time. They are from a tiny set of Danish islands, the Faroe Islands, a place apparently steeped in Danish fervor. The second track posted below -"Sinklars Visa" from the new album Land -has a fantastic traditional feel to it because of the a cappella Danish that opens it.

For us Americans this music might strike us as a bit odd. The second posted track is in Danish which we are obviously unaccustomed to. But the national identity behind some form of popular music that is also artful is weird to us. This isn't lame country made for the lowest common denominator. It is steep in a very old tradition that comes from a shared past. It is the fusion of ancient ceremony and national blood with the technological and sometimes brutal blitz of metal. Maybe it is identifiable to us as something we could accomplish through Civil War mythology. We might kind of get it - blood music and that sense of ancient ethnic pride - through the fiction of Tolkein as Theoden calls forth the Eorlingas (the riders of Rohan) to assail the armies of Sauron the Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King. Just to make that comparison even greater, look at how much the cover of Eric the Red looks like Tolkein's Argonath. TYR's music has that same epic sweep.



Without further ado...videos.




"Alive"


"Sinklars Visa"


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Past Metal Posts:
Helmet, Cynic, Death, Decapitated, Necrophagist, Testament, Arch Enemy, and Obituary.

Padian on evolution education and politics

Kevin Padian, everyone's favorite paleontologist from UC Berkeley and the Dover Trial has written an article posted at Comptes Rendus Biologies titled "The evolution of creationists in the United States: Where are they now, and where are they going?" The French think that Americans are generally nuts regarding our general disdain for evolution (too many of us are) so this is a nice update for them.

Padian provides a solid overview of the history of the issues. In the penultimate section he provides some strong advice for what scientists can do to help promote good education about evolution:

Scientists can offer their expertise to publishing houses and are in fact frequently asked to review individual chapters of textbooks; however, publishers have no obligation to accept their recommendations. Furthermore, if a scientist's advice seems to counter the publisher's status quo, the publisher will probably discount it. A more effective tactic is to provide reviews and testimony to state and local education officials about the scientific quality of textbooks when they are proposed for adoption. When scientists publicly express concern about the quality of textbooks proposed for their children, it is difficult for officials to ignore.

However, scientists can be even more effective at the college and university level, where they themselves are the consumers and adopters (and even the writers) of their own textbooks. I have recently undertaken a study of the presentation of macroevolution — specifically how major new adaptations arise — in college texts in general biology, vertebrate paleontology, comparative vertebrate morphology, and evolution. Surprisingly, many of these books present virtually nothing on the subject; some present cladograms but do not link them to morphological and functional change; some present comparative anatomy but do not provide an evolutionary connection. It cannot be assumed either that students will draw these connections or that many textbook writers have the knowledge to explain them properly.

Accordingly, the University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education have begun a project to provide instructional approaches and examples of macroevolutionary change to textbook publishers, teachers, and the public. These examples will be housed on a website sponsored by the museum, which has long led the campaign to educate the public about science by means of the Internet. Visitors are invited to visit the site, http://evolution.berkeley.edu, and to monitor it for future developments.

Sound advice I say. Expertise only has power when those with it use it in the political processes that we have at our disposal. And let's face it, the scientific community could be a very powerful force for its own promotion. The scientific method should be a tool that citizens use in their decision-making. Scientists should model and promote science in public discourse, whether in the review process of textbooks or in the political arenas of local school boards, in state boards, in writing letters to officials, in working together to lobby officials in person, by writing letters to the editor, or by becoming effective formal and public teachers.

Only through participation can we preserve those things that are imporant to us. Scholarship is important. But so is dissemination. The cloistered ivory tower or restrictive lab prevents scientists from advocating for our most powerful tool with which we can understand our world. The experience we afford our students must be transferable to the world in which we live. Scientists must show us how science does that.

[Hat tip to Kevin for the article.]

Let them raise chickens

Sustainability and self-reliance have gotten a bit of a boost. We hope.

In a nice piece of local news the State College Borough Council has passed an ordinance that allows local families to raise up to four chickens on their property. Households that raise chickens have to meet sanitary conditions subject to inspection and regulation by the borough. [For history on this check here, here, and here.]

The vote passed 4-3 with those voting for the bill and those who championed it in public comment citing issues of sustainability as reasons for it:

Mary Haight, who raised 12 to 16 chickens on a 100-acre farm for more than 20 years, said the birds are "business-like, sweet-tempered animals" that would be an asset to the State College community.

"I think it's in the same spirit as having a family garden where you grow your own lettuce and tomatoes," she said. "We're not that urban that we can't have chickens under the specifics you've outlined in the ordinance."

Even if we were in a more urban area, we might still be able to raise chickens. People in larger cities - Brooklyn for example or Seattle - are raising chickens because they are fed up with industrial meat production. There is a small but growing desire among lots of people to attain some measure of involvement with their food whether by buying from local farmers, growing their own herbs and vegetables in window boxes or in gardens, or by raising their own poultry. And one of the great things about raising your own chickens is that if you are a gardener or involved in communal gardening, you can use their manure as fertilizer.

But that manure and the noise seems to actually be what could push State College's mayor to veto the ordinance. Other council members and ordinance detractors worry that it is "lax on enforcement" and the effect it will have on property values. Give me a break. People who safely raise chickens show the neighborhood that they are actually creating a more integrated local community, one more able to take care of itself and less reliant on the web of corporate agribusiness that has systematically eroded communities for the last years.

And those who worry about rooster noise: in order to raise a rooster, you need 10 acres. That's pretty serious.

How many of us have actually killed and plucked our own chickens in the last 5 years? 10 years? 25 years? How many of us have any idea of what it means to maintain a relationship with an animal that we feed with the fruits of the land on which we live? How many of us cultivate relationships with animals that aren't pets that we feed industrially produced processed meat products to? My guess: not many. To raise your own chickens is a step in the right direction.

I hope that the mayor withholds his veto. He's only used it twice in his 15-year tenure.

If you want more info. on raising your own chickens in an urban environment, go to Urban Chickens.

[Image courtesy of treehugger.com.]

World AIDS Day: Protect yourself and protect others.

Today Bloggers Unite is united for World AIDS Day. I encourage you to get tested if you haven't in a while and you've been engaged in risky behavior. If you live in my area (central Pennsylvania), you can go to the AIDS Project. They have HIV testing today and December 15, January 12 and 21, and on February 18. If you don't live in my area, check out the Advanced Testing Center to find out how and where to get tested.

I have a friend with AIDS who is fortunately quite healthy (in the healthy sense I discussed in my previous post). I believe that it is your utilitarian duty to ensure your fellow people's health that you get tested and behave responsibly - know your partner, develop healthy relationships, use protection, and understand the consequences of your actions. Do what you should do and encourage others to do the same.

Some thoughts on the medical industry

I wrote the following (and have left it unedited) to a friendly acquaintance the other day who had a disconcerting trip to the hospital. Some of you work in the medical or pharmaceutical industry and so I am curious to know what you might think about it.

Am I too pessimistic? Totally off base? Am I dehumanizing the people I suspect of dehumanizing the rest of us? Is that in the nature of bureaucracy which is integral to our culture?

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I'm afraid that this is a very complicated endeavor. The dignity of any hospital treatment varies greatly in any given hospital, from one hospital to the next, and dependent on whatever "malady," "disease," or "condition" you might "suffer" from. I have incredible respect for people who seek to alleviate the suffering of other people because they act on behalf of greater happiness for all of us. Sadly, much of medicine is not that. We are, as you so rightly point out, herded into a giant medical apparatus that treats a very specific malady as if that were the way to treat all of us. But we have created this world and should expect it. Why do I say this?

The world of partitioned expert knowledge and bureaucracy generate this kind of distinct and separate expertise. Science, in order to refute some bad ideas, must attain very controlled conditions and support only the most limited findings. Human beings are the subject of medical science. But any given medically scientific finding is incredibly limited in scope and often only tenuously supportive of another finding in medical science. I don't have much of a problem with the questions of medical science - they are limited and arguably often value free or generally for a perceived good that alleviates or reduces human suffering. But the questions of medical science focus on this particular system - say the circulatory system - and then zeroes in much more to, say, the biochemical chain known as the blood-clotting cascade in such a way that medical researchers can develop drugs that can do x,y, or z or prevent q,r, or s in that cascade. That is a very specific endeavor that I think can lead to two negative things.

First, notice that these men and women who work on drug X are not necessarily caregivers per se, but researchers in the bureaucratic and economic apparatus of research and development. Both large-scale bureaucracies and economies demand a great deal of rationalization (i.e. partitioning) and anonymity. Care cannot be given anonymously. Anonymity may breed impartial justice but it does not yield the loving touch that care needs. We go to our mothers when we are sick precisely because she knows us so well. The hospital as a bureaucracy constructed on the profit-seeking engine of medical technology industries (who are not categorically evil by any means) almost necessarily breed an apathetic apparatus that states that is a place that dispenses healthcare. Health and care can neither be dispensed or administered or consumed to "sheeple." No sentient animal and certainly no sapient (knowing) and senescent (ageing to death) animal deserves to be treated as though it were a number in a feedlot to be separated as a desireable from the undesireable. This leads us to problem number two.

The researchers driving much of this system, who discover this disease and that disease, and then the drugs to combat them or the machines to understand them or the new tools to excise them only multiply our problems as Hercules created when he cut the heads off of the Lernean Hydra. The level of specificity, the number of maladies newly classified and understood and ready for "cure" and the "cures" themselves, only breed new maladies to be controlled and cured as drug cocktails create combinatorial effects that are, at this time, impossible to predict. I don't mean to say that there aren't lots of very smart people with good intentions who work quite hard to figure out as many things as they can. But I can say with great confidence that these people with their limited capacities as human beings, even working together as a great super-organism of care, cannot predict the panoply of unforeseen consequences that come from this Pandora's Box. They can't. It is impossible.

Finally, because they must deal with aggregate problems, human beings as peices of data run through MiniTab or SPSS (statistical software programs), we become nameless sheeple to be moved through the "system" of so-called "healthcare." Doctors and nurses under the canopy of all of this technocratic wizardry - a veritable medical Matrix - are encouraged to "process" patients and "move them through" so that they are "cured" in the most limited sense available to them. It ensures at least a modicum of impartiality and scientific application. Notice that when you are cured of X, you are not necessarily healthy. The "healthcare" system cannot do that for you or me. It can only process you as a limited agent who suffers from some specific thing that it can or might be able to deal with and if it can't then it tries something or says it does not know.

In the end, I say don't look at the "healthcare" industry to know how to be healthy or how to be cared for. It does neither of those things. The term "healthcare" is an Orwellian renaming by economically powerful technocrats who understand that the practically engineered tools that extend from medical science can earn them great profits and also can extend our lives - something all of us cannot help but want. Health in this sense is the mere extension of an individual person's life. Care is the minimal necessary maintenance by others of an individual in order from them to live longer.

Health should be the integrated sense of physical, cognitive, emotional, and social well-being of any person. Care is that which supports that health to a degree that prospers as much joy as possible in that individual person. The modern hospital cannot do that for a person. It is not made to do that.

Families and communities can do that. Medicine is a tool.

My experiences lead me to confirm some of this. Doctors are experts about whatever they are experts on. Technicians are biotic extensions of the machines that they use to measure whatever they measure. Administrators are faceless wizards behind the curtain who serve many masters, none of whom is any single person. The closest we get to care most of the time comes from nurses who are so concerned with human pain that they must immerse themselves in human suffering that they must fight the effects of the institutions in which they work. But they too are often pushed along by the partitioning of humans and their schedules in such a way that they must stop what they are doing and move on to the next patient. I adored the nurses who helped my wife and I after her C-section, but we don't know them and never will. We are forgotten faces within the iron cage of the bureaucracy. We got some care and a lot of diagnostic maintenance.

We are cattle for an impersonal and evolving technocratic environment.

I hope this wasn't too depressing to read.