07.05.09
Posted in Activism, Commentary, Current Events, Environment, Sustainability at 4:04 pm by Christina
If you visited any of the links in Part One: The Problem of Peak Oil – or perhaps even if you didn’t – you likely noticed that being aware of peak oil is scary; doomers and survivalists abound. James Howard Kunstler writes his commentary under the heading “Clusterfuck Nation”. If I wasn’t horrified enough by the dramatic realities of peak oil, it didn’t take long to notice that the petroleum crisis isn’t happening in a vacuum. Woven together with peak oil are crises of climate change, financial collapse, water and land degradation, food declines, overpopulation: together, Richard Heinberg’s “peak everything”.
Acceptance takes time. Surely there must be some way out? Solar and wind will save the world? Unfortunately, alternative energies are oil-dependent. Solar and wind technologies are capable of producing electricity; they are not capable of generating enough power to reproduce themselves. In other words, you can’t use a solar panel or wind turbine to make a new solar panel or wind turbine. We’d need to dedicate all our remaining hydrocarbon resources to the manufacture of alternative energy installations. Furthermore, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is dramatically lower for alternative energies than for petroleum. In 1930 petroleum had an EROEI of 100:1, meaning it took one barrel of oil to mine one hundred new barrels; by 1970 it was 30:1 and in 2000 it had declined to 11:1. (The first petroleum gushed out; what’s around now is harder to bring out and harder to process into usable fuels.) (Energy Bulletin: The Net Hubbert Curve by David Murphy) Energy alternatives, green or not – solar, nuclear, geothermal, etc. – top out at about 10:1 EROEI. That means we would have to create up to 1000% value in alternative energy sources in order to match the 1930s petroleum level that drove the height of the industrial complex; right now non-hydrocarbon energies total only 13% (Figure 2, International Energy Outlook 2009 by the US Dept. of Energy). The arithmetic is a little offputting, isn’t it? And it doesn’t even begin to tackle the enormous challenge of transportation in this age of globalization; the challenges to alternative energy there are, as my middle child says, “gi-normous”.
All I know is, things must be really bad if the energy companies are actually advertising to get people to purchase less of their product – i.e., to consume less energy: Chevron’s Will You Join Us? campaign My reading has made it clear that absent an eleventh hour, miraculous scientific or technological discovery (notice the oxymoron), peak oil is unresolvable.
Thank goodness for the peak oil optimists. These folks acknowledge that peak oil and parallel crises are going to mean “the end of the world as we know it” (lightheartedly called Camp TEOTWAWKI), but refuse to countenance a true apocalypse. They devote themselves to the hard work of modeling low-energy, self-sufficient, cooperative living, promoting real peak oil solutions and strategies, and helping increasingly aware people like me and perhaps you move past peak oil denial and grief into functional adaptive work.
Sharon Astyk is foremost among peak oil optimists. A college friend pointed me to Sharon’s blog, Causabon’s Book (an obscure George Eliot reference from this former English Lit. graduate student), where I was able to glimpse past the dark curtain of peak everything into the world that can exist on the other side. Depletion and Abundance, Sharon’s first book, is about petroleum depletion and the full life that can be had under peak oil conditions. It can’t be full of Lunchables, international travel, or on-demand cosmetic surgery (I’m pretty bummed about one of those); but it isn’t empty. In fact, Astyk’s vision of post-peak life is filled with many of those things most people value: productive work, close communities, health and well-being. The simple answer is that we need to redefine what those things are.
Sharon’s vision resonates with me; I think it’s because we both have children at home. If you peruse peak oil literature, you will find the presence of children a rare thing; and their presence correlates strongly to an optimistic, hard-working vision of post-peak. The doomers don’t have children and they don’t seem to care about the seventh generation or even the first generation out from peak. That’s not for me! Sharon took her family to a farm in the poorest county in upstate New York. (Coincidentally, I’ve an aunt who did the same thing in the same county after she retired from teaching.) Through her farm Sharon is able to directly model one possible post-peak lifestyle. It’s not the only possibility, though, and she tackles others via her online course “Adapting in Place”. One’s post-peak vision might include relocation to a farm, as Sharon’s did; but then again, it might not.
The common thread among all the lifestyles Sharon discusses is the low-energy reality of the post-peak world. The reduction in or loss of cross-country and international shipping, giant tractors and combines, and agricultural chemicals means the answer includes local, organic, hands-on food production. No gasoline for automobiles means the answer includes feet, bikes, and possibly electric-powered public transportation (if we get both transit networks and non-fossil electricity production on the agenda soon enough, like yesterday). The absence of Ecuadoran beef or bananas may seem like a loss, but what about the abundance of good health that takes its place because of well-grown seasonal food and regular exercise?
The blogging community has been a tremendous boon for peak oil aware folks. The internet is one thing they’re all willing to keep electrified, or at least to bike into the library to access! I made a peak oil post to my homeschoolers’ groups and got a 1% response; when a group is that small, it’s hard to network with each other for support. It’s so necessary to have support when most of the world looks at you with a blank expression. Besides moral support, the peak oil community is so generous with practical and informational support as well. Sharon Astyk offers not only the Adapting in Place class, but also a class on food storage and preservation and two different ones on garden design.
The second blog I read regularly is One Green Generation, written by Melinda in Seattle. I don’t remember how I got to Melinda’s blog, and she is peak oil aware – but peak oil is not her point. Her point is sustainable living. Melinda writes posts that help troubleshoot difficult adaptations, hosts challenges that encourage positive changes, and generally provides a forum for people tackling the same difficult adjustments. As an urbanite, her perspective is different from Sharon’s while reinforcing the same shared values and purpose.
The last peak oil blog I read regularly is Peak Oil Blues by Kathy McMahon. This “Peak Shrink” is a clinical and teaching psychologist and chicken farmer who offers, essentially, free therapy to the peak community via her blog “couch”. Whatever I’m feeling about peak oil, chances are someone has written her a letter about it and she’s responded with solid advice about how to embrace the feeling and convert it into productive action. Peak oil is an emotional rollercoaster; a lot of days I can be productive, and then one day I’m on the couch burying my face in mass-market paperbacks and industrial strength junk food. The Peak Shrink helps get me back on track.
It’s amazing to me, the generosity of others. So much time and energy goes into the process of these writings – not just Sharon’s full-fledged books, but every blog post these people write. Although my first glimpse of peak oil was like a bucket of ice water in the face, now that I’ve caught my breath it’s nice to know there are plenty of people offering towels. Although the doomers and survivalists can be compellingly hypnotic with their apocalyptic visions, the calm, practical words of people like Sharon, Melinda and Kathy confirm for me that we can convert the apocalyptic visions into hallucinations if we turn ourselves to the work.
To be continued in Part Three: Finding the Answers.
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07.02.09
Posted in Activism, Commentary, Current Events, Environment, Sustainability at 4:04 pm by Christina
A year ago, I learned about peak oil. Peak oil is the point in time when maximum production (extraction) of petroleum occurs. There is a peak because petroleum is, practically speaking, a finite and non-renewable resource. (Petroleum is technically renewable; it just takes millions of years and precise geologic conditions to create it.) Energy Bulletin has a good peak oil primer. The term “peak oil” has a specific scientific meaning; as a concept, “peak oil” refers more generally to the imminent decline in the availability of fossil fuel energies.
Peak oil is not something universally acknowledged. As with climate change, though, the majority of scientists admit the geologic reality of the decline of fossil fuels and argue only about the shape of the graph.
The challenge of peak oil comes in the form of our consumption of and dependence upon fossil fuels. In the rich world, demand for and consumption of fossil fuels has increased annually to catch up with supplies over the last 150 years. Liquid hydrocarbons (petroleum, aka crude oil) as well as the various natural gases have been so abundant and are so chemically useful that commerce and industry have derived hundreds of thousands of products from them:
- plastics in every room of every home, office and factory
- synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester for clothes, carpeting
- pharmaceuticals and other medical applications
- fertilizers and pesticides for food production
- asphalt and other construction products
- manufacturing components
and so forth.
These end-use products are highly visible to us, but of course hydrocarbons are overwhelming consumed as combustible fuels, either in fuel tanks of cars, tractors and airplanes, or when powering the conversion of other resources into consumable products: cotton into the clothes I’m wearing, or silicon into the computer chips powering my laptop.
Citizens of rich countries have learned to consume fossil fuel as if it were alcohol and they college students on spring break. We live many miles from friends and family and our jobs, and count it as nothing because we can hop in the car or book a flight. Our consumption is not only metaphorical; our agricultural system uses ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy, making our consumption literal as well. I have read estimates that our individual hydrocarbon consumption is equivalent to harnessing the labor energy of one hundred or more human slaves. Fossil fuels are not necessary for human survival; hundreds of thousands of years of human existence proves that. But we are as practically and psychologically dependent on them as any addict is to their drug.
Peak oil would present a challenge at our current consumption and dependence levels. But those levels are not peaking; they are rising. India and China, with one-third of the global population, have the steepest consumption curves as their economies strive for U.S. levels; no country has a falling consumption curve. With peak production upon us, supplies will decrease against rising consumption.
How we handle that gap will determine our future.
To be continued in Part Two: Looking for the Way Out.
Resources on peak oil:
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03.07.08
Posted in Activism, Articles, Commentary, Current Events, Education, Homeschooling at 4:05 pm by Christina
A ruling came out of California’s Second Appellate Court last week, in re Rachel L., that if read quite broadly, denies everyone but credentialed teachers the right to homeschool their children in this state:
“California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children. Thus, while the petition for extraordinary writ asserts that the trial court’s refusal to order attendance in a public or private school was an abuse of discretion, we find the refusal was actually an error of law. It is clear to us that enrollment and attendance in a public full-time day school is required by California law for minor children unless (1) the child is enrolled in a private full-time day school and actually attends that private school, (2) the child is tutored by a person holding a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught, or (3) one of the other few statutory exemptions to compulsory public school attendance (Ed. Code, § 48220 et seq.) applies to the child.” (page 3)
In California, there is no “homeschooling”. There is public schooling, compulsory attendance to which is required of children aged 6 to 18; and there are a few exemptions to compulsory attendance. The pertinent exemptions from this case are listed in Ed. Code Section 48220ff. Children can be exempted from attendance by one of two paths: credentialed tutoring or private schooling. The tutoring exemption is very specific, requiring an appropriate state credential as well as regulated hours of instruction. The private school exemption (48222 in the above link) is far more general:
- “Children who are being instructed in a private full-time day school by persons capable of teaching shall be exempted.”
- Teaching must be in English, with certain exceptions.
- The school must “offer instruction in the several branches of study required to be taught in the public schools.”
- Attendance must be kept, including all absences half a day or greater.
The exemption is valid after the attendance supervisor or similarly designated official confirms that the private school is in compliance with Section 33190, the private school affidavit statute, which requires an annual filing with the state. (In practice, I don’t believe any district verifies the private school exemption proactively for every private school student; that would be incredibly costly in staff and funding each year. The exemption is only verified if an attendance challenge is made.) Interestingly,
“The verification required by this section shall not be construed as an evaluation, recognition, approval, or endorsement of any private school or course.” (48222 again)
This is echoed in 33190:
“Filing pursuant to this section shall not be interpreted to mean [legal jargon about what "mean" means] … that the State of California, the Superintendent of Public Instruction [etc.] … has made any evaluation, recognition, approval, or endorsement of the school or course … “
These clauses emphasize the determination of the state to avoid interference in the educational operations of private schools. Private schools are therefore free to pursue with broad discretion the type of education they choose, both in content and in methodology. A school is free to teach young earth creationism or to implement the free democratic school philosophy (e.g. Sudbury Valley or Summerhill strategy), or other content or methodology as they wish.
In practice, the combination of the private school exemption and the very limited private school regulations (essentially an hour or two of paperwork each year for a tiny, two-student school such as I operate) have formed the foundation for independent homeschooling in this state. There is nothing in California law, statutory or judicial, that restricts the establishment of a private school as done by homeschoolers here. No law
- says a private school can’t be located in a private residence.
- says a private school must charge tuition.
- says a private school must have a minimum number of students.
- says a private school teacher can’t instruct their own child(ren). (In fact, the criminal background check provision for school personnel states explicitly that it is waived for a parent working exclusively with their own child(ren).)
- says a private school can’t have one adult who is principal, faculty and staff simultaneously.
Although the recent ruling has every homeschool e-list in the state, and many more around the country, wildly abuzz with strategic discussion and well-informed indignation, in a strict reading the Second Appellate Court has changed only one aspect of California’s education law. In a Bill Clinton-esque (someone else’s beautifully appropriate adjective) application of semantics, the private school exemption statute was interpreted to mean that a student must be in physical attendance at the private school:
“Section 48222 provides an exemption from compulsory public school education for ‘[c]hildren who are being instructed in a private full-time day school.’ (Italics added.)” (ruling p.15; italicized emphasis of “in” is part of the ruling, just to be clear!)
The children in the case, while enrolled in a private school, participated in that school’s independent study program (ISP). The school in question does in fact have a campus program as well, but there are many ISP-only private schools throughout the state serving homeschoolers exclusively. What the Second Appellate Court discovered is that there is no law (pro or con) governing the authority of a private school to offer independent study. There is only Ed. Code 51745, which gives authority to public school districts and county boards of education to establish ISPs (presumably but not explicitly within the public system).
It is important to note that this case does not arise solely from a compulsory attendance challenge, but from the family’s frequent intersection with various child protective services. This particular case was instigated by one of the children on behalf of herself and I believe two of her siblings, for various reasons of neglect and/or abuse. Their court-appointed attorneys wanted them in a traditional school facility, where they would be under the regular observation of more adults; this would presumably give them more protection against said neglect and/or abuse. The trial court ruled that the parents have a constitutional right to homeschool, and the appellate court overturned that ruling of law, with the full documentation of statute and precedent.
I have concluded, from reading through the various documents and statutes, that my own homeschooling choice (to run a private school) is not affected by this ruling. I am in compliance with all the private school regulations, and my children attend, on-site, a private school within the exemption guidelines ruled in this case. I do not expect district officials to come to my door demanding truancy proceedings on my kids.
Notwithstanding the legitimacy of my own homeschooling method, I believe this ruling makes an unfairly strict interpretation of the private school exemption by denying the right of a private school to offer independent study. Since independent study is explicitly organized for the public schools in 51745, the state obviously believes it is acceptable for a student to do the bulk of their learning away from the direct supervision of their official school teacher. Given the minimalist statutory regulation of private schools in California, quite the opposite of this ruling makes better sense: that there is an implied right for a legally compliant private school similarly to offer independent study. Independent study by definition reduces a student’s exposure to their teacher; whether that teacher is public and credentialed, or private and “capable of teaching”, makes no difference. The court could easily have ignored or rejected the parents’ “constitutional right to homeschool” argument and made the case under welfare law that it was “in the best interests” of the children that they be enrolled in a traditional school.
State Superintendent Jack O’Connell went on record in response to media inquiries about this ruling that he supports “parental choice when it comes to homeschooling”, which is a bit vague but still a reasonable comment, unlike the teachers’ union officials who have cited the ruling in support of their belief that all students should be taught by a credentialed teacher, obviously in complete ignorance of CA private school regulations. Governor Schwarzenegger went on record more vehemently, calling the ruling “outrageous” and for it to be overturned by the courts or by new legislation. This support from state officials is greatly appreciated, though there is rampant speculation that they are less motivated by concern for parental rights, and more concerned with the reality that 166,000 homeschooled kids at more than $7500 per child means the state would need to find $1.245 billion merely in ADA funding (average daily attendance), to say nothing of facility space for all those kids, at a time of universal cuts to balance a state budget with a shortfall of $7 billion or more.
The assorted homeschooling advocacy groups concerned with California issues (I belong to both HSC and CHN and there are others) are strongly against legislative action and are recommending that individual homeschoolers sit tight while the legal eagles work for a milder, but still thorough, resolution to the issue. (In general, legislation is not desired because it always comes with extensive hoops that detract seriously from the efficacy of homeschooling; the most intrusive and most common is standardized testing, which as we see in the public schools causes “teaching to the test” and erodes true education and learning.) These advocates have agreed to seek from the CA Supreme Court the “depublication” of the ruling; this step would have the ruling limited to the troubled family at issue in the case, thereby denying its broader application vis a vis the statutory interpretations.
I strongly support this action as promoting both an affirmation of the rights of California homeschoolers and a positive resolution for the children at risk in the case. I have made a financial donation to the legal effort, and have offered my time and energy as a volunteer to the various legal and media teams. (I did a pre-interview with a TV reporter this morning but the manager didn’t approve his story; this afternoon, I spoke on record with a reporter for the Fresno Bee.)
If you are interested in making a financial donation to support the effort, here are the direct links for that: HSC CHN
Links to articles and statements about the case:
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06.01.07
Posted in Commentary, Education, Homeschooling, Kids at 3:54 pm by Christina
I homeschool in a pretty unregulated state: California. Here, we have a few different legal paths of exemption from compulsory attendance at a traditional public school:
- alternative public school (e.g., a district independent study program, a public “charter” school)
- credentialed tutoring
- private school (either someone else’s, or create your own!)
Independent homeschoolers in California who have no need for external supervision or institutional support follow the guidelines for establishing and operating their own private school. (Well, some do practice civil disobedience against the compulsory attendance law and homeschool “underground”.) This is how I homeschool; I run a private school called The Learning Continuum, which currently has one administrator (me), two teachers (me and my partner), and two students (the baby isn’t of compulsory age yet!). Each fall I file a private school affidavit with the state Department of Education averring my compliance with private school regulations. These are quite minimal:
- attendance records (basically a calendar that says “A=Absent”; my kids are never absent on a “school day”)
- faculty and staff records (a simple resume; a CA private school teacher must be “capable of teaching”)
- health and immunization records (for which a waiver option is legal)
- course of study (required: offering courses in the general subjects of public schooling, i.e., science, mathematics, etc.)
Private schools are otherwise unregulated unless they pass various size thresholds for institutional health and safety requirements (like fire escapes and so forth). There is no governance of curricula, hours/days/scheduling, grades, testing, diplomas, and so forth. I am very happy to be homeschooling in California because of this. California homeschoolers have a terrific amount of freedom to approach their children’s education from the philosophical and methodological bases that are appropriate for their particular family. (And yes, this freedom comes at what some perceive as a cost: the ability of parents we disagree with to apply their own values in education, whether that be teaching creationism (or paganism), or never purchasing a textbook (or only purchasing textbooks). Diversity is the true cost – or is it benefit? – of all freedom, not just freedom in homeschooling…)
Given the CA regulations I described above, independent homeschoolers here are not mandated to follow a particular scope and sequence. For those not familiar with the term, it refers to the academic breadth and progression of a particular topic. Sometimes this is categorized by topic (for example, Decimals from McREL; here is their scope and sequence home page). However, it is most commonly organized by grade level, such as at World Book; the California Department of Education has a bit of a hybrid, starting with the general subject areas and working by grade within those. Although adherence to a particular S&S is not required in CA, many homeschoolers do so, making a personal choice to either use curricula that offer that kind of structure, or creating their own curriculum following a published S&S like the ones above.
Other homeschoolers are more freewheeling. I count myself in that category (in “official” homeschooling lingo, my style is termed “eclectic”); we start off as complete unschoolers, establish structure in some areas around the 9th or 10th birthday, and liberally follow the kids’ learning interests as general pedagogy. Every once in a while I have an urge – part intellectual interest, part anxiety – to look over scope and sequence documents and see “how I am doing” as a homeschooling parent. For example, my older daughter (11) is attending a music sleep-away camp later this month; she will be immersed in a group of traditionally-schooled kids for the entire week (the first time this is occurring without evening respite). Embracing the motto “be prepared”, we will help her strategize handling any situations that arise from our alternative choices; in order to do this for academics, I have to research what exactly it is that they’ll know. I also spent several hours yesterday with a homeschooling friend whose kids are in a public school program (and who therefore track the CDE requirements more closely than we do); occasionally the competitive instinct stimulates me to seek where my kids are in relation to the vast majority of kids out there.
I always discover the same thing: my kids’ knowledge is scattered on the S&S like seeds tossed in the wind. Some of the things they know aren’t even listed, because I and they value categories of knowledge that have lost favor – or perhaps never had it – in public education (e.g., music and other fine arts; visual arts and crafts; anything that was ever learned in a “home economics” class; inter- and intrapersonal skills; etc.). For the things that are listed, I must travel all over a grade-level S&S in order to find what they have learned. I always discover that they know far more than I would have been able to articulate; and when I find things they have not yet learned, it’s always because it does not yet have relevance in their lives (and not because I forgot to pass on the knowledge).
Scope and sequence documents are useful and important in public education; they are part of the system of accountability that is necessary in all government endeavors. For homeschoolers, their utility is far less evident. So much of knowledge is non-linear, thereby obviating the sequence segment; and breadth of knowledge is such an individualized experience that what is touted as a “one size fits all” scope becomes in reality a “one size fits none”. Most homeschoolers seek a far less generalized education for their children, wanting to offer them knowledge that they will retain, not forget. If you bookmark S&S sites, as indeed I have, remember that as a homeschooler you must use them with care!
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04.26.07
Posted in Commentary, Food, Homeschooling, Kids, Parenting at 8:29 am by Christina
I was listening to NPR on the road yesterday, and there was a segment on educational software in schools. Apparently a study recently released showed no impact on test scores in schools that implement such software.
The topic itself didn’t interest me overmuch, but I was stunned by the repeated emphasis place on one concept: performance. How kids are performing on the tests, shouldn’t the software help kids perform better, and so forth.
Hey educrats – are these kids, or are they circus seals? Do you merely want them to be able to hold balls on their noses until you toss them a kipper?
How stupid of me. Of course you do. They’re easier to manage that way. So help them perform well in the short term, on these tests in school, and in the long term, as a malleable populace.
All I know is, this is why I homeschool. I want my children to learn. I want them to understand and seek joy. I want them to have the fortitude to recognize and follow their own unique path. And when they’re performing, I want them to understand that they have an audience of one – themselves.
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04.24.07
Posted in Commentary, Current Events at 11:29 am by Christina
but maybe we should give it a try!
Listening to NPR this week, there of course have been lots of shows covering the murders at Virginia Tech (usually calling them “killings” or “shootings”, but that’s another post entirely!). Many of the shows have a call-in aspect, and so I’ve had the untrammeled pleasure of hearing numerous people spout the infamous and unfortunately successful tagline of the NRA: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”
I don’t think I will ever understand the rationalizations and logical fallacies that lead gun owners to believe that their rights to hunt and keep handguns around the house will be targeted if we pass legislation limiting access to military- and police-force weapons to the military and the police! It’s not like the NRA is even being literal to the entire Second Amendment; they deliberately ignore the opening modifier: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” etc. Sorry folks, it’s been a long time since the U.S.A. depended on a militia of average citizens for its security; now we use a standing, i.e. permanent, army/navy/ etc. Or didn’t you know that?
But, if we’re going to be so darn literal, why don’t we focus on what exactly “arms” meant in 1791? A revolver mechanism had been invented by then, but it hadn’t taken off; it wasn’t until the 1800s that multi-shot weapons starting spreading around. And semiautomatic (requiring only trigger action for shooting) and automatic (requiring only one trigger action for multiple shots) weaponry took even longer to come around. “Arms” clearly didn’t mean weapons of mass destruction like the ones used in the Virginia Tech murders. Or is there some reason we can’t keep automatic weapons out of the public marketplace, but we can regulate grenades, land mines, ICBMs, nuclear weapons, biochemical weapons, and so forth? “Arms” either means “armaments”, or it means something more restricted; I’d bet the NRA doesn’t think it means any and all weapons, so what’s the support for their position? The modern militia – the standing army – uses all sorts of weapons that the public can’t access legally.
The gun spokespeople on the shows argued that we need less restriction, not more, because if we had less restriction, other students in the classrooms would have had weapons of their own and could have stopped the killer sooner. Folks, if the killer was able to get guns through legal channels, I’m betting most of the students could have done the same. The fact of the matter is that they chose not to.
Unfortunately, they don’t teach logic and rhetoric in schools these days – it would undermine the unspoken goal of creating a malleable populace – and as a result many swallow the slippery slope argument hook, line and trigger.
My thoughts have been heading to Blacksburg all week, but more than that, heading out to the country in general. There will be another tragedy – more than one – and they could happen anywhere.
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04.17.07
Posted in Articles, Commentary at 12:08 pm by Christina
Thomas Friedman has a new (very long, very good) article up at New York Times Magazine: “The Power of Green”. Friedman’s very well-built horn is petropolitics and oil dependence, and I hope he keeps getting louder and louder with it. The time for clean, renewable energy is NOW, although it really was yesterday and we all missed the boat.
Consumerism is preventing us from thinking out to the seventh generation; the motivations of those before us to build toward a better future for their descendants are lacking in our modern culture. “Buy now, pay later” is a maxim that doesn’t refer only to credit cards; it is the byword of American action, from junk food to energy to drug wars to oil wars. We are likely residing in the first historical era that will pass on a reduced future to our children; the impacts of our communal choices, even if we were to make significant changes now, will devolve on my kids and your kids and they will have to be up to the struggle of it.
Our government needs to take action now to set standards that market capitalism is not willing to outline. Why that is, I don’t know; as Friedman says, the most energy-efficient car manufacturer is also the most profitable one (Toyota). Why haven’t U.S. manufacturers followed suit? Perhaps it’s because Congress has not taken their regulatory steps; according to Friedman, Japan has extraordinarily high gas taxes and efficiency standards, and Toyota has had to figure out how to operate a successful business within those regulations. I don’t believe that unregulated “free market” capitalism is the perfect system; it’s a pretty good economic model, but a rather poor social model. Government does have a role to play, and unfortunately ours is abdicating rather than standing at the plate.
I found it very interesting that as governor of Texas, George W. Bush pushed for a “market intervention” mandating that 2000 megawatts of new, renewable energy had to be online in Texas by 2009. The market responded to that with a burst of progress in wind energy and met the goal in 2005! Unfortunately, as president Bush has become a one-note trombonist – terrorism and nothing else – unfortunately without the analytical depth to realize that one can combat terrorism along many vectors.
When we moved into this new home, I contacted our energy supplier to purchase our energy from renewable sources. Unfortunately, PG&E doesn’t have a residential program in renewable energy. I left it at that. Starting today, I’m going to push harder to find a way to bring renewable energy to our home. What are you going to do?
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04.05.07
Posted in Articles, Commentary at 10:02 am by Christina
Yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination of this great man, truly one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. Common Dreams has a commentary piece up that you should read: “The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV”. King stood for far more than civil rights for blacks, which is the limited view most people understand and accept.
I heard an interview on NPR the other day with the head designer/architect for the MLK Memorial that is just about into construction in Washington, D.C. One of the topics they discussed was the selection process for text on the memorial. (It was part of a segment on a book called Etched in Stone.) I wonder if a similar santization has taken place for the memorial…
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03.27.07
Posted in Articles, Commentary, Homeschooling at 11:25 pm by Christina
The New York Times has a new article out: “Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day”.
The article itself is about the variations, financing and other aspects of this trend in public education, but it unfortunately doesn’t manage to uncover the greater truth: the things that are broken in the schools cannot be fixed by tying kids to desks for more hours. The system is too invested in its own perpetuation to look deeply at what is going wrong! “We’re doing a good job, we just need more time to be successful!” Sheesh. I haven’t the energy to say more – it’s been a long night of chorus and I’ve an early morning tomorrow (followed by another long night of chorus).
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03.07.07
Posted in Articles, Commentary at 6:45 pm by Christina
The New York Times Magazine has an 11-web-page article up called Darwin’s God, about the scientific exploration of the development of religious belief in humans. Although touching on the agressive anti-religion positions of scientists like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, the article focuses on Scott Atran, an anthropologist, and on the debate within evolutionary biology over whether religious belief is an adaptation or merely a byproduct of an adaptation.
An adaptation is a biological characteristic that becomes propagated through a species because it has successful application to the advancement and/or survival of the species. Examples of adaptations are webbed feet, opposable thumbs, prehensile tails. A byproduct also spreads throughout the species, but it has no real value toward advancement or survival; it is simply correlated to a biological characteristic that does have value. The example given in the article is the redness of blood; the adaptation is the use of iron (hemoglobin) for increased oxygen transport, with the color going alongside but having no benefit.
(Before I continue, I will clarify that religious sensibility does not refer to specific religions. Religious sensibility has to do with more broad cognitive states: the perception of things that are invisible, intangible, supernatural.)
Adaptation theorists explore whether human advancement and/or survival over time has benefited from religious belief:
So trying to explain the adaptiveness of religion means looking for how it might have helped early humans survive and reproduce. As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.”
Such sentiments, some adaptationists say, made the faithful better at finding and storing food, for instance, and helped them attract better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and sober living. The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.
On the other side, byproduct theorists have observed that the cognitive states within which religious sensibility is found evolved because they increased the success of the human species:
Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.
These cognitive tools, evolved over time because they offered survival benefits to the human species, leave us “primed” for religious belief. Agent detection, for example, is the cognitive tool that makes us assume that there is something or someone making things happen, and the evolutionary advantage is that we can protect ourselves against the agent if we assume it is there. The article gives the example of rustling leaves: if one assumes there is a predator causing the rustling, one can prepare for an attack. Sure, you might be wrong, but if you’re not, you’ll be alive because you pulled your club to the ready. Agent detection is behind all the discarded gods, the ones my kids are reading about in Greek and Roman mythology now as part of their constellation study in astronomy: Zeus casting thunder and lightning in anger; the tearful sorrow of Isis causing the flooding of the Nile; Helios riding a sun-chariot across the sky each day.
This article gave voice to my own ideas about religious belief; it’s something I think about, and although I’ve done reading on atheism, ethics and so forth, I’ve never delved into the biology of religion. (Which is interesting, because I’m definitely what might be called a biological reductionist, meaning I believe that everything is rooted in biology, that our thoughts and emotions are ultimately physical in nature, the complex results of electrochemical reactions.) I have to say the adaptationist argument was not compelling to me; I don’t agree that an accidentally arising belief in the supernatural could have offered benefits to early humans. The arguments presented – that the group unity of shared belief offers benefits when the unity is applied via shared labor, conquest, etc. – seem very weakly applied to early humanity when both population density and group size were small. I find the byproduct theory far more persuasive; the various congitive processes described are both of significant benefit to species survival and advancement, and offering obvious haven to intangible and supernatural concepts. It also offers explanation for why myself and many other atheists, although intellectually grounded in the reality of non-belief, have the occasional reflexive hiccups into religious sentiment (such spasms decreasing in frequency as the distance from the atheist conversion increases).
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