Living Among Refuse (redux)

When I first wrote about this topic back in July 2007, I had only just learned of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and similar garbage gyres in others oceans). Though I’d like to report simply that nothing has changed, the truth is that conditions have worsened. Some commentators have rationalized contextualized the issue by observing that the Earth, the environment, the ecosphere, the biosphere, Gaia, or whatever one wishes to call the natural world has always been under assault by humans, that we’ve never truly lived in balance with nature. While that perspective may be true in a literal sense, I can’t help gnashing my teeth over the sheer scale of the assault in the modern industrial age (extending back 250+ years but really getting going once the steam engine was utilized widely). At that point, production and population curves angled steeply upwards, where they continue point as though there be no biophysical limits to growth or the amount and degree of destruction that can be absorbed by the biosphere. Thus, at some undetermined point, industrial scale became planetary scale and humans became terraformers.

News reports came in earlier this month that the remote and uninhabited (by humans) Henderson Island in the Pacific is now an inadvertent garbage dump, with estimates of over 17 tons of debris littering its once-pristine shores.

This despoliation is a collateral effect of human activity, not the predictable result of direct action, such as with the Alberta Tar Sands, another ecological disaster (among many, many others). In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) describes its mission as protecting human health and the environment and has established a Superfund to clean up contaminated sites. Think of this as a corporate subsidy, since the principal contaminators typically inflict damage in the course of doing business and extracting profit then either move on or cease to exist. Standard Oil is one such notorious entity. Now that the EPA is in the process of being defunded (and presumably on its way to being deauthorized) by the current administration of maniacs, the ongoing death-by-a-thousand-cuts suffered by the natural world will likely need to be revised to death-by-millions-of-cuts, a heedless acceleration of the death sentence humans have set in motion. In the meantime, industry is being given a freer hand to pollute and destroy. What could possibly go wrong?

If all this weren’t enough, another development darkened my brow recently: the horrific amount of space debris from decades of missions to put men, communications and surveillance satellites, and (one would presume) weapons in orbit. (Maybe the evil brainchild of inveterate cold warriors known unironically as “Star Wars” never actually came into being, but I wouldn’t place any bets on that.) This video from the Discovery Network gives one pause, no?

Admittedly, the dots are not actual size and so would not be as dense or even visible from the point of view of the visualization, but the number of items (20,000+ pieces) is pretty astonishing. (See this link as well.) This report describes some exotic technologies being bandied about to address the problem of space junk. Of course, that’s just so that more satellites and spacecraft can be launched into orbit as private industry takes on the mantle once enjoyed exclusively by NASA and the Soviet space program. I suppose the explorer’s mindset never diminishes even as the most remote places on and now around Earth are no longer untouched but human refuse.

Report for Your Destruction

An old Star Trek episode called “A Taste for Armageddon” depicts Capt. Kirk and crew confronting a planetary culture that has adopted purely administrative warfare with a nearby planet, where computer simulations determine outcomes of battles and citizens/inhabitants are notified to report for their destruction in disintegration chambers to comply with those outcomes. Narrative resolution is tidied up within the roughly 1-hour span of the episode, of course, but it was and is nonetheless a thought-provoking scenario. The episode, now 50 years old, prophesies a hyper-rational approach to conflict. (I was 4 years old at the time it aired on broadcast television, and I don’t recall having seen it since. Goes to show how influential high-concept storytelling can be even on someone quite young.) The episode came to mind as I happened across video showing how robot soldiers are being developed to supplement and eventually replace human combatants. See, for example, this:

The robot in the video above is not overtly militarized, but there is no doubt that it will could be. Why the robot takes bipedal, humanoid form with an awkwardly high center of gravity is unclear to me beyond our obvious self-infatuation. Additional videos with two-wheeled, quadriped, and even insect-like multilegged designs having much improved movement and flexibility can be found with a simple search. Any of them can be transformed into ground-based killing machines, as suggested more manifestly in the video below highlighting various walking, rolling, flying, floating, and swimming machines developed to do our dirty work:

Foodstuff Half-Lives

From the not-really-surprising-news category comes a New Scientist report earlier this month that the entire world was irradiated by follow-on effects of the Fukushima disaster. Perhaps it’s exactly as the article states: the equivalent of one X-ray. I can’t know with certainty, nor can bupkis be done about it by the typical Earth inhabitant (or the atypical inhabitant, I might add). Also earlier this month, a tunnel collapse at the Dept. of Energy’s Hanford nuclear waste storage site in Washington State gave everyone a start regarding possible or potential nearby release of radiation. Similar to Fukushima, I judge there is little by way of trust regarding accurate news or disclosure and fuck all anyone can do about any of it.

I’m far too convinced of collapse by now to worry too much about these Tinkerbells, knowing full well that what’s to come will be worse by many magnitudes of order when the firecrackers start popping due to inaction and inevitability. Could be years or decades away still; but as with other aspects of collapse, who knows precisely when? Risky energy plant operations and nuclear waste disposal issues promise to be with us for a very long time indeed. Makes it astonishing to think that we plunged full-steam ahead without realistic (i.e., politically acceptable) plans to contain the problems before creating them. Further, nuclear power is still not economically viable without substantial government subsidy. The likelihood of abandonment of this technological boondoggle seems pretty remote, though perhaps not as remote as the enormous expense of decommissioning all the sites currently operating.

These newsbits and events also reminded me of the despair I felt in 1986 on the heels of the Chernobyl disaster. Maybe in hindsight it’s not such a horrible thing to cede entire districts to nature for a period of several hundred years as what some have called exclusion or sacrifice zones. Absent human presence, such regions demonstrate remarkable resilience and profundity in a relatively short time. Still, it boggles the mind, doesn’t it, to think of two exclusion zones now, Chernobyl and Fukushima, where no one should go until, at the very least, the radioactive half-life has expired? Interestingly, that light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, seems to be telescoping even farther away from the date of the disaster, a somewhat predictable shifting of the goalposts. I’d conjecture that’s because contamination has not yet ceased and is actually ongoing, but again, what do I know?

On a lighter note, all this also put me in mind of the hardiness of various foodstuffs. God knows we consume loads of crap that can hardly be called food anymore, from shelf-stable fruit juices and bakery items (e.g., Twinkies) that never go bad to not-cheese used by Taco Bell and nearly every burger joint in existence to McDonald’s burgers and fries that refuse to spoil even when left out for months to test that very thing. It give me considerable pause to consider that foodstuff half-lives have been radically and unnaturally extended by creating abominable Frankenfoods that beggar the imagination. For example, strawberries and tomatoes used to be known to spoil rather quickly and thus couldn’t withstand long supply lines from farm to table; nor were they available year round. Rather sensibly, people grew their own when they could. Today’s fruits and veggies still spoil, but interventions undertaken to extend their stability have frequently come at the expense of taste and nutrition. Organic and heirloom markets have sprung up to fill those niches, which suggest the true cost of growing and distributing everyday foods that will not survive a nuclear holocaust.

Keys to the Kingdom

I picked up a copy of Daniel Siegel’s book Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human (2017) to read and supplement my ongoing preoccupation with human consciousness. Siegel’s writing is the source of considerable frustration. Now about 90 pp. into the book (I am considering putting it aside), he has committed several grammatical errors (where are book editors these days?), doesn’t really know how to use a comma properly, and doesn’t write in recognizable paragraph form. He has a bad habit of posing questions to suggest the answers he wants to give and drops constant hints of something soon to be explored like news broadcasts that tease the next segment. He also deploys a tired, worn metaphor that readers are on a journey of discovery with him, embarked on a path, exploring a subject, etc. Yecch. (A couple Amazon reviews also note that grayish type on parchment (cream) paper poses a legibility problem due to poor contrast even in good light — undoubtedly not really Siegel’s fault.)

Siegel’s writing is also irritatingly circular, casting and recasting the same sentences in repetitious series of assertions that have me wondering frequently, “Haven’t I already read this?” Here are a couple examples:

When energy flows inside your body, can you sense its movement, how it changes moment by moment?

then only three sentences later

Energy, and energy-as-information, can be felt in your mental experience as it emerges moment by moment. [p. 52]

Another example:

Seeing these many facets of mind as emergent properties of energy and information flow helps link the inner and inter aspect of mind seamlessly.

then later in the same paragraph

In other words, mind seen this way could be in what seems like two places at once as inner and inter are part of one interconnected, undivided system. [p. 53]

This is definitely a bug, not a feature. I suspect the book could easily be condensed from 330 pp. to less than 200 pp. if the writing weren’t so self-indulgent of the author. Indeed, while I recognize a healthy dose of repetition is an integral part of narrative form (especially in music), Siegel’s relentless repetition feels like propaganda 101, where guileless insistence (of lies or merely the preferred story one seeks to plant in the public sphere) wears down the reader rather than convinces him or her. This is also marketing 101 (e.g., Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Budweiser, etc. continuing to advertise what are by now exceedingly well-established brands).

What’s Missing

Pessimists, misanthropes, fatalists, and doomers (I’m all types) often find themselves defending the position that maybe we don’t live at the very best, super-duper, tippy-top time in history, that although technology in particular has admittedly delivered some amazing innovations and improved our material conditions considerably even over our fairly recent past, we nonetheless lack spirituality and meaning — unless of course one’s spirituality and meaning are mistakenly found in technology. The technological sublime is so deceptively glamorous and ubiquitous that it obscures the idea that maybe another time and place made for a more ethical, moral, and noble life. (Experience varied widely, obviously.) In addition, personal freedoms enjoyed in liberal democracies are difficult to argue against, though that’s more characteristic of those at the very top of the socioeconomic heap than those of us below who know to keep things buttoned up lest we discomfit our betters. Perhaps the most broadly enjoyed modern development is increased lifespan borne out of improved healthcare. And quite recently, the grossly expanded communications age (the information age is nested inside) reputedly makes learning and keeping in touch far easier than ever before. I won’t dispel any of these. However, I have two complaints against modernity as evidenced by a body of posts extending back through the life of this blog: life lacks many salutary aspects delivered passively by bygone social structures and technology smuggles in a host of problems with its bounty.

Among the failed attributes are (1) lack of a cohesive narrative for what life ought to mean beyond grubbing for money, chasing fame and social cachet, and overpopulating the planet with progeny (many of whom suffer neglect while parents are away grubbing for money), (2) lack of true community and social conditions necessary to be properly situated within a wholesome context, (3) spiritual and emotional vacuity, (4) destructive social presences and bullying, especially online (as exemplified by the Bully-in-Chief) and by civil authorities, (5) unrelenting, disorienting technological and social change, including slang and memes that are impossible to track fully without being in the thrall of celebrities, pundits, and media in general, (6) little prospect of things improving near term, and (7) the still-dawning realization that, like the existential angst from the so-called Atomic Age and its threat of complete nuclear annihilation, we possess tools sufficient to destroy ourselves many times over (including rotting ourselves out from the inside in a fevered race to the cultural bottom) and have unwittingly fired the slo-mo suicide gun. We’re only just waiting for the bullet to strike its target. Since the gun is aimed at industrial civilization, the target is all of us. Dead men walking, or perhaps more accurately, the zombie shuffle.

A significant minority has replied to this set of miserable circumstances by voting into office our our current president, 45. According to one astute commentator, 45 was never understood as a solution but rather a murder weapon used by the disenfranchised to kill the host, namely, our sick society run by plutocrats maniacally hellbent on destroying everyone outside their immediate concern, which is just about everybody.

Outrage Engines

I pull in my share of information about current events and geopolitics despite a practiced inattention to mainstream media and its noisome nonsense. (See here for another who turned off the MSM.) I read or heard somewhere (can’t remember where) that most news outlets and indeed most other media, to drive traffic, now function as outrage engines, generating no small amount of righteousness, indignation, anger, and frustration at all the things so egregiously wrong in our neighborhoods, communities, regions, and across the world. These are all negative emotions, though legitimate responses to various scourges plaguing us currently, many of which are self-inflicted. It’s enough aggregate awfulness to draw people into the street again in principled protest, dissent, and resistance; it’s not yet enough to effect change. Alan Jacobs comments about outrage engines, noting that sharing via retweets is not the same as caring. In the Age of Irony, a decontextualized “yo, check this out!” is nearly as likely to be interpreted as support rather than condemnation (or mere gawking for entertainment value). Moreover, pointing, linking, and retweeting are each costless versions of virtue signaling. True virtue makes no object of publicity.

So where do I get my outrage quotient satisfied? Here is a modest linkfest, in no particular order, of sites not already on my blogroll. I don’t habituate these sites daily, but I drop in, often skimming, enough to keep abreast of themes and events of importance.