Brian Griffith's Blog, page 3

Making evidence on bees disappear

When bee colony collapse disorder spread across the country in the following seasons, the EPA claimed there was no evidence that pesticides were responsible. And this was confirmed in 2006, when the EPA suddenly closed its research library in Washington due to “budget pressure,” and moved all its previous research on the effects of agricultural chemicals into uncatalogued cardboard boxes in a cafeteria basement War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

The greatest counterculture on earth

China’s women have always made their own values, their own goals, and their own versions of religion. I believe this vast tradition is the greatest counterculture in the world.
A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization

The single organism

What then, in terms comprehensible to us, were these Sung [dynasty] philosophers affirming? Surely the conception of the entire universe as a single organism.
Science and Civilization in China

Women are like water

"Everybody says women are like water. I think it's because water is the source of life, and it adapts itself to its environment. Like women, water also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life." -- Xinran, "The Good Women of China."The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices

Our pesticide wars

In December 2013, JAMA Neurology published a study showing a link between DDT exposure and Alzheimer’s. We might ask, do you remember trucks spraying DDT around your neighborhood in the 1960s?
War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

The Dalai Lama on insects

For some reason, when the Dalai Lama was asked about the most important thing to teach children, he said it is “to teach them to love insects."
War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

farming as matchmaking

Though most Chinese villagers do not display obvious reverence for plants or animals, they tend to feel that success on the farm requires that people, plants, and animals get along. In this part of the world, the gradual domestication of crops and animals was mainly a process of forming friendships, as in the rather stunning friendship of rice farmers with water buffaloes. And then there were all the other symbiotic relations that the villagers encouraged, as when they learned that rice, beans, mulberry trees, ducks, and carp fish all help each other to grow. The humans in this landscape were not just takers, using up finite resources. They acted like matchmakers, trying to foster partnerships between creatures.
War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

the most beautiful image on earth

My sentimental favorite example of positive influence is from Macau, where the Portuguese government offered the city a farewell present in 1997. It erected a 20-meter-high statue of Guanyin overlooking the harbor. But the artist, Cristina Leiria, clearly melded the goddesses of China and Portugal into one figure. It was both the Virgin Mary and Guanyin at the same time, symbolizing a fusion of the best and most beautiful from both the East and the West. Here, I suspect, is an early sign of a coming planetary religion, in which no tradition, authority, or sex prevails, but all things beautiful and good share the world’s admiration.
A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization

the evolution of empathy

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.
Charles Darwin

the wild camel nature preserve

As the value of wildlife went up, nations around the world increasingly moved to protect the asset. Where Bactrian camels were threatened because their environment was the testing ground for China’s atomic weapons, the government protected a 67,500 square mile Arjin Shan Lop Nur Wild Camel Nature Reserve. War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals