Paul Vitols's Blog, page 25

Uncle Sam wants you

This morning when I checked my Twitter tab I found this tweet by Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review magazine:

What excites the indignation of people who hate drones: the remoteness of the operator, and the asymmetry in power.

He was referring to the pilotless drone aircraft used by the U.S. administration to assassinate various perceived or presumed enemies in places like Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia. The program began in the Bush administration and has escalated dramatically in the Obama administration; the total number of assassination missions will likely be in the thousands by now.

I felt moved to respond to Mr. Pontin’s tweet:

@jason_pontin Plus some people are irked by murder and by the slaughter of bystanders.

He tweeted back:

@PaulVitols But drones kill so fewer bystanders than bombers or cruise missiles, or anything else we have.

I responded:

@jason_pontin The real problem is the lack of a war or of any judicial process. We can make killing convenient, but we can’t make it right.

And to this he replied:

@PaulVitols Ah. Well, if you want to object to the President’s war powers, that’s a 60-year expansion, and I can’t help you.

If these drone strikes are regarded as acts of war, it raises the question of what war is—and War is one of the Great Ideas, which means that its nature and definition are controversial. Arnold J. Toynbee, in his A Study of History, argues that the nature of war has changed in modern times. As recently as the 18th century, war was still “the sport of kings,” conducted at the pleasure and expense of princes through the agency of professional troops who had relatively little to do with civilians. Battles were set-pieces conducted in open country. But by the end of the 18th century that was already starting to change. Under the emerging idea of nationalism war burst the bounds previously set for it and drew in everyone.

Toynbee puts his finger on the emergence of this new “totalitarian” mind-set in the fledgling United States of America, as evidenced by the treatment of the United Empire Loyalists who had sided with Britain in the struggle for independence:

Unlike the French colonists in Canada after the previous war, these partisans of the British Crown in the Thirteen Colonies had to leave their homes, bag and baggage, after the American Revolutionary War. Under the Stars and Stripes the Loyalists found life impossible, and the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Ontario are peopled with their descendants down to this day.

I remember, growing up during the Vietnam War, when things like the massacre at My Lai came to light, hearing that “civilians” would inevitably be killed because they were indistinguishable from the enemy and were in fact mixed in with them. If you wanted to kill the enemy, you had to kill everyone. It was total war. Luckily, in the memorable words of that military training song that I heard recently while watching An Officer and a Gentleman, “napalm sticks to kids.”

The 21st century has brought a further change in the idea of war. It is no longer something conducted against states but is waged by states against private individuals. The United States is not formally at war with Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia; it takes great pains to avoid any such formal declaration, since this would entail legal consequences, nationally and internationally. “War” is now something informal and covert. Drone assassinations are made against people named in secret “kill lists” that are authorized personally by the president each week. It’s part of his routine.

Leaving aside the question of justice, which is actually central, I pose this question instead: How can such a “war” end? There is no definite enemy, no central authority who can, in principle, surrender and agree to terms. There is only an endless succession of rationalized murders, a game of whack-a-mole with an endless supply of moles—and their families.

Another literary source comes to mind: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I remember that Winston Smith goes to the movies and sees newsreels of people—women, children—being killed in the ceaseless wars between Oceania and its competing totalitarian states. The scenes provoke laughter in the audience, as they’re intended to. The wars themselves will never end, for, as the slogan of the Ministry of Peace has it, “War is peace.”

And that should be our own slogan, should it not? We’re at peace, yet we’re at war. They’re the same thing. Aren’t they?

keeping it real

But there are some people, nevertheless–and I am one of them–who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.

Thus G. K. Chesterton in his 1905 work, Heretics. Those words struck me the first time I read them, probably in my 20s, but it has been only by slow degrees that I have come to see how much I share his point of view. I now realize, and am glad, that I am a member the group that he denominates with the pronoun we.

For as I work on my various projects—my literary theory, a philosophy of politics with respect to the environment, and of course my novel in progress The Mission—I keep rediscovering that everything else depends on one’s “view of the universe”. My hunch is that the most intractable conflicts in life are ultimately due to differences in this view. They are intractable because they are hard to grasp and hard to communicate, but, most importantly, they are intractable because they are often unconscious.

Technically, Chesterton’s “view of the universe” and “theory of the cosmos” come under the heading of cosmology, which is one branch of the philosophical field called metaphysics, the other two branches being ontology, or the theory of being, and epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. The word metaphysics itself comes from the title of a treatise by Aristotle concerned with those topics. The word literally means “after physics”, and it referred to the fact that this treatise followed Aristotle’s treatise on Physics, which examined the structure of the natural world. The world of nature is the world that can be observed with the senses; but metaphysics addresses itself to those aspects of reality than cannot be observed in that way. Metaphysics is concerned with the nature of reality itself as such. What do we think is real, and why?

I remember reading an intriguing observation by William James, I think it was in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), that people regard as real what provokes the strongest emotions in them. Our strongest emotions impel us to action, and we always take action with the intent of having an effect on the world—an effect on reality, if you like. But this brings to mind a traditional Buddhist image that illustrates how this very behavior is actually mistaken and a never- ending cause of trouble for us: the image of a rope which we take to be a snake.

Imagine stepping into a dim, cluttered room, and seeing a big, fat snake coiled on the floor right before you. You feel a jolt of adrenaline; maybe you scream and jump back involuntarily. You scramble to escape, and reach to snap on the light so you can see the snake better. But when you do, you see that it’s just a rope lying coiled there. It’s inert and harmless, and all your panic was for nothing.

According to the Buddha, our emotional responses to life—all of them—have exactly this same basis. They are “panic” responses to a reality that is fundamentally not the way we think it is. Everywhere, we see snakes; and everywhere, it’s just ropes.

In the Buddhist view, the “snake” in question is, in the first place, our own ego, which we mistakenly take to be fundamentally existent; and, in the second place, all the objects of sense, which we equally take to be fundamentally existent. If we saw them as they are, that is, as not fundamentally existent, then our actions and reactions would become truly realistic; we would treat the coiled rope as a coiled rope, instead of as a snake.

A vivid example of this “panic” response always returns to my mind. It was from watching a TV documentary. I forget the exact subject of the documentary, but one segment featured an interview with a man who was serving a life sentence in a California prison for murder. It had happened in traffic. Another motorist had done something to anger this man, so he pulled a handgun from his glove compartment, and, intending to scare that other motorist, took a shot at him. But the shot, aimed to miss, hit the man and killed him. So the shooter drew a 20-year sentence. He spoke calmly during the interview, but he made the point at the end, for those who are provoked to anger in traffic or elsewhere: “Don’t do it—walk away, it’s not worth it.”

Such was the calm, sober opinion of one who knew whereof he spoke. He had felt that he had been subjected to an injury and an injustice in traffic, and he had the means to address those things, so he thought, in his handgun. Everything had seemed clear, real, and urgent—just as with a snake nearby. Later, when his emotions had calmed, he saw that he had been mistaken. Too late.

It seems that while we treat those things that provoke strong feelings in us as real, the truth seems to be almost the reverse. We’re much more likely to see things as they really are when our mind is calm and cool.

This calm, cool frame of mind is what is cultivated by meditators, such as Buddhists, and by philosophers generally. For our problem is not just in knowing what other people’s views of the universe are—our lodgers’, our enemies’—but in knowing what our own view is. And if it’s important to know what others’ views are, how much more important is it that we know our own?

For we all have a metaphysics. We all have deep-seated beliefs about these things, on which we act. We just don’t know, by and large, what those beliefs are. But they are there to be found. We just need to get calm, and to think. Maybe to read—and even meditate.

how to actually win hearts and minds

I just saw a headline on my Google News home page: “Mali mission has barely begun: experts”. It’s from the Montreal Gazette. I haven’t read the article, but the headline prompted a disturbing series of thoughts.

The thoughts are about imperialism, not just in Africa but worldwide. Strong countries like to intervene in the affairs of weaker countries. When France sent troops into Mali recently, most commentators said that French president François Hollande had “no choice” in the matter. Why? Because the internal disturbance might spill into neighboring countries, and France’s main supplier of uranium is nearby Niger. Anyway, northwest Africa is France’s backyard, and we all have a right—nay, a responsibility—to maintain order in our own backyard, do we not?

When unrest erupts in a country, that is, a country in which an imperial power has an economic or military interest, the imperial power is quick to send “help”. This help is always mainly military. We want to help with the killing and destruction (I say we because Canada is increasingly eager to offer this kind of help, as in Afghanistan). And as long as that economic or military interest is there, and as long as there is killing and destruction to be done, we’re staunch about staying for “as long as it takes.”

I’d like to suggest an alternative way of helping countries in trouble. I’d like to propose that all the resources that are thrown into helping with the killing and destruction be thrown instead into helping with the healing and nurturing. All these supposedly well-intentioned interventions in troubled countries have resulted in enormous destruction and suffering—much more, I am sure, than anything we’re permitted hear about back home. The normal state of affairs in these interventions is fiasco and unintended consequences, all negative. So instead of helping to turn these distressed people into corpses, how about helping those of them who are refugees?

I’ve read that the number of refugees that have fled Syria is about 600,000. They will have fled to Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, maybe Lebanon. What’s happening to them there? How are they being accommodated? What is their housing like? Food? Medical services? I’m not sure, but I’ll bet they could be improved. I’ll bet they could be improved quite a lot.

So far, imperialists have not ventured into Syria, I’m assuming because unlike, say, Libya, there are no natural resources there. But if the rhetoric about wanting to help “the people of Syria” is true, then we should be willing to dedicate as many resources to looking after Syrian refugees as we are to, say, bombing “insurgents” in Afghanistan.

If you want to win hearts and minds, this is the way to do it. There are 600,000 Syrian hearts and minds who have fled their homes in fear for their lives, and have sought refuge outside the borders of their own perilous country. If they, every one of them, could find decent shelter, food, and medical care in their place of refuge, it would make a much bigger and more positive impression than any amount of destruction or slaughter you may do on their supposed behalf. And I have little doubt that Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon would welcome a hand in managing the human tide that has washed over their borders: more hearts and minds that might be favorably impressed.

Might good conditions for refugees encourage some people to flee a country when otherwise they might not? It might. And maybe it should. For why should people who simply want to live their lives be forced to remain in the deathtrap of a civil war? Let them decamp to decent, safe, dignified accommodations while the combatants kill each other. And let the rich world pick up most of the tab—or all of it.

If you read the Iliad you will see vividly that war has always been grim and terrible. But by the 20th century it stopped being glorious, because there is no glory in massacring civilians. That is what war has become, and there is no excuse for a country that calls itself civilized to engage in it, except perhaps to repel actual incursions over its own border, and then only to the point when the aggressor has departed.

My wife Kimmie and I are donors to Doctors Without Borders, who offer medical care to refugees and others in the poor world. They represent the paradigm of how the rich world should be intervening in the poor world during emergencies. Their disinterested, compassionate, and skilled help needs to be scaled up to meet the size of the demand, which is very large.

But we can afford it. We spend vastly more trying to slaughter “bad guys.” It’s time to beat our swords into plowshares, or perhaps our drone assassination bombs into clinic beds. It’s worth doing; and if we believed our own rhetoric, it’s what we would do.

prose sketch: riding the SeaBus

Fri. 25 Jan 2013 ca. 12:15 p.m. Aboard the Vancouver Beaver

Still the insistent squeal of rubber rubbing metal of the dock; but now the doors have snapped shut, the diesel horn has blasted its warning, and the engine has surged to its travel revolutions: we’re out on the quiet water of the harbor.

The clouds lie pearly and thick in a flat mass over the city, a great floating island in a pale-blue sky. We head almost into the sun, out of sight above the clouds but shining in a hammer-finish sheen on the water. We adjust course, aiming now for the great terminal cranes on the Vancouver side, the armatures of giant mechanical giraffes, all frozen, power cut.

The ferry is only lightly populated. Most of us sit facing forward in our dark coats and jackets. One or two conversations can just be heard over the engine, the vibrations of which tremble up through the carpeted floor and the bone-colored plastic seats.

We pass close to the dock on the left: the great blue hull of a ship waiting by the orange network of cranes. No humans in sight.

Now we adjust course again, aiming directly for the dock at Granville Waterfront Station. Canada Place slides by to the right. The buff and glass buildings of downtown, standing at all angles and different heights, close in over us. The engine roars in spurts, adjusting, as we head into the cave of the dock. Rocking, bumping, the waiting purr . . . and . . . we’re there.

The Odyssey redux

In 1992 I created and wrote, along with Warren Easton, a TV show called The Odyssey. Well, the media have finally caught up with me. Three young guys in Toronto run a podcast called Rewatchability devoted to TV shows that have been buried by the sands of time, and today’s segment features The Odyssey. The podcast includes an audio interview with me talking about the origin and meaning of the show.

For my part, it’s fun to talk with people who were part of the actual audience of the show while it was being broadcast. I continue to be surprised at the impressions and responses that our series evoked in people, and I am mighty pleased that they are still thinking and talking about it.

The Idea of Happiness by V.J. McGill

The Idea of Happiness by V.J. McGill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book covers the terrain of its philosophical subject, but winds up placing more emphasis on modern social science.

Every sentient being wants to be happy and wants to avoid suffering—so I learned in my training as a Buddhist. But how many of us sentient beings can define happiness? Do we know what it is that we all supposedly want?

This book is one of 5 monographs sponsored by the Institute for Philosophical Research in the 1960s (the others are The Idea Of Freedom, The Idea of Justice, The Idea of Progress, and The Idea of Love), intended as the first part of a project to publish a book on each of the 102 Great Ideas of Western thought as identified in the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series.

That project was not completed, although I hope that it will be one day by some visionary and public-spirited team of philosophers, for the idea of the project is an excellent one. The idea is to examine each of these Great Ideas, not with a view to resolving it or even extending the philosophical discussion of it, but rather to clarify and organize the thinking that has already been done on it in the course of Western history. The Institute’s task was not philosophical but dialectical: to elucidate a controversy without taking sides.

Although that was the original intent for these books, this particular book, by V.J. McGill, departs from that agenda in treating its topic of Happiness in a more conventional, history-of-philosophy way. To me this makes the book less valuable than, say, Otto Bird’s excellent The Idea of Justice, which can serve as a paradigm for how to present such a dialectical analysis. I can only assume that the author here, V.J. McGill, felt that the idea of Happiness has really changed over the centuries, and that therefore he could not present it as, so to speak, a conversation between writers from different centuries who are treated as contemporaries, as though they were all sitting at the same table. There is much of that approach here, but not consistently all the way through.

But the author does break down the idea of Happiness and show its evolution in the literature. The writer who gave it the most careful and complete thought was Aristotle, so his analysis forms the basis of the discussion. In brief, Aristotle thought that happiness consists in virtuous activity. It’s impossible for a human being to be happy who is not expressing his humanity fully, especially in those respects that are uniquely human and not shared with any other creature, and the virtues are among these, relying as they do on people’s powers of free choice and reason. The man who has developed, as habits, the virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and prudence, is as happy as a human being can be, in whatever circumstances he may find himself.

And those circumstances mattered a lot, according to Aristotle, for he thought that no one could be happy if he were undergoing grave illness or great misfortune—although he would be happier than someone who lacked his virtues. The Stoics, on the other hand, disagreed: they held that happiness is the practice of virtue, full stop, and one’s circumstances are irrelevant to this. To the Stoics, in theory, it makes no difference if a man is living in luxury or being broken on the rack; as long as he is virtuous, he is happy.

Another strand in the tradition is represented by Epicurus, who held that happiness is simply pleasure. His school has often been attacked for advocating sensuality and license, but Epicurus was at pains to refute this. He observed that the pleasures of drunkards, gluttons, and libertines were episodic and entailed much pain; he felt that the greatest balance of net pleasure was enjoyed by those who lived modest, contemplative lives in the company of good friends.

This hedonistic thread would be picked up centuries later by Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians, who advocated an ethics of promoting the greatest pleasure of the greatest number, with no individual’s pleasure counting as more important than anyone else’s. And this egalitarian perspective is a new thing in the literature, for ancient writers like Aristotle would never have supposed that all people’s pleasures were of equal worth. Indeed, Aristotle regarded happiness as an impossibility for slaves and for tradesmen, since they lacked the freedom to be in control of their own lives. For Bentham, it is the duty of each of us to concern ourselves with the pleasure of all, and this responsibility falls most of all on government in the framing of laws.

This idea, however, that government is responsible for the happiness of the people, is not new; for Aristotle also believed it, and indeed he saw this as the very purpose of government and the state. For people come together not just to survive, but to lead a good life, and government is the supreme power entrusted with realizing this aim.

McGill goes on to discuss happiness in connection with the modern disciplines of psychotherapy and social science. While Freud felt that happiness is not possible, and other psychologists have generally avoided the word in favor of terms like “self-actualization”, nonetheless their analyses of the components of good mental health resemble many of the ancients’ components of happiness. McGill gives the impression that he is enthusiastic and optimistic that these psychological insights, coupled with judicious programs of the modern welfare state, are a promising advance on ancient thinking about happiness and may very well bring most of us there.

To me this seemed unduly sanguine, possibly reflecting the optimism of the time in which the author was writing. There was a dark underside to the prosperity and pleasures of the consumer culture, and that underside is more visible every day as the world shows the stresses of overcrowding and overconsumption. Even if we believe that material pleasures can indeed provide happiness, we need to take a page out of Epicurus’s book and practice restraint—not just for the sake of the world, but for our own sake.

The actual writing here is clear, calm, sober, and unexciting; and the historical approach is not as powerful and illuminating as the fully dialectical method used in the other books of this series. But it provides an excellent overview of this all-important topic, and therefore is of great service to any rational being who wants to pick it up.

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prose sketch: shoppers resting

Sun. 13 Jan 2013 ca. 1:15 p.m. Park Royal South

Back at this same oasis on the concourse of the mall: two planar sofas, two cubic chairs, all occupied by shoppers between missions. Four men, one woman, one of us with any of the others: five solitaires. The young aboriginal guy opposite me is on the phone, left ankle on right knee in a figure-4 posture. The old guy at the opposite end of his sofa is in the same posture, ball-cap slouched on his head, paper coffee-cup in hand. A meaty, jowly face. But now he’s risen to shuffle across the steppe of the tiled concourse, and by coincidence the young guy has followed him.

The other man is in the chair to my right: middle-aged, carelessly sprawled back. Another old man has arrived who knows him, and they’re talking now: the middle-aged guy has a husky, high-pitched voice: the Godfather. His hands are folded on his belly. The old friend has a more piercing, nasal voice. His silver hair is cropped close to his scalp like moss on a rock.

The woman, in the second chair, is maybe only a girl, not even 20. She’s Chinese, and is also writing in a thin little notebook. She wears dark jeans and her feet, crossed at the ankles, do not reach the floor. Could she be writing about me? What might she say?

“Middle-aged Caucasian man, all in blue with his faded old jeans and darker-blue windbreaker, hi-tech gray walking boots—Helly Hansen. Dark-blond hair, heavy glasses, a craggy, focused face. He writes forcefully, jiggling the notebook on his knee. Often he looks up, turning his head to look high around him, up at the mezzanine and the skylights.”

Ah: and just as I finished that little description, she snapped her notebook shut, jumped up, and was gone.

the pursuit of happiness

Are you happy?

Do you find that question embarrassing? Many of us do. We’re comfortable answering it with respect to some specific, restricted area (“I’m happy with the way the centerpiece works with the tablecloth”), but get progressively less comfortable answering it with respect to our life as a whole.

Happiness is one of the Great Ideas of the Western intellectual tradition, and I’m reading a book on it right now: The Idea of Happiness by V. J. McGill, published in 1967. I’m interested in all the Great Ideas, but I was led to this work when I sensed that happiness, or the Great Idea of Happiness, which I will capitalize, may be a cornerstone of a political philosophy of the future—one that provides for a thriving natural environment on Earth. This future-oriented philosophy has been named the Commonwealth of Life by Peter G. Brown, and I have posted about it before. Many writers on the environment have criticized the use of gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of the wealth or welfare of society, but without proposing anything specific to take its place. I believe the ideal candidate would be happiness.

This idea is not new. Indeed, it has been implemented: for the Dragon King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, has instituted “gross national happiness” (GNH) as an official metric of his country. They compile a “GNH index” based on 33 indicators under 9 “domains” or categories, including psychological well-being, health, and education, derived from both polling and other more objective sources. The idea is gaining some traction, and world conferences are held on it from time to time.

For myself, I haven’t studied their system in any detail, but on the face of it GNH seems like a much better metric of social well-being than GDP. Why, indeed, is GDP used as a metric at all by governments? It is taken to be a measure of wealth, and wealth in turn is taken to be a proxy for happiness. But both of these assumptions are false, and therefore all policy based on them is misguided and even counterproductive. If a government really does care about the happiness of the people, why not focus directly on that, as Bhutan has done, instead of using these proxies?

I see two problems: definition and measurement. On the one hand, there is no consensus about what happiness is or how to attain it. On the other, there is no concrete way to measure it, which presumably would be necessary if it were to be made a practical goal of public policy. But pretty much everyone prefers wealth to poverty, and wealth can be measured, at least in theory, so we have GDP as our metric. The bad news is that wealth doesn’t make you happy, and GDP does not even really measure wealth. The worse news is that this relentless chasing of GDP is possibly more responsible than anything else for the degradation of the biosphere of Mother Earth.

Before I got into this subject in more depth I wanted to acquaint myself with the Great Idea of Happiness—hence the book, which I’m almost finished reading. Some of the main thinkers on Happiness in the Western tradition are Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, Kant, and Bentham. There seem to be three main threads:

happiness arises from virtuous living (Aristotle)
happiness is synonymous with pleasure in the widest sense (Epicurus, Bentham, and the Utilitarians)
happiness is not a proper concern for an ethical person, who is instead focused on performing his duty (the Stoics, Kant)

Of these three broad points of view, the one that seems to best reflect my own experience is that of Aristotle. For if I think of when I have been happiest, it has always been when I have been engaged in some virtuous, or at least wholesome, activity. Some of my happiest moments were when I was a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey, Nova Scotia, in 2002. I was seeking to train my mind and body in the service of all sentient beings.

To me an excellent example of a happy man is Ebenezer Scrooge after the spirits of Christmas have brought about his transformation. He is grateful for his life, he knows exactly what he wants to do with it—help others—and he has the means to do it. And he says, memorably, “I don’t deserve to be so happy.”

So I’ve formed my own tentative definition of happiness: “wholesome pleasure.” And I’m tempted to say that the more wholesome the pleasure is, the greater your happiness.

How do we measure something like that? I honestly don’t think we can. But that doesn’t mean that happiness can’t or shouldn’t form the basis of enlightened public policy. I believe that, in the long run, it must. So quite likely Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the Buddhist king of Bhutan, is showing us the way, and all we need to do, for our own happiness and for the happiness of others, is to follow.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This vivid, well-written book leaves one hungry for more of its title topic.

I seem to recall first seeing this book advertised and perhaps recommended in Scientific American magazine in 2008. That, combined with the book’s intriguing premise and its provocative cover art, made me eager to read it. I bought a copy and started reading it, only to leave off soon as the wind of my reading interest shifted elsewhere, as it often does.

I picked it up again over Christmas and powered on to the end. I found that it took a bit of a push to finish it, because I felt that the author had wandered too far away from the matter at hand. For while Weisman does show us things that would happen if humans were suddenly to vanish from Earth (that is his premise), he spends much more time setting up the locations and researchers involved in the various locales that he zooms in on; and while these descriptions are always engaging and evocatively portrayed, they are still only about the world with us still in it.

For example, he spends several pages in the middle of the book describing the ancient underground cities of Cappadocia in central Turkey—a fascinating archaeological curiosity that I’d never heard of before. But while I was indeed glad to read about these, the purpose of describing them was simply that these ancient excavations may be among the artifacts of man that last longest into a future in which we ourselves don’t.

Other descriptions seem more closely on-topic, such as an account of the petroleum-processing megaplex of Texas City, Texas, were huge amounts of crude oil are taken in, processed, and piped out. What happens with all that crude and all those toxins depends sensitively on whether people do or do not flick certain switches before they depart the scene. The account of nuclear plants and their waste is even more tightly linked to the “what will happen if” premise. Here, I have to admit, although I am an advocate of nuclear power, I found the prognosis for unattended nuclear plants to be most troubling. Nuclear messes are not pretty—and they’re not brief.

Ugly though nuclear leftovers are, I found the most troubling chapter to be the one on plastics. For it turns out that we, humanity, have already filled Earth with them. The soils and oceans are full of plastics, especially the tiny pellets known as nurdles from which larger plastic structures are made. These particles, which never biodegrade, have long been in the global food chain, and will continue to move up it, concentrating in the top-of-chain species, such as you-know-who, interacting with our biology in unknown but unhealthy and irreversible ways.

I’ve read before about how the Pacific Ocean contains a vast floating island of garbage. In Weisman’s book I learned that these floating islands are in every ocean, and that the most remote beaches on Earth are strewn with discarded running shoes, bottles, and disposable diapers. One of my main takeaways from this book is that Homo sapiens, as a species, regards Earth’s land as his dump, the oceans as his toilet, and the atmosphere as his smokestack. And they’re all getting full.

It’s hard not to conclude that the world without us would be, well, better off. And that’s too bad.

This book is thought-provoking. It is also well researched and written in an informative, fast-moving, punchy style (which sometimes was a bit flip for my taste). It is a good book. But I wanted to be led more through the landscape of an Earth depopulated of us, and led through a timeline of it, rather than spending so much time looking at landscapes still filled with us.

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prose sketch: rainy Sunday

Sun. 6 Jan 2013 2:20 p.m. my living room

A little brighter than twilight—just. A rainy vacant Sunday in the New Year. Through the big windows looking onto the balcony, the world is a study in wet mustardy browns and rusts: the plain wood lattice of the rails, the algae sheen of the unfinished wooden deck, the green-rimed terra-cotta of the pots Kimmie set next to the wall for warmth, the shriveled leaves of the balding maple that embraces the salient of the deck. Behind: the beige wall of the neighbors’ town house, windowless, its top out of sight. Little jewels of rain tremble below the handrail of the balcony. Beyond all: the wet indefinite sky, dully backlit for another hour or two.

A sense of patient hunkering in, not so much waiting as enduring.