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POVOS INDÍGENAS ISOLADOS E DE RECENTE CONTATO NO BRASIL Após 26 anos, é possível celebrar a eficácia dos princípios do Sistema de Proteção ao Índio Isolado: o respeito à decisão dos povos de se manterem isolados e a autodeterminação dos grupos de recente contato. No entanto, dificuldades apontam para um colapso do sistema. por Antenor Vaz
Avistamentos ou contatos com indígenas “isolados” na América do Sul têm sido notícia recorrente na imprensa internacional. Brasil, Equador, Peru, Colômbia, Bolívia, Paraguai e Venezuela abrigam mais de duas centenas de referências sobre a presença de grupos indígenas isolados e/ou recém-contatados. O Brasil voltou a ser notícia quando um grupo de sete indígenas isolados decidiu contatar os ashaninka da aldeia Simpatia (localizada na Terra Indígena Kampa/Isolados, no Alto Rio Envira, Acre, uma região de fronteira do Brasil com o Peru). Um grupo de isolados, na manhã do dia 11 de junho, tentou comunicação verbal, mas não foi compreendido pelos ashaninka. Por meio de gestos, solicitavam roupas e objetos industrializados – facões, panelas, entre outros. Faz cerca de três anos que esses “indígenas não contatados” são avistados próximo das aldeias dos ashaninka em busca de objetos industrializados e produtos das roças. Esse fato desperta curiosidade acerca do então grupo isolado, mas também suscita outras questões: existem outros grupos indígenas isolados no território nacional? Quantos são? O que ocorre com esses grupos após o contato efetivado? Existem políticas públicas dirigidas a esses povos? Como o Estado brasileiro concebe essa questão e quais são os instrumentos de “proteção” para eles?
Povos indígenas isolados Cerca de 90% dos povos indígenas isolados que restam no planeta vivem em sete países da bacia amazônica e chaco paraguaio, em florestas onde os ciclos ecossistêmicos e a biodiversidade se encontram preservados. Esses povos mantêm-se em isolamento como defesa de um contato que se mostrou destruidor, seja por conflitos com o “branco” ou com outros povos indígenas. A decisão de isolamento é manifestada por atos de ameaça dirigidos a invasores, mas principalmente pela fuga sistemática em direção a territórios cada vez mais distantes das frentes de expansão da “civilização” – territórios escassos e submetidos à avidez que cobiça cada centímetro de terra para a completa conversão da “natureza” em “recursos naturais”. Para o Estado brasileiro, a definição de “índios isolados” ainda é a do Estatuto do Índio (1973): “quando vivem em grupos desconhecidos ou de que se possuem poucos e vagos informes através de contatos eventuais com elementos da comunhão nacional”. Grupos indígenas de recente contato, para a Funai, são “grupos que mantêm relações de contato permanente e/ou intermitente com segmentos da sociedade nacional e que, independentemente do tempo de contato, apresentam singularidades em sua relação com a sociedade nacional e seletividade (autonomia) na incorporação de bens e serviços”. Com a Constituição de 1988, a Funai instituiu a política específica de proteção aos índios isolados, calcada na “premissa do não contato” enquanto “prerrogativa da autodeterminação” desses povos. E, em 2009, reconheceu a necessidade de conceber políticas diferenciadas para os grupos de recente contato. A despeito de iniciativas abnegadas de servidores, da sociedade civil organizada e de indivíduos isolados, essas políticas tendem a ser pouco efetivas diante do sucateamento e do desprestígio do órgão indigenista oficial perante as demais políticas de governo. Mas, afinal, qual é a política de Estado para os povos indígenas isolados e de recente contato no Brasil de hoje? Para responder, é necessário retroceder na história.
A política indigenista da Colônia à República A política indigenista na Colônia, Império e República Velha no Brasil levava a marca do tráfico indígena e negreiro e dos conflitos entre as oligarquias locais, secundadas pelas vagas de imigração europeia. Nesse contexto, “a questão indígena” transitou de umaquestão de mão de obrapara uma questão de terras.1 O debate girava entre exterminar os índios “bravos” ou civilizá-los. Para efeito prático/administrativo, até o século XIX os índios se subdividiam em “bravos” e “domésticos ou mansos”. Os “bravos”, não se submetendo aos aldeamentos e, consequentemente, às leis, eram perseguidos e exterminados. Essas duas concepções povoam o imaginário da população brasileira. A criação, em 1910, do Serviço de Proteção ao Índio e Localização dos Trabalhadores Nacionais (SPILTN), renomeada em 1918 como Serviço de Proteção ao Índio (SPI), racionalizou a incorporação dos territórios e das populações indígenas à sociedade brasileira na Primeira República. O principal articulador desse projeto foi o Marechal Rondon, que aplicava um sistema militar de defesa da integridade territorial no país. Para o SPI, cabia à República resgatar as populações indígenas do extermínio. O símbolo da nova orientação foi a substituição da palavra “catequese” pelo termo “proteção”. De maneira geral, podemos afirmar que a política indigenista do Estado resumia-se à política de atração/pacificação como premissa de proteção, fomentando a passagem dos índios a trabalhadores agrícolas, levando ao extermínio físico e aniquilação cultural dessas sociedades, e servindo à integração dos territórios indígenas à sociedade brasileira.
Funai – “Contato” enquanto paradigma de “proteção” Em 1967, em meio a denúncias de corrupção no SPI, foi instaurada uma Comissão de Inquérito no órgão. O Relatório Final,2 publicado em 1968, entre outras conclusões, determinou a demissão e a suspensão de duas dezenas de servidores. Nesse mesmo ano e num contexto de reorganização burocrática do Estado, os militares extinguiram o SPI e criaram a Funai. No que se refere aos índios isolados, mantiveram-se os princípios do contato/atração enquanto norteadores da proteção.
Proteção dos índios isolados no contexto da redemocratização Em 1987, a Funai criou a Coordenadoria de Índios Arredios, atribuindo-lhe a competência de coordenar as ações relativas à atração e ao contato com grupos indígenas “arredios”. Naquele mesmo ano, coordenado pelo sertanista Sydney Possuelo, ocorreu o I Encontro de Sertanistas, que teve como finalidade a“análise da política de atração dos grupos indígenas arredios, visando definir uma nova postura da Funai”.Esse evento tornou-se um marco divisor, uma vez que formulou a mudança do paradigma do “contato” para o “não contato” enquanto premissa para a proteção dos isolados. E, ainda em 1987, a Funai introduziu a Coordenadoria de Índios Isolados(CII),3 estabeleceu diretrizes e criou o Sistema de Proteção ao Índio Isolado (SPII). Tendo como referência a Constituição de 1988 e o princípio da autodeterminação dos povos, a Funai definiu como uma de suas diretrizes garantir “aos índios e grupos isolados o direito de assim permanecerem, mantendo a integridade de seu território, intervindo apenas quando qualquer fator coloque em risco a sua sobrevivência e organização sociocultural”.A experiência inovadora desenvolvida pela Equipe de Localização dos Índios Isolados da Reserva Biológica do Guaporé, entre 1989 e 1994, resultou na primeira terra indígena demarcada exclusivamente para um grupo isolado, sem se estabelecer o contato.
O Sistema de Proteção para Índios Isolados e de Recente Contato O SPII, concebido originalmente em 1987, é a estrutura administrativa destinada à proteção física, patrimonial e cultural dos grupos indígenas isolados. Em 2007, após duas décadas de experiência, formulou-se o Sistema de Proteção e Promoção de Direitos para Índios Isolados e de Recente Contato (SPIIRC),subdividido em quatro subsistemas: 1) Gestão (Planejamento, Administrativo, Sistematização, Comunicação e Capacitação); 2) Proteção (Localização, Monitoramento e Vigilância); 3) Promoção de direitos (Processos Educativos e Intercâmbio, Educação Etnoambiental e Saúde); e 4) Contato. As ações deproteção, promoção de direitos e contato são desenvolvidas por equipes denominadas Frentes de Proteção Etnoambientais (FPEs). Nesse sistema, o contato pode ser estabelecido por decisão do grupo indígena isolado, por estranhos, ou pela Funai quando se caracteriza perigo eminente de extinção. Em 2003, com a definição de um novo estatuto para a Funai, criou-se a Coordenação Geral de Povos Indígenas Recém-Contatados,mas o tema relacionado aos grupos de recente contato só voltou à discussão em 2007 e se institucionalizou com a reestruturação da Funai entre 2009 e 2012. A partir das práticas desenvolvidas com os grupos indígenas de recente contato (zo’é, korubo, akuntsu, kanoé, piripikura, awa guajá, entre outros), surgiu a necessidade de repensar as ações instituídas. Em 2010, deu-se início à concepção de programas nos quais se priorizaram a promoção sociocultural e a proteção física e territorial desses povos sujeitos a extrema vulnerabilidade, que resultariam na formulação da Política para Povos Indígenas de Recente Contato. Até hoje a Funai ainda não publicou portaria instituindo essa política pública.
Quantos e onde estão os índios isolados e de recente contato no Brasil? Em 1988, o sertanista Wellington Figueiredo mapeou os grupos indígenas isolados no Brasil, relacionando 88 localizações com possível presença de grupos de isolados. A cada uma dessas localizações atribuiu-se a nomenclatura de “referência”. As últimas atualizações realizadas pela Funai indicam 104 registros de índios isolados e dezesseis de grupos considerados de recente contato no Brasil (veja tabela).
Cenário atual: duas décadas do SPII Após 26 anos de execução do Sistema de Proteção ao Índio Isolado é possível celebrar a eficácia de seus princípios: o respeito à decisão dos povos de se manterem isolados e a autodeterminação dos grupos de recente contato. No entanto, dificuldades de ordem conjuntural e estrutural apontam para um colapso do SPIIRC. O aumento da pressão da frente expansionista/desenvolvimentista pelos territórios ocupados por índios isolados e de recente contato, inclusive nas regiões de divisas internacionais, a falta de apoio político ou omissão dos poderes constituídos, o aumento das ações proselitistas missionárias, as atividades econômicas ilegais, os empreendimentos de grande impacto derivados de políticas e programas de governo, e os empreendimentos privados levarão os grupos isolados a procurar contato como única forma de sobrevivência. Dessa forma, a política estatal de “não contato” vai configurando-se como mera ficção retórica.
Desafios da política para índios isolados e de recente contato Neste passeio pela atuação do Estado, o termo “proteção” assumiu conotações e práticas distintas, a depender do momento político/econômico: a “proteção” enquanto pacificação/contato, com a finalidade de incorporar os indígenas à civilização (Rondon); contato na perspectiva do protecionismo com “aculturação” lenta e controlada dos indígenas (irmãos Villas Bôas); contato na perspectiva do integracionismo ao mercado regional (Francisco Meirelles).4 Todas elas sob o guarda-chuva do contato enquanto prerrogativa da “proteção”. Já na Nova República, com a decisão tomada na Reunião dos Sertanistas (1987) no âmbito do processo constituinte, a política para grupos isolados mudou radicalmente ao adotar o “não contato” enquanto premissa de proteção e a consequente introdução do Sistema de Proteção ao Índio Isolado na perspectiva da proteção territorial (Sydney Possuelo). Atualmente, a Funai/Coordenação Geral de Índios Isolados e Recém-Contatados (CGIIRC) tenta dar continuidade à política de proteção na prerrogativa do não contato; as políticas de governo em curso, porém, não acenam com a mesma postura. Com essa compreensão, observa-se um paradoxo entre a finalidade de “proteção” para a qual a Funai fora criada e sua relação com o Poder Executivo, a quem é subordinada, quando este coloca em prática políticas que impactam os grupos isolados e de recente contato. É necessário e urgente que a Funai, em cooperação com a sociedade civil, resgate sua atribuição constitucional de proteger e promover os direitos indígenas, incluindo os grupos isolados e de recente contato de modo que seus técnicos e dirigentes não se desviem dessa atribuição. O que se observa hoje é um volume grande de “tarefas administrativas” sendo exercidas por sertanistas/coordenadores de FPEs e seus auxiliares, impossibilitando-os de atuarem nos trabalhos de proteção in situ, que lhes competem. Como já dito no início: as políticas indigenistas subordinam-se aos planos de defesa nacional, construção de estradas e hidrelétricas, expansão da agropecuária/agronegócio e extração de minérios. No papel, as mais nobres intenções valem, mas, de fato, as disputas em torno da questão indígena, desde o tempo colonial, têm como cenário de fundo o ordenamento territorial e os recursos naturais. E, para a Funai, resta mitigar os efeitos de uma política da qual é refém. Esse contexto reproduz-se na maioria dos países sul-americanos com presença de índios isolados e de recente contato. No entanto, como na Colômbia, as políticas e metodologias de proteção têm tido avanços consideráveis. E a Funai, refém das políticas desenvolvimentistas, como a seleção brasileira de futebol, vai perdendo seu lugar de protagonista no campo da proteção para índios isolados e de recente contato. Antenor Vaz *Antenor Vaz é físico, educador e sertanista. Especialista em laboratórios didáticos de física, trabalhou nas áreas de educação popular, metodologias de trabalhos com jovens e gestão de projetos sociais. Sua maior experiência na área social deu-se com educação indígena e coordenação de trabalhos de localização de grupos indígenas isolados na Amazônia brasileira. Pôs em prática a Política para Índios Isolados na região amazônica, o que possibilitou a criação da primeira Terra Indígena (T.I. Massaco) exclusiva para índios sem contato reconhecida pelo governo brasileiro. É membro do Comitê Consultivo Internacional para Assuntos de Índios Isolados e em Contato Inicial. Foi coordenador de políticas para índios de recente contato na Coordenação Geral de Índios Isolados e de Recente Contato (CGIIRC) da Funai até março de 2013. Ilustração: Daniel Kondo 1 Manoela Carneiro da Cunha, “Política indigenista no século XIX”. In: História dos índios no Brasil, Companhia da Terra/Secretaria Municipal de Cultura/Fapesp, São Paulo, 1992. 2 Esse relatório tornou-se nacionalmente conhecido como “Relatório Figueiredo” e ficou desaparecido por mais de quarenta anos. Recentemente foi localizado nos arquivos do Museu do Índio, no Rio de Janeiro. O relatório denuncia não só os casos de corrupção do SPI, mas também todo o processo de repressão e barbárie exercido pelo Estado contra os indígenas. 3 A CII ao longo dos anos alterou sua nomenclatura e seus objetivos. Em 2012, foi publicada a última alteração por meio do Decreto n. 7.778, de 27 de julho de 2012, no qual passa a se chamar Coordenação Geral de Índios Isolados e Recém-Contatados (CGIIRC), subordinada à Diretoria de Proteção Territorial, e que traz em sua nova configuração o trabalho com os índios recém-contatados. 4 Carlos Augusto da Rocha Freire, Sagas sertanistas: práticas e representações do campo indigenista no século XX, tese de doutorado do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social do Museu Nacional da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), 2005. |
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| 04 de Agosto de 2014 |
Alternate mechanism of species formation picks up support, thanks to a South American ant (University of Rochester )
21-Aug-2014
By Peter Iglinski
A queen ant of the host species Mycocepurus goeldii.
A newly-discovered species of ant supports a controversial theory of species formation. The ant, only found in a single patch of eucalyptus trees on the São Paulo State University campus in Brazil, branched off from its original species while living in the same colony, something thought rare in current models of evolutionary development.
“Most new species come about in geographic isolation,” said Christian Rabeling, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rochester. “We now have evidence that speciation can take place within a single colony.”
The findings by Rabeling and the research team were published today in the journal Current Biology.
In discovering the parasitic Mycocepurus castrator, Rabeling and his colleagues uncovered an example of a still-controversial theory known as sympatric speciation, which occurs when a new species develops while sharing the same geographic area with its parent species, yet reproducing on its own.“While sympatric speciation is more difficult to prove,” said Rabeling, “we believe we are in the process of actually documenting a particular kind of evolution-in-progress.”
New species are formed when its members are no longer able to reproduce with members of the parent species. The commonly-accepted mechanism is called allopatric speciation, in which geographic barriers—such as mountains—separate members of a group, causing them to evolve independently.
“Since Darwin’s Origin of Species, evolutionary biologists have long debated whether two species can evolve from a common ancestor without being geographically isolated from each other,” said Ted Schultz, curator of ants at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of the study. “With this study, we offer a compelling case for sympatric evolution that will open new conversations in the debate about speciation in these ants, social insects and evolutionary biology more generally.”
A queen ant of the parasitic species Mycocepurus castrator.
M. castrator is not simply another ant in the colony; it’s a parasite that lives with—and off of—its host, Mycocepurus goeldii. The host is a fungus-growing ant that cultivates fungus for its nutritional value, both for itself and, indirectly, for its parasite, which does not participate in the work of growing the fungus garden. That led the researchers to study the genetic relationships of all fungus-growing ants in South America, including all five known and six newly discovered species of the genus Mycocepurus, to determine whether the parasite did evolve from its presumed host. They found that the parasitic ants were, indeed, genetically very close to M. goeldii, but not to the other ant species.
They also determined that the parasitic ants were no longer reproductively compatible with the host ants—making them a unique species—and had stopped reproducing with their host a mere 37,000 years ago—a very short period on the evolutionary scale.
A big clue for the research team was found by comparing the ants’ genes, both in the cell’s nucleus as well as in the mitochondria—the energy-producing structures in the cells. Genes are made of units called nucleotides, and Rabeling found that the sequencing of those nucleotides in the mitochondria is beginning to look different from what is found in the host ants, but that the genes in the nucleus still have traces of the relationship between host and parasite, leading him to conclude that M. castrator has begun to evolve away from its host.
Rabeling explained that just comparing some nuclear and mitochondrial genes may not be enough to demonstrate that the parasitic ants are a completely new species. “We are now sequencing the entire mitochondrial and nuclear genomes of these parasitic ants and their host in an effort to confirm speciation and the underlying genetic mechanism.”
The parasitic ants need to exercise discretion because taking advantage of the host species is considered taboo in ant society. Offending ants have been known to be killed by worker mobs. As a result, the parasitic queen of the new species has evolved into a smaller size, making them difficult to distinguish from a host worker.
Host queens and males reproduce in an aerial ceremony, in the wet tropics only during a particular season when it begins to rain. Rabeling found that the parasitic queens and males, needing to be more discreet about their reproductive activities, diverge from the host’s mating pattern. By needing to hide their parasitic identity, M. castrator males and females lost their special adaptations that allowed them to reproduce in flight, and mate inside the host nest, making it impossible for them to sexually interact with their host species.
The research team included Ted Schultz of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, Naomi Pierce of Harvard University, and Maurício Bacci, Jr of the Center for the Study of Social Insects (São State University, Rio Claro, Brazil).
The Climate Swerve (The New York Times)
CreditRobert Frank Hunter
AMERICANS appear to be undergoing a significant psychological shift in our relation to global warming. I call this shift a climate “swerve,” borrowing the term used recently by the Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt to describe a major historical change in consciousness that is neither predictable nor orderly.
The first thing to say about this swerve is that we are far from clear about just what it is and how it might work. But we can make some beginning observations which suggest, in Bob Dylan’s words, that “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.” Experience, economics and ethics are coalescing in new and important ways. Each can be examined as a continuation of my work comparing nuclear and climate threats.
The experiential part has to do with a drumbeat of climate-related disasters around the world, all actively reported by the news media: hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and wildfires, extreme heat waves and equally extreme cold, rising sea levels and floods. Even when people have doubts about the causal relationship of global warming to these episodes, they cannot help being psychologically affected. Of great importance is the growing recognition that the danger encompasses the entire earth and its inhabitants. We are all vulnerable.
This sense of the climate threat is represented in public opinion polls and attitude studies. A recent Yale survey, for instance, concluded that “Americans’ certainty that the earth is warming has increased over the past three years,” and “those who think global warming is not happening have become substantially less sure of their position.”
Falsification and denial, while still all too extensive, have come to require more defensive psychic energy and political chicanery.
But polls don’t fully capture the complex collective process occurring.
The most important experiential change has to do with global warming and time. Responding to the climate threat — in contrast to the nuclear threat, whose immediate and grotesque destructiveness was recorded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — has been inhibited by the difficulty of imagining catastrophic future events. But climate-related disasters and intense media images are hitting us now, and providing partial models for a devastating climate future.
At the same time, economic concerns about fossil fuels have raised the issue of value. There is a wonderfully evocative term, “stranded assets,” to characterize the oil, coal and gas reserves that are still in the ground. Trillions of dollars in assets could remain “stranded” there. If we are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sustaining the human habitat, between 60 percent and 80 percent of those assets must remain in the ground, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative, an organization that analyzes carbon investment risk. In contrast, renewable energy sources, which only recently have achieved the status of big business, are taking on increasing value, in terms of returns for investors, long-term energy savings and relative harmlessness to surrounding communities.
Pragmatic institutions like insurance companies and the American military have been confronting the consequences of climate change for some time. But now, a number of leading financial authorities are raising questions about the viability of the holdings of giant carbon-based fuel corporations. In a world fueled by oil and coal, it is a truly stunning event when investors are warned that the market may end up devaluing those assets. We are beginning to see a bandwagon effect in which the overall viability of fossil-fuel economics is being questioned.
Can we continue to value, and thereby make use of, the very materials most deeply implicated in what could be the demise of the human habitat? It is a bit like the old Jack Benny joke, in which an armed robber offers a choice, “Your money or your life!” And Benny responds, “I’m thinking it over.” We are beginning to “think over” such choices on a larger scale.
This takes us to the swerve-related significance of ethics. Our reflections on stranded assets reveal our deepest contradictions. Oil and coal company executives focus on the maximum use of their product in order to serve the interests of shareholders, rather than the humane, universal ethics we require to protect the earth. We may well speak of those shareholder-dominated principles as “stranded ethics,” which are better left buried but at present are all too active above ground.
Such ethical contradictions are by no means entirely new in historical experience. Consider the scientists, engineers and strategists in the United States and the Soviet Union who understood their duty as creating, and possibly using, nuclear weapons that could destroy much of the earth. Their conscience could be bound up with a frequently amorphous ethic of “national security.” Over the course of my work I have come to the realization that it is very difficult to endanger or kill large numbers of people except with a claim to virtue.
The climate swerve is mostly a matter of deepening awareness. When exploring the nuclear threat I distinguished between fragmentary awareness, consisting of images that come and go but remain tangential, and formed awareness, which is more structured, part of a narrative that can be the basis for individual and collective action.
In the 1980s there was a profound worldwide shift from fragmentary awareness to formed awareness in response to the potential for a nuclear holocaust. Millions of people were affected by that “nuclear swerve.” And even if it is diminished today, the nuclear swerve could well have helped prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
With both the nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a crucial ethical component. People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren.
Social movements in general are energized by this kind of ethical passion, which enables people to experience the more active knowledge associated with formed awareness. That was the case in the movement against nuclear weapons. Emotions related to individual conscience were pooled into a shared narrative by enormous numbers of people.
In earlier movements there needed to be an overall theme, even a phrase, that could rally people of highly divergent political and intellectual backgrounds. The idea of a “nuclear freeze” mobilized millions of people with the simple and clear demand that the United States and the Soviet Union freeze the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons.
Could the climate swerve come to include a “climate freeze,” defined by a transnational demand for cutting back on carbon emissions in steps that could be systematically outlined?
With or without such a rallying phrase, the climate swerve provides no guarantees of more reasonable collective behavior. But with human energies that are experiential, economic and ethical it could at least provide — and may already be providing — the psychological substrate for action on behalf of our vulnerable habitat and the human future.
Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming (Cornwall Alliance)
May 1, 2009
PREAMBLE
As governments consider policies to fight alleged man-made global warming, evangelical leaders have a responsibility to be well informed, and then to speak out. A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming demonstrates that many of these proposed policies would destroy jobs and impose trillions of dollars in costs to achieve no net benefits. They could be implemented only by enormous and dangerous expansion of government control over private life. Worst of all, by raising energy prices and hindering economic development, they would slow or stop the rise of the world’s poor out of poverty and so condemn millions to premature death.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
- We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.
- We believe abundant, affordable energy is indispensable to human flourishing, particularly to societies which are rising out of abject poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that accompany it. With present technologies, fossil and nuclear fuels are indispensable if energy is to be abundant and affordable.
- We believe mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, achievable mainly by greatly reduced use of fossil fuels, will greatly increase the price of energy and harm economies.
- We believe such policies will harm the poor more than others because the poor spend a higher percentage of their income on energy and desperately need economic growth to rise out of poverty and overcome its miseries.
WHAT WE DENY
- We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.
- We deny that alternative, renewable fuels can, with present or near-term technology, replace fossil and nuclear fuels, either wholly or in significant part, to provide the abundant, affordable energy necessary to sustain prosperous economies or overcome poverty.
- We deny that carbon dioxide—essential to all plant growth—is a pollutant. Reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures, and the costs of the policies would far exceed the benefits.
- We deny that such policies, which amount to a regressive tax, comply with the Biblical requirement of protecting the poor from harm and oppression.
A CALL TO ACTION
In light of these facts,
- We call on our fellow Christians to practice creation stewardship out of Biblical conviction, adoration for our Creator, and love for our fellow man—especially the poor.
- We call on Christian leaders to understand the truth about climate change and embrace Biblical thinking, sound science, and careful economic analysis in creation stewardship.
- We call on political leaders to adopt policies that protect human liberty, make energy more affordable, and free the poor to rise out of poverty, while abandoning fruitless, indeed harmful policies to control global temperature.
– See more at: http://www.cornwallalliance.org/2009/05/01/evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/#sthash.BAbK7cNe.dpuf
Global Warming Deniers Are Growing More Desperate by the Day (Moyers & Co.)
August 6, 2014
Fox News aired a report by the Heartland Institute purporting to “debunk” a top climate change report while obscuring the background of the organization, which previously denied the dangers of tobacco. (Image: Media Matters)
This post originally appeared at Desmogblog.
The Heartland Institute’s recent International Climate Change Conference in Las Vegas illustrates climate change deniers’ desperate confusion. AsBloomberg News noted, “Heartland’s strategy seemed to be to throw many theories at the wall and see what stuck.” A who’s who of fossil fuel industry supporters and anti-science shills variously argued that global warming is a myth; that it’s happening but natural — a result of the sun or “Pacific Decadal Oscillation”; that it’s happening but we shouldn’t worry about it; or that global cooling is the real problem.
The only common thread, Bloomberg reported, was the preponderance of attacks on and jokes about Al Gore: “It rarely took more than a minute or two before one punctuated the swirl of opaque and occasionally conflicting scientific theories.”
Personal attacks are common among deniers. Their lies are continually debunked, leaving them with no rational challenge to overwhelming scientific evidence that the world is warming and that humans are largely responsible. Comments under my columns about global warming include endless repetition of falsehoods like “there’s been no warming for 18 years,” “it’s the sun,” and references to “communist misanthropes,” “libtard warmers,” and worse…
Far worse. Katharine Hayhoe, director of Texas Tech’s Climate Science Center and an evangelical Christian, had her email inbox flooded with hate mail and threats after conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh denounced her, and right-wing blogger Mark Morano published her email address. “I got an email the other day so obscene I had to file a police report,” Hayhoe said in an interview on the Responding to Climate Change website. “They mentioned my child. It had all kinds of sexual perversions in it — it just makes your skin crawl.”
One email chastised her for taking “a man’s job” and called for her public execution, finishing with, “If you have a child, then women in the future will be even more leery of lying to get ahead, when they see your baby crying next to the basket next to the guillotine.”
Many attacks came from fellow Christians unable to accept that humans can affect “God’s creation.” That’s a belief held even by a few well-known scientists and others held up as climate experts, including Roy Spencer, David Legates and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick. They’ve signed the Cornwall Alliance’s Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which says, “We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception.” This worldview predetermines their approach to the science.
Lest you think nasty, irrational comments are exclusively from fringe elements, remember the gathering place for most deniers, the Heartland Institute, has compared those who accept the evidence for human-caused climate change to terrorists. Similar language was used to describe the US Environmental Protection Agency in a full-page ad in USA Today and Politico from the Environmental Policy Alliance, a front group set up by the PR firm Berman and Company, which has attacked environmentalists, labor-rights advocates, health organizations — even Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Humane Society — on behalf of funders and clients including Monsanto, Wendy’s and tobacco giant Phillip Morris. The terrorism meme was later picked up by Pennsylvania Republican congressman Mike Kelly.
David Suzuki: The War on Climate Scientists
Fortunately, most people don’t buy irrational attempts to disavow science. A Forum Research poll found 81 percent of Canadians accept the reality of global warming, and 58 per cent agree it’s mostly human-caused. An Ipsos MORI poll found that, although the US has a higher number of climate change deniers than 20 countries surveyed, 54 per cent of Americans believe in human-caused climate change. (Research also shows climate change denial is most prevalent in English-speaking countries, especially in areas “served” by media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch, who rejects climate science.)
It’s time to shift attention from those who sow doubt and confusion, either out of ignorance or misanthropic greed, to those who want to address a real, serious problem. The BBC has the right idea, instructing its reporters to improve accuracy by giving less air time to people with anti-science views, including climate change deniers.
Solutions exist, but every delay makes them more difficult and costly.
Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.
The views expressed in this post are the author’s alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our readers.
Anthropology and Christianity (Oxford University Press’s Blog)
AUGUST 13TH 2014
The relationship between anthropologists and Christian identity and belief is a riddle. I first became interested in it by studying the intellectual reasons for the loss of faith given by figures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are an obvious set of such intellectual triggers.
They were influenced by David Hume or Tom Paine, for example. Or, surprisingly often, it was modern biblical criticism. The big intellectual guns, of course, were figures such as Darwin, Marx, and Freud (and perhaps we can also squeeze Nietzsche in as a kind of d’Artagnan alongside those Three Musketeers). The so-called acids of modernity eat away at traditional religious claims.
As I accumulated and analyzed actual life stories, however, I hit one such trigger that had not been explored by scholars: the discipline of anthropology. It is not hard to find studies – sometimes daunting heaps of them – on Christianity and evolution or Christianity and Marxism and so on, but it was not clear to me what anthropology had to offer that was so unsettling to Christianity. Nor could I find where to go to read about it. Then there was the self-reporting of anthropologists. I’m a historian so I was coming at the discipline as an outsider. Every anthropologist I talked to, however, confidently told me that anthropology was and always had been from its very beginning a discipline that was dominated by scepticism and the rejection of faith.
Many were quite willing to go so far as to call it anti-Christian in ethos. They reported this whether they themselves were personally religious or hostile to religion – whether they self-identified as Catholic, evangelical, liberal Protestant, Jewish, secular, or atheist. If my random encounters were not profoundly unrepresentative, it seemed to be a consensus opinion. And it was not hard to find printed sources that also offered this assessment emphatically.
But then something strange began to happen. As I had shown interested in the relationship between anthropology and Christianity, my informants (to use an anthropological category!) would also casually mention as a kind of irrelevant, quirky novelty that a certain leading anthropologist was a Christian.
“Of course, dear old Mary Douglas was a devout Catholic, you know.” Purity and Danger Mary Douglas? One of the most influential anthropologists theorists of the second half of the twentieth century – no, I didn’t know. “Curiously, Margaret Mead, to the bemusement of her parents, chose to become an Episcopalian in her teens and was an active churchwomen for the rest of her life, even serving on the Commission on Church and Society of the World Council of Churches.” Coming of Age in Samoa Margaret Mead? One of the most prominent public intellectuals of twentieth-century America? That is curious.
“Strange to say, Victor Turner, who had been an agnostic Marxist, converted to Catholicism as an adult.” Really? The anthropologist who got us all talking about liminality and rites of passage and so on? The theorist behind the work of whole generations and departments of anthropology? Curiouser and curiouser.
“Oh, Catholic converts interest you? Well, of course, the presiding genius of the golden age of Oxford anthropology, E. E. Evans-Pritchard was one, as was Godfrey Lienhardt, and David Pocock, and . . .”
“What is that you say? What about Protestants? Well, Robertson Smith was an ordained minister in the Free Church of Scotland. Another fun fact was that the Primitive Methodist missionary Edwin W. Smith became the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute.” And so it went on.
What is one to make of the strong perception that anthropologists are hostile to religion with the reality of all these Christian anthropologists hiding in plain sight? The answer to such a question would no doubt be a complicated one with multiple, entangled factors. One of them, however, clearly relates to changing attitudes over time regarding the intellectual integrity and beliefs of people in traditional cultures.
Early anthropologists who rejected Christian faith such as E. B. Tylor (often called the father of anthropology) and James Frazer (of Golden Bough fame) were convinced that so-called “primitive” people had not yet reached a stage of progress in which they could be rational and logical. These pioneering anthropologists saw Christianity as a vehicle that was perniciously carrying into the modern world the superstitious, irrational ways of thinking of “savages”.
As the twentieth century unfolded, however, anthropologists learned to reject such condescending assumptions about traditional cultures. As they came to respect the people they studied, they often decided that their religious life and beliefs also had their own integrity and merit. This sometimes led them to reevaluate faith more generally—and even more personally. This connection is particularly strong in the life and work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard. He was both an adult convert to Catholicism and a major, highly influential champion of the notion that peoples such as the Azande were not “pre-logical” but rather deeply rational.
Victor and Edith Turner went into the field as committed Marxists and agnostics with a touch of bitterness in their anti-Christian stance (Edith had been raised by judgmental evangelical missionary parents). The Turners’ dawning conviction that Ndembu rituals had an irreducible spiritual reality, however, ultimately led them to receive the Christian faith as spiritually efficacious, true, and as their own spiritual home.
When anthropologists today glory in their discipline’s rejection of faith they often have in mind a very specific form of belief: a highly judgmental, narrowly sectarian version of religious commitment that condemns the indigenous people they study as totally cut off from any positive, authentic spiritual knowledge and experience. Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner, however, are typical of numerous Christian anthropologists who were convinced that the traditional African cultures they studied possessed a natural revelation of God.
The riddle of anthropologists and the Christian faith is at least partially solved by distinguishing between “the wrong kind of faith”—the rejecting of which is a standard trope in the discipline—from an ethnographic openness to spirituality which can surprisingly often find expression in Christian forms for individual theorists.
Image credit: Old Christian Cross, by Filipov Ivo. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Polícia enfrenta ‘demônios’ em grupo evangélico; conheça os PMs de Cristo (Folha de S.Paulo)
12/08/2014 06h00
“Na hora de decidir por atirar ou não, muitas vezes a técnica não vai ajudar. O policial vai precisar de um sentido maior.”
A afirmação do coronel da PM Alexandre Terra ajuda a justificar, no vídeo abaixo, a existência dos PMs de Cristo.
A associação, de cunho religioso e atualmente presidida pelo policial, existe há 22 anos na corporação paulista e contrasta com a rotina muitas vezes violenta dos seus membros.
Na reportagem, de Anna Virginia Balloussier com fotografia de Rodrigo Machado e edição de Diego Arvate, o coronel exalta a busca do equilíbrio para superar “situações sobrenaturais” vividas por policiais que “ficaram possessos por demônios”.
The Anthropocene: Too Serious for Post-Modern Games (Immanence Blog)
August 18, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The following is a guest post by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. It continues the Immanence series “Debating the Anthropocene.” See here, here, and here for previous articles in the series. (And note that some lengthy comments have been added to the previous post by Jan Zalasiewicz, Kieran Suckling, and others.)
The Anthropocene: Too Serious for Post-Modern Games
by Clive Hamilton
In his post “Against the Anthropocene”, Kieran Suckling makes two main arguments. The first is that the choice of “Anthropocene” as the name for the new epoch breaks with stratigraphic tradition; he feels uncomfortable with a change in tradition, not least because he suspects the break reflects a hidden political objective. The second is that similar names have been invented for the era of industrialism in the past, names that have gone out of fashion, and the Anthropocene will go the same way.
Many scientists and social scientists have entered the debate over the Anthropocene. Each of them seems to want to impose their own disciplinary framework on it. Thus one respondent to Kieran’s post wrote that it is “difficult to get a handle on the term ‘Anthropocene’ because it means very different things to different people”. This is true, but it is true because most people have not bothered to read the half dozen basic papers on the Anthropocene by those who have defined it, and therefore do not know what they are talking about.
The problem is that those who want to colonise and redefine the Anthropocene completely miss the central point being made by Earth system scientists like Paul Crutzen, Will Steffen and Jan Zalasiewicz. I have elsewhere explained why those who have not made the gestalt shift to Earth system thinking cannot help but get the Anthropocene wrong. The Earth system scientists are saying that something radically new has occurred on planet Earth, something that can be detected from the late 18th-century and which is due predominantly to a serious disruption to the global carbon cycle. This disruption has set the Earth system on a new, unpredictable and dangerous trajectory.
Ecologists who have not made the leap to Earth system thinking have been the worst offenders. But a few social scientists and humanities people have been joining the fray, bringing their constructivist baggage. Kieran, I fear, is one of them.
In response to Jan Zalasiewicz’s comment that Paul Crutzen came up with the term at the right time, Kieran misunderstands him, asking: “Why was the time right? Is there something about western psychology and history that made this time right?” So he treats the development of a body of scientific evidence as if it were merely an emanation of social and psychological conditions. It’s a reading that has all of the epistemological and political faults of the “social construction of science”, an approach that today is deployed most effectively by climate science deniers.
Kieran’s disquisition on the historical use of terms like “the age of man” compounds this mistake. It suggests that he has missed the fundamental point – thefundamental point – about the new epoch: that the functioning of the Earth systemhas changed, and that it changed at the end of the 18th century; or, if we want to be absolutely certain, in the decades after the Second World War. I sense that Jan Z’s gentle reminder was lost, so let me stress it. He wrote: “The Anthropocene is not about being able to detect human influence in stratigraphy, but reflects a change in the Earth system” (my emphasis). The core of the problem, I think, is that most participants in the debate do not actually understand what is meant by “the Earth system”.
So whatever historical interest it may have (and personally I find it fascinating), the fact that Cuvier, Buffon, de Chardin and several others have deployed terms like “the age of man” has no bearing whatsoever on the current debate, which is about a physical transformation, a rupture, that has actually occurred. Arguing that it’s all been said before – “I can show that your claim to have come up with something decisively new is historically inaccurate” – is a standard rhetorical strategy known as deflation. But it carries the same danger we were warned of as children when our parents read us the story of the boy who cried wolf. Whatever historical precedent, and whatever environmental alarm bell may have been rung in the past, the wolf has arrived.
Deflationary moves that characterise the Anthropocene as merely the latest attempt by anthropocentric westerners to impose an “age of man” frame on the world – that it is a fad that will wane as all the others have – betray an essential failure to grasp what the Earth scientists are telling us is now happening in the Earth system. When the IPCC tells us we are heading for a doubling or, more likely, a trebling of CO2concentrations it is not a fad. When the world’s scientific academies warn we are heading into a world of 4°C warming, changing the conditions of life on the planet, they are not saying it because it’s fashionable. And if the Anthropocene is another example of western linguistic imperialism, changing the name will not exempt the poor and vulnerable of the South from its devastating effects.
No, I’m sorry, this is serious now. After all the attacks on climate science and the well-funded, systematic campaign to discredit climate scientists, people of good will have an absolute obligation not to play around with the science. The constructivist games of the 80s and 90s are an intellectual luxury we can no longer afford.
Let me now comment on Kieran’s argument that the Anthropocene is wrongly named because it deviates from naming tradition. He writes that epochs are never named for the causes of change but for the changed composition of the species present in each epoch, era or period. When we examine the helpful lists he provides linking eras, periods and epochs to their characteristic biota, the word that appears uniformly is “appear”. Eukaryotes appear, reptiles appear, fish appear, mammals appear, and so on.
When he calls for consistency in naming, then, we should name the Anthropocene not after the cause of the new epoch (techno-industrial anthropos) but after the new forms of life that have appeared. The problem is that no new forms of life have yet appeared. It seems very likely they will, but it would be impractical to wait 100,000 years before we knew what to name the latest epoch. By then all of the members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy will be dead (they who already in my imagination are like the wizened judges of the Court of Chancery hearing Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Bleak House).
So we are stuck with an anomaly; why this should cause anxiety, except to those wedded to tradition, I do not know. We are practical people; if we cannot apply the old principle to naming a manifestly new and important geological epoch then we must choose a new principle.
Kieran’s solution to the problem is to name the epoch after the radical homogenization of the planet’s species (along with the extinction of many). He suggests the “Homogenocene”. But here he only smuggles in a new criterion, replacing the appearance of new species with a change in the distribution of existing ones. If we were to accept Kieran’s argument then, as Jan points out, why not name the epoch after the overwhelmingly dominant feature of homogenisation, the spread of humans across the globe. According to Vaclav Smil, humans and their domestic animals now account for a breath-taking 97 per cent of the biomass of all terrestrial vertebrates. On Kieran’s own criterion, we would name the new epoch … the Anthropocene.
Finally, it will help if I tell the story of the naming of the Anthropocene, for an innocent reader of Kieran’s piece may draw the conclusion that there was some kind of secret meeting at which a group of western scientists committed to an anthropocentric worldview conspired to promote their ideology by choosing a name that embodies it. Kieran asks: “What belief system(s) drive the shift … to a name based on the power of one species, a species that happens to be us?”
The answer is more prosaic and goes like this. In 2000 Paul Crutzen was at a scientific meeting in Mexico. As the discussion progressed he became increasingly frustrated at the use of the term “Holocene” which he felt no longer described the state of the Earth system, which he knew had been irreversibly disrupted and damaged by human activity. Unable to contain his irritation he intervened, declaring to the meeting: “It’s not the Holocene, it’s … it’s … it’s … the Anthropocene.”
That was it. He just blurted it out; and it stuck. Paul Crutzen is an atmospheric chemist. Given his training it is no surprise that as his brain struggled for the right word it would come with one that linked the state of the Earth to the activities of humans, anthropos. If there had been a savvy sociologist sitting at the table, she might have said: “Wait a minute Paul. It’s not humans in general who got us into this mess, but western industrial ones. So let’s call it the Capitalocene or the Technocene.”
Who knows, perhaps that intervention would have changed the course of history right then. But it didn’t happen, and we have the term we are now debating. Crutzen and his various co-authors would agree with the savvy sociologist that it has been techno-industrialism with its origins in Europe that brought on the new epoch. They have argued persistently that the Anthropocene began with the growth of industries powered by fossil energy towards the end of the 18th-century and accelerated with the hyper-consumerism of the post-war decades.
The real adversaries here are not Crutzen et al. but those scientists, mostly ecologists who do not ‘get’ Earth system science, who are making all sorts of erroneous and confusing claims about the Anthropocene’s origins lying in the distant past, thousands of years before European industrialisation. If anyone is trying to displace responsibility for the mess we are in then they are the culprits. It is they who want to blend the Anthropocene into the Holocene and thereby make theanthropos of the Anthropocene a neutral, blameless, meaningless cause, so that the radical transformation that we now see is the result merely of humans doing what humans do, which nothing can change. No wonder political conservatives are drawn to the early Anthropocene hypothesis.
How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen (The Atlantic)
Environmentalists warn us that apocalypse awaits. Economists tell us that minimal fixes will get us through. Here’s how we can move beyond the impasse.
Josh Cochran
Not long ago, my newspaper informed me that glaciers in the western Antarctic, undermined by the warmer seas of a hotter world, were collapsing, and their disappearance “now appears to be unstoppable.” The melting of these great ice sheets would make seas rise by at least four feet—ultimately, possibly 12—more than enough to flood cities from New York to Tokyo to Mumbai. Because I am interested in science, I read the two journal articles that had inspired the story. How much time do we have, I wondered, before catastrophe hits?
One study, in Geophysical Research Letters, provided no guidance; the authors concluded only that the disappearing glaciers would “significantly contribute to sea level rise in decades to centuries to come.” But the other, in Science, offered more-precise estimates: during the next century, the oceans will surge by as much as a quarter of a millimeter a year. By 2100, that is, the calamity in Antarctica will have driven up sea levels by almost an inch. The process would get a bit faster, the researchers emphasized, “within centuries.”
How is one supposed to respond to this kind of news? On the one hand, the transformation of the Antarctic seems like an unfathomable disaster. On the other hand, the disaster will never affect me or anyone I know; nor, very probably, will it trouble my grandchildren. How much consideration do I owe the people it will affect, my 40-times-great-grandchildren, who, many climate researchers believe, will still be confronted by rising temperatures and seas? Americans don’t even save for their own retirement! How can we worry about such distant, hypothetical beings?
In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.
Worse, confronting climate change requires swearing off something that has been an extraordinary boon to humankind: cheap energy from fossil fuels. In the 3,600 years between 1800B.C. and 1800 A.D., the economic historian Gregory Clark has calculated, there was “no sign of any improvement in material conditions” in Europe and Asia. Then came the Industrial Revolution. Driven by the explosive energy of coal, oil, and natural gas, it inaugurated an unprecedented three-century wave of prosperity. Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.
In the best of times, this problem—given its apocalyptic stakes, bewildering scale, and vast potential cost—would be difficult to resolve. But we are not in the best of times. We are in a time of legislative paralysis. In an important step, the Obama administration announced in June its decision to cut power-plant emissions 30 percent by 2030. Otherwise, this country has seen strikingly little political action on climate change, despite three decades of increasingly high-pitched chatter by scientists, activists, economists, pundits, and legislators.
The chatter itself, I would argue, has done its share to stall progress. Rhetorical overreach, moral miscalculation, shouting at cross-purposes: this toxic blend is particularly evident when activists, who want to scare Americans into taking action, come up against economists, with their cool calculations of acceptable costs. Eco-advocates insist that only the radical transformation of society—the old order demolished, foundation to roof—can fend off the worst consequences of climate change. Economists argue for adapting to the most-likely consequences; cheerleaders for industrial capitalism, they propose quite different, much milder policies, and are ready to let nature take a bigger hit in the short and long terms alike. Both envelop themselves in the mantle of Science, emitting a fug of charts and graphs. (Actually, every side in the debate, including the minority who deny that humans can affect the climate at all, claims the backing of Science.) Bewildered and battered by the back-and-forth, the citizenry sits, for the most part, on its hands. For all the hot air expended on the subject, we still don’t know how to talk about climate change.
As an issue, climate change was unlucky: when nonspecialists first became aware of it, in the 1990s, environmental attitudes had already become tribal political markers. As the Yale historian Paul Sabin makes clear in The Bet, it wasn’t always this way. The votes for the 1970 Clean Air Act, for example, were 374–1 in the House, 73–0 in the Senate. Sabin’s book takes off from a single event: a bet between the ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich and the economist Julian Simon a decade later. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which decried humankind’s rising numbers, was a foundational text in the environmental movement. Simon’s Ultimate Resource (1981) was its antimatter equivalent: a celebration of population growth, it awakened opposition to the same movement.
Activist led by Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, protest the building of the Keystone XL pipeline at the White House, February 2013. (AP)
Ehrlich was moderately liberal in his politics but unrestrained in his rhetoric. The second sentence of The Population Bomb promised that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death within two decades, no matter what “crash programs” the world launched to feed them. A year later, Ehrlich gave even odds that “England will not exist in the year 2000.” In 1974, he told Congress that “a billion or more people” could starve in the 1980s “at the latest.” When the predictions didn’t pan out, he attacked his critics as “incompetent” and “ignorant,” “morons” and “idiots.”
Simon, who died in 1998, argued that “human resourcefulness and enterprise” will extricate us from our ecological dilemma. Moderately conservative in his politics, he was exuberantly uninhibited in his scorn for eco-alarmists. Humankind faces no serious environmental problems, he asserted. “All long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.” (All? Really?) “There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely.” Relishing his role as a spoiler, he gave speeches while wearing red plastic devil horns. Unsurprisingly, he attracted disagreement, to which he responded with as much bluster as Ehrlich. Critics, motivated by “blatant intellectual dishonesty” and indifference to the poor, were “corrupt,” their ideas “ignorant and wrongheaded.”
In 1980, the two men wagered $1,000 on the prices of five metals 10 years hence. If the prices rose, as Ehrlich predicted, it would imply that these resources were growing scarcer, as Homo sapiens plundered the planet. If the prices fell, this would be a sign that markets and human cleverness had made the metals relatively less scarce: progress was continuing. Prices dropped. Ehrlich paid up, insisting disingenuously that he had been “schnookered.”
Schnookered, no; unlucky, yes. In 2010, three Holy Cross economists simulated the bet for every decade from 1900 to 2007. Ehrlich would have won 61 percent of the time. The results, Sabin says, do not prove that these resources have grown scarcer. Rather, metal prices crashed after the First World War and spent most of a century struggling back to their 1918 levels. Ecological issues were almost irrelevant.
The bet demonstrated little about the environment but much about environmental politics. The American landscape first became a source of widespread anxiety at the beginning of the 20th century. Initially, the fretting came from conservatives, both the rural hunters who established the licensing system that brought back white-tailed deer from near-extinction and the Ivy League patricians who created the national parks. So ineradicable was the conservative taint that decades later, the left still scoffed at ecological issues as right-wing distractions. At the University of Michigan, the radical Students for a Democratic Society protested the first Earth Day, in 1970, as elitist flimflam meant to divert public attention from class struggle and the Vietnam War; the left-wing journalist I. F. Stone called the nationwide marches a “snow job.” By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.
Climate change is a perfect issue for symbolic battle, because it is as yet mostly invisible.
The result, as the Emory historian Patrick Allitt demonstrates in A Climate of Crisis, was a political back-and-forth that became ever less productive. Time and again, Allitt writes, activists and corporate executives railed against each other. Out of this clash emerged regulatory syntheses: rules for air, water, toxins. Often enough, businesspeople then discovered that following the new rules was less expensive than they had claimed it would be; environmentalists meanwhile found out that the problems were less dire than they had claimed.
Throughout the 1980s, for instance, activists charged that acid rain from midwestern power-plant emissions was destroying thousands of East Coast lakes. Utilities insisted that anti-pollution equipment would be hugely expensive and make homeowners’ electric bills balloon. One American Electric Power representative predicted that acid-rain control could lead to the “destruction of the Midwest economy.” A 1990 amendment to the Clean Air Act, backed by both the Republican administration and the Democratic Congress, set up a cap-and-trade mechanism that reduced acid rain at a fraction of the predicted cost; electric bills were barely affected. Today, most scientists have concluded that the effects of acid rain were overstated to begin with—fewer lakes were hurt than had been thought, and acid rain was not the only cause.
Rather than learning from this and other examples that, as Allitt puts it, “America’s environmental problems, though very real, were manageable,” each side stored up bitterness, like batteries taking on charge. The process that had led, however disagreeably, to successful environmental action in the 1970s and ’80s brought on political stasis in the ’90s. Environmental issues became ways for politicians to signal their clan identity to supporters. As symbols, the issues couldn’t be compromised. Standing up for your side telegraphed your commitment to take back America—either from tyrannical liberal elitism or right-wing greed and fecklessness. Nothing got done.
As an issue, climate change is perfect for symbolic battle, because it is as yet mostly invisible. Carbon dioxide, its main cause, is not emitted in billowing black clouds, like other pollutants; nor is it caustic, smelly, or poisonous. A side effect of modernity, it has for now a tiny practical impact on most people’s lives. To be sure, I remember winters as being colder in my childhood, but I also remember my home then as a vast castle and my parents as godlike beings.
In concrete terms, Americans encounter climate change mainly in the form of three graphs, staples of environmental articles. The first shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing. Almost nobody disputes this. The second graph shows rising global temperatures. This measurement is trickier: carbon dioxide is spread uniformly in the air, but temperatures are affected by a host of factors (clouds, rain, wind, altitude, the reflectivity of the ground) that differ greatly from place to place. Here the data are more subject to disagreement. A few critics argue that for the past 17 years warming has mostly stopped. Still, most scientists believe that in the past century the Earth’s average temperature has gone up by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
Rising temperatures per se are not the primary concern. What matters most is their future influence on other things: agricultural productivity, sea levels, storm frequency, infectious disease. As the philosopher Dale Jamieson points out in the unfortunately titled Reason in a Dark Time, most of these effects cannot be determined by traditional scientific experiments—white-coats in laboratories can’t melt a spare Arctic ice cap to see what happens. (Climate change has no lab rats.) Instead, thousands of researchers refine ever bigger and more complex mathematical models. The third graph typically shows the consequences such models predict, ranging from worrisome (mainly) to catastrophic (possibly).
Such charts are meaningful to the climatologists who make them. But for the typical citizen they are a muddle, too abstract—too much like 10th-grade homework—to be convincing, let alone to motivate action. In the history of our species, has any human heart ever been profoundly stirred by a graph? Some other approach, proselytizers have recognized, is needed.
To stoke concern, eco-campaigners like Bill McKibben still resort, Ehrlich-style, to waving a skeleton at the reader. Thus the first sentence of McKibben’sOil and Honey, a memoir of his climate activism, describes 2011–12, the period covered by his book, as “a time when the planet began to come apart.” Already visible “in almost every corner of the earth,” climate “chaos” is inducing “an endless chain of disasters that will turn civilization into a never-ending emergency response drill.”
Bill McKibben says we must “start producing a nation of careful, small-scale farmers … who can adapt to the crazed new world with care and grace.”
The only solution to our ecological woes, McKibben argues, is to live simpler, more local, less resource-intensive existences—something he believes is already occurring. “After a long era of getting big and distant,” he writes, “our economy, and maybe our culture, has started to make a halting turn toward the small and local.” Not only will this shift let us avoid the worst consequences of climate change, it will have the happy side effect of turning a lot of unpleasant multinational corporations to ash. As we “subside into a workable, even beautiful, civilization,” we will lead better lives. No longer hypnotized by the buzz and pop of consumer culture, narcotized couch potatoes will be transformed into robust, active citizens: spiritually engaged, connected to communities, appreciative of Earth’s abundance.
For McKibben, the engagement is full throttle: The Oil half of his memoir is about founding 350.org, a group that seeks to create a mass movement against climate change. (The 350 refers to the theoretical maximum safe level, in parts per million, of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a level we have already surpassed.) The Honey half is about buying 70 acres near his Vermont home to support an off-the-grid beekeeper named Kirk Webster, who is living out McKibben’s organic dream in a handcrafted, solar-powered cabin in the woods. Webster, McKibben believes, is the future. We must, he says, “start producing a nation of careful, small-scale farmers such as Kirk Webster, who can adapt to the crazed new world with care and grace, and who don’t do much more damage in the process.”
Poppycock, the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner in effect replies in The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse. A best-selling, telegenic public intellectual (a species that hardly exists in this country), Bruckner is mainly going after what he calls “ecologism,” of which McKibbenites are exemplars. At base, he says, ecologism seeks not to save nature but to purify humankind through self-flagellating asceticism.
To Bruckner, ecologism is both ethnocentric and counterproductive. Ethnocentric because eco-denunciations of capitalism simply give new, green garb to the long-standing Euro-American fear of losing dominance over the developing world (whose recent growth derives, irksomely, from fossil fuels). Counterproductive because ecologism induces indifference, or even hostility to environmental issues. In the quest to force humanity into a puritanical straitjacket of rural simplicity, ecologism employs what should be neutral, fact-based descriptions of a real-world problem (too much carbon dioxide raises temperatures) as bludgeons to compel people to accept modes of existence they would otherwise reject. Intuiting moral blackmail underlying the apparently objective charts and graphs, Bruckner argues, people react with suspicion, skepticism, and sighing apathy—the opposite of the reaction McKibbenites hope to evoke.
The ranchers and farmers in Tony Horwitz’s Boom, a deft and sometimes sobering e-book, suggest Bruckner may be on to something. Horwitz, possibly best known for his study of Civil War reenactors, Confederates in the Attic, travels along the proposed path of the Keystone XL, a controversial pipeline intended to take oil from Alberta’s tar-sands complex to refineries in Steele City, Nebraska—and the project McKibben has used as the rallying cry for 350.org. McKibben set off on his anti-Keystone crusade after the climatologist-provocateur James Hansen charged in 2011 that building the pipeline would be “game over” for the climate. If Keystone were built, Hansen later wrote, “civilization would be at risk.” Everyone Horwitz meets has heard this scenario. But nobody seems to have much appetite for giving up the perks of industrial civilization, Kirk Webster–style. “You want to go back to the Stone Age and use only wind, sun, and water?” one person asks. A truck driver in the tar-sands project tells Horwitz, “This industry is giving me a future, even if it’s a short one and we’re all about to toast together.” Given the scale of the forces involved, individual action seems futile. “It’s going to burn up anyhow at the end,” explains a Hutterite farmer, matter-of-factly. “The world will end in fire.”
Whereas McKibbenites see carbon dioxide as an emblem of a toxic way of life, economists like William Nordhaus of Yale tend to view it as simply a by-product of the good fortune brought by capitalism. Nordhaus, the president of the American Economic Association, has researched climate issues for four decades. His The Climate Casino has an even, unhurried tone; a classic Voice of Authority rumbles from the page. Our carbon-dioxide issues, he says, have a “simple answer,” one “firmly based in economic theory and history”:
The best approach is to use market mechanisms. And the single most important market mechanism that is missing today is a high price on CO2 emissions, or what is called “carbon prices” … The easiest way is simply to tax CO2 emissions: a “carbon tax” … The carbon price [from the tax] will be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
Nordhaus provides graphs (!) showing how a gradually increasing tax—or, possibly, a market in emissions permits—would slowly and steadily ratchet down global carbon-dioxide output. The problem, as he admits, is that the projected reduction “assumes full participation.” Translated from econo-speak, “full participation” means that the Earth’s rich and populous nations must simultaneously apply the tax. Brazil, China, France, India, Russia, the United States—all must move in concert, globally cooperating.
To say that a global carbon tax is a simple answer is like arguing that the simple answer to death is repealing the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Alas, nothing like Nordhaus’s planetary carbon tax has ever been enacted. The sole precedent is the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 treaty banning substances that react with atmospheric ozone and reduce its ability to absorb the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. Signed by every United Nations member and successfully updated 10 times, the protocol is a model of international eco-cooperation. But it involves outlawing chemicals in refrigerators and spray cans, not asking nations to revamp the base of their own prosperity. Nordhaus’s declaration that a global carbon tax is a simple answer is like arguing that the simple answer to death is repealing the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Does climate change, as Nordhaus claims, truly slip into the silk glove of standard economic thought? The dispute is at the center of Jamieson’s Reason in a Dark Time. Parsing logic with the care of a raccoon washing a shiny stone, Jamieson maintains that economists’ discussions of climate change are almost as problematic as those of environmentalists and politicians, though for different reasons.
Remember how I was complaining that all discussions of climate change devolve into homework? Here, sadly, is proof. To critique economists’ claims, Jamieson must drag the reader through the mucky assumptions underlying cost-benefit analysis, a standard economic tool. In the case of climate change, the costs of cutting carbon dioxide are high. What are the benefits? If the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises only slightly above its current 400 parts per million, most climatologists believe, there is (roughly) a 90 percent chance that global temperatures will eventually rise between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit, with the most likely jump being between 4 and 5 degrees. Nordhaus and most other economists conclude that humankind can slowly constrain this relatively modest rise in carbon without taking extraordinary, society-transforming measures, though neither decreasing the use of fossil fuels nor offsetting their emissions will be cheap or easy. But the same estimates show (again in rough terms) a 5 percent chance that letting carbon dioxide rise much above its current level would set off a domino-style reaction leading to global devastation. (No one pays much attention to the remaining 5 percent chance that the carbon rise would have very little effect on temperature.)
In our daily lives, we typically focus on the most likely result: I decide whether to jaywalk without considering the chance that I will trip in the street and get run over. But sometimes we focus on the extreme: I lock up my gun and hide the bullets in a separate place to minimize the chance that my kids will find and play with them. For climate change, should we focus on adapting to the mostprobable outcome or averting the most dangerous one? Cost-benefit analyses typically ignore the most-radical outcomes: they assume that society has agreed to accept the small but real risk of catastrophe—something environmentalists, to take one particularly vehement section of society, have by no means done.
On top of this, Jamieson argues, there is a second problem in the models economists use to discus climate change. Because the payoff from carbon-dioxide reduction will occur many decades from now, Nordhausian analysis suggests that we should do the bare minimum today, even if that means saddling our descendants with a warmer world. Doing the minimum is expensive enough already, economists say. Because people tomorrow will be richer than we are, as we are richer than our grandparents were, they will be better able to pay to clean up our emissions. Unfortunately, this is an ethically problematic stance. How can we weigh the interests of someone born in 2050 against those of someone born in 1950? In this kind of trade-off between generations, Jamieson argues, “there is no plausible value” for how much we owe the future.
Given their moral problems, he concludes, economic models are much less useful as guides than their proponents believe. For all their ostensible practicality—for all their attempts to skirt the paralysis-inducing specter of the apocalypse—economists, too, don’t have a good way to talk about climate change.
Years ago, a colleague and I spoke with the physicist Richard Feynman, later a national symbol of puckish wit and brash truth-telling. At the frontiers of science, he told us, hosts of unclear, mutually contradictory ideas are always swarming about. Researchers can never agree on how to proceed or even on what is important. In these circumstances, Feynman said, he always tried to figure out what would take him forward no matter which theory eventually turned out to be correct. In this agnostic spirit, let’s assume that rising carbon-dioxide levels will become a problem of some magnitude at some time and that we will want to do something practical about it. Is there something we should do, no matter what technical arcanae underlie the cost-benefit analyses, no matter when we guess the bad effects from climate change will kick in, no matter how we value future generations, no matter what we think of global capitalism? Indeed, is there some course of action that makes sense even if we think that climate change isn’t much of a problem at all?
As my high-school math teacher used to say, let’s do the numbers. Roughly three-quarters of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels, and roughly three-quarters of that comes from just two sources: coal in its various forms, and oil in its various forms, including gasoline. Different studies produce slightly different estimates, but they all agree that coal is responsible for more carbon dioxide than oil is—about 25 percent more. That number is likely to increase, because coal consumption is growing much faster than oil consumption.
Geo-engineering involves tinkering with planetary systems we only partially understand. But planet-hacking does have an overarching advantage: it’s cheap.
Although coal and oil are both fossil fuels, they are used differently. In this country, for example, the great majority of oil—about three-quarters—is consumed by individuals, as they heat their homes and drive their cars. Almost all U.S. coal (93 percent) is burned not in homes but by electric-power plants; the rest is mainly used by industry, notably for making cement and steel. Cutting oil use, in other words, requires huge numbers of people to change their houses and automobiles—the United States alone has 254 million vehicles on the road. Reducing U.S. coal emissions, by contrast, means regulating 557 big power plants and 227 steel and cement factories. (Surprisingly, many smaller coal plants exist, some at hospitals and schools, but their contributions are negligible.) I’ve been whacking poor old Nordhaus for his ideas about who should pay for climate change, but he does make this point, and precisely: “The most cost-effective way to reduce CO2 emissions is to reduce the use of coal first and most sharply.” Note, too, that this policy comes with a public-health bonus: reining in coal pollution could ultimately avoid as many as 6,600 premature deaths and 150,000 children’s asthma attacks per year in the United States alone.
Different nations have different arrangements, but almost everywhere the basic point holds true: a relatively small number of industrial coal plants—perhaps 7,000 worldwide—put out an amazingly large amount of carbon dioxide, more than 40 percent of the global total. And that figure is rising; last year, coal’s share of energy production hit a 44-year high, because Asian nations are building coal plants at a fantastic rate (and, possibly, because demand for coal-fired electricity will soar as electric cars become popular). No matter what your views about the impact and import of climate change, you are primarily talking about coal. To my mind, at least, retrofitting 7,000 industrial facilities, however mind-boggling, is less mind-boggling than, say, transforming the United States into “a nation of careful, small-scale farmers” or enacting a global carbon tax with “full participation.” It is, at least, imaginable.
The focus of the Obama administration on reducing coal emissions suggests that it has followed this logic. If the pattern of the late 20th century still held, industry would reply with exaggerated estimates of the cost, and compromises would be worked out. But because the environment has become a proxy for a tribal battle, an exercise in power politics will surely ensue. I’ve given McKibben grief for his apocalyptic rhetoric, but he’s exactly correct that without a push from a popular movement—without something like 350.org—meaningful attempts to cut back coal emissions are much less likely to yield results.
Regrettably, 350.org has fixated on the Keystone pipeline, which the Congressional Research Service has calculated would raise this nation’s annual output of greenhouse gases by 0.05 to 0.3 percent. (James Hansen, in arguing that the pipeline would be “game over” for the climate, erroneously assumed that all of the tar-sands oil could be burned rapidly, instead of dribbling out in relatively small portions year by year, over decades.) None of this is to say that exploiting tar sands is a good idea, especially given the apparent violation of native treaties in Canada. But a popular movement focused on symbolic goals will have little ability to win practical battles in Washington.
If politics fail, the only recourse, says David Keith, a Harvard professor of public policy and applied physics, will be a technical fix. And soon—by mid-century. Keith is talking about geo-engineering: fighting climate change with more climate change. A Case for Climate Engineering is a short book arguing that we should study spraying the stratosphere with tiny glittering droplets of sulfuric acid that bounce sunlight back into space, reducing the Earth’s temperature. Physically speaking, the notion is feasible. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, created huge amounts of airborne sulfuric acid—and lowered the Earth’s average temperature that year by about 1 degree.
Keith is candid about the drawbacks. Not only does geo-engineering involve tinkering with planetary systems we only partially understand, it can’t cancel out, even in theory, greenhouse problems like altered rainfall patterns and increased ocean acidity. The sulfur would soon fall to the Earth, a toxic rain of pollution that could kill thousands of people every year. The carbon dioxide that was already in the air would remain. To continue to slow warming, sulfur would have to be lofted anew every year. Still, Keith points out, without this relatively crude repair, unimpeded climate change could be yet more deadly.
Planet-hacking does have an overarching advantage: it’s cheap. “The cost of geoengineering the entire planet for a decade,” Keith writes, “could be less than the $6 billion the Italian government is spending on dikes and movable barriers to protect a single city, Venice, from climate change–related sea level rise.”
That advantage is also dangerous, he points out. A single country could geo-engineer the whole planet by itself. Or one country’s geo-engineering could set off conflicts with another country—a Chinese program to increase its monsoon might reduce India’s monsoon. “Both are nuclear weapons states,” Keith reminds us. According to Forbes, the world has 1,645 billionaires, several hundred of them in nations threatened by climate change. If their businesses or homes were at risk, any one of them could single-handedly pay for a course of geo-engineering. Is anyone certain none of these people would pull the trigger?
Few experts think that relying on geo-engineering would be a good idea. But no one knows how soon reality will trump ideology, and so we may finally have hit on a useful form of alarmism. One of the virtues of Keith’s succinct, scary book is to convince the reader that unless we find a way to talk about climate change, planes full of sulfuric acid will soon be on the runway.
Our Microbiome May Be Looking Out for Itself (New York Times)
A highly magnified view of Enterococcus faecalis, a bacterium that lives in the human gut. Microbes may affect our cravings, new research suggests.CreditCenters for Disease Control and Prevention
Your body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes, collectively known as your microbiome. Naturalists first became aware of our invisible lodgers in the 1600s, but it wasn’t until the past few years that we’ve become really familiar with them.
This recent research has given the microbiome a cuddly kind of fame. We’ve come to appreciate how beneficial our microbes are — breaking down our food, fighting off infections and nurturing our immune system. It’s a lovely, invisible garden we should be tending for our own well-being.
But in the journal Bioessays, a team of scientists has raised a creepier possibility. Perhaps our menagerie of germs is also influencing our behavior in order to advance its own evolutionary success — giving us cravings for certain foods, for example.
Maybe the microbiome is our puppet master.
“One of the ways we started thinking about this was in a crime-novel perspective,” said Carlo C. Maley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-author of the new paper. “What are the means, motives and opportunity for the microbes to manipulate us? They have all three.”
The idea that a simple organism could control a complex animal may sound like science fiction. In fact, there are many well-documented examples of parasites controlling their hosts.
Some species of fungi, for example, infiltrate the brains of ants and coax them to climb plants and clamp onto the underside of leaves. The fungi then sprout out of the ants and send spores showering onto uninfected ants below.
How parasites control their hosts remains mysterious. But it looks as if they release molecules that directly or indirectly can influence their brains.
Our microbiome has the biochemical potential to do the same thing. In our guts, bacteria make some of the same chemicals that our neurons use to communicate with one another, such as dopamine and serotonin. And the microbes can deliver these neurological molecules to the dense web of nerve endings that line the gastrointestinal tract.
A number of recent studies have shown that gut bacteria can use these signals to alter the biochemistry of the brain. Compared with ordinary mice, those raised free of germs behave differently in a number of ways. They are more anxious, for example, and have impaired memory.
Adding certain species of bacteria to a normal mouse’s microbiome can reveal other ways in which they can influence behavior. Some bacteria lower stress levels in the mouse. When scientists sever the nerve relaying signals from the gut to the brain, this stress-reducing effect disappears.
Some experiments suggest that bacteria also can influence the way their hosts eat. Germ-free mice develop more receptors for sweet flavors in their intestines, for example. They also prefer to drink sweeter drinks than normal mice do.
Scientists have also found that bacteria can alter levels of hormones that govern appetite in mice.
Dr. Maley and his colleagues argue that our eating habits create a strong motive for microbes to manipulate us. “From the microbe’s perspective, what we eat is a matter of life and death,” Dr. Maley said.
Different species of microbes thrive on different kinds of food. If they can prompt us to eat more of the food they depend on, they can multiply.
Microbial manipulations might fill in some of the puzzling holes in our understandings about food cravings, Dr. Maley said. Scientists have tried to explain food cravings as the body’s way to build up a supply of nutrients after deprivation, or as addictions, much like those for drugs like tobacco and cocaine.
But both explanations fall short. Take chocolate: Many people crave it fiercely, but it isn’t an essential nutrient. And chocolate doesn’t drive people to increase their dose to get the same high. “You don’t need more chocolate at every sitting to enjoy it,” Dr. Maley said.
Perhaps, he suggests, the certain kinds of bacteria that thrive on chocolate are coaxing us to feed them.
John F. Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who was not involved in the new study, suggested that microbes might also manipulate us in ways that benefited both them and us. “It’s probably not a simple parasitic scenario,” he said.
Research by Dr. Cryan and others suggests that a healthy microbiome helps mammals develop socially. Germ-free mice, for example, tend to avoid contact with other mice.
That social bonding is good for the mammals. But it may also be good for the bacteria.
“When mammals are in social groups, they’re more likely to pass on microbes from one to the other,” Dr. Cryan said.
“I think it’s a very interesting and compelling idea,” said Rob Knight, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, who was also not involved in the new study.
If microbes do in fact manipulate us, Dr. Knight said, we might be able to manipulate them for our own benefit — for example, by eating yogurt laced with bacteria that would make us crave healthy foods.
“It would obviously be of tremendous practical importance,” Dr. Knight said. But he warned that research on the microbiome’s effects on behavior was “still in its early stages.”
The most important thing to do now, Dr. Knight and other scientists said, was to run experiments to see if microbes really are manipulating us.
Mark Lyte, a microbiologist at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center who pioneered this line of research in the 1990s, is now conducting some of those experiments. He’s investigating whether particular species of bacteria can change the preferences mice have for certain foods.
“This is not a for-sure thing,” Dr. Lyte said. “It needs scientific, hard-core demonstration.”
Nasa-funded study warns of ‘collapse of civilisation’ in coming decades (Independent)
‘Business as usual’ approach of economic elite will lead society to disaster, scientists warn
ADAM WITHNALL
Sunday 16 March 2014
Modern civilisation is heading for collapse within a matter of decades because of growing economic instability and pressure on the planet’s resources, according to a scientific study funded by Nasa.
Using theoretical models to predict what will happen to the industrialised world over the course of the next century or so, mathematicians found that even with conservative estimates things started to go very badly, very quickly.
Referring to the past collapses of often very sophisticated civilisations – the Roman, Han and Gupta Empires for example – the study noted that the elite of society have often pushed for a “business as usual” approach to warnings of disaster until it is too late.
In the report based on his “Human And Nature Dynamical” (Handy) model, the applied mathematician Safa Motesharri wrote: “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history”.
His research, carried out with the help of a team of natural and social scientists and with funding from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has been accepted for publication in the Ecological Economics journal, the Guardian reported.
Motesharri explored the factors which could lead to the collapse of civilisation, from population growth to climate change, and found that when these converge they can cause society to break down because of the “stretching of resources” and “the economic stratification of society into ‘Elites’ and ‘Masses’”.
Using his Handy model to assess a scenario closely resembling the current state of the world, Motesharri found that civilisation “appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among the Masses that eventually causes the collapse of society”.
The report stressed, however, that the worst-case scenario of collapse is not inevitable, and called on action now from the so-called real world “Elites” to restore economic balance.
“Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion,” the scientists said.
This is not the first time scientists have tried to warn us of potentially impending global disaster. Last year it emerged that Stephen Hawking and a team of Britain’s finest minds are drawing up a “doomsday list” of the catastrophic low-risk (but high-impact) events that could devastate the world.
Is empathy in humans and apes actually different? ‘Yawn contagion’ effect studied (Science Daily)
Date: August 12, 2014
Source: PeerJ
Summary: Whether or not humans are the only empathic beings is still under debate. In a new study, researchers directly compared the ‘yawn contagion’ effect between humans and bonobos — our closest evolutionary cousins. By doing so they were able to directly compare the empathic abilities of ourselves with another species, and found that a close relationship between individuals is more important to their empathic response than the fact that individuals might be from the same species.
Scientists have found that differences in levels of emotional contagion between humans and bonobos are attributable to the quality of relationships shared by individuals. Credit: Elisa Demuru
Whether or not humans are the only empathic beings is still under debate. In a new study, researchers directly compared the ‘yawn contagion’ effect between humans and bonobos (our closest evolutionary cousins). By doing so they were able to directly compare the empathic abilities of ourselves with another species, and found that a close relationship between individuals is more important to their empathic response than the fact that individuals might be from the same species.
The ability to experience others’ emotions is hard to quantify in any species, and, as a result, it is difficult to measure empathy in an objective way. The transmission of a feeling from one individual to another, something known as ‘emotional contagion,’ is the most basic form of empathy. Feelings are disclosed by facial expressions (for example sorrow, pain, happiness or tiredness), and these feelings can travel from an “emitting face” to a “receiving face.” Upon receipt, the mirroring of facial expressions evokes in the receiver an emotion similar to the emotion experienced by the sender.
Yawn contagion is one of the most pervasive and apparently trivial forms of emotional contagion. Who hasn’t been infected at least once by another person’s yawn (especially over dinner)? Humans and bonobos are the only two species in which it has been demonstrated that yawn contagion follows an empathic trend, being more frequent between individuals who share a strong emotional bond, such as friends, kin, and mates. Because of this similarity, researchers sought to directly compare the two species. Over the course of five years, they observed both humans and bonobos during their everyday activities and gathered data on yawn contagion by applying the same ethological approach and operational definitions. The results of their research are published today in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ.
Two features of yawn contagion were compared: how many times the individuals responded to others’ yawns and how quickly. Intriguingly, when the yawner and the responder were not friends or kin, bonobos responded to others’ yawns just as frequently and promptly as humans did. This means that the assumption that emotional contagion is more prominent in humans than in other species is not necessarily the case.
However, humans did respond more frequently and more promptly than bonobos when friends and kin were involved, probably because strong relationships between humans are built upon complex and sophisticated emotional foundations linked to cognition, memory, and memories. In this case, the positive feedback linking emotional affinity and the mirroring process seems to spin faster in humans than in bonobos. In humans, such over-activation may explain the potentiated yawning response and also other kinds of unconscious mimicry response, such as happy, pained, or angry facial expressions.
In conclusion, this study suggests that differences in levels of emotional contagion between humans and bonobos are attributable to the quality of relationships shared by individuals. When the complexity of social bonds, typical of humans, is not in play,Homo sapiens climb down the tree of empathy to go back to the understory which we share with our ape cousins.
Journal Reference:
- Elisabetta Palagi, Ivan Norscia, Elisa Demuru. Yawn contagion in humans and bonobos: emotional affinity matters more than species. PeerJ, 2014; 2: e519 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.519
Treating mental illness by changing memories of things past (Science Daily)
Date: August 12, 2014
Source: Elsevier
Summary: Author Marcel Proust makes a compelling case that our identities and decisions are shaped in profound and ongoing ways by our memories. This truth is powerfully reflected in mental illnesses, like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addictions. In PTSD, memories of traumas intrude vividly upon consciousness, causing distress, driving people to avoid reminders of their traumas, and increasing risk for addiction and suicide. In addiction, memories of drug use influence reactions to drug-related cues and motivate compulsive drug use.
“Memory reconsolidation is probably among the most exciting phenomena in cognitive neuroscience today. It assumes that memories may be modified once they are retrieved which may give us the great opportunity to change seemingly robust, unwanted memories,” explains Dr. Lars Schwabe of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. Credit: Image courtesy of Elsevier
In the novel À la recherche du temps perdu (translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past), Marcel Proust makes a compelling case that our identities and decisions are shaped in profound and ongoing ways by our memories.
This truth is powerfully reflected in mental illnesses, like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addictions. In PTSD, memories of traumas intrude vividly upon consciousness, causing distress, driving people to avoid reminders of their traumas, and increasing risk for addiction and suicide. In addiction, memories of drug use influence reactions to drug-related cues and motivate compulsive drug use.
What if one could change these dysfunctional memories? Although we all like to believe that our memories are reliable and permanent, it turns out that memories may indeed be plastic.
The process for modifying memories, depicted in the graphic, is called memory reconsolidation. After memories are formed and stored, subsequent retrieval may make them unstable. In other words, when a memory is activated, it also becomes open to revision and reconsolidation in a new form.
“Memory reconsolidation is probably among the most exciting phenomena in cognitive neuroscience today. It assumes that memories may be modified once they are retrieved which may give us the great opportunity to change seemingly robust, unwanted memories,” explains Dr. Lars Schwabe of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He and his colleagues have authored a review paper on the topic, published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry.
The idea of memory reconsolidation was initially discovered and demonstrated in rodents.
The first evidence of reconsolidation in humans was reported in a study in 2003, and the findings have since continued to accumulate. The current report summarizes the most recent findings on memory reconsolidation in humans and poses additional questions that must be answered by future studies.
“Reconsolidation appears to be a fundamental process underlying cognitive and behavioral therapies. Identifying its roles and mechanisms is an important step forward to fully harnessing the reconsolidation process in psychotherapy,” said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.
The translation of the animal data to humans is a vital step for the potential application of memory reconsolidation in the context of mental disorders. Memory reconsolidation could open the door to novel treatment approaches for disorders such as PTSD or drug addiction.
Journal Reference:
- Lars Schwabe, Karim Nader, Jens C. Pruessner. Reconsolidation of Human Memory: Brain Mechanisms and Clinical Relevance. Biological Psychiatry, 2014; 76 (4): 274 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2014.03.008
Preserving Biocultural Diversity (New York Times)
AUG. 12, 2014
In a small classroom in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a little girl sits, her face knitted in concentration. “Nitóxka, nátoka, niuóxka” — one, two, three — she slowly counts out, just as generations of other Piegan children have before her. Meanwhile, half a world away on the lower slopes of Mount Gorongosa in southern Africa, another little girl races excitedly about a field with her friends, gathering as many bugs as quickly as possible. She takes one particularly fetching find to a man who identifies it as a praying mantis, member of the family Mantidae, and adds it to a running tally.
What do these two far-flung scenes have in common? Each of these girls is, in her own unassuming way, making a contribution to preserving the world’s cultural and biological diversity.
The first is learning her indigenous language, a dialect of Blackfeet, in an immersion program in Montana. The second is taking part in a bioblitz on the outskirts of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique — an organized effort, under the direction of a scientist, in which ordinary people collect and add up as many species as they can in a defined area within a set time. In this case, the scientist is none other than the biologist Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s greatest champions of biodiversity, who recalls the scene in his newest book, “A Window on Eternity.” By counting, each little girl is learning how to keep track of the differences she will encounter in the world.
Most of us think of nature and culture as belonging to two separate domains. One contains items such as butterflies, the Amazon rainforest and photosynthesis; the other, things like wedding ceremonies, Beethoven’s piano sonatas and sushi. But in fact nature and culture — which we can think of as two great realms of diversity in which all the world’s differences are registered — often interpenetrate. These areas of overlap are now often described by a new term: biocultural diversity.
We see the commonalities clearly when we look at two fundamental components of biological and cultural diversity: species and languages. Both evolve via a process of descent with modification, although cultural evolution is far more rapid than biological evolution. Both can be classified into closely related families that share a common ancestor. Both coincide geographically, with highest diversity in the tropics and lowest at the poles. And both are threatened with extinction on a scale never before seen in history.
How deep is the threat to biocultural diversity? In a new report, “Biocultural Diversity: Threatened Species, Endangered Languages,” we compare the status of and trends in biological and linguistic diversity around the world. Because species and languages are alike in many ways, we use methods originally developed by biologists and adapt them to measure global linguistic diversity. Our analysis shows that at least 25 percent of the world’s 7,000 languages are threatened with extinction, compared with at least 30 percent of amphibians, 21 percent of mammals, 15 percent of reptiles and 13 percent of birds.
We also developed a new Index of Linguistic Diversity that captures the recent general trend in which a few of the world’s largest languages are “cornering the market” as speakers shift away from smaller ones. When we superimpose the global trend line of our new index upon that of the Living Planet Index, a well-respected measure of the rate at which biodiversity is declining, the result is astonishing: They track one another almost perfectly, with both falling about 30 percent between 1970 and 2009.
Why is this happening? The ultimate reason is globalization. We now live in a world where the dominant economic and political forces are aligned to encourage uniformity and the seamless global interchange of products and information. Government policies generally favor developing resources for human use, which simplifies the landscape as it destroys wild animal and plant habitats. Similar policies promote linguistic unification either directly, through sanctions on minority language use, or indirectly, such as by concentrating economic opportunities in cities, thereby making it more difficult for the rural areas in which most languages evolved to remain viable places for the next generation of speakers.
Many of us are uneasy about the proposition that erasing differences is the only route to well-being. But almost inevitably, the facts and figures, all of them pointing toward death and disappearance, make our deepest longings seem puny by comparison. Overwhelmed by trend lines, confused and dispirited, we fall victim to a kind of moral paralysis in which we do not act to protect what we value most because we think we cannot legitimately justify why we care in the first place.
The late Darrell Kipp knew this well. He co-founded the Blackfeet immersion program in Montana as part of a lifetime dedicated to preserving that language. In a guidebook widely used by other Native American language activists, Kipp hammered home that the only obstacle to setting forth is our own feeling of helplessness. “Don’t wait, even if you can’t speak the language,” he urged. “In the beginning, I knew thirty words, then fifty, then sixty. One day I woke up and realized I was dreaming in Blackfeet.”
The dual extinction crisis is actually a golden opportunity for new directions in conservation. If biodiversity organizations joined forces with advocates for linguistic and cultural self-determination, there would be a double payoff. Traditional ecological knowledge that has evolved over millennia among indigenous peoples living in a diversity of Earth’s ecosystems is being rapidly lost as the languages which encode that knowledge disappear. By working together with biologists, field linguists could help to maintain those cultural treasure troves. Conservation biologists could benefit from applying some of that traditional knowledge to their own work. By combining expertise, not only would biocultural diversity be conserved in the environments in which it evolved, but time-tested traditional environmental knowledge could be shared and adapted as appropriate to the wider landscape.
Some of this is already happening. For example, a recent study by scientists in collaboration with Canada’s Taku River Tlingit First Nation used in-depth interviews with tribal members, each with many years’ experience closely observing woodland caribou, to develop a habitat model to help recover this endangered species. When compared with a model created using Western scientific methods alone, the First Nation model correctly identified the caribou’s preference for using frozen lakes as part of its winter habitat — an important nuance that was missed by the Western model. Knowledge of this kind is valuable for our understanding of wildlife ecology and management. The Tlingit language, however, is now spoken by fewer than 1,000 people and is critically endangered.
This kind of cross-cutting conservation work is increasing, but much of what is going on is at the grass roots, far under the radar. From Montana to Mozambique, everyday people are dreaming dreams of a world whose differences are valued and protected. There are many powerful forces arrayed against the continuation of our planet’s generative capacity, and many of these same forces stand to benefit if the world’s cultures are homogenized. But on the other side of the equation is the cumulative power of millions of individuals who know that diversity in nature and culture is the genuine condition of life on Earth.
David Harmon is executive director of the George Wright Society, which promotes support for protected areas and cultural sites, and a co-founder of Terralingua, an NGO devoted to biocultural diversity. Jonathan Loh is a biologist specializing in biological and cultural diversity, and an honorary research associate of the Zoological Society of London.
Carbon dioxide ‘sponge’ could ease transition to cleaner energy (Science Daily)
Date: August 10, 2014
Source: American Chemical Society (ACS)
Summary: A plastic sponge that sops up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide might ease our transition away from polluting fossil fuels to new energy sources like hydrogen. A relative of food container plastics could play a role in President Obama’s plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The material might also someday be integrated into power plant smokestacks.
Plastic that soaks up carbon dioxide could someday be used in plant smokestacks.
Credit: American Chemical Society
A sponge-like plastic that sops up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) might ease our transition away from polluting fossil fuels and toward new energy sources, such as hydrogen. The material — a relative of the plastics used in food containers — could play a role in President Obama’s plan to cut CO2 emissions 30 percent by 2030, and could also be integrated into power plant smokestacks in the future.
The report on the material is one of nearly 12,000 presentations at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society, taking place here through Thursday.
“The key point is that this polymer is stable, it’s cheap, and it adsorbs CO2 extremely well. It’s geared toward function in a real-world environment,” says Andrew Cooper, Ph.D. “In a future landscape where fuel-cell technology is used, this adsorbent could work toward zero-emission technology.”
CO2 adsorbents are most commonly used to remove the greenhouse gas pollutant from smokestacks at power plants where fossil fuels like coal or gas are burned. However, Cooper and his team intend the adsorbent, a microporous organic polymer, for a different application — one that could lead to reduced pollution.
The new material would be a part of an emerging technology called an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), which can convert fossil fuels into hydrogen gas. Hydrogen holds great promise for use in fuel-cell cars and electricity generation because it produces almost no pollution. IGCC is a bridging technology that is intended to jump-start the hydrogen economy, or the transition to hydrogen fuel, while still using the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure. But the IGCC process yields a mixture of hydrogen and CO2 gas, which must be separated.
Cooper, who is at the University of Liverpool, says that the sponge works best under the high pressures intrinsic to the IGCC process. Just like a kitchen sponge swells when it takes on water, the adsorbent swells slightly when it soaks up CO2 in the tiny spaces between its molecules. When the pressure drops, he explains, the adsorbent deflates and releases the CO2, which they can then collect for storage or convert into useful carbon compounds.
The material, which is a brown, sand-like powder, is made by linking together many small carbon-based molecules into a network. Cooper explains that the idea to use this structure was inspired by polystyrene, a plastic used in styrofoam and other packaging material. Polystyrene can adsorb small amounts of CO2 by the same swelling action.
One advantage of using polymers is that they tend to be very stable. The material can even withstand being boiled in acid, proving it should tolerate the harsh conditions in power plants where CO2 adsorbents are needed. Other CO2 scrubbers — whether made from plastics or metals or in liquid form — do not always hold up so well, he says. Another advantage of the new adsorbent is its ability to adsorb CO2 without also taking on water vapor, which can clog up other materials and make them less effective. Its low cost also makes the sponge polymer attractive. “Compared to many other adsorbents, they’re cheap,” Cooper says, mostly because the carbon molecules used to make them are inexpensive. “And in principle, they’re highly reusable and have long lifetimes because they’re very robust.”
Cooper also will describe ways to adapt his microporous polymer for use in smokestacks and other exhaust streams. He explains that it is relatively simple to embed the spongy polymers in the kinds of membranes already being evaluated to remove CO2 from power plant exhaust, for instance. Combining two types of scrubbers could make much better adsorbents by harnessing the strengths of each, he explains.
The research was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and E.ON Energy.
ARTS OF LIVING ON A DAMAGED PLANET (Aarhus University)
ARTS OF LIVING ON A DAMAGED PLANET
THURSDAY, MAY 8, 2014. URSULA LE GUIN
Bettina Aptheker and Anna Tsing opened the Anthropocene Conference May 8-10, 2014 at Santa Cruz, USA and introduced keynote speaker Ursula K. Le Guin.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Keynote 5/8/14 from AURA on Vimeo.
Keynote speech by Ursula K. Le Guin
The talk by Ursula K. Le Guin was the first event in the three days Anthropocene Conference: “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet”. The acclaimed science fiction author gave a talk about her work in front of a completely sold out theatre. A panel discussion with Donna Haraway and James Clifford followed after her talk.
FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2014: INTRODUCTION BY ANNA TSING
On the first official day of the Anthropocene Conference Anna Tsing gave the opening speech and introduced the program.
Anna Tsing, Opening 5/9/14 from AURA on Vimeo.
INHABITING MULTISPECIES BODIES
Presentations by Donna Haraway and Margaret McFall-Ngai. Discussant: Jenny Reardon
Donna Haraway: ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble’
Sympoiesis, not autopoiesis, threads the string figure game played by Terran critters. Always many-stranded, SF is spun from science fact, speculative fabulation, science fiction, and, in French, soin de ficelles (care of/for the threads). The sciences of the mid-20th-century “new evolutionary synthesis” shaped approaches to human-induced mass extinctions and reworldings later named the Anthropocene. Rooted in units and relations, especially competitive relations, these sciences have a hard time with three key biological domains: embryology and development, symbiosis and collaborative entanglements, and the vast worlds of microbes. Approaches tuned to “multi-species becoming with” better sustain us in staying with the trouble on Terra. An emerging “new new synthesis” in trans-disciplinary biologies and arts proposes string figures tying together human and nonhuman ecologies, evolution, development, history, technology, and more. Corals, microbes, robotic and fleshly geese, artists, and scientists are the dramatis personae in this talk’s SF game.
Margaret McFall-Ngai: ‘The Post-Modern Synthesis in Biology’.
The Changing Landscape in Light of Advances in Molecular Biology, Genomics, and Microbiology The impact on biology of major advances in technology cannot be overestimated. Since 2006, the cost of sequencing of genomic material has decreased from ~$6000 to ~$0.10 a megabase, enabling the field of biology to explore aspects of the form and function of the biosphere never before possible. Most notable has been our new found ability to identify and characterize the diversity of the microbial world. The data to date demonstrate that microbes are extremely diverse and that the historical focus of biology principally on animals and plants does not provide an accurate view of the biological world. This presentation will examine our current views and how the field might make the transition to a more integrated conceptual framework.
ON DAMAGED LANDSCAPES
Presentations by Kate Brown & Deborah Bird Rose. Discussants: Eric Porter & William Cronon
Kate Brown, “The Radiogenic Shadow”.
The experience of carrying the radiogenic legacy of the nuclear arms race is akin to the shadowy existence of radioactive isotopes itself. People who lived downwind and downstream of the world’s first plutonium plants (in the American West and the Russian Urals) have had an extremely difficult time making themselves heard or seen as victims of the plants’ massive issuance of millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment over four decades of the arms race. These bystanders of nuclear exposure rarely showed up in medical and environmental studies. They were overlooked in the post-Cold War declarations of the plutonium plant territories as national sacrifice zones slated for clean-up. Courts have dismissed them as plaintiffs and denied many compensation. Recently, at the 70th anniversary of the Hanford plutonium plant, celebrants will enjoy a “James Bond theme evening,” and a Casino Royale with plutonium passes, but nothing on the program refers to downwinders or the health effects of long term exposure to low doses of radioactive isotopes. The uses of interdisciplinary research and experimental narrative forms goes part way toward figuring out how to observe and describe the existence of people whose biological existence, and that of their off-spring, are irretrievably entangled with the radioactive waste of the 20th century nuclear arms race.
Deborah Bird Rose, “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed”.
The politics of greed are doing their best to ensure that love for life’s symbiotic gifts and pleasures is denigrated and ridiculed, if not utterly destroyed. I have been working with those who are vulnerable, particularly with endangered animal species and their human defenders. In this paper I seek to open our hearts to the beauty of multispecies love in the midst of plunder.
CARING FOR COUNTRY/REWILDING
Presentations by Jens-Christian Svenning & Jessica Weir. Discussants: Ingrid Parker & Chris Connery
Jens-Christian Svenning, “Future Megafaunas: A Historical Perspective on the Scope for a Wilder Anthropocene”.
A new approach to nature management is increasingly discussed and implemented, namely rewilding. It emphasizes the re-establishment of self-managing ecosystems, with species introductions to restore ecosystem functioning as a key facet. Large animals (megafauna) has received most emphasis in rewilding, reflecting the disproportionate and often dramatic losses of megafaunas around the world within the last 50,000 years and historical shifts in human-megafauna relations. I will first provide an overview the reasons for these losses and their ecological implications. I will then discuss rewilding in the context of the shifting human-megafauna relations and their current dynamics. Finally, based on these considerations I will provide a future-oriented perspective on megafaunas in the Anthropocene.
Jessica Weir, “‘Caring for Country’ and Ecological Restoration”.
Amongst the irrigated rivers of southeast Australia, Indigenous people engage in ecological restoration projects so as to build momentum for a management change that invests more in ecological and cultural integrity. Here, Indigenous people have long been marginalized in the institutions of land and water management, and the assertion of their rights and responsibilities to ‘Care for Country’ can often be confrontational. This paper considers the strategies that Indigenous people use to both fit into this space, as well as transform it, so as to create better conditions for their own knowledges and practices, including greater respect for Country. Much more than social justice, this work is about resituating humans within their environments, and more-than-humans within cultural and ethical domains (Plumwood 2013), and provides insight into one experience of articulating a rethink of nature so as to change understandings of fact and governance.
MEMORY, HISTORY, PLACE.
Presentation by William Cronon. Discussants: Andrew Mathews & Jens-Christian Svenning
William Cronon, “The Portage: Time, Memory, and Storytelling in the Making of an American Place”.
In a lecture drawn from the first chapter of the book he is writing on the history of Portage, Wisconsin, William Cronon meditates on the roles that memory and storytelling play in human place-making. A natural ecosystem or an abstract geographical space becomes a human place, he argues, through the endless accretion of narratives that render that place meaningful for those who visit or live in it. Curiously, although Portage is virtually unknown to most Americans, it has played a surprisingly important role in shaping American ideas of nature.
SATURDAY, MAY 10, 2014. ARTS OF NOTICING
Presentations by Deborah Gordon & Anne Pringle. Discussants: Donna Haraway & Anna Tsing.
Deborah Gordon, “The Evolution of Collective Behavior in Ant Colonies”.
An ant colony operates without central control. No ant can assess what needs to be done. Each ant responds to its interactions with other ants nearby. In the aggregate, these stochastic, dynamical networks of interaction regulate colony behavior. I have been studying a population of about 300 harvester ant colonies in the desert in southeastern Arizona for more than 25 years. A colony lives for 25-30 years. Harvester ant colonies regulate foraging activity according to food availability and current humidity. Colonies differ in how they regulate foraging behavior. Recently we have been able to match parent and offspring colonies. We used this to learn about colony life history and to measure colony reproductive success, to ask how collective behavior is evolving in current drought conditions. Colonies that regulate foraging so as to conserve water are having more offspring colonies. Ants are extremely diverse, and species differences in collective behavior reflect relations with diverse environments.
Anne Pringle, “Life and Death in a Petersham Cemetery: The Life Histories of Lichens”.
Lichens are ecosystems, typically formed from an individual fungus, associated photosynthetic partners, and myriad other fungi and bacteria. In October 2005 I began a survey of Xanthoparmelia lichens growing on tombstones of a New England cemetery. Each year I record the births, growth, and deaths of near to 1,000 thalli. I am using data to explore a series of questions, including: is the probability of death equivalent across years, or is death more likely at older ages? Can a lichen be immortal? I am also using genetic data to explore the demographic histories of these species, testing a hypothesis that Xanthoparmelia experienced a massive increase in numbers in the recent past, coincident with the advent of intensive farming across New England and construction of miles of stone walls. Data collected to date suggest the life history patterns of these symbiotic, modular, and indeterminate organisms may be poorly served by traditional demographic models.
CROSS-SPECIES HISTORIES
Presentations by Carla Freccero & Marianne Lien. Discussants: Thomas Wentzer & Maya Peterson.
Carla Freccero, “Wolf/Men,” 5/10/14 from AURA on Vimeo.
Carla Freccero, “Wolf/Men”.
This paper considers the genealogy of the relationship between humans and wolves, both in material encounters and in imaginative figurations. In Jacques Derrida’s seminar on The Beast and the Sovereign, the wolf figures prominently as “wild” double of the sovereign. Both the wolf and the sovereign represent exceptions insofar as they are a law unto themselves, the one on the outside of the polis, the other mirroring him as the “tyrant” inside. From Hobbes’s famous deployment of Plautus’s phrase, “homo homini lupus,” onward, the wolf has been asked to stand in for something particularly “savage” about mankind, even as female wolves walk their own path of figural maternal mirroring. Finally, wolf-human mergers also carry with them atavistic fantasies about racial difference that continue to impress modernity with their spectral effects.
Marianne Lien, “Escapee, Homeless, and Those That ‘Wander Off’: Salmon as Rubble in Norwegian Rivers”.
In Norway, which is home to the largest living population of wild Atlantic salmon, human and salmon have guided each others’ lives in a fluid evolutionary tapestry that predates historical records. More recently, industrial development, hydroelectric power, and salmon farming have added new layers to this tapestry, and we see some salmon flourish while others are under threat.
My paper traces salmon stories from the shores of the Vosso river, where the original Vosso salmon are returning in great numbers, as a result of recent cultivation efforts. Salmon provide not only prey for anxious anglers, but data too, and as such they help to ‘domesticate’ a river, making it legible for biologists in charge. What emerges from these efforts are multiple propositions about the nature of the river, couched within a paradigm of what John Law calls a ‘one-world world’.
In my paper I will search, instead for the cracks, and the openings where the data become less certain, more indeterminate, and don’t add up. Tracing the movements of salmon that ‘wander off’, the misfits, and the ones that never quite make it, I will try to tell a story of the river which is not over-determined, but remains sensitive to the generative capacity of underwater lives. My concern is how to tell a story that allows the messiness, the damaged, and the incidental rubble, and my stories are an attempt to answer, ethnographically.
GARDENS AND GRAVES
Presentation by Lesley Stern
Lesley Stern, “A Garden or a Grave? The Canyonic Landscape of the Tijuana-San Diego Region,” 5/10/14 fromAURA on Vimeo.
Lesley Stern, Q&A from AURA on Vimeo.
Lesley Stern, “A Garden or a Grave? The Canyonic Landscape of the Tijuana-San Diego Region”.
We stand on a dusty ledge on the edge of a canyon near a freeway and a long snaking wall, the wall that divides Tijuana and San Diego, Mexico and the U.S. On one side we look down to preserved wetlands—on the other side to a slum city. These two landscapes are forged out of one canyon, Las Laureles Canyon, through which sometimes flows (and sometimes flows disastrously) the Tijuana River. The entire Tijuana-San Diego area is built on, around, and in spite of canyons. Some, in a spirit of ecological progress, are now being Edenically restored, some are being progressively destroyed. But they are all linked. Los Laureles Canyon has served as a laboratory for various disciplinary investigations—ethnography, ecology, urban planning, border studies. …This paper, while mindful of these approaches, asks, rather, how might we write the story of the canyons and their inhabitants in that space where ideas of ‘landscape’ and conceptions of ‘the garden’ intersect. Not always harmoniously.
Roundtable Discussion with Nils Bubandt, Margaret Fitzsimmons, Peter Funch & Nora Bateson
The roundtable discussion ended the Anthropocene Conference in Santa Cruz, May 8-10, 2014.
Nils Bubandt from AURA on Vimeo.
Margaret Fitzsimmons from AURA on Vimeo.
Peter Funch from AURA on Vimeo.
Nora Bateson from AURA on Vimeo.
O papel das Ciências Sociais em um mundo em mudança acelerada (Fapesp)
Craig Calhoun, diretor da London School of Economics, fala sobre a responsabilidade da área como instrumento para a compreensão crítica da realidade e intervenção na esfera pública (foto: Leandro Negro/Ag. FAPESP)
12/08/2014
Por José Tadeu Arantes
Agência FAPESP – Que traços melhor caracterizam o mundo contemporâneo? Entre as grandes mudanças ocorridas no cenário global quais são aquelas que de maneira mais completa definem o tempo presente? Como transitar da perplexidade que essas mudanças inspiram para sua inteligibilidade em grandes quadros interpretativos? Essas foram, resumidamente, as principais indagações que o sociólogo Craig Calhoun procurou responder em palestra realizada em julho na sede da FAPESP, em São Paulo.
Nascido em 1952, o norte-americano Calhoun tornou-se diretor da prestigiosa London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) em setembro de 2012. Antes disso, dentre várias atividades, desempenhou, nos Estados Unidos, as funções de professor de Ciências Sociais na New York University e de presidente do Social Science Research Council (SSRC), organização independente dedicada ao avanço da pesquisa em Ciências Sociais e áreas afins.
A despeito de ter nascido e se graduado nos Estados Unidos, Calhoun tem conexões antigas com o Reino Unido, pois fez mestrado em Antropologia Social na University of Manchester e doutorado em Sociologia e História Econômica e Social Moderna na University of Oxford. Igualmente determinantes em sua trajetória intelectual foram os trabalhos que realizou em outros países, notadamente na conturbada região do Chifre da África.
Mesmo com o importante cargo que ocupa atualmente, Calhoun faz questão de manter um posicionamento intelectual crítico e um trato pessoal informal e acessível (confira seu blog emhttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/craig-calhoun/).
A palestra que proferiu na FAPESP foi pautada por um texto que produziu recentemente em parceria com o sociólogo Michel Wieviorka, da École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, na França, intitulado Manifesto pelas Ciências Sociais (a versão integral pode ser lida em francês emhttp://socio.hypotheses.org/147).
A pergunta feita no início desta apresentação foi assim respondida por Calhoun e Wieviorka em seu manifesto: “Dentre as mudanças que obrigam as Ciências Sociais a transformar seus modos de aproximação, as mais espetaculares podem ser resumidas a duas expressões: a globalização e o individualismo. São duas lógicas que, em conjunto, balizam o espaço no interior do qual a pesquisa cada vez mais é chamada a se mover.”
“A palavra ‘globalização’, em sentido amplo, inclui dimensões econômicas, mas também culturais, religiosas, jurídicas etc. Hoje, numerosos fenômenos abordados pelas Ciências Sociais são ‘globais’, ou suscetíveis de serem observados sob esse ângulo”, prossegue o texto mais à frente.
Quanto ao individualismo, o manifesto o caracteriza como “um segundo fenômeno, não menor, porém mais difuso”. E afirma: “Seu impulso traduziu-se desde cedo na pesquisa por um interesse sustentado pelas teorias da escolha racional, mas também, e principalmente, em tempos mais recentes, pela consideração, cada vez mais frequente, da subjetividade dos indivíduos.”
Depois de sua palestra, Calhoun concedeu a seguinte entrevista à Agência FAPESP:
Agência FAPESP – A nova realidade global é muito diferente daquelas nas quais surgiram e se desenvolveram as teorias sociais clássicas, nos séculos XIX e XX, fato enfatizado em sua conferência. Quais são as diferenças mais significativas?
Craig Calhoun – Algumas das principais diferenças entre o período histórico atual e os anteriores incluem a intensificação da globalização e, nessa intensificação, o maior papel desempenhado pelas finanças. Trata-se não apenas de uma nova configuração do capitalismo em geral, mas, especificamente, do capitalismo financeiro. Outro item é o retorno da geopolítica. Vemos nos conflitos mundiais uma mistura de questões geográficas, políticas, culturais e civilizacionais, que apresentam padrões diferentes daqueles que caracterizavam o período da Guerra Fria. A Guerra Fria, de certa maneira, bloqueava esse tipo de geopolítica, que vemos hoje nas crises da Síria, do Iraque, da Ucrânia e tantas outras.
Outra diferença é a emergência de um capitalismo informal em larga escala. Quando pensamos no setor informal, geralmente pensamos em pequenas unidades produtivas, localizadas em residências, favelas etc. Mas, hoje, a economia informal atingiu uma escala gigantesca, incomparavelmente maior do que aquela que havia antes. Existe, nesse segmento, o narcotráfico e o tráfico humano, mas não apenas isso. Há muitas outras atividades, movimentando grandes somas de dinheiro.
O mundo contemporâneo também é moldado por questões ambientais, em um grau que jamais vimos: as mudanças climáticas globais, a questão dos recursos hídricos e de outros recursos, a poluição e a degradação das periferias das grandes cidades, questões relacionadas com justiça ambiental, quem ganha e quem perde em relação ao meio ambiente.
Finalmente, sublinharia a questão do déficit institucional. Muitas instituições que ajudavam as pessoas a manejar riscos em sua vida ordinária foram corroídas ou perderam financiamento ou enfrentam problemas. Construir e fortalecer instituições que ajudem as pessoas a resolver os problemas em suas vidas são grandes questões em todo o mundo.
Agência FAPESP – A respeito das questões ambientais, o senhor estudou a influência do contexto social no agravamento dos danos causados por desastres naturais. É bastante conhecido seu estudo dessa contextualização no caso do furacão Katrina, de 2005. Eventos extremos como esse tendem a ocorrer com frequência cada vez maior devido às mudanças climáticas globais. Que lições seu estudo do Katrina oferece para o enfrentamento de novas ocorrências?
Calhoun – De fato, sabemos que as mudanças climáticas tendem a provocar mais eventos extremos, com furacões e outros desastres. Há uma geografia desses eventos que mostra que as áreas costeiras e outras regiões específicas são particularmente vulneráveis. Um importante aspecto dessa geografia diz respeito ao planejamento urbano. Na grande maioria dos casos, não construímos cidades levando em conta como elas poderiam enfrentar eventos desse tipo.
Depois do Katrina, tivemos, em 2012, o furacão Sandy, que impactou fortemente a costa de Nova York. Isso fez com que as pessoas percebessem que o desenvolvimento futuro da cidade de Nova York precisa incluir preparações para eventos desse tipo. Algumas providências, como a instalação de geradores alternativos para produzir eletricidade, não dizem respeito diretamente às Ciências Sociais. Mas outras, como a criação de sistemas de evacuação ou sistemas de atendimento a pessoas desabrigadas, são questões de Ciências Sociais.
Trabalhos como os realizados por agências humanitárias em várias partes do mundo, dando assistência a refugiados por causa de guerras ou desastres naturais, tendem a se tornar cada vez mais importantes, inclusive em países ricos.
Aprendemos com esses eventos que a pobreza e a desigualdade são fatores definidores dos impactos de furacões ou outros desastres. Quando existe água por todos os lados, quem vive nas áreas mais baixas e alagadiças? Os pobres. Quando existe vento por todos os lados, quem vive em construções mais vulneráveis e sujeitas a desabar? Os pobres. A importância das desigualdades foi claramente evidenciada em New Orleans por ocasião do Katrina.
Temos outra importante questão social, que diz respeito às pessoas que vivem sozinhas. Na sociedade contemporânea, há mais pessoas vivendo sozinhas do que em qualquer época anterior. E essas pessoas são especialmente vulneráveis no contexto de desastres.
Agência FAPESP – O senhor trabalhou no Chifre da África, no nordeste do continente. Em que medida essa experiência influenciou suas concepções acerca das mudanças que propõe para as Ciências Sociais?
Calhoun – Minhas concepções realmente se baseiam em várias experiências internacionais. No caso do Chifre da África, a experiência direta me ensinou o que eu não havia aprendido em livros. Por exemplo, quando estive pela primeira vez no Sudão, no início dos anos 1980, uma das lições que aprendi foi a importância da infraestrutura física. As Ciências Sociais normalmente não prestavam muita atenção à infraestrutura física, como estradas e eletricidade. Mas isso muda a vida social, determina a interconexão entre diferentes partes do país, define a maneira como as pessoas podem trabalhar ou não. Nessa época, o Sudão tinha apenas uma única estrada intermunicipal pavimentada.
Também entendi a relatividade de dados estatísticos, como o Produto Interno Bruto (PIB). No início dos anos 1980, o Sudão tinha um PIB muito próximo ao da Malásia e o Egito possuía um PIB quase igual ao da China. O PIB é um número grosseiramente enganoso. Mesmo naquela época, o Egito não estava em uma posição confortável comparativamente à China. Isso se deve em parte ao fato de que o PIB não computa as heranças históricas, como o fato de que a China possuía uma rede de trabalhadores em todo o país, de que o nível de educação era melhor na China, de que o nível de saúde era melhor na China. Entendi que os indicadores superficiais, como “baixa renda” ou “média renda”, são altamente enganosos. O nível de renda não informa sobre a verdadeira riqueza de um país.
O último ponto que gostaria de ressaltar sobre o Chifre da África, especialmente sobre o Sudão e a Eritreia, é a importância de comunidades e sociedades sob o nível do Estado nacional e através do Estado nacional. Toda a região é um complexo de inter-relações, em que cada país é, em parte, determinado pelos seus vizinhos, em que refugiados e incursões militares atravessam as fronteiras nacionais e abalam fortemente a situação, em que grupos tribais e comunidades originais e linguísticas são muito fortes, e em que não fica muito claro como as pessoas se identificam.
Dou um exemplo do Sudão. Uma comissão constitucional propôs que deveria haver várias línguas nacionais que reconhecessem todas as principais nacionalidades existentes no país. E houve um protesto do povo saho contra a inclusão de sua língua no sistema educacional. Isso era estranho. Por quê? A resposta foi que, se suas crianças fossem educadas em saho, suas oportunidades seriam muito bloqueadas, o que os manteria sempre em estado de subdesenvolvimento. Então, eles pediam educação em árabe. É apenas um exemplo, mas permite perceber quão complicada é a relação entre diferentes identidades, em diferentes escalas.
Agência FAPESP – Isso vem ao encontro de um dos importantes subtemas abordados em sua palestra: a relação entre sociedade e sociedades. Sociedades, com suas características próprias, incluídas na sociedade maior, supostamente representada pelo Estado nacional. Qual o peso desse tipo de relação no atual conflito do Oriente Médio?
Calhoun – Temo que esse conflito se torne cada vez pior. Há muitas coisas diferentes convergindo nele. Parte da questão são os conflitos religiosos. E lembremos que não são apenas conflitos envolvendo islamismo, cristianismo e judaísmo, mas também conflitos envolvendo xiitas e sunitas e grupos ainda mais específicos no interior do islã. É por isso que o Ocidente não entende muito claramente o que está acontecendo.
Há também uma questão de Estados. Consideramos, por exemplo, o caso do Irã. Existem interesses próprios, não pelo fato de o Irã ser xiita, mas por ser um Estado específico. Há também interesses de povos que não têm um Estado, como os curdos. Um dos poucos vencedores na atual situação são os curdos, que, pela primeira vez, talvez possam formar seu Estado, no norte do Iraque.
Existe a vulnerabilidade das populações minoritárias. Os Estados nacionais são muitas vezes acusados de genocídio, de tentar impor a supremacia da população majoritária. Apesar disso, às vezes, são capazes de proteger minorias e alcançar uma paz relativa. Intervir, como os Estados Unidos fizeram, por meio da Guerra do Iraque, desestabilizando o Estado, também coloca as minorias em risco. E não devemos achar que os Estados nacionais sejam a única fonte de genocidas. A desestabilização em situações em que existem muitos povos diferentes tentando viver em paz uns com os outros também é um fator de genocídios.
A guerra do Iraque foi um desastre não mitigável para a região. Talvez algumas pessoas tenham tido boas intenções, mas foi um desastre, que colocou em movimento uma série de eventos. Esses eventos também têm outras causas, mas, agora, foi criada uma situação muito difícil de pacificar e estabilizar. E uma situação na qual é impossível ver justiça. Se apenas conseguirmos a paz já será um grande passo adiante. Mas não haverá justiça para a maioria dos refugiados, que foram forçados a abandonar suas casas.
Agência FAPESP – Em sua palestra, o senhor criticou o conceito, hoje bastante difundido, de “Tina” (acrônimo para “There is no alternative” – “Não há alternativa”). A situação atual do capitalismo é apresentada como algo tão natural que nos iludimos pensando que ela jamais poderá ser mudada.
Calhoun – Do meu ponto de vista, uma das primeiras condições para as Ciências Sociais, especialmente para as Ciências Sociais críticas, que eu acredito serem as ciências reais no caso, é reconhecer que “Tina” não é verdade. Quase sempre há alternativas, algumas melhores, outras piores. Se acreditarmos que aquilo que existe atualmente é natural, necessário, inevitável, seremos incapazes de entendê-lo. Não apenas não entenderemos os futuros possíveis, mas também não entenderemos a realidade corrente, porque não entenderemos por que esse conjunto específico de condições existe e não outros. Eu acho que este ponto de vista crítico não é propriedade de nenhuma corrente de pensamento específica. Mas precisamos reconhecer que aquilo que existe é apenas parte do possível, se quisermos entender tanto a realidade corrente como as realidades futuras.
Vídeo – Entrevista com Craig Calhoun (em inglês).
Parte 1
Parte 2
Parte 3
Uma mente brilhante e inquieta aos 86 anos (Fapesp)
John Nash, que ganhou o Nobel de Economia e teve sua vida contada em filme, fala sobre Teoria dos Jogos e sobre suas novas pesquisas (foto:Agência FAPESP)08/08/2014
Por Diego Freire
Agência FAPESP – A mente brilhante, que ganhou o prêmio Nobel de Economia em 1994 por revolucionar o campo da Matemática conhecido como Teoria dos Jogos, continua contribuindo para novas revoluções na ciência e na vida em sociedade. O matemático norte-americano John Nash, 86 anos, esteve em São Paulo no fim de julho e falou sobre suas pesquisas atuais na Princeton University.
Nash veio ao Brasil para ministrar palestra no International Workshop on Game Theory and Economic Applications of the Game Theory Society (IWGTS), realizado na Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade da Universidade de São Paulo (FEA-USP) no âmbito da Escola São Paulo de Ciência Avançada (ESPCA), modalidade de apoio da FAPESP.
Também participaram do evento, entre 25 e 31 de julho, outros três laureados com o Nobel em Ciências Econômicas: o matemático Robert Aumann (2005), da Hebrew University of Jerusalem, em Israel, e os economistas Eric Maskin (2007), da Harvard University, e Alvin Roth (2012), da Stanford University.
Muito antes de se tornar conhecido do público geral por ter sua história contada no filme Uma Mente Brilhante, de 2001, John Forbes Nash Jr. ganhou notoriedade no mundo acadêmico por suas contribuições à Teoria dos Jogos, área sistematizada em 1944 pelo matemático John von Neumann (1903-1957) e pelo economista Oskar Morgenstern (1902-1977).
Originalmente, os trabalhos na área utilizavam jogos em que os participantes precisavam fazer escolhas com base nas decisões dos seus oponentes, e os pesquisadores estudavam funções matemáticas que explicariam a competição ou a cooperação entre os jogadores. A pesquisa de Nash determinou o ponto de equilíbrio dessa relação, que passou a ser conhecido como Equilíbrio de Nash.
“Antes, entendia-se que, a partir de uma importância estabelecida, o que quer que uma pessoa ganhasse, a outra perdia. Por conta disso, jogar era visto apenas como uma formalidade. Com o tempo, o fato de haver ganho ou perda e a importância daquilo que estava em jogo se tornaram interesse de estudos”, disse em entrevista à Agência FAPESP.
Uma das mais famosas aplicações do Equilíbrio de Nash é a usada no jogo conhecido como Dilema do Prisioneiro, em que dois homens são presos suspeitos de terem praticado o mesmo crime. Não há provas contra eles, que são interrogados separadamente e encorajados pela polícia a delatar um ao outro, ganhando em troca a liberdade.
Haveria, então, duas opções: calar-se ou acusar o companheiro. Se os dois se acusam mutuamente, são igualmente condenados; se calam, são soltos. Mas a desconfiança de um acusado sobre a decisão que o outro poderia tomar aumenta a probabilidade de os dois se acusarem, o que levaria ao pior resultado: a prisão de ambos.
A melhor solução para os dois jogadores é a menos provável, pois requer cooperação cega, dado que eles não conversam a respeito. Dessa forma, o mais provável é que eles se acusem, pois ambos têm mais a ganhar delatando o outro.
O Equilíbrio de Nash é a solução em que nenhum jogador pode melhorar seu resultado com uma ação unilateral. Nesse caso, se um acusado que tende a delatar o outro muda unilateralmente sua estratégia e decide colaborar com a polícia, ele “perde” no jogo e é preso.
O conceito proposto pelo matemático é considerado fundamental na Teoria dos Jogos e é um dos métodos mais usados nas Ciências Sociais para estimar o resultado de uma interação estratégica.
A partir desse entendimento, seu trabalho contribuiu para a aplicação de conceitos puramente matemáticos a diversas áreas do conhecimento que tenham situações análogas a jogos, entre as quais a Economia, a Antropologia, as Ciências Políticas e a Biologia.
Transferências de poder
Na palestra ministrada na ESPCA, Nash descreveu um de seus experimentos recentes. “Em um jogo experimental, os vários jogadores participantes não foram orientados sobre como deveriam reagir ao comportamento daqueles com quem estavam interagindo. A interação foi sendo repetida mais e mais ao longo do jogo até que, naturalmente, os participantes passaram a incentivar o cooperativismo entre si, formando coalizões”, disse.
Durante o processo, Nash observou o comportamento dos jogadores quanto às transferências de poder realizadas na formação das coalizões, a aceitação por parte de alguns deles e a distribuição de recompensas por parte dos favorecidos.
“A aceitação dependia das gratificações. E jogadores com forças diferentes poderiam aceitar uma transferência de poder para outro participante, caso fossem recompensados por isso”, afirmou.
O experimento permitiu a Nash colocar o processo real de formação de coalizões e seus métodos de aceitação em um modelo matemático, demonstrado pelo cientista no evento.
O trabalho com jogos repetitivos, a formação de coalizões e os métodos de aceitação revelou ainda um aparente paradoxo observado pelo matemático: a evolução natural do comportamento cooperativo mesmo entre organismos ou espécies que interagem apenas por motivações egoístas, fenômeno que tem estudado nos últimos anos.
A exemplo do que ocorreu na concepção do Equilíbrio de Nash, a motivação para as novas pesquisas veio da observação inquieta do mundo.
“A ideia dos métodos de aceitações ocorreu quando eu estava contribuindo com um acampamento científico para jovens, ministrando uma palestra sobre a evolução e como ela naturalmente ocorre em modelos de cooperação entre duas ou mais espécies”, contou.
O episódio evidencia o interesse do matemático por novidades, demonstrado também durante o evento. Nash não esteve no local apenas para sua palestra. Ele participou como ouvinte de diversas outras apresentações e acompanhou atentamente a exposição de pôsteres, demonstrando interesse pelo trabalho desenvolvido no Brasil com a Teoria dos Jogos.
“Atualmente, em meus estudos, também tento dar continuidade a uma área mais complexa, que trata de jogos que podem ser parcialmente competitivos e parcialmente colaborativos”, disse. “Não estou certo sobre como vão se referir a essa área de pesquisa no futuro, se vão incluí-la na Teoria dos Jogos, se vão dizer que é estatística ou se é econometria. O certo é que há muito a se fazer.”
Animalistic descriptions of violent crimes increase punishment of perpetrators (Science Daily)
Date: August 4, 2014
Source: Wiley
Summary: Describing criminals and criminal activities with animal metaphors leads to more retaliation against perpetrators by inducing the perception that they’re likely to continue engaging in violence, a new study suggests.
Describing criminals and criminal activities with animal metaphors leads to more retaliation against perpetrators by inducing the perception that they’re likely to continue engaging in violence, a new Aggressive Behavior study suggests.
When surveying jury-eligible adults, investigators varied animalistic descriptions of a violent crime and examined its effect on the severity of the punishment for the act. Compared with non-animalistic descriptions, animalistic descriptions resulted in significantly harsher punishment for the perpetrator due to an increase in perceived risk of recidivism.
“This research is yet another reminder that justice may be influenced by more than the facts of a case,” said lead author Dr. Eduardo Vasquez.
Journal Reference:
- Eduardo A. Vasquez, Steve Loughnan, Ellis Gootjes-Dreesbach, Ulrich Weger.The animal in you: Animalistic descriptions of a violent crime increase punishment of perpetrator. Aggressive Behavior, 2014; 40 (4): 337 DOI:10.1002/ab.21525
Walking to a place where “the mountains are weeping” (Glacier Hub)
Posted by GlacierHub on Aug 4, 2014
Having rested during the night we embark on a walk to Drangajökull. Unlike other Icelandic glaciers, it does not reach up to the high mountainous interior of the island. It is, nevertheless, impressive and has a history of its own. Centuries ago, local peasants and fishers would travel across it along specific routes, transporting driftwood and other goods, telling news, and spreading gossip.
We spot the glacier from the main road by the coast. Part of it stretches like a “tongue” (jökultunga in Icelandic) down towards the valley below it, as if it is making fun of us. We are not expecting a long walk, and we only carry a bottle of water and some fruit in our rucksacks but are equipped with solid mountain shoes that are well broken in. Walking on them feels like driving a caterpillar, smoothly plying the rough landscape of gravel, rocks, creeks, and wetlands. I have had my shoes for years now and I keep saying that they will probably outlive their owner. Nonetheless, I know that this is risky walk. If anything happens we are in trouble, since we are in one of the most remote areas of the island, without cell phone service.
Our only ambition is only to get to the edge if glacier. Walking on it would be difficult, and we don’t have the necessary expertise on potential routes and dangers. At the beginning of the walk, at the wide opening of the valley, we sense a gentle summer breeze against our faces. The air seems trapped in the valley, warmed by occasional sunshine. The scene feels still, almost silent. Occasionally, we can hear the song of birds.
As we get closer to the glacier, the narrowing valley begins to feel different. We next encounter the chilly air descending from the glacier. It is pleasant, though, as it cools us on the strenuous walk. The soundscape is changing fast, as if heavy speakers were blasting from everywhere with multiple echoes from the mountains. There is water running from all sides, gushing through the snow cap and from under the glacier. The only way for us to communicate is by shouting. Every now and then we have to cross small creeks, walking on stones or jumping across. We manage to avoid the biggest streams that come from the glacier itself. When we turn to look behind us, we see that they seem to add a brownish color to the ocean, visible behind us on the coast.
Along the way to the glacier we meet a few people on journeys like our own. There is a young couple from Switzerland. This is their second visit to the glacier in two years. Another couple, from Germany, had been on this route three years ago. This sounds like a pilgrimage and I wonder what it is that repeatedly brings people all this way. Ironically, none of us, the four Icelanders, has been here before.
A little before we reach the glacier, the heel on one of my shoes gets loose. For a while it follows me like an Achilles heel, with repeated nods or reminders on my foot. The walk turns out to take much more time than we expected. We seem to be getting closer, but will we ever reach the glacier? Getting there is supposed to take about two hours and we are beginning to feel fatigued. I am bemused that, after all, I have outlived my shoes, but the damaged sole poses a serious problem in this terrain. Luckily, I manage to tie the loose heel to the rest of the shoe with its long lace.
When we reach the glacier, we sit under it for some minutes, close to a large gap, something like a cave carved into the glacier. It is time to rest. The roaring sound of flowing water and the feel of ice-cool air are everywhere. We wonder what glaciers might have meant to medieval Icelanders and what impact global warming is heaving in places like this one. Some of the cave walls show curious layers or strata. Are these a kind of human narrative, carved in rocks, gravel, and ice? How much of what we are experiencing is informed by the dramatic events of the Anthropocene, when human forces finally had an effect on nature? Perhaps these are the some of the concerns that increasingly take people on journeys to glaciers, whether they are people like ourselves who are traveling within our own country, or others who have undertaken the greater effort to cross an ocean to arrive at this spot. On top of the pleasures of challenging walks and of outliving one’s shoes.
This guest post was written by Gísli Pálsson of the University of Iceland.
How to choose? (Aeon)
When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark
Illustration by Tim McDonagh
Michael Schulson is an American freelance writer. His work has appeared in Religion Dispatches, The Daily Beast, and Religion and Politics, among others. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
We could start with birds, or we could start with Greeks. Each option has advantages.
Let’s flip a coin. Heads and it’s the Greeks, tails and it’s the birds.
Tails.
In the 1970s, a young American anthropologist named Michael Dove set out for Indonesia, intending to solve an ethnographic mystery. Then a graduate student at Stanford, Dove had been reading about the Kantu’, a group of subsistence farmers who live in the tropical forests of Borneo. The Kantu’ practise the kind of shifting agriculture known to anthropologists as swidden farming, and to everyone else as slash-and-burn. Swidden farmers usually grow crops in nutrient-poor soil. They use fire to clear their fields, which they abandon at the end of each growing season.
Like other swidden farmers, the Kantu’ would establish new farming sites ever year in which to grow rice and other crops. Unlike most other swidden farmers, the Kantu’ choose where to place these fields through a ritualised form of birdwatching. They believe that certain species of bird – the Scarlet-rumped Trogon, the Rufous Piculet, and five others – are the sons-in-law of God. The appearances of these birds guide the affairs of human beings. So, in order to select a site for cultivation, a Kantu’ farmer would walk through the forest until he spotted the right combination of omen birds. And there he would clear a field and plant his crops.
Dove figured that the birds must be serving as some kind of ecological indicator. Perhaps they gravitated toward good soil, or smaller trees, or some other useful characteristic of a swidden site. After all, the Kantu’ had been using bird augury for generations, and they hadn’t starved yet. The birds, Dove assumed, had to be telling the Kantu’something about the land. But neither he, nor any other anthropologist, had any notion of what that something was.
He followed Kantu’ augurers. He watched omen birds. He measured the size of each household’s harvest. And he became more and more confused. Kantu’ augury is so intricate, so dependent on slight alterations and is-the-bird-to-my-left-or-my-right contingencies that Dove soon found there was no discernible correlation at all between Piculets and Trogons and the success of a Kantu’ crop. The augurers he was shadowing, Dove told me, ‘looked more and more like people who were rolling dice’.
Stumped, he switched dissertation topics. But the augury nagged him. He kept thinking about it for ‘a decade or two’. And then one day he realised that he had been looking at the question the wrong way all the time. Dove had been asking whether Kantu’ augury imparted useful ecological information, as opposed to being random. But what if augury was useful precisely because it was random?
For the Kantu’, the best option was one familiar to any investor when faced with an unpredictable market: they needed to diversify
Tropical swidden agriculture is a fundamentally unpredictable enterprise. The success of a Kantu’ swidden depends on rainfall, pest outbreaks and river levels, among other factors. A patch of forest that might yield a good harvest in a rainy year could be unproductive in a drier year, or in a year when a certain pest spreads. And things such as pest outbreaks or the weather are pretty much impossible to predict weeks or months in the future, both for humans and for birds.
In the face of such uncertainty, though, the human tendency is to seek some kind of order – to come up with a systematic method for choosing a field site, and, in particular, to make decisions based on the conditions of the previous year.
Neither option is useful. Last year’s conditions have pretty much no bearing on events in the years ahead (a rainy July 2013 does not have any bearing on the wetness of July 2014). And systematic methods can be prey to all sorts of biases. If, for example, a Kantu’ farmer predicted that the water levels would be favourable one year, and so put all his fields next to the river, a single flood could wipe out his entire crop. For the Kantu’, the best option was one familiar to any investor when faced with an unpredictable market: they needed to diversify. And bird augury was an especially effective way to bring about that kind of diversification.
It makes sense that it should have taken Dove some 15 years to realise that randomness could be an asset. As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit.
Over the millennia, cultures have expended a great deal of time, energy and ingenuity in order to introduce some element of chance into decision-making. Naskapi hunters in the Canadian province of Labrador would roast the scapula of a caribou in order to determine the direction of their next hunt, reading the cracks that formed on the surface of the bone like a map. In China, people have long sought guidance in the passages of the I Ching, using the intricate manipulation of 49 yarrow stalks to determine which section of the book they ought to consult. The Azande of central Africa, when faced with a difficult choice, would force a powdery poison down a chicken’s throat, finding the answer to their question in whether or not the chicken survived – a hard-to-predict, if not quite random, outcome. (‘I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of,’ wrote the British anthropologist E E Evans-Pritchard, who adopted some local customs during his time with the Azande in the 1920s).
The list goes on. It could – it does – fill books. As any blackjack dealer or tarot reader might tell you, we have a love for the flip of the card. Why shouldn’t we? Chance has some special properties. It is a swift, consistent, and (unless your chickens all die) relatively cheap decider. Devoid of any guiding mind, it is subject to neither blame nor regret. Inhuman, it can act as a blank surface on which to descry the churning of fate or the work of divine hands. Chance distributes resources and judges disputes with perfect equanimity.
The sanitising effect of augury cleans out any bad reasons
Above all, chance makes its selection without any recourse to reasons. This quality is perhaps its greatest advantage, though of course it comes at a price. Peter Stone, a political theorist at Trinity College, Dublin, and the author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (2011), has made a career of studying the conditions under which such reasonless-ness can be, well, reasonable.
‘What lotteries are very good for is for keeping bad reasons out of decisions,’ Stone told me. ‘Lotteries guarantee that when you are choosing at random, there will be no reasons at all for one option rather than another being selected.’ He calls this the sanitising effectof lotteries – they eliminate all reasons from a decision, scrubbing away any kind of unwanted influence. As Stone acknowledges, randomness eliminates good reasons from the running as well as bad ones. He doesn’t advocate using chance indiscriminately. ‘But, sometimes,’ he argues, ‘the danger of bad reasons is bigger than the loss of the possibility of good reasons.’
For an example, let’s return to the Kantu’. Besides certain basic characteristics, when it comes to selecting a swidden site in the forest, there are no good reasons by which to choose a site. You just don’t know what the weather and pests will look like. As a result, any reasons that a Kantu’ farmer uses will either be neutral, or actively harmful. The sanitising effect of augury cleans out those bad reasons. The Kantu’ also establish fields in swampland, where the characteristics of a good site are much more predictable – where, in other words, good reasons are abundant. In the swamps, as it happens, the Kantu’ don’t use augury to make their pick.
Thinking about choice and chance in this way has applications outside rural Borneo, too. In particular, it can call into question some of the basic mechanisms of our rationalist-meritocratic-democratic system – which is why, as you might imagine, a political theorist such as Stone is so interested in randomness in the first place.
Around the same time that Michael Dove was pondering his riddle in a Kantu’ longhouse, activists and political scientists were beginning to revive the idea of filling certain political positions by lottery, a process known as sortition.
The practice has a long history. Most public officials in democratic Athens were chosen by lottery, including the nine archons who were chosen by sortition from a significant segment of the population. The nobles of Renaissance Venice used to select their head of state, the doge, through a complicated, partially randomised process. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Social Contract (1762), argued that lotteries would be the norm in an ideal democracy, giving every citizen an equal chance of participating in every part of the government (Rousseau added that such ideal democracies did not exist). Sortition survives today in the process of jury selection, and it crops up from time to time in unexpected places. Ontario and British Columbia, for example, have used randomly selected panels of Canadian citizens to propose election regulations.
Advocates of sortition suggest applying that principle more broadly, to congresses and parliaments, in order to create a legislature that closely reflects the actual composition of a state’s citizenship. They are not (just to be clear) advocating that legislators randomly choosepolicies. Few, moreover, would suggest that non-representative positions such as the US presidency be appointed by a lottery of all citizens. The idea is not to banish reason from politics altogether. But plenty of bad reasons can influence the election process – through bribery, intimidation, and fraud; through vote-purchasing; through discrimination and prejudices of all kinds. The question is whether these bad reasons outweigh the benefits of a system in which voters pick their favourite candidates.
By way of illustration: a handful of powerful families and influential cliques dominated Renaissance Venice. The use of sortition in selection of the doge, writes the historian Robert Finlay in Politics in Renaissance Venice (1980), was a means of ‘limiting the ability of any group to impose its will without an overwhelming majority or substantial good luck’. Americans who worry about unbridled campaign-spending by a wealthy few might relate to this idea.
Or consider this. In theory, liberal democracies want legislatures that accurately reflect their citizenship. And, presumably, the qualities of a good legislator (intelligence, integrity, experience) aren’t limited to wealthy, straight, white men. The relatively homogeneous composition of our legislatures suggests that less-than-ideal reasons are playing a substantial role in the electoral process. Typically, we just look at this process and wonder how to eliminate that bias. Advocates of sortition see conditions ripe for randomness.
Once all good reasons are eliminated, the most efficient, most fair and most honest option might be chance
It’s not only politics where the threat of bad reasons, or a lack of any good reasons, makes the luck of the draw seem attractive. Take college admissions. When Columbia University accepts just 2,291 of its roughly 33,000 applicants, as it did this year, it’s hard to imagine that the process was based strictly on good reasons. ‘College admissions are already random; let’s just admit it and begin developing a more effective system,’ wrote the education policy analyst Chad Aldeman on the US daily news site Inside Higher Ed back in 2009. He went on to describe the notion of collegiate meritocracy as ‘a pretension’ and remarked: ‘A lottery might be the answer.’
The Swarthmore College professor Barry Schwartz, writing in The Atlantic in 2012, came to a similar conclusion. He proposed that, once schools have narrowed down their applicant pools to a well-qualified subset, they could just draw names. Some schools in the Netherlands already use a similar system. ‘A lottery like this won’t correct the injustice that is inherent in a pyramidal system in which not everyone can rise to the top,’ wrote Schwartz. ‘But it will reveal the injustice by highlighting the role of contingency and luck.’ Once certain standards are met, no really good reasons remain to discriminate between applicant No 2,291 (who gets into Columbia) and applicant No 2,292 (who does not). And once all good reasons are eliminated, the most efficient, most fair and most honest option might be chance.
But perhaps not the most popular one. When randomness is added to a supposedly meritocratic system, it can inspire quite a backlash. In 2004, the International Skating Union (ISU) introduced a new judging system for figure-skating competitions. Under this system – which has since been tweaked – 12 judges evaluated each skater, but only nine of those votes, selected at random, actually counted towards the final tally (the ancient Athenians judged drama competitions in a similar way). Figure skating is a notoriously corrupt sport, with judges sometimes forming blocs that support each other’s favoured skaters. In theory, a randomised process makes it harder to form such alliances. A tit-for-tat arrangement, after all, doesn’t work as well if it’s unclear whether your partners will be able to reciprocate.
But the new ISU rules did more than simply remove a temptation to collude. As statisticians pointed out, random selection will change the outcome of some events. Backing their claims with competition data, they showed how other sets of randomly selected votes would have yielded different results, actually changing the line-up of the medal podium in at least one major competition. Even once all the skaters had performed, ultimate victory depended on the luck of the draw.
There are two ways to look at this kind of situation. The first way – the path of outrage – condemns a system that seems fundamentally unfair. A second approach would be to recognise that the judging process is already subjective and always will be. Had a different panel of 12 judges been chosen for the competition, the result would have varied, too. The ISU system simply makes that subjectivity more apparent, even as it reduces the likelihood that certain obviously bad influences, such as corruption, will affect the final result.
Still, most commentators opted for righteous outrage. That isn’t surprising. The ISU system conflicts with two common modern assumptions: that it is always desirable (and usually possible) to eliminate uncertainty and chance from a situation; and that achievement is perfectly reflective of effort and talent. Sortition, college admission lotteries, and randomised judging run against the grain of both of these premises. They embrace uncertainty as a useful part of their processes, and they fail to guarantee that the better citizen or student or skater, no matter how much she drives herself to success, will be declared the winner.
Let me suggest that, in the fraught and unpredictable world in which we live, both of those ideals – total certainty and perfect reward – are delusional. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to increase knowledge and reward success. It’s just that, until we reach that utopia, we might want to come to terms with the reality of our situation, which is that our lives are dominated by uncertainty, biases, subjective judgments and the vagaries of chance.
In the novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), the American sci-fi maestro Philip K Dick imagines an alternative history in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War. Most of the novel’s action takes place in Japanese-occupied San Francisco, where characters, both Japanese and American, regularly use the I Ching to guide difficult decisions in their business lives and personal affairs.
Something, somewhere, is always playing dice
As an American with no family history of divination, I’ll admit to being enchanted by Dick’s vision of a sci-fi world where people yield some of their decision-making power to the movements of dried yarrow stems. There’s something liberating, maybe, in being able to acknowledge that the reasons we have are often inadequate, or downright poor. Without needing to impose any supernatural system, it’s not hard to picture a society in which chance plays a more explicit, more accepted role in the ways in which we distribute goods, determine admissions to colleges, give out jobs to equally matched applicants, pick our elected leaders, and make personal decisions in our own lives.
Such a society is not a rationalist’s nightmare. Instead, in an uncertain world where bad reasons do determine so much of what we decide, it’s a way to become more aware of what factors shape the choices we make. As Peter Stone told me, paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, ‘the first task of reason is to recognise its own limitations’. Nor is such a society more riddled with chanciness than our own. Something, somewhere, is always playing dice. The roles of coloniser and colonised, wealthy and poor, powerful and weak, victor and vanquished, are rarely as predestined as we imagine them to be.
Dick seems to have understood this. Certainly, he embraced chance in a way that few other novelists ever have. Years after he wrote The Man in the High Castle, Dick explained to an interviewer that, setting aside from planning and the novelist’s foresight, he had settled key details of the book’s plot by flipping coins and consulting the I Ching.
14 July 2014
Be Horrified At All The Ways Climate Change Will Destroy Us, Kindly Collected In One Map (Fast Co/Exist)
Ben Schiller
August 1, 2014 | 8:14 AM
Climate change not only means warmer temperatures. It means a tremendous churning of natural processes that human beings rely upon.
Climate change is likely to have a range of complicated impacts affecting all kinds of human activity–from new water patterns that produce more flooding, to lower crop yields that exacerbate hunger in poor places.
The maps here trace the complicated “human dynamics of climate change.” They were developed by the U.K. Met Office (the official British weather forecast service), together with the U.K. Foreign Office and several universities.
They start with a “present-day” picture map, which shows trade in various commodities (wheat, maize, etc), important areas for fishing, routes for shipping and air freight, and regions with high degrees of water stress and political fragility.
Then the maps get into specific issues, based on “business as usual” climate forecasts for 2100, i.e. what will happen if society does nothing to stop global warming from its current track. You can see, for example, how higher temperatures could increase demand for irrigation water; how parts of the world could see increases and decreases in water run-off into rivers; how different areas (like 70% of Asia) are set for more flooding; and how the warmest days in Europe, parts of Asia, and North America are projected to be 6°C warmer.
The poster also has summaries for each region of the world. North Africa, for instance, “is projected to see some of the largest increases in the number of drought days and decreases in average annual water run-off.” North America, meanwhile, is forecast to see an increase in the number of drought days, increasing temperatures on its warmest days, and, depending on the region, both increases and decreases in river flooding.
The overall impression is one of flux. Climate change not only means warmer temperatures. It means a tremendous churning of natural processes that human beings rely on.
* * *
Human dynamics of climate change (UK MetOffice)
The impacts of climate change will not be experienced in isolation, but will affect humans in the context of the way we live
The ‘Human dynamics of climate change’ map aims to illustrate some of the impacts of climate and population change in the context of a globalised world. You can download the map and the supplementary information below:
HDCC map supplementary information (PDF, 629 kB)
There are two types of information included in the map – present-day human dynamics, and projected future changes in climate and population between a present day baseline (1981-2010) and the end of the 21st century (2071-2100).
The climate projections shown do not include any assumptions about adaptation or adaptive capacity. They represent the potential long-term influence of climate change on human activity, and may be thought of as a driver of change. This map shows a ‘business as usual’ greenhouse gas concentration scenario ( RCP8.5) that contains no explicit greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, with a ‘middle of the road’ socio-economic scenario ( SSP2) for population change.
To illustrate how the information on the map can be interpreted, an overview of the global picture is included in the supplementary information, and a number of regional case studies are explored on the map itself; these are also included in the link below. However, the different impacts (both positive and negative), and the different contexts in which these impacts occur, interact in multiple, complex ways. We invite you to explore the information and discover the links that mean the most to you.
Questions and answers related to the map are available here: HDCC map Q & A (PDF, 70 kB)
Alternative version of the map
An alternative version of the map is available here: HDCC alternative map (PDF, 8 MB) , and a similar version under an ‘aggressive mitigation’ greenhouse gas concentration scenario (RCP2.6) is also available for comparison here: HDCC alternative map mitigation (PDF, 7 MB)
The following document details the differences between these two versions and the version at the top of the page: HDDC map alternative version information (PDF, 35 kB)
For more detail on the present-day and future change information used to produce the ‘Human dynamics of climate change’ map, follow the links below.
The Most Violent Era In America Was Before Europeans Arrived (Science 2.0)
By News Staff | August 4th 2014 01:34 AM
There’s a mythology about the native Americans, that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature – it’s easy to create narratives when there is no written record.
But archeology keeps its own history and a new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions dead in wars and, in the case of Germany, China, Russia and other dictatorships, genocide, was not the most violent – on a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians.
Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.
“If we’re identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death,” said Kohler. The study also offers new clues to the mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to 0 in 30 years.
From the days they first arrived in the Southwest in the 1800s, most anthropologists and archaeologists have downplayed evidence of violent conflict among native Americans.
“Archaeologists with one or two exceptions have not tried to develop an objective metric of levels of violence through time,” said Kohler. “They’ve looked at a mix of various things like burned structures, defensive site locations and so forth, but it’s very difficult to distill an estimate of levels of violence from such things. We’ve concentrated on one thing, and that is trauma, especially to the head and portions of the arms. That’s allowed us to look at levels of violence through time in a comparative way.”
It wasn’t just violent deaths that poke holes in the harmony with the land and each other myth. A paper in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the Southwest also had a baby boom between 500 and 1300 that likely exceeded any population spurt on earth today. The northern Rio Grande also experienced population booms but the central Mesa Verde got more violent while the northern Rio Grande was less so.
Kohler has conjectures on why. Social structures among people in the northern Rio Grande changed so that they identified less with their kin and more with the larger pueblo and specific organizations that span many pueblos, such as medicine societies. The Rio Grande also had more commercial exchanges where craft specialists provided people both in the pueblo, and outsiders, specific things they needed, such as obsidian arrow points.
But in the central Mesa Verde, there was less specialization.
“When you don’t have specialization in societies, there’s a sense in which everybody is a competitor because everybody is doing the same thing,” said Kohler. But with specialization, people are more dependent on each other and more reluctant to do harm.
If that sounds like rationalization based on Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, it is.
“Pinker thought that what he called ‘gentle commerce’ was very important in the pacification of the world over the last 5,000 years,” said Kohler. “That seems to work pretty well in our record as well.”
The episode of conflict in Southwest Colorado seems to have begun when people in the Chaco culture, halfway between central Mesa Verde and northern Rio Grande, attempted to spread into Southwest Colorado.
From 1080 to 1130, the Chaco-influenced people in Southwest Colorado did well. In the mid-1100s, there was a severe drought and the core of Chaco culture fell apart. Much of the area around Chaco lost population, and in 1160, violence in the central Mesa Verde peaked. Slightly more than a century later, everyone left that area, too.
“In the Mesa Verde there could be a haves-versus-have-nots dynamic towards the very end,” said Kohler. “The people who stayed the longest were probably the people who were located in the very best spots. But those pueblos too were likely losing population. And it might have been the older folks who stuck around, who weren’t so anxious to move as the young folks who thought, ‘We could make a better living elsewhere.'” Older, or with too few people to marshal a good defense, the remaining people in the Mesa Verde pueblos were particularly vulnerable to raids.
At least two of the last-surviving large pueblos in the central Mesa Verde were attacked as the region was being abandoned. Some of their inhabitants probably made it out alive, but, says Kohler, “Many did not.”
Citation: Timothy A. Kohler, Scott G. Ortman, Katie E. Grundtisch, Carly M. Fitzpatrick and Sarah M. Cole, ‘The Better Angels of Their Nature: Declining Violence through Time among Prehispanic Farmers of the Pueblo Southwest’, American Antiquity, Volume 79, Number 3 / July 2014, DOI: 10.7183/0002-7316.79.3.444. Source: Washington State University
City and rural super-dialects exposed via Twitter (New Scientist)
11 August 2014 by Aviva Rutkin
Magazine issue 2981.
WHAT do two Twitter users who live halfway around the world from each other have in common? They might speak the same “super-dialect”. An analysis of millions of Spanish tweets found two popular speaking styles: one favoured by people living in cities, another by those in small rural towns.
Bruno Gonçalves at Aix-Marseille University in France and David Sánchez at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Palma, Majorca, Spain, analysed more than 50 million tweets sent over a two-year period. Each tweet was tagged with a GPS marker showing whether the message came from a user somewhere in Spain, Latin America, or Spanish-speaking pockets of Europe and the US.
The team then searched the tweets for variations on common words. Someone tweeting about their socks might use the word calcetas, medias, orsoquetes, for example. Another person referring to their car might call it theircoche, auto, movi, or one of three other variations with roughly the same meaning. By comparing these word choices to where they came from, the researchers were able to map preferences across continents (arxiv.org/abs/1407.7094).
According to their data, Twitter users in major cities thousands of miles apart, like Quito in Ecuador and San Diego in California, tend to have more language in common with each other than with a person tweeting from the nearby countryside, probably due to the influence of mass media.
Studies like these may allow us to dig deeper into how language varies across place, time and culture, says Eric Holt at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Super-dialects exposed via millions of tweets”
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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