Here’s a handful of additional passages I found particularly profound, moving, fascinating, illuminating, or otherwise noteworthy and memorable in my reading last month.
Note that the title of this post and the original Potent Passages from May 2007, and also of future posts that I’ll make in a similar vein, doesn’t necessarily indicate that all of these items were first published in the month named, but merely that I read them during that month (although in the present case, the following items actually were all published in May).
In some cases the things I’ll include in these types of posts may also have been quoted in the excerpts included in a given month’s reading list. The thing is, they have a very good chance of getting buried there amidst the deluge of accompanying text, so I’ll be holding them up for more direct inspection in these “potent passages” posts.
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From John Michael Greer, “Religion and Peak Oil: The Next Spirituality,” The Archdruid Report, May 10, 2007
For the religion of progress in any of its forms — the straightforward atheist anthropolatry of Richard Dawkins and his peers, or the quasi-theistic versions that use the forms of older faiths but redefine them in progressive terms — the coming of the deindustrial age promises a major crisis of faith. The same is true of today’s Christian fundamentalism, which rejects the progressive vision but has made itself just as vulnerable to a future that shows no particular interest in conforming to its apocalyptic prophecies. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that despite their current popularity both these faiths are on their way out; too much hostility stands between them to allow the sort of mutual accommodation that happened between Shinto and Buddhism in Japan, and some more recently arrived faiths have already begun to work the same strategy on them that Christianity worked on classical Paganism and Greek philosophy.
Catholicism is another matter. While American Protestantism has been losing members steadily for decades, the Catholic church has been holding steady, not least because so much immigration into the US today comes from predominantly Catholic countries. Demographics have worked very much in Catholicism’s favor, and will very likely continue to do so. Whether the church in America can hold together in the face of the issues pulling it toward schism is a good question, but if it can manage that, A Canticle for Liebowitz may not be as farfetched as it looks.
Buddhism, it seems to me, is also very much worth watching. In the last few decades, especially but not only on the west coast, Buddhism has transformed itself from an exotic foreign import to a homegrown faith with a growing popular appeal, and Buddhist monasteries can be found all over North America these days – there are three of them within a short drive of the town where I live. If it continues along its present growth curve, Buddhism could turn into a major religious force in North America over the next few centuries.
Yet it’s also worth watching the fringes, and keeping an eye out for wild cards. Christianity was a legally proscribed minority faith only a few generations before it seized control of the Roman world. In a world of contingencies, where slight causes can drive vast effects, some religious movement barely large enough to be noticed today might turn into the dominant religion of North America a few centuries down the road. Arnold Toynbee noted in his massive A Study of History that the downslope of civilizations seem to be the incubators of universal religions, and rarely so dramatically as in times when the most basic assumptions of a civilization are visibly disproving themselves. This is such a time, in case you haven’t noticed.
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James Howard Kunstler, “We Want Solutions!” Clusterfuck Nation, May 28, 2007
Wherever the environmentally-informed gather these days (i.e., the clusterfuck-aware), a nervous impatience often mounts, and ends up expressing itself as an outcry for “solutions.” For example, at the Telluride Mountain Film Festival, where I happened to be this past weekend, along with a couple of hundred other people who spewed airplane exhaust across the stratosphere to get there. This year’s twin themes were the Castor-and-Pollux of Clusterfuck Nation, Global Warming and Peak Oil.
Many frightening documentary films and Powerpoint talks were served up in the opening symposium (including ones by Dennis Dimick, the editor of National Geographic, Daniel Nocera of MIT, and yours truly) and, as the morning wore on, the audience grew visibly impatient, until one speaker dropped the word “solutions,” and the audience gave out a big whoop of approbation.
It only made me more nervous, because this longing for “solutions,” strikes me as a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth’s ecosystems (and human civilization with it). And I think such a wish is, in itself, at the root of our problem — certainly at the bottom of our incapacity to think clearly about these things.
I said so, of course, which seemed to piss off a substantial number of my fellow festival attendees.
My position on this can be easily misunderstood. I don’t want civilization to collapse (I like Mozart and access to root canal). I don’t want Homo sapiens to go extinct, or the planet to parboil. I certainly don’t believe in doing nothing in the face of this emergency. But I also don’t believe we are going to make any hassle-free switch in the way we run things — or that we should want to. Would the USA be a better place if we could run Wal-Mart and Las Vegas on wind power? I don’t think so. Would the public benefit from another hundred years of suburban living — and an economy based largely on creating ever more of it? All the Prozac in the universe would not avail to offset the diminishing returns of that bullshit.
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From Jonathan Leake, “Fiddling with figures while the Earth burns,” The Times Online, May 6, 2007
If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.
“We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,” said Lovelock. “We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.”
Lovelock has delivered such warnings before, but this weekend they have a special resonance. Last week in Bangkok, Thailand, the world’s governments finalised this year’s third and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) setting out how humanity might save itself from the worst effects of climate change.
. . . . Lovelock believes that the transformation is happening far too fast for humanity to tackle, especially in a world that remains committed to economic growth and whose 6.5 billion population is predicted to reach more than 9 billion by mid-century.
. . . . At first sight Lovelock’s predictions seem wildly at odds with the IPCC’s reports, but in many ways the only difference is in the vividness of the language. “The progressive acidification of oceans due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to have negative impacts on marine shell-forming organisms (ie corals) and their dependent species,” said the IPCC report detailing the impacts of climate change – its careful language draining the drama from a warning that vast tracts of the ocean may turn so acidic that little life will be left in them.
It added: “At lower latitudes, especially seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1-2C), which would increase risk of hunger.” What these measured tones imply, warns Lovelock, is that millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – of people living in equatorial lands will be forced from their homes, with most of them heading northwards. “The world will face mass shortages of food and water. That will lead to wars and the effective clearance of vast areas of land as the deserts spread,” he said.
Lovelock’s reputation as a scientific seer was founded four decades ago when he published his Gaia hypothesis. His idea, that the Earth’s chemistry, climate and life were all closely linked into a kind of self-sustaining system, is now received wisdom. It has become clear that the first life forms on Earth transformed its early climate and atmosphere, generating the oxygen that allowed life to evolve – eventually into us.
. . . . He is not alone in predicting a huge northwards shift in human populations: in his new book, How the World will Change with Global Warming, Professor Trausti Valsson, an Icelandic academic, predicts how population centres will move north.
“The Arctic ice cap is melting. When it goes it will open up new shipping routes, new fishing grounds and new oil fields,” said Valsson. “The Arctic Ocean will become the new Mediterranean with Siberia and Canada as the centres for human culture and civilisation.”
Lovelock is fond of recounting how, on a recent lecture tour of America, he was accosted by earnest academics seeking advice on whereabouts in Canada they should buy their second homes.
Behind such comic anecdotes, however, lies the grim possibility that billions of people face a miserable life and death as humanity finds a new equilibrium with the Earth. At 87 Lovelock acknowledges that he is unlikely to be one of them. His concern is for the generations represented by his nine grandchildren. “What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.”
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Michael Pollan, “Unhappy Meals,” The New York Times Magazine, January 28, 2007
If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
. . . . The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.
. . . . It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things — who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients — those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health — gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.
. . . . Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.
. . . . [T]he widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.
. . . . This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism program.
. . . . [T]he typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can’t put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That’s why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.
Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.
. . . . No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?
In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs, that reach all the way down to the soil.
. . . . “Health” is, among other things, the byproduct of being involved in these sorts of relationships in a food chain — involved in a great many of them, in the case of an omnivorous creature like us. Further, when the health of one link of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the creatures in it. When the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk. Or, as the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard put it in 1945 in “The Soil and Health” (a founding text of organic agriculture), we would do well to regard “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” Our personal health is inextricably bound up with the health of the entire food web.
. . . . The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.
It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us “adapt.” Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.
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From Michael Nystrom, “The Fourth Turning, Part II — Rise of the Anti-Boomers: Millennial Generation 1, Imus 0,” Bull! Not Bull,
Adults blame the current crop of kids for their own offensive media, but it is “the 30-year olds who write it, the 50-year olds who produce it, [and] the 70-year olds whose portfolio’s profit from it!” Today’s youth culture is filled with words and images that are offensive to most adults, but the adults producing it sure like the money they make from it! The big surprise is that - according to the research by Strauss and Howe - the majority of kids find it offensive, too. They go along with it is because for the time being, they have to. They’re just kids, after all.
But their turn is coming.
Strauss and Howe [authors of 1997’s The Fourth Turning) go to great lengths to take on widespread misconceptions about the rising generation. They note that prior to the defining event of the Kennedy Assassination in 1963, Boomer kids were mindlessly watching Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in surfer movies, giving every indication that they would accept their parent’s conformist world ‘as is’ and “merge seamlessly into the world of tract houses, corporate jobs, and stay-at-home moms.” No one at the time came to the logical conclusion that they would reject it all and rebel against the status quo, just as no one now expects the current Millennial generation to complain much (what is there to complain about - they have everything!) or amount to much more than super consumers, just like their parents.
But simply trying to make a linear extrapolation of their current lives of iPods, manga, video games, internet chat and YouTube misunderstands a fundamental, recurring characteristic about all generations: They rebel. They all do, and they always do. What seems to be lost on the critics of the Millennials is that - for the time being - the kids are simply reflecting the cultural images and social mood created by their elders. How they rebel is likely to be the defining story of the next several decades.
. . . . Howe and Strauss assure us that the kids are smarter than most people give them credit for, and that they see through the hypocrisy and the double standards of the adult world quite clearly. When they’re ready, they’ll reshape the world into one that is more in line with their own - not their parents - values, much to the bewilderment of their elders. This coming of age will most likely occur against the backdrop of the Fourth Turning crisis that the authors have discussed previously, perfectly setting the stage for the re-imagining of America.
According to Strauss & Howe:
Per the experience of earlier generations, the coming of age of the Millennial Generation is likely to take place in the midst of a profound shift in America’s social mood, a shift that will match and reflect the new generation’s personna. For Millennials, this shift will focus on the needs of the community more than the individual, so it is likely to induce large-scale institutional change. Thus, the word rebellion is not entirely appropriate. The word revolution might better catch the spirit of what lies ahead.