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Latest Musing Imagining a Post Pandemic World How might a post-pandemic world look and feel? Let’s imagine a creative team at a New York City advertising agency pitching a campaign in 2050 for a new perfume (more than most products, perfumes are sold by attaching to the dreams and aspirations of their times).  The Big Apple, ... continue Latest Book Deep Past Buy from Amazon more info Articles by Category endangered animals rapid climate change global deforestation fragging Books Winds of Change Buy from Amazon more info Afterword to the softbound edition. The Octopus and the Orangutan more info The Future In Plain Sight more info The Parrot's Lament more info Silent Partners more info Affluence and Discontent more info The Alms Race more info Apes, Men, & Language more info

The Pope Moves the Church Sunday July 05, 2015 [This essay appeared in the Financial Times on July 3, 2015]   Free market conservatives hate it, it fails to address the threat of overpopulation, and it dismisses carbon credits as a way to combat global warming. Nonetheless Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, will ultimately be recognised as one of the most significant events in the modern environmental movement. Above all, it takes a big step towards healing a breach between western religions and nature that dates back to the dawn of monotheism. Francis goes much further than Pope Paul VI, who more than 40 years ago inveighed against the “ill-considered exploitation of nature”. He explicitly recognises and explores the link be­tween what he construes as a warped interpretation of dominion — an interpretation that relegates nature to mere stuff put at humanity’s disposal — and the wanton despoliation of the planet. His encyclical builds on the thinking of the many Christians who mined Biblical texts to support the notion that the creation is sacred. The Pope cited his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, who averred “through the greatness and beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker”. It is no overstatement to say that the present, human-wrought, sixth-great extinction crisis — the biggest die-off in species since the dinosaurs — as well as the climate crisis that may prove our undoing, are a result of the view of dominium Pope Francis seeks to bury. Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, recognised this nearly 50 years ago. He argued in an essay on the origins of pollution that the arc of western religion has been to get the gods off our back so that humanity can do business. This started in ancient Greece, where moral space for exploiting nature was created by moving the gods out of the trees and exiling them to Mount Olympus. The advent of monotheism took this further by bundling the deities into one God and placing Him in outer space. Throw in the Protestant revolution, which made material success virtuous, and it was but a short step to the throw­away consumer society Pope Francis rails against. The conclusion that humanity is intrinsically different from the rest of nature made sense to early Christian thinkers, given that they rarely encountered any creature that suggested continuity between animals and people. By contrast, in central Africa, great apes provided a constant reminder for the animists that nature is a continuum. It is notable that the version of Genesis recounted by Josephus — a Zelig-like figure of Roman times who was first a Jewish general, then an adviser to the son of the Emperor Vespasian and also an important historian — states that humans could talk to the animals before the fall, an explicit statement that knowledge and intellect separate us from the rest of the natural order. Over the years, the text and the interpretation changed; instead of being a curse, the knowledge that caused our alienation from nature morphed into a glory. Fast forward to 1962, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring marked the dawn of the modern environmental movement, awakening the world to pollution. A few years later there was some success in teaching language to chimpanzees, which may ultimately have done more to undermine the concepts of human nature that supported the moral justification for our abuse of nature. Today, attitudes about animal intelligence have shifted to the point where US courts have permitted filings arguing that chimpanzees should be regarded not as property but persons. An un­thinking sense of entitlement has given way to an honest struggle to reconcile acknowledgement of our ties to nature with the functioning of a modern industrial society — the same conundrum Francis addresses in his encyclical. Indeed, there is proof in the encyclical that the Pope is mindful of the conundrum posed by recognising that nature is sacred in a modern industrial society. In paragraph 90, he acknowledges that humanity must accept its responsibilities without the divination of nature paralysing all economic activity or eclipsing the plight of the poor. There is no easy way to achieve that balance, but even the subtle shift from entitlement to respect and awareness of life’s interconnections could work wonders. Thus religion, at its most profound, changes. Two decades ago I asked James Parks Morton, then dean of Saint John the Divine, the Episcopal cathedral in New York City, how the Church could reconcile the idea of respect for nature with an ethos that for centuries has viewed nature as mere stuff. His simple answer was that a cathedral’s transept was the centre of the soul of its community; and, if the centre moved, the church had to move. Pope Francis is trying to move the church. Laudate Papa. contact Eugene Linden

Short Take Relaxing COVID-19 Restrictions will Kill, not Save, the Economy   [This is a more developed version of the previous Short Take} Those who want to relax mandates on self-isolation and social distancing to save the economy have got it exactly backwards. Reopen society too soon, and we risk destroying the economy as well as public order and our shaky democratic institutions. The reason comes down to two words: supply lines.  Supply lines for necessities such as food are already under stress. Those going to grocery stories encounter random instances of empty shelves and vegetable bins. Smithfield Farms shut down a South Dakota plant that supplies roughly 4% of the pork in the nation after over 500 of its workers tested positive for the coronavirus. Other giant meat processors such as Tyson have also shut down plants for similar reasons. Farmers in the West are having trouble finding workers to harvest the crops now reaching maturity in the fields. And even if they manage to get the crops picked, farmers are out of luck if the truckers fail to show up, or the flow of packaging for their products get interrupted.  Right now, these disruptions are episodic, but that should be concerning because we haven’t even seen the end of the first wave. What we have seen is that vital front-line workers such as nurses, doctors, EMT’s, and other first responders have had trouble finding protective equipment and maintaining morale. Some have staged walkouts over the dangerous conditions, and these are workers with a sense of mission. By contrast, for most of the hourly-paid workers who keep supplies made, distributed, and sold, their work is a job that pays the bills. It would be appropriate if society recognized that they played a vital role, but mostly these workers encounter demanding bosses, monotony, and surly customers. If sick, they are not going to work – nor would we want them too. And they are not likely to risk their lives if going to work exposes them to contagion. Disruption of one link, e.g. the trucker that delivers food the last mile, could halt a supply chain. COVID-19 is a threat to every link. Should a second wave hit before there is a readily available, cheap and effective treatment, it’s a very high probability that many supply lines will be disrupted and filling the gaps could easily overwhelm the nation’s businesses.  Even today, on the evening news, we see images of vast caravans of cars lined up to get supplies from food banks. Imagine two weeks of empty shelves in the stores that feed our cities. How likely is it that civil order could be maintained in that situation? Will people suffer in silence if they realize that they can’t buy food for their kids because our leaders reopened the economy before a treatment was available because they wanted to prop up the stock market (which is how it will be portrayed)? If we want to look analogues for what life is like once supply chains break down, they’re readily available today in cities like Mogadishu, Kinshasa, and Port au Prince.   Thus far, the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic seems to be a mélange of Boss Tweed, Don Corleone and Inspector Clouseau. For the next act, the administration has a choice: Churchill, who bolstered British morale during the London Blitz, or Pol Pot, who sacrificed millions of his countrymen for a bad idea. Let’s hope those around Trump can convince him that the cure for the disease is the cure for the economy.   read more

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