This land was made for you and me ... and ants too!

It is Earth Day!

I worry about the natural environment, the living and the non-living, to qualify as an tree-hugging nutcase according to some. But, I am not ideologically fully in the environment camp, leading some to view me with suspicion that I am one of those right-wing guys.  As always, I don't belong to any party.

I am concerned about all things around me.  I don't even want to kill spiders or ants.  Unless they directly interfere with my life.  I don't want to see ants in my kitchen, but I don't care if they are having a party on the sidewalk outside my home.  I don't like to see spiders or flies or gnats inside my home.  When I do see them inside, well, I do kill them.  But I feel bad for them.  I feel guilty when I crush those tiny critters. Sometimes I even apologize to them, as if that makes any difference to the ant!

I care for, and worry about, the natural environment--the living and inanimate--because of a deep conviction that the cosmos is not merely about us humans and our own comfortable material existence.  My sincere belief that there is nothing for me after this life ends does not mean that I am going to trash this place while I am here.

Source

Even when I kill ants and spiders that come into my home, I make sure I kill them as fast as I can.  I don't want those critters to suffer.  I cannot imagine how scientists do experiments on animals; I would think that it is nothing but watching them suffer.  If from those experiments we derive some life-extending benefits to humans, are our additional years worth all that suffering we put the animals to?  Why this supremacy of humans?

I don't ever get trapped into the Earth Day rhetoric of "save the planet" either.  The planet has no feelings.  It just is.  It is not "save the planet" mantra; it is about saving ourselves.  It is about the every day life (and death) issues, starting from how we treat the rivers and the mountains, the ants and the elephants, and fellow humans, ... that Earth Day should be about.  

We need to think of every single day as Earth Day.

Do the religious worship nature?

One of my students has begun her project work on the disconnect between humans and the natural world.  "This disconnect from nature conflicts with human’s quality of life, physical health, psychological well-being, food sources, drinking water, our awareness of the natural world, and many more factors," she writes.

I am glad that younger people are thinking about these issues.  But then this is Oregon, and it is a rare Oregonian who is not in tune with nature.  I hope that kids and youth all over the world are thinking about these, so that they can undo the mess that we older folks have created for them.

The following is a slightly edited post from a few months ago:
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The undergraduate years gave me the time and space for me to figure out how I viewed many aspects of life, including religion.  Like a pendulum that violently swings, suggesting instability and the entire structure falling apart, the violence within was also reflected in my words and action.  In retrospect, I am immensely glad, and relieved, that I did not suffer a breakdown.

The internal tensions related to religion and the various daily practicalities of life resulted from the years of brainwashing.  I had yet to start any serious reading and thinking about how screwed up other religions might be.  Graduate school provided me that opportunity too.

While I did not take courses on religions, many of the books and articles that I read, and the lectures that I listened to, gave me insights.  One of those was about the relationship between god, nature, and humans.

In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, there is plenty of nature worship.  Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees.  And, of course, even killing the damn roaches troubled the really faithful ones.  But, apparently not so in the Judaeo-Christian framework.  Why?  The Bible said so:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

God rules over man, who rules over nature.  A relationship that is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.

Of course, just because people say they are religious does not mean they truly mean it. Many devout brahmins, for instance, devour meat.  And there are nature-worshiping hippies among Christians.  But, the broad framework suggests that the faithful might look at nature differently because their views stem from what their religions brainwashed them.

Do evangelical Christians in the US then put into practice a view that man rules over nature?  And, therefore, do they think differently from many of us who are worried about environmental crises and climate change in particular?

The following excerpt should settle that, it seems:

Here, for example, is what a church youth minister had to say about environmental care: “If we have the opportunity we should help take care of this planet that we’ve been given. Having said that, I also believe that the value of human life is higher than the value of a whale, or a species of monkey.”
It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about the environment. It’s that they care about people more.

Of course, the people that evangelicals care about don't live in shitholes--but, that is a post for another day!

Meera Subramanian worked on a series to find the middle ground in these environment discussions.  In one, she talked to a bunch of students at the Harvard of the evangelicals--Wheaton College.

While many evangelicals are preoccupied with the long-term state of human souls and the protection of the unborn, Diego and the other students I met at Wheaton are also considering other eternal implications and a broader definition of pro-life. They are concerned about the lifespan of climate pollutants that will last in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and about the lives of the poor and weak who are being disproportionately harmed by the effects of those greenhouse gases. 

But, as much as I found the world a challenging place back when I was a teenager, these students also are in a tough spot:

It can be tough to be an evangelical who cares about climate change, Chelsey said, "because the environmental activists don't trust you and the evangelicals hate you." Or they could hate you

If only we could engage in serious and sincere discussions all over the world on the relationship between humans and the natural world that envelops us.  If only!

Every day is Earth Day

It is Earth Week!

I worry about the natural environment, the living and the non-living, to qualify as an tree-hugging nutcase according to some. But, because I am not ideologically fully in the environment camp, there are others who view me with suspicion that I am one of those right-wing guys.  As always, I don't belong to any party.

The following is an edited post from April 19, 2015.
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My neighbor has always made fun of me, whenever he finds me sweeping away the cobwebs around my home.  "You don't have to do it if you spray the chemicals I use" he reminds me and jokes that I am one of those who doesn't want to kill even spiders.

Which is true.  I don't want to kill spiders or ants or anything unless they directly interfere with my life.  I don't want to see ants in my kitchen, but I don't care if they are having a party on the sidewalk outside my home.  I don't like to see spiders or flies or gnats inside my home.  When I do see them inside, well, I do kill them.  But I feel bad for them.  I feel guilty when I crush those tiny critters. Sometimes I even apologize to them, as if that makes any difference to the ant!

I care for, and worry about, the natural environment--the living and inanimate--because of a deep conviction that the cosmos is not merely about us humans and our own comfortable material existence.  My sincere belief that there is nothing for me after this life ends does not mean that I am going to trash this place while I am here.

Source

This being the Earth Day time, my various news feeds feature writings on many aspects of our existence on this glorious pale blue dot.  In one, the author reflects on a part of his life in which he was an animal experimenter:

First, I had to learn how to shock a pigeon. A graduate student demonstrated how one person held the pigeon upside down while the other plucked out the feathers in back of its legs, cut two lengths of stiff stainless steel wire from a spool and pushed them through the skin and under the pelvic bones. The wires were then soldered to a harness placed on the pigeon’s back. The harness contained a plug that would be connected to a source of electric shock during experiments. No anesthetic or sedative was used.
One day, while programming an experiment, I accidentally touched the electrodes and got a jolting shock that numbed my entire arm. I was amazed that, according to my professor, the shock level was the correct one to use for pigeons. I told myself that pigeons must not feel pain as much as I did

We tell ourselves all kinds of things in order to keep doing those things over and over.  

I was told that everyone had to take a turn killing the pigeons after the experiments were finished. A graduate student showed me how to dump a couple of dozen birds into a clear plastic garbage bag, then pour a splash of chloroform on them and tie the bag shut. I remember the first and only time I did the killing

I would imagine that except a minority, most of us would get messed up beyond repair if we conducted experiments on animals.  Especially if we did that more than once.  I would think we would forever be haunted by the images and the sounds.  

As I look back on this nearly 50 years later, I am astonished that the daily grind of depriving, shocking and killing these animals did not move me to leave my job. My rationalization is that I was a student and young worker in institutions of higher learning, programmed to receive the wisdom of academia. I was studying how the science that supposedly advanced our civilization was done. Speaking of his infamous experiments in which human subjects followed orders thinking they were giving extremely painful shocks to other humans, the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram said, “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” I think that describes me pretty well.

Even when I kill ants and spiders that come into my home, I make sure I kill them as fast as I can.  I don't want those critters to suffer.  Yet, experiments on animals is nothing but watching them suffer.  If from those experiments we derive some life-extending benefits to humans, are our additional years worth all that suffering we put the animals to?

I sat with a small notepad writing the alien’s speech as my thoughts drifted back to my days in punishment research. The words flowed in almost final form as I drew on my own rationalizations for my acts of animal torture. Tears welled up in my eyes as I wrote: “We now recognize that you, too, are a sacred life-form. We deeply regret what we have done. We ask forgiveness. We are sorry.”

I don't ever get trapped into the Earth Day rhetoric of "save the planet."  As George Carlin joked, the planet knows how to take care of itself.  The planet will easily shake us humans off--a volcanic eruption alone can knock us out.  A virus can easily knock us out and put us in our place.  It is not "save the planet" mantra.

Instead, it is the every day life (and death) issues, starting from how we treat the rivers and the mountains, the ants and the elephants, and fellow humans, ... that Earth Day should be about.  And for those, we need to think of every single day as Earth Day.

We miss these during these awful shelter-in-place days :( 

Earth Day: What would George Carlin Say? :)

George Carlin was one heck of a truth teller.  The neat thing in his sharp humor was that he was not preachy, like how sometimes Jon Stewart can get.  Carlin delivered his social criticism straight that made us squirm even as we laughed with him.  I wish we had more Carlins around.

This is a special Earth Day edition. 

George Carlin on "stuff" ... I didn't know he had this routine when I wrote something similar a couple of years ago.  His critique of the consumerist behavior, which is why we then have Earth Day, well, watch it:



However, as much as I am one of those nutcases who takes reusable bags to the grocery store and don't waste "stuff" .... well, I get ticked off at all the phony talk on Earth Day, and there is nobody better than Carlin to expose the hypocrisy.  Watch him shred to pieces all the humbug about Earth Day



If only South Park had this Smug Alert episode in an embeddable form :)