The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 2

His Royal Highness, Charles, Prince of Wales

If you were Charles, Prince of Wales, do you think you would just avoid rocking the boat, or would you take on big issues like the environment?

His Royal Highness (I'll stick to "HRH" for brevity's sake) has done the latter, in spades. His 2010 book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World is evidence of that.

HRH tells us precisely why we need to save Nature from our own depredations. The book is both a sweeping indictment of our present anti-Nature economy and culture and a font of information about how we can change our mindset ... and exactly what mindset we need to change it to.

Why do we need to change at all? Because, says HRH, in our present way of doing things, we use a fallacious measure of (hopefully) rising economic prosperity: GDP growth. The Gross Domestic Product measures the value of all the goods and services produced in a year, and if GDP goes up from one year to the next, that's supposedly great news.

But it isn't, really. GDP fails to take into account the harm we do to the natural environment en route to generating greater economic "success" for ourselves.

Here's a telling example that HRH gives:

We have inadvertently created economic signals and measures [such as GDP] that regard many natural forms of capital as valueless ... . For example, some 75 per cent of the electricity produced in Brazil comes from large hydro-power dams.

The Itaipu hydroelectric facility on
the the Paranã River that lies between
Brazil and Paraguay. It is the largest
power station on Earth.

[These hydroelectric power facilities] are totally reliant on rain which, in the main, is produced by the rainforests of the Amazon basin.

I'll Interrupt HRH briefly, because that last point deserves some explanation. The explanation comes from another passage in the book, one that talks about images taken from space by NASA satellites and edited into a film sequence:

From a vantage point in space, [the film] shows the annual pattern of cloud formation over rainforests. As the trees and other vegetation breathe and grow, so they exhale water vapour. Around twenty billion tonnes [a "tonne" or "metric ton" equals 1,000 kilograms] of water are released every day by the Amazon rainforests alone, and this condenses into great swirls of white cloud that then produce rain.

Here's a picture of the clouds that the rainforest produces:

Now, back to the original quotation from HRH's book:

Yet the forests have been cleared in pursuit of economic growth, and [the cost of having less rainfall in the Amazon basin] has not been factored into the future price of producing electricity. In other words, the short-term value of deforestation [in producing new farmland] is not set against the slightly longer-term rises in the price of power it will cause ...

Put more succinctly, our slanted GDP is a measure which fails to take into account the hidden economic value of such things as the rain clouds that fail to materialize when we wantonly cut down the trees of the Earth's rainforest!

The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 1

I've discovered a wonderful book that expresses much that I myself believe about the sacredness of the natural world.

It's by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. Prince Charles's book is titled Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World.

Co-written with Tony Juniper, an expert advisor to The Prince's International Sustainabilty Unit, and Ian Skelly, who regularly helps His Royal Highness articulate his vision in words, the book is truly Charles's personal vision, distilled after decades of working for environmental reforms. (For brevity, I'm going to take the liberty of referring to this well-known author and public figure by his first name alone, if I may be forgiven for doing so.)

The book is lavishly illustrated with color photographs, but it's no coffee-table book. It's a serious, highly personal revelation of Charles's own feelings and hopes for the planet.

To summarize his own sacramental attitude towards nature, Charles uses an epigraph from William Shakespeare's "As You Like It":

Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

A fuller quotation is:

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
’This is no flattery. These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
           (II.i.1–17)

Harmony is a deeply felt evocation of a marvelous outlook that I find myself sharing ... though mine is still a-forming, while Charles's has been in formation since he was a very young man.

Charles's Very Broad Discussion

Prince Charles's book is quite broad in its discussion of where we need to be going, environment-wise. It is spiritual and practical at the same time. Charles gives us a great deal of the history of how our anti-nature attitudes formed in the West. He also tells of the rich trove of traditional wisdom about nature that we can uncover when we look at other, non-Western societies down through the annals of time. In our own cultural tradition, moreover, there have long been what might be termed minority voices who've extolled what our dominant attitudes have disparaged.

I want to avoid, for the moment, trying to emulate the vast scope of Charles's vision and just pick out little pieces of it that help me, and I think will help others, get closer to seeing the earth as a sacrament.

The Beautiful Marbled Cone Snail

The first little puzzle piece comes from Charles's discussion of the sea snail called the "marbled cone," officially Conus marmoreus, and its many kindred species:

Here is what Charles has to say about these lovely marine predators, who are up to about six inches in length, and who are presently under very real threat of extinction:

One group of animals that appears to be especially rich in potentially useful compounds is cone snails. These predatory creatures live on tropical reefs and in mangrove forests, mostly in the South Pacific region. There are about 700 different species and each is believed to manufacture 100-200 different peptide toxins [a peptide is like a protein molecule, but shorter] to coat the paralyzing harpoons they use for hunting. Although only about six species and about 100 toxins out of a possible 140,000 have been studied in any detail, it seems they offer the enormous potential of providing the basis of future painkillers and treatments for epilepsy. Some scientists believe that cone snails may contain more useful medical compounds for humans than any other group of creatures on Earth. And yet they, too, are under threat because coral reefs are being eroded by development, pollution and climate change, and also because mangrove forests are being cleared to make way for shrimp farms and other coastal developments.

Beauty and Practicality

Why should we care about the fate of cone snails? The reasons are basically two:

1. They're truly beautiful examples of the millions of living kinds that God has made.
2. They have untold and untapped practical value to humankind, if we let them survive.

In other words, beauty and practicality are two sides of the same save-all-the-endangered-species "coin."

In the discussions I usually encounter of environmentalism, it's usually one or the other that gets emphasized. And when it's couched in terms of other than practicality, the discussion is often one that tells how "neat" or "cool" or "scary" a certain animal is ... as in many discussions one reads of sharks or snakes, for example.

It's not always easy to think of a shark or a snake or a barb-throwing venomous cone snail ("Cone-an the Barb-arian"?) as a thing of beauty.

Or, put better, as a sentient being of beauty, not just a thing. We don't exactly know how sentient a snake or a snail is, of course, but in my estimation there is some sentience in all critters. And that is a beautiful fact about the world we all live in together.

10 Reasons To Be a Backyard Bird Feeder

I'm a lazy bird watcher. I don't have a lot of patience with going out into the field and hoping to see interesting birds there. That's why I have several bird feeders set up in my back yard.

Successful bird feeding is a lot trickier than it looks, I've found.

What foods, for instance, attract what kinds of birds? How do I keep squirrels and raccoons from eating it all and/or destroying the feeders? Questions like that abound.

That's one reason why I just bought Sally Roth's The Backyard Bird Lover's Ultimate How-To Guide.

(Another reason is that it was 40% off at Border's, which is jettisoning inventory before it goes out of business forever.)

Anyway, here are 10 reasons why I suggest becoming a bigtime backyard bird feeder:

1. You'll have plenty of company. According to Roth, one out of every four adult Americans — 46 million of us — watches birds in his or her backyard.
   
   
2. Birds are the living descendants of dinosaurs. How cool is that!
   
   
3. If you watch the birds "up close and personal" for several minutes through binoculars or field glasses, it's an immersive experience that is uncannily calming.
   
   
4. Even the dullest-looking birds can be truly beautiful when seen through magnifying optics.
   
   
5. Watching through field glasses makes the calls and songs of the birds come alive for you.
   
   
6. Feeding birds in your backyard can help a struggling species survive long enough to adapt to today's fast-changing environmental conditions.
   
   
7. You'll build up a certain amount of "sweat equity" in your backyard ecosystem: assembling and erecting feeders, keeping them clean and upright and filled; lugging in all the food that you dispense; etc. (And none of this comes cheap, either.) That means you'll have yet another motivation to care even more about our avian cousins on the family tree of life.
   
   
8. Over time, you'll build up a sort of internal, mental field guide to the birds you rub shoulders with. You can be very proud of all the knowledge you gain ...
   
   
9. ... Not to mention your ever-growing "life list": the tally of bird species you have clapped eyes on at least once in your life.
   
   
10. Then there are the interrelationships you'll build between the birds and what you plant or install in your garden. You'll find you can't resist putting in things like honeysuckle, berry bushes, and zinnias, for instance, since they attract and feed numerous kinds of birds all by themselves. Same with birdhouses and birdbaths. Once you start realizing that all God's creatures interact with all facets of their environment, you'll know in a very practical sense what an ecosystem is meant to be.

Flush with Enthusiasm (But Use Less Water!)

Some questions have occurred to me that have surely occurred to everyone else concerned with the environment: what about all the water we use for toilet flushing?

Are we throwing too much ecological "money" down the loo? Should we implement a "flush tax"?

According to a 1999 report by the American Water Works Association, each person in this country flushes the toilet an average of a little more than 5 times per day. The current U.S. population is nearly 312 million people, so if each of the 312 million individuals flushes five times a day, the number of flushes per day is 1,560,000,000.

That works out to 65,000,000 flushes each hour, or almost 1.1 million flushes per minute in America.

Most modern home toilets use 1.6 gallons of water per flush. That suggests each person uses 8 gallons per day or 2920 gallons per year just for toilet flushing. Of course, the figure might go up or down depending on how many flushes take place outside the home, if the toilets or urinals that are used have a per-flush volume other than the standard 1.6 gallons of water of a home toilet.

I've read that if everyone in the United States flushed the toilet just one fewer time per day, we could save a lake full of water about a mile long, a mile wide, and four feet deep every day.

A rate of four to five toilet flushes per U.S. citizen per day amounts to roughly 2.5 billion gallons of water flushed down the drain daily. That's enough to supply fresh drinking water to the entire population of Chicago for more than three years.

Home indoor water use statistics vary a lot, but seemingly 40% gets flushed down toilets, more than 30% is used in showers and baths, laundry and dishwashing take about 15%, leaks (including toilet leaks) claim 5% or more, which leaves about 10% for everything else.

So if five flushes per person per day were to shrink to four, home water savings would amount to 25%-of-40% of current daily use. 10% of all the water currently being used per day would be saved.

Dual-flush toilets could save even more. These have two selectable flush volumes, 1.6 gal. and 0.8 gal. The latter would typically be used for liquid waste, the former for solid. If four of a person's daily five flushes used the 0.8-gal. amount, each person could save 3.2 gallons per day. That's a reduction from 8 gallons to 4.8 gallons a day, which is a saving of 40%. In terms of total household water use, that comes to 40%-of-40% or 16%.

In earlier decades, most toilets flushed using 3.5 gallons of water, not the 1.6 gallons that are standard today. That was more than twice the waste water per flush!

On a related note, did you know that pharmaceuticals we consume are released through urine? This means after years of our being a society of pill poppers, there’s a vast quantity of pharmaceuticals lurking in our sewage systems. 90% of the pharmaceuticals taken end up in our urine. Scientists are now finding estrogen from birth-control pills, pain medication, and antidepressants in fish.

As for a "flush tax," my home state of Maryland has one! Since 2004, $2.50/mo. has been added to sewer bills (and an equivalent $30 a year fee on septic system owners) to pay for environmental cleanup efforts in the Chesapeake Bay. Read all about it in this article from the Chesapeake Bay Journal.

It's the Ecology, Stupid (Part 1)

Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life is fine reading for someone like me who is interested in Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism.

What, really, is ecology? At its deepest level, Capra suggests, it's all about relatedness. If you look at an ecosystem, first you just see the individual animals and plants in it. They, along with the nonliving items such as rivers and rocks that surround them, would seem to compose the ecosystem.

In other words, at first glance an ecosystem would seem to be a collection of things, some living and some not.

But that misses something important. Those supposed "things" interrelate. Birds build nests on inanimate cliff outcroppings. Trees provide shelter for squirrels and insects. Birds eat insects. Trees produce seeds and nuts. Birds and squirrels eat seeds. Foxes eat nuts. And so on and on and on ...

Capra (right) shows that the relationships matter more than the "things" that have these relationships.

Many of the so-called "things" — foxes, squirrels, birds, insects, trees, etc. — are, within themselves, again ecosystems. So, too, are our bodies. In our gut we host a plethora of "good" bacteria, for instance; they help us digest food.

If, as the foxes, squirrels, birds, insects, trees, etc. are, we are living organisms, our cells interrelate as well, making up tissues that make up organs than make up our internal organ systems. For example, our circulatory system includes the heart, the arteries, the veins, the capillaries, etc. At each level of organization, all the supposed "things" are interactive and interdependent.

Another example: our brains are organs made up of cells that are highly interactive and interdependent. That's why we are conscious and have subjective awareness.

The foxes, squirrels, birds, insects, etc. have brains. We usually assume, though, that they have no consciousness, no subjective awareness.

But if consciousness is an emergent property of interrelatedness — which in Capra's view is what it seems to be — who are we to say it's limited to human brains?

Could an ecosystem, with its complex, multi-tiered webs of relationships, be conscious? How would we know if it is? How would we know if it isn't?

24 Hours of Reality

Want to make a difference in the fight to arrest global climate change?

First, watch this video:


Then visit The Climate Reality Project to learn more about "24 Hours of Reality," a global online event coming this September 14 & 15 that will unite the concerned and show the world how many of us care ... about the world!

And don't forget to make a donation!

Endangered Species #1

Here's the first post in my new series about endangered species. This one highlights one of the most magnificent cats in the world ...

... the cheetah!

The cheetah is one of Africa's most sought after species when people from this country go on photographic and video safaris. For one thing, it's beautiful; for another, it's one of the best hunters around. It achieves by far the fastest land speed of any living animal — between 70 and 75 mph in short bursts covering distances up to 1,600 ft. It has the ability to accelerate from 0 to over 62 mph in three seconds. Look out, Thomson's gazelles!

Cheetah chasing a gazelle. (Click to enlarge.)

Yet the African cheetah is classified as a "vulnerable" species, meaning its future is uncertain. Approximately 12,400 cheetahs remain in the wild in twenty-five African countries; Namibia has the most, with about 2,500.

There is also an Asiatic cheetah. It's "critically endangered," with just fifty to sixty of them thought to remain in Iran. The Asiatic cheetah is the only animal that has been declared extinct in India in the last 100 years.

Cheetahs have been around since the late Pliocene geologic period, which ended around 2.5 million years ago. They are the only surviving member of the genus Acinonyx, meaning that the cheetah is the only cat with non-retractable claws and paw pads that can't grip. That's why cheetahs can't climb vertical tree trunks!

Here's where cheetahs still live today:

Why have cheetah numbers declined? Lions and hyenas will kill cheetah cubs, of course. And scientists say cheetahs are too inbred, with low genetic diversity leading to various impairments to individual cheetahs' chances of survival. But the low genetic diversity explanation does not account for why that situation has been true for thousands of years, while cheetah numbers have been in decline only for about the last century or so.

If you like cheetahs, try to catch up with a wonderful episode of the PBS series Nature called "The Cheetah Orphans."

You can find a list of the world's endangered species at the Earth's Endangered Species website.

The Dream of the Earth, Part 10

What if we modern Judeo-Christians — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or even fallen away/atheist — have inherited a mindset that disposes us to deprecate and even to steal from Mother Nature?

And what if we don't even know that we have that mindset, because it seems so "natural" to us that we can't imagine any other? That's the situation described by the late Passionist priest-monk Thomas Berry in his landmark 1988 book The Dream of the Earth.

C. G. Jung
(1875 - 1961)

In my previous nine posts in this series about Berry's book, I've talked about Berry's ideas and introduced parallel ideas from Carl Gustav Jung (pictured at left), the psychoanalyst who in the first half of the last century developed an understanding of the human psyche which gives a deeper explanation of why our nature-deprecating mindset exists.

First of all, we need to keep in mind that modern people disagree among themselves. Some, as religious people, emphasize matters of the spirit, and that emphasis makes physical nature a "second-class citizen" of the material world, often imagined as fallen, even corrupt.

Others of us, those who are secularists, believe more in science than religion. Secularists would rather concentrate on the material world than on matters of the spirit.

Engineering the Earth?

Sadly, much secularist thought accords with a centuries-long tradition of trying to manage nature and make changes to how it functions. Berry contends trying to engineer the earth to suit our human aspirations makes ours a "wasteworld," not a "wonderworld." It doesn't work. It can't work.

On the other hand, those who are still religious in their outlook seem to have little spiritual connection to the earth. They and the secularists disagree about the existence of God, but they oddly agree quite well about not seeing nature in sacramental terms.

So why the secularist/spiritual split, anyway?

One reason for the secularist/spiritual split in the modern world, says Jung, is that the modern, Western, scientific attitude has lost its former connection to the contents of the unconscious archetypes that are shared by all humankind. For its part, Western Christianity has likewise lost its connection to the foundational archetypes.

Disconnection from Our Archetypal Roots

Any archetype — an "archetype "is a template which exists in what Jung called the "collective unconscious" and belongs accordingly to all humanity — is something we are normally unaware of. Yet archetypes govern all of the images and symbols we dream up. Jung said Christ, in particular, symbolizes the supreme archetype that he called the "Self."

The Self, Jung said, is the image of God within the soul, and its wide variety of external images include mandalas ...

... and depictions of Christ on the Cross:

The Self Archetype as a Symbol of Wholeness

The Self represents completeness or wholeness. That may sound as if it likewise ought to represent spiritual perfection, but Jung said it does so only with a crucial qualification.

If the Self archetype hidden in the depths of the unconscious shows forth as images of perfection rather than of wholeness, it must do so by first splitting in two. One of the two halves of the Self has to be "good," the other "evil." The good half is what then manifests as images or symbols of perfection.

This, in fact, is what Jung said has happened in Christian history. Right from the start, Christian belief "constellated" — activated, ushered forth from the unconscious — the good side of the Self in ways that insisted that Christ himself had no evil side, no "shadow." Christ was without sin. So, too, should we be.

Two Halves of the Self

"Splitting" created a tension between the two halves of the Self, only one of which represents the spiritual or "good" side of the human personality.

The "good" side of the Self became present to our consciousness in response to the advent of what Jung called the "Christ-symbol." The Christ-symbol is the way in which the crucified/risen/ascended Christ was viewed by his first devotees in the early church. Jung said that the Christ-symbol "constellated" for us the "good" half of our Self archetype.

The other half of the split Self is the animal or "evil" half that we each also possess, and it was pushed further into our unconscious realm by the advent of the Christ-symbol.

Owing to the Myth of the Fall — the Genesis story of how a serpent convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden — nature came to be seen as fallen and corrupt. As human beings, our "animal nature" was seen as prey to evil. Our dark, animal side is what the repressed, "evil" half of Jung's Self archetype represents; the good, now-conscious half of the Self can be thought of as, for Christians in particular, a psychic prototype that, when constellated, manifests the all-good, all-light, all-spiritual side of our nature.

Inheriting such a view of ourselves and our world, is it any wonder that we Christians today so often deprecate and even fear Mother Nature? We religiously resist the caged-in-the-unconscious animal side of our Self because in the days 2,000 years ago when our church was established, it made fine spiritual sense so to do.

New Blog Logo!

I've come up with a new logo for this blog:

It's a Celtic cross. In the middle is a spider web(!), and in the middle of that is a picture of the earth.

The Celtic cross symbolizes Christianity, and in particular Catholic Christianity, since this type of cross is associated with Ireland, where a popular legend has it that the Celtic Catholic cross was introduced by Saint Patrick or possibly Saint Declan during his time converting the pagan Irish.

The spider web symbolizes the universe. The idea here is that all parts of the universe are connected in invisible ways to each other, such that an event on one of the "filaments" of the web is felt by all the other filaments. This is true of an actual spider web, of course.

Here, I am thinking mainly of the mysteries of quantum physics, and in particular the idea of "entanglement." Two electrons, introduced to one another so that they are "entangled" and then separated by any amount of distance — say, halfway across the universe — will continue to act as mirror images of one another. If one is given clockwise "spin," for example, the other will instantly develop counterclockwise spin. The spider web symbolizes the mythic meaning of the fact that in our universe elementary particles and even particles of light — photons — persistently dance with one another in that way.

The earth in the very middle represents our planetary home, the only such home that we know of that has evolved life forms that can contemplate, as Douglas Adams put it in his comic novels, "life, the universe, and everything."

Taken as a whole, the logo represents the fact that our earth and our universe are surrounded by, are grounded in, and proceed from divinity.