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The Pandemic Speaks

May 23, 2021

The Pandemic Speaks

Are you finally ready to listen to me now? If so, here are my 10 timeless truths.

RomanPlaguePicture.jpg
The angel of death striking a door during the plague of ancient Rome. Engraving by J.G. Levasseur after J. Delaunay. Image via Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons.

Audi, vide, tace. I have been trying to engage you in conversation for more than a year, but you have not listened.

Perhaps you don’t want to grasp the truths I have to offer. They are gifts really, but I know you will never see my generosity in that light. Such fear. Such ignorance. Ad altiora tendo.

But I am bound by ancient oaths and I must deliver these few plain lessons as I have faithfully done for thousands of years.

I read confusion on your face.

Did you think that I would speak with the rage of Moses, the indignation of Isaiah?

Or did you think I would appear in Marvel cape on a TikTok video?

Did you expect me to play chess with your armoured ego like Death in The Seventh Seal?

No matter. Let me start my instruction by reminding you of my curriculum vitae. I earned it at the finest university: the diversity of life over the history of time.

For millennia, I have laboured in the natural world, imposing limits and borders in places you seek to globalize with your technologies and economies. Do you really think the world will be more secure when bits of plastic outnumber fish?

I have but one non-linear mission, and that is to celebrate and restore diversity.

Your rising and falling civilizations cultivate fragility, and that is simply the way of things. While you seek to build great walls of stability, I bring volatility. This tension explains why we collide like two rams on the mountain of history.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Big Story

March 24, 2018

The Big Story

Can We Change Civilization by Changing Its Origin Story?

The Slave Market – Gustave Boulanger Public Domain

How did humans go from savanna-dwelling primates to moon-bouncing Tide Pod™ eaters? This is the big question that Big History has been trying to answer for millennia. Sure, other ages may have framed the question differently.

Pre-Internet historian Herodotus may have asked, How did humans get from Promethean clay to Babylon? Mass death enthusiast Christopher Columbus may have asked (he didn’t), How did humans get from biblical clay to Indian gold? But for the past few hundred years, the Big Thinkers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jared Diamond, have generally agreed on the basic contours of our history:

Humans set out on our baffling journey in a pristine Garden of Eden, living benignly in small bands of hunting and gathering primitives. They would dance, copulate, and paint in caves in an egalitarian state of nature, or a nasty, brutish one depending on your temperament and desire for couch cushions, cotton cuffs, and monarchy. Our fall from Eden came with the slithering of agrarian city-states into our lives. As soon as we began cultivating beans and beer, the story goes, we had to build a large bureaucratic apparatus to manage all the products and people populating these nascent city-states. Given the complexity of this task, dictators, kings, and emperors – keen administrators, that is – were unfortunately necessary to organize this dense population into productive workers. Most of the people living in this new thing called “civilization” would have to toil as slaves, alas. Sorry, this is just the Faustian bargain one must make to enjoy cities and storable food: wage/chattel slavery and all-powerful despots in exchange for literature, indoor plumbing, and memes.

But anthropologist and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber, is having none of it. In a recent piece published in Eurozine, he and UCL archaeology professor David Wengrow argue that this story is all wrong. Instead, the Davids suggest, the story is a lot messier and a lot more open to alternative forms of civilization and economy:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

A world made by hand

October 26, 2017

A world made by hand

Only a few generations ago we made many things by hand.  Over the last 50 years store bought products have replaced handmade goods.  Few people still work with their hands, and I often wonder what we have lost in this process?  What have we lost when we no longer enjoy or even know how to make things with our hands?

Humans prehistory is described by the tools and artifacts left behind.  Tools were both functional as well as art.  I love handling a kitchen tool that belonged to my grandmother.  Human development is attributed to our opposable thumb and ability to make and use tools.  So how have we changed now that we seldom use hand tools, and our hands are most often busy using a computer or phone? Are these the same kind of tools as a wood lathe, a knife and cutting board, or a needle and thread?

I love making pottery, bread, and cooking from scratch.  My grandmother taught me to knit and sew and I’ve made several articles of clothes and scarves.  I taught myself to carve wooden spoons and often think I should spend more time doing that…but don’t.   Like many people in their 50’s I often think, I’ll do that after I retire.  We are drawn to the beauty of artisan crafts and desire to explore making them ourselves, but don’t.  Perhaps life is too busy, it would take too much time to make things by hand.

In a world that has less energy available, a world that cannot afford to burn more fossil fuels, we need to move away from machines and back towards things made by hand.  That probably seems unimaginable if you didn’t grow up with a parent or grandparent that made things by hand.  But I think the reality of living like this will be more satisfying than you can imagine.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Change & How It Has Made Us Who We Are Today

August 8, 2017

Climate Change & How It Has Made Us Who We Are Today

All we ever hear is how Climate Change is caused by humans and it will destroy the world. They have been yelling that New Orleans and Miami will be UNDER WATERwithin the next century as rising sea levels put more than 400 US cities ‘past the point of no return’ unless we suddenly raise taxes and hand the power to government to change the climate.  In Princeton, New Jersey, the actual construction of the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library was set in motion at the University. Excavation begun January 2, 1946, and the building opened for use on September 7, 1949. This was where I conducted my research that produced the Economic Confidence Model.

The excavation for the underground floors of the Firestone Library was difficult. In the spring of 1946, a group of Princeton geologists found fossils from fish of the late Triassic Age in a section of shale. The fossils, which had been buried there for 175 million years, were amazingly well-preserved and revealed new details about the prehistoric fish. This site proved one of the richest grounds for finding Triassic fish fossils in the world. The fossils were sent to museums. Clearly, most of New Jersey was under water before. The Global Warming crowd made it seem that we are responsible for everything – not nature. New Jersey was once below sea-level.

An interesting book Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, is documenting how humankind dealt with the extreme challenges of the last Ice Age and climate change the Global Warming people ignore. Climate change has affected the evolution of humankind and is responsible for spreading humanity across the globe. Our genetic history in the context of climate change during prehistory, reveals another dimension to the argument.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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