THE BACK OF THE BOX

When I was a kid (b.1939), vitamins were such a new idea that the Cheerios box featured educational comics with little pixies, each representing a different vitamin, and a girl named Cheery.  Today Honey Nut Cheerios have had to be taken off the market because people are allergic to nuts, and the new recipe for the dough is announced to be “gluten free.”  We have gone from looking for good things to add to looking for bad things to remove.  

I remember having measles, scarlet fever, and chicken pox.  One of my brothers had rheumatic fever, which can affect the heart.  He did develop a bit of a heart murmur which obsessed my mother ever after, though he was cleared to compete in wrestling in high school and had no problem.  Now people in small towns nearly force their boys to play aggressive football, even knowing that it will probably at some point cause brain damage from concussions.  Our ideas about what is dangerous, esp. for children, change all the time.

Other ideas about what to do will persist without anyone even noticing.  Here’s a benign example:  people know I have a lot of books and that I write all the time.  Their assumption is that it’s like the reading they know, which was mostly in school.  They ask, “How many books do you read in a week?  Three or four?”  The number of books read in a time period is the way schools and libraries try to encourage reading.  You read it, then discard the book.  It’s over.  Consumed.  Consumer thinking.

But I read half-a-dozen books at a time.  Sometimes I only read a few pages, put the book down, come back to it months or even years later.  I read by chasing themes in content, or because there’s a side-issue that’s suddenly gripping.  On the shelves I try to keep general subjects together, which means the contents may be separated in the writing by years.  My grandmother’s books mix with what came in the mail today.

Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday” is living in the bathroom where I’m working my way through child-raising practices in self-contained tribes away from “civilization.”  More focused on coping with trauma and predation (tigers) than on diseases, there are strategies so negligent that adults often have burn marks from getting too close to fires.  No one intercepted them or taught them not to get close.  Compare with modern fire-retardant chemically treated child’s pajamas which turned out to get into the child’s system with damaging consequences.

On the other hand, children growing up in the Amazon rain forest where dangers are everywhere, are on their mother’s backs at first, then within her reach, then within her eyesight which is close in a jungle.  Lifelong, they go in groups.  But in safer places, like the Australian outback, Diamond assures us that the infamous deadly snakes are rare and there are no big mammal predators.  Children go on “walkabout” alone.

My copy of Gambles’ “Origins and Revolutions” is traveling through the house everywhere.  I have to hunt it down because I read short bits, need a quote, or am ready for the next bite.  Then I’m distracted and put it down in a new place.  I need Diamond’s information about tribes, in that constantly on-going dialogue we’re all having about whether things are getting better or worse and what changes we should make.  Once we accept responsibility for ourselves and our lives, how they evolve, we have a lot of research and thinking to do.   

Are isolated change-resistant enclaves, like the upscale mothers of Marin County — who refuse vaccination and thereby start epidemics — right to so emphasize what’s “natural”?  There are tribes who leave their children almost entirely unsupervised.  Child mortality is high, but those who survive are the ones with brains, gumption, and confidence.  The adults are admirable, except not very compassionate. There is an isolated group that cherishes their babies, refuses all abortion, tolerates handicaps.  The gene for club feet is in this closed population and the rate of affliction has risen to 15% of the babies.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075152-did-zikas-recent-mutations-let-it-explode-as-a-global-threat/?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2016-2801-GLOB&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNSAL

Clearly the way we raise our children is an interaction among morality, danger, attachment, and all sorts of other contingencies.  Now, as this new plague traveling with the mosquitoes expanding their territory across oceans because of airplanes and climate warming, and the first horrific cases of babies with tiny heads are beginning to hint that there are other consequences due to the same virus (possibly paralysis), the best we can do is to warn women not to get pregnant.  As though that ever works!  Women have been warned not to get pregnant for centuries. Might as well warn mosquitoes not to bite.  And I’m not looking forward to the mosquito-phobes (who also tend to be bat-phobes) insisting on intense spraying of Valier this summer.  (Dandelions are also a target.)

When I was a kid, childhood diseases were considered inevitable.  We were all vaccinated for smallpox.  A classmate died of tetanus because her father wouldn’t get her the vaccine because they were poor and it was costly.  About the time I was born, the daughter next door died of polio.  Luckily we never got mumps or whooping cough, since there were no vaccines for them.  Now there are, but people still resist.  Vaccination was a group experience when we lined up in grade school, but now in the US it is likely to be a private experience, which makes it easier to refuse.

I got pneumonia and had a penicillin shot.  Since my bed was up against one of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined our house, I found “Riders of the Purple Sage” and read it in a fever haze, my first grownup novel.  Earlier, when my brother had rheumatic fever, I was put to sleep on the couch downstairs, which was very exotic to me.  I had the idea that people only slept on the second floor.  I had found “Biography of a Grizzly” which was a small book with little drawings, so I read it all night while the mantel clock struck away the hours.
  

That's a geyser, not a volcano.

The story happens near Yellowstone.

Engulfed in grief for poor Wahb, dying old and alone, I finished about the time the others got up and had to convince them my fatigue and red eyes were not a symptom.  When I discovered that my mother, on medical advice, had burned my entire paperdoll collection, a village that lived in a suitbox under the brothers’ bed, it seemed to me related to the death of Wahb.  

Holocaust, natural death, disease, and care-taking were combined.  Every bit of fabric was washed with bleach or Lysol.  All surfaces in the room were scrubbed.  Somehow my father’s books were ignored.  It was as though books were a kind of privileged status, protected and protective.  They made your brain big.

When I googled for information about Zika, what I got was advertising for an amusing video game called “Tiny Brains”.  So here’s what we’re teaching kids:  you are entitled, privileged and smart BECAUSE of adults helicoptering your lives and emphasizing amusement.  The adult bargain with fate is that if they pour every attention and expense into the present happiness of their children, other people’s children can go to hell.  They don’t even need school lunches.  And if you don’t obey the adults, they will withdraw that support and kick you out, the same as your boss treats you at work.  What this kind of attitude creates is genocide supporters and gated cities.

By Jim Kirwan

But the planet is relentless.  Mosquitoes, viruses, climates — old age.  No one gets out alive.  What matters is what you do until then.  There are two kinds of survival: individual and group.  Your life is shaped by how you define your group, and to what degree your group helps you survive.  So now what shall we do about Zika and the other plagues coming out of Pandora’s box?  Personally, I don’t eat boxed cereals anymore.  I get my info from books.  And the occasional website post.

https://aeon.co/opinions/artificial-food-has-made-human-civilisation-possible?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f72a7e8e04-Daily_newsletter_Thursday_28th_Jan_20161_28_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-f72a7e8e04-68600437

THE BRAIN'S THRESHOLD

Teachers -- even special ed teachers -- agree that the threshold event when someone learns to read -- usually but not always in the primary grades -- is exciting and gratifying.   They can often describe the moment.  Some kids learn to do it before they even start school but no one reads before they can talk.  It is estimated that maybe ten per cent of human beings do not have the brain gizmos that would allow them to read, but almost everyone can speak.  Remembering the sensation of realizing I was reading English for the first time -- looking at the marks on the paper and hearing them in my head -- I tried to read French.  But they remained alphabet on the page that I could sound out, but that never became meaning.  I did not know anyone who spoke French -- had only heard sentences in movies.

Philosophy is more than words

When I read philosophical websites that are mostly occupied by males in their twenties and thirties, usually rather upscale but maybe not, they will insist that the ability to read and write is the definitive characteristic of human beings.  Probably none of them have ever taught anyone else to read and have themselves learned to read at an early age.  They will claim that it’s not possible to think without words and that consciousness is tightly linked to words.

Contemporary brain research is proving them wrong so they just ignore the work, figuring it will go away and is irrelevant anyway.  But it is not and as it unfolds, it becomes more and more meaningful.  When I began reading Suzanne Langer in the Eighties, it was brushed aside.  Now even Chomsky and Piaget need rethinking.  All who depend only on introspection and outward observation are having to reinterpret what they thought was obvious.  

What if there are more than two languages?

Right off for beginners, consciousness -- which in the case of introspection is itself a function of consciousness -- is no longer the key to identity.  “I think therefore I am” is no longer true because “I” am so much more than thinking and thinking is so much more than words.  

One must realize that “I am a composed cellular creature with a dashboard that is only fractionally conscious and entirely dependent on sensory information gathered from all over the body, even including microbes in my gut.”  That is, a person is a vessel of information dependent on instrumentation.  Those senses, the instruments, are developed from health, access, and the culture that teaches us one language but not another.  The world outside the skin is so much more than can be taken in by the senses that it must be edited, digested, transformed, and symbolized even before it gets to the main dashboard of the brain.

The brain operates on the pattern of the tree -- or maybe we should say “bush” since there is not one main trunk but many branches, mostly developed through gestation, birth and the immediately following years, and dependent on events over which no infant has control.  These are mostly provided by caretakers, generally the parents, who try to make sure of nutrition, protection, warmth, and so on, and who also interact with touch and voice to call out the formation of the whole body, but especially the brain.

Only luck in timing and circumstances can give parents the chance to do their best.  War, famine, disease, insanity, geo-catastrophe all interfere.  Variations in the parents’ and culture’s beliefs will cause variations in the kind of human being that develops through the experience of the growing creature, who forms his or her brain according to what happens -- not simply receiving, but interacting, which with luck will mean demand meets capacity, instinct triggers response, need is supplied, and space for expansion welcomes exploration.

In order to read, one must have already learned to speak, which happens during a “window” in learning ability.  It’s sensible to assume that speaking can’t happen without some level of maturity in the air management paraphernalia dependent on the bellows of the lungs.  Babies can make vowel sounds early, but consonants depend on delicate management of the interruption of the air stream to make sibilants (“s,z,ch”) and plosives (“k,t,b,p”) with tongue against teeth and palate.  Beyond that is the action of the larynx, the push of the diaphragm, the uplift of the ribcage, and mastery of the lilt of the particular language and its gender-indicating inflections.   None of this is available to someone looking at marks on a surface.

Between speaking and interpreting silent marks is a sequence of abilities that are probably handled by different parts of the brain.  One is the ability to recognize shapes, which some suggest derive from hunting, learning to recognize the ear of the rabbit in grass, the butt configuration of a deer in a confusion of leaves, or the print of a paw in mud.  Another is the ability to follow and retain a “trail” of varied marks from left to right, recognizing the line length, maintaining control of which tier of the lines one is looking at, so that the letters stay in words, the words stay in sentences, and the brain follows the stream of them in an orderly fashion.

At first this process is helped by “sounding” the marks out loud, but then one learns to just hear them in the head, and eventually they become transparently silent so that the reader is only conscious of the meanings and even later the meanings become a structure of understanding.  Religious performance in litanies may be community-shared out-loud words in unison, which have an emotional impact like that of music, particularly if the words are familiar and have been repeated often enough in history to have become associated with specific occasions, so that they call out the emotions of those times.

If the meaning of the words is too dissonant in terms of their application to the occasion or in terms of the context of the person at the moment, they will be jolted into awareness.  This has been happening lately when people recite the Pledge of Allegiance or quote the inscription at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.  Sometimes the words of songs are deeply meaningful and sometimes they are offensive.  (Perhaps meant to be.) Their meaning can change over the decades or even after some kind of life-rift that reconfigures one’s understanding of the world.

Humans originally came to consciousness in one place, one culture, one family configuration, but now people must be highly flexible as they accept new terms of life. Many cope by narrowing and rigidly limiting their experience to people like themselves, denying that anything outside a “compound” of familiarity is good or even exists at all.  But other people let themselves become mirrors, shadows, without a center, merely responding to what is around them.  The growth necessary to really understand a whole new terrain can be like trying to read French without ever having heard it spoken -- much less understanding nuances like what is inflected to be male or female, what shows public relationship or marks intimacy.  

The problem of translation between two contexts becomes the problem of a double-identity that generates a third, more universal, more experience-based.  Those who master this, which can include something like a religious conversion, are different.  To those who don’t know anything but their own lives, the difference can be threatening.  But, once felt, this threshold experience that invites one through a door into a broader world is the very definition of consciousness and “being human” in a human body.

THE FOUR STAGES OF IDENTITY

At present my understanding of the process of being a person with an identity is in four parts that respond to basic principles, which follow.

Identity is a time-art that takes in and discards in the same way that a body does, but it is more than a body.

The identity of any person is interactive with an ecology that is partly physical -- food, weather, material culture, molecules of various kinds -- and partly mental.

It is impossible to escape one’s identity, but one can constantly negotiate the terms of dwelling in it, even though much of it is not available to the conscious mind.  And one can mentally grasp the existence of the uniqueness of every identity in the world as well as believing in the existence of internal functions that can’t be accessed by introspection, but explored by experiment.  That is, we know there are parts of us we can't know.

Likewise, it is impossible to escape one’s instrument of existence, which is the body, but by admitting the existence and bringing to consciousness the elements that impinge on that body -- from emotion to disease to trauma to physical contact with others -- it is possible to protect oneself, be effective in the world, and form attachments to others.

Language is the formal capture of spoken thought, which represents concepts formed in the brain by acquiring and filtering our interaction with the world and our viscera.  First in spoken words, then in written translation.  Music is a language that needs no words but can accompany words to add meaning.  The same is true of dance, painting, sculpture, or any other art form.  But also science and games.  All carry meaning based in “felt concepts” which are then expressed in math, models, structured rules, and so on.

The sum total of felt concepts may be encapsulated in sense memories, which are a kind of GPS system for the location of the concepts in the brain.  The more intense the experience the closer the link to the sensory information recorded at the time.  Remembering it will bring back the muscle memory as well as conventional smell, taste, sight and so on.  The sum of these will trigger emotion.  Sometimes even re-experiencing.  The current belief is that during sleep-dreaming and maybe daydreaming, the person is sorting memory, maybe re-combining or editing.

A “personhood” is in four parts:

1.  The world out of which the identity emerges.  That world will remain outside the body, but send in sense information even in the womb as soon as the brain is capable of recording it.  This includes the womb itself, the woman’s body and the nutrition and molecular support it provides, the sounds of her heartbeat and digestion, whatever impinges on her senses strongly enough to penetrate to the fetus: maybe music, maybe walking, maybe very strong sunlight.  Her emotional responses will travel through her blood in the form of molecules like adrenaline or serotonin and the baby will share them.

2.  The information from outside the skin is always coming to the body in what we call the “sensorium” which is far more than five senses.  The sensorium is complex, constant, sorted and filtered by the brain.  Besides the nerves that convey pain or operate our muscles, there is a second set of nerves in three parts.  As a whole they are called the autonomic nervous system and they are not normally conscious, but quietly operate the viscera.  There are three branches:  sympathetic and parasympathetic which have to do with arousal and relaxation (things like eye dilation, heart beat speed, breathing) and also the enteric branch which manages digestion and the colony of microbes in the gut.  When something is unusual, we have a “gut feeling” about it.

3.  The management of the information of the sensorium is done in a collection of “nodes” or complexes of neurons which are built by the brain as it grows, according to what stimulus it receives through its sensorium.  The basic centres about hunger, warmth, light, falling, become the foundation for a scaffolding about what to trust, how to express distress or pleasure, how to focus.  The most basic inner “rules” or filters are very hard to change and are not usually conscious.  Control of muscles is also part of this, working from the largest tasks (sitting up) to the smallest (threading needles).

At some point the brain develops enough to achieve self-awareness as if it were a world available to introspection and expression.  Concepts become defined enough to be “felt”, emotions are connected to them, and they can be attached to words or images.

Then comes the ability to look at other people and see what they are feeling and expressing, to see that they are like oneself but still unique.  This is a skill that comes from experience, exposure to many kinds of people.

4.  Community is the next step, beginning with the dyad of the caretaker who has empathy with the baby and teaches eye contact, cuddling, conditioning to behave in certain ways.  The small child assimilates what his community believes about the world and how to act in it.  These early life convictions are deep, indelible, and hard to bring to consciousness unless exposed to other ways.  The consequences of that depends on the community and how welcoming it is.  If the community forbids knowing about any other communities, then discovering them anyhow can be a terrible shock -- but also an enlightenment, like Buddha discovering that people suffer.

This is not the whole story, of course.  A process is a time art.  At about eight or nine the child’s adrenal glands begin a regime of lengthening bones, elaborating inner process, and kindling the sexual organs.  When that task is complete, at about the “teen” years, the child is fertile and nearly adult with strong drives.  He or she is adult enough to perpetuate the species -- give birth and protect a small child -- but must have time to learn how to do that well.  A community’s understanding of how to do that -- and there is not one way -- will determine the quality and success of that culture as well as that person.  In the past many cultures have not had the resources to keep a person alive long enough see his or her children grow up with enough time to pass on the best developed cultural contents.

“Nature’s way” -- which is not a way at all, but simply the interacting factors of existence which produce the illusion of some kind of plan -- is often to create many more individuals than the culture can support.  Some die of hunger, some of war, some of a mountain side engulfing the whole village at once.  Chance and opportunity control events.  

But now humans have become clever and informed enough to want to create a true “plan.”  But there is not and never will be enough resources to go around; we will all always be a plague waiting to happen.  We are attached to each other, to ourselves, to the world as we know it, and we wish to preserve that which we “love.”  Love is a powerful force for survival, even if it is the survival of the other.  How we love goes back to our time in the womb.

How we decide to sacrifice those who threaten us and our ways is the root of ethics.

Ecology is the complex interconnections that allow more, and more diverse forms of life to co-exist, thus extending the carrying capacity of the planet.  Because they “emerge” from the life around them, they fit or they could not have survived.  Most of our attempts to play Sim-World have been for too clumsy.  Worse than that, we simply don’t perceive as much as we need to, partly because of those foundational convictions being limited and partly because our sensorium isn’t picking up the evidence, and partly because those constructed meaning-sorting-centers in the brain are blocking what we need or telling us too much or wrong things.  Unforeseen consequences and side effects eat away at us.

What ecology will support humans?  One that is complex, varied, sustained by pleasure, shared by communities, and always in process.  But I look around and see the opposite.  We're afraid to kiss the sea anemone.  It doesn't care.  It was here first.

(ongoing)

PROM NIGHT AND THE WATER IS RISING

Front yard  4/26

Back yard  4/26

This morning the cats and I rose to discover that the white stretch limousine parked across the street as part of preparations for prom night in Valier was covered with snow and the trees and bushes everywhere were bowed over with their snow load.  I knew the forecast, had seen the building cloud snow-shelf behind the Rockies, and have lived through many of these Spring monsoon snows, but I was still startled.  It’s not cold and the snow is already melting enough to chute off the trees and roofs.  Soon it will be only ermine trim, like that on the theatrical homemade crowns for the prom King and Queen.  

People who haven’t lived here long will joke about global warming (bring it on!) and the farmers will smile about the moisture.  When I drove to Cut Bank a few days ago in a howling, pounding high wind, there was one section where a newly plowed field was so dry that it was blowing so much dirt across the road that the road was hard to see.  The topsoil of that field is now in Minneapolis.

On the environmental listserv for the organization called the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, a professor has posted a question both ethical and strategic.  She wants to know how to handle the teaching of research and empirically-based thought in general writing courses when the topic is climate change.  Because her community adamantly and sometimes angrily opposes the idea.  

The list, for all its sophistication, calls it “global warming” but it is far more than that when one gets into research about what many people now call "global climate change".  It’s even more than that.  Heat=energy and it is the retention and driving convection of that energy that interacts with geology to create the mammoth planetary currents of air and water through the oceans and across the continents.  You've heard of the Japanese current?

Bangladesh

Coping with the rise in sea level caused by melting of ice at the poles will be major, because humans have always built along waterways and some countries (Bangladesh) will disappear underwater.  Already villages in Alaska have had to move.  Loss of permafrost, the depletion of the glaciers that feed major rivers, general shifting of tornado "alleys" and increased intensity of droughts and hurricanes, deaths of forests, expanding territories for disease and their vectors, extinction of species like polar bears and penguin, loss of fish due to the failure of water column turnover -- it’s enough, as one of the respondents said, “to make semi-grown men cry.”  And that happens.  I’ve seen it.  Of course, grown men and women often fly into a rage when they realize the real nature and dimension of the problem.

ASLE conference panel

The inquiring professor wanted to know how she could keep from being shifted from classification as a dependable teacher to being considered a trouble-making activist and therefore losing her job, as well as short-changing the education of the students.  Those latter may not give up the pursuit of money and refocus on saving the world, but they will be a different kind of voter.  That will make some politicians very angry.

Therefore, I will shield the identity of the professor who said, “If institutional priorities . . . can [make] top-down changes in curriculum occur which would make GW education more than optional, and I don't know what to do about this, particularly in regions where a) the majority culture is skeptical of or indifferent to GW and b) where the institution wants/needs as many enrollees as possible to generate funds, and therefore seeks to exclude all Negativity.

“Your questions bring up lots of other thorny issues, e.g., what channels of future activism can the teacher actually offer the motivated student?  What psychological effect will a continual focus, however realistic, on a problem generating hopelessness have on the person "just starting out" in adulthood (I assume here the "traditional" student)?  As we sing 'roun here, "Everybody wants to go to heaven/But nobody wants to die."  For this innerness of global warming awareness I strongly recommend the new book by Steven Pavlos Holmes, exploring personal responses to gw.”   

Steven Pavlos Holmes, Independent Scholar

“Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming” by Steven Pavlos Holmes.  On Amazon for about ten bucks or Kindle.  I ordered a used paperback, my usual standard.  I had thought that this climate change was moving slowly enough that at 75 years old, I would be gone.  I don’t have children.  Now it appears that the beginning has already begun.  Just not this snowstorm, not even this dust storm, and the snowpack on the Rockies is “normal”-and-above for the time period in which we’ve been keeping records.  But there are other things to consider.

An Australian fire whirl

If something drowns Bangladesh, if something forces an Alaskan fishing village to move, if something caves off the sides of mountains and changes the intensity of cyclones in Kansas and turns Australia into a holocaust -- it changes me, too, because everything is connected.  This is grain country and we know that the profit of our grain depends on the world climate -- not just in terms of rain and sun, but also in terms of politics.  What happens to the Ukraine happens to our wheat elevators.   The markets are the same. 

One of the first responses is to compensate by evading expensive regulations, particularly when owners are faraway (not in physical danger) and workers are local (in danger), which is the case with many of the services in our area.

“A Minnesota-based agriculture company was fined $211,000 by federal safety regulators who said Wednesday it had repeatedly failed to ensure workers weren't exposed to grain-dust hazards in Montana.

“CHS Inc. was cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 19 workplace safety violations at grain elevators in Cut Bank, Glendive, Denton and Valier. A company spokeswoman said CHS will challenge the violations.

“Three were repeat violations, including failing to test the air quality in work spaces for potentially explosive grain dust, hazardous gases or lack of oxygen, regulators said.

“Dust from grain in elevators is considered highly combustible and can be more explosive than coal dust, Funke said.

“Fourteen of the violations alleged against CHS were classified as serious, meaning there was a substantial probability of a worker death or injury.”

Another consequence is a deepening wedge between two demographics in a state where liberal populations are concentrated in the scenic and university towns and conservative people are spread across the rural landscape.  So there are climate rallies to support clean-energy in 13 communities today: Bigfork, Billings, Bozeman, Columbia Falls, Great Falls, Hamilton, Helena, Kalispell, Lame Deer, Missoula, Pablo, Red Lodge and Whitefish.  NOT Cut Bank, Glendive, Denton and Valier.  (The rumor that a coal company arranged for this snowfall is only a bitter joke.)  

From my point of view it's a very interesting development that the Native American people, who have been scorned in small town settings but championed by universities and environmentalists, are now arriving at a position where they can provide payback politically.  Consider the impact on negotiations over irrigation water rights to Birch Creek, which divides Valier from the Blackfeet Reservation.  Consider frakking.  Consider wind farms.

Prom tonight -- then what?

As is often remarked, the only real constant is constant change and as grain farmers know, life is always a trade-off between givens and surprises.  Culture can foster collaborative changes in attitude or it can ignite wars.  Both are happening.  This is not a simple squabble over where to set the planetary thermostat.  

WHAT ARE WE HUNTING FOR?

My Netflix queue has two sides, one for mailed discs and the other for streaming.  The streaming ones seem to have a separate distribution algorithm but I’m not exactly sure what it is.  There might be several.  I have my own algorithm and one is following actors I admire, so I streamed “The Hunter” because of Willem Dafoe. http://www.magpictures.com/thehunter/   Also, I admire Sam Neill.  I only knew Frances O’Connor as an actress with a face like a Valentine.  Add that it’s an Aussie movie and that it won a prize at the Toronto Film Festival, which I value more than others.  But I wasn’t looking for an enviro film.

I was only marginally aware of Tasmanian tigers and even less so Tasmanian devils -- in fact, I confused the two.  Both are evolutionary side tracks in which marsupials became the equivalent of mammals on other continents, more like hyenas and wolverines than tigers or bears because those were the niches they claimed and those were the characteristics that let them survive there. 

Tasmanian Tigers  AKA Thylacines  1908

Tasmanian Devil  present

They are only part of what makes movies “down under” seem so mysterious and yet familiar -- people say “mystic.”   Almost sci-fi. Philosophical enviro films love landscape, especially the gentler films, which also love sex.  It’s unusual for them to be about hard-man hunters or to combine that with brilliant clear-eyed children like Sass (Morgana Davies) and Bike (Finn Woodlock).  From now on I’ll follow Julia Leigh, the writer of the originating novel.  Check out the reviews on imdb.com, esp. the ones from Aussies.

This remarkable film fits with my enviro preoccupation here in my own mystic landscape full of guarded people, which I survive in part by watching TED talks.  I even subscribe.  The next day after I streamed “The Hunter,” the Ted Talk subscription sent http://www.ted.com/talks michael_archer_how_we_ll_resurrect_the_gastric_brooding_frog_the_tasmanian_tiger.html   There I found the source material for the image of the thylacine, brought back to life in the movie by CGI.  Some swipes at YouTube yielded many clips about the Tasmanian devils and even the prototype for the Sam Neill character, a man who remembered living thylacines (Tasmanian tigers’ proper name).

Stewart Brand added his pitch at:  http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_the_dawn_of_de_extinction_are_you_ready.html  He has founded a study group called “Revive & Restore” which is part of his umbrella institution: “The Long Now.”  http://longnow.org/revive/   The thylacine is a remnant that some believe may still be there somehow.  Aurochs are an early kind of cattle (pictured in cave art) close enough to its descendant that it can be recovered by backbreeding (inbreeding).  Condors were brought back by capture and hand-raising.  Woolly mammoths are found frozen -- lots of DNA.  And then there are the dinosaurs. . . 

There are many ways of bringing back the animals of the past, even the people of the past (Neanderthals), but in the background is always the question of bringing back the environment.  (There are businesses that restore streams, even if they’ve been running for a century underground in culverts, “daylighting” them.)  Is an animal itself unless it is interacting with the environment that gave rise to it?   Isn’t it behavior as much as anatomy?   And now we realize that the whole planet has changed, will change, in part because of ourselves.  Is a human a human being if it’s not on the planet Earth?  Could a Neanderthal ride the subway or conduct an orchestra?  (Yes.  But not well.)

So everything is code and we can both read it and create it.  (But not well.)  When I say EVERYTHING is code, I shark-jump God.  God IS the code.  You can dress it up by talking about a goddess’ net or “process theology.”  It’s still just energy code, masquerading as solid objects -- change that somehow seems stable, full of moments because our brains code it that way.  Humans don’t have soul -- they have awareness.  (But not well.)

When I first started reading enviro stuff it was about the land.  One biologist talked about people imprinting with whatever landscape they knew the best, so then that became their idea of what any movement should restore.  She was frustrated because some people had come from back East and knew the Flathead Valley only as it was with the current infestation of spotted knapweed, which covered everything with a purple haze and killed everything that competed.  The newcomers saw that as beautiful and didn’t want to exterminate it.  MANY range weeds are recent invaders.  

In 1990 I picked a “bouquet” at Heart Butte (a remote place in the foothills of the east slope of the Rockies) in order to get the kids to write about them.  After looking each plant up in my handbook, it became clear that we were living in a degraded place.  They’ll scream at the word but de- just means “subtracted” so the word just means it’s below -- less than -- grade A compared to the original foothills grazing.  Until then, I had not been critical of lupine and other bright elegant plants that came from elsewhere.

Brand does not neglect the moral and practical issues of bringing back lost species.  How does one judge “code,” why isn’t it just a matter of imposing our own preferences on the world, and what do we do when some want it the way it is now while others will fight to restore us to 1800 or 1491 or before the retreat of the glaciers ten thousand years ago.  If we’re going to mess around in such matters -- oh, we already are -- the consequences may be quite unlike anything we intend.  Haven't been in the past.

So now we’re on religious ground and the shift is so very deep that most people will not be able to grasp it.  The core of this “religion” is still about survival, both survival of the group and the survival of the individual, but it does not mean access to a perfect place with so much bliss that it may amount to non-feeling, no friction.  It means survival through participation, through consciousness of the fractal swirl that surges on all sides, including the inside.  Not so different from what some people mean when they say “God is in you/you are in God.”  In our times too many people feel that they cannot survive except by NOT participating.  They make themselves like hardened spores that drift through space, hitchhiking on asteroids.

What do I mean by participation?  First of all, it is openness to the senses.  Second, it means an awareness of pattern.  Third, it means being open-handed, open-hearted, letting the process go on with as little ego-interference as possible.  The courage necessary to do this is enormous, not least because to do so can mean going against the entire Western cultural juggernaut, except for the educated sub-culture that has been looking at the evidence.  There are corollaries:  be where you are; smell the roses; take your neighbor’s hand; respect your lover’s body; doubt everything, doubt nothing.

What surprised me about “The Hunter,” the movie, was it’s tenderness.  It’s very much aligned with this sacred approach to life: participation, being where you are, taking your neighbor’s hand and so on.  Dafoe’s character, used to luxury hotels, accepts the hippie/dippie context he has fallen into, repairs the generator, scrubs out the disgusting tub, washes the drugged mother with the help of her children, relates to those children with respect and intelligence, restores music to the trees, and walks the land as part of it.  None of this is preachy.  But he survives.  Alone.  But wait -- maybe not.

(You might like:  prairiemary: Sam the Worm Man in the Sweet Grass Hills   Jun 26, 2005

Giant worms that smell like lilies aren't quite Tasmanian Tigers, but the principle was the same.)

HEDGEHOG: CHARISMATIC MINI-MAMMAL

You might not know from reading this blog that much of my personal reading is about animals.  Most recently I’ve enjoyed “The Hedgehog Dilemma: A Tale of Obsession, Nostalgia, and the World’s most Charming Mammal.”   The author, Hugh Warwick, is also quite charming.  Like many of my favorite books (for instance, Tim’s “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping”) came from Daedalus remainders:  www.salebooks.com.  Whoever is the buyer has good taste.

A hedgehog is not just a mini-porcupine.  Though they have variations of temperament, they are little more than clockwork in some ways.  A sort of pokemon. snuffling around nocturnally in the debris of gardens, thinking of food and sleeping in an improvised bed.  Its armament is more “prickles” than quills, but formidable enough that a person would be well-advised to wear gloves.  

Like most of the best books about animals, the little specific beastie leads to speculations about the whole array of habitats and their ecological connections, including the emotional ties to human beings.  The conflict is always between the scientists trying to understand what really happens versus the constant streams of fantasy, both positive and negative -- with the worst results often arising from the positive taken to extremes.  Not just “loving to death” but also weird practices like fans quaffing worm shooters (vodka garnished with the larva that hedgehogs look for).

On the scientific side, Warwick “radio-tagged” a dozen hedgehogs with the embellishment of little green lights, and then tracked them night after night to see where they went.  With a small spring scale, he weighed each specimen when it was relocated as a check on their health.  The goal was to see whether the little juveniles could survive since they had been in care all winter because of abandonment by their mothers or maybe damage to them that caused citizens to bring them for care.  It turned out that the majority in the study were lost, but not due to any fault or lack in themselves.  Many were run over by cars or their natural predator, badgers, left only the empty and prickly skins in a little smudge of hedgehog blood.

At first Warwick tried to identify the adventurers by their radio frequencies, but their tendencies to variation soon became names.  The animals around here most frequently radio-tagged and followed are grizzly bears, which also will acquire names.  Even if conventional names are resisted, their tag numbers become names in the same way as .007.   It’s hard to imagine mistaking a hedgehog for Bond, James Bond.  Most people associate the species with Beatrix Potter’s “Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle,” a benignly aproned little character.  Of course, Potter was more or less forced into anthropomorphism because she was excluded from proper biology writing, though she was highly qualified -- merely female.

At one point English hedgehogs were accused of being egg-suckers and there was a campaign to kill them in order to save birds.  At another they became the object of obsessive pet-lovers who would pay enormous sums for them, even though they were hardly nice to pet.  The craze encouraged quick breeding -- that’s IN-breeding -- that sowed a mutation causing the animals to develop the staggers and die tormented.  The usual human distortion, already so common in dogs and race horses. 

Warwick concludes in the end that hedgehogs are in part so addictive BECAUSE they have so little personality that they don’t attach -- they are perfect for projection of fondness and ownership precisely because it’s all in the heart of the beholder.  No counter assertions or demands from the pet.  Check out this encounter:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=D36JUfE1oYk  A spooked but curious kitten is seeing what’s in her own mind -- a big spiky mouse, maybe.  The little beast, unafraid, is in an improvised “bathtub” because hedgehogs stink and they often have fleas.  They spend their lives bumbling around in what amounts to compost and they eat slugs, so why would anyone be surprised?

When really grumpy, hedgehogs make grumbling hissing objections and give a reflexive little leap.  Warwick said he had one little critter he especially prized because when kindergarten classes came around and each child had a chance to hold it, it dependably sneezed, sputtered and leapt in the hands of each one.  Seems like it would be easy to design a little toy that would do that.  But it wouldn’t be biological, which is part of the charm.

This book is in three parts.  One is about hedgehog research, both the figuring out of what they do, where they go, and whether indeed they suck eggs -- and on the other hand how humans react to them.  The middle part investigates some of the more marginal human fandom, which dresses up like hedgehogs, eats worms, races them against each other and -- well, I suppose intimacy with a prickly beast is finally limited.  One can hardly have sex with a hedgehog though some people have speculated about it.  A black lab that joined Warwick on his nightly hedgehog canvass, deploying his nose radar with more efficiency that Warwick’s radio transmission antenna, ended up being left at home because his tender mouth was bleeding in spite of carrying the spiked and rolled up hedgehogs very gently.  But there IS a porn star named “The Hedgehog.”  You can google him.  He’s a high-personality character. 

Hugh gives us an honest account of his rather narcissistic attempt to find a “Hugh’s Hedgehog” which lives in China.  He had seen a “study skin” in a museum collection but hoped to find a living one in situ.  It was an adventure with many risky moments, small confusions and hardships, just as all good travel literature ought to be, but in the end he succeeded -- in a manner of speaking.  It seems that hedgehogs are good to eat and Hugh rescued “Dora,” a little creature at the food market, and set her free.  She WAS Hugh’s for a short time.  He also managed to locate and hold the very first collected study skin of Hugh’s Hedgehog.  AND he had lunch with a rock group called “Hedgehog” and acquired one of their CD’s called “Noise Hit World.”  It’s from the category called “NoisePoP.”  The musicians claimed that they named themselves Hedgehog because in China it is considered a very spiritual animal.  Also, they identified with the independence and prickliness.

The third section is more philosophical about the uses of a hedgehog as a charismatic mini-mammal to educate people, calling them to action on behalf of the webs of life around the world.  Warwick speaks of “Bubblegum love,” which is his term for sentimentality, “blindness to what is real.”  He speaks of the need to know the wild without destroying it with our relentless ideas about owning, cuddling, commercializing and corrupting every aspect into something toy-like.  We must learn to respect the lives and self-determined goals of a little beast whuffling around in the hedges, looking for slugs to eat and then to digest whilst curled up in a mash of dry leaves.  NOT wearing an apron.