OUR METHODS DEMAND BASICS

U of Chicago Div School

“What’s your method?” was always the first question at U of C Div School.  The idea was to establish a stream of precedents that were already known, so as to impose limits and a sort of spine, a line of thought.  In the best of worlds, that strategy would yield an essay that was coherent and intelligible.  Of course, if you chose a method no one liked or understood, you were doomed.

This morning on Aeon.com I ran into a new question:  “Then what?”  In Div School terms, this is teleology.  It depends on what your goal might be.  

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=feca0f6557-Daily_newsletter_weekend_edition_16th_January_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-feca0f6557-68600437  

Lewis Dartnell

What happens after the accepted methods of our civilization — like exploiting fossil fuel and centering everything on profit — are exhausted, no longer apply?  What methods will save us?  When one is on territory unknown (terra incognita) the question becomes even sharper but the methods benefit from being fuzzy, wandering, and mixed.  This Aeon piece was derived from a blog based on “The Knowledge”, a book or series of books or nested blogs that seem to have their source in a man named Lewis Dartnell.  He’s handsome, young, and smart enough to star in a BBC series and my only question is “why isn’t he?”  The title, of course, is from the knowledge of London streets a taxi driver must have to pass a certifying test; it’s a “where are we going” question.

But here’s where I’m really hooked.  It’s a subject I met in seminary: the wilderness in the city.  Most of my classmates thought of it in terms of people: savage mental pygmies, I guess.  But like many others I’ve always been easily seduced by what some call “ruin porn.”  That is, abandoned industries and housing that are being reclaimed by the “natural” world.  http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ruin-photography/  This link should take you to examples of how transient anthro-construction can be.  We’re used to seeing Aztec pyramids and Asian mega-statues overwhelmed by jungle, but now we’ve added catastrophic evacuations (Chernobyl) and resource-exhausted communities (abandoned mining towns in the West).  It's not hard to imagine the U of C quads as ruins.

In fact, strictly speaking, my own buildings qualify, since two of them were temporary knock-ups used during the rebuild of Swift Dam, one a shop and the other the caretaker’s shack.  Nature and time are dismantling them, as well as this modest house built in the Thirties with an add-on bathroom and garage.  But my earliest and most vivid images are from the trail in Macleay Park in Portland where my family went to hike in the Forties and Fifties.  It was a WPA project with a lot of stonework, including a little bathroom which became a sin center and then was burned and buried, though the stone walls and arched entrances remain.  Our teenaged babysitter hanged himself nearby, in an earlier wave of alienation among young men.  Our movie horizons are full of post-apocalypse landscapes. 

Macleay Park

A periodical related to this complex, called “Ernest Journal” ,(http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk) guides this line of thought with optimism:  how would we rebuild?  Actual practical information.  How to make glass.  How to make breakfast.  How to survive an asteroid strike.  I have a friend who’s a bit of a survivalist — he just survived major cancer surgery and is restored to his health of years earlier — which means being a bit of a pack rat.  The secret here is knowing which rat to pack, and that means a grasp on basic technologies like electricity wiring, water piping, and gardening.  

Here in Montana where the grid is thin and weather gets cold (it’s generally already very windy at any temperature) one learns quite a bit about dust physics, insulation, smoke management, cooking over fires (the coals, not the flames) and other dynamics.  The traces of earlier civilizations — drag marks of travois, bits of metal or glass beads on the hill tops where bodies were left for the sun to take back, pictographs on stone — are either durable or gone.  They are not likely to be smothered by vines but the boulders are embroidered by vivid lichens, plant extremophiles.

In England which is wet and sitting on what once seemed an inexhaustible mountain of coal, the industrial revolution got a good headstart on a lot of forces that have ended now: colonies, factories, railroads. ships — all of which led to a demographic shift, an influx of people not accustomed to industrial life, a demographic apocalypse that will be the irresistible force that changes immovable Britain.

As it happens, I know quite a lot about molten metal and even a bit about ceramic kilns   In Oregon there were always glass-casters nearby.  They liked to build their studios near the beach for the sake of the cool breezes, the same as we used to prefer casting bronze in the winter, during weather just like this: snow on the ground and zero temps.  With the big fans going, the furnace and the protective gear were bearable.  Technology at this primitive level does not depend upon instruments, except maybe a pyrometer until you learn to tell temp by the color of the molten metal.  It’s a matter of human senses and internalized knowledge that comes from experience.  Less dramatic is woodwork or pouring concrete, or maybe animal husbandry which adds the dimensions of empathy and persuasion.  These are “methods.”

Sci-fi loves this sort of thing, and so do the paleoarcheologists who try to imagine the steps between the last hominid and the first modern human.  Of course, there is no “step”, no “break”, but a series of small developments that folded back on each other, became culturally contagious, used the environment instead of just surviving it.  Some of those uses were glass, stone and metal.  These survive even humans and the pre-ag aeons are named for them.  (Aren’t we the Glass Age, if you count silicon and sky scrapers?  I’ve never forgotten photos of an experimental house built only from scavenged car windshields.)  And now we turn to gravity energy in the tides, solar energy on the roof, volcanic energy in Iceland, and microbial energy in our sewage lagoon.  Clearly, energy is where you find it.

The biological energy we have not mastered — maybe I should say supported — is human beings.  What a waste for people to be drowning in the Mediterranean, starving in Syria, dying of exposure in the streets of American metropolises.  Why can’t we figure out how to address this gradual apocalypse?  This erosion of life?  What if our goal was not to restore the world as we know it, but to find a new way to be in the world.  This is not the first time the question has been asked. It’s teleological. 

Darnell embracing a Martian friend

Here’s Dartnell speaking:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbbvf-GkJcA

AS WE TRANSFORM THE WORLD, IT TRANSFORMS US

When even the Thames froze

Here’s one to think about for global warming doubters.  The atmosphere of the planet we call “Earth” (at the moment, in English) has changed quite a bit even in historic times.  The 17th century in Europe in particular seems to have had some extreme low temperatures that destroyed crops, caused famine and drove emigration to America.  The “little winter” is thought to be the result of volcano action that filled the air with dust enough to shut out sunshine.  

In the Americas about the same time was a human-caused change that no one in the Eurocentric world has studied much from an atmosphere-content angle.   This article reminds us. https://networks.h-net.org/node/2718/blog/turtle-island-examiner/92812/extinction-event   The author is Dave Nichols, who edits the H-Amindian scholar’s network and has a blog at http://happenedstrangely.blogspot.com called “Stranger Things Have Happened.”  He is a history professor who specializes in early America, including the indigenous people.

Dave Nichols

“. . .The 1610 CO2 sink resulted from the “rewilding” of large parts of Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and the Antilles, as carbon-fixing forests replaced 160 million acres of fields and towns. Behind this regrowth lay grim second-order causes: the deaths of tens of millions of Native Americans, the former cultivators and inhabitants of the newly-reforested zones, from enslavement and epidemic disease. Peru suffered a catastrophic smallpox outbreak as early as the 1520s, Mexico lost 80-90% of its indigenous population (of at least twenty million) during the first eight decades of Spanish dominion, nearly all of the Taino peoples succumbed to disease, hunger, and overwork, and at least one epidemic scythed through the populous chiefdoms of southeastern North America in the sixteenth century.

“It is hard to convey the magnitude of these losses, which killed so many millions of people, destroyed at least two major regional empires, and paved the way for European conquest of the Americas. Mass deaths became depressingly common in the past century, and on a “longue-duree” time scale most empires are, almost as soon as they arise. Geology, however, gives us even longer time scale with which to appreciate the significance of European colonization and American depopulation. The latter left as its grim monument an atmospheric marker as distinctive, durable, and global as the iridium layer that betokened the death of the dinosaurs.

“Extinction did not prove absolute and final for the dinosaurs, of course; their much-evolved descendants remain with us, small, feathery, and prone to singing and soaring. Nor did European contact exterminate Native Americans, however much some Europeans might have wanted it. Sixteenth-century Indians' descendants might speak new languages, wear different clothing, and practice some trades unknown in pre-1500 America (like astronaut or lawyer) but they are still markedly and proudly indigenous. Individuals may die, but peoples are much harder to destroy.”

by DElevit on DeviantArt

These are “memento mori” events.  [Memento mori is the medieval Latin theory and practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.  -- Wiki]  I wish someone would drop one of them down the front of Trump’s trousers.  

Survival of individuals and populations is what drives everything that living things do -- even when they are opposed to each other.  What supports survival is preserved by the survivor group by definition, but they are not necessarily individuals. Dave Nichols reminds us that the other element is transformation.  Both individuals and groups who can transform are more likely to survive.  The necessary transformation may be in a dimension so small as an evolved molecular change to fight a blood disease or may be as deliberate as vaccination.  We know there is always a remnant that mocks progress and, as we have seen in California, their children die.  There is always a cutting edge that rushes ahead to unproven medical interventions and they die as well.  And there is always a larger force, like the climate change that allows tropical insect vectors to move north, carrying malaria.  Sometimes that’s a big surprise.

I was interested in another bit of history, this time about sources of power and how each forces or bequeaths change.  (From Delancyplace.com mailing list of quotes, but I didn’t get the date.)  The original industries of England were powered by watermills, which is why they feature so largely in their novels -- they brought both wealth and tragedy as industrialization is prone to do.  Then the huge underground coal deposits were discovered and developed by deep mining, so the population and the factories moved there and towns were totally different because the men were underground and died young.  But the country as a whole became a major power, a dominator, and the cities grew.  The class system went into overdrive, which triggered labor unity.

In the US at the moment both coal and oil have been challenged by natural gas, which is much cheaper and easily piped.  And the “Green” forces are getting a toe-hold with wind turbines and solar energy, which is developing “off the grid” in scattered locations. The population has concentrated in cities so that power must be transported to them and is also now powered by the internet which must be transported on lines, supported by electrical sources.  Wealth and political control has moved to the transporters, I suppose you might say the “power vectors” which are supra- or sub- to organizations, usually corporations and uncontrollably international.  Those who move the oil and grain control the world.  At least the human population, and mostly in the cities.  

How is it that the population of small Montana towns are depleted, challenging the adaptability and possibly the survival of the place?  But a town like Shelby, which has made itself a hub of distribution (including people if you include the major private prison), is a “crossroads”?  Is it also outside governmental and even state of Montana control?  The troubles at the medical center suggest that.  Somehow too many regulators and enforcers (Homeland Security; Border Patrol; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; FBI; CIA, Highway Patrol; Immigration and Customs; and the persistent usefulness of the “Medicine Line”) cancel each other out as well as pushing aside local law enforcement.   Minor local criminals thrive on drug traffic and deal-making; major criminals -- like international corporate resource manipulators -- also do well.

If the Anthropocene that began with carbon-based greenhouse effects ends by drowning the idyllic sunny islands where the moguls and movie stars build retreats and by heating the Middle East sand kingdoms past human existence, it seems like a well-deserved self-snuffing. If somehow the entire planet ends the Anthropocene, a thin layer of UV-disintegrated plastic covering both continents and seas, there will be no one here to be surprised or have regrets.

The best we can do is start transforming now in all the ways we can figure out.  Some groups are doomed.  (We can spare 1% as soon as we get a grip on them -- you know who I mean.)  It is not the weak, the infected, the crippled, the old, and the newborn who are threatening the group -- in spite of political fear-mongering -- but the greed and politics of the group are certainly killing individuals with weak defenses.

Remember the plagues: pestis in Europe, smallpox in America.  Memento mori.  The continents will re-wild without us.

"BECOMING DINOSAURS" by David Trexler

When people aren’t cautioning us about following Rome into the crash of civilization, they’re warning us about going extinct like the dinosaurs. They’re just trying to scare us, right? Well, right and wrong.

I first met David Trexler when he was about nine or ten years old. We often stopped in Bynum to check out the rock shop because Bob and the Trexlers were long-time tourist business owners. In the Sixties one night Bob Scriver and I went down because David’s mother was selling her skeleton with an arrow embedded in it. (Not HER skeleton, but she owned it, kept it in a case to show tourists.) Marion, widowed, needed some money fast, but Bob decided against the skeleton. In the Sixties we didn’t know about the dino eggs but they were probably in the buckets around the room.

Here’s a media account of the dino egg story.

http://www.lacusveris.com/The%20Hi-Line%20and%20the%20Yellowstone%20Trail/The%20Rockies/Dino_Hunter.shtml

Now David Trexler is all grown up, a full-blown paleontologist with a Master’s degree from the University of Calgary. And he has written a book: “Becoming Dinosaurs: A Prehistoric Perspective on Climate Change Today.” It’s both reassuring and scary. Reassuring because climate change is not as cut-and-dried simple as the media makes it out to be. But there are still a lot of variables out there and some of them -- the most scary one, in fact -- have not been considered until only a few years ago. You ever hear of “methane clathrate”? Me, neither, but if you did, I’ll bet it was in the news coverage of the big ocean oil rig explosion and spewing. One of the problems -- maybe causes -- relates to this material of methane clathrate clogging the pipes and valves of the rig.

Methane clathrate is basically ice that burns, even explodes. It forms in cold water and there are huge deposits on the “shelfs” of land under the ocean along the coasts. If the ocean deposits -- or any other methane clathrate deposits -- get to a certain temperature, they will be released as gas and rise to the surface. There could be enough released to sharply increase global temps to unendurable levels or even to smother nearby oxygen breathers.

Methane, you know, is the gas that cows and frat boys contribute to the atmosphere at the literal end of their part of the food chain. But the amount is trivial compared to what comes out of smokestacks, cars, and various natural processes. It is part of a molecular dynamic that shapes what life can exist on this planet. Only a few centuries ago humans figured out that “air” was actually something, that it had constituents, and that they changed -- much less found ways to understand how the proportions of gases have varied over the millennia, why, and how that affected living beings. We still know a very limited amount about these unseeable gases.

If we keep on with global warming, it will not just mean that you can grow plants farther north. (Today the Great Falls Tribune had a story about changing the boundaries of the growing zones.) Mostly people are thinking in terms of gradual change, gradual enough to deny. But global warming could easily heat the ocean, which is our moderator of temps planet-wide, enough to release a LOT of methane ice at once which WILL create an actual apocalypse, a sharp rise in planetary temperature over a period in between one and two decades, which will kill a very high proportion of humans and other living things. This has happened at least once in history, according to the records preserved in geology.

Most of the thinking about global warming has been in terms of a household thermostat. We like gradualism -- so we have time to adjust. Our understanding of evolution has also been that it was gradual. But lately there has been new willingness to consider sharp changes -- for instance, genes that relocate or precipitate a cascade of changes. Likewise, there has been a new understanding of geological processes. It’s hard to envision a mountain jumping, even as one looks at photos of Mt. St. Helens erupting, and harder to think about its impact on the atmosphere once the effects are very high.

Much of the thinking about the effects of methane ice melting is described by D. Dorritie on a website called www.killerinourmidst.com and there are other sources of information, but David Trexler’s book is a colorful, thoughtful, deeply informed description that will have you pondering how to take action. The OTHER and quite bright side of understanding methane clathrates is that the deposits are holding energy (methane is natural gas, right?) in amounts that dwarf any oil or coal deposits on land. Now that we know it’s there, and if we can figure out how to “mine” it, we will have a source of energy that can last a very long time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “short term” morality, which is expedient and can bring in quick profits -- maybe at very high cost, like borrowing against payday at an exorbitant interest rate -- as opposed to “long term” morality which might mean saving or waiting because of the future benefits and resources. It’s also the difference between a few people “making a buck” now and everyone profiting in the long term on a dinosaur scale.

People like David Trexler who work daily, hands-on, with the bones of life forms long gone, while living on the east slope of the Rockies, knowing that those mountains are the THIRD cordillera thrown up by plate tectonics and then worn down to a peneplain, feeling the sense of embeddedness and participation that one gets from living here under high winds and relentless cold, can step away from the greed and markers of success in the cities and corporation board rooms. Grounding in science becomes infused with a kind of mysticism, a protective merging with the land. Okay, it’s religion. It supports a morality.

I’ll go even farther and say that industrialization -- world-wide -- has resulted in a kind of “frakking” of the heart, but this landscape and awareness of its long history since it was part of Gondwandaland, the unified first land mass, will restore you. “Becoming Dinosaurs” is an excellent meditation manual.

A REALLY WINDY ISSUE

Just before I moved back to Montana in 1999 from Portland, Oregon, I was working as the clerical support for the City of Portland Site Development department.  One of the city’s struggles was with the concept of “takings,” which was just catching fire.  If the team required that a wetland behind a projected supermarket be retained to catch run-off, the supermarket would declare that the city was depriving them of the potential profit from building on that area and demand payment for it.  It was sort of the reverse of condemnation -- that is, usually land-owners are paid when land is taken by the larger jurisdiction for the greater good of the community.  But this was part of the good design for the site.  It was such a new idea that when Brian Kahn (an environmental lawyer) and I talked about it, he didn’t believe it.  Now he does.

Larry Salois was my UPS man -- he has retired just now, partly to keep track of his lawsuit against the Montana-Alberta Tie Line -- high tension electricity lines across his mother’s property.  (She’s has Alzheimers and is in a nursing home.)  When he went out to see where the survey line ran, it crossed a wetland and was placed where it would disturb tipi rings, an ancient camping spot.  Both of these things, according to the negotiated rules, were not supposed to happen.  Larry was willing to accept a contract for the tie-line to cross his mother’s property, but he wanted it moved over -- not a lot, but enough to miss the wetland and tipi rings.  The company refused, afraid of having to redesign and jigger its line so much that they would lose some of their profit.

Larry is Metis (that’s why the French name -- he’s descended from the Red River people who come from a mix of Indians and early trappers) and he’s a bug for history, so we’ve talked more than just saying, “Sign here!”  I’ve taught relatives of his and worked with others.  MATL was operating under the assumption that 1) he was just a dumb Indian and 2) what he wanted was money.  Their assumptions were big city white guy attitudes.  This has been underlined by a letter in the Great Falls Tribune rebuking Hertha Lund, the lawyer who won the case against MATL that brought them to a standstill by blocking public condemnation of the land.  The tone of it was patronizing and irrelevant, calling her down for being “rude” to such important people as them.

When I left Montana the last time in 1991, Montana Power was a stable organization, the pride of the state.  Then they got computer fever and like gold strikers sold off much of the company in order to chase the cyber-bubble.  At the same time the power industry quietly de-regulated.  If they attracted any attention, they sent up a great flurry of protestations that they were only trying to make the state “business friendly.”  Yeeeaaaas.  VERY friendly.

So here I sit in Valier, within eyeshot of a huge wind farm, while Northwestern has not maintained or modernized the major transformers that feed the town well enough to keep them from bursting into flames.  I kid my cousin that my house is one step above camping out and she, having visited me, says,  “And that’s when your electricity works!”  Brown-outs are common, some of them bad enough to burn out refrigerators, furnace motors, computers and the fancy embroidery machines at Pony Impressions.  Insurance was balky.  

So do I really care whether Calgary or California needs more electricity?  Not a whole lot.  Let them conserve.  California, if you care to remember, is where some electrical plants were taken off line for “maintenance” in order to jack up prices during a heat wave that brought in a bonanza of AC use.  Kind of hard on some of the older folks down there.

Anyway, back to Montana.  Since “the dumb Indian who was just holding out for more money” turned out to be a shrewd Metis with a tough female lawyer -- not quite the thin edge of the wedge the big boys had hoped to intimidate as an example -- someone with good connections in the legislature thought of just passing a law giving MATL the right to seize land using condemnation law.  By this time the landowners further to the south and in other states had begun to figure it all out.  There is now a specialty law company that takes these cases, increasing expertise and resources to say nothing of public attention.

http://www.nationaleminentdomain.com/2011/04/articles/national-eminent-domain/montana-alberta-tie-line-files-brief/

One of the most interesting aspects of MATL is that it is international  and its owners are at least in part not American.  So the benefit of the eminent domain would be for a private corporation in a foreign country.  An international corporation is trumping state and nation, overriding local benefit.  They are trying to set a precedent for several transmission lines, all pointed out of state, that will make the company “too big to fail” or regulate.

Here’s a quote from Brad Molnar, a four-term Montana legislator and currently the vice chairman of the Montana Public Service Commission:

“If half of the capacity on MSTI  and Path 8 [other tie-lines] is filled with our current supplies we will be about 50 percent short to fill the needs of NorthWestern Energy’s residential customers and our industrial base. To replace this with a new 1000MW coal plant (like that is possible) would be in excess of $1 billion. And another billion dollars for new transmission lines to serve us as our current capacity would be exhausted shipping our legacy power out of state. Treason would look different in what respect?”

Strange world when an international corporation can come into Montana, not to dig up our copper, but to “take” our wind (originally touted as a way of sparing us from air pollution) in order to necessitate that our coal be dug up for a “takings” that will be our very breath.  Of course, the time is ripe.  People are worried about the economy.  In small towns people think,  “Hey!  If a bunch of wind farm guys move in here, I could probably rent my mother-in-law’s house to them now that she’s gone.  I could get the kids through college with that little extra boost.”  No one has a clear plan for twenty years in the future when the turbines begin to fail.

Here’s a quote from the Billings Gazette for April 5:

“Senate Republicans are floating a new proposal to break the legislative logjam over landowner rights vs. property condemnation powers of transmission line developers — but so far they’re not finding any takers.

“A House member who’s been pushing for stronger landowner rights said Tuesday that the proposal has some positive elements but still gives a green light to the Montana Alberta Tie Limited (MATL) power line to condemn property along its north-central Montana route.

“‘I’m not interested in the Legislature resolving the court suit,’ said Rep. Kelly Flynn, R-Townsend, referring to a legal battle blocking MATL’s condemnation power.

“‘I think that would be best decided by the Montana Supreme Court.’”

Take THAT, Montana-Alberta Tie Line, international corporation!