Two Kinds of Knowledge and the Health of Human and Natural Systems

Speech written and delivered by Steve Harrell at the University of Washington Global Health Seminar, 06 March 2009

“I am honored to be invited to come speak to you today; honored and a little bit puzzled. Global Health? I don’t do global health. I don’t do health at all. I’m an anthropologist with an interest in ecology and geography.

But we want you.

Want me to do what?

Want you to talk about resilience and resurgence.

I only do resilience; still waiting for the resurgence to happen.

So talk about resilience.

Resilience in ecosystems?

Yes?

OK, here goes….

So perhaps I come to you out of an interest in health after all. Not the health of individuals, as in medicine, or even the distribution of human health through geographic, temporal, and social space, as in public health. But the health of the systems in which humans are embedded, the health of the political, social, economic, and in particular the ecological systems in which people live their lives. I can’t prove that the health of the systems has any direct relationship to the health of the people in them; that is something for the biostatisticians to work on—though I can’t imagine that it doesn’t. So let’s assume that it does, that a healthy, resilient ecosystem gives people a better chance of maintaining or recovering health, and go from there. I will spend my time today talking about a what makes a healthy, resilient ecosystem. At the end of my talk I will make some suggestions as to how this kind of thinking might contribute to an approach to health problems, and invite your comments and discussion.

I will organize my presentation today around three dichotomies: productivity vs. resilience, traditional knowledge vs. technological knowledge, and command-and-control management vs. golden-rule management. Each is an aspect of the larger dilemma that faces us in the 21^st century.

Productivity vs. Resilience

Productivity and its twin, efficiency, are all around us. We measure our success by GDP growth, worker productivity, just-in-time manufacturing, energy efficiency of our economy. We are committed in most of what we do to a principle of maximizing output per unit of input. In some ways this is justified. It has given us our modern economy, including not only a comfortable material standard of living, but also the surplus over subsistence that allows us to develop non-material resources, and to spread beyond the privileged elites of society those things that we consider make life worth living, including not only arts, literature, and culture, but also science and medicine.

In fact, it is possible to see human history over the long term as the story of the growth of productivity. Since the dawn of Homo sapiens sapiens perhaps 120,000 years ago, the amounts of goods and services that we have managed to extract from the earth and cycle through our bodies and our social institutions has increased by several orders of magnitude. In pure natural selection terms, this was inevitable, at least until the last few decades. Those individuals who produced more could rear more children to adulthood; those societies (if we believe in group selection) that could marshal resources more efficiently could prevail over those who could not, and so expanded at the expense of their less efficient rivals.

But even several hundred years ago in many places, making societies more productive, managing resources for maximum efficiency of output per unit of input, sometimes caused ecological and social collapses because of lack of resilience. The case studies that Jared Diamond narrates in his popular book Collapse provide some well-known, if occasionally disputed, examples. Easter Islanders maximized timber production for monuments, boats, and weapons, and ended up using up the forest faster than it could restore itself by natural growth. Mayans managed irrigated agriculture to maximize the surplus available for ritual, governance, and the living standards of the upper classes, and when prolonged drought came, they were unable to deal with it. In a more recent and less disputed case, the cod fishery in the northwest Atlantic, which was being managed for something called maximum sustainable yield, all of a sudden collapsed in the early 1980s. The message of these cases is clear: when we manage our resources for maximum output over the short term, the system in which the resources are embedded loses the ability to deal with large-scale shocks or disturbances: it loses its resilience.

We need to define resilience carefully here. The founder of resilience ecology, C. S. Holling, divides resilence into two types: engineering resilience, the time it takes for a system that has been disturbed to return to its original state, and ecosystem resilience, the magnitude of shock that a system can absorb without changing the basic variables that control the state of the system. Here I am concerned almost entirely with ecosystem resilience, defined in another way as the ability of a system to maintain its basic nature in the face of outside shocks or disturbances. A good example comes from the famine-relief system of late 17^th and 18^th-century China, the heyday of the Qing dynasty. China by this time was already a highly populated country, with a population during this period that grew from about 200 million to about 350 million people. Realizing the danger of famine in a land that was subject to frequent floods and droughts, the Dynasty established a system of granaries and grain reports to deal with the eventualities of crop shortages. Every county had a state-managed granary that was kept full and kept fresh—as it became clear each fall what the current year’s harvest was likely to be, a suitable proportion of the previous year’s grain was sold off while it was still edible. And local officials, in addition to keeping the granary full and fresh, were also charged with making regular reports on the grain prices in the local markets. If they found the prices to be rising too rapidly, they would dump grain from the granary on the market, so as to prevent hoarding and speculation and make sure that there was a supply of grain for people if their own harvests came up short, and to make sure that prices did not rise to the paradoxical point where people would starve even though there was grain around, because they could not afford it. In this way, despite the frequent floods and droughts, and despite the high population density, there were very few famines; the system was resilient in the face of outside shocks.

But toward the end of the 18^th century and into the 19^th, the granary system, along with the administration of the dynasty in general, began to decay due to corruption, fatigue, lack of leadership at the top, and perhaps too much population growth to be accommodated even by such an admirable and well-designed mechanism as the granary system. Granaries began to be left empty, price reports were sometimes not based on real data, or not made at all, and all the grain that was produced was consumed directly or went into the markets rather than into emergency storage. There was no mechanism to put surplus grain on the market, because there was no saved surplus, and thus no mechanism to keep prices at an affordable level. So when drought or flood hit for several years in a row, prices rose, there was no way to keep them down, producers could not buy to supplement their own harvests, and the frequency of famines went up, despite the fact that overall production continued to rise, and production per capita remained steady.

What had changed from the late 17^th century to the mid-19^th was not that the production of the system had gone down; in fact it had gone up. Nor was there a decline in productivity, defined in terms of output to input ratio; it had at least stayed steady. And of course the frequency of abnormal weather had not gone up or down. What had changed was that the resilience of the system had decreased, the buffer against calamity had come down, the ability of the system to absorb disturbances and still function had gone down. Or in strict mathematical terms, the size of the disturbance that the system could absorb and still retain its basic functions had decreased. Even a short-term drought or a one-season flood, in some areas, could lead to famine. The controlling variables in the system had also changed; no longer was preventing famine locally a matter of keeping the granaries full and fresh and monitoring market prices; with the granaries no longer full, monitoring market prices became an empty bureaucratic exercise.

You will notice that all the examples I have given so far have been cases where human societies are coming up against the limits of their production capacity given available technology. Islands of course are prime examples of environments with finite possibilities to expand their resource bases, and so are technologically advanced, densely populated societies like 18^th and 19^th- century China. And we have to admit, the simple logic of natural selection says that, in the short run (a few generations), those who produce more will prevail over those who produce less, and the logic of maximum production, like a genetic trait that confers reproductive fitness, will be passed on to the culture, the ideology, the morals of the next generation.

So we should not be surprised that productivity and efficiency will win out in the short run over resilience. And for most of the earth’s history, in favorable environments at least, this has come at little cost. The loss of resilience was usually trivial compared to the gain in productivity, though there were always local examples of systems that became brittle and unresilient, and reached thresholds or tipping points which, once crossed, no longer enabled them to operate as before. But now we are in a different kind of world, where our current level of productivity is clearly unsustainable on a global scale. And science, as it has developed in the service of economic growth, development, and increases in the standards of material well-being, has typically been productivity oriented. This certainly has to change, but given that we have nearly 7 billion of us, we can’t just give up productivity in the interests of building a more resilient system. What to do?

It seems to me that we can draw a partial lesson—and I emphasize that the lesson is only a partial one—from communities who have managed their resources for resilience over centuries or millennia. Such communities that still exist today are often those we have come to label “indigenous,” living in small enclaves on the borders or margins of more productive polities and populations, with low population densities and relatively low levels of productivity and resource consumption, but with high levels of resilience. These peoples have developed not only practices, but also forms of knowledge that we often call TEK—Traditional Environmental Knowledge or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and on the basis of this knowledge have succeeded in managing their marginal environments in ways that have preserved their resilience. Let’s take a closer look at TEK and the ways it contrasts with, and perhaps ultimately can be made compatible with, modern scientific knowledge.

Traditional Environmental Knowledge vs. Scientific Knowledge

Traditional Ecological Knowledge, whether it is employed by a community that we would now call indigenous or not, must come from a community that has been in the same place, or the same kind of place, for a long time, long enough that empirical observations of the environment and how to manage it have become part of the received wisdom that is passed down from generation to generation, that has come to be assumed to be the way the natural world works. There are several important characteristics shared by systems of TEK the world over, and these characteristics are its common strength, at the same time they are its common limitation and the reason it cannot replace, but must be used alongside of, modern scientific knowledge.

First and foremost, TEK is place-based. On the whole, unlike science, it is not based on the deduction of universal principles and applying them to particular situations, but rather on deep, detailed, and long-term observation of particular phenomena and the relationships between them. It is not devoid of general principles, but these general principles are expressed in the form of particulars. For example, the science of population biology tells us that if we remove too many reproductive-age individuals from a population, the population will not be able to reproduce itself, and this could be applied to any population, including for example the caribou herds in the north of Quebec. The TEK of the native Cree, by contrast, tells you that if you shoot more than you can use, and if you don’t use every usable part of the animal you shoot, the caribou will get angry and not allow themselves to be shot. Different rules apply to fish management, though a population biologist would probably say they were applications of the same principles.

Second, TEK is applied. There is no “pure research” in traditional societies, or if there is, it is a matter of speculation about the cosmos, and even then it is often done with respect to real human and natural communities. So TEK principles are guiding principles, they are, in Clifford Geertz’s terms, models for as well as models of behavior. The Nuosu people in Southwest China with whom I work have a prohibition against cutting conifers during the growing season between the blooming of the first rhododendrons in the Spring and the harvest of the last crop of oats in the fall. Anyone who violates this prohibition will bring lighting and hail upon the community. There are, to be sure, perfectly good, completely material reasons for not cutting trees during the rainy season when they will cause erosion, and Nuosu people understand the relationship between bare ground and erosion perfectly well. But the point is made in terms of what one should and should not do, in terms of the moral as well as the ecosystemic consequences of violating the prohibition.

Third, TEK is resilience-oriented, rather than productivity oriented. In all long-abiding small-scale societies, we find both ecological and ethical injunctions not to use more than one needs. Koyukon salmon fishermen in central Alaska, for example, have a rule that when you have what you need, you stop fishing. Anything more is greed, and greed will be punished—ethically as well as ecologically—by diminished availability of fish in the next season. In modern times, people use outboard motors, and they don’t have to consume everything they produce; they can market some of the fish to meet some of their daily needs. But to use them to get rich is to risk the implicit contract between people and the species they consume—if people consume them wisely, morally, without greed, then the species will allow themselves to continue to provide food or other resources for humans. Thus there is always leeway; there is always something left, and this renders the system resilient in the face of unexpected shocks.

Fourth, and we can see this embodied in the three principles I have talked about already, TEK does not distinguish natural phenomena from moral phenomena. Scientists, of course, also argue over the question of whether or not science is value-neutral, and the consensus, I’m sure, in a room full of public health professionals is that it is not. What you study and how you use the results have moral consequences. But the morals are not inside the science itself—science cannot determine whether something is moral or not, and only philosophy, ethics, and politics can determine whether science is moral or not. But in the TEK view of the world, the way components of an ecosystem—human and non-human—relate to each other is itself moral. Shooting too many caribou or cutting pine trees in the summertime is itself an act with moral consequences, in this case negative ones. There is no option to decide that, even though we know a particular practice will diminish the population of a particular resource, to go ahead and do it anyway. The fact that the salmon population will fall and the fact that greed in fishing is wrong are one and the same fact.

When approaching TEK for the first time, especially coming from a background that includes some critique of science, it is natural to want to embrace all these good principles of place-based, practical, resilience- based, morally connected knowledge. But they have their limitations. Because TEK is so tied to time and place, there are questions about whether it is generalizable or exportable, and indeed about whether the system of knowledge is itself resilient enough to deal with the widespread disturbances that occur in the form of the imposition of modern science, particularly in the service of developmental projects conducted by state or NGO organizations. If a previously subsistence-oriented community becomes tied to the market, if its children are formally educated for the first time in government schools, if commercial interests extract community resources in the name of development, these may all bring about problems that a community did not face previously, and whose solutions are not readily apparent in the TEK of the community. In addition, as the world becomes more interconnected economically, ecologically, even microbially, problems may arise that are beyond the scope of TEK to conceptualize or handle. In other words, even though it emphasizes resilience and resilience is a good thing, TEK is not equal to a lot of problems in which local communities are now embedded. We need science. But we need science that embodies resilience thinking, not just science that embodies productivity thinking. Let’s see if we can explore what the difference between these two kinds of science might be.

I think we need to begin with the idea of “high modernism.” This began as a concept in literature and the arts—Picasso, Bauhaus, Stockhausen and all them—but expanded to cover the attempts in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to engineer the social and ecological world in the same rational way that Stockhausen manipulated the chromatic scale, Picasso the space on the canvas, or the Bauhaus architects the living space of modern citizens. James Scott used the term “high modernism” in his book Seeing Like a State, whose brilliant subtitle refers to a kind of science that emphasizes productivity: why certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Scott includes the great rational developmental projects of the early 20^th century—colonialism, Stalinism, fascism, and after the second world war, the ideology of development espoused not only by first-world agencies like USAID, but also by the governments of what have successively been called “poor,” “underdeveloped,” “third-world,” and now, in that most maddening of euphemisms, “developing” i.e. poor, countries.

So many of these state-instigated schemes that have failed have invoked science as their guiding principle. But I would venture that it is not the science that most of the scientists on the UW campus would recognize as such. The science that scientists do involves hypothesis testing, experimentation, controlled observation. Above all, it involves skepticism, inquiry, and verification or, if we are strict Popperians, falsification. But science, as used by developmental regimes, has little to do with these admirable principles of intellectual inquiry. It involves taking the results of such inquiry and transforming them into schemes for rationalizing the world. Stalin’s scientific socialism and the development of the mechanized collective farm, British colonial land surveys and stock rationalization programs in Africa, US colonial land surveys and stock rationalization programs in the American southwest, the introduction of high-yielding varieties of grains in the Green Revolution in Asia, management of fisheries for maximum sustainable yield, all of these have been attempts to use the results of science to engineer societies and economies, without the feedback loops of real science that monitors results, continually tries to formulate new hypotheses, and adjusts its applications of the results to real situations accordingly.

As Scott ruefully points out, because he like most academics is more sympathetic to the goals of the political left than to those of the political right, most of the extreme examples of trying to engineer the world have been perpetrated by socialist governments. Inspired by the Marxist dictum that materialism means changing the world by changing the relationship of humans to the means of production, they have undertaken grand schemes of engineering directed both at society and at the ecosystem. The great sociologist Franz Schurmann, himself a leftist, characterized the Chinese revolution as the attempt to replace culture, an organically grown system of symbols and ideas, with ideology, an invented system of symbols and ideas, and to replace society, an organically grown system of relations among people, with organization, a similarly invented or engineered system of social relations. As we know, the Chinese revolution culminated in the retreat back into the exploitative, unfair, socially amoral system we call capitalism, whose rules and structures, however exploitative, unfair, and amoral, were organically grown and thus likely to have something to do with the realities they served to understand and to organize.

This kind of engineering, the application of scientific results generated under laboratory conditions to attempt to control complex systems in the real world, brought us Hetch Hetchy dam, palm oil plantations for biofuels, soil-bleeding wheat monocultures in the Palouse, levees that allowed New Orleans to grow, the air polluting steel mill, and antibiotics that would kill just about any bug except the one that mutated to be resistant to it. But let’s not be ridiculous. It also brought us clean, safe drinking water, inexpensive ways of moving goods, including those that can serve for famine relief, the pluot, the iPhone, and the anaesthesia that makes most modern surgery possible. The problem is not science; the problem is science in service of the hubristic mentality that there is no system it cannot engineer, no problem it cannot solve, nothing so complex as to be beyond the reach of its methods to understand and control. It would by silly to think we should be giving up science for the modern equivalent of TEK, some sort of touchy-feely, place-based, organic system of local knowledge, and try to run our lives with it. In the first place, there is no TEK for us to go to. We have not been in one place long enough, we cannot create place-based knowledge that informs a large area, let alone the whole earth, and we have to be able to communicate across national, regional, geographic, and cultural divides. What we need is a more humble form of science, one that recognizes the complexity of natural and social systems, and that can and should try to influence their structure and functioning, but not to control them, because it recognizes that they are more complex than the models that science can formulate to understand them, or than the prescriptions that science can dictate to control them. It is what Robert Francis of our own School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, using ideas adopted from Holling’s and his colleagues’ resilience ecology, calls “second stream science.” In contrast to “first-stream science,” which assumes that natural and social systems are knowable and predictable, and seeks to make predictions and to manage the systems based on those predictions, instead recognizes that these systems have unknowable and unpredictable elements, and seeks to understand rather than to predict, and to manage based on promoting, or just leaving in place, those aspects of the system that promote resilience.

I’m getting abstract here; perhaps an case study from my own work in the mountains of southwest China will bring us back again to empirical reality. In the Cool Mountains of southern Sichuan, the Nuosu and other indigenous peoples have lived sustainable livelihoods in a harsh mountain environment for over a thousand years. Material resources were few, weather and crops were unpredictable; the standard of living was not high. But the cultures managed to flourish in this environment, I think, because they recognized the principles of resilience, redundancy, and sustainability that are so important to understanding ecosystems as they actually functioned. They not only developed an intricate and detailed catalogue of plant, animal, and fungus species in their environment, where each one grew or roamed, when it bred or blossomed, what it was good for or what was dangerous about it. More significantly, they developed a systems understanding of how the ecosystem worked, how the social system worked, and what were the parallels and connections between the two kinds of systems. One of the ways in which they taught this ecosystem knowledge to their children was through a series of parallel proverbs, called lurby. A couple of examples will illustrate how these worked to transmit knowledge about the nature of systems and the need to preserve their resilience.

Aqu mu, aqu zze. Do the white, eat the white. White here refers to the white wood of the pine tree, a species that is central to people’s lives providing poles and boards for house construction, branches to protect mud walls from rainstorms, branches and needles to mix with manure to make fertilizer for the fields. As many of you no doubt know, te kie shot ap fa, when you cut the pine, it doesn’t regrow. You can’t prune a pine (or a Doug Fir, for that matter) back to the ground and have it grow again. So if you have cut the pine, it’s not going to come back. This doesn’t mean don’t cut the pine. You need pine trunks to build houses. It means realize the consequences if you cut the pine; consider the long-term consequences for the forest, rather than just the short-term consequences for the house you are building.

Onyi abbo mi, yy ke lo ji she. Mother’s brother gives to father; water flow is maintained. This one took me awhile to understand. But what it does is draw an explicit and beautiful parallel between two complex systems: the social system and the ecosystem. The social system is composed of patrilineal clans, which of course need to reproduce a new generation. And the only way they can do so, since the virtually universal incest taboo proscribes marriage within the clan, is to ally with another clan by accepting its gift of a bride who will be mother and reproducer for the original clan. What does this have to do with the flow of water? Well, in order for the clan to produce the material things it needs for its present and future existence, it must have a variety of natural resources, but the key to all these is water. Water not only feeds the people, it feeds the crops and the livestock. So as with the flow of descent within the clan, the flow of water must be maintained. And water must be kept clear, which means that, according to yet another proverb, ssy zzu i pa mu, yy zzu i pa mu, trees are parents, water is parents. The water will be clear and suitable for feeding people and animals if it has trees next to it to prevent erosion and keep down the sediment load. The water without the trees will be muddy, unsuitable for production, just as the clan will be sterile without the wife’s clan to help it reproduce.

There is no time here for further details of Nuosu ecological thinking. But consider what happened when the Chinese revolution came to this area and, in
Schurmann’s words, attempted to replace culture and society with ideology and organization. For the Communists, productivity, development, and national strength stood alongside social justice as pillars of the revolution. And these ideas were summed up in a series of slogans with form not unlike those of the Nuosu lurby, but with very different content. For example, population needed to increase, in light of the Marxist principle that it was human labor that built wealth and transformed the world. In a slogan, 人多力量大 “The more people, the greater our strength.” Also, labor would lead to the complete transformation of the natural world for the benefit of humans, or in a slogan, 人定胜天 “Humanity is destined to conquer nature.” In fact, it was only lack of courage that stood between us and the management of the world for almost infinite productivity, in a slogan, 人有多大胆，地有多大产 However courageous people are, that is how productive the land will be. In the Cultural Revolution, this was encapsulated in a slogan that located not only victory, but existential joy in human struggle against nature (as well as against other people), 与天斗，与地斗，与人斗，其乐无穷，Struggling against heaven, struggling against earth, struggling against people—the joy is boundless.

In light of these “scientific” principles, Nuosu, as a minority people at a low level of “development” along the Stalinist historical scale from primitive to slave to feudal to capitalist to socialist societies, were thought of as backward (their productivity was low) ignorant (only the priestly clans new how to read and write), superstitious (they believed in the animistic principle that there are spirits everywhere, in all things), and above all unscientific. They needed to replace their scattered compounds with concentrated villages where they could better be mobilized to take part in the revolution; they needed to replace their low-productivity, diversified, un-rationalized system of mixed fixed and shifting agriculture with a high-productivity system of modern crops; they needed to replace their exploitative clan and caste system with a just, rational system of people’s communes and agricultural production cooperatives. More than anything else, they needed to boost the productivity of their ecological system. As a consequence, a whole series of attempts to engineer the system were brought to the land of the Nuosu. The results were mixed.

On the one hand, I continue to strive to avoid romanticizing other, simpler ways of life. One thing that the revolution brought was elimination of smallpox and a few other epidemic diseases. This was done by forcing everyone to be vaccinated—no religious or moral objections. More endemic things like leprosy took a lot longer to cure. Another positive benefit was the opportunity to go to elementary school and become literate in the Chinese language, the key to success in the wider society in which Nuosu people were now embedded. And there were some roads, which made getting places easier, as well as serving their primary function of improving mobility for administrative and military personnel.

But on the whole, most changes did not improve people’s living standard very much, though they did decrease the resilience of the system. In the Great Leap forward, large swaths of forest were cut down, to fire the kilns to bake the tiles for new houses in concentrated villages, to plant more crops and raise productivity, and for a short time to fuel the steel mills that every county was required to build in China’s initial drive for industrialization. Initially, the results were disastrous. As resilient as the original system was, it could not survive the shock of precipitous communization, and 20 or 30 people starved to death.

But the radical experiment did not last long; by 1961 or so, collective agriculture had been established as an alternative stable state, and the long-term net results were two: biodiversity loss and more erosion. Both of these meant that the new system was a lot less resilient than the old. Forced to grow crops on marginal land, there was less watershed protection, and the river began to flow in a braided course, with much more seasonal flooding and a higher sediment load. With nearby forests cut down, people had to travel farther to gather firewood and other forest products. Many species with symbolic or aesthetic meaning became difficult to find. And all through this, people did not have any more to eat, and continued to live a subsistence existence. In other words, the attempt to boost productivity did so only marginally, at the price of a huge drop in resilience.

Command-and-Control vs. Golden Rule Management

These two forms of science—first-stream science that takes the results of observation and experimentation and attempts to apply them to engineer social and ecological systems, and second-stream science that recognizes that these systems are too complex to be commanded or controlled—have their equivalents in two kinds of management strategies. In their important work on the “pathology of resource management,” C.S. Holling and Gary Meffe name these command-and-control management and Golden Rule management. Command and control management means trying to manage a system for maximum output, and in doing so to minimize the variation that is natural to the system, but that makes production amounts less reliable. Golden Rule management takes into account that the resilience of systems is dependent on their diversity and complexity, and manages with one “golden rule” in mind—“strive to maintain critical types and ranges of variation in natural systems.” I will begin with some examples of command-and-control management as applied to systems somewhat different from those I have dealt with so far.

First, corn. I am guessing that many of you have read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but if not, and you are interested in questions of resilience, you should read the first section, on corn. Agriculture in the American Midwest is to a large extent based on three crops—corn, wheat, and soybeans—but more than anything else on corn and its secondary products, from beef and pork to cornstarch and high fructose corn syrup to corn ethanol—don’t call it booze—to run our cars. The ecological effects of having such a monocrop regime are noteworthy—single crops, managed for maximum output, eliminate genetic diversity in crops. Solution—command and control. Establish seed banks to keep the currently non-favored varieties from extinction. Also monocrops are susceptible to pest outbreaks that put the whole crop at risk (we might contrast this to what happened when a hailstorm hit our valley in Southwest China in summer, 2004. It wiped out the corn, but didn’t hurt the buckwheat or the potatoes, so people had a hard time, but they didn’t starve). Command-and-Control solution to pest outbreaks—pesticides. Pesticides hurt humans and may further diminish crop variety. Command and control solution—GMO. Engineer the pesticides right into the crop—we have bT corn. Genes from BT corn may invade the genome of other varieties, but there is probably a command-and-control notion to that, also. Chasing our collective tail.

But the ecological effects of the monocrop are perhaps no more important than the economic ones. Everyone is dependent on the price of corn; if there is too much, according to the laws of supply and demand, the price will drop. Command-and-control solutions? Two. First, since the price is so low, get farmers to grow more, so their gross income will not drop. This, of course, violates the assumptions of classical economics and will drive the market price even lower, but there is a command-and-control solution—create a subsidy price that the government will guarantee. Right now, farmers are dependent on these subsidies, and it remains to be seen whether President Obama’s considerable persuasive powers will be enough to persuade Congress to eliminate them for farmers making over half a million a year.

Another example of the pathology of resource management, an even more pathological one. The Soviet Union. The whole thing. Lenin and Stalin and their bureaucratic successors had engineered a completely artificial social and political system, whose economy was planned entirely according to command and control principles. Realizing at some level that the system was pathological, they developed a dual apparatus to command and control it. The first was of course the famous security apparatus—prohibit free expression and free flow of information, and punish those who attempt to violate the prohibition. The second was the propaganda apparatus—command the categories of thought that can circulate publicly. Berkeley linguist Aleksei Yurchak analyzes the linguistic aspect of late Soviet society in an aptly titled article called “Everything was forever, until it was no more,” and shows that late Soviet propaganda language had no verbs. The ideological and organizational system was commanded not only into the linguistic equivalent of a monocrop, but into complete immobility. It had so little resilience that all it took was Mikhail Gorbachev to nudge it just a little bit to try to make it work better, and the mighty edifice fell apart.

Now I’m going to venture, with some trepidation, into your field. Several possibly related phenomena come to my own non-expert mind. First is chasing antibiotic-resistant microbes. A resistant strain evolves, whether it is falciparum malaria or MRSA or whatever the next one is. Eventually we get a drug for it, and then some other strain evolves that is resistant to that drug. The second is our preoccupation with antisepsis and the recent reports that allergies and asthma have risen in prevalence in this country in the past few decades, perhaps due to the phenomenon of disinfecting everything all the time. I have no proof, but something that an organic dairy farmer in Whatcom County said to me may have a bearing here. I asked him why he pasteurized his milk, since it is legal and possible with meticulous attention to standards of cleanliness to sell raw milk in the state of Washington. He said he had no proof, but he thought our current society was too clean for people to be able to tolerate even the low levels of infection that are normal in raw milk, and which were tolerated in milk from Daisy the family cow a hundred years ago.

What about management according to the Golden Rule strategy: allow possibilities, maintain diversity, keep some resilience in the system? The TEK-based systems of management I mentioned above certainly do this, but there are other examples that occur on larger scales and are more appropriate to our contemporary world. I think first of all about not building in floodplains. Despite the human suffering involved with Hurricane Katrina, I think New Orleans will end up a much more ecologically healthy place if areas susceptible to breaks in the highest levees remain as natural wetlands instead of being restored as residential districts. Here in Washington, the floodplains of major rivers seem to bear the same lessons. Build buffers against agricultural chemicals seeping into the stream, grow a diversity of crops suited to different micro-environments, better yet, control pests by diversifying the crop, not growing too many things too close together, and you won’t need so many agricultural chemicals. It is very interesting to talk to apple farmers in Eastern Washington who have switched from “conventional” agriculture, controlling pests with chemicals, to organic methods where they encourage the predators who feed on the pests (and would otherwise be killed along with the pests by the agricultural chemicals). They report that pest infestations go up right after the switch, but then they go down again, and they end up having fewer pests with the organic regime—no chemicals—than they originally had when they were spraying regularly. Predators—birds or parasitic insects—are part of the natural diversity, and if you follow the golden rule and manage for diversity, the net outcome is less trouble with pests.

Again, I hesitate to venture too far into the public health field, but I am thinking of the history of AIDS in Uganda as a lesson in something like golden-rule management. I got in interested in this case through learning from Martina Morris about transmission networks, and through learning from a very gifted UW microbiology undergraduate, Carly Cox, about the conjunction between the disease and the social changes there. As you all know, Uganda is widely regarded as the greatest success story in the fight against AIDS, with prevalence declining from a high of at least 15% in the early 1990s to an estimated 5 percent today. And the USAID report “What Happened in Uganda” provides two conclusions that link the relative success in Uganda compared to many other African countries with originally comparably high HIV prevalence: First, “The most important determinant of the reduction in HIV incidence in Uganda appears to be a decrease in multiple sexual partnerships and networks.” AIDS spread in a system where people routinely had multiple, short-term sexual partners, itself a result of a breakdown in traditional social order during and after the Amin regime. To address this problem, a coalition of government, international NGOs, and local activists undertook a social and educational campaign to restore some order to sexual behavior. Rather than attack one single variable, they worked to minimize the whole nexus of systemic factors that caused the problem, something analogous to allowing the apple pest predators to come back into the system or not crowding livestock to the point where they need antibiotics. They created, in a sense, a system with its own controls, rather than trying to control problems that were originally caused by unwise alterations in the system. Secondly, expenditures over a 10-year period on the education campaigns that are reported to have led to changes in sexual behavior are estimated at about $2.50 per adult. How much would it have caused if prevalence stayed high and everyone were provided with ART therapy? And current worries that the US-supported abstinence-only programs might be responsible for a possible recent rise in incidence once again remind us of command-and-control management. Rather than a system-wide approach that tries to keep dangerous sexual behavior in check, the abstinence-only programs concentrate on maximizing (or in this case minimizing) a single variable. Just like feeding antibiotics to cattle instead of giving them enough room, like planting corn everywhere and then developing the pesticides to control the inevitable outbreaks that you have caused yourself.

Some concluding thoughts

I hope I have managed to suggest ways in which managing whole systems for resilience rather than for maximum productivity reduces the chances of calamity, whether it is famine, corn blight, epidemics, or even total system collapse. But of course we can’t always ignore productivity, not when there are nearly 7 billion of us, there will soon be close to 9, and many of us are still poor compared to the few wealthy ones. We can’t go back to maximum resilience and all second-stream science. Confucius spoke of the Doctrine of the Mean, and Buddha of the Middle Way. Both were reacting, 2,500 years ago, to extremists, and perhaps we ought to react the same way to extremists on the side of technological fixes and also to extremists on the side of the “natural,” unforced functioning of systems. To find a middle way between productivity and resilience is the great challenge of the 21^st century.”

Contributed by R. Chavid

The Penan of Sarawak

originally compiled by Rhymi Chavid, March 2008

Sarawak became an autonomous state of the federation of Malaysia on 16 September 1963. Since this time, logging has depleted 90% of Sarawak’s old growth forest ( >10 Ma ).

Area of Conflict: The Sarawak state of Malaysia on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia
Population: 2.4 M (2006)
Area: 124,450 km^2

Ethnic majority: none
>40 ethnic groups, each with their own distinct language, culture, lifestyle.

Dayak people:
>200 ethnic subgroups of indigenous peoples of Borneo
Orang Ulu:
Collective term for the ~30 tribes living in Sarawak (5.5% of the population).
Both terms are used for the Penan.

The Penan are one of the last nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes alive today and live along rivers deep within the tropical forests of Sarawak and Brunei. Numbering 10,000 total, only 350-500 individuals have yet to be forced or coerced into settling in longhouse ghettos predominately located in logged areas that have been stripped of their resources.

For the Penan, only what is needed is taken (‘molong’) and all is shared. Resources from the forest allow them to hunt (poison blowpipe) and harvest (sago palm) with a minimum impact on the land.

The Rainforest

“Eighty percent of Borneo is covered in tropical rain forest, one of the oldest and richest ecosystems on earth. Many of the life forms on Borneo are unique to the island. About one third of its plant species are found nowhere else on earth. Thirty of its birds are endemic, as are thirty-nine of its terrestrial mammals. Borneo is home to scattered populations of rare and endangered animals such as the Sumatran rhino and the orangutan. One entomologist working in Borneo identified some 600 species of butterflies and caterpillars in a single day. Another reported over a thousand species of cicadas.”

The Conflict

“Thirty years ago, the introduction of commercial logging [mainly The Samling Group] spurred encroachment onto the lands of Borneo’s indigenous peoples. The majority of all forests of Borneo have been licensed to logging and plantation concessions, and most of these overlap with ancestral indigenous land claims. In violation of international and national law, logging and oil palm companies are clearing and burning vast tracts of ancient forest on a scale often exceeding rates of destruction in the Amazon. Current estimates predict that Borneo’s rainforests will disappear by the year 2010.
Industrial logging and plantation development in Borneo’s forests have polluted rivers, degraded fragile forest ecosystems and made it difficult for communities to find the forest products they need to survive.

Forest destruction has led to a decline in the bird, fish and mammal populations dependent on trees for seeds and fruit, as well as to a loss of medicinal plant, rattan, and palm species. The incursion of roads has enabled poachers to access the area, and hillside erosion has led to extreme siltation of watersheds and coral reefs, which are affecting regional and global climate patterns. Forest destruction has threatened traditional systems of land management and inflicted poverty, pollution and social disintegration on once thriving communities.

Efforts to protect remaining land through blockades, demonstrations, and court cases have met with repression and brutality on the part of government agencies and corporations. As forest resources have become depleted, economic pressures have driven young villagers to leave their communities in search of employment. Industrial appropriation of indigenous land has compelled traditionally nomadic tribes to settle and become agriculturist, as their basic needs can no longer be fulfilled by forest resources. Recently settled nomads (Penan in Sarawak, Punan in East Kalimantan) are increasingly reliant on a cash economy for food, medicine, and other necessities. Tribes in transition to a settled lifestyle have little access to education and health facilities and lack basic survival knowledge such as food crop cultivation and construction of permanent living structures.

The Malaysian and Indonesian governments have done little to mitigate the impacts of forest destruction, and governmental conservation efforts have largely been a failure due to high demand for illegal timber by exports mills. In protected areas, bribes offered to government officials enable logging companies to carry out illegal operations. National and international laws that defend indigenous land rights are rarely enforced and frequently broken. Lands without written documentation of ownership are considered available for exploitation, and while Malaysian law recognizes native customary rights to lands occupied and cultivated by indigenous peoples, there is no official procedure to document such claims. Government requirements for written documentation of land ownership leave the burden of proof on communities who have had little or no access to titles or maps for these purposes.”

“Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing today the Penan and other Dayak have set up blockades in an attempt to halt logging operations on their land. These succeeded in many areas but the efforts were hard to sustain and ended in large-scale clashes between the indigenous communities and the state backed logging companies, supported by the police and Malaysian army. The confrontations ended with several deaths, many injuries and large-scale arrests of indigenous people.”

Bruno Manser

Bruno Manser, originally from Switzerland, lived among the Penan for six years (1984-1990) and was the initial impetus to action for the Penan. Sarawak officials denounced Bruno Manser as “a communist and Zionist” due to his living with the tribe and was declared persona non grata in Malaysia with a bounty of $40,000 on his head. He was last heard from through correspondence in 2000 from Sarawak and is missing/presumed dead.

Bulldozers and Blowpipes (VHS) featuring Manser, and his journal/testimonial book from those years (with wonderful drawings), Voices from the Rainforest, are recommended.

Anderson Mutang Urud

Anderson Mutang Urud from the Klabit (a settled tribe) has traveled internationally to increase awareness and heighten international concern for the situation in Sarawak. He was instrumental in founding the Sarawak Indigenous People’s Alliance (SIPA) in 1991 to disseminate information and campaign against unsustainable logging. He has been arrested and named in many court cases as a result of his efforts. The following excerpts are taken from the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1992 and from an interview on January 14, 1994 conducted by Prasiidananda Avadhuta

“When a timber company moves into the forest, it doesn’t consult us or pay us any compensation. When an area is logged, fish, wild animals, sago palms, rattan and medicinal plants disappear. The trees which bear the fruit which feeds the wild pigs are cut down for timber so the pigs disappear, and with them the main source of meat for our peoples.

Many of us are now hungry. Trees and vines with poisonous barks are felled, and find their way into the streams, killing the fish. Mud from land which can no longer keep its topsoil pollutes the rivers, bringing disease and destroying our sources of drinking water. Even when we mark our burial grounds, the logging companies bulldoze them with no regard for our feelings. Hundreds of graveyards have been destroyed in this way. When we complain about the destruction, they sometimes offer us a small sum of money as compensation. But this is an insult to us. How can we accept money that is traded for the bodies of our ancestors?

The Penan people are our neighbors in the forest. The Penans are totally dependent on the forest for their survival. Now, bulldozers and chain saws are destroying their way of life. As one of our old women said, ‘This logging is like a big tree that has fallen on our chest. I wake up in the middle of every night, worried and depressed. I talk to my husband and wonder what the future holds for our children.’

Our situation now is like a child who has fallen into a fast-flowing river and cannot swim. The child cries out, extending its arm for someone to help. If no one takes the hand, the child will surely drown. I ask you, the United Nations, must people die before you respond? Must there be war, and blood running in the streets, before the United Nations will come to a people’s assistance? Even though we are desperate, our people have avoided violence. We have used only peaceful methods of protest.

An old man I know once asked a policeman why it was he could not blockade a road on his own land. The policeman told him that Yayasan Sarawak had been given the license to log the forest, and so the land belongs to the company. This is what the old man said in reply, ‘Who is this Yayasan Sarawak?’ If he really owns the land, why have I never met him in the forest during my hunting trips over the last sixty years?’

The government says that it is bringing us progress and development. But the only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps. For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence, helplessness, the destruction of our culture, and the demoralization of our people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. But these jobs will disappear along with the forest. In ten years, the jobs will all be gone, and the forest which has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone with them. Why do we need jobs? My father and my grandfather did not have to ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest. It was a good life. We had much leisure time, yet we were never hungry, or in need. These company jobs take men away from their families for months at a time. They are breaking apart the vital links that have held our families and our communities together for generations. These jobs bring our people into a consumer economy for which they are not prepared.

I say to my country, and to other developing countries, that in our race to modernize, we must respect the ancient cultures and traditions of our peoples. The wealth of indigenous communities lies not in money or in commodities, but in community, tradition, and a sense of belonging to a special place. The world is rushing toward a single culture. We should pause, and reflect on the beauty of diversity.”

Sources:

The Borneo Project

Bruno Manser Fonds

 

Contributed by R. Chavid

Rely on the Tiger

By Rhymi Chavid, March 2007

Ranked number one on the 2006 Fortune Global 500, ExxonMobil reported revenues for that year at just under $340 billion, earning the corporation a daily profit of nearly $100 million (Fortune). In 2004 (the latest year with available data), ExxonMobil was responsible for the production of over one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, snagging the corporation another top ten ranking: sixth in emissions behind the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and India (UCS report 4).

On their website, ExxonMobil “…pledge[s] to be a good corporate citizen in all the places we operate worldwide. We will maintain the highest ethical standards, obey all applicable laws and regulations, and respect local and national cultures. Above all other objectives, we are dedicated to running safe and environmentally responsible operations” (ExxonMobil). Yet company affiliated memos tell a different story.

One such internal memo of the Global Science Team (created by ExxonMobil in 1998) states, “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognize) uncertainties in climate science… [our] strategies and tactics [are to]…develop and implement a national media relations program to inform the media about uncertainties in climate science” (UCS report 40).

During the 2004 election cycle, ExxonMobil made $935,000 in political contributions to block climate and emissions legislation. This was on top of the $16 million it spent through 43 advocacy groups and the $61 million paid to lobbyists (between 1998 and 2005) in order to manufacture uncertainty over the science of global warming (USC report 5). A hefty portion of the $16 million alottment was given to the Competitive Enterprise Group (CEI), a “non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government” (CEI). With $2 million of ExxonMobil’s money burning a hole in their pockets, CEI created two television ads to further ExxonMobil’s interests.

The first ad presents carbon dioxide under a false light. Sunny images of children blowing bubbles and the floating seeds of dandelions are accompanied by the voice-over:

“There’s something in these pictures you can’t see. It’s essential to life. We breathe it out, plants breathe it in. It comes from animal life, the oceans, the earth and the fuels we find in it. It’s called carbon dioxide- CO2. The fuels that produce co2 have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor. Lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love. Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed. What would our lives be like then? Carbon dioxide- they call it pollution, we call it life” (CEI 1).

The ad emphasizes the ‘naturalness’ of carbon dioxide, which is presented as a helpful little chemical compound responsible for liberating us from darkness, toil, and isolation. Indeed, carbon dioxide is naturally occurring, as are numerous other elements and chemical compounds that nonetheless become toxic when consumed or produced in excess. Iron, for example, is one of the ten most abundant elements on earth and an essential dietary mineral. However, iron consumption in excess of between 180-300 mg per kg of body weight can result in iron poisoning, leading to shock and eventually death from liver failure (Nieman 2). And what about the chemical compound H20- water? Covering two thirds of the earth and also essential to life on earth, water can also be dangerous in excess, as it is with floods, water intoxication, and drowning. This circular logic does nothing to prove that an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not cause harm. Additionally, the either/or argument posed in the ad above completely omits the existence of cleaner energy sources that would alternatively “light up our lives…create and move the things we need [and] the people we love.”

The second ad invents uncertainties in the science of global warming expressly through illogic and misrepresentation. Headlines from newspapers flash over the screen as the narration announces:

“You’ve seen those headlines about global warming. The glaciers are melting. We’re doomed. That’s what several studies supposedly found. But other scientific studies found exactly the opposite. Greenland’s glaciers are growing, not melting. The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner. Did you see any big headlines about that? Why are they trying to scare us? Global warming alarmists claim the glaciers are melting because of carbon dioxide from the fuels we use. Let’s force people to cut back, they say. But we depend on those fuels to grow our food, move our children, light up our lives. And as for carbon dioxide it isn’t smog or smoke it’s what we breathe out and what plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide- they call it pollution, we call it life” (CEI 2).

This ad projects an ‘us against them’ stand by using ‘we’ as though scientists and the public are at odds. “We’re doomed,” “why are they trying to scare us,” “the fuels we use,” “cut back, they say,” “we depend on those fuels to grow our food, move our children, light up our lives,” and “what we breathe out.” Aligning the voice of the ad with the audience sets up the ad’s punch line- if ‘they’ call it pollution and ‘we’ call it life, then it follows that ‘we’ (the audience), call it life and not pollution, too. Straw-person attacks assist this strategy with the assertion that “we’re doomed,” asking “why are they trying to scare us?” and alleging the wish to “force people to cut back.” It’s a bit of a stretch to compare researching climate change and reporting your findings to the assertion that we’re all doomed with an underlying desire to scare and force the public into submission.

Continuing with wordplay, the placement of a few choice terms—“supposedly,” “exactly,” and “claim” cunningly slant the certainty away from the science and towards speculation. A bit of semantics are involved as supposedly is defined as “accepted or believed as true, without positive knowledge” and “merely thought to be such; imagined” (Dictionary). As science shies away from declaring absolutes, the former definition indeed applies, yet the connotation of ‘supposedly’ leans toward the latter definition—one of speculation and controversy. Similarly, ‘claim’ is properly used, but implies speculation. On the flip side, ‘exactly’ connotes precision, yet in this context, refers only to the contradictory studies being precisely the opposite of the initial studies.

Ultimately, however, that statement is inconsequential as CEI cherry-picked the information to begin with. When questioned about CEI’s ad, Ola Johannessen, lead author of Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in Interior in Greenland (one of the two articles ambiguously referenced in the ad), “replied, ‘They have misused my paper.’ Essentially, the ice-sheet growth is an indication, not a refutation of global warming” (Dheere 3). And as author George Monbiot points out in his commentary over the ads on BBC’s Newsnight, “70 out of the 81 glaciers measured by the World Glacier Monitoring Service are shrinking” (Monbiot).

As an environmentalist who opts to spend four hours a day on public transit in lieu of driving her car, has written several reports, and has given presentations on climate change, I can’t help but feel more than a little miffed over the egregious content of these ads. In fact, I find them downright insulting. As more time passes and emissions increase exponentially, the severity of consequences also increases. Well-funded disinformation campaigns such as the ones backed by ExxonMobil delay the curbing of global emissions, the implementation of stricter regulations, and modified energy practices. Despite the overwhelming peer-reviewed data available attesting that “… the primary source of the increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial period results from fossil fuel use” (IPCC report 2), the population of our world is at the mercy of a few powerful corporations with large bank accounts. How long will we allow these money-hungry entities to obscure the truth and delay action without repercussion? More importantly, what does it say about our society that we are willing to believe a mass of lies swimming in illogic because it is more convenient, instead of making changes that are necessary for the health and survival of life on our planet?

Works Cited
“Fortune 500.” Fortune 17 Apr 2006. 13 Mar 2007 <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/snapshots/496.html>.

Union of Concerned Scientists, et al. Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to “Manufacture Uncertainty” on Climate Change. Union of Concerned Scientists. 12 Feb 2007. 12 Mar 2007 <http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html>.

ExxonMobil Corporation. 12 Mar 2007 <http://www2.exxonmobil.com/corporate/>.

Competitive Enterprise Institute. Competitive Enterprise Institute: Advancing Liberty, Public Policy Research, CEI. 2007. 12 Mar 2007 <http://www.cei.org/pages/about.cfm>.

“We Call It Life.” Competitive Enterprise Institute: Advancing Liberty, Public Policy Research. CEI. 2007.12 Mar 2007 <http://www.cei.org/pages/co2.cfm>.

Nieman, Judith. “Metals as Toxic Agents.” Metals in Health and Disease. 13 Mar 2007 <http://www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk/studentwebs/session2/group29/irontox.htm>.

“Supposedly.” Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 13 Mar 2007. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/supposedly>.

Dheere, Jessica. “A Convenient Excuse, but the Wrong Kind of Green.” Villager [New York] 21 June 2006. Voted New York State’s Best Community Newspaper. 13 Mar 2007 <http://www.thevillager.com/villager_164/talkingpoint.html>.

Monbiot, George. BBC. Fall 2006. 12 Mar 2007. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at0T7Fi5l_I>.

Contributed by R. Chavid

The Bad Rap of Spiders

By Rhymi Chavid

As a volunteer Spider Collection Assistant at The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the rampant misinformation disguising itself as “common knowledge” regarding spiders. Rod Crawford, Curator of Arachnids for the Burke’s incredible collection of specimens, spends a great deal of time dispelling these myths in the form of emails, telephone calls, and his fascinating website, Spider Myths.

Though, admittedly, I am in the early stages of my arachnid education, the typical layperson knows little to nothing about the lives and behaviors of these amazing, beautiful creatures. To compound the problem, I’ve come across numerous contradictions between seeming “spider experts” in my reading on the subject. This may be due to an attempt to simplify the complex or by generalizing exceptions, but I believe it is a great disservice to the 40,000+ species (and the many more yet to be discovered) that have spent the past ~400 million years evolving an astonishingly diverse and effective way of life.

I encourage you to check out Rod’s website for a taste of the abounding spider myths that are perpetuated by unfounded fears, beliefs, and Hollywood films.

Contributed by R. Chavid

Innovative Search: search with and without words

By Ramona Broussard

Most people are familiar with Google. Google contains multitudes; with Google, it is possible to search the Web, you can download Google to your desktop and search your computer with it, you can choose to use the I’m Feeling Lucky search on Google’s home page to go directly to the top result, and you can search news, shopping and images on Google as well. If you’re like me, you use Google an average of 5 times a day, not counting email or blog access. Wired offers some excellent tips on their how-tow Wiki at wired.com such as narrowing your search by file type or searching ranges with two periods.

With searching being a hot topic, it’s no surprise that there are other tools to search with. Ask.com offers an option to search with an “eraser” on, meaning that your search will not be saved anywhere, allowing you to search with anonymity. This could help if you are looking for a gift for your room-mate who shares your computer, or could be used for more nefarious purposes.

Sites like del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon allow you to tag web sites and search through other users’ tags. Some Web sites, especially those trying to be 2.0 compatible, have their own searches. Twitter allows you to search their Web site. The Creative Commons Web site allows you to search through their portal for images, or other media that are tagged with the Creative Commons permissions.

My favorite new search tool is Midomi, where you can search for a song by humming the tune into a microphone. At Midomi.com you can sing, hum, or whistle a tune or words, or you can go old-fashioned and type a search, to find that song you’ve been ba-ba-ba-ing for the last day and a half. You can then hear the song either by the artist, or by users who have contributed to the database. I hear it works great on an iPhone, but I can say for certain it’s the most innovative search I’ve used on my computer since I started using Google image search.

Contributed by R. Broussard.

Next Step, a Nobel Prize for Literature?

By Richard Dawkins, taken from eSkeptic, Edge, and originally published in The Telegraph.

“In a 1968 book review of The Double Helix, anthologised in Pluto’s Republic, the distinguished biologist Sir Peter Medawar wrote that if a young man as talented as Jim Watson had been born British, especially in the Cambridge of his and Crick’s time, he would have been steered towards literary studies:

It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English Schools of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about.

Scientism of this order provokes shrieks of outrage, and I would not recommend Medawar’s style of patrician insouciance—not till you reach the age of 60 and have a Nobel prize as well deserved as his. The suspicion that Medawar is righter than most of us publicly admit may be fleeting, and it may be secret, but it should at least embolden the young science writer. Choose science, and you have something important to write about.

Not just important but fascinating. Not just fascinating but open-ended: you’ll never run out of subjects, where the effort of simplification repays the writer as richly as the reader. Einstein said: “Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Any fool can oversimplify. Far from talking down, flatter your reader. Don’t apologise for elitism, encourage your reader to join the elite. Don’t shrink from choosing the exact word that says it best, even if it drives your reader to the dictionary. A dictionary never harmed anyone, and a word can excite by its very unfamiliarity.

Seek to enlighten and inspire, not impress. Darwin may not have been the most graceful role model for a young writer, but he laboured mightily to be understood because he knew the importance of what he had to convey. He worked to anticipate every problem that might arise, even devoting an entire chapter to “Difficulties on Theory”.

Dawkins’s Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.

Theoretical physics is a genuinely difficult subject. Envious disciplines, which I shall not advertise, conceal their lack of content behind billowing clouds of deliberate obscurity, hilariously lampooned by Alan Sokal in his hoax article, “Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity”, published by Social Text to the subsequent embarrassment of that pretentious journal’s “Editorial Collective”. Wanton obscurantism subverts the very point of science. If science seems difficult, it should only be because the real world is difficult. Yet a sufficiently skilled writer can cut through the difficulty without losing content and without dumbing down.

Yeats proclaimed “The fascination of what’s difficult”, and at different times described poetry as a “craft”, or “trade” which had to be learned.

A line may take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Stitching and unstitching, yes, that hits home. Economy of line serves scientists no less than poets and novelists. Learn parsimony by reading Shakespeare—or Evelyn Waugh—as well as J B S Haldane or D’Arcy Thompson. Learn lyricism by reading Wordsworth, as well as Carl Sagan or Peter Atkins. Learn wit from P G Wodehouse, as well as Steve Jones or Matt Ridley. You cannot write unless you love reading.

Adjectives and adverbs are special treats. Ration them. The passive voice is not to be encouraged—see what I mean? Use short sentences, but vary their length or your prose will plod. Such advice is commonplace and I go along with it. But I’ve never written down a formula for writing, and I shrink from anything formulaic. If your tennis serve works for you, an insensitive coach who barges in and tells you to throw the ball higher may ruin everything. If you’re too aware of your own technique you may dissect it to destruction. I hate it when editors belabour me with their schoolmarm rules, so why would I impose rules on others?

Whatever I say, then, it is no more than what seems to work for me. Read your stuff aloud and tune your ear to its cadences. Read it to yourself, again and again, and each time trim more fat. Each time, apply the virtual red pencil of a different imaginary critic. If occasionally you venture into a purple passage, let it be nature’s truth that leads you there, not self-regard. Fall in love with your subject, not your prose.

I love amazing numbers, and I suspect that many readers do too. How many miles of neurons are in the human brain? Others have worked that out, so calculate an equally astounding number yourself. Remember the little boy who pleaded: “Please tell me one thing I could tell Daddy that he doesn’t know already.” Prick your reader’s imagination with a stunning fact, or a fresh metaphor, or by turning a familiar fact dizzyingly upside down, or by filtering it through the alien lens of a Martian eye. However useful science may be, and however relevant to everyday life, that is the least important thing about it. Science is, above all, wonderful. You may write to inform. You should write to inspire.

No scientist has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Why not? I suspect that it simply hasn’t occurred to the judges. “Literature”automatically conjures “novelist”, or “poet”. Yet, could there be a better subject for great literature than the spacetime fabric of the universe? Or than the evolution of life? Or than Sherrington’s enchanted loom of the brain? At very least it is not obvious why fiction should make greater literature than reality. And science is the study of the real world. Nobel Prize for Literature? Now there’s a life’s challenge for the aspiring science writer. “

Contributor: R. Chavid