#121 / Black Swan

We are generally not prepared to see a "black swan." We expect to see white ones.

If a black swan were to appear, on a pond near us, we would be surprised. Later on, we could probably explain how it got there.

Thus, a metaphor is born.

The epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written an entire book about this so-called "Black Swan" metaphor: Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Taleb's book focuses on "the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events, and our tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively." Click on the image to read an entire article on the phenomenon in Wikipedia.

I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about "politics," which I consider to be the way that we collectively decide what we want to do, and thus what realities we want to create. An obstacle to what I think of as a "good" politics (in other words, a politics that assumes that we are truly "free" to create the kind of world we want) is our tendency to believe that reality is captured best through "extrapolation."

What (currently) "is" seems "real," and we begin to assume that what currently exists actually defines the possibilities of reality, and that the future will be found (not made) by extrapolating what is happening to us today.

I just hate that!

The basic problem with this way of thinking about politics (or the world) is that it relegates human beings to the position of "observers." In fact, we create our human world through human action, and we don't just "discover" it. The opposite is true in the world of Nature.

The "black swan" metaphor reminds us that the unexpected and the improbable are also "real." It's an antidote to our acceptance of what "is" as the defined truth about the extent of the possible.

#120 / Wait For The Credits

I watch a lot of films
And I believe
We should always
Wait for the credits

Even simple stories
End up involving
Lots of people
Doing lots of things

Watch for your name
I'll watch for mine

At the end of the story
There is always
A lot of credit
To go around

#119 / Saving The Planet

I suppose that some environmentalists might be offended by George Carlin's YouTube rant, presented here. He's right, though, that human efforts to "save the planet" seem to imply that Nature depends on us.

In fact, quite the opposite is true!

#118 / A River Runs Through It

On Thursday May 17th, Friends of the River will be hosting its Capital River Awards, honoring activist Patricia Schifferle and the Planning and Conservation League. Click the image to find out more about this event, and to book a table or make a reservation.

If you don't want to click on the image, look at the image. Free flowing rivers are an appropriate symbol of the abundance that Nature provides. They are its reality, as well. In our rivers, water, wildlife, and beauty abound. All things we need.

The history of human interaction with the rivers demonstrates our continual human attempt to put Nature under our control. Friends of the River in an organization that reminds us that we depend on Nature for the resources that support our human civilization, and that when we bind and imprison Nature, we put our own world at risk.

#117 / Power #2

People are (quite justifiably) suspicious of political power, but as I said in an earlier posting, I think that the best way to deal with this is by trying to make every person more powerful, rather than by trying to make our institutions of government less powerful. "Power" is the ability to get things done, and surely we want our government to be able actually to accomplish something.

If you happen to be an elected official, say a County Supervisor, you will command 20% of the voting power of the the Board of Supervisors. That means that your ability to get things done is potentially very great.

Lots of local officials spend most of their time telling their constituents why something is impossible. The way I look at it, one County Supervisor, plus two more votes, gives that elected official the ability to accomplish anything that the County government can do - which is quite a bit!

Here is some free advice to the candidates: if you are lucky enough to be elected, use your vote to do what your constituents want their government to do.

That makes them powerful, which is the way it's supposed to be!

#116 / More On Disintermediation

Mike Carlton, of Carlton Associates, runs an advertising agency. He writes about it, too. Click on the "no agents" image if you'd like to peruse a set of his white papers.

What is Mike Carlton worried about? He's worried about that thing that did in his travel agent: "disintermediation."

Getting rid of the middle person and dealing direct; that's disintermediation. That could happen to an advertising agency, the way it happened to travel agencies. Today, we book our own flights online. Ten years ago, we had travel agents do that for us. No more agents! More and more, nowadays, we are dealing "direct." What does that mean? No more agents! No more agencies!

In politics, moving towards disintermediation means getting rid of those who act "for us" in the political process. It means more citizen participation and more "direct democracy."

I can live with that.

#115 / Adbusters

Moving towards a culture of "less," rather than "more," could possibly save civilization as we know it, by putting less strain on the world of Nature that ultimately has to support everything we do in our "civilized" world. If we are ever to get to less, we are going to have to stop egging ourselves on to consume ever more, which is why a group like "adbusters" may be particularly relevant.

Adbusters calls itself “a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.”

The "Occupy Wall Street" slogan came out of adbusters.

What comes next?

We need to keep thinking (and doing) if we are ever going to change our world.

#114 / Less #2

I regularly read Connections Magazine, published by the Peace & Justice Network, based in Stockton, California. The April 2012 edition of Connections (not yet available online, as I post this) contains a sobering article by Wendi Maxwell. Maxwell indicates that there is a lot less to "celebrate" in Stockton than one might gather from looking at the website of the real estate search company from which I got the image I am using in today's post. (You can click the image to get the reference).

According to Maxwell's article, city leaders have declared that Stockton will soon be unable to pay its debts; there is not enough money to carry the city through June, and to achieve the savings needed, by laying off employees, approximately 600 employees would have to be laid off, out of a total workforce of 1400. To summarize: "unless something drastic is done immediately, the city will face bankruptcy." City leaders are now trying to use a recently enacted state law, AB 506, to negotiate with the city's creditors.

Stockton got to where it is today by basing its decisions on an expectation that the economic boom times that began in the mid-1990's would never end. According to Maxwell, the projects that city leaders undertook (including the marina pictured here) apparently struck some members of the Stockton community as "grandiose." Nonetheless, the elected officials just forged ahead, anyway. They weren't thinking about having to make do with "less."

I am from a different town, Santa Cruz, and while the economic situation here is not good, my city is not as bad off as Stockton. Even so, there have been lots of service cutbacks, and employee pay cuts, and there certainly is no guarantee that things will get appreciably better, going forward. At this juncture in our city history, despite real experience with the need for fiscal restraint, city officials appear ready to invest over $2 million dollars of the city's "deep financial reserves" to build a tent auditorium to provide a home (at the cost of local taxpayers) for a "D" league basketball team, associated with the Golden State Warriors, that is now based in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Before committing the thin financial reserves of the City of Santa Cruz to a project that many city residents might well find a little "grandiose," I hope that city officials will think about the plight of Stockton, where bad choices have led the city to the brink of bankruptcy.

Learning to live with "less," rather than to develop "more," may be an all-around good principle. Better to get there voluntarily, rather than by necessity.

#113 / Iron

I have just recently watched The Iron Lady, a 2011 film about Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of Britain. Meryl Streep stars.

I was not (and continue not to be) a fan of Margaret Thatcher and her policies, but I must admit that I liked one of her observations about politics, presuming that the quote attributed to her in the film is accurate. Politics ought to be, she says, about "doing something," not about "being somebody."

#112 / This Is The Day

We often find ourselves engaged in a heedless rush to replace the realities of the world of Nature with realities we create ourselves, as with our desire to "drillbabydrill," and to extract hydrocarbon energy sources from any place we may find them. One way we can help forestall and mitigate the adverse impacts of such heedlessness is to seek out and engage in unintermediated experiences with Nature.

That is a real word, "unintermediated," though you may not find it in every dictionary. I suggest trying the OED, if you're a subscriber.

The dogwood blossoms of the Sierra, pictured in this post, are just one example of the wonders of the natural world that are almost always available to us - almost anywhere, and anytime, but most particularly in this spring season.

Lie on the lawn. Look at sky. This the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it (Psalm 118:24).

#111 / drillbabydrill

I try to keep myself informed about the valiant efforts of those environmental advocates in Washington, D.C. who are swimming upstream against the political tides, and who are working as hard as they possibly can to protect our marine environment from the ravages of offshore oil production.

This morning, I heard from one of the persons working on offshore oil issues for The Wilderness Society. His email alert outlined the contents of what he called the "three drillbabydrill bills" currently pending in the Congress.

I had never, previously, seen the "Drill Baby Drill" slogan modified to be an all lower case adjective. Somehow, that designation works for me; it seems to convey the utter thoughtlessness of the push to extract oil resources from any and all locations in the natural environment in which they may be found, from the Gulf of Mexico, to the Florida and California coasts, to the Arctic Circle.

In this case, as in so many others, our world is not made better by our success in plundering the resources of the world of Nature. Quite the opposite. If global warming is real (it is) then every time we find and exploit a new hydrocarbon resource we increase the danger of species extinction, including the extinction of our own human species. This would be true even if the production techniques now being used to produce these hydrocarbon poisons weren't themselves ever more terribly destructive of the natural environment.

drillbabydrillbabydrillbabydrillbabydrill....

This is the way we cook the frogs in the pot.

#110 / Red Pill

I remember liking the movie The Matrix quite a bit, and must have seen it right after it first came out. But when I recently saw a reference to "taking the red pill," I was at a total loss.

Wikipedia says that the term "red pill," and its opposite, "blue pill," are pop culture terms that symbolize the choice between living in the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) and embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (red):

The terms were popularized in science fiction culture via the 1999 film The Matrix. In the movie, the main character ... is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. The blue pill would allow him to remain in the Matrix, a fictional computer-generated world. The red pill will lead to his escape out of the Matrix and into the "real world."

As I remember the movie, the world of illusion is definitely human-created. In my way of thinking, it would always be an illusion to believe that the world in which we most immediately live is truly the "real" world. Our world, the matrix upon which our histories are constructed, is real enough, but not ultimately "real," real with a capital "R." Our world, call it a world of illusion, the world that we create and most immediately inhabit, is ultimately dependent on the world we didn't create, the world of nature, a world that is, indeed, where painful truths are often resident.

Now that I am reaqcquainted with the metaphor, I'm taking the red pill.

#109 / Superbugs

The "Natural Society" is dedicated to organic, non-synthetic, and non-pharmaceutical avenues to good health. One of their recent articles on "superbugs," and how the craze for hand sanitizers may be spurring the superbugs on, was illustrated by the picture I have used with this post. I like the picture!

In fact, the world of Nature does resist the human claim that human efforts and endeavors are able to eliminate the features of the natural world that humans sometimes find either irksome or even threatening in a more substantial way. If we can keep in mind that any new reality we create is ultimately dependent on the world of nature, that may be the best "antidote" to lots of problems, and particularly to one of the truly great afflictions to which humans are susceptible: namely, an excess of overweening pride!

#108 / Hole In The Bucket

Speaking of "less," one way not to need "more" is to make sure that we're not wasting anything.

My father made that point to me, when I was growing up, in terms of basic family economics, and he used the "leaky bucket" example.

The same principle works on a grander scale. We may not need to manufacture more water with an environmentally and economically costly desalination plant, for instance, if we can just make sure that our existing water system isn't "leaking." In California, energy conservation was seen as an alternative to new nuclear power plants (credit the first term Jerry Brown with that), and that "conservation strategy" did, in fact, work out. The Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that there is a lot of conservation left in the system, too.

As for the general principle, if we had to walk a mile for each bucket of water (or anything else) we used, my sense is that we'd be a lot more attentive to how we could eliminate waste.

#107 / Problem?

I am convinced that we can change the future (not by going back into the past, but by our actions in the present). Sometimes, though, it's just not that easy to figure out what to do.

#106 / Forward March

I got a comment on one of my recent Two Worlds postings. I thought it contained some very good advice. In a very brief compass this phrase lets us know how we should think about what it means to admit that we are wrong, and that we need to reverse field to correct our errors and get to where we want to go.

I lived through the Vietnam War. Confessing error and reversing field was what we needed then. That's just one of countless examples.

My thanks to Michael Lewis for this insight:

When standing at the abyss, with our toes hanging out over the edge, we have two choices. We either step carefully backwards away from the edge. Or, we turn around and take a step forward.

Forward, march!

#105 / The Past Resists The Future

I received Stephen King's recent book, 11/22/63, as a Christmas present, and I promptly read it. It's about time travel (among other things), and the book suggests that if it were possible to go back into the past, and to take actions there to change the future, the past would "resist," and make it difficult (though not impossible) to make the future different.

King's book could serve as a cautionary tale about what would actually happen if it were, indeed, possible to utilize time travel techniques to alter the past so as to achieve what might be anticipated to be a "better" future. Time travel with that future-changing objective in mind, the way King presents it, is probably worse even than a generalized release of genetically-modified organisms into our natural environment, hoping that all will be well.

Despite the fact that time travel is not (a current) option, people are, apparently, writing about it, and there seems to be something of a consensus that the past (or the "universe") would resist attempts to make changes in the past that are intended to achieve a different and better future. This topic was addressed in the Friday, April 13th column by Jon Carroll, who wrote previously about 11/22/63. In this recent column, Carroll references time travel novels written by Connie Willis, which novels also indicate that the universe would resist time travel-based efforts to alter the past so as to modify the future.

Without the need for science fiction, or for the yet unattainable option of time travel, I'd like to point out that the past resists the future right now, as a basic principle underlying the human reality in which we live.

History has a "momentum" created by our past actions, and this momentum carries us forward into the future on a pathway that is most determined by the "past," and not by our immediately "present" actions. I think the nautical metaphor captures this the best, which is why I have already written about how difficult it is to change our course on the "ship of state."

Difficult, but not impossible. The past "resists," but the future is ours to make. We just need to change direction, then "hang on."

#104 / Animal Me

On Wednesday this week, as I took my daily shower, and as the warm water cascaded down my back, the slippery soap I was using jumped from my hand, and ... before I could even think about it, my hands somehow caught it on the fly, in the displaced and different place it had gotten to, and then returned to their work. All this occurred without my need (or ability) to think about performing what was, actually, an amazingly athletic feat, an action that demonstrated a kind of coordination that I would have doubted that I possess.

This is not the first time that this has happened, and other, similar "recoveries" from slips and missteps convince me that my body has an automatic ability to do things, physically, that far exceed what I would ever be able to accomplish intentionally, if I ever tried, intentionally, to duplicate such prowess and agility.

There is an "animal me" that is wise beyond my brain. I need to trust it more.

There is a natural world, that is wise beyond our human works. We likewise need to trust it more.

#103 / Less

The "recycler's hierarchy" goes this way:

1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle

Lots of us jump to number three in the list. In fact, as I put out the family recycling for a morning pickup last Monday I could hardly push the cart because it was so heavy. Lots of "recycling" there.

Recycling is better than nothing, but what we really need is "less." That ought to be a life ambition, socially and personally. It would be a kind of turnaround. Don't you think we probably do need to turn around, and head some other direction? That's my thought. I think we need to do that for lots of reasons. If we don't we will continue to do permanent damage to the natural world upon which we all ultimately depend.

I haven't read the book pictured, but the title goes with today's topic. Bookshop Santa Cruz can connect you with lots of books on this theme, including Living More With Less.

#102 / A Faster Horse

I just read an interesting article on "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs." According to the article, published in the Harvard Business Review, Jobs didn't have much use for focus groups:

Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups
When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

In politics, as currently practiced, focus groups are how our so-called "leaders" decide where to lead us.

Not really a great way to lead!

#101 / TBTF

"Participatory democracy" would require a lot of work. Let's face it, our politics has tended to gravitate towards a different system, in which personal involvement is minimized. We have preferred to have our lives administered by others - by individuals and institutions whom we assume must know what they are doing, and whom we also assume must have the public interest at heart. Unfortunately, recent events have demonstrated that these assumptions have largely been erroneous. Neither our elected leaders nor the major institutions that govern our society and economy are in fact dedicated either to good practices or the public interest.

Our banking and financial system is a great example. This area is just too complex for the ordinary person to understand, right? And someone is looking out for our interests, right? Maybe it's the Federal Reserve. Or maybe it's our national government more generally, since we all know that the government regulates these banking giants; surely we can rely on that regulation to protect us.

Not so, as we all now know. But what are we going to do about it? We don't all have to join the Tea Party, but we do need to do something, and getting a handle on the financial institutions that control our national economy still demands more personal involvement than most of use are willing to put in. It requires more study, education, and knowledge than most of us have time for. What is the solution?

One solution is to revise the rules that govern our economy and the financial institutions that have become TBTF - "too big to fail." In other words, one reason that our economy is being manipulated by giant banks, insurance companies, and similar institutions is that we have allowed these institutions to make the system so complex and interdependent that we can't actually understand it anymore, and therefore have to trust the financial elite (presumably more knowledgeable than we are) to make the right decisions. The complexities can be unraveled, and the institutions can be "downsized."

I'm in favor of that. So, it seems, are others, even major players in the current complexities. Harvey Rosenblum, head of the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, and Richard Fisher, President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, seem to be two of them. The Wall Street Journal has recently published a column by Rosenblum and Fisher, headlined, "How Huge Banks Threaten the Economy." Their article is big news in the financial press.

Breaking up the giants and taking back control over our own economy and politics will not be easy. It will require a lot of work. No one currently in power (in government or in the major institutions that govern us, directly or indirectly) is going to undertake this task.

It's up to us. Read all about it in Tom Hayden's article. It's titled, "From Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street."

#100 / The PHS

Pictured is the edition of The Port Huron Statement that I still have in my library. According to the cover, it cost me thirty-five cents. The Nation magazine has celebrated the 50th anniversary of this important document by publishing a reflective essay by Tom Hayden. He and Richard Flacks are generally credited with authoring The Port Huron Statement, which Hayden now identifies as "the PHS." The Port Huron Statement was a seminal declaration of the "New Left," and an explanation of the aims and ambitions of Students For A Democratic Society (SDS).

I recommend the Hayden essay in The Nation. Even more, I recommend that we all revisit the idea that we can (I would say "must") create the kind "participatory democracy" called for in the PHS. That brand of democracy is definitely different from what seems to pass for "democracy" today.

"Participatory" means that we need to be engaged ourselves - passionately, personally, and permanently.

#99 / He Is Risen

When I was in Jerusalem, I visited two locations which were said to be the place where Jesus' body was laid after his crucifixion. One of these locations had a church built on top of it, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The other was the "Garden Tomb," pictured here (with a line of students from Germany waiting to enter). This place seemed to me to meet the specifications outlined in the Bible (See John 19: 38; 41). Whether or not Jesus was in fact buried here, however, will never be known, and even less could it ever be proven that Jesus rose from the dead. That assertion, clearly, is not demonstrated by the fact that there is a location that corresponds to what the New Testament says about Jesus' burial. Even assuming that the burial could be conclusively shown, the Resurrection remains a matter of faith.

Today, those with faith assert that "He is Risen," and that the nature of our world is different from what it seems to be. We are, if such faith be justified, created beings, children of a loving God, with access to eternity. If such faith be justified, "Death Shall Have No Dominion."

#98 / Sin

After law school, I went to theological seminary in New York City, and my Old Testament professor told me something that made a big impression on me. He said there were lots of different kinds of "sins" mentioned in the Old Testament, but that the common denominator is quite clear. The essential component of "sin" is our assertion that human beings have the powers of the Creator, instead of recognizing our role as "creatures."

According to the way my professor told it, we are under the authority of the one who created us. We didn't create ourselves, and if we forget that, and start acting like we did, that's when what we do becomes a "sin."

If I am right about my "Two Worlds" hypothesis, and we live most immediately in a world that we do create ourselves, it is easy to see why we start believing that "we" are the creators of everything. We forget, in other words, about that World of Nature that we didn't create, the World upon which we and everything we do is ultimately dependent. Fascinated by our own powers (which are certainly large), we justify the prophecy of Isaiah (Isaiah 2:8), as he inveighed against the sin of idol worship:

Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made.

For Christians, this is Holy Week. It's a good time to think about what Isaiah said.

#97 / Third Dimension

I have been writing this "Two Worlds" blog for over three years, and I am beginning to question the adequacy of my own hypothesis, specifically insofar as it appears to postulate a "two dimensional" reality: (1) The World of Nature, upon which we ultimately depend, and (2) The human world that we create ourselves, and that we most immediately inhabit.

It is not that I want to repudiate my "Two Worlds" view. I continue to think it is very helpful to recognize that we do create (and can change) the reality of the world in which we reside most immediately, while simultaneously recognizing that we live in and are totally dependent on a world that we don't create, the World of Nature, whose laws and limits we must respect, since the laws of that Natural World are absolute.

That said, and that analysis admitted, there seems to be another dimension to our reality, as well, going beyond either "politics," which establishes our human world, or "science," which maps the laws and limits of the World of Nature.

There is a "third dimension" that defines our situation. Besides the Natural World that ultimately sustains us, and the human world that we create ourselves, and that we sometimes act ourselves to sustain and support, there is a realm of the "spirit," to which we all have access, and no accurate account of our reality can overlook or ignore it.

These days, I'm starting to think about that third dimension more.

#96 / Actionable Science

SESYNC stands for "National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center." The Center, which I gather is a relatively new effort, is supported by the National Science Foundation, through a grant provided to the University of Maryland. Additional support and funding is provided by the University of Maryland, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and Resources for the Future.

SESYNC has been established to engage in what it calls "actionable science." Dr. Margaret A. Palmer is leading the effort. She has her own "Palmer Lab," and has done work on the ecosystem impacts of mountaintop mining, and on the world water crisis. "Actionable science," as defined by SESYNC, is "scholarship with the potential to inform decisions (government, business, and household), improve the design or implementation of public policies, [and] influence public or private sector strategies, planning and behaviors that affect the environment."

Of course, any scholarship is likely to have the "potential" to inform decisions. One would hope so, anyway. I gather that what might be different here is that the scientific scholarship is to be tailored and directed to answer specific inquiries from government and business. Unfortunately, I think there is some danger there, if those who will be doing the research and writing the scholarly papers then think that their work is "objective." There is a long tradition of business-supported "science" that ends up proving whatever the sponsoring businesses want it to. You could call it "actionable science." As I say, it's dangerous to do "purpose-driven" science and then believe that the answers obtained are "the truth."

I keep thinking that my "two worlds" hypothesis might provide some appropriate cautionary advice. the "actions" that human beings always want to take, to carry out their own projects (and to create their own world), often do not pay attention to the inherent limits of our natural environment, upon which all our human creations depend. "Actionable science" isn't going to change that truth. I hope that no one involved in SESYNC thinks it can.

#95 / Havel

The April 9, 2012 edition of The Nation magazine has an excellent article on Vaclev Havel, the Czech playwright who became the first President of the Czech Republic.Havel is quoted to the effect that "responsibility establishes identity." I take this to mean that Havel believed that we become who we are only as we take responsibility for acting within the world:

Brought by art to an awareness of his entrapment, the individual might be tempted to despair. He can’t after all, single-handedly stop the destruction of the world. Havel’s position was that the individual should start with the development of one’s self. To do this, one has to become responsible in a series of concentric social contexts that Havel calls “horizons.”

We begin with ourselves, in other words, but we don’t stop there. While we cannot save the world as individuals, there is another way. As we move out from our individuality towards politics, as we push into a new “horizon” in which others are also acting, we generate, according to Havel, “an organic force of a special kind – a living instrument of social self-awareness.” That is the force that indeed can stop the destruction of the world, and that can create a new one. It is the revolutionary impulse that Havel first exemplified individually, and then helped precipitate in his country. It is the revolutionary impulse that our own nation experienced in 1776. It is the revolutionary impulse that we must find within ourselves again.

#94 / Environmental Law And Policy

Today, I am starting to teach a course in Environmental Law and Policy, at the University of California at Santa Cruz, filling in for Professor Tim Duane, who is teaching at the Seattle University School of Law this Quarter.

According to the official syllabus, the course will “focus on environmental laws in the context of the legal institutions that determine and implement the law. Particular attention will be paid to the interactions among and between the three branches of government in the American legal system: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The course will also illuminate how the three different “levels” of government in our system – the federal, state, and local levels of government – interact with respect to environmental law. The course will mostly focus on the federal environmental laws that have dominated environmental policy in the United States since the period during which most of them were adopted, from 1969-1973. While the “political” forces that have driven and drive the adoption of legislative enactments will not be extensively examined, the importance of “politics” in determining the legal force of legislation will play a role in our analysis of what has come to be called “environmental law.” A main emphasis in the course will be on seeing how environmental law is implemented through a dynamic interpretation and reinterpretation of legislative and regulatory enactments, in the context of politically‑sensitive administrations, courts, and legislatures."

What I am really hoping will come across, to the fifty or so students in the course, is this basic thought: "laws" are the rules we establish for ourselves, to guide our own actions, and it is imperative that we develop and follow human-created laws that will show appropriate respect for the "laws" of Nature (the environment) upon which all of our works depend.

#93 / The Precautionary Principle #2

The precautionary principle states that if a policy (or action) has a suspected risk of causing harm, in the absence of a rational consensus that harm will not occur, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate the policy (or action). Effectively, this allows policy makers to make discretionary decisions in situations where there is evidence of potential harm in the absence of complete proof. The principle implies that there is a responsibility to intervene and protect people from exposure to harm where there is a plausible risk.

I have written about the precautionary principle before. I think it's a pretty important principle indeed. Santa Cruz County residents who want to know how to incorporate this precautionary principle into the laws and regulations that guide local government should mark their calendars for a presentation on Friday, April 20th. On that date, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., the Santa Cruz County Branch of the Women's International League For Peace And Freedom and Cabrillo Earth Week will sponsor a discussion of the precautionary principle in the Cabrillo College Forum. 

Human beings have an immense pride in their own ability to create new realities. That is one of the glories of our human existence. Without due humility before the World of Nature, however, upon which all of our human works ultimately depend, we can put not only our own world, but even the Natural World itself, at immense risk. A topic worth pondering.

#92 / Synthetic Biology

According to an article in the April 30th edition of the San Jose Mercury News, synthetic biology is "genetic engineering on steroids."

The article is "cautionary," and I think rightly so.

"Synthetic biologists build artificial organisms using the building blocks of life. While techniques vary, the intent is the same: to create life from scratch." When human beings seek to assume responsibility for building a world alternative to the world of Nature, upon which our human world depends, they put our entire human creation at risk.

Not a good idea!