reading

Everett Rogers's magnum opus was diffusion of innovations; but he has made another significant contribution to science in the form of a book on the history of communication studies as a discipline (Rogers, E. M. (1994). A history of communication study: A biographical approach. New York: Free Press.). It is a book full of great historical details and surprising revelations - such as the realization that the discipline was originally started with oil money, and sustained with corporate injections ( = early research on media advertising campaigns) and CIA funds ( = intercultural communication). Dirty money trails aside, Rogers tracks three fundamental ideas that influence the development of communication theories; the discipline stands on the shoulders of three giants, namely Darwin, Marx, and Freud.

Throughout my education, I have been accustomed to seeing Charles Darwin as one of the giants of science (speaking of that quote, Darwin is buried next to Sir Isaac Newton himself in the Westminster abbey). Darwin's name brings associations of a somber bearded man, the book about the descent of man, Galapagos finches, evolution, and survival of the fittest. It is a dry image; associated only vaguely with the more romantic and less bookish notion of a sea voyage aboard a ship by the name of the Beagle.

The Darwin of the Beagle era is none of that, as the reading of his diaries demonstrates (http://lensyoga.com/node/charles-darwins-beagle-diaries). We see a young man, full of wonder and anticipation, tirelessly collecting specimen at sea and on land, and writing copious research notes about the process - with none of the certainty and finality that we are accustomed to associate with his name.

The Beagle Record is even more revealing. Here the selections from Darwin's diaries are complemented by excerpts from Captain Fitz Roy's narratives; but even more importantly, with Darwin's letters to his family and to John Henslow, his mentor at Cambridge.

The Darwin of the letters is anything but dry - adventurous, tumultuous, sometimes full of hope and great anticipation, and at other times gravely depressed and doubtful - but above all witty, energetic, and occasionally almost mischievously childish and sarcastic. This is not the Father of Science Darwin - it is the Darwin who tirelessly rides for hundreds of miles with gauchos across South America, who remarks about a travel companion that she daily increases in every direction except height, who climbs vertiginous mountains of Tahiti and sleeps in huts made out of banana leaves; and who repeatedly tosses the same iguana into a pool of water "as far as [he] could throw it" to see why the animal is so averse to being in water - the lizard invariably returns straight to him because it has no fear of man (and no natural enemies on land), but it instinctively fears its numerous aquatic enemies.

We see a man - or rather two men, Darwin and FitzRoy - driven by a sense of duty; one tirelessly collecting animals, fossils, and geological samples for the advance of natural history; the other making a decision to invest his own funds to purchase a schooner to expedite the survey of the coast of South America which is the primary goal of the Beagle's voyage.

Reading the Record has made me see the human dimension of Darwin's life; but it also made me respect him and his companion for this unfaltering drive of Duty; a drive so strong that Robert Fitz Roy 30 years after the voyage took his perceived failure to perform the Duty so seriously that he commited suicide (and Darwin himself greatly undermined his health as he worked night and day upon his return to produce the publishable report of the voyage). This feeling of Duty (and the heavy toll it takes on its bearer) is perhaps best expressed in Fitz Roy's letter to Captain Beaufort (August 15, 1832):

Oh that time and Resources could be multiplied in proportion to the demand - I would then give you and myself satisfaction. Every fresh step only shews me a multitude of others which ought to be taken; and the more I scribble and think, the more I find to scribble and think about.

The Beagle Record: Selections from the original pictorial records and written accounts of the voyage of H. M. S. Beagle. Edited by Richard Darwin Keynes; Cambridge University Press, 1979

This is a truly remarkable book, beautifully and lovingly edited by Richard Keynes and published by Cambridge in 1988. To a student of Darwin and evolution it provides the day-to-day backdrop to the scientific life, the context to the process of discovery and thought; but it stands very well on its own not only as a superb travel narrative, but also as a coming-of-age story of sorts, as we observe Darwin's very character transformed by the voyage. He is 22 when the Beagle sails and 27 when she returns; he is invited to join the voyage (without a salary) by Capt. FitzRoy, who is his senior by only 4 years. He starts on the right note - amazement and anticipation, and inevitably arrives at the only possible conclusion by the end of the journey - a mindset of tranquility and tolerance, nevertheless marked by an undeniable firmness and resolution of character. One should forgive Darwin's occasional misspellings (carefully preserved by Keynes and retained by me in typing up the quotes below) and admire his style - its elegance, its poetic quality, but also its love of the absurd and the ridiculous.

December 17, 1831 - Devonport
It is necessary to have gone through the preparations for sea to be thoroughily aware what an arduous undertaking it is. It has fully explained to me the reasons why so few people leave the beaten path of travellers.

January 24, 1832 - St Jago, Cabo Verde Ids.
After our one o'clock dinner, Wickham, the Captain & myself went to the famous Baobob tree & measured it more accurately.
(in the Narrative of the surveying voyages of HMS Adventure and Beagle, FitzRoy wrote: In a valley near the town is a very remarkable tree of the Baobab kid, supposed to be more than a thousand years old; but I am not aware of the grounds upon which such assertions are made).

March 6, 1832 - Bahia
The greater part of the day has been spent in idly lying on deck. - I am not surprised that people are so indolent in a hot country; neither body nor mind require any exercise; watching the sky is sufficient occupation for the former and the latter seems well contented with lying still.

March 15, 1832 - Bahia
In the evening I went to the Hotel d Universe, where by the help of three words "comer" to eat, "cama" a bed & "pagar" my host & myself contrived to agree very well.

June 11, 1832 - Rio de Janeiro
The air is motionless & has a peculiar chilling dampness. - Whilst seated on the trunk of a decaying tree amidst such scenes, one feels an inexpressible delight. - The rippling of some brook, the tap of a Woodpecker, or scream of some more distant bird, by the distinctness with which it is heard, brings the conviction how still the rest of the Nature is. -

June 30, 1832 - Rio de Janeiro
Went to the city to purchase several things. - Nothing can be more wearisome than shopping here. - From the length of time the Brazilians detain you & the unreasonable price they at first ask, it is clear that they think that both these precious things are equally valueless to an Englishman. -

November 17, 1833 - Montevideo
The church is a curious ruin; it was used as a powder magazine & was struck by lightning in one of the ten thousand storms of the Rio Plata. - Two thirds of the building was blown away to the very foundation, & the rest stands a shattered & curious monument of the united powers of lightning and gunpowder. […]
The inhabitants do not require much education in their representatives; I heard some men discussing the merits of those for Colonia; "that although they were not men of business, they could all sign their names". With this every reasonable man was satisfied.

November 20, 1833 - spending the night in an estancia on the Rio Negro
The Captain at last said, he had one question to ask me, & he should be very much obliged if I would answer him with all truth. - I trembled to think how scientific it would be. - "it was whether the ladies of Buenos Ayres were not the handsomest in the world". I replied, "Charmingly so". - He added, I have one other question - "Do ladies in any other part of the world wear such large combs". I solemnly assured him they did not. - They were absolutely delighted. The captain exclaimed, "Look there, a man, who has seen half the world, says it is the case; we always thought so but now we know of it". My excellent judgement in beauty procured me a most hospitable reception; the Captain forced me to take his bed, & he would sleep on his Recado.-

November 29 - December 4, 1833 - travelling between Mercedes and Monte Video
At Mercedes I asked two men why they didn't work: - one said the days were too long; the other that he was too poor. The number of horses & profusion of food is the destruction of all industry. - Moreover there are so many feast days; then again nothing can succeed without it is begun when the moon is on the increase; and from these two causes half the month must be lost.

December 28, 1833 - Port Desire
The plain, as is universally the case, is formed of sandy chalk, & gravel; from the softness of these materials it is worn & cut up by very many vallies. - There is not a tree, &, excepting the Guanaco, who stands on some hill top a watchful sentinel over his herd, scarcely an animal or a bird. - All is stillness & desolation. One reflects how many centuries it has thus been & and how many more it will thus remain. - Yet in this scene without one bright object, there is high pleasure, which I can neither explain or comprehend.

March 21, 1835 - crossing the Andes on the way between St Jago and Mendoza
When we reached the crest & looked backwards, a glorious view was presented. The atmosphere was so resplendidly clear, the sky an intense blue, the profound valleys, the wild broken forms, the heaps of ruins piled up during the lapse of ages, the bright colored rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of Snow, together produced a scene I never could have imagined. Neither plant or bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted the attention from the inanimate mass. - I felt glad I was by myself, it is like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in the full Orchestra a Chorus of the Messiah.

July 20, 1835 - Lima
Lord E. Clinton & a Frenchman were riding & were attacked by a party of Soldier-robbers, who plundered them so completely, that they returned naked, excepting their drawers. - The robbers were actuated by warm Patriotism; They waved the Peruvian banner & intermingled crys of "Viva la Patria"; "give me your jacket". "Libertad Libertad" with "Off with your trousers". -

October 9, 1835 - Galapagos Isds, observing giant tortoises
In the pathway many are travelling to the water & others returning, having drunk their fill. - The effect is very comical in seeing these huge creatures with outstretched neck so deliberately pacing onwards. - I think they march at the rate 360 yards in an hour; perhaps four miles in the 24. - When they arrive at the Spring, they bury their heads above the eyes in the muddy water and greedily suck in great mouthfulls, quite regardless of lookers on.

September 25, 1836 - reflections upon the voyage coming to an end
It must be borne in mind how large a proportion of the time during a long voyage is spent on the water, as compared to the days in the harbour. And what are the boasted glories of the illimitable ocean? A tedious waste, a desert of water as the Arabian calls it. No doubt there are some delightful scenes; a moonlight night, with the clear heavens, the dark glittering sea, the white sails filled by the soft air of the gently blowing trade wind, a dead calm, the heaving surface polished like a mirror, and all quite still excepting the occasional flapping of the sails.

Having read four volumes of John Fowles, I proceeded with both relief and caution to something entirely different, encouraged by a friend's recommendation - Kurt Vonnegut's "Slapstick". To use an airline turn of phrase, on initial approach it seemed like a completely different landscape; yet at close range it was remarkably similar to Fowles - the same autobiographical tone, the same troubled sadness and concern for humanity's lunacy. Only of course (fittingly for a book with the title Slapstick) the message is delivered in a frivolous and grotesque fashion:

The way Mother described Heaven, it sounded like a golf course in Hawaii, with manicured fairways and greens running down to a lukewarm ocean. I twitted her only lightly about wanting that sort of Paradise. "It sounds like a place where people would drink a lot of lemonade," I said. "I love lemonade," she replied.

There is a generous measure of self-negating mockery, both at oneself and at one's country - for example, when one of the characters is asked to comment on China's withdrawal from diplomatic ties with the U.S., she promptly and firmly replies, "What civilized country could be interested in a hell-hole like America?". The explanation provided by the Chinese themselves is even better: there is "no longer anything going on in the United States which was of any interest to the Chinese at all".

The image of Manhattan turned into the Skycraper National Park - deserted, overgrown, populated by only a very few survivors that have adapted the city's now useless infrastructure to their own daily needs - is strangely familiar to a modern viewer thanks to WALL-E; but it was pleasant to discover an earlier occurrence of the theme.

I usually try to finish my blog posts with a sentence or a paragraph that brings closure; it lulls me into narcissistic complacency, an illusion of observing my literary and intellectual strengths. And I will end today, uncharacteristically, with a Vonnegut quote and an invitation to anyone (including myself) who is inclined to take themselves with seriousness and admiration: "Why don't you go and take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut?".

The first volume ends with Fowles's success with his first published novel, "The collector"; and follows his most successful years commercially until his wife's death in 1990; yet we learn from the diaries that these are not necessarily equally successful in terms of peace and happiness. John and Elizabeth leave London for East England; and the tone of the journals shifts from that of an involved participant to that of an observer. This of course is not to say that one causes the other; but rather both the move and the shift are caused by Fowles's inability and unwillingness to fit into the increasingly materialistic and removed style of life - that he observes not only in London, but also in his self-imposed exile in Lyme Regis; as well as in the US in Los Angeles, Florida, and Boston.

4 January 1966, Boston
… we feel enveloped by the Roman generosity to favored guests. Once again the Roman qualities of America overwhelm one: everything based on power, on mean gold rather than the gold mean. America is in a way the inability to think of gold metaphorically.

18 January 1966
The sexlessness of American women - there is a sort of compact well-groomed hardness about them, a sexiness learned by recipe, an assertiveness that really asserts the opposite of what is intended: a queasy masculinity rather than an offered femininity. Of course men (and the whole society) must partly cause this; but it is distressing how few rebels there are. How so many women here assume their Americaneity. No quietness, no tenderness.

22 January 1966
We drove to Miami Beach, where a monstrous regiment of huge hotels stand whitely against the stale Carribean. To see the size and vulgarity of these establishments, the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Doral, is the only reason to go to the place: they are so vile, so nightmarish, so (alas) American, that they cannot be missed. In a way it is the city of the dead - all the people there are old, uninspired, industrial debris. In the lifts the women of fifty and sixty stand like cattle. One has to push them aside to get out. They drift round the lounges like somnambulists, from meal to meal, from room to room, bound, chained, as the black slaves were once chained in the slave ships, to a moronic routine in a moronic world.
In a way it is a European city, a monument to the dream of countless generations of unprivileged European peasants. They dreamt of an aristocratic city like Venice, perhaps; and they translated it, when they had the chance, into Miami.

5 November 1966 Lyme Regis
The fault of our society has been to emancipate women but to refuse to furnish (to train them for) their freedom. They are to be equal to us; but the only equality offered them is ours, the male definition (in social and career terms) of the concept. So the only ones who gain are the masculine type, the ones who can copy them. All that has happened to the true women is that they have been turned out, like so many cage birds, into a world where they cannot fend for themselves.

15 January 1967 London
Dinner with Twiggy, the latest idiocy in the fashion world. Impossible, really, to dislike her. Such innocence. Once can no more blame her than a bird for pecking fruit-buds.

31 October 1968 London, upon meeting Denys Sharrocks
Then he confessed that he has written a few commencing pages of a telly play recently, but 'as soon as I was back in my office on Monday, I had all the pressure of reality on me'. It's rather like some free man saying, I couldn't do it because I had to report to the Tower to be racked. I mean there is something medieval in his determination to be determined by what he hates.

1 November 1969 Boston
We toured around antique shops that day. New England has lost its charm for me. Not that the houses and architecture are any less pretty, but I hadn't noticed before the poverty of culture - in all this area, no animals. No cows, no horses, no sheep. No fields. Nobody walking. Nobody working their gardens. Just the quiet endless flow of cars. Everybody going somewhere but arriving nowhere. They seem to me like people in a dream, quite unaware of how narrow and imprisoned their way of life is. At one antique shop there was a herb garden: a sudden human touch. Thyme, chamomile, marigold, mint. And old woman made it.

19 November 1969 San Francisco
The pleasure of seeing - we arrived about five - office-workers streaming home on foot; the scaled down buildings, even the slow-moving traffic. It is very noticeable, the humanity of people's faces here. This is still a human, a concerned, an honorable city. One that knows it is in danger; eyed, after Los Angeles's blindness.

29 December 1970 Lyme Regis, after a friend's visit
From the moment he gets up he discussed ideas, opinions, definitions - no wonder they finally gave Socrates his glass of hemlock. One can stand just so much of this furiously intellectual, mental approach to life.

24 March 1983 Lyme Regis, upon reading Matin Amis
Nausea, in the Sartrean sense, seems far from dead; and a decided cold shoulder turned on any humanist view of life - tolerance, generosity, and classical observer role for the writer. There is a marked shift away from the common reader-writer assumption into a generally waspish personal hatred of all that is not similarly waspish. A literary century gone very sour.

24 March 1988 London, upon visiting the zoo
Its cruelty, for the mammals, is what strikes one: their various cage neuroses; the jerboas springing monotonously against the glass, even the endlessly circling, pointlessly darting fish. Hell haunts so many cages, once one starts translating them into human terms; that we should condemn so many species to look like this, half-live like this.

23 May 1988 London
To London. That long south-western approach, from Basingstoke on, confirms me in my hatred of the Great Wen; the endless suburbia, overcrowding, antheap of it. Only a sick race on a sick planet could not see the folly the human race has lead itself into, the city mania, the way need for money and economic success has perverted every decent value. In London you see it also, a kind of a fixed look, half-avaricious, half-determined, in the people going home from the office; of the trapped in a certain way of life.

26 July 1989 Lyme Regis
In form I might belong to humankind; in reality I seemed one of a ravenous self-destroying horde of rats. I am glad there is no god. If there were I cannot imagine that we rampant, myopic and insatiably self-centered creatures should be allowed to survive a single day more.

The stated purpose of The Economist newspaper is "to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress". I agree with that motto in principle; except I think it misguided to define victory in terms of "pressing forward" and "progress". But the fundamental opposition between intelligence and ignorance is clearly real.

A similar theme is found in John Fowles' first novel, "The Collector". It is a painful book to read; not because it is bad, but because its subject matter is so raw and the delivery and message are so powerful. It is essentially the same struggle - ignorance against intelligence, with intelligence remaining undefeated in spirit, but crushed in reality by the relentless onslaught of ignorance.

The character impersonating intelligence is a young woman; and it is through her that half of the book is told. She is innocent, idealistic; and yet that is no excuse to dismiss her opinions as some hippy fringe nonsense out of which one has to grow. She is the voice of the author (although that is of course a big oversimplification) and the voice of intelligence. She just happens to be a young female; but in fact she starts thinking what she is thinking because of her exposure to the ideas of an older artist, who is a male, with whom she has exchanges like this one:

He let me go up and made me sit on the divan and he put on some music and turned out the lights and the moon came through the window. It fell on my legs and lap through the skylight, a lovely slow silver moon. Sailing. And he sat down in the armchair on the other side of the room, in the shadows.
It was the music.
The Goldberg Variations.
There was one towards the very end that was very slow, very simple, very sad, but so beautiful beyond words or drawing or anything but music, beautiful there in the moonlight. Moon-music, so silvery, so far, so noble.
The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you can get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere, but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.
Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend that it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at that moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.

When she is faced with ignorance - impersonated by a gray young male who is suddenly rich because he won a lottery - she realizes how incomprehensible the ignorant (the Calibans) are to the intelligent, and vice versa:

If he does think about the pictures, he accepts everything I say. If I said Michelangelo's David was a frying-pan he'd say - "I see."
Such people. I must have stood next to them in the Tube, passed them in the street, of course I've overheard them and I know they existed. But never really believed they existed. So totally blind. It never seemed possible.

Why should we tolerate their beastly Calibanity? Why should every vital and creative and good person be martyred by the great universal stooge around?
In this situation I'm a representative.
A martyr. Imprisoned, unable to grow. At the mercy of this resentment, this hateful millstone envy of the Calibans of this world. Because they all hate us, they hate us for being different, for not being them, for their own not being like us. They persecute us, they crowd us out, they send us to Coventry, they sneer at us, they yawn at us, they blindfold themselves and stuff up their ears. They do anything to avoid having to take notice of us and respect us. They go crawling after the great ones among us when they're dead. They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.
I hate them.
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and the mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little. I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitations of the bourgeoisie.
I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying the dead at heart.

The most blood curdling part of The Collector is not the crushing of intelligence by ignorance. It is the thought that as much as we would like to see ourselves on the side of intelligence, there is a lot recognizable on the side of ignorance too. Worse than ignorance is only ignorance convinced of its intelligence and righteousness, a Caliban convinced he is a martyr. One must listen continuously to oneself to detect the double-dealings in our souls.

I listened for traffic, but there was none. I heard an owl. And an aeroplane.
If only people knew what they flew over.
We're all in aeroplanes.

Not every book is based on good science rather than anecdotes or conjecture. When it is scientific, it is rarely well written. When well written, it is not always provocative and novel. And the rarest of all gifts, few provocative academic books pass the test of who-the-fuck-cares-besides-your-tenure-committee.

Paul Hawken's Blessed unrest is unique in that it is all of the above - factual, precise, fresh, meaningful, and timely. The main argument is delivered with precision, elegance and poise. The greatest social movement that is the focus of the book is the one with no name and no unifying ideology. It is a bottom-up movement that includes a variety of people, causes, and geographies - social rights, working rights, social equality, transparency, preservation, sustainability. My favorite element of the argument is that Hawken convincingly shows that social movements of the past and the environmental movements of today are two sides of the same coin. The less privileged strata of society are usually the people who suffer the most from pollution, deforestation, erosion and other forms of environmental degradation. The same ideology of exploitation is applied to people and nature.

The answer can be summarized in one word - sustainability (a word that, according to Hawken, Exxon Mobil at some moment explicitly prohibited in its printed materials, while sponsoring "skeptics for hire" to deny climate change). Growth that is couched in terms of greater creativity not in terms of ever-increasing consumerism requiring more and more natural resources. Change that is bottom-up rather than top-down. Local solutions to global problems.

The movement is not a rigid structure with a centre of command - it is a distributed global ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of organizations. The book ends with a meticulously organized taxonomy of these organizations that takes about a hundred pages. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg itself is online - a dynamic community with its own discussions boards, groups, and other tools expected of a modern social media network site. It is the finest and the most prominent example of an ever-growing endeavor that helps us move "from a world created by privilege to a world created by community".

Last Friday I drove for 15 hours, travelling 870 miles and consuming approximately 32 gallons of gasoline. My truck (Ford Ranger with the 2.3 liter engine) is the most fuel efficient and the least polluting of all trucks currently sold in the US. It produces 279 grams of CO2 per mile travelled (which compares poorly to the cleanest car, the 2010 Toyota Prius, at 127 gm/mile, but favorably to the 476 gm/mile of the Nissan Titan or the 479 gm/mile of the the Porsche Cayenne). So my ride produced 242 kilograms of CO2. If I had the inclination to drive like that every day, I would have produced 88 metric tons of CO2 a year, four times the average of US per capita emissions, and forty times the average the global per capita emissions. In other words, even if I drove like that only once every forty days, that driving alone would produce enough CO2 to match the global per capita average.

The reality is even worse. The carbon impact of my drive includes the emissions that were needed to extract, refine, and transport the fuel as well as the emissions needed to extract, refine, and transport the raw materials for the manufacture the vehicle itself. I am also indirectly responsible for the pollution needed to sustain the infrastructure that makes driving possible - maintaining the roads, filling stations, and road police. I am responsible for the destruction of habitats needed to build the roads, noise and light pollution that they create, and the disruptions in the migration patterns of wildlife. These hidden costs are immense. They are not reflected in the MPG or CO2 emissions numbers. All these factors are connected and interdependent, sometimes linked together into positive feedback loops (where a growth in consumption in one area leads to a spiral of increased pollution and consumption in other areas).

If my contribution as an individual is so huge, what is it like to have a society of driving loving individuals? What sort of environmental impact can they produce? This is one of the questions that Jared Diamond attempts to answer in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book looks at the problem from a variety of disciplinary angles, and describes a broad range of societal settings - Norse Greenland, oil mining in New Guinea, Anasazi and Pueblo people, modern Los Angeles, and the vanished civilization of the Easter Island, to name just a few.

It is a great read that I am not going to summarize or evaluate here. It is also a very thought provoking read, and I am going to focus on the ideas that it triggered.

1. Many of our problems can be explained by the tragedy of the commons. When a resource is shared with various parties exploiting it, they tend to each attempt to extract as much as possible. As a result, resources that could be used in a sustainable manner with quota management are overexploited, depleted, and destroyed.

2. Reducing the environmental impact often necessitates a change of values that the cultures hold dear. For example, the US would have to give up the myth of the untamed Wild West, and the exhilarating freedom of driving on a whim (among other things) to reduce its footprint.

3. World population problem is not the only problem; it is the growing proportion of the population striving for and achieving First World lifestyles, thereby driving the global per capita impact up.

4. As a corollary to both 2 and 3, one of the worst values that we have that contributes to our growing impact is defining achievement as increased consumption.

5. Recycling is wonderful, but not even remotely as wonderful as non-consumption. Recycling only solves a tiny fraction of the carbon cycle - the consumer part, not the manufacturing part, which is many times more than the consumer part.

6. The current governmental pre-occupation with global warming and green house emissions - as well as endless debates whether global warming is happening distracts us from problems that are most certainly happening - soil erosion, depletion of fisheries, deforestation, increasing consumption, toxic waste and toxic manufacture transfer to the Third World, and so on.

7. Those still doubting the gravity of these problems should be reminded of the Pascal's wager. The risk of doubting them and being wrong is the risk of destroying the Earth; this is a chance no one should want to take.

There are many ways to learn about a new city or a country. You could look at its GDP data, or the exchange rate, or the atmospheric pressure and dew point, or any other point estimates and indicators. You could read a Lonely Planet guide about it. Or you could go spend a week there. If somebody asked you about it later and all you had was the GDP data, you could simply tell them what the number was. They would have the same information as you then. But you can't share your travels with them the same way. Your impressions are complex, multifaceted, irreducible to stories and pictures.

Complex phenomena are all around us - snowflakes, tornadoes, ant colonies, stock markets. Studying them requires a new approach. Converting them to point estimates - size of the flake, speed of the wind inside the tornado, number of ants, Dow Jones - doesn't give them justice. The simplifications are too crude, too much data is lost. One solution to that is to have multiple point estimates. We can map the snow flake configuration with 1 micron accuracy - and if that is not enough, even greater detail.

But it is never going to be enough. The map can never be the territory. The measurements are imprecise; initial imprecision translates into greater and greater errors as we model the reality over time using point estimates. Eventually we have to admit that some of these problems - even the seemingly simple ones - are transcomputational - we cannot know what the weather will be two weeks from now, what the stock market will do in a month, or what would be the in-thing at the Milan fashion show next year.

Stuart Kauffman tackles the issue in his new book, Reinventing the sacred. Kauffman is one of the most respected scholars in the study of complex systems. This is his fourth book, and it builds on the first three. His earliest book, Origins of order, published in 1993, is a rigorous academic account of order-for-free, bottom-up emergence of high level order from the actions of lower level agents - such as the water molecules forming a snowflake. It was followed by At home in the universe, a brilliant translation of the first book into language comprehensible to the non-academic audiences. In 2000, Kauffman published Investigations - although it would be more accurate to call it Musings or Ramblings. It reads like a notebook - powerful raw ideas in need of better argumentation and cleaner style.

Reinventing the sacred resembles all three. It has some hardcore theory that many will hard to follow (such as the discussion of quantum decoherence). It has some excellent explanations of what these concepts mean in layman terms. And it has oodles of speculation and conjecture.

But there is also a new element - one that has to do with religion, ethics, philosophy, and the emergence of a global society and culture. Emergent order is the quality of the universe. Life emerges naturally. Human consciousness emerges naturally. Culture, language, society, economies all follow similar paths - unpredictable, irreducible, forever changing, forever creating. There is no need to invent a creator God to explain it all. But there is something that can be revered - the endless creativity of the universe itself. Worshipping this creativity is the suggested foundation for a new global culture, global ethic, global religion.

It is a beautiful idea, but one that is not easy to argue. The argument annoys the hard scientists (and anyone who wants to defend reductionism), philosophers (and anyone who finds Kauffman's foray into epistemology amateurish), complexity scientists (why can't Kauffman talk about biology and leave the rest out), and last but not least, the believers in a Creator God.

The task is enormous, and it is also enormously important. Kauffman's book isn't flawless - but on a subject as daunting and broad as world ethics, no argument can be. The book suffers from occasional repetitiveness and uneven style. It oscillates between barely understandable discussions of quantum physics and bar-style down-to-earth real life examples delivered with excessive nonchalance and camaraderie. But most of the time the book stays right in the middle, and despite redundancies and style issues, it delivers a strong argument - an argument that is not only thought-provoking, but timely and important as well. I have thoroughly enjoyed it - how can you dislike a book where a scientist who understands biology, mathematics, and quantum physics devotes several pages to praising rhetoric?

But this is a reductionist narrative about the book. The book is a lot more complex than my ramblings about it. You should read it yourself, or at the very least, listen to Stuart Kauffman talk about it himself. You can also read some of his most recent thoughts on this NPR blog.