Upending Settled Expectations

"Why the Onondaga Land Case may decide the fate of humanity"

In a Taino legend, there was a time when the Earth was very hot and the people were confined to two caves. They were kept fed by a brave man named Marocael who wandered out at night to hunt and gather. One night he tarried in returning to the caves and was overcome by the sun. When the people saw what had happened they closed the doors and it is said that he was changed into stone.

Long ago, in upstate New York near the present-day city of Syracuse, the retreat of glaciers over seismically active deep magma chambers carved Lake Onondaga, 4.6 miles long by 1 mile wide with an average depth of 35 feet. As people moved in to settle the lands in this now more favorable climate, the lake and its 8 major tributaries offered more than any might reasonably need. In addition to the fertile glacial drumlins and forest game, the lake held Atlantic salmon, sturgeon, brown trout, northern pike, large and small-mouth bass, walleye, carp, channel catfish, white perch, and more. By the late 19th century, fish from the lake were being harvested and served in restaurants across the state.

The still-active mudboils— dynamic ebb-and-flow features usually associated with Yellowstone Park— erupt and form cones, then return to silence after feeding their mineral-rich sediments to one side of the lake. Saline brine flows from deep underground to surface springs at other points, adding more minerals but the lake is dimictic, meaning the water completely changes from top to bottom and end to end four times each year as it discharges to Seneca River and ultimately to Lake Ontario.

When the people known as Gana’dagwëni:io’geh found and settled there, they were truly blessed. For many generations, they fought to defend this lake territory, and those battles were very costly to them. Then, a thousand years ago, the Great Peacemaker approached the Onondaga and the other warring tribes and got them to agree to create the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Confederacy, today among the oldest representative democracies still functioning.

The Six Nations owned and occupied by aboriginal rights and treaty most of New York State before the founding of the United States, according to a recent law review article. They were never conquered but in 1788 gave up some of their land claims in exchange for greater assurances they could keep those they held most sacred, including Lake Onondaga.

French explorers were first shown the salt springs in 1654. That brought British-American salt producers. When the newly created State of New York began taking land secured to the Haudenosaunee by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, a delegation traveled to Philadelphia in 1790 to entreat President Washington.

Washington pointed to the recently enacted Trade and Intercourse Act as “the security for the remainder of your lands” and promised:

that [t]he general Government will never consent to your being defrauded—But it will protect you in all your just rights.

***

If, however, you should have any just cause of complaint against [land speculators], and can make satisfactory proof thereof, the Federal Courts will be open to you for redress, as to all other persons.

After that, the story is all too familiar. Washington retired and died and took his promises with him. The Nation sued for their land but was thrown out of court.

Concerned about malaria, the white settlers rushing into Onondaga territory drained the swamps and wetlands at water’s edge. They erected the city of Syracuse, named for the Sicilian city where militaristic Sparta defeated philosophy-and-art-loving Athens in 413 BPE. The sewage of 450,000 people was dumped, largely untreated, into the lake for more than a century. Salt production gave way to soda ash, glass, chemicals, detergents and paper. Forest gave way to urban sprawl. From 1884 onward, about 20 tons of soda ash per day went directly into the lake. In 1920, the Solvay Process Company merged with four other chemical companies, forming Allied Chemical. In 1950 it began the production of chlorine by mercury extraction. Between 1946 and 1970, 165,000 pounds of mercury were discharged, sometimes 25 pounds per day. Federal and state governments banned fishing in 1970 and sued to stop the contamination, but the company just erected barrier lagoons, which leaked.

Other chemical manufacture contaminated lake sediments with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pesticides, creosotes, heavy metals (lead, cobalt, and mercury), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), chlorinated benzenes, and BTEX compounds (benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, xylene).

No fewer than 90 sewer outflows have been issued state permits to discharge into the lake and tributaries. The high levels of ammonia and phosphorus due to sewage have favored excessive algae growth. Swimming has been prohibited for the past 82 years. By the end of the 20th century, few fish could be readily found, and women of childbearing age, infants, and children under the age of 15 are advised against eating any.

This year the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights agreed to hear the land rights claim of the Onondaga Nation. When, in 2013, the US Supreme Court dismissed the Onondaga case, the Nation’s General Counsel, Joe Heath, called it

...just another example of the shameful history of broken treaties, land thefts, forced removal and cultural genocide that is the foundation of New York’s and the United States’ treatment of the Indigenous peoples and nations. Essentially, the courts have ruled that none of these horrible, historic harms matter under US law, because ‘it is not fair to raise these problems at this time.’

The courts had agreed with Heath on nearly all the facts and the violations of law. The State of New York had brazenly broken federal laws when it acquired and resold Indian lands. The only divergence between the lawyer and those sitting in judgment arose when it came time actually to do something about the injustice.

Unlike other land claims, such as that of the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot, or the Sioux demand for the Black Hills, the Onondaga did not seek to reclaim possession by dispossessing those living on lands that were stolen. They did not ask to take down Syracuse and reflood the swamps. The Nation asked only for a declaration that the territory was rightfully theirs—a redrawing of the borderlines between separate nations—and the right to resume responsible regulation within their borders, such as by levying taxes on alcohol and tobacco to raise funds to reclaim and restore Lake Onondaga and its tributaries.

The case is really about the lake. If environmental management of the watershed continues to be left to State and Federal agencies, the pattern of favoring industry über alles will continue, to the detriment of the tribe and all its relations.

Careful not to risk going too far, the Nation asked for a declaration of sovereign responsibilities, rather than possessory rights, and said the court could craft the order to prohibit dispossession of existing residents if it so chose.

The response from the United States ignored that nuance. The lower courts took judicial notice that “the subject land became populated and developed by non-Indians,” and that “there are non-Indians now living on the subject land,” but ruled that disturbance of “settled expectations” would be too great in returning ownership to the Onondaga.

In its petition for rehearing, the Nation argued that federal equity standards required that courts take into account the disruption and hardship experienced by the Indians as well as the whites—“being deprived of their traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering sites; losing access to important cultural, burial, and ceremonial sites; and having their sacred lands polluted and degraded.”

The rehearing was unsuccessful, as was the appeal to the US Supreme Court, but by virtue of federal refusals to adjudicate, the Onondaga gained jurisdiction to the international court. On April 14, 2014, the Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. That claim has now been accepted as within the Commission’s jurisdiction and a briefing schedule is progressing.

Climate activists like myself read something more ominous into the Supreme Court's rejection of the Onondaga claim. The federal courts never said the Haudenosaunee should not be allowed to protect their environment or have restitution for the illegal taking of land. They said the consequences of returning ownership and environmental management responsibility would disrupt “settled expectations.”

When you consider what is about to transpire within the lifetimes of those now living, there are many “settled expectations” about to be disrupted.

The “settled expectations” of the residents of Paradise California went up in smoke in 2018. The “settled expectations” of residents of Lismore Australia drowned under rooftop-high rain bombs twice within weeks in 2022. An estimated 15,000 lost their lives in the Paris Heat Wave of 2003. A similar number may have died of heat this year in India and Pakistan. During mid-January 2022, several countries of South America, including Argentina, certain parts of Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, experienced a record-shattering heatwave, with daily temperatures over 44 °C (111 °F).

And yet, their settled expectations—all of them—create an impediment—now a legally enshrined impediment—to taking the 11 percent prescription proposed by the thousands of scientists who wrote the most recent IPCC report. Those scientists recommended placing consumer culture on a glide path of annual reductions, moving into negative emissions territory by 2030, and continuing beyond zero until greenhouse gases were restored to something resembling pre-industrial concentrations (230 ppm CO2e) through the magic of carbon dioxide removal.

Theirs is the only survivable economic plan that contemplates a human future. It is severely disruptive to settled expectations but less than standing out in the sun waiting to be turned into stone.

References

Berkey, C., A. Page and L. Robertson, The Misuse of History in Dismissing Six Nations Confederacy Land Claims, 42 Am. Indian L. Rev. 291 (2018) https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/ailr/vol42/iss2/2

Cayuga Indian Nation v. Pataki, 413 F.3d 266 (2d Cir. 2005), cert. denied, 547 U.S. 1128 (2006) (reversing $248 million judgment on basis of City of Sherrill)

Oneida Indian Nation v. City of Oneida, 617 F.3d 114 (2d Cir. 2010), cert. denied, 565 U.S. 970 (2011)

Onondaga Nation v. New York, et al., 134 S. Ct. 419 (2013)

Onondaga Nation v. New York, Petition for Rehearing, 2012: 11.

Onondaga Nation v. New York, 500 F. App’x 87 (2d Cir. 2012), cert. denied, 134 S. Ct. 419 (2013)

Pané, Ramon, On the Antiquities of the Indians (1496)

Shinnecock Indian Nation v. New York, 628 F. App 54 (2d Cir. 2015), cert. denied, 136 S. Ct. 2512 (2016)

Stockbridge-Munsee Cmty. v. New York, 756 F.3d 163 (2d Cir. 2014), cert. denied, 135 S. Ct. 1492 (2015)

 

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

 ____________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Doubt Club, Social Media and Catastrophic Risk

"Have we run ourselves into an inescapable trap?"

We only have eight years before we are cast into a course that will be hard to claw back from. — Kim Stanley Robinson, Your Undivided Attention podcast, February 10, 2022

In 2007, when Tristan Harris was 22 and a Stanford undergrad, he founded a startup called Apture which made it easier for people to drill down on some subject without leaving the website they were on. His startup (and himself) were later acquired by Google but back when Apture was still struggling, Harris founded the Doubt Club. He gathered a group of startup founders together once a month to vet concerns about what they were inventing out of the earshot of funders. Doubt Club took its inspiration from physicist Richard Feynman, who said, “It is our capacity to doubt that will determine the future of civilization.” Harris left Google in December 2015 to focus less on web tools and more on doubt. He co-founded Time Well Spent, now called the Center for Humane Technology.

The Amazon is burning and could, by itself, tip Earth into a new hothouse stasis that would end not just the human experiment, but most terrestrial life for millions of years. That burning traces to the Facebook-engineered election that catapulted right-wing Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of Brazil and the false imprisonment of his predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula had an 87% approval rating but was jailed in Operation Car Wash on charges of embezzlement after he stayed at the beachfront home of a supporter. The 2018 election, won with a minority of votes, was only one of many that year to amplify misinformation by social media. Fortunately for Brazil, although too late for the Amazon rainforest, Lula’s false conviction has been expunged and he now leads in polls to unseat Bolsonaro in the 2022 election.

Are we already in World War III? Not between NATO and Russia but rather between weaponized social media and a habitable planet? If so, what can be done to restore peace? The Center for Humane Technology offers a three-step program:

1. Shifting Understanding
2. Changing Behavior
3. Building Community

Shifting understanding is about education — about how we got where we are, how serious it is, and why it has to change. An impossible future cannot happen. Continuing to imagine and plan as though we will inhabit such a world is delusional. Part of our understanding needs to include that we do not, and likely will never, understand everything, and most notably the consequences of our own acts. We have to rely instead on external, system wisdom and try as best we can to limit the damage we, as tiny parts of the larger system, do. Donella Meadows, one of the co-authors of the 1972 Club of Rome Report on Limits to Growth, said:

The world is a complex interconnected, finite, ecological, social, physiological economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple and infinite. Our persistent intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.

Abstraction allows extraction, which, by failing to account for the other benefits of a holistic system, leads to depletion and pollution.

Tristan Harris extends that conceptualization from seeing a forest as merely a bunch of trees — extractable two-by-four boards or heating pellets — to monetizing the measurable slices of time you spend hovering or scrolling with your finger — “one second of attention, two seconds of attention.” Our attention is being commodified into marketable blocks and sold. Outrage-generating content — a pedophile QAnon elite is running the world from the basement of a pizza parlor — outsells, stimulating engagement but producing negative societal fallout, including sedition, mayhem and mass murder. For cheap near-term benefits, the purchaser of ad-views externalizes massive social costs in the long-term. And in technological exponentiation the long term shrinks to months, weeks, days and then seconds.

Daniel Schmachtenberger has reasoned,

Every new type of tech that has emerged has created an arms race we haven’t been able to prevent. Major tragedy of the commons issues like climate change and overfishing and dead zones in the oceans and microplastics in the oceans and biodiversity loss we haven’t been able to solve. So rather than just think about this as like an overwhelming number of totally separate issues, [we should ask] the question of what are the patterns of human behavior as we increase our total technological capacity? Why are they increasing catastrophic risk and why are we not solving them well? Are there underlying patterns that we could think of — catastrophic risk generator functions — that if we were to identify those and work at that level we could solve all of the expressions or symptoms and if we don’t work at that level we might not be able to solve any of them?

Schmachtenberger gives some examples:

The first underlying driver is a structural perverse incentive built into macroeconomics — that the elephant dead is worth more than the elephant alive, and so is the rhino, and so is … so now you have a situation where that’s the nature of incentive, where you’re incentivizing an activity and then trying to bind it or keep it from happening. And the same would be true with overfishing as long as live fish are worth nothing and dead fish are worth more. When we have war and there’s more military manufacturing GDP goes up, and when there’s more addiction and people are buying to feed their addiction GDP goes up, and when they’re more sick people paying for health care costs GDP goes up. So it’s obviously a perverse kind of metric — that someone can fiscally advantage themselves, or a corporation can, in a way that either directly causes harm or indirectly externalizes harm.

Schmachtenberger goes on in his interview on Harris’s podcast to describe the attention harvesting and directing economy and how it was never Facebook’s or Google’s goal to destabilize elections or foster civil war, but those were unintended externalities of organizing the world’s information and making it freely available to everybody with the advertising model. The nature of the ad model optimizes by “appealing to people’s existing biases rather than correcting their bias, appealing to their tribal in-group identities rather than correcting them and appealing to limbic hijacks rather than helping people transcend them and as a result you end up actually breaking the social solidarity and epistemic capacity necessary for democracy.”

Have we run ourselves into an inescapable trap? Schmachtenberger does not think so.

Going to the level at which the problems interconnect, where that which everybody cares about is being factored, and where you’re not externalizing other problems, while it seems more complex, is actually possible. And possible is easier than impossible. It’s not just that there’s a lot of issues, right? There are a lot of issues and the issues are both more consequential at greater scope and moving faster than previous issues because of the nature of exponentiating technology. It’s not just that the problems are all interconnected, it’s also that they do have underlying drivers that have to be addressed otherwise a symptomatic-only approach doesn’t work.

Changing behavior comes from personal or collective reflection that goes deep enough to reach the metaprogram that drives our most urgent priorities. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the needed change because of how deeply embedded it can be. How many climate vegans keep pets, and cling to them even after being told they are far more destructive of the atmosphere than, say, cows, pigs or chickens? How much of the economy of nations is driven by social marketing and advertising that is, if not outright false, deceptive by glaring omission? Inspiration to change has to be strong or it will falter. Many tries may be required. Meadows, in Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, wrote,

Magical leverage points are not easily accessible. Even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it. Whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

In 2017, Daniel Wahl described the evolution of Meadows’ points of intervention in a post for Medium. Wahl, tracking Meadows, synthesized Guidelines for Appropriate Participation in Complex Systems as:

• Get the beat.
• Listen to the wisdom of the system.
• Expose your mental models to the open air.
• Stay humble. Stay a learner.
• Locate responsibility in the system.
• Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
• Pay attention to what is important, not to what is quantifiable.
• If something is ugly, say so.
• Go for the good of the whole.
• Expand time horizons.
• Expand thought horizons.
• Defy the disciplines.
• Expand the boundary of caring.
• Celebrate Complexity.
• Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

Wahl details each of these in his Medium post. What Meadows was exploring at the time she died (the intervention work was published posthumously in 2001 by the Whole Earth Review under the title ‘Dancing with Systems’) might be called hyperwicked solutioneering. She knew that whole systems defy compartmentalization and trying to solve connected, interlinked problems by taking them apart doesn’t work. Behavior is not a personal problem. To change human behavior in any lasting way one has to address quantum entanglement — nature versus nurture, soil biota and the gut microbiome, heritable prejudices, genes, memes and temes.

Building community is the best strategy both for arresting recidivism and having greater effect on the overall situation. “Community” is loosely defined, from “communities of interest” like virtual gamers, to serious put-your-life-on-the-line ecovillagers traversing the intersections of old and new in real time, with scars to show for it. Humans are tribal animals and this part has a certain kind of predestined inertia to it, in our tropism to survive, although it may also develop opposing communities as it pushes at boundaries for those who would rather not let go and don’t want to look farther down the road.

There is no simple prescription here. Anyone looking for that may be disappointed. The discussion itself is helpful but won’t pull our fat from the fire. The future racing at us like a wildfire glow is not the one marked by multi-thousand year glaciations, axial tilts, pole shifts and orbital variations while we circumnavigate our galactic center. It is one we created, made of wild swings and dead alleys. It is a volatile, unpredictable, unstable mess.

The work to be done is Earth system repair, as rapidly as we can manage that now. There is no app for that.

 _____________

 

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they are being given an unusual opportunity. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

 _______________________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Amplification Loops on Fault Lines

"We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology -- E.O. Wilson"

Last week I began untangling a string about how we as a species have evolved in the past two centuries into behaviors that run counter to our own survival. I described how modern public relations magicians had been able to capture the group attention with seductive language, and though behavioral psychology and cognitive science, to segment and manipulate how people get information or act upon it.

There are many people, some of them self-described neoluddites, who simply disconnect from the Matrix in an attempt to escape it. They may cancel their Facebook account. They may stop watching cable news or voting for either of the major parties. But they still gather information, even if it is from alternative, more palatable sources for them. They may think they have escaped the Matrix but the Matrix does not think it has lost them. They are still datapoints in the algorithms of pollsters, especially if they fall into he undecided category. They are now in the category of “those who are attempting to escape the Matrix.” Globalized technological civilization does not permit escape. It is like a cult, with many traps to prevent you from ever leaving. 

Even dedicated neoluddites may inadvertently use or consume manufactured terms like climate change instead of climate chaos, pre-owned cars instead of used cars, or Homeland Security, mother country, freedom fighters, and gluten-free “all-natural” (an oxymoron).

George Lakoff, author of The Elephant in the Room, likes the example of Mother Russia, drawing as it does upon timeless respect for Mother Earth (Mat Zemlya). It is one reason why today so many Russians support the “police action” in Ukraine. By thinking of your nation as your mother you associate it with your childhood experience. These are among the ways that social engineers, and Lakoff includes himself, manipulate culture into believing ideas that are totally fictitious — by honing in on our herd instinct that we have conserved over evolutionary time as a mechanism for group survival and the reason we cluster in towns and find solace in the safety of relationships with family and neighbors whom we trust.

Tristan Harris, whom some may recall from the recent Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, describes himself an “an American technology ethicist.” After studying Freud, Bernays, Luntz and public relations at Stanford, he worked as a metasystem designer at Google. Now he has a TED collective podcast, Your Undivided Attention, where he interviews insightful disrupters like Kate Raworth, Audrey Tang, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Yuval Noah Harari. In a recent podcast interview on Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification, he explained our predicament this way:

HARRIS: The important thing to establish here is that the mind can be persuaded. Everyone is persuadable. … You’re always using language and when you use language you’re casting spells that create a framework for seeing reality. And we just have to be aware of this, because increasingly there are actors that are better and better at knowing which language to use to get us to feel or believe one way or the other. And then you link this with the tech equation — technology is getting better and better at reinforcing certain language patterns over and over again. 

HAGENS: I just hired a coach to help me with various efforts with my organization and one thing she said off the bat was that the language I used to describe our situation is too negative. I say “the problem.” Instead I should say “the challenge” or “the opportunity.” And the facts are all the same but the language that I use tends to be too negative because I’m freaking terrified about what’s coming so naturally I have negative sounding words.

It is not necessary to this situation that there be some evil genius behind a curtain manipulating our thoughts, the sort of Ministry of Truth found in George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1948). We are doing it to ourselves, more or less innocently, because whenever we click a thumbs-up “like” for some friend’s post from a pro-Trump rally or for a photograph of an abortion rights demonstration, we are throwing raw meat to the bots in the basement who adjust our social media feeds thereafter to be pro-Trump or pro-abortion and erect a shell around us, moderating whose posts appear on our screen, what news headlines we see, how we are stimulated or soothed, even what possible Tinder dates we get to swipe. 

Naturally, we are alarmed when we hear this. Maybe we write our politicians, or complain at one of their stage-managed town meetings. And they pledge to haul Mark Zuckerberg before the court of public opinion and stage a mock trial to expose his ties to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Congressional pronouncements, or hearings, are mostly Kabuki theater, operating for drama, screenviews, clicks and swing voters, but then if you are Putin or Xi, it’s the best news you could hear, because there are plain fault lines within the populations of countries that threaten you. So then Russian and Chinese bot trolls elbow aside the Israeli and Saudi bot trolls to buy silent ads pushing for what makes both sides more angry. They turn up the temperature. Protest becomes sedition.

HARRIS: That’s what my colleague Renée DiResta calls amplifiganda because they’re just selecting what your own domestic voices in your country are saying — the most polarizing and divisive voices — and they’re just piling onto those things. So you can think of the news feed algorithm behind Facebook and Twitter and so on as a fault line finder… and then it just puts an amplification loop on that fault line. It’s like turning up the contrast in a photograph where all the lines suddenly get really visible.

Amplification is a trillion-dollar industry driven by advertising and subscriptions. It is minting new billionaires every week. Cyberwar defenders are not just at a disadvantage, they are hopelessly outgunned.

What do they do in that circumstance? They lash out, futilely but dangerously. The damage they do is more to themselves — and “free” societies — than to perceived or real enemies, and the more desperate they become, the speedier they hasten their own demise. 

Caitlen Johnstone writes: 

The Department of Homeland Security has secretly set up a “Disinformation Governance Board”, only informing the public about its plans for the institution after it had already been established.

The disinformation board, which critics have understandably been calling a “Ministry of Truth”, purportedly exists to fight disinformation coming out of Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border. 

***

“It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” Psaki said. “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”

The answer to the question of “who opposes that effort” is of course “anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears.” No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true, exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.

I mean, is anyone honestly more afraid of Russian disinformation than they are of their own government appointing itself the authority to decide what counts as disinformation?

***

We went from a massive narrative control campaign about a virus, which people accepted because they wanted to contain a deadly pandemic, straight into a massive narrative control campaign about Russia and Ukraine. Without skipping a beat. Like openly manipulating everyone’s understanding of world events is just what we do now. Now we’re seeing increasingly brazen censorship of political dissent about a fucking war that could easily end up getting us all killed in a nuclear holocaust, and a portion of the Biden administration’s whopping $33 billion Ukraine package is going toward funding “independent media” (read: war propaganda).

***

Nothing about the state of the world tells us that the people who run things are doing a good job. Nothing about our current situation suggests they should be given more control, rather than having control taken away from them and given to the people. We are going in exactly the wrong direction.

Harris tells Hagens that we live in an increasingly complex world where technology is redefining freedom of speech — a world where computers can flood the public marketplace with synthetic media of videos of things that didn’t happen — of photos of faked nerve gas attacks in Syria or bombings in Kharkiv. Where do privacy and free speech get protected there? Is sharing faked videos to millions of people giving them informed choice?

These are not yet answerable questions. Perhaps that is because the framing is wrong. We can’t solve hyperwicked problems with standard anti-wicked thinking.

We’ll continue our more advanced anti-wicked thinking next week, same time, same place. Hyper-jumps or not, take the red pill.

_____________________________

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

 _________________________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Edward Bernays’ Red Pill

"Instead of knowledge, universal access has given the common man a rubber stamp inked with advertising slogans."

 

The terms "red pill" and "blue pill" refer to a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in contented ignorance with the blue pill. The terms refer to a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix.

—Wikipedia

 

Writing this week for The Atlantic, a Johns Hopkins Russian scholar, Peter Pomerantsev, describes his recent visit to Ukraine where he interviewed a family near Kyiv, the Horbonoses, who had been compelled to share their cellar bomb shelter with five occupying Tatar and Siberian soldiers.

At first, the captain fervently repeated Kremlin propaganda: He and his compatriots were in Ukraine to rescue the Horbonoses, he said; the soldiers were fighting not Ukrainians but Americans; this wasn’t a war, but rather a “special operation.” Once it was over, they could all live happily under Putin’s rule, he said.

Irina would push back. She didn’t need rescuing, she would say. There were no American soldiers or bases in Lukashivka, or anywhere in Ukraine. She didn’t want to live under Putin. When the captain said that he had been told Ukrainians were barred from speaking Russian, she told him they could speak in any language they chose. (I spoke with the Horbonoses in Russian.)

Gradually, he was worn down, confronted not simply with Irina’s protestations but with the grim facts of the war. In the conflict’s early days, he was buoyant, believing conquest to be imminent. He would rush into the cellar, declaring, “Kyiv is surrounded! Chernihiv is about to fall!” But as the weeks went by, and neither Kyiv nor Chernihiv fell, his mood soured. At one point, Sergey told me, he had to show the captain where Kyiv was on a map, leaving the Russian surprised to learn that it was not anywhere nearby, as he had assumed, but nearly 100 miles away.

***

As the weeks progressed, the Horbonos family began to see that the Russian soldiers were beginning to understand how much unnecessary damage they had wrought.

The Horbonoses’ home, a house they had been building for 30 years, was completely destroyed; their library burned for two days before collapsing into rubble. When Irina couldn’t take it anymore, she would begin to cry and scream at the soldiers in the darkness of the cellar: “We had everything! What are you doing here?” The Russians would only sit in the dark, silent.

By the time the Russians left, a bond of sorts had built up between the family and the soldiers. “What are you doing here?” the Horbonoses would ask. “What’s the point of this war?” Despondently, the Russians would answer that they had come expecting not a fight but a celebration, “a victory march in Kyiv.” Now they were not wholly convinced by the Kremlin’s narrative. They apologized for all the destruction they had brought.

It would be so much better, one said, if they could someday visit as guests. Sergey was livid. “You’ve come here to kill me and destroy my home,” he said, “and we are meant to be friends? We can only be enemies.” The Russians again apologized, and soon all of them began to say that the war was senseless. They even began calling it a war.

If you think about the evolutionary timeline of any intelligent species, after it obtains the self-awareness to interrogate itself and reflect upon its strengths and failures, it can begin to build what might be called second order or “meta” tools to improve its qualities of intelligence, compassion, foresight, and so forth. These tools might include schooling its young, caring for its old, a spiritual practice like meditation or ritual observances, journaling, metaphysical dialog, or communing with other species or mind-altering plants. We don’t know how many of these activities our evolutionary cousin cetaceans or cephalopods may have engaged in. I like to imagine my Paleolithic ancestors passing the last Ice Age in earthen or subterranean habitats while expressing their deepest thoughts through images painted on walls, clay figurines, and eloquently spoken languages.

Our evolutionary mental augmentations were likely very gradual and are now deeply embedded in our genome and culture—in our likes and dislikes, our knee-jerk reactions, our loyalty to leaders and tribe.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, our tools and methods to become more self-aware are slower by orders of magnitude than our abilities to evolve and enhance our physical prowess as a species though instruments and technologies. Only recently have we probed our collective psyche enough to discover embedded programs like normalcy bias, confirmation bias and loss aversion—that gaining money in the stock market or a poker game doesn't doesn't feel as good as not losing money feels bad; or that saying nasty, insulting things about a member of a different tribe gives you an instant wave of gratification from the dopamine rushing to your brain.

A child learning magic tricks quickly discovers some of these hidden parts even before he or she has a name for them. Making a coin vanish from one’s closed hand entails misdirection, concealment and illusion, but it also requires a willingness from the audience to suspend disbelief and believe in magic—placing mind over reality.

In the late 19th century, Sigmund Freud proposed that personality was made up of three key elements—the id, the ego, and the superego—and that there is a reservoir of thoughts, memories, and emotions that lie just outside the awareness of the conscious mind. Freud called it the subconscious or superego.

"The father of public relations" Edward Bernays took that theory of mind and monetized it with the publication of two books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928). Bernays evangelized that by understanding the subconscious mind and how that influences the behavior of group, it would be possible to manipulate both individual and group without anyone even realizing it. To test his hypothesis, Bernays launched public relations campaigns convincing women to smoke ("Torches of Freedom") and to get USAnians to start their day with a hearty, cholesterol-rich breakfast centered around bacon and eggs. He quickly found himself in demand by the US intelligence community for crafting propaganda, which Bernays soon learned to call “psychological warfare” (because good nations don’t engage in propaganda). After WWI he found a calling in the business community, who were eager to hypnotize the subconscious group mind of consumers into buying their junk. Cheap commodities had created a problem because a surfeit of fossil energy and automation allowed them to be churned out far beyond actual demand. Bernays discovered that he could manufacture demand as rapidly as the growth of supply. By convincing people that, for instance, only disposable cups were sanitary, or that automobiles should always be the latest model to retain your social status or attract potential mates, Bernays and his acolytes birthed a throwaway culture of spendthrift consumerism. You can add to this any number of addictive consumables—alcohol and tobacco products, Big Pharma anti-depressants and mood-enhancers, sugary soft drinks and snacks for children—and the economy soars while public health craters.

In 1924 Bernays set up a vaudeville "pancake breakfast" for Calvin Coolidge to change his stuffy image to that of someone with a sense of humor. In the 1932 presidential election. Bernays advised Herbert Hoover to sow disunity within the opposition and to present an image of himself as an invincible strongman, a strategy used by office seekers ever since, leading to logjammed governance and bloated military budgets. In 1954, paid $100,000 per year by United Fruit Company, Bernays convinced the CIA to overthrow the Guatemalan democracy and become the scripted supplier of information following the coup. Cambridge Analytica, for all its sophisticated tools by which to alter election outcomes in the country of your choice, has not invented anything new.

In the Minority Rules (1927), Bernays wrote:

But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given [the common man] a rubber stamp, a rubber stamp inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of tabloids and the profundities of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamp is the twin of millions of others, so that when these millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. [...] The amazing readiness with which large masses accept this process is probably accounted for by the fact that no attempt is made to convince them that black is white. Instead, their preconceived hazy ideas that a certain gray is almost black or almost white are brought into sharper focus. Their prejudices, notions, and convictions are used as a starting point, with the result that they are drawn by a thread into passionate adherence to a given mental picture.

Bernays had latched onto the powerful concept of segmentation. Through polling, he could locate those who agreed with the proposition he was being paid to promulgate, those who disagreed, and those who were in the middle. He didn’t need to spend much time with those who agreed or disagreed. The former were in his creel and the latter were unlikely to be snared. His target was the mass in the middle—the undecided—and once identified, the shape of their reality could be custom fit.

Bernays ideas were foundational for pollsters and pundits like Frank Luntz, who crafted the art of election manipulation by confining discourse to one-minute soundbytes, talking points and subliminal, dog-whistle messaging. Luntz hit his stride with Newt Gingrich's fraudulent and divisive Contract with America and its do-nothing governance strategy, as well as knee-jerk support for pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian brutality; misdirecting the gaze away from Saudi Arabia; always voting for more military, NSA and CIA funding; and word crafting such as death tax instead of estate tax, and climate change instead of global warming. Bernays and Luntz were kids who had figured out how magic works. It is about clever deception, such that even if revealed it delights rather than antagonizes.

They developed a trade, and a whole new school of thought, of how to turn the creativity and free will of human beings into monetized, predictable commodities of human behavior. It is that engineered behavior that has moved from mindless bacon and egg breakfasts and Coca Cola to destroying climate, biodiversity, civilization and our common future. This is the school that built the fortunes of Facebook, Amazon, Google and TikTok. It is the foundation for Web 3.0, the metaverse, and whatever follows.

I will continue to explore this, and a possible responses, in the essays that follow.

____________________

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project "The Green Road." 

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. 

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

 ______________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Musk on Mars

"Don’t expect to see dome cities adorn the Red Planet like they did the covers of 1940s science fiction magazines."

I think Elon will find that space travel is easier than content moderation.

—Tyler Crowley

Just days before the enigmatic founder of PayPal, Tesla and Space X acquired control of Twitter for $44 billion, stock trading news wires lit up with the story of how Elon Musk had secured a $675 million funding round that valued his Boring Company at about $5.7 billion. The company plans to bore tunnels under many cities to alleviate traffic and to complete the TBC Loop, an all-electric, zero-emissions, high-speed underground public transportation system taking EVs long distances through low-pressure tubes via pods traveling up to 760 miles per hour. Las Vegas, a city known for its scorching heat and flash floods, also contracted with TBC for transportation tunnels along its famous casino strip and to the airport. Boring claims its latest tunnel machine is going to build about 600 miles of tunnels, or 30 times more tunnels worldwide than in the last 20 years combined, every year.

Prufrock is a next generation Tunnel Boring Machine designed to construct mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks instead of years, and at a fraction of the cost. The current iteration of Prufrock, called Prufrock-2, is designed to mine at up to 1 mile/week, meaning a tunnel the length of the Las Vegas strip (approximately 4 miles) can be completed in a month. Prufrock-3 is designed to be even faster, with the medium term goal of 1/10 human walking speed, or 7 miles/day. In the short term, if each Prufrock-2 mines at 1 mile/week, and TBC produces 1 new Prufrock machine per month, then TBC will be introducing 600 miles/year of capacity. As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.

— TBC Press Release

Musk is known to place his various enterprises into a matrix that interconnects and synergizes their seemingly different products and services. Tesla developed the battery technology that allowed Solar City to build large off-grid projects that formed their own solar microgrids and then became the grid. Space-X became the launch platform that enabled StarLink to leapfrog existing cabled internet and deliver broadband straight to consumers from space. Now The Boring Company could make possible, at least in Musk’s unfathomable imagination, his mission to Mars, the outer planets and their moons.

What is seldom discussed by Star Trek aficionados is a poorly kept secret known since at least the Apollo 11 mission, when NASA affixed a film badge to Neil Armstrong. Here is what that badge showed when developed back on Earth:

Those tracks and pinholes represent ionizing radiation—cosmic rays—blasting through “First Man” Armstrong’s body at near-light speeds. Some may have come from the original Big Bang. Others from a galaxy like our own, or from our own star, the Sun. The big black line diagonally running across the strip is labeled as a heavy nucleus, which is to say an alpha particle. Ordinary atoms of high atomic number, such as radium, thorium, uranium or americium, may have had their electrons stripped away in stellar collisions that created a very heavy, highly charged proton-neutron pair, or “heavy nuclei.” What is recorded on Armstrong’s badge are the ionization events produced by glancing collisions of the film substrate with the particle along the core of its track. Had the particle passed into Armstrong’s body, as similar particles undoubtedly did, the ion track would have left broken strands of RNA and DNA caught exposed during cell mitosis—the most actively cell dividing organ being bone marrow, the source of white blood cells—leading to any of hundreds of lethal diseases attributed to radiation mutagenesis, including all types of cancer. Armstrong was lucky. He logged a total of eight days and 14 hours in space (two of those hours walking on the moon), sustained no serious or lasting injury, and lived to the ripe old age of 82.

Musk knows that to get to Mars using existing rocket technology, astronaut colonists would need not 8 days but 9 months. According to NASA, if you wanted to make it a round-trip, it would take no less than 21 months as you will need to wait at least three months on Mars until Earth and Mars are in alignment to make the trip back home.

Because of what was observed on Armstrong’s film badge, NASA embarked on many years of experiments and calculations about what radiation may mean for space travel. One such study involved twins in the astronaut program, one of whom, Scott Kelly, spent 11 months on the International Space Station while his identical twin got jabbed and poked regularly in Houston. The medical results demonstrated several long-lasting changes, including lasting alterations in DNA and cognition. Scott also returned to Earth slightly younger than his twin.

Consistent with chronic exposure to the space radiation environment, signatures of persistent DNA damage responses were also detected, including mitochondrial and oxidative stress, inflammation, and telomeric and chromosomal aberrations, which together provide potential mechanistic insight into spaceflight-specific telomere elongation.

— NASA Twin study

 

The study showed that better countermeasures against the risks associated with radiation would be needed if any human being was going to make it to Mars and back. Musk might be thinking he can shorten flight time with on-orbit staging, booster acceleration and ballistic capture at the terminus of each flight, but that still will not avoid weeks of radiation exposure with each trip.  

The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) onboard the Curiosity Rover collected data during travel from Earth to Mars, followed by years of the same on the surface of Mars itself. The Martian Radiation Experiment (MARIE) on board the Mars Odyssey satellite is collecting similar data.

Absorbed radiation dose rate during the transfer between Earth and Mars range from 1.75 to 3.0 mSv/day (300 mrem). The standard for nuclear power plant exposures to the public is, by way of comparison, 2 mrem/hr but no more than 100 mrem in a calendar year. For workers the limit is no more than 5000 mrem in a calendar year, although it should be noted that nuclear workers on average die younger than in other occupations and suffer many radiation-related ailments. In any space travel, the annual non-occupational nuclear plant limit would be exceeded in the first 8 hours of flight and the occupational dose reached in the first 17 days. At 342-547 uSv/day (34-55 mrem/d) on the surface of Mars, colonists would exceed the average natural radiation they were annually exposed to on Earth every 5 or 6 days. Levels on Earth typically range from about 1.5 to 3.5 mSv/yr (150-350 mrem/y) unless you live near Fukushima, Chernobyl or Rocky Flats. Natural background exposure for everyone has approximately doubled since the atom was first split in 1942.

Natural background radiation is ubiquitous and, for most people, the main source of radiation exposure (UNSCEAR 2000). About a third of this is attributable to cosmic rays and terrestrial gamma radiation whereas the rest is due to inhalation (mainly indoor radon) and ingestion of radionuclides (UNSCEAR 2000). Whereas the effective dose from radon is delivered primarily to the respiratory system, terrestrial gamma and cosmic rays dominate doses to the red bone marrow (Kendall et al. 2009), the primary site of leukemia initiation.

—Spycher, et al (2015)

The usual go-to’s for shielding from radiation are water, concrete, lead, and carbon-steel. Weight considerations take those off the table for space flight. A search for kevlar-like shields is underway. Hydrogenated Boron Nitride Nanotubes (HBNNT)—microtubules that can be woven into composites, fabric, yarn, and film forms—could be integrated into the spacecraft structure as well as the astronauts’ spacesuits. Fabricating a heavy polymer on Mars with an army of construction robots might be possible, but apparently Musk has a different plan: The Boring Company.

While NASA has conjectured it might be possible to find lava tubes below the surface of Mars and radiation in the interior of those lava tubes would be 82% lower than on the surface, wouldn’t it just be cheaper to drill your own tubular habitats to a depth where you’d be 99% protected?

Don’t expect to see dome cities adorn the Red Planet like they did the covers of 1940s science fiction magazines. Any colonial cities of the 21st century, if they are to happen, will be deep underground.

Given the speed and ferocity of climate change on Earth, we might all be living in something like that here well before then, so it won’t be a big change of scenery for colonists to get used to. The man with his finger on the pulse of where disruptive markets will be going in the future is the same guy who just bought Twitter. Don’t ask me why.

References

Bloshenko, Alexandra D., Jasmin M. Robinson, Rafael A. Colon, and Luis A. Anchordoqui. "Health threat from cosmic radiation during a manned mission to Mars." arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.09604 (2020).

Demoury C, Marquant F, Ielsch G, Goujon S, Debayle C, Faure L, Coste A, Laurent O, Guillevic J, Laurier D, Hémon D and Clavel J (2016) Residential Exposure to Natural Background Radiation and Risk of Childhood Acute Leukemia in France, 1990–2009, Environmental Health Perspectives, 125:4, (714-720), Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017.

Luxton, Jared J., and Susan M. Bailey. "Twins, Telomeres, and Aging—in Space!." Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 147, no. 1S-2 (2021): 7S-14S.

Garrett-Bakelman, Francine E., Manjula Darshi, Stefan J. Green, Ruben C. Gur, Ling Lin, Brandon R. Macias, Miles J. McKenna et al. "The NASA Twins Study: A multidimensional analysis of a year-long human spaceflight." Science 364, no. 6436 (2019): eaau8650.

Scott, Ryan T., Kirill Grigorev, Graham Mackintosh, Samrawit G. Gebre, Christopher E. Mason, Martha E. Del Alto, and Sylvain V. Costes. "Advancing the integration of Biosciences data sharing to further enable space exploration." Cell Reports 33, no. 10 (2020): 108441.

Schmitz-Feuerhake, I., Dannheim, B., Heimers, A., Oberheitmann, B., Schröder, H. and Ziggel, H., 1997. Leukemia in the proximity of a German boiling-water nuclear reactor: evidence of population exposure by chromosome studies and environmental radioactivity. Environmental Health Perspectives 105 (suppl 6), pp.1499-1504.

Spycher, Ben D., Judith E. Lupatsch, Marcel Zwahlen, Martin Röösli, Felix Niggli, Michael A. Grotzer, Johannes Rischewski et al. "Background ionizing radiation and the risk of childhood cancer: a census-based nationwide cohort study." Environmental Health Perspectives 123, no. 6 (2015): 622-628.

 

---

The Green Road

 

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project "The Green Road." 

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. 

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

 

 

Tong Bingxue 仝冰雪 @tongbingxue

When quarantine meets storm in Shanghai today. Stay safe and stay alert everyone.

April 25th 2022

87 Retweets212 Likes

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app