Philosophy

This is the best news that I have heard in ages, from the Boston Globe Online:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Pennsylvania yesterday ruled that intelligent design is “nothing less than the progeny of creationism” and should not be taught in public schools.

The ruling, handed down by a judge appointed by President Bush, is a major legal setback for proponents of intelligent design, which holds that living organisms are so complex they cannot be explained by evolution and must be the work of a higher power. Christian right leaders have argued that it should be taught in school systems across the country.

The ruling, the first legal test of intelligent design, comes after a six-week trial in which expert witnesses and parents on both sides of the dispute took the stand to argue their positions on a Dover, Pa., school board policy requiring science teachers to inform students of “gaps” in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and to share competing views, including intelligent design.

Intelligent design proponents, mindful of legal barriers against teaching creationism in public schools, have long argued that their theory passes constitutional muster because it is not based in religion. They use the term “intelligent designer,” rather than God, to describe an omniscient force behind life on Earth, and they draw on a pool of scientists to raise questions they say Darwin’s theory fails to answer.

But in a sweeping 139-page opinion that went far beyond the legality of the Dover policy, Judge John E. Jones III concluded that intelligent design is religious and that its inclusion in public school violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

The ruling rebuked prominent intelligent design theorists, saying their assertion that evolution cannot coexist with religious beliefs is ”utterly false.” Jones also harshly condemned the Dover school board members who backed it.

Those school officials, Jones charged, “time and again lie[d] to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose” behind promoting the theory of intelligent design, which he said was to promote religion.

Jones is a lifelong Republican who ran for Congress and narrowly lost more than a decade ago. He has described his mentor as Tom Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor who served as homeland security secretary. Bush appointed Jones to the bench in 2002.

Click here to read more…

Update 30th December

The actual judgement can be read by clicking here.

Many academics genuinely believe that promoting anxiety and fear about a problem is a form of valium public service, according to Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at Kent University, writing in The Times Higher Education Supplement last month.

The articles includes the comment:

The defence of the “good lie” or the “greater truth” is invoked when inflated stories are peddled to raise awareness of an issue. …

Appeals to a “greater truth” are prominent in debates about the environment. It is claimed that problems such as global warming are so important that a campaign of fear is justified. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, justified the distortion of evidence in the following terms: “Because we are not just scientists but human beings… as well… we need to capture the public imagination.” He added that “we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified statements and make little mention of any doubts that we have”. With such attitudes widely circulated, is it any wonder that Hurricane Katrina is widely perceived as punishment for humanity’s environmental sins? That advocacy research translates so well into the language of divine retribution indicates how the crusading spirit can destroy the integrity of academic enterprise.

Of course academics are entitled to adopt a partisan role. They also have a right to raise concerns about the problems that capture their imagination.

We are also normal human beings who can get carried away with the findings of our research. Academic passion and commitment make a significant contribution to society. But however noble the ideals that motivate it, the promotion of fear displaces the quest for the truth. Instead of clarifying issues it contributes to a dishonest polarisation of attitudes that invariably closes down discussion. Fear entrepreneurship on campuses, like elsewhere, serves only the interest of intolerance and prejudice.

I reckon the biggest lie from the global warming alarmists is that it is going to get drier as it gets warmer.

On 27th May last year ABC Radio’s World Today had a feature titled ‘Changing conditions means more efficient water use needed: expert’ in which Peter Cullen suggested that as a consequence of climate change there will be more droughts and that agriculture will need to re-adjust. A few months later Tim Flannery was on ABC TV’s 7.30 Report (23rd June 2004) telling us that Australia was going to be affected by climate change sooner and harder than anywhere else on the planet and that Perth may end up a ‘ghost metropolis’ from lack of rain.

That was before the drought broke. I had a look at dam levels in Perth this morning and they keep rising, click here.

Isn’t it true that as it gets warmer it is, on average, going to get wetter? That’s what Australia’s climatologists tell us (Australasian Science, June 2004). That’s why there is more snow falling on Greenland. Furthermore, a paper by Roderick and Farquhar in the International Journal of Climatology (Vol 24, Issue 9, 2004) indicates that contrary to expectations, measurements of pan evaporation show decreases over the last 30 years in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere and also across Australia.

There seems a great propensity to exaggerate water issues and suggest that there is everywhere a shortage.

Media headlines in Queensland’s south east over the last week have focused on Brisbane Lord Mayor’s anger at nearby Gold Coast and Redlands decisions to reduce water restrictions and allow watering of gardens from 4pm rather than sticking with a 7pm to 7am regime. Redlands have a near full dam and completely independent water supply, yet Brisbane’s Lord Mayor wants everyone to suffer the restrictions. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Brad Allenby, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University, suggests in an essay at Earthvision website that ideologically driven environmentalism is failing, that there is a need for a new environmentalism which he terms ‘phoenix environmentalism’. Allenby writes that:

“Phoenix environmentalism rejects Edenic teleologies and static utopianism and accepts complex adaptive systems as preferable models of our current reality. This is a difficult step, for it cuts strongly against powerful existing emotions. It means accepting that humans will continue to impact evolutionary biodiversity, while creating designed biodiversity in companies and laboratories; that the world’s ecosystems will change profoundly as a result of human activity; that more technology, not less, will characterize the world.”

Read the full essay:

As readers will recall from their training in the classics (or Harry Potter), the phoenix is a bird that burns in old age, to be reborn from its ashes. Regarding environmentalism, a recent poll sponsored by Duke University speaks to the burning and old age: only 10% of those polled identified the environment as one of their top concerns, compared to 34% listing the economy and jobs. This would not be remarkable if we were in a recession, but it is quite significant given that the economy has been growing for a couple of years. Moreover, 79% claimed they favored stronger environmental standards, but only 22% said that environmental issues have played a major role in their recent voting. Judging by the almost total lack of environmental discussion in the last presidential election, even that 22% number is a gross overstatement of voter interest.

These numbers are in a sense simply validation of a trend that has been apparent for at least ten years. Classic, ideological environmentalism, born of the 1960’s, is not just in trouble; as the Nietzschean “The Death of Environmentalism” notes, it is deceased as a viable mainstream public policy discourse. With notable exceptions, the environmental community has not adjusted to this reality, instead huddling in an ever shrinking self-selected band of true believers waiting for the rest of the world to recover its senses and return to the alter. This can be seen in the unchanging negativity of the rhetoric of most environmental organizations; in the tendency to cling to the Kyoto Treaty as if it were the only talisman capable of granting safe passage to the future; in continued efforts to halt rather than appropriately shape powerful technological waves such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Thus, it is not surprising that to some the poll data represented “a clear disconnect” (the quote is from William Reilly, former U.S. EPA head). But in reality it does not. For most Americans, environmental issues have always been only one good among many, and in general as the most obvious environmental problems have been addressed, they have switched their priorities to other good they also value, such as jobs. For classic environmentalists, on the other hand, the environment is a transcendent value, and thus cannot be balanced away in such a risk/benefit calculus. The disconnect, therefore, is an artifact, and an indicator, of an environmentalism whose age has passed.

But there is a phoenix at work here, and an important one. It has several characteristics. For one, it is more systemic than the environmentalism it grows from, and displaces; whether reified as “environmental justice” or “sustainable development,” it integrates social, cultural, and economic factors as well as just environmental ones. For another, it rejects environmentalism as a dominant discourse in favor of understanding, and creating tools and methods for introducing, environmental dimensions into other human activities, especially management and design of institutions, products, and services. It also tends towards pragmatism, taking the position that it is better to accomplish what can be done within the world as it is, rather than insisting on an Edenic world that can never be.

But perhaps most fundamentally, phoenix environmentalism rejects Edenic teleologies and static utopianism and accepts complex adaptive systems as preferable models of our current reality. This is a difficult step, for it cuts strongly against powerful existing emotions. It means accepting that humans will continue to impact evolutionary biodiversity, while creating designed biodiversity in companies and laboratories; that the world’s ecosystems will change profoundly as a result of human activity; that more technology, not less, will characterize the world. It means accepting accelerating change in all human systems, which, in an age that scientists have already entitled “”the Anthropocene,” or the Age of Man, includes most “natural” systems as well. Indeed, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, material flows of all kinds, the biosphere, oceanic and atmospheric systems — these are increasingly shaped by human design and human culture, and to deny this is simply to blink reality. In such a period of rapid technological, cultural, and economic evolution, ossified mental models based on unthinking attachment to past patterns will inevitably fail.

The solution is not to deny ethical responsibility for outcomes, or to retreat to irrelevancy, no matter how romantic. Rather, the challenge is to develop a phoenix environmentalism that enables us to ride turbulent waves of change while guiding them as best as possible to be ethical, rational, and responsible.

It reminds me of the piece by Steward Brand titled Environmental Heresis, click here.

………

Thanks to detribe for sending me the Earthvision link.

I have previously posted that the left think the right are evil and the right think the left are dumb, click here. In the same post I suggested that people who really believe as much should get out and about a bit more.

Well last night I was out at the Brisbane Institute hearing Dr David McKnight from the University of Technology in Sydney promoting his new book “Beyond Right and Left: New politics and the Culture Wars”. As the title suggests, the event was promoted as being about moving beyond the traditional concepts of left and right in politics.

McKnight outlined the two reasons for writing the book:

1. The fall of the Berlin Wall signified the end of an era and crystalised a broader crisis of ideas for the left. At the same time Prime Minister Howard has made mateship and egalitarianism his values undermining a 150 year Labor tradition. In summary the foundational ideas are crumbling for Labor. Furthermore, with the rise of environmentalism, Labor has not been able to “capture ideas on environmentalism and try and squeeze them into a left bottle … it won’t work”.

2. The rise of the new right and its radical agenda with an emphasis on markets and individualism is driving radical social change and “transforming values”. McKnight suggests that there is nothing ‘conservative’ about John Howard’s agenda and that if the left are to counter they could perhaps embrace conservatism and recognise they have more in common with groups like Family First and the churches. He suggests Labor seek to build alliances with such groups drawing on shared traditional values.

McKnight then went on to suggest that the new alliance would be a progressive one.

When it was time for questions I asked: why would you label a new approach based on conservative ideas ‘progressive’? I suggested that it might be more appropriate to label John Howard and his so-called radical agenda ‘progressive’?

McKnight responded with the comment that the good guys are always the progressives, while the bad guys are always the conservatives.

So McKnight hasn’t progressed beyond the left-right divide and the notion that the right are fundamentally evil? The more I get out and about, the more it seems that the left really are dumb.

Stewart Brand predicts that over the next ten years the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

I hope he is right!

Following is the rational in a piece titled ‘Environmental Heresies’ published byTechnologyReview.com:

Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps century to century.

The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces-romanticism and science-that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.

There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That’s fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed societies see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don’t fit the consensus story line.

Take population growth. For 50 years, the demographers in charge of human population projections for the United Nations released hard numbers that substantiated environmentalists’ greatest fears about indefinite exponential population increase. For a while, those projections proved fairly accurate. However, in the 1990s, the U.N. started taking a closer look at fertility patterns, and in 2002, it adopted a new theory that shocked many demographers: human population is leveling off rapidly, even precipitously, in developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to follow. Most environmentalists still haven’t got the word. Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off. Nations already in a birth dearth crisis include Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia -whose population is now in absolute decline and is expected to be 30 percent lower by 2050. On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birthrates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping. It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason. Any variation from the 2.1 rate compounds over time.

That’s great news for environmentalists (or it will be when finally noticed), but they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world’s women didn’t suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town.

Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they’re a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.

The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban squatters-which Robert Neuwirth’s book Shadow Cities already estimates at a billion-is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new dominant human habitat is humane and has a reduced footprint of overall environmental impact.

Along with rethinking cities, environmentalists will need to rethink biotechnology. One area of biotech with huge promise and some drawbacks is genetic engineering, so far violently rejected by the environmental movement. That rejection is, I think, a mistake. Why was water fluoridization rejected by the political right and “frankenfood” by the political left? The answer, I suspect, is that fluoridization came from government and genetically modified (GM) crops from corporations. If the origins had been reversed-as they could have been-the positions would be reversed, too.

Ignore the origin and look at the technology on its own terms. (This will be easier with the emergence of “open source” genetic engineering, which could work around restrictive corporate patents.) What is its net effect on the environment? GM crops are more efficient, giving higher yield on less land with less use of pesticides and herbicides. That’s why the Amish, the most technology-suspicious group in America (and the best farmers), have enthusiastically adopted GM crops.

There has yet to be a public debate among environmentalists about genetic engineering. Most of the scare stories that go around (Monarch caterpillars harmed by GM pollen!) have as much substance as urban legends about toxic rat urine on Coke can lids. Solid research is seldom reported widely, partly because no news is not news. A number of leading biologists in the U.S. are also leading environmentalists. I’ve asked them how worried they are about genetically engineered organisms. Their answer is “Not much,” because they know from their own work how robust wild ecologies are in defending against new genes, no matter how exotic. They don’t say so in public because they feel that entering the GM debate would strain relations with allies and would distract from their main focus, which is to research and defend biodiversity.

The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it. I would love to see what a cadre of hard-over environmental scientists could do with genetic engineering. Besides assuring the kind of transparency needed for intelligent regulation, they could direct a powerful new tool at some of the most vexed problems in the field.

For instance, invasive species. Most of the current mass extinctions of native species is caused by habitat loss, a problem whose cure is well known-identify the crucial habitats and preserve, protect, and restore them. The second greatest cause of extinctions is coming from invasive species, where no solution is in sight. Kudzu takes over the American South, brown tree snakes take over Guam (up to 5,000 a square kilometer), zebra mussels and mitten crabs take over the U.S. waterways, fire ants and fiendishly collaborative Argentine ants take over the ground, and not a thing can be done. Volunteers like me get off on yanking up invasive French broom and Cape ivy, but it’s just sand castles against a rising tide. I can’t wait for some engineered organism, probably microbial, that will target bad actors like zebra mussels and eat them, or interrupt their reproductive pathway, and then die out.

Now we come to the most profound environmental problem of all, the one that trumps everything: global climate change. Its effect on natural systems and on civilization will be a universal permanent disaster. It may be slow and relentless-higher temperature, rising oceans, more extreme weather getting progressively worse over a century. Or it may be “abrupt climate change”: an increase of fresh water in the north Atlantic shuts down the Gulf Stream within a decade, and Europe freezes while the rest of the world gets drier and windier. (I was involved in the 2003 Pentagon study on this matter, which spelled out how a climate change like the one 8,200 years ago could occur suddenly.)

Can climate change be slowed and catastrophe avoided? They can to the degree that humanity influences climate dynamics. The primary cause of global climate change is our burning of fossil fuels for energy.

So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration” (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

Nuclear certainly has problems-accidents, waste storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best avenue to a “hydrogen economy”, combining high energy and high heat in one place for optimal hydrogen generation.

The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem (see “A New Vision for Nuclear Waste”, December 2004). Many reactors now have fields of dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons. One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing. That’s the kind of idea that can go from “Impractical!” to “Necessary!” in a season, depending on world events.

The environmental movement has a quasi-religious aversion to nuclear energy. The few prominent environmentalists who have spoken out in its favor-Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, Friend of the Earth Hugh Montefiore-have been privately anathematized by other environmentalists. Public excoriation, however, would invite public debate, which so far has not been welcome.

Nuclear could go either way. It would take only one more Chernobyl-type event in Russia’s older reactors (all too possible, given the poor state of oversight there) to make the nuclear taboo permanent, to the great detriment of the world’s atmospheric health. Everything depends on getting new and better nuclear technology designed and built.

Years ago, environmentalists hated cars and wanted to ban them. Then physicist Amory Lovins came along, saw that the automobile was the perfect leverage point for large-scale energy conservation, and set about designing and promoting drastically more efficient cars. Gas-electric hybrid vehicles are now on the road, performing public good. The United States, Lovins says, can be the Saudi Arabia of nega-watts: Americans are so wasteful of energy that their conservation efforts can have an enormous effect. Single-handedly, Lovins converted the environmental movement from loathing of the auto industry to fruitful engagement with it.

Someone could do the same with nuclear power plants. Lovins refuses to. The field is open, and the need is great.

Within the environmental movement, scientists are the radical minority leading the way. They are already transforming the perspective on urbanization and population growth. But their radicalism and leadership will have to increase if humanity is to harness green biotech and step up to its responsibilities for the global climate. The romantics are right, after all: we are indivisible from the earth’s natural systems.

End.

The environment movement in Australia is behind the US in its approach to wild fires. But the coronial inquiry into the Canberra fires which restarted on the 17th of this month may change all of that.

I like Brand’s description of scientists. But so many of our celebrity scientists and science managers and science communicators fit his description of environmental romantics.

Just back from another day at the beach: this time Mooloolaba which is an hour and a bit north of Brisbane. The sky was a perfect blue and a terrific breeze chopped the tops off some of the waves.

There are no camels at Mooloolaba. But I see today a story at ABC Online about camels at Broome’s cable beach and how they will soon be fitted with ‘poo bags’.

I guess the bags can be emptied where the poo can be mulched – rather than washed out to sea? I don’t know about the ocean off the north west, but parts of Australia’s east coast are nutrient poor. I wonder what the decision to mandate ‘poo bags’ was based on?

I will be in Darwin later this week at a conference on ‘population’. In preparation I have been reading a paper by Ron Brunton titled ‘The End of the Overpopulation Crisis’. He quotes from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book ‘The population bomb’:

I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago … The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. AS we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scence a hellish aspect.

Brunton remarked “Clearly, Ehrlich felt some revulsion at the culturally unfamiliar use of personal and public space by a people who were physically different from himself.”

I reckon Ehrlich would also be intolerant of camel’s pooing on the beach.