The crows are in our neighbourhood tonight. As I went to take out the garbage just now I stopped to admire the clear sky and the bright gibbous moon, letting the night sounds catch me up. Above the slow whoosh of cars passing by, I heard the strange croaking calls sounding high and clear. Across the street, a pale-limbed tree had sprouted dark, dark leaves in its upper tier of branches. But these were no leaves.
They seem to roam about the city in a pattern I don't understand. A couple of times I have tried to track their movements through the neighbouring city of Waterloo, trying to determine whether there's a rhythm to their choice of roosting places. Around here they move in thick, dark flocks that seem to fill the sky with unholy noise, shifting and billowing as evening draws on and they slowly settle in for the night. They like the tall trees, the spruces especially.
Earlier today, in the early afternoon while the sun was bright and the air still, I took a walk up the paved trail that runs along Schneider Creek, going slow and listening. I was struck by how much crow-noise there was ahead of me, upstream- they don't usually visit our part of town in numbers. The second thing that struck me was the deafening silence in my immediate surroundings, and once I had clued in to that I stopped still, listening harder. A small breeze blew, two dry leaves rubbed together, and that was all. I started walking again, looked up, and saw the Cooper's Hawk roosting in a low branch not twenty yards in front of me.
I've written about this terror of the urban woodlands before. Its short, slate-grey wings and long tail are adapted for diving and banking between trees, which means that it can chase down its aerial prey if the element of surprise isn't enough. There could be several patrolling the wooded sidings of the downtown railway tracks, but in my mind there is only one. It was right out in the open this time, facing me and preening its speckled belly. I watched until my attempt to crouch down for a better view unnerved it, and it dropped off its branch and vanished into the trees. I tried to follow, but after a few minutes of turning up nothing but crows I returned to the trail.
Farther along, a guild was working the trunks and low branches at the edge of the treeline- a mixed flock of chickadees, downy woodpeckers, juncos, and cardinals. Their feeding music was sweet to the ear, but before long I heard the clump, scrape, clump, scrape of a human in winter boots approaching. The songbirds fell silent, vanishing one by one, but it was only as the walker passed me with a friendly nod that a cardinal in one of the topmost branches broke the quiet with an alarm call, then again, and again and again. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see the Cooper's Hawk banking away, back into the forest. The cunning bird had shaken me off, then lain in wait for a noisier human to use as cover for its attack on the guild. Now I watched it cross the creek, sure that this time I had lost it for good.
I tell this story partly out of a birder's sense of exultation, and partly as a way of illustrating the ways of crows. I did not think it necessary to mention, throughout this gripping episode, that the crows never let up their noise. Not for one second. As far as I can tell, crows live in a world entirely separate from other birds. They aren't preyed on by hawks and they don't prey on songbirds. They're among the most intelligent of avians, known to gather shiny objects for their pleasure and capable of recognizing individual human faces, and yet they seem to take no part in the subtle, ever-shifting web of intrigue between hawks and songbirds.
As I neared my home end of the creek, I passed through the raucous flock and crossed the footbridge into a residential neighbourhood. Did I mention that I was walking slowly? Very, very slowly, scanning every tree. This was well, for as I started up the street toward my building I saw the hawk a third time, swooping up to perch on a short wire slung between the street line and a house. Its back was to me this time, but it was playing no games. As I approached, it dropped off its perch again, startlingly low, and vanished around the house at the street corner. For the third time, no amount of careful footwork and steady scanning could reveal its hiding place. Eventually I turned homeward, silently radiant. Hunting is a game that only the privileged play for fun, and I consider it a profit to have lost to the master.
Meanwhile, the crows gather. Did I mention their incredible noise? Nature's game is one of balance, diversity, dynamic forces at play, and when you see such a crowd of beings, all the same, all doing the same thing, you know that something is up. These crows come to the city in such numbers because of us. Like dark shadows they follow our crowded movements, and in a very real sense they are hunting us. Feeding off of us. They are aware of our unawareness, and know that they can profit from it. No matter how I track their movements across the stars, I will never know the crows as well as they know me, as I come down from my apartment on a Sunday night to take out the garbage. Almost too easy, they seem to say, laughing their dark and knowing laugh. They'll return to the landfill when morning comes.
Sunday, 1 March 2015
Sunday, 22 February 2015
Deep Time, Thin Ice
Last week I went walking with a friend along the Grand River, which carries the lifeblood of our part of Southwestern Ontario. It was cold, so cold that my eyelashes froze. So did the carrots in my satchel that I'd been saving to eat later. The scarf over my face became a mask of ice as my very breath crystallized and clung to me.
Even the river, which usually remains open at the centre of the current, had closed over at one place where the water bends away from a steep slope of cedars. From a clifftop upstream we looked down on the vastness of snow, ice, and deep water, weeping into the north wind that drove us back before long into the shelter of the forest. Further on, we found a place to descend to the riverbank, where we watched a bald eagle rise out of the willows, cross over the icy water, and disappear into the cedars.
In a place like this, what you want to do is listen. The forest holds still, every waking creature listening with all its strength for sounds of food or of danger. Somewhere nearby, someone is starving. The trees seem to hold the whole weight of the world in their branches, snow like thought falling silently, not even a twig left unconsidered. Your own breath becomes the most important sound in the world.
Or maybe what you want to do is talk, to fend off the stillness with words and thoughts of your own, although you don't know where these came from that are now leaving your lips. Like snow they drifted in from some place outside you, from the north, perhaps, and like snow they will leave you silently, when the time is right. Now they eddy and whirl, words in the white forest sounding out faint and small, like the cries of geese: 'I am here, I am here, I am here.' After a while you fall silent again, drifting.
As far as I know, the Grand River has been here a long, long time. Longer than my people have lived in this land. Longer than it took us to come out of the great dark forests of northern Europe, to open the soil and slay the tree giants, to build the ships that would carry us here. Longer than it took for the Roman Empire before us to rise and fall in majesty and ruin. It is a deep, deep thing, this river.
Down by the bank we broke off chunks from the buckled slabs of ice that thrust upward where they met land. Throwing them, we broke through near the middle of the river, where the new ice was thin and wind-wrinkled. We wondered aloud how animals could survive this season of savagery, even as we gazed across to where a set of tiny footprints led down to the water's edge, over the ice where we could not hope to tread.
There are things I know, and there are things I do not know. I know that it is winter now and that spring will follow shortly, but I do not know exactly when. I know that all the powers in the world are now in a final sprint in their long race to the bottom of the age of oil, but I do not understand why. I know that over the last seven years a great many people and institutions have invested their financial hopes for the future in the promise of fracking and tar sands, enterprises which are now starving under the unbearably low price of crude. I know that it will not be long before the greatest empire the world has ever known, under which I have lived my entire life, makes a fateful move in eastern Ukraine, whether toward catastrophe or toward acceptance and retreat. But I do not know how many. I do not know how long.
One thing there is to know about winter is that it is a time of not knowing. You want to know what the future will hold, and the future says, 'Hold on.' You can't know which of your bird neighbours will live to see the sun return, or what the snowmelt will do to the river that now lies tamely under ice. You don't know whether your own small hopes will come true, or whether they were the right things to hope for in the first place. You don't, and you can't, but you know that you will soon know, and in a way this is more difficult than knowing nothing at all.
This is how you live, in winter. From day to day, silence to silence, listening and watching and resting, readying yourself for the time when you will know.
Even the river, which usually remains open at the centre of the current, had closed over at one place where the water bends away from a steep slope of cedars. From a clifftop upstream we looked down on the vastness of snow, ice, and deep water, weeping into the north wind that drove us back before long into the shelter of the forest. Further on, we found a place to descend to the riverbank, where we watched a bald eagle rise out of the willows, cross over the icy water, and disappear into the cedars.
In a place like this, what you want to do is listen. The forest holds still, every waking creature listening with all its strength for sounds of food or of danger. Somewhere nearby, someone is starving. The trees seem to hold the whole weight of the world in their branches, snow like thought falling silently, not even a twig left unconsidered. Your own breath becomes the most important sound in the world.
Or maybe what you want to do is talk, to fend off the stillness with words and thoughts of your own, although you don't know where these came from that are now leaving your lips. Like snow they drifted in from some place outside you, from the north, perhaps, and like snow they will leave you silently, when the time is right. Now they eddy and whirl, words in the white forest sounding out faint and small, like the cries of geese: 'I am here, I am here, I am here.' After a while you fall silent again, drifting.
As far as I know, the Grand River has been here a long, long time. Longer than my people have lived in this land. Longer than it took us to come out of the great dark forests of northern Europe, to open the soil and slay the tree giants, to build the ships that would carry us here. Longer than it took for the Roman Empire before us to rise and fall in majesty and ruin. It is a deep, deep thing, this river.
Down by the bank we broke off chunks from the buckled slabs of ice that thrust upward where they met land. Throwing them, we broke through near the middle of the river, where the new ice was thin and wind-wrinkled. We wondered aloud how animals could survive this season of savagery, even as we gazed across to where a set of tiny footprints led down to the water's edge, over the ice where we could not hope to tread.
There are things I know, and there are things I do not know. I know that it is winter now and that spring will follow shortly, but I do not know exactly when. I know that all the powers in the world are now in a final sprint in their long race to the bottom of the age of oil, but I do not understand why. I know that over the last seven years a great many people and institutions have invested their financial hopes for the future in the promise of fracking and tar sands, enterprises which are now starving under the unbearably low price of crude. I know that it will not be long before the greatest empire the world has ever known, under which I have lived my entire life, makes a fateful move in eastern Ukraine, whether toward catastrophe or toward acceptance and retreat. But I do not know how many. I do not know how long.
One thing there is to know about winter is that it is a time of not knowing. You want to know what the future will hold, and the future says, 'Hold on.' You can't know which of your bird neighbours will live to see the sun return, or what the snowmelt will do to the river that now lies tamely under ice. You don't know whether your own small hopes will come true, or whether they were the right things to hope for in the first place. You don't, and you can't, but you know that you will soon know, and in a way this is more difficult than knowing nothing at all.
This is how you live, in winter. From day to day, silence to silence, listening and watching and resting, readying yourself for the time when you will know.
Sunday, 25 January 2015
The Shape of Our Time
My readers may know that I volunteer with a grassroots organization called Transition KW. The story of our era's 'Transition', as it's called by the international Transition Network, is one
that isn’t widely known. Most people will tell you that our world is changing,
even that it’s changing faster than ever before, but few will be willing to say
exactly where that change is headed. The narratives of peak oil and climate
change provide clues as to what kind of story we’re living today and where the
present moment fits in the overall plot, but even then it can be hard to fit the
news flashes into a meaningful picture of the shape of our time.
When I watch four sparrows
dive low across Queen Street and hook upward into the small tree next to the
yoga studio, for example, I know by the shape of their flight that something
has spooked them. I crane my head for some sign of a hawk or other predator
casting its ripple of tension across the downtown landscape, but my skill as a
bird tracker isn’t sharp enough yet to know where or even whether a bird of
prey has staked its perch in my vicinity.
Similarly, the shape of the
land beneath my feet has a meaning I’m beginning to comprehend, but only
gradually. My walking route to a friend’s house traverses the
geological wonder that is Cedar Hill, a region of downtown Kitchener roughly
bounded by Queen, Courtland, Stirling, and Charles Streets. Somewhere in the
unfathomable depths of time, glaciers left behind this mountain of sandy soil
to tower over the swamp that became Victoria Park and Schneider Creek.
When I walk up the west face
of the hill toward my friend’s house, the words ‘over the mountain,
over the mountain’ echo in my head
to the rhythm of my footfalls. When I reach the summit and look down
from Cameron Heights on the high school football field and the distant
reaches of southeast Kitchener, I feel I’ve been granted the rare gift of
perspective. As I descend toward Charles Street, this busy city become my
reality once more; it environs me
and shapes what I see or don’t see, underfoot and overhead.
Both our immediate environment
and the history we live from day to day have a shape, a meaning, and a story.
They make sense in a way that we may not understand until we walk them,
or live them out, provided we’re paying attention as we go. Like any good
story, they contain multiple perspectives; Cedar Hill has a long history as a
low-income neighbourhood, with a strong sense of community identity that
escapes my immediate attention as I walk its streets. Likewise, as my
awareness of bird movements increases, so does my awe at the complexity
of their perpetually shifting game of hide and seek, life and death.
Meanwhile the news marches on.
We hear confusing, conflicting stories about extreme weather events and the
price of oil. We struggle to understand the violence that seems to spring
up in unexpected places. But these things too have an underlying shape, and
like a geologist or a tracker reading the landscape, we can read the shape of
our time if we look with the perspective that history gives us: our own history
as a civilization and the history of the Earth itself.
We know that industrialization
has depleted the most accessible deposits of fossil fuels
in the earth’s crust, and at the same time converted those fuels into
dangerous greenhouse gases. We know that the choices of our forebears
have forced us to choose between ever more costly and toxic fuel
sources, on the one hand, or a steep decrease in the amount of energy we use.
No market fluctuation or innovative drilling technology will save us
from this fact. And as a global political order built on oil extraction is
strained to its limits, the old fault lines of that order will show the
stresses in ways that will seem sudden and inexplicable if we haven’t been
paying attention to the underlying story.
As for the meaning of that story?
It’s not an easy question. I may as well ask, does Cedar Hill have a meaning?
What about the flight of birds? Why should the shape of our time need a
meaning, when it simply is, founded
in the unfathomable past and stretching into the unknowable future?
But I’m only human. I need
meaning. Just as ancient priests read meaning in the movements of birds,
just as ancient peoples read meaning in the mountains that shaped their worlds,
naming them and walking their steep paths slowly and reverently, I need to
make sense of what’s happening around me. I know I won’t find it by reading
internet forums, helpful as those may be. I’ll find it by paying attention,
walking slowly, and opening my awareness to the things and people that environ
me. These are the things that are meaningful. These are the things that have
shaped me, and will continue to do so as we descend from the peak together.
Saturday, 13 December 2014
An Experimental Kind of Magic
Having reflected further on this blog and its purpose, I'm satisfied with my decision not to continue posting weekly. But I'm not satisfied leaving certain things unsaid.
My idea up until now was to use blogging as a teaching tool to complement my work with kids and adults in the urban forests of my hometown. Certain regularly-occurring blogs have been transformational in my own understanding of nature and the magic thereof, so I know the value of having deep truths articulated in ways that are accessible and timely in terms of a student's growth.
My assessment of the blogging experience so far is that it's been excellent for my own growth as a student, in that it's kept me disciplined and productive, producing some 1200 words every seven days for an audience of my peers who can correct and guide the development of my thoughts. I think it's been a good move to consider myself an apprentice Wizard of Earth rather than a master, because after seven months of attempting to teach myself and a willing experimental audience of online readers, I've gained a greater appreciation for the planning, foresight, and experience that good teaching requires. Those are skills I just haven't developed enough yet to make a weekly blog worthwhile.
As the magnetic pull of writing has drawn me back toward the keyboard, however, I've been taking thought as to what this blog might mean going forward. I'd like to re-envision A Wizard of Earth as a wizard's laboratory (perhaps a crackpot wizard's laboratory), an experimental kitchen where ideas are allowed to bubble and stew and explode in colourful puffs of smoke. If I find success in the magical brews concocted here, I can bottle them and bring them to my teaching blog on the Forest School website, which doubles as a business platform and so receives a larger willing audience.
The 'willing' part is key, as the best kind of learning happens as a collaboration, be it between student and teacher, student and peer, or student and nature (that last one is a practice I'd like to develop further). My own studies cannot be conducted in isolation, and the internet is a useful tool for sharing one's research and receiving touches of guidance from those who take an interest in guiding it. I'm only just learning to use the blogosphere, but it's dawning on me that amid the vast superhighways of cyber-data transecting the wasteland of inanity that is the internet, there are fertile and steaming oases, fermenting in hidden pockets of the intellectual landscape, where real ideas are shaped and discussed and brought back to the living world as tools for living well.
That is the point, isn't it? We're all trying to live well with the time that is given to us, and for each person that means something different. But if there is to be anything we share, i.e. a physical world and life together within it, then we have to be willing to share our inward attitudes toward that which we share, and hope to share well. Hence another blog about nature...
I'll continue to wrestle with the problem of spending time with computers vs. spending time with humans and trees, no question about it. But recent conversations with humans have led me to reconsider the value of written exchanges, and to consider giving this experiment another shot, with perhaps a more experimental kind of attitude. Because I'm really interested in the idea of magic I've been brewing here, and although I may not be entirely sure of what I'm talking about yet, I think it's worth exploring.
My idea up until now was to use blogging as a teaching tool to complement my work with kids and adults in the urban forests of my hometown. Certain regularly-occurring blogs have been transformational in my own understanding of nature and the magic thereof, so I know the value of having deep truths articulated in ways that are accessible and timely in terms of a student's growth.
My assessment of the blogging experience so far is that it's been excellent for my own growth as a student, in that it's kept me disciplined and productive, producing some 1200 words every seven days for an audience of my peers who can correct and guide the development of my thoughts. I think it's been a good move to consider myself an apprentice Wizard of Earth rather than a master, because after seven months of attempting to teach myself and a willing experimental audience of online readers, I've gained a greater appreciation for the planning, foresight, and experience that good teaching requires. Those are skills I just haven't developed enough yet to make a weekly blog worthwhile.
As the magnetic pull of writing has drawn me back toward the keyboard, however, I've been taking thought as to what this blog might mean going forward. I'd like to re-envision A Wizard of Earth as a wizard's laboratory (perhaps a crackpot wizard's laboratory), an experimental kitchen where ideas are allowed to bubble and stew and explode in colourful puffs of smoke. If I find success in the magical brews concocted here, I can bottle them and bring them to my teaching blog on the Forest School website, which doubles as a business platform and so receives a larger willing audience.
The 'willing' part is key, as the best kind of learning happens as a collaboration, be it between student and teacher, student and peer, or student and nature (that last one is a practice I'd like to develop further). My own studies cannot be conducted in isolation, and the internet is a useful tool for sharing one's research and receiving touches of guidance from those who take an interest in guiding it. I'm only just learning to use the blogosphere, but it's dawning on me that amid the vast superhighways of cyber-data transecting the wasteland of inanity that is the internet, there are fertile and steaming oases, fermenting in hidden pockets of the intellectual landscape, where real ideas are shaped and discussed and brought back to the living world as tools for living well.
That is the point, isn't it? We're all trying to live well with the time that is given to us, and for each person that means something different. But if there is to be anything we share, i.e. a physical world and life together within it, then we have to be willing to share our inward attitudes toward that which we share, and hope to share well. Hence another blog about nature...
I'll continue to wrestle with the problem of spending time with computers vs. spending time with humans and trees, no question about it. But recent conversations with humans have led me to reconsider the value of written exchanges, and to consider giving this experiment another shot, with perhaps a more experimental kind of attitude. Because I'm really interested in the idea of magic I've been brewing here, and although I may not be entirely sure of what I'm talking about yet, I think it's worth exploring.
Tuesday, 18 November 2014
Looking Back, Moving On
When I began writing this blog I was brimming with ideas, so full I thought I would burst if I didn't find a way to set them down in readable form and share them. Over the last seven months I've quite enjoyed sitting down for a few hours each week to shape those ideas and really test myself to see if I knew what I was talking about. In some cases I did, in others it became clear that I needed to dig deeper. That was helpful.
It's also very satisfying to have written some 40, 000 words over thirty-two weeks and not have them locked in a desk drawer, which has been the fate of most of my life's writing up until now. Thank you, internet. Thank you, even more, to those of you have stuck with me this far. Being able to share words with you means so much to me.
Now, however, I find I'm replenishing my store of ideas more slowly than I'm spilling them onto the internet. More specifically, I'm spending more time in front of the computer than I am wandering outdoors and soaking in new ideas and experiences. Not only does that make me tired, unhealthy, and generally less happy, it also makes me a hypocrite. That is not how I would like to be, so... I am going to put an indefinite hold on posting weekly to this blog. I want to continue to write, but I want to write more poetry, stories, and articles shared in tangible forms. Maybe even a sermon or two.
The content of this blog will remain live, and I may return to it at some point, or decide to post occasionally. If you want to subscribe in case of occasional posts here, the form's on the right sidebar. If you want to leave a message for me, post a comment at the bottom of the page and I'll receive notification. A 'not for posting' comment is fine too, I can read your message and not publish it on the blog if that's your wish.
I do intend to continue with the KW Forest School blog, and that may well become my primary outlet for ideas about nature and the magic thereof. (Still working on getting a 'subscribe' option on that page.) Things are afoot in the non-virtual world, and it looks like Forest School is going to be good, satisfying work. So check us out, like us on the face book, check back now and then, and maybe we'll change the world one of these days. Starting tomorrow.
It's also very satisfying to have written some 40, 000 words over thirty-two weeks and not have them locked in a desk drawer, which has been the fate of most of my life's writing up until now. Thank you, internet. Thank you, even more, to those of you have stuck with me this far. Being able to share words with you means so much to me.
Now, however, I find I'm replenishing my store of ideas more slowly than I'm spilling them onto the internet. More specifically, I'm spending more time in front of the computer than I am wandering outdoors and soaking in new ideas and experiences. Not only does that make me tired, unhealthy, and generally less happy, it also makes me a hypocrite. That is not how I would like to be, so... I am going to put an indefinite hold on posting weekly to this blog. I want to continue to write, but I want to write more poetry, stories, and articles shared in tangible forms. Maybe even a sermon or two.
The content of this blog will remain live, and I may return to it at some point, or decide to post occasionally. If you want to subscribe in case of occasional posts here, the form's on the right sidebar. If you want to leave a message for me, post a comment at the bottom of the page and I'll receive notification. A 'not for posting' comment is fine too, I can read your message and not publish it on the blog if that's your wish.
I do intend to continue with the KW Forest School blog, and that may well become my primary outlet for ideas about nature and the magic thereof. (Still working on getting a 'subscribe' option on that page.) Things are afoot in the non-virtual world, and it looks like Forest School is going to be good, satisfying work. So check us out, like us on the face book, check back now and then, and maybe we'll change the world one of these days. Starting tomorrow.
Tuesday, 11 November 2014
In Remembrance of the Disappeared
Here in Canada the eleventh day of the eleventh month is set aside to honour those who have given their lives in war, especially in the World Wars. It was ninety-six years ago today that the armistice was signed which ended the War to End All Wars. At the eleventh hour on this day, it's customary to stop what we're doing, at work, in school, wherever, and observe a minute's silence.
Of course, it was only twenty years after the signing of that armistice that the War to End All Wars was renamed the First World War, as the fires of the Second broke out across Europe. The Paris 1919 talks that had redrawn world maps and forced crippling reparation payments on Germany ensured peace, but not justice, and thus set the stage for a second round of conflict between the same chief combatants beginning in 1939.
Since the end of the Second World War there has been peace between the major world powers, despite the long shadow of nuclear standoff between the US and the USSR. The last seventy years have seen amazing progress worldwide, both in terms of average life expectancy and average annual income. In the words of Professor Hans Rosling, "aid, trade, green technology and peace" seem poised to continue that trend well into the future. My only objection to Professor Rosling, apart from his aversion to truthful rendering of statistics, discussed in last week's post, is that what counts as peace depends on whom you're asking.
On this day of remembrance I'm thinking of a journey I made three years ago to the southern United States. I had boarded a bus one Thursday morning after French class and travelled through the night with a group of several dozen others, arriving Friday around noon in the deep south. Our destination was Columbus, Georgia, where thousands of people from across the United States and Latin America gather each November at the gates of Fort Benning, the United States Army base in town.
For three days of the year, the open street leading onto the grounds of the base is blocked by three chain linked fences topped with barbed wire and monitored by a watchtower and low-flying helicopters. That's because they know the peaceful demonstrators are coming.
Fort Benning is home to the School of the Americas (SOA), also called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The name change came in 2001 after eleven years of pressure from organizations like SOA Watch, which hosts the yearly demonstration, and mounting allegations that the SOA was training Latin American military personnel on American soil in the arts of torture, terror, and assassination. In fact, since its beginning in 1946, the institution has trained 64 000 soldiers from Latin American nations to return to their home countries and target educators, union organizers, and others who stand up for the rights of the poor. In those seventy years, hundreds of thousands have been raped, tortured, disappeared, killed, or forced to flee their homes and homelands.
It's well-known that the US government funded guerrilla groups known as 'contras' to fight against the elected Nicaraguan government during the 1980's, and that the CIA has been instrumental in various coups and attempted coups in Latin America, but what's not generally well-known is how institutionalized the violence is. I met a very kind and gentle social worker not long ago, a young father dedicated to his work assisting mentally ill youth, who had served in the US army at Fort Benning and knew of the SOA only as 'the foreign unit'. When I tell people about my friends in the States who work for peace and social justice, it's hard to convey what exactly it is they're working against without remembering the stories of those who journeyed thousands of miles to speak on a temporary stage before the gates of Fort Benning about murdered parents or other relatives.
Why are these people being killed? The short answer is that they seem to regard the current state of world affairs, enthusiastically illustrated by Hans Rosling's dynamic graph (stop video at 4:15) as intolerable. Remember, the ratio of average income in the poorest of nations compared to average US income, according to Rosling's 2010 statistics, was 3:400. When I travelled to the SOA in 2011, this sort of disparity was on display in installations like the one pictured below.
The signs on the buckets indicate that "Farmworkers make $5 for harvesting this amount" and "Supermarkets charge $1000". The crop in question is tomatoes, a staple of the North American diet. What's interesting is that the ratio of workers' to supermarkets' earnings on display here (5:1000 or 2:400) is reminiscent of the income ratio between rich and poor nations cited above (3:400). Similar number sets, very different displays, with very different emotional resonances.
For the people who pick the tomatoes we eat, the peace that followed the Great Wars and the rise of the United States to superpower status means something very different than it does here in North America. For those who try to organize their fellow labourers to demand better rights and wages, it means something different again. It's just not in the interest of the free market to allow people like that to speak out and get away with it. On the Sunday morning of the gathering at Fort Benning, a funeral procession circles the area before the gates, with each participant carrying a white cross inscribed with the name of someone killed by an SOA graduate.
Of course, it was only twenty years after the signing of that armistice that the War to End All Wars was renamed the First World War, as the fires of the Second broke out across Europe. The Paris 1919 talks that had redrawn world maps and forced crippling reparation payments on Germany ensured peace, but not justice, and thus set the stage for a second round of conflict between the same chief combatants beginning in 1939.
Since the end of the Second World War there has been peace between the major world powers, despite the long shadow of nuclear standoff between the US and the USSR. The last seventy years have seen amazing progress worldwide, both in terms of average life expectancy and average annual income. In the words of Professor Hans Rosling, "aid, trade, green technology and peace" seem poised to continue that trend well into the future. My only objection to Professor Rosling, apart from his aversion to truthful rendering of statistics, discussed in last week's post, is that what counts as peace depends on whom you're asking.
On this day of remembrance I'm thinking of a journey I made three years ago to the southern United States. I had boarded a bus one Thursday morning after French class and travelled through the night with a group of several dozen others, arriving Friday around noon in the deep south. Our destination was Columbus, Georgia, where thousands of people from across the United States and Latin America gather each November at the gates of Fort Benning, the United States Army base in town.
For three days of the year, the open street leading onto the grounds of the base is blocked by three chain linked fences topped with barbed wire and monitored by a watchtower and low-flying helicopters. That's because they know the peaceful demonstrators are coming.
Fort Benning is home to the School of the Americas (SOA), also called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The name change came in 2001 after eleven years of pressure from organizations like SOA Watch, which hosts the yearly demonstration, and mounting allegations that the SOA was training Latin American military personnel on American soil in the arts of torture, terror, and assassination. In fact, since its beginning in 1946, the institution has trained 64 000 soldiers from Latin American nations to return to their home countries and target educators, union organizers, and others who stand up for the rights of the poor. In those seventy years, hundreds of thousands have been raped, tortured, disappeared, killed, or forced to flee their homes and homelands.
It's well-known that the US government funded guerrilla groups known as 'contras' to fight against the elected Nicaraguan government during the 1980's, and that the CIA has been instrumental in various coups and attempted coups in Latin America, but what's not generally well-known is how institutionalized the violence is. I met a very kind and gentle social worker not long ago, a young father dedicated to his work assisting mentally ill youth, who had served in the US army at Fort Benning and knew of the SOA only as 'the foreign unit'. When I tell people about my friends in the States who work for peace and social justice, it's hard to convey what exactly it is they're working against without remembering the stories of those who journeyed thousands of miles to speak on a temporary stage before the gates of Fort Benning about murdered parents or other relatives.
Why are these people being killed? The short answer is that they seem to regard the current state of world affairs, enthusiastically illustrated by Hans Rosling's dynamic graph (stop video at 4:15) as intolerable. Remember, the ratio of average income in the poorest of nations compared to average US income, according to Rosling's 2010 statistics, was 3:400. When I travelled to the SOA in 2011, this sort of disparity was on display in installations like the one pictured below.
The signs on the buckets indicate that "Farmworkers make $5 for harvesting this amount" and "Supermarkets charge $1000". The crop in question is tomatoes, a staple of the North American diet. What's interesting is that the ratio of workers' to supermarkets' earnings on display here (5:1000 or 2:400) is reminiscent of the income ratio between rich and poor nations cited above (3:400). Similar number sets, very different displays, with very different emotional resonances.
For the people who pick the tomatoes we eat, the peace that followed the Great Wars and the rise of the United States to superpower status means something very different than it does here in North America. For those who try to organize their fellow labourers to demand better rights and wages, it means something different again. It's just not in the interest of the free market to allow people like that to speak out and get away with it. On the Sunday morning of the gathering at Fort Benning, a funeral procession circles the area before the gates, with each participant carrying a white cross inscribed with the name of someone killed by an SOA graduate.
As I look over these pictures now, remembering the power of that ceremony three years ago as well as my American friends preparing to bear witness in the same way less than two weeks from today, I'm reminded of the poem so often read on Remembrance Day here in Canada: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row." The crosses raised up at the gates of Fort Benning have no official recognition from the powers of the world, but the names they bear are as important as the names of those who died in the clash of the powers during the World Wars. Their voices do not fade away, but remain with us, reminders that without justice there is no peace.
Tuesday, 4 November 2014
Defence Against the Dark Arts: Statistics
I want to carry on the discussion of two different ways of wizarding begun in last week's post by looking at an example of what I'd call dark magic. Just as Saruman and Gandalf took different approaches to power in The Lord of the Rings, there are different ways of using magic as I've described it here- simply put, the ability to perceive and manipulate meaning.
By that definition, of course, everyone's a little bit magical. The fact that you can turn a series of black markings on a screen into living ideas that grow and move around inside of you is an indication of that trait, and a marvelous thing to consider. The fact that certain objects in your home are arranged so as to bring to life certain memories or feelings is an indication that you already have a sense that meaning is a dimension of the world as much as mass, temperature, and colour are. The fact that there have been systems of knowledge and practice developed to tap into this dimension, in order to, for example, train the will toward greater clarity of thought and action, or to activate the natural healing processes of human bodies, indicates that other peoples in other times and places have been more attuned to this dimension than we are here and now.
I am not learned in such arts. But in my own small way I am trying to understand the meanings of things, and to get behind the fog that surrounds certain aspects of our lives. The example I want to show you today involves the youtube, so find a pair of headphones or a quiet nook and check out this five minute video.
By that definition, of course, everyone's a little bit magical. The fact that you can turn a series of black markings on a screen into living ideas that grow and move around inside of you is an indication of that trait, and a marvelous thing to consider. The fact that certain objects in your home are arranged so as to bring to life certain memories or feelings is an indication that you already have a sense that meaning is a dimension of the world as much as mass, temperature, and colour are. The fact that there have been systems of knowledge and practice developed to tap into this dimension, in order to, for example, train the will toward greater clarity of thought and action, or to activate the natural healing processes of human bodies, indicates that other peoples in other times and places have been more attuned to this dimension than we are here and now.
I am not learned in such arts. But in my own small way I am trying to understand the meanings of things, and to get behind the fog that surrounds certain aspects of our lives. The example I want to show you today involves the youtube, so find a pair of headphones or a quiet nook and check out this five minute video.
Did you watch it? How about that? Pretty neat, huh? Now let's talk about what just happened.
To begin with, we are invited to follow an elderly but spry wizard into his workshop as he tells us about his work as a teacher and his familiarity with data. He is genial but definitely learned beyond the average mortal. Next he shows us his team, all skilled in the technical arts, and invites us to join him on a venture which even he has never tried before: 'animating the data in real space'. Having uttered these words, whose meanings are hidden from the untutored, he proceeds to dazzle us with his art.
Data is one thing, presentation is another. You'd think that 120 000 data points would speak for themselves, but that's not so. As I've said in previous writings here, how one chooses to narrate world history says a lot more about the teller than about how we've got to where we are. Hans Rosling's perspective is clear: we're all becoming healthier and richer as time progresses, and we live in "a converging world" in which "the historical gap between the West and the rest is now closing".
But take another look at that graph- pause the video if you wish, and get out a tape measure or ruler. I'd highly recommend actually trying this, because it illustrates what I'm talking about far better than my description can. When I open the video in full-screen on my computer, my tape measure indicates that the left half of the graph, up until the $4000 mark, measures 3.4 inches. 3.4 inches to the right of this mark should land us at $8000 on the x-axis, but instead I find myself at well over $40 000. It's clear that the right half of the graph is working on a different scale than the left half; indeed, all three portions of the graph are operating at different inches-to-income ratios, or else the scale accelerates continuously at an unspecified rate. This would be fine if it were acknowledged and explained, but it isn't.
Now pause the video around 4:15 and pick a dot in the upper right corner of the graph, I don't know, say, the USA- it's the big yellow dot just past the $40 000 mark. If I use my tape measure to extend the x-axis along a uniform scale of 3.4 inches for every $4000, the $40 000 mark falls at 34 inches (2' 10") from the y-axis, putting the US nearly three screens away from Congo, the poorest nation on the graph. (It's not clear whether the 'Congo' dot represents the Republic of Congo or the Democratic Republic of Congo, which are separate but neighbouring nations, but from the size of the dot I'd guess it's meant to indicate the DRC, which is about 17 times more populous).
The tape measure exercise is a way of more accurately visualizing the data suggested by this graph. You can corroborate by comparing the 1810 stats (pause video at 1:15) and the 2010 stats (pause at 4:15). It's hard to tell at the outset which blue dot represents 'Congo', but the poorest nation in 1810 seems to have an average annual income of about $150. Assuming a uniform scale between the $400 and $4000 mark, the US falls at around $2000 a year. The income ratio between the poorest nation and the US in 1810 is thus 3:40. By 2010, the graph indicates that the poorest nation, Congo, earns double what the poorest nation in 1810 did, around $300 a year. Meanwhile the average US citizen has seen their annual income rise to twenty times what it was in 1810, at over $40 000 a year. The income ratio between the poorest nation and the US is now 3:400.
What this data demonstrate is not that we live in a converging world, but that over the past two hundred years the West and the rest have vastly outstripped the poorest nations, in terms of both real and relative wealth. In 1810 the highest-earning nation in the world, the Netherlands, earned 20 times what the lowest-earning nation did. In 2010 the highest-earning nation (I'm assuming that green dot is the United Arab Emirates) is off the chart, well past the US, which itself is well past earning 100 times what the lowest-earning nation makes.
These examples are from the extreme ends of the data spread, but you can easily pick a segment of the 2010 graph and notice nations whose citizens earn 10 times what people in other nations earn. In 1810, by contrast, only the very richest (the Netherlands, the UK, and those just behind them) and the very poorest (the African nations clustered around $300 a year and below) were separated by an order of magnitude.
You'll notice that I've been rather thorough so far about not doing any research outside of Hans Rosling's video, aside from dipping into my gazetteer to ascertain the relative populations of the two Congos. I'm taking it for granted that his team's numbers are true and accurate. The visual element, the graph, is somewhere between a truth and a lie, since it contains no falsehood but suggests something other than the truth. What sways me toward naming this little show as dark magic is that it supports an impressive-sounding expert like Hans Rosling in drawing conclusions that are just lies.
What's curious to consider is why he would do such a thing. I've no doubt that Rosling is a brilliant statistician, fully capable of creating a visual representation of world health and income statistics that doesn't distort the data. I've also no doubt that he knows what kind of picture a uniformly-scaled graph would paint, and that he made a deliberate decision to hide that picture from view. Perhaps he wanted to put the full weight of his scientific and technical authority behind a message of hope in "aid, trade, green technology and peace". The person who introduced me to this video certainly seemed encouraged by it. On the other hand, perhaps Rosling wanted to use his arts to summon such emotions in his viewers for other ends. You just can't tell by watching.
What you can tell is that the US, along with its cronies 'the West and the rest', have become fabulously wealthy in the past two centuries. This was mostly accomplished by monopolizing and burning through millions of years' worth of fossil fuel energy. It's a funny coincidence, to say the least, that as US power and wealth have grown, the number of nations hosting US military personnel has increased from 3 in the 1920's, to 39 during the Second World War, to 64 in 1968, to 148 in 2011. The world just seems to love American soldiers. It also seems to love American aid, trade, and peace, especially when those things come in the form of IMF debt, sweatshops, and regime changes. Too bad they aren't making a lot of green technology in the US these days, because the world really doesn't have enough yet of what America has to offer.
Of course, what we can actually expect from the future is a convergence of several factors not listed by Professor Rosling: disease, economic crisis, faltering technological innovation, and war, all hinging on the underlying factors of energy scarcity and an overburdened global empire. Each of those factors will feed into the others to create conditions such as those you see depicted at 1:55 in the video. These are not pleasant facts and numbers, but if we want to grasp the kind of real hope that sustains and empowers, we will have to first move through an honest assessment of what there is to hope for. It's not the end of the world, but it is the end of our world. There is no hope in the continuation of progress.
Now is the time for wizards in the tradition of Gandalf the Grey to arise and speak truth to power, because there is much that is good and that can be saved from the wreck of the empire of progress. The role of these wizards is to shake us free of the lies that tell us either to despair in the face of overwhelming power, on the one hand, or to remain naively hopeful in the security offered by power, depending on whether we see that power as benevolent or destructive.
The lies of Saruman the White and his followers are seductive, but as I've said before, sometimes a quick history lesson is enough to clear the air. And let's not forget that there is a third wizard in The Lord of the Rings, one whom Saruman laughs to scorn but whose wisdom is hidden from the minds of the mighty: Radagast the Brown, friend of all birds and beasts and growing things. Perhaps we'll have occasion to speak more about him in coming weeks.
What's curious to consider is why he would do such a thing. I've no doubt that Rosling is a brilliant statistician, fully capable of creating a visual representation of world health and income statistics that doesn't distort the data. I've also no doubt that he knows what kind of picture a uniformly-scaled graph would paint, and that he made a deliberate decision to hide that picture from view. Perhaps he wanted to put the full weight of his scientific and technical authority behind a message of hope in "aid, trade, green technology and peace". The person who introduced me to this video certainly seemed encouraged by it. On the other hand, perhaps Rosling wanted to use his arts to summon such emotions in his viewers for other ends. You just can't tell by watching.
What you can tell is that the US, along with its cronies 'the West and the rest', have become fabulously wealthy in the past two centuries. This was mostly accomplished by monopolizing and burning through millions of years' worth of fossil fuel energy. It's a funny coincidence, to say the least, that as US power and wealth have grown, the number of nations hosting US military personnel has increased from 3 in the 1920's, to 39 during the Second World War, to 64 in 1968, to 148 in 2011. The world just seems to love American soldiers. It also seems to love American aid, trade, and peace, especially when those things come in the form of IMF debt, sweatshops, and regime changes. Too bad they aren't making a lot of green technology in the US these days, because the world really doesn't have enough yet of what America has to offer.
Of course, what we can actually expect from the future is a convergence of several factors not listed by Professor Rosling: disease, economic crisis, faltering technological innovation, and war, all hinging on the underlying factors of energy scarcity and an overburdened global empire. Each of those factors will feed into the others to create conditions such as those you see depicted at 1:55 in the video. These are not pleasant facts and numbers, but if we want to grasp the kind of real hope that sustains and empowers, we will have to first move through an honest assessment of what there is to hope for. It's not the end of the world, but it is the end of our world. There is no hope in the continuation of progress.
Now is the time for wizards in the tradition of Gandalf the Grey to arise and speak truth to power, because there is much that is good and that can be saved from the wreck of the empire of progress. The role of these wizards is to shake us free of the lies that tell us either to despair in the face of overwhelming power, on the one hand, or to remain naively hopeful in the security offered by power, depending on whether we see that power as benevolent or destructive.
The lies of Saruman the White and his followers are seductive, but as I've said before, sometimes a quick history lesson is enough to clear the air. And let's not forget that there is a third wizard in The Lord of the Rings, one whom Saruman laughs to scorn but whose wisdom is hidden from the minds of the mighty: Radagast the Brown, friend of all birds and beasts and growing things. Perhaps we'll have occasion to speak more about him in coming weeks.
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