Hello Interactors,

Watching all the transnational love at the Olympics has been inspiring. We’re all forced to think about nationalities, borders, ethnicities, and all the flavors of behavioral geography it entails. After all, these athletes are all there representing their so-called “homeland.” And in the case of Alysa Liu, her father’s escape from his. Between the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall, “homeland” took on new meaning for many immigrants. This all took me back to that time and the start of my own journey at Microsoft at the dawn of a new global reality.

HOMELAND HATCHED HERE

With all the focus on Olympics and immigration recently, I’ve found myself reflecting on my days at Microsoft in the 90s. As the company was growing (really fast), teams were filling up with people recruited from around the world. There were new accents in meetings, new holidays to celebrate, and yummy new foods and funny new words being introduced. This thickening of transnational ties made Redmond feel as connected the rest of the world as the globalized software we were building. By 2000 users around the world could switch between over 60 languages in Windows and Office. In behavioral geography terms, working on the product and using the product made “here” feel more connected to “elsewhere.”

This influx of new talent was all enabled by the Immigration Act of 1990. Signed by George H. W. Bush, it increased and stabilized legal pathways for highly skilled immigrants. This continued with Clinton era decisions to expand H-1B visa allocations that fed the tech hiring boom. I took full advantage of this allotment recruiting and hiring interaction designers and user researchers from around the world.

In the same decade the federal government expanded access to the United States, it also tightened security. Terrorism threats, especially after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, spooked everyone. Despite this threat, there was more domestic initiated terrorism than outside foreign attacks. The decade saw deadly incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by radicalized by white supremacist anti-government terrorists, which killed 168 and injured hundreds, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history before 9/11.

A year later, the Atlanta Olympic bombing and related bombings by anti-government Christian extremists caused multiple deaths and injuries. Clinic bombings and shootings by anti-abortion extremists began in 1994 with the Brookline clinic shootings and continued through the 1998 Birmingham clinic bombing. These inspired more arsons, bombings, and shootings tied to white supremacist, anti-abortion, and other extreme ideologies.

Still, haven been shocked by Islamist extremists in 1993 (and growing Islamic jihadist plots outside the U.S.) the federal government adopted new security language centered on protecting the “homeland” from outside incursions. In 1998, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 62, titled “Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas,” a serious counterterrorism document whose title quietly normalized the term homeland inside executive governance.

But there was at least one critical voice. Steven Simon, Clinton’s senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, didn’t think “Defense of the Homeland” belonged in a presidential directive.

Simon’s retrospective argument is that “homeland” did more than name a policy, it brought a territorial logic of legitimacy that the American constitution had historically resisted. He recalls the phrase “Defense of the Homeland” felt “faintly illiberal, even un-American.” The United States historically grounded constitutional legitimacy in civic and legal abstractions (people, union, republic, human rights) rather than blood rights or rights to soil. Membership was to be mediated by institutions, employment, and law rather than ancestry.

“Homeland” serves as a powerful cue that suggests a mental model of ‘home’ and expands it to encompass a nation. This model is accompanied by a set of spatial inferences that evoke familiarity, appeal, and even an intuitive sense. However, it also creates a sense of a confined interior that can be breached by someone from outside.

This is rooted in place attachment that can be defined as an affective bond between people and places — an emotional tie that can anchor identity and responsibility. But attachment is not the same thing as ownership. Research on collective psychological ownership shows how groups can come to experience a territory as “ours.” This creates a sense of ownership that can be linked to a perceived determination right.

Here, the ingroup is entitled to decide what happens in that place while sometimes feeding a desire to exclude outsiders. When the word “homeland” was placed at the center of statecraft it primed public reasoning from attachment of place through care, stewardship, and shared fate toward property ownership through control, gatekeeping, and exclusion. It turns belonging into something closer to a property claim.

What makes the 1990s especially instructive from a geography perspective is that “access” itself was being administered through institutions that are intensely spatial: consulates, ports of entry, employer locations, housing markets, and the micro-geographies of office life. The H-1B expansions was not simply generosity, but a form of managed throughput in a system designed to meet labor demand. And it was paired with political assurances about enforcement and domestic worker protections.

Mid-decade legal reforms strengthened enforcement by authorities in significant ways. Mechanisms for faster removals and stricter interior enforcement reinforced the idea that the state could act more decisively within the national space. The federal government found ways to expand legal channels that served economic objectives while also building a governance style increasingly comfortable with interior control. “Homeland” helped supply the conceptual bridge that made that socioeconomic coexistence feel coherent.

It continues to encourage a politics of boundary maintenance that determines who counts as inside, what kinds of movement are legible as normal, and which bodies are perpetually “out of place.” If the defended object is a republic, the default language justification is legal and civic. If the defended object is a homeland, the language jurisdiction becomes territorial and affective. That shift changes what restrictions, surveillance practices, and membership tests become thinkable and tolerable over time.

HOMELAND’S HOHFELDIAN HARNESS

If “homeland” structures a place of belonging, then “rights” are the legal grammar that tells us what may be done in that place. The trouble is that “rights” are often treated as moral abstract objects floating above context. Legally, they are structured relations among people, institutions, and things. But “rights” can take on a variety of meanings.

Wesley Hohfeld, the Yale law professor who pioneered analytical jurisprudence in the early 20th century, argued that many legal disputes persist because the word “right” is used ambiguously.

He distinguished four basic “incidents” for rights: claim, privilege (liberty), power, and immunity. Each is paired with a position correlating to another party: duty, no-claim (no-right), liability, and disability. When the police pull you over for speeding you hold a privilege to drive at or below the speed limit (say, 40 mph). The state has no-right to demand you stop for going exactly 40 mph. But if you’re clocked at 50 mph, the officer enforces your no-right to exceed the limit which correlates to the state’s claim-right. You have a duty to comply by pulling over. If the officer then has power to issue a ticket, you face a liability to have your driving privilege altered (e.g., fined). But you also enjoy an immunity from arbitrary arrest without probable cause.

Let’s apply that to “homeland” security.

If a politician says we must “defend the homeland,” it can mean at least four different things legally:

* Claim-Rights: Citizens can demand that the government protect them (e.g., from attacks). Officials have the duty to act — think TSA screening or border patrol.​

* Privileges: Federal Agents get freedoms to act without legal blocks, such as stopping and questioning people in so-called high-risk zones, while bystanders have no-right to interfere.​

* Powers: Federal Agencies hold authority to change your legal status. For example, they can label you a watchlist risk (e.g., you become a liability). This can then lead to loss of liberties like travel bans, detentions, or asset freezes.​

* Immunities: Federal Officials or programs shield themselves from lawsuits (via qualified immunity or classified data rules), effectively blocking citizens’ ability to sue.

Forget whether these are legitimate or illegitimate, Hohfeld’s point is they are different forms of rights — and each has distinct costs. Once “homeland” is the object, the system tends to grow powers and privileges (capacity for overt or covert operations), and to seek immunities (resistance to challenge), often at the expense of others’ claim-rights and liberties.

Rights are not only relational, but they are also often spatially conditional. The same person can move through zones of legality experiencing different practical rights. Consider border checkpoints, airports, perimeters of government buildings, protest cites, or regions declared “emergency” zones. Government institutions operationalize these spaces as “behavioral geographies” which determines who gets stopped, where scrutiny concentrates, and which movements count as suspicious.

The state looks past the abstract bearer of unalienable liberties and due process to see only a physical entity whose movements through space dissolve their Constitutional immunities into a series of observable, trackable traces. Those traces become inputs to enforcement. This is what makes surveillance so powerful. “Homeland” governance is especially trace-hungry because it imagines safety as a property of space that must be continuously maintained.

But these traces are behavioral cues and human behavior is never neutral. They are interpreted through normalized cultural and institutional schemas about who “belongs” in which places. Place attachment and territorial belonging can become gatekeeping mechanisms. Empirical work on homeland/place attachment links it to identity processes and self-categorization. Related work suggests that collective psychological ownership — “this place is ours” — can predict exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants and outsiders. In legal terms, those social attitudes can translate into pressure to expand state powers and narrow outsiders’ claim-rights.

A vocabulary rooted in a ‘republic’ tends to emphasize rights as universal claims against the state. This is where we get due process, equal protection, and rights to speech and assembly. A homeland vocabulary tends to emphasize rights as statused permissions tied to membership and territory. Here we find rights of citizens, rights at the border, rights in “emergencies”, and rights conditioned on “lawful presence.” The shift makes some restrictions feel like a kind of protecting of the home. Hence the unaffable phrase, “Get off my lawn.”

HOMELAND HIERARCHIES HUMBLED

If the “homeland” is framed as a place-of-belonging and rights are the grammar of that place, then the current crisis of American democracy boils down to a dispute over the nature of equality. This tension is best understood through the long-standing constitutional debate between anticlassification and antisubordination, which dates back to the Reconstruction era.

Anticlassification, often called the “colorblind” or “status-blind” approach, holds that the state’s duty is simply to avoid explicit categories in its laws. Antisubordination, by contrast, insists that the law must actively dismantle structured group hierarchies and the “caste-like” systems they produce. When the state embraces a “homeland” logic, it leans heavily on anticlassification to mask a deeper reality of spatial subordination.

In what we might call the “Theater of Defense,” agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increasingly rely on anticlassification principles to justify aggressive interior crackdowns. They frame enforcement as a territorial necessity by protecting the sanctity of the soil itself. A workplace raid or roving patrol, in this view, does not target any specific group. Instead, it simply maintains the “integrity” of the homeland. This reflects what law professor Bradley Areheart and others have described as the “anticlassification turn,” where formal attempts to embody equality end up legitimizing structural inequality.

Put differently, the state exercises a Hohfeldian Power to alter individuals’ legal status based on their geographic location or “lawful presence.” At the same time, it shields itself from legal challenge by insisting that the law applies equally to everyone who is “out of place.” This claim of territorial neutrality is a dangerous legal fiction. As scholars Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst have shown in their work on algorithmic systems, attempts at neutral criteria often replicate entrenched biases.

Triggers like “proximity to a border” or “behavioral traces” in a transit hub do not produce blind justice. They enable targeted scrutiny and the erosion of immunity for those whose identities fail to match the “belonging” model of the “homeland.” The state circumvents its Hohfeldian Disability, avoiding the creation of second-class statuses, by pretending to manage space rather than discriminate against persons.

This shift from a civic Republic to a territorial “homeland” is the primary driver of democratic backsliding. Political scientist Jacob Grumbach captured this dynamic in his 2022 paper, Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding. Analyzing 51 indicators of electoral democracy across U.S. states from 2000 to 2018, Grumbach developed the State Democracy Index. His findings reveal how American federalism has morphed from “laboratories of democracy” into sites of subnational authoritarianism.

States with low scores on the index — often under unified Republican control — have pioneered police powers that insulate partisan dominance. We see this in the rise of state-level immigration enforcement units, the criminalization of movement for marginalized groups, and the expansion of a “right to exclude.”

These states are not just enforcing the law. They are forging what Yale legal scholar Owen Fiss would recognize as a new caste system. By fixating on “defending” state soil against “infiltrators,” legislatures dismantle the public rights of the Reconstruction era — the right to participate in community life without indignity. Today’s backsliding policies transform the nation’s interior into a permanent enforcement zone. They reject the Enlightenment ideals of America, rooted in beliefs like liberty, equality, democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law.

To fully understand Constitutional history, we best acknowledge that America’s universalist creedal definition wasn’t solely European. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything shows how Enlightenment values of liberty and equality arose from intellectual exchanges with Indigenous North American thinkers. Kandiaronk, a Huron statesman, traveled to Europe in the late 17th century and debated French aristocrats. His critiques were published and circulated widely among European intellectuals, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.

Graeber and Wengrow point out that before the widely popular publication of these dialogues in 1703, the concept of "Equality" as a primary political value was almost entirely absent from European philosophy. By the time Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men in 1754, it was the central question of the age.

Kandiaronk criticized European society’s subservience to kings and obsession with property. He contrasted it with the consensual governance and individual agency of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy embodied in their Great Law of Peace — a political order prioritizing the public right to exist without state-sanctioned indignity.

The writers of the U.S. Constitution codified a Republic of “unalienable rights,” synthesizing Indigenous/European-inspired liberty with Hohfeldian Disabilities that legally restrained the state from territorial monarchy. Backsliding erases this profound philosophical endeavor. Reclaiming the Republic means honoring the Indigenous critique that a nation’s legitimacy rests on its people’s freedom, not its fences.

We seem to be moving from governance by the governed to protecting an ingroup. In Hohfeldian terms, the state expands its privileges while shrinking the claim-rights of the vulnerable to move and exist safely. This leads to “spatial subordination,” managed through adiaphorization — a concept from social theorist Zygmunt Bauman’s 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust.

Bauman, a Polish-Jewish survivor who escaped the Nazis’ grip on his early life, drew “adiaphora” from the Greek for matters outside moral evaluation. Modern bureaucracies make horrific actions morally neutral by framing them as technical duties, enabling atrocities like the Holocaust without personal ethical torment.

As territorial belonging takes precedence, non-belongers are excluded from moral and legal obligations. They become “non-spaces” or “human waste” in the eyes of ICE and DHS. This betrays antisubordination, the “core and conscience” of America’s civil rights tradition, as Yale constitutional scholars Jack Balkin and Reva Siegel called it. A democracy can’t endure if it permanently relegates any group to legal impossibility.

In the “homeland”, immigrants may live, work, and raise families for decades, yet remain mere “traces” to expunge. Weaponized place attachment turns affective bonds into property claims. This empowers the state to “cleanse” those deemed to be “out of place.” Rights become statused permissions, not universal ideals. If immunity from search depends on territorial status, the Republic of laws has yielded to a Heimat — a term the Nazis’ usurped for their blood-and-soil homeland…that they then bloodied and soiled.

Reversing this demands confronting the linguistic and legal architecture that rendered it conceivable. It’s time to rethink the “homeland” frame and its anticlassification crutch. A truer and fairer Republic would commit to antisubordination and the state would be disabled from wielding space for hierarchy. A person’s immunity from arbitrary power should be closer to an inalienable right to be “secure in one’s person” that holds firm beyond checkpoints or workplace doors…or your front door.

Steven Simon was right to feel uneasy with Clinton’s wording. “Homeland” planted a seed that sprouted into hedgerows of exceptional powers and curtailed liberties. Are we going to cling to a “homeland” secured by fear and exclusion, forever unstable, or finally become a Republic revered for securing universal law and rights? As long as our rights remain geographically conditional, we all dwell in liability. Reclaiming the Republic, and our freedoms within it, may require transforming the Constitution from a Hohfeldian map of perimeters into a boundless plane of human dignity it aspires to be.

Hello Interactors,

Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state.

But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied.

SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZURE

On December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged as public theater, was not a solemn judicial act. A special scaffold was built, martial law was declared, and an estimated 4,000 spectators witnessed the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

The spectacle mattered because it carried meaning beyond Mankato. The hanging marked the end of the six-week U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. This brutal conflict devastated the Minnesota River Valley and left deep trauma in Dakota communities. It also conveyed that the state could swiftly and effectively attempt control of contested land by violent force.

Mankato was the visible climax, but Fort Snelling was the quieter cruelty that continued. After the war, Dakota families — women, children, elders — were confined in harsh conditions near the fort during the winter of 1862–63. Disease and exposure killed between 130 and 300 Dakota people. Execution and exile worked together. One provided public power, the other attempted to ensure territorial outcomes.

Here’s what Dakota Chief Wabasha’s son-in-law, Hdainyanka, wrote to him shortly before his execution:

“You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. My wife is your daughter, my children are your grandchildren. I leave them all in your care and under your protection. Do not let them suffer; and when my children are grown up, let them know that their father died because he followed the advice of his chief, and without having the blood of a white man to answer for to the Great Spirit.”

This moral failing was part of a larger burgeoning political economy. In 1862, the Twin Cities were still emerging, with mills, river commerce, and infrastructure. Yet the region’s future as an urban, financial, and political center depended on converting Dakota and Ojibwe homelands into transferable property. The spring prior to the massacre, in May 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, handing out 160-acre chunks of stolen land labeled now as “public.” Colonizers and immigrants could occupy this land, and be defended by the US government, if they showed they could “improve” it through five years of occupation.

This act negated all Dakota treaties, seized 24 million acres of Minnesota lands, and mandated removal of what were now called Dakota “outlaws.” This converted communal Indigenous homelands into surveyed “public domain” eligible for homesteading, auctions, and rail grants, directly feeding wheat production for Minneapolis mills. Speculators and railroads exploited the act via proxy filings, reselling “cleared” parcels at profit to European immigrants.

By 1870, non-Native population surged from 172,000 to over 439,000. The “clearing” of land was not metaphorical. It was the prerequisite for surveying, fencing, settlement, rail corridors, and the wider commodity circuits that would bind the Upper Midwest to national and global markets.

That is what Harvard historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism. He argues that global capitalism’s ascent was not a clean evolution toward free exchange. It relied on coercion, conquest, and violence. As his book on the history of Capitalism lays out, state funded war capitalism fundamentally relied on slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed commerce, and the imposition of sovereignty over both people and territory.

In this framing, the Dakota and Ojibwe were obstacles to industrialization and commodification. The frontier needed to be safe for settlement and investment of Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, as well as railroads and industry. This included these two flour mills, the world’s largest by 1880: General Mills and Pillsbury.

The gallows in Mankato were the blunt instrument that made the state-capital alliance credible. The point was not only to punish alleged crimes, but to demonstrate a capacity and will to kill. The American state needed to show it could override Indigenous sovereignty and reorder space. The subsequent removals and confinement at Fort Snelling completed the transformation. “Home” was recoded from relationship into asset. This land was no longer lived geography but extractable territory, from stewarding real soil to the selling of real estate.

TOPHOPHILIA, TIES, AND TENSIONS

War capitalism is not merely to punish resistance, but to convert a lived place into a fungible asset. But violence plays a deeper role than just legal rearrangement. It has to break this constant of human life: our attachment to place.

Behavioral geographer Yi-Fu Tuan borrowed the term topophilia to describe this attachment — the “affective bond between people and place or setting.” The phrase can sound soft and sentimental but it can also cause friction in projects of political economy.

The state may be able to abolish or rewrite a treaty, redraw a border, rename a river, and issue new deeds, but it still confronts bodies that have been oriented by firm ground. It’s on these grounds that paths are walked, food gathered, relatives buried, stories anchored to landmarks, and seasonal rhythms internalized as a habit of life. The obstacle is embedded and embodied in the physiology, including cognitive, and grounds to location.

Modern neuroscience gives a concrete account of how place becomes part of a person. The hippocampus plays a central role in spatial memory and navigation, and research on place cells shows that hippocampal neurons fire in relation to specific locations in an environment. Familiar surroundings are not only around us they are within us. The brain builds spatial scaffolding that links location to memory, routine, prediction, and emotional regulation.

When cognition is tied to the specificity of place, it becomes hard for a parcel to be made equivalent to another. Commodification demands interchangeability. A home cannot easily be made equivalent to another home when it’s part of the nervous system — not quickly, not cleanly, and often not at all. When the state-capital alliance imagines territory as a grid of extractable value, it is implicitly trying to override how humans experience territory.

That is why “simple” displacement so often produces disproportionate harm. Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove coined the term root shock to describe the traumatic stress that follows the destruction of one’s “emotional ecosystem.” Root shock is not only grief or nostalgia. It is a stress response to the sudden loss of the social and spatial cues that stabilize daily life. The shredding of a mesh of relationships, routines, and meanings embedded in a neighborhood or homeland.

The root shock of the state violence of 1862 was not just incidental to the project of transformation. It was structurally necessary. If topophilia is a biological and psychological anchor, then a purely legal or economic strategy (bureaucratic coercion) will often be insufficient because the anchor of topophilia holds. To clear land at speed and scale, the state reaches for tools that can sever attachment abruptly. Public executions, mass incarceration, forced marches, and exile doesn’t just relocate people. They’re violent attempts to scramble the conditions under which people can remain attached at all. It transforms topophilia into vulnerability.

Work on social exclusion and “social pain” helps explain why. In a widely cited fMRI study, Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during experiences of exclusion. This parallels patterns seen in physical pain studies where distress is tracked with painful activities. The point is not that social threat is “just like” physical injury, but that the brain treats social severing as a serious alarm condition. It’s something that demands attention, vigilance, and behavioral change to overcome.

ROOTS, RESISTANCE, AND REPAIR

Topophilia doesn’t end with the so-called frontier or attempts at ‘removing’ its inhabitants. It reappears wherever people form durable bonds. That includes the streets and schools, churches and parks, language, kin, and the local economies and cultures war capitalism eventually built. The Dakota and Ojibwe were never “removed” in any final sense. Many live and organize in and around the Twin Cities today.

In South Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protector Movement, a biproduct of the American Indian Movement, works out of the American Indian Cultural Corridor along Franklin Avenue — an immediate target for ICE. The protectors made their presence known as a form of ongoing place-based care and defense.

It is a living archive of tactics for defending attachment under pressure through direct action, community building, patrols, and the mundane discipline of showing up. What it offers is not merely a critique of state violence, but vigilance without spectacle, care without permission, and solidarity as a daily habit rather than a momentary sentiment.

Other areas of Minneapolis show how when federal enforcement turns public space into a zone of uncertainty, topophilic neighbors often respond by adopting exactly those same “weapons” of persistence — care, documentation, rapid communication, mutual aid — that have long characterized Indigenous resistance and slavery abolitionist networks.

Standing Rock, where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies gathered in 2016 to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, demonstrated how quickly infrastructure can scale when a place becomes a shared object of defense.

The #NoDAPL movement assembled a broad coalition of Indigenous nations and allies, over 200 tribes, alongside legal support, medical care, and communications systems designed to withstand state patience.

The 2020 George Floyd uprising in Minneapolis also revealed how love of place can become a platform for organized care rather than retreat. Alongside protest, residents built mutual-aid channels, street-medic networks, food distribution, and neighborhood defense efforts that treated the city as an emotional ecosystem worth repairing. What looked to outsiders like spontaneous eruption was, on the ground, a rapid layering of roles that included medics, legal observers, supply runners, translators, and de-escalators. This ecology of participation made it possible for large numbers of people to act without centralized command.

Social psychology helps explain why these movements generate allies rather than only sympathizers. One key concept is collective efficacy — the combination of social cohesion and a shared willingness to intervene for the common good. It blossoms when people repeatedly see each other act, learn local norms of mutual obligation, and build trust that intervention will be supported rather than punished. All rooted in topophilia.

Place attachment can bridge boundaries that would otherwise keep people separate. Work in community psychology and planning shows that place attachment and meaning can support participation and collective engagement, especially when development or coercion threatens everyday life. In other words, topophilia is not just private feeling. When it’s under threat it can become public motive and an engine for coalition.

The coalition in Minneapolis is being characterized by the federal government as terrorists. This borrows from a long history of resistance to violence because war capitalism has never been only domestic. The United States and its allies refined coercive governance overseas through night raids and “capture-or-kill” operations in Afghanistan, midnight house raids in Iraq, and broader militarized campaigns that treat homes as “searchable terrain” and communities as “intelligence environments.”

Many of the officials, contractors, and voters who authorized or normalized these methods rarely imagined the same atmosphere of violent seizure in their neighborhood. As unimaginable as it may be watching unmarked vehicles, sudden detentions, and public uncertainty coming to American streets — used against the very citizens and taxpayers who fund such operations — it’s not to those victims overseas in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, or even inner city America.

That return is what the poet and politician Aimé Césaire called the “imperial boomerang” effect, the idea that techniques tolerated in peripheral countries can come home to roost. In the U.S., the boomerang has long “landed” first on people of color. It emerges through surveillance and disruption campaigns like the two decades of the covert and illegal COINTELPRO program where the FBI targeted counterculture groups of the so-called New Left.

Or the “Palmer Raids” of 1919 and 1920 targeting largely Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their left-leaning politics. These led to riots in 30 US cities and culminated in the bombing of the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the US attorney general. These programs all reflect the notion that war can come home — just look at the increased militarizing of policing complete with SWAT tactics.

And the same history that produced the scaffold of war capitalism of the past also produced reservoirs of resistance we see here and now. When neighbors anywhere respond to incursions not only with fear but with organized vigilance and material support, they are adapting older strategies of care found in Indigenous, abolitionist, and other movement-based defenses of people and places against infiltration, intimidation, and attempted violent removal.

We can see how war capitalism endures. Mankato’s 1862 gallows aimed to clear Dakota homelands of their people for homesteading, rails, and mills. Meanwhile, today’s Operation Metro Surge includes thousands of federal agents raiding Minneapolis homes and streets, attempting to sever immigrant attachments to allegedly enforce labor control and national security. These militarized spectacles of warrantless entries, tear gas, and shootings echo what Beckert has uncovered. They treat people and place as obstacles to commodification rather than roots of stewardship.

Yet topophilia also persists. These cross cultural rapid-response networks are not new to these lands, even though the US government tried to erase them centuries ago. The inspiring actions we see in Minneapolis reflect the values of compassion, positiveness, and respect for all relatives with neighborly solidarity that the first occupants of that land embraced. They’re now woven with their allied 21st century neighbors in common and shared resistance. As best expressed here by Indigenous studies and political ecology scholar Melanie Yazzie. (and the longer version here)

Minneapolis, like those acts of resistance in the nearby Dakotas, enacts and rehearses an alternative form of civil governance that centers mutual obligation over coercion and extraction. It shows how cities can survive the strain and stay alive — not through fear and gain, but through care that grounds and sustains.

Hello Interactors,

My daughter in Manhattan’s East Village sent me an article about the curated lives of the “West Village girls.” A few days later, I came across a provocative student op-ed from the University of Washington: "Why the hell do we still go to Starbucks?" The parallels stood out.

In Manhattan’s West Village, a spring weekend unfolds with young women jogging past a pastry shop in matching leggings, iced matcha lattes in hand. Some film it just long enough for TikTok. Across the country, students cycle through Starbucks in Seattle’s U-District like clockwork. The drinks are overpriced and underwhelming, but that’s not the point. It’s familiar. It's part of a habitual loop.

Different cities, similar rhythms. One loop is visual, the other habitual. But both show how space and emotion sync. Like an ambient synth track, they layer, drift, and return. If you live in or near a city, you exist in your own looping layers of emotional geography.

FLASH FEEDS

My daughter has been deep into modular synthesis lately — both making and listening. It’s not just the music that intrigues her, but the way it builds: loops that don’t simply repeat, but evolve, bend, and respond. She’ll spend hours patching sounds together, adjusting timing and tone until something new emerges. She likens it to painting with sound. Watching her work, it struck me how much her synth music mirrors city life — not in harmony, but in layers. She’s helped me hear urban rhythms differently.

Like a pop synth hook, the Flash loop is built for attention. It's bright, polished, and impossible to ignore. Synth pop thrives on these quick pulses — hooks that grab you within seconds, loops that deliver dopamine with precision. Urban spaces under this loop do the same. They set a beat others fall in line with, often flattening nuance in exchange for momentum.

This isn’t just about moving to a beat. It’s about becoming part of the beat. When these fast loops dominate, people start adapting to the spaces that reflect them. And those spaces, in turn, evolve based on those very behaviors. It’s a feedback loop: movement shaping meaning, and meaning shaping movement. The people become both the input and the output.

In this context, the West Village girl isn’t just a person — she’s a spatial feedback loop. A mashup of Carrie Bradshaw nostalgia, Instagram polish, and soft-lit storefronts optimized for selfies. But she didn’t arrive from nowhere. She emerged through a kind of spatial modeling: small choices, like where to brunch, where to pose, where to post are repeated so often they remade a neighborhood.

Social psychologist Erving Goffman, writing in the 1950s, called this kind of self-presentation "impression management." He argued that much of everyday life is performance. Not in the theatrical sense, but in how we act in response to what we expect others see. Urban spaces, especially commercial ones, are often the stage. But today, that performance isn’t just for others in the room. It’s for followers, algorithms, and endless feeds. The “audience” is ambient, but its expectations are precise.

As places like the West Village get filtered through lifestyle accounts and recommendation algorithms, their role changes. They no longer just host people, but mirror back a version of identity their occupants expect to see. Sidewalks become catwalks. Coffee shops become backdrops. Apartment windows become curated messes of string lights and tasteful clutter. And increasingly, the distinction between what’s lived and what’s posted collapses.

This fast loop — what we might call spatial virality — doesn’t just show us how to act in a place. It scripts the place itself. Stores open where the foot traffic is photogenic. Benches are placed for backdrops, not rest. Even the offerings shift: Aperol spritzes, charm bars, negroni specials sold not for taste but for tagability.

These are the high-tempo loops. They grab attention and crowd the mix. But every modular synth set, like a painting, needs contrast.

So some people opt out, or imagine doing so. Not necessarily with loud protest, but quiet rejection. They look for something slower. Something that isn’t already trending...unless the trend of routine sucks you in.

PULSING PATTERNS

If Flash is the pop hook, Pulse is the counter-melody. It could be a bassline or harmony that brings emotional weight and keeps things grounded. In music, you may not always notice it, but you'd miss it if it were gone. In cities, this loop shows up in slow friendships, mutual aid, and cafés that begin to feel like second homes. These are places where regulars greet one another by name. Where where hours melt through conversations. It satisfies a need to be seen, but without needing to perform. It’s what holds meaning when spectacle fades.

If the fast loop turns space into spectacle, the counter loop tries to slow it down. It lures the space to feel lived in, not just liked. It’s not always radical. Sometimes it’s just choosing a different coffee shop.

Back in Seattle’s University District, students do have options. Bulldog News. Café Allegro. George Coffee. These places don’t serve drinks meant to be posted. They serve drinks meant to be tasted. They’re not aesthetic first. They’re relational. These are small gestures that build culture.

Social psychologists Susan Andersen and Serena Chen describe this through what they call relational self theory. We don’t become ourselves in isolation. We become ourselves with and through others — especially those we repeatedly encounter. Think about the difference between ordering coffee from a stranger versus someone who knows you like sparkling water with your Cortado. It’s a different kind of transaction. It eases things. It reinforces your own loop.

So why do people routinely return to Starbucks? It isn’t just about caffeine addiction. It’s about being part of a socially reinforced rhythm — anchored in convenience, recognition, and the illusion of choice.

Stores like Starbucks are often strategically located for maximum accessibility and convenience. They're nestled near transit hubs, along commuter corridors, or within high-traffic pedestrian zones. These placements aren’t arbitrary. They’re optimized to integrate into daily routines. It's less like a countermelody and more like a harmonic parallel melody. As a result, practical considerations like proximity, availability, and reliability often override ideological concerns.

People return not because the product is exceptional, but because the store is exactly where and when they need it. The Starbucks habit isn’t only about routine, but rhythmic predictability that appears personal. In this sense, it functions as a highly accessible pulse: a loop that’s easy to join and hard to break. It's made of proximity, subtle trust, and convenience, but is dressed as choice.

My daughter's chosen counter loop lives in the East Village — not far, geographically, from the Instagram inspired brunch queues of Bleecker Street. Her loops are different. She carries conversations across record stores, basement venues, bookstores with hand-scrawled signs, and a few stubborn restaurants.

These are Places where the playlists aren't streaming through Spotify. Her city isn’t organized around visibility. It’s organized around presence. Around being seen to be honored and remembered. Like the bookstore dude who knows the lore on everyone, or the cashier who waves her through without paying, or her Brooklyn bandmate friends who fold her in like family.

Sure, this scene intersects with the popular loops — modular synths are having a moment — but it sidesteps the sameness. It stays unpredictable, grounded in curiosity and care rather than clicks. The gear is still patched by hand. The performances are messy and often temporary. And yet, the loops — literal and figurative — keep returning. Not because they’re engineered for attention, but because they allow people to build something slowly...together...from the inside. Especially when done in partnership with another synthesist.

You might see this in your own city. The quiet transformation of spaces: a café hosting a poetry night; a yoga studio turned warming shelter during the storm; a laundromat that leaves a stack of free books near the dryers. These are not accidents. They are interventions. Sometimes small, sometimes subtle...but always deliberate.

They stand in contrast to the churn of the viral. They also offer an alternative to despair. Because the counter loop isn’t just critique. It’s care enacted. And care takes time.

Still, even pulsing care needs structure. It needs floor drains, power outlets, and open hours. It needs a stable substructure.

UNDERCURRENT UNDERTONES

Undertone is the foundational structure on which other elements are built. It's the core of modular synth music. This isn’t just rhythm. It’s the subtle, slow, and reactive scaffolding. These core loops evolve and shift setting the timing and emotional tonality for everything else.

They don’t dominate, but they shape the flow. They respond to what surrounds them to ground the composition. Cities, too, have these base layers. Often imperceptible, they are visceral, ambient, and persistent. They come into focus with the smell of rain on warm pavement. The clink of a key in a front door. These are not songs you hum, they’re the ones your heart and lungs make.

Long before the influencer run clubs, celebrity shoe stores, and curated stoops, there was the mundane sidewalk. Not the kind tagged on a friend’s story or filtered through the latest app. Just concrete. Scuffed by strollers, scooter wheels, boots, and time. The sidewalk doesn’t follow trends, but it does remember them.

Cities are built on these undertones: habitual routes, early deliveries, overheard exchanges, open signs flipped at the same hour each morning. They aren’t glamorous. They don’t go viral. But they are what hold everything together.

Urban scholar Ash Amin calls this the “infrastructure of belonging.” In his work on ordinary urban life, he writes that much of what connects us isn’t spectacular. It’s what happens when people brush past one another without ceremony: the steady hum of life happening without the need for headlines. Cities function not just because of design, but because of everyday cooperation — shared rhythms, implicit trust, systems that keep working because people show up.

It can seem mundane: a delivery driver making the same drop, a retiree watering the sidewalk garden they planted without permission, the clatter of trash bins returning to their spots. These moments don’t make the city famous, but they do make it work.

Even the flashiest loops rely on them. The West Village girl’s curated brunch only happens because someone sliced lemons before sunrise and wiped the table clean before she sat down. The Starbucks habit loop in the U-District clicks into place because the supply truck showed up at 5 a.m. and the barista clocked in on time. They’re the dominant undertone of cities: loops so steady we stop noticing them...until they stop. Like during the pandemic.

A synthesist might point to an LFO: Low Frequency Oscillator. These make slow drones that hum under a syncopated rhythm; a pulsing sub-bass holding space while textures come and go. The mundane in a city does the same: it holds the mix together. Without it, the composition falls apart.

If you’ve ever heard a modular synth set, you know it doesn’t move like pop music. The loops aren’t clean. They evolve, layer, drift in and out of sync. They build tension, release it, then find a new rhythm. Cities work the same way.

Their beauty isn’t always in sync — it’s in polyrhythm. Like when two synth voices loop at slightly different speeds: a saw wave pinging every three beats, a filtered drone stretching over seven. They collide, resolve, then drift again. Like when a car blinker syncs to the beat of a song and then falls out again. In modular music, this dissonance isn’t a flaw. It creates a sonic texture.

City rhythms don’t always align either. A delivery truck pulls up as a barista closes shop; protest chants counter a stump speech; showtimes shift with transit delays. These clashes don’t cancel each other out — they deepen the city’s texture, giving it groove.

Sociologists Scannell and Gifford call this place attachment: the slow accrual of meaning in a space through repetition, emotional memory, and lived interaction. It’s not always nostalgic. Sometimes it’s forward-looking. The act of building the kind of city you want to live in, one relationship at a time.

And beneath all of this, the city continues its own loop: subways running through worn tunnels, trash collected on quiet mornings, someone sweeping a shop floor before the door opens.

Both protest and performance rely on this scaffold. The Starbucks picket line doesn’t just appear. It’s supported by planning, scheduling, and shared labor. The music scene doesn’t just materialize. It's shaped by decades of flyers, friendships, and repeat customers.

The viral and the intentional both need the mundane.

Cities, when they work, are made of all three: the flash of now, the pulse of choice, and the undertone of the necessary. Like springtime flowers, the city creates blooms that emerge at the surface. They draw attention, cameras, and admiration. These blossoms don’t just attract the eye, they draw in pollinators who carry influence and energy far beyond the original scene.

But none of this happens without the rest of the plant. It’s the leaves that capture sunlight day after day, the roots that pulse the unseen through tunnels, the microbes that toil in the grime and dirt to nourish those all around them. Urban life mirrors this looping ecology. Moments that flash brightly, pulses that quietly sustain, and undertones that hold it all together. The bloom is what gets noticed, but it’s the layered and syncopated life below — repeating, decomposing, reemerging — that make the next blossom possible.

Hello Interactors,

Do you ever walk through a neighborhood and wonder where all the people are? It happened to me last weekend. What’s worse, it was a 1960s planned development that reminded me of the suburb where I grew up. I don’t remember the streets being this quiet, but maybe these planned communities were meant to be this way. Or maybe we’ve changed. Or both.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A DASH TOWARD THE PAST

There it sat in the driveway, a brawny black pickup truck with an NRA sticker in the rear window and TRUMP plastered on the bumper. The protruding chrome tailpipe was gaping wide. Black exhaust dust clung to its edges. Three late-model cars were parked askew in the front lawn. Two doors down and across the street I saw a pride flag hanging next to a Black Lives Matters sign that read, “WHITE SILENCE IS WHITE VIOLENCE.”

I passed more houses and heard a barking dog approaching angrily. It ran alongside a taco truck parked in a driveway with the name of a Mexican restaurant painted on the side. Two other cars were in the driveway and one in the lawn behind a chain-link fence that restrain the dog. I had walked nearly an hour in this suburban neighborhood and had yet to see a single human being.

I was at my son’s track meet last Saturday in a town near Tacoma called Federal Way. I had some time to kill so I decided to take a walk. I picked a green patch on Google Maps that appeared to go down to the water and headed off to explore. The sidewalk from the High School ended 50 feet from the parking lot and I never saw another. The streets were quiet in this 1960’s neighborhood scattered with single story ranch-style homes intermixed with two-story split-level boxes.

Melancholy reflected off of these beige, white, and brown painted homes. They all featured a yard, a driveway, assorted overgrown shrubs and a tree or two. These homes are identical to the homes I would run in and out of as a kid in small town suburban Iowa. They were all built as part of the post-war building boom during America’s economic heyday when ordinary, mostly White, middle class folks could buy into the American Dream.

This housing development was built to accommodate a booming population drawn to jobs at the Tacoma Port, nearby Boeing factories, lumber yards, and paper mills. As the 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan states,

“…certain areas in King County, such as Federal Way, will have a population boom partially due to the employment opportunities that exist or are contemplated in the Tacoma area.”

Development was happening so fast that in 1958 the State of Washington purchased a 300-acre swath of land at nearby Dash Point for $185,000 to make it a state park. That’s $1.7 million in 2022 dollars and about what you’d pay for a single home near Dash Point today. Indigenous people lived on these shores before being displaced to a nearby reservation as part of the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. The Puyallup people are still fighting for access to surrounding private land to fish; their lawful right as written in the treaty. Most, if not all, treaties fail to honor Indigenous notions of shared use of land and resources that fly in the face of more self-centered and guarded Western ideals and philosophies of individual property ownership and rights.

The state’s 1958 purchase of the Dash Point property was from a company aptly named the “Modern Home Builders.” That same year natural gas pipelines were laid and fire hydrants were getting installed every 600 feet. In 1959 a sewer plan was revised to keep up with the rapid development.

In 1960 a 600-acre “Residential Park” began showing their 650 homes to buyers – many of whom were likely war veterans who were enjoying cheap government subsidized mortgages. Churches were being erected, bowling alleys were being laid, and ‘American Concrete’ had their grand opening featuring “Free Washed Sand for the Kiddies.”

This Federal Way neighborhood I was walking in wasn’t the only one going through this transformation in the 1950s and 60s. It was happening across the country. I grew up in one and benefited from it. It was easy for me to imagine these homes as brand new. I could close my eyes and smell fresh white American concrete, I could see kids riding their bikes, new cars pulling into the driveways, and smoke rising from the backyard barbeques. Life was good.

By 1966, when most of this neighborhood I was walking through was built, the U.S. stock market had peaked. Nobody would have believed it then, but this marked the beginning of a long slow economic decline. The stagflation of the 1970s and the area’s shift toward software in the 1980s and 90s froze much of Federal Way in the past. Beginning in 1990 with the Washington Growth Management Act suburban sprawl was curbed, then much of Boeing left the area, mills closed, and Western Washington jobs shifted from blue collar to white.

Meanwhile, today the tech industry continues to push home values across the region upward while most incomes remain stagnant. The median price of a home in Federal Way is $580,000 and has grown 16% year over year for the last five years. The estimated yearly median income between 2013-2017 was around $62,000 and the per capita income was only $30,288. That’s well below the 2020 median household income in the United States of $67,521 which had dropped from $69,560 the year prior. Federal Way may be lagging economically, but it is extremely rich with diversity. The Federal Way School District reports over 111 different languages spoken in family homes. But not in the streets where I was walking. Not a peep.

This is a common sight in many suburban neighborhoods, and this one was no exception. Though, seeing one to five cars per household led me to believe these people must be home. I can imagine each of these homes filled with people glued to a screen. But should they ever leave, they’ll surely get in a car given the walkability score of 22 out of 100. Besides, there aren’t many places of interest within walking distance. Unless, of course, you’re a walking fanatic like me.  

CURVESOUS CARTESIAN CUL-DE-SACS

This area, like so many others, was designed to be anthropocentric – it puts the individual self at the center. Just as cars do. America is made for cars and driving a car conjures a belief that the ‘self’ is most important. This is my car and my road so get out of my way. Automobile advertising repeatedly reinforces the image of being alone in comfort in a climate controlled moving cocoon made of metal and plastic. It’s hard to deny, a good car is comfortable.

And most of them comfortably reside at these single family homes which are also designed to put the ‘self’ and the ‘single’ family first. The handful of Christian churches I walked by also stress the power of the individual. The Bible’s Book of Genesis verse 1:26 states:

“God” said “Man” has “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Does that not sound kind of creepy?

Civil Engineers and Urban Planners were, and still are, the gods who hold dominion over city plans that often encourage cities to creepeth upon the earth. Federal Way itself crept out of sprawling Seattle and Tacoma. Planners made sure to plan for demand and single family homes on a large piece of land is what people demanded…and developers happily lent a hand. These demands have not receded. The 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan addressed ‘Residential Land Use’ with these words,

“Over the years and especially after World War II, the continued construction and upgrading of highway facilities has consistently improved accessibility to major employment centers. Since there has been ample suitable residential land available in relation to the demand, the effect of improved accessibility has resulted in residential development being located farther and farther out from major centers of employment. From the earliest times of the history of King county, a larger percentage of its residents have shown a preference to living in single family dwellings as opposed to multi-family structures. They could always afford this preference.”

They noted that in 1960 Seattle used 36 acres per 1000 persons, but by 1964 were planning to double that to 72 acres per 1,000 persons outside the ‘Urban Area’ of Seattle. They said,

“In the past, the grid iron pattern resulted in more acreage in streets than recent development.”

And since the 1950s and the expansion of freeways and highways there would be less need for the grid and compact development. They said,

“In the future, a large percentage of the streets and highway system acreages will consist of freeway type facilities rather than local streets.”

And to make sure developers, for whatever reason, didn’t attempt to build more dense housing on these sprawling acreages they included language that protected residents who may resist such attempts. They draw special attention to “URBAN CENTER DEVELOPMENT” (their emphasis), They wrote,

“residential densities should decrease at greater distances from an urban center…Some areas of the County should be kept at a lower density even though close to an urban center. These areas include locations where a pattern of large lot sizes is already established or is desired and where residents need the assurance that the character of their neighborhood will be stabilized.” (my emphasis)

There is a discernable distaste for uniform Cartesian grids in the language of this plan. Part of the modernist post-war vision was to move away from compact urban development of the 19th century that favored neighborhood stores, modest property allocations, and use of public transit. Multi-family structures had connotations of poor, often ethnically diverse, residents which by today’s standards are read as thinly veiled racist and classist biases. The 1950s and 60s pushed for more rural and pastoral land use that attempted to blend a growing middle class into a natural landscape connected to a freeway.

They wrote,

“The grid form of layout, while easy to design on the drawing board, can result in inharmonious relationships with the site. It can, however, add clarity to an otherwise confusing street pattern, but should be used judiciously to avoid monotonous rows of houses.”

They instead called for more organic street and lot layout saying,

“Depending on topography or other natural features affecting street design…an infinite number of variations exist in the arrangement of lots and houses and can be used to take advantage of natural features of the landscape.”

The cul-de-sac is called out in the plan as one example to follow.

“A third general form may be called a court, cul-de-sac, or cluster, and features a grouping of buildings which have service orientation at the street but privacy to the rear.”

I grew up on on a cul-de-sac and can vouge for the design goals these planners set out to achieve. But we now know that these dead ends can lead to overly circuitous routes should people choose to walk, bike, or bus to their destinations. They were planning for the automobile as the only viable and desirable choice of transport.

“residential neighborhoods should be designed with long blocks in order to avoid excessive cross streets which are costly to construct and maintain…Pedestrian crosswalks should be required only where necessary such as through blocks over 900 feet in length or where access to a school, park, or shopping area is essential.”

While they did recommend providing a sidewalk on at least one side of the street, it read more as a suggestion than a requirement. Under a section titled, “Street Design Factors” they said this about sidewalks,

“Even though sidewalks may be used less for walking in residential than in business areas, their hard surfaces provide children’s play areas close to home.”

THE APPRAISAL OF THE SOCIO-SPATIAL

The words “close to home” say a lot about these city plans and the desires and demands of home owners and builders. These places were designed and engineered by professionals from ‘above’ using maps and diagrams. They remained detached from the people and places they were planning for. And the very ‘townscapes’ these people were designing were intended to detach the occupants of these spaces from the larger, messy, and complex society that surrounded them.

They made plans for homes with ‘privacy in the rear’ where children play ‘close to home’. Architects and builders designed structures that insured privacy – in the words of ‘High Modernist’ Le Corbusier – they were “machines for living.” These properties included ‘service orientation at the street’ that included a driveway leading to a garage where the other ‘machine for moving’ could be stored.

This methodically mapped, measured, and mechanized ‘mecca’ is the making of well meaning men dating back to Mercator. The 17th century father of Cartography used techniques of triangulation to turn the earth into a scientific measuring instrument. The centuries old Mercator projection, which distorts northern land masses to give priority to the Dutch sailing distances between them, is still the most popular and familiar projection used today.

Then came Newton who saw the entire universe as a kind of machine – “a container for objects and facts.” He married his Newtonian physics with Euclidean geometry. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who also taught physical geography, argued “space and time were inner conditions of the human…ordered by logical categories.”

Starting in 1747, and over the course of 50 years, the Cassini family drew a highly precise map of France using geodesic triangulation – the first of its kind. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) expanded on these techniques to measure and delineate land across the United States. But theses topographical maps were also used for the erasure of certain natural elements and to eliminate certain people. After all, their primary purpose was, and still is, to wage war or defend against it. These maps also remain the basis for mapping, planning, and ordering urban areas in the United States to this day.

This Western anthropocentric, mechanistic, objectification of spaces, and the use of maps and drawings to represent them, is alluring and seemingly addictive. It’s also part of the reality of everyday urban life. Ali Madanipour, a Professor of Urban Design at Newcastle University, separates urban spaces into two dimensions: physical and social.

The ‘physical’ is what garners the most attention, probably because it’s most visible and easy to understand. The arranging and grouping of buildings is at the scale of an urban planner and politician, the form and function of buildings are the domain of architects and developers, and the patterns and construction of spaces in between these structures, like streets, alleys, highways, freeways, and parking lots, is the domain of the civil engineer.

These objects are arranged in space creating places where people interact with each other and the natural and built environment – the interaction of people and place. But these interrelationships extend to the people who build them and those who control how, when, and where they’re built. This complex, multi-dimensional, interconnected social dimension over space and time is hard to see, harder to visualize, and thus hardest for us all to understand.

Madanipour summarizes,

“A study of urban form therefore refers to the way physical entities, singly or in a group, are produced and used, their spatial arrangements, and the interrelationships, and also how monetary and symbolic values are attributed to them.”

The way men mapped and arranged the physical entities in that Federal Way neighborhood were produced for the monetary gain of developers, the city, county, and state. The symbolic values were codified in that 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan that encouraged interrelationships between individuals to be in the home, close to home, or in a car – all while guaranteeing the ‘character of their neighborhood’ would be stabilized.

It was all planned on a map that men loomed over like a god or a general staging a battle over territory. But they were also giving people what they wanted. Weyerhaeuser wanted trees for paper and profit, developers wanted stolen land in exchange for money, and people wanted what many believe is entitled to them: individual ownership of their land. After all, it’s written in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution – to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".

The GPS I used to navigate these quiet curvilinear roads, carved into the earth then cauterized with concrete, is rooted in the same Western history of cartography, science, and philosophy that assisted in building its physical urban form. But the space I was visiting was not designed to be used as I was using it. That is why, to some degree, I didn’t see a single person. This environment was not built to foster interactions between people and place, but for cars to move individuals through space.

This place was designed for these people to be ‘close to home’ and in the home. These residents were probably socializing and forming interrelationships, but in a virtual environment. There were being entertained on a screen in their hand, on a desk, or on a wall. The culmination of combined technologies as old as their homes.

And when they did finally decide to leave their home, they likely tapped their destination on their phone. They climbed into their ‘machine for moving’, and were instructed to drive to clusters of physical structures of their choosing. They then glided on surfaces of ‘in-between’ spaces across America’s concrete places. The American dream financed by a loan. Blessings of liberty, that has left them alone.

Hello Interactors,

Beauty may be in eye of the beholder, but it’s also in the brain. We all seem to be drawn to balance, order, and predictable patterns which rulers, T-squares, protractors, and compasses have readily provided. It’s the stuff maps are made of. They’ve brought progress and good fortune to many over the centuries, but have they also lead to our decay?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

HIGH FASHION

I can’t deny it. I’m a sucker for grids. I’m drawn to music, art, and designs that are balanced, orderly, and intelligible. Give me a ruler, a protractor, a compass, and a pencil and I’d happily make art and designs all day. Growing up I’d handcraft lettering on cards using my Dad’s plastic flowchart stencils. What can I say, I’m a product of modernity. A neat and tidy aesthete.

But that attraction was called into question last week as I was watching The Hobbit. The movie’s protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, lives in an organically shaped earthen home carved into the side of hill. There’s not a Cartesian grid or plane anywhere to be found. Every wall is curved as if bored into the hillside by a giant gopher. I was so smitten that I murmured out loud to my family, “I could definitely live in that house.” Has my planar proclivity passed me by, or has the curving complexity of nature caught my eye?

Neuroscience has uncovered evidence that we humans, perhaps other animals as well, tend ‘like’ and/or ‘want’ aesthetic order and balance. Evidence of elements in oddities ordered by humans abounds in centuries of found paintings, carvings, jewelry, and even cities.

But firm empirical conclusions of this gray-matter matter remain elusive. Although, neuroscientists do agree on one thing: there is no single ‘beauty center’ in our brain. When hooked up to brain imaging machines, scientists observe “activity in the frontal pole, left dorsolateral cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, motor cortex, parietal cortex, ventral stratum, and occipital cortex, among others.” And there is ongoing work trying to tease out the order in which these activities unfold betwixt the vast network of synapsis in a brain containing as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. A task seemingly more complex than the identification of the regions themselves.

If aesthetically pleasing ordered intelligibility is indeed a universal mammalian trait, getting to that cognitive state is complex – understanding it even more so. Some scientists believe another reason concrete evidence is elusive is because the visual stimuli used across studies varies considerably.

Designing and administering cognitive research requires rationalizing inputs across studies to achieve more predictable outcomes. This ‘streamlining’ of the scientific method is not only applied to studies, but to the design and manufacturing of products, and the planning, mapping, and administration of our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states.

Political scientist and legal anthropologist James C. Scott once alluded to the similarities between designing observational studies and the design of our modern urban environments writing,

“The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.”

Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing Like a State, is critical of what he calls High Modernism which is an over-reliance on Cartesian principles, the scientific method, and unfaltering faith in technology. While he admits these advances improved – and continue to improve – the human condition, he believes blind adherence to these aesthetic, bureaucratic, and technocratic principles may have also put us on a path toward what we now see as potential human extinction.

The list of ‘High Modernists’ in art, science, design, and politics is long, but Scott created a “Hall of Fame” of geo-political modernists like former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Cold War strategist Robert McNamara known for his ‘scientific management’ style, New York commissioner-cum-urban planner and power broker Robert Moses, founding head of Soviet Russia and dictator of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin, the Shah-of-Iran who sought to modernize and nationalize his entire country and industry, and the influential architect and urban designer Le Corbusier who advocated for standardized inhumane design and erasure of historical and cultural tradition – especially in the aftermath of war.

Scott’s full list includes people of not any one political persuasion. He reveals how both conservatives and progressives are capable of “sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” He notes they all use “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” And he observes the public really has no recourse, nor often the desire, to resist it. He says,

“The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.”

That ‘desire’, as it were, I suspect is partially driven by the aesthetics found in the uniformity, balance, and order of ‘High Modernists.’ Parsimony, the reductive removal of redundancy, is what persuades people to purchase overpriced but simplified products like Prada. It’s what spurred Tom Wolfe to observe in his book From Bauhaus to Our House that elite modernists want to fill cities with “row after row of Mies van der Rohe.” The German architect was known for his stark rectilinear buildings made of what he called ‘skin and bone.’

In addition to fashion and architecture, modernist desire was (and still is) embodied in many elements of society and popular culture from literature, to industry, to transportation. Much of this progress occurred during the Industrial Age of the 19th century. I can imagine the exhilaration of high speed movement through space over time on a bike, car, or train surely began with fright but ended in delight. Even desirable.

As Scott points out, the state provided the means for this desire to manifest. He invites us to,

“imagine that what these designers of society had in mind was roughly what designers of locomotives had in mind with ‘streamlining.’ Rather than arresting social change, they hoped to design a shape to social life that would minimize the friction of progress. The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian.”

FROM CRAWLING TO SPRAWLING

It was locomotives that brought many colonizers to my home town, Norwalk, Iowa in the late 1800s. But the first was Samuel Snyder in 1852. He built a log cabin near an area called Pyra. He was likely on the land of the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je) people, or as neighboring tribes called them ayuhwa “sleepy ones” otherwise known as Iowa. Pyra was a few miles south of the state capital, Des Moines (Hartford of the West) that was incorporated just one year earlier.

By 1856, four years later, Pyra had a post office and a new resident, George Swan, who made his presence known by “putting up a pretentious edifice, to be used as a hotel.” Swan was a politician and newspaper publisher who moved from Norwalk, Ohio but was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. He became postmaster in part to change the name of the town from Pyra to Norwalk.

The renaming of Indigenous place names to Western names is another common act of the ‘High Modernist’, as is laying out a town in your vision. Which was the next thing Swan did.

The county and the township had already been gridded and platted as part of Thomas Jefferson’s squaring of a nation, but it was Swan’s ‘authoritarian’ vision that allowed for the ‘social engineering’ of the town I grew up in. He was aided by a handful of settlers including Jesse Huff and Mary Huff. One of my best friends came from the Huff family, his uncle was our baseball coach, and his grandpa was the long time Norwalk city manager. That’s three generations of city administration aided by the modern state’s ‘means of acting on the desire’ to ‘level terrain’ so they may build their ‘utopia.’

It took until the 1950s and 60s before Norwalk become a true suburb of Des Moines – an expansion beyond what Swan could ever have imagined. Its population sputtered growing modestly between 1900 and 1950 from 287 to 435, but then grew 205% between 1950 and 1960 to 1,328. The town didn’t expand beyond Swan’s initial footprint until 1969 and it’s been sprawling ever since. It’s now hard to discern the border between Des Moines and Norwalk. When I lived there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s corn and soybean fields provided a visible gap.

Despite these well-intentioned ‘High Modernists’ sprawling attempts around the world at carefully planned and engineered social utopias, scholarly literature reveals what Scott suspects. Research across economists, geographers, and planners suggests this general consensus:

“urban sprawl as a multidimensional phenomenon [is] typified by an unplanned and uneven pattern of urban development that is driven by a multitude of processes and which leads to the inefficient utilisation of land resources. Urban sprawl is observed globally, though its characteristics and impacts vary.”

The words ‘uneven’ and ‘multitude of processes’ and ‘inefficient utilization’ resulting in ‘varying impacts’ don’t fit the exacting premise promised by enlightened ‘High Modernists.’ This study I’m quoting was done in reaction to the fact that despite the populations of European cities declining, their footprints have continued to sprawl since the 1970s. They say, “There is no sign that this trend is slowing down and, as a result, the demand for land around cities is becoming a critical issue in many areas.” This is the essence of urban sprawl.

The ordinal origins of sprawl are synonymous with their historic modernist and economic origins – the Central Business District. The shape and pattern of the impending sprawl in the United States and Europe is like a spider spinning it’s web from the center out. Causes are often oversimplified by a focus on the economic trade-off between housing prices and commuting costs. Importantly, this economic function is a result of the modern state’s role in ‘providing the means of acting on the desire’ of select individuals to live ‘elsewhere.’

There are other factors that determine the shape, resolution, and scale of sprawl. A 2006 study determined that

“sprawl in the USA between 1976 and 1992 was positively related to groundwater availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralised employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth and the low impact of public service financing on local taxpayers.”

Other studies include another big factor in the United States, ethnicity: that same 2006 study found “that increases in the percentage of ethnic minority populations within cities and rising city centre crime rates both led to a growth in urban sprawl.” Curiously, a similar study focused on Europe “confirmed the positive impact of higher crime rates on sprawl, but observed the opposite effect for the impact of ethnic minority populations.”

I HAVE A CITY IN MIND

Sprawl isn’t just happening in the U.S. and Europe, but in developing countries as well. Since opening up in 1979, China has seen unprecedented sprawl in conjunction with their rise in socioeconomic development. Urbanization increased “17.92% in 1978 to 59.60% in 2018, and scholars predict it will reach 70% in 2035 and 75% in 2050.”

As is the case in the United States and Europe, “the expansion of urban land mainly sacrifices rural land, especially cropland, which produces negative effects such as ecological degradation, water and land loss, and soil pollution.” This study concludes that “urban land expansion has garnered much attention, and studies have focused on land transition monitoring, effects analysis, and mechanism identification. However, discussions on suburban development and its subsequent effects remain insufficient.”

These researchers draw attention to three commonly used dimensions in studying sprawl:

* Administrative - Administrative boundaries such as towns close to a city.

* Spatial - Location, Density, and Spatial Activity adjacent and within commuting distance of the city.

* Social - Attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.

A primary thrust of ‘High Modernism’ are found in those first two dimensions. ‘High Modernists’ seek to ease the ‘administrative’ costs through the reduction of ‘spatial’ complexity. There’s actually nothing modern about that, really. Unless you consider the 5th century BC Greek polymath Hippodamus ‘modern’. He is considered the ‘father of European urban planning’ beginning with his grid plan of the Greek port city Piraeus that remains today. But being a mathematician, he no doubt was seeking spatial parsimony for city administrators.

The economist Herbert Simon (who studied decision making in large organizations) describes the ‘administrative man’ this way:

“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.”

Simon elucidates how the first two dimensions of the effects of ‘High Modernist’ urban sprawl, – ‘administrative boundaries’ and remote measures of ‘spatiality’ – are ‘gross simplifications’ of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world.’ This ‘real world’ may be better evidenced in the third dimension of measures, ‘social attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.’

But even these attributes can remain removed the real world if viewed from a map or table of data. We need only look at Redlining as an example of how ‘social’ dimensions can be used to negate, subjugate, frustrate, dictate, alienate, arbitrate, automate, and attempt to eliminate certain classes, races, and ethnicities through actuated, calculated tax rates, interest rates, and loan rates through a slate of mandates from magistrates of the city-state, state-state, and nation-state.

The French Philosopher, Michel de Certeau, observes in his book The Practice of Everyday Life how Walking in the City, despite its gridded plans, results in people defiantly deploying practical and tactical shortcuts despite attempts by centuries of ‘High Modernism’ to control them. He writes that ‘the City’,

“provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.”

But he also wonders if this concept of the city is decaying. He reflects on the strength, resiliency, and tenacity of humanity despite the potential erosion of ‘High Modernism’ and asks,

“Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well?”

He invites us to not turn our “bewilderment” of ‘High Modernism’ in ‘catastrophes’” of its undoing but instead,

“analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay…”

As much as I like the ordered, gridded aesthetic, I’ve come to better appreciate the beauty in our ‘microbe-like’ natural world. Modernity may be defined by the analytical geometry of Descartes, but I can’t help but wonder if the work of another 17th century mathematician may come to shape our future.

His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician who invented, perhaps along with Isaac Newton, calculus. Leibniz is also credited with discovering self-similarity which forms the bases for Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Mandelbrot’s geometry, his ‘Art of Roughness’, describes the mathematics behind branching systems found in fern leaves, cauliflower, trees, and coastlines as well as our circulatory system, nervous system, bronchial system, and maybe even Bilbo Baggin’s hobbit home in the hill.

If it wasn’t for the fractal-like nature of the gray-matter of our brain, it wouldn’t be able fold upon itself to fit within the small cavity of our cranium. Even its network of neurons, and the synaptic patterns they form as we fawn over beauty, follow the mathematical laws of Leibniz and Mandelbrot. Our world may not need be ordained by Cartesian order because it’s already organized. We just need to understand it and follow its lead.

As neuroscientists continue to map the brain in search of what draws us to order and balance in objects as well as cities, perhaps they could consider the conjecture of British physicist and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West when he writes:

“…because the geometry of white and gray matter in our brains, which forms the neural circuitry responsible for all of our cognitive functions, is itself a fractal-like hierarchical network, this suggests that the hidden fractal nature of social networks is actually a representation of the physical structure of our brains. This speculation can be taken one step further by invoking the idea that the structure and organization of cities are determined by the structure and dynamics of social networks…

…In a nutshell: cities are a representation of how people interact with one another and this is encoded in our neural networks and therefore in the structure and organization of our brains.”

Hello Interactors,

Last Sunday I ‘rabbit-holed’ on the origins of Easter. That led me to Passover, and then Ramadan. The origin stories all involve the movement of people, or their ephemeral equivalents, through space over time. And they all share a ‘common interest’ in one of the most ancient cities on the map — Jerusalem. Is there a map for that?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MAPPED OUT

Spring has sprung, Easter Pass(ed)over, and Ramadan lingers on. Last week Christians celebrated the rising of their messiah from a tomb, Jewish people celebrated the exodus of their people from slavery, and Muslims continued to gather, contemplate, and fast. It’s rare these three holidays occur at once. The Islamic calendar of 354 lunar days cycles with the moon through the 365 solar days of the Christian calendar allowing the these three religious holidays to coexist every three decades.

The histories of these religious traditions are all rooted in the interactions of people and place. Ramadan celebrates the night the Quran was passed down from above, Easter stems from the Germanic goddess Ēostre who rises to coax the sun to return, and Passover is from the Hebrew word pasha meaning “he passed over” commemorating the angel of death passing over them.

People pass over terrain every day around the world. As Ēostre rises the sun warms the earth and people begin agitating, moving, traversing, and colliding like molecules being heated by the sun’s radiation. As the earth rotates waves of interactions between people and place rise and fall with the sun, rolling across the earth’s surface in perpetual motion.

And yet our maps sit still. They are static moments of effervescent daily life frozen in time. Google Street View offers snapshots of people living their lives; unforgiving they strive, pixels blurring their eyes. But our world is anything but static. And yet our lives depend on fixed representations of us and all that surrounds.

Take electoral district maps as an example. Every ten years, when the U.S. census is taken, the federal and state governments are required to reapportion the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and State Legislatures to match the current population. Accordingly, they’re also required to map numerically equal districts in the spirit of neutrality in a process called redistricting. Here’s an interactive redistricting map from FiveThirtyEight.

It is seemingly impossible to be impartial in the remapping of these districts. Various subgroups of the general population are advantaged while others lose out. The system tends to bias regions with economic vitality because they typically attract the most people. Those people most advantaged economically are also those who are most mobile. Those less mobile tend to be more economically disadvantaged and are usually low-income, minorities, less educated, and skilled laborers in declining industries and geographies.

The rich get richer, the poorer get poorer. Those who are mobile, move; and those stuck, are out of luck. One piece of research from 2019 by two political geographers reveals that “that districts with the fastest rate of growth have a higher level of affluence.” This means the ‘winners’ will gain house seats while the ‘losers’ lose seats. Their research looks at the 89 U.S. House seats that have shifted due to redistricting since 1960. Their results shows that,

“Rewarding population growth means rewarding certain interests that produced it, the converse is true for punishing population loss. This is an underappreciated point among the many who think that a population basis for apportionment is problem-free and self-evidently superior to any other scheme.”

WIGGLE ROOM

There are many rules applied to generating electoral district maps by the states, but according to the Loyola Law School the most common is Contiguity. There are 45 states that stipulate districts must be contiguous. In other words, a district can’t have an island floating inside another district. Borders must be adjacent.

The next most common rule is adherence to Political Boundaries “to the extent practicable”. Thirty-four of the states have this as part of their state constitution or statute. This means a district map has to attempt to align its boundaries to county, city, or town lines.

Compactness is another rule or guideline. They say, “scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness” and that, “32 states require their legislative districts to be reasonably compact; 17 states require congressional districts to be compact.” Idaho appears to have the most specific definition of ‘compactness’ stating officials, “should avoid drawing districts that are oddly shaped.” I honestly have yet to see an electoral district map that is not oddly shaped. It turns out ‘compactness’ is a matter of opinion. Just look at Texas!

Communities of interest also commonly show up in districting rules. There are 15 states that consider keeping “communities of interest” whole when drawing state legislative districts; 11 states do the same for congressional districts.” Those with a ‘common interest’ are people who share the same interest in a given piece of legislation. Just last May Kansas reinstated their guidelines and criteria stating:

“There should be recognition of similarities of interest. Social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and economic interests common to the population of the area…should be considered.”

Given these popular rules, it’s not hard to see how poor people and ethnic and racial minorities are literally excluded from representation. It’s also easy to see how redistricting amplifies political partisanship. The U.S. Constitution says little about how to limit these powers. And while the Supreme Court have stated excessive partisanship is unconstitutional, they’ve also “explicitly blessed lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage” Moreover, they’ve said they will not consider claims of extreme partisanship claiming there is no legal way to determine how much is ‘too much’.

But I’m not certain there is a fair way to map representation using static maps that assume constituents somehow live, work, pray, or school within an electoral district. Perhaps it’s possible in some rural areas, but I go through three congressional districts and four state legislative districts just to get to the airport. To be ‘contiguous’ and ‘compact’ the district lines go down the middle of Lake Washington. Do the people I see on the other side of the lake really have different ‘community interests’ than mine?

It was Thomas Jefferson who pushed to violently displace or exterminate Indigenous people, possess their land, and then grid it up to be sold (or given for free to homesteaders), farmed, and then taxed. After all, he was a farmer with an agrarian vision of colonial settlements across the country featuring schools, churches, and a government seat within ‘political boundaries’. You can read just how easy it was for settlers to grid their own property in a piece I wrote last year called, Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day.

While these people mobilized across the country, farmers and settlers were not that mobile relative to today. Early settlements were naturally ‘compact’. ‘Common interests’ were instilled through fear. Settlers banded together despite their ethnic or religious differences because they fretted over when and where the original occupants of the land they were farming may return hostile and violent demanding their stolen land be returned. And ‘contiguity’ would have been easily achieved given the rectilinear plots they platted.

Territorial and electoral mapping became more complicated the more complex American societies became. Trains, streetcars, and bicycles made it easier for people to travel longer distances to live and work. The ‘common interests’ became more diffuse with each advance in transportation and wave of immigration. I can see how a politician might wish to squiggle the square on a map to wriggle toward voters to tap.

Wriggle as they may, their constituents wiggled more. Now we have evidence that mobility and affluence are linked to partisan political maps that advantage the advantaged at the expense of ‘others’. We also know that lower income people are often priced out of affluent areas to suburbs, exurbs, and even rural areas. They are forced to live in areas often very different than where they work. Are their ‘common interests’ really relevant to their legislative representation?

For example, if poorer people must rely on public transportation to get to and from work or school, are local, state, and congressional politicians in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas really going to listen to their complaints about equitable transportation? Will they get fair ‘legislative representation?’

And increasingly, for some, the pandemic has made it possible to live and work in wildly different places. What does ‘compactness’ or ‘communities of interest’ or ‘contiguity’ look like on a map under these dynamic conditions? Mapping for the purpose of political representation, taxation, and even urban and transportation planning assume built environments are as permanent as the physical earth in which they arrange themselves. Even a decennial census admits to a certain pace of life that is inconsistent with the increase in mobility, technology, and, unfortunately, climate change and economic inequality.

MAPPING SPACE AND TIME

There are some who have been calling for a shift from this stiff short shrift. From as early as the mid 1990s, a leading voice in this choir of change is Michael Batty. He is an urban planner, geographer, spatial data scientist, and professor at the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London. In 2002 he wrote an editorial in the Journal of Environment and Planning titled Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events.

In it he writes,

“It is possible to conceive of cities as being clusters of `spatial events', events that take place in time and space, where the event is characterized by its duration, intensity, volatility, and location. There may be interactions in time and space between events, leading to clusters and other aggregations, but the dominant way in which these descriptions are characterized is clearly temporal.”

He defines duration as being as short as ‘trip making’ — measured in minutes or hours, to ‘living at a residential location’ — measured in months or years. Intensity could the intensity in which an event impacts people or place. It may be correlated with the ‘compactness’ of people involved in ‘common interests’ relative to those around them. Volatility is the variation in intensity and may be correlated with duration. A white collar worker with a predictable routine (or working from home) would measure as less volatile than a gig worker taking part-time jobs across a given region, country, or the world. Location, then, is the traditional measure and mapping of the terrestrial as well as population scale, size, and density.

In his 2018 book, Inventing Future Cities, Batty dedicates a chapter to The Pulse of the City. Here he talks of a,

“’liquid city’: a place where physical desires, face-to-face contacts, and digital deliberations provide a new nexus of innovation. Flows, networks, and connections, rather than inert structures, dominate this physicality as infrastructure comes to represent this new liquidity built on layer upon layer of flux and flow.”

He isn’t the only voice challenging traditional static notions of place, Doreen Massey was another. She was a British social scientist and geographer and Professor of Geography at the Open University in the UK. She began her career in the field of economic geography where she focused on social and economic inequities that create stark divisions between regions and social classes. This led her to reconceptualize the sense of space.

In a 2013 interview, she talked about how space is often the afterthought when considering ‘time and space’ in the social sciences. Time is given much attention as ‘the dimension of change and dynamism’ and space is relegated to inert earth ‘out there’ that we ‘cross-over’, ‘devoid of temporality.’ She points to a well held historical position in academia that if the field of history is about time, then geography must be relegated to space. Throughout her career, she worked to change that.

Her research and writing aimed,

“to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live, and in the organization of the societies in which we live.”

She offers this scenario as an example: When we are ‘crossing-over’ ‘inert land’ ‘out there’ in a car or train and glance out the window, we acknowledge we are moving through space and the physical geography is indeed part of it. But our eyes and brains also capture snapshots of people walking across a street, ordering food from a street vendor, or strolling in a park. These moments, like those on Google Street View – these interactions of people and place – are also part of the space.

She surmises that,

“Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other.”

Mapping these concepts and phenomena is as complicated as explaining it, but dynamic mapping continues to make strides in mapping complex spatial processes.

One of the most visceral examples is this 2014 video of 30,000 airplanes flying in Europe’s airspace over the course of a single day.

And there are tools that help analyze air traffic flow data like this.

Companies like INRIX have been studying traffic flow data on the ground for decades. Their software allows for traffic flow analysis and visualizations using real-time data from vehicles.

When I take the bus I use an app called OneBusAway that shows in near real-time the location of a bus on route from origin to destination.

There are also companies like StreetLight Data who buy anonymized and aggregated location data from mobile phone providers that probabilistically determine traffic flows generated from cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

These are examples of dynamic cartography that approach articulations of Batty’s ‘liguid city.’ They are baby steps toward representing the dynamism Massey sought to better understand our relations and connections with each other. But they lack the richness census data provides and we’re a long way from trusting governments to track us 24/7 365 days a year as part of their routine census collection. Many people already view the census as a personal violation of privacy.

At the same time, our methods are stuck in the past. When Jesus was believed to be rising from his tomb, the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or Muslims fasting as the Quran was handed down it was all happening in cities they believed to be as permanent as the religions they birthed. In the case of Jerusalem, it was. That certainty came under question during the dawning of the Enlightenment and the spread of colonialism. The Industrial Age accelerated the pace of change and innovation in technology and urban design. Society’s pace quickened and cities, and connections to them, acted as civic accelerators.

In 1914 Scottish cartographer and geographer John Bartholomew created an Atlas of Economic Geography for King George V. It included a map that showed how long it would take to get to various places around the globe. It would have taken King George several weeks to traverse the boundaries of his British Empire. You can now do it in a day.

There is a disconnect between the open-ended superexponential growth of ‘political boundaries’ that accelerate our pace of life and the process of determining who governs them. Representative governments are determined by methods of mapping from a bygone era. What does this say about our future?

I’m with Michael Batty when he says,

“I think there is much we need to say about cities as we come to terms with a world that is intricately connected and where information underpins our every act.”

Hello Interactors,

I ran into a friend last week who shared a bit of neighborly news. A border dispute is brewing in our neighborhood and you can bet maps are soon to be weaponized. It’s nothing new in border disputes around the world, but do maps really lead to a shared understanding of people and their interaction with place? It may be time cartography gets radical.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

COMMUNITIES DEMANDING IMPUNITIES

I step quietly as I near the end of the private lane. Ahead there’s a beige colored fence, barely six feet high, blocking the pathway. It’s attached adjacently to a fence bordering the owner’s yard. As I gently approach the fence I see a dingy string innocently dangling from a small hole in the upper right corner near the fence post. A slight tug on the string and I hear a metal latch release on the other side. It’s not a fence after all, but a secret gate.

I push it open and slither through sheepishly looking around to see if I’d been caught. I’m careful to lift the cold black metal latch to silence it as I gently close the gate behind me. I scurry past the driveway glancing at the house. My pace quickens down the remainder of the private lane before me. I self-consciously scurry by neighboring homes and scamper up a steep hill before triumphantly stepping onto the territory of public domain: a city street.

This secret passage along a private drive is known to longtime locals in the neighborhood like me. The gate sits on private property connecting two private lanes that connect two public parks at each end. Adventurous out-of-towners looking to walk or bike from one park to the other usually see the gate masquerading as a fence and turn around. But for as long as these roads have existed, locals have hastily snuck through the graciously placed gate.

But the fate of this gate is a question as of late. Do they have the right to block a pedestrian route that connects public parks even though it’s on private land? Or do they have the duty to honor the traditions of a community that has relied on this path for decades if not centuries? To answer these questions, governments, corporations, and individuals turn to legally binding property maps. Instead of arming themselves with their own maps in a race to the court, perhaps they should join arms around one map seeking mutual support.

The word map is a shortened version of the 14th century middle English word, mapemounde. That’s a compound word combining latin’s mappa, “napkin or cloth”, and mundi “of the world” and was used to describe a map of the world that was most likely drawn on an ancient cloth or papyrus.

This etymology resembles cartography from latin’s carta "leaf of paper or a writing tablet" and graphia "to scrape or scratch" (on clay tablets with a stylus)”.

Given modern cartography’s reliance on coordinates, the word cartography easily could have emerged from the word cartesian. That word is derived from the latin word cartesius which is the Latin spelling of descartes – the last name of the French mathematician, René Descartes. Descartes merged the fields of geometry and algebra to form coordinate geometry. It was a discovery that, as Joel L. Morrison writes in the History of Cartography, formed the

”foundation of analytic geometry and provided geometric interpretations for many other branches of mathematics, such as linear algebra, complex analysis, differential geometry, multivariate calculus, and group theory, and, of course, for cartography.”

This two dimensional rectangular coordinate system made it easy for 17th century land barons and imperial governments to more easily and accurately calculate distance and area on a curved earth and communicate them on a flat piece of paper. The increased expediency, accuracy, durability, and portability of paper allowed Cartesian maps to accelerate territorial expansionism and colonization around the world.

But rectangular mapping of property, Cadastral Mapping, dates back to the Romans in the first century A.D. Cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,

“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration...”

Even as Descartes was inventing analytical geometry in the 1600s, European colonizers in the Americas were using rectilinear maps in attempts to negotiate land rights with Indigenous people. For example, between 1666 and 1668 a land deed clerk filed a copy of a map detailing a coastal area in what is now as Massachusetts near Buzzards Bay. The original map was drawn by a Harvard educated Indigenous man named John Sassamon who was also a member of the Massachusett tribe.

Sassamon was respected by colonizers because he represented the ideal of an assimilated native but he was also held in high regard by local tribes…including the Wampanoag for which this map served as a legal document. He was an asset to both populations and served as an interpreter in a wide range of negotiations between tribes and colonizers.

This map was used by the Plymouth colonists to negotiate terms over Wampanoag land with their leader Metacom (or as he was also known as, King Phillip). It shows a rectangle featuring a river on the left side of the map labeled, “This is a river”, a line drawn at the top and the bottom labeled, “This line is a path”, and on the right side is a vertical line that encloses the rectangle. Surrounding the area are names of tribes and a body of text at the bottom describing the terms of the deal.

Herein lies a controversy, the intention of the map, and the fate of the mapped land. The text can be read one of two ways:

“Wee are now willing should be sold” or “Wee are not willing should be sold”.

The full statement in the records reads:

“This may informe the honor Court that I Phillip arne willing to sell the Land within this draught…I haue set downe all the principal! names of the land wee are not willing should be sold. ffrom Pacanaukett the 24th of the 12th month 1668

PHILLIP [his mark]”

Nine years later, in January of 1675, Sassamon warned the governor of the Plymouth Colony, Josiah Winslow, that Metacom (King Phillip) was planning an attack. The Wampanaog, and other tribes, had become frustrated and threatened by encroaching colonists. Days later Sassamon’s body was found in a pond.

At first many thought he had drowned fishing, but further evidence revealed his neck had been violently broken. A witness came forth claiming to have seen three Wampanoag men attack Sassamon. The three men were tried before the first mixed jury of Indigenous people and European settlers. They ruled guilty and all three men were hung.

This created increased tensions and mistrust between Metacom and the Puritans leading to the King Phillips War in the summer of 1675. The battle lasted three years, most of which was without Metacom. In August of 1676 he was hunted down and shot by another Indigenous man who had converted, forcibly or voluntarily, to Puritan ways. Metacom’s wife and children were captured and sold as slaves in Bermuda. Metacom was cut into quarters and his limbs were hung from trees. His head was put on a post at the entrance to the Plymouth colony where it remained for two decades.

LABORERS MAPPING WITH NEIGHBORS

Violence against and dispossession of Indigenous people by colonists and industrialists usually involves a map. That’s as true today as it has been at least since the Romans. But it hasn’t stunted attempts over the years to reduce or eliminate these injustices. For example, at the end of World War I, while U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and his Inquiry team were remapping Europe at the Paris Peace Conference, the League of Nations was born.

Out of this organization came the International Labor Organization (ILO) with representatives from Belgium, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was chaired by the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers. Founding members were made of representatives from government, employers, and workers. In the interest of creating a peaceful, safe, and just world, they intended to establish fair labor practices around the world, including fair pay for women – a provision Gompers brought to the table himself. Two lines of their founding preamble stand out amidst today’s international social disorder,

“Whereas universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice…

Whereas also the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries.”

Social justice and historic income inequality are conditions that need improved among most countries today as they did in 1918. But when it came time to ratify the permanent ILO members, the U.S. Congress voted to deny Gompers a seat at the ILO table. U.S. politicians were suspect of the League of Nations and many feared these international labor rights may interfere with privatized labor in the United States. It wasn’t until 1934 that the U.S., with the urging of FDR, was allowed to take a seat at the ILO by the U.S. Congress.

Nonetheless, during the 1920s the ILO conducted several studies concerning labor conditions around the world. That including the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples as a result of widespread colonization. In 1930 ILO 29 was passed drawing much needed attention on forced labor of Indigenous and Afro-descendant people.

For the next two decades the ILO continued to conduct research and create programs throughout their conventions. In 1951 the ILO Committee of Experts on Indigenous Labour devised a 20 year blueprint that addressed land and labor rights of Indigenous populations. They brought together various UN organizations like the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. It culminated in the publishing of a 1953 report on the core social and economic conditions facing Indigenous Peoples in the Americas.

Four years later this work made its way into the passing of ILO 170 as part of the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention of 1957. The preamble includes language that admits there exists,

“in various independent countries indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations which are not yet integrated into the national community and whose social, economic or cultural situation hinders them from benefiting fully from the rights and advantages enjoyed by other elements of the population…”

This was the world’s first attempt to codify Indigenous rights into international law through a binding convention. These conventions included government made maps that were used as legally binding documents. Up to this point in history almost all legally binding maps were produced by governments. But with the spread of neoliberalism around the globe in the 1950s, mapping efforts began to be outsourced from governments to private firms and corporations. This shift was amplified by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s Point Four Program that offered technical assistance to developing countries, especially Latin America, and was largely funded by private institutions like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

Neoliberal economists out of the University of Chicago, Chicago Boys, were also embedded in Latin American governments in hopes of spreading neoliberal policies that favored U.S. industries. Conservative politicians, emboldened by the Cold War, also feared these countries may turn to socialism or communism; especially given the majority of the founding members of the ILO and the League of Nations favored social programs as a means of protecting and providing social justice and stability. The U.S. stood alone in opposition to these principles and policies, but remained influential nonetheless given the U.S. military and monetary domination.

But the privatization of legal and technical documents by neoliberals, including maps, resulted in unintended consequences. If within the ILO trifecta of “government, employers, and workers” governments and employers could provide legally binding maps and documents, so could workers. This opened an opportunity for Indigenous communities, and their advocates, to provide their own maps that countered centuries-old border claims and land rights made by expansionist governments and industrialists, both of which are inextricably linked.

The language in ILO 170, while groundbreaking, was still drenched in paternalistic chauvinism and assumed assimilation of Indigenous Peoples as the binding element. One example is shown in the preamble above, “not yet integrated into the national community.” Over the course of the following 40 years Indigenous Peoples worked with the international community to revise the language. In 1989 the ILO passed ILO 169 which “takes the approach of respect for the cultures, ways of life, traditions and customary laws of Indigenous and tribal Peoples who are covered by it. It presumes that they will continue to exist as parts of national societies with their own identity, their own structures and their own traditions. The Convention presumes that these structures and ways of life have a value that needs to be protected.”

However, the word Indigenous Peoples was footnoted. In a compromise to include language of Indigenous self-determination, the ILO asked that the United Nations take up the matter on self-determination claiming it was beyond the scope of the ILO.

Indigenous people continue to advocate for their rights as “workers” through labor organizations in the ILO trio of “government, employers, and workers.” Only 23 of the 187 countries in the ILO have ratified ILO 169 and the United States and Canada are not among them. Most all are in Latin America and one of the most lethal legal weapon Indigenous people have continue to be counter-maps – maps that counter centuries of exploitive hegemonic colonialism.

FROM FALLABLE MAPS TO TANGIBLE RAPS

After decades at successful attempts at counter-mapping, it may have run its course. Governments and corporations have come to use maps to gain further legal control over Indigenous lands through abundant resources and political maneuvering. If the courtrooms of international law were a knife fight, governments and corporations show up with laser guided missiles. Labor unions in those 23 countries that ratified ILO 169 struggle for leverage, representation, and a voice – especially unions representing Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. And if they’re suffering, imagine the masses of unrepresented workers in the remaining 164 countries who have not ratified ILO 169.

Meanwhile more and more natural resources are sought in increasingly sensitive environmental areas, like the Amazon forests, where the majority of biodiversity and CO2 sucking vegetation is protected by Indigenous communities and their way of life. And as global warming increases, their living conditions will likely lead to more dispossession and even extinction.

Mapping technologies since 1989 have also become progressively democratized. They’ve empowered even more people to take to cartography to get their voices heard, claim their land, and their way of life. There has also been a steady increase in members of these Indigenous populations earning degrees in science, social science, technology, and law. They’ve also found increasing numbers of likeminded scholars, intellectuals, activists, and practitioners from the around the world to help.

Bjørn Sletto, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, and Charles Hale are four such examples. They are editors of a recent book called Radical cartographies : participatory mapmaking from Latin America published by the University of Texas Press. It “sheds light on the innovative uses of participatory mapping emerging from Latin America’s marginalized communities”. It’s a “diverse collection” of maps and mapping techniques that “reconceptualize what maps mean”. They argue what is missing, even in counter-mapping, are “representations of identity and place”.

The lead editor, Bjørn Sletto, is a native of Norway, was educated in the United States, and has lived and researched in Indigenous communities and border cities in Latin America. He writes in the introduction that

“Beyond making claims on the state, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities appropriate participatory mapping technologies to strengthen self-determination, local governance, and resource management within their own territories…”

What he’s found over decades of experience is that,

“This fundamental rethinking of the role of maps and the different ways they can be created, analyzed, and remade is driven in large part by inhabitants of the territories themselves, rather than by Western scholars or NGOs.”

These scholars have compiled a book that gives these Ingenious people voice and representation through their own methods of cartography. They’ve been allowed to describe geographies “in their own language and on their own terms.” By “describing and depicting the natural and built environments emerging from Indigenous, Black, and other traditional groups in Latin America” they are able to “demonstrate that these radical mapping practices are as varied as the communities in which they take place”.

María Laura Nahuel is one contributor in the book. She is a resident of the Mapuce Lof (Community) Newen Mapu, Neuquén, Argentina and received her undergraduate degree in geography from the Department of Humanities at the National University of Comahue, Argentina. She writes that,

“the current political, economic, cultural, and judicial context of our work has led us to think carefully about how the state’s historic monopoly over cartography has served to subjugate the ancestral and millenary wisdom of our people, the Mapuce. In particular, new multinational resource extraction projects, which are endorsed by the Argentine government, threaten our livelihood and subject us to a constant state of tension and uncertainty. This reality has led us to develop territorial defense strategies as well as plans for achieving kvme felen, or a state of good living. Mapuce participatory cultural mapping plays a key role in this process.”

Co-editor Joe Bryan is another contributor in the book. He is the associate professor in geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he focuses on Indigenous politics in the Americas, human rights, and critical cartography. He asks in the book’s concluding commentary:

“What is a territory? The question pops up repeatedly across the chapters in this volume. After all, what are mapping projects if not attempts to define territory? The problem, as several of the authors suggest, is that mapping affords a partial understanding of territory at best. At worst, mapping runs completely counter to Black and Indigenous concepts of territory with potentially devastating results. That outcome makes the question of what a territory is all the more pressing...”

He goes on to observe that,

“We are used to thinking of territory as a closed object, a thing that can be mapped, recognized, and demarcated. The dominance of this concept is reinforced by mapping, beginning with the use of GPS units and other cartographic technologies to locate material instances of use and occupancy... Legal developments reinforce this approach, pushing titling and demarcation as a remedy to the lack of protection…”

The owner of the property on which that gate I sometimes sneak through wants to build a new home. Their plans don’t leave room for a gate nor are they particularly interested in maintaining a right of way for the public. It’s caused a kerfuffle in the neighborhood. Home owners on this private lane want their privacy while their neighbors want to maintain access between parks.

It’s a battle of territory and maps are the weapon. Individual home owners show title maps that reveal there is no public easement on the private lane. The city acknowledges there is no easement in their maps either, but are acting in the interest of the majority and asking owners to grant easements so the path may remain. It may come down to the courts to decide and you can bet maps will be involved. But as Joe Bryan says, maps afford only a partial understanding of territory.

I’m not suggesting the problems of affluent suburban property owners are of equal consequence to the existence and rights of Indigenous and Black communities or the protection of vanishing natural resources. But what they do have in common is the insufficiency of traditional Cartesian maps to adequately represent interests of governments, corporations, and individuals in battles over borders and territories. Especially when their weaponized.

A primary trigger of the King Phillip War in 1675 was the encroachment of European colonizers. This led to misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication of territory use and rights on a Cartesian map drawn by an Indigenous member of the Massachusett tribe supposedly seeking shared understanding between cultures. Here we are in 2022 where technology and enlightened cultural sensitivity abounds, and rigid Cartesian maps are still leading to dispossession and violence of under-represented and vulnerable communities.

But like the Europeans that colonized these lands over 500 years ago, we are turning to Indigenous people for guidance on how best to map and understand territories. We are again asking them to use maps as a way to best interact with people and place through what the editors of that book call radical cartography. Perhaps it’s time we put down our weapons of maps destruction and draw a map together. It just may draw us all closer together. How radical is that?

Hello Interactors,

This post is part three of my three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE GIPPER AND CAP MAKE A MAP

On the top of the geography building at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was a high security floor the CIA helped to fund…or so I heard. I never set foot in there, but I know both the CIA and the FBI routinely recruited geography students when I was there in the late 80s. They still do. The geography department was, and still is, buzzing with research in cartography, satellite imaging, and Geographic Information Science (GIS).

I remember learning how to detect a hidden nuclear missile silo camouflaged in the Russian landscape using stereoscopic glasses pointed at two LANDSAT images produced from orbiting satellites. Special imaging software was also being developed at the university to better filter and detect these patterns, and more, in remote sensing imagery.

But the kind of mapping I was most interested in was thematic mapping. I was mostly interested in computer graphics and animation, but I could also see the allure of bending cartography to serve creative means. For my senior project I converted a digital USGS topographic map of Santa Barbara into a 3D model so I could fly a camera over the terrain as a logo rose from behind the foothills. It was used as an intro animation for videos made for the newly formed National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). This was, after all, the real focus of the geography department – and the U.S. government.

The influential chief geographer for the U.S. State Department from the 1920s through the 1940s, Samuel Whittemore Boggs, had settled on this cartographic dichotomy I was experiencing as a student. He surmised maps could be either rhetorical tools of delusion and propaganda (like fancy 3D animated video bumpers) or scientific instruments of knowledge and understanding (like Geographical Information Science). These two sides of a single coin were present 40-odd years later as I was studying geography at UCSB.

By the time I was studying cartography as an undergrad the Cold War was well embedded into the culture of all Americans, including institutions and universities. Some of my youngest memories as a kid were nuclear fallout drills at school. They weren’t all that different from tornado drills common to Iowa kids, but the films they showed us of the effects of nuclear blasts made me wish tornados were our only worry.

I also have memories of propaganda making its way into our school work as well. I remember math problems that compared missile lengthy between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – a nod to male anatomical one-upmanship.

Our culture was infused with geopolitical agendas and competitions pitting Americans against Soviets. I recall the ‘Miracle on Ice’ when the U.S. hockey team unexpectedly beat the U.S.S.R. in the 1980 Olympics. That was when the U-S-A chant was popularized. I was 15 and remember having a basketball game that day. The gym was electric with pride.

We all lived under constant fear and threat that the Soviet government could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at any minute, so anything that felt like a victory was celebrated.

The fear was all well communicated and orchestrated using cartohypnotic techniques Boggs had warned of. This fear mongering wasn’t unique to the United States. University of Richmond professor Timothy Barney writes,

“An ominous arrow-filled 1970 map forecasts the logistics of a Greece and Turkey invasion, while another encircles Denmark and Northern Europe. The secret Warsaw Pact exercise ‘Seven Days Over the River Rhine’ from 1979 used cartography extensively to chart, complete with red mushroom clouds strewn about the continent, an all-too probable nuclear clash between Cold War powers.”

The United States has a long history and practice of thematic political cartography dating back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This inspired the formation of a thematic mapping division in the State Department. After World War II, in concert with the Department of Defense, Cold War propaganda elevated to a new level — including in cartography. It was cartohypnosis through government sponsored osmosis that created widespread prognosis of Soviet-American neurosis.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he had campaigned on increased military spending to ward off what he believed to be encroaching communism and military threat from the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense was his California friend, businessman, and politician Casper Weinberger, or ‘Cap’ as he was called. Weinberger shared the same fear Reagan did over evidence that cash-starved Russia was pouring much of their GDP into military spending.

To convince the American public that Reagan’s so-called ‘small government’ required ‘big spending’ on defense, he pulled a page from the 1918 State Department assembling a team of researchers, artists, illustrators, and cartographers to build his own ‘Inquiry’ into Soviet military weaponry and strategies. They produced a 100-page pamphlet called ‘Soviet Military Power’ out of the U.S. Defense Department that was intended to ‘alert’ the public to the ‘threat’ of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Armed Forces.  

The first publications were distributed in 1981 across the country and were sold in Post Offices for $6.50 or $20 today. These were printed every year from 1981 to 1991 as what some government officials refer to as ‘public diplomacy’. However, scholars use ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘propaganda’ interchangeably because it’s often hard to discern which is which.

The fact is, these publications worked. They were a perfect compliment to Reagan’s public speeches that routinely referred to his Reagan Doctrine which was “to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” This included funding overt and covert anti-communist resistance groups around the world – many of which illegally used acts of terror.

The Iran–Contra affair provided ample evidence of the malicious intents and actions behind Reagan’s Doctrine – funneling money from Iranian missile sales to fund militant guerilla fighters overthrowing the government in Nicaragua. Fourteen people in Reagan’s administration were indicted. Weinberger was indicted on five felony charges including accusations he lied to Congress and obstruction of investigation. Another four charges were brought against him but his cases were never tried. He was pardoned by then President George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s former Vice President.

Many of these sovereign nations the United States involved themselves in were seeking independence from reliance on foreign powers like the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, because their forms of government often leaned toward social and communal inspired governments, Reagan assumed they’d fall under the control of the communist Soviet Union. It also meant Western corporations could lose out to state sponsored corporations.

The U.S. State Department had been attempting to spread Western economic and political propaganda around the world from at least the 1950s. President Truman’s Point Four Program (funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) and the Chicago Boys (programs involving neoliberal University of Chicago economists, including Milton Friedman) were efforts to spread right-wing libertarianism around the world. That included backing a military dictatorship in Chile.

REVERSING CARTOHYPNOSIS

By the 1980s these strategies helped instill fear in Americans that the Soviet Union could one day envelope the world. Decades of claims that communism spreads like a disease – Latin America today, Anglo America tomorrow – laid the groundwork in the 1980s for the ‘Soviet Military Power’ propaganda publications to have maximum impact. The fear in many is still there to this day and is heightened by Putin’s aggression via the Kremlin. Another example of an imperialist state department aggressively meddling in the business of a sovereign nation seeking their independence from an all-powerful overlord.

Author Tom Gervasi spent years in the late 80s researching the government’s claims made in these publications. He read the CIA’s annual reports to Congress, Military Posture Statements of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sworn testimony from chiefs of the military services and Defense Department officials before the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of Congress, as well as documents provided by NATO governments. He also consulted the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

In 1988 he republished the 1987 issue of Weinberger’s ‘Soviet Military Power’ with annotations in the margins debunking many claims made by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. He also highlighted salient examples and techniques of propaganda, including cartohypnotic maps.

One shows the land mass connecting Europe with the former Soviet Union. The Soviet territory is covered with a blue blob overlaying its boundaries. Flowing south into Europe are massive arrows encroaching on Europe. The map gives the impression the U.S.S.R. not only has the opportunity to expand by land into all of Europe but that they also have the means to do so and a plan to do it.

Gervasi comments in the margins asking us to

“Imagine opening a book and seeing the arrows going the other way, thrusting deep into the Soviet Union. The average American or West European reader would feel surprised and quite possibly indignant, finding it a complete misrepresentation of our intentions. That is how the average Soviet citizen would feel opening this book to this page. But this is powerful propaganda, immediately imprinting on our memory the vision of one possibility, without imprinting the reverse possibility, and so reinforcing allegations of Soviet intent made repeatedly, without any evidence to support them.”

And in echoes of Boggs’ suggestion that cartohypnosis can be reversed, Gervasi reminds us that

“Indeed, images like the ones below are so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that if the propagandists can ever be silenced, it will take several decades of raising clear-sighted new generations to erase all our artificial fears and suspicions of the USSR.”

Another map shows the entirety of the former U.S.S.R. in a simple outline with radiant cones stretched in every direction emanating from Moscow and other major cities. The title of the map is Ballistic Missile Early Warning, Target-Tracking, and Battle Management Radars. It suggests the U.S.S.R. had advanced radar systems ready to defend against attack.

Gervasi notes,

“This may give the impression that only the Soviets have such radars. A splendid map could be drawn of the U.S. radar system, stretching from Scotland to Hawaii, including the 12 large phased-array radars of our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, the four large phased-array radars of our PAVE, PAWS system, the 75 radars of our DEW Line and North Warning System, our Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System, the three radars of our Navy’s Space Surveillance System, the 16 radars of our Air Force Spacetrack and other systems, and of course, our over-the-horizon backscatter radars. All of these are already fully operational, whereas the Soviet system shown here, as the text below acknowledges, will not be operational until the mid-1990s at the earliest.”

Gervasi isn’t the only one to critique claims made in these publications. Even the conservative think-tank, The National Interest, debunks the ‘Pentagon’s exaggerations’ made in the these publications. In 2016 they took aim at what became Reagan and Weinberger’s pride and joy, the Strategic Defense Initiative – or as its was commonly referred to as, Star Wars. This was a space and ground-based laser program envisioned to obliterate threatening Soviet nuclear missiles. They write that Weinberger’s,

“Soviet Military Power made ominous predictions about Soviet lasers, lasers powerful enough to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles, or disable satellites in orbit…[the publication stated] ‘in the late 1980s, (the Soviet Union) could have prototype space-based laser weapons for use against satellites.’ It went on to imply that there were working anti-satellite lasers at [a] Soviet research complex…”

In 1989 a group of Americans, including engineers and physicists, visited this research site. They concluded the Soviets could only produce a two-kilowatt laser beam. For comparison, experts claim 250 kilowatts are needed to destroy a weapon. It took until last year, 2021, for the U.S. to demonstrate a 300 kilowatt laser weapon. But means to consistently control this device keep it from being deployed.

The representative from Virginia, Jim Olin, a former electrical engineer at GE was on that tour in 1989 and said,

“It seems to me it pretty clearly is not a power laser and doesn’t represent any threat as a weapon.”

In 1942, the librarian at the American Geographical Society, John Kirtland Wright, who is an authority on the history of geography, wrote on the power of maps:

“Like bombers and submarines, maps are indispensable instruments of war. In the light of the information they provide, momentous strategic decisions are being made today: ships and planes, men and munitions, are being moved. Maps help to form public opinion and build public morale. When the war is over, they will contribute to shaping the thought and action of those responsible for the reconstruction of a shattered world. Hence it is important in these times that the nature of the information they set forth should be well understood.”

We live in a time when someone can go to their favorite search engine, type ‘map of Bering Straight’, copy and paste the image into an image editor, type in big red letters “RUSSIA” on one side of the maritime border and “USA” on the other, and voila…a map made to persuade public opinion. They can then feed it into the social media mass distribution machine and off it goes through a global network to be seen by more eyeballs than Casper Weinberger and Ronald Reagan could ever have imagined. If Boggs thought maps could be weaponized as hypnotic mind benders in the 1940s, imagine what he’d say now?

We’ve reached a point where making your own map has never been more accessible. And it’s only going to get easier. I’ve dwelled on the negative aspects of maps as propaganda, but I’m inspired by Boggs’ notion of reverse cartohypnosis. The threat of physical war has never been more real than it is today as the West continues to push an unpredictable dictator into a corner. A corner defined on territorial maps drawn in 1919 by American’s that defined boundaries between Russia and Ukraine. Maps that were made to persuade.

Putin is a man deluded by attachments to past maps that drew borders around a union of socialist republics. He has grown hateful of those who challenge that past, him, or his beliefs. His delusions are so grand that he may only be satisfied when he ‘wins’ or everyone else ‘looses’.

Like Biden and most presidents before him, he is both a victim of and an contributor to decades of cartohypnotism and through waring propaganda between two super powers seeking imperial domination.

With maps as weapons of war in an global battle for information superiority, I ask that we check our own delusions, aversions, and desires before becoming entranced by the seduction of a map. Arm our self-made mental radar and defense systems that warn us of intentions to exaggerate, placate, and sedate our vulnerability to bombs of persuasion. And should we decide to become a cartographer and make our own map one day, make sure we’re doing our best to reverse the effect of cartohypnosis.  

Hello Interactors,

This post is part two of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Both World Wars exemplified the hauntingly prescient title of that 1904 paper by England’s eminent geographer and burgeoning politician, Sir Malford MacKinder – The Geographical Pivot of History. And his most famous simplified world map depicting the Natural Seats of Power inspired derivatives all around the world. That was especially true at the conclusion of World War I and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Peace preparations by the United States began the same month they declared War on Germany in April of 1917. By November a team of researchers, writers, lawyers, and cartographers moved from the New York City Public Library to the third floor of the American Geographical Society. Surrounded by a collection of maps and books the team set work on what was called the Inquiry.

One of the primary geographers assigned to this effort was Mark Sylvester William Jefferson. He was a professor at the Michigan State Normal School at Ypsilanti and specialized in the thematic mapping of population distribution. He even invented a term for it – anthropography. The distinguished professor emeritus of geography at Southern Connecticut State University, Geoffrey L. Martin says,

“His maps were accurate, attractive, and invariably ingenious in design.”

These maps for the Paris conference were to convey reams of physiographic and demographic information regarding Europe and surrounding regions. Martin notes,

“Jefferson had the remarkable ability to simplify complexity, to inspire ingenuity of cartographic expression, and to display such manual dexterity with economy of line that his leadership, long hours, and indefatigable fascination with the enterprise insured success for the mapping effort.”

Jefferson, and his team of cartographers, joined a select group, including President Woodrow Wilson, on board the USS George Washington headed to France in December of 1918. By the middle of December the Inquiry team assembled in a hotel in Paris, including Jefferson and his twenty-five draftsmen. The team grew in size requiring them to knock down a wall at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of Paris’ finest hotels on the Champs-Élysées.

Martin, pulling from Jefferson’s diary writes,

“By February of 1919 Jefferson’s team of cartographers spanned five rooms, an engraving apparatus was provided, and armed guards were posted at the door.”

During the proceedings, Jefferson sat on the geographers’ commission. Other geographers and attendees were impressed and overwhelmed by the cartographic prowess of the American delegation. Chatter in the halls, parks, and hotels centered on the role maps played during the convention. They were not only the common denominator amongst a diverse delegation, but also the premiere communicator and persuader.

Martin concludes,

“The value of maps had been recognized prior to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, yet at Paris the map suddenly became everything.”

The momentum from this event followed those involved in the Inquiry back the United States. The State Department experienced firsthand the influential power of cartography and established their own geographic division and the Office of Geographer. The division’s maps and collections started with those made during the Paris Peace Conference. They were organized by Colonel Lawrence Martin who served under Woodrow Wilson and became the first head of the department in 1921.

Martin retired in 1924 and selected Samuel Whittemore Boggs to replace him. Boggs came to New York in 1914 and worked compiling and editing maps. In 1921 he began a Master’s program at Columbia studying under two professors who were also cartographers at the Paris Peace Conference. These men, like many of those involved in preparing for the conference, left idealistic that maps could lead to a fair and just conclusion of international territorial disputes.

Boggs embodied that spirit coming out of college and combined it with imaginative approaches and highly academic, technical cartography skills. It made him well positioned for the role political geography and cartography was about to play as territorial pieces continued to shift around the earth’s spherical chess board.

That proverbial board was also shrinking as the airplane became an increasingly important element of war and travel. The Library of Congress map librarian and geographer, Walter Ristow, called this ‘air age geography.’ The war, and the proliferation of maps, inspired interest from the public in world geography.

In 1942, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio in a Fireside Chat he called “On the Progress of War”. Pearl Harbor was a vivid reminder to the American public that air-age globalism had clearly arrived. He said,

“This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air-lane in the world.”

But then he did something I suspect no other president had done prior or since and asked the American public to pull out their own world map and following along with him. It’s an indication of just how pervasive and commercialized mapmaking had become.  He continued,

“That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you (the) a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me in the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war."

Maps as a tool of communicating geopolitics had hit the mainstream. By the 1940’s Boggs had recognized that maps he and others were producing could do one of two things: either ‘delude the public’ or ‘inform them.’ Being the idealist he was, he worried most about the risks of delusion.

He wrote an article in 1947 in The Scientific Monthly titled, Cartohypnosis. Referring to maps he used in territorial disputes in the deserts of Afghanistan he says,

“Map-conscious people, however, usually accept subconsciously and uncritically the ideas that are suggested to them by maps. In part because maps appear to represent facts pertaining to mother earth herself, veracity and authority are frequently attributed to them beyond their deserts.”

He continued,

“In what might be called ‘cartohypnosis’ or ‘hypnotism by cartography,’ the map user or the audience exhibits a high degree of suggestibility in respect to stimuli aroused by the map and its explanatory text.”

In what could be seen as now as a critical indictment of the U.S. government by an employee of the U.S. State Department he says,

“And frequently a sort of mass hypnotism is practiced by men who attempt to delude the public.”

All the while, he seemed to remain idealistic reminding us that,

“Sometimes self-hypnotism and illusion occur quite innocently…[and] may also be used effectively to dehypnotize people…we should therefore consider what maps may be made, and how they may be used to awaken people to an intelligent understanding of the world and the problems of our times.”

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hello Interactors,

This post is part of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen. They each can stand on their own (maybe), but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Someone posted a map on Facebook recently showing just how close Russia is to Alaska. The post read, “This should make you 😳 America. My kids were not taught as much geography and history as I was growing up. This probably needs to be shared to remind us all. For those who think Russia is all the way on the other side of the world [it is] only 53 miles at the Bering Strait’s narrowest point. Like us driving from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo.”

The comments to the post echoed this worry with words like, “Too many don’t realize this.”; “There are small islands 25 miles apart.”; “OOOOOOOOO scary.”; and “I’ll admit that I didn’t realize this.”   

They probably didn’t realize this either: the United States and Russia not only share the largest maritime border in the world – a line stretching 1600 nautical miles dividing the Chukchi Sea to the north and the Bering Sea to the south – but it cuts straight through two islands called the Diomedes. On one side is Russia’s Big Diomede – actually part of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug a federal subject of Russia – and just two miles west is Little Diomede which is part of Alaska. Both have small fishing villages, one settled by Russians and the other Americans.

If folks are scared by the geographic proximity of 53 miles, two miles must really freak them out? And they’d best be sitting down for this little tidbit…there is no ratified treaty in place between the United States and Russia that enforces this boundary.

The last attempts made to negotiate a deal with Russia was in 1991. The person who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was none other than Senator Joe Biden from Delaware.

Biden addressed the committee with these words,

“…today the subcommittee meets to consider a measure that constitutes one small step down that path of cooperation. This measure, the U.S.-Soviet Maritime Boundary Treaty, represents the attempt of the two sides to resolve an important dispute through negotiation, compromise, and mutual pledge to abide by the solemn obligations of a bilateral treaty and international law.”

The dispute this treaty would lay to rest concerns the sovereign rights and jurisdiction of the United States and the Soviet Union in the seas between Alaska and Siberia. The treaty would govern each country’s right to manage fisheries and to conduct oil and gas exploration and development in a vast maritime area.”

In 1990, then Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to resolve the ordeal. But the Russian parliament believed he was acting in haste. The Soviet Union was beginning to crumble and they believed Gorbachev was giving away too much fishing, sea passage, and oil and mineral rights to the United States in exchange for other provisions. The USSR collapsed in December of 1991. This left Biden’s sixth month old efforts under the George H. W. Bush administration unanswered. No administration since has attempted to ratify the treaty and I doubt Putin is in the mood for Biden to resume talks.

The area maps referred to as Russian America, a piece of land nearly the size of Texas, is what we now call Alaska. It had already been colonized by Siberian fur trappers in the 1700s and the Russian Orthodox Church was already busy trying to convert Indigenous people to Christianity. By 1800 the Russian-American Company was established – organized by Emperor Paul I of Russia. By 1850, 300,000 sea otters were hunted to extinction. Seventeen years later, in 1867, amidst a fur market slump from over hunting, the end of the U.S. Civil War, a Russia battered by the Crimea war ceded Russian America to the United States as part of the Alaska Purchase. It didn’t become a U.S. state until 1959.

Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million or $134 million in 2022 dollars. Russia feared they couldn’t defend the territory from the British who were busy trying to colonize Canada and had just defeated the Russians in the Crimea war with the help of the French. So, they expressed interest in selling it to the then U.S. Secretary of State William Seward who had already offered to buy it just a few years prior and was happy to negotiate the purchase.

Biden gave reference to the purchase in his Foreign Relations subcommittee pre-amble by joking,

“the 1867 Convention, by which Russia ceded Alaska to the United States, made it possible for Mr. Murkowski to become a U.S. Senator.”

The Maritime Boundary Agreement this committee aimed resolve, but never did,

“these conflicts by: One, declaring that the 1867 Convention line is the maritime boundary between the United States and the Soviet Union; two, establishing a precise geographic description of the line; and three, providing for the transfer of jurisdiction and Russia rights in four special areas.”

The first American to map the new state of Alaska may take issue with Biden’s use of the words ‘precise geographic description.’ Land wasn’t the only thing the U.S. got for their $7.2 million, they were also handed maps and charts of the region drafted by Russian mapmakers. These were promptly handed over to the man who was soon to become the head of the Pacific branch of the Office of United States Coast Survey, and premiere geographer of the time, George Davidson.

He excelled at geodesy and astronomy coming out of Girard College in 1845. By 1850 he was on the California coast determining accurate latitude and longitude of coastal features. He worked his way up the Pacific coast to Oregon and Washington mapping much of the Puget Sound and naming many of the Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. Mt. Ellinor is named after his soon-to-be wife, Ellinor Fauntleroy. The Fauntleroy ferry in Seattle takes you from the Fauntleroy Cove to Vashon Island. Mt. Constance is named after her sister, and the two side-by-side mountains, The Brothers, are named after her two brothers.

His triangulation and astronomical observations were regarded as the highest precision geodesy recorded to that date. The baselines required to accurately triangulate and map the Pacific coast states are named after him – the Davidson Quadrilaterals. And before those Russian maps had been handed over to him, he had already been asked to make maps of the physiography and natural resources of Alaska by the U.S. Congress.

Most maps were copied from Russian maps and others drawn by an Indigenous Chief who knew more about the land than the Russians. A 1937 biography claims “Davidson always got on with Indians—he treated them as men.” These maps were included in a report to a congressional committee that resulted in a unanimous vote for America to purchase Russian America from the Russians.

Davidson was mapping Alaska at 51° to 71° latitude north amidst the mosquitos in August of 1867, but less than a year earlier the Office of Coast Survey had sent Davidson down to 5° to 7° latitude north, in January of 1867, to map a potential site for the Panama Canal.

The Office of the Coast Survey was started by Thomas Jefferson in 1807 and still publishes the nautical maps of the U.S. – including the annually published 10 volume publication, United States Coast Pilot. Historically, these guides relied on local mariner knowledge and newspaper articles. They were a practical necessity for private, commercial, and governmental mariners. But in 1858 George Davidson was the first to provide his own accounts making this issue the first official United States Coast Pilot by the Office of the Coast Survey.

Davidson went on to become the president of the California Academy of Sciences, a University of California Regent, and the University of California, Berkley’s first geography professor. He was the department chair from 1898 until 1905.

Davidson defined the essence of what map making was at the time. It served the desire and need Jefferson had for precision, utilizing the best surveying and geodesic instruments and techniques of the time. Naturally these were used for exacting territories for colonizing, capitalizing, and exploiting. The United States had become an exuberantly expansionist, empire-building country. But by the middle of the 19th century through the start of the 20th another kind of map was entering its golden age – thematic mapping.

Thematic maps use information not readily observed but are nonetheless part of the geography. For example, maps depicting the weather or statistical information like demographics. They can also include strategic and political information.

The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and the start of the decline of England’s dominance. New territories, like Alaska, were not only getting mapped but were also helping to shift geopolitical dynamics. The world was sufficiently mapped such that world leaders need not send ships afar to determine political strategies.

One of the first and most influential of these geopolitical thematic maps came from England’s equivalent of George Davidson, Sir Halford John Mackinder. In 1904 he wrote a paper that included a map in The Geographic Journal called “The Geographical Pivot of History.” In the introduction here he writes,

“In 400 years the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy…But the opening of the twentieth century is appropriate as the end of a great historic epoch…The missionary, the conqueror, the farmer, the miner, and, of late, the engineer, have followed so closely in the traveller’s footsteps that the world, in its remote borders, has hardly been revealed before we must chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation.”

His map is an oval shaped Mercator projection that puts continental Europe, Africa, and Asia in the middle. Its shape gives it a spherical illusion. The map’s title is The Natural Seats of Power and features three crescent shaped concentric zones. At the center is what he called Pivot Area – which is most of continental Europe, some of Asia and what became the Soviet Union, the next ring is labeled Inner and Marginal Crescent – which is more of Europe, the British Isles and Japan, and furthest from the center are the Lands of Outer or Insular Crescent – which include continental America, most of Africa, and Australia.

Part of Mackinder’s goal was to not only illustrate to an island country — that came to power by sea — just how connected the world is by land. He also simplified the complexities of detailed coastal charts and topographic maps into easy to understand centers of power. Timothy Barney, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at the University of Richmond (and self-proclaimed map-nerd) wrote in the Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography that, “Mackinder was prefiguring a social, economic, and political shift in the twentieth century towards a globalized world, all on the flat page of the map.”

Mackinder would not have known it then, but his ‘Pivot Center’ indeed became the focal point of not one, but two world wars that drew powers from all three of the Natural Seats of Power on his map. But he also put thematic geopolitical mapping at the center.

Hello Interactors,

This is the last week of winter. Next week I’ll start writing about cartography. Today’s post just may whet your appetite. All of the dislocation maps resulting from the war in Ukraine got me thinking about a pervasive human behavior; the ultimate interaction of people and place – migration.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BOWLING FOR BALLERS

I was on a walk last weekend and as I approached an Indian restaurant I noticed two families gathered a car in the parking lot. The parents were saying their goodbyes as the kids tussled about impatiently. Just then a perfectly spherical white ball of wadded up paper came rolling down the parking lot entrance and on to the sidewalk in front of me. Chasing behind was boy, maybe thirteen years old, with his shirt untucked, coat half on, and out of breath. He glanced at me, swopped up the ball, swiveled around, and threw it back toward his family like a skilled cricket bowler.

A generation ago this would have been a rare sight. More likely it would have been a boy, probably White, winding up and pitching like his favorite pitcher on a baseball mound. I did a bit of pitching when I was that kid’s age. I was taller than most at that age and could throw pretty hard. So they put me on the mound. I threw hard alright, but batters trembled with fear. I had a control issues.

Give me a glove today and I’ll spare you the fast ball, but I still throw a mean knuckle ball. I kept a couple gloves at Microsoft and would occasionally go out and play catch with anybody willing. It was fun introducing that sport to team members from other parts of the world. At some point we decided to introduce each other to our respective national sports. First up was India and cricket.

Guess who volunteered to be the bowler – or pitcher in baseball terms. Me. The guy who pitched as a kid, but also hit a fair number of them too. We played on a patch of artificial turf on the Microsoft soccer field. That field has since been torn up to make way for more buildings and an on-campus cricket pitch.  

Cricket balls are quite hard and travel at great speeds so we decided a tennis ball would be best. I took to it pretty fast, according to my Indian teammate Deepak. The bowling motion is very different than a pitching motion, but he was a good coach. The arm is kept straight and is rotated around the shoulder joint. Much like Pete Townsend of The Who strumming his guitar.

I loved it. Until the next day...and the next. Ok, for a full week my arm, shoulder, and back were wondering what the hell I was thinking. That was the last of cricket. The next international sport came from a Dutch teammate, Martijn. It’s called Fierljeppen (or far-leaping). It’s basically pole vaulting over a canal. We had a nearby canal designated, but a proper pole never materialized. Probably for the best. I was pushing it on the liability front. Somebody was sure to end up in the water.

The would-be canal to be leapt was in Redmond, in the county’s biggest and oldest park, Marymoor Park. While Feirljeppen is unlikely to ever occur there, cricket soon will. Microsoft isn’t the only one building a cricket pitch in Redmond. Just a couple weeks ago the county approved a 20-acre Marymoor Cricket Community Park. Here’s what the King County Council Chair, Claudia Balducci, had to say,

“As our region grows, we see more interest in cricket, which is one of the most popular sports in the world. I can’t think of a better place for a world-class cricket pitch than East King County and especially Marymoor Park.”

When she says ‘world-class’ she means it. The city of Redmond and the county are partnering with Major League Cricket (MLC) to build the facility. Construction is expected to start in 2023 and may one day host professional cricket, the U.S. National Team, and maybe even the World Cup. If you didn’t know, the Cricket World Cup is the most watched sporting event in the world. An estimated 2.2 billion people tuned in during the 2019 cup.

The first international cricket match was actually between the U.S. and Canada in 1844 and was played in New York City. It was contested at the St. George’s Club Bloomingdale Park in front of 20,000 people. That site is now the NYU Medical Center. A decade later baseball began displacing cricket as one of America’s favorite sports.

American football was hitting the scene then too. It eventually displaced rugby in popularity in the U.S. after the American’s won the first gold medals in Rugby in 1920 and 1924. But like cricket, that sport is also hugely popular outside of the U.S. But rugby is again gaining popularity in the United States. One survey claims participation grew 350% between 2004 and 2011. In 2018, over 100,000 fans showed up in San Francisco for the World Cup Sevens tournament. The United States is bidding to host the Rugby World Cup in 2027.

Both rugby and cricket originated in England and spread throughout the world through colonization. Baseball also started in England and American football is a derivative of rugby. The forward pass was perfected and popularized by the Indigenous American Wa-Tho-Huk, or “Bright Path.” But he was named and baptized at birth as "Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe" – Jim Thorpe.

His father was half Irish and half Sac and Fox (two Great Lake area tribes forced to settle in Oklahoma) and his mother was half French and half Potawatomi. They were both practicing Catholics and so was their son until the day he died. Jim Thorpe and his Carlisle Indian Industrial School teammates are largely responsible for the style of American football you see today. Thorpe was also the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal and was a professional baseball player.

Baseball, cricket, and rugby – and it’s American Football derivative, originated in England but spread with White colonial settlers. Like a ball tossed from it’s origin to it’s destination. And now after generations of colonization, kids of parents born in those far away colonies – like the kid in that parking lot – will be tossing them to players with heritage as mixed as Jim Thorpe…on soil Bright Path’s Indigenous ancestors once called their own.

Colonization really did toss people as if they were balls. It very much was an origin and destination game. Slaves and indentured workers were pulled from their homes to imperial origins while White administrators and ‘adventure’ seekers were tossed to colonial outposts to ‘settle’ land and people. And then before long, in a postcolonial world, people from those extended territories began migrating to colonial origins.

It's what the Jamaican poet Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or “Miss Lou” referred to in her poem as, Colonization in Reverse. The first stanza reads:

Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,

I feel like me heart gwine burs

Jamaica people colonizin

Englan in Reverse

HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE

Much of social science has dwelled on this concept of migration being about people going from ‘here’ to ‘there’. This has drawn excessive attention to these locations and the effects of the movement of people from place to place. It leads some people to wonder what will happen to that place over ‘there’ when people leave? But even more people wonder what will become of this place ‘here’ as a result of them immigrating? Immigration is one of the most polarizing and thorny societal issues wrought with emotion and socio-political implications. People seem to be most concerned with the immediate situation and seek political near term solutions fearing their own lives and cultures may be threatened.

But there’s a growing number of postcolonial thinkers and researchers challenging the ‘here’ and ‘there’ obsession and the impulse to seek near-term solutions. One group of diverse cultural geographers assembled by the American Association of Geographers settled on two major themes of interrogation of postcolonial migrations. They relate to time and place:

* Broaden the temporal lens. Before jumping to remedies aimed to cure local symptoms of migration, reach back to its colonization origins to better understand it’s roots.

* Reassess the ‘here’. What is ‘here’ today is a product of the relationships it formed with ‘there’. The people and the land of colonizers have been shaped by the people and lands of those distance territories.

Within this framework, ‘here’ and ‘there’ no longer exist or have lost their distinction. Centuries of colonization and migration have created a multi-faceted tapestry of trans-territorialism and mix-ethnicities in a beautiful, albeit complex, cross-cultural milieu.

This blurring and multiplicity is a very hard sell in a world that is becoming increasing polarized and nationalized. Nationalists would like a Hogwarts-style sorting hat from Harry Potter fame. They’d like to place this hat upon the head of every immigrant so they may be sorted into ‘here’ or ‘there’ categories. Many immigrants, if not most, feel the pressure to act, look, and speak in ways that reduce the chances of people wondering are they one of us or one of them? They’re forced to reduce their vibrant, complex heritage to fit a binary ‘here’ or ‘there’ dichotomy with questions of race intertwined.

Meanwhile, those Western colonizers who were sent or ventured to faraway lands absorbed, stole, interpreted, and profited from those distant cultures and traditions. Their kids went to school there, made friends, and maybe even stayed, married a local, and raised their own mix-ethnicity family. And of these countless families, many returned to their colonial homeland but few are asked to place the sorting hat upon their head. They then wrote books, told stories, and painted pictures of people and places of faraway lands – and still do – while the people of those lands are often denied entry to their country.

And what do we make of the effects of territories carved, fractured, and divvied up among Western imperialists? Susan P. Mains, a professor of Geography at Dundee University in Scotland, is the lead author on a 2013 paper Postcolonial Migrations. She quotes two historians writing on the partitioning of Indian and other South-Asian territories by the West. They write that,

“’...18 million [Indian refugees who] struggled to resettle themselves and the energies of at least two generations were expended in rebuilding lives shattered by the violent uprooting caused by the partition’.” Mains continues, “Displacement and ongoing territorial conflicts are the legacy of this fracture.”

In 1947 the British divided the subcontinent into two independent states, India and Pakistan. The partition was largely along Muslim and non-Muslim lines. Those religious tensions and divisions have been reignited recently as India’s Prime Minister, a Hindu, has increasingly been blending his politics with his religion. His critics accuse him of being Islamophobic and say he’s guilty of igniting hate crimes against Muslims. Human rights watchdogs are seeing more evidence of this and warn it may get worse – especially in impoverished neighborhoods. The sorting hat, a British import, seems to have followed a well trodden path to India.

This current conflict will no doubt cause Muslims to migrate creating even more displacement and fracturing of family and friends. Again, the focus by most media and academics will be on where they are from and where they are going. Are those people over ‘there’ coming over ‘here’?  But little attention will be given the diaspora within the sub-continent, the historic origins of conflict and violence by imperialists, and the impact on the individual human lives.

For many, the fear of where these migrants will land outweighs their concern for their well-being. This fear strips them of the curiosity needed to assess how their own actions, and those of their ancestors, contribute to the plight of the disenchanted, disowned, and dislocated.

GO WITH THE FLOW

In 1885, the Geographer and German immigrant to England, Ernst Georg Ravenstein published what he called “The Laws of Migration”. It was a paper that appeared in the Journal of Statistical Society. But, as my former Geography professor, Waldo Tobler, pointed out in 1995 (the 100 year anniversary of Ravenstein’s laws) Ravensein failed to provide a single mathematical equation to support his so-called laws.

It seems, like his contemporizes in Economics, he was seduced by the mathematical certainty of Physics. He sought laws to describe the migration patterns he observed in 19th century England, but forgot the math. Or perhaps he knew, like many economists, that human behavior lacks the certainty of physics and these laws were more suggestive than declarative. Either way, this lack of certainty and clarity doesn’t keep social scientists from continuing to borrow metaphors, research techniques, and language from physics.

For example, Tobler says,

“It is most curious that the literature on migration is replete with this kind of [fluid physics] terminology. We speak of "migration flows" and "migration streams" and "counter-currents", and refer to intellectual or cultural "backwaters", as if there were eddy currents. One can be "outside of the mainstream". And there are "waves of immigration", etc.”

Tobler also found an 1885 map Ravenstein created for his paper that “seems to have been completely ignored by scholars, historians, and cartographers.” The map is titled, as expected, “Currents of Migration." Tobler was a pioneer in computer cartography, but even he admitted it would be “difficult to see how one could program a computer to produce this map using the kinds of statistics available [in 1995]. Certainly it would be a challenge.”

Mapping migration continues to be a challenge for cartographers. As Putin seeks to reassemble a former Soviet Union partitioned into independent nation states in the early 1990s, he’s induced mass migration. Different media outlets use different ways to communicate these migrations with varying degrees of success.

James Chesire is Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography at University College London and he took to Twitter a couple weeks ago critiquing the BBC’s crude interpretation of the crisis. He wrote,

“It’s time to innovate the ways we show people fleeing war. 8 arrows for 874,026 human beings is not good enough.”

He goes on to illustrate how arrows imply ‘flow’ in a particular direction from ‘here’ to ‘there’. As you can see, even today, we seem to be stuck using centuries old flawed physics metaphors while continuing to emphasize place based abstractions that imply binary flows from one place to another. Lost are the heartbreaking stories, the historicity that lead to mass movement of people, and cultural and ethnic complexities that define the region.

One map he points to from 2016 is by the mapping company ESRI. It attempts to bridging the gap between stories, images, and cartography in communicating what they title, “The Uprooted: War, sectarian violence, and famine have forced more than 50 million people from their homes—the largest number of displaced people since World War II.”

But somehow it still portrays the movement of people solely as a crisis. People indeed are suffering crisis, but migrations and movement of humans, of all animals, doesn’t have to be articulated as perpetual crisis. We don’t have to keep focusing on the spatiality, the borders, the nations, the states, and the cascade of political and social hierarchies they instill. Migration is an artifact of human existence – of animal existence – whose fate can be reduce to arrows.

Arrows typically show movement in one direction. What about migrants that return? Where are their arrows? In the Handbook of culture and migration Dr. Julia Pauli, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Hamburg, writes,

“In all regions of the world, state policies frame human migration by enabling, encouraging, restricting, punishing and hindering movement. Major events like the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ have made this very visible…New policies and programs worldwide aim to encourage migrants to leave their host and destination countries and return to their original communities.”

She cites other researchers who point out, “’there is a significant overlap between the latest surge of interest in return and efforts to remove unwanted immigrants from destination countries.’” And many countries are capitalizing on return migration. Citing Asia as an example, Pauli says “Countries like Vietnam perceive wealthy and well-educated migrants more and more as a resource that needs to be returned home.”

You can bet the state policies Pauli cites will include government sponsored technologies to track, trace, and true these flows of humanity. Trump is as crude as the wall he wants built. Meanwhile, Biden is as stealth as the cameras, drones, and biometric AI technologies he’s funding on the southern border of the United States. A report titled The Deadly Digital Border Wall was jointly created and published between Mijente, Just Futures Law, and the No Border Wall Coalition. They write,

“By exposing these technologies, this report aims to empower border activists, organizers, and residents to challenge the corporate tools used for border control and immigration enforcement by U.S. government agencies, and to more effectively advocate for a surveillance-free world.”

It's striking that Ukraine had the second fastest declining population in the world in 2018. Russia’s birthrates climbed after the fall of the Soviet Union but they too have declining birthrates. Coupled with high mortality rates, especially among older men, from alcoholism, depression, accidents, homicides, and suicides most of the former Soviet Union states were barely holding on to citizens well before this war.

Russia was offering families money to have two or more kids. Payments were not in cash, but in a ‘mother’s trust fund’. Women could draw from the fund at a later date to pay for a mortgage, education, and a small pension. Few found that offer attractive. Since 2014 Ukraine has been offering $1,500 cash over a 3-year period for every kid a woman births. Critics warned this may only lead to more orphaned kids as parents may prefer take the money and abandon the kids. Another potential dislocation migration story waiting to happen.

China’s birthrate dropped for the fifth year in a row last year despite their lifting of the ‘one child policy’ in 2015. It’s their lowest rate since 1949 and the birth of Communist China. Rising living expenses is the number one reason parents give for not having more kids. Two centuries ago, women in the U.S., China, Russia, and India all would have had five kids or more, but now they’re all clumped together around two births per woman – just below the world average of 2.44.

Meanwhile low income countries are declining but average 4.34 children per woman. Many of these countries will also be the first to suffer the effects of climate change, war, and increased risks of poverty.

Nationalists around the world, including the more powerful U.S., China, Russia, and India, cling to a narrative that roots their feet in the ground of a given homeland, as if ordained by their God to take root. They then build border walls that restrict, repel, or release people based on their own delusions of righteousness. This grasping of false identity, yearning for elusive security, hungering for more land, money, and resources, and fretting over dwindling birthrates of their ‘chosen ones’ only makes them tighten their grip on faith, pump their inflated egos, and deepen their roots of nationalism.

Meanwhile, for a myriad of simple and complex reasons, people move. We like to draw lines to form borders and arrows on maps. Draw attention to binary origins and destinations – ‘here’ and ‘there’. But Susan Mains and her colleagues believe arrows are forms of “intellectual violence” and remind us that

“Lines do not determine boundedness of the communities from which folk came; or those to which folk are moving. Instead lines acknowledge that circulation, movement and cultural transfer have been integral to human populations, their cultures and society.”

Cricket, rugby, baseball, and even Jim Thorpe’s American football are all demonstrations of circulation, movement, and cultural transfer. Even the passing glance between me, a middle-aged man of mixed European ethnicity and a boy likely of mixed sub-continental Indian ethnicity is an acknowledgement of cultural transfer. Our age difference broadens the temporal lens of our own colonial origins. Soon he’ll be playing on a cricket pitch in Redmond on colonized land shaped by the people of distance territories.

Hello Interactors,

Wars, gas prices, eventual food and mineral shortages, inflation, a nagging pandemic, homelessness, immigration, migration, social and economic inequities, rising health prices, home prices, climate change, and natural disasters. What am I missing? Global society needs a hug but we’re all afraid to offer one. We need fixed, I believe, but we are fixed in what we believe.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

TWISTED UP AND HOG TIED

As bombs dropped across Kyiv and surrounding areas last Saturday causing destruction in their path, large missiles were also descending on portions of the state Iowa. These were trees and debris launched by a series of tornados moving at a groundspeed of 45 miles an hour generating winds upwards of 170 miles per hour. They swept across a swath of land 117 miles wide. The storm was rated at a level 4 on a five point scale. Level 4 tornados create devastating damage. Well-constructed houses are leveled; structures with weak foundations are blown some distance away; cars are thrown; large missiles are generated.

This storm swept through the town where I grew up, Norwalk. None of my friends or family were impacted, but seven people died just south of Norwalk in neighboring Lucas County. Another nearby county, Madison – made famous by the book and movie The Bridges of Madison County – was also hit. The National Weather Service said, “This is second longest tornado in Iowa since 1980.”

March is a little early for tornados in Iowa and July is a little late. But last July twelve swept through the state with top wind speeds of 145 miles an hour. And on July 18th of 2018 they had 21 twisters hitting 144 miles per hour.

In 2020 the state was hit with a derecho – a long-lasting wide-spread blast of tornado-level winds that destroyed tens of millions of bushels of corn. Together with the stresses of the pandemic, this event pushed many farmers over the edge. It was enough to prompt Iowa State University to create a program called, “I Worry All the Time: Resources for Life in a Pandemic.” It offers steps to help people answer the question posed by the university’s outreach director, David Brown: “How do we maintain our resilience in the face of these challenges?”

These natural events and human adaptation programs signal what the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms worldwide, “Globally, climate change is increasingly causing injuries, illness, malnutrition, threats to physical and mental health and well-being, and even deaths.” The panel of climate experts warn,

“The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments. They are causing severe and widespread disruption in nature and in society; reducing our ability to grow nutritious food or provide enough clean drinking water, thus affecting people's health and well-being and damaging livelihoods. In summary, the impacts of climate change are affecting billions of people in many different ways.”

You would think existential threat would be a top concern. Especially among citizens of the United States given our outsized per capita-consumption of energy, goods, and resources. Nope. After President Biden’s recent State of the Union Address, Pew Research reported on a poll taken in January examining American’s views on major national issues.

Seventy-one percent of those surveyed said ‘strengthening the economy’ should be the top priority for the president and Congress to address this year. Second was ‘reducing healthcare costs’ at 61 percent. ‘Dealing with climate change’ came in 14th out of 18 topics with 41 percent believing it is something government should address.

Survey participants who lean both politically Left and Right believe the economy is most important. Though, Republicans believe it more than Democrats. But not my much – 82% versus 62%. A 20 point difference. But on climate change the differential is the largest of all 18 issues surveyed. Only 11% of Republicans surveyed believe the government should prioritize reducing effects of climate change versus 65% of Democrats. That’s a 54 point difference in opinion. This suggests that of all the things Americans are divided on, the one that poses the biggest threat is the one with which we differ the most.

This survey targets adults age 18 living in the United States. I’ve been thinking about those youngest and oldest surveyed. I try to imagine what effects climate change will have on them in 20 years. The IPCC paints a grim picture. They created three periods of time that reflect what life will be like on planet earth given where we are today.

The three periods are near-term (up to 2040), mid-term (2041-2060), and long-term (2061-2100). By 2040, the near term, a good chunk of the upper end of baby-boomers (who dominate federal government) will be dead or nearing death. Those ages 18 today will be 36 in 2040. The year 2100 seems far off, but if that 18 year old is lucky they’ll be 96 in 2100. A child born today will be 78 years old.

They’ll read about those suffering Iowa farmers devastated by natural disasters, economic hardship, and a pandemic with envy. The IPCC says

“children aged ten or younger in the year 2020 are projected to experience a nearly four-fold increase in extreme events under 1.5°C of global warming by 2100, and a five-fold increase under 3°C warming. Such increases in exposure would not be experienced by a person aged 55 in the year 2020 in their remaining lifetime under any warming scenario.”

We are most likely too late to avoid this reality. The focus now is on adaptation. Our multi-legged, winged, and gilled friends are already trying. There is ample evidence of species climbing to higher land, shifting to cooler regions, or diving to greater depths in the ocean. This will have ripple effects throughout the ecosystem on which every living being relies – including humans. We have the mental capacity to do more than other animals than just adapt, but appear unable to do so.

The IPCC says, “Adapting successfully requires an analysis of risks caused by climate change and the implementation of measures in time to reduce these risks.” They ask these five questions:

* Is there an awareness that climate change is causing risks?

* Are the current and future extent of climate risks being assessed?

* Have adaptation measures to reduce these risks been developed and included in planning?

* Are those adaptation measures being implemented?

* Are their implementation and effectiveness in reducing risks monitored and evaluated?

On the first they claim there is increased awareness that climate change is causing these risks. Anecdotally, I see historically climate denying institutions, companies, and individuals calling for adaptation and mitigation strategies and technologies. It’s hard to say how many of them are acknowledging climate change out of fear or just seeking financial gain. Like our healthcare industry, many see opportunity in human suffering as a result of climate change.

But the IPCC also says “given the rate and scope of climate change impacts, actions on assessing and communicating risks, as well as on implementing adaptation are insufficient.” These IPCC reports can’t get any more direct. They conclude,

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”

GET ALONG LITTLE DOGGIE

Norwalk, Iowa is home to two movie star super-heroes, the lead in “Aquaman” Jason Momoa and Brandon Routh who played Superman in “Superman Returns”. Another famous actor was born in nearby Winterset, Iowa in Madison County – home of the covered bridges. His name is John Wayne.

Or Marion Morrison, as he would have been known back in Winterset. His family moved to California when he was nine. He got the nickname ‘Duke’ when a local fireman started calling him ‘Little Duke’ after frequently seeing him walking his dog, Duke. ‘Duke’ sounded better than Marion and soon everyone was calling him by his nickname, Duke. His stage name, John Wayne, came with his first leading role in the 1930 film The Big Trail.

John Wayne claims to have been a socialist while attending USC pre-law, voted for FDR in 1936 and supported Woodrow Wilson. But by 1944 he became concerned with communism and helped create the politically conservative organization Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. He and its members believed the motion picture industry, and the country, was being infiltrated by communists.

But critics said the organization sympathized with fascists, was anti-Semitic, against unionization, and endorsed the Jim Crow laws of the South. It broke up in 1975, but by then John Wayne’s views were well publicized. He told Playboy magazine in 1971 that

“I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.”

And it’s fitting he often played a cowboy because he believed America was not

“wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

Playing leading roles as both cowboy and war hero, John Wayne became the symbol of American exceptionalism, individualism, strength, and masculinity. When Kirk Douglas played the role of Vincent van Gogh in a 1957 film Wayne told him,

“Christ, Kirk, how can you play a part like that? There's so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not these weak queers."

On welfare John Wayne said,

“I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living.”

Ronald Reagan was a close friend of John Wayne. They were both actors, shared conservative worldviews, and had a shared vision for the American ideal that each of them personified. They remain idols of the Republican party to this very day. I’m guessing roughly one-third of the country still align to their worldview. It’s a view that holds hierarchy and authority, usually male authority, in high regard. They believe individuals control their destiny, government should not hold them back, and are skeptical of what John Wayne called ‘well-educated idiots.’

This would likely include the scientists who authored that IPCC report I keep quoting. By extension, they are largely skeptical of the risks of climate change. And they see attempts by the UN, EU, or any governmental agency to enact mitigation measures as impeding individual, industry, and economic progress.

But those who favor a more egalitarian and communitarian worldview see many of these strict social hierarchies and entrenched capitalistic traditions as the sources of social, economic, and environmental inequities and destruction. They seek restrictions on individual gluttony, corporate excesses, and industry exploitation.

This group, often characterized as ‘The Left’, tend to believe that if they could just ‘educate’ the public, especially their counterparts, ‘The Right’, they’d come to realize the threat that we face. They’re convinced education is the answer. Clearly this isn’t working.  

In 2012 a group of scientists decided to test this education theory. What they found is that not only is the theory wrong, but that

“Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.”

We believe what we want to believe based largely on which crowd we want to be affiliated with and experts are not immune. And ordinary people on both ‘The Left’ and ‘The Right’ use the best available science to justify their beliefs. And the more knowledge we accumulate the more entrenched we become.

This study confirms what others have shown which is we are polarized in our beliefs about climate change. But it also reveals that those who claim to be politically ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist’ don’t necessarily share worldviews despite be co-located on the political spectrum. Those who ‘lean Republican’ or are ‘slightly conservative’ and those who are ‘Independent’, ‘lean Democrat’, or are ‘slightly liberal’ showed their respective opinions on climate risk were exceedingly different than those claiming to be decidedly ‘conservative Republicans’ and ‘liberal Democrats.’

In other words, their study suggests polarization isn’t just about Republicans and Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives, or the Far Right and Far Left, it’s about our individual worldviews and the communities we pick. And, importantly, what opinions members of those communities deem acceptable to believe and communicate. The risk of be ostracized by your in-group is so great that we resist admitting we may agree with some of what the out-group believes – even if deep down we believe it to be truthful.

Here’s an extreme example inspired by the study. Imagine a diehard Republican Iowa farmer, Scott, who lost a family member in one of those tornados. Perhaps he heard of a farmer friend of a friend who had crops damaged by those storms in 2020 and became bankrupt. Scott may have become so troubled and anxious that he even attended one of those therapy sessions Iowa State University holds.

Somehow these unfortunate life events eventually convinced him climate change is real, but he largely keeps his opinion to himself for fear of not fitting in. Then one day he gets invited to go on a hunting trip in North Dakota by an old high school friend who works on a fracking rig. There he is surrounded by his buddy’s work pals, oil guys, talking s**t about liberals who get riled up over climate change. How likely is Scott to admit to these guys that he believes in climate change? It makes no difference that he’s a Republican or they are, he knows it’s his clan and he knows the social cost of speaking his mind. He knows climate denial is part of what keeps him in the club.

On the other side, the environmental science community and some activists, across the mostly liberal spectrum, are splintering over mixed worldviews on energy policy. Many environmental scientists weigh the risk of human lives due to climate change against accidents from nuclear energy reactors and are coming out in support of nuclear energy. They get skewered on Twitter for advocating in favor of nuclear power even though they’re doing it in the name of saving lives and the planet. The “No Nukes” movement of the 70s is so strong to this day among the environmentalist crew that anybody who dares to say “Yes to Nukes” is shamed, blamed, and defamed.

It turns out that when we feel bounded in our rationality, we are really good at seeking knowledge to unbind it. Psychologists and sociologists called it ‘motivated cognition’. Our memory does it on our behalf. For example, we tend to remember our successes more than failures. And if a recollection of an event doesn’t match our current worldview, we’ll unknowingly reshape the memory to suit our current motives.

We also tend to preference and ingest new and novel information when it suits our immediate interest and desires. We tend to want to believe a study even when we know the sample size is too small or is poorly designed. This makes bite sized social media fed by our social feeds perfect appetizers for the full meal deal found in a longer article, news report, podcast, or talk show.

But this study – that my own motivated cognition led me to – points to an even more weighty form of cognition: ‘cultural cognition’. This theory is frequently used to better understand how we evaluate risk. It states that our personal values are what lead us to seek facts so we may conduct our own risk analysis. And we are more likely to believe what our in-group wants us to believe than what may actually be true.

LOVE ‘EM UP

We live in a diverse society of conflicting opinions. For us to minimize the effects of climate change, to make kids born today not suffer more than they have to, we’re going to have to come together now. Yesterday.

So what do we do? Sadly, there are more studies identifying these behaviors and theories explaining them then there are confirming solutions. But the authors of the study offer a clue. It has to do with minimizing the self-threat people feel when confronted with information they disagree with…or more specifically, with opinions and knowledge they deem representative of the out-group.

When we are presented information that affirms our beliefs, we use that as evidence to bolster our position in our in-group. This is referred to as self-affirmation bias. It’s what keeps us polarized in our camps. It makes us feel good and raises our self-esteem. But there are many things that can raise our self-esteem that aren’t related to our consumption of self-affirming sound bites.

When we’re presented with information that feeds our self-affirmation bias we have a choice to make. We can gobble it up as another self-esteem boost or we can interrogate, question, and evaluate it. We have agency to choose whether this is true or not or even worthy of consideration.

And studies have shown that the best way to get ourselves in this frame of mind is to find another way to boost our self-esteem before consuming the information. Just by writing down one thing that we value about ourselves or others value in us is all it takes. That self-esteem boost is sufficient enough that we loose the craving for that self-affirming nugget of information being fed to us from members of our tribe.

For example, in one study they found

“a capital punishment proponent should feel more open to evidence challenging the death penalty’s effectiveness if he or she feels affirmed as a good friend or valued employee. Self-affirmations, [they] argue, trivialize the attitude as a source of self-worth and thus make it easier to give up.”

This reminds me of the Seattle Seahawks head coach approach to coaching. Pete Carroll is known for signing players who excelled at one position in college or professionally and then convincing, converting, and committing them to become equally proficient, or more, in a different position. They are invariably resistant. After all, they have their ego, identity, and paycheck wrapped up in their history as a certain kind of player in a particular position. They’ve even created their own in-group fan club they don’t want to disappoint.

Carroll’s solution is very easy and unorthodox for a football coach. Instead of focusing on what new skills they need to learn, an anxiety he knows they already possess, he reminds them of what they’re good at. He builds up their self-esteem by focusing on them as humans or on their athletic skills unrelated to the position. As Pete says, “I love ‘em up.”

He finds that within a short time they are the ones that come to him saying, “Coach, I think I’m ready to try that position.” He barely has to mention it. By boosting their self-esteem Coach Carroll puts them in a frame of mind whereby they no longer need to rely on their ego boosting, self-affirming biased past to feel good about themselves. And, by in large, they’re better for it.

This demonstrates that we need not wait for others to find alternative ways to build self-esteem. When confronted with people who you find resistant to your position on issues to do with the environment, economy, or equity try offering them a compliment. Maybe ask them what makes them feel good in the world. Ask them what they like doing, what they’re good at. Maybe even ask them what they fear.

You’ll be triggering pangs of self-esteem in them. You’ll be reminding them of how special they are. And let’s face it, we’re all special and we’re all afraid of something. My experience is that when I do, I may not win them over right there and then – or ever – but I just might find what we have in common. You may find, as I have, that just by this act you’ve boosted your own self-esteem such that you may be open to their opinions.

I wonder what would happen if our friend Scott, the right-wing farmer in Iowa, reminded a couple of those North Dakota frackers what makes them special. Maybe it’s a hidden talent, hobby, or award they earned at work. And I wonder if in doing so he would have found an opening to ask them about what they really felt about fracking, fossil fuel, and the impact it was having on the land they were walking on and the animals they were hunting. For all we know, they’re all afraid of the effects of climate change but fear the backlash from their peers more than the world ending.

The latest IPCC report emphasizes the complexities surrounding the interaction of people and place and the role these interdependent interactions play in the cause and effects of climate change. They write, “This report has a strong focus on the interactions among the coupled systems climate, ecosystems (including their biodiversity) and human society. These interactions are the basis of emerging risks from climate change, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss and, at the same time, offer opportunities for the future.”

They go on to state that “Human society causes climate change…impacts ecosystems and can restore and conserve them.” [my emphasis] They also remind us that

“Meeting the objectives of climate resilient development thereby supporting human, ecosystem and planetary health, as well as human well-being, requires society and ecosystems to move over (transition) to a more resilient state.”

A sizable chunk of disadvantaged members of our global community have been forced into a perpetual and exhausting resilient state for centuries. All at the hands of generations of a relatively small advantaged few. The outreach director at Iowa State asked weary farmers, “How do we maintain our resilience in the face of these challenges?”

Our increased polarization is taxing the resiliency of our respective out-groups. It’s time we restore and conserve them, embrace the diversity of opinion, recognize all worldviews are coupled systems that make up the messy but necessary human condition. Yes we have a climate crisis, but we also have an empathy crisis. Planetary health starts with mental well-being. Let’s boost our own self-esteem, the esteemed members of our clan, and even those you can’t stand. Those born today will appreciate it when they’re your age.

Hello Interactors,

The 80s band Tears for Fears released a new album recently. Their biggest hit, Everybody Wants to Rule the World has new meaning this week. What is it about empire building sociopaths in the West and the East that makes everybody want them to stop trying to rule the world?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CHRONICLING THE TRUTH OF THE RUS

Rurik, a Norse Viking prince, made his way south from present day Denmark, to establish a ruling government in Novgorod in what is now Russia. He was invited by Slavik and Finn-Ugrik people to apply his governing skills to their feuding tribes.

Rurik then extended his presence further south to a city called Kiev in 850. It took another 1000 years for Kiev to be pronounced Kyiv in Ukrainian. In Russian it’s still pronounced Kiev. This outpost became the center of what became the Kievan Rus; a loose collection of Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic peoples of Eastern and Northern Europe. The city was well positioned on a visible bank on a northern edge of the Dnieper River. Its convenient and defensible position allowed Rurik to reign over what became the Rurik Dynasty.

The people of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all stake claim to this origin story.

Rurik was replaced in 882 by his kinsman Oleg. It was Oleg that declared Kiev to be the capital of the Kievan Rus. Given the nexus of trading activity in Kiev it became a contested region. Oleg led many wars against semi-nomadic tribes from the south and the east.

One hundred years later one of those leaders from the east, the Byzantine ruler Basil II, came asking for money. Then leader Vladimir of Kiev agreed so long as he could marry his sister. Basil II gave his sister over on the condition Vladimir, a pagan, convert to Orthodox Christianity. He not only agreed, but insisted everyone in the region convert as well. He baptized the people of Rus in 988 and just like that Christianity was spread throughout the region.

This Rus-Byzantine religio-political arrangement was no doubt influenced by the Roman Catholic Church who sought influence over this important Eurasian borderland. By 1054 there came an East-West schism in the church. Eastern Orthodox churches in Constantinople and those in Rome each viewed the other as drifting from the ‘true church’. They split between Orthodox Catholics of the East and Roman Catholics of the West. Though they both continued to largely share the same beliefs and practices.

There is no central Orthodox Church in Ukraine any longer. It has since splintered into a variety of denominations along with a myriad of other religions. It’s estimated 75% of Ukrainians believe in a Christian God. But another East-West schism has emerged this week as Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill seek to pull Ukraine back from the allure of the West. They both seek a centralized Russian Orthodox Church under Kirill and a central government under Putin. A forced religio-political unification of the people of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine under a single language, religion, and government. Echoes of Oleg and Rurik and historic east-west tensions – Vladimir of Kiev meets Vladimir Putin.

In 1113 a document called The Primary Chronicle was written from which this history is documented. The first sentence reads,

“These are the narratives of bygone years regarding the origin of the land of Rus’, the first princes of Kiev, and from what source the land of Rus’ had its beginning.”

Seventy-four years later came another source of regional history, the Hypatian Chronicles, and with it the first printed occurrence of the word Oukraina – Ukraine.

The etymology of this word is debated to this day. The most popular interpretation comes from a Slavic word for ‘borderland’ or ‘frontier region’ but others argue it’s more possessive as in ‘territory’. Perspectives are as variable as their lineages.

A Dutch map from 1645 shows the word Okraina in the middle of wilderness. Wild indeed. By this time in history this region was known to be wild with wars fought over its land, riches, and strategic position between Europe and Asia. From the days of Rurik to today territories in western Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova have cyclically been claimed by Germany, Astro-Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. These boundaries have been contested, drawn, and redrawn since the invention of maps.

Maps played a significant role in attempts to ‘permanently’ define the boundaries of territories, and so did the proliferation of books that defined their historic narratives. The Gutenberg press, invented in the late 1400s, offered those with power and money to write and disseminate narratives coincident with territorial boundary maps that fit their view of the world and of history. This was the world’s first use of mass-media to control a particular geo-religio-political narrative and competing counter-narratives concerning regional communities. Many of which were communities of the imagination.

NATIONALISM; JUST IMAGINE

Imagined Communities is the title of a book by a Cornell political scientist, Benedict Anderson. He addresses the still vague notion of ‘nationalism’ – a squishy idea with a powerful force. He argues for a definition that transcends historical attempts to define it by self-interested ideologues. The word ‘nationalism’ was not widely used until the 19th century. It has since become a term we insist on ascribing to every human just as we do gender, race, or ethnicity

The Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn wrote,

“’Nationalism’ is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as ‘neurosis’ in the individual…and largely incurable.’”

Anderson proposes this definition of nation: “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” By imagined he means even the most sparsely populated nation will include enough people that one will ever be able to know, meet, or even hear their fellow residents. And yet, everyone claims to be able to imagine who they are. The British-Czech social anthropologist, Ernest Gellner succinctly writes,

“‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’”

Imagined communities became sovereign nations during ‘The Enlightenment’. Faced with historical dominion by religions while simultaneously discovering the multitude of religions in the world, even the most devote elite came alive with dreams of their own imagined free nations – accepting they must also fall under the guise of a given God. Hence the existence of the United States – one nation under God.

A God that some interpret as encouraging, excusing, or mysteriously ignoring communal inequalities and exploits in the name of national identity and comradeship that runs as deep as it does wide. As Anderson surmises,

“Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

One of the unifying elements of these imagined communities is language. In the 18th and 19th century the people of the northern Balkans witnessed the invention of a number of literary languages. In the 18th century the Ukrainian language was ‘tolerated’ by the more dominant Russian speaking population as a folk language spoken by yokels in Ukraine – or “Little Russia” as it was called.

But in 1798 Ivan Kotlarevsky, a Ukrainian writer, wrote a poem in Ukrainian about life in Ukraine. It became very popular. Six years later, in 1804, the Kharkov University was founded and became the literary hub of Ukraine. In 1819 the first publication of Ukrainian grammar was printed. Russian grammar was defined just 17 years prior.

By 1830 more Ukrainian writers were published in their native language. This is the date that established the language as a bonding element of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1846 the first nationalist organization was founded. And not by a politician with a sovereign agenda, but by a historian.

Language invention was happening in many places during this time. In 1820 Finland, for example, an interest in Finnish tradition and culture emerged and was written in Latin and Swedish. This created a groundswell of nationalism by writers, teachers, pastors, and attorneys. They stitched their collective past stories and dialects and published dictionaries and grammar guides. They forge a more confident and self-determined government and national identity defined by their borders and their language.

These writers, lexicographers, folklorists, and composers were not acting solely out of national pride, but to feed a burgeoning print market. And who were they selling to? Affluent and powerful families. Only half of the most advanced states in Europe were able to read in 1840. Over ninety percent of Russians could not read.

But it wasn’t just the old ruling classes and nobility that were becoming literate. A rising middle class was emerging. Former plebes and appendices amassed wealth and become professionals in a growing worldwide commercial and industrial economy. And with it a growing number of wealthy upper class – the nouveau bourgeoises.

As the number of capitalist and wealthy land owners increased through the rise of the industrial age, so did the number of languages they spoke. Latin was displaced by local dialects. This enhanced the bond between commercial and political elite separated by distant cities but united by their language, national identity, and status. Status is what they shared with those in other nations that may not speak their language. Whether it was across a border or an ocean, they knew they were dealing with another well-educated, wealthy man beaming with national pride just like them.

And with this growth in wealth and status came increased investment, bureaucracy, and debt in budding nation states. Infrastructure, civil and social services, and militaries were needed. Between 1830 and 1850, Russia’s expenditures grew 44 percent, 75 percent in America, and over 90 percent in Netherlands. All amidst the proliferation of print media in a local vernacular aimed to strengthen the bonds of a growing population of literate masses; imagined communities forged together in a shared belief of an illusory nation, identity, and an expected entrenched in-group allegiance to an irregularly shaped border drawn on a map by someone invested in securing it.

TRUST EMPATHY

The national borders of Ukraine were absorbed into the larger Soviet Union in 1944. The Dnieper River forms a natural east-west boundary that also divides ethnicities. Putin has strategically captured those cities in Ukraine that already have sizable ethnic Russian populations. These cities have a long history of bouncing back and forth between more ‘western’ or ‘eastern’ ruling nation states.

My brief version of this rich and complex history cannot be reduced to east versus west, good versus evil, or Russian versus Ukraine. And yet that’s what mass media does every single day. Our brains seek efficiency, our short attention spans lead us to crave easy answers – a team to root for, a nation to blame, a person to hate. An imagined community which to affiliate.

Whether it’s The Primary Chronicle of the early Rus, the dissemination of Gutenberg pressed books, invented languages, or mass-media pumping out sound bites they all share a common goal. They propagate propaganda from a group of selected, elected, or protected imperialists and (usually) capitalists invested in perpetuating, protecting, and expanding imagined nations. They speak, act, and plot on behalf of a group of diverse collections of people; portions of whom believe they share something in common, a common identity, an imagined community. Nationalists.

But another portion of whom see these imaginary nations as vacuous, illusory, and increasingly weakened by a growing global cyber-connected mass of humanity. They are introduced to, awakened by, ‘woke’ to the widespread voices of the historically squelched, discarded, sidelined, and suffering. Individual lives directly impacted by powerful, greedy, and imperialistic power brokers.

The three most dominant modern-day authors of nationalism, select sorcerers of imagined communities, and cunning cartographers of calculated cartesian colonies are China, Russia, and the United States.

Their influence can come in three flavors:

* Formal geo-politics by academics, intellectuals, and think tanks. One example is The Pentagon’s New Map of 2004.

* Practical geo-politics by politicians. For example, Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ or Obama’s ‘world without weapons’ – a drone policy that targeted and killed innocent people in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.

* Popular geo-politics by filmmakers, artists, and musicians. These geo-political messages target ordinary people in books as inert as Readers Digest or as overt as James Bond books and films. Not to mention the more obvious Captain America.

These catalysts of nationalism contain messages that create unhealthy biases in ways that only neuroscience can detect. Neuroscientist Emile Bruneau dedicated his academic and professional career to achieving peace in the world by understanding the negative effects of bias, often fed by governments through media, can have on behavior.

As an undergrad he worked as a counselor in Ireland with a non-profit that brought troubled youth riddled with the historic tensions of their Protestant and Catholic upbringing. After a week of successful trust building between these kids, the staff were patting themselves on their altruistic backs for a job well done.

And then, unexpectedly, a fight broke out between two boys. The next thing they knew all 129 kids were wailing on each other. He left that experience convinced he and his fellow counselors had somehow made their condition worse. He sought neuroscience to help him uncover the biological evidence behind what he experienced.

What Bruneau’s novel research techniques have revealed are three aspects of our intuition that we should evaluate with care, caution, and suspicion: trust, empathy, and dehumanization.

* Trust: For the first time those Irish kids trusted each other despite their differences. But the instance that trust was broken betrayal set in and with it violence toward the perpetrator. The greater the trust, the greater the fall at the first sign of betrayal. Altruism isn’t always true nor is it always permanent.

* Empathy: Having empathy is a prized virtue especially in intergroup conflict. Western media has clued into this. Muslim terrorists are portrayed as violent and selfish sociopaths who lack even an ounce of empathy for others. And yet the first woman Palestinian suicide bomber, Wafa Idris, was one of the most caring, sensitive, and selfless members of her community. She even trained as a volunteer medic. Bruneau discovered the measure of one’s empathy is not a predictor of violent behavior. But what is a consistently strong predictor is the gap between empathy for your own in-group relative to the empathy for the out-group.

* Dehumanization: The sure fire way to reduce empathy for an out-group is to dehumanize them. History is ripe with nation states bombarding their imagined communities with images and words depicting their enemies as animals. As the British colonized Ireland they portrayed the Irish as monkeys. The Germans portrayed Jews as rats. The US pulled, and continue to pull, from a veritable zoo of animals to portray Japanese, Germans, Iranians, Mexicans…the list is embarrassingly long.

When the U.S. was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran Mike Huckabee was quoted as saying, “I think we underestimate the radical nature of these animals who run Iran.” The accompanying graphic, presumably from Fox News, included an illustration of a sewer drain over Iran with insects streaming from it.

Bruneau used this occasion to conduct an online experiment. He presented Americans with a picture of the evolution of humans from the hunched chimpanzee to upright homo sapiens. Beneath it were three sliders; one for Americans, Europeans, and Iranians. He then asked them to slide the slider to the appropriate stage in evolution from animal to human for each group. Iranians fell 13 points shy of the reportedly 100% human Americans and Europeans.

He conducted similar experiments while people’s brains were being scanned by an MRI machine. When people were shown imagery of out-groups or people in social classes lower than their own, like the homeless, the same region of the brain was activated for those people as for animals.

But here’s the good news. Bruneau said he can find small sets people where these effects are minimized. They’re people whose occupations lead them to have empathy for out-groups. For example, Israeli peace activists brainwaves match those of Palestinians. They’re indistinguishable.

Bruneau discovered that just five minutes of explaining what happens in our brains is enough for people to shift their behavior toward empathy for members of an out-group. If you reveal the fact that bias exists in all of us, we’re motivated to overcome it.

As we continue to be inundated with words and images by academics, intellectuals, think tanks, politicians, pundits, broadcasters, artists, cartoonists, mapmakers and other creators of mass-media, be mindful of how they portray Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. Know that Russian, Ukrainian, American, and European political and commercial institutions have a vested interest in preserving their imagined communities.

Those representing the interest of the geo-political states of Russia, China, and the United States will, as always, be using dehumanizing tactics as a way to reduce empathy for members of out-groups while boosting empathy for their own in-groups. It’s this gap, Emile Bruneau warns, that we need to mind.

I feel pressure every day to take a side in this war, but I’m trying to resist. Putin must be stopped, that much I know. But if I must choose, I choose ordinary people and other members of our animal world. I choose empathy for the Russian mother whose son is being forced to commit crimes against humanity; empathy for the Jews throughout Ukraine who have experienced extermination attempts at the hands of both Russian and Ukrainian hate groups over the years; empathy for those fighting for their lives in Ukraine, seeking asylum in other lands, and the brave souls who continue to share real images and stories from a living hell brought on by yet another sociopathic imperialist.

I am suspicious of attempts by governments and corporations that ask me to trust them, to side with them, given centuries of betrayal. Yet I need government and companies to live a safe and comfortable life. And I need them to act on behalf of the living world and not imagined communities. I seek empathy for all creatures who feel depressed, suppressed, or oppressed by their political and commercial institutions, contained by their imaginary borders, and routinely manipulated through dehumanizing mass media propaganda that only serves to widen humanity’s collective empathy gaps.

It is believed that the Slavic people seeking peace in their land said to Rurik, 'Our land is great and rich, but there’s no order in it'. Those words have never been more true. Though, I suspect a Viking ruler lacked empathy for out-groups. But, then again, it was Christians who painted horns on the helmets of Norse sailors to dehumanize them as the devil.

Hello Interactors,

This week, four strange bird encounters landed in my lap — three in real life, one on my screen. First, a crow tore through the bushes in our yard chasing a frantic nuthatch. Moments later, I spotted two more crows feasting on roadkill just outside our house. Then, while walking with my wife, we watched four ducks in hot pursuit of another, flapping furiously down the street — some kind of aerial turf war. And finally, scrolling through my feed, I stumbled on a paper describing a Cooper’s Hawk hacking the city’s traffic system to hunt smarter. After all that, I tried seeing cities as a bird might. So I wrote as one.

HISS, HUM, HUNT

I first sense the city as vibration. Before sun rays even breech the branches, a hiss of car tires emerge; street lamps click off; somewhere a garage door rumbles open. Each resonance strikes the hollow chambers of my bones like sonar. It’s a sketch of distance, density, and direction. This all makes perfect sense to me even though I am just a kid. A juvenile Cooper’s Hawk — Accipiter cooperii — yet the human-made maze below me is as legible to me as the nest I left barely two winters ago. What follows, in human words, is a recount of one day’s hunt. I hope to demonstrate what humans regard as intelligence, innovation, and enterprise exists in a single act of predation.

DANCING WITH DATA AT DAWN

Perched on a gray mast of the Main and Prospect traffic light, I begin to render the scene. My basemap is no pixel grid glowing on some screen across town; it is a topological organ in my scull. Topology matters when a lamppost sits one maneuver away from the porch roof, which is one glide away from the dumpster rim. My so-called ‘bird brain’ calculates dynamic flows of probability. One flip of a traffic light, a garbage truck rolls by, and that gust of wind changes direction. My internal map pulses between “larger” when prey likelihood rises and “smaller” when likelihood falls.

As I gaze out above the east-west avenue, a slipstream peels off the 7AM wave of commuters. I spot a sparrow in a vortex that spirals from the garbage truck’s wake at 07∶13. That acoustic shadow beneath that florist’s van is one place I could pass unseen. But is a sparrow worth it?

What I am doing — unknown even to myself — is what spatial scientists call real‑time kernel‑density estimation. At any point on a simple 2D path I can plop a small mathematical bump — a kernel. I can then reason about the density mapped below me by stacking up every bump’s contribution at a particular spot. That once scatter of points on a map morphs into a smooth curve that shows where meaningful observations truly cluster. I continuously weight a landscape of pigeons, cyclists, and idling SUVs by situational context rather than simple Euclidean distance.

Complexity geographer David O’Sullivan calls this kind of adaptive map a narrative model — a story the system tells itself so it can keep acting. My mental basemap obeys what is adjacent to what on this map. After all, a three‑meter hedge is more impenetrable than thirty meters of empty air; therefore straight‑line distances can lie and deceive. When humans try to simplify distances by saying, ‘as the crow flies’, they have no idea what they’re leaving out.

BRAKES BUILD BARRICADES

At 07∶26 a stainless‑steel button is pressed; I hear the relay’s metallic click 3.2 seconds before the little white pedestrian blinks alive. I am perched here because I anticipated this poke by pedestrians on their morning commute. Vehicles will now queue as these bi-peds spill into the cross walk. The stacked metal boxes of steel, rubber, and plastic will form a barricade forty meters long…potentially.

Brake‑lights align into a pulsing crimson corridor whose half‑life I have calculated and averaged across nineteen previous dawns. Humans call the coming congestion a nuisance, but I call it camouflage. For twenty‑two seconds the asphalt canyon’s turbulence drops below an acceptable range. I can now hover as if among cedars.

A scientist has been watching from the opposite curb. They will soon begin recording this trick in their field book as so: a hawk anticipates the signal pattern and times its dives to the red‑phase distribution of brake lights.

Because most queues are short, but occasionally very long, I have to be careful to time this properly. If I dive for prey based on the overall mean of the lineup, I will arrive while half the cars were still rolling to a stop — dangerous. So instead, I consider just the top-10% longest lines. Scientists marvel that I learned this algorithm in a single winter. I marvel that they need calculators to compute it.

ZEBRA STRIPE SLALOM STRIKE

I drop. The scent of hot rubber folds swirls with the cedar‑resin on my breast feathers as the warm air fills my plumage. The slowing bumper of a school bus becomes a landing spot — a moving parapet. Fresh into the dive, the thermoplastic zebra stripes flash white‑white‑white like a stroboscopic speedometer. None of this was made for me, yet every dimension matters for my survival. The curb‑to‑planter setback of 0.9 meters sets my glide angle; the bollard spacing — installed last year to calm e‑scooters — creates a slalom that funnels starlings toward an ornamental plum in a front lawn.

Urban design handbooks invoke words like livability and placemaking, as if these geometries were some kind of neutral toolkit. But for me, in the instant before impact, this curb‑to‑planter setback, this bollard slalom, adjudicates more than legal fiction — it means life and death.

Urban forms may look passive, yet every angle, radius, and dwell time means someone has won and someone has lost — wide curb radii speed cars through a right-turn but lengthen the crossing exposure for a toddler. Urban geometry is power cast in concrete; it never clocks off, and is both political and ecological: a three‑second refuge for a starling is a three‑second targeting solution for me.

FORCE AND FEATHERS FACES FEEDBACK

Impact. Feathers erupt like dark gray confetti. The starling crumbles under thirty‑four newtons of closing force — about the weight of a brick slammed into its ribcage. While I mantle the prize, a more philosophical bird might wonder: Who authored this death? Was it my neuromuscular burst alone? Or the person whose fingertip initiated a forty‑second cascade of stopped traffic? Or the traffic engineer who — chasing level‑of‑service targets — extended the red phase by six seconds last fiscal year?

Philosophy of science warns against naïve linear causation; urban events rarely run in neat A → B lines. Herbert Simon, writing on complex systems, described cities and organisms as “nearly decomposable hierarchies,” where slow, macro‑scale layers — like signal‑cycle regulations, curb geometries, and commuter habits — set the boundary conditions within which rapid micro‑events unfold. My talon snap and a starling’s dodge happen inside those higher‑order constraints, even as countless such micro‑acts, in aggregate, keep the larger structure of life humming along.

My strike, therefore, is a city‑scale phenomenon folded into tendon and keratin — street grids, signal cycles, and global supply chains compressed into one ballistic gesture. In the metallic tang of blood this mystery unfolds. I taste data: adipose fat tissue infused with fryer grease, feather sheaths dusted in brake dust, hormone ratios ticking through molt stage like seasonal code. Each swallow becomes a lab assessment — an unwitting biopsy of the urban food web — revealing how corn subsidies, restaurant waste, and airborne microplastics percolate up the trophic ladder. To devour a single starling is to audit the metabolic ledger of the Anthropocene, one protein strand at a time.

All of which reminds me that agency, mine, yours, the starling, is relational: the prey’s demise is over‑determined by a network whose nodes include asphalt viscosity — how a petrochemical blend modulates surface friction, drainage, and midday heat plumes — and municipal bond ratings that decide whether this intersection receives fresh pavement or another crosswalk. Chemistry, finance, and instinct co‑author every kill I make, and every step you take.

FIBERS, FOSSILS, AND FIRMWARE REFRESH

Dusk now drapes the mast in violet. Streetlamps flicker on; LED headlight arrays begin tinting the roadway cyan. Beneath the darkening asphalt, copper once meant for a clicking telegraphs now pipes broadband; beneath that, bricks baked when canals were high‑tech cradle those cables like red‑clay fossils. Media archaeologist Shannon Mattern argues that cities have always computed — tallying grain on cuneiform tablets, ringing bell‑tower hours to synchronize labor, routing mail through pneumatic tubes — only the substrates keep shifting, from clay and bronze to fiber optics and silicon. And trust me, nature was doing math long before humans claimed to invent it.

From my perch, epochs overlay transparently: timber palisades, horse drawn carriage tracks, fiber conduits. My hunting tactic is merely firmware patch v.2025 in a 5,000‑year old operating system. Your protocol tomorrow may be Li‑Fi pulses from a smart pole — a future where streetlamps won’t just illuminate, they’ll whisper streams of data in rapid-fire flashes — or the hiss of an autonomous shuttle that brakes at frequencies human reflexes never reach.

And you’ll be impressed with yourself. Meanwhile, I listen, map, and adjust — in my world here, survival goes to whoever learns faster, not whoever hits harder. Every fresh tactic buys a heartbeat of advantage, yet it also tightens the ratchet: the prey adapts, signals change, habits shift. Humans follow the same spiral — each smarter signal controller, each app‑driven reroute, plugs one gap while opening two more, slipping us all a step deeper into the city’s endless, restless loop.

OF DASHBOARDS AND DAGGER-WINGS

Humans may obsess over their dashboards and digital twins, yet a hawk that weighs less than a laptop already runs a live cognitive twin of the urban systems you built. Your impressed with monthly model updates while my model is updated at wingbeat resolution. If Homo sapiens hope to build a resilient future they might start where I perch: by listening for weak signals, mapping contingencies as well as coordinates, and recognizing that every curb, click, and feather participates in these nested conversations of forces.

The next time you press that crosswalk button and that electromechanical relay inside the signal‑control box snaps the circuit closed, ask not only whether it is safe to cross but what other intelligences have read that clue before you.

Meet us in the hush of those red taillights — inhabit that brief, engine‑silent interstitial where the white pedestrian man shines — then test what flickers in your own peripheral “bird brain”. Listen for the thin rustle of variables you once called noise; trace how a single press of that button ripples through nerves, budgets, buildings and beaks. Hold the silence long enough to notice how even I, a vicious dagger‑winged stalker, leave scraps for ground‑feeders and vacate a block after one clean kill so others may eat. If you can rest in that hush without lunging for your phone or some manically measured meaningless metric, you may begin to practice reciprocity — paring appetite to need, letting leftovers seed the next cycle — while stalking your own assumptions with the same taloned precision I bring to feather and flesh.

Hello Interactors,

There’s talk of turning a nearby hotel into transitional housing for the homeless. Everyone agrees the county needs to address the homeless crisis, but they never imagined the solution would impact them. What is it about people that makes them reluctant to share their space with those who have been displaced and disgraced?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GET OFF MY LAWN

I joke that Bellevue – once a sleepy Seattle suburb – will one day become the Manhattan to Seattle’s Brooklyn. If real estate prices are an indicator, it’s already happened. The median price of a Bellevue home is now $1.56 million compared to Manhattan’s $1.25. It’s even greater than San Francisco’s median price of $1.33 million. But San Fran’s own wealthy suburb, Sunnyvale, has a median price of $1.69 million which some believe will be eclipsed by Bellevue by the end of this summer.

The population in western Washington’s Puget Sound region has grown exponentially in the last 60 years – from 1.5 million people in 1960 to 4.3 million in 2020. King County, which includes, among others, Seattle, Bellevue, and Kirkland, is just one of five counties in the country to add more than 300,000 people in the last ten years.

These two factors, record high home values and exponential population growth, has created a housing and homelessness crisis. King County estimates “about 40,800 people in 2020 and 45,300 people in 2019 experienced homelessness at some point in the year.” It prompted the creation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. Their “mission is to significantly decrease the incidence of homelessness throughout King County, using equity and social justice principles.” The organization is led by Marc Dones.

Dones recently spoke at a U.S. Congressional hearing on “Addressing Challenges in Serving People Experiencing Homelessness.” Dones talked about how prior investments “have been over focused on service systems” and not on actually housing the homeless. They said, “it simply doesn’t matter how many social workers attend to a person’s needs…if we don’t have anywhere for them to go.”

They continued,

“homelessness disproportionately impacts people of color as a direct result of this country’s history of racialized exclusion from housing. While Black people represent only 12% of the general population, we routinely make up 30 – 40% (or more) of the homelessness population. Native people, who make up only 1% of the general population, often make up 3 – 6% of the population experiencing homelessness.”

“Homelessness is an economic issue. It’s about not having the money to pay the rent.”, Dones said. It’s long been a problem, but Dones is calling for the county to respond as if it is a crisis. They recommend acquiring and repurposing hotels and motels. Dones says, “it’s critical to double down on supporting communities to engage in this work now, to rapidly online housing and shelter options that can bring people inside.”

One such acquisition the county is considering is a La Quinta Inn that sits right on the border of Kirkland and Bellevue. It’s conveniently located near a major highway onramp to Seattle, close to a transit hub, and has easy access to bike paths. But it’s also next to a handful of daycares, private schools, and affluent, predominantly White, neighborhoods.

It’s rumored one of the La Quinta employees leaked the news the county was considering the purchase. The Kirkland City Manager was forced to issue a public statement ahead of the typical public review process. As you might imagine, it exploded. Parents of children who’s kids attend nearby schools became terrified of the thought of homeless people being housed next to their kids. Area residents fumed over what this might do to their neighborhoods and home values. Over 3,000 people signed a petition opposing the purchase. Others expressed gratitude that the county was finally acting on the crisis and applauded Kirkland’s willingness to work with the county on making this location a success.

Most of the public comment I witnessed dwelled on drug use, gun violence, and sex offenders. These are legitimate concerns grounded in real fear that are not to be diminished. Alcoholism, domestic violence, and sex abuse can all increase the risk of becoming homeless, but they can also be introduced and perpetuated because of homelessness. People can also turn to alcohol and drugs in the lead up to loosing a job or a home. Substance abuse can become a means of numbing the pains of living on the street. The bodily discomfort of sleeping on the ground, the mental anguish that comes with being ignored or shamed by society, and the physical and cognitive stress that comes with increased vulnerability to crime and violence would make anyone seek comfort from drugs or alcohol.

Meanwhile, one 2021 study reveals how “homeless youths frequently engage in survival sex as a means to get their basic needs met…The literature suggests that coercion, economic necessity, substance use, and having friends and peers involved in survival sex are key factors...” The researcher concludes that solutions should not only focus on getting these youth trauma-informed care and treatments for substance abuse, but also jobs and to “help secure transitional or stable housing.”

It's what leads Marc Dones to stress,

“The reality is that every day we allow someone to experience homelessness, the harder it will be for us to connect them with the resources they need.”

Homelessness in America increased notably in the early 80s. In 1983 there was a sudden and dramatic increase in homelessness after the 1981-82 recession. It resulted in the formation of the Emergency Food and Shelter Program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It specifically calls for "sensitivity to the transition from temporary shelter to permanent homes and attention to the specialized needs of homeless individuals with mental and physical disabilities and illness and to facilitate access for homeless individuals to other sources of services and benefits."

Long time Urban Institute researcher Martha Burt was asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the program in the early 80s. She said it was too convenient to blame the recession alone for this increase. Others pointed to the Reagan administration policies that cut funding for social services and mental healthcare facilities that were more abundant in the 1970s. But she resisted attempts to pin causes on any one single factor. She said,

“The causes of homelessness include structural factors, personal factors, and public policy. Most important, homelessness is associated with poverty and the accompanying inability to afford housing…”

She found the housing problem fell into two buckets: One, some cities simply have a housing shortage. Two, those with sufficient housing have units that are too expensive. Those who can’t make rent or mortgage payments typically exhibit physical, mental, addictive, educational, or social disabilities and deficits. This makes them more vulnerable than the rest of the population. She found this to be a “failure of social and mental health support programs, and the absence of any coordinated efforts that include government housing resources.”

After 40 years of continually increasing homelessness, King County is finally trying heed her advice and are coordinating efforts with city governments and private parties to provide government housing resources. We may actually be on a path to bringing relief to victims of homelessness – to our King County neighbors who are suffering and vulnerable. So why are so many Kirkland and nearby Bellevue residents insistent on casting themselves as suburban victims of a government that is attempting to solve an urban problem everyone admits we have?

Is it because these people believe their suburban space is being invaded by what they perceive to be strictly urban problems? The homeless and homelessness are both undesirable elements of society that many see as an urban problem. Modern suburbia was invented as a place nearby desirable urban resources but detached from ugly urban realities. But it wasn’t always that way.

MY SPACE

The word suburb comes from Latin: sub- ‘near to’ + urb ‘city’. Early suburbs were areas outside the walls of cities that hemmed in the privileged and weeded out those engaged in undesirable, polluting, dangerous, and agricultural pursuits. By 17th century England, especially around London, the suburbs were considered “inferior, debased, and licentious”. A suburban sinner was slang for “loose woman, prostitute.” In 1613 Shakespeare wrote, “There’s a trim rabble let in, are all these your faithfull friends o’ th’ Suburbs?”

In the United States suburbs began appearing in the 1820s as ‘borderlands’. Then by 1850 they became picturesque enclaves in response to the ill-effects of the industrial age. That prompted the expansion and development of rural land connected by rail called ‘streetcar buildouts’ in 1870. Then came Sears and Roebuck ‘mail-order’ homes that resulted in ‘self-built’ suburbs starting in 1900. By 1940 mass-produced ‘sitcom’ suburbs emerged which were accelerated by freeway and highway expansion. This allowed for faster commuting in private vehicles from developments far from urban cores creating the ‘edge nodes’ of the 1960s. And by the 1980s suburbs stretched into the ‘rural fringes’.

Each of these periods of suburban development were catalyzed by responses to the conditions the previous periods created. Each sought to escape the other. The last three periods of which were aided by federal subsidies like the home mortgage interest deduction. But these schemes locked out poor people and especially people of color and other ethnic and religious minorities. Meanwhile, local governments and private developers created restrictive zoning laws and covenants that dictated what kind of homes could be built and who could live in them. Those unqualified were confined to urban regions and systematically blocked from living in the suburbs. The effects are alive today.

Black home ownership in the Puget Sound has declined from 36% in 2000 to 30% today. Even in once segregated areas of Seattle Black home ownership is down as increasing housing prices force them further from the area. But there are only so many places they can go.

In 1990, in response to ever expanding suburban developments in the ‘rural fringes’, the state passed a Growth Management Act that curtailed further conversion of rural land into yet another suburb. As the population increases in an area restricted spatially, it puts pressure on building more housing on existing land. But zoning laws in single family neighborhoods restrict duplexes, triplexes, or even small apartments and condos from being built. As a result, problems once contained to urban areas, like homelessness, spill over into these neighborhoods and surrounding suburban areas.

When Seattle created their first suburb, they annexed a remote area around an algae plumed lake called Green Lake. Some Seattle residents fumed that officials would waste resources on such a remote area. Meanwhile, others were eager to escape an increasingly bustling Seattle for a shiny new suburb to the north. No one today would recognize or regard Green Lake as a suburb. Most Green Lake home owners would scoff at the accusation they live in a suburb! But they’re also scoffing at their homeless neighbors residing in the tents pitched in the popular park that surrounds it. A plight they could have never imagined.

Nor could residents of Bellevue and Kirkland imagine transitional homeless accommodations in their backyards. Many chose to live in the suburbs because they feared aspects of city life, like the homeless. Some of those same people also fear those who look, pray, or act different from them. They bristle at the thought of them becoming ‘their’ neighbors, frequenting ‘their’ stores, and walking ‘their’ sidewalks. Choosing to live nearby the city also meant living apart from ‘those’ people. They thought, “Give me my space, because this is my place.”

This distinction between space and place is vague practically and linguistically. Space requires context and can shift in granularity from a place on a shelf to my place in the universe. But for the purpose of this essay, let’s stick to the dictionary of geography. It offers a space-oriented definition of place that says they are spaces “’organized into places often thought of as bounded settings in which social relations and identity are constituted’”.

These relations and identities are shaped over time. Kirkland and Bellevue, as prime examples, were created as White suburbs of Seattle especially after the timber, steel, and coal industries dried up. But even housing for these workers were segregated. It’s now unlawful to segregate suburbs, but zoning restrictions and property values still create ‘bounded settings’ that indirectly create and maintain certain ‘social relations and identity’ found in that definition of ‘place’. A place that historically and still predominantly centers on exclusionary White culture – a culture currently being challenged by undeniable shifting demographics.

The Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says places are “archives of fond memories.” “’To know the place’”, he says, “’is to know the past.’” The Canadian geographer Edward Relph says places are “’the present expressions of past experiences and events and of hopes for the future.’” Tuan says, “’it is only the repetition of experiences that turn[s] space into place.’”

This repetition enhances memories that also serve a spatial cognitive function – orientation and navigation. Our memory forms cognitive maps that not only organize and arrange components of the environment in our mind, but also the ordered pattern in which they come together to get us from point A to B. These relative locational assignments of places are triggered by memories and help cement these divisions between urban and suburban spaces. For suburban dwellers, homeless encampments become physical geographic landmarks ‘over there’ relative to ’here’. That space is their place over there and this space is my place over here.

An uncomfortable interaction with a homeless person in a specific geographical location can form a memory that gets cataloged as a landmark. These experiences give meaning to places. We want to be distanced from locations formed by negative experiences while seeking safety, security, and comfort in places shaped by positive experiences. In the book, Sense of Place, Fritz Steele writes,

“’place is created by the setting combined with what the person brings to it. In other words, to some degree, we create our own places; they do not exist independently of us.’”

LANDING IN A PEACEFUL PLACE

The geographer’s John Agnew and James Duncan highlight “three major elements of place:

* locale, where the social relations are constituted;

* location, which is the geographic areas…that frame the localized social actions and networks;

* and sense of place, which is defined as the ‘local structure of feeling.’”

One of the ways to structure feelings of place is by shaping the social relations of a given locale. One way to do this is for local governments to pass ordinances that shape the environment through law. It’s what the geographer Susan Massey calls “politicized space” and it’s what redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and rigged home mortgage agreements were all about.

The Civil Rights Law of 1964 makes it illegal to create such outwardly biased laws and legal agreements. But intentional and unintentional biases still exists. To help make progress on more equitable housing, the state of Washington signed into a law last year a provision requiring cities to eliminate barriers that could provide emergency or transitional housing. It also requires by law that cities incorporate solutions to affordable housing in their city’s comprehensive plans.

But local politicians and staff intent on perpetuating a certain “culture of place” find creative ways to do so. Medina appears to be once such city. Medina is a sleepy little wooded enclave abutting Lake Washington just west of downtown Bellevue. It’s home to some of the region’s super-wealthy, including Bill Gates. The median price for a home in Medina is $7.15 million.

On Valentine’s Day last week, the city of Medina issued a memo that included draft revisions to some of their zoning ordinances in response to the new state law. While they can’t outright restrict attempts to build transitional or affordable housing, they can limit them. It’s still debatable as to whether this language will be deemed too restrictive. One proposal says “permanent supportive and transitional housing facilities are permitted”, but under certain conditions.

The list of conditions is long but here are a few,

* The number of “standard dwelling units” on a given piece of land must be limited…presumably to one given the strict single family home zoning laws.

* The units cannot exceed a maximum of “eight residents at any one time, plus up to four resident staff.”

* Facilities must be a “24-hour a day facility where rooms or units are assigned to specific residents for the duration of their stay” with a minimum stay of 72 hours.

* Meals, laundry, and social programs “are limited to the residents and not available for drop in use by non-residents.”

* No facilities “may be located within half a mile of another” facility “calculated as a radius from the property lines of the site.”

I can’t help but imagine small high-security pseudo prisons as I read these restrictions. But on the positive side, it’s a start. And a big step for a city like Medina.

I don’t know who’s crafting these words but I can imagine they’re keen to uphold a certain suburban nostalgia of an idyllic, bucolic, and affluent reserve. But let’s not forget this is a plot of land stolen from Indigenous people, raped of old growth forest for timber, tilled to grow crops for Seattleites, and then carved up by developers to build a golf course and fancy homes a short distance across the lake from the Emerald City. An itty bitty bit of pretty nearby but distant from the nitty-gritty city.

In the Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography, Pragya Agarwal, summarizes that,

“Place is inherently spatial. However place is not static, and time cannot be detached from place.” She adds, “Not only is time associated with change in the physical aspects of place, but also the meanings of place are variable and dynamic…”

The separation of place and space is inherently vague and ever changing. We are all experiencing morphing societal normality, increasing population reality, forcing an adaptation of our spatial capacity. Our emotions are informed by our experiences, shaped by the interactions we have with people and place. As Herb Simon says,

“The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”

It's true nobody dreamed the Kirkland La Quinta would become a single occupancy transitional home to hundreds of victims of homelessness. But then again, nobody born into this world dreams of becoming homeless. For all of us to get comfortable, we should consider the patterns of suburban sprawl and recognize there is no escaping the complex and bitter realities that surround us.

It’s the yearning to escape that these nearby places take shape. But suburban formation breeds urban damnation. Spatial attempts to avoid distress, leads to contempt of places of homelessness. Let’s drop the pretense and nostalgic purity, and gift our neighbors with housing security.

Hello Interactors,

Hints of loosening COVID restrictions are wafting through the air like a contagious air-born disease. Does this mean people will be heading back to work? Some can’t wait, some would rather not, and others would love to have such a luxury to consider. Is remote work here to stay? And if so, are we sure it’s healthy?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

COMFORTABLE BUSINESS

He had just returned to the office for the first time in two years. I asked him what it was like. I wondered how many people were there with him. He responded, “Let me put it this way, when I pulled into the parking garage I counted maybe six cars.”

I was having lunch with a couple Microsoft friends recently. Our conversation started there and then turned to the current hiring climate in the tech industry. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and a dizzying array of startups are all vying for talent. They’re offering insane starting salaries, stock grants, and signing bonuses. But there seems to be one non-negotiable with tech workers – flexible working arrangements.

Before we knew it, the three of us were talking about what cities would be best to live in knowing employers don’t really care where you live. But even among well-paid tech workers, cost of living became the most salient factor in choosing an ideal city. Rising real estate prices pose the biggest challenge, but optimal internet speeds were up there too.

One friend, who had recently left Microsoft for a startup, mentioned the downsides of remote work. She said it’s really hard getting to know a team you’ve never met in person and even harder for them to get to know you. She senses judging and fields odd questions that aren’t about her, but about her role and what she’s being asked to do. And broad communication from their CEO seems to always fall flat. She said he comes across as disingenuous, less human, and overly focused on short term deadlines and quarterly results. Reflecting on our time working together she’s said she really valued the ‘non work’ interactions that happened on our team. We did feel more like a ‘family’ than a ‘squad.’

Two years of disrupted work practice has led to a combination of ‘the great shuffle’ – people swapping companies in search of higher pay and benefits, ‘the great displacement’ – rising cost of living involuntarily pushing lower paid workers from their homes, or ‘the great resignation’ – cost cutting companies incenting early retirements or aging workers opting to retire early. It’s left companies wondering if this is a phase or if people have habituated to increased flexibility. The CEO for Stitch Fix, an personal apparel shopping service, said they’re seeing customers looking to replace a third of their wardrobe with what they call “Business Comfortable” clothes. She says their customers want to stay working in sweats, but want them to look more ‘professional’ when on Zoom calls.

Cities and local businesses are impacted too. Can they count on workers coming back in droves to commercial districts buying breakfast, lunch, coffee, and drinks? Or even haircuts. Nikita Shimunov owns a barbershop in Manhattan where he once saw 50 to 60 men pass through his shop in a day. It’s trickled to 10 to 15 customers daily and he’s been forced to reduce staff by half. His financial future hinges on the empathy of his landlord.

Many cities rely on these tax revenues to fill their coffers. But if masses of people stop going in to work, it has huge implications on urban planning. Microsoft is wrapping up the final touches on a massive new corporate campus in Redmond at a time when many, maybe even most, may remain working remotely. It’s next to a brand new light rail stop planned and designed to serve thousands that now may never come.

Not all flexible work arrangements are the same or even desirable. Flexibility can introduce or amplify home and work conflicts for individuals, teams, companies, cities, and regions. Technology, especially mobile technology, has been blurring work and home boundaries for decades. What does it mean to achieve a work/life balance when the boundary disappears? And for those with young children, the burden of parenting, home schooling, and working can become overwhelming. And given our social norms, that burden largely, and unfairly, falls on women.

Women are also unfairly expected to conform to certain traditional workplace ideals that focus on physical appearance and presence. For example, wrestling with a screaming toddler on a Zoom call with un-brushed hair, no makeup, and no sleep can make some people judge her as ‘not being professional’. And come review time, how might some managers reflect on these interactions when it comes time to hand out pay increases or offer new opportunities for growth? Meanwhile men get to poke fun at each other for wearing pajamas and having bed head.  

I had a remote employee years ago and my biggest fear was that she seemed to always be available. Remote workers can sometimes over communicate or stretch their availability. They can over compensate for not being physically present. But being always ‘on’, ‘available’, and ‘connected’ can lead to burnout. These pressures, self-inflicted or induced, can also lead to exhaustion and mental duress. Some anthropologists believe humans did not evolve as we did by working even eight hours a day, let alone 12 or more. It doesn’t necessarily lead to optimal team performance either.

Individual suffering can spill over to co-workers which creates even more stress and burnout. Team members can become withdrawn which exasperates feelings of isolation and loneliness. Quiet, more subdued, colleagues can also feel excluded or overlooked. Some choose to turn their cameras off to combat feelings of personal intrusion or surveillance. Or maybe they’re hiding their bed head. This can ultimately lead to job dissatisfaction prompting them to seek another team or company.

I know from experience how attrition can spread like an infectious infliction as those who leave prompt others to do the same. Perhaps ‘the great shuffle’ we’re experiencing isn’t just people running toward opportunity, but impunity.

IS FLEXIBILITY THE FIX?

Flexible working arrangements can take on a variety of flavors and can be called many things. Even before the pandemic, Microsoft had always had what they called ‘flex-time’. It simply means your manager doesn’t really care when you come and go so long as you get your work done. But these days flexible working arrangements can be called names like “remote work”, “tele-commuting”, “tele-work“, “mobile work”, or “virtual work”. There are also those who are “self-employed”, “on-call”, “on-demand”, or working in “shared spaces”.

A group of business school researchers at the University of Reading in the UK just published a literature review on research focused on flexible work practices. They came up with a taxonomy that clumps arrangements into four categories:

Remote, Spatiotemporal, On-demand, and Self-directed. Remote work is like the COVID caused ‘work from home’ many are experiencing today. Spatiotemporal work includes shared spaces, ‘touch down spaces’, ‘office clubs’, and even ‘job sharing’. On-demand work is for workers who are on-call like Uber or Grubhub drivers. Self-directed workers own their own companies, freelance, or contract.

Each of these come with their own advantages and disadvantages. Working from home, or Remote work, is what most people think of when considering flexible working arrangements. Products like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and a growing list of alternatives, make it easy to ‘plug-in’ remotely. Like, for example, joining a meeting from wherever you may be.

I was on a walk one summer morning before sunrise in some nearby woods when I had to join a meeting scheduled in another time zone. So I sat on the limb of a fallen tree over looking a wooded ravine and took part in the meeting as the sun rose. Halfway through, however, the limb snapped and down I went. Good thing the camera was off. And, yes, I was muted.  

But these remote work products, including Slack, Teams, Zoom and others, allow for both synchronous and asynchronous communication. This can lead to days and evenings filled with either a meeting, interruptions from notifications and alerts, or the dreaded FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – a fear that addicts people to be constantly checking and dealing with email, channels, or text message threads. In other words, constantly working.

This invariably infringes on time spent with family and friends. These prolonged stresses can drive some people to withdrawal and become isolated. And for those who seek control and domination over others, like manic micro-managers, it means they can wield these real-time, always on, communication tools like a weapon. And the quicker people respond to their seemingly psychopathic needs, the more fervent their interruptions become. It’s a cycle that can leave people anxious, depressed, and looking to get away. Those feeling violated in their own homes sometimes seek a shared workspace elsewhere.

Sharing work spaces over different times and places is what researchers call Spatiotemporal work. This style of working hit the news a few years ago when the shared workspace company WeWork failed its initial public offering (IPO). Started in 2008 as GreenDesk – an “eco-friendly coworking space” – it became WeWork in 2010 with an infusion of cash from a wealthy real estate developer. By 2014 it was “the fastest-growing lessee of new office space in New York”. They grew too quickly and imploded in their 2019 IPO, refinanced and went public in 2021, and are now leveraging rising COVID driven real estate prices to recoup some of their losses. While their memberships still remain low, the pandemic has created a growing need for humans to come together physically to collaborate and bond. Especially as team members are scattered across regions, countries, and the globe.

Microsoft, like many organizations, have long used ‘off sites’ as temporary ways to pull teams together for a day or more – a kind of spatio-socio-temporal team building field trip. Some I attended were more sashay to build cachet than work with a perk, but some companies are now using these excursions as more routine means of encouraging more physical collaboration. New software tools like Cloudfare make it easier for managers to schedule and arrange gatherings of geographically dispersed employees in places like AirBnb’s, employee’s homes, or even existing offices – an on-site off-site.  

Some companies are even allocating money to teams so they can book these off-sites themselves as a way to bring team members together physically – even if it’s just for a picnic, a walk in a park, or a bike ride. Some companies are even buying apartments or hotel suites as more permanent ‘off-site’ locations. The Wall Street Journal reports that one 26 person startup, Aidentified,

“rents two corporate apartments, one in Boston and one near San Francisco, in lieu of offices, so employees can gather when needed. Each apartment is equipped with a conference table, seating areas, a kitchen and bedrooms where out-of-town employees can stay.” The 3,000-square-foot, three bedroom, multi-level Boston apartment has an outdoor terrace overlooking the Boston Public Library.   

If this sounds extravagant, it is. Companies rich with cash can often become embarrassments of riches. This competitive hiring climate exists within a grossly disproportionate wealth disparity that compounds these excesses as each company seeks to out do the other in attempts to lure and retain employees. But these off-sites need not always be entirely self-serving. The nonprofit Forté Foundation, a women’s business leadership advocacy group, took some time during their three-day off-site in Austin, Texas to build bikes for a local nonprofit…in between pamper parties, luxury lunches, and extravagant excursions of course.

For those laboring behind the scenes to prop these posh parades of privilege, it’s hard to see any of this as actually being ‘work’. Many managers funding these fun fests often wonder the same thing. In order for managers to know whether these remote employees are actually working or not requires more software. Task management and planning tools like Confluence, Trello, Project, Planner, or Basecamp let managers keep an eye on task completion, deadlines, and engagement. But this can make some employees feel like they’re being watched, scheduled, and controlled. The opposite of flexible, but still far from indentured manual labor most of the employed world endures.

AN ANT ANTEDOTE

Shared work, space, and calendars are sold and celebrated by the software industry as new cultures of openness and inclusion, but not everyone is equally comfortable sharing their locations and schedules. Others find the overhead required to fill out forms, schedule tasks, and report progress inhibits their ability to actually be productive. And when tasks are shared among team members, it’s not always clear who was responsible for doing what. Often times the bulk of the work falls on those most conscientious or those seeking glory and control. Managers are then stuck with no clear way of evaluating contributions fairly. That is if they can get employees to actually fill out their forms in the first place.

In addition to rogue, power hungry, and individualistic workaholics dominating a team, sporadic sharing work practices centered around short-term deliverables can also lead to groupthink. In an effort to complete tasks, individuals can be prone, even encouraged, to taking the path of least resistance instead of finding more creative and effective solutions that may be out of the norm. These can all have financial implications for companies as product quality may suffer, or those less geared for these sharing cultures and workspaces could suffer a loss in compensation or opportunities.

The results of that UK literature review revealed that researchers have been trying to tease apart the impacts of flexible work practices since the emergence of so-called ‘Smart Cities’ and ‘Sharing Culture’ around 2010. Within a year social science researchers were already looking into aspects of social isolation. By 2012 themes of gender inequality and work-family conflict entered the scene. Then came financial costs, lack of visibility, blurred spaces, and health impairment. And then, after COVID came to town in 2019, these topics blew up. And by last year, 2021, the themes of dispersed spaces and employer-employee tensions were added to the decade old list of concerns.

These researchers observed that, “while almost all the studies have explored both the positive and negative consequences of technology use, none have examined the downsides of changes in (or to) technological platforms on employee behavior and work.” They were surprised to find that

“researchers have not explicitly focused on the changes in traditional hierarchies and the dynamic nature of manager–employee relationships as a result of technology-enabled [Flexible Work Practice].”

They say existing research aims to understand technology as a facilitator of flexible work “thus perpetuating the instrumental view of technology.”

Given this finding, they call on a shift in perspective. Instead of just explaining the role technology is playing in enabling flexible work practices, seek to describe the social force it plays in shaping our behavior which in turn shapes our networks of relationships. They wrote, “Given the active role that technological platforms continue to play in organizational life, other conceptualizations of technology are required…” One theory they suggest leveraging is Actor-Network Theory (ANT).

The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography describes Actor-Network Theory as a

“unifying thread [that] constitutes the central line of connection to the field of human geography.”

It’s an ever evolving social theory that argues

“all manner of things (as many as you can imagine) are variously entangled together in specific formations or networks in the making of the world.”

As I stand here in Kirkland, Washington on the 18th birthday of my son and daughter, I can look back over those nearly two decades and see the role technology has played in bringing that central line of connection in human geography into focus. The combination of the internet, mobile technologies, and geo-political globalization have connected an assortment of ever expanding networks of people and place. And then, in the final three years of my kid’s high school existence I can see how that technology has both granted them needed flexibility but also robbed them of social opportunities.

But despite it all, they have flourished. And yet not all kids have – nor have adults. As affluent, mostly white, remote workers enjoy their ‘flexible working arrangements’ – like next day Amazon orders, late night GrubHub ice cream deliveries, and TaskRabbit handy man assignments – those ‘on-demand’ workers on which they rely suffer their own perplexing paradoxes. While ‘on-demand’ work has supplanted needed income for many struggling to make a living, it’s also taken a toll on their health.

Because laws lag in defining and representing the rights of these workers, they’re prone to exploitation by corporate overlords and overly demanding and consuming customers. It can lead to job related and economic anxiety, stress, and uncertainty. And because they operate alone, without a tightknit team – a family – it leaves ample time to reflect on their plight. They can become preoccupied with how society, their government, their companies regard, treat, and abuse them.

As I walked home from that lunch with my friends last Friday, I looked around my little town of Kirkland. It’s been shaped by nearly a century and a half of people – actors – enrolling, transforming, and interacting within nested networks of natural and engineered environments. Kirkland was intended to be a steel town. Peter Kirk’s vision was for it to be “The Pittsburgh of the Northwest.” The Peter Kirk building is now the Kirkland Arts Center. Ole Pete could never have imagined any of this. Just as we never imagined we’d be forever shaped by a measly virus.   

I looks like my next lunch with friends will likely be unmasked. Washington is currently planning for mask free restaurants at the end of March – more flexible eating arrangements will soon be meeting flexible working arrangements. I’ll be curious to see whether more Softies return to the Redmond campus over time or whether the future of their work remains primarily remote. It’s hard to tell without a string of caveats.

This tiny microbe has disrupted an entire global actor-network. Just how much our behavior has been changed permanently is unknown, but there’s no going back to some semblance of ‘normal’. The future is as uncertain as predictions for how far into the future the global pandemic will continue to circulate. As Dr. Heidi Brown, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Arizona said recently,

“Until the epidemiologists can tell you what’s going to happen in the future without massive uncertainty caveats, then we’re still in an epidemic-type situation.”

Hold on to your hats, and your masks, we’re all about to learn there is not such thing as a free lunch.

Hello Interactors,

The Olympics are in full swing. I admit I’m staying up later than I probably should be, but I’m a sucker for the Olympics. Yes it’s strange seeing a white strip of snow down a brown windy hill or watching big air competitions against a dystopian industrial waste site, but hey, that’s Beijing! But maybe I’m being too judgmental. Surely there’s more than meets the eye.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE GU GLUE

Jubilant in her successful landing, the Chinese skier put on the brakes spraying snow over the blue padded barriers as the camera centered her in the frame. She had just landed her first jump in the Olympics’ big air competition. She pulled off her goggles and beamed a big, immaculate toothy smile into the camera. My first thought was, “This girl is not Chinese.” I had never heard of Eileen Gu, but that was about to change.

She had just landed a right double 1440. That’s four full gravity defying rotations in the air after descending a hill 20 stories high and then launching off a curved ramp pointed to the sky. She was the first woman to land a similar double cork 1440 just two months prior. That prompted the French skier, Tess Ledeux, to counter in January by being the first woman to land a 1620 – four and a half rotations.

Ledeux managed to land that same jump in her opening run at the Olympics in Beijing earlier this week and held the top spot until Gu’s third and final jump. While Gu was at the top waiting her turn, her mom called from the stands at the bottom of the hill. Yan Gu introduced Eileen to skiing in Lake Tahoe where she sometimes worked as a ski instructor. She told her daughter to play it safe and stick to the 1440. Eileen responded,

“Mom, executive call here, vetoed. I am going to make the 16, and you are going to deal with it.”

After visualizing the trick when her eyes closed, arms swaying, shoulders jerking, like a dog running in their sleep, she aimed her skis down the slope. High in the sky, confident in her 1620 launch, Gu grabbed the bottom of her ski – a safety grab – a trick she had never attempted before this run. She landed triumphantly and the judges launched her into first place. As she threw her fist in the air in celebration it was rewarded with a loud cheer from the Chinese fans sprinkled throughout the stadium. Her mom, of course, being one of them.

Yan Gu was born in Shanghai and grew up in Beijing. The Olympics are in her home town. Her mom, Eileen’s grandmother, still lives there. When Yan was in her twenties, she did what many other Chinese students did, and continue to do. She sought an education in America. After receiving a degree in chemistry from Peking University in Beijing, she enrolled in a master’s program in biochemistry and molecular biology at Auburn University in the late 80s. She went on to be a research associate at Rockefeller University before going on to earn an MBA at Stanford in 1994. She now works at an investment firm in San Francisco where she specializes in Chinese investments.

The director of an extreme outdoor sports high school in Mt. Hood Oregon, Mike Hanley, said “Yan is very pleasant but one of the most intense human beings I have ever met in my life. She smiles and tells you how great you are. But then you find out, after the fact, what the requests are. She loves her daughter and wants her daughter to get priority.”

Getting priority attention from coaches and trainers in America means paying more money. Extorsion? Maybe. But money talks. Yan, a single parent, was willing to pay whatever it took to secure the right training to match her daughter’s ability and her own drive to insure her child’s success. Not many parents of talented kids can afford to do this without striking deals with big name extreme sports brands, like Red Bull or Burton, on behalf of their kids. Child labor? Maybe. But it pays the bills.

But Yan has been off the hook for paying much at all since her daughter started striking her own lucrative modelling and endorsement contracts. She’s was a millionaire before hitting 18. She not only landed Red Bull, but Cadillac, Apple’s Beats by Dre headphones, Tiffany’s, Louis Vuitton and Victoria’s Secret. Those are some big names. But in China she’s also paid to represent the Bank of China, China Mobile, a milk company, and Starbucks of China. She is estimated to command $2.5 million per deal. With over 20 modelling, spokesperson, and endorsement deals she must be worth over $50 million dollars at age 18. And that was before she won the gold medal.

In addition to being beautiful, talented, and rich, she is also smart. She scored 1580 on the SAT out of a perfect score of 1600, was the first to graduate early at her private high school in the Bay area, and will attend Stanford next fall. Oh, and did I mention she plays the piano and was one of the top distance runners in the state of California before turning her attention to the Olympics? She is what overly competitive parents the world over wish their kids to be. Sorry kids of demanding parents, Eileen has set the bar high. And for Eileen, good luck living through the onslaught of Western chauvinism, racism, and ethnocentrism. Not to mention a healthy dose of wealth, ability, and beauty resentment and jealousy.

Gu decided, supposedly with her mother’s urging, to compete for China three years ago when she turned 15. She had grown up fluidly splitting her time between China and Chinese language and culture and the U.S. and American culture. As she said in a press conference this week,

“in the US, I’m American, and when I’m in China, I’m Chinese”.

But reporters, mostly male, weren’t satisfied with the answer. The English sports reporter, Oliver Brown, thought that line was “a cute line, but sadly impractical, for the simple reason that China does not recognise dual citizenship.” Gu refuses to indulge reporters on admitting whether or not she renounced her U.S. citizenship or whether the Chinese government made an exception for the girl the Chinese media call “Snow Princess”. Insistence by Western media, and many others, on making a bi-racial teenage woman pick one side or the other will likely not relent any time soon.

REPRESENTATION ORIENTATION

I’m reflecting on my own initial reaction to learning Gu wasn’t representing America. My first thought, like many, is she’s a product of American culture, education, coaching, and lavish ski schools and resorts. Other athletes are saying the same thing. Jen Haduk, a Winter X Games gold medalist and a former member of the U.S.A Women’s team, told the New York Post that

“[Eileen Gu] became the athlete she is because she grew up in the United States, where she had access to premier training grounds and coaching that, as a female, she might not have had in China…I think she would be a different skier if she grew up in China. This makes me sad.”

Eileen Gu admits the access she had to snow, coaching, and opportunity allowed her to pursue her dreams and potential. In an interview on NBC, they show her giving a speech in middle school on the impact Title Nine had on women and sport. She also reveals in that interview that every trick she learned in America she took to China where throngs of young Chinese girls were eager to learn from her.

A Chinese-American girl fluent in Mandarin teaching Chinese girls to do tricks on skis also helped her become the athlete she is. Eileen Gu would not have been the skier she is had she grown up in China, but Chinese girls will now grow up trying to become the skier she is. And you can bet the Chinese government will see to it they have what they need to succeed. In fact, some believe it was the money and support China offered Eileen Gu three years ago that may have contributed to her decision to represent that country. An offer the American team I’m sure could not match. Another Yan Gu deal made on behalf of her daughter? Perhaps. But you can bet other parents of bi-racial or dual citizenship kids would be tempted to do the same.

Eileen Gu was born with rare athletic abilities. She was also born fearless. It was one of the reasons her mother made sure she had ski lessons. She could see as a young child that her daughter lacked the kind of fear most of us have skiing fast down a mountain of snow and ice. After suffering a concussion as a young teenager on a practice run, an injury that put her out of commission for a week, she couldn’t wait to get back to jumping. These natural abilities cannot be taught regardless of where you grow up.

And we shouldn’t be so quick to diminish Eileen’s lived experience as a Chinese-American routinely visiting her family in China. While it has only accounted for five or six years of the 18 she’s been alive, it’s undeniably part of who she is, what she does, how she thinks, and what she believes. But I, like so many others, didn’t consider that in my initial reaction and judgement of Eileen Gu. I jumped to seeing her as representing a country and only after did I question my reaction and come to see her as a human being.

As geographers Alan Latham and David Conradson wrote in 2003, even the field of human geography is “Dominated by an obsession with the politics of representation.” Little interest has historically been given to “considerations of the place, or the productiveness, of practice” by individual human beings.

By seeing Eileen Gu as Chinese-American, bi-racial, or dual citizen can lead to objectification and categorization. There is a growing understanding and recognition in the social sciences that race categories often lead to either feelings of fear or desire. For example, unkept asylum seekers crossing the border from Latin America may elicit fear leading many to want to kick them out. Meanwhile, a super-model, Chinese-American, Olympic gold medal athlete elicits a desire to claim her as ‘theirs’.

As we sit and watch Eileen Gu smile for the camera after performing death defying feats with sublime grace or see a magazine cover graced with her face, we are reduced to dwelling on her race. Those of us in the West have grown up being barraged with pictures, paintings, movies, comics, and text that portrays races different from our own in insufficient and often inaccurate ways.

For China and the Chinese it’s a form of Orientalism. The word Orient is derived from a Latin word oriēns which can mean anything originating from the East, including the sky, sun, or lands and people East of Europe. Orient was thought of as the East and it’s antonym, Occident, was thought of as the West.

This word and it’s denotations and connotations allowed Western scholars, writers, artists, and designers to divide the world between ‘us’, the West, and ‘them’ the East. The Orient was portrayed as a place far away with exotic customs, cultures, and people – ‘Other-than’ or ‘Other-worldly’; a place to be explored, conquered, and diminished. Consequently, its people were portrayed as ‘Others’ who were to be either ‘saved’, slaved, exploited, or killed.  It’s a portrayal that continues to this day.

James Bond is the suave savior from the West who is shaken by exotic foreigners but stirred to action through acts of either violence or sex. And while we know it’s fiction, it’s filmed in a pseudo-authentic way that often includes a wink or a nod from Bond into the camera. Indiana Jones does the same thing. Steven Spielberg told it’s creator, George Lucas, it’s a “James Bond film without the hardware.”

MIND AND BODY EQUALITY

The late Jamaican-British sociologist, Stuart Hall led efforts beginning in the 1960s to include race and gender in the scholarship of cultural studies. He observed in 1993 that social scientists, including post-colonial geographers, continue to downplay the role text, images, and symbols play in how we relate to the representation of cultures foreign to Western tradition. He believed representation should be considered within a wider cultural context. Hall believed the

“processes of artistic production and ownership, use of media technologies, practices of distribution, government legislation and regulation, as well as different forms of audience consumption across the globe, influence how an image is ‘read’ and understood.”

For highly produced imagery like Bond films or pictures of Eileen Gu in an advertisement, there is an intent by the producer of the image to encode a particular message to the viewer. But how viewers then decode and interpret that message is as variable and complex as humanity itself. The geographical context that informs an individual consumer’s identity influences the meaning of that message.

The imagery in Bond Films or stylized photos of Gu also don’t provide a voice to the displaced or marginalized people that make up the bulk of these ‘foreign’ populations. The West can use the power of imagery to impose meaning which only perpetuates the idea that the West controls the rest. ‘We’ hold dominion over ‘them’. As geographer Anoop Nayak puts it,

“The power of whiteness to continually narrate the existence of racialised Others is a violent reminder of the privilege that comes with being located as the architects and inheritors of modernity.”

Eileen Gu just may be fashioning these Western media mechanisms into a weapon of her own. She has the potential to use her talent, intelligence, and good looks – and the dominant Western style media platforms – to give voice to those in China who do not. If we’re to believe Eileen Gu, she wants to inspire and empower young Chinese-born girls to use sport as a way to give them a voice.

She knows they don’t have Title Nine to help them in China, so she’s using her Chinese language skills and her individual beauty, elegance, intelligence, and grace as a substitute. All under a Chinese flag. She is using the media tools of traditional Western domination not to hush or misconstrue but to crush what oppresses young girls so they can see what they can do.

Eileen is outspoken and well spoken. She’s come out against increased Asian hate crime in America and supports the BLM movement. But she remains silent on human rights abuses in China. This really bothers people. Especially reporters.

Meanwhile Tesla sells more cars in China than anywhere in the world. Where are the calls for Elon Musk to speak out? Microsoft was the first software company allowed to open an office in China around the same time Eileen’s mom was coming to America. It remains a highly productive, innovative, and influential subsidiary for Microsoft. I’ve witnessed myself. I don’t see reporters demanding Satya Nadella or Bill Gates to come out against China. Eileen, just like Elon, Satya, and Bill, know that to do so means disadvantaging their chances for influence from inside China.  

Could it be that these Western, mostly male, reporters only see Gu as a two-dimensional, bi-racial American girl? Are they put off by how she expertly and effortlessly dodges their questions? Are they frustrated they can’t dominate this woman, this girl, this Asian-American who can look and sound Western one moment and Chinese the next?

When the British reporter Oliver Brown writes how her well crafted and practiced line, “in the US, I’m American, and when I’m in China, I’m Chinese”, came across as ‘cute’ to him, is that not only condescending but patronizing, paternalistic, and misogynist? And did he not politicize, objectify, and perhaps ‘Orientalize’ her by insisting her words were “sadly impractical, for the simple reason that China does not recognise dual citizenship.”? There is nothing simple about any of this.

And am I guilty of doing the same when my first reaction was to judge her on her appearance without knowing anything about her, her life, her family, her culture, or her intentions?

Who knows what her real citizenship is. Maybe China turned a blind eye to their policy that refuses dual-citizenship. It’s a practical move on their part if it means they get a world renowned Snow Princess Chinese ambassador out of it. I wouldn’t put it passed Eileen and her mom to scheme and arrange such a deal. Her mom is a professional Chinese deal maker, after all. Just as Musk, Nadella, and Gates are. Who knows what arrangements these successful Western businessmen have with China, but you can bet they’re practical.

When the ski coach from Oregon – who knows a thing or two about dealing with Eileen and her mom – was pressed on what he thought of Eileen choosing to ski for China he said, “It’s a decision that seems practical and pragmatic, just like every decision she makes.”

In the 1880s and 1890s, a French aristocrat interested in the history and sociology of sport toured America and England learning about sports administration. His name was Pierre de Coubertin. He was particularly fascinated by rugby. He believed it best demonstrated how “organised sport can create moral and social strength” and how it could “help to set the mind and body in equilibrium”. As a former rugby player, I concur.

He took his learnings back home and with the help of the French government organized the first Olympic committee in 1894. By 1896 the first modern Olympic games took place in Athens. It attracted the largest contingent of international athletes of the time.

As I watch the remainder of the Olympics I’m trying to see through the media veils that distort and disorient portrayals of people. Instead of being just another American rooting for Americans, I’m marveling at the athletically gifted, courageous, and tenacious humans participating in ‘organized sports that have shaped their moral strength.’

Maybe if we all do that together we can also build social strength. Watching Eileen Gu twirl through the air while dodging the admonishing stare can be dizzying — and then some. But seeing her as a human first and an athlete second sets my mind and body in equilibrium.

Thanks for reading Interplace! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Hello Interactors,

While the media dwells on border disputes like Russia and Ukraine or Trump’s wall, COVID, climate change, and the global economy thumb their nose at territorial boundaries. Are these borders we obsess over even real or are they products of our imagination?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A CASTLE WITHOUT HASSLE

On Sunday I pulled the beast from the closet. It had been awhile. Probably too long. It pulls with a heaviness that always takes me by surprise. Its long neck, standing tall above its body, awkwardly slumped over my shoulder as I drug its head from the darkness. I walk down the hall with its neck strung out behind me tugging on its short, stout resistant body that pressed heavy with resistance.

I don’t know why we keep it. Nobody in the family likes it. It’s not that it eats incessantly; that’s why we got it. It’s more that it’s so damn heavy and awkward. No wonder we keep it in the closet longer than we should. But there’s only so much dust and dirt one can tolerate in a house. It was time to vacuum.

We tolerate a fair amount of dust in our house. Lazy? Maybe. Is it so bad that we let a little dust accumulate? As the comedian George Carlin once said,

“Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.”

I grew up, like many people I suppose, learning to have anxiety around dust accumulation. But I was raised Methodist and it was John Wesley, Mr. Methodism himself, who most likely coined the phrase, “cleanliness is next to godliness.” He had a thing about remaining clean. But this idea dates back to the Old Testament. Cleanliness for the Hebrew people wasn’t about the home, it was about the body. That’s how we got baptism, foot washing, hand washing, and, yes, circumcision. Either way, to be clean was to be pure.

By dragging this weighty, electrified, menace with its dust breathing head across floors, window sills, and furniture I am not only sucking up undesirables into a bag, I am purifying the home. And just to make sure these impurities don’t escape the menace of this machine it features a HEPA filter on its exhaust. Why do people feel the urge to purge these dusty hombres from our home?

There are practical reasons, I am sure, just as with washing our bodies. But it’s different with our homes. These unwanted microscopic interlopers have made their way inside our home and we want them outside our home. As they invade we become territorial. We sweep dust into a bin, under the rug, or out the door. There is a spatial differentiation to ‘cleansing’ the home of ‘undesirables’. Get out and stay out!

As a child, were you not allowed to take food into certain rooms? Do you take your shoes off at the door? How about, “No pets upstairs!” Growing up I had friends where entire living rooms were off limits to kids. Parents are known to issue all kinds of spatial regulations to their families. “Go to your room!” “Get out of the kitchen!” “Take it outside!”

But rooms can also house fond thoughts. Some of my best memories were in my basement. I played pool, the piano, and with trains. I watched home movies, made art, or pulled an Encyclopedia from the shelf and was transported to another world. I told this story to someone on a Zoom call last week and they leaned into the camera looking not at me but around me and asked, “And where are you now?” “In my basement”, I replied.

But not everyone has fond memories of their homes. If they had one. For victims of spousal and/or child abuse, or even slavery, recalling memories of home – or certain rooms in a home – brings on discomfort, anxiety, and pain. Response to that anguish varies by person.

The influential feminist author, professor, and social activist bell hooks (a pen name borrowed from her grandmother’s name Bell Blair Hooks and reduced to lower case out of deference) writes in her book Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics that black women, during her childhood in the south,

“constructed their homes as places of care, nurturing and retreat from a harshly racist society in which most of them also worked outside their own homes, in domestic service at the homes of white people.

Making their own home, hooks believed, however modest or temporary had ”radical potential” to regain “their ‘subjectivity’ (their personal human identities) in a society which tended to categorize them oppressively by gender and ethnicity as ‘women’ and ‘black’.”

This interpretation of and relationship to ‘home’ can be complex. For some “a man’s home is his castle” so long as ‘he’ is the ‘master’. This phrase first read as “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” Which is to say “An English person’s home is a place where they may do as they please and from which they may exclude anyone they choose.” It was popularized after appearing in the book The History of the Norman Conquest of England in 1868 by the English historian Edward Augustus Freeman. However, it had been ensconced in British law since 1505. The law read,

“If one is in his house, and he hears that such a one wants to come to his house to beat him, he can well make an assembly of folk among his friends and neighbours to assist him, and to aid in safeguard of his person...”

But if an assembly can’t be made, or one can’t escape, then

“the house of one is to him his castle and his defence, and where he properly ought to remain…a servant can beat one in defence of his master…a servant can slay one in saving the life of his master, if he [the master] cannot otherwise escape.”

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

When the home comes to be known as a place that offers comfort, solace, independence, privacy, and the legal right to harm – even kill – an intruder you deem threatening, it also becomes a place that excludes. The ‘head of the household’ can assert their superiority; especially when coupled with traditional gendered roles. It’s where phrases like, “Are you the man of the house?” or “Who wears the pants in this family, anyway?” serve to validate and perpetuate male superiority and dominance in the home. At its worst, can even lead to domestic violence.

What, then, does this say of homelessness? If Western social norms, legal text, and financial incentives favor home and property ownership, imagine what kind of insecurities or negative connotations come with being without one? Many fear the homeless, but the fears of the homeless – or nearly homeless – are surely greater.

And what about homeless people who call their city their ‘home’? Imagine living in a city your whole life, renting as an adult, maybe even saving to buy a house, when suddenly a rent increase pushes you out to live in your car, on the street, under a bridge, or in a park. These people have not left home, but are considered ‘homeless’. ‘Houseless’ is more accurate, but does little to ease the feelings of loss, anxiety, and pain that comes with losing a roof over your head and the status that comes with it.

If homes are a place of inclusion for the owner and its occupants, a place of’ belonging’, what places outside of the boundary of the home do we ‘belong’? We perceive our environment through the most intimate of senses; touching, tasting, hearing, smelling, and to the least intimate, seeing. But we are bounded in our ability to absorb and reason over the barrage of information our senses provide. We are thus influenced by our abilities and reasons for being in particular places.

These inputs form mental images that help navigate space, are shaped by perceptions, preconceived notions, and relationships with people and place. Each individual understands and relates to their environment in unique ways. Environments, territories, places, and the people in them, do not exist in some objective ideal but in a subjective reality informed by our senses, beliefs, and histories.

Humanistic geographer David Ley, who leveraged the work of the French geographer Vidal de le Blache, asserts that ‘home’ is a combination of the very real, regional physical environment with which we can see, touch, hear, and feel – our objective reality – and the social environment formed by the lives we lead – our subjective reality – which can be influenced by our imaginations and our emotions.

Humanistic geography relates ‘home’ to a sense of ‘belonging.’ This sense or feeling exists at multiple scales from our body, abode, neighborhood, town, region, county, state, or country. We talk of ‘home towns’, ‘home field advantage’, or ‘hangin’ with my homey’s.’ And when we’re far away from them for a long time we often yearn to ‘go home.’ We become attached to these ‘homes’. They become a part of who we are – a slice of our identity and pride. The way we think of our ‘homes’ is how we would like others to think of us. There’s a word for this ‘belonging’ that combines the Greek words ‘love’ and ‘place’: topofilia.

But this sense of ‘belonging’ is more than identifying with our physical surroundings. It’s more than the senses detect as you return ‘home’ from a long journey; it may be the smell of rich soil, the humidity enveloping your body, the cool mist absorbed by your thirsty pores, the arid sun radiating your closed eyes, or that songbird signing in the tree. ‘Belonging’ can also mean belonging to the people of that place – real or imagined.

These people and places with which we feel ‘belonging’, at scales ranging from our bodies to homes, neighborhoods to cities, or states to countries become defensible. We become territorial. This need and desire to defend ourselves, our people, and our place is an act of control that aims to exclude others.

Territories are defined by boundaries. Boundaries, when seen from the inside are protectors but from the side or the ‘others’ are rejecters. National borders, for example, are not natural and often have no physical demarcations at all. Nor are they fixed in space or time. These imaginary boundaries are created and maintained by various people over the course of history who make determinations on who is inside and outside the border. And it’s based on a this elusive notion of ‘belonging’. In the case of national borders, it’s based on a national identity – a ‘homeland’.

BORDER DISORDER

A nation-state is an idea that is grounded in a fabricated ideal created by a select group based on the identity they assigned to a particular set of people. This manufactured idea and it’s origins, like any idea, is contestable, changeable, and continually in flux. Like the borders themselves. To give the illusion of permanence to these unnatural homeland borders, and the national-identity they suggest, requires a constant propagation of ‘myths’ – propaganda. To reduce or eliminate contention of a fabricated national-identity, or the borders they represent, people need to be convinced these territories must be be defended. Just as they would their own body or home.

Geographer Stephen Daniels suggests that both these real physical geographies and perceived national identities are interdependent. He says,

“…national identities are ‘coordinated, often largely defined, by “legends and landscapes”, by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient or promised home-lands with hallowed sites and scenery’.”

UCLA Geographer John Agnew calls this a “territorial trap”. He says that by “regarding states as fixed units of territorial sovereign space, unchanging through time; separating domestic (inside) from foreign (outside) political spaces; [and] treating the territorial state as a container of society” we are committing a conceptual error.

It is this very trap that Trump tapped to prop himself up as president. He would repeatedly say, “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country.” To make the invisible border visible, he focused on building a wall. He encouraged his disciples to chant, “Build the wall, build the wall.” Staged political performances at the border drew the attention of the world. While making the intangible tangible, he strengthened the territorial trap. He perpetuated the myth that this border represents a “fixed territorial sovereign space unchanging through time”.

But the United States didn’t even have a border patrol until Herbert Hoover in 1924. It too was largely a performance with the same racist goals as Trump – sweep those dirty, dusty Mexicans outside. That same meager border patrol of the 1920s remained meager until the 1990s. And remember, Texas, a state that shares a border with Mexico, was its own country, the Republic of Texas, under President Sam Houston for nearly a decade before the U.S. annexed them in 1845. There is nothing fixed or permanent about borders or territories.

This fetishizing of territorial boundaries has fueled a rise in border walls over recent decades. Guggenheim Fellow and political geographer Reece Jones writes,

“Two thirds of the seventy border walls that exist today were built in the past twenty years by countries as diverse as Bangladesh, China, South Africa, and Norway.”  

In the 2020 book Borders and Border Walls, Élisabeth Vallet shows how border walls have gone from nearly zero in 1940 to over 72 in 2020. What’s more telling is 47% of those are built by democratic governments, 35% authoritarian, and 18% a hybrid of both. I’m assuming the U.S. is in the democratic bucket, but indeed may be slipping into hybrid.

In a 2020 paper called Populism, Sovereigntism, and the Unlikely Re-Emergence of the Territorial Nation-State, British historian Aristotle Kallis writes that it leads to

“economic nationalism and an embrace of protectionism, political chauvinism, isolationism, reassertion of strict border controls, reversal of previous international commitments, and an expansive range of discriminatory measures targeting those excluded from the narrow definition of ‘the people’.”

Reece Jones puts it like this,

“Since states the world over are threatened by the dawning of a global consciousness—a global awareness of economic, political, and environmental connections—states everywhere are responding with increasingly violent efforts to signify their control over their borders. Indeed, the border has become the location for the performance of the territorial sovereignty of the state, par excellence.”

Populist, nationalist politicians and parties are behaving like a homeowner who’s convinced their home is soon to be invaded. The dust collecting around their ‘homeland’ are people who look different and share different beliefs and ideals. In America, Black and Indigenous scholars are surfacing alternative territorial and societal histories that intrude on traditional “legends and landscapes” many in this country believed to be fixed. These people are ensnared in a territorial trap, scared the rope is about to snap. So they build walls and political clout, they make calls to keep it all out.

But the dust they fear isn’t going away. Try as they may, global consciousness is here to stay. So they best remember what George Carlin had to say.

“Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.”

Hello Interactors,

We all intuitively feel the world is falling into selfishness, defensiveness, and pettishness. Me, my, and eye for an eye. If the words we see in the books we read are any indication, it’s not just intuition but fact. And the shift started right around 1980.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WE PRAY FOR NOT FOR US, BUT ME

Do you use words like believe, hope, fear, sense, feel, pray, soul, or mystery? Or are you more likely to use words like science, technology, model, method, fact, data, analysis, transmission, or system? If you’ve read even one Interplace essay, then I believe that my preference is no mystery! And I hope and pray you’ll read more than one. After all, I search for facts and data and then perform some analysis of the science of systems.

What if I asked whether you use the words I and me more than we and us? One look at social media and it would be apparent. All the social strife, climate fright, or COVID concern has many people screaming into the digital void or retreating to the nearest corner curled up mumbling to themselves and their rectangular shiny black mirror of a screen. This is a very personal and individual reaction that commonly begins with the word “I” followed by “hope” or “pray.”

What if I told you the world has both been increasingly using feeling words, like sense and soul and individual words, like I and me since 1980? What’s more intriguing is these two uses are correlated. The band R.E.M. was sending us clues back in 1987 when they released their song, “It’s the end of the world as we know it – [and I feel fine]. In it they sing,

“Save yourself, serve yourselfWorld serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed”

A paper came out just last month that provides evidence of this dialectical drift. The researchers, led by Martin Sheffer, of Wageningen University in The Netherlands, assembled a massive corpus of text from millions of books found on Google Books dating from 1850 to 2019. Reading and analyzing the text of this many books is humanly impossible, so they put machines to work. They used text analysis tools to search, count, find correlations, and detect sentiment.

A simple example of this can be done by anybody with access to the internet. There are websites that will count the occurrences of a given word in a body of text and then arrange them into a word ‘cloud’. The largest word in the cloud represents the most frequently used word and the smallest the most infrequent. Here's a word cloud of the over 130,000 words I wrote on Interplace in 2021.

But these simple clouds don’t say anything about what kind of words they are or what associations they may have with other words or ideas. And they don’t lend insight into what words are likely to occur together. But there are statistical methods and software tools that, if given enough clean data, can cluster words of similar meaning and correlate them to the occurrence of other words.

What these researchers discovered is that “words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined.” Words to do with senses, spirituality, emotions, and personal relationships are “sentiment” laden words that reflect a “personal world view.” Over time, they were displaced by “fact based” words used in argumentation of “societal systems”. They also found this pattern correlates with the rise of we and us and the decline of I and me after 1850.

And then, starting around 1980, this trend peaked and then flip-flopped and the trend accelerated in 2007. That is when, the authors write,

“across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.”

Of course, explaining why this happened is much harder than finding the evidence, which is also no small feat. The researchers speculate that 1850 was a time when the Industrial Revolution was hitting its stride. Science and technology were credited with economic prosperity and the promise of logic and rationalistic determinism seeped into culture and then books. Out with the mystical and in with the technical. It’s what the sociologist Max Weber called a process of “disenchantment”.

But sociologist and political theorist, Steven Lukes, researched and wrote a book on the origins of “individualism.” He reveals the word ‘individualism’ has multiple ‘semantic histories’ and meanings. It entered the scene in the nineteenth century along with two other big ‘isms’ – ‘socialism’ and ‘communism.’

The first use came in 1820 in France in response to the French Revolution. Because conservative elites, especially religious leaders, viewed the revolt against the establishment as a result of Enlightenment thinkers and doers, individualism was a derogatory term. Lukes writes,

“Conservative thought in the early nineteenth century was virtually unanimous in condemning the appeal to the reason, interests and rights of the individual.”

Put simply, it was seen as the beginnings of anarchy. According to French dictionaries, it remains a pejorative word in France to this day. There were reasons for suppressing individualistic thoughts, principles, and beliefs and they had everything to do with maintaining political, social, and religious order.

Meanwhile, for the socialists of the 1800s, the term ‘individualism’ offered a counter to their ideal ‘collectivism.’ They believed that individuals who drift from the herd become prey to exploitive laissez-faire industrial capitalism. Lukes points to the French philosopher and economist, Pierre Leroux, who argued individualism would lead to

“’everyone for himself, and…all for riches, nothing for the poor’, which atomized society and made men into ‘rapacious wolves’…”

Individualism as a counterweight to collectivism is also what the British latched onto well into the late nineteenth century. So both the political, religious, and philosophical left and right had their own reasons for squelching individualism and their associative words in the nineteenth century.

THE BELOVED RUGGED HUG

After the French aristocrat and politician, Alexis de Tocqueville, extensively toured America in 1831 he concluded democracy, of which he was dubious, is rooted in individualism. Lukes writes that Tocqueville warned that individualism led to

“the apathetic withdrawal of individuals from public life into a private sphere and their isolation from one another, with a consequent weakening of social bonds. Such a development, Tocqueville thought, offered dangerous scope for the unchecked growth of the political power of the state.”

As we sit her nearly 200 years later amidst rising authoritarian threats, he may have a point.

As the nineteenth century came to a close collectivist social and political structures were weakening. This is what Lukes claims gave rise to the beginnings of a turn toward individualism. He writes, “For the last quarter of the century was the period in which the market-driven politics of neoliberalism swept across the globe.” He notes that it was the “crisis of the welfare state and the spectacular fall of communism” that led to a “depletion of the meaning of ‘socialism.’” He says the term could no longer be “used with the same confidence” especially “in contrast to its two traditional antonyms, ‘capitalism’ and ‘individualism.’”

And then, in 1922, then U.S. Commerce Secretary, Herbert Hoover, published a small but influential book called “American Individualism.” He then campaigned on the idea of ‘rugged individualism’ and the romantic, though overstated, idea of the self-reliant American frontiersman. Having spent time in Europe at the end of WWI witnessing its devastation he returned to write in his book that there were “’two convictions … dominant in [his] mind.’

The first was that “the ideology of socialism, as tested before his eyes in Europe, was a catastrophic failure.” “Socialism”, he wrote, went against “the fundamental human impulse of self-interest” and “was unable to motivate men and women to produce sufficient goods for the needs of society.”

The second conviction was that America, “The New World” as he called it, was far removed from European “imperialism, fanatic ideologies, ‘age-old hates,’ racial antipathies, dictatorships, power politics, and class stratifications.” And to be fair, Hoover’s book portrays a fairly progressive stance on individualism. He believed there is a limit to individualism and warned that

“We shall never remedy justifiable discontent until we eradicate the misery which the ruthlessness of individualism has imposed upon a minority.”

Of course, his actions spoke otherwise as he blamed the depression he failed to remedy as President on low wage minority Mexican immigrants southern farmers relied on to keep costs down. He deported one million Mexican Americans after enacting a program he called “American jobs for real Americans.” Sound familiar? I guess individualism matters only if you’re white. And perhaps, ruthless.

Many different philosophers, politicians, and practitioners have nuanced variations and interpretations of the word ‘individualism’ over the last 200 years, but Lukes found that only these three have survived. The far right believes individualism leads to anarchy, the far left believes individualism is a symptom of selfishness, and hardcore capitalists believe individualism breeds progress and prosperity for all.

Which makes it all the more difficult to pin down what happened around 1980 that marked a shift from collectivistic ‘we’ to the more individualistic ‘me’? The authors of the study offer a clue: The Information Age. The 1980s was when the information age was just getting rolling. In 1980 Microsoft had been around for five years already. The Apple II, the first mass-marketed personal computer, had been selling for three years. And a new internet consortium was formed called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). They quickly invented and adopted three very familiar suffixes: .com, .gov, and .edu. By 1985 Prodigy, Compuserve, and Quantum Computer Services – later named America Online (AOL) – were connecting people with access to a computer to the internet.

People with such means started expressing themselves to people around the world using words and pictures over the internet. By the time 2007 rolled around the iPhone had come out and with it the ability to tap, type, and shoot from a pocket-sized super computer/phone. We may fret over the time spent on screens passively consuming massive amounts of information, but we forget not all of it is passive. If you consider all the thumbs and fingers typing into chat boxes, messaging apps, and comment streams, or posting and broadcasting pictures and videos on social media platforms, there are more people writing and publishing than ever in the history of humanity. It’s bound to have an effect on the language we use.

The 1980s also marked the beginning of what has become out-sized income inequality in America. While Jimmy Carter had spent four years making peace in the world, trying to get us on solar power, and adopt the metric system, he struggled to make progress on inflation. Meanwhile, neoliberals from both parties had grown tired of attempts of social reform since the 60s and 70s. Just as in the 1800s, neoliberals became disenchanted with the passivist and collectivist attempts at another FDR style Great Society that wreaked of socialism.

Instead, they stood on principles of American exceptionalism, classical liberalism, traditional family values, free markets, free trade, Judeo-Christian values, limited government, moral absolutism, natural law, rule of law, protectionism, Republicanism, and tradition. It was the celebration of the individual, singular beliefs, and individual gain – I/me – over the promise of a diverse collective; a systematic community of reciprocity – we/us.

WISELY AND SLOW; THEY STUMBLE THAT RUN FAST. — SHAKESPEARE

What held constant through a string of both Democrat and Republican presidents are neoconservative economic policies that have left the United States with the most extreme wealth disparity in its history. For those who have benefitted the most, it may be easy for them to point to individualism as the reason for their success. This fits with Hoover’s idea of the rugged individualist who ‘earned’ their way to the top through no means but their own effort. Like Frank Sinatra’s song, “I did it my way.” It’s just as Leroux warned in the 1800s, ’everyone for himself, and…all for riches, nothing for the poor.’

For those who have seen their relative income decline since 1980, it may be easy for them to feel, as the socialists of the 1800s worried, that they were exploited by capitalism and corporate America. Perhaps they may feel, as Tocqueville warned, an apathetic withdrawal from public life from unchecked growth of a political power that has seemingly turned their back on them over the last 40 years.

The economists at Oxford’s Our World in Data show that from 1980 to 2014, “independently of where you are in the US income distribution, those who are richer have seen larger income growth.” But they go on to point out that this hasn’t always been the case. In 1980, “independently of where you were in the income distribution, those who were poorer used to enjoy larger income growth.”

Trump preyed on the beliefs and emotions that surround this science and these facts and it got him elected.

Meanwhile, other fears and anxieties have led many more to retreat to hyperbolic emotion and self-righteousness. A pandemic hit stoking fear and uncertainty. Climate change has caused extreme variability in weather patterns heightening existential anxiety in many. The list goes on and on.

Consequently, we all have reasons to be afraid of something and it can influence the words we use. The authors of the paper lean on what some scientists believe are two different cognitive modes of operation: System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow). System 1 is intuitive, effortless, and without control. System 2 is deliberate, effortful, and rational. The researchers plotted System 1 words that relate to “belief, spirituality, sapience, intuition, and senses” and System 2 words that are rooted in “science, technology, and quantification”.  They show the frequency of System 1 words decreased after 1850 and then increased after 1980 while System 2 words increased after 1850 and then declined after 1980. They plotted words found in American English, British English, German, French, Italian, and Russian and similar patterns emerged.

Could it be the more connected we become and the faster we consume and react to information, the more reliant we become on System 1? Are we too quick to respond, leaning on our beliefs, intuition, and senses? But what does it mean to slow down and let System 2 kick in? Is it even possible to slow down a global society connected through a vast and complex digital network?

Or did the lethargy of the tools, technology, and social and political structures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century slow us down enough to reason and rationalize? Or maybe rational thought is an illusion. After all, these bi-modal cognitive scientists claim 98% of our daily cognition is System 1. We react, they claim, more than we ponder.

It was Daniel Kahneman who won a Nobel Prize for his advances in bi-modal cognitive research. It led to a best selling book called, “Thinking Fast and Slow.” But in subsequent interviews he reveals more nuance into what is happening. He’s beginning to believe our choice of beliefs and the words we use to describe them are more chance than anything. Kahneman asks,

“What does it mean to know something?...It has very little to do with actual evidence…it is anchored psychologically by the fact that other people you trust also believe in this thing. And it is only then that you invent reasons for it. It’s because the reasons that they cite for their beliefs have very little to do with their actual beliefs, which are usually informed by chance social factors.”

He claims it’s what makes people create nonsensical associative beliefs. For example, those who are against gay marriage also typically don’t believe in global warming. He says,

“It has an associative and emotional coherence, that’s all.” System 1. Emotion, intuition, and belief. Kahneman believes, for example, that “if you want to influence people about global warming, you have to speak to System 1 – we overestimate the influence of speaking to System 2. It’s quite disturbing when you realize people consider facts irrelevant.”

I’m no Nobel prize winning cognitive psychologist, but I question whether we can boil cognition down to two modes. But, I have no evidence; though others are collecting it. And in a global vote between ‘we’ and ‘I’, I doubt the ‘I’s’ have it. Just as our own eyes can’t see themselves, an “I” can’t be itself alone. The only way an eye can see an eye is by looking into the eye of another being. We did not come into this world alone, we did not survive birth alone, we did not learn to walk, talk, learn, or earn alone. And we’re not alone, around this world. Many, though not all, are on social media, blogs, newsletters, or podcasts writing and saying words that we believe – in volumes unparalleled in human history. We are alone together, bounded by words, tethered forever. Even if we are just echoing the people we trust.

Hello Interactors,

Two years ago yesterday, the first case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported just north of Seattle in Everett, Washington. By the end of the month, my town, Kirkland, became famous for more than just the brand of Costco toilet paper. It was the site of the first serious outbreak of COVID in the United States. How many more years will this last? It all depends on if we’re honest with each other and behave ourselves.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

I WANT YOU

It wears many crowns: multae coronae; this virus, this disease. CO-VI-D. COVID. We watched as its thorny tips gripped the tender tissue deep in the lungs of unsuspecting Chinese victims in Wuhan. Replicating, mutating, devastating. Like many crowns before, it sought expansion; new territories to explore, humans to exploit, and lives to destroy. But not the impenetrable America, we thought. Not immutable Americans. Epidemics are for poor countries. Others. What collective stupidity.

Viruses know no borders. America’s first serious outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus occurred in a health center just over a mile from my home in Kirkland, Washington. Like any invader, it scared people into their homes. First reactions were to stay clear of the facility from whence it was spreading…and anyone who may work there.

Doctors and nurses at the home were early spreader suspects. Would they spread it to hospitals, other patients, or their families? Not yet knowing how it spread or how to avoid it, early advice was to simply wash your hands. Wash everything – your clothes, your groceries, and even your Amazon packages. Masks were regarded as ineffective by many U.S. medical pundits and practitioners. Wash your hands, they said.

The United States has a history of denial when it comes to epidemics. When the Spanish Flu was first reported in 1918 in a U.S. Army camp in Kansas, the U.S. had just entered World War I the year prior. Citizens of warring countries in Europe, including Great Britain, were experiencing outbreaks of the flu but were loathed to report it. They feared their enemies would know their troops were vulnerable and weakened. They also didn’t want the public, especially draftees, to fear both the war and an epidemic. And they wanted the media to focus attention on the war, not public health.

Spain, who’s King had contracted the flu, was neutral during War World I so freely reported the outbreak that was soon to be ravaging Europe. The Spanish flu did not originate in Spain, just the honest reporting of it.

The U.S. government, and its high ranking military, were equally hush on the outbreak. It didn’t help that two months after the first reported case, Congress passed the 1918 Sedition Act.  This made it a crime to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States." Newspaper editors may have had their own reasons for not reporting on the epidemic, but fear of legal action by the federal government may have topped the list.

By the end of summer, the flu had spread enough that doctors became increasingly worried. For example, in September of 1918, doctors in Philadelphia asked the press to advise the public against attending an upcoming “Liberty Loan” parade. Local papers refused to run the articles. Doctors pleaded with Philadelphia’s public health director to cancel the parade, but their pleas were dismissed. The parade became a super-spreader event. Over the course of the next month, over 12,000 people in the Philadelphia area died from the Spanish Flu.

President Woodrow Wilson didn’t help. Wilson, borrowing a page from the Europeans, chose a combination of censorship and propaganda. This was America’s first real governmental threat to the freedom of the press. He demanded “loyalty” from all Americans in the lead up to World War I and his administrations pursuit to “make the world safe for democracy.” Days after Congress declared war in April of 1917, Wilson issued an executive order creating an agency called the Committee on Public Information. It was led by the journalist, George Creel, and was intended to persuade Americans to support the war and recruit soldiers.

One of the departments was called the Division of Pictorial Publicity and included volunteer artists and illustrators. One of those illustrators was James Montgomery Flagg. Perhaps drawn to patriotism with a name like Flagg, he made one of the most enduring illustrations in American history. It’s the ubiquitous poster of Uncle Sam sternly pointing his finger at the viewer with the face of an angry father, with words in all-caps, “I WANT YOU…FOR THE U.S. ARMY.”

Wilson’s PR man, Creel, was not unlike the over controlling press secretary’s that Trump appointed. Creel demanded the White House only publish good news, flattering reports of the government and the country, and, most of all, propaganda supporting America’s efforts in the war. Mentioning the spread of infectious disease across America did not fit the agenda. Especially when, as in Europe, the bad news included soldiers being infected. Many of whom, were being shipped to Europe where they continued the spread of the virus.

Military doctors pleaded with their superiors and the President to stop sending troops overseas, suspend the draft, and quarantine soldiers. All Wilson was willing to do was temporarily suspend a single draft and reduce the numbers of troops headed to Europe by 15%. By the end of 1918, 45,000 soldiers died from the Spanish Flu. That’s just over one-third of 116,000 who died fighting.

In November of 1918, during one of the epidemics largest spikes, the war came to an end. Some believe the Spanish Flu brought World War I to an end. But far be it from any nation’s leaders to admit as much. While Wilson was in Paris in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, he came down with a bad case of the Spanish Flu. The White House tried to hide this fact from the public issuing a statement saying the nasty Paris weather had given him a cold.

MASKING REALITY

Not all leaders ignore the advise of medical professionals reporting from the field. Just a few years prior to the Spanish Flu epidemic, in 1910, a plague was ravaging Northern China. All those infected were certain to die within 24-48 hours. In a race with Russia to claim scientific and medical superiority in a cure for the disease, the Chinese Imperial Court assigned a little known doctor, Lien-teh Wu, to head eradication efforts.

Dr. Wu had discovered through an autopsy that the disease was spread through the air and not by fleas, as suspected. Wu had spent time in Europe as part of his training and observed surgeons using gauze masks during surgery to avoid sneezing or spitting into open wounds. If the mask prevented particulates from escaping the nose and mouth, he thought, perhaps it could prevent them from entering. He began experimenting with his own masks by layering cotton with gauze and fitting the mask close to the face.

But there were skeptics. One was an experienced French doctor who was practicing in China at the time. Dr. Wu explained to the doctor his theory of the plague being spread airborne and that his mask reduced spreading. The Frenchman responded, “What can we expect from a Chinaman?” To prove he was right, the racist doctor visited a hospital housing victims of the plague without Wu’s mask. He died two days later.

News of the efficacy of Dr. Wu’s invention spread around the world. Mask use was commonplace in the medical profession by the time the Spanish Flu hit. Even ordinary citizens were aware of its effectiveness. While it’s impossible to prove at this point, populations in U.S. that wore masks faired better than those that did not. Seattle was one such city that embraced mask wearing.

But just like today, there were detractors. The same excuses were used one-hundred years ago as we hear today. People complained they couldn’t breath. Others felt it was a challenge to their civil liberties. Businesses worried mandatory mask wearing would hurt business while some thought masks would offer a false sense of security.

San Francisco passed a law mandating mask wearing, but enforcement posed challenges. One over zealous enforcer shot a man who refused to wear a mask. And when a photo emerged of the mayor and other public officials not wearing masks at a boxing match, citizens revolted; especially when they were not charged or assessed fines that ordinary citizens faced. Still, San Francisco stood out as the mandate resulted in a significant decline in cases.

The widespread prevalence of mask wearing in America, and news of San Francisco’s success abating the disease, spread to other parts of the world. Most notably, Japan. In February of 1919 their National Public Health Bureau pushed local health workers to wear masks while tending to flu victims. Later they added guidelines for mask wearing by the public in crowded places like trains and trams. By the fall of 1919 Japan was distributing free masks to those who could not afford them. They then included cinemas and busses to the list of suggested public spaces for mask wearing.

As the Spanish Flu subsided in America, so did mask wearing in public spaces. But it stuck in Japan, and other East Asian countries, to this day. Maybe we’ll be seeing more of it in the West even after COVID subsides. If it ever does.

As the COVID pandemic unfolded, we witnessed a proverbial passing of the buck as the world searched for answers. The finger pointing started at the origin. Doctors and nurses were put on the spot as people demanded clues as to what it was and how it spread. Western medicine has taught us to view doctors as omniscient beings, fountains of knowledge – surrogate paternal or maternal oracles of comfort. But through three surgical masks and a plastic shield they said, “Don’t look at me, you need to talk to the virologists. Besides, I’m just trying to stay alive myself. Now excuse me, this person can’t breathe.”

The virologists, a bit removed from the mess, summoned their knowledge of microscopic distress. They spoke of gamma phage, viroids, prions, and nano plagues. And when peppered for clarity amidst the hysteria – to get the gist on this viral mist – they pointed to epidemiologists.

These fine folks are the furthest from the pain. People become numbers and points on a plane; Statistical patterns that seek to explain; hints at causation of a transmission chain. But the models they use assume we’re the same. They think we behave like lemmings in a game.    

Epidemiologists (as well as virologists and physicians) perform mathematic experiments using a fixed set of variables that assume humans behave, and react, the same across diverse populations. Those assumptions are largely modeled after behavior Western science has been most focused on over the centuries:

WEIRD people. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

And as we know, even within the WEIRD community, there is a lot of variation in behavior!

When statistical models assume idealized behavior of the so-called, rational man – people who consistently and optimally perform subjective but rational acts – they ignore the fact people do not largely act rationally. This makes it hard to then predict how the virus will behave across diverse sets of populations. Especially when those who do act rationally are randomly exposed to interactions with people who may not act rationally. Human social behavior, especially at the scale that epidemiologists study, can be more random than not.

THE COMPLEX ALTERNATIVE

But there are those seeking to change this. A November 2021 study by a diverse set of researchers, mostly out of the University of Illinois, introduced randomness into the more traditional and relatively inadequate epidemiological models to simulate human social behavior. Instead of using variables that assumed people would act rationally and predictably, they seeded them with a distribution of random numbers that more accurately account for the random interactions we have with people and place.

By capturing multiple features of COVID outbreaks they discovered a “small fraction of individuals were responsible for a disproportionately large number of secondary infections.” Traditional models assumed this would lead to herd immunity. This has not shown to be true even among those areas hardest hit by the first wave. They also discovered another “puzzling aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic.” They observed frequent regional plateaus with an “approximately constant incidence rate over a prolonged time.”

They reasoned it is human behavior that likely causes this pattern. They surmise that what causes “both suppression of the early waves and plateau-like dynamics is that individuals modify their behavior based on information about the current epidemiological situation.” They also suggest these epidemical dynamics of “long plateaus might arise because of the underlying structure of social networks.”

What they claim is happening is local outbreaks cause people to adjust their behavior, either voluntarily, through social pressures, or both commercial and governmental restrictions. When people move less the cases plateau. But as soon as they start trending down, everyone starts moving again. Some of these people, even during the peak, travel to different regions that may be experiencing a slump of outbreaks. A portion of whom are carrying the virus and inadvertently spread the disease creating a new wave of cases in that locale.

These short-term localized waves, and commiserate behavior, repeatedly occur around the world. They create, and perpetuate, persistent long-term waves of the pandemic. These researchers claim these longer-term waves have the potential to stretch out for years given current human behavior.

When the pandemic first started to unfold, the Santa Fe Institute started a podcast series called Transmission. It looked at the pandemic from a Complexity Science perspective. The host, Michael Garfield opens by stating, “The coronavirus pandemic is in one sense a kind of prism: it reveals the many interlocking systems that, until disrupted, formed the mostly invisible backdrop of modern life…” He continued, “The virus acts on, and invites new understanding through, the complexity we only take for granted at our peril.”

The Institute took the transcripts from those episodes, and other Santa Fe Institute reports, studies, and insights from a set of international complexity thinkers, and published them in a recent book titled “The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 pandemic.” It invites the authors of these early reports to reflect on what they got right and what they didn’t.

Garfield recently interviewed the two editors, the current and former president of the Santa Fe Institute, David Krakauer and Geoffrey West. He had them reflect on the book, but also on what they believe Complexity thinkers got right and where there’s more to be learned.

Krakauer mentions a split in opinions and hints at what is the essence of the study I quoted from before,

“There are those who will say we have to get behavior into the mathematical models. Otherwise they're going to be useless, right? And we've talked about this before; the early phase of infection being quite biological and well-behaved exponentially, and then going nuts with human behavior dominating rather than biology.”

But he goes on to point out that it’s not that mathematicians have thrown in the towel.

“But then there are others who said, no, we just have to find the new course grain models. We just have to be more sophisticated. Drop the deterministic mass action, put the stochasticity [randomness] in, and then we get the causality out. We don't get prediction out, but we get causality out. So there, even the community is internally riven on the question of what the right response should be.”

Near the end, Krakauer concludes by saying, “I think we do not understand how collective intelligence works.” but that over the last two years, “we were all schooled in collective stupidity.” He thinks “we haven't even begun to understand what's going on here” and that we’re “not even in the foothills of understanding how complex reality works.”

Geoffrey West reminds us that “we can't solve these problems unless we have everybody together.” And he’s not just talking about the scientific community, he includes “society in terms of the shakers and movers [like policy makers] who are thinking about these problems from a completely different, and usually non-scientific viewpoint.”

I sit here in Kirkland on this inauspicious anniversary and reflect on my non-scientific point of view. Sadly, what the virus of multae coronae has taught me is this: Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. That’s Latin for “Generally people believe what they want.” But beliefs, like viruses and mask wearing adherence, has the potential to change locally in the short-term while spreading globally in the long-term.

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hello Interactors,

Our family hit a snag in the transportation department last week. Our routine was disrupted making us scramble for remedies — including possibly needing a new car. It all came at a time when the state of Washington released its 2021 figures on automobile related deaths. It made me wonder and reflect on car dependency, the Covid funk, and the psychology of cars.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG

“It’s making a strange noise, shifts awkwardly, and smells funny,” my son and daughter exclaimed. There had been similar reports previously, but things had worsened. “It seems ok on the straights, but sounds and feels worse going down hill,” they added. Then, as my daughter got in the car to go to swim practice, she soon came back inside and said, “I’m taking the other car. Uno is making an awful noise and smells even worse than before.”

Our kids call our 2006 Audi A3, Uno. The Washington State Licensing authority named it when it was born. They even sent us two rectangular plates with its name stamped into it, along with a few appended random numbers. We mounted one on its nose and the other on its rear-end. Our kids use Uno to commute to school 12 miles away as well as other errands, appointments, and events. They both have a bit of an emotional attachment to this aging little black hatchback. Uno even becomes Dracula during Halloween when they affix dangling white fangs on each side of the license plate frame.

I’ve had an emotional attachment to Audi’s since I was a kid. I saw my first Audi in the mid-70s. It was Audi’s first car sold in the United States – The Audi Fox. A guy down the street owned one. His name was Delbert Woody. I was drawn to Delbert. He was a World War II veteran who personified the post-war male mystique. He rode a dirt bike in the open field behind his house, was an avid hunter and fisherman, drove construction trucks for a living, was a life long Teamster Union member, and loved pecan pie and Pepsi. He, like so many other war veterans, got married after the war and settled in the suburbs. They were the first to move into one of Norwalk, Iowa’s first subdivisions in 1960. Their single story ranch house, nestled neatly in a line of others just like it, sat on a hill below the water tower at the edge of town on a street aptly named: Edgemont.

Also in keeping with post-war tradition, he had a fascination with cars. I remember him owning more than one and this was during the 1970s gas crisis and recession. Audi entered the U.S. market selling the Fox as a ‘solution to the gas problem.’ The Fox was marketed as a sports sedan with a sporty suspicion, front-wheel drive, and an engine that could get 25 miles to the gallon. All for $3400. That’s roughly $20,000 today. I can see how a masculine blue collar gearhead like Delbert was attracted to this car, despite it being German.

I’m not sure what I liked about it. Maybe it was the novelty of a foreign car in small Iowa town, the European styling, or maybe it was the cool fox emblem on the back. Probably all the above. The truth is, Delbert and I, and all auto-dependent motorists, share something in common. We all have brains that contain two separate modules that combine to form relationships with automobiles.

One of these cranial circuits uses cool calculating rational thought that views a car as a utility – an appliance. It’s sensitive to numbers: miles per gallon, range, price, 0-60, reliance ratings, and a myriad of other self-justifying statistics. The other side of the brain tugs on our heart strings. Emotional affections warm our heart in the comfort of a climate controlled cocoon. It makes our heart go pitter patter with the status cars provide, or cause our pulse to quicken at the sudden and effortless acceleration through space.

Both of these neuro-negotiators conspire to construct our comforting and sometimes conniving relationships with cars. And automakers have learned how to manipulate both of these brainy battles through design and marketing.

Uno got its name from a random license plate generator, but automakers are less random. For Delbert Woody’s Audi Fox, Audi wanted to associate that car with a fox. A fox is agile, strong, fast…and cunning. Many animals are. Which is why it’s not hard to find cars named after animals. Here are just a few: Plymouth Barracuda, Mercury Sable, Buick Skylark, Corvette Stingray, Pontiac Sunbird, Ford Thunderbird, Dodge Viper, AMC Eagle, Chevrolet Impala, and who can forget the Ford Pinto.

As you can see all of these are American made cars. U.S. automakers also like aggressive macho sounding names. Especially Dodge, with names like Challenger, Ram, and Avenger. Europe and Japan have a few examples like the Fiat Spider or Suzuki Samurai, but nothing like the U.S. You may be thinking to yourself, what about the iconic Volkswagen Beetle? Sorry, but that’s a nickname. It’s official name in Germany was Volkswagen Type 1. What about the Volkswagen Rabbit? It was the Volkswagen Golf in Europe. And Delbert’s Audi Fox would have been called the Audi 80 anywhere else but America.

The design of vehicles are also expressive. When Uno dawns his fangs at Halloween, the gimmick only works because the headlights make the eyes and the grill its mouth. Different cars take on different personalities when viewed from the front, or more commonly, when viewed in your rear view mirror. There’s speculation by some psychologists that these personalities may even be reflected in the owners and their driving behavior. There is certainly evidence that some car design and some drivers have become more aggressive over time. But it’s equally true that some aggressive looking cars are sometimes driven by passive people. Or maybe they’re using the design of their vehicle to hide or express some other hidden or deep seeded emotion or personality trait.

RAGE DISPENSED THE MACHINE

Stefan Gössling is a professor of social science at Lund University in Sweden. He researches and writes extensively on transportation. In 2017 he released a book called The Psychology of the Car. He says there are a wide range of emotions that relate to the power and dominance that play a central role in car culture. He cites research affirming “that driving powerful cars is generally understood as a means of expressing macho personalities.” Driving a powerful car exudes superiority and control.

He lists different aspects and levels of control we have driving cars:

* Agency: To be able to decide when to leave at any point in time, and for any given destination

* Semiotics: Being in charge: control of inside (music, temperature) and outside environment (navigation system, speed), and car physics (fuel levels, revolutions per minute)

* Haptics: Holding the steering wheel, pushing pedals, shifting gears

* Smells and soundscapes: Choice of smell or music, interior

* Physics of movement: Being able to drive fast, to accelerate

But he also quotes the sociologist, John Urry. He too wrote extensively on the sociology of mobility, especially regarding the loss of control that can come with controlling a fast moving machine. The automobile, while offering us much control, can also rob us of critical experiences. He writes,

“Dwelling at speed, car-drivers lose the ability to perceive local detail, to talk to strangers, to learn of local ways of life, to stop and sense each different place. Sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures and smells get reduced to the two-dimensional view through the car windscreen and through the rear mirror, the sensing of the world through the screen being the dominant mode of contemporary dwelling. The environment beyond that windscreen is an alien other, kept at bay through the diverse privatizing technologies incorporated within the car. These technologies ensure a consistent supply of information, a relatively protected environment, high quality sounds and increasingly sophisticated systems of monitoring. They enable the hybrid of the car-driver to negotiate conditions of intense riskiness on high-speed roads.”

Our roads are designed to drive at high speeds. They even include optical illusions to put you at ease. For example, the length and distance between dashed lines on highways are designed to trick your brain into believing your body is moving slower than it really is. And while there have been many amazing safety advancements in the engineering of roads and cars for those inside the vehicle, they’ve inadvertently made them increasingly dangerous for those outside of the vehicle.

Washington state ended 2021 with the highest number of road fatalities in 15 years. There were more than 540 fatal crashes killing over 600 people. One hundred and eighteen of whom were walking or riding their bike. An additional 2,411 crashes were estimated to have caused serious injury – a 16% rise over 2020. Thirty one people were killed in Seattle alone in 2021.

While the design of our infrastructure and vehicles encourages speed, other factors are at play as well. Alcohol and drug related crashes have continued to climb 25% since 2019. Speed also was a major factor climbing 18% since 2020.

There are a multitude of interrelated factors that lead to increasing numbers of motorists killing and injuring people – especially cyclists and pedestrians. But given the social malaise that has overcome us all over the last few years, anger and aggression are likely key factors. Whether it’s lockdown lunacy, income inequity insanity, racial reality, gender gut checks, or fights between the lefts and the rights there are ample reasons for us all to be disturbed.

There are also threats to the status quo. Increasingly cities are seeing bike and bus lanes squeezing out car lanes, rising gas prices, and talk of congestion fees. Meanwhile, automakers are ditching the traditional internal combustion engine for progressive green machines. These are levels of social change that many welcome, while others reject – especially those adverse to change or who feel their individualism is threatened.

So they take it out on others on the road. We’ve all witnessed, or are guilty of perpetrating, acts of aggression on the road: dodging and weaving through traffic, tailgating, flashing lights, running red lights, honking, flipping the bird, or yelling out the window. Worse yet, extreme forms of road rage where people take chase in a fit of anger to inflict harm or intimidation. There are more passive aggressive examples too, like parking in a bike lane, stopping in a cross walk, or failing to yield to a blinkering merging bus.

In 1994, Jerry Deffenbacher, a Colorado State psychology professor who studies correlations of anger and anxiety with behavior, created a Driving Anger Scale that scientists have been using since. Results as recent as 2016 suggest personality traits like “impulsiveness, narcissism, and normlessness” confirm studies from 2013 that link narcissism to aggressive driving. One researcher concluded:

“driving anger of narcissistic individuals may result out of threats to perceived power, control, and position rather than to image and attention seeking.”

Results also vary by age, gender, driver experience, and culture. In a country who’s culture flaunts and breeds narcissism, individualism, and macho maleness – possibly even overly tolerant of outward expressions of anger as an acceptable emotional response – we should not be surprised to see increased aggression on the part of some motorists.

Sometimes anger directed at strangers can take the form of contempt. The car then becomes a way to separate one’s self from others deemed inferior or from an anxiety inducing changing environment. Here’s how one geography researcher, Jason Henderson of San Francisco State University, described an SUV driver in a 2006 study looking at the politics of automobility in Atlanta, Georgia.  

“After spitting into a toll collection device on the highway, the angry white male described his disdain at the possible alternatives to his SUV — a compact urban form with intensive transit infrastructure containing pedestrian and transit spaces where people would have physical proximity to ‘others’ of different racial, class, gender or sexual orientation. Seen in this context, his SUV was more than just an instrument for traveling through the city. It was an instrument of secession from what he scorned in contemporary American urban space.”

WITH URBAN FRICTION COMES CAR ADDICTION

We took Uno to the doctor. We had a sneaking suspicion it may be done for. When my wife pulled into the shop they said, “You best turn that off, it doesn’t sound good. You probably should have had it towed.” But after waiting a few days for the prognosis, it turned out to be a couple bad spark plugs, failing coils, and noise inducing broken catalytic converter.

When my son heard this news, he said, “Let’s straight-pipe it!” Straight-piping is when you remove emission reducing mechanisms so that the sound, and pollution, from the engine goes straight out the tailpipe. Both my son and my daughter have an affinity for loud cars. My son can tell you the make and model of a car just from the sound of the exhaust. He’s a combusting carbon connoisseur. And lucky for him, there seems to be an increasing number of loud tailpipes these days.

I’m more aghast at the uproarious racket. I grumble and mutter under my own exhaust as these cars rumble by, “There goes another UAS. Urban Attention Seeker.” And it seems I’m right. Overly loud modified exhausts, or even some motorcycles (I’m looking at you Harley Davidson), are symbols of rebellion. They signal to anyone in ear shot opposition to authority and social norms. They scream, “NOTICE ME!”

In Gössling’s book he cites the research of Robert Merton who is regarded by many as the founder of modern sociology. He also studied criminology where he developed strain theory which says strain in an individual can come about in a society that pressures people to attain more than they can possibly achieve. So they seek forms of rebellion. More recent advances in this theory by the criminologist and social psychologist Robert Agnew point to three factors that lead to criminal acts of rebellion. They largely stem from childhood stress, trauma, victimization, and neglect:

* The inability to achieve positively valued stimuli (e.g., money, status, autonomy)

* The loss of positively valued stimuli (e.g., loss of romantic partners, property)

* The presentation of negatively valued or aversive stimuli (e.g., verbal and physical abuse)

But loud cars, or motorcycles, can just as easily be driven by financially successful people at the top of the social status hierarchy. These are the cars my son most admires. They’re hyper or super cars made by companies like Lamborghini, Ferrari, or Mercedes Benz. One of his favorites is the throaty land yacht by Mercedes Benz – The G Wagon. These are less emblems of rebellion and more signals of status. Both are forms of attracting attention.

And so is an Audi A3. Even though it was the cheapest car Audi sold at the time, it is still a luxury German automobile. And while it is a brand I dreamed of owning since childhood, I can’t deny my purchase also helped to signal my status. If my rational brain had one out, and I viewed the purchase of the car as an appliance for mobility, I could have easily put myself into a more affordable hatchback. As one friend put it, the A3 is really just a Volkswagen Golf for grown ups. Works for me.

We decided to keep Uno in the family. And sorry, son, Uno won’t be straight-piped. It’s getting a new catalytic converter…even though replacing it will cost more than the car is worth. This is the last year our kids will be driving Uno to school together and they want that little car to be a part of it.

Our kids could ride a public bus to school, but it takes an hour to go 12 miles and they have afterschool activities at locations far and wide. My son took the bus for a year and it left him exhausted with little time for homework. We chose to put them in this school, but we didn’t chose the car dependent design of our surrounding cities.

When it comes to car dependency, it turns out there really are two sides of the brain at work; one rational and one emotional. Gössling breaks them down into ‘real’ and ‘perceived’ dependencies. ‘Real’ dependencies are like what I just described. There are aspects of urban planning and design that intentionally require people to have a car to live a modern, happy, healthy, and productive life. The car is an appliance that gets you to the doctor, practice facility, grocery store, or school on time – places that require a car and are practically inaccessible by anyone who cannot or choses not to drive a car.

‘Perceived’ dependencies are rooted in fears and emotions where, as Gössling says,

“alternative transport is considered ‘dysfunctional,’ i.e., creating anxieties related to complexity (buying tickets, finding ways), claustrophobic spaces, monitoring in ‘militarized’ environments (control, security), encounters with marginalized people (homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts), or specific smells and noises. Car use may also be related to status, fright-flight-fight responses, or other fears and phobias. In such situations, car reliance may be considered an addiction.”

Automakers feed this addiction through advertising, marketing, and design. As Gössling summarizes in his list of car industry appeal strategies. I can imagine these being whispered seductively to the emotional side of our brain:

* The car will be good: The car is increasingly less polluting and safer in traffic

* The car is your home: Home and car melt into one space

* The car is your partner: You are a more capable person in cooperation with your car

* The car will protect you: It is a dangerous world

* You need the car: Appeals directed at subconscious

* Be aware of government: Someone is trying to take away your car

I for one am ready to break the addiction. Who knows, once our kids leave the house for college, maybe it will be time for Uno to graduate too. That someone trying to take away the car may just be me. Unless, of course, Audi releases an electric retro Audi Fox!

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hello Interactors,

Welcome to 2022. Or, as my son likes to say, twenty-twenty also. Today we begin our winter journey through human behavior as it relates to the interaction of people and place. As we further divide, we seem to also be drifting apart. So I turned to one of our leading philanthropic philosophizing musicians, Bono, for the answer.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BONO SCRATCHES

The holidays have a way of making you reminisce. I was thinking back 14 years ago when I met Bono at Microsoft just before the 2007-2008 holiday break. He was promoting his RED giving initiative and a small group of us in Windows were meeting with him and his team on ways to incorporate RED into Windows as a cross promotional scheme. Bono thought it especially relevant given we were in REDmond, Washington.

I was an early U2 fan. I bought their third album, War, on vinyl in 1983 when it first came out. So I brought it along to the meeting to see how Bono would react. As we filed into the Microsoft board room being greeted by members of the RED team and Bono, I was watching his eyes through his yellow tinted glasses. He immediately latched on to the album in my hand, walked over to me and said, “You just don’t see many of these.” And he took it from me as I followed him to the conference table. He asked me my name, pulled out his red pen and wrote on the back of the album cover, “It took 24 years but we finally hooked Brad. See you…” He then drew his signature profile of his long nose, glasses, and a straight smile and signed it, “Bono.”

He was shorter than I imagined. But genuine and endearing. He shared the space and time in that meeting with everyone. But, at the end, he couldn’t resist taking jabs at the Windows logo. “Look,”, he said. “I’m not a business person, I’m an artist.” He then stood up and approached the white board. He talked about how awful the Windows logo was. “Why is the Windows logo a flag?”, he asked. “It bothers me.” He then grabbed a pen and drew a simple four pane window and said. “See, a window. How hard can that be?”, he demanded. And sat down.

He had a point. And within a couple years, he got his wish. Pentagram, a design firm in New York, designed a new Windows logo. And with it came a new Microsoft logo that looks more like the sketch Bono made. But it turns out, as is often the case, even that idea was not new. Pentagram had proposed that same logo years before, but it was rejected.

But I admit, I was a bit distracted during his loquacious logo lecture. It was hard taking him seriously in his skin tight gold pants. He was distracted too. While Bono was pacing along the whiteboard with pen in hand, his other hand was routinely futzing with his crotch. He looked like a baseball player stepping out of the batters box to adjust his cup or scratch an itch. It’s not the image of a rock star you want lingering in your head.

I prefer to remember Bono as a 20 year old kid on MTV bellowing protest songs from the album he signed.

U2’s album, War, is noted for its harsh departure from their previous two albums, both musically and lyrically. They set out to tackle themes of war as Ireland had seen its fair share in his lifetime. Their biggest hit from that album, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, leads in with drums resembling a military march and features the blending of physical and emotional impacts of war. It includes lines like, “The trench is dug within our hearts.” It goes on to address the apathy around war and how our defiance against it is lessened by the numbing of the everyday violence mixed with fictionalized versions on TV.

And it's true, we are immuneWhen fact is fiction and TV realityAnd today, the millions cry We eat and drink while tomorrow, they die

The song, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” refers to a particularly bloody conflict in 1972 called Bloody Sunday. On Sunday, January 30th, 26 British soldiers opened fire on unarmed protestors in Northern Ireland killing 13 on the spot. One other died later from wounds. Many of these 14 people were either fleeing or helping other injured civilians.

These lyrics are about the effects of Northern Ireland conflicts that had been occurring for more than two decades by the time U2 released this album. The conflicts occurred mostly in Northern Ireland over political and nationalistic opinions between two warring factions. On one side were Unionists and loyalists, who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, and on the other Irish Nationalists and republicans, who sought to abandon the United Kingdom to create a United Ireland. Those seeking to stick with the United Kingdom were mostly Ulster Protestants, and those seeking independence were mostly Irish Catholics which added further religious and historic dimensions to what the Irish called The Troubles.

GROUPIES

These two factions created what sociologists call in-groups and out-groups. In-groups are defined as “a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member.” Out-groups are “social groups with which an individual does not identify.” It’s easy to imagine how these two groups in Ireland could formulate in-groups and out-groups along historical, social, religious, and political lines. And looking around today, it’s easy to spot scads of in-groups and out-groups all around us and around the world.

In many cases these attributes and divisions are real. In the case of the Irish conflict, who is a Protestant and who is a Catholic, for example, is empirically verifiable. But often times out-groups are created through fabrications of identity traits. They simply become reinforcing prejudicial stereotypes rooted in an underlying fear. Members of the in-group come to feel threatened and build elaborate cases for why the out-group should be feared.

It happened in the United Kingdom with Brexit and in the United States with the swell of conservative in-group and out-group identification that Trump helped to solidify. It continues today on the topic of global warming. Many conservatives refuse to believe global warming is a fact. They fear making multi-national corporations accountable for environmental destruction would hurt the economy and America’s dominant position on the world stage. So they invent Anti-American ‘liberal’ out-groups and throw scientists, environmentalists and anyone who agrees with them into the groups. They then sprinkle combustible myths over the lot of them and then strike the match of Fox News and watch it burn.

Many sociobiologists, like the recently deceased E.O. Wilson, would argue these people are simply executing on a well established evolutionary strategy. They’re protecting their own in an act called kin selection. It’s defined as “the evolutionary strategy that favors the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at a cost to the organism’s own survival and reproduction.”

When an in-group feels threatened, they turn to their members and seek protection while simultaneously turning their back on the out-group. Regardless of which group you’re in, you can’t help but feel threatened by some aspect of the effects of globalization. And so you turn to your in-group for comfort, protection, and strategies for survival.

E.O. Wilson extends this argument further to include group-selection theory. Where as kin theory is an individual evolutionary act singled out as favorable through natural selection, Wilson also argues the same can be applied to groups. Those groups that amass the largest in-groups come to dominate the progressively weakening out-groups.

It turns out these theories are hotly debated. Arguments against group-selection theory question how a group could possibly survive natural selection if they’re hellbent on self-destruction. It turns out, like the over reliance on the physical sciences to simplify economics, Darwinian ideas, while revolutionary and sound on their own terms, fail to extend to the complexities of the modern human psyche.

The intricacies in the balance or tension, for example, of selfishness and cooperation in socio-psychological interactions are unlikely to be explained simply through evolutionary histories. Sociologist, Brian Castellani, studies the complexities of place and health and he reminds us that,

“as recent developments in the complexity sciences have made rather clear (e.g., Byrne & Callaghan 2013; Capra & Luisi 2014), psychological existence and more widely social psychology and socio-anthropological existence are different forms of emergent self-organization, which require interdisciplinary understanding beyond just the biological sciences or physics or any such attempts at reductionism.”

E.O. Wilson would likely agree as these are themes he covers in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. It’s there that he concludes,

“The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences. Conversely, the material world exposed by the natural sciences is the most important frontier of the social sciences and humanities. The consilience argument can be distilled as follows: The two frontiers are the same.”

Humans are social animals. We survived and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by dealing with the tensions and conflicts between individuals and groups with whom they lived. Castellani writes,

“given that we are resolutely social organisms, it is better stated that our human capacity for altruism, cooperation, competition, aggression, and social commitment are, for the most part, a function of the fact that we have evolved, as a species, in highly complex social groups – group selection true or not.”

He continues,

“…the psyche’s evolution did not produce the tension between individuals and civilization; instead, the psyche’s evolution is a function of this tension.”

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE; PREJUDICE, ABUSE, BUSINESS CYCLE

Success, or happiness, of an individual or a group, in evolutionary terms, most likely came down to a realization that in order to survive one must choose to sacrifice. Any of us who ever played on a team, a band, or worked in a group knows that collaboration through cooperation can only work with individuals who make certain sacrifices for the team. Hence the old adage, “there is no ‘I’ in team.”

We indeed are hardwired, evolutionarily speaking, to act in our own self interest to survive against an imminent threat. Fight or flight instincts are real. Yet we are equally hardwired to choose self-sacrifice. If such a sacrifice is deemed too extreme, we have the ability to choose to leave the group. Such a choice in the early days of homo sapiens came with its own risk; the group may not survive nor may you. The odds of survival are in favor of the natural forces of both local and global societies. These odds advantage the survival of groups over the survival of individuals thus discouraging such selfish behavior.

And yet it still happens. We need only look at voluntary military service as evidence of self-sacrifice for the betterment of the group. And the draft is a great example of an in-group, the government, sacrificing individuals for the survival of the larger group, the country. But such cases are rare, especially with regards to heroes, relative to the general population. But there are smaller, less drastic altruistic sacrifices people make everyday. It’s a group of people that form their own in-group.

This in-group makes small sacrifices for the betterment of the planet; they recycle, walk, bus, and cycle, drive less, buy less, fly less, downsize, or simply conclude they must grow their own food. These actions are also driven by fear of the effects of globalization. Think globally, act locally. These people perceive a global threat and fear that if they don’t make some sacrifices for the good of the group, they, nor the group, will survive.

But such sacrifices are only effective at a scale larger than one’s own home, business, or even city. It needs to scale globally. We know how to scale for powerful impact. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, developed theories on the relationship between power and knowledge. He noted two different forms of technologies of power. (He’s using the term technology broadly to mean the practical aims of changing the human environment) First there are the technologies of self which is the power to make your own decisions. The second are the technologies of power and government. For example, even if you decide not to wear a mask in public, institutions hold the power to oblige you to do so.

We are pressured individually by our in-groups, or defiant in opposition to an out-group, to behave a particular way. Yet, overlaying it all – even in the presence of fierce hatred and animosity between groups – are human invented policies, procedures, laws, treaties, and obligations that find a way to mend, connect, skirt, or correct the differences between groups. Technologies of power.

And even at a psychological level, we posses as humans innate concerns for our global commitment in our day-to-day lives. Technologies of self. Sigmund Freud, in his book titled Civilization and its discontents, talks of roles that Brian Castellani generalizes as “conforming,” “cooperative,” “cohesive,” “common identity,” and “let’s-work-together-and-figure-out-how-to-get-along.” These are the very roles civilizations have relied on to survive and thrive throughout our existence.

History has a pretty good track record of societies and governments coming together despite our differences. The outcomes are not perfect, but we made it through the Cold War, civil rights movements globally, and ongoing negotiated tensions between the United States and China or even North Korea. The social-psychologist Anselm Strauss summarizes it like this,

“The negotiated order on any given day could be conceived of as the sum total of the organization’s rules and policies, along with whatever agreements, understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements currently obtained. These include agreements at every level of organization, of every clique and coalition, and include covert as well as overt agreements.”  

Any unhappiness or fear we may feel is of our own doing. And we’ve invented social super structures, technologies of power, to address them while knowing full well they also perpetuate our unhappiness. It’s what makes people want to retreat to a simpler past. Some wish to escape to a primitive natural oasis as Thoreau did around Walden Pond while others want to retreat, like Trump does, to the 50s and 60s as a way to “Make America Great Again.”

BONO IS NO HIPPIE

Thoreau discovered retreating to nature and isolating himself from society did not yield the happiness he expected. He too, after all, was a social animal. And while many in America, especially White men, reflect nostalgically on how much better it was for them in the 50s and 60s they forget, or don’t care, to remember it was a time of rampant spousal abuse. Wife beating was not made illegal in all states until 1920. It wasn’t until the 1970’s women’s movement that it got the attention it deserved. The term ‘domestic violence’ didn’t appear until 1973.

In 1930 Freud addressed our attraction to the chimera of nostalgia by observing “that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we [believe we] should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” Considering he wrote this at a time when Nazism and Stalinism was on the rise, it’s clear his observations would have been very real.

In 2018, the British comparative religion writer and former Roman Catholic sister, Karen Armstrong, noted

“that such nostalgia remains the primary motivator for the rise in religious, cultural, and political fundamentalism throughout the world—all a reaction to the perceived “ills” and “inequalities” of globalization and global civil society, which these nostalgic thinkers “read” as resolutely global, secular, elitist, bourgeois, liberal, harmful, and blasphemous.”

It’s not hard to identify such in-groups: nationalist movements in Europe, Muslim Fundamentalists and extremists, and the Alt-Right movement in America – which is dangerously neighboring the in-groups of the Christian right, the Tea Party, and increasingly the majority of the Republican party.

But there are also groups who want to move toward a more global civil society. They see the tolerance and blending of religions, cultures, and traditions as a way to advance the global community. These are people who live in the now and believe advances in income inequality, race relations, gender spectrum awareness, health and wellness, and reducing global warming can yield a better future for all. And they embrace the global network society introduced through the rapid advancement of the information age.

As Brian Castellani says, “at no previous point in our history of anatomically modern Homo sapiens have humans had the capacity to engage in, perpetuate, or share their social commitments (global or otherwise) on such a global scale.”

And while some dream of a utopian network society – a massive global in-group – any dip into social media will tell you it’s unlikely anyone will get that many people to agree on a set of binding principles and sacrifices.

But the global network society has proven effective at rallying local acts of defiance that lead to compromise. The worldwide BLM movement is the most immediate example. And as unpleasant as it is, defiance in the spirit of altruistic progress toward a better future may be our only choice.

It is this very progress that defines an out-group in the eyes of conservatives. The ills of globalization, in their eyes, are the progression, recognition, release, and rise of the historically oppressed. They invent scapegoats in the form of brown skinned immigrants or encroaching Asian wealth and dominance. Many in this in-group fear the grip of the mythical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant slipping away and yearn for a nostalgic Western dominance that they believe their Christian God ordained them to execute.

Progressives define conservatives as an out-group. They feel the ills of globalization are the result of over-exploitive capitalistic dominance wrapped up in Western expansionist dogma. Their scapegoats are business men, White male politicians, and toxic masculinity. They fear an allegiance to ever rising GDP will result in a collapse of natural resources and increasing climate instability that threatens the existence of all living beings. Many in this in-group yearn for a nostalgic return to local living and simpler lives that depend less on the globalist infrastructure of over-exploitive capitalism.

Castellani believes it comes down to this,

“As such, in the face of this misery, we really only have two options: bring peace and happiness into the world through civil disobedience and brutal compromise (both within ourselves and in relations to our bodies, nature and others); or allow our fear of the global to draw us into nostalgic retreat, which often quickly turns our best dreams and intentions into global nightmares.”

Track 4 on U2’s album, War, is a piece entitled “Like a Song.” It’s one of the least performed songs by the band, but its lyrics speak to today’s divided groups. In Verse Two Bono nods to in-group signaling that can trigger nostalgia while also calling us to rebel against our divisions, seek connections with others through agreeable terms, and strive to help one another.

And we love to wear a badge, a uniformAnd we love to fly a flagBut I won't let others live in hellAs we divide against each other and we fight amongst ourselvesToo set in our ways to try to rearrangeToo right to be wrong, in this rebel song

Those are some wise words from a group of 20 year old wannabe punk rockers. And after all these years, Bono continues to acknowledge that the struggles for peace and justice, while motivated by altruism, can only happen through defiance, resistance, and compromise. It is, after all, the natural order of complex systems.

In a 2015 Rolling Stone interview he’s quoted as saying,

“When you get bleak about things and think, Gosh, is there an end to this? Yeah, there is, it just takes lots of work, lots of time. I was never a hippie— I’m punk rock, really. I was never into: “Let’s hold hands, and peace will come just because we’ll dream it into the world.” No, peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world. But it can be done, I’m sure of that.”

Hello Interactors,

The first year of Interplace is nearly complete. I want to thank everyone who supported me through 2021 by subscribing, reading, listening, commenting, and sharing. I also want to thank the London Writers’ Salon and all faithful writers who showed up on Zoom with me every morning at 8:00 Pacific time. It brought companionship, accountability, and miles of smiles.

Evolutionary biologists call interactors the individual traits that are so uniquely beneficial that they lead to natural selection. You are my interactors ­– special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. Thanks to you, that journey will continue through 2022. I’m keeping to the same structure, but may summon the courage to do occasional interviews as well.

A year ago I kicked off Interplace. In the winter I wrote about human behavior, then moved to cartography in the spring, physical geography and the environment in the summer, and economic geography this fall. This is post number 50 and the last of 2021. Should Interplace 2021 be a book, it would be comprised of four sections, 50 chapters, nearly 740 pages, and over 130,000 words.

To celebrate, I thought I’d share excepts from the most read posts from each of the four seasons. I also included titles and links to all 50 pieces at the end.

But before I start, I thought I’d share a quote from the legendary leader the city of Seattle was named after, Chief Si'ahl (siʔaɫ). These words appeared in my first newsletter and continue to serve as an inspiration for Interplace today. They’re worth sharing again as we reflect and contemplate the constellation of interactions with people and place we all had throughout 2021 and imagine what’s ahead in 2022.

“Humankind has not woven the web of life.We are but one thread within it.Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.All things are bound together.All things connect.”

And now, excerpts from the top four most read Interplace posts of 2021.

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

Take Your Head for a Walk

Your brain makes maps on your behalf. But if you want a good one, take a hike. Your brain will love you for it, and your future self will too.

It turns out walking and cognitive mapping are mutually dependent systems that are only optimized when done together. Driving or riding as a passenger are poor substitutes for enhancing our interactions with place. In the words of neuroscientist, Shane O’Mara,

“The brain’s navigational and mapping and memory systems are so intertwined as to be almost one and the same. Walking to somewhere depends on the brain’s navigational system, and in turn walking provides a vast amount of ongoing information to the brain’s mapping and navigation systems. These are mutually enriching and reinforcing systems.”

Our cities don’t make it easy to walk. A century of car culture has kept people from interacting with place. We can deduce from the research I’ve cited, that this is a bad thing. Not only do we have a biased and hazy image built in our minds of the environment in which we live, sitting in a car or a chair does not facilitate happy thoughts.

We all succumb to what these two Iowa State researchers referred to as the ‘dread effect’. The thought of expending more energy than necessary can make one dread walking. It’s all too easy to tap a destination on Google maps, hit the ‘walking distance’ tab, shutter at the time and effort it would take to walk, and then grab the keys and drive there. But since Covid hit, I instead grab my headphones, take a step, and feel the cells in my brain come alive. I am interacting with place, with a smile on my face, as a cranial cellular symphony traces a map of the space.

SPRING: CARTOGRAPHY

You Are What You Map

How triangles, topology, quadrangles, and cartography yield maps that can skew both messages and time

The Renaissance accelerated the field of cartography. This was an era of discovering new knowledge, instrumentation, and the measuring and quantification of the natural world. Mercator’s projection stemmed from the invention of perspective; a word derived from the Latin word perspicere – “to see through.” European colonial maps were drawn mostly to navigate, control, and dominate land – and its human occupants. We have all been controlled by these maps in one way or other and we still are. Our knowledge of the world largely stems from the same perspective Mercator was offering up centuries ago. The entire world sees the world through the eyes of Western explorers, conquerors, and cartographers. That includes elements of maps as simple as place names.

Take place names in Africa, as an example. The country occupied by France until 1960, Niger, comes from the Latin word for “shining black”. Its derogatory adaptation by the British added another ‘g’ making a word we now call the n-word. But niger was not the most popular Latin word used to describe people of Africa, it was an ancient Greek derivative; Aethiops – which means “burn face”. If you replace the ‘s’ at the end with the ‘a’ from the beginning, you see where the name Ethiopia comes from.

There’s another Westernized place name just west of where the Dakota and Lakota people thrived called Gannett Peak. It’s the tallest mountain in the state of Wyoming and is part of the Bridger-Teton range. I’m sure you’ve heard of the more popular neighboring range, the Grand Teton’s; another notable (and sexist) French place name which means – ‘Big Boobs’. Gannett Peak is named after Henry Gannett – the father of American mapmaking.

He was one of many geographers throughout the history of western colonization. Sure he was more influential than most, but they were all tasked with the same thing. Whether it was triangulating British territories in India, finessing French regions in Africa, or delineating Dutch districts in Brazil they were all measuring, mapping, and manipulating how others should see the world. It’s the paradox of mapmaking. No matter your intent, whatever line you draw will reflect the bias you bring.

Mercator was biased by perspective because that’s what the culture of his time led him to do. Gannett mapped natural occurring features of the land because the mapping of minerals and other natural resources was in high demand. Iowa was named Iowa because that’s the word they knew. Even attempts to counter-map the dominance of cartesian colonial cartography can’t escape its own bias. Nobody can. But we live on a melting planet, so our days remain a few. If we’re going to survive this calamity, we must see that our thoughts are skewed. So the next you look at a map, consider its point of view. If we all do this together, we can invent a world anew.

SUMMER: ENVIRONMENT

Calamity in Klamath

Mukluks suffer over water for suckers

California’s fires have claimed two million acres. Ten percent of the sequoia population was taken by a single fire; trees that have been on this planet for thousands of years – gone. It’s so dry in southern Oregon’s Klamath valley that wells are drying up. Homeowners are having to drive for their water. The county has ordered cisterns from as far away as Oklahoma, but are running up against shortages of rain barrels due to choked supply chains and increased demand.

The Klamath valley has seen its fair share of emergencies, but every generation seems surprised. And sometimes apathetic. The first occupants of this area were the Klamath Tribes: the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin-Paiute people. They were sometimes referred to as mukluks or numu – the people. People, while differentiated by name, are still animals. And like our multi-legged, finned, scaled, and winged companions, we are an integral part of the environment. This was, and remains, a pan-Indigenous concept that deserves reminding. The Klamath Tribes embraced this belief in a shared communal slogan, “naanok ?ans naat sat’waYa naat ciiwapk diceew’a “We help each other; We will live good”

By the 1950s the Klamath Tribes became one of the most prosperous tribes in America. In keeping with their traditional ways, they owned, managed, and sustained the largest stand of Ponderosa Pine in the West. Driven by a self-sufficient determinism millennia old, they were the only tribe to make enough money to pay the United States Government for the services their people utilized. 

But their success made them a target. The Klamath Tribes stood out. Having demonstrated just how profitable their land could be, it was time the United States took even more than they had a century prior.

On August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was issued by the United States Congress announcing the official federal policy of termination. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Klamath Tribes. Included were the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas.

Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands, 11,500 Indigenous people lost their native legal status, and over one million acres of land lost its trust status. Not a single tribe has improved economically since, while corporations have profited handsomely.

I’m convinced that a combination of traditional knowledge and new science, technology, and invention will yield the best path forward for managing our global climatic conundrums. But we can’t just tech our way out of this. We’re going to have to change our food habits, reduce extractions, eliminate commercial and consumer waste, and overhaul the global food system.

The dam has been cracked, but it needs to be broken wide open. All living organisms depend on water. They depend on us. Let’s listen to the ancient words of the Klamath people: When we help each other, we will all live well.

FALL: ECONOMICS

Cryptocurrency, Euro-insurgency, and Economic Urgency

Untangling economic supremacy through heresy while offering an alternative destiny

Cryptocurrency was invented to circumvent the juggernaut that banks, governments, and credit card companies hold on the currency market. But the more it gets legitimized as an alternative currency, the more interested these traditional institutions become. For example, one form of cryptocurrency rising in popularity are stablecoins. It’s a digital currency that can be converted into ‘real’ money and is issued by the very institutions the inventors were hoping to circumvent. It seems there is no escaping Western economic dominance.

The truth is, alternative currencies and economies exist all around us and have for centuries. For example, in a district of central London call Brixton, where David Bowie once lived, shops no longer accept the British Pound. Instead they take an alternative currency called the Brixton Pound that features a picture of Bowie on a paper bill that is as nicely designed and proportioned as Bowie himself.

Many schemes like this exist outside of the Western world too – and they’re often not tied to the dominant currency system. For example, there’s a settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya called Bangladesh. Not to be confused with the country of Bangladesh. It was named after an early settler who unexpectedly packed up and moved to Bangladesh never to return. The area was hence called Bangladesh. It’s a poor informal settlement made of self-made homes and little to no infrastructure, yet is home to over 20,000 people. They work at nearby industries at the fringe of Nairobi doing odd jobs regularly paid workers refuse to do.

Many are well educated, but work is intermittent and there are more qualified workers than there are jobs. It leads to extreme poverty, apathy, and strife. One local teacher in the Peace Corps, Will Ruddick, became frustrated that he was graduating kids with no where to go. He said many of whom were more skilled academically than many he’d witnessed at Stanford. Ruddick happens to also have a PhD in econophysics – a branch of economics that draws inspiration from the field of physics. He began wondering how he could devise a way for residents in areas like Bangladesh to earn consistent wages doing meaningful work in their community. He wanted ways for them to create and share in their abundance, take charge of their own livelihoods, and build a self-sustaining economic future.

American economic geography professor, Eric Sheppard, from UCLA offers that because Western style capitalism relies on “uneven and asymmetric connectivities” that end up “driving uneven geographical development”, we’ve arrived at a place where the dominant global economic scheme of globalization has failed “at scales ranging from the globe to the neighbourhood.”

Instead of propagating or placating a dominant global economy, what if we acknowledge, embrace, fertilize, understand, celebrate, and experience alternative economies embedded within or on the fringe of the establishment, like those Ruddick has pioneered. After all, these are economies that have been forged through the interaction of people and place whose shared histories have, as Sheppard says, “found them encountering, rather than propagating, Capitalist economic development.”

Following is an index of all the pieces I’ve written over the last year. Thanks, again, for the support. I’ll see you all next week and next year.

FULL LIST OF INTERPLACE 2021

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

THE INTERACTION OF PEOPLE AND PLACE

My First Subscribers

Raccoons Destroyed My Lawn

What the World Needs Now is Love

The Lone Star Is in a Frozen State

WASPs and Weeds Gone Wild

A Computer on Every Desk and a Car in Every Garage

Bill and Brad's Excellent Adventure

Take Your Head for a Walk

SPRING: CARTOGRAPHY

I'd Rather Be Spinning Logos

A Groma from Rome Finds a New Home

A Nation Squared

Miami Priced, Ohio Diced

Guns, God, and Gold

Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day

You Are What You Map

The U.S. Census: Mapping a Sense of Us

Boomtown Maps

Winning Over the Windy City with Watercolors

Maps as Logos; Atlases that Impose

Spring 2021 Cartography Review

Cul-de-sacs, Caucasians, and the Kansas Garden City

SUMMER: ENVIRONMENT

The Obscene Man

A New Chapter to Behold as the Network of Life Unfolds

Ruckelshaus and Hickel Get us Out of a Pickle

Big Science Meets Big Ecology under the Big Sky

Muggy Conditions, Buggy Coalitions, and Collegiate Ambitions

Nature, Nurture, Math, Art and Virtue

An Olympic Sized Metabolism

An Ancestor's Garden

Solar Powered Imperialist Addictions

Charlie Watts and the Strange Attractor

Calamity in Klamath

Ditches, Wells, and Dams. Riches, Cartels, and Scams.

Lay Dung; Feng Shui

FALL: ECONOMICS

The Wealth of Generations

Space Cadets and the Earthy Crunchies

Only a Nobody Walks in L.A.

From a Shoe Lust Hit, to 'Just Do It'.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Hitler and the Capitalist's Fix

Supply Chain Pains as China Gains

Bond, Bezos, Gates, and Musk

Black Friday and the Christmas Creep: Part 1

Black Friday and the Christmas Creep: Part 2

The ‘One Click Buy’ Empire Needs an Umpire

Hoops, Groups, and Feedback Loops

Cryptocurrency, Euro-insurgency, and Economic Urgency

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, Your Story Has Many Branches

Hello Interactors,

For all you Christmas celebrators out there, happy Christmas Eve. Since many will be gathering ‘round a Christmas tree, I thought I’d tell the story of its origin. And like so much of America history, it has ties to immigrants and slavery; but in this case — anti-slavery.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A TREE SO YEE MAY BE FREE

“If the morning drives are extended beyond the city, there is much to delight the eye. The trees are eased in ice; and when the sun shines out suddenly, the whole scene looks like one diffused rainbow,—dressed in a brilliancy which can hardly be conceived of in England. On days less bright, the blue harbour spreads in strong contrast with the sheeted snow which extends to its very brink.”

These are the words of Harriet Martineau. She was a English writer, journalist, and social theorist who pioneered observational methods that came to influence the field of sociology. One of her more popular books came at the end of her travels through the United States in the 1830s titled, Retrospect of Western Travel. The passage above describes what she saw as she left the Boston city limits in the snow the winter of 1835.

You may have images of her bundled up in a one horse open sleigh, over the hills she went, dashing all the way. But according to Martineau, you can let go of any such romantic inclinations. Here’s her take on sleighing.

“As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms. No doubt early association has something to do with the American fondness for this mode of locomotion; and much of the affection which is borne to music, dancing, supping, and all kinds of frolic, is transferred to the vehicle in which the frolicking parties are transported. It must be so, I think, or no one would be found to prefer a carriage on runners to a carriage on wheels,—except on an untrodden expanse of snow. On a perfectly level and crisp surface I can fancy the smooth rapid motion to be exceedingly pleasant; but such surfaces are rare in the neighbourhood of populous cities. The uncertain, rough motion in streets hillocky with snow, or on roads consisting for the season of a ridge of snow with holes in it, is disagreeable, and provocative of headache. I am no rule for others as to liking the bells; but to me their incessant jangle was a great annoyance.”

And if that’s not enough to convince you, she offers up a quote from unknown source that puts a finer touch on the realities of sleighing.

“Do you want to know what sleighing is like? You can soon try. Set your chair on a spring board out in the porch on Christmas-day: put your feet in a pail full of powdered ice: have somebody to jingle a bell in one ear, and somebody else to blow into the other with the bellows,—and you will have an exact idea of sleighing.”

Martineau was on her way to a Christmas evening celebration at the home of a former Harvard German language professor, Charles Follen. Although, due to scheduling conflicts the event was actually on New Years Eve and not Christmas Eve. The cozy holiday scene that Martineau proceeds to unfold came to be the most, though not the first, read articulation of what came to be the center piece of American Christmas celebration – the Christmas tree.

Follen was a German immigrant so perhaps it’s not that surprising that a Christmas tree would feature prominently in her story. It’s been a long held belief that German immigrants brought their time-honored Christmas tree tradition with them. Though, as we’ll soon see, the evolution of the Christmas tree tradition in America paralleled that of Germany.

Martineau’s account of that evening, while factual, leaves out important historical details as to why she was celebrating Christmas with Follen and his family that night. These were two radical Unitarian abolitionists who bonded over their insistence that slavery be eradicated totally and immediately. Northerner’s, and New England Unitarians, were split on the matter of abolition. Follen’s convictions are what got him fired from Harvard a year prior.

As for Martineau, she was a well known and respected journalist but not yet a public activist. But after attending a women’s abolitionist meeting that November, she was convinced she needed to act. She was asked at that meeting to write publicly avowing her beliefs. Being one of the only women writers of her time to sustain herself through writing and still requiring access to America’s mainstream elite for her book, she faced an ethical dilemma.

Later she wrote, “I foresaw that almost every house in Boston, except those of the abolitionists, would be shut against me; that my relation to the country would be completely changed, as I should suddenly be transformed from being a guest and an observer to being considered a missionary or a spy.…”

News leaked of her position on slavery and Boston newspapers ridiculed her. Their headlines spread across the country and she was forced to alter her itinerary. The event she was attending at Follen’s home wasn’t just a Christmas celebration, but an anti-slavery strategy session. That spring, she (in the company of Charles Follen) took to the road not as journalist, but as an activist.

CHRISTKINDLE AND BELSNICKEL

Historians and folklorists have determined that the first Christmas tree in America was most likely in the home of a German immigrant in Pennsylvania. But it’s unlikely to have occurred anytime before 1810. The first known sketch of a family celebrating Christmas, featuring a small tree atop a table, was not printed until recent decades but dates to either 1812 or 1819.

Recall from my November posts on the origins of Thanksgiving, this was also the time when St. Nicholas was also entering the picture in New York. The Christmas tree tradition was also just emerging in Germany at this very same time. The Christmas tree, like Santa Claus himself, wasn’t a long held German tradition but a story told by a select group of elites who latched on to a small, isolated, and obscure holiday event that was occurring in what was then Strasbourg, Germany but is now part of France.

It was established sometime in the 17th century as a quasi-religious way of judging children on the basis of them being naughty or nice. If you were nice you got a visit that night from Christkindle (i.e. the Christchild) and if you were naughty you got a visit from Hanstrapp; Strasbourg’s equivalent of what became known as Belsnickle (roughly translated: St. Nicholas in Fur).

This character has echo’s of behavior seen by Wassailers during Thanksgiving celebrations where men, often of lower class, would dress up and go door to door, often times even welcoming themselves in. Perhaps this offers a clue into how Santa became a home invader. Though, should Belsnickle determine a child in the home had been naughty, he gifted the parents with a stick with instructions to whip the poor child.

The Christmas tree tradition expanded beyond Strasbourg around 1750. Its spread may have been accelerated by a young up and coming writer, naturalist, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1771. Recall from my October post, that by the dawn of the 18th century Goethe had established himself as the go-to guy by the German government for writing, organizing, and evangelizing his opinions and observations on everything from gardening, to parks management, to economics.

He had spent some time in Strasbourg and “discovered in this city a new sense of “German” identity that transformed his larger cultural vision.” His 1774 novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther, is a story of a love triangle that ends tragically. And in the lead up to this tragedy, Goethe writes how young Werther “spoke of the pleasure the children would feel and remembered how in times long past he had himself been transported to paradise by the surprise opening of a door and the appearance of the decorated tree with its candles, sweets, and apples.”

It wasn’t until 1810 that the Christmas Tree tradition made it’s way to Berlin. It was introduced in Munich in 1830 by the Queen of Bavaria. Goethe had inspired a string of writers publishing stories of Christmas trees that were disseminated throughout Europe and the United States. And it was all happening at the same time of the first recorded evidence of a Christmas tree in America – 1820.

And then, in 1836, came the first printed image of a Christmas tree in America. It was titled “Christmas Eve” and was featured in a story called The Stranger’s Gift. It was written, as you might expect, by a German immigrant. But not just any German immigrant. It was written by Herman Bokum, the professor who replaced Follen after Harvard let him go for his public opposition to slavery just one year earlier.

YOUR BOUGHS CAN TEACH A LESSON

After Follen lost his job at Harvard he was hired by a family to home school their two children. Follen strictly followed a progressive teaching method derived from a Swiss educational reformer named Johann Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi had a child-centered and directed educational philosophy. He believed every child is born with inherently good qualities and it’s the teachers role to find them and cultivate them. It’s unclear whether Follen’s enemies convinced the family to reconsider, the family themselves had a change of heart, or Follen, ever dogmatic in his principles, refused to budge on his teaching approach, but two weeks before Christmas of 1835 he was terminated.

It is in this context that Harriett Martineau attended the Christmas celebration in Follen’s newly built home on the corner of Follen Avenue outside of Boston. Martineau did not mention Follen by name in her retelling of their Christmas tree celebration, only Follen’s son who everyone called “Little Charley.” She writes,

“I was present at the introduction into the new country of the spectacle of the German Christmas-tree. My little friend Charley, and three companions, had been long preparing for this pretty show…I rather think it was, generally speaking, a secret out of the house; but I knew what to expect…The tree was the top of a young fir, planted in a tub, which was ornamented with moss. Smart, dolls, and other whimsies, glittered in the evergreen; and there was not a twig; which had not something sparkling upon it… Charley looked a good deal like himself, only now and then twisting himself about in an unaccountable fit of giggling. I mounted the steps behind the tree to see the effect of opening the doors. It was delightful. The children poured in; but in a moment, every voice was hushed. Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke; only Charley leaped for joy.”

It was two years before Martineau’s book was published. She continued her friendship with Follen until his tragic death in 1841. He was killed when a steamship he was traveling on exploded. His photograph hung on the wall of her home until she died in 1876.

And in the intervening years of her book being published, a writer friend of theirs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, wrote a fictional story called “New Years Day” that included a brief mention of a Christmas tree celebration akin to what actually took place at the Follens. It was published that same year, 1835, making it the first piece of American literature to mentioned a Christmas tree.

It’s unfortunate America’s Christmas tree origin story doesn’t start with the telling of Charles Follen and Harriett Martineau and their New Years Eve anti-slavery strategy meeting around the Christmas tree. Not only is their relationship full of intrigue, but the idea of the Christmas tree immortalized as an historic symbol of freedom from slavery seems an appropriate American Christmas tale. Perhaps the story of Follen and Martineau is what we should be reading to children every Christmas eve and not just T’was the Night Before Christmas.

Both the story of the Christmas tree as a time-honored German cultural tradition and America’s favorite Christmas time fable, T’was the Night Before Christmas, were largely fabricated and perpetuated by a select group of elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Clement Clark Moore, the author of T’was the Night Before Christmas, — and his reactionary New York Episcopalian Knickerbocker friends — were interested in imbuing their Christmas tales with aristocratic authority. In contrast, Bollen and his Unitarian Christmas tree literary acquaintances used the Christmas tree to add momentum to the swelling progressive reformist movement of the 1830s.

Stephen Nissenbaum, in his book The Battle for Christmas, explains the similarities between the unfolding of these two events, American traditions, and these two men,

“There were important similarities between the antislavery sensibility and the new attitude toward children. Abolitionists and educational reformers shared a joint empathy for people who were powerless to resist the wrath of those who wielded authority over them—slaves and children, respectively. (Both types of reformers had a particular abhorrence of the use of the lash as a form of punishment.)”

He continues,

“In fact, what Charles Follen did in 1835 is similar in that sense to what Clement Clarke Moore had done more than a decade earlier, although his reasons—Moore was a reactionary, Follen a radical—were profoundly different. But both men had reason to feel alienated from their respective communities, and both responded by turning inward, to their own children, and using Christmas as the occasion for doing so.”

And in both cases, literature, and access to it, played a starring role. Nissenbaum, writes,

“As it turns out, the most important channels through which the ritual was spread were literary ones. Information about the Christmas tree was diffused by means of commercial literature, not via immigrant folk culture—from the top down, not from the bottom up. It was by reading about Christmas trees, not by witnessing them, that many thousands of Americans learned about the custom. Before they ever saw such a thing, they already knew what Christmas trees were all about—not only what they looked like, but also how and why they were to be used.”

It seems another mythical folk tradition is still propagated from the top down more than experienced from bottom up. Recalling Harriet Martineau’s American observation that “As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms.”

Hello Interactors,

I was in Santa Barbara recently having dinner on a friend’s deck when a rocket’s contrail streaked the sky. “Another one from Vandenberg,” he said. “Wait a couple minutes — you’ll hear it.” And we did. “They’ve gotten really annoying,” he added. He’s not wrong. In early 2024, SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the rest of the world combined, much of it from Vandenberg Space Force Base (renamed from Air Force Base in 2021). They’ve already been approved to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, with filings for 30,000 more.

This isn’t just future space junk — it’s infrastructure. And it’s not just in orbit. What Musk is doing in the sky is tied to what he’s building on the ground. Not in Vandenberg, where regulation still exists, but in Starbase, Texas, where the law doesn’t resist — it assists. There, Musk is testing how much sovereignty one man can claim under the banner of “innovation” — and how little we’ll do to stop him.

TOWNS TO THRUST AND THRONE

Musk isn’t just defying gravity — he’s defying law. In South Texas, a place called Starbase has taken shape along the Gulf Coast, hugging the edge of SpaceX’s rocket launch site. What looks like a town is really something else: a launchpad not just for spacecraft, but for a new form of privatized sovereignty.

VIDEO: Time compresses at the edge of Starbase: a slow-built frontier where launch infrastructure rises faster than oversight. Source: Google Earth

This isn’t unprecedented. The United States has a long lineage of company towns — places where corporations controlled land, housing, labor, and local government. Pullman, Illinois is the most famous. But while labor historians and economic geographers have documented their economic and social impact, few have examined them as legal structures of power.

That’s the gap legal scholar Brian Highsmith identifies in Governing the Company Town. That omission matters — because these places aren’t just undemocratic. They often function as quasi-sovereign legal shells, designed to serve capital, not people.

Incorporation is the trick. In Texas, any area with at least 201 residents can petition to become a general-law municipality. That’s exactly what Musk has done. In a recent vote (212 to 6) residents approved the creation of an official town — Starbase. Most of those residents are SpaceX employees living on company-owned land…with a Tesla in the driveway. The result is a legally recognized town, politically constructed. SpaceX controls the housing, the workforce, and now, the electorate. Even the mayor is a SpaceX affiliate. With zoning powers and taxing authority, Musk now holds tools usually reserved for public governments — and he’s using them to build for rockets, not residents…unless they’re employees.

VIDEO: Starbase expands frame by frame, not just as a company town, but as a legal experiment — where land, labor, and law are reassembled to serve orbit over ordinance. Source: Google Earth

Quinn Slobodian, a historian of neoliberalism and global capitalism, shows how powerful companies and individuals increasingly use legal tools to redesign borders and jurisdictions to their advantage. In his book, Cracked Up Capitalism, he shows how jurisdiction becomes the secret weapon of the capitalist state around the world. I wrote about a techno-optimist fantasy state on the island of Roatán, part of the Bay Islands in Honduras a couple years ago.

It isn’t new. Disney used the same playbook in 1967 with Florida’s Reedy Creek District — deeding slivers of land to employees to meet incorporation rules, then governing without real opposition. Highsmith draws a straight line to Musk: both use municipal law not to serve the public, but to avoid it. In Texas, beach access is often blocked near Starbase — even when rockets aren’t launching. A proposed bill would make ignoring an evacuation order a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by jail.

Even if Starbase never fully resembles a traditional town, that’s beside the point. What Musk is really revealing isn’t some urban design oasis but how municipal frameworks can still be weaponized for private control. Through zoning laws, incorporation statutes, and infrastructure deals, corporations can shape legal entities that resemble cities but function more like logistical regimes.

And yet, this tactic draws little sustained scrutiny. As Highsmith reminds us, legal scholarship has largely ignored how municipal tools are deployed to consolidate corporate power. That silence matters — because what looks like a sleepy launch site in Texas may be something much larger: a new form of rule disguised as infrastructure.

ABOVE THE LAW, BELOW THE LAND

Elon Musk isn’t just shaping towns — he’s engineering systems. His tunnels, satellites, and rockets stretch across and beyond traditional borders. These aren’t just feats of engineering. They’re tools of control designed to bypass civic oversight and relocate governance into private hands. He doesn’t need to overthrow the state to escape regulation. He simply builds around it…and in the case of Texas, with it.

Architect and theorist Keller Easterling, whose work examines how infrastructure quietly shapes political life, argues that these systems are not just supports for power — they are power. Infrastructure itself is a kind of operating system for shaping the city, states, countries…and now space.

Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite constellation, provides internet access to users around the world. In Ukraine, it became a vital communications network after Russian attacks on local infrastructure. Musk enabled access — then later restricted it. He made decisions with real geopolitical consequences. No president. No Congress. Just a private executive shaping war from orbit.

And it’s not just Ukraine. Starlink is now active in dozens of countries, often without formal agreements from national regulators. It bypasses local telecom laws, surveillance rules, and data protections. For authoritarian regimes, that makes it dangerous. But for democracies, it raises a deeper question: who governs the sky?

Right now, the answer is: no one. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 assumes that nation-states, not corporations, are the primary actors in orbit. But Starlink functions in a legal grey zone, using low Earth orbit as a loophole in international law…aided and abetted by the U.S. defense department.

VIDEO: Thousands of Starlink satellites, visualized in low Earth orbit, encircle the planet like a privatized exosphere—reshaping global communication while raising questions of governance, visibility, and control. Source: Starlink

The result is a telecom empire without borders. Musk commands a growing share of orbital infrastructure but answers to no global regulator. The International Telecommunication Union can coordinate satellite spectrum, but it can’t enforce ethical or geopolitical standards. Musk alone decides whether Starlink aids governments, rebels, or armies. As Quinn Slobodian might put it, this is exception-making on a planetary scale.

Now let’s go underground. The Boring Company digs high-speed tunnels beneath cities like Las Vegas, sidestepping standard planning processes. These projects often exclude transit agencies and ignore public engagement. They’re built for select users, not the public at large. Local governments, eager for tech-driven investment, offer permits and partnerships — even if it means circumventing democratic procedures.

Taken together — Starlink above, Boring Company below, Tesla charging networks on the ground — Musk’s empire moves through multiple layers of infrastructure, each reshaping civic life without formal accountability. His systems carry people, data, and energy — but not through the public channels meant to regulate them. They’re not overseen by voters. They’re not authorized by democratic mandate. Yet they profoundly shape how people move, communicate, and live.

Geographer Deborah Cowen, whose research focuses on the global logistics industry, argues that infrastructure like ports, fiber-optic cables, and pipelines have become tools of geopolitical strategy. Logistics as a form of war by other means.

Brian Highsmith argues this is a form of “functional fragmentation” — breaking governance into layers and loopholes that allow corporations to sidestep collective control. These aren’t mere workarounds. They signal a deeper shift in how power is organized — not just across space, but through it.

This kind of sovereignty is easy to miss because it doesn’t always resemble government. But when a private actor controls transit systems, communication networks, and even military connectivity — across borders, beneath cities, and in orbit — we’re not just dealing with infrastructure. We’re dealing with rule.

And, just like with company towns, the legal scholarship is struggling to catch up. These layered, mobile, and non-territorial regimes challenge our categories of law and space alike. What these fantastical projects inspire is often awe. But what they should require is law.

AMNESIA AIDS THE AMBITIOUS

Elon Musk may dazzle with dreams full-blown, but the roots of his power are not his own. The United States has a long tradition of private actors ruling like governments — with public blessing. These aren’t outliers. They’re part of a national pattern, deeply embedded in our legal geography: public authority outsourced to private ambition.

The details vary, but the logic repeats. Whether it’s early colonial charters, speculative land empires, company towns, or special districts carved for tech campuses, American history is full of projects where law becomes a scaffold for private sovereignty. Rather than recount every episode, let’s just say from John Winthrop to George Washington to Walt Disney to Elon Musk, America has always made room for men who rule through charters, not elections.

Yet despite the frequency of these arrangements, the scholarship has been oddly selective.

According to Highsmith, legal academia has largely ignored the institutional architecture that makes company towns possible in the first place: incorporation laws, zoning frameworks, municipal codes, and districting rules. These aren't neutral bureaucratic instruments. They're jurisdictional design tools, capable of reshaping sovereignty at the micro-scale. And when used strategically, they can be wielded by corporations to create functional states-within-a-state — governing without elections, taxing without consent, and shaping public life through private vision.

From a critical geography perspective, the problem is just as stark. Scholars have long studied the uneven production of space — how capital reshapes landscapes to serve accumulation. But here, space isn’t just produced — it’s governed. And it’s governed through techniques of legal enclosure, where a patch of land becomes a jurisdictional exception, and a logistics hub or tech campus becomes a mini-regime.

Starbase, Snailbrook, Reedy Creek, and even Google’s Sidewalk Labs are not just spatial projects — they're sovereign experiments in spatial governance, where control is layered through contracts, tax breaks, and municipal proxies.

But these arrangements don’t arise in a vacuum. Cities often aren’t choosing between public and private control — they’re choosing between austerity and access to cash. In the United States, local governments are revenue-starved by design. Most lack control over income taxes or resource royalties, and depend heavily on sales taxes, property taxes, and development fees. This creates a perverse incentive: to treat corporations not as entities to regulate, but as lifelines to recruit and appease.

Desperate for jobs and investment, cities offer zoning concessions, infrastructure deals, and tax abatements, even when they come with little democratic oversight or long-term guarantees. Corporate actors understand this imbalance — and exploit it. The result is a form of urban hostage-taking, where governance is bartered piecemeal in exchange for the promise of economic survival.

A more democratized fiscal structure — one that empowers cities through equitable revenue-sharing, progressive taxation, or greater control over land value capture — might reduce this dependency. It would make it possible for municipalities to plan with their citizens instead of negotiating against them. It would weaken the grip of corporate actors who leverage scarcity into sovereignty. But until then, as long as cities are backed into a fiscal corner, we shouldn’t be surprised when they sell off their power — one plot or parking lot at a time.

Highsmith argues that these structures demand scrutiny — not just for their economic impact, but for their democratic consequences. These aren't just quirks of local law. They are the fault lines of American federalism — where localism becomes a loophole, and fragmentation becomes a formula for private rule.

And yet, these systems persist with minimal legal friction and even less public awareness. Because they don’t always look like sovereignty. Sometimes they look like a housing deal. A fast-tracked zoning change. A development district with deferred taxes. A campus with private shuttles and subsidized utilities. They don't announce themselves as secessions — but they function that way.

We’ve been trained to see these projects as innovation, not governance. As entrepreneurship, not policy. But when a company owns the homes, builds the roads, controls the data, and sets the rules, it’s not just offering services — it’s exercising control. As political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism reshapes civic life around the image of the entrepreneur, replacing democratic participation with market performance.

That shift plays out everywhere: universities run like corporations, cities managed like startups. Musk isn’t the exception — he’s the clearest expression of a culture that mistakes private ambition for public good. Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.”

In a New York Times article, Jill Lepore quoted Banks as saying his science fiction books were about “’hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, ‘Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?’”

The issue isn’t just that we’ve allowed these takeovers — it’s that we’ve ignored the tools enabling them: incorporation, annexation, zoning, and special districts. As Brian Highsmith notes, this quiet shift in power might not have surprised one of our constitution authors, James Madison, but it would have troubled him. In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned not of monarchs, but of factions — small, organized interests capturing government for their own ends. His solution was restraint through scaling oppositional voices.

“The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed...and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”— James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)

Today, the structure meant to restrain factions has become their playbook. These actors don’t run for office — they arrive with charters, contracts, and capital. They govern not in the name of the people, but of “efficiency” and “innovation.” And they don’t need to control a nation when a zoning board will do.

Unchecked, we risk mistaking corporate control for civic order — and repeating a pattern we’ve barely begun to name.

We were told, sold, and promised a universe of shared governance — political, spatial, even orbital. But Madison didn’t trust promises. He trusted structure. He feared what happens when small governments fall to powerful interests — when law becomes a lever for private gain. That fear now lives in legal districts, rocket towns, and infrastructure built to rule. Thousands of satellites orbit the Earth, not launched by publics, but by one man with tools once reserved for states. What was once called infrastructure now governs. What was once geography now obeys.

Our maps may still show roads and rails and pipes and ports — but not the fictions beneath them, or the factions they support.

References:

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso Books.

Highsmith, B. (2022). Governing the company town: How employers use local government to seize political power. Yale Law Journal.

Madison, J. (1787). Federalist No. 10. In A. Hamilton, J. Madison, & J. Jay, The Federalist Papers. Bantam Books (2003 edition).

Slobodian, Q. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy. Metropolitan Books.

Hello Interactors,

This is the last full week of fall and so the last episode on economic geography. Happy early winter solstice everyone. Soon we in the North start tilting toward the sun. I’ve learned a ton this season and hope you have too. Today I conclude with a summarization of the history and effects of capitalism as we know it today and offer a glimpse at alternatives. We like easy answers to hard problems, but I’m here to tell you it’s messy and complex. And that’s just the good stuff.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE URGENCY OF CRYPTOCURRENCY

Cryptocurrency was trending as a topic again this fall. It spiked in October. I still see residual evidence of this in my social media feeds where debates rage on over whether it’s a legitimate form of currency or just a speculator’s delight.

Cryptocurrency was invented to circumvent the juggernaut that banks, governments, and credit card companies hold on the currency market. But the more it gets legitimized as an alternative currency, the more interested these traditional institutions become. For example, one form of cryptocurrency rising in popularity are stablecoins. It’s a digital currency that can be converted into ‘real’ money and is issued by the very institutions the inventors were hoping to circumvent. It seems there is no escaping Western economic dominance.

Money in the U.S. is commonly believed to come from the government, but most greenbacks issued today come from banks. They order currency from the Federal Reserve based on public demand which is then put into general circulation – which is growing worldwide. In fact, there are more U.S. dollars circulating outside of the U.S. than in it. Much of which is used by people struggling financially around the globe.

Meanwhile, those not struggling are using cash less and less. Recently, some New York retailers even attempted to go cashless. It prompted the city to pass a law requiring food establishments to accept cash or face a $1,000 fine.

Still, increasingly we see people paying for items with their phone. In this digital, post-cash society it’s easy to imagine an alternative virtual currency sneaking in. If our democracy can be challenged, why not our currency? A recent New York Times article by Peter Coy on the slipping grip of cash notes that “Some economists believe there is a risk that we’ll someday find ourselves with nothing that is universally accepted as a medium of exchange.” He goes on to remind us that is was Socrates who “originated the concept of a noble lie, which is a myth that elites propagate for what they view as the good of the public.” He then quotes Michael Dorf of the Cornell Law School who believes “the solidity of money is one such lie.”

The truth is, alternative currencies and economies exist all around us and have for centuries. For example, in a district of central London call Brixton, where David Bowie once lived, shops no longer accept the British Pound. Instead they take an alternative currency called the Brixton Pound that features a picture of Bowie on a paper bill that is as nicely designed and proportioned as Bowie himself.

It’s been in circulation since 2009 and 250 area shops accept it. Workers in Brixton also get paid with it and you can even settle your utility bills with it. It’s a hyper-local monetary scheme that incentivizes local residents to shop local, buy local, and live local. The Brixton Pound has inspired cities across the UK to do the same and now Bristol, Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool, and Plymouth all have their own alternative local currencies.

Many schemes like this exist outside of the Western world too – and they’re often not tied to the dominant currency system. For example, there’s a settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya called Bangladesh. Not to be confused with the country of Bangladesh. It was named after an early settler who unexpectedly packed up and moved to Bangladesh never to return. The area was hence called Bangladesh. It’s a poor informal settlement made of self-made homes and little to no infrastructure, yet is home to over 20,000 people. They work at nearby industries at the fringe of Nairobi doing odd jobs regularly paid workers refuse to do.

Many are well educated, but work is intermittent and there are more qualified workers than there are jobs. It leads to extreme poverty, apathy, and strife. One local teacher in the Peace Corps, Will Ruddick, became frustrated that he was graduating kids with no where to go. He said many of whom were more skilled academically than many he’d witnessed at Stanford. Ruddick happens to also have a PhD in econophysics – a branch of economics that draws inspiration from the field of physics. He began wondering how he could devise a way for residents in areas like Bangladesh to earn consistent wages doing meaningful work in their community. He wanted ways for them to create and share in their abundance, take charge of their own livelihoods, and build a self-sustaining economic future.

So in 2010 he launched an alternative local currency experiment called Eco-Pesa in three informal settlements in Kenya. That experiment became permanent in Bangladesh with the creation of their own currency; the Bangla-Pesa. Unlike the Brixton Pound, this alternative currency can’t be exchanged for the national Kenyan currency. It’s a closed system of money creation that serves one purpose: support a shared willingness among community members to accept and trade money in exchange for goods and services.

It has over 2000 members and 220 businesses and has helped fill the settlement with money, eliminate market instability brought on by outside nationalistic forces, provide opportunities for investment, and grow Bangladesh businesses that generate jobs.  

He went on to found Grass Roots Economics which is a resource and platform that supports and inspires experiments like his. The platform has launched seven different forms of local currency in poverty stricken informal settlements across Africa, including two in South Africa and one in Congo. Last year the Red Cross leveraged the organization to establish more local currencies during Covid helping to grow the number of registered users of local currencies to over 50,000 people. Ruddick sees no reason why it can’t continue to scale regionally and even nationally. Maybe even across the second largest continent in the world. And he has the track record and models to substantiate his claim.

GREAT DIVIDE; WHITE PRIDE

The primary obstacle to such schemes taking hold too pervasively is the default global capitalocentric economic system of the West; a scheme that relies on places like Bangladesh to perpetuate its dominance. It’s a form of power and control that has existed since the spread of European colonialism starting in the 1400s.

Europe had yet to be introduced to capitalism. Which means, contrary to popular belief, they didn’t invent it. There’s now ample research pointing to evidence of capitalist trade and profit already occurring across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Folks like Christopher Columbus would have tripped over these capitalist trade routes as he stumbled his way upon their shores. In fact, it’s more likely European colonial scouts like Columbus were in the untenable position of trying to convince these well established economies that they should allow lowly Europeans to even participate in their capitalistic schemes.

The Ming dynasty in China and the Mughal Empire of South Asia would have been two of the more established world centers of economics at the time. Medieval Europe, in comparison, would have looked primitive and backwards by their standards. But over the course of centuries, the Europeans managed to disrupt (often violently) existing capital structures creating what has been called the Great Divergence – a socioeconomic shift in balance to the West.

Just how ‘great’ it was is a matter of perspective, of course. To Amer-Europeans it was great. I certainly grew up learning that. I was taught Europeans were fortunate geographically, gifted intellectually, and superior culturally. Their ‘enlightened’ selves rose above the paltry ills of feudal medievalism to erase an embarrassing historical stain. Their inventiveness gave rise to free and fair democracy and capitalism that eventually spread from America’s sea to shining sea. Not so fast.

A new book by Anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow show compelling evidence that it was actually a visit from the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman, Kandiaronk, who planted the seeds of ‘enlightenment’ with European philosophers in his eloquent and observant criticism of European ways. Here is a fragment of a speech he delivered to a group of French philosophers and statesmen in 1703:

“I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?”

The heart of Kondiaronk’s critique is what fueled the ‘great divergence.’ Their ‘slaughterhouse of the living’ is what disrupted existing Asian economic dominance. It wasn’t ‘enlightenment’ but well documented, practiced, and executed forms of slavery, racism, and war-instigated establishment of European controlled capitalism. They re-centered economic activity around themselves through force, but convinced themselves, and others to this day, that their actions were justified. The British and American economic geography professor, Eric Sheppard, from UCLA puts it like this:

“The stories Europeans told themselves, and imposed on others, amounted to a self justification of their role as a uniquely civilizing force, marginalizing the colonized (from Ireland to India and the Belgian Congo) as less-than-civilized, in order to justify their less than-human treatment by self-described liberals.”

In the late 1800s, after the U.S. slaughtered 3,000 Filipinos as part of an overnight raid in the colonization of their land, America’s favorite poet at the time, Rudyard Kipling, wrote a poem that emblemizes the racist, violent, and self-justified imperialistic sentiment of the time:

Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To wait in heavy harness,On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

It was published in the New York Tribune, New York Sun, and San Francisco Examiner. It was also loved by President Theodore Roosevelt who sent a copy of it to his close friend and Massachusetts politician, Henry Lodge, with a note that read:

“Rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.”

Capitalism is rooted in racism and its emergence was tied to the colonization of captured territories over seas through militaristic invasions. By the time Roosevelt was putting it in practice in the U.S., it was a centuries old well-oiled machine. The rights of European territories to claim sovereignty and organize captured territories first emerged in Europe after the signing of the Treaty of Westfalia in 1648. After 80 years of European territorial and religious wars, this peace treaty forced the Holy Roman Empire to divvy out sovereign states (countries) across Europe and allowed them to also choose their own official religions.

This event coincided with the emergence of political economists in Scotland, England, and France who had been debating and writing socioeconomic theories for years. Especially after the visit from Kondiaronk. They seized the opportunity to imbue their concepts with a secular vision that allowed capitalism to thrive between diverse European countries, and religions, for their mutual benefit. One such economic theory to eventually emerge was Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand.’

With a European model of economic abstraction established, it was then tied to government controlled nation-state territories. It was a no-brainer to replicate this model for any remote territory conquered, bartered, and stolen overseas. And just like that, global colonization had taken hold. The emergence of the great divergence.

It is from this confluence of events that the Western educated world has come to believe capitalism as conceived in the minds of Enlightened European thinkers. And because they self-justified themselves as intellectually and spiritually superior to other races and religions, including Kondiaronk, they believed, and we’ve been taught, that the European colonial and capitalistic expansion was for the good of humanity.

But let’s be honest, this is fantasy. And it’s dangerous to abstract away capitalism from the real and documented horrors of racism, slavery, rape, persecution, theft, exploitation, and extermination that allows it to flourish to this day. It shouldn’t be sanitized as a ‘great divergence.’ It should be chastised as a hate insurgence.

With the rise of Trumpism we are witnessing the sheen of capitalist oriented racism shining through decades of opaque but fading layers of failed attempts and promises of liberty and justice for all. And it’s in the spirit of domineering nationalists taking up Kipling’s distant, but misguided, call to accept the ‘White Man’s burden.’ And how much better is the Biden administration when kids captured at the border under Trump still remain in cages like ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.’ In the words of Kondiaronk, “the world’s worst behaviour.”

Both the left and the right, who are still smarting from Covid supply chain woes and wringing their hands over increasing inflation, are both viewing the global economic juggernaut their parties helped to construct with suspect for the first time. They’re not alone. Every country in the world is scrambling to reconsider their local economy as it relates to Western capitalistic global domination. No wonder the world is suffering a collective anxiety attack.

DON’T CRINGE AT THE FRINGE

We are witnessing an array of identity crisis across the socio-political spectrum. From far right nationalistic white-supremacy authoritarianism to the far left hopes of reconstituting socialist theories of idealized utopias. Both of which are different forms of top-down autocratic attempts at organizing social order and economies – one through neoliberal capitalistic oligarchies and the other through socialistic governmental central control. And because our poor human brains are attracted to binary polars, seek simple answers, and loath the messy middle, we suffer.

Meanwhile, fringe experiments in alternative economic schemes continue to flourish as they always have. But some encroach on the establishment more than others. And one in particular operates at a scale big enough to challenge the West’s strangle hold on global economics – China. China’s global Belt and Road Initiative, while China-centric, is also undeniably globally inclusive.

They have been dispersing their investments in infrastructure and commodity creation and extraction in a myriad of countries – big and small, rich and poor – around the world since 2013. At home they operate a hybrid Socialist and Capitalist government that then orchestrates attempts at controlling a global economy. If a hybridist socioeconomic experiment is seriously challenging the default world economy of the last 50-60 years, shouldn’t the U.S. and Europe consider conducting experiments of their own? Or has hubris and denial taken too strong of a hold? Only history will tell.

It’s safe to say that the days of claiming Western style capitalism and U.S. exceptionalism have been exposed and debunked. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has come into the light and it’s empty. And the neoliberal free market economy is anything but free and has financially imprisoned millions for decades. Also gone are the Eurocentric interpretations of history. It’s time we stop insisting that the capitalistic scheme dominating the world today, while not perfect, is the least-bad option and therefore every country must adopt it. It’s rhetoric like this that the global North uses to twist the arms of the poorer global South to align them with their socio-political and economic agenda.  

Our beloved binary brains, again, are attracted to global North versus global South battles of theories and victories. The same can be said of East versus West. But most countries caught in this polarization have their own theories, some invented, and some borrowed or influenced – good or bad – by centuries of globalization, education, and financing from the global North. It’s no fun, but we need to wrestle with the messy middle.

We in the West are so trained to assess and judge other geographies, cultures, and economies from our ivory towers of exceptionalism – as if surveying a globe from a godly perch – labeling, cataloging, and objectifying human and non-human entities, that we forget the interaction of people and place. As the late great economist, Herb Simon, says, (as illustrated on my about page)

Those folks in Kenya stand at the fringe of a global economic system that either ignores them, exploits them, or starves them to death. It’s what it means to be marginalized. But with the help of a friend, they are discovering their plight is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which they find themselves. They have found a way to stand up, recognize and accept the apparent complexity, and act out of respect for each other’s position relative to one another…and the selfish globalized economic apparatus that put them there.

Professor Sheppard concludes that he and his Western educated colleagues, “suffer from a particular set of geographical blinders.” He says, “they look at our world in ways that normalize the European perspective on how development happens.” It’s a perspective he’s critical of because it’s a model of economic geography that “fails to deliver on its promise of development for all, everywhere.”

He goes on to offer that because Western style capitalism relies on “uneven and asymmetric connectivities” that end up “driving uneven geographical development”, we’ve arrived at a place where the dominant global economic scheme of globalization has failed “at scales ranging from the globe to the neighbourhood.”

To help combat his own implicit bias, he planted himself in Jakarta to do his research. “Thinking through Jakarta”, he says, “the raggedy fringes that matter are the hybridity of Indonesia’s political economy, informality and biophysical processes.” Instead of hypothesizing over concepts or proselytizing projects from the canons of capitalism, he’s asking that we recognize, as those in Bangladesh and Brixton did, that “relations with Capitalism are crucial to understanding how” emerging alternative economies embedded on the insides of dominant systems “coevolves with its outsides.”

Instead of propagating or placating a dominant global economy, what if we acknowledge, embrace, fertilize, understand, celebrate, and experience alternative economies embedded within or on the fringe of the establishment. After all, these are economies that have been forged through the interaction of people and place whose shared histories have, as Sheppard says, “found them encountering, rather than propagating, Capitalist economic development.”

Cryptocurrency is likely to trend again. Our anxiety has us looking for easy answers and social media likes shiny technocratic objects. Meanwhile, I’m rooting for Will Ruddick and his grass roots economies. A humane form of reciprocity that even the brilliant, eloquent, and enlightened Kondiaronk would recognize. And maybe even support.

Hello Interactors,

The field of economics is stuck in the past. They need to move on, and they need to do it fast. Stop standing around, get in on the bustle. MOVE, MOVE, MOVE! HUSTLE, HUSTLE, HUSTLE!

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BE ON THE VERGE TO SURGE

I recently attended my first full length high school basketball game. The last time I saw a high school game I was playing in one. Not much has changed in thirty-seven years. But I did notice more standing around than when I was playing. Watch any NBA game these days and you see a lot of standing around. Maybe these stagnate high school players are just trying to be cool.

When you stand in one place on the court, there’s little interaction with your teammates, the player guarding you, the ball, or the floor. It easy to predict what’s going to happen. Not much. My coaches always told me to move without the ball. Later in life, when I played in adult leagues, I found myself yelling to my teammates, “MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL, MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL.” I didn’t like games where guys just ran to the corner and stood there waiting for the ball or for someone to shoot. Bor-ing.

Moving around the court without the ball brings dynamism to the game. It increases the chances of interacting with your teammates, your competition, and the ball – across various parts of the court. Coaches design plays expressly to move players around the floor in coordinated orchestration just to get players open. Only then can they interact with the ball and hopefully score.

But plays quickly break down and improvisation ensues. It’s what I love about playing and watching basketball. When players are dynamic, new situations and interactions continually emerge and they’re constantly different. But then when a player gets the ball, the attention, interaction, and players converge on that one person. And as soon as they pass the ball or shoot it, everything diverges again. These split-second cycles of emergence, convergence, and divergence are continually in motion and each intentional or random action from any player, the ball, or even the referee or crowd, can send the cycle spinning in another trajectory.

Participating in this continual transformation of conditions yields a constant flow of new sensory inputs. They serve as raw material for the brain to invent new and novel interactions. The creative capacity of any player to introduce novelty based on their knowledge of the rules, the split-second state of players interactions, the location of the ball, the time on the clock, and hundreds of other sights, sounds, touches, and smells is what makes basketball work. It’s a continual flow of interactions with people and place that is constantly evolving based on adaptations to ever-changing novel situations.

Here are three examples of different layers of interaction happening in a game of basketball. While elements within a layer interact with each other, elements between layers do too.

One is happening between the players and the structure of the game. Any one player has the potential to have influence in the game, but they also have the choice to do so. And they can’t do just anything, there are rules to the game and certain social constructs that influence their behavior.

Another is happening at a locational level; in the painted rectangle under the basket, inside and outside the three-point line, half-court, and full-court – even out of bounds or at the circles for jump balls. There’s also home court versus away within a conference, advancing post-season to play teams in a district, or even, if you’re lucky, to play distance teams in a state tournament. My sister was lucky enough to do that. She sunk a last second jumper from the sideline to win the Iowa girl’s state tournament in 1981.

A third layer are the social and interpersonal interactions and transactions that occur between competitors, coaches and their players, and between referees, coaches and bench officials. These interactions also have a spatial component. Casual banter between a player and a referee under the basket during a free-throw takes on a different timbre than a referee angerly signaling a technical foul in the face of an out of control coach on the sidelines.

And then there are the physics of the game. In high school a math nerd friend of mine and I would try to determine the equation for the parabola of our jump shots. “You need to adjust your slope to be more like -.07 if you’re going to shoot 14 feet from the hoop.”, we’d joke. Through years of practice, professional shooters like Steph Curry can dial in each variable of a jump shot, including velocity and spin, to achieve the perfect 48-degree angle needed for a swoosh.

Dribbling a basketball up and down is predictable because physics is predictable. Hold a basketball in your hand and it possesses potential energy. Rotate your hand and gravity pulls the ball to the earth. When it hits the floor, potential energy converts to kinetic energy. As the ball returns to the hand kinetic energy transforms back to potential energy. Repeat. You can even do it while running – which involves yet more physics like acceleration and velocity.

These tangible and physical aspects of the game, while mathematically decipherable and predictable, are also intuitive. A kid can learn to dribble or shoot a Nerf ball into a hoop at age two. We marvel at players who can do physical feats well not only because we know how hard they are, but because they’re easy to understand. They’re rooted in physics that can be observed and measured. And in the case of free throws, where other variables influencing the outcome of the shot are minimized, statisticians can even calculate the probability of the ball going in based on known physics and the player’s historical record of free throw shooting. My sister shot 72% from the free throw line. Impressive.

LET’S GET PHYISICAL; IT’S COMPLEX

Physics is what inspired the field of economics.

Physics was the most respected science in academia and society at the time, so economists legitimized their social science by drawing associations to physics. They borrowed language from physics and built clean, rational mathematical models to communicate their ideas. It gives the illusion economics is as predictable as physics, but it turns out not to be true. And most of them know it, but it doesn’t keep them from perpetuating the myth.

While it’s officially now basketball season in the U.S., it’s also nearing the end of the year. That means more basketball to watch, but it also means more prognosticators making predictions for 2022. Including financial predictions. And just like basketball, economists and journalists focus on what’s most intuitive and calculable. The easy stuff rooted in static statistics.

A recent New York Times article talks about how Covid has demonstrated the difficulty of predicting the future, yet Wall Street analysts can’t help it. They’re already trying to predict the state of the economy a year from now. As the article says, “It’s time again for analysts to gaze into their crystal balls.” Even the analysts have trouble taking themselves seriously.

Here’s how the head of research at one global bank, BNP Paribas, puts it, “’The numbers are meaningless in a sense,’ he said, and continued with an engaging smile, ‘Whenever I make a forecast, and I have done this for a number of years, I know it is going to be wrong.’ But, he added, “The numbers are an illustration of where things are going; And they provide grounding, he said, to ‘have a thematic discussion with our clients.’”

You’d think their clients would have clued in by now. Last year Wall Street predicted 2021 would end with the S&P 500 at 3,800. They were off by 20%. Even after taking a hit from the Omicron scare last week, it was hovering around 4,500.

These people are using the same general techniques for predicting a global financial market as those predicting whether an NBA star will make their next free throw or win their next game. And they do it knowing full well there are infinite variables and inherent complexity in the myriad of interactions in a global economy. It would be like a sports analyst predicting who will win the NBA championship and by how much at the start of the season. Some still try, but they, and we, all know it’s a lark. Yet, when it comes to making financial forecasts, most mainstream economists (and universities) lead us to believe their methods are sound and that the economy is as predictable as physics. It’s not.

That’s not to say predictions of complex phenomena are worthless. People around the world rely on weather forecasts to plan their day and their businesses. Predictions have improved greatly over the years thanks to better technology and modeling, but also because meteorology, a branch of geography, knows they’re dealing with a complex system. They recognize, as do their models, that it’s more complex, for example, than just physics and that a successful prediction requires knowledge of the initial conditions of a storm. Which is literally unknowable. So they start with what they know, observe and understand the interactions, and update their model.  Mainstream economists have yet to even admit they’re dealing with a complex system, let alone how to identify and verify initial conditions of catastrophic economic events.

The weather, the economy, and basketball are all complex systems. Weather is a natural system and economics and basketball are social systems. While they operate at vastly different scales and don’t share all the same attributes, they still have much in common.

One defining attribute is that complex systems are comprised of non-linear interactions between its parts – like elements of those layers of interaction I described in basketball. It’s impossible to fully understand a complex system by reducing it to its component parts – like just shooting or dribbling, for example, doesn’t fully explain a basketball game. And yet, that’s what mainstream economics continually tries to do as it clings to simplistic models and diagrams that try to mimic the laws of physics – like the ‘law’ of supply and demand, for example.

But the economy, like basketball, is an unpredictable system made up of decision makers (or agents in economics and players, coaches, and referees in basketball). The output of their interactions yields more than what is put into them which is what makes them non-linear. For example, a team of basketball players don’t simply stand in fixed positions passing the ball in a linear predictable fashion. They’re agents who take in a fixed set of inputs and decide how to make the most of them with the knowledge and skill they possess.

And these agents are not perfectly rational in their decision making, as mainstream economists assume them to be. Their rationality is limited, or bounded, by their capabilities, emotions, time, circumstances, or myriad of other distractions, preferences, or constraints. But they learn and adapt, often through interactions that are in constant motion and always changing. And each little micro-movement of behavior that comprises an interaction yields a new, novel, and emergent outcome that sometimes reveal patterns.

Because structure is imposed on the game (or the economy), order emerges from those micro-movements of activity creating a rhythm or pattern at a macro-level. For example, the rhythm and cadence of a basketball game that can sometimes emerge out of a fast break, or successive fast breaks. The opposing team’s coach recognizes that pattern; often times prompting them to stand up and call a time out just to disrupt the pattern. These continual sources of novelty self organize and perpetuate creating evolutionary momentum – like a hot shooter swept up in the flow of a game.

INTERACTION GAINS TRACTION

The global economy behaves much the same way and can be described by the same three layers of matrixed interactions mentioned earlier.

One layer of interaction is happening between the decision makers (or actors) in an organization and their teammates and competitors within the structure of local, state, and international law. Any one employee has the potential to be effective in the game of commerce, including the choice to do so.  And they can’t do just anything, there are rules to commerce and certain social constructs that influence their behavior.

More interactions happen at a locational level; at local, regional, national, and global scales. Even at a local level there are interactions between employees within an office, floor, or building or between buildings in larger corporations. Regional managers in large institutions interact with a network of affiliates across a diverse set of geographies who in turn are interacting locally and with other regions. Global corporations interact at a national level, but also around the globe with other states and regions who are in turn interacting with networks of countries and areas everywhere.

A third layer includes social, political, and economic interactions and transactions between people and institutions in a vast complex array spread across territories near and far. Small business associations interact with local elected officials to enact laws and regulations while CEOs of mega-corporations convene and conspire with international monetary organizations and world leaders to control and evolve world economic policies.

There are interactions occurring within and between each of these layers creating a matrix of interconnections. In basketball, we tend to be drawn to a particular player or their jump shot and not to the interactions they have had, are having, or are about to have between them and their teammates, coaches, and referees across the entire expanse of the court, over the course of the game, or across locations over the course of season.

The same is true in economics. We tend to focus on a CEO or a company’s performance or a political leader and their nation’s GDP. We’re not obsessing over the interactions occurring within and between the various relationships that interconnect corporate structures, policies at different scales of geography, or interactions between economies, societies, and their various localities.

Distinguished Professor of Geography at the National University of Singapore, Henry Wai-chung Yeung quotes two researchers studying how organizations relate and interact. He uses it to make an argument for why it’s more important to focus on the interaction between entities than the entities themselves.

“Taking a relational orientation suggests that the real work of the human organization occurs within the space of interaction between its members. Thus, the theorist must account for the relationships among, rather than the individual properties of, organizational members.”

Though Yeung also reminds us these theories too are drawn from physics. Quantum physics. It turns out there have been attempts by economists to pull away from Newtonian comparisons for also most as long as they’ve been around.

It was the British economist, William Stanley Jevons, who in 1871 devised the first ‘law of demand’ by drawing a graph that mimicked Sir Isaac Newton’s 1687 graph depicting his theories on the laws of motion. Borrowing Newton’s idea of an atom as the single foundational unit that defines the laws of motion, Jevon’s invented the ‘single average individual, the unit of which population is made up.’

It is from this oversimplification that he arrived at what he called the ‘calculating man’ — a perfectly rational human who maximizes the utility of their decisions. Jevons then came up with the ‘law of diminishing returns’ which states the more something is consumed, the less desirable it becomes. We don’t have to look far to see that is not universally true. Certainly not as true as the laws of motion.

But going back to the 1870s, I can imagine the allure of this theory. As evidenced in how Jevons’ describes markets being pulled into equilibrium just as gravity pulls a pendulum to rest,

“Just as we measure gravity by its effects in the motion of a pendulum, so we may estimate the equality or inequality of feelings by the decisions of the human mind. The will is our pendulum, and its oscillations are minutely registered in the price lists of the markets.”

But he goes on to admit that economists did not yet have the tools to measure this dynamically.

“I know not when we shall have a perfect system of statistics, but the want of it is the only insuperable obstacle in the way of making Economics an exact science.”

I suspect if Jevons were alive today, he would be scratching his head as to why more economists have not embraced complexity science to inch economics closer to an exact science. He’d be dismayed at how mainstream economists have resorted to just standing in the corner of the court arrogantly waiting for the ball to be thrown to them. He’d be screaming, “MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL! MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL!”

And they would; because he’s Jevons – one of the first economic stars in the league. And when they do, they’ll immediately experience how new situations and interactions continually emerge and how their reactions will be constantly different. And when they get the ball, the attention, interaction, and other economists will converge on them.

And then, as quickly as the moment arises, they pass to the next person and everything diverges again. These split-second cycles of emergence, convergence, and divergence of economic thoughts, theories, and actions would swirl in continual motion. Each intentional or random action from any economist, the market, politicians, or society would send the cycle spinning in another trajectory. A complex system of complexity economists lost in the perpetual momentum of the flow of the game.

And there, sitting at courtside, would be the great Sir Isaac Newton rising from his chair with his hands over his head and then sitting down. Only to rise and do it again. A single initial condition that would surely prompt others to do the same. Soon a pattern emerges as other fans join in. Pretty soon a self-organized wave propagates among the crowd and around the gym.

Each individual deciding to interact in response to a changing condition they observed in their environment constrained by the structure of the gym to forms a perpetual wave. Another complex system initiated through a set of initial conditions through the act of a single individual who decided not to just arrogantly stand there.

Hello Interactors,

As the holiday season calls on us to shop online, it’s worth considering the cost. I’m not talking about the price of the item your mouse is hovering over, but the hidden cost of getting it delivered to your doorstep.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GETTING HIP TO A TIMELY TIP ON A CALIFORNIA TRIP

“I think you’re transporting drugs”, my cousin said casually. “Why else would they send a 20 year old kid to New Jersey from L.A. just to drive an old station wagon across the country?” “You’re the perfect foil…a 20 year old blond kid from Iowa just doing his job…no cop would ever think to search for drugs.”

It was on my mind the whole trip. Especially when I was pulled over in Nebraska for speeding. A portly County Mounty waddled his way to the car as I deftly stashed the radar detector under my seat. I watched him in my side mirror as he put on his hat while approaching the car. Cold winter wind rushed in as I rolled the window down and greeted him with the best rural “howdy” I could muster. I then asked him how fast I was going. He pulled his glasses down over his nose, looked me straight in the eye and said, “I don’t know, son, but it took me 10 minutes to catch up to you.”

He was indeed curious about the New Jersey plates and why I was headed to California, but he let me go with a warning. “Take it slow, son, I’m sure those folks out West want to see you make it ok.”

By the time I got to the California border, I was ready to be done. I decided to take the southern route into L.A. – the famed Route 66. I had hit a lot of snow in Colorado and was eager for sunny, dry roads. But that would have to wait. A massive ice storm met me in the high desert town of Victorville, California. I was barely able to find a place to stay for the night as the freeway was lined with cars in the ditch.

The next morning the roads were bare and wet as I headed west through the pass dividing the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains and into the vast San Bernardino valley. It was named by Spanish colonizers who took the same route in the late 1700s, then more Europeans a century later, and fellow Iowans soon after that. This valley was once home to sprawling citrus groves that attracted winter weary farmers from the Midwest. It was still agricultural when I was inching my way toward L.A. in 1985 in a blue Oldsmobile station wagon – a suspected innocent drug smuggler.

And then just last week there I was, over 30 years later, plodding my way toward L.A. down the same Interstate 10. My family and I took a trip to Southern California to visit schools for my son. A lot has changed. They paved paradise and put up parking lots, warehouses, and sprawling housing developments too. The freeways were crammed with semi-trucks as commuters blinkered their way through the lanes. They were competing for space in their hour-plus long trek to jobs in the L.A. basin.

It’s a long commute to and from what is known as the Inland Empire, but the average selling price of a home is $482,000. That’s nearly half of what you’d pay in Los Angeles ($841,000), further south in Orange county ($983,000), or San Diego ($802,000).

While four hundred grand is relatively low for Southern California, prices are climbing. The average price is already above what it was before the financial collapse of 2008. That’s when average single family home prices in the Inland Empire plummeted to under $200,000. The region was home to some of the worst foreclosure stories in the country. At one point, one in five homes in the area were in foreclosure. People were literally walking away from their homes. Even though housing is booming again, inventory is actually lower than it was before the collapse.

Wall Street backed firms like the Blackstone Group, the Lewis Group, and Oak Tree Capital Management swooped in and bought large swaths of foreclosed homes. They’ve been renting them to those who can’t afford to buy until the price of the home reaches a level they feel they can best profit by selling. Buy low, sell high and wish the struggling family good bye.

(Incidentally, the founder of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, who is worth around $21 billion, was one of a handful of billionaires who continued to support Trump financially after the raid he incited on the capital. And when the Obama administration suggested Wall Street fund managers like Schwarzman pay at least as much in taxes on earned interest as ordinary wage earners, Schwarzman said Obama was waging war on the wealthy and added, “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” What an odd and insensitive comparison for a Jewish man to make. But, Trump has a way of attracting odd and insensitive people.)

As billionaire backed firms competed for foreclosed housing stocks, there was no chance a single individual seeking to buy a home could get in on the competition. One man in Rancho Cucamonga bid on over 200 houses but failed on all accounts. And while these outside firms were scooping up homes at $200,000 a pop as late as 2012, new housing construction was selling at $300,000 to $800,000. While this was a small fraction of the total, it incented even more developers to build more expensive homes which continue to drive up prices across the region.

WORLD HYPOXIC CENTER

But the 2008 housing crisis wasn’t the first to hit the Inland Empire. Trouble was brewing even as I lumbered through the valley in the mid 1980s in that New Jersey station wagon. In 1978 California passed Proposition 13 which altered how property taxes were calculated. The law was intended to reduce property tax burdens on residents already being forced to the more affordable periphery of desirable urban centers across L.A. The Inland Empire absorbed many of those people throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s – and continues to attract more to this day.

Proposition 13 also changed the financial dynamics between state, regional, and local economies as local tax revenues plummeted. Local governments had to find new sources of revenue resulting in these three primary (and familiar) outcomes;

“1. the appearance of auto malls and big-box retail stores, and the disappearance of ‘mom and pop’ shops in virtually every community in the region;

2. new relationship between land developers and municipal authorities;

3. the creation of private/public development projects as potential revenue generators.”

It didn’t help when a steel factory shut down in 1983 eliminating 10,000 jobs. Then, in 1991, as the Cold War threats diminished, George H. W. Bush shut down the Norton Air Force base and closed a nearby missile factory. Then, in 1993, the March Air Force base was also trimmed. Over 30,000 jobs were lost accounting for nearly seven percent of the area’s population.  

By the mid 1990s multi-national corporations were moving manufacturing hubs and jobs overseas. As trade imbalances mounted container ships began piling up at the Long Beach Port due south of the Inland Empire. Portside storage facilities were overwhelmed and distributors began looking to the Inland Empire for land to build new, large, modern distribution centers.

Within a decade vineyards and dairy farms were replaced with warehouses. One month residents were driving by signs advertising fresh fruit and then next a block long gray box with an Amazon sign bolted to the wall. Sketchers has a single facility stretching 1.8 million square feet and hopes to expand their footprint as part of an area wide 41.6 million square feet warehouse expansion. By the end of 2013 the Inland Empire had become the Warehouse Empire of the nation accounting for 1.6 billion square feet of distribution, logistics, and warehouse facilities.

Forty five percent of the nation’s imports are trained, trucked, or flown into the Inland Empire, unpacked, sorted, and reloaded onto trains, trucks, and planes that then fan out again across the nation. It’s like a logistics heart that pulses goods purchased with a single click through the veins and arteries of the nation’s transportation infrastructure.

The city of Moreno Valley is building what they call the World Logistic Center. It’s a 41.6 million square foot $3 billion expanse that will feature a 2,600 acre corporate campus. While they claim it will be one of the most sustainable corporate campuses in the nation, the South Coast Air Quality District estimates the project will add an additional 30,000 heavy-duty trucks to area roads per day. That’s nothing but dollar signs for some, but nothing but trouble for most.

Heavy-duty diesel trucks emit 24 times more fine particulate matter than regular gasoline engines. These are the chemical compounds that are so small they easily seep into the lungs and pollute blood streams. The State of California and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have identified more than 40 different toxic pollutants in diesel emissions.

“In 2003, the Riverside and San Bernardino counties ranked first and second, respectively, in the nation for total particulate pollution.”

Between 2000-2002 Riverside’s particulate matter concentrations were 1.75 times the federal limit and more than twice the state’s standard.

One 2007 study conservatively estimated that the “logistics industry expansion will cause 32-64 cases of excess mortality and morbidity valued at $247-455 million per year.” Those living closer to the freeways will be effected more. And because housing is cheapest along the noisiest and most polluted roadways, those most impacted will be those most vulnerable physically and financially – which historically are people of color and the elderly.

PROPOSITION UNSEEN

The Inland Empire is a regional microcosm of economic geography. It’s part of a global experiment – a worldwide economic capitalistic petri dish – that has been festering and bubbling at different scales since the 1970s. As residents were pushed out of settled areas in the L.A. basin due to rising property values, the Inland Empire became a target for sprawl. The passing of Proposition 13 cut funding for public health, education, and infrastructure forcing local governments to pursue public/private partnerships.

Proposition 13 also included special provisions for commercial development, attracting opportunistic capitalists and politicians. To this day, city and county government officials across the Inland Empire continue to be investigated, charged, and tried for bribery, corruption, attempts to destroy documents, and guilty pleas. While the gentrification attracts jobs and provides much needed housing and flows money through the region, it also increases commute distances, clogs roads, and contributes to some of the worst air pollution in the country.

That flow of capital into the Inland Empire is coming from state and national economic policies that started in the 1970s. Seeing an end to the post-war growth of the 1950s and 60s, the United States and their allies instituted financial deregulation that reoriented their capitalist economies. Globalization was on the rise at the same time the U.S. allowed for more foreign investment on American soil.

When I was living in L.A. in the 80s, it was private and commercial Japanese investors grabbing up property and high rises in L.A. Now the top three foreign investors come from Canada, Mexico, and China. And they’re largely interested in suburban areas like the Inland Empire.

The very financial regulation that created the necessary funds to build the seaports, airports, railways, and freeways that provide our economy’s circulatory system have been diminished by both parties over the last 50 years. The 1978 California Proposition 13 was a warm up act for Reagan’s failed tax-cut, trickle down theories he claimed would bring prosperity to every American. Every president since has been promising as much yet income disparities continue to grow. Jeff Bezos’ net worth has grown $65 billion since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile, even a hint of inflation threatens to push millions more into poverty and thousands to live in their cars or on the streets.

It should be noted that the logistics business in the Inland Empire would likely not exist if it weren’t for a federally funded air force base that has since been converted to air cargo airports where streams of cargo planes land 24/7. Not to mention the federal and state funded freeways crisscrossing the valley that private heavy-duty trucks use and abuse with little to no restrictions. Trucks that are driven by drivers who continually fight for their right to organize for fair wages and healthcare. And let’s not forget the federally funded internet that makes it all too easy to click a ‘buy’ button and have a package magically arrive the next day…most likely through a sprawling warehouse in the Inland Empire.

Globalization – and the functional regulation of the world economy by select countries – has complicated the flow of capital through regions like the Inland Empire. It’s left small town governments stretched and starving for funds. They’re stuck begging for crumbs from money-rich corporations in exchange for favors. It’s led to criminal activity among conspiring opportunists – some of whom are simply trying to secure funds for schools.

I doubt I was trafficking cocaine. I was working for one of L.A.’s oldest company’s, Platt Music Corporation. They started out selling sheet music but had morphed into a consumer electronics distributor – also known as a middle-man. If you bought a TV in a California department store in the 80s, it likely went through Platt. They had just gone public a year before I started running errands for them across the far reaches of L.A. – and the country. But then big-box stores like Circuit City and Best Buy appeared and increased competition for consumer electronics. Soon department stores were forced to negotiate their own prices directly with manufacturers. Platt folded in 1987 after 82 years of doing business in L.A. Another ‘mom and pop’ shop gone. Capitalism eating itself.

CAPITAL ARREST

Geographer David Harvey put it best when he said, “Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.” And the Inland Empire, a struggling locus to distribute and focus the country’s goods, is a prime example that leads Harvey to conclude, “The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.”

Many economic geographers contend that both perceived and real economic and social crisis are necessary for capitalism to sustain itself. Circuits of capital flowing inside the Inland Empire interact with circuits flowing outside in ways that transform the culture and shape of it’s cities. The constant expanding and contracting creates inequities and uneven development that capitalists then exploit. We often think of capitalism as a constant that can be universally applied, but in reality it thrives off of localized geographic and economic upheaval and repair – starve one area to reduce it’s value, buy low; boost investments through private capital and governmental lubricants, sell high; then seek or create the next devalued area.

This process is sold to us as job creation. It can, but often at the expense of jobs elsewhere. Production of goods and services is a social process while the ownership of production, and the profits that come with it, are largely privately held. Unless there are laws in place to distribute portions of the wealth accumulation in support of the social process of production, streets crumble, cities stumble, and angry residents rumble. We’re witnessing how the concentrated accumulation of capital and misery indeed go hand in hand.

We humans are really good at calculating the price of convenience, but are terrible at measuring the cost. For example, privileged car owners happily jump in the driver’s seat knowing how comfortable and convenient it is. But few stop to consider how much space a car takes up on the road, how much their tire dust is floating into the mouths of fish, or how many toxic exhaust chemicals are sucked into the lungs of that kid standing on the corner.

And how many of us hesitate to click ‘buy’ knowing how nice it is to have a package delivered to our doorstep in 24 hours or less? We don’t consider the additional 30,000 heavy-duty trucks that will rumble down the local roads and freeways of the Inland Empire. Or the how local warehouse workers will make ends meet when Amazon replaces them with robots. Or what about the critters living in the foothills of the valley?

Someone is thinking of them. In 2020 the Friends of the Northern San Jacinto Valley, sued Moreno Valley over further expansion of their Global Logistics Center into sensitive areas. They settled just a few weeks ago. Six hundred acres will be added to the endangered-species reserve system in exchange for enough land to build the equivalent of 40 shopping malls worth of warehouse space. The Inland Empire really is the Warehouse Empire.

Maybe it’s time we pull consumerism over and slip on our hat as we saunter up to the speeding capitalist. And when they roll their window down asking how much damage they’ve done, we peer over our glasses and earnestly say, “I don’t know, son, but it’ll take generations to fix it.”

Hello Interactors,

Today is Black Friday. It’s one of the most anticipated shopping days of the year. In Part 1 of this two part series, I talked about how the Christmas holiday season is rooted in consumption and classism. Its origins had little to nothing to do with Christianity, but everything to do with establishing social order. Black Friday is no different.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

VISIONS OF SUGAR-PLUMS DANCED IN THEIR HEADS

American colonial settlers debated Christmas celebrations well in the 1700s. Bouts of drunken caroling, groveling, and fallacious philia raged from harvest season’s end through December. While the practice was as old as the Roman Saturnalia, Puritan settlers hoped to sever the European connection.

One Puritan, Reverend Increase Mather, “accurately observed in 1687 that the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so ‘thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].’”

The harvest parties only increased until the colonists overthrew England’s Dominion of New England in 1689. One Connecticut almanac producer, John Tully, wrote in 1688,

“The Nights are still cold and long, which may cause great Conjunction betwixt the Male and Female Planets of our sublunary Orb, the effects whereof may be seen about nine months after…”

Tully also bravely printed Christmas Day on the 25th alongside his weather predictions.

There was not another mention of Christmas until 1711 when Increase Mather’s son, Reverend Cotton Mather (who applauded Indigenous massacres because they “brought Indian souls to hell”) wrote in his December 30th diary,

“I hear of a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock, who have had on the Christmas-night, this last week, a Frolick, a revelling feast, and Ball [i.e., dance].…”

The following year, around Christmas time, he preached from the Bible criticisms of faux Christians who used religion to veil ungodly sexual acts, “‘giving themselves over to fornication’—'ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.’”

Despite Mather’s routine attempts to curb young people’s desire to turn religious events into parties, such at weddings or Sunday night revelry, it only increased. Population data from this time period shows a marked increase in unwed pregnancies. Records show seven month old marriages that featured an addition to the family a couple months later. Also, there’s a notable swelling of births roughly nine months after Christmas. That’s when I was born.

By the early 1700s, Cotton Mather gave up. He reluctantly accepted that Christians could be both Christmas revelers and Christian reckoners; a weakening of Puritanism and a concession his father surely would have admonished. But it set the stage for moderation as evidenced in Benjamin Franklin’s older brother, James Franklin’s, 1733 couplet:  

“Now drink good Liquor, but not so, / That thou canst neither stand nor go.”

James was the one who trained young Ben to become a printer. Benjamin Franklin is also remembered as the nation’s model of self-restraint, but perhaps less so as a philanderer. He fathered an illegitimate child before entering a common-law marriage with his housekeeper’s daughter. Perhaps his rustles in the sheets started with a little wassail in streets.

In December of 1734, Franklin wrote this in his second edition of his famed Poor Richard’s Almanac:

“If you wou’d have Guests merry with your Cheer, / Be so yourself, or so at least appear.”

Then again five years later:

“O blessed Season! lov’d by Saints and Sinners, / For long Devotions, or for longer Dinners.”

What Benjamin Franklin, and prolific almanac producer Nathanial Ames, aimed to do throughout the 1700s was to cast Christmas, through printed word, as a time to be merry – but in moderation. Slowly, by the late 1700s, Christmas carols began sneaking into America’s first printed hymnals. The Christmas celebration had finally made piece with Christianity. The Universalists were the first to hold a December 25th service in 1789.

CLOTHES WERE ALL TARNISHED WITH ASHES AND SOOT

But the dawn of a new century, and the industrial age, brought a shift in attitudes around Christmas. The elite, again, distanced themselves from the occasion. As urban cities grew and jobs shifted from the farm to the factory, winter brought new dynamics to the onset of the season. Some factories closed in the cold months as did shipyards along frozen waters.

This brought unemployment and idle time to laborers. Whereas historically wealthy farm owners were willing to amuse the working class in a societal roll reversal – through transient and theatrical wassailing – the urban elite power structures were unwilling to participate. But it didn’t stop the working class from venting.

The once faint mockery of their employers – imbued with subtle hints of revenge should they not offer them gifts, food, or alcohol – turned fierce and riotous in the 1800s. Papers in both England and the United States barely mention Christmas at all between 1800 and 1820. But that was about to change.

In the first decade of 1800, one of New York’s most influential men, John Pintard, became particularly peeved by the seasonal banditti. He reminisced on ‘better days’ when the rich and the poor got drunk together. And while he wished his wealthy friends reveled more among themselves, he grew concerned that “the beastly vice of drunkenness among the lower laboring classes is growing to a frightful excess…”

And in a familiar tone, echoed to this day by many, he feared “thefts, incendiaries, and murders—which prevail—all arise from this source.”  Which is why he helped create the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism. This was an organization that sought to curb money directed at care for the poor, but to also stop them from begging and drinking. The white elite ruling class of the 1820s –- as well as many in the 2020s – complained of what one New York paper described as, “[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, etc., to the great disturbance of the neighborhood.”

Pintard was also hopelessly nostalgic. He founded the New York Historical Society in 1804 and was instrumental in establishing Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July, and Columbus Day as national holidays. Pintard also introduced America’s icon of nostalgia, Santa Claus. Seeking a patron saint for the New York Historical Society, and for all of New York City, he commissioned an illustration to be painted of St. Nicholas giving presents to children. While the icon was not intended to be seasonal, it was nonetheless printed on December 6th, St. Nicholas Day, in 1810.

He pined for the days when the rich and powerful could rule over what was becoming a burgeoning working class. In 1822, as Jefferson had just passed a law allowing non-property owners to vote, Pintard wrote to his daughter,

“All power is to be given, by the right of universal suffrage, to a mass of people, especially in this city, which has no stake in society. It is easier to raise a mob than to quell it, and we shall hereafter be governed by rank democracy.… Alas that the proud state of New York should be engulfed in the abyss of ruin.”

WHAT TO MY WONDERING EYES SHOULD APPEAR

1822 was also the year his friend, and wealthy land owner, Clement Clark Moore, wrote what was to become the most influential Christmas poem ever: “A Visit from St. Nicholas” or as it is known today, “T’was The Night Before Christmas.”

This single poem, written for the elite upper class, encapsulates the nostalgia of wassailing Pintard and his friends pined for, while making themselves feel good about themselves for ‘giving to the needy.’ Moore did this by substituting the unruly lower working class, begging for gifts from their master, with children expecting presents on Christmas morning.

He kept the gift giving mysticism of the centuries old St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, but removed the judgmental elements of a Bishop who may make them feel guilty for maintaining class divide by making him “merry”, “droll”, “rosy”, and “plump.” He also made him a lower class “peddler”. And while Santa made a loud noise “on the lawn” with a “clatter”, just as a lower class wassailer would have, he was but a small and unthreatening “right jolly old elf” who kindly left toys he had labored over for the children.

And he asked nothing in return. With a “wink of his eye” and a “finger aside his nose” (a gesture meaning “just between you and me”) Moore gave the privileged class, who were fearful of home invasions at Christmas time, assurance they “had nothing to dread.” All they needed to do, was keep their wealth within the family and buy their kids and friends gifts at Christmas time. Forget the poor, they thought, they’re as hopeless as democracy.

The vision and version of Christmas and Santa Claus that Moore provided his haughty affluent peers, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was soon to be read by a growing middle class and an increasingly literate lower class. That’s as true then as it is today.

And while Moore was a country squire who never worked a day in his life, and hated the gridding up of property in a growing New York City, he grew to love the money he earned selling off family property he inherited. Geographer Simeon DeWitt was chopping Manhattan into a Roman style grid to make room for a population that grew from 33,000 in 1790 to nearly 200,000 by the time Moore’s poem was written in 1822. He even included a chimney in his poem for Santa to climb down as a way for city folk to better relate to a scene he’d rather have happened in his bucolic hills of a New York of yore – an area today we call Chelsea.

What also changed was the gifts exchanged. Traditional Christmas gifts consisted of hand made food and goods forged from natural countryside surroundings. But as Christmas moved to the city, handmade gifts were displaced by store bought presents.

The first known American Christmas advertisement came from one of the country’s busiest ports, Salem, Massachusetts in 1806. Then two more in 1808 in both Boston and New York in the New York Evening Post. By the 1820s they were everywhere. In 1834 a Boston magazine wrote,

“’All the children are expecting presents, and all aunts and cousins to say nothing of near relatives, are considering what they shall bestow upon the earnest expectants.… I observe that the shops are preparing themselves with all sorts of things to suit all sorts of tastes; and am amazed at the cunning skill with which the most worthless as well as most valuable articles are set forth to tempt and decoy the bewildered purchaser.’”

It went on to warn shoppers to “’put themselves on their guard, to be resolved to select from the tempting mass only what is useful and what may do good…’”

Sounds like Black Friday.

THE LUSTRE OF MID-DAY TO OBJECTS BELOW

While there was aggressive advertising as early as the 1800s, there was a social stigma around being too showy with luxury purchases. It was a sign of European aristocracy that the colonists, of all economic strata, were keen to avoid. But Christmas time had long been a cyclical excuse to overconsume. Shopkeepers and manufacturers latched on this association tempting even the most tempered to exult in excess through advertising, promotions, and sales.

It was the Puritans who invented Thanksgiving as way to celebrate the harvest separate from the religiosity of Christmas time. The specific day on the calendar bounced around until the late 1700s when regional governors dictated it be celebrated as close to Christmas as possible. It was even held on December 20th one year.

It didn’t take long for Thanksgiving to become commercialized either. New England farmers and merchants would strategize on how to best profit from the carnival-like drunken festivals that surrounded Thanksgiving just as it did Christmas.

Once Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be the official day of Thanksgiving in 1863, retailers could plan their profits around a firm date. Then, in 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved it back a week during the depression to extend the Christmas shopping season an extra week so retailers could reap more profits. It was a controversial ruling and FDR’s date came to be known as Franksgiving. Happy Franksgiving, everyone!

The 1900s was also the time when the marauding tradition of parading through the streets became a sponsored event by department stores. Eaton department store sponsored the first in Toronto in 1905 and then Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade came along in New York City in 1924. These parades began an unwritten rule among retailers to refrain from advertising Christmas sales until the parade had commenced. That made the Friday after Thanksgiving the first day shops were open for business and the start of holiday shopping.

The term ‘Black Friday’ didn’t enter the picture until 1961 in Philadelphia. ‘Black days’ were customarily days marking bad events. So much like the dread of the chaotic colonial traditions of parading wassailers, the Philadelphia police came to describe the traffic, congestion, and shopping hysteria the day after Thanksgiving as ‘Black Friday.’

But retailers didn’t much like the negative association. It took 20 years before a new association was cemented. And it was, again, Philadelphia that led the charge. A November 28th, 1981 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer was the first to describe Black Friday as the day when retailers, who suffered ‘in the red’ for most of the year, could move their ledger into the ‘black’ during the holiday shopping season.

Black Friday triggers an event, just as solstice did for the Romans, that offers an opportunity for those in power, capitalists in the form of retailers, to open their doors just as the wealthy land owners did, and offer great deals to those who can’t afford various luxuries, like figgy pudding, rum spiced pie, perry, or wassail.

Just as Roman slave owners used the Saturnalia to remind slaves of their place in society, or wealthy land barons to remind peasant laborers of theirs, capitalists use the holiday season as an chance to remind us all who’s in charge. And what Pintard, Moore, and their band of wealthy Knickerbockers did was wrap it all up in a fairy tale that portrays it all as benevolence by tying it to the Christian saint known for charity – Ole St. Nick.

They feared the masses becoming educated and empowered with the right to vote. They railed against democracy sensing it would only loosen their grip on power. And here we are on Black Friday of 2021, the start of the holiday shopping season, as powerful conservatives in Washington are drooling over ways to carve up a bill that represents the biggest investment in America’s most needy since FDR like it was a Thanksgiving turkey. Pass the wassail, please.

Reference:

The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997

Hello Interactors,

This is part one of a two part series on the role of economics in the holiday season. We’re a week away from Thanksgiving, but Christmas has already started to enter our lives. If it feels like it keeps creeping closer to Halloween, that’s because it is. Little did I know, it actually started out that way.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

HOUSE INVASION

It was 9:00 on Christmas night when four men forcibly entered the house. John Rowden, his wife, their adopted son, and a live-in helper, Daniel Poole, were all home. The four men made their way to the living room, sat on the couch in front of the fire, and starting singing Christmas carols. Clearly drunk, at some point one of the men turned to Rowden and said sarcastically, “How do you like this, father?” They demanded alcohol as payment for their ‘entertainment’. Rowden didn’t like it at all and asked them to leave.

They had heard Rowden had fine wine in his collection. They said they’d happily pay him for the alcohol later, but demanded the wine now. Rowden’s wife stepped in reminding them that their house was not a bar and they should leave. Much to their surprise, the men did; only to return minutes later claiming they had the cash to pay for the wine.

Fearing the scoundrels would break in if they didn’t take the money, the Rowden’s decided to sell them a bottle of their prized wine. But first they demanded proof that the men had the money. Rowden cracked open the door and one of the men shoved fake money in his wife’s face as the others tried to enter the house.

The Rowden’s, with the help of Daniel Poole, managed to push them back and secure the door. The four men appeared to have given up. But moments later they heard them yelling sardonically from outside, “hello.” Poole tried to reason with them. He reminded them that it was Christmas night and they should be home. They saw this as a provocation and challenged Poole to come out and make them go home.

Poole refused, of course, so they began throwing rocks at the house. They pried away siding, destroyed rockery, fences, and tore down poles. After an hour and a half of persistent vandalism, it finally subsided and the family was safe and sound. The house? Not so much. Merry Christmas.

This true story is from 1649 and took place in Salam, Massachusetts. Two of those four men were later implicated in the Salem witch hunts. These intrusions were a common occurrence in the colonies during the holiday season, but more so in England. These four men were wassailing. Today we might call it caroling, but at the time it was really more a combination of Thanksgiving, Mardi Gras, trick-or-treating, and caroling. We don’t run into many drunk carolers these days, but we would have in 17th century England and their colonies.

The Puritan settlers outlawed wassailing after colonizing. In fact, they banned any celebration of Christmas. Because the bible makes no mention of the birth of Jesus on any particular date, there was no cause for celebration. Of course, there was little cause for celebration among the Puritans at all; especially excesses of revelry, alcohol, and sex.

The Puritans tried banning Christmas in London too. It prompted a book to be written in 1686 called The Tryal of Old Father Christmas. It featured a Puritan jury made up of “Mr. Cold-kitchen”, “Mr. Give-little”, and “Mr. Hate-good.” Perhaps these characters inspired Charles Dicken’s character, Ebenezer Scrooge, 150 years later.

TRICK OR TREAT, SMELL MY FEET, GIVE ME SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT

The Rowden’s were a relatively affluent family who owned a pear orchard from which they made pear wine or cider, known as “perry”. Those four young men were of a lower class, possibly even laborers for his orchard, and they came to Rowden’s house to be merry with his perry.

It was common practice throughout Europe and England for wealthy land and farm owners to treat their lower class workers to a meal and/or gifts in late November and early December. After what must have been an intense and laborious season of harvesting, canning, slaughtering, and preparing for the coming winter months, December marked an end to a fruitful season worth celebrating. December 6th was the customary end of the harvest season in Western Europe, just a week and a half after America’s modern-day traditional harvest celebration – Thanksgiving.

To recognize and honor their hard work, it became customary for workers to exchange gifts with their masters or employers. Some exchanges were initiated from the lower class workers and other times by the upper class employers. But every wealthy land owner knew that if they didn’t so something to commemorate their worker’s labor, they risk workers taking it upon themselves to come knocking.  Just as those four men did to old man Rowden, singing,

Come bring, with a noise,My merrie, merrie boys,The Christmas log to the firing;While my good dame sheBids ye all be free [i.e., with the alcohol]And drink to your heart’s desiring…

The upper class quickly learned that it’s best to open their doors to the peasant class, feed them, entertain them, and send them on their merry way…or else. As evidenced in this little jingle,

We’ve come here to claim our right…And if you don’t open up your door,We will lay you flat upon the floor

While I’m sure there were examples of benevolent exchanges between classes, the ritual also served as an explicit reinforcement of social order. You’re down there and we’re up here. Don’t think that we’re equals. We have the goods and you come begging. And begging they did, singing,

Again we assemble, a merry New YearTo wish to each one of the family hereMay they of potatoes and herrings have plentyWith butter and cheese, and each other dainty

Christmas was a time when the poor were excused for begging. If they were not happy with what was offered, they took revenge. Again, a bit like Halloween. Give me a treat, or you’ll get tricked. The privileged class knew they could do little to stop the raucous revelers, just as there’s little to be done should some kids decide to toilet paper your trees or egg your house on Halloween.

THE POPE PULLS A TRICK, WITH OLE ST. NICK

Another hallows eve refrain was dressing in costumes. Often it was the lower class mocking the upper class by dressing and acting like them. Men would sometimes dress as women and women as men. Others would use it as a way to mock religious leaders or politicians.

And it was almost always a rowdy and drunken celebration because one of the substances the merry bands would be begging for was alcohol – usually the cidery punch known as wassail. They’d run door to door and through the streets singing this familiar holiday tune,

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green;Here we come a-wandering, so fair to be seen.Love and joy come to you, and to you our wassail, too.And God bless you and send you a Happy New YearAnd God bless you and send you a Happy New Year

We are not daily beggars that beg from door to door;But we are neighbours' children whom you have seen before.Love and joy come to you, and to you our wassail, too.And God bless you and send you a Happy New YearAnd God bless you and send you a Happy New Year

This widespread postharvest behavior had been happening for thousands of years. It was so baked into the fabric of society that even the church began painting it with Christian imagery and metaphor. Because the celebrations occurred on or around the end of November and into December there were many elements of Christianity to which they could attach the events.

During Roman times, December 17th marked the day of the Saturnalia – a festival honoring the god of agriculture, Saturn. All work halted for a week as people decorated their homes with wreaths. They shed their togas to dawn festive clothes, and they drank, gambled, sang, played music, socialized and exchanged gifts. It was a celebration of their agrarian bounty and the return of light at Winter solstice. It was also a time to invite their slaves to dinner where their masters would serve them food.

One Christian Saint affiliated with early December – and the one most honored today in the form of a plump jolly man wearing a red velvet suit – is Saint Nicholas. December 6th is St. Nicholas Day. For many European countries this marked the official end of the harvest season. And even today it’s recognized in some countries as a kind of warm-up act to the more official and accepted Christmas day, December 25th.

Nicholas of Bari was a Greek Christian bishop from modern day Turkey. Also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker, he earned a reputation during the Roman Empire for many miracles; all of which, were written centuries after his death and thus prone to exaggeration. But, he was most famous for his generosity, charity, and kindness to children, the poor, and the disadvantaged. He was said to have sold his own belongings to get gold coins that he’d then put in the shoes outside people’s homes. This is the origin of the tradition of putting shoes or stockings out on Christmas Eve.

They say he also saved the lives of three innocent men from execution. He chastised the corrupted judge for accepting a bribe to execute them. You can bet St. Nick would have made sure old-man Rowden had shared his perry before things got too scary.

And he certainly would have been watching over the peasant farmers and slaves to insure they were treated fairly. He seemed to always have an eye out for inequities and justice for common people. Maybe that’s what made him a saint. Or maybe he was just born that way. After all, Nicholas in Greek means “people’s victory.”

DON’T GO HIDING, OFFER GOOD TIDING

The Puritans obviously lost at their attempts to ban Christmas. Lacking any evidence from the Bible, the Christian powers that be eventually settled on the 25th of December as the day Jesus was born. They most likely picked the 25th because that was the day winter solstice landed on the Roman calendar. And while much is made of Christmas day, a certain song reminds us there are actually 12 days of Christmas. Maybe more.

It may feel like Christmas creep when you see holiday decorations appear the day after Halloween, but historically speaking that’s when the party starts. Trick-or-treating kicks off two months of gorging on goodies, making merry with perry, and pleading, pestering, and pining for presents from parents. Just as peasants begged for bounty from their overlords.

Christmas tradition is mostly a months long after-work party that celebrates wealth accumulation while reinforcing a certain economic relationship between the haves and the have-nots. Yes, there are “good tidings to you and all of your kin” and it is a celebration from the heart that can feed the soul with some warm “figgy pudding.”

But lingering under the guise of generosity on the part of the giver is a threat of violence if it’s not shared equitably. “For they’d all like figgy pudding, so bring it out here!” And if you don’t, then “they won’t go until they get some, so bring some out here!”

Maybe think twice before feeling too smug plopping a penny in the Salvation Army’s red pot while making pleasant with a nearby peasant. If your flush with funds this holiday season, and pay people to serve you, be mindful of who you snub.

Tip graciously and share wisely. The ones who deserve it the most, may be the one’s who could do you the most damage. You’d hate for a worker’s revolt where the disadvantaged come knocking on the doors of rich people carrying a yule log, some drunken friends, a bit of angry resentment, and a nearly empty bowl of wassail.

Reference:

The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997

Hello Interactors,

Most of you probably heard about Bill Gates’ recent over the top 66th birthday celebration. The images conjured up visions of a Bond film. It got me thinking about Bezos and Musk and how they could easily be cast as villains in a Bond film. Maybe real-life really is stranger than fiction. Or maybe they’re one in the same.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BOND MEETS ELON

The scene opens in Monaco with the bay crowded with boats. James Bond has just climbed aboard a private mega yacht and is snooping around. With a single hand he pulls open a glass sliding door on the upper deck and steps inside an opulent room filled with fine furniture.

He glances out a window to reveal a long gray military frigate docked at shore with a helicopter perched on top. Speeding toward it is a motor boat that mysteriously vanishes under water 10 meters shy of the hard chined towering frigate.

Bond squints with suspicion. He then notices a reflection in the shiny brass compass housing just in front of the window. Somebody is approaching him from behind. He quickly grabs a towel and somehow manages to kill his assailant with piece of white cotton terry cloth fabric that he then uses to dab the sweat from his brow.

The scene cuts to a celebration on the French frigate. The military’s top brass and dignitaries arrive in chauffeured Mercedes Benz sedans as a Navy brass band plays in the background. We cut briefly to see a closeup of two identification cards being swapped by black leather gloved hands. Back to Bond on the boat and he’s just stumbled across a dead man that stiffly falls from a closet stripped of all his clothes – presumably the previous holder of one of those ID cards we just saw.

We cut back to shore and are introduced to an attractive woman who just arrived for the ceremonies. And now back to Bond who puts two and two together and jumps from the super yacht onto a high speed tender. The camera zooms in on the throttle as we’re treated to the throaty roars of a muscular V12 engine. Bond shoves the throttle forward and jets towards the celebration.

We cut to a speech by a French bureaucrat standing on the frigate. He’s spouting off the technological features of a new helicopter that is about to be demonstrated. He calls it “Europe’s answer to the electronic battlefield.” The Tiger helicopter, he says, uses “stealth technology.” It’s “hardened against all forms of electronic interference, radio jamming, and electromagnetic radiation.”

We then cut to two pilots making their way toward the helicopters below deck on the frigate. But, they’re interrupted by the beautiful woman we were just introduced to. After some flirty back and forth dialog, she raises her gun and kills them both.

Next we see her wearing one of their helmets and uniform as she’s joined by her companion Bond saw dip below the surface in the motorboat moments earlier. They make their way out onto the helicopter pad where the Tiger awaits. The announcer says, “Please welcome the pilots!” They climb in and start the propellers whirling as we cut to Bond making his way up the steps of the dock and through the crowd.

He runs toward the frigate to stop them, but is halted and thrown up against the wall of the ship by two French navy officers. A gun is held to his sun soaked face as he watches the Tiger helicopter whir away.

I couldn’t help but recall this scene from the 1995 Bond film, GoldenEye when I read reports and saw pictures of Bill Gates’ rented yacht docked in a remote bay somewhere in Turkey shuttling guests by helicopter to his beachside 66th birthday bash.

There’s no question Bill lives the life similar to those mega rich and powerful international men of mystery that Bond films cast as antagonists. He lives in a sprawling high tech compound on Lake Washington with a Bond-like subterranean garage. When he’s not around to commute by car to his nearby office, he has a barge tugged into a secluded cove where his helicopter can land. A small boat shuttles him to shore. He escapes up a mysterious private elevator in a midrise office building overlooking the lake and the Seattle skyline.

For his Turkish birthday bash, Bill paid upwards of $2 million dollars a week to rent one of the world’s largest yachts, “Lana”. One of his guests, Jeff Bezos, also rented a yacht. Some speculate he actually owns it, but the “Flying Fox” rents for over $3 million a week. It too had helicopters shuttling people to the beach party.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, wasn’t there but we can imagine he would not have been out done. Perhaps there was a shortage of yachts to rent. Or maybe he was in the Space X control room rattling off all the technological wonders of his new rocket perched on the platform outside.

I can imagine the scene cutting to 007 careening down the tarmac in his Tesla Cybertruck. Flying just above him, a bodacious, musclebound, blond bombshell leaning out of an unmanned drone. She’s firing rounds of thermonuclear plasma from her space pistol as the countdown clock to launch ticks toward zero. Will 007 make it to Musk in time, or will the double agent vixen sabotage the launch?

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC TRIUMPHANT SEXIST

These three men have more in common than being billionaires, they’re all science fiction junkies who pursued a path of technocratic, world dominating, capitalistic monopolies. They’re also rational egoists. They believe their selfish actions to be perfectly rational. In fact, in their estimation, any action on the part of any human is only rational if and only if it maximizes one's own self-interest.

The libertarian darling philosopher and writer Alice O’Connor, or better known as Ayn Rand, a favorite of theirs I’m sure, said “it’s not only irrational to act against your own self-interest, but it’s also immoral.”

She was a big fan of 007 books, but not the films. She didn’t like how the humor diminished the glory of individualism. She said the movies “undercut Bond’s stature, to make him ridiculous.” At least she wasn’t alone.

The inventor of the character, Ian Fleming, thought he was ridiculous too. He believed Bond as a “blunt instrument wielded by a government department who would get into bizarre and fantastic situations […] he’s always referred to as my hero. I don’t see him as a hero myself. On the whole I think he’s a rather unattractive man.”

Billionaires today are villainized as rather unattractive men. Like Bond movies, they celebrate and flaunt the excesses of mass-consumption and capitalism. We can track the rise of this behavior with the rise of the Bond franchise. From the early books in the 1950s to the most recent Bond flicks, we are offered superheroes of a technologically driven mass-consumer society.

But it’s not a society of the masses. It’s a glamorized vision of a small exclusive society that props itself up so it can look down at the rest of the world’s global population. Without whom, through their toils and disenfranchisement, the elite exclusive little society would not exist. Nor would villainous billionaires. Or maybe not as many.

Bond films divide the world into workers, buyers, and capitalists. All three of those characters are presented in that single helicopter scene in GoldenEye. Two navy pilots (workers) killed point blank by a hired villain (worker) so she could fly a technologically advanced machine built with blue-collar labor (workers) and purchased by the government (buyer) from a corporation (capitalist) using tax dollars collected largely from workers.

And it was Bond’s job to represent the public’s interest, squash the entire operation, and save capitalism.

And the audience cheers him on. The audience, of course, is made mostly of people who have a vested interest in a government secret agent protecting the laws that maintain their private ownership of property, consumption of goods, and privilege over those tasked with serving them. They give permission to Bond to do things that go against the grain of Western democracy and its Christian roots.

He’s allowed to break the law, promote misogyny, destroy property, and even commit murder. So long as the dominant social order is upheld, mass-media consumers turn a blind eye.

Social scientist, Toby Miller calls it a “popular endorsement of overt governmental processes through the publicly-ratified rule of law.” It’s exactly what many in Europe and America want.

The former New York Times movie critic, Vincent Canby, wrote in 1971 that Bond is a “steadfast agent for the military-industrial complex, a friend to the C.I.A. and a triumphant sexist.”  In 2012 the American Conservative magazine said “Bond’s Britain is relevant, wealthy, and influential, still a beacon of Western ingenuity.”

Gates, Bezos, and Musk are all beacons of Western ingenuity. But they’re also cartoons of capitalism, just as Bond is a cartoon of Western hegemony. Film critic and painter, Manny Farber wrote that Bond films are “a catalogue of posh-vulgar items for licentious living.” The former Head of Media at The Guardian and now professor, Jane Martinson said in 2012 that

“feminists were sick of a long-running multibillion-pound franchise that left a series of beautiful women as little more than roadkill in the path of the spy we never loved.”

History professor Theodore Roszak called Bond the “embodiment of technocracy.”  

These critiques could have just as easily been leveled against Gates, Bezos, or Musk and their lifestyles and beliefs. And for most of the effects of neoliberal economics for that matter.  

LORDE EDGE TAKES AIM

GoldenEye was filmed 26 years ago. Bill Gates would have been 40 years old. That’s about the same age the actor playing Bond, Pierce Brosnan, would have been. Pierce was born in Ireland. His father abandoned him and his mother at infancy. At four they moved to London where he was raised by his grandparents while his mom worked as a nurse. When they died he was put in a boarding house. He was ridiculed by British kids for being Irish. He went on to learn commercial illustration at 16, then acting, and worked as a busker breathing fire on street corners. Not exactly the path of a true 007.

Gates was born into wealth and privilege and admits to reading his fair share of science fiction. But unlike Bezos and Musk, he isn’t that interested in taking up life on Mars. His mom instilled a strong since of philanthropy in Bill as a young boy that many have benefited from today. His wealth created my own, so I can’t be too hard on him.

He’s unquestionably the smartest men I’ve been around, but he can’t be the world’s 007. He’s not that smart or ingenious. And while his giving is commendable, I can’t help but wonder if Seattle would have a homeless crisis had a larger fraction of his billions been siphoned off over the last 40 years for the public good. Maybe had the government taken more of his income to circumvent global problems, he wouldn’t have to spend as much money trying to solve them.

Bezos comes from a broken family. He excelled at math, computer science, and engineering. He built an alarm as a kid that would sound should someone try to enter his room. Sounds like a budding 007 to me. Upon graduating as valedictorian, Bezos told a local paper that he hoped

"to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park."

Bezos loves the Iain M. Banks science fiction novels, Culture series. They’re about humanoid aliens occupying artificial habitat on planets strewn across the Milky Way.

But what was lost on Bezos, a fierce libertarian, is that Banks was a committed socialist. In a recent New York Times article, Jill Lepore quoted Banks as saying the books were about “’hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, ‘Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?’

Musk was born into wealth, but his parents divorced when he was nine years old and he lived with his dad. A decision he came to regret calling him “a terrible human being.” He was teased as a young boy and was hospitalized once after being thrown down a flight of stairs. He wrote and sold his first software at age 10, when on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in economics and a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1989. He was accepted at Stanford to do a PhD in materials science, but opted to ride the internet startup wave instead.

He too was a fan of Iain Banks. Jill Lepore also noted that Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” That makes two renowned libertarian brainiacs who somehow missed Iain Banks’ socialist agenda.

Last weekend Musk changed his Twitter name to “Lorde Edge.” The speculation is that it’s a derivative of the word edgelord which is “Someone, especially posting on the internet, who uses shocking and nihilistic speech and opinions that they themselves may or may not actually believe to gain attention and come across as a more dangerous and unique person.” It’s a character trait you might expect in a Bond anti-hero.

Pierce Brosnan saw his first Bond movie, Goldfinger, in 1964 when he was 11 years old. His stepfather took him to see it in London. I wonder what the 11 year old Brosnan thought of Pussy Galore and her band of merry lesbian aviators.

The movie ends with Bond and Pussy Galore on the ground having just survived parachuting from a plane. Helicopters are coming to rescue them, but he leans over her and says, “This is no time to be rescued” and pulls the parachute over himself and Pussy Galore as they kiss.

I can imagine Brosnan’s stepdad leaning over and whispering to the young Pierce the words of the character’s creator, Ian Fleming, “Pussy only needed the right man to perform the laying on of hands to cure her psycho-pathological malady.”

The discrepancy between Brosnan’s life and the fictional life of the character he played is metaphorical. England had long played the leading role in world power and dominance but it had been cracked by the U.S. and the fire breathing working class identity was starting to show through. Ayn Rand’s biggest fear was coming true. The grand singularly focused empire was becoming diminished by the tragedy and comedy of the commons.

The talented set designer for the Bond films, Ken Adam reflected in 2008 that Goldfinger was a time when “when the British took off their handcuffs and said: ‘F**k, the Empire doesn’t exist any longer. Now, we will take over.’” Pussy Galore not only signaled liberation, she provided proletariat comic relief.

Gates, Bezos, and Musk all play the leading role of the enterprising, multi-national capitalist. They’re protagonists to many and antagonists to most. Either way, they’re flawed and troubled humans with troubled beginnings but also brilliant and talented men who have brought much good – an allegory for neoliberal economics.

Modern neoliberal economics has brought, and continues to bring, unmatched prosperity to underprivileged people around the world. But, it’s also created historic income disparities, social strife and anxiety, and it’s destroying the planet. The real psychopathological malady isn’t in the form of lesbianism, it’s in unbridled capitalism.

Truth be told, my entire family love watching Bond movies. Pre Daniel Craig, anyway. I can’t handle the glorified violence in mainstream movies anymore. My daughter laughs at the misogyny, but relishes the moments women rule over men. My son loves the chase scenes, but is outraged by the sexism. My wife rolls her eyes at the absurdities, but cheers on the fleeting female power. I marvel at the set design and gadgetry, but wonder how my teenage kids are interpreting these messages.

My daughter summed it best when I asked her why she like Bond films. She said,

“Sometimes it’s entertaining to watch something you know is just classically bad.”

There are people outside the United States, and some inside, who think that as they watch the absurdities of American gluttony. Perhaps we’ve reached that point England did in the 60’s when the masses realized the empire doesn’t exist anymore.

Many are entertained watching Bill, Jeff, and Elon fly and float as they falter, flaunt, and philander. They are what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call the hyper-competent US businessman: “part James Bond, part Henry Ford.”

But what their exploits do, just as Bond films do, is perpetuate a particular cultural narrative that substantiates a societal norm. They lead most members of the dominant ruling class to believe that Bill, Jeff, and Elon’s unique individual contributions, be it corporate or philanthropic, are benefitting society as a whole when in reality they’re mostly benefitting themselves and the dominant ruling class.

Or maybe the joke’s on us and Musk really is casting himself as a real-life sociopathic anti-hero, “Lorde Edge.” After all, the objective for Bond in GoldenEye was to circumvent a space weapon that was destined to blow up the planet with an electromagnetic pulse.

Let’s hope the battery in that Tesla Cybertruck 007 is driving down the Space X tarmac doesn’t run out of juice. That rocket Elon is about to launch just may contain a space weapon he plans to aim back at the planet; fulfilling Jeff’s sadistic boyhood dream of a planet earth free of humans.

Reference

Toby Miller. Paradoxical Masculinity: James Bond, Icon of Failure. From the book The Cultural Life of James Bond.

Hello Interactors,

It’s hard to miss news about global supply chain woes these days. Between Covid, natural disasters, and strained trade relations with China it seems unlikely we’ll see anything that looks like normal for some time. But companies aren’t waiting to find out. They’re taking matters into their own hands. Or so they think.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MARIA CANTWELL AND THE CHAIN GANG

“There are some people who are saying, ‘Look, what I need is short term because this is never going to happen again,’ ” she said. “Then there are other people who are saying, ‘This is going to happen more often than we think.’ The world is a very different place, and it’s not just the pandemic. It’s natural disasters. It’s the floods down in the South. It’s tornadoes, it’s hurricanes.”

These are the words of Ellen Kullman. She’s the CEO of Carbon Inc., a 3-D printing company. She’s also the former CEO of DuPont, sits on the board of directors for Goldman Sachs and Dell, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a recognized leader in global science and engineering, and once chaired the US-China Business Council.

She knows a thing or two about global supply chains; which have had their fair share of attention recently. As global corporations have pushed their employees to work Harder, Better, Faster, and Stronger. They must appease shareholders demanding perpetual growth, even at the cost to people and the environment. To do so, they rely on other parts of the globe for raw materials and labor – a spatial fix.

Covid has taken a 200-year capitalism strategy believed to be immune to disruption and has created a supply chain pandemic. Just as the disease is testing our body’s immune system, it’s also testing the resiliency of networked global supply chains.

The onset of the pandemic showed early signs of vulnerability when global corporations were hit by governmental restrictions. Without notice borders around the world were closed, lockdowns prevented employees from working, and no sooner were facemasks recommended did we run out of supply. Dr. Gary Gereffi from Duke’s Global Value Chains Center said,

“China accounted for about 60% of U.S. face mask imports prior to the pandemic, but China suspended its exports of face masks worldwide as it dealt with its own outbreak of COVID-19 cases in early 2020.”

It wasn’t until late August that the supply gap was filled by U.S. producers.

Gereffi was testifying on July 15, 2021, in a hearing chaired by Democratic U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell on “Implementing Supply Chain Resiliency.” The meeting was in reaction to one of Biden’s first executive orders. It launched a 100-day review identifying vulnerabilities in the nation’s supply chains and how to address them.

The witnesses in the hearing included Gereffi from academia and five others from government agencies and the business sector. Their testimonies paint an accurate state of the country’s complicated over reliance on the global supply chain. They also had asks of the government that you might expect; more government funding, private-public partnerships, subsidies, or for the government to get out of the way. Or, in the case of Lex Taylor, a confusing mix of all the above.

William A. (Lex) Taylor III runs The Taylor Group of Companies, Inc. It was founded in 1927 as Taylor Machine Works in Louisville, Mississippi. Did I mention the ranking member and co-chair seated alongside Cantwell was U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi?

The Taylor Group is now a privately held holding company for Taylor Machine Works (heavy industrial forklifts), Taylor Power Systems (power generators), and Taylor Defense (remanufactured military material).

Taylor complained about the lack of resiliency in the global supply chain. He said the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) had quickly come up with a plan for how to circumvent the Covid caused supply chain conundrums called operation “Floorplan”. It was modelled after what he deemed a “successful Payroll Protection Program the Congress instituted at the Small Business Administration.” A clear nod to a government success story by a devote capitalist.

But he claimed operation “Floorplan“ failed “because of the political wrangling and failure of the government to understand the big-picture consequences of letting supply chains falter.” Yet the association seemed ok asking the government to bankroll his “Floorplan” program.

He went on about how every private company involved in his vast and deep supply chain began raising their prices to control their limited and dwindling supplies – a tried and true trick of the free-market system.

Compounding inflation among suppliers forced him to ultimately raise his prices too; all the while trying to stay afloat. He said, “we have kept our lines running but are facing 30% to 75% price increases either from our vendors or the transportation companies, or a combination of both.”

What gouged him the most was unbridled free-market pricing; a practical solution driven by the private sector. At the same time, he wanted federal dollars to fix the problem with a government subsidized “Floorplan.”

But while he and his employees benefitted from the government run Payroll Protection Program – and he wished the federal government would have funded his “Floorplan” – he would rather the free-market solve his problems. Even though the free market created the bulk of his financial pain.

In his closing remarks he said,

“My request is that this committee not act to overcorrect with solutions that may cause unintended consequences. Rather, I encourage you to support the free-market system and allow it to do what it does best and find solutions that are practical and driven by the private sector.”

Price gouging is a practical mechanism of the free-market. A solution? Maybe not.

BOEING BOEING GONE

In her opening remarks, Maria Cantwell said, “I would say, Senator Wicker, I'm not sure 20 years ago, if we would've had the same hearing.”

Twenty years ago Cantwell was in her first year as a U.S. Senator. Amassing independent wealth from her time in the software industry, she threw a lot of her own money into her campaign against the eleven year incumbent, Republican Slade Gorton. Microsoft was her biggest donor, followed by two law firms, and the fourth largest campaign contributor was Boeing.

Six months later Boeing sought their own spatial fix and announced they were moving their corporate headquarters to Chicago. By September of 2001, after being headquartered in Seattle since 1916, the Boeing corporate offices fell vacant.

Eight years later, in 2009, after the 2008 financial crisis, Boeing applied another spatial fix moving an assembly plant from Washington to South Carolina. North Charleston’s economy had been devastated by the closure of a naval shipyard and the Great Recession. They were experiencing record high unemployment rates.

So the state offered Boeing an incentive to move their factory. If Boeing could create 3,800 jobs and invest $750 million over the next seven years, the state would pitch in another $450 million.

Boeing had already been dealing with ugly union strikes in Washington. Four of their last seven contract negotiations ended in strikes. Conservatives blamed the machinists while liberals blamed Boeing. Either way, South Carolina was union free. An unorganized labor force is attractive to corporations because they can dictate the terms of pay uncontested. Some states, and nations, will even suppress or ban unions in hopes of attracting businesses to their regions.

Frank Larkin of the Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said in 2009, “It became clear early on that the company was less interested in making a deal than they were in getting more incentives out of South Carolina…The longer they sat at the table with us, the more South Carolina offered them."

Just 2.7% of South Carolina’s labor force is unionized – the lowest in the United States. Since the plant opened in 2011, Boeing has been fighting attempts by employees to unionize. In 2017, 3,000 employees tried and failed to unionize. A year later they succeeded despite Boeing funding a widespread media campaign against it.

So, Boeing took them to court. Because litigation slows down unionization, it buys time for Boeing to continue to use their wealth, power, and strength to disrupt the momentum of organizers. It also provides opportunities to fire employees as a way of sending a message to workers.

In November of 2018 they fired air force veteran, Richard Mester and two others for failing to report a bird strike on a Boeing engine. Mester had been doing this line of work for 30 years and knows a bird strike when he sees it. The Guardian reported, “He had just bought a house and had two daughters in college when he was terminated.” Mester said, “It was easy to see it was because we were union members…Boeing has no qualms about squashing any possibility of a union down here. Unfortunately we were the result of that.”

Despite the dwindling Boeing presence in Washington state, Maria Cantwell did mentioned in her opening remarks, “I can say for me in the state of Washington, aviation supply chain is something we're very proud of. More than 150,000 people work in that supply chain that continue to innovate and create new products…[this] is where the innovation is happening in the supply chain.”

She’s referring to an insight offered in a testimony by Richard Aboulafia, the VP of Analysis at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. Out of the gate he exposed the realities of the aviation supply chain by talking about value, innovation, and vulnerability.

He said, “For a typical Boeing jetliner, 80% of the value gets added at the supplier level…When Boeing sells a jetliner…suppliers, collectively, realize more revenue than [Boeing does].”

He added, “the innovation that takes place in aviation happens at the supplier level, and not at the prime level. Boeing’s 737 jetliner [has] been in production for around half a century. But the…successful transformation of these aircraft is because of the tremendous innovation that has taken place at the supplier level.”

Perhaps this explains why Washington state has not fought to win back the union heavy airplane assembly business. As Microsoft rose in the 90s and Amazon in the 2000s, the area attracted higher paying white collar engineering talent that fed into the aviation supply industry. Washington’s aviation history catalyzed a new industrial trajectory; what evolutionary economists call path dependence.

Aboulafia continued, “As with most complex manufactured products, an aircraft production system is only as strong as its weakest link. The supply chain, crucial to industry success, is also its greatest Vulnerability.”

China is fully aware of this vulnerability. Aboulafia said, “China, notably, is not a significant source of aircraft components, even from transplant factories. In fact, at the peak level of U.S.-China aerospace trade, the trade balance between the two countries was 17-1 in the U.S.’s favor.”

This does not bode well for U.S. aviation suppliers. Aboulafia said, “The only area of serious concern, outside of Covid-19 itself, is China, the biggest single export market (and tied with the US for biggest single market). At the peak level of deliveries to China, 2018, the country took 23% of all jetliner deliveries worldwide. This has fallen precipitously, for both market reasons and due to geopolitical factors. This trade is under threat, due to slowing in-country growth rates, China’s reluctance to recertify Boeing’s 737MAX, and the U.S. Government’s decision to put Western components for China’s ambitious national aircraft programs on a possibly restrictive export list.”

Furthermore, Covid put a real dent in the airlines biggest revenue generator – international business travel. It’s forced them to ground planes and halt new orders. And while business is picking up again, the companies bringing supply chains closer to home will be taking fewer overseas business trips to Asia.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Italian apparel company, Benetton is planning to “cut its Asia-based production by half in the next 12 to 16 months and move the work to countries on the Mediterranean.” It’s an end to a decades old reliance on Asian labor and supply chains that “requires regular visits to make sure manufacturing and materials meet quality standards and some aspects, such as production timing, aren’t under the company’s control overseas.” (1)

HOG TIED ON THE SUPPLY SIDE

Reading and watching the testimonies from Cantwell’s hearing, I couldn’t help notice the yearning for the glory days of the 20th century Fordist era when America dominated manufacturing and supply chains. The Duke professor, Dr. Gereffi, gushed over the reemergence of the furniture and textile industry in North Carolina and how his state excels at efficient pig processing.

Lex Taylor sees dollars signs with a “Floorplan” that can build more trucks, generators, and recycled military parts. And while Boeing has all but ceded the airline market to AirBus, Cantwell wants the 150,000 aviation experts in Washington state to at least be supplying parts.

Some of these aging, all male except Cantwell, boomers testifying at the hearing are of the age where I can imagine them reminiscing on the golden years of the nationalist “America First” sentiment that Trump tapped into in 2016. Wicker would have turned 16 in 1967, the end of the Fordism era.

But there were also testimonies that looked to a Post-Fordist industrial era. IBM’s Dr. Dario Gill talked about their semiconductor lab in New York and how their public-private partnership will produce new chips out of the factory in Malta, New York. Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senator from New York, helped seal that deal with the $110 billion Endless Frontier Act; $10 billion of which goes toward hubs like those in New York. The North Carolina Research Triangle hopes to get on that money as well. Dr. Gereffi talked of how North Carolina’s booming weaving loom know-how could transmogrify from cotton into silicon.

The Endless Frontier Act is a bipartisan bill intended to counter China’s semiconductor dominance. But, again, it falls victim to this outdated notion that America can return to our Fordist days. I know I’m over simplifying, but it takes a special combination of hubris and ignorance to believe you can replace 30 years of global supply networks, throughput, and intellectual property with a ‘Made in America’ stamp. Federal funding is needed to remedy our supply chain woes, but chest pounding nationalistic protectionism won’t get us there.

The most reasoned testimony in Cantwell’s hearing came from James A. Lewis. He’s a Senior Vice President and Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He said, “Two things broke that global supply chain. The first is the rise of a predatory China that will use any means to displace competitors in its quest for global primacy. The second is the COVID-19 pandemic, which produced an understandable desire in many nations to reduce their dependence on foreign suppliers and instead rely on national capabilities.”

He talked about how America got spooked when we realized how much we relied on China for necessary medical supplies. It prompted many in the U.S. to “want to move some critical production back onto their territories.” He’s right.

Atlanta home builder PulteGroup got fed up with delays and is building an automated assembly plant in South Carolina. Majestic Steel USA is opening new facilities across the country to avoid impediments in the supply chain. Climate calamities are also forcing companies to rethink supply chains. Paint powerhouse Sherman-Williams got fed up with Hurricane delays at southern ports. They bought a company with sites in Oregon and South Carolina to handle the load.

But as Lewis point out, in many ways this is just copying China and may be short sighted. Even the knee jerk reaction from Schumer and the Endless Frontier Act. He said, “This supply chain nationalism is reinforced by growing and powerful competition for technological leadership and by events like the semiconductor shortage.”

He continues, “Twentieth century American innovation was national, but today’s innovation base is international, with strong research and commercial links between the United States, Europe, and Asia.” And he rightfully concludes, “A country that cuts itself off from this international innovation system will fall behind.”

China has assumed America, and Europe, have been in decline since the end of the Cold War in 1989. They recognized the strategy of the U.S. and our allies was to seek regions to either invade, persuade, or buy. And then, theoretically, establish a Western style democracy to further build out a global supply chain, buy labor, and manufacture and sell goods and services.

So they invested heavily in industry within China and then expanded globally investing in 70 countries worldwide in infrastructure. Their One Belt One Road initiative has been building mines, dams, ports, railroads, airports, solar installations and more around the world to control the extraction and flow of resources and capital.

It’s like a parasitic super-structure on top of the West’s established global supply chain. It grows their dominance by feeding off of Western consumerism and neoliberal economic policies; all the while continuing to spoon Chinese made goods to the perpetually hungry mouths of American consumers.

John A. Lewis concluded his remarks with a stern directive:

“The U.S. must respond to China’s hostility, but we can no longer rely on market forces alone to advance the national interest. Defensive actions alone will not suffice. These themes all point to the need for a renewed industrial strategy, but it cannot simply duplicate previous policies because we are now in a world where the private sector leads. This means the task [for America] is to find where government intervention can best support a multinational commercial innovation base.”

A renewed industrial strategy is needed, indeed. But, so is a new economic creed that doesn’t breed greed.

Hello Interactors,

I was reminded that three years ago this week I was on a trip visiting remote Microsoft development centers overseas. Those trips afforded me the luxury of observing and understanding diverse geographies, societies, and economies. But it also drove home both the pleasure and pain imposing political and economic structures can bring.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

FLY OVER AND DIVE IN

It was the model concentration camp. Shaped in an equilateral triangle made of 10 foot high stone walls painted white, it featured machine guns mounted high at the corners; fixed on the lowly prisoners. The sidewalk leading to the entry is pleasant and tree-lined; an attractive and seemingly innocent approach to a place that is anything but. It stirs a morbid twist of emotions. The perversity is punctuated by the words forged in iron bars on the entry gate: Arbeit Macht Frei – work makes you free.

To get to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp you disembark the train in a small nearby village and walk one mile to the entrance. The same path the prisoners would have taken. You pass by houses where whole families would come out to hurl rocks and spit on fellow humans; some were Jews, some homosexual, others with a mere limp, and occasionally even a relative.

That place reminded me of how easily a government can invent a structure motivated by domination and impose it on a region and it’s citizens. It demonstrates how a small group of people can create the necessary conditions for the production of labor, death, and destitution through extreme exploitation; a top-down political and economic structure masterfully and morbidly executed by masterminds who firmly believed there actions were for the good of humankind.

These camps bring us closer to the worst human suffering imaginable. But they also draw attention the to seemingly innocent complicit behavior lurking in the shadows. Hitler had regional aspirations for the structures he imposed that elicited reactions on a global scale. His actions also influenced individual behavior and shaped the culture of citizens and cities at a local level.

This site is short train ride north of Berlin. I was in town on business, so two of my colleagues and I decided to visit before flying home. My job took me around the globe visiting remote Microsoft development centers. In a single trip, I once flew from Seattle to Ireland, on to Israel, then China, and back home to Seattle.

From Haifa to Hyderabad or Bangalore to Berlin, I’ve observed structural societal patterns from high in the sky that are shaped by a global economy, and I’ve also experienced emergent forms of adapted human and cultural behavior on the ground. A single short trip around the world can bring into focus how environments have been shaped by people over millennia – both natural and manufactured – and how in turn those environments have shaped the people.

Glancing out the window as I descended into these major cities I could spot the warm autumnal colored patchwork blocks of agricultural land stretching into the distance. They gave way to increasingly dense dendritic spars of cold concrete roads slicing through clusters of steel buildings dotted with piercing lights as ant-like traffic pulsed its way though the tangled bustle.

I imagine these monstrous metropolis’s rising out of ancient embryonic farming, fishing, or mining settlements reminiscent of the neighboring landscape; a form of economic development termed, environmental determinism. Indeed that is true for many cities and towns, big and small, around the world, but in the last two hundred years a new ‘ism’ has been determining the development environment more than natural resources – capitalism. It’s led to uneven and inequitable development and settlement.

For example, while Indonesia’s 17,000 islands is home to some of the world’s richest resources, their per capita income is under $4,000 per year. Meanwhile, the tiny island city-state of Singapore, a place with few natural resources at all, has a per capita income of over $100,000 per year.

Many are quick to assume Singapore advanced it’s economy because it modeled itself after the West. Some regions did do this voluntarily, but it was also a common justification in the 1950s and 1960s for Western powers to swoop in to ‘improve’ so-called “Third World” countries. Powerful rich Western nations would introduce, often forcefully, Western democracy and then hand over economic development of resources and industry to private firms.

Indonesia was one such experiment. It’s now not only one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia and Oceana, but their dense forests continue to be converted to agricultural fields by outside firms making it the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. And just last year, their government passed deregulation laws that provide incentives for the coal industry to build dozens of power plants. Imposing Western style capitalism is destroying both their environment and their livelihood.

Global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization all pull from this play book. They seek poor and underdeveloped regions of the world and seduce, or coerce, them into believing that the way to the promise land is through both Western style democracy and industrial production. They then encourage mass consumption. The Global Plastics Action Partnership writes,

“Seventy percent of [Indonesia’s] plastic waste, an estimated 4.8 million tons per year, is considered mismanaged in ways such as being openly burned, irresponsibly dumped, or left to leak into oceans and waterways…the flow of plastic waste into Indonesia's oceans is projected to increase by 30% to around 800,000 tonnes by 2025.”

AN ADDICT GETS THEIR FIX

Economic systems, in a very basic form, are ways of creating value and distributing it. The simplest economy could mean just putting food on the table. Some are more feudal-looking where value is created for a landlord. Others are communal economies where value is created among the group and then shared between members.

Capitalism, the dominant system in the world today, creates value through waged labor and the private ownership of assets, like accumulated wealth and property. All it takes is a small group of people, capitalists, to own the assets needed to produce the value. They buy labor from people in exchange for the production of that value. Both the labor and the outputted value are bought and sold through a market system.

With wealth accumulation as a primary motivator, capitalist economic systems are engineered to grow profits. If growth lags, profits decline and competitors swoop in to recruit labor and buy cheapened assets. Capitalists are therefore incented to continually seek new means of gaining profit.

Profit comes from the value created by labor beyond which they are paid. For example, if I pay an employee $10 an hour, and it takes them an hour to produce value, if I sell that value on the market for $10 I am breaking even; no profit. If I sell the value for $15, I make a $5 profit.

But if the market demands the value to be sold at $10 (for example a competitor is selling the same value at $10) then a capitalist is incented to find a labor pool willing to create value for $5 an hour or less.

If $5 an hour is not enough of a wage for a worker to buy clothes, food, put a roof over their head, or raise a family – and is not empowered to demand a higher wage – capitalists seek labor pools in regions where they can. And raising a family is also important to a capitalist because the kids are potential future labor.

This idea of extracting more value out of labor than what a capitalist is willing to pay is called exploitation. Because capitalists own the assets or the means necessary to create the value – be it land, machines, material, facilities, software, or intellectual property – they hold power. Capitalists are motivated to accumulate wealth because wealth offers the ability to own assets and property. And with ownership, comes the power to exploit labor.

Social classes sort along these divisions in capitalist societies. Capitalists own the assets that create value and they buy labor from the working class. This simplistic description may conjure up images of slaves or migrant workers hunched over in fields with their shoulders being pulled by the weight of their yield as the sun presses down on their backs, or child labor in the dangerous steel factories of the industrial age, or overworked Asian women tediously assembling mobile devices in China.

But corporations seek to exploit white collar workers too. There’s a reason I was flying to remote parts of the world for Microsoft. There are software developers in the world willing to do the same work as American engineers for less pay. China and India were the first, but as labor prices climb in those regions software companies quickly go on the hunt for the next set of skilled labor to exploit, like Africa.

Geographer David Harvey termed this hunt for lands of cheaper labor a spatial fix. The concept was first related to a problem of overproduction of goods. Imagine a small town where the workers are producing more goods than they can buy. The surplus of goods begin to pile up creating a problem of overaccumulation. Capitalists then seek to expand to another territory to sell and produce value while fixing the problem of slowed growth, hence the term spatial fix.

This reveals the paradox of Capitalism. As soon as a region is established to produce value from labor, it starts a clock of degradation. Take Detroit, for example. As soon as Henry Ford started buying local labor to produce value for consumers using property and assets he owned, the countdown clock to the region’s demise began.

Evidence of spatial fixes that then decline exist wherever colonialism is found: Manufacturing clusters of the Northeast United States, the rust belt in the Midwest, textiles in North Carolina, metal working factories of Connecticut, mining towns in the West, agricultural clusters across the country. Japan has theirs, so does Germany. And now, the most grand example of wealth accumulation in history – China.

China’s Pearl River Delta (PRD) was rural just 40 years ago, much like the Detroit area would have been when Henry Ford showed up. But,

“The PRD now hosts nine major mainland cities in addition to the special administrative zones of Hong Kong and Macau. Two of those cities – Guangzhou and Shenzhen – are both home to over 10 million people. With more than 66 million residents in 2017 in total, the PRD has been designated by the World Bank as the world’s largest megacity, rivalling France and the United Kingdom in population terms. Its gross domestic product (GDP) of over $1.2 trillion puts it on a par with Russia, Australia, or Spain, and exceeds that of Indonesia, which has four times the population. In terms of trade levels, the region is only exceeded by the United States and Germany. The region attracts one‐fifth of China’s inward foreign direct investment (totaling over $1 trillion since 1980), and accounts for over 10 per cent of its GDP and 25 per cent of its exports. All this in a region that accounts for less than 1 per cent of China’s land area and 5 per cent of its population.”

ABSOLVE, RESOLVE, AND EVOLVE

But a spatial fix is mounting in the PRD too. Fewer Chinese are migrating to the area and the cost of labor is rising, so firms are starting to relocate elsewhere in China and Southeast Asia. Thus begins the decline of the PRD.

Companies also seek other ways to grow profits, such as technology innovations. Japan’s foray into robotic assembly lines in the 1970s and 1980s is the perfect example. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are constantly finding ways to improve efficiencies in server farms around the globe through innovations in software and hardware – and cheap labor.

But these efficiencies can result in a surplus of labor. And if people are out of work or their wages are held too low, the demand for products starts to decrease. As container ships continue to backup at ports around the world, you can imagine how over-accumulation can become a crisis for capitalism. Or recall during the early outbreak of Covid when dairy farmers had to poor milk down the drain and livestock famers were forced to slaughter hundreds of animals when demand for those products plummeted.

There’s a tendency for economists, capitalists, and spin doctors to portray a spatial fix as a good thing. It’s growth, after all, and remember from last week’s post – up means good. But you can see the tension and instability capitalism can introduce. Pay workers too much and you lose profit. Work them too hard and they’ll quit. Pay them too little and they can’t afford housing, goods, and services – or property. Companies then produce more than they can sell, machines and workers go idle and there goes hope of further growth.

Capitalism is inherently volatile and prone to instability and rife with tension and contraction. Labor wars, unemployment see-saws, too much inventory or too little, prices are increased or slashed. I live in a city with more wealth than some nations, while more homeless tents pop up everyday.

We’re led to believe these crisis of instability are temporary. Everyday we’re fed statistics on GDP, earnings reports, employment rates, and an alphabet soup of climbing or falling stock symbols. We’re told that disruptions to any of these are the result of outside forces: viruses, weather, logistics, war, social unrest, power outages, or that servers have been hacked. Something else must be wrong, because we’ve been led to believe the economic system we have is for the good of humankind. Capitalism has been good for some humans, and it isn’t always kind. It’s time to adjust and evolve.  

The families now living in those homes in Germany outside of Sachsenhausen did not hurl rocks at us. They adapted to new cultural norms, moved on, or died out after liberation. The camp itself morphed into a prison for Nazi war crime criminals, and then it became a museum. The town went from the destination of Hitler’s elite visiting the model camp, to a town for tourists seeking understanding and solemn, sobering solace.

As fascism and Nazi power came to this village, before Sachsenhausen was built, self-interested elites collaborated and colluded in the process. They rounded up their political enemies and intellectuals challenging the movement and forced them into labor. Their properties and assets were possessed by the government or colluding private entities. It was for the good of humankind, they argued.

This is what Western governments and capitalists do when they find a new region to exploit. They seek self-interested parties with which to collaborate and collude. Those who resist are jailed, silenced, displaced, or killed. The devalued property and assets are then bought in an act of accumulation through dispossession and the locals sell them their labor for whatever price they demand. And it’s done for the good of humankind, they argue. Work will make your free.

But like concentration camps, long after the choreographed chaotic and volatile exploitation, disruption, death, and destruction of people and land, cities and regions heal. They transform and evolve through new and novel interactions between people and place. Their history, no matter how awful it may be, becomes a catalyst for a new trajectory; what evolutionary economists call path dependence.

Soaring over cities and diving into their current and past histories reveals capitalism’s influence on the shape and form of their urban tissue at different scales. Flying into Beijing you see high-rises towering next to rice fields. On the ground, one minute you’re walking in Ancient China, and the next you’re transported to the future. You see the powerless and penniless on one corner and powerful and prestigious on the other.

Up against the fence surrounding the Microsoft building in Hyderabad – that looks like it belongs in Redmond – you see cardboard homes and mud and garbage running through their belongings.

Jerusalem is split down the middle with one side lush and green with new, stylish Western style architecture and the other in near ruin with crumbling, dilapidated homes.

I saw evidence of effects of dominant and imposing structural governmental and capitalistic priorities playing out at a global scale down to the local level. But, in the ashes of the dying and the unwanted I also witnessed the genesis of societal transformation through the interactions of people and place.

The unbridled structures of global capitalism may have dominated, exploited, and devastated vulnerable people and places for the last 200 to 500 years, but I sense a need for a fix – a liberation from this well-meaning but dangerous and destructive economic tyrant.

Hello Interactors,

As the rain returns to the northwest it’s time to summon even more motivation to get outside for exercise. I established a bit of a fitness pattern this summer and I’m motivated to keep it up. But the rain isn’t the only thing holding me back, so is my body and my mind.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

As part of my Monday fitness routine, I begrudgingly slog jog up a steep hill in my Market neighborhood, zig-zag my way through gravel alleys, down calm side streets, and through occasional narrow easements that snake between homes guarded by fences and barking dogs. Some called this route the ‘Market wiggle’.

It drops me onto an arterial road that skirts along a wooded wetlands. I suffer as I shuffle on a rolling narrow strip of painted bike lane for about a half a mile where I’m presented with a decision. Do I keep running up a gradual hill to achieve more distance or do I face the challenge of ascending a wall of over 100 steps that climb up a steep grade to my destination. It’s a short cut, but also a glute burn.

My destination is an outdoor gym plopped on a patch of asphalt nestled in the corner of an expansive park made of grassy ball fields and scattered pines. I have my routine: a series of upper body exercises on machines that leverage my body weight. I do pull-ups (kind of), seated bench press, and sit-ups. I usually have the place to myself. Though I was once surprised by an eager and excitable white toy poodle. As I was doing sit-ups he ran up behind me and licked the salty sweat off my face.

Upper body fitness has never been my favorite. It’s a necessary evil that seems to be getting harder all the time. But I have my repetition goals and I’m determined to improve. Pullups are the hardest. After a summer of just holding my chin above the bar, I’m finally getting to a point where I can actually pull myself up. (kind of)

My forearms don’t much like supporting my weight. I finish my routine and head back home. Just across from the park is a the middle school track. It’s a cinder track; a relic in the rainy northwest where most tracks have turned artificial. On the weekends I do a timed mile. I can’t help but be disappointed in my time and progress. I just can’t run as fast as I used to.

I also beat myself up over my lack of progress. I should be getting faster by now. I should be able to do more pullups. A battle in my brain ensues.

DEVIL: If you lose weight, maybe you can run faster and do more pullups.

ANGEL: Yeah, but you’re not really overweight – in fact, you’re maintaining a healthy weight because you’re running.

DEVIL: Unless, of course, the extra weight is coming from the added muscle mass from all those stair climbs, and upper body work.

ANGEL: But you can’t stop doing upper body work. You know you’ve been losing muscle mass since the day you turned 30.

DEVIL: C’mon, dudes older than you can run faster than this. You can’t run faster until you start running faster. And you just have to keep doing more pullups if you want to do more pullups!”

Then an independent interloping inquisitor interrupts; “Why are you trying to run faster? Why is the number of pullups important? What is your goal? Is it to increase the number of pullups and decrease your running speed, or is it to maintain your health?”

It’s hard to rally behind asymptotic performance plateaus. Just ask any aging professional athlete. And it’s depressing to consider that as long as that plateau may be, its end is punctuated by a certain mortal decline. I am fully aware of my body’s limitations in this race with mortality, but my mind is trained to expect, and even crave harder, better, faster, stronger.

WHAT GOES UP, MUST COME DOWN

We are all trained by a culture infused with metaphors that lead to a desire to increase growth and optimize time. In 1980, two cognitive linguists, scientists, and philosophers, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote a seminal book called Metaphors We Live By. They give examples of how orientation concepts and words like up and down shape how we think and act.

You can see evidence of it in the words I’ve already written. I was beating myself up and feeling down because the number of pullups wasn’t going up. I get depressed when my running times fall off. My athletic abilities are declining as I near the height of my physical abilities. Have I reached a peak? I am now longer in top shape. As my age slowly climbs up, my abilities will be sinking fast. What if I come down with an illness? My health will decline. And one day, I will drop dead.

They suggest other metaphorical orientation concepts by category:

HAPPY IS UP AND SAD IS DOWN.I’m feeling up. I fell into a depression.

FORESEEABLE FUTURE EVENTS ARE UP (and AHEAD)What’s up on the agenda? I’m afraid of what’s ahead of us.

HIGH STATUS IS UP, LOW STATUS IS DOWNShe’ll rise to the top. He’s at the bottom of the hierarchy.

MORE IS UP, LESS IS DOWNThe GDP rose. My income fell.

GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWNThings are looking up. Things are at an all time low.

RATIONAL IS UP, EMOTIONAL IS DOWNHe couldn’t rise above his emotions. The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane.

Another metaphor their book highlights also runs deep in our culture:

TIME IS MONEYYou’re wasting my time.I don’t have the time to give you.I’ve invested a lot of time in her.You’re running out of time.Is it worth your while?He’s living on borrowed time.You need to budget your time.Thank you for your time.

The Bible is as riddled with these metaphors as Christianity is with our culture. The great sociologist and political economist, Max Weber, claims Protestantism is at the root of capitalism in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,

"In these cases the choice of occupation and future career has undoubtedly been determined by the distinct mental characteristics which have been instilled into them and indeed by the influence on them of the religious atmosphere of their locality and home background."

Here are some quotes from the bible that urge followers to work their butts off, or else.

Through laziness, the rafters sag; because of idle hands, the house leaks.The diligent hand will rule, but laziness will lead to forced labor.Fools fold their idle hands, leading them to ruin.

Here’s one from the King’s bible that lends insight into perhaps why the American workforce is overworked, has too few days off, and is led to shame should they loose their job.

How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man. Proverbs 6:6

It may come as a surprise, but not every culture lives by these metaphors. The culture I was raised in certainly did. It’s also one that views the more innocuous concept of future as ahead, but another culture may view it as behind — or up, down, through, under, or over for that matter. Perhaps some cultures have no orientation metaphors at all, or use them differently than, say, the Bible does.

When these two researchers came together to write their book, they “discovered that [these] certain assumptions of contemporary philosophy and linguistics have been taken for granted…since the Greeks.”

Substantiating the role cultural metaphors play in shaping thought and action “meant rejecting the possibility of any objective or absolute truth.” Those absolutisms, including those found in the Bible, are assumed in so much of Western tradition and contemporary belief systems.

The alternative, as outlined in their book, is to suggest the human lived experience plays a more central role than some religious, mythical, or universally constant human objective truth.

Our current economic system relies heavily on a belief in rational choice theory. This idea, in keeping with the Western tradition Lakoff and Johnson sought to debunk, says that humans – also known among neoliberal economists as homo economicus – routinely conduct perfectly objective and absolute rational cost-benefit analysis before deciding how to spend money or accumulate wealth.

If what Lakoff and Johnson suggest is true, and I’m inclined to believe it is, there is no such thing as objective or absolute truth in decision making. Our decisions are guided by our culturally engrained metaphors. The so-called invisible hand that neoliberal economists turn to as a self-interested magical motivational source of individual wealth and prosperity is actually the invisible mind; a mind influenced by embedded conceptual metaphors that guide our emotions which in turn trigger our thoughts and actions.

IN EXCESS WILL END SUCCESS

Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that if you want to find evidence of irrational behavior in self-reported rational people, study their entrenched dogmatic positions – it’s there you’ll find their irrational behavior. In our currently divided society, you don’t need to look far to see evidence of the myth of perfectly rational behavior in human decision making.

“Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.” Those are the words of British ecological economist, Tim Jackson. To illustrate the myth, he offers that “People are persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about.”

Aristotle observed as much in the 4th century and wrote about it in a set of eight books on the philosophy of human affairs called, Politics. He wrote,

“For, as their enjoyment is in excess, they seek an art which produces the excess of enjoyment; and, if they are not able to supply their pleasures by the art of getting wealth, they try other causes, using in turn every faculty in a manner contrary to nature…some men turn every quality or art into a means of getting wealth; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end they think all things must contribute.”

There are ongoing debates about what Aristotle would think of today’s economy. Both capitalists and communists draw on Aristotle as the genesis of their philosophies. But suffice it to say, Aristotle was not a fan of individual wealth accumulation. Any accumulation should be shared back to the society in support of a healthy community.

Some scholars believe Aristotle would say “the lending out of money to acquire more money is merely the most unnatural and corrupting way to employ money.” As corrupt, they claim, as using human sexuality to sell sex.

They believe Aristotle would not have made it a “question of the market value of your gold.” But instead, “what kind of man your gold makes of you.”

It also seems Aristotle would not have been very impressed with the damage we inflicted on the earth in our pursuit of wealth accumulation. He was aware of the negative aspects of “unintended consequences” due to human activity, but he also found them to be “generally bad and disappointing.” That, for sure, is a departure from our current neoliberal stance.

It was Adam Smith, the father of the capitalist economic system that dominates the world today, who said,

“[People are] led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.”

By this logic, the plastics industry is led by an invisible hand to promote an end (for example, a path toward more plastic in the ocean than fish), which was no part of their intention. The oil industry is led by an invisible hand to promote an end (for example, climate collapse), but is not part of their intention. Even though they’ve known this for over 30 years.

The aerosol industry was led by an invisible hand to promote an end, a hole in the ozone, which was not part of their intention; but the world rallied to curb its use. The tobacco industry was led by an invisible hand to promote an end, addiction to a cancer causing drug, which was not part of their intention; but the U.S cracked down on them anyway.

British economist, John Maynard Keynes – an advocate of the free market, but also of instituting limits, put it best by issuing this sober warning,

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

LEAKS AND PEAKS; GO WITH THE FLOW

Influential American economist Milton Friedman started to distance himself, and U.S. economic philosophy, from Keynesian ideas in the 70s. The country was in a recession and personal wealth accumulation had stagnated.

This American ideal of wealth accumulation began in American economics in the late 1940s after two world wars and a depression. Personal and national wealth accumulation was as much a need as it was a desire. It only follows that the model of economics we have with us today puts personal and corporate wealth accumulation at the center, above all else. (note the orientation metaphors I inadvertently used: follows, center, above all else!)

This economic model was drawn in a diagram by economist and Nobel prize winner, Paul Samuelson, for the canonical economic text book, Economics, in 1948. It has sold over four million copies and is still used by many schools today.

That book became standard issue for Econ 101 in universities across the country that were flooded with men returning from WWII. It’s a simple diagram that shows Circular Flows of money being exchanged between households and businesses.

Households flow labor into businesses which in turn crank out goods and services. Businesses flow wages to households that flow that money back to businesses through consumer spending on their goods and services.

There are also leakages in this central flow from households; savings leak into banks, taxes to the government, and imports to trade. These leaks are converted into value and flowed back to the business side as injections into the economy; investments flow from banks, spending from government, and exports from trade.

As economist Kate Raworth points out, missing from the diagram is the earth and the resources necessary to sustain this economic flow. But many advocates of this model believe resources are endless.

In the 1980’s University of Maryland business professor and neoliberal, Julian Simon, believed that

“Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover.”

He imagined competitive market prices would keep resources from being over exploited and novel inventions would efficiently reuse and recycle any wasted matter and energy. That doesn’t appear to be working.

Instead improvements in technology have accelerated the rate of extraction resulting in environmental degradation and collapse. Take the fishing industry. With improved sensing technologies, they’re able to fish small and sparsely populated schools of fish. It can lead to collapse and extinction.

What’s more, these small populations are vulnerable to effects of climate change which challenges both their survival and ability to repopulate. And sure enough, if they do recover, the fishing industry pounces and the cycle of over exploitation begins again.

Systems thinker, environmentalist and Dartmouth professor, Donella Meadows, states:

“Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate. But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource.” 

In contrast,

“Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.”

Indigenous cultures have known this for millennia. That’s why they leave harvestable crops behind. If they didn’t, they know there would not be any seeds for next season.

We have been led to believe, and our current economic systems substantiates, nonrenewable resources are limitless. We’re taught that even though our self-interest in accumulating wealth may come with unintended consequences, those negative effects are a matter of “value judgement.”

For example, valuing profit over the health of the planet and it’s occupants is a matter of judgement. It’s a line of thinking that values capitalism and corporate and individual wealth accumulation over all else – even the prospect of the collapse of entire species; including humans. Will capitalism seek to out live human existence? You be the judge.

We’re reminded every day that economic indicators can only go up because our culture evolved to associate up with good. If an economy can only be deemed good by a limitless line that goes up for eternity but relies on limited resources that require periods of flattening of that curve to be renewed, we need to extend the metaphor for good to include flat and even declining.  

Up is good. Growth is good. And we don’t have time to waste. But even though the Bible tells us otherwise, we might want to sit down and take a breather sometimes and call it good.  

My aging body reminds me, there are limits to up. I struggle with accepting this fact. Most do. It also shows there are exceptions to metaphors. Just because our age goes up, that doesn’t necessarily mean it feels good.

My body is a renewable resource but with a limited and declining life span. It can’t support the extraction of resources indefinitely, but it can maintain a finite flow of energy equal to my body’s, albeit declining, regeneration rate.

But if I push too hard and exploit my resources; and equate increased pullup reps or faster running speed with good, I’ll drive my resources below a critical threshold and they’ll become nonrenewable.

So now when I’m feeling up for a run. I don’t let myself get too depressed when my energy starts to fall. Instead of digging deep in a yearning for peak performance, I change my goal and shift my metaphor. I push that irrational ‘growth at all cost’ dogma to the side, bring the joy of a flat and slightly declining curve to the foreground, and feel my energy levels and my spirit rise.

You see, I have a rational mind after all. Aristotle believed our ability to reason with our feelings is what makes us human. It’s what sets us apart from other animals. I have a rational choice to make when presented with a curve that flattens out or declines. I can succumb to the cultural belief and emotion that a line that curves flat or trends down is always bad, or I can shift my thinking that it is sometimes good and even necessary for survival.

If I can do this with my fitness routine amidst a mid-life crisis, surely we can for an imbalanced economic regime amidst a climate crisis.

Hello Interactors,

My wife and I took our daughter on a trip down Interstate 5 earlier this week so she could tour the University of Oregon. It’s a beautiful lush campus in a funky college town that is speckled with fancy new structures financed largely by Nike founder and alum, Phil Knight. Upon the completion of the new track stadium last year, his total contributions to the school is nearing one billion dollars. Where did it all come from?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

TIGER TRACK TREADS

He dominated his races. He’d jump far in the lead at the sound of the gun challenging his competitors to keep up as his fans chanted “GO PRE, GO PRE, GO PRE”. They’d often be wearing the pervasive shirts that said the same. At the end of one race he grabbed a shirt from sarcastic fan and stretched over his sweaty chest for his victory lap; it read, “STOP PRE!”

Running for the University of Oregon between 1970-1973, Steve Prefontaine never lost a collegiate race in the 3 mile, 5,000 meter, 6 mile, or 10,000 meter events. But internationally he wasn’t so fortunate. He came in a disappointing fourth at the 1972 Munich Olympics in the 5K. Afterwards he said,

“I felt exhausted. They didn't allow me to run the race the way I had planned to, I was chasing them all the way."

He lost three times in his senior year in the one mile event. This same year he challenged the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU) that ruled athletes representing the United States at the Olympics must not receive payment or be endorsed. Prefontaine, a charismatic athlete on and off the track, grew huge crowds wherever he ran. He knew companies would benefit from his abilities, so why shouldn’t he? He also knew he was receiving free shoes and clothes from another Eugene legend – Nike.

By the mid-70s Nike was a decade old and was just getting rolling. Prefontaine’s coach, Bill Bowerman, was the co-founder and a legend in his own right. Preferring to be called teacher instead of coach, Bowerman taught 33 Olympians, 38 conference champions, and 64 all-Americans in his 24 years as head coach. He retired at the end of Prefontaine’s senior year. One of his runners was Nike founder, Phil Knight.

Knight was a middle distance runner at the university until graduating in 1959. While he ran a respectable personal best of 4 minutes 13 seconds, he was not the best runner on the team. Which made him a good candidate for testing the shoes his coach was experimenting with.

Bowerman was obsessed with athletic performance and was frustrated by the poor quality of American running shoes. So, he made his own and asked his athletes to be subjects in his experimental pursuit of the perfect shoe. Sometimes they’d make their feet run faster and sometimes they’d make them bleed. Bowerman didn’t want to risk injuring his top runners, so Knight was often a subject.

The shoe fetish must have rubbed off on the young Phil Knight. After graduating from the University of Oregon he went on to get his MBA at Stanford. There he learned how Japanese companies were overtaking the camera market from Europeans and wrote a paper about how they were about to do the same for the shoe market.

After earning his MBA in 1962, he worked as an accountant while tinkering on the weekend with the idea of being a shoe distributor. He hopped on a plane to Japan to visit shoemaker, Onitsuka after seeing their Tiger brand at the Olympics. He presented his Stanford paper and they were impressed. They wanted to break into the U.S. market and saw this as their chance. When asked what the name of his company was, Knight invented the name on the spot recalling the ribbons he had won competing as a kid – Blue Ribbon Sports.

In 1964 the first shoes arrived and Knight sent a couple of pairs to his shoe sorcerer and former coach, Bill Bowerman. The two shook on a deal to become business partners; Phil would run the business and Bill would design a shoe with just the right stiffness. By 1970 Knight was selling Tiger shoes across the country. As the Japanese Tiger shoe started to dominate the U.S. market, Knight cut ties with Onitsuka, renamed his company Nike, asked a Portland State University graphic designer to design the now ubiquitous ‘swoosh’, and grabbed Bowerman’s first attempt at a Nike shoe, the Nike Cortez.

The shoe was released at the height of the 1972 Olympics after the world witnessed the USA Track and Field team wearing the shoe. Knight and Bowerman made $800,000 selling the Cortez, a 100% increase over selling the Onitsuka Tiger. In 1980, the year they went public, Nike already had 50% of the U.S. market. Today the company is valued at $32 billion and is the largest supplier of athletic equipment in the world.

PHIL AND BILL SPLIT THE BILL

Phil Knight and Bowerman’s success are now enshrined in what I claim is the most beautifully designed sports facility in the country – Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. Eugene is known as Track Town USA because of the success of Bowerman, Prefontaine, and the string of track and cross country athletes the University of Oregon has cranked out over the years. It all happened on Hayward field. A $270 million renovation opened last year and Phil Knight led the funding.

We were just there last weekend on a campus visit with our daughter. You don’t have to look far to see the financial impact Phil Knight has had on that campus. Outside of the oval track crowned jewel he contributed $27 million for a major library renovation that now bears his name, $25 million for new law school building that also endows 27 chairs and professorships, numerous upgrades to the football stadium, $500 million pledged for the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, and another $41.7 million for a student-athlete tutoring center. And don’t forget the basketball arena named after his son who died unexpectedly in a scuba accident, the Matthew Knight Arena.

That initial collaboration between Knight and Bowerman led to one of the most successful companies in the world. What they did together is a perfect example of two of the most critical ingredients to a dynamic economy: innovation and entrepreneurship.

Innovation is invention with impact. Bowerman personifies the image of the mad scientist tinkering in the garage in pursuit of the perfect solution. He spent so many hours breathing the toxic fumes emanating from his exploratory rubber compounds that he eventually succumbed to nerve damage. The man who wrote a best selling book on jogging in the 1970s became unable to follow his own advise due to the loss of control in his limbs. He sacrificed the speed of his own feet for the swiftness of others.

Phil Knight was born a competitor and entrepreneur. As a teen his dad refused to hire him at the newspaper he ran. He wanted Phil to struggle to find his own job. So he did. He took a job at his dad’s competing newspaper running seven miles each way to get to work. In graduate school he had a sixth sense that the Japanese approach to product development was worth emulating.

He was also savvy enough to make sure his partnership with Bowerman gave him a 51% stake in the business and Bowerman 49%. He knew he could use that leverage to make sure it was a business they were running and not laboratory for running shoes.

ECONOMOUS ANONYMOUS

The role of place should not be overlooked in their collaboration. Economic geographers point to the trust and norms that develop between individuals through close collaboration among local social networks. Personal relationships don’t adhere to a higher order economic structure, they emerge from an accumulation of shared knowledge and passion that increases the potential for innovation.

The idea stems from the great economist Karl Polanyi. In his landmark 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi gives this concept a name: embeddedness. Stanford economic sociologist, Mark Granovetter, reaffirmed the idea in his oft referenced 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

Phil and Bill were also participating in an act of creative destruction. This term comes from one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Austrian turned American, Joseph Shumpeter. Shumpeter pointed out that for an invention to become an innovation, it has to have impact through capital investment and also lead to the rise of new businesses. Blue Ribbon Sports started in Bowerman’s garage with a rubber sole made from his wife’s waffle iron and a $500 loan from Knight’s dad. But as Nike they outsource manufacturing to factories around the world, thus avoiding having to spend capital dollars owning a single building or piece of equipment.

Had these two been tinkering in Eugene two or three decades earlier, it’s likely Eugene would have become the Detroit of athletic equipment and apparel. Known in economic circles as Fordism, Henry Ford perfected the practice of building mass produced products systematically using locally sourced labor, usually men, who could theoretically earn enough to afford the products they were assembling. This wasn’t always the case. Women, especially women of color, were often forced to take side jobs to make ends meet.

But Nike was emerging in the Post-Fordist era of the 1960s and Phil Knight had already clued into the manufacturing advantages Japan had pioneered after WWII. In post-war Japan, the government played a critical role in shaping their industries. They controlled imports and exports, but also “national systems of innovation” by creating “formal and informal institutions” to facilitate the “coordination and promotion of technology transfer.”(Economic Geography), A national form of embeddedness.  

But as Japanese companies were growing, they were also getting pressure to maximize profits. A popular way to do this is to pay workers less. So during the sluggish stagflation of the 1970s, Japan introduced ‘non-regular employment’; or more generally, the temporary worker. Which, by in large, were, and still are, adult women.

These workers are not only paid less, they “have much less job security than regular employees,” have “no considerable protection from dismissal”, their “average job tenure is significantly lower than for regular employees”, and they “have limited access to on-the-job or formal training and weak career prospects.”

Karl Marx once noted in the 1800s that capitalism always seeks to eliminate the worker. Nike achieved this by sourcing near slave labor in poor countries so far away from the customer that the worker appears to have been eliminated. They let some poor nameless and faceless woman in a foreign land risk nerve damage making their shoes, so they, or their fellow community members, wouldn’t have to.

Much has been written about the overseas Nike sweatshops since they were exposed in the 1990s. The CBS program “48 Hours” did a piece titled, “Just Do It – Or Else”, where they showed workers in Viet Nam getting swatted over the head by their supervisors for making errors in the stitching of a Nike garment.

Or how about the 1997 New York Times article where they revealed Vietnamese workers were exposed to the odorless carcinogenic chemical toluene at 177 times the legal limit. And who can forget the Life Magazine photo of the 12 year old Pakistani boy stitching the laces into a Nike soccer ball? Just Do It.

FACE THE FACELESS, EMPOWER THE POWERLESS, HEED THE GREED

Seeking cheap labor in regions far away from the eyes of consumers not only hid these exploits from Nike customers, but it absolved Phil Knight of responsibility. By outsourcing capitalism to a faraway land, Nike abstracts it way and disassociates from it. Clemson University political and moral philosopher, Todd May, puts it like this,

“It is of the character of transnational capitalism that the source of economic oppression is often thousands of miles away, separated from those it exploits by many levels of bureaucracy, language, and national borders.”

In 2001 a Nike representative reacted this way to accusations of reported worker abuse, “It’s not within our scope to investigate. We’re about sports, not manufacturing 101.”

Nike has tried to curb these abuses. In 2005, they were the first apparel manufacturer to disclose the names and locations of its nearly 500 plants. They’ve created watchdog groups in many of these locations to monitor progress, but many contractors and subcontractors pack up and move to a different location away from the surveillance.

One effective way to draw attention to these exploits is to empower employees to pool their knowledge, organize, and act; a united worker’s rebellious version of embeddedness.

Companies like Nike can fold up shop at the spur of the moment and find a new supplier. They don’t own the equipment, nor do they have any obligation to the plight of the workers or effects on the local communities. Workers are cluing into this reality and instead put pressure on local, regional, and national governments to do the protesting of exploitive capitalism on their behalf.

Here’s how Thai activist and labor organizer Junya Lek Yimprasert describes it,

“We found out that the factory and the equipment already belonged to the bank. If the workers were to demand a share of the proceeds of the sale, they would get zero, so they decided to change the strategy. First they would hold the employer responsible; second the government; and finally the brands they had produced for.”

It seems to be working. In Sri Lanka, one union organizer observed,

“Auditors from Nike visited the factory and finally the company recognised our union. It had an impact on all [of the] free trade zones. The Board of Investment governing the zones amended its guidelines to allow for unions and make employers recognise them.”

Back in the 70s when Prefontaine was squabbling with the AAU, he was demanding athletes be recognized and compensated for their labor. And just a couple weeks ago, Phil Knight helped organize a company called Division Street, Inc., that will help Oregon student athletes monetize their own name, image, and brand.

I can’t help but be impressed with the new buildings and support Phil Knight is lavishing on his alma mater. Especially, the Hayward Field renovation. But I also feel discomfort knowing it all came at the expense of near slave labor at the hands of nameless and voiceless humans, mostly women, tucked away in a sweatshop.

And I’ve grown weary of public universities, and city governments, begging billionaires to throw us some spare change in hopes of making our communities as rich as they are. Celebrating philanthropy, the contributions of great men, and even star athletes only accentuates the socioeconomic malaise that divides us and unsettles us.

I have an idea. What if instead of lavishing the Oregon campus with another chunk of change or fancy building, Phil Knight took a stand. What would happen if, in an homage to Steve Prefontaine’s “STOP PRE” self-effacing sardonic strut, Phil grabbed a shirt from a Nike fan, pulled it over his suit as the crowd chanted “NI-KEE, NI-KEE, NI-KEE”, and he ran a victory lap around Hayward Field in a bright green Nike shirt with neon yellow lettering that read: “STOP GREED!”

Hello Interactors,

This week, I’ve been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that’s been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren’t just struggling with transportation or housing. They’re struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don’t we ask that more often?

STRANGERS SHUNNED, SYSTEMS SIMULATED

The urban century was supposed to bring us together. Denser cities, faster mobility, more connected lives — these were the promises of global urbanization. Yet in the shadow of those promises, a different kind of city has emerged in America with growing undertones elsewhere: one that increasingly seeks to eliminate the stranger, bypass friction, and privatize interaction.

Whether through algorithmically optimized ride-sharing, private tunnels built to evade street life, or digital maps simulating place without presence for autonomous vehicles, a growing set of design logics work to render other people — especially unknown others — invisible, irrelevant, or avoidable.

I admit, I too can get seduced by this comfort, technology, and efficiency. But cities aren’t just systems of movement — they’re systems of meaning. Space is never neutral; it’s shaped by power and shapes behavior in return. This isn’t new. Ancient cities like Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) in central Mexico, once one of the largest cities in the world, aligned their streets and pyramids with the stars. Chang’an (chahng-AHN), the capital of Tang Dynasty China, used strict cardinal grids and walled compounds to reflect Confucian ideals of order and hierarchy. And Uruk (OO-rook), in ancient Mesopotamia, organized civic life around temple complexes that stood at the spiritual and administrative heart of the city.

These weren’t just settlements — they were spatial arguments about how people should live together, and who should lead. Even Middle Eastern souks and hammams were more than markets or baths; they were civic infrastructure. Whether through temples or bus stops, the question is the same: What kind of social behavior is this space asking of us?

Neuroscience points to answers. As Shane O’Mara argues, walking is not just transport — it’s neurocognitive infrastructure. The hippocampus, which governs memory, orientation, and mood, activates when we move through physical space. Walking among others, perceiving spontaneous interactions, and attending to environmental cues strengthens our cognitive maps and emotional regulation.

This makes city oriented around ‘stranger danger’ not just unjust — but indeed dangerous. Because to eliminate friction is to undermine emergence — not only in the social sense, but in the economic and cultural ones too. Cities thrive on weak ties, on happenstance, on proximity without intention. Mark Granovetter’s landmark paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, showed that it's those looser, peripheral relationships — not our inner circles — that drive opportunity, creativity, and mobility. Karl Polanyi called it embeddedness: the idea that markets don’t float in space, they’re grounded in the social fabric around them.

You see it too in scale theory — in the work of Geoffrey West and Luís Bettencourt — where the productive and innovative energy of cities scales with density, interaction, and diversity. When you flatten all that into private tunnels and algorithmic efficiency, you don’t just lose the texture — you lose the conditions for invention.

As David Roberts, a climate and policy journalist known for his systems thinking and sharp urban critiques, puts it: this is “the anti-social dream of elite urbanism” — a vision where you never have to share space with anyone not like you. In conversation with him, Jarrett Walker, a transit planner and theorist who’s spent decades helping cities design equitable bus networks, also pushes back against this logic.

He warns that when cities build transit around avoidance — individualized rides, privatized tunnels, algorithmic sorting — they aren’t just solving inefficiencies. They’re hollowing out the very thing that makes transit (and cities) valuable and also public: the shared experience of strangers moving together.

The question isn’t just whether cities are efficient — but what kind of social beings they help us become. If we build cities to avoid each other, we shouldn’t be surprised when they crumble as we all forget how to live together.

COVERAGE, CARE, AND CIVIC CALM

If you follow urban and transit planning debates long enough, you’ll hear the same argument come up again and again: Should we focus on ridership or coverage? High-frequency routes where lots of people travel, or wide access for people who live farther out — even if fewer use the service? For transit nerds, it’s a policy question. For everyone else, it’s about dignity.

As Walker puts it, coverage isn’t about efficiency — it’s about “a sense of fairness.” It’s about living in a place where your city hasn’t written you off because you’re not profitable to serve. Walker’s point is that coverage isn’t charity. It’s a public good, one that tells people: You belong here.

That same logic shows up in more surprising places — like the World Happiness Report. Year after year, Finland lands at the top. But as writer Molly Young found during her visit to Helsinki, Finnish “happiness” isn’t about joy or euphoria. It’s about something steadier: trust, safety, and institutional calm. What the report measures is evaluative happiness — how satisfied people are with their lives over time — not affective happiness, which is more about momentary joy or emotional highs.

There’s a Finnish word that captures this. It the feeling you get after a sauna: saunanjälkeinen raukeus (SOW-nahn-yell-kay-nen ROW-keh-oos) — the softened, slowed state of the body and mind. That’s what cities like Helsinki seem to deliver: not bliss, but a stable, low-friction kind of contentment. And while that may lack sparkle, it makes people feel held.

And infrastructure plays a big role. In Helsinki, the signs in the library don’t say “Be Quiet.” They say, “Please let others work in peace.” It’s a small thing, but it speaks volumes — less about control, more about shared responsibility. There are saunas in government buildings. Parents leave their babies sleeping in strollers outside cafés. Transit is clean, quiet, and frequent. As Young puts it, these aren’t luxuries — they’re part of a “bone-deep sense of trust” the city builds and reinforces. Not enforced from above, but sustained by expectation, habit, and care.

My family once joined an organized walking tour of Copenhagen. The guide, who was from Spain, pointed to a clock in a town square and said, almost in passing, “The government has always made sure this clock runs on time — even during war.” It wasn’t just about punctuality. It was about trust. About the quiet promise that the public realm would still hold, even when everything else felt uncertain. This, our guide noted from his Spanish perspective, is what what make Scandinavians so-called ‘happy’. They feel held.

Studies show that most of what boosts long-term happiness isn’t about dopamine hits — it’s about relational trust. Feeling safe. Feeling seen. Knowing you won’t be stranded if you don’t have a car or a credit card. Knowing the city works, even if you don’t make it work for you.

In this way, transit frequency and subtle signs in Helsinki are doing the same thing. They’re shaping behavior and reinforcing social norms. They’re saying: we share space here. Don’t be loud. Don’t cut in line. Don’t treat public space like it’s only for you.

That kind of city can’t be built on metrics alone. It needs moral imagination — the kind that sees coverage, access, and slowness as features, not bugs. That’s not some socialist’s idea of utopia. It’s just thoughtful. Built into the culture, yes, but also the design.

But sometimes we’re just stuck with whatever design is already in place. Even if it’s not so thoughtful. Economists and social theorists have long used the concept of path dependence to explain why some systems — cities, institutions, even technologies — get stuck. The idea dates back to work in economics and political science in the 1980s, where it was used to show how early decisions, even small ones, can lock in patterns that are hard to reverse.

Once you’ve laid train tracks, built freeways, zoned for single-family homes — you’ve shaped what comes next. Changing course isn’t impossible, but it’s costly, slow, and politically messy. The QWERTY keyboard is a textbook example: not the most efficient layout, but one that stuck because switching systems later would be harder than just adapting to what we’ve got.

Urban scholars Michael Storper and Allen Scott brought this thinking into city studies. They’ve shown how economic geography and institutional inertia shape urban outcomes — how past planning decisions, labor markets, and infrastructure investments limit the options cities have today. If your city bet on car-centric growth decades ago, you’re probably still paying for that decision, even if pivoting is palatable to the public.

CONNECTIONS, COMPLEXITY, CITIES THAT CARE

There’s a quote often attributed to Stephen Hawking that’s made the rounds in complexity science circles: “The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” No one’s entirely sure where he said it — it shows up in systems theory blogs, talks, and books — but it sticks. Probably because it feels true.

If the last century was about physics — closed systems, force, motion, precision — then this one is about what happens when the pieces won’t stay still. When the rules change mid-game. When causes ripple back as consequences. In other words: cities.

Planners have tried to tame that complexity in all kinds of ways. Grids. Zoning codes. Dashboards. There’s long been a kind of “physics envy” in both planning and economics — a belief that if we just had the right model, the right inputs, we could predict and control the city like a closed system. As a result, for much of the 20th century, cities were designed like machines — optimized for flow, separation, and predictability.

But even the pushback followed a logic of control — cul-de-sacs and suburban pastoralism — wasn’t a turn toward organic life or spontaneity. It was just a softer kind of order: winding roads and whispered rules meant to keep things calm, clean, and contained…and mostly white and moderately wealthy.

If you think of cities like machines, it makes sense to want control. More data, tighter optimization, fewer surprises. That’s how you’d tune an engine or write software. But cities aren’t machines. They’re messy, layered, and full of people doing unpredictable things. They’re more like ecosystems — or weather patterns — than they are a carburetor. And that’s where complexity science becomes useful.

People like Paul Cilliers and Brian Castellani have argued for a more critical kind of complexity science — one that sees cities not just as networks or algorithms, but as places shaped by values, power, and conflict. Cilliers emphasized that complex systems, like cities, are open and dynamic: they don’t have fixed boundaries, they adapt constantly, and they respond to feedback in ways no planner can fully predict.

Castellani extends this by insisting that complexity isn’t just technical — it’s ethical. It demands we ask: Who benefits from a system’s design? Who has room to adapt, and who gets constrained? In this view, small interventions — a zoning tweak, a route change — can set off ripple effects that reshape how people move, connect, and belong. A new path dependence.

This is why certainty is dangerous in urban design. It breeds overconfidence. Humility is a better place to start. As Jarrett Walker puts it, “there are all kinds of ways to fake your way through this.” Agencies often adopt feel-good mission statements like “compete with the automobile by providing access for all” — which, he notes, is like “telling your taxi driver to turn left and right at the same time.” You can’t do both. Not on a fixed budget.

Walker pushes agencies to be honest: if you want to prioritize ridership, say so. If you want to prioritize broad geographic coverage, that’s also valid — but know it will mean lower ridership. The key is not pretending you can have both at full strength. He says, “What I want is for board members… to make this decision consciously and not be surprised by the consequences”.

These decisions matter. A budget cut can push riders off buses, which then leads to reduced service, which leads to more riders leaving — a feedback loop. On the flip side, small improvements — like better lighting, a public bench, a frequent bus — can set off positive loops too. Change emerges, often sideways.

That means thinking about transit not just as a system of movement, but as a relational space. Same with libraries, parks, and sidewalks. These aren’t neutral containers. They’re environments that either support or suppress human connection. If you design a city to eliminate friction, you eliminate chance encounters — the stuff social trust is made of.

I’m an introvert. I like quiet. I recharge alone. But I also live in a city — and I’ve learned that even for people like me, being around others still matters. Not in the chatty, get-to-know-your-neighbors way. But in the background hum of life around you. Sitting on a bus. Browsing in a bookstore. Walking down a street full of strangers, knowing you don’t have to engage — but you’re not invisible either.

There’s a name for this. Psychologists call it public solitude or sometimes energized privacy — the comfort of being alone among others. Not isolated, not exposed. Just held, lightly, in the weave of the crowd. And the research backs it up: introverts often seek out public spaces like cafés, libraries, or parks not to interact, but to feel present — connected without pressure.

In the longest-running happiness study ever done, 80 years, Harvard psychologist Robert Waldinger found that strong relationships — not income, not status — were the best predictor of long-term well-being. More recently, studies have shown that even brief interactions with strangers — on a bus, in a coffee shop — can lift mood and reduce loneliness. But here’s the catch: cities have to make those interactions possible.

Or they don’t.

And that’s the real test of infrastructure. We’ve spent decades designing systems to move people through. Fast. Clean. Efficient. But we’ve neglected the quiet spaces that let people just be. Sidewalks you’re not rushed off of. Streets where kids can safely bike or play…or simply cross the street.

Even pools — maybe especially pools. My wife runs a nonprofit called SplashForward that’s working to build more public pools. Not just for fitness, but because pools are public space. You float next to people you may never talk to. And still, you’re sharing something. Space. Water. Time.

You see this clearly in places like Finland and Iceland, where pools and saunas are built into the rhythms of public life. They’re not luxuries — they’re civic necessities. People show up quietly, day after day, not to socialize loudly, but to be alone together. As one Finnish local told journalist Molly Young, “During this time, we don’t have... colors.” It was about the long gray winter, sure — but also something deeper: a culture that values calm over spectacle. Stability over spark. A kind of contentment that doesn’t perform.

But cities don’t have to choose between quiet and joy. We don’t have to model every system on Helsinki in February. There’s something beautiful in the American kind of happiness too — the loud, weird, spontaneous moments that erupt in public. The band on the subway. The dance party in the park. The loud kid at the pool. That kind of energy can be a nuisance, but it can also be joyful.

Even Jarrett Walker, who’s clear-eyed about transit, doesn’t pretend it solves everything. Transit isn’t always the answer. Sometimes a car is the right tool. What matters is whether everyone has a real choice — not just those with money or proximity or privilege. And he’s quick to admit every city with effective transit has its local grievances.

So no, I’m not arguing for perfection, or even socialism. I’m arguing for a city that knows how to hold difference. Fast and slow. Dense and quiet. A city that lets you step into the crowd, or sit at its edge, and still feel like you belong. A place to comfortably sit with the uncertainty of this great transformation emerging around us. Alone and together.

REFERENCES

Castellani, B. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge.

Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. Routledge.

David, P. A. (1985). Clio and the economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review.

Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology.

Hawking, S. (n.d.). The 21st century will be the century of complexity. [Attributed quote; primary source unavailable].

O’Mara, S. (2019). In praise of walking: A new scientific exploration. W. W. Norton & Company.

Roberts, D. (Host). (2025). Jarrett Walker on what makes good transit [Audio podcast episode]. In Volts.

Storper, M., & Scott, A. J. (2016). Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment. Urban Studies.

Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.

Walker, J. (2011). Human transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. Island Press.

West, G., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2010). A unified theory of urban living. Nature.

Young, M. (2025). My miserable week in the ‘happiest country on earth’. The New York Times Magazine.

Hello Interactors,

I was stuck needing a car this week to meet a friend for coffee, but didn’t have access to one. So, I grabbed a bus and was there nearly as fast as a car would have taken me. That isn’t always the case, of course. The incident brought back some challenging memories of a time when I was suddenly carless in a region known for cars — Southern California.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

PACIFIC COAST MY WAY

I couldn’t have been in a better mood. It was my 22nd birthday, the sun was shining, and I had just passed a spectacular view. Fields of strawberries stretching out to the Pacific Ocean. And just beyond was an orange and pink gradient sky as the sun dipped behind the dark silhouetted Channel Islands.

I was heading to L.A. from Santa Barbara where I was going to school. I was driving my silver 1983 Dodge Colt with an all maroon interior and vinyl seats. I had splurged on a sheepskin driver’s seat cover to keep my bum and back cool in the relentless southern California sun. My cousin had planned a birthday dinner at her home in Los Angeles, complete with a chocolate cake. I was trying to make good time.

As I climbed out of the flat agricultural valley on Highway 101, up the pass through the Santa Monica Mountains, and into the San Fernando Valley, I heard a loud clunk come from my engine. With my foot all the way to the floor, the car slowed to about 45 miles an hour. It didn’t sound right either. I pulled over and popped the hood, but didn’t know what to look for.

I got back in the car and inched my way to the nearest exit with my hazards flashing, pulled into a gas station, chatted with a mechanic and called my cousin to inform her and her husband to go ahead and celebrate without me. My engine had blown one of it’s four cylinders and I was going to be awhile. I puttered my way 50 miles west on side roads from the valley to the coast. Happy birthday to me.

I ended up selling my car to a scrap yard.

It was a life lesson that was just getting started. Stranded in L.A. without a car, all I could think of was that song, Nobody Walks in L.A., by the 80s band, Missing Persons.

“Walkin’ in L.A. Only a nobody walks in L.A.”

It was still in rotation on L.A.’s famed radio station, KROQ, at the time. But, without a car radio I was stuck humming it to myself as I walked in L.A – a nobody.

American roads are designed to make you feel like a nobody unless you’re in a car. It’s baked into the laws and rights of our roadways. Transportation engineer manuals guide street design to marginalize pedestrians. It’s no accident that nobody walks in L.A., it’s by design. They’re made to humiliate you and scare you into buying a car. Only then will you be somebody.

My first choice to get down to L.A. from Santa Barbara was the train. It took me from a beachside station in Santa Barbara to a gorgeous central station downtown L.A. where my girlfriend would pick me up. It was mostly commuters or vacationers so I felt like I was somebody. But it rarely got up to 50 miles per hour and would stop every 10 or 15 minutes to let another train pass or pick up more passengers. It was the slowest option. Luckily the coastal scenery made it tolerable.

Then I discovered I could take the airport shuttle from Santa Barbara to LAX and she could pick me up there. That was more expensive, but it was fast and went along the scenic Pacific Coast Highway. And it was also filled mostly with business travelers so I felt like I was somebody.

The worst option was the Greyhound bus. The L.A. station was in a rough neighborhood and was filled with some aggressive panhandlers and dealers. My girlfriend was always scared to drive away from that place alone. The ride itself to Santa Barbara was comfortable enough, but was often late at night. I was usually the only White person. There were a lot of Hispanic folks headed to stops near where the strawberry fields were.

One time the driver, also Hispanic, pulled off the freeway, turned onto a gravel road and stopped in what looked like the middle of a strawberry field. It was dark and desolate. He opened the door and on hopped a friend or family member he clearly knew. He got back on the freeway and we were off. At first I was annoyed, but then I realized the driver made that person feel like he was somebody. It made me feel that way too. But I felt like a different somebody than when I was with mostly White affluent business travelers on their way home from LAX. Was I valuing airline travelers more than bus travelers?

Living without a car in a car-centric world shifts your perspective. You encounter life differently and are exposed to more personal interactions. They need not be direct interactions; sometimes just watching a blind person navigate a public space or seeing someone suffering with a mental condition is enough to contemplate your particular plight.

Relying on public transportation hurls you into humanity whether you like it or not. You’re forced to reckon with the reality that you are sharing space and time with people different from you; but it also makes you one of them. A fellow human. Somebody.

But it can be uncomfortable grappling with this truth, so many people seek an escape from reality. And for most Americans, that means buying a car. As Gary Numan says in another new wave hit from the 80s,

Here in my car

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It's the only way to live

In cars

THE NOTORIOUS GDP

There is one form of public transportation that people seem to tolerate above all others – the airplane. Airports are a lot like train and bus stations, except they’re occupied by people who can afford to be there. And while the airline industry is highly subsidized – making it more affordable to those with modest incomes – the price of an airline ticket is out of reach for most of the world’s population.

Still, large airports provide private lounges for those seeking an escape from even the modestly privileged. I’ve been in these lounges and they can be very nice. Especially on an overseas trip. But as nice as they are, I’m always reminded there are some, now more than ever, who deem even those exclusive sanctuaries to be below them. Even sharing a ride with other first class passengers is a step too deep into humanity. So they buy their own jets. Maybe it’s time for Gary Numan to update his lyrics.

Here in my Lear

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It's the only way to fly

In Lear’s

All human beings occupy the same physical space on an earth that rotates at the same rate for all of us. We are all granted at birth access to the same space and time. A true natural born right. But societies and governments place different values on space and time. Including monetary value. Property value is more commonly understood; especially in the United States where owning property is much like owning a car – you’re not really somebody until you own one.

You’re also not really somebody until you have a job. At least in the eyes of most economists. And not just any job. A legitimate job. Sorry stay-at-home parents, most of whom have been and are women, your work is not valued. Economies originated as gendered concepts and still are. As a student, I was also a nobody. At least in terms of contributing to the economy.

If a monetary value can’t be placed on an activity, it’s not counted. The activity has to include money being exchanged through a price fixed market economy of some kind. Some company has to be siphoning money from the activity to be valued and calculated. Otherwise, it’s considered not worth counting.

Those activities include transportation. Each time you take a trip on a plane, bus, shuttle, or car your time is being valued by the government. Walking and biking to your legitimate job has zero value because no money has been exchanged in the activity. It turns out walkers are not only a nobody socially, but economically too. Walking and biking is considered an uncomfortable burden to economists.

The most common way to measure the economy is through a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Countries calculate GDP in different ways, but the most straightforward and common method is actually rather simple. Which also makes it dubious given how complex human behavior is to understand let alone measure.

The equation takes all the recorded money spent on goods and services within a given region. This money may have been privately spent on individual consumption, like a cup of coffee or a bus ticket. Let’s call that C – for Consumer spending.

The money could have been spent on an investment, like property or stock in a company. Let’s call that I – for Investment.

Don’t forget the government spends money on our behalf as well. They spend money on roads, hospitals, libraries, schools, military, police and other services. Let’s call that G – for Government spending.

There’s also money flowing in and out of the country from abroad through exported and imported goods. That’s an easy one to calculate too. They take the value of exports; let’s call that X – for eXports and subtract the value of imports; we’ll call that M – for iMports.

Now we can do simple arithmetic to assess the value of a country’s economy.

Gross Domestic Product = Consumption Spending + Investment Spending + Government Spending + (Exports minus Imports). More tersely,

GDP = C + I + G + (X – M).

In other words GDP is a measure of a place full of people generating wealth through a series of complex monetary interactions.

As you might imagine, it’s more complicated than that in reality. Consumer spending we understand. Investment too, if you’re fortunate enough to have such means. But even that starts to get murky. Exports and imports are complicated, and so is government spending. It’s also inequitable. Since we’re talking transportation, let’s focus on transportation spending.

In order to balance inequities in government spending, the U.S. government relies on the same thing I did when weighing my different transportation options – cost-benefit analysis. I was constantly doing cost-benefit analysis in my head after my car croaked.

I would think to myself, “What does it cost to take the airport shuttle? What is the benefit to doing so? If it costs twice as much as the bus, will it get me there in half the time? It will be more comfortable, but what’s the price of comfort? What’s the price of convenience? Do I have enough money to even be doing this analysis?” It’s exhausting. Relying on public transportation in a country built for cars tests both your sanity and your vanity, but also your patience.

SWEAT AND THE JET SET

The biggest benefit of transportation is the amount of time saved getting from point A to point B. Time is what is most valued. But when the government values that time, they don’t assign equal values to different modes of transportation. The faster the mode of travel, the more valued it is. When the government conducts cost-benefit analysis, they value transport by air at $63 per hour while transport on the surface is valued at $25 per hour using median salaries as their basis.

Government economists call this: efficient. Zachary Liscow, an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, explains it like this:

“Rich persons can earn more in that hour saved. But since the time of the rich is valued at such a higher rate, this policy pushes funding toward the rich instead of the poor, making it harder for low-income people to access jobs.”

The more money you have, the more choices you have to travel from point A to point B faster. This is a big motivator for the ultra-rich to buy their own airplanes. Take it from the guy who started the Microsoft research group at Microsoft in 1991, Nathan Myhrvold. He penned an article in a 1998 Vanity Fair article that stepped through his rationale for his first private jet purchase. It was written anonymously, but he’s since admitted he wrote it.

He says,

“I was, in effect, hostage to the air-travel system for the equivalent of three months a year. You’d have to be a career criminal to earn that much jail time—and the food would be better. If I had my own jet, I’d get that time back. I’d come and go without schedules or the fear of missing a flight. My time in the air would be spent in an office with wings, where I could work or relax. I would finally have 12 months to live the life that, in effect, I had been cramming into 9 months of non–airline time. This perspective made it hard not to like a jet.”

Owning your own jet is insanely expensive. But it would be even more expensive if the fuel wasn’t subsidized through the government. Myhrvold puts this reality into stark perspective:

“A jet can easily consume 3,000 pounds of fuel an hour, the equivalent of a 12-ounce can of Diet Coke every second. Fortunately, in bulk, jet fuel—essentially the same stuff as kerosene or diesel fuel—is actually cheaper than Diet Coke. All told, direct flying cost is about $2,500 ($4,000 in 2021 dollars) per hour.”

Private planes emit 10 times more carbon than conventional airlines. Four hours equals the average amount your or I emit in an entire year. One in ten flights departing France are private jets. While conventional airline flights were down 60% in 2020, due to Covid, the number of private flights by private jet increased.

A form of travel economists would call the most efficient also happens to be one of the worst things you could do to the environment. And it all gets measured and reported as positive contributions to the economy and the GDP.

I can’t deny flying in a private jet would be nice. Especially if they didn’t pollute. I think most everyone would agree. But owning a car is pretty nice too. And for most of the world’s population, owning a bike would be a luxury.

But I do think a more equitable distribution of government spending on transportation would benefit more people – especially those disadvantaged. That’s more true today than ever before given the sorry state of our bus and rail systems across the country. And despite the spending airports do get, many are also in a sorry state.

Measurements like GDP and economic political mechanisms like cost-benefit analysis have become a means to an end. Every administration since Nixon has used cost-benefit analysis to either increase or decrease regulation. Cost-benefit analysis started as a tool to benefit industry, then became a device for environmental regulation, and has since become an array of political levers either party uses to advance legislation or block it.

These engines of political and economic power have been used to measure and manipulate the wealth accumulation of a select and privileged few. But as this machine is climbing the hill of prosperity, a loud bang of inequity is reverberating from under the hood. The Biden administration has pulled over, popped the hood, and is examining what’s inside; often not knowing what to look for. Meanwhile, we keep climbing the hill, albeit cautiously. If we can’t find a way to make the engine of economic mechanisms and measures result in a more equitable distribution of wealth, it just might be time to scrap it.

Hello Interactors,

Most people’s awareness of the economy starts with three letters: GDP. It seems every news report about the health of any nation starts with their GDP. And there is only one direction it can go for anyone to be satisfied and that is up. Even though we all know that as those numbers go up the health of our environment goes down. How did we get here?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BEN AND ARIES

In 1817, German poet, playwright, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, 

“Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred years and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.” 

Goethe himself fell victim to this, but it’s unlikely he considered his ideas stupid. No member of any school of dogma does. He considered himself a cut above the rest; a genius in fact. At least as defined by his more famous German peer, philosopher Immanuel Kant.  

Goethe was a naturalist and believed his genius was his ability to translate his knowledge of the natural world into manmade civic matters – like economics. He was equally adept at using words like “budget, balance, economy, law and order” in describing the workings of the German government as he was describing his gardens. Or mines. Goethe was put in charge of managing area parks, mines, and forests which gave him ample opportunities to marry elements of botany and geology with economics. 

He was following in the footsteps of the French economic school of thought from the mid-1700s, The Physiocrats. They too believed in the order of natural law. They thought “the only choice humans had was either to structure their polity, economy and society in conformity with the ordre naturel or to go against it.” Talk about being dogmatic. 

There were some big names in this school of thought; including Benjamin Franklin. He sided with the Physiocrats arguing the only real productive contributions to a nation’s economy was naturally – through land ownership and farming. It’s a school of thought that propelled Thomas Jefferson, also a land loving naturalist, to push for land grabs across the country for the purpose of farming and land taxation. It’s also what separated the industrial mercantilists of the America’s North and the agrarian agriculturalists of the South which eventually led to a civil war.  

Colonialization, at its heart, was about land acquisition for agriculture, industry, transportation, international trade, and real estate. It was also about ethnic, racial, and gendered economies, and eventually the development of urban form. It set out to dominate the interaction of people and place. It was also the emergence of the field of economic geography.  

But long before the Enlightenment and colonization, in 4th century BC, the State of Qin in western China developed timber maps that included locations and distance measures to the sites. These are some of the oldest economic maps in the world. And then along came the Greek philosopher Strabo. He published a book called Geographica just before his death in 24 AD. It was found and reprinted in Latin in 1469 and describes the interactions of people and places from around the various parts of the world Strabo visited, including their economies. 

This reprinted work proved more influential to the burgeoning Enlightenment thinkers of 15th century, than Strabo’s first century contemporaries. Either way, economic geography took hold in Europe throughout the Enlightenment and into the 19th century as Goethe was writing erotic plays, listening to Beethoven live, and dabbling in economics between trips to the garden. 

NEW-MATH MEETS HU-MAN

Strabo’s work would have been picked up by another German, Alfred Weber – the brother to one of the founders of modern-day sociology, Max Weber, who believed capitalism came to exist through the protestant work ethic. Max ended up winning the ‘who will be most famous’ yearbook prize, but Alfred likely would have been more popular at the time.  

He made a name for himself as an economist developing some of the first theories on industrial location in 1929. He wanted to know why and how industries, cities, and farms determine where to locate. So, he developed analytical and interpretive methods to do so.  

Citing agglomerations, a collection of contiguous cities, industries, and labor pools, Weber was likely influenced by one of the most prominent British economists of the time, Alfred Marshall. He authored the 1890 book, Principles in Economics, and was the founder of yet another economic school of thought – The Cambridge school of neoclassical economics. We’ll learn more about Alfred later.  

Weber and Marshall were also influential outside of Europe. Weber’s work made its way to North America by way of a young mathematician named Walter Isard in the 1940s. Isard was a Quaker and thus a conscientious objector during World War II. His civil service was then satisfied as an attendant in a mental hospital.  

He had recently earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago where he was inspired by Weber. He spent his time at the hospital translating Weber’s work from German into English. He went on to teach regional science at MIT, started the first doctoral program in regional science at the University of Pennsylvania, and rounded out his career at Cornell in 1979. He died in 2010 as one of the most influential quantitative geographers in the field.   

But while Isard was still a young boy, another strand in economic geography had already been started in America; but from a humanist standpoint. Geographer and geologist, Wallace Atwood, also a University of Chicago graduate, had published a book in 1920 called Teaching the New Geography. It was targeted at elementary school teachers and encouraged a more progressive method of teaching geography to young people that avoided rote memorization of place names.  

Page one states that Atwood believes,  

“the study of geography in the elementary-school stage should do more than…provide geographical facts – it should give them a real understanding of…a definite power of interpreting their effect on human life.”  

He goes on to state,  

“Fortunately, we have now learned to teach the facts of place, political, physical, economic, and commercial geography in association with the more vital, more interesting, and more thought-provoking topics of human geography. In other words, we have come at last to focus the study on people, not things.” 

Atwood became the founding editor of the journal of Economic Geography out of Clark University in 1925 and eventually became the school’s president. The journal continues today to “redefine and reinvigorate the intersection between economics and geography” and is the discipline’s leading academic journal. 

HEAD AND TAILS

These two schools of thought and approach, technical and naturalist, were both indicators and influencers of the larger field of economics and politics. But they were also two sides of the same coin. On one side, there was a top-down, mathematical interpretation and explanation for what was occurring spatially as goods and people moved through space and time. This approach to economics emerged out of the work of Weber, Isard, and others in Europe and North America who are fondly referred to as the ‘space cadets’. There work complemented another emerging field in economics called econometrics – the application of statistics to economic relationships.  

On the other side of the coin were the earthy-crunchy, naturalists. The roots of the French Physiocrats grew into Germany creating sprouts of ideas tended to by people like Goethe. Seeds then spread to America and were planted by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Their land rights and agricultural economic beliefs blossomed into a gridded patchwork of townships, farms, cities, roads, and waterways that stretched across a continent.   

Colonial settlers toiled and tilled yielding fruits of labor in the form of property taxes and crop revenue. The funds of which built a military that protected industrialists seeking access to sacred Indigenous land to lay tracks for trains and mountains for mines.  

Cities grew across the oceans connecting the northern hemisphere with diverse populations of people cross-fertilizing ideas, yielding new seeds of inventions and innovation, that continued to spread around the world through interconnected vines of nutrient rich endeavors. All of which were extracting natural resources and exploiting human labor at rates never seen in the history of the world.  

By the 1900s the industrial age had lined the pockets of the economic elite, coal fired steam stoked success, but also paired pollutants to particles that penetrated the lungs of those less lucky. Trees were toppled, canyons collapsed, and sand stripped of their sediment. It was enough to prompt the Republican naturalist President Teddy Roosevelt to regulate railroads and conserve natural resources; an attempt to give Americans and the environment a “square deal”.   

His actions encouraged people like Wallace Atwood to pause and grow concerned. Atwood hoped to inspire a generation by asking children of the 1920s to be thoughtful about the power people have over interactions between physical geography, politics, place, and the effect they have on human life. Imagine where we’d be today if Atwood’s books and words actually took hold. I don’t know about you, but my primary geography education was still pretty much about memorizing Anglo-American names of cities and states around the world.  

This coin of economics offers mathematical quantitative spatial and econometric measures that include indicators of success for world-wide economies, on one side, and the other a naturalist-inspired human-environmental articulation of the potential positive and deleterious effects on physical geography and life. The measures of one side of the coin are even inspired by words of the other, like ‘health’ and ‘growth’.  

But the two sides suffer from a perverse cycle of codependency that lingers to this day. For example, we live in a society that measures, rewards, and celebrates how increased sales of automobiles contributes to the ‘growth’ of an economy knowing full well their presence is destroying the ‘health’ of the environment and its inhabitants.  

As gas prices plummet, economies grow – and so does the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Higher wages mean more consumerism and economies grow; and so does the size of toxic landfills and islands of plastic in the ocean. More cars on the road yield more accidents and more injuries and deaths. But they also yield economic growth in the insurance, auto, and healthcare industries as insurance, repair, and medical bills pile high. Economic indicators that rise, also measure our demise. We need no better proof that humans do not act logically nor rationally. 

THE AIMS AND PAINS OF KEYNES

But that would have been a tough argument to make in the late 19th and early 20th century. Most mainstream economists today would still argue. Arguments that stem from the principles of the preeminent 20th century British economist, John Maynard Keynes.  

Remember Alfred Marshall, the father of the Cambridge school of neoclassical economics? Keynes was a family friend and protégé of Marshall’s and expanded on his ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. One of which was the notion that people’s subjectivity in decision making plays a small role.  

In his 1921 Treatise on Probability Keynes wrote that when we are faced with a decision, we weigh the facts based on the knowledge we have. The decision that follows is “fixed objectively, and is independent of our opinion.” A probable choice “is not probable” just because we think it is. Some mythical natural law has determined it. 

I don’t know about you, but despite the knowledge I possess about the negative effects of sugar, it’s probable that I’ll have dessert because in the opinion of my sugar craving brain, I deserve it. And while I know the ocean is full of plastic, it is probable that I will continue to buy plastic products because, in my opinion, I think I want that product. But who am I to judge an Eton grad and one of the most influential people in the history of economics? He must be right. Right? In my opinion, not really. 

Keynes’ biggest contribution to economics, and the world we live in today, came in his 1936 book, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Here he outlined how an economy could be a nationwide entity bounded by certain governmental policies. These policies act as levers, to use a industrial metaphor, that control prices, interest rates, and even consumer demand – consumers who are governed by natural laws of objective logic uniformly identical to any other human. 

By positioning humans as yet another cog in a machine, economists could more easily substitute human behavior into their mathematical models. While some, like Cambridge Philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, disagreed with Keynes, and developed alternative mathematics to demonstrate it, Keynes beliefs survived. In large part because should each individual act on their own accord, subjectively, it would be seemingly impossible to mathematically model the outcome. And where’s the fun in that? 

Economists across Europe and North America agreed. By the end of World War II, Keynesian economics dominated economic scholarship and practice. It’s the model we have today and can be characterized in these four economic processes: 

* Economies are external to our lives. One of the most efficient ways to trick people into believing this fallacy is to put the word ‘the’ in front of Economy. The mechanical metaphors also help to position economic processes as something external to our lives; just like machines. 

* Economies operate under their own internal logical and objective rules. Entire cultures and societies may come and go, but economies are unaffected. Political parties come and go, but economies remain omnipresent. Diverse societies and religions may rise and fall throughout space and time, but economies remain constant and monotheistic. 

* Economies operate on a national scale. The mathematical techniques and apparatus surrounding the analysis and reporting of economies represent the success or failure of an entire nation. It was as early as the 1940s that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) became the primary indicator of a nation’s economic health. These measures allowed for inter-national comparisons and worldwide economic systems like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. 

* Economies must be operated and managed through governmental intervention. This is the key to perpetual economic growth. Governments not only can make it possible but it is their duty to do so. Politicians latched on to this idea quickly, which is why Republicans and corporations stacked collegiate economic departments with Keynesian thinkers and funded their research.  

It’s been 100 years since Keynes published his economic treatise. That’s ten decades of Keynesian economists convincing each other their school of thought is right by pointing to perpetually climbing GDP numbers while ignoring the climbing curve of carbon dioxide concentration. The words of Goethe still ring true: 

“Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred years and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.” 

It’s not hard to look around to see the students of this school of economics have failed. Our social foundations have been rocked. Our food, water, health, energy, education, social networks, income, work, housing, gender equality, peace and justice, social equity, and political voice are all suffering. And all that surrounds us too: climate change, ozone depletion, air pollution, biodiversity loss, freshwater withdrawals, chemical and soil pollution, and ocean acidification are pushed to their limits. 

But here’s what gives me hope. If it took just 80 years to dig this hole we’re in, I’m confident we can find our way out in less time than that. I’ve painted a narrow and bleak picture of mainstream economics, but know there are many economists around the world with alternative theories and practices. I’ll be exploring some in future posts. 

But the Keynesian school is what I want to replace.  So here are some things to embrace.  My school says: economies are embedded in the interactions of people and place.    Economies emerge as people converge in a perpetual swirling of reactions.  Social foundations and friendly relations are what make the economic milieu.  But without clean air and water too, any economy is doomed.  So embrace the patterns as complexities emerge among people and place interactions. 

References:

Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction, 3rd Edition. Neil M. Coe, Philip F. Kelly, Henry W. C. Yeung.

Goethe's Economy of Nature and the Nature of His Economy. Myles W. Jackson. University of Cambridge. 1992.

The History of Economic Thought. Gonçalo L. Fonseca. Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Hello Interactors,

This week kicks off the fall series on economic geography. My introduction to economics started with a room full of giggling girls. Its founding began by exploring a common moral sympathy, but it has become anything but. This evolution has been relatively fast; occurring throughout the lives of a rural postman pioneer and his pioneering punch card punching son.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

STUFF IT

As I walked in the door, the girls awkwardly spun around and grinned with a tinge of embarrassment. And then back to their friends as giggles percolated across the room. I tried to play it cool as the teacher welcomed me and led me to a special desk against the wall. She sat down next to me, maybe a little too eager, and helped me to get started.

It was 1984 and Claus Oldenburg had recently finished a civic sculpture, Crusoe Umbrella, for what was then called Nollan plaza in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. My friend’s dad, Charles “Chick” Herbert, designed the concrete plaza featuring a shallow pool across from his angular stark white Civic Center. The sculpture is an homage to the umbrella Robinson Crusoe built from sticks and plants. Oldenburg thought the plaza looked like an oasis amidst the high-rise buildings in a state that felt like an island in the middle of a continent that most people only see while flying over on their way to New York or Los Angeles.

The neon red animating Travelers Insurance logo atop one of the buildings also served as an inspiration – an umbrella. The curved handle of the base also reminded Oldenburg of a backhoe sometimes seen on the ubiquitous tractors grooming the fields of Iowa. And the long skinny shaft that connected the umbrella to the handle reminded him of the road through downtown Des Moines where he saw High School kids cruise on Saturday nights as they ‘scooped the loop’. I was one of them.

Come Monday it was back to school. For the senior art project we got to choose our own medium for our entries into the spring art show. I had Claus on the brain. In addition to large public sculptures, Claus was also known for his oversized stuffed everyday objects. The Des Moines Art Center collection had one; a massive three-way plug made out of blue vinyl that lazily drooped from the ceiling partially stuffed with filler. I decided I was going to do a giant soft sculpture of my own for the spring show. I choose to make a wall mounted hand-cranked pencil sharpener – a staple of every classroom in those days and a farewell homage to my final year in the Norwalk School District.

Des Moines was home to more than just insurance companies. It’s still a major center for insurance and financial services. And publishing. If you’ve ever flipped through a magazine in America, it was most likely printed by the Meredith Corporation. Growing up it was also home to the farm equipment manufacturer, Massey Ferguson. Through the 1970s their factory made mostly lawn tractors and snowmobiles, but it was also a center for the company’s legal, financial, and marketing departments. My Dad worked there for twenty five years.

You can’t really make a soft sculpture in most art rooms. Their set up for drawing, painting, printing, and ceramics. So during art period, I’d grab my cheap beige muslin fabric from my art locker and walk down the hall by shop class where guys would point at me and laugh as they tinkered with an old clunker locals would donate to the school. I’d proceed through the black double doors, hang a left down a long empty hallway, pause at the door, peek through the relight, and slowly open the door. I’d walk through a class full of giggling girls, sit down to the sewing machine against the wall, and start sewing. The only dude in my four years to ever to set foot in a high school home economics class.

THE ORIENT EXPRESS

The word economics in English-speaking worlds was born out of home economics. There are still hangers-on, like ‘economy sized’ goods at big-box stores or ‘economy-sized’ rental cars. Economizing in this context means to be miserly or frugal. That was certainly what I grew up learning. Both of my parents came from humble beginnings.

My Mom’s mother is the daughter of German immigrants and her father the son of Irish immigrants. Both farming families had to scrape to get by. My Grandmother survived the Spanish Flu; even after caring for parents who both had it.

My Dad was born into the depression in his mother’s bed in 1933. He was the second youngest of twelve. His dad served in both World Wars and was the town postman; he started out delivering mail by horse.

They both lived in a small town in southern Iowa called, Orient. They were born into an era and area dominated by a small scale farming economy. There wasn’t a lot of need to think beyond the economics of the household. Having a large family meant that many more hands for labor. The area was settled by farmers with homesteaded land offered by the government. Orient was mostly there to support the local farmers.

This small Iowa town was founded in 1882 during the great swell of America’s industrial age. It’s marquee feature and primary reason for existence was a grain elevator in the center of town. It was part of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. Also known simply as the Burlington. This company started as the Aurora Branch Railroad and was created by the Illinois state government in 1848. It grew to dominate tracks through western Illinois, southern Iowa, northern Missouri, across Nebraska, and extended its reach far north and west into Montana.

Eight years later, in 1900, the American federal government had traded, stolen, or bought enough land and offered incentives to corporations like Burlington to run trains coast to coast. Their tracks divided herds of buffalo, countless Indigenous communities, and were built on the backs of mostly by low-wage Chinese immigrant laborers.

In 1882, the year Orient was founded, the U.S. government thanked these people by instituting the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned further Chinese immigration and blocked naturalization. It is what started the so-called Yellow Peril – an anti-Asian sentiment that has resurfaced in recent years in the form of racist hate crime.

MORAL UTILITY

By the late 1800s the Western world had been putting theories of division of labor to practice for over one hundred years. It’s what fueled the Industrial Revolution. It all began the same year the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and the publishing of A Wealth of Nations. This highly influential book was written by a Scottish professor of moral philosophy, Adam Smith.

He was an awkward and absent minded man who is said to have "had a large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment." Smith himself agreed he was no looker saying, "I am a beau in nothing but my books."

Despite his speech impediment and awkwardness, he found success lecturing. He began writing and lecturing on economic topics in 1748, but from a moralistic standpoint. He expanded on what he deemed obvious and simple principles of natural liberty. An idea that had been around since the Greeks; and likely the Zoroastrians before that; one of the longest running religions in the world out of Persia that espouses three core principles I think we can all get behind: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.

Natural liberty, or natural law, was a feature in many Enlightenment thinkers of Smith’s era and is ensconced in the U.S. Declaration of Independence – "all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". His lectures also concerned the increasing opulence in England during this period. It led him to write his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 that explored “moral sympathy” or what today we might call empathy – the capacity of an individual to express sympathy for other members of society.

It was after this that he turned toward more explicitly toward economics and the inclusion, exclusion, and overlap of natural law with manmade legal laws that were beginning to be written by Western societies and nations. He theorized it was the legal power of the state to control labor that brought about wealth, dominance, and control and not the accumulation of silver and gold. It led to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A book who’s name has shortened over time to the Wealth of Nations.  

That book became his most famous and leads many to call Adam Smith the father of the field of Economics. In it he reveals how the division of labor in scaled up industrial enterprises leads to growth and wealth accumulation. By having teams of specialized skilled workers conducting interdependent tasks, industries could scale production more efficiently and profitably – in large part through slave or low-wage labor.

This mechanized view of labor divisions echoed scientific theories and discoveries in biology and physics that would have been swirling around Smith during the Age of Enlightenment. The influence is evident today by looking at the language of economists and business professionals. Money flows through economies; especially when there are waves of prosperity. Economics is a mechanism that uses the gravitational pull of consumers and sellers. Unless, of course, there is friction from far away resources or customers. Markets seek equilibrium. So long as we avoid inflation.

Economics can even be described in farming and biological terms. A market can be fertile. Every day on the radio, tv, and social media you hear about the health and growth of the economy. Goods can be in circulation, products can be reproduced; come Black Friday in November consumers will be triggered by herd instincts. In the end, economies are a function of natural selection. Only the fittest companies and strongest governments will survive.

By the late 1800s scientists were on a roll. They had discovered an underlying uniting principle of physics that also unified the discipline: all matter in the universe is connected by a unifying force – energy. The burgeoning field of economics, eager to model itself off science and math, sought their own unifying principle and settled on an economizing word – utility.

ECON ONE-BY-ONE

Prior to the industrial age, the production of goods required the labor of an individual farmer, merchant, blacksmith, baker, carpenter, or cobbler which was harder, slower, and more expensive to scale when demand became greater than supply. To maximize profits, firms had to maximize the utility of their workers. And they did that by creating specialized divisions of labor.

But that quaint image of a farmer and merchant, could be recognized in Orient even when I visited my Grandparents as a kid in the 70s and 80s. It had a single tiny grocery store, a hardware store, and assorted repair shops. Nearly everyone in town had a garden and the city was surrounded by fields and farms of corn, beans, hogs, and heifers. And running straight down the heart of town was a railroad.

Nestled next to it was a grain elevator five stories high that would get filled with area corn and soybeans waiting for the next train to come to haul it away; a cog in a nationwide industrialized economic machine in the middle of small-town Iowa on an island of a state within a vast continental land mass that stretches from sea to shining sea.

The wealth of this nation, in keeping with Smith’s theory, grew from the federal and state laws that, in cooperation and sometimes collusion with private firms, controlled the price of land and labor to build the nation’s largest industries; including the railroads that ran through Orient, the steel used to make the trains, tracks, and railcars that were fueled by what seemed like endless supplies of coal, oil, and gas. Industries also controlled the seed the farmers bought, the fertilizers and pesticides they spread, and the equipment they used to till, plow, plant, and harvest – like Massey Ferguson.

My Dad was a Computer Audit Analyst at Massey Ferguson. He exceled in math, majored in it, taught for awhile, got married to my Mom, and then landed a job in 1969 writing COBOL programs for a small financial software firm in Des Moines. He soon moved to Massey Ferguson where he wrote more COBOL on punch cards. He’d bring them home for me to play with and draw on as a small boy. I can still see them stacked under the piano bench in my room on Jackson street that looked out to the elementary school across the street.

My Mom and Dad and their Mom and Dad bridged generations of economies. My Grandpa Weed was born in 1889. The Ford Motor company was still a twinkle in Henry Ford’s eye. My Mom and Dad were born in the thirties into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Era; when Democrats were the party of protecting people over banks and not the party of protecting banks over people. FDR must be rolling in his grave. He famously quipped, "I took economics courses in college for four years, and everything I was taught was wrong."

By the time I was born, my family had entered the ranks of the middle class FDR had imagined. My parents experienced old-fashioned agrarian economies that even Adam Smith would have recognized. They rose with the White educated middle class and settled into the comfortable suburban sprawl of the post World War boom to raise a family. They witnessed the growth of American industries that cranked out planes, trains, automobiles, and rockets. And, yes, Massey Ferguson tractors, snowmobiles, and riding lawnmowers too.

But my Dad also bridged the industrial economy and the knowledge economy by becoming one of the first software professionals in 1969 as part of a newly burgeoning high-tech industry. Within my lifetime, the lives of my parents, and of theirs the formal discipline of Economics was born overseas, grew larger in America, and has metastasized into a global economic instrument void of any of the moral foundations its founding father, Adam Smith, envisioned. Where’s the empathy? Where is the capacity of an individual to express sympathy for other members of society?

Our world economy has come to resemble the soft sculptures of Claus Oldenburg. A parody of mass production and mass culture that has ballooned to comedic scale and is sagging mournfully from the gravitational pull of its own weight.

Maybe what we need is to step away from our classes, march into the void, open a new door, endure the ridicule and laughter, and sit down to sew us a new moral economy that can be stuffed with good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.

Hello Interactors,

This is the last post on the subject of physical geography. Starting next week and through the fall I’ll be digging into economic geography and how the interaction of people and place relates to inequality, instability, and sustainability of local and global economies.

This final post of the season ushers in a windy wet fall by focusing on the forces of wind and water; and our sometimes intimate relationships with nature.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

PUZZLING PILES IN THE PARK

I paddled my kayak two miles across a calm Lake Washington this week to a park where I water baby native plants. I realized I move through fluid water at about the same pace as I walk on solid ground. Kayaking is a lot like swimming that way. But dryer. You’re in the water extending one arm forward, grabbing water with the paddle, pulling it behind you while pushing your other arm forward so it can do the same. I lean sideways slightly on each extension rotating the boat, extending its length, rocking back and forth with each stroke. Just like swimming. But dryer.

I’m not much of a misty spiritual type, but there is a oneness with water that I experience when swimming or kayaking that is hard to explain. I feel it when I sail too. So does the boat. Sailboats hum with vibration when the force of wind on the sail is balanced by the forces acting on the keel underwater. These invisible forces propel the boat forward, but can also slow it down.

Polynesians were some of the best, if not the best, sailors and navigators in the world. To sense the subtle cues of shifts in the current on the vast Pacific waters, the men would put the tiller between their legs and let the most sensitive nerves in their body sense the changes. Their scrotum. Now that’s being one with your boat – and the water.

Most people have lost touch with this kind of intimacy with nature. The closer we get to embracing urban life, the more distant nature recedes. I’m reminded of this every time I beach my kayak at the waterfront park I’m helping to restore. I pull the boat ashore, strap on my work gloves, slip on my branded Green Kirkland hat, and set out to water baby native plants under a canopy of firs and old growth cotton woods. But invariably, in my periphery, I’m distracted by a bleach-white pile of toilet paper clumped just beyond the trail.

People pooping in public parks is as much pernicious as it is puzzling. One day I became curious how widespread in the park this was. Perhaps this stand of trees is just a particularly pleasant place to poop. So I walked the park. Crossing over a footbridge, I spotted two juice boxes tossed to the side of the creek. I walked down the bank and under the bridge to see more wads of white waste.

I collected the juice boxes and tissue and heard a mom on the bridge say to her kids, “Oh look, that nice man is picking up litter!” I had a moment of pride bolt through me, but it was displaced by rage that almost made me want to holler back, “Yeah, so why don’t you and your kids get your butts down here and help!” I didn’t, of course. But I wanted to yell at somebody.

As I walked further up the creek, I could see the bank leading up to the restrooms was spotted with white. The closer I got to the building, the more clumps of toilet paper I found. What compels people to walk into a restroom stall, pull more toilet paper from the roll than a single human needs to wipe their fanny, stride outside and into the woods, and poop. Or pee. I found more evidence of pee-pee than poo-poo. Which tells me it’s those with the internal hardware doing most of the doo-dooing in the dirt.

I suppose you could cry, COVID! And it’s true. I could see where some would be concerned with being in a public restroom for too long. And let’s face it, it’s nicer in the woods than in a public facility. I’d rather be looking at a tree than a stall door with graffiti etched into it; breathing air that surrounds with a nasty stench to it. But park staffers tell me it was happening long before Covid and it’s been getting worse. While doggy doo-doo is their number one park problem, a close second is public plops from people.

The BBC wrote a piece about these dastardly deeds of the terrible turds. They interviewed a forensic psychologist who gets called onto scenes of crimes where someone has dropped some dung. The first thing he asks the police officer is this, “Is it soft or hard?” They think this psychologist is in need of psychiatry. It’s the number one indicator of intent. If it’s soft, the person was anxious, stressed, and realized they either drop trough or poo their pants. So they landed a pile in the middle of the living room and then made off with the TV. If it’s hard, then this person is most likely angry and bitter about the world and this is their way of expressing it.

He says the reasons for these episodes range from anxiety, alcohol, illness, rage, or, as one anger management expert put it, people want to make a statement: “Life is s**t, so stand in it.”

Either way, these psychologists warn us that shaming is the last thing we should do to remedy this rectal ruse. In any form, it’s a sign of anti-social behavior that most likely stems from some kind of trauma in these people’s lives. I’ve stopped picking it up and instead snap a photo with a description of the location. The city is trying to track occurrences so they can be more targeted in their solutions. I’ve also come to muster compassion for the sources of these pearly piles of paper that pop out amidst the brown brush.

WIND AND WATER

This park experience has offered me a whole new angle on the interaction of people and place. Defecating in public I think we’d all agree is a social taboo. Taboo is Polynesian word. It’s formed from the word ta – to mark and pu – an adverb of intensity. It can be spelled tabu or tapu. The Polynesians used this word in many contexts, but one was conservation of natural resources. They would mark reefs, groves, plants, and animals as taboo when they became overfished or overly picked, plucked, or hunted.

Numerous anthropologists noted this elsewhere in the world among Indigenous societies; typically with religious overtones to sacred edicts. The Kayapo people of Brazil have religious sanctions as a way of managing groves of trees. Maya’s Huastic people protected sacred groves as did Moroccans and the Chinese.

China’s ancient practice of feng shui 风水 is alive today. Search for feng shui on Amazon books and you’ll be greeted with over 40,000 books to choose from. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and cultural ecologist, Gene Anderson, spent years researching behavior of poor laborers in Hong Kong. His first encounter with feng shui was in 1965. A hospital was being built on a nearby hill where he was staying. As he interacted with area farmers and laborers, they would remark on how bad it was to build there. The elders would tell him, “This is very bad; the construction has cut the dragon’s pulse.” He studiously noted the comment, but found it an odd thing to say.

Soon after, a typhoon struck. Two feet of rain in two days brought water that turned to mud as it came gushing down the mountain. The newly built hospital foundation was wiped out and homes were buried in mud at the foot of the hill. The next time he saw his farmer friends, they said, “See? This is what happens when you cut the dragon’s pulse.” Geologists would say it was “slope failure” due to “over steepening.”

After ruminating on the catastrophe, Anderson wrote,

“A light went on in my head. The Chinese, pragmatic to the core, had described the phenomenon in terms strange to me; but the phenomenon they described was perfectly real. I reflected that the geologists’ terms “oversteepening” and “slope failure” were not much more empirically verifiable than the dragon. Any Chinese peasant would find them even stranger than I had found that eminent serpent, since I had already learned from reading that ancient Chinese saw dragons in the scaly, ridged contours of mountain ranges.”

Anderson never thought of facts the same way again. Feng shui guides people to not put houses on a slope or rise. A year later, Anderson observed the effects of another natural disaster – the great floods of 1966. He noticed the only houses to survive, were those that obeyed the principles of feng shui.

While he had ample empirical evidence that feng shui works, he could never quite square with the mystical connotations. He had trouble relating to “dragons in the hills”, “tigers in the ridges”, “veins of subtle circulating force”, and “wavelike flows of good and bad luck.” But with time, he’s discovered and appreciated the interdependence of hard-nosed pragmatic empiricism and the more spiritual cosmology of ancient Chinese tradition.

The literal meaning of feng shui combines “wind” and “water”. It is the ancient Chinese science of how people interact with place in a way that minimizes damage from natural forces. It guides the planning of houses, buildings, villages as well as ways of getting around: roads, bridges, waterways, and highways. Natural forces in traditional Chinese culture is called ch’i (qi 气) – a force vital to life but can’t be seen. It’s literal meaning is “air” or “breath”; both invisible vital forces that should not be impeded. Feng shui exposes principles that avoid blocking or disrupting that invisible vital force – or ch’i.

Wind, in my mind, is the perfect spiritual and empirical example. You can’t see wind, but it’s best not to impede it. And when I’m sailing, wind can bring bad luck – no wind, too much wind, or wind in an unhelpful direction. And it can also bring good luck – a consistent gentle wind blowing in a helpful direction. Harnessing and channeling the invisible force of wind balances forces between the sail and the keel causing fluid turbulence that makes a boat hum and a sailor smile. (Though the turbulence can also create drag, so is best appreciated only momentarily if you’re in a hurry!)

Water holds both empirical and mystical and metaphorical truths as well. One look at a drainage map of any massive river system reveals a fractal-like network of tributaries, creeks, and streams that feed into progressively larger rivers. Like the capillaries and veins that gradually grow in diameter as they approach the two largest veins in our bodies – the superior and inferior vena cavae. These connect to the heart that pulses at precisely the right rhythm to send blood all the way to the extremities where the smallest capillaries in mammals deliver oxygen and nutrients to surrounding cells.

River systems in tidal zones and floodplains work much like our circulatory systems. The natural cycle of seasonal drought and floods or ebb and flow of tides distribute water, nutrients, and organisms through what is known as a flood pulse. And like wind, these forces cannot be seen, are best not impeded, and can be described by many as bringing good or bad luck. A drought stricken flood plain flush with forgotten water is good luck for plants and animals reliant on the pulse. A tidal rush from a tsunami is nothing but bad luck.

S**T HAPPENS

It’s not hard to imagine an undulating mountain ridge with piercing rocks silhouetted against the sky appearing like the scales on the back of a curvaceous dragon. It’s also not hard to imagine the streams running through the steep crevices and valleys and into the flood plains; pulsing like the veins of a mountain dragon. Describing naturally occurring forces this way is both pragmatic and poetic. Empirical and mystical. Especially in the absence of any other explanation.

But the first Western scholars to encounter these people lacked such imagination and grace. J. J. M. de Groot was one such person. He was a Dutch missionary and religion instructor at Leiden University in Germany. Here’s how he described what he heard and observed when he spent time in China in the 1800s,

“Feng shui is a mere chaos of childish absurdities and refined mysticism, cemented together, by sophistic reasonings, into a system, which is in reality a ridiculous caricature of science.”

These words resonated with other Western explorers, scholars, and writers so they copied them. They considered feng shui a form of superstition or religion; a belief that propagated through generations of text books throughout the Western world. But in recent decades that has changed. Most scholars now regard feng shui as scientific. In 1996, Gene Anderson described it like this: “a system of empirical observations and pragmatic knowledge, bound together by an overarching theory that is supposed to be naturalistic.”

If you’ve ever been backpacking, you’ve likely pooped in the woods. My climbing friend told me you don’t really have a climbing partner until you’ve pooped next them while dangling from a rope on the face of a cliff high above the mountain floor into what they call a poop-tube. And I’ve spectated at enough cross-country and endurance events to know emergency pooping happens in the woods, on the trail, or even on the bike. S**t happens.

But as more people flood urban areas around the world and cities struggle to maintain open, natural spaces, we can’t be leaving grunts on the ground. Besides, it’s not like this is the only form of environmental degradation humans are inflicting on the world. We are unquestionably impeding vital natural forces. Wind, water, and other natural forces are getting chocked. A widespread blockage of the world’s ch’i.

The Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest imagined salmon as humans wearing fish skins. When I put on my wetsuit and swim in Lake Washington, I am a human wearing a fish skin. These people have their own spiritual and cultural beliefs that are also bound together by pragmatism and naturalistic theory. The salmon – and the seas, lakes, and rivers they occupy – bind with the native people and their sense of place. They believe they are here to take care of the salmon, because the salmon take care of them.

Lake Washington used to be home to countless salmon. They would have been running under my kayak on their way to Juanita Bay this time of year. There would be so many of them that they’d clog the entry to Forbes Creek; a floor of wiggling salmon so thick you could have walked on top of them. The last time a salmon was spotted trying to spawn here at Forbes Creek was 2001.

The lake level dropped in 1910 when they cut a path to Seattle’s Lake Union so ships constructed in Kirkland could make their way to sea. Upstream the creek’s water is polluted from lawn fertilizer runoff, pesticides, and tire dust and oil from the flow of traffic on the freeway under which the water flows. Tire particulates have shown to be particularly harmful to baby salmon. And while that electric car may look green, the added weight of the battery and increased torque from engine results in even more tire wear and particulate matter. We all breath it and the salmon do too. Cars and trucks are defecating in our streams.

Lake Washington is as deep as it is wide. It was carved by a giant receding glacier. Creation stories passed down through generations of the Puget Sound’s coastal tribes tell of chaotic natural forces of the post ice-age. Glaciers retreating, rivers flowing in both directions, volcanoes, earthquakes, and freezing temperatures. It took thousands of years for things to settle down to where salmon could populate the region and fir trees could climb to the sky. But the spiritual and pragmatic words to describe the anxiety and fear felt by this dynamic changing environment have endured through millennia.

The native Puget Sound word dookw is a root word that means “to change” or “transform.” Out of it grew words that describe worry, dissatisfaction, and anger; all words that could describe feelings most of us feel as we ponder the ferocity of wind, the slowing riparian pulse of cyclical drought and rain, or the rising sea water as the northern ice melts. It’s the pervasive anger and worry those psychologists said could can lead to hard stools.

Indigenous people have lived through a lot of s**t, but they don’t leave it there for us to stand in. Dookw is also the root word for “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” A positive sign that if we all find a connection to the sometimes violent vital forces of nature, we will live to see another day while charting courses to the future.

Hello Interactors,

I’ve started to making my own milk again. It’s not really milk. It’s creamy colored water made from pulverized remains of nuts or grains that I sweeten with a little maple syrup. Invariably I get lazy and real dairy creeps back in. But every time I look at that carton, I know what’s inside didn’t come from that cute cow or that stylized farm on the label. And however it got here, I know it came at a cost greater than what I paid.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MILK MAN

Rick has a phone to his ear with one hand while he clicks his mouse in the other. He’s searching websites for a hay baler part while calling neighboring farmers to borrow theirs until his part arrives. He clicks a browser tab that is already open to the weather forecast. Rain is coming. Tension mounts as friends and relatives kick into gear. The hay has to be cut before that rain comes.  

Have you ever had milk straight from the cow? It truly tastes like milk you’ve never had. It was so good, I was warned to not drink too much or too fast. Gluttonous dairy consumption can lead to an upset tummy. But I was assured that if I ever wanted more, there was always a fresh container waiting in the refrigerator.

Chances are if you grew up with milk, your refrigerator has milk in it. It’s probably not straight from the cow, and it may just look like milk (oat milk is all the rage – especially once Oprah and Jay-Z got in on the action), but the West likes their milk and milk products. But consumer demand is worldwide. The more Taco Bells and Pizza Hut’s pop up on streets around the globe demanding cheese, the more milk supply is needed. Starbucks sells more milk than they do coffee. People like their milk and coffee.

I was in Mexico City once eating breakfast at a local eatery with a friend. The waitress sauntered around with a carafe of coffee in one hand and a pitcher of milk in the other. She’d walk up, make eye contact, and start pouring coffee until you said stop. She’d fill the rest with milk. I miss Mexican coffee.

It was hard for me to imagine a dairy farm in a mostly arid Mexico. Growing up in Iowa, I have images of vast grassy fields dotted with milk cows; a winding grove of water thirsty trees clinging to a creek or river bordering the farm. A&E Dairy was the only brand of milk I ever knew. They’ve been bringing milk to Iowans since 1930. We had an actual milkman as a small child. A gray sheet metal box with a blue A&E logo on the front sat nestled in the corner of our doorstep. He’d raise the hinged lid and gently place a glass container of milk inside.

By fourth grade, in 1976, that all had changed. We took a field trip to the A&E bottling plant in Des Moines, Iowa. I remember watching an industrial sized see-through bin full of white plastic pellets the size of ball bearings funneling into a heated form. After a couple seconds, a plastic one-gallon milk container emerged. The glass jar delivered by the milk man had been replaced by crates of one-gallon milk jugs. They’d load them into a semi-truck and off they went; onto a freeway that was as old as me.

A&E, like all American dairy producers, were just beginning to scale up their farms. President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz sent this message to American farmers, “get big or get out.” It was the beginning of the end for small and medium sized farms across the country as milk production steadily climbed from around 54 million tons in 1976 to nearly 100 million tons in 2018. It doesn’t show signs of stopping.  

MILK: THE MAN

Rick, his wife Terri, and a team of extended family members were able to get the hay in the barn before the rain started to fall. But there was no time to rest. A semi-truck had backed its long shiny silver milk tanker up to the barn and was waiting patiently, though a little stressed, for some help. It was time to mix their milk with that of other producers in the Delaware River Valley just north of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Both milk and water flow from this watershed south to an increasingly thirsty New York metropolitan area where urbanites peek up from their steaming molten chocolate cake at trendy restaurants to ask their waiter, “Got Milk?”

With milk production continuing to ramp up over my lifetime, these New Yorkers must not be the only ones craving milk. The entire country must be hankering for more. Not true. Despite American momma cows producing more and more milk every day, the average American milk consumption per capita in 2018 is equal what it was when I was born in 1965 – 256 kilograms per person per year. That’s around 65 gallons a year or just over five gallons per month. That includes cheese, but not butter.

If a growing American population doesn’t account for the growth of dairy production in America, that tells you American dairy farmers interested in endless growth and profits are relying on exports. But Milk is very expensive to ship given its weight. One gallon weighs 8.6 pounds. Because it’s 87 percent water, 9 percent skim solids, and 4 percent milk fat it needs to be broken down into dry ingredients. Dry milk and dry whey make it easier and cheaper to ship. Once it reaches its destination, it’s reconstituted into milk or cheese by adding water.

This has led to an explosion in commercial exports. The United States has become the world leader in nonfat dry-milk and dry whey exports. Their biggest markets are Mexico, China, Philippines, and Indonesia. To meet consumer demand and a growing food processing industry in China, a 2020 Department of Agriculture report expects exports to continue to grow.

To meet this demand, the dairy industry continues to expand. And like Nixon’s Earl Butz “get big or get out” advice, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said in 2019, “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out.”  He said that in a speech at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin – a state known for cheese – where they lost 800 dairy farms that same year to consolidation.

Licensed dairy farms across the country numbered just over 70,000 in 2013 and is now a little over 31,000. A 55% decline in seven years. Meanwhile, the amount of milk they can get from a single cow has increased. Cow milk production has increased 11.5% since 2011 and the USDA is expecting increases to continue.

To get your head around how production increases while the number of dairy farms decreases, consider one of a half a dozen companies providing most of the milk to the world – Riverview. Based in Minnesota, their website seems corporate but kind. Maybe even a little innocent. It says,

“[They] utilize both rotary and parallel parlors. Each site is a little different from the others, but the activity is the same: milking cows. Each cow produces about eight gallons of milk per day which is sent to processing plants to make cheese.”

But they don’t talk about the farmer they approached proposing a 24,000-cow dairy near his farm in Minnesota. They were hoping to buy his corn to feed all these cattle. He couldn’t imagine a 24,000-cow operation and turned them down. In addition to worrying about the odor, damage to roads, and pollution, he was most concerned about the amount of water that would take.  

One researcher estimates Riverview uses nearly one quarter of all the water used for hog and dairy farms in Minnesota. And they’re not through. State records show permits for two farms of over 10,000 cows. Minnesota isn’t the only state they’re interested in. They’ve extended into one of the most unlikely places to raise and milk cows (given my bucolic ideal of farm country) – the deserts of Arizona.

COCHISE CHEESE PLEASE

Rick and Terri started their farm from scratch. They raise three kids, endured and recovered from a house fire, and have managed to raise some amazing kids, award winning cows, and by my standards, some very tasty milk. But it’s getting harder and harder to make ends meet. Their youngest son is interested in continuing the farm, but prospects of survival are grim.

New York was the fourth biggest producer of milk in 2020 behind California, Wisconsin, and Idaho, but they were also fourth behind Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania in the number of dairy farms lost. New York state lost 240 small dairy farms last year. The pandemic didn’t help. And mega-farms have seized the opportunity to prey on financially vulnerable farmers – like Terri and Rick. But also farmers in Arizona where wells are running dry.

Riverview was most likely attracted to Arizona because of its lax water laws. If you’re a farmer in rural Arizona, there is no limit to the water you can use. But scoot your boots too close to roost near Phoenix or Tucson, and you’ll be wrestled, metered, and hog tied. So they picked a location made popular by California pistachio farmers who got there before they did – Sunizona, Arizona.

This town sits in the Willcox basin in Cochise County. It’s a dried lake bed, Lake Cochise, named after an ancient Indian culture that existed 9,000 – 2,000 years ago. In keeping with America’s enigmatic ways, it’s both a National Natural Landmark and a designated bombing range for the U.S. military. But it’s also home to acres of crop circles in a desert that is prone to dust cyclones. Sounds like a perfect place for a dairy farm.

Below this dusty playa is a vast underground water source. Sometimes. Its replenishment cycle has turned sporadic since large-scale agriculture came here in the 1940s. Before big-ag hit it had enough water to satisfy demand for residents of nearby Tucson for 970 years. And in more recent decades, the effects of climate change have resulted in the nearby mountains getting pounded with rain some years and other years nothing. Farmers are forced to dig deeper and deeper wells to capture a steady supply of water. In 2015 area farmers used four times more water than was being recharged. It’s created a race to the bottom. But digging wells isn’t cheap and the more money you have the deeper you can dig.

Imagine a friend offers to buy a drink to share. They sit down with a tall glass of your favorite icy concoction and then slide you a straw across the table as they dip theirs into the depths of the drink. You plunge yours in and take a long cool draw. Halfway through the drink you realize you’re only siphoning ice melt from the pile of cubes that have become exposed. Meanwhile your friend is happily slurping away from a straw longer than the glass. That’s when you realize your friend gave you a straw shorter than theirs. Some friend.

The farmers in the Willcox basin have built short-straw wells over the years to grow everything from nuts, to cotton, to alfalfa. But many can’t afford to dig deeper. So Riverview swoops in and buys them out. Many are happy to take the money and run, some are hoping Riverview’s money will spill over into the community, and others feel isolated, stressed, and bewildered.

Riverview is taking over the place. A money-rich mega-dairy from Minnesota who showed up with a straw twice as long as their neighbors. More short-straw farmers see wells run dry as desert dust turns green with grain to feed the thousands of Riverview cattle.

To get as much milk out of their cows as possible, operations like Riverview load 90 cows into a carousal that slowly spins in constant motion. Cows enter, get milked as it turns, and then get dropped off. An area that used to get treated to a deep dark night sky lit only by the milky way is now blinded by the light pollution of a 24-7 dairy operation. A water sucking corporate machine who will surely deplete this ancient basin of its water and then move on to the next aquifer. If there are any left.

WAVES OF WATER

You can see why my wife’s cousin, Terri, and her husband, Rick, can’t compete. They’re playing a different game. Having spent some time with them on the farm, I can tell you they have a love and respect for their cows and their land. And they’re proud of the thought somebody down the road, even in another state, is drinking milk they produced. In the presence of factory farming, in an era of ‘go big or go home’, Terri and Rick’s method of dairy farming is receding. That quaint, romantic, idealized grassy farm with a single cow that dairy’s print on their containers is vanishing faster than our water supply. And it will likely not return.

I remember a slogan from an ad campaign paid for by the American Dairy Association that read, “Milk does the body good.” It indeed does. It’s tied with eggs as one of the highest quality, efficient, and micro-nutrient rich foods you can consume. There’s evidence that the earliest domestication of cattle was by nomadic hunter-gatherers who discovered how handy it was to have a food source walk alongside you. Talk about efficient.

Energy we get from cow biproducts is minimal compared to what it takes to generate it.

Feeding livestock requires tons of grain which requires tons of water. In the United States, roughly half of the water for agriculture comes from irrigation and the rest from local ground sources like the aquifer in the Willcox basin. But not all feed can be grown locally, so it’s grown elsewhere and trucked or shipped in. When I was born in 1965, 2.5 million acres of U.S. land was irrigated for corn and soybeans. In 2017 that had grown to 12 million.

California, the country’s biggest milk producer, draws far more water than any other state. But most of that water is drying up. As the West dries up, irrigation moves east.

Nebraska leads the country in the amount of land used for irrigation. California is number two.

But Nebraska is drawing from the Ogallala reservoir. This High Plains aquifer is one of the largest in the world. But it too is getting depleted. Conservation efforts have helped. Programs have been underway for years and together with new genetically modified corn that requires less water, depletion rates have lessened.

Increased in demand is coming from many sources: housing developments, corn and soybean crops, natural gas fracking, and hydraulic drills for oil pipelines to name a few. This, coupled with variation in replenishment rates from climate change, means natural habitat is at risk. A 2017 study used satellite imagery to examine the effects on wildfowl. Measuring multiple years of water inundation during replenishment cycles, they came to this conclusion:

“These results indicated that realized inundation was well below the capacity of the landscape as indicated by maps of potential playas. Thus, even when holding water, the observations here indicated the area of available open-water habitats, for waterfowl, for example, was below the potential capacity described by wetland maps.”

MILKING THE ALTERNATIVES

Back in 2001, Rick and Terri drove their kids across the country in an RV. They passed by 3000 miles of farm country; over the Ogallala and across the arid West to our home in Kirkland, Washington. I was drinking soy milk at the time and had them all try their first swig of the so-called milk. Let’s just say not a single glass was emptied and the kids all looked at me sideways for awhile.

Plant-based milks are growing in popularity, but it’s mostly an elite urban phenomenon right now. And you can bet most of those oat milk drinkers still like their cheese. Most of the milk from Riverview’s tens of thousands of cows goes toward cheese production.

The truth is, we don’t have enough land and water to meet a growing worldwide demand for dairy products. Especially amidst exponential population growth. We’re facing a choice between sliced cheese on a dish or trees and the fish; ice cream in a bowl or a stream that meets the shoal. The Colorado River once rushed into the shoals of the salty Pacific Ocean, but now it runs dry inland in Mexico.  

I can’t say I’m doing very well myself. I’ve reduced my dairy consumption and sometimes make my own Oregon sourced hazelnut ‘milk’, but I’m not fortifying it with the nutrients I get from dairy. And I’ve tried plant-based cheese. It’s not there yet.

Perhaps I shouldn’t beat myself up. Maybe U.S. farmers should stop chasing profits found in lucrative foreign markets and conserve the natural resources this country depends on. Maybe grow more food for people and less food for livestock. More milk and cheese for me please, let them find their own dairy over seas. I now that sounds dogmatic, but maybe it’s just pragmatic. Besides, rainfall is getting sporadic and population growth is dramatic. Meanwhile, the amount of freshwater in the world remains static.

Or maybe I stop hanging on to my Western dairy diet and seek appetizing alternatives. I may be better for it. Remember Rick and Terri’s advice? Gluttonous consumption of dairy can lead to an upset tummy. Greedy consumption of natural resources can lead to an upset global ecosystem. It’s time for a change. Terri and Rick are having to adjust to a new reality that challenges their past, maybe it’s time we all do. Especially companies like Riverview.

Hello Interactors,

What a wild water filled week. From too much water coming too fast to not enough coming too slow, the United States is bearing witness to the schizophrenic behavior of an angry imbalanced ecosystem. Our mother earth isn’t the only one with schizophrenia. The United States, and other eco-wrecking countries, can’t decide if Indigenous people — the historical stewards of this planet — should be silenced and contained or begrudgingly ordained as the knowledge keepers and leaders of how best please our angry mother earth.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

IN COMING

It was eight o’clock on a sunny morning when Kelly Minty Morris received a notification on her phone that read “extreme alert”. A missile was headed straight for her. This must be some mistake, she thought to herself. This was something that she didn’t think of having to deal with in her country. She and her husband were in Hawaii where he was about to compete in a 100 mile trail running endurance race called the HURT100. Missiles can bring a whole new level of hurt; but, as she looked around, to her surprise, nobody was scrambling or panicking. Not even herself. They all believed it must be some kind of blunder.

There is no mistaking that this summer has had its fair share of climate scares. The Northeast have had nothing but rain all summer. Just this week New York’s Central Park was dowsed with six inches of rain in as many hours. A once in a 500 year event.

The Northeast continues to be battered by wind and rain killing over a dozen people in its path. It’s the fallout of hurricane Ida, the fifth most severe hurricane on record, that slammed Louisiana’s coast earlier in the week but was barely phased by its landfall. Now a new hurricane is brewing as climatologists predict a 60% chance that more extreme hurricanes will follow this year.

Meanwhile, water in the west is wanting. California’s fires have claimed two million acres. Ten percent of the sequoia population was taken by a single fire; trees that have been on this planet for thousands of years – gone. It’s so dry in southern Oregon’s Klamath valley that wells are drying up. Homeowners are having to drive for their water. The county has ordered cisterns from as far away as Oklahoma, but are running up against shortages of rain barrels due to choked supply chains and increased demand.

Kelly Minty Morris sat for a half an hour, there in Hawaii, fretting. But she was more concerned with the lackadaisical response to an incoming ballistic missile than the actual damage it may inflict. “It really did feel surreal,” she said. “I wasn’t panicking, I wasn’t anxious, I wasn’t upset, my brain kept telling me, ‘This can’t be real, this can’t be real.’” And then it happened. Another text buzzed her phone. The alert was a mistake. A state employee had pushed the wrong button. I suspect that’s a former state employee.

Kelly left that incident reflecting on the collective apathy she witnessed. She began to wonder what it would take to get people to actually act in the face of an emergency. Upon her return home to Oregon, she vowed as a Klamath County Commissioner to put steps in place that encourage people in her area to respond appropriately to an emergency. She said, “You don’t want to be waiting for an actual emergency to then figure out what you should have done.”

KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN

The Klamath valley has seen its fair share of emergencies, but every generation seems surprised. And sometimes apathetic. The first occupants of this area were the Klamath Tribes: the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin-Paiute people. They were sometimes referred to as mukluks or numu – the people. People, while differentiated by name, are still animals. And like our multi-legged, finned, scaled, and winged companions, we are an integral part of the environment. This was, and remains, a pan-Indigenous concept that deserves reminding. The Klamath Tribes embraced this belief in a shared communal slogan, “naanok ?ans naat sat’waYa naat ciiwapk diceew’a “We help each other; We will live good”

These people did live well. For thousands of years area bands and tribes — bound by loyalty and family — fished, hunted, farmed, and ranched the land in a perpetual act of reciprocity that respected and honored the land and its occupants. From the marshy banks of Oregon’s Klamath Lake and up the Sprague Valley, south along the rivers feeding California’s Lower Klamath Lake, across the lava beds and all the way down to Shasta Mountain, the Klamath tribes prided themselves on their industriousness.

But by the 1800s, the word industrious took on a different tenor. The industrialist fueled American imperialism swaggered on to the scene with their own slogan: No thanks, we’ll help ourselves; so that we will live good.

In 1826 The Hudson Bay Company trappers invaded Klamath territories and conflicts ensued. By 1838, the company had made maps of the region making it easier for John C. Frémont to lead an expedition into the area in 1843 as part of the country’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

If you’ve even been to California, you probably have seen Fremont’s name. In addition to the city of Fremont in northern California, there are dozens of streets and places that bear his name. He was a civil war general; one of four appointed by Abraham Lincoln. He was also the first nominee to run for presidential office by the Republican party. But he was decommissioned by the military in 1856 for his ‘unorthodox ways’.

Ten years prior, on April 6, 1846, Fremont massacred between 120-200 Indigenous people on the Sacramento River. A month later, May 12, 1846, led by his trusty scout Kit Carson, they raided a Klamath village killing over fourteen people. Kit Carson had been killing and scalping Indigenous people from Colorado to California for nearly twenty years by this point. His first was when he was nineteen years old in 1828.

After two decades of wars waged against the Klamath Tribes by the United States, they agreed to a treaty in 1864. In exchange for the 22 million acres these people had cared for over thousands of years and for hundreds of generations, the United States granted them the right to continue to hunt, fish, and gather within a designated 1.2 million acre reservation. Less than one tenth of their land. The treaty also included rights to the water.

Article 6 of the treaty read:

“To each head of a family shall be assigned and granted a tract of not less than forty nor more than one hundred and twenty acres, according to the number of persons in such family; and to each single man above the age of twenty-one years a tract not exceeding forty acres.”

The treaty was ratified in 1870. With a signature at the bottom of a string of legalese I can barely understand, these people lost nearly 99 percent of their land and ancestral heritage.

The dispossession created tension between the Klamath and Modoc leading to the Modoc War between 1872-73. The Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin people mostly remained loyal to one another; and they remained industrious. As part of the treaty, the United States agreed to provide services and support aimed at assimilating these native people into Western culture and livelihoods. Article 5 of the treaty states:

“The United States further engage to furnish and pay for the services and subsistence, for the term of fifteen years, of one superintendent of farming operations, one farmer, one blacksmith, one sawyer, one carpenter, and one wagon and plough maker, and for the term of twenty years of one physician, one miller, and two school-teachers.”

Elders encouraged young people to learn the new ways of living and farming; including farming timber. By 1870 they constructed a lumber mill and began selling timber back to settlers. They even sold lumber to the United States to build Fort Klamath – a U.S. military outpost used to deter attacks from Indigenous people on encroaching settlers.

KILL THE TRIBES, STEAL THEIR MONEY

By the 1950s the Klamath Tribes became one of the most prosperous tribes in America. In keeping with their traditional ways, they owned, managed, and sustained the largest stand of Ponderosa Pine in the West. Driven by a self-sufficient determinism millennia old, they were the only tribe to make enough money to pay the United States Government for the services their people utilized.  

But their success made them a target. The 1950s marked the beginning of the Cold War as communist paranoia swept through the United States. The reservation system the government had thrust upon Indigenous people was suddenly deemed communist. These people, and their alien ways, were seen as anti-American. Worse yet, most tribes were dependent on a central government – clear evidence of communism. This is the same central government that stole their land, attempted genocide, and forced the remaining survivors onto reservations.

America was also building highways at this time and needed land; they were selling cars and needed oil; they were building atomic bombs and needed uranium; and they needed money to fund wartime debt and nation building of countries we had destroyed or help to destroy in two World Wars.

The United States surveyed the country in search of valuable land and resources and the reservations and treaties they had invented were getting in the way. They needed that land to tax, sell, and exploit for natural resources and money. In the words of former Cheyenne Senator from Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell:

“In Washington’s infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years.”

In 1952 the House of Representatives issued Joint Resolution 698 which called for a list of tribes to be terminated. The focus was first on tribes that had demonstrated self-sufficiency, had been adequately acculturated, and were willing to accept the termination of federal assistance.

The Klamath Tribes stood out. Having demonstrated just how profitable their land could be, it was time the United States took even more than they had a century prior.

On August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was issued by the United States Congress announcing the official federal policy of termination. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Klamath Tribes. Included were the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas.

Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands, 11,500 Indigenous people lost their native legal status, and over one million acres of land lost its trust status. Not a single tribe has improved economically since, while corporations have profited handsomely.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon – an unlikely preacher of morality and legality – issued this statement of repudiation to Congress:

“Because termination is morally and legally unacceptable, because it produces bad practical results, and because the mere threat of termination tends to discourage greater self-sufficiency among Indian groups, I am asking the Congress to pass a new Concurrent Resolution which would expressly renounce, repudiate and repeal the termination policy as expressed in House Concurrent Resolution 108 of the 83rd Congress.”

Since the end of termination, as of 2013, “78 of the 113 terminated tribes have been recognized again by the United States government and 35 now have casinos; 24 of these tribes are now considered extinct; 10 have state recognition but not federal recognition; and 31 are without land.

GAMBLING OUR EXISTENCE

In 1974, a Federal Court ruled the right of the Klamath Tribes to their Treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather. They also ordered that the tribe be consulted on land management matters that may infringe on their Treaty rights. In 1986 the Reagan administration restored their Federal recognition, but did not return their land. They were then asked to come up with a plan for how to remain self-sufficient if they were to remain in the area.

They were determined to honor their commitment to their ancestors who, like them, cared for the land they lived on for thousands of years. And already demonstrating their ability to coexist with colonial settlers, they also wanted to adhere to their belief, “We help each other; We will live good.” So they proposed building a casino.

In 1997, 45 years after termination, and the Reagan administration’s approval allowing tribal casinos, they opened the doors to the Kla-Mo-Ya Casino. While casinos indeed infuse money and resources into challenged tribal communities, there’s also evidence casinos lead to gambling addictions – especially among economically vulnerable residents – including aging tribal elders.

The Klamath Tribes water rights are front and center as wells run dry in the Klamath River basin. For millennia, people of the Klamath Tribes celebrated the return of fish in the spring after long harsh winters had drained their food supplies. Two of the most prominent species they welcomed home were the c’waam and koptu – also known as Lost River and suckers.

Since 1991, the number of juvenile c’waam has all but vanished. In recent years, Klamath tribal biologists have begun a program to rebuild their populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started their own program in 2018. But it may be too late. Over 75% of the fish habitat is lost. Dams have reduced their territory, runoff from agricultural chemicals have polluted the waters, and irrigation systems have drained the marshes they need to survive. The same marshes the Klamath people had cared for and depended on for generations – alongside their finned friends.

The federal government has been working with the tribe to rehabilitate the marshes by pulling water from the lake. But with extreme drought conditions, there’s little water to go around.

As residents and ranchers see their wells and irrigation pipes dry up, they’re calling on the government to release more water from the lake. But both the state of Oregon and the U.S. Federal Government have determined the Klamath Tribe has superior rights to the water. The last time conflict over water rose to this level was back in 2001. That was when three White men drove through a local town firing 12-gauge shotguns yelling, “SUCKER LOVERS.” The local sheriff called it an act of terrorism.

Surely Klamath County Commissioner, Kelly Minty Morris, has prepared her community for this “extreme alert." I’m afraid not. Once again, Kelley has been taken off guard echoing the same words she used just three years prior when dealing with the thought of an airborne missile attack. “This is something that you don't really think of having to deal with in a country like ours," said Klamath County Commissioner Kelley Minty Morris. "It's unimaginable to me even though it's going on right in my community."

Having to drive for water is not something people like Kelley are accustom to, but the descendants of this land’s caretakers have been doing it for hundreds of years. Just ask residents of America’s largest nation within our nation, the Navajo Nation. To combat the spread of Covid-19 that ravished this area, hand washing stations were installed that people had to drive or walk to just to wash their hands.

It can take two hours to drive to the nearest voting box in Navajo Nation. But that didn’t keep the U.S. Supreme Court from recently upholding voting rights legislation in Arizona that will make it even harder for these people to cast a vote for change. The judges 6-3 vote claimed a two hour drive doesn’t exceed the “usual burdens of voting.” That’s what systemic racism looks like.

I don’t mean to diminish the suffering of people in Klamath County, including Commissioner Morris. Human suffering knows no history, social standing, or ethnicity. After all, some of the ranchers and residents who need the water are also Klamath Tribal members.

Water will become increasing scarce in the arid West. It’s time we stop pretending we can build more housing developments, plant more lawns, water thirsty crops, feed more cattle, frack more gas, green more greens, sprinkle more sprinklers, or build more dams. It’s clear the climate will change faster than our behavior, but we don’t have time.

The recent IPCC report highlights water as a pressing global issue. It warns that in addition to increased rainfall like we’ve seen in parts of the United States recently, droughts will also increase in some regions, fire weather will become more frequent, and oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds will become warmer and more acidic.

Since 1991, the Stockholm International Water Institute has been studying water governance, transboundary water management, water and climate change, the water-energy-food nexus, and water economics around the world. They remind us that by 2050, our plant could be home to 10 billion people. Even as populations grow, the amount of freshwater remains constant. Here are five ways they recommend we avert a global water crisis:

* VALUE WATER

If we increase the value of water, we will reduce use and pollution. All sectors of society must learn to manage water in a way that strengthens the water cycle.

* SHARE WATER

Competition over water will only increase, so we need to manage it together. The better prepared we are for erratic rainfall, droughts, and floods the better we can handle the fallout.

* TRANSFORM AGRICULTURE

Agriculture must be massively transformed. To avoid mass hunger from degraded lands, we need to make freshwater available for alternative uses – food production practices today account for 70 per cent of freshwater withdrawals. Those practices are the main drivers of water pollution and global warming.

* RESTORE ECOSYSTEMS

A mass extinction of species, like the threatened c’waam, koptu, and salmon, could threaten human existence. We depend on healthy ecosystems for food, water, and livelihoods. By protecting and restoring ecosystems we can limit climate change, stop the loss of biodiversity, and improve water security.

* BUILD RESILIENCE

Droughts, heat waves, floods, and rainstorms are expected to become more frequent and more severe. All sectors of society need to redesign for resilience. Communities that protect their local watersheds and manage forests in a way that improves groundwater recharge tackle several of the world’s greatest challenges simultaneously.

It’s taken a team of Western educated PhDs and three hundred years of ‘enlightenment’ to arrive at five things the Indigenous populations around the world have known for thousands of years. We chose, and continue to choose, to silence them. But the tide is turning.

I’m convinced, as these Swedes are, that a combination of traditional knowledge and new science, technology, and invention will yield the best path forward for managing our global climatic conundrums. But we can’t just tech our way out of this. We’re going to have to change our food habits, reduce extractions, eliminate commercial and consumer waste, and overhaul the global food system.

The dam has been cracked, but it needs to be broken wide open. All living organisms depend on water. They depend on us. Let’s listen to the ancient words of the Klamath people: When we help each other, we will all live well. Expanding on the words of Kelley Minty Morris: we don’t want to be waiting for the edge of human extinction to then figure out what we should have done to avoid it.  

Hello Interactors,

I spent this week listening to my favorite Rolling Stones songs and fretting over whether democratic infighting in Washington would end our best, and perhaps only, hope of climate change legislation. I can’t get no satisfaction and my sympathy for the devil is wearing thin. I hate to be the beast of burden, but can somebody gimme shelter?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MAINTAINING ORDER

The drummer for the Rolling Stones, Charlie Watts, passed away this week at 80 years old. The Stones have been around longer than I have and Charlie was their only drummer. He was never the flamboyant type, seeking drum solos or surrounding himself with racks of drums to satisfy some insatiable percussive proclivity. He just sat there in his suit doing his job – keeping rhythm for a singer who dances like he has ants in his pants.

Drummers never get the credit they deserve. They live in the shadows of vanity seeking vocalists and guitarists grasping for glamour. They’re always the brunt of sinister jokes about lacking the intelligence or talent to play a ‘real instrument’; so they’re stuck beating sticks on thin bouncy membranes stretched over cylindrical cannisters.

But having played in bands with no drummer, I can tell you it’s no fun. It’s hard to find drummers, and even harder to keep them. I wonder if Mick and the boys knew how good they had it? Keeping a beat is no easy feat. A good bass player helps, and while we’re all drawn to a pleasantly sounding harmony, it’s the lowly drummer who sets tone. Without a steady beat, music quickly unravels into a chaotic cacophonic calamity.

The world could use a drummer right about now. Nature, humans, society, and the climate have lost the beat. After decades of operating in regular 4/4 time, with occasional key changes or transitions to alternating rhythms, the universe has devolved into a seemingly extended random free-form improvisation. Pure chaos. How does this happen?

Learning new songs with a band hints at how it unravels. Humming along and feeling good about yourself, out of no where some band member misses a chord or drifts off beat. Everyone starts glancing around at each other in search of the culprit as you sense it getting worse. As the piano player and band leader, I’d sometimes start to pound my keys a little harder — emphasizing the beat in the process. Kind of like speaking louder and with a DIS-TINCT CA-DENCE TO SOME-ONE WHO DOES NOT SPEAK YOUR LANG-UAGE in hopes they’ll suddenly clue in.

But invariably another band mate would follow my lead and start playing louder to match my increasing volume. The next thing you know the drummer does too. It’s hard to play drums loud and slow, so the pace of the song quickens. Each change from one single individual results in corresponding feedback from other individuals in the group; that, in turn, induces more reactions from individuals – a dynamical system in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Soon things evolve into a loud frenetic chaos. That’s when you understand how punk music was born.

Eventually everyone realizes that while playing fast, loose, and loud is fun for awhile it’s also exhausting and futile. Especially when learning songs like the sanguine but melancholy jazz standard, My Funny Valentine. We managed to learn enough songs to be hired for a wedding once, but we’d joke that music critics probably would have slotted us somewhere between jazz, R&B, and comedy.

Many classic jazz standards start out steadily predictable, but then cascade into chaotic frenzied solos that pass from one instrument to the other. I suspect even the subdued Charlie Watts took his turn soloing in his early days as a jazz drummer. Another standard of jazz standards is to collectively return to the steady state of the song’s uniform pattern played in unison — restoring order after the disturbance.

Many jazz conventions are rooted in the 12-bar Blues. Blues is recognized as blues, and jazz as jazz, because there are strict underlying rules governing the controlled creative chaos of soundwaves emanating from instruments and vocal chords. The Rolling Stones knew as much. That’s why Mick Jagger described their work on the 1972 album, Exile on Main St., as "runaway outlaws using the blues as its weapon against the world.” That album took the world by storm and is the highest ranking Stones album on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. That’s one storm nobody could have predicted.

THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR

That same year, 1972, MIT mathematician and meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, published a paper on the challenges of predicting storms titled, Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas? His paper was the first to describe chaos theory. And the premise of his paper’s title has been shortened to what we now call the Butterfly Effect. Poetically, a certain set of values in an equation that exhibits a concept central to chaos theory called a strange attractor yields a plot that resembles a butterfly.

While studying mathematical models of weather systems, he discovered one small change in these dynamical systems could result in disproportionate and unforeseen effects. It was a major discovery. Chaos theory is believed by some to rank up there with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics as three of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century.

His research showed prediction of dynamical systems is dependent on an initial condition. He posited the gentle small flap of a butterfly’s wings could be an initial condition that could lead to a massively destructive typhoon on the other side of the globe. That’s not to say weather systems actually work this way, but his point was no meteorologist can accurately predict the weather without first knowing the initial condition of the weather system.

When our band would spiral into chaos, it was the result of some initial event; a band member playing too slowly or quickly, off melody, out of tune, or a myriad of other mitigating circumstances. It could have even been the locally brewed Hefeweizen we were drinking or the spicy green curry we sometimes ate before practice at the hole-in-the-wall Thai place down the street.

Dynamical systems are complex systems that change over time and are fundamental to chaos theory;  weather systems are just one example. We are surrounded by dynamical systems. Our own bodies are dynamical. Ecosystems, societies, companies, local, state, provincial and national governments, continental regions, and global institutions all exhibit elements of dynamical systems.

And like members of a band playing from the same sheet music, they don’t stand on their own in isolation, but instead are connected and bonded through mutual interactions. They influence each other and are in-turn influenced. But complex systems are also self-healing systems. If a single component is removed, the system can carry on. Just as many bands do when they lose a drummer.

People who study complex dynamical systems, like Lorenz did, use mathematical models – equations that represent a simplified model of real phenomena – to simulate the behavior of these systems. One such model is called a logistic model.

Not to be confused with military or freight logistics, this word was offered by the Belgian mathematician, Pierre François Verhulst in 1845. He presumably chose the word logistic to both contrast and relate it with the more well known term logarithmic which he used to describe a curve that today we’d call an exponential curve – a curve that shows a greater increase in growth over time.

A logistic curve appears ‘log-like’ or ‘log-ish’ in its appearance because it starts out looking like an exponential curve but then flattens out over time. Some believe Verhulst merged log with istic the same way we merge simple with istic to form the word simplistic, hence the word logistic. But by now some of you are thinking, “Brad, nothing about this is simplistic and the growth of my confusion is growing exponentially over time. At what point does my confusion level out and become more logistic?” Not yet, I’m afraid.

Logistic models can be used to simulate population growth, just as Verhulst was when he discovered it. Human populations around the world are growing exponentially and aren’t expected to level off until 2050 or 2060. Non-linear population growth is hard to fathom. The only compound growth we seem to relate to are our savings accounts. But with disappointingly low interest rates, even those are hard to imagine growing.

There’s also the issue of carrying capacity in studying population growth. Limited space and resources impact growth rates. So do viral diseases like COVID-19 – a deadly nonlinear dynamical system that is so dumbfounding that even the most reasoned people refuse to take steps to stunt its growth.

Epidemiologists, biologists, demographers, pathologists, economists, and climatologists all use mathematical models, and other elements of chaos theory and complexity science, to find patterns amidst what appears to be random disturbances within these dynamical systems.

In the 1980s two scientists expanded on the work of Lorenz’s logistic model. Lord Robert May, a theoretical biologist, and Mitchell Feigenbaum, a theoretical physicist, discovered a way to map variables of the logistic model to create a simple equation that when iterated over time can predictably display chaos. It was a discovery that displaced Newton’s idea that the universe operates like clockwork in an infinitely predictable fashion.

A universe that ends in chaos sounds scary. Learning that dynamical systems are mathematically proven to yield chaos makes good ole’ mother earth seem more like a tyrannical erratic witch. The work of the devil. But what May and Feigenbaum discovered, as did the French team of Pierre Collet and Charles Tresser a year later, is there is order to be found in the chaos.

They were able to mathematically determine the rate at which predictable patterns of disruption reorganize until the next point of disturbance. The time between these self-healing disturbances become shorter over time leading to what is called ‘the edge of chaos’ — the strange attractor. After which, predictability vanishes into chaos.

If I had a recording of our band spinning into chaos learning a new tune, I suspect I could probably predict when we were on the edge of chaos. But while we could all feel those moments of disturbance that returned to a steady state, and even the edge of chaos, there is no way we could have predicted them in the moment. Given the frequency of climate calamities, it sure feels like we’re approaching the edge of chaos, even if we can’t predict when.

THE TIPPING POINT

The abrupt change that occurs after the edge of chaos can sometimes be called a tipping point. The Paris Agreement includes a series of legally binding pledges various countries have taken to avoid a climatic tipping point. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), refer to the tipping point like this:

“An abrupt change is defined in this report as a change that takes place substantially faster than the rate of change in the recent history of the affected component of a system. In some cases, abrupt change occurs because the system state actually becomes unstable, such that the subsequent rate of change is independent of the forcing. We refer to this class of abrupt change as a tipping point, defined as a critical threshold beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly.”

When you hear reports like this of researchers using models to predict the effects of climate change, many of them are using these same techniques. Building models that more accurately simulate the real world offers better predictions of how long we have between periods of self-stabilization on a potential path to chaos.

The good news is improvements in large scale computing power enables nests of multi-variate differential equations to be calculated faster than ever. But some argue the divergence from the historical norm is often so great, that using the past to predict the future may be futile.

This graph of the recent Tennessee flood shows the time it took to achieve record flood levels over the last 1000 years. These record rainfalls were measured over a two day period. This area of the state reached a ‘once in a thousand years’ flood of 13 inches in just eight hours. By the end of the second day of measuring, it had peaked at a new record high of 17 inches.

We’re in a race between using mathematical models that leverage events of the past to understanding what’s happening to us now, and perhaps the future edge of chaos. But current events are nothing like we find in the past. This makes it all the more necessary and urgent to turn the Paris pledges into American action.

Step one is to pass the budget reconciliation bill the Democrats were hashing out this week. It includes most of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, including the recent bipartisan infrastructure package out of the Senate. We may have lost Charlie Watts, but our elected officials have a chance to get the beat back. This package includes what is needed for us to meet our end of the Paris Agreement and hopefully return to some kind of climatic stability. If not, we face the edge of climatic chaos – the tipping point.

Future generations will look back at this week and either credit us with being sinners or saints. I’m reminded of a Rolling Stones tune Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote off of the 1968 album, Beggars Banquet. It’s a song I sang with my buddies one summer nearly a decade after its release called Sympathy for the Devil. Mick sings in the first person as the devil; a metaphor for the historical devilish British behavior as he chronicles throughout the song. But, the mention of the Kennedy’s reveals the sentiment extends overseas to the Yanks as well.

The first verse introduces the devil embodied as a stereotypical Christian colonial capitalist. The final verse exits with a vision of a hellish wasteland of chaos the devil is willing to inflict if we don’t do some serious reflecting, repenting, restraining, and repairing. We need to restore the natural earthly rhythms, or else. It goes like this:

Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of wealth and taste

I've been around for a long, long year

Stole many a man's soul and faith

I was 'round when Jesus Christ

Had his moment of doubt and pain

Made damn sure that Pilate

Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Just as every cop is a criminal

And all the sinners saints

As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer

'Cause I'm in need of some restraint

So if you meet me, have some courtesy

Have some sympathy, and some taste

Use all your well-learned politesse

Or I'll lay your soul to waste

Hello Interactors,

It’s been a troubling week in international news as we all watched Afghanistan unravel. That country has been through a lot over the last two decades and centuries; most of which is due to Western invasion and intervention. To make matters worse, the effects of climate change are compounding their problems. I hope we can learn how to better help, they’re going to need it.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GOING SOLAR

Soon after absorbing the tragic scenes in Afghanistan this week, I was reminded of an article I read around this time last year. It was about successful deployments of solar technology by poor Afghan farmers to pump water from desert wells to grow crops. Afghanistan ranks among the lowest on the Global Adaptation Index making them one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. As if they needed more problems.

Solar energy can be transformational, even when deployed at small scales. We’re not talking about massive solar farms plastering the desert paid for by corporations, governments, or non-governmental organizations (NGO) through some kind of ‘Go-Green’ initiative. These are installations by rural farmers struggling to survive. The first remote solar array was notice back in 2013, but soon local towns were piled high with solar panels.

The panels are not cheap. Seed money usually comes from a dowry – money given from a bride’s family to the groom at the time of marriage – which is roughly $7,000. A single solar panel costs $5,000, so it’s a big chunk of money. But the panel pays for itself in just two years. They simply set it up, plug it into the provided pump, kick aside the old, expensive, and troublesome diesel motor and watch the water come streaming out of their well.

The number of solar panels has doubled every year since 2012 tapping wells far into the desert. By 2019 there were over 67,000 installations dotting a single narrow region in southern Afghanistan. And for every diesel conversion to solar comes an increase in productivity. The blue areas of these maps show less productive cultivation and light green as more productive. In addition to the increase in the number of farms, you can also see an increase in yield. Their success attracts even more people to the desert. Between 2012 and 2019, 48,000 new homes were built. Increased competition for a water supply that climate change has already diminished, the introduction of solar pumps has started a countdown clock as to when they’ll all run out of water.

Which, in one way, may be a good thing. While one of the crops farmers choose to grow in the desert are sun hungry plants like tomatoes, their main, and most profitable crop, is opium. The majority of opium is refined to make heroin. Afghanistan is the world’s leader in opium production making it the leading source of heroin, one of the most illicit addictive drugs there is. And this region of Afghanistan, Helmand, produces 80% of the Afghan supply to the world. Most of it to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Before solar entered the fray in 2013, Afghanistan was producing 3,700 tons of opium a year. By 2017, a record year, their production nearly tripled to 9,000 tons. It created a glut in the market and prices fell, reducing production among farmers still on the more expensive diesel pumps. Meanwhile, solar farmers continued to produce and profit at 2017 levels.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED : MISSION ADMONISHED

The opium market has been growing in Afghanistan since the 1990s, with the exception of one outlying year – 2001. That was the last time the Taliban took control and one of their many bans was on growing opium.

When the United States infamously invaded Afghanistan in 2002, opium production quickly bounced back to pre-Taliban levels, and has been growing since. England joined in the invasion, in part to curb the supply of heroin to the UK and other parts of Europe. They’ve found that as production of opium increases, the demand for heroin also increases; and with it crime as addicts resort to breaking and entering and aggravated assault to fund their habit. England’s biggest war casualties occurred in the region of Helmand, the world’s hotbed of opium and the country’s highest concentration of solar panels.

What a bitter twist of wartime irony this is. Britain was the first country from the West to invade Afghanistan in the mid-1800s; in part to increase the production and trade of opium to the Chinese through the East India Company as part of the Opium Wars between Great Britain and China.

Opium in China was first used for medicinal purposes, but by 1840 millions of Chinese were addicted. The United States saw this as an opportunity and a few decades later were dropping cigarettes from airplanes in China in an effort to supplant the Chinese addiction to opium with an addiction to nicotine. Journalist and East Asian writer, John Pomfret, notes that in the

“1890s, only a few people smoked. By 1933, the Chinese were puffing on a hundred billion cigarettes a year, more than any other nation except the United States.”

Great Britain invaded Afghanistan from India, a country they colonized a century earlier. Still smarting from their failure to gain control in the Americas, they reluctantly turned to the east. To conquer Afghanistan, they enlisted poor Indians as low ranking infantry and invaded Afghanistan in 1839. The British claim they were fearful the Russians would take control of this strategic trading route, but Afghans on the ground tell a different story. It seems what the British were really worried about was parts of India being invaded by growing numbers of Persians and Afghans who opposed British imperialism.

Indians put up a fight when England invaded India, just as Indigenous Americans did. Afghanistan was no different. War is ugly by any dimension, but the Europeans (and Americans) have an established reputation among victims of invasion for being particularly ruthless. Much attention is given to the atrocious behavior of the Taliban against women, but very little to none is given to how British, and their low ranking Indian infantrymen, treated women upon invading Afghanistan. Women of this region were formidable fighters during this time, leading thousands in battle and inspiring many more through poetry to take arms in defense of their homeland from encroaching colonial imperialists.

In 2018, Farrukh Husain, a Muslim Afghan history researcher, published a book called Afghanistan in the Age of Empires: The Great Game for South and Central Asia. It is one of the few, if not only, books written by a Muslim Afghan for a Western audience about the history of this region as told from someone with ancestral ties to these events. He reveals the power and leadership Afghan women held in those days. He writes of a battle near Helmand, where solar panels now dot the desert,

“…no contemporary author has written about the first such charge by a burka clad woman against the British, during May 1842, to avenge her husband’s death at the head of thousands of Afghans, which took place…in…Helmand.”

One month later, on June 17, 1842, British Brigadier General Thomas Monteath led troops into a peaceful remote village called Ali Baghan where they proceeded to rape and plunder.

The English language newspaper out of Calcutta, India, the Bengal Hurkaru, reported,

“To ravage and burn villages, and to violate the women inhabiting them, are not precisely the best measures calculated to restore the honour of Great Britain. We talk about national disgrace, and begin ravaging villages and violating helpless women, as though any misfortunes could disgrace us so irredeemably as these crimes.  A miserable hamlet about six miles from Jellalabad, on the Peshawaur side, is assailed by a brigade of British troops, who happen to find some accoutrements belonging to the men of the 44th; the village was given up to plunder, the women were violated, and the tenements burned.“

Atrocities like this and violence against women continue to this day in Afghanistan. The United States is no better as evidenced by the methods of torture throughout the United State’s so-called ‘War on Terror’. And while we continue to be bombarded with stories through Western media about how the United States was in Afghanistan helping to liberate Afghan women, I suggest you read this May 2021 article by Farrukh Husain as an alternative and local narrative.

Or if you have trouble trusting a Muslim Afghan man writing on Afghan women, check out this bit of ethnographic research from Dr. Teresa Koloma Beck, called Liberating the Women of Afghanistan: An ethnographic journey through a humanitarian intervention where she asserts the West’s

“humanitarian engagement further politicized the category of gender and, hence, amplified its importance. Yet, as in other places of the world, it also served to perform and reproduce ideal-typical images of the Western Self.”

CLIMATE MATTERS MORAL TATTERS

Climate change is expected to bring more unrest to Afghanistan and areas like it around the world. One report from the United State’s National Institute of Health reports, “both short-term shocks, such as natural disasters and associated losses of livelihood opportunities, as well as longer-term stressors, such as growing scarcity of resources associated with drought, can increase the risk of instability.” That instability can include armed conflict, as evidence by one Syrian conflict that “at least partially driven by drought, has, estimated conservatively, resulted in over 143,000 deaths as of 2016.”

These poor countries will need the help of rich countries if we care at all about saving the lives of humans and non-humans alike. But the West has to reckon with our past if we’re to be trusted with the future. We’re not very good at owning up to our mistakes or rubbing our own noses in the atrocities we inflicted on innocent people through an unbridled need to perpetuate our greed. Claiming moral superiority while killing people already suffering the effects of climate change – as Obama did with over 540 drone strikes during his presidency – should make us pause and reflect on our ethical standing. Whether it’s in the name of God or in pursuit of gold, the United States (and many other countries, clans, and conquerors) have a way of conveniently justifying colonial conquest, rape, abduction, torture, slavery, or genocide.

The 18th century English feminist writer and philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft, put it efficiently and accurately when she wrote:

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, which is the good he seeks.”

To sell our message of ‘good’, the United States also has what our victims of evil don’t have; a well crafted and well funded media machine – spanning the political spectrum – to lull the masses into a sometimes angry and sometimes celebrated, numbing complicity. But like any addiction, the more you feed it the harder it is to break. And this country, and our military, is addicted to aggression.

But Norway is one country that is taking a step back. As current chairs of the UN Security Council they issued a public statement on the recent plight of Afghanistan on August 16th asking the international community to be “willing and able to relate to, co-operate with, and support a future, new Afghan government in which the Taliban participates.”

But long before that, sensing the confluence of social and climate induced unrest and reflecting the West’s track record on foreign interventions, the Norwegian Minister of International Development funded research to better understand the successes and failures of climate mitigation strategies and efforts from the West. Their report titled, Adaptation Interventions and Their Effect on Vulnerability in Developing Countries: Help, Hindrance or Irrelevance?, came out in May of this year.

The study’s highlights read like this:

* “Adaptation interventions may reinforce, redistribute or create new vulnerability.

* Retrofitting adaptation into existing development agendas risks maladaptation.

* Overcoming these challenges demands engaging more deeply with the local context of vulnerability.

* Real involvement of marginalised groups is required to improve use of climate finance.

* Unless adaptation is rethought, transformation may also worsen vulnerability.”

What they found among the 60 internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability are four consistent themes:

*        Shallow understanding of the context of local vulnerability;

*        Inequitable stakeholder participation in both design and implementation;

*        A retrofitting of adaptation into existing development agendas;

*        A lack of critical engagement with how ‘adaptation success’ is defined.

Inequality is evident everywhere we look: income, race, religion, gender, social status, cultural norms, transportation, and so many more. Add to that environmental inequality. What these researchers concluded is that unless we start by first focusing on equality, no amount of government, private, or corporate funding of technological or financial fixes will matter. For example, building a sea wall, dam, or dike to stem flooding rivers or rising seas can easily be celebrated and manipulated into appearing to make progress on climate change. But if those efforts steal water from an Indigenous tribe, or limit physical access to schools of disadvantaged families, then simply throwing money at them or subsidizing a move to the city does not constitute an equitable solution that is sensitive to their local context of vulnerability. But it’s easy to see where such engineering feats would fit an existing corporate or governmental agenda, possibly even win sustainability awards, or get endorsed by a Western celebrity complete with a selfie that goes viral.

Don’t get me wrong, getting solar technology scaled to the point where a poor Afghan farmer could afford it is a marvel of technology and a demonstration of the positive effects of innovation in free-market capitalism. But if it also results in the increase of heroin worldwide, how can we feel good about the outcome? The vast majority of heroin in the United States doesn’t come from Afghanistan, it comes from the deserts of Mexico where surely solar pumps are also being sold. In 2018, marijuana sold for $80 per kilogram in the United States. Meanwhile, heroin sold for $35,000 per kilogram. What would it take to persuade those Mexican farmers to grow vegetables instead of opium? And what kind of moral standing can America have as we lead the world in drug disorders and are the number one consumer of opioids – with heroin as the second leading cause of overdose behind pain relievers.

Afghan women are number two behind United States women in drug disorders. Is that what we mean when we claim we liberated Afghan women? Few women in Afghanistan, especially under Taliban rule, have access to their own land; a clear inequality that needs addressed. But there was a bright spot for Afghan women and farming in recent years in a good example of what appears to be a more equitable climate intervention.

Ghuncha Gul, and Afghan farmer, always dreamed of owning her own farm. With the help of the United Nations Development Program she fulfilled that dream in 2018 by offering her training, land, and resources for her own greenhouse and beehives. Her village friends now affectionately call her ‘honey’ عسل.  She proudly admitted,

“Women in villages work just as hard as men. In fact, we work alongside the men." Two hundred years ago, she just may have been leading the men.

As money wielding climate adaptation efforts take shape by the privileged and powerful around the world, let’s ensure people like Ghuncha are given equal rights and their knowledge and customs are understood and respected. In the process of co-designing and implementing climate adaptation strategies in the context of local inhabitants of their land, let’s also make sure we leave the exchange more enlightened than the Age of Enlightenment, more righteous than Western imperialism, and more informed than the Western propaganda machines leave us believing we are. Maybe if we do, these people will return the favor when we discover our own crisis have left us equally, if not more, vulnerable.

Hello Interactors,

This has been an eventful week, but also a week of more extreme heat and smoke. Just when climatologists warned of the certainty of more extreme weather patterns. I’m ready for fall and we’re barely halfway through summer. My plants are struggling too. Does anybody out there know how we’re going to adapt?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE RIGHT TURNS LEFT FOR RIGHTS

Monday of this week, August 9th, was International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Did you know that? What about Tuesday, August 10th. That was the anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt in what we now call New Mexico. In 1680, the Pueblo people forced 2000 Spanish colonial settlers off their land. Given this was the first example of American people rejecting European rule, some consider this to be America’s first Revolutionary War – nearly 100 years before the more popular version. Oh, and on Wednesday, August 11th my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. But even fewer people know about that historical date.

The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples was created by the United Nations in 1994. The date honors August 9th, 1982; the first day of meetings for the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations. This group’s mandate was to:

* Promote and protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Indigenous peoples;

* Give attention to the evolution of international standards concerning Indigenous rights.

August 9th celebrates the achievements and contributions Indigenous people have made, and continue to make, to governance, stewardship of the environment, and knowledge systems aimed at improving many of the challenges our world’s environment’s face today.

Indigenous people make up 5% of the world’s population and use one quarter of its habitable surface. But, they protect in reciprocity 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

The UN defines Indigenous People as:

“Inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment.”

The United Nations’ recognition of the sovereign rights of Indigenous people stems from the International Indian Treaty Council which grew out of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s and 70s. The United Nations recognized the rights of Indigenous people before the United States did. In fact, when the United Nations put the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to vote in 2007, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia voted against the declaration. They have since reversed this vote, but the American Indian Movement had long recognized the United States was in violation of treaties signed over the last 300 years. So acting as sovereign nations – that happen to reside within a larger, dominant, and controlling nation – they turned to the United Nations for recognition.

Much of the legally binding language used in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples comes from the legal language written into the original treaties by the United States. Which is why the conservative originalist from the West, Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch, sided with liberals last year in a landmark ruling over McGirt v. Oklahoma. The Supreme Court determined that much of that state was legally ceded to Indigenous people by the United States Federal government two centuries ago and it was high time the country obeyed their own laws. The year prior, Gorsuch did the same in the state of Wyoming. Oddly, the recently deceased Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a darling of the left, has a mixed record voting in favor of Indigenous people. A 2021 article from Cornell University states,

“During Justice Ginsburg’s first 15 years on the court, 38 Indian law cases were argued. The rights of Indigenous nations prevailed in only seven of those cases. Indigenous nations lost in eight of nine Indian law cases for which she wrote the court’s decision.”

After the Oklahoma ruling, John Echohawk from the Native American Rights Fund – an organization that has spent 50 years fighting for Indigenous rights – was quoted as saying,

“This [case] brings these issues into public consciousness a little bit more…That’s one of the biggest problems we have, is that most people don’t know very much about us.”

It seems Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of those people.

John Echohawk is following in the footsteps of those who kicked off the American Indian Movement back in 1968, drawing attention to Indigenous rights. Their focus was on the systematic poverty and police brutality toward Urban Indian’s who had been forced off of their land and into cities for generations. This Indigenous grassroots movement rose out of the city that was recently put the international map for its display of obvious police brutality – Minneapolis, Minnesota.

GRANDMA KILLS A CHICKEN

I was not yet three years old when the American Indian Movement was born. I grew up about 250 miles due south of Minneapolis, in Norwalk, Iowa. It’s a suburb of Des Moines surrounded by farmland – much of which is being converted to housing developments. We didn’t live on a farm, but we always had a garden. I wasn’t that keen on gardening as a kid, but I wasn’t shy about eating the beans, corn, and potatoes that Iowa’s rich soil and climate yielded. My Mom’s surefire way to get me motivated to weed the garden or pick beans was to say, “Ok, you’re going to want to eat these beans once their picked, so maybe you should be the one picking them.”

My parents learned to garden from their parents. My Grandma on my Mom’s side always had a big garden. It ran the width of her backyard and was flanked by a dirt alley on one side and a shed on the other. Off to the side of the yard was a rusty barrel I remember being as tall as me. That’s where we’d burn her garbage; now that was a job I enjoyed. I’d haul a bag full of stuff to the barrel, step up on a log nestled next to it, dump in the combustible waste, and drop a fiery wooden match on top of it. Poof. Those trips to the barrel also included carrying a bucket of kitchen scraps into the garden. We’d dig a hole with a shovel, dump the smelly scraps into the hole, and cover it up. Direct injection composting.

My grandparents also kept chickens in the backyard. Our trips to grandma’s house on Sundays usually included a fresh chicken from her yard and vegetables from her garden. She’d walk out back, chase down a chicken, wring its neck, chop its head off, and get to pluckin’.

Occasionally, my uncle Bud would show up with a pheasant or two (or three) strung out in his trunk, shot with his shotgun on his way to grandma’s house. I was always careful to avoid eating the lead shot dotting the glistening meat like embedded peppercorns. In the summer, dinner ended with a bowl of fresh berries and cream from a cow just down the road. But most of the time, it was pie. My grandma made a pie – using lard for the crust – almost everyday until the day she died.

My grandparents on my Dad’s side had a garden and a few apple trees too. My Dad was born in the depression into a family with 11 siblings in the same town my Mom was born. He and his brothers and sisters lived off of the eggs from the chickens they kept. In the dead of winter, they’d hunt squirrels and hang them from the clothesline in the backyard where they’d freeze stiff; more protein to feed hungry mouths during Iowa’s harsh winters. My grandma Weed made a loaf of bread everyday to feed all those hungry tummies.

I am one generation removed from that lifestyle and I’m having trouble keeping a single pepper plant alive. My parents were not farmers, and we did not hunt, but they had learned how to grow and hunt enough food to keep a family alive. Sure their childhood tables were also augmented with store-bought foods, but there was a concerted effort to grow, eat, can, and store as much food as possible. That desire and knowledge seems to get lost with every generation.

Many of the techniques my parents and grandparents used to grow food was taught to them by their European ancestry – knowledge that was passed down from generation to generation. Settlers settling farms and homesteads across America brought with them agricultural methods taught to them in their European homeland. One such convention are rows of segregated crops; a row of beans, a row of squash, and a row of corn, for example. But that’s not how those crops were being grown by people they found here already farming this land.

THREE SISTERS SHARE

Colonial settlers were clueless as to what to do with corn when they first arrived. The locals did teach them to farm corn, a plant first domesticated 10,000 years ago by the Indigenous people in what we now call Mexico. But, in return, some puritanical settlers thought they could show these folks a thing or two about farming. Dismayed by the untidiness made from the climbing clumps of squash at the base of corn stalks gently strangled by spiraling bean vines, the settlers went about mansplaining how to properly plant plants in neat tidy rows – one for corn, one for beans, and one for squash.

But it turns out planting each of these crops to grow alone yields fewer ears of corn, beans, and squash. What the native farmers had learned over those 10,000 years is that when you plant these three plants next to one another, they uniquely help each other above and below ground to grow and prosper. Native people call this method of planting The Three Sisters and it was often planted in waffle-like gardens that create gridded microclimates.

The first sister born is corn. It peaks its head out of the soil in the spring and shoots up straight like a pole. With enough growth to stand on its own, sister bean is born. Bean vines quickly start swirling in circles in search of something to cling on to – like a blindfolded kid playing pin the tail on the donkey. It latches onto the knees of it’s older sister, corn, and they grow toward the sun together. Then comes baby sister squash, crawling along the ground eager to choose its own path in the shadows of its older siblings.

The baby sister, with its broad abundant leaves, helps shade the soil trapping water destined for the three sister’s roots in its water retaining waffle divot. It also keeps sun from tempting pesky weeds from popping up. All three sisters need nitrogen to grow, but lack the ability to siphon it from the air – despite the fact our atmosphere is made up of 78% nitrogen gas.

What these Indigenous people learned over centuries of ecological observation and experimentation is that beans are the secret to providing the missing nitrogen. And Western science has proved it by providing the tools necessary to observe and understand the microscopic biological mechanisms that allow this genesis to unfold. Indigenous people knew it to be true, and Western science allowed it to be seen and described in consistent, repeatable, mathematical, and physical terms that transcend languages, cultures, and geographical boundaries.

What we now know is that nitrogen comes from a fastidious underground bacteria called Rhizobium. It loves to make nitrogen, but only under special conditions. For starters, it needs to be free of oxygen. Given soil is filled with oxygen, it needs to find a suitable host willing to provide an oxygen free environment. As sister bean sends her many roots in all directions it invariably encounters the lingering Rhizobium nodules. Through microscopic chemical communications, the two strike a deal. In exchange for the much needed nitrogen, the bean root provides an oxygen-free nitrogen manufacturing facility for the bacteria; the benefactors of this underground nitrogen source are not only the beans, but her sisters, corn and squash, as well.

I learned all this from Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi tribal member as well as the Distinguished Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, at the State University of New York. She sums up this symphony of familial biological reciprocity in her landmark book, Braiding Sweetgrass, with a lesson for us all – not just plants. A lesson taught and practiced by Indigenous people for generations. She writes,

“The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others. Being among the sisters provides a visible manifestation of what a community can become when its members understand and share their gifts. In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies.”

There was one more big event this week from another UN organization called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is a team of climate researchers from around the world and they came out this week to report what they’ve been saying all along about climate change, but this time with an unequivocal warning. The extreme weather events we’re experiencing is indisputably caused by humans. Oh, that’s us. Past reports have used words like may and could but scientists have tossed away their gloves and came out swinging this week. We’re in trouble and it may not be reversible.

Three years ago I ripped out my lawn and planted drought tolerant succulents. Well, the raccoons had the idea first I just went along with it. When the Northwest had its hottest June on record, the sun sucked the life out of plants that are naturally equipped to withstand prolonged heat. Some of the leaves didn’t just shrivel, they nearly evaporated. My backdoor neighbor’s peppers looked like they had roasted on the vine.

On Wednesday night I was talking to a restoration ecologist who works for the City of Kirkland. He organizes teams of volunteers across the city to help eradicate invasive species and plant natives in their place. When I asked him about one park filled with tall lush cedars and firs along Interstate 405 that also features a mining pit at one end where the state dug for gravel to build the freeway, he talked of the struggles getting plants to grow on this compromised soil. He went on to explain how they’ve decided to pick a species that can handle not only the rocky soil, but also the increasing temperatures in Western Washington. So they’re trying a tree more commonly found on the more arid side of Washington state, the ponderosa pine.

One of the big takeaways in listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book is that while we humans have a way of beating ourselves up over the damage we’ve caused the environment, we also have the capacity (and the obligation) to help heal it. When we care for the earth, it cares for us in return in a symbiotic act of reciprocity. Indigenous people figured this out eons ago and the hubris of “Enlightened” European colonial settlers regarded their ways as “savage”. I’m not advocating for some romantic pastoral nirvana where we all trade our homes for huts, tend to our own chickens, and live off the land. But I do believe we live among millions of people who possess ancestral knowledge that, when paired with modern science and technology, could yield a more fruitful outcome. Many cultures living together on the same soil exchanging nutrients and knowledge in an act of reciprocity that benefits us all as individuals and as a global community faced with few alternatives for survival.

Hello Interactors,

I’ve spent many a night this week watching the Olympics. I’m also trying to get back into running shape; which to me feels like training for the Olympics. It demands a lot of energy and patience, but also reaps a lot of rewards — like ice cream. But I’ve also been thinking back to the energy my family consumed flying across the country and then driving all over New England. We rarely give it a second thought, but we humans expend a lot of energy. And we’ve been doing more and more of it for some time.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WINNING GOLD ON THE COUCH

I love watching athletes compete at the Olympics. The power and grace exhibited by the world’s best athletes is a wonder. I imagine burgeoning, and aging, every-day athletes around the world running, jumping, gunning, pumping, throwing, and rowing just a little harder over these few weeks – inspired by super-human performance. It takes an amazing amount of skill and energy to run 23 miles an hour over 100 meters; as the world’s fastest human, Usain Bolt, did in 2012.

To go fast requires generating force that is transferred from the body into the ground. Athletes competing for gold in the 100 meter dash create five times the force of their body weight to hit that those speeds. This week I watched Athing Mu win the first U.S. Olympic medal since 1968 in the Women’s 800 meter. I marveled at her ability to generate the required force to hit the speed necessary to both lead the race and win while conserving just enough to endure the full 800 meters (two laps around the track). This event is eight times longer than the 100 meter race, but Mu was still creating upwards of 3.5 times her body weight in force.

Sprinters spend more time in the air then they do on the ground. Generating 5 times their body weight in force requires them to lift their knees high enough to transfer energy through their feet and into the ground. Marathoners, in contrast, spend more time on the ground than they do in the air. They have to spread the necessary force to win running over 42 kilometers or 26 miles in two hours. To do this, they lengthen their stride to conserve energy thus minimizing the time their feet spend in the air. This excellent interactive piece by the New York Times breaks it all down with videos and graphs.

Having evolved from hunter gatherers, our bodies are tuned to conserve energy. We take well advantage of the first law of thermodynamics: in a closed system (like our bodies) energy isn’t created or destroyed, but is instead transferred. Metabolism is a good example. It takes energy from the food we consume and transfers it to energy the body needs to function. Our ability to sweat, while sometimes annoying and uncomfortable, is another example of the first law of thermodynamics. It gave us a sizable advantage over other species by cooling our body while tracking prey on the wide open savannah; or chasing down a competitor for an Olympic gold medal.

I too was expending energy sitting on the couch with my bowl of ice cream watching 19 year old Athing Mu dominate her competition. I was creating around 100 watts of energy just sitting on my butt, whereas Athing Mu would have been generating 20 times that at 2000 watts. Active humans moving about the earth expend an average of 120 watts of energy a day – enough to power a very bright old fashioned light bulb. But I was actually expending way more energy than Athing Mu. There was electricity powering my TV, my satellite receiver, and the amplifier powering my speakers. That says nothing of the triangulated satellites circling the earth, the equipment in Tokyo broadcasting the signal, and all the cameras, microphones, and computers needed to entertain me.

And what about the energy that went into my ice cream. The oil extraction for the fertilizer for the grain that fed the cows, the gas in the tractors that grew the grain, the trucks and trains that delivered the grain, the lights in the barn, the machinery for milking, the truck that picked up and delivered the milk, the cascading energy flowing through the steely factory that made the ice cream, the many trucks (and their refrigerators) that delivered the product, the energy to run the freezer and lights in the store, the energy in our car that drove to the store and back, and our own refrigerator keeping it cold. All so I could satisfy a craving for sugar while pressing buttons on my remote control. Sugar: a product that requires delivery on container ship from an island half in the middle of the Pacific half way from my home to Japan where the race was unfolding.

THE MEASURE OF PLEASURE

Simply sitting there I generated way more watts than an Olympian. Gold medal for me! In addition to our body’s naturally occurring metabolism, we’re all part of what is known as social metabolism. This is the flow of energy through and between nature and our global societies. In addition to biological ecosystems and metabolisms made of plants and animals, the globe’s human occupants have created an industrial ecology with its own metabolism. To fulfill our lifestyle industries extract natural resources, transform them into products and services, and we humans gobble them up. The more people on the planet yearn and earn the money needed to climb out of poverty and up the social ladder, the more energy and materials flow through the system. Just like animals, the more we eat the greater the waste; the faster the pace, the greater the heat. So, hooray for humanity, we’re winning the poverty race! But, boo for humanity, we can’t sustain this commodity consuming pace.

Commodity is derived from the Latin word commoditas which means amenity or convenience.  Most commodities are raw materials extracted from the earth like oil, iron, or gas. But they can also be basic resources that are grown and farmed like the milk and sugar in my ice cream. Prior to the practice of agriculture, humans were left to feed off of the fruits of the naturally occurring landscape. They had to walk or run in search of their commodities. It meant having to spread out in small bands roaming the earth for basic energy providing resources.

But once humans figured out how to colonize plants and animals the amount of metabolic energy available from food became proportional to the land available to them. The practice of agriculture represents a fundamental shift in biological metabolism that occurred in select spots around the world soon after the ice age over 10,000 years ago. Within 1000 years the dispersed geographies of New Guinea, East Asia, West Africa, the Amazon, and the Andes – all places completely cut off from communication with each other – discovered the practice of agriculture.

They could also concentrate and conserve their energy within a designed and confined space. The more land they had the more food they could grow, animals they could raise, and time and energy they could spend on other things. This allowed for the invention of improved farming equipment, optimized farming techniques, and conflict resolution over available space.

Quantitative historians like Ian Morris and Jared Diamond study the intersection of resources, energy, and societies over time and narrow in on geography as a major driver of increased social metabolism. Morris documents his methods in his 2013 book, The Measure of Civilization. With empirically derived models, Morris landed on the premise that it was physical geography that determined the West’s rise in global domination more than the great White man’s intellect, religion, politics, or genetic lines.

Oxford Geography professor, Yadvinder Malhi, has taken the data Morris provided and calculated the social metabolism of societies over time. You might imagine a steady linear growth of social metabolism as nomadic hunter-gatherer societies morphed into organized agricultural societies, but the curve is more exponential featuring anomalous peaks and valleys here and there. There’s also evidence that the West indeed had a bit of a jump on the East stemming from the Mesopotamia’s initial forays into agriculture. (Morris considers Mesopotamia as West in his historical analysis) But once China latched onto agricultural practices 1000 years later, the social metabolism of the East and West more or less rose together.

But clearly the data shows something significant has happened in the last few thousand years. From roughly 2000 BCE/BC to today we see a steep exponential climb in social metabolism, from around 1000-1500 Watts per person to 2000-2500 leading up to the first century CE/AD and then a precipitous decline back down below 2000 Watts person. The decline halted sooner for the East than the West and then the East began to rise again as the West continued to fall.

In examining that period more closely we see social metabolism stagnated at around 2000 Watts per person from 500 CE/AD until the 1700’s when social metabolism began a meteoric rise – shown as nearly vertical lines on an exponential curve – to over 4000 Watts per person today. Shown together in the context of historical societal development, Malhi shows the peak of that metabolic mountain occurred in the middle of the Roman Empire in the West and the Han Dynasty in the East. But as both of these dominant realms declined, so did their social metabolism.

Around 500 CE/AD the data shows the West continued to decline as the East began to rise. Then, in 900 CE/AD, China’s Song (Sung) Dynasty emerged. There is increasing evidence revealing how much more advanced Chinese civilizations were during this era than in Europe. China’s national income was triple that of Europe in the 12th century as their population doubled over the preceding two centuries. By the end of the Song dynasty around the 13th century China had over 200 million people – the largest population in the world. Europe’s Middle Ages population peak is estimated to be only 75 million people.

THE HUMAN’S RACE

The growth of the Song dynasty led to the increase in cities, the invention of the world’s first paper money, and the decline of centralized governmental control of the bank. The first movable-type made of ceramics allowed for broad dissemination of knowledge and culture; as did the invention of the first compass depicting true north. Coupled with the world’s first organized and sustained navy and the first chemical formula for gun powder, it’s easy to see how China was a formidable power capable of expansion around the world. And a growing social metabolism.

Their growth came about through the expansion of commodities. They perfected the cultivation of rice in the regions of central and southern Song and created markets and exchanges that utilized early ripened rice from southern regions. Soon rice products and other foodstuffs could be created and sold as commodities in an economy that was expanding in numbers and complexity as the population swelled.

Malhi theorizes the decline and stabilization of social metabolism through the Song dynasty, and China through to the 1700s, was a limit on the land necessary to grow agricultural energy. It’s a plight that can be argued for medieval feudalism in Europe as well during roughly the same time period. Societies that enter into a metabolic limit become vulnerable to various economic, societal, and climatic shocks to their system. We are all witnessing just how devastating the spread of disease can be to a society; or how income inequality can lead to societal strife; or a single storm can wipe out 90,000 square miles of farm land creating $13 Billion of economic loss in a single day.

But humans adapt when our potential goes untapped. With the dawn of the 16th century came the European age of enlightenment and a shift in societal, economic, and intellectual dominance from the West. We also learned energy for fuel need not only come from the carbon stored in the wood that surrounds us, but from ancient deposits made of fossils buried deep in time and in the ground. The industrial age introduced fossil fuels — a source of energy more dense than any society had ever experienced prior. And today, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, we still rely on oil and coal to fuel a seemingly insatiable appetite for increasing social metabolism.

But things are changing. This week the Wall Street Journal reported banks, including Chinese banks, are curtailing funding for new coal-fueled power plants in countries like Viet Nam and Bangladesh. However, within the borders of China and India — the world’s largest populations of rising social metabolism — they still have plans to expand coal-fueled power plants.

And while oil companies are enjoying their biggest profits since the onset of the pandemic, they’re deciding not to invest this windfall in additional oil exploration and refinery expansion. Facing pressure from investors, they’re instead assessing the shift to renewables. While predictions of peak-oil have stymied prognosticators since 1919, perhaps we’re entering a time when the market will decide when enough is enough.

Speaking of predictions. I could have predicted the U.S. men’s 100 meter relay team would have not made even the semi-finals this week. A country (and sport) known for its individualism, our U.S. Track and Field organization routinely struggles with coming together to run as a team for the Olympics. The great American sprinter, Carl Lewis, agrees in a Tweet he issued just after the race while coaching some young amateur athletes.

It wasn’t so much a matter of metabolic performance, these were some of the fastest and physically trained men on the planet, but it was a matter of failed hand-offs in the transition zone. You lose the race if you can’t master handing the baton to the next athlete on your team. Any relay athlete will tell you that and it requires a lot of discipline and practice.

Looking at the data and analysis Morris and Malhi provided, each generation in the East and the West, from the 17th century to today, have successfully handed the baton to the next generation in a progressive race of growing industrial and social metabolism. With the help of historical and predictive modelling, many historians, climatologists, and ecologists have identified the finish line of our biosphere. We’re all a part of a generational relay race and the finish line is fast approaching. Let’s all do future generations waiting to run their leg of human endeavor a favor and not botch the hand off.

Hello Interactors,

This week, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to "weigh" Earth's 1.5 trillion trees. It will give scientists deeper insight into forests and their role in the climate — far beyond surface readings. Pretty cool. And it's coming from Europe.

Meanwhile, I learned that the U.S. Secretary of Defense — under Trump — had a makeup room installed in the Pentagon to look better on TV. Also pretty cool, I guess. And very American.

The contrast was hard to miss. Even with better data, the U.S. shows little appetite for using geographic insight to actually address climate change. Information is growing. Willpower, not so much.

So it was oddly clarifying to read a passage Christopher Hobson posted on Imperfect Notes from a book titled America by a French author — a travelogue of softs. Last week I offered new lenses through which to see the world, I figured I’d try this French pair on — to see America, and the world it effects, as he did.

PAPER, POWER, AND PROJECTION

I still have a folded paper map of Seattle in the door of my car. It’s a remnant of a time when physical maps reflected the reality before us. You unfolded a map and it innocently offered the physical world on a page. The rest was left to you — including knowing how to fold it up again.

But even then, not all maps were neutral or necessarily innocent. Sure, they crowned capitals and trimmed borders, but they could also leave things out or would make certain claims. From empire to colony, from mission to market, maps often arrived not to reflect place, but to declare control of it. Still, we trusted it…even if was an illusion.

I learned how to interrogate maps in my undergraduate history of cartography class — taught by the legendary cartographer Waldo Tobler. But even with that knowledge, when I was then taught how to make maps, that interrogation was more absent. I confidently believed I was mediating truth. The lines and symbols I used pointed to substance; they signaled a thing. I traced rivers from existing base maps with a pen on vellum and trusted they existed in the world as sure as the ink on the page. I cut out shading for a choropleth map and believed it told a stable story about population, vegetation, or economics. That trust was embodied in representation — the idea that a sign meant something enduring. That we could believe what maps told us.

This is the world of semiotics — the study of how signs create meaning. American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce offered a sturdy model: a sign (like a map line) refers to an object (the river), and its meaning emerges in interpretation. Meaning, in this view, is relational — but grounded. A stop sign, a national anthem, a border — they meant something because they pointed beyond themselves, to a world we shared.

But there are cracks in this seemingly sturdy model.

These cracks pose this question: why do we trust signs in the first place? That trust — in maps, in categories, in data — didn’t emerge from neutrality. It was built atop agendas.

Take the first U.S. census in 1790. It didn’t just count — it defined. Categories like “free white persons,” “all other free persons,” and “slaves” weren’t neutral. They were political tools, shaping who mattered and by how much. People became variables. Representation became abstraction.

Or Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist who built the taxonomies we still use: genus, species, kingdom. His system claimed objectivity but was shaped by distance and empire. Linnaeus never left Sweden. He named what he hadn’t seen, classified people he’d never met — sorting humans into racial types based on colonial stereotypes. These weren’t observations. They were projections based on stereotypes gathered from travelers, missionaries, and imperial officials.

Naming replaced knowing. Life was turned into labels. Biology became filing. And once abstracted, it all became governable, measurable, comparable, and, ultimately, manageable.

Maps followed suit.

What once lived as a symbolic invitation — a drawing of place — became a system of location. I was studying geography at a time (and place) when Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and GIScience was transforming cartography. Maps weren’t just about visual representations; they were spatial databases. Rows, columns, attributes, and calculations took the place of lines and shapes on map. Drawing what we saw turned to abstracting what could then be computed so that it could then be visualized, yes, but also managed.

Chris Perkins, writing on the philosophy of mapping, argued that digital cartographies didn’t just depict the world — they constituted it. The map was no longer a surface to interpret, but a script to execute. As critical geographers Sam Hind and Alex Gekker argue, the modern “mapping impulse” isn’t about understanding space — it’s about optimizing behavior through it; in a world of GPS and vehicle automation, the map no longer describes the territory, it becomes it.

Laura Roberts, writing on film and geography, showed how maps had fused with cinematic logic — where places aren’t shown, but performed. Place and navigation became narrative. New York in cinema isn’t a place — it’s a performance of ambition, alienation, or energy. Geography as mise-en-scène.

In other words, the map’s loss of innocence wasn’t just technical. It was ontological — a shift in the very nature of what maps are and what kind of reality they claim to represent. Geography itself had entered the domain of simulation — not representing space but staging it. You can simulate traveling anywhere in the world, all staged on Google maps. Last summer my son stepped off the train in Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time in his life but knew exactly where he was. He’d learned it driving on simulated streets in a simulated car on XBox. He walked us straight to our lodging.

These shifts in reality over centuries weren’t necessarily mistakes. They unfolded, emerged, or evolved through the rational tools of modernity — and for a time, they worked. For many, anyway. Especially for those in power, seeking power, or benefitting from it. They enabled trade, governance, development, and especially warfare. But with every shift came this question: at what cost?

FROM SIGNS TO SPECTACLE

As early as the early 1900s, Max Weber warned of a world disenchanted by bureaucracy — a society where rationalization would trap the human spirit in what he called an iron cage. By mid-century, thinkers pushed this further.

Michel Foucault revealed how systems of knowledge — from medicine to criminal justice — were entangled with systems of power. To classify was to control. To represent was to discipline. Roland Barthes dissected the semiotics of everyday life — showing how ads, recipes, clothing, even professional wrestling were soaked in signs pretending to be natural.

Guy Debord, in the 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, argued that late capitalism had fully replaced lived experience with imagery. “The spectacle,” he wrote, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

Then came Jean Baudrillard — a French sociologist, media theorist, and provocateur — who pushed the critique of representation to its limit. In the 1980s, where others saw distortion, he saw substitution: signs that no longer referred to anything real. Most vividly, in his surreal, gleaming 1986 travelogue America, he described the U.S. not as a place, but as a performance — a projection without depth, still somehow running.

Where Foucault showed that knowledge was power, and Debord showed that images replaced life, Baudrillard argued that signs had broken free altogether. A map might once distort or simplify — but it still referred to something real. By the late 20th century, he argued, signs no longer pointed to anything. They pointed only to each other.

You didn’t just visit Disneyland. You visited the idea of America — manufactured, rehearsed, rendered. You didn’t just use money. You used confidence by handing over a credit card — a symbol of wealth that is lighter and moves faster than any gold.

In some ways, he was updating a much older insight by another Frenchman. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he wasn’t just studying law or government — he was studying performance. He saw how Americans staged democracy, how rituals of voting and speech created the image of a free society even as inequality and exclusion thrived beneath it. Tocqueville wasn’t cynical. He simply understood that America believed in its own image — and that belief gave it a kind of sovereign feedback loop.

Baudrillard called this condition simulation — when representation becomes self-contained. When the distinction between real and fake no longer matters because everything is performance. Not deception — orchestration.

He mapped four stages of this logic:

* Faithful representation – A sign reflects a basic reality. A map mirrors the terrain.

* Perversion of reality – The sign begins to distort. Think colonial maps as logos or exclusionary zoning.

* Pretending to represent – The sign no longer refers to anything but performs as if it does. Disneyland isn’t America — it’s the fantasy of America. (ironically, a car-free America)

* Pure simulation – The sign has no origin or anchor. It floats. Zillow heatmaps, Uber surge zones — maps that don’t reflect the world, but determine how you move through it.

We don’t follow maps as they were once known anymore. We follow interfaces.

And not just in apps. Cities themselves are in various stages of simulation. New York still sells itself as a global center. But in a distributed globalized and digitized economy, there is no center — only the perversion of an old reality. Paris subsidizes quaint storefronts not to nourish citizens, but to preserve the perceived image of Paris. Paris pretending to be Paris. Every city has its own marketing campaign. They don’t manage infrastructure — they manage perception. The skyline is a product shot. The streetscape is marketing collateral and neighborhoods are optimized for search.

Even money plays this game.

The U.S. dollar wasn’t always king. That title once belonged to the British pound — backed by empire, gold, and industry. After World War II, the dollar took over, pegged to gold under the Bretton Woods convention — a symbol of American postwar power stability…and perversion. It was forged in an opulent, exclusive, hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire. But designed in the style of Spanish Renaissance Revival, it was pretending to be in Spain.

Then in 1971, Nixon snapped the dollar’s gold tether. The ‘Nixon Shock’ allowed the dollar to float — its value now based not on metal, but on trust. It became less a store of value than a vessel of belief. A belief that is being challenged today in ways that recall the instability and fragmentation of the pre-WWII era.

And this dollar lives in servers, not Industrial Age iron vaults. It circulates as code, not coin. It underwrites markets, wars, and global finance through momentum alone. And when the pandemic hit, there was no digging into reserves.

The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet with keystrokes — injecting trillions into the economy through bond purchases, emergency loans, and direct payments. But at the same time, Trump 1.0 showed printing presses rolling, stacks of fresh bills bundled and boxed — a spectacle of liquidity. It was monetary policy as theater. A simulation of control, staged in spreadsheets by the Fed and photo ops by the Executive Branch. Not to reflect value, but to project it. To keep liquidity flowing and to keep the belief intact.

This is what Baudrillard meant by simulation. The sign doesn’t lie — nor does it tell the truth. It just works — as long as we accept it.

MOOD OVER MEANING

Reality is getting harder to discern. We believe it to be solid — that it imposes friction. A law has consequences. A price reflects value. A city has limits. These things made sense because they resist us. Because they are real.

But maybe that was just the story we told. Maybe it was always more mirage than mirror.

Now, the signs don’t just point to reality — they also replace it. We live in a world where the image outpaces the institution. Where the copy is smoother than the original. Where AI does the typing. Where meaning doesn’t emerge — it arrives prepackaged and pre-viral. It’s a kind of seductive deception. It’s hyperreality where performance supersedes substance. Presence and posture become authority structured in style.

Politics is not immune to this — it’s become the main attraction.

Trump’s first 100 days didn’t aim to stabilize or legislate but to signal. Deportation as UFC cage match — staged, brutal, and televised. Tariff wars as a way of branding power — chaos with a catchphrase. Climate retreat cast as perverse theater. Gender redefined and confined by executive memo. Birthright citizenship challenged while sedition pardoned. Even the Gulf of Mexico got renamed. These aren’t policies, they’re productions.

Power isn’t passing through law. It’s passing through the affect of spectacle and a feed refresh.

Baudrillard once wrote that America doesn’t govern — it narrates. Trump doesn’t manage policy, he manages mood. Like an actor. When America’s Secretary of Defense, a former TV personality, has a makeup studio installed inside the Pentagon it’s not satire. It’s just the simulation, doing what it does best: shining under the lights.

But this logic runs deeper than any single figure.

Culture no longer unfolds. It reloads. We don’t listen to the full album — we lift 10 seconds for TikTok. Music is made for algorithms. Fashion is filtered before it’s worn. Selfhood is a brand channel. Identity is something to monetize, signal, or defend — often all at once.

The economy floats too. Meme stocks. NFTs. Speculative tokens. These aren’t based in value — they’re based in velocity. Attention becomes the currency.

What matters isn’t what’s true, but what trends. In hyperreality, reference gives way to rhythm. The point isn’t to be accurate. The point is to circulate. We’re not being lied to.We’re being engaged. And this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Which through a Baudrillard lens is why America — the simulation — persists.

He saw it early. Describing strip malls, highways, slogans, themed diners he saw an America that wasn’t deep. That was its genius he saw. It was light, fast paced, and projected. Like the movies it so famously exports. It didn’t need justification — it just needed repetition.

And it’s still repeating.

Las Vegas is the cathedral of the logic of simulation — a city that no longer bothers pretending. But it’s not alone. Every city performs, every nation tries to brand itself. Every policy rollout is scored like a product launch. Reality isn’t navigated — it’s streamed.

And yet since his writing, the mood has shifted. The performance continues, but the music underneath it has changed. The techno-optimism of Baudrillard’s ‘80s an ‘90s have curdled. What once felt expansive now feels recursive and worn. It’s like a show running long after the audience has gone home. The rager has ended, but Spotify is still loudly streaming through the speakers.

“The Kids' Guide to the Internet” (1997), produced by Diamond Entertainment and starring the unnervingly wholesome Jamison family. It captures a moment of pure techno-optimism — when the Internet was new, clean, and family-approved. It’s not just a tutorial; it’s a time capsule of belief, staged before the dream turned into something else. Before the feed began to feed on us.

Trumpism thrives on this terrain. And yet the world is changing around it. Climate shocks, mass displacement, spiraling inequality — the polycrisis has a body count. Countries once anchored to American leadership are squinting hard now, trying to see if there’s anything left behind the screen. Adjusting the antenna in hopes of getting a clearer signal. From Latin America to Southeast Asia to Europe, the question grows louder: Can you trust a power that no longer refers to anything outside itself?

Maybe Baudrillard and Tocqueville are right — America doesn’t point to a deeper truth. It points to itself. Again and again and again. It is the loop. And even now, knowing this, we can’t quite stop watching. There’s a reason we keep refreshing. Keep scrolling. Keep reacting. The performance persists — not necessarily because we believe in it, but because it’s the only script still running.

And whether we’re horrified or entertained, complicit or exhausted, engaged or ghosted, hired or fired, immigrated or deported, one thing remains strangely true: we keep feeding it. That’s the strange power of simulation in an attention economy. It doesn’t need conviction. It doesn’t need conscience. It just needs attention — enough to keep the momentum alive. The simulation doesn’t care if the real breaks down. It just keeps rendering — soft, seamless, and impossible to look away from. Like a dream you didn’t choose but can’t wake up from.

REFERENCES

Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)

Baudrillard, J. (1986). America (C. Turner, Trans.). Verso.

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967)

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books.

Hind, S., & Gekker, A. (2019). On autopilot: Towards a flat ontology of vehicular navigation. In C. Lukinbeal et al. (Eds.), Media’s Mapping Impulse. Franz Steiner Verlag.

Linnaeus, C. (1735). Systema Naturae (1st ed.). Lugduni Batavorum.

Perkins, C. (2009). Philosophy and mapping. In R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier.

Raaphorst, K., Duchhart, I., & van der Knaap, W. (2017). The semiotics of landscape design communication. Landscape Research.

Roberts, L. (2008). Cinematic cartography: Movies, maps and the consumption of place. In R. Koeck & L. Roberts (Eds.), Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image. University of Liverpool.

Tocqueville, A. de. (2003). Democracy in America (G. Lawrence, Trans., H. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Eds.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1835)

Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1905)

Hello Interactors,

My family and I are safely back home in Kirkland, Washington. It feels good to be home and dry and mosquito free. Reflecting on our visit to assorted colleges and the words uttered by students giving campus tours and admission counselor pitches, I imagined my kids embarking on their collegiate journeys. It’s a grand opportunity to pattern-match what you know and what you love with what a school can offer. The trick is finding a pattern that is close and then adapting to the environment or finding an environment that can adapt to your pattern. Is there such a school?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

RELIGHTING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

We’ve all experienced movies and TV shows where the camera slowly pans across a vast landscape, often with mountains and steep valleys. And then, just as your eye registers wilderness, our visual sense is rewarded by the sound of a screeching, soaring bird echoing through the valley. It’s a Hollywood convention that blends suggestive artistry with the absoluteness of nature. Sometimes the sound of the screech is accompanied by the image of an eagle. That’s when my daughter and I look each other and roll our eyes and think to ourselves, “That’s not an eagle.”

We got to witness the true marrying of the bird with that sound while sitting on the deck at my sister-in-law’s house in Connecticut. And right on cue, my daughter and I looked at each other with jaws agape only to return our squinting gaze back to the sky as a hawk soared above us unleashing that familiar sound. Our senses, primed by the repetitive artificiality of film, were substantiated by the naturally occurring biology of a bird. The blending of art and science.

Arts and humanities have been separated from math and science through decades of academic and societal tribalism. But don’t tell our brains that. It really can’t tell the difference. Our family can’t either. My wife and I found this overlap to be our grounding attraction. Separately growing up finding fascination and success in blending the arts with mathematics; we continue to insist the braiding of these individual strands yields a stronger rope. Nature and nurture has seemingly put our kids on similar paths.

Our daughter is equally adept at communicating with the environment as she is drawing it. She recently went to the Seattle Zoo to draw some animals. When she approached the tiger cage, alone, the tiger rose, stretched, and chuffed – an audible non-threatening breathy snort through the nose typically reserved for another feline friend or zookeeper. The big cat then proceeded to pose for her. She has a way with animals. She also immerses herself in the mystical ancient worlds of Chinese fiction and then exquisitely draws the scenes from memory. As she focuses her college search, she’s attracted to programs that will teach her mind to invent and her hands to make interpretations of both natural and imaginary worlds.

Our son is more interested finance and economics. As a self-proclaimed car nut, perhaps he’s driven by the immediate desire to amass enough money to own his own exotic car collection. Or maybe as a budding car photographer he too is attracted to programs that celebrate the blending of arts and sciences. After all, despite attempts in recent decades to attach economics to rational mathematical certainty, it is still a branch of the social sciences. And it’s confounded by the interwoven and interdependent uncertainties of human behavior who’s desire to attain worldly possessions is bounded by the limits of our natural resources.

In the words of esteemed biologist, E. O. Wilson, from his book Consilience – The Unity of Knowledge:

“But the theorists cannot answer definitively most of the key macroeconomic questions that concern society, including the … strength of ”externalities” such as the deteriorating global environment. The world economy is a ship speeding through uncharted waters strewn with dangerous shoals. There is no general agreement on how it works. The esteem that economists enjoy arises not so much from their record of successes as from the fact that business and government have no where else to turn.”

Wilson goes on to argue that of all the fields in social science, economics, as it was intended to be studied and practiced, is furthest along the path of integrating the arts and sciences. Economics has embraced the lucidity of calculus and analytical geometry that advanced fields like physics, chemistry, and biology.

But it was the behavior of the physical environment that inspired Newton to invent the language of calculus to describe it. It was through the manipulation of environmental conditions that he arrived at the mass and distance laws of gravity and three laws of motion – all in the span of just three years. For the first time the world had a way of consistently and empirically describing and understanding astronomical orbs in motion and earthly sand in the ocean. Poet Alexander Pope summed up Newton’s nudging of the world from darkness in two lines:

"Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

FROM NEWTON TO NEEDHAM

Newton’s influence on the age of Enlightenment cannot be understated. Once great thinkers of the time realized the power of analyzing and describing complex phenomena in repeatable, fundamental terms, they sought ways to apply it. In 1835 Belgian astronomer and mathematician, Adolphe Quetelet, asked why not apply these methods to social phenomena? Soon the field of “social physics” was born; what we now call sociology. Quetelet was interested in applying statistical methods to the social sciences believing they could help explain phenomena like crime rates, marriage rates, and suicide rates.

He was criticized by other scientists for assuming such events had an explanation other than freedom of rational choice. Here we are 186 years later and many in the social science of economics still believe humans are rational actors and insist personal choice will ultimately lead to our collective good; despite a world economy with historic income inequality, exploitive labor practices, fragile global supply chains, extractive capitalistic markets, and dwindling natural resources. Their math does not compute.

The enlightenment’s insistence on precise reduction of the natural world into mathematical minutia was the work of Newton’s predecessor, the inventor of algebraic geometry and modern philosophy, and France’s preeminent scientist, René Descartes. He believed that because the world exists in three dimensions, it should be described in three dimensions. I spent last spring focused on the chopping of America into a grid made of dots named after Descartes: the Cartesian coordinate system.

Descartes vision for a unified knowledge grounded in a fundamental reduction of the world into mathematical terms came to him in 1619 in a single night of successive dreams. He recognized everything in the world, from rainfall to reasoning, results from cause and effect. This rational description of naturally occurring phenomena is what led him to marry the idea of physics with medicine to create the field of biology.

But as a devote Catholic and a believer in God as the perfect creator, he had a conflict to resolve. He solved it by creating the separation of mind and body. With one phrase, I think, therefore I am, he was able to justify the idea of God as being all powerful in his head while his body was of this world and thus scientifically testable and mathematically measurable.

Some historians believe is was this logical and rational separation that fueled the explosion of scientific discovery throughout three centuries of Enlightenment in a Europe dominated by religious belief, power, and control. An era of discovery unique to Europe. British scientist and historian, Joseph Needham, spent most of his career trying to understand and explain why countries like China and India didn’t have their own ‘Enlightenment’ given their advancements in science that predated European discoveries.

In 1969 he posited what has become known as “The Needham Question.”  He asked,

“Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo.”

He was particularly interested in why the same discoveries “had not developed in Chinese civilization.” After all, Needham pointed out later, in 1985, that even one of the founders of the Enlightenment, Francis Bacon,

“had selected three inventions, paper and printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass, which had done more than (anything else), he thought, to transform completely the modern world and mark it off from the antiquity of the Middle Ages. He regarded the origins of these inventions as ‘obscure and inglorious’ and he died without ever knowing that all of them were Chinese.”

In 1937 three Chinese students came to study at Cambridge where Needham was doing work in biochemistry. One of these students, Shen Shih-Chang, studied under Needham, another, Wang Ying-lai, went on to be the first to create a synthetic insulin, and the third, Lu Gwei-djen, was a biochemist and historian who taught Needham Chinese and went on to co-author the influential book, Science and Civilisation in China with Needham.

Their knowledge of science and history inspired him to take many extended trips to China to meet and consult with an array of Chinese scholars, artists, and scientists. His commitment to this cross-cultural exchange is what led him to co-found the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1945.

Needham concluded that China’s

“focus stayed on holistic properties and on the harmonious, hierarchical relationships of entities, from stars down to mountains and flowers and sand. In this world view the entities of Nature are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers. As a result the Chinese never hit upon the entry point of abstraction and break-apart analytic research attained by European science in the seventeenth century.”

[Wilson: Consilience] As Needham’s interpretation of the history of Chinese science unfolded, he became increasingly convinced the ancient spiritual belief of Taoism played a central role in their discoveries and advancements.

THE TAO OF YOU

The word Tao is a Chinese word that can have many meanings depending on tonal variation. According to one Chinese dictionary, said one way it has 39 meanings all related to “way” or “path”, but if said with another variation it has six meanings related to “guide” or “lead.” Etymological scholars seem to agree on the root meaning: “to tend in a certain direction.” The Traditional Chinese characters for Tao pictorially construct such a meaning: 迪.   辶 ti  "walk" and , 由 yu  "to proceed from”. Taken together they can mean "follow a road," "go along," "lead", "direct", or "pursue the right path." Maybe we could add another popular English word the western world adopted, “enlightened.”

Like Needham, my daughter was also influenced by the presence of Chinese students. What started in middle school as an obsession with K-Pop has morphed into a fascination with a genre of Chinese fantasy novels called  仙侠, Xianxia. The literal translation is 仙 xian “immortal” 侠 xia “hero” and the novels feature mortal protagonists known as ‘cultivators’ who nurture life experiences and resources through struggle and pain to become immortal beings or xian. Like Needham’s interpretation of Chinese science, this genre draws heavily on Taoist beliefs and also Chinese martial arts. Cultivators are often students of Tao philosophy and they’re “following a road” in “pursuit of the right path”.

My daughter is enamored with the Taoist doctrine of living simply and honestly and in harmony with nature. It’s what she experiences in her Dr. Doolittle-esque interactions with animals, drawing them in their habitat, or even recreating scenes depicting twisted plots from one of 300 chapters found in her voluminous Chinese novels. The word plot was first meant to mean a building site. Then directors came along to plot areas on a stage for actors to enact a scene — for a story that we now refer to as a plot.   

We humans have been plotting through the visual arts, depicting stories of animals and humans interacting with people and place, for at least the last 30,000 years. Caves have allowed these images to remain all this time, but many scholars believe people were drawing on whatever they could find; countless images washed away by weather and time. What my daughter is doing is in her DNA. It’s in yours too.

Drawing is what provided a shortcut through Darwinian evolution. Before our brains were able to draw, pre-human creatures were stuck evolving at the same evolutionary rate as any other species. But once our brains became powerful enough to take what we saw in the world and then draw it, that knowledge could be stored for generations. Over successive iterations, the plot thickened.

By drawing scenes and telling stories humans could communicate between tribes and generations about what worked and what didn’t. The sound of the hawk screeching across the sky. What does it look like? What does it mean? We cheated the system of evolution through maps, drawings, and depictions of life and death; humans in search of advancement, economic utility, with minimal negative externalities. We drew images of struggle on the path of mortality in search of the right path; cultivating a journey to the immortality of our species through artistic genetic shortcuts. Without images our species would have evaporated ages ago. Given the climate crisis, and our economy that fuels it, what stories will the images tell to future generations?

Epigenetics is the study of how our behavior and our environment influence how our genes work. We shape our environment and our environment shapes us. We all inherit a set of DNA from nature, but epigenetic environmental changes alter how a DNA sequence is influenced. Nature and nurture. My wife and I have given our kids the genes they have and we’ve provided the environment for their DNA to be influenced. In another year they’ll be embarking on journeys into environments of their choosing learning new ways to shape their own DNA and the environment around them. Like the bird flying high in the sky, let’s hope they find ways to live simply and honestly and in harmony with nature. Let’s hope we all find the right path.

Hello Interactors,

This week’s post is coming to you from Avon, Connecticut as we’re about to head north to Maine. We’ve experienced some unseasonably humid days (and nights), a waiter serving bug spray in Cape Cod, and a hot and sticky college campus visit in Rhode Island. I can hear the locals now, “Welcome to New England.”

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WHATA WET SUMMA

I’ve become a weather wimp. Or, maybe I always have been. Summers in my native Iowa were hot and humid. I remember nights when the temperature would actually increase as I lay in bed, spread eagle, staring at the ceiling waiting for just a single puff of air to waft through my window. I’m not sure I was ever dry during those Iowa summer months.

Humidity makes me sweat more than most. I’m sweating just thinking about it. Perspiring makes me perspire. So you can imagine what I was thinking this week as I, with my family, were descending a long hill downtown Providence, Rhode Island, with air so thick and a sun so hot that it felt like I was walking on a treadmill in a steam bath with a heat lamp over my head. As we approached the banks of the Providence River, we read a sign on one of the buildings that that visitors of the Rhode Island School of Design should check-in at the admissions building. You guessed it, it was at the top of the hill we had just descended.

Just two steps up the hill and I had sweat gushing from my head. Part way we encounter a fountain. I soaked the cooling towel I tucked in my backpack and draped if over my skull and was rewarded with a cool tingling sensation down my neck. The bliss was short lived as we trudged up the final steps of the admissions building featuring a sweeping view of Providence and a sign on the door that read, “Closed”.

The Northeastern region of the United States is known for its humidity, but July has been unseasonably wet. This is good news for the one thing that everyone agrees is more dreaded during summer than humidity. Mosquitoes. Cape Cod has been hit hard, especially the small town of Wellfleet. The fleet of white vans marked with the name “Mosquito Squad” parked in a lot on the way in to town should be the first clue this area is prone to these ‘Swamp Angels’. The word mosquito is Spanish for ‘little gnat’. I prefer ‘mini-beast’. Bart Morris of the Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project said, while spraying larvicide amidst clouds of mosquitoes, “This is about as bad as I've seen it…biblical in size.” Gabrielle Sakolsky has been with this organization since 1993 and she’s never seen a population boom like this. Dry air usually controls mosquito populations, but not this summer. It’s been a wild July in the Northeast. And it’s not over.

Cornell University’s Northeast Regional Climate Center reports all but two days of the first half of July included a flashflood somewhere in the region. July kicked off with a tornado in Delaware and a week later New York subways were flooded. Then came two days of Tropical Storm Elsa with severe thunderstorms and torrents of rain. Connecticut, where we are now, and Maine, where we’re headed next, were hit with five inches of rain and flash flooding. The coasts were slammed with 67 mile per hour winds while New Jersey whipped up another two tornados as winds howled over 100 miles per hour. Then, on July 12th, 10 inches of rain dowsed southeastern Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey causing major flash flooding.  That’s a lot of extreme weather in less than two weeks. And a lot of moisture.

In the first 15 days of July, portions of the Northeast have seen rainfall that is 300% above normal. The Cornell climate center tracks 35 weather sites that stretch from West Virginia to the south to northern tip of Maine in Caribou, which actually was only at 57% of their normal rainfall. Boston was another story. They were 574% above normal. You can see why the mosquitoes were doing a happy dance in Cape Cod.

“Eight major climate sites experienced their wettest first half of July on record and another 17 of the sites ranked this July 1-15 period among their 20 wettest on record. In fact, for 12 of the major climate sites, it is already one of the 20 wettest Julys on record.”  

ABNORMAL MEMORIES OF NORMAL

It’s hard to know what normal is anymore. But the climate change explainers at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) remind us their analysis includes previous normal weather patterns. They adjust for the effects of climate change periodically and the last time they adjusted was 2011. That’s when the baseline for normal had shifted from the period starting in 1971 and ended in 2000. They created a handy map that demonstrates what plants and animals already knew – the planting zones across the United States had shifted north in latitude and up in elevation as normal temperatures warmed over that 30 year period.

The point of analyzing and reporting on weather normals is to reflect what is normal today, and not how the values have changed over time. So NOAA updates their models every decade or so to reflect the “new normal”. It turns out reporting and understanding temperature normals is easier than precipitation normals.

NOAA has collected 10 sets of these U.S Climate Normals dating back to 1901. The map below shows how the United States has warmed over the course of these ten segments of time. The blue zones are areas where the temperature was cooler than the 20th century average and the red zones are those areas warmer than average.

Looking at these maps tells the story anybody born between 1901-1940 will tell you – generally speaking, it used to be cooler. Though, unfortunately, they can’t really. It’s called generational amnesia and it inflicts all of us. As climate and energy writer David Roberts writes, reflecting the research from two researchers at Columbia: “”extremely hot summers” are 200 times more likely than 50 years ago. Did you know that? Can you feel it?” It’s also part of what is called shifting baseline syndrome. We can’t relate to the baselines of the past. That’s true for temperatures, plant and animal populations, and the more fickle baselines of precipitation.

NOAA’s same 10 time segments for U.S. Climate Normals for precipitation don’t show the same gradual nation-wide pattern temperatures do. Even before climate change, precipitation patterns varied greatly across different regions of the U.S. Unlike temperature normals, where we can say its generally getting warmer, we can’t say it’s generally getting wetter or dryer over time. We’re stuck with the more unsatisfactory answer, “It depends.”

Take the Southwest as an example. It’s easy to think it’s just been getting gradually drier, but it’s a mixed bag. For the first two sets, 1901-1930 and 1911-1940 it was wetter than the 20th Century average. And then the next four segments were dryer until the 1961-90 segment which shows a mix of wetter and dryer across a mix of zones. The two most recent periods, including 1981-2010, have been wetter than average. This regional precipitation variation is evident even in the Northeast precipitation numbers Cornell provided for the first half of July. Caribou, Maine was drier than usual while Boston blew the normal out of the proverbial water.

Given how dry and hot the Southwest has been, recency bias – the tendency to favor recent events over historic ones – will probably will keep people from believing that is true; before, that is, generational amnesia and baseline syndrome take over. But some weather events leave a lasting impression. As it did for my father-in-law, John Pappalardo, who grew up in Winsted, Connecticut.

In August of 1955, John’s sophomore year at the University of Connecticut on his way to becoming a dentist, the Mad River running through Winsted flooded. “There’s a reason we called it the Mad River”, John told me, as he recalled the images of the flood:

“Our two story house was flooded with water as high as the thermostat on the wall. We stayed up all night on the second floor as water ran down our street. It took a full day before someone came by in a boat, rowed in our front door, and rescued us from the staircase. But we were lucky, my friend’s house was split in half. You could see the dishes sitting in the cupboard from the street, just as they had left it.”

Two hurricanes in as many weeks had ripped through Southern New England. First came Hurricane Connie between August 11th to the 14th which dumped four to six inches in two days saturating the land with water. Then, three days later, on August 17th, came Hurricane Diane dumping nearly 20 inches of rain in two days. Both exceeded New England records. With the land already saturated with water from the first hurricane, the banks of the Mad River couldn’t contain the onslaught of water from the second. Thus began a cascade of flooding through Winsted, down the Mad River, and into the Farmington River – Connecticut’s largest tributary feeding into the Northeast’s largest river, the Connecticut River.

EVAPORATION NATION

Stretching 410 miles long, the Connecticut River Basin stretches through four New England states; it forms the border of Vermont and New Hampshire and divides Massachusetts and Connecticut. The river provides 70% of the water to New England; 41% of which comes from Vermont, 30% from New Hampshire and Connecticut, and the remainder from another six New England states. It collects water as far north as the Canadian border and spills it into the Atlantic Ocean to the south at Long Island, New York. Like much of the Northeast, a lush tree canopy covers 80% of the basin. It’s health is vital to the Northeast Region making it a target of study for the effects of climate change on the region.

Laying awake at night here in Avon, Connecticut, tucked under a canopy of trees, saturated soil, and a mosquito dive-bombing my ears, the still presence of humidity surrounds my body and engulfs my mind. I contemplate animals like me sweating – perspiration; plants sweating – transpiration; and the soil sweating – evaporation. Just then, the rush of rustling leaves permeates the stagnant calm as buckets of rain come pouring down. Precipitation – the source of perspiration, transpiration, and evaporation.

The trees, like me, struggle to transpire amidst the invisible gaseous vapors of humidity – the most abundant greenhouse gas there is. Humidity is the measure of the amount of water vapor in the air and is a primary player in the water cycle – and in cooling the planet. Just as sweat pulls heat from our body to be transported to the air, humid water vapors suck water and heat from animals, plants, soil, lakes, streams, and puddles and ferries it around the globe.

Humidity is also invisible to the sun as radiation dances through the vapors and is absorbed by the earth. The soil in Avon is pregnant with fifteen days of record July rainfall and the sun’s stored energy radiates back into the atmosphere long after the sun has set; steaming me on the mattress like a plump white sticky bun. This nighttime reheating process explains why those hot Iowa nights would grow warmer as the night progressed. As the rich Iowa soil emanated stored heat, I wasn’t the only one sweating. So was the abundant Iowa corn. One acre of corn will transpire 3,000-4,000 gallons (11,400-15,100 liters) of water a day making significant contributions to the state’s humidity. Back here in Avon, the oak trees above me will contribute 40,000 gallons (151,000 liters) of water a year to the atmosphere. And I thought I sweat a lot.

Scientists will sometimes combine the measures, and the letters, of evaporation and transpiration to form the term: evapotranspiration. Global climate models tell us evapotranspiration increases 2% for every degree of warming. Given global precipitation amounts must be balanced by evapotranspiration under a warming planet, it follows that the world should be seeing less frequent and shorter durations of precipitation. That is, we should also be seeing more and longer periods of dry days so that the atmosphere can be replenished with water vapors from evapotranspiration.

But this is why it’s important to not just study the whole with aggregated data, but the highly variable parts as well with contextual data. Measures of specific regions can deviate significantly from a global mean. A 2014 study, quotes researchers from 2008 who “noted that over the period of 1895–1999, annual precipitation averaged over New England increased by 3.7% while the change of annual precipitation for individual states in New England varied between −12% and 29.5%.”

This same study compared various sections of the Connecticut River Basin for each season. They analyzed the evapotranspiration, surface runoff, baseflow (stream flow between precipitation events), and soil moisture and found data to “support the theory that extreme precipitation events are becoming more common in a warming world.” Their “results show a clear increase in precipitation intensity for the Connecticut River Basin in the latter half of the 20th Century and early 21st Century.” While being careful to note it’s not always the case, they also find it “interesting to note” that “as precipitation intensity increases, frequency of precipitation is likely to decrease.”

Another thing that kept me awake on that humid night in Connecticut was smoke. A good example of the nuanced and variable climate conditions regions can bring. Smoke from fires in drier areas of the Midwest United States, and parts of Canada and Pennsylvania drifted over the Northeast in a toxic smog that created an atmospheric red filter to the moon. A grim reminder of what may greet us in our return west to Seattle next week, through August, and well into October. Meanwhile, sorry Northeast, NOAA predicts “above normal precipitation is likely for the central and eastern Gulf Coast region and from the Appalachians to the Atlantic Coast” for August through October. Sounds like those mosquitoes will continue to do their happy dance.

But before we head home, we stop in Maine to visit my sister and a couple more schools. Then back to water logged Boston to board a giant jet-fueled mosquito headed back against the prevailing easterly winds to the dry west coast. I’ll be ready to dry out in the mosquito-free air of Kirkland, Washington. Minus the smoke, of course. I also need to water the soil around the baby native ferns, firs, and vine maples I’m nursing to health in my nearby Kirkland park. Water that will start a cycle of evapotranspiration that, when combined with my perspiration, will form water vapors headed for the sky joining clouds drifting in from the Pacific Ocean headed east for more record setting precipitation in New England. Perhaps next year, they’ll be joined by my kids too.

Hello Interactors,

This week I’m coming to you from Cape Cod. Yesterday we saw “red tide” algal plumes stretching a quarter of a mile along a flat sandy beach against a receding tide. This is a common occurrence in Massachusetts, but the frequency of occurrences of “red tide” are increasing worldwide. The last couple weeks have seen extreme weather events in unsuspecting places worrying even the most conservative climate scientists. Perhaps it’s time we put less attention on the drama of the consequences of climate change and more on educating the public on the science behind it.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CSU AND TENNEESEE TOO

Our family is on a trip visiting family on the east coast – and also few colleges for two rising seniors. I never visited my first college, Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colorado. I was mostly following a friend who, like I, wanted to study graphic design. CSU had a notable program, but it was mostly known as an agricultural school. It’s closer to the state of Wyoming than it is Denver and is flat with rolling plains of grassland that spread out below the foothills of the Rocky Mountains – cow country. A fact that becomes obvious when the wind blows from the east carrying the stench of livestock fields in neighboring Greely, Colorado.

I had no idea Colorado State was also home to an international ecosystem research center, the National Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL). Ecology was not a new thing, but most ecological research was conducted by researchers in isolation of one another. This program, however, aimed to bring different disciplines together – like ecology, soil science, and climatology – to study their mutual effects on each other. This program was nearly as old as I was when I showed up there as a wide-eyed eighteen year old Iowa boy.

Initial plans for this lab were formed in 1966 with initial seed funding coming from the Ford Foundation and then the National Science Foundation (NSF) soon after. It was run by one of the most influential and gregarious pioneers in the field of systems ecology, George Van Dyne. Systems ecology is a quantitative approach to studying, integrating, and synthesizing entire ecosystems made of living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) components. And Fort Collins was the first U.S. site of a larger International Biological Program dedicated to exploring and combining big science and ecosystem ecology.

Van Dyne grew up in south eastern Colorado as a true cowboy working the ranch by horseback. He satisfied his love and curiosity of western land and animals by studying animal science at CSU as an undergrad and range science for his masters degree from South Dakota State University. Continuing his focus on total ecological systems, he went on to earn a PhD at the University of California, Davis developing mathematical models of ecological data.

After completing his PhD in 1963 there were few places in the world with the necessary computing power to crunch George’s differential equations that weaved a varied matrix of ecological variables. So he headed to Oak Ridge Tennessee to join the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); home to one of the country’s largest mainframe computer centers at the time.

Van Dyne joined two professors at nearby University of Tennessee, Knoxville who had created the first systems ecology course in the United States. He would go on to author four papers a month, double the expected rate of a research scientist, all while enthusiastically teaching. In one noontime course he could be seen

“writing on the chalkboard with his right hand, eating a sandwich with the left, and talking in his soft, intense baritone voice about many exciting developments in ecosystem modeling.”

Many of Van Dyne’s over 120 refereed papers were written during his eighteen months in Tennessee.

MAINFRAME MATHEMATICAL MODELLING

Van Dyne’s work at Oak Ridge was on a nearby grassland, and the expertise he garnered analyzing the data led him to edit a seminal 1969 book entitled The Ecosystem Concept in Natural Resource Management. It was his love of the grasslands and his knowledge of the quantitative study of systems ecology that led him to run the National Resource Ecology Lab in Fort Collins focused on the west’s Grassland Biome – lands dominated by grasses. There he would assemble and analyze data coming in from grassland sites strewn across a rectangular block west from Oklahoma to California north to Washington and back east to South Dakota.

Each site had researchers in the field estimating plant biomass from pre-determined and equivalent plot sizes. They all used the same statistical methods in attempts to maintain similar sample sizes across sites. The IBP program goals were to collect and estimate averages within 20 percent with 80 percent accuracy by leveraging models created by mathematicians and teams of postdoc researchers from a variety of backgrounds.

Van Dyne and team were interested in the role abiotic factors play in the ecological health of grasslands. The model included over 180 internal state variables. For example, the number of herbivores or amount of organic minerals found in the sample sites. The model also included abiotic driving variables like rainfall or processes stemming from photosynthesis like radiation. Their work culminated in 4400 lines of computer code that included 500 parameters. It took seven minutes to compile and run a program that simulated two years of effects of grassland under the modelled conditions on a state of the art mainframe computer from the Computer Data Corporation, the CDC 6400. The follow-on to this model was the CDC 6500 which cost $8 million in 1967 – or over $63 billion in 2021 dollars – and weighed over 10,000 pounds. This same mathematical model would run almost instantaneously on a ordinary laptop today.

In hindsight, the model is considered overly complex but it did satisfy the goals Van Dyne set out to achieve;

“to create a model that would serve as a communications device and organizer of information, be useful as a research tool, and yield results that could help in elucidating biological phenomena in grassland ecosystems.”

There were four basic questions the model was intended to address:

* What is the effect on net or gross primary production as the result of various abiotic disturbances?  

* How is the carrying capacity of a grassland affected by these disturbances?

* Are the results of a simulation model like this consistent with field data taken in the Grassland Biome Program, and if not, why?

* What are the changes in the composition of the producers as a result of these disturbances?

The model didn’t prove to be robust enough to be a reliable predictor of the future, but it did succeed in demonstrating a systems approach to modelling an ecosystem.

This was a highly controversial endeavor that was seen by many conservative practicing biologists and ecologists as obtusely abstract, misguided, expensive – and competitive. They witnessed large amounts of NSF money going toward Van Dyne’s ‘grand experiment’ and they began to worry their own individual research would dry up.

Traditional ecological research had been a solitary endeavor and many of the older practicing scientists preferred the more conservative individualistic approach to science. Meanwhile, the younger liberal scientists were encouraged by the more open and collaborative approach of systems ecology Van Dyne encouraged. They preferred the teamwork required in collecting, analyzing, and publishing what was shared among a diverse array of contributors. It was a split in belief and approach that mimicked the cultural attitudes of the sixties and seventies.

As a result, established scientists began speaking out and became critical of the big science approach to ecological systems research – and Van Dyne’s program in particular. They questioned the quality of data collected across so many sites by a variety of scientists of differing backgrounds and were dubious of the aggregation of data needed to conform to the models Van Dyne and his team of mathematicians had devised.

Van Dyne did not give in easily, however, and by 1972 he had hired teams of ‘integrators’ to work with site directors and scientists to synthesize the large amounts of data in preparation for analysis. One of the original integrators and organizers was Jim Ellis. He was second only to Van Dyne in his understanding of the interaction of ecological processes with human societies. By encouraging standard methods of defining variables and measuring outcomes, the work these people did is considered by some to be some of the first examples of organized software quality assurance.

By 1974, Van Dyne had amassed a team of over fifty researchers and integrators. By then, however, the NSF had been swayed by the critics and they seized funding the Grassland Biome Program. But some of this undoing was Van Dyne’s own making. While he was a dedicated scientist who gave much of his time to young scientists, he also created a confrontational work environment inviting competing opinions and relished in fostering heated debates. He also had a notorious top-down management style and many of the younger scientists chose to move to other projects than continue working in such an environment.(1)

A MAN OF ACTION AND A CALL TO ACTION

The roughly seven years of the IBP Grassland Biome Program was fast, inventive, and impactful producing mounds of scientific papers. The computer model the team devised was never able to answer the grassland questions they had hoped, but it marked a special point in ecological systems research and sparked the development of future ecological simulation modeling and research programs. Including centers at the University of Georgia, Colorado State University, Utah State University, San Diego State University, and Oregon State University. Ecological simulation models, and research programs, have improved over time and are now considered an essential part of ecological science. Any multi-variate questions being asked through today’s planetary ecological simulation models would likely not be possible without George Van Dyne and the IBP.

Large scale, heavily funded ecological programs like the one Van Dyne choreographed do not exist today. Big science attention and dollars tend toward the human genome project, astronomy, interplanetary exploration, and biochemistry. And members of the mainstream media don’t help. They’d rather report on Bezos, Branson, and Musk comparing the size of their rockets and how far they can reach into the stillness of space. Not to take anything away from the innovations that have stemmed from the infusion of private money into the amazing advancements in modern-day rocket wizardry, but all three seem to have given up on planet earth. Perhaps the advertising industry and the mass media consuming public have too.

But ecological systems scientists have not given up. Programs like the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) employ nearly 2000 scientists across 28 U.S. sites and includes an international component. Started in 1980, this program is funded by the NSF and data from their research can be found through the Environmental Data Initiative and DataONE. There’s also a program operated by Battelle called the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Also funded by the NSF, this program was conceived in 1999 and has been fully operational since 2019. Their mission is to “advance the ability of scientists to examine and understand the interactions between life and the environment at the scale of an entire continent.” Just like George Van Dyne, they seek to quantify ecological processes over time across large spatial extents through complex sampling across space and time.

And the National Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) continues to function today out of Colorado State University in Fort Collins; as does the Fort Collins Science Center (FORT) as part of the United States Geological Society (USGS). They “develop and disseminate research-based information and tools needed to understand the nation’s biological resources in support of effective decision making.” My friend and former college roommate, Pat Shafroth, is a Research Ecologist there and was instrumental in studying the impact on riverside vegetation upon the destruction of the Elwha Dam, the opening of the Elwha River, and the return of spawning salmon.

George Van Dyne was ahead of his time. His intuition to first study abiotic factors like rising water temperatures come into focus in light of this summer’s climate catastrophes. We no longer need simulations to tell us the Sacramento River is “facing a “near-complete loss” of young salmon, which cannot grow beyond their egg stage in waters heated by extended temperatures of over 100 degrees.” Abiotic perturbances from a warming planet have clearly effected the life of the living.

Flooding is another abiotic perturbance that impacts the lives of living creatures across a large geographic area over a short period of time. The grieving families of the 122 Belgian and German lives that were lost in the flooding this week no longer need a mathematical model to warn them of the dire consequences of human-induced climate catastrophes. And that says nothing of the nonhuman lives taken by the insufferable rushing water.

But dwelling on despair only breeds despair. If there’s one thing ecological systems scientists like George, and even my friend Pat, have taught us is that making one small change in a network of interdependent ecological variables can have a large scale impact. We just need to know where to make the change.

Scientists know where to focus, but we need big government to act on the big investments they’ve made in big science and big ecology to enable big changes. Collective individual behavioral at the tips of fractal like ecosystem networks helps, but even if everyone on the planet did their part to reduce CO2 emissions, it’s still only four percent of total emissions. We need governments to enact legislation that gets us to clean energy policies quickly – small changes, further up the fractal chain that have big cascading impact through the network of life.

So if you want to do your part to help, go to call4climate.com or dial 202-318-1885. Just punch in your zip code and you’ll be presented with the necessary talking points and then connected to your representative Senate offices. Do like George Van Dyne and take action.