Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 07/28/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“A DEEPER SHADE OF GREEN”
by Bill McKibben
also author of the best-selling book “The End of Nature”
Our quotes are from article in 08/06 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC:
“This is the year when we finally started to understand what we are in for..
“First, British scientist James Lovelock, who invented the instrument that allowed us to detect our eroding ozone layer, published an essay predicting that we’d already added too much CO2 and that runaway global warming was inevitable. He predicted that billions will die this century. A few days later came a less dramatic but equally alarming announcement. The steady and long-serving NASA climatologist James Hansen defied federal attempts to gag him and told reporters that new calculations about, among other things, the instability of Greenland’s ice shelf showed ‘we can’t let it go on another ten years like this.’ If we did? Over time, the buildup of CO2 emissions would ‘imply changes that constitute practically a different planet.’ Less than ten years to reverse course. Not our kids’ lifetimes, or our grandkids’. Ours.
…“Historians, I think, will look back on this as the time when denial finally began to crumble. When we finally began to understand that the planet as we’ve known it was at stake – and not from a possible scenario, like nuclear war, but from the consumption of the coal and gas and oil that power most of the actions of our lives. This is new. Humans have never faced a civilization-scale challenge before. Whether we deal with gracefully or not depends, I believe, on what happens to that creed we call environmentalism.
“Environmentalism is mostly an American invention, one of the most powerful ideas we’ve offered to the rest of the planet…
“But when it came time to deal with global warming, this kind of environmentalism flunked. Despite 20 years of increasingly dire warnings, American carbon emissions continue to grow; we won’t even engage in the Kyoto Protocol, the one international effort to bring carbon emissions under some kind of control. A few western European are doing better, but even they are having trouble meeting their reduction targets. And the developing world is starting to flood the atmosphere with CO2 on an almost American scale. From 1990 to 2004, China’s carbon emissions increased by 67 percent, nearly all of it the result of coal.
“We’re now starting to realize this failure was almost inevitable. Environmentalism’s method of handling global warming is flawed…
“But it’s also contributed to that gathering sense of dissatisfaction, and to that cloud of carbon dioxide. If everyone has to drive their own car everywhere (and the biggest car possible, to maximize their own safety), then it’s hard to reduce emissions. If our idea of paradise remains a 4,000-square-foot house on its own isolated lot, it’s hard to imagine really rapid change. But there are at least glimmers of another possible future…
“We don’t need to erase individualism; it is one of the glories of the American character. But environmentalists desperately need to learn how to celebrate community, too.
“Environmentalism isn’t dying. In fact, the need for it has never been greater. But it has to transform itself into something so different that the old name really won’t apply. It has to be about a new kind of culture, not a new kind of filter; it has to pay as much attention to preachers and sociologists as it does to scientists; it has to care as much about the carrot in the farmers markets as it does about the caribou on the Arctic tundra. That’s what the printouts on atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide tell us, and it’s a message echoed by the researchers studying happiness and satisfaction. We don’t need a slightly rejiggered version of the world we now inhabit; we need to start working on changes on the scale of the problems we face.
“Fear of what will happen unless we shift, desire for what might happen if we do – together they’re creating new openings for a more thorough shake-up than any American thinker since Thoreau has envisioned. But ten years is not a lot of time; we’d best get started.”
“KNOW IT ALL
by Stacy Schiff”
Our title and quotes are from THE NEW YORKER of 07/31/06:
“On March 1st, WIKIPEDIA, the online interactive encyclopedia, hit the million-articles mark, with an entry on Jordanhill, a railway station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a single sentence about the station at 11 P.M., local time; over the next twenty-four hours, the entry was edited more than four hundred times, by dozens of people. (Jordanhill happens to be the ‘1029th busiest station in the United Kingdom’; it ‘no longer has a staffed ticket counter.’) The Encyclopedia Britannica, which for more than two centuries has been considered the gold standard for reference works, has only a hundred and twenty thousand entries in its most comprehensive edition…
To read the complete fascinating article, click on http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060731fa_fact
“WHY DO WE DREAM?”
Our title and quotes are from an article on http://www.sciam.com:
“Ernest Hartman, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and the director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, Mass., explains.
“The questions, ‘Why do we dream?’ or ‘What is the function of dreaming?’ are easy to ask but very difficult to answer. The most honest answer is that we do not yet know the function or functions of dreaming…
“Therefore I will try to explain a current view of dreaming and its possible functions, developed by myself and many collaborators, which we call the Contemporary Theory of Dreaming. The basic idea is as follows: activation patterns are shifting and connections are being made and unmade constantly in our brains, forming the physical basis for our minds. There is a whole continuum in the making of connections that we subsequently experience as mental functioning. At one end of the continuum is focused waking activity, such as when we are doing an arithmetic problem or chasing down a fly ball in the outfield. Here our mental functioning is focused, linear and well-bounded. When we move from focused waking thought-reverie, daydreaming and finally dreaming – mental activity becomes less focused, looser, more global and more imagistic. Dreaming is the far end of this continuum: the state in which we make connections most loosely…
“The Contemporary Theory of Dreaming holds that the process is not random, however, and that it is instead guided by the emotions of the dreamer. When one clear-cut emotion is present, dreams are often very simple. Thus people who experience trauma – such as an escape from a burning building, an attack or a rape – often have a dream something like, ‘I was on the beach and was swept away by a tidal wave.’ This case is paradigmatic. It is obvious that the dreamer is not dreaming about the actual traumatic event, but is instead picturing the emotion, ‘I am terrified. I am overwhelmed.’ When the emotional state is less clear, or when there are several emotions or concerns at once, the dream becomes more complicated. We have statistics showing that such intense dreams are indeed more frequent and more intense after trauma. In fact, the intensity of the central dream imagery, which can be rated reliably, appears to be a measure of the emotional arousal of the dreamer. Therefore, overall the contemporary theory considers dreaming to be a broad making of connections guided by emotion…Thus we consider a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events.”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_directory.cfm and then on the title.
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