Rachel Carson

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress at great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.


                                                                              Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson was born to a farming family in western Pennsylvania in 1907, and died in 1964. There was never an election in her adult life in which she was ineligible to vote, and she was old enough to have been glad when the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. She was the smartest kid in her class, and enjoyed nature and literature. Her college graduated her with honors, but she delayed graduate school because of family financial difficulties. Carson did receive a master's degree in zoology from John Hopkins, but further financial difficulties, including her father's death kept her from continuing.

Carson went to work for the Bureau of Fisheries, and wrote and edited  Fisheries publications and radio broadcasts. She went on to write for newspapers and The Atlantic Monthly, and published a trilogy of books about the ocean, Under Sea and Wind, The Sea around Us, and The Edge of the Sea.

We remember Rachel Carson for her 1962 book, Silent Spring, which is one source for the environmental movement. Silent Spring documented pesticide -- particularly DDT -- damage to the environment. Bald eagles, which are fairly common now, were once threatened with extinction because pesticides, concentrating at the higher end of the food chain, made eagle eggs fragile. Carson took a lot of heat, particularly from the chemical industry,

The chief criticism of Carson and Silent Spring was that banning DDT would condemn people in the tropics to death from malaria, although Carson had argued for study and judicious use, rather than  abandonment. The criticism continues half a century later, although a lot of that time has been spent trying to understand relationships and context, the workings of systems. Carson should be remembered as a pioneer in systematic thinking about problems, in a time of pure purposiveness.

Donella Meadows

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

Donella Meadows

Donella Meadows lived from 1941 until 2001. She studied Chemistry as an undergraduate at Carleton College, and received a doctorate in Biophysics from Harvard. She went as a researcher to MIT, and worked there with Jay Forrester, the inventor of magnetic data storage, in the early days of computer modeling.

In 1972, Meadows published the book The Limits to Growth with her husband, Dennis Meadows, as well as Jorgen Randers and William Behrens. The book was a report to a private group, the Club of Rome, that is interested in challenges facing all of humanity. Limits modeled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population using finite resources, and predicted economic behavior.

Limits' conclusions indicated that humanity's situation is perilous. It has been criticized by commentators of widely ranging sincerity and understanding, and twenty- and thirty-year updates have been published.

The thing to take away from Limits and from Donella Meadows, though, is a way of thinking. For instance, predicting how long a resource, say oil, will last takes more than just dividing known reserves by barrels per year. Modelers need to predict discoveries of new reserves, relative difficulty of getting existing and predicted reserves, increases in population and industrialization, and changes in consumption due to new technologies. Good citizenship may not require fluency with modeling these variables, but it does demand that we know they are there and how they interact.

Meadows' Places to Intervene in a System is probably her best know paper (about two thousand words). It is available as a PDF at http://www.sustainer.org/?page_id=106,

As html at http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/places_intervene_system.html,

in the Winter, 1997 Whole Earth Review, in her posthumous book Thinking in Systems: A Primer, and outlined at Wikipedia. She wrote a syndicated column, Voice of a Global Citizen, which is archived at http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/.

Thermotats And Voter Literacy

More on my snarky theme, Literacy Tests for Voters and Public Servants.

Are thermostats valves or switches? The way they work is to sense room temperature, and to switch the furnace on or off, depending on the setting a human chooses. This one has a feature that changes the setting depending on time. Most of us, including me, treat thermosstats like valves: set the thing higher, and more heat might come out, but the furnace only has one setting. (What's really happening is that we're cheating, getting a little warmer until somebody more responsible comes along and busts us.)

Why is this important? Thermostats are an example of negative feedback, and an introduction to thinking accurately about how the world works.

I Can't Read Our Permanent Address

The text lettered on this painting is the last paragraph in this post.

I painted this around 1990. I’ve tried to pin the date down by remembering where I got the canvas. It’s a piece of muslin, with a crude print in green and white of an elephant and foliage. You can still see a ghost of the design from behind. It was an employer’s cast-off, but I can’t remember whose, and I changed jobs about the time I painted it.

The picture of the dome-dwellin’ hippies who have just converted a VW Bug into a horse-drawn buggy does a pretty good job of illustrating the quote, taken from the writings of a biologist and inventor named John Todd. When I started painting, I wasn’t thinking of putting words in. I tried a couple of things to fill the foreground around the car. They didn’t work. I’d been researching John Todd a year or so earlier, and lifted an appropriate passage. My sloganeering reminded Barbara and me, both, of a bunch of semi-trailers we used to see in Lamoille, Illinois (just a little north of where US 34 crosses I-80). Some put-upon soul was using them as billboards in his public relations war with the county. There were a couple hundred words of argument, and we’d see them after a few hours of driving and just before we were due at Barbara’s father’s, so we never stopped, and we never learned what the megillah was about.

(No responsible horse owners would ever allow that fencepost with the loose bobwire in their pasture. I liked the way it kept my eyes from leaking off the canvas, though, so I left it.)

I entered the painting in a group show, back in April. It was the occasion of a couple of conversations with other, more painterly and less “anecdotal”, artists. The conversation that I remember most, though, was with a friend who dropped in to support me. Mark thought the quote was incomprehensible, and probably thought the reason was ostentatious vocabulary. I’ve tried since then to rewrite it, but I haven’t been able to keep its meaning, and make it more accessible, without making it longer.

Maybe somebody else could take a stab at it.

“Tomorrow is our permanent address. It is the structure or morphology of a system that determines its behavior and subsequently its fate. The coefficients or parameters within a system
determine only rates and relative dominance. This distinction is significant since current attempts to adapt technological society to changing conditions are focused on coefficients which are not fate-determining.”