Environmental science
"The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key that will unlock the New World Order"---Mikhail Gorbachev 1996
THE FIRST LAW
Gregory Bateson in his Steps Toward An Ecology of Mind(Chandler, San Francisco, 1972) argues that the ecological system as a whole is more important than the individual organisms that comprise it. The unit of survival is not the organism or the species but the entire environment. "Mind," to Bateson, "is a vast and integrated network." This statement seems to be eminently sensible and clearly one that is consistent with Baha'i philosophy and its approach to ecology.--Ron Price with thanks to Gregory Bateson, quoted in Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self, WW Norton, NY, 1984, p.258.
The poetic imagination
and selfhood itself
lies in an awareness
of my divided nature
and the immense gulf
between aspiration and limitation.
Such is the critical polarity
at the base of my life
and the foundation
of the Baha'i community,
producing, as it does,
the perpetual balancing act
of unstable and inner forces
we must reconcile or be torn apart.
Such is the first law of human psychic life1
as we accept that the whole is definitely
more than the sum of its parts.
1 Charles Fair, The New Nonsense: The End of the Rational Consensus, p.45.
Ron Price
13 May 2001
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HOW EARTH MADE US
Iain Stewart(b. 1964-) is a Scottish geologist, television and radio presenter, as well as a professor of Geoscience Communication at the University of Plymouth. I have just finished watching his epic 5 part series How Earth Made Us.(1) I am twenty years older than Stewart, am a retired teacher and lecturer, now poet and publisher and currently am the secretary of the Baha’i Group of George Town Tasmania, the oldest town in Australia, the oldest continent.
Professor Stewart’s line of thought reminded me of Ellsworth Huntington’s intellectual mission “to determine step by step the process by which geological structure, topographic form and the present and past nature of climate have shaped man’s progress, moulded his history, and thus played an incalculable part in the development of a system of thought which could scarcely have arisen under any other physical circumstances.”(2) Stewart presents a focus on how the environment has shaped history.
While this series was presented on Australian television the Plains Humanities Alliance held a public panel presentation entitled “Changing Places: The Geographic Turn in the Digital Humanities.”(3) Sometimes called humanities computing this field has focused on the digitization and analysis of materials relating to the traditional humanities disciplines. Digital Humanities currently incorporates digitized materials from the traditional arts and humanities disciplines, such as: history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies. It then combines the methodologies of these disciplines with tools provided by computing such as: data visualisation, data retrieval, computational analysis, digital publishing, and the electronic publication fields.
Also relevant to this discussion is geographic information system or geospatial information system(GIS). This is a system that captures, stores, analyses, manages and presents data with reference to geographic location data. It is a critical tool in facilitating a new wave of spatial analysis. In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis and database technology. GIS may be used in archaeology, geography, cartography, remote sensing, land surveying, public utility management, natural resource management, precision agriculture, photogrammetry, urban planning, emergency management, landscape architecture, navigation, aerial video and localized search engines.
GIS allows users to create multiple layers of information that can be aligned on the same map or spatial field. Historical maps can be scanned and geo-referenced, that is, stretched to fit the current map, thus allowing users to combine and overlay various forms of information in order to understand how they relate to one another. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)ABC1 TV, 8 March 2011 to 5 April 2011, 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., (2)Ellsworth Huntington, Wikipedia; Aaron Hofer, Geographic Determinism Through the Ages, and “Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?” Jared Diamond, as well as (3) The Office of University Communications University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Tooling Up for Digital Humanities.
I think it quite logical, Ellsworth,
that there is a step-by-step process
by which geologic structure, forms
topographic, & the present and past
climate have shaped progress, moulded
our history, thus playing an incalculable
part in the development of systems of
thought which could scarcely have arisen
under any other physical circumstances.1
I think it quite logical, Samuel,2 that the primary
source of conflict in our post-Cold War world is
and will be the cultural and religious identities as
you formulated in your 1992 lecture at the AEI:
American Enterprise Institute.2 And so Professor
Stewart, I can agree with your thesis, in part, and
I did enjoy your series on TV in this Australian
autumn: delightful, Ian, absolutely delightful!!*
1 Ellsworth Huntington(1876-1947) was professor of geology at Yale and known for his studies on climatic determinism.
2 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.
Ron Price
19 April 2011
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Rethinking Prosperity: Forging Alternatives to a Culture of Consumerism....Bahá'í International Community’s Contribution to the 18th Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development
Against the backdrop of climate change, environmental degradation, and the crippling extremes of wealth and poverty, the transformation from a culture of unfettered consumerism to a culture of sustainability has gained momentum in large part through the efforts of civil society organizations and governmental agencies worldwide. Beyond informed policies and ‘greener technologies’ it is a transformation that will require an earnest examination of our understanding of human nature and of the cultural frameworks driving institutions of government, business, education, and media around the world. Questions of what is natural and just will need to be critically re-examined. The issue of sustainable consumption and production, under consideration by this Commission, will need to be considered in the broader context of an ailing social order—one characterized by competition, violence, conflict and insecurity—of which it is a part.
In its contribution to the Commissions’ review of the 10-Year Framework for Programmes[i] on sustainable consumption and production, the Bahá’í International Community would like, first, to note the strengths of this evolving Framework and, second—in line with the vision outlined above—to identify issues which require further elaboration. In terms of its strengths: the Framework considers the economic, social and environmental aspects of the transition to sustainable consumption and production, thereby breaking down the long-standing compartmentalization of these domains[ii]; it recognizes the inter-linkages between the themes of the Framework (e.g. education, institutional capacity building, participation of women, application of indigenous knowledge, etc.)[iii]; it has sought to involve stakeholders from around the world through regional consultations; and it calls on actors from all levels of society to achieve the goals articulated therein.
For the rest of this contribution of the International Baha'i Community to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development go to the following link:
http://www.bic.org/
For more information on the Baha'i Faith and the United Nations go to:
http://info.bahai.org/article-1-6-0-6.html
INVISIBLE REALITY
The only method to knowledge is the method of the artist, for there is no absolute knowledge. All knowledge is stamped with our imperfection, or its, or both. For the world is not a fixed, solid array of objects. It shifts under our gaze and must be interpreted by us, by an act of judgement. The entire experience of life is more delicate, more fragile, more fugitive and startling than we can ever catch in the butterfly net of our senses. -Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Science Horizons Inc., 1973, pp.353-364.
While this wondrous Administration, the precursor
of a new Order, has been taking form this century,
our very notion of space and time was being redefined
by Albert Einstein. The world we are all in, we can not
experience with our senses; invisible to our eyes,
beyond our touch: protons, neutrons, leptons,
DNA, RNA, not just meaningless dancing atoms.
Even matter itself we created for the first time in
these days when this Administration was first
taking form. So many immortal creations in this
century: mapping the universe, the mind. We’ve seen
the universe in a grain of sand and made our heaven
of a flower; infinity and eternity we now hold in our hand
and we can trace all of existence in less than an hour.
Ron Price
23 March 1996
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WHOSE MASTERPIECE?
I first came across Leonard Cohen in the early months of 1968 when I was living on Baffin Island. Leonard Cohen had come to the music industry relatively late, having already established himself as a published novelist and poet. He turned his hand to music when his song Suzanne became a hit for Judy Collins and in 1967 he went into the studio to cut his debut album for Columbia.
Gerard Fannon, in his “Album Review: Songs of Leonard Cohen Columbia 1967” on 8 January 2009,(1) wrote that: “The ten songs on the album are beautifully constructed. Few lyricists have since been able to wrestle with the ideas of love, loss and longing quite so intelligently, articulately and ambiguously as Leonard Cohen. He depicts a world entirely at the mercy of the chaos that arises from love and lust, mastery and submission, the supplicant and the worshipped. Though his words may seem lofty or pretentious, they convey a deep-rooted sense of humanity.”
“Many artists work their whole career, Fannon continues, “to create a work of such singular artistic vision as Songs of Leonard Cohen, and it is even more remarkable that Cohen achieved this the first time he set foot in a studio. Songs of Leonard Cohen remains an astonishing and enduring debut. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)the internet site: Suite101.com
I heard you again when they gave you
a tribute at the Sydney Opera House in
2005, Leonard, and I noted some of what
you had to say about writing: you wanted
to respond to the beauty in the world; you
do not command your work--it commands
you; you’ll never untangle life’s mysteries;
you do not dwell on the past or the future.
Fame and wealth came so early to you
with your first book of poetry and novel
before you were thirty. My writing took
decades longer; I really only got going in
my fifties and had to unload my career as
a teacher and all that community work so
that I could free my spirit to respond to the
beauty around me and engage symbiotically
with my real-life master-piece....if it is that..
which became my epic, my opus, my oeuvre
by sensible and insensible degrees due to the
mysterious dispensations of Providence which,
as you say, Leonard, one never really untangles
and the leaven which leavens the world of being
and furnishes the power by which the wonders of
the world--the sciences and the arts--are manifest.
16 February 2009
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The sprawling novels of David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie and the like are books which remain inextricably tied to the information society they depict. So while they contain massive quantities of obscure scientific knowledge, geographical and biographical trivia, lists and details, they fail the test of art: namely, to realize something different from this information.
If such critics are at all persuasive in their claim that neither the subjects nor the reader can usefully do anything with all this information, then these novels are indeed symptomatic of the culture Richard Sennett(1) describes, a culture where ceaseless consumption of either goods or information mitigates against possession. Sennett's suggestions as to how we might alter this situation through the provision of basic incomes, job sharing, and counter-institutions to provide stable work---are designed to reconnect the thread of experience together, and to enable a self to become more grounded in time, but they are perhaps too modest in the face of the spiritual, economic and environmental situations that stem from the new capitalism.
Still, Richard Sennett's book, The Culture of the New Capitalism,(2) eloquently depicts the devastating irony that results when the iron cage of modern capitalism opens, only to imprison us within more intangible forms of unfreedom. And might the transience, risk and fragility that frame the world of market speculation come to infect the way the rest of us work and live? Richard Sennett thinks so. His new book argues that we need to rethink Marx's dictum 'all that is solid melts into air'. The once praised 'creative destruction' of capitalism now merely destroys. For Sennett, this 'new capitalism' requires us to rethink our assumptions about openness and freedom.
One of the ways, the contexts, I have had to rethink my assumptions, especially for a person like myself who has lived in nearly 40 houses in his autobiographical life and had more jobs than he can shake a stick at, has been in the management of short and long term relationships while migrating from job to job and place to place. If institutions no longer provided a long term framework, I have had to improvise my life-narrative. I also had to do without a sustained sense of self from time to time, at crisis periods; I had to find some basis, a new basis, for such a self. We all need a sustained sense of self, a sustaining life-narrative, to value our experiences, to be good at something specific. The major continuity in my life through these four epochs, the years 1944 to 2021, has been the religion I came to be associated with through my mother some fifty-eight years ago at the age of nine. It has been the primary glue, so to speak, although medications for my bipolar disorder have been quintessential as well. All other continuities, and there have been several, have provided a hypothetical glue. Truths which are perennial but not archaic have been at the core of my life and sustained it—or so it seems to me as I gaze back to my first memory in 1947/8, sixty years ago.
In some ways this ideological continunity is like the continuity of place as I have experienced it since WW2. My understanding and appreciation of both the intellectual underpinnings of my religion and the sense of meaning I derive from place is much like my experience as I walk down many a city street. On many city blocks and village streets in Canada and Australia where I have spent all my life, it was possible to find groups of buildings that spanned one or two hundred years of construction methods and styles. They visually supported and enhanced each other, and in addition they provided examples of some regional culture and development. These human habitations and centres were often as young as thirty or forty years, or even less. This was the case in most of George Town, Zeehan, Katherine, South Hedland and Frobisher Bay among other towns where I lived. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Richard Sennett the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, the Bemis Adjunct Professor of Sociology at MIT and Professor of the Humanities at New York University, and (2) The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale, 2006,
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THE LONG CLIMB
The very concept of history has yet to be constructed.
-Louis Althusser in The Althussserian Legacy, E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, editors, Verso, London, 1993, p.97.
The old narratives are proving
distasteful, inadequate, vulnerable,
repudiated, like some change of fashion,
requiring epochal shift due to
the intrusion of new forms,
questions and conceptual frameworks,
incommensurable philosophic and
theoretic perspectives and tapestries.
The resulting factionalism and fragmentation
calls out for a healing connectedness,
bringing the parts together in dialogue
out of which may come
the disciplines, the social sciences
of the twenty-first century
to help us all in the long climb
to the perfection of the human community.
5 October 1996
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THE WEIGHT
Only by reading R.F. Price's poetry, on one level, as a prolonged and fragmented autobiography, conceived, for the most part, after bearing the weight of a new Faith as one of its pioneers for some thirty years and after striving to carry its message to his contemporaries in some of the remotest regions of Canada and Australia, can the elusive unity of its vast bulk be glimpsed.(1) It is an autobiography that attempts not to confine its wisdom and virtue within the small circle of his experiences, his friends and his religion, in short, everything already intimately related to him. He tries to counter the tendency to overvalue these natural and personal enthusiasms and interests. He widens his field, his scope, his frame of influence to take in the richest and most varied "cultural attainments of the mind,"(2) attainments within the range of the social sciences and humanities and largely acquired by reading. -Ron Price, with thanks to (1)Justin Wintle, Furious Interiors: Wales, R.S. Thomas and God, Flamingo, London, 1996, p.xviii; and (2) 'Abdu'l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35.
I do not humbly shun epiphanies
if they come my way like the diamond,
produced from many years of weight,
sometimes quite insufferable, wet with
tears from those Eskimo kids, & in the
corridors and toilets of the psychiatric
places and again and again and again
until finally released on that lithium &
soothing chemistry, before getting
abused in the hot north and then......
wrung completely dry in a miasmal
ooze from which I tried to inch my
consequential necessary way.(1)
I came to see it all as vapour in the desert.
I had dreamed, hoped, for fresh water but
knew it to be mirage, illusion. It was no mere
nothing, no quintessential nothingness; these
were but my first steps to the taste of the fruits
of holiness and that tree of wondrous glory.(2)
(1) Roger White, The Language of There, p.34.
(2) Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words, No.68.
2 December 2001
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FOULEST WEED
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. -Shakespeare, Sonnets, Sonnet 94.
Just as bodily diseases are contagious, likewise the spiritual diseases are also infectious. We quarantine an individual & we do not associate with Covenant-Breakers. -The Power of the Covenant: Part Two, NSA of the Baha’is of Canada, 1976, pp. 34-5.
This refuge against schism,
disruption, anarchy and betrayal,
this hall-mark of my Faith, found
some lilies growing there, where
great honours had been bestowed,
and they did fester, smell: Remy,
White, Sohrab, Avarih, Zimmer--
sweet things turned sour by their
deeds. For however the flowers be
when infected with this virus of
violation, even the basest weeds
surpass their beauty, colour, charm.
Personal conscience is not ultimate
authority, this home of foulest weed.
6 October 1997
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