Aaron Antrim’s blog

After reading the last chapter first, “To What End?”:

Let me stay for starters that I appreciate E.O. Wilson’s perspective very much. He discusses world problems clearly and with persuasive factual support, often reinforcing his point by drawing analogies from medical science and common sense wisdom to put the importance of protecting biodiversity, reducing resource utilization, and curbing population growth in compelling light. His approach is in most ways an optimistic one, as he believes that systems can be changed from within, and that logic, reason, and science are tools to persuade and solve problems. It is interesting to note the differences between him and Wendell Berry, starting with the covers and jackets of their books. The cover of Citizenship Papers, a product of modern printing technology, has been made to imitate the product of much older printing technology. The typeface used on the cover is a slightly ragged serif font lending an old-fashioned feel. The background color of the jacket is a light ivory, suggesting old sepia-toned paper. The title itself has a historical ring to it, and calls up the tradition of citizenship.

The cover of Consilience, on the other hand, is a stark black and white, in an inverted white-on-black scheme (something in vogue among graphic designers). There is very little text on the cover compared, and it is all in a modern, clean sans-serif typeface, surrounded by a faintly embossed black circle suggesting geometric perfection. The entire effect is dramatic and even a little sinister. The title of the book itself is a rarely used word whose usage, while inspired by historical precedent, is also something new Wilson works at developing in the book.

The cover jacket photos on the two books are quite different. E.O. Wilson is posed in suit and tie in a library or office. In the background there are shelves of books. He appears confident and at ease, smiling congenially into the camera. Wendell Berry’s photo, while probably equally posed, is an attempt to appear candid. He is dressed as a “working man,” clothes in which he can both comfortably work with pens and papers in, and do some work out of doors should the need arise.

E.O. Wilson shows much more comprehensive knowledge and understanding of where we are as a planet. Wendell Berry shows greater reflection on his life, local landscape, and community, and he shares his passion for a way of life that promotes their improvement. Wendell Berry doesn’t write using a computer because of the energy they use whereas Edward Wilson drives a not-terribly-economical Volvo, because, he says, it’s practically mandatory for all Harvard profs. I appreciate both Berry’s and Wilson’s perspectives, and while I see the potential for disagreement between them, especially seeing as how Berry wrote Life is a Miracle as a point-by-point rebuttal against Consilience, I think both are necessary and should not be treated as mutually exclusive.

aaron :: Oct.23.2005 :: Inscape / Landscape class :: No Comments »

In class discussion, many have criticized E.O. Wilson for expounding racist views. I’m curious, concerned, and interested in these criticisms because I thought E.O. Wilson’s perspectives, were, for the most part, well-considered. So, is E.O. Wilson a racist? If he is, what has prevented me from seeing it? What passages have others seen as racist? Is there more than one way interpret these passages? To what extent should an author take responsibility for ambiguity within their text? Are his views somehow indicative of some widespread strain that runs through western science?

One observation I have made about criticisms of racism that have been made in-class towards E.O. Wilson is that many have been made by humanities or social science majors. As an English major myself, I am extremely interested in this tendency. I think it is because of the post-structuralist approach that has come to permeate much of the thinking that goes on in the study of literature, art, politics, and history, which rejects ultimate explanations, and is wary of the justifying power of science, and of scientific rhetoric because of the way it has been used in the past. Post-structuralist thought sees science first and foremost as a human construction from which there is more to be learned about its practitioners than about the objective world it purports to know.

I think that subscribing completely to post-structuralism is contradictory, because post-structuralism itself advises us to be skeptical of theories. Post-structuralism has been a useful way to look at human sciences, arts, and history from different angles, but in the end I think it is one tool among many, and is insufficient. It is a way of keeping science in check, criticizing science, and holding science accountable, but it should not usurp science. I treat deconstruction and the other tools of post-modernism as useful tools that are not intended to find final answers. The founder of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida’s most famous quote “There is nothing outside the text,” seems to me a kind of joke, but one that is useful and profound. There is a world outside of the text, outside of ourselves, outside of the body of scientific knowledge, outside of the inscape — that’s the landscape. And it’s the job of science especially, but also the arts and humanities, to constantly work at bridging this gap, even if it turns out to be unbridgeable.

So the question at hand with regard to the alleged racist content in E.O. Wilson’s book is: to what extent does his discourse represent reality, and to what extent is it influenced or founded on possibly racist human institutions and traditions (as some post-structuralist readings might say).

I did a little re-reading in the last chapter of Consilience “To What End?” and pulled out a few quotes to examine for this study, passages that I did not pay particular notice to during my first reading, and which I now can see might be construed as in some way racist, but which I myself feel are legitimate discussions that do risk racist interpretation but are not necessarily racist. I understand why Caitlin said she is concerned more about the audience who is reading this than what is actually on the page. The world’s history of racial exploitation demands more that we are more careful in our discourse today, and without a more elaborate discussion of race, E.O. Wilson does risk playing to potentially racists reader’s views.

Here’s the first quote I pulled out:

“The one undoubted global change is of lesser consequence. It is the shift occurring worldwide in the frequencies of racial traits such as skin color, hair type, lymphocyte proteins, and immunoglobulins, due to more rapid population growth in developing countries. In 1950, 68 percent of the world’s population lived in developing countries. By 2000 the figure will be 78 percent. That amount of change is having an effect on the frequencies of previously existing genes, but none of the traits involved, so far as we know, have world shaping consequence. None affect intellectual capacity or the fundamentals of human nature.” (271)

If the global change in comparative racial population is of “lesser consequence,” that is, not very important, then why mention it? The mere mention of this statistic seems to accord it some level of importance and thus possibly reinforce a potentially racist belief that this is something important that should be paid attention to and dealt with in the text. Of course, E.O. Wilson’s comment anticipates the potentially racist presuppositions in his audience by pointing out that “none of the traits involved, so far as we know, have world shaping consequence. None affect intellectual capacity or the fundamentals of human nature.” At the same time, he contributes to racial prejudices by equating the change in the comparative populations of the developing world and the developed world with a change in the racial composition of the world, which, in a world where development is highly prized, is a dangerous thing to to, an equation that should not be drawn without a discussion with points like the ones in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. By the way, E.O. Wilson can not be all that bad because Jared Diamond enthusiastically praises E.O. Wilson on the back of Consilience. Another detail of note is that Wilson lumps all the qualities of racial difference into one list, in effect privileging caucasian skin above other races as the absence of race instead of comparing all the races among each other (caucasian skin included). I am willing to give Wilson the benefit of the doubt on many of these points, choosing to believe that it is a combination of laziness and and an assumption that his audience is a highly educated reading public who will bring an advanced understanding of history and politics with them when they read his book. Perhaps this is a dangerous assumption to make.

In Chapter 4, Wilson acknowledges that much goes into science that we don’t see in the final results. This is an insightful point he makes. It shows that he is aware of the way that much of what goes into science is hidden from us. I think this is an opportunity for racial and other kinds of bias to be introduced:

“Perhaps only openly confessional memoirs, still rare to nonexistent, might disclose how scientists actually find their way to a publishable conclusion. In one sense scientific articles are deliberately misleading. Just as a novel is better than the novelist, a scientific report is better than the scientist, having been stripped of all the confusions and ignoble thought that led to its composition. Yet such voluminous and incomprehensible chaff, soon to be forgotten, contains most of the secrets of scientific success.” (64)

Here’s the second potentially racist quote I pulled out:

“On the surface it would seem, and was so reported by the media, that the Rwandan catastrophe was ethnic rivalry run amok. That is true only in part. There was a deeper cause, rooted in environment and demography. Between 1950 and 1994 the population of Rwanda, favored by better health care and temporarily improved food supply, more than tripled, from 2.5 million to 8.5 million. In 1992 the country had the highest growth rate in the world, an average of 8 children for every woman. Parturition began early, and generation times were short. But although total food production increased dramatically during this period, it was soon overbalanced by population growth. The average farm size dwindled, as plots were divided from one generation to the next. Per capita grain production fell by half from 1960 to the early 1990s Water was so overdrawn that hydrologists declared Rwanda one of the world’s twenty-seven most water-scarce countries. The teenage soldiers of the Hutu and Tutsi then set out to solve the population problem in the most direct possible way.
“Rwanda is a microcosm of the world. War and civil strife have many causes, most not related directly to environmental stress. But in general, over-population and the consequent dwindling of available resources are tinder that people pile up around themselves. The mounting anxiety and hardship are translated into enmity, and enmity into moral aggression. Scapegoats are identified, sometimes other political or ethnic groups, sometimes neighboring tribes.” (288)

I found this argument for the necessity of natural resources availability to peace compelling. These sorts of arguments, I think, represent the great strength of Consilience - Wilson’s ability to argue for what he broadly terms conservation: of landscapes, biodiversity, and natural history by engaging examples from many different disciplines and geographical areas all over the world. I can also see how this passage could be dangerously misconstrued if someone read it as meaning that resource scarcity is a more real problem than racial tension. His language, describing racial genocide as a solution to over-population and resource scarcity is potentially inflammatory or dangerous if read the wrong way. Again, I think Wilson makes many assumptions about his reading audience. In this case what I got was the implication that the absence of better options leads to nasty ends — “solutions” which solve one problem (overpopulation) but are themselves terrible, horrible problems (in other words, really, really bad solutions). This was really effective rhetoric because it scared me that the world will see more genocide and wars as natural resource scarcity and over-population become more prevalent (we’re seeing this happen with oil). I don’t want to live in a world where war is a solution! But by choosing the word “solution,” E.O. Wilson risks suggesting that that was somehow acceptable or inevitable (of course, the inevitability of such an event is exactly what makes the whole scenario into such a persuasive rhetorical element), or that no other options were available to solve racial conflict in that case. The idea here seems to be that it’s not racial conflict that needs to be solved but resource scarcity; once that problem is solved or the population is reduced all our other problems will go away. But he counters such a mistake on the part of his reader by saying “War and civil strife have many causes, most not related directly to environmental stress.” With these two causes of war and genocide established, it’s my hope (and probably E.O. Wilson’s too) that understanding how environmental stress can contribute to, but not be the sole cause of, political strife, will lead to better decisions, fewer taboos placed on birth control methods, and fewer conflicts and wars. From a race relations point of view, one of the positive effects of this passage is that it points out another way in which racially different people are made into false scapegoats in times of stress.

aaron :: Oct.23.2005 :: Inscape / Landscape class :: 68 Comments »

“It [education] requires breaking free of old pedagogical assumptions, of the straitjacket of discipline-centric curriculum, and even of confinement in classrooms and school buildings. Ecological education means changing (a) the substance and process of education contained in curriculum , (b) how educational institutions work, (c) the architecture within which education occurs, and most important, (d) the purposes of learning” (33).

I found some news articles that suggest Orr’s criticisms may have further relevance to us here at HSU. At least in the case of the the HSU director of facilities’ thoughts on the future of the marine sciences laboratory facilities. He favors the creation of one larger marine sciences lab rather than two smaller labs. While this may be more impressive to some prospective students, it neglects to consider the importance of the setting of the classroom, the environment outside the classroom, which ideally should be brought into the classroom. His operating philosophy indicates a view, the same one criticized by Wendell Berry, that learning is placeless, that academic environments are more self-contained than connected with their environments.

Here’s an excerpt from the April 21st issue of the Northcoast Journal (thank you Northcoast Journal, for the community service you perform by keeping your archives online, unlike the Times-Standard and some other local publications):

“Our preferred option is based on a two-lab concept that calls for construction of a satellite marine laboratory (HSU Bay and Estuarine Studies Center) at a biologically acceptable location on Humboldt Bay, while maintaining the existing TML,” the statement reads. “Existing space would be reallocated at TML and a modest on site expansion, if needed, could accommodate future increased demands at TML itself. We estimate that this preferred option would satisfy all marine science needs at HSU for at least 25-30 years.”

Hankin referred to the plan as “adding to the arsenal” of the marine studies department.

But Bob Schulz, director of physical affairs for HSU, doesn’t fancy the idea, seeing the venture as adding to the university’s maintenance costs. From a marketing standpoint Schulz thinks bigger will be better — one large site that fuses the marine lab with the Natural History Museum would be more attractive to incoming faculty, students and tourists, he said. Scattering the marine facilities between Trinidad and Eureka would not look as impressive as one larger complex would.

“Imagine you’re 17 or 18 years old and you come here to look into the marine biology program and you have to drive to two different facilities that are [25] miles away from each other,” Schulz said. “That is not going to have as much of an impact as one larger site.”

Hankin doesn’t agree with Schulz’s logic. Access to diverse habitats is part of what makes HSU’s marine programs unique, he says.

(Read full article “Out with the Tide” complete with pictures.)

aaron :: Oct.13.2005 :: Inscape / Landscape class :: No Comments »

Why is it that the things we could do to reduce our natural resources usage might actually save money but that they are not implemented? Is it because there is a class of capitalists who stand to win short-term benefits from business as usual? Or is it because consumers don’t know to choose any other options? Or, is it because ecology is not integrated into our educational programs? These are not rhetorical questions, I would sincerely like to find an answer to this question — to find out which of these possible answers or combinations of answers are correct.

Also a note on Orr’s use of the word “creation:” I wish he would explain his word choice here. “Creation” implies there must have been a creator. Since not all of the audience of this book is going to agree with this perspective, this issue deserves to be discussed somewhere in Earth in Mind. Perhaps he is implying the existence of a god-creator figure, or perhaps he is simply using this word to refer to the universe at large and the seemingly miraculous existence of galaxies and living beings, not making reference to a creator. Is he trying to reach out to the religious in his reading audience by using language that will make sense to them? In any case, it is opaque what Orr means by this word choice.

aaron :: Oct.09.2005 :: Inscape / Landscape class :: 71 Comments »

“Most colleges and universities intend their campuses to look like country clubs, weedless and biologically sterile places maintained by an unholy array of chemicals. Campus landscapes ought to be more imaginatively designed to promote biological diversity and ecological resilience and to raise the collective ecological IQ of the campus community.” (68)

Just this past summer, Orr’s complaint became a whole lot more applicable to Humboldt State. I hope this trend doesn’t continue. If it does — Yikes!

So, I guess I’ve started to launch in on the whole “gateway” thing and as tired as everyone has probably become of it I’m going to bring it up again. The first thing to note about the Gateway is that it was recommended by an out-of-the-area consultant, illustrating Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and David Orr’s principle that local decision-making is the best way to manage the local landscape. Of course, the HSU President Richmond, while a resident, is a relative newcomer; I think that Bob Shultz, director of facilities has been here for a while.

Anyway, I agree that a new gateway was needed, and I actually like the new open feel of L.K. Wood with its enhanced visibility, but I think that the gateway is too large; its scale is intended for autos rather than pedestrians and bicyclists, and that the lawn along L.K. Wood might be irrigation and chemical intensive.

aaron :: Oct.09.2005 :: Inscape / Landscape class :: No Comments »