Category Archives: Great Work

Aging, Great Work, Health, Politics, Weather +Climate

Bad to the Bone

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Samhain                                            Full Thanksgiving Moon

Losing my wisdom impacted my jaw bone.  Bad.  It still hurts.  Very distracting and annoying.

Sierra Club tonight working on a hiring committee and then the Legcom, still trying to suss out what the elections meant.

In a strange way I think the challenge of a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor will make us think again about the whole political process and how we can make things happen.

Very nasty weather headed our way for the day tomorrow, a day when many people travel by car.  Glad I don’t have to go out and Kate only has to go to work and back.

Great Work, Politics

The Man

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Samhain                                         Full Thanksgiving Moon

Y-chromosome work this am.  First, the Celica in for oil change, look over.  Then, Tundra in for bulb replacements on the left headlight and the fog light.  Tried to do Latin but my concentrater failed me:  TV’s, noise, residue of Vicodin and lack of sleep.

Why is it that the TV has invaded all sorts of spaces?  Is it that no one reads anymore?  No one can sit quietly with their own thoughts?  Don’t know about you, but it irritates me.

Later on today working on a hiring committee for a policy person for the Sierra Club.  58 applicants and many very talented folks. After that the Legcom meets to take stock of the elections and our priorities in light of them.

Right now, I’m sleepy.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story

An Ancientrail, Still Traveled

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Tracking down a quote from a Mary Oliver book led me to Plato and to his Symposium, in particular a portion dedicated to the mysteries of love.  It reminded me of my initial excitement in studying philosophy, created in large part by J. Harry Cotton, a professioral stereotype at Wabash College.  He wrapped tobacco in a light paper plug, inserted it into his pipe, applied a match and away we went into the history of Western philosophy, J. Harry’s head wreathed in tobacco smoke.  He often quoted whole pages of Plato or Aristotle in Greek, showing us the key words on the blackboard, explaining the intricacy of their translation and how an interpretation could turn on a single word.  I’d never met any one like J. Harry and my memory of him is still fond.

The excitement he stirred slowly winked out when I had to transfer to Ball State University, out of money for Wabash.  There the logical positivists still reigned, even though their star had already fallen in graduate schools across Europe and the US.  At Ball State I had the opposite of J. Harry, Robert something.  He was the head of the department and an avowed enemy of all metaphysics and a champion of philosophy as clarifier of scientific language.  What exactly do we mean by cold?  Hot?  Solid?  Gas?  Not unimportant question in a techn0-scientific age, but hardly inspiring.  At least to me.

I finished out my philosophy major, but added one in anthropology because my passion for it, once lit, did not go out.  This was all a long, long time ago.  I graduated from Ball State in 1969, so that’s, what?  41 years and another millennium in the past.

What is truth?  Justice?  Beauty?  How do we know what we know?  What is a sound argument?  What is a weak one?  Why?  How have ideas about these big questions changed over time?  And why?  What do they matter now, in our world?  This was what interested me and the logical positivists had nothing to teach me in regard to them.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up in Seminary, where those questions still matter and where there are answers and the history of the answers.

Ironically, of course, I have come to inhabit the flattened, anti-metaphysical world of the logical positivists, but not from the perspective of clarification and rejection of metaphysics, but from the standpoint of existentialism.  In this new world, which I’ve inhabited since 1991 or so, gnothi seauton, know thyself,  inscribed over the door within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that lead to the Oracle, has been my holy writ.  Rather than books full of poetry, creation myths, messiahs and anti-Christs, I have two words.  They’re enough for me, though.  More than enough.

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

In The Right Spot After All

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Samhain                                      Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Goethe captures the crux of a dis-ease I felt at the dam conference, a dis-ease that probably explains more of why I didn’t end up in academia than other explanations I often give myself.  In short there was more talking than acting and even the references to acting were talking and more it was talking about talking to partners and allies in their language.

Thinking of the caliber in this dam conference is, however, not easy; in fact, it is hard and many of the people who spoke were clever, insightful, giving a new spin to old ideas, my favorite example the delta subsidence problem. People who can take a long held belief and shake it inside out until it reveals it’s underpinnings have my utmost respect.  I hope sometimes I can reach that level in my own thinking; it’s the way change can get started, the reframing of the old in terms of something new.

Who would think, for instance, that sea level rise inundation of coastal delta areas might be alleviated by removing dams upstream?  So, first you have to have the new idea, the problem and its source carefully linked before action can target a plausible solution.

Still, I find myself impatient with just this kind of thinking, that is, root and branch thinking that stops without corollary action.  In the end I’m more of an action guy, much as I love the abstract, the analytical, the historical, the exegetical and the hermeneutical.  I want to change the way dams impact rivers and streams, whether it be by better design or by removal or by prevention.  I want to leverage the way dams have become visible issues into victories for the planet, victories that turn us toward a benign human presence on the face of the earth.

In the end I would have been unhappy as an academic, I see that now.  I would have strained against the confines of the classroom and publish or perish.  As it happens, I’ve been able to continue my learning on my own while engaging pretty consistently as a change agent.  Probably led the life I was meant to lead after all.  Good to know.

Aging, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics, Weather +Climate

Losing a Friend, More on Dams

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Samhain                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something…metaphysically sinister….the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam.”

John McPhee Encounters with the Archdruid (1971)

We lost half a cedar tree in our backyard to heavy snow and wind.  We nurtured this tree from a small cedar bush into a two trunk tree that shaded our small patch of grass just beyond the deck.  These early heavy snows can be hard on evergreens since they retain needles throughout the winter, making them vulnerable to the wet and often large snow falls of late fall.  We’ll have a chance to do something new out there come spring.  Kate wants a lilac tree.

Here’s another thing about dams.  They generate, in addition to hydroelectric power, strong feelings.  People love’em or hate’m.  After they are built, they often become so much a part of the local ecology that people defend them from destruction with much the same fervor that folks oppose their construction in the first place.

There are a multitude of problems created by dams:  river flow is often altered and in turn alters the ecology both upstream and downstream, sediment pools at the base of dams robbing downstream deltas of needed material, archaeological sites can be destroyed or rendered extremely difficult to discover, populations are often displaced and, often, are denied access to the power produced by the dams which relocated them.

Equity questions abound as in the case of waters diverted to Los Angeles and Las Vegas from the arid Western states of Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona and as in the case of a dam on the Zambezi river, built by Mozambique but because it needs military protection from rebel forces, forced to sell its electricity to South Africa at 1/7th of the world price.  Dams concentrate capital and political power in often unhealthy ways, especially in third world countries and especially when used as elements of a geopolitical strategy by such bureaucracies as the US Bureau of Reclamation.

More as the week goes on.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

By A Dam Site

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Samhain                                     Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Once in a while it’s bracing to throw yourself in the deep end and I did that today.  I went to a conference titled  Experiments on Rivers:  the Consequences of Dams.  I realized how little consideration I’d given to dams by the end of the day.  I’ll just give you one example and it came in the first three minutes of the conference in a presentation from Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Director of the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics, headquartered at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, location of the conference.  After four slides and a technical explanation, Efi told us that of the 40 large river deltas in the world surveyed in a recent scientific study, 27 of them had much less sediment than the same deltas had before the construction of dams begun largely in the 1950’s.

What’s the big deal?  Well, it turns out that all deltas are subsiding, that is, sinking.  The thing that keeps the deltas and the land forms dependent on or within them from getting inundated is the build up of sediment; sediment now significantly blocked in 27 cases by upstream dams.  Think global sea level rise, then put the two together.  Efi’s crowd predicts that without solving the sediment deposit drought New Orleans (why does everything focus on the Big Easy?) will be gone by 2100.  Whoa.

I’ll drop other information in throughout the week so I don’t overload ancientrails with dam related topics.

The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory*, created in 1938, has run continuously since then, churning out (ha, ha) hydraulic studies for dams, transportation studies and much, much more.  The tour of the wind tunnel (also a from of hydraulics), delta modeling and stream and river bed modeling was worth the time to attend the conference.  This is real science done with made up tools, including a pipe cleaner forest and a wooden and plexiglass model of downtown Minneapolis.

*SAFL is the world’s only fluid-mechanics laboratory that uses a natural waterfall as its prime water source. For over 70 years researchers from around the world have been visiting our unique location on an island in the Mississippi River to conduct research for developing innovative and sustainable engineering solutions to major environmental, water resources, and energy-related problems. We would like to extend our warmest invitation to visit our facilities and talk with our research staff and students.

Asia, Great Work, Politics

Dams

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Samhain                                               Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Headed out early today to a UofM Institute for Advanced Studies conference on dams.  The focus is on dams as an area of study, but the sub rosa agenda covers the problems dams pose, not only ecologically I learned yesterday at the keynote lecture, but also politically and “extra-scientifically.”  Extra-scientific refers to the ways good science gets bent by political objectives into motivation for or rationale for something motivated by other factors, often geopolitical in nature.

Gotta write here about my tour yesterday for the Rochester Friends.  I kept losing folks as the tour went on and I didn’t feel I connected with them.  Left me in a down place, but determined to do a better job on my next Thaw tour.

A winter storm watch posted for Andover, 6″ of wet snow.  About time.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, US History

A Tour Knocked Together

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Samhain                                       Waxing  Thanksgiving Moon

Finished initial work for my tour of the Thaw exhibition.  Some new information will come on Thursday during the Friends lecture focusing on Blackhawk and his ledger book, Elizabeth Hickox and her finely crafted miniature baskets and Maria Martinez, the renowned potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo.  I’ll meld that into the work I’ve just done.

I’m starting on Thursday in the Plains gallery with Judith Fogarty’s martingale and medicine bag for which she won the 1988 best of show at the Santa Fe Indian Art Festival, a prize of distinction in native american arts.  From there we’ll look at the honor shirts and Blackhawk’s ledger book, still in the Plains collection.  The Woodlands gallery, our home region, contains a wonderful bag, probably part of the kit of an Anishinabe shaman of the Midewiwin Society.  In the Arctic and Sub-Arctic I’ll take the group to the Yupik masks.  In the Northwest Coast region we’ll look at the frontlet of Raven-who-owns-the-sun and the bulging sided bent-wood bowl for serving fatty fish.  We’ll end up with a Maria Martinez pot and an Elizabeth Hickox basket.

This is a wonderful opportunity to see the very best of native art covering broad geographic regions.  A rare chance.  Hope you’ll be able to come.

Great Work, Politics

Coping With Change

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Samhain                                            Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

A meeting with lobbyists and politically minded folks this morning, trying to suss out the impact of the Republican wins in the elections.  The energy in the room was good, nothing energizes political folks like a solid enemy.  enemy

I did not get a ticket this time.  My patience was at guru on the mountain top level, except for that one s.o.b.  The road passed underneath me as a calm ribbon of stability in a changing world, something strange like that.

I still don’t know these folks well enough to participate much and my knowledge level about the ins and outs of state legislative and administrative politics confines me, too.  Won’t last forever.

Aging, Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Good Pharma

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Samhain                                             New (Thanksgiving) Moon

When I walked into the Northrup King building last night, I had to pause a moment to let another time in my life, also spent there, sink in, too.

The period was not unlike the current one with high unemployment and plant closings dominating the news.  This was the mid 1970’s, the era when the contraction of the American automobile industry began in earnest and my hometown went from Smalltown, USA to Shutteredtown, USA.  No longer at home, I had lived in Minnesota for five years at the time, involved in anti-war work and organizing for labor unions and local neighborhoods.

In 1975 ripples went out through the activist community in Minneapolis that Sandoz, the pharmaceutical giant, had plans to purchase the Northrup-King seed plant and close it down.  Many of us rallied to the workers there and began a campaign to stop the plant closing and save the jobs.  As our research proceeded, we learned an important and, to me at least, sobering truth: pharmaceutical companies were buying up seed companies; Northrup-King was far from the only one.  Why?  Because the pharmaceutical companies had the perspective and vision to see the imminent emergence of biotechnology.

They realized that future profit streams could require as many patents as possible on genetic material; germplasm would be the new precious metals, the oil fields of tomorrow.  And they wanted to control as much of it as they could.  Seed companies like Northrup-King already had patents on many of the cultivars of wheat, corn and soybeans, foodstuffs necessary to humanity’s most basic survival needs, add to them patents on specific chemical combinations and plant-based medicines already held by Big Pharma and the potential for mischief, if not downright evil seemed self-evident.  This was before the big push to patent parts of the human genome, now well underway.

We fought hard, working regulatory, legislative and union channels, organizing street protests and trying to raise the visibility of these issues, but we lost.  As did most plant closing campaigns.

After this sifted through my memory banks and into present experience, I walked up the iron steps onto a former loading dock, walking into a studio filled with brightly painted flowers and novel re-uses of older technology.  Art Attack! was a good anti-dote, good pharma.