I was once asked by someone why I had named my blog after Moe Greene, an incidental character in The Godfather. Hmm. This blog focuses on environmental statistics related to Missouri. Hence the name Mo-green-stats. For the most part, I have stuck to that theme, only deviating a few times. This post is one of the deviations.

I want to share with you my perspective on humanity as it relates to Earth’s environment. Overall perspectives like this aren’t meant to be fully accurate. They only work with respect to some characteristics. With regard to those characteristics, however, they can be illuminating, and provide a quick way to sum-up complex issues. In short, don’t take what follows literally, but rather as a darkly evocative vision.

My perspective originates from Peter Russel’s The Global Brain. (It’s a book and a video. The book is available through Amazon, and you can find the video on YouTube. There are other works with the same name by other authors. Be sure you get the one by Peter Russel.) It presented two views of the role of humanity. Russel was a proponent of the Gaia Hypothesis – the idea that the Earth itself is a self-regulating entity, a unitary whole with many parts, that is analogous to a single living organism. Russel noted the way humans have built electronic data processing and communication systems around the world, and the way we have organized and brought more and more systems of the globe under control. He thought that in animals, those were functions performed by the nervous system, especially the brain. He wondered if human beings could be regarded as the Earth’s brain – a global brain, hence the title of his book.

He also noted, however, that we had proliferated without limit, and the rate was increasing. He noted how we had displaced other species from their locations and environmental niches. He noted how we seemed to consume an ever larger share of the Earth’s resources, converting more and more of the Earth to satisfy our needs, and he noted how we polluted and poisoned the planet with our waste. He wondered if, instead of a brain, we were actually a cancer.

He concluded that the ensuing decades would make clear which we were.

It has been 47 years since the publication of his book. The electronic, communication, computer, and artificial intelligence trends he noticed have done nothing but accelerate, and his view of an interconnected world has become more and more true. At the same time, however, the overpopulation, displacement of species, consumption of resources, and pollution of the planet have also done nothing but accelerate. Perhaps both are true. Perhaps we are both the global brain and the global cancer – the global brain cancer.

The analogy between humanity and a cancer brings certain characteristics into focus. Cancer starts as normal tissue. Take a colon cancer, for instance. When we are born, we start off as just a few undifferentiated cells. As we gestate, more and more cells accumulate, and they begin to differentiate. Some become brain cells, some lung cells, some heart cells, some colon cells, and so forth. The body has ways of controlling all this.

Like all cells, the colon cells of the young individual seek to nourish themselves, grow, and replicate. As they do, a colon grows in the fetus until it becomes an intact, functioning organ. The body has ways of controlling all this.

The colon cells stay only in the colon. They don’t migrate to the head and fill your head with colon. They don’t go to your foot and fill your foot with colon. The body has ways of ensuring that they stay right where they should.

After birth, the child continues to grow, and the child’s colon does, too. The growth of the colon keeps pace with the growth of the individual. At some point, the individual reaches full size, and he/she stops growing. Amazingly, the colon does too. The body has ways of managing all this.

But when colon cells become a cancer, something happens. One or more colon cells escape the regulation of the body. Outside the body’s control, they do what all cells seek to do, only they do it without limit: they start replicating like crazy. They grow and grow, when they shouldn’t. As they do, they recruit more resources from the body to fuel their growth, and they excrete toxins which damage the tissue around them, providing more room for growth.

Pretty soon, they have filled all the space in their immediate vicinity, killing or pushing aside other cells. When all the space has been taken, they burst out into the rest of the body. This is called metastasis. Once out in the rest of the body, they travel to distant locations, places where they have no business being, and set up colonies there.

The original cancer grows, and the metastases grow. They convert more and more of the body’s resources to fuel their growth, depriving the other organs of the resources they need. And they put-out more and more toxins, slowly poisoning the other organs of the body. Being deprived of needed nutrition and poisoned by toxins, the host body weakens. Eventually, it gets to be too much, and the host dies. When the host dies, the cancer dies too; somehow, it never thought of that beforehand.

Similarly, humans started out as a few individuals of a specific and unique type, like cells of an organ. Our population grew slowly, but only to a point. We filled an ecological niche, doing our part to contribute to the overall balance, what Disney popularized as the Circle of Life. Like cells, we wanted to nourish ourselves, grow, and multiply. But the Earth had ways of holding our numbers down and keeping us in our place, and for a long time our population remained low, and we stayed in our niche. Do you see the parallel with normal colon cells?

At some point, however, we escaped the Earth’s control, and we began to multiply like crazy. As we did, we began converting the resources of the areas around us to serve our needs and nourish our growth. We displaced other species, and we began producing all manner of waste which polluted and poisoned the land and the waters. Just like a cancer.

At some point, we filled up all the living space around us, and we burst out into the rest of the world. Just like a metastasizing cancer, humans spread to the far reaches of the globe, often to places that are hostile to human life, places where you might say we didn’t really belong.

The population of our original settlements grew, and the population of the places we colonized grew. Like a metastasized cancer, we converted more and more of the earth’s resources to fuel our growth. Like a metastasized cancer, we produced more and more toxins, poisoning more and more of the planet. The Earth is weakening, and I have documented many of the ways in this blog.

Eventually, it will get to be too much, and our host, The Earth, will suffer a severe decline in its ability to support life (its equivalent of dying). When the Earth dies, just like the cancer, we too will die. Somehow, we won’t have managed to think of that beforehand.

It’s a dark vision. Most people like to think of mankind as, in the words of the old Jefferson Airplane song, the “crown of creation,” unique in the universe, fashioned in the image of God. To see humans as none of that, to see us as a global cancer, is quite a “come down.” What a bummer!

What would we do if we stopped seeing ourselves as the crown of creation, and started seeing ourselves as a global cancer? What if, in addition to seeing all of the triumphs of mankind as advancements, we also came to see them as the relentless progress of a deadly cancer? It would make a lot of things look very different!

It is such an uncomfortable perspective! And yet, I can’t help feeling that it is important for us to step outside the grandiose view of mankind. We need to wonder if all of our triumphs are really such good news, after all.

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This is my second-to-last post on Mogreenstats. I will be summing up and ending the blog next week.

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Sources

Russel, Peter. Undated. The Global Brain. Video originally published in Viewed online 9/30/2019 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1sr9x263LM.

Russel, Peter. 1983. The Global Brain: Speculations on the Evolutionary Leap to Planetary Consciousness. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher. This and also more recent editions with slightly different names are available on Amazon.

If you listen to the national media, especially the conservative media, you might think that interest in environmental protection has gone the way of the dinosaur, swept away by a national consensus to focus on economic growth at all costs.

Nonsense.

Figure 1. Source: Gallup Inc.

Gallup Inc. is a global analytics and analysis organization that conducts what we all know as Gallup Polls. One of the questions they regularly include in their polls is “With which one of these statements do you most agree – protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth (or) economic growth should be given priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent?” The results are shown in Figure 1. It is a chart from Gallup showing the percent of respondents choosing the environment over the economy, and vice-versa. To it I have added a line showing republican and democratic presidencies (red and blue, respectively).

In 1990, people chose environmental protection over economic growth 71% to 19%. That is a huge majority! Support for the environment weakened starting in 2000. By 2010, respondents chose the economy over the environment 53% to 38%. Since then, support for the environment has rebounded, with the most recent figures showing respondents picking the environment over the economy by 57% to 35%. (The percentages don’t sum to 100% because some people answer that they don’t have a preference, or they decline to answer the question.)

Even 57% to 35% is a large majority – a difference of 32%: for every 10 people who chose the economy, 17 chose the environment. No American president has ever been elected by such a margin. Warren Harding comes closest (!), with a margin of 26%. Some recent “landslides” involved margins of 23% (Nixon over McGovern, 1972, and Johnson over Goldwater, 1964). Even the famous Reagan “landslide” of 1984 (Reagan over Mondale) was only 18%. The current Tweeter-in-Chief, due to a quirk in the electoral college system, was elected with a minority of the vote (-3%).

Figure 2. Source: Gallup, Inc.

Since 1998, Gallup has also asked respondents “Is the seriousness of global warming generally exaggerated, generally correct, or is it generally underestimated?” Figure 2 shows the results. The dark green line shows the number of people who think the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated. The dark black line shows the number of people who think its seriousness is generally correctly portrayed. The gray line shows the percent of people who think it is underestimated.

A minority of people think that the seriousness of global warming is correctly represented – that is constant across the whole time period. For much of the period, more people thought its seriousness was exaggerated than thought it was underestimated. In recent years, that has shifted, and now more people think it is underestimated (41%) than think it is exaggerated (33%).

Where would I fit on that last question? I think I would refuse to answer it. I feel that global warming is one of the most significant challenges facing humanity. But I feel that it is a slow-motion catastrophe. Just as a simple example: if you go to Miami Beach or Lower Manhattan in 100 years, you are likely to find they are very different places, struggling to cope with flooding, sometimes more severe, sometimes milder. However, that is a change that will unfold over the entire coming century, giving people lots of time to adapt and adjust. Thus, those who say the danger is fabricated are underestimating it. On the other hand, those who say an existential catastrophe is imminent are exaggerating.

What is true is that the carbon that goes into the atmosphere stays there for nearly a century. Thus, if we don’t act quickly, we most likely doom ourselves to a change that will unfold over decades, and which we will be impotent to prevent.

As the two figures above illustrate, environmental concerns have NOT been swept away our current president. Rather, he is acting to prevent Americans from addressing problems that they feel are important, even if it involves some economic sacrifice.

Source:

Gallup Inc. 2018. In Depth: Topics A to Z: Environment. Downloaded 3/27/2019 from https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx.

I’m unable to write new posts for a couple of weeks. This is a rerun of one I published on 11/11/16, just after the election.

I expect Donald Trump to be a poor president. But it isn’t the end of the world, at least not yet.

It is time I addressed the elections of 2016 in this blog. Politics is far outside my focus here, yet the election has been a momentous event, and I don’t think I should ignore it completely.

I did not support Mr. Trump, nor did I support the slate of Republicans who ran the table in Missouri’s statewide elections. The environment is not a high priority for them, and some are overtly hostile to environmental concerns. I fear that their election is a mistake, and we will pay for it for many decades. Yet, the future is not set in stone, and we don’t yet know whether their actions in office will match their terrible rhetoric.

With that said, do not forget that this country has weathered many storms. The situation is not yet as dire as it was in 1812, when a foreign power invaded and burned our capital. Nor is it as dire as in 1860, when the South seceded from The Union. It is not as dire as it was in 1933, when unemployment was about 25%. It is not as dire as it was in the 1940s, when World War II broke out. “Keep calm and carry on.” It was good advice then, and it is good advice now.

We need to accept that Mr. Trump will be our next president, then we need to start moving into the future. There are a couple of things we need to do. We need to make our voices heard, and we need to be loud and clear about what is acceptable and what is not.

• Racism and bigotry are not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• Attacks on free speech are not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• Attacks on facts and science as the basis of knowledge are not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• Bullying and abuse are not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• Ignoring or being hostile to the environment is not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• (Today I would add that attacking the rule of law and the institutions that uphold it is not okay, NEVER, EVER.)

At the same time, the election results suggest that the status quo is not working for many people. When I was young, it was a fine thing to be liberal and progressive. But today in Missouri, the word “liberal” has become an epithet, and political adds hurl the word at opponents like mud. Did liberals earn that scorn? How? I don’t see much future in liberal policies until we are willing to look at what we have done that has offended so many.

I don’t have much hope that Mr. Trump is going to be a good president, but perhaps he will surprise us. Some who were supposed to become great presidents didn’t (Herbert Hoover), and some who were supposed to be lousy presidents became great (Abraham Lincoln). We’ll have to wait and see. Until then, here in St. Louis the sun is shining and it is a spectacular fall day. The world hasn’t failed yet. Keep calm and carry on.

Since publishing the above post, Mr. Trump has, in my opinion, proved himself to be one of the worst presidents in American history. He has had some policy successes, but in the process he has done huge damage to our country, both at home and abroad. It appears to me that he is intentionally trying to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, or to make it a puppet of the corporations it is supposed to regulate. Worst of all, he has attacked and deliberately weakened the institutions that uphold the rule of law in America. This is damage that will be hard to repair, and we will pay for it for decades to come.

I’m unable to write new posts for a couple of weeks. This is a rerun of one I published 11/6/2016.

Opinion

On 11/2/2016, the New York Times published an article by Farhad Manjoo on How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth. Manjoo wrote that the Internet, instead of delivering us into a “marketplace of ideas,” has led us into echo chambers dominated by preconceptions and biases. In those echo chambers, we hear only our preexisting beliefs endlessly repeated. Facts get evaluated through the lens of belief, and if they disagree with belief, they get ignored or denied. While not a new problem, he believes that the Internet is magnifying it. If he is right, it represents a serious problem for our democracy, which relies on the judgement of an informed public.

Psychologists and sociologist have known for a long time that we tend to see the world in ways that confirm preexisting beliefs, and they call it “confirmation bias.” There are many theories about why. One of my favorite explanations comes from a study that was done by Drew Westen and his colleagues during the 2004 presidential election. He took equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats and showed them self-contradictory statements by both Bush and Kerry. It took the subjects a moment to process what they had seen, but to nobody’s surprise, the Republicans explained away Bush’s contradiction and criticized Kerry for his. The Democrats did the inverse: they explained away Kerry’s contradiction, but criticized Bush for his. Thus, the subjects seemed to twist what they had seen, almost as if in a kaleidoscope, until it matched their preexisting beliefs.

So far, nothing new, just one of many demonstrations of confirmation bias. However, Westen added a wrinkle: while all this was going on, he had his subjects’ heads in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). An fMRI measures the uptake of glucose by regions of the brain. Regions of the brain increase their uptake of glucose when they are being used. Thus, an fMRI provides a picture of which regions of the brain are active. The regions “light up” with color on the fMRI display.

Westen expected that while his subjects were busy processing, brain regions associated with thinking would light up. And when they achieved a resolution and spoke their opinion, then the brain would go quiet, at rest. But that is not what he found. He found that while his subjects were thinking, the regions of the brain that lit up were the regions associated with emotional pain. And when they spoke their opinion, the brain didn’t go quiet. Instead, the pleasure centers of the brain lit up. These are the regions of the brain that light up when a person takes a dose of a narcotic.

Thus, Westen’s conclusion was that we experience facts that contradict our preconceived ideas as pain. And when we twist reality to conform to our ideas, the pain goes away, and we get a “hit” of pleasure like taking a narcotic.

No wonder we do it. And those echo chambers that Manjoo mentioned? That’s where we go, like opium dens, to get hit after hit of our favorite narcotic.

That is why Mogreenstats focuses on large-scale studies. I diverge into other stuff from time-to-time, but mostly I focus on statistics about the environment. I see it as an antidote to the propaganda one hears about the environment, whichever echo chamber it comes from. No, these studies aren’t perfect. But I see them as being as close as one can get to actual facts. If we don’t base our public policy on facts, it is not likely to be effective.

Source:

Westen, Drew, Pavel Blagov, Keith Harenski, Clint Kilts, and Stephan Hamann. 2006. “Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgement in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 18(11), p. 1947-1958. Viewed online 11/2/2016 at http://birc.jaredjustus.com/assets/publications/Westen,%20Kilts%202006%20J%20Cognit%20Neurosci.pdf.

Wikipedia. Drew Westen. Viewed online 11/2/2016 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Westen.

I expect Donald Trump to be a poor president. But it isn’t the end of the world, at least not yet.

It is time I addressed the election of 2016 in this blog. Politics is far outside my focus here, yet the election has been a momentous event, and I don’t think I should ignore it completely.

I did not support Mr. Trump, nor did I support the slate of Republicans who ran the table in Missouri’s statewide elections. The environment is not a high priority for them, and some are overtly hostile to environmental concerns. I fear that their election is a mistake, and we will pay for it for many decades. Yet, the future is not set in stone, and we don’t yet know whether their actions in office will match their terrible rhetoric.

With that said, do not forget that this country has weathered many storms. The situation is not yet as dire as it was in 1812, when a foreign power invaded and burned our capital. Nor is it as dire as in 1860, when the South seceded from The Union. It is not as dire as it was in 1933, when unemployment was about 25%. It is not as dire as it was in the 1940s, when World War II broke out. “Keep calm and carry on.” It was good advice then, and it is good advice now.

We need to accept that Mr. Trump will be our next president, then we need to start moving into the future. There are a couple of things we need to do. We need to make our voices heard, and we need to be loud and clear about what is acceptable and what is not.

• Racism and bigotry are not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• Attacks on free speech are not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• Attacks on facts and science as the basis of knowledge are not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• Bullying and abuse are not okay, NEVER, EVER.
• Ignoring or being hostile to the environment is not okay, NEVER, EVER.

At the same time, the election results suggest that the status quo is not working for many people. When I was young, it was a fine thing to be liberal and progressive. But today in Missouri, the word “liberal” has become an epithet, and political adds hurl the word at opponents like mud. Did liberals earn that scorn? How? I don’t see much future in liberal policies until we are willing to look what we have done that has offended so many.

I don’t have much hope that Mr. Trump is going to be a good president, but perhaps he will surprise us. Some who were supposed to become great presidents didn’t (Herbert Hoover), and some who were supposed to be lousy presidents became great (Abraham Lincoln). We’ll have to wait and see. Until then, here in St. Louis the sun is shining and it is a spectacular fall day. The world hasn’t failed yet. Keep calm and carry on.