Rationalizing Extinction--an Oped by Alexander Pyron

I know. A lot of you have been feeling guilty about how we humans are causing the 6th great extinction event in earth's history. 40% of all species on earth are predicted to slip quietly into history. But we're good people! For the most part. How could this happen? Well, no use wringing your hands, you hand wringers, you. Because, voila!, extinction turns out to be good, after all, according to R. Alexander Pyron, an associate professor at George Washington University who is trying his hand at opinion writing. Why change our destructive behavior when we can change our ethical standards instead? Demonizing the human race is so last century. Time to rationalize! Time to get anthropocentric about the Anthropocene.

A colleague had sent me the link. The headline (written by the newspaper's editors) sounded like a troll from an online comment section. "We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution: The only creatures we should go out of our way to protect are Homo sapiens."

"Cool!", I exclaimed, looking at the headline on my phone while standing in the parking lot of a nature preserve, getting ready to lead a nature walk on a Sunday afternoon. I shared the provocative title with others who had gathered. We reveled in relief as all that species-guilt we'd been feeling for as long as we could remember drained away, melting into the pavement beneath our feet.

By chance, I'd been analyzing a book with a similar message, "Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, " by Chris D. Thomas. The book may well have emboldened Pyron to write his opinion piece, and given the Washington Post a rationale for publishing it. Both the book and the oped seduce uninformed readers by upsetting the applecart of mainstream thinking, and by letting the reader off the hook. Remember Dr. Strangelove and "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb?" Doctors Thomas and Pyron are doing something similar with the Anthropocene, but with no sense of satire.

Much of their thinking is rooted in books published some years ago--by Marris, Pearce, Orion and others--that vilified habitat restoration and invasion biologists and portrayed invasive species as a blessing in disguise. I thought that line of thinking had long since died of its own strained logic, but Thomas's book appeared this summer, presenting the old arguments in an even more nihilistic form.

If nothing else, Pyron's essay is useful for pointing out some recurrent habits of this genre, which seeks to undermine our trust in mainstream scientific thought. Below are some typical techniques, with quotes from his opinion piece:

Portray the “Other” as emotional, sentimental, and self-serving. In this case, the "Other" is mainstream biological and environmental thinking about habitat restoration and extinction.

• “Yet we are obsessed with reviving the status quo ante.”
• “And if biodiversity is the goal of extinction fearmongers, ...“

Claim that working to restore nature, or otherwise expend conscious effort to reduce humanity's negative impacts, is a waste of time and money.

• “But the impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency.”
• “Conserving a species … serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.”
• “whatever effort we make to maintain the current climate will eventually be overrun by the inexorable forces of space and geology.”

Declare the conservationist Other’s words to be meaningless, either by erasing distinctions or mocking the Other’s words with quotation marks.

• "There is no such thing as an 'endangered species,' except for all species."
• “We are a part of the biosphere just like every other creature, and our actions are just as volitional, their consequences just as natural.”
• “alien species will disrupt formerly 'pristine' native ecosystems.”

Manage guilt or purge it altogether.

• “extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it.”
• “Humans should feel less shame about molding their environment to suit their survival needs.”
• "Conservation is needed for ourselves and only ourselves."

Play tricks with time frame. Sure, we're doing harm to nature, but all will be fine a million years from now. Can you imagine such reasoning being used for any other problem we face?

• "Our concern, in other words, should not be protecting the animal kingdom, which will be just fine. Within a few million years..."
• “If this means fewer dazzling species, fewer unspoiled forests, less untamed wilderness, so be it. They will return in time."

Cherry pick evidence. Oftentimes, one positive trait is used to supposedly compensate for all the negative traits of invasive species. The positive trait might be a pretty flower, or nitrogen-fixing ability, or erosion control.

• “ Studies have shown that when humans introduce invasive plant species, native diversity sometimes suffers, but productivity — the cycling of nutrients through the ecosystem — frequently increases. Invasives can bring other benefits, too: Plants such as the Phragmites reed have been shown to perform better at reducing coastal erosion and storing carbon than native vegetation in some areas, like the Chesapeake.”

Most writings in this genre use extinction as the only measure of damage to native species, but Pyron's oped is even more heartless, claiming that extinction is all part of the game, neither good nor bad.

• “Invasion and extinction are the regenerative and rejuvenating mechanisms of evolution, the engines of biodiversity.”
• "The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings."

Make biodiversity purely a numbers game; minimize or ignore the evolution of complex interactions between species

• "South Florida, where about 140 new reptile species accidentally introduced by the wildlife trade are now breeding successfully? No extinctions of native species have been recorded, and, at least anecdotally, most natives are still thriving. The ones that are endangered, such as gopher tortoises and indigo snakes, are threatened mostly by habitat destruction. Even if all the native reptiles in the Everglades, about 50, went extinct, the region would still be gaining 90 new species — a biodiversity bounty."

Present evolution as winners and losers

• “Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. “

Overall, Pyron's writing has an "abandon ship" quality. Ayn Rand's "In Defense of Selfishness" comes to mind. Libertarianism, as described at lp.org, envisions "a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others." This sort of thinking leaves us helpless to prevent collectively created crises. Opposition to collective action to slow or prevent climate change then necessitates a way to rationalize the tragic consequences. Pyron's political views are unknown, but he essentially extends the libertarian view of the individual to the species as a whole. Hope is invested not in proactive avoidance of disaster, but in the endgame: "we will find a way to adapt." And if that fails, then come back in a million years. Everything's sure to be fine then.

Update: Alexander Pyron later wrote an apology on facebook. 

The Cat in the Hat Moves into the White House

What sort of cat wears a hat, wreaks havoc wherever it goes, makes a monstrous mess that entertains as it appalls, turns the world red from "lying", and suffers no personal consequence? Why, it's the Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss. If you missed it in childhood, you can witness it now, in the news every day. While the adults were out, a man in a red hat and no scruples slipped into the White House. This time, there will be no magnificent machine to clean up the mess, no VOOM! to erase the lies that spread red across the land.

Little lies founder,
But big lies can stick.
Lies can determine
The leaders we pick.

Taken together, The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back anticipate our current cat-in-chief's tremendous capacity to demolish what was carefully put together, and generate an endless stream of red lies that spread and spread. In the Cat in the Hat Comes Back, the first red stain happens when the cat lies in the tub. From that first "lying", the red stain spreads from bathtub to mother's dress, to Father's shoes, to the rug, ultimately coating the snowy landscape outside.

If you don’t like that lie,
Then I’ll give you another.
I’ll give you its cousins,
Its sister and brother.

The cat has helpers to spread its brand of mayhem even further. Out of the cat's red hat leap small assistants who spread the red until it coats the land. Those assistants, in our increasingly unreal world, include not only those who wish to spread the lies, but also those attempting to stop them.

We’ll make ourselves welcome--
A lying family--
On the porch of your house
Drinking new lies for tea.

How do you stop a lie from spreading? The standard method in journalism is to state the lie, then explain that it isn't true. The more outrageous the lie, the bigger its headline, and the more it dominates conversation. Whether the lie gets repeated with an air of disgust or irony or stern correction, the assumption is that people will see it for the lie it is. But lies, if they are repeated often enough, become true for people who aren't paying much attention. The actual truth often can't compete.

The truthy truth truthers
Will frown all around,
At how high I can fly
While they’re stuck on the ground.

If someone is accused of a crime, each time that story is reported, the accused is associated with the crime. But if the crime is a false accusation about someone else, then news reports taint the lied-about more than the liar. The lied-about can charge the liar with slander or defamation of character, but that risks even more news coverage with yet more repetitions of the lie.

We’ll keep telling lies
Till you think they are true
Do you think it can’t happen?
It can happen to you.

We become like the boy and girl in Dr. Seuss's stories, powerless, aghast, but also entertained while watching their world order come undone.

And how do you stop a big lie once it’s out
By saying it again while it prances about!

As an example of how lies can be like a stain that keeps spreading the more you try to stop it, consider a pre-election series in the New Yorker that documented myriad lies. These are thoroughly researched, devastating articles, and yet they also serve to spread the lies further. Though the series' alliterative title, "Trump and the Truth", was meant to be ironic, at a subliminal level some may be swayed instead by the visual power of two words that share the same length and the first three letters. By associating Trump with the truth, the title works against the articles' content. And because of the difficulty of reporting lies, the articles' content even works against itself. Of 1260 words in one of the articles, only 195 present the truth, while 628 convey Trump's lies.

This is the journalist's predicament, in a time when content may not register. Instead, it's the subliminal message in the image, the look or sound of words in the headline that people respond to. In a similar manner, some people watching the presidential debates last fall may have picked up on Trump's impressive physical bearing, rather than what he actually said. For people wishing to believe, appearance will win out over content.

Click on "Read More" below to see the 195 words of truth, presented almost apologetically, and how more than half of the article actually helps spread Trump's message.

Climate Think: Comparing Climate Change and Drunk Driving

Here are two examples of what can be called Climate Think:

• If we viewed terrorism the way we view climate change, there'd be no security checks at airports, because no one could prove definitively when or even if a plane will be hijacked in the future.

• If we viewed drunk driving the way we view climate change, there'd be no law against Driving While Intoxicated, because no one could prove for certain that alcohol was the cause of the accident.

The burning of carbon fuels previously stored safely underground has increased atmospheric carbon dioxide by 40%. All weather is now influenced by climate change. The oceans are now 25% more acidic, due to some of that extra carbon dioxide turning into carbonic acid when it's absorbed by the oceans. All ocean chemistry is now influenced by climate change. Our bodies strictly regulate our internal chemistry, including pH, yet many people seem to think we can radically alter the earth's chemistry without consequence.

If the universe were patrolled by police, the earth and its drivers would be arrested for DWI.

Background:

When it comes to terrorism and drunk driving, the potential for harm is considered sufficient to take action. Contrast that mindset with the tortured and timid suggestions that climate change can in part be blamed for the destructiveness of recent hurricanes and wildfires.

Using Climate Think, a drunk driver could argue that his accident was minor compared to many accidents caused by sober drivers. He'd point out that many drunk drivers make it home safely, and there's no way it can be definitively proved that his alcohol levels caused the accident.

You can see these sorts of rationalizations being used in news coverage of climate change quoted below: "the possible role climate change played..", and "climate change is not necessarily causing specific fires to occur." Imagine the same sort of apologist approach being used to report on drunk driving.

An editorial in the Washington Post: This editorial has a brave headline, but then gets very timid, with its "time to talk" and "possible role" and "measures the nation should take."

See it, say it: Climate change

"While California prepares for what promises to be an arduous rebuilding, Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and other places hit by this year’s unprecedented back-to-back-to-back hurricanes are still mopping up and, in Puerto Rico’s case, just beginning to rebuild. So it would seem to be a natural time to talk about the possible role climate change played in these disasters and about measures the nation should be taking to slow global warming."

An article in the NY Times: It would be interesting to see a news report state that alcohol levels accounted for half of a driver's weaving on the road, or half of a deadly accident.

California’s Wildfires: Why Have They Been So Destructive?

Researchers from the University of Idaho and Columbia University published a study last year saying that climate change had caused more than half of the dryness of Western forests since 1979. 

Parched landscapes can increase fire size and duration, said Scott L. Stephens, a professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley. 

But it is important to note, he added, that climate change is not necessarily causing specific fires to occur. Wildfires are a natural part of a forest’s life cycle and have been part of the state’s history since long before anyone called it California.

Las Vegas: A Layer Cake of Crazy

The mass shooting in Las Vegas, gruesome and horrific, is just the top layer of a cake made of crazy. Increasingly, acts of insane mass violence play out within a culture whose version of normality is itself profoundly destructive and, like the killers themselves, ultimately self-destructive. We mourn the dead in Las Vegas, but that grief is felt in the context of a daily and deepening mourning for a larger extinguishment, playing out day after day, global in scope.

That larger extinguishment of the world we cherish is being carried out not by the attention-grabbing men who spray bullets or drive trucks into crowds, but through the collateral damage of what passes for normal everyday life. The proliferation of guns and other armaments is scary, but it's the chemical warfare that we have all been enlisted to participate in that is driving the most profound and destructive transformations. Society itself has been weaponized, not only with guns, but with vehicles and homes armed with exhaust pipes and chimneys, whose emissions of climate-changing gases are no less destructive for lack of drama or ill-intent. Though an exhaust pipe is discreetly hidden under the back of a car, it is aimed at the future, with nature and ultimately us the victims of its emissions.

The peace we seek in a return to normal is an illusion. Las Vegas, in the size of its massacre and the conspicuousness of its unsustainable consumption, is a steroidal version of the giant gamble that haunts normality worldwide. How does a city like Las Vegas return to normal? By turning its fountains back on, in the middle of the Mojave Desert. In Las Vegas, normal is just a different kind of crazy, a glamorous void into which people pour their dreams and money.

Las Vegas, in a country where many pretend that climate change is a hoax and corporations are people, is a city that pretends to be anywhere but where it is. There, along with opulent fountains, you can find giant versions of the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canal of Venice, the Colosseum, the statue of David, the Statue of Liberty, and the pyramids of Egypt.

The Mandalay Hotel, from whence the unhinged gunman's bullets flew, is named after a sentimental Kipling poem, longing to return to "Mandalay, where the flyin' fishes play." During construction, the hotel was found to be sinking, as is much of the Las Vegas area, as water is sucked from aquifers below, so that fishes and people can play in the driest desert in North America. The city spent $1.5 billion to bore another giant straw closer to the bottom of the nearby damming of the Colorado River called Lake Mead, so it can continue sucking water from the reservoir as it too drops, already down to 40% of its original capacity due to recurrent droughts made worse by climate change. In part due to Las Vegas' thirst, the Colorado River runs dry before reaching its ocean outlet. Billions more may be spent to build a pipeline to raid groundwater 250 miles to the north. Contrary to a false headline that made the rounds in 2016, the city does not run on renewable energy, but powers its glitz and gambling with fossil fuels, thereby contributing to its own future desiccation.

So we have a crazy gunman in a gambling city in a country that gambled on a president who, like Las Vegas, offered glitz and glamour, and a void for voters to pour their last ditch dreams into--the voting booth just another slot machine. Consider the possibility that the giant gamble with climate change that infects the core of normal has laid the foundation for a layer cake of crazy.

The Unintentional Acts of Good People are the World's Greatest Threat

Text from the president's address to the U.N. earlier this week provides a good example of how the greatest threat to our future is being ignored. The text pits the "righteous many" and "decent people and nations" against "the wicked few."

"The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based. They respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries. If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph. When decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength."

There are, of course, people out there with destructive intent who pose a danger. Nuclear weapons will always keep the end of civilization potentially just minutes away. But such a good vs. bad duality leaves the door wide open for the most powerful and insidious agent of destruction to do its work.

Though each one of us may lead a productive and caring life, we remain in another respect like beasts of burden, harnessed to pull civilization closer to the cliff. To the extent that our machines run on fuels extracted from underground, we serve collectively as a team of mad chemists, redistributing carbon and thereby unleashing powerful forces of radical change. Of course, we don't mean to play this role. We are, as stated in the president's address, "decent people." But our participation in the destabilizing of the planet's chemical balance is no less substantive and real for being unintentional. Why, in order to conform and fit in to society, are we essentially forced to wear that harness and daily contribute to destructive transformations of our climate and our oceans?

We know who is keeping us in this bondage. It's the politicians who pretend that all evil is intentional, who pretend that the fuels combusted to run our lives and our vast economy do not have vast and lasting negative consequence, and who, armed with deeply entrenched pessimism, actively oppose alternatives to that bondage.

We won't be free, nor our nation truly defended from danger, until the deniers of human-caused climate change are stripped of their political power. Until then, preoccupation with the evil intent of the "wicked few" will leave us vulnerable to the collective and unintentional impact of the "righteous many."

August Forebodings

August in an incompetent president's first year has become a time of foreboding. That sense of dread is part of the fallout from voters' attraction to presidential candidates who hide their privilege and lack of preparation behind an engaging populist speaking style.

In 2001, George W. Bush was spending the month of August at his ranch in Texas, clearing brush rather than acting on warnings that al Qaeda was preparing to attack inside the U.S.. In 2003, Al Franken, the comedian more recently turned senator from Minnesota, detailed the ignored warnings leading up to the 9/11 attacks in his serious and funny book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. At Amazon, you can read Chapter 16, "Operation Ignore", by clicking on the bookcover.

Now, a president even less equipped to handle the job is taking a long vacation, and it's hard not to wonder at what threat is brewing while a president distracts himself and the nation with outrageous tweets. It's worth remembering that George W. Bush's popularity, like Trump's, was dropping during his lackluster first year in office. When Bush's popularity shot up to 90% after the 9/11 attacks, he used the popularity to launch an ill-advised war, and get elected to a second term that ended in economic collapse.

At a time when the Trump administration is teetering on the brink, it's easy to imagine a scenario similar to the Bush years, when a president's incompetency unexpectedly played in his electoral favor.

Even without attack from outside, the nation continues to be sabotaged from inside, as anti-government ideology allows incompetent candidates to get elected, and then proceed to mismanage or dismantle government operations.

NOTE: Columnist Paul Krugman, whose columns often have an uncanny coincidence with my own thoughts, addressed August's foreboding in a different way:

Despite this, it may seem on the surface as if the republic is continuing to function normally. We’re still adding jobs; stocks are up; public services continue to be delivered. 

But remember, this administration has yet to confront a crisis not of its own making. Furthermore, a series of scary deadlines are looming. Never mind tax reform. Congress has to act within the next few weeks to enact a budget, or the government will shut down; to raise the debt ceiling, or the U.S. will go into default; to renew the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or millions of children will lose coverage.

Trump and Mass Hypnosis

Many of us made it through last year's primaries and election, and the first six months of the Trump administration, without hearing about the techniques of mass hypnosis that may have contributed to his improbable election. A look back, though, shows that a number of people trained in hypnosis were recognizing sophisticated use of persuasion techniques where many of us were seeing coarseness, bullying, and lies. As articles like the New Yorker's How Trump is Transforming Rural America document how persistent is support for the president in some areas, despite all the incompetency and scorched earth policies emanating from the WhiteHouse, it's worth asking how hypnosis might be playing a role.

Scott Adams, the writer of the syndicated cartoon series Dilbert, recognized a method in Trump's madness during a primary debate in August, 2015. He wrote a blog post entitled "Clown Genius", about how the allied techniques of hypnosis, persuasion, and negotiation would win Trump the presidency. When, for instance, Trump declares he's worth $10 billion, it anchors a big round number in your mind. It doesn't matter what the true figure is. Though critics may offer far smaller numbers, the underlying message of all that discussion in the media will be that he is a wealthy man. Adams goes on to describe in detail the logic behind "anchors", "intentional exaggeration", and "thinking past the sale". Though Adams may be naive when he asserts that Trump's talents of persuasion could serve him not only as candidate but also as president, he offers valuable insights into the logic behind the campaign.

In March, 2016, TheHill interviewed hypnotist Richard Barker about Trump's techniques, which include "future pacing" and repetitive words and phrases. At rallies, Barker explains,"he gets them to visualize two problems, then he gets them [to] nod their heads three or four times for solutions."

The transformative power of Trump's use of repetition at rallies is described in this chilling account by a journalist in the New Yorker article:

Last October, three weeks before the election, Donald Trump visited Grand Junction for a rally in an airport hangar. Along with other members of the press, I was escorted into a pen near the back, where a metal fence separated us from the crowd. At that time, some prominent polls showed Clinton leading by more than ten percentage points, and Trump often claimed that the election might be rigged. During the rally he said, “There’s a voter fraud also with the media, because they so poison the minds of the people by writing false stories.” He pointed in our direction, describing us as “criminals,” among other things: “They’re lying, they’re cheating, they’re stealing! They’re doing everything, these people right back here!” 

The attacks came every few minutes, and they served as a kind of tether to the speech. The material could have drifted off into abstraction—e-mails, Benghazi, the Washington swamp. But every time Trump pointed at the media, the crowd turned, and by the end people were screaming and cursing at us. One man tried to climb over the barrier, and security guards had to drag him away. 

Such behavior is out of character for residents of rural Colorado, where politeness and public decency are highly valued.

In May, 2016, TheWeek published a column by James Harbeck with a fine-grained analysis of the rhythm and intonation in the repetition Trump uses at rallies and in tweets to achieve a hypnotic effect. Among the techniques he identifies are the use of "the same words and phrases incessantly and identically", "the same structures over and over and over to set up an automatic cue-response expectation", and "the rule of three". Harbeck ends the column with this: "So there it is: How to hypnotize voters, in six simple moves. Be funny. Be confident. Be a bully. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Close with the emotion. Win."

In October, as the election approached, a college student and budding hypnotist named Kevin Butler wrote in awe of Trump's abilities. He explains that no one can be hypnotized against their will. It's not weak-mindedness that creates vulnerability to these techniques, but an openness to what Trump has to say.

Many of us heard a message of hate, fear, vulgarity, lies, and empty promises, and turned away in disgust. But what made so many others open to the message? The current fiasco has been 40 years in the making, a long marination of minds to make them more vulnerable to emotional appeals and empty promises. People point to the deep despair that has taken hold in economically depressed rural areas. Conservative radio and Fox News, with little competition from more objective news media, have used that despair to stir resentment towards coastal elites. If minds are saturated with lies and spin, and hardened with resentment, then truth, if it be heard at all, will sound foreign to the ear. Anti-government sentiment, which in its virulent form becomes like an auto-immune reaction in which the nation's institutions come under attack, is magnified by insecure religious leaders who view government as a competitor with God for their congregations' loyalty. The sabotage of legislative progress during the Obama years deepens people's cynicism about government's capacity to improve our lives, which in turn has played electorally into the hands of the saboteurs. And then there's the flight from issues during campaigns by the news media, which find that emotion-laden stories draw more listeners.

In an age when a suicide candidate can penetrate the nation's defenses and occupy the White House, and as the status quo creates and becomes increasingly undermined by the destabilizing effects of climate change, no amount of military might, and no wall, can keep a nation secure. A democracy grows weak and vulnerable from within, from lies, festering divisions and deepening resentments. The interior of a nation has its own front lines, defended by teachers, scientists, journalists--all who are willing to serve truth and rationality, who seek commonality and accept difference, who mend rather than thrive on division.

There is no easier way to artificially create and sustain division than to feel entitled to one's own facts. Two months into the Trump presidency, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a profile of the cartoonist Scott Adams mentioned above, who had been so impressed by Trump's hypnosis skills. Despite all the chaos in the White House, he still saw Trump as doing "the people's work", and has written a book, to be published later in the year, "Winning Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter".

Another Adams, John Adams, the 2nd president of the United States, might counter as he did in 1770, that "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the states of facts and evidence." John Adams spoke those words in a courtroom--one of the last bastions in what is now a rapidly shrinking world where facts still matter. When Ronald Reagan, speaking at the Republican National Convention in 1988, misquoted Adams and said, instead, "Facts are stupid things", his Freudian slip presaged the rising ocean of passion that Donald Trump would so expertly manipulate to send facts fleeing to whatever high ground might somewhere remain.

At the same time, this is the golden age of facts. They are literally at our fingertips, ever more conveniently presented on the internet, for anyone who wishes to find them. Might facts be just one more thing in the world that reaches a state of perfection only to become outmoded? We need someone with the necessary hypnotic powers of persuasion to convince people they still matter.