People Who Want To Be Themselves VS People Who Are Hiding As "Normal"

This was not at all on my agenda for today.  But then I saw  this Guardian article:

". . . Kids like Seph bring into sharp focus what it means to be male, female or something else. There is still widespread belief that minors with gender dysphoria – the clinical term for the distress caused by a mismatch between a person’s sense of their gender and their birth-assigned sex – should not be encouraged to transition. At least eight states have proposed bills that would criminalize doctors who prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to trans adolescents.

On one side of the debate are people who think Seph’s gender dysphoria will fade by adulthood. On the other are the vast majority of mental health professionals who study gender dysphoria insisting that affirming a child in whatever way they express their gender is beneficial to their mental health. . . ."

Here's my proposal on this topic, a different way to think about those opposing transgender rights.  Well, it's not really that different from what lots of people have already said.  

On the one side we have transgender human beings.  People whose physical signs of gender are either ambiguous or are in conflict with their mental sense of themselves.  (And probably a number of other variations of a theme.)  Their desire to dress, walk, adorn themselves, and the activities they want to participate in, with the people they want to be with, all that and more, doesn't match society's norms of how they should do those things.  

On the other side we have 'normal' people who find transgender human beings wanting to be themselves, a horrible, terrible thing.  Why?  The constitution says nothing about how people should dress and act.  It does say people have the right to pursue happiness.  Why interfere with another's pursuit of happiness?

We do have limits on pursuit of happiness - mainly when those pursuits do harm to other people.  But what harm do transgender folks living their lives honestly do to others?

I'd offer two interrelated reasons:

1.  It violates their world view.  People may like to change their cars or their clothing, but they don't want to change their fundamental views of the world.  Changing cars still confirms driving.  Changing clothes still confirms wearing clothes.  But changing genders violates people's fundamental binary belief system - male/female, good/bad, black/white, true/false.  A bright student of mine who was also raised Fundamentalist, told the class that he opposed homosexuality because it was wrong in the eyes of his church.  When challenged by other classmates, he finally said:  "The word of God is infallible.  It's a whole package.  If it's wrong about homosexuals, then the whole package falls apart."  

If transgender people are allowed to be themselves openly and society is more accepting of them, then their own world view is challenged.  Worse, their children get to see challenges to that world view.  

2.  It violates their personal view. 

 Let me tell you about another student.  He looked good, dressed well, spoke well.  But his papers didn't work.  I don't remember exactly what was wrong, just that I marked them up a lot, pointing our lack of supporting details and that what he was saying didn't sound authentic.  Things like that.  

He made an appointment to see me.  He told me he'd had a difficult childhood - again, I don't remember the details.  But he said he carefully watched the 'successful' people and remade himself in their likeness - the way he dressed, the way he walked, the way he talked.  Everything.  Until he passed for 'normal' and 'successful.'  My comments on his paper were, he said, pulling all that apart, exposing the boy he was running away from.  And after talking to his therapist, he was dropping the class.  He wasn't ready to face that or to have someone else (me) see that.  I told him I was sorry, but that I trusted his and his therapist's judgment.  

I think there are a lot of people living like that in the world.  They are disguised as 'successful' people - that is people who look and act like society's norms would have us look and act.  We have so many people hidden behind facades.  

For some of them, maybe many, people who defy society's norms because they are too oppressive are threatening.  They threaten their world view and they challenge their personal view.  That was true of gay people.  It was true of women who wanted to be more than a housewife.  Of African-Americans who wanted to be treated the same way white people are treated.  

Some closeted gays have been outed for being more anti-guy than the norm.  People have said they did this to hide their own internal struggles with their sexuality.  

But people can be hiding from lots of sources poor self-images - abusive childhoods where they were never good enough for their parents.  Or they grew up in poverty whose tendrils still pull down their self image. Or they weren't thin enough, tall enough, pretty enough, smart enough, articulate enough, or 'enough' in any of the countless ways our society tells us we have to be.  

"According to the latest annual statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, nearly $16.7 billion was spent on cosmetic procedures in the U.S. in 2020. (From Baylor College of Medicine)"

A July 2019 Business Insider article reports 

"The beauty industry is growing faster than ever before. Today it's valued at an estimated $532 billion and counting," 

Another 2019 Business Insider article  says:

"The U.S. weight loss market is now worth a record $72 billion, but the number of dieters has fallen, due to the growth of the size acceptance and body positivity movement."

We could add the money spent at gyms and in therapy and any other kinds of businesses that make money off of people's poor self-image, businesses aimed at making people 'normal.'  

That's not to say there aren't legitimate reasons any of these activities.  But a certain percentage of people who pursue these things would just be better off in a society more tolerant of differences.

And for those who can't make themselves look successful, there's alcohol and drugs to dull or even to escape reality for a while.  

REMI reports that people in the US spent $253.8 Billion on alcohol in 2018. But it's important to remember that about one-third of adults don't drink at all, and many drink relatively little..  Others very moderately.  I'm having trouble finding numbers that divide total expenditures on alcohol among different types of drinkers.  But there is:

"In 2019, 25.8 percent of people ages 18 and older (29.7 percent of men in this age group and 22.2 percent of women in this age group4) reported that they engaged in binge drinking in the past month,4 and 6.3 percent (8.3 percent of men in this age group and 4.5 percent of women in this age group5) reported that they engaged in heavy alcohol use in the past month.5"

And then there's the amount paid for illegal drugs - about $146 billion in 2016.

Basically, there are lots of signs that Americans are not happy.  I would suggest that many, if not most, are living lives, in Thoreau's words, of quiet desperation*.  Seeking to survive not just the physical world, but the social and political world.  

I'd suggest that those most desperate to 'fit' are those who are most inclined to attack those who are true to themselves.  Honest, open people threaten them.  They also make them conscious of the fake lives they are living.  I can't prove this, but I throw it out as something to consider and study.  

We should all be striving for a society where all people have not only 'the right' to pursue happiness, but the actual opportunity to do so.  

And, of course, there are the scavengers of the GOP who are always looking for fears to exploit in the next election.  

After I did the first draft, we went to the Bainbridge Art Museum and I saw these two words juxtaposed in one of the exhibits and it seemed meant for this post.  

*Iddo Landau takes exception to the broadness of Thoreau's comment, but does acknowledge, too, a number of points I make in this post.

" . . .time made truth of what appeared to be"

A young girl, in 1921 Ireland, disappears.  Some of her clothing was found at the beach near her home. After much searching, there is no body found, just the evidence left on the beach.  

"As the surface of the seashore rocks was pitted by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be.  The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created.  The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced.  The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distress brought by the sea, so silenced did at Lahardane*."

William Trevor,
The Story of Lucy Gault

But the reader knows better than the other characters in the book.  The clothing and that sandal were snatched by a 
dog while the girl was, in the author's  word, 'bathing' in the ocean.  In fact the girl is angry at her parents because they have decided they must leave the only home she knows.  They haven't told her the reason they are leaving - an attack on their house by young Irishmen with petrol cans.  Other large rural homes have also been attacked and other land owners have left.  

But my attention today is this phrase "time made truth of what appeared to be."  Read it a couple of times.  What appeared to be.  The incidents in the book took place in 1921.  

Today truths don't accidentally lead us astray.  They are meticulously created to lead us astray, to divide and conquer.  Fox News repeats them over and over until time makes truth of what appears to be.  Even to the extent that other media repeat the claims. They are designed to trigger our fears, to weaken us.  And we know that Russia plays a role in this exercise that most of the Republican Party is afraid to confront.  Few GOP politicians have the ability or the courage to challenge the lies the party is using in an attempt to fool enough voters into voting for the GOP.   

As I watch Ukrainians face the aggression of Russia, I see a courage that we see rarely in the US these days.  As I see the videos of Russian people protesting the war, I see a courage much greater than is required of most white Americans when they protest.  And when I see President Zelensky vow to stay in Kiev and lead the opposition to Russia, I see a courage that, for instance, my junior Senator doesn't come near to having.  He won't even risk an election five years off, to publicly voice opposition to, say, to vote to impeach the man who called for an insurrection to overturn the election.

*I've looked up Lahardane.  Such a place exists, it's on the ocean in the book, but not on maps.

 

Day 6 AK Redistricting Trial: Putting The Puzzle Pieces Together

I've spent over a year now attending on line or in person almost all the Alaska Redistricting Board meetings.  An old overview of the Redistricting project and an index of all my posts is here and also at the AK Redistricting tap under the blog banner up top.  

Today we heard the end of the Valdez case and the beginning of the Calista case. 

• Stephen Colligan, Mat-Su's Redistricting Contractor again
• Sheri Pierce, the Valdez City Clerk on the stand again
• Kimball Brace, the Valdez Redistricting Expert again
• Andrew Guy, President and CEO of Calista, Calista Witness

The first three have all been on the stand before.  This was Guy's first appearance as we move into the Calista part of the trial.  But I'm going to hold off on that until I catch up  with other things.  This post is intended to try to make sense, from a macro view, of what's going on.

The Puzzle Pieces - D36, D29, Mat-Su and Fairbanks pieces

[There are three other areas of complaint (Eagle River senate pairings, Skagway, and Calista villages), but they don't seem to spill over into other areas so much.  So I'm not focusing on them right now.  I'd also note, if there is significant partisan consequences to this fight, I haven't figured that out yet.]

The trial is bringing out some of the things that weren't so obvious in the mapping process we saw.  I'm still trying to make sense of what was going on behind the scenes.  It's sort of like putting a jigsaw puzzle together with two exceptions:

1. All the pieces have to be within 3 or 4% of 18,335 people
2. The images on the pieces aren't that obvious 

Those images on the pieces are only slowly becoming visible - sort of like rubbing a pencil on a paper to get the image of a coin below.  They're showing up as the socio-economic ties that exist among the people in the districts, or at least that mappers claim exist.  

So let me tell you what's becoming clear.  There are two districts (D29 and D39) and two clusters of districts (Mat-Su and Fairbanks) whose population needs and  socio-economic integration claims conflict and are competing for the same territory.  The losers in this competition - Mat-Su and Valdez - have challenged the plan.  

Piece 1:  District 36 - Doyon Trying to Get Doyon and Ahtna Villages All Into One District 

The Doyon Coalition has been part of the redistricting process from early on.  They had a team that was preparing maps of the state well before the Board got the final census numbers in August and they submitted one of the Third Party maps that were adopted by the Board and taken around the state for comments.  

But what was their goal?  Through the testimony it's now clear that the goal was to get all their shareholders - Doyon and Ahtna - into one district.  If I understand this right, these are basically Athabascan villages.  

D36 & surround districts 29, FB, and Mat-Su

This has come out clearly in the testimony.  

D36 is, according to the redistricting expert for Valdez, the largest election district in the United States.  If it were a state it would be about the 8th largest in the US by size.  It goes from Holy Cross on the lower Yukon up and around Fairbanks and then back down the other side with a long straight edge against the Canadian border including Glennallen and the Copper River and the Richardson Highway communities but not Valdez.  And at the end they were able to carve out an arm reaching along the Denali Highway to reach Cantwell which as Michelle Anderson, President of Ahtna, explained has "about 30 shareholders with a Cantwell address." (It was later mentioned that there were more Athabascans in Cantwell, just not Ahtna shareholders.) 

D36 contains 4000 'excess' Fairbanks people, so it's one of the Fairbanks districts in a sense.  The others are circled in white. The Magenta outlines the Mat-Su districts and the Denali Borough, except the Cantwell cutout.  I'd note there were questions like how are Holy Cross and Glennallen socio-economically integrated?  I did notice doing this that Ahtna's headquarters are in Glennallen.  Another fact about this district: despite getting all the Doyon and Ahtna villages in, the population is 30% Native and 70% non-Native.  

Note:  You can see all the districts I write about in this post on the D36 map.

Piece 2:  District 36 - Valdez Cut Off From Traditional District With Richardson Highway Communities Partners Up Toward Fairbanks and/or PWS and now Paired With Palmer-Matsu Suburbs Instead 

This is the piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit according to the Valdez court challenge.  They argue they were the last piece for the Redistricting Board  and forced to fit in ways they argued against but lost.  75% of the population is in the Mat-Su, particularly the suburbs of Wasilla and Palmer.  Valdez has about 4000 people.  A key number in this story.  

In previous decades the Valdez district  had various parts of the Richardson Highway corridor and sometimes were joined with Prince William Sound. But in this map all the Richardson Highway communities were cut out and they have to drive over 100 miles outside the district to get to Palmer and Wasilla on the other side.  I'd note D29-0 (Valdez) is paired with 30-O to form a Senate seat.  30-O is the green district on the left and goes all the way to the edge of Fairbanks.  So after you drive to Palmer, it's another 300 mies or so to the other end of their Senate district.  

Valdez has made the most persuasive (to me) argument about why they are economically (if not socially) integrated with the pipeline corridor and that they are actually in competition with Palmer.  They argue that the port at Point McKenzie is competitive with the Valdez port for state money.  And they have competing natural gas pipeline proposals.  Thus having a Palmer/Wasilla based representative means their interests won't be represented as strongly (if at all) by their rep in Juneau.

Piece 3:  Mat-Su Cluster: Mat-Su Wanted To Keep All Their Districts In Mat-Su and Denali Boroughs - Did Not Want to be paired with Valdez

Mat-Su Borough had enough population for 5.84 districts.  They testified they'd been planning for this for five years.  They knew how to do this.  They said they gave their map to the Board, but it was ignored.   They wanted to be paired with Denali Borough to the north and along the Glenn Highway out to about Glennallen and surrounding communities.  (Can you see where this is going?)

Cantwell was eventually cut out of Denali Borough and  put into D36, though that's only about 200 people.  On the other end, Glennallen and the nearby Ahtna villages along the Glenn Highway also went to D36.  And so Mat-Su got paired with Valdez to fill out their numbers.  

Note:  You can see all of the Mat-Su/Denali/Valdez districts on the D36 map at the top of this post.

Piece 4 - Fairbanks Cluster - Board Chair John Binkley, of Fairbanks, Wanted To Keep All Five Fairbanks Districts Inside The Borough Boundaries Even Though They Were Overpopulated By 4000 People

While Mat-Su gained population, Fairbanks lost population.  They were down to enough population for 5.2 districts.  They had about 4000 people more than five districts.  Remember that number?  According to a few people who testified, Board Chair John Binkley, who was born and raised in Fairbanks and lives there now (though he spent some time in St Mary's and Bethel), didn't want to break the Fairbanks Borough boundaries.  Which meant that the five Fairbanks districts in his original map, were overpopulated.  They all were well over the 18,335 ideal size for a district, but not unconstitutionally over.  But probably too much for an urban area.  That means they would be underrepresented in the House because districts with more people have one rep and other districts with fewer people also have one rep.  Board member Nicole Borromeo and others reported Binkley was firm about this. 

Binkley testified he wanted to keep the Borough intact because, "Would I like to be moved out into a large rural district?"  

So that was the choice he saw.  People in Fairbanks would be taken out of the Borough and put into a large rural district -  D36.  But there were other options.  There had been districts in the past that paired Fairbanks to Valdez along the pipeline corridor. I don't know how much Binkley knew about Doyon's plan to have a district with all the Ahtna and Doyon villages. There was even a text presented in court from a Doyon team member to Board member Borromeo that seemed to show that they'd orchestrated a resolution from the Fairbanks Borough Assembly asking that the 4000 excess votes be moved to another district.  The question was from where in Fairbanks do you take the people?   

So when Fairbanks was broken on the west - causing an uproar from the people of Goldstream who were being moved into D36 - 4000 people went to D36.   Valdez' chances of their own 4000 people being put into  either D36 or a pipeline corridor district with the excess Fairbanks population were dashed.  

Conclusions

From what I can tell, and I'm far from certain, these are some of the consequences.

Athabascan Identity and Pride Was A Winner

Doyon and Ahtna won in the sense that their goal was to get all their villages into one district.  I think they've done that.  The main benefit that I see is symbolic and maybe even spiritual:  their territory, so to speak, is represented in a political subdivision of the State of Alaska. The political map matches the ANCSA (Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act) map.  As Ahtna president Michelle Anderson testified about the people of Cantwell, they don't feel excluded from their people any more.  While white urban folks might see a protuberance jutting into the Denali borough, that clashes with their ideal of district compactness, Athabascans see their brothers and sisters back as part of the family.  It's an important connection that is invisible to most people living in Anchorage.  

One thing that became clear to me in this trial is that most non-Native (particularly urban) Alaskans don't have a clue about rural Native Alaska. Even Judge Matthews had to be corrected on his pronunciation of the the word Calista (A ch sound, not a k sound.)  When most non-Native urban folk look at rural Alaska, we don't see all the differences between languages, dialects, family ties, types of traditional foods, and a myriad more factors that are important to the people urban non-Natives  lump together as "Alaska Natives."   These are similar to the religious, national origin, economic, racial, educational, political differences urban folk see among ourselves. Sometimes these are merely interesting, at other times they are significant.  

In this round of redistricting Alaska's Native peoples have had more input and impact on how Alaska's political maps treat the socio-economic factors that are important to Alaska Native peoples than ever before.  

A couple of notes here:

1.   While I'm pretty sure that Doyon is mainly Athabascan, I believe there was mention in the testimony that there are people from other groups mixed into the Doyon area.  Looking at Doyon's website (which everyone should do), I don't see claims that all their members are Athabascans, though it does include Athabascan history.  Ahtna's website explicitly tells us:

"Ahtna, Inc. shareholders are mainly comprised of the Ahtna Athabascan people of the Copper River and Cantwell regions of Southcentral Alaska."

2.  My spellcheck thinks Athabascan should be spelled Athabaskan.  I was confused when it changed my spelling, but I let it be.  But now as I look at the Doyon and Ahtna websites, I'm adding Athabascan with a c to my laptop's dictionary and taking out Athabaskan with a k.

Valdez Was The Biggest Loser

In yesterday's trial session, Intervenor attorney, Tanner Amdur-Clark, questioned Valdez City Clerk Sheri Pierce.  He challenged her assertion that the Board didn't really consider Valdez until the very end when everything else was locked in and there weren't any options left that Valdez wanted.  

He asked her if she had been to the September 17 session or the September 20 session.  Like any normal person, she couldn't tell for sure about random dates like that, but didn't recall hearing discussion of Valdez.  

But fortunately I have all my posts about the 2020 Redistricting Cycle indexed on a tab on the top of this blog.  So I went there, scrolled down, and checked those dates, pulled up the posts, and searched for 'Valdez.'   September 17 was when the third parties presented their maps and were questioned by the Board.  I don't have any details, just links to the proposals.  Mostly the third parties made presentations.  On September 20 the board questioned the third parties about their maps.  Amdur-Clark asserted that Nicole Borromeo talked about Valdez that day.  She did.  But she was merely questioning Tom Begich about the Senate Minority's decision to put Valdez in with Cordova and Kodiak. (The Board's final map puts Cordova with Kodiak, but leaves out Valdez which is also on Prince Willam Sound..)  When the Board spoke about Valdez, it was in the context of other districts.  The focus wasn't on Valdez until the end.  

Valdez made the best case I've heard at the trial on socio-economic integration (one of the Constitutional requirements for districts and a topic covered exhaustingly in this trial).  While others talk about why people are similar or different, Valdez is the only one I've heard that argues why it matters for their district.  The argue there are key economic issues - competing ports and competing natural gas pipeline proposals - where Valdez and Mat-Su are in competition.  A legislator representing both communities will be hard pressed to represent the interests of both communities fairly.   75% of the population of D29 live in the suburbs of Palmer and Mat-Su.  Valdez knows that means 

• it will be almost impossible for someone from Valdez to become the representative and 
• on the key issues of major infrastructure funding, the D29 rep will lean for the Mat-Su proposals.  

In a pipeline corridor district that Valdez wanted to be part of, the whole district would have the same interests as Valdez in these major projects.  (Valdez lists a lot of other issues they have in common with the pipeline corridor folks.)

Mat-Su Didn't Get What They Wanted, But Didn't Lose That Much Either  

I don't really see any serious legislative problem for Mat-Su.  It's true they are over populated by an average of 2-3% overall, but that's well within the limits.  There are some issues about parts of districts that, say Palmer thinks belong to them (the hospital) but are in another district.  However, they didn't make clear how that would hurt them in the legislature.  

They don't want to be paired with Valdez, and it certainly makes it trickier for a representative to have such spread out population centers, but Mat-Su has 75% of the voters in that district and should get what they want from their legislator.  

Some of the complaint I heard from Steve Colligan, their mapping expert, was frustration that although Mat-Su had begun planning for this five years, had gotten professional mappers and software, had prepared districts that met with their local needs (the hospital was together with Palmer, roads were divided in ways that made sense to the population living on them, etc.) the Board seemed to ignore all  that and did what it wanted, creating less perfect districts.  There's may well be more that I missed or wasn't stated.  

The pairings may also impact who runs for office.  Mat-Su has some of the most conservative legislators in the state, including lifetime Oath Keepers Member, David Eastman, whom the Alaska legislature is investigating for belonging to a group that advocates overthrowing the government  

Where the lines are drawn affects which potential candidates are in which districts, but I'm not up on those details and couldn't tell you.   

Fairbanks 

I know the least about the implications of Fairbanks.  The fact that the population that went to D36 came from the west Fairbanks community of Goldstream seems like a political decision.  Goldstream itself has almost 3600 people (notice how close that is to the 4000 number that keeps popping up) and it's a left leaning community.  In the testimony they said they were a short drive from the University, and many people work there.  Dermot Cole, a journalist from Fairbanks, says that cutting off the Goldstream community takes a strongly liberal leaning community out of the Fairbanks voting mix and puts them into the rural district that Doyon created, diluting liberal voting in Fairbanks.  The Division of Elections shows that the two Goldstream precincts voted for Biden 54%- 46% for Trump.

OK, that's enough for people to chew on.  It's just my take and I may have missed things.  Doing all this online and not in person means I can't easily chat with people mingling around the courtroom to get other insights.  But it also lowers everyone's risk of COVID.  But since we're near Seattle now being grandparents, the electronic connection is the only way I can keep track.  

Making Sense of Today's Redistricting Board Trial Testimony [UPDATED Formatting]

 [UPDATE Sat. Jan 29, 2022 - The numbering got messed up horribly in the original posting and I'm fixing that now.  Blogger is tricky with outlines and if you break them accidentally anywhere it screws them all up.  Peter should be #3 overall, not #5 of the new narratives. So I've also bolded the headings of each discrete point.]

I jotted down notes today about things I thought I should write about.  I do have 14 1/2 pages of single spaced typed notes, but you really don't want that, I'm sure.  So let me talk about what struck me as meaningful  from today's testimony.  

Clockwige: Judge Matthews, Peter Torkelson,
Tanner Amdur-Clark, Matt Singer

Take aways

1. While I, like others, was worried about political gerrymandering in Eagle River, I  missed the coordinated efforts to put all the Doyon and Ahtna villages into one district.  Well, I didn't totally miss it.  Doyon reps were there at most meetings, including attorney Tanner Amdur-Clark who is now the attorney for the intervenors.  
1. the text messages revealed yesterday and today - a few, I expect we'll be seeing more - reveal communications between Amdur-Clark and Nicole Borromeo over the efforts to get all Doyon and Ahtna villages together.  And another text shows coordination between Borromeo and Marna Sanford, a member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly, trying to get the Assembly to pass a resolution saying that because they were overpopulated (their five districts were each considerably above the 18,335 ideal district size) to get Chair John Binkley to back off on his strong attachment to the idea that Fairbanks should just absorb the the excess 4000 people over 5 districts to keep Fairbanks intact.  This also relates to the Valdez case, because by putting those 4000 people into D36, it meant that Valdez' 4000 people couldn't be in D36 where they wanted to be.  
2. Are thsee bad things?  Human beings follow two different sets of rules - human, rules of loyalty to family and community and people versus the rule of law - those rules that government sets up for us.  These often come into conflict with each other.  That's why, for example, spouses are not compelled to testify against each other in courts of law and why we have nepotism rules. When I lived in rural Thailand, the loyalty rules took precedence over the legal rules. What I realized in Thailand was that the people in my town depended on each other for many things, including helping each other plant and harvest rice.  Survival over the centuries had depended on community cooperation.  When I got to Alaska I slowly began to realize there were a lot of similarities to that sort of communal culture among Alaska Native peoples.   
3. Doyon was working openly and explaining its objectives in public meetings.  They weren't trying to get more politicians elected from any particular party.  They seem to have been trying to get the electoral districts to match how the people of Ahtna and Doyon see themselves.  
4. There were a lot of assumptions on my part about how the GOP appointed Board members seemed to be getting advice from people outside the public participation process.  Advice that wasn't reflected in the public testimony.  Particularly on how to draw lines in Anchorage and then with the Senate pairings and the allocation of staggered terms.  If there are similar text messages or emails from the Board members, we haven't seen them yet.  And while I missed this behind the scenes communications by Borromeo, it fits in with the testimony of Budd Simpson and others today who said that there was a lot of feedback from the public that wasn't on the record because it came in discussion between two Board members, say while traveling, or in conversations about the maps with the public on the tour around the state with the maps
5. Again, what Doyon was doing was what every other community and local governmental unit was doing - lobbying for what they thought was best for their people.  That's different from lobbying to impact which party dominates in the legislature.  
2. The new narratives.  At the end of the debates over the House districts, there was a lot of concern that Bethany Marcum had changed the Anchorage House districts at the last minute and created a district that put an East Anchorage neighborhood with Eagle River.  There was a great deal of surprise in the end when Budd Simpson voted in favor of the previous map that didn't have that new Muldoon-ER district,  while Marcum and Binkley no.  
1. What had happened? Why had Simpson voted against his team on the Board?  He said later that he'd been convinced by the overwhelming testimony against putting ER and Muldoon together that way.   Though he no longer felt that way when Marcum did the same thing with the Senate pairings.   
2. Today we got a new narrative about Marcum's no vote on the House plan (that passed 3-2)  Marcum’s new explanation for voting against the successful House map was that her vote was a signal to the people of the state that she knew there were issues and not everyone was happy.  She knew it was going to pass anyway, so didn't matter.   
3. Maybe that's true.  Maybe Budd Simpson had said he was going to vote yes on the map.  Or maybe Simpson surprised Binkley and Marcum the way he surprised everyone else.  Or maybe they agreed that he would vote no on the House districts, but then vote yes on a Muldoon-East Anchorage Senate pairings, which he did.  Even though the testimony from Eagle River and from East Anchorage was still overwhelmingly against the pairing.  
4. More likely in my mind, this is the new narrative to explain that first vote. Let's see what comes out in the next few days. 
3. Peter Torkelson and the Deviation Number Mistake - Torkelson has been the Board's Executive Director since December 2020, about the same time I started monitoring the Board.  From my very first contact with Torkelson  he's been very open, receptive to my suggestions for making the website easier for the public, and he's given me information and documents I've asked for.  He was always ready to help out.  He and his staff created a very helpful website and populated it with all sorts of information for the public.  Including getting the videos and audios of Board meetings up within days at most.  He's also gotten all the public testimony up very quickly.  And even though I wrote the other day, reflecting on the third party mapping teams and Stephen Colligan's testimony - and before the outside expert Kimball Brace testified - that next time the Board really needs people with more experience and expertise with GIS and mapping software, I think that Torkelson has a great sense for the tech side and did reasonably well as did the Board.  But I'd echo Chair John Binkley today when he was asked how well he thought the Board's final map was.  He said it was as good as any of the proposed maps. Maybe.  But it wasn't the best possible map that they might have achieved with a team of really skilled technicians.  
1. That said, Torkelson was grilled today about not having a degree in computer science or training in GIS before this job.  Steve Jobs and Bill Gates never finished their degrees either.  Not comparing Torkelson to them.  Just saying that people with natural aptitude and drive can achieve a lot.  And Torkelson had a rarer skill - the ability to work well with people and keep his cool under pressure.  He also has a strong public service ethic.  He wanted to make the best maps possible, knowing that ultimately he took direction from the Board. I didn't have as much contact with the Deputy Director TJ Presley, but I only had positive experiences when I did.  And Eric Sandberg, who I knew when he worked with the 2010 Board, is also a dedicated and talented tech.  
2. I also have to note that there was mention the other day, from Outside expert for Valdez, Kimball Brace, that there was a problem with the numbers on the deviation table* that was part of the Final Proclamation Plan.  He explained something about when they changed the numbers of the districts at the end, a bunch of the districts - Calista's attorney Schecter said 28 - had wrong numbers.  Today Schecter followed up on that.  He was very concerned that these numbers were up on the website and were incorrect.  This was at a time when attorneys were gathering data for their lawsuits.  He was particularly concerned that when Torkelson discovered and corrected the numbers that the site didn't say anything about the numbers being corrected.  It would have been hard for someone working with the numbers to realize that they had been changed without such notice.
3. I know how hard Torkelson worked and how dedicated he was to accuracy.  He explained to me at one point how he and (I think) Eric Sandberg had duplicated the Census data separately to make sure they had downloaded it correctly and they really had the true numbers.  (They didn't get a hard copy, they had to download from the internet and then later got the hard copy, which they then checked to be sure the original had downloaded correctly.)  So I'm sure part of Torkelson was mortified at the problem with the deviation table.  The Board's attorney Singer in redirect tried to repair some of the damage.
1. The numbers were correct in the original list on November 5 when there was a lot of clamor for them from local governments and the media.  It was only four days later, when that had died down, that the new district numbers were applied to the districts and the new deviation table made, that something happened to some of the numbers for many of the districts.
2. The numbers for the districts that Schecter's client - Calista - is interested in, were not affected.
4. It's not clear to me how the error was discovered.  Brace (Valdez' hired expert) seem to imply that he had discovered the problem when he testified the other day.  But today it sounded like Torkelson told Valdez attorney Brena in the deposition.  In which case it would seem Torkelson found the error and fixed it, but didn't widely announce it, but he did say he told the Board's attorney and assumed he would notify people if that was necessary.
1. (I would say that on this blog when I change substantive comments, I try to always make that clear.)
4. The East Anchorage plaintiffs have a race based argument that they want to add to the record that is opposed by Board’s counsel, presumably about the affect of the ER pairings.  This is just an alert.  There have been some cryptic comments about this yesterday and today.  The last court documents added to the Most Requested Cases page on their website are dated 1/20/22, so the public (including me) hasn't had access to them, so I don't know what East Anchorage attorney has asked of the judge.  I just know that the Board's attorney is strongly opposed to whatever it is.  
5. ^Bahnke pretty much tells us that SEI (Socio-Economic Integration) is in the eye of the beholder - I think I'll leave this for a post on the weekend.  But it is significant because it's one of the key criteria for whether a district is constitutional and there's been a lot of discussion based on whether key disputed districts meet that requirement.  
6. A lot of communication between the Board and the public was not on the record - Bahnke said that, Simpson said that, Torkelson said that, and we had the text message put on the record yesterday from Amdur-Clark to Borromeo and other emails.  Mostly they said there was just a lot of communication through conversations with the public and between Board members while traveling that ever got recorded.  Partly that's the tension between gathering enough information and documenting it.  For me the test is whether there were communications that were not documented or otherwise publicly acknowledged, that changed the outcome of the maps.  
7. Can you drive to Cordova from to Valdez?  This was a question that was asked of a number of witnesses today (and I think yesterday).  Everyone said no.  But I would point out that the Marine Highway goes from Cordova to Valdez and, yes, you can take your car or truck on the ferry and 'drive' to Valdez and the Richardson Highway. That's why it's called the Marine Highway.  
8. ^4000 pop exchange between Fairbanks and Valdez into 36 - This one I'll save until the weekend too. It's important to understand these cases.
9. ^Reporting and the relationships you develop with your subjects - Another point I want to save for later, but it particularly relates to someone like me reporting on a governmental body over a long period of time - long enough to develop at least a professional relationship and getting to know people as more than just a role on a Board.  It's particularly apt today because of  my comments about Peter Torkelson.  This one can probably wait until after the trial is over.
10. ^Importance of hearing the wishes of Alaska Natives and understanding the cultures relationships, and differences - another biggie that needs to wait

*The deviation table is the list of each district and how much each deviated from the ideal district size of 18335 shown in actual numbers and in percentages.  This would be used to determine if a district was over or under populated and by how much.

^I've marked those topics I'm postponing discussion on with the carat so I can find them easier and remember to expand on them.  

"Laws are the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape. -Solon (a Greek lawgiver, c.600 BC)"

I saw this quote in a Tweet.

I thought the quote descriptive of what generally happens in the US justice system.  Poor people get sent to prison for years for minor crimes while rich and famous people are much more likely to get much shorter terms, or no terms, for more egregious crimes.  The Sacklers, for instance, are still enjoying their billions out of prison.

The Tweet was a reply to a video showing the most well known unindicted Jan 6 conspirators.

But I try to always check on quotes - they are often  

• bogus 
• misquoted
• attributed to the wrong person.

This one is genuine, and while it's reworded, it conveys the meaning of the original, and while it cites the right source, it gives credit to Solon rather than to Anacharsis.

But it's calls attention to a truth that's been articulated 2600 years ago.

From Tufts: 

"5.

In particular we are told of private intercourse between Solon and Anacharsis, and between Solon and Thales, of which the following accounts are given.¹ Anacharsis came to Athens, knocked at Solon's door, and said that he was a stranger who had come to make ties of friendship and hospitality with him. On Solon's replying that it was better to make one's friendships at home, ‘Well then,’ said Anacharsis, ‘do thou, who art at home, make me thy friend and guest.’ [2] So Solon, admiring the man's ready wit, received him graciously and kept him with him some time. This was when he was already engaged in public affairs and compiling his laws. Anacharsis, accordingly, on learning what Solon was about, laughed at him for thinking that he could check the injustice and rapacity of the citizens by written laws, which were just like spiders' webs; they would hold the weak and delicate who might be caught in their meshes, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful. [3] To this Solon is said to have answered that men keep their agreements with each other when neither party profits by the breaking of them, and he was adapting his laws to the citizens in such a manner as to make it clear to all that the practice of justice was more advantageous than the transgression of the laws. But the results justified the conjecture of Anacharsis rather than the hopes of Solon. It was Anacharsis, too, who said, after attending a session of the assembly, that he was amazed to find that among the Greeks, the wise men pleaded causes, but the fools decided them.

1 In Plut. Sol. 5 and Plut. Sol. 6.

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. 1.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy."

I'd note that The Real Harry Ripcord profile says, "CEO of Urban Dictionary"

What's The Big Deal About 2022? It's An Arbitrary Number. Think Bigger

A goal of this blog is to get people to break out of patterns of thinking so they can see the world or some portion of the world differently.  To step back and recognize '"truths" they believe as actually just one way of knowing the world.  

So New Years Day seems a good time to meddle with our concept of being in 2022.  Because for Jews New Years happened several months ago and it is 5782.  For Chinese, New Year is a month off and it will be 4730.  For Thais the New Year will begin in Aril and they will usher in the year  2565.

It's good to have rituals around time.  They help us step back and think about what we've done over a period of time. Teaching is a great profession because you get to start fresh with each semester - it's not just one continuous long slog.  Birthdays help us reflect as do anniversaries.  Or the changing seasons.  

But it's also important to remember how arbitrary the numbers can be.  There is some connection to the natural world.  365 days is close to how long it takes the earth to revolve around the sun.  But other cultures pin their years to the moon.  But much about time is a human decision about how things should be.  

Calendars Through The Ages tells us:

Before today’s Gregorian calendar was adopted, the older Julian calendar was used. It was admirably close to the actual length of the year, as it turns out, but the Julian calendar was not so perfect that it didn’t slowly shift off track over the following centuries. But, hundreds of years later, monks were the only ones with any free time for scholarly pursuits – and they were discouraged from thinking about the matter of "secular time" for any reason beyond figuring out when to observe Easter. In the Middle Ages, the study of the measure of time was first viewed as prying too deeply into God’s own affairs – and later thought of as a lowly, mechanical study, unworthy of serious contemplation.

As a result, it wasn’t until 1582, by which time Caesar’s calendar had drifted a full 10 days off course, that Pope Gregory XIII (1502 - 1585) finally reformed the Julian calendar. Ironically, by the time the Catholic church buckled under the weight of the scientific reasoning that pointed out the error, it had lost much of its power to implement the fix. Protestant tract writers responded to Gregory’s calendar by calling him the "Roman Antichrist" and claiming that its real purpose was to keep true Christians from worshiping on the correct days. The "new" calendar, as we know it today, was not adopted uniformly across Europe until well into the 18th century.

The same site tells us about the beginning of counting the years.  

"Was Jesus born in the year 0?

No.

There are two reasons for this:

There is no year 0.

Jesus was born before 4 B.C.E.

The concept of a year "zero" is a modern myth (but a very popular one). In our calendar, C.E. 1 follows immediately after 1 B.C.E. with no intervening year zero. So a person who was born in 10 B.C.E. and died in C.E. 10, would have died at the age of 19, not 20.

Furthermore, as described in section 2.14, our year reckoning was established by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century. Dionysius let the year C.E. 1 start one week after what he believed to be Jesus’ birthday. But Dionysius’ calculations were wrong. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus was born under the reign of king Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C.E.. It is likely that Jesus was actually born around 7 B.C.E.. The date of his birth is unknown; it may or may not be 25 December."

 I'd note for those Christians who feel they are discriminated against, most of the world uses the Western calendar that is roughly based on the birth of Christ.  Even if they also have calendars based on other events.  

Let's look at some other New Years from different cultures.

Indian New Year Diwali

"One of the most celebrated Indian New Year is 'Diwali' ', which means 'the celebration of lights'. Deepavali symbolize the starting of the Hindu New Year which is generally the main holiday of India. This festival is celebrated in the month of Kartika, which generally falls in the October. Diwali is an holiday in India, Nepal, Guyana, Malaysia and Singapore. Even though, it is a Hindu festival and has deep Hindu mythology connected with its origin, people from different religions also celebrate Diwali. As the name implies, Diwali is celebrated with lights, lamps and fireworks. The main reason behind Diwali celebration is to get away of the evil, which is symbolized as darkness, and to follow the paths of virtue."

From The Heart of Hinduism:

"Various eras are used for numbering the years; the most common are the Vikrami Era, beginning with the coronation of King Vikram-aditya in 57 BCE and the Shaka Era, counting from 78 CE. In rituals the priest often announces the dates according to KaliYuga, (see Kala: Time). For these three systems, the year 2000 corresponds to 2057, 1922, and 5102 respectively, though the last figure is subject to some debate."

Telugu New Year

"is known as Ugadi, which is derived from "Yuga Aadi" means New Age. According to the Hindu mythology Lord Brahma has created universe on Chaitra Shuddha Prathpade thus Telugu New Year is celebrated on Chaitra Shuddha Prathipade which is also first day of the lunar calendar. Telugu New Year is bright full moon day of the first month of spring."

Enkutatash – Ethiopian New Year!

"Every year on September 11, Ethiopians celebrate their New Year. The holiday is called “Enkutatash,” which literary means the “gift of jewels.” This naming came from the legendary visit of the Ethiopian Queen Sheba to that of King Solomon of Jerusalem back in 98 BC. During her visit, this famous queen of Ethiopia brought the king a collection of “jewels.” Upon her return home, the queen was restocked with a new supply of “enku” (jewels) for her treasury.

Ethiopians called the New Year “Enkutatash” because the period the queen arrived back to Ethiopia coincided with the New Year’s celebration in September. Celebrating the New Year in September, however, is originally connected to the Bible as it is the period that God created the Heavens and the Earth and so this period should be the beginning of a New Year."

Songkran - Thailand  From a post I did in 2008 when we were living in Chiangmai.

Chiang Mai.com gives an overview of the holiday of Songkran (the link is no longer any good)

"The family sprinkling scented water from silver bowls on a Buddha image is a ritual practiced by all Thais in on the third day of Songkran, known as Wan Payawan. This is the first official day of the New Year and on this day people cleanse the Buddha images in their homes as well as in the temples with scented water. The family is dressed in traditional Thai costume and wearing leis of jasmine flower buds. The water is scented with the petals of this flower."

I'd recommend visiting the post this comes from to see how it goes from a reverend washing of Buddhas to a free for all water fight in the streets.  

She knows I have a camera, so she's offering to douse me just a little bit.  It ended up down my back.  There are over three posts on our Songkran in Chiangmai.

And there's a Part 2 and Part 3 as well that go into different aspects of Songkran.

This year in Thailand the new year will be 2565

The Burmese New Year is related to the Thai New Year.

"Burma’s most important festival

Taking place from April 13 to 16 each year, the Buddhist festival of Thingyan is celebrated over four to five days, culminating on the Lunar New Year Day.

Water throwing is the distinguishing feature of this festival, and you’ll find people splashing water at each other almost everywhere in the country.

Thingyan traces its roots back to a Hindu myth. The King of Brahmas called Arsi, lost a wager to the King of Devas, Thagya Min, who decapitated Arsi. Miraculously, the head of an elephant was placed onto Arsi’s body, and he then became Ganesha.

The Hindu god was so powerful that if his head was thrown into the sea it would dry up immediately. If it were thrown onto land it would be scorched. If it were thrown up into the air the sky would burst into flames.

Thagya Min therefore ordained that Ganesha’s head be carried by one princess after another who took turns for a year each. The new year thus has come to signify the this annual change of hands."

Chinese New Year:  (This is a great site, with almost everything you could want to know about Chinese New Year)

"Chinese New Year is celebrated by more than 20% of the world. It’s the most important holiday in China and to Chinese people all over. Here are 21 interesting facts that you probably didn’t know about Chinese New Year.

1. Chinese New Year is also known as the Spring Festival

In China, you’ll hear it being called chunjie (春节), or the Spring Festival. It’s still very wintry, but the holiday marks the end of the coldest days. People welcome spring and what it brings along: planting and harvests, new beginnings and fresh starts."

This year it begins on February 1, 2022 and it will be the Year of the Tiger.  It will be the year 4720.

Jewish New Year - The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are very holy days - time to reflect on one's failings and to ask for forgiveness from God and from those you have wronged.  It's also a time to forgive those who have wronged you.  It's currently the year 5782.

You can see more here.

So let's not get so hung up on 2022.  Today is just another day, following yesterday.  Let's be sensible in dealing with COVID. 

1.   Let's work hard to preserve the US democracy - with time and with money. Write your members of Congress.  Help those organizations fighting voter suppression.  And figure out who is doing Stacy Abrams work in your state.  And if nobody is, find some partners and do it yourself.   

2.  And let's also do everything we can to take national and world action to minimize the impacts of climate change.  For that, I'd suggest connecting with Citizens Climate Lobby, the most focused and efficient organization I know of.  

3.  Be kind, but not a sucker.  Know your power - don't underestimate it or overestimate it - and stand up to bullies when that's feasible and protect others who are targeted.  Take a self defense class if you feel threatened.  Our former president has given his followers to act on their worst impulses.  But don't give up.  The super power I wish on everyone is the power to make everyone around you feel loved.  

 

E. O. Wilson Died Yesterday. I'm Reposting This 2010 Post In His Memory

[And I've added a video of a conversation between Alan Alda and Wilson  at the bottom.]

The Future of Life - Why is this so hard for people to deal with?

It's a battle between two narratives:

Narrative 1:

The free market is the most economical system for bringing prosperity to the world and government regulation just screws things up.

Narrative 2:
The free market has many positive benefits, but it also commodifies our collective resources resulting in the catastrophic destruction of the Earth's species and if we don't stop this trend immediately, we will destroy those things that makes life possible on earth.

I am much closer to the second narrative than first.  One of the most persuasive arguments in Wilson's book (he favors Narrative 2)  comes in the chapter "How Much is the Biosphere Worth?" A 1997 study estimated the annual value at $33 trillion.

Ecosystems services are defined as the flow of materials, energy, and information from the biosphere that support human existence.  They include the regulation of the atmosphere and climate;  the purification and retention of fresh water;  the formation and enrichment of the soil;  nutrient cycling; the detoxification and recirculation of water;  the pollination of crops;  and the production of lumber, fodder, and biomass fuel. [p. 106]

Reading this book as oil floods the Gulf of Mexico and eight years after it was published, my basic view of the world was reinforced and my frustration with my fellow humans who choose to ignore the impact human population increases have had on the earth and who choose to ignore the impact of their gluttonous consumption of the world's resources.  It's as though we have been selling off pieces of our back yard garden where we've been growing our food and now we are taking the wood off our house for heating fuel without thinking about where we will get our food and where we will live in the future. When will we realize that consuming our resources like this can't end well? 

I sympathize with people who cling to the material things that were part of the American dream as they were growing up.  But I'd also point out that happiness can be found at lower levels  of material consumption.  Sure, we need a basic level of comfort - housing, food, security, etc.  But where is that basic level?  How is it that generations of humans lived well without big screen televisions, without SUVs, without 2200 square foot homes, etc?  Are all these things worth an unsustainable exploitation of the earth's resources?  Wilson says strongly no. 


My book group met Wednesday night to discuss E. O. Wilson's book The Future of Life.  It's a short (189 pages) but difficult book.  It's data heavy and could use, as one of the group members suggested, much better headings and titles.  For example, Wilson talks about biodiversity for much of the book and I was looking for where he was going to tell us why this is important.  It wasn't obvious.  I finally found it in the chapter called "For the Love of Life" which would more usefully have been titled "Why Biodiversity Matters."   

Wilson also doesn't do a good job of clearly telling us his key points.  They're there, but hidden in all the data.  I did read the book carefully, taking lots of notes, so I did get some of them.  But without Wilson spelling them out, I have to guess that these are the ones he thinks are the key points.


1.   Biodiversity* is shrinking.  We are losing species and genetic variety at a faster and faster pace every year.

2.  The Causes of Biodiversity are summarized as HIPPO;

Habitat destruction.  Hawaii's forests, for example, have been three-fourths cleared, with the unavoidable decline and extinction of many species.

Invasive species.  Ants, pigs, and other aliens displace the native Hawaiian species.

Pollution.  Fresh water, marine coastal water, and the soil of the islands are contaminated, weakening and erasing more species.

Population.  More people means more of all the other HIPPO effects.

Overharvesting.  Some species, especially birds, were hunted to rarity and extinction during the early Polynesian occupation.  [p. 100;  Hawaii is just the example of what is happening around the world here]

I need to emphasize population because he spends a lot of time on this.  The increase in human population underlies the other four factors.  

3.   It's late in the game to stop this destruction of biodiversity but if humans become aware and have the will, it is possible.  The final chapter is called "The Solution."  I have problems with the idea of a "solution" in human affairs.  We don't solve issues as though they were math problems.  Rather we better balance the factors that affect the issue, and we may well unbalance it in the future.  And given the negativity of most of the book, one wonders whether the author really believes things can be changed or if the editors said it needed a happier ending.  But here are some of the things he offers in that chapter.

• Ethics - Humans, he argues, have a genetic propensity toward fairness.  If people see that some people are destroying the planet by using more than their fair share, they will fight for fairness. (But what if they are the ones gaining unfairly?)
• The way is to change people's narrative. We think of the environment (all of its resources) as capital.
  
  

  Having appropriated the planet's natural resources, we chose to annuitize them with a short-term maturity reached by progressively increasing payouts.  At the time it seemed a wise decision.  To many it still does.  The result is rising per-capita production and consumption, markets awash in consumer goods and grain, and a surplus of optimistic economics.  But there is a problem:  the key elements of natural capital, Earth's arable land, ground water, insects, marine fisheries, and petroleum, are ultimately finite, and not subject to proportionate capital growth.  Moreover, they are being decapitalized by overharvesting and environmental destruction.  With population and consumption continuing to grow, the per-capita resources left to be harvested are shrinking.  The long-term prospects are not promising.  Awakened at last to this approaching difficulty, we have begun a frantic search for substitutes.   

  This leads to two problems:
  • Economic disparity and
  • Accelerating extinction of natural ecosystems and species
  
  He suggests adding statistics that take into account the value of the biosphere into our  evaluations of economic assets and deficits as one way to change how we use our resources. 
  
  He then goes on to list the action that can be taken to turn things around
  
  
  
  • Salvage the world's hotspots - those habitats that are both at the greatest risk and shelter the largest concentration of species found nowhere else.
  • Keep intact the five remaining frontier forests (combined Amazon Basin and the Guianas; Congo of Central Africa;  New Guinea;  the temperate conifer forests of Canada and Alaska combined;  the temperate conifer forests of Russia, Finland, and Scandinavia combines.)
  • Cease all logging of old growth forests everywhere.
  • Everywhere concentrate on lake and river systems, which are the most threatened ecosystems of all.  
  • Define and prioritize the marine hotspots of the world.
  • Complete the mapping of the world's biological diversity
  • Use most advanced ecosystem mapping techniques to ensure full range of the world's ecosystems are included in global conservation strategies.
  • Make conservation profitable.
  • Use biodiversity to benefit the world economy as a whole.
  • Initiate restoration projects to increase the share of the Earth allotted to nature.
  • Increase capacity of zoos and botanical gardens to breed endangered species.
  • Support population planning

There are other issues the book raised for me:

1.   What is a reasonable human population on earth where humans can live a comfortable live style that doesn't use up the Earth's resources?

2.   How do we get there?

3.  How do we get people to see the collective impact of individual behavior as we try to balance saving the biosphere and biodiversity with the market economy?

4.  How do we conceive the difference between the death of individuals and the death a species?

5.  How do we understand what is a normal rate of species extinction versus a human caused rate of species extinction?

All of these are addressed in the book to some degree, but need much more discussion.

Some group members expressed the bittersweet hope that the oil spill might help raise people's awareness of how our resource use endangers the planet.  



*From his glossary at the back of the book:

Biodiversty:  All of the hereditary variation in organisms, from differences in ecosystems to the species composing each ecosystem, thence to the generic variation in each of the species  As a term, biodiversity may be used to refer to the variety of life of all of Earth or to any part of it - hence the biodiversity of Peru or the biodiversity of a Peruvian rainforest.  (p. 213-214)


NOTE:  Blogspot sent out a notice that they have a new agreement with Amazon to enable bloggers mentioning books to automatically link to Amazon so that readers can easily buy the  book and the blogger would get a percentage.   I have resisted ads on this blog for various reasons - including aesthetics, conflicts of interest, and the fact that the size of my readership isn't large enough to earn me significant profits anyway.  But I thought I'd mention this.  There are some books I mention I wouldn't encourage my readers to buy.

But this one I think everyone should read.  Including our governor and mayor who strongly support economic development without calculating the costs to the biosphere of the projects.  Neither cares if we wipe out the Cook Inlet beluga whale population - which NOAA has declared an endangered species - if it means that we'd have to think more creatively to maintain our current economic situation.  But the governor has vetoed money that would have added about 1200 kids and about 100 mothers to Denali Kid Care health insurance because some of the money might be used for an abortion.  The intentional loss of one potential human being is more important to our governor, it seems, than the loss of a whole species.

The original post had a few comments. 

I'm adding this conversation between Wilson and Alan Alda.

" . . .it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair"

This book was published in November 26, 1859.  It takes place from 1775 through 1793 in Paris and London.   Dickens wrote about a period that began 85 years earlier and ended 67 years earlier.  He himself wasn't born until 1812, nineteen years after the end of the time he wrote about.  

Today, that would be like writing about the period between 1936 and 1954.  There are folks alive today who were alive in that period who could be consulted.  

Looking ahead, it would be like a writer in the year 2093 writing about events between 2008 and 2026.  How much of today's social media posts and videos will be available to that writer?

A Tale Of Two Cities  begins with this single sentence paragraph.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,  it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on being received for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

 

It does seem to describe the times we're living in.  

And many of us might see similarities between the inside cover illustration and January 6, 2021.

It's still less than a year since that infamous day. But quickly it will be further and further behind us.    Most of us see it as a day of infamy when Donald Trump hoped to overthrow the election and install himself permanently in the White House. A troublingly noisy and large minority see it as a day when patriots tried to overthrow a democratic election.  I'm hoping it's the worst Trump legacy, but I worry there will be more and worse.  

How many years will it take for historians to give the verdict?  And how long will that verdict stick?

"

AIFF 2021: Captive and Tall Tales [Updated]

My Favorite Doc and Most Powerful Film So Far:

The film Captive is why I like film festivals.  This is not an easy film.  The journalist/film maker, Melissa Fung, is in Nigeria interviewing young girls who have been kidnapped and forced to marry Boko Haram soldiers.  She looks in on them over a couple of years as she reveals to the audience that she too has been captured and raped.  The screenshot gives a sense of the rapport that Fung has with her subject, which is part of why this is such a powerful film.  Given the stories we hear everyday about the US, we have many similar survivors.  And, given the Texas legislature, the rape statistics in the US in general, and the naked power lust of January 6,  we have many men in the U who have no empathy or understanding of women or other human beings.  And while these young women live in comparative poverty, their clothing and beauty are exquisite.  

[UPDATE Dec. 7, 2021 4:13 pm

I couldn't resist this link which showed up today.  The abduction of women is a global and local problem.]

My Favorite Feature So Far                 

Tall Tales.  Hungarian film maker Attila Szasz has had the best film at the Anchorage International Film Festival twice already.  He makes beautiful, tight, thought provoking films. This one takes place at the end of WWII.  Men have been scattered all over the war zone and wives and parents are desperate for word about their husbands and sons who haven't returned.  The main character reads the classified ads seeking information and goes to visit the desperate families and tells them what they want to hear.  But things get complicated.  He's not the only one telling Tall Tales.  The credits and the noirish color add to the that post war period feel.