Indigenous People's Global Summit on Climate Change

There's a major event happening in Anchorage this week. It's so important that even the Anchorage Daily News covered it today.

Hundreds of indigenous people from around the world are gathering in Anchorage this week to discuss climate change and solutions for a warming planet. The Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change, a five-day United Nations-affiliated conference, will run through Friday, with about 400 people from 80 nations expected to attend.

There's no question that modern science doesn't have all the answers and I think that humans, through genetics and through their life experiences, have different levels of risk aversion and tendencies to prefer doing things individually or in groups. These and other factors affect how they react to issues like global warming and whether they prefer collective or individual solutions. And these preferences tend to affect which facts they believe and which they are skeptical of. I have had a link for global warming skeptics on my right side bar for a long time. It addresses just about every argument skeptics raise about climate change.

There are a lot of people who ridicule the idea of global climate change (probably a better term than global warming) because they see themselves negatively impacted if Global Climate Change is more extreme than just natural fluctuations and steps to reduce carbon emissions are taken. They see deterioration of their lifestyle, deterioration of their income, and other dire consequences.

The lifestyles and cultures of indigenous peoples, as materially modest as they have been compared to modern Western lifestyles, have been threatened all over the world as the capitalist economic systems seek natural resources in the local environments of indigenous peoples whether in the Arctic or rain forests or in deserts. (I know that some people will get apoplectic seeing me use a word like 'capitalist' in that previous statement, but I'm merely stating something that I don't think anyone can dispute whether staunch capitalist or diehard socialist.) Western (and Eastern) ideas of legally owned private property are in stark contrast with collective and migratory connections to land of many indigenous peoples. Australian Aboriginal songlines most captivatingly discussed by Bruce Chatwin in his book Songlines, are an alternative way of mapping and of conceiving of how humans and land are related. I'm not saying it is a better way, but it was their way which was in conflict with how the European immigrants to Australian conceived of land.

The website for this week's conference offers a fair amount of background material. One document is a guidebook on climate change for indigenous peoples and I've copied section 12.

12 Guide on Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples

Massive floods, strong hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons and storm surges lead to the destruction of houses, infrastructure (bridges, roads, electrical lines, dams, mine-tailing ponds, etc.), forests, agricultural lands, crops, livestock, marine and coastal resources; massive land slides; loss of freshwater supplies, increase of pathogenic micro-organisms and vectors which are carriers, loss of
electricity, etc.

• These lead to human impacts such as physical isolation because of floods and massive landslides which reduce possibilities for them to market their crops, livestock, marine and coastal resources, etc.; the loss and destruction of ancestral lands, resources and homes, food insecurity and hunger (destruction of crops, destruction of coral reefs and mangroves, and spawning beds of local fish, decrease and loss of livestock, etc.); fresh water-insecurity; energy insecurity; increased prevalence and virulence of infectious diseases such as cholera, etc.
• More frequent and prolonged droughts and floods cause the disappearance of plant and animal species that have sustained indigenous peoples as subsistence food sources or as essential to their ceremonial life.
• Extreme and unprecedented cold spells and prolonged wet environment results to health problems, such as hypothermia, bronchitis and pneumonia, especially among old people and young children.
• A drop in water levels, drought, desertification and saltwater intrusion leads to more hunger and impoverishment. Water and food insecurity is exacerbated.
• Traditional livelihoods ranging from rotational agriculture, hunting and gathering, pastoralism, high montane livestock and agricultural production, coastal and marine fishing, trapping, agro-forestry livelihoods, among others, are undermined because of climate change.
• Adverse impacts on traditional livelihoods and their ecosystem will also mean loss of traditional knowledge, innovations and practices associated with these livelihoods and ecosystems.
• Loss of revenue, economic opportunities and the practice of traditional culture are expected to increase the social and cultural pressures on indigenous peoples. The outmigration of indigenous youth to seek economic opportunities elsewhere because climate change has limited further their opportunities in their own communities, could lead to erosions of indigenous economies and culture.
• Increase in a number of indigenous persons who end up as environmental refugees or who outmigrate because their lands have gone underwater or have eroded due to landslides.
• Capacities of indigenous women to perform their roles as seed-keepers, water bearers, transmitters of culture and language, among others, are undermined.
• The loss or migration of culturally important species will make it more difficult for elders to practice and pass their traditional ecological knowledge to the next generation. (from the Background page)
  

Indigenous peoples, just as people who have moved into their territory from elsewhere, include very smart and not so smart individuals; people who are well-centered and those who have serious problems. Some are well educated others haven't had that opportunity or inclination. Some contribute to their own problems, some make life better for themselves and for others. In general, their issues are everyone's issues, though the specifics may be different. They tend though, as societies, to have maintained a closer tie to their land and natural environments than have people who live in more human constructed environments. What they know about how their environments are changing is something the rest of us should pay attention to.

Digital Detox - Monday April 20

I was just thinking this morning that maybe I should have a day a week where I don't touch my computer. (If I were an orthodox Jew I'd already have this on the Sabbath.)

And then I got an email just now with this message:

Computer screens, iPods, TVs, phones and the dozens of other devices we’re cybernetically attached to are so pervasive that we can’t escape them. We live them, we breath them, we need them ... Or do we?

On Monday, April 20, Adbusters challenges you to do the unthinkable: unplug. Say good-bye to Twitter and Facebook. Turn off your TV, iPhone and Xbox. Reconnect with the natural world and the people around you. You’ll be amazed at how the magic creeps back into your life.

Go to www.adbusters.org for inspiration, articles, videos, posters and more. Next Monday, don't be afraid and don't find excuses ... take the plunge and see what happens.

Did that suggest a whole week? I think just one day would make a good start. So, I challenge you to pick one of the next seven days to just shut off everything digital (good thing I still have a turntable) and take in reality without the virtual shield.

Thanks, Jim.

Poster from this Adbuster link.

[For those of you who saw the earlier version of this with the message cut on the right, I just got rid of the box. But if someone would like to suggest a relatively easy way to adjust the code in the box to do the same thing, I'm listening.]

David Chalmers Extending Our Minds

It was standing room only at the talk by philosopher David Chalmers. In a room that sits maybe 200 people, about 15 or 20 had to stand because all the seats were full. On a Friday night. Thirty years ago you might have said that's because there's nothing to do in Anchorage, but that is definitely not true today.


Chalmers' talk at UAA reminded me of what I like and don't like about the discipline of philosophy. What I like is the imagination and creativity where a proposition is made that goes beyond how we normally think about things. A bit like science fiction. But philosophers then make careful and detailed, excruciatingly detailed arguments, to support this newly created conceit, to attack it, and to defend it. I like the conceits and the thought that goes into initially developing the logical argument to support the conceit. What gets old for me is how long they'll argue over things that seem irrelevant to anything that matters. But then I'm sure that people who accidentally get to this blog often react the same way to what they read here.



In any case, the conceit that Chalmers and his colleague Andy Clark created about ten years ago (in a paper called The Extended Mind)is the idea that something outside your skin - like your i-phone or like an Alzheimer's patient's notebook where he keeps track of things he needs to remember. I'm using 'he' because in his example, Otto is the Alzheimer's patient who is compared to a 'normal' human named Inge who performs the same functions (the notes in the notebook) in her mind.

Chalmers challenged us to think outside the skin and it was an interesting exercise. He argued that objects can act as mind extenders if they had several characteristics. Sort of like the way a cane helps aid in the act of walking, a calculator or a notebook, can aid the act of thinking. And when it does, it becomes part of the mind. Or put another way, the mind expands outside the skin to include the notebook.

The video gives a snippet of the talk. This is not the most important point, but it was a time when he walked over to our side of the room and there weren't so many heads in the way.



It was good to see so many people out for a philosophy talk. No, our governor was not there. But others were and they stayed around to ask questions afterward.

What's Consciousness?

[UPDATE:  See post of his presentation here]

[photo from Chalmers' website]
We may or may not find out tonight (Friday April 17) at UAA when Australian philosopher David J. Chalmers talks at the

UAA/APU Consortium Library Room 307.
7 pm.

My daughter, a philosphy major at UW, says "He's big!"

Here's a bit from on

Publish Post

e of his papers:

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers
Philosophy Program
Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University

1 Introduction
Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain.

Sutton's Greenhouse - Buy Local

It was pushing 50˚F (10˚C) when I did my run today and the sun was bright and the sky blue.

But it was grey Tuesday until I got to Sutton's. This is our neighborhood greenhouse. Family owned and run. It's not your spic-n-span everything-in-order store. It feels like it's lived in. It's one of those vestiges of how things used to be. Like Spada's that used to be near the corner of Tudor and Lake Otis. You know this is a labor of love because they can't be making too much money from this. The back rooms aren't open yet, but the green and the warmth and the fragrance made for a great stop.

And there are bargains still to be had. Most of the plants for sale in the picture are plugs - little plants in individual plugs of soil. The ones in front here weren't cheap - $1.95 each. But the ones in back were only 25¢. There were too many good ones for me to decide. And if I get them, then I have to care for them pretty quick. So I just bought some seeds, for now, and I'll go back and pick out the plugs I want and can handle.


Before you go get plants at national corporate stores like Lowe's or Home Depot or even Costco, check out the local greenhouses like Sutton's that are run by local folks and much more of the money you spend stays in Anchorage. Even if some things are a little more expensive, you know that most of the plants were grown locally [I called and asked and they guessed about 60% are locally grown.]. That saves energy shipping them up here. (OK, what's the tradeoff between the shipping energy use and keeping greenhouses going here? I don't know, but most things from Lowe's are grown in greenhouses outside as well.) And the plants here are grown by people who know what grows well in Anchorage. And unlike most of the clerks at Lowe's, the people here can answer your questions.

Sutton's is at 2845 E Tudor Rd on the corner of Wright Street and Tudor - a few blocks east of Lake Otis. If you're headed toward the mountains, it's on your left. 907-563-5521

Anonymous Bloggers

Anonymous left another message. There's been quite a few actually, a number of which I didn't post to allow him to give me information without publicly revealing clues to his identity. The style of Anon's posts range from 'loose' to 'very reasonable. You may have read a few and not realized it was the same person. And then he slips back into this sort of post. It slides along the edges and over the boundaries of respectful and seems at places to be reacting more to his image of what I'm writing, rather than what I'm actually writing.

OK, being rational isn't the only reasonable option. There's also funny. And tapping into one's emotions is also fine. But being irrational - things like jumping to conclusions based on false assumptions, not responding to the other person's arguments, not being internally consistent, etc. - doesn't help the discussion along. I understand that someone can forget all those things in an emotional reaction. But then as we calm down a bit and get to chatting, I expect one to get over that and into a more rational discussion, one where we aren't making snide comments. That doesn't mean we can't identify behavior that we see as negative or harmful, but that when we do that we try to separate the behavior we see as problematic from the person were talking to. And we point out the behavior we have problems with. When the discussion is in writing, it's not too hard to do.


As I've said in an earlier post, getting something like this once in a while is not a problem. If someone is doing their best to express themselves, but they aren't great writers, no big deal. But it was a flurry of such posts that caused me to turn on the 'review comments' function and to offer some guidelines for commenting here. And suddenly this and at least one other anonymous poster took more care on their posts. So I began approving them.

Let me go through the latest comment with my reactions. This is a comment on the post Blogging - What's Real? How Do We Know? Stevens, Kepner, Joy? posted April 3 and this comment is dated April 15, 12:27pm. (I've been rejecting this sort of post since last week, but I do want my readers to know what I'm reacting to.) In the comment prior to the one below, I say I have a life beyond the Stevens trial, but I'll pay attention and if I think I have something of important to say, I will. I end with, "If anyone has important info that isn't available elsewhere and they are willing to write in an objective, non-derisive way, I'll consider guest posts." Anon writes:

Well, derivise, and non-objective commentary, has been thrown at some DOJ attorneys from assorted, as if that is some Soccer Club thing, the Artic Bears vs, AMERICA & fed by the cheering, and Esq AK club fans in assorted artic circles.Wev the head, the main nail 'em,, nail the public servants, those outsiders, those lower 48ers

OK, I take this to mean there are Alaskans who are being derisive and non-objective about some DOJ attorneys.

The main public servant attorney under attack by the Artic Club is Nick Marsh.
He acheived a substanial victory in the 9th Circuit, when some of the Artic Club sought to withhold evidence(the Ak bribe matters).
He is a graduate of Duke Law School, and used to work with a big NYC law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, and was noted in this case:

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/351/351.F3d.1348.01-16973.html

OK, I've seen Nicolas Marsh in action at the Alaska political corruption cases. I've given my impressions of him in court which in terms of the important things were mostly positive. I did find him very technically competent, but, particularly in the first trial, I thought his person to person communication with the jury could be stronger. I know about Marsh's previous employment because I googled him during the Alaska trials since the DOJ would give no background information about the attorneys. I'm guessing the victory in the 9th circuit was the Weyhrauch appeal, but I'm not sure the importance of the linked case. It mentions Marsh once as the eighth of eleven attorneys listed for the Plaintiffs-Appellees.

With all the artic club white collar club support group, now -- will Mr Marsh have to hire an attorney(his own attorney), given how the artic club is yapping, and jiving, and going on about the low
fatality rates on red shirts, and the flow of traffic.

Since my most recent post was about traffic fatalities in Thailand during Songkran and how much higher they were than deaths in the red shirt demonstrations, it seems reasonable to conclude that Anon is including me amongst the 'artic club' 'yappers' that are responsible for Marsh apparently hiring a private attorney. (And I have reason to believe that the Anon comment on the Thai traffic post is from this same Anon.)

Here's a spot where I don't see the logical flow of Anon's argument. I've hardly said anything about Marsh for a long time. I did note a couple of times that he had been on the team that very competently handled the Alaska cases. If anyone cares, they can put Marsh into the 'search blog' window in the upper left on the tool bar above. Is it because I'm not dropping everything else I'm doing to pursue this? Since when are bloggers beholden to do the bidding of their commenters? Now, Anon may take that to be a derisive comment. I think it's a fairly reasonable statement of my take on this. I could be wrong on it being presumptuous, but rather than taking it as an insult or condescension, if Anon were to take issue with this, he should point out why it isn't presumptuous.

I suppose derivise is in the eye of the beholder, it does point that up.
For a while, it looked like Steve was obssessed on blowing the cover for some "annons", to tell who they were not, as if he has that copy right, & as if telling 'em how to write comments on SEA Museums, or fear abounded he would lose friends, if he did not.

I can understand the confusion based on one of my post titles.. But I did address this in an earlier post or comment. And the post itself isn't about identifying the commenter. My post on "Figuring out My Anonymous Commenter" was not aimed at figuring out who the commenter was, but at the commenter's motives and how I could determine if the commenter actually had access to important information relevant to the Stevens trial fallout. While I think I have an obligation to be polite to people who post here, I don't have an obligation to spend my time responding to whatever they propose for me to do. If I determine it isn't leading to something useful (the commenter has the responsibility to help me see the importance,) I don't need to spend more time on it. And if the commenter is changing the tone of my blog by the number and tone of the comments, I have no obligation to keep posting them. Fear of losing friends? It might be interesting to see who Anon thinks my friends are. My friends respect what and how I write even if they don't always agree with me.

I don't have a need to know who Anonymous is. It would be helpful to be able to distinguish between one Anon and another Anon so I can be sure to respond to them individually. But I respected Anon's privacy and suggested he email me instead of posting to the world if he was concerned.

Anon's response was links to sites explaining government programs to eavesdrop on private email. Since I thought he was telling me he didn't want to be tracked down, I then tried to set up a way for Anon to communicate with me without having to post his comments for the whole world to see. The response to that was blasting me for censoring his comments. I do recognize that trying to communicate that way raised the possibility that some messages from me didn't get read. But I have evidence that most if not all were read.

We have lost all hope of objective, fairness, and bringing out to the artic club other aspects on things, it is most obvious how the Artic Club works.
So, now band this post too, with so many others, and pat yourself on the back as some fairness objective: IN the KNOW from your perspective.
Hey, you pay the hook up fees, that must make you non-derivise, and in the know.
Now, do as your usual -- push your remove button. And, wait for others to examine matters, who do not have that Artic edge/ slant.

I understand this to mean that I'm still hopelessly unfair and subjective, and I'm still going to ban this commenter. I have a license to be derisive (no examples of where I was being derisive.) Then Anon seems to back off a bit. Go ahead, Anon, seems to be saying, give it up and let others, without an Alaska perspective, pursue this story.


This good cop/bad cop routine is starting to get tiring.

So, why am I spending all this time on this Anonymous commenter? (Yes, I'm pretty sure there are more than one of these Anon bloggers, but I'm also reasonably sure that many are from the same person). Because:

• Writing things out helps me think through them.
• I assume that there is a person inside every body despite the masks people hide behind. So I'm giving a shot at some real conversation before I pull the plug on these comments.
• Anonymous bloggers and anonymous commenters are something of an internet phenomenon. I hope that my thoughts here might be helpful to others facing this.
• Maybe someone who has a better handle on this will email me with sage advice.
• Even if I'm wrong and my effort to engage Anon in a real conversation fails, other readers can understand my thinking process as I try to work this out.

Thailand: 220 deaths and 2,658 injured

You didn't read that news about Thailand in the New York Times, did you? Or any other US newspaper or tv news?

Because this was traffic deaths during the Songkran holiday period which began as the rioting was winding down. Traffic deaths are not as important to us as rioting or terrorist deaths. (I imagine to the families they are, but not to the media or to politicians.)

There are about 40,000 annual traffic deaths in the US. That's about 340,000 people killed in the United States since 9/11. The number of people killed by terrorist attack inside the US has been about 3000 since 9/11. (A recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report says 2008 was the lowest number - 37,313 - since 1961 due to more seatbelt use and less driving because of high gas prices.)

Finding figures on how much we've spent on the war on terror - including Iraq and Afganistan - is much harder on Google than one would expect, but the numbers in this March 2006 article cover the range pretty much:

within another three years, total direct and indirect costs to U.S. taxpayers will likely by more than $400 billion, and one estimate puts the total economic impact at up to $2 trillion.

So, we got lots of news about Thai red shirt demonstrators in the streets, but the reports I've read say that only two people died. But right after the demonstrations were over and Songkran festivities began, 220 people have died already in Thailand. And who is covering that?

Tourists left Bangkok because of riots. But being on the roads of Thailand is much more dangerous. Especially on a motorcycle. What we know about the world - especially places and events we don't see with our own eyes - is largely shaped by the media and what stories they choose to report and choose not to. And how they report the stories and how much time they spend on them. So the tourists came to Thailand even though traffic collisions are high because they don't pay much attention to that (until they get there.) But the visions of rioters in the street looked far more dangerous. But actually weren't.

We pay much less attention to traffic deaths than to riot or terrorist deaths. If saving people's lives were the important factor, would we have spent huge amounts of money to send soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan while spending a tiny fraction of that to prevent traffic deaths? Don't forget 340,000 in traffic deaths v. 3000 in terrorist attack in the US since 9/11. But we didn't spend 100 times as much to prevent traffic deaths. What if we did? or just 100 times more than we spend now to prevent traffic deaths?

Here's more on the Thai story from the Nation via ThaiVisa

BANGKOK: -- Road casualties climbed to 220 deaths and 2,658 people injured as 2,658 accidents were recorded nationwide in the first four of the "seven most dangerous days" of the Songkran festival.

Chiang Rai had the most accidents at 102 followed by Nakhon Si Thammarat at 94, Paichit Varachit, deputy permanent secretary of the Public Health Ministry, said yesterday.

Monday alone saw 863 traffic accidents with 81 deaths and 940 injuries.

Driving under the influence of alcohol was the major cause of accidents followed by speeding.

Most mishaps involved motorcycles driven from 4pm-8pm.

The rest is at the link above.


You may or may not have noticed that I have not used the term "traffic accidents" in this post. My son has convinced me that most so called traffic collisions are preventable.


Also, doing this post brought to my attention the difficulty in getting budget estimates for traffic death prevention. Obviously there are bits of money in different federal appropriations and then each state has its own appropriations on this. But you'd think there were people specializing in this topic who would have reasonable estimates. Maybe they just don't post them on the web. Or their sites come up low on Google.

Anchorage 24 Hour Film Competition Winner

Someone got here Sunday googling 24 hour film contest. Well, I knew there was one as part of the Anchorage International Film Festival back in December and that's where they got.

But last night at the Bear Tooth I learned there was another competition this past weekend. Before "Waltzing with Bashir" we got to "Oscar." The first video is from the Bear Tooth tonight when they explained the requirements of the competition and introduced the winner "Oscar".





And here's the winner straight from YouTube.

Keeping Up With Thai Crisis

Thaicrisis is another blog (in addition to Bangkok Pundit) where you can get a deeper understanding of what is happening in Thailand. The link is to the About page which has a brief overview of the blog and interesting comments.

This is another example of how blogs can give a much richer sense of what is happening than the Main Stream Media as events unfold.

It started with the bike pump

Martial chaos in Bangkok. Clues to check out on the Stevens' case. Local outrage about the comments of the Palin attorney general pick, but with hints his nomination isn't doing well. It was already afternoon when we finally got up - not sure I can still blame this on jet lag. And as I write I realize I totally forgot about the Songkran celebrations at the Thai Wat here in Anchorage. Taxes to get organized. And I found a website with links to Thai music videos - a great way to work on my Thai since they have the Thai words below. And unlike on Thai tv, I can stop them and play them again til I get it.

The relative warmth - low 40s, about 7˚C - and the rapidly disappearing snow were calling too. The deck was clear, the back and front yards are showing a lot more brown in just the few days we've been home.

So let's chuck everything and ride over to Suttons and look for some seeds, maybe even some seedlings.

But when I got the bikes out, J's tires were soft. The pump wasn't where it was supposed to be in the garage. I seemed to vaguely remember thinking about taking it to Thailand with us back in January, so where did it end up? Not in the two most likely places.



Then I looked into M's old room which has turned into our store room. We'd cleared out some closets and drawers and cabinets to give our house sitters some room. It got a little rough at the end as we just threw things in to get them out of the way before heading to the airport. Was it in there?

Well, sorting through the old stuff and getting rid of as much as we can was also on the list of todo's and maybe the pump was buried in there. About two hours later, with a lot more floor showing, I found the pump. But it was too late to go. We lived in two rooms in Chiang Mai quite comfortably. Certainly we can get rid of a lot of stuff in here.