Being Human: The Search for Order

by Seán Ó Nualláin

Overview

We live at a time of unparallelled environmental and moral crisis. Not only do we not believe anything but, despite exponential advances in information production, we do not know very much either. This book is a guide for everyone who, understandably, feels perplexed.

Presenting an explanation of recent findings in science and their relationship with society and politics as we enter the third millennium, the book also seeks to provide guidance towards responsible political action in this current crisis. From new technology's power to preserve the status quo, to the true impetus behind the Human Genome Project, Sean Ó Nualláin brings to topical concerns some much needed clarity.

Complete with reader-friendly summaries to current thought in the biological, physical, and social sciences, the book is designed to be accessible to a general readership, it should also appeal to all those working or studying in the Sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781841500881
Publisher:	Intellect, Limited
Publication date:	01/03/2013
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.00(d)

Read an Excerpt

Being Human

The Search for Order

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By Seán Ó Nualláin

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2002 Seán Ó Nualláin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-088-1

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CHAPTER 1

The Current Crisis

Dickens' famous decree that the present is always simultaneously the best and worst of times should give us pause when using terms like 'the current crisis'. This disclaimer aside, the current combination of real environmental degradation, conceptual confusion (the epistemological crisis) and moral paralysis gives us grounds to feel unique. This part briefly outlines the environmental, demographic, economic, political, epistemological and the moral/spiritual components of the crisis.

i. The environmental crisis

The metaphor of a frog boiling is often used to describe our relation to the current environmental holocaust. A frog will feel no pain, and take no evasive action, while being boiled provided the water is initially tepid and only gradually warmed. In the same vein, we have recently gotten used to, inter alia, ozone depletion, new extremes in climate, and reduced sperm counts. Our very survival is threatened in the most direct possible way; yet few of us spend any time in agitating for necessary reforms, or even giving these threats the most basic attention. The sheer scale of the figures often makes the environmental crisis seem remote. Worldwide we lose 25 billion acres of topsoil annually, 97 per cent of old-growth North American forests are gone, the largest aquifer in the world will dry up within thirty-five years (Hawken, 1994). However, we don't seem to be able to respond appropriately even when told that the simple pleasure of sitting outdoors in the sun is now life-threatening.

Environmentalism is paid lip-service by all but those like Rush Limbaugh whose profession it is to provoke. However, it has yet to enter mainstream economics (which we deal with later) or – more disturbingly – resolve itself into a coherent 'ecophilosophy' (Fox, 1990). For the most radical environmental activists and thinkers, humans are a cancer on a biosphere which has rights equal to ours; 'The most effective way an individual can protect the global environment ... is to abstain from creating another human' (Hall et al., 1995). A more moderate Green view is simple antiindustrialisation (Sachs, 1990). On a psychological level, environmentalists disagree about how we should regard ourselves in relation to the environment; as just another process in Nature's dance, as an evil aberration, or (transpersonal ecology) as capable of opening the floodgates of self to experience oneness with the environment. Which of these is most correct, and what is the relevant evidence? As we shall see, modern physics can support anything (or nothing) in terms of such views. The grounding of Green thought in correct physical, economic, and metaphysical frameworks is one of the main tasks of this book. It takes very seriously the arguments that environmentalism has yet to address the North/South economic divide (Athanasiou, 1996) and that, in its radical form, it is actually potentially counter-productive to the task of saving the biosphere (Lewis, 1992).

Before revisiting the ecophilosophy debate, let us remind ourselves of the sheer scale of the environmental crisis. We shall first of all review the bare facts of the matter, starting with the influence of artificial chemicals on the environment. We shall then consider the political and commercial opposition to saving the environment. As we shall see, the problem is compounded by the lack of a coherent 'ecophilosophy' manifest, inter alia, in the extreme fractiousness of the environmental movement. Finally, some solutions are tentatively proposed. One of the tasks of the remainder of the book is to fill out the details of these solutions.

Todd Hayne's mid-nineties movie 'Safe' stars Julianne Moore as one of the increasing number of people who are becoming allergic to the essentially artificial environment in which we live, (try to) breathe, and have our being. That her real problem turns out to be the distance in her 'intimate' relationships is the kind of theme which will concern us later (in Part II). One statistic she is given on her way to the health farm is particularly appropriate here: of 60,000 or so (at a conservative estimate) artificial chemicals in our biosphere, only 10% have been tested for safety.

The organochlorides have a starring role here. Only one natural organochloride is known to science; not coincidentally, it plays a crucial role in the maintenance of the ozone layer. The others, formed when chlorine and other halogens react with hydrocarbons, include DDT, PCBs and, most currently dangerous of all, the dioxins. These latter compounds emerge as by-products when chlorine is used in a bleaching process. 'Whiter than white' has a huge environmental cost. So stable and insidious are organochlorides that each breath we take involves the inhalation and exhalation of between 10 and 20 types of them (Hawken, 1994, 41–3). The danger inherent in these chemicals is best represented by the hole in the ozone layer caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). However, and as close to home as could be, they also act to disturb our entire endocrine system by mimicking hormones. One possible result is the 50% drop in sperm counts registered among Parisians since 1938; the finding has been replicated elsewhere.

In their monograph 'Our Stolen Future', Colborn et al. (1997) detail the cost to the biosphere of artificial chemicals. The human body, like that of any higher animal, has hundreds of different receptors for naturally occurring chemicals. Some of these are derived from those of insects; as a result, humans are sensitive to drugs derived from the coca plant, and other such plants. Let us focus for the moment on the type of factor that may have caused the drop in sperm-count alluded to above. Estrogen, the main female hormone, and testosterone, which probably requires no introduction, are very similar in chemical structure. However, diethylbestrol (DES), first synthesised in 1938, can mimic estrogen, though sharing few points of structure in common with it, leading to speculation that drug receptor capacity derives also from quantum level attributes. Remarkably, the pesticide DDT, first announced also in that seminal (or not) year, and bearing as little resemblance to estrogen as DES, can also cause feminization by acting as a mock-estrogen. The list continues with PCBs, which have been saddled with the blame for some herring-gull colonies featuring many same-sex nests (though, of course, the issue of the prevalence of homosexuality in nature is itself moot). Finally, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), arising from the incomplete burning of any carbon-containing material, actually bond with the DNA in the nuclei of cells, causing the relentless advance of cancer (Colborn et al., p. 17). The freak's gallery of fish from the Cuyahoga river, and androgyny of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence, has an utterly shocking human counterpart not just in sperm counts, but in the consequences of radiation exposure.

Even organochlorides are relatively benign over time compared to plutonium (see Bertell, 1985, pp. 22, 209–10, and also p. 399 for further references). Making Plutonium infinitely more dangerous are two separate phenomena, one biological and one sociopolitical. First of all, plutonium is naturally attracted to bone. Secondly, the efforts made to give public relations support to the nuclear industry (we shall use 'greenwash' to describe this general process) is unparalleled in recent politics. Bertell (1985, x–xiii) gives several examples of cover-ups of serious nuclear accidents in the USA and Russia by the authorities. In like vein, the French were not informed of any specific danger to their health, post-Chernobyl, even after the massive death rates became known. The English have continually used their superior geopolitical clout when Ireland has complained about their using the Irish Sea as a dumping-ground for nuclear waste. In particular, Sellafield has recently been exposed as full of cover-ups, with a managerial culture allowing fraudulent accounting of waste. Missile envy seems a common thread in all these events.

Again, we can seriously err in forgetting the environmental holocaust in ex-communist countries. A lake called Karchay near the former secret city of Chelyabinsk can give a lethal dose of radioactivity in one hour to anyone standing beside it (Hertsgaard, 1992). This writer cannot find in his range the capacity to do justice to the horrors that were inflicted on the people of Kazakhstan as the USSR did its human experiments with radioactivity exposure on them; he can only refer to the novelist de Lillo (1998, p. 800), whose Underworld attempts to describe these horrors.

It is the victims who are blind. It is the boy with skin where his eyes ought to be, a bolus of spongy flesh, oddly like a mushroom cap, springing from each brow ... It is the man with the growth beneath his chin, a thing with a life of its own, embryonic and pulsing. It is the dwarf girl ...

Feshback et al. (1992, pp. 73–5) describe the result of diverting the feeders to the Aral Sea.

The storms of chemically-laden dust ... were by the 1980s poisoning farmlands 1,200 miles away.

Global warming due to human activity is as established a fact as most in the 'scientific' canon (Zimmer, 1996). In 2001 the intergovernmental panel on climate change upped the ante considerably on its warnings; the autumn of 2000 was the wettest in Britain since records began in 1766. However, the recent explosion of Mount Pinatubo was a reminder both of how devastating natural events can be to the climate and how resilient the biosphere is. To put things in perspective, I began writing this book from a place in Ontario which is almost 2,000 km. from the North Atlantic. A mere 10,000 years ago, it was a coastal area. With the resistance to the global warming hypothesis, we come to what will be a familiar juncture. Until – and indeed after – the seas come crashing into Ottawa, many scientists will not accept the hypothesis' truth. Computer models supporting the hypothesis track increases in CO2 from as far back as 1860. The temperature pattern suggests CO2 and sulfates have been taking an increasingly active role in the regulation of climate, proving the global warming hypothesis. The rearguard action fought by some antediluvian scientists allowed several countries to escape their obligations as committed to at the Rio summit by dint of 'carbon trading' by providing political capital. Following the more recent Tokyo negotiations, the issue of whether planting trees to compensate for fossil fuel consumption is effective has become moot. Current models suggest that it is only in their youthful phase that trees, through photosynthesis by day, produce more oxygen than they consume, through respiration, by night. Of the Green trinity reduce-reuse-recycle, only the first seems applicable to fossil fuels. We can take it, however, that even in the best-case scenario, where the US breaks the habit of a lifetime and accepts the Kyoto protocol, low-lying island groups like the Maldives are doomed. (Mind you, the events of September 11, 2001, concentrated minds in the US; the previously isolationist Bush administration paid its huge debt to the UN, and may now be inclined to ratify such previously disdained legislation as the 1999 UN convention for the suppression of financing for terrorism. Who will now bet against ratification of other international treaties?)

When it comes to forests, the facts are clear-cut (apologies!). Eighty-eight per cent of coniferous forests in Eastern and Central Europe are endangered. Meanwhile, we lose between 0.6% and 3% of our rain forests each year. 1995 saw the worst ever clearing to date of Brazilian rainforest. As Goldsmith (1993, 178–9) explains, this is bad economics as well as bad ecology. Along with their other biospheric functions, rain forests perform a massive cooling role; the cost to substitute this by artificial means is calculated at about 150 trillion dollars (ibid.).

Let us very briefly mention some other aspects of the environmental Shoah. Only two-thirds (and shrinking) of the world's land area supports any appreciable biological activity; we have lost 50% of our original wetlands to our artificial environment. Famously, it was found that several thousands of different species can reside in a single rainforest tree. Millions of these trees with their unknown species are killed off each year. Gell-Mann (1994, 330–1) suggests the extinction rate today may be comparable to any in the earth's past. However, we will not see the speciation with which nature bounces back (for example, the dinosaurs' roles were filled by mammals). Extinction is a massive problem also in that we lose many possibly 'miracle' cures inherent in the species we destroy.

As has been mentioned, the American Ogalola aquifer loses 20 billion gallons of water annually; elsewhere, Libya and Israel have at least got unreplenishable water supplies in common. To replace the extinguishing species, we are producing a glut of domestic animals; chickens outnumber us more than 3 to 1. Nor is there any terrestrial escape; along with the famous ozone hole in the Antarctic we can mention severe air pollution in the Arctic (Zimmer, 1996). With the already-mentioned loss of topsoil we can couple massive habitats loss for large mammals (manifest most of all in Africa's Serengeti plain) and land degradation.

Let us now investigate how commercial and political forces exacerbate the situation. Stauber et al. (1995) point out that, since the publication of Silent Spring, corporate interests have worked hard to menace, discredit and undermine environmentalists. Japan's government recently introduced a cartoon 'Mr. Pluto' figure to accustom kids to the joys of plutonium. Even so acute a critic as John Ralston Saul (1992) praised the Anglo-Dutch Shell company who, it is now revealed, actively connived at the genocidal measures of the Nigerian government against the Ogoni people. Shell's moral nadir was its role in the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Shell will pop up again and again in the course of this book as a case study of a multinational that, having engaged in questionable activities, saw the writing on the wall and began to mend its ways. As I write (in 1999), viewers of stations like MTV are regaled with video clips of anthropologists who are funded by Shell to study native cultures. Moreover, having realised that even the most optimistic estimates foresee an end to fossil fuels, Shell has begun to invest massively into research in alternative energy sources that are non environmentally-destructive. The PR machine has been hard at work cranking out ads in, for example, the October 1999 Scientific American (Vol. 281, Number 4);

Ignoring alternative energy is no alternative. Keeping pace with the world's accelerating demand for energy and supplying power to remote areas require (sic) Shell to pursue renewable resources like solar, biomass and wind energy. We established Shell international Renewables with a US $500 million commitment to develop these new opportunities commercially.

(p. 13)

The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away; some parenthesised weasel words at the bottom of p. 14 indicate that perhaps all is not well;

Each Shell company is a separate and distinct entity. In this advertisement, the words 'Shell', 'we', 'us', and 'our' refer, in some places, to the Royal Dutch/Shell Group as a whole, and in others to an individual Shell company or companies.

As is observed below, Monsanto, in its new incarnation, will probably be the next company to go this route. Only rarely, in the case of monopolies like Microsoft, will governments even pretend to intervene effectively against transnationals. For the most part, what will happen is a change of heart in the company itself, whether brought on by a fall in the share price (as was the case with Monsanto) or not. Moreover, despite the moral abyss that was Shell's position in Nigeria, it might claim that its actions had to be seen in the historical context of the attempted secession by Biafra, which Saro-Wiwa had a hand in thwarting. Its behaviour was nonetheless reprehensible in the extreme and a campaign sustained, inter alia, by the Sierra Club, contributed to the greening of Shell.

Let us look at another example of effective action. I can now state openly and without fear of libel action that McDonald's was instrumental in burning tropical rainforest, because of the courageous actions of two English Greenpeace supporters. This is almost a perfect case study of the right type of action to heal these wounds and we'll now spend some time studying it. What is also of significance here is that both principals were part of a splinter Greenpeace group which was continually being infiltrated by private investigators hired by McDonald's et al. Indeed, there were moments of farce when investigator was pursuing investigator; another occurred when one female called, coincidentally, Shelley started an affair with an activist, visiting his family, but eventually leaving behind only her cat as a memento of his dealings with McDonald's. (Vidal, 1997, 71–2)

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Being Human by Seán Ó Nualláin. Copyright © 2002 Seán Ó Nualláin. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Introduction,
1 The Current crisis,
i The environmental crisis,
ii The demographic crisis,
iii The economic crisis,
iv The political crisis,
v The moral/fideistic/epistemological crisis,
2 Our Age of Ignorance,
i Noetic Science,
ii Physics,
iii Biology,
iv Economics,
v Technology,
vi Psychology,
vii Politics and Sociology,
viii Religion and Myth,
ix Value,
x Some conclusions,
3 Theories of Everything,
Introduction,
i Dei ex machina,
ii Precedence claims and claim-jumps,
iii Eschatologies,
iv Stake Takeover,
v Weltanschauungen,
Conclusions,
Appendix A: How does Science Progress?,
Appendix B: The Reduced History of Physics,
Appendix C: Genetic technologies,
References,
Index,