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Why Ten Instincts? (What May Roslings Have Left Out?) and Why Now?

Posted on November 30, 2025 | Leave a comment

As November draws to a close, I’m winding down my extended discussion of the book Factfulness and its possible relevance to current American and global situations. The book’s themes are likely to pop up occasionally in future blog posts, but never at the level of this month’s concentration. 

I’m not sure why the authors chose ten as the number of “instincts” they wanted us to watch out for. Lots of advice and self-help books have numbers in their titles—for examples, Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Arrien’s The Fourfold Way, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life—but most categories overlap in actual situations. Perhaps ten is a handy number, a little beyond our typical ability to retain all at one time, but the number of fingers or toes most folks have, the base number system used in most commercial enterprises around the world. 

As I read and reread the various Factfulness chapters, I sometimes wished that the authors leaned somewhat less heavily on the distortions created by our instinctual tendencies. In their books, TED presentations, and gapminder website, the overwhelming number of examples they give are ones in which humans can be outperformed by “chimps,” Roslings’ stand-ins for totally random answers. (Given three possible answers, random responses would be right about 33 percent of the time.) Other recent psychological and sociological studies have highlighted some of the ways our earlier, partly “built in” ways of looking at the world do not fit modernity well. The one question on which most of Roslings’ respondents outperform “chimps” is the likelihood of continuing global temperature increases due to current high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Maybe the Roslings could have included just one or two other areas in which we humans are not worse than random in matching our perceptions to reality? 

Since Factfulness came out, nearly a decade ago, I believe its relevance has only increased. The U.S. (and other “developed” economies) continues to grapple with multiple challenges. The Roslings, with their extensive long-term experience of the “developing” world, have done us a substantial service by focusing there, puncturing many preconceptions about the limited potential of Asian, African, and Latin American peoples (the so-called “global south”). Many in these societies are poised for continuing economic and cultural advancement. Near its conclusion, the book delineates five substantial global risks facing us in the 21st century: pandemics, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. According to the authors, “…each has the potential to cause mass suffering either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or decades.” Any of these dwarf the overblown sense of risk many of us get exercised about in our instinctual responses.

What I liked best about the book was its concluding example—an illiterate peasant woman in what was then rural Zaire who may have saved Hans Rosling’s life with her insightful, impassioned speech and action incorporating appropriate responses to multiple misleading instinctual reactions:  

“I was in a remote and extremely poor village, … part of a team investigating an epidemic of the incurable paralytic disease called konzo. … The research project … had been meticulously prepared. But I had made one serious mistake. I had not explained properly to the villagers what I wanted to do and why. … (I)t was only when I switched off [some needed, noisy equipment] that I heard the raised voices. … Then I saw: a crowd of maybe 50 people, all upset and angry.  … I started to explain.  … One man with a machete started screaming again. … Then a barefoot woman, perhaps 50 years old, stepped out of the crowd. …

[She drew analogies to previous measles research that resulted in vaccines to eliminate this dangerous childhood disease. She mentioned her grandchild, stricken with gonzo, suggesting that medical research might lead to breakthroughs against future additional cases.] 

[Then] she turned her back on the crowd, pointed with her other hand to the crook of her arm, and looked me in the eyes. ‘Here. Doctor. Take my blood.’

I am amazed at how well [Factfulness] describes her [counter-instinctual] behavior. She seemed to recognize all the dramatic instincts that had been triggered in that mob [angry at Rosling’s inadequately explained attempt to draw their blood for research into a nutritional disease]. The fear instinct had been triggered by the sharp needles, the blood, and the disease. The generalization instinct had put me in a box as a plundering European. The blame instinct made the villagers take a stand against the evil doctor who had come to steal their blood. The urgency instinct made people make up their minds way too fast. 

Still, under this pressure, she had stood up and spoken out [with both emotion and examples that resonated with her fellow villagers]. … (S)he had courage. And she was able to think critically and express herself with razor-sharp logic and perfect rhetoric at a moment of extreme tension. …” 

In too much of the media exposure I get, in too many of my own reactions, I find evidence of “instinctual” responses and behaviors that can and sometimes do endanger the viability of our human enterprise. Remembering “factfulness” helps pull me back closer to reality.  

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Of Smokestacks and Cliffs

Posted on August 2, 2024 | Leave a comment

As we approach the shank of summer, I’ve been reminiscing about a long-ago summer I spent at a magical place, Montreal’s “Expo 67.” It was my first summer away from home and on my own. I was just out of my teens, in a serious relationship, not sure what to do about it. My boyfriend was hundreds of miles away, working at a summer camp in Pennsylvania. In those pre-internet days, we wrote postal letters back and forth, sometimes emboldened to share by mail what we’d shied away from in person. 

The world was in turmoil, perhaps a bit more than usual. I was somewhat bewildered, but hopeful about prospects for a better society. Expo 67 was a perfect vantage point for viewing new possibilities.  

Because I’d also fallen in love with the French language, at first I’d considered dropping out of college to spend the entire April-October interval of the fair as a participant-observer. I thought that a prolonged stay in French-speaking Québec province would improve my language skills beyond what I was getting in coursework at my small liberal arts college in Virginia. Our academic dean suggested an alternative—why not apply to work just for the length of my summer break, when visitors to the fair would be at their peak, the need for extra staff most urgent? That way I could get almost the same exposure to French language and culture without interrupting my college education. 

Of the hundred or so application letters I sent out, only one produced a definite job offer—preparing and selling Belgian waffles at one of the fair’s many snack bars. I jumped at the chance. Once school let out, I boarded a bus headed north across the border. It took an intervention by my soon-to-be boss to prevent me from becoming an undocumented worker. There were many in Montreal that summer—American young men evading the military draft, or newcomers from elsewhere fleeing disasters, disorder, or worse in their countries of origin.  

Over time I became one of Smitty’s Waffles best strawberry cappers. I earned a pittance, but was surrounded by others in the same situation. We shared low-cost housing tips.  We traded end-of-shift free food among the half dozen or so snack bars in our cluster. Sometimes this included freshly whipped butter, made in our gigantic electric mixer by whipping the cream that topped our waffles for just a little too long (and substituting a little salt for the sugar). 

Montreal had extended its public transportation system for the fair. A monthly pass for the Metro was affordable, even at minimum wage. Best of all, on my days off, I got free entry to the fair.  An exhibit I sampled multiple times was sponsored by Canada’s telephone companies. It featured a trans-Canada travel film, the first in immersive Imax, a genre many of us have come to enjoy since. Though I haven’t located an online archive of the film, I can remember snatches of scenery, from the easternmost stretches of the Maritime Provinces along the Atlantic to British Columbia on the Pacific. However, it’s two scenes from Canada’s interior that linger most vividly in my mind. 

The first is an aerial panorama of a huge steel mill complex near Sudbury, Ontario, belching smoke. Back in 1967, making steel was seen as a hallmark of industrial might, with smokestack pollution a bothersome but necessary byproduct. 

The second snippet is slightly longer—several young people joyriding in an open jeep across a vast plain, with no other traffic in sight. Abruptly, the vehicle brakes to a stop, just as the celebrants reach the edge of a thousand foot drop. Even after several viewings, I still gasped at the sudden halt and the averted plunge to oblivion. 

Since 1967, industrialized countries have reduced some of our smokestack pollution, viewing it as a health threat. Since 1967, we’ve also gotten increasingly concerned about a global “cliff” of climate change, caused by humanity’s net emissions of greenhouse gases. We humans have yet to master satisfying our needs and wants without endangering our long-term survival as a species. The 2015 Paris International Climate Agreement may be a small start toward solutions. It’s been signed by over 190 countries that produce 98% of the globe’s greenhouse gases. The U.S. is currently a signatory. We are reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, if not yet quite as fast as climate accords targets. I’m trying to play my part. I’m also rooting for those young joyriders. I want us to apply our collective human brakes fast enough and creatively enough to keep us from plunging over the edge of a climate cliff. 

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Fearing Fear Itself

Posted on February 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

It sometimes seems to me that the media environment surrounding me is getting increasingly fear inducing. Should our American predilection for gun violence have me quaking in my shoes? Is another deadly pandemic inevitable? Should I be afraid of the overwhelming consequences of irreversible climate change? Is our political system broken beyond repair? To help provide context and retain some sense of balance, I look for historical parallels and trends rather than just following the headlines or lead story:  

—Colonial America had more endemic violence than we see now. Dueling with pistols was then considered a socially acceptable means of “settling” disputes. Unfortunately, firearm deaths remain among major causes of death in the U.S., with the majority of those deaths being suicides. Rates vary considerably by locality and over time. After a U.S. low of under 29,000 fatalities in 1999 and 2000, the death toll again began to climb. Starting in 2015, it increased significantly, by 2021 exceeding 48,000. However, because of population growth, the gun death rate of 14.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2021 was still below the prior peak of 16.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 1974. 

—During the 2020-2023 covid pandemic, losses were immense, but the global death toll, estimated at 5 to 6 million, was just over 10% of the estimated toll of the prior 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. Both pandemics fell far short of the catastrophic losses from bubonic plague outbreaks that wiped out about a third of Europe’s human population during the 14th century. 

—Erratic weather events seem to have become more frequent, yet warning systems, preparation, and remediation resources have also improved. In 1900, a hurricane all but obliterated Galveston, Texas. The storm killed an estimated 10,000 people, primarily because there were inadequate weather warnings.

—We certainly have a current crop of crooked politicians and political shenanigans, but the respective eras of “Boss Tweed” of NYC’s Tammany Hall and later “Kingfish” Huey Long of Louisiana could run contemporary political machinations a close second. 

In our current round of political theater, have we allowed ourselves too often, though, to be frightened by our supposed differences, be they political party, ethnicity, gender, or any other category? It may now sadly be a somewhat realistic fear to fear those who for political gain try to incite us to fear each other.   

Our most famous U.S. political quote about the toxicity of fear comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address in March, 1933. Then, the nation’s economy was reeling after a 1929 stock market crash and several years of deepening economic dysfunction. FDR was a seasoned politician and also someone who had made an arduous recovery from the paralyzing polio he’d contracted in 1921. Without downplaying the dire state of the economy, he spoke to rally our citizenry by beginning with the need to reduce fear: 

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”  

He then went on to outline actions for restoring trust (there’s a reason many banks have “trust” as part of their names) and for minimizing further panic (there’s also a reason that financial panics are called “panics.”)

A recent explanation of the importance of not succumbing to fear comes from a 2018 book that helped get me through covid isolation: Factfulness. Authored by former Sweden-based global health researcher, professor and statistician Hans Rosling, the book evaluates a whole set of instinctual responses that can distort our human reactions to situations and events. Fear is one of the most insidious. 

Anecdotally, Rosling describes his initial reaction while coping as a young emergency room physician with his first trauma event, a downed, incoherent pilot. Temporarily short of more seasoned backup, Rosling’s initial reaction was fear-driven: 

“…(M)y head quickly generated a worst-case scenario. … I saw what I was afraid of seeing [a Russian intruder signaling the start of World War III]. Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”  

Fortunately for Rosling and for his patient, an experienced nurse soon returned from her lunch break and identified the real problem [a Swedish pilot whose training mission had ended with a ditched plane and resulted in hypothermia]. She reclaimed the situation before the young doctor’s fear response resulted in serious errors. 

Rosling also provides statistical evidence contrasting what we find frightening and what our actual risks may be: “This chapter has touched on terrifying events: natural disasters (0.1 percent of all deaths), plane crashes (0.001 percent), murders (0.7 percent), nuclear leaks (0 percent) and terrorism (0.05 percent). None of them kills more than 1 percent of the people who die each year, and still they get enormous media attention.”

Per Rosling, we all need to become better at distinguishing between what we find frightening and what is truly dangerous. He elaborates: “The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected—by your own attention filter or by the media—precisely because it is scary.” We need to evaluate situations based both on the actual danger and on our level of exposure to that danger. 

In conclusion, he offers this suggestion: “Get calm(er) before you carry on.”  Good advice for troubling times. 

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On to Kyiv, and Then What?

Posted on February 24, 2022 | Leave a comment

Like many globally in this media-saturated world, I’m distressed about the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by its larger neighbor Russia. For weeks, we’ve seen reports of a buildup of Russian troops and military equipment along the borders with Ukraine. Now it seems that troops and equipment are on the move and a full-scale invasion has started. The aim, as nearly all American pundits and experts tell us, is to topple the existing Ukrainian government and to install a regime more to Russia’s liking. 

This is a scenario that has played out countless times throughout history by whatever superior military power desired to dominate its neighbor(s). The United States of America has not been immune to using such tactics, despite our protestations of “spreading democracy,” and so on. 

Problems can arise in the aftermath of a military conquest, as we’ve seen most recently and tragically in contemporary Afghanistan. Conquering and governing are two rather different domains. Once a new regime gets installed, who repairs the infrastructure that’s been damaged or destroyed during the conquest?  Who provides the basic necessities—food, clothing, shelter—to a cowed, needy, and probably sullen civilian population?  Who firms up borders and stems the outflow of brain and talent of those eager and able to leave? Who works to reduce the likelihood that resentments will fester and eventually result in further armed conflicts when the balance of military power shifts?  

I’ve never traveled in Ukraine. Prior to the current war, my main point of reference to Ukraine was the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, a now-decommissioned power plant near the Ukrainian/Russian border, about 70 miles from Kyiv. Much earlier, I was taught courses in Russian language and culture by a college professor who’d escaped from Ukraine during the final days of World War II. When “Dr. K.” taught us, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was near its height, the Cold War was raging, and the availability of non-official information about conditions in any socialist republic was severely limited. As our language facility in Russian improved, Dr. K. showed us articles from the Soviet press that glorified the Soviet state without mentioning any possible problems. 

An ancillary point of reference to things Ukrainian: I’d learned to recognize a musical piece, “The Great Gate of Kiev.” I liked the somewhat ponderous music, but didn’t make much effort to visualize an actual gate. It turns out that there was not actually a “great gate” when composer Modest Mussorgsky wrote his piece during the late 19th century. The Kiev-related piece was the final composition of a suite called “Pictures at an Exhibition” that featured an artist’s rendering of what a memorial gate might look like. It would have celebrated the survival of Tsar Alexander II after a failed 1866 assassination attempt. In much earlier times, there had been a gate, erected during the 11th century reign of Yaroslav the Wise as part of city fortifications. (Per the sources I referenced, an actual memorial gate was reconstructed in Kyiv in 1982 by a then-waning USSR.)  

The impulse to conquest seems to be part of our human heritage, from the earliest cave dweller with a bigger club, through the desolation wrought by 1940’s era fire bombings and atomic bombs, through the 1990’s Rwandan genocide conducted mostly with machetes, plus all the other “more conventional” weaponry used before and since. If we are to survive as a species, it seems to me that we need to cultivate more assiduously a countervailing impulse to nurture. The members of the military I know best and most admire are much more eager to assist after natural or man-made disasters than they are eager for combat and conquest. The ongoing disaster of our current global viral pandemic, plus the slower-moving planet-wide disaster that is climate change, can use all our ingenuity and empathy. These and other disasters call out for the greatest exercise of our nurturing sides that we can muster. 

If or when Kyiv “falls,” then what?   

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January Musings

Posted on January 15, 2022 | Leave a comment

In January, 2022, media exposure in the part of the U. S. where I now live has tilted toward retrospectives about last January’s U.S. Capitol Riot. Sometimes, even the ongoing covid pandemic gets relegated to second billing. Human-induced climate change can come in third or even lower. Most of the news is bad and can seem overwhelming. Before I get totally overloaded, I temporarily turn off all media outlets and go for a walk in nature. I am fortunate to have this option.   

In January, 2017, I took part in a very different mass event, the January 21 “women’s march global.” According to the British journal The Independent, between 3.3 and 4.6 million people participated in nearly 600 locations within the U.S., making that day’s events the largest domestic protest in U.S. history up to that point. By some estimates, nearly 6 million people protested globally. Over 200 associated events took place on every continent, including Antarctica. 

On the National Mall in Washington, D.C.,  half a million attendees, mostly women, converged in 2017 for a day of peaceful protests and speeches supporting women’s rights, environmental responsibility, and a variety of other causes. 

In North Carolina, my home then, I participated in a hastily organized Raleigh event which drew about 17,000 people, twice the number that local organizers and police had planned for. This event was also peaceful, with humor, flexibility, even camaraderie between some police officers and marchers.

The size of the January 6, 2021 Washington, D.C. demonstration prior to the Capitol assault has been variously estimated at from several thousand to as many as 20,000. Not all participants in the rally were involved in the subsequent riot. According to an ongoing study by researchers at the University of Chicago, of those arrested so far for their actions at the U.S. Capitol, 93% are white, and 86% are male. (For a more detailed analysis, check the “Chicago Project on Security and Threats,” https://cpost.uchicago.edu.)  

As someone who is comfortable with a female identity, if not with all the restrictions that female identity has sometimes imposed, I’m both curious and concerned about the gender disparities of the 2017 and 2021 events. A half million mostly female demonstrators in Washington in 2017 managed a peaceful protest with no damage and no arrests. Less than a tenth that number of mostly male attendees in 2021 caused multiple deaths, an estimated $1.5 million in damage to the interior of the U.S. Capitol, and over 700 arrests so far. 

As we try to put January, 2021 into perspective and work toward curbing our current pandemics of virus, violence, and climate-changing economics, it should be evident that inflammatory rhetoric and destructive behavior have only worsened them. We have to continue talking and working with each other across our real and perceived divides. We need to find ways to better live out a national motto inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States in 1782: “E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One.” 

Women who helped organize the 2017 events have not stopped working, but have gotten less visible. We have turned to other avenues in our attempts to support meaningful change. The focus is both local and global. There’s an emphasis on women in the “global south,” who’ve contributed little to current global problems but are disproportionately impacted by the policies of “the industrialized north.” Wherever we live on our planet, it is true that disasters and conflicts disproportionately impact women.

Paying too much attention to the news can be disheartening. Going for a walk helps me regain perspective. I also find solace in some favorite lines of a favorite poet, Marge Piercy’s “The Seven of Pentacles:”

“..[S]he is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.”

True masculinity does not require rioting and destruction. There is ample room for a masculinity that supports equal access to life’s opportunities, that can be strong without being bullying, that does not rely on vilifying an “other” to be validated. 

Perhaps some who are gifted at dismantling cults can work with the men (and women) who were part of the violence on January 6, 2021. Each of us, whatever our gender,  can continue work on our own unique tasks in the global effort to reinforce the mutual vulnerability and solidarity we share on this planet with its over 7 billion temporary human guests. 

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The Weather of Mysteries, the Mysteries of Weather

Posted on October 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

I grew up on mysteries, both televised and in book form. Though I mostly ignored the Nancy Drew series (part of every preteen girl’s book shelf?), by the time I finished high school, I’d been steeped in Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner. I had vague images of the little English village where Miss Jane Marple solved murders. The Orient Express and a tour boat on the Nile seemed exotic and thrilling places for sleuth Hercule Poirot to twirl his mustache and exercise his little gray cells. Though I didn’t expect Perry Mason ever to lose a case, I enjoyed weekly TV evenings watching Mason and prosecutor Hamilton Burger match wits in courtroom dramas.  

Once I left my family home and moved around the country and overseas, my personal library went through several changes.  Lately, it’s been downsized, but I’m still within range of a public or university library. I’ve consistently gravitated toward the mystery section. Over time, my tastes have evolved. I’ve concentrated more often on women novelists who feature women protagonists and who define their settings in meticulous detail, often including the weather. 

At the suggestion of a friend, I began reading the Susan Wittig Albert series about the fictional Texas hill town of Pecan Springs. Her “cozy mystery” part-time detective and full-time herb and plant store owner/operator China Bayles tapped into a love of landscape that had been dormant in me for a while.   

Not long after I moved to North Carolina in 2007, I came across a holiday story by local author Margaret Maron. Before long, I’d read everything I could find by this self-taught writer, whose fictional East Carolina milieu of Colleton County, presided over by bootlegger’s daughter Judge Deborah Knott, sometimes seemed intriguingly, uncomfortably real. I especially remember Storm Track, a 2000 murder mystery with an Atlantic hurricane built into the plot. 

Now I’m a recent transplant to southern California, trying to find my way in this semi-desert climate partially filled with retirees like me. No hurricanes here. Muted seasonal changes so far. (Luckily) no significant earthquakes since our move. The other bane of this area is wildfires. Locals with longer pedigrees than mine have told me scary stories of past area fires and evacuations. This year’s outbreaks have already set records for size and ferocity.  Therefore, I was only a little surprised when a summer library visit produced a wildfire mystery, Martha C. Lawrence’s Ashes of Aries. The plot was a tad out of my usual range, but the description of a Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood in flames was almost too vivid. 

Lately lots of pundits have spent lots of print and air time expounding on a changing climate that is likely to include an increase in drastic weather events, some unpredicted.  I’ve found a blog post, but not yet an Albert novel about the great freeze-up of February, 2021, when much of Texas discovered the limited reliability of its electric grid under winter stress. I’m sure there are other novels with wildfires, others with hurricanes. Our reality may be approaching or exceeding the weather limits of popular mystery fiction. 

It seems as if the strides made in the past century or so toward being able to predict weather more consistently and reliably are getting undercut. Hurricane predictors talk about “rapid intensification.” States and regions in the U.S. West declare drought emergencies. They try to evolve contingency water resource plans on the fly. Wells run dry. Power grids fail or are shut down to reduce the chance of spark-ignited wildfires.  

It makes sense for those of us who can to get more serious about resource conservation. Per author Jonathan Safran Foer, in his recent non-fiction book We are the Weather, our personal choices do have an impact: we need to eat less meat, do less driving, travel less by air, have fewer children. For me, the child part is over and done, but I’m working on the remaining three issues. 

Once, in the few months I’ve lived in San Diego, I experienced an unexpected dividend of our less predictable weather: a brief but intense rainbow.   

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Our (Flawed) Experiments with Truth

Posted on September 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

Recently, rereading some personal journals I wrote nearly forty years ago, I came across a reference to the English-language version of a famous autobiography I was then reading, Mohandas Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I’ve since lost my copy, and didn’t journal much of the content. Skimming a current online summary, I learned that Gandhi first published the work in his native language, Gujarati, in weekly installments in his newsletter in India during the latter 1920’s. Then, he was actively engaged in the struggle for Indian independence from Great Britain. In his work, he described the first forty some years of his life, with emphasis on the evolution of his concept of satyagraha, often rendered in English as “non-violent passive resistance.” The book has been translated into 15 regional Indian languages and at least a dozen European ones.

The title of the work has stuck with me. While Gandhi’s definition of “truth” has a strong spiritual component, somewhat different from many Western perspectives, the gist of his argument seems to me to be that one may approach “truth” but cannot codify it or force it into any set system. To a Westerner, his search sounds something like our use (and misuse) of the method of scientific inquiry. My understanding of scientific method is that we can only approximate “whole truth,” never totally pin it down. Nevertheless, we conduct successive experiments to align our understanding more closely with expanding portions of truth. Sometimes old explanations are disproved. No theory or explanation is ever final, but only as good as its ability to describe and predict actual phenomena. 

The current rancor about multiple cultural and political issues seems to me to be partly due to a misguided attempt to force “truth”  to remain static. We watch coverage of the evolving covid-19 pandemic as if there must be one definitive solution to the burgeoning number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. We want to reduce a complex set of public health issues to simple “good guys/bad guys” scenarios. 

“Tell us the answer,” we demand. 

We may frame successive revisions in advice from the CDC or the WHO as evidence of unreliability, rather than as responses to changes in viral variants, levels of contagion and community spread, and mortality/morbidity rates. We may try to assign blame for the initial spread of the virus, as if calling the pandemic the “kung flu” could impact the pandemic’s current global trajectory or destruction. We may try to discount scientists wrestling with a hugely complicated global health challenge as “elitist,” preferring to believe whichever online media pundit best fits our preexisting biases. None of these reductionist ploys coincides with the “truth of covid-19” as we know it so far.

One of my more recent reads touched on the equally divisive issue of climate change. In A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism, historian-author Patrick Allitt quoted former climate scientist and member of the Intergovernmental  Panel on Climate Change, Stephen Schneider. Schneider, until his death in 2010, was for many years a professor of biology at Stanford University. An early advocate of reforming public policies to mitigate and adapt to human-induced climate change, Schneider nonetheless recoiled from efforts to pin down exact consequences or remedies or to demonize climate skeptics. Schneider tried to explain, using terms that got and can get quoted out of context to support a variety of views:

“As scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. …This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope this means being both.”  (A lengthier version of Schneider’s views is available online at https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Mediarology/mediarology.html.) 

As I try to shield myself and my loved ones from the worst impacts of either potentially deadly viruses or equally deadly weather events and climate shifts, I take some solace in imagining Gandhi and Schneider in a vibrant afterlife, sharing insights and learning from each other’s experiments with truth. 

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Selective Memory and Finishing the Work We are In

Posted on November 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

Selective Memory and Finishing the Work We Are In  —by Jinny Batterson

I can remember parts of events that happened when I was much younger. On Friday, November 22, 1963, I was a Maryland high school student. I remember hearing our school principal start an announcement over the school intercom that day at an unusual time for announcements. I remember coming down the stairwell between the two floors of our building along with many other students changing classes. 

I don’t remember whether the announcement I heard while going downstairs was the first—that President Kennedy had been shot—or the second—that he had shortly afterward been pronounced dead at a Dallas hospital. I don’t remember whether school that day was dismissed early or whether school was canceled the following Monday for his funeral. I don’t remember much about that year’s Thanksgiving the following Thursday. 

Earlier in 1963, there had been a tense standoff between the nuclear-armed U.S.A. under Kennedy’s leadership, and the nuclear-armed U.S.S.R. under Nikita Khrushchev about the positioning of nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba, then led by Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro. I don’t remember whether my dad built a nuclear fallout shelter in our front yard before or after Kennedy was shot.  

Parts of our education when I was a student involved memorizing famous poems and speeches. I can recite most of a short Abraham Lincoln speech from a century earlier, first spoken in November, 1863 at a dedication ceremony for a military cemetery at the site of one of the U.S. Civil War’s deadliest battles:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are …testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.…The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. …It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us … that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In the tragic days after Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, his Gettysburg speech was nearly forgotten. Later, the contents of the speech took on more importance. When the current Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. in 1922, the Gettysburg Address was inscribed on one of the monument’s inside walls.  

We are now experiencing another test of the viability of our democratic institutions. Each of us brings different memories to an ongoing impeachment inquiry. Witnesses and questioners interpret incidents differently, partly based on their training and point of view. Our current President ran for office touting the belief that our nation could return to a time when the U.S. was preeminent in global affairs. As an astute businessman, he could “fix things.” Some seem to think his position grants him nearly unlimited license to promote his own interests. Attempts to remove him from office are “character assassination.” Others less charitable to the President point out that our political system is based on checks and balances designed to restrict any one person or political entity from rigging the system to his own benefit, from “fixing things.” 

Absent from the immediate debates and questioning are considerations of the impacts of global over-dependence on fossil fuels to human and planetary health. Scientists tell us that both the United States of America and the rest of the world’s nations have only a decade or so to drastically curb our output of the climate-warming gasses produced by burning fossil fuels if we are to maintain a planet capable of supporting human life as we know it.

On another wall of the Lincoln Memorial is his second inaugural, delivered in March, 1865, just over a month before his assassination. We might be wise to remember its conclusion:  

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle… to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. 

Regardless of the outcome of our immediate political crises, climate change requires all of us to strive on, using whatever tools of intellect, wealth, compassion, and ingenuity are at our disposal, to finish the work we are in.     

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Climate Change Hope

Posted on August 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

Climate Change Hope  —by Jinny Batterson

It’s been over a generation since I first became concerned that human activity might irreversibly change our planet’s climate. I’ve gradually been revising my lifestyle to reduce my input to the problem. Even now, though, if I pull up an online “carbon footprint” app to measure how many earths would be required to support all humanity in the style to which I’m currently accustomed, my number is a good bit over one. I can feel anxious sometimes.

Over my lifetime so far, I’ve had chances to visit many different world regions, and to notice adaptations in other cultures that help reduce waste and emissions without causing privation. So I continue to adapt, plus I do my best to encourage others to make lifestyle adjustments that are planet-friendly without feeling like deprivation. Some I talk with are enthusiastic; others either ignore me or offer a variety of negative responses, the most common being: 

—It’s not really a problem; see this snowball? (denial)

—It’s somebody else’s problem, I didn’t cause much of it so why should I have to fix it? (projection)

—If governments and corporations won’t fix it, what can one person do? (defeatism)

Like anyone with an opinion, I have what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” Once I’m convinced of a view, I tend to pay more attention to information that supports it and to ignore or discount contradictory information. My current view is that anyone who tries to persuade you that climate change is a simple phenomenon with a single solution has likely not done much research and/or has discounted lived experience.  Do Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and/or major increases in the number and severity of wildfires signal global warming? Does a severe winter signal the opposite? I doubt we can ever know for sure. Given the impossibility of certainty, I think it makes sense to err on the side of conserving as much of the planet’s existing climate and species as we can. I try to listen respectfully to those with different views, and to revise my opinions when reliable new information becomes available. Most of the time I’m a “glass half full” sort of person, so I try to pay attention to efforts toward reducing or adapting to climate impacts, to applaud them and, where practical, to follow suit.

London’s transportation mix, from what I saw of it on a recent visit, encouraged me. I was amazed at the number of riders of its extensive subway (“underground”) system, plus the volume of bicycle commuters and the widespread availability of dedicated bicycle lanes and monitored bicycle parking areas. Near the rental apartment complex where I was staying was a two-tiered parking lot, for bikes.  Each weekday morning, extensive stands of standardized rental bikes near the major intersections and bridges emptied out, refilling in the evening. During some of my pedestrian sightseeing, I noticed “ULEZ zone” signs posted on major thoroughfares. Via later research, I learned that this acronym is for “ultra-low emission zone,” an area covering much of central London where vehicle traffic is restricted. Only cars, trucks, and buses which meet stringent emissions standard are allowed. The zone was activated on April 8, 2019; drivers who violate it face hefty fines.

In other reading and internet exposure, I’ve come across additional worthwhile suggestions. Given my gender, I was drawn to the recommendation in the collection Drawdown, published in 2017, about the importance of educating and empowering women as a component in reducing or adapting to climate change impacts (ranking 6th best of the 100 partial solutions suggested). Recently, I came across the results of a 2019 study of the possible impact of a massive global tree-planting effort on climate. Thomas Crowther, a climate change ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, coauthored an examination of global land use and found enough suitable unused land so that a trillion trees could be planted, reforesting an area equivalent to the size of the U.S. and potentially reducing atmospheric carbon substantially. Another source of encouragement is a talk given by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a Canadian who now teaches at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas, about productive ways of talking about climate reality: “The most important thing we can do about climate change is talk about it,” posted on the TED website in December, 2018. Please let’s keep talking!    

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Voting with Our Feet (and other essential body parts)

Posted on July 19, 2015 | 3 comments

Voting with Our Feet (and other essential body parts)   —by Jinny Batterson

Recent retirees like me get a lot of health-related information—mailers, email reminders, targeted Internet advertising.  Fairly often, these messages tout the benefits of regular exercise. Walking gets mentioned a lot—helps our circulation, requires little special equipment, can be done anywhere, anytime. So, even in the heat of summer, I try to keep up a regular walking routine. Over the past several seasons, I’ve been doing a good bit of more targeted walking, too, participating in protest marches and fundraisers for causes I think are important.  One of those is global climate change; another is voting.

Last September, I joined hundreds of thousands in New York City to draw global attention both to the problems we’re creating with our profligate use of fossil fuels and to possible alternatives, including the low-tech, available-to-nearly-everyone switch to walking more and using our vehicles less. I got a walker’s high moving along with the varied and huge crowd around me, most in comfortable shoes, some with banners, others with slogans on their clothing, some coasting beside us on skates or bicycles, a few in wheelchairs.

This past week, I joined a smaller, more localized crowd in Winston-Salem, North Carolina to draw attention to the start of a federal court case considering the constitutionality of several restrictive 2013 changes in my home state’s voting laws. The weather was sultry—July in North Carolina can wilt even the most stalwart. However, organizers had ordered thousands of bottles of cool water, and we guzzled it down as we listened to speeches and songs before taking to the streets. We wanted to help reinforce the message that the U.S. Constitution has been repeatedly amended to expand, rather than constrict, the franchise. The 15th amendment gave the vote to male former slaves; the 19th enfranchised women; the 26th, ratified in 1971, reduced the voting age from 21 to 18, giving the ballot to 18 to 20 year olds, including young men subject to military conscription.

I’m most grateful that my tramps have so far been voluntary. Nowadays, a huge number of people are walking for more distressing reasons—the number of international refugees and internally displaced persons has reached a level not seen since World War II. In 2014, nearly 60 million people, about 1 in every 125, were in refugee camps or temporary shelters due to wars and ethnic conflicts around the globe. When armed conflict breaks out, many vote with their feet just to survive.

In Isabel Wilkerson’s 2011 award-winning saga, The Warmth of Other Suns, I read that nearly 6 million African-Americans voted with their feet during the period between 1915 and 1970. These participants in the “great migration” left the Jim Crow south for points north and west, pushed out by fear and discrimination, and/or pulled away by the lure of better opportunities and less blatant oppression.

During my lifetime so far, I have not been forced to vote with my feet because of wars or oppression. However, voting with a ballot is a right I no longer take for granted. Recent quantum leaps in the sophistication and prevalence of gerrymandering make it more difficult for me to cast a meaningful vote, as do both subtle and more blatant attempts at voter suppression. Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have made “voting with money” more prevalent, an emphasis I find distressing. The problem has gotten too big for any single citizen, candidate or political party to solve on its own.

At the New York City march, some carried placards proclaiming: “There is no Planet B.”  On a less global level, I wonder, if we destroy our country’s democracy, what “plan B’s” await us? Our union has become considerably less perfect over the past decade or so. Perhaps we can reverse the trend—some of us may have to vote repeatedly with our feet in protest marches. We’ll also need to engage our heads, our hearts, our hands, having serious debates about vital issues, registering and voting, resisting demagoguery and pat answers, listening to each other, working together. Let’s keep walking…

 

 

 

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