wise words

Excerpts from The Relevance of E. F. Schumacher in the 21st Century
By John Fullerton
May, 2008

Our global economic system is broken not because of the credit crisis; it is
broken because it is predicated on perpetual, resource driven growth with no
recognition of scale limitations.

What we are not hearing, at least in the mainstream media, is a critical
reframing of the questions that address root causes. . . . . We are
not hearing a debate about the sustainability of a perpetually growing
global economic system nested within our finite biosphere. We are not
hearing a debate about the wisdom of allowing financial power (and systemic
risk) to be increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few financial
institutions of increasing complexity and scale. We are not publicly
questioning the wisdom of the system we have allowed to evolve in response
to capital's quest for ever increasing financial returns. Nor are we
debating where to look for creative responses.

However, nothing could be more important at this critical time. What we
must grasp is that the financial crisis we are reacting to is but a cyclical
side show to the bigger issues we face regarding the sustainability of our
economic system. We should see the present financial crisis as a wake up
call to this far greater challenge. We should search with an open mind for
the wisdom we need to transition our economic system onto a sustainable
path, grounded in ecological reality, with a respect for human justice and a
deep appreciation for all life.

What is needed is nothing less than a new economic myth, which incorporates
the central issue of scale in order to supplant and transcend the "invisible
hand" of the free market. We need a "post-modern (post-materialist)
economic theory".

At the beginning of the 20th century, scale did not matter. At start of the
21st century, scale redefines our economic challenge.

In my personal quest for this new economic myth, I was stopped dead in my
tracks after discovering E.F. Schumacher several years ago. Most who know
of Schumacher know him from his seminal work, Small is Beautiful - Economics
as if People Mattered (1973). The fortunate ones have also read his final
published work, A Guide for the Perplexed, a title that grabbed me and did
not disappoint. Most disciples of Schumacher probably encountered his clear
thinking during the 70s. Many went on to become leaders in the
environmental movement. I was in junior high school when Small is Beautiful
was published, and then was busy building a career in global finance during
the 80s and 90s on the belief that finance rather than politics would
dominate international relations during my lifetime. I got that right, but
not in the way I expected. Seeing global finance, what I do, as a root
cause in fueling our unsustainable economic system, has shaken many of my
prior beliefs on economics.

. . . it is now time that we transcend to an economics built upon
wisdom. Schumacher's instruction is clear and compelling. "From an
economic view point, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must
study the economics of permanence." This intention takes us in a profoundly
different direction than conventional, Cartesian thinking. "Permanence"
suggests valuing durability over efficiency, stability over speed. These
are different values from those typically celebrated in the marketplace.

We need to think about what adjustments are necessary to "insure" the
permanence of our collective home, which must include a stable civil
society. Such thinking must address the very nature of our economic system.
Without a sustainable and just economic system, there is no permanence. We
need to inject these ideas into the public debate by reframing the cyclical
economic concerns that preoccupy the mainstream media. We see little true
recognition of this profound challenge among our business, financial and
governmental leadership, which remains absorbed with short-term tactical
issues.

Following Schumacher's lead, we should look to the great wisdom traditions
for direction in this truth. Where better to look than to the ideas and
teachings from all cultures that have stood the test of time, rather than
restrict ourselves to contemporary economic theories that we know are
limited and incomplete.

Schumacher is relevant to our critical 21st century challenges precisely for
this reason. His philosophy, his concern about the limits of materialistic
scientism, his distinctions between divergent and convergent problems, and
his ideas of decentralism, appropriate technology, and human scale to name
but a few, are all rooted in the great spiritual and philosophical
teachings. Not surprisingly, his ideas, in addition to being humane and
just, are aligned with nature and nature's sustainable way, the only truly
sustainable system we know. They are, I believe, rooted in truth as best as
Schumacher could discern it, and therefore they represent wisdom, the wisdom
of permanence.

If you examine Schumacher's personal library, which is carefully stewarded
at the
E. F. Schumacher Society in the Berkshires, you will find that most of the
texts are not about economics. Instead, they include the great
philosophical and spiritual texts from all traditions. Schumacher's gift
and genius was to derive economic principles and ideas from these teachings,
to have the courage to speak the truth, despite knowing it often flew in the
face of conventional economic thinking, and to make the truth accessible
with his clear and witty prose. What emerges is certainly not the final
word on the economics of permanence. Some of his thinking is outdated, or
simply missed the mark. But as a foundation to build upon, it is
invaluable. The reason his ideas about economics ring true is because they
are built upon these wisdom traditions. The contradictions of modern
economics are gone.

Our challenge now is to refine and update this thinking and to chart a
practical path of convergence between the reality that exists in our
economic system today and the principles we strive to uphold and upon which
our long run prosperity undoubtedly depends. . . . The opening decades
of 21st century may be our best chance to launch the critical transformation
of our economic system to an economics of permanence. We need to get it
right, as only our collective consciousness will allow.

Transitioning to a sustainable and just economic system is the ultimate
challenge of the 21st century. History no doubt will judge our generation
by how well we acknowledge, embrace and take up this challenge.


The full article will be found at the E. F. Schumacher Society's website:

http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/fullerton_08.html

John Fullerton is a former Managing Director of JPMorgan where he worked for
18 years in New York, London, and Tokyo, and subsequently was CEO of an
energy focused hedge fund. He is now seeking to launch an investment fund
focused on investing in high impact sustainability initiatives, and is
working on The Purpose of Capital, a book about the role of investment
capital in sustainable economics. He is a friend and supporter of the E. F.
Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

John can be reached at john (at)level3cap.com.

... and not a little hubris

FDA Proposes Guidelines for Genetically Engineered Animals

(BioWorld Today Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Washington Roundup

WASHINGTON - The FDA last week proposed new guidelines intended to clarify the agency's regulatory authority over genetically engineered animals and its requirements and recommendations for drugs, devices and food derived from such animals.

Genetic engineering — the process in which recombinant DNA technology is used to introduce new characteristics or traits into organisms - has been widely used in agriculture to make crops resistant to certain pests or herbicides or with improved nutritional qualities, regulators noted.

In medicine, genetic engineering is used to develop microbes that produce drugs and other therapeutic products for use in humans, and in food, the process is used to produce microorganisms that aid in baking, brewing and cheese-making, the FDA said.

Regulators stressed that genetically engineered animals are not clones — genetic copies of the animals from which they are produced.

Many kinds of genetically engineered animals are in development but none have been approved by the FDA for marketing in the U.S.

Such animals can be classified in groups based on their intended use, regulators explained. For example, biopharm animals are those that have undergone genetic engineering to produce particular substances, such as human insulin, for pharmaceutical use. Research animals may be engineered to make them more susceptible to particular diseases, such as cancer.

Food use animals are engineered to provide healthier meat, such as pigs that contain healthy omega-3 fatty acids at levels comparable to those in fish, regulators explained.

The draft guidelines, which are open for public comment until Nov. 18, are not legally binding or enforceable as with regulations, the FDA noted.

Rather, the guidelines provide advice to industry about how best to comply with statutory or regulatory requirements.

The FDA said its existing statutory authorities under the new animal drug provisions of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and current rules are sufficient to regulate genetically engineered animals.

While the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine will be responsible for overseeing biopharm animals, the final pharmaceutical will be reviewed by either the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research or the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the agency said.

Genetically engineered mice in research laboratories are not covered by the FDA's guidance, but instead remain under the National Institutes of Health's guidelines for recombinant DNA research, regulators said.

"Genetically engineered animals hold great promise for improving human medicine, agriculture, the environment and the production of new materials," said Randall Lutter, deputy commissioner for policy at the FDA. The agency, he said, has "long been involved" in the scientific evaluation of such animals.

"Through genetic engineering animals can produce pharmaceutical proteins and replacement tissues in their milk, eggs, and blood, which can be used in the treatment of human diseases such as cancer, heart attacks, hemophilia, rheumatoid arthritis, pandemic flu, malaria and small pox," said Barbara Glenn, the Biotechnology Industry Organization's managing director of animal biotechnology.

In addition, she noted, research also is being conducted to produce transplant organs in pigs that may be a source of organs for humans.

Giuliani to Fight Ranbaxy's Import Ban

After the FDA last week said it was banning imports of drugs made at two plants owned by Indian drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, the firm hired former New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani to help fight its case.

The FDA said Ranbaxy had repeatedly failed to fix problems at two plants in Dewas and Paonta Sahib, India. Therefore, regulators said they issued an alert to U.S. Customs officials to detain 30 generic drugs made at the plants, which include gabapentin, cephalexin and zidovudine, a drug designated under the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program.

Because Ranbaxy is the sole supplier of the antiviral drug ganciclovir, the FDA said it would not "generally" detain shipments into the U.S. of that drug.

Douglas Throckmorton, deputy director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, stressed that the agency had no concerns so far about any drugs from the plants that currently are on U.S. pharmacy shelves and had no evidence that Ranbaxy has shipped defective products.

"This is a preventive action taken to protect the quality of the drugs used each day by millions of Americans by ensuring that the process used to make the drugs adheres to the FDA standards for quality manufacturing," Throckmorton told reporters during a media briefing.

A spokeswoman for the agency told BioWorld Today that U.S. regulators had analyzed about 80 samples of finished drugs from the two Ranbaxy plants and found that "all samples met their applicable specifications."

Regulators said until the firm addresses its manufacturing plant deficiencies, the drugs from the two plants would remain on the import alert and the agency would not approve any of Ranbaxy's other drug applications.

Ranbaxy, meanwhile, has hired New York-based Giuliani Partners LLC at an undisclosed fee. "Ranbaxy is committed to a swift resolution to address these issues and to continuing to supply the global marketplace with safe and effective pharmaceuticals," the firm said in a statement.

The India-based company also is the subject of an investigation by the Justice Department for possible fraud and other improprieties in the firm's applications to sell drugs in the U.S.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Thursday said he was expanding an ongoing investigation into whether the FDA knowingly allowed drugs suspected of being fraudulently approved and manufactured in violation of good manufacturing practices to be sold in the U.S. to include Ranbaxy's PEPFAR drugs. "It is important that the recipients of PEPFAR drugs know the FDA has done everything it should be doing to ensure the safety and effectiveness of these life-saving medications," Dingell said.

PEPFAR drugs are supplied to developing nations to treat HIV/AIDS and are granted expedited reviews by the FDA. However, the drugs cannot be granted approval for marketing in the U.S.



Copyright—2008 Thomson BioWorld, All Rights Reserved.

pending further research, this is interesting

Mills: The Dangerous Myth of Energy Independence

Robin M. Mills writes in an op-ed for IC

A pernicious myth has recently re-emerged: that oil is ‘running out’, that global production will soon peak and enter inexorable decline. What is the proper response to ‘peak oil’ – to attempt energy self-sufficiency, or to take military control of oil producing regions before the Chinese or Russians get there?

The current high energy prices emerge from a long period of low prices and under-investment, itself the fruit of the breakdown of international energy relationships in the oil crises of 1973-4 and 1978-80. Contrary to vocal ‘peak oil’ claims, high prices are not due to a lack of resources in the ground. There remains vast potential around the world for increasing recovery from existing fields, discovering new oil, as recently in deepwater Brazil, or in the largely untouched US offshore, and for ‘unconventional’ sources such as Canada’s famous ‘oil sands’, biofuels, synthetic fuels from natural gas and coal, and others.

Ideas about forestalling an oil crisis by ‘energy independence’, or by military action, are therefore mistaken. Indeed, such ‘solutions’ are likely to create the crisis they seek to mitigate. ‘Energy independence’ for the United States was touted by Nixon in 1974, by Ford in 1975, by Carter in 1977, by Reagan in 1981, by Bush Senior in 1991, by Clinton in 1992 and by Bush Junior in 2003, during which time American oil imports doubled. ‘Peak oil’ ideas, recent high oil prices and fears of Middle East hostilities seem to have made the quest more urgent. Campaigns encourage American consumers to boycott Middle Eastern ‘terrorist oil’, and laws are proposed to sue OPEC. When Arab countries, even staunch US allies, attempt to recycle their oil earnings into the faltering American economy, politicians whip up media storms to keep them out.

Such a climate, with elements of paranoia, racism and Islamophobia, is profoundly harmful to the proper objective of energy policy: not independence, but security. Energy security is achieved when suppliers find markets, and markets find supply, at prices permitting both of them economic stability and growth. This requires a complex web of inter-relationships between producers and consumers. As the oil company Chevron observes in its advertising, ‘There are 193 countries in the world. None of them are energy independent’, a fact well illustrated by the USA’s recent deal to supply nuclear power technology to the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. In a global market, like that for oil, no country can wall itself off - compare the flourishing state of energy-poor Japan or Singapore with the poverty of isolated Burma or North Korea. Attempts by a major nation to achieve energy self-sufficiency are very distorting to economic competitiveness, as is clear from the contradictory blunders of 1970s US energy policy.

It is even worse when bad relations with major energy suppliers, and conflicting messages about future energy policy, discourage much-needed investment. If one side believes they are buying oil from terrorists, and the other thinks they are selling to neo-imperialists, it is not surprising that oil prices are high, investment is lacking and most of world oil reserves are monopolised by state companies. In fact, the Middle Eastern nations have generally been very reliable suppliers, and use of a mythical ‘oil weapon’ is very unlikely – any régime would be reliant on its oil earnings to sustain the economy, while strategic reserves in the industrialised countries give some ‘staying power’ to outlast an embargo. Moreover, while terrorists might manage to penetrate the strong defences of an oil facility and mount a spectacular attack, it is unlikely that they could achieve major, long-running disruptions in global energy supplies.

Policies to encourage US domestic production, increase efficiency and introduce alternative energy sources are desirable, often for environmental rather than energy security reasons, but they have to be pursued with vigour and resolution. With its ‘pork barrel’ subsidies and the interminable, inconclusive debates over whether to open new exploration areas, build new pipelines and terminals for clean natural gas, extend support for renewable energy and increase mileage standards, United States energy policy has been more erratic and hostile to increasing output than most of the Middle Eastern countries. Promises to ‘jawbone’ OPEC into supplying more oil sit very oddly with the US’s uniquely comprehensive moratoria on offshore oil and gas production.

Because of the abundance of oil and other energy sources, an era of ‘resource wars’, predicted by some, is far from inevitable, and certainly not a desirable policy outcome even for the likely ‘winners’ of such wars. We should certainly not fall into the monomaniac trap of seeing every geopolitical conflict as rooted in oil policy. Military ‘control’ of oil is not achievable or cost-effective, as the Iraq war shows, and as we know already from the Japanese experience in World War II, and Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran. The expenditure on such wars vastly exceeds the value of any oil ‘secured’, and while production can struggle along in war-torn areas, it is impossible to develop major new fields. ‘Police actions’ to deal with specific threats are entirely reasonable, as long as they are multi-lateral and proportional to the danger posed. It would be nice, although possibly a lot to ask, for them to be carried out competently.

Thus grandiose military adventures destroy the co-operation which is essential for global energy trade. ‘Energy independence’ is a chimera, expensive, unachievable, and swimming against the tide of greater global economic integration. The world is not running out of oil, but we need a rational and balanced dialogue about how to co-operate on bringing that abundant energy to consumers. If the profound misunderstanding of, and hostility towards, the Middle East, continues, the house of energy security is being built on sand.

Robin M. Mills, author of ‘The Myth of the Oil Crisis’ (Praeger, 2008)




ROBIN M. MILLS is an oil industry professional with a background in both geology and economics. Currently, he is Senior Evaluation Manager for Dubai Energy. Previously, he worked for Shell. Mills is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics and Association of International Petroleum Negotiators. He holds a Master's Degree in Geological Sciences from Cambridge University

Originally posted By Juan Cole to Informed Comment at 2/9/2008 12:16:00 AM.

Harry hits Harvard... quite hard, too...

J. K. Rowling's commencement speech to the graduates, this year, at Harvard University... What a marvel!

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

Childish superstition: Einstein's letter makes view of religion relatively clear

Scientist's reply to sell for up to £8,000, and stoke debate over his beliefs

• The Guardian, Tuesday May 13 2008

Albert Einstein, pictured in 1953. Photograph: Ruth Orkin/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.

A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.

Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".

Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

The letter will go on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair on Thursday and is expected to fetch up to £8,000. The handwritten piece, in German, is not listed in the source material of the most authoritative academic text on the subject, Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion.

One of the country's leading experts on the scientist, John Brooke of Oxford University, admitted he had not heard of it.

Einstein is best known for his theories of relativity and for the famous E=mc2 equation that describes the equivalence of mass and energy, but his thoughts on religion have long attracted conjecture.

His parents were not religious but he attended a Catholic primary school and at the same time received private tuition in Judaism. This prompted what he later called, his "religious paradise of youth", during which he observed religious rules such as not eating pork. This did not last long though and by 12 he was questioning the truth of many biblical stories.

"The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression," he later wrote.

In his later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory.

His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.

"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

“My wish is a change of consciousness in every human being as a pre-condition for a better world.”

Albert Hofmann

Hunger. Strikes. Riots. The food crisis bites

by Robin McKie and Heather Stewart
-- guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008

It is the constant sensation of hunger that makes Kamla Devi so angry. She argues with shopkeepers in New Delhi over prices and quarrels with her husband, a casual labourer, over his wages -- about 50 rupees a day.

"When I go to the market and see how little I can get for my money, it makes me want to hit the shopkeepers and thrash the government," she says

A few months ago, Kamla (42) decided she and her husband could no longer afford to eat twice a day. The couple, who have already sent their two teenage sons to live with more prosperous relatives, now exist on only one daily meal. At midday Kamla cooks a dozen roti (a round, flat Indian bread) with some vegetables fried with onions and spices. If there are some left, they will eat them at night. The only other sustenance that the couple have are occasional cups of sugared tea.

"My husband and I would argue every night. In the end he told me it wouldn't make his wages grow larger. Instead we went down to one meal a day to cut costs."

It is a grim, unsettling story. Yet it is certainly not an exceptional one. Across the world, a food crisis is now unfolding with frightening speed. Hundreds of millions of men and women who, only a few months ago, were able to provide food for their families have found rocketing prices of wheat, rice and cooking oil have left them facing the imminent prospect of starvation. The spectre of catastrophe now looms over much of the planet.

In less than a year, the price of wheat has risen by 130%, soya by 87% and rice by 74%. According to the United Nations's Food and Agriculture Organisation, there are only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks in the world, while grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s.

Edge of catastrophe

For the Devi family, and hundreds of millions of others like them, the impact has been calamitous, as Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, warned at this weekend's Group of Seven (G7) meeting in Washington. Brandishing a bag of rice, he told startled delegates from the world's richest nations that the world was now perched at the edge of catastrophe.

"This is not just about meals forgone today, or about increasing social unrest; it is about lost learning potential for children and adults in the future, stunted intellectual and physical growth," he said. Without urgent action to resolve the crisis, he added, the fight against poverty could be set back by seven years.

Not surprisingly, these swiftly rising prices have unleashed serious political unrest in many places. In Dhaka on Saturday, 10 000 Bangladeshi textile workers clashed with police. Dozens were injured, including 20 police officers, in a protest triggered by food costs that was eventually quelled by baton charges and tear gas. In Haiti, demonstrators recently tried to storm the presidential palace after prices of staple foods leaped by 50%.

In Egypt, Indonesia, Côte d'Ivoire, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal and Cameroon there have been demonstrations, sometimes involving fatalities, as starving, desperate people have taken to the streets. And in Vietnam the new crime of rice rustling -- in which crops are stripped at night from fields by raiders -- has led to the banning of all harvesting machines from roads after sunset and to farmers, armed with shotguns, camping around their fields 24 hours a day.

But what are the factors that led to this global unrest? What has triggered the price rises that have put the world's basic foodstuffs out of reach for a rising fraction of its population? And what measures must be taken by politicians, world leaders and monetary chiefs to rectify the crisis?

Not surprisingly, the first two of these questions tend to be the easier ones to answer. Economists and financiers point to a number of factors that have combined to create the current crisis, a perfect storm in which several apparently unconnected events come together with disastrous effects.

Biofuels
One key issue highlighted at the G7 meeting was the decision by the United States government, made several years ago, to give domestic subsidies to its farmers so that they could grow corn that can then be fermented and distilled into ethanol, a biofuel that can be mixed with petrol. This policy helps limit US dependence on oil imports and gives support to the nation's farmers.

However, by taking over land -- about eight million hectares so far in the US -- that would otherwise have been used to grow wheat and other food crops, US food production has dropped dramatically. Prices of wheat, soya and other crops have been pushed up significantly as a result.

Other nations, including Argentina, Canada and some European countries, have adopted similar, but more restrained, biofuel policies. But without mentioning any countries by name, Zoellick clearly pointed the finger of blame at the US.

Everyone should "look closely at the effects of the dash for biofuels", he said. "I would hope that countries that, for whatever reason, energy security and others, have emphasised biofuel development will be particularly sensitive to the call to meet the emergency needs for people who may not have enough food to eat."

This point has also been stressed recently by the British government's chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington. "It is very hard to imagine how we can see the world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous demand for food," he said. "The supply of food really isn't keeping up."

For his part, Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary -- asked on Friday about the impact of US energy policies on food prices -- tried to bat away the question. "This is a complex area, with a number of causes," he told reporters. The first priority, he added, was to get food supplies to people who need them, before considering the longer-term reasons for the rising prices.

Action needed

It was not a point shared by the chief of staff in the UN trade and development division, Taffere Tesfachew, who flew to London last week ahead of a vital meeting of the leaders of the world's poorest nations in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Instead of an agenda designed to achieve economic progress in the developing world, the meeting will instead focus on the pressing issue of food.

Tesfachew said that decades of aid have been skewed to ambitious industrialisation programmes and that the World Bank and others have failed to invest in the agricultural sector. "We believe these high food prices won't disappear in the next two years, so now is the time to redress imbalances in terms of ethanol subsidies," he said.

Zoellick was also clear that action was now urgently needed. "In the US and Europe over the last year we have been focusing on the prices of gasoline at the pumps. While many worry about filling their tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it's getting more and more difficult every day," added Zoellick, who made an impassioned plea to the world's rich nations to provide emergency help, including $500-million in extra funding to the UN World Food Programme.

This call was backed by finance ministers from the G24, who represent the leading developing countries, who also demanded extra cash to help cushion the poor against the shock of rising food prices. As well as causing hunger and malnutrition, the rising cost of basic foodstuffs risks blowing a hole in the budgets of food-importing countries, many of them in Africa, they argued.

Climate change

Regarding the other factors that have combined to trigger the current food crisis, experts also point to the connected issue of climate change. As the levels of carbon dioxide rise in the atmosphere, meteorologists have warned that weather patterns are becoming increasingly disturbed, causing devastation in many areas. For several consecutive years, Australia -- once a prime grower of wheat -- has found its production ruined by drought, for example. Scarcity, particularly on Asia's grain markets, has then driven up prices even further.

Some campaigners see climate change as the most pressing challenge facing the world, while others now say that biofuels -- grown to offset fossil-fuel use -- is taking food out of the mouths of some of the world's poorest people. The net result will be eco-warriors battling with poverty campaigners for the moral high ground.

On top of these issues, there is the growing wealth of China and its one billion inhabitants. Once the possessor of a relatively poor rural economy, China has becoming increasingly industrialised and its middle classes have swelled in numbers.

One effect has been to trigger a doubling in meat consumption, particularly pork. As the country's farmers have sought to feed more and more pigs, more and more grain has been bought by them. However, China has only 7% of the world's arable land and that figure is shrinking as farmland has been ravaged by pollution and water shortages.

The net result has been to decrease domestic supplies of grain just as demand for it has started to boom. Again the impact has struck worst in the developing world, with wheat and other grain prices soaring.

And finally there is the issue of vegetable oils. Soya and palm oils are a major source of calories in Asia, but flooding in Malaysia and a drought in Indonesia have limited supplies.

In addition, these oils are now being sought as bio-diesel, which is used as a direct substitute for diesel in many countries, including Australia. The impact has been all too familiar: an alarming drop in supplies for the people of the developing world as prices of this basic commodity have soared.

One such victim is Kamla Devi. She has already had to abandon dhal, a central, protein-rich dish of lentils that was a key part of her family's diet for several months. Now the cooking of fried food -- in particular, pooris, hot, puffed, oil-soaked bread -- has had to follow suit for the simple reason that cooking oil has become unaffordable.

"It has affected my health," she says. "The rich are becoming richer. They go to shopping malls and they don't need to worry. The problem with prices only matters for the poor people like me."

Additional reporting by Amelia Gentleman and Nick Mathiasson

Four key factors behind the spreading fear of starvation across the globe

Growing consumption

Six months ago, Zhou Jian closed down his car-parts business and launched himself as a pork butcher. Since then the 26-year-old businessman's Shanghai shop has been crowded out -- despite a 58% rise in the price of pork in the past year -- and his income has trebled.

As China's emerging middle classes become richer, their consumption of meat has increased by more than 150% per head since 1980. In those days, meat was scarce, rationed at about 1kg per person per month and used sparingly in rice and noodle dishes, stir fried to preserve cooking oil.

Today, the average Chinese consumer eats more than 50kg of meat a year. To feed the millions of pigs on its farms, China is now importing grain on a huge scale, pushing up its prices worldwide.

Palm oil crisis

The oil palm tree is the most highly efficient producer of vegetable oil, with less than half a hectare yielding as much oil as about three hectares of soybeans. Unfortunately, it takes eight years to grow to maturity and demand has outstripped supply. Vegetable oils provide an important source of calories in the developing world, and their shortage has contributed to the food crisis.

A drought in Indonesia and flooding in Malaysia has also hit the crop. While farmers and plantation companies hurriedly clear land to replant, it will take time before their efforts bear fruit. Palm-oil prices jumped by nearly 70% last year, hitting the poorest families. When a store in Chongqing in China announced a cooking-oil promotion in November, a stampede left three dead and 31 injured.

Biofuel demand

The rising demand for ethanol, a biofuel that is mixed with petrol to bring down prices at the pump, has transformed the landscape of Iowa. Today this heartland of the Midwest is America's corn belt, with the corn crop stretching as far as the eye can see.

Iowa produces almost half of the entire output of ethanol in the US, with 21 ethanol-producing plants as farmers tear down fences, dig out old soya bean crops, buy up land and plant yet more corn. It has been likened to a new gold rush.

But none of it is for food. And as the demand for ethanol increases, yet more farmers will pile in for the great scramble to plant corn -- instead of grain. The effect will be to further worsen world grain shortages.

Global warming

The massive grain storage complex outside Tottenham, New South Wales, today lies virtually empty. Normally, it would be half-full. As the second-largest exporter of grain after the US, Australia usually expects to harvest about 25-million tonnes a year. But, because of a five-year drought, thought to have been caused by climate change, it managed just 9,8-million tonnes in 2006.

Farmers such as George Grieg, who has farmed here for 50 years, have rarely known it to be so bad. Many have not even recovered the cost of planting and caring for their crops, and are being forced into debt. With global wheat prices at an all-time high, all they can do is cling on in the hope of a bumper crop next time -- if they are lucky.

Food in figures

37-million: Hectares of corn planted by US farmers last year, up 19% on 2006.

76%: Amount of US corn used for animal feed.

8kg: Amount of grain it takes to produce 1kg of beef.

20%: Portion of US corn used to produce 19-billion litres of ethanol in 2006/07.

50kg: Quantity of meat consumed annually by the average Chinese person, up from 20kg in 1985.

10%: Anticipated share of biofuels used for transport in the European Union by 2020.

$500-million: The UN World Food Programme's shortfall this year, in attempting to feed 89-million needy people.

9,2-billion: The world's predicted population by 2050. It's 6,6-billion now.

130%: The rise in the cost of wheat in 12 months.

16 times: The overall food consumption of the world's richest 20% compared with that of the poorest 20%.

58%: Jump in the price of pork in China in the past year.

$900: The cost of one tonne of Thai premier rice, up 30% in a month.

Compiled by Caroline Davies

WRITERS AND THE WAR

Because I think it's fundamental, this is reprinted here (without permission) from Resurgence N°239 , 2006. Sorry, Gary!

Above all, we need human beings who love the world.

I GREW UP in the maritime Pacific Northwest, on a farm north of Seattle where we kept a hen flock, had a small orchard, and tended dairy cows. My uncles were loggers, merchant seamen or fishermen.

After college, where I studied anthropology, literature and East Asian culture, I had no choice but to go back to working in the woods and at sea. In the late fifties I spent nine months working in the engine room on an American-flag oil tanker that hired me out of the port of Yokohama. I was a member of the National Maritime Union and had my seaman’s papers, and it wasn’t hard to pick up a job in almost any port of the world. That ship kept me at sea for a continuous nine months. Two things touched me deeply on that job: one was the stars, night after night, at every latitude, including way below the equator. With my little star book and red-beam flashlight I mastered the constellations of the southern hemisphere. The other was getting to know the birds of the ocean. I loved watching the albatross – a few of those huge graceful birds would always be cruising along behind our ship, trailing the wake for bits of food. I learned that a wandering albatross (of the southern hemisphere) might fly a million miles in one lifetime, and that it takes a pair of them almost a year to raise one chick. Night and day, they always followed us, and if they ever slept it seems it was on the wing.

In January 2005, a study was released describing the sudden decline of albatross numbers worldwide. It even prompted an editorial in the New York Times. Their sharp decline is attributed to much death by drowning. The long-line fishing boats lay out lines with bait and hooks that go miles back, dragging just below the surface. An albatross will go for the bait, get hooked and be pulled down to drown. As many as 100,000 a year are estimated to perish in this way, enough to threaten the survival of the species if it keeps up. What have the albatross, “distinguished strangers who have come down to us from another world”, ever done to us? The editorial concludes, “The long-line fishing fleet is over-harvesting the air as well as the sea.”

Out on the South Pacific in 1958, watching the soaring albatrosses from the stern of a ship, I could never have guessed that their lives would be threatened by industrial societies, turning them into ‘collateral damage’ of the affluent appetite for ahi, maguro – tuna species (my own taste too) – yet this is just a tiny, almost insignificant example of the long reach of the globalised economy and the consumer society into the wild Earth’s remote places. A recent book on global logging and deforestation is titled Strangely Like War. What is happening now to nature worldwide, plant life and wildlife, ocean, grassland, forest, savannah, desert – all spaces and habitat – the non-human realm of watersheds and ecosystems with all their members, can be likened to a war against nature.

Although human beings have interacted with nature – both cultivated and wild – for millennia, and sometimes destructively so, it was never quite like war. It has now become disconcertingly so, and the active defence of nature has been joined by a few artists and writers who have entered the fight on ‘the wild side’ along with subsistence peoples, indigenous spiritual leaders, many courageous scientists, and conservationists and environmentalists worldwide.

THERE IS A tame and also a wild side to the human mind. The tame side, like a farmer’s field, has been disciplined and cultivated to produce a desired yield. It is useful, but limited. The wild side is larger, deeper, more complex, and though it cannot be fully known, it can be explored. The explorers of the wild mind are often writers and artists. The “poetic imagination” of which William Blake so eloquently spoke is the territory of wild mind. It has landscapes and creatures within it that will surprise us; it can refresh us and scare us. It reflects the larger truth of our ancient selves, both animal and spiritual.

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said something like “Art survives within modern civilisation rather like little islands of wilderness saved to show us where we came from.” Someone else said that what makes writing good is the wildness in it. The wildness gives heart, courage, love, spirit, danger, compassion, skill, fierceness and sweetness – all at once – to language. From ancient times, storytellers, poets and dramatists have presented the world in all its fullness: plants, animals, men and women, changing shape, speaking multiple languages, inter-marrying, travelling to the sky and under the Earth. The great myths and folktales of human magic and nature’s power were our school for ten thousand years. Whether they know it or not, even modern writers draw strength from the wild side.

How can artists and writers manage to join in the defence of the planet and wild nature? Writers and artists by their very work ‘bear witness’. They don’t wield financial, governmental or military power. However, at the outset they were given, as in fairy tales, two ‘magic gifts’: one is the ‘Mirror of Truth’. Whatever they hold this mirror up to is shown in its actual form, and the truth must come out. May we use that mirror well! The second is a ‘Heart of Compassion’ , which is to say the ability to feel and know the pains and delights of other people, and to weave that feeling into their art. For some this compassion can extend to all creatures and to the world itself. In a way nature even borrows the voices of some writers and artists. Anciently this was a shamanistic role where the singer, dancer or storyteller embodied a force, appearing as a bear dancer or a crane dancer, and became one with a spirit or creature. Today, such a role is played by the writer who finds her- or himself a spokesperson for non-human entities, communicating to the human realm through dance or song. This could be called ‘speaking on behalf of nature’ in the old way.

Song, story and dance are fundamental to all later ‘civilised’ literature. In archaic times these were unified in dramatic performance, back when drama and religious ceremony were still one. They are reunited today in the highest and greatest of performance arts – the grand scale of European opera, the height of ballet, the spare and disciplined elegance of Japanese Noh theatre, the grand and almost timeless dance and story of Indonesian gamelan, the wit and hardiness of Bertolt Brecht’s plays, or the fierce and stunningly beautiful intensity of Korean p’ansori performance. Performance is of key importance because this phenomenal world and all life is of itself “not a book, but a performance”. I will say more about performance a little farther on.

FOR A WRITER or an artist to become an advocate for nature, he or she must first stumble into some connection to that vast world of energies and ecologies. Because I was brought up in a remote rural district, instead of having other children to play with I had to entertain myself by exploring the forest surrounding our farm, observing the dozens of bird species and occasional deer, fox or bobcat; sometimes hunting, sometimes gathering plants that I could sell to herb-buyers for a few pennies, and camping out alone for several days at a time. Heavy logging was going on in the nearby hills. Even as a boy I was deeply troubled by the destruction of the forests and the careless way that hunting – of both waterfowl and deer – was conducted.

At fifteen I got into the higher mountains of the Cascade range in Washington State, starting with the ridges and high meadows around the snow-covered volcano called Mount St. Helens, or Luwit, a 3,000-metre peak just north of the Columbia river. Here is what I discovered back then, and finally chose to write about in my recent book Danger on Peaks.

Climbing the Mountain

Reaching the summit, I thought – west coast snowpeaks are too much! They are too far above the surrounding lands, there is a break between, they are in a different world. If you want to get a view of the world you live in, climb a little rocky mountain with a neat small peak. The big snowpeaks pierce the realm of clouds and cranes, rest in the zone of five-coloured banners and writhing crackling dragons in veils of ragged mist and frost-crystals, of pure transparency in blue.

Mount St. Helens’ summit is smooth and broad, a place to nap, to sit and write, watch what’s higher in the sky, or do a little dance. Whatever the numbers say, snowpeaks are always far higher than the highest airplanes ever get. I made my petition to the perfect shapely mountain, “Please help this life.” When I tried to look over and down to the world below, there was nothing there.

And then we grouped up to descend. The afternoon snow was perfect for glissade, and leaning on our stocks we slid and skid between cracks and thumps into soft snow, dodged lava slabs, got into the open snowfield slopes and almost flew to the soft pumice slopes below. Coming down is so fast – still high we walked the three-mile dirt road back to the lake.

Atomic Dawn

The day I first climbed Mount St. Helens was August 13, 1945. Spirit Lake was far from the cities of the valley, and news came slow. Though the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, and the second dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th, photographs didn’t appear in the Portland Oregonian until August 12. Those papers must have been driven in to Spirit Lake on the 13th. Early in the morning of the 14th I walked over to the lodge to check the bulletin board. There were whole pages of the paper pinned up: photos of a blasted city from the air, the estimate of 150,000 dead in Hiroshima alone, the American scientist quoted saying “nothing will grow there again for seventy years.” The morning sun on my shoulders, the fir forest smell and the big tree shadows; my feet in thin moccasins feeling the ground, and my heart still one with the snowpeak mountain at my back. Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself something like “By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mount St. Helens, I swear I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.”

The statement in that 1945 newspaper saying that nature would be blighted for decades to come outraged me almost as much as the destruction of innocent human life. I was already a youthful conservationist/environmentalist, and after that I went on to be active in the anti-war movement as a student, and struggled against the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons. At the time it seemed as though these efforts were naive and hopeless, but we persevered.

During my university years I was studying the philosophies and religions of the world. I learned that the most important single ethical teaching of the Buddhist tradition is Ahimsa, nonviolence towards all of nature. This seemed absolutely right to me. In the Abrahamic religions, “Thou shalt not kill” applies only to human beings. In socialist thought as well, human beings are all-important, and with the ‘labour theory of value’ it is as though organic nature contributes nothing of worth – later it came to me: “Green plants doing photosynthesis are the ultimate working class.” Nature creates the first level of value, labour the second.
Then I read translations of Buddhist texts from India and China. The Dao De Jing and the Zhuang-zi texts helped broaden my view. I read the Lún y? – the Confucian Analects – and saw how the Master called for ‘etiquette’ in regard to nature, as well as human society. These studies brought me to the thought that almost all of later ‘high civilisation’ has been a type of social organisation that alienates humans from their own biological and spiritual heritage.

While I was labouring in the forests most of my fellow loggers were Native Americans of the Wasco and Wishram tribes of Eastern Oregon. From them I learned that it was possible to be a hunter and a fisherman with a deep spiritual attitude of gratitude and nonviolence.

EVENTUALLY I RE-ENTERED college as a graduate student in East Asian Languages at the University of California at Berkeley, and finally got a chance to go to East Asia. I lived for a while in a Zen Practice Hall in Kyoto, Japan and studied with a Zen teacher in the Rinzai (Chinese Linji) tradition. I took the precepts under my teacher, who told me, “Of all the precepts, the First Precept is most important and contains the others: Ahimsa, Non-harming, Cause the Least Possible Harm.” To live with that precept is a challenge – he once said to me, “How do you not harm a fence? How would you save a ghost?”

I lived in Japan for ten years, partly in the monastery but also in my own little house, and supported myself by teaching English conversation to Japanese company people. I asked my adult students, “Why are you so intent on learning English?” They answered, “Because we intend to extend our economic influence worldwide, and English is the international language.” I didn’t take them seriously. Today that company, Matsushita Electric, is worldwide.

In my spare time I hiked in the local mountains, studied East Asian plants and birds, and started seriously reading scientific books on ecology and biology. All those essays analysing food chains and food webs – this was a science, I realised, dealing with energy-exchange and the natural hierarchies of various living systems. “When energy passes through a system it tends to organise that system,” someone wrote. It finally came to me that this was about eating each other – almost as a sacrament. I wrote my first truly ecological poem, which explores the essential qualities of human foods:

The Song of the Taste

Eating the living germs of grasses
Eating the ova of large birds
the fleshy sweetness packed around
the sperm of swaying trees

The muscles of the flanks and thighs of soft-voiced cows
the bounce in the lamb’s leap
the swish in the ox’s tail

Eating roots grown swoll inside the soil.

Drawing on life of living
clustered points of light spun out of space
hidden in the grape.

Eating each other’s seed.eating
ah, each other.

Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread: lip to lip.

This innocently celebratory poem went straight to the question of conflict between the ethics of ahimsa and the necessary lives of indigenous peoples and Native Americans I had known. They still practise ceremonies of gratitude, and are careful not to present themselves as superior to other life forms. Ahimsa taken too literally leaves out the life of the world, and makes the rabbit virtuous but the hawk somehow evil… People who must fish and hunt to live can enter into the process with gratitude and care, and no arrogant assumptions of human privilege. This cannot come from ‘thinking about’ nature; it must come from a being within nature.

There are plenty of people of influence and authority in the churches, in industry, the universities, and high in government who still like to describe nature as “red in tooth and claw” (a line of Alfred Tennyson’s) – a fundamental misunderstanding – and use it as part of the justification for the war against nature.

I WOULD NOW like to propose some simple definitions. The English word ‘nature’ is from Latin natura, ‘birth, constitution, character, course of things’ – ultimately from nasci, ‘to be born’. It connects with the root nat which is connected with birth, so we have ‘nation’, ‘natal’, and ‘native’. The Chinese word for ‘nature’ is zi-ran, meaning ‘self-thus’. Although in common English and American usage ‘nature’ is sometimes used to mean ‘the outdoors’ and set in opposition to the realm of development, the word ‘nature’ is best used in its specific scientific sense, referring to the physical universe and its rules, the ‘laws of nature’. In this use it is equivalent to the Greek physis. In other words, ‘nature’ means ‘everything’. The agricultural, the urban, the wild mountains and forests and the many stars in the sky are all equally phenomena. ‘Nature’ is our reality.

Cities and agricultural lands however are not wild. ‘Wild’ is a valuable word. It is a term for the free and independent process of nature. A wilderness is a place where wild process dominates and human impact is minimal. Wilderness need not be a place that was never touched by humans, but simply a place where wild process has ruled for some decades.

The wild is self-creating, self-maintaining, self-propagating, self-reliant, self-actualising, and it has no ‘self’. It is perhaps the same as what East Asian philosophers call the Dao. The human mind, imagination, and even natural human language can also thus be called wild. The human body itself with its circulation, respiration and digestion is wild. In these senses ‘wild’ is a word for the intrinsic, non-theistic, forever-changing natural order.

‘Ecology’, another key word, has Greek oikos as its main root, with the simple meaning of ‘household’. It referred originally to the study of biological interrelationships and the flow of energy through organisms and inorganic matter. In recent years it has become a synonym for ‘outdoor nature’ in popular usage. I prefer to use it closer to the original meaning, with an emphasis on the dynamics of relationship in wild natural process. (I presented these definitions more fully in my 1990 book The Practice of the Wild.)

The field of ecological study embraces questions of population rise and fall, plant and animal succession, predator-prey relationships, competition and co-operation, feeding levels, and the flow of energy through ecosystems – and this is just the beginning. I have learned a great deal in my work on the forest issues of western North America over the last few years from people in the field of forest ecology (sometimes with the help of my older son, Kai Snyder, who is in this field). I have come to better understand the dynamism of natural systems, the continuous role of disturbance and the unremitting effects of climatic fluctuations. The ‘human ecology’ aspect of the ecological sciences helps us understand the role that human beings have played as members of wild nature, and how the interconnectedness of the entire planet requires that we take care of this place that we live in, and which lives in us. It tells us what ‘sustainable’ means, and that modern humans must again become members of the organic world.

The organic life of the planet has maintained itself, constantly changing, and has gone through and recovered from several enormous catastrophic events over hundreds of millions of years. Now we are realising that the human impact on air, water, wildlife, soil and plant life is so extreme that there are species becoming extinct, water dangerous to even touch, mountains with mudslides but no trees, and soil that won’t grow food without the continuous subsidy provided by petroleum. As we learned over time to positively work for peace to head off the possibilities of war, so now we must work for sustainable biological practices and a faith that includes wild nature, if we are to reverse the prospect of continuously dwindling resources and rising human populations.

One can ask what it might take to have an agriculture that does not degrade the soils, a fishery that does not deplete the ocean, a forestry that keeps watersheds and ecosystems intact, population policies that respect human sexuality and personality while holding numbers down, and energy policies that do not set off fierce little wars. These are the key questions.

Many of our leaders assume that the track we’re on will go forever and nobody will learn much; politics as usual. It’s the same old engineering, business and bureaucracy message with its lank rhetoric of data and management. Or, when the talk turns to ‘sustainability’ the focus is on a limited ecological-engineering model that might guarantee a specific resource (such as grass, water, or trees) for a while longer but lacks the vision to imagine the health of the whole planet. The ethical position that would accord intrinsic value to non-human nature, and would see human beings as involved in moral as well as practical choices in regard to the natural world makes all the difference.

“AS … A DEWDROP, a bubble, a cloud, a flash of lightning, view all created things.” Thus ends the Diamond Sutra, reminding us of irreducible impermanence. Sustainability cannot mean some kind of permanence. A waggish commentary says, “Sustainability is a physical impossibility. But it is a very nice sentiment.” The quest for permanence has always led us astray – whether building stone castles, Great Walls, Pyramids for the Kings, great navies, giant cathedrals to ease us toward heaven, or cold-war-scale weapons systems guaranteeing ‘mutually assured destruction’. We must live with change, like a bird on the wing, and, doing so, let all the other beings live on, too. Not permanence, but ‘living in harmony with the Way’.

The albatrosses, all sixteen species of them, are companions with us on Earth, sailing on their own way, of no use to us humans, and we should be no use to them. They can be friends at a distance, fellow creatures in the stream of evolution. This is fundamental etiquette. Legislation from the governments regarding fisheries in the sea or deforestation in the mountains would help enormously.

So, back to those key questions: what would it take? We know that science and the arts can be allies. We need far more women in politics. We need a religious view that embraces nature and does not fear science; business leaders who know and accept ecological and spiritual limits; political leaders who have spent time working in schools, factories or farms and who still write poems. We need intellectual and academic leaders who have studied both history and ecology and like to dance and cook. We need poets and novelists who pay no attention to literary critics. But what we ultimately need most is human beings who love the world.

ONE TIME IN Alaska a young Koyukon Indian college student asked me, “If we humans have made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?” I thought it an excellent question, directly on the point of etiquette and propriety, and putting it from the animals’ side. I told her, “The Ainu say that the deer, salmon and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. We do ceremonies and rituals. Performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy. The ‘deep world’ is of course the thousand-million-year old world of rock, soil, water, air and all living beings, all acting through their roles. ‘Currency’ is what you pay your debt with. We all receive, every day, the gifts of the Deep World, from the air we breathe to the food we eat. How do we repay that gift? Performance. A song for your supper.”

I went on to tell her that I felt that non-human nature is basically well-inclined toward humanity and only wishes modern people were more reciprocal, not so bloody. The animals are drawn to us, they see us as good musicians, and they think we have cute ears. The human contribution to the planetary ecology might be our entertaining eccentricity, our skills as musicians and performers, our awe-inspiring dignity as ritualists and solemn ceremonialists – because that is what seems to delight the watching wild world.

Gift economy: what’s that? That might be another perspective on the meaning of ecology. We are living, so to speak, in the midst of a great potluck feast to which we are all the invited guests, and we also are eventually the meal. The Ainu of Hokkaido, when they had venison for dinner, sang songs aloud to the deer spirits who were hanging about waiting for the performance. The deer visit human beings so that they may hear some songs. In Buddhist spiritual ecology, the first thing to give up is your ego. The ancient Vedic philosophers said that the gods like sacrifices, but of all sacrifices that which they most appreciate is your ego. This critical little point is the foundation of yogic and Buddhist practice. Zen philosopher Dogen famously said, “We study the self to forget the self. When you forget the self you become one with the ten thousand things.” (There is only one offering that is greater than the ego, and that is ‘enlightenment’ itself.)

The being who is willing to give away her or his enlightenment is called a Bodhisattva. In some of the Polynesian societies the Big Person, the most respected and powerful figure in the village, was the one who had nothing – whatever gift came to him or her was promptly given away again. This is the real heart of a gift economy, the economy that would save, not devour, the world. (Gandhi once said, “For greed, all of nature is insufficient.”) Art takes nothing from the world: it is a gift and an exchange. It leaves the world nourished.

Poems, novels, plays, with their great deep minds of story, awaken the Heart of Compassion. And so they confound the economic markets, rattle the empires, and open us up to the actually existing human and non-human world. Performance is art in motion; in the moment; both enactment and embodiment. This is exactly what nature herself is.

Soaring just over the sea-foam
riding the wind of the endless waves
albatross, out there, way
away, a far cry
down from the sky

Gary Snyder is an American poet, writer, and environmental activist. His most recent book of poems is Danger on Peaks.