Rust Belt Abandonment, Explored

I grew up in Cleveland, and the city will always remain close to my heart.  In the last century alone, the city went from a population of almost a million in 1950 (and considered a must-see tourist destination by European elites!) to under 400,000 in 2010, as the population migrated to the suburbs – or leaving the region entirely without anyone to coming in to take their place.  The old industrial Midwest, also known as the Rust Belt, has been in trouble for some time.

Touring (or perhaps, more accurately, trespassing) into modern day ruins has become a popular pastime, even among  people I know, and the photography of such places has become an art form of its own.

A few days ago I came across this article in the blogosphere, and it definitely struck a chord.  http://rustwire.com/2011/12/27/things-are-broke-can-ruin-porn-help/

I shared it with my friend R. who wrote this response.  I think he put it more eloquently than I would have ever thought to:

Thanks for sharing this article.

While it is a blow to the American way of life, with its principle of ever-expansion, this was inevitable. It is the way of the world in general, for countries, as well as their cities, to rise and to fall. Change is the only constant that can be counted upon.

Cities & countries live and die by the people who live there. Ruins such as those featured in the article are modern-day places which require little/no excavation, and tell of a place’s past.

Despite having 21st century technology, we are not immune to having places that are broken & abandoned due to money issues, social issues, or political issues. People will always be people, whether in the now or in the ancient times. “There is nothing new under the sun.”

To dig into my personal beliefs for a moment, I believe that this brokenness is a picture of man’s sin nature, and that the currently-prosperous parts of cities are a picture of the best that man can do without God’s offering of salvation. The thing is, even these prosperous parts of the city can and likely will one day fall into ruin. Through salvation in Jesus, I believe that God will bring us into heaven, where sin has not tainted things, and because of that, things will remain new, as God has said, “Behold, I make all things new.” (That statement itself is in the present-progressive form, meaning that it is continually happening in the present.) This may not be what everyone sees when they look at ruins, but it is one thing I see.

I like ruins, because it reminds me of our human-ness. It lets me know that we are neither immune nor exempt from change, and that whether or not we wish for it, change is inevitable. I also like ruins because it shows that “stuff” can never be as important as people. Stuff will break, get lost, stolen, or the like, and it can be replaced. People, on the other hand, are susceptible to the same, but cannot be replaced.

In the end, people are the only thing that really matters.

No matter what you believe, the impermanence of our own lives and even of the work of our hands that outlive us really do make us think, “Is this it?  It can’t possibly be that way.”

The fortunes of cities around have risen and fallen – Rome went from caput mundi during the empire to a broken-down, overgrown town in Michelangelo’s day, and back to a modern bustling metropolis since Mussolini, although its global position has since been overshadowed by the likes of London, New York, and Tokyo.

But this narrative is unfamiliar with Americans, who have only seen expansion and growth.  America has also been different in that instead of sticking to cities, people have moved into the suburbs thinking that it will insulated them from the decay of the cities.  However, I don’t think that’s the answer.  I mean, certainly, if you feel a calling to go somewhere new, by all means, do so.  But if we have problems in our own backyard, we need to face them, not run away.  Continuing to do so like we have in the last half-century has only made us a nation of broke nomads.

On Revolution

“Revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror.” – Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966)

In some ways I do believe in this, but when we get to discussing Libya I can tell you that the issue is not so clear cut.  There is a famous misquote of Malcolm X where he states that no revolution has ever been bloodless.  But if you listen to the entirety of his 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” you’ll hear that he continues to say that history has evolved to the point where revolution CAN be bloodless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO9UF3q6Fhg

America today is at a time or in a day or at an hour where she is the first country on this earth that can actually have a bloodless revolution. . . . And the only way without bloodshed that this can be brought about is that the black man has to be given full use of the ballot in every one of the 50 states. – Malcolm X

And so the unrest from the Civil Rights Movement was channeled into policy instead of full revolution. Fast-forward 25 years later to Eastern Europe and you see the Revolutions of 1989 unfold.  A bloodless coups after bloodless coups brought down an authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and ushered in new governments and a new age of democracy.

The only reported death during Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, that of one Martin Smid, was later found out to have been made up.  Ceaușescu’s Romania was the only country to undergo violent revolution, but even that was an astoundingly rapid and accomplished in just the week before Christmas of that year.

Of course, things could have ended up differently.  Why the fall of the Soviet Bloc was largely so peaceful had a lot to do with Gorbachev’s unwillingness to use military force.  Had the tanks been called in, the revolutions could have ended the way Prague Spring in 1968 or Beijing Spring in 1989 did.

The Arab Spring of 2011 has toppled three authoritarian governments as of October 2011.  True, blood has been shed in these revolutions.  However, in Tunisia and Egypt, these revolutions were brought about by peaceful protesters, not by armies.  Libya is a different story.  Eight months of civil war finally ended the brutal rule of Muammar al-Qaddafi.  However, eight months is a long struggle considering that the Romanian Revolution lasted only 9 days.

Considering the Heinlein quote, then, are prolonged, bloody revolutions necessarily premature, bringing untold misery to the people, whose efforts are only stolen by another dictator in the end?

There is a saying, “justice delayed is justice denied.”  If one says that the revolution is premature, then we are condemning people to continue to live under tyranny. Aren’t the people of Libya better off now that they’re not living under Gaddafi’s brutal rule?  Isn’t it far better for them that they overthrew him now (as violent as the civil war was) than to have to endure until the dictator died of natural causes?  No one deserves to live in oppression, so who are we to tell rebel armies, “it’s not your turn” ?

Conversely, is living under oppressed tyranny better than being killed in revolution or purged in a reign of terror?  Who can make this value judgment?  And haven’t some protracted and bloody revolutions actually been successful?  Look at the United States of America.  It had a bloodly revolution and look at how it is today.

But there is a cautionary tale in all of this:  the Chinese Revolution of 1911.  It was intended to bring democracy to the Chinese people, but instead military factions jockeyed for power, leading to a second revolution (1913) and the splintering of the country into warring factions (1916 – 1928) and a prolonged civil war (1927 – 1949) that was only interrupted by Japanese invasion (1931 – 1945).

After the Japanese were defeated, the country once again plunged into civil war and a third revolution (1946 – 1949), the aftermath of which was purges (Anti-Rightist Campaign), mob violence (Cultural Revolution), and terror (White Terror, Cultural Revolution) on both the winning and losing sides.  To boot, the winning side went on to suffer the largest famine in modern history (Great Leap Forward, 38 million dead).  From 1917 to 1987 it is estimated that 92.1 MILLION people died in the chaos following the 1911 Revolution, NOT including the roughly 20 million deaths from The War Against Japan/World War II.

By the time the dust settled normalcy was restored in Taiwan it was 1987, 76 years later.  Mainland China, while now relatively stable and prosperous, is STILL not under the democratic government envisioned by the revolutionaries of 1911.  And it’s been 100 years.

After all this, was the 1911 Revolution worth all the misery, purges, violence, and terror it led to, WITHOUT even achieving the goals of WHY the revolution was brought forth in the first place, a full century later?*

Should we have waited for a more fitting moment in history for the revolution to be carried out bloodlessly, as in the Velvet Revolution, without the ensuing tumultuous century of misery?  Even better, couldn’t all of this have been done through gradual reform, rendering revolution irrelevant?

Then, what about Libya? Will it be like America, or will it be like China? It is too soon to tell, but I hope Libya end up being more like America.

Libya’s National Transitional Council has clearly outlined the steps and timeline it will take to make Libya a fully-functioning democracy.  The recent elections in Tunisia gives hope that the democratic process will prove contagious, and that it will actually take root in Libya as well.

On Libya’s future I am hopeful. I sincerely wish them the best.

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* Arguably, the goals of the 1911 Revolution have been achieved in Taiwan, but that is poor consolation considering Taiwan’s population and area are dwarfed by the population and area of the Mainland, where the revolution occurred and was intended to take root.

The Myriad Things

A continuation of the previous post on how Daoism, and the universe, are not about binaries (and how “yin” =/= “evil”):

As stated in the Dao De Jing,

Tao produces one
One produces two
Two produce three
Three produce myriad things

I will now talk about gradients and shades of grey.  The previous post talked about how every dark and be further subdivided into light and dark, and that the so-called “darkest dark” will still possess light.  The converse is true, for the “lightest light” will still contain some darkness.

To presume that existence occurs along gradient (so called shades of grey) presumes that there is no light in the darkest dark and no darkness in the lightest light.  Therefore, I would say that thinking of the “darkest dark” and “lightest light” as ends of a gradient is at best an oversimplification and at worst wrong.

I hereby propose a different way of understanding the universe: the color wheel.

In the absorption spectrum, black is actually composed of all the colors of the rainbow combined.  Similarly, in the emission spectrum, white is composed of all of the colors of the rainbow combined.  From this illustration, we can see that even “shades of grey” is a gross oversimplification.  From black and white we get not only grey but every color in existence.

So let’s go back to the quote and break it down:

Tao produces one -> (Taiji, i.e. the undifferentiated everything)
One produces two -> (black and white)
Two produce three -> (black, white, and grey)
Three produce myriad things -> (black, white, grey, and every color imaginable)

We must understand that the universe in all its complexity isn’t even about binaries or gradients.  Instead, everything is its own color.  No color is by any means “better” than the other.  After all, what would be a spectrum that is entirely red?  It’s no longer a spectrum.  All the colors are all inseparable parts of the same spectrum.

Similarly, all parts of the universe have their differences and cannot be neatly categorized into binaries or even gradients.  There is no one aspect that is “better” than the other – they all have their place and purpose.  The only people who would dare say that they know better than the universe are ignorant and possibly possess hubris of an enormous scale. Remember – pride comes before the fall.

To close: everything in the universe is different and does not fit into neat categories.  At the same time, everything in the universe is still part of a greater whole

Not about binaries

It has come to my attention that some people have the misconception that Daoism categories things into convenient binaries.  For the record, I would like to say how far from the truth that is.

Let’s start with the yin-yang symbol.  We know its colors are black and white.  But remember, within the black is a white dot, and within the white is a black dot.  Within the light will always be some dark.  Within the dark will always be some light.  This symbolism actually breaks the binary, as it shows the falsity of absolute categorization.

Philosophically, the white dot within the black can be divided further into its own yin and yang (the parts of which can be further subdivided into their own respective yin and yang), and the black dot within the white can also be divided further into its own yin and yang and so on.  Like fractals, the division can continue for several levels, even endlessly.  Within the brightest white will be some dark.  Within the darkest black will be some light.

The idea of further subdivision of the lights and darks within the yin-yang symbol is what gives rise to the eight trigrams, also known as bagua.  The different configurations of the trigrams show the nuances of yin yang and their possible combinations.

Let me be clear about this.  The idea of one element being inseparable from its so-called opposite is to show how binaries can’t exist and that everything is intertwined and part of a whole.

Another thing:  Let’s please not equate yang with ‘good’ and yin with ‘evil.’  Truthfully, the misapplication of contrasts has been used to justify unfair things, such as patriarchal society, where women as the ‘yin’ were considered to be inferior.  But gender binaries are also as fluid as the yin-yang symbol; however, that’s a discussion for another day.

Yin and yang are just parts of a system that just are, just as day and night just are.  They coexist with, give meaning to each other (like how ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ give meaning to each other), and are part of a larger whole.  Surely we would not advocate that ‘day is good’ and ‘night is evil,’ requiring that we must have day all the time and no night!  Such a system would be unbalanced and cause great harm.  I would even call it dangerous.  Thinking in such terms would be thinking so narrowly as to miss the larger picture of how entire systems work.

A few take-away messages:  Daoism emphasizes balance, wholeness, and interconnectedness.  It’s not about binaries, dualities, or good and evil.  While I cannot possibly explain everything that is the Dao (“the Dao that cannot be explained is not the Dao”), the least I can tell you is that the conception of Daoism categorizing things into binaries is just flat out wrong.

Thinking Evapotranspiration (or, Terraforming Australia)

Trees cause rain.

The Amazon Rainforest generates ~50% of its own rain just by having so many trees together.[1] Trees pull water from the ground and store it in themselves, which is then released into the air through the stomata of their leaves. This is evapotranspiration.[2] Past a critical density and critical size in area of trees, the humidity generated by the trees will generate rain.

Australia is mostly dry grassland and desert in its interior. Yet, 50,000 years ago the geologic record shows that Australia was covered in forests* and twice as wet.[3] What happened?

The evidence points towards people.

People arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, and soon afterwards, the continent dried out. No other climatic effects were observed in the rest of the world. Part of this was due to a change in monsoon patterns. When the monsoons returned 14,000 years ago, Australia’s rainfall did not come back.

How did people cause this change in climate?

Two lines of thinking are people’s direct and indirect impacts. The direct impact is theorized to be that people cut down the trees and used control burns as a form of agriculture. When the trees disappeared, the interior dried out, turning inland Australia into a desert.[4]

The second theory is that people overhunted the animals that kept the forest ecosystem in equilibrium. Without the animals to maintain ecological equilibrium, the forests could not maintain themselves and the desert took over.[5]

Also worth noting is that in the desert interior of Australia is a depression that is below sea level, which occasionally becomes a lake during the intermittent desert rain. This place is known as Lake Eyre.

(Lake Eyre: Wikimedia Commons)

Since the 1800s dreamers have floated schemes of digging a canal from the sea to flood Lake Eyre with seawater, in hopes that the presence of a lake would generate rain in the parched interior. However, these dreams did not take into account the rates of evaporation in the desert, where such a canal would only result in Lake Eyre becoming a much thicker salt flat that does not cause rainfall in the desert. A sea-flooded Lake Eyre does not have sufficient size to generate rain in such a dry environment.[6]

The alternative scheme was to dig massive tunnels through the mountains of Queensland to divert their massive amounts of rainfall into the interior. But the engineering feasibility and sheer cost of the massive tunneling project has stalled that idea as well.

(The Boomerang Scheme:  p. 174, Inter-basin water transfer: case studies from Australia, United States, Canada, China, and India, by Fereidoun Ghassemi and Ian White)

So, here’s another idea: replant trees in the interior of Australia.

Start on the leeward size of the mountains and slowly move towards the desert. Of course, doing so means that we need to learn from China’s Great Green Wall. China’s artificial forest, the largest in the world, is meant to stop the desertification of northern China. However, the use of poplar monocultures means that the forest is not biologically diverse and lacks a mutually-reinforcing biological feedback loop. The result has been die-offs in 1/4 of the trees planted and many trees with stunted growth.[7] As such, China’s planted forest is not as effective as it could be in preventing desertification and locking up carbon.

A planted artificial forest, if we are to do this in Australia, must consider biological diversity needed to keep such a forest sustainable. This begins with successional dynamics, where first grassland shrubs are planted, which then paves way for larger and larger trees until a climax forest is reached.

This planted forest would start on the leeward side of the mountains of Queensland and slowly grow towards the interior over a period of decades. Once this forest passes the critical size it will generate rain. Studies have shown that if the interior of Australia can return to its pre-human level of precipitation, Lake Eyre would become a permanent freshwater lake with a size larger than Taiwan (or Belgium or Maryland for our Western readers).[8]

The downsides:

• A government program to replant the Australian interior will cost a lot of money and people-power.

• Replanting will take some grazing and farming land out of productivity.

One solution to the two problems posed above is that ranchers and farmers could be assigned land stewardship jobs in taking care of the vegetation that will draw rain back to the interior. The European Union and the United States already have similar land stewardship programs.[9] This, of course, has the other downside of needing subsidies, as protecting the land instead of selling meat does not generate profits.

• Another downside is that more trees will draw down groundwater levels until the aquifers below are replenished, which could take decades to centuries as well.[10]

The positives:

• Increased rainfall – Australia is the driest continent, and water availability limits the country’s economic growth and carrying capacity. More water can help Australia increase both. This will be especially important as population in Australia increases and the country takes in people from island nations that are to be flooded by global climate change.

• Flooding Lake Eyre – This will provide Australia with a reservoir of water that would provide a new home for temperate climate creatures and people (acknowledging that creatures adapted to Lake Eyre’s current condition may be out of luck), the lake would be a driver of economic growth with lakeshore development, moderate the climate of the interior, and if it exceeds the critical size, be able to generate rain in the interior of Australia.

• Locking up carbon dioxide – along with Canada and the United States, Australia has one of the highest carbon emissions per capita in the world. With world governments hesitant to slow economic growth for the sake of the environment, more trees are needed on a massive scale to counter the massive amounts of carbon dioxide that humans are pumping into the atmosphere.

Of course, increased rainfall will occur if and only if the forest that generates the rain exceeds the critical size needed to cause rain. This means that the forest must be more or less contiguous, not carved up into separate blocks. Separate blocks of forests would dissipate the humidity generated by the trees and no rain will result.

Lessons for the Amazon

The Amazon is currently being cut into disparate blocks in the name of development, and the resulting drying out of the rainforest has already become noticeable.[11] Just as there is a tipping point for enlarging forests to increase rainfall, the Amazon rainforest is heading for the opposite tipping point where decreasing forest size will lead to a massive drying out – leading to conditions present in the desert interior of Australia today.

This is not to say that the people of Brazil and the Amazon Basin should not or cannot develop. Rather, there are ways – ways rooted in ancient, pre-Agricultural Revolution traditions – where economic development can take place by only slightly retooling the ecosystem and NOT entirely subjugating nature to the will of humans. But that is a story for another time.

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* Australia has several species of eucalyptus trees that cannot cross-breed. When Australia was one contiguous forest, eucalyptus trees had a clinal gradient where trees close to each other could cross-breed but those far away could not. Remember from biology that as long as such a reproductive gradient exists, these trees are considered to be of the same species. When the forest disappeared, the gradient also disappeared, leaving trees that were formerly of one species separated into several different, sexually incompatible species.

[1] http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/rainforest_ecology.html , http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/last-of-amazon.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evapotranspiration
[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/prehistoric-polluters-484363.html
[4] Ibid. #3
[5] Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee. p. 329, 357, 364. HarperPerennial. 1992
[6] http://www.k26.com/eyre/The_Lake/Ideas/Fill_Lake_Eyre_/fill_the_lake.html
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Wall_of_China#Measuring_success
[8] Ibid. #3
[9] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4748066
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Wall_of_China#Problems
[11] Lenton, T.M. et al. “Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system.” 2008. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105:1786-1793.

The Evolution of Peace

The previous post on policy as the continuation of war spurred another thought on the changing nature of our motivations for peace. Back in the day, wars were acceptable means of settling disputes. Military might and strategic cunning determined the outcome of such conflicts. Up through World War II, the way to win was through force.

The Cold War changed the picture somewhat. Of course, wars still flared in Asia and Africa, but for North America, Russia, and Europe sandwiched in between, the threat of nuclear annihilation prevented the outbreak of all-out conflict.

Our motivation to maintain peace became based on fear.

With the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalization, our national economies became interdependent. The United States and China have become so intertwined that war between the two sides must be avoided at all costs not just for fear of lives lost, but because our mutual prosperity is so dependent on each other. In this context, the “nuclear option” is no longer about actual nuclear weapons, but about crashing each other’s economies.

Our motivation for maintaining peace is now based on greed.

In the interest of peace, fear costs fewer lives than violence, and greed is more productive and mutually beneficial than fear. But when can our motivation for maintaining peace evolve to be about us truly caring about each other?

Looking back on the path that we as a species have taken, I am hopeful that we are getting there. They have been small steps away from violence, but I do think that we are reaching that more inspired level of living and interacting with each other. Someday, I hope that we can move beyond greed as our society’s main motivator and maintain peace for the sake of peace itself.

Standing von Clausewitz on its head: “Policy is the continuation of war by other means”

Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once famously stated, “war is the continuation of policy by other means.” However, in examining human behavior from an evolutionary point of view, perhaps the inverse, “policy is the continuation of war by other means,” is closer to the truth in our species and society.

But is war a result of our being unable to control our instincts, or are they random happenstances? I would argue that wars have a biological basis, and it is society that is channeling these urges elsewhere.

An ecological niche means that one species gets one niche. When the population grows, that turns into a competition either among individuals or among packs. Humans have evolved as pack creatures (organized as tribes) and the competition for resources among the tribes is the root of war.

With the onset of the Agricultural Revolution c. 8000 BC, more food meant that tribes got bigger and started taking over other tribes. This led to the formation of civilizations and then nation-states. This also means that:

more cultural homogenity = less intertribal conflict

But advances in technology mean that conflicts are bloodier when they do happen. Furthermore, since the level of organization at the nation-state level is more complex than that of the tribal level, I would say that at the more complex level it stops being about ecological niches and more about power plays. At that point, I recall a quote that I saw somewhere, “wars are like car crashes. They can be avoided with better driving.”

However, as societies get larger, I don’t believe that competition for ecological niches or power plays cease to exist, especially when societies contain cultural cleavages such as differing ethnicities or religious beliefs that organize society into tribe-like entities. Competition within a society would then be channeled through political means to contain the friction amongst these groups, which, in weaker states (e.g., Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia) have actually blown into full-scale civil war.

As I see it, war has a biological basis in ecological competition. This is not to say that it is something that we should let happen because “it has always been with us,” but I just note that it’s interesting to see how what we have inherited is then channeled into other more socially acceptable forms of interaction.

Of course, this is a theoretical exercise that, ultimately, may not be provable without thousands of years of observations and data gathering.