Category Archives: Nature

Fantasy Fiction, Nature, Science fiction

Ghost in the machine?

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I was intrigued by this story in Nature:

“A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.”

Koch made the bet on his confidence that science would pinpoint the exact location in the brain that produced consciousness because of the advances in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which reveals changes in blood flow associated with brain activity. The wager, a case of wine, added incentive in addition to both bragging rights and the lure of discovery.

So the game was on!

As the Nature article concludes, the researchers confirmed “areas in the posterior cortex do contain information in a sustained manner,” and that “some aspects of consciousness, but not all of them, could be identified in the prefrontal cortex.” Koch admits his theories were not totally proven, and, being a scientist of his word, paid up.

Who says science isn’t entertaining?

What’s distressing, however, is how proponents of dualism are using this story as some kind of vindication. The notion that humans are unique assemblages of mind and matter and therefore outside of and superior to nature goes back to Plato, the Vedic writers, and that notorious rascal Rene Descartes. One commenter claimed Koch’s failure to prove his hypothesis as vindication that we are truly “ghosts in the machine.”

Interesting they used that term, which was coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his argument against dualism. He deemed the position as a gigantic category mistake. I love his illustration: A visitor to a university may see classrooms, libraries, and other parts of the campus, but at the end of the tour, asks, “But where is the university?” not realizing the term refers to all of its components working as a unit. Similarly, the various sections of the brain handle their own functions, and we use the term “consciousness” to refer to all those functions working in harmony.

Why is this important? If our supposedly supernatural minds make us superior, all of nature is dumb matter good for nothing but exploitation. This not only imperils nature but alienates us from the world in which we live. The next step is contempt for our own bodies. A philosophy that leads to ecological ruin and rootlessness is an evil that must be exposed for what it is. And just as Koch and Chalmers could entertain and enlighten us with their little joust for science, we can enjoy stories that both inspire and force us to consider where we’re going and where we could end up.

Nature

Earth Day

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Stories

“What is all the philosophy in the world to the joy of the beautiful swallow? Civilisations have risen and crumbled, faded into nothingness, like footprints in the desert obliterated by sand. The sweet little whispering call of my long-tailed titmice fashioning their bottle nest, so happy in the sunshine, is a wiser and more profound utterance than all the philosophy collected from the books of the world.” Henry Williamson, The Lone Swallows

Nature, Publication day, Science fiction

Little Blue Marble 2022 Anthology

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I’m pleased to announce that Little Blue Marble has selected my short story “A Tree Amid the Wood” for its 2022 anthology.

In my story, biotech pioneer Franklin Pratt builds a living house that senses and responds to the needs of its owner. Franklin’s invention has the potential to reduce homelessness, pollution, and social isolation, but a stroke robs him of the ability to communicate. And worse — he fears and distrusts the only person who can help him.

Little Blue Marble publishes speculative fiction and articles aimed at raising awareness about the environment. I can’t tell you how proud I am to have my work included with so many fine authors.

My reverence for nature inspires both my fiction and blog posts about the wild places I’ve explored, from maritime forests to deserts. One of the themes I keep returning to in my writing is the mismatch between human needs and the unnatural straitjacket of modern life. Culture and nature should complement each other. Media analyst Arthur Asa Berger has observed that “culture” comes from the Latin “colere,” which means to tend to the earth and cultivate. Humans, like all other living things, need a nurturing environment. I believe the disconnect between human nature and creeping global homogeniety is at the root of modern neuroticism.

But don’t let the serious subject matter fool you — this book features well-crafted, entertaining stories. Little Blue Marble’s 2022 Anthology not only promotes a vital cause but will make a great Christmas present.

Now available in print from Amazon.

Ezra Pound, Nature, Science fiction

A Tree Amid the Wood

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A Tree Amid the Wood

I am delighted to announce my story “A Tree Amid the Wood” is featured in the latest edition of Little Blue Marble, which publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry focusing on ecology.

Franklin Pratt lives in a special house of his own design. It is a living thing that senses and responds to its owner’s needs by growing rooms as needed and reflecting the owner’s emotional state with bioluminescent blossoms. Once it’s mass-produced, Franklin’s invention can provide housing for millions and help heal the environment.

But since his stroke, Franklin is unable to share his creation with the world. He feels he’s a prisoner in his own home and distrusts Carrie Masada, the woman who supervises his team of caretakers. Franklin fears she only wants to steal the secret of his house.

And he’s right. Carrie wants Franklin’s secret. But why?

My love and concern for nature has inspired a number of my posts and published stories, so while honored by this acceptance, I am especially pleased my story promotes a cause I believe in deeply. The title comes from one of Ezra Pound’s early poems, “The Tree“:

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bough
And that god-feasting couple old
That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
‘Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart’s home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.

 As in Pound’s lovely poem, my story explores how love of the natural world is the essential foundation for understanding, connecting, and caring — in other words, for becoming fully human.

Nature, Science fiction

Earth Day, 2021

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First Collection

“The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth. Its priests believe until their death that material prosperity bring enjoyment and happiness – even though all the proofs in history have shown that material prosperity doesn’t bring anything else than despair. These priests believe in technology still when they choke in their gas masks.”

Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

I view technology the way George Washington viewed government — like fire, a dangerous servant and fearful master.  Used with wisdom, it can produce good things. Misused, it — or should I say we — can botch up a perfectly good planet.  Hunting Ground, one of my published stories I’m most proud of, took a humorous but serious look at what happens when we imagine we can endlessly exploit nature without consequences.

A little food for thought before Earth Day.

Fantasy Fiction, Nature, Science fiction

The Magic of Swamps

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My wife and I just got back from Carolina Beach. We spent Tuesday hiking through Carolina Beach State Park, a 761-acre wildlife sanctuary in southeastern North Carolina bordered by the Intracoastal Waterway and the mighty Cape Fear River.
We need more places like this. After driving nearly 200 miles from Charlotte down I-74, much of which is garrisoned by countless installations of Burger This and Taco That, we were ready for something that wasn’t standardized and sterile.

The Swamp Trail was alive with surprises. Here’s the Lily Pond, which was overflowing with dark green lily pads and dotted with white blossoms, all floating in unpolluted water. The air around the Lily Pond smelled deliciously earthy and rich.

Not far away, large swaths of the pine forest still showed signs of this summer’s controlled burn. This process helps clear away old and diseased vegetation, thereby freeing up nutrients for the soil and new life, such as this little guy:

If this newborn pine reminds you of the young Groot, you’re not the only one.

Swamps reaffirm the astonishing resilience and adaptability of life. The Wilmington, North Carolina area is the only place in the world where you can find Venus Flytraps. Both Pitcher Plants and Venus Flytraps evolved in an environment lacking the proteins and nitrogen needed to sustain them, so these plants started feeding on meat. We didn’t come across any Venus Flytraps on our hike, but here are some Pitcher Plants we saw waiting for their usual customers, including flies, small frogs, and even birds:

Carnivorous plants. Pretty wild, huh?

Guess you could say swamps are to our everyday environment what science fiction and fantasy are to our routine reading. In the swamp, you’re face-to-face with nature’s more fantastical creatures, creatures whose vitality and outlandish attributes force you to pay attention to them. Swamps are the incubators of wild imaginings and unexpected beauty. My story “Hunting Ground,” which was included in the Unbound II: Changed Worlds anthology, was not only set in a swamp but inspired by my boyhood ramblings in local marshes. Did carnivorous plants get a starring role? Well, their (could be) cousins did …

Getting outdoors, and hiking in particular, help you sharpen your senses. And don’t forget how experiencing nature lets you encounter beauty and rediscover peace of mind, which can lead you to becoming a more balanced person and a better writer.

Movies, Nature

Woman at War

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Woman at War Last night, the Charlotte Film Society screened a fascinating movie titled Woman at War. It’s the tale of a music and yoga teacher who’s determined to sabotage an aluminum plant in the Icelandic wilderness.

Halla, the protag, wages war against a noisy, smelly, and sprawling collection of gritty metal cubes and towers unnaturally plopped onto the mystical Icelandic grassland. Add in the aromatic hydrocarbons and mutagens the plant belches out, and it’s easy to understand why a person who cherishes nature would take up arms against such a monstrosity. Business leaders and the government see the plant as an economic blessing; Halla sees one of William Blake’s dark Satanic mills.

Despite the film’s issue-packed premise, it doesn’t preach. Halla ranges the Icelandic grassland like Artemis with her bow, fulfilling her self-appointed role as the modern-day protector of nature. As is appropriate for a Greek goddess stand-in, she’s followed by a chorus that not only reflects her emotional reactions, but also provides comic relief.

The film is much more than a plea for clean air. Nearly surrounded by the police, Halla is rescued by a gruff farmer who becomes her accomplice. The two quickly realize they’re most likely related. So the movie’s primary conflict is between those with deep ties to their land and foreign investors who care only for the raw materials the land can produce. It’s the local and ancestral versus the global and rootless.

Woman at War was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival but failed to snag an Academy Award. If it comes to a local art cinema, check it out. It’s a hidden gem that deserves a wider audience.

Nature, Sociobiology, Writing

Stories as Flight Simulators

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Charles Chu recently reviewed Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Gottschall, a distinguished fellow in the English department at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, analyzes literature from the perspective of Darwinian evolution.

What E. O. Wilson did for sociology, and Deena Weisberg for psychology, Jonathan Gottshall has done for literature. The resulting insights are both fascinating and useful.

Gottshall notes that every human society tells and passes down stories, and not just histories of actual events. Since imaginative tales are universal, he argues, storytelling must be essential to survival. People everywhere must deal with problems, the key concept behind what some have called Gottshall’s Grand Unified Theory of literature:

Stories the world over are almost always about people (or personified animals) with problems. The people want something badly — to survive, to win the girl or the boy, to find a lost child. But big obstacles loom between the protagonists and what they want. Just about any story — comic, tragic, romantic — is about a protagonist’s efforts to secure, usually at some cost, what he or she desires.

As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”

But wait a minute! If fiction is an evolutionary adaptation, surely some cultures could find it advantageous to avoid wasting the tribe’s time on stories about things that never happened. Wouldn’t it be more practical to spend that time perfecting survival skills? Not so, says Gottshall:

“Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end. We get to simulate what it would be like to confront a dangerous man or seduce someone’s spouse, for instance, and the hero of the story dies in our stead.”

The stories every human culture tells about itself are a vital part of that culture, and the most basic requirement for a successful culture is teaching the next generation how to survive. So the acid test “survive or die” is the core of not only Darwinian evolution, but of good storytelling. That’s why James Scott Bell advises writers that EVERY plot must be about death:

That’s what great fiction is about—how a character transforms when forced into conflict (I contend that to be great, the conflict must be life or death—death being physical, professional, or psychological/spiritual. This includes thrillers, romance, literary…any genre).

Conflict — critical conflict — is the heart of a good, rousing tale. It reveals character, opens our eyes to the world around us, and even manages to teach us a thing or two about ourselves.

History, Nature, Reading

Hurricanes, History, and Writing

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spaghetti graph

Hurricane Florence has left us dazed, confused, and waterlogged. As bad as it was, the shifting forecasts and endless revisions of the storm’s projected path only made it worse. Florence was supposed to march through North Carolina and douse Raleigh, instead, it hit Wilmington and slowly churned its way through South Carolina, spinning off tornados and flooding low-lying areas. Here in Charlotte, trees are down and many roads and yards are under water. Now comes the clean up. Yuck.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back in the heady days of the Enlightenment, learned individuals imagined they could predict and control both man and nature through science. French scholar Pierre-Simon de Laplace assured fellow scientists they could one day predict the exact movements of tides and storms — in fact, he went so far as to claim that the movement of every atom could be calculated.

Now we have both private industry and government departments armed with Cray supercomputers that can guzzle meteorological data from all over the world, digest it faster than Laplace ever dreamed, and spit out detailed predictions.

Problem is, those details are often wrong — just as we’ve just seen with Hurricane Florence.

A long, long time ago, I worked in the insurance industry as an analyst and project manager. Pretty handy with a computer, a long-time weather buff, and an instructor of statistics, I served on the North Carolina Rate Bureau’s Property Committee a number of years, where I studied long-range weather forecasts. Our mandate was to recommend and justify future rate proposals based on expected weather patterns. To make a long story short, I learned quickly that despite all our efforts, we were only guessing at future trends.

More famous experts have performed as badly, even worse. Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly” chronicles the greatest miscalculations in history, including America’s conduct of the Vietnam War. Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, was a whiz kid with a degree from Harvard Business School. Here’s how Tuchman summarizes McNamara’s mindset:

“Precise and positive, with slicked-down hair and rimless glasses, McNamara was a specialist of management through ‘statistical control’ … his genius for statistics left little respect for human variables and no room for the unpredictable.” (p. 285)

The military establishment Secretary McNamara guided was all too receptive. The commander of the US forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, the years of escalation and certain victory, was William C. Westmoreland. Though later denounced as the “most disastrous American general since Custer,” Westmoreland was not ill-prepared for the job. He’d graduated West Point with the highest rank possible, first captain, and was America’s youngest major general ever. And he’d studied statistics at — Harvard Business School. In fact, his reliance on “kill statistics” overstated American success in Vietnam, setting up both the American military and public for a nasty confrontation with reality.

If US leaders had listened to historians rather than statisticians, and recognized that Vietnam’s ancient animosity against China precluded Communist Chinese control of an independent Vietnam, they could have avoided a tragedy. Instead, they relied on the dehumanizing scientism of B.F. Skinner to “stress” the Vietnamese into acting “rationally.” Despite the odds, first against the French, and then the Americans, the Vietnamese prevailed.

Sadly, those who would reduce people to a logical, globalized, and disconnected existence aren’t going to let a few tragic failures stop them. But no matter what they say or do, numbers alone cannot define humanity or nature. Humans stubbornly refuse to surrender purpose, identity, and emotional fulfillment. And we are not without weapons. Literature is a wild, throaty howl of defiance to those who would reduce us to formulas or pawns in their ideological schemes. And that’s a fact we can be sure of.

Nature, Science

Quote of the day

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“‘Centrism’ is about eclecticism across time, not just across the partisan spectrum: I’m a ‘reactionary’ about some civilizational traditions that proved useful for centuries, but a ‘progressive’ about embracing many social & technological innovations.” Dr. Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist