Here’s a reading from The Fate of Nature, with picture taken on our tidepooling explorations.
Increasingly, we pay for important cultural needs on the honor system, with the rising prominence of non-profit news being a prime example. The model seems to work for public radio (where I am headed this afternoon to do a series of ‘pledge breaks’). But research shows that the community-building aspect of ‘all pitch in’ has certain limits.
I learned a lot about this during a week I spent at Indiana University with Elinor and Vincent Ostrom while I was working on my book, “The Fate of Nature.” Vincent is a political theorist and, as a consultant, helped write key sections of the Alaska Constitution. Lin is a policy scientist, and in 2009 became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Their key discoveries came in the area of studying different kinds of ownership. Private property and public property are only two slices of the kinds of property we live with all time. Commonly owned goods are often our most important, and can include natural resources like fish or air, cultural resources like the English language, and the ocean or areas of land.
What we own in common can be divided four important ways, depending on whether we can exclude users, and if use causes diminishment. A fishery is a common pool resource: it is difficult to exclude users, and overuse diminishes the resource. A public radio station is a public good: no one can be excluded, and more users take nothing away from other users.
Those are the two most difficult categories to manage. It’s relatively easy to manage a toll road or a potluck dinner, because in both cases users are easy to exclude.
Most culture on the honor system comes to us as public goods. If I write a blog post on the Internet and it spreads widely, its value doesn’t go down as more people read it.
But who are the suckers who produce these goods that are given away to everyone? I have the motive of trying to generate interest in my book when I post, but why am I planning to spend a couple of hours at KSKA pitching when I could be working (or more likely, working out)?
I used to think of pitching as begging, but it doesn’t feel that way. It’s feels good. A significant portion of people (behavioral economists can tell exactly how many) enjoy cooperating and supporting group contributions.
Another portion of folks cooperate when they see it happening and producing benefits, but they won’t initiate it. A final percentage are free-riders, and won’t help unless they fear punishment, exclusion or some other push in that direction.
Lin Ostrom’s important discovery was that communities with boundaries could manage common-pool resources—such as a locally-controlled fishery. People tend to sort out a scheme that works. The strong cooperators and conditional cooperators create the system, and the freeloaders go along to avoid punishments (whether formal or social).
But there’s no social stigma associated with listening to public radio and not contributing—no one knows if you gave, or if you listen. (And pledge breaks aren’t punishment, however they may feel. For one thing, they affect the first person who gives as much as the last deadbeat.) That’s probably why most people listen but don’t give. The strong cooperators carry all the weight.
That works because public radio is a big public good that’s quite inexpensive to produce compared to benefit we receive. A small percentage of people can carry the weight. Other goods aren’t so easy to carry. Public libraries, for example. They can’t exist without support from almost everyone. For another example, big media operations like daily newspapers, with their large, skilled staffs. They’re too expensive to survive without being able to exclude users.
Community walls are breaking down. The causes are diverse. The overwhelming power of large corporations and government. The loss of place as Internet and other media make us into world-spanning beings. And for other reasons we wouldn’t want to reverse, such as the new freedom for all kinds of people to choose their own paths.
Without community boundaries to manage social norms of cooperation, we lose a lot. I’m glad to be part of public radio, but I can see that model isn’t an answer by itself. Without close connection between people, we can’t work together well enough to pay for the big things.
The Alaska political elite can’t be trusted to protect the Alaska environment. Not even on a basic level. So how do we get to a world where local people have the power to care for their own ecosystems?
That’s a fundamental question. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and it will take me a number of posts (and my book) to address it. For now, I’d like to establish the alienation of Alaska’s leaders from its people and their place.
Like other Americans, Alaskans as a whole hold most of their elected leaders in contempt. Moreover, the Alaska political elite pursues a strongly anti-environment direction that doesn’t reflect Alaska’s culture or the will of its people.
Three quick examples of that. Predator control. Opposed repeatedly in Alaska referenda, repeatedly strengthened by the state. Cruise ship environmental and business controls. Imposed by a strong public vote, rolled back as far as possible by the state. Climate change. Serious academic research shows the vast majority of Alaskans believe in it, want to do something about it, and don’t trust state leaders when they talk about it (they do trust scientists and their own neighbors)
I experienced a vivid example of this a few years ago listening to our Anchorage public radio station, as Senator Con Bunde, R-Anchorage, and Representative Mike Doogan, D-Anchorage, talked about conservation of the polar bear in the face of climate change on a show called “Community Forum.” Bunde said (and I paraphrase), that if it comes down to the polar bear or the Alaska economy, he would take the Alaska economy. Doogan quickly agreed.
Just to make clear, they said the extinction of a keystone Arctic predator is less important than the temporary exchange of money among 600,000 of our species’s 6 billion members.
But I don’t think that’s the main reason why Alaskans hold such a low view of their leaders. Members of the political elite often wring their hands about these consistent poll results, and low voter turn-outs, as if the problem is with the public.
What if the public is right?
The recent FBI investigation in Alaska showed the legislature and governor’s office to be deeply corrupt. The oil industry’s representative in Juneau, Veco’s Bill Allen, did the dirty work. Now media reports suggest he’s a pedophile, too, likely shielding more politicians from prosecution based on his testimony.
Allen’s use of corrupt practices had been uncovered publicly more than 20 years earlier, yet he was allowed to become the most powerful non-elected person in Alaska. Among those he corrupted were representatives Vic Kohring and Bev Masek. Insiders knew for many years that these legislators were intellectually and temperamentally incompetent in their jobs, as Masek’s sentencing hearing showed, tragically, when she used her own inability to understand her job as an excuse for her corruption.
The fact is, these people never could have gotten any other job at anything like the pay or skill level of a legislator. Same for former Senate President Pete Kott and some others. Presumably they did whatever necessary to hold onto positions they didn’t deserve.
So why did voters keep returning them? Here’s a hypothesis I suggest is difficult to counter. Many of those citizens who do vote think of their state government as a dirty business of dividing up resource spoils and use their votes to get their share. They hold their noses and choose people who, for whatever self-serving reasons, will handle a dirty job of making sure the district gets taken care of.
There are certainly good, honorable, hard-working, public-spirited people in public office. One of the sacrifices they make when they serve is the contempt and disrespect of the people they represent, and the low expectations that drag down everything they try to accomplish.
Many people in office don’t know how the public see them. Everyone treats them with respect and even honor. Our politeness, and greed, assure they’re in a bubble.
Then, every so often, a controversy erupts that drags them down further, like that concerning how much lobbyists can spend on legislator meals without disclosure. The most telling part about that issue was that it passed with a few jokes but not much outrage, because legislators hiding their free lunches is about what people expect.
It’s reasonable that those who want to bring real change to our relationship with the environment don’t want to get involved with this system. It’s a daunting realization, but our government will remain a foe of ordinary people in this cause until it is fundamentally transformed.
The anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, March 24, will never pass without sadness and wonder for me. It deserves to be remembered. If you were there, it cannot be forgot. The spill meant so many things; among the simplest, its lesson in humility. We can’t clean it up. We mustn’t let it happen again.
Here are memories from my book, The Fate of Nature, which contains my longest writing about the spill, and probably my last.
About two weeks into the oil spill I called my editor and said I wanted to write a story without any people in it—just about the rocks. Despite his skepticism, the next morning I got a seat on a helicopter from a temporary employee for the State of Alaska who was gathering up journalists and putting them on choppers to bill to Exxon as state oil spill business, at $1,600 an hour. The pilot had no instructions and most of the reporters on board knew nothing about the area, so I directed the flight to Green Island, where I’d heard there was good tide pooling.
The helicopter descended toward a narrow tidal isthmus of gravel that attached a pair of vertical rock islets west of the main island’s low-profile forest. The 1964 earthquake had thrust these diagonal shafts of rock upward like crystals, shards of land amid slivers of sea. In the 25 years since the earthquake, kelp, urchins and popweed had recolonized the rubble collars at the foot of each tower. At the top of each, crowding tiny patches of green beyond the reach of salt water, uncombed shocks of little spruce and hemlock trees were hung with moss. Sun off smooth water warmed our faces as the helicopter drilled downward, as I imagine a spaceship would do, committing our footsteps to this one world from among the many above which we had hovered.
As the helicopter’s engine spun down and quiet fell I worked around the slippery rocks on the outside of the island by myself, hearing a raven cry and the distant voices of the photographers—they had found an oily bird, hollowed out by scavengers, in the beach grass. I heard barnacles clicking, drying under a sheet of sun-warmed tar. The place smelled of sulfur rather than salt and, in places, stank of rotting animals. I remembered an Independence Day weekend party on Yukon Island, in Kachemak Bay, when we climbed over rocks like these and picked mussels to cook in a pot over a beach fire—a warm, sunny evening, sipping wine—the mussels steam open in just a few minutes, and then each shell is a tiny plate, rich with butter and garlic and that tender, delicate flesh. The mussel beds on Green Island were as plentiful, but they didn’t need steaming to open them—my fingers could easily do it, and inside the meat was black.
The tide pools varied, as always, worlds within worlds with their own stories of birth, sustenance, conflict and death. I remembered being eight years old on a similar shoreline with my mother, staring down through the glassy roof of each pool, pulling aside forests of eel grass to find tiny creatures squirming, and scooping water in a clam shell to catch inch-long fish, watching hermit crabs scamper away from sunflower stars with twenty-four legs and fifteen thousand feet. Some of the Green Island tide pools had ceased to exist: they were full of syrupy sludge, smothered and obliterated. Others pools were poisoned, but still visible. A flower-like sea anemone had turned brown; another looked nearly normal, but didn’t respond to a touch. A sunflower star’s thousands of feet were smeared with thick oil. Limpets and chitons, which hold hard to rock, fell away at a touch, and even barnacles could be swept away by a fingertip. Down under the eel grass, in the crevices, creatures without common names—white, shrimplike animals—curled up dead, in piles.
Another pool was still relatively healthy, but the tide was coming in. A slick that met the shore rose with the water. A seal swam, like a ghost, under the oil, then popped its head up and looked at me. As the flood met the tide pool, the oil swirled in.
The helicopter roared. The rising water had neared its skids, and I had to run back to get on board.
The media is the message in new media even more than old. How we read helps define how we think. If what you read is short and superficial, you’re not likely to have deep thoughts as a result. Blogs are not only that, but they are heavy on irony, outrage or dogmatism, which are not deeply enlightening forms of expression.
In The Fate of Nature I wrote this about being outdoors in Prince William Sound:
Anchored in a tiny cove on an island in the southwest Sound, we paddled ashore in miniature plastic kayaks to pick blueberries. The drowsy green woods were fully enclosed from the sky except for big drops of gathered rainwater that clattered down from the long, sagging bows. The silence of deep moss rendered hypnotic the repetitive process of grasping one bright blue orb and then another and the gradual increase of the blueness in a plastic bag—the only contrast from universal green. The Sound erases the rest of the world in a few days. Being is different here. Time smoothes, pulsing slowly with the tide, losing the quantized, mechanical tick it has in the city. Decisions in the Sound are creations, not selections from a menu of choices. Cognition, or thought, is different here, too. It’s continuous, not suited to boxes. Whole ideas grow up, long thoughts leading to unexpected destinations—unlike the flitting of city thinking, which is mostly reactions to questions, messages, lines and squares. From this perspective, that city life, if remembered at all, looks like a mechanical complex of herky-jerky activity, as incoherent as a hazily remembered dream. Both mental frames are real—urban or outdoor—but the continuity that arises in this environment makes it is easier to feel connected to other living things.
That one paragraph is way too long for a blog post! (Oops, there’s a little new media irony.) But it gets to my point: there’s much more to saving nature than our practices as consumers and disposers. It matters how we think. We won’t transform the world if we’re flitting from one idea to the next.
I’ve been struggling to figure out how I can write meaningfully on line when my topic is one that takes a lot of thought, a slower mode of thought, and some commitment from readers. And to do it when I don’t really have time for a lot of uncompensated writing.
The experiment I’ve decided upon is to focus on a topic that I can develop through the progress of the blog. I’ll refer back to previous posts, and count on readers to go back and catch up. In the exchange of meaning between writer and reader there is no substitute for effort–if readers don’t want to dig in and understand what I have to say, they just won’t get it. It’s an experiment, because I don’t know if anyone will make the effort on line.
So what’s to be my topic? I plan to develop the politics and economics of a society that would avoid the path we’re on of hollowing out nature. One little piece at a time.
Ian Garrick Mason is exactly right about the current run of climate change doubts. It’s not that these people are stupid, but evaluating reality requires good judgement, too. http://www.iangarrickmason.com/2010/02/a-dank-and-claustrophobic-universe/#more-407
Sustainability would certainly be better than liquidation of the earth’s resoures. A sustainable relationship to the global ecosystem would at least mean we were spending our income rather than our savings.
But sustainability won’t get us where I and most people I know what to be. One form of sustainable human impact on the earth would be conversion of every possible resource to human use. Every inch of the globe could be sustainably exploited. While such a system might be brittle and subject to catastrophic failure, as Joe Perkins suggests below, I don’t believe one can assume that it would be. Perhaps technology will find a way around problems of monoculture, through something akin to seed banking and crop rotation.
A future you really believe in has to rely on more something more fundamental. The point I make in the book is that a sustainable human impact on the earth that doesn’t leave wilderness and wildlife in an undomesticated form would not sustain us as whole human beings. Our need for meaning and connection requires that our planet contain more than just people.
Making that point takes a good bit of the book. But if you accept it, then you need a different goal than sustainability. A better word is sufficiency. People need to stop acquiring resources and wealth when they have enough to live happy, fulfilling lives. That level, which I beleive would leave us below complete hollowing out of all natural systems, would also need to be sustainable. But sustainability alone is not enough.
I received this thoughtful response to my ‘Book of the Year’ lecture on Thursday. The writer, Joe Perkins of Anchorage, was responding to the idea that humankind’s current path is leading us to a fully domesticated biosphere, which I asserted could be categorized as sustainable, even though it’s not the world in which many of us want to live.
Joe is an attorney and the chair of a board I serve on, for the Anchorage Library Foundation. Here are his excerpted comments:
I am not at all sure that a fully developed world with no reservoir of wildness and the diversity that exists within wildness would be sustainable. (Thoreau may have been right for reasons he did not fully understand: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”) A fully developed world would be too uniform, too brittle, and thus too easily damaged or destroyed by something as simple as a hybridized rice fungus, the bird flu, the collapse of fisheries due to acidification of the oceans, or just plain and simple social unrest caused by coastal flooding (or any of the foregoing).
My biggest concern with where we (humankind) are heading at the moment is that our lifespans make us too shortsighted to deal with unprecedented (except in the geologic record) information that foretells consequences that are inherently “lagging” in nature. For example, think about something as simple as the way Westchester Lagoon or Jewel Lake freeze and thaw, or why the ocean around Hawaii is coldest not in December but in March. In Anchorage we see the days getting shorter in August and September and October, we feel the days getting colder, but still the lagoon remains unfrozen until November. Meanwhile, we see the days getting longer and we feel them getting warmer in February, March, April, and yet the lagoon sometimes does not thaw until the first week of May—and then it is thawed within 3 days.
We know why this happens (i.e., we understand the physics of air and water), and it can be explained mathematically with partial differential equations. But in the case of CO2 and climate change, 250 years of ever-increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere still has not created the kind of undeniable effect on our surroundings that tells all of us that we have a problem—perhaps because the Pleistocene has been ending for the last 10,000 years and so shrinking ice caps and glaciers arguably are nothing new (though I know the Inupiat elders would say that things have been changing faster over the last hundred years).
Perhaps ocean acidification will be the secondary effect we finally notice, but in all likelihood we won’t notice that THAT is a problem until ocean ecosystems start failing. But that would be well down the road.
Still, I remain an optimist. We can wean ourselves off of coal and oil if we, individually and collectively, decide to make the investment.
Also, by observation we can learn. Probably the greatest threat to the destruction of wildness is the ever increasing “island-ization” of wild or semi-wild areas. See David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo (1997). Still, we can learn from that, too. In Anchorage, we continue to have moose, bears, and salmon in town because our streams and stream corridors are protected and because we have reservoirs of wildness right next door (Chugach State Park, Kincaid Park, the tideflats, and portions of Fort Rich). Communities and regions that act to preserve and connect their reservoirs of wildness will be much healthier in the long run than other places.
Thursday night I will give the Book of the Year talk at the University of Alaska Anchorage. (Details here.)
After giving my “Whale and Supercomputer” lecture more than 100 times from eastern US to west, from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Barrow, and in England and France, it is officially retired. Now I’m remembering how challenging it is to put together a one-man show, hold the audience, inform them, and put across a key part of the book.
I’ve been taking pictures right along as I researched and wrote The Fate of Nature over the last six years. I’ve got some good ones. The trick is how to match pictures, words and ideas. It’s a fascinating puzzle. I’m looking forward to presenting what I come up with.
Until you see the faces of the audience, you don’t know how it is going over. That’s the thrill of public speaking. I relish the experience. I spend most of my time communicating, but I’m usually alone when I do it. The feedback of a live audience is the payoff for a lot of lonely work and thought.
If you’re in Anchorage, come join us.
Last week I received a jacket quote (also known as a blurb) from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. If I were not me, I know I would be curious as to how I had managed this. As you are probably well aware, I am not famous.
I’ve never met Bobby Kennedy, but he is a long-time friend to Alaska’s marine environment. Bob Shavelson of Cook Inletkeeper was my contact. Bob is a leadinng guardian of the Inlet, a watchdog who has a formidable bark. I’ve admired and supported him, but didn’t know him well. Kennedy was founder of the national Waterkeeper Alliance and Bob has been a board member and has hosted him on trips to Alaska.
Other folks I know better read the manuscript for The Fate of Nature and encouraged Bob to take an interest. I approached Bob myself and gave him the manuscript in the middle of last summer. His wife is a writer and he knows how this whole self-promotion thing works and he was generous with his time and attention. However, I never really expected Kennedy to take an interest.
Long story short, Bob kept at it and through the changing seasons and events, including the death of Senator Kennedy, my manuscript never fell fully from his to-do list. And last week, just in time, the words arrived in my email in-box.
Fame is magic in our culture. Certain incantations work better for certain things. This jacket quote, which you can read here, felt like a magic wand of publicity that suddenly dropped into my hand.
Thanks Bob and Bobby!
