The North West Passage

…And Why Activists Who Protest The Olympics Are Missing The Point.

I love the Olympics. I’m also a social justice and environmentalism campaigner – well, perhaps not as much now as I was in my 20’s.

So I have to tell you, when I read or hear of people condemning the Olympics for social justice or environmental reasons, I get irked.

Yes, I know that the Games are terribly commercial. Yes, I know that a lot of the athletes are paid professionals now. Yes, I know that the displays of national patriotism and pride can often get quite vulgar and obnoxious. And yes, I know that there are plenty of other important social causes that could have benefited from the money that governments spend hosting the Games or sending athletes overseas to compete.

Yes, I know all those things. I still love the games.

First: There’s a fallacy of false dilemma lurking in the way some activists criticize or ignore the games. For it is clearly possible to enjoy the Games without giving up one’s activist beliefs. Just as some anti-war campaigners say things like “Support the troops but oppose the war,” surely a similar proposition could apply to the Olympics. “Support the athletes but oppose the commercialism.” Additionally, it seems to me that refusing to watch the games on telly is a totally empty protest anyway. The organizers don’t notice, and so nothing changes. And finally, protesting the games by ignoring them does not feed the hungry nor shelter the homeless nor empower the powerless. And if the whole world ignored the games in protest against something, that would not stop the something being protested. That would stop the games, tout court.

Second: Sport is competitiveness properly channeled. In business, in politics, and almost every other field of human activity where competitiveness reigns, the nature of the competition is such that the losers must be punished and humiliated. In the competitiveness of warfare, the losers are killed. But in sport, the losers need not incur shame or punishment, and they don’t have to die. The comparison between sports and war-fighting is where this second proposition seems strongest to me. Sport is an endeavour in which human beings may experience the same, or very nearly the same, sense of adventure, drama, camaraderie, competition, danger, love, and the immensification of life, as many soldiers attribute to army life or to warfighting. But in sports, no one has to die.

Third: Olympians are sexy. I just watched today’s matches in women’s fencing, and it was probably the hottest thing I’ve seen in a very long time. When Elisa DiFrancesco knew she won gold, she roared at the crowd like a wild animal and then jumped on her coach in celebration, and I suddenly wished I could be just like her. And that’s to say nothing of the litheness of all those trained and muscular bodies, or the artistry of their movements on the gymnastics floor, or the diving board, or the running track, or – actually I’m not sure what this has to do with my original topic. Sorry for the distraction there.

Fourth: The Olympic are an instrument of world peace. Just think of all those countries in the world – countries who are otherwise at odds with each other, playing games of diplomatic one-upmanship, cheating each other on trade deals, or even licking their wounds after having openly fought each other on battlefields – all sending their elite athletes to a world class gathering dedicated to friendship and culture. The very idea is awesome! And the Olympics has sometimes (but very rarely) served as a global platform to make peace statements, such as Thor Heyerdahl’s call for peace in Sarajevo, during the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, 1994. The Olympics can also demonstrate other socially just and progressive values. For instance: this year, for the very first time, every competing country has women on their team. Of course, it can represent evil values too: the facist power displays of the Berlin 1936 Olympics is the often cited example. But today, some very strong social pressures are working to prevent that kind of thing from happening again, which were not as strong in 1936, making such things much less likely.

Finally: Human excellence deserves celebration. This is not just for the sake of creating role-models. It’s also that every record broken, every unexpected victory, every surprising strategic innovation, and so on, is an extension and expansion of human potential – an “edification of the type Man” to use Nietzsche’s terms. This is a spiritual thing: for this edification of the human is one of the ways that we mere mortals seek the highest and deepest things in life, address ourselves to the immensities, and sometimes achieve that wonderfully pagan kind of immortality: apotheosis.

This celebration of athletic excellence contributes something to the second proposition, that the Olympics is competitiveness properly channeled. For those who stand on the silver or bronze podiums, and those who didn’t quite get that far, may still be participating in the spiritual edification of humankind by the expansion of our athletic possibilities, and so they too are ‘winners’ of perhaps an existential sort. As are we all.

But given that human excellence deserves celebration, it is therefore entirely appropriate, I think, that the games should also be surrounded by quasi-pagan theatre and ritual in the opening and closing ceremonies. There’s the dramatization of sacred stories: the history of the games, and of the host nation. There’s the torch relay from a sacred centre, Mount Olympus, to the host city, and the lighting of a sacred fire. There’s the raising of flags, the swearing of oaths, the distribution of honours, and the procession of the magisters, also known as the political dignitaries and the athletes. There’s the ritualistic reversal of these actions in the closing ceremonies, providing a melancholy but aesthetically satisfying sense of completion. Finally there’s the totemic adoration of an icon with five rings, whose presence proclaims a set of shared public values, in a manner little different than the adoration of a God who proclaimed for us our laws. Done laughing? But the analogy is very real. For just as God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, so does Olympic Spirit gives us three commandments: “Faster, Higher, Stronger” – and in winter it gives us one more: “Unity Through Sport”. The Olympics celebrates human athletic excellence religiously, as it should. And sure, some of these theatrics might go beyond the ‘mean’, and stray into that vice which Aristotle called vanity: the excess of honour. But I see the risk of incurring that vice as just the price of admission.

Taken together, these ideas seem to me good reasons to celebrate and enjoy the games. Indeed, I see the games as the sort of thing that belongs in the socially just world that many activists, including myself, want to create. If you want the people to be free, let them have their games: for playing sports and games are things that free people do.

Some of these arguments may also apply to other large projects that could edify us all, even while there are also other pressing social problems. Building the Large Hadron Collider, for instance, or sending a robotic probe to Mars, need not exclude making education and health care more universally accessible, building decent infrastructure on First Nations reserves, or creating a progressive justice system that does not criminalize the poor. We really can have both at the same time – if we want them both and are willing to commit ourselves to them.

So sit down in front of your computer or your telly, tune into an Olympic event – any event, whether athletes from your country are competing or not – and celebrate that it is good to be human, and good to be alive on earth, because we human beings are actually quite amazing creatures. And if tomorrow you have some kind of social activism work you want to do, then go and do it. And if you think the Olympic spirit has been corrupted by commercialism, or that it only distracts us from other social problems or that it diverts resources from other needy causes, then go and protest those social problems. But don’t dismiss the Olympic spirit itself. And don’t disrespect the athletes.

I got an interesting question from someone who backed my Kickstarter project:

Upon further research, it seems that you have a spiritual (specifically Pagan) background. Does this affect the timbre of your textbook? I am certainly aware of “spiritual” people who do, in fact, honor the values of critical thinking; However, I am also aware of others who use the language of this process in order to impose their own spiritual viewpoint of the universe in place a true skepticism. Does your textbook promote a spiritual approach to thinking? Or, does your textbook actually explore the concepts of logical reasoning, thinking for oneself, questioning everything, standing up to authority, etc.? I’m not saying that it does or doesn’t (how can I? — haven’t read it), but I’d like to know your response to these questions.

This is my response.

I am a philosopher, first and foremost. And although I have been part of the pagan community for much of my adult life, my thinking in the last several years has been more humanist than anything else. Most people in the pagan community know this about me (well, if they know about me at all). My most recent published works have been more philosophical than pagan, which has earned me some criticism from my own community, let me tell you!

I have some personal views about why I think philosophy and human reason is spiritual, but I have published those views elsewhere, notably in chapter 17 of my book “Circles of Meaning“. So I don’t need to use this logic text to describe those views. But if you are curious or worried about what bias I might bring to this project, that book might be a place to find it. You could also peruse my blog. Here’s a recent post that might be relevant to your concern.

Moreover, I have had in my classroom students with a huge variety of religious points of view, from mainstream Abrahamic faiths to small subcultures that I had never heard of before. And so I have acquired a lot of experience in presenting critical thinking principles and exercises in a respectful way, as objectively and as bias-free as possible. For when it comes to teaching logic, as I have done for many years, my purpose is not to tell people what to believe and what not to believe. It is to help students identify good and bad reasons for believing whatever they believe. Thereafter, students can make up their own minds. This is what any good philosophy professor does, no matter what his or her religion happens to be.

In the FAQ of the project, you can see the proposed table of contents for “Clear and Present Thinking”. You may note that I’m planning a chapter on “thinking about religion”. The thrust of that chapter will be to help students recognise the difference between strong and weak reasons for believing whatever they happen to believe about religion. I’m planning a discussion of Anselm’s Ontological Argument, Aquinas’ 5 Ways to God, and Pascal’s Wager, for instance. But I might also recruit a few contributors from several faith traditions for commentary. Two seminaries have already contacted me to inquire about using this textbook for their religious education programs, and neither of them are pagan seminaries.

Similarly, I hope to recruit contributors from across the political spectrum for the chapters on thinking about politics and economics.

I hope this helps answer your questions. Please contact me privately if you would like to know more.

Brendan

I have around 1260 people on my Facebook list. So I see lot of “memes” every day. Memes are ideas, expressed in pictures and videos and quotations and so on, which people share with each other, and the more they are shared the more their movements seem to take on a life of their own. One day I thought it would be fun to save them to a database, and tag them according to the kind of messages they express. What would I discover? Were there some kinds of memes that are more popular than others? What are these things really telling me about the thoughts and feelings of the people around me? And what are they telling me about myself?

The original idea was to take a kind of “snapshot” of the content of my (online) intellectual environment over four days, to see what was in it. What does this term ‘intellectual environment’ mean? First, I assure you this term does not refer to something fuzzy or vague. It is a definite reality. Think of it this way. In each of the various social worlds in which you move and interact with other people, ideas are mentioned, talked about, presented, argued over, approved, disapproved, and generally exchanged between people in many different ways. It often happens that in the process of getting bandied about like this, some ideas become more influential and more prevalent than others. You find this in the way certain words, names, phrases, jokes, questions, and beliefs are used more often than others. And you find it in the way people describe, define, criticize, praise, or judge things more often than other ways. The ideas that are expressed and traded around like that, and especially the more prevalent ones, form the intellectual environment that you live in. Thus your intellectual environment is the analogue to your your house, your neighbourhood, your local ecosystem, and the rest of your physical environment.

My basic rules were simple. I would take only the pictures which appeared while I happened to be online. That way, I wouldn’t have to be online all day. And I also promised myself not to deliberately change my web surfing habits during those days, so that I wouldn’t get an artificial result. I also didn’t track the links to blog posts, news articles, videos, or other online media. Just to be simple, I only tracked the photos and images. And I only tracked the ones which someone on my list shared after having seen it elsewhere. That way, each of these pictures had passed a kind of natural selection test. Someone had created the image and passed it on to someone who thought it worthy of being passed on to a third person.

After the first few hours, I had about 50 memes for my collection. And I already noticed a few general trends. So I started tagging the samples into what appeared to be the four most obvious categories: Inspirational, Humorous, Political, and Everything Else. The Humour category was already by far the largest, with more samples than the other categories combined. At the end of the first day, there was enough variety in the collection that I could create sub-categories. The largest of which was “Humour involving cats or kittens”. No surprise there, I suppose.

But at the end of the second day, with about 200 samples in my collection, I started to notice something else, which was much more interesting. A small, but significant, number of these samples had to with social, political, or religious causes other than those which I personally support. Some promoted causes that were reasonably similar to my values, but I have never done all that much to support them. For instance, I’ve nothing against vegetarianism, but I’m not vegetarian myself. So I labeled those ones the “near” values, because they are not my values, but they are reasonably close, and I felt no sense of being in conflict with them.

Then I noticed that some of my samples were for causes almost directly opposed to the ones I normally support. For example, I am not a Conservative voter. But the point here is not to start a debate about particular political positions. The point is that a lot of people on my FB list were showing support for values other than my own, through the memes that they shared. So instead of “un-friending” people with different political views than me, I saved and tracked their political statements just as I did everybody else’s. And I labeled those statements the “far” values, because they expressed values fairly distant from my own.

So now I could look at all these images and put them in three broad groups: Common values, Near values, and Far values. And in doing so, I had discovered a way to statistically measure the real variety of my intellectual environment, and the extent to which I am actually exposed to seriously different world views. Let’s name this measurement your Intellectual Environment Diversity Quotient. Or, to be short about it, your DQ.

At the end of four days, I had 458 pictures, and I had tagged them into six broad categories: Inspirational, Humour, Religion, Causes, Political, and Foreign Language. Here’s how it all turned out. (Note here that if some of these numbers don’t seem to add up, that is because some samples were tagged more than once, as they fit into two or (rarely) three categories.)

Total size of the dataset: 458 (100.0%)
Inspirational images: 110 (24.0%)
Humour: 225 (49.1%)
Religion: 36 (7.8%)
Causes: 148 (32.3%)
Political: 47 (10.2%)
Foreign language: 11 (2.4%)

And by the way, only 5 of them asked the recipient to “like” or “share” the image.

Now, for the sake of calculating how much real difference there is in my intellectual environment, we have to look at just the images expressing social, political, religious, or philosophical values of some kind. This doesn’t necessarily exclude the inspirational or comic pictures that had some kind of political or moral message, because as mentioned, a lot of the pictures got more than one tag. As it turned out, around half of them were making statements about values. (That, by the way, was also very interesting.)

Here’s the breakdown of exactly what my friends were posting pictures about. And as you can see, there’s a lot of variety. But what is interesting is not how different they are from each other. What’s interesting is how many of them are different from my own point of view. You can figure this for yourself by comparing the memes in your own timeline to what you say about yourself in your own FB profile, or by just deciding with each image, one at a time, how far you agree or disagree with each one. But in either case you have to be really honest with yourself. In this way, calculating your DQ is not just about taking a snapshot of your intellectual environment. It’s also about knowing yourself, and making a few small but serious decisions about what you really stand for.

Total Religion, Causes, and Political: 231 (100.0%)

Total religious: 36 (15.5%)

Buddhism: 4 (1.7%)
Christianity: 6 (2.5%)
Pagan: 8 (3.4%)
Northern / Asatru: 6 (2.5%)
Aboriginal / First Nations: 3 (1.2%)
Taoism: 1 (0.4%)
Hindu: 1 (0.4%)
Any: 6 (2.5%)
Athiesm: 1 (0.4%)

Total causes: 148 (64.0%)

against cruelty to animals: 3 (1.2%)
against religious proselytization: 3 (1.2%)
Support education, science, critical thinking: 19 (8.2%)
Pro-vegetarian: 1 (0.4%)
Organic and/or backyard gardening: 3 (1.2%)
feminism / anti-violence against women: 3 (1.2%)
feminism / sexual power relations: 7 (3.0%)
feminism / body image: 5 (2.1%)
anti-war: 4 (1.7%)
Israel-Iran antiwar solidarity: 3 (1.2%)
Support for soldiers / war veterans: 8 (3.4%)
Support for retired military dogs: 2 (0.8%)
support gun ownership: 3 (1.2%)
race relations, anti racism: 1 (0.4%)
support gay marriage / LGBT pride: 10 (4.3%)
support environmentalism: 5 (2.1%)
support universal health care in America: 1 (0.4%)
support the student protest in Quebec: 3 (1.2%)
Against facism and neo-nazism: 1 (0.4%)

Total party political: 47 (20.3%)

Right wing: 8 (3.4%)
Left wing: 36 (15.5%)
Centre: 3 (1.2%)

Now for the sake of figuring your DQ, we need to look at the percentage of value-expressing memes which are near to my values, and the percentage of those which are distant. That’s the measure of how much of the intellectual environment you live in could really challenge you, if you let it.

Total: 231 / 100.0%
Common values = 150 / 64.9%
Near values = 64 / 27.7%
Far values = 17 / 7.3%

So, my DQ, rounded off, is 28 and 7.

(And before you ask: no, I’m not going to tell you which values I labeled as common, and which I labelled as near or far, because that’s not the point here. If you already know me, you can probably guess.)

Now, you might be thinking, if I did the experiment on a different day, I’d collect different samples, and I’d get a different result. This was especially clear in the humorous pictures, because some of them depended on the time of year for their effect. For example, I got a lot of Douglas Adams references, because one of the days I was collecting the images was “Towel Day”. I also got a lot of Star Wars images because I was collecting my samples on May the 4th. Similar effects can also influence the memes that were expressing values, for instance if the dataset is collected during a religious holiday. Therefore, the figure I just quoted above might not be very accurate. Well, to address that possibility, I ran the experiment again two weeks later. And here’s what I got the second time.

Second set = 470
Total Religion, Causes, Political, Second Set: 243 (100.0%)
Common values = 157 (64.6%)
Near values = 77 (31.6%)
Far values = 9 (3.7%)

As you can see, it’s a slightly different result. The total collection was larger, and there were a lot fewer distant values represented. And among the comic pictures, there were a lot more references to Doctor Who. But overall it wasn’t a big difference. In fact the fraction of pictures which expressed some kind of value was still about 50%, just as before. So if I add the second set to the first, and do the math again, I can get a more accurate result, like this:

Both sets combined = 474 (100.0%)
Common values = 307 (64.7%)
Near values = 141 (29.7%)
Far values = 26 (5.4%)

New DQ = 30 and 4.

Now, I don’t know whether that figure is high or low, because I have no one else’s data to compare it to. And I also don’t know whether it would be good or bad to have a high DQ, or a low one, because, well, that’s a value statement too!

But what I do know is that I can now accurately measure the extent to which my intellectual environment has a real range of different ideas and opinions. I can measure how much “otherness”, social or religious or political “other-ness”, exists in my world. I can also measure how much I prefer the somewhat less stressful company of people who think more or less the same way I do. Or, I can also measure the extent to which my intellectual environment serves only as a kind of echo-chamber, repeating back to me my own ideas without examining them very deeply.

But the really fun part of this experiment is that you can do it too! What’s your DQ? Post your results in the comments section below.

And did you find this exercise useful and fun? If so, please support The Campaign for Clear and Present Thinking. I’m considering including this exercise in the project.

Good morning,

I invite you to join the campaign for “Clear and Present Thinking” – it’s a campaign to create a high-quality textbook in philosophy and critical thinking, and make it available to everyone in the world for free.

We’re doing it for two main reasons:

– Textbooks are far too expensive. Frankly, a lot of my students are so cash-strapped they are forced to choose between food and the rent, two of three times a year. This is a project that will reduce the cost of education by about $70 for all my students, and potentially many more.

– Good critical thinking skills matter. We’ve all been frustrated or hurt by people who make foolish decisions, or who hold dogmatic and unexamined beliefs.

And good critical thinking is not just about analyzing concepts. It’s also about questioning everything; standing up to authority; being creative and resourceful; thinking for yourself; and knowing who you are.

Everyone benefits when more people can do those things really well, and I’m writing this book and using it in my classes to help make that happen.

This campaign will help me raise the funds to pay for contributors, designers, artists, and translators, so that we can create a high quality teaching tool for college students, and make it available to the whole world.

But it won’t happen if we don’t reach our funding target of $5,000. And the success of the project depends on how much social media attention it gets.

So please, spread the word! Share it on Facebook, Twitter, G+, your blog, and every social network you use. And please donate to the project! And I thank you for your support.

Click here to find out more, and to contribute!

People sometimes ask, since I am a philosophy professor, what do I teach?

Well there are several answers. One is that I teach logic, argumentation, and the history of ideas. Another is that I teach the skills that help people to question everything, stand up to authority, be creative and resourceful, to think clearly and carefully, to think for themselves, and to know who they are.

But as a philosopher and as something resembling a spiritual man, what do I teach?

Well in that sense of the question, I have no special teaching at all. I offer no new tables of the law; I make no demands; and I tell no one what to do.

Well then, if I do not teach such things, then what do I do?

I examine my situation, as a living human being, here at this place on earth, and at this time in history.

Things are so rarely what they appear to be on the surface. Everyone knows that; but few will tap upon the surfaces of things, to hear what realities from within echo back.

I find that I have these immensities before me: the earth beneath me, other people around me, my loneliness within me, and my death upon me.

And so I have these questions: how shall I dwell upon the earth? How shall I converse with my people? How shall I emerge from my loneliness? How shall I face my mortality?

And to find answers, I have all my relations: my body, my landscape, my animals, my food, my family, my guests, my friends, my lovers, my elders, my hometown, my arts, my possessions, my heroes, my mind, my teachers, my storytellers, my leaders, my healers, and my gods.

I find that every one of us has these same realities, these same questions, and these same relations. In some sense, then, I find that we are one.

As I tap upon the surfaces of the immensities, I ask: which of my tuning-hammers makes music, and which ones only make noise? The best music, I have found, is made with humanity, integrity, and wonder.

And I have found that everyone has these instruments ready to hand. Everyone, I affirm, although I also find that only a few of us take them up and play.

And to understand me fully, think of the many meanings of the word ‘play’.

When I hear music, I share it; I hope that my people will listen with me. When I make music, I share it too; I hope that my people will celebrate with me and play along. When I make dissonant or offending sounds, I trust my people will warn me, so I can make amends as best as I can.

This I do, not simply as a philosopher or a spiritual man; this I do as a human being, alive on earth, at this place and time.

Nothing more, perhaps, could be asked of anyone. And, perhaps, nothing less.

As a writer, although I have the backing of an excellent international publisher, I still have to do most of my own publicity and marketing. I have two promotional “giveaways” already open (read about them here and here). Now let me tell you about a third.

Two years ago I recorded “The Island”, an album of 12 of my original songs. For a while, I was selling them on the internet for $10, but I took that down because, well to be honest, I ran out of CD’s. Not that I had made many in the first place.

Over the last few months I’ve received a lot of emails asking if the album will be made available again. So here’s what I propose: Instead of arranging to send me the $10, I will email you the album as a series of mp3’s, for free,

And in return, you will write a review of one of my books on that book’s Amazon page, and also on any social networking tools that you use (your blog, your FB or G+ page, your Twitter feed, etc.)

It would not have to be a lengthly review: even three or four sentences would be enough. As I must do most of my own publicity, I need as much help from others as I can. A positive review would be most welcome, of course, but an honest one is all I ask for. The album will be sent as soon as the review you write is visible on the net.

If interested, email me directly. And thanks for your help!

Interested in a free signed copy of “Circles of Meaning”, or “Fellwater”? Just click Like or Share on the book’s Facebook fan page. For every 1,000 “Likes” I will give away a copy of the book to someone selected at random from those who liked or shared it.

Fellwater:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fellwater/335085003202636

Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Circles-of-Meaning-Labyrinths-of-Fear/107651916030523

Spread the word!

Anyone heard of the “Eco-Handprint”? I was first directed to this idea by a colleague of mine at work, who pointed me to this blog post by Jing Gomez, “Handprints”, posted on 23rd March 2012. This blog post was cited in my college’s announcement of its new “Heritage Handprints” environmental awareness campaign.

The main expert mentioned in relation to the origin of the “Handprint” was Gregory Norris of the Harvard School of Public Health. As the blog post describes it:

In Norris’ study, he mentions that after learning to compute LCA (Life cycle assessments) for their total footprints, his students come to conclude that the earth would have been better off if they had not been born. Sadly, many subscribe to this.

This led Norris to invent a new economic indicator, the “Handprint”, the measure of how much human activity benefits the earth. But let’s look at the claim that students who performed this assessment concluded that “the earth would have been better off if they had not been born”. Now misanthropy is certainly a major moral problem. But misanthropy is not the problem here: the problems are pollution and global warming. And those who say that studying the “Footprint” produces misanthropy are simply wrong, as I shall explain.

The idea of the “Handprint” is given to us as a preferable alternative to the “Footprint”, the main economic indicator of environmental impact that has been used effectively by scientists since the 1990’s. Here’s what the blog post says a “Footprint” is.

Traditionally, talk centers on footprints — the sum total of the negative impact of pollution released and resources consumed by the products we use. It cannot but be depressing.

But this is wrong. Here’s how it is defined by Mathis Wackernagel, the man who invented the idea of the eco-footprint in the first place:

EP/ACC is a simple, yet comprehensive tool: it provides an accounting framework for the biophysical services that a given economy requires from nature. It is calculated by estimating the land area, in various categories, necessary to sustain the current level of consumption by the people in that economy, using prevailing technology. An economy’s full Ecological Footprint would include all the land whose services this economy appropriates from all over the globe to provide necessary resource inputs and to assimilate corresponding waste outputs. The EF/ACC concept thereby demonstrates the ecological dependence of economic systems. It is both an analytic and heuristic device for understanding the sustainability implications of different kinds of human activities, and serves as an awareness tool and an action-oriented planning tool for decision-making towards sustainability.

(M. Wackernagel, “Ecological Footprint and Appropriated Carrying Capacity: A Tool for Planning Toward Sustainability” Doctoral thesis accepted by the Faculty of Graduate Studies, School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, October 1994).

A straw man fallacy can be found in the claim that an ecological footprint is the sum of all negative human impacts on the earth. But as you can see from the original definition, that’s simply not true. The ecological footprint is the sum of all human impact of any kind, positive or negative. It is the sum of how much physical land on the earth is needed to supply all of a given society’s material needs: food, building materials, energy, and the like. It is also a measure of how much land is needed to assimilate our waste: landfills, incinerators, and so on. The eco-footprint of London, England, for instance, is estimated at 50 million hectares, or approximately the land area of the rest of the United Kingdom.

Now when one looks at the actual impacts of human communities like that, it may appear as if they are all harmful to the earth. But that’s simply not true, because the EF/ACC measure is capable of incorporating the extent to which environmental exploitation is sustainable and renewable. In other words, it already does the job of measuring the positive impacts. And indeed its job is also to measure whether our impacts are harmful or not. Thus there is simply no need for a separate economic indicator to tell “the other half of the story”. Thus the characterization of the eco-footprint as a measure of the “negative” or “harmful” impacts is a straw man.

The blog post targets not the actual problem of global warming and climate change, but rather targets its effect on human emotions. It talks about how the study of humanity’s eco-footprint “cannot but be depressing”. It says that the study of humanity’s eco-footprint is the “ugly side” of the story. But these are all red herrings. Global warming and climate change is a fact, agreed upon by the vast overwhelming majority of serious scientific evidence discovered by competent scientists. Now some people may, indeed, feel profoundly personally troubled by this fact. But if we are good scientists and good critical thinkers, then we care more about reality and the truth than we do about our personal feelings. And if the facts of the case are unsettling or upsetting, our duty is not to tell ourselves a gratifying feel-good story about them. Rather, our duty is to do something about it.

But what should we do? The blog suggests that doing superficial things like printing computer documents on both sides of a page, or inflating car tires properly, will save the earth. Thus the illusion is created that leads people to believe, wrongly, that by doing such superficial things, they are fulfilling the moral duty to protect the environment from harm, including the kind of harm that can render the earth unliveable for human beings. But that is like re-arranging the furniture in a house that is on fire. And this is an appropriate analogy, given that one of the recent serious effects of global warming is an increase in the size and frequency of forest fires.

Indeed that very complacency and non-action is veritably encouraged by the author of the blog post, in his statement that we should “think beyond big changes”. There is no polite way for me to say what I’m about to say: but to “think beyond big changes” is to fail to criticize the economic and political forces which both created and also continually benefits from the continued destruction of the earth. A guilty conscience is soothed; a depressing reality ignored; and the corporate-funded destruction of the Earth is permitted to continue unabated. While we ordinary people recycle our plastic bottles and lower our thermostats in the evening, the big corporations build more offshore oil platforms, and more coal-fired power plants, and pumps more pollution into the atmosphere and the oceans we all breathe and drink.

In sum, the “handprint” is a deliberate attempt to prevent people understanding the problem of global warming properly. It’s not the hand that touches the earth and heals: rather, it is the hand that covers the eyes and the camera lens so you don’t see, covers the pages of your scientific journals so you don’t read, and plugs the ears with its fingers so you don’t hear the truth. And it’s the hand that holds down other people’s hands and prevents them from doing the most useful and effective kind of work.

Dr. Brendan Myers has a Ph.D in environmental ethics, and serves as professor of philosophy at Heritage College, Gatineau, Quebec.

Who Is Carlo DiAngelo?

If you can find out, you could win a copy of “Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear” by Brendan Myers!

“Carlo DiAngelo” is a character from Myers’ new novel, “Fellwater“. But like several characters in the story, there’s hints that he might actually be thousands of years old. Back then, Carlo lived in the Roman Empire, and he had another name.

If you can figure out what his original name was, I’ll put you in the draw for a free, signed copy of “Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear“! I’m putting three copies of “Circles of Meaning” up for three winners. So you have triple the chances of winning!

This draw will take place on Monday, 30th April 2012, and the winner will be announced on the Fellwater “fan” page on Facebook, here. Happy reading friends! And good luck!

If you’ve seen The Wicker Man (1973), and then go to see its successor film The Wicker Tree (2011), you will probably leave feeling that the 1973 original is the better of the two films. Yet now that it’s been about 12 hours since I’ve seen the new one, I have to admit the new one is growing on me.

The film starts with images of a group of pagan revelers, dancing around with firebrands. This scene, filmed in slow motion and partially out of focus, sets a dreamlike quality but also lets us know that eventually we’re going to see these people again. And since we have all seen the 1973 film we know they are celebrating someone’s death. Then we’re taken to Dallas, Texas, to meet our heroes: two young and innocent and starry-eyed and cute-as-can-be Christian evangelicals about to embark on missionary work in Scotland. One of them, Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol), is a famous gospel singer, and so her arrival in Scotland is something of an event. But when she and her cowboy boyfriend Steve (Henry Garrett) go door to door delivering missionary pamphlets, all they get is rejection. Cue the entry of Sir Lachlan Morrison, played by silky-voiced Graham McTavish, who invites our heroes to try and evangelise the people of his village, Tressock. Wicker Man fans might enjoy the homage to the previous film in certain names. Morrison, here the name of the local lord, is possibly related to Rowan Morrison; and Nuada, the god of the sun worshipped on Summerisle in 1973, here serves as the name of the company that manages a nuclear power plant.

When we arrive in Tressock, signs of a flourishing pagan culture are evident immediately, from the icon of a pagan goddess on the hood of a car, to the apparent sexual licensiousness of nearly everybody: and this was a little disappointing. I would have liked that reveal to have been a little more subtle. But then again, we’ve all seen the 1973 original and we all know what to expect. The locals are polite to Beth and Steve, and even sing along to one of their Christian hymns at a prayer meeting. Then they invite our heroes to become the May Queen and the Laddie in an upcoming festival. And that’s when we as the audience are sure they’re doomed. What remains, then, is to see exactly how they meet their doom. In a way, the film is about the inexorability of fate: Lord Summerisle himself says as much in a cameo appearance. So the plot of the film is an unfolding of Beth and Steve’s fate. We as audience members know what is going to happen: all the mystery and surprise is in how it happens. In that sense the film is a bit like a prequel.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that some of the supporting characters can be quite casual, even clownish, about some very macabre activities. And through them the film attempts a kind of marriage between comedy and tragedy. I’m really not sure that this marriage worked.

At times the inexorability of the plot prompted in me a feeling of shadenfreude, as our pair of all-American poster children for virtue are so easily manipulated and deceived by the people of Tressock. But I also felt a lot of pity for them too. Their relationship with each other, and with themselves, really sustained the film. Like Seargeant Howie before them, they are religiously upright and committed, which gives their characters a solid basis. They are the two normal people in a world full of eccentrics. But unlike Howie, they are not fully pure. And the subtle struggle within each of them to live up to their new commitments interested me. Beth, for instance, secretly misses the career she had before becoming an evangelical. And Steve showed some genuine cognitive dissonance after an afternoon of infidelity with local nymphomaniac Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks). By the way, Lolly’s libido turns out to be driven not by hedonism, but by despair. If you can infer exactly what her despair springs from, I hope you will agree she has one of the finest emotional moments in the film. I’d best say no more about that, lest I spoil any more of the plot.

I must also say, there were some moments at the end I genuinely didn’t expect. Beth and Steve met their fate as we knew they would, but the shock you feel when director Robin Hardy’s thesis is revealed – the thesis that great evil can come when people’s beliefs in the rightness of their actions is strong enough – came from an unexpected direction. This too helped make up for the weaknesses of the film: the unstable union of comedy and tragedy, the wooden-ness (dare I say wicker-ness?) of some of the characters. I’d give the film three out of five stars, although somehow I feel as if I should be giving it more. There’s still lots of depth and richness to be explored in the world of the Wicker Man, and lots more terrors to be seen as well. Robin Hardy, if you’re reading this, I hereby volunteer to write the script for the third film.

Some links: Official web site (with trailer) / Wikipedia / IMDB