To take the most curmudgeonly one first, if Killer Whales have legal rights comparable to those of humans (or at least natural born US citizens), do they have legal responsibilities as well—and can Tilikum thus be prosecuted for murder or manslaughter for the death of Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau? Or will his plea be self-defense?

That’s stretching it, obviously, but one of the interesting questions posed by this case—much like the general questions that arise when we talk about “animal minds”—is where is the dividing line? This question came up repeatedly in the 1970s and 1980s with reference to all of the chimp/language studies, around which the linguistics and psychology community was sharply polarized until everyone got bored and forgot about the chimps and moved on to the more ivory-towerish questions posed by Artificial Intelligence instead. Then there’s John Lilly’s work, which galvanized a lot of people (including me) by being tantalizing, but never as much as Lilly thought it was, and Lou Herman’s work, which was a lot more detailed and orderly, but also a lot more cautious. But that these are animals with minds is no longer in question.

PETA, I have to say, has a point here. A number of observers and even some scientists have, over the decades, questioned the appropriateness of keeping dolphins and whales penned up. I remember some absolutely horrible facilities from the 1970s around Tampa where dolphins were kept in tanks not much larger than a bathtub, and a comparison to human solitary confinement in a small dark cell designed for sensory deprivation would not be unjustified. And one could argue that Sea World’s facilities, while spacious, aren’t really designed to avoid stress. In addition, orcas and dolphins are smart, like chimps and some other primates—whether they’re as smart as people are isn’t really the appropriate question. But they do seem to be smart enough to cause a great deal of head-scratching and revisions to the kinds of assumptions made forty or fifty years ago about the question of animal intelligence. This knowledge has been hard earned, by both humans and dolphins (which Killer Whales actually are, by the way—they’re a big species of dolphin). Let’s face it—we’re talking about Killer Whales (and dolphins, presumably, and possibly chimps and some other primates)—we’re not talking about anteaters, or bats, or lizards. And even if we’re not smart enough ourselves to articulate why this is, we sort of know that it’s true.

And yet, and yet…once past the obvious quandary posed by the fact that it’s PETA, who can be some of the most annoying people on the face of the planet when they put their minds to it, who are actually doing an interesting thing here, there are some other issues. First of all, legal systems take a while to catch up to events, yes, but there are already a bunch of laws on the books relating to the protection and preservation of marine mammals—although they don’t go so far as to define “slavery” as the equivalent of a large tank at Sea World.

That outfits like Sea World could see some financial hit here is pretty clear, but also irrelevant. Obviously, no one would go to Sea World to see a Herring show. Well, maybe they would—I don’t know. But there is also the consideration that Marine Parks, like Zoos, provide an educational function—and it’s not trivial. Well, maybe with the mass adoption of the internet over the past two decades a bit less so, but it’s hard to tell. There are genuine animal rescue programs. There are (or used to be) petting pools. These are fun places, but people learn stuff too–and while it’s one thing to see an animal on television or a computer screen, it’s another thing see see one in person–so to speak.

Additionally, one can foresee a not completely impossible scenario in which several interesting legal rulings result in Zoos and Marine Parks having to decide which animals they would keep, and what to do with those big tanks now that they had to let all the dolphins and killer whales go. Not to mention where all those very large dolphins and killer whales would actually go to. There are chimp retirement parks around the US—but there’s nothing comparable for marine mammals. Since many of these animals only know a life in captivity, it’s plausible that release in open water could be a death sentence. This is just one of the imponderables. Remember the Free Willy whale that there was a massive campaign to release, and which raised millions to send him to Iceland where he could be released? That didn’t turn out so well, although that certainly isn’t an argument that he should have stayed where he was. On the other hand, there are clearly cases where a return to open water, especially back to an original population, is not only possible, but seems like the right thing to do.

So this will be interesting to watch unfold–one of those dilemmas posed by modern life for which whatever the resolution, someone will be deeply unhappy. I don’t know enough law to know which way this might go, but the fact that the judge is even entertaining the possibility of letting this proceed probably seems like some sort of milestone–whether a good or a bad one depends, of course, on how this gets resolved.

Today, the Journal published a response by 38 climate scientists to the commentary as a letter to the editor. This continues a pattern at the Journal of refusing to grant equal space and prominence to refutations of factually deficient commentaries. But given the Journal could have simply refused to publish any response, this is something a reasonably significant accomplishment. (Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway document the Journal‘s long and iniquitous history of refusing to publish rebuttals in great detail in their book Merchants of Doubt, reviewed by S&R here)

Here are the opening lines from the rebuttal:

Do you consult your dentist on your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field, and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

On January 27, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed on climate change by the climate science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology….

Please click on the link above (or this one, which could move the rebuttal behind the Journal‘s paywall at any time) to read the rest.

Actress and lesbian Cynthia Nixon has caused a firestorm in the gayosphere by saying that for her, sexual orientation was a choice.

Obviously, this view undermines the arguments of gay political orthodoxy, and gives the right wingnuts who run “gay rehabilitation prayer camps” support that they were right all along–”See Harold, I told you he was just doing it to be ornery.”  Of course, the truth is  probably like most things: The truth is somewhere in between. It may be for her, but it isn’t for most gay people.

At any rate, this becomes pretty scary when coupled with another news item from the week, news that conservatives are conservative because they are stupid.

Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

And this isn’t some progressive spoof either, it’s a peer reviewed study based on longitudinal market research in the U.K. Now on first blush, you’d think this would bring a smile to our liberal faces. And it did. I admit it. (Although I started to send it to my conservative friends, but didn’t, since I thought it might be cruel. Probably not, since they don’t believe in science and statistics anyway.)

But the more you think about it, the bigger problem it is for us. Because if people are conservative because they’re stupid, then that’s a problem because one of our core tenets is: It’s off-limits to persecute people for things they have no control over like skin color, sexual orientation, intelligence, etc. I can see it now. At some Florida supermarket somewhere, a small boy is pointing to a seventy year-old woman wearing a halter top, hot pants and a Newt Gingrich button and his mom is saying, “Shhhhh! Don’t point, Alex. She’s a Republican, but she can’t help it.”  And this means that we have to stop mocking Rush and all right-wing positions on climate, gun control, taxes and the like, because they are too dumb to understand why their ideas are bad.

Just outside Chicago, one hospital is advertising its obesity clinic with billboards that say, “It’s a disease, not a decision.”

Romney-Santorum 2012. It’s a condition, not a choice.

Dear Mr. Rutan,

Ever since you won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 you’ve been a minor hero of mine. I’ve felt that the development of private human spaceflight was the critical next step toward moving humanity off our small blue marble since I was in high school, and SpaceShipOne was the first major step in that direction. The commercialization of space travel is a large part of why I work in aerospace myself designing satellite and space vehicle electronics.

This is why I was disappointed to find that you had co-signed a Wall Street Journal commentary regarding human-caused climate disruption along with 15 other scientists and engineers. The commentary was replete with incorrect and misleading information. So much so, in fact, that I was surprised that you, as an engineer, would attach your name to it.

You may not be aware of this, but greenhouse crops are very productive because farmers take great care to ensure that the crops have optimal nutrition. The farmers ensure that the crops in the greenhouses have enough water, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients in addition to higher carbon dioxide. Without increasing all of these nutrients merely increasing carbon dioxide in the greenhouse’s air will not produce fast growing, nutritious crops. This is why the greenhouse claim made in the Journal commentary was incomplete and misleading – higher atmospheric carbon dioxide only leads to greater productivity when all other nutrients are also more available. It’s not a foregone conclusion that, outside of greenhouses, the other nutrients plants need to flourish will be more available. In fact, a great deal of research over the last few years suggests the opposite, that usable precipitation and fixed nitrogen will actually become rarer, counteracting most if not all of the improvements in crop yields and overall carbon sequestration by plants worldwide.

This is one example of incomplete and misleading information from the commentary you signed. There are at least five more. I can detail them for you if you are interested.

Mr. Rutan, as a successful engineer you have certainly developed an innate understanding that the quality of your opinions can only be as good as the information you have. In the case of human-caused climate disruption, I’m afraid that the information upon which you’re basing opinions appears to be rather poor quality. Climate realists like myself accept that the case for human-driven climate disruption is supported by multiple independent lines of evidence and that no alternative hypothesis yet presented has withstood scientific scrutiny or explained the observed climate changes. In this case, the strongest and best available data supports the proposition that humans are driving global climate disruption, that the disruptions to the Earth’s climate will continue to worsen this century, and the sooner we address the root causes of climate disruption, the better.

Mr. Rutan, if you our your people are reading this, I’d love to sit down with you sometime, engineer to engineer, and discuss why I think your opinions are based upon incorrect and incomplete data.

Very truly yours,

Brian Angliss

Bats have a bad rep. Think bat and you likely think bat with rabies. Think bat and you likely think dirty bat or bat as vampiric bloodsucker. Think bat and you likely think evil harbinger of doom and destruction. (Okay, that last one’s a tad over the top … but you get the idea.) Bats have fewer defenders than fear-laden critics.

But bats, the only mammal structurally capable of sustained flight, are just creatures with significant ecological — and economic — roles. Hate mosquitoes and other insects? They’re on the nighttime menu for bats. Like bees, many bats pollinate plants and spread seeds. Bat shit (sorry; bat guano) is rich in nitrogen and is a profitable fertilizer. Bats’ ability to navigate in the dark (echolocation) is a subject of significant scientific study.

But in the past five years, up to 6.7 million bats are estimated to have died in 16 states and Canada, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. Three species face extinction — the little brown bat, the northern long-eared bat and the tricolored bat. A malady called white-nose syndrome is killing them.

Researchers gleaned the estimate by counting bats in winter trips to caves. Bats roost densely, reports Darryl Fears of The Washington Post. So researchers take digital photographs of bats snoring through winter and literally count noses of bats. In 2009, researchers estimated bat deaths at about 1 million. The new figure has alarmed scientists. Says Mylea Bayless, conservation programs manager for Bat Conservation International in Austin, Tex.:

We’re watching a potential extinction event on the order of what we experienced with bison and passenger pigeons for this group of mammals, The difference is we may be seeing the regional extinction of multiple species. Unlike some of the extinction events or population depletion events we’ve seen in the past, we’re looking at a whole group of animals here, not just one species. We don’t know what that means, but it could be catastrophic.

White-nose syndrome, reports Fears, is caused by a fungus called Geomyces destructans. The fungus eats through the skin and membranes of bats. The syndrome was first observed in in 2006 in Howe Caverns near Albany, N.Y., a popular tourist destination down the road from me. Reports Fears:

Since then, biologists in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, Indiana and other states have returned to caves and mines during the annual winter hibernation of bats and reported alarming numbers of fresh dead to wildlife and gaming agencies.

The extensive demise of bats threatens forest health — and segments of the economy based on forests.

The paper products industry could also be hard hit if pests such as the emerald ash borer proliferate in the absence of bats. Loggers in states such as Vermont “ought to be concerned, but I don’t think the word has really gotten out to these folks,” said Mollie Matteson, a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity in Richmond, Vt.

“It certainly behooves people concerned about the health of forests — loggers or ecologists — to pay attention,” Matteson said. “But it’s hard to make a direct connection between 7 million bats dead and what happens to forest pests.”

I still don’t like bats. I’ll still duck when they flit over my deck. But none of us should be happy that nearly 7 million have died with no apparent recourse to a cure. The potential extinction of any species — even one that fills many of us with fear and loathing — must concern us.

More on bats:
• white nose syndrome
• the economic cost of losing bats
• the science of bats (video)
• Bat Conservation International
• Organization for Bat Conservation

photo credit:
• vampire bat by Michael & Patricia Fogden/Corbis

by Robert S. Becker

Stay ‘til the end – and a rich payoff of Carl Sagan’s gemlike insights. A little clean-up work first, to clear the palate.

I don’t regularly read Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer (CK, as in crank), often regret when I do, ending with gnashing teeth. From time to time, perplexity or hilarity moves me to the dark side, hunting out the loopy logic behind the latest fringe skullduggery. I used to read that wily conservative wordsmith, Peggy Noonan – a far better stylist – until I gagged at her unctuous Vatican sycophancy.

So, I brightened suspiciously at Krauthammer’s seemingly apolitical title, “Are we alone in the universe?” Ah-ah, I guessed, are greedy oligarchs, having written off the Middle East quagmire, reigniting manifest destiny into space? Doesn’t commerce that follows expansion, like Columbus or our interminable invasions, pay back venture capital that ventures far and wide? Imagine the military cash blast from space voyaging, as in W.’s fantasy pitch for actual Mars landings. What overstretched empire desperate for a larger purpose wouldn’t drool to conquer the moon, awarding itself an armed catbird seat to spot evildoers “from above,” like gods?

CK opens with confusion, puzzled why we haven’t yet found intelligent life elsewhere despite the huge sample pool – billions of stars, an infinity of solar systems. I was itching to hear him pontificate about not finding intelligent life scattered across his own party’s goofy field of candidates. But no, instead the Crank posited that advanced civilizations are rare because they self-destruct, ironically killed off by their own “intelligence.” And then the shocker: he cited the hallowed authority of Carl Sagan. Sans proof or citation. Right, sounds just like the scientist Sagan I recall, the indefatigable founder of the whole SETI program – the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. Why would this incredible space enthusiast waste decades and large budgets if he believed there was nothing to find? The world’s most famous scientist of his generation wrote a book called Intelligent Life in the Universe.

Finally, out of this Krauthammer morass emerges this leap of logic, a defense of rational, life-affirming politics:

if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction . . . in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations —[politics] is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.

Is this it, a covert campaign pitch, implying redemption, indeed survival, depends wholly on smarter politicians? How can he blithely ignore a contradiction the size of Jupiter? How can politics be “sovereign” when CK’s own frantic fringe, the creeps who defy compromise on national debt or paying our bills, torpedo the process? Where’s the illusory sovereignty of politics when the right holds only contempt for unhinged, lying liberals? How can CK evoke politics when his demented fellows play demotion derby, denigrating huge threats like global warming or worldwide pollution plus any sort of political solutions? Right, the sovereignty of politics drowned in a bathtub.

That dead end aside, there’s more nonsense afoot, like Krauthammer’s claim any search for space life “betrays a profound melancholy, a lonely species in a merciless universe [that] anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence”? Utter silence, like the key “background noise” that revealed the Big Bang? CK whines this void of contact is “maddening” because “it makes no sense.” Wait a minute. Doesn’t scientific curiosity, not melancholy, drive our space investigations, as Sagan’s illustrious career proved? Since when is science about self-pity, not wonder or desire for knowledge? Testing, testing, earth to CK.

Second, considering the brevity of the SETI hunt (a few decades), the vast distances, and the rarity of the life-sustaining Goldilocks habitats, jumping to any big conclusions is absurd. Results: not maddening, nor surprising, certainly not unexpected. Further, our “lonely species” is maddeningly overpopulating our shrinking planet, thus dying from disease, malnutrition, and poverty. The poorest among us aren’t melancholy or anxious because no wizard found any chatty playmates lights years away, but because desperate earthlings are bereft of resources. This supposedly “smart rightwinger” obviously skipped way too many science classes.

Then, from bad logic he shifts to chicanery, as my research failed to establish where “Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.” Would Sagan the evidence-driven scientist make such specific predictions about absent civilizations about which no one knows anything? True, Sagan the strong critic of nuclear arms – and the Vietnam War, plus damage to the earth – imagined dire results for this very planet. But he had evidence galore, even before 1996 when he died. Readers, any help here?

CK’s distortion reflects his hijacking lines from Sagan’s novel, Contact (pgs. 358-360), especially fanciful dialogue between Ellie (human scientist) and the Alien, to whom she asks how his imaginary “advanced civilization” might respond to cosmic threats.

[Ellie] “If the Nazis had taken over the world, our world, and then developed interstellar spaceflight, wouldn’t you have stepped in?”

[Alien] “You’d be surprised how rarely something like that happens. In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always.”

First obvious fallacy: fictional characters speak for themselves, not their creators. That’s why essays exist. Second, the Alien only cites “aggressive” civilizations prone self-destruction, thus they’re the exception: “You’d be surprised how rarely something like that happens.” I resent when cranky mental midgets, for their own needs, misrepresent what mental giants “say” in novels. Wrong and stupid. There’s only one correction to such intellectual crimes: Sagan’s own lucid wisdom, full of important ideas and opinions, even wit, without sounding strident or self-righteous.

Here’s a summary of Sagan quotations, and a few favorite Sagan’s treats, tasty enough to drive away the bitter taste from getting Kraut-hammered:

Gems in Sagan’s World of Wonders:

“We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.”

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

“What a marvelous cooperative arrangement — plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.”

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

“A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.”

“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.”

“I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

“The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.”

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

“The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God,’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

“Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become space-faring – not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive … If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.”

“Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it’s burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being — and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.”

“We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”

“Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us — and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.” 

#8:

The thermometer says it’s 23 degrees, but the wind blowing east off the Gulf of Maine says differently. I can hardly feel my fingers though my deerskin mittens have been off for less than half a minute. I wanted to grab a couple snapshots with my Blackberry of the waves as they roll in and hit the granite shoreline that the receding tide has been slowly revealing. As the waves hit, the same wind that’s numbing my fingers is sheering off the tops of the whitecaps before they hardly have time to spray. There’s a booming flash of white—and then the wind erases it.

I’m standing at the southern tip of Mt. Desert Island, near the western end of the natural seawall. I’ve come here, to the edge of the sea, to spend some time with Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea.

I’ve also brought Carson’s first book, The Sea Around Us, although for most of the day the sea is safely out there. The cold weather has forced me to spend most of my time huddled in my car with the heater going as I’ve read. It’s pretty much what I expected, although you can never really be sure what the weather’s doing at the coast until you get there. From Acadia’s mountaintops, I’ve seen fogbanks roll in from the open sea and swallow entire islands in Freshmen’s Bay in a matter of minutes. I’ve walked through feet of snow to sit, in shorts, on Sand Beach on warm March weekends. You just never know.

A trip to the coast always recharges me, and I thought Carson might make a particularly good traveling companion. Sitting on the edge of the sea to read her work might be an appropriate way to try and channel her a little bit. The Edge of the Sea is a magnificent little book, so to read it here, even if I’m shut away from the sea in my car, is a treat.

If Robert Frost had gone to work writing nature guides for Roger Tory Peterson, the result would have probably resembled something like this book. First published in 1955, it is a love letter to lovers of the sea, to those who find joy exploring tidepools and beaches. Such places are, for Carson, places of wonder, and she invites readers to take a peek. “By daylight the sunlight filters through the jungle of rockweeds to reach its floor only in shifting patches of shadow-flecked gold,” she writes, “by night the moonlight spreads a silver ceiling above the forest….”

Carson breaks her book into three main sections, each one focusing on a different type of coastline: the rocky coasts of New England, the sandy beaches of the mid- and southern Atlantic seaboard; the coral and mangrove coasts of Florida’s tip. She traces the geological history and influences of each area and then begins to pick her way along the water’s edge. As a result, The Edge of the Sea brims with information about the fauna and flora of the coast the way Maine’s rocky shore brims with mussels.

But Carson’s not merely content to offer information. She relays essence. Take those mussels, for instance. “Their shells were a soft color, the misty blue of distant mountain ranges,” she writes. The moment you read something like that, you know it’s true, whether you’ve seen vast mussel beds or not (and I have seen plenty, though none today here at the seawall).

Every walk along the sea’s edge that Carson writes about offers an opportunity to see something new. “Everywhere I looked, directly in the beam of my flashlight or obliquely in the half-illuminated gloom, crabs were scuttling about,” she writes about one such nighttime walk. “Boldly and possessively they inhabited the weed-shrouded rocks. All the grotesqueness of their form accentuated, they seemed to have transformed this once familiar place into a goblin world.”

Through Carson’s thoughtful exploration, the wonders never cease. For instance, she explains that a large population of periwinkles scraping the seaside rocks for food has a pronounced erosive effect, cutting away rock surfaces, grain by grain, at about the same pace as the earth’s major forces of erosion—rain, frost, and floods. As someone who’s spent hundreds of hours along the Maine coast, it was startling to have something as common as periwinkles examined with such fascinating newness. I had resolved to go look for one when I was out taking photos, but the spray on the rocks had turned to a thin layer of ice that I didn’t have the nerve to brave.

As exquisite as The Edge of the Sea is for its poetic prose and its thoughtful science, Carson has one final treat in store for readers: she brushes, like a warm coastal current, against some of the biggest philosophical questions out there. “What truth is expressed by the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf?” To try and understand the sea is to try and understand “the ultimate mystery of Life itself,” she says. That’s some heavy thinking for tidepool gazers.

I read The Edge of the Sea in conversation with The Sea Around Us as a way to better understand Carson’s writing style. In doing so, I’m starting to better see the boundary between nonfiction and creative nonfiction. The Edge of the Sea, while brimming with facts and information about life along the shore, was written with a definite literary flair and a self-conscious reflectiveness. The Sea Around Us is a more traditional nonfiction work because Carson pretty much keeps herself out of it. She intends to convey information, albeit in an interesting style and with a keen eye, rather than evoke emotion.

“The face of the sea is always changing,” she writes. “Crossed by colors, lights, and moving shadows, sparkling in the sun, mysterious in the twilight, its aspects and its mood vary hour by hour. The surface waters move with the tides, stir to the breath of winds, and rise and fall to the endless, hurrying forms of the waves.”

The Sea Around Us reads like a biography of the ocean. Carson considers the ocean through nearly every lens a reader might imagine: ecologically, geologically, geographically, chemically, and culturally. She looks at waves, currents, tides, salinity, temperatures, sea levels, depths, and climate. She looks at the ways scientists have mapped and measured it. It is a perfect Oceanography 101 text—or a least it would’ve been in the 1960s. First published in 1951, The Sea Around Us got an update from Carson in 1961; she incorporated findings gathered since the book’s first publication so that the new edition would be as current as possible.

In the fifty years since, oceanographic research has yielded exponentially more information about the seas (although we still know less about parts of the ocean than we do about parts of outer space). As a result, The Sea Around Us can’t help but be a bit dated, although it still holds up surprisingly well as a solid read.

Being landlocked in Western New York as I usually am, I long for the sea, so to be here this afternoon is treat enough. To have Carson provoke me into new ways of considering it, though, makes me a little giddy.

I’ve yet to tackle Carson’s seminal Silent Spring, which I hope to look at before this reading project wraps up. I’d also like to look at her book The Sense of Wonder, which looks to be even more solidly ensconced on the “creative” side of the nonfiction continuum.

In the meantime, I’ll crank up the heater for another minute or so and make one last foray out to the edge of the sea before the sun drops below Bass Head to the west. The lighthouse there, with its red beacon, will stave off darkness, warning ships to beware the edge of the coast. The sea will ignore the light, and the dark, and the wind. It will keep rolling in.

by Robert Becker

Is “Higgs boson” a creative particle or energy field? Can we thus infer an “anti-God particle,” as anti-matter opposes matter, or dark energy battles gravity?

Any covenant with Godhead, in my book, comes down to Creation. Genesis, the source of time, space, and being; in short, existence. Especially our piddling existence. Without creation as we know it, we’d be deficient in mass, not even rocks; or with multiverse speculations, we could also be someone else, who knows where, gabbing with utter aliens. Because we esteem existence (over all the sorry alternatives), let us greet the New Year by honoring the force that could well have made something real out of, well, something not. The “God Particle.” Hallelujah!

If this particle is a particle. Could be more an energy or force field, but let’s not quibble yet about what stabilizes mass, from atoms to black holes. Hark, this herald angel sings, glory to the brand-new king, the Higgs boson “God particle,” as the media (and some scientists) sing forth. And good news, too, for all of our enlightened defiance against the noxious rearguard, a.k.a. Biblical literalism — folks “born-again” looking backwards, stuck in an outdated 2000 year-old, flat earth-centered time warp.

Without creation, what sort of enduring covenant could exist between the consciousness that dies, in short us, and something greater, higher, farther out? And more permanent we hope than rocks. Science is “tantalizingly close” to explaining man’s ultimate free-lunch quandary — what makes something from nothing (or chaos)? Fundamentalists, beware — here’s an ever-present catalyst that refudiates that humanized, Old Testament figure notorious for bad temper, non-negotiable demands, and playing favorites. On the line, if physics identifies the source of creation, boom goes the creditability for our most famous creation myth, part of our cultural, moralistic dogma to make tribes pray, shamans honored, and offspring obedient.

Outside is inside

Happily, the God Particle evokes no impatient, abstract father figure but the very catalyst that facilitates mass, as the glue-like Higgs boson, per one scientist, “surrounds us and penetrates us, binding the galaxy together.” Does not reality depend wholly on something that gives mass to the otherwise massless? Not Darwin, Freud nor Einstein introduced this ultimate root of the root, delivering a big-time, dope-smack to outdated Bronze Age creation fables.

Alas, even this breakthrough will not free fundamentalists from their most onerous fallacy. How can one tribe’s assemblage of texts, inscribed by fallen men as specified by the Eden story, be declared inerrant because they say so? How can anyone take on faith alone what every century since 1500 has progressively discredited as fable? Not only is the earth not fixed, flat nor immobile, we’re not the center of anything (except human ego); further, there’s no “up there” there for heaven, no species (with or without souls) that was created perfect and immutable, and DNA stamps our link to all other life. We are, in defiance of zealotry, the offspring of this earth, linked by proteins (and atoms, thus Higgs) to everything, and especially to everything that reproduces. All else is noise.

What rational being proposes a humanoid first mover who “in the beginning” out of the void “created the heavens and the earth”? That’s just so Old Testament, signaling the true “void” was human knowledge, lacking the technology, mindsets, and hard-won evidence that conveys orderly creation. We don’t look to the Bible for medical cures, shape of the earth, structure/motion of our solar system, genealogical precision, geographic accuracy, nor historical veracity. Why then swallow its take on creation hook, line and sinker?

Epic Battle: Knowledge vs. Ignorance

First breakthrough insight from the God particle: truth is not “out there, up there or far away,” but inside our elemental core, every atom, and every process that ultimately defines what human means. We exist only because quantum stuff, like quarks, got ordered into the push-pull of strong and weak forces in universal play. We think because something like the God Particle (or its cousins) organized energy (or fields) into mass, starting the pinball game of life, its own “ineluctable modality of the visible,” in James Joyce’s phrase.

The Bible isn’t only wrongheaded about the origin and structure of the universe, for me it presents an intellectual dead end. If some humanoid simply created everything — as a gift to his self-regard — then creation becomes an effect without an engaging, revelatory cause. Science now suggests “creation” is far older, and far more bewitching, than today’s novelty, that 19th C. marvel called Creationism. In the epic, unending battle between knowledge and ignorance — the only battle truly worth fighting for — science now takes on Creationists and the Rapture. The real, adult intellectual and spiritual action is not fixating Genesis, but distinguishing reality from delusional, solipsistic leaps of faith.

Confirmation of the Higgs boson (or related forces) complicates creation in all the right ways, without demolishing what we already know. Further, the Higgs, by informing mass, advances the great, remaining mystery — what causes gravity — allowing tantalizing peeks inside the inside. For those mystic-minded, the God particle reinforces notions of supersymmetry, proposing every known type of particle has an undiscovered twin. That helps physicists explain how elemental forces behaved when the universe was young. We’re not talking 5000 years ago either, but when stuff tussled across primordial, contending battlegrounds — some forces favoring connectedness (the order of the cosmos) and some “darker,” expansive, more entropic backing random movement.

Science the Great Unifier

This discovery so transcends Genesis we could have a whole new narrative bridging science with philosophy, even religion, for we embrace the architecture of order itself, with mass, direction, even implied values called meaning. Intriguingly enough, finding this God particle answers to predictions from the 1960s, just like anti-matter, predicted in 1928, was confirmed by 1932. Of course, attributing god-like attributes to quanta doesn’t disprove the existence of an ultimate power (a galactic force field) but we happily leave behind that paternalistic master of ceremonies evoking light and day and night as if a stage director with an infinite budget.

I have for years made noises that Godhead relates to electro-magnetism and atomic valance, for I come from an industry (high end audio) that applies electricity, electron flows, and shifting energy fields. Loudspeakers, for example, translate tiny electric pulses into the physical motion of sound waves re-created in your very room. Now we explore well beyond to ponder special catalysts, without any big guy in the sky, but how sub-atomic smithereens became you and me — and even those rigid fundamentalists down the street. Now that’s a unifying, reassuring winter solstice miracle that gets my blood flowing and my head reassured we may be more than just chemicals colliding. We are insightful creators ourselves.

Score!

It seemed like a no-brainer to me when I saw Supervolcano: Eruption on the bookstore’s “new arrivals” table.

For being about the world’s greatest cataclysm, though, Turtledove’s new book was more “bore” than “score.”

I love Turtledove’s work, particularly his alternate histories. His fantastic research skills create plausible scenarios for those histories, and they’ve served him well, too, in some of his “straight-history” historical novels. I figured I’d get similar treatment in Supervolcano. As a geological novice, I thought everything Turtledove presented seemed plausible.

He also has a knack for thinking of things–repercussions of the eruption, in this case–that I’d never consider. Neither would most people, which is why casualties after a cataclysm would likely be so high. hat would all that grit in the air do to your car’s air filter, your windshield, your eyes, to your lungs? What would a destablized U.S. mean for the Middle East?

Turtledove also pays meticulous attention to characterization in everything he writes. He typically weaves together the stories of six or eight main characters (sometimes more), and in telling their individual stories in minute detail, he advances the larger plot, as well. A character sitting in an airport terminal might be able to give Turtledove the opportunity to posit about air traffic. Or perhaps the character catches something on CNN about weird weather patterns around the globe.

But Supervolcano’s characters are largely repulsive: a vain ex-wife, a bitchy daughter, a pot-smoking freeloading younger son, an emotionally distant older son…. Who’s to like in there, and why do I want to spend time reading about them?

Fortunately, the main protagonists, police lieutenant Colin Ferguson and his girlfriend, geologist Kelly Birnbaum, are likeable enough. Ferguson falls into a lot of police stereotypes, though, and Kelly doesn’t get enough face-time—odd, considering she’s a volcano expert and the book is about a giant volcanic eruption.

The Yellowstone “supervolcano” is real enough, too. It sits under the earth’s crust in the northwest corner of Wyoming, where it butts up again Idaho and Montana, stretching for some 50 miles or so in diameter. (Look for the dark area near the enter of the map, right.) Its geothermal action is responsible for geysers like Old Faithful.

Geological evidence suggests that the supervolcano erupts every 640,000 years or so—and apocalyptics like to point out, by that timeline, we’re due for an eruption any time now. Such a blast would be thousands of times stronger than the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens and would even make eruptions like Krakatoa and Pompeii look dinky. Think potential extinction event, perhaps. Dinosaurs and meteors—that kind of “big.”

In Supervolcano, Yellowstone blows its lid about two-thirds of the way through the book, and it seems almost incidental.

Turtledove typically uses his large casts to sprinkle them in various key spots across the wide landscape of action so that he can tell the larger story from a lot of perspectives. Kelly has a close call when the eruptions blows, but otherwise, most characters are well away from the blast. There’s no one trapped in, say, Denver as the city gets buried under feet and feet of ash and grinds to a halt. The one character who lives there ducks out of town early. While her story ends up showing the life of people trapped in refugee camps, her previous perspective, trapped inside a dying city, would’ve been far more fascinating.

Other characters get sprinkled in L.A., Nebraska, and Maine, where winter gets really bad. Such perspectives allow Turtledove to explore some of the continental-wide effects of the blast, there’s little action.

And I’m not gonna lie: I wanted action. I wanted massive volcano carnage and mayhem. I wanted Dante’s Peak and Volcano rolled into one on the page. Instead, I got, “Oh, look at the TV! There’s been a big volcanic explosion. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. How terrible. My, isn’t the weather acting bit peculiar? Oh, and I was hoping I could talk to you about changing my major again.”

In Turtledove fashion, each character’s final episode leaves him/her in a place where there’s a bit of on-the-spot resolution but, in the context of the larger plot, he/she is well-positioned for a sequel. Turtledove could easily pick up right where he left off.

If he does, though, things better get a little Mad Max. I want Supervolcano II: Descent Into Hell. That’s why people read this stuff: action, suspense, and apocalypse. Characterization is all well and good, but people who read this kind of stuff want to see things blow up and burn down. I don’t know how much more mundane daily life I can take.