Month: November 2012

11/30/12

Things that would make even Dickens go “hmmm…”

Candy CoalHaving just finished Joe Romm’s excellent new book, Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga on the myriad uses of the techniques of rhetoric, I momentarily thought to title this post “Christmas Candy Coal Stocking-Stuffer: Naughty, Not Nice,” but just couldn’t get it past my gag reflex. In any case, I don’t know whether this is a now-classic holiday candy that I just never noticed before, being not inclined these days to frequent that particular supermarket aisle, but the galvanized steel tub brimming with boxes of it right at the check-out line in Trader Joe’s yesterday was impossible to miss.

In fact—as I’ve since learned—if you web search “candy coal” you’ll find a ton of it, from chunky mint chocolate candy coal, to chunky hard licorice candy coal (comes with its own Victorian-style hammer, for the experience of breaking it into yet smaller chunks!), to recipes for how to make your own, and a lot of ads referring to the traditional “If you kids don’t behave you’ll get a lump of coal in your stockings for Christmas, instead of presents!” right before noting how sweet the stuff is when made from dark chocolate instead of compressed carbon. That’ll teach ’em.

At a younger, more naive age, I might’ve gone oh… hmmm… cute, I guess, but whatever. Pardon my rather distinct lack of trust on this, but these days, with our fossil-fuel-driven massively uncontrolled chemical experimentation on the atmosphere leading to ever greater climate disruption, with Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming racketing around in my brain, with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign to replace dirty coal-fired power plants with clean renewable energy, Bill McKibben’s Do The Math tour promoting divestment from fossil fuel interests, politicians afraid to use the word climate (unless they’re the sort who attack the scientists and the science), and ever-more-aggressive pushback from the coal and oil industries, it’s a very different hmmm… indeed.

Yes, of course I’d love some Candy Coal! And could I please have some Light Sweet Crude Maple Agave to go with that? Perfect!

Yeah, right. I need a candy cigarette.

11/30/12

Cycles: Look! It’s our planet breathing!

As often as we hear these days how the Earth’s climate is warming due to all the carbon dioxide we’re pouring into the air by burning fossil fuels, I thought it’d be worth mentioning that until a few weeks ago the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere had been falling rapidly for months. In fact, it started to fall in late May, and continued to do so all through summer and into autumn, finally slowing down in October. By now, the amount of CO2 in the air is increasing again.

But actually, it does this every year. What’s going on?
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11/30/12

Seeing what’s here

“You have to know how to see what’s here.”

It’s not an exact quote, but when I was studying economics in the late 70s, a friend of mine in the program said something like this to me one day as we were driving I-95 between West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, and he began pointing things out—old neighborhoods, new developments, business districts, malls—and talking about economic geography, location theory, the study of how villages, towns, cities, and the economic activities that occur within them, come to be located where they are on a landscape.

In early 2008, I was asked to have the Zen Center of Los Angeles certified as a wildlife habitat, something that several of our members had done for their backyards.  On the website of the National Wildlife Federation there is a questionnaire one can fill out indicating which features your place offers for the support of wildlife.  The basic categories are food, water, shelter, and places to raise young, and within each of these the questionnaire lists the kinds of things a place might have that would provide these ecosystem services.  If enough of them are present, NWF will add your place to their registry of wildlife habitats and send you a plaque.

This certification program serves to identify habitat and encourage its maintenance, wherever the necessary elements are found or can be created, whether it be a farm, a neighborhood park, a backyard, or an apartment balcony.   Living in the midst of a vast city, with so much of our daily life devoted to interacting with each other and immersed in the myriad artifacts of our civilization, it becomes too easy a habit of mind to perceive only the human realm, and so difficult to recognize even a backyard for all that it actually is.

So I printed out the questionnaire and began to walk the grounds, noting as I went how this thing or that one fit into one or another of their categories.  It was a wonderful experience.  It allowed me to see my surroundings, things I passed by every day, in a new way.
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11/29/12

The voice that gushes out of the earth

Now, mountains, rivers, earth, the sun, moon, and stars are mind. At just this moment, what is it that appears directly in front of you? The sun, moon, and stars as seen by humans are not the same, and the views of various beings differ widely. Likewise the views about one mind differ. Yet these views are nothing but mind. Is it inside or outside? Does it come or go? Does it increase one bit at birth or not? Does it decrease one particle at death or not? . . . All this is merely a moment or two of mind. A moment or two of mind is a moment of mountains, rivers, and earth, or two moments of mountains, rivers and earth. . . .

“Everyday mind” means to maintain an everyday mind in the world of life and the world of death. Yesterday comes forth from this place. When it goes the boundless sky goes, when it comes the entire earth comes. . . . This boundless sky and entire earth are like unrecognized words, or the one voice that gushes out of the earth.

Body and Mind Study of the Way
—Eihei Dogen

[Epigraph to Chapter 9 of Nine-Headed Dragon River, by Peter Matthiessen]