Wisdom at Work

Shift - A Proven, No-nonsense Way to Achieve Results

2007-05-06T10:35:00.000-05:00

Shift A Proven, No-Nonsense Way to Achieve Outstanding Results Coming to Coconut Grove in June

We humans are energy beings composed of one energy vibrating at four different frequencies ranging from the invisible to the visible.

Spiritual – the highest vibration, invisible and quantum. We experience it as: intuition, trust, faith, compassion, inspiration, forgiveness

Mental - a little denser than spirit, but still invisible. We experience it as thinking, ideas, strategy, plans, structure, organization, focus, clarity

Emotional - denser than mental with visible patterns. We experience it as joy, sadness, excitement, fear, urgency, wonder

Physical – dense and visible. We experience it as material, objective, substance - force, hard work, practice, skill, grounding

We are all of these, all at once, right now. Not either one or the other, not when we die, but all, right now. In business we tend to use two and ignore two. Which do we use, which do we ignore?

The shift is about moving from experiencing ourselves as bodies with brains, to experiencing ourselves as energy beings with four aspects. It’s about shifting from using two and ignoring two, to using all four; from playing with half a deck, to playing with everything we were born with.

If the four aspects are understood to be on a continuum, instead of a pyramid or dichotomy, shifting is easier. Mindfulness makes one aware of when to shift. Any pain or dissatisfying performance can be a cue to accept responsibility and shift, rather than as a reason to blame, criticize or stay stuck.

During the Shift Workshop participants will:

--Experience wholeness –all four aspects

--Use the Shift concepts to increase access to all four aspects

--Learn how to use mindfulness as a trigger for shifting

--Learn how to shift to the continuum from the dichotomy or pyramid

--Learn how to shift from being stuck to flow

--Explore applying the Shift technology to important, real life situations

--Practice shifting

--Develop life plans using all four aspects

Friday Funnies

2007-04-27T12:11:00.000-05:00

My wife and I divorced over religious differences. She thought she was God and I didnj't.

I don't suffer from insanity: I enjoy every minute of it.

I work hard because I don't know any better.

Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them.

I used to have a handle on life but it broke.

Don't take life too seriously: No one gets out alive.

You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.

I'm not a complete idiot. Bome parts are missing.

Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.

NyQuil, the stuffy, sneezy, why-the-heck-is-the-room-spinning medicine.

God must love stupid people; She made so many.

The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

Salt in the Soil = Economic Problems

2007-04-26T10:11:00.000-05:00

Salt, is another huge problem for Australia’s soil, Jared Diamond says in Collapse. Just as the first farmers were not aware of the nutrient poverty in Australia’s soils, so they were not aware of all the salt in the ground.

In southwestern Australia’s wheat belt, the salt in the ground comes from its having been carried inland over the course of millions of years by sea breezes of the adjacent Indian Ocean.

In southeastern Australia, another prominent wheat belt, the basin of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray and Darling Rivers, lies at such a low elevation that it has been repeatedly inundated by the sea then drained, leaving much of the salt behind.

Another low-lying basin inland, was formerly filled by a freshwater lake that did not drain to the sea, but became salty by evaporation like Salt Lake in Utah and the Dead Sea in Israel, and eventually dried out, leaving salt deposits that were carried by winds to other parts of eastern Australia.

Some Australian soils contain more than 200 pounds of salt per square yard of surface area. Salt is easily brought to the surface by land clearance and irrigation agriculture, resulting in salty top soils in which no crop can grow. More about Australia, Monday; tomorrow: Friday Funnies.

Economic Ramifications of Unproductive Soil in Australia

2007-04-25T10:57:00.000-05:00

Jared Diamond says in Collapse that a second economic consequence of Australia’s low soil productivity impacted agroforestry - tree agriculture. Most of the nutrients are actually in the trees themselves, not in the soils. Therefore, tree growth rates and yields have been uneconomic. In fact, Australia’s leading native timber tree, the blue gum of Tasmania, is now being grown more cheaply in many overseas countries that in Australia itself.

A third consequence involves fisheries. All of the nutrients in rivers and at least some of those in oceans near the coast, come from the soils drained by the rivers and then carried out to sea. Because of Australian soil’s productivity, rivers and coastal waters are also relatively unproductive, with the result that Australia’s fisheries have been quickly mined and overexploited, just like the farmlands and forests. Today, of nearly 200 countries in the world, Australia has the third-largest exclusive marine zone surrounding it, but ranks only 55th in the value of its marine fisheries and the value of its freshwater fisheries is negligible.

Another aspect of soil unproductivity is that the original settlers were unaware of the problem. When they arrived and encountered magnificent extensive woodlands that included what may have been the tallest trees in the modern world – the blue gums of Victoria’s Gippsland, up to 400’ tall, they were deceived by appearances into thinking that the land was highly productive. But after loggers had removed the first crop of trees, and after sheep had grazed the standing crop of grass, settlers were surprised to discover how slowly the grass and trees grew back.

The original settlers, as well as some people today, were quite slow to realize that the land was agriculturally uneconomic. In many areas, farmers and pastoralists had to abandon the land after making large capital investments in the form of homes, fences, buildings, wells, and roads. From early colonial times and continuing today, Australian land use has gone through many such cycles of land clearance, investment, bankruptcy and abandonment.

Low Soil Productivity Impacts Ag Productivity

2007-04-24T14:55:00.000-05:00

In Collapse, Jared Diamond points out that low average productivity of Australian soils has had major economic consequences for Australian agriculture, forestry and fisheries. The nutrients present in arable soils at the beginning of European style agriculture were quickly exhausted. In effect, Australia’s first farmers were inadvertently mining their soils for nutrients. Since then, nutrients have had to be added artificially in the form of fertilizer, increasing costs compared to more fertile soils overseas.

Low soil productivity means low growth rates and low average yields. Therefore a larger area of land has to be cultivated than in other countries to obtain similar yields. So fuel and maintenance costs for machinery also tend to be relatively high. An extreme case of infertile soils occurs in southwester Australia, part of Australia’s so-call wheat belt and one of its most valuable agricultural areas. Wheat is grown on sandy soils leached of nutrients and essentially all nutrients have to be added artificially as fertilizer. This makes the “wheat-belt” a gigantic flowerpot in which, just as in a real flowerpot, the sand provides nothing more than the stuff, the medium, that holds the plants.

As a result of the extra expenses due to disproportionately high fertilizer and fuel costs, Australian farmers selling to local Australian markets sometimes cannot compete against overseas growers who ship the same crops across the ocean to Australia, despite the added costs of that overseas transport. For example, it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees. The same is true of Canadian pork and bacon compared to their Australian equivalents. So why do they persist?

Australia and the Five Factor Theory of Collapse

2007-04-23T08:58:00.000-05:00

In Collapse, Jared Diamond says, “Still another virtue of Australia as a chapter is that it illustrates strongly the five factors whose interplay I have identified throughout this book as useful for understanding possible ecological declines or collapses of societies.”

First, people have had massive impacts on the Australian environment. Second, climate change is exacerbating those impacts. Third, friendly relations with Britain have molded Australian society and shaped its environmental and population policies. Fourth, though Australia has not been invaded by outside enemies (bombed but not invaded) Australian perception of actual and potential overseas enemies has shaped its environmental and population policies.

Fifth, Australia also displays the importance of cultural values - including some imported ones that could be viewed as inappropriate to the Australian landscape - for understanding environmental impacts. “Perhaps more than any other First World citizens known to me,” Diamond says, “Australians are beginning to think radically about the central question: which of our traditional core values can we retain, and which no longer serve us well?”

Three features of the Australian environment make it extremely susceptible to human impacts: soil quality, water availability and distance, both inside and outside the country. Though water shortage and deserts are the qualities that first come to mind when thinking of Australian environmental problems, the quality of its soils have caused even bigger problems than has water availability.

Australia is the most unproductive continent: the one whose soils have on average, the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rates, and the lowest productivity. That’s because Australian soils are mostly so old that they have become leached of their nutrients by rain over the course of billions of years. In fact, the oldest surviving rocks in the Earth’s crust, nearly four billion years old, are the Murchison Range of Western Australia. A sustainable economic system and sustainable cultural values would take cognizance of these facts.

Friday Funnies

2007-04-20T14:04:00.000-05:00

If you've ever worked for a boss that reacts before getting the facts and
thinking things through, you will love this!

A large company, feeling it was time for a shakeup, hired a new CEO The new
boss was determined to rid the company of all slackers.

On a tour of the facilities, the CEO noticed a guy leaning on a wall. The
room was full of workers and he wanted to let them know that he meant
business.

He walked up to the guy leaning against the wall and asked, "How much money
do you make a week?"

A little surprised, the young man looked at him and replied, "I make $400 a week. Why?"

The CEO then handed the guy $1,600 in cash and screamed, "Here's four weeks'
pay, now GET OUT and don't come back."

Feeling pretty good about himself, the CEO looked around the room and asked,
"Does anyone want to tell me what that goof-ball did here?"

From across the room came a voice, "Pizza delivery guy from Domino's"

Australia's Potential for Collapse Mirrors Our Own

2007-04-19T15:14:00.000-05:00

“While many other countries besides Australia are mining their environments,” Jared Diamond says in Collapse, “Australia is an especially suitable choice for this final case study for several reasons. It is a First World country, unlike Rwanda, Haiti and the DR, but like the countries in which most of the likely readers of this book live. Among First World countries, its population and economy are much smaller and less complex than are those of the US, Europe or Japan, so that the Australian situation is more easily grasped.

“Ecologically, the Australian environment is exceptionally fragile, the most fragile of any First World country except perhaps Iceland. As a consequence, many problems that could eventually become crippling in other First World countries and already are so in some Third World countries – such as overgrazing, salinization, soil erosion, introduced species, water shortages, and man-made droughts – have already become severe in Australia.

“That is, while Australia shows no prospects of collapsing like Rwanda and Haiti, it instead gives us a foretaste of problems that actually will arise elsewhere in the First World if present trends continue. Yet Australia’s prospects for solving those problems give me hope and are not depressing. Then, too, Australia has a well educated populace, a high standard of living, and relatively honest political and economic institutions by world standards.

“Hence Australia’s environmental problems cannot be dismissed as products of ecological mismanagement by an uneducated, desperately impoverished populace and grossly corrupt government and businesses, as one might perhaps be inclined to explain away environmental problems in some other countries.” More Monday, tomorrow, Friday Funnies.

Potential Collapse in Austrailia

2007-04-18T09:38:00.000-05:00

Now, Australia, for those among us who think modern, white, English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon civilization is immune from the horrors of Rwanda, China and the ancient collapses.

In Collapse, Jared Diamond, begins his discussion of Australia by saying, “Mining in the literal sense –i.e. the mining of coal, iron and so on – is the key to Australia’s economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings.” Mining is also a metaphor for Australia’s environmental history and current predicament.

Mining is about exploiting, removing and taking resources that do not renew themselves. Gold in the ground, or oil, or copper, doesn’t breed more gold, oil or copper, therefore, there’s no need to consider gold renewal rates. Miners extract the minerals as rapidly as is economically feasible, until the lode is exhausted, then walk away.

Mining minerals may thus be contrasted with exploiting renewable resources such as forests, fish and topsoil, that DO regenerate themselves by biological reproduction. Renewable resources can be exploited indefinitely, provided they are removed at a rate less than the rate at which they regenerate. If these are exploited at rates exceeding their renewal rates, these, too, will be depleted to extinction.

“Australia has been and still is ‘mining’ its renewable resources, as if they were minerals. They are being overexploited at rates faster than their renewal rates. At present rates, Australia’s forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable, but the latter aren’t.”

Lessons for the First World

2007-04-17T12:35:00.000-05:00

Before, moving forward with Collapse, I want to make the point that it is vital to understand the phenomena described in Rwanda, Easter Island and in Central America as generic phenomena – as events, conditions and human reactions that could, given similar conditions, happen anywhere, even in Europe and the USA.

It is too, easy to miss or dismiss the generic lessons and implications of these stories because they’re about contemporary African and ancient cultures, believing they are nothing like us. Thinking that way would be a sad mistake. You and I would probably do the same things in similar situations. The point of Diamond’s work is for us to understand that and do what we can to prevent those situations.

In the next two chapters of Collapse, Jared Diamond, does a comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, DR, two different countries sharing the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, and a discussion of China. A common theme in both chapters is that both China and the DR have/had top-down command-and-control governments which were able to perform better than the “market.”

In the DR, Balaguer, the dictator for thirty years protected the forest and other natural resources, while growing the economy, and in China the leadership reduced the birthrate and slowed the pressure of population growth. The point in both cases, is that the scope, scale and danger of the problems requires a top-down, command and control approach, rather than the laissez faire/denial/trust the market approach of the current US government. Indeed, both countries used a combination of centralized command-and-control and decentralized market incentives.

Understanding Evil in Rwanda

2007-04-16T08:33:00.000-05:00

Even before 1994, Rwanda was experiencing rising levels of violence and theft, perpetrated by hungry landless young people with out off-farm income, Jared Diamond said in Collapse. Andre and Platteau note, “The 1994 events provided a unique opportunity to settle scores, or to reshuffle land properties, even among Hutu villagers…. It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with available land resources.”

Such a fatalistic explanation provokes negative reactions for various reasons. First, any explanation of why a genocide happened can be misconstrued as excusing it. But no explanation can alter the personal responsibility of the perps for their evil deeds. In most discussions of the origins of evil: some people recoil at any explanation, because they confuse explanation with excuses. Yet explanations are important in the Rwandan horror, as in all such horrors, NOT to exonerate the perps, but to gain knowledge to decrease the risk of such things happening again in Rwanda or elsewhere.

It may make some sense to reject an over simplified explanation in the Rwandan genocide. Other factors did contribute: the racial distinctions, Tutsi invasions from Burundi, competition between rival political factions, world bank austerity measures, hundreds of thousands of desperate young men displaced and in refugee camps. It is safe to say population pressure does not automatically lead to genocide. But clearly, in Rwanda, population pressure was one of the important factors.

Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves. In Rwanda’s collapse, we can put faces and motives on the unpleasant resolution. Similar motives probably operated, in the collapses of Easter Island and the Maya. And, similar motives may operate again in the future, in countries that fail to solve their underlying problems.

They may operate again in Rwanda, where population in still increasing at 3%, women have their first child at 15 and the average family size 5-8. A Tutsi who survived only because he happened to be away when his neighbors arrived to hack his wife and 4 children to death said, “The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”

Land and Family Ties

2007-04-12T08:51:00.000-05:00

This situation gave rise to frequent serious conflicts that the parties could not resolve themselves, Jared Diamond says in Collapse, conflicts that were referred to traditional village conflict mediators and less often to the courts. Households reported more than one such conflict each year. Most were not well resolved because the land was already fully occupied. An interesting sub class of these cases, 10% of them, involved “hunger thieves,” people who owned no land and were without off-farm income, who lived by stealing for lack of other options.

The land disputes undermined the cohesion of Rwandan society. Traditionally, richer landowners were expected to help their poorer relatives. But the richer land owners were still too poor to spare anything for poorer relatives. That loss of protection especially victimized vulnerable groups: separated or divorced women, widows, orphans, and younger half-siblings. When ex-husbands ceased to provide for their separated or divorced wives, the women would formerly return to their natal family, but now their own brothers opposed their return, which would make the brothers or the brothers’ children even poorer.

The women might then seek to return to their natal family only with their daughters, because Rwandan inheritance was traditionally by sons, and the woman’s brothers wouldn’t see her daughters as competing with their own children. The women would leave her sons with their father, but his relatives might then refuse land to her sons, especially if their father died or ceased protecting them. Similarly, a widow would find herself without support from either her husband’s family or from her own brothers, who again saw the widow’s children as competing for land with their children.

The most painful and socially disruptive land disputes were those between fathers and sons. Traditionally, when a father died, his land passed to his oldest son, who was expected to manage the land for the whole family and to provide his younger brothers with enough land for their subsistence. As land became scarce, fathers gradually switched to the custom of dividing their land among all sons. But different sons urged their father to different, competing proposals. Younger sons became bitter if older brothers who married first received more. The youngest son, who traditionally was expected to care for the parents in their old age, demanded an extra share of land to carry out that responsibility.

All of these types of conflicts ended up before mediators or the courts, with fathers suing sons and vice versa, sisters suing brothers, nephews suing uncles, and so on. Family ties were sundered and along with them the restraints on hateful behavior. Close relatives became competitors, bitter enemies and potential murderers.

Hacked to Death in Rwanda

2007-04-11T08:32:00.000-05:00

Hutu killed Hutu in 1994, and Tutsi, too, because there just wasn’t enough – of anything: land, food, livelihood, to go around. In Collapse, Jared Diamond quotes the work of two Belgian scholars who had first hand experience of Rwanda, living in the Kanama commune in the northwest.

The fertile volcanic soil supported 1,740 people per square mile in 1988, and 2,040 in 1993, higher than Bangladesh. Those high population densities translated into very small farms – median size .89 acre in 1988 and .72 in 1993. Each of these was further divided into 10 separate parcels so that each farmer was tilling “absurdly” small parcels averaging only .09 in ’88, and .07 in ’93.

Because all the land was already occupied, young people found it difficult to marry, leave home, acquire a farm and set up their own households. Young people postponed marriage and lived at home with their parents. Between 1988 and 1993, the percentage of women 20-25 living at home rose from 39-67% and men from 71% to 100%. That obviously contributed to the lethal family tension that exploded in 1994. Not surprisingly, it proved impossible for most people in Kanama to feed themselves.

Even when measured against the low calorie intake considered adequate in Rwanda, the average household got only 77% of its calorie needs from its farm. The percentage of the population consuming less than 1,600 calories per day (considered below famine level) was 9% in 1982 , rising to 40% in 1990 and some unknown higher percentage thereafter. The Kanama farm society was increasingly divided between the rich haves and the poor have-nots, with decreasing numbers of people in the middle. Older heads of households tended to be richer and have larger farms.

Paradoxically, off-farm income was earned disproportionately by owners of large farms. The extra off-farm income allowed them to buy land from smaller farms, with the result that large farms tended to buy land and become larger while small farms got smaller. Thus at Kanama, most people were impoverished, hungry, and desperate, but some were more impoverished, hungry and desperate than others - impoverished, hungry and desperate enough to hack their neighbors to death….

Inefficient Agriculture Contributes to Masacres

2007-04-10T08:41:00.000-05:00

In Collapse, Jared Diamond explains why ethnic hatred by itself, was not enough to account for the tragedy in Rwanda. Already densely populated before European arrival because of moderate rainfall and an altitude too high for malaria, with European involvement and the introduction of New World crops, public health, medicine and stable borders, population began growing at over 3% per year. By 1990, even after the killings and mass exilings of previous decades, Rwanda’s average population density was 760 people per square mile, higher than England’s 610, and approaching Holland’s 950.

But England and Holland have highly efficient agriculture, requiring only a few percent of the population to produce enough food for everyone else, plus some surplus for export. Rwandan agriculture is much less efficient, still using handheld hoes, picks, and machetes; and most people have to remain farmers, producing only enough for themselves and little or no surplus to support others. Instead of modernizing agricultural methods, the growing population was accommodated by clearing forests, draining marshes, and shortening fallow periods by trying to extract 2 or 3 consecutive crops from a field in a year.

By 1985, all the arable land outside of national parks was being cultivated. There was more food and more people and no improvement in food per person. Steep hills were being farmed right up to their crests. Soil erosion began. Forest clearance led to drying-up of streams, and more irregular rainfall. By the late 1980’s famines began to reappear and in 1989, there were sever food shortages brought on by a combination of drought, regional climate change, and the local effects of deforestation.

All of this contributed to the massacres of Tutsis by Hutu in 1994. But what about the numerous cases where Hutu killed Hutu? How did these factors contribute to those?

More Than Tribal Hatreds in Rwanda

2007-04-09T09:59:00.000-05:00

In Collapse, Jared Diamond quotes from Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, published by the organization Human Rights Watch, to show that the generally accepted explanations of the tragedy are inaccurate. “This genocide was not an uncontrollable outburst of rage by a people consumed by ‘ancient tribal hatreds.’… This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power.” Has the leadership in the US engaged in something similar….without the genocide, of course?

“This small, privileged group first set the majority against the minority to counter a growing political opposition within Rwanda. Then faced with RPF (rebel and Burundi) success on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, these few powerholders transformed the strategy of ethnic division into genocide. They believed that the extermination campaign would restore the solidarity of the Hutu under their leadership and help them win the war…” The evidence is overwhelming that this view is correct and accounts in large degree for Rwanda’s tragedy.

But other considerations contributed, too. There was a third ethnic group, the Twa or pygmies, that made up 1% of the population. They were at the bottom of the social structure and didn’t constitute a threat to anyone, yet most of them were also massacred in the 1994 killings. And there weren’t just two factions, there were three. All were mixed, not pure, either Tutsi or Hutu, but each containing elements of the other. The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi is not nearly as sharp as often portrayed.

The two groups speak the same language, attended the same churches and schools and bars, lived together in the same village under the same chiefs, and worked together in the same office. Hutu and Tutsi intermarried and while they look different on the average, many individuals are impossible to ethnically identify. In fact, about one quarter of Rwandans have both Hutu and Tutsi among their great-grandparents. Thus, Diamond says, “we cannot avoid asking ourselves: how, under those circumstances, were so many Rwandans so readily manipulated by extremist leaders into killing each other with the utmost savagery? We need to search for other contributing factors in addition to ethnic hatred.”

Friday Funnies

2007-03-30T13:51:00.000-05:00

A glossary of medical terms and alternate meanings

Labor pain -- Getting hurt at work

Medical staff -- A doctor's cane

Morbid -- A higher offer than I bid

Nitrates -- Cheaper than day rates

Node -- Was aware of

Outpatient -- A person who has fainted

Pap smear -- A fatherhood test

Pelvis -- Second cousin to Elvis

Post operative -- A letter carrier

Recovery Room -- Place to do upholstery

Rectum -- Darn near killed him

Secretion -- Hiding something

Seizure -- Roman emperor

Tablet -- A small table

Terminal illness -- Getting sick at the bus station

Tumor -- More than one

Urine -- Opposite of you're out

Varicose -- Near by/close by

Vein -- Conceited

Genocide in Rwanda

2007-03-29T10:07:00.000-05:00

In the second half of Collapse, Jared Diamond looks at modern societies starting with the massacres in Rwanda, just ten years ago.

Human population growth in East Africa, among the highest in the world, recently 4.1% in Kenya, resulting in a doubling of the population every 17 years, was a significant contributor to the horror. Africa’s population has been exploding recently for many reasons: The adoption of crops native to the New World (especially corn, beans, sweet potatoes, an manioc/cassava, broadening the agricultural base and increasing food production beyond what was previously possible with native crops alone.

Other factors are: improved hygiene, preventive medicine, vaccinations of mothers and children, antibiotics, and some control of malaria and other endemic African diseases; and national unification and the fixing of national boundaries, thereby opening to settlement some areas that had been fought over no-man’s lands.

Population problems such as those in East African are called “Malthusian,” after Thomas Malthus, the English economist who in 1789, said that human population would outrun the food supply. That would happen, Malthus reasoned, because population growth proceeds exponentially, while food production increases only arithmetically. Hence, a population will tend to expand to consume all available food and never leave a surplus, unless population growth itself is halted by famine, war, or disease, or by making preventive choices. Italy and Japan and China have made those choices. But modern Rwanda illustrates a case where Malthus’s worst case scenario seems to have been right.

Rwanda’s average population density is triple even that of Africa’s third most densely populated country (Nigeria), and 10 times that of neighboring Tanzania. Genocide in Rwanda produced the third largest body count among the world’s genocides since 1950, topped only by the killings in Cambodia, 1970sm and Bangladesh 1971. Tomorrow, Friday Funnies, then no posts for most of next week. I’ll be in NYC for Passover.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

2007-03-28T09:58:00.000-05:00

Thus, the Greenland Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole, said Jared Diamond in Collapse. Sound similar to what’s happening now in the USA? Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society.

Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost. We modern Americans should not be too quick to brand them as failures, when their society survived in in-hospitable Greenland for longer than our English-speaking society has survived so far in hospitable North America.

Ultimately, though, the chiefs found themselves without followers. Reality reared it’s ugly head. The people had had enough and decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. The last right the Norse chiefs in Greenland obtained for themselves was the privilege of being the last to starve. Much as many of our chiefs deserve a similar privilege, I trust we will not follow them to the death. Enough! The emperor has no clothes. There are alternatives. We know what they are. Let’s begin to make them happen.

Collapse and the Concentration of Power

2007-03-27T12:14:00.000-05:00

The Norse, like other medieval European Christians, Jared Diamond says in Collapse, scorned pagan non-European peoples and lacked experience of how best to deal with them. “Only after the age of exploration that began with Columbus’ voyage in 1492 did they learn Machiavellian ways of exploiting native people to their own advantage, even while continuing to despise them.

“Hence, the Norse refused to learn from the Inuit and probably behaved towards them in ways ensuring their enmity. Many later groups of Europeans in the Arctic similarly perished as a result of ignoring or antagonizing the Inuit, most notably the 138 British members of the well-financed 1845 Franklin Expedition, every single one of whom died while trying to cross areas of the Canadian Arctic populated by Inuit. The European explorers and settlers who succeeded best in the Arctic were those most extensively adopting Inut ways, like Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen.

“Finally, power in Norse Greenland was concentrated at the top, in the hands of the chiefs and clergy. They owned most of the land (including all the best farms), owned the boats, and controlled the trade with Europe. They chose to devote much of that trade to importing goods that brought prestige to them: luxury goods for the wealthiest households, vestments and jewelry for the clergy, and bells and stained glass for the churches.

Chiefs had two motives for running large sheep herds that could damage the land by overgrazing: wool paid for the imports, and independent farmers on overgrazed land were more likely to be forced into tenancy, and become the Chief’s followers in his competition with other chiefs. Many innovations such as importing more iron and less luxuries, designing different boats and using different hunting techniques might have achieved success. But those would have threatened the power, prestige and narrow interests of the chiefs. In the tightly controlled, interdependent society of Norse Greenland, they were is a position to prevent these.

The Collapse of Norse Greenland

2007-03-26T13:51:00.000-05:00

Were the Greenland Norse doomed from the outset, trying to practice a lifestyle that could not possibly succeed, so that it was only a matter of time before they would starve to death, asks Jared Diamond in Collapse? Norse decision-making was no more suicidal than is ours today, Diamond says. The Norse arrived in Greenland at a period when its climate was relatively mild. Not having lived there for the previous thousand years, they had not experienced the series of cold and warm cycles that characterized the place. Indeed, modern Greenland under the Danes is not self-sufficient but depends heavily on Danish foreign aid and EU fishing licenses.

The Norse did not arrive with open minds. Like all colonizing peoples, they arrived with their own cultural values and preferred lifestyle, based on centuries of experience in Norway and Iceland. They thought of themselves as dairy farmers, Christian and European. Their Norwegian forebears had successfully practiced dairy farming for 3,000 years. Their shared language, religion and culture bound them to Norway, just as those shared attributes bound Americans and Australians to Britain.

All of Greenland’s bishops were Norwegians sent out to Greenland, rather than Norse who had grown up in Greenland. Without those shared Norwegian values, the Norse could not have cooperated to survive in Greenland. In that light their investments in the whale hunt, cows and churches are understandable, and quite similar to investments in statues on Easter Island, even though on purely economic grounds those may not have been the best use of Norse energy.

The Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland’s difficulties. The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.

The Elite Cop Out

2007-03-22T10:14:00.000-05:00

How did such a huge population of millions of people disappear? Jared Diamond asks in Collapse. He asked the same question about the disappearance of the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon. There is no sign of all those millions surviving to be accommodated as immigrants in the north. Some died of thirst and starvation, others due to war and still others were not born at all because of infertility due to the poor quality of the available food.

By 1714, the population of the Maya at the center of their civilization in what is now Honduras was 3,000. By the 1960’s it had risen to only 25,000 but in the 1980’s immigrants flood in and the population is 300,000 today, and half the area is again deforested and ecologically degraded. One quarter of all the forests in Honduras were destroyed between 1964 and 1989.

The mismatch between population and resources, one of the five factors causing the collapse, is also accelerating. So is climate change, another factor. As is the disconnect between rulers, the ruled and the environment.

The kings and nobles of the Maya Classic period failed to recognize and solve the seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Evidently, their attention was focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars – sound familiar? – erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all these activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems.

“Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, and like the Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster – reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs.”

Constant Warfare

2007-03-21T09:32:00.000-05:00

Because of this, Jared Diamond says in Collapse, Maya cities remained small without archaeological evidence of royally managed food storage and trade that characterized ancient Greece and Mesopotamia. Yet Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and irresolvable, primarily because limitations of food supply and transportation made it impossible for any Maya principality to unite the whole region in an empire, the way the Aztecs and Inca did.

The intensity of the warfare is evident in recent discoveries of massive fortifications surrounding many Maya sites; vivid depictions of warfare and captives on stone monuments, and the translation of Maya writing, much of which proved to consist of royal inscriptions boasting of conquests. Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals. There were wars of all kinds: between separate kingdoms; attempts of cities within a kingdom to secede; and civil wars resulting from frequent violent attempts by would be kings to usurp the throne. All depicted on monuments.

This warfare, the repeated occurrence of longs droughts, and the resulting lack of corn, hastened the Maya collapse. Hundreds of skeletons recovered from Copan, one of the more prosperous kingdoms, show inhabitants’ health, both peasants and nobles, deteriorating from 650-850. Because Copan’s king was failing to deliver on his promises of rain and prosperity in return for the power and luxuries, he was blamed for these difficulties. The last writing involving any Copan king is 822.

The population at the peak of the Classic period is estimated at between 3 million and 14 million people, but there were only about 30,000 people at the time that the Spanish arrived. When Cortes passed through in 1524-25, his army nearly starved because they found so few villages from which to acquire corn. He passed within a few miles of the ruins of the great Classic cities of Tikal and Palenque, but heard or saw nothing of them because they were covered by jungle and almost nobody was living in the vicinity.

Agriculture and War

2007-03-20T09:41:00.000-05:00

In his discussion of the Maya Collapse, Jared Diamond makes an interesting and insightful connection between agriculture, war and the cohesiveness and success of a society.

Corn, the dominant crop of the Maya, has a lower protein content than the Old World stapes of wheat and barley. The Maya also had fewer domestic animals to eat and no large ones like oxen, cows, horses or donkeys to use for power, transport and plowing. They depended on a narrower range of crops than did Andean farmers. Thus, the modest productivity of Maya agriculture, and their lack of draft animals, severely limited the duration and distance possible for their military campaigns.

“We are accustomed to thinking of military success as determined by quality of weaponry, rather than by food supply. But a clear example of how improvements in food supply may decisively increase military success comes from the history of Maori New Zealand. The Maori are the Polynesian people first to settle New Zealand. Traditionally, they fought frequent fierce wars against each other, but only against closely neighboring tribes. Those wars were limited by the modest productivity of their agriculture, whose staple crop was sweet potatoes. It was not possible to grow enough sweet potatoes to feed an army in the field for a long time or on distant marches.

In 1815 Europeans arrived with guns and potatoes. The result was a 15 year period of Maori history from 1818 – 1833, when Maori tribes that had acquired potatoes and guns from the English sent armies on raids to attack tribes hundreds of miles away that had not yet acquired potatoes and guns.

In the same way, “Maya armies and bureaucracies remained small and unable to mount lengthy campaigns over long distances. Even much later, in 1848, when the Maya revolted against their Mexican overlords and a Maya army seemed to be on the verge of victory, the army had to break off fighting and go home to harvest another crop of corn.”

The Maya

2007-03-19T12:54:00.000-05:00

In Collapse, Jared Diamond says that a reason for devoting a chapter to the Maya, “is to provide an antidote to our other chapters on past societies, which consist disproportionately of small societies in somewhat fragile and geographically isolated environments, and behind the cutting edge of contemporary technology and culture.

“The Maya were none of those things. Instead, they were culturally the most advanced society in the pre-Columbian New World, the only one with extensive preserved writing and located within one of the two heartlands of New World civilization. Lest one be misled into thinking that crashes are a risk only for small peripheral societies in fragile areas, the Maya warn us that crashes can also befall the most advanced and creative societies.”

The Maya illustrate four of the five points in Diamond’s explanatory framework. They did damage their environment, especially by deforestation and erosion. Climate changes, droughts, contributed. So did hostilities among the Maya themselves – political and cultural factors, especially the competition among kings and nobles that led to a chronic emphasis on war and erecting monuments rather than on solving underlying problems.

Yet ancient Maya culture survived the collapse. There are still Maya people living in their ancient homeland and speaking Maya languages.
But, their ancient cities remained deserted, hidden by trees and virtually unknown to the outside world until rediscovered in 1839 by John Stephens, a rich American lawyer. The first Maya contact with Europeans came in 1502, just ten years after Columbus “discovered” America. The Spanish began to conquer the Maya in earnest in 1527, but did not subdue the last principality until 1697. “In one of history’s worst acts of cultural vandalism,” bishop Diego de Landa, who resided in the Yucatan Peninsula from 1549-1578, burned all Maya manuscripts he could find in his effort to eliminate paganism.

As with other societies Diamond has explored, farmers are the bedrock, the base of the pyramid upon which the nobility, priests, artisans and soldiers rest. In the US today, farmers make up just 2% of our population but each one feeds 125 other people. In ancient Egypt, each farmer produced five times the food required for himself and family. But a Maya peasant could produce only twice the needs of himself and his family. Thus, 70% of Maya society consisted of peasants because Maya agriculture had limitations.

Friday Funnies

2007-03-16T14:12:00.000-05:00

DORMITORY:
When you rearrange the letters:
DIRTY ROOM

PRESBYTERIAN:
When you rearrange the letters:
BEST IN PRAYER

ASTRONOMER:
When you rearrange the letters:
MOON STARER

DESPERATION: When you rearrange the letters:
A ROPE ENDS IT

THE EYES:!
When you rearrange the letters:
THEY SEE

GEORGE BUSH:
When you rearrange the letters:
HE BUGS GORE

THE MORSE CODE:
When you rearrange the letters:
HERE COME DOTS

SLOT MACHINES:
When you rearrange the letters:
CASH LOST IN ME

ANIMOSITY:
When you rearrange the letters:
IS NO AMITY

ELECTION RESULTS:
When you rearrange the letters:
LIES - LET'S RECOUNT

SNOOZE ALARMS:
When you rearrange the letters:
ALAS! NO MORE Z 'S

A DECIMAL POINT:
When you rearrange the letters:
IM A DOT IN PLACE

THE EARTHQUAKES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THAT QUEER SHAKE

ELEVEN PLUS TWO:
When you rearrange the letters:
TWELVE PLUS ONE

AND FOR THE GRAND FINALE:

MOTHER-IN-LAW:
When you rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER