Here at DP, we rely on long walks in the forest to maintain some faint semblance of sanity during these times when the lunatics are running amok. Thus we welcome the publication of A Forest Language: Words that Illuminate the Astonishing World of Trees, by Hannah Fries. Below follows a brief excerpt, as relayed from the pages of the always worthwhile Orion magazine.
Hear hear!
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Now comes the latest assessment of Planetary Boundaries as published in the second Planetary Health Check report, developed by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Five key takeaways and a video summary relayed below:
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Now comes artist Irene Stapleford with a showing of new work at Chalk Gallery in Newburyport, work that instantly caught our attention here at DP for its explicit understanding of trees as sentient beings and not as “forest resources” to be exploited. Chalk Gallery owner & curator Nina Tanis writes:
TOWERING AVENGER (TISOPHONE)
SERENE PINE
ABUNDANCE AT ELEVATION
We borrow the title for this post from a lucid sentence written many decades ago by philosopher Günther Anders:
“There is no situation that is morally more evil than the situation in which evil has been so fully integrated into the situation that the individual itself is spared from being evil.”
Now comes AI dissident Connor Leahy, the U.S. executive director of ControlAI, an advocacy group focused on educating lawmakers and their staff. Excerpts from a recent interview below:
One plausible imagining of the future, wherein evil becomes wired into the fundamental infrastructure of human life, was offered a decade or so ago by the creators of the TV series The 100:
TOO MANY PEOPLE
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Now come excepts from a 1982 (!) interview with Arne Naess, words that remain as deeply meaningful today as the moment they were spoken; and two images from the studio of artist Karen Bamonte, from a new series titled Broken Circle.
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Now comes author Sarah Wilson via a few excerpts from a recent interview centered on her new book, I Eat the Stars. The title descends from a poem by astronomer Rebecca Elson.
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Now comes Earthjustice, with a call to action to defend public lands that in many cases are also sacred to First Nations communities:
The attacks on our national monuments continue at a relentless pace. At the behest of industries such as coal and hardrock mining and politicians like Senator Mike Lee of Utah, President Trump just dramatically shrunk Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments by over 90%. This move could enable drilling, mining, and other harmful activities on these iconic public lands. We need your help to tell Congress to defend these national monuments.
Loved by Utah residents and outdoor enthusiasts across the country, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments have been stewarded by Indigenous people for centuries.
Reducing protections would:
Growing influence from extractive industries threatens monuments and other public lands that belong to us all. This follows a pattern of administrative and legislative attacks on our public lands, like the recission of the Roadless Rule, the withdrawal of the 20-year mining ban next to the Boundary Waters, and the opening up of marine monuments to commercial fishing.
What’s more, this attack could open the door for similar attacks on national monuments across the country.
We need you to tell Congress: hands off our national monuments!
Let’s be clear: These attacks are illegal and deeply unpopular. But we know this fight is winnable because we’ve been here before: The first Trump administration tried to strip protections from half of Grand Staircase-Escalante and nearly 90% of Bears Ears National Monument. We, alongside our tribal partners, immediately filed lawsuits on behalf of conservation groups. President Biden then restored them in 2021.
Tell Congress today: Reject these attacks and defend our public lands!
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Now comes a quartet of distinguished climate scientists: Raymond Pierrehumbert, Julia Slingo, Michael Mann and Valerie Masson-Delmotte.
Below, a few salient paragraphs from their recent editorial opposing solar engineering, which in our view represents the ultimate dead end of Human Supremacism.
To these questions, we suggest the only rational answer = a resounding NO.
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Relayed from excellent reporting & analysis elsewhere, the following evidence of human supremacy in its deranged and potentially terminal phase:
No wonder, then, the following survey results from Gallup:
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Now comes Nicholas Carr, with a few salient paragraphs from his New Cartographies substack, always worth close consideration:
We find ourselves today, Anders wrote in The Obsolescence of the Human, surrounded by products that don’t appear to us as having been produced by us. We have handed off so much of their design and production to industrial technologies that we can no longer take a shared pride in their invention and manufacture. Indeed, they have come to project an otherness that seems not just separate from us but superior to us. They mock us as outdated masses of meat and bone. Today’s products, Anders observed,
are simply “there.” We encounter them primarily as necessary, desirable, superfluous, affordable, or unaffordable consumer goods that become “mine” only after I have bought them. As such, they are much more likely to be proof of one’s own insufficiency than evidence of one’s power.
This sense of insufficiency transformed “Promethean pride” into “Promethean shame”—the shame contemporary man feels at having been born instead of made, of being a product of natural processes rather than technological ones. “He despises himself,” wrote Anders, “in the same way that things would despise him if they could.” The shame, he went on, becomes particularly sharp when a person first sees a so-called thinking machine:
As for the man who is for the first time confronted with a working computing machine, self-aggrandizement and pride are even more alien to him. An observer who erupts with the exclamation, “My goodness, aren’t we great guys, to be capable of this!” when encountering such a machine is a clown, a figment of the imagination. Quite the contrary! He rather murmurs with a shake of his head, “My god, it’s incredible what it—the machine—can do!” At the same time, he feels highly ill at ease in his creaturely skin, for the machine half gives him the creeps and half puts him to shame.
Though it was written seventy-five years ago, that last sentence strikes me as one of the more perceptive descriptions of man’s confrontation with generative AI: “he feels highly ill at ease in his creaturely skin, for the machine half gives him the creeps and half puts him to shame.”
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So where does Promethean Shame end? As Anders writes elsewhere: in a world without us!
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