Dolphins, the Navy, Animal Rights and Ranching

I had a difficult decision to make the other day: whether to vote Yes or No to approve a permit for the US Navy to bring four bottlenose dolphins into the state for a couple of weeks to further their training in mine detection.  Because bottlenose dolphins are on the State of Hawaii's Restricted Organisms List Part B, the Navy needs to get a permit from the State of Hawaii Department of Agriculture whenever they bring their dolphins into the state.  Mostly these permits are approved at the "ministerial" level, that is at the discretion of the department chairperson and without a public comment mechanism.  However the permit conditions needed to be updated so the matter was brought before the Board of Agriculture, of which I am a member, and in a public meeting format.

It was difficult because it was a layered decision.  Looking at it from the purely legal standpoint there were some difficulties, because the permit was being requested to conduct "scientific research" and from the documentation and the testimony given by the Navy representative who phoned into the meeting it was pretty clear that the dolphins were being brought in for training and not for anything that could be considered "scientific research" by even a lenient interpretation of that phrase.  On the other hand, in order for anything to get done in this world, and especially in the highly  bureaucratic State of Hawaii, there needs to be a certain flexibility of interpretation - if the cause is a good one, of course.  For instance, I'm delighted to bend the rules to the breaking point for a small farmer.  But using dolphins for military purposes - that is on the edge of what could be called a good cause, in my opinion, and way over the line into bad, bad, bad for quite a few people, whose testimony sat in a substantial stack at my seat when I came into the meeting.  Of course, most of the testimony was protesting using dolphins as weapons carriers, which is not what these dolphins were being trained to do.  How to weigh passionate but off-target testimony?  What weight to give my own thoughts and feelings about the use of dolphins by the military? How do the dolphins feel about their lives?

From a certain point of view I have no business even thinking about animal rights since I make a living raising animals for food and training animals to be obedient to my will. I ask my dogs and horses to put themselves in danger for me.  The dogs love it; the horses for the most part would rather be dozing under a tree somewhere but gain social status in their herd, I've noticed, that closely follows their skill in interacting with humans.

I don't think that animals have the same kind of rights that humans have among ourselves.  "Rights" are a human game, a game which involves our history of symbolic language, the invention of legal codes from Hammurabi on down.  Even among humans the language of "rights" is a fragile construction, with little pragmatic value, except in the context of specific political and economic institutions and power constellations.

But there is a morality or code of behavoir that is a logical offshoot of our evolving knowledge of ecosystems and environment.   That code of behavior can make the difference in whether we further degrade the environment until there are no more wild animals or plants left, or not.  Caring about what the military is up to with bottlenose dolphins (or sea lions or dogs or horses for that matter) is one small part of going towards the Not.

Considered pragmatically, using dolphins to detect mines seems to be of minimal risk to the dolphins and to potentially save human lives. I'm not opposed to working animals, obviously, as long as they are treated with respect.  And there was that thing where if I voted No it would look like I caved in to pressure from the animal rights groups with their stack of mostly off-base testimony.  Also maybe the Navy would be mad at the State and cut jobs at Pearl Harbor or some other unforeseen consequence of this little permit.

On the other hand there was that point of legality. And the fact that underwater mines and dolphins just don't go together. Just because.

So I voted No on the permit because I didn't think we should bend the rules for the military and their use of dolphins. And someone else on the board voted with me, but we were outvoted 5-2.  One more vote and it wouldn't have passed.  But I think that it passed is OK, for now.

A Brief History of “Unempowerment” aka Unemployment

“From this know-how, what could be detached from human performance was gradually cut out and “perfected” with machines that use regulatable combinations of forms, materials, and forces…As its techniques are gradually taken away from it in order to transform them into machines, it seems to withdraw into a subjective knowledge (savoir) separated from the language of its procedures (which are then reverted to it in the form imposed by technologically-produced machines). Thus know-how takes on the appearance of an “intuitive” or “reflex” ability, which is almost invisible and whose status remains unrecognized.”

Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 69.

Being an intellectual child of the 90's I'm easily seduced by French theory, although the humanism that underlies thenRenaissance, the Enlightenment, and post-modernism is all of a piece in allowing full subjectivity only to the mind of the highly domesticated urban dweller, and that is a existential foundation that I have become less and less willing to grant. If you only "recognize" city people and the forms of knowledge generated in cities, then climate change and mass unempowerment and industrial mono-culture and "big data" is what you get.  

Still, French theory is a useful antidote to thinking in American terms, which some people would say is impossible anyway.  But there was Aldo Leopold. 

Aldo Leopold

“…The land is too complex for the simple processes of the “mass mind’ armed with modern tools.  To live in real harmony with such a country seems to require a degree of public regulation we will not tolerate, or a degree of public enlightenment we do not possess.

But of course we must continue to live with it according to our lights.  Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use.  The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age.”

Aldo Leopold, "The Virgin Southwest", 179 in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays.

"Biutiful"

Barcelona is not so different from Ka’u

I just watched the DVD Biutiful, a film by the Mexican writer/director Inarritu.  It is a movie that explores human wildness - set in the slum edges of sprawling Barcelona and following the last days of a good but troubled man, Uxbal, a father of young children, dying of cancer, caught in the pitiless economic system that is both “normal” and terrifying.  Even for the privileged, the monster of ruin is always lurking just a few footsteps away.  All it takes is a little twist of fate, a short string of bad luck for any of us to fall victim.

At first I was shamed by this movie.  My preoccupation with grass and animals, nature and beauty seem so out-of-touch, so precious compared with with the harsh realities of the urban dispossessed.  Yet -  the traps which entangle Uxbal are derived from our civilization’s abandonment of nature and the true needs of humans: making an honest living being one of those needs.  Not that Uxbal had much of a chance or choice to make an honest living, born a virtual orphan in a mega-city on a planet with a human population in overshoot and a crashing environment.  The movie itself makes this point with shots of beached whales on a bank of televisions that Uxbal passes and smokestacks billowing in the neighborhood where his family lives. All they can do is try to survive.

Lack of work and of money to buy a place to live are the problems that drive the movie.  Simple problems really, and simple to fix, if we could be honest with each other about what needs to be done and just in our dispensation of work and recompense.  There is plenty of work to do done but what our economic system rewards handsomely is not honest work but enterprising exploitation. By our twisted set of values, producing is considered demeaning, and exploitation clever and obligatory.

The problem of making a living are the same in the country and the city, as are the perverse incentives to profit off each other.  The traps that are built into the system and which can engulf a person a little unlucky or unwary are just as unforgiving in the country.  What is more, it is still the country that must subsidize and provide for the existence of the cities. It has always been that way in the cultures that we call civilized, since the time of the Mesopotamian kingdoms, since the ancient kingdoms of China.  To produce the primary materials that the city requires of the countryside in a never-ending stream is a far more demanding way of living than that of the urban dwellers who scavenge on the edges of the urban economy, as the characters in Biutiful do.  If there is ever going to be sustainable civilization on this planet a reconciliation between nature and the city is necessary, and the people of the countryside are the ones that know the language -which is a language of actual bodies working, living, and dying rather than a symbolic language of power and image - in which that reconciliation must be worked out. 

In the end, country or city, what we are  all looking for is the same, as  in the movie’s title: a little bit or, preferably, a lot of beautiful for our children.

Renewable Energy Connection

My daughter asked me a funny question yesterday: "Do you think it was sunny enough today that I could have a smoothie?"
Funny but practical.  You see I bought a powerful blender at Walmart, so powerful that its power demands overload the PV system, so unless the sun is blazing down, I usually have to start up the generator for the minute or so that she needs the blender to make her smoothie.
And I'm glad that: 1. she has a gut sense of the connection between energy production and energy demand without boring lectures and powerpoint demonstrations, and 2. that she is making a smoothie because they're yummy.

The US SOTU and Missing the Point of Climate Change

President Obama mentioned climate change in his SOTU speech the other day.  He said that it is undoubtedly the greatest challenge facing this generation and future generations and that his administration is making strides to address it: the landmark agreements between China and the US on reducing fossil fuel combustion and carbon pollution.It was an  admirable speech and yet it was also another example of missing the point on "climate change."

"Climate change" is Nature speaking to us, and the language that she is using is what we are calling climate.

Climate change is the mother of all feedback loops in the vast system we are calling climate, but which is indistinguishable from the vast system we call life.  It is life that maintains the climate of life - trees in the forest, plankton in the ocean, birds, land animals, fish.

Climate change is merely the symptom of our indifference to life, our willingness to pollute our own habitat and poison life, including our own life.  

That indifference to life is learned as a norm in a culture that places little value upon invisible, immaterial, unquantifiable necessities - life and nurturance, love and community. 

We do not learn to see life.  We are not taught to become connoisseurs of life, as we taught to be connoisseurs of material things.  

We do not learn to see life in the foreground, to take pleasure in life, in its beauties and its miracles, to value life above all else. 

Which is a mistake.  A fault in our logic as a civilization, which is creating the symptom called climate change.  

What else is more important than life?  It is the most basic, the most necessary.  

When we forget this, when we allow ourselves to forget and discount and degrade life, we lose our way.  Lowell Catlett says it this way: “You cannot have healthy human beings without contact with plants and animals.”

If we are not surrounded by life, the core of our being is empty - we are plagued, individually by neuroses and illness, and we become a civilization heading inevitably to the destruction of our own life-support system, to the degradation of our environment and of our souls.  “We fall back into the biological category of the potato bug which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself,” says Aldo Leopold. 

Climate change is Nature saying to humans: Change!  Re-orient yourselves to what is most important, stop and think about what is necessary for your own existence and health.  Re-define civilization in light of life.  Reach deep and see what you are.

Such a re-orientation is not a revolution.  It is not about political power, although it can be expressed in politics.  It is not a religion, although it might speak to what we hold sacred. It is a choice.  It is a shift in fundamental values that we can make going forward, it is a change in how we can make decisions and choose life paths and trajectories.  It is a way to imagine and define oneself and one’s relationship to the world.  It is a way to overcome the blind selfishness that our civilization teaches us and which spawns our irresponsible consumerism, our worship of dead things and empty symbols, and our implicit sanctioning of rapacious economic development, predatory wealth and power based on brutality.  

To value life is also selfishness because there can be no self without life.  It is simply a broader and more logical kind of selfishness.   To see life in the center of one’s being is to come home to what is most real, to wake up after a long, strange dream.  

Ali'i

My Catahoula hound Ali'i died a few days after Christmas.  There is so much good and beautiful still in my life, but Ali'i was a magnificent creature and the bond between us was intense.  Vicki Hearne, the writer and dog trainer, in her essay "Oyez a Beaumont," writes about the "dangerous ones" that take ahold of your heart and don't let go. Ali'i came from a line of dangerous hounds.  He was the grandson of my dog King, who hunted wild cattle with me in the high mountain forests, before we settled down to being staid and semi-respectable ranchers.  He was the great-great-grandson of my brother's dog Handsome, who was the first Catahoula I ever met, and whose eyes burned with a blue fire that I'll never forget.  Someday, perhaps, I'll look into a Catahoula puppy's eyes and see a glimmer of danger.  Maybe I'll still be strong enough to meet that dauntless gaze...