About Pessimism v. Optimism. I disagree with Jason's self-criticism that he is too often guilty of resorting to a declensionist narrative.
I would add something to Rescher's taxonomy: personality pessimism. Often times we might have a personality trait that filters out the incoming data, selectively glomming on to that which validates our viewpoint. We might call that a predisposition in search of a justification. Does Jason have it? Imagine I knee nothing of him or that he was even involved in the Field Guide: just reading the corpus of the articles and cross-checking the accuracy against the data I had available I would conclude the writer(s) was entirely accurate and had no attitudinal predisposition.
Given the data we have about the Anthropocene, it is very realistic to be pessimistic. Seeing a house on fire makes one a believer in owning a fire extinguisher. No pessimism involved.
Thank you for all the hours you spent researching this article Jason! Tipping points is a huge topic with huge consequences and calls for universal human attention in my belief.
The world is a tremendous arena of interacting dynamic processes. The mathematical functioning of such interactions is complex needless to say, but we can generalize to predict that the mathematical inflections we call tipping points- the ones we notice, that is -are just the tip of the iceberg. There are most certainly thousands we haven't noticed and many are irreversible- damage is occurring daily at the cellular level of the global dynamic system despite the braking effects of homeostatic mechanisms and the pace of damage is accelerating
We're not even yet aware of all this but we will be. It is difficult to hold a meliorist outlook in the face of the wrenching/torquing dynamics of the Anthropocene..
The interactions between some of these I hope to get into next week. I too think intuitively of cascade failures based on the interactions, but from what I'm reading in the GPT doc it's not that clear. The main message of course is "let's not go down that road."
“ High levels of PFAS in your drinking water is an emergency, but learning that rainfall everywhere on Earth contains an unhealthy level of PFAS leaves us stunned until we can quietly contemplate our responsibility and plan our response.” That was definitely my response when I got both of those pieces of news.
In your well? So sorry to hear it. On my end, we have a developing story that I'll tell someday.
There are so many other big, heavy environmental stories happening, but somehow the news that rain even in remote corners is contaminated just hit me hard. Maybe, having spent a lot of time in remote places, I'm sensitive to the "no escape" facet of that news.
No, not in our own well, although to be honest I don't think they test for that when we take it in (we tested for things like iron, sulphur, and so on). It was more, like you, the news that every drop of rain in the entire world is possibly contaminated. It makes sense it would hit you even more having been to the places you have -- the "no escape" facet as you say.
PFAS testing is still young, and separate from ordinary water tests. Here in New England it costs a few hundred per test at least, and they're looking for close to 30 substances I think. There are a few thousand in the PFAS family. The precautions for simply taking the sample, i.e. how to avoid contaminating it with the PFAS that's everywhere in our lives, is wild, and will be the source of an essay I'll write sooner than later.
When even Antarctic snow is contaminated, I get a bit riled. Though it shouldn't be a surprise, since anything in the jet stream ends up there, like microbes landing in the snow around the South Pole. Some eke out a bit more life in the microscopic melt layer of an ice crystal in the sunlit snow. Then they get buried for millennia before springing back to life when the ice hits the sea. PFAS chemicals have joined the cycle.
That reminds me of something a friend of mine, who used to be a glaciologist, wrote about take samples and what it takes to avoid the collection materials and so on being contaminated. (She's got a book about her science career coming out next year that I read an early version of and will be recommending all over! https://watershednotes.ca/book/)
Getting riled is understandable. I think it's natural for any of us to imagine there is somewhere that hasn't been contaminated by unnecessary human waste, but even more so when it's a place you've been and worked and loved.
Your last graf reminds me of something the poet Andrei Codrescu wrote about that he called "the disappearance of the outside." His larger point was about our increasing sense or pretense that all of reality is inside the civilizational bubble, but if you haven't had at least some deep moments in a truly wild place it can be hard to know otherwise. Then when you know, but find the bubble swallowing it up...
God that is so, so true. I spend a lot of time in designated wilderness areas and feel it every time I have to reenter the ... I never know what to call it anymore. Modern world? Human-constructed? Civilization means so many different things to so many different people. Clean air and all the children fed would be a good start in my book.
Well dang it. I know we're crossing liminal space, and I don't mind being reminded. Truly I don't get why everyone isn't frantic about this all the time.
We are not all frantic about it all the time because we have our personal mental health to consider. How to be able to understand and read about these realities is a struggle, finding balance between awareness and the ability to handle such awareness is a constant challenge for me.
Agreed. I think we'd feel less tense and closer to a balance if we knew that there was a genuine ongoing effort to deal with what's unfolding. Great stuff is being done, good policies exist here and there, but not to the necessary scale.
Thank you, Diane. Frantic is a hard state to maintain, I guess. Though there's a quiet version that I think is infecting many of us, with some unquantified unknown lurking. But we like our problems in the front yard before we deal with them. It's the policy makers who should be doing the risk assessment helping us understand that this is in the front yard already.
Another note. I find Nicholas Rescher's taxonomy of optimism very fruitful and it can be fruitfully applied to pessimistic viewpoints (such as mine.). Rescher talks of actuality, tendency, and prospect optimisms. Applying this analysis to pessimism, we can define:
1. Actuality Pessimism is the assessment that generally things are not currently in good shape.
2. Tendency Pessimism is the assessment that whether presently things are entirely bad, entirely good, or a mix of the two, that conditions are generally getting worse as we move into the future.
3. Pessimism is the assessment that as things presently stand, and factoring in our foreseeable abilities to arrest, retard, or reverse changes we dislike, that things will at least in the medium term probably get worse still.
I count myself in all three camps. But not a fatalist. That is to say I don't think "doomers" have the luxury of just passively watching what we consider the inevitable collapse of systems we hold dear. We must take the offensive and fight to protect the glaciers, the ice shelves, the cryosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, the plant and animal species, even the microbiome.
I should note that neither Rescher nor I think that people are global in their pessimism or optimism. For example, I am fairly pessimistic in how I view the climate is going, but on the whole am a relentless optimist.
All this is well said, Michael. Thank you. As I've said before, I'm a pessimistic optimist too. We lurch along with good intentions and last-minute altruism amid a whole lot of selfish nonsense.
Thanks for the pessimism taxonomy. That's a useful window. Tendency Pessimism reminds me of the phrase "declensionist narrative.," something I've long been guilty of. We see the decline amid the day-to-day more prominently perhaps than we should.
About Pessimism v. Optimism. I disagree with Jason's self-criticism that he is too often guilty of resorting to a declensionist narrative.
I would add something to Rescher's taxonomy: personality pessimism. Often times we might have a personality trait that filters out the incoming data, selectively glomming on to that which validates our viewpoint. We might call that a predisposition in search of a justification. Does Jason have it? Imagine I knee nothing of him or that he was even involved in the Field Guide: just reading the corpus of the articles and cross-checking the accuracy against the data I had available I would conclude the writer(s) was entirely accurate and had no attitudinal predisposition.
Given the data we have about the Anthropocene, it is very realistic to be pessimistic. Seeing a house on fire makes one a believer in owning a fire extinguisher. No pessimism involved.
Thank you for all the hours you spent researching this article Jason! Tipping points is a huge topic with huge consequences and calls for universal human attention in my belief.
The world is a tremendous arena of interacting dynamic processes. The mathematical functioning of such interactions is complex needless to say, but we can generalize to predict that the mathematical inflections we call tipping points- the ones we notice, that is -are just the tip of the iceberg. There are most certainly thousands we haven't noticed and many are irreversible- damage is occurring daily at the cellular level of the global dynamic system despite the braking effects of homeostatic mechanisms and the pace of damage is accelerating
We're not even yet aware of all this but we will be. It is difficult to hold a meliorist outlook in the face of the wrenching/torquing dynamics of the Anthropocene..
The interactions between some of these I hope to get into next week. I too think intuitively of cascade failures based on the interactions, but from what I'm reading in the GPT doc it's not that clear. The main message of course is "let's not go down that road."
“ High levels of PFAS in your drinking water is an emergency, but learning that rainfall everywhere on Earth contains an unhealthy level of PFAS leaves us stunned until we can quietly contemplate our responsibility and plan our response.” That was definitely my response when I got both of those pieces of news.
In your well? So sorry to hear it. On my end, we have a developing story that I'll tell someday.
There are so many other big, heavy environmental stories happening, but somehow the news that rain even in remote corners is contaminated just hit me hard. Maybe, having spent a lot of time in remote places, I'm sensitive to the "no escape" facet of that news.
No, not in our own well, although to be honest I don't think they test for that when we take it in (we tested for things like iron, sulphur, and so on). It was more, like you, the news that every drop of rain in the entire world is possibly contaminated. It makes sense it would hit you even more having been to the places you have -- the "no escape" facet as you say.
PFAS testing is still young, and separate from ordinary water tests. Here in New England it costs a few hundred per test at least, and they're looking for close to 30 substances I think. There are a few thousand in the PFAS family. The precautions for simply taking the sample, i.e. how to avoid contaminating it with the PFAS that's everywhere in our lives, is wild, and will be the source of an essay I'll write sooner than later.
When even Antarctic snow is contaminated, I get a bit riled. Though it shouldn't be a surprise, since anything in the jet stream ends up there, like microbes landing in the snow around the South Pole. Some eke out a bit more life in the microscopic melt layer of an ice crystal in the sunlit snow. Then they get buried for millennia before springing back to life when the ice hits the sea. PFAS chemicals have joined the cycle.
That reminds me of something a friend of mine, who used to be a glaciologist, wrote about take samples and what it takes to avoid the collection materials and so on being contaminated. (She's got a book about her science career coming out next year that I read an early version of and will be recommending all over! https://watershednotes.ca/book/)
Getting riled is understandable. I think it's natural for any of us to imagine there is somewhere that hasn't been contaminated by unnecessary human waste, but even more so when it's a place you've been and worked and loved.
Your last graf reminds me of something the poet Andrei Codrescu wrote about that he called "the disappearance of the outside." His larger point was about our increasing sense or pretense that all of reality is inside the civilizational bubble, but if you haven't had at least some deep moments in a truly wild place it can be hard to know otherwise. Then when you know, but find the bubble swallowing it up...
God that is so, so true. I spend a lot of time in designated wilderness areas and feel it every time I have to reenter the ... I never know what to call it anymore. Modern world? Human-constructed? Civilization means so many different things to so many different people. Clean air and all the children fed would be a good start in my book.
Well dang it. I know we're crossing liminal space, and I don't mind being reminded. Truly I don't get why everyone isn't frantic about this all the time.
We are not all frantic about it all the time because we have our personal mental health to consider. How to be able to understand and read about these realities is a struggle, finding balance between awareness and the ability to handle such awareness is a constant challenge for me.
Agreed. I think we'd feel less tense and closer to a balance if we knew that there was a genuine ongoing effort to deal with what's unfolding. Great stuff is being done, good policies exist here and there, but not to the necessary scale.
Thank you, Diane. Frantic is a hard state to maintain, I guess. Though there's a quiet version that I think is infecting many of us, with some unquantified unknown lurking. But we like our problems in the front yard before we deal with them. It's the policy makers who should be doing the risk assessment helping us understand that this is in the front yard already.
Another note. I find Nicholas Rescher's taxonomy of optimism very fruitful and it can be fruitfully applied to pessimistic viewpoints (such as mine.). Rescher talks of actuality, tendency, and prospect optimisms. Applying this analysis to pessimism, we can define:
1. Actuality Pessimism is the assessment that generally things are not currently in good shape.
2. Tendency Pessimism is the assessment that whether presently things are entirely bad, entirely good, or a mix of the two, that conditions are generally getting worse as we move into the future.
3. Pessimism is the assessment that as things presently stand, and factoring in our foreseeable abilities to arrest, retard, or reverse changes we dislike, that things will at least in the medium term probably get worse still.
I count myself in all three camps. But not a fatalist. That is to say I don't think "doomers" have the luxury of just passively watching what we consider the inevitable collapse of systems we hold dear. We must take the offensive and fight to protect the glaciers, the ice shelves, the cryosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, the plant and animal species, even the microbiome.
#3 is "Prospect Pessimism" apologies for the omission.
I should note that neither Rescher nor I think that people are global in their pessimism or optimism. For example, I am fairly pessimistic in how I view the climate is going, but on the whole am a relentless optimist.
All this is well said, Michael. Thank you. As I've said before, I'm a pessimistic optimist too. We lurch along with good intentions and last-minute altruism amid a whole lot of selfish nonsense.
Thanks for the pessimism taxonomy. That's a useful window. Tendency Pessimism reminds me of the phrase "declensionist narrative.," something I've long been guilty of. We see the decline amid the day-to-day more prominently perhaps than we should.
Well thought out and worth a read. Thank you.
Thank you, Amanda. It's a ton of info. I'm hoping to translate it clearly.