Welcome Mercy On-line Students, 2009

Hi Class,

Here is a blogspace for us to further our discussions of Environment and the Psychology of Behavior in a public forum. It is a place where we can post pictures and youtube videos and invite the world to interact with us.

We will start with posts of the google map terrain pictures of your environments, which will appear below as you send them to me.

Once all the images are posted we can engage in comparative analysis of the landscape features that shape our behavior.

Picture number one, below, is my immediate home environment, where the home office of our Verein (NGO) "Solar CITIES" is located .  You can see that we are quite close to both a major autobahn (so we can hear the rush of traffic) and a huge railroad network.  We are also a half hour walk from downtown Essen (left side of the picture) which is a pedestrian only shopping zone.  This makes a big difference to our psychological health, because we don't have to drive and when we get downtown there is always a festive atmosphere without the roar and rush of traffic and its associated smells, smoke and dangers.















 Picture number two is of Pelham Parkway in the Bronx -- one of you lives there!
Notice how U.S. cities are generally laid out in a rectangular grid pattern, while older European cities are more "organic", with curving or radial streets coming out of various centers.  Most European cities are built around railroad terminals and pedestrian zones, most modern American cities around highway off-ramps. How does this affect our perceptions? Do straight roads "straight-jacket" our thinking? Do they help us organize our thoughts and rationalize our world?

Picture 3 is of Utica, NewYork, where another of you lives.  

Picture 4 depicts Chappaqua. One of you works there at one of three jobs.  The countryside has a more organic transit form, usually following natural contours of hills, valleys and water features.















Figure 5 is of Yorktown Heights, where that  person resides.













Image 6 is of Armonk, where that same person goes for a second job.













Picture 7 is Mahopac, the third location of her employment.













Picture 8 is of Cortland Manor, where one of our fellow students moved after living in the  Bronx.  Clearly there are differences! But how did they affect her behavior?

Picture 9 is of the Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry Campus.   I lived most of my life in the Draper Lane apartments across the Mercy Woods from the campus.  From this image it is obvious how little of the forest is left since the developers destroyed it to build the Landing and the Fireman's housing.











 Picture 11 is one student's home in  Poughkeepsie:

Picture 12 is the distance and route that one of our students has to take to get from home (A)  just to get to the college bookstore (B)!  It appears, at least, to be a scenic drive along the river, but the map gives no indication how bad traffic might be!

A.L.'s new neighborhood, in Coop City, the Bronx where eagles fly by the window:

A.L.s old neighborhood, in Marble Hill.  Note that in both cases she has been living in a RIPARIAN environment (a river environment) quite close to the water.  Given that most human civilizations evolved by rivers, how might this affect your psychology?  Does real estate next to the river command a higher price? Does it appreciate in value faster?  How is such real estate doing in today's housing crisis?  Why is living next to a river considered by people to be worth paying a premium? When does living next to a river become undesirable?

On leaving the Earth and its Cycles Behind

January 6, 2005

I reject the natural cycles of biology. And rejecting them may be quintessentially human -- our most defining characteristic.
Our special (speci-al; read "species-all") hallmark is our absence of oestrus and our year-long month-long sexual receptivity (c.f. Jared Diamond's "Why Sex is Fun") shared by almost no other animals in the world. It is hypothesized that our ability (willingness, longing?) to have sex all the time, even when it could be considered wasted effort (in reproductive terms) is an adaptation to maintain and secure the pair bond for the difficult task of rearing a large brained, slow-maturing offspring. Sex keeps the couple together through hard times and ensures fidelity. By rejecting the natural menstrual cycle and seasonal cycle as rulers of sexual activity, humans have been able to evolve to a level of consciousness and intelligence and physical prowess far exceeding the millions of other life forms with whom we share this planet.

I suspect that to continue evolving progressively we must divorce ourselves even further from the cycles of this planet.

In defense of ignoring our environment

Our disdain for recycling and ecology may stem from this "progressive evolutionary instinct." Our world-wide adoption of eschatological religions with linear story lines and our overall rejection of recycling religions (i.e. circular, cyclical religions) may also stem from the same urge. We don't want to be ruled by the ebb and flow, rise and fall, incarnation-decomposition-reincarnation rhythms of this lonely little planet. We don't want to be ruled by the slow trickle of solar radiation and its limited rate of income (or at least capture by fellow life forms who can do 3 % conversion at best). The 10% rule of energy transfer up the trophic levels infuriates us. We want it all and always!

Wearing beards as a recidivist trait

Men shave their beards in "advanced" societies, and enforce their growth in "backward" societies. The Taliban and Bin Ladens of the world are seen as recidivist, anchored by ancient books and old rhythms. Beards are what happen in the 'natural' life and death cycle. Beards show age, reveal experience, signal the transfers of power that occur through the life cycle. We free ourselves from that cycle when we shave, holdingon desperately to our species' special neoteny.

It is said (Desmond Morris, E.O. Wilson, Jared Diamond et al.) that we differ from chimpanzees in that we retain some fetal characteristics into adulthood. It is implied that the genetic switches that make us different from our closest relatives were merely time dilation switches in development (ontogeny) that carried into phylogeny (see Stephen J. Gould ; I think it is in Aldous Huxley's "Ape and Essence" where an idea is put forward that a man allowed to live several hundred years eventually turns into an ape! Or was that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Creeping Man"?)

If we are aware that to be human is to stay young -- to perch perpetually at the starting line, at the opening salvo of every natural cycle in some eternal spring, then it makes sense to rail against every autumn, to fight the winter of our soul, to fight senescence in every way.

We must get out of harmony with "nature".

The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one can not live in a cradle forever."
-Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

William E. Burrows, in "The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth" makes an eloquent case for creating an ARC on the Moon, an archive or "backup drive" of civilization to preserve our history and values for when the earth is impacted by another asteroid collision (or other large magnitude disaster). He goes further in urging us to backup civilization throughout our solar system to increase the odds of this fragile phenomenon -- intelligent life -- surviving the myriad catastrophes that can (and will) occur in our pocket of space.

An argument can be made that just as the moon (and the "moon-strual" cycle) no longer rule our sexual appetites we must lot let the sun (or our orbit around it) rule any of our behavior. Those deadly yearly cycles must be conquered. Very soon we will (by choice or necessity) leave this earth, this moon, this sun. We will abandon this solar system and its infernal, eternal cycles. Our evolution into a space faring civilization demands it. To suggest otherwise is to condemn us (and any intelligent organisms who follow in our footsteps) to extinction. The philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard was quite adamant about this in the arguments he laid out in his "Post-modern Fable".


We will need our individual members to live for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. We will need to delay reproduction for hundreds of years.
AND THIS WILL BE NOTHING NEW!

Conforming to another Fable:

It is recorded in Genesis -- the most widespread creation myth of our species -- that our progenitors lived almost a thousand years (950 in the case of Noah) and often delayed reproduction until many hundreds of years had passed (as many as 500 in Noah's case; his father Lamech had him at 182). This is of course if we take the Bible literally (some who believe in the Bible do not and have other more terrestrial explanations for the numbers)

But taken at face value, longevity and neoteny are in the Bible. (Bible thumpers will be delighted to hear this! So come on religious folk, get behind this space faring initiative!)
According to the Bible (don't you love the implicit authority in that phrase?) we lived for nearly a thousand years when we first came to this planet and our current 120 year "limit" was only imposed on us when we decided to stay and mingle our genes with some of the locals (dying young was partially a punishment for the "the sons of God" interbreeding with the "daughters of men" -- this allegedly angered God).

Well, now that we are leaving, we no longer need the limit.

Being adapted to the Earth and its cycles can be seen as the curse we inherited when we left Eden (clearly a land without cycles of life and death, birth and senescence, predators and prey, winter and summer) and mingled space-faring genes with planet-bound genes. We must now decouple ourselves from this planet's rhythms if we are to gain purchase in space.

I use biblical fables metaphorically, but I wouldn't be the first person to connect the influence of the Genesis myth to our attitudes toward our environment and role in it. UCLA History Professor Lynne White Jr. wrote The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis in Science 155: 1203-1207.

As Eric Doyle argues in "Ecology and the Canticle of Brother Sun" ( an analysis of St. Francis of Assissi's "Canticle of Brother Sun" and how Franciscan thinking can be used to help us deal with our ecological crisis),

"In an article published in March 1967, Professor Lynn White of the University of California, argued that the historical roots of the ecological crisis can be traced to the traditional Christian view of man’s dominion over nature.’ Professor White maintained that because the roots of the trouble are largely religious, the remedy must be essentially religious".(p. 392)

Turning to Genesis and other long-preserved creation myths is not an untenable way to mobilize humankind toward measures that would preserve creation, and Burrow's idea of creating a (Noah's) Archive of civilization and the living heritage of the Earth in space is not without precedent in our religious history.

What is complex about using religion and eschatology to deal with our ecological predicament is that it involves so many contradictions, chief among them the question of whether we should be trying to adapt to the earth and its limitations or transcend them. And if we attempt to transcend, what becomes of the other life forms with whom we share this planet?

One argument says,

"Hooray for the indifference of people to their environment! Bravo if you disdain "nature" per se! You are ready to blast off this earth!"

I am no environmentalist. I am a space man.

I was born a year after the Russians put the first man in space and watched the first man walk on the moon in the Summer of '69 when I was in the second grade. My view of the earth was always the one looking down FROM space -- put that image in a child's head when he is little and it is hard not to think of oneself as separate from the home planet. The famous "earth from space" image reproduced in thousands of books and posters cannot help but give us the feeling that we are aliens, for when we learned Geography and Geology in School we were introduced to the 3rd Rock from the Sun the way an extra-terrestrial child would be - from outside. That's how I grew up.

As a space-man, I want to understand each planet I visit and know what resources there can sustain us. But like any good traveler and conscientious visitor or polite houseguest I want to leave the resource cycles of each place intact so that it will still be here next time I visit and will be available to other visitors (utilitarian argument) and because it has its own intrinsic worth (spiritual argument).

In my space capsule it is like being in the garden of Eden from which I came. It is a land of perpetual spring where I am forever young.

I frolic and play and carry on like an eternal child.

My wife Sybille has a recurrent dream that is perhaps about the same theme. In her dream she is running on a track and her mother insists she leave the race and come sit and drink tea with her. She does so, but is upset and annoyed. As well she should be. In the extended neoteny hypothesis it should be the elders who join us on the track not the other way around. They should not be allowed to drag us into their earthly grave, slow us down, force us to adapt to their rhythms of decay. We reject our elders because they want us to stop running, to change phase, to "grow up". They want us to fulfill their expectations that we reproduce their departing genes because they have no faith that there is anywhere else to go. They are stuck on earth. They are preachers of stagnation. And as long as we are merely "running around in circles" (as Sybille is when she runs on the race track) what argument do we have?

But when we are racing for the stars, all this will change.

No more stopping for the "long dark tea-time of the soul". No more "pause that refreshes" -- no quittin' time for dying and recycling. We are taking our CHON (our CHON'PS -- so as not to forget the Phosphorous and Sulfur) off this "God forsaken little planet". It will be a net drain on resources, but don't worry those of you who choose to remain behind; the next meteor strike or asteroid collision will return plenty!

The Great Leap Forward

All of this will become clear when humanity discovers evidence of astrobiology - of extraterrestrial life. It should have happened on January 14th 2005 (8 days from when this essay was first written) with the first surface probe of Titan, the moon of Saturn, but all we got were confirmations of hydrocarbon seas. It could happen any day now with the results of the Phoenix lander's analysis of Martian soil. But so far all we have are confirmations of water ice.
Recently we have learned that the building blocks of DNA are of extraterrestrial origin.

Once we do confirm exobiology - life out there -- the race to space will begin in earnest.

The human genome project (and the genome projects of other species), along with stem cell research, will give our neotonic tendencies their due. We will achieve relative "immortality". God will speak to those who have ears to hear ("you are close to the tree of life -- now go reclaim Eden"). And we will move out in the journey of a thousand years.

By the year 3000 we should no longer be reckoning by years, which are silly solar revolutions, and will reckon time in linear, not circular distances.

No more cycles.

Men and women will choose reproduction without ovulation -- sex will be a form of play, keeping people bonded for the long and challenging journey ahead.

We have been working through the consequences of consequence-free sex for 30 years or more. Stuck on Earth it wreaked emotional and social havoc, but in space, until our worlds are bigger than a tin can, it will serve us well.

We had to go through "overpopulation" (and deliberate migration to cramped apartments in unnatural settings) to get adjusted to the challenges of space travel, or at least this is what our descendants will claim in hindsight. What does it matter if it is true or not? Did the hand know that it was "meant" to evolve into the chiropteran wing of the bat? Would it ever admit it? Yet if bats could speak they would claim they had to have hands at some point in their evolution in order to have wings. The insects among you will disagree, but the birds will chirp in their teleological approval, more or less!)

The Muslim Spacemen will claim Ramadan was an exercise to help decouple us from the daily cycles of consumption and that God knew that we needed the discipline of fasting to make the journey through the vast desert in the sky.

Christian spacemen of Catholic origin will claim a 40 day Lent necessary for crossing interstellar resource-poor spaces.

Etc.

We are preparing for a journey.

So back to our species' unique sexual problems:

In space, the female cannot dictate the the amount of sexual activity based on her "cycles". If she did, we would only have sex in the fall or early winter (in seasonal climates) or 9 months away from the most favorable times of the year for child birth and survival. When we did come together it would be like it is for other animals -- only for three days during the month. But in extra-terrestrial space there are no seasons, no days or nights, no calendars to reckon things by.

We may have started that out behaving like most other animals, but apparently the human male didn't conform to the usual pattern for very long. Almost all other animal males simply lose interest in their females during the times they aren't receptive, and many actively avoid them.

In the classic Red Deer of Rum studies done by TH Clutton Brock et al. they talked about "Sexually antagonistic genetic variation for fitness in red deer (Nature, 447: 1107-1110. [PDF]); In his seminal 1982 book "Red deer: Behaviour and ecology of two sexes" (University of Chicago Press, Chicago) TH Cluton Brock made the argument that for many mammals males and females are, for all intents and purposes, two different species for most of the year (in terms of behavior and niche exploitation).

When I was at Harvard, Professor Mark Leighton gave all of us in Biological Anthropology a host of examples of primates that show similar divergence between the sexes in their behavioral ecology. In species that maintain the sex drive for most of the year, when many males find their mates unreceptive but there are other receptive females in the population, they simply choose another sex partner. Therein begins the patterns of promiscuity that so upset those of us with big brains, long memories and the ability to feel jealousy.

Animals (like Gibbons and many bird species) that face resource constraints (where resources are patchy in distribution and need defense) tend to evolve monogamy.

Human males who maintained monogamy in resource challenged areas (for example during migrations), usually facing conditions where other females weren't available, pressed for extended receptivity in their mates. Female mutants who had the trait for ever-present desire obviously out-competed their more reticent competitors, hung on to their males for longer periods of time, earned their mate's devotion and secured their defense and resource provision, and thus passed on the trait to more offspring.

We ended up evolving the largest brained creature on the planet (relative to body mass), changing the biology of the species, and making the males and females of our species more similar than most others.

Monogamy and constant sex within the pair bond are the hallmark of our evolution. To get back in sync with female bio-rhythms is to make a major step backwards. It forces men to at least "think" promiscuously (coveting neighbor's wives, for example, and committing "adultery in the heart" if not de facto), it weakens the pair bond and degenerates us (literally, back to genetic patterns of our distant ancestors).

Simply look at the standard behavior pattern: Boy and Girl meet, get attracted and excited, have constant sex on a many-times daily basis until Girl gets pregnant. After childbirth, when the female is receptive again, the cycle begins anew. Eventually the couple reaches its reproductive limit. They continue to engage in intimate behavior to keep the pair bond strong for the duration of child rearing. Once all the children have been weaned and there is no evolutionary pressure to stay together, the sex life of most couples begins to wane (in many cases a loss of interest in sex can happen much earlier; allegedly it is the female who loses interest in constant sex, having passed through that seasonal biological phase of the cycle). Without sex, the relationship usually starts to get tense, fights break out without the irrational salve of ecstasy to bring the pair back together, and pretty soon the couple either break up or lose their ability to cooperate effectively. Old age and a decrease in the hormones of libido are often to blame for a decrease in sexual interest, but there is also the disease of senescence which erases secondary sex characteristics and their ability to stimulate. Unfortunately the female is the one to suffer the most from discrimination that results from this, as many older men begin to seek sexual companionship from "younger women", often causing much suffering in their former mates (as we all know, in a male dominated society, the men, who may well have lost their sex appeal, trade status, power and wealth -- i.e. resources -- for sexual gratification).

Either way we, as a species, must face up to the effect sex has on our ability to get along and the effects of aging on sex. And we must wonder what our libidinous tendencies will do to our prospects for survival in a changing environment.

When we start gong into space in earnest and cannot use procreation as our excuse for sex during long journeys (wherein having an increasing population would create severe resource problems), couples will need to be completely free of cyclical thinking in order to maintain harmony. They will have to be free of cycles that go beyond ignoring outdated concepts like "day and night" and "spring and autumn" and equally ignore ideas like "the spring of youth" and "the autumn of our lives". In journeys that will last hundreds to thousands of years, our attitudes toward age and the feeling that "for everything there is a time and a season" will have to be reconsidered, and probably re-engineered. Along with our bodies.

We will have to forget about Nature and stop behaving according to our "nature" -- the human nature that evolved in harmony with the cycles and rhythms of the Planet Earth.

In fact everything we did and all the traits we evolved during our relatively short tenure on the planet Earth (ca 100,000 years?) to stay adapted to our relatively unchanging environment (+/- a few ice ages) will have to be reconsidered in the light of the challenges we will face in outer space. They will also have to be reconsidered in light of the challenges we will face as the earth's environment changes so quickly and radically (due to both anthropogenic and non-human causes).

Either way, we will have to think about what pieces of human nature to preserve and which to discard.

I think it is time we started a serious global dialog about this. The Environment is Changing and with it the Psychology of Our Behavior.

Technophobia

Here is a passage from "Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema" (Edited by Annette Kuhn) that leads a chapter called "Technophobia" by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner:

"Science fiction films concerning fears of machines or of technology usually negatively affirm such social values as freedom, individualism, and the family. In the 1970s films, technology was frequently a metaphor for everything that threatened 'natural' social arrangements, and conservative values associated with nature were generally mobilized as antidotes to that threat. But technophobic films are also the site where the metaphor of nature which sustains those values can be most saliently deconstructed. From a conservative perspective, technology represents artifice as oppsed to nature, the mechanical as opposed to the spontaneous, the regulated as opposed to the free, an equalizer as opposed to a promoter of individual distinction, equality triumphant as opposed to liberty, democratic levelling as opposed to hierarchy derived from individual superiority. Most important for the conservative individualistic critique, it represents modernity, the triumph of radical change over traditional social institutions. Those institutions are legitimated by being endowed with the aura of nature, and technology represents the possiblity that nature might be reconstructable, not the bedrock of unchanging authority that conservative discourse requires. Indeed, as the figure for artificial construction, technology represents the possibility that such discursive figures as 'nature' (and the ideal of free immediacy that it connotes) might merely be constructs, artificial devices, metaphors designed to legitimate inequality by positing a false ground of authority for unjust social institutions.

" The significance of technology thus exceeds simple questions of mechanics. It is usually a crucial ideological figure. Indeed, as the possibility of reconstructing institutions conservatives declare to be part of nature, technology represents everything that threatens the grounding of conservative social authority and everything that ideology is designed to neutralize. It should not be surprising, then, that this era should witness the development of a strain of films that portray technology negatively, usually from a conservative perspective."(pp. 58-59)

It should also not be surprising that authoritarian regimes dominate in "backwards countries" and that dictatorships suppress the introduction of and mass education of technological foundations.

Narrative themes as driving factors in people's behavior

Dr. Hind Rassam Culhane, psychology professor and chair of the Social Sciences department at Mercy College (a.k.a. my mother) sent me an article from the New York Times (May 22, 2007) called "This is Your Life (and How You Tell It) by Benedict Carey. It has resonance for this course, so I thought I should link you to it and put its conclusions into perspective for "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior".

The upshot of the article (which draws for Dan McAdams 2006 book "The Redemptive Self" is that narrative themes (some of them claimed to be distinctly "American" such as narratives of "emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances") have a profound effect on how we cope with our environments and their challenges. Narrative themes, suggests McAdams, "guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future".

The article quotes research that confirms something we have talked about in this course: that facts are better remembered when constructed into a storyline, and that the storyline imbues those facts with meaning that can drastically affect how we interpret and use the facts.
"Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction" says Carey, echoing something we learned at Harvard freshman year when discussing Carl Sagan's "Dragon's of Eden": human brains are pattern generators. We see patterns in nature, even when they are technically absent (as in the constellations of the stars and the shapes we see in clouds); these patterns are organized into stories (Astrology is full of them) and we use these story narrative "tropes" (see Hayden White's 1978 "Tropics of Discourse" for more on this) to frame how we should behave.

None of this is new, but as usual in science, it is worth noting when research begins to statistically confirm our assumptions. (One might even lament the burden of the scientist in having to confirm what is to many obvious; Daniel Kehlmann has Alexander von Humboldt do exactly that on page 250 of his excellent docudramatic historical fiction "Measuring the World":

"Hastily Humboldt assured him that he had only said one should not overestimate the achievements of a scientist, a researcher was not a creator, he didn't invent anything, he didn't conquer lands, he didn't produce bounty, he neither sowed nor did he reap, and he would be followed by others, and still others, who would know more and then even more until finally everything was just swallowed up again..." )

I often reflect on this irritating and ego-demolishing truth as I continue my survey on hot water demand and use in historic and informal poor communities in Cairo -- how many hundreds of rat infested, crumbling, garbage filled households must I interview simply to prove with statistical rigor that the urban poor are suffering from the lack of environmental amenities that every human should have to be able to progress? But this is how science works -- relentless, slow and exacting.

And here I can link the two projects together -- my thesis and the article by Benedict Carey:
I think that a large part of the problem in development, and a crucial explanatory factor as to why the urban poor are suffering so much, is that they are victims of a debilitating narrative trope. While my own research is too limited to take note of the stories my subjects tell of themselves (I am doing a micro-economic survey in Urban Planning, not a psychological study of the participants), I am quite sure that if somebody were to follow up on my research they would find that many among the urban poor, particularly in Cairo and generally in third world countries, lack a coherent story that points toward victory in their struggle for well-being.

This I cannot prove statistically with my research, but anecdotally it is becoming clear that the urban poor of Cairo (and I saw it among the urban poor of Los Angeles during the decade I spent working there, and among the urban poor of Guatemala and Indonesia whom I worked with for the better part of another decade) have a story they tell about themselves that puts them invariably in the first person, as victims of moods and behavior problems that have become interpreted "as part of their own behavior, rather than a villain to be defeated... to them, therapy [is] part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle" (Carey, page 3). If Carey's interpretation of the Jonathan Adler's psychology studies (presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology) is correct, when people frame their story as "one of victorious battle" ( ' I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own' says Adler), they tend to do better at overcoming adversity.

So what has happened to the Egyptians? You can read the economist Galil Amin's excellent books "Whatever Happened to the Egyptians" and "Whatever Else Happened to the Egyptians", and get a historical perspective, then add to it Adler's insights (quoted in Carey): "so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption" rather than otherwise good "scenes usually tainted by some dark detail."

In my view what has happened to the urban poor is that the fight has been knocked out of them. Their civic leaders and reformers, they are taught from a young age, were all killed, imprisoned, exiled or humiliated. The true Jihad -- the fight to conquer one's inner demons and emerge victorious as a civic-minded citizen -- has been warped and rewritten as a narrative about doing violence to "outside demons". In this way the poor face only two uncomfortable choices -- wallow in ineffective and self-defeating despair, or join some horrible movement where terror is the only outlet available to make your story be heard. Neither are palatable to the majority, but slipping into self-defeat is much easier, and a gentler way to go down. Most people, particularly in the slums, prefer and take the gentler path, despite everything you see and read in the media.

So how do we put the pluck back into people so that they can take care of themselves and pull themselves out of poverty?

I think that we must truly consider how narrative themes drive people's behavior toward their environmental challenges. I think we must consider that narrative themes, or tropes ARE part of the environment. And we must work to help people reconstruct those narratives so that they can tell stories about themselves that are, in the end, triumphant.

This is why, when I am working with my Zabaleen garbage recycling friends, I introduce them at conferences and to the media as "the heroes of Egypt -- the hopeful giants of the new age of recycling, who can turn one man's garbage into anothers gold". I urge them not to be ashamed to be working in "garbage", and ask that my picture be taken with the pigs in the pig waste, which we will turn into biogas, with the goats who are turning city trash into milk and cheese, with the donkey carts that release no net CO2 into our dangerously warming atmosphere, with the piles of dirty plastic that we are turning into solar hot water collectors.

The story has a happy ending. It is up to us to frame it that way for those who are living it.

The End of Nature, Nature's End, PhotoModeler, Sketchup for Google Earth: How do they relate?

I am sitting at my desk reading the product tour for a software package called PhotoModeler ("Meauring and Modeling the Real World") and I can't help thinking about a Whitley Streiber/James Kunetka thriller I read years ago called "Nature's End" (Schwarzer Horizont in German) and about how all this relates to Bill McKibben's "The End of Nature" which Professor Susanna Hecht assigned us in our urban planning classes at UCLA back at the turn of the century (did nature end with the millenium?).

If I recall Nature's End properly (I read it at the beginning of the 90's) it begins with hero John Sinclair using 3d modeling/animation/simulation software to reconstruct the many possible paths a crime could have followed so that the jury can decide which seems the most plausible. It would seem that Photomodeler sotware is beginning to be used in exactly this fashion. On their own website Eos Systems, the creator of Photomodeler, states,

" PhotoModeler software is used extensively by police, investigators, and forensics firms worldwide. Using photographs or video images taken at the scene, PhotoModeler helps to extract accurate 3D measurements and models quickly and easily, allowing you to analyze and measure crime and accident scenes long after the incident has taken place! ... PhotoModeler has capabilities to help solve even the most advanced accident reconstruction cases."

What is interesting to me is that Streiber writes books of fiction as "simulations" or "models" of events that either have happened, but where it is difficult to establish the true facts surrounding the events (e.g. alien encounters -- a kind of "accident reconstruction case") or could happen (e.g. the kind of future environmental disasters that formed the basis of the Roland Emmerich film "The Day After Tomorrow, inspired by Whitley Streiber and Art Bell's Prophetic "The Coming Global Superstorm", later novelized by Streiber himself.) But while the "1 dimensional" linear narratives found in books can do a decent job of laying out possible paths in a sequential, or serial fashion, and films can do a nice job of fleshing out those paths with rich graphics, real-time interactive 3D simulations based on actual physics and measurement can create the most compelling cases for any given scenario.

This is where a combination of Photomodeler and Google Earth Sketchup and some as yet unchosen Game Engine (like the Havoc Physics Engine, which is not free, or the Blender Game Engine, which is) can produce the desired outcome suggested by Bill McKibben in "The End of Nature".

In his book McKibben offers us two choices (as Led Zeppelin sang in Stairway to Heaven, "yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run... there's still time to change the road you're on"). McKibben says we can take the path he calls "The Defiant Reflex" using our technology to macromanage and micromanage the environment so as to reduce its negative effects on us as it degrades, or we can take "The Humble Approach" whereby we give up our dream of "control".

The idea behind our Solar Cities Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game is that we should be able to use software like Photomodeler, Sketchup, Google Earth and Blender to create the kind of simulations John Sinclair could use to defeat dangerous fanatics (like Gupta Singh and George W.) and play them out in the court of humanity in front of an international jury of connected minds who can rationally and democratically vote on and thus choose the paths we take into the future.

I personally believe that McKibben's binary logic is flawed and that both "The Defiant Reflex" and "The Humble Approach" can work in tandem. In fact I think that they will see-saw back and forth, as our greater control over and understanding of the political and environmental ecology of the earth help us lose our fear and give us more confidence in devolving some of our control (if not all of it) to the collective intelligence of the God-Earth-Mind system. Call it "Gaia" or call it "Hive Intelligence" or "Swarm Intelligence", or simply call it "The Invisible Hand" tempered with "Moral Sentiments"; the idea is that we didn't create this system, this earth, this universe, it created us, and we can trust it to do its job of creating and nurturing living systems once we understand where it functions and where it fails (for us!) and how to tweak it, when necessary (as all living beings do) , to try and avoid suffering and extinction.

Perhaps "The Defiant Path" will lead inexorably to "The Humble Approach", much as Marx predicted that Capitalism was a necessary phase on the journey to communal harmony through an "inevitable" socialism. I think the jury is still out on that -- but of course all of these eschatological theories contain deep epistemological flaws in that they all involve definitive "end points" -- a flaw echoed in book titles such as "The End of Nature" and "Nature's End", to say nothing of Fukuyama's "The End of History".

The point today, class, is that a tool such as Photomodeler, and other technologies that let anybody, anywhere easily reconstruct the past or make predictions of the future based on easily obtainable physical evidence in the present, CAN be used for social and environmental good, if we will only orient our thinking that way, and contribute actively to the collective task at hand.

"Avatars are really just points of view made flesh"...

Read more about it on Ogle Earth...

Interacting in Google Earth: Creating a "Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game" -- The Sky's the Limit!

"Good morning class! It's a bright sunny day with a mild breeze here in Essen, Germany; perfect for taking a run down by the Baldeneye See. I would love to show you the locks along the river that have made transporting goods so cost efficient for the past couple of centuries that "land-locked" areas like Westphalia have been able to prosper long before the Autobahn and other highway systems transformed our landscape and environment.

"Of course, this is an on-line course and you are in places as far away as Texas and North Carolina and Dobbs Ferry, New York, and I don't have time to put together a video for the class like I did when we visited the Zeche Zollverein coal mine to discuss how air quality has affected psychology since Germany switched to natural gas.

"So what to do? We talked at the beginning of the class about using Second Life as a way to meet and explore environments in 3 Dimensions and interact in real time. The problem, of course, is that Second Life is a fictitious environment, so while it offers many simulation possibilities, it can't help us with historical or contemporary spatial geography.

"Now, however, in researching ways to create our "Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game", I have stumbled upon the good news that we may soon be able to use Google Earth as our "realistic" version of Second Life.

First, there was the discovery that Google Earth already has a built in flight-simulator. Type Ctrl + Alt + A (Win) or Open Apple Key-option-A (Mac) and you can choose between F16 fighter plane or an SR22 Propellor plane. Then you can select any airport in the world for your take-offs and landings, or start in the air and fly anywhere on the known earth from right above your favorite location. With so many Google Sketchup models beginning to turn Google Earth into a truly 3D landscape, Google Earth is quickly becoming the best flight simulation game out there! Marco Gallota gives great examples and pics on his blog.
Folks reacting to Marco's enthusiasm on Digg.com have predicted that we will soon be able to use Google Earth as a hyper realistic virtual gaming environment, replete with user controllable avatars. This would be perfect for the development of our "serious" gaming -- the Solar Cities Political Ecology ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that was inspired by Buckminster Fuller's World Game.

There are already tools that are making more personal interaction with Google Earth possible. One that I downloaded last night, called "Unype" , created by (and you will like this as Mercy College students!) New York's own Murat Aktihanoglu. Murat is not affiliated with Google but offers his excellent program for free in the best cyberpunk spirit (remember the cyberpunk motto is "information longs to be free!"). Clearly Murat is an aficianado of Neil Stephenson's seminal novel "Snow Crash" (which inspired Second Life) as the avatar he created for Unype in Google Earth for his tutorial is named "Hiro Protagonist"!

Murat's brilliant program allows a "multi-user Google Earth Environment" and works in tandem with Facebook and Skype. When you launch these three programs simultaneously, the Keyhole Mark Up language file generated (yes, that is what .KML really means, in case you forgot -- though I have encouraged you to think of it as a "coordinate markup language") lets you see where your facebook friends are in Google Earth, lets you coordinate your actions via Skype (here is the tutorial) and moves your avatar around their Google Earth (and vice versa) as you explore Google Earth locations on your screen. That way you can follow people down paths and yes, I could take you on a tour of the Locks in the Baldeneysee river!

Due to limitations in the Google API (not in Unype allegedly) the avatars are static 3D meshes (no moving feet or arms or faces, but fully skinned and texture mapped) and they don't move freely -- there is a lag, so they kind of "hop" around the screen every few seconds as you move your cursor. It ends up feeling a bit like playing a protracted game of chess.

In time, however, we can expect the Google API to improve once they see how useful Mr. Aktihanoglu's app is (we know from on-line gaming that bandwidth is not necessarily the issue).

How soon can we expect Google Earth to take on the true characteristics of an on-line game experience and thus be useful for creating our Political Ecology ARG? Rumors are flying, but there is a hopeful site with encouraging news called Ogle Earth that keeps you updated about all developments in virtual earth technology. They inform us that Google Earth is already working with Chinese developers to come up with true avatars for Google Earth, and that part of what is driving this seems to be healthy competition with Bill Gates' Virtual Earth technology.

Apparently everybody wants to make a real world version of Second Life that lets virtual shopping interface with real shopping (try it, then buy it). Our hope in this Environment and the Psychology of Behavior class, and at Solar Cities, is that the potential of using these GUI's for social and environmental justice is not lost on the developer community! Bill and Melinda Gate's foundation does great things in Africa, for example, and with the advent of the "hundred dollar laptop" -- IF the computer designers to skimp on the processing power -- it should be possible for even the poorest among us to participate in the redesign and improvement of our communites.

In a few weeks, when I have finished creating some of the buildings and "green technologies" for the slums of Cairo, you will be able to download the .KMZ files (zipped forms of .KML files) of our field work locations from solarcities.eu (which is very much still under construction) and install Unype and Skype and register on Facebook and we will take a "class field trip" to the poorest sections of Cairo, Egypt, and take a look at our development efforts in Darb El Ahmar with the Muslim craftspeople community of Medieval Cairo and Manshiyat Nasser with Coptic Christian Zabaleen garbage recycling community.

From this tour (an analogue in virtual reality of the tour we took Professor Randall Crane and his 25 graduate students of Urban Planning from UCLA last year) you may find yourself inspired to come and work with us or to contribute some of your ideas for sustainable development on-line.

The idea, of course, is to turn Game Development into a vehicle for Sustainable Development!

And now, with Google Sky giving us the possibility to actually leave the Earth and explore the heavens, we may even be able to further Pat Friedrich's excellent class project, and virtually terraform Mars!

It seems that as we develop our political ecology Alternate Reality game using Google Earth, the Sky's the limit!!