Don's Review: Law, Politics, Science, Philosophy

March 13, 2010

"There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit-the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us-the child who's hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room." —President Barack Obama, speaking to Northwestern University graduates, June 2006

            Everyone’s talking about the newfound or oncoming “Age of Empathy.” In humanity’s history, after the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason, now comes the Age of Empathy, or so they say.

From http://www.psychologytoday.com/, Ray B. Williams last October wrote:

’Greed is out. Empathy is in.’ That's how Frans de Waal begins his book, “The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons For A Kinder Society” (Harmony, 2009; $25.99). De Waal is a biologist, professor of psychology and director of the Living Link Center at Emory University. In 2007, Time magazine selected him as one of the world's most influential people.

The global financial crisis of 2008, together with the election of a new American president representing a vastly different political and social perspective, has produced a "seismic shift in society," argues de Waal. He says it is long overdue that we jettisoned our beliefs about human nature--proposed by economists and politicians--that human society is modeled on the perpetual struggle for survival that exists in nature. De Waal says this is mere projection on our part. Nature is replete with examples of cooperation and empathy.

Empathy, de Waal explains, is the social glue that holds human society together. He argues that modern psychology and neuroscience research supports the concept that "empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control." He points to the fact that many animals survive not by eliminating each other, or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing.

            One thing is clear—they better be right. More than six billion people are trapped on a tiny planet surrounded by trillions of miles of open, deadly space. It’s a bit like being on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific with only a one in a trillion chance of rescue. It’s also a bit like stuffing the Bidens, Obamas, the George W. Bushes, and the Cheneys into a one bedroom apartment. What do you think would happen if that were a reality? Would Cheney accidentally shoot Biden while getting his gun from the top shelf of the single hall closet? Would Obama be able to bring all viewpoints together in a calm, nonviolent discussion when mice and roaches infested the place?

            We know the answers.

            One can look at the earth as a one BR apartment with six billion tenants—and growing. If life as we know it is to continue for our kids and grandkids, an Age of Empathy had better develop. It may have been one of Obama’s goals when he took office. It may have been what Bill Clinton had in mind when he pushed for NAFTA in the 1990s. But they were both premature.

            So far, we’ve seen the result of Obama stuffed into the 1BR apartment we call the Beltway of of D.C. with the omnipresent and never-leaving house-guest corporate interests, each with their 12 dependent kids (government officials) taking up every square foot of White House floor space with their sleeping bags and junk.

            Humanity has not shown, in its 10,000-20,000 years of existence a tendency towards smooth transitions from one Age to another. If an Age of Empathy is coming, it likely will be preceded by unspeakable violence, poverty and disease. It is likely that a World War III of sorts will catastrophically kill of the weaker peoples and nations, the misguided ones, and those who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

            When the dust clears, another Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe after World War II killed 40 million people, this time devised by a forced union of interests that were at one time vicious opponents, will again be needed. Just as Japan and Germany were hated in World War II, after World War III, the West, China, India, Middle East, Russia, and so on, may finally become our friends—out of necessity, not empathy.

            Despite the proclaimed Age of Empathy, I don’t see cooperation between those areas and nations without a cataclysmic catalyst.

            Certainly, there is no empathy shown by the elites to the unemployed after the Great Recession began in summer 2008. My boss didn’t say, “If you lay off those three employees, I’m quitting too.” My union didn’t say, “If you lay off those three employees, we’re striking.” No. The parent company didn’t say, “Oops. We bought toxic investments which caused this mess. Our ‘bad.’ We executives will immediately resign. There will be no layoffs.” Everyone still is a pure capitalist: “Whats the profit in it for me?”

            But Williams writes, given all we know about empathy in other animal species, why do we persist in seeing human existence, particularly in business, as a fight for survival, with winners and losers? De Waal calls this the "macho origin myth" which insists that the human species has been waging war on itself as a reflection of our true nature. What has been ignored is the fact that empathy has been evident during that entire time. De Waal points to a mass of examples of sacrifice, empathy, co-operation and fairness in humans and other animals’ species. For example, how many people know that most soldiers are unwilling to fire at the enemy, even in battle?

Unfortunately, philosophy and religion as well as science have long suggested that caring and kindness do not come from our biological nature, but are ways that humans overcome biological instincts. In contrast, aggression, dominance and violence have been attributed to our DNA. According to de Waal, for humans and other advanced animals, sharing, compromise and justice matters. He argues that feeling and acting with empathy for others is as automatic as aggression.

De Waal explains how empathy has three layers. The first layer is emotional contagion, where the flush of emotions runs through a group of people during a dramatic event. The next layer is feeling for others, our empathetic response when we see another's predicament. And the third layer is "targeted helping," the ability to feel the way another does. He suggests that the historical predominant view of humans as slaves to a "selfish gene" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have competing genes--some selfish and aggressive, an others selfless and empathetic--and they are constantly jostling for position. People are complicated and complex, not instinctively cruel and selfish; they are capable of caring and empathy with equal passion and depth.

            Although we now have a U.S. Supreme Court that, for all the world, looks completely cut off from reality and certainly cut off from the huddled masses of commoners who “survive” on less than $200,000 per year (what ABC newsman Charlie Gibson once called the average salary in America), there have been pragmatic, empathetic jurists, most notedly Oliver Wendell Holmes.

            Jack Edward Bronston, a retired partner with Davidoff Malito & Hutcher, writes that Holmes commented in his book "the Common Law," that judicial decisions often originate outside the law in the "inarticulate premises" which judges bring from their life experience to their decisions. Few cases demonstrate this more vividly than Wyeth v. Levine, in which both "liberal" and "conservative" judges abandoned deeply held constitutional views to reach a result which, one may surmise, reflected their underlying "inarticulate" view of the facts, their "empathy" as it were, rather than a strict application of the law.

In a famous line of dissents, Holmes insisted that that Sherman Antitrust Act, by its plain language, did not prevent former competitors from merging, as at common law such mergers were not “combinations in restraint of trade.” On similar grounds, he argued that the Sherman Act did not prohibit retail price maintenance agreements or forbid trade associations in which price and production data were exchanged. In these opinions Holmes insisted that the majority read their own unstated economic views into the statute. Holmes was at pains to expose these “inarticulate premises,” and in the process he expressed his own views of economics in compressed form.

Holmes believed that the Sherman Antitrust Act was an “imbecile statute” that, he said in a letter, aimed “at making everyone fight and forbidding anyone to be victorious.” Dissenting from the Court's opinion that retail price maintenance agreements violated the Sherman Act, Holmes said that the Court majority's apparent policy was mistaken: competition within a sector of industry had little effect on price, and accordingly their reason for applying the Sherman Act failed even on policy grounds. Similarly, while upholding trade unions' right to organize and strike, he maintained that higher wages would be obtained by unions only at the cost of other workers.

The basis for these views, Bronston writes, was his often‐expressed conviction that the “stream of products,” by which he apparently meant something like the gross national product, was fixed at any one time and that any increase was quickly absorbed by the growth of population. He believed further that the share withdrawn by the wealthy capitalist class for its own consumption was minuscule in comparison to the total. If essentially all the wealth in society was consumed by the large mass of its citizens, it seemed to follow by an iron logic that workers competed with each other, not with capitalists, for a larger share of the national product and that prices reflected not costs or competition but the share of the product that consumers were willing to give to any one commodity. Proposals for economic reform, redistribution of wealth, and enhanced competition, therefore seemed to him equally wrong. He insisted that the only hope for improved living conditions lay in eugenics and population control—“taking life in hand”—a view brutally expressed in his opinion in Buck v. Bell, upholding Virginia's compulsory sterilization law.

Holmes began “The Common Law” in 1876, with “Primitive Notions in Modern Law,” which began as a series of essays that presented a systematic analysis of the common law. He completed the series, somewhat hastily, and presented the essays as the Lowell Lectures in Boston in November and December 1880. They were published as, The Common Law, in 1881, a few days before Holmes's fortieth birthday.

The Common Law, often called the greatest work of American legal scholarship, became one of the founding documents of the sociological and, then, the realist schools of jurisprudence, and it had a considerable impact on tort and contract law in both the United States and Great Britain. It marked the beginning of empirical studies of judges' behavior and formed the basis of Holmes's later work on the Supreme Court.

In Holmes's view, acquired in 12 years of law practice, judges decided cases first and found reasons afterward. Their actual grounds of decision were based on the “felt necessities” of their time as much as on precedent or purely logical calculation. Consciously or unconsciously, judges expressed the wishes of their class. Law therefore was both an instrument and a result of natural selection. If law was simply an instrument to accomplish certain material ends, it seemed to follow that the law should concern itself solely with external behavior, and Holmes argued that he could discern in the developing common law a trend toward complete reliance on “external standards” of behavior rather than subjective states of mind or personal culpability.

Holmes had labored unsuccessfully, like his predecessors, to make sense of the tangled mass of legal rules of behavior. In 1880, however, he seems to have seen a new organizing principle. The question in every case, Holmes realized, was whether liability would be imposed. His general organizing principle then became clear: liability would be imposed when the breach of a rule of conduct resulted in injuries that an ordinary person would have foreseen. The injuries, and not the breach as such, were the central motive of policy; the law was founded on a policy of avoiding unjustified harms. (It was this insight that later made possible an economic analysis of the law.)

In The Common Law, Holmes argued that law had evolved from more primitive origins toward this still partly unconscious “external standard” and that law would continue to evolve toward a fully self‐conscious instrument of social purpose. Holmes's book itself, presumably, was an important step in this evolution toward self‐awareness.

De Waal himself wrote that:

For about a decade before I wrote The Age of Empathy, I gathered information on the role of empathy and trust in society -- both human and animal. This material came partly from our own research, but most of it from all kind of external sources, recent articles on human behavior, pieces in the media, lectures I attended, clippings from newspapers, and so on. Stories of empathy and altruism are all around us.

The funny thing is that when we’re talking about humans, no one sees any problem to ascribe behavior to empathy, even behavior about which I have my doubts. Is a seller of old cars really empathic when he asks about our children or is it truly empathy that drives a politician to tearfully hug the victims of an earthquake, as Berlusconi recently did in Italy? I don’t trust every display of empathy in the human species. But with animals, we have the opposite problem. They may act in ways that leave no doubt in my mind, such as when a dog rescues a child from an attacking snake or when a chimpanzee goes over to the loser of a fight, and gently puts an arm around him or her, but there are always people who object to the assumption of empathy in other species. They argue that this is anthropomorphic. I fight this opinion in my book, as I have done in many others, because I am a strong believer in neurological and evolutionary continuity across all animals.

The book has two main themes. The first is to analyze empathy and it various levels from an evolutionary standpoint, tracing its origin all the way back to early mammals. I would never exclude birds as potentially empathic, but so much less is known about them that I focus on the mammals. Many people have dogs and cats at home, so that they have no trouble understanding the connections that I make between human and animal empathy. The second theme is trickier, because it’s outside my area. This is the role of empathy in society, including human society, such as in politics, religion, the economy, and so on. Couldn’t we use a bit more empathy in society? I feel that the time is ripe for this question, since the emphasis on greed as the driving force has lately been exposed as extremely dangerous. It has brought us near financial ruin, and society is grappling with what to do next.

In taking this two-pronged approach, I move back and forth between the behavior of humans and other animals (including neuroscience and evolution), and the larger social implications. Undoubtedly, not everyone will be happy with the latter, since it caries political implications, but for me it is hard to listen to conservative politicians explain that it is okay to starve the masses, that this is how nature works, and not to counter with what we actually know about nature, including human nature. Just to give one pretty unbelievable example of the lack of empathy in politics: Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis recently opposed subsidized school lunches for low income children, claiming that "hunger can be a positive motivator."

Aside from tackling Social Darwinism, my deeper interest is how empathy works. We know very little about this, but what we do know is that empathy is not some sort of cognitive construct, the way psychologists often like to present it, but goes far deeper. It is very much emotion based, mediated by our body and how it connects with other bodies. Empathy also involves neural structures far older than our species. This includes the famous mirror neurons, which do not get a whole lot of attention in my book – mainly because I am no expert, and for the moment we often have more speculation than knowledge. These neurons will undoubtedly be a big part of any explanation of empathy that science will come up with.

In popular books [like De Waal’s], in contrast, one is free to say it the way one feels it is. Intuition is a major part of every scientific enterprise, and to express one’s intuitions in as clear and understandable a way as one can, is both a challenge and a privilege. In popular books, at least, one is allowed to stick out one’s neck.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do feel that the central claims of a book need to have the backing of data. Readers shouldn’t be misled by the many anecdotes, thinking that this is all there is. I use those mainly to liven up the text and keep the attention focused. Most of the time, the anecdotes are part of a larger body of knowledge. For example, I can tell about chimpanzee consolation, and give a few good examples, but there are actually studies that have documented hundreds of cases, and analyzed them in graphs and tables. Or, I can give an example of how monkeys react to unfairness, but again, the experiments that we and others have conducted take many years in which we test not just two monkeys but many different pairings under many different circumstances. Those who would like to see the “meat” of the research behind the book, rather than the stories that I tell, need to go to the note section and reference list. There are many serious studies that support the claims I make.

Gary Olson, Ph.D., who chairs the Political Science Department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Penn., says:

But, how does de Waal explain what has been characterized elsewhere as a culturally-induced empathy deficit disorder, a condition bordering on the pathological and having its roots in our socioeconomic system? In a 2007 interview, not included in his book, de Waal said, “You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.” Unless I’ve totally misread him, the operative word there is “extreme,” as there’s nothing in de Waal’s public writings, inteviews, or lectures to indicate that he’s personally opposed to capitalism, people getting rich, and so forth. De Waal objects to an unrestrained market system, not capitalism itself. He prefers that the economic system be mitigated by more attention to empathy in order to soften its rough edges.

At one point he proclaims his sympathy for American conservatives “who detest entitlement,” while going on to assert that “The state is not a teat from which one can squeeze milk from any time of the day, yet that’s how many Europeans seem to look at it.”

As a Dutch immigrant, de Waal arrived in the United States with the following mindset: “But I also noticed that someone who applies him- or herself, as I surely intended to do, can go very far. Nothing stands in their way.”

He follows this by a comparison with European welfare states and concludes, "Having lived for so long in the United States I find it hard to say which system I prefer. I see the pros and cons of both." But de Waal can also write sentences such as:

People without mercy or morals are all around us, often in prominent positions. These snakes in suits, as one book title labels them, may represent a small percentage of the population, but they thrive in an economic system that rewards ruthlessness....

A society based purely on selfish motives and market forces may produce wealth, but it can’t produce the unity and mutual trust that makes life worthwhile.reliance on greed as the driving force of society is bound to undermine its very fabric.

The author seriously underestimates certain capitalist imperatives and the role played by elites in cultivating callousness, thereby undermining social solidarity, reciprocity and empathy. Capitalist culture devalues an empathic disposition, and, as Erich Fromm argued 50 years ago, there is a basic incompatibility between the underlying principles of capitalism and the lived expression of an ethos of empathy.

As Antonio Gramsci insisted, culture is inextricably bound up in class, power and inequality. Consensual control is realized through mass media, education, religion, popular culture and other facets of civil society in concert with the state.

In sum, one need not accept de Waal’s sometimes ambivalent attitude toward the market, his warm words for so-called “economic freedom” and “incentive structures,” his gloss on a presumed U.S. merit-based system or his sanguine view of Obama’s potential to usher in a new era of cooperation, in order to appreciate the book's major contributions.

Without question, de Waal’s essential findings should become part of mainstream conversation. But we need to go further by joining them with a radical political analysis, one that spells out the cultural mechanisms that give rise to an empathy-deficient society. Only then can we reclaim the continuity of morality that emerges so eloquently from these pages. © 2009 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved.

Experience, as we learned earlier, begins with sensations and feelings that flow from engagement with others. While one's sensations and feelings make possible the initial connection with the other, they are quickly filtered by way of past memories and organized by the various powers of reason at our disposal to establish an appropriate emotional, cognitive, and behavioral response. The entire process is what makes up empathetic consciousness. Empathy is both an affective and cognitive experience.

If empathy did not exist, we could not understand why we feel the way we do, or conceptualize something called an emotion or think rationally. Many scholars have mistakenly associated empathy with just feelings and emotions. If that were all it was, empathic consciousness would be an impossibility.

Reason, then, is the process by which we order the world of feelings in order to create what psychologists call pro-social behavior and sociologists call social intelligence. Empathy is the substance of the process. Reason becomes increasingly sophisticated as societies become more complex, human differentiation more pronounced, and human exchange more diverse. Greater exposure to others increases the volume of feelings that need to be organized. Reason becomes more adept at abstracting and managing the flood of embodied feelings.

By reimagining faith and reason as intimate aspects of empathic consciousness, we create a new historical synthesis--the Age of Empathy--that incorporates many of the most powerful and compelling features of the Age of Faith (gods control us and everything) and the Age of Reason (our brains can overcome and control everything) into a human who meshes with his environment, including good guys and bad guys, while leaving behind the disembodied story lines that shake the celebration out of life.

The Enlightenment philosophers--with a few notable exceptions--eliminated the very mortality of being. To be alive is to be physical, finite, and mortal. It is to be aware of the vulnerability of life and the inevitability of death. Being alive requires a continuous struggle to be and comes with pain, suffering, and anguish as well as moments of joy. How does one celebrate life or mourn the passing of a relative or friend or enter into an intimate relationship with another in a world devoid of feelings and emotions?

New developments in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and psychology are laying the groundwork for a wholesale reappraisal of human consciousness and leading the way to a more sophisticated approach to a theory of mind.

Researchers in a diverse range of fields and disciplines are beginning to reprioritize some of the critical features of faith and reason within the context of a broader empathic consciousness. They argue that all of human activity is embodied experience--that is, participation with the other--and that the ability to read and respond to another person "as if " he or she were oneself is the key to how human beings engage the world, create individual identity, develop language, learn to reason, become social, establish cultural narratives, and define reality and existence. © 2010 Huffington Post, by Jeremy Rifkin, the author of 'The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis,' published by Tarcher Penguin in January 2010.

Feb. 7, 2010

Fairy tales are the part and parcel of humanity’s existance and survival.

Everywhere you look there’s another one. One of the biggest is Santa Claus. A fat, white (of course) man brings just-what-you-asked-for gifts to billions of kids in one night. Yet 99 percent of (Western) children believe in him despite a few who have mental queries (How does he get through our two-inch metal exhaust pipe on the roof and out of our furnace—and back—without us noticing?)

                Another, especially around this time of year is: “Ooohh, I have to leave the room. If I’m in the room, he’ll blow this field goal attempt.” This is more accurately called “magical” thinking.

                Another is making a wish when you blow out your birthday candles out.

                These are harmless. But they get progressively worse until they threaten life on this planet.

                One of the doozies is the unwaivering belief in one’s tribe. “My nation is better than yours.” Even the people who believe that letting the U.S. flag touch the floor is being unpatriotic or the ones who still believe the world was created—as is—4,000 years ago should be able to recognise how much better they feel when their tribe (team) makes the field goal or (nation) has 20 times the military strength of the rest of the tribes combined. It’s a leftover from our ancestors 10,000-20,000 years ago who felt better when their tribe actually massacred another tribe, meaning they could eat, procreate and survive a few more years.

                The harmfulness in those types of beliefs can be seen in the demise of society on Easter Island. Competing chiefs built those famous isolated 30-feet tall heads (representing themselves) higher and fancier to indicate their prowess, according to Jared Diamond in his book, “Collapse.”

                A story by Laura Flanders of Grit TV, indicates that people worldwide still are “into” “Easter Island” monument-heads: The $1.5 billion building unveiled in downtown Dubai in early January is the world's new tallest tower. Dubai is one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is located south of the Persian Gulf on the Arabian Peninsula. More than half a mile high, more than two Empire State buildings tall, the Dubai tower has 169 stories, the world's highest swimming pool, the world's highest place of worship, ”and the world's tallest mountain of denial,” as Flanders puts it.

Like the Empire State building before it, the Dubai tower was built in a global depression when cheap labor was plentiful, as were the dreams of the ambitious and affluent.

The tower was constructed in the desert heat by low-paid immigrant workers, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, paid 5 to 20 dollars a day. (It's a state secret how many lost their lives in the process.) While the state-owned construction operation suppressed worker demands and banned unions from the site, it catered to consumer fantasy with equal extravagance. The tower features 144 apartments and a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer. In the super scraper, the super-affluent can live and vacation without leaving the brand, or the building.

Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed and his Chicago-based architects hailed their building as a symbol of future good [and] all things great. There's just one glitch. According to the Sunday Times, that future involves melting the equivalent of 28 million pounds of ice a day for air conditioning, and the consumption of billions of gallons of desalinated water in a city-state that already has the world's highest per-capita carbon footprint.

The climate actually changes as you ride the elevator, Flanders writes. It's hotter at the bottom. The engineers are doing everything in their power to counter physics and so far so good. But rising heat of a far less metaphorical sense already struck in the form of economics.

In last minute switch at its inauguration, the Burj Dubai ("Dubai Tower") was renamed the Burj Khalifa. It, finally, was a concession to reality. Sheikh Khalifa, the head of Abu Dhabi, Dubai's oil rich neighbor, has repeatedly saved Dubai from financial collapse during the construction of the tower when devastating defaults beckoned.

                Another doozy is that humans are superior to other animals on this tiny planet surrounded by a trillion-trillion light years of nothingness. Because we are “children of God” and smarter than a beaver or an unknown insect in the Amazon, we use up the animals until they’re gone and then move on. Just as we do with resources such as oil.

                Yes, we’ve outsmarted the hapless lion or snow goose, but their deaths came no more painfully than ours will. But ours will be at our own hands. The goose at least had the intelligence to run when the two-legged, upright animal stands there with an ax in one hand.

                Now President Obama says he will push to make “clean coal” and biofuels a priority as a means of getting his program of weaning the U.S. off of fossil fuels off the ground.

            But, the “powers-that-be,” which include Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and, above all, the Cheney task force (the 2001 National Energy Policy Development Group), and now the well-meaning, but corporate-funded and -staffed, Obama administration ALREADY have a differnet plan for solving the crises, and ALREADY have begun implementing it.

            It’s called the “Great Die-Off.” The elites who have been stripping the carcass of the middle and lower classes since Saint Reagan in 1980 are now going to let the rest die by the millions in the U.S. and the hundeds of millions worldwide until this little planet again can support whoever remains. The planet and laws of physics do not compromise. They will force an economic paradigm change from constant, infinite growth to a no-growth, status-quo economy within the next 10-20 years.

            Like a five-year-old asking himself, “How does “Santa Claus get through that two-inch pipe?” I’ve asked, in “Don’s Review,” “Where have all the green jobs gone?” “The solar panels?” “The conversion of GM, Ford, and Chrysler plants for production of electric cars or hydrogen-run cars? The emission restrictions? The inspiring speeches to help people break through their denial and confront the crisis? Why did Obama bring so many Goldman Sachs and Citigroup mates to his staff? With a smart guy like Obama, you know that there’s a plan and that he either has signed on to it as the most reasonable plan or someone is holding a gun to his head.

I think he has signed on to “demand destruction.”

Michael C. Ruppert in “Confronting the Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post-Peak Oil World” (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2009) lays bare the answer I had suspected.

Obama’s latest biofuel push is a pipedream, a diversion, to dupe millions into thinking humanity’s superior intellect will win out again. However, historically, the balance in nature was tipped about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans first tilled the soil. “What remained of that balance vaporized in the last 100 years,” Ruppert writes.

                Over the last 60 years, humans have taken to artificially replenishing soil nutrients with chemicals derived from oil and natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock for all nitrogen-based fertilizers. “It greatly increase productivity, but is not sustainable and actually harms the soil,” Ruppert says.

                This “green revolution” as it was called in the 1950s and 1960s is what accelerated the massive population explosion over the last century from just over one billion people to near seven billion people on the planet.

                “Ancient civilizations perished because they did not rotate their crops,” Ruppert says, and farmers worldwide have returned to monocropping because of the oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides. Soils have been turned into addicts that can’t function without the chemicals.

                Globalization will die with ever-increasing fuel costs, Ruppert writes, and that is a good thing. All regions of the world will have to resort to localized food production.

                “In a very real sense we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow or agriculture. Along the way there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased four-fold while crop yields only increased three-fold. Now, we have reached the point of MARGINAL RETURNS. The ‘Green Revolution’ is becoming bankrupt.’”

                The U.S. food system consumes 10 times more energy than it produces in food energy. Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable.

How are we going to take more food and use it to power our cars and trucks, President Obama? And from WHICH mouths are we going to take that food to feed our carbon-based fuel habit?

                Agricultural consumes 85% of all U.S. fresh water resources. Overdraft has made the Colorado River a trickle by the time it reaches the Pacific. The great Ogallala aquifer that supplies much of the water for the southern and central plains states and on into New York will become unproductive in a matter of decades.

                The authors of these studies believe that the agricultural crisis will only begin to impact us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050. However, Ruppert says the crisis is likely to happen much sooner.

                For sustainability, global population will have to be reduced from the current 6.32 billion to 2 billion—a reduction of 68% or over two-thirds. Ruppert writes that the end of this decade (2010—not 2020) could see spiraling food prices without relief. “And the coming decade could see massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced by the human race.”

                And Obama is going to boost those spiraling food prices? Why? To hasten the “die-off”?

And Obama’s other pipedream? His corresponding recent announcemtn in favor of funds pushed towards clean-coal production. But: “Clean coal is one of the biggest lies in human history. It would be a suicidal policy,” Ruppert writes.

There is not a single clean-coal generating plant in the WORLD. Coal combustion emits many poisonous substances like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and lots of particulate material in addition to CO2.

Commercially viable carbon sequestration is still a theoretical and hugely expensive proposition. It IS being done in real life, but not on a cost-effective basis and it is NOT being done at any generating plant ANYWHERE. Even if you figured out the initial processes, you would still have the very expensive proposition of compressing and transporting the CO2 over long distances to either underwater caverns or to geological formations.

Then there is the solid waste from so-called “clean coal.”. Each year U.S. power plants kick out enough of the stuff to fill a train of coal cars stretching from Manhattan to L.A. and back three and a half times.

Julian Darley, now an energy analyst in London is the founder of the Post Carbon Institute. He says the only possible future for humanity will be one in which carbon-based fuels are a SIDEBAR to other, sustainable regimes. “Clean coal” doesn’t address that end of the equation at all. “Carbon sequestration has NOT been implemented yet. We’ve run out of money to use it. We’ll come back and do it later, maybe,…when there’s more money.”

Ruppert says that, as president, Obama should look at the economy, the deficits and then he may understand that there isn’t going to be any retrofitting later on. Coal production could peak in as little as 15 years. America’s railway system has been neglected and this is the only realistic way to ship coal over long distances.

The railways would have to be rebuilt. None of this has been set in motion as of yet.

                This brings us to the biggest doozy of all fairy tales—that of a loving God, or Heavenly Father, or Supreme Being, etc.—watching over each of us with plans for each of us. So, if we are forced to jump from a future World Trade Center-like building and splatter ourselves on the sidewalk below, “it’s part of God’s plan.” And our goulash of bones and organs scraped up by government workers will later serve a greater purpose. I see people—in church each Sunday—still believing that Eve took a forbidden fruit and God has given us our troubles as punishment for what she did some 4,000 years ago.

                If this story has any merit it would be IF it’s a homespun folktale passed orally from generation to generation based on when the first human being’s brain evolved enough to realize her identity as a separate being and to know that her death could come that very day, or, if she’s lucky, in 30 years. But it WILL come.

                In short, that we are physical machines in a morally neutral world. Everything we do is to squelch an anxiety or fear or fulfill a need (like sex or eating). We are just computers inside flimsy hardware, which are our carbon-based bodies that deteriorate everyday and are replaced in total many times until the breakdowns overtake the replacements and we die.

                This is some of the premise of a can’t-put-down book “The ‘God’ Part of the Brain” byMatthew Alper (Sourcebooks, Naperville, Ill. 2006).

                Can you imagine the fear and anxiety when those first hominids gained self-awareness and understood that they sat there naked under the sword of Damocles (they could die any second or live to be old, but had no control over that or any knowledge of how to increase the chances of a long life as a just-evolved homo sapiens sapiens)?

                A tale told around the campfires at that point in time by wise elders to calm younger tribe members could have been that of Adam and Eve. Eve biting of the apple of knowledge could have been a metaphor for the first hominid to became horrifed at impending, inevitable death.

                Ruppert knows what horror and desperation his book also could bring. How devastating it would be if everyone knew how hopeless things are or if everyone knew of Cheney and Goldman Sachs’ and others’ plan for a “die-off” or for endless wars so Saint Reagan’s “city on the hill,” the U.S., can control the world’s resources and decide who lives and dies. But he says the truth is better than fairy tales:

“I realize now there is only one thing we can change that will give our descendants any chance of salvaging the best parts of mankind’s accumulated experience, art and wisdom—our minds. I only want to try to help create the knowledge that will help produce the least amount of suffering by humans and other animals that is possible under current conditions.”

                Yet, we go blithely on. Safe in our belief that God has plan and, if we die, buried alive under Hudson River dirt when the seas rise and we are trapped on the New York City islands, it will serve a greater good.

                I ask, “Would we EVER give that benefit of the doubt to ANY authority or person we can see and touch here on this planet? Then, how can we give it to someone we’ve never seen?” We’ve only heard mind-numbing, sleep-inducing words scribbled by fairy-tale or folktale writers about 4,000 to 2,000 years ago.

                Those words—including the Book of Mormon—are like music. Music is such a force in most people’s lives and musicians like Paul McCartney are worshipped like Gods because it and its composers have the ability to induce numbness in our brains (as do the rhythms of Scripture passages) or pleasure (if music). In either case, the brain’s nerves then take us away from the unrelenting absurdity and disgusting filth of everyday life—the raging boss or wife, the feces that we clean off ourselves each day, the unseen germs we know are swimming inside our skins, the sword of Damacles hanging over us. The unfulfilled desires for food, sleep, sex, children, certainty and control.

                The steady flow of sand in the hourglass as we say to others—when the fairy tales fail us—“Were did the time go?”

As Ruppert said, we need to “change our minds.” We need fact-based (not magical) education and to face our deaths fully so that we can work to make life for as many as possible as good as possible while we are alive.

In a November story by  New America Media  by EunSook Lee, she asks “Would it be acceptable if we were to make medical care out of reach for any segment of our nation’s population? For the 15.5 million Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders? Or for the 44.3 million Latinos? Let’s hope not. But, as it stands, our growing acceptance is paving the road for health reform proposals that categorically exclude our nation’s immigrant population. We forget that when people like Lou Dobbs or Rep. Joe Wilson are enraged about ‘immigrants’ they are talking largely about communities of color. Americans know it is wrong to discriminate based on immutable characteristics such as sex or race—but convincing them to protect the act of being an immigrant remains a challenge that cuts across social justice issues such as health reform.”

“The days are nearing when we may see the passage of major health reform legislation. We know how immigrants may be treated -- for example, undocumented immigrants may be excluded from purchasing health insurance with their own money. Also, there are common problems that include: the continued ban on federal funding for legal immigrants in Medicaid who have had their status for less than five years.

“Currently, legal immigrants, who work and pay taxes that contribute to our health care system will continue to be ineligible to receive federally-funded Medicaid services for five years. In this case, we are not talking about those who make at least 133 percent of federal poverty level and could access affordability credits like everyone else for purchasing insurance in the exchange. We are talking about immigrants with the lowest incomes. It is unreasonable and saddening that under the current health reform proposals, the people who really need it will not get it,” Lee writes.

Communities across America are waking up to this realization and Congress needs to take notice. In San Francisco, a group of Chinese American tenants gathered over 1,000 signatures in just two days, for example. A strong and diverse coalition of local and national community organizations from health advocates to immigrant rights organizations to Asian American and Pacific Islander community groups came together, because the call for equity in health reform needs to be louder.

Jared Diamond in another of his outstanding books, “Guns, Germs and Steel,” outlines how the first cognizant hominids awoke in eastern Africa and then migrated, on foot, northward throughout the Eurasian continent. With countless evolutionary selections helping to make certain groups caught in a certain climate develop the skills for living in that climate, it, by chance, left the immigrants from eastern Africa that reached Europe with whiter skin because of the cooler climes than their brothers remaining in hot Africa (where a darker skin color was needed to ward off the sun’s ill effects). Agriculture slowly developed along certain latitudes stretching east and west in Eurasia and along more easily traveled landscapes. Agriculture first developed in the Fertile Crescent (part is within Iraq) as hominids by accident found out which plants survived the best. They kept those seeds and replanted only those seeds. That knowledge moved east and west, wherever the landscape made walking easier.

People in Europe also lived near bountiful seas and tried catching fish in diverse ways. This led to population growth, along with agriculture, and the need to use their newly developed boats to explore the seas. Some of those white-skinned people found their way to Central America and South America. There their germs, guns and steel overwhelmed millions of their brown-skinned brothers and sisters who had created their own metropolises and wondrous buildings according to the needs and demands of their climates and locations.

By accident, white people, were able to conquer the equally smart South Americans via their swords and fast boats and immunity to the strange germs they spread via touch and coughs.

We need more studies like those of Jared Diamond to dispel the overwhelming fairy tales by which we live our lives, such as the racism we still fight in America hundreds of years after the first slave was “renditioned” from Africa. We need to throw away old taboos about studying our brains. Neuroscience already shows so much about how we subconsciously imitate our parents. We could learn much more. That knowledge would make laws designed to destroy or slowly “kill-off” nonwhite people seem silly and tragic.

We need to face reality, not fairy tales, even if it means acknowledging the hard truth that when we die, there is no “little person” or “spirit” in our brain that goes “above the stars” to a place called heaven where we live with our families and a “Heavenly Father”-- who looks human and actually has a body like we do, according to the Mormon prophet (or libertine, the mendacious) Joseph Smith--happily ever after.

Dec. 21, 2009

Euthanasia laws have to be changed to allow euthanasia under strictly controlled cirumstances. Yes, it’s hard to define those circumstances, but legal giants have tackled more difficult questions.

Euthanasia was definitely needed in my father’s situation in 2006 (below). Yet, if it had existed, in my own personal hospital life-or-death fight in 2004, I may not be sitting here writing this now, five years later.

There are clearcut cases, like my father’s, in which letting someone die with dignity is an easy call—but still prohibited in most jurisdictions in our mechanically moral world.

I don’t believe in miracles. I am an atheist. I believe that if something like the Oregon laws, defining certain conditions, had been in effect for my dad, that angel of a man would not have had to suffer like a dog in a field for 14 days. There was no need to worry that “god” would miraculously cure him. Yet, if someone had pulled the plug on me when my organs started shutting down—well, that would have been too soon. But, in my case, it scientifically speaking, clearly was too soon; and the doctors told that to my relatives.But they had my relatives there, on stand-by, in case I had died.

This issue can and must be dealt with. No one should have to suffer the way my dad did—especially a saint of a man like him.

One of my greatest fears now is suffering tortuously for weeks or months as my dad did before he died. I do not want to endure that suffering for the sake of religions’ fairy tales. I want to be treated as we treat our pet dogs, cats and horses—we “put them down” so they don’t suffer. Why must humans suffer excruciating mental and physical pain and die with less dignity than a dog found injured in a field. The farmer would put the dog down post haste. His main concern? That Rover must NOT suffer under any circumstances.

Recently, in Australia--which had been progressing into the 21^st century and not remaining stuck to what Iron Age scribes wrote 3,000 years ago and fat-cat stewards living off of tithing blather about now--the government announced a mandatory Internet Clean Feed proposed by Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy. This was slammed by Voluntary Euthanasia Advocate and Director of Exit International, Dr Philip Nitschke.

Said to be mandatory to prevent Australian’s access to all RC (refused classification) material, Dr. Nitschke has said the Clean Feed is the thin edge of the censorship wedge.  Although where voluntary euthanasia is concerned, this is the final nail in the coffin for voluntary euthanasia advocacy in Australia. 

Speaking from Sydney to Internet reporters, Dr Nitschke said, “I feel extremely angry on behalf of the members of our organisation and all other interested folk who will find themselves barred from accessing information about their end of life choices.

“What the government is implementing with this mandatory Net censorship is the final act of more than a decade of preventing elderly and seriously ill Australians the right to determine the time and manner of their passing.”

It was not enough that conservative, Catholic politicians of the likes of Kevin Andrews took away the Territory’s Rights of the Terminally Ill Act back in 1997.

In 2001, the Howard Government amended the Customs Act to make it illegal to import and export printed material about voluntary euthanasia.

In 2006, the Howard Government introduced the Suicide Related Materials Offences Act which prevents the use of the telephone, fax, email and the internet to discuss end of life issues.

In 2007, the Office of Film and Literature Classification approved the publication of the best-selling Peaceful Pill Handbook, only to have their decision overturned upon instruction of then Attorney General Philip Ruddock by the Literature Review Board.

Dr. Nitschke said he is now looking at seeking political asylum overseas and investigating countries where free speech and one’s right to information are taken seriously.

“I really pity the elderly folk. Our seniors deserve better than this,” he said. “To say to rational adult Australians that they cannot use the telephone, cannot import printed material, cannot buy a book and now cannot visit the websites they wish is just outrageous.”

            My dad’s agony—and that of his family--went as follows (I am Joe):

                Joe backed away from his dad’s hospital. His throat had started to get scratchy. He got into his car and drove down the street to the local pharmacy and bought Theraflu. He got hot water at the hospital’s  cafeteria and gulped the medicine down.

He knew the symptoms arising just as he entered the hospital were no coincidence. His dad was dying and he didn’t want to confront that, but he had to say good-bye to the old man. He’d gotten sick all his life when he didn’t want to do something—like the time his throat hurt when it was time for the Boy Scout’s one-week campout. His old man had volunteered to drive him to the camp site 60 miles away as soon as his throat was better—no pressure, just his dad’s good nature. But Joe didn’t want to be away from his parents that long at age 12 with all those strange kids. He was only 12 and had had only one good friend each period of his life. He wasn’t a mixer, though he could do his own share of bullying. He was happiest just listening to the radio. “Mr. Music” was what they called him. He could name a top-40 song after two notes.

He stuck to himself, making his own way—much like his dad, who also was withdrawn and had few close friends--probably only his brothers, Joe’s uncles. His dad stayed by himself at the “farmer’s elevator” where they made “feed” for cattle. He drove trucks and shoveled vitamins into mixers from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day with half an hour for lunch.

                Still, when Joe was old enough to want spending money, his dad wouldn’t give it to him. Joe had to get a morning paper route, 6 a.m., back at 7. Eggs and bacon with lots of salt. Wheaties with a half-inch of sugar. His mother and father were hardworkers. In bad weather, however, his dad would drive Joe through the driving rain or plow the family car through snowdrifts before heading to his 7 a.m. job. Joe didn’t have to ask.

                Now Joe had to see that gentle, sweet man on his death bed. Joe walked in. His dad raised his only good arm, the left, and raised his left eyebrow, and curled the left corner of his mouth. He had suffered a massive stroke and was totally paralyzed on his right side. Typical dad. Joe couldn’t tell if he knew he was dying or didn’t. Joe squeezed the old man’s fingers. His dad curled the left half of his mouth.

                “Dad. How are ya?” His father’s stroke had left him unable to talk. “You’re fine, you old fart!” Joe said. “This will keep you off the streets, outta trouble! I won’t have to bail you outta jail!” His dad’s eyes brightened. Simple jokes for a simple man. That’s all it took. Then his dad raised his left arm up and down to show Joe that he was mobile—perhaps to show him that he could rehab his way out of this mess. “Fuck” Joe thought. “I bet no one’s told him that he’s gonna die in a few days. Assholes.” A quick visit with the doctor and his brothers confirmed his suspicion.

                He had been assigned his mom and dad’s old bed to sleep in at the old homestead. His brothers had taken the other beds. Joe’s cold was worse. His nose ran like a sieve and his breathing was painful and noisy. That night he took sleeping pills with more Theraflu. He had to get sleep and his sides were killing him.

                He trouped back to the hospital. Late that morning, alone, he took his dad’s head in his hands and said, “Dad, I want you to know that we love you and we appreciate your bustin’ your gut for us, to give us the best possible lives. But I want you to know that you’re very, very, sick. You’ve had a major stroke--that’s why you can’t move or talk. I just wanted you to know.” His father’s eyes dimmed; some of the glow was gone. Joe had been right, the old man thought he could rehab his way out if it. Well, now he could get his thoughts together, say his prayers and—perhaps--relax, knowing that worldly struggles were over, and he could see his loved/hated wife again.

                Joe kissed him on the forehead and walked out of the room. He hadn’t been able to say “You’ve only got 4 days to live” but he felt his dad’s death may have more dignity now at least. “He’s laying like a fish on a dock, gasping for air,” Joe thought. “My dad—the sweetest guy in the world—doesn’t deserve that.” Joe would have killed his dad that same day, but for the anti-euthanasia laws. His living will said “no extraordinary measures,” so all they could do was keep a sugar-salt solution in his arm until he starved to death or his congested heart gave out or his clogged arteries in his neck completed the stroke. “How ironic-- starvation. Dad loved food,” Joe thought. He remembered his dad’s tales of eating 5 eggs and sausages at his grandma’s table. And eating those same eggs and bacon and Wheaties at his wife’s table.

                Joe could hardly breath. His inhaling was raspy now. His sister-in-law, a nurse, said, “Go to the ER.” He did. A 30-year-old doctor said, “You’ve fluid up both sides of your lung linings. I’m going to hospitalize you.”

“It’s not gonna happen,” Joe said. The young doctor’s cheeks turned every shade of red.

“Then sign these waiver forms,” she said.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me during my dad’s wake and his funeral,” Joe said. “And then, if I stayed in this town, I’d be away from my wife and kid. It won’t happen.”

                That night he had to sleep on his mom and dad’s living room floor. He needed a hard surface, so his lung-linings wouldn’t move so much as he breathed. He got some sleep--on all those OTC drugs.

Returning to my job in New York, I wrote this in an email to a colleague:

My Dad had a stroke on Sept. 4, early in the morning. The nurses found him unresponsive. They took him to the hospital.

That’s where I found him Sept. 8, gasping like a fish out of water as the pneumonia insidiously, gradually shut down his lungs. He couldn’t move his whole right side of his body. Could only move his left eye brow and eye and the left corner of his mouth a bit. And his left toe a bit. And his left thumb. At times, he looked like Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie, “The Shining,” with his eyebrows arched and mouth tangled ina crazy grimace.

There he lay from Sept 4 to Sept. 14, early in the morning, when death finally showed some mercy and took him. During the interim, the sparkle  was in his eye as he watched his four children talk to him, make weak jokes, and sing old-time songs to him from the left side of his bed.

None of us knew whether he knew he was going to die in a matter of days: via another stroke, heart attack, cancer or  pneumonia. I took his head in my arms one day and said: “Dad. Just so you know for sure. You had a MAJOR stroke on the left side of your brain recently. That’s why you can’t move your right side and that’s why you are in this hospital. I just wanted you  to know. And to know that you are very , very sick.”

He seemed to calm  down then, although some of the twinkle left his left eye. He still tried with all his might to interact with us, even raising his left arm at the elbow—proudly. None of us could applaud him. I don’t know if my brothers or sister told him he had only  a few days to go.

I took walks in the sun, which in all its power rejuvenated me somewhat.

Then Dad qualified for hospice care within that same hospital room. That meant that they could give him morphine as a “comfort measure.” This took him away from us. He fell asleep almost continuously, but the repeated horrid drags of air stopped.

Death took him that Thurs night early in the morning. None of us was there. We got there half an hour afterwards.

I kissed his forehead. It was still warm.

Death took him. I can’t talk to him any  more. He can’t talk to me. He was cremated. He is dust

I realize that the U.S. is fast approaching a theocratic dictatorship and that most readers view atheists as “the devil.” But for those who believe in reality and not fantasy, I recommend acquisition of the following toolkit, so that they may die with dignity. The dignity they would readily give their cat, hamster, dog or goldfish:

15 Dec 09

The Good to Go Toolkit

PO BOX 101810 DENVER, CO 80250

800.247.7421 503.228.9160 FAX

www.compassionandchoices.org

Compassion & Choices Good to Go Toolkit –Page 2 of 9

Introduction

Regardless of age or health status, none of us knows when a future event might leave us

unable to speak for ourselves. Talking with your loved ones now, appointing a representative

and preparing a written record of your wishes will be invaluable should you become unable

to make or communicate health care decisions.

The Good-to-Go Toolkit is designed to help you identify your priorities and help ensure your

wishes are honored. This collection of material is designed to guide the process of making

and communicating your decisions. Just as the choices are yours, there is no one way to go

about it but we suggest you start with the Values Worksheet. The conversations you have

with your loved ones and your physician are essential in communicating your wishes. And,

documenting your decisions, and the people you want to support you, records those wishes.

Use the checklist on the following page as you work through the toolkit to keep track of your

progress.

Compassion & Choices Good to Go Toolkit –Page 3 of 9

Good to Go Toolkit Checklist

 Read the Good to Go Resource Guide, a 16-page introduction to end-of-life planning

with ideas, inspiration, information and answers.

(Available online at http://www.compassionandchoices.org/g2g)

 Complete the Values Worksheet (Pages 4-5).

 Complete your state-specific advance directive/living will. This includes 2 equally

important pieces:

o Living will/advance directive

o Medical durable power of attorney.

(Available online at http://www.compassionandchoices.org/g2g, or call us at

800.247.7421)

 Give thought to the special circumstances that could arise if you suffer from serious

dementia. Add the specific Dementia Provision to your advance directive documents

(Page 6).

 What else? My Particular Wishes provides you with a way to inform your physician,

nurse or other care provider of your consent or refusal of certain specific therapies

(Page 7).

 Complete a Hospital Visitation Form – especially for people who are not traditionally

recognized family members (Page 8).

 Talk to your loved ones. Pages 13-14 of the Good to Go Resource Guide will give you

ideas on how to make those conversations happen.

 Talk to your physician. You can use A Letter To My Doctor as a guide if you want to

put your wishes in writing or as an outline for your conversation (Page 9).

 I’m Good to Go!

What?!?

Got questions? Need ideas or inspiration? Here’s help.

• Organizations and web resources for common end-of-life issues are listed in Internet

Resources. http://www.compassionandchoices.org/learn/links

• The Bookstore pages list recommended publications dealing with end-of-life issues.

http://www.compassionandchoices.org/care/bookstore

Support. Educate. Advocate. Choice & Care at the End of Life.

Values Worksheet

The following are questions you may want to consider as you make decisions and

prepare documents concerning your healthcare preferences. You may want to write

down your answers and provide copies to your family members and healthcare

providers, or simply use the questions as “food for thought” and discussion.

How important to you are the following items?

Very Important Not Important

Letting nature take its course 4 3 2 1 0

Preserving quality of life 4 3 2 1 0

Staying true to my spiritual beliefs/traditions 4 3 2 1 0

Living as long as possible, 4 3 2 1 0

regardless of quality of life

Being independent 4 3 2 1 0

Being comfortable, and as pain free as possible 4 3 2 1 0

Leaving good memories for my family and friends 4 3 2 1 0

Making a contribution to medical research 4 3 2 1 0

or teaching

Being able to relate to family and friends 4 3 2 1 0

Being free of physical limitations 4 3 2 1 0

Being mentally alert and competent 4 3 2 1 0

Being able to leave money to family, 4 3 2 1 0

friends, or charity

Dying in a short while rather than lingering 4 3 2 1 0

Avoiding expensive care 4 3 2 1 0

CONTINUED ON REVERSE

Compassion & Choices Good to Go Toolkit –Page 4 of 9

What will be important to you when you are dying (e.g. physical comfort, no pain, family members

present, etc.)?

How do you feel about the use of life-sustaining measures in the face of terminal illness? Permanent

coma? Irreversible chronic illness, such as Alzheimer’s disease?

Do you have strong feelings about particular medical procedures? Some procedures to think about

include: mechanical breathing (respirator), cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), artificial nutrition and

hydration, hospital intensive care, pain relief medication, chemo or radiation therapy, and surgery.

What limitations to your physical and mental health would affect the health care decisions you would

make?

Would you want to have financial matters taken into account when treatment decisions are made?

Would you want to be placed in a nursing home if your condition warranted?

Would you prefer Hospice care, with the goal of keeping you comfortable in your home during the final

period of your life, as an alternative to hospitalization?

In general, do you wish to participate or share in making decisions about your health care and treatment?

Would you always want to know the truth about your condition, treatment options, and the chance of

success of treatments?

Compassion & Choices Good to Go Toolkit –Page 5 of 9

PO BOX 101810 DENVER, CO 80250

800.247.7421 503.228.9160 FAX

www.compassionandchoices.org

The Dementia Provision

Most Advance Directives become operative only when a person is unable to make

health care decisions and is either “permanently unconscious” or “terminally ill.”

There is usually no provision that applies to the situation in which a person suffers

from severe dementia but is neither unconscious nor dying.

The following language can be added to any Advance Directive or Living Will. There it

will serve to advise physicians and family of the wishes of a patient with Alzheimer’s

Disease or other forms of dementia. You may simply sign and date this form and

include it with the form My Particular Wishes in your Advance Directive.

If I am unconscious and it is unlikely that I will ever become conscious

again, I would like my wishes regarding specific life-sustaining

treatments, as indicated on the attached document entitled

My Particular Wishes to be followed.

If I remain conscious but have a progressive illness that will be

fatal and the illness is in an advanced stage, and I am consistently

and permanently unable to communicate, swallow food and

water safely, care for myself and recognize my family and other

people, and it is very unlikely that my condition will substantially

improve, I would like my wishes regarding specific life-sustaining

treatments, as indicated on the attached document entitled My

Particular Wishes to be followed.

If I am unable to feed myself while in this condition

I do / do not (circle one) want to be fed.

I herby incorporate this provision in to my durable power of attorney for health care,

living will and any other previously executed advance directive for health care decisions.

_______________________________________ __________________

Signature Date

Compassion & Choices Good to Go Toolkit –Page 6 of 9

My Particular Wishes

For Therapies that Could Sustain Life

In addition to the information on other Advance Directive forms I have completed, I wish to make my instructions

known with respect to specific therapies that could save or prolong my life.

This form is meant to inform my physician, nurse or other care provider of my consent or refusal of certain specific

therapies. It is also meant to guide my family or any other person I name to make health care decisions for me if I

cannot make these decisions myself.

I understand it is impossible to know what a person would want in a particular circumstance, unless that person

has previously stated his or her wishes. I hope this document helps those who must make difficult decisions to

proceed with comfort and confidence. By following these instructions they know they are acting in my best interests

and are consenting or refusing certain therapies just as I would if I could hear, understand and speak.

Decisions While I am Capable

So long as I am able to understand my condition, the nature of any proposed therapy and the consequences of

accepting or refusing the therapy, I want to make these decisions myself. I will consult my doctor, family and those

close to me, spiritual advisors and others as I choose. But the final decision is mine. If I am unable to make decisions

only because I am being kept sedated, I would like the sedation lifted so I can rationally consider my situation

and decide to accept or refuse a particular therapy.

Comfort Care

I want any and all therapies to maintain my comfort and dignity. If following my instructions in this document

causes uncomfortable symptoms such as pain or breathlessness, I want those symptoms relieved. I desire vigorous

treatment of my discomfort, even if the treatment unintentionally causes or hastens my death.

Decisions for Specific Therapies

If my mental or physical state has deteriorated, the prognosis is grave and there is little chance that I will ever regain

mental or physical function, I would like the following:

* This means doctors may see if the therapy quickly reverses my condition. If it does not, I want it discontinued.

_______________________________________ __________________

Signature Date

Yes Trial period* No

1. Antibiotics, if I develop a life-threatening infection of any kind.

2. Dialysis, if my kidneys cease to function, either temporarily or permanently.

3. Artificial ventilation, if I stop breathing.

4. Electroshock, if my heart stops beating.

5. Heart regulating drugs including electrolyte replacement, if my heartbeat becomes irregular.

6. Cortisone or other steroid therapy, if tissue swelling threatens vital centers in my brain.

7. Stimulants, diuretics or any other treatment for heart failure, if the strength and function of

my heart is impaired.

8. Blood, plasma or replacement fluids, if I bleed or lose fluid circulating in my body.

Compassion & Choices Good to Go Toolkit –Page 7 of 9

Hospital Visitation Authorization

I, _______________________________________________________________________________,

residing at _____________________________________________________________________in

_______________________County, State of ___________________, do hereby give notice and

authorization that if I should become ill or incapacitated through any cause that necessitates

my hospitalization, treatment, or long-term care in a medical facility, it is my wish that the

following person(s) ________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________________ be given

first preference in visiting me in such medical or treatment facility, whether or not there are

parties related to me by blood or law or other parties desiring to visit me, unless or until I

freely give contrary instructions to medical personnel on the premises involved.

Executed this __________ Day of __________ (Month), __________ (Year)

at (location of signing) ______________________________________________________

By: ______________________________________ ____________________

Signature Date

Witness Signatures:

Witness 1 Witness 2

____________________________________ ____________________________________

Signature Signature

____________________________________ ____________________________________

Address Address

____________________________________ ____________________________________

Date Date

This form is provided by Compassion & Choices. For information about choices at the end

of life and case management services for the terminally ill, please contact us or visit our

website: www.compassionandchoices.org

Compassion & Choices

P.O. Box 101810

Denver, Colorado 80250

800-247-7421

Compassion & Choices Good to Go Toolkit –Page 8 of 9

A Letter to My Primary Health Care

Provider Concerning My Beliefs about End-of-Life Decisions

Dear Dr.____________,

It is important to me to have excellent and compassionate care - to stay as healthy and active as

possible over the course of my life. At the end of life, my personal values and beliefs lead me to

want treatment to alleviate su_ering. Most importantly, I want to ensure that if death becomes

inevitable and imminent, the experience can be peaceful for me and my family.

If there are measures available that may extend my life, I would like to know their chance of

success, and their impact on the quality of my life. If I choose not to take those measures, I ask for

your continued support.

If my medical condition becomes incurable, and death the only predictable outcome, I would

prefer not to su_er, but rather to die in a humane and digni_ed manner. I would like your

reassurance that:

If I am able to speak for myself, my wishes will be honored. If not, the requests from

my health care representative and advance directives will be honored.

You will make a referral to hospice as soon as I am eligible, should I request it.

You will support me with all options for a gentle death, should I become terminally ill.

_is includes providing medications that I can self -administer, at the time of my

choosing, to help me achieve a peaceful death. As you know, the State of Washington

has enacted a Death with Dignity Law that authorizes a physician to prescribe

medications to allow terminally ill patients to choose the time and manner of death.

I am not requesting that you do anything unethical while I am in your care, but I hope for

your reassurance that you would support my personal end-of-life care choices as listed above.

I hope you will accept this statement as a fully considered decision, and an expression of

my deeply-held views. If you feel you would not be able to honor such requests, please

let me know now, while I am able to make choices about my care based on that knowledge.

Signed:__________________________

Date:____________________________

Print Name:__________________________

For additional information and forms regarding end-of-life care and choices, please visit: http://www.compassionandchoices.org.

Compassion & Choices Good to Go Toolkit –Page 9 of 9

Nov. 23, 2009

“Fear begets gods.”

--Lucretius

                Let’s try a thought experiment, especially if you are a highly religious person in the standard sense.

                Let’s believe the scientists: especially regarding evolution. Let’s believe—at least for this thought experiement—that the world began 4.5 billion years ago, that life first formed on earth as one-cell organisms about three million years ago, that mammals and other human being relatives formed 100,000 years ago, and that hominids—the group we ALL (black, white, yellow, red, olive, Islam, Christian) came from began about 20,000 years ago in east Africa and then scattered because of food hunting and gathering needs into isolated groups in Asia, Europe, Africa, and near the Bering Strait (eventually into the Americas).

                Let’s believe that one day some of the more advanced hominids—of which we are the ONLY survivors—suddenly were able to perceive themselves as individuals, realizing that the images in the pools of water were NOT different hominids, but themselves! “Hey! That’s me! And that must be Fred over there, not me. Yeah, that’s Fred. What a pitiful gatherer.” They formed an ego, realizing that they definitely were going to die, that it (at that time) could be, at best, 40 years from now, or, at worst, any second, and that one second followed another forever—that there existed things like “eternity” and “infinity.”

                Let’s follow the scientists and say that this realization was just another step in evolution from the original molten mass of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other elements in the newborn earth, that there is no little person inside ourselves running our bodily machinery, and that there is no spiritual superior being watching lovingly over each and every one of us with a father’s care—a loving father like Ward Cleaver or Andy Taylor—not an abusive father.

                In short, that we are physical machines in a morally neutral world. Everything we do is to squelch an anxiety or fear or fulfill a need (like sex or eating). We are just computers inside flimsy hardware, which are our carbon-based bodies that deteriorate everyday and are replaced in total many times until the breakdowns overtake the replacements and we die.

                This is part of the premise of a can’t-put-down book by Matthew Alper called "The 'God' Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God" (Sourcebooks,   2006).

                Can you imagine the fear and/or anxiety when those first hominids gained self-awareness and understood that they sat there naked under the sword of Damocles (they could die any second or live to be old, but had no control over that or any knowledge of how to increase the chances of a long life as a homo sapiens sapiens)? It was after the first cognitive lightning flash that we were hit by the thunder: “If I am, if I exist, then isn’t it conceivable that one day I might not?”

                Please say you are a religious person in the standard way and are still with me. Who am I kidding? Anyone still reading likely is a secular humanist. Well, here goes anyway:

                Let’s stick with the scientists (you promised!?!), so because all traits must perform a specific function that serves to increase a species’ survivability, if humans possess specific neurophysiological sites responsible for generating tribal religious rites and consciousness, then the same must hold true for those parts as well. There must have existed some distinct environmental pressure  that forced the selection of new adaptations and there must have been some pressure that selected  those individuals with spiritual cognition to survive from our species. Given that nature weeds out all that is superfluous, spiritual tribal rites and tales and traditions must somehow have enhanced each of the different tribes’ scattered about the earth survivability.

                In that last 100 years alone, we have transformed our planet’s surface more than any other species has in the last 3 billion. Our intelligence that brought us the horseless carriage and nuclear power and domination over all other species has backfired  with nearly the same potency that it has served us.

                With that first bit of self-awareness, the wheels of life that had been turning so smoothly for billions of years had turned into an existential crisis.

                I think that even those readers who remain who are religious in the conventional way would agree that pain exists to tell us to run away from the fire in order to survive. Pain also is an evolutionary adaptation. And we endeavor to reduce that pain.

                Another example of a negative sensation in humans is loneliness. When one is isolated from the community, he is most vulnerable. Loneliness prompts individuals to pursue the company of others. This is part of “separation anxiety,” which is just as strong. This is discomfort experience when we are separated from a loved one. We perceive ourselves as joyous  when reunited, but it is really the end of our anxiety that we experience.

                We needn’t approach the fire again. Our memories provoke similar anxiety because they contain memories of emotions as well as details, hunting trails, etc. It’s for this reason that anxiety became a biological necessity.

                While this also is true of smaller mammals, such as rabbits, humans have much more storage space and the enhanced capacity to comprehend our future. Because of anxiety, we became motivated to procure food not just for today, but for our possible futures. Such foresight has advantages, of course, but it also backfires. Because of our well-developed foresight, we experience anxiety for all possible horrors we may experience in the future. The anxiety level rises tremendously. It is this anxiety function that motivated inventing countless items such as electric light and medical technologies. We are obsessed with our futures.

                Let’s ask: How do we use our foresight when it constantly is telling us  that we are ultimately going to die?

                No matter how hard we work to keep ourselves young, provide food and shelter, and funding for the U.S. Department of Defense, we know that death is inevitable and inescapable. It is this awareness that strips the anxiety function of its efficiency and therefore strips humankind of its capacity to survive.

                Scientists tell us that human’s burial customs far into the past attest to this preoccupation with death. The burial of the dead is practiced by no other species. Death is inextricably bound up with humans’ consciousness of time.

                Making things worse, we also know that death can come at any moment. “We live our lives anxiously standing under the mythical sword of Damocles awaiting  the day when that single strand of hair that holds inevitable death suspended above our heads will finally snap,” Alper writes.

                Let’s go back to the primitive tribes. How much security did they have that each day  would not be their last? Imagine a time when there was no real medical science, when men had to go out with their crude hunting instruments and bludgeon some ferocious beast to death in order to feed their family. In those times, the threat of death was unrelenting. Still, even with our medical advances over the last 200 years, very little has really changed. “Consequently, we are forced to live out our lives in a state of constant mortal terror of an enemy we can’t see, flee or defeat,” Alper writes. “In essence, we are no better off than if we were born with a time bomb strapped to us set on a random timer to explode at any given moment within the next 50 or so odd years.”

                In addition to this, almost as potent, is our fear  of losing those we love. We are dependent on others for our physical as well as emotional  survival. We also, therefore, live in constant fear of losing our loved and needed ones to sudden, morally neutral death.

                With the dawn of self-conscious awareness, the anxiety function had imploeded rendirng us a debilitated and ineffectual organism.

                We channel our energies, therefore, into frivolous attempts to avoid death and into a morbid array of self-destructive behaviors. We become the only animal that will needlessly kill one another as well as ourselves.

                Because of our awareness of inevitable death, life takes on existential meaningless. Our struggle to survive became a struggle in futility.

                This was a whole new set of rules we now played by, and unless something could be done to ameliorate our species’ pain and anxiety, we might have succumbed to the forces of extinction (which still is an open question, with our nuclear weapons, biological and neurological weapons, love of lifestyle over prevention of global warming, which will kill billions).

                If nature didn’t provide the newly emergent human with some type of adaptation by which to counter the anxiety of mortal awareness, we may have gone extinct. Nature was going to have to modify our cognitive processing so that we could survive the debilitating horror.

                It’s the belief of most scientists that the awareness of death created so much tension that it induced a selective pressure on our cerebral physiologies. “Just as environmental pressures transform entire species, why shouldn’t these same pressures  be able to transform one of our organs, the brain?” the author asks. “Shouldn’t those same Darwinian principles that apply to all organic matter apply to our cerebral evolutions as well? How else are we to imagine that all of our other cognitive centers—be they linguistic, musical, or mathematical—emerged?”

                Suddenly those individuals whose brains possessed some genetic mutation that could withstand the overwhelming anxiety were more likely to survive. Because of that, they were more likely to pass whatever advantageous adaptation the possessed to their offspring.

                Alper reasons that after a certain number of generations passed, those humans who dealt best with the anxiety (had a built-in predisposition to believe in or perceive an alternate reality, one that supersedes the limits of this finite physical realm) were most apt to survive. The process continued until a cognitive function emerged that altered the way these first humans perceived reality by adding a “spiritual” component.

                A new reality was born in humans, one that compelled our species to think—to believe—itself transcendant, to imagine that we are more than we really are: That we live forever; that we are eternal beings, at least in spirit.

                Alper says that one evolutionary trait was a major factor in the rise of belief in an afterlife and humans as immortal (in spirit) beings. That trait was yet another that gave us domination over other species, but had a down side: the power  to enumerate. We could measure moments in time and soon realized that after each moment came another, on into infinity, or eternity. Humans suddently had to endure the notion of how brief life is and how their existance was ultimately and painfully insignificant.

                Not only did we need protection from actual death but from “all the possibilities that might exist after death. Humans were aware that they might exist  for all eternity, but how? In what form? Would eternity be pleasurable or painful? Would we retain our conscious identities, and, if so, in what state?

                Humans now had to contend with the anxiety of the possibility of eternal suffering or, perhaps more troublingg, of eternal non-existence.

                Rather than let those fears overwhelm us, nature selected those whose cognitive sensibilities compelled them to process the concept of death in a new fashion. Alper says that after hundreds of generations of natural selection, a group of humans emerged who perceived infinity and eternity as an inextricable part of self-consciousness and self-identity. A series of neurological connections emerged that compelled us to perceive ourselves as “spiritually” eternal. We were now “wired” to believe that our conscious self, referred to as our spirit or soul, would persist forever. Humans came to see themselves as immortal, a concept that has “endured universally among nearly every single culture from the dawn of the species.”

                Humankind was saved. This could explain our blindness to global warming and situations like neverending religious wars and the ongoing nuclear proliferation. Each person believes that he or she is “good” and has the “correct” god and will receive an eternal reward after the nuclear holocaust. Each person believes that his or her tribe’s god and rites are the real ones, so, to heck with other people and this material world. Those people believe they may die here, but will live eternally in some kind of bliss.

                As the result of selective pressures, neurological connections had emerged that generated in ALL the tribes an inherent belief in an all-powerful imaginary father whose infinate powers would protect us from death and all that came afterwards.

                Alper says “at some point in the last two million years, during the emergence of the later hominids, a cognitive adaptation emerged that enabled us to cope with our awareness of death while, at the same time, allowing us to retain our intelligence and self-conscious awareness. We are now “wired” to perceive physical death in a much more palatable manner. Humans could go on living in a state of relative calm, even amid our awareness of inevitable demise. “This, I contend, is the purpose of a spiritual/religious function,” Alper writes. “It suggests that god represents the manifestation of a human perception, a coping mechanism.”

                Many people at churches around the world get up in front of their congregations and “testify” that they “know this is the one true church” and they “can feel the spirit.” Most of the time when you discuss atheism with a religious person, that is all the “evidence” they can cite for god’s existence. That and Scriptures written 2,000 to 3,000 years ago by people living in the Iron Age, or people who regulary use peyote to “see” god, or by people in dire circumstances who hallucinate because of their near starvation or dehydration (If you want to see “god,” just go on a fast, especially without liquids.), or wake up from an operation with the effects of medical opioids still within you and you’ll imagine that Jesus is speaking to you from inside the wall opposite your bed or that a white-haired old man with a long, flowing beard is watching you from just around the corner of your hospital building and that every time you look over their he steps back behind the wall.

                The sensation that people feel in their stomachs is cross-culturally experienced. Nobel laureate Romain Rolland wrote about sensations he had had that he felt caused “all religious sentiment”: “[They] consisted in a peculiar feeling, which he finds confirmed by many others. It is a feeling he calls ‘sensation of eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, oceanic.”

                I last had that feeling at age seven when I took “holy communion” at the local Catholic church. I’ve also had it while staring at the stars in nights gone past. It is much the same feeling one gets when in love with a woman, or anxious before giving a talk before a huge crowd. In our church, people often speak of it as a “feeling in their stomach.” Butterflies anyone?

                I became an atheist after my father had to be starved for 14 days in 2006 before the doctor could give him morphine for the pain. He had suffered a massive stroke and was paralyzed on his right side. He could not speak—only curl the left-hand side of his mouth up in a grin. His skin was too weak to withstand a portal for food. They could only give him a salt-sugar solution. They could not, and we could not, legally let him die with dignity. Instead, he lay there like a fish on a dock, gasping for air. He looked like Jack Nicholson’s character when he goes crazy in “The Shining.”

                After 10 days of that suffering, the doctor was legally allowed to put him on hospice care and give him morphine. On his records the doctor had to record “For pain.” Each day the doctor gave him a higher dosage until he died four days later.

                It’s not easy being an atheist. I’ve struggled with a concept that won’t go out of my head because of its genetic character and because it was drilled into me since I was five at the local Catholic school. Since 2006, I’ve lost friends who thought I was Satan tempting them or who were repulsed by the idea of a world without a kindly “Heavenly Father.”

                But that world, where a kind god cares for each of us individually, had broken down for me when Dad died. No kindly Heavenly Father  would have tortured that angel of a man like that for 14 days.

That is my testimony.

Before joining Senator John Glenn's Washington staff in 1985, Caroline Arnold (csarnold@neo.rr.com) was a teacher, founded and ran a successful small business, and served three terms on the Kent (OH) Board of Education.  In retirement she keeps a garden, is principal cellist of the Stow Symphony, and serves on the Kent Sustainability Commission and on the boards of Kent Social Services and Family & Community Services in Portage County.  

Nov. 4, 2009 

"... walking is much healthier than jumping to conclusions or running off at the mouth"
Record-Courier "SoundOff!" comment

During a discussion of sustainability at a recent breakfast caucus of the Healthy Transportation Task Force of the Kent Environmental Council, my friend Larry Cole remarked that technologies for far more efficient internal combustion engines – which could make substantial contributions to the sustainability of world energy supplies – have existed for a long time, but have been ignored or resisted by the auto industry.

Sustainability (never a goal of the auto industry) is an infant concept, first proposed in 1987 as ‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.' Its similarity to the "seventh generation" philosophy of the Iroquois has been noted: chiefs must always consider the effects of their actions down through sevehn future generations.

In US capitalism, sustainability is often parsed as a "triple bottom line" – increasing profits, improving the planet and improving the lives of people. Some critics question whether increasing profits is compatible with improving the planet or people's lives.

But there is general agreement that sustainability is about planning our actions today to ensure a liveable world for future generations. The city of Kent has a Sustainability Commission and a Sustainability Plan; Kent State University has a Sustainability Task Force. The USEPA has a Sustainability Program.

But how do we do sustainability? How do we address our human destiny – either for local communities or for the 6.7 billion people on our frail little planet? Although we have incredibly advanced technologies, our economic, political and social systems are proving totally inadequate for governing ourselves or managing our powers in sustainable ways.

Sustainability is founded on altruism – caring for others. Auguste Comte (1798 -1857) coined the word, proposing that we should ‘live for others' – vivre pour autrui – instead of living for God, or money, or self-gratification.

Living for others can be based on religion (Christianity "love your neighbor", Islam "give alms"), humanism (Do unto others ...), family loyalty ("He's my brother), as a freestanding moral virtue (It's the right thing to do) or the evolutionary imperative (alone we die).

And sustainability – the altruism of caring for all others down to through many generations – is for all practical purposes socialism: how we as societies or as a species manage our commons – the resources, risks, and challenges we share in common with others.

Over the past decade I have been alarmed by an increase in what I will call "missionary conclusions" jumped to by many so groups religious, commercial, technical, military, Left, Right, and Extraterrestrial. These conclusions – unsustainable and un-altruistic – go something like this: "We know the truth, (the whole truth and nothing but the truth) and know what to do to create the right future for everyone. Others who do not accept our truth or support our programs may – indeed should – be forced into compliance – for their own good as well as that of future generations – with whatever coercion or violence it takes."

We hear this conclusion in proposals for escalation of the war in Afghanistan: the only right way forward is to punish the terrorists of Al Qaeda and/or Taliban with a bigger and better war with more soldiers, bombs and drones.

We see this in the conclusion that the best we can do to control a nation we suspect is building a nuclear bomb is deterrence by threat of obliteration by our nuclear bombs. (Dale Butland: "Living with a nuclear Iran", ABJ, 10/14/09 http://www.ohio.com/editorial/

commentary/64193112.html )

We hear this conclusion from those who fear that illegal immigrants or the undeserving poor might cost us money, or that giving everyone health care might raise our taxes.

Sustainability through altruism is also healthier than jumping to conclusions in another sense: caring for others, mutual help and interdependence have repeatedly proved to be more effective and durable in human societies than force and selfishness. Our human fitness to survive to seven generations (or even to the next generation) may be impaired if we keep jumping to short-term, local and self-centered conclusions.

Who should decide what sustainability goals get priority? Scientists, technologists and statisticians? Congress? the US President, the Pope, the UN, Generals at the Pentagon, the Free Market, guided by Wall Street CEOs? 2 billion Christians? 1.6 billion Muslims?

So far we haven't even agreed what realities we are dealing with (e.g:. global warming, energy consumption, wars, 6.7 billion people, pandemics, genocide, GM foods, etc.) How will we ever agree on a reality we want for future generations?

Instead of jumping to short-term conclusions about how the world should be, and running off at the mouth about our own incorruptible truths and others' scurrilous lies, we need to walk with others in the real world and talk about what we see – altruistically, sustainably – calling on our basic human kindness, sense of justice and ideals of freedom to help one another.

It won't be easy. There is a strong current of YOYO (You're On Your Own) running though our society. Our democratic practice of political accountability has been overwritten by a culture of consumerism and the buying of political compliance. Our economy is largely controlled by myths about free-markets and the individual's freedom to make money and not pay taxes. Many people believe that God commands certain outcomes, and that they must force God's will on everyone.

Do we want sustainability? Are we willing to live for others? 

Walk.  And tune in around AD 2250.

Copyright Record Publishing Co, LLC. 2009

Nov. 4, 2009

Janis L. Dickinson, Department of Natural Resources and Field of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Copyright 2009 by the author. First published in Ecology and Society under license by The Resilience Alliance.

Reversing the trajectory of global climate change requires widespread support for policies and incentives that will reduce carbon emissions. Although it is certainly in the world's best interest to promote carbon neutrality, it is not in the material interests of nations or individuals to hinder economic growth (Dyson 2006, Woodward 2008). Given that the link between the use of fossil fuel and economic development is a significant political-economic barrier to restraint, the greatest hope for transformative change may be mobilization of ideological communities toward a ground swell of support for carbon neutrality.

The popularity of environmental education initiatives, including Al Gore's The Climate Project, attests to a belief that increasing awareness helps change individual behavior and promotes advocacy, but there is little real evidence that this is so (Blumstein and Saylan 2008). Although short-term behaviors often shift as a consequence of educational experiences (Kaiser and Fuhrer 2003), the resulting behavioral changes are typically short lived (Dwyer et al. 1993). We must question the assumption that increased knowledge of the dangers will generate a sustained rational response (Janssen and de Vries 1998, Dessai et al. 2004), because even the behavior of conservation biologists, who frequently drive large pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles, suggests that this is not the case. Behavioral response to the threat of global climate change simply does not match its unique potential for cumulative, adverse, and potentially chaotic outcomes (Dyson 2006).

Despite ample evidence of an inevitable rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide during this century, Dyson (2006:120) argues that "humanity's experience of another difficult 'long' threatHIV/AIDSreveals a broadly analogous sequence of human reactions. In short, (i) scientific understanding advances rapidly, but (ii) avoidance, denial, and recrimination characterize the overall societal response, therefore (iii) there is relatively little behavioral change, until (iv) evidence of damage becomes plain." The implication is that only direct experience with adverse outcomes leads to behavioral change, leaving us with the question of why the connection is so flimsy between what we know, what we value, and how we behave.

This question is rooted in the ideas of Ernest Becker, whose work culminated in two companion syntheses: The Denial of Death (1973) and Escape from Evil (1975). Here I expand Becker's cultural and proximate psychological understanding of human behavior to provide new insights into the challenge of implementing a rational response to global climate change. First, I summarize Becker's ideas on psychological repression of death anxiety through symbolic perpetuation of the self, and clarify the empirical framing of these ideas within the branch of social psychology known as "terror management theory" (TMT). I then use TMT research paradigms, which examine how thinking about death influences human behavior (Pyszczynski et al. 2006), to make predictions about how individuals and groups respond to mortal environmental problems like global climate change. The purpose of this synthesis is to explore one of the key psychological links between the reality of global climate change and the difficulty of mobilizing individuals and groups to confront the problem in a rational and timely manner. I focus on Becker's mechanistic (proximate) understanding of self-esteem striving, transference idealization, world view defense, and outgroup antagonism, illuminating several ways in which death-denying defenses and perpetuation of the symbolic self are psychological barriers to the development of modern, rational, sustainable belief systems, advocacy, and action.

ERNEST BECKER'S IDEAS ON DENIAL OF DEATH AND THE SYMBOLIC SELF

Becker's ideas have their historical roots in psychoanalysis (Rank 1941, Freud 1957, Brown 1985), his own disciplinary training in cultural anthropology (Hocart 1933, 1952, 1954, Becker 1971b) and sociology (Berger and Luckmann 1966, Becker 1971b), as well as in the philosophical pragmatism of John Dewey (Dewey and Bentley 1949). In The Denial of Death (1973), he proposed that human beings are predisposed to suppress thoughts of death to manage anxiety about the inevitability of mortality. Along with an enlarged brain and prefrontal cortex, human beings gained the capacity to use symbolic language and simulate experience, imagining the future before it happens (Rakic 1995, Leifer 1997). One component of consciousness is awareness of a "self" (Dennett 2004), and with this awareness comes awareness of the inevitability of mortality. Becker invoked Rank's (1941) assertion that fear of annihilation is the primary source of human anxiety. The flip side of fear of annihilation is anxiety about the self, which is the basis of neurosis.

Becker suggested that thinking about death is so costly that denial of death is ubiquitous and explains the majority of human mythologies and world views. He proposed that we repress thoughts of death and dying by pushing them out of consciousness and creating a mythical, culturally and socially informed reality that provides a context for self-esteem or even heroism. We use our unique self-awareness and imagination to create a fictional self through shared meaning, myths, cultural world views, and projects for building self-esteem (causa sui or Oedipal projects). Cultural world views include all ways of viewing the world, from belief in the supernatural to the creation of meaning within cultures of honor, materialism, myths, nationalism, religion, and reverence for youthfulness, beauty, or artistry. Ancestral cultures were more integrated and provided a consistent context for self-esteem with well-defined roles that governed interactions within ritual units or social groups, but, in the modern world, in which people no longer operate within a single culture, we have a larger variety of contexts or world views within which to strive for self-esteem as doctors and scientists, soldiers and nationals, parishioners and priests, consumers and aesthetes, artists and athletes, cult or gang members, and world leaders (Becker 1973, Lifton 1993).

Another way to reduce anxiety about mortality is to project power and importance onto some idealized other, often a celestial god. In Becker's (1973) words, we are "meaning seeking creatures." We have the capacity to see ourselves in relation to larger systems, including the cosmos, and to comprehend the idea that we are small and insignificant relative to what we see in the sky: the stars, the planets, the universe (Leifer 1997). Because this is terrifying (Rank 1932), we repress thoughts of death and project a power and importance onto something larger that will save us. This psychological phenomenon, known as transference, was proposed by Freud (1957) to describe patients' projection of aspects of the parent-child power and love relationship onto the analyst. Recently, controlled behavioral experiments provide empirical support for transference idealization with anxiety-reducing effects that can be understood using neural network approaches (Gabbard 2006) and visualized with neural imaging techniques (Gerber and Peterson 2006). Charismatic leaders and deities are common soteriological transference objects, but so are movie stars, political leaders, lovers, and teachers. The exact nature of transference varies, but what is critical is that transference objects appear larger than life and more enduring than the mortal self.

The proximate psychological mechanisms that form the basis of the ideas presented here neither conflict with nor support hypotheses at the ultimate, evolutionary level of analysis, at which the experience of and defenses against existential terror can be viewed either as costly byproducts of the evolution of consciousness (Landau et al. 2006) or, more plausibly, as products of selection resulting from the advantages of ideologically based within-group cooperation and extra-group competition (Hardin 1968, Hauert et al. 2002, 2006, Wilson 2006). This treatment focuses only on the proximate level of analysis while recognizing that hypotheses at the two levels are not mutually exclusive and thus do not compete (Reeve and Sherman 1993).

Becker connected the denial of death to a broad suite of behaviors enacted in defense of a cultural world view, placing his ideas within the context of Western society's increasingly distant relationship to nature and rejection of death as an integral part of life (Becker 1975, Lifton 1979). His goal was to revitalize the enlightenment tradition (Anchor 1979) and develop a "science of man" that would discover the psychological reasons why people gravitate toward finding meaning within some context of cosmic significance, why group ideologies so often involve literal or symbolic immortality, why cultural ideologies are so often the grounds upon which battle lines are drawn, and why so much of human motivation is subconscious and thus outside awareness.

Applying these ideas to the environment, I propose that unconscious defenses identified by TMT can both block and promote rational responses to global climate change. Given the paradox that most modern immortality-striving hero systems hinder our chances of survival, what might we learn by investigating the psychological mechanisms governing our choices? Understanding proximate behavioral mechanisms, particularly unconscious motivations that govern decision making, may reveal methods for generating a sustained response to global climate change in the short term and provide insights that individuals and institutions can use to foster rational responses to escalating environmental crises over the long term.

TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR DENIAL OF DEATH AS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Terror management theory (TMT) is the formalization of Becker's ideas within the field of social psychology. Although not universally accepted (Navarrete and Fessler 2005), TMT is supported by evidence from more than 300 empirical studies testing a wide range of predictions with Western and indigenous societies in various parts of the globe (Pyszczynski et al. 2006). For this reason alone, it is worth taking seriously and integrating with environmental thinking, particularly with regard to human responses to climate change.

Pyszczynski et al. (1999) proposed a dual-process model in which both proximal and distal terror management defenses comprise the anxiety-buffering system required to keep death thoughts at bay. Proximal defenses are launched when death thoughts rise to consciousness, whereas distal defenses are responsible for keeping death thoughts unconscious. The experiments ask whether TMT is a good predictor of how people will behave in response to "death primes," which are stimuli that increase mortality salience, rendering unconscious thoughts of death conscious or, if they remain unconscious, making death thoughts more accessible.

PROXIMAL DEFENSES AND PREDICTED RESPONSES TO INFORMATION ABOUT GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Proximal defenses use rational thinking and deploy immediately after conscious thoughts of death are triggered; they involve both active suppression and cognitive distortions that relegate the problem of death to the distant future (Pyszczynski et al. 1999). Distraction, planning, and biased cognition, such as denial of risk and rationalization, all serve to suppress thoughts of death, reducing abstract awareness of mortality. Individuals filter information in ways that appear rational, biasing cognition away from the inevitability of death. To this end, people are prone to deny the validity of research and tests indicating that their lives could be in danger (Kunda 1987) and elect to endure pain and suffering so long as it is accompanied by a promise of long life (Quattrone and Tversky 1984).

Where global climate change is concerned, proximal defenses to thinking about mortality are likely to manifest in three ways: (1) denial of climate change, i.e., climate skeptics; (2) denial that humans are the cause of climate change; and (3) a tendency to minimize or project the impacts of climate change far into the future, where they no longer represent a personal danger (Table 1). For example, after viewing the apocalyptic film "The Day After Tomorrow," subjects' beliefs in the likelihood of extreme events declined (Lowe et al. 2006). Although this result was neither studied nor interpreted within the context of TMT, it is consistent with proximal defenses. Proximal defenses cause people to minimize the severity of mortal problems. If thinking about climate change triggers proximal defenses, people who say that they believe climate change is occurring will still tend to underestimate the need for an immediate response. As conditions worsen and it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the effects of global climate change, more people will probably switch over to distal defenses.

HOW DISTAL DEFENCES INFLUENCE HUMAN CAPACITY TO RESPOND TO GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Distal terror management defenses comprise the most interesting predictions of Becker's work. They are thought to be activated when the accessibility of death thoughts increases, although these thoughts still remain unconscious (Pyszczynski et al. 1999). Distal defenses are symbolic and occur in the absence of negative affect, physiological arousal, or distress; they are deployed in response to verbal or written death primes and subliminal death stimuli, which strongly supports the idea that they are unconsciously motivated. Experiments indicate that bolstering self-esteem helps to keep death thoughts at bay (Greenberg et al. 1992b). Consequently, threats to self-esteem can elicit terror management defenses, whereas factors such as a history of secure attachment or thinking about one's own secure relationship have buffering effects (Florian and Mikulincer 1998, Mikulincer and Florian 2000, Mikulincer et al. 2003). Experiments designed to explore distal defenses are intriguing because they tap into unconscious motivation in compelling ways, asking whether interventions (primes) that increase mortality salience also increase the individual's striving for self-esteem, defense of his or her own world view, antagonism toward outgroups, and idealization of lovers and leaders.

Distal defenses are also counterintuitive. If primes related to global climate change increase the accessibility of death thoughts, exposure should lead to (1) transference idealization in the form of blind following and a reduction in the rational criticism of public figures, particularly charismatic leaders; (2) increased striving for self-esteem, which in Western society could mean counterintuitive increases in status-driven consumerism, materialism, and other behaviors that increase carbon emissions; (3) increased outgroup antagonism, not just between environmentalists and anti-environmentalists, but among religious groups, gangs, and other ideological groups; and (4) a tendency to bolster the existing world view even if it is not sustainable. A startling example of this is the "Drill, baby, drill" chant that erupted at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, in 2008. No rational approach could ever produce this gleeful negation of drilling's profound aesthetic and environmental costs.

In past studies, death primes have included questions that cause subjects to imagine their own deaths, graphic footage of the deaths of others, indirect triggers including proximity to a funeral home, and subliminal messages like flashing the word "death" imperceptibly across a computer screen (Solomon et al. 2004). Controls involve anxiety-producing stimuli like physical pain, e.g., dental pain; psychologically stressful situations unrelated to death, e.g., having to give a speech or take an exam; and subliminal presentations of a neutral word that has the same length and number of vowels as the word "death" (Arndt et al. 1997, Solomon et al. 2004). I know of no study that investigated whether delivering information on global climate change increases death thought accessibility. However, if it does, then experiments that manipulate the way in which information on global climate change is presented, including the extent to which graphic details or the potential for human mortality are revealed, could prove useful not only for testing the idea that mortality salience influences human response to global climate change but also for determining the most effective ways to structure climate change education.

A critical but frequently misunderstood component of TMT is that distal defenses are designed to reinforce a "symbolic self." This means that TMT does not predict that individuals will choose the strategy most likely to avoid death or harm. If it were that simple, making death thoughts more accessible would cause people to drive more carefully. However, when driving and self-esteem are linked, Becker's hypothesis makes the opposite prediction, and this was borne out in an experiment in which subjects who linked driving with self-esteem drove faster and became more reckless in response to stimuli that made them think about death, sacrificing true safety for false safety in the form of defense of the ego (Ben-Ari et al. 1999).

This result parallels the prediction that increased confrontation with the problem of global climate change will lead to increased consumerism and status-seeking through material wealth (Kasser and Sheldon 2000). This is the crux of Becker's argument: The behaviors people exhibit are not necessarily those that reduce the risk of death, and in fact they may sometimes increase it as long as they also bolster the individual's symbolic self and the complex, immortality-striving hero system that defines it. Such counterintuitive responses can be seen in some of the studies integrated into the discussion of climate change below, and are but a small sample of a large inventory of experimental studies supporting the use of distal defenses in the management of existential terror.

WHEN CLIMATE CHANGE PRIMES ELICIT TERROR MANAGEMENT DEFENSES

What happens when discussion of climate change makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death? We have seen that death-denying defenses are often counterintuitive, causing individuals to incur greater rather than less danger and leading to irrational outcomes and behavior. If confronting global climate change increases mortality salience, which remains to be tested, the precise behavioral manifestations will likely be as varied as the many extant cultural world views. For example, people who find self-esteem via materialism and an ideology of entitlement will probably buy more SUVs and become more antagonistic toward environmental causes and points of view, favoring suppression of the environmental movement and harsher penalties for the more radical protestors. In contrast, people who find self-esteem through humanist ideologies or environmentalism should become increasingly militant and vocal about their causes. This clash between two major Western ideologies is likely to produce even deeper ideological rifts within and outside the United States than we currently see.

Thinking about climate change may also result in ideological conflict within individuals. Environmental awareness and a tendency to promote conservation behavior will be undermined when the environmentalist ideology threatens an individual's self-esteem within some other ideological context. Because people adhere to more than one ideology (Lifton 1993), there is such a thing as a "materialistic environmentalist." This leads to the question of what is required for people to hold two conflicting ideologies at the same time; this question is understudied, and the outcome probably varies with personality type. Lifton (1993) discovered that "doubling," i.e., the creation of separate selves, occurred among doctors who became killers at Auschwitz; this is an extreme response that allows people to retain deeply discordant ideologies, which is difficult because internal conflict undermines self-esteem with guilt and shame.

How does TMT inform efforts to increase environmental awareness and behavior? First, it illustrates why Wilson's (2006) approach to the clergy, which explains how people can integrate concern for biodiversity within their existing world views, might be more productive than Dawkins's (2006) more direct approach, which contradicts and dismisses or even attacks the world view of much of humanity, arguing for an entirely new one. Second, it provides a mechanistic explanation for why the responses necessary to reduce carbon emissions may be difficult to come by even among conservationists. Finally, it identifies additional barriers to and possibilities for assembling ecological communities whose priorities match the real dangers we are facing, with the unifying characteristic being that the context for self-esteem and, most importantly, the doctrines of leaders are aligned with the mission of stopping climate change.

The integration of TMT with social theory may also prove useful in understanding the psychological impacts of the "risk society," which is less "progress-centric" and focuses instead on adaptation to the manufactured risks associated with human activity (Giddens 1990, Beck 1995). If the perception of risk, including the risks associated with climate change, increases death thought accessibility, and this becomes increasingly likely as the impacts of climate change reveal themselves, then efforts to move people toward environmentally responsible behaviors may have the opposite effect, causing them to purchase large gas-guzzling vehicles, listen to Rush Limbaugh, join fundamentalist cults, or, in the case of university faculty, hunker down and write more scientific papers.

We currently lack the basic understanding required to design educational structures to support leadership, resilience, and courageous responses to the problem of global climate change. Investigation of the psychological underpinnings of response to climate change is important in designing educational strategies, particularly those that involve teaching young people. I propose that inspiring young people to bring their talent, creativity, and energy to the table is insufficient without also providing a climate change ideology for the collective good. Social support and a reconfiguring of identity are critically important in overcoming addictions to nicotine and alcohol (Barber and Crisp 1995, Christakis and Fowler 2008), and the inability of environmental education projects to promote behavioral change may rest with their failure to provide a social context for self-esteem.

NEW HISTORICAL SOURCES OF IMMORTALITY AND POWER AS PROXIMATE CAUSES OF ENVIRONMENTAL HARM

Lifton (1993) proposed that, beginning in the 20th century, people were forced to adopt a many-sided ideology because of unprecedented change ranging from social and political dislocation to the expanding geography of employment opportunities. This dislocation, combined with the mass media revolution and the threat of human extinction, has required people to continuously recreate their symbols and become "fluid and many-sided." In ancestral societies, ideologies commonly focused on rebirth and renewal as forms of symbolic self-perpetuation. Becker (1975) wrote about the "new historical forms of immortality and power," the most universal and primary of which is money. Modern Western society has lost the alignment of community with the "ritual unit" or cultural world view (Becker 1973). Whereas the ritual unit was once the community or clan, today the ritual unit is often mismatched to the cultural grouping within which it resides. Although the family and the church or state continue to exist, the intermediate communities are either missing or transient, and not everyone has a defined role within which he or she can feel successful.

Because there are few cultures remaining that have not been superseded by larger entities, with tribes becoming townships, cities, states, and nations, we no longer have an "integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust" (Becker 1975). Although this might open up the possibility of a utopian, egalitarian, and secular society in which the combined gifts of individuals prevail, what we have in the West is a secular inequality devoid of a shared sense of the sacred and a heroism that triumphs over nature, perpetuating itself through new immortality ideologies that value material acquisitions and money. Lacking in heroism, these immortality ideologies come up empty or even inspire guilt. The irony of Western materialism is that wealth beyond the point of basic material comfort does not make people happy (Gilbert 2005).

Support for materialism as a functional immortality ideology comes from experimental evidence that thinking about death increases consumptive behavior (Kasser and Sheldon 2000). When subjects were asked to write essays about death and then project their circumstances 15 years down the line, they imagined themselves wealthier and with more possessions than did controls. More directly relevant to natural resource management, this pattern was upheld in a second experiment in which subjects in the "mortality salience" condition consumed resources more greedily in a forest management game than did control subjects. This suggests that mortality salience accelerates the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968). The impact of mortality salience on consumptive behavior can also be seen in response to television advertisements: With the increase in death-related news reports, it was possible to ask whether subjects exposed to news about death increased their valuations of high-status items for sale during television commercials. Subtle reminders of death caused viewers to place a higher value on high-status items and to devalue low-status items (Mandel and Heine 1999). This effect was absent in control subjects who were not reminded of death. Given these results, increased mortality, e.g., from terrorism (Pyszczynski et al. 2002), war, and extreme weather, is likely to increase consumerism and carbon emissions.

Technocracy itself is an immortality ideology that, although it is coupled with materialism, has as part of its makeup an element of the magical and a belief that new tools and innovations provide solutions to both the small day-to-day problems of life and the larger problems of human happiness and mortality. Technology is entrancing, and, functionally, technologists become creators of magic and the wizards of today, claiming the same authority over technology that doctors claim over human health or shamans over the cursed. This has always been so, going back to ancestral peoples who learned to use fire, tools, wind, and wheels. Even in subsistence societies, technology has a greater impact on a variety of sociological variables than do supernatural or religious beliefs (Nolan and Lenski 1996).

Traditionally, technology consolidates power within a society and exacerbates inequity. What is interesting about the new information technologies is that they do both: They consolidate power with patents, exclusive intellectual capital, and expensive tools, and they distribute power through open source technologies and open communication networks. As such, they promote material segregation while at the same time providing a relatively open network within which ideological communities can function. Photo galleries, forums, listserves, Google groups, and new social networking tools like MySpace, Facebook, and Second Life present mechanisms for growing online communities. In this new virtual world, frequent interaction is easy to achieve, and the topics around which free choice interaction occurs can be very focused and specific, suggesting that large social networks function like smaller ideological communities once did in the real world. It is also true that, although the Internet can unite and assemble large communities of action, e.g., Moveon.org, it can also be used to manipulate. The complexity of its impact on culture, relationships, and environmental behavior is worthy of scrutiny and study.

Like materialism, technology offers opportunities for reducing the impacts of ideology and life-style on the environment, including the invention of tools that allow individuals to save energy (Midden et al. 2007) and social networks that encourage sustainable behaviors. The flip side of this is that technology and materialism both lead to the increased use of natural resources (Vlek and Steg 2007), and so both materialism and the belief in technological salvation in their present manifestations will ultimately have negative impacts on the conservation of natural resources and on our ability to reduce carbon emissions.

CONSERVATION AS AN IMMORTALITY PROJECT: RECRUITING CONSERVATIONISTS FROM CULTURES OF HONOR

Although cultures of honor likely have their evolutionary basis in mate competition (Shackelford 2005), when viewed through the psychological lens of Becker's ideas they provide a context for self-esteem. For example, urban gangs allow members to strive for self-esteem more successfully than within the broader cultural context of their urban schools or the monetary ideology of contemporary Western society (Lopez 1991). Cultures of honor form in response to marginalization, and their codes and ideologies are highly variable, although they all have self-esteem as a common ingredient. This is why disrespect or "dissing" figures so importantly as a context for conflict.

What is it about youth conservation corps projects that make them such a good fit for youth emerging from urban cultures of honor? The answer may be a simple one. Local, redemptive conservation projects focused on environmental justice communities have all of the trappings of an immortality project and provide a meaningful context within which imperiled youth can strive for self-esteem and happiness. Currently, youth conservation corps programs across the United States have more poor, inner city youth applying to join their ranks than they can accommodate. In many cases, the young men leave gangs and lucrative, but illegal, drug-dealing operations to dedicate themselves to the conservation corps, working for low pay and minimal scholarships. This trend may have direct parallels with the Civilian Conservation Corps enacted by Roosevelt as part of the New Deal in 1933. Members express the desire to better themselves and develop a sense of justice about issues of pollution and environmental degradation.

The link between self-esteem, the creation of communities of action, and justice issues is a powerful one that can be applied to climate change as well, because global climate change is predicted to have the greatest and earliest impacts on the poor. Becker's ideas translate into a hypothesis that has social value: What is lacking in many challenged communities is not merely resources, but the resilience that comes from having a supportive context for meaning. This thinking suggests that eco-groups can seed challenged coastal communities with the raw materials for participatory action research (Minkler 2000) toward improved resilience (Faber et al. 2001, Kuo 2001, Tidball and Krasny 2007); mental health (Faber et al. 2001); science, technology, engineering, and math learning; the management or remediation of environmental problems; and climate change activism.

Gangs are typically high in bonding social capital, with deep, close within-group connections, but low on bridging social capital, which involves connections among groups of different socioeconomic status and power (Bolin et al. 2004). If youth conservation projects provide a shared context for self-esteem and promote bonding social capital without providing opportunities for bridging social capital, they may simply create new "gangs." Providing opportunities for youth conservation corps to address issues with politicians and the broader community could create the bridging social capital required to avoid increases in outgroup antagonism.

LEADERS, ARCHTYPES, AND TOTEMS: A PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORY OF SUSTAINABLE CULTURE

In ancestral societies, nature was an integral part of immortality-striving rituals and symbolism, providing a context for the vital lies or "character armor" that people require to survive as conscious beings in a social world (Becker 1975). This integration is seen today in new religious environmental movements (Goodenough 1998, Ostrow and Rockefeller 2007), with both theistic and nontheistic emphasis on the spiritual dimensions of conservation (Goodenough 1998, Orr 2002). Although these movements may exacerbate ideological antagonism, they also hold promise for creating an ideological groundswell to reduce carbon emissions, particularly with the support of charismatic conservation leaders (see, for example, http://renewalproject.net ).

Nontheistic conservation communities often arise around ideological symbols or charismatic archtypes. The practice of bird watching in the United States has grown dramatically, increasing by 155% in the years from 1982 to 1995 (Fitzpatrick and Gill 2002). This rapid exponential growth, similar to the growth that sometimes accompanies new religious movements, suggests that bird conservation communities function as ideological entities. Concern for and ideal love of archetypal charismatic organisms such as birds can be interpreted within the context of transference idealization.

Like fantasy and belief in the supernatural, the idealization of birds may have anxiety-buffering effects (Solomon et al., in press). Belief in a supernatural higher power increases in response to reminders of death, regardless of whether that particular higher power is embodied by the subject's own belief system or that of an outgroup (Norenzayan and Hansen 2006). To the extent that birds elicit a religious fervor, ritual bird watching may serve an anxiety-buffering function that goes beyond the benefits of spending time outdoors; if this is so, then asking bird watchers to think about bird watching should reduce death thought accessibility and anxiety.

When it comes to climate change, birds may be superior archetypes to other charismatic organisms. Not quite celestial, they have the unusual capacity to take to the sky with a beauty, mystery, and charisma that renders them elusive, godlike, and apart from us. These characteristics make them ideal symbolic "transference objects" on which to project a striving for immortality. The connection between vitality and flight can be seen in ornithological literature of the early 20th century, when flowery, anthropomorphic language was not uncommon. Thomas Mason Earl wrote of a common nighthawk he observed over a 5-yr period, "But if she really ever noticed me giving her more than ordinary attention, she had never indicated that there was any reciprocal feeling of interest. No doubt she regarded all earth-walkers as worms of the dust, far inferior to her own kind that could mount like spirits to the vault of heaven" (Earl 1924). Studies indicate that people project more power onto objects that appear higher than lower in the visual field (Schubert 2005; Solomon et al., in press). In addition to altitude, flight itself appears to have special qualities; flight fantasies are universal across the spans of culture and time (Ogilvie 2004; Solomon et al., in press).

In a study of flight fantasy, participants primed with thoughts of death were more likely than controls to express the desire to fly. In another study by the same group of researchers, participants were asked to visualize a detailed flight fantasy, while "grounded participants" were asked only to visualize the rising sun. A previous study demonstrated that people asked to think about death gave George W. Bush elevated approval ratings (Landau et al. 2004). In the flight experiment, subjects who visualized themselves in flight were less likely than grounded participants to give Bush the high ratings typically associated with experimentally induced mortality salience; this indicates that flight visualization ameliorates terror management defenses (Landau et al. 2004; Solomon et al., in press). If birding has similar effects to thinking about flight, it may foster resilience to direct confrontation with the problem of climate change.

Among birds, iconic species may be particularly effective totems of immortality, providing support for understanding and addressing the problem of climate change. Just as the bald eagle is a symbol of national independence, strength, and freedom, it has become, for one inner city neighborhood, a symbol of community resilience. In the Earth Conservation Corps' experience of bringing back the bald eagle to Washington D.C. after a 50-yr absence, the eagles have become symbols of environmental justice and restoration for both the river and the community; each eaglet is an immortality symbol named after a young corps member murdered in the difficult neighborhood of Anacostia (Renard 2006). The eaglets are a symbolic perpetuation of these young lives and, as a consequence, solidify the ideology that holds the corps together.

The concept of birds as transference objects suggests several other ways in which birds have unexpected links with conservation behavior. First, the desire to save birds may be a pro-conservation terror management defense that elicits striving for self-esteem within the cultural world view of conservation activism. The idealization of birds as archetypal organisms may allow individuals to experience mortality threats associated with global climate change in a nonthreatening, non-self-referent context and to practice with these threats much in the way that children are thought to practice with frightening thoughts through fantasy (Jones 2002). Becker (1967:126) described human beings as "the animal in nature who, par excellence, imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience."

Birds provide important connections with nature, even if the only contact is with non-native birds common in cities. Such contact may be the primary hope for mobilizing urban populations to care about environmental issues (Dunn et al. 2006). Currently, more than half the world's population lives in cities, and this constitutes a large segment of humanity that is disconnected from the natural world (Louv 2005). This realization is the underlying basis of programs like Celebrate Urban Birds at The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the Council for Environmental Education's Flying Wild, which propose that teaching about birds close to home will re-establish these missing connections, reduce fear of nature, and get people to spend more unstructured time outdoors.

By merging two ideas, i.e., the personal connection to nature through birds (Dunn 2006) and the denial of death (Becker 1973), the growing attachment to and projection-idealization of birds and other charismatic species may provide an important route to helping the public to recognize, care about, and act upon climate change in a sustained way. It may be more effective than forecasting the impacts of climate change on human populations, because birds are external to self, and this appears to be an important characteristic of an immortality project. Birders may also prove more resilient to the stress associated with conservation work than their less bird-o-philic counterparts. These are testable ideas that may enhance the strategies of conservation organizations and improve the way in which we convey difficult and important information about global climate change.

Bird watching is not just a hobby, a labor of love, and a spiritual experience; it is also a culture of honor and a competitive sport with regional and national events like Big Day and Big Year. Birding conservation communities are stratified with status and leadership equivalent to birding prowess. They serve a social function worthy of study, and, as with any sport, bird watching provides a context for self-esteem. Interestingly, serious birding may have parallels with hunting, as opposed to gathering, because there appears to be a gender bias in which most of the top competitive bird watchers in the United States are male. Regardless, it is reasonable to hypothesize that bird watching communities provide the cultural context for the heroic enactments of competitive birders and the conservation efforts they support.

SCIENCE AS A PANACAEA: FETISHIZING THE PROBLEM OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Academic science is both a world view and a context for self-esteem according to Becker (1975). This can lead scientists to imbue the scientific process with a power that it does not actually possess. Environmental biologists surely grasp the complexity of living systems and the requirement for data and accurate forecast modeling of the effects of global climate change. We also recognize how unpredictable the changes are given that global warming is likely to affect not just populations but community and ecosystem interactions. Studying global climate change is a way for scientists to feel that we are both conducting important research and contributing to the greater good, which bolsters self-esteem within two ideologies at once, namely, the ideology of science and the liberal political ideology that most environmental scientists ascribe to. Although research may provide major insights that help to mitigate change that is inevitable, terror management theory predicts that we will focus our attention and resources on discovery and mitigation for global climate change at the expense of actions that will stop the process from occurring in the first place. The frequency with which scientists currently discuss "adaptation to" and "mitigation for" climate change is disturbing, and may speak of a reluctance to confront the problem with a realistic attitude (Dyson 2006). Awareness of this possibility can help redirect scientists to circumvent distal defenses in this somewhat ironic context.

THE BINARY NATURE OF PRESERVATION AS A CULTURAL WORLD VIEW: IS THERE POTENTIAL FOR A HEROIC SOCIETY?

In his final book, Becker (1975) explored the potential for a heroic society. His analysis provided a new perspective on the psychodynamic basis of the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968). Now, 35 yr after his death, how might we move forward toward understanding and addressing the problem of global climate change? Becker recognized that human beings are universal seekers of meaning who require opportunities for heroism and derive significance through their identification with the world views provided by relationships, religions, society, politics, and the arts (Becker 1971a). If true change requires both heroic leadership and a cultural context for the heroism of many, a cultural world view that incorporates both innovation and idealization of the natural world is the logical immortality project and the best opportunity for heroism in these times. Love of nature is a deep ethical and spiritual issue that is consistent with most belief systems. Preservation of land, species conservation, and the creation of innovative technologies to combat the problem of climate change provide profound opportunities for symbolic immortality.

When confronted authentically, without TMT defenses, the conservation ideology is mortality salient, beginning with the recognition that as individuals we will not go on and that continuation of the world with its rich complex of biodiversity is something we can no longer take for granted. What does it mean to preserve the wilderness and to be in the world with wildlife? What does it mean to be without it and to lose even one species? With consciousness comes a will to touch the world with our own special brand of humanness, i.e., our identity, and with this perhaps there is a vicarious sense of loss when another living species disappears. Whether it is the loss of the Hawaiian Po'o-uli (Melamprosops phaeosoma) or the apparent loss and resurrection of the Ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), we are elevated by the will of other creatures and diminished by their absence. This ideology, although psychospiritual in nature, promotes courage and encompasses a shared responsibility for other organisms and for tackling the problem of carbon emissions.

On the other hand, although transference idealization, an emphasis on charismatic species, and the promotion of conservation ideologies can foster sustainable behaviors by making use of what we know about distal terror management defenses, it is likely that mortality-salient philosophies and theologies hold the most promise for avoiding distal defenses and addressing the challenges of global climate change. Because increased mortality salience and outgroup antagonism are predicted outcomes of rapid climate change, understanding how TMT defenses are influenced by rational analytic thinking becomes critically important.

Rational analytic thinking has a modulating effect on world view defense, reducing the impacts of mortality salience on behavior (Greenberg et al. 1992a). For example, priming with an argument for tolerance reduced the effects of mortality salience on outgroup antagonism in U.S. subjects confronted with individuals critical of the United States and its policies (Greenberg et al. 1994). If it is adopted with rational awareness, a cultural world view that values the natural world is authentic. However, because rational awareness is unstable, the practice of awareness requires repetition. In one experiment, individuals did not engage in symbolic world-view defense when they practiced a deep contemplation of death similar to Buddhist meditation (Greenberg et al. 1994). In general, deep contemplation and experiencing fear with conscious awareness helps individuals to avoid distal defenses, whereas feeling little or no fear is associated with an amplified, unconsciously motivated, world view defense, even in response to mild death stimuli (Greenberg et al. 1994). This body of research suggests that a combination of rational thinking and anxiety-reduction techniques, such as meditation practice, will reduce reliance on distal defenses, leading to the direct confrontation with climate change required for authentic leadership.

Evidence of a universal moral grammar that places nonharming and fairness above community, authority, and purity (Haidt 2007) suggests a need to explore the ways in which moral axes interact with striving for self-esteem, world view defense, and social capital to shape cooperative and competitive behaviors and their impacts on responses to global climate change. Understanding individual variability in neurosis is also important, as suggested by the finding that physical sensitivity to sudden noise or reminders of danger is associated with a tendency to move toward a more conservative political stance (Oxley et al. 2008). The predictions of TMT, if integrated with resilience theory, might increase our understanding of the potential for social learning, visioning, scenario building, and leadership to support ideological and physical communities (Folke 2006).

TMT may prove useful in understanding the risk society (Beck 1991). Climate change has the quality of seeming both real and unreal, but, along with other current nuclear, chemical, and ecological risks, it demands that we move away from seeing the present in the light of progress relative to the past and instead view the present in the light of risks whose effects will be felt in the future (Beck 1991). This is a large and perhaps unprecedented shift for humankind, and our capacity to make this shift demands increased confrontation with mortality.

This means that understanding how risk interacts with our immortality-striving hero systems is fundamental to addressing the problems faced by a risk society. Contexts for self-esteem based upon progress are under threat; TMT predicts that this threat will create resistance and interfere with rational change. As Lifton (1993) suggested, undermining the symbol systems of "the immortalizing animal" can lead toward transformation and a sense of self that is based significantly on one's connection to mankind, or it can increase rigidity and bolster the desire to control circumstances. TMT predicts which experiences will tend to tip the balance away from rigid control in favor of connection.

Ulrich Beck (1991) suggested that a revival of the enlightenment, removed "from its professional incrustations," will have to consider how people can change themselves, not only in trivial areas such as life conduct or peculiarities of personality, but also in such major things as their relationships to themselves, to the world, and to reality. It is not yet clear how many people have the capacity to engage in sustained restraint to avoid consequences, not for themselves, but for the future of their children and grandchildren. We are beginning to see the academic disciplines mobilize around the climate change issue. Recently, mainstream sociologists were called upon to overcome their disciplinary inhibitions against listening seriously to what scientists have to say about nature and the more recent inhibition against thinking about the future, and asked to engage fully with the issue of climate change (Leahy 2008, Lever-Tracy 2008). The climate change problem requires the attention of teams of natural and social scientists, including social psychologists, sociologists, ecologists, and other biogeochemical scientists, economists, anthropologists, and sociobiologists, all seeking to understand the people paradox and what it means for our potential for cooperation and our prospects for survival and quality of life in the future (Homer-Dixon 1991, Janssen and de Vries 1998, Killingback et al. 2006, Oxley et al. 2008). This attempt to bring into the discussion the work of Becker and the relevance of terror management theory is designed to begin one such dialog.

Making the unconscious conscious is both a cause of and a cure for distal defenses. Becker was aware of this conundrum and did not see his ideas as providing a panacea for the human condition, but as a starting point for understanding the key issues facing humanity. He saw people's relation to nature as one of six common human problems and lamented the shallowness of the modern connection to the natural world, contrasting it with the sacred view of natural objects common among indigenous people (Becker 1971a). Described as dark, his final work offered no solutions beyond a belief in the value and vitality of the spirit (Becker 1975). Nevertheless, Becker's ideas, along with the experimental work of others he influenced, bears the mark of a journey at the end of which is the recognition that answers to the large questions of life cannot be divorced from morality, ethics, responsibility, and even spirituality (Goodenough 1998, Orr 2002). In this he kept company with leading scientific and philosophical seekers of his time (Einstein 1950, White 1967).

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. (Carson 1962)

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