Category Archives: Dharma Reflections

THE INDIVIDUAL MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE

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What power or even influence has an individual against the behemoths of big business, big brother, big government, global warming, global terrorism, species extinction, starvation in Africa, obesity in the U.S., quagmire in Afghanistan, drought in western America, habitat destruction and eco-system collapse everywhere, and the exploding population of Homo sapiens on planet earth? Can one person alter the course of these and other runaway trains of destruction and tragedy? Do the actions and thoughts and example of an ordinary individual matter?
The answer is yes, but not enough people ask the question.
To judge from such indicators as the less than 50 percent of eligible America voters who vote, the burgeoning market in anti-depressant drugs, and the average number of hours a day most Americans spend watching mindless television it would seem that hopelessness reigns. If it isn’t hopelessness most Americans don’t view the aforementioned behemoths as problems. Another possibility is that many people see them as part of the price of doing business and are not wallowing in hopelessness, but, rather, are filled with hope that such problems will eventually go away before affecting their lifestyles too severely. Either way, the individual who chooses not to be engaged in issues larger than immediate personal survival, happiness, convenience and comfort is still involved in and affected by those issues.
That is, an individual can choose to not engage in the large issues of the time, but no one can choose not to be involved or unaffected. Jim Morrison once said, “No one gets out of here alive.” And no one gets out of here uninvolved. An individual who doesn’t cast a ballot votes with his absence. The individual who remains a silent witness to oppression and injustice and corruption speaks volumes. The man who surrenders passion to propriety has nothing more to say that hasn’t been said before, and he who gives up propriety for passion usually never shuts up about it but often has something worthwhile to say. Those who sell their integrity to the highest bidder are never paid enough, never satisfied or truly engaged.
It takes a whole individual to be engaged.
The whole individual is humanity’s elemental building block. Humanity is the sum of its individuals, each one is inescapably connected to the lives and deaths of each of the others. The unengaged individual is incomplete, and humanity strains to support the spaces the unengaged cannot fill. Humanity suffers, groans and breaks along predictable fault lines of unengaged individuals.
Do the actions and thoughts and example of individuals matter?
Gandhi broke the back and spirit of British imperialism and created modern India.
Martin Luther King broke the back (but, sad to say, not the spirit) of institutionalized racism in America.
David Brower kept the Grand Canyon from being dammed.
Renee Askins got wolves re-introduced into Yellowstone and the American west.
An unknown Chinese man stopped a tank in Tienamen Square by simply standing his ground.
Daniel Ellesberg shortened the war in Vietnam by many months, if not years.
Someone leaked the photos of American military personnel torturing Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison.
Jon Marvel started what has become the Western Watersheds Project which gives the landscape of western America and all its flora and fauna a chance to survive.
Maria Montessori started a school based on the wisdom of children helping themselves and their peers and, in the process, learning to feel (and be) competent and self-assured.
Robert frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon followed their conscience, maintained integrity, remain whole.
Each individual matters.
To vote is to be engaged.
Write a letter to the editor.
Protest what you oppose.
Support what you approve.
Adopt a child from a Russian, Chinese or Nicaraguan orphanage.
Speak your mind without fear.
Take a walk in the woods, along a beach or by a river.
Walk across the room, unplug the television and throw it away.

THE DALAI LAMA AT 80

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“Someone else’s action should not determine your response.”
“Instead of wondering WHY this is happening to you, consider why this is happening to YOU.”
Two quotes from HH the 14th Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama is 80 and has not slowed down or lessened his efforts on behalf of his stated three main commitments: 1.) Promoting the human values of compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline; 2.) Promoting religious harmony and understanding among the world’s major religious traditions. (His web site elaborates, “Despite philosophical differences, all major world religions have the same potential to create good human beings.”); 3.) As a Tibetan and the spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama’s third commitment is to preserve Tibet’s Buddhist culture of peace and non-violence.
Though the Dalai Lama represents the best of an ancient culture and viewpoint on human life (peace and non-violence), he is a futurist, an enlightened man who has written that modern science and the ancient practice of contemplation. “…share significant commonalities especially in their basic philosophical outlook and methodology. On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. Both Buddhism and science prefer to account for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect. From the methodological perspective, both traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. For example, in the Buddhist investigative tradition, between the three recognized sources of knowledge‑‑experience, reason and testimony‑‑it is the evidence of the experience that takes precedence, with reason coming second and testimony last. This means that, in the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be.”
Empirical evidence as well as common sense confirm peace and non-violence as preferable to conflict and brutality and in 1989 the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was among the first to show that peace and non-violence are available to every person and thereby the entire world.
In 2005 he addressed the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C. despite the protest of a few hundred of its 35,000 members who objected to a religious leader at a scientific meeting. But more than a decade earlier after observing a brain surgery he asked the surgeons “Can mind shape brain matter.” That is, it has long been known that the physical condition of the brain affects the content and dynamics of mind. Can the mind, in turn, alter the brain?”
Though William James in the 19th century and subsequent scientists had suggested the possibility, no one before the Dalai Lama had proposed that question and asked science for an answer.
The answer, under the umbrella name of ‘neuroplasticity,’ is ‘yes.’ A mind devoted to compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment, self-discipline, religious harmony, peace and non-violence can shape its brain the same. Think of that. HH the Dalai Lama does.

THE COSMIC LAW

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In the Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen the first two definitions of “dharma” are : 1. The cosmic law, the “great norm” underlying our world; above all, the law of karmically determined rebirth. And, 2. The teaching of the — Buddha, who recognized and formulated this “law”; thus the teaching that expresses the universal truth.
As Buddhists we take refuge in the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha, the teacher, the teachings and the community of companions on the path. The dharma is the teaching—both received and given—by the individual practitioner in every second of every day in the normal actions, thoughts and intentions of daily life.
The dharma, the teaching, is continuously both received and given. In the dharma we are all students and teachers, and it is a mistake to become attached to either role. This point, in my view, deserves more consideration, discussion and contemplation than it receives.
The first definition mentioned above includes “karmically determined rebirth.” That is, the circumstances of our lives, according to the dharma, are a result of karma, cause and effect. How we were in the past (not just past lives) determines how and where we are in the present. How and where we are in the present and what we have and have not learned from the past will determine the future. That’s the dharma.
There is no truth or falsehood to the dharma. The dharma is just our everyday, normal lives, and by living within the dharma, “…the teaching that expresses the universal truth” we are able to find out for ourselves what is true and what is false. That is, the cosmic law is not a set of rules which we follow, but, rather, is the never ending dynamics and lessons of each of our everyday lives as we live them every minute of every day. Padmasambhava expressed the dharma this way: “If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”
That’s the dharma.
Look carefully.
No one else and no teaching can tell you what is true and what is false. If a teacher or a teaching indicates that it is good practice to develop a regular practice of meditation every day, that is, in my view, good advice, but the only way in which you can determine whether this is true for you is to practice and to remain open to what is. Is the practice true for you or not? Only you can discover for yourself what is true and what is false. Dr. Richard Davidson, Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin and a friend and colleague of HH the Dalai Lama, brought up in a lecture a (to me) surprising premise: for some people, primarily those suffering from bi-polar and schizophrenic disorders, meditation may actually be destructive.
All who are practicing are eager to learn, to hear and follow the teachings and the path, to know what is true and what is false, eager to be certain so that we can relax. But the dharma doesn’t tell us what is true and what is false. That is something we must each do for ourselves in our own lives.
The only certainty is that the circumstances of our present life, each action, thought, breath, intention of that life is the dharma. As such, it is the means, the vehicle, the alarm clock that can wake us up.
There is a Zen admonition to live each moment with the awareness of a warrior in the night behind enemy lines, and, for that warrior, that is the dharma. Or, as Dogen said, “If you can’t find the truth right where you are , where else do you expect to find it?”

SECOND SUNS: A Book About Vision

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Everyone reading this who has had cataract surgery appreciates the second chance at vision that surgery provided, and they as well as readers with the good fortune of good eyesight cherish the opportunity to see goodness in the world. That’s one of several reasons why “Second Suns,” a book by David Oliver Relin is a nourishing read for everyone who endeavors to see the world more clearly. The world as it is, with more than seven billion imperfect humans struggling to survive on a planet that cannot and a human community that will not sustain them (us) in dignity, equality and good health, is a better and more inspiring place because of David Relin and the two central men of this story, Sanduk Ruit and Geoffrey Tabin.
Ruit was born into poverty in a remote mountain village of Nepal, a week’s walk away from the nearest school. Ruit’s obvious intelligence as a young boy inspired his family to arrange for him to be schooled in India, an education they could not afford without help and that began with an arduous 15 day walk with his father from his village to be left alone in a foreign land. He chose medicine as a field of study because of three siblings whose early deaths could have been prevented with access to medical care in developed countries, and within a few years of becoming an ophthalmologist Ruit had revolutionized cataract surgery in the poorest countries on earth.
Tabin, an American, is Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah. He graduated from Yale where he was captain and a star player on the tennis team, earned a Masters in Philosophy at Oxford and received his MD from Harvard. He is a well known and highly accomplished climber and the 4th person to have climbed the seven summits, the highest points on each continent, including, of course, Everest. He dropped out of medical school several times to go on climbing expeditions and somehow managed to get back in, and, according to Relin, “…tended to dance along the border of socially acceptable behavior.” He once recited an obscene poem to a group of medical school students, and his life experience, culture, personality, athleticism, opportunities and private life are as different from Ruit’s as, say, Kathmandu is from Cambridge.
Still, the two of them managed to team up (Ruit as mentor, Tabin as acolyte) to change and redefine the meaning and possibilities of modern medicine in the undeveloped countries of the world. Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries has one of its highest rates of cataracts, and since Ruit opened the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu in 1994 nearly 200,000 (mostly) destitute Nepalese have had their eyesight restored. Ruit and Tabin have trained hundreds of ophthalmologists and established centers in India, China, Tibet, Bhutan and Africa and thereby restored sight (and hope, smiles and life itself) to hundreds of thousands of people.
“Second Suns” informs, inspires and resonates for several reasons at multiple levels, including the examples of two doctors and the writer who tells their story of living according to the human ethic of how much they are able to contribute to the world rather than the material standard of how much they can extract from it.

DAVE McCOY: A Man For All Seasons

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When Dave McCoy first saw the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California he said, “I’d never seen anything like it. I loved the snow: I started dreaming about it. I said, ‘This is where I am going to spend my life.’”
Many people reading this understand that experience and subsequent path.
That same year McCoy received the foundation of what he called ‘…the best possible education.’ He told Leigh Buchanan: “When I was in the eighth grade my folks separated. It was during the Depression, and so my mom and I got on a Greyhound bus and went to meet my father’s parents in Wilkeson, Washington. We got acquainted, and she left me there. I stuck around for two and a half months, but I didn’t like the rain, so I took my knapsack and headed back to California. I rode with the bums on the trains, ate at their campfires at night, and listened to their stories. It was the best possible education.”
At the time Dave was 13 years old. His formal education ended with high school, but with that best possible informal education, his love for snow and mountains, hard work and fun he built Mammoth Mountain Ski Area from a rope tow on the side of hill to one of the largest and best ski areas in North America. Many people reading this already know it but for those who don’t Dave’s influence on skiing and skiers is incalculable, and that story is best told in Robin Morning’s fine book “Tracks of Passion.” Dave, who I’ve known since 1953, will be 100 years old in August. I hadn’t seen him since his 90th birthday party but a few weeks ago I had the privilege and pleasure of spending a few hours in conversation with him.
That talk illuminated and reiterated why I am among many, many people who consider Dave McCoy among the most remarkable, decent, genuinely good human beings we have ever known, a great man by any measure. That is, his successes, accomplishments and positive impact on the community of Mammoth, the larger world of skiing and thereby the world at large did not make him a great man, but rather, the other way around. We reminisced about several people, events and dynamics of the life and lives we know and consistent perspectives and themes kept surfacing in Dave’s narrative:
“Most people are essentially good,” he said, “and if you give them the right chances they will show you that goodness.”
“All of us make mistakes. That’s part of learning. The thing is to learn from them and to move on and not repeat that one and don’t be afraid of making a different one.”
And there is this as told to Leigh Buchanan: “In 1991, we had to lay off 150 people, because we had six years of very light snow. Instead of keeping all the best people, I looked at the people that were really able to take care of themselves and let them go first. It worked out, because they ended up doing greater things than they had been doing. It may not have been wise, but that’s the way it is with me.”
Thanks, Dave.

NOBODY HOME

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This alone from “Nobody Home: writing, Buddhism, and living in places” by Gary Snyder in conversation with Julia Martin is worth the price of the book and the pleasure of the read:

“Snyder: Part of the actualization of Buddhist ethics is, in a sense, to be a deep ecologist. The actualization of Buddhist insights gives us a Buddhist economics not based on greed but on need, an ethic of adequacy but simplicity, a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions. What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”

As always with Snyder, there is more. Born in 1930 he was a founding father of the “Beat Generation,” a cultural/literary movement of the 1950s with an outsized influence on the consciousness of America. It was never large in numbers, but its early members included Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, John Clellon Holmes, Neal Cassidy, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, while later adherents included Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey. The Beats viewed the accepted mores of the establishment as constrictive to the human spirit, destructive to social equality and a sell-out of the best of humanity. Whether or not one embraced (I did and do) or rejected it (many did and do), the message of the Beat Generation lives on, nowhere moreso than in the work and life of its last standing founding father whose book Turtle Island earned the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975.
This latest book began in 1984 when a young South African graduate student, Julia Martin, wrote Snyder a letter with questions about his writings. She writes, “It started as an intellectual exchange and became an exploration of practice. As a young person living in a society demarcated by the paranoid logic of apartheid, it was refreshing to meet the spaciousness of Gary’s way of seeing. His delight in wildness…the truly radical realization that things are not things but process, nodes in the jeweled net… a tendency to walk out of the narrow prison of dualistic thought.” Nobody Home is a compilation of some of their correspondence and interviews of nearly 30 years and shows, among other things, how the beat of the Beats is still keeping time. From opposite sides of the world they illuminate the connectedness of all things, times, places and people‑‑‑apartheid and a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions, Snyder’s comment to Julia that “…you can hope that your country never becomes a superpower because that’s a huge drag” and the book’s closing lines from HH Dalai Lama, “Compassion, love, and forgiveness, however, are not luxuries. They are fundamental for our survival.”
The Beats go on.

 

WHAT IS A MOUNTAIN PERSON

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The question sometimes arises in mountain communities, “what is a mountain person?” Certainly, simply dwelling in the mountains or in a mountain town does not make one a ‘mountain person,’ just as residing in a city does not eliminate one’s mountain personhood, Jimmy Chin, for example, one of the world’s best known professional mountaineers and mountain photographers, lives with his wife and child in New York City. No two people will answer such a question the same, but here are a few of my own reflections and observations. Thanks are given to Chomolungma and Miyo Lungsangma that the question isn’t who is a mountain person. The answer to that can only be made by each mountain person for him or her self.
First, a mountain person is made, not born. Everyone arrives in this life a helpless hunk of flesh and blood with a brain one third the size of its parents’ and no more care for, appreciation of or love for mountains and harmonious mountain living than a Pacific bivalve mollusk. Mountain people have evolved in accordance to the demands of survival. In evolutionary terms, today’s mountain person is descended from the first amphibian creatures that finally got tired of fighting for a bit of oxygen below sea level and crawled up on land looking for more oxygen and just kept crawling toward high country without contemplating too carefully the fact that the higher you get the less oxygen there is. A mountain person, like all the other kinds, is not without contradictions but keeps on crawling, learning about the community of local humans, birds, beasts, trees, rivers, lakes, rocky mountain peaks, alpine meadows, ecosystems and water tables and, along the way, why a healthy forest and a hillside without structures on it are beautiful, and that nature’s beauty is an end in itself. It is a tradition as old as the climb from the sea to the highest peak and its journey up is not always pretty, easy, fast or chic. It’s a slow process that takes place at a mountainous pace and won’t be rushed.
It takes awhile for the most well-intentioned, dedicated mountain person to learn the value of organic respect for the priceless gifts that mountains offer those who live within, visit from time to time and gaze upon from the valley, a reverence perhaps best expressed by Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two people to summit Mt. Everest: “It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” A friend who lives in a city is fond of saying “…because I am a mountain woman” in attribution to some of her best, most transcendent experiences “…simply because of the feelings I get when I’m ‘there’ although I like to think it means I am also strong. I would think that anyone who has experienced being on a mountain, looking out on the world, would have these feelings….I love pure air even if it is thinner.”
Many years ago while living in a mountain town well-known for its mountain amenities and organic consciousness as well as social excess and shallow pretentiousness I was interviewed by a writer for a national publication. He commented that the town seemed to lack “soul.” I didn’t agree with him but acknowledged his point and replied, “Perhaps, but there are many soulful people here,” and I offered some names of people we both knew and a few he didn’t know but knew about. We concurred that those individuals in a town he viewed as soulless had soul.
A mountain person has soul.

Don’t you think?

EVOLUTION, CREATIONISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

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Polls, like statistics, are neither definitive nor sacrosanct in helping us understand the world, but they are not without value. A series of recent polls indicate that somewhere between 28 percent and 47 percent of Americans think that the theory of evolution is a better approach to an understanding of life on earth than a belief in creationism. If the polls are close to correct, somewhere between more than half to more than two-thirds of Americans do not believe in evolution. To those of us who view creationism as something akin to a professed or real belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, virgin birth, the Easter Bunny, infallibility, American exceptionalism and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this is astonishing.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. Other polls show that 52 percent of American teenagers believe in astrology. Among biology teachers, 34 percent think psychic powers can be used to read peoples’ thoughts, 29 percent believe we can communicate with the dead and 22 percent believe in ghosts. Biology teachers who use psychic powers to read minds, who communicate with the dead and who believe in ghosts are as astonishing as Creationists. One wonders what sort of evolutionary biology they teach their young charges.
Creationism comes in more than one flavor, but the plain species maintains that the universe, including all life and humanity, was created by God in six days sometime around 6000 years ago. The theory of evolution maintains that the universe and everything within it, including humanity, is a bit older, mysterious and complex than that simplistic description.
That a majority of Americans hold creationist beliefs about the universe, the earth and human life (and death) has both obvious and subtle religious, educational, cultural, social, political, military and personal consequences. It also has incalculable and mostly unacknowledged environmental costs. As Van Potter who coined the term ‘global bioethics’, said in reference to world survival, “To future generations, ignorance, superstition and illiteracy are the greatest barriers to a hopeful future for our descendants.”
If a majority of the people do not believe in and are, therefore, ignorant of evolution, then it follows they do not believe in and are ignorant of the tenets of biology. It is a biological environment in which we live. All of us‑‑Creationists, evolutionists, environmentalists, religious fundamentalists, Republicans, Democrats, scientists and evangelists‑‑all live (and die) in this same environment. A person who is convinced that the environment was created in a few days less than 10,000 years ago for the convenience and use of human beings is going to view things like ecology, biology and the connections between different living species differently than one for whom evolution is an on-going biological process (experiment?) in which we are all, inescapably, involved.
Laurence Moran defines evolution as “a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations.” That seems simple enough, scientifically provable (and proven) and not threatening to any but the narrowest religious perspective. But it takes more generations than creationists have, and, more to the point of the environment, the possibility of change carries with it the responsibility of change. If the earth and its environment and all its creatures, including man, are part of an interconnected evolutionary process which mysterious beginning and ending and meaning we do not (and cannot) know, then we have a responsibility to be very careful about disrupting that process and destroying its mechanisms. If, on the other hand, the earth and its environment and creatures were put here a few thousand years ago for the use and benefit of homo-sapiens, then polluted rivers, dead lakes, clear cut forests, toxic air, two-headed frogs, drought, the extinction of any species besides homo-sapiens, acid rain, denuded and eroded landscapes, nuclear and toxic waste sites so poisonous that 10,000 years will not erase their peril to all life are just part of the creation. Not to worry. As Oklahoma U.S. Senator James Inhofe says, “God is still up there, and He promised to maintain the seasons and that cold and heat would never cease as long as the earth remains…The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
That somewhere between more than half to more than two-thirds of Americans do not believe in evolution helps explain why environmental issues are so far down the list of American voters’ concerns. To those of us who view the environment of earth as the very foundation of all life, including human life, such cavalier apathy is insane, in the same realm of human consciousness as burning women and calling them witches at the stake was insane, but, excepting the burned women themselves, having far more serious consequences.
Be that as it, according to the polls, is, the environmental movement needs to shift its focus. Using science to convince voters that the environment and the evolution of all life are in danger of being irreparably damaged by man’s technology, stupidity and greed is not sufficient. The environmental movement operates on the assumption that evolution is accepted by most Americans. At the risk of being branded witches (or worse), environmentalists need to meet the gibberish that is creationism head on and expose it as the irrational, brain-dead, fear-based, dogmatic religious superstition that it is.
The environment and human thought will benefit and show heritable changes over many generations by such a focus on evolution in action.

 

TROPHIC CASCADES

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All of nature‑‑the environment’s cornucopia of lakes, forests, rivers, oceans, mountains, meadows, deserts and plains, and the flora and fauna of local and foreign ecosystems and you and me representing humanity, just to name a few of the interlocking parts of the natural world‑‑is affected every day by trophic cascades. It is a term and topic not without controversy, both within the scientific community and among those prone to conflating science and politics or at least the economic interests that buy politicians. Nevertheless, we are all well served by contemplating and trying to understand (and observe) trophic cascades in the world in which we live.
Author, scientist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is credited with first describing the dynamic as early as the 1930s and ‘40s in connection with his observations of wolves and the effects on the ecosystem when they were removed. Just mentioning wolves, as everyone reading this well knows, invites controversy. Perhaps if Leopold had been observing mountain pine bark beetles, sea otters, wolverines or blue green algae and their trophic cascading relationship to the changing interactions of entire ecosystems, instead of wolves, the term ‘trophic cascades’ would rest more comfortably in popular discussions and debates about the world’s environment.
Leopold literally turned ecologists’ understanding of the environment upside down. Before him, it was generally perceived that every ecosystem was regulated from the bottom up by resource availability: that is, plants at the bottom take energy from the sun; herbivores take energy from (eat) the plants and carnivores (predators) at the top take energy from (eat) the herbivores. The food chain of nature is far more complicated than this simplistic description, of course, but Leopold noted that when wolves were removed from a particular environment the deer population increased which in turn reduced the vegetation which negatively affected every part of the ecosystem connected to that vegetation. That is, all of it and its regulation worked both top down as well as bottom up. Brian Silliman and Christine Angelini of the Nature Education Knowledge Project describe it as, “When ecosystems are green, predators are often holding grazers in check, while, when they are overgrazed, predator loss or removal is often responsible for elevated grazer densities and plant loss. This tri-trophic interaction, where predators benefit plants by controlling grazer populations, is known as a trophic cascade.”
By the early 20th century the sea otter of southeast Alaska and the Aleutian Islands were hunted to near extinction for their pelts, called by one wholesale distributor “the most luxurious and exclusive fur in the world.” Sea urchin populations exploded as their primary predator the sea otter vanished, and, as a consequence, kelp beds, a staple of healthy seabed ecology in Alaska diminished drastically. In recent years sea otters have been reintroduced to the oceans around the Aleutians and “…predictable changes in the density of sea urchins, kelp, and the organisms that utilize the habitat created by healthy kelp beds, have been observed, demonstrating the potential for whole-ecosystem recovery with the reinstatement of predator populations (Estes & Duggins 1995).”
That is, trophic cascades can decimate entire ecosystems from bottom to top of the food chain and vice-versa, and they can also reverse the damage in both directions and restore ecosystems to the dynamic balance that is a healthy natural world.
Think of that.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE SHOE

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 “What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?”
Michelangelo
As is illustrated daily in every human community and activity on Earth individual humans are capable of accomplishing what had previously seemed impossible, improbable and incomprehensible. It happens every day, in every realm of life, and always has. For reasons beyond the scope of this writing, our culture is prone to focus on the inconceivable physical accomplishments of the superstar of the day, particularly those involving competitive sports and outdoor adventure, more than the myriad other aspects of humanity—intellectual, emotional, social, political, scientific, economic, environmental and others. But the same dynamics that create the need and desire to push the limits, expand the boundaries of the possible and comprehensible and explore the unknown are common to all people and every endeavor, including the personal.
Yesterday’s highest standard of knowledge and action becomes today’s mundane and the old standard often looked back upon as more superstitious fear than intelligent thought, but the dynamics that drive exploration, innovation, creativity and conscious expansion as well as expanded consciousness are always present. As, of course, are their impotent, idle opposites. There is real risk involved in the dynamism of change and expansion in understanding and possibility, as there is false security in yesterday’s perceived reality. I mean, for every million scientists who have proven the existence of life on earth for millions of years there is a Creationist who faithfully believes life on earth is less than 10,000 years old; and for every million scientists and billions of less scientifically trained people with healthy brains and observational skills (and the personal integrity to listen to them) who know that global warming is reality there are a minority of hollow deniers who comfortably insist, despite all scientific evidence and common observation to the contrary, that global warming caused climate change is nonsense and that the more than 10.5 billion tons of CO2 mankind pumps into the atmosphere each year has no effect on that atmosphere or on global warming. Some of the stupidest of deniers will tell you with a face as straight as the cynical curve of corruption that science is only an opinion and scientific facts debating points. That denial is rooted in false security and the fear (in some cases terror) of the changes and very real economic (especially economic), social and practical turmoil addressing global climate change will inevitably cause. Confronting those issues seems impossible, improbable and incomprehensible. And very scary. The only thing worse is not addressing them. That’s even scarier. And all the more reason to meet them head on.
Only 500 years ago Galileo Galilei, known as the “Father” of modern observational astronomy, physics and modern science, faced the Roman inquisition and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life for the ‘heresy’ of his ground breaking, accurate scientific observations. Today Galileo is honored for his intelligence, scientific efforts and integrity, as the inquisition is rightfully scorned for its lack of them. The inquisition, like today’s Creationists and deniers, embraced the status quo of certainty instead of acknowledging (and acting upon) the evolving uncertainty of the growth of knowledge. If there are human beings on Earth in 500 years they will scorn the deniers and Creationists of today as we do the inquisition.
I am reminded of such matters by a motivational talk I recently attended given by a woman named Jessica Cox. Due to a rare birth defect she was born without arms in 1983 in Arizona. Today Cox has a BS degree in psychology, uses her feet the way most people use their hands, can type 25 words a minute on a keyboard, has an unrestricted driver’s license and drives her own car and pumps her own gas into that car, has two black belts in Taekwondo, is a certified SCUBA diver, puts in and removes contact lenses from her eyes with her toes and is the first armless person to earn a pilot license to fly a light-sports aircraft. Needless to say, her life is filled with impossible, improbable and incomprehensible fulfillment, as well as persistence, patience, passion, desire and unbelievable amounts of work and attention to detail. Cox makes her living as a motivational speaker at which she excels. She flies all over the world to give her talks and one of the on-going, interesting aspects of her life is when she arrives at the airport rental car agency to rent a car. The reader can imagine, but she always gets her car.
At the talk I attended Cox demonstrated how she puts on and takes off her red, lace-up tennis shoes. It took her a long time to figure out how and develop the skills to lace up and tie her left tennis shoe with the toes of her right foot. She was very pleased when she finally did it, but then, of course, she was presented with the problem of how to lace up and tie her right tennis shoe when her left foot was encased in the shoe. It took her a long time to imagine and then piece together the skills to do it, but she puts on and laces up her own tennis shoes whenever she wants. Jessica Cox calls the process of learning such improbable if functional skills “Thinking outside the shoe.”
The world needs more people to think outside the conformities of the shoe, the authorities of the boot and the dogmas of the wader.