This is probably one of the poems I love most, for so many reasons. The way it shifts between description and evaluation, the former showing an outsider’s perspective, the latter a relationship to another human being as well as a yearning for some form of grace. The tenderness with which a seemingly “crazy” act is put into perspective, disambiguated as a form of loving, is striking. We so often, scared to death by the perceived reality of losing our minds, rather distance ourselves from crazy behavior, instead of finding some remaining value in it. Oliver also acknowledges that we cannot count on (or control) a particular way of aging, but might be blessed – either avoiding dementia or finding a light within. A frightful admission and her unswerving insistence on finding hope, as in so much of her work.
There is a German saying that age brings out either the cow or the goat in women. The former is supposed to be a hefty, placid, friendly, not particularly flexible form of being. The latter has more the qualities of what English speakers would call “catty” a nervous, snippy, mean and often stubborn crone. Folk wisdom like this is wrong as often as it is right, or contains at least partial kernel of truths, as all stereotypes do. Fact is, despite an explosion of research into aging across the last decades we, as scientists as well, know very few things for sure.
We do know that the brain parts that regulate inhibition of behaviors are affected early on. The subsequent disinhibition might be relevant for becoming “a goat,” bitterness and anger now more expressed.
There seems to be overall agreement, that although personality traits remain relatively stable across the life span (UNLESS dementia occurs, which can completely change your personality without your fault) some traits seem to get a bit stronger age, and others diminish. Of the “Big Five” personality traits, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability seem to be getting a lift with maturation. Two other traits do decline with age – a general openness to experiences, and both facets of extraversion, social vitality and social dominance. (Ref.) Personality and aging interacts – some of us have an easier go accepting the hardship of aging than others. Personality resources such as self-esteem, perceived control, self-efficacy and resilience shape the person’s response to adversity in later life, not surprisingly.
What else do we know? Some of our long-held beliefs – for example that older people display a positivity bias and are better at emotional regulation compared to younger ones – are now questioned. New insights have found that contemporary old people are cognitively much better off than their peers who were born 20 years earlier, when tested at the same age. This is not because we somehow managed to delay the onset of age-dependent decline or because we decline more slowly across the years. Rather, we have been overall, across our lifespan, cognitively strengthened with better education, technological use, wider access to information, and that overall improved performance is giving us some slack to cover up the early signs of decline with age.
There is a whole enterprise exploring the biology of aging to help with prevention, progression and prognosis of disease and disability. It is a two way street – aging is a risk factor for developing chronic disease, but diseases also hasten aging.
There is a body of work dedicated to better understand the effects of personal, interpersonal, and societal factors on aging, including the mechanisms through which these factors exert their effects. Research is looking into the interaction between behavior (lifestyle)social, psychological and economic factors, as well as the timing of intervention during critical periods in a person’s life span where the course is set, and the effect of place (there are geographic aspects that impact aging.)
Researchers are interested in looking a population differences, to see where disparities need to be tackled, and also how we can improve our understanding of the consequences of an aging society to inform intervention development and policy decisions.
They got their work cut out for them. Whether potential answers enable us to improve our empathic responses to people living with dementia, or help us to prepare better for our own decline, I cannot tell.
Disaster-porn: “to satisfy the pleasure that viewers take in seeing other people’s misfortunes, as by constantly repeating vision of an event, often without commentary or context”. – Australia Macquarie Dictionary
My morning readings include the news from Europe, brought to me among others by Der Spiegel, a German weekly and the country’s largest news platform on the web. All photographs but one today were seen on their site last week, and elicited decidedly mixed feelings. They lure with beauty while depicting disaster, simultaneously drawing attention to human suffering as well as away from it.
An ice vendor waiting for customers during the worst heat wave in decades. In neighboring Nawabshah (Pakistan) the highest value ever recorded: 128.7 F on May 1st.
Somehow the term disaster-porn came to mind. It is a phrase often used to define depictions of suffering in the developing world, but also applied to the increasing number of end-of-world or other catastrophe movies coming out of the film industry, and not just in Hollywood. Is it ethical to depict, create and watch all this stuff? Let me put the answer right in front: it can be, theoretically. At least this was what I concluded after reading the essay that I am summarizing today while trying to solve my dilemma.
The remnants of a container depot in Bangladesh that stood in flames and then exploded, throwing heavy objects through the air for hundreds of yards. Dozends dead, hundreds injured. Foto: picture alliance / dpa / AP
The term disaster-porn can be found as early as 1987 when a Washington Post editorial about the stock market crash. It described that those of us doting on the disasters in cinematic action dramas are lured into believing that it is either all fake, or that we personally will escape bad fate in the end, never mind the millions we watch dying in catastrophic scenarios. The term has been popularized ever since, sometimes in specific ways, like in Pat Cadigan’s 1991 Sci-Fi novel Synner which used “porn” as a suffix denoting an excessive, overly aestheticized focus on a single topic. (The award-winning novel, by the way, envisions a world where the line between machines and reality becomes porous, a possible disaster scenario now in the real-life news 30 years later…just google AI.) The phrase is thus applied not just to fictional descriptions of disasters but also to round-the-clock depictions of round-the-world catastrophes by the media.
Iraqi boys herding sheep in a sandstorm. They are not allowed to enter into the province of Najaf, to avoid spreading the Crim-Congo fever. They are stuck at the border in the middle of the storm. Foto: Quassem Al-Kaabi / AFP
What is the problem? On the one hand, in an ever more interconnected world where we might be called on or able to help with disasters even at distant locations, information about them helps our collective mind to make decisions. In other word, the depictions might elicit empathy and understanding, which can turn into human solidarity.
On the other hand, there are multiple problems. Disaster-porn can be gratuitous and exploitative – published to sell clicks, or used as justification to simplify complex geopolitical realities, and thereby encourage military operations under the guise of humanitarian action.
In addition, over-exposure to images of doom can lead to a muting of your reaction, draining our reserves of pity, desensitizing us to others’ pain. It can be experienced as damaging our own sense of well-being, thus having us turn away from the suffering in the world. Compassion fatigue elicited by a pity crisis.
Boy amidst storks sifting garbage in the Indian province of Guwahati. Dangerous because of the extreme heat – several garbage dumps have spontaneously caught fire and combusted. Foto: Biju Boro / AFP
There is some inherent psychological truth to the fact that we better protect ourselves from too much exposure to bad news. If we feel that there is absolutely no way we can interfere with the starvation, drowning, imprisoning, wounding, torture, and killing of people, seeing them exposed to these situations will create a sense of anxiety that we will try to resolve by averting our eyes. A barrage of doom scenarios leads to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, both associated with depression, and subsequent paralysis when we think about possible action – just no sense left, that we could make a difference. Here is just one of the studies that lays out that scenario.
Another way to cope with extreme heat across Asia.
And yet…
“Disaster porn, then, in all its iterations and for all its flaws, is a vital political terrain in which publics are at least implicitly asked to struggle with the social significance of the suffering of others. It connects public issues like war, famine, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks to the private lives of those they affect, and shows us how disruptions of social structure become disruptions in individual biographies. This is the case in even the most seemingly stereotypical news reports of suffering in the developing world, and in even the most outlandish Hollywood disaster epics as well.” (Ref.)
Literature and disaster movies contribute in an odd way: they do describe the role chance plays with some people being more endangered than others, some surviving when others don’t. Yes, there are heroes (or villains) who manage to suggest that with some amount of smarts and vision you can still control the outcome (echoing our sense of exceptionalism in U.S. culture), but there are all the others who are not so lucky, because it is often determined by the vicissitude of geographical location alone, rather than specific talents or skills. Chance confers the privilege of survival. It might make us think about our own privilege and so raise compassion, since so far chance has spared us, amidst the forest fires, or floods or infectious diseases.
The Clark Ford River flooded the houses of many of the inhabitants of Fromberg, MO. This is a lawn ornament submerged in the waters. Foto: David Goldman / AP
Leave it to me to read and watch these kinds of novels and films, if only to spare you to have to do it yourself…..
My current target is a 1973 science fiction novel by Sakyo Komatsu, Japan Sinks, which took 9 years to write.It has been made into numerous films, a highly praised animé version among them. Some had altered endings, some were withheld during certain time periods because they were too close on the heels of real life disasters in Japan, given the exposure to earthquakes and the Fukushima catastrophe. The latest, a Netflix production, is so bad that I recommend it on a day where you need help to erupt in laughter – the acting – if you can call it that – guarantees that you will.
The book, however, is worming its way into my brain. The basic story concerns a scientist’s discovery of the likelihood that all of Japan, the entire archipelago, is going to go under due to earthquakes, ocean floor faults, and what not. One of the narrative lines concerns how the government is handling the crisis, from negligence to obstruction to panic. Don’t look up, this year’s U.S. disaster movie that I discussed here, probably took a page out of that book. Another line focusses on the distribution of millions of people around the world, with nationalist impulses against immigration vying with empathy for a drowning people. The philosophical question it raises, though, is one that we will have to think through in climate change migrations to come: what does it do to your identity, as member of a nation, or a tribe or a culture or a language group, when the place that defines you ceases to exist? Literally is no longer there to return to? Is it destructive to lose that connection to place which is a base for underlying sense of self, or is it empowering because you can shed the debt you incurred as a member of the nation (say of an imperialistic or fascistic past) and start from scratch?
Think it through – time not spent doom scrolling…
We could also focus on the message conveyed by a random stranger who was kind enough to let me photograph her t-shirt 2 days ago.
I think we missed it twice in 40 years, our annual pilgrimage to a zoo on “ZooDay.” It is a commemoration of our first date ever at the Bronx zoo in NYC, all those centuries ago. Since we misremembered the original date by about 2 weeks when we first went back, we decided to add two weeks to the calendar every year and so it has been rotating through all seasons. This year it was cold, like all of this interminably rainy spring.
Traditionally a pilgrimage is defined as a journey, “often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life,” tells me my trusted Wikipedia. What we are doing at the zoo is not exactly a pilgrimage, but a celebration of a journey together – plenty of unknown places encountered there as well, and, yes, personal transformation.
I sometimes wonder why we stick to it (the zoo date, not the marriage!) Zoos elicit mixed feelings – how can you not feel for living beings put into cages? Then again, some species only escape extinction because zoos these days enable them to live and, with luck, procreate. And certainly zoos have an important educational function, allowing kids cut off from nature to experience first glimpses of awe when seeing something beyond a two-dimensional screen. At least that was what I thought, before reading some more on it.
There is quite a bit of smart writing around the controversy of zoos’ legitimacy these days. Here is a list of zoo-related books that cover a wide array of topics. Many argue that zoos should be abandoned. The most fascinating, for me at least, is a recent book called Zoo Studies, an interdisciplinary collection that examines zoos from historical, philosophical, social, and cultural perspectives, edited by Tracy McDonald and Daniel Vandersommers. And here is a fun paper, What’s new at the zoo?, that looks at the last decade of research results around zoo-related issues, including whether animals have human-like emotions and should be afforded the rights of people.
(The New York York Court of Appeals, by the way, ruled this week that animals are not persons in the legal sense, and therefor can be denied fundamental human rights, like not being illegally imprisoned in zoos. The advocacy group who sued on behalf of an elephant interestingly used the legal construct of habeas corpus, in vain. (Funny how the Supreme Court decided that corporations are persons, for even longer than Citizens United, when our closest biological relatives are not, but that is a story for another day.)
There are many articles around claiming that science has “proven” that animals have emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, etc.), even complex emotions (shame, for example), like humans. One that caught my eye was a study about pigs that were deemed optimistic. The pigs were conditioned to two different sounds that signaled either something positive (food) or something unpleasant. They quickly learned to approach the good and avoid the bad. They were then put in differing environments – the lucky pigs got room to roam, and stimulating interactive toys. The control group pigs were in small cages with one non-interactive toy. Next they were presented with a novel sound, and, surprise, the stimulated pigs approached it, the other ones avoided it. Conclusion by the research team: good “mood” or stimulation fosters “optimism” in their research participants. They’ll approach in hopes the goodies will come.
I have a beef with that pork interpretation: Let’s start with Occam’s razor which is basically a scientific principle that says you should always prefer simpler explanations over complicated ones (parsimony). Why is this? The answer has several parts, but at the least, you should put into your theory only things that are truly demanded by the evidence, and no more.
The notion of pig optimism tramples that principle. First, let’s be clear that the evidence that’s at issue is nothing more than a behavior of approach or avoidance. That’s all. Where is the evidence here that in any way speaks to the pigs’ mood or emotions much less complex emotions?
How should we think about these pigs? One of the classic principles of behavior is Thorndike’s Law of Effect which basically means if you do something and it has a good result, you keep at it. If you do something and it turns out badly, you’ll stop. This principle explains many bits of human behavior but it also explains the behavior of a range of other animals, including organisms as simple as sea slugs. And that is all the theory you need for the pigs.
In the enriched environment the pigs saw novel objects, approached them, found them to be not harmful and in some way useful. That encouraged a habit of approaching novel objects. They learned to generalize broadly, in contrast to the control group who was provided only with a narrow gradient of experience. The pig did not have to develop a world view of the sort we might call optimism, the pig did not have to develop any feelings about this, and the pig didn’t need any brain sophistication to follow the Law of Effect. I say again: extraordinarily simple organism follow that law, with no implications for what they feel or believe.
Is it possible that pigs have feelings? Yes, I suppose. But if this behavior counts as evidence, then we lose any hope of figuring out which animals are complex enough to feel emotions and which are not. Here is a really interesting overview of the issues, anthropomorphism included, by Philipp Ball, a science writer.
And on a completely unrelated topic, involving a pig that elicits complex emotions rather than having them: the highest GermanCourt just decided this week that a 13th century stone relief of a huge sow suckling identifiably Jewish people, with a Rabbi lifting the pig’s tail and staring into her anus, can remain in place above a famous church door. Jewish plaintiffs had gone to court to have the anti-Semitic sculpture removed, unsuccessfully. The BGH ruled that the church in Wittenberg (where Martin Luther – a rabid anti-Semite himself – once preached) had done enough to transform the sculpture into a “memorial,” by adding a bronze baseplate and a nearby display with an explanatory text. The sculpture is known as Juden Sau, Jewish Sow, a derogatory term for Jewish people used then and now by anti-Semitic Germans. For much longer than since the first ever zoo was ever established in 1793 in France….
Of course, not a single photograph of a pig. At least it’s the title of today’s music – the beautiful sound track for a movie I still have not seen but am told I have to…Pig.
“Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power through the stripping away of voting rights and persecution of women, immigrants, black people, queer people, trans people – all of whom have been targeted by mass shootings in recent years.” –Rebecca Solnit
Agnotology is another word I had to look up in the dictionary. It refers to the study of ignorance, and the ways in which ignorance can be the outcome of acts of interference with your learning. Ignorance, then, not just as the absence of knowledge, but the product of cultural or political processes designed toprevent you from knowing.
(Photographs today are from the museum at Fort Sumter, the site of the start of the American Civil War, and graves of the fallen in Charleston, South Carolina, mostly decked with confederate flags and visited by birds.) I approached the monument by boat a few years back.
According to Proctor the “cultural production of ignorance” has been instrumental for the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. It is now embraced by the gun lobby as well. (I am summarizing what I learned here.)
Think of things that can make you sick: tobacco, sugary foods, chemicals applied for agricultural use, poisoning ground water, to name just a few. The industries peddling these commodities are focused on certain propaganda. You can cast doubt on the scientific linkage between cigarettes and cancer, for example. You can shield producers and sellers from scrutiny. And you can shift the debate to issues of “personal responsibility.” Same for things that sicken the planet: you can cast doubt on the relationship between fossil fuel use and climate change, protect the oil industry from scrutiny, and shift responsibility to the consumer, rather than reveal structural policies that harm.
With regard to guns that kill: you can prevent research from being done (or revealed) that shows the true causes for gun violence, including objective measures of what freely available gun access implies. You can spare the industry any liability, and you can blame individual factors, like mental health, or loosening family structures, or grooming teachers, or sexual mores or video games – you name it, all with the goal to prevent policies that curb the unconstrained purchase of arms.
And last but not least, you can sell alternative “legal scholarship,” which eventually makes it upstream to the courts when interpreting 2nd Amendment origins and meanings.
Given the amount of misinformation, what DO we know about the history of gun laws? The first law prohibiting guns for certain people was enforced in Virginia in 1633. No guns for Native Americans. Other colonies followed suit. Enslavers, too, wasted no time (Source here):
As early as 1639, on the other hand, laws were requiring White men to be armed to be able to act as militias controlling the enslaved population.
Eventually the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution was written not to favor individual gun use but for the protection of these slave-controlling militias, so that no-one could disarm them and disadvantage the Southern, slave-holding states who needed their might.
Note the phrasing in the museum annotation (below images of slaves) above. “only a small percentage…” as if that makes it less egregious. The rest was sold into slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil, with North American interests in plantations fed there as well. And they brought sickness to the continent! How dare they?
Below the focus on the variability of slavery experiences almost suggest there were some conditions that weren’t as bad as others, and prosperity demanded it!
Fast forward to the 20th century. The NRA early on approved of legislation limiting access to certain weapons, like the National Firearm Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968. Things changed, though, with the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Deal, expanding the powers of government and altering structural hierarchies of US society. Fierce backlash happened among those seeing their status threatened, and a push towards unfettered arming of men. In the 1990s we saw a growing militia (Christian white power) movement in response to Clinton’s gun laws. (Think Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas.) These extreme right wing forces subscribe to the “insurrection theory” of the 2nd Amendment, which says that the 2nd Amendment protects the unconditional right to bear arms for self-defense and to rebel against a tyrannical government. If and when a government turns oppressive, private citizens have a duty to take up arms against the government. The Proud Boys were just one division that put this into action, among other things, during the January 6th storming of the Capitol.
By 2007 the majority of justices on the Supreme Court had been appointed by presidents who were members of the NRA. In D.C. vs. Heller, Scalia argued that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns (unconnected to a well-regulated militia), but vaguely implied that there were limits to the right, frustrating both gun control voices and the NRA folks who had never seen a limit they liked, as far as their own desires were concerned
If you can tolerate a style of writing that does not shy away from a somewhat excessive use of expletives, I highly recommend reading Elie Mystal’s Allow Me To Retort, an analysis of the Constitution in extremely accessible form, with insights into the 2nd Amendment in particular. It is a short, brilliant primer. Here is a review that captures everything I felt after finishing this book.
A radical change to the law is expected to be handed down by the Supreme Court this month, expanding 2nd Amendment rights. Here is is the Brennan Center for Justice‘s full analysis of what we will likely face. It is worth noting that once the door has been opened to prohibit the government from sensible regulations, as is expected here with regard to carrying guns, other regulative power might soon be taken away as well: environmental protection, public health requirements, work place safety, to name just a view.
It is no surprise, then, that the teaching of history as it unfolded, and of the conditions some try to maintain (most Americans want stricter gun laws), is anathema to those who want to turn the clock back, weapons in hand to meet a government that does not please them (after they meet their neighbors, who do not please them either given the neighbors’ quest for righting the injustices of a racially segregated society.) They do everything to obscure and obfuscate the knowledge that could empower true democratic policies and decision making and impact the sales of deadly military-style weapons and the ideological purposes they serve – agnotology in action. A Supreme Court undermining majority rule acts as the hand maid.
My twitter feed regularly sends me images of three artists, without me ever having followed those sources. Riddle me that! I like two of them very much (Max Ernst and Varo Remedios,) but had never heard of the third one, Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898). He was a Russian Realist (in contrast to the other two surrealists,) and I now recall I included one of his paintings in a recent blog about people wandering through landscapes. But that’s it.
Pine on sand # Heuer #photography
In any case, looking at Shishkin’s landscapes, painted around the area of St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia, I was struck how many of them resided in variations in my photographic archives, without ever having set foot into Russia. The scenes were photographed in Europe and North America. The fact that similarities can be salient, just as dissimilarities can, seemed noteworthy in light of the fact that I know so many people who are currently moving away or have moved away from places they have called home for years. Not everything will be unfamiliar!
Stone in the forest # Heuer #photography
For the younger ones, the reasons for moving have to do with increased flexibility of the workplace, allowing to do your job long distance. For those I am most familiar with, a continual change of location implies mostly excitement, and has also been the norm between college, grad school, post docs and so on. Relocation of us older folks is a different thing – often done to be closer to family, to be of mutual support, sometimes done to find environments easier on an aging body or to escape into (visions of) tranquility. Not an entirely new phenomenon, if you think of the many East Coast “snowbirds” who annually tracked to Florida in the winter from the Northern states (again, I am aware it is the privilege of a certain class.)
Oaks # Heuer #photography
You give up a few things when you move. Your familiarity with the lay-out of your city and environs, your ease of finding your way, your knowledge of where to find things (in shops or nature,) not to mention your doctors, dentists, and last but not least the friends who remained (this latter one is for older people often a reason to move rather than to stay – people around you are no longer.) And your sense of place, your attachment to and pride in the place you call home, will be disturbed, although, as we will see, it can be reestablished on the other end with remarkable fluency.
Mounds # Heuer #photography
There is a whole research enterprise in various scientific disciplines that explores the (dis)advantages of a sense of place that comes mostly from having lived somewhere for a long time, if not all of your life. (I got my information here and here.) Definitions vary as do approaches, it can be confounding to try and get a grasp of it.
For psychologists, it is the experience of a person in a particular setting, feelings and thoughts included. In geography, it’s called topophilia, the affective bond between people and place or setting. For historians it is a sense of place that we ourselves create in the course of time. It is the result of habit or custom, reinforced by what might be called a sense of recurring events. For anthropologists, place attachment is more than an emotional and cognitive experience, it includes cultural beliefs and practices that link people to place, a symbolic element tying us to shared history.
The tree in the field # Heuer #photography
Let’s stick with the psychology: the feelings and thoughts about where you live. They can be influenced by numerous bonds. There is the biographical tie, you were born here or lived here for a long time. The bond can be based on spiritual relationships, you feel a sense of belonging within your people’s history, for example. You can be tied to a place for ideological reasons (let’s skip that…) or due to an accepted narrative (creation myths, stories of origin.) And, importantly, the relationship can be a commodity: you choose a place based on desirable attributes, grand children high on the list (!), life style preferences, health advantages and so on. Last but not least the tie to a place can be involuntary, a bond by material pressures, constrained by economic dependency or lack of choice (and I am not going into the legislative proposals floating around that in the future women will only be allowed to leave a state if they prove they are not pregnant.)
Sandy Coastline #ivanshishkin # Realism
Sandy Coastline # Heuer #photography
Note, for all of you who move(d) with mixed feeling: the element of choice is one that can (re)establish a sense of place, a positive attachment. Given that our notions of a somewhat ideal community change across the life span, it follows that we would want to relocate towards something closer to our ideals. It might not be easy, but then being stuck in an increasingly lonely place isn’t either. It might not be your first choice, but at least you have a choice, in contrast to people displaced by involuntary reasons.
Mirror Lake shrouded in mist # Heuer #photography
The research bears out that you increase the likelihood of positive attachment to a place with increased participation in a community, with benefits for the environment in return (the more attached people are to a place, the more they invest to protect that place, urban or rural). I think community participation is particularly difficult if you are older, and now constrained by the pandemic dangers for many of us. Nonetheless, focussing on ways to integrate with people who share interests or political goals might be the way to go. Joining walking tours to explore the architecture or history of a place might help. Even if you loathe group activities or don’t feel up to take history courses, there are ways to familiarize yourself with the place on one’s own. Worthwhile exploring!
(And on a totally selfish note: I miss every single one of you who is moving/has moved…. you are putting a dent in my sense of place! And welcome to the ones moving in!)
Grass # Heuer #photography
Music by a quintessential Russian composer. (And YES I do not cancel Russian artists if they have no affinity to current events.) “The 14th symphony is scored for soprano, bass, and orchestra and dedicated to English composer Benjamin Britten. Comprised of 11 texts by Federico Garcia Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker, and Rainer Maria Rilke, the theme of mortality unites these varied texts. The result is a highly unorthodox, engrossing reminder that death is always waiting.”
So we might as well make the best of our remaining time, moving and all!)
Originally, I meant to write about my Trouble with Change. I decided to get a grip instead – let me explain.
Columbia River, looking East
Two of my regular haunts, the Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Preserve in WA, and parts of the Tualatin River National Wildlife Preserve south of Portland closed a while ago for considerable amounts of time, 3 and 1.5 years respectively, to restructure the landscape, reconnecting the rivers with floodplains. Altogether important environmental improvements, with me (and others) moping about years of lost access even while acknowledging the need, and now celebrating the re-opening.
Restored flood plain and lake, respectively
When I first learned about the closures in 2019, I was upset that everything changes, even landscapes, usually reliable points of constancy. In fact, hiking through both preserves this week, I was again sad about some paths no longer accessible, while others were rerouted and still bore signs of human construction and interference, which will soon disappear, I guess.
Harrier Hawk
I consider myself a person pretty open to change, even if it is not always chosen by myself. I have lived through and adapted to major changes, the types of environments I lived in, from small rural German village-life to years in metropoles like New York City, the languages I have spoken, careers that came and went, constellations within my household, rise and decline of friendships and last, but not least, changing capacities of an ailing body. All taken, with the exception of short interims of sadness or agitation, in stride. So why is the change in the faces of familiar landscapes such an issue? You tell me.
Herded goslings and flock of lesser yellowlegs, I think
Plain old ducks
It makes me embarrassed. Almost ashamed, given the intense demands for adaptation to change required by the many refugees in this war- and misery-torn world of 2022. Think about the psychological burdens for any given refugee, with Ukraine of course holding a special place in my consciousness right now. The trauma load often consists of the pre-flight part, where violent events, threat to life or loss of loved ones and destruction of home are experienced. Then the flight itself whether under a carpet of bombing, or across ocean with unstable boats, drowning in the Mediterranean, burning to death in dry Greek island camps or freezing to death at closed Polish borders, you name it. Then the arrival in the host country, which reacts to despondency with varying degrees of helpfulness, often dependent on the color of your skin, the (dis)similarity of religious and cultural practices, your ability to speak or learn the language and degree of prior education.
Northern flicker, joined by swallows
Add to this forms of survivor guilt, that you escape a dreaded fate that others didn’t (think of the large number of Afghans who were left behind by those who were allowed to flee,) the separation of family units (men not allowed to leave their country of origin, for example, to be recruited) and the complete loss of trust when your very own friends and neighbors became the enemy who killed you and yours (think Bosnia, for example,) or refused to believe the reality of your plight (your Russian family not accepting that war occurs in Ukraine.) It is no surprise, then, that studies indicate that depression and anxiety are at least as common as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)and suggest that one or a combination of these conditions affects at least one in three refugees. (Ref.) One in three…
Turtles
Of course there are exceptions – here is a well-told story of a Syrian refugee in Germany whose intelligence, achievement orientation and a good portion of luck enabled successful adaption despite cultural and bureaucratic obstacles. Here is a thoughtful document for professionals how to help children through the acculturation process that speaks to a larger, more general need and seems to have been successful. (Source is Canadian, the only thing I could find in English.)
Blue herons roosting
In any case: the burden of required change while under psychological duress, or even traumatized, is immense.
My own reaction to changes in nature should be nothing but endless gratitude for what I have and what I’m spared. Duly noted. Grip gotten.
Common yellow throat
Yellow-rumped warbler (Butter butt!)
Music today is a favorite cello concerto. War horse, I know, doesn’t make it less beautiful.
And here is someone waiting for the mosquitoes to enter his beak:
Yesterday was May 1st, International Labor Day, the traditional day for honoring workers and workers’ movements internationally. It originated, interestingly enough, out of the labor union movement in the U.S. in the late 1800s, calling for an 8 hour work day. Would’t you know it, the day is not officially recognized in this country today, since any sort of emboldening international solidarity is resisted.
(In honor of May 1st, today’s images are of posters around the world, found in postings by @Jacobin.)
In any case, it is a day that sees protest marches around the world, not all related to labor issues but more generally questioning capitalist rules or political developments (in France, for example both the left and the extreme right were protesting yesterday against Macron’s victory, in Germany large blocs of people protested against housing prices and policies and in favor of feminist politics.) These protests often see large police contingents posted to intervene if violence breaks out, to arrest those perceived to break laws and to protect interests of the state. In Berlin alone, 6000 police officers were posted across the weekend.
When those arrested are brought to trial, the police are called on to testify as eyewitnesses. This brings me to the actual focus of today’s blog, the many myths surrounding the evidence provided by police in general criminal proceedings, as described in a paper by psychologists Kathy Pezdek & Dan Reisberg, Psychological Myths about Evidence in the Legal System: How Should Researchers Respond?, to be published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory & Cognition in June.
The article describes some of the myths that pervade the legal system. I will alert you to the myths that are listed and why it is important that we become aware that they, as it turns out, have no basis in fact. I will not reiterate the scientific literature that shows how these myths are debunked, which is the core of the scientific paper, but would go beyond the scope of a blog. (Preprints for the whole article can be requested here: Kathy.Pezdek@cgu.edu, or here: reisberg@reed.edu.)
Myth #1: Officers are More Accurate Eyewitnesses than Civilians
Judges, jurors, and many others believe that law enforcement personnel are more credible than other witnesses when they testify in court and, moreover, that officers are more accurate eyewitnesses than civilians. A related claim is that identification evidence provided by police officers is more reliable than identification evidence provided by civilians, and thus the safeguards generally required when civilians are asked to make an identification – safeguards that include proper instructions before the identification, a properly constructed lineup, and so on, are not needed for police officers.
The reality: Police officers have no advantage as eyewitnesses in identifying the perpetrator. Some studies even suggest they are at a disadvantage.
Myth #2: High Stress Improves the Accuracy of Memory
Many people buy into the belief that stressful events are better remembered – and, in fact, are remembered accurately, completely, and with little or no forgetting as time goes by. Ain’t so, and that goes for police officers as well. If anything, high stress impairs memory, rather than enhances it. In addition, memory for stressful events, just like memory overall, can be influenced (and distorted) by post-event misinformation, so holds no special status.
In other words, then: officers suffer perceptual and memory distortions when under stress, just as civilians do.
Myth #3: A Sleep Cycle after a Use-of-force Incident Improves Memory
There are many policy proposals supported by state legislatures and police unions that there should be a “cooling off period” after the use of force before questioning the involved officer, periods trending in length from 72 hours to 10 days. Often this proposal is part of a policy termed the “police officers’ bill of rights.” The claim is that this delay will improve memory, in addition to helping the officer regain composure and get some rest. This stands in conflict with what the evidence shows: delayed reporting is inferior to reporting immediately after an event. Memory fades, folks.
In addition, delay in reporting creates a risk that the officer (or any other witness) will encounter information that can merge with their original memory, undermining memory accuracy. Confusing the source from which you gained knowledge is also enhanced with he passage of time. Even if one did not eye these proposals suspiciously as a tool for the involved officers to get their act together and prepare and coordinate testimony, the suggested delay will hurt not help the finders of fact and the legal proceedings in general.
Myth #4: Double-Blind Lineups are Unnecessary
For photographic lineups, a double-blind procedure is one in which the lineup is administered by someone not involved in the investigation, so that neither the administrator nor the witness is told which photo shows the police suspect. With this procedure in place, the witness makes a selection guided only (one hopes) by the witness’s recollection of the actual culprit’s appearance, and not due to some (involuntary or voluntary) cues or hints by the administrator, and this does diminish bias in identification procedures. Despite their protestations, police officers are not immune to the effects of non-blind lineups. In other words, they, too, should be asked to identify culprits using the double-blind procedure.
Myth #5: Viewing BWC Footage Does Not Contaminate Officers’ Memory
After using force, law enforcement officers are asked to write a report, describing the episode. In many jurisdictions, police insist that they should write the report only after reviewing their body worn camera videos. Any suggestion to the contrary has been strongly rejected by police organizations. This refusal ignores the data that show how memory accuracy is contaminated by seeing the video. It provides the officers with actually-not-remembered information, and this information is simply absorbed into their eventual “memory” report – exactly the pattern expected based on decades of research on post-event suggestion.
Myth #6: Police Officers Can Accurately Detect Deception
There is a widespread notion that police officers are trained to detect liars and are better than your average civilian at doing so. Just for the record: we are all pretty lousy at detecting deception: on average not much better than tossing a coin. Law enforcement officers are not much better in their performance – but do assume that they are. Their confidence levels in their ability to detect lies stand in little correlation to their actual abilities. Training or experience do little to improve these skills, but they seem to feed into false assurance about skill levels.
Why does all this matter?
For one, if legal decisions are made based on false assumptions (evidence given by police witnesses is superior, thus can be trusted over diverging evidence, for example,) we are in trouble. Educating judges, attorneys, jurors and the police themselves seems important to avoid false conclusions that decide people’s fate. These myths are also often reflected in policy documents that govern both law enforcement and legal procedures. It seems important to debunk the mistaken beliefs of policy makers as well, given how consequential these myths are.
The quality something has when it is possible for you to know in advance that it will happen or what it will be like
(often disapproving) the quality somebody/something has when they are exactly as you would expect and therefore boring – Oxford English Dictionary
It has been quite a while since I wrote my last Art on the Road essay, more than two years, in fact. Predictably so, given the pandemic’s impact on traveling. I am still restricted to short car trips, but mobile now, and so hopefully have interesting things to report across the next months.
Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop
Predictability and its opposite, unpredictability, currently loom large in my mind, given the fact that we’ve seen such sudden changes in a world that considered itself, at least from Western nations’ privileged perspectives, relatively stable. Now the horrors of millions dead from or afflicted by the lasting damage of a virus have been joined by the terror of an unprovoked war in Europe, with unpredictable outcomes in a world filled with nuclear weapons.
Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop
Humans like predictability, given its relation to something we crave: a sense of control and protection from randomness which threatens our longing for a rational, just world. As societies we have created norms, both legally and customary, to allow us to predict and trust. Those who defy these norms are usually disliked at best, punished at worst. This rule comes with exceptions, though. People versed in political or militaristic power struggles often favor unpredictability to seed chaos and fear. And those in the sciences and the arts who approach problem solving or creation in unpredictable ways often come up with the most creative solutions.
Sculpture on the artist’s house wall
Another dimension of predictability is what we are trying to predict, based on our understanding of how the world works. Once upon a time, Newton gave us a basic model for prediction: express the immutable laws of the universe in formulas, plug in the data, and do the math. That might work if we want to know when a dropped ball hits the ground, but that’s not nearly the full spectrum. We have trouble predicting psychological behavior given the many visible and invisible factors that affect our minds. And when we do predict outcomes we often have no clue about the underlying cause – just look at the internet’s prediction markets that allow people to place bets on future events. The resulting odds can accurately predict outcomes (who gets elected, what show will thrive) without giving us insight as to why these things will happen.
Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop
And then there is the (un)predictability of the material one works with. Which brings us at long last to the artist I want to introduce today, sculptor and woodturner Christian Burchard. He works with wet and unstable wood which often, if not always, behaves in unpredictable ways. (In fact, today’s title is a riff on the title of a lecture, Predictable Unpredictability, he and another artist, Pascal Oudet, gave at the prestigious Chicago’s SOFA (Sculptural Objects Functional Art & Design Fair) some years back.)
***
I met with the artist at his Southern Oregon wood shop and house, which hold vast collections of his work. It was pretty much a chance encounter. I had come to Ashland to interview his partner and was introduced to Burchard who graciously agreed to talk to me as well and show me around the next day. The beauty of the accumulated wooden objects, turned, carved, polished, raw, strewn about or stashed in shelves outside the usual formal displays one encounters in exhibitions and galleries, caught my eye as an artist. The story behind them caught my ear as a writer. No titles, no dates, no artist statements about this or that series, just the artist and his creations, addressed as “my acrobats” here or “my books” there, a tangible relationship.
Burchard collects, cuts, turns, dreams wood. Almost exclusively the wood of one of the Pacific Northwest’s most distinctive, evergreen hardwood trees, Arbutus menziesii, known as Madrone. It grows on drier, lower elevation sites, coastal bluffs and in the mountains. Drought tolerant, it doesn’t need particularly rich soil and can live up to 200 years, growing to about 75 feet or more in height under ideal conditions. Madrone is culturally significant to the PNW Coast Salish First Nations. Legend has it that during the great flood Madrona trees provided an anchor for their canoes to hold steady and not drift away.
According to Elder Dave Elliot in Saltwater People, “W̱SÁNEĆ peoples traditionally do not burn Arbutus for firewood because it is an important actor in the origin of their people. Some elements of the trees could be used, such as the bark and leaves for medicines. The extent of this tree’s meaning as a symbol of life and resilience cannot be measured.” (Ref.)
Madrone trees that I photographed along the Pacific Coast
The tree, seeking sun, often grows in crooked ways, with lots of burls, interesting shapes, perfect for a sculptor exploring new form. Working with the wood when it is still green, though, introduces not just unpredictable outcomes: how will it warp and flex when it dries? It also contains a serious element of risk – when you put it to the lathe, careful to turn, creating a form, will it snap and break at the last minute? All the work in vain, a good piece of wood ruined? Will charring or bleaching, carving or chiseling enhance the character of the wood or obscure it?
From the series Baskets and Vessels
Burchard is not a stranger to risk taking, in fact I am tempted to describe him as a perennial risk taker, on many levels of a life intensely lived. Judging by the results, and the deep laugh lines around his eyes, it has served him well. Then again, the concurrent losses might not be visible to the stranger, even one who felt the familiarity that so often spontaneously arises when one ex-pat meets another.
Christian Burchard, sculptor and woodturner
The artist and I are both of the same generation, have left our shared country, Germany, within three years of each other some 40 years ago, lived in the same city, and had the travel bug even before we emigrated, spending some chunks of time abroad (Australia and Asia for him, South America and Africa for me.) It cannot have been easy for Burchard. He comes from a distinguished family of politicians, bankers and lawyers who played a significant role in the history of the Hanseatic League, a great-grandfather serving as mayor of its largest city, Hamburg and its immense harbor. Think Thomas Mann’s seminal novel The Buddenbrooks, just in a different town. The small network of patrician families ruled for centuries as a kind of oligarchy, providing mayors, senators, clergy and lawyers, fed by the wealth of a huge merchant imperium and shipping companies. Aristocracy was disdained, as were Jews, even assimilated ones, and a strict separated class system was de-facto maintained despite the official version that in the Hanseatic city each and every inhabitant was of equal standing. You could purchase the right to be a citizen of higher standing (Großbürgerrecht) only with true wealth and that right was then inherited by male heirs, allowing you to serve in political office.
From the Series Spherical
True democracy was, in other words, in short supply, pride, on the other hand, was not. There are reports of Burchard’s ancestor, the mayor Johann Heinrich Burchard, that he ordered the portrait painter Heinrich Kugelberg during the creation of a mural in the ballroom of Hamburg’s city hall to remove the image of a young man kneeling to receive baptism because “Hamburg’s citizens don’t kneel in front of anyone.” (Ref.)
This is a montage depicting the Hamburg City Hall, seat of the mayor, from my series Seeing Strange (2018)
There was some rise and fall of individual families, but across the centuries it was a prestigious, exclusive lot that ran the city’s business, courts and politics, intermarried, and accumulated wealth. Diligence, responsibility, reliability and predictability were all high on the list of values of the Hanseatic classes as was devoted service to their city and a cooly analytic approach to trade. To be born into this world came not just with silver spoons but also intense pressure to perform and uphold those class privileges. If you did not, complete ostracism was one of the possible consequences. I remember the years after my uncle (by marriage), a descendent of another famous Hamburg mayor, Heinrich Kellinghusen, walked out on my aunt, unannounced on Christmas Eve, no less, to move in with – the scandal ! – a purported prostitute, and I was told that no-one ever talked to him again.
From the series Vessels
Others, however, seemed to escape that fate. Another Hamburg lawyer and senator of the Burchard branch, Wilhelm Amsinck Burchard-Motz, became deputy mayor of Hamburg in 1933. The election of the new Senate under Nazi leadership that March prompted him to switch party allegiance from the DVP to the NSDAP. That seemed not to matter in post-war Germany where he served as the chairman for the German Association for International Maritime Law and as Vice President of the German Golf Association and Chairman of the Hamburg Country and Golf Club in the Lüneburg Heath, as exclusive a club as they came at the time.
(Here is his portrait by artist Anita Rée, an insanely gifted avant-garde painter in the 1920s. An assimilated Jew, she converted to Christianity and was expressly anti-semitic herself, only to get sucked into the maws of rising fascism. She committed suicide in 1933.)
Portrait of Wilhelm Amsinck Burchard-Motz by Anita Rée, late 1920s
Another mayor who served the city recently for 7 years is now the German chancellor tasked to bring the world away from the brink of nuclear war. Here is a perceptive portrait of the man from the New Statesman Journal, describing Olaf Scholz’ hanseatic profile and demeanor, assumed to bring us safely through this crisis.
***
To defy the strong expectations to follow in the footsteps of your forbears and give up much privilege if you don’t, must have required an iron will by Christian Burchard, an intense wish to control his own fate, or a kind of desperation to get away from it all. After apprenticing as a furniture maker in Germany, he escaped to the US in 1978, at age 23, studying sculpture and drawing at the Museum School in Boston and at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver BC.
Burchard’s Wood Shop
Burchard opened his own studio in Southern Oregon in 1982, supplementing his income with furniture making and house construction, building a house for his own young family, all the while garnering more and more recognition as a gifted wood sculptor. The list of exhibitions is long, he is represented in various private and public collections, and he regularly is invited to the important craft shows of the Smithsonian, or the American Association of Woodturners. In fact, preparations for a cross-country trip, bringing new work to the Smithsonian in D.C., were in full swing during my visit.
***
It is pretty predictable that you find common ground when you share the experience of immigration. There is a tacit understanding that things are lost as much as gained. There is an unspoken agreement that you know some things that are hard to explain to those who did not leave a complicated past behind. In our conversation this became explicit only due to the timing of Putin’s unpredicted, if feared, invasion of Ukraine that very day. The topic of war and its associated frights and horrors was inescapable during a post-war German childhood, stifling and paralyzing at times, guilt-laden or guilt-avoidant, depending on your family, always hovering in the background. Nothing we could control, it controlled us.
All the more it is interesting to see an artist commit to a path – working with unstable wood – where control is ephemeral as well. Maybe it is exactly the balance he craves: where lack of control once created sorrow, here it results in visceral beauty. Something emerges, authentic, if scarred, from unpredictability and takes on a life of its own.
The Lathe
There is a vitality to his small books, a fluttering sense of just opening or just closing, as you wish. But Burchard exerts spatial control as well, introducing his own visual blueprint in his latest framings within quilt-like configurations or wall sculptures. A sense of order direly needed in an environment where climate change has become an agent of chaos.
Wall Sculpture and objects from the Books and Pages series
The beautiful land that he and his partner live on, the goats he rears for making cheese, the pond that is necessary for sustaining their independence with a vegetable garden, are all affected. To meet the danger of the ever closer, encroaching fires, they had to rip out many trees, bushes, much vegetation, fire proofing the buildings. He – half-jokingly – referred to a recently acquired van as something useful for flight, should it become necessary, which brought me full circle to the imagery of our childhoods as related by our parents, the firestorm from bombs destroying large parts of Hamburg and the flight from the invading forces in Berlin and parts further East.
The artist with his goats, and views from his property
Recent psychological research in the study of memory has turned from looking at memory exclusively as the processes involved in preserving the past, to exploring how it is used to predict the future. We have the tools – and the choice – of looking back or looking forward.
The meaning I found in Burchard’s work reflected that dual function. It also reminded me of Antonio Gramsci’s future-oriented declaration:
“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” ― Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters
The sculptures express the optimistic view that the imperfect, the warped and twisted and charred can all connect us to a vision of nature’s beauty, but they also point to the possibility of acquiring a new life after an old one ceased to exist.
Acrobats
***
On my 5-hour drive home from Ashland I left the highway for a break and found a small pond with picnic benches, close to a campground. (Why anyone would want to camp next to I-5 is a mystery to me. Solving it has to wait for another day.) I stopped next to a park-service van and took the left-over from the previous day’s sandwich to the bench. A woman in park service uniform was pacing at the edge of the water, searching for something. It turned out she had nursed a duck, severely injured by aggressive geese, back to health the previous summer, driving over 40 miles every other day to bring food, water and splints for the creature. She had seen the duck during the winter as well, fully restored, but now it was gone. I got the story in more detail than I can relate, her worry for the bird gushing out of her. Her final words before she drove away were willfully optimistic: “Perhaps he found a nice wife and they are off to build a nest.”
Wherever I go I predictably meet people who are passionate about something. What that something might be – a life devoted to being independent and making art, a year devoted to saving a duck – is unpredictable. What I do know, though, is that I am glad to be on the road again, encouraged by people who put their faith in a possible future, during times when dark forces try to drag us back into an oppressive past.
Below is a presentation by the artist.
Music today is by Tuvan Throat singers which hold a special place in Burchard’s life.
Preface: I debated long and hard if it was frivolous to post today’s musings, written at the beginning of the week, given the grim news out of Ukraine as Putin’s forces have fully invaded the country and appear intent on regime change. But I do believe we need to take care of our mental health by not exclusively thinking about terrifying things, and so thought this would be 10 minutes of your day to focus on something else. I will, however, add at the end some sources that support Ukrainians from a variety of perspectives.
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A lot of people I know are happy to buy old photographs they find at flea markets or antique stores. Not the artistic kind, mind you, but snapshots of people who they never met, who have probably walked on long ago, and whose families had no interest in keepsakes. I have always felt that it was intrusive, somehow crossing a border into someone’s privacy, not quite kosher.
Nonetheless, I very much enjoy it when collectors actually come up with some interesting aggregate that tells us something about similarities and differences across time, or capture a Zeitgeist, or point to some inexplicable curiosity. I know, I’m not consistent, but then who is….
One of those accumulations of discarded photographs was published in 2015 by a Frenchman, Jean-Marie Donat, who had searched for and found photographs of people posing with others, costumed as polar bears, in Germany from the 1920s to the 1960s. The book’s limited edition, a collection of over 200 found photographs weirdly titled TeddyBears, is sold out. Thus I cannot tell if the mystery of such a strange prop was ever revealed.
There is speculation, though, that the hype started with 2 beloved polar bears in the Berlin Zoo in the early 1920s, and costumed employees taking pictures with themselves and visitors to increase zoo attendance. From there it spread.
I can personally vouch for the presence of such creatures in Berlin with this 1928 picture of my then 4-year old mother, posing to the left of the bear. How the album survived war and flight, I don’t know. If that picture had landed at a flea market, perhaps I’d be glad for an interested collector who would keep that smile around.
Another edition of snapshots – this time of women in trees – was recently showcased in The Marginalian (formerly Brainpickings.) Described as “Sweet and Subversive Vintage Photographs of Defiant Delight,” Popova offers both some of the photographs and her, as always, thoughtful commentary on the nature of tree climbing and taking photographs of unusual activities or circumstances.
The collector Joachim Raiss eventually jumped on the polar bear train as well, it looks like. Irresistible flea market finds, I guess. The views of women in trees appealed to me, someone known to have climbed a tree or two in better times, as a display of discarding of norms and exuberant recklessness, even if Sunday finery was involved.
(My photographs today are of unclimbed but admired trees, pines and eucalyptus, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and along the Pacific coast.)
Speaking of reckless and tree climbing: How does this bit of science journalism sound to you?
“Climbing a tree or balancing on a beam can dramatically improve cognitive skills, according to a study recently conducted by researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Florida. Working memory capacity increase of 50 percent found in research.” (Ref.)
These assertions refer to a study that looked at a group of adults who were given training exercises that focussed on proprioception, the awareness of body orientation and positioning. They engaged in activities that required both attention to body position and physical exertion – lifting, running, balancing, crawling, specific new sequences of movements. Their working memory (how you process and remember facts currently in your view) was tested before and after the training and it improved! Control groups either listened, while seated, to a lecture, or did a gentle form of Hatha Yoga, Kripula Yoga, which focusses on body posture and awareness, contraction of muscles and breathing, and neither control group showed a gain in working memory capacity.
Shall we rejoice – hey, all we need is the right exercise and our decrepit memory picks up… or shall we give the study a closer look?
For one, no mention of tree climbing in the methods section – where did that come from? Secondly, the groups were extremely small, just 18 participants in the experimental condition of movement training, larger control groups, but still underpowered and in any case not the same number of participants.
Groups also varied along so many dimensions that any comparison is very hard to link back to a causal factor. The age composition was different, the gender composition was almost reversed between training group and one control group.
The duration of the experiment was much longer for the training group (2 and 2.5 hrs respectively for training, while only one session for one hour at yoga.) The training exercises were new, the yoga control, however, was intermediate, in other words familiar with the moves. (It is also inexplicable why this study did not find a beneficial effect of Yoga on working memory, when many other studies of Hatha Yoga have…).
And last but not least, the task they used to assess memory improvement is not one of the better ones, we’ve had more precise tools in our tool box for the last 20 years.
I am summarizing these things not only so you don’t have to slog through a methods section. More importantly, I don’t just want to point out that there is weak research out there and data interpretations that cannot be trusted – I assume we all agree on that.
I am trying to stress the issue of reckless science reporting, that papers over ambiguous results or introduces bad data, and will soon be contradicted when the next result is out that points in a different direction. The public, in general, is mostly not aware of what constitutes reliable science and what should never have made it through the review process. Seeing conflicting results, ever changing tacks on this or that claim, will undermine trust in science, at a time when that trust is already at a low point, politically expedient for some, no doubt.
Shouting not from the rooftops, but the tops of trees: check the science before jumping to conclusions and writing it up for cheap effects in the news. Scientist in tree insists!
Music today is from Berlin in the 1920s where many of the snapshots were taken, Kurt Weill’s Dreigroschen Oper original version.
And here is another Weill song, covered by David Bowie who lived in Berlin and performed live there.
And no, I did not really climb that tree! I climb heights with photoshop these days…. But I did photograph the tree.
Almost out of the door, I grabbed the small point&shoot camera despite knowing better. It had been a bad week of painful lymphedema in chest and arm around the incisions, and I really should not lift my arm too much. Oh well. Was I ever glad I had at least this camera with me when doing the familiar round at Oaks Bottom. Come join me!
They were out, my cherished crows, in masses, hanging in the trees squawking, strutting through the meadow. Which should be much less straw colored in February, reminding me that we’ve now had four years in a row where rainfall was way below average.
Entering the wooded path, the beauty – Japanese print-like – of the duckweed on reflecting water was inspiring, even with the knowledge that it is found growing in water associated with cropping and fertilizer washout, or down stream from human activities, particularly from sewage works, housed animal production systems and to some extent industrial plants.
Given the color, I was not sure if it was common duckweed or more likely azolla, red water fern. The ducks didn’t care, and neither should we. Both are fascinating plants, providing nutrients and helping ecosystems.
Gadwalls, I learn. They live in the Great Plains but migrate through here.
The herons were unperturbed, out for lunch, ignoring me walking but a few meters away from them. I guess the loudly singing tree frogs at the pond’s rim were on the menu.
Beaver activity was visible everywhere,
but I think this fellow was a muskrat.
I can never tell. A kilometer further down I spotted this guy, and given his lunch, a fish, the likelihood was otter. As I said, cheap camera, not the resolution one would have wished for with this sight. I mean how often do you see an otter eating fish 15 minutes downtown from city center?
When I got to the viewpoint, the extent of the drought became more visible. This should be a lake, folks, not a dry hole in the ground.
If you are like me, it gives you the creeps. If you are like many of our compatriots, it instills fear, sometimes to the point of a condition that the the American Psychological Association (APA) defined as eco-anxiety, ”a chronic fear of environmental doom.” It is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5,) but clinicians all over report attempts to treat it.
Not sure if this was the doe or one of her fawns that I regularly saw last summer
Last April, an article in the Scientific American described in depth what therapists are facing and how they have to make decisions about how to treat the massively increased numbers of patients who present fear if not panic in the face of climate catastrophe. A 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association showed that “more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on the planet, and more than half (55%*) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.”
Red-tailed hawk
The NYT joined the topic with an article last week, describing the treatment approach by one of the earliest proponents of a necessary treatment approach to eco-anxiety.
Here is the dilemma: there is a tension between eco-anxiety’s role as a rational response to an existing threat, on the one hand, but also a potentially debilitating response, on the other hand.
There’s no clear, standard definition as to when eco-anxiety is unhealthy. It is rational to be fearful in view of a threat, and the threat is real. It is, however, unhealthy if it paralyzes your daily function, as it now does for scores of people. There is also the question of therapists’ own (political) beliefs. If they think your analysis of the threat is exaggerated or delusional (they don’t believe in climate change or its imminence) they will pathologize your response, which will have an impact on your therapeutic relationship.
Scrub Jay
Therapists themselves also feel unable to cope with their own feelings about environmental destruction. “When a therapist hasn’t begun to come to terms with their own emotions around climate change, it can add to the emotional turmoil of clients coping with overwhelming grief and anxiety, said Tree Staunton, a climate psychotherapist in Bath, England. For example, a therapist’s own grief, anxiety or guilt might come off as defensiveness or withdrawal.“ (Ref.)
Then there are the cases of people, in particular children, who have been personally impacted by traumatic events like fires, flood and tornados or hurricanes caused or aggravated by climate change, who are living with actual PTSD that needs to be treated while the threat of these events is ongoing.
Willamette River bank bordering Oaks Bottom on the Westside
The trolls were out, en masse, in the comment section for the NYT article. But so were thoughtful letters to the editor (2 examples below,) that highlighted important facts found both in and beyond the article.
“… the corporate construct that cleverly shifts the responsibility of a carbon footprint onto each individual. This is similar to the way the petrochemical and plastics industries have shifted all responsibility for recycling, particularly of the packaging they create, onto the individual, although the responsibility for recycling plastics should lie with the manufacturers.” (Mary Englert, Portland, Ore. The writer is a retired licensed professional counselor.)
“youth distress is directly related to the experience of governmental dismissal of and inaction on climate change. Young people are essentially reporting that their governments are gaslighting them by dismissing and devaluing their concerns, and by falsely stating that they are taking necessary action.This has significant political implications. Multiple reviews of the mental health effects of climate change (this is not a new topic in academia) all predict civil unrest and conflict as the long-term outcome. Politicians have a chance to correct course, honor their young constituents’ fears and act decisively. While therapy matters, preventing climate catastrophe matters more.” Mary G. Burke, San Francisco. The writer is a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the university’s Climate Change and Mental Health Task Force.
Baldies
It is easy to feel helpless and anxious when thinking what we can do about the destruction of our world, when really a few large corporations—and complicit politicians—call the shots. But there ARE things one can do, and in the doing alleviate some of the anxiety.
There are some political moves that can help activists. Science is contributing tools to fight collective helplessness.
There is important information that you can read, outlining possible next steps. Earthtrack, for example, offers tons of information about governmental subsidies that harm the environment. Environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) are government actions that by design or effect accelerate the production or consumption of natural resources or undermine broader ecosystems supporting planetary health. The data show at least $1.9 Trillion a year (2% of global GDP) being dished out to Energy, Mining(non-energy), Fisheries, Forestry, Water, Construction, and Transportation industries. The organization informs about both the beneficiaries of such subsidies, worldwide, and reports on possible actions against them.
Anna’s Hummingbird
And then there is art. The hole in the ground where the Oaks Bottom Lake should be reminded me of this project from L.A. last year.
Cara Levine and associated artists provided their week-long participatory event as a communal reaction to and lifting of grief over the losses incurred during the pandemic – including the land, where the dig took place, of The Shalom Institute campus – which was devastated by the Woolsey Fire of 2018. Might as well throw our eco – fear into the mix, or the hole as the case may be, being strengthened by knowing we are not alone.
Or we could be digging ourselves OUT of a hole by collective action. You know where you find me doing just that.
Scrub Jay
Music today is one of my picks when I try to deal with surges of anxiety.
