It's official: Pollution causes smaller penises

Pthalates, estrogen-mimicking chemicals used in plastics like PVC piping and cling film plastic wrap, make male babies less male. They reduce the amount of androgens that get expressed in fetal development, and, among other "feminizing" changes, baby boys whose mothers were exposed to higher levels of pthalates while pregnant had smaller penises when they were born. It's true! You can read about it here.

If that isn't karmic payback, I don't know what is.

Longer-term studies are needed to find out if this also makes the males less competitive and aggressive when they grow up. I am willing to bet, though, that this kind of finding will finally make the male leaders of chemical companies wake up to the effects of their products. Sometimes, Mother Nature can kick you in the balls. Literally.

How many ways of knowing are there?

Anthropologist Graham Townsley writes that the modern world is a place where two processes are happening simultaneously: the world’s indigenous peoples are adopting ways of the modern world in an effort to get the material comfort and commodities of that world, and people in the modern world are trying to understand the ways of the world’s indigenous peoples in a search for meaning.¹ I am not just interested in searching for meaning, but also in broadening our definition of what does it mean to know something? Scientific knowledge is one kind of knowledge, and it has wonderful qualities and uses. It does, however, have limitations. If one of its limitations is linguistic and cultural (see "Ecological understanding & Language", 7 June), then it makes sense to try to understand indigenous ways of knowing in order to have a better grasp of all the ways humans can know.

English is the language of most scientific writing, and English has impoverished ways of talking about relationships, where some indigenous languages build ecological relationships or family relationships into the structure of the language itself. In the Yurok language of Northern California, whose speakers live beside the Klamath river, a verb has to be conjugated differently depending on whether the speaker is talking to the listener in an upstream or downstream direction. They have fifteen different ways to count, so that the number words for three people are not the same as for three redwood trees.² In some Aboriginal languages, verbs have to be conjugated differently depending on who is speaking to who, and certain tenses and conjugations may be forbidden between certain speakers. The relationships between certain groups of people and totem animals is built into the language in Mati Ke, a northern Australian language: "Aboriginal languages have fewer words in them than English does. But those words are held and balanced in an intricate web of relationships. Lose the vocabulary and you lose the relationships."³

The ways that English describes events and time are also different from those in many indigenous languages. Benjamin Whorf noted this fact about Hopi: not all of their verbs require a subject who is doing the verb; some verbs just happen.⁴ This is also true of Aboriginal languages in Australia. Michael Christie, of Northern Territory University in Darwin, Australia, says, "There are amazing things about Aboriginal languages. Their concepts of time and agency, for example. They go right against our ideology of linear time – past, present and future. I reckon they’d completely revolutionize Western philosophy, if only we knew more about them."⁵ Even in learning Spanish, I am discovering that I have to think carefully about whether an action is continuous or discrete to choose the right verb tense.

For all of the diversity of language and thought, languages are inter-translatable, with effort. The problem is that almost no one in the colonizing world makes the effort. Other ways of thinking may be unfamiliar, but we can learn to think in those ways. "There are grammatical forms in Athabascan languages, notably to do with motion and time, or in Algonquian, to do with the animate and the inanimate, that are indeed difficult for a speaker of Indo-European languages to grasp. Grammatical categories in these…languages…are deeply unfamiliar to most other peoples of the world. Yet even in these cases, the difficulty of translation relates to unfamiliarity, not to any seeming intrinsic incomprehensibility. …I can set out what a grammatical distinction is doing, even though I may not be able to reproduce that distinction in ordinary English grammar.⁶ We can learn the ways of thought instantiated in other languages, but often we do not. And yet, our knowledge of the world might benefit from trying to understand the concepts held in indigenous languages.

Some languages in Northern Canada have many different words for knowing: knowing because you saw something, knowing because somebody else saw and told you, knowing because you saw it in a dream, and I can’t even remember the others, because we don’t "lexicalize" this in English.⁷ And yet, these are important distinctions, with most of science falling in the "knowing because somebody else saw and told you" category. It is important that we not lose these other ways of understanding knowledge. An English-dominated world is an ontologically impoverished world.

¹ Graham Townsley, “Kamaroa: A revival in the Western Amazon,” 2001, p. 50. Quoted in Jeremy Narby, 2005, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, pp. 170-171.
² Malcolm Margolin, 1995, "The spirit of bioregionalism," in Bridges to the Future: Proceedings of Shasta Bioregional Gathering IV, September 1995,pp. 9-19. Glen Ellen, CA: Bob Glotzbach/Regeneration Resources.
³ Mark Abley, 2003, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, London: Arrow Books (Random House), p. 6.
⁴ Benjamin Whorf, 1956, "Languages and Logic," in Language, Thought & Reality: Selected Writings, Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
⁵ Quoted in Abley, 2003, p. 277.
⁶ Hugh Brody, 2000, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, NY: North Point Press, pp. 49-50.
⁷ Brody, 2000.

Freaky science facts, & ethics

Here's an eerie study, to come out of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Michael Kosfeld and colleagues had people play a bargaining game that involved one person handing over money to another person, in which the giver didn't know the other person, never met them, and had to choose to either trust the other person and give them the money or not. They gave some people three whiffs of a nasal spray containing oxytocin, and some not. The ones who had sniffed oxytocin were much more likely to hand over their money to strangers. You can read about it here. Oxytocin is the brain hormone that is released when people form attachments to others: it floods both mothers' and babies' brains during nursing, it is released during orgasm, and release can be stimulated by stroking and touching.

On the one hand, I read this and think, "That's really interesting! We're really getting a look at how certain chemicals influence social emotions and behaviour!" But a half-second behind that thought, another one arrives: "What happens when marketing people get their hands on this?" I can picture a future in which used-car dealerships are flooded with oxytocin-aerosols, in which hidden canisters release little puffs of oxytocin into shopping center aisles, to put shoppers in a more trusting mood. I think we can say with some certainty that marketers will do this. Kosfeld argues that oxytocin can't be used to con people because "it takes nearly an hour to reach the brain and have any effect." But that doesn't mean shopping centers wouldn't try to saturate the atmosphere with it to simply produce an atmosphere of trust and increase the likelihood of people falling for sales pitches after they've been in the shopping center for a while. (Then again, maybe this would just make people fall in love with other shoppers. "Something about the way she reached for that box of laundry powder... I just knew we were soulmates." Who knows?)

So where is the forum where we discuss the ethics of new findings like this? I'm not saying Kosfeld shouldn't do the research, shouldn't publish it, shouldn't tell the press about it. But where in the modern world do we have a discussion about the ethical implications of such research? Where do we discuss passing regulations to say that people should not be exposed to such chemicals without giving their explicit consent? Regulation has to keep pace with science.

On self-concept and belonging to a place

A friend said to me that he has a theory that people have high self-esteem when they feel accepted by people on whom their safety depends; therefore people spend a lot of mental energy examining whether they're accepted by people. The first part of this I think is absolutely true, but the second part, I think is only true of certain cultures. I am not at all sure that worrying about acceptance is a human universal. I have to say, I think it's only people who live in modern industrial cultures who spend much mental energy on that.

I don't come from a traditional culture, so I don't know from experience, but I have been getting a sense about what belonging and community means in such cultures from books I've read about hunter-gatherer cultures, or novels I've read set in traditional agricultural cultures like India's. People in these cultures don't have to worry about acceptance, because they grow up with a sense of belonging. Community is a given, extended family is a given, being loved and accepted by that community is a given, so no computational energy needs to be spent on whether or not they are accepted. In hunter-gatherer cultures, the sense of belonging extends beyond the human community to belonging in the wider community of living things, belonging to the land they live in. I would expect that in cultures still living in a largely traditional way, self-esteem is not an issue, because acceptance is not an issue. Only when colonizers show up in their lives in a significant way does it become an issue. They only have to start worrying about belonging when interaction with the modern industrial world makes younger generations start to question their traditions. Breaking with those traditions means risking not belonging. This can happen when a place is colonized, or when someone from a traditional culture moves to a new country, and the younger generation starts to adopt the values of the new country. (See the movie "Ae Fond Kiss", or read Monica Ali’s brilliant novel Brick Lane, or any novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.)

It is only in a culture that has no real sense of community, no sense of belonging to a particular place, that acceptance by others becomes an issue. Safety is not an issue when you grow up assuming you belong. Safety is very much an issue when you grow up in a place and among people where you are not sure you belong. So worrying about the acceptance of others is a symptom of coming from a culture made up of immigrants from other places. In North America, we non-indigenous people are all from somewhere else. Agriculturalists are always moving on to other places in search of more farmable land and new opportunities¹. Hunter-gatherers are not. They may move about within a territory, but they feel that their territory is the perfect place, the place where they know how to make a living without depleting the resources: "a territory is made perfect by knowledge"¹.

In a new land, a new country, immigrants are not as safe as people who have been there for hundreds or thousands of generations: they don't know the ecosystem as well, and they are thrown in with other immigrants from other places, whose customs and assumptions may be very different. Colonial nations made up of immigrants have to worry about acceptance from others, because it is a safety issue. Then this value gets passed down through the generations, unconsciously, so that three or four generations down the line, the children are still socialized to worry about acceptance, but the original reason for it has been lost. Later generations of immigrant families who have done well don't really have to worry about safety – they're provided for, but they still worry about acceptance. In their homelands, immigrants (or should we call them pre-immigrants?) had community and extended family – they belonged. All of that belongingness is broken apart when an immigrant moves to a new country, and that sense of alienation, of not belonging, and of having to worry about acceptance gets passed on. It becomes something woven into the fabric of such societies, but that does not mean it's healthy. Rootlessness, alienation, not belonging, neurosis about self-acceptance – these are symptoms of not being "home." These are features of colonial nations made up of immigrants.

So how does one start to belong in a new place? I am an immigrant, the only person in my extended family (that I know of) ever to live in Australia. I do not "belong" to this land yet. I can do something my ancestors didn't do when they moved to North America: I can recognize the rights and needs of the traditional owners of the land here. I can become an ally and friend to Australia's indigenous people. If I'm going to live in a land as an immigrant, can't I do that with the blessing of the people who do belong to this land? How does one start to belong in a new ecosystem? If there was ever a landscape I felt I belonged in, it was Colorado. I loved the mountains, the pines, the aspens, the cottonwoods, the mullein, the bluebells in spring. Summer thunderstorms rolling in off the plains and running up against the Rockies. The land in Colorado was like a friend to me, and I miss that friend. I also did things for that landscape, actively worked on conservation – tree planting after a fire, donating to local conservation groups. I can do the same things here in Queensland. I have a great fondness for open eucalyptus forests and subtropical rainforests with their towering strangler figs, but they aren't my friends yet. Can I come to love the land here, to see it as a friend? I'm still getting used to the plants and animals here, still in that stage of having them become familiar. Then the fondness will take root.

In the entry of May 19, I wrote about Okanagan elders saying of white folks in a valley below their village: " 'The ones below who are not of us [as place], may be a chaotic threat in action; they are all self-absorbed [arguing] inside each of their heads.' My father's words might be something like this: 'Their actions have a source, they have displacement panic, they have been pulled apart from themselves as family [generational sense] and place [as land/us/survival].' "² To have any sense of security and self-esteem, we of immigrant cultures need to regain that sense of family, community and place. But we don't just need to do it because it will make us happier. We need to do it for the sake of the world, because otherwise, modern industrial culture will poison and destroy everything in its path. I once heard someone on the radio say that America was the only culture that had colonized itself. It's time for modern industrial culture (and America is currently the driving force of that culture) to stop colonizing itself and others. For the sake of the world. For the sake of all that it means to be human. For the sake of our birthright of feeling we belong in the world.

¹ H. Brody, 2000, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, NY: North Point Press.
² J. Armstrong, "Keepers of the Earth," in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, T. Roszak, M. Gomes & A. Kanner (Eds.), San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. 316-324.

Ecological understanding & language

When biologists describe a new species, the popular press talks about it in terms of science has “discovered” a new species, “previously unknown.” This may well be true for deep sea species, but for plants and animals on land, in many cases the species wasn’t unknown at all. Often, whichever indigenous human group lives in or near that species’ habitat has known about the species for a long time. Ecologists and biologists are increasingly realizing that to describe the world’s ecosystems, they need to rely on the knowledge of the indigenous people who live in those systems.

In Australia’s Northern Territory, Parks & Wildlife is giving back native title for many lands within the Park system, and is working with local Aboriginal people to co-manage the wildlife in the parks. Surveys of flora and fauna are done in collaboration with Aboriginal people. In Arnhem Land in the far North, a long-necked river turtle lives in holes in the rock cliffs above a river that cuts a deep gorge through the Arnhem Plateau. Until the year 2000, this turtle had neither an English nor a scientific name, and scientists had not realized that it was different from the northern long-necked turtle, Chelodina rugosa. In the language of the Gagudju, however, one of the Aboriginal peoples who live on the Plateau, the Arnhem long-necked turtle was called burrundganji, whereas the northern long-necked turtle was called almangiyi. They made no such confusion between the two species. In honour of their knowledge, the biologists who formally described the Arnhem long-necked turtle used the Aboriginal name in the species’ scientific name, Chelodina burrundganjii.* There are only a handful of people left who still speak the Gagudju language. As in many Aboriginal languages, knowledge of the land and ecology is woven into the words and structure of the language. What ecological knowledge do we lose with each language that gets swallowed up by English?

Joint Park management in the Northern Territory

* from Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, by Mark Abley, 2003, London: Arrow Books (Random House)

Actually living

"I inhabited those moments in a way that was usually lost to me. They came through an amplifier that made … the pulsing world around us more vivid and radiant, more real. I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even, and the impassive way I’d treated them."*

That passage hit home. Reminds me of a refrigerator magnet poem I wrote years ago:

how used we are
to trudging through moments
when we could
smear summer sweet peaches on our tongues
swim in pounding seas
sing delirious sky music
drunk with being

* From Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair, London: Headline Book Publishing (Penguin), 2005, p. 191.

Science & indigenous knowledge

In the words that follow, I started to write about “Western culture,” by which I meant “those modern, industrialized cultures which have oppressed indigenous people around the globe, especially if the people in those cultures had dark skin.” When I lived in America, a lot of lefty political diatribes that I heard were full of references to “Western culture does [insert bad thing here]”, “people in Western culture are taught [insert bad belief here].” Now that I live in Australia, however, the term “Western culture” doesn’t sit as well with me. Which cultures and nations have traditionally colonized others? Though it mostly colonized the Americas in its early days, for the past century the U.S. has been a strong global force for colonialism. The nations of Europe have been colonized and have colonized others many times over. Australia and New Zealand are now separate nations, with mainstream cultures born of European backgrounds, but they are not geographically “Western.” The Chinese have a long history of imperialism, colonizing many indigenous peoples of Asia. Ask the indigenous Ainu of Japan if colonialism is a disease only of Western nations. In fact, the colonizers and the colonized are spread throughout Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Africa, Australia and the Pacific, so “Western culture” just doesn’t capture it. I think a more accurate way to put it in today’s world would be “modern industrial technological” culture, but it’s a bit unwieldy. And indigenous cultures have plenty of technology, it’s just different technology. What to do, linguistically? For now, I’ll just say “modern industrial culture.”

The colonial attitude is one of entitlement and superiority. Colonizers feel that because their way of life is superior, they have a right to supplant other ways of life with their own, and to help themselves to the resources of the colonized people without compensation to those people. The colonialism of the modern industrial world has extended to a colonial attitude towards other systems of knowledge. First, the attitude of superiority insists that the scientific knowledge of modern industrial culture is superior to other ways of knowing. Second, modern industrial culture has often acted as if entitled to the benefits of indigenous knowledge (such as pharmaceutical knowledge) without compensating indigenous peoples appropriately or at all.

There is a different model for interactions between indigenous people and scientists, where scientists ask "What can we learn from each other?" and "What can we do for you?" instead of saying, “Here, you need me to teach you,” or “What can I take from you?” Any such relationship has to be based on mutual respect, which means that scientists would have to be open to a world-view in which there are many valid kinds of knowing. How many scientists are truly open to such a view? Well, there’s a few of us, some geneticists, evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists and psychologists.

How does science treat non-scientific ways of knowing?

One thing I would like to do is to create a space to talk about two things: How can science and wisdom come closer together?
How can scientists and indigenous people come into mutually respectful dialogue? (And are there any good examples of this happening? I know of a couple here in Australia.)

Last week I went to a rally and walk for the National Day of Healing, which used to be called "Sorry Day." It started in 1999, with a movement for white Australians to say publicly, "I'm sorry" for the Stolen Generation (Aboriginal kids who were taken from their parents and adopted into white homes). On the first Sorry Day, there were about 40,000 people who turned out for the march in Brisbane, and almost twice that many in Sydney. Today there were less than a hundred of us, maybe 40 aboriginals, and 15-20 whites. (Though you can't tell by looking, so I'm not sure.) At the rally, there were some very sad stories of what Aboriginal people have gone through to try to find their families and their origins.

So, in the spirit of reconciliation, I'll just say here that I want to commend one scientific research/conmmercial project that is a (rare) example of what might possibly be a non-exploitive partnership between a scientist and a local Aboriginal tribe. Ron Quinn, a professor of chemistry at Griffith University here in Brisbane, is working to develop a painkiller from the bark of the mangrove tree. He learned about its painkilling properties from an Aboriginal group in the northwest of Australia, and under the terms of his grant to develop this painkiller, they get 50% of the proceeds from the sale of it. It's a rare example of acknowledging intellectual property rights, but at least there is one. (Ron Quinn's company generally appears to be a "bioprospecting" company that does not generally acknowledge aboriginal rights or contributions.)

I'm a good capitalist, but somehow I still feel empty

A friend is thinking about leaving a successful career, giving up on material possessions, residence and income, and simply walking, walking in the world under an open sky, until slowly, slowly, the pressure of modern life recedes, and she has a clear view of her inner world. (I do believe the plan was to have money available for food and shelter, don't worry.) My first reaction when I heard this was, of course, can I come too?

I’m willing to bet that anyone thinking about it would feel (before more practical considerations raised their ugly, dream-destroying little heads) the same tug, the same sense of what a delicious relief it would be to live a simplified life. Twenty-first century pilgrims, Kerouacs without cars, intrepid wilderness explorers without the wilderness, we’ll all take to the roads and byways... wait a minute. There’s something wrong with a culture in which people feel wistful about being free of the pressures of that culture. The world we have created for ourselves, this modern, commercial-industrial, growth-oriented world is intolerable to the human spirit.

Shouldn’t we just find a different way to live?

The Simple Living Network

What would science be like if ...?

Doing all this reading lately about indigenous cultures, and hunter-gatherer ways of knowing has made me think, what would science look like if it came from a different perspective? What would science look like if it was approached with the idea that wisdom was as essential an ingredient as knowledge? Not much to say on that topic today as I'm in a rush, but here's what author Barbara Kingsolver has to say:
"I have held in my hand the germ of a plant engineered to grow, yield its crop, and then murder its own embryos, and there I glimpsed the malevolence that can lie in the heart of a profiteering enterprise. I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship. A sacred grove, as ancient as time."

from Small Wonder: Essays, 2002, Harper Collins.