In Transit: The Joys of Flying

I like flying, I really do. My mother agrees with me. We talked about it in the car on the way to the airport—she was nice enough to agree to pick me up and drop me off.

For me, I love the aerial view. Just love it. Don’t care if it’s cloudy or sunny. If it’s sunny then I have an unimpeded view of the ground and I can track the changing watershed basins, transportation networks, topology, geology, and ecology right beneath me. When we’re close to the ground I analyze the connectivity of classic cul-de-sac suburban neighborhoods and compare them to the connectivity of the older, denser neighborhoods that you find closer to city and town centers. I try to guess which highway that is (probably the accursed I-81). When we’re higher up I try to recognize landmarks such as lakes and mountain ranges. Flying out of the airport in Burlington, VT provides an amazing view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. Far below, tiny pools of water shimmer like coins, scattered at various elevations throughout the mountains, are testament to the legacy of the glaciers that shaped the landscape of the Northeast 12,000 years ago. If it’s spring or fall, I can see the changing seasons illustrated in the graduated amounts of green on the ground as I travel south or north. That was obvious today. Traveling from New York to DC, the white crusts of ice on ponds and rivers disappeared, exchanged for a faint fuzz of green shading over the farm fields.

If it’s cloudy out, once the plane rises above the cloud cover, I put on my polarized sunglasses (a necessity for this; otherwise, it’s just too bright to make out much detail, and probably bad for your eyes to boot) and attempt to puzzle out the topography of the clouds. There must be more atmospheric instability over there to the west, where the clouds are roiled and rising, as opposed to the other clouds which are smooth and scalloped and static. I know less about atmospheric science than I do about geography, geology, and ecological communities, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to apply my limited knowledge and having fun with it.
Having this level of intellectual stimulation, combined with the excitement of turbulence and the involuntary gasps of breath and speeding heart rate that comes with it, makes flying pretty much the best roller coaster ride I can imagine. (Obviously the excitement fades if you’re on the plane for more than a few hours, which is why I can’t in honesty extend my praise to international flights to, say, New Zealand–the thing I remember most about that flight is when a poor suffering 6-month-old baby puked on my bag.)

My mother, on the other hand, mentioned that she doesn’t mind having layovers in airports because she enjoys people-watching. Of course she does, she’s a people-observer and people-interactor by profession–she’s a registered nurse (shoutout to nurses! one of the most under-appreciated professions in the country). To me, the clothes, bags, languages and movements of the mass of people passing through an airport form a sort of cultural topography that the geographer in me itches to map somehow. Do people from different countries tend to congregate in different areas of the airport, what are the customs around sharing phone charging outlets, striking up random conversations, etc. Right now I’m at the Washington Dulles airport, staring more or less directly at an older balding white guy who has a ton of musical electronic equipment out and is bobbing his head and singing along to something, while a troupe of black-veiled Muslim women herd their children down the concourse behind him. Flight for Riyadh is leaving soon. Rarely do you see such a concentration of diversity, and the combination of people in an extreme hurry with people who are idling hours away, like me, is especially amusing to watch.

To top it all off, the musician I saw at my friend’s house last night sang a really sweet song of his own invention about the magic of kisses in airports, so I’m happily thinking of that right now. Thanks, Old Man Luedecke, for that. I promise I’ll buy some tracks, once my wallet recovers from this little jaunt. In the meantime, maybe some other folks want to check out his stuff? If you like good folky-style songwriters, you will not be disappointed, I guarantee.

All this, and I’m not even halfway to Austin. This is gon’ be good. If you’re in Austin, if you’re at the American Atheist Con, tweet at me if you want to hang out, talk, get a drink, do some karaoke, or whatever. I’m down for anything.

Austin, Here I Come!

I have been so busy during the past couple of weeks. Spending a lot of time out in the rural areas where there’s little cell coverage, much less free wifi. I have so many things that I want to write about but here is the most important thing right now: tomorrow I get on a plane and will arrive in Austin TX for the American Atheist Convention!

Just the fact that I have a Surly Amy Scholarship to go to this event has pretty much forced my out of the closet with a whole bunch of people. I tell them that I’m going to Austin, and they ask why, and I tell them. It’s pretty awesome.

Tonight I was reminded that there are awesome people and cool things happening pretty much everywhere–a neighbor of mine hosted a house party/acoustic concert which was well attended, though I have my complaints about the etiquette of some of the attendees–why go to such an event if you just want to talk over the music at the top of your lungs?–but it’s nice to be reminded that my little upstate wannabe-city isn’t a complete washout in terms of art and culture.

I have made arrangements to rent a bike for the weekend and I intend to take full advantage of that rental. I’ve heard, via colleagues in the transportation planning field, that Austin is a great place to bike (relatively), so I plan on testing that out.

This is going to be, first of all, WARM. Second of all, lots of fun. More updates will follow as events warrant.

Fuck the Pope

In honor of the election of Pope Francis, I actually sat down and listened to the entire Pope Song by Tim Minchin. I agree with it entirely. Fuck the Catholic Church, fuck the Pope, and fuck you if you still call yourself a Catholic after everything–the tens of thousands of children raped and abused, the girls and women enslaved in the Magdalene Laundries, the needless suffering imposed on hundreds if not thousands of sick and dying people by Mother Theresa, the promotion of a profoundly, fundamentally immoral philosophy under the disguise of being God’s infallible moral voice on Earth–all of it. There no fucking excuse. None. The Catholic Church is evil.

I recently discovered the website Information is Beautiful, run by David McCandless. As a person with interest and some experience in creating maps, I truly respect the work that has gone into these thoughtful, elegant representations of reality. Please click on the link, because the image you see above is cropped. The original graphic gives much more terrifying detail about the possible outcomes of 3 – 6 degrees of warming, which seems likely, including the flooding of coastal cities, reduction in crop yields, ocean acidification and attendant fishery collapses, droughts, severe hurricanes.

This is an excellent graphic – I already knew most of the information in it, but one thing that leaped out at me, which I hadn’t really grokked before. That is the fact that fossil fuel extraction companies already possess in their reserves enough oil and gas to push us into ecological catastrophe. And of course they are still proposing new pipelines, new wells in the Arctic and the Gulf, the Tar Sands, and that’s before you even leave North America.

I hope you click that link and take a look – the image you see above is a cropped version of the original.

I have to confess that I am pessimistic about the future of our civilization. I’m pretty sanguine about the ultimate survival of humans qua humans, but that’s cold comfort when I consider the fact that my sister’s grandchildren may only know about the internet from stories told by bitter old survivors.

Let’s think for a minute about a few of the things we would have to do in order to really get serious about climate change. According to the experts who provided the data behind the image from Information is Beautiful, we have about 10 – 13 years to get really serious about doing something to stop or slow greenhouse gas emissions:

• Transportation: widespread replacement of fuel infrastructure for individual vehicles. Development of hydrogen or electric vehicles. Better yet, severe cutbacks in use of personal vehicles and large increase in public transportation and automobile alternatives such as bicycles
• Food: complete redesign of food production and distribution systems so that fewer calories of oil are burned in the process of growing the good and the process of moving it to the market that needs it, and agricultural land is managed sustainably so that it requires fewer fossil fuel-based inputs
• Housing: efficiency retrofits for all existing housing stock, stringent efficiency requirements for new construction, including possible the requirement of passive solar design and solar hot water heating
• Energy: complete redesign of electrical grid so it can deal with decentralized power production as well as peaks of various types of energy production throughout the day
• Consumer goods: entities that produce material goods for consumption should be responsible for entire life cycle of pollution generated by production, including greenhouse gases burned in transporting raw materials and finished goods from extraction to manufacture to market. “Recycle” would be a silly, redundant word, because it should be unthinkable to manufacture a product that can only be used once

These are all things which are completely doable – but they’re nearly impossible because our political system has been captured and subverted – and some of the same companies that are planning this irresponsible development of further fossil fuel extraction are the same that are causing the profound disconnect between what the constituents of our allegedly representative democracy want and need, and what their elected representatives are willing to do for them.

Take one example – in the housing category, one simple thing we could do is pass a law that all roof shingles and other roofing materials must be white or light-colored. This would increase the albedo, or average reflectivity of the land surface in the country, and that would slow the process of warming by sending more heat back out into space rather than keeping it here to get trapped by those greenhouse gases. And can you imagine the outcry from right wing Congressional representatives and the right wing media? How dare the government tell homeowners what color to paint their roofs! It’s unthinkable, at least for national legislation in the USA. Just that one tiny little thing.

So I’m pessimistic. Sad to say. I really hope I’m wrong, but I’m deadly scared that I’m right – and if I allow myself to contemplate the information, my heart starts to break and I can’t finish the work I was trying to do.

I do have suggestions for how we can achieve a change in our political system dramatic enough for us to make the drastic changes required to deal effectively with climate change, and I want to write about those too – but I doubt that 10 – 15 years is enough time to implement that change. I am still going to try, though.

EDIT: I have no idea why WordPress insists on transforming my hyperlinked text into text that is also HUGE.

Visualizations

are cool.

It’s the solar system from a non-fixed perspective. Well done, DJ Sadhu.

A Shiny Happy Moment

A few months ago, my truck broke down. I was kind of in the middle of a street, albeit a side street in a little housing development, and I was trying to push it off a little further to the side of the road. I was in front of a couple of the apartments. Well, this sweet young couple came out and offered to help me move the truck. I gratefully accepted. Then, they invited me inside so I could have someplace warm and dry to wait for the tow truck. Then, they offered me dinner while I was waiting. The man was a native to the region, more or less, and his wife was an immigrant from Sri Lanka. Her mother also lived with them. They were so kind and helpful. They served me a generic lentil and rice dish, and also kale chips, which were surprisingly tasty (and by “tasty,” I mean “salty”–I love salty stuff). Finally the tow truck came and I bid them goodbye, but first I got their number and promised to get in touch since they were such cool people.

Well, today I was driving by their house and I remembered their kindness and my intention to contact them. I had been thinking about them in the past couple of days, thinking about how hard it is to find friends in new places (it’s been about a year since I moved to the Southern Tier region) and that I should really get in touch with them. So I stopped and knocked on the door, more or less on a whim. They were home! And the giant photographs of their wedding in Sri Lanka were missing from the walls and there were boxes everywhere. They remembered me instantly and invited me in, warning off the hyperactive terrier that was a new addition to the family.

Turns out they’re moving – if I had stopped by the same time next week, I would have found an empty apartment, or someone else moving in.

But the fact that I stopped in sort of cemented our connection, and it turned out that I know a bunch of people in the area they’re moving to–including my sweetheart, whom I visit fairly often. So I promised to ring them soon with phone numbers and names of people I know, and to drop by for dinner the next time I head south to visit.

I have more substantive posts brewing in my brain, but I just wanted to share that little story in the meantime. People can be wonderful. And when you find wonderful people, don’t let them go! Follow up on those connections! I wish I had dropped by earlier so that I could have cooked them dinner in return for the time they nourished me in my moment of distress. But hey, I didn’t miss them entirely, and now I know even MORE people in Maryland!

So. It left me feeling a little “shiny happy” today. I hope you got the warm fuzzies too.

P.S. Is it just me, or do Michael Stipe and Quentin Tarentino look a lot alike? Especially in their earlier incarnations. Weird.

Day of Solidarity with Black Non-Believers

Today, February 24th, is the fourth Sunday in February, and as such it is the third annual Day of Solidarity with Black Non-Believers.

In 2011, Donald Wright first proposed holding a Day of Solidarity for Black Non-believers without asking anyone’s permission; he didn’t wait to see if hundreds of people would line up behind the idea before taking that first step and creating a Day of Solidarity in Houston, Texas. Although there doesn’t seem to be much promotion for the Day of Solidarity this year, no one has to wait for permission to celebrate the Day of Solidarity either. If anyone, anywhere, wants to celebrate the DoS, please, go right ahead and create your own event; contact other nonbelievers in your own community and decide how you’d like to spend that time with each other: share a meal; visit an art gallery or museum; go see a movie or a play; go ice-skating; etc. Make some phone calls, post your event on your own Facebook page as well as on the DoS Facebook page; celebrate, and remain an activist—not just a joiner—for the rest of the year; make a commitment to social change. Right now, what society needs are people who are committed to social change; we have enough talkers, and in order to create meaningful change, we must each assume leadership by doing the right thing—with or without company!

The future as well as the integrity of the secular community depends not on people who do as they are told, but on those of us who are both independent thinkers and activists.

–Naima Washington

So, when I was 12 or 13, I was walking down Main Street, passing the department store, heading for the library, and I saw a group of black boys, high schoolers or college students. I remember noticing how my heart sped up with fear. Somehow I’d absorbed the idea that young black men are extra dangerous – more so than the “average” (read: white) man. This didn’t really jive with my young nerdy embrace of the Vulcan ethos, “IDIC,” Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination. Difference is not to be feared, so I thought, and so I believed consciously, but subconsciously I feared those young men. It’s a vivid memory, perhaps because the cognitive dissonance was so strong.

My parents were proud of being supportive of the civil rights movement, and emphasized ideas about equality. They were not big on enforcing or obeying gender stereotypes. They spoke approvingly about MLK Junior and beamed with pride when I “went steady” in 7th grade with a cute dark-skinned boy in the 8th grade who won the dance contest at the Junior High Dance, and gave me the blue teddy bear he won thereby as a Valentine’s Day present. And yet there I was, acting out the stereotype that young black men and boys are violent thugs.

That experience is one among many that predisposed me to quickly grasp the concept that racism is a system in which we all participate, sometimes without intending to or even knowing that we are. I think that’s something that white can do to help the struggle against racism – have an accurate understanding of racism and how it works. Embrace the Smooth Model of racism – it’s about the effects, not the intent.

Think about your neighborhood for a minute. Then consider that, concurrent to the public apartheid of Jim Crow, there was also a fully legal and government-sanctioned program of segregation by neighborhood and sometimes by town. This practice was called “redlining” and if you’re not familiar with the practice, basically it meant banks and the Federal Housing Authority collaborating to identify and map neighborhoods that were “good investments” and which were “too risky.” The Wiki page has a pretty succinct description, so I’ll just put it here:

Such maps defined many minority neighborhoods in cities as ineligible to receive financing. The maps were based on assumptions about the community, not accurate assessments of an individual’s or household’s ability to satisfy standard lending criteria. Since African-Americans were unwelcome in white neighborhoods, which frequently instituted racial restrictive covenants to keep them out, the policy effectively meant that blacks could not secure mortgage loans at all.

Emphasis mine. See how skepticism comes into play here? Racism clouded the ability of the white men making those maps to accurately assess reality. And because of that, they did a lot of damage: they made it nearly impossible for several generations of black families to get mortgages for their houses, loans for their businesses, and even supermarkets in their neighborhoods.

That’s just one area in which the basic material substrate of our lives is so heavily influenced by our history of racialized injustice here in the USA. The house you live in, the neighborhood, how far you have to drive to get groceries (whether you have to drive, too), and of course whether your family has generations of wealth-generating home ownership to draw on. Pick a realm of life–education, medicine, environmental hazards, work, whatever–and there’s a similar story of deliberate exclusion, papered over by the pretense that the Civil Rights movement was, like, a million years ago, and slavery was a million years before that, and everything’s copacetic now. This is an attitude that a.) does not withstand critical inquiry; as I just demonstrated, the footprints of racism are everywhere, if you don’t deliberately blind yourself to them and b.) does active harm to the project of achieving equality. When you have one group of people asking, “How can we solve this problem?” and another group is saying, “There is no problem here,” there can’t be any productive dialogue. The question of whether racism, and other bigotries, are a problem in the atheist/skeptic community (as they are in ALL communities, without exception) is a binary question: either it is a problem, or it is not. The correct answer is that there is a problem. As skeptics, we need to stop being patient with those who insist that there is no problem. They should have no more credibility than creationists or climate change deniers.

Eventually this will happen, but we can help it along by not taking discussions of how you may have come across as racist so personally, and by paying attention, getting accurate information, and applying critical thinking. And of course speaking out against racism as often and as loudly as possible, joining actions, donating to organizations such as Sikivu Hutchinson’s Women’s Leadership Project.

This is my very small contribution to the Day of Solidarity with Black Non-Believers this year. Next year I hope to join in again, with a bit more lead time – I think I heard about it just a couple of weeks ago for the first time – and I hope you’ll join in too.