This Land Is Not Our Land

This is the title in one of the songs of the musical Nanyehi, written by Becky Hobbs and Nick Sweet. The musical is about the ancestor I share with Becky: Nancy Ward, a.k.a. Nanyehi. If you get a chance, go see this musical (information at the link above).

In this song, Nanyehi’s warrior cousin Tsiyu Gansini and his warriors has encountered a white farmer on Cherokee land. The farmer showed them the deed which the South Carolina legislature had given him, proving his land ownership. Tsiyu Gansini told him that it was Cherokee land and the legislature had no right to sell it. As a matter of fact, even the Cherokees did not own the land. Nobody can own the land. It belongs to the Great Spirit, or to God, or to all the species, not to any individual human. “This land is not our land, it’s only ours to use, it don’t belong to me, it don’t belong to you.” This is the original Cherokee view (and that of many other tribes), and remained so until private land ownership was forced upon the tribes (in the case of the Cherokees, by the Dawes enrollment of 1904).

For years, I have opened the class session about ecology, for my general biology students, with this song. It expresses perfectly what I want them to understand about ecology. After going over some basic concepts of ecology, such as the Ten Percent Law and biological magnification, I then show them a slide that summarizes ecosystem services, especially as it relates to plants. All the things that plants do for us for free! A forest is worth much more alive than dead. I wrote a whole book about this years ago: “Green Planet”.

How do I draw all of this together? If you look at the Earth, or any part of it, from the private ownership viewpoint, then a forest is worth more dead than alive. You, the owner, can get money for the timber. But to the world as a whole, it is worth more alive than dead. A living forest creates oxygen, uses up carbon dioxide, holds down the soil, lets rain penetrate into the soil, etc. But notice that these are all benefits not just to you, the owner, but to everyone else. If you forego the profits from the timber, most of the benefits go to other people and you cannot make a profit on it. Other people, who do not pay you, get to breathe the oxygen.

That is, to see the benefits of ecosystem services, you have to take the original tribal view rather than the modern capitalist view. The rich people who own most of the land do not care if the land’s ability to keep us alive is destroyed, so long as they can live someplace where someone else’s plants are producing oxygen and preventing floods.

Nobody in my classes has ever complained about my attack on unlimited private capitalism. I think it is because I introduced it in the context of tribal world views (in Oklahoma, many of my students are part or full Native American) and through the vehicle of Becky’s music.

Natural Selection at Work—Or Not

The free enterprise system is often considered to be a practical application of natural selection. Natural selection requires variation within a population, and that some of those variants are more successful than others, based not upon chance but upon their traits. Natural selection works on genetic variants in a biological population, and on different ideas within a culture. Good ideas (some of them called memes) catch on. It is supposed to work in the marketplace also: a company that treats their customers badly will, in theory, lose market share.

But this is not always true. On the day that I originally wrote this essay (August 21, 2014), Bank of America settled with the Department of Justice with a $16.65billion settlement, the largest settlement in history between a single corporation and the federal government. They used the financial crisis of the last decade as an opportunity to trick customers into buying investments that were falsely represented. You would think that the market would respond in Darwinian fashion and declare B of A to be a bad corporation, unworthy of investment. But you would be wrong. That same day, B of A stock prices were up 3 percent. Apparently corporations can do whatever they want and get away with it in the long run; if they get caught, the penalty is miniscule compared to the money they make by continuing to abuse their customers. Thank whatever God there may be that I got rid of both of my B of A mortgages. I still have some credit accounts, but the balances are shrinking and someday I will be certifiably B of A free.

Another example is a group called Wyndham Rewards. They book motel rooms online and give you bonus points for doing so. Sounds like a good deal, and for me, for a decade, it was. But just this summer motel managers started giving me horror stories about how customers who had booked online through Wyndham Rewards have gotten screwed over. In my case, a Super 8 motel put me into a smoking room when I had reserved a non-smoking room. This is a potential health hazard. The Super 8 refused to change my reservation until finally I threw so much of a tantrum that they were ready to call the police. It was a calculated tantrum, designed to apply psychological pressure on the manager. The manager at that motel, and managers at others, told me this was not an uncommon occurrence. The manager told me that I could pay for a non-smoking room if I wanted—that is, I could have paid for two rooms if I wanted the right one. Gee thanks.

I have spent hours trying to get this mistake resolved. The Super 8 manager blamed Wyndham, and Wyndham blamed the Super 8 manager, over and over. In the end, they got together and blamed me. The Wyndham customer service manager told me that the problem was my fault for having trusted the online Wyndham Rewards booking; and, once I arrived at the motel, I had done the right thing by reacting angrily in order to get a problem resolved.

I have concluded, based on my experience (and what motel managers have told me of other experiences) that Wyndham Rewards is a company that will take your business and offer you defective service in return. Will the market respond to these abuses? Or will Wyndham Rewards continue to be profitable despite the way they abuse customers?

I will attempt, now, to participate in the natural selection process. I have posted this blog entry. I will not use this company’s services again, nor will I stay (unless there is literally no other choice) at any of the associated hotel and motel chains. Here is the list:

·        Days Inn

·        Hawthorn

·        Howard Johnson

·        Knight’s Inn

·        Microtel

·        Ramada

·        Super 8

·        Travelodge

·        Wingate

·        Wyndham

Please join me in helping to reduce the profits of these companies and of Wyndham Rewards. It is possible that you may get satisfactory service from these hotels and motels by booking directly with them, but I, for one, will try to use the market against them because of their participation in Wyndham Rewards.

If we share our experiences online with others, it might actually make a difference. I certainly published my experiences on TripAdvisor. They sent me an email saying that 5,435 people have read my reviews (and that was a few months ago). And we should publish not just our negative experiences, but our positive ones. My most popular review was a very positive one about Buffalo River National River, which 1,350 people had read, mostly in the US but some from Europe as well. Numbers like this, while small in comparison to the total number of travelers, show that there is some hope for using the power of marketplace selection to make a difference in how customers are treated.

Let’s see if natural selection works in the marketplace.

Altruism: The Third Alternative for Ecology and Evolution

Consider the following to be my holiday message to you. It is adapted from an essay I wrote for my website.

I recently read a book entitled The Penguin and the Leviathan, by Yochai Benkler, a leading scholar in business research. I have read many books about altruism, many of them by scientists such as Frans deWaal (The Age of Empathy), Dacher Keltner (Born to Be Good), and Martin Nowak (Super Cooperators). These books repeatedly make the point that individuals within animal species, individual humans, and businesses can profit from being nice and generous to others. Altruism, rather than violent competition, is the most important component of “the law of the jungle.” Just ask any of the chimps that deWaal has studied. The way to the top is primarily through cooperation, not violent competition. Even apes understand this. Benkler’s book is published by Crown Business, a division of a major New York publisher. Its intended audience is not science buffs but business leaders. In the title, the Penguin is Tux, the icon of Linux, whose business model is cooperation rather than top-down command, and the Leviathan is the cynical view of life presented centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes.

Benkler, though not a scientist, has done a very good job of summarizing the evolutionary science of altruism. But the thing that opened my eyes the most was that Benkler presented altruism as a third alternative for how a society could operate. The other two ways are state control and free market. We usually think that these are our only two choices. But, as Benkler explains, this is not true.

Both state control (as exemplified by dictators on the political right or the political left) and free market economics operate from the assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish. State control attempts to force people to not be selfish. The free market tries to capitalize upon those utterly selfish economic machines known as humans. But Benkler points out that altruism is a fundamental instinct of the human mind. As Michael Shermer said, it feels good to be good; humans enjoy being altruistic. Altruism motivates much of what we do.

Our only hope, from Benkler’s viewpoint, is to build our society and economic system in a way that facilitates altruism. Governments should not try to solve all social and economic problems by law and by creating big agencies; governments should be (in my words) conduits of the altruism that already exists in people’s minds. Governments should be altruism enablers. Similarly businesses should embrace altruism, appealing to their customers’ instincts to want to create a better world for everybody. Customers are selfish, but also altruistic. Customers are increasingly offended by corporations that display conspicuous selfishness; that assume the customers are merely selfish; or that use little greenwashing gimmicks to make themselves look environmentally friendly or socially altruistic. We customers are not stupid, nor are we totally selfish. We are (some of us more than others) partly altruistic and we expect our governments and businesses to also be altruistic.

Benkler makes the point that right now, when dictatorships are falling and the free market has proven ineffective enough that it has shaken the very faith of Alan Greenspan himself, is the time when altruism has a chance to influence the very structure of the economy and government. Governments and business CEOs have been good only at spending money, with disastrous consequences that nobody can ignore any longer.

Altruism, perhaps the greatest gift of evolution, is also the only way to solve our environmental problems. Neither of the other alternatives, government fiat or the profit motive by itself, have significantly deflected our worldwide momentum toward ecological disaster.

Joy to the world? Altruism? Maybe.

Parasite Load

There are many parallels between ecosystems and the world of free enterprise commerce. A well-functioning economy resembles a healthy ecosystem in many ways: natural selection favoring the most effective individuals, whose interactions are sometimes competitive, but are also frequently altruistic (within species) or mutualistic (between species). Every ecosystem has parasites, but any ecosystem in which parasites proliferated to the point of commandeering most of the energy flow would quickly degenerate and collapse.

The modern American economy is dominated by parasitic corporations. One such corporation is Bank of America. They are good at doing only two things: taking bailout money, and compensating their CEO. They did repay all $45 billion of their TARP money, but they continue to be incompetent at everything else. But they, the parasites, inflict their incompetence upon us, the hosts.

I have learned this through experience. I recently tried to refinance a mortgage through Bank of America, which was a fiasco. My application was reassigned to a series of five different people, and at each transition documents were lost and new rules popped up out of nowhere. Finally, I decided to terminate the application. Fortunately, I did not need the money.

What I encountered was sheer incompetence. Average consumers work hard and earn money from their work, but corporations are parasitic upon their employees and customers. In particular, financial corporations keep the entire country under a burden of usury. They are parasites on us. They give us nothing useful in return, certainly not money. When you pay back some of what you owe, on time, what you get in return is a higher interest rate (or at least that was the case until Obama’s financial overhaul package became law). Financial corporations suck America dry, drinking in a large proportion of the economy like drunk ticks.

Fortunately there is one thing we can do. We can simply choose to not participate. We can refuse to participate in the business ecosystem, burdened by its parasites, except where necessary. We can just say no to any unnecessary expenditures. I know that this is “bad for the economy” but it produces a sense of personal, even spiritual, liberation to just not buy things.

The image that I keep in mind is this. Bdelloid rotifers (is that what you were expecting?)! Fungal parasites kill them, but they simply dry up and blow away in the wind, leaving their fungal parasites behind! And that is what I am trying to do, by meditating upon the good things I have in life, and not thinking about things I would like to obtain.

Social Evolution: Capitalism Works Except When It Doesn't

This entry is recycled from myprevious evolution blog (March 2009) that I have now closed.

One of the hallmarks of the human species is altruism. There are three kinds of altruism: generosity toward one’s family; generosity toward others who might someday reciprocate; and generosity to poor and perhaps unknown strangers, which gives the altruist an enhanced social standing. All three forms of altruism are really enlightened self-interest rather than pure sacrifice.

As events in the past year have vividly shown, bankers and “financial services” executives seem to be outside of this universal human realm of altruism. (“Services,” in this sense, appear to have the same meaning as “servicing” a livestock animal.) The insurance giant AIG has received so much federal bailout money that it is now mostly owned by us, the taxpayers. In 2009, they announced their intention to give $165 million of the taxpayer money as executive bonuses, much of it to the very executives who bankrupted the company. They claimed that they have no choice in the matter, that they had already promised these bonuses before they received bailout money. The outpouring of rage from the American people was nearly unprecedented. USA Today had a picture on its front page of the AIG logo with a tomato spattered on it.

Some writers have applied the concepts of natural selection to the economy. Their view is “the survival of the fittest,” and their system is called capitalism. Strangely, some of the people most enthusiastic about survival of the fittest in the marketplace reject evolutionary science. There are several problems with doing this. One is that human individuals and societies have options open to them that other animal species do not. We have an intricate form of cultural evolution. We can decide to say no to our genes, and to do what we think is right even if it is not in our selfish individual interests. Richard Dawkins quoted the intentionally childless Steven Pinker as saying, “My selfish genes can go jump in the lake.” Another is that extreme capitalists have applied only part of evolutionary theory: they have applied “survival of the fittest” but totally omitted altruism. The result is true stupidity: for example, AIG seems to be totally clueless that being mindful of their civic duty could be worth billions of dollars of customer revenues to them. If they think they can make us their customers by hitting us atop the head with a club, they are following the 1950’s-B-movie version of evolution, not the scientific version.

Capitalism works except when it doesn’t. Republicans have said to just let companies do whatever the hell they want to. Senator Phil Gramm has been especially vigorous in removing federal oversight and underfunding the Securities and Exchange Commission. Then, when outrageous selfishness causes an economic collapse, these same capitalists come with lugubrious faces and outstretched palms asking for socialist handouts.