Earth, We Have a Narrative, Part Two.

As I said in the preceding entry, scientists need to tell visceral, compelling stories if we are to have any chance that the public will notice the Truth that we Reveal. We have yottabytes of information about global warming, but Senator Jim Inhofe can simply say that God told him there is no global warming, and that settles it. (He vaguely refers to the Bible for support, but misquotes it.) We scientists are the Revealers of Truth, at least as much as any group of humans can be. We need to get our story out. This is part of the message I get from Randy Olson’s Houston, We Have a Narrative, which I introduced previously.

But how can we get a compelling, visceral story out of global warming?

The best stories have a single protagonist and often a single antagonist, good vs. evil. It is not as successful if you have a whole population of protagonists or antagonists. Stalin said that the suffering of an individual is a tragedy, while the suffering of a multitude is a statistic. He knew a thing or two about causing such statistics. I remember a church play when I was a teenager in which two girls were chattering away while a boy was agonizing over the suffering of the world. When he said, “My grandmother died,” the girls immediately stopped chattering and came over to comfort him. Then when he said, “Not really, but a million other grandmothers died,” the girls went right back to their chattering.

The protagonist need not be perfectly good or the antagonist perfectly evil, but they need to be there. But with global warming, the protagonists are the thousands of scientists and environmentalists who are trying to lead the world toward an atmospheric carbon balance that will avoid catastrophe. And the antagonists are everybody, including many scientists, who simply consume too much energy, directly or indirectly, by driving vehicles that are bigger than they need to be, using the air conditioning more than we need to, etc. Corporations are also antagonists, but they are responding to our demand. Oil companies could not make money if we decided we don’t want to burn as much oil.

But maybe here we have the kernel of a good story here. Let’s start building a plot. The antagonists are two gray-haired men who just happen, by merest chance, to resemble the Koch Brothers, mega-giants of the oil industry. And in their bored-room, they are depressed, because they have seen all the economic analyses that show that demand for oil is decreasing even while most economic growth and jobs are in wind and solar. Renewable energy is good for the economy, but not for them. Oh, wait, this is getting good. Into the bored-room comes the daughter-in-law of one of the men. She cries as she sees the charts on the smart-boreds. (I can do even better. Got it!) She is holding their little granddaughter. She says, Daddy, you promised me that oil was the key to a golden future for our family, but all around me I see climate disasters, and I just know that my daughter, your grand-daughter, is going to grow up in a cataclysmic world of climate disruption. Oh, Daddy, how could you do this to me? To her? Then, of course, you need the morally-conflicted son who finally decides to leave his high-paying oil job and join Earth First! and sabotage bulldozers. And then...

You get the point. You can see why this kind of fiction might never get published and would never become a movie, since there is so much money and political power (are there any politicians who are not wholly dependent on industry money?) against it. Now, meanwhile, there is a protagonist. A climate scientist who just happens to look like Michael Mann is driving out in the countryside at night, headed into New York City where he is going to fly, at the last minute, to France, where he will be warmly embraced by President Emmanuel Macron, who has invited American climate scientists to move to France (this part is real). He has just said goodbye to his father, who happens to look like James Hanson. But, in a scene that I am shamelessly stealing from the movie Silkwood, somebody forces his car over to the side of the road...

At the last minute, it is the son of the oil magnate who rescues the climate scientist...

This would be a dangerous narrative to promote. Corporations would not like it one bit, and when they don’t like something, watch out. We are, therefore, left with the complex, less visceral narrative, not just because of oil industry money, but because the oil giants are not the only antagonists.

The climate denialists could come up with something similar. A novelist and screenwriter could come up with an evil, secret organization of environmentalists who want to kill the one, heroic climate scientist who knows the truth that global warming is a hoax. The evil environmentalists drive around in blue Priuses looking for their victims. The Antarctic ice isn’t really melting; it is the evil, evil scientists who cause the glaciers to fall apart by blowing them up with bombs. And the evil, evil scientists also issue false weather reports so that families with smiling, playing kids will have picnics in river valleys all unaware that a gigantic rain event is going to flood them to their deaths, over which the scientists will drool in glee. Of course, this kind of book is so stupid that it couldn’t get published.

Wait. The above paragraph is pretty much a summary of Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear. Millions have read it and think it is pretty much a true picture, with the names changed to protect the guilty. But while oil corporations could sue the ass off of anyone who would write the first novel idea I proposed above, even with the names changed, who has ever sued Michael Crichton for his novel? At least, a Google search turned up nothing. And he’s dead now.

The narrative that the oil companies are spreading is:

• The oil companies aren’t in it for the money. Oil executives make thousands of times more money than any climate scientist, but this does not, of course, color their perception. They are totally free of the love of money.
• The oil companies want to make the future more secure for you, your children, and your grandchildren. They could not possibly be sacrificing your future for short-term gain.
• The oil companies are the only ones who can save us.

With this kind of narrative, you can see why scientists like Michael Mann get death threats. People who buy into the oil company narrative see climate scientists as, practically, killers.

You can see the problem. Climate science explains things, while denialists simply accuse everyone else of being evil. The denialists have the thriller-story.

This is the same problem that almost any scientific topic has. Take diabetes. (You can have it. I have it, not too badly yet.) How can you tell a story that has a single protagonist and single antagonist? You cannot start a story with someone suffering multiple amputations or something; that would be too depressing. It would be better to start with someone who has just experienced his first, and frightening, diabetes-related event. He’s driving along in the country, and he happens to look like me, and drive a car like mine (a bright green Prius), and he suddenly starts going blind and has to pull over and park. It isn’t really blindness; it is an ocular migraine, in which a small gray circle like a solar afterglow spreads across the whole field of vision, breaking the visual information apart into twinkles and scrambling it. In fifteen minutes it is all over, the man’s vision has returned, but he realizes he should have taken the earlier warning signs more seriously. This is scary without being depressing.

But the antagonist? What would it be, a pancreas? Or would it be...ah, I’ve got it. The antagonist could be a pharmaceutical corporation that wants to charge one hundred billion zimbabwean dollars per pill for something you have to take twice a day. The protagonist is a botanist who studies a rare species of tree that has a phytochemical that can control diabetes, but the pharmaceutical companies know about it and are hunting him down to get him from threatening their multibillion dollar glucophage and insulin industry. Now, I wonder where that idea came from? Actually, I discovered a plant extract that kills bacteria, and a small pharmaceutical company was investigating it, but a big company bought them out and stopped the research. I imagine that it was because the chemical in my extract remains active even at high temperatures and after sitting on a desk and drying out for months, and would thus be very cheap to transport onto the battlefield and into the jungles... But, of course, I do not know any of this.

My point is that the only way to make major scientific topics such as global warming or diabetes into gripping narratives would be to do things like this to them. Or maybe some very creative person could come up with a middle road between boring and overdramatized that would work. We’re still waiting for that to happen, and it can’t happen soon enough.

Walking—A Connection to Our Evolutionary Past

Our bodies evolved to enable prolonged exercise, which is quite absent from our modern lifestyle. We have used technology to create artificial environments, but not environments to which our bodies are adapted. My preferred form of exercise (one which, unlike organized sports, is consistent with my general clumsiness) is walking.

Walking uses up blood glucose, and it does so happily: you can relax, you can notice things about trees and birds and people, and it doesn’t cost anything, except for some cheap shoes. And it is something that most people (including most diabetics) can do. There is no minimum amount of walking less than which is useless. And it brings lots of oxygen into your alveoli. Once in a while I even break into a jog, though not for very far.

Of course, unexpected problems can arise. For me, it is the fact that in rural Oklahoma, nearly everyone drives a pickup truck that belches out huge billows of fumes. Even the new ones. I wonder if part of the standard detailing of new trucks in rural Oklahoma is to attach a little spigot that sprays fumes into the air directly from the fuel tank. (I just made that up. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.) Almost every man in rural Oklahoma is so worried about his manhood that he feels he has to compensate for whatever he has to compensate for by getting a big truck (sometimes with truck balls). (I didn’t make that part up.) And of course they leave a stream of fumes that the wind blows into my alveoli for an entire block. If there is one truck on the road, it will find me and pickle me in its hydrocarbons. And of course almost everybody lets their dogs run loose. The dogs would probably eat me if I were not glazed with petroleum derivatives.

Walking creates a positive feedback loop. The more walking, the more capacity for walking.

Walking allows me to notice things about trees. What I did not expect was that my observations would become useful. In 2006, I started making maps of the trees along my walking route, and writing down the day in spring when each tree burst its buds. It turns out that, from 2008 to the present, the trees have been opening their buds about two days earlier each year, a rather striking record of global warming. A research presentation at the world meeting of scientists who study phenology came out of these observations.

By pursuing a healthy lifestyle, I make myself a better participant in the health of the planet, create a positive feedback loop for even greater health, and open myself up to serendipity.

The Selfish Diabetic

I have a slight case of diabetes, which has proven manageable by changes diet and lifestyle, without medication. But the diagnosis I originally received got me thinking about how a diabetic might look at the world.

One of the easiest things that can happen when one is diagnosed with the onset of diabetes is to become immensely selfish. It would be easy for a diabetic to ignore the problems of the rest of the world and say that his or her focus should be, aside from work and family, on maintaining his or her health. Where could such a person find the time to also worry about such things as global warming and world hunger?

This argument would be true if living happily with diabetes were a problem separate from others, and if it had a purely technical solution. But the diabetic has to choose how to live. And, as it turns out, living responsibly in the world is also the path to health despite diabetes.

As it turns out, the kinds of food that diabetics have to reject are the same kinds of food that are killing the global ecosystem. To live as a deliberately happy diabetic is to live in an ecologically responsible fashion. Among the things that I have to reject, to keep diabetes from developing, are refined sugar and fat meat. But these are also foods I must reject if I am to be a responsible world citizen. Some of the best tropical farmland in the Philippines is used to raise sugar, as an export crop, rather than to raise food for Filipinos. We Americans can pay more for sugar than poor Filipinos can pay for rice and beans. My use of sugar was contributing to keeping Filipinos poor. And fat beef? A vast amount of farm acreage in the United States is used to raise corn and soybeans not for human consumption but to feed to livestock, especially cows. Industrial farming, processing the corn and beans, feeding it to livestock, and processing the livestock uses a huge amount of energy, most of it from fossil fuels, and generates a lot of waste, including bovine-burp methane which is a potent greenhouse gas. I now eat less beef, thus reducing the market for some of the most environmentally destructive commercial practices. The change in diet I have to make is the change I should have made anyway. I had already, for ecological reasons, begun eating less sugar and beef; I just needed to go further in that direction. The right thing for me was also the right thing for the world. It didn’t have to be that way, but it is.

“The environment” is a misleading term. It is not just about rare birds and distant rainforests. The environment is everything that surrounds us, and includes us. The environment is the medium through which we relate to other people. Part of what we do to love other people is to help to keep the environment safe for them to live in.

Frequently, the best foods for diabetics are those that are not locally grown and are not available at all times of the year. That is, for most American diabetics, much good food must be transported thousands of miles and/or processed. Transportation and processing use a lot of energy and have a major impact on the environment. I thought about this when I bought fresh broccoli and lettuce in the winter. What do you think? Should I have done this? I also bought fresh carrots and cabbage. Carrots and cabbage can at least be stored for longer periods than broccoli and lettuce; they can be raised and stored locally, to a certain extent. Sugar comes from tropical farmlands; but stevia is an imported tropical product also. Unsweetened yogurt and dried fruits also have less environmental impact than fresh green vegetables in the winter. I say this in order to simply admit that a happy diabetic, eating from the vast table of foods that are healthy, will often encounter foods that are not “environmentally friendly,” even if they are pesticide-free. (Mushrooms? They can be local and year-round. All you need is a dark room and (let’s call it) mulch. And every place has mulch.)

Nevertheless, for the most part, a happy diabetic eats foods that are better for the environment and for the people of the world than he or she might otherwise have eaten. There is no need for a diabetic to cast aside a dedication to environmental and social responsibility in order to be a happy eater.

How does this relate to evolution? In the Stone Age, humans didn’t have to worry about the environment. Nowadays, there are so many of us and our technology is so toxic that every little thing we do is wrong. Don’t throw anything on the ground, etc. But we no longer live in the environment in which we evolved. We live in an environment thick with other human beings whose interests we must altruistically respect.

Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants

This is the subtitle to Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. Those seven words delineate a perfectly adequate diet: for anyone; for anyone interested in saving the planet; and for borderline diabetics.

Last winter I was diagnosed with the beginning of diabetes. I am not yet at the stage that requires any medication, and the fact that since that time I have lost 20 pounds might mean that I am safe. My response is to find creative solutions that I can enjoy. I am posting occasional entries about diabetes on this site if they relate to evolution and/or to the environment in which we have evolved and in which we live. I am not turning this blog into a diabetes forum.

Diabetes is considered to be a disease of civilization. That is, many scientists believe it results from physiological adaptations that were perfectly good in the Stone Age but which are maladaptive for civilized people. I can see that this argument makes sense for obesity. The ability to store food in the form of fat, during a time of feasting, and then use it up later during famine, was utterly essential in the Stone Age, when your tribe might get to feast on a dead mammoth then have nothing for a long time. But today, when food is continuously available, obesity results from fat storage. As Pollan said in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, our bodies are preparing for a famine that never comes. Not only that, but fat storage was a sign of affluence in the Stone Age; being fat was therefore attractive to potential mates. There is a fair amount of Paleolithic pornography to this effect. Therefore both natural and sexual selection favored the potential for obesity in Paleolithic times.

But diabetes? How could the inability to control blood sugar levels be adaptive under any set of conditions? Some scientists say that having high blood sugar levels (that is, a reduced ability of cells to absorb and use the sugar) was adaptive because it kept our Stone Age ancestors from using up their blood sugar too fast. Sorry, but this sounds like one of those just-so stories that modern evolutionary science is trying to get away from. The nascent science of evolutionary medicine would be well served to leave such stories behind. Of course, I could be wrong, in which case I will post a revision of the opinion here stated. Diabetics need to eat lots of small meals; this is precisely what our Stone Age forebears did not always have the luxury of doing, especially when they spent all day chasing down big game and when wild grains, roots, nuts, and berries were unavailable.

Some people propose that we adopt the Paleolithic Diet. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that this is not too useful unless you adopt the Paleolithic Lifestyle—running through the forest or across the savanna all day.

Michael Pollan’s advice, to eat food, not too much, most plants, is good advice for all of us. People with diabetic tendencies could include a bias against starch and sugar.

I will be participating in Botany 2013, the big meeting of botanists, starting next weekend. If I have a chance, I will blog from there.