The Saunterer

John Erskine on the language of music

    There is bigoted speaking. There are nasty drawings. There could be sadistic pantomime or dancing. Yet music is special for permitting only the communication of good things, John Erskine said:

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

    For a brief biography of John Erskine, click here.

Mike McKinney on the idiocy of the human race

    Of all the species, we are the most intelligent. Much the most of our intelligence is misguided. Misguided intelligence is idiocy. In a word: Of all the species, we are the only one that excels in idiocy. Not harmless idiocy. Dangerous idiocy of the worst kind. We were reminded of this the other day as we Sauntered in some thoughts of one of the wise minority. He is Mike McKinney, environmental geology professor, University of Tennessee:

    By studying our planet's past, I know that all species are temporary. I know that everything we build is going to be flattened. Everything we build is eventually going to disappear. As much as we like to think of ourselves as being apart from nature, we are not apart from nature. It all goes under the umbrella of humility - how ephemeral the human is, how short-lived, how much we are part of the machinery of nature. Every aspect of nature teaches us about humility. . . . What we call the first law of ecology is that everything is connected. . . .You never do just one thing. The guy that invented the internal combustion engine didn't think he was going to change the climate. The guys who promote urban sprawl don't consider the fact that they might be degrading the Gulf of Mexico, but they are, because a lot of our pollution goes to the Gulf of Mexico. . . .
    I am thinking about mountaintop mining, and just that the definition of where we live is a mountain. If we destroy the mountain, do you know how much electricity we get out of that mountain for the coal? An entire mountain provides an hour's worth of electricity for the U.S. That is insane by anybody's laws. So instead of respecting this icon of our area we grind it up, burn it for an hour's worth of electricity. And in the meantime, we've lost the most unique ecosystem east of the Mississippi. We've lost the fish, we've lost the plants, we've lost the birds - the migratory birds who breed here have no place to go. We've lost our cultural heritage, our Indian burial grounds, and shown total disrespect for nature.

    Extracted from “Earth Talk: An interview with UT geology professor Mike McKinney,” by Beth Carroll Hunley, Metro Pulse - Knoxville’s Weekly Voice, Vol 17, Issue 16, June 29, 2007. To read the full interview, click here. For Dr. Michael L. McKinney’s home page, click here.