The Saunterer

Abraham Maslow’s idea on how to prevent suicides

    We have here in Abraham Maslow’s idea a preventive measure against even thinking of committing suicide:

If you take into yourself something important from the world, then you become important. You have made yourself important thereby - as important as that which you have integrated & assimilated to self. At once it matters if you die, or are sick & can’t work, etc. You must take care of yourself, respect yourself, get plenty of rest, not smoke or drink too much. You can no longer commit suicide - that would be too selfish. It would be a loss for the world. You are needed, useful. Easiest way to feel needed. Mothers with babies don’t commit suicide as easily as nonmothers, I feel sure, because they are needed, because they’re too busy to indulge themselves.

Easy medicine for self-esteem: become a part of something important. Be able to say: “We of the United Nations . . .” or “We physicians . . .” or “We psychologists have proven that . . .” (thereby participating in the glory, the pleasure, the pride, of all psychologists anyplace). (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 186.)
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    For a brief biography of Abraham Maslow, click here.

Joseph Wood Krutch and the tragedy of land development

    About Joseph Wood Krutch and the tragedy of land development, Margaret Regan wrote the following in the Tucson Weekly:

An eloquent naturalist from New York City, Krutch had retired to Tucson in 1952 to live in the desert he so prized. It didn't take long for him to become dismayed by the city's eastward gallop toward the Rincons, by the tract houses sprouting up all over the flat desert valley. In a speech in 1956, he took the boosters of the Rotary Club to task.

"Whenever I see one of those posters which reads 'Help Tucson Grow,' I say to myself, 'God forbid,' " he said. "I suggest that the Rotary Club adopt a new motto: 'Keep Tucson Small.' " Krutch's sentiments were so rare in those boom days that The Arizona Daily Star reporter on the scene was bewildered. Perhaps, the reporter wrote, Krutch was "speaking more or less in a humorous vein."

Comedian Krutch was not. He was one in a long line of resisters to Tucson's growth, said historian Michael F. Logan, who told the Krutch story in a lecture last week at the Arizona Historical Society. Author of Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest (University of Arizona Press, 1995), Logan said that Tucsonans have been arguing about change and development almost as far back as the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, when they bickered more about military outposts and acequias than about zoning and owls.

"I look at communities as being in flux," Logan said. "They're always contested terrain."

The contested terrain of Tucson, of course, continued to fall to the bulldozer despite Krutch. The anonymous tract houses of his day are now in the city's inner ring, and what was pristine desert then has given way to seas of pink-tile roofs and taco-deco strip stores. The naturalist's own piece of desert heaven now lies beneath the Crossroads Festival shopping center at Grant and Swan, Logan said.

    To read all of Regan’s article, click here:

Joseph Wood Krutch on why the phrase “an economy of abundance” is meaningless

[An] “economy of abundance” is a meaningless phrase unless one asks, “Abundance of what?”. A society could have an abundance of physical space and also an abundance of spiritual space. It could have an abundance of leisure, of contemplation, of intellectuality, and of spirituality. It might even have an abundance of manners. And it might have all these things without having any more of many other things; might indeed find it easier to keep the one abundance if it did not have thrust upon it more of the other.

Yet of this obvious fact few seem ever to think. Most take it for granted that the abundance which is desirable is the abundance which manifests itself most conspicuously in, say, juke boxes, television sets, organized playgrounds, and even, perhaps, of schools and of museums. They seem not even aware of the fact that much has grown scarcer while these things have been becoming more abundant, and that many things threaten to grow even scarcer still.

I am no ascetic and, so at least I believe, no fanatic of any other sort. I am not praising want and I have no romantic notion that distresses should not be relieved. But I do, in all seriousness, question the assumption that endless progress implies the needless multiplication of goods and gadgets, even that “real wages” and “production per man hour” are necessarily an approximate index of welfare. I am not saying that a reduction in the standard of material living automatically brings with it an increase in happiness or nobility, but I do doubt that the converse is true, and I do find it astonishing that this doubt seems so seldom shared.(Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 330.)
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For a brief biography Joseph Wood Krutch, click here.

Three musts for environmental managers

    Must # 1: Heed the results of Dietrich Dörner’s research, as covered in his book, The Logic of Failure. About the book, Michael Crichton says:

Future environmentalists will heed Dietrich Dörner’s “The Logic of Failure.” Mr. Dörner is a cognitive psychologist who invited academic experts to manage the computer simulations of various environments (an African herding society, a town in Maine). Most experts made things worse. Those managers who did well gathered information before acting, thought in terms of complex-systems interactions instead of simple linear cause and effect, reviewed their progress, looked for unanticipated consequences, and corrected course often. Those who did badly relied on a fixed theoretical approach, did not correct course and blamed others when things went wrong. Mr. Dörner concludes that our failure to manage complex systems such as the environment reflects bad habits of thought, over-reliance on theory and lazy procedures. (Quoted from The Wall Street Journal, 9/29/05.)

    Must # 2: Realize that managing the environment is more an art than a science. In Prussian field marshal Graf von Moltke’s words:

Strategy is a system of makeshifts. It is more than a science. It is bringing knowledge to bear on practical life, the further elaboration of an original guiding idea under constantly changing circumstances. It is the art of acting under the pressure of the most demanding conditions. . . . That is why general principles, rules derive from them, and systems based on these rules cannot possibly have any value for strategy. (Quoted from The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dörner, p. 97.)

    Must # 3: Absorb every point of Michael Crichton’s essay, "Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century,” taking its warnings and suggestions to heart. For an excerpt from Crichton’s essay, as well as Internet access to all of it, go Dave Iverson’s Forest Policy - Forest Practice weblog by clicking here.

Leo Tolstoy on cause and effect in history

    Leo Tolstoy is saying a good deal about the difficulty of being sure of cause and effect in ecology when he writes the following about the difficulty of being sure of cause and effect in history:

The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous.

To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all those human wills, man’s mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected units. The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.

The second method is to consider the actions of some one man - a king or a commander - as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a single historic personage. . . .

It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some larger or smaller unit as the subject of observation - as criticism has every right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must always be arbitrarily selected.

Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history. . . .

Every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a single man. Whenever I look at my watch and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring church; but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten, I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the position of the hands of the watch. . . .

The peasants say that a cold wind blows in late spring because the oaks are budding, and really every spring cold winds do blow when the oak is budding. But though I do not know what causes the cold winds to blow when the oak buds unfold, I cannot agree with the peasants that the unfolding of the oak buds is the cause of the cold wind, for the force of the wind is beyond the influence of the buds. I see only a coincidence of occurrences such as happens with all the phenomena of life, and I see that however much and however carefully I observe the hands of the watch, and the valves and wheels of the engine, and the oak, I shall not discover the cause of the bells ringing, the engine moving, or of the winds of spring. To do that I must entirely change my point of view and study the laws of the movement of steam, of the bells, and of the wind. History must do the same.

    These lines are from Book 11 of War and Peace, the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, first published 1922-23. For bringing it to our attention, we thank Chris Dicus, once a student in a research methodology course we taught, now a forest fire researcher at Cal Poly.
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    For a brief biography of Leo Tolstoy, click here.

Smoldering causes in cause and effect

    Smoldering causes are causes that exist inwardly with little or no outward sign that they are operating and will have effects.

    We are most familiar with obvious causes; they exist outwardly and give clear signs when they are operating, and they produce clear effects.

    An obvious cause: In chapter 20 of Jack London’s novel, Adventure, Sheldon is on the receiving end of one: “It was a blow in the face to Sheldon. He smarted with the truth of it. . . .”

    An obvious cause: In baseball we see the swing, we see the ball sail, we see the catch - all in an instant, all in front of us.

    A smoldering cause: Behind every divorce is complex of smoldering causes.

    A smoldering cause: With scurvy, we cannot see its cause, which is at work long before we notice the damaging effect.

    A smoldering cause: The ceaselessly creeping developments that are destroying Utah’s once-picturesque Cache valley.

    A smoldering cause: Global warming comes out of a confluence of smoldering causes. Imperceptible to most, molecule by molecule, carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere; temperatures rise a hundredth of degree this month, a hundredth the next; glaciers trickle away; animal species vanish one at a time. It creeps not speeds, remote and not under our noses. Then comes the day of no return, when it is upon us with a colossal head of steam.

    Although the effects of smoldering causes sneak up on us, they are not always bad in the bad sense of sneaking:

    Education is a smoldering cause. Does education work? Yes, going to school for twelve or more years builds mind. Though we can’t point to any day in school where what we learned made a difference in what we now know, schooling produces great effects.

    Friday’s post (2/10/06) in this web log mentioned a smoldering cause. Recall the passage:

“. . . wilderness promotes social and economic well-being. It begins with wilderness feeding the creative processes of artists and consumers of the arts. In turn, the nonmaterial values produced by the arts, including painting, music, poetry, essays, literature, dance, film, and theater, seep into the everyday world, giving rise to material values, affecting our attitudes and the decisions we make, having formative effects on political values, scientific values, religious values, family values, health-care values, and educational values, partly determining the subjects we teach in schools, the scientific knowledge we seek, the ways we treat each other, and the products that are made.”

    Of what value is literary fiction, as War and Peace, David Copperfield, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hamlet, . . . ? Literature is a device for bringing smoldering causes and their effects into the span and space of human attention.

Jonathan Richardson on the sublime

    Jonathan Richardson defined the sublime as “the most Excellent of what is Excellent, as the Excellent is the Best of what is Good.”

    As a graduate student, the day during spring break when I discovered the Grand Canyon was the day I discovered the sublime. I later discovered that I could experience the sublime in great works of people, primarily in the arts. For, “the most Excellent of what is Excellent” is quality, and quality is sublime.

    Quality can be found in wilderness and in work; each can suspend our powers of comparison.
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    For a short biographical sketch of Jonathan Richardson, click here.

What is wilderness for?

    For part of the answer, which alone is sufficient justification to preserve large tracts of wilderness, permit me to quote myself (from “What is Wilderness For?,” by H. Charles Romesburg, April, 2002, The Highlands Voice, newsletter of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy):

As most everybody learns, nature is vital to our physical well-being. For one thing, it sustains the balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen in the atmosphere. For another, it holds medically-useful molecular compounds, preventives and cures to be discovered in centuries ahead.

At the same time, few learn that wild nature, or wilderness, especially when experienced in solitude, is vital to society’s creative well-being. One source of support for this is my research into the credos of notable creators, as written in their published diaries, journals, letters, and memoirs. Here is a sample of the beliefs, and of some of the creators holding the beliefs:

To begin with, wilderness stands alone in its psychotherapeutic powers. It is a wick that draws away our neurotic troubles, removing their capacity of tormenting (John Cowper Powys). To experience wilderness regularly, Powys said, is “to possess the power to forget.” By this, wilderness frees us to create better, and to appreciate the creations of others.

Further, wilderness stimulates the imagination, increasing our stock of images, material for envisioning and designing new creations (Pierre Auguste Renoir, Gustave Flaubert, Joseph Addison). Wilderness promotes the flow of creative ideas from the subconscious to the conscious (Eugene Delacroix, William Hazlitt, Richard Jefferies). Wilderness brings us spiritual refreshment, vitalizing the creative impulse, motivating us to create (Rupert Brooke, Rachel Carson, Hans Hofmann, Odilon Redon).

This all enters into a subtle but real chain by which wilderness promotes social and economic well-being. It begins with wilderness feeding the creative processes of artists and consumers of the arts. In turn, the nonmaterial values produced by the arts, including painting, music, poetry, essays, literature, dance, film, and theater, seep into the everyday world, giving rise to material values, affecting our attitudes and the decisions we make, having formative effects on political values, scientific values, religious values, family values, health-care values, and educational values, partly determining the subjects we teach in schools, the scientific knowledge we seek, the ways we treat each other, and the products that are made (Wassily Kandinsky, M. C. Escher).

There are two conditions to this. One, only large tracts of wilderness can give these benefits; pocket wildernesses can’t (Margaret Fuller). Two, the large tracts must be free of both human-made things and of signs that such things have ever been there (John Ruskin, William Wordsworth).

    (The cited creators’ credos are in my book, The Life of the Creative Spirit.)

The beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime in wilderness

    The beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime in wilderness are three considerable answers to, “Why do we need more large wilderness areas?” Each of the three increases us in its special way.

    Recalled from my many Saunterings inside Grand Canyon, over the years:

    The beautiful: the air smelling of creosote after rain; the tadpoles lazing in rock basins.

    The picturesque: every haphazard jumble of rocks and colors, in every direction, at every distance, viewed in every degree of light.

    The sublime: the Canyon’s immensity; thunder echoing and re-echoing around; the Milky Way as ancients saw it.

    The officials that designate areas as wilderness should put in their standards that the areas must be large; small areas cannot satisfy our needs to know the picturesque and the sublime.
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    Frederic Edwin Church’s paintings of scenes in the Catskills illustrate the picturesque. His paintings of icebergs and of Niagara Falls suggest the sublime. To see samples, click here. For a brief biography of him, click here.

John C. Van Dyke on the impossibility of describing the Grand Canyon

    The Grand Canyon is impossible to describe because the sublime is impossible to describe. John C. Van Dyke put it so:

Even the people who write prose, and are not popularly supposed to be bothered with fine frenzies, have their troubles in describing the Canyon. They have not enough adjectives to go around or to reach up and over. Language fails them. The tourist who comes out to the Rim for the first time and exclaims “Good God!” comes as near description as the more elaborately wordy if by his exclamation he means not only his own surprise but the greatness and goodness of God. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 328.)

    For a brief biography of John C. Van Dyke, click here.