Recently I’ve been looking for cool new (juiced looking) desktop backgrounds and where better to turn than science? My foray into the world of ABC Science News has yielded significantly more than just intricate patterns and fluoro colours (though it certainly had that in spades); some really interesting articles also sprang up (unsurprisingly, perhaps). Amongst the scoops on the latest issues of ethics in genetics and microchip technology, there were some which related to more general news items – those which also get people worrying, funnily enough: in this case, the London riots and climate change.
Knee-jerk
The articleon the London riots caught my eye because of its headline: “Riots behave like bushfires, says expert”. I have had a fairly long-standing interest in chaos/complexity theory and the similarities in behaviour of dynamic systems that seem on the surface to be completely different (weather, economy, geography, animal populations and biology, etc.) so this title really grabbed my attention. Could riots, a distinctly human phenomenon, really act like naturally occurring bushfires? In spite of the heading, the article itself didn’t really delve into this much, quickly getting sidetracked in the “causes” debate (though it was from a refreshingly psychological – rather than political, social, or economic – perspective, suggesting that processes such as “deindividuation” allowed people to weaken their own morality and adopt that of a group... intriguingly Jungian). The little similarity that the article did highlight, however, was still quite thought-provoking.
The article quotes Dr Kristian Skrede Gleditsch from the University of Essex: "There's some evidence suggesting that... the severity of riots is inversely proportional to their frequency... It's kind of like a forest fire. Most fires go out very quickly, but a few become catastrophic. Once they reach a certain magnitude, they can become self-sustaining and very hard to contain." As anyone living in bushfire-prone Australia would know, the severity of bushfires is also inversely proportional to their frequency. The longer an area goes without a bushfire, the more ideal the conditions become for one to occur. The imagery is quite analogous too: The police rush to areas where rioting breaks out, like fire-fighters rush to areas that are aflame; once they arrive it takes them a certain amount of time to get the situation under control, depending on its magnitude. If many crises appear simultaneously then the force gets overstretched and it becomes impossible to manage, allowing them to potentially grow uncontainable. The similarity appears to stop here, however; unlike bushfires, riots are seen as artificial events, more directly influenced by human actions and social policies, so blame (even though it is always dished up all-round) is more readily attributed to the prior conditions that led to the problem rather than the actual response to the event (the left blaming unemployment, systematic poverty, and discrimination and the right blaming liberal immigration policies and welfare dependency) , whereas bushfires are seen as largely naturally occurring, thus unavoidable, so that the vast majority of blame is given to the response of emergency personnel and residents (the left blaming inappropriate reporting techniques and the right blaming Christine Nixon).
Although the two phenomena should not be conflated, in both cases blame is always attributed after the fact (indeed, that’s why it appears in the media at all – something bad has happened). We only ever really react in a kneejerk fashion to these issues; even in a “best-case” scenario all we get is an “I told ya so” and persistent pointing to various omens from the past. [Where were you, oh seer, before the event? If you were actually trying to avoid the occurrence, why didn’t you successfully convince people? You can blame their ignorance but in fact the fault was in your incompetent communication of the problem; you were right yet still you couldn’t get people to see it your way... So take no self-righteous victory from the tragedy but rather in humility accept that you, you who knew better than others, failed to successfully avert the danger through effectively explaining the problem.] Our sense of responsibility (and, in some cases, culpability) is only enlivened by the catastrophe and never the mismanagement that we see leading up to it. The kneejerk reaction eclipses the prevention and preparation which are necessary beforehand; even strategies of prevention such as back burning are only really executed in response to an already raging fire. Responding only to the most direct of stimuli, like children we wander around pulling our hands away from painful prickles, instead of ceasing to play in the thistles altogether. We are a materialistic culture of concrete events before fluid time, of particles before waves, of stuff before space...
Stoking the Fire, Burning up Energy
So far I have looked at the similarity of the reactive nature of approaches in the contexts of both riots and bushfires. To avoid hypocrisy by only blaming the response (to the response) for focussing too much on the original reaction to the crisis, I will explore other aspects of the original article’s comparison of riots and bushfires. The juxtaposition of these two brings into question the natural/artificial dichotomy which is so instrumental in defining our thoughts concerning these events, and the world generally; we’ll see the duality first get reversed, and then muddled to the extent that it no longer serves a useful purpose. This will emphasise the necessity of a progressive (in the grammatical sense – that is to say, ongoing), preventative, holistic strategy concerning both situations.
As stated above, wildfires are seen to be natural occurrences while riots are deemed artificial, largely because of the human element involved. This leads to a focusing of the blame on response mechanisms for the inevitable in the case of fires and general social factors for the preventable in the case of riots. Obviously, this approach makes sense, but being too reliant on the idea of bushfires as natural and riots as artificial can cause problems. For example, the article suggests that the more often riots happen, the less severe they tend to be – as if there was an amount of excess anger, or energy, or some such value, which would need to be released in any case. Thus, though the form of the expulsion may vary, it would necessarily occur with a certain frequency resembling something like a natural cycle, perhaps. I have discovered similar sentiments in my recent reading about Confucian ethics: “In times of rich harvest, more young people are prone to laziness; in the time of poor harvest, more young people are prone to violence.” (Mencius, 6A7, trans. Chung-ying Cheng) That such a statement could seem applicable today when it was written two and a half millennia ago displays the accuracy more of a scientific statement concerning nature (indeed, its reference to harvests even hints at a particular form of natural cycle) than a musing from the “soft” humanities. So the artificial, man-made, aspects of the riots can be underplayed in favour of a view which considerers it more natural and inevitable insofar as it is a measure of energy which needs to be release one way or the other.
The very similar sentiment of civil disobedience as energy dispersion can be gleaned from a 1996 Harper's article where economic and political analyst Edward Luttwak compared Japanese and American employment policies:
When I go to my gas station in Japan, five young men wearing uniforms jump on my car. They not only check the oil but also wash the tires and wash the lights. Why is that? Because government doesn't allow oil companies to compete by price, and therefore, they have to compete by service. They're still trying to maximize shareholder value, but they hire the young men. I pay a lot of money for the gas.
Then I come to Washington, and in Washington gas is much cheaper. Nobody washes the tires, nobody does anything for me, but here, too, there are five young men. The five young men, who in Japan are employed to wash my car, are here standing around, unemployed, waiting to rob my car. I still have to pay them through my taxes, through imprisonment, through a failed welfare system.
But in Japan, at least they clean my car.
Both societies have young men who won't make the grade as computer programmers, who cannot enter into the brave new world of Bill Gates and George Gilder. In Japan, they arrange matters so that these people are employed. Are they efficiently employed? Goodness, no. Of course they're inefficiently employed. But they're no longer a threat to society.
While I would be cautious to consider participation in the labour force as the best means of neutralising the threat to society posed by an otherwise unemployed individual [indeed, the working classes have historically been much more volatile than the unemployed and, in fact, classical Marxism detests the completely destitute class (the lumpenproletariat) precisely because they do not pose enough of a threat to the existing order], the quote still hints at a more “naturalistic” and less artificial understanding of social problems; they are inevitable to an extent and should be treated as such and mitigated. Stationary potential energy, if not harnessed by society, can turn (or be directed) against it, or will need to be released in some way.
This perspective on riots as natural can also, conversely, inform an understanding of bushfires as artificial rather than natural. The idea that there is a latent potential energy that may be released with destructive consequences if not harnessed seems to inform the Australian Aboriginal practice of fire-stick farming or “burning off” where forest or grassland is regularly and systematically burned to reduce the fuel-load for a potential major bush fire and fertilise the ground, increasing the number of young plants, providing additional food for kangaroos and other fauna hunted for meat. The instigation of these fires is, perhaps counter intuitively, seen as a way to look after the land. A symbiotic evolution of many thousands of years has made immolation a central part of the reproductive cycle and life cycle of native plants and trees, to the extent that their eucalyptus sap is highly flammable (it seems kind of counter-intuitive for trees to have flammable blood but there you go...). After a burning off, the ash fertilises the ground while the new green sprouts and charred remaining trunks serve as a fire retardant barrier (imagine trying to burn a matchstick twice over). While from our perspective bushfires look like an unavoidable natural disaster where the human element enters in the response phase, once an emergency has already arisen, from an Indigenous perspective negligent mismanagement of the land for many years prior to the event makes hazardous bushfires a uniquely manmade, and thus artificial, problem. We can see how we have an active duty which, if spurned, constitutes a significant portion of the cause of the crisis and, in a very real sense, engenders the catastrophe – the human element in the bushfire situation can now be seen to go far beyond simply the response effort.
Another consideration which makes bushfires look somewhat more artificial, at least in the danger they pose, is that the hazard only exists because we humans put ourselves, our houses and our communities, in the way. A fire engulfing an almost perfect rectangular prism doesn’t seem like the most natural image. “Perfect” geometrical forms such as spheres, prisms, and the like rarely occur in nature. The stable, static, edifice is out of place; clearly an artificial addition to the otherwise homogenous surrounds. It is a dwelling, created and inhabited by humans. In this sense its construction in that place was also that of an artificial, manmade, danger: the hazard of the bushfire. When you build a structure, you simultaneously erect the conditions – and necessity! – of its collapse; though these conditions and the mode through which they arise are modified based on the surrounds of the monolith. A similar point – the interdependence of place and placement, of site and project, and their mutual creation – is made by Heidegger in “Building Dwelling Thinking” in his Poetry, Language, Thought:
“The bridge swings over the stream with ease and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream's bed, the bridge-piers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream's waters to run their course. The waters may wander on quiet and gay, the sky's floods from storm or thaw may shoot past the piers in torrential waves-the bridge is ready for the sky's weather and its fickle nature. Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more.”
Here we see, just as the banks emerge only with the bridge on the stream (or, as is clearly implied, its imagining), the fire danger (and bush as environ, for that matter) only emerges as the houses and communities are constructed in its midst (in the clearings in the forest, perhaps?). This thought can lead to a reformulation of the oft-mistaken-to-be Buddhist question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” While broader questions about perception and existence are beyond my purview here, this is an interesting link to be drawn: If a bushfire rages and no one is near, does it pose a threat? Can it burn flesh? Does it even cause heat? It takes two to tango (what is the sound of one-hand clapping?) and this is the case too when one dances with danger. The hazard is caused as much by the victim’s placement in a precarious position (but let us never forget who is the victim and who the perpetrator, nor confuse where the responsibility lies) as by the manifestation of certain situations, such as a bushfire.
Thus both riots and bushfires can be seen as either artificial or natural occurrences, or a mixture of both. They are artificial insofar as humans play an active role in their coming about, yet they are natural to the extent that they appear cyclical and obey similar principles to what might be deemed “purely” natural phenomena; likewise, they represent the movement of energy according to certain identifiable patterns which resemble those of what is considered the conventionally natural world. The fundamental point to takes from all this, however, is that it is in reality an interplay between movement and stillness and how to be in either state, or both. The store of energy (or perhaps more accurately the current, or flow) must be burned at times, released elsewhere, and the big question is how we use it and harness it...
Arse ‘n’ Arson
To further confound the natural/artificial dichotomy, bushfires are sometimes stared by certain individuals with the conscious objective of causing fire-based mayhem and so too did the London riots have a distinct quality of conscious organisation about them, besides their apparently spontaneous occurrence (as do others generally... the Cronulla riots are another good example). An arsonist cannot do it alone, however; in a tropical rainforest even the most ardent firebug equipped with the most flammable of artificial fuels could not hope to start a campfire. The scene needs to be set, so to speak, before someone or some few can tip it over the edge. This is the significance of the expulsion of energy – this energy is the latent fuel for arson; it is the combustible material of our social relations and must be disposed of through healthy means. Personally, I find the most effective form is dance, because of the vigorous amount of physical movement required and the personal affinity I have with it, but any freely expressed cultural activity will do. Individual expression is paramount here as any even slightly coerced motion returns the activity to the level of energy blockage rather than energy release or mediation.
One serious impediment to energy expression is over-focus on survival. Almost all organisms, when they feel threatened and single-mindedly pursue the goals of survival, close up – going into a high energy conserving state – and await the abatement of the threat. This is not conducive to the healthy release of energy if it is the state of the organism most of the time; life must feel comfortable to open up and reproduce itself in any meaningful way, to change and grow. Fear and anxiety about survival preclude growth as a healthy expression of excess energy; in fact, survival will automatically occur and does not need to be laboured, hurried, or forced...
It is here where the articles I found about climate change really became relevant. I discovered that, against my expectation, there were many articles about the self-stabilizing factors surrounding climate change, suggesting that it wasn’t such a huge thing to be worried about. The depths of the ocean has been found to soak up some of the warming occurring and could offset it for decades (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/09/19/3319695.htm). Likewise, regions of the ocean uncovered by the melting of ice in the Antarctic can now be inhabited by phytoplankton, which consume CO2 through photosynthesis (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/11/11/2739420.htm) – in fact, the melting of these ice shelves fertilizes the ocean, making it a good breeding ground for these various carbon-dioxide gobbling organisms (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/08/04/3284610.htm). This natural process of self-regulation is much more successful than human attempts at similar ventures (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/01/29/2477264.htm). Plants in otherwise arid grasslands may now, because of higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, open their stomata for shorter periods to achieve the same amount of CO2 intake for photosynthesis. This is important because while the stomata are open the plant loses high amounts of water – the shorter open period offsets the dryer climate (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/08/04/3284610.htm). Animals are also responding faster the climate change than was previously supposed through methods such as migration (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/08/19/3297635.htm) and even the particularly vulnerable shelled sea creatures are responding better than first thought (http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/08/22/3297891.htm).
That I’d never heard of these feel-good, Earth actually kicks ass news stories doesn’t really surprise me – because when the arsonist is also the one who manages the national parks, it’s no wonder that conditions are being artificially altered to be naturally conducive to fire. The worrying we see around us is worrisome, the anxiety is the noxious pollutant – it retards the natural flow of energy, which is all it was ever really about: Finding new, good, fun ways to express the excess, to be in synergy with the energy. We need to have more faith in the things around us, so that we can get on with the job of fixing ourselves... the only thing that was ever broken in the first place.
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