Letters to the Editor
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Princess Yang Kwei-fei
Machiko Kyo as the Princess walking to her death is heartbreaking image. Mizoguchi's 1955 film is a classic.
Glad to hear that the beauteous princess is not to blame for the total destruction of the T'ang.
However, I blame Reagan for the destruction of our so-called civilization. Carter was proposing 20% of our energy from renewables by the year 2000. Reagan came in and that idea went out the window with the rest of the greenhouse gases. To rub it in, Reagan was nowhere as beautiful as Princess Yang Kwei Fei or Machiko Kyo.
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The Great Deforestation
At about the same time you are suggesting, the Chinese philosopher and essayist Liu Zongyuan wrote the following lines:
The official guardian's axes have spread through a thousand hills,
At the Works Department's orders hacking rafter-beams and billets.
He was commenting on the people who had been charged with protecting the forests and natural resources, with the opposite - the campaign which essentially removed the vast old growth forests in China.
So much lumber was removed then that the life blood of the mountains, the soil, flowed down the Yangzi and Yellow rivers out approximately 90 km. into the sea.
The presently sinking Shanghai built on land formed from the silt deposited long ago from denuded forest mountains appears to re-affirm the shuffling of one economic consequence for another.
Based on a third of the timeframe covered in the Nature report, Mark Elvin's recent book 'The Retreat of the Elephants: an environmental history of China', would seem to suggest that the hand of man may figure larger than you suggest in the report's climatic inventory.
In his book, he discusses those ideas we all have in mind, how nature, climate, man, culture and the philosophical/economic system of a time come together, to form a lasting impact on the environment we call home.
While relying on the work of one Chinese poet after another, Elvin neglects any mention of Yang Guifei when those forests fell.
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Homocentrism
Last time I looked, it seemed to me that we are about 18,000 years into a 20,000 year or so cycle of ice cap retreat. The process is very much cyclical. The earth has been here before (without us H. sapiens), and will often again (likely without us), but the graph makes it look like the excursions are amplifying.
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/images/spec_map_graph.gif
(Link doesn't work; copy and paste.)(To make the graph reflect global warming, it must be inverted and reversed, which is well beyond my electronic capacity.)
The idea that humans are "causing" climate change strikes me as about so homocentric as the proposition that humans were present at the creation of the universe, and will still be present, eating peeled grapes (grown where and by whom?) on golden couches (mined where and by whom?), when the universe is destroyed.
(If the "intelligent" creator of the whole universe would rather spend an exclusive eternity with rich stupid old white guys with three chins, and those who take them seriously, than with the blue whale, the T. rex, or the hummingbird that can fly the Gulf nonstop, not to mention the humanly unimaginable assortment of creatures on the planets circling the 60 septillion (18 zeroes) stars that the astronomers currently estimate, doesn't that make the creator pretty stupid?)
Paleoclimatology, digging its bores into the ice caps and the rings of the bristlecones on the way to the summit of Mt. Evans in the Rockies that predate the pyramids, is well on the way to explaining much of human history that was previously considered magical or divine (if there's a difference), such as the disappearance of the Anasazi, the sexual prowess of the Jade Concubine, and the baffling question of why anyone would ever have wanted to live in Israel. (It may once have made sense, long ago.)
If Nick Brooks is right, it may even explain why H. sapiens invented "civilization," by which I take it he means the agricultural methods that eventually led us to the cheap, abundant food that has us eating and breeding ourselves into pending extinction.
(Note that, at Brooks's onset of civilization, we were well past the current retreat of the ice caps past the mean for the last three-quarters of a million years.)
Brooks's suggestion that civilization led to a "harder life," of course, is just stupid, and ignores the numbers. I remember reading somewhere (and I'm too lazy to go find it tonight) that at their peak the Neanderthals numbered maybe 10,000 living souls on the earth, and our Cro-Magnon ancestors back then couldn't have been much more numerous. (DNA studies will eventually reveal whether we screwed them to death or just killed them.) We were only about 250,000 at the time of Jesus.
If Brooks thinks civilized life is hard, let him spend an Arctic winter living in snow caves and eating dead grass and the insects and rodents he can catch with his bare hands, since I doubt he could knapp a flint. Hard, my ass.
The invention of agriculture led us to a billion H. sapiens on the planet in the year 1804. Compare that to 10K Neanderthals. Science and technology brought us to something like 2.5 billion H. sapiens when I was born, something like 7 billion now, maybe another doubling if I live long enough. Harder life, my ass. Count your living children.
The Chinese started killing their children back before the Yellow and the Yangtze reached the sea. Back then, the Colorado probably did, too.
Now, we're next.
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Thank you
There are times when an observance, coupled with facts, shocks you with its beauty and unexpectedness. I've always been fascinated by the story of Yang Guifei and the Emperor.
Thank you.
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Homowhateverism
Thanks for that elaborate knee-jerk reaction, Silverback. But I don't think that increased population size equals a better standard of living. Quite the opposite, in fact. Until they were forced to give up their traditional lifestyles as hunters and gatherers, the people of central Africa often worked 15 hours a week to provide all their daily needs - a lot less than you and I do. Civilization is a lot of work. Go watch Koyaanisqatsi a few times, eh? And read some Marvin Harris while you're at it. Being commodified and packaged into oblivion might lead to stability but it doesn't do much for our dignity as a race.
However, I understand that some people simply can't look at the label "climate change" without getting all defensive and needing to explain that it's nature's course (which was the point of the article, if I interpreted it correctly). Too bad, really, because this is an elegant explanation for why humans decided to adopt a lifestyle that in most cases was detrimental, required more work, and eroded personal freedom. Even if there are now 7 billion of us living in little concrete boxes eating spaghetti out of aluminum cans. Maybe if we get civilized enough we could get that number up to 50 billion!