Putin as the New Leviathan: “nasty, brutish, and short”

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. FOR WAR consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather.  For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclusion thereto of many days together, so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.  All other time is peace.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal.  In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.[1]

Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

---

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), pp. 95,96. (See Part I, Chapter XIII).  Note how the first paragraph links “the nature of war” with “the nature of weather”.  Perhaps Putin’s invasion of Ukraine can be viewed through the lens of our looming climate crisis, as well.  With respect to Putin’s deficiency in height, he is in good company: Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and, of course, Mao were all short. 

Another Dull Day in the Life of a B.C. Emergency: First a Heat Dome, then Fires, now Flooding

 

     Hint: don't drain a lake, build on it, and then expect nothing to happen.

Greta Thunberg’s first inspiration: “The Little Prince”

Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, especially the speech “Can You Hear Me?” (delivered in London to the Houses of Parliament on 23 April 2019) evokes aspects of The Little Prince:

Throughout my life, I have been in touch with many kinds of serious people.  I have lived a great deal with grown-ups.  I have seen them intimately, close at hand.  And that, I’m afraid hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.[1]

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943).

---

[1] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (London: VIVI Books, 2018), p. 4.  See also Greta Thunberg, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (London: Penguin Random House, 2019), pp. 57-68.

Native Born Son (or, arctic memoirs with a paradigm). A Book Review.

Hidden in an attic in the village of Canton, just north of Port Hope, Ontario, lay for many years the dusty journals of J. David Ford, born in the eastern arctic in 1910.  Recently discovered and edited by Marnie Bickle, a family relative, Native Born Son (2018) chronicles Ford’s youthful adventures as a member of a long line of fur traders living among the Inuit at the north end of Hudson Bay – namely Coats Island and Southampton Island. The stories include, as well, high school at St. John’s, Newfoundland, but more dramatically the journey on land, snow, ice and sometimes water to obtain foodstuffs, after the annual supply ship failed to arrive, blocked by ice, circa 1930.

Full disclosure: as it turns out, Ford was husband to my own grade 9 Geography teacher, though I did not learn this until after purchasing the book.  We all knew her as “granny Ford” (it was her last year of teaching) at Port Hope High School.  Little did we know that Ruth and David Ford corresponded with each other over the course of WWII, and upon his return from overseas - when they married and built a home together - he dealt with “shell shock” for the remainder of his life, such was the difficult transition from the arctic to the theatres of war.

But anyone wanting to discover the hardship of Canada’s nomadic north well before the era of snowmobiles and – now – climate change and would benefit from reading this book. Consider the following sample passage.

When the igloos were ready, we beat the snow from our frosted parkas and crawled in through the snow house door on hands and knees.  We felt some warmth immediately.  A caribou tallow candle was lit; then we prepared a feast of beans and pemmican made from seal and caribou meat, raisins, salt and pepper.  We had tea and bannock that had been fry-baked in seal oil.  The bannock was very easy to eat and seldom froze in spite of the -60 [degrees] F weather.[1]

Who builds igloos today?  Ford articulates how wooden structures, such as the HBC store or his home, would be completely lined with blocks of snow for insulating purposes.  Given the current melting of the permafrost, much that Ford describes in his journals has disappeared, known to perhaps a few Inuit elders today, if any.  Reading Native Born Son recovers knowledge of the past but unfortunately does not restore some of the most important elements (aside from the human) – the need for snow and ice.

The journals are lively, but at a sublime level they are also suggestive of a new (but still ancient) paradigm – one that admires (or feels closely connected to) Indigenous and Inuit ways.  Ford’s life in the arctic straddles two different cultures, but he is almost totally immersed, communicating in their language and respected by all generations. Today numbers of people want to replace the prevailing model of man’s power over nature and its resources as the accepted modus vivendi. Reading the memoir invites us to consider a more sustainable example of cohabiting with nature, valued by this growing minority to be the way of the future.  Thus, parenthetically-speaking, it should not come as a surprise, for example, that some in the Green Party now want Jody Wilson-Raybould to lead them, given that Elizabeth May has stepped down. 

This paradigm shift reflects the degree to which we have experienced (for lack of a better term) a kind of ‘Indigenous revival’ in recent years, compensation in part for Canada’s original sins at Residential Schools.  Ford himself was raised a Christian, yet he defended the Inuit absence of a religion (leading them in prayer only once when the risks faced by the group were particularly high).  In broader terms, while the Lord’s Prayer is now absent from our classroom rituals, it has been replaced by regular public acknowledgements by “settlers” gathered on unceded Indigenous territory.  Northrup Frye’s The Great Code (1982), which examined the Bible’s lasting influence on imaginative literature in the West, has been supplanted by John Ralston Saul’s work, A Fair Country (2008), which alleges that Canadians are more métis than European in origin, a questionable claim.[2]  It is worth surmising, however, that we seem to be developing a new kind of secular code, and Native Born Son belongs to the literature which unearths and esteems Indigenous ways – and European man’s cooperation with its wisdom.

---

[1] J. David Ford, Native Born Son: The Journals of J. David Ford, ed. Marnie Hare Bickle (Cobourg, ON: Blue Denim Press, 2018), p. 200.

[2] See my book review of A Fair Country posted to this blog site.

Charles Fourier: World's First Climate Change Theorist

In his work The Theory of the Four Movements (1808) the early French utopian socialist Charles Fourier argued that the aurora borealis – or, as he calls it: “the northern crown” - would melt the ice at the North Pole which would then be under “full cultivation because of the shining ring of light”.[1]  He went on to say that the sea as a result would taste differently, like a “kind of lemonade,”[2] but he is also known for his understanding of afforestation and its influence on rain and wind.[3]  He even pronounced on the idea that “great ships will … sail through isthmuses like Suez and Panama”, a notion possibly picked up from another French utopian socialist, Saint-Simon (1760-1825), or from his followers.[4]   Here is just some of what Charles Fourier (1772-1837) had to say about climate change:

When the human race has extended the cultivation of the globe beyond sixty degrees north, the planet’s temperature will be less extreme and generally more pleasant; the rutting will become more active, the aurora borealis will occur more frequently, will be fixed over the pole and will broaden out into a ring or crown.  The fluid, which at the moment only emits light, will acquire an additional characteristic and distribute heat as well as light. …

The influence of the northern crown will be powerful enough to be felt across a third of the atmosphere; it will be visible in St Petersburg, Okhotsk and along the entire sixtieth parallel.  The heat will increase, will be felt from there to the pole, which will enjoy the sort of temperatures currently characteristic of Andalucia or Sicily.  The entire world will by then be under cultivation, bringing about a rise of five or six degrees, possibly even twelve, in the uncultivated regions such as Siberia and the north of Canada.  There are two reasons for the climate to become milder in the areas adjoining the sixtieth parallel: the effect of increased cultivation and the influence of the crown, which will mean that only temperate winds like the ones which blow from Barbary across to Genoa and Marseilles, will emanate from the pole.  The conjunction of the two factors will cause the sixtieth parallel to bask in the temperatures currently enjoyed by the fully cultivated regions of the forty-fifth such as Bordeaux, Lyons, Turin and Venice, so that the cities of Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Tobolsk and Yakutsk, in the coldest latitude on earth, will enjoy temperatures comparable to those in Gascony or Lombardy, always allowing for the slight variations caused by the proximity of mountains and the sea.  And the coastal regions of Siberia, unviable today, will enjoy the gentle temperatures of Provence and Naples.[5]

---

[1] Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2008), p. 33, 34.  For some delightful comment on Fourier’s eccentricities see Dominic Pettman’s essay “Get thee to a Phalanstery: or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade” in The Public Domain Review [blog] 2019/05/01.

[2] Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, p. 50.

[3] Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959) p. 151.

[4] Ibid., p. 151 fn 2.  See also Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, p. 175.

[5] Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, pp. 47, 48.

Revising Descartes: Is scientific man ‘lord and master of nature’ in an era of climate change?

For they made me see that it is possible to achieve knowledge which would be very useful for life and that, in place of the speculative philosophy that is taught in the Schools, it is possible to find a practical philosophy by which, knowing the forces of actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we should be able to use them in the same way for all the applications for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.[1]

Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637).

---

[1] René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings, tr. Desmond M. Clarke (Toronto: Penguin, 1999), p. 44. [Part 6].