January 2022, first blog of the new year. And I can tell this is going to be a multi-parter.
One day in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when I was a teenager in the 1970s, my adored and adorable white mutt persian cat - Samantha - came to the door with a baby cottontail rabbit. As I recall, she was clutching the baby rabbit by the scruff of its neck, as Samantha did with countless litters of her own kittens over the years. But I knew she was a hunter, she'd likely eat the baby bunny, and I reacted quickly to save it.
Samantha gave up the baby rabbit to me with what seemed a minor fuss as compared to times I'd tried to get back a prized bird or mouse. I rushed to show the baby rabbit to my little brother and sister, who cooed and said how cute it was, and I started to tell them about a wild cottontail my great aunt and my mom and I raised successfully when I was 3 years old, and the memories of...
... Wham. Samantha was back, with a second baby cottontail rabbit. We were so occupied with the first, stupidly in hindsight. Bunnies are born in litters of five or six. The eyes were not quite open, so this was a nest of bunnies, and Samantha hadn't fought to keep the first, either because she was on a fire-fighter rescue mission to save all the other bunnies, or she knew there was plenty of lamb hasenpfeffer where that came from.
So I gave the first and second baby rabbits to my siblings, and followed Samantha this time, out into the side yard of our brown split level home on the corner, down the hill toward the small park across the street. Samantha went on with her mission, and this time I was tracking her. She entered some leafy ivy covered portion of the yard, and quickly emerged with Peter Rabbit #3. I grabbed both the cat (now growling) and kitten still in her mouth and carried them both back to the front door, where our mom was now preparing a box for the involuntary kitten-bunnies. We got the third baby rabbit out of Samantha's mouth, and then shut the cat in the lower floor of the house to keep her from returning, whether as Terminator 1 or Terminator 2 - this fluffy white Schwartzenegger was in the penalty box.
But how long, realistically, could we expect to keep our "free range" cat, who'd been free to live her life indoors or out for 15 years? Some moral blue district suburban PETA subscriber today would tell me to keep all cats indoors, and never remove their claws, accept the collateral damage to the wallpaper and furniture. And today no doubt the population of humans is doubled, and the standard of living of humans now supports far more cats and far larger home spaces. But this was Arkansas in the 1970s, and I came from a family of Ozark farm dwellers. Rabbits have as many litters as they do each year because they have evolved to be food. If not for the owls, bobcats, foxes, falcons, coyotes and wolves, rabbits would suffer a mass overpopulatoin, disease and starvation. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution left us with rabbits facing far fewer pumas and grey wolves, and if some farmers grandkids cats caught and ate a few, it was merciful violent mitigation of the dearth of carnivores humans had created over just the past few centuries.
My 1978 Pentax K1000 pointed at my sister stirs amygdala counter-threat
Peter and the Wolf, Lady or the Tiger, we had culturally adapted a fear of apex preditors which was by the time of my childhood a quaint shadow of evolutionary need. These baby bunnies were to Samantha an opportunity to reduce the supply of beef and chicken raising, and all the carbon and energy cost of scaled pet food production. The problem she faced was that humans today retain a Nurture Instinct, which is happily and thankfully cultured by social norms.
We 1978 humans of Fayetteville were experiencing a mix of pleasure - three baby rabbits! - and horror. Rubber-necking at the cat's score didn't cause us to love Samantha the cat less (at least not in the long term). And I'd successfully been a 3-year old bit player in a previous rescue of a bunny rabbit with (as I recalled) pieces of bread soaked in milk. But my mom (the one truly raised on a subsistence farm in Ridgedale, Missouri, a quarter-mile from the Arkansas line) said that it was unlikely the mother rabbit would return to the nest to nurse the two remaining baby rabbits. They'd die of starvation, most likely.
In the wild, a mother rabbit (or bird, or chimp) has evolved an instinct to nurture the young, based (as my amateur channeling of Dr. Steven Pinker tells it) on societies or populations likelihood of future procreation. But unlike "greed and fear", being desire-less and fearless is not common. Those counter qualities are the object of many religious faiths precisely because they are rare, unnatural, and demand discipline.
So after waiting many hours watching to see if the mother bunny might return, and seeing no sign of it (my watching the unheated pot boil may not have helped), we decided to mitigate the risk of starvation and ignore the Star Trek Prime Directive and rescue the remaining 2 bunnies from the nest. The mother rabbit's amygdala of fear of the scent of the cat - or the mama rabbit's statistical risk analysis - told her she can have several litters per year, generating the food for predators she'd selflessly evolved into, if and only if she doesn't get eaten NOW. Risk aversion is a powerful card when there is a population so plenty that even a well-fed housecat becomes the neighborhood's apex predator.
So this story sets up a few pins for this series of blogs. I'll try to remember to tell what finally happened to the baby bunnies before the end of the series (but first must remember to finish and edit the series).
I know that I've previously postulated the theoretical Super Intelligent being, the Higher Power, the idea of someone so much more intelligent than me or anyone I know that the intelligence would bewilder us as much as my explanation of how a cell phone works fails to instill knowledge on my cat. God could try to explain things to me until God was blue in the face, but if it's more than my mind can digest at once, my mind is a bottleneck for truth.
My theory of intelligence borrows from Einstein's simple explanations of how he came to the Theory of Relativity, by mind experiments about how trains traveling at various degrees up to the speed of light would perceive forward motion as backward motion, the sound of doppler effects, etc. Explaining infinity and the speed of light, of truth and enlightenment and all of that, to a creature whose amygdala is built to be distracted by very immediate opportunities and risks, desires, and fears, is bound to be an exercise in futility. That's why storytellers use parables and anecdotes about rabbits and housecats.
So in the next parts (2 or 3 I'm guessing), I'm going to talk about the ways politicians, policymakers, philosopher prophets, and shareholder reward mechanisms, for good and for bad and for intended and unintended consequences, manipulate society's amygdala, sending jolts to stir fear, desire, and more noble traits like nurture and selflessness. This is what the "leaked Facebook" discussions of algorithms is about, but I'll stick to environmental policy.
In 2001, when I started the Good Point Recycling company after dabbling in thrift stores, reuse, and "digital divide" stimulus, the value of processed cathode ray tube (CRT) cullet or pieces of glass was about 7 cents per pound, processed and delivered to a lead zinc or copper smelter for a fluxing agent. Prior to 2000, the cost and revenues for CRT glass were the same as for recycled bottle glass - generally poor, and subject to mining policy developed in the 1800s to stimulate (subsidize and protect) strategic metal supply. It was already an uphill battle to compete with primary (mined) leaded silicate produced under the umbrella of the General Mining Act of 1872. But it existed, and the good and bad years for secondary leaded cullet. Whether before the Bevill Waste (conditionally exempt mining slag used by the industry every 5 or six years) decision or after, when the London Metals Exchange price of lead hit a point where 7 cents per pound made CRT cullet a bargain.
What happened to CRT glass is that it was labeled a risk, a liability, a hazardous waste. Fear of liability over stockpiles of CRT cullet caused the price to decline regardless of the cost of mined lead or zinc smelting. And I can try to explain this until I'm as blue in the face as God gets explaining my role on the history of the planet from time to time.
But the blog series about Einstein's Amygdala is about how "conservatives" and "liberals" and anyone with a cause winds up taking the cat's predatory desire, or the rabbit's bolting in fear impulse, to scale production at the most profitable levels.
The art of capitalism is to scale things to make them cheap. The cheaper they are, the more humans benefit from owning them. The more humans' standard of living increases, the more secondary product is on the market to compete with new sales.
In the pizza industry, there is no copyright or patent to protect Dominos from Papa Johns. It is a recipe of "commodity" markets. Like secondary leaded glass cullet used to be, competing with anglesite produced from Perkoa or Ok Tedi or Kabwe lead mining in Zambia (shoutout to my dear friends at PureEarth, aka Blacksmith Institute, who refused to me in person in NYC in 2015 a month after they published a list starting with A is for Agbogbloshie).
Risk is relative. Mitigation has to be engineered to maximize the environmental benefits of rhe market resistance. More to follow.
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