Nature is associated with gifts from Earth’s lands and oceans.

Forests thick with greens and browns.

Streams cutting through rock and dirt.

Paw prints forming lines in white vastness.

The world untouched by human inhabitance. That’s nature.

But also, whatever comes naturally is nature.

Feelings and actions embraced at lightning thought.

Effortless habits built by infinite loops.

Essence, instincts and impulse.

Artificial means can become something natural.

It is not natural to allow an ill body to find cures by itself.

It is natural to treat disease and infection with tools and expert’s wit.

Artificial becomes natural.

A human brain is capable of complex relationships beyond binary genders.

Behaviors once oppressed, now understood and slowly embraced.

They become as natural as celebrating Christmas in December.

Or watching a flock of pigeons swarming a busy city park.

Acceptance becomes natural.

---

“If you live according to nature, you will never be poor. If you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.”

Insightful analysis and strategies catalog for a greener, eco-friendlier world, leveraging the use of science and engineering. I learned some of the less obvious options to achieve it: cities, nuclear energy and genetic engineering.

Population scattered in the countryside, away from centralized distribution of energy and collection of garbage, is suboptimal. Cities are far more efficient in the use of resources and services for the very real large populations that inhabit greenhouse-effect-producing countries.

Nuclear energy is, within the measure of our current technological capabilities, the greenest source of energy at scale. It can efficiently and cleanly provide energy to very large populations.

Also at scale, genetically engineered organisms (GMOs) allow for more efficiently dealing with food demand. Food waste, in the form of a crop lost to bad weather or plague, is one of the largest contributors to the greenhouse effect.

As produced nowadays, crops no longer resemble an “organic”, “original” breed. They have been modified across generations through artificial selection so they’re more resilient to destructive events. GMO practices simply accelerate and improve the efficiency of such modifications.

These areas allow human’s footprint on the Earth to be engineered, providing control on our impact and prolonging inhabitance. It takes a properly informed society and investment into improving the technology behind each.

What’s stopping us?

Ignorance and misinformation.

Politics and short-term thinking.

Hypocritical guardrails and illogical ethics.

Tribalism.

---

The book is summarized by the author in a beautiful, concise paragraph:

Ecological imbalance is too important for sentiment. It requires science. The health of natural infrastructure is too compromised for passivity. It requires engineering. What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable. We live one life.

Sometimes when I was at home I would jump out of bed and try to figure out where I was. I would look out the windows, see houses and trees and begin to panic. I would try to find the tiller, turn away from the land. Then I would wake up, standing there, and it would come to me that I wasn’t on the boat. This made me realize I was a lot more afraid of sailing than I admitted, and the fears I was hiding came to the surface in the dark.

But I knew, I knew. If I sailed far enough, if I didn’t crash my boat against some rocks, I would put my anchor out in some foreign land. I would climb a hill and meet a goatherd. We would sit under a tree, drink wine and eat goat’s cheese. He wouldn’t have heard of Chernobyl or disposable diapers, and I wouldn’t tell him.

He would tell me his story and I would tell him mine. We would look at the hills, the sky. And I would walk down the hill with the fine touch of a natural person, someone who belongs to the earth, to the sea. Someone beyond the reach of the evening news.

From Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor, by Paul Lutus

Conozco de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en su mayoría gracias a producciones de Hollywood. Esas que mayoritariamente están enfocadas en las heróicas hazañas de soldados aliados en sus campañas Europeas y en el Pacífico. Montecasino, Normandía, las Ardenas, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Midway, Dunkerque. Grandes y cruciales batallas, con despliegue fascinante de armamento y coraje. Junto con el Holocausto y el sufrimiento del pueblo judío, forman la base de mi conocimiento histórico.

Quizá por falta de relatos o gracias a la globalización, últimamente he notado más relatos del lado perdedor: la Alemania nazi.

Tomás es mi gran amigo de muchos años. Lector voraz y fanático de la historia, en especial si tiende a la geopolítica. Hablar con él es abrir una enciclopedia de hechos históricos, que sólo pueden llegar a su memoria cuando algo realmente nos apasiona. De esas pasiones que son únicas de cada quien y que a veces pasan desapercibidas.

Utopia is an idealistic book. A description of a society abiding by a set of rules that promote collectivism over individualism.

By organizing a group of individuals into an emergent entity, the entity thrives over others and perpetuates itself across time, in a generalized state of well-being.

An extract from Emerson’s Self-Reliance:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, – and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

I’ve worked with people who have not gone to college. People who have informally or empirically studied a craft and gone off and made a living of it. I’ve also seen college graduates fail at a real job. Folks who have graduated with honors and gotten beat up by the realities of work-life.

College is a micro-universe, a bubble. It has a set of rules that we can follow and reach a successful outcome. Like playing a video-game. You can start, play, fail, restart, try again, succeed. The reward is an acknowledgment from a group of experts. When finished, you have won the game of college. It does not imply you have won the game of work-life.

At the end of our teenage years, we’re given the task of choosing what we’ll want to do professionally for the rest of our lives. It’s not an absolutist choice, but society does not reward those who periodically switch professions. We are continuously rewarded in the career ladder if we become specialists at a craft. This makes the choice, at that age, immensely stressful. Even if we don’t realize it.

What Emerson reflects on in his passage is entitlement. As a college graduate, I felt a sense of “deserving” a certain job. I had studied all the components of computer engineering and passed the expert’s trials, so I must be qualified. Right? As soon as you start seeing how real business operate, and how money is really made –by providing value to someone else–, it is easy to realize how unprepared I was.

Emerson talks of “the sturdy lad.” One that hasn’t had the opportunity to formally train in a craft. One that out of passion or labor, has empirically learned a craft. If we come out of college so unprepared, isn’t work-life the great equalizer? Don’t we all, when confronted with problems from the true craft, face it on equal grounds? Aren’t we all forced to become sturdy lads in order to succeed? Don’t we all get a hundred chances?

A book about realizing metaphors as fundamental to our perception of the world around us.

Like seeing, hearing or tasting, they enable understanding the truth of our experiences, whether “external” (as in, the physical realm) or “internal” (ideas, thoughts and feelings). A representation of the experiences we live: past, present or potential. Information in packages.

The combination of both learned language and metaphors, aside from providing perception, drive many of our actions.

The deeper this book goes into defining, decomposing and categorizing metaphors, the more it mingles in philosophy. Our own personal philosophy is defined by a heavy use of metaphors. This likely happens unconsciously for most. It is also influenced by the culture we live in, which is also defined, in large parts, by metaphors.

Since we’re limited in the amount of literal definitions for concepts, we turn to metaphors to expand our understanding. They’re easier to remember, friendlier as components that compose concepts and are instantly relatable. They’re language’s representation of the human mind’s capacity to interconnect concepts. Gateways into ideas and interconnection of thoughts that flow out of our mind. This paragraph was full of metaphors. It’s fascinating.

Objectivism is not infallible for understanding the world (both physical and non-physical). Not for humans anyway. We require a grain (or a whole bag of) subjectivism as a complement. Through the injection of the subjective “metaphorical reasoning” we expand our understanding, using unique relationships between entirely different concepts. It’s a skill, inherent to human beings, and a huge driver of our species’ dominance over others.

Not all content consumption is passive. Good books, films, journalism, videos, podcasts, etc., encourage you to think critically. When you’ve finished a book or an album, there should be a period of time for you to reflect on what you’ve experienced. You should have a break to let your mind wander, to examine your response, to write your thoughts down, to discuss them with others. That’s one reason I love seeing movies at the theater. We talk about preserving the communal experience of watching movies, but what about when the movie ends, that ritual of slowly getting up, emerging into the lobby, and waiting until someone finally says, “So what did you think?” The conversation that follows, in the car rider home or over drinks at a bar, is what makes the passive viewing experience active.

from Escape Into Meaning, by Evan Puschak

Aquí va un extracto de El Evangelio Según Jesucristo, de José Saramago:

No obstante, la lógica no lo es todo en la vida, y nada raro es que, justamente, lo previsible, que lo es por ser el remate más plausible de una secuencia, o porque, simplemente, ya había sido anunciado antes, no es raro, decíamos, que lo previsible, llevado por razones que sólo él conoce, acabe por elegir, para revelarse al fin, una conclusión, por así decir, aberrante, bien en lo referente al lugar, bien lo que a la circunstancia se refiere.

El pasaje sirve como mecanismo de exposición. Se describe la razón por la que el protagonista tomó cierta acción: Jesús decide abandonar a El Pastor (Satán) después de años como su ayudante.

Es también un perfecto ejemplo de la prosa de Saramago. En su estilo, una reflexión está enterrada en texto que parece lleno de obstáculos. Una sopa de trama y exposición.

Si se ignoran los conectores y las disculpas, lo que el autor quiere expresar es: “La lógica no lo es todo. Puede suceder que alguna circunstancia o lugar, por más previsible que sea, acabe por elegir una conclusión fuera de lo normal”

¿Está justificada la verbosidad del autor? ¿es justificada exponer esta reflexión a trompicones? George Orwell es famoso por promover la practicidad del texto escrito. Por su arte de expresar una idea compleja con fraseo eficiente y reduciendo el uso de palabras inusuales. Esto podría interpretarse como un uso perezoso de la lengua. No es tan simple.

Cuando un sendero es mantenido, ¿es común permitir que crezca la maleza que podría obstaculizarnos? Una respuesta sensata es “no”. Lo ideal es mantenerlo limpio. ¿Es lo correcto caminar un sendero en su forma más natural o de la manera más eficiente posible hasta el destino? ¿Debe importar el objetivo del autor cuando leemos? ¿O debemos, simplemente, leer?

A nivel narrativo, ¿qué gana un autor al expresar una frase de una manera que parece desconcentrada? Cuando trabajamos, los cambios frecuentes de contexto son de los mayores enemigos de la productividad. Algo parecido puede ocurrir cuando leemos. Invertimos atención a un párrafo sólo para llegar al final y preguntarnos qué acabamos de leer.

¿Es el estilo de Saramago una expresión de cómo reflexionamos? Definitivamente no reflexionamos linealmente. A medida que avanzamos en una idea, justificaciones, contraargumentos y otras ideas se presentan. Todo esto desvía la atención pero también nutre la profundidad de la idea inicial.

El estilo parece estar basado en retórica práctica. En el estilo como ideas son comunicadas oralmente. Como si estuviese en un seminario acerca de lógica y la previsibilidad de los acontencimientos. En retórica, es normal añadir conectores, secciones y justificaciones a medida que vamos racionalizando lo que queremos expresar. La habilidad que se desarrolla es la de expresar ideas de manera concisa, con fraseo práctico y transmitible, al momento.

Mi conclusión es que, al escribir, no hay método exacto. La comunicación usando el lenguaje, y específicamente el escrito, tiene altos niveles de subjetividad. Por esto, es un arte.

Puedo entender a quienes podrían considerar a Saramago como un escritor complejo. Su estilo no es convencional y puede resultar difícil de leer. En particular lo encuentro plagado de riqueza e inspiración. Al expresar tramas complejas en este estilo, sólo deja claro que, con su experiencia, desarrolló maestría en su oficio.

This book was a lot of fun to read. It helped confirm my convictions around science and rational optimism.

Science’s mission towards representation of the natural world pushes out any reliance on supernatural beliefs for good explanations.

The Enlightenment, as a consequence of science’s philosophy, set the bases for human progress in a way no other form of collective thought had done before.

What’s the Enlightenment’s biggest gifts? The promotion of individualism and liberty of thought, which allow ideas to mature in groups. Large-scale problems are solved by rational ideas that spring up from these, not from those that tap into the emotional, like nationalism and tribalism. We take such liberties for granted and rarely acknowledge the historical efforts that have provided them.

This book put words to notions I have around factless, rhetoric-fueled ideologies, organizations and rituals. It’s mind-blowing how much information is collated, referenced and structured into flowy, fact-based explanations around the multiple subjects it touches.