Sustainability Southeast

(This letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, 2 December 2007.)

Congratulations are due Nobel Prize Winner, Al Gore. By raising awareness of the scientific consensus on climate change, he favors a good enough future for our children. At least to me, the “powers that be” are in denial of reality and unwilling to openly and honorably express their understanding of Al Gore’s concerns with regard to the ominous human predicament that is looming before the human community. That many too many politicians and economic powerbrokers adamantly support the soon to become unsustainable global enterprise of endless big-business expansion, does not favor our children’s well-being or safety, I believe. These leaders appear to have pledged their primary allegiance and reverent devotion to the short-term ‘successes’ of unbridled economic globalization, regardless of the long-term potential for catastrophe that such a recklessly unrestrained and unrealistic pursuit portends. For leaders to conspicuously ignore the carefully and skillfully obtained scientific consensus on climate change and global warming, in particular, is incomprehensible.

Plainly, what is necessary now is clarity of vision, intellectual honesty and courage as well as a willingness among leaders to begin “centering” their attention on the distinct probability of threat(s) to humanity that is posed by the gigantic scale and patently unsustainable growth rate of the over consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human population worldwide in our time.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill

(This letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, 15 August 2007.)

Bravo to Winston Kirby for his CHN letter of August 8th, “Candidates ignore pressing problems”. Many too many politicians and corporate CEOs are ignominiously disregarding consistent and overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming and other pernicious forms of climate change. Everyone understands the importance of technology in addressing global problems that are looming before humanity. What is woefully inadequate, what is unconscionable, is the dearth of reasonable and sensible leadership by those who have assumed positions of power in the political economy. Business-as-usual that adamantly and relentlessly favors unbridled industrialization and unrestrained economic globalization could be approaching a point in history when the huge scale and rapid growth rate of endlessly expanding business activities become patently unsustainable on a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet the size of Earth.

Perhaps now is the time for national leaders to follow the wisdom of Mr. Kirby by at least acknowledging “a nest of world problems,” the reality of which most leaders remain in denial. Given the probability that certain clearly identifiable global problems can be expected to fall into the laps of our kids, it appears somehow not quite right both to willfully leave these problems unattended and, even more disturbing, to fail in the exercise of our duty to warn the children: a duty to warn them of potential dangers to life as we know it and to the integrity of Earth.

—
Steve Salmony
Chapel Hill

(Steven Salmony wrote this Guest Column for the Chapel Hill News, 11 February 2007.)

Each human culture presents its many members with knowledge of reality and with longstanding, adamantly held perceptions that are illusory. For example, unverified cultural transmissions can give rise to widely shared distortions of the world whenever mistaken impressions are consensually validated as if they represent what is real.

In these instances, humans ubiquitously emit culturally biased and scientifically unsupported communications that confuse human reasoning and often promote a certain cortical conceitedness that is not useful in acquiring an understanding of the practical requirements of reality.

Over long time periods, preternatural ideas are passed down from generation to generation, with an unintended result. Distorted perceptions of reality are shared among people, thereby confounding the efforts of humanity to share an adequate awareness of what is real.

When good science emerges, it is initially disturbing because the new science usually challenges well-established but unrealistic ideas about what it means to be human, the “placement” of the human species within the natural order of living things, and the requirements of biophysical reality. New scientific facts of this particular kind are uniformly difficult for people to see because unexpected data expose hubris to view by the human species.

Since humans are shaped early and pervasively by a superabundance of culturally derived transmissions in our perception of reality, it becomes an evolutionary challenge for human beings to see the world as it is and to gain knowledge of the human species as one of many miraculous creatures to inhabit so wondrous a planetary home as Earth.

When a scientist-practitioner of psychology such as myself thinks a patient is suffering from mental illness, that determination is an evidence-based clinical judgment. However, cultural standards of normalcy are not as carefully and rigorously developed as are clinical judgments, but instead are casually agreed upon and promulgated as social norms and conventions that include scientifically validated perceptions of reality as well as misperceptions of what is real.

Because some distorted impressions of the world are valued by those who share them, these misperceptions are readily passed from member to member within a culture, among both peers and the generations.

Deeply disturbed mental patients distort reality so drastically that their incorrect impressions of reality do not become established by being passed along to other people. By contrast, “normal” people in instrumentalities of governance, social organizations and cultures appear not to misperceive reality so sharply, yet distortions of what aggregations of normal people perceive do remain.

A term of art in psychology is useful here, folie a deux. The term means that two people share an identical distortion of reality. This understanding leads to other terms, folie a deux million for a government agency or political party, folie a deux cent million for a social order or folie a deux billion for a culture. These terms refer to misperceived aspects of reality held and commonly shared by many people of a government, a society or a culture.

At least one way to define the highest standard of normalcy for people in these aggregates is in terms of being able to adequately distinguish what is illusory from what is in scientific fact real.

—
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill

(This letter was published in the Chapel Hill News, 22 November 2006.)

Just before dawn, I awakened for no apparent reason, leapt out of bed, opened the back door and wandered down to the water’s edge.

Everyone else was still slumbering in a dream state, I supposed. Darkness overspread Eastwood Lake and the homes surrounding it. There was one light visible across the lake in the home of Bud Parsons. As I looked around I suddenly noticed something strange and completely unexpected, something more incredible than anything I had ever seen before. In my living room and in Bud’s house, an elephant-size humanimal was easy to see.

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