What’s Love Got to do With It? Or Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise, or Happiness?

Forty four years ago, I heard this rather unsettling half-poem in the pipe-tobacco-infused offices of Emil Wolfgang Menzel, primatologist emeritus at New York’s Stony Brook University. It went something like this.

“Higamous hogamous, women are monogamous. Higamous pigamous, men are polygamous.” In layman terms it means: Women want to have babies with only one partner while men prefer having babies with many.

Sensible as this may sound to some religious and rap groups, this same school of thought theorizes that this disparity has more to do with animal instinct than human spirit, as much as we may wish otherwise. For the past 70 years Menzel et. al. have studied the boundary between the two, with some unsettling conclusions.

Ivan Pavlov showed a bell works as well as a bowl of food in getting dogs excited about dinner. B. F. Skinner took Pavlov a frightening step further showing human behavior can be similarly, even subliminally shaped, much to the delight of Madison Avenue. E.O. Wilson pulled out all the stops saying our DNA dictates what we do.

All this dissecting of human behavior into biochemistry, instinct, and evolution can empty meaning from the joy, love, compassion and contentment we all treasure. Which is why nobody ever heard of these guys. They kept asking questions nobody wanted answered.

To them, our emotions are little more than brain-stem-based strategies to ease primitive impulses past a far more cautious frontal cortex. Said another way, difficult decisions are made all the easier by “going with your gut”, “relying on instinct,” “getting worked up” or, dare I say it, “falling in love.”

Therein lies the rub. There’s a trade-off we all make when we get emotional that one might easily argue leaves us vulnerable to those less so. Which has me wondering why, in this the “Information Age,” are we all so overwrought? Is it because there’s money and power to be had, all at the expense of the overwrought?

So, in this issue of NBN we pay homage to Tina Turner and so many others turning our heartfelt feelings into capital gains, political office or gruesome wars, with the simple question that earned Tina a ton: “What’s love got to do with it?” Or sadness, anger, fear, surprise, happiness, and disgust. You’ll love it. Click here.

Wasting Time Wasting Energy

Remember handkerchiefs? For our younger readers, there was a time when, if you had to blow your nose, you used an ornate square of cloth kept in your purse or pocket. Here’s the weird part: you didn’t throw it out. You tucked your “snot rag” away to use over again until it was deemed dirty.

Even then you did not throw it out. It went into the weekly wash along with your favorite sun dress or polo shirt. For generations raised on one-and-done Kleenex this may be TMI, but brace yourselves young people, there is more.

Imagine washing and reusing diapers or getting take-out beer from a bar in a small tin bucket. Time was when there were no drive-thru restaurants or plastic utensils, and you always cleaned your plate, literally and figuratively.

Cities reeked of horse manure because the stuff was everywhere. You lived in these smelly cities because everything was in walking distance. Blocks of ice delivered by horse-drawn carts cooled refrigerators. Cars were a novelty, not a necessity.

My dad and his aunt supplied many of these anecdotes. They were born in the 1920s and 1890s, respectively, back when women were women and men did all the voting. Around this time dirt-cheap energy was discovered quite literally oozing from the ground,

That discovery changed everything. The next century was a fossil-fuel-fed frenzy of ever-increasing production and consumption of oil, gas and all kinds of other “stuff” made from it. By 2019 the US was burning through 93 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy to meet the needs of 331 million Americans. More than 80 percent of that from fossil fuels.

That’s about 2,500 BTUs or 625,000 calories per person per day, the same amount of energy as each of us—kids included—eating 1,136 Big Macs. In. One. Day. For a little perspective: One gallon of gasoline holds about 28 million calories or about 51,000 Big Macs. Yet, less than one third of the energy we consume each day goes to transportation.

The rest goes to buying all the “stuff” we can’t live without shortly before we throw it out: Kleenix, Pampers, plastic water bottles, plastic straws, Baggies, tin foil, incomprehensible amounts of agricultural chemicals, incomprehensible amounts of clothing, bread crusts, four-day-old Dim Sum, four-year-old flat-screen TVs, and date-stamped gourmet cookies to name an infinitesimally small sample.

All compliments of our inexhaustible appetite for exhausting fossil fuels. It’s how each of us produces three times more trash than anybody else in the world. Energy may not be created or destroyed, but it sure can be wasted and doing so in this country is almost a status symbol.

Generations before us worked long hours so their kids could buy all this “stuff” getting thrown out. So much so, being a “hard worker” became the highest form of praise in this country, regardless of what you worked hard at. All while we turned a blind eye to discarding the fruits of our labor half-eaten. It’s more like 60 percent, but who’s counting.

Here’s the punch line, it appears the younger generations are questioning this “hard-worker” ethic, and not just the rich ones. Is this “Great Resignation” the dawning of a great realization that we’re wasting a lot of our lives so we can waste all that energy? Could Millennials and their kin be contemplating not wasting the most precious resource of all, our time? Or at the very least putting our time to better use: ourselves?

If so, what’s going to happen to the people, industries and infrastructure dedicated to making all the “stuff” we work so hard to waste? If not, what do we do with our mounting excesses and how do we cover the spiraling costs of the energy needed to keep producing it? Lastly, why on earth are we doing it! Some inconvenient truths and disquieting questions as we trash waste in this issue of News by Nature.

Transpac: The Call of the Squall

Misshapen spires of cumulonimbus clouds plopped randomly across the moon-lit sky lurked like sullen sentries in our path. “Squalls,” mumbled the skipper of the Santa Cruz 50, a fiberglass missile of a sailboat which had been my home since leaving the security of California’s coast for one of yachting’s most storied races. Pondering those ominous silhouettes, I remember thinking: “I’m 1,000 miles from shore.”

I’d first heard of the Transpac a few months earlier when I joined my brother and that same skipper, my brother’s step-son and his fiancé, and some ringer named Brian for the 125-mile Newport Beach, CA, to Ensenada, MX, race: a roughly 24-hour event neatly named the N2E. My brother’s boat back then was a One Design 35, a surfboardish sort of affair notable, if in no other way, for its inability to yield a sleepable surface anywhere along its 35-foot length.

The Transpac was an altogether different race with an altogether different crew. Spanning 10 days and 2,225 miles, the Transpac is as close to professional sailing as a recreational sailor is likely to get without owning the boat. A potentially dangerous endurance test which Hooper listed among his qualifications to get aboard Capt. Quint’s “Orca” in the movie “Jaws”. Real tough-guy stuff that made it onto “Outside” magazine’s list of “50 things to do before you die”.

Being a lover of the open ocean since my shark-fishing days, I dreamed of once again communing with the denizens of the deep so I jumped at the invitation. Getting my wife to sign-off meant promising away many a long fall weekend hiking the Appalachian Trail, but come July 4, I’m cruising Long Beach Harbor in the Santa Cruz, shaking-out a brand-new inventory of sails better measured in acres than square feet. I know, it’s a hard life, but someone’s got to live it.

What followed was a hard life. Every 24 hours of the race was chopped into “watches” where either of the two crews comprising our nine-man team sailed the boat. While on watch I assumed the only task on the boat that I excelled at, an aptly named assignment called grinding which involved straddling an 8-inch-wide fiberglass bulkhead and “grinding” a winch which tightened or loosened the spinnaker, a sail that acts more or less as the boat’s gas pedal. 

This description of grinding is a gross over-simplification of a task that, executed properly, pushes the boat to its limits while avoiding life-threatening catastrophe, which is pretty much the modern day Transpac’s modus operandi.

Numerous nuances to successful grinding were alternately whispered or yelled at me by my three other watch mates: upper-middle-aged men from all walks of life whose only common thread is decades of open-ocean racing.

Each watch was exhausting in every way human endurance can be tested and you sat watch every other three or four hours depending on if it was day or night—a distinction that completely escaped the skipper, who was also the head of my watch.

So, between fitful naps that sent my circadian rhythms into a tailspin, I could be found grinding my ass off to a chorus of derisive voices poised to pounce on any mistake a second or so before it could be made. The one or two times I took the helm, that same chorus grew deafening sending the boat anywhere but straight as my watch mates all seemed to have different approaches to the same tasks.   

At 58 years old I found myself a very poor match for this mental and physical abuse. If a little reluctance curdled in me the requisite enthusiasm expected of every Transpac crew member, the skipper picked up on it immediately and I was guilty as charged a little more than I’d like to admit. 

Yet quitting was not an option as it would no-doubt mean finishing out the race enduring vastly intensified derision from the skipper and my watch mates, who through deed or dictate reminded me at every available opportunity that I was the worst sailor on the boat, despite my decades of recreational experience. So, I latched onto grinding, one of the more physically demanding tasks on the boat, as an easy means of proving my competence to my watch and shutting them the hell up in the process. 

The Transpac, it turns out, does not accept mere competence. It demands enthusiasm, all too rabidly displayed by my younger brother who also signed up for the race and has his own fiberglass missile on the east coast. My occasional, ever-so-slight indifference made me the laggard of my crew while my younger brother’s effervescence made him the darling of his, adding an extra layer of irritant as I listened from my shoulder-width berth below-decks to what a grand time he seemed to be having whenever he was on watch. 

These misfit feelings lasted until Day 5. Up to then my crew-mates spoke vaguely about squalls, either to frighten or avoid frightening those with less experience with same: true intent was hard to gauge with those guys. Now it would seem to me that, sitting in the middle of the world’s largest ocean in a 50-foot boat, anything called a squall should be avoided at all costs.

Far from avoiding squalls, the present day Transpac sentiment is that the added energy is not to be squandered by so-sober an act as taking down a few acres of sails. Certainly not for this skipper, unbeknownst to me as I extruded myself feet-first from my berth in the back of the boat to answer the call to the 11pm to 2am watch on Day 5-6.

I latched myself to the boat’s lifeline and immediately started grinding. The wind was around 21 knots, but clearly “freshening,” to use the sort of misnomer often employed by my watch-mates to hide the many real dangers so easy to find in an open-ocean race where survival is secondary to winning. Within minutes the wind reached sustained speeds of 26 knots. That’s 29.92 mph.

What the heck. Let’s call it 30 mph. For those not familiar with the acute sense of vulnerability found only on a perch four feet above sea-level in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean and charging into a storm of unknown magnitude, gusts are not the same as sustained winds. Gusts end.

The previous 4 days of the Transpac treated us to perfect, sustained winds in the low 20s that kept the boat cruising at a brisk 13 to 14 knots. Gusts occasionally edging higher allowed the fore-mentioned ringer to surf a fortuitous following sea to clock the boat’s top race speed of just over 20 knots.

Experiencing 16,000 pounds of boat “ripping”, to quote the skipper, across 6- to 8-foot ocean waves, propelled by sails obscuring your view from ear to ear is thrilling. Particularly when it’s just for a half minute or so in broad daylight. 

There are certainly a few other human responses to experiencing the same for half an hour, at night, with no idea when or if it will end, or if even more “freshening” is around the corner. I might add here that, we were well beyond any rescue helicopter’s range.

On the night of my first squall, my response came down somewhere between dread and exhausted resignation as I snapped my life vest to the life line and the boat settled into a sustained speed of 15 knots breaking into 17 knots every other minute or so as the gusts crept over 30 knots. 

Oh. I forgot to mention the rudder. On Day 3 of Transpac 2017, a disquieting thudding I reported to the skipper on Day 2 turned out to be the rudder and damaged bushings therein which help control the boat reliably under periods of extreme stress, such as a 26-knot squall. (In defense of the skipper, there were all sorts of noises emanating from the bowels of that boat. He didn’t take me seriously at any other point in the race, there’s no reason to fault him for not doing so at that time.)

Below decks, these bushings were about 3-feet from the head of my birth and as we got further offshore, what little sleep I got was despite the thudding. Think of Edgar Allen Poe’s, “Tell Tale Heart”. As I took to my post at the start of the squall, despite the roar of wind and rushing water, all I could hear were those occasional thuds. Were they getting louder? More frequent?

But about 5 minutes into the squall something happened that now has me seriously thinking all this suffering was not for naught. Through a laser focus on my near continuous grinding, I became one with the Saran wrap of spinnaker stretching forward ahead of the bow.

I pulled it back from the brink of collapse to grasp the entirety of available energy without losing the half second or so it took to cue the cockpit chorus. At that moment, in that squall, I became an indispensable part of a team ripping the boat through a really hairy stretch. At night.

This is an experience that is hard to describe but I derived enormous satisfaction from it. Finally, I felt on a par with my maniac crew-mates. More such moments followed. Most notably when we entered a Cuisinart of cross currents called the Molokai Channel shortly after sunset and about two hours before the finish line.

For this crucial stage of the race, the skipper promoted me to trimming the spinnaker, which is sort of the opposite of grinding. My younger brother—who was on deck for the finish—had that job, while my older brother was given the helm.

Rather than risk fraternal discord comparing sailing skills across crew members, it’s certainly accurate to say the three of us were among the least experienced open-ocean racers on the boat. The skipper’s assigning the three of us to take the boat across the finish line was one of a few flashes of cortical-level thought he exhibited that still earns him my grudging respect.

As we entered this blackhole of unseen nautical challenges, all I wanted to do was get past the finish line safe and sound. Once again, the skipper and I didn’t see eye to eye. All he did was whisper—5 inches from my ear—“keeping pushing” the spinnaker out while telling me to make sure I “don’t blow it up.” Finish line or no, I wasn’t too keen on the former command out of total dread of the latter result. 

Nonetheless, the three of us executed flawlessly and his exhortations that night got us over the finish in 10 days, 12 hours, 21 minutes and 55 seconds, probably several minutes sooner than if we’d just coasted comfortably through the Molokai Channel, as I so dearly wanted to do.

As it turns out, those minutes helped propels us from seventh to sixth place in arguably one of the most competitive classes in the race. Not bad for a crew that spent a total of three hours sailing together the day before the start of the race.

Now, I’ve enjoyed similar exhilaration and feelings of accomplishment in much less trying circumstance. Many of them hiking 1,000 or so miles of the Appalachian Trail with my wife, an activity I suspect I’ll be doing a lot more of should I start formulating arguments for another Transpac. I’ve also experienced equally white-knuckled thrills day sailing.

The thing about the Transpac is this: Outside of a war zone, you will never get such a disparate group of middle-aged men to work so closely together. And I mean closely. As admittedly the least experienced racer on the boat, being able to take and keep my place among them is something I’ll look back on fondly for the rest of my life.

So, despite my vows after the race, and all the chest-beating and condescension during, I’ll consider another Transpac if the invitation is offered. I just hope this essay hasn’t significantly increased my chances of going overboard in the middle of a squall, in the middle of the night, 1,000 miles from shore. Then again, at least I will have died having crewed a Transpac.   

The Bubba Bros: Fraternity in Fanaticism

NBN so clearly remembers waking up Nov. 4, 2016 with a new-found sense that we’re saps. Not simply because our country had just elected a president completely opposed to all our hopes and dreams for humanity. Rather, it was the discovery that so many don’t share those hopes and dreams including, as it would turn out, close friends and family. As we saw it, 62 million Americans somehow believed that what’s best for them is best for this country and the rest of the world can go hang. It was a wake-up call.

Readers, before you say: “What a sap,” consider for a second when NBN came of age. Grave moral lessons from the Great Depression and WWII were the timber from which our hopes and dreams were hewn. Sure, America’s done stupid, bad, even inhuman things. But then there is the United Nations, The Marshall Plan, USAID, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air and Waters acts. The Statue of Freekin’ Liberty. The ends always justified the means in America, right?

Nov. 4, 2016, marked open season on all that. The means became the end in the United States. Atlas shrugged, bigly. Rather than fight the good fight and “resist” this sudden, seismic shift in national priorities, NBN spent the next four years trying to figure it out. Tools for said investigation were two friends who helped put the past POTUS in power and tried again this last November. Two very different friends. We’ll call them the Bubba Bros.

There is no way the Bubba Bros would last five minutes in each other’s company. Yet here they are, four years later still wholeheartedly endorsing the unrelenting, indiscriminate deconstruction of our administrative state. They love this country but hate its government. (Who doesn’t, right?) Nonetheless, this impossible communion of such antithetical actors is a warning shot across the bow of those who, however reluctantly, believe our government can still be an agent for good. You know, saps. Understanding what binds the Bubba Bros, all 74 million of them, in Our Latest Post.

The Siren’s Song of Idiot America

With a lot of help from an out-dated electoral process, and a little push from those who would do us harm, the United States finds itself today being ruled by the unruly. George Orwell called them Proles and Hillary Clinton called them deplorables. Sarah Palin called them Soccer Mom and Jon McCain called them Joe the Plumber. In this issue of News by Nature, we call them Idiots. As blacks use “Nigger” in comradery and even respect, so NBN uses “Idiot.” At one time or another we’re all Idiots. NBN remembers fondly working construction jobs with fellow Idiots talking sports, laughing at off-color jokes and using the word “ain’t” a lot.

For Idiots, life is a daily discipline of applying skills learned over younger years to a fresh set of tasks, each loosely defined by the same parameters called a “job.” There’s innovation enough to make those jobs reasonably interesting, but never so much that it cuts too deep into productivity. In the Idiot’s world, there’s a time for learning and a time for doing your job and over time the former yields to the latter until age takes over and then someone younger, stronger and paid less takes over.

This occupational obedience earns Idiot World the respect of a job well done and the reliable measures of a life well lived: providing for a family, and buying stuff and having fun with both.These contentments free us from the anxieties of underachievement while occasionally letting us overindulge when we overachieve. When we over-indulge and under-achieve—when Joe the Plumber becomes Joe Six-Pac—society frowns, we pay our penance to higher authorities and, hopefully, return to work Monday with a clear conscience determined to do better.

Today science, technology, engineering and math are ending Idiot World. STEM is leveraging our daily production to where we continuously and vastly outpace our old jobs. STEM is confronting Idiot World with the ugly contemplation of just how important are these jobs generations before us dedicated their lives to. By contrast, just how important are we that software and robots now do our jobs more efficiently and affordably.

As STEM upends primal forces which have governed Idiot World since the Industrial Revolution, innovation is becoming the most sought-after skill set. That’s got Soccer Mom and Plumber Joe plenty frightened for their future. Frightened people are unruly people and as STEM busily transforms the world around them, we have a fake Idiot in the Whitehouse using the only levers left to keep real Idiots blissfully ignorant: the promise of plenty of pointless jobs and praise from higher authorities. In the Latest Post: The evils of STEM in a God-fearing, blue collar, Idiot World.

Is Conservative Christian Capitalism Our Culture?

As NBN noodled over a line of logic to leverage into an entire issue, we came upon this one very simple question: Would Jesus vote for Trump? Would The Prince of Peace support a guy who places winning or losing above all else? Would the man who forgives trespassers back a president who puts them in cages? Would a man who turns the other cheek endorse a man who points the finger of blame? Trump comes up short if not altogether subversive to the teachings of most all religions but let’s drill down to the heart of the Christian Conservative Faustian Pact that elected this guy: the right and responsibility of every person to govern themselves and the money to be made doing so.

At NBN we’re far from biblical scholars but of the few times we’ve cracked the Good Book, we’ve always been struck by the way Jesus asked people to follow their heads and their hearts and less so all those laws people promulgate when these two organs aren’t up to the task. Two thousand years later “The Gipper” (see above) took that ball and ran with it becoming the patron saint of Christian Conservatives in the process. Yet in the half century since Reagan declared that big government is bad government, dozens of social, economic and environmental protections have been passed, making The Gipper and the US government bigger than ever in the eyes of Christian Conservatives being told such restrictions go against God.

So now Christian Conservatives are canonizing a new saint. Donald Trump makes Reagan look like a liberal as he reverses priorities and policies this country has embraced since WWII. All while he feigns allegiance to a different set of strictures time has imbued with a mythical status that makes breaking them worse than illegal in the eyes of millions of feckless faithful. Therein lies the rub for this issue. The rules we obey and why in the Latest Blog.

Spring 2020: When Laissez Fare Loses Its Luster

If there is one lesson we’ve learned from the corona virus outbreak, it’s that time and technology do not suffer fools gladly. It’s for the lack of this lesson that the folks running the country put America First in COVID contractions, collapsing our consumer economy in the process. Yet, as those same folks struggle to revive that economy there’s a more important lesson for the rest of us: consumerism sucks. To help make this point consider this two-sentence history of American consumerism told most decidedly from a conservationist’s perspective.

Shortly before the Industrial Revolution, Europeans inspired by faith and bankrolled by business crossed the pond and went to work on 1 million square miles of priceless old-growth forests crawling with valuable fur-bearing critters and an endless supply of game, all presided over by a defenseless people readily converted into a free labor force. Those First Settlers were soon supplanted by less ethereal/ethical entrepreneurs who developed the modern world’s most enduring slave trade and expansive grasslands into farming wealth sufficient to monetize an ample supply of oil into an opportunity to monopolize the global fossil fuel industry, just as oil emerges as the world’s primary energy source.

In other words: The Founding Fathers happened upon a winning lottery ticket just in time for emerging technology to turn the entire country into a cash cow. To the FF’s credit they fashioned a government that allowed them to milk this historically unprecedented economic opportunity for all it was worth. Hey, NBN likes to give credit where credit is due. But, what happens when people stop buying, whether for a crisis like Corona Virus, or other reasons. That’s when laissez fare loses its luster, in our Latest Blog.

Winter 2019-20: Cheating, An American Success Story

At NBN we love watching Hollywood heroes. Productive workdays grind to halt when we happen upon YouTubes of Platoon, The Big Short, Shawshank Redemption, Do the Right Thing, and Fiddler on the Roof to name a few. What kind of heroes are Teyva and Mookie? They are real people who do the right thing, simply because it’s the right thing to do, not to save the world from some evil menace. Kind of like Jesus, before he became a “Christian,” or Allah before he became “Great.”

The evil NBN’s Hollywood heroes fight is an inconspicuous sort which masquerades as being good through traditions and beliefs so ingrained adherents unquestioningly use them as moral yardsticks to measure their own self-worth. The kind of evil that’s often called good by the people holding those yardsticks.

This issue of NBN is not about good and evil, or even Hollywood script-writers, per se. It’s about the people we so often find holding the yardsticks. People that for the purposes of this post we will refer to as cheaters.

There are all kinds of cheaters in this world, but they all share one thing: they take advantage of weakness. In some respects such cheating is perfectly fine. A 400-pound lion snapping the neck of a defenseless baby gazelle is nature’s way. But a genius, sweat-of-the-brow investor goading colleagues less-so into making a malignant bet that ultimately cripples the global economy? Or a Bed-Sty pizza delivery boy leading the looting of his place of work for not sufficiently respecting the community it has served for 25 years?

When it comes to humans, defining cheating depends on discerning good from evil. That gets tricky and that’s where the people with the yardsticks step in. People like priests, politicians and script writers—let’s call them poets, for alliteration purposes. We trust them to explain and interpret the morality of such conflicts and sadly, they too cheat. More and more, these days. It’s just nature’s way, right? But is it human nature? Do we want it to be? Cheating, a success story, in our Winter 2019-20 Blog.