Rampant consumerism must be checked, Speth says

James Gustave Speth called for people to re-devote themselves to improving the "art of living." By Neale McDevitt

Flu season may be just around the corner, but environmental activist James Gustave Speth says we have a new scourge to watch for: “afluenza,” a virulent strain of consumerism that, if left unchecked, may prove fatal to our planet.

Delivering his 2008 Beatty Memorial Lecture to a full house at the Centre Mount Royal Auditorium on Oct. 18, the Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University said rampant capitalism is the chief culprit behind the degradation of the environment to the point where the planet’s ability to sustain life has been seriously undermined.

Past articles:

• The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong, April 27, 2006
• How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate, William Ruddiman, March 8, 2006
• Canada in the World: The Challenges Ahead, Michael Ignatieff, October 1, 2005
• When Will We Detect Extraterrestrials, Seth Shostak, March 30, 2005

• April 27, 2006 - McGill Reporter

  Religious scholar Karen Armstrong offers ancient advice for modern times

  What would sages of the ninth century BC say about global warming and suicide bombers? Can philosophers who never saw electricity or even a bicycle offer sound advice on nuclear weapons, the greenhouse effect or 9/11?

  "Certainly," Karen Armstrong told a packed house at McGill on April 27. A former nun turned religious scholar, Armstrong is world-renowned for connecting past, present and future, as she does in her most recent book, The Great Transformation: the Beginning of Our Religious Traditions.

  In China, India, Israel and Greece, during what was known as the Axial Age (circa 900 to 200 BC), social change prompted major spiritual developments. The movement toward city life, industrial and agricultural revolutions, and the introduction of iron weapons — more lethal than any yet seen — sparked the development of traditions that nourish humanity to this day: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism in India; Confucianism and Daoism in China; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

  According to Armstrong, Axial Age spirituality offers a solution for the frightening problems of our modern age. "The great discovery of the Axial Age is that the divine can be found in the core of everyone, and so everyone is sacred."

  Confucius was the first to develop the Golden Rule in 500 BC. Five hundred years later, Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, would summarize the Torah as, "Do unto others as you would have done to you. The rest is commentary." Jesus advised his followers to love their enemies. All religions have a version of the Golden Rule.

  "It's a perfectly practical solution because it's not rocket science. People just don't want to practice it because they prefer to have a weekly uplift from religion and then go back to their regularly scheduled lives, unscathed."

  At least one audience member smelled danger in turning to religion to resolve problems, when religion itself is the cause of so many conflicts.

  Armstrong disagreed. "Some people do religion badly, just like some people cook badly. Sex can be done badly, too, but that doesn't make sex bad." It is incompetence, rather than religion itself, that is detrimental. Politicians who use religion in their platforms are not necessarily excellent examples of religious sentiment. As for religion's role in conflicts, violence begets violence, which then affects everything, including religion. Violent disasters are not limited to religious conflicts: Hitler's and Stalin's massacres were secular.

  Despite her belief in the importance of religion, Armstrong's latest book critiques its present-day practice. Very often, religious communities are more interested in dogma than compassion. "What's the fun of being religious if you can't disapprove of others?" quipped Armstrong. "We shouldn't cut other people down to size any more than we should cut God down to size. Religious truths aren't to be proved or disproved. They're programs for action."

  Karen Armstrong's talk was sponsored by the Faculty of Religious Studies and the McGill Bookstore, and was made possible through the generosity of the Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee.

  The Great Transformation: the Beginning of Our Religious Traditions is available at the McGill Bookstore.

  March 8, 2006 - McGill Reporter

  Global warming expert not full of hot air

  While it may be hard to imagine that agriculture has had such an enormous effect on climate, William Ruddiman asserts that farmers were affecting the global climate well before the industrial revolution. On March 8, the author of Plows, Plagues and Petroleum delivered the Mini-Beatty Lecture, "How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?"

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  Ruddiman, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, first compared current interglaciation, the relatively mild stretch between ice ages, to the previous three interglaciations - about 100,0000, 200,000 and 300,000 years ago - believing that the previous three should be fairly good predictors of what is happening today. He examined carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in the atmosphere from each interglacial period by using data from ice core samples. By this point, Ruddiman said the previous three interglaciations' levels of carbon dioxide had already peaked and were declining. The current period shows a peak and then, instead of declining, methane and carbon dioxide concentrations increase again.

  He sees the use of land for agriculture as a reason for the increase in greenhouse gases, since this involved increased deforestation and irrigation for rice and cereal crops. "If you're doing agriculture in a forest, you have to cut trees and if you cut trees whether you burn them or let them rot, that's carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere."

  "Five thousand years ago, people started to irrigate for rice on a fairly extensive scale," he said. As early as 10,000 years ago, humans were growing crops and began domesticating animals. As agriculture spread, forested areas were claimed by people as farmland or grazing pastures.

  "The natural trend would have been for global temperatures to go much lower and for the greenhouse gas levels to have gone down, but we pushed them to go up and this greenhouse effect kept us from getting to the threshold of the next ice age." Ruddiman ran a model with colleagues John Kutzbach and Steve Vavrus to see what kind of climate we would currently have if there were no greenhouse gases caused by human activity. The model set carbon dioxide and methane levels to what they would be today without the human effect and the climate cooled substantially. "It would be on average seven degrees colder over Hudson Bay. Ice would be accumulating."

  In the past, skeptics of global warming dismissed his hypothesis out of hand, claiming greenhouse gases caused by human activity are good because they averted an ice age. Ruddiman counters that his research shows how sensitive our climate is to human activity. "I'm a mainstream person about global warming. It's going to be large, to very large."

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  October 1, 2005 - McGill Reporter

  Return of the (philosopher) king: Ignatieff wows at Beatty Lecture

  Michael Ignatieff delivered a hit for Homecoming on October 1, rousing a packed auditorium with a bold articulation of Canada's present and future place in the world. Speaking at the annual Beatty Lecture, Ignatieff drew on history and political philosophy to offer a forceful vision of national identity and foreign policy. The speech was marked by several standing ovations for Ignatieff, who occupies a post as Director of Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and who will be taking a visiting professorship at the University of Toronto this January.

  Sporting a McGill tie, Ignatieff opened by playing to a crowd composed largely of alumni and prominent Montrealers. He noted that his grandmother was an early principal of Royal Victoria College and joked that he shared an ancestral affinity with the "cold heart of Scottish Calvinism" that drove James McGill. The speaker also cited alumnus "Le Grand Laurier" as a personal hero. Ignatieff then dove into the stern stuff, setting out his ideas for the country in a speech that often soared above the platitudes that typically mark Canadian political dialogue.

  In "Canada in the World: The Challenges Ahead," Ignatieff set out the challenges that confront the country in this era when Canada's traditional touchstones of imperial identity (British and American) have been superceded by what he sees as an emerging but undefined multilateral order. He observed that Canada typically leverages greater power in bodies like the UN and NATO, but is now struggling to express its influence in the face of the widening fissures in those institutions.

  The county's future, Ignatieff said, lies with a strong military and a new understanding of its relationship with the United States. He told the audience that Canadians are learning that the consequences of disagreeing with America have diminished, but that they must nonetheless resist adopting a superiority complex.

  "Anti-Americanism is going to look pretty parochial in the future when new poles of influence may have shifted eastwards toward countries like India and China."

  The audience began stirring as Ignatieff broached national topics that he perceived as fundamental to "building an identity beyond complexes." The three most pressing of these topics he described as multiculturalism, aboriginal issues and - of course - Quebec. Recognizing "the brilliant generation of Quebecers" who went to Ottawa and Quebec City in the 1960s, he credited the province with imparting a new sophistication to Canada's self-understanding, one that transcended its older imperial identity.

  Ignatieff declared that the era of multiculturalism sounded the death knell of 'two solitudes' and has forced everyone in Canada to search for a sense of national identity rooted not in common ethnic origin, but in common citizenship. That sense of citizenship must come to the fore, he warned, lest Canada face the prospect of being attacked by its own people: "London is the nightmare that we must avoid at any price."

  Faint hints of electoral politics dusted the speech, but the prospect of a Right Honourable Ignatieff became explicit during audience questioning. Responding to an audience member's inquiry that opened with "As Prime Minister," the speaker firmly dismissed questions of future office. A gaggle of Young Liberals watched closely from the third row.

  On questions of federalism, Ignatieff deftly straddled the issue of provincial autonomy versus federal power. While praising the many innovations that have emerged from the provinces, he stressed the need for clearly delineated federal responsibilities. The audience rose for several ovations as Ignatieff blasted the concept of a Canada composed of "ten balkanized principalities" and decried a political stalemate that has reduced the national discourse to revenue squabbling.

  "We don't agree on the political rules of the game," he observed, and noted that the individual rights set out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are not sufficient political glue to hold the country together. Ignatieff was also emphatic in pronouncing that debates akin to Meech and Charlottetown were not tenable.

  When later pressed by the Reporter as to how the "rules of the game" were to be clarified without a major constitutional accord, Ignatieff stated that he was averse to "grand bargains and dice-throwing," but that deals were nonetheless necessary to make the country work. He added that Ottawa has to be emphatic in retaking exclusive responsibility for those matters that are clearly federal, such as foreign affairs.

  Other questions for Ignatieff touched on the role of Islam in Canada. He stated, to applause, that Canada must learn to reconcile tolerance with limits, and that when the rights of women come into conflict with sharia law, it is the former that must prevail. The country has an imperative to find a way of inclusion for Muslims, said Ignatieff, and that "if we get this right, the world is watching."

  The lecture was delivered in English, with portions in imperfect but elegant French. It formed part of a busy weekend for Ignatieff, who spoke at a series of other events at McGill, including a Conference on International Humanitarian Law. Ignatieff appeared touched by the reception he received and repeatedly thanked the McGill community for the hospitality it had accorded him.

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  April 14, 2005 - McGill Reporter

  Listening to the Great Divide

  Seth Shostak believes in aliens. And there is a good chance you do too if you were one of the hundreds who heard him speak last March 30. In a jammed McIntyre Amphitheatre, Shostak delivered a rousing lecture in which he made a compelling case for the presence of beings on other planets who will be in touch with us before long.

  Shostak is a senior astronomer with the SETI Institute, the American-based research group whose acronym stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He was at McGill to give a talk entitled "When Will We Detect Extraterrestrials?" for the Astrobiology Lecture Series.

  Shostak's presentation was a jolly mix of the cosmic and the comic, as he interwove pop culture icons with the latest details of the SETI Institute's search for life elsewhere in the universe. He explained how recent advances in astrophysics have allowed researchers to hone in on the location of thousands of planets, meaning that the institute's search through "the cosmic haystack" is becoming more precise every year.

  "Planets are as common as cheap motels," quipped Shostak, who told the audience that the present era of indexing the heavens is akin to 1492 when, in one generation, a group of explorers mapped most of the globe.

  The efforts of Shostak and his colleagues to discover extraterrestrial life is premised on the fact that however difficult it may be to travel to the stars, it is very easy to send information to them. The group is expanding its efforts to employ radio telescopes as a means of detecting signals from other galaxies. The Allen Telescope Array in California will allow researchers to not only search for direct messages, but also to detect inadvertent cosmic noises that might be emanating from other planets. Just as our own CBC leaks into outer space, some form of "Alien Idol" might conceivably be drifting our way via radio or microwaves. Should this be the case, the institute's new radio-telescope cluster will be capable of listening in.

  As he gave a nimble explanation of the SETI Institute's methodology, Shostak also entertained the audience with popular culture depictions of extraterrestrial activity. Slides showed everything from pulp novel aliens to UFOs in Area 51, as Shostak gently debunked some of our society's more persistent myths about outer space. Crop circles received a special dose of skepticism.

  "It just doesn't seem likely that they'd come all the way here to carve graffiti into our wheat -- usually on a Friday night," he noted.

  But joking aside, Shostak is convinced that extraterrestrial contact will occur in the near future. His optimism is partly fueled by the expanding pace at which scientists are locating new planets, and by the increased listening power of earth's telescopes. The Allen Telescope Array, in particular, represents a large advancement. The planned array consists of 350 small telescopes that are wired together so as to converge on many frequencies at once. The upshot is that scientists will be able to monitor more of the cosmos than ever before, making it increasingly possible that a signal can be detected. Shostak is presently so optimistic about making interstellar contact that he put a latte on the line, promising to buy the entire audience a deluxe coffee if a signal is not detected.

  "We will have a signal in the next two dozen years. You will be alive when this happens," he said.

  The conclusion of the lecture was received with considerable applause from the audience, who then asked a series of questions. Based on the queries and on a loose poll conducted by Shostak at the beginning of the talk, it was apparent that about two-thirds of those present believed in extraterrestrial life, with the other third unconvinced.

  One of those in the former camp is Professor Hojatollah Vali of the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Anatomy and Cell Biology, who organized the event in conjunction with his undergraduate course in astrobiology. Vali was clearly pleased by the large turnout, and took care to thank the sponsors who contributed to the lecture's success. These included the Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee, the Canadian Space Agency and the Faculties of Medicine and Science.

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