I am delighted to share this article from Inside Higher Education by friend and colleague Ray Schroeder. Ray focuses on recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and what educators need to do to help students make the best of this new resource.
When I was a junior in high school many, many years ago, we read in Mr. Smith's English class, Henry David Thoreau's classic memoir, Walden. After the class reviewed the book and discussed it, Mr. Smith asked me what I thought of Thoreau. My response was that I thought he should have gotten a job instead of hanging around the pond.
Today, I have been reading an essay on Walden in Loren Eiseley's collection, The Star Thrower. After all these years, Eiseley, has opened my mind to what Henry David Thoreau was really doing at Walden Pond. He was re-discovering humanity and its relationship to the Nature in which we all exist.
Eiseley quotes Thoreau's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson as remarking, "Few adults can see nature," and adds that Thoreau "saw nature as another civilization, a thing of vaster laws and vagaries than that encompassed by the human mind." Eiseley adds that, "We are, in actuality, students of that greater order known as nature. It is into nature that man vanishes."
Today, as human activity is increasingly challenging the natural world, it is time to take a fresh look at Thoreau's "Walden" and, perhaps, get a fresh sense of that civilization into which we were born.
State College PA currently has a large field installation of solar energy panels installed near the hospital that it uses to support the provision of electricity to area homes, offices, and businesses. The community is currently exploring the idea of building a second installation. I got a survey in the mail asking for my opinion. It noted that community members may be concerned about several issues, including cost, the potential that a new solar installation could reduce the space available for farms, etc.
My first thought was this: How could increasing the use of solar power for our electricity be worse than the current system, which mainly uses petroleum and gas, along with water power and wind power, to supply electricity?
Our current reliance on oil, gas, and, more recently, nuclear power to provide electricity has one big drawback: It harms the natural world and contributes to global warming. In effect, it makes us un-natural residents of our home planet.
On the other hand, if we invest in solar energy, we will be motivated to find ways to make solar the collection of solar power less intrusive and, at the same time, less dangerous to our natural environment. If we are truly committed to solar power, we should be able to find ways to reduce the size of the collection devices so that the technology is less intrusive and disruptive to plants and animals around it. As we move into a new technological frontier, we need to find methods of generating power that allow our natural environment to thrive with us.
When he died at the age of 69 in 1970, anthropologist, philosopher, and natural science writer Loren Eiseley had already become respected as a twentieth century version of Henry David Thoreau. Toward the end of his career, he focused increasingly on the impact of human civilization on the world around us—the living nature in which human civilization developed.
In 1970, a volume of Eiseley’s essays, The Invisible Pyramid, was published. One of the essays, “The Time Effacers,” examines Eiseley’s view of the rise of modern science, which he describes as “. . . an increasingly time-conscious, future-oriented society of great technical skill, which has fallen out of balance with the natural world around it.” (p. 70) He defines the rise of a scientific society as “a society of constant expectations directed toward the upcoming future. What we have is always second best, what we expect to have is ‘progress.’ What we seek, in the end, is Utopia.” (ibid.)
As I write this, Eiseley’s work is more than a half-century in the past. In many ways, the issues he raised in 1970 are still with us, and the impact of our Industrial Revolution—from polluted rivers and air to global climate change—is becoming clearer as its products become intertwined with those of the Technological Revolution that has been underway since before his death. “In the extravagant pursuit of a future projected by science,” he wrote, “we have left the present to shift for itself.” (p. 71). Science, “as it leads men further and further from the first world they inhabited, the world we call natural, is beguiling them into a new and unguessed domain.” (ibid.)
He concludes, “When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond. She has dealt with the locust swarm and she has led the lemmings down to the sea. Even the world eaters will not be beyond her capacities. Sila, as the Eskimo call nature, remains apart from mankind “just as long as men do not abuse life.” (p. 80)
Note: My quotations from The Invisible Pyramid are taken from Volume Two of the Library of America’s Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos.
Heather Cox Richardson recently posted an item about the roots of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Here is a quote from her post:
In response, Congress reiterated that the law must treat all men equally. It passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and sent it off to the states for ratification. The states added it to the Constitution in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that ‘No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’
This amendment protects U.S. citizens from legal abuse. It ALSO protects “any person” of being deprived “of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. . .”
This is a very important reminder of our nation’s commitment to government that guarantees fair treatment of all people before the law. Anyone who does not honor the Fourteenth Amendment in this situation is disobeying the Constitution itself—I would call that a serious crime.
The government must require ALL federal employees—including Presidential appointees who lead government agencies—to obey the Constitution and to accept the Constitution as law that applies to all people in the U.S. and to ensure that their employees follow the law as articulated in the Constitution.
It was a very booksy Christmas at our house this year.
I got three history books:
History Matters, a collection of writing by David McCullough, with a forward by Jon Meacham, that illustrates the importance of history in shaping, as McCullough writes, “what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for” (p. 3). I look forward to reading it.
A Short History of the World in 50 Failures by Ben Gazur, who looks at failures across history, from ancient times to the modern world, that have shaped history.
Mark Twain, new 1000+ page biography of one of America’s greatest writers by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Ron Chernow.
My son gave me the Mark Twain biography and was surprised to get a copy for himself from his uncle.
But the real surprise was “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.” I already had a copy, but got a new one from my son. I also gave one to my brother-in-law; who gave one to my son.
Let the winter weather rage, I have good books to keep me busy!
