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Very California: Travels Through the Golden State

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Diana Hollingsworth Gessler

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“Mormon pioneer Isaac Behunin is generally credited with giving the name "Zion" to the canyon. Zion was a term used by Latter-day Saints to describe a place of peace where they could gather to worship God.... When Isaac Behunin arrived in Springdale in 1862 he is said to have exclaimed, ' These are the Temples of God, built without the use of human hands, A man can worship God among these great cathedrals as well as in any man-made church--this is Zion.”

PioneersMormon PioneersZions National ParkIsaac Behunin
Book:Zion National Park
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“We drove through Utah, the Crossroads of the West, bordered by all the mountain states, except for Montana. Laying rooted in the backcountry we saw some of the most awe-inspiring groove gulleys we’d ever seen, but it was the intensity of Zion National Park that held our attention; The red rock backdrop dazzled us as brutal rapids nose-dived off the cliffs into pools surrounded by abundant green piñon-juniper forests and fiery peach and coral sandstone canyons carved by flowing rivers and streams. It would honestly not have surprised me to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid plunging from an unforgiving precipice into the river below.”

UtahZions National ParkButch Cassidy Sundance Kid
Book:Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe
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“The subject matter is constantly discussed among different women groups for the next couple of days – arisan mamah mamah, yoga grup, klub jantung sehat, grup senam tongkat - and the news of Bobby's arrival spread like wildfire. Of course, the gossips are not without its own set of embellishments regarding his family's fortunes, his countenance, his excellent education, and so on and so forth. This is besides the fact that they are all still mere speculation at this point since none of the gossipers has actually met the man in person.”

RomanceCultureBillionaire RomanceOverseas Chinese
Book:Mind Your Assumptions: A Pride and Prejudice novel
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“The mystery of what happened to Easter Island’s civilization has haunted generations of writers and scientists. There are no trees on Easter Island because the Easter Islanders cut them all down. They deforested their island in the building and transportation of those giant stone heads. In the process of deforesting the island, they also started a downward spiral that drove their civilization to collapse. Easter Island serves as an object lesson for the interaction between an isolated, habitable environment and a civilization using that environment’s resources: they did it to themselves. The parallel to our current situation on Earth seems clear. In his 2007 bestseller, Collapse , anthropologist Jared Diamond unpacked that parallel. His work explored the trajectories of a number of human civilizations that disappeared at the height of their vibrancy and power. Diamond’s examples included the Anasazi of the American southwest, the Maya, and the Norse colony on Greenland. In each case, the civilization overshot the carrying capacity of its environment. Their populations grew as the society became ever more ingenious at extracting resources from its surroundings. Eventually, the limits to growth were hit. A short time after running into those limits, each civilization fell apart. Easter Island was the”

CollapseApocalypseCollapse Of Civilization
Book:Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth
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“Page 7: (H)e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the 'ethical cosmos' [the dual code of Amity and Enmity] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. … Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process … Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure. Page 25: Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?”

Kin SelectionDual Code Of Amity And EnmityGroup Evolution
Author:Arthur Keith
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“Over your lifetime, your individual greenhouse gas contribution will only increase the temperature of the planet by about a half a billionth of a degree Celsius. That, you might think, is such a small difference as to be negligible, so you shouldn't bother trying to reduce your personal emissions. This reasoning, however, doesn't consider expected value. It's true that increasing the planet's temperature by half a billionth of a degree probably won't make a difference to anyone, but sometimes it will make a difference, and when it does, the difference will be very large. Occasionally , that increase of half a billionth of a degree will cause a flood or a heatwave that wouldn't have happened otherwise. In which case the expected harm of raising global temperatures by half a billionth of a degree would be fairly great. We know that something like this has to be the case because we know that, if millions of people emit greenhouse gases, the bad effects are very large, and millions of people emitting greenhouse gases is just the sum of millions of individual actions.”

Climate ChangeGlobal WarmingTragedy Of The CommonsGlobal Catastrophic RiskExpected HarmExpected Value
Book:Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
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“an ecologist named Garrett Hardin wrote an article titled, The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin’s thesis was that individuals acting in their rational self-interest would use whatever resources are available to them, blithely ignoring the fact that any finite resource eventually runs out, which is disastrous for everyone, including themselves. To illustrate, Harden used the metaphor of the open pasture, the commons as he called it, to which herdsmen bring their cattle to feed. Understandably, the herdsmen seek to feed as many cattle as possible in order to maximize their income and improve their lives. Over time however, the effects of overgrazing take a progressive toll on the commons, eventually rendering it unusable for all herdsmen.”

Tragedy Of The Commons
Book:Dealing with The Devil, My Mother, Trump and Me
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