Nuclear/Rabbit

Periodically I write on nuclear issues. And most people in my life call me Rabbit. (Or bunny, or buns, or…perhaps this is too much information?). But it isn’t often that the rabbit and the nuclear overlap. This is one of those times.

I was congratulating a friend’s daughter on her upcoming bat mitzvah. I wanted to sign my email mazel tov, [Hebrew name for rabbit]. So I googled “rabbit in Hebrew” and got:

arnevet (hare)

arnavon/arnavoni (little sweet bunny)

shafan

I found this at the “House Rabbit Society” website, “An international nonprofit organization that rescues rabbits from animal shelters and 
educates the public on rabbit care and behavior.” http://www.rabbit.org/

The site also had news of rabbits around the world, including “Japan's Earless Rabbit Sparks Worries About Radiation, Mutation.” Posted on June 9, the article begins:

“It's no Godzilla, but an earless rabbit allegedly born near Japan's severely-damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant has become the latest poster child for the side-effects of radiation exposure.

The bunny -- purportedly captured on video just outside the crippled plant exclusion area and posted on YouTube on May 21 -- has become big news in Japan and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere, stoking fears that contamination from the damaged facility could cause genetic mutations.”

Here is the YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqVY9azhH3U&feature=player_embedded

Now you, Dear Reader, may well be saying, Wait a minute, small eared Rabbit. This story is most likely a hoax! Allegedly! Purportedly! And of course you might well be right. First, the YouTube video’s poster has not been found, so this rabbit could have been from anywhere in the world. Second, it is hard to identify the exact causes of birth defects in animals. And third, it turns out this might not be a birth defect/mutagenic problem at all. Mary Cotter, a veterinarian from the House Rabbit Society, reported that she’s encountered two earless rabbits, whose mothers had most likely over-groomed their baby’s ears. (And I thought it was bad when my aunt used to spit on her handkerchief and wipe things off my eight year old’s dirty face!)

For the record, the two earless bunnies were named "Stubs" and "Nubbins."

2

So it is hard to know whether this bunny really is a victim of Fukushima. And I was impressed by the strong assertions in the article regarding radiation and genetic mutation. It cites F. Ward Whicker, professor emeritus at Colorado State University's Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences, to the effect that natural radiation can also cause such anomalies, that usually the cause cannot be determined:

"So far as science has shown, there have never been mutations produced by ionizing radiations that do not occur spontaneously as well."

And then an even bigger gun is wheeled out: nuclear historian Richard Rhodes. He points to the research done after the atomic bombing of Japan:

"In the years after World War II, there was a major American commission that looked into the health ramifications of the atomic bombings, and it found no genetic changes in the populations of Hiroshima or Nagasaki," said Rhodes, who has written extensively on the bombings. "There were no birth defects attributed to the bombing, and no genetic consequences."

Now this was interesting. An American commission you say? And no genetic consequences to the massive doses of radiation encountered by Japanese downwinders/survivors? Or wait…none “attributed” to the bombing. It isn’t that I doubt Rhodes (though I believe he is a strong proponent of nuclear power, which is a different title than “nuclear historian”). But…since much of the article asserts that it is next to impossible to attribute birth defects to a particular cause, then I must assume that the number of birth defects after World War 2 did not rise significantly. Was this the case? How good was the study? Honestly, it is hard for me to imagine that there were no consequences to the bombing. But I’m off to see what the study indeed says, and who conducted it.

3

Meanwhile, the rabbit has become indeed a kind of poster animal for Fukushima in a variety of news reports, all generated by the YouTube viral video (268,298 hits as of today). What happens when you eat nuclear grass. Not good science. Of course, neither, in my opinion, is a nuclear power plant you can’t turn off. Meanwhile, in the absence of a real public debate about the Fukushima accident and its implications, and in the wake of new and ever more frightening revelations about the severity of the radiation releases from the land of Godzilla and Tepco, the viral earless rabbit circles the globe, ambassador of a kind of deep fear of what, after all, is not being heard.

Dog Park: Candace

I was walking back from the dog park when Candace walked by trailing dogs like the pied piper of the canine set. She has a very cool cowboy hat, shades, and she is a total Jedi when it comes to the dogs around her.

They know - almost every one and I'd place bets on it - that she makes contact with each of them, and that they make contact with her. Dogs have their name said by her, treats given by her, wisdom and advice dispensed by her...

I wish you could have seen it dear Reader. Across a neatly cropped suburban park at the edge of Santa Cruz, in a lake of June sunlight (the same sunlight that falls on San Francisco and Point Reyes and on a good day on Monterey for that full Steinbeck look...).

She was striding with these great gorgeous Irish wolfhound dogs this furry round poodle-something my dog the black terrier/Chinese crested. Maybe. My 12 pound running partner and cross between a skunk and a prospector.

Right exactly out of a fair tale.

Blog for Market Day

I’m reading a novel by Helon Habila called Oil on Water. And after reading The Windup Girl, I’ve been thinking a lot about how technology and capital follow closely on each other to destroy fragile human political and social arrangements.

The Habila novel takes place in “the oil rich and devastated Niger Delta,” as the bookjacket announced. The plot takes us up river, similar to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and as the two journalists seek the wife of a oil executive, kidnapped by militants, we see the horror of this devastation firsthand.

Indigenous people who sold their rights to clean water and their original life to oil companies and ended up with broken VCRs and a river awash in life-destroying oil, dead fish and armed resistance, a government keen on keeping oil revenues flowing even if it means the flow of blood and the flow of pollutants. And those who tried to resist the oil money? Who made the “right” choice? Their chief is taken and executed; the soldiers come back with his “confession” and his “signature” on papers, and the oil companies win anyway.

The mixing of valuable natural resources and neocolonial multinational corporations and infinitely corrupt and corruptible “governments” - well. When you read Conrad and get to the horror, the horror, you know what he’s talking about, his code for the horror of the Western mix of naïve and arrogant idealism and decidedly non idealistic strategies for the taking of things from those with flatter noses and darker complexsions. Not much has changed, except perhaps for the extent of the environmental devastation that now accompanies the extraction of what the white men value.

Hannah Arendt said that fascism and totalitarianism always come home; the strategies practices “over there” come back with the people who practiced them. Now we have fracking, the extraction of natural gas from bedrock, a mind numbing technology for destroying water sources and land on the way to finding “clean” natural gas.

Those of us who have learned to distrust the adjective clean will not be surprised when the head of an energy corporation smiles into the camera and makes fracking sound like a miracle of human ingenuity which will help heat homes employ people bring us safe and clean energy. And that is part of what novels like Habila’s do: they help us not only see and think, but feel, and feel again, the human and environmental horror visited by the neverending search for resources.

The modern curse: to live over or next to things the first world needs, and needing, feels it owns.

I’m at a Farmers Market and it is June and everything feels hopeful, sustainable, a moment when humans can and do pull off a marvelous cultural action. It is strange to be writing this post amidst such a scene. And these burgundy red cherries will taste sweet on the tongue later.

A sweet side to life, and a shadow side, always.

The cell phone in the Garden

In Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden, Nathaniel Hawthorne has an a-ha moment. In his notebooks he describes an Arcadian moment; he is sitting enjoying nature when he hears the shrill (and peace-shattering) blast of a locomotive engine. Marx goes on to notice that this exact scene is reproduced in text after text in American literature. Whatever else the machine does for us and to us, it destroys a certain kind of contemplative life, and replaces the possibilities of Arcadia with the imperatives of machine time and machine space.

I’ve just read two nonfiction studies, Distraction by Damon Young, and Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers. Both contain a Hawthorne-like “cell phone in the garden” moment, meant to personalize and dramatize one main feature/bug of cell phones: they distract us. Damon Young describes wandering with his wife in a little Greek village on the island of Ithaca (of Odyssey fame). He describes how Ithaca differs from the party islands like Santorini, and allows the village to come to life as a place out of time: “strangely deserted,” melancholic, full of grape vines and fat green and purple fuit and stone walls and an old almond tree. Finally they come to a cliff-top resting place that is “pure poetry.”

And that is when it happens: in Arcadia, in this garden of slow time, his cell phone rings. Just like Hawthorne’s steam engine, Young’s cell phone interrupts a reverie: “The white cliffs, the herbs, the sunlight and the sea – all these blessings slowly dimmed as I was wrenched out of my reverie.” And he goes on to reflect on the unconscious reflex that answering the “digital nagger” has become, and within a sentence this reflex has grown into “something slightly sinister,” an addiction.

Young includes this scene in a book devoted to the causes of and “cures” for modern distraction. True to his calling (he is a philosopher), Young finds that distraction and its obverse, focus or attention, are always already problematic in mortal human lives. It isn’t that we have too much information now and didn’t before; it isn’t that we have cell phones or the Internet or that we are somehow radically less able than our predecessors. Or rather it is not these things alone; instead, these seem to make more difficult an already difficult task: to flourish given that we must attend to this and not that, to make thoughtful choices about where our attention ought to go.

Powers repeats this cell phone in the garden trope in his chapter on Hamlet and his “tables” (the Elizabethan version of a blackberry, a wax writing pad that can be erased and used again each day). And even more uncannily, the scene Powers draws is a repeat of Young: a phone call from his mother. He is on his way to her house when he gets her call; her picture comes up, the “Kabuki” drama of him being late and her agreeing to hold dinner unfolds, and then they sign off. As he drives, the call stays in his mind: he feels an “unexpected surge of emotion” about how much he loves her, how good-natured she is, how his son seems to have inherited these traits. The music playing in the car (jazz), the scene unfolding outside the car (pine woods) all merge with the memories of his mother, and these build in each other to an absorbing joy.

So not the machine in the garden? No. But that is not to say that cell phones are not exactly as Young would have it. The difference is the gap between the call, and the deeper experience he found he had. The gap was created artificially by being in the car, and cut off from other mundane tasks:

[The joyful epiphany about his mom] “happened after what we typically think of as the connection, the call itself, was over. There was a gap between the practical task and the deeper experience that followed, If that gap had not been there, would I have reaped the same benefits?”

In fact, he says, the cell phone and its ilk (screens of all kinds) are not bad in themselves, but in that we constantly move from one communication to another, we lose the chance to give “room” to the “after” of communication, to the room in ourselves for reflection. And this is the point that Young is making as well. This link between the utilitarian side of digital experience and the “vital significance” side is, he argues, what is missing in our current technophilia, our belief in our devices. We can have these significant moments and do, but only when we allow a gap or a pause between the rush of communicative events. And this gap allows us to reflect, as Young would have us do, on which elements of the communication are worth focusing on, are of value.

I’m not exactly sure what to make of these two scenes. But one thing is clear: the feeling that a machine (the railroad, the cell phone) is somehow connected to an interruption of reflection and of deeper feeling.

Cyborg anxiety. The anxious feeling that even when we are “controlling” machines, they are somehow also controlling and shaping us in ways we don’t like and can’t, well..control.

susan leigh star

I am meeting Susan Leigh Star for the first time, and she is dead.

I am reading Susan Leigh Star for the first time, reading her semi famous essay about the onion, "Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions." Personal; political. Critical; theoretical. Insider; outsider.

Poetic. A writer of poems as well as essays and books and theory.

Her essay on onions and justice begins with an Adrienne Rich poem:

Today I was reading about Marie Curie.

she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness

hr body bombarded for years by the element

she had purified

It seems she denied to the end

the source of the cataracts on her eyes . . .

She died a famous woman denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds came from the same source as her power

(Rich, 'Powcr', 1978)

This means across a wide range of emotions for me (a friend has cancer, she is facing radiation, I was in the snow watching snow fall after Fukushima wondering if my tongue could taste the radiation on the flakes).

Susan Leigh Star did not deny her wounds nor did she neglect to find the source of her power.

I am struck by how present she is, and how many clues are dropped by those who, guilty by association, share her drive to theory and feminism and justice.

I am surrounded, here at her festschrift, at this celebration of her work, by her. She is living in the words her friends are saying, living in her own words illuminated on the big screen in PowerPoint so that a quotation form her book Ecologies of Knowledge glows carmine and hovers above us. She is living in her partner Geoff Bowker, in Donna Haraway and Katie King and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa.

Thursday night, the University Center was late-lit by the in and out sunlight filtering through redwoods. Crystal and I found Warren and we talked until the presenters began presenting, and I listened and felt a ghost suddenly collect herself and float unseen into the room, listening to herself being invoked and represented and admired and honored. The woman behind the words.

Friday we gathered around the comforting altar of coffee urns, then Jenny Reardon invoked her yet again and back she came, and each speaker in her own way was dancing with her, moving as she/they moved, moving us, letting themselves be moved. Astrid Schrader and harmful algae; Maria and the many meanings of soil; Katie King and boundary objects and transcontextual feminism. Karen Barad and the Judaism she shared with Leigh and the meanings of these days between Passover and Shavuot, the days of the counting of omer, of grains, the harvest, a counting and economy not of capitalism but of justice. Tikkun, the healing of the world and ourselves at the same time.

Karen noted that there is the justice of thou shalt not, and the justice of Omer, of thou shalt: thou shalt leave a corner of the field unharvested so the hungry can glean and eat. Each day read against and through seven values of justice.

Today: compassion read through grounding

Yesterday: boundary making read through grounding.

Since Leigh was a theorist of boundaries, of boundary objects (one of her theoretical hobbyhorses and contribution to STS, science and technology studies). I shivered a little when Karen lined up the talk of boundary objects yesterday, and the ancient practice, generations considering boundaries.

So we hear amazing and brilliant women theorize using Leigh Star's work, honoring but also extending and using. And she was present for this; she was doing work still, beyond the grave, or perhaps not in the ground only.

And after lunch (with Donna and Katie and others, that kind of conversation across food and among scholars that I love love love) I drove with Crystal down from on high to the flatter lands below the University, my brain buzzing and blooming, and I thought, oh. This is our first meeting, Susan, and I just hope I held up my end of our encounter, hope I helped bring you around if that is your desire, hope I played a role in the honoring of your soul's sleep, if that is your current state.

You asked important questions, cui bono, who benefits? And I'll take up that banner, if you please. I think we all are looking beyond for the more that we are, that can be, that exists as surely as you continue, just that surely, not less or more.

Lifting my virtual glass to you, and the incredible community you gathered around you.

3/11

3/11 11

We learn some new words: Venting. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1. General Electric Boiling Water Reactors. General Electric Mark I reactor. Containment. Evacuation zone. Cooling. TEPCO.

We learn that there are six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power site. We learn that there are four nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daini site. We learn that these reactors are 200 miles north of Tokyo. And they are run by Tokyo Electric Power Company, Tepco.

Take a huge complex and dangerous power plant. Imagine an earthquake and a tsunami as a huge hand unplugging the power plant. Now imagine that without power, the plant cannot manage its dangerous fuel. Now imagine that pressure is rising in the plant, like blowing up a balloon to bursting. Now imagine “venting” the balloon so that it does not utterly pop; and that the air inside the balloon is toxic. Really toxic.

You are no longer sitting safely wherever you live now. Instead, you are one of the 3000 people living within a few kilometers of the site. You gotta get out, now. Or you are living ten kilometers away; you don’t need to go, just stay inside. Keep those windows closed. Try not to breathe.

Now you are starting to get it. 3/11 is 9/11 for the earth. It is Katrina and New Orleans; it is BP and its oil rig.

They are not going to protect you, whoever you think they are: the corporations that run these massive technologies. The government agencies that pretend to regulate them. The media that we imagine are watching the agencies watching the massive technologies and the corporations that deploy them.

So. What are you going to do? Yes, the world is in a fix, and there is no place to escape. But you’ve been escaping for years. Hoping they will not fuck things up. Hoping they will take their obscene profits and run things reasonably well.

Well, they didn’t. They never will.

Now it is that time, in the movie, when the main characters – the plucky teens, the isolated and marginalized hero and heroine, the animals threatened with extinction – find a way, however unlikely, to change the story line, to pull it out in the ninth inning, to hit the eleventh hour and find resources they never knew they had.

Ok, let’s roll the film.

Iron Man 2 as a cyborg fable

Last night I worked with my son on an exam about World War 1 for quite a long time. We went over the Mandate system, reparations, the War Guilt Clause, the Schlieffen Plan. So when our neighbor asked if we wanted to watch Iron Man 2, we took a welcome break, threw the textbook down, and went to watch Robert Downey Jr. test his blood toxicity for almost the entire movie. Since most of the people watching knew I write about cyborgs, I asked the assembled – two parents, three teenage boys – to be on the lookout for cyborg themes. My son replied “yeah we’ll be sure to watch for the way exoskeletons make us stronger.”

First of all, it is sort of funny that my 15 year old knows the word exoskeleton, and probably not from me. Second…well, it is interesting, isn’t it, that Iron Man 1 & 2 are both kinds of fables about technology, the kinds of exoskeletons we don, and the purposes for them? At one point before a Senate committee, the sleazy senator played by Gary Shandling demands that Tony Stark give his weapon-cyborg system to the US military. And Stark replies that it isn’t a weapons system, it is a kind of prosthetic. He is making a cyborg argument, and only half of it; of course it CAN be a weapon system. In fact, when the action scenes start, a lot of the subtlety (well what passes for subtle in a blockbuster) of the film’s anti-militarist, anti-proliferation stance is lost. We just want to see battles between new kinds of superheros in flying armor. Or at least the 15 year olds seem to take this position.

So it was with interest that I came across the article “When Power Armor Makes You a Cyborg.” [http://io9.com/5743585/when-power-armor-makes-you-a-cyborg], which asks the question “But what happens when the armor changes you?” The article samples some film and a lot of gaming cyborgs, and concludes – as I do – that these technologies are not simply “tools” to be used by good guys for good and bad guys for bad. Instead, the armor or exoskeleton effects the user’s personality. Consider how people change when they get behind the wheel of a car, especially certain cars (SUVs, offroaders, high performance cars). But the article focuses on people who become cyborgs WHEN they put on their power armor prosthetics. So Darth Vader doesn’t count (already was a cyborg).

The article focuses on Iron Man the comic hero, not the film hero:

You could definitely argue that Tony Stark becomes a cyborg the moment he needs his arc reactor in his chest to keep his heart beating. But several times in the comics, Tony's gone a lot further towards cyborg-hood. In particular, in one storyline, Tony gets injected with Extremis, a techno-organic virus that rebuilds Tony's body — and gives the ability to link to any computer on Earth. With his upgraded technology, Tony has the Iron Man armor inside his body, until nanobots bring it out of him.

In the comic and in the film, Tony Stark begins as a selfish narcissistic playboy, and ends up “more” human than he was (though still with flaws like alcoholism). The technology forces him to realize his vulnerability (this is particularly true in the film) and that of others who may need what his now-necessary cyborg prosthesis can deliver. Hence the way the armor comes "inside."

In contrast, the anime and manga series Evangelion feature a number of Iron Man-like suits, called mecha or gundam. This is a cyborg post-apocalyptic action story that features hostile space beings called Angels, and a paramilitary organization called Nerv which fights them. Evangelions are giant mecha or cyborg suits worn by teenage pilots, “plain human kids,” from the Nerv, including the hero, Shinji Ikari.

Unlike Iron Man, the Evangelions or EVAs highlight the neurological link that the human teens have with their cybernetic prostheses. This constant linkage with the prosthetic has implications:

in the second [Evangelion] movie…we're told over and over again that if Shinji Ikari and the other pilots descend too deep inside an EVA, they will change and become something no longer human. And this keeps happening, with the pilots evolving into something post-human in the process.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Ever since the earliest cyborg stories like No Woman Born, the addition of a cyborg shell or a new metal/cybernetic body chances the human. Something metal affects the female protagonist of No Woman Born, and she no longer has prototypical 1940s “female” emotions. Yet this was seen (at least in one reading of the story) as a potentially positive thing for the woman who had been burned horribly in a fire, and who before that had been more or less controlled by her two male handlers (husband, manager).

In the anime series of Evangelion, the goal is (according to the io9 website) Shinji’s goal is “to merge with his EVA,” after which "Shinji's mind will evolve beyond individuality in its merge with his EVA." This notion of merging with the prosthetic can also be seen in the film and manga Ghost in the Shell, with its ongoing story of how the cyborg body of Major Motoko Kusanagi seems to flatten her emotions while enabling her to perform superhuman bionic acts. And in the end of Ghost in the Shell, Motoko merges with a bodiless AI called the Puppetmaster, and responds to a call from a ghost-like being that inhabits the entire Internet and offers Motoko new powers and transcendent knowledge. Because she is cyborg and not simply human, this appeals to her, as a logical extension of what she already feels.

In Iron Man 2, the arc reactor that powers Tony Stark and keeps him alive is also poisoning his blood with its metal, Palladium. Of course, the technophilic film shows Tony inventing a new element that allows him to survive and keep his cyborg powers. But the notion that our prosthetics infect us, one way or the other, and lead us past a particular notion of “human,” is found in most cyborg stories.

Let’s end with this: unaugmented humans are, themselves, poisoned with elements of their (prosthetic) identities. They are not inevitably more capable of emotion, or better. In some ways cyborg stories, and their cyborg protagonists, make this poison visible.