This evening, I’m planning on going to an event held at a restaurant specializing in Japanese cuisine, before meeting some friends afterwords at an Irish-themed pub.

There is literally no part of life that isn’t globalized.  And I’ll be damned if that isn’t one of the coolest things about living in the future.

Just in my city (a metropolis of just under 500,000 people), I’ve seen a huge number of species in the heart of town.  A partial list includes raccoons, foxes, marmots, skunks, geese, ducks, mice, rats, coyotes, pigeons, hawks (several species), and crows.  On a recent walk down to the river and back, I counted eight different sorts of non-human animals living, apparently comfortably, in the city.  These are all animals that have adapted from their natural environments to thrive in these new, artificial¹ ones.

What struck me on this particular walk, is that this phenomenon, i.e. species adapting to a change in environment, is the fundamental driving force of evolution.  And human beings have instigated these changes in environments all around the globe. Both intentionally (e.g. through urbanization) and unintentionally (e.g. pollution). This lead me to thinking about epic climatic and environmental shifts and the fact that all of the environmental changes that we’re seeing all around the globe have qualitatively similar analogs in geological history. Temperatures have swung wildly just in human history, and have done even more so in the millions of years that large animals have been wandering the earth.

These historical changes in environment have caused the extinctions of many species and the adaptations of others. Indeed, there’s good evidence for the notion that we have one or more of these environmental changes to thank for many facets of our biology, including our giant brains, our upright gate, and our mostly hairless bodies.² These changes, and transitively the extinctions and evolution they elicited, have been caused by a wide range of factors, from the impact of celestial objects to volcanic eruptions to tipping-point changes in the amount of plant life on the planet.

And yet the only environmental changes in the history of the planet, which people ever talk about in moral terms are the ones that we credibly have a hand in. Now this is undeniably due to the fact that we are moral agents. One simply can’t hold an asteroid responsible for changing the earth’s climate.

But to simply make the distinction that human-caused ecological changes are moral issues and other kinds aren’t doesn’t really capture the way people think about climate or environmental change. We seem to only be willing to cast a certain subset of these changes in moral terms. We seem willing to accept our agency and take the blame for big, abstract changes to the environment that don’t really have any personal impacts, but not to smaller, concrete changes which many of us find personally convenient. After all, not even the staunchest adversaries of global warming seriously suggest that urbanization is a moral issue. And those that due tend either to be derided as nutjobs or just ignored like the crazy uncle at Christmas.

Urbanization has changed the environment (at least in a local fashion) all over the globe. What’s more, it’s done so to a much greater extent than has global warming. As of a few years ago, half the people on the planet live in large urban centers. About two dozen of these urban centers now have populations over ten million people. The largest of them, the megalopolis of Tokyo, has over thirty million.³ Many of these urban centers cover thousands of square miles of territory, with suburban sprawl spreading for many more miles outward from them. All of these radically changes the local environment, putting huge stresses on species, ecosystems, and even local weather.⁴

And yet no one seriously suggests that the existence of Tokyo is a moral problem. And if anyone did, they’d immediately be pushed to the margins of the conversation. We seem to simply accept radical shifts of local environment. Huge environmental changes that we see every day (e.g. roads, sky scrapers, suburban sprawl) are considered fine, dandy, business as usual. But take a few abstract steps back and say that the globe is warming (a phenomenon that none of us can really experience directly), and suddenly, it seems, people are far enough removed from the issue to talk about it in terms of moral outrage.

Tell me that my house is an environmental change and therefore evil and I’ll ignore and deride you. Tell me that my “carbon footprint” is evil and I’ll go right out and buy a bicycle. The only real difference, it seems, is one of abstraction. It can’t possibly be one of scope, after all, since the building of a house does far more damage to the local ecosystem (effectively obliterating a portion of it) than one car does to the global ecosystem.

It seems to me, then, that it’s the abstraction that allows us to consider environmental changes in moral terms. To consider the small, concrete changes that human beings make and benefit from every day (and have been for as long as we’ve been human), seems to just cut too close to home. Sure, my modest city of a half million people displaced hundreds of square miles of natural environment, drove out many species, and dwindled the numbers of some that are decidedly imperiled. But no one in their right mind is going to say that Spokane is Evil.

“And really”, we seem to say, “what does it matter? We still have hawks in the sky, geese in the river, and raccoons in the garbage bins. Sure we changed this environment, but it’s convenient, and anyway, some of the critters seem to be doing alright by the change.

Now if only we could do something about those accursed SUV drivers and their carbon footprints, everything would be just fine.”

Those things which do relate to blogging are now spread out across three different blogs.  See, I’m one of those annoying people who likes to compartmentalize things.  Often to a sickening degree.  Some of it comes from what procrastination in the guise of productivity.  But sometimes it really helps me to be able to sit down and block out a certain section of my mind to focus on.  Right now, this is reflected in three blogs that I’ve got up:

Fifty-Two Tuesdays (My Music Blog) – Wherein I post songs I dig, reviews of things, and anything else related to music.  Music is a huge part of my life.  I listen to it 8 or more hours a day, on average.  I think a great deal about it, and it helps me to have a place to write about it.

Shut Up and Hack (My Tech/Code Blog) – This is the newest of my blogs, and it largely grew out of two things.  One was that I was filling this blog up with nothing but politics and tech.  I was getting sick of politics, but I figured that if I was going to just blather about tech all the time, I wanted to do it in a blog with that as the stated mission.  It also helps that I built that blog with code-blogging in mind, and that informed layout choices as well as spurred me to track down and install some good code-oriented WordPress plugins.

The Blag Switch (Everything Else) – This blog continues to be more or less a dumping ground.  I’ve come to terms with the fact that this is one blog that’s not going to be purpose-driven.  I have principled objections to “Misc.” folders and it drove me crazy for awhile that that’s basically what this blog is.  That being said, it’s proved very handy to have a place where I can dump all the errata that pops into my head.

I’ve thought about starting other blogs (a philosophy blog and a gun blog, in particular), but down that path seems to lie madness.  As it stands now, I think that operating a blog for music and a blog for code while maintaining this blog as a place to dump anything else I care to seems like it works pretty well.  At some point in the future I may condense blogs or create new ones.  But for now, three seems to be doing the trick.

Honestly, it feels strange not keeping all my blogging in one place.  To have a blog is so often considered a binary thing; a person either has a blog or they don’t.  To have several feels both clinically compartmental and also remarkably self-indulgent.  But to roll all my writing into one blog feels almost unbearably chaotic.

I guess for now I’m choosing self-indulgence over chaos.

On the phone with my mother.

Mom: So what are you up to?

Me: Oh, just walking home from work.

Mom: So what’s the music I hear in the background?

Me: That’s not music, that’s a car alarm.

Mom: Oh, it sounded like one of those indie bands . . .

But the work is paying off.  My new client release is chugging along slowly but surely.  It’s been plagued with environmental issues and a myriad of mystery bugs that exist only on the client’s side of the fence.  Still, we’re forging ahead and should be releasing on time.  It’ll be close, but it’ll be there.

Of course all of this has left me not much time for anything else.  I’m prepping for comps, which is slow-going.  I need to bother my thesis adviser about a draft I sent him a few weeks ago and haven’t heard back on.  But all in all, things are coming together.  I have hopes that I’ll be done in May.

So alas, not much time for blogging.  (Of course, it also doesn’t help that Left 4 Dead 2 and Dragon Age have been using up what scant free time I have.  They’ve both got their hooks in me pretty deep and when I can spare an hour, it usually goes to one of the two of them.)  Hopefully I’ll be able to limp things along until the end of the year when work calms down.  That is, assuming it does.  Work has a nasty way of looking like it will settle down and just not ever actually doing so.

I’ll try to have some actual content up in the near future.  In the meantime, though, it’s back to comps practice questions for me.

Which is, in a way, a bit of a slog.  I’m much more interested in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy, and while I’m glad I know the Ancients, it’s been hard to motivate myself to learn them inside and out in the fashion that one has to for Comps.  Still, once I get the first Comp out of the way, the second one should be much more pleasant.

And then?  Well, then who knows really.  I think that there’s enough material that could go in my thesis that, if I got a burst of inspiration I could probably flush it out to book length.  But given how sick I am of the topic now, it would probably have to sit for awhile.  I also want to do a doctoral degree SOME day (hopefully focusing in AI or Robotics).  Probably after I’ve let formal academics go for awhile so that I can recover.

For now, though, I’m face-down in Plato, Aristotle, et al.  From there it’s on to Augustine, Aquinas, and those.  Then it’s Comp #1, and then on to the more interesting (to me) stuff.

In closing, I’ll leave you all with a quote from one of my favorite Ancients who is, regrettably, not on the Comps list. 

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger) scripsit:

“Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave.” (Epistle 47)

Alas, Boondock Saints II is only open in select theaters.  VERY select theaters:

(via IMDB)

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Then again, I’m kind of on-principle opposed to any brief summation of political or social views.  For as much as I love quotes and pithy bon mots, I think that too often in politics they get in the way of meaningful discussion.

Of course, I’m interested, as always, at my readers’ thoughts on the matter.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

A few years ago, in one of those rare flashes of self-centered epiphany, I realized that my favorite season is, generally speaking, whichever one follows the season we’re currently in.  Every time the seasons roll over, I have about 2 to 3 weeks of ebulient joy about the change of the weather and the unique pleasures of the new season.  But then I quickly get to romanticizing the next season in the cycle and nervously anticipating it.

At the moment, Fall can’t come fast enough.  Here in the Inland Northwest, it’s been taunting us for about two weeks.  We’ve had a few short runs of brisk, autumnal weather, intermixed with warm, muggy, decidedly late-summer days.  The leaves started changing a week or so ago, but they’ve been doing so at a maddeningly slow pace.  All in all, there’s been just enough Fall in the air to whet my appetite.  Fall truly can’t come soon enough.

And yet, a month or so from now, I’ll probably well and thoroughly sick of fall.  I’ll be done with leaves everywhere and the cool-but-not-cold weather and the way the Autumn light in these parts seems to cling to things like a visual miasma.  I’ll be ready for long nights with a book by the heater and snow gently falling outside and etc.  I’ll then spend the next two months anxiously pining for Winter, right up until it arrives and the cycle starts over again with a month of enjoyment followed by two months of impatient waiting for Spring.

Basically, I have seasonal ADD.  I’m enamored with a season’s climatic charms just long enough to really enjoy it for a few weeks, and then I’m done and bored with it and ready for the next one.

So what season is my favorite?  Generally the one that’s just on its way.