Monthly Archives: August 2026

Safety in NIMBers

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By Catboy69 (Wikimedia Commons)

I live in an area not yet entirely trampled by modernity. Wildness still has a waning foothold, here. In late spring, fawns get “the zoomies” in the open space around our house. Newts hunt worms on the driveway when it’s wet out. Douglas squirrels are busy in the trees. Raccoons, possums, and coyotes make reliable nocturnal appearances. A cougar once traipsed through the wooded area between our house and the street. Bears are periodically spotted in the neighborhood. A chorus of frogs provides a soundtrack for summer nights—complemented by the occasional owl. A variety of other birds abound, including bald eagles nesting year after year in trees behind our house. Bats, various pollinators, dragonflies, and garter snakes add to the variety. It’s a real treat and privilege to be at least a witness in this Community of Life.

One downside is that roadkill is not uncommon in this interface region, and wildlife loses the contest every time. Deer, possums, and newts are the most visible to us. Every time I move a smashed newt off our street, I am close to tears and apologize to the departed critter: this should never have happened; you did nothing wrong; you didn’t deserve this end. It’s particularly painful when the flattened newt is on the very driveway that I try keep clear of visually-confusing leaves and other material—and exercise hyper-vigilance when driving through. Even if it was not me whose tires did the deed, I know that I failed in my watch, and feel it deeply. The core fault lies in operating a vehicle across newt habitat: an alien novelty in ecological terms.

Frequent exposure to roadkill prompts my wife to say that this is why we should all live in cities. Leave the hinterlands to wild creatures. It’s selfish to want to live amongst the wildlife. Confine us all to what I might term designated hell-holes, or feed lots.

A clear logic accompanies this argument, and it’s hard for me to efficiently articulate why I am diametrically divergent. It just seems viscerally clear that cities are not “the answer” for dialing back the host of threats perpetrating a sixth mass extinction. In this post, I will attempt to make the case.

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Is Cognition Inherently Dangerous?

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By Andrzej Barabasz (Wikimedia Commons)

Has anyone noticed the blasphemous tendency in my posts to belittle cognition? The position is that brains are imperfect and tiny subsets of the universe that are not remotely up to the task of supplanting time-tested ecologies with cognitive constructs involving agriculture, writing, money, and legal systems. Paraphrasing Frank Egler, it’s not that nature is more complex than we think, but more complex than we are capable of thinking. Brains can’t be expected to fool Mother Nature, in the end.

Does that mean cognition as a whole is ecologically worthless and inherently destructive? Of course not! Lots of creatures—even crickets—rub neurons together to make thought. Moreover, non-neural forms of cognition take place among plants, fungi and microbes to help figure out how to cope with varied situations. These neuron-free beings even learn (see examples of amoebas and plants). Clearly cognition itself is not ecologically disastrous—demonstrating compatible utility over eons. Humans used top-shelf brains for millions of years without precipitating ecological disaster. Yet human brains are also key players in staging the current disastrous path.

How can we tell what sorts of human cognition are safe, then? I propose a metaphorical framing that helps identify when cognition “goes rogue” that I hope will also be useful for others.

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Academic Prison

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The Ivory Tower behind bars (E. Jason /Getty Images).

You may have noticed a recurring theme on Do the Math that involves prisons. Inspired by Ishmael, I compare modernity to a prison whose bars few inmates can even detect: prison life is all they’ve ever known. The brain creates a prison that for many becomes more real than the universe itself. The last post cast Richard Feynman as a prisoner of modernity. If challenged about the hypocrisy of eviscerating modernity while enjoying a house, car, grocery store, and internet I tend to point out that a prisoner can offer perhaps the most legitimate complaints about prison or even the entire penal concept. Moreover, if I tried to live an authentic ecological life in my location, I would soon end up in an actual prison after violating any number of property rights and other laws that function to keep people in the modernity pen. Likewise, we know what happens to people who take direct action to disable infrastructures and institutions of modernity, right?

I did, at least, manage to break free from one major harness of modernity. I left my academic job at age 53. In doing so, I took a 75% paycut and effectively said no-thank-you to perhaps millions of dollars of cumulative income. Granted, this is different from a 100% paycut. But I hope it can be appreciated as a substantial step away from the treadmill, imposing a much simpler and lower-impact lifestyle. I don’t pretend to be living in right relationship to the Community of Life, but neither do I feel that I, personally, must accomplish the full journey if I can use my time to help many others start the journey themselves. It will take generations—facilitated by the inevitable dynamic duo of death and replacement. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.

Academia is its own sort of prison, which is what we’ll examine here. You’ve no doubt heard much ballyhoo about academic freedom, which sounds great. But maybe that’s akin to a prisoner being allowed unsupervised time in the prison library on account of good behavior. The ostensible freedom has both soft and hard limits.

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