Wanted: a theology of mining (part 3)

Every now and then I look back on he statistics for Points of Inflection.  Consistently, the posts that attract the greatest number of hits are the ones on "Wanted: a theology of mining": part one and part two.   It's not hard to guess why: on the one hand, mining raises a whole cluster of significant theological and ethical questions and, on the other, it seems (at least from my searching) that there has been very little written about this relationship.  I hope that better qualified people than I am will get into this discussion!

Meanwhile, in this post I want to begin laying out some ideas about the methodology for a constructive "theology of mining".

 1. A "theology of mining" is not the same as an "ethics of mining", though it has ethical implications. "Theology of mining", like theology of anything else, should situate mining within the whole Christian narrative of creation, fall, incarnation, and redemption; should correlate the practicalities of mining with the large themes of grace, creation, and restoration.

2. A theology of mining should be attentive to the use of mining language in Scripture.  When such language is used at length, it is often metaphorical.  There seem to me to be two key metaphors:
(a) The search for wisdom is compared to mining, as in Job 28 which I already quoted. According to Crenshaw, wisdom is "the reasoned search for specific ways to ensure personal well-being, to make sense of vexing anomalies, and to transmit this hard-earned knowledge so that successive generations will embody it". To compare this search to mining both reflects an understanding of mining and encourages ecological reflection on the wisdom tradition more generally.
(b) The refining of metals is compared to moral and ceremonial purification, e.g. in Isaiah 48:10, Malachi 3:1-3.

3. However, a theology of mining should not be bound to the specific Scriptural references to mining.  Other theological themes will be relevant and important.  Among these, I'd include the "community of creation" theme (which in various places includes the stones and mountains, i.e. the objects of our mining enterprises, as part of the community that, together with human beings, praises God); the "community across time" theme (we are linked to future generations, and receive form the past); the "sacrifice" theme (related to meat-eating in the OT: after the Flood, animals yield their lives for human food, but they do not thereby become mere objects on which we act... an analogy for mining?)

4. A theology of mining has to be embedded in a larger theological story about what human beings are called to do on this earth and what "sustainability" means in a biblical narrative that has a beginning and a goal.

Photo:  British Columbia Govt Photo, licensed under Creative Commons.   Mining Revenue Sharing Agreement - August 24, 2010 - Forests Minister Pat Ball, front right, and Mining Minister Randy Hawes, second right, with Chief Shane Gottfriedson of the Tk'emlups First Nation, left, at the historic mining revenue-sharing agreement between B.C. and the Stk'emlupsemc of the Secwepemc Nation in Kamloops.

Have we reached the end of economic growth?

That's the title of a piece in the Washington Post this evening.  (link here).  The picture on the left also comes from that piece, with the caption "Only flying cars can save us". 

The article reports on an  analysis by Robert Gordon at the National Bureau of Economic Research, entitled Is US Economic Growth Over?  The article is fascinating as evidence that the possibility of a "steady state" economy is entering mainstream economic analysis.  But don't expect any discussion of the positive benefits that such an economy might provide.  The prospect that Gordon might be right is described in the Post piece as "doom and gloom", "unnerving pessimism", and so on.

But why should this be the case? It is equally plausible to envisage the "end of growth" as a process of maturing, like a teenager entering adulthood; or even as a process of transformative change, like a caterpillar (another voracious consumer) becoming a butterfly. 

It would be a troubled teenager who regarded the news that s/he could not physically grow for ever as "doom and gloom" in any serious sense.

"Sustaining mathematics" - a colloquium

My department runs a weekly "Mathematics Colloquium" - a presentation, usually by a visiting speaker but sometimes by a department member, which introduces and explains some new development in and around mathematics.

This week, for the first colloquium of the new academic year, the colloquium committee invited me as the outgoing department head to share some reflections about what I'd learned since taking up that office in 2007.  I tried to organize my thoughts around the theme of "Sustaining Mathematics", and on sustaining four "ecosystems" each of which is embedded in the next one:

1. Personal intellectual life
2. The culture of mathematics
3. Public support for and understanding of mathematics
4. The global environment

... and under (4), I gave a quick run-through of some basic calculations related to climate change (mostly working from the excellent blog Do The Math, especially this post.)

If you are interested in the presentation, you can find the slides here.

 For my mathematical audience, these calculations were easy to follow.  Nevertheless, it seemed to me that quite a few had not really engaged with this material before, even at this quite modest level.  One of the points I tried to make - I don't know whether I succeeded or not - is that as technical educators we have a responsibility not just to think about these questions for ourselves but also to develop our students' ability to engage with them in an informed way.

I'm interested in hearing about other peoples' efforts to do that.

Book review: "Fixing the Moral Deficit"

Amazon.com: Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget (9780830837953): Ronald J. Sider: Books via kwout

I recently finished reading Ron Sider's new book on "the deficit".  "America faces a historic choice", he writes. "We have a deficit crisis, a poverty crisis and a justice crisis. And they are all interrelated."  With the appointment of Paul Ryan as Romney's vice-presidential nominee, this book becomes even more timely.

This is a really helpful, detailed and yet passionate analysis of the federal budget deficit, the Obama and Ryan budget proposals, and biblically-based principles which Sider sees as applicable to federal budgetary decisions.  It concludes with a specific set of proposals (Sider is not content with the easy work of criticism, but is willing to but his own ideas out there) and then an encouragement to individual action ("We Can Do It").

I very much appreciated the wealth of detailed information about budget numbers, poverty, healthcare spending and so on in the first chapters. Sider recognizes that it is hard to give "just the facts" but he makes a good-faith effort to do so, and I felt that I understood things much more clearly as a result of reading these chapters.

I appreciate also his eirenic tone. True, some things aggravate him, especially politicians who make bold statements about deficit reduction and then carve out special exceptions for their own constituencies.  But he is not out to trash either the Obama or the Ryan plans, though he finds both of them inadequate, nor to paint either of their authors as beyond the pale.  (And I am glad to see the acknowledgment of the impact that G.W. Bush's PEPFAR program has had - it is a deep shame to see this compassionate initiative now on the budgetary chopping block.)

Finally, I appreciate and affirm Sider's conviction that the measure of a society is how it treats its weakest and poorest members. This has been his consistent message through his work with Evangelicals for Social Action and since the publication, in the 1970s, of the ground-breaking Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.  In this book, with its focus on debt and deficits, this conviction is expanded also to a focus on intergenerational justice - how are we treating our children and grandchildren, including those not yet born?

Here are a couple of questions that the book left me with.

1. What are the limits of the analogy between debts incurred by a household and national debts? On a household level, it is easy to think of "spending money" as something like "eating food" - in either case, once you eat (or spend) it, it is gone. But of course that is not really correct on the level of the larger community: the money I spend is someone else's income, whereas the (excuse me) waste products of my dinner are not anyone else's food. In the same way, a substantial portion (not all) of "US government debt" is also "US citizen savings".  This thought makes language about the "national credit card" a bit oversimplified. 

2. Sider writes at one point, "We cannot find long-term solutions to our debt crisis without sustained economic growth." This is standard thinking, of course, and it reflects why people go into debt in the first place: you take out the student loans now because you expect, later on, to be making more money and able to pay them off.  But "long-term sustained economic growth" - a continuous global increase in the production and consumption of goods and services -  is probably not on the agenda any more.  So where does that leave the questions of debt and intergenerational justice?

3. As society moves towards a lower- or no-growth model, many writers see us developing a greater degree of local and regional resilience, rather than reliance on large national and global institutions.  The book is strongly focused on the federal government (since its subject is, after all, the federal budget deficit) or, in the last chapter, on individual actions.  Where does Sider see intermediate levels of social structure fitting into the picture?

Sustainability and STEM event at PSU

 Here is an event that may be of interest to Penn State faculty and students who are involved in the STEM (science-technology-engineering-and -mathematics) fields.  I heard Tom Pfaff speak at the Join Mathematics Meeting last winter and am very glad that he'll be coming to our campus to talk about his work on integrating sustainability themes into calculus courses. 

Registration is now open for a professional development workshop on 

Multidisciplinary STEM Engagement through Sustainability Education

September 13 and 14, 2012, 

at Penn State's University Park Campus 

with invited guest, Dr. Thomas Pfaff, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Co-Director of Multidisciplinary Sustainability Education Project, Ithaca College

http://www.ithaca.edu/mse/

Sponsored by the Penn State Center for Sustainability, the Department of Mathematics, and the Eberly College of Science Center for Excellence in Science Education 

Click here to register.

"The Coal Question"

 Today (August 13th) is the 140th anniversary of the death of the British economist William Stanley Jevons (pictured at left, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

Jevons' is no longer a household name, though he is famed among economists as one of the originators of the "marginalist revolution" - the application  of the ideas of calculus to economics. Keynes was later to say of Jevons that he was "the first theoretical economist to survey his material with the prying eyes and the fertile, controlled imagination of the natural scientist". Jevons was also the inventor of an early computer called the "Logical Piano", whose name is so intriguing that I wish I could say more about it.

But it was for "The Coal Question", published in 1865, that Jevons became famous. He wrote at a time when coal was by far the primary industrial energy source and feedstock - just as oil is today - and when Britain was by far both the largest producer, and the largest consumer, of coal.  Since the Industrial Revolution of a century before, Britain had known steadily expanding production, population, and prosperity, and had acquired a worldwide empire. Jevons' book brought the unwelcome news that coal, the foundation of all this prosperity, was a finite resource that would not be replenished, and would quickly be exhausted by continued growth.

Beans, carbon credits, and partial derivatives

Anybody remember this little jingle from childhood? (Warning: may be NSFW)

I'm often tempted to use this in Calculus III to help explain the difference between partial derivatives and total derivatives.

If you have a system in which all sorts of quantities x, y, and z and so on are varying, the partial derivative of z relative to y (say) measures the rate that z would change if y was varied and everything else was somehow held constant.  ("The more you fart, the better you feel" - assuming you ate a constant quantity of beans to start with).

The total derivative though (of z relative to x, say) measures the rate that z would change if x was varied and everything else in the system responded in the "natural" way ("So eat baked beans with every meal" - we are not holding the fart rate constant here while changing bean consumption - I don't even want to think about the experimental protocol to achieve that.)

These ideas are not the same and confusing them can lead to some paradoxical policy advice (as in the jingle!).  I was reminded of this when reading an important article about the unintended consequences of emissions trading.: "since 2005 the 19 plants receiving the waste gas payments have profited handsomely from an unlikely business: churning out more harmful coolant gas so they can be paid to destroy its waste byproduct. The high output keeps the prices of the coolant gas irresistibly low, discouraging air-conditioning companies from switching to less-damaging alternative gases. That means, critics say, that United Nations subsidies intended to improve the environment are instead creating their own damage."

Typically, economic incentives are constructed based on partial derivatives - if I increase the price of good g, and everything else stays constant, then the consumption of g will drop.  But in reality, everything else doesn't stay constant.  And the response of the economic system as a whole may be very different - even in the opposite direction - from what simple thinking about one effect in isolation might suggest.  (If g is a Giffen good, consumption of g may rise as its price increases.)

The complexity of the economy's response to incentives at least raises a question about the assumption that "experts" will be able to construct an incentive scheme that stably guides the economy to a "safe" level of greenhouse gas emissions.