Reptile Brain

Reptile Brain

If Reptile Brain sounds like it would make a good name for a rock 'n' roll band, I would certainly agree, it is. In fact, there is a band in Madison called Reptile Palace Orchestra and they are, actually, quite good. They've been around for a number of years, I understand, and, maybe, if they named their band as a comment on human civilization - please forgive me if I offend anyone - perhaps they were prescient.

Prescient is a big word for a Polar Bear. But Monona was reading the New York Times Book Review earlier today, and that's where the word came up. The dictionary says it means: knowledge of things before they happen or come into being.

Speaking of reptiles crawling along, you may wonder where my bear brain is going with this. And where does this handsome couple fit in? Meet my new best friend, Raj. And his wife Tora.

We met Raj last week at the Atwood Community Center where he gave a presentation titled What You Can Do About Global Warming on a cold and snowy night. Even so, we wondered what - for an event that was well-advertised in the newspaper weeks ahead and held in a community of more than 250,000 people - the turn out of seven people meant? There was a gentleman from the power company, a gentleman from the Sierra Club, and three other gentlemen, including our friend, Michael Paul, and one of who we talked to after Raj's presentation, Ric.

Raj is a disciple of Al Gore and something called The Climate Change Project. theclimateproject.org Earlier this year Raj spent a few weeks attending the project's Nashville boot camp, so to speak, where he and others learned how to be foot soldiers, as it were, to spread the word of Gore, as presented in his book and movie, An Inconvenient Truth. The essence of the book, the movie and Raj's talk is basically: that billions of humans out there driving cars fueled by gas and heating homes and buildings with coal is overloading Earth's atmosphere with the consequence of way-too-much heating - our fair, and now-suffering planet - up.

Raj pointed to three things as major challenges to civilization that have contributed to global warming and that may have a role in determining our future fate: world population explosion, the fossil-fueled, rapid industrial/technical revolution, and our own way of thinking. In closing, Raj made this observation: "It's difficult to make these changes, to wrap our heads around these issues of human survival." And he posed this question to his audience of seven: "What's the disconnect?"

As the small audience broke up, Ric told me he had read that it was embedded in the behavior of our early human ancestors to harvest food, like shellfish, where-ever it could be found, and then, once the food was gone, these early humans would leave behind the emptied stocks, the despoiled shells and move on. Ric suggested that, perhaps, it was some primal behavior that had us, as a species, despoiling our place-on-Earth by burning the candle of CO2-emitting-fossil-fuel at both ends, polluting the fragile atmosphere we need to raise crops, drink water and to breathe, as though we could just, simply, pick up and move on.

Monona nodded her agreement and speculated: "Perhaps, as a species, we are kind of "frozen" within the limitations of our still-evolving reptile brains."

Truly yours,
~Polar Bear Witness
PS: Stay tuned to read more about this topic in our next blog: (Monona's Theory of the) Reptile Brain, Part Two