Word: cowboy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...West was won, Los Angeles and the 20th century were built, by the cowboy mind. To the cowboy, nature was a vast wilderness waiting to be tamed. The land was a stage, a backdrop against which he could pursue his individual destiny. The story of the world was the story of a man, usually a white man, and its features took their meaning from their relationship to him. A mountain was a place to test one's manhood; an Asian jungle with its rich life and cultures was merely a setting for an ideological battle. The natives are there...
Modern science, a cowboy achievement, paradoxically favors the Indian view of life. Nature is alive. The barest Antarctic rock is crawling with microbes. Viruses float on the dust. Bacteria help digest our food for us. According to modern evolutionary biology, our very cells are cities of formerly independent organisms. On the molecular level, the distinction between self and nonself disappears in a blur of semipermeable membranes. Nature goes on within and without us. It wafts through us like a breeze through a screened porch. On the biological level, the world is a seamless continuum of energy and information passing back...
Some of these circuits are long and slow, so that consequences may take years or generations to manifest themselves. That helps sustain the cowboy myth that nature is a neutral, unchanging backdrop. Moreover, evolution seems to have wired our brains to respond to rapid changes, the snap of a twig or a movement in the alley, and to ignore slow ones. When these consequences do start to show up, we don't notice them. Anyone who has ever been amazed by an old photograph of himself or herself can attest to the merciful ignorance of slow change, that is, aging...
...trick is to become more like Indians without losing the best parts of cowboy culture -- rationalism and the spirit of inquiry. We need more science now, not less. How can we stretch our nerves around those numbers and make them as real and as ominous as our cholesterol readings? Repeat them each night on the evening news? We need feedback, as if we were the audience in a giant public radio fund-raising drive hitting the phones and making pledges. Like expert pilots navigating through a foggy night, we need the faith to fly the planet collectively by our instruments...
...remote Grand Teton National Park, a glorious setting and a logistical nightmare. At a modern-day campsite near Jackson Hole, advance men have hauled in satellite dishes, encryption machines, secure telephones, simultaneous-translation systems, crates of computers, hundreds of pounds of barbecue and a gift box of hand-tooled cowboy boots...