Intolerable Beauty. Photos by Chris Jordan & Chris Dunker

Technically, "Intolerable Beauty" is the title of the first group of photographs only, but I thought it fit both so that's what I called the whole post (to be fair).

Photographs of the awful scale of our waste. Click on "Intolerable Beauty" after clicking here.
Thanks for the tip Caleb!

Photographs of the awful scale of our industry. After clicking here click on (in this order):
1) mouse over the "di" logo
2) click "Gallery"
3) click "Industrial"
4) click "Geneva Steel"

Geneva Steel was a short drive from where I now live. A man's life was not worth a dime there. Good riddance.

Specialization of populations

Great interview on KUER's Radio West about the phenomenon of choosing to live with people who think/believe/vote the way we do and the damage it has done to our nation. Click here to listen. (The player is on the top left hand side of the web page).

Undeniable intangibles

CD's and mp3's are to vinyl albums as airplanes are to trains. These are aspects of scale which don't have to do with size, but a graduated series denoting levels of simplicity and speed. I argue that a vinyl album sounds and feels far better than their digital counterparts not just because of the sound itself but also because of the fact that we can see and understand what's going on as the sound is generated. They don't leave us behind technologically. If a belt drive on a turntable breaks we can rig up a new one with a long rubber band. If we hear a pop in the middle of a song we can work to gently clean the impurity off with a little fluid. This intangible element preserved a sense of pride of ownership, a sense of stewardship. You could tell a lot about a person by looking at his record collection, totally aside from the music they contained. Back when CD's began to take over I remember the vinyl die-hards talking about the "warmth" of music played back on records which resulted from the fact that the full sound was recorded on the disk and not just a tinny-sounding sample. They were absolutely right. Because record albums are so simple technologically, they are more approachable, more participatory. In other words more humane. Is it any wonder they seem to be making a comeback?

Likewise with trains as compared to airplanes. Because they travel more slowly, trains seem to be at one with the landscape and the small towns and large cities they criss-cross through. People develop real feelings for trains because they exist at a more human scale. In spite of their shear engineering muscle there's a sense that trains are a kind of humble servant, like an old friend. In contrast airplanes have become a kind of brutal taskmaster. In a plane, gone is the sense of history, rumination and unfolding geography. Maybe because it preserves these things, train travel seems to do a better job of preparing a person emotionally and spiritually for arrival at their destination. Perhaps in the same sense that the needle of a record expresses every detail of the music, a train doesn't abbreviate the terrain or the necessary richness of the journey. (Maybe jet lag is the body's attempt to make up for in dreaming, what was lost in wakeful experience). Instead all that remains in airplane travel is the schedule, the evaluation of service, amenities, etc. What a shame. Who knows, maybe train travel will make a comeback, too.

Standardization in retail and restaurants

I probably don't have to tell you that you can go practically anywhere in America and find many of the same stores and restaurants. This stinks. Of course, this phenomenon is the result of massive scale. By tuning our tastes to narrower and narrower possibilities these giants have removed much culture, surprise and fun and generally made life worse for Americans-not to mention fed us pure trash. Sadly some people prefer it this way. Ever notice how people rarely gather at chain restaurants? (with the possible exception of bored-out-of-their-mind teenagers) Real neighborhood establishments attract locals and become a place for them to hold court. This is an important part of their character. My brother travels for work much of the year and has a policy of only eating at mom-and-pop establishments. Fortunately he can still do this without starving. If more of us did, I think we could reverse this awful trend.

Standardization of spelling and grammar

The champions of massive scale have also promoted the standardization of spelling and grammar. They do this to help ensure that new language as it evolves is unpopular. The way they do it is by con-vincing people that "proper" language comes from books rather than from families and communities. As a vehicle for this misinformation they have established mass-schooling (and associated texts) with the help of government. By subjecting people to artificial ideas about what is correct, they reinforce divisive and inhyewman concepts of class hierarchy by making it possible to readily identify those who aren't educated in a certain way and exploiting people's natural clannishness in order to encourage a system of self-perpetueighting, contempt, discrimination, exclusion, etc. Doo partly to a lack of this kind of education, the lower classes are unhindered creatively and become a fountain of new expreshun - full of color, spontaneity and feeling. This is particularly true among the youth, who develop, pick up on and spread new language up through the social ranks until the society as a whole is influenced by it. This is because of the innate ability of children who, in the absence of adult teaching actually create language from scratch. Also, by the age of 5 the average child knows more grammar than has ever been recorded in any textbook. These phenomena are a natural threat to the insecurity of power. By engineering a top-down orientation, those in power hope to stifle innovation and democracy in order to protect their own insidious intrists. As an alternative, I have decided to pepper my writing with nonstandard spelling. I have found it to be an unexpected source of creativity, fun as well as a way to infuse my thoughts with more meaning, not less. I highly recommend it!

Specialization in "food" products

Specialization in food could more accurately be described as reductionism. For example, at some point in history people decided refined food was more prestigious. It probably had to do with the fact that eating refined food meant you could afford servants to refine it for you. Fast forward to today when technology has replaced human servants. Good for the human servants, but still just as damaging to the served - as it breeds dependence, unrealistic expectations and a spoiled sense of entitlement. Add to that poor health. Refined food is only one example. The proliferation of this royal attitude causes us to decide we like one part of something and toss out the rest in many, many cases. Or concentrate one part and put several times the normal amount into something. And thus are born a million food fads. I always cringe at a radio ad that plays here a lot recently. "You could never drink enough green tea to get the benefits of just one serving of ______. It would be physically impossible!" Take something as every-day as juice. We would rarely if ever eat the amount of fruit that goes into making a single glass of juice. Yet we have serious health problems because we over indulge in sugar and a big part of it is juice and "juice drinks". Fruit comes balanced right off the tree. Not just because there is fiber, too. There are relationships between all the ingredients that food scientists don't study very much. Why? Because the more you do to something the more scarce a commodity it becomes (funding for studies often comes with the promise or hope of a marketable product at the other end). Few studies are conducted on foods and plants as they grow in nature and the health sustaining relationships of the ingredients as they interact in their natural and pristine state. Why do that, when people would just end up going down to their local nursery and buying a potted plant or vegetable start for $2 (or a pack of seeds with a few dozen for the same price)? Who would get rich from that when they naturally reproduce themselves? Better to make a $4 processed food product or better yet a $30 or $500 prescription drug using a secret patented process.

In my freshman biology class at Brigham Young University, they tried to erase any question about the superiority of reductive science in our minds by giving us two papers to read. One was a peer-reviewed paper about some new cancer treatment and one was a magazine article featuring testimony about the health maintaining properties of the herb fenugreek. The material we were given to help us understand how to judge between the two was scornful of the latter, to say the least. I consider what our professor, and no doubt other professors as the course was a university-wide graduation requirement, did as third-rate brainwashing, designed to program our assumptions by implying that we would be socially and professionally ostracized for believing that fenugreek and other herbs (not to mention overrule the very idea that testimony is a valid and valuable means of evaluating options - a basic tenet of LDS doctrine. In addition, by promoting the supremacy of air-tight science they undermine another indispensable Mormon doctrine and the experience of thousands, if not millions of Church members - that of faith healing) have medicinal value. Did I mention that they also implied that doing so could be dangerous, even though fenugreek has been used to spice food for hundreds, if not thousands of years? The fact that they would assume that our minds would be in a state of readiness to fall for such nonsense amounts to a ringing indictment of our school system as a whole, but that's another subject.

Reductive science has made it's way into our food supply and into our stomachs, filling our doctors/dentists offices and hospitals in the process. (Don't believe me? Try kicking refined foods and see how often you get sick or have a cavity) Again, this comes from the faulty philosophy that things are simply the sum of their parts. In actuality, foods eaten as close to the way they are found in nature are by far the healthiest. Not only do they not make us sick, they keep us from getting sick as well and can even reverse existing health problems. Another beautiful thing about it is that it saves work because less is done to it. Like many things in modern life, if we actually did the sensible thing we would destroy jobs in the food industry (two words that should have never been placed side by side) and bankrupt the healthcare industry. I say we get to it.