JANUARY 18, 2025 – Recently, I watched a Netflix documentary about the mind-boggling effort to build, launch and deploy James Webb. Of course, I’m not referring to the second NASA administrator by that name but the largest telescope ever built (by earthlings) and named in honor of him. The documentary reminded me of what I’ve often mentioned to people who inquire about my health, to-wit: “My successful interaction with the legions of smart, expert, caring and dedicated medical personnel has made me an incurable optimist.”
Slinging James Webb him . . . er, it . . . into space and lodging it a million miles from earth (four times the distance from us to the moon) was an unrivaled feat of visionary engineering, savvy political navigation, and international cooperation and coordination. By comparison, the medical basis of my “incurable optimism” seems almost pedestrian. If “intelligent life” exists elsewhere in the known cosmos, what are the odds that such other-world intelligence has evolved in vision, imagination and practical application that could measure up to the stunning achievement of James Webb? The conclusion implicit in that rhetorical question is no more of an overshot than is the parallel statement, “What complex of sounds assembled by alien life could probe the human heart, mind and soul as deeply as Beethoven’s Ninth plumbs our nature?”
In other words, despite our innumerable failings, “we” are the most amazing creatures known to . . . well, okay . . . to us. From a perspective that’s more down to earth, let’s see a dolphin, a great blue whale or a whole grove of giant redwoods conceive, fabricate, and render fully operational, a telescope that can see to the edge of time and space; or for that matter, create and perform a Beethoven symphony—or most critical to my continued existence, an effective medical procedure that can be administered on an out-patient basis to a human beset with a blood cancer called multiple myeloma?
Yet because of such high-altitude achievements, we should be far more demanding of ourselves when it comes to noticing, examining critically, and addressing effectively our many failings and failures. Chief among them is our relationship with the mother ship.
If “nature” has gone rogue on us these past few years, to a high degree—pun fully intended—we’ve “gone rogue” on nature. Though a direct link can’t yet be empirically established between, on the one hand, our voracious consumption of fossil fuels[1], and on the other, unusual drought, above-normal temperatures, and the unusual ferocity of the Santa Ana winds, no informed person can deny an increasing relationship between climate change and conditions that fanned the flames of catastrophe recently in southern California. To the correlation between climate change and weather extremes, add our approach to zoning, home-siting, home building, brush control, water management, logistical and emergency planning, and a host of other human directed inputs, and we wind up with a wildly destructive environment that rebels against us and robs over 80,000 people of their homes, possessions and communities.
Given the persistence of earthbound life, however, and getting back to my “incurable optimism,” we humans are nothing if not resilient. If the devil incarnate resides in the flames of unholy destruction, divine determination eventually chokes the devil and allows us to rise from the ashes. Consider the thousands of firefighters on land and in the air; take notice of the many more volunteers—including undocumented immigrants, by the way (I heard several interviewed on the radio)—who with meals, clothing, and shelter are reaching out to the dispossessed. It’s a great wonder to see how such aid comes together in response to disaster. From a distance the aid seems to materialize at the swoosh of a magic wand. In reality, charitable relief is the sum of many unsung heroes, gracious hearts and anonymous hands.
Scientists, engineers, and planners, meanwhile, can and will create breakthroughs in how our roguish relationship with earth can be better managed. The rest of us must support corrective policies and actions before everyone’s toast is burnt. As daunting as that task incumbent on us might seem, there’s precedent for hope . . .
The unholy mess in California is a reminder of an even bigger conflagration that wreaked havoc decades ago in a place at the opposite end of the country—the South Bronx. Over the course of the 1970s, an estimated quarter of a million people lost their residences, as blocks upon blocks of old apartment buildings went up in smoke and flames. The South Bronx seemed to be caught in a social and economic death spiral that threatened to raze eventually everything in sight, including any glimmer of hope for the future. The rest of the city, the state, the country, the world turned its back on the people whose lives were upended by the destruction. Outsiders had little sympathy for folks who would “burn down their own apartment buildings.”(In fact, other factors were afoot: government policies—such as redlining and “planned shrinkage” of existing (old and more affordable) housing stock and small businesses that supported local residents; ancient wiring that couldn’t handle the load of modern appliances; the closure of fire stations to save money for the debt-strapped city; insurance fraud on the part of landlords, who collected rents but neglected maintenance until their buildings were uninhabitable, whereupon the buildings would be torched (by local kids paid off by the landlords) for insurance money.
What arose from those ashes and rubble of despair was a miraculous grassroots effort; one that embodied what’s best about our species: resilience, imagination, determination, and appreciation for the common good. Ordinary people with extraordinary courage, persistence and leadership skills led a homegrown mission to save their community. They formed myriad non-profit groups, combined their sweat equity and rebuilt what had been destroyed. Their inspirational stories are captured in Paradise Bronx (see my series, “Trotting Around with Trotsky” (1/3 – 1/5/25)) and in another highly acclaimed documentary I watched recently, Decade of Fire, produced by one of the many heroes who led the recovery.
Yes, there’s plenty wrong with the world, but mixed in with the bad—and often spurred by it—is much extraordinary good, every bit as impressive down here on earth as James Webb is up there in space. A salient difference, however, is that we don’t have to fly the Bronx Phoenix to the moon or take what will surely be the California version to Mars. All we need to do is try a little harder to spread the “good” down here on earth.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1]Inextricably bound to this consumption is our insatiable thirst for energy—electricity—whether from fossil fuels or “renewables,” but in either case (except solar panels and windmills attached to our homes), served to us via powerlines crisscrossing the landscape. Powerlines are a prime suspect in the recent conflagrations.
