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OML Archives-
Subject: Re: Cloud Busting - Fri, 8 Mar 1996 00:58:51 -0500
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 00:58:51 -0500 From: "Shawn P. Wilbur" <swilbur@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu> Message-Id: <Pine.3.07.9603072337.D1972-d100000@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu> Subject: Re: Cloud Busting To: orgonomy@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Sender: owner-orgonomy@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Henri Bergson - a thinker Reich admired, and with whom he shared a great deal in the way of conceptual apparatus - was fond of saying that what was most difficult in solving any problem was determining the right question to ask. Once you had that, however, solutions came rapidly... We still seem to be looking for the right question or questions, or for the right way to frame them. As i'm reading things, however, it seems that the major concerns about cloudbusting arise from some sense that it is an intervention into a "natural" process - artificial because it is a willed intervention, and subject to claims about responsibility for the same reasons. Jim Martin just pointed out one of the complications in asserting causal responsibility for the atmospheric event which occurred at the time of OROP Israel. (And Michael Clement pointed out how quick, perhaps uncritically, we are inclined to jump to belief in the ability of cloudbusting to deliver result.) We have at least two sorts of willed attempts at intervention: OROP Israel, conducted by DeMeo & the international team he worked with, and the Israeli cloudseeding operation, which, according to the article in _Pulse...#4_, continued long after the rains had begun. The latter is important, and out of the control of the OROP Israel crew. DeMeo is actually quite cautious in his assessment of the causes of the "excess" precipitation. (I recommend the article, and the rest of the journal for that matter. It's fascinating reading, and very clear.) In any event, there are at least several interventions which might have a causal relationship of one sort or another to the rainfall following the breaking of the drought. We might note - particularly as DeMeo comments specifically in the article on the notion of "weather modification," which he rejects as an appropriate description of cloudbusting - that these two interventions are of rather different types. Cloud seeding really aims at weather modification - "making rain" - while cloudbusting aims at something more like "letting rain," administering atmospheric therapy to circulation systems which have become blocked and/or rigidly channeled. Importantly, there is an assumption within cloudbusting that there is a "cause" represented by tendencies within the planetary weather system itself, and that this cause can be frustrated by other forces. Cloudbusting would therefore be an intervention into a system of multiple conflicting forces, each exerting potentially causal influences. But we need, i suspect, to back up and think more about the circumstances under which an operation like OROP Israel might seem like a good idea. That would have to include the political exigencies, such as the threat of war over water resources. Certainly, science never gets to operate in a value-free environment, however much we might wish for "pure science." But maybe the more interesting question is to ask about the causes of drought. I haven't had a chance to read DeMeo's dissertation work on desertification yet. I suspect a close look at that might illuminate the short report on OROP Israel a great deal. However, given the assumptions of Reich's work about the circulation of orgone in the planetary weather system - and well beyond (cf _Cosmic Superimposition_) - and given what conventional science and the ecology movement have suggested about our daily, largely inadvertent interventions in nearly all natural systems, we might have to start multiply partial causes even further. Did someone - or all of us someones, sick folks and poor shepherds of the planet that we are - cause the drought that was already causing loss of life and livelihood? My reading of the cloudbusting literature that i have read is that at least some authors - Jerome Eden, for instance - closely link physical deserts to emotional desertification. As with the question of the Emotional Plague, it is hard to ask the question of why a given ill exists without addressing one's own place in an unhealthy social organization. The questions of causation and responsibility are extremely important, but in no way are they simple. And i continue to suspect that if we are thinking through Reich's system - or any close relative - we're going to be denied any innocent spaces from which we can safely throw stones, at least in anything like good faith. This business of intervening or not intervening (if that is possible) in global systems is certainly being addresses in contemporary philosophy and social thought. Michel Serres' recent _Natural Contract_, for example, begins with the disturbing fact that human being are already in the process of radically changing "natural" systems on a global scale, and suggests that once that is the case it becomes our ethical responsibilty to continue to intervene, and to do so with greater care and awareness. That's a fairly startling ethics, and moreso the more you follow its logics, but i find it hard to refute entirely - and it is instances like those surrounding OROP Israel that i find the most troubling in this context. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just not do things that are dangerous, as if by avoiding those sins of commission we could remain guiltless? But what about the sins of omission, and the ways in which we are already implicated in environmental degradation, global weather change, emotional desertification? Can we really stand around, pretending the hands we're ringing are lilly-white? I suspect that that's a luxury we no longer have. -shawn
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