Burning Man or Man Burning Down the House?

I like thinking inductively, bringing together disparate symbolic entities to see how their intermingling can lead to interesting new meanings. 

 

 

                    Plate Block of Scott 1107 International Geophysical Year

 

So, I have owned this rather striking block of commemorative postage stamps with selvage and plate number for years, but was never curious enough to interpret exactly what it was celebrating. Not until now. It was celebrating a time of global scientific collaboration between the democratic West, and the Communist East during the height of the Cold War.  But they were also competing on the world stage for scientific advances, which could lead to technological breakthroughs that reward countries with influence, wealth, and prestige. The designated time of this friendly rivalry in earnest was between July 1, 1957 and December 31, 1958, and was named International Geophysical Year. An example of binary technological achievements during that time was the October 4, 1957 Soviet launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik and the January 31, 1958 American response launch of Explorer 1. The stamps were rendered with bi-color engravings that necessitated using a double run through presses of different plates, one for the frame and the other for part of the central vignette, each with a separate ink color.

 

What made me want to “unearth” these stamps was an intriguing Netflix drama, The Billion Dollar Code. It told the story of the origins of what became Google Earth, the supposedly free consciousness-altering, Internet-based computer program that provides a seamless visualization of the earth in a massively large spatial navigation app. This revolutionary program all of us use all the time everywhere from the palm of our hand has had an impact in tandem with the 1968 Apollo 8 moon mission picture that captured for the first time the whole Earth, the entire planet, our only home since the dawn of our species, rising up as Apollo emerged from the other side of the moon. Problem is that Google didn’t invent Google Earth. A rag tag team of young German digital artists did in the heady days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolized the end of that Cold War.

 

That’s how I learned about the event known as Burning Man.

 

 

Burners Heading to Mecca

Burning Man is an annual technofest held during the week before Labor Day on an expansive, dry lake bed of caustic alkaline dust in a remote Nevada desert. Tens of thousands attend. Though “It aims to be an undefinable event, somewhere between a celebration of counterculture and a spiritual retreat”, it can include friendly collaboration between innovative adversaries, sort of like International Geophysical Year, often with Earth-shattering consequences. According to the Netflix docudrama, it was at an early Burning Man event that the German progenitors of the way to effortlessly glide over Earth in seconds to any specific latitudinal and longitudinal point on the ground seemed to have given away to others strategic hints to the code in their software that explained the capabilities of their Earth-navigating program they called “TerraVision.” These hints would not be lost on “friendly” attendees who would end up working for Google.

 

 

 

But the Earth-shattering consequences I was thinking about did not include the digital accomplishment akin to the freedom of Icarus’ flight with feathery bird wings in ancient Greek myth or even the failed lawsuit brought against Google over their alleged infringement of the TerraVision patent in a New York courtroom in 2017. It is how one can now more poignantly interpret the image on those postage stamps about which the Google Earth docudrama had reminded me. We must recognize an eerily accidental, yet significant symbolic Freudian slip the stamp designers made.

 

I had wondered about the orb and the surrounding fire in the stamp’s vignette, why the earth was black and what the fire meant to convey, perhaps a stylish symbol for the fire left behind on the launch pads of rockets putting Landsat satellites in orbit to probe for Earth's secrets. After all, the stamps were commemorating the world’s collaborative scientific advances studying the earth during International GEOphysical Year. 

 

It is rather a rendering of the Sun. Early telescopic photography of our intensely, blindingly bright star used filters to black out the orb so as to be able to make visible the corona, the sun’s effluence of matter that would provide clues to its content and energy, and which was represented by the phalanx of fire in the stamp’s vignette.

 

 

Showing a fiery sun, not our Earth, was a misunderstanding. It led the engraver to scratch into die metal an incorrect symbol for that year’s scientific exploration of Earth. The benefit is that I can use it to more accurately interpret my stamps. On them is Burning Man. Michelangelo’s God innervates and animates a piece of mud, turning it into a creature who is freed from blind, deterministic instinct to choose his destiny. Man’s choices often include the decision not to honor God or the biodiverse, and thus efficient and stable, home God has made for him; rather, to use his self-seeking and self-serving nature to exploit the earth until it is left burning.

Let’s rename Burning Man “Man Burning Down Our House". It is an appropriate title of an “Apocalypse,” a topic of an earlier post used to illicit human-caused global climate change.

 

 

The source for the symbolic and now iconic picture above is Weather Wealth Newsletter, and illustrates a report by a meteorologist and commodity trading advisor called “A Burning Earth, the Natural Gas Price Rally. An excerpt is, as follows.

 

“The historic record heat hammering both the U.S. and Europe injected a serious dose of bullishness into the market. However, in order for us to get another major leg up in prices, this bullish weather forecast needs to remain and there must be an active hurricane season.” 

 

What is amazing here is how blind to all else the pursuit of wealth can make us. This writer is like Nero who fiddles while Rome burns. Even worse: there's a pile of money to be made on worsening weather. Let the burning happen. Bring on class 5 hurricanes. Grab that cash and make a stash. There is now, for instance, enough business for an entire industry of competitive players who hire wage slave workers to travel from extreme weather disaster clean up to the next like migrant workers following the shifting weather belts that determine the timing of the harvests.

 

I found the following excerpt about Burning Man, which I redacted with additions in parentheses.

 

“Burning Man is all about self (serving)-expression and the rejection of (overt) corporatism and (underlying) capitalism. Instead of using money (the love of which is the root of all evil), attendees borrow, barter and trade for what they need (which are things to sustain the person, not wealth to enrich). People create a fleeting, self-sustaining community that (theoretically) leaves no trace or trash upon its completion.”

 

 

The following are tenets of the Burning Man festival, which I also redacted with additions in parentheses.

 

Radical inclusion: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man (especially those sponsored by the wealthy tech industry elites).

 

Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving (of gifts easily procured by those exploits that are dependent upon voltage or magnet polarization-generated securities).

·       

 Decommodification: In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by (read: nurtured by very well disguised) commercial sponsorships, transactions (read: not conducted publicly) or advertising (that is restricted to word of mouth).

·           

Radical self-reliance: Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources (and financial support proffered by the coffers of technological free enterprise; it costs the typical burner $800 for a pass and parking space and, adding to this transportation, often by plane, or private jet if attendees are influencers or the wealthy tech elite, food, 1.5 gallons of water per person per day, 12” rebar stakes to anchor a tent against fierce winds, and other survival-related supplies can easily push the cost into the $thousands according to Insider).

 ·     

Radical self-expression: arises from the unique gifts of the individual (recruited by techno entities for their remarkable talents, especially visionary intuition).

 

                                   Burning Man Celebrates a Chosen Mind Set

·    

 Communal effort: Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration (read: teamwork that will be rewarded through private free enterprise later).

 ·   

 Civic responsibility: Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare (Burning Man requires signing an indemnity agreement.) and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants (True believing acolytes in the spirit of Burning Man self-govern as a collective).

 

 Leaving no trace: Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather (which is now hard to achieve when the ancient desert playa is rendered a mud wrestling quagmire by extreme weather events due to climate change wrought by technology. After the unprecedented hurricane of 2023’s torrential rains temporarily stranded the city of thousands, myriad blown jetsam termed MOOP---matter out of place---included orphaned tents that lay caked in dried muck, and toilet paper and carpets churned into the sodden dirt.).

 ·    

 Participation: Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation (made capable by conjuring a pairing of intro-personal, quasi-religious inclusion and a sense of exclusivity).

   

 Immediacy: Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture (especially when tied to an ethic of Epicurean egoistic hedonism).

 

                   Mad Max: Desperate for Gas after the Apocalypse

Intellectuals held in suspician for thinking

Has intellectualism become a specter of the so-called “deep state,” the esoteric, abstract organization who secretly rules over us and is run by covert no-name boogy men? Used to be that appreciative citizens relied on wonks to run the complex systems of modern societies and, in healthy democracies, with a reliance that generated respect, because the “experts” could handle such abstractions that enabled us to live our lives in unprecedented freedom and prosperity. Then globalism think tank deep thinkers who got American business to export labor in order to strangle the unions, and power hungry officials like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who manipulated a very non-intellectual President Bush the Second to get the electorate to support a twenty year, $5,000,000,000,000 incursion into Iraq and Afghanistan (see picture caption below), and the writings of terribly misguided libertarians like Ayn Rand who persuaded the Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, drunk on the neoliberal attraction of derivatives to provide a false sense of security, to sign off on a subprime mortgage profiteering binge that gave us the Great Recession, and college financial aid officers who fed unsuspecting students $1,600,000,000,000 of federally subsidized loans to pay for educations at too many new schools made too expensive by fiscally conservative state legislators who pulled back on supporting higher education while touting its need if students were to become members of the middle class, only for them to realize there are no lucrative jobs, only a life time of principal and interest payments,,,,made ordinary people suspicious of intellectualism. Who can blame them?

Who are the proper "deep state" targets of the disillusioned, disenfranchised electorate, politicians or corporate heads? Wait, they can be both. There is wealth to be generated when one is both. Donald Rumsfeld was President and CEO of several companies between stints as Secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000 and had received stock options from Halliburton. In the run-up to the Iraq War, Halliburton was awarded a $7 billion contract for which only Halliburton was allowed to bid. And Donald Trump who was supposed to divest from controlling his wealth by placing it in a blind trust in order to become president, had the trust run by his sons and daughter.

Rapid Global Climate Change: A Peek at the Apocalypse

For a while now I’ve been tinkering with my concise, concrete, comprehensive position statement (PS) on the alarming present and future state of the planet and what it means. Like a broadside hung up at your post office to get you to enlist for the war or to be on the look out for America's most wanted, I am trying to get you

r attention.

If its meaning is impactful enough, it ought to spur us into action. We are not easily spurred into action by matters of fact, though.  We science educators run into trouble with their overuse, which can easily lead to dulling yawns and what-else-is-new? apathy. So I have tried to "de-sciencefy" it to increase clarity and use clever cause and effect strings for heightened interest.

Hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds is yet possible, and if it alarms you enough to open the link at the end you will find a wonderful, more in-depth statement that I discovered this morning by the director of our local land trust, based on the 2021 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Hope means knowing what effective responses you can make.

So here goes. 

For thirty years I taught environmental systems science to high school students, with an emphasis on human-caused rapid global climate change. It is thus no accident that young people like Greta Thunberg are leading the public outcry regarding the impacts of rising pollution and heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuel. They come storming into our polite summits prepared with a scientific literacy that includes an understanding of how interconnected are the world’s natural life-support systems, balanced by means of negative feedback.

 

Now unbalanced, the feedback is turning positive. For instance, ever more trapped heat dries out more forest, which burns more easily, which releases more heat trapping carbon dioxide gas, which melts more polar ice, which exposes darker water to sunlight, which is absorbed as heat instead of reflected as light back to space, which warms the poles, melts even more ice and releases methane gas, with 80 times the heat-trapping capability of carbon dioxide, from former permafrost, all which accelerates the rate of heat entrapment. 

The great oceanic carbon sink is losing its capacity to further absorb excess atmospheric CO2 because gases are less able to mix with liquids as they warm. Moreover, oceans are already poisoned by carbonic acid that the gas causes when mixed with water. 

The great terrestrial carbon sink, the Amazon, is turning into a savanna because the loss of carbon-sequestering forest is weakening rainfall, which makes harvests lower, which gives farmers an economic motivation to clear more land to make up for lost production, which means more fires and less rain. 

Fluid circulation of air and water around the globe that once swirled in balanced, uniform cycles has started to “wobble,” like a toy top does as it slows. These changes are giving new names to old, once rare events, including polar vortexes, high pressure heat domes, bomb cyclones, and atmospheric rivers. 

Once normal, large scale patterns of winds and interactions between shallow and deep-water oceanic currents that regulate the distribution of heat and moisture around the planet are being disrupted. As positive feedback drives change to critical tipping points, change accelerates and is harder to reverse. 

Insurance companies are abandoning California and Florida because of too frequent and too intensive, heat-driven hurricanes blowing more water in heat-expanded seas inland, wrecking and drowning coastal cities teaming with increasingly unaffordable housing. 

Greed that blinds us into denial of objective facts regarding environmental limits and their now increasingly obvious consequences has granted us a peak at the Apocalypse we are bringing upon ourselves. 

To be unequivocal, this crisis is the most massive, complex, and decisive challenge to modern civilization.

 

 

Phew! Sucks to be us. What to do? The great warming since the dawn of the industrial age is 1.1 degrees Celsius. That is an unequivocal scientific fact. We see the effect. We are involved. No one is exempt. Everyone must act. Because everyone knows about "earth-rise" from the Apollo 8 space mission. That's us, remember? We are there on our only home. We can destroy it. We can heal it.

But let's face that fact, born out of basic anthropology. Most people look upon scientists as Cassandras whose warnings can be ignored. "Sure, it is hotter; sure, forest fires are raging; sure, storms are bigger. But I have more immediate concerns to worry about" is the response of most people. That keeps the politicians from willing to make the hard decisions that will save us from the coming apocalypse. We must save ourselves. Things get done when we do them. And we do them when there is hope.

An encouraging response that kindles hope and enables me and my neighbors to get involved is  conservation of the terrestrial carbon sink found at our local level here in Maine. It is discussed by the director of Blue Hill Heritage Trust at this link. 

https://bluehillheritagetrust.org/thoughts-on-blue-hill.../

Collecting in Collaboration: Hudson-Fulton Plate Block First Day Covers

About ten years ago, during a stamp auction, I bid $1,200 on an envelope, pictured below. I failed to win the lot. But the story did not end there.

Lot I.

Letter to B. A. Webber, Superintendent in Ashton, RI. from a letter writer at the Dodgeville Mill in Dodgeville, MA and franked in Dodgeville on the first day of issue with a plate number and partial inscription pair of Scott 372. This is the lot I failed to win (grr).

The postage stamps on the envelope were commissioned for a pecuniary festival held in New York meant to boost commerce in the city and commemorate two objects engraved on each stamp. One was Robert Fulton’s Clermont paddle boat traveling between Albany and New York, which was the first viable commercial steam-powered line in America (5). The other was the sailboat commanded by a certain European explorer who discovered the river upon which the Clermont would steam many years later, Henry Hudson.

Serviced in 1909, the envelope today has a catalog value of $950, not because it's old, has a rare stamp, or is addressed in a fancy calligraphic hand long before keyboarding stole our basic skill of writing in longhand. It's because the postmark shows it was cancelled on the day the stamp was issued, July 25.

Moreover, it was made a decade before collecting such “first day covers” began to be promoted by the Washington D.C. bureau in charge of making stamps in order to sell more of them, which would subsequently establish a new form of collecting, induce stamp dealers to service them for a fee, and make them more common. So this first day cover was rare.

Its rarity was enhanced by details without which I would not have been interested in bidding. Whoever serviced this envelope put more postage than was necessary on it, two stamps instead of the first class postal rate that one 2c stamp represented. The reason to me was obvious. It was so that the stamps could include enough edge paper, called selvage, to include two bits of information about the stamps: the number of the flat plate used to hand-press images of 100 stamps at a time onto full sheets, and the name of the federal agency responsible, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. These were add-on values not represented in the catalog value. Since I collect no other form of postal history, this was indeed a prize.

Bidding began online, after which the fate of the lots would be decided live at the gallery. I had opened online with the minimum, $500, with a reserve up to $1,200, which was $250 over catalog value. No one else posted a bid. I remember well the day action went live and in person as well as online. I was not familiar with live auction bidding, which was why I put down enough to go well past catalog value. I wanted that envelope and hoped the bidding would stop well below that. There was hesitation when $1,200 was reached. And then someone in the gallery bid $1,300. I desperately tried to make my computer override it, but failed. The gavel slammed down. My wife had been watching over my shoulder, but saying, “Well, at least you saved a bunch of cash” did not assuage my disappointment.

There is often absolution after failure. In this case, of course, the failure was not critical, and I happily went on collecting. Years later kindly absolution came by means of enhanced skills in collecting procedures, chances with similar lots, lessons in history that resulted from scientific research, and an opportunity for storytelling. Since I was a high school science teacher, let’s continue the story using a scientific method.

HYPOTHESIS

Stamp collectors working in the early twentieth century textile industry aided each other in initiating a novel kind of philatelic item, to wit, “first day covers”.

GEOGRAPHICAL SETTING

Textile mills in an area of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, emptied by the Blackstone River, which becomes the Providence River that flows past Providence, RI into the bays emptying into the Atlantic past Newport, RI

DATA

Lot II.

Letter to William E. Sykes in Dodgeville, MA from a letter writer in Providence, RI and franked on the first day of issue, September 25, 1909, with a plate number and partial inscription pair of Scott 372. I won this lot  at auction for $300, considerably less than $1,200 bid on Lot I. It's shown below.

Lot III.

Letter to B. A. Webber, Superintendent in Ashton, RI, from the same letter writer of the Lot I envelope and franked in Attleboro, RI with a plate number single of Scott 372 two days prior to the official first day of issue. This lot is for sale on eBay for a firm price that is appreciably more expensive, $2,000.

RESULTS

Bertrand A. Webber worked his way up the ladder in the textile industry. He perhaps started his career in Maine in 1888, per a textile trade paper entry, “B. A. Webber of Chicopee, MA is now at Auburn, ME”. (1) He become superintendent of the Lonsdale Company of Ashton, RI, which is located on the Blackstone River north of Providence. Webber would remain in this position until his death sometime in the spring of 1922, according to the June 6, 2022 entry, “...filling the vacancy caused by the recent death of Bertrand A. Webber.” (2)

William E. Sykes, the addressee of my cover, Lot II, also worked his way up the ladder. Eleven years after these letters were written in 1909, a textile trade paper dated November 4, 2020 states, “William E Sykes of Pontiac has been made agent and superintendent of the Arctic and Centreville textile mills” (3) in the heavily industrialized mill towns south of Providence in the Warwick area.

In a 2004 nomination form to place the Centreville mill in the Dept. of Interior National Register of Historic Places is the following.

“The Centreville Mill is, located at 3 Bridal Avenue in the village of Centreville, a mixed industrial, commercial, and residential area in southern West Warwick, Rhode Island. The 12.7-acre mill parcel is located largely on the east bank of the South Branch of the Pawtuxet River, a heavily industrialized waterway that supplied power and process water to numerous industrial enterprises along its route from its head waters in the Flat River Reservoir in Coventry, Rhode Island to its confluence with the North Branch at the village of Riverpoint, and to Pontiac Mills in Warwick.” (4, with my bold italics)

CONCLUSION

We can surmise that William E. Sykes of Pontiac in Warwick, south of Providence might be the one who worked in the Dodgeville mill northeast and across the state line in Dodgeville, MA. If so, someone he knew in his home region serviced the Lot II cover, my cover, which got sent to him the first day of issue. On the same day in Dodgeville and also in Attleboro nearby, it was perhaps Sykes who ran around to local post offices servicing the Lot I and Lot III covers and sending them to Webber, a higher up at the mills up river north of Providence.

Perhaps Sykes intended to ingratiate himself to this superintendent he admired enough to want to become one himself by using a very flowery calligraphy for the addressee. Sure enough, Sykes moved back to the area of Warwick and West Warwick in 1920 to head mills there.

In any event, these were serious collectors, able to recognize the value of servicing specimens that would be called first day covers during the early days of the Fourth Bureau, beginning in 1920 with the administration of Warren Harding. Moreover, they were sophisticated, bothering to include selvage and plate number. Lot III, addressed to Webber by the same hand as Lot I, was even posted two days before the official date of release, which indicated a remarkable incentive in procuring (by twisting the arm of a local postmaster) and enacting a highly collectible and inspiring “pre-first day” first day cover.

One more conclusion: Rewards are rarely obtained in first instances. Persevering patiently over time can often lead to rewards later, usually in forms not easily predicted.

Sources:

1. Wade’s Fibre and Fabric: A Record of American Textile Industries (a practical paper for the cotton and woolen trades) Vol. VII No. 182 August 25, 1888

2. ibid. Vol. 70 No. 1908 June 6, 2022

3. American Wool and Cotton Reporter Vol. XXXIV No. 45 November 4, 2020 page 57 (3847)

4. Centreville Mill National Register of Historic Places Registration Form

5. https://www.nps.gov/safr/blogs/did-the-age-of-sail-end-part-1-sail-gives-way-to-steam.htm