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Photo by Micah A. Ponce

As I write this, Hurricane Gustav is bearing down on the Louisiana coast, having forced nearly 2 million people to evacuate and rattling the nerves of a nation that still remembers the human suffering wrought by Katrina.

The threat is immediate. Anybody can see the massive vortex of wind and rain spinning its way toward the coast. Everyone knows that as it makes landfall, the storm will bring immediate destruction.

By now we all know the look of someone who has lost everything to a natural disaster. Television has taken care of that. We have seen the faces of those who found themselves in harm’s way. We feel a touch of their pain in the aftermath.

And in the case of Gustav, many people still feel a sense of moral outrage at the lack of government response following Katrina.

Triggering alarm

In short, Gustav has all the ingredients for triggering alarm. We humans are hard wired to respond to threats like Gustav. It is part of our evolutionary makeup.

Psychologist and book author Dan Gilbert, speaking at Pop!Tech 2007, identifies four factors that trigger what he calls cerebral alarm:

• It has a face. We humans are social animals and have an obsession with anything human.
• It violates our moral sensibilities and arouses our visceral emotions.
• It poses a threat now, not in the future.
• It threatens to cause abrupt changes.

Check out the video. It’s about 15 minutes long.

(I found this video on the blog A Few Things Ill Considered in the post Global Warming is Happening Too Slowly)

Changing tide

These cerebral alarm triggers have served us humans well over the last million or so years, giving us a chance to survive extremely difficult circumstances.

But we are no longer the vulnerable biped fending off starvation, predators and enemies on the African savannas. We have become the grand architects of our planet, shaping anything and everything around us.

My post on the danger of shifting baselines addresses one of the four triggers: abrupt change. When people lose track of the original conditions in an environment, the baseline for that environment shifts. People see only the changes since the new baseline. As a result, they fail to see the true magnitude of change. The change is too gradual to notice.

Photo by Tidewater Muse

This is consistent with the way our brains are wired to respond. We can recognize and respond to abrupt, absolute changes. If the wind knocks a tree through your roof, you take action.

Slower changes, however, often go undetected. If a warmer climate allows a beetle infestation to spread and destroy large stands of the same tree, it may take years for the magnitude of the change to be recognized.

We humans like to think we’re smarter than we are. We like to think that we’ve somehow transcended the reptilian part of our brain. But as it stands, we have plenty of room for improvement. Only a small part of our brains think about the future. We are still evolving in that regard.

Slow descent

As Gilbert observes in his Pop!Tech talk:

One day at a time we’ve transformed our world into an ecological nightmare that our grandparents would never have tolerated but that for most of us is simply business as usual because each day isn’t drastically different than the one before.

This goes back to what I was writing in my post on shifting baselines. As Gilbert points out, the impurity of our air, water and food has risen dramatically during our lifetimes but we tolerate it.

Our world today, with our bans on eating fish and smog alerts, was the stuff of science fiction 60 or 70 years ago, Gilbert said.

Photo by Taras Kalapun

Where’s the horizon?

We still lack cerebral alarms for climate change and other ecological crises. How do you put a human face on them? How do you attribute any one natural disaster to a larger pattern?

Should you even try? Doesn’t that just confuse the issue?

The sense of immediacy is growing. More people and institutions, of all political views, are beginning to agree that the time has come to address climate change.

But, does this mean we’re seeing further into the future or that the point of no return has moved perilously closer?

The blog Climate Progress noted last week that the Brookings Institution, a think tank known for its centrist policies, has joined the call for an immediate response to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It now says that we may have only seven years to begin cutting emissions or face global catastrophe.

Imagine the Brookings Institution saying such a thing four years ago. Who do you blame for the delay? Human nature?

New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin wrote last month in his blog Dot Earth about what he calls “dawdling in the face of looming risks.”

In Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’?, he quotes David Ropeik, an expert in risk communications:

The very concept of sustainability is predicated on reason…that humans can see the collective harms their behaviors are doing, and, as rational actors, correct those behaviors. But there is overwhelming evidence from all sorts of fields that our behaviors are not so much a product of reason as they are the result of our overpowering animal instinct to survive.

Even the argument that “Behaving the way we are now is destructive, and hurts our chances for survival” is an argument based on reason. It requires individuals to think rationally and act in the name of the greater common good rather than instinctively in their own self-interests. We’re just not programmed that way.

In short, we respond to hurricanes, not the slower unfolding of planetary crises.

Thinking ahead

Clearly we humans can think and plan for the future. We set goals for ourselves all the time and find ways to realize them. But those are individual pursuits that in one way or another enhance our personal survivability. It gets trickier as the goals and objectives expand to include larger numbers of people.

It may be tempting for those of us who do think about these things to pat ourselves on the back for overcoming our primitive nature and thinking ahead to future global problems. But how many of us actually do things now to address those problems?

It gets tricky. Our present needs so often consume us.

How do we change that? Can we change that?

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Photos by Micah A. Ponce, Tidewater Muse, Taras Kalapun

Baboon skull

Last year, May through July, I did field research in the Caprivi region of Namibia. The area is rather remote, smack dab in the middle of southern Africa.

For the people who live there, life proceeds at a walking pace. Electricity and running water don’t exist, except at the lodges, which use generators. Nearly all homes are made from poles, mud and thatching grass.

Family in Caprivi

As part of my research, I needed an informal census of my study area. I needed the name of each village, its GPS coordinates and its number of households. To do that I had to get permission from the headman of each one. Altogether there were 103 of them, though some villages were small and close together.

I hired a local man named Elvis to help me do it. He spoke four Caprivi languages and English fluently.

Elvis, my research assistant

White devil

The first day started late. We talked to 13 village headmen. In four of those villages, people asked Elvis whether I belonged to a satanic church. One teenage girl called me a white devil and grabbed a jagged piece of glass for protection.

Being accused as a Satanist unsettled me a bit. Couldn’t they tell I was one of the good guys?

As Elvis explained it, people were concerned about white Satanists from nearby Zambia. Rumor had it that these Satanists were in Caprivi recruiting new members for their church. They showed videos on the life of Jesus but later offered their followers large sums of money to murder a family member. The church leaders would then drink the blood. They also had a thing for kidnapping children.

Apparently members of the church were easy to identify. They were white and might try posing as researchers so they could get information on your family.

Oh great.

Much to Elvis’ credit, only one village headman that first day refused to have his village counted.

We faced this rumor each and every day. Someone always brought it up. In a brilliant case of a rumor run amok, one village headman told us in all seriousness that two of the church members had in fact been seen recently in a nearby village. They were posing as researchers taking a census.

That would be Elvis and I.

Overcoming the suspicion

I was flying blind. Without access to real information, I had no idea where this story originated.

Was it simply a deep-seated suspicion of white people following years of apartheid? Was it some over-zealous ministry that horribly botched its relationship with the locals?

Was it me?

I had no choice but press on. Otherwise, three months of research would be wasted.

I decided to divide and conquer. The less educated were the most likely to buy into the rumor. Others knew better. I would integrate myself into the community as best I could in the short time I was there.

• I bought my beer at the bottle stores, not at the lodge, and drank with the guys.

At the bottle store

• I attended the church closest to my campground where I stayed, after being invited to do so.

Church choir

• I went out of my way to give people rides. (This can be a dangerous practice, especially if you’re in South Africa.) In a place where maybe five locals own a car, that’s a big deal. One day Elvis and I managed to pack seven people into the 4×4 with us, saving them a three-hour walk through the bush. That was a crowded ride.

• We walked a lot. I didn’t always have the vehicle. Our record was 17km and 33 villages in one day. It gave me the chance to experience life the way many Caprivians do - on foot. It gave me a feel for the daily rhythm of their lives.

Long walk with Elvis

Finally the truth

As it turned out, the rumors were almost true. Almost. But I didn’t find out the real story until I got back to the States and could do some Internet research.

In November 2006, riots broke out in Lusaka, Zambia, after word spread that the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God had kidnapped two people and were about to sacrifice them. Thousands of Zambians rioted at the church, causing hundreds of thousands of US dollars in damage.

The Zambian government temporarily closed down the church and deported two of its pastors. The US Department of State’s Web page for Zambia even mentions it. The Universal Church denied the rumors. And it sued a Namibian government-run newspaper for libel for running a story headlined State bans ‘satanic’ sect.

So the rumor had legs, and strong ones at that. As it turned out, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God is Namibia’s fastest-growing denomination.

Maybe their missionaries really were crawling around the bush.

What can you take from this?

Hopefully you won’t find yourself in exactly this kind of predicament, but people do tend to be suspicious of outsiders. Rumors and past experiences can fuel that suspicion. So what do you do when you feel the heat of being wrongly accused?

• Don’t give up - Don’t push back too hard but stand up for yourself.

• Look for allies - Not everyone will share those suspicions.

• Listen to people - The more you listen, the more people will trust you.

• Take part in the community - Obviously you can’t force yourself on people but you can find ways to connect.

• Don’t jump to conclusions - People might have legitimate reasons for feeling the way they do, even if those reasons are based on bad information.

I didn’t go back this year, but friends of mine did. They said that everywhere in my study area, people would ask about me. Even the little old ladies. They wanted to know when I was coming back.

I guess I passed the test.

I first crossed paths with Andre the Giant back in the bad old days of 1989 - before Web browsers, cell phones and digital cameras. A Category 4 hurricane named Hugo had just slammed into the South Carolina coast and wiped the slate clean on my hometown of Charleston. Ground zero.

My girlfriend and I had lost our downtown apartment after Hugo pulled the roof off. Fortunately we rode out the storm a few blocks away at the Omni Hotel, which let us stay free for five days. We found a flooded out two-story apartment to call our own and started scrubbing floors and walls. No lights, bad water, hot weather.

Everywhere people picked up the pieces and waited for the return to normal. It would be a long wait.

During those weeks I saw the sticker for the first time. Downtown on King Street, close to where the skateboarders hung out.

Photo by leiabox

Back then, Andre the Giant had something of a headlock on popular culture. But this was altogether different. Why did he have a posse? And why include his height and weight? Who did this?

In the weeks that followed, that sticker popped up on traffic signs and trash cans all over town. At first it annoyed me … some stupid prank. Then it perplexed me. Finally it amused me.

I still had no idea who was behind it, but it now occupied a part of my world. In the aftermath of the storm, it somehow made sense. It gave me hope.

Somewhere amid the rubble, Andre the Giant and his posse were ready for … something.

Photo by theopie

Three years later I saw it for the first time in a different place, this time on a stop sign on the east side of Providence, Rhode Island, where I had just moved. Someone there had the stickers too! I felt right at home.

By now, 2008, you must have seen this sticker yourself. If not, you have and just don’t know it.

Photo by pkdan

A pre-Internet meme

As it turned out, the artist behind the sticker was Shepard Fairey, a Charleston native who had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design when I arrived in Providence.

My first two exposures to the sticker were the result of geographic coincidence. But by then, 1992, the stickers were spreading fast.

Shep, as he’s known around Charleston, had released a meme.

Photo by vandalog

These days the term meme is most often associated with viral phenomena on the Internet. But a meme is simply a unit of cultural information that gets passed from one person to another. “Andre the Giant has a Posse” was that kind of meme: portable, unplugged and ready to rumble.

The stickers popped up in cities on the east coast, the west coast and in between. In a 1996 interview with the hometown newspaper, Shep said:

It’s strange how it spread and caught on. I wanted to make my mark somehow and so decided to do it through the repetitive use of a graphic image.

The sticker itself had no actual meaning, Shep said. Instead, he wanted to see how people reacted and interpreted the image, and what that said about who they were.

The Giant gets bigger

Andre the Giant eventually morphed into the Obey Giant. Perhaps it was a copyright issue. At first I was disappointed. The Obey stickers didn’t have the same prankster spirit as the original.

But Shep had the momentum. He turned his graphic designs into a powerhouse. These days his art can be found in galleries and museums across the US and worldwide. His designs continue to sell out regularly through his online company, Obey Giant.

As his Web site logo says, Obey Giant has been “manufacturing quality dissent since 1989.”

Photo by BERT ‘2332'

Plenty of people try to launch memes and for the most part they fail. Shep’s universe continues to expand.

He took what could have been a curious one-time fad and turned it into a social phenomenon. It helped that he had the talent to create memorable art and had an image that could be cheaply mass produced. But he also used social networks to unleash his art on the world.

Where’s your posse?

A meme has to hit at the right time with the right idea and connect with the right channels to spread.

Blogging is one such channel. But it takes more than playing with a digital medium to turn an idea into a force to be reckoned with. For that, you need to reach beyond the Internet and find a vision, a message, that others are willing to spread.

Photo by andy castro

Too often it seems that people confuse the medium with the message. People talk about content and marketing, but successful ideas like Shep’s don’t start there. They start as a joke between skateboarders. They lurk under the surface as half-formed thoughts and daydreams that slowly develop and wait to be discovered.

The moral of the story is dig deep. Your meme is in there somewhere. And that somewhere is not online.

Go find it. And don’t forget to bring your posse.

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This post is an entry in the Killer Titles - Group Writing Project

Photo credit links: BERT ‘2332’, theopie, leiabox, pkdan, vandalog, andy castro