Writings on an Ethical Life by Peter Singer, New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2000. These are reprints from books by plausably the most controversial and among the most influential of living philosopher's. If you read a headline "Bishop denounces moral laxity" you would expect a Catholic Bishop preaching on modern sexual mores. But what if it was a Methodist Bishop (yes, they have them), speaking on our treatment of animals and the environment? These are the ethical areas of interest to Peter Singer. An Australian recently appointed DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University who wants to convice you that our ethnocentric view of the world is ethically wrong.

See Jessica Polichetti's Review

Native Americans and The National Parks by Robert H. Keller of Bellingham WA. The original occupants of this land have not always been well treated and respected by the National Park Service. Here are some case studies.

A Conspiracy of Optimism, Management of the National Forests since World War Two by Paul W. Hirt, Environmnetal Historian, Washington State University, 1994, University of Nebraska Press.
If you were to read only the Introduction, Conclusion, and Appendix: "Footpaths through Forest History", you would have a new, well founded understanding of what went wrong with the US National Forest Service in our life time. Beginning in 1967, I have wondered if the retoric of sustainable yeild matched the performance on the ground. Answers were always generalized or evasive. At first, clearcuts were where we got our blueberries in the Fall. Then, we could see more blueberry patches than trees. "Lots of cutting during WW2",we were told. "Had to adjust downward when we lost the North Cascades Park", (but the cut went up). Now a skillful historian with access to much of the data has laid out the entire story for us to understand.

"We, the people of the United States, .., have a serious problem: Too many of us nowdays neither mean what we say nor say what we mean. Moreover, we hardly expect anybody else to mean what they say either. The eight principles that follow point toward a politics of integrity.

1. THE NATION EXISTS FOR ITS PEOPLE. Integrity requires that we try to live our ideals. ...People are ends, not means. People, and people alone, are the reason there is a United States of America.

2. SOME THINGS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHERS. A politics of integrity is a politics that sets priorities, ... Justifications, no matter how thoughtful, will no longer suffice as substitutes for the setting of priorities.

3. CONSISTENCY MATTERS. ...integrity requires that the principles on which the government operates be applied consistency. If welfare programs have bad effects on individuals, they must also have bad effects on corporations, and corporate welfare should receive the same scruting...

4. EVERYBODY GETS TO PLAY. A politics of integrity must be consistent in its rules instead of fixing the rules so that one side gets to win. If religious advocacy in the public square is bad, then this is as true of the Revernd Martin Luther King Jr. as it is of the Reverend Pat Robertson.

5. WE MUST BE WILLING TO TALK ABOUT RIGHT AND WRONG WITHOUT MENTIONING THE CONSTITUTION. Individual rights are a good thing, but to make a cult of individualism can lead to social disaster. It is no accident that the United States has among the highest rates of abortion and the highest rate of private ownership of firearms in the world.

6. OUR POLITICS MUST CALL US TO OUR HIGHER SELVES. The wealth with which politicans make their electorial purchases comes in a variety of forms, but nearly all of them play to our selfish instincts.

7. WE MUST LISTEN TO ONE ANOTHER.

8. SOMETIMES THE OTHER SIDE WINS.

Thomas Jefferson has always been a larger than life hero for many of us. Does it amaze you how people on both the left and the right quote him? Sometimes the same quote? Here are some books that look at him differently.

AMERICAN SPHINX The Character of Thomas Jefferson

American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence

"But within the committee and, above all later, when Congress let loose its collective editorial talent on Jefferson's prose, other men made more substantial and constructive contributions to the Declaration of Independence than pleased Jefferson at the time, and far more than he remembered in the 1820's."

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University Press of Virginia

Ms. Gordon-Reed's conclusions make a credible case for Sally Hemings the mistress. Some historians, including Joseph J. Ellis , AMERICAN SPHINX, above, "believe something of the race card is played here." "She is more interested in prosecuting white historians like Dumas Malone and Merril Peterson and finding their treatment of the information less than adequate." In Malones case on this issue, it is deserved.

Genetic testing of Jefferson's and Hemings heirs in 1998 has now established beyond a reasonable doubt that some of Sally Hemins children were Thomas Jeffersons.

UNDAUNTED COURAGE

Ambrose discusses a number of interesting situations. Lewis and Clark had outstanding leadership qualities to have completed the mission without incident among the troops. Also, when they reached the Nez Perce in present day Idaho acording to the Nez Perce oral tradition, the americans were sick with dysentery and the Nez Perce considereded killing them for the weapons and trade goods. They were talked out of it by a women who had been captured by the Blackfeet and sold to a Canadian fur trader. The trader had treated her well and she felt these people were friends. In 1877 the U S army drove Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce from Idaho, including old men and women who had been children in the village when Lewis and Clark visited.

The title comes from a tribute written by Thomas Jefferson of Merriweather Lewis in 1813 after Lewis had taken his own life.
"Of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness and perserverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from it's direction, careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order and discipline, intimate with the Indian character, customs and principals, habituated to the hunting life, guarded by exact observation of the vegetables & animals of his own country, against losing time in the description of objects already possessed, honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding and a fidelity to truth so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves, with all these qualifications as if selected and implanted by nature in one body, for this express purpose, i could have no hesitation in confiding the enterprise to him.

ASSOCIATED PRESS in the July 20, 1997 Seattle Times:
THREE FORKS, Mont. -
Meriweather Lewis and William Clark owed the success of their venture in good part to the American Indian, and in particular to two Indian women, historian Stephen Ambrose says. Ambrose spoke recently to about 90 people who came to Missouri Headwaters State Park to hear the author of the best-selling book about Lewis and the expedition, "Undaunted Courage."

As the 200th anniversary of the expedition approaches, towns and cities along the route are gearing up for celebrations and re-enactments. Ambrose said he expects there will be a lot of hard feelings among American Indians.

"We're going to have Native Americans saying things we're going to have to deal with...," Ambrose said.

Lewis did kill a Blackfeet teen-ager, he said, but Lewis didn't start the fight. The Blackfeet had tried to steal their rifles. "That's like running off with a man's horse in this country - that's his life," Ambrose said.

"The expedition owed its success to Indian women," Ambrose said, "and to other things - luck being big, big, big..."

The success of his book has left Ambrose flabergasted. It started with what he thought was an overly optimistic printing of 40,000 copies but now is up to 650,000.

"That's incredible for a book about dead white males that's got footnotes," he joked.

A Brief Lewis and Clark and Thomas Jefferson Bibliography by Clay Jenkinson who dramitizes Thomas Jefferson and Meiwether Lewis on the stage.

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