1798. The Problem with Marxian Economics

By Michael A. Leibowitz, Monthly Review, April 2015

“Marx was before all else a revolutionary. His real mission in life,” noted Frederick Engels at Marx’s graveside, “was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present-day proletariat.”1 Could the same be said about Marxist economists? That they are revolutionaries whose real mission is to contribute to the overthrow of capitalism?

Marxist economists pride themselves on having a better understanding of capitalism than non-Marxists. Theirs is not the mainstream economics that focuses upon how individual behavior tends to generate the best possible world (except in the case of the occasional market failure), upon how that interaction within the market produces the appropriate rewards to the owners of all factors of production (except when interfered with), which sees economic crises as accidents (or as the result of perverse individual behavior), or which views capitalism (or, rather, the “free market”) as the end of history. In contrast, Marxist economists look at capitalism as a system based upon the exploitation of workers—a system that tends to destroy the original sources of wealth (human beings and nature) and that has an inherent tendency to generate crises.

Marxian economics asks the important questions. Its concern is not the determination of prices and the behavior of rational individuals in response to hypothetical changes in variables (all other things equal, of course). Rather, Marxian economics is a version of systems theory. It asks: what is the nature of this particular system, how is it reproduced and how is it not reproduced? And, particularly, as Engels indicated, how do we contribute to the overthrow of capitalist society and to the liberation of the proletariat?

If these are the important questions, though, why is the performance of Marxian economics so poor in achieving these goals? Let me suggest that the failure of Marxian economics to provide “persuasive alternatives” to neoliberalism and the neoclassical economics that underpins it is not due to its exclusion from the capitalist mass media or its marginalization in, if not complete exclusion from, the economics departments that train new generations to proselytize the logic of capital. There is a better explanation for the relative irrelevance of what is called Marxian economics in the midst of this grave crisis not of capital but of human beings and nature, those original sources of wealth, which capital is destroying.

Disciples and Theoretical Degeneration

Judged by their preoccupations, a simple explanation for the irrelevance of Marxist economists is that they are disciples—a species of followers who ensure the degeneration of a theory. Commenting upon the disciples of Hegel and Ricardo, Marx argued that disintegration of a theory begins when the disciples are driven to “explain away” the “often paradoxical relationship of this theory to reality”; it begins when, by “crass empiricism,” “phrases in a scholastic way,” and “cunning argument,” they attempt to demonstrate that the theory is still correct. In short, the disintegration of the theory begins when the point of departure is “no longer reality, but the new theoretical form in which the master had sublimated it.”2 Who could deny the extent to which self-identified Marxist economists spend their time trying to prove Marx right? Who could deny the presence of “crass empiricism,” scholastic phrases, and “cunning argument” whose real point of reference is the theory rather than concrete reality?

In short, not only does the focus of Marxist economists ensure the irrelevance of the theory at a time when it should be at the center of discussions (like the recent studies of inequality) but that the received doctrine of Marxian economics itself stagnates. After all, when the point is to defend that theory, it is heresy to question its premises and assumptions—even if Marx himself questioned them.

I speak here as such a heretic. Let me identify a few of the problems I see in the received doctrine of Marxian economics. Some of these points will be familiar to people who have read my books and articles. How much time and energy have Marxist economists spent searching for a correct solution to the so-called transformation problem, a waste of both time and energy, given that Marx clearly described prices as the mere form of value, profits as the form of surplus value, and the rate of profit as the form of the rate of surplus value? A mystical transformation indeed (if one is talking about a real as opposed to logical transformation), from essence to form of essence.

Similarly, consider how much time has been spent by Marxist economists on the inexorable fall in the rate of profit, when Marx was so clear in indicating that the course of the profit rate depended upon the relative rates of productivity change in Departments I and II. Or consider all the discussions of the development of relative surplus value that are oblivious to the fact that the conclusion that capital is the beneficiary of productivity increases flows from an assumption, namely that workers are precluded from gaining because the standard of necessity is given for a given country and a given era, an assumption that Marx intended to relax in his unwritten book on Wage Labor. As I have argued in my book, Beyond Capital, once you remove that constraint, then the effect of productivity increase, all other things equal, is rising real wages.3

Of course, if one is to talk about the misadventures of the received doctrine of Marxian economics, it would be remiss not to mention the law of value, which in this received doctrine amounts to the Ricardian determination of relative prices in accordance with quantities of concrete labor. Marx, as we should know, entirely rejected this pre-Marxian view and insisted that he had solved a riddle not even posed by classical political economy by developing the concept of abstract, homogeneous social labor, which is only manifested as money. This distinction was absolutely critical, and Marx, indeed, described it as one of the most important new parts of the book.

Because that distinction is not understood, the incantations and genuflection to this pillar of Marxian economics, the law of value based upon concrete labor, continue. No matter that Marx indicated in 1868 (in response to criticisms of his discussion of value) that his discussion of value is simply about the “necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions” and, in particular, about how a society allocates its labor among activities when there is no visible hand.4 Every child should know (to evoke Marx’s language), accordingly, that the law of value is about the invisible hand, that is, how a commodity-producing society allocates the labor contained in commodities. And, of course, every child should know as well that Marx’s concept of value does not apply to that labor that is not allocated by the market and thus is not represented by money.

Certainly, there is much more that could be said about all this (not to mention the quotations necessary to support these assertions). However, I have said enough to hint at why I view much of the received doctrine as the work of disciples who contribute to the degeneration of the theory of “the master.” Let me turn, though, to the question of capitalist crisis and its supposed link to revolutionary activity. It is an article of faith, one that Marx himself expressed in short articles and correspondence, that the new opportunities for revolution would come with economic crisis. Accordingly, Marxian economists have in large part become the chroniclers of capitalist economic crisis. Is it coming? Has it come? When did it come? Has it always been here? The stakes are high for the one who can come up with the correct answer. For, as the story of Rumpelstiltskin tells us, if we can only find the correct answer, the earth will open up and swallow capitalism. And the winner will have thereby demonstrated that he (it is always he) has contributed to the overthrow of capitalism.

The Working Class in Capitalism as an Organic System

But consider the theme of Marx’s Capital. It is essential to recognize that Marx analyzed capitalism as an organic system—as a system of reproduction in which the premises of capitalism were results of the system itself. That, Marx stressed, is the character of every organic system. As he indicated in the Grundrisse, in capitalism as developed, “every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system.”5 That is what Marx wanted to demonstrate, that the premises of capitalism as an organic system, capital and wage-labor, were also its results.

Thus, in Chapter 23 of Volume I of Capital, Marx summed up his exposition in the preceding chapters by explaining that capitalism is a system that contains within itself the conditions for its own reproduction, one which, when viewed “as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal,” is understood as “a process of reproduction.” He concluded the chapter by stressing that the capitalist process of production “produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.” In short, by producing the essential premises of capitalism.6

But what does it mean to say these are results? We see that, in capitalism as an organic system, capital is the result of the exploitation of workers. In that organic system, capital comes from nowhere else. It is the result of capitalist domination of workers within the sphere of production, of the realization of the latent surplus value contained within commodities through the sale of those commodities and of the replacement and expansion of capital consumed in the process of production. What is capital? Marx’s clear answer to this central question was that capital is the workers’ own product turned against them.

The other premise of capitalist production is the wage-laborer. But, it is essential to understand that in capitalism as an organic system, wage-laborers do not drop from the sky. Rather, these wage laborers are people who have been produced within capitalist relations of production; this second side, the human product of capitalist production, is the basis of Marx’s condemnation of capitalism. After all, workers are not only exploited within capitalist relations. They are also deformed. If we forget this second result of capitalist production, as so many do, we will never understand why workers fail to rise up spontaneously when capital enters into one of its many crises.

Consider the nature of the workers produced by capital. While capital develops productive forces to achieve its preconceived goal (the growth of profits and capital), Marx pointed out that “all means for the development of production” under capitalism “distort the worker into a fragment of a man,” degrade the worker, and alienate him or her “from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process.”7 Capital explains the mutilation, the impoverishment, the “crippling of body and mind” of the worker “bound hand and foot for life to a single specialized operation” that occurs in the division of labor characteristic of the capitalist process of manufacturing. But did the development of machinery end that crippling of workers? Marx’s response was that under capitalist relations these developments completed the “separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour,” thinking and doing become separate and hostile, and “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” is lost.8

A particular type of person is produced within capitalism. Producing within capitalist relations is what Marx called a process of a “complete emptying-out,” “total alienation,” and the “sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end.”9 How else then but with money, the true need that capitalism creates, can we fill the vacuum? We fill the vacuum of our lives with things; we are driven to consume. Thus, in addition to producing commodities and capital itself, capitalism produces a fragmented, crippled human being, whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things—more and more things. Consumerism, in short, is not an accident within capitalism. Capital constantly generates new needs for workers and it is upon this, Marx noted, that “the contemporary power of capital rests”; in short, every new need for capitalist commodities is a new link in the golden chain that links workers to capital.10

Is it likely, then, that people produced within capitalism can spontaneously grasp the nature of this destructive system? On the contrary, the inherent tendency of capital is to produce people who think that there is no alternative. Marx was clear that capital as it develops tends to produce the working class it needs, workers who treat capitalism as common sense. As he explained in Capital: “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.”11

That is strong and unequivocal language. Marx added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the unemployed “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker.”12 With that constant generation of a relative surplus population of workers, wages are “confined within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured.”13 Accordingly, Marx concluded that the capitalist can rely upon the worker’s “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.”14

Where, then, in Marx’s theoretical opus is there a basis for crises tending to produce a revolutionary situation? Isn’t Marx arguing, rather, that “once it is fully developed” capitalism “breaks down all resistance”? Doesn’t the constant creation of unemployment ensure the “social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable”? Once we consider the side of the worker, the nature of the worker who is the product of capitalism as an organic system, isn’t it clear from Capital that, rather than a tendency for a revolutionary outbreak, capitalist crisis weakens workers and their organizations?

Two inferences appear to follow. The first is that workers’ resistance (that resistance that breaks down when capital is fully developed) is likely to be strongest before capitalism is an organic system, that is, before capitalism has succeeded in producing the working class it needs as a premise. Thus, one would expect to see greater worker militancy in the less-developed and emerging capitalist countries as workers resist the crippling and deformation that real subordination to capital brings.

A second inference is that worker resistance is likely to be greatest in periods of capitalist boom, that is, when the reserve army does not play its assigned role. As Michał Kalecki argued in 1943 in his classic essay on the “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” in a period of full employment, workplace discipline and political stability decline because workers tend to “get out of hand”: “Indeed, under a regime of permanent full employment, ‘the sack’ would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined and the self-assurance and class consciousness of the working class would grow.”15

Add to these inferences more recent developments: the way in which globalized capitalism, rather than concentrating workers in particular workplaces, tends to decentralize, disunite, and disorganize workers, plus the way in which the constant pressure of consumer debt affects the militancy of workers. Add all this up and it suggests that the prospects of building a socialist alternative once capitalism is fully developed are not very high. Is there no escape from this sobering conclusion?

Building On and Transcending the Moral Economy of the Working Class

Central to much of my work has been the conclusion that Marx’s Capital provides a powerful answer to the question of what capital is, but that it does not really consider capitalism as a whole (or, indeed, develop fully capitalism as an organic system). It does not because it does not develop the side of the workers as subjects, subjects who struggle for their own goals. At its core, that goal is what Marx referred to in Capital as “the worker’s own need for development.” Indeed, the one-sidedness of Capital is most obvious when we recognize that it does not examine wage struggles (precluded by the assumption of a constant standard of necessity) or the essential requirement of capital (once we relax that assumption) that it divide and separate workers in order to capture relative surplus value.

When we focus upon the side of workers, we recognize that they are more than merely the products and results of capital. Their specific relation to capital within capitalist relations of production does not exhaust their nature. They exist within many relations—families, communities, and nations—and they interact with other workers. Through all their activities within these relations, through all their struggles to satisfy their need for development, they produce themselves.

Certainly, the workers’ place within capitalist relations of production is critical because of the way that functioning within that relation shapes and deforms them. However, the worker experiences that relation differently than does the capitalist. Whereas for the capitalist, exploitation, understood by him as the profitable employment of the worker, is essential for his existence as capitalist, the worker experiences exploitation as inadequate income relative to needs and considers the resulting inequality unfair and unjust. Similarly, whereas for the capitalist, workplace discipline and top-down organization are viewed as rational, the worker experiences these as despotism and unfreedom and wants little more than to reduce her workday in length and intensity to an absolute minimum.

“A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” a fair distribution of income, time, and energy for one’s self—all these are forms that “the worker’s own need for development” takes. And that need for human development—a need that capital so clearly thwarts—goes well beyond what occurs in particular workplaces. It, indeed, goes beyond a specific and direct relation to capital. Its traces can be found, for example, at any given point in particular norms of health (including the desire for a healthy environment), education, and housing that are viewed as fair and just and that workers will struggle to maintain.

All these existing norms constitute the moral economy of the working class. Characteristic of that moral economy is that workers tend to struggle individually or collectively against what they perceive as violations of those accepted norms of fairness and justice. In short, workers do struggle. But they do so within limits: as long as they look upon capital’s requirements as “self-evident natural laws,” then faced with capitalist crisis, workers will sooner or later act to ensure the conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital. Nevertheless, insofar as they do struggle, workers produce themselves differently; that is, as Marx indicated, they prevent themselves “from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production.” Thus, workers’ struggles based upon their sense of fairness are also an essential part of producing the workers who face capital. Those workers are the result of more than just the side of capital.

But, as I argued in my recent article on “fairness” in Studies in Political Economy, equally characteristic of the moral economy of the working class is that its reference point is the past—its struggles tend to be defensive.16 When workers struggle against austerity and neoliberal economic policies, their concept of “fairness” may involve simply an implicit hope to return to the days of a “good” capitalism. Although the basis of their spontaneous activity, the moral economy of the working class does not go beneath the surface and, accordingly, cannot identify the underlying factors that produce and sustain particular norms. And the result (which was apparent in the case of E. P. Thompson’s eighteenth-century crowd, the working class in developed capitalism from the 1970s on and the working class in “real socialism”) is that those norms can be violated successfully and (through a process of adaptive expectations) new, lower norms are enforced and become accepted.17

But recognition of the limitations of moral economy does not mean we should take comfort instead in the immaculate Abstract Proletariat. Rather than beginning with abstract concepts of the proletariat, the starting point must be real people with particular ideas and concepts. Accordingly, I proposed in the Studies in Political Economy article that for revolutionaries who would help to put an end to existing structures of exploitation and deformation, it is essential to recognize the importance of the moral economy of the working class but to go beyond it to the political economy of the working class.

Given that the people produced within capitalist relations tend to view capital’s requirements as self-evident, as common sense, the spontaneous struggles rooted in the moral economy will never be successful in going beyond capitalism. That is why one obligation of revolutionaries is to do what Marx attempted, namely to demonstrate how those violations of the moral economy are inherent in the nature of capital, how capitalism destroys human beings and nature, and how the crises affecting the lives of workers are not accidents. In short, to convince workers to replace the conservative banner of moral economy with the revolutionary banner of “abolish capitalism!”—and, further, to build the political instruments that can facilitate this.

However, by itself, demonstrations of the nature of capitalism are not sufficient to convince people that there is an alternative. To move people to struggle to change the system, it is essential to articulate what is implicit in current struggles in order to show how these contain within them the elements of a new society. That means there must be a vision that looks forward. To struggle against a situation in which workers “by education, tradition and habit” look upon capital’s needs “as self-evident natural laws,” we must struggle for an alternative common sense.

Marxism’s Lost Core

For the political economy of the working class, that vision is what Marx called the “inverse situation” oriented to “the worker’s own need for development,” that is, a society based upon the goal of human development. That inverse situation is the hidden premise of Marx’s Capital. Permeating Marx’s book is the need to invert the capitalist inversion, this “inversion, indeed this distortion, which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production.”18 In short, as I stressed in The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, the centrality of the worker’s own need for development should be at the core of the struggle to build the socialist alternative.19 Indeed, human development is “Marxism’s Lost Core.”

With a concept of socialism as an organic system—what President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela called the elementary triangle of socialism: (1) social ownership of the means of production, (2) social production organized by workers, and (3) the satisfaction of social needs and purposes—we can show how current struggles and aspirations are linked to the vision of a socialist society. What this means is a society focused upon equality (in the absence of the private ownership of the products of past social labor), upon the development of human capacities (where there is protagonism in all our productive activities), and upon solidarity and community (where our mutual dependence is not that of indifferent commodity producers in a market). These are elements upon which to build a new common sense, one that recognizes the importance of struggling for a society in which the condition for the free development of each is the free development of all.

You don’t need to be a Marxist economist to do this. Indeed, given the entry requirements for the club of Marxist economists, it may be better if you are not. However, if Marxist economists abandon the practice of functioning as disciples who must prove the master right, we can make significant contributions by focusing upon Marxism’s lost core, human development. We can engage directly in the Battle of Ideas by challenging the assumptions and fallacies of mainstream economics by contrasting the dynamics of human development in society to the atomistic statics of neoclassical economics. Why, in short, aren’t we doing what Marx did in relation to the mainstream economics of his time?

Further, we can focus upon the health of the working class rather than exclusively upon the health of capital by developing the theory and measures of human development, including explicit consideration of the crippling effects of producing under capitalist relations. By doing so, we can challenge the liberal advocates of human development who accept the logic of capital and whose implicit goal is a more fair capitalism that focuses upon the removal of particular barriers to human development rather than the removal of the principal barrier, capitalism itself. That challenge is long overdue.

These are just a few contributions that Marxist economists can make if we assume the responsibility to put the weapon of theory in the hands of the working class and revolutionary activists. If we do that, we demonstrate that our real mission (as that of Marx) is to “contribute…to the overthrow of capitalist society” and to “contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat.”

Notes

1 ↩Frederick Engels, “The Funeral of Karl Marx,” in Philip S. Foner, ed., Karl Marx Remembered (San Francisco: Synthesis Publications, 1983), 38-40.

2 ↩Michael A. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21.

3 ↩Ibid. See the further discussion in Michael A. Lebowitz, “Trapped Inside the Box? Five Questions for Ben Fine,” Historical Materialism, 18, no. 1 (March 2010): 131–49.

4 ↩Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, July 11, 1868, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), vol. 43, 68.

5 ↩Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage 1973), 278.

6 ↩Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I (New York: Vintage, 1977), 724.

7 ↩Ibid, 548, 643, 799.

8 ↩Ibid, 482–84, 548, 607–8, 614.

9 ↩Marx, Grundrisse, 488.

10 ↩Ibid, 287; Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 32–44.

11 ↩Marx, Capital, 899.

12 ↩Ibid.

13 ↩Ibid, 935.

14 ↩Ibid, 899. Emphasis added.

15 ↩Michał Kalecki, The Last Phase of the Transformation of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 78, 82.

16 ↩Michael A. Lebowitz, “‘Fairness’: Possibilities, Limits, Possibilities,” Studies in Political Economy 92 (2013).

17 ↩E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971): 76–136.

18 ↩Marx, Capital, 425.

19 ↩Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).

1797. The Many Droughts of California

By Jeff Wheelwright, The New York Times, April 3, 2015

In California fracking used 70 million gallons of water in 2014

MORRO BAY, Calif. — CALIFORNIA has only two seasons, rainy and dry. In March, when the rains stop — assuming they have begun — we must forget about precipitation for at least six months. The rainfall determines our mood for the summer and fall. Where I live, on the Central Coast, 17 inches of rain per winter has been the long-term average. Beating that number — we last did it five years ago — feels like winning the lottery. Lately, the average has been well under 10.

The difference between a good rain year in California and a bad one depends on the number of storms blowing in from the Pacific. One or two storms a winter is bad; four to six, good. Even in wet, happy years, when we shrug off floods and mudslides, rain is intermittent. Storms soak the valleys and snow blankets the mountains for a day or two, but then follows a week or two of sun. During the dry times, where we find ourselves now, the long series of sunny days becomes a little scary. As of Wednesday, the water content of the snowpack in the Sierra range was lower than at any time since 1950. Relentless pumping of groundwater is causing farmland to sink in the Central Valley.

As the drought enters its fourth year, the voluntary tightening of water use has failed to meet its goals. So this week Gov. Jerry Brown instituted mandatory restrictions. Cities and towns will have to cut their consumption by 25 percent, compared with 2013.

But the state is so big and diverse that a dozen different droughts are in effect. Northern Californians, blessed with racing rivers, have relatively little to worry about, while around the megalopolis of Los Angeles, the water sources are remote and aqueducts are lifelines. Desert dwellers near Arizona and Nevada hardly perceive drought, while coastal residents like me take false comfort from the ocean and standby desalination plants.

Yet all across the state, skirmishes over a shrinking resource are taking place. Having watched my neighbor wash his truck when he’s not supposed to, now I’ll be justified in turning him in. More of us will report violators to the city authorities — though perhaps without giving our names. If the drought continues, California’s easygoing social compact may crack and wither, too.

Although aqueducts crisscross the state, half of Californians draw water from local reservoirs and groundwater. Two communities facing each other across Morro Bay — my town and the younger, more ragged community of Los Osos — have adopted different approaches. About 20 years ago, we in Morro Bay paid for a pipeline to tap into what’s called state water. That makes us dependent on someone else’s allocations, but in a drought we are in better shape than Los Osos, which relies solely on groundwater. Under strain from overpumping, Los Osos aquifers are threatened by chemical pollution and saltwater intrusion from the ocean. Morro Bay has municipal wells as backup, and a desalination plant to filter brackish groundwater. We try not to be smug.

About 30 miles inland, the city of Paso Robles is surrounded by ranches and vineyards. This picturesque, rolling country is a favorite of wine-tasting tourists. Unfortunately, the local reservoirs are below capacity and groundwater pumping has lowered the water table so that ranchers and landowners are finding that their wells are drying up. Vineyard owners, who are relative newcomers, not only take the bulk of the groundwater but also can afford deeper wells, so as to take more. Class warfare is beginning. Even forming a committee to review the problem has been divisive.

The conflict looming the largest in the state is the one between urban and agricultural interests, but that mother of all battles, upheaving the economy, will not be fought unless the drought lasts several more years. Years ago when water rights in California were assigned, the cities and their industries were not as muscular and thirsty as they are today.

The surface water for the big farms and dairy operations in the Central Valley is first transported from mountain reservoirs to the delta region, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet the fingers of San Francisco’s East Bay. The delta also provides the water that town and city dwellers drink.

Here is the home of the delta smelt, a 2-inch-long fish that has been caught up in water battles for a generation. By court order, the endangered smelt is entitled to a certain amount of river water, ahead of downstream users. Farmers in the Central Valley have blamed the smelt for cutting their allotments — and that’s during the good years. Residential supplies haven’t been affected by the smelt, so far as we’ve noticed.

Since the drought started, the fish has had fewer and fewer defenders. Recently, it might have done the state a favor by becoming what one biologist termed “functionally extinct,” because of an increasingly saline environment. If society writes off the smelt, who will inherit its portion of the water? Probate for the fish could be rancorous — a dry run, so to speak, for a much greater struggle to come. Perhaps we Californians have taken our bountiful natural resources too much for granted. Let’s hope that nature doesn’t settle the score.

Jeff Wheelwright, a contributing editor at Discover magazine, is the author of “The Wandering Gene and The Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA.”

1796. California Drought Shows Fallacy of the Ideology of Endless Growth

By Adam Nagourney, Jack Healy and Nelson D, Schwartz, The New York Times, March 5, 2015

A golf course in the Sun City Palm Desert community for older adults sits near barren land about 10  miles east of Palm Springs. Credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times.

LOS ANGELES — For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life — 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture and vineyards.

But now a punishing drought — and the unprecedented measures the state announced last week to compel people to reduce water consumption — is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been this state’s driving engine has run against the limits of nature.

The 25 percent cut in water consumption ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown raises fundamental questions about what life in California will be like in the years ahead, and even whether this state faces the prospect of people leaving for wetter climates — assuming, as Mr. Brown and other state leaders do, that this marks a permanent change in the climate, rather than a particularly severe cyclical drought.

This state has survived many a catastrophe before — and defied the doomsayers who have regularly proclaimed the death of the California dream — as it emerged, often stronger, from the challenges of earthquakes, an energy crisis and, most recently, a budgetary collapse that forced years of devastating cuts in spending. These days, the economy is thriving, the population is growing, the state budget is in surplus, and development is exploding from Silicon Valley to San Diego; the evidence of it can be seen in the construction cranes dotting the skylines of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

But even California’s biggest advocates are wondering if the severity of this drought, now in its fourth year, is going to force a change in the way the state does business.

Can Los Angeles continue to dominate as the country’s capital of entertainment and glamour, and Silicon Valley as the center of high tech, if people are forbidden to take a shower for more than five minutes and water bills become prohibitively expensive? Will tourists worry about coming? Will businesses continue their expansion in places like San Francisco and Venice?

“Mother Nature didn’t intend for 40 million people to live here,” said Kevin Starr, a historian at the University of Southern California who has written extensively about this state. “This is literally a culture that since the 1880s has progressively invented, invented and reinvented itself. At what point does this invention begin to hit limits?”

California, Dr. Starr said, “is not going to go under, but we are going to have to go in a different way.”

An estimated 38.8 million people live in California today, more than double the 15.7 million people who lived here in 1960, and the state’s labor force exploded to 18.9 million in 2013 from 6.4 million people in 1960.

California’s $2.2 trillion economy today is the seventh largest in the world, more than quadruple the $520 billion economy of 1963, adjusted for inflation. The median household income jumped to an estimated $61,094 in 2013 from $44,772 in 1960, also adjusted for inflation.

“You just can’t live the way you always have,” said Mr. Brown, a Democrat who is in his fourth term as governor.

“For over 10,000 years, people lived in California, but the number of those people were never more than 300,000 or 400,000,” Mr. Brown said. “Now we are embarked upon an experiment that no one has ever tried: 38 million people, with 32 million vehicles, living at the level of comfort that we all strive to attain. This will require adjustment. This will require learning.”

This disconnect, as it were, can be seen in places like Palm Springs, in the middle of the desert, where daily per capita water use is 201 gallons — more than double the state average. A recent drive through the community offered a drought-defying tableau of burbling fountains, flowers, lush lawns, golf courses and trees. The smell of mowed lawn was in the air.

But the drought is now forcing change in a place that long identified itself as “America’s desert oasis.” Palm Springs has ordered 50 percent cuts in water use by city agencies, and plans to replace the lawns and annual flowers around city buildings with native landscapes. It is digging up the grassy median into town that unfurled before visitors like a carpet at a Hollywood premiere. It is paying residents to replace their lawns with rocks and desert plants, and offering rebates to people who install low-flow toilets.

At the airport that once welcomed winter-chilled tourists with eight acres of turf and flowers, city officials are in the early stages of replacing the grass with cactus, desert bushes and paloverde trees. The city had hoped to replace the entire lawn, but the project’s $2 million price tag forced it to begin instead with three acres, said David Ready, the city manager.

“Years ago the idea was, come to Palm Springs, and people see the grass and the lushness and the green,” Mr. Ready said. “We’ve got to change the way we consume water.“

Fallow Fields

Other places face different threats to their way of life. Mayor Robert Silva of Mendota, in the heart of the agricultural Central Valley, said unemployment among farmworkers had soared as the soil turned to crust and farmers left half or more of their fields fallow. Many people are traveling 60 or 70 miles to look for work, Mr. Silva said, and families are increasingly relying on food donations.

“You can’t pay the bills with free food,” he said. “Give me some water, and I know I can go to work, that’s the bottom line.”

Richard White, a history professor at Stanford University, said the scarcity of water could result in a decline in housing construction, at a time when there has been a burst of desperately needed residential development in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“It’s going to be harder and harder to build new housing without an adequate water supply,” he said. “How many developments can you afford if you don’t have water?”

Greg Smith, 51, a web developer who works from his home in Escondido, said he was considering moving to Washington State because of his distress at what he described as the state’s slow response to the drought.

“If this gets out of control, I’ll probably end up leaving,” Mr. Smith said. “This has been a problem for as long as I’ve been alive.”

“I’ve watched this state get trampled by developers,” he added. “They keep building homes, but where’s the water going to come from?”

The governor’s executive order mandates a 25 percent overall reduction in water use throughout the state, to be achieved with varying requirements in different cities and villages. The 400 local water supply agencies will determine how to achieve that goal; much of it is expected to be done by imposing new restrictions on lawn watering. The 25 percent reduction does not apply to farms, which consume the great bulk of this state’s water.

State officials signaled on Friday that reductions in water supplies for farmers were likely to be announced in the coming weeks, and there is also likely to be increased pressure on the farms to move away from certain water-intensive crops — like almonds.

A New Normal

Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, pointing to Mr. Brown’s executive order and his own city’s success in reducing water consumption, said he was confident that the state would find ways to deal with an era of reduced water supplies, in a way that would permit it to continue to grow and thrive.

“We have to deal with a new normal,” Mr. Garcetti said. “That said, do we have enough water to sustain life here? Absolutely. Do we have enough water to grow economically? Absolutely.”

“Cities that are much drier and truly desert — Phoenix, Las Vegas — have shown the ability to have economic growth,” he said.

Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce, rejected the idea that the drought and the state’s response to it would prompt industries to move away or stop adding jobs. “The rest of the economy is managing it, learning how to deal with it,” he said.

This is hardly the first crisis California has faced; there has always been a tension between the natural beauty and delights of living in California and the external threats, be they the dizzying ups-and-downs of the state budget, the rolling blackouts during the energy crisis in 2000 and 2001, the earthquakes or periodic droughts.

“People on the East Coast always want to say that the glow of California is gone,” said Felicia Marcus, the head of the State Water Resources Control Board, which is putting into effect the 25 percent reduction in water use ordered by Mr. Brown last week. “It isn’t. I don’t see it as any diminishment about our prospect of growth. There has to be a more evolved way about using the resources we have. We have a long way to go before we have tapped out our resources.”

The critical question is the extent to which Mr. Brown has succeeded in persuading people here to shake long-held habits and assumptions.

“I’m not going to stop watering,” said Matthew Post, 45, referring to the gardens around his Benedict Canyon home. “The state does not know how to arrange the resources they have, and so we have to pay for it,” he said. “They say that they will raise the prices because there is a drought, but when the drought ends, will they reduce the prices?”

Much like the Gold Rush more than 150 years ago or the rise of Silicon Valley, the assumption of cheap and abundant water has been a crucial part of California’s identity, history and economy.

And until recently, it seemed that the California dream was sustainable: booming cities, wide lawns in the suburbs, green golf courses in an otherwise parched landscape and, above all, a vibrant agricultural sector in places not much wetter than a desert.

Although there were serious droughts in the mid-1970s and late 1980s, the current water shortage and last week’s executive order are a turning point for the state, and the West more generally, water experts say.

“The idea, at least until the latter part of the 20th century, was that water would be cheap and plentiful and the focus was on developing new supplies,” said Heather Cooley, water program director for the Pacific Institute, an environmental research group based in Oakland. “Folks realize we have now reached the limits of supply, so the focus is on demand.”

While the mandatory cuts in home water use are the first ever, efficiency has been slowly gaining ground in recent decades. Total water use in Los Angeles, San Francisco and many other urban areas is now lower than it was in 1980, despite the huge economic growth and population increases.

The latest restrictions represent a cultural change, as well as a lifestyle one, going well beyond taking shorter showers or forgoing the Sunday afternoon ritual of hosing down the family car.

Half of residential use is outdoors, primarily lawns, Ms. Cooley said. “And what Californians see as beautiful,” she said, “has been a lawn that has been the standard for front yards and backyards.”

Now, with utilities paying people to replace thirsty traditional grass turf with water-sipping native plants and other drought-tolerant shrubbery, long-held aesthetics are shifting. “This will change what Californians see as beautiful,” she said.

But even a significant drop in residential water use will not move the consumption needle nearly as much as even a small reduction by farmers. Of all the surface water consumed in the state, roughly 80 percent is earmarked for the agricultural sector.

“The big question is agriculture, and there are difficult trade-offs that need to be made,” said Katrina Jessoe, assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis.

Bill Melzer, 72, a bond broker walking his dog on a sunny morning in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, said he was worried about the drought, about the prospect of higher fines for using too much water and about what might happen to the agriculture industry. But he said he was not worried about the future of his state.

“The dream of California now is probably different than back in the 1960s,” he said. “Now it’s more financial opportunity. I think before it was what we’re looking at now — great weather, beach weather, tremendous diversity of lifestyle. Really, if you cannot find your lifestyle in this state, there is something wrong with you.”

Dr. Starr, the University of Southern California historian, said the crisis would force California to do what was needed to carry on. “Our destiny is not just to be a fantasy place,” he said. “As much as we enjoy the good life in California, we have to come to terms with Mother Nature, with our arid environment.”

“Every time California has a problem — we ran out of electricity in the early 2000s, then we ran out of money, and now we are running out of water — people say California is over,” Dr. Starr said. “It’s not over. It’s too important a part of American culture to be over. But it will change itself.”

1795. Fracking Linked to Earthquakes in Oklahoma

By Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Michael Wines, The New York Times, April 3, 2015

PRAGUE, Okla. — Yanked without warning from a deep sleep, Jennifer Lin Cooper, whose family has lived near here for more than a half-century, could think only that the clamor enveloping her house was coming from a helicopter landing on her roof. She was wrong.

A 5.0-magnitude earthquake — the first of three as strong or stronger over several days in November 2011 — had peeled the brick facade from the $117,000 home she bought the year before. Ms. Cooper, 36, could not get out until her father pried a stuck storm door off the front entrance. Repairs have so far cost $12,000 and forced her to take a second job, at night, to pay the bill.

At a packed town hall meeting days later, Ms. Cooper said, state officials called the shocks, including a 5.7 tremor that was Oklahoma’s largest ever, “an act of nature, and it was nobody’s fault.”

Many scientists disagree. They say those quakes, and thousands of others before and since, are mainly the work of humans, caused by wells used to bury vast amounts of wastewater from oil and gas exploration deep in the earth near fault zones. And they warn that continuing to entomb such huge quantities risks more dangerous tremors — if not here, then elsewhere in the state’s sprawling well fields.

“As long as you keep injecting wastewater along that fault zone, according to my calculations, you’re going to continue to have earthquakes,” said Arthur F. McGarr, the chief of the induced seismicity project at the federal Earthquake Science Center in Menlo Park, Calif., who has researched the Prague quakes. “I’d be a little worried if I lived there. In fact, I’d be very worried.”

But in a state where oil and gas are economic pillars, elected leaders have been slow to address the problem. And while regulators have taken some protective measures, they lack the money, work force and legal authority to fully address the threats.

More than five years after the quakes began a sharp and steady increase, the strongest action by the Republican governor, Mary Fallin, has been to name a council to exchange information about the tremors. The group meets in secret, and has no mandate to issue recommendations.

The State Legislature is not considering any earthquake legislation. But both houses passed bills this year barring local officials from regulating oil and gas wells in their jurisdictions.

The state seismologist’s office, short-staffed, has stopped analyzing data on tremors smaller than magnitude 2.5 — even though a recent study says those quakes flag hidden seismic hazards “that might prove invaluable for avoiding a damaging earthquake.”

The governor referred an interview request to Michael Teague, her energy and environment secretary. Mr. Teague said the governor’s earthquake council was helping coordinate the response to the shocks and that underfunded regulators and scientists had benefited from efforts to find new state and federal assistance for their work.

“It’s not working well enough if your house is shaking, absolutely no doubt,” he said. “But it’s working very well.”

But others say the political will is missing to confront an earthquake threat tied to Oklahoma’s dominant industry.

It is “a dangerous game of Russian roulette,” said Jason Murphey, the Republican state representative from earthquake-ridden Guthrie, in central Oklahoma. “If a dangerous earthquake happens and causes lots of damage and injuries,” he said, “a cloud will hang over the energy sector for a long time to come.”

If scientists see dangers, many Oklahomans are wary of disrupting an industry so woven into everyday life.

The state’s oil and gas wells gush profits to corporate owners, but also royalties to farmers and homeowners, and tax payments to the state and cities. By some accounts the industry supports as many as one in five Oklahoma jobs. It showers Oklahoma universities with millions of dollars in donations and helps make dreams like Oklahoma City’s N.B.A. franchise, reality.

It is also a major political contributor to Ms. Fallin, legislators and all three elected members of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which oversees oil and gas production and disposal wells.

“We always want to be invited to the prom,” said State Representative Cory Williams, a Democrat from Stillwater, the home of Oklahoma State University and one of the state’s most seismically active areas. “And we’ve decided that oil and gas is the best prom date we’ll ever get, and we don’t want oil and gas to go away.”

Those blessings, however, are not unalloyed.

From 2010 to 2013, Oklahoma oil production jumped by two-thirds and gas production rose by more than one-sixth, federal figures show. The amount of wastewater buried annually rose one-fifth, to nearly 1.1 billion barrels. And Oklahoma went from three earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater to 109 — and to 585 in 2014, and to 750-plus this year, should the current pace continue. In the United States, only Alaska is shaken more.

The Corporation Commission lacks explicit authority to regulate earthquake risks. So it is trying to contain the risks posed by roughly 3,200 active wastewater disposal wells using laws written to control water pollution.

Last spring, the commission began trying to weed out quake risks by scrutinizing wells near larger quakes for operational problems and permit violations. A few dozen wells made modifications; four shut down. It is now difficult to win approval for new wells near stressed faults, active seismic areas or the epicenters of previous quakes above 4.0 magnitude. Regulators significantly expanded the areas under scrutiny last month. Yet the quakes continue.

Privately, some companies are cooperating with regulators and scientists by offering proprietary information about underground faults. Publicly, the industry wants Oklahomans to beware of killing the golden goose.

Many in the industry were reluctant to comment for this article. But Kim Hatfield, the regulatory chairman of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association and president of Crawley Petroleum, warned: “A reaction of panic is not useful.”

Shutting down disposal wells and the industry they serve, he added, “will make ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ look like a cheery movie.”

A Surge in Wastewater

The mechanics of wastewater-induced earthquakes are straightforward: Soaked with enough fluid, a layer of rock expands and gets heavier. Earthquakes can occur when the pressure from the fluid reaches a fault, either through direct contact with the soaked rock or indirectly, from the expanding rock. Seismologists have documented such quakes in Colorado, New Mexico, Arkansas, Kansas and elsewhere since the 1960s.

But nowhere have they approached the number and scope of Oklahoma’s quakes, which have rocked a fifth of the state. One reason, scientists suspect, is that Oklahoma’s main waste disposal site, a bed of porous limestone thousands of feet underground, lies close to the hard, highly stressed rock containing the faults that cause quakes.

The salty, sometimes toxic wastewater is a byproduct of extracting oil and gas, whether by hydraulic fracturing of once-unreachable shale deposits, commonly called fracking, or from conventional wells. Most is pumped out of the ground with oil or gas, then returned to the earth in a so-called disposal well, often at a different location.

The Corporation Commission faces a complicated task. It can order a shutdown or operational change only one well at a time, and only if a well violates its operating permit or is clearly tied to an earthquake risk.

But geologists say the sheer volume of waste being buried in an area with many wells — and not any single well — causes most quakes. It often is difficult or impossible to assess blame to a particular well.

Some other states like Arkansas and, this week, Kansas, have imposed blanket shutdowns or cutbacks on wells near active quake zones. “We don’t have the ability or the legal authority to issue a moratorium,” Dana Murphy, one of the three elected corporation commissioners, said in an interview.

“We do have the ability to take certain actions in emergency situations,” she continued. “But that’s emergencies when they start happening. It doesn’t talk about what happens before the emergencies occur.”

The 2011 quakes that damaged Ms. Cooper’s home in Prague (pronounced “prayg”) illustrate the regulators’ limited reach.

Acting on geologists’ suspicions after the first temblor, regulators tested and pored over operations data from three wells — two small ones and a huge one, called Wilzetta, sunk by the Tulsa-based company New Dominion in 1999. They were seeking some definitive cause of the tremor.

They found none. The wells still pump today, even as worried regulators wave off operators who want to sink new ones. Indeed, by December 2013, Wilzetta had nearly doubled its average monthly volume of waste compared with the months before the 2011 shocks.

Without convincing evidence that a well poses a seismic threat, one official said, regulators are powerless to order precautions, much less shutdowns. “Shut it in? How?” said that official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was barred from discussing specific cases. “Show me the cause. Show me the violation.”

Hamstrung, regulators now may have pushed their authority to its limits. Beginning last May, the commission began tightening permits for new disposal wells, requiring seismicity tests and requiring shutdowns if quakes occurred nearby.

Existing wells were unaffected. But last month the agency required operators of hundreds of wells to prove they were not accidentally pumping wastewater into bedrock, which seismologists say raises earthquake risks.

“We are operating on the assumption that time is of the essence,” a regulatory program manager at the commission, Matt Skinner, said in an interview.

Scientists certainly agree.

Federal seismologists have for a year warned of rising earthquake risks. Last July, researchers stated in Science magazine that wastewater-induced earthquakes were approaching a fault near Oklahoma City capable of producing a magnitude 7.0 shock, though other experts call that unlikely. In January, scientists including Oklahoma’s state seismologist, Austin Holland, cited a rising quake risk and identified three faults capable of “significantly larger” earthquakes.

Last month, a South African geophysicist delivered the most specific warning yet: Another magnitude 5-plus quake could occur by 2016, and one fault running through Stillwater and two other cities potentially could yield up to a magnitude 6.5 shock.

While scientists worry, political leaders have been slow to recognize the threat.

First elected in 2010, Governor Fallin appointed the earthquake advisory council last September. “Oklahoma has always had seismic activity, but the reality is we are seeing more,” she said then. “It’s important that we study this issue and have sound science that can inform decisions.”

She allowed only last week that wells accidentally drilled into rock containing faults could “potentially” set off shocks. Scientists say that is only one factor at play in the quakes.

The governor’s 12-member earthquake advisory council, drawn from industry, government, the Legislature and academia, works as an information clearinghouse, said Mr. Teague, her energy and environment secretary and the group’s chairman.

“The whole idea of the group,” he said, “is what are you working on? What are the gaps that you’ve got, and is there somebody else that can fill that gap?”

The most glaring gaps, however, remain mostly unfilled.

Last month the state promised a clerk, two technical experts and $50,000 to help regulators assess wells, but a $600 million-plus budget deficit makes significant aid unlikely. The Legislature could grant the commission greater authority, but legislators say that is not an option in a state where regulation is deeply unpopular, and the oil and gas industry holds political and economic sway.

Residents File Suit

The industry has worked on several fronts to contain concern about the quakes.

In October 2013, almost two years after the Prague quakes, Dr. Holland, the state seismologist, issued a news release warning that the earthquake risk in Oklahoma City, about 50 miles west of Prague, had increased. Wastewater disposal wells, he added, may be “a contributing factor.” Two weeks later, he was summoned to the office of the University of Oklahoma’s president, David L. Boren, to meet Harold G. Hamm, the chairman of Continental Resources, one of the state’s biggest oil and gas companies. Mr. Boren sits on Continental’s board, for which he has been paid more than $1.6 million in stock awards and directors’ fees since 2009, according to proxy statements.

Continental officials did not respond to a request for comment. Last month, after the newsletter EnergyWire reported the meeting, Mr. Boren called the session “purely informational.”

Dr. Holland said that Mr. Boren assured him his academic freedom as a scientist was unchallenged. Then, Dr. Holland said, Mr. Hamm told him that public discussions of disposal wells “are unnerving — they can dramatically affect the industry.”

Continental is seeking to shape that public discussion, arguing in newspapers, on television and to regulators that the earthquake epidemic is not man-made, but part of an unusually active period for quakes worldwide.

Still, in public meetings and in courtrooms, some residents have begun to demand an accounting. In August, Sandra Ladra, a Prague resident injured by a collapsing fireplace during the 2011 earthquakes, sued the Wilzetta well’s operator, New Dominion, and the Spess Oil Company, which operates the two smaller wells nearby.

Then, in February, came a class-action lawsuit against the two companies by Ms. Cooper, whose house in Prague was heavily damaged. Her suit seeks compensation for quake damage not only to her home, but to any homes in nine counties surrounding Prague.

That case has yet to be heard. But Ms. Ladra’s suit, now before the State Supreme Court, previews the industry response: The wells operate legally, and regulators should hear complaints against them. Letting juries decide their culpability in earthquakes invites financial disaster.

“I don’t want to belittle the public’s concern about earthquake swarms. I live here, too,” Robert G. Gum, a lawyer for New Dominion, said at an October hearing. “But it’s no more important to the people sitting in this courtroom and the people in this state than the state’s economy. It’s no more important in recognizing how important the oil and gas industry is to that economy.”

If juries hold the companies liable for Prague’s earthquakes, he added, “I doubt if this is the last lawsuit that will get filed. These wells will become economic and legal liability pariahs. They will be shut down.”

To Ms. Cooper, that message is clear. “People need to just take their losses for the greater good of the oil and gas companies — you know, do your part,” she said.

She does not buy it.

1794. Book Review: The Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness

By Derek S. Jeffreys, The American Journal of Bioethics, Fall 2002

 

This book should disabuse anyone of the idea that animals are unthinking machines or creatures that act solely on instinct. Presenting extraordinary data about animal behavior, Donald R. Griffin persuasively shows the presence of cognitive activity in some nonhuman animals. Unfortunately, he also endorses a simplistic philosophy of mind that undermines his thesis that animals have consciousness.

Griffin structures his book with initial chapters considering objections to animal cognition, multiple chapters devoted to research on animal behavior, and concluding chapters considering the philosophical and scientific import of animal cognition. Behaviorism, he argues, arbitrarily denied animal cognition, and now that it is largely discredited, we should be more open to the idea of animal consciousness. Considering behaviors ranging from finding food and using tools to language and symbolic communication, Griffin argues that animals have thoughts and develop concepts. For example, he presents a wonderful account of how honeybees develop complex systems of signals and dances to communicate food sources, house hunt, and alter hive construction. He also describes the extraordinary level of language use and cognition in apes and dolphins. Using this data, Griffin reflects insightfully on the ethical and scientific significance of animal cognition, urging us to seriously reevaluate how we treat other animals.

A defective philosophy of mind, however, vitiates Griffin's insights about cognitive ethology. Early in the book when discussing animals, he pledges allegiance to philosophical materialism, stating that he will "take it for granted that behavior and consciousness (human and nonhuman) result entirely from events that occur in their central nervous system" (p. 4). However, he never defends this highly controversial assumption, and I could not ascertain which kind of materialism he endorses. For example, identity materialists argue that conscious states are identical with events in the central nervous system. Functionalists, however, identify consciousness with complex functions of the organism. Griffin seems completely unaware of such important philosophical distinctions, and his treatment of animal consciousness suffers as a result.

Griffin creates further confusion when he considers the physiological indices of thinking (chapter eight). Identity materialists often claim they can correlate neural activity and consciousness. However, after surveying the available literature on this topic, Griffin concludes that we lack such clear correlations. Without them, I cannot see how he can justify his claim that consciousness results "entirely" from events in the central nervous system. Moreover, he assumes that establishing such correlations would explain consciousness, but he ignores how consciousness and neural processes possess different properties. 

Nonmaterialists often cite these differences when they reject identity materialism. Again, Griffin seems unaware of an important discussion in contemporary philosophy.

A more fruitful approach to the subject of animal consciousness would focus on intentionality, or the way consciousness directs itself toward objects. The classic approach to cognition in the European Middle Ages, intentionality was retrieved and developed by modern phenomenologists. By carefully exploring intentionality, we can define levels of consciousness. Griffin's data suggests intentionality in some nonhuman animals, but it differs drastically from human consciousness. Human beings have the extraordinary capacity to transform the material world around them into entities like beliefs. They can then construct second-order beliefs about these beliefs. In the medieval world these were called "second-intentions." Griffin offers very suggestive evidence that apes may form second-intentions, but otherwise he purports to establish animal consciousness by merely identifying a central nervous system and limited intentionality. This will not do asa sophisticated philosophical treatment of consciousness.

Griffin's book should be required reading for anyone interested in animal cognition. Nevertheless, it may lead the reader philosophically astray, and he or she should read it in tandem with a serious study of the philosophy of mind.