Another Year of Being Grateful for Abundance All Around Us

 

This essay follows up on the previous one about the French Revolutionary Calendar.

In the original calendar, as explained in this wikipedia entry, each day was named after something to be found in the world of an ordinary person. These days were named after ordinary things, not after kings or saints or presidents. It may have seemed difficult to find 360 things after which to name the dates of the calendar, but the world is so full of things about which we can be grateful that it was not difficult at all. In my daily journals from that time in my life, I named each day after a tree or other plant one year; in another, after people who had been important in my life.

In the original calendar, the first day of Vendémiaire was named after the grape (raisin), as you would expect in France. Many of the later dates were named after trees and other plants, many of which would escape the attention of all but the closest observers. These included the érable à sucre (sugar maple), colchique (autumn crocus), and belle de nuit (beauty of the night, otherwise known as the four-o’clock flower). One day was named for hemp (chanvre), which is the same species but not the same breed as marijuana. The French make distinctions that we often ignore in America, such as potiron (winter squash) and citrouille (pumpkin) for the purposes of making soup. The list was made after the Europeans had incorporated food plants from North America, such as pomme de terre (potato), piment (hot pepper), and tomate. Of course, they also included domesticated animals, including those one might not expect a day to be named after, such as âne (donkey), bouc (billy goat), and grillon (cricket). They had days named after fuels and other materials such as tourbe (peat), houille (coal), argile (clay), and even fumie (manure). Of great importance to ordinary people were the tools such as herse (harrow), hoyau (fork hoe), pelle (shovel), and of course the pressoir (wine press). One might not expect an environmentalist like me to be thankful for coal, but when used in moderation coal can be an essential part of a sustainable and healthy economy.

Salvatore Fresca made a series of engravings, one for each of the French Revolutionary months, each of them of voluptuous women scarcely clad. But only in the three summer months were the women bare-breasted.

By naming each day after something, I had my eyes opened not only to biodiversity but also to the diversity of little blessings that we all have but about which we, concentrating on our own problems and stresses, do not think about. I seem to remember in my journal (which now has over 13,000 entries) I had a day named after the pencil. How often have you thought about and been grateful for pencils? Today’s list could be so much longer than the 1792 French list, and would include telephones and computers and vaccines and antibiotics and…

Few have said it better than Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things/That I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Not to mention the fact that few kings have been or are as happy as most of us ordinary people! Today, and this year, look around you and be grateful.

Happy New Year!

This is mostly a repeat of what I posted on my blogs on September 23, 2013, which I’ll bet few if any of you have read. I myself had forgotten it (Moi-même je l'avais oublié). I have written a new follow-up essay which I will post next time.

Happy New Year, everybody. At least, according to the French Revolutionary calendar that was adopted in France right after the Revolution. It was used from 1793 until 1805. Read more here. One purpose of the calendar was to produce a scientifically-based calendar system.

Part of the scientific basis is that it was modeled after nature, after the seasons and the phenomena associated with them, rather than arbitrary months invented by human governments. For example, March used to be the first month, but Roman emperors added January and February, apparently for purposes of tax revenue. Because the Romans stuck two months onto the beginning of the year, the names of the months now make no sense. “September” means seventh, “October” means eighth, “November” means ninth, and “December” means tenth. But the French Revolutionary Calendar begins very close to the Autumnal Equinox, which was actually yesterday. The seasons, and the movements of the Earth relative to the sun, dictate this calendar.

The French Revolutionary Calendar is also based on the moon. Each of the twelve months has thirty days, consistent with the phases of the moon. Twelve months therefore have 360 days; the remaining five days were special days added to the end of the year. Today is the first day of Vendémiaire, that is, the month of grape harvest.

The traditional religious calendar had feast days of the saints. The French Revolution swept religion aside and established non-theistic science as its basis. This is one of the reasons I like it so much: it takes its framework from nature, rather than foisting a religious framework upon nature. Their calendar named each day after (in most cases) plants, although many were named after animals or farm implements. For example, today is raisin, or grape. I guess the revolutionaries had their priorities straight, didn’t they: naming the first month after the grape harvest, and the first day after the grape.

The Revolutionary Calendar was just one way of rethinking the world. The scientists of the French Revolution also produced the metric system, which is not only still used but has been expanded. The metric system is based on nature. For example, they said the meter was one-ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole. (They were pretty close.) It was also based on powers of ten. Instead of 16 ounces in a pound and 2000 pounds in a ton, or 5280 feet in a mile, there were 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 100 centimeters in a meter, and 1000 meters in a kilometer. And it is based on water, also. A milliliter is one cubic centimeter (cc). A milliliter of water weighs one gram. A calorie is the amount of heat that can raise the temperature of 1 cc of water 1 degree Celsius. How nicely it all fits together. No wonder scientists have used the metric system for a long time. And every major country other than the United States uses the metric system. As scientists continue to explore the very large and very distant and very small and very brief, they have expanded the metric system to 24 orders of magnitude both ways from the base. There are a million million million million yoctoseconds in a second, and a million million million million meters in a yottameter. The French revolutionaries did not imagine this possibility. Now the metric system has spread around the world, while the Revolutionary Calendar has been largely forgotten.

The Revolutionary Calendar is certainly not the only one based on nature. The Jewish calendar begins with the Month of Nisan in spring.

The reason I like to observe the Revolutionary Calendar, in addition to the regular calendar, is that it helps to fit my thinking into the cycles of nature. It helps me realize that we are part of nature, rather than being masters over it. Just as we cannot force the sea to not rise (see my earlier blog entry), we cannot force January 1 to be the first day of the year in anything other than an artificial sense. We have to start thinking of ourselves as part of the mesh of nature, of evolution, of ecology.

So happy 1 Vendémiaire, everybody!

Darwin Meets Albert Schweitzer

It is likely that few of you in the newer generation have heard of Albert Schweitzer. He was famous in the middle of the twentieth century. He lived a long time in the city I now call home, Strasbourg, France. I just posted a video about him.

Schweitzer was most famous for doing what almost nobody does anymore. He was a polymath, that is, a genius expert in what seems to most of us like unrelated fields. His fields were:

• Music: He was an expert at playing and building organs.
• Philosophy.
• Theology: He wrote about the historical Jesus and the mystical Paul.
• Medicine.

Unlike many of us, who are certified in one field (mine is plant ecology) but who know a lot about other fields because we have read a lot about them, Schweitzer actually had degrees in music, philosophy, theology, and medicine. Some examples of people who have thought broadly about more than one area of inquiry are:

• Isaac Asimov, the biochemist who wrote about science in general and even about theology; he even had a joke book;
• René Dubos, the microbiologist who wrote about human nature;
• Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who wrote about everything, even baseball;
• John Polkinghorne, the physicist turned priest.

Schweitzer felt called to be a medical missionary in Africa. He was criticized because his field hospital in what is now Gabon was not up to the medical standards even of the time. But in its first nine months the clinic had 2000 patients; some of them traveled for days and hundreds of kilometers to go there. Could somebody else have done a better job? Probably, but there was no one else.

He won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize not just for these things but also for his activism against colonialism and nuclear proliferation.

Was there a theme that tied all of these things together? I think it was reverence for life. The aspects of music, philosophy, theology, and medicine that he emphasized were those that made life better for humanity, which he loved.

Today it is difficult or even impossible for a scientist to be an expert in more than one major field of human thought, because every field of thought has grown exponentially; at least, science has. He was not trying to get people to know more scientific facts, but to celebrate how science (in this case medicine) can improve people’s lives (this is my message to the science blog readers). Nor was he trying to get people to believe certain doctrinal points. He was an evangelist, but not of doctrine; rather, of a reverence for life—this is my message to the religion blog readers.

Joan of Arc and Science

I recently visited the equestrian statue of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) in Strasbourg, France. I have posted a video [https://youtu.be/ahKGTla7E18 ] about what I learned.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl, aged about 17, when she claimed that the Archangel Michael and Saints Margaret and Catherine had told her that she needed to lead the French troops to victory over England, which at that time (1429) occupied a large portion of what is today France. This was during the Hundred Years’ War, and France was not doing too well. The French troops were under siege in Orléans.

Jeanne must have had a mesmerizing personality, because she convinced the future French King Charles VII that the voices in her head had told her France would prevail and Charles would be king. She was put in charge of the portions of the French army that eventually drove the English away from that siege and some others as well. She was a military heroine—a 17 year old peasant girl. The story did not end so well for her. She started losing battles, and when she was 19 she was put on trial and convicted of heresy. She was burned at the stake in 1431. One of the charges was that, in leading battles, she had worn men’s clothing. Later, a new trial found her not guilty and today she is esteemed as one of the patron saints of France. Everyone has heard about her.

Every artistic depiction of her shows her to be very beautiful. The usual standards of physical beauty, however, is not at all necessary. She would have appeared beautiful to those who believed her divine claims, no matter what she actually looked like.

What this means for us, as we examine the role of religion in human history, is that even the craziest of claims are credible if the person making them is persistent and absolutely convinced of them. She heard the little voices in her head and had not the slightest doubt of their authenticity. Many historians today believe that Jeanne was schizophrenic (the little voices were in her brain) or had Menière’s disease (the little voices were in her inner ear). We do not know. More to the point, she did not know.

Religious claims can be made and believed on no further basis than the assertion of those who make them. No other evidence is needed. Many people claim that there is, in fact, evidence other than assertions that support many religious beliefs, such as Jesus’ resurrection. But such evidence is not necessary to true believers.

Scientific thinking, however, requires that the person making a claim provide evidence that is verifiable to people other than the one making the claim. You can read more about it in my book Scientifically Thinking. This is an important reason that we should depend on science, rather than religious assertion, to guide us in making decisions of worldwide importance—which nearly all of our decisions are these days.

Breathtaking Racism in Modern America against Native Americans

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. You can find more information about this book and these videos in my science blog.

 

When you hear about racism in America, you usually think of white racism against black people. More recently, racism against Hispanics have been in the news, since being Hispanic makes you a possible illegal alien, until proven otherwise. Once in a while you hear about racism against Asian Americans. And, of course, immigrants from every country in the world, except the very white ones, face discrimination.

But there is one group about which you hear less often, the largely-silent victims of racism: the Native Americans. Natives are underrepresented in reportage and in fiction. Many if not most Americans think of Native Americans as dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the Rez in flyover country. Most Americans who have this image of Natives say this with pity, rather than with scorn, the way true racists would say it.

I can write these things because I am a member of the Cherokee tribe, with my lineage completely documented. And I build my book, Forgotten Landscapes, around ten generations of my family’s history.

Perhaps the major part of the racism against Native Americans is that most Americans (assuming themselves to not be racist) believe Natives were hunter-gatherers prior to the coming of European “civilization.” The racists would say “savages” instead of “hunter-gatherers.” Those who consider themselves non-racist would say that there was (or is) nothing wrong with being a hunter-gatherer.

Many people even think that the European-white American conquest of Natives was a blessing, because it replaced a miserable savage condition with a happy, white civilized condition.

But this perception of Natives is about as wrong as it can possibly be. The factual basis upon which anti-Native racism is based is just simply wrong. Not just offensive, but factually incorrect. Some tribes, it is true, were hunters and gatherers. But many tribes—such as the Cherokee tribe from which my family comes—were not hunter-gatherers.

Native Americans had large cities before European contact, and by the time Columbus came these cities had shrunk into large villages, but they were still connected by strong continent-wide trade networks. There were millions of healthy well-fed people who were able to resist Viking invasions (which nobody else did) and would have resisted later European invasions had it not been for European diseases such as smallpox, and European guns.

Native Americans transformed the North American landscape by the controlled use of fire, by skillful group hunting, by agriculture, by irrigation, and even by planting orchards. The whole face of “wilderness America” was an artificial product of Native activities.

I’m not talking about Aztecs and Incas and Mayas here—regarding whom everyone has heard—but the civilizations of North America, which reached their peak around 1200 AD. It has been erased from history, and from the landscape, by racist assumptions. You can hardly find any remnant of it anymore; we don’t even know what they called themselves, or which tribes still in existence are their descendants.

We are here; we have been here longer than any other group; and we had an important impact on the American landscape, until we were decimated by Europeans starting in 1492. You need to know this about us. Too often, people look right at us and do not see us.

These are big claims, I realize, but I explain and document each of them in my book, which I encourage you to read.

Forgotten Landscapes: Truth and Sanity

 have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.

 I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. My first video is Darwin Restores Truth and Sanity.

In March 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I’m sure Donald Trump thinks he can rewrite American history by simply speaking His version of it into existence, but even He cannot do this. All he can do, by executive order, is to remove all National Park and Monument signage that does not have his version of American history on it. He cannot rewrite the textbooks and change all school and college courses, however much He would like to do so.

What version of American history does He want to impose? The white supremacist version. He wants to proclaim that white settlers moved into an empty North America and brought the bright white light of civilization to the few savages who already lived there. Trump is offended by signage that makes reference to slave owners and to white who killed Native Americans.

My book, Forgotten Landscapes, is in fact the way to restore truth and sanity to American history. I do not, like Trump, do so by calling my critics liars and insane. Instead my book presents the evidence:

• That Native population densities were large before European diseases decimated them
• That Natives managed the North American landscape through fire management, hunting, and agriculture

This is not the first time the Trump Administration has tried to erase Native Americans from history. In January 2025 the Justice Department proclaimed that Native Americans did not quality for birthright citizenship. The very day I made this video, the Supreme Court was deliberating a birthright citizenship case. (Update: On June 27 the Supreme Court decided that Trump had the right to limit birthright citizenship. This means that Cherokees like me might very well not be citizens of the United States or of any other country.)

The only way to restore truth and sanity to American history is for all of you, individually, to make sane and truthful use of the evidence. My book provides that evidence.