10 July 2008
Who are the Victims?
Another idea I have for an occasional series: News stories in which some group is labelled 'the victim' of a group, abstraction, or individual. I think it's educational and interesting to explore who or what are identified as victims and perpetrators in the media.
Recently,
American people are the victims: "The whiners are the leaders. Hell, the American people are victims. ..." [Said by political advisor and former Congressman Phil Gramm, reported today]
Palestinians are the victims of Jewish persecutors: "Touring the somber [Holocaust] museum, it occurred to [Israeli-Arab lawyer] Mahameed that 'we Palestinians are the victims of the terrible things that were inflicted on the Jews by the Holocaust.' [8 July; the article is actually eye-opening, moving, IMO]
Bass and salmon are the victims of mismanagement: "Striped bass are the victims of gross state and federal mismanagement of Central Valley rivers and the Delta, as are collapsing Sacramento River chinook salmon populations." [8 July]
Tuna are the victims of their own success: "Chronically overfished, Mediterranean tuna are the victims of their success with fish lovers, especially with the passion for sushi." [3 July]
Sociopathic politicians, celebrities and sports figures are the victims: "For all the public examples of bad behavior set by politicians, celebrities and sports figures, many young people see these individuals for exactly what they are: spoiled, overrated sociopaths who are the victims of an overly indulgent, disengaged society in search of civilization." [7 July]
Pakistani college women are the victims of cell phone use: "Mostly intermediate students are the victims of mobile mania" [8 July]
San Diego stores are the victims of shopping cart theft and displacement: "The stores are the victims, Councilman Jack Feller said, and they aren't the ones who should be punished." [12 June]
and finally, the word "victim" isn't used but it's sure implied in this odd story [7 July]:
"A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.
"County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.
"Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections 'has become a black hole' because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.
"Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud 'Excuse me!' He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a 'white hole.'"That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy."
wtf?
20:15 Posted in animals , community , crime , earthcare and environment , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
02 June 2008
Local Food
Interactive map to show what's fresh in your state, by month. How come New Hampshire and Vermont have artichokes in June but Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut don't?
(via Rebecca)
11:12 Posted in community , consumption , earthcare and environment , gardening and weather , holidays and seasons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
28 April 2008
What I'm Reading Online - Our Personal Connection To What Is Wrong
>> SACRALISING DRESS
This article at Anderson Cooper's 360 Blog by a former female Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint, interested me because it seems to concern sacralising behaviour (related post).
"Women lost a lot of rights in 1953. They no longer had any say in who they could marry nor could they choose how to dress. The way this was spun was that since the community had come through the raid so successfully, it was now ready to practice a higher form of God's law. (God is always the explanation when things get more restrictive; change is presented as a prize for being righteous and faithful. We were always told we were worthy of a higher law.)"
She reiterates the idea a little further down the page:
"The clothing also desexualizes women. Our chests are flattened out and any natural shape is hidden.
"We were always told by Warren Jeffs when the dress and choices became more restrictive that is was a sign that 'God loves you so much he wants you to be more like him.' (We believed Warren received direct revelations from God.) What we were losing were rights and any sense of control over our lives and all individuality."
As mentioned in a study of religious and secular communes in the previous blog post, the study's authors concluded that "ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."
>> LIVING CLOSE TO NATURE = POVERTY AND MISERY, or ENRICHING RELATIONSHIPS with earth and others? Or both?
"Couldn't God Have Designed A Gentler Universe?" by Jesuit astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ at Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British Jesuits got my attention because I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea for a bookgroup, which is about American Greg Mortenson's mission to build schools in Islamic countries (Pakistan and Afghanistan). Twice in that book there's a sort of teaser for a comparison-contrast argument that never actually happens. Early in the book, the question is raised whether the rural mountain town that Greg is so taken with is a paradise, because the people seem happy, they are welcoming, they smile a lot, they are patient and accepting of what happens, they have leisure time, they have close relationships with each other and live intimately with the land and seasons, or a miserable backwater, because the people have high rates of goiters, cataracts, malnutrition and infant mortality, almost no access to health care, live in frigid temperatures for half the year, and work very hard to survive. Later in the book, there is a moment's musing about a 'hard' but 'pure' life of such people, and what Western technological influences like roads, bridges and buildings will do to the close relationship those people have to their land.
Consolmagno's words resonated with that in my mind:
"There's an odd divide in Western culture nowadays. We've become separated from nature. We have air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars, air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned lives. [In far northern climes, substitute 'well-heated' for air-conditioned.] We spend most of our lives wrapped in cotton wool. If we feel pain, we want it to stop, now.
"Well-lit streets at night that mean that most people never see the Milky Way -- or at least not until the lights go out. After the Northridge earthquake in southern California in January 1994, the phones at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles started ringing off the hooks as people wanted to know why the earthquake made the sky look so scary. The earthquake struck at 4:30 a.m., while it was still dark outside. When people rushed through their blacked-out homes to the outdoors, a million people saw something in the skies over Los Angeles they'd never seen before: stars. And they were terrified. ...
I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Africa.I saw there how we used to live, back before flush toilets and neon lights. People lived close to nature, in a way that hardly anyone in America does anymore. And I learned in Africa that there’s a word for people who live close to nature: starving.
Our lifestyle puts a heavy toll on the environment; but so does the lifestyle of the desperate people in Kenya or Haiti, who strip the forests bare in their day-to-day struggle to stay alive. So I don’t necessarily mean to disparage our cotton-swabbed existence. My point is just to point it out, because the shock we experience when a natural disaster hits us is precisely the wrench of being jerked out of our cotton-wool womb and forced to confront nature. Nature can be hostile as well as beautiful; nature gives us food and gives us death."
The rest is worth reading, though no answers are given.
>> Two articles on the HIGH PERCENTAGE OF IMPRISONMENT in the U.S.:
Adam Liptak in the NYT (23 April) writes "Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations'" and Marie Gottschalk writes "Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not" in the WaPo (15 April), both on the same topic.
Gottschalk points to a recent Pew Center study which showed "that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison" and one in every 32 adults is or has either been "incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision." The U.S. incarceration rate "is 5 to 12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the highest in the world." The rate is ten times higher for African-American men: One in 9 young black men is imprisoned.
Liptak elaborates on the stats: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes -- from writing bad checks to using drugs -- that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations."
Gottschalk, citing hearings held by Senator James Webb (D-Va) last October, says that the increases in incarceration are not "driven so much by an increase in crime as by the way we chose to respond to crime," with tougher sentencing guidelines. Her main point is that "the leading presidential candidates have not identified mass imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the country's top civil rights concern."
Liptak points to more reasons than simply tougher sentencing guidelines for the high U.S. incarceration rate (which, he notes, seems to have led to decreases in crime, although Canada's crime has likewise decreased with no concurrent increase in incarceration rates), and he discusses each factor separately:
"Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime [a murder rate 4 times higher than many Western European nations], harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges -- many of whom are elected, another American anomaly -- yield to populist demands for tough justice."
Is this high rate of imprisonment our country's nuanced form of mob justice?
Concerning the factor of "American temperament," Liptak notes that "some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates. 'Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,' wrote Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, in Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective (2007).
"'It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,' Mr. Tonry wrote. 'Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.'"
>> WHY BOTHER WITH ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY?
That's what Michael Pollan ask, and answers, in his article titled "Why Bother" in the NYT Magazine (20 April). Pollan examines some of the obstacles and justifications for doing nothing, or very little:
Why bother to take any steps in the direction of reducing my footprint on the Earth "when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit."
And even if, for the sake of virtue, "I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint?" (Pollan points to studies that show they may not. )
"If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only 'food miles' but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out."
His argument for making our daily, individual lives more sustainable is this:
"Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: 'Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, ... cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.' So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences. "
Pollan cites Wendell Berry, who 30 years ago "was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives -- the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the 'split between what we think and what we do.' For Berry, the 'why bother' question came down to a moral imperative: 'Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.'"
----
Much more to Pollan's article (specialisation, hidden energy costs, why we should take individual steps anyway), but where this last bit leads me is back to a perhaps romantic notion of the 'purity' -- or at least the honesty -- of living life close to the land, and that state of being contrasted to the cultural free-floating angst, the urge to crime and urge to punishment (leading to high rates of incarceration and a punitive justice system), the need to sacralise and the need to artificially create meaning that we find widespread in our culture, where we are so much more likely to be living without integrity, living "the best we can," as Berry says, in at least a veiled awareness of our own complicity in unsustainable living, in an unnecessarily harsh 'justice' system, in the war we are waging and its collateral damage as well as its intended damage to humans, other animals, and the Earth, and so on. We can watch reality TV, and it's an almost-but-not-quite successful effort to screen ourselves from Reality, from "our personal connection to what is wrong."
10:50 Posted in community , consumption , crime , earthcare and environment , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
16 April 2008
Getting Cancer, the Natural (Usual) Way
An article in Slate yesterday by Darshak Sanghavi (pediatric cardiologist and professor at U. Mass Medical School) asks why the U.S. and Europe focus our rhetoric and resources on some uncommon and/or unproven causes of cancer rather than trying to prevent and better screen for the many natural causes of cancer.
In part, he says, it's because of a popular (but false) motif, that "the natural world is less toxic and more healthful than the industrial one," so that avoiding cancer, it seems, can be accomplished by buying organic, unpasteurized, and more 'natural' foods and cosmetics:
"Unwittingly, we've seriously impeded cancer prevention with this not-so-useful distinction between the natural and artificial. It's distracted us from the uncomfortable truth that most cancers are caused by the natural environment around us. As a result, we expend great effort and ink on low-yield strategies to prevent cancer, even though the better ones lie within our grasp."
Sanghavi talks about some 'artificial' sources of very few cancers (asbestos, DES, Alar, and folic acid) and a few of the most common natural causes of cancer: UV-A rays of the sun, Helicobacter pylori bacteria, Hepatitis B, the human papilloma virus, and exposure to a mold product called aflatoxin.
He ends by suggesting that we've been approaching cancer prevention as something within our individual control, just another consumer shopping challenge, when actually it's vaccines, large-scale agricultural reform, and regular screening that would reduce cancer deaths:
"Our scattershot approach to preventing cancer subscribes to the cult of personal responsibility, albeit with a recent eco-friendly twist: To really help themselves, goes the thinking, people must simply take charge of their health and avoid cancer-causing, artificial products. Somewhat insidiously, we're starting to believe that cancer mostly is prevented by informing individuals to change their consumption habits -- not by proactive, broad-based public-health measures like widespread vaccination or agricultural reform.."
13:35 Posted in death , earthcare and environment , food and drink , health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13 April 2008
Correlation between Rainfall and Witch Killings
Nicholas Kristof's column in the NYT today -- "Extended Forecast: Bloodshed" -- connects the killing of witches with the environmental affects of climate change:
"Here’s a forecast for a particularly bizarre consequence of climate change: more executions of witches. As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars -- and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.
"In rural Tanzania, murders of elderly women accused of witchcraft are a very common form of homicide. And when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall -- either drought or flooding -- witch-killings double, according to research by Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
"'In bad years, the killings explode,' Professor Miguel said. He believes that if climate change causes more drought years in Tanzania, the result will be more elderly women executed there and in other poor countries that still commonly attack supposed witches."
Kristof also looks at the strong relationship between economic hard times and lynchings, civil wars, and other forms of violence against 'the other' who is judged to have caused the hardship.
14:50 Posted in community , earthcare and environment , finance and business , gardening and weather , girardian anthropology , politics, government and law | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
12 March 2008
RIP Delhi, 1946-2008
An elephant died yesterday.
Delhi, an elephant at the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, TN, died early yesterday morning in her sleep after a time of decline (you can read about her last days here).
She came to the sanctuary in 2004, having been confiscated by the USDA after she was neglected and harmed by the Hawthorne Corp., which lends elephants to circuses.
An email from the Elephant Sanctuary today said that "while her sisters and caregivers slept, Delhi made her transition. Her passing was silent and peaceful, she passed without waking. We are all spending the day honoring our last precious hours with her; caregivers are still fussing around her, whispering quiet goodbyes. Misty carefully touched all over Delhi's body and then gently stepped over her, sheltering her dearly departed friend."
There will be a memorial page for Delhi at the ES website soon.
19:44 Posted in animals , death , earthcare and environment | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
28 February 2008
What I'm Reading Online
Just catching up on some things ...
----> "Are you going to hell?", a Salon interview by Louis Bayard of former born-again Christian John Marks, whose recent book Reasons to Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind details Marks' "two-year investigative odyssey through the heart of Christian America. Listening to the fiery testimony of megachurch preachers, traveling from Easter pageants and Focus on the Family seminars to Christian rock concerts and blogger conferences, Marks experienced firsthand both the promise and the limitations of the faith enterprise -- even as he queried, all over again, the grounds of his own beliefs." Marks hopes the book will lead to increased dialogue between evangelical Christians and others, a conversation which he says will be loud and angry, and which "can be done but only with both sides acknowledging that the other won't change."
Bayard mentions the statistic that "some 40 million unbelievers are attending church services," and aks why, to which Marks responds: "Because they like the church, they believe in what it represents, they believe in the social stances, they believe in the political values. But when you get to this central question -- Do you believe that Jesus Christ redeemed you for all time and do you live as if that's true? -- most people cannot tell you how many real believers there are."
----> Dave Pollard on "responsibility" as "promising back" and the many pitfalls of human interaction, particularly in groups. What he says resonates strongly for me right now as a leader (host, facilitator) of a small group and even as an active member of other regular small groups. I think I am usually aware at the time of hurt or disappointment in reaction or response to my actions and others' actions in small groups, but I often don't know what to do about it, other than to focus my attention on responding skillfully:
"All of these truths are about Responsibility and its burden. When we stand up in front of a group as an 'authority', or talk to an individual one-to-one, or just communicate wordlessly with someone, we are being asked to take some responsibility for their feelings, their understanding, and even their love. When a member of the audience asks us a question and we answer in a way that is unsatisfactory to them (for whatever reason) they are hurt. When we say something to someone that makes them flinch or frown or leads to a 'pregnant pause', they are hurt. When someone looks at us, perhaps in invitation to some further communication and we turn away, they are hurt. It is not intentional. No one is to blame. But there has been a Failure of Responsibility. The word 'responsibility' comes from the Latin words meaning to promise back. All of this pain is the result of unintended broken promises."
----> Which is more environmentally responsible: reading a newspaper in print or online? Brendan Koerner (The Lantern) at Slate says that reading online is better, but only slightly, and he doesn't have the stats to prove it. There's a lot to consider, either way: For paper, there's the tree content, the percentage of the paper's paper that's made of recycled paper, the emissions and petroleum use of the pulping process, and the newspaper distribution environmental costs. (Not to mention the petroleum use and emissions of the machines used to hew and transport the logs, which he doesn't.) For online versions, there's the kilowatt-hours of electricity used by each server (perhaps hundreds of them, including ad servers), the electricity to power the end-user's computer, and perhaps the environmental cost of disposing of all of our computer hardware, though that assumes that reading newspapers is a major reason people have computers -- a dubious assumption, IMO. Then there's the issue of carbon -- online, carbon is released right into the atmosphere; in print, it's 'locked' into the newsprint, which can be recycled or will decompose slowly in a landfill (but doesn't it release into the atmosphere then?).
My head hurts.
05:25 Posted in community , consumption , earthcare and environment , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
11 February 2008
O Christmas Tree
We undecorated and took down the Christmas tree yesterday.
It's always a sad chore, made sadder this year by all the new growth the tree has been sending out, so that even as some branches were losing copious quantities of needles, others were vibrantly demonstrating the tree's potential for new life. It was if the tree didn't realise it had been severed from the ground, or as if it had recovered from being ungrounded and was now settling in to life in its new location and new role in our living room, lapping up a gallon of water every day, busily producing.
It was hard to let it go, even though from its new location in the backyard, it may yet take on another role -- as shelter for birds and small animals.
In memory of our resilient tree:
11:50 Posted in earthcare and environment , holidays and seasons , householding | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02 February 2008
What I'm Reading: Cancer causes, friends, redirected aggression, banishing plastic bags
OFFLINE: I'm reading The Oldie, my favourite magazine (thanks, R+C!). The January 2008 issue has this line quoted from 'journalistic doyenne' and fashion editor Felicity Green (by way of Katharine Whitehorn on Book of the Week) : "I have plenty of friends to do things with -- I just have no-one to do nothing with." Reading it I recognised that I've chosen and cultivated as friends primarily people that I can "do nothing with." Even if we end up doing "things" together, I'm comfortable doing "things" with them because I'm comfortable "doing nothing" with them. I think I assume everyone is like this?
ONLINE READING
* By 'bagging it,' Ireland rids itself of a plastic nuisance by Elisabeth Rosenthal in the IHT yesterday. Would that the U.S. could summon the same will to tax plastic bags out of existence: "In a determined attempt to deal with litter, Ireland passed a plastic bag tax in 2002 -- now 22 euro cents, about 33 U.S. cents -- at the register if you want one with your purchases. There was an advertising awareness campaign. Then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts. Within weeks, there was a 94 percent drop in plastic bag use. Within a year, nearly everyone bought reusable cloth bags, which they now keep in the office and the back of their cars. Plastic bags became socially unacceptable -- on par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after your dog."
Which does beg the question: What do people use to clean up after their dogs now? I know there must be something other than plastic bags for this messy chore, but what is it?
* Theories of cancer: How paradigms shift and culprits change in the fight against the disease, and what concerned citizens can do about it, by Sandra Steingraber, reviewing two books at Times Online.Steingraber, in reviewing SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER by Devra Davis, an epidemiologist with the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and Phil Brown's TOXIC EXPOSURES: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement, talks about her own bladder cancer diagnosis and the kinds of factors (environmental, genetic, lifestyle, etc.) that have been highlighted as likely causes of cancer in the late 1970s, the mid-1980s, the 1990s, and now.
The thesis of Davis's book "is that 1.5 million lives have been lost, because Americans failed to act on existing knowledge about the environmental causes of cancer. This failure has been created by at least eight different factors, both acting together and independently of each other." The factors: the cowardice of research scientists; exploitation of wishy-washy scientific consclusions by "those who profit from the status quo;" unresponsive regulatory agencies; shrinking environmental and public agencies whose work is "compromised by corporate interests;" the evolutionary history of epidemiology and its need for access to industry; the court system's unwillingness to consider various kinds of scientific evidence; outright harassment of researchers; and bad timing.
Brown's book "focuses on the ways in which environmental-health activists and their advocates in science are challenging the carcinogen-deniers that Davis writes about." Brown is a medical sociologist at Brown University and a longtime researcher in the field of environmental health. Steingraber recommends that both books be read together as they're complementary.
* The Targets of Aggression by David P. Barash in the 5 Oct. 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Ed is about redirected aggression, first in literature (Sweeney Todd and The Iliad) and then in the real world (the bombing and subsequent invasion of Iraq, the correlation of lynchings and cotton prices from 1882 and 1930 in the U.S. South, the court system, and so on). He observes what people have long known, that when we suffer pain, we usually react by passing it on to someone else -- the perpetrator if possible, but if not possible, then "others are liable to be victimized, regardless of innocence."
Barash's thesis is that while it's not 'ethically good,' this behaviour is definitely an ingrained, natural phenomenon of (all?) animals. He cites as evidence several rat experiments in which rats in pain, if they can 'take out' their pain on a stick or, preferably on another rat, reduce the impact of the pain stress on their adrenal glands, reduce ulcers, and generally protect themselves from stress. "Redirected aggression does not simply derive from irrationality or human nastiness, but -- along with retaliation and revenge -- is entrenched in the very fabric of the natural world, part of a continuum involving nature's response to pain. ... It feels bad to be a victim, but the pain can often be somewhat assuaged by victimizing someone else in turn."
Lots more worth reading here. He brings in the idea of forgiveness and the concept of pain in Buddhism and Christianity (with an interesting atonement theory twist), and asks questions about how to respond to "violent transgressors," and what will best "provide order, security, and personal satisfaction, as well as minimizing subordination stress, without simply passing along the pain of the victimized ... and without creating new victims?" And he wonders, if "people who seek to hurt others are doing so because they have themselves been hurt, does that diminish their responsibility or guilt?"
06:00 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , earthcare and environment , girardian anthropology , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
12 January 2008
Snowfall Amounts
Having done this exact search myself, I offer to you herzogbr.net's "Reference Question of the Week" for this week, which is to find actual snowfall amounts on two recent dates for one location. If someone asks you this question, or you want to know yourself, and the dates fall within the last month, reading his report might save you several hours of hunting down the data. (Bottom line: Go to accuweather, type in your zip or city, and near the bottom of the resulting page click "Past Weather - Past Month." You'll see a chart for the current month, and you can also "select a new month" to see data for the previous month. Any data further back in time will cost you.)
Also potentially useful is the National Climatic Data Center's text listings of snowfalls (amount of snow that fell that day/night) and snowdepths (amount of snow laying on the ground) for every county in the U.S., and for multiple towns in many counties, listed by month of the year for the past 2.5 years. The snowfall listing files are dlysnfl.txt files; the snowdepth listings are dlysndpth.txt files
Have I mentioned that we have had a lot of snow this year?
13:04 Posted in earthcare and environment , gardening and weather , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02 January 2008
Consumption, Population and Quality of Life
Good article by Jared Diamond in today's NYT ("What's Your Consumption Factor?"), clearly explaining why it's not so much population as consumption that drives resource use (and over-use) worldwide: If "the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up [to America's resource use/standard of living], world [population] rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people" instead of the 9 billion people the world is projected to have by mid-century.
"Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies -- for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy -- they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people."
Other points:
Higher consumption (1st-world standard of living) is not tightly correlated with higher quality of life, partly because "[m]uch American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe's standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans' wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures." [I agree generally but wonder when he suggests solutions whether he's considering America's expansive geography and Europe's compact one.]
Fishing and timber industries can operate sustainably now but don't. Instead, both are "managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields."
Americans' consumption rates will be reduced, one way or another, because they're unsustainable.
16:53 Posted in community , consumption , earthcare and environment , finance and business , simple living , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
30 September 2007
Recent Reading
Recent online reading of interest: of Girard, desire, imitation and fashion; musing on death and life; findings of sloppy science; essays on climate change and human responsibility; the anniversary of Sputnik; and how hypocrisy traps make some of us squirm.
>> Death and the garden, Shelley, not looking out the window, obituary motifs, and thoughts on decay in The glad reaper: Our obituaries editor finds solace in a garden, a correspondent's diary (by Ann Wroe) in The Economist:
"More than I used to, I note the premature browning of leaves and grass, the erosion of statues and stones, the rotting of things. The odd pangs and pains in my own body I now surmise to be Death knocking, or leaving a calling card, with a promise to come back later.
"Is this morbid? Some friends and colleagues think so, joking nervously about 'the Grim Reaper' and 'Grave-Watch', muttering of coffin counts. But to me it is simply part of a continuum: death in life, life in death. Everything in nature springs up, flourishes, dies, springs up again: we do the same. Bodies form and decay all the time. What the spirit does, being outside nature, has the potential to be much more interesting. But since we have forgotten that life, if we ever knew it, we are left with physical dissolution, and we don't like it much."
>> Girard and the world of fashion: The Forces of Beauty and Desire in Fashion Imitation:
"It would hardly be controversial to mention beauty and desire in the same sentence. We desire to be beautiful, to own beautiful objects, to be with beautiful people. ... Our daily experiences assure us that desiring something is a conscious, spontaneous act. The things we desire are the things we have chosen. But what if this is not the case? What would this mean for a theory of beauty?
"Rene Girard ... views desire as something that is formed in the relationships people have with each other rather than as something found within individuals themselves. Perhaps more importantly, he stresses that imitation underlies the relationships in which desire is created. ... As an example, my best friend who is more beautiful than me wants to buy a dress. The theory of mimetic desire says that I also want the dress, not because I believe it to be a beautiful dress but rather because it is a dress that is desired by my beautiful friend.
"Two important points emerge from this scenario. The first is that my desire to have the dress is a direct response to the way in which I compare myself unfavourably with my friend. Moreover, by owning the dress she likes, I hope to take on the qualities I admire in her but perceive to be lacking in myself. In essence, I am trying to become my friend when I copy her desires. As Girard states, 'aware of a lack within ourselves, we look to others to teach us what to value and who to be.' Desire is therefore about self-identity. Advertising can be seen to exploit this insight."
>> I didn't read this but heard it yesterday on NPR's Weekend Edition: Khrushchev, Schorr Look Back on Sputnik. On the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the world's first human-made satellite, Sergei Khrushchev, the son of then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and Dan Schorr, who was then Moscow Bureau chief for CBS News, talk with Scott Simon about its significance. I don't know why, but my attention was riveted as I listened to the interview.
>> Also worth listening to, Scott Simon's reflections on the Larry Craig case: What makes Scott squirm:
"It's the exultation among so many that another hypocritical politician has been exposed. ... There are those who believe Mr. Craig deserves his humiliation because he's a hypocrite ... I guess by now I have seen enough of life that I prefer to see someone as a real, complicated human being ... Human life, including sex, abounds with hypocrisy, faithlessness, carelessness, and people who say 'I love you' when they only mean, 'I want you.' People who say 'My spouse doesn't understand me,' when they really mean, 'My spouse knows me too well.' Most adults can supply their own examples. ... I wonder if people who applaud Larry Craig's arrest ... really want to arm the police with a moral license to set traps that catch people in hypocrisy. That's the kind of trap that most of us would step into someday."
>> Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic (1993-2003), writes about the morality of environmental and political choices in his op-ed piece, Our Moral Footprint, in the NYT.
Havel's essay seems a response to current Czech Republic president (since 2003) Vaclav Klaus's op-ed of June 2007, What is at risk is not the climate but freedom, in the Financial Times, in which Klaus says that "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now ... [is] ambitious environmentalism. ... This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."
Havel eventually asserts, as does Klaus, that the climate and the Earth are not at risk, but Havel's take on it is markedly different from Klaus's:
"The end of the world has been anticipated many times and has never come, of course. And it won’t come this time either. We need not fear for our planet. It was here before us and most likely will be here after us. But that doesn’t mean that the human race is not at serious risk. As a result of our endeavors and our irresponsibility our climate might leave no place for us."
Before he gets there, he more pointedly contends:
"It is also obvious from published research that human activity is a cause of change; we just don't know how big its contribution is. Is it necessary to know that to the last percentage point, though? By waiting for incontrovertible precision, aren't we simply wasting time when we could be taking measures that are relatively painless compared to those we would have to adopt after further delays? ... We can't endlessly fool ourselves that nothing is wrong and that we can go on cheerfully pursuing our wasteful lifestyles, ignoring the climate threats and postponing a solution. ...
"I’m skeptical that a problem as complex as climate change can be solved by any single branch of science. Technological measures and regulations are important, but equally important is support for education, ecological training and ethics -- a consciousness of the commonality of all living beings and an emphasis on shared responsibility."
>> Sloppy Science Studies: Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis in the WSJ. I'm almost to the point of not believing any scientific study, even replicated ones, certainly not based on summaries reported in the mainstream media, and I probably don't know enough science or remember enough statistics to trust my own judgment reading the original studies. (Of course, why should I believe this guy's findings, either?):
"Dr. [John] Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye. ...
"These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. 'There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims,' Dr. Ioannidis said. 'A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.' The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined."
Update, 4 Oct 2007: Related to this: "The facts never speak for themselves, which is why scientists need to 'frame' their messages to the public," an article by Matthew C. Nisbet and Dietram A. Scheufele, in The Scientist.com:
"The dominant assumption is that ignorance is at the root of conflict over science. According to this traditional 'popular science' model, the media should be used to educate the public about the technical details of the issue in dispute. Once citizens are brought up to speed on the science, they will be more likely to judge scientific issues as scientists do and controversy will go away. The facts are assumed to speak for themselves and to be interpreted by all citizens in similar ways. ...
"... Arguments in favor of the popular science model are not very scientific. In fact, they cut against more than 60 years of research in the social sciences, a body of work that suggests citizens prefer to rely on their social values to pick and choose information sources that confirm what they already believe, often making up their minds about a topic in the absence of knowledge. A second challenge to the popular science model is that in today's media world, by way of cable TV and the Internet, the public has greater access to quality information about science than at any time in history, yet public knowledge of science remains low. The reason is that a small audience remains attentive to science coverage, but the broader public literally tunes out, preferring other media content."
14:25 Posted in books and reading , death , earthcare and environment , education , finance and business , girardian anthropology , math and numbers , politics, government and law , science and tech , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
12 September 2007
Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens
George Africa at Vermont Flower Farms visited Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, Maine, and photo-blogs it here. Some lovely shots.
My photos of same are at Flckr.
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11 September 2007
Photo Journal of Woodsy Urban Walk (Boston)
Nice: 9 Miles of Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, thanks to Evan at Life Is Sweet in the Fenway
12:26 Posted in animals , art and photography , community , earthcare and environment , gardening and weather , simple living , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
14 June 2007
Fooling Around with the Camera in the Garden
I'm learning how to use my digital camera in manual mode, so that I can control the focus, the exposure (lighting), the aperture, or f-stop (for range and depth of focus), and/or the shutter speed.
Here are a few close-up, (relatively) low-light photos from the garden yesterday and today, taken manually. In order, they're two yellow iris, a centaura montana (cornflower), a yellow and purple iris in bud, and a (different) purple iris in bloom.
14:30 Posted in art and photography , earthcare and environment , gardening and weather | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
04 June 2007
RIP Georgia
Georgia, the first patient of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center (arriving Mother's Day), has been euthanised. She arrived with severe injuries cased by a small boat outboard engine, including five deep propeller lacerations and many broken bones. Her health was declining though she was being treated, so a CT scan was performed on 31 May, revealing that the wound to her head had "caused several fractures to her skull and penetrated her brain resulting in untreatable damage and infection. Additionally, the wounds to her carapace and shoulder continued into her body cavity causing internal complications that were also untreatable." The team decided to humanely euthanize her "right away in the midst of the tropical storm on Saturday, June 2."
From her necropsy, the team hopes to learn how to help engineers design more 'animal friendly' boat engines.
20:34 Posted in animals , death , earthcare and environment , health and medicine , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
21 May 2007
Handy Climate Change Guide
The handy New Scientist "Climate Change: A Guide for the Perplexed" succinctly refutes or explains the 26 most common climate change myths and misconceptions, such as: Chaotic systems are not predictable, They predicted global cooling in the 1970s, CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas, The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming, We are simply recovering from the Little Ice Age, Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming.
15:51 Posted in earthcare and environment , pop culture , science and tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
15 May 2007
Spring Garden
The garden is getting underway now in mid-May, with days in the 60s and nights varying from the 30s to 50s. Today we're getting an "April shower" that's beneficial for the plants, though T-storms are predicted for tomorrow.
Blooming at the moment are forsythia, tulips, a few daffs (most haven't bloomed yet), bleeding heart (pink and white), azalea, ornamental cherries (one weeping), brunnera (bug gloss; pictured), pulmonaria (lungwort), and of course the annuals I've planted (geraniums, impatiens, and pansies).
I've spent perhaps 20 hours this week and last raking, weeding, planting, clearing out old raspberry canes, pruning, etc. Finally have begun to tackle the wooded area that we've left untouched for almost 5 years.
Photos are here (the first 13 are from this season).
09:15 Posted in art and photography , earthcare and environment , gardening and weather | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
27 April 2007
Fairness, Procreation and a Hummer
What's Fair?
We often think we know, but maybe we simplify the context to such a great extent that we're usually wrong.
Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) asks whether, because he hasn't procreated and is therefore saving a huge amount of energy in that realm, and because he routinely walks to work and therefore saves energy every day, it's fair for him to have a Hummer. Is it?
19:55 Posted in consumption , earthcare and environment , math and numbers | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
26 April 2007
Cars and How They Define Space
The science fiction and fantasy writer Orson Scott Card's essay Life Without Cars is excellent.
"We got our wish. We no longer live in cities. We don't live in towns. We don't live in the country, either. We don't live anywhere at all. Just island neighborhoods in splendid isolation, with roads so convoluted that half our driving is just to get out of the island and onto a road that goes somewhere.
"You want to take a walk? No sidewalks in most places, and nowhere to walk to. ...
"You're at WalMart. You want to go to Home Depot. You can see it from where you are, but please don't be stupid and try to walk there. Our streets hate pedestrians. You have to walk all the way out to the street -- or cut through prickly hedges or climb fences."
I remember about 20 years ago I tried to walk from a bus stop near White Flint Mall (in Bethesda, MD) to White Flint Mall proper. I could see the one from the other, just across a multi-lane street or two. Mistake. For some reason unfathomable to me even then, the roads, lights, traffic speed, etc., weren't designed for a pedestrian to cross to a shopping center from a bus stop -- though the bus might be seen as the access vehicle for many would-be shoppers. It took me 20 minutes, a few desperate dashes across speeding traffic, and walking in weeds up to my shins to reach the Mall. Then I had to figure out how to get into it, because it's mostly accessed through the parking garages. If you haven't done it before, I can tell you that walking around the exterior of a Mall on foot is a very, very slow process.
Now I live in a small town, where I can walk to the library, coffee shop, many churches, several banks, some doctors' offices, the post office (though that walk could be more pedestrian-friendly), drug store, small grocery store, etc. I am grateful such a place still exists.
In the section of his essay headed There's Another Way, Card describes his ideal town attributes, some of which my town exhibits:
"Narrow streets with sidewalks on both sides. When people are parked at the curb, cars can't pass each other going both ways. So cars go very slowly and the drivers are constantly alert." // Yes to the sidewalks and narrow streets, but unfortunately, cars often don't slow down even when passing parked cars. So far, though, I haven't witnessed an accident in town.
"Yards are small." // Yes, they are. I'd prefer them a little larger, and sunnier so I could grow more vegetables and herbs, but not at the cost of lovely shady trees.
"Children walk to school. Adults walk to stores that are only a few blocks away. Nobody lives more than three short blocks from a bus stop or other public transportation, and because so many people use public transit, the buses come frequently; you never wait more than fifteen minutes during the peak times." // Alas, we fall far short. Children almost universally ride the bus to school, and the school bus stops every few yards it seems, so no one has to walk. Some adults do walk or bike to stores to do errands, but most still drive, even a few blocks. The bus stops wherever anyone flags it down, so that's handy, but it runs only once an hour and almost no one takes it.
"People meet their neighbors because they're not all locked inside metal-and-plastic shacks moving down the street. You pass each other going to and from schools and stores and work." // Yes, this is mostly true here. I run into as many people on the sidewalks and in downtown shops as I do in the grocery store on the outskirts of town. The hybrid and idle-profuse version of this is that it's not uncommon to be walking down the street, heading to the bank or library, and to have a friend in a car slow down to talk for a moment. Not so good.
"The houses aren't all alike." // We have a mix of large and small single-family, duplexes, and apartments within less than a quarter mile of each other in many parts of town.
Card's section on Why We Need to Get Cars Under Control offers these reasons:
1. Stop Funding Our Enemies. Reduce "the vast pool of oil money from which the sponsors of terrorism can draw."
2. Get Back That Wasted Time.
3. Saving Lives. In 2005, 43,200 people died on American highways. If we were fighting a war in which 40,000 people died every year and it had gone on that way for the past twenty years, wouldn't you join the anti-war movement? ... People don't die randomly -- they die because of drunks, reckless teenagers, sleepy drivers, stressed-out drivers in a rage, and drivers so desperate not to be driving that they're trying to do something else at the same time.
If we drove half the number of hours, the quality of our driving would likely improve. If our kids could get somewhere without cars, we could save their lives by not letting them drive when they're still so immature they endanger themselves and everyone else. If all drinkers walked to and from the bar, it would save 16,000 lives a year from alcohol-caused accidents.
4. A Tax on the Poor. "Because we design our cities so that you can't function without owning at least one car, the working poor have to spend a huge portion of their income on gasoline and car costs."
5. Oil Is Not Forever. "Anybody who thinks the 'free market' will always guarantee surpluses understands neither the market nor history. It is strict government oversight that has softened the economic booms and busts that used to devastate us; the free market is perfectly happy to collapse under stress and leave us eating acorns. The surest way to avoid economic ruin when the oil runs out is to need less of it."
6. Parking Lot Land. We can reclaim it!
7. Air Pollution. We'd all be healthier without cars pumping poisons into the air.
8. Exercise. If we actually used our legs to get from place to place, instead of cars, we'd get plenty of exercise without having to set aside special time to do it.
And then he addresses how to do it. (And see his follow-up article, Walking Neighborhoods, for more details.)
More on Card at his website.
11:21 Posted in community , earthcare and environment , finance and business , pop culture , simple living , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
06 April 2007
Snow Photos from Yesterday
We got a foot of snow Wednesday night and Thursday morning. It's beautiful, and melting fast in sunny 33 degree temps.
11:10 Posted in art and photography , earthcare and environment , gardening and weather | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
21 March 2007
A Land of No-Place
John Doyle at Ktismatics follows up his post on heterotopias with one on atopias:
"Today the heterotopia seems like an endangered species. It's not being crowded out by the multiplication of normal sites; rather, the entire systematic proliferation of interconnected but discrete sites is endangered. In its place we see the extension of the atopia, the no-place."
Examples of atopias -- "just a knot in the net which grants no hold but connects other knots" -- are the marketplace, the internet, consciousness, science, democracy, evolution, pop culture ....
Are atopias Nowheresville, Arizona, or are they a vibrant oscillation of energy shimmering in the collective imagination?
20:35 Posted in community , earthcare and environment , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
20 March 2007
Jets More Fuel-Efficient Than Prius?
Philip Greenspun says that the double-decker Airbus A380, which started flying to the U.S. yesterday, is more fuel-efficient than a Toyota Prius. If you have to travel 8,000 nautical miles and if only one person occupies the Prius.
"The plane can carry 81,890 gallons of fuel and flies 8000 nautical miles, i.e., it burns approximately 10 gallons of fuel per nautical mile or 9 gallons per statute mile. The plane can seat 850 people if configured as an all-economy ship, so the mpg per person is approximately 95 (assuming the plane is fully loaded, which most planes seem to be these days). The Prius gets around 45 mpg in real-world driving and, though it can seat 5, is typically occupied by one person."
He also notes that based on "an analysis of overall per-passenger-mile transportation cost, including capital investment and labor costs," the Boeing 747 was "the cheapest form of transportation period." Cheaper than walking? Bicycling?
Of course, no one is going to take an Airbus for a 20 mile commute to work, and no one is going to drive a Prius from the U.S. to France, so it's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison; but there are times when I am choosing a mode of transportation for a 1,500 mile trip. I have assumed -- or perhaps been told -- that airplanes are the least fuel-efficient way to go. Now I wonder what the mpg for a smaller plane (holding only 150 or 300 passengers, say), going a shorter distance (spending more time as a percentage of the whole trip taxiing, taking off, and landing), might be.
11:02 Posted in consumption , earthcare and environment , finance and business , science and tech , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
13 March 2007
We Have Issues
Thanks, Indexed.
16:46 Posted in community , consumption , earthcare and environment , finance and business , health and medicine , politics, government and law , pop culture , sex , silliness and humour , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
05 March 2007
Geographical Quiz
I was going to call this a time-waster, but perhaps it's really not -- I can think of worse ways to spend 10 minutes than to bring to mind the name of every country in the world.
This quiz asks the user to input the names of all (?) 245 countries in the world in 10 mins. Some territories, colonies and dependencies seem to be listed, like Denmark's Faroe Islands and New Zealand's Tokelau, while others aren't, like The Iles Eparses -- made up of Bassas da India, Europa Island, Glorioso Islands, Juan de Nova Island, and Tromelin Island -- and in fact most of the countries under French jurisdiction. Unfortunately, the official name of the country is needed -- e.g., not Korea, but Democratic People's Republic of Korea; The Gambia, not just Gambia; not Transnistria but Pridnestrovie) -- and spelling counts, which seems unfair when it comes to a name like Djibouti or Azerbaijan. I only knew how to spell Liechtenstein because of Switzerland's recent invasion of it.
11:12 Posted in community , earthcare and environment , lists , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
27 February 2007
What I'm Reading
Back from away. Thanks for the well wishes. I may do a family update later, or not.
Meanwhile, lots of feeds to read when I got home. Some of the best so far:
1. Funny. Sarah Vowell Q&A at Daily Intelligencer. Includes this:
Q: How much is too much to spend on a haircut?
A: I cut my own hair. Not to save money but because I never know what to talk about with the hairdresser. The last time I tried it again it was like an hour of hearing about rollerblading routes.
2. Spiritual. John at Priestcraft on ordinary people living a more eucharistic life. Has a Catholic bent but applicable for people of all faiths. Includes suggestions for making mealtime more eucharistic and following "'the Mass of St John' ... in which you go through some of the prayers of the mass, joining yourself in spirit to the eucharist as it is celebrated around the world."
3. Animal. Sad elephant news. Despite ivory ban, African elephants reportedly being decimated:
"An international effort to halt the illegal killing of elephants for their ivory tusks has all but collapsed in most of Africa, leaving officials and advocates alarmed about the survival of the species. A study released yesterday estimates that as many as 23,000 of the animals were slaughtered last year alone. ...
That's 1 in 12 elephants on the African continent, not counting the elephants in Botswana, which are well-protected and overbred.
"'Almost half of Africa's elephants had been slaughtered in the eight years before the [1989] ban, but now the situation is even more extreme beca