My soapbox

Yeah, I sometimes feel like a broken record.

I've got TV while I'm here in TX and have been watching CNN for the first time in my life. This is the Real News? I've seen 15 minute stories on the new pre-teen vampire flick, in depth reports on OJ Simpson's trial and whole shows about Brad Pitt/Anjelena Jolie. In the meantime? In the meantime... Last week Venezuela had a voter turnout of more than 60% (in a non-presidential election year!) utilizing sane and reliable electronic voting booths. Nigeria held elections which were followed by riots that killed over 400 people. The U.S. again refused to sign a cluster bomb treaty, endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians (cluster bombs victims are 98% civilian, most often children).

How did I get this news? From the Christian Science Monitor, the BBC and Al Jazeera. How does the American public get this news? Mostly, they don't. How can we expect citizens to be involved in their world and their community when they don't even know what's going on?

Logistics

I've been listening to history lessons on my iPod while I run in the mornings (yes, I'm a bit of a dork, but you should all know that by now). They started in Ancient Greece and we're up to the 1800's. I heard a good one on Washington the other day and I've been thinking a lot about him since. His ragtag group of paid militia were getting ready to head home on the 31st. He had one week. It was dark and snowing and he had to ferry 2,400 troops across the river, which took about 12 hours- until 3am. How do you keep 2400 people in place for 12 hours on a cold, dark Christmas eve? Especially ones who were low on morale (1,700 of their comrades were sick or injured and they'd suffered a series of defeats) and wanting to go home to their families?

For some reason, Washington has fallen out of vogue these days as Lincoln's star is (deservedly) rising. Still, Washington was a great man with a strong moral compass. He had little formal schooling, but had a wisdom and intellect that made up for time in a classroom. The little story about the cherry tree may or may not be true, but it illustrates his lifelong integrity well. He did not want to lead the war against the British (he had been a soldier in the British army himself), and later on he did not want to be president. All he wanted was to live in Mt Vernon with his beloved wife and farm his land. However, he recognized his duty and simply did it.

Washington's public farewell address warned against foreign influence in domestic affairs and American meddling in foreign affairs. He counseled friendship and commerce with all nations, but warned against involvement in foreign wars and entering into long-term "entangling" alliances. We could do worse than to revisit his ideals of freedom, personal integrity and diplomacy.

But, mainly, this post is just an excuse to put up that picture. It made me chuckle.

Old school Environmenalism

I've been re-re (and in some cases re-re-re-) reading some of my favorite environmental authors. Authors who I first read 15, 20 years ago and who instilled in me my initial concepts of ecology, sustainability and conservation. Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, John Muir. People who nudged the movement a little more towards the mainstream, a direction it continues to move today.

As with so many "classic" writings (Jane Austin, Emerson, Shakespeare), it's easy to read them once in school, put them on a shelf and avoid them for the rest of your life. Then, years later you pull them down again, on a whim or when you've read everything else in your library. You discover to your shock that the sick and twisted Lady Macbeth actually gives you nightmares. That the love affair between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy is strikingly similar to how you behaved when you were in love at 20. These books are classics not because teachers force them on their literature class, but because they speak to people, they address emotions and circumstances that have not changed in 500 years and will not change for 5000 more.






Annie Dillard changed the face of the environmental movement. Edward Abbey, John Muir and Aldo Leopold founded or inspired the formation of environmental organizations that are still active and influential today (EarthFirst, The Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, respectively). What is easy to forget, what I am thrilled to discover again, is that they were also gifted writers. Their clear-eyed vision of the natural world is inspiring. After reading A Pilgrim At Tinker's Creek in the evenings before bed, I walk around the next morning in a daze, looking at flowers by the side of the road or birds on telephone wires as if I had never seen them before. I read Abbey's travels through the Four Corners and my eyes water and my throat becomes dry with the red dust of the dessert.






It seems environmental writers today are so serious, so overwhelmed with the significance of The Crisis that they have forgotten what it was that they loved about Nature to begin with. They overwhelm the reader with statistics and numbers and policies and they leave out the wonder that can be found in a school of fingerlings or the sight of a clump of bear fur stuck on a broken branch.

I know there's a crisis. I know we have to make change happen or we will loose the fingerling, the bears and the trees. I just don't want to loose my own sense of wonder along the way.

Why the Public is Ignorant

My local paper has a about a quarter of a million subscribers and has received 7 Pulizer Prizes in its 100+ year history. It is the major newspaper for at least 4 surrounding states from Alaska to Northern California. Yesterday's front page? On a day when major bombings occured in Iraq, when national and international election campaigns are ongoing, when the economy is tumbling into crisis? The front page, above the fold headline was about a 17 year old girl who was trying to break the World Record for the Mile Crawl. That's right, she was pictured wrapped in bubble wrap and duct tape, and crawling around a track.



How can we expect the citizenry to be informed about issues when the paper that they read over breakfast refuses to provide important stories? Yes, there is good information out there. Blogs and online newspapers are recognizing the need for quality journalism and are filling the gaps left by the "old media". Unfortunately, finding reliable sources of news and staying updated takes time and effort and besides, why should the newspapers be so willing to turn over their duties as public servants? Our nation was based on the idea that the people have the ability to understand important issues but that understanding requires a media that is willing to provide the facts.

Change or Die

Why is it so hard to change? The Buddha tells us that change is inevitable, that everything is always changing. We are always changing whether we like it or not, so why do we resist change for the better? Why do we allow entropy (laziness) to change us instead of changing ourselves?

Dr. Raphael Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, an annual summit of leaders in the health care, told a recent audience, "A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral." That is, they're sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control. Levey didn't bother to name them, but you don't need an MD to guess what he was talking about: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise

Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University was more explicit He turned the discussion to patients whose heart disease is so severe that they undergo bypass surgery, a traumatic and expensive procedure that can cost more than $100,000 if complications arise. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. The procedures temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives. Around half of the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this so-called restenosis are complex. It's sometimes a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself. But many patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery -- not to mention arrest the course of their disease before it kills them -- by switching to healthier lifestyles. Yet very few do. "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle," Miller said. "And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."



For the last two weeks, I've been shadowing a nutrition counselor. She sees patients who have been referred by their doc and most of her patients are overweight often with diabetes, heart disease and other related conditions. She is giving them advice for change that is cheap, simple, and has no negative side effects. She wants her patients to cut down on sugary treats and high fat foods; eat more fruits and vegetables; and get a little exercise. I'm shocked by the number of patients who refuse to use skim milk in their 20 oz Mocha Latte, or who can't give up their third dessert in the evening. These same patients are the ones who will insist that their doctor give them every last test, medication or procedure up until their last breath, but they won't put in a little effort to loose 10 pounds.

On a similar note, I was listening to a podcaster who I really enjoy (but don't always agree with) and he was discussing an article in his local paper. This article was written by a grad student who was studying climate change. This student's theory was that if we didn't cut our carbon emmisions by 96% in the next 20 years, climate change would become inevitable. Ninety six percent! The podcaster claimed that we couldn't change by that much if we were threatened with a nuclear bomb. He's probably right, but why not? Could you cut your emmisions by 96% if it was a choice between change or die? Could I?

What I Eat and Why I Eat It

"In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka"- Isaac Bashevis Singer




I've been a strict vegetarian for so long now that I rarely talk about it any more. Most folks who know me at all probably don't think about it unless I'm coming over for dinner and they have to decide what to cook. However, just because I don't
talk about it and I'm not in people's face all the time doesn't mean it isn't important to me. In fact, precicely because it comes up for me three times every day (at least) it remains a huge issue for me. I thought I'd take some time to lay out what I see as the most important parts of this decision. I'll write a some thoughts, but I'll include lots of links (if I can figure out how to paste links on here) that have tons of good information. The links I'm posting are just the tip of the internet iceberg. There are tons of great recipe sites, sites on animal rights and farm animal rescue, and lots and lots of sites on environment and health as they relate to vegetarianism.


First, to straighten out some facts which probably don't mean much to the general public. I rarely call myself a vegan because my animal-free lifestyle is limited to my diet. I do not eat milk, eggs, fish, chicken or whatever people call "vegetarian" when in fact they just don't like beef. However, I wear leather shoes and wool sweaters, which true vegans do not. I do this only after examining the alternatives (clothes made from oil-based products) and deciding that animal products are the lesser evil in the big picture. I wish there was a better choice, but until then I just try to minimize my purchases.


Second, and I want to say this right out, being a vegetarian is not that hard. There are an incredible number of excellent quality meat, egg, and dairy subsitutes out there. Making the change is easy. People always say "Man, I really respect you, but I could never do that". This is part of the problem- I'm not some kind of vegetarian monk in it for the benefits of self-deprivation. Anybody can do this. Health care orginazations agree that it is healthy for all ages and activity levels, including pregnant and nursing women or children. There are soy ice creams out there that are better than regular ice cream.





OK, I originally became a vegetarian because of animal rights. I worked in college on a small farm and personally slaughtered chickens and turkeys (although even at the time I was a vegetarian). We also raised pigs, lambs and a few cows for slaughter. Our animals were raised sustainably and kindly and their meat went to the college cafeteria. Still, the idea of raising an animal for the purpose of killing it seemed wrong to me. In reality, most animals are raised in horrific conditions. Don't fool yourself that buying organic, range free eggs makes it better. Those labels literally mean nothing. Animals are sentient beings and they feel pain when their beaks are cut off or when they are made to stand all day on concrete floors or when they are ravaged by their neighbors in crowded conditions. These atrocities happen in "humane" farmyards just as they do in factory farms.
Check out Gary Francione's website. He's a law professor at Rutgers who specializes in animal rights. His big issue is the idea of "animal welfare"- the mistaken idea that it's better to eat free range/range free meat and eggs.
Also Compassion Over Killing, which has informational ads suitable for all ages
The Meatrix an award-winning series of short films a la the Matrix
Finally, Earthlings, which is the most powerful animal rights film I've ever seen. Check out the link, and then buy the DVD.


The second reason I am a vegetarian is environmental. The agriculture indusry has a major impact on water and land use as well as pollution especially in the form of runoff into groundwater and streams. Fishing, a major industry where I live, is raping the oceans. By switching from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet, you'll make more impact on the environment that if you swapped your Hummer for a Prius.
Six Arguments for a Greener Diet has bite sized information including fun things like calculating the environmental impact from your weekly diet and a mini-tour of a farm
Less cute, and more dense is the UN report on the environmental impact of livestock. You can download the whole report there
Another dense report from the UN is on fisheries and can be found here



The third and final reason I don't eat meat is for health reasons. As a health care professional, I see the results of our typical American diet every day in diagnoses of obesity, diabetes, colon cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, gall bladder disease, osteoporosis... A vegetarian diet can't cure every disease, but I feel strongly that every person would benefit from a vegetarian diet. Often people try going veg and quit because they felt tired or weak. These people never hesitate to share this experience whenever I mention that I am a vegetarian. I stand by my earlier statement that it's easy to be a vegetarian, but you do have to put a little thought into it, especially when you're beginning. You can't just cut animal products out of your diet and replace them with potato chips and apple juice.
About dot com has a decent introduction to this subject, with some good links including the vegetarian food pyramid put out by the USDA


One quick final note on nutrition. Protein is the big buzz word these days, especially thanks to Dr Atkins (don't get me started on the Atkin's diet). The second most common response I get after people express their misplaced admiration is to ask where I get my protein. In fact, the US RDA for an average man is 52g and 44g for a woman (international recomendations are 37g for a man and 29g for a woman. I wonder why Americans need more protein than Italians). Anyway, that amount of protein is easily obtained- I get 12-15g just by eating cereal with soy milk for breakfast. A PB&J on whole wheat bread for lunch bumps you up over 20. Plant based protein is high quality and digestable and adequate even for elite atheletes. On the other hand, excess protein is directly related to osteoporosis, liver disfunction, immune problems and kidney disease.



If you're interested in any or all of these issues, consider switching to a vegetarian diet. If you're nervous about how to start, the best way is to choose one day a week or one meal a day and make the change. This is much more productive than switching to organic, range free products. Just making your lunch vegetarian can be a huge impact on the enviroment, as the PB&J campaign advocates.

"When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. It is inconsistent. I can never accept inconsistency or injustice. Even if it comes from God. If there would come a voice from God saying, "I'm against vegetarianism!" I would say, "Well, I am for it!" This is how strongly I feel in this regard."- Singer again

A Time To Read

My schedule has changed and I find myself with more free time than I've had in recent memory. Having spent the last 15 years of my life without a television, I cannot seem to work up an interest in my new roommate's favorite programs so I tried turning my attention to books. I can't remember the last time I was able to keep up with contemporary fiction and I was excited to settle in to some stories that I've heard so much about lately.

At the airport bookstore I picked up two recent Pulitzer Prize winners- The Road and Middlesex- and the bestseller The Lovely Bones (the store had a buy 2, get 1 free sale going on at the time). I was utterly mystified. While Middlesex was at least entertaining, the other two were so bad that I could hardly get through them, I found myself skimming over long sections of prose, just to get the pain of reading over more quickly.

The Road was a typical dystopian post-apocalypse scenario with the catch here being- wait for it-- they don't specifically say that the conditions were caused by a nuclear explosion. Thus, we don't know for certain what caused the current situation- WWIII? A virulent disease? Space aliens? Do we care? Not really. Oh, and also, he doesn't use quotation marks. If you've seen Mad Max, you can guess not only the major plot elements but also probably a few of the more important scenes.

The Lovely Bones, while marketed as adult literature, is actually a novel written for teenaged girls. Complete with boys and acne and a parental divorce. Yes, the main character is dead, but once you get over that conceit the book is full of mawkish characters and tedious episodes of suburban life.

Is this the kind of tripe people want to read? At least Middlesex contains complicated characters and intricate plot twists. Personally, I thought the book dragged a bit in the last third, but perhaps I was just still reeling from the two previous episodes of literary bludgeoning that I'd just experienced.

Thankfully, I also came upon The Solitudes, by John Crowley. This is a re-release of a novel that was originally published in 1987 as the first of a four part cycle called Aegypt. This is not the first work by Crowley that I've read- his novel Little, Big is one of my favorites, and his collection of short novels called Otherwise has some real gems- but it does not disappoint. Crowley is a sci-fi fantasy writer- Little, Big won the prestigious World Fantasy Award for best novel- which is not a genre that I usually enjoy. Still, it's not the fantastic that draws me to him, but the purity of his writing. His novels are dense with history and I seem to spend an equal amount of time with Wikipedia as I do with the book itself. Little, Big takes place in present day upstate New York, but the 12th century German King Barbarossa plays a major role. Here in the solitudes we follow the young professor Pierce Moffet through the tumultuous 70's. Woven throughout this modern tale is the story of the 15th century featuring mathematician/astrologer John Dee, Italian monk and martyr Geordano Bruno, and a young struggling actor named Will Shakespeare.

Check out this exerpt. The character was unexpectedly waylaid (due to a mechanical failure on a greyhound bus) on a trip from NYC to a small college in upstate New York. He ended up spending the night in a small town, missing an interview but starting something more important:

"He would think of it often, in different ways and in different contexts; he had already begun to think of it in the frigid airless bus passing away. And- on city streets, still violent with summer, foul with loathsome summer; in his tower apartment, grown too large now as the suit of a wasted strveling; or when steeling himself for the task he now knew lay ahead- he would sometimes feel those scenes he had visted lying just behind him, a pool of golden light, so close that he was uncertain just how he had traveled from there to here: to here where he supposed he must now be for good, or as nearly for good as made no difference.

Unfortunately, The Solitudes is not really a stand-alone novel but truly the introduction of the series. Fortunately, the following three books are available, the final fourth novel having only been published in 2007. Unfortunately, I hear the rest of the story does not maintain the high standards set by this one. I'm betting they're better than The Lovely Bones, though.

Ode to Corvidae

Where I am currently (temorporarily) living, they've got Magpies, Steller's Jays and Crows. I grew up with Steller's Jays- a pair of them nested outside my bedroom window all through high school and they acted as my 5 o'clock alarm. Here, they come right down to the back porch and scold the cat through the glass door. She ate their hatchlings this summer, and I'm convinced that, while they probably don't understand the details, they remember a greivous offense. Steller's Jays are named after one of my favorite naturlists, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who lived in the first half of the 18th century and left his name on a long list of animals in Eastern Russia and Western North America. His namesakes include the Steller Sea Cow (a now extinct 25' long 10 ton manatee-like creature that lived in the Behring Sea), the Steller Sea Lion (weighing in at 3 tons, they are the largest eared seal, found from Russia along Alaska to central California), the Steller Sea Eagle (the world's heaviest bird at 15-20lbs, found in Russia and Japan), Steller's Eider (a sea duck found in Russia and Alaska), Cryptochiton stelleri, the Gumboot Chiton (a giant- 13"- lumpy looking mullosc found along the shores of the Northern Pacific), and Artemisia stelleriana, a species of wormwood.

Anyway, back to the corvids. We had American Crows where I grew up as well, and they were a common sight by the side of the road or in parks and beaches. One time my dog caught a crow in the back yard. We were sitting in the living room and suddenly realized the sky was black with hundreds of crows (a "murder" of crows). There was the dog, crouched in the middle of the yard with an uninjured bird in her paws. She was frozen in fear. We called her in the house and eventually the birds dispersed. I have never seen so many birds at one time and I have no doubt they they would have soon begun to attack her and the results would not have been pretty.

They've got magpies here too- a crow sized bird and the prettiest corvid I've seen with their iridescent green tails and flashing wings. I've got no other experience with magpies, but they share the corvid wit and bravery, strutting along the street, throwing sidelong glances at cars and pedestrians.


My favorite of the corvids is the Common Raven. People often don't understand the difference between ravens and crows, and certainly from a distance they both simply look like a black bird. However up close or in comparison, the differences are striking. A mature Common Raven is between 22 to 27" in length, with a wingspan of 45 to 51"! Compare this to the crow which is 16-21" with a wingspan of 33-39". This is like mistaking a hawk with a pigeon. The raven's beak is much heavier and thicker than a crows as well. Ravens nest in groups (an "unkindness" or a "terror" of ravens) of up to 800 birds and are monogamous, sometimes for life. They have over 50 distinct vocalizations, sounding at various times like a gurgling toilet or a purring cat.



To the Native Americans where I live, Raven is a a trickster who brought fire to man and hung the sun and moon in the sky, he created lakes and rivers and taught man many tricks and skills for surviving in an unforgiving environment. However, in other cultures, raven is unmistakebly associated with evil. During the military invasions and plagues throughout Europe in earlier centuries, the raven dined on human corpses, and they apparently loitered near the sites designated for human executions. The word “ravenstone” means a place of execution in old English. The Germans have a word, “rabenaas,” meaning raven's carrion, denoting a person who should be hanged.


Mythology aside, corvids are certainly one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. Based on a brain-to-body ration, corvid brains are equal in size to a chimp or a dolphin and only slightly smaller than a human's. While observers have often seen crows using tools to accomplish tasks, a recent study found that crows can use multiple tools for complex jobs. Their ability to imagine possibilities and draw conclusions is apparently more highly developed than apes.

Like so many things in life, our familiarity with corvids has bred comtempt. We are so used to seeing crows at the dump or jays raiding the birdfeeder that we rarely even notice them anymore. Then, when you're least expecting it, a raven will fly right over your head, the beat of his wings heavy in your ears. You will be drinking your morning coffee and glance out the kitchen window to find the bright black eye of a magpie, fascinated with your ritual. Don't forget that we share this life with other creatures and we do not know what goes on behind their gaze. Don't fall into the trap of believing that there is nothing going on outside our walls.

Walking home

Alces alces gigas, the Alaskan race of moose is the largest of all moose types- he stands 6.5' at the shoulder and can have antlers that span 6' across. Saw this fellow on the way home one day.

From Wikipedia:
A moose's body structure, with a large heavy body suspended on long spindly legs, makes these animals particularly dangerous when hit by motor vehicles. Such collisions are often fatal for both the moose and motorist. This has led to the development of a vehicle test in Scandinavia referred to as the "moose test" (Älgtest in Swedish, Elch Test in German). The term was invented by the Swedish motor magazine "Teknikens värld" for a test where the tested car needs to make a sharp S-turn at high speed. The term "moose test" came to common knowledge when Mercedes A-klasse badly failed the test and turned over. German reporters didn't see the relevance of the test, and the testers replied that that kind of maneuver was important when trying to avoid collisions with moose. The test was not referred to as moose test in Sweden prior to this incident, but simply as an evasion manoeuver test, intended to test the car's ability to perform an evasive manoeuver to avoid colliding with any obstacle suddenly occurring on the road. However, since the Swedish journalist talking to the German press didn't know what "evasive manoeuver test" would be called in German, he simply called it "Elch test" - which quickly spread in German media and then stuck. Generally, upon impact the bumper of the car will break the moose's legs. The main body of the moose will then collide with the windshield, often with disastrous effect to both motorist and animal. In a collision of this nature, a car's airbags may not deploy or be of much use if they do