Tell It Like It Is

Surveillance.

If you do not remember or have never heard of the Yippies, let me explain. The Yippies were a social and political change group in the 1960's famous for shutting down Wall Street, running a pig for president, and other acts of radical protest. They were thinkers, truth tellers, activists, and pacifists. Abby Hoffman and his American flag pants is probably the best-known part of the Yippies, but their work and modern legacy hardly begins or ends with him. Judy Gumbo, one of the original Yippies and co-author of The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, has emerged as an important voice in the 21st century debate over privacy, spying, and the power of government. Gumbo's writing about the 60's is not nostalgic but provocative, underscoring the need to face historical truth, and speak with clarity and honesty about the U.S. government, free speech, and the consequences of fighting for social change. Fifty years later is a great time to evaluate what we did and did not learn and accomplish in the 60's, perhaps it will help us find our way.

To read her important blog, Yippie Girl:
http://yippiegirl.com/judy-gumbo/bugged.html

Photo:
http://societeperrier.com/blog/digital-museums-the-15-best-collections-on-tumblr/

Out of Soweto

Apartheid.

Nelson Mandela may or may not be on his death bed, but the discussion of his legacy and the huge undertaking of forging ahead without him has already begun.  From 1948 to 1994 South Africa was under a government-run system of racial segregation rooted in colonialism and the slave trade.  In the 1990's Nelson Mandela was elected president and an era of relative peace began.  However, for all that has been done to abolish apartheid, an entrenched system of economic injustice and personally held racism still remains.  What will happen to the people of South Africa without their iconic leader?  Will they be able to move forward with grace and dignity or will they descend, as so often happens when leadership changes into in fighting and lack of vision?  Let us hope that Mandela has had the wisdom to be clear about his vision for the future and has left a legacy of like-minded and well-regarded friends and colleagues in his stead.

With the Fishes

Sleeper.

Yesterday, demonstrating an astoninishing lack of ability to prioritize with regards to public safety or funds, the FBI spent an entire day searching an abandoned field outside Detroit for the body of Jimmy Hoffa.  Oddly, they found nothing.  Meanwhile, the FBI's own "Crime Clock" provided us with this information:

A violent crime occurs in the United States every 25.3 seconds

There is a murder every 35.6 seconds

A forcible rape occurs every 6.2 seconds

A robbery occurs every 1.4 seconds

But the Jimmy Hoffa thing, it's really pressing, you know?

Resources/Photograph:

FBI Crime Clock

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/crime-clock

Image

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/06/17/investigators-dig-up-michigan-field-in-search-for-jimmy-hoffa-remains/

Work a Day

Occupied.

While much attention is paid to the unemployment rate, which has been slowly decreasing in recent months, very little thought is given to the employment rate, which has not increased and remains at levels closer to that of 1983 than the pre-2008 economic boon.  The unemployment rate is mired in it's own convoluted mechanics.  It only looks at people actively seeking employment in the last four weeks and it neglects the partially and underemployed as well as the disenfranchised.  The employment rate though, when you eliminate the effects of retirement by focusing on 24 to 54 age range, becomes a much better descriptor of the state of occupation in the US population.  

What the approximately 75 percent employment rate tells us is that one in every four American adults who could and should be a productive part of the workforce is idle.  I think this has a lot to do with the devaluation of trade and craft work, the lack of willingness of the younger workers to take manual labor jobs, and an increasing cultural trend towards laziness.  It likely also has a lot to do with inadequate education, government subsidies that have no employment requirements, deeply rooted and institutionalized discrimination against minorities, women, the alter-abled, and anyone with a criminal history.

I cannot help but notice, however, that at least anecdotally, there are a lot of competent, educated, and employable people out there that are just not doing anything.  I wonder at this.  I struggle to imagine an idle life, not having to be anywhere or do anything but also not contributing to the world around me.  I wonder about boredom, self esteem, and how these people face the idea of their own futures.  I struggle to imagine a life without occupation and fail to relate to anything these able mind and bodied people have to say about politics, social issues, policy, or just about anything else. 

I believe that the employment crisis is a primary indicator of our cultural unwellness.  We are a country built on hard work, it is time to return to that ethic.  You are not too good for that job.  Waiting for a better offer is not a good idea.  The time is right now.  Get up.  Get sorted.  Get moving.  Life is in the doing.

References/Photograph:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/06/news/economy/employment-rate/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

http://www.thejrexperiment.com/2013/04/23/lazy-programing-reddits-xavier-mendel/lazy-2/

The War Dead

Memorial.

While it may be a lauded American tradition to take to the woods with our RV's, barbecues, and beer over the Memorial Day weekend, this year, according to the AAA three percent less of us actually did so.  Perhaps it was the weather, the high price of gas, or simply our 21st Century disconnect from the outdoors, but AAA was right, the campgrounds were ghost towns this weekend.  What were hopping though, were the  postage-stamp sized cemetery's of our rural communities.  This weekend those tiny memorials overflowed with blooms, family's, and babes in arms being taught to pay their respects.  I saw clutches of older men in lawn chairs circling the grave site of a lost war buddy and mothers and daughters standing silent at the foot of their solider husbands and fathers.  

We are a military-driven industrial complex.  For whatever reasons we have, as a culture, become decidedly and increasingly violent in our approach to globalization and the procurement and protection of our way of life.  We pay for these things in people.

The American Military War Dead:

Major U.S. War Casualties	U.S. Deaths	Wounded	Date
Iraq War	4,800	31,965	2003 – 2011
Afghanistan	1,803	9,971	2001 – Present
Gulf War	258	849	1990 – 1991
Vietnam War	58,209	153,303	1955 – 1975
Korean War	36,516	92,134	1950 – 1953
World War II	405,399	670,846	1941 – 1945
World War I	116,516	204,002	1917 – 1918
Civil War	625,000	281,881	1861 – 1865
American Revolutionary War	25,000	25,000	1775 – 1783
All U.S. Conflict Casualites	U.S Deaths	Wounded	Missing
Grand Total	1,343,812	1,529,230	38,159

References/Photograph:

 http://www.statisticbrain.com/u-s-war-death-statistics/

http://historyofeconomics.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/american-exceptionalism/

Camper Van

Pop.

My father refuses to even think about getting an RV or camper of any kind, regardless of how much he might enjoy himself with it, because he thinks that only Republicans use RVs.  I myself should hate RVs because I come from a long tradition of outdoors roughing it types that preach about sleeping on bare ground and haul our own waste for miles through the back country.  But I am getting old and where I was once able to sleep in comfort in my tent I now just really want an air mattress.  In reality, I do not think that I was ever really comfortable, I think that I was just young and tough and determined not to look like I could not handle it.  Funny how we can let a stereotypes limit even such simple things as comfort and recreation.  When really, who cares?

Photograph Courtesy of:

http://www.refinery29.com/5242

Walk On By

Homeless.

The baby boomer generation is growing old; all of them; all at the same time.  The unanticipated consequences of the boom, which for the first few decades of their lives were a boon to the economy, have shifted.  Instead of a country over flowing with young, healthy workers, we are a country of elders.  And they are in bad shape.  The boomers have high rates of cancer and obesity, they lost much of their wealth in the recent recession, and are increasingly dependent on social programs that are dwindling and under sequester.

They are also increasingly homeless.  According to a report by NPR, the average age of a homeless person in the United States is 47.  Life on the streets is hard, unsafe, physically demanding, and exposed to the elements.  Life expectancy is short.  

Homelessness is growing.  These are our elderly, our veterans, our mentally ill, and our most unfortunate.  Try to remember that the true face of homelessness is not standing, drug-ridden at the corner with a sign asking for money to help them score, but hidden in the edges of our view, doorways, libraries, clinics, taking up what small space they can.  

Try not to look away.  Let's try to start seeing homelessness before we look around and find that we have neglected an entire generation, left them on the ice.  Let's keep good care of our elders.

To Locate a Homeless Shelter Near You:

http://www.homelessshelterdirectory.org/

References/Resources:

NPR's recent story on homelessness and aging in America:

http://www.npr.org/2013/03/13/173463462/aging-homeless-face-more-health-issues-early-death

Photo Courtesy of:

http://www.empowernetwork.com/dianed/photographer-lynn-blodgett-executive-vp-of-xerox-to-debut-portfolios-at-art-basel-first-time-for-sale-to-the-public/

By the Numbers

Population

If you have not looked at population numbers for the countries of the world lately, or ever, it is time. A simple glance at the numbers illuminates all sorts of things about US foreign policy, why we go to war and where, and why we hear about some countries more than others.  It also shatters a lot of our preconceived notions about social, political, and economic dominance, our own self-import, and the idea that land mass has anything to do with population.  The top 15:

1. China

2. India

3. United States

4. Indonesia

5. Brazil

6. Pakistan

7. Bangladesh

8.  Nigeria

9. Russia

10. Japan

11. Mexico

12. Phillipines

13.Vietnam 

14. Germany

15. Ethiopia

These are not predominantly Western or Christian countries.  Many of them have incredibly high population densities and incredibly low standards of living.  They have histories riddled with militarism, questionable human rights ethics, and war.  Ourselves included.  Two of them are African nations, which I only mention because of the American tendency to justify part of our ignorance of the African continent with the false belief that few people live there.  

Sometimes numbers speak for themselves.  Think about this list the next time you listen to or watch the news.  Think about it when looking at the kinds of stories that get covered, and especially those that get ignored or obscured.  Decide for yourself what you should be paying attention to.  

Start with the numbers.

Real Time Counters:

http://www.worldometers.info/

References:

World Populations by Country:

http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/populations/ctypopls.htm

Image courtesy of:

http://www.ethiojps.org/PopulationMaps.html

A First Lady

Birdie.

Ladybird Johnson was a reluctant and unexpected first lady.  She was unsure of her abilities as a public speaker, and aware of her place well within the shadow of Jacqueline Kennedy.  She had an unpopular husband known best for ushering us into the Vietnam era and she stepped into her role as first lady under a cloud of public grief that would mark the beginning of decades of disillusionment and social change.  She was commonly referred to as  "wife in capital letters".  She wore a lot of yellow.

But. She also played an important role in the formation and implementation of the Headstart program, which today services more than 22 million children nationwide and was essential to the formation of the Redwoods National Park.   

We assume we know people, what they stand for, what they do, and what's important to them.  That Ladybird Johnson was one of the nation's early environmentalists may surprise us speaks to our tendency to pigeonhole people, and judge them based on their most public selves.  That she so quietly accomplished so much speaks to her ability to remain true to herself, regardless of her public obligations and personal challenges.

Do what you love.  Do what's important. You never know what you might accomplish.

References/Links:

To visit the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center Website:

 http://www.wildflower.org/ladybird/

Image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Bird_Johnson

The PBS Biography of Ladybird:

http://www.pbs.org/ladybird/

Head Start:

http://www.nhsa.org/

Heavy Oil

Pipeline.

The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 and is the oldest grassroots environmental organization in the United States.  Founded by John Muir, the mission the Sierra Club is to "do something for wildness and make the mountains glad."  the Sierra Club has a reputation for being accessible to people from all points of view and walks of life and are typically considered mainstream in their methodology, preferring education, resource sharing, and lobbying over protest or contention.  The club was essential to the formation of the National Parks Service, the inclusion of the Grand Teton area as a National Park, the addition of over 45,000 acres of wilderness to the Olympics National Park, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

This week, for the first time in its 120 year history, The Sierra Club participated in a direct action protest involving civil disobedience   48 prominent environmentalists, including the executive director of the Sierra Club were arrested after blocking the main gate of the White House in an effort to draw attention to their concerns regarding the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.  Proposed pipeline would transport oil from the tar pits of Canada to the Gulf Coast of the United States.   

This is not a typical pipeline debate.  This is not about habitat destruction or road-less areas or even the push away from fossil fuels.  This is a simple mass balance problem. Tar sand oil produces significantly higher emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than other forms of crude oil.  The proposed pipeline would create a dependence on this dirty kind of oil that would be the equivalent of adding over 6 million cars to the road.  In an era of fuel economy and climate change such a step, taken largely to protect national security interests and our own, obviously outdated way of life clearly runs counter to our long term well-being.

It speaks volumes that after over a century an organization that has worked so hard to mainstream itself and distance itself from the radical left in order to gain widespread support and credibility has chosen to use such bold tactics.  These are not hippies or tree huggers, these are business people, political thinkers, policy makers, and scientists; and they know that once the pipeline is built, we will use it.

We have a unique opportunity to fix an environmental problem before we create it.  Do something.

To email President Barack Obama:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments

Like what you are reading?  Then support the Kickstarter for my book Girl Gone Wild- On Being a Woman in the Wilderness.  Thanks!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1731666363/girl-gone-wild-a-guide-to-being-a-woman-outside?ref=city

"Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains." 
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 235.

References/Links:

The Sierra Clubs Website:

http://www.sierraclub.org/

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/13/171943410/dozens-including-sierra-club-director-arrested-at-white-house-keystone-protest

http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/favorite_quotations.aspx

http://priceofoil.org/2013/01/17/petroleum-coke-the-coal-hiding-in-the-tar-sands/

Photo of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt riding in Yosemite 1903:

http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/media_detail/260/

Gag Order

unacceptable.

I want to talk about torture and I don’t want to talk about torture. I am at a loss to understand how any group of people can possibly endorse, legalize, or justify the brutal and vivid mistreatment of anyone, regardless of perceived threat or political climate. Let me be clear, I am not entering into a discussion or debate regarding this issue. I am not entertaining the possibility of sleep deprivation, the withholding of food, temperature extremes, stress positions or water boarding being acceptable behavior. Ever. There are no grey areas. There are no excuses. Every one of us knows cruelty when we see it. We are taught as children that violence is neither a solution to conflict nor a means to our desired ends. It is unacceptable for us to forget or fail to heed this lesson as adults.

Our detainees, prisoners, whatever we are calling them are people. They have souls. And they are in our care. We can make no real progress towards the formation of a peaceful, compassionate, and sustainable society while we, through our complacency and silence, endorse torture. We have to stop this, and we have to stop it now.

Write to a member of congress, the president, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, let them know that Americans believe in compassionate justice, that this is not how we choose to be represented in the world.

For a Congressional Directory:
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

To Email Barack Obama:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

I tried to find an email address or contact information for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but couldn’t. Go Figure.

Photograph Courtesy of :
http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/gallery_images/0812/0000/0258/washday_005_mid.jpg

A Walk In The Woods

saunterer.

A long weekend and the beginning of summer do a lot to remind us to go outside, breath the fresh air, listen to the birds, stretch our legs, and experience wildness. I think it’s important, amid the beer, fireworks, weenie roasts, and recreational vehicles that mark the American camping experience, to make sure that we do just that, stretch our legs and experience wildness. It’s not often anymore that the majority of us find ourselves away from the crush of noise, information, and development that comes with “civilized society”, and I think our distance from the wild plays a key role in our health and well-being, and our decision making as a people. Distancing ourselves from the wild is part of why we are able to devalue the environment, and that devaluation reveals itself in our politics, policies, and way of life. It allows us to waste resources, diminish habitat, allow entire species to go extinct, and engineer our bodies and our food.

I feel at my most engaged in the environment when walking through it. A walk in the wilderness does more to ease my mind, body, and soul than almost anything else. And it reminds me, in a tangible and profound way, that I am connected to this place, this world, this land, that it sustains me. Thoreau, in his 1862 essay, Walking, had this to say about the value of a walk in the woods, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land… They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”

We can make no progress in the improvement of our daily lives, in the fostering of health, community, sustainability, or peace, until we acknowledge and embrace our connection to the wilderness. Take a first step, take a walk.

To read the full text of Thoreau’s Walking:
http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html

To Read Emerson’s Nature:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html#Chapter%20I

Photo courtesy of:
http://dinabloomphoto.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/edith.jpg

Playing For Change

allegro.

Playing for Change is an organization dedicated to the creation and propagation of peace through shared humanity and aesthetics, the playing of music. More specifically, Playing for Change is an international collective of musicians that play benefit concerts for and build music and art schools in impoverished communities. The project is rooted in the belief that music is an equalizer, a common thread that allows people to transcend distance and boundaries, be they political, economic, cultural, or ideological, that music is a path to peace. They illustrate this by producing mosaic videos of musicians from around the world playing the same song, somehow together, as a one-world choir, despite the distance. And they seem to play straight up into heaven, and right through to your soul.

They have a point. Music unites.

Watch and Listen:
http://www.playingforchange.com/episodes

Participate:
http://www.playingforchange.com/participate

Let Them Eat Cake

agroterrorism.

There are a lot of great, albeit traditionally left-winged reasons to eat locally. Eating locally supports small family owned farms and food producers, decreases the carbon footprint of your meals, discourages industrialization of farming practices and therefore the prevalence of pesticides and herbicides, supports your local economy, increases community sustainability, decreases dependence on the migrant workforce and foreign energy sources, and generally results in healthier meals and fresher/tastier food on your table. And we wonder why more conservatives haven’t hopped onto this bandwagon.

But there are a couple of reasons for eating locally that the conservative right can get behind. Eating locally is the best protection against food-related outbreaks of illness and diesease and eating locally is the best way to combat agroterrorism. That’s right, agroterrorism, the malicious use of plant or animal pathogens to cause devastating disease in the food supply.

In 2006 Michael Pollan wrote an article for the New York Times discussing the role of industrialization in the prevalence of food-related outbreaks. While his article was written in the context of a spinach-related E coli outbreak, the recent problems with the peanut industry and the worldwide outbreak of swine flu have brought the issue back into focus. In his article, Pollan argues that the centralization of food processing and distribution centers leads to more frequent and widespread issues of infection and contamination, whereas food grown, processed, and distributed locally decreases the reach of food-related outbreaks and allows for faster and more efficient identification of sources and solutions to food-based illnesses. Pollan further goes on to note that when Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” This sentiment was reiterated by the G.AO. in its 2003 Bioterrorism report to Congress, “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry make them vulnerable to attack.” And they’re right, in 2006 eighty percent of beef in the United States was slaughtered by four companies and seventy-five percent of all precut salads were processed by only two companies. The implications of these numbers when viewed in the context of the spread of disease and our current healthcare crisis is terrifying. And the proof, at least lately, is in the peanut butter.

What this means is that food consciousness is no longer the proprietary holding of the liberal left, but a necessary and immediate change that must be made in the daily lives of ordinary citizens for the protection of public health and safety. Take back your health from the hands of industry, eat locally, and with compassion.


To read Michael Pollans article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/magazine/15wwln_lede.html

For more information on farmers markets, eating locally, and CSA food shares:
http://www.localharvest.org/
http://100milediet.org/
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/

A Gay Affair

pro-love.

Yesterday Maine became the fifth state, following Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and Massachusetts, to legalize same sex marriage. This decision followed in the footsteps of several other brave and groundbreaking states that are legalizing same sex marriage and providing civil rights protections for homosexuals based on voter mandates, Supreme Court decisions, and legislative bills. As one of the last groups to be recognized as human beings and therefore deserving of the same basic rights provided to the rest of us, the gay community must be overjoyed. As should the rest of us, since the withholding or erosion of civil rights in any form threatens the rights of us all. This is cause for great celebration, and I take it as a significant indicator that we as a country are beginning to remember that we value things like freedom and equality, not for some, but for everyone.

Philosophically, in my mind the issue comes down to this, are you pro-love or anti-love? In a pro-love world, the kind I optimistically believe I live in, we are all allowed to bond ourselves to whomever we choose. If we are brave enough to commit our lives to that person, then more power to us, as most people can attest, relationships, in any form, but particularly long-term, loving, life-sharing relationships are hard work. I like to think that we are all capable of recognizing that the choice of who we share our lives with has less to do with sex than with compatibility, mutual respect, and friendship. Good things come from people sharing their lives with one another, and we should encourage and celebrate it, even if it doesn’t fit our own image of a life union. Be a part of the revolution and ask someone today, are you pro-love?

Risky Business

greed.

I am not a businessman. I’m not playing with gender here, because I’m not a businesswoman either, and even if I were, the last six months have proven to me that it’s being a businessman that really counts. I have never claimed to be a businessman, nor do I have any desire to be so, but in my line of work, being as tied as it is to the construction industry, there is an essential and growing need to “do business”. In fact, I, as I am nearly daily reminded by my boss, have no degree or advanced coursework in business. Aside from being reasonably good at what I do and able to write an articulate sentence and perform elementary math functions, I am almost wholly unqualified for business. However, being a geologist, this is not something that has typically been a problem. Until recently.

The recent economic crisis has left my place of work a barren wasteland of empty cubicles and lost bids. The men that remain are largely shells of their former selves, clearly having spent most or all of their adult lives defining themselves by their jobs and paychecks, they are now leading obvious lives of quiet desperation. What remains, before we’ve even seen signs of recovery, are desperate men clinging to the tenants of “business” and convinced that if they proceed exactly as they have in the past, using the same business models, something will change. By necessity, my education in “business” has been rapid.

What I’ve largely learned is this, honesty is not important, not to clients, but particularly not to staff. Neither is humanity nor compassion, employee loyalty is only valued in good times, in bad times, just cut them loose. Preserve, above all else, the profit margin for the owners and the inflated salaries of management. Claiming to be right is more important than actually being right, and the only people who are every really right are the ones with the least actual knowledge of the subject. Salaried and exempt employment in hard times is license to take over the lives of your employees, how about say, going to Texas, unexpectedly, with the flu, for many weeks, to work 90 hours a week and only be paid for forty? Hey, you don’t want to do it we’ll find someone more desperate than you who will.

They say in hard times you see peoples true colors, but in truth, with business there’s only two colors, red, and black. And as far as I can tell, real “businessmen” will do whatever it takes to stay in the black, as long as it poses no threat to their egos, salaries, or established operating procedures. And we wonder how we arrived to the place in which we find ourselves.

I invite everyone to take a moment to inventory your value system, and look hard at what really motivates your decisions and the way you treat the people that you work with and those that work for you. If it’s your mortgage, your car payment, the lifestyle to which you’ve grown accustomed, or professional ego, then the current economic crisis offers you an opportunity to tap out of the fight, implement a new business model, live under a new paradigm. It’s the only path we have to a sustainable economy.

Photograph courtesy of :
http://www.photomediacenter.org/images/Businessmen.jpg

Bad Medicine

patience.

In the midst of the growing national debate on health care reform, I have been a patient. I participate in two diametrically opposed health care systems. Traditional western medicine, where my appointment is cancelled and I'm charged a fee if I'm late while I frequently wait up to two hours to be seen for my appointment, and non-traditional/naturopathic healing, where I usually can just call and talk to my health care professional in person, and I often don't even need to be seen in person. I understand that both sides bring things of value to medicine. But only one of them allows me to retain my humanity.

I can't even bring myself to summarize the statistics I have in front of me regarding the state of medical care in the United States. But we all know, without the numbers or references, we all know that we pay more for a less efficient or effective system than almost any industrialized nation in the world. We also know that we're fat and getting fatter, and suffering the health repercussions. We know that our health care system is entrenched in the treatment of symptoms rather than causes, and that we are more likely to demand a prescription than suck it up and make a lifestyle change. We know that the current system values the prolonging of life far beyond the preservation of quality of life. And we all know, that even giving its failings, it's the only system we have fiscally available to us. And we still can't afford it.

So we need to go off the grid. All of us. Before our collective health and well-being goes the way of climate change, way too little, way too late. There's too much money invested in the "western system" to expect tangible and substantive changes, the ones that will make us happier and healthier, in our lifetimes. So, make the lifestyle changes you need to make to be a healthier person. Eat whole foods, that you prepare yourself. Exercise. Get massages instead of muscle relaxants, eat garlic instead of taking antibiotics. Meditate. Get a naturopath, they are true healers. Laugh. Take care of your body, it's the only vessel you're given.

A Nice Ride

spotted.

For the last few months there has been ongoing debate over a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decision to neither designate critical habitat nor develop a recovery plan for the endangered jaguar. A recent ruling by U.S. District Judge John Roll said the agency did not use the best scientific evidence available in deciding that critical habitat for the jaguar was "not prudent" because Fish and Wildlife contended that its main threat in the United States was from being hunted, not from lack of habitat.

Jaguars once roamed from the southern tip of South America north to the region surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border. Today significant numbers of jaguars are found only in remote regions of South and Central America—particularly in the Amazon basin. In fact, of the three to five jaguars believed to still spend any portion of their time within the United States, only one is considered to have the majority of its habitat in the U.S.

That cat, known as Macho B, may have been the oldest know jaguar in the world.

On March 2, the Arizona Game and Fish Department resolved the issue independent of the legal system. Macho B was captured on Feb. 18 in a snare placed by the Arizona Game and Fish Department in an area outside Tuscon. The cat, which was described in field reports as healthy and robust, was tranquilized, equipped with a radio-tracking collar, and released.

Macho B was recaptured on March 2 after wildlife personnel reportedly feared that it might be in poor health. It was transported to the Phoenix Zoo, where a veterinarian said it had irreversible kidney failure and was euthanized the same day.

The federal government has opened a criminal investigation into the capture and death of Macho B amid accusations that a biologist working for the state illegally baited a trap to attract the cat.
The tragedy in this is that we will now spend more in legal fees, press coverage, and public outrage and debate far more resources than would have been allocated to the protection of critical habitat in the first place. And all the noise and outrage in the world will do nothing to help the few remaining jaguars whose range extends into the United States. Lets hope that what we learn from this is that we can’t afford to wait, or rather, the species with whom we share our home cannot afford for us to wait. Habitat protection, hunting restrictions, and recovery plans are crucial to maintaining biodiversity and our own quality of life. Do something.

To read the endangered species act:
http://www.fws.gov/laws/lawsdigest/ESACT.html

To take action:
http://www.worldwildlife.org/
http://www.nrdc.org/
http://www.wildlifeimages.org/


References:http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/jaguar.html
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/02/macho-b-jaguar.html
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/04/01/20090401jaguar0401.html
http://travel.mongabay.com/colombia/600/co06-1366.jpg

Something Called Weather Forecasting

eruption.

Last month, the Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal, in a sad and pathetic attempt to find something tangibly wrong with the stimulus package lambasted congressional democrats for trying to fund “something called volcano monitoring,”. Yesterday, Mt. Redoubt, near the Kenai Penisula in Alaska did a beautiful job of explaining to the poor fool exactly what volcano monitoring is and why it's needed. Even in its remote location the eruption of Redoubt, anticipated, tracked, and foretold by the geologists at the Alaska volcano observatory, has disrupted domestic and international air traffic, both rerouting and canceling flights. Had the prevailing wind direction been different, significant amounts of ash may have disrupted the communities on the peninsula, and if it were closer to a larger population center, the threat of serious damage and loss of life from mud flows would be real. Jindal's attitude is even more distressing when taken in the context of the presumed support that he and everyone else in his state has for continued funding for the National Weather Service. Even with the economy the way it is, we can't actually afford to be ignorant or knee-jerk in our allocation of funds, because, well, shit still happens.

photograph courtesy of the USGS, 2009

http://danielcima.com/Image.asp?ImageID=10095&apid=1&gpid=1&ipid=1&AKey=dgwhcn5e&imode=PaD

Friday Night Fish Fry

dam.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in conjunction with the Bonneville Power Administration and several other federal and state agencies announced last week that they will resume "Sea Lion removal" along the Columbia River this week. To be clear, "Sea Lion removal" is not the transportation of Sea Lions to alternative habitats without dwindling sources of food or radioactive water, its just killing Sea Lions, either with a rifle if you're a good shot, or by lethal injection (if you're not). Why, you might ask, are we killing Sea Lions? The official story is because they have migrated upriver in search of food, depleting the increasingly fragile salmon population. But really, its not how much salmon they eat, it's that they won't pay $10 a pound for it. So you see, the Sea Lions have to go.

Don't get me wrong, the decreasing salmon population is distressing, both for the salmon and as an indication of the overall health of our waterways. After constructing 25 dams on the Columbia and an additional 250 more throughout the watershed, the wild salmon population has dropped from 10 million to 300,000. The last thing the salmon should have to deal with on their long and treacherous life journey is a natural predator. Besides, this policy clearly reflects an acknowledgment of the impacts of human consumption and energy generation on natural systems while restoring balance between species and promoting biodiversity.