Olga Bonfiglio

Book Review: A 1,000-Mile Walk on the Beach

2012-01-26T04:57:00.000-08:00

A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach:

One Woman’s Trek of the
Perimeter of Lake Michigan

By Loreen Niewenhuis

Crickhollow Books (Milwaukee)

click here for Loreen's website

This article appeared in the Huffington Post on Friday, January 27, 2012

Interesting shapes or places on a map frequently move us to go and see what’s there. It might be an island, a peninsula, an isthmus, a continent. For Loreen Niewenhuis, it was Lake Michigan.

At age 45 after being married and the mother of two teenage sons, Niewenhuis wanted to do something for herself by herself, that was bigger than herself. It seemed fitting, since she had a lifelong love affair with Lake Michigan, that she make the 1,000-mile journey all around it—by hiking it.

Her husband, sons, brother, other family and friends didn’t always understand her yearning but they knew the headstrong woman was determined to go for it. Occasionally, when one or two of them joined her at different points of the journey, they discovered both the lake’s captivating effect on her as well as the electric drive she had within to complete the “lake trek.”

Niewenhuis was well-prepared for the journey. She studied maps and satellite images of the lakeshore, its parks, beaches and cities in order to divide up her trip into segments. She brought her GPS, cell phone, camera and notebook. She calculated her day’s walk and picked overnight places to stay. She spent the fall and winter conditioning herself for the long walk that began in March 2009. She even contacted reporters in various towns to tell them of her quest and most of them obliged.

Throughout her journey, I found myself walking with her anxious to hear how she drummed up courage to get through such tough places like Chicago and Gary. I enjoyed her descriptions of the picturesque beauty and solace of the more remote areas, especially from South Haven to Traverse City, places I have visited and loved. (It was around Muskegon that I first saw and became captivated by Lake Michigan!) And, I cheered for her, too, as she crossed from Wisconsin into Illinois and then met family and friends on the last 10 miles of her “hike” into Navy Pier in Chicago, the place where she launched her walk six months before.

Niewenhuis remains steadfast in her mission to traverse the perimeter of the entire lake. A couple times she went back to ground not trod, which included the five-mile walk across the Mackinaw Bridge on Labor Day. After all, this is the area where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet! Such attention to the integrity of the trip makes her more convincing and heroic, actually.

However, Niewenhuis gives readers more than just a travel story, as good as it is. She discusses the historical, geological, geographical, biological and environmental aspects of the lake and draws upon books and experts in the field for background. This effort gives readers an opportunity to become more intimate with the lake and to understand the extent of the breakdown of the lake’s ecosystem, which began in the mid-1800s and is resulting in fish extinction, species invasion and industrial pollution. Her book could be a good springboard for action for reading and environmental groups.

Like any trip, Niewenhuis suffers some mishaps like losing her water bottle filter (she drinks lake water so that its molecules can become a part of her); living through blistered feet and leg cramps; contending with scrapes and scratches from climbing over rocks or big blocks of cement; scaling sand dunes; weathering wind, rain and even snow; enduring unforeseen detours; dodging prowling big cats and bears; getting around off-limits sites like the Palisades nuclear power plant; and camping alone. Fortunately, she remained safe throughout the trip and did not encounter any dangers she couldn’t overcome.

What greatly helped her were constant communications with family or friends throughout the trip, which I’m sure, eased their concerns over her safety. Such are the conveniences of modern travel unlike the hardships and blind navigation of early explorers. But that was another time. Today we travel into different territory where we seek answers to questions about who we are and how we relate to Nature. These are spiritual questions that require different ways of thinking and using our bodies, as Niewenhuis shows. What’s interesting is that she inspires others—particularly women—to pursue similar treks in seeking answers for themselves.

The motivation behind her trip was to be alone for a while “to see if I still liked who I am at my core.” As she took one last look at the lake at her endpoint, she reflected on what she had accomplished.

“I had time to see what stores of resolve and strength and courage resided within me. Time to be fully alive, solitary, and completely present in the moment. And, at the end, I found I was content and confident within myself.”

Niewenhuis got to know herself in a new way, and as a writer, she has the gift to share it with others through her book.

I highly recommend A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach, especially for women travelers who want to achieve a particular goal in their lives. All it takes is picking two points on a map and following them through to the end. And, it just may change your life in ways you can’t imagine.

Out of Respect—and Gratitude

2012-01-23T05:46:00.000-08:00

Apparently, the next phase of the local food movement entails the slaughter and butcher of local animals. In this essay, I have tried to capture what that means as I witnessed the slaughter of three goats on a local farm in southwestern Michigan.

It was different this morning. The overcast December sky hinted of snow to come. The hayrack was empty. The trough held no grain. Even the heated watering bucket next to the pen gate had not been filled the evening before.

The tools were different. An array of special knives lay on a clean white towel with each fabricated in surgical stainless steel for a specific task. Some longer and very narrow. Some wider. Others short with a slight curve. The ivory-handled knife was special: it was longer and wider than the others but it, too, was honed to razor sharpness. Its specific design, based on millennia of halal and kosher practice, was to administer slaughter that was humane, quick, and painless. The knife was wrapped and tied in a wide clean cotton cloth and only exposed for the task to come.

The silence in the barn was both hallowed and deafening. A solitary figure quietly stroked the tranquil, pregnant goat does and their spirited “girl” kids. He made sure their feed bins were full and their water fresh and unfrozen. Yesterday, he had changed the bedding in the birthing stalls with fresh, crisp straw, just as he had eight months before when the “boys” and the “girls” were born. Gender would again mark the fate for each of them on this morning.

The guinea hens were locked in the poultry house up the hill and far away from the buck pen. They were still yakking away and getting used to their extra space since the 40-some ducks left the farm a few days before. Only the three nosy turkeys kept vigil albeit a short, cautious distance away from “the area.”

A faded black and yellow rope with a hooked latch on one end had lain limp and out of sight until today when it was placed around the neck of a young and furry black and white buckling. He was first in line this time when the farmer called the “boys” to the gate. The buckling thought he had cleverly outrun his brothers. Unlike most goats who are skittish around people, these goats had been “handled” from birth, so they welcomed the farmer in their usual, frolicsome way, pushing each other away to be first. Typically, they were greeted with cheerful, yet soft words and, perhaps, a brushing, but not today. Only soft words and gentle stroking greeted them.

The Black ‘n White probably thought he had been singled out for some new adventure when he was led outside the pen. The last time he went past the gate was a month or two ago when his father, Leonidas, with uncanny dexterity picked the chain latch and escaped the confinement of their spacious pen. The buckling and his eight brothers bewildered by their freedom did what goats love to do: kick up their heels in a capricious dance of unbridled freedom and joy. They thought they are getting away with something. That’s why goats are associated with the zodiac sign of Capricorn or with the word, caprice, or with the musical term, capriccioso, meaning fantastic in style.

So this time the Black ‘n White pranced proudly as he was led to “the area.” The farmer then did something strange. He faced the young goat north and straddled him as he gently talked to him. He placed his gloved hand beneath the jaw of the goat and massaged it, as he had done many times before. In his right hand and behind his right leg out of view he held the ivory-handled knife and waited for the goat to come to a calm, quiet place within. Then he loosened the rope. As the young buck slowly glanced to his left the farmer delicately lifted his head upward. Then, in one rehearsed, instantaneous and smooth-flowing movement, the long, ivory-handled knife came down and it was done.

Rich, red blood gushed out of the buckling as he lurched forward. His body arced eastward and left little red droplets on the snow. Suddenly, he dropped and convulsed on the ground for a few seconds until his body stilled from his head all the way down to the last frisky wags of his tail.

Actually, the Black ‘n White died instantly when the knife sliced his jugular vein and carotid arteries. His body became a bundle of reflexive spasms that kept moving until his muscles, starved for life-giving blood and neural messages, ceased to function.

Pompadour-Boy, the brown goat with the blond hair spilling out of the top of his head like a waterfall, was next. He came to the gate when the farmer called and then proudly swaggered out of the pen. He didn’t notice his brother’s carcass on the ground when they passed it.

Then he, too, was stopped in “the area,” faced north and straddled. As he took a calm breath, the black and yellow rope was loosened from his neck and then the fatal swipe instantly downed him. He jumped away in an arc just like his brother, only in the opposite direction, and he, too, left tiny red droplets in the snow. As he lay on his side most of his body’s blood oozed out. The tip of his tongue stuck out between his teeth, and his eyes remained open and glazed.

The third and last buckling didn’t come to the gate when he was called. Instead, he stayed in the furthest corner of the pen cavorting with the does and doelings who were in the barnyard next to the buck pen.

This sort of mating ritual had gone on among the “boys” since the summer when the does went into heat. Bucklings display mating behavior when they are only a few months old and can impregnate a mature doe at just four months old. To attract the "ladies," a raring-to-go buck sticks out his tongue and groans with desire. He also sprays his urine on his beard and face and on passing targets including other bucks or even on the farmer. Scent glands on his head also produce the distinct “buck smell” during mating season. This penetrating odor of ripe buck and aging urine acts as an aphrodisiac for the does and is the main reason many people are disgusted by goat bucks.

When the does are in heat, they tend to hang around the bucks rather than ignore them as they usually do. Such behavior signals the farmer that they are ready to mate.

Sometimes a farmer keeps a castrated buck with the does as another way of knowing whether the does are in heat. In this herd, that job fell to Lil’ Man, the long pointed-eared buckling that was somehow conceived by Tiger, a French Alpine, through a woven wire fence with electrified wire off-sets. Such is the power of caprine desire!

So when the faded black and yellow rope was placed around the brown buckling’s neck, he resisted. After all, showing off to the “girls” was his purpose in life. On the other hand, did he intuit his fate? Even leaving the pen apparently had no attraction for him as it had his brothers, so a mildly resistant struggle ensued and continued even as the farmer straddled him in “the area.”

“C’mon, my sweet boy,” pleaded the farmer.

After a time the goat finally calmed down and it was done.

This last cut was the cleanest one of all and goat spasmed backward equidistant between his brothers. His resting place formed a perfect downward-facing triangle amid the other two carcasses and his arced droplets of blood completed a kind of trefoil.

At this point, I realized I had witnessed a sacred event but it took some time, research and reflection to understand it.

Sacred Sacrifice

Three is a sacred number in most cultures and religions. In Christianity, for example, the number signifies the Holy Trinity and is sometimes represented as triangles. An upward-facing triangle symbolizes fire or “the aspiration of all things towards the higher unity,” according to Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols (1962). A downward-facing triangle symbolizes water. These goats lay in a downward-facing triangle and their droplets of blood traced a trefoil in the snow.

The trefoil is an ancient and basic ideogram for a high spiritual dignity going back 5,000 years. It is a common design in Gothic church architecture often used in masonry or windows as a sign of entry. In this, my first witness of animal slaughter, you might say that I had just been “baptized” into Nature’s sacred mystery called the “circle of life.”

As the top of the food chain, human beings eat animals like goats no matter how cute and furry they are. In this way, the animals “sacrifice” their lives so that humans might live. That’s the essence of the “circle of life.”

Grocery stores camouflage this fact by presenting meat that is impossible to recognize as an animal, says food guru Michael Pollock. It is an example of how modern Americans have disconnected themselves from Nature and its ways. So, how can people understand what the animals sacrifice if they’ve never seen them alive or don’t know how meat gets to their table? And, how can people be thankful for their food if they don’t know what it takes to get it? A truly modern dilemma!

However, I wasn’t thinking about these things that day. I was distressed, speechless and unable to know exactly how to react to what I had just seen.

I had known the “boys” as members of the farm. I had petted their soft fur and watched them romp in their pen as they jumped on top of each other, danced on their plastic shelters or raced each other to feed on their daily portions of milk or hay.

When I first arrived on the farm, the “boys” were only a few weeks old. As I approached the pen, their natural curiosity and herd instinct drew them all toward me. They nudged me with their noses to pet them and I obliged. Their soft fur and playfulness reminded me of my cat, and I felt an instant connection to them.

Petting the goats wasn't my only pleasure. Since the garden was near their pen, the tedium of pulling weeds in the hot sun was delightfully minimized by the bucklings’ occasional bleats. Sometimes I’d answer them and we’d have our own little call-and-response jam session.

Since the day of the bucklings’ births, the farmer knew he would process them for meat and he wasn’t happy about this prospect even though he and his wife would have meat for a year. He euphemized their fate by calling it “freezer camp,” as if to prepare himself for this day.

What made it especially difficult for him in slaughtering the goats was that he took such great care with them when they were born. One he had to resuscitate because it wasn’t breathing. Another was a breach birth and he had to go inside the doe up to his elbows to turn the kid properly in order to help its birthing.

However, bucks are typically used for meat and the farmer felt a keen responsibility to give them a good life on pasture and in the sun throughout their short lives. He called it “good stewardship,” and “responsible animal husbandry.” Meanwhile, the bucklings are prepared for this “one different day” early in their lives. The basic ritual for their slaughter is practiced with them through stroking and handling. The farmer’s use of the knife, too, is practiced both in form and to ensure that the animal does not see the blade.

Transformation

I helped transport each of the three bodies in a wheelbarrow and took them to a room in the barn where they were processed. However, the room was decidedly different from my experience with it previously. I never noticed the pulleys on the ceiling. And, the small table with the knives resting on it, I’d never seen before.

The hind legs of the slaughtered bucklings are spread apart and attached to a gambrel (a two-foot-long steel bar with crimped ends) through the gap between their ankle and Achilles tendons. The gambrel is then hoisted to the ceiling with the pulleys. This arrangement provides better control during skinning and evisceration. Hanging the head downward facilitates complete bleeding, which vastly improves the quality of the meat.

While in this state, the beauty of the goats’ fine coats is more apparent. But that doesn’t make it any easier to look at them, especially since their open throats still bear a very rich red color. A closer look reveals their severed jugular vein, carotid arteries and trachea that made the difference between life and death in one short instant.

Seeing the bodies hang also makes it plain for me to understand how precious—and fragile—life really is. Less than an hour ago these goats were fully alive! But that is another point. These bodies are no longer goats; they have become carcasses. This transformation causes me to relate to them differently—and quite unexpectedly.

The first cuts of the carcass begin at the top, the anus, which is tied off to avoid the spillage of feces that wasn’t eliminated in the goat pen when the goat was alive or during the body’s last muscle spasms as it lay on the ground. The fur has also been brushed off and rinsed from any mud or dirt for the same reason. The bladder is also tied off.

The carcass is still warm since the heat from its former self was between 101.5 to 103.5 F. Steam pours out of it when it hits the cold air.

The hide is carefully sliced with a special short curve-bladed knife down the center of each hind leg to above the scrotum. The scrotal sac is removed with the testicles into the ten-gallon tub on the floor below the carcass. The knife then goes down the middle of the chest, always cutting outward to prevent any hair from touching the meat or penetrating the peritoneum sac that contains the organs. At this point, I saw what for me was a new and curious world of the inner body.

The lungs are clear and pink without blemish. The intestines are translucent as is the colon so it’s easy to see how the tiny round fecal pellets were eliminated. The heart is encased in the pericardium to protect it. How small it is given the work it did to pump blood throughout the goat’s 90-pound body!

Small globs of fat surround the organs but there aren’t many of them. These carcasses are lean and clean because the goats grazed on grass and hay and they drank the does’ milk. This diet will make the meat (yet another transformation) tender and tasty when it is cooked.

All of the internal organs are encased in a sac lining of the abdominal cavity called the peritoneum and great care is taken to assure that it is not punctured. Instead, the peritoneum sac attachments are carefully severed and the organs all come out at once and slowly drop into the tub below. The offal is later buried in the earth where it will decompose.

It takes more time to cut through the peritoneum sac if you want to remove the liver and heart, which make for good eating. Actually, internal organs are healthier to eat than the skin and muscle (the outer walls of the carcass) because they are nutrient dense. Most predators eat only their prey’s internal organs or they eat them first before consuming the rest of the body.

A final rinsing of the carcass with water releases the leftover blood and the clinging fat globs. Most of the goats’ blood was spilled on the earth after they expired so there was little of it dripping on the floor.

After evisceration was finished, the three carcasses hung in silence. The ribs glistened in the low light. The heads hung limply since they were still connected to the backbone. The eyes remained open. A clean stick was placed within the chest cavity to help cool the carcass and age it.

On the next day a professional meat processor would skin the carcasses, and hang them to age. Then he would process them and divide the meat into smaller packages for the freezer. Later, the meat would be put into an oven or roasting pit and provide a fine meal (yet another transformation) that would nourish and satisfy the farmer and his wife who always say a little prayer of gratitude for the goat who gave his life for them.

Gratitude

Each year, millions of animals are slaughtered and butchered for the meat we eat at our dinner tables, but the way we raise and process meat in America today is so contrary to the care and sacred treatment of the animals that I witnessed on this day.

Animals live in crowded feedlots. They are fattened up with grain (not grass, their natural food), injected with antibiotics, shipped to stockyards on fast-moving trucks and killed in noisy, scary slaughterhouses. They are regarded merely as commodities and the profits they command. They are stressed, uncomfortable and usually sick. The diet they’re fed in a stockyard would eventually kill them.

These realities didn’t matter much to me before I witnessed the slaughter of the goats. In fact, I was completely oblivious to them. Like most people, I merely took the meat I bought at the grocery store for granted, and of course, didn’t connect it to animals even though I knew intellectually that that’s where it came from.

The Native Americans knew how to relate to the buffalo they ate. Before they killed it, they thanked the animal for its sacrifice and cried over its loss of life. Now I understand why. I felt this same way on this cold, gray wintry day.

My work on this small, local farm has allowed me to develop a new relationship with food through the time and muscle I expend to milk a goat, grow potatoes or clean the barn for its life-giving compost. This work all requires care, patience, responsibility—and a little luck from Nature. That’s why grace is said before meals, a practice whose purpose had become so routine and so disconnected from the growing or raising of food that it didn't make any sense to me.

The three slaughtered boy-goats introduced me to a more spiritual way of relating to food. That’s what happened to me when the trefoil appeared from goats’ red droplets of blood on the snow. I entered it and discovered the divinity of Nature.

And, my overwhelming response was simply to be grateful to the animals who gave their lives. That is the greatest respect I can show them—and it has changed my life as a result.

Guest Report: Big-City Mayors Dig In To Food Policy

2012-01-21T05:10:00.000-08:00

AMY DAVIS/MCT /Landov In the summer, Shirley and Ewald August grow blueberries at their Windsor Mill, Md., farm and sell at Baltimore farmers markets.

by Nancy Shute
NPR's feed blog, The Salt
January 19, 2012

Food policy can sound like a dreary enterprise best left to Washington, D.C. But big-city mayors are starting to see local food policy as a key step in getting healthy, affordable food to their constituents.

This afternoon, the mayors of America are meeting in Washington, D.C., to launch their own food policy task force. The goal is to share information on projects that work, and also make sure that federal food policy doesn't muck up those local efforts.

Baltimore is one of a handful of cities, along with New York and San Francisco, that have crafted their own food policy initiatives. Baltimore's effort started in 2009, and involves the city departments of health, planning, sustainability and development, as well as an advisory group of 30-plus organizations.

"It's starting to become a growing movement, which is exactly what we would like it to be," says Holly Freishtat, director of Baltimore's Food Policy Initiative. The city's food priorities include a customized map of food deserts that includes corner stores and convenience markets, which play a big role in the city's food scene. About 20 percent of the city's residents live in food deserts, without access to fresh food.
That map is being used to guide the growth of projects like the Virtual Supermarket, which lets low-income residents order groceries online and pick them up at their neighborhood library. Freishtat told The Salt that this year the Virtual Supermarket will be expanded to include pickup points in public housing and senior housing. (Here's an NPR story on the program's 2010 launch.)

It's successes like the Virtual Supermarket that are pushing the mayors to get involved in federal food policy. Under U.S. Department of Agriculture rules, recipients of food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) can't use those benefits online. So it's illegal for them to use standard online grocery delivery services. The Virtual Supermarket gets around that by having recipients pay when they actually pick up the goods.

"One of the conversations we'll be having is wanting to work with USDA and grocery retailers to overcome the policy barriers and technology barriers to online SNAP benefits," Freishtat says.

Urban dwellers might think that USDA doesn't have much to offer them. That would be wrong, Freishtat says. Baltimore has reaped more than $1 billion in benefits associated with farm bill programs over the past five years. Lobbying to make sure that the 2012 farm bill reauthorization works for the benefit of urban food initiatives, she says, "is the next step."

Guest Report: Honeybee Deaths Linked to Seed Insecticide Exposure

2012-01-18T06:23:00.000-08:00

by Brian Wallheimer, 765-496-2050

bwallhei@purdue.edu

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Honeybee populations have been in serious decline for years, and Purdue University scientists may have identified one of the factors that cause bee deaths around agricultural fields.

Analyses of bees found dead in and around hives from several apiaries over two years in Indiana showed the presence of neonicotinoid insecticides, which are commonly used to coat corn and soybean seeds before planting. The research showed that those insecticides were present at high concentrations in waste talc that is exhausted from farm machinery during planting.

The insecticides clothianidin and thiamethoxam were also consistently found at low levels in soil - up to two years after treated seed was planted - on nearby dandelion flowers and in corn pollen gathered by the bees, according to the findings released in the journal PLoS One this month.

"We know that these insecticides are highly toxic to bees; we found them in each sample of dead and dying bees," said Christian Krupke, associate professor of entomology and a co-author of the findings.

The United States is losing about one-third of its honeybee hives each year, according to Greg Hunt, a Purdue professor of behavioral genetics, honeybee specialist and co-author of the findings. Hunt said no one factor is to blame, though scientists believe that others such as mites and insecticides are all working against the bees, which are important for pollinating food crops and wild plants.

"It’s like death by a thousand cuts for these bees," Hunt said.

Krupke and Hunt received reports that bee deaths in 2010 and 2011 were occurring at planting time in hives near agricultural fields. Toxicological screenings performed by Brian Eitzer, a co-author of the study from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, for an array of pesticides showed that the neonicotinoids used to treat corn and soybean seed were present in each sample of affected bees. Krupke said other bees at those hives exhibited tremors, uncoordinated movement and convulsions, all signs of insecticide poisoning.

Seeds of most annual crops are coated in neonicotinoid insecticides for protection after planting. All corn seed and about half of all soybean seed is treated. The coatings are sticky, and in order to keep seeds flowing freely in the vacuum systems used in planters, they are mixed with talc. Excess talc used in the process is released during planting and routine planter cleaning procedures.

"Given the rates of corn planting and talc usage, we are blowing large amounts of contaminated talc into the environment. The dust is quite light and appears to be quite mobile," Krupke said.

Krupke said the corn pollen that bees were bringing back to hives later in the year tested positive for neonicotinoids at levels roughly below 100 parts per billion.

"That's enough to kill bees if sufficient amounts are consumed, but it is not acutely toxic," he said.

On the other hand, the exhausted talc showed extremely high levels of the insecticides - up to about 700,000 times the lethal contact dose for a bee.

"Whatever was on the seed was being exhausted into the environment," Krupke said. "This material is so concentrated that even small amounts landing on flowering plants around a field can kill foragers or be transported to the hive in contaminated pollen. This might be why we found these insecticides in pollen that the bees had collected and brought back to their hives."

Krupke suggested that efforts could be made to limit or eliminate talc emissions during planting.

"That's the first target for corrective action," he said. "It stands out as being an enormous source of potential environmental contamination, not just for honeybees, but for any insects living in or near these fields. The fact that these compounds can persist for months or years means that plants growing in these soils can take up these compounds in leaf tissue or pollen."

Although corn and soybean production does not require insect pollinators, that is not the case for most plants that provide food. Krupke said protecting bees benefits agriculture since most fruit, nut and vegetable crop plants depend upon honeybees for pollination. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates the value of honeybees to commercial agriculture at $15 billion to $20 billion annually.

Hunt said he would continue to study the sublethal effects of neonicotinoids. He said for bees that do not die from the insecticide there could be other effects, such as loss of homing ability or less resistance to disease or mites.

"I think we need to stop and try to understand the risks associated with these insecticides," Hunt said.

The North American Pollinator Protection Campaign and the USDA's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative funded the research.

Sources: Christian Krupke, 765-494-4912, ckrupke@purdue.edu

Greg Hunt, 765-494-5605, ghunt@purdue.edu

Guest Report: The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods

2012-01-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

New research shows that when we eat we're consuming more than just vitamins and protein. Our bodies are absorbing information, or microRNA.

By Ari LeVaux, The Atlantic January 9, 2012

Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to proteins in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood.

The type of RNA in question is called microRNA, due to its small size. MicroRNAs have been studied extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been linked to human diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. The Chinese research provides the first example of ingested plant microRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function.

Should the research survive scientific scrutiny, it could prove a game changer in many fields. It would mean that we're eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but information as well.

That knowledge could deepen our understanding of cross-species communication, co-evolution, and predator-prey relationships. It could illuminate new mechanisms for some metabolic disorders and perhaps explain how some herbal medicines function. And it reveals a pathway by which genetically modified (GM) foods might influence human health.

Monsanto's website states, "There is no need for, or value in testing the safety of GM foods in humans." This viewpoint, while good for business, is built on an understanding of genetics circa 1950. It follows what's called the "Central Dogma" (PDF) of genetics, which postulates a one-way chain of command between DNA and the cells DNA governs.

The Central Dogma resembles the process of ordering a pizza. The DNA knows what kind of pizza it wants, and orders it. The RNA is the order slip, which communicates the specifics of the pizza to the cook. The finished and delivered pizza is analogous to the protein that DNA codes for.

We've known for years that the Central Dogma, though basically correct, is overly simplistic. For example: Pieces of microRNA that don't code for anything, pizza or otherwise, can travel among cells and influence their activities in many other ways. So while the DNA is ordering pizza, it's also bombarding the pizzeria with unrelated RNA messages that can cancel a cheese delivery, pay the dishwasher nine million dollars, or email the secret sauce recipe to WikiLeaks.

Monsanto's claim that human toxicology tests are unwarranted is based on the doctrine of "substantial equivalence." This term is used around the world as the basis of regulations designed to facilitate the rapid commercialization of genetically engineered foods, by sparing them from extensive safety testing.

According to substantial equivalence, comparisons between GM and non-GM crops need only investigate the end products of DNA translation: the pizza, as it were. "There is no need to test the safety of DNA introduced into GM crops. DNA (and resulting RNA) is present in almost all foods," Monsanto's website reads. "DNA is non-toxic and the presence of DNA, in and of itself, presents no hazard."

The Chinese RNA study threatens to blast a major hole in that claim. It means that DNA can code for microRNA, which can, in fact, be hazardous.

"So long as the introduced protein is determined to be safe, food from GM crops determined to be substantially equivalent is not expected to pose any health risks," Monsanto's website goes on. In other words, as long as the pizza is OK, the introduced DNA doesn't pose a problem.

Chen-Yu Zhang, the lead researcher on the Chinese RNA study, has made no comment regarding the implications of his work for the debate over the safety of GM food. Nonetheless, his discoveries give shape to concerns about substantial equivalence that have been raised for years.

In 1999, a group of scientists wrote a now-landmark letter titled "Beyond Substantial Equivalence" to the prestigious journal Nature. In the letter, Erik Millstone et. al. called substantial equivalence "a pseudo-scientific concept" that is "inherently anti-scientific because it was created primarily to provide an excuse for not requiring biochemical or toxicological tests."

To these charges, Monsanto responded: "The concept of substantial equivalence was elaborated by international scientific and regulatory experts convened by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1991, well before any biotechnology products were ready for market.

This response is less a rebuttal than a testimonial to Monsanto's marketing prowess. Establishing the concept of substantial equivalence worldwide was a prerequisite to the global commercialization of GM crops. It created a legal framework for selling GM foods anywhere in the world that substantial equivalence was accepted. By the time substantial equivalence was adopted, Monsanto had already developed numerous GM crops and was actively grooming them for market.

The OECD's 34 member nations could be described as largely rich, white, developed, and sympathetic to big business. The group's current mission is to spread economic development to the rest of the world. And while that mission has yet to be accomplished, OECD has helped Monsanto spread substantial equivalence to the rest of the world, selling a lot of GM seed along the way.

The news that we're ingesting information as well as physical material should force the biotech industry to confront the possibility that new DNA can have dangerous implications far beyond the products it codes for. Can we count on the biotech industry to accept the notion that more testing is necessary? Not if such action is perceived as a threat to the bottom line.

Listen to a discussion on GMO labeling on the Diane Rehm Show

Guest Essay: Living for Change A Year to Remember

2012-01-03T03:58:00.000-08:00

by Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige

Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership
Detroit

2011 opened with the Arab Spring when the people of North Africa decolonized themselves, thrilling the world with their nonviolent gatherings, ousting the dictators the United States has supported to secure its access to Mideast oil.

The world’s eyes next focused on the struggle to defend the collective bargaining rights of Wisconsin public workers against the right-wing attacks coordinated by Governor Scott Walker. The growing mobilization swelled to tens of thousands of union members, their families, and supporters.

By the fall of the year hundreds of thousands had participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its offshoots throughout the nation and across the globe, We/they were not only righteously and rightfully protesting corporate domination of our culture and the suffering that that is inducing.

“We/They were taking back our government, taking back our humanity, ” as Danny Glover put it in his unforgettable speech at the Oakland Mall, on October 15.

The ongoing struggles of 2011, from the Arab Spring to Wisconsin and the Occupy/Decolonize movement and our current crises, are rooted in the decline of the empire which made possible the middle-class standard of living and the welfare state with its thousands of public employees to take care of tasks for which we the people must become increasingly responsible.

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of Rights. We have entered the epoch of Responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

Now is the time for us to re-imagine work and re-imagine life. The new paradigm we must establish is about creating systems that bring out the best of each us, instead of trying to harness the greed and selfishness of which we are capable. It is about a new balance of individual, family, community, work, and play that makes us better human beings.

This means that we need to practice visionary organizing. Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society and in ourselves. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.

Revolutionaries, Evolutionaries, and Solutionaries

The first edition of The Next American Revolution, our new book, was released in the spring of 2011. Since then it has been a true joy to see so many diverse peoples turn to this little book for help in understanding how and why another world is necessary, possible, and already in the process of being created.

We have met hundreds of people at book release events, where we have shared the stage with good friends and fellow visionaries like Ruby Dee, Danny Glover, Amy Goodman, Michael Hardt, and Lisa Lee. And we’ve continued the conversation through radio interviews with figures like Michael Eric Dyson, Celeste Headlee, Krista Tippett, Tavis Smiley, and Cornel West.

Many readers have bought multiple copies of TNAR to share with family and friends. Teachers have begun assigning it to their classes. Faculty, students, and staff at several small colleges are reading it together. Activists have started study groups revolving around the book. And because so many others in faraway places want to talk about The Next American Revolution, I have become a regular user of Skype.

Why is this book having such a deep resonance?

Maybe it’s because it is giving Americans in all walks of life a more people-friendly view of revolution as empowerment rather than struggle for political power.

Maybe it helps us view Revolutionaries as Solutionaries, working together to solve very practical problems of daily life, growing our souls by growing our own food and bringing the neighbor back into the ‘hood.'

Maybe it’s giving us the new, more positive view of ourselves that we’ve been hungry for.

Maybe it helps us envision ourselves as Revolutionaries, moving away from the wrong side of the world revolution where we have seemed stuck since the Vietnam War.

Maybe it also helps us see ourselves as Evolutionaries, making the radical revolution of values that Dr. King called for during that war, transformimg ourselves from materialists, militarists, and individualists into a people who can be proud of how we are advancing humankind to a new stage of consciousness, creativity, and social and political responsibility.

But transformational organizing takes more than growing numbers. We need to ask ourselves new questions about how to provide for the general welfare and how to educate our children. We must create ways to meet these basic needs not mainly through a growing number of public workers but through caring for one another in beloved communities.

We must begin reorganizing our local, state and federal budgets so that we spend public monies not for military domination and to support the Mubaraks of the world but for constructive human and domestic needs.

From Promoting Jobs to Reimagining Work

In cities like Detroit, abandoned by global corporations, community people are struggling to build more self-reliant, localized economies, growing our own food, and restoring the neighbor to the ‘hood’.

At the peak of the industrial epoch in the twentieth century we were convinced that progress depended on the continuing expansion of government and mammoth enterprises like GM. It was difficult to remember that “doing it for yourself” is probably one of the three or four key instincts that we have inherited through evolution over millions of years. It is part of what makes us human. If we can do something for ourselves, we don’t feel as powerless as the person who has to get somebody else to do it for them. The more we can do for ourselves, the more in control of our future we are.

This is an idea whose time has come back as we enter the postindustrial epoch.

That is why I have been so inspired by the Detroiters who in the midst of our city’s devastation are discovering new ways to make Detroit a City of Hope. We are seeking to expand our humanity not by growing our economy but by growing our souls.

Those of us who live here feel fortunate. Our city has a proud tradition of plowing new ground. We are excited to be doing so now—literally in our urban farms and gardens and figuratively in our non-stop conversation about a new economy.

Industrial jobs came here early and in large numbers. They left here early and in large numbers. The continuing jobs crisis is an opportunity to go beyond clamoring for more jobs and begin imagining work that frees us from being the appendages to machines that we have become because of our dependence on jobs. Instead of looking to politicians for programs that will provide millions of jobs, we need to encourage the creation of work that not only produces goods and services but also develops our skills, protects our environment, and lifts our spirits.

We have been thinking and doing a post jobs-system economy in Detroit for almost two decades. But we know we have not been alone. All over the planet more and more people are thinking beyond making a living to making a life—a life that respects Earth and one another.

Cultural Revolution and Visionary Organizing

We must come together as inventors and discoverers committed to creating ideas and practice, vision and projects to help heal civilization. My friend Wayne Curtis calls this creating “a whole new culture.”

His remark suggests to me that we need more discussion and understanding of the cultural revolution Detroiters are now making in response to the devastation of deindustrialization. A former Black Panther, Wayne founded the Feedom Freedom Growers urban farm on a sparsely populated eastside Detroit block with his partner, Myrtle Thompson. Their efforts to “grow a garden, grow a community” and their dedication to “make a way out of no way” demonstrate how the vacant lot represents the possibilities of cultural revolution.

Detroit’s cultural revolution is transforming how we view our selves, our surroundings and our institutions. We are making a life and not just a living by feeding ourselves, educating our children and taking more responsibility for each other and our communities.

This cultural revolution is very different from the cultural revolution involving the education of mostly illiterate Russian peasants advocated by Lenin after the Bolshevik seizure of state power in 1917. It is also very different from Mao’s 1966 cultural revolution, which sent millions of educated Chinese youth to work in the countryside and learn from the peasantry. It goes beyond the cultural revolution of the 1960s that began to redefine race, gender, generational relations.

Today’s cultural revolution, which is emerging from the ground up especially in Detroit, is as awesome as the transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture eleven thousand years ago and from Agriculture to Industry a few hundred years ago.

I anticipate that in the second decade of the twenty-first century we will deepen and broaden the visionary advances that became visible in the first decade.

It will become clearer to more millions that our good health depends on our making the good food revolution. Instead of relying on an industrialized food system that keeps us ignorant and powerless about what we take into our bodies, we will be producing most of our food locally, not only growing vegetables on neighboring lots, rooftops and balconies but raising chickens in backyard coops and fish in home and other local aquariums. This is not just a question of physical health but also one of spiritual values.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, I anticipate that our work will increasingly take the form of crafts because as robots replaced human beings on the production line in the twentieth century, we began to realize that, while the industrial age produced material abundance, it was really a digression in the continuing evolution of the human race because the Labor which it required, be our payment high or low, was so fragmenting and inhuman that it could be done by robots.

In this decade I anticipate that in view of the obvious failures of No Child Left behind and Race to the Top, the continuing schools crisis will be resolved by our creating community-and-place-based schools. By making the tackling and solving of community problems a normal and natural part of the school curriculum from K-12, our schools will empower children and young people, showing our respect for them as fellow citizens. We will finally realize that the best way to interest children and young people in their own education is by community involvement and not by tests, threats and other punitive measures.

Guest Essay: The Joy of Quiet

2012-01-01T05:26:00.000-08:00

By PICO IYER
New York Times
December 29, 2011

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside.

What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently of “The Man Within My Head.”

The War in Iraq Is Over--Not

2011-12-18T02:44:00.000-08:00

KNOW's Sunday vigil in front of the Federal Building in downtown Kalamazoo

This article appeared in the Huffington Post on Wednesday, December 21

Members of the Kalamazoo Nonviolent Opponents of War (KNOW) held their usual Sunday peace vigil in front of the Federal Building in downtown Kalamazoo as they have been doing since September 1, 2002. And, it doesn’t look as though they are going away despite President Obama’s declaration of the end of the war in Iraq.

“Officially the war is over, the military has left, but our overall attempt to dominate the region is still there,” said today’s convener Ron Kramer.

Kramer pointed out that U.S. foreign policy of regional dominance will continue with the presence of State Department officials and independent contractors in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, drone attacks in Pakistan, the militarization of America and our huge military budget ($642billion was recently approved for FY 2016).

“So there’s still plenty for us to do,” said Kramer amid the honking car horns of approval on this cold but sunny day in downtown Kalamazoo.

There were only 20 people present at the vigil although the numbers averaged in the hundreds before and during the early months of the war. KNOW attracted over 700 people, its highest attendance, for an evening candlelight vigil on March 20, 2003, the day after the war began.

“War is destructive. War doesn’t build nations. It doesn’t build peace. It doesn’t build prosperity,” said Walter Ogston who has been demonstrating over the past nine years. “It destroys things. It destroys lives and it destroys livelihoods, and it destroys culture, and it destroys respect. We need to respect people in the other parts of the world, in other nations, not try to manipulate and destroy them.”

“We should be using other means than military, [like] peaceful means, to solve conflicts,” said Tobi Hanna-Davies, who organized bus trips to Washington, D.C. and New York for peace demonstrations intended to prevent the war in 2002 and 2003.

“We’ve just used military force as our first resort,” said Hanna-Davies. “It should be the very last resort. We need a Department of Peace that’s funded where people really get educated in how to solve conflict. We shouldn’t be acting like we’re in the Middle Ages still.”

Jean and Joe Gump

“If I’m not demonstrating, it’s because I’m sleeping,” said long-time activist Jean Gump, 85, whose demonstrations for peace go back to the Civil Rights Movement in 1965. She with her husband, Joe, were standing on public street corners protesting sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein in the 1990s following the first Persian Gulf War. Gump is also a member of the Kalamazoo Women in Black who “mourn for all victims of war and violence,” as their placards say.

Last year Gump served time in federal prison for trespassing at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. on July 5, 2010,during a 30th commemorative demonstration for nuclear resistance. She was one of thirteen activists from Plowshares arrested and sentenced. Plowshares is a group that works to rid the United States of its nuclear weapons through acts of civil disobedience.

Gump previously went to federal prison for breaking into a Minuteman II missile silo near Holden, Missouri in 1986, as did her husband in 1987 when he went to the K-9 missile site in Butler, Missouri.

Kramer, a criminologist at Western Michigan University who specializes in international law and state crime, has written extensively on the war in Iraq including a book titled Crimes of Empire: The Bush Administration’s Illegal War On Iraq.

“The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a blatant and gross violation of international law,” said Kramer. “It was a war of aggression. The Nuremberg Charter called a war of aggression the ‘supreme international crime.’”

“During the phase of the occupation and the course of the war, the United States committed a number of war crimes,” continued Kramer who listed as evidence the use of depleted uranium, torture at Abu Ghraib, the devastation of the country, the creation of a population of refugees and internally displaced people and huge death tolls, which go largely unreported.

Various reports of Iraqi deaths range from 100,000 to 1 million.

Kramer said that the war has resulted in huge consequences for the United States as well. The official count of Americans dead is 4,484 with 33,186 wounded.

The cost of conducting war in both Iraq and Afghanistan has reached $1.2 trillion although Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, believes the cost of the Iraq War alone will more likely be over $3 trillion. His book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (2008) discusses the extent to which these costs will be imposed for many years to come, including the enormous expenditures that will be required to care for very large numbers of wounded veterans.

Kramer also said that the war has created more anger against the United States throughout the Middle East, generating more recruits to terrorism and allowing Iran to emerge as a major force in the region now that Saddam Hussein is gone.

“The Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq was worst the foreign policy blunder in American history and the ‘supreme international crime.’ What bothers me is that no one in that administration is ever going to be held to account for the crimes they committed.”

Kramer said that under international law the Obama Administration has responsibility to prosecute those who committed these crimes but that it has done nothing and is, in fact, following some of the same policies.

Activists gather for brief meeting after their Sunday vigil

KNOW will continue with its weekly Sunday peace vigils as well as its monthly meetings, retreats and peace events.

KNOW’s peace efforts have been chronicled in my book, Heroes of a Different Stripe: How One Town Responded to the War in Iraq.

Guest Essay: Act with Compassion, Not Out of Fear

2011-12-18T01:15:00.000-08:00

by Patricia Lynn

Delton, Michigan

Fear is a strong emotion. Traumatic experiences, phobias, or lack of confidence can cause people to be fearful in certain situations. However, when a government continuously promotes fear, it is ultimately to control the thinking and behavior of its population. In Hitler’s time it was fear of Jews. Post-9/11 Americans have been constantly reminded to be fearful of “strange” behaviors, smells, appearances, parked cars, unattended items, and especially Muslims and Islam.

I was appalled at the article, “State Police Ask Public to Be Alert for Suspicious Activity,” appearing in the Reminder (Barry County) for the week of December 3^rd. There was no author identified, but internal to the article is the suggestion that this is a bulletin straight from Emergency Management/Department of Homeland Security. The article specifically mentions “strange” behavior with no description of what might qualify as “suspicious.”

Do we as citizens of Barry County really want to be calling 911 when a fellow citizen appears to be acting “strangely” or worry that our own “stressed out” activity might be interpreted by someone as “suspicious” and we’ll be turned into the authorities?

Let’s examine some behaviors that might appear “strange” to someone else, but have an understandable explanation.

A mentally ill person who is not properly medicated may be screaming at an invisible enemy. Someone whose bank has just refused to re-negotiate a mortgage, and is facing foreclosure, may make idle threats out of pure anger and utter defeat. A jobless mother facing a long winter with reduced heating assistance could appear suspicious when seen wandering up and down an aisle, stopping to fondle a toy gun, over and over again, wishing she could buy it as a Christmas surprise for her son. A father who has just lost custody of his children, and won’t be able to see them until after the holidays, might leave his briefcase in the court house, distracted by overwhelming sadness and loss. Someone who is homeless and hungry could appear strange wearing unusual clothing and moving in odd, repetitive ways, trying to stay warm. A combat veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder may act very nervous or become agitated in a crowd of people.

Examples and explanations for “strange” behaviors are many, as are the hardships facing our fellow citizens in Barry County for whom there is no relief in sight. Every person has his or her own unique way of feeling and acting in the face of adversity, and many of those behaviors or activities could appear “suspicious” to an observer. It seems to me that compassion is a more powerful and appropriate emotion to practice with our fellow citizens in these difficult times. Compassion allows us to recognize and feel our shared humanity with another person and then compels us to act in some way to relieve their suffering or an injustice.

President Obama has stated he will now sign the National Defense Authorization Act, overwhelmingly passed by Congress, in which he is granted specific powers to authorize the military to arrest and indefinitely detain, without being charged or having a trial, any person anywhere in the world, including American citizens on American soil, merely “suspected” of being a terrorist or aiding a terrorist organization. The “suspicious” activities listed by Emergency Management/Department of Homeland Security are so vague that it is possible to imagine countless innocent activities that could result in an arrest.

There are real and serious problems facing us in our communities, country, and world. Some issues are very scary especially when our elected representatives and other world leaders seem unwilling or unable to negotiate solutions. But, there is not a terrorist lurking around every corner.

I refuse to allow fear to occupy my life or silence my voice!

Former Congressman Howard Wolpe Memorialized by Friends and Former Constituents

2011-12-14T05:13:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the U.S. House of Representatives

Courtesy of WMU News

This article appeared on the Huffington Post on Monday, December 19

Friends of former Rep. Howard Wolpe gathered at Western Michigan University (WMU) on Tuesday to remember the man they had loved, admired and worked for in countless campaigns.

The seven-term U.S. congressman (1979-93) died at his home in Saugatuck, Mich. on October 25. He was 71 and had a heart ailment.

Dignitaries from various periods in his life spoke of his faithfulness and passion to principle and problem solving whether it was legislation that allowed right turns on red or what was seen as his greatest achievement, passage of the U.S. Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986 that imposed sanctions against South Africa.

Lynn Jondahl, former state representative and Wolpe colleague, set the tone as master of ceremonies by quoting James Baldwin that Wolpe was a man who “earn[ed] one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”

Jondahl also read condolence letters from President Barak Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. The president characterized Wolpe as a “courageous fighter” and one who “helped make government work as a force for good.”

The former political science professor turned legislator “obsessed with wrestling with ideas and theories” to get “reasonable people to come together to reach reasonable solutions to problems,” said Jondahl.

One of Wolpe’s first public actions took place in Kalamazoo in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He organized a march to the all-white male City Commission demanding they do something about prejudice and racism in the city, said Chet Rogers, a colleague, friend, former campaign manager and aide.

The march came out of a brainstorming session that concluded the best way of attacking racism was to educate and change the white community.

This action gave Wolpe the reputation as the town radical, said Rogers. It later led him to a seat on the City Commission where he was elected to two terms and able to make some small changes.

He then went to the state legislature in 1972 and became only the second Democrat to win that district in history. Wolpe’s hands-on, door-to-door campaigning and constituent services led him to the U.S. Congress in 1978 after losing a 1976 bid by less than one percent. He decided not to run for re-election in 1992 after redistricting.

“Howard believed that government could be good and that the job of government was to create a fair and just society,” said Rogers. “He worked at this fearlessly.”

In this July 15, 1996 file photo, then United States presidential envoy Howard Wolpe, right, shakes hands with Burundian President Ntibantunganya Slyvestre at the presidential palace in Bujumbura, Burundi. Photo: Sayyid Azim / AP

As much as he loved being a legislator, nothing has satisfied Wolpe more than being a peacemaker in one of the most volatile regions of Africa.

In 1994, after an unsuccessful bid for governor in Michigan, he served as the special envoy to the African Great Lakes region under President Bill Clinton until 2001.

Later, as director of the Africa Program for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, his last position before retirement, Wolpe went beyond conventional diplomacy methods in order to help bring peace and reconciliation to Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia.

In a previous interview with Wolpe, he said that his secret in handling conflict is providing a communication platform for all factions involved and letting them share with each other the ways they perceive their opponents.

Conventional diplomacy is aimed at obtaining a “quick acceptance,” to agreements drawn up by lawyers, said Wolpe. The element missing in this process is taking into consideration the personalities of the leaders who have just signed the agreement.

He said he learned this technique from his child psychologist mother, Zelda Wolpe, and first saw it in action when she applied it during a racial strife situation in the Kalamazoo schools in 1970.

Around the same time, Wolpe and Chet Rogers, were at WMU running simulations of SIMSOC, a role-playing “game” created by then University of Michigan sociologist William Gamson. The simulation requires participants to cope with the daily problems of governing society and to grapple with issues like abuse of power, justice, diversity, trust, and leadership as they negotiate their way through problems like labor-management strife, political turmoil, and natural disasters.

Former Rep. David Bonior of Michigan who served with Wolpe on the state legislature, also spoke highly of Wolpe saying he was “smart, serious, energetic, full of hope” as he worked on pet issues like the environment, peace, women’s rights, labor, people with disabilities and racial justice.

“He had the skill of putting coalitions together [with both sides of the aisle] and to create the dynamics to get something done.”

Bonior pointed to Wolpe’s fight for sanctions against South Africa.

Wolpe sat on the Foreign Affairs Committee and chaired that panel’s Subcommittee on Africa. He wrote legislation against apartheid in South Africa and, after President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill, he got Congress to override the veto.

Wolpe did this despite the fact that two major corporations in his district, the Kellogg Company and the Upjohn Company, opposed him. Nevertheless, he remained in communication with them and he made friends with Nelson Mandala after his release from prison.

“Few people make a significant difference on the world stage,” said Bonior. “Howard did. And, by his actions, he moved us closer to racial justice and harmony.”

Steve McDonald, director of the Africa Program at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, said he sat beside Wolpe when he berated an African president intending to go to war. He saw how he worked with hardened Hutu and Tutsi soldiers by having them share their fears with each other.

In doing so, “they realized the aspirations and fears of the other guy,” said McDonald, and that changed the conversation.

Peter Yarrow of the Peter, Paul and Mary singing group, was friends with Wolpe and sang two songs in honor of him: “Don’t Laugh at Me” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”

Wolpe is survived by his wife, Julie Fletcher, and a son, Michael. He lost his first wife, Judy, in 2006 when she drowned off the coast of Guatemala while the couple was on vacation.

News and Tributes on Howard Wolpe

African Star News Magazine

All Africa

New York Times

Roll Call

Washington Post

Kalamazoo Gazette

More Kalamazoo Gazette

Guest Essay: High Stakes Testing in Schools

2011-12-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

Could you pass a tenth grade reading test? sample test

Could you pass a tenth grade math test? sample test

By Marion Brady
veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.

But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.

Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”

One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.

“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”
Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.

Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”

A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”

My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”

He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.

How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?

QUIZ: How would you do on this same test taken by a school board member? Find out: Reading Quiz | Math Quiz. Questions come from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) for 10th grade. Or try your hand at questions from the National Assessment of Education Progress for fourth and eighth graders.

Guest Essay: High Stakes Testing in Schools

2011-12-11T07:11:00.000-08:00

by Valerie Strauss
Washington Post

This is a follow-up to Monday’s guest post about a school board member who took a version of a state standardized test and was horrified at what he found.

That post was written by veteran educator Marion Brady, who said he did not name the board member to save him from mean personal attacks by critics. The board member, however, agreed to talk to me about the experience on the record because he has come to feel very strongly about the issue.

The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year.

The FCAT, begun in 1998, has been given annually to students in grades 3 to 11 in mathematics, reading, science and writing. It is the bedrock of what is regarded as one of the nation’s most extensive and widely studied school accountability systems. In the last school year, the state began rolling out a next-generation FCAT. For more on the testing program, see here.

Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years.

Monday’s post explained how Roach took a version of the FCAT and reached this conclusion in an email to Brady:

“I won’t beat around the bush. The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a ‘D,’ and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

“It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities....

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actuall y been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here are some of the highlights of an interview I did with Roach today further exploring his reasons for taking the test and reaching the conclusions that he did.

*Now in his 13th year on the board, he had considered taking the test for a while as he began to increasingly question whether the results really reflected a student’s ability. He was finally pushed to do it earlier this year, he said, after a board meeting at which the chairman listed five goals, and one of them caught his attention for being so unremarkable.

Roach said: ‘He [the chairman] said that by 2013 or 2014, he wanted 50 percent of the 10th graders reading at grade level....I’m thinking, ‘That’s horrible.’ Right now it’s 39 percent of our kids reading at grade level in 10th grade. I have to tell you that I’ve never believed that that many kids can’t read at that level. Never ever believed it. I have five kids of my own. None of them were superstars at school but they could read well, and these kids today can read too.

“So I was thinking, ‘What are they taking that tells them they can’t read? What is this test? Our kids do okay on the eighth grade test and on the fifth grade test and then they get stupid in the 10th grade?”

He asked someone who works at the board to help him take the FCAT but state law only allows it to be taken by students, so it was arranged for him to take a version of it.

He took 60 math questions and a four-part reading test.

How did he score?

On the reading section, he scored 62 percent, a ‘D’ in Orange County. On the math, he said he knew none of the answers but guessed correctly on 10 of the 60.

*Thousands of Florida students with 3.0 or higher grade point averages are denied high school diplomas, Roach said, because they fail at least one portion of the FCAT. Last year, he said, 41,000 kids were denied diplomas across the state — about 70 in his district — and some of them have a 3.0 GPA or better.

*He said he understands why so many students who can actually read well do poorly on the FCAT.
“Many of the kids we label as poor readers are probably pretty good readers. Here’s why.

“On the FCAT, they are reading material they didn’t choose. They are given four possible answers and three out of the four are pretty good. One is the best answer but kids don’t get points for only a pretty good answer. They get zero points, the same for the absolute wrong answer. And then they are given an arbitrary time limit. Those are a number of reasons that I think the test has to be suspect.”

He said he visits schools frequently in his district, including the three high schools (there are 19 high school in the entire county), and talks to principals about this issue. He said they are frustrated that students who they know can read and do math can’t graduate because they can’t pass the test.

Could that mean that all of the teachers in all of the schools are grading too easy?

Roach said “absolutely not.” He knows a lot of the teachers and they aren’t a “soft touch.”

*He said he never brought it up at a board meeting in part because the meetings are publicized and he wasn’t ready until now to publicly discuss it.

*The math section, he said, tests information that most people don’t need when they get out of school.

“There’s a concept called reverse design that is critical,” he said. “We are violating that with our test. Instead of connecting what we learn in school with being successful in the real world, we are doing it in reverse. We are testing first and then kids go into the real world. Whether the information they have learned is important or not becomes secondary. If you really did a study on what math most kids need, I guarantee you could probably dump about 80 percent of math scores and leave high-level math for the kids who want it and will need it.

*His final conclusion on the FCAT:

“They are defending a test that has no accountability.”

Michigan Can Be a Leader in Dealing With Climate Change

2011-12-10T02:10:00.001-08:00

This article appeared on the Huffington Post on Friday, December 9, 2011
Energy Bulletin on Saturday, December 10, 2011
Kalamazoo Gazette on Friday, December 23, 2011

The opportunity to pull Michigan out of its economic slump and deal with climate change is right in front of us.

"Michigan is one of the key places on earth where we can turn this around," said Peter Sinclair, an award-winning graphic artist, illustrator, animator, long-time environmentalist and blogger of Climate Crocks.

"[Green technology] can become the spear point of a major industrial revolution more impacting than the computer revolution."

He spoke recently at the Kalamazoo Nature Center about the effects of greenhouse gases (GHG) on the natural cycles of the earth and what we can do about it.

Millions of young people prepared for jobs in the emerging green technology could make a huge difference on our world in much the same way that young people were inspired by President Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon, said Sinclair.

"We need that kind of national mission now!" said Sinclair who contends that green technology can help the planet and create a new, green economy.

Many people fear that any change from our current fossil fuel economy will mean that we will have to live in caves, candlelight and be without cars. Many detractors and non-believers in climate change play on that fear, too. Here, too, the reality differs from the rhetoric.

Dow Chemical in Midland has been progressively reducing its carbon footprint and making money from improved energy efficiency, said Sinclair. Between 2009 and 2010 the Fortune 500 company saved $760 million. This came about in 1990 when the company made a $2 billion investment and designed a sustainability strategy. It has resulted in $9.4 billion in savings, with a $7 billion net savings.

"Solar shingles" can be put on the roofs of new "zero-energy houses." They use 70 percent less energy than today's houses -- and then generate enough energy to be sold to other users. These shingles are made in Saginaw and they have attracted other solar fabrication companies to move into Michigan.

Upgrading the insulation of old houses is another opportunity, and although the cost is still high, it is declining precipitously. Part of the reason why is that some companies like Sungevity are adopting a "solar leasing model" where panels are installed for free, the homeowner rents them and unused energy goes back into the grid.

Actually, the price of solar energy has fallen 5 percent every year since 1970 while the cost of electricity has risen by 5 percent every year in the same period, according to Andrew Birch, CEO of Sungevity.

Sinclair called solar technology a definite paradigm shift where we can generate more energy than we use. This is possible because it takes 15 terawatts to supply the earth's power needs for one year while the sun provides 6,000 times more energy (8,600 terawatts) every day -- for free, according to Sungevity.

Today, there are one million solar roofs operating in America and there is a lot of potential for growth, said Sinclair.

While Sinclair admitted that the zero-energy house is not the total answer to our climate change problems, green buildings are the direction we need to go. For more than a decade, Leadership in Engineering and Environmental Design (LEED) has been the standard to which green builders aspired. Now, a new standard has emerged called the "living building." It generates all of its own energy with renewable non-toxic resources, captures and treats all of its water, and operates efficiently and for maximum beauty.

The Ford Rouge Plant in Dearborn has a "living roof" where several varieties of sebum (a mossy-looking plant) are trained to grow up the factory's outer walls to keep the factory warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

This came about when Ford called in acclaimed "eco" architect Bill McDonough in 2004 to help with the redesign of their Rouge plant in Dearborn where the F150 pick-up truck is made. As a result, the factory now has one of the biggest green roofs in the world.

Roger Gaudette of Ford Land talks about the idea behind the green roof in this video.

Wind turbines provide yet another energy-producing alternative and Michigan once again is well-positioned to take advantage of this technology. Pigeon (in the Thumb area) is a leader in generating wind power while hundreds of turbines are going up in Gratiot County (south of Mt. Pleasant) with plans for more in Montcalm County (east of Gratiot County).

Sinclair said that there is enormous potential for the Great Lakes region to equal the wind generation expected of the Great Plains, often dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of wind." The East Coast alone has enough wind to power the whole country, he said.

Skeptics may ask, however, what happens when the wind stops blowing?

"This is a non-problem," said Sinclair who explained that every energy source is intermittent and that they are designed to store energy for those down times. The same thing can happen with wind.

He added that Michigan has excellent geology for underground caverns where energy may be stored.

Several community colleges have already created educational training programs for wind energy technicians who can make $22 to $33 per hour, said Sinclair. That would command salaries of $40,000 to $60,000 per year.

There is also a need for people who can build, design and transport windmills.

"This is good for Michigan and it could create 30,000+ new jobs -- if we want them," said Sinclair. "The window is now open but it can close. Right now, we are dithering."