Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Earth Day by the numbers

I'm a few days late, but I just came across the following informative and sobering numbers in the Nutrition Action Healthletter, which I unreservedly recommend to all.

Earth Day by the Numbers

66 is the percentage of grain fed to animals, 4500 is the number of gallons of water needed to produce a quarter-pound of beef.

Michael F. Jacobson • April 22, 2016

 

Today, April 22, is the 46^th annual Earth Day, when more than 193 countries celebrate their love and care for our planet. Here are some numbers to consider as you contemplate the future of our one Mother Earth:

1 pound: the amount of fertilizer needed to produce 3 pounds of cooked beef

5 times as much: the irrigation water used to grow feed grains compared to fruits and vegetables

5 tons: the soil lost annually to erosion on an average acre of cropland

7 pounds: the amount of corn needed to add 1 pound of weight to feedlot cattle (some of that weight gain is not edible meat)

19 percent: the proportion of all methane, a greenhouse gas, emitted by cattle and other livestock

41 percent: the share of irrigated land planted in livestock feed crops

66 percent: the proportion of grain that ends up as livestock feed at home or abroad

331: the number of odor-causing chemicals in hog manure

4,500 gallons: the rain and irrigation water needed to produce a quarter-pound of raw beef

8,500 square miles: the size of the “dead zone” created in the Gulf of Mexico by fertilizer runoff carried by the Mississippi from the upper Midwest

33 million: the number of cars needed to produce the same level of global warming as is caused by the methane gas emitted by livestock and their manure

22 billion pounds: the amount of fertilizer used annually to grow feed grains for American livestock

3.3 trillion pounds: the amount of livestock manure produced annually

17 trillion gallons: the amount of irrigation water used annually to produce feed for U.S. livestock

Source: Six Arguments for a Greener Diet  by Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., and the Staff of the Center for Science in the Public Interest

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Rumi on pilgrimage

O, Pilgrim

O pilgrim, where have you been?
Where are you now?

While you have been searching the world
the Beloved has been here all along
waiting for you.

Let the caravan carry you home
to your deepest heart’s desire.
The treasure you sought was buried in your own garden.

Come home, o wanderer, and behold the face in the mirror.
Look behind the eyes and see the One
who has been searching for you.

You are seen;
you are known 
and you are beloved.

If your seeking has brought you here at last,
you know that there is nowhere else to go
and nothing more to say.

 

Jellaludin Rumi

 

 

The social life of trees

I have long had a feeling of close affinity with trees. In my childhood I wanted to be a forest ranger, imagining myself walking and caring for the paths and keenly aware, through a lookout tower, of any threats to forest life. That affinity led me yesterday to linger with a fascinating story in The New York Times:

German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too

HÜMMEL, Germany — In the deep stillness of a forest in winter, the sound of footsteps on a carpet of leaves died away. Peter Wohlleben had found what he was looking for: a pair of towering beeches. “These trees are friends,” he said, craning his neck to look at the leafless crowns, black against a gray sky. “You see how the thick branches point away from each other? That’s so they don’t block their buddy’s light.”

Before moving on to an elderly beech to show how trees, like people, wrinkle as they age, he added, “Sometimes, pairs like this are so interconnected at the roots that when one tree dies, the other one dies, too.”

Mr. Wohlleben, 51, is a very tall career forest ranger who, with his ramrod posture and muted green uniform, looks a little like one of the sturdy beeches in the woods he cares for. Yet he is lately something of a sensation as a writer in Germany, a place where the forest has long played an outsize role in the cultural consciousness, in places like fairy tales, 20th-century philosophy, Nazi ideology and the birth of the modern environmental movement.

Mr. Wohlleben traces his love of the forest to his early childhood, where he raised spiders and \turtles. In high school, teachers painted a dire picture of the world’s ecological future, and he decided it was his mission to help.

After the publication in May of Mr. Wohlleben’s book, a surprise hit titled “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries From a Secret World,” the German forest is back in the spotlight. Since it first topped best-seller lists last year, Mr. Wohlleben has been spending more time on the media trail and less on the forest variety, making the case for a popular reimagination of trees, which, he says, contemporary society tends to look at as “organic robots” designed to produce oxygen and wood.

Presenting scientific research and his own observations in highly anthropomorphic terms, the matter-of-fact Mr. Wohlleben has delighted readers and talk-show audiences alike with the news — long known to biologists — that trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the “Wood Wide Web”; and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots.

“With his book, he changed the way I look at the forest forever,” Markus Lanz, a popular talk show host, said in an email. “Every time I walk through a beautiful woods, I think about it.”

Though duly impressed with Mr. Wohlleben’s ability to capture the public’s attention, some German biologists question his use of words, like “talk” rather than the more standard “communicate,” to describe what goes on between trees in the forest.

But this, says Mr. Wohlleben, who invites readers to imagine what a tree might feel when its bark tears (“Ouch!”), is exactly the point. “I use a very human language,” he explained. “Scientific language removes all the emotion, and people don’t understand it anymore. When I say, ‘Trees suckle their children,’ everyone knows immediately what I mean.”

Still No. 1 on the Spiegel best-seller list for nonfiction, “Hidden Life” has sold 320,000 copies and has been optioned for translation in 19 countries (Canada’s Greystone Books will publish an English version in September). “It’s one of the biggest successes of the year,” said Denis Scheck, a German literary critic who praised the humble narrative style and the book’s ability to awaken in readers an intense, childlike curiosity about the workings of the world.

The popularity of “The Hidden Life of Trees,” Mr. Scheck added, says less about Germany than it does about modern life. People who spend most of their time in front of computers want to read about nature. “Germans are reputed to have a special relationship with the forest, but it’s kind of a cliché,” Mr. Scheck said. “Yes, there’s Hansel and Gretel, and, sure, if your marriage fails, you go for a long hike in the woods. But I don’t think Germans love their forest more than Swedes or Norwegians or Finns.”

Mr. Wohlleban traces his own love of the forest to his early childhood. Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in Bonn, then the West German capital, he raised spiders and turtles, and liked playing outside more than any of his three siblings did. In high school, a generation of young, left-leaning teachers painted a dire picture of the world’s ecological future, and he decided it was his mission to help.

He studied forestry, and began working for the state forestry administration in Rhineland-Palatinate in 1987. Later, as a young forester in charge of a 3,000-odd acre woodlot in the Eifel region, about an hour outside Cologne, he felled old trees and sprayed logs with insecticides. But he did not feel good about it: “I thought, ‘What am I doing? I’m making everything kaput.’ ”

Reading up on the behavior of trees — a topic he learned little about in forestry school — he found that, in nature, trees operate less like individuals and more as communal beings. Working together in networks and sharing resources, they increase their resistance.

By artificially spacing out trees, the plantation forests that make up most of Germany’s woods ensure that trees get more sunlight and grow faster. But, naturalists say, creating too much space between trees can disconnect them from their networks, stymieing some of their inborn resilience mechanisms.

Intrigued, Mr. Wohlleben began investigating alternate approaches to forestry. Visiting a handful of private forests in Switzerland and Germany, he was impressed. “They had really thick, old trees,” he said. “They treated their forest much more lovingly, and the wood they produced was more valuable. In one forest, they said, when they wanted to buy a car, they cut two trees. For us, at the time, two trees would buy you a pizza.”

Back in the Eifel in 2002, Mr. Wohlleben set aside a section of “burial woods,” where people could bury cremated loved ones under 200-year-old trees with a plaque bearing their names, bringing in revenue without harvesting any wood. The project was financially successful. But, Mr. Wohlleben said, his bosses were unhappy with his unorthodox activities. He wanted to go further — for example, replacing heavy logging machinery, which damages forest soil, with horses — but could not get permission.

After a decade of struggling with his higher-ups, he decided to quit. “I consulted with my family first,” said Mr. Wohlleben, who is married and has two children. Though it meant giving up the ironclad security of employment as a German civil servant, “I just thought, ‘I cannot do this the rest of my life.’”

The family planned to emigrate to Sweden. But it turned out that Mr. Wohlleben had won over the forest’s municipal owners.

So, 10 years ago, the municipality took a chance. It ended its contract with the state forestry administration, and hired Mr. Wohlleben directly. He brought in horses, eliminated insecticides and began experimenting with letting the woods grow wilder. Within two years, the forest went from loss to profit, in part by eliminating expensive machinery and chemicals.

Despite his successes, in 2009 Mr. Wohlleben started having panic attacks. “I kept thinking, ‘Ah! You only have 20 years, and you still have to accomplish this, and this, and that.’” He began therapy, to treat burnout and depression. It helped. “I learned to be happy about what I’ve done so far,” he said. “With a forest, you have to think in terms of 200 or 300 years. I learned to accept that I can’t do everything. Nobody can.”

He wanted to write “The Hidden Life of Trees” to show laypeople how great trees are.

Stopping to consider a tree that rose up straight then curved like a question mark, Mr. Wohlleben said, however, that it was the untrained perspective of visitors he took on forest tours years ago to which he owed much insight.

“For a forester, this tree is ugly, because it is crooked, which means you can’t get very much money for the wood,” he said. “It really surprised me, walking through the forest, when people called a tree like this one beautiful. They said, ‘My life hasn’t always run in a straight line, either.’ And I began to see things with new eyes.”

Where is the lamp beside the golden door?

A physician colleague who practices and teaches palliative care and geriatrics at Harvard Medical School, Muriel Gillick, MD, also publishes a fine short essay online once a week, under the general title, "Life in the End Zone" (http://blog.drmurielgillick.com/). Given the importance of her topic this week, and her own wise response, I am taking the liberty of reprinting her comments below. Read them alongside a New York Times graphic, "Why It Takes Two Years for Syrian Refugees to Enter the U.S."

 

Where is the lamp beside the golden door?

by Muriel Gillick, MD

22 Nov 2015

 

According to the New York Times, fewer than 2000 Syrian refugees have been accepted for resettlement to the United States. Of these, half are children and one-quarter are over age 60. So the refugee crisis, of which Syrians are a significant part, affects older people as well as the young and the middle-aged. As we hear more and more strident calls to keep out these refugees, ostensibly because they might be terrorists, when in fact they are seeking to escape from those same terrorists who roam their native lands, we would do well to remember an earlier refugee crisis. It’s a crisis I’m all too familiar with, as my parents—then ages 13 and 14—were among those who left Germany in the winter of 1939, at first merely to escape persecution, later to escape death. It would be 8 years before they finally found refuge in the United States, where they have lived productive lives for the past 68 years.

By the summer of 1942, tens of thousands of European Jews had already been rounded up by the seemingly unstoppable Germans and incarcerated in ghettoes, enslaved as forced laborers, or sent to extermination camps. Those who remained in Holland, Belgium, and France were on the run. One of the only countries to run to was Switzerland, an oasis of neutrality in war-torn Europe. But in August, the Swiss government sealed its borders to refugees, invoking the time-honored allegation that further Jewish immigration was a threat to the peace and stability of their society. In December of 1942, the government clamped down further, ordering that every refugee over the age of 16 be turned away at the border. In the coming months, the Swiss police would send about 25,000 people to almost certain death.

It was not the first time that the world had turned its back on Jewish refugees. In the summer of 1938, just days after the American Independence Day holiday, representatives from 32 countries gathered at the majestic Hotel Royale in the French lake-side resort of Evian-les-Bains to discuss the plight of the millions of European Jews who wished to immigrate to avoid discrimination, persecution, and worse. For over a week, the delegates convened to express their concern--but did nothing.

 

A few months later, on what would become known as Kristallnacht, synagogues were torched throughout Germany, Jewish businesses destroyed, and 30,000 people arrested for the crime of being Jews. In response, a democratic US Senator and a Republican representative introduced a bill that would have admitted 20,000 Jewish refugee children to the United States. But public opinion was resoundingly against immigration on the grounds that it could be harmful to American citizens, and the bill died an early death. 

 

When the United States entered the war, virtually all immigration to this country ceased. But already that fateful fall, the State Department had deliberately put barriers in the way of Jewish refugees. Even accessing the limited quotas in place as of the xenophobic Immigration Act of 1924 became increasingly difficult. Consulates abroad were instructed to “delay” and “effectively stop” the trickle of immigrants arriving in the United States by resorting to administrative devices to “postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”

 

After World War II was over, the member states of the newly established United Nations recognized the callous cruelty of their behavior towards refugees. Committed to mending their ways, they drew up the Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which asserted that everyone has the right to “seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” This was followed in 1951 with the “Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees” which defined refugees and delineated their rights. In 2001, dozens of countries reaffirmed their commitment to the rights of refugees, acknowledging that “many persons still leave their country of origin for reasons of persecution and are entitled to special protection on account of their position.”

 

In light of this history, the current attempts by state governors, including Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, to close their hearts and barricade the gates to refugees is both tragic and intolerable. We must not confuse the persecuted with their persecutors. We need to remember the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty, a gift to us from France, from the poem, “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus:

 

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

 

 

 

 

Life in the End Zone: perspectives on aging

Editor's note: For some time I have been following a weekly blog published each  Sunday. It's called "Life in the End Zone: perspectives on aging," and is written by Muriel Gillick, MD, who describes herself briefly as "a physician who specializes in the care of patients with advanced illness (palliative care) or advanced age (geriatrics), or both. I am also a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts and a faculty member in the Department of Population Medicine within the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute." You can explore Dr. Gillick's blog by clicking on this address.

With more and more of my friends−as well as myself−nearing "the end zone," and with a career-long personal and professional interest in the whole human life cycle, I've found Dr. Gillick's short weekly combination of information and reflections of real value, and wanted to bring them to your attention. I do so this week, with her words below, because she is beginning a series of weekly discussions of a new World Health Organization report on aging that she persuasively describes as "a remarkable and inspiring document."

 

Posted: 04 Oct 2015

The World Health Organization released a brand new report. It doesn’t have a very snazzy title—it’s called World Report on Ageing and Health—but it’s a remarkable and inspiring document. 

 

Not surprisingly, none of the major US newspapers breathed a word about its release. Maybe the reporters just haven’t had time to go over it: it is, after all, 260 pages. Or maybe they figure that what’s happening in the rest of the world isn’t terribly germane to the US. Perhaps−and I suspect this is the real reason−the media don't want to think about aging. In fact, the report is brimming with fascinating observations and interesting insights, many of which are relevant to the United States both in terms of our own aging population and in terms of national security. There is so much in here worth commenting on, that I think I will devote more than one blog post to the report. Let me begin by sharing some of the most astonishing things I learned in the first half of the report.

 

The report begins by suggesting that rather than thinking about expenditures on older people as pure costs, they should be seen as investments. It points to a study done in the UK a few years ago which calculated that if you put everything that the government spends on old people in one column (pensions, health care, other social welfare programs) and you put the contributions of older people in another column (taxes, consumer spending, work), you come up with a positive balance. At least in England, the net contribution of older people amounts to 40 billion pounds per year.

 

One of the most startling differences between this new report and its predecessor is that today's version defines healthy aging as the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age. I like that. All health care systems in all countries, the authors argue, should have as their [preeminent] goal fostering the functional ability of older people by supporting and maintaining their intrinsic capacities and by enabling those with diminished functional capacity to do the things most important to them. This is a marked improvement, in my view, from the last major WHO report, Active Ageing, which came out in 2002, that talked about "optimizing opportunities for health." Then, health was the ultimate objective; now, health and healthcare are means to an end and that end has to do with the ability to function in society.

 

The description of what health in older age looks like in different countries is both intriguing and sobering. My attention was drawn to a single chart showing the percent of the population age 65-74 and the percent age 75 and older with limitations in one or more activities of daily living, by country. Only a handful of countries were listed. But the gap between the worst off and the best off was shocking—as was the revelation of who occupied the extremes. In first place is Switzerland, with fewer than 10% of the 65-74 year olds suffering a limitation in function and fewer than 20% of those over 75. In last place is Russia, with 60% of the younger old and 80% (that’s not a typo) of the older old reporting at least one ADL [activities of daily living] deficit. I haven’t quite figured out how this relates to Putin’s policy in Ukraine and Syria, but I suspect there’s a connection. There's something very rotten in the state of Russia.

 

On a more optimistic note, the chapter on “Health Systems” gives some uplifting examples of countries that have introduced novel approaches to improving the well-being of their older populations. Ghana is making an effort to harness its well-established system of community health workers to meet the needs of older people. And Brazil has begun integrating aging into its national family health strategy: it is using multidisciplinary teams comprised of physicians, nurses, and physical therapists, psychologists, nutritionists, occupational therapists, and others to work in community centers and to go into patients’ homes to deliver care.

 

More to follow....

 

 

Oliver Sacks's 82nd birthday - Part Two: "My Own Life"

Three days ago I noted Oliver Sacks's 82nd birthday, but I didn't write that it was likely to be his last. This passionate and prolific author, neurologist and physician has terminal liver cancer. How one chooses to live with the knowledge that one's time on the planet is predictably short tends to focus one's mind;  that process is particularly vivid and clear for a mind as capacious as Dr. Sacks's. He wrote about his experience in the extraordinary essay reprinted below. See also Maria Popova's birthday tribute to Dr. Sacks.

 

My Own Life

by Oliver Sacks

New York Times, February 19, 2015


A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.

Hume continued, “I am ... a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”

Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.