osprey | The Casual Blog

July 9, 2021

Some good soul, and talking about race

This past week we went out to see a movie for the first time since BC (Before Covid). Sally had read about a new documentary, Summer of Soul, playing at the Rialto, our old time neighborhood movie house. There was only one guy there selling tickets, and he also sold drinks and snacks, so it took longer than usual time to get a ticket, popcorn, and a beer.

But it was so worth it! Summer of Soul is about a concert series in the summer of 1969 in a park in Harlem with mostly Black musicians and hundreds of thousands of Black people listening, singing, and dancing.

The musicians included already famous and future legendary performers, including Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Nina Simone, David Ruffin, Max Roach, Ray Baretto, Mahalia Jackson, the Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. That is, some of the very best gospel, blues, jazz, soul, and rock ever made. The musicians seemed to feel the love, and their performances showed it.

It was amazing that it ever happened, and unfortunate that it never became a cultural touchstone, like Woodstock, which happened the same summer. Fortunately, the producers saved the videotapes, and now, 52 years later, we can get a good look at what we missed. It may be just the right moment to discover and cherish this wonderful moment of Black culture. The film is streaming on Hulu.

As you probably already know, race is multi-dimensional issue in the United States, which we haven’t fully worked through. One indicator of this is the odd new moral panic about the teaching of critical race theory. I learned last week that parents in Loudoun County, Va. and other places are harassing and threatening school board members because they believe their young children are being taught this specialized CRT scholarship.

This notion, promoted by fearmongering rabble rousers at Fox News, is almost certainly untrue. But it’s concerning that these parents, who presumably love their children, seem really worried. They apparently think their children may learn some really bad lessons — ones that run contrary to our traditional narrative of progress and harmony.

It isn’t surprising that being clear and direct about race makes some white people uncomfortable. For one thing, it isn’t how we were taught. For another, it may involve unpleasant feelings, like regret, shame, and guilt. For some, there could be a feeling that their position in the hierarchy is indefensible and threatened. And it isn’t surprising that some react to this discomfort defensively, converting it into anger and denial.

But I still find it remarkable that those who want avoid the issue attack those who would like to address our racial history and problems as racists.

Anyhow, for those who aren’t full of that sort of fear and anger, I recommend a recent podcast series from RadioLab: The Vanishing of Harry Pace. It tells what is known of Pace, a highly accomplished businessman who wrote popular songs, started Black Swan records, led a Black insurance company, and then seemed to change his racial identification.

Part of what’s fascinating is how race can seem firmly fixed, and turn out to be highly ambiguous. Similarly, history that we assume must be well settled can turn out to be full of uncertainty.

Along this same line, remember the Alamo? The way I heard the story as a kid, it was a heroic battle for freedom in Texas. This was not true, according to Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. In an interview on Fresh Air, Burrough explained that the battle was part of a struggle mainly about preserving and expanding slavery by white settlers in what was then part of Mexico, where slavery was generally illegal.

The supposed idealism and heroism were Hollywood creations. Burrough noted in the interview that contradicting the traditional accounts of the heroism of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, etc. made some people, including militia types, extremely upset.

Getting back to music, I’ve been reading a biography of Claude Debussy by Stephen Walsh. As is usually or always true with music writing, it doesn’t succeed in conveying anything close to the actual music, but it does suggest perspectives for listening. Debussy’s music, some of which I’m capable of playing on the piano, was highly original, but he also acknowledged being inspired by music from other cultures, including the Javanese gamelan tradition of Indonesia.

Inspired by Walsh’s account, I decided to track down some gamelan music, and found plenty on YouTube. The examples I heard didn’t sound at all like they could be Debussy’s model, and I’m inclined to think he drew more from traditional Japanese music. But with YouTube it was surprisingly fun to dip into Javanese and Japanese music. It inspired me to start exploring other traditional world music through there — from eastern Europe, native Americans, west Africans. There’s a ton!

These photos are from Jordan Lake this week. There weren’t a lot of birds there, and those I saw didn’t perform any spectacular feats, like catching a fish. But I liked this osprey.

May 15, 2021

Attacking fact checking, and the big election lie emergency

I’d planned to head to eastern NC this week to look for black bears and other creatures. Unfortunately, in Raleigh and elsewhere, there was a gas shortage. For a few hours, drivers and cars waited in long lines to get into stations, and then, the lines disappeared, and all the stations that I checked were out of gas.

The primary cause was a criminal hack of a major fuel pipeline company, with a secondary cause of a mass freak out (panic buying). People will probably calm down eventually. In the meantime, anyone taking a long road trip faced a good chance of getting stranded without gas, and so I sadly put off the bears. These pictures are ones I took recently at Jordan Lake and Raulston Arboretum

I’d been looking forward to taking a break from the subject of Trump, elections, and democracy. For a couple of weeks, it looked like we were heading towards normal, still with big problems, but having avoided a crash into full-on fascism. Right now we’ve got a full plate of wars, diseases, and other miseries, and it would be good not to add to the to-do list. So I’m sorry. But this is an emergency: our democracy is in a crisis.

Before I get to the crisis, a related development: this week a state legislator in Michigan proposed a new law aimed at fact checkers. As a former professional fact checker, I wondered what was up. According to the Washington Post, the legislator in question was a supporter of “Stop the Steal” and opponent of Covid safety measures. He proposed that fact checkers be required to register with the state, post a million dollar bond, and face fines and lawsuits for their mistakes.

As an ex-lawyer, I’m pretty confident that such a law would be struck down as unconstitutional, as long as we have anything resembling our current constitutional system. But the proposed law is one more indication of the fragility of that system.

It’s been four decades since I worked as a fact checker at The New Yorker, and through the years it never occurred to me that the government might try to put the lid on fact checking. I assumed that almost everyone would prefer to have truthful, reliable information, as opposed to mistakes or lies. Even though right-wing propaganda networks regularly play fast and loose with facts, the idea of making it a crime to try to get the facts right is something new.

Here’s fact checking in a nutshell: the job of the checker is to figure out whether statements purporting to be factual are accurate. Sometimes this is straightforward, as with correctly spelling names and confirming addresses, but other times it requires more research and analysis. On issues requiring expertise or first-hand knowledge, it requires consulting reliable experts or sources. It requires judgment when, as happens, experts or sources disagree. In such cases, the checker may add a note that there’s a disagreement.

Like all humans, fact checkers sometimes make mistakes. In such cases, they may be reprimanded, fired, or, in cases of libel, sued. So the proposed Michigan law would seem pointless, if the point were to punish mistakes. It makes sense, though, if the aim is to clear the way for big lies by discouraging checking. For those whose careers depend on lies, facts are pesky things.

And so we come to the crisis. This week Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney was tossed out of the Republican leadership because she called out the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election and was denied the presidency because of fraud.

This action resembled Republicans’ refusal to impeach Trump, but it was actually worse. It’s the difference between quietly tolerating a lie and loudly shutting down those that oppose the lie. Instead of merely declining to hold Trump accountable for the January 6 attempt to overthrow the election, the Republicans are now effectively co-signing his lies about the election and endorsing the January 6 insurrection.

In an almost-but-not-quite comic development, some congressional Republicans are now rechristening the mayhem of January 6 as a normal tourist visit unrelated to Trump and his supporters.

For any who have forgotten, Trump supporters waving MAGA flags and sporting MAGA paraphernalia stormed the Capitol, shouting death threats, and vandalizing the premises as they searched for fleeing legislators who’d been about to complete certification of the election of Biden. There were several deaths, dozens of injuries, and legislators and guards who feared for their lives.

Meanwhile, having narrowly lost the last election, Republicans in 30-some states are moving forward with new voting laws designed to reduce the number of Democratic voters. According to a new report in Mother Jones, this effort has been organized with military precision by a right-wing dark money outfit associated with the Heritage Foundation.

The quasi-clever cover story for these laws is that they are needed to address voter fears of election fraud. There could be such fears, but in fact, there is no significant election fraud problem. The fears are based on the outrageous lies propagated at high volume by Trump and his supporters in connection with their effort to overturn the last election.

Senate Bill 1 could put a stop to the worst of the state level election rigging, but that legislation is opposed by Senate Republicans and can’t advance as long as the filibuster stays in place. At the same time, state Republicans are getting rid of election officials who refused to go along with the Trump attempt to steal the 2020 election, and replacing them with Trump loyalists. That is, they’re putting in place election officials who appear committed to stealing elections when directed.

There are a lot of moving parts, but the direction is clear: the end of our traditional system of transferring power peacefully based on fair elections. Republicans are in the process of replacing it with a system in which elections are a sham used by the powerful to fool the gullible. Such systems have a long history, but only in countries that we would not call democratic, such as China, Russia, and North Korea. To put it plainly: Republican leaders are now working on a large-scale effort to undermine the foundation of American democracy.

There are, of course, some principled Republicans who oppose this effort, and others who haven’t yet heard what’s happening, but would not support it. But right now the Republican leaders at the national and state level are moving ahead to set up a system where only their candidates can win. For many rank-and-file Republicans, persuaded by decades of right-wing lies that Democrats are evil socialists and otherwise very scary, changing the system to keep out Democrats may seem like a good idea.

Possibly the Trump fever will break, and those with the illness will revert to traditional support for fair elections and facts over lies. But I wouldn’t count on it. It’s more likely that our democratic experiment will only survive if we fight for it (non-violently, of course). We could start by junking the filibuster and moving ahead with Senate Bill 1.

May 16, 2020

A modest proposal for reining in the plutocracy: the decency test

Osprey this week at Lake Jordan

These last few months of the Covid-19 pandemic have been a crucible of sorts. We’ve all been tested in various ways, and learned a few things. If we didn’t know already, we’ve learned that our President has no idea what he’s doing, or even the idea that he should be doing something. Instead, faced with a serious problem, he looks for a scapegoat to blame (China . . . the World Health Organization . . . Obama). He still thinks like a reality TV huckster, uninterested in anything except getting as much attention as possible.

He is what he is, and with any luck we’ll soon vote him out and our heads will stop spinning from his crazy rants. But we’ll still have the question, how did this happen? How did we elect as President the rottenest person ever? The common wisdom these days tends to focus on the unholy alliance of right wing evangelicals and economically frustrated blue collar workers, with both groups fearful of social change and angry at diminishing opportunities.

But there’s clearly another important element that hasn’t been examined as much: super rich Republicans. In a recent piece in The New Yorker, Evan Osnos attempted to uncover why Republicans in the richest part of Connecticut decided to support Trump. He focused on Greenwich, CT, the epicenter of homes of the hedge fund moguls and other Wall Street financial types who make annual sums that stagger the mind, reaching the hundreds of millions of dollars.

It comes as no surprise that these people are mostly Republicans, but their value system as recently as a generation ago had an element of modesty, charity, and noblesse oblige. Osnos’s investigation indicated that their support for Trump went hand-in-hand with a loss of those values.

Eaglets this week at Shelley Lake

To the extent there’s a theory underlying the Trumpism of the super rich, it appears to be an extreme libertarianism in which the only unit of measure is the individual, and the only value is wealth accumulation. They think there’s no such thing as the public interest, and greed is, for them, good. The public issue of primary concern to them is lowering their own taxes — that is, keeping as much as possible for themselves and contributing as little as possible to the public good.

I am not without sympathy for the super rich. A few of them are not Republicans and did not support Trump. A few of them are intelligent, thoughtful, and funny. And they all have some problems (divorce, cancer, having teenagers) that are as miserable for them as for the rest of us. But it’s a huge mistake to think that the super rich are somehow deserving of their advantages.

We’ve been deeply conditioned to think that being wealthy is a good indicator of attributes like intelligence and hard work. But it’s not true. Most intelligent, hard-working people never get rich. The truth is, getting rich is mostly a matter of luck. If you’ve made it, chances are you hit your first jack pot the day you were born by having the right parents, who had excellent genes to bequeath and fine positions in the existing pecking order.

You probably kept on your lucky streak with good schools, good summer camps, and top-drawer undergraduate and graduate schools. You may have worked hard, and it may have felt like your accomplishments were simply the result of all your own hard work. But you had a lot of people helping, showing you what was required — what to work on, how long, and how hard. Also, you may not even have noticed, but there were a lot of not very prosperous people all around you making sure you were well fed, clothed, housed, and otherwise prepped for success.

Great blue heron at Shelley Lake

Of course, it helps to be in the right place at the right time, like starting a Wall Street career just as regulatory oversight of financial institutions was geared way down. There are many different kinds of luck that combine for mega wealth. Though it should be noted, as Osnos does, that insider trading and fraud also helped in building some of the most fabulous fortunes.

But even if being wealthy were a good indicator of inherent superiority, rather than mostly luck, there would still be good reasons to call out the super rich Trump supporters. Their value system is deplorable — self-centered, like those of a young child in Kohlberg’s system. Their orientation is exclusively on their own advantage; other people don’t matter. This is unfortunate for them, of course, since they miss out on a lot of what’s really beautiful and rewarding in life. But once they decide to take a role in public affairs, it’s a problem for all of us.

As the Koch brothers and their rich buddies have proven, it’s surprisingly easy, if you have unlimited funds, to spread disinformation and buy influence. With personal wealth as a primary value, they change the laws so they can more easily make and keep more money. They get other laws that minimize the chance of any progressive change in public policy. For example, they pay for and get lower taxes, deregulation, sycophantic judges, and gerrymandered elections.

As the super rich contribute less and less in taxes, public infrastructure and institutions, like roads, bridges, and schools, are defunded and fall into disrepair. Crumbling infrastructure is actually helpful, since it provides them with another argument “proving” government is ineffective. Interestingly, according to Osnos, Connecticut, with so many super rich citizens, has some of the worst roads in the country. Perhaps that’s not a problem, if you’ve got a helicopter, a yacht, and a jet. Meanwhile, they make sure nothing gets done to address the worsening existential disaster of a planet getting steadily hotter.

The extreme inequality in American society is disturbing, but it wouldn’t be as frightening if the super rich had a different value system. It’s possible to imagine super rich people using their wealth not just to seek further comforts and advantages for themselves, but also to address the needs of other humans less fortunate and a planet in dire peril. Before the Reagan years, that was the norm, and it could be again. Or else we could proceed along our current path towards a Hobbesian war of all against all, The Hunger Games, and Blade Runner 2049.

So how do we stop the bleeding? Elizabeth Warren’s idea of a wealth tax made a lot of sense, but I have a simpler and more fun idea: a decency test. Every head of household making more than three hundred times the median annual salary (that’s around $10,000,000 a year) would need to give non-reprehensible answers to five simple questions. First, we give a little shot of truth serum. The time allowed for the test is 2 minutes. You may start now.

Using a number 2 pencil, please answer each of the following questions by choosing just one of the four possible responses.

I believe the most important policy objective for our government is to:

a. Implement a fair system of public health.

b. Assure a quality education for all children.

c. Protect public safety and stop useless wars.

d. Cut my taxes.

My greatest objection to our current public policy is:

a. Not enough is being done to reduce infant mortality.

b. There’s no system to assure adequate basic nutrition.

c. We don’t have reliable public transportation.

d. There have not been enough cuts to my taxes.

The moral quality that best describes the way I relate to other people is:

a. Honesty.

b. Reasonableness.

c. Kindness and compassion.

d. Greed and indifference.

If I could have just one wish to improve the world, it would be to:

a. Eliminate the risk of nuclear war.

b. Stop global warming.

c. Eliminate racial prejudice and work to correct the harm it has caused.

d. Eliminate all taxes.

5. Other than lowering taxes, my chief hope for making this country a better place for all is that we:

a. Consider the welfare of those less fortunate.

b. End the unequal treatment of women.

c. Improve the fairness of our justice system.

d. This question makes no sense.

If you answered d to questions 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, you are going to Hell. Just kidding! But you will have to pay a special tax of 95% of all your accumulated wealth, with new yearly assessments until you pass the decency test. These funds will be used for improved health care, better schools, more reliable public transportation, green energy, and other desperately needed public initiatives. We hope you see the light, but if not, we won’t feel too bad, since we’ll see your money doing good things. Good luck!

April 26, 2020

Happy 50th Earth Day, and calling out the plutocrats

Great blue herons at Jordan Lake

I went out to Jordan Lake a couple of mornings last week, including on Wednesday, which was the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day. I managed to get my photography gear down the loose rocks to the river side, set up the tripod, tested exposures, and waited to see what would happen. I enjoyed watching the birds, and especially the ospreys and the great blue herons.

The GBHs are really good at catching fish! It happens so fast that you can barely even see the catch. Looking at the pictures afterward, I felt sad for the unfortunate fish, but still happy for the birds. They aren’t cruel; they fish out of necessity.

On the drive, I listened to more of the Scene on Radio podcast, which I’ve found very thought-provoking. The producers and scholars discussed libertarian ideas, including the notion that all government is bad and individual wealth is the highest good, and explored how those ideas relate to race and politics.

As the podcast noted, what drives the hard-right plutocrats is not just pure greed, but also a kind of twisted idealism. They believe that the individual is supremely important, and individual success is the highest good. There is no point to social organizations or communities other than as a platform for high achievers. Wealth is a sign of virtue, and poverty a sign of vice. Greed is good, and only the wealthy matter.

Osprey with fish

These people generally admire the work of Ayn Rand, a third-rate writer and pseudo philosopher whose awkward and sad novels idealize grotesquely rugged individuals. Admiring Rand is more than a sign of poor literary taste; it indicates moral immaturity. In the Randian libertarian view, it is not just understandable, but desirable, to cultivate indifference to the welfare of others. The poor are by definition unworthy, and deserve whatever misfortune strikes them.

Preventing minorities from voting is an important political objective for the libertarian right. The plutocratic leadership expects to always be a minority working to benefit itself, and so an actual democracy where everyone is allowed and encouraged to vote would not work for them.

If there were a level playing field and an informed electorate, the majority would never vote for such a system, since it doesn’t serve the best interests of most people. But of course, we do not have those things. Instead, we have massively-funded disinformation campaigns, gerrymandered electoral districts, and laws discouraging the non-rich from voting. And if that is not sufficient, they cheat. This could all be viewed as wrong, but they view it as well justified, since they believe (or at least some part of them believes) that all that matters is their own welfare and success.

It is hard to believe how pervasive these libertarian, anti-government ideas have become, especially given how much they conflict with traditional American norms of fairness, equality, and representative democracy. This helps explain why we in the US lack some of the basic attributes of advanced democracies in Europe, such as a health care system that works for people other than the rich and safety net programs for ordinary people. Such programs would involve government action. And in this extreme libertarian view, government action is always bad. The same for taxes.

This is one of the rays of hope of the coronavirus pandemic: it exposes the narrowness and moral degeneracy of these ideas. It could hardly be more obvious that government action is needed to address the pandemic, and it seems crazy to argue otherwise. To be sure, some still do. Some are so in love with their ideas, or desperate for income and food, that they have been marching in protest against business closures, at the risk of their lives. But others are not so fanatical, and are moderating their views to accommodate reality, and survive.

Perhaps we’ll emerge from this crisis with a more realistic view of the importance of government, and more compassion for those less fortunate. We might rediscover the significance of the natural world, and cultivate more appreciation for animals other than humans and the fascinating interrelationships of living things. If we can get started down that road, there’s still hope that we won’ t ravage the planet completely before Earth Day 100.

April 19, 2020

Big birds, pandemic masks, non-dairy cheese, factory farms, and the war on climate change

Bald eagle at Shelley Lake

I managed to get up early three mornings this week to spend some time with the birds of our area, including these bald eagles, great blue herons, and ospreys. The birds weren’t doing anything special — just living their lives. But it was especially heartening in this perilous time to get their orientation — intense, with all the senses open, and prepared for the next opportunity.

This week Sally got me a coronavirus mask that had been sewn by the tailor at our dry cleaners. It’s green and looks, well, strange. I’m starting to wonder whether we’ll be getting used to not seeing much of each other’s faces.

As the pandemic and the stay-at-home order continue, we’re trying to make the best of things. One good thing is finding time and energy to try new projects. This week I finally got around to one I’d been meaning to do for a while: making non-dairy cheese.

I’ve known for some time that dairy products involve heart-breaking cruelty to cows. Like other mammals, mother cows feel intense attachment to their young. The reason they make milk is to feed their babies. Factory dairy farms get them to make more milk by a cycle of artificial impregnation and stealing their calves immediately after birth.

The mothers cry out for their missing calves and grieve. Confined in small spaces, they are fed unhealthy diets that often include hormones and steroids. Their natural life span is around 20 years, but on factory farms they are too exhausted, sick, or injured to keep going after 5 years. So they are killed to make hamburgers.

Great blue heron in early morning fog at Jordan Lake

Some time back, Sally and I started finding good plant-based substitutes for milk — soy, cashew, almonds, oats. Quitting ice cream was challenging, for obvious reasons, but we’ve recently discovered some delicious non-dairy substitutes — Ben & Jerry’s, So Delicious, and Nada Moo. But it’s been hard to give up the deliciousness of cheese. We’ve had good plant-based cheese substitutes in restaurants, but haven’t seen them in our grocery stores. If you’re looking for a business opportunity, there’s a business idea, which you’re welcome to steal.

In the meantime, I tried a friend’s recipe for non-dairy brie, the main ingredient of which was cashews. It took some work, and I nearly burned out the blender motor, but the result was pretty good. I used fresh herbs — rosemary, sage, and chives. It tasted a lot like brie, but the consistency was more like a dip. I may have done too much blending. Anyhow, I’m planning to give it another shot soon.

I just finished reading Jonathan Saffron Foer’s recent book, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. It’s a book about the relationship of factory farming to climate change and to us. Foer reviews the facts, including the fact that animal farms are a major contributor to global warming. He thinks that we need to take whatever action we can as individuals to combat the developing catastrophe of climate change. Recognizing how deeply habituated we are to eating meat, he proposes that if we can’t quit entirely, we try eating it only at dinner.

Foer is a fine writer, and I was heartened by his good sense and good-heartedness. But I agreed in part with Mark Bittman, the NY Times reviewer, who said that hoping to save the planet by giving people good reasons to change their habits is probably not going to work. Old habits die hard, especially when they’re constantly reinforced by the advertising of agribusiness fighting for its accustomed profits.

Bittman recommended a piece by Bill McKibben that was in the New Republic in 2016 titled A World at War — We’re Under Attack from Climate Change, and Our Only Hope Is to Mobilize Like We Did in WWII

The war metaphor is not a new one, but it is still apt. McKibben points out that if Hitler had been wreaking havoc on our cities with firestorms, hurricanes, droughts, and floods, we would have seen the necessity of mobilizing to fight back. As McKibben recounts, in WWII the US mobilized in just weeks and months to make bombers, ships, tanks, and other weapons under the direction of the federal government. He argues that we’re going to need that sort of leadership to head off complete disaster.

Osprey at Jordan Lake

One benefit of the pandemic is that it is helping us get a new understanding of what a real crisis is, and how we can’t just do nothing. That may help us understand the need for government leadership on climate change. The idea that markets alone will solve our current problems is not going to work, and the political leadership now in place is not going to work.

The TImes reported this week on new research on the threat of climate change to animals. The scientists found that the risk of mass extinction is much closer than previously thought, with thousands of species at risk beginning in the next decade. The study emphasized that this is not inevitable, if we take dramatic action soon.

At the same time, the pandemic has brought into focus the precarious situation of working people. With businesses shut down, no jobs, and no savings, having food and housing is no longer a given. Pending getting new leaders and a compassionate safety-net system, we’ve been trying to do some extra giving for food and other necessities.

The latest: Sally discovered the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is raising money for domestic workers who have no other resources. It’s a great time to help workers whose job is helping others and who can’t work from home.

March 23, 2020

Getting close to birds and farther from people: hunkering down for the pandemic

Last week I got out to Jordan Lake three times and spent some time around sunrise with the wildlife there. I saw lots of great blue herons, and several ospreys and bald eagles, as well as the less glamorous gulls, crows, and turkey vultures.

With the human world in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, I was especially grateful for some time with the birds. Of course, they have their own life and death struggles, including finding enough food to survive each new day. But they manage it without undue drama, keeping their focus on the task at hand. Once the essentials are taken care of, they become very still, alert but peaceful.

The pandemic has quite suddenly changed everything. We don’t know how long it will be before something like normalcy returns. In the meantime, there will be brutal economic hardship for laid off people who need the next paycheck for housing and food. On top of that, cutting direct human contact will likely cause a spike in depression and suicides. This is going to be tough.

In the midst of what looks like an epic disaster in process, it may not be the best time to talk of lessons to be learned. On the other hand, we’re all going to have some time on our hands, which we might use to think about our situation.

Illness can be a revealing crucible. It forces us to face up to reality. For example, parents may have all kinds of kooky ideas about praying for health, but when their own child gets seriously ill, and prayer doesn’t seem to be working, they will usually take the child to the doctor. Illness forces us to quit playing and get serious.

And so it is that we’re now looking to scientists for guidance about covid-19. Our President has led a war on science, muzzling experts and eliminating scientific positions and agencies, as the Times and others have noted. But he seems to be shifting gears, and now he’s consulting with doctors, public health experts, and other scientists.

At this point, it is hardly news that we have an incompetent and mentally ill President who sees the world exclusively in terms of how it can gratify his ego and bank account. But like the parents with a sick child, even he has come to see it’s time to go to the doctor and get actual facts and possibly some help. He’s still inclined to boost xenophobic conspiracy theories, but he’s finally making concessions to reality. Along with increasing death and misery, denying reality now might even be politically damaging.

As little as I respect the President and as fervently as I want to see him defeated, I want to wish him well in this regard: may he find the wisdom to defer to the best experts. Our scientists and doctors won’t have all the answers, but they’re our best hope. Assuming we make it through this crisis, we might apply this same rule to address other global crises, like global warming.

For the rest of us, there’s an opportunity to pause and reflect. Covid-19 has brought into stark relief the fragility of our social, economic, and governmental systems. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s now clear that our national healthcare system is a hopeless mess. Our social safety net is full of holes. Our system of profit-at-all-costs capitalism is failing to address basic needs.

In the face of the pandemic, even those officials of the all-government-is-bad view are modifying their opinion and trying to do something. It looks like the government may be sending out real checks to actual families to mitigate some of the hardship. This looks like progress, and also like a tiny band-aid. But who knows? We may look back on this as the historic beginning of a transformative new system with a universal basic income and greater fairness.

One thing is certain: this is not going to be easy. It’s definitely not the case that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. We need to cultivate our courage, and our compassion. Those of us with some surplus need to help others. My old friend Deborah Ross, a Democrat running for Congress in N.C. District 2, suggests donations to the N.C. Food Bank. The Washington Post yesterday had a helpful list of charities working for those who will be hardest hit.

September 1, 2019

Spirit bears, dental hygiene, and why our eating matters

A rare spirit bear, also known as a Kermode bear, near Klemtu, British Columbia

During my recent trip to the wilds of British Columbia, I didn’t have room for all my new photo files on my hard drive, so this past week I bought a massive (14 TB) new one. Once I got the new device running, I edited more of my wildlife photos. Those included shots of the very rare spirit bear, an osprey that had caught a salmon, and a humpback whale, some of which are here. It was a moving experience to share space for a little while with these creatures.

This week it was time for my six-month dental check up. I’m a big believer in good tooth care, since we each get only one set of teeth, and it’s much more difficult to eat without them. So I put some effort into rinsing, brushing, and flossing, since if I don’t, who will? Well, actually, it kind of takes a village. I’ve got a whole team giving advice, encouragement, and occasional repairs at Dr. Williams’s general dentistry practice.

Of course, my tooth health depends on a lot of others. I’m thinking of all the hardworking folks who make the dental floss, toothbrushes, and tooth paste, who wire the building and and keep the electric grid working, who put in the plumbing, who operate the water system, and trusted teachers from my childhood, especially my Mom.

An osprey and its prey. Moments later, the fish got loose, and was caught mid-air by a bald eagle.

But of those closest to my mouth now, I want to thank D, my latest dental hygienist, who pushed me hard to add a Waterpik to my routine, which I did a few months back. I used to think Waterpiks were silly and useless gadgets, but I’m now a believer. D says my Waterpiking has been very good for my gums.

I like that D is truly passionate about tooth care, and I always learn some interesting tooth facts in our cleaning sessions. She pointed out that TV and movie people all whiten their teeth nowadays, whereas in older movies teeth are grayer. She told me that drugstore whitening products use the same chemical as custom work (that is, peroxide) and generally work fine, but they likely won’t go on as evenly.

In moments of existential dread, I’ve sometimes wondered what’s the use of worrying about teeth, or any bodily maintenance issues. With all the enormous risks on our horizon, including nuclear weapons, asteroid strikes, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, runaway superintelligent artificial intelligence, and of course the dire effects of global warming, it’s difficult to factor in individual bodily worries. The vastly different scale of the two sorts of problems prevents comparisons.

But we can’t help but feel that we as individuals have some significance, and our lives are worth taking some trouble over. Along this line, I’m reading This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by Martin Haaglund, a Swedish philosopher at Yale. Haaglund suggests that each individual carries various identities, such as parent, child, professional, church goer, and customer, which may be added to or fluctuate over time. Part of the essential work of living a life is choosing how to realize the goals associated with those identities and prioritizing when the identities conflict. Haaglund’s theory is thought-provoking, and I expect to have more to say about it in a future post.

But for now, I’m comfortable that having serviceable teeth is not inconsistent with trying to stop environmental degradation or prevent nuclear accidents. Our identity as caretakers of our bodies is entirely reconcilable with our identity as citizens trying to avoid catastrophe.

Grizzly bear cub

In fact, the issues of personal health, societal well being, and the environment are interconnected. One of the great ironies of modern first world life is how, with all our wealth and knowledge, and with the miracles of modern dentistry, we eat so poorly. Most of our deadliest health risks, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and obesity, are closely related to our typical food choices.

In my nature photography travels over the last few weeks, I’ve shared meals with a lot of prosperous, well-educated, and gifted people, who have traveled widely and made some beautiful photographs. Much as I enjoyed our talks, I was really saddened to see how poorly a lot of them nourished themselves. Offered a choice between French fries and fruit, most always took the fries.

Grizzly mom getting a plant food snack

I’d have to be nuts to think of taking away anybody’s French fries (and I admit, I enjoy them from time to time), but I’m just saying, fruit is generally the better choice. Given how important eating is to our health, it’s remarkable how little most of us think about it, and how many of us do it unwisely. How well or poorly we nourish ourselves is a major determinant of the length and quality of our lives. It’s a really big deal.

So I was glad to see this was the subject of a recent op ed piece in the NY Times entitled Our Food Is Killing Too Many of Us. The authors explained that our typical diet accounts for elevated death rates, and noted that this is a political issue that is not being discussed by politicians. They proposed thinking of how we eat as a medical issue, and encouraging healthy eating as a fundamental part of a healthy life. They had several practical ideas for new policies, including getting doctors to put an emphasis on nutrition and discouraging junk food with taxes. They suggest that improvements to our eating would simplify the problem of how we provide health care, since we wouldn’t have to provide so much of it.

All this seems sensible, but somehow our nutrition system is harder to talk about than our healthcare system (which is also hard). The food industry has done an amazingly effective job at conditioning us to think of food as primarily about fun, rather than survival. Even suggesting that we should eat more plant foods and less processed junk sounds kind of grumpy and unfun. At parties, insisting on talking about healthy eating is a good way to get some alone time.

But this mindset may be slowly changing. There was a report this week that the meat industry is fighting the growing popularity of plant-based meat-like products, like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. The industry is pushing for new state laws to outlaw using the word meat to describe these products. My first reaction to this was outrage, but then I realized, it’s kind of good news: leaders of possibly the cruelest business on the planet are worried about their continued profitability. They must view plant food as serious competition.

And there’s increasing awareness (though still not enough) that better diets are good not just for individual human bodies, but for the planet. For example, industrialized meat production is a significant contributor to global warming. As the Times noted this week, even reducing our meat consumption by 25% would significantly lower our collective carbon footprint.

But while I was organizing these thoughts, the Washington Post reported that in connection with the next version of the federal dietary guidelines, the Trump administration has prohibited the use of scientific studies likely to support eating less meat, dairy, sugar, and processed food. There is, of course, a lot of science that points in that direction, and it’s beyond irresponsible not to at least take a close look at it. If your objective were to destroy more of the natural world and maximize people’s likelihood of an early death, one way to get there is exactly this: suppress the science.

Near where we saw the spirit bear

July 24, 2014

A charming New England beach trip, with friends, shorebirds, croquet, and a spot of evolutionary theory

Last weekend we took Friday off and flew to Boston, then drove down to Westport, Massachusetts, a small coastal town on the border with Rhode Island, where we were privileged to be guests of Sally’s cousin and her family. The area has a lot of New England charm, with stone walls and farm fields. Our hosts’ house was beautiful, and also well designed for relaxing. We did a lot of sitting around and talking, eating, and laughing.

Two mornings I got up early and walked down to the beach to stroll with my camera. The beach was rocky, but pretty. It was peaceful to just walk with no one around as the sun came up. I watched the shore birds, and felt a combination of amusement, delight, and wonder.

In the backyard, we saw a beautifully camouflaged tree frog sitting on the stone wall. It decided to jump onto Sally, which she liked.

We also took a boat ride and saw quite a few ospreys, including nesting fledglings and patrolling parents.

We took along a 12-week-old golden retriever puppy, the cutest thing ever, friendly and curious, with amazingly soft fur. This one had a specially designed life jacket.

On Sunday after a beach walk and a lovely breakfast, we watched the end of the British Open, where Rory McElroy triumphed like a true champion. Then we played some croquet in the backyard. It had been some years (like maybe 40) since last I tried croquet, and I was definitely rusty. But it’s a fun game, and I’d enjoy playing again.

It was also fun to sit on the back porch and read. I finished re-reading Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived, by Chip Walter,a book that must have not been too successful, since Jocelyn had a free copy for me. It is a non-specialist science book about the evolution of homo sapiens and other humans.

I hadn’t known that we were only one of at least twenty-seven human species that existed in the last seven million years, some of which overlapped in time with us. Our kind originated about 200,000 years ago, but came close to extinction about 70,000 years ago, when only 10,000 or so individuals were alive in southern Africa. Walter’s book explores how it is that we alone survived and became what we are.

Our brains had something to do with it, of course, but that begs the question why our brains became what they are. According to Walter, it relates to our long childhoods, which relate to our ability to learn from other humans, which relates to our social natures. We are naturally curious – learning machines. And we are creative, because creativity gains attention for the individual and brings innovative progress for the group. Our development of symbolic thought and complex communication systems allowed for social organization that made us the dominant creature on the planet. There’s a lot interesting fact and theory here, and also an acknowledgement that there’s still much we don’t know about ourselves. A stimulating, worthwhile book.

Tag: osprey