Left, Right and What?

I just finished watching the 20/20 special on political polarization in the US and feel rather conflicted about it. On one hand, I understand the need for people with different political views to be able to talk to one another. On the other hand, this "meta" position isn't enough. I have strongly held political views myself, and most of them are quite liberal. I really think that we as a society would be better off with, for example, more social freedoms and a more equal distribution of wealth. People with views opposite mine are, for the most part, just as sincere. So where do we go from here?

The first thing that comes to mind is the inadequacy of the "left-right" political spectrum. The folks at the Political Compass have designed a two-dimensional system that rates a person as being more authoritarian or libertarian on separate social and economic scales. (I might add a "parochial-cosmopolitan" axis.) Science fiction writer and physicist David Brin has some great stuff on his blog about alternative models of politics and lots of provocative ideas about what modern societies need to prosper.

Unfortunately, the American political system enshrines the left-right dichotomy in its two major parties. The Democrats and Republicans present us with packages of issues that may be completely unrelated (what does gay marriage have to do with the war in Iraq?), but most of us feel we have to choose one or the other. In Europe and much of the rest of the democratized world, citizens have more choices in selecting a party that truly represents their views, but Americans appear to be stuck with two. I remember doing a short presentation on the Green Party in my high school government class. Greens are fairly left-wing on most issues, but my teacher pointed out that two of the party's Ten Key Values, decentralization and personal responsibility, are traditionally associated with conservatives, at least in the US. The Green Party is not centrist but it does take on elements of several philosophies.

While there are several reforms I could recommend, especially instant runoff voting (you rank several candidates in order of desirability) and the prevention of gerrymandering, I don't think it's enough in the long run. If voters are getting more polarized, why are there so few supporters of creative, potentially radical ideas in Congress? Why do so few Democrats campaign for universal health care or the Department of Peace? I don't know, but merely responding to the issues of the day is not going to get us through this century. This is where sites like WorldChanging.com come in.

WorldChanging is a repository of ideas, inventions, tools and projects for a better world. Reading it, you become excited about Brazil and India. You learn about green buildings, serious games and dialogue. WorldChanging's strength and weakness is that it's non-political, but there are websites with a similar spirit that include politics. Check out the Radical Middle and the Global Ideas Bank -- and start working for something new. In the end, we won't meet in the middle, but we may reach higher ground together.

Friday Random 10

Sorry for not posting much this week. I've been crazy busy but hope to make up for it next week and possibly this weekend. There's good stuff in the pipeline!

And now, without further ado, the random ten:

• Echo's Children, "How Far Back Does Music Go?". A neat a capella song from an unfortunately disbanded duo.
• John Denver, "Rhymes and Reasons". One of my all-time favorites.
• Alan Jackson, "Midnight in Montgomery". Talk about atmosphere!
• ARKA, "Tear Down the Walls". A Chilean rock group sings about "tearing down the walls" that divide us. Bury your chains! (In English.)
• Bruce Cockburn, "When the Sun Falls"
• Vince Gill, "Worlds Apart". Sweet, sad and wise.
• Larry Warner, "The Archivist". A filk song of a wasted life.
• Kathy Mar, "The Word of God". Evolution vs. creationism. "Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks!"
• Animaniacs, "Several Drops of Water". Remember Animaniacs? A cartoon take on the water cycle.
• Collin Raye, "Sweet Miss Behavin'". Fun!

Stars to Brains

Just a quickie tonight. There's a post on illuminating science about a "Stars to Brains" conference held in honor of physicist Paul Davies. If you have a moment, check it out.

Brilliant, Just Brilliant!

A poem about spam!

"In my in-box, every morning,
Greetings from a slew of spammers,
Each, to fool the filters, using
In the header and the body,
Random lines from 'Hiawatha'"...

Zooming in on Salmon

There's a cool post on WorldChanging about salmon restoration in the Pacific Northwest. From a global perspective, salmon are just a pixel. But look closer:

Zoom in once, and you learn that the forests ringing the north Pacific glean nitrogen from marine sources — ocean-borne nutrients that the salmon brought upstream in their bodies, and then left behind when they died. Their lives nurture 137 species of wild animals, plus a 138th that scientists habitually overlook: Homo sapiens.

Look closer at the health of the salmon populations, and you can see how a host of human impacts, from hydro dams to ill-conceived hatcheries, from irrigation projects to poor stream crossings, have conspired to reduce their populations. Keep zooming in, to the solutions that people are beginning to try, and it comes down to something as prosaic as installing a better culvert or replacing flood irrigation with sprinklers.

Friday Random 10

• Stephen Longfellow Fiske, "Eagle Fly"
• Johnny Cash, "Guess Things Happen That Way"
• Dar Williams, "Bought and Sold". Takes on Wal-Mart and weapons manufacturers in the same song.
• Collin Raye, "I Know That's Right". If this song doesn't make you feel good, nothing short of drugs will!
• Mariah Carey, "Hero"
• Julia Ecklar, "Ladyhawke!". Ever heard of filk? Nice example -- a fantasy song.
• Leslie Fish, "Sequoia sempervirens". Yes, it's a song about a tree and yes, I'm enough of a nerd to properly format the Latin name.
• Julia Ecklar, "Survivor's Song". The thoughts of a nuclear war survivor. Powerful!
• John Lennon, "Imagine". A perfect contrast with the previous song.
• Gaia Consort, "Evolve" (live version). I blogged about this one. You can hear it here.

The Beauty of Evolution

There's a lovely post on Pharyngula about the evolutionary connection between fish gills and our thyroid glands. Fish use their gills not just for gas exchange but also to control the concentration of salts in their bodies. So what does a fish do when it finds itself on land and needs to regulate calcium in its blood? Read the post to find out!

Nature Green in Leaf and Shoot

Debates about the nature of ecological communities have shaped many aspects of the science. Ecologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries generally saw communities as highly interdependent systems or even superorganisms whose composition was shaped by biotic interactions and coevolution. The contrary view, that the physical environment in a location pretty much controlled what plants lived there, gained ascendency later. This idea, modified to included the effects of chance and some competition, is still dominant today. However, mutualism is finally beginning to get some recognition as an important factor determining community composition. (The word "mutualism" refers to an interaction between two species that benefits both of them -- what laypeople typically think of as "symbiosis".) The debate is not merely academic. It has real consequences for conservation and restoration of damaged ecosystems.

The May 2006 issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment contains a review paper by Francisco M. Padilla and Francisco I. Pugnaire about the use of nurse plants in ecological restoration. This approach involves planting the plants you want next to larger plants already growing in the area. (Yes, I get paid for each use of the word "plant".) The nurse plants may shield the target species from harsh weather, bring up water and nutrients, protect against grazers and attract pollinators. However, this approach doesn't always work. Environment matters, as does the identity of the nurse and target plants.

Nurse plants are most helpful in harsh environments like chapparral and alpine tundra. In easier conditions, competition between the two plants trumps any beneficial effects. For the same reason, nurse plants are more useful in dry years than wet years. This counterintuitive effect may occur because the deep roots of the nurse plant bring up water and the shade it casts helps the establishing seedling conserve water.

The species of the nurse and target plants also makes a difference. Plants that release growth inhibitors into the soil don't make good nurse plants. (Duh.) Late successional species benefit more from having nurse plants than early successional ones. And, although the authors don't discuss this, I'd bet pairing close relatives will increase competition and reduce beneficial effects.

The importance of this synthesis goes beyond practical restoration work to providing key insights for community ecology. If nurse plants matter in restoration succession, they probably also make a difference in natural succession. Since these interactions show at least some species specificity, we can draw a similar conclusion about species interactions in succession and ecosystem development. Finally, both biotic interactions and physical conditions make a difference; indeed, physical conditions can determine the nature of the interaction between nurse and target plants. The same effect can be expected in the wild.

No Cats were Harmed in the Making of This Website...

But you should check it out anyway! I refer to Cat Flinging: An Illustrated History of Catflinging in Europe and North America, the first scholarly work on this much under-appreciated sport. An excerpt:

The cat is much like the bagpipe in that there are few people who are entirely indifferent toward either. (The similarity does not end there, however, a fact that will be documented hereinafter.) For the sake of illustration, let us assume it possible to create a list objects in the environment ordered according to their ability to engender collective indifference in the human observer. At the top of our indifference index one would probably find such things as tofu and Ed Sullivan, objects with the capacity to engender violent indifference. The cat and the bagpipe, however, would have their place at the bottom, somewhere in the vicinity of Monte Python and chewing tobacco. It is perhaps largely the cat's low indifference index that best explains the controversy surrounding the art of cat flinging.

What Kind of Whole is North Korea?

According to this, North Korea might be among the few states -- perhaps the only one -- that might be said to form a real whole. Seems fragile.

Wife Swap Leads the Way

One of my guilty pleasures is watching the ABC reality show Wife Swap with my mom. For those who don't know how Wife Swap works, the show has the wives in two families change places for two weeks. For the first week, each woman lives by her new family's rules; at the beginning of the second week, she gets to make some changes. Usually, both families come away having learned something, or at least give the impression of having done so.

The episode I saw today, which originally aired on November 28, 2005, featured two families, the Stonerocks and the Finleys. Both families learn to pay more attention to their childrens' needs, but the key theme in the episode is religion. The Finleys are hard-core atheists, while Jeff Stonerock preaches in what looks like a pretty fundamentalist church. Kelly Stonerock takes over Reggie Finley's Infidel Guy radio show while Amber Finley hires a secular tutor for the homeschooled Stonerock kids. Predictably, fur flies.

For me, the key moment came when Amber discussed discrimination against atheists with Jeff, explaining that she rarely goes out because of it. That topic NEVER comes up on TV. Later, when the families meet, they again discussed prejudice against atheists/agnostics/Brights and the religious Stonerocks sympathized, telling the Finleys, "We are on your side". The show's finale? Jeff Stonerock preaches a sermon at his church, saying that atheists are worthwhile individuals and God loves them and Christians equally. Amen to that! :-)

Seriously, I hope today's show starts to open a discussion of the civil rights of secular individuals. Religion is here to stay, and so is doubt. With tolerance, reason and separation of church and state, we can get along while disagreeing and build a better society for everyone.

Networks in Epidemics and Ecology

Tara Smith at Aetiology has a neat post about networks, particularly in disease transmission. Studying networks allows you to see and analyze how entities, like people in a society or species in an ecosystem, interact. Sometimes, you discover neat and useful patterns. For example, many infectious diseases, including HIV in America, are primarily spread by hyper-connected individuals. Other times, a person does more than their share of disease transmission by simply shedding more of the infectious agent than other people. SARS is an example of this.

To me, the coolest application of network science is to ecological networks such as food webs. Neo Martinez, Jennifer Dunne and their colleagues at PEaCE Lab have done some fascinating work on food web structure. One of their basic results shows that you can create realistic food webs using very simple rules -- animals have a certain size and eat things that are a given fraction of that size. Their simulations also show that the ability of a food web to withstand species extinctions depends on how richly interconnected the species are.

A different approach to the study of ecological networks is that practiced by Bernie Patten and the Systems and Engineering Ecology group at the University of Georgia. Their work looks less at network structure than at dynamics and general principles. I'll be joining this group in mid-August, so expect more on ecological networks starting then.

Displaying the Flag

Rigor Vitae explains why it won't be displaying an American flag any time soon. I wish I'd said it that clearly!

Nationalistic chest-thumping is one thing if you're Lithuanian or Gambian, but when you're a member of the most privileged and powerful group on Earth, it's more than a little unseemly. I would no sooner don a t-shirt that read “Proud to be an American” than I would one that proclaimed “Proud to be a White Man.”

I'd say there should be limits even if you are Lithuanian or Gambian. Some very bloody conficts have resulted from nationalism in small countries -- look at the Balkans.

Science, Poetry and the Sun

BLDGBLOG reviews The Music of the Spheres, an out-of-print book about astronomy. Some of the quotes are pure poetry. Enjoy!

"As the sun unceasingly explodes in arching structures of storm and prominence, 'glowing veils of gaseous calcium' escape. In others words, the same mineral responsible for animal bones bursts outward from the sun in astrophysical shells that 'look like gnarled trees with blazing rain pouring downward from their branches in beautiful magnetic curves that have been clocked at speeds up to 400 miles a second.'
"

Tracking the Nitrogen Cascade

This isn't quite pure ecology (we'll get there, I promise), but I thought I'd post it today.

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Global warming is in the news. Small increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are changing Earth’s climate, with unpredictable results. By now, almost everybody has heard of this human impact on the carbon cycle. Yet impacts to the nitrogen cycle are even more dramatic. We have doubled the amount of biologically available nitrogen annually cycling through the environment, with complex and sometimes subtle consequences.

It has been said that the first law of human ecology is, “we can never do merely one thing”. This is the major challenge in thinking and writing about impacts to the nitrogen cycle. Effects form a complex cascade that has to be considered as a whole. In addition, there may be effects we are not even aware of yet.


Consider a molecule of nitrogen, N₂. The two atoms making it up are held together by a strong and stable triple bond, making the nitrogen inaccessible to the vast majority of living things. Yet this element is the fourth most common one in living things, necessary to make the amino acids that make the proteins that make most structures inside you, your goldfish and the fly on the wall.

The reason all three of you are alive is that a few kinds of bacteria called nitrogen fixers have mastered the trick of fixing inert atmospheric nitrogen, turning it into forms they and everyone else in the biosphere can use. Nitrogen fixers live both in the ocean and on land. They commonly associate with certain plants, forming root nodules on clover, beans, acacia trees and other members of the legume family. Using special enzymes to speed up a process that would otherwise be unbelievably slow, they combine it with oxygen or hydrogen to form nitrate or ammonia. These compounds find their way into plants and from plants go to animals, fungi and bacteria.

Eventually, they reach the denitrifiers. These bacteria live in oxygen-poor waters and sediments, where they use dissolved nitrate ions to extract energy from food. They give off nitrogen gas as a waste product, lowering the amount of biologically available nitrogen in the biosphere.

Following this cycle one nitrogen atom at a time, we may travel from the nitrogen-fixing nodules on an alder’s roots to a moose, a wolf, and denitrification by bacteria in a marsh. Another journey might take us from a pea plant to a human, bacteria in a sewage treatment plant, algae, an insect larva, more bacteria and, as always, eventual denitrification. Until less than a century ago, this would have summed up the basics of the nitrogen cycle.

At that time, farmers, who often need extra nitrogen for their crops, applied animal or human manure to their fields or planted nitrogen-fixing crops. People also got some nitrogen, for both industry and agriculture, from Chilean deposits of guano (aka bird poop). At the turn of the 20th century, Chile led the world in commercial nitrogen production. This, of course, gave Chile – and whoever could control access to Chile – much political and economic power.

Nitrogen compounds are used not only for agriculture but also to make explosives and gunpowder. So when German chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to make ammonia from nitrogen in the air, he made possible both modern agriculture and modern warfare. Working with engineer Carl Bosch, Haber developed mass production of ammonia. Without the Haber-Bosch process, Germany would have run out of food and munitions by 1916, with who knows what consequences for the modern world.

Even more important, though, is the Haber-Bosch process’s impact on our food supply. It has been estimated that 40% of the people alive today owe their lives to artificial fertilizer. Humans are now responsible for more nitrogen fixation than all natural processes combined. The environmental consequences have been correspondingly enormous.


Let us now take a step back from nitrogen and think about how elements move through the biosphere. All living things take in some substances and excrete others. From these small flows, cycles emerge. For an example, think about food. Eat a slice of bread and as your body combines it with oxygen to release energy, you exhale CO₂. A wheat plant can take that CO₂ and use it, with water and sunlight, to make seeds that then become flour for your bread. The wheat also releases oxygen that you inhale and then release as water and CO₂.

Scale up these processes over a large area or even the whole Earth. You will now see biogeochemical cycles in which water, air, life and even the slow movements of geology transport the chemicals of life throughout the world. Without knowing all the details of every process involved, we can get an idea of how much of what substance flows from where to where each year. How much carbon from the soil to the atmosphere? How much phosphorus from land to ocean? How much nitrogen from the atmosphere to nitrogen-fixing bacteria?

Globally, these numbers remain roughly constant year to year, at least on time scales meaningful to us. But the amount of biologically available nitrogen cycling through Earth’s systems has doubled in about a hundred years. Think of putting twice as much electricity as usual through the wiring in your house. You don’t know what will be damaged by the power surge, but you know something will.


What if we could follow a single nitrogen atom fixed in the Haber-Bosch process? Part of a nitrate ion in a bag of fertilizer, it is bought by a corn farmer in Iowa and applied to his field. An atom of nitrogen stands only a 14% chance of becoming part of a corn plant and helping feed someone.

Our atom is not among the 14%. Instead, it sinks into the groundwater, where it has plenty of company. A well supplies water to the farmhouse, but its water now contains high levels of nitrates. If the farmer’s baby drank this water, bacteria in her stomach would convert the nitrates to nitrites, which can bind to hemoglobin and cause a potentially serious condition called methemoglobinemia or blue baby syndrome. Luckily, the community knows about the threat and residents give infants bottled water.

Some water from the well goes on the family’s vegetable garden and our atom comes along for the ride. The garden receives its own fertilizer, much of which gets washed into a pond after a summer rain. Algal growth goes haywire from this bounty. In a process called eutrophication, the algae grow, die and decay, robbing the water of oxygen and killing fish.

A heavier rain comes and the farm pond overflows. The nitrate ion with our atom of nitrogen flows from stream to stream, eventually reaching the Mississippi River. Here, more and more nitrogen is added as you go downstream. Wetlands along the river’s edge that could absorb some of this excess were destroyed long ago. Eventually, the water with its load of fertilizer reaches the Gulf of Mexico.

Here, eutrophication takes place on a huge scale, creating a dead zone thousands of square miles in area. Fish and other marine organisms die or are driven out, with devastating impacts on both biological and, potentially, human communities. While fishermen have, so far, largely managed to work around the dead zone, in the end, people cannot fish where there are no fish! In some places, however, the problem is even worse because algae there produce toxins that accumulate in shellfish and can sicken or kill people who eat the shellfish.

Finally, the nitrate ion is denitrified and becomes a nitrogen atom that spends several years floating around in the atmosphere as part of a nonreactive N₂ molecule. Eventually, though, it reaches Beijing and gets sucked into a businessman’s car engine, where high temperatures combine it with oxygen to form a gas called nitric oxide, NO. Even more NO forms from the nitrogen present in gasoline, as does nitrous oxide, NO₂. If nitrous oxide reaches the upper atmosphere, it contributes to ozone depletion and acts as a greenhouse gas 200 times more potent than CO₂.

NO comes out through the car’s exhaust pipe and becomes part of the city’s infamous smog. It also contributes to the formation of ground-level ozone, a respiratory irritant. Sitting in traffic, the businessman coughs.

A little later, wind blows the NO a few miles out of the city, when rain begins to fall. The molecules containing our atom and a few million of his closest pals dissolve in rainwater and change into nitric acid. When this acid rain falls on the ground, it injures plants. When lakes become acidic, fish and amphibians die.

The root of a plant absorbs our nitrogen atom. This is another, more subtle, effect of nitrogen deposition. In many ecosystems, nitrogen abundance limits plant growth. Plants must compete for this critical nutrient and the competition helps maintain diversity. When more nitrogen is added, it becomes easier for a few species to take over. If that happens, the ecosystem can become less able to resist shocks like droughts.


What can we do to get the nitrogen cascade described earlier under control? There are three major types of strategies: reducing the amount of biologically available nitrogen we create, keeping it where we want it and increasing denitrification.

Reducing fossil fuel use is an important component of the first strategy. In addition, technologies that greatly reduce nitrogen oxide emissions are available right now. Their universal use would make human contribution to the atmospheric concentration of these chemicals quite minor. Preventing emissions is generally better (and, in the long run, cheaper) than cleaning them up at the end of a pipe.

Keeping nitrogen where we want it means working with farmers to reduce fertilizer use and improve its efficiency. Farmers certainly don’t benefit from wasting money on fertilizers that aren’t even taken up by plants! However, they sometimes use more than the recommended amount as a sort of gamble. Most years, water availability limits how much benefit a fertilized crop can derive from nitrogen. Some years, however, are wetter than usual and the crop could grow more with extra nitrogen. Farmers don’t want to miss out on that kind of chance, so they apply more fertilizer than recommended by the USDA.

One proposed solution is a kind of insurance policy. Under a program providing such insurance, farmers would apply the USDA recommended amount of fertilizer to most of their land but fertilize some small patches as much as they want. If there was a substantial difference in yields, the insurance company would compensate the farmer. This is being tried on a small scale in the US.

Improving the efficiency of irrigation can help prevent fertilizer runoff. So can more ambitious plans, such as a switch to year-round cropping to keep soil nutrients in place. Individuals can reduce or eliminate fertilizer use on their own lawns and gardens.

The final strategy, encouraging denitrification, typically boils down to encouraging wetlands. Protection of existing wetlands is important, as is restoration, particularly along streams and rivers. Constructing wetlands on farmland is another promising approach because it puts denitrification close to the nitrogen runoff source.


The nitrogen cascade is a beautifully complex problem that makes global warming seem straightforward. Solving it requires us to think on multiple scales and in terms of whole systems. In the end, we can’t double the amount of an important nutrient flowing through the biosphere each year without expecting consequences.

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Sources

Carlisle, Elizabeth. 2000. “The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone and Red Tides”.

Charles, Dan. 2002. “The Tragedy of Fritz Haber”.

Fields, Scott. 2004. “Global Nitrogen: Cycling Out of Control”. Environmental Health Perspectives 112(10). (Slightly technical, but excellent.)

Fisher, David E. and Marshall Jon Fisher. 2001. “The Nitrogen Bomb”. Discover. 22(4)

Galloway, James N., et al. 2003. “The Nitrogen Cascade”. BioScience. 53:341-356. (Comprehensive but technical.)

Pafko, Wayne. "Nitrogen: Food or Flames". "The History of Chemical Engineering".

Raloff, Janet. 2004. “Dead Waters”. Science News. 165:360

Raloff, Janet. 2004. “Limiting Dead Zones”. Science News. 165:378. (This two-part series on dead zones is aimed at interested non-scientists.)

Science Museum of Minnesota. “The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone”. (Mostly for kids, but works for anyone.)

Vitousek, Peter M., et al. 1997. “Human Alteration of the Global Nitrogen Cycle: Causes and Consequences”. Issues in Ecology 1. (Excellent introduction. Somewhat technical, but aimed at general public.)

My Dream House

Worldchanging and Inhabitat have posts about using trees to grow the walls of a house. The technique, called pleaching, bends and weaves the trees together into a structure, which can even provide fruit for its inhabitants. The walls are then covered with cob (a mixture of mud and straw) for insulation and waterproofing. You end up with a genuine treehouse. Talk about fun!

I wonder whether these kinds of houses could prove beneficial in the developing world.

Good Advice from Robert Muller

Robert Muller has what I think would be a truly worldchanging idea if implemented:

No student should be allowed to study economics before having studied ecology or he should study the two disciplines together.

Expect some ecology here tomorrow.

On Being an Imperfect Girl

Tara Smith at Aetiology comments on over-achieving girls in high school and college. You've seen the type -- the straight-A student who plays tennis, competes in Academic Decathlon, is a student body officer (if not president) and somehow squeezes in volunteer work. I know her but I wasn't her.

In high school, I quickly discovered that cerebral palsy would prevent me from taking the same number of honors and AP classes that my friends were -- I simply couldn't do things fast enough. So I decided to just focus on what interested me. I took a mixture of classes, from AP to regular. I joined the debate team in eleventh grade and was in the ecology club as long as it existed, but mostly I did my own thing. I gardened. I organized an online volunteer pledge drive among fellow Collin Raye fans. I became known as the school's environmental activist. And I got into every college I applied to.

UCLA was more of the same. I was elected co-vice president of the Astrobiology Society but quit CALPIRG after finding no room for creativity. I devoted a lot of time to working for global government and volunteering on Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign. I took lots of classes outside my major, completed several truly independent research projects, created my own positions at two out of three summer internships and co-founded the UCLA Math and Biology Society. Basically, I kept busy but blazed my own trail.

Result? Despite a less-than-stellar GPA, I got into the Ecology Ph.D. program at the University of Georgia -- my top choice -- and was awarded a very nice fellowship.

Tara Smith writes:

I worry a lot about my daughter... She's already very independent and wants to be the best at whatever she does. I want her to be competitive and to succeed, but I want her to define for herself what 'success' means. I don't want her to be obsessed with perfection and to be overly critical of herself. I don't want her to put what others think of her above what she thinks of herself. I want her to have a realistic view of life and a good work ethic, and not to expect things to be handed to her on a platter. I want her to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, even when things are difficult and stressful. I want her to have some kind of balance between work and play, even if she chooses a challenging career path. In short, I still want her to have it all--but I want to help her keep her perspective and not fall into the 'imbalanced, anxiety-ridden, perfect girl' stereotype 'crumbling under the weight of their own expectations' that Martin describes.

My advice to Tara? Encourage your daughter to choose activities that are either fun, helpful to others, or learning experiences. (Hint: student government is often none of the above.) Teach her to compete with herself more than with others and let her know it's okay not to be perfect. Most importantly, help her find her passions. It's all right to be consumed by your work if you are doing what you love.

Irresponsible Perfectionism

Several green blogs, including bootstrap analysis, are complaining about Wal-Mart's decision to sell organic food at prices no more than 10% higher than regular. Echoing many enviros, bootstrap analysis writes:

"More organic foods are being shipped from far-flung places; they may be organic, but the environmental costs of the amount of fossil fuel needed to ship them is just as bad if not worse than those of conventionally-grown foods purchased locally."

True, in the short run, buying local is easier on the environment than consuming food that has travelled thousands of miles, even if it is organic. And, yes, supporting small, local farmers is a good thing, both socially and environmentally. The problem is that a farmer doesn't need to do anything to be local. An organic farmer, on the other hand, needs to change deeply entrenched practices. Organic certification takes several years. Farmers who make these changes deserve our support.

On a related note, raising demand for organic food encourages farmers, most of whom are local to somebody, to go organic. Selling organic food, which does cost more to produce, only to local consumers may not be enough to support a farm. Increasing local demand would be ideal, but shipping produce to more distant locations is frequently necessary. As increased demand causes the number of organic farms to rise, buying locally grown organic food will be easier and the need to support far-away farmers transitioning to low-input agriculture will decrease.

Author Michael Pollan, in commenting on Wal-Mart's decision, asserts that, "To index the price of organic to the price of conventional is to give up, right from the start, on the idea...that food should be priced not high or low but responsibly." But what does it mean for food to be responsibly priced? Surely, part of "responsible pricing" is affordability. Already, poor people in America are at a much greater risk for obesity than the rich or middle-class. Why? Because calorie-dense foods are cheap and fruits and vegetables are not. Raising food, particularly produce, prices will increase the health gap between rich and poor. (In the long run, such things as urban agriculture and living wage legislation can help address this problem.)

No, selling organic food at Wal-Mart prices isn't a perfect or complete solution to the problems of our food system. But at this stage, to demand perfection would be irresponsible.

Relaunching "Perceiving Wholes"

I have posted nothing on this blog since January. However, I hope to restart regular posting now. There's so much good stuff to write about!