I am trained as a research scientist, with a doctorate in Biology from Cornell University and a long list of publications in refereed journals in my specialty, the classification of fungi. I do not wave these credentials in order to claim expertise in any or all aspects of science, but rather to establish that I am accustomed to modern Western habits of scientific thought and capable of bringing them to bear in other aspects of human intellectual activity.

A key aspect of any scientific inquiry is the null hypothesis: that is, the mirror image of the model/generalization, the value of which the research scientist is attempting to demonstrate, either through actual experiment or through systematic observation in systems such as the Solar System that do not lend themselves to experimental manipulation. Rigorous scientific proof requires demonstrating that the null hypothesis is extremely unlikely.

A well-designed experiment ought to simultaneously produce evidence concerning a hypothesis and its alternative, and be objective in data collection. Poor science that translates into poor policy decisions results when an investigator selectively collects and considers data likely to support the original hypothesis, ignoring evidence to the contrary. That political ideologies and the corporate bottom line both influence what questions scientists explore, how they conduct research, and how the results are disseminated, is scarcely to be doubted.

Having seen firsthand what goes into the sausage that the media markets to the public as proven scientific fact, I entertain a healthy skepticism when some bit of science becomes the object of evangelical zeal, and its proponents demonize all opposition, ridiculing the null hypothesis as unworthy of a second thought.

This skepticism was recently activated by a post on a social networking site concerning a recent law passed in Tennessee, which states, among other things, “”The state board of education, public elementary and secondary school governing authorities, directors of schools, school system administrators, and public elementary and secondary school principals and administrators shall endeavor to create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to…respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues.” Two issues, specifically alluded to, were the chemical origins of life and global warming, and the reposted feed characterized this as a corporate conspiracy to require the teaching of climate change denial in Tennessee schools.

Climate change is real. That global temperatures have been rising in recent decades is an incontrovertible fact. The correlation between temperature rise and increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, whose principal source is burning fossil fuels, is also not controversial. However, the cry of climate change is being used to sell products and policies that are not necessarily in the public interest and some of the charge of “climate change denial” targets legitimate questions. Recently a political candidate in my home town tried to convince me that because I was concerned about global warming (which I am) I should naturally support not only public transportation (which in general I do) but a specific costly project that no-one has demonstrated will either improve the overall convenience and attractiveness of the local bus system or result in net energy savings.

Failing to respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinions about controversial scientific issues is bad pedagogy, and presuming that no legitimate controversy can exist, simply because the preponderance of evidence now at our disposal favors a particular theory, is bad science. How many theories, espoused within the last hundred years with as much fervor as those mentioned in the Tennessee statute, are now wholly or in part discredited? No one would now, for example, presume to teach science from A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White (1898) – though I have seen it quoted as a justification for allowing attacks on religion in school classrooms. White’s fellow faculty member, zoology professor Burt Green Wilder, assembled a collection of over 600 pickled human brains in the belief that investigation of the minutiae of their construction could be correlated with all manner of individual character traits. A fair chunk of what I learned in high school biology in 1962 is now dated and doubted.

Without understanding the essential difference between a theory (however robust and well-demonstrated), which is always open to question, and a well-documented concrete data point, a person is never going to really understand the scientific method. 

Photo Credit

American Phrenology Journal – Public Domain

A Scientist Thinks Outside the Box: The Null Hypothesis is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

What could be more human than our universal need for clean drinking water?

Recently, I met the CEO and founder of Charity:Water, Scott Harrison, at an international conference on fundraising.  Scott delivered an impassioned and inspiring talk about his non profit.  Charity:Water brings clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries.  In six years, they have funded 6,185 projects in 19 countries.  The result?  2,525,000 people now have clean drinking water.  His model is brilliant.  Charity:Water operates on the premise of accountability.  This happens on two levels.  One, the organization has two pots of money – one for operations and one for donations and never have the two met.  The staff work with major donors and partners who have invested in the mission to fill the ‘well’ so that all operational costs are covered.  What does this do?  It means that people like myself and many of my friends can be assured that 100% of our contribution to clean water projects will be used for that very purpose.  It brings people back to the table of philanthropy.  Another level of accountability  shows itself in Charity:Water’s stewardship of its donors.   They show donors through video footage, photos and stories where their money went and how it has impacted the lives of others.  Their tag line?  Water changes everything.

Diseases that live in dirty water collected by nearly one billion people in the world including Canada and the US, but particularly in developing areas of Sub Saharan Africa, Southeast Asian and Latin America, are the cause of many health related problems.  Every 19 seconds a mother loses a child to a water related illness and many children do not make it to their 5th birthday.  30,000 people will die this week alone because they do not have clean drinking water.  But, the crisis extends to quality of life in other ways.  People, primarily women and children, spend nearly three hours a day walking to swamps, ponds and rivers that contain dirty water.  The time that is spent collecting water means that children are not learning to read and write and women are not earning an income.  Education, health and poverty are issues that could be vastly improved buy access to clean water.  The solution?  $20 can bring clean water to one person.  Charity:Water takes the money donated by people like me and puts it into projects that create water filtration systems and drilled or hand-dug wells.  The results are amazing.  Now, people have a clean water point that is close to their home.  This creates opportunity.  Children are able to go to school and women are able to stay at market longer, earning more money for their families. If communities had local, clean water points, Africa alone could save 40 billion hours each year. This number equates to the entire annual work force of France.

But, these are just statistics, right?  Right.  What really spoke to me was the story Scott told us about a woman named Helen Apio.  She, like me and so many mothers I know, always puts everyone else’s needs ahead of her own.  She would wake before dawn to walk nearly a mile to the nearest water point where she would wait with hundreds of other women who were also walking a great distance to the only clean water point.  She spent most of her day walking and waiting.  And then she would bring the water home and have to make decisions on how to use it.  Would she water her garden? wash her children’s school uniforms? cook a meal? or drink the water?  With the limitation on how much she could carry, difficult decisions had to be made and she always came last.  And now with a clean water point in her community, she is “happy now…I have time to eat, my children can go to school. And I can even work in my garden, take a shower and then come back for more water if I want! I am bathing so well.”   She said, “I am beautiful.”

Water restores dignity.  Water changes everything.

Hearing Scott speak transformed my world view, inspired me as a philanthropist and as a fundraiser.  I listened to another mind blowing talk at this same conference where fundraising professional Tony Myers said that philanthropy does not belong to us.  It does not belong to the Brits or the Canadians or even the Americans.  It belongs to the world.  It is part of the human experience to give and to receive.  We should know how to do both.

I’m an Aries.  In fact, it’s my birthday today.  Usually, I ask my friends and family for diamonds, rubies, sapphires and spa appointments.  But, today, on my 41st birthday, I am taking Scott Harrison’s challenge and am giving up my birthday.  All I’m asking for this year is water because water changes everything.

Click here if you want to be part of a movement that can change everything…

Photo Credits:

©Charity:Water

Giving up My Birthday for Water is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Recently my personal cyberspace has been inundated with blurbs about the so-called Republican “War on Women,” mostly having to do with a conservative-led challenge to a national mandate that employers with religious objections to contraception and abortion be required to pay for insurance coverage for these services. It’s a genuine Constitutional issue. Freedom of conscience is an important safeguard against steamroller tactics propelling a society towards an enticing but ultimately disastrous trajectory. But somehow the messages that appear on bulletin boards assume that women have a right to compel others to pay for a particular form of contraception, and that this overrides the personal moral qualms of a nontrivial proportion of the population.

I’m skeptical about national grassroots movements. I’m skeptical about the seemingly spontaneous eruptions of political sentiment that occur in blogging networks and social media sites. Most of the people with whom I am connected are educated individuals with relatively high personal ethical standards, but they are not critical enough when it comes to forwarding socio-political messages whose ultimate source is unknown, and they sometimes inadvertently propagate misrepresentations that serve aims and entities far removed from the apparent goals of the campaign.

The issue in the contraceptive insurance debate is not whether women will have access to chemical birth control, but who is going to foot the bill. When chemical contraception first became available, it was generally an out of pocket expense, but in recent years more insurance plans have provided coverage and government subsidies have been available for low income women.

There remains, however, a large population for which contraception is still an out of pocket expense, and this limits what pharmaceutical companies can charge for the product. Jack the price of something up too high, and people will stop buying it – unless there is a pressing need for it and no comparable substitute, or they are addicted to it, or it is paid for by a third party.

The first two conditions clearly do not apply. While no over the counter or behavioral method of birth control entirely matches the convenience and effectiveness of the Pill, some come close. Women do not experience withdrawal symptoms or physical craving when they stop taking hormonal birth control. Consequently, if the pharmaceutical industry is to maximize its profits on what is already a lucrative product line, they need to push the third party angle, lobbying for mandatory insurance coverage for the working population and government subsidies for those in the social welfare system.

There have been a number of instances recently where pharmaceutical companies have manipulated the FDA drug approval process to remove long-established generic drugs from the market, resulting in an order of magnitude increase in the cost of critical medications. Adding drug coverage to Medicare is at least correlated with this trend. The influence of major pharmaceutical companies in the FDA is immense; the public certainly cannot count on the Federal Government to be a neutral party when balancing the overall good against the corporate bottom line.

What is to stop the same thing happening with hormonal birth control? Not Planned Parenthood, which acts as Big Pharma’s chief salesman. Not the medical research community, which is funded by the pharmaceutical companies and the Federal Government and can easily come up with a study demonstrating that a long-established generic product is unsafe compared to a newly patented variant whose clinical history is unknown. To date, efforts through legislation to control medical costs have been woefully ineffective. There is no gatekeeper here.

Further Reading:

Birth Control Subsidies Slashed:  Will Big Pharma Take a Hit?

The Real Cost of Birth Control According to Planned Parenthood hormonal contraception costs between 5 and 60 dollars a month depending on the brand and type of insurance. This is the cost to consumer not the overall cost obviously. Figures in the article do not include the cost of a doctor’s visit required to obtain pills.

A Giant Pain in the Wallet How drug companies are making crucial, common drugs up to 100 times more expensive.

Photo Credit

Progestin pills – King County Health Services

The Contraception Debate in Cyberspace is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Over and over again, in nearly all facets of my life, I am being called to reclaim that power, which is our birthright as humans. It’s a power beyond gender, beyond social structures, and beyond appearances.

But as a white man living in a society that has been dominated by white supremacist patriarchy, locating and embodying that power amongst the layers and levels of oppressive falsehoods is quite a challenging task. It’s a different challenge from that experienced by women, transgendered folks, and people of color, but the reality is that that we are all harmed, and we all are called, in our own ways, to be healed and become whole and liberated.

Somewhere early on in life, a seed was planted within me that something was deeply wrong with how we have arranged ourselves. It didn’t make sense to me, for example, that women were rarely considered leaders, and that many women lived in fear of violence from men. Images of destroyed buildings and dead bodies in Lebanon and other places were seared into my young brain, forever rendering warfare an idiotic affair driven by male hubris and greed.

During high school, I found myself careening between the aggression of raging hormones, and a deep fear of hurting anyone. I played multiple sports, excelling at soccer, and yet often fled to reading and writing for general solace. I recall a time when I flipped a teammate on his back during a soccer practice, and after a fierce chewing out from the others on the team I spent weeks feeling guilty for having been so careless with someone who was my friend.

I was timid with girls, partly our of fear, but partly out of respect. When I listened to my neighborhood friends talking about “getting a piece of ass” and chasing “bitches,” I nodded silently while inwardly cringing at the dehumanization of it all. My first girlfriend most likely dumped me because I wasn’t bold enough, didn’t take charge enough in certain situations, sexual and otherwise.

There was a battle in my sixteen-year-old mind between a man not yet born and a boy who wanted to be good and respectful. In some ways, this battle has continued to this very day.

During college, I started working hard to break down whatever sexism I inherited as a man in this culture. I voraciously read feminist literature, was active in women’s rights events like Take Back the Night, and eventually dated a woman whose life was – at that time – immersed in trying to untangle the knots of patriarchy she saw around her.

The unlearning of believing that what was always had been was all around me. I was also becoming a campus leader, starting organizations, serving on the student senate, and learning how to talk with elected officials in an assertive manner. All of this brought me face to face with power – my own and the collective powers we share (which really are from the same source).

What I saw around me, I mostly didn’t like. Young men, and some women, engaging in the kinds of coercive and manipulative games that are driving the halls of Congress, and the boardrooms of multinational corporations, schools, and nearly every major institution in our society. I recall conspiring with a friend and another member of the university student senate to upend some project the senate leadership was attempting to push through. Although I think we were “in the right,” I also felt somewhat off about how we were going about everything behind their backs. In addition, the way in which personalized attacks on them glued us together later became something I have noted is an attribute of power-over sickness.

When dehumanization in any form is at the center of any action, political or otherwise, we have stepped out of our true power, and into the land of domination and oppression.

But I hadn’t made that leap of understanding yet. I mostly recognized that something was off, and responded by trying to suppress anything that remotely felt like those oppressive forces.

When I learned that my then girlfriend had been raped twice as a teenager, I took a similar course around much of my sexuality, enhancing the “good” and “respectful” aspects that I’d developed during high school.

I didn’t want to be anything like “those guys.” Not in my relationships, nor in how I worked and led in the world.

There was nothing wrong with this, but now I am recognizing that this was only a step towards liberation.

——–

And what’s calling now is the marrow of our long lost ancestors whose feet were deeply rooted on the ground.

Those whose arms could stretch all the way to the stars, and whose hearts’ beat with the tides, and lifted with the limbs of the oaks.

That being a man does not mean being forced to choose between domination and forms of quiet resignation.

That being a man need not be limited to anything we have associated with men throughout history.

That being a man need not be defined in opposition to that which I loathe.

That I am so much more than any gender could contain.

That only I can expel the animal of patriarchy -

and reclaim the animal
of humanity
inside.

Photo Credit

Thumbnail, Patriarch – Wikimedia Public Domain

Patriarchy Stole My Power. Now I’m Gonna Take it Back! is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Two of my favorite bloggers are present in this interview on the blog Jizo Chronicles. I want to reflect briefly on the following section:

On a larger scale, exploring interdependence has really shaped the way I understand solidarity. I don’t have to “know” someone in order to comprehend that we are connected — spiritually, and through local and global systems. The workers at the Foxconn factories in China, who face penalties of twelve years in prison for attempting to unionize, probably helped produce this laptop I’m typing on. And they must continue to work under unbearable conditions; otherwise, they and their families won’t eat. But their situation won’t improve, necessarily, if I give up my laptop, or stop buying Apple products. Instead (in my opinion) I am called to practice compassion and solidarity by supporting the actual struggles of the workers, and similar struggles of workers and peasants not only abroad but in the U.S. as well.

With the markedly increased speed and potential impact of communications these days, we actually have a greater chance of making a difference in the lives of people living half way across the globe. The digital support through blog posts, tweets, articles, petitions, etc. that people around the globe sent to folks protesting in Arab countries over the past year has been heard and deeply felt. The reciprocal standing in solidarity from those same protestors was felt by yours truly and many of his fellow Occupiers during the past several months as well. It may seem like a tiny thing – a blog post, a sharing on Facebook or Twitter – but it all adds up. And these days, often quickly.

There was a photo a few months back of an Egyptian protestor in Tahir Square holding up a sign supporting those who had been beaten in Katie’s current hometown of Oakland during the occupy protests. It brought me to tears.

We aren’t alone. No one is alone. And there are more and more creative ways people are finding to stand in solidarity with people around the world. From expanding the messaging being used against destructive legislation at home to include it’s global impact, to strategically spreading ideas for social change, we are moving beyond simply clicking on a petition and forgetting about it.

Furthermore, the best elements of the nearly worldwide now protest movements are starting to combine activism with a deep commitment to personal relationships. Recognizing that how we are with each other, how we care for each other, is probably just as important (if not more so) than any political “victory.”

Occupy Interpersonal Relationships is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

The second half of the story of a tiny fishing town in Nova Scotia’s and how it stands as a lesson in community renewal.

Revitalization Engines
Following a couple of decades of decline, Lockeport is again in the midst of a broad-based renewal. All the energy and excitement in the town came together at that two-day conference in October 2009. Dayle Eschelby organized the event. She was Lockeport’s Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (ICSP) Coordinator. Hiring her was a requirement by the federal government to qualify for the town’s share of gas tax revenue. It was Eschelby who discovered Storm Cunningham and got him to the conference, taking advantage of a relationship he already had with the Nova Scotia Community College.

Eschelby’s efforts demonstrate the importance of a second important principle of community revitalization – you can’t sit around waiting for rescue. “What’s really important,” says Dayle, “is that we don’t wait for things to come to us, but we go out really searching, trying to make the connections, doing the networking and starting the groundwork.” Eschelby is the last person you’d catch sitting around and waiting for change. She goes out and makes it happen.

Lockeport dynamos like Dayle Eschelby and Bil Atwood work under the Town Clerk Joyce Young for the Lockeport Town Council. Lockeport’s Economic Development Committee advises the Town and oversees projects. “I refer to them generically as renewal engines because they churn out this constant flow of projects,” says Storm Cunningham of the people behind Lockeport’s revitalization. “What’s important is that it does the visioning, the culturing and the partnering. In a town that size – Lockeport is only 650 people – you could have a one-person renewal engine.”

While it wasn’t Eschelby’s idea to associate the schools with UNESCO – Sue Boutilier, Instructional Designer with the Nova Scotia Community College School of Trades and Technology, thought of it – Dayle made it happen. She wanted to tie the school to the Town’s sustainability plan and to something called the Southwest Nova Biosphere Reserve, the five counties from Annapolis around to Queens, including the Tobeatic Wilderness Area and Kejimkujik National Park. The stated purpose for the reserve is to plan for sustainability. Dayle is very excited about the UNESCO link because the students, teachers and curriculum could all take part in revitalization efforts. “It’s going to give us a new way of thinking about our sustainability,” she says.

The Future and Its Threats
Dayle, Bil and Storm all believe the work in Lockeport has barely begun, mostly because there is so much potential. Dayle says, “I think we’ve been handed a gift on a silver platter.” According to Storm, “Number one, it’s got a spectacular location. It’s got some wonderful natural assets. You’ve got wonderful heritage. It’s still got a viable fishing economy that can be revitalized and built upon. It’s not just a one-trick pony.”

There’s no shortage of ideas about how to build a sustainable Lockeport, many of which have been around for a while. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a nice school. Now that we are a UNESCO site, I think it would go hand in hand with a new school.” Bil agrees that Lockeport’s natural assets can be built upon, “I’d like to bring in some more businesses, aiming at 15 to 20 workers or so. Or even just more businesses for tourism season whether cafés or t-shirt shops or kayak rentals. Make it a destination.”

One big idea that’s been kicked around for 30 years is a Centre of Marine Excellence. Both Dayle and Storm believe the idea is still viable. Dayle sees the schools, fishermen and local fish plants, a local business called Allendale Electronics that makes products for the fishing industry and even the Beach Centre as potential partners. “It’s a fishing town,” says Storm. “The ideal thing is to get the fishing back. What we originally talked about was using Lockeport as ground zero for a regional renewal effort, the biosphere reserve group of counties. There are a lot of things that can be done to greatly increase fishing income.”

Of course, there are those who believe such plans are foolhardy, who see all the effort as a waste of time, energy and money, who refuse to get involved or even support the efforts of Lockeport’s revitalization engines. Dayle believes such apathy, even hostility is the single biggest threat to Lockeport’s efforts to rebuild to something resembling the vitality of a previous age while staying true to its new principles of sustainability. “A lot of this needs to be community driven,” she says. “If people don’t get involved and don’t take ownership, it’s going to be hard to get a lot of these things done.”

Storm Cunningham sees a second threat – the loss of the renewal engine, in this case Dayle herself. “If they lose Dayle, they’re going to lose an awful lot. There’s no substitute for somebody who has the vision, the passion and the energy to make things happen and to stick with it long enough to see it through. It’s the single most damaging thing I can think of to Lockeport’s future right now, and it would take so little money to keep her going.” Dayle’s job ended on April 30, 2010.

Still, Storm Cunningham certainly hasn’t lost hope for the town. He sees promise in Bil Atwood’s position as project manager, as well as the work of the Economic Development Committee and the key role Town Clerk Joyce Young plays in revitalization. As Storm himself puts it, “I met a lot of really smart people who are quite aware of Lockeport’s potential.” One person may have left one position, but the revitalization engine in Lockeport may just be strong enough now to withstand Dayle’s departure.

Projects continue in Lockeport, the most recent being to raise the Little School House Museum and pour a foundation under it so it can withstand storm surges that occasionally push the ocean over nearby sand dunes. When I asked Bil how he’d know when revitalization was finished, he replied, “Oh, we’ll never be done. As soon as you’re done, then that’s the word, you’re done.” As so often happens in a small community, Bil has filled many roles over the years. In fact, he was one of those two entrepreneurs to build a set of beach cottages back in the 1990’s. Neither he nor the other members of the Lockeport renewal engine are about to let the revitalization process stall any time soon. They’ll never give up

Photo Credits

All photos by Darcy Rhyno

Lockeport Mayor Darian Huskilson at the newly constructed look-off over Lockeport Harbour. 

Lockeport High School with the UNESCO worldwide school network sign. 

Lockeport Beach Centre, a part of this fishing port’s rebirth.

How to Remake a Town, Part 2 is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

I turned 40 in 2011 and my goal was to rededicate myself to balance.  I’m a size 12 and I decided that I wanted to be strong, really strong.  Ironically, I was inspired by watching bad American television and seeing so many buff male bodies. Why I was inspired by the muscular physique of men, I have no idea. Freud might know, but I don’t actually care. Over the past nine and a half months, I have built quite a bit of muscle. I haven’t changed my eating and I haven’t lost any weight. I just wanted to be strong. My trainer says I can lift more weight on a romanian dead lift than most men – even perhaps him and he’s buff like my American actor friends.  Part of  it is my flexibility.  It’s not an easy exercise for the inflexible. But, whatever the reason my progress is great and I’m not focused on external results. I feel strong. I can run 10Km. And, I’m only going forward.

And, this is precisely why I’m so fired up by the response to the recent photo shoot instigated by Plus Model Magazine and featuring Katya Zharkova.

The plus sized modelling industry is relatively new – 1990s. Why there has to be a separate industry for models wearing clothing sizes above 10, I don’t know. Is it new because it’s driven by capitalism and designers are greedy for more clients? Is it new because women are lazy, getting fat and want to assert their completely unhealthy bodies? Or, is it new because the average clothing size and model is 23% smaller than she was 20 years ago, when she was only 8% smaller and not all women are actually this small?  Have we forgotten that one of the iconic beauties in West was a size 12? Nobody said that Marilyn was plus sized.

According to Wikipedia plus size modeling has received criticism. Some commentators believe that plus-size models may be setting a bad example to women on how they should look. They believe that promoting large models may lead to women believing that having an unhealthy lifestyle is acceptable. I’m wondering why the general public is jumping to the conclusion that someone who is ‘overweight’ is unhealthy when the wide-spread image of women is represented by models who may very well have the BMI of an Anorexic person.  It is possible to have two women side by side, one a size 12 and once a size 0 and both are healthy.

It’s 2012.  Let’s start judging health on something other than body shape, size and weight.

And now, I’ll stop my rant because it’s time for my Sunday 10K. 

Further Reading:

‘Most runway models meet the BMI criteria for anorexia’, claims plus-size magazine in powerful comment on body image in the fashion industry.  Mail Online

To see all the photos from this shoot, visit Plus Model Magazine

Photo Credits:

Plus Model Magazine

Fear of Fat is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Ah, there’s nothing so promising as the New Year’s resolution — a better body, a better bank account, a better world. And nothing so daunting – working out, working harder, working for the common good. It’s a time for decision making and commitment to a future self and a future that is in some way better than the present one. Trouble is, as humans we aren’t known for reliably making decisions in our own long term best interest. Neither are we known for reliably keeping pledges to ourselves and to others.

As this New Year approached, I got thinking about resolutions and more generally about decision making and why we choose to do certain things and not others. I wondered why decisions are so often against our own best interests and why they’re so difficult to stick to, even when we know we’ll suffer if we don’t.

The first problem is New Year’s itself. The month of January is named for the two-faced Roman god Janus – he’s the god of doors and beginnings – so this month has for the last couple of millennia been a time of looking back and looking ahead. The double purpose of the month means it’s an ideal time to make decisions because looking back means we can take into account lessons learned from mistakes and successes while planning the future.

That’s all fine and good. We’ve decided that the first day of this set of days named after a Roman god will be the one we designate as decision making time, but it is after all totally arbitrary. The New Year in China, for Hindus and for Muslims among others has nothing to do with this particularly western tradition.

So, if we’re going to make decisions — whether they’re about something as self-centered and trivial as our personal appearance (I’ll lose twenty pounds in 2012 or take up body building as a hobby) or to something as fundamental as our state and future as a species (I’ll convert my car to burn vegetable oil or refuse to fly anywhere ever again) — the decision-making process shouldn’t be tied to something as arbitrary as the arrival of a particular date in our Gregorian calendar. Decisions should be made more rationally and more nobly. We should make decisions, say, about our health only after receiving the results of a medical checkup; we should make financial decisions before we sign up for a mortgage; we should make decisions about the future of our environment based on the latest science and out of concern for the planet and our own fate.

But we just don’t always make our decisions out of nobility or via a rational thought process. Too often, we make decisions in other ways for other reasons. A study by a friend of mine, Chloe Tudor, proves it. A fourth year student at the University of Toronto, Chloe was motivated by Robert Kenner’s hard-hitting 2008 film Food, Inc. exposing the worst of factory farming to study how people make ethical decisions about what they eat.

Chloe designed an elegant little study in which she showed ten participants a ten-minute film about slaughterhouse practices. Afterwards, she asked each if watching the footage was enough to make them change their eating habits. While all were disturbed by what they saw, only half were motivated to find ways to eat more humanely. Following up several weeks later, Chloe discovered that only one participant had stuck to the initial decision to avoid factory farmed meats.

Disillusion is there to read in Chloe’s report. “Animal rights activists argue if slaughterhouses had glass walls,” she writes, “everyone would be vegetarian. However, even my small experiment tells me that this isn’t the case.”

Chloe sensed there was some force at work strong enough to keep people from their commitments and even from making them in the first place. She challenged the participants by identifying at least seven shops where they could easily buy meat produced by more ethical means. They responded with what Chloe categorized as excuses. She discovered that both sets of participants felt too inconvenienced by the changes they’d have to make in their shopping practices. Meat is an essential part of a healthy diet. It’s easier to ignore the issue of ethical treatment of animals altogether. Chloe countered each excuse with a rational answer that explained how easy it was for the participants to act on their impulse to avoid factory meat. The result? No change in behaviour.

So what is it that kept the participants from making or living up to their deeply felt decisions? That most intractable of human traits, laziness. It’s just plain easier to keep doing what we do. It seems to me that Chloe’s study makes a strong argument for the New Year’s resolution. Who are we kidding? We need a kick in the pants like a day named for regeneration and set aside as the one day of the year dedicated to making decisions. Otherwise, we’d procrastinate ourselves into heart attacks and climate change. We might do so regardless, but the New Year’s resolution at least gives us a chance. Flawed as it is as a means to a better future self and a healthy future world, we’ve settled on January 1 as decision day and we’d better stick to it.

Okay, so resolutions are made. Now what? How do we stick to our commitments? In the conclusion of this two-part series on the New Year’s resolution, I’ll take a look at commitment devices, a new development in the science of decision making.

Photo Credits

Fireworks @ Flickr

Food Inc Poster @ Wikipedia

The New Year’s Resolution, Part 1 is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

JC Scott takes an impactful snap shot of a girl chasing bubbles, leading him to question the actions we take now which will leave an indelible mark on the planet to be inherited by a younger generation. 

I lead a pleasant life. For example I took this photo at a winery dinner this summer, attended only by invited guests. We all arrived by speedboat downriver from Kingston followed by a short SUV ride to the winery, just onshore and inland a few miles from the St. Lawrence River, near Rockport, Ontario. All the people at the party were invited because they own a certain type of very nice boat or were guests on the boats like me. The event was hosted by a vineyard, and it was there that I captured this Andrew Wyeth type image of a young girl, running freely and blowing soap bubbles in a field, just before sunset.

Who will protect this hope for a future where young girls can run in fields, this delightful innocence, this pastoral calm? Who will occupy this space? The parents of this girl, who are upper middle class yacht owners, are dependent on a structure that is being eroded and corrupted by that now infamous 1% and although they themselves may aspire to that lofty 1% niche in society, I know from my personal experience, how far upper middle class is from that 1% niche. As someone who attended my country’s most exclusive boarding school on an academic bursary, I learned that 50 feet is nowhere close to a 500 foot yacht and with boats that’s how boats, and wealth, and real influence are measured.

There is a space occupied in normal times by the upper middle class, where meretricious social values form the backbone and define the ideals for the enhancement of society. These ideals are crumbling, being eaten away by the dominance and social reward of sheer greed and the untrammelled criminal behaviour of Wall Street within our North American political system. Today the architects of shadow economies and debt derivatives are now the deans of Harvard and Columbia business schools and the perpetrators of deceit are now the current draftspeople of White House and thereby Canadian fiscal policies.

Passing along to this girl, a dept as great as any society has ever passed to the next generation is simply not fair. The space we all need to occupy is the space wherein humanity, ecology and liberty define that absolutely no one, no matter what politician they may own, is ever allowed again to steal this beautiful girl’s future, steal her hopes, threaten her health or diminish her ability to generate her own wealth. That is the space I wish to occupy, a green field, on a healthy planet with no financial or carbon debt passed from one generation to another. Occupy this space with me and with the 99% if you have the will.

Photo Credit

©JC Scott

Occupy This Space is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

How is America planning for retirement?  A challenge for both elderly and young people, author Martha Sherwood discusses some of the pit falls of raising the minimum age for collecting Social Security benefits in the United States.

Proposals to raise the minimum age for collecting both minimum and full Social Security benefits in are gaining increasing traction across the political spectrum. This looks like a comparatively painless way to address an intractable underlying problem: a large birth cohort entering retirement in the middle of a recession, which pushed forward by many years the date at which benefits exceeded payroll taxes. The Federal Government raised payroll taxes and supposedly stockpiled a surplus during the 1990s in anticipation of just such a crunch, but unfortunately they loaned the surplus to themselves, spent it on other programs, and are now faced with empty coffers and the prospect of having to borrow money to cover their debt to today’s retirees.

Life expectancy at age 65 increased, by a little less than five years, in America between 1940 and 2007, but the main reason so many people are now collecting Social Security, or shortly will be, is the large birth cohort now entering retirement. That birth cohort cannot be ignored. If the Social Security and Medicare systems cannot provide benefits sufficient to cover an adequate standard of living and the level of medical care people have come to expect, for that proportion of retirees who are dependent on it, then something has to give. There don’t seem to be accurate figures anywhere on what proportion of older Americans cannot realistically expect to continue working and have no significant resources other than Social Security and Medicare to fall back on, but if you add the roughly 20% who have significant health issues, people whose incomes have fallen below subsistence level before retirement and are counting on Social Security and Medicare to substitute for other social safety net programs, and discouraged workers, it’s a large and growing number of people.

Charging the maintenance of these people, who contributed faithfully to the retirement program which is now broke, to Social Security Disability, or extended unemployment, or entitlement programs such as section 8 housing, or heavily subsidized private insurance under “Obamacare” does not save the public any money and multiplies the bureaucratic headaches. The alternative is to tolerate high levels of poverty and unmet healthcare needs among the elderly. This would, indeed, have the effect of reducing life expectancy and therefore balancing the Social Security budget. One would hope that our country had a robust enough social conscience to reject such a solution.

Overlooked by most commentators, but surely a factor in the current Social Security deficit, is the shorter working life of the average worker due to escalating education requirements, and, in the current recession, the large number of young people who have been unable to enter the work force at all. Unless the work force is actually growing, older people who postpone retirement are occupying their children’s jobs, forcing the children to postpone having families of their own and depressing the consumer economy.

People who argue for raising the retirement age will claim that people in their sixties are, for the most part, better able to work than their parents were, because the percentage of them reporting poor health has declined from 33 to 22%, the share of physically demanding jobs has fallen from 57% to 46%, and the percentage of adults 55 to 64 who are college graduates rose from 16 to 32%. There is the assumption that anyone who can’t work will be able to collect Social Security disability benefits and that anyone who can work will be able to find a job at a living wage.

The recession has already produced a spike in applications for disability benefits among people with a variety of disabilities, none an absolute barrier to employment, who have been laid off and have no hope of competing against a horde of younger job applicants. Employers, including public employers, are trimming older workers. For persons 62 and older, Social Security is the main safety net in the face of being downsized. Without this fallback, lower income workers who have no retirement savings would end up in actual poverty. It is all very well to say that people should be saving more for retirement, but at present median family income allows for very little slack in a family budget. Those people of the Baby Boomer generation who did save for retirement have seen home equity and investments gutted by forces beyond their control or ability to anticipate, and many have also been forced to draw on the remainder early because of unemployment or a health crisis.

The very rapid rate of technological change in the workplace creates difficulties for older workers, especially when employers invest little in training existing employees, preferring to hire new blood which has paid for its training out of pocket. Most desk jobs now require a large array of computer skills that are second nature to a twenty-something but difficult for an older person to acquire. Jobs may not be as physically demanding as they once were but the demand to constantly learn new ways of doing things has escalated, and few sixty year old workers have a learning curve as steep as a person half their age.

The people advocating raising the retirement age are making many assumptions, including projecting an economic recovery which so far has failed to materialize. One way or another, the system is going to have to produce a way of distributing intergenerational benefits and obligations in a way that is sustainable and affordable, across the entire spectrum of the American population. Raising the Social Security retirement age and throwing a large number of older people onto social safety net programs that are even more stressed is not the answer.

Further Reading:

The Heritage Foundation

Urban Institute:  Fact Sheet on Retirement Policy

Photo Credit:

Microsoft Images

Raising the Retirement Age in America is Robbing Peter to Pay Paul is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN