Fences both protect and destroy animal habitat

More than 50 years have passed since the end of the Korean War and the establishment of a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. In those 50 years an abundance of plants, bird and animals have thrived in a strip of land only 150 miles long and two and a half miles wide. 97% of the land is now covered by forest and prairie.

Making themselves at home in the DMZ are Asian black bears, spotted seals, lynx, and the rare red-crowned and white-naped cranes, to name a few. Some believe the Siberian tiger has returned to the land where no human live.

In spite of years of separation, a North-South reconciliation seems inevitable. Two rail lines and two highways have been rebuilt across the DMZ. South Korea's Ministry of the Environment says that when reconciliation comes, the DMZ will be preserved for two years until more long-range plans can be developed. What those plans will be is anybody's guess. The international organization the DMZ Forum wants to see the land become a Peace Park, both to protect the land and to honor the many soldiers on both sides who are buried there.

No buffer zone exists between the wood and the steel of the 700 mile fence being built between the U.S. and Mexico. With some 440 miles of fence still to go, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wants to make sure he completes the job before George Bush leaves office. To that end, he has announced he will be ignoring
36 federal environmental laws.

Animals, of course, are no respecters of borders. Bears, lions, wolves, parrots bighorn sheep and owls cross back and forth as part of their survival. The jaguar, which until recently bred only in Mexico, may just now be establishing a breeding presence in Arizona. Even more than Korea's DMZ, the 2,000 mile long U.S.-Mexician border is able to support a diversity of wildlife because of its diversity of terrain and climate.

The Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife claim Chertoff's waiver of environmental laws is unconstitutional and have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. They want more time to develop plans to lessen the environmental impact of the wall.

Thus two entirely different human impulses, the yearning for reconciliation by Korea and the demand for isolation by the U.S., threaten habitat that once destroyed may never be remade.

How Massachusetts are you?

Take this little quiz over at GoToQuiz and find out how Massachusetts you are. Not too many questions yet, but the author plans to expand. If you have good ideas for additional questions, you can leave them in the Comments section.

Sample questions:

Do you know what a packie is?
A beater car
A young camper
The local liquor store
Sure, and I can tell you which ones sell nightcrawlers too!
Who is "Whitey" and why is he so famous?
A well-known Irish pub owner in Southie who has twelve kids
A well-known firefighter from Worcester that grew up with Denis Leary
Former Boston mafioso and on the FBI's 10-Most-Wanted since '95
Brother of former UMass President Billy Bulger

Councilor Tim Rooke doesn't get ward representation

The Civil Rights and Race Relations Committee met again this afternoon to discuss plans for implementing ward representation. I must say it was a thought-provoking meeting. Each department head that had been charged with assessing potential changes in their departments gave a report. Mike Plaisance over at the Republican will probably give more details but for me two issues remained key. The first is resolving the situation with the School Committee, three of whose members were elected for four year terms but who can only serve two years in order for ward representation to be implemented.. The second issue, and one that will play out over time, is the role of neighborhood councils and civic associations in a system with ward representation.

Councilor Tim Rooke (not on the committee) came in about fifteen minutes after the meeting started and was greeted by Chairman Tosado. Rooke started by asking about salaries for ward councilors-- were they going to be the same as at-large councilors? Tosado said yes, that he had looked at Chicopee and Holyoke, both of which have at-large and ward councilors, and that the salaries were the same.

Rooke said he'd wondered about that, because, for example (I'm going to have to paraphrase here because I didn't have a tape recorder) if you were a councilor from ward seven, you'd get to vote on ward seven issues, but....At that point, he seemed to tune into a general sense of disagreement.

"Isn't that the way it is?" he asked.

"Everybody votes on everything," I said, at which point Chairman Tosado said, "Michaelann, please, let the lawyer answer that," cutting me off. (Although I noted he seemed to have no problem with the men who spoke out of turn.) So then City Attorney Ed Pakula gave the legal opinion and basically said just what I'd said, only with more words..

I must say I was just astounded that a sitting city councilor, who was one of two "no" votes on ward representation proposal when it came before City Council in 2006 apparently was unaware of the details of what he was opposing and even now has not taken the time to educate himself about ward representation-- now the law of the land, even for him, if he plans to run again. Perhaps he thinks he's such a shoe-in for an at-large seat next fall that he doesn't have to think about those those lowly ward councilors?

At this point Councilor Rooke went from bad to worse when he started questioning whether there would still be a role for neighborhood councils and if the city should continue to pay for staff for some of them! Of course this is exactly what the neighborhood council members present were fearful about, a forced irrelevance of the council and civic association system.

Rooke said he thought Mayor Sullivan had created the neighborhood council system in the 70's as a way of giving neighborhoods a voice, but now with the ward representation, would they be needed? I thought his question surprisingly parochial seeing as nearly every city in Massachusetts has neighborhood councils AND a mixed-- at-large and ward-- city council. Maybe Councilor Rooke doesn't get out of town much. I think it was Councilor Tosado who had a good comeback-- neighborhood councils are not ward-based and neighborhoods often overlap wards.

Well, I certainly think there's a continued need for neighborhood-based organizations.As far as I can recall, we've got twelve neighborhood councils and ten civic associations. Long may they reign.

I'll save the School Committee for tomorrow..

Poor people kicked out of session on poor people

Well, if this isn't typical. Premier Dalton McGuinty of Ontario was elected partly on his party's platform of reducing poverty by 25% in five years, but now that he is starting the process of "getting firsthand feedback" (his words) apparently that doesn't include getting any input from the people actually living in poverty.

Today poor people protested the invitation-only poverty session. Some of the protesters had their mouth shut with tape with the word "silence' written on the tape. Infoshop has a good story about people's struggle to be heard..

I must say, however, the Premier's 25% reduction on poverty sounds a whole lot better than what is promoted in cities around the country including Springfield-- and some states have their own plan, also; Massachusetts does-- although sometimes I get confused: is it eliminate chronic homelessness in five years? or all homelessness in ten years? or ten percent in five years? or five percent in...oh, never mind.

Premier McGuinty must know something about where the economy is headed that I don't know, to set his sights so high.

Homeless, Tired of foreclosures, Reclaim Vacant Government Homes

I have a link to these folks -- the Nashville Homeless Power Project-- on my blog, and when I got this email today, asking for help publicizing what they're up to, I was happy to oblige.

Contact: Jeannie Alexander, 615-799--8108

Homeless, Tired of foreclosures, Reclaim Vacant Government Homes

The Nashville Homeless Power Project led a march of poor and homeless families for housing, Wednesday which culminated with the takeover of vacant HUD homes. The march began at 1:00 p.m. in front of the Metro Court House then proceeded to Dickerson Road, an area that has been recently rezoned for luxury development. The homeless group is concerned that redevelopment will again not prioritize the needs of the poor and may push families out of the area. “In this time of foreclosures, many of us are facing homelessness. We need our city to prioritize poor and working families above luxury development. Despite repeated promises from local government the homeless are left the die in the streets while their demand for housing is ignored” said Clemmie Greenlee, formerly homeless grandmother and organizer with the Power Project.

The march then became a caravan and participants were driven to Tom Joy Elementary School where the group held a brief prayer vigil for the estimated 1,800 homeless school children in the Nashville area. The march ended where one of the vacant HUD homes has been reclaimed. Homeless people vow not to leave the homes voluntarily.

Cheri Honkala, National Organizer of the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign, also participated in the march and takeover and cited the City of Nashville for “ their failure to address the homeless crisis and rise in foreclosures. “ Representatives of the power project vow that the May 7^th march and takeover is the next step in a fight that will not end until everyone has access to safe and affordable housing. Jeannie Alexander, program director of the Power Project further stated that the takeover was the first public takeover of a vacant HUD home by the Power Project but that the organization has “covertly taken over more than a dozen other vacant houses in the city” and will continue to take additional houses “as long as there are people who do not have homes.”

Iraq: making it out alive but not for long

The war in Iraq may be off the radar screen for many of us, but not for U.S. military personnel and their families.

In the month of April, 51 servicepeople died in Iraq, the highest number since last September. April injury numbers aren't out yet, and we know the military bigwigs do the best they can to obscure the real numbers, but documented physical injuries, serious enough to cause evacuation from Iraq, stand at at 29,395. Emotional injuries accompany the physical also, but you don't have to be bleeding on the outside to be in a world of trouble and pain.

Suicide is the final symptom of emotional distress, and apparently the Department of Veterans Affairs and its Secretary James Peake have been deliberately underplaying just how high veterans' suicide rate, especially Iraq veterans, really is.. Today Peake testified at the House Veterans' Affairs Committee where he was accused of criminal negligence in the cover-up of the suicide crisis.

One age group among veteran suicides really stands out: the 20 to 24 year olds. Their suicide rate is two to four times higher than the same age group among civilians.

In November, 2007, CBS News broke a story on veterans' suicide rate.
At a December Congressional hearing, Director of Mental Health Services for Veterans' Affairs Dr. Ira Katz said that CBS's numbers weren't accurate.
Today, the CBS numbers were confirmed.
More than 120 suicides a week; more than 1,000 attempts a month.

Starling Saga: please don't fall out of your nest!

Well, the starlings have refurbished the nest under the eaves of the building where I work and yesterday morning I found two-thirds of an empty pale blue egg. When I got home I saw another empty blue egg under the house's eaves that hadn't been there in the morning. I had this image of a starling calendar: mate on April's first Wednesday, finish building nest, lay eggs, hatch babies-- on different days but simultaneously across the city.

Does a bird's offspring inherit the nest of the parents? Where I used to live, there was a pair of starlings under the eaves for twenty years!-- four or five generation's worth, as it turns out; a starling in the wild lives from five to seven years, although domesticated starlings can make it into their teens.

Last year the baby starling at work fell out of his nest three times; twice I was there to put him back. the third time happened over a weekend; the bird was dead on my arrival.

So to this year's starling, who I could hear today faintly chirping: stay in your damn nest until you can fly! I don't want to have to resort to the whole Circle of Life mantra for comfort.Just do the right thing and be one of those long-lived starlings. Now if my readers will just say to themselves, "I do believe in starlings, I do, I really DO!".

Gas tax holiday a slick piece of propaganda

Looks like we're getting better at seeing through election-year propaganda. A CBS News/New York Times poll released yesterday said 49% of those polled thought the holiday a bad idea, 45% thought the tax a good idea, with 4% undecided.

Today's Boston Globe reports that SUV sales for April alone fell more than 32%, while sale of small cars increased 16%.

Seems like the high gas prices are forcing us to do what we should do, anyway: drive less, conserve what we have, and use public transportation. Has the tide turned about gas-guzzling cars, or will we go right back to our old ways if-- a very BIG if-- gas prices go down?

Is the sun my enemy?

OK, I know severe sunburns are bad for you, especially if you get them as a kid-- it increases your risk of melanoma as an adult. And if you want the skin of a thirty year old when you're sixty, by all means avoid the sun. But otherwise, why is it again that I'm supposed to think the sun is my enemy? I've never really bought it.

Last month the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology came out with a report saying there were no health benefits in drinking eight glasses of water a day. Hmm...and yet:

• Up to 60 percent of the human body is water
• The brain is composed of 70 percent water
• the lungs are nearly 90 percent water.
• 83 percent of our blood is water, which helps digest our food, transport waste, and control body temperature.
• Each day humans must replace 2.4 litres (about 2 1/2 quarts) of water, some through drinking and the rest taken by the body from the foods eaten. U.S. Geological Survey.

By chance, I found an article from Natural News that summarizes exactly how I feel.

Think about it, for a moment. It is now the position of conventional medicine that:
• Water is bad for you.
• Sunlight is bad for you.
• Nutritional supplements are worthless.
• Herbs are dangerous and might kill you.
• Meditation and prayer has no medical benefit.

And what, might you ask, do these doctors recommend that patients do to enhance their health? Here's what they recommend:
• Poison your body with chemotherapy.
• Slather your skin with sunscreen that blocks vitamin D production.
• Take medications that cause permanent liver damage.
• Drink processed beverages and eat processed, cooked foods.
• "Manage" your biochemistry with medication, not nutrition.
• Have your breasts surgically removed to prevent breast cancer...

Gee, it's no surprise, then, to learn about this latest finding that "water has no health benefits."

Check out the article. Graphic from Kids for Saving Earth.

Ward representation: will the city have made any progress?

The Civil Rights and Race Relations Committee will be meeting again on Wednesday, May 7, 4:30 at the City Council office to figure out how to implement ward representation.. This is a just about when Chair Jose Tosado said the next meeting would take place-- six to eight weeks from the first meeting, which was March 12.

The key item on the agenda, from my point of view, is how elections for School Committee members will play out. When the ward rep bill was placed in the city's ballot last November, it turned out that the City Council had failed to think through what would happen to the staggered terms of those three School Committee members who were elected last fall. Although they're supposed to serve four year terms, there doesn't seem to be any way to implement ward rep without all school committee members starting out on the same foot-- new elections-- in 2009. This didn't make Antoinette Pepe, Chris Collins and Thomas Ashe, who were elected to four year terms last fall, very happy.

I can't think of any other way to resolve this situation, but we'll see what happens Wednesday, when City Attorney Ed Pakula. is supposed to present a legal opinion about how to resolve this situation.

Of course I'm not surprised that the City Council didn't think this through before they submitted the proposed ward rep law to the Legislature for approval to be placed on the ballot. I believe councilors were only thinking about themselves, and how to look like winners in the face of the community's federal lawsuit against the city.

So we shall see what they come up with on Wednesday! I'll report back.

Made in China

Edwards bookstore to close

The news is not entirely unexpected, but Edwards Bookstore in Tower Square, Springfield, will be closing on May 16. The last of the area's independent bookstores will be gone, victim of the mega-bookstores like Barnes & Noble and online sellers like Amazon.com.

I wonder, sometimes, what my life would have been like without Springfield bookstores.

All through high school, I would spend at least three late afternoons a week in Johnson's Secondhand Bookstore, browsing for hours and getting great bargains for a dime. So many of my lifelong interests were shaped sitting on a stool in those narrow isles-- religion, philosophy, history, science, nature-- and, as I think about it, from books ten to sixty years old! I memorized all the bones in the human body from a 1910 anatomy textbook, don't ask me why. Sometimes I'd take my find of the day and go next door to Johnson's Tea Room (which no one seems to remember) for tea and bread pudding. When, at seventeen, I decided to run away from home, I smuggled all my most expensive books to Johnson's where I then sold them (with many apologies) and made enough money for a bus ticket to Boston. Fifteen years later, I was able to diagnose myself with a severe case of lead poisoning based on a 1920's Materia Medica volume (lead poisoning was more common in those days) that somehow had stayed with me from the city to the country.

Not long after high school, I worked in Johnson's Bookstore-- the new section-- for about six months. I remember that certain books were marked with the red letter A, meaning we were not allowed to sell them to anyone under twenty-one-- in fact, I couldn't buy them myself. The A was supposed to stand for "Adult," but I always thought of it as Hawthorne's Scarlet letter. Seemed like there was always a Johnson brother standing in the corner, hands behind his back, rocking slowly on his heels and watching our every move.

After a while Cunningham's Bookstore became my hangout. It was a new kind of bookstore-- paperbacks only-- with authors that would never have turned up at Johnson's: Franz Fanon, William Burroughs, Luigi Pirandello, Edward Becket, Kenneth Patchen, Collette. In that intellectual period between the tail end of the Beat Movement and the first stirrings of the new counterculture, I soaked up everything I could. It was there that I met my first daughter's father and some of the friends I have to this day, forty years later.

And forty years latter, books from Johnson's and Cunningham's are still on my bookshelves. I have about 2,000 books and I've read three-quarters. I'm now at an age where I put a little thought into what I will reread and what I will read for the first time, especially as I now have a passion to understand physics-- don't ask me why-- and you don't exactly zip through a book on string theory.

Sometimes I look at my books and wonder where they will all go when I die. In the meantime, I savor their company.

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Poverty News from the Southern Hemisphere

An opinion piece in The Australian by the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union is asking labor unions to rethink their migrant labor policies in the face of a shortage of at least 100,000 workers this year.

Recently the Asian Development Bank assessed that at least one-quarter of the people in the Pacific have insufficient incomes to meet their basic needs.

Today in the East Timorese capital of Dili 58 per cent of young people are out of work; one-third of the population of the strife-torn Solomons capital Honiara live in poverty; and more than half the population of Australia's former colony of Papua New Guinea live below the basic needs poverty line.

Previous migrant worker schemes have suppressed wages of Australian workers. (Sound familiar?) But unions could endorse a new plan if:

• First, Australians would get the first opportunity to be employed before any migrant labour is deployed.
• Second, a worker on the scheme can expect to earn the same as an Australian doing the same work.
• And, most importantly, punitive measures would be taken against any employers who seek to exploit the scheme to drive down wages and conditions in their industry or to treat the foreign workers as some sort of indentured slaves.

An opinion piece in the Cebu Daily News, Philippines, blames U.S. speculation in rice on the high prices in the Philippines and elsewhere, pointing out that rice production has greatly exceeded rice consumption in the last thirty years. The editorial also questions why the Philippines, a top rice producer, is finding it necessary to import 2.1 metric tons of rice this year, saying that government officials in the Arroyo administration are lining their pockets from the supposed shortage.

Plastic, chemicals and declining fertility rates: what, me worry?

Back in the early 80's I wrote an article for the Valley Advocate on the decline in sperm count in American men. I can't find it now but what sticks in my mind is that 20 million/mL was now considered within normal range whereas only thirty years before, 80 million/mL was normal. I remember that the chemical dioxin figured prominently as a suspect.

In 1996, Michael Castleman at Mother Jones magazine was bewailing the fact that fourteen years after NBC canceled an interview with the author because the story just wasn't firm enough, declining sperm rates still hadn't cracked prime time.

The silence is still deafening in 2008. We're starting to get the global picture, and we think about our bodies in terms of health, but don't think about declining sperm count unless we're actually trying to have a baby. Talk about a "silent epidemic."

The number of toxic chemicals found in semen and the rest of our bodies is quite astounding. The latest chemical to draw public attention is bisphenol A, a chemical used in the manufacture of hard plastic, including plastic baby bottles. Last week CVS, Walmart and other companies announced that by next year, all such bottles would be off their shelves and replaced with a different (presumably safer) type. Canada intends to ban all bottles with the chemical in 60 days unless evidence can be produced that the chemical is harmless. (Canada is using the Precautionary Principle to make its decision, which manufacturers of the bottles say is unfair. Here's the definition from Wikipedia:

The precautionary principle is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.^[1] It aims to provide guidance for protecting public health and the environment in the face of uncertain risks, stating that the absence of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason to postpone measures where there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm to public health or the environment.)

93% of the U.S. population has bisphenol A in their bodies, according to a recent study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some years ago I remember reading that after a while, plastic milk bottles become permeated with fat from the milk. And where do those plastic molecules go, pray tell?

While we're working on the policy issues that affect our well-being, what can we do on a personal level? (Yes, it's still worth it.)

Don't heat food in the microwave using a plastic container. Don't store liquid food, especially acid or fatty foods in plastic. (Come on, hasn't some part of you always known it was a bad thing to do?) In the supermarket, look for foods stored in glass and hang on to the containers later for other uses. Because people don't cook much anymore, secondhand stores usually have plenty of great bakeware with lids, tall glass jars and other dishware for which you'd hesitate to pay full price.

Whatever control over our local environment that we can take, we must.

May Round-Up of News from the Homeless Blogs

When I started this blog, I did a fairly exhaustive hunt for blogs by and/or primarily about homeless people. I found a good number though not as many as I'd hoped, and put them on my blogroll. That was almost a year ago.

Since then, five or six blogs have disappeared or become inactive. If a blog owner hasn't written in five months, I figure they're gone. Two blogs about New Orleans homeless haven't been updated since February, when the injunction prohibiting the destruction of public housing was denied and the tent city that had grown up across from City Hall was forced to dismantle. Clearly, these blogs are linked with the state of organizing. I'm hoping they and the organizing recover.

Many bloggers seem to be taking a moment to think deeply about the bigger picture and root causes. Tim Harris at Apesma's Lament talks about how the huge growth in the prison population and the number of homeless people that began in the 80"s is linked to globalization. Oldtimer Speaks Out has been writing about how psychological and physical damage affects veterans, and how it can lead to homelessness. The latest post is about Rand Corporation's study, "The Invisible Wounds of War." Wandering Vets has the last part of a series on Counting the Homeless, who it serves and how homeless counts obscure the truth. Homeless in Abbotsford, B.C. is blogging about homeless counts, too: the post title is Herd Management.

Jackie Dowd at the 13th Juror is writing about how her home state of Florida is Number One again in documented violence against homeless people. By the way, USAToday has an article on how several states, including Massachusetts, are looking to toughen laws against violence against the homeless. (Couldn't find any reference to it at the Commonwealth's website, but without a docket number, that's not unusual.)

Last but not least, Kevin Barbieux at The Homeless Guy has an apartment! And Homeless Man Speaks talks about what to do with a $5 donation.
Graphic from Riacale's photostream at Flickr.

NAFTA to blame for rise in illegal immigration

Remember those activity books we had when we were kids where you'd have to connect the dots for the picture to take shape? If we connected the dots named NAFTA, illegal immigration, globalization, recession, job loss, environmental degradation and corporate greed, what would the picture look like? We're living in that picture but we have barely begun to connect the forces affecting us.

In 1995 2.5 million Mexicans were in the country illegally; by 2006, another 8 million had crossed the border. A major part of the blame has to go to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Why? Because more and more Mexicans can no longer make a living in Mexico!

• NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven the Mexican farmer off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder many so Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their 'death warrant.'
  
• NAFTA's service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.
  
• Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has resulted in sweatshop pay running sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour. Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter, CommonDreams, 2006.
  

Within four years of NAFTA's implementation, 2 million Mexicans had lost their jobs, Mexico's share of imported food grew from 25% to 43%, and 40 million people were living in extreme poverty. Momentum.

Now, with a growing worldwide food crisis, Mexico's food security has been gravely damaged. Yes, there's still food-- but it's growing increasingly unaffordable, as Mexico's cost of living has nearly tripled in the last twelve years, while wages haven't even gone up by a third. Many of Mexico's farmers were strongarmed into growing genetically modified corn-- only to find out that saving seed, a practice thousands of years old in Mexico, was now illegal. New seed has to be bought from companies like Monsanto every year.

What other countries, including Mexico, are experiencing as a tidal wave is still only making ripples on our shore, but our luck won't hold out forever. Until we stop confusing the symptom (illegal immigration) with the cause, we won't be able to take the steps we need to change our ever-darkening picture.

Denis Poroy/AP/Wide World Photos