Numbers game

Entering the house for lunch today, I found the most recent Reed magazine sitting in the pile of mail below the letterbox.  I’ve browsed some of it already, but read through the article on the admissions process.  Given that I worked in admissions for three years while at Reed, in my final year as an intern, responsible for weighing in on the applicants, the article was of interest to me.

I was disappointed.  The article explains the process well enough.  But there is a strong theme, almost sensationalist in its tone, of worry about the dwindling acceptance rate.  Repeated emphasis is placed on percentage of students accepted, both historically and nowadays.  The author worries, or repeats others’ worries, that the decreasing acceptance rate signals a shift in Reed culture from the fringe to the center.  Yes, there are quotes from people like good old Ed Segel and Peter Steinberger about how everything is just fine, but the overarching impression, emphasized by the final quote from an alumna admissions counselor about how she wonders whether she would get in nowadays, is that things are changing for the worse.

The one thing that bothered me in particular about the article is that, although the author mentions - repeatedly - the rising number of applicants, and even mentions - once - the desired entering class size, the rather obvious leap from inflating-applications-and-steady-state-class-size to dwindling acceptance rate is never made.  And small class size, with all its ramifications, seems to me to be much more crucial to the preservation of Reed culture than a resulting loss in acceptance rate.  Can you imagine if every class at Reed was like Hum 110 lecture?  Hundreds of students gently dozing in motionless air.  The prof an unreachable entity at the front, passing on knowledge without being able to actually interact with his or her students.  What would distinguish Reed from a stereotypical state school, were that the case?

The author states that, “Since 2001, applications to Reed have doubled, and the acceptance rate has plummeted - from 74 percent to an all-time low of 32 percent this year.” This year, there were 3,485 applicants.  So in 2001, there were roughly 1,750 applicants.  That means that back in 2001, about 1,300 were accepted.  This year, about 1,100 students were accepted.  That’s not a huge difference in output for a massive difference in acceptance rates.  Even I can see that, and as we all know, my math sucks.  So why not spend some time in the article debating about whether small class sizes are critical to the preservation of Reed culture, rather than hand-wringing about a percentage? 

In the end, it seems to me that the conflict is deciding which is more crucial: Reed’s tradition of broad admissions acceptance, or Reed’s tradition of small class sizes.  I know which one I would vote for.

Michael Maniates

Going Green? A short argument for big aspirations in the environmental sector.

Unexpected

D’you know, I’m actually… well, “enjoying” would be too strong a word… relishing studying for the math portion of the GRE?  It’s not that I actually like math; I still don’t.  But math has always been something I’ve been afraid of.  Something I had to be forced to do.  Something that, despite my protestations that I can do anything I set my mind to, I couldn’t do.

I don’t like having fears, or, at least, leaving them untackled.  Particularly when it’s something as omnipresent as math.  I hate feeling sheepish/ashamed every time I get asked to do even the most basic math and either can’t do it or have to resort to a calculator or my fingers.  And I really hate feeling like I’ve left something unfinished, unresolved. 

I didn’t realize that I considered math unresolved.  As far as I’ve been concerned these last ten years, I had done my bit, managed to scrape through even BC Calculus, and that was that.  So what if I couldn’t really add or subtract and the sight of fractions and ratios sent chills down my spine?  Why should that matter - I got a history degree; I was going to do something firmly on the verbal side with my life.

But now that I’m working on math again, I’m discovering all sorts of things.  For one, it turns out that there are a lot of tricks to doing basic math that work better than trying to do it straight.  (Like figuring a 15% tip by moving the decimal place and adding half, or adding half again to figure VAT, etc.) For another, I’m discovering that I *can* do math.  I’ll still probably never be able to calculus (which is fine by me), and I’ll never be quick (which is more of a problem, given the timed nature of the GRE, but still something I can live with).  But I can do it.

And you know, that makes me very content.  I have chosen to challenge a fear that I have held for… oh, ever since starting math classes back twenty-odd years ago.  And I can do it.

Yes, we can.

I attended an “Earth May Day” event hosted at the local university this weekend.  The event was intermittently interesting: the MP for Cheltenham is well-spoken and well-informed, for instance, and there was an interesting game-driven discussion session.  But during that discussion session, something very disturbing became clear.

Before and after the game, the session’s facilitator asked a series of questions about attendees’ views on climate change.  Keep in mind, all the attendees were specifically targeted and invited as being eco-oriented and well-placed to have an effect within the local community.  We were supposed to raise our hands as he went along a continuum of opinion responses from one, being very pessimistic, to seven, being very optimistic.

One of the questions was something like, “Do you think humans can overcome climate change?” Both before and after the game, I was the only person who responded with the most optimistic seven.  Most people ended up in the middle-to-bottom range.  A number of people supposedly moved themselves to a more optimistic response after they had verified that yes, the question was about whether we CAN, not whether we WILL.

If the people who care enough about issues like climate change to give up their Saturdays, and who are in influential positions within the community (at local schools, in local government, etc.) are so pessimistic about our ability to get ourselves out of the mess that we have created/exacerbated, how are we supposed to inspire anyone else to join up?  People will not even try if all they hear is that it’s hopeless!  And how are we supposed to gather the momentum to create the necessary changes if those of us who are best placed to push for change feel, if we’re being honest, that there’s not really any point?

Look, I’m not pretending that I don’t have pessimistic moments.  I have to admit that I consciously CHOSE to answer “seven” when asked.  And I know my optimism may seem naive to some. 

Pessimism is normal.  Optimism is hard to maintain.  But conscious choice is absolutely crucial. I know I’ve said this before, but I honestly - really, truthfully - believe that I can do anything I set my mind to.  And I believe that that extends to all humanity. 

We are a remarkable species.  We have accomplished so much in our time on earth.  So many things that used to be “impossible” are now everyday - space travel, walking on artificial limbs, talking instantaneously with someone on the other side of the planet.  All these things were accomplished because someone chose to address a perceived impossibility.  Yes, we’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way.  Yes, by solving some problems we have caused others.  That’s how you learn.  The current ecological problems may be an example of that.

If we choose to roll over and give up, to believe that anthroprogenic climate change is unfixable, well, then, it will be.  We’ll all freeze or bake or drown or whatever.  We may still freeze or bake or drown, even if we choose otherwise. It may be, as many say, that the current instabilities are part of a cycle far too large for the brevity of human existence to comprehend.  Certainly mass extinctions are an obvious part of history. 

If, however, we choose to try, then we can neutralize all the things that contribute to anthroprogenic climate change.  We can find a happy medium; we can make carbon-neutral planes and cars, ways to support a healthy economy without the mounds of waste and pollution that the current system creates, ways to have green space and animals and human civilization too.  We can undo any damage that we have done.  We CAN.  Then, no matter the end result, we will have tried.

A nice story

This article was on the front page of the NY Times today.  About a returned Stradivarius violin and a cabbie.

Sweaty palms

I’ve just signed up for my first attempt at the GRE.  ::hyperventilating::  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee… July 2nd - six days before leaving for Africa.  Will have to be very organized between now and then, to make sure that I get both studying and preparing for the journey completed adequately.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

Interesting, quick read

A short article about the author’s attempt to succeed at the King Corn Challenge, i.e. not to eat any corn products for three days. 

Ah, May.

7 p.m. and the sun is still well above the horizon.  It’s been strange - it honestly seems like only a few days ago that the sun was setting at 5 p.m.  Maybe the shift to later hours has seemed so sudden because it’s only recently that we’ve started to have nice weather; when it’s nasty-grey and raining, the difference between daytime and nighttime is less pronounced, perhaps.

“X” is for “xenophobia”

I took the bus from Gloucester up to Cheltenham yesterday, for my weekly afternoon of volunteering; I was knitting away at the baby blanket I’m working on whilst riding.  On the bus with me were are trio of girls (about my age), one sitting up front with her toddler in a stroller, the other two sitting across the aisle from me.  In the back of the bus was another girl.  (There were plenty of other people on the bus, but these are the main characters.) The girl in the back of the bus started humming along - then singing along, but quietly - with her music.  One of the trio of girls (wearing a see-through shirt with a tatty bra on underneath, massive, cheap gold jewelry, and lime-green false fingernails that extended an inch beyond the ends of her fingers) turned and gave the humming girl a look that would have peeled paint.  The humming girl stopped humming.  But this wasn’t enough, no, no.  The nail-girl whipped out her cell phone and started playing crappy-quality rap tunes on it without any headphones. 

Now, I know I should have kept my mouth shut.  But I didn’t.  I did the requisite enquiring glances at the girl - who was oblivious or, more likely, just didn’t care.  So, after a few minutes of this, I leaned over and said, politely, “I’m sorry, but I don’t suppose you could turn down your music, could you?  Not everyone necessarily wants to listen to the same music you do.”

Nail-girl and her friends started bawling me out.  I mean SERIOUSLY so.  Curse words were yelled at me, the non-toddler friend got out her cell phone and added it to the din, with both of them shouting across at me about whether I liked *this* track or *that* track; one of them said, and then the two of them repeated several times “to each other”, gleefully, about how I was probably knitting a dog blanket for myself, for my basket… ::rolls eyes::

So, after putting up with this abuse for about five minutes, I finally leaned back over and said, “Look, I just asked you politely to turn down your music.  I don’t deserve this kind of abuse.” Then they heard my accent, and xenophobic insults, things like “you should go back to where you came from” were added to the mix.  Huzzah.

I stuck it out - kept knitting, stayed on the bus until only one stop before I would normally have gotten off - but I was pretty shaken up when I got off.  One of the other passengers got off as well, caught up to me, and actually apologized for the girls’ behaviour.  He had spent time in America, and wanted to go back, and would have spoken up on the bus, but “it wasn’t worth it.” I told him it was okay, I was the unexpectedness of the attack that was the real problem, because by and large everyone in England is unfailingly kind and polite and courteous.

So that was my fun bus experience.  I hope it’s not repeated next week.

We dig dig dig dig dig dig dig in the [garden] the whole day through…

Last Sunday was garden day.  Or rather, it was “attempt to do things in the garden and get foiled at almost every turn” day.  (Well, not quite that bad, but still.) We went out there with a list of things to do - pull up cement slabs, move cement slabs to the front, shift compost bin, mow lawn/jungle, put in a trellis to block view of said compost bin and collapsing shed, plant some lovely clematis to twine through said trellis to help block said bin and shed, install rain barrel downspout…

What we got done: pull up and move cement slabs, shift compost bin, mow half of lawn/jungle.  The main problems came up when a.) we couldn’t borrow a working lawnmower until early afternoon, at which point b.) it started pouring down rain.  Not so great for when working with a putsy little electric lawn mower.  But we did manage to go over to B&Q, price some stuff, and decide to plow ahead with seeding our lawn this coming weekend.  I’ve hired a rotovator and asked a couple of friends around to help with the heavy labor, tempting them with sweet promises of lasagna for their troubles.  A. is (conveniently for him) flying to the Netherlands on this coming Sunday morning for a week-long job and therefore WON’T be around on Monday, which is a bank holiday and the day that we’ll be doing all the digging and laying and mowing and seeding.  Ah well.  He feels guilty, but I pointed out that he was in the house for a year doing work before I was here, so it’s about time that I get to do something to make up the balance.  :-)

I’m really, really looking forward to having a back yard that doesn’t make me feel guilty and/or white-trash-y every time I look out into it.  Even if it won’t be like that for a while.  I’ve been a bit worried about the new lawn getting enough water, but then as I cycled home from work for lunch, it started pouring (and then hailing, which wasn’t so fun), so perhaps this whole global “warming” thing will help us late-lawn-planters.

food

Big in the news these past couple of days has been the revelation that some of the major oil companies have reported higher-than-expected profits for the first quarter of this year - in the case of BP, up a staggering 48% from this time last year. What’s been the major contributor?  Why, fuel shortages, of course.

What has also been big in the news of late?  Food riots and shortages.

Oh yes, and hedge fund managers earning billions of dollars. 

They are all connected.

Lots of people earn varying amounts of money treating food as a commodity.  Michael Pollan highlights, in the first section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma , the bind that many American farmers are in, thanks to the system of subsidies and futures that requires them to push their corn yield ever higher while paying them ever less for it.

“Rice is plentiful in Cambodia, and the country has been a net exporter for the past decade.  But it is becoming less and less affordable for the people who grow it. A 2006 survey, well before the spike in food prices, found that 22 percent of Cambodians in rural areas could not meet their own basic food needs.”
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What prompted this blog entry was an article on today’s New York Times front page.  The article has, as I read it, three main points:

1.) Chemical fertilizers led and lead to increased production, which in turn leads to better standards of living.  (As illustrated by the emotion-tugging image of a prematurely-aged, shrivelled Vietnamese woman.)
2.) Fertilizer shortages, combined with the growing demand for food worldwide, lead to food shortages, destabilization, riots, etc.
3.) Therefore, we need to make more fertilizer.

Imbedded in the article is the implied, unquestioned belief that economic growth is inevitable and desirable.  Additionally, as people earn more, they are of course going to want to eat more meat.  There is a passing reference to one - just one - potential environmental problem (dead zones as a result of fertilizer runoff).

But what really, really yanks my chain about the article is that, although the authors state that the increase in worldwide food production (as a result of artificial fertilizers) “was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900,” they don’t seem to experience any cognitive dissonance between that statement and their assertions regarding increased world population and food shortages.  The conflict is there, to my mind, but I have a hard time seeing it in the article.

Now, for my rant-out-on-a-limb.  The very last quote of the article underlines the authors’ third main point, that more fertilizer is better; indeed, necessary.  But what the article lacks is any recognition of the possibility that these current problems are symptomatic of the unsustainable nature of modern Industrial Agriculture.  The system is unfair: how can it be right that some people become very rich, or even somewhat rich, off of a system that simultaneously means that many other people cannot afford to eat the food they produce?  The system is also necessarily limited.  Chemical fertilizers are currently produced from fossil fuels - natural gas, petroleum, etc.  Now, perhaps I’m confused, but aren’t we supposedly experiencing a gas shortage?  Doesn’t that imply, perhaps, that petroleum production might, at some point, conceivably STOP?  And probably the same for natural gas, another finite-quantity fossil fuel?

So, let me see if I have this straight: we’re experiencing massive worldwide food shortages due in [large] part to increased world population, which was made possible by chemical fertilizers.  So we need to pump up food production - more fertilizers!  That way, nobody starves, everybody’s happy and can go back to reproducing to their heart’s content.

But what about in 50 or 100 or however many years’ time?  When every last bit of petroleum and natural gas on the planet has been used up.  And plants revert to natural levels of production.  And there are billions more people on the planet.  And alternative production methods have not been tried and tested because, back in 2008, “others [said] that those approaches, while helpful, [would] not be enough to meet the world’s rapidly rising demand for food and biofuel.”

What then?
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Note: I was going to keep going with my solutions, but I ran out of steam after the rant.  So instead of a semi-coheret prose version, I’ll give you as far as I got in note form.  It is as follows:

I am not advocating letting people starve.  What I am advocating is a rethink.

Nowadays, it seems that the pursuit of happiness is usually conflated with the pursuit of wealth.  Yet there are myriad publications and studies out there that posit that riches, beyond a certain level, really don’t have that much of a positive impact on happiness.  Once one is past the basic needs of life, aspects of living such as interpersonal relationships are more important for happiness than wealth.

Why not level things out, then?  Instead of having some people earning billions of dollars a year and others unable to afford basic foodstuffs, why not work on figuring out some way of reaching equilibrium?  It will probably involve a reshaping of the idea of a global market, and probably will mean a return…

(I even petered out mid-sentence!  I meant to go on with something like a return to more old-fashioned ways of living, but that got me thinking about “Things I don’t know what to do about” point number 3.  And I lost my previous train of thought.)

Things to do:

- try to buy locally, when you can, so that farmers can break their dependence on commodified crops
- spend more times with your friends and family, particularly if they are local, as an antidote to the malaise that can creep in without the adrenaline-pump of commercial gratification
- invest - time, your spending power, your word-of-mouth advertising abilities - in alternatives to the status quo.  So, more buses, trains, bicyclists, locavores, free-range farmers, etc.
- TRY!

Some things I don’t know what to do about:

- But what about all those people who earn a living in the commercial sector? If people stop buying, how will they support themselves?
- the “it’s easy for you to say” aspect of me saying all this.  Here I am, living a comfortable life in a developed nation.  How can I not be hypocritical?
- the helpless feeling when I think of the interdependencies of modern life and know that there isn’t any single, simple “fix” or even less than a hundred, a thousand fixes.  The system is too complex.  I don’t want to return to the Dark Ages any more than anyone else.  So I want medicine and lighting and the ability to see my family even though I live thousands of miles away.  But I don’t think things can continue to work like this, and am, at the same time, awfully afraid of taking a wrong step, of inadvertently making things worse whilst trying to make them better.  “The road to hell…” and all that.  Part of me very much just wants to stick my head in the sand and wait for the inevitable meltdown, and just cross my fingers that I will still be around afterwards.  And will be able to deal with whatever comes “afterwards”. 

Favorite reads

In case anyone was interested, here’s a run-down of eco-sites I peruse on a regular basis. 

Crunchy Chicken
Ecology and Policy
Fake Plastic Fish
Greenpa
Green World
Grist
Inhabitat
La Marguerite
No Impact Man
Worldchanging

Tasty, tasty

In a spring-weather-inspired fit yesterday, I opened up one of the packets I’ve received from the Heritage Seed Library and emptied the seeds into a seedling pot.  The soon-to-be-nascent (I hope) heritage chile pepper plants currently sit in our west-facing window, swaddled in their little plastic bag, eating up all the lovely sunlight we’ve been having.  I have grand visions of strings of dried chiles *from my plant!* hanging in our kitchen, just waiting to burn the tongues of all those unsuspecting visitors.  ::grin::

Unfortunately, all the other seeds are less houseplant-friendly.  Indoor onions, anyone?

::trumpets blaring::

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

(Yes, I know it’s not a celebrated holiday or anything like that, but I couldn’t think of anything more inspiring or less cheesy to say.  So that’s how it is.)

“the sum total of countless little everyday choices”

Depending on which blogs you read, Why Bother may seem overlinked; everyone’s talking about it on most of the blogs/pages I read.

But if you haven’t heard about it, and haven’t read it, you should.  It’s an opinion piece by Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book I read a couple of months ago and loved.  I won’t summarize the article for you - it’s short enough to only take a few minutes to read.

Neither do I have any shareable thoughts on it yet.  I’ve only just finished reading it, and need some time to mull it over, rather than just posting a bunch of “I agree completely"-type thoughts.  But I will leave you with the one sentence, of the entire article, that resonated the most with me:

“Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.”