Beacon Broadside

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth

An unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world. Fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world's wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the prairies of Eastern Europe. Veteran science writer Fred Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over, and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to be.

The Land Grabbers is a first-of-its-kind exposé that reveals the scale and the human costs of the land grab, one of the most profound ethical, environmental, and economic issues facing the globalized world in the twenty-first century. The corporations, speculators, and governments scooping up land cheap in the developing world claim that industrial-scale farming will help local economies. But Pearce's research reveals a far more troubling reality. While some mega-farms are ethically run, all too often poor farmers and cattle herders are evicted from ancestral lands or cut off from water sources. The good jobs promised by foreign capitalists and home governments alike fail to materialize. Hungry nations are being forced to export their food to the wealthy, and corporate potentates run fiefdoms oblivious to the country beyond their fences.

Pearce's story is populated with larger-than-life characters, from financier George Soros and industry tycoon Richard Branson, to Gulf state sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, British barons, and Burmese generals. We discover why Goldman Sachs is buying up the Chinese poultry industry, what Lord Rothschild and a legendary 1970s asset-stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil, and what plans a Saudi oil billionaire has for Ethiopia. Along the way, Pearce introduces us to the people who actually live on, and live off of, the supposedly "empty" land that is being grabbed, from Cambodian peasants, victimized first by the Khmer Rouge and now by crony capitalism, to African pastoralists confined to ever-smaller tracts.

Over the next few decades, land grabbing may matter more, to more of the planet's people, than even climate change. It will affect who eats and who does not, who gets richer and who gets poorer, and whether agrarian societies can exist outside corporate control. It is the new battle over who owns the planet. 

Fred Pearce is an award-winning author and journalist based in London. He has reported on environment, science, and development issues from sixty-seven countries over the past twenty years. Environment consultant at New Scientist since 1992, he also writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and Yale University’s prestigious e360 website. Pearce was voted UK Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and CGIAR agricultural research journalist of the year in 2002, and won a lifetime achievement award from the Association of British Science Writers in 2011. His many books include With Speed and Violence, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, The Coming Population Crash, and When the Rivers Run Dry.

"Wherever I went, people were being moved off with little or no regard for their historic or cultural rights. The grabbers want big spaces – 50,000 hectares – and you can only get that if you take commonly owned ancestral lands. They come in and put in an airstrip and a compound and roads and canals and the villagers are told to go to the nearest town and they lose absolutely everything." Read an interview with Fred Pearce at the Guardian.

Read an excerpt from The Land Grabbers at Scribd.

Funded by a Felony: How Pfizer Paid for a Big Pharma Watchdog

Carl Elliott is the author of White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. Elliott is a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the Believer, Slate, the London Review of Books, and theAmerican Prospect. His six previous books include Better Than Well, Prozac As a Way of Life, Rules of Insanity, and A Philosophical Disease.

This post originally appeared in two parts at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog.

In June, I will be returning to Washington for the annual Pharmed Out conference, a project located at Georgetown University Medical Center. It is one of my favorite events of the year, in part because of the wide array of academics, journalists, and activists who attend, but mainly because of its extraordinarily committed, outspoken director, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, and her merry band of student volunteers. Adriane agreed to an interview by email.

Would it be fair to say that your project was funded by a felony?

Yes, we were funded by the Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Grant program, a novel and never-to-be-repeated program that resulted from a settlement between Pfizer and all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We promised so much that before we got the grant, the grant administrators asked us to cut down what we promised to do. We refused — and in the end, we exceeded what we promised.

Just by chance, we had begun our project by shooting an interview of Shahram Ahari — a former drug rep for Eli Lilly who is now a medical student — talking about how he had sold Zyprexa. That was just days before the story broke in The New York Times about how Lilly hid data about adverse effects. Jim Ridgeway, the investigative reporter and filmmaker we worked with, realized that what we had was newsworthy and insisted that we release a quickly edited video clip. We didn’t even have a phone line yet, let alone a Web site. So we released the video on YouTube, crediting the not-yet-existing PharmedOut, with Georgetown’s media office as the contact number. It received a lot of media attention. The video “Zyprexa Drug Rep” has been viewed more than 150,000 times.

Since then, we’ve done novel research on, for example, promotional tone in medical journal articles, and how marketing messages are inserted into CME. We created the first educational module that has convinced physicians that they are personally affected by promotion. And we’ve had groundbreaking conferences, the third of which will be held at Georgetown on June 14-15. It’s called “Missing the Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal,” and will cover the potential adverse effects of marketing drugs and medical devices.

How did you get started as an activist?

I came out of women’s health advocacy work, and we were fighting medicalization of childbirth, menopause, and menstruation, so I feel I always had that bent. Being a reformer suits my crabby nature.

I come from a family of utterly fearless women. I’m the most cautious, but apparently still less afraid than most. My parents were both anti-Vietnam war activists. My mother was very active with Women’s Strike for Peace, and met with Vietnamese women in Djakarta. My brother was president of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] at Rutgers. I think I learned to walk at demonstrations.

I got involved in feminism, women’s health, worked at Planned Parenthood as a teen, then a reproductive health clinic as a counselor and medical assistant. I would sometimes ask docs to treat women who couldn’t afford care. I decided it would be easier to become a doc then beg docs to help people. Anyone who hasn’t been through medical training romanticizes medicine; med school and internship were so tough in unexpected ways.

I know exactly what you mean, but maybe you should explain. 

Med school was anti-intellectual and inhumane. First there was the vast quantity of mind-numbing rote memorization of largely irrelevant material in the basic-science years, followed by the clinical years, in which we learned tradition, myth, and ritual. The overwhelming amount of material in the preclinical years makes students pine for shortcuts. No wonder they’re ripe for the simplistic, definitive messaging of drug reps later. Third year was one long hazing ritual; then in fourth year we were accepted into the fold. And in gratitude, we would accept and perpetuate the whole dehumanizing training system.

Questions were punished. Empathy for patients was discouraged. I was horrified that there seemed to be no connection between medicine and public health, and only a tenuous connection between medicine and science. (Whenever docs are caught out doing something nonscientific, they say, medicine is an art, not a science.) And only lip service was paid to the concept of patient autonomy, or making medical decisions in the context of a patient’s own life and values.

So when they removed your soul in medical school, did it hurt? I was under the impression that soul extraction was a pretty simple procedure, but to be honest, I found it excruciatingly painful. 

Yeah, they need to work on the informed consent for that procedure.

I think all of us found ourselves doing things or thinking things we would not have imagined being capable of. Being deprived of sleep, food, and the company of loved ones is terrible for the soul. I remember reading an account of a hungry, exhausted intern who wolfed down the dinner of a patient who had just died. No physician would be proud of that, but we would all understand it. We need to change the training system. Physicians-in-training who are treated compassionately will treat their patients with compassion. Medical training is changing, but not fast enough.

Can you think of any particularly bad moments that seem emblematic to you? 

The interns discussing how we envied patients because they were lying in bed and eating and watching TV. It’s terrible looking back on how distorted our thinking was. One of my internship mates ended up in a mental institution; another intern attempted suicide. Standing in a supply cabinet looking for a kit to cath someone who hadn’t peed in 18 hours and realizing, “Hey, I haven’t peed in 18 hours either.” On a psych rotation, handing out an account of a patient permanently damaged by electroconvulsive treatment to fellow students and having them hand it back, saying, “I don’t want to hear the other side if it involves more reading.” Being criticized for putting my arm around a pregnant teen on the way to the exam room. Realizing that preference in IV fluids or antibiotics varied by medical specialty as opposed to patient or disease characteristics. The utter exhaustion — falling asleep on a bus to my clinic for four hours, as the bus crisscrossed the Bronx. The guy I lived with didn’t make it home one night because he fell asleep on a dumpster at a subway station.

What about your writing? When did that start, and how?

I always wrote. I come from a family of writers and activists. Words were important. My father was a professor working on his fourth book on American government when he died at age 39. My mother wrote as well — a column for a small newspaper, letters to the editor. She would have written more had she not been left widowed and penniless with a nine-year-old and a 19-year-old. She never finished a cookbook she started, but my brother, a chef, later wrote one. I was made to write letters as a child, and my family wrote letters to each other. I remember coming home once to an eight page screed from my mother unfurling from a kitchen cabinet.

Anyway, my mother went into the restaurant business, which she ran like a social-service agency. She hired a busboy too damaged to speak, poor single mothers, a prostitute from Chinatown. She brought in chefs from China. Our restaurant launched many others in DC. She was so generous to everyone. We never had money, but we had lots of fun and ate like kings. Food, in my family, was the most important thing. My grandmother believed you should be able to recreate any dish you taste. Not that she deigned to make much non-Chinese food. She did make a great apple pie, from sour, quarter-size apples from a tree in her backyard. I didn’t realize that she had learned to make apple pie in some YWCA American acculturation course she took after coming to the U.S.. As a child I thought apple pie was a Chinese dish. The day my grandmother made a bad dish was the day we knew she was dying.

How have you managed to keep Pharmed Out going?

Those of us who started the project came out of nonprofit groups so we knew how to work crazy hours, convince volunteers to work harder for free than they ever worked for pay, and stretch a penny until it screams. We have an incredibly smart, savvy, responsive, creative team.

Our strength has always been the industry insiders who have provided us invaluable information on marketing practice, and the utter dedication of the doctors, scientists, students, artists and all the individual donors — who have kept the project going despite our having no external funding support since 2008. Every single person whom I paid off the initial grant continued to volunteer for the project after the money ran out. Our Web master supported the site for years; every academic stayed on. Even our work-study student continued to work for free after our funds ran out. Our fabulous anonymous team is what makes this project great. Because so many team members — not just industry — must remain anonymous, we made a decision not to name those team members who could be named. Our staff has been phenomenal. Alicia Bell, now a med student at the Medical College of Virginia, was the founding staff-person who became an amazing colleague over our first four years; without her we would not have achieved the impact we did. Beth Johnson and Nicole Dubowitz have also been great. But every one of our projects is a team effort. As director, I get way too much credit. I have a brilliant, efficient team that reminds me often of one of my mother’s favorite quotes: “The difficult with ease, the impossible with time.”

Pill photo from BigStock.

Eboo Patel: The Holiness of Common Ground

Eboo Patel is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation and the forthcoming book Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America. He is founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, an international nonprofit building the interfaith youth movement. He was appointed by President Obama to the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and serves on the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. This post originally appeared at Huffington Post.

Delivered at the Colgate University Baccalaureate.

In the early days of Islam, when the Muslim community was small and fledgling, and being harassed and hunted by the powerful tribes of Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad -- may the Peace and Blessings of God be upon Him -- sent a delegation of his companions to a land called Abyssinia.

When they arrived, the Kingdom's ruler, a man known as the Negus, summoned them to his court and demanded they explain their purpose. Ja'far, speaking for the Muslims, said they were followers of the Prophet Muhammad, believers in the One God, reciters of the Quran -- a divine scripture which, among other things, had deep reverence for Jesus and his mother Mary.

Ja'far then quoted a verse:

...'I am but a messenger
Come from thy Lord, to give thee
A boy most pure.'
She said, 'How shall I have a son
whom no mortal has touched, neither
have I been unchaste?'
He said: 'Even so my Lord has said;
"Easy is that for Me; and that We
May appoint him a sign unto men
And a mercy from Us"...

The sources say that the Negus and his assembled advisors wept so hard at this recitation that their beards were wet and their scrolls were soaked through. The Abyssinians were Christians, and the knowledge that an emerging religious community would hold as holy what they held as holy moved them deeply.

When I first read that story, it occurred to me that there were many ways that those Muslims could have explained their faith to the Negus. They could have shaken their fists and marked their disagreement with the Christian belief that Jesus is the Son of God. They could have wagged their fingers, and lectured the Negus and his court on the distinct notion of revelation in the Quran. Instead, they chose to extend their hand, to speak of the shared reverence for Jesus and Mary, the mutual belief in the virgin birth, the joint view that Jesus was sent by God as a messenger and as a mercy. In other words, the Muslims chose to highlight common ground.

Honestly, I hate the term "common ground." It just sounds boring. Every time it escapes my lips or gets tapped onto my keyboard, I imagine the audience preparing for a snooze. Passion, everyone seems to agree, lies with the partisans -- those who stand at either pole and volley verbal assaults. The only way to generate audience electricity, the most direct route to expressing personal authenticity, is to mark the territory of difference and erect a barrier.

God, I know the satisfaction in that. I've shaken and wagged so many times that I'm surprised I've got fists or fingers left. And precisely because I've exercised those muscles so frequently, I know intimately the many prices to be paid for singing the song of division, especially when it's put to the soundtrack of self-righteousness. 

One price is fewer converts to my cause. All of my shaking and wagging has only ever succeeded in ending conversations, and sending people running in the opposite direction. In the history of the world, I don't know if anyone has ever been truly convinced of anything when staring into a shaking fist or a wagging finger. 

The price I've been more attuned to recently is of the relationship lost -- the cost of what we might have learned from each other, what we could have accomplished together -- if I had just led with my hand. Wherever you stand on whatever divisive issue the headlines are screaming about -- however much we might disagree on that particular matter -- I want to reject the instinct to dig in there. I want to nurture the discipline to look elsewhere, to find common ground. The Quran says that God made us different nations and tribes so that we may come to know one another, that where there are differences, we should engage them in the best and most beautiful of ways. The term common ground might lack a little electricity -- and I'd be happy to entertain synonyms from this well-educated crowd -- but the idea is holy, and finding it is a spiritual practice. Let me give you an example. 

People ask me all the time why, as a Muslim who is concerned about the intersection between religion and politics in the world, I don't talk more about the elephant in the room when it comes to interfaith relations: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It's not that I don't follow it, or that I don't have a point of view. I don't lead with that because, when it comes to the relationship between Muslims and Jews, there are -- stick with me on this metaphor -- other animals in the zoo. I'd much rather talk about those: the similarities between Jewish law and Muslim law, Jewish practices of charity and Muslim practices of charity, Jewish patterns of integration in America and Muslim patterns. To limit the conversation about a 1,400-year-old relationship between two great faiths that has spanned nations and civilizations and been largely mutually enriching to the experience of a few decades on a single patch of land seems to me narrow. When we concentrate only on the elephant, we not only we ignore the other animals, we also distort them. The more we talk and talk and talk about the elephant, the more every animal starts to look like an elephant.

Similarities between the Muslim view of interfaith cooperation and the Jewish view brought me to Ruth Messinger, President of American Jewish World Service, one of the most inspiring NGOs I know. Ruth has been a mentor of mine for the past 15 years, helping nurture me and Interfaith Youth Core along our journey. She came by our offices a few weeks ago and talked about the holiness of common ground. Someone on my staff asked where she got that conviction, and Ruth told this story.

Her first professional experience was in Western Oklahoma in the early 1960s. She was a Jewish woman from New York City with a graduate degree working for the government -- lots there for the locals to be suspicious about. The best place to do her job happened to be at churches. So she went. A lot. She went to formal brick churches on Sunday mornings, she went to Bible studies on porches on Wednesday evenings, she went to backyard praise gatherings on Thursdays.

I imagine Ruth did not agree with everything she heard, was probably offended by some of it. I imagine a few of the people looked at her crosseyed. But Ruth had something a lot more powerful than political and theological disagreement. Ruth had hundreds of children -- abused, neglected, orphaned children. And she needed to find foster families for them. The evangelical ministers in Western Oklahoma considered this God's work. After the sermons and the songs and the altar calls and the amen choruses, they would stand at the pulpits and point at Ruth and say, "This woman has informed me that there are four of God's children in our community who are hurting and need families to take care of them. I need four families to come forth and volunteer to do God's work with her and me and take them in."

"We always got our families, and it never took long," Ruth told my staff.

How many subjects did Ruth Messinger and those Western Oklahoma evangelicals disagree on? Those arguments could have lasted long into the night. But Ruth Messinger chose to extend a hand instead of wag a finger or shake a fist. Hundreds of children in Western Oklahoma grew up in families instead of orphanages because Ruth Messinger stood on common ground.

When I graduated from college, I had this belief that the whole world was going to take notice of my every move. If I was nice to a homeless person, everyone would be nice to homeless people. I would give the signal, and we would end homelessness. There's a Bob Dylan song about that: "Someday, everything is gonna be diff'rent, when I paint my masterpiece." Took me a while to figure out that it was satire.

Will the headlines about Afghanistan or Iraq or the election be different next month if you extend your hand a bit more? Probably not. Will cable news anchors hang it up when you commit to finding common ground? I'd be lying if I said yes. But sometimes you do things because they are important to do, because they are holy.

As William Carlos Williams writes in "Love Song":

Who shall hear of us
in the time to come?
Let him say there was
a burst of fragrance
from black branches.

What Can We Learn From the Failures of Desegregation?

Sarah Garland is a staff writer at The Hechinger Report. She has written about education, crime and immigration for the New York Times, Newsweek, the Atlantic, and the American Prospect, among others. Her first book, Gangs in Garden City, was a runner up for an Investigative Reporters and Editor award. Her second book, Divided We Fail, will be published by Beacon Press in 2013. This post originally appeared at the Hechinger Report blog.

In a New York Times editorial over the weekend, University of California, Berkeley professor David Kirp asks why we’ve turned away from school integration, an education reform that has quite extensive evidence showing it worked:

“Economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did.” 

Indeed, during the 1970s and 1980s—the time when desegregation was in full force—the achievement gap closed faster than it ever has before or since. Why did we abandon such a successful intervention? Kirp writes that “desegregation was too often implemented in ham-handed fashion, undermining its effectiveness,” but doesn’t go into detail.

In fact, the “ham-handed” way that busing was done in many cities is part of the reason for its downfall. Black students may have benefited, but there were many sacrifices that came along with busing—and not just long bus rides for black kids. Kirp doesn’t mention how black families viewed desegregation, and the flaws many saw in the way it was framed and then implemented. In reporting I’m doing for a book due out next January, Divided We Fail, I have spent the past few years talking to a group of black families about their views of busing, and why they led a charge against desegregation in their city of Louisville, KY.

The other piece of the puzzle of why desegregation disappeared is the rise of the school choice movement. Others have argued before that the two don’t mix well, and school choice won out.

None of this is to say that desegregation should be considered irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Both its successes and failures have a lot to teach those seeking to reform the public education system today.

Bus photo from Bigstock.

Pilgrimage to Mount Hornaday

Alexis Rizzuto is an Editor at Beacon Press. 

As an editor, I feel very fortunate to have worked with Stefan Bechtel on his book about the early and fierce conservationist William Temple Hornaday. As an eco-activist myself, I was captivated by Hornaday's story, that he went up against circumstances just as dire as we face today—so many species just about to blink out of existence due to the actions of some humans and the apathy of others—and said, “No, I will not allow this to happen.” And then fought by every means he could for the rest of his life.

His crusade for the bison is especially inspiring. Like the flocks of the now-extinct passenger pigeon, which would darken the sky for miles, the bison herds historically thundered by the millions over the Great Plains. But, as Hornaday said, there is “no volume of wild life so great that civilized man could not quickly exterminate it.” The massive bison slaughter was an intentional act of genocide, against the Plains Indians with the bison as proxy: from millions to a few hundred. His description of the carcass-covered plains, where once bison families stood peacefully eating prairie grass, is heart-rending. But thanks in good part to Hornaday, descendants of those last few still survive, and I was lucky enough to be able to visit Yellowstone last fall to see them for myself.

The first bison I saw was a solitary male, out in a field grazing. Not too close but within good binocular distance. To me, this was an almost mythic bison: I looked at him through the spiritual debt my species owed his. He was a magnificent representative of his almost-extinguished race, and I had the urge to bow in respect. At that moment I recalled that the “Indian name” I had as a child (my mother’s best friends were Oneida) was Little Buffalo.

It was also at that moment I banned my husband from eating buffalo burgers.

During our week in Yellowstone my view of bison went from mythical to personal as I got to know them better. In Lamar Valley we sat for hours, observing small herds dotting the plateau near and far. Mothers with frisky calves, trotting and frolicking. A couple of young males butting heads, one alpha leading his herd across the river (which reached only to their knees).  Small family groups, sitting or sprawled out in the grass under an afternoon sun. When grazing, they had an undeniably bovine placidity, chewing, kicking up insects for the cowbirds that hopped near their feet and sat on their backs.  At other times they were completely undignified, especially when taking their dust baths: it was funny to see these majestic animals belly-up in the dirt with legs flailing like grass-happy dogs.

Their cattle-like appearance lulls people into forgetting that these are wild animals, and the parks department includes warnings in their literature to keep your distance. The males weigh up to 2,000 pounds and can run over 30 mph. Both genders have horns. More people die from bison goring than bear attacks, because people think these quietly ambling animals are harmless. I heard a story of someone putting their child on a bison’s back for a photo.

The only hint at aggression we saw was a male defending his chosen mate. He never left her side, quietly chuffing sweet nothings into her ear, sniffing her, nibbling her side. But if another male came too close, he lowered his head and grumphed at them. I was glad the others gave way. Michael Lanza (in Before They’re Gone) has compared a charging bison to a grand piano sprouting horns and moving at the speed of a race-horse. I did not want to see two grand pianos collide.

We got more up-close and personal when we ran into a bison jam; cars were stopped in the middle of the road not because people were stopping to watch wildlife, but because a herd was crossing the road, with some of the animals simply standing in the midst of traffic. A few got within ten feet of us, close enough that we could see the patchiness of their fall coats and hear their munching as they pulled up grass by the roadside.  

Our most intimate experience of bison was tactile. In a couple of visitor centers, we could bury our fingers in the thick, wiry fur of preserved hides, feel the heft of their horns, and examine their vertebrae. We learned that the hump on their shoulders is actually specialized musculature designed to keep bison moving in deep snow: they swing their heads back and forth like a plow, and the vertebrae in this area are elongated to support these massive muscles.

Though the animals’ continued existence is history's best tribute to Hornaday, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a mountain in Yellowstone named for him. I could not leave without seeing it. Before departing the lodge on the morning of our quest, we asked a ranger for help locating the mountain. We had a map that showed the general spot, but I wondered if they could be any more specific. The ranger had not heard of Mt. Hornaday, but she wanted to be helpful, so she looked it up in a reference book and sure enough there it was with a short bio of the man. I filled her in on the rest of the story and why I wanted to see this mountain so badly. Because I had told her something she didn’t know about the park, she awarded me a “Junior Park Ranger” sticker, which is one of my favorite souvenirs.

My husband used his GPS to locate the mountain but it wasn’t really visible from the road, so we took an unplanned hike up Pebble Creek Trail to reach a high enough elevation to see the 10,000-foot peak named for my new hero. The trail was more than I had bargained for, and we were low on water. I wanted to give up, but Alex urged me on and only a couple of miles later we reached a clearing that gave us the perfect of view of the adjacent summit we were after!

Since then, I have kept up with bison news and goings-on in the West. One of the most exciting recent stories has been the reintroduction of Yellowstone bison to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. The Yellowstone bison are among the last genetically pure, wild bison (others have been interbred with cattle on ranches). They are the direct descendants of the last few survivors of the genocide, and about 60 of them have now been returned to the prairies of Montana, under the care of their original Plains cohabitants. Since the move, five new calves have been born to the herd, their little hooves aerating the tall-grass prairies that have not felt their tread in over a century.

High-Profile Allies in the Abortion War

Today's post is from Carole Joffe, author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us. Joffe is a professor in the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco (however, the views and opinions expressed here do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Regents of the University of California, UCSF, or the UCSF Medical Center). This post originally appeared at RHRealityCheck.

“…there is now an unprecedented and sweeping legal assault on women’s reproductive rights. New legislation is being introduced, and sometimes passed, in state after state that would roll back access to abortion and contraception, mainly by intruding on the relationship between doctor and patient…..But where are the doctors? They have been strangely silent about this legal assault, even though it directly interferes with medical practice.”

The above statement is important not just because of the insightful words being said, but because of who is writing these words, and where these words are published. The writers are Marcia Angell and Michael Greene, and the piece they wrote on current abortion restrictions appears in USA Today, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the United States. Dr. Angell, a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School, is the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine; Dr. Greene is professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and chief of obstetrics at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Why do the credentials of the writers, and the place of publication, matter? The significance of these issues becomes clear if one takes into account the longstanding marginalization of abortion — and abortion providers — in the United States. As I learned in researching a book on the first generation of doctors who provided abortion after Roe v Wade, these pioneers acutely felt their isolation from mainstream medicine. Most hospitals did not establish abortion services, most professional organizations did not set guidelines for abortion care, very little training of residents in abortion procedures was taking place, and many individual providers told me of sanctions they experienced because of their involvement with the abortion issue. I heard numerous stories of academic advancement denied, difficulty in getting research published, but perhaps most poignant of all, the lack of colleague-ship they felt with their fellow physicians. As I speculated, the memories of the “back alley abortionists” were still so strong in the period immediately after Roe that even ethical and competent doctors, such as those I interviewed, were tainted with that legacy. In short, a majority of physicians then (as now) have supported legal abortion — but there was less support for the abortion provider.

To be sure, much has changed for the better since 1973 in U.S. medicine with respect to abortion. The number of training sites has considerably improved; such technological developments as medication abortion (formerly known as RU-486) and an improved device for Manual Vacuum Aspiration have brought many primary care doctors and, where legally permitted, nurse practitioners, midwives and physician assistants to offer early abortion care; perhaps most importantly, organizations such as Medical Students for Choice and PRCH (Physicians for Reproductive Choice in Health) have facilitated collegial contact between numerous clinicians who go on to become abortion providers, or who are already doing so, and clinicians in other fields who, while not performing abortions themselves, firmly support those who do.

However, while the stigma surrounding abortion within medicine may have lessened, in the larger society it has only worsened — as we see from the unprecedented number, and character, of the restrictions proposed in the last year and a half. In fact numerous states even mandate that abortion patients be told misleading or downright untrue facts, such as the links between abortion and breast cancer or infertility — while a number of states have passed, or are proposing, laws that shield doctors from lawsuits if they withhold accurate information, such as the results of prenatal diagnosis that might lead a pregnant woman to seek an abortion.

Back to the forceful statement by Drs. Angell and Greene. They are not the only voices within medicine to object to these egregious measures. The Pennsylvania Medical Society and the Wisconsin Medical Society, for example, are on record as opposing restrictive laws in those states because they interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Pippa Abston, a pediatrician in Alabama, has become an outspoken critic of Alabama's mandated ultrasound law, speaking at rallies and making a video of her opposition, and others have voiced objection as well.  But given the cultural stigma that now surrounds abortion, the fact of two high profile physicians at one of the country’s leading medical institutions, speaking out in such a widely read newspaper, is a particularly welcome blow against the legislative persecution of abortion providers. To me, it is especially encouraging, given the past marginalization of this field that I have described, that the two physician-writers have not themselves built careers around abortion.

Angell and Greene mince no words in denouncing the assault on medical ethics that such laws represent, and make clear their understanding that the stakes in these battles go well beyond abortion care. “Physicians…have ethical commitments to patients that they cannot and should not be required by state law to set aside. Prominent among them is the responsibility to place the welfare of their patients above all other considerations.”  But their statement does not only call for the proper treatment for patients. They end their piece with a call for the relevant medical professional organizations — too timid till now, in their view — to support their members who are caught in this war on those who serve women.

Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples

For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other “for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” for periods of thirty or forty—sometimes as many as fifty—years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife.

In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals how some of these unions didn’t merely improve the quality of life for the two people involved but also enriched the American culture.

Among the high-profile couples whose lives and loves are illuminated in the following pages are Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, literary icon Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, author James Baldwin and Lucien Happersberger, and artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Read the prologue at Scribd. 

Read a review of Outlaw Marriages at Edge. 

Couples featured in Outlaw Marriages:

Walt Whitman & Peter Doyle
America's most influential poet found his muse for in a young conductor on a horse-drawn streetcar.  

Martha Carey Thomas & Mamie Gwinn
Thomas created the first graduate program for women in the United States at Bryn Mawr College, but counted on her partner for assistance with many of her academic duties. 

John Marshall & Ned Warren
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City both owe a great debt to these intrepid collectors of antiquities.  

Jane Addams & Mary Rozet Smith
The first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Addams shared her life and work with her partner of more than four decades, a woman from a wealthy family who helped keep Hull House afloat. 

Bessie Marbury & Elsie de Wolfe
Elsie de Wolfe is widely recognized as the founder of the field of interior design. Bessie Marbury was a highly successful theatrical agent, as well as the woman who made a series of suggestions to de Wolfe that led to the interior designer becoming a pioneer in her field. 

J. C. Leyendecker & Charles Beach
America's most popular and successful illustrator in the early decades of the twentieth century, Leyendecker drew on his partner of fifty years for inspiration and guidance in his work.  

Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde author as well as a literary mentor for such legendary writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Alice B. Toklas took it upon herself to see that Stein’s works got into print, becoming not only her partner’s editor but also her literary agent and publicist. 

Janet Flanner & Solita Solano
For fifty years, Janet Flanner served as the Paris correspondent for the New Yorker. But it was Solita Solano who encouraged her to move to Europe to jump-start her career in journalism.

Greta Garbo & Mercedes de Acosta
Screen legend Greta Garbo was the daughter of poor Swedish laborers, but her partner taught the actress how to dress and speak like Hollywood royalty. 

Aaron Copland & Victor Kraft
One of America's most celebrated composers, Aaron Copland was honored with a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. His relationship with a free-spirited and troubled violinist took his work in bold directions.  

Tennessee Williams & Frank Merlo
Frank Merlo weaned Tennessee Williams off a diet of drugs and casual sex so the playwright was able to create his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

James Baldwin & Lucien Happersberger
An unconventional but long-lasting relationship helped Baldwin find the stability he needed to become one of the most important writers of his generation. 

Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg urged Jasper Johns not to ignore a bizarre dream he had but instead to act on it and paint the American flag-as he had done in the dream. 

James Ivory & Ismail Merchant
Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were widely recognized, during the final decades of the twentieth century, as setting the gold standard when it came to adapting iconic novels into high-quality motion pictures. Among their best-known works are A Room with a View and Howards End—both films won multiple Academy Awards. 

Audre Lorde & Frances Clayton 
Frances Clayton gave up tenure at an Ivy League university to help her partner, Audre Lorde, reinvent herself as a pioneering poet who gave voice to women of color around the globe. 

About the Author: Rodger Streitmatter, a former newspaper reporter, is a member of the School of Communication faculty at American University. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his husband, Tom Grooms.

Mr. Hornaday's War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World

Mr. Hornaday's War is a long-overdue bigoraphy of William Temple Hornaday, first director of the Bronx Zoo, who helped launch the American conservation movement. 

He was complex, quirky, pugnacious, and difficult. He seemed to create enemies wherever he went, even among his friends. A fireplug of a man who stood only five feet eight inches in his stocking feet, he began as a taxidermist and an adventurer who tracked tigers in Borneo with friendly headhunters, lead crocodile-hunting expeditions in the Orinoco, and scouted the last remaining bison in the Montana territories.

William Temple Hornaday (1854-1937) was also a man ahead of his time. He was the most influential conservationist of the nineteenth century, second only to his great friend and ally Theodore Roosevelt. When this one-time big-game collector witnessed the wanton destruction of wildlife prevalent in the Victorian era, he experienced an awakening and devoted the rest of his life to protecting our planet's endangered species. Hornaday founded the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., served for thirty years as director of the renowned Bronx Zoo, and became a fierce defender of wild animals and wild places. He devoted fifty years to fighting gun manufacturers, poachers, scandalously lax game-protection laws, and the vast apathy of the American public. He waged the "Plume Wars" against the feathered-hat industry and is credited with having saved both the Alaskan fur seal and the American bison from outright extinction.

Mr. Hornaday's War restores this major figure to his rightful place as one of the giants of the modern conservation movement. But Stefan Bechtel also explores the grinding contradictions of Hornaday's life. Though he crusaded against the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, he was at one time a trophy hunter, and what happened in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo, when Hornaday displayed an African man in an "ethnographic exhibit," shows a side of him that is as baffling as it is repellant. This gripping book takes an honest look at a fascinating, enigmatic man who both represented and transcended his era's paradoxical approach to wildlife, and who profoundly changed the course of the conservation movement for generations to come.

About the author: Stefan Bechtel is the author of ten previous books. A founding editor of Men’s Health magazine, his work has appeared in Esquire and the Washington Post, among other publications. 

“Stefan Bechtel’s Mr. Hornaday’s War is essential for anyone interested in U.S. conservation history and the wildlife protection movement. Not only did William T. Hornaday save the bison from extinction, but he is also the spiritual progenitor of today’s Endangered Species Act. Every zoo in America should erect a statue of the larger-than-life Hornaday. Bechtel has [my] unstinting admiration for writing such a smart, thoroughly researched, landmark biography. A gaping deficit in our understanding of progressive era ecological warriors has been filled.” — Douglas Brinkley is Professor of History at Rice University and author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt’s Crusade for America

Read "The Last Buffalo Hunt," Chapter 5 from Mr. Hornaday's War

Watch an interview with author Stefan Bechtel.

Monsters vs. Ferns: An Eco Mom's Mother's Day

Amy Seidl is an ecologist and teaches at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Finding Higher Ground: Adaptation in the Age of Warming and Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World. 

Last Mother’s Day, I woke to a rainy, chilly day, one that nonetheless began nicely with breakfast in bed­—poached eggs and toast, tea, and a cupful of my own coconut yogurt. “What next Mom?” four year-old Helen asks. “I’d like to walk in the woods.” I say. “Let’s check in on the spring flowers, the migratory songbirds, and newly unfurling ferns. Maybe collect some wild leeks for dinner.” “It’s raining,” they complain. “But it’s Mother’s Day,” Dad replies firmly.

We dress and prepare to leave the house for a local trail. Helen chooses her own wardrobe for the rainy outing—Crocs, a pair of tights under a summer dress, and her favorite hat with a butterfly stitched in the front. An hour later, we are all damp to the skin and heading for home to light a fire and make tea. But we have managed to hear and see the rose-breasted grosbeak, to identify four species of fern, to marvel at the rare white trillium, and to collect a handful of wild leeks. Not a bad catch for a raw, 40-degree day.

Then the idea of a matinee comes up. We check Netflix: Earth and Monsters vs. Aliens emerge as options. The four of us crowd around the laptop to watch the previews. Mother/infant pairs of humpback whales swim in an immense ocean, elephant herds famous for their bonding are tracked across Africa, and baby polar bears—the icons of climate change—nurse from their mother’s teats before exiting icy dens and encountering an all-too bright and warm world. James Earl Jones’ voice draws me like a preacher, but the children grumble, “We’ve seen all this on Planet Earth.”

Next we preview Monsters vs. Aliens. Ginormica, the 10-story tall monster with Disney eyes to die for, is skating across the San Francisco Bridge while a genetically-engineered blue tomato swallows highway medians and extraterrestrial aliens land in Modesto, bent on capturing the speck of a planet the locals there call Earth. The trailer is hilarious, funny, silly, and captivatingly colorful.

Can we make a film that addresses a future affected by climate change as captivating as sci-fi monsters saving humanity from aliens? As good a question is, should we?

I raise my children in a TV-free household. Much of our media comes through the radio, and Celia knows to turn the NPR station off when the news of a car bombing or other inappropriate material is aired. My children receive National Geographic and National Geographic Kids Magazine, along with an occasional catalog. We take weekly trips to the library for story hour and kids book group. But by and large my husband and I deftly censor the entrance to media, opening doors to information we deem suitable and in keeping with our values and closing doors to information that is contrary to our beliefs –violence, a culture of consumption, and the overly sexualized characterization of girls and women being chief among them. (Does the Title 9 catalog fall into this category? I’m still deciding…surely the Athleta one does.)

Still, it isn’t difficult to see where the marketers are making inroads. Scholastic Book Sales at the school introduce Hannah Montana, books featuring TV characters, and cheap gadgets and toys. The library at my daughter’s small school (6 grades and 130 children) now carries American Girl Magazine, a newly created zine full of tween marketing strategy, with articles on room redecorating and birthday party themes. Even though my children are not seeing the 100 commercials a day viewed by TV-watching children, the $15 billion spent each year on advertising and marketing to children manages to pervade even the most “gated” households. My point is that I’m finding it increasingly hard to instill positive values—ones that resonate with the message of why, for instance, we need to stop climate change—in the context of a consumer culture that explicitly targets children.

While we may want to educate our young about climate change—explaining why there is no pond hockey at Christmas, or why the hollyhocks that used to bloom around my daughter’s birthday are now blooming well before, or why we are walking 8 miles down Vermont’s Route 7 with a thousand other people carrying signs that read “Save our Syrup”—we need to do it in the context of a culture that is just waking up to the certainty that climate change is happening. Happening now.

Children are wise. But they also have short attention spans. From my own experience I know that when I go down the path of overtly educating my children about global warming, often triggered by an extreme weather event like March’s heat wave, I am likely to hear one of the following: “Can I have a play date?” (Helen) or “I’m going to go ride my bike” (Celia). This is not to say that they aren’t taking the information in, aren’t mulling it over while they shift into low gear to get up the hill. But what I realize is that children orient themselves toward fun; a little bit of sober information goes a long, long way.

Enter the marketers who understand that fun for children is what it’s all about; colorful fun—crazy blues, electric greens, hilarious yellow—silly and giddy and popping-out fun. Like the eyes on Ginormica, the spandex-clad star of Monsters vs. Aliens. Every bit animated and every bit sultry, Ginormica hits, neurologically speaking, the bull’s eye for every child’s attention.

As adults concerned about global warming, what we want is for our message to be factually accurate, long-lived, one that serves to evolve a new set of values, or to strengthen values already in place. But I believe the message has to on some level be enjoyable too, something people want to be a part of, something kids want to do. 

I don’t have an answer here except to say that marketing and our own literacy in it has to be part of the equation. The messages we give to our children land in a greater context than the one we create in our households; parents of children older than mine can attest to the superpower strength of these other contexts. They are powerful, and highly strategic, as Juliet Schor concludes in her book Born to Buy on how advertising and marketing sells to children. But our messages are powerful too. And they can be more powerful with better strategies.

Talking with children about climate change is in essence talking to ourselves about our own stewardship of the planet. The response to the facts, in our minds as well as theirs, quickly becomes, “Why do we keep emitting greenhouse gases knowing what we do?” or “What are we doing to stop global warming?” The fact is we are collectively complicit and therefore collectively responsible to come up with solutions, ones that will define our future.

I would have much preferred to watch the nature documentary on Mother’s Day, so I wasn’t in a great mood after watching my daughter’s choice of film. I won’t give away the ending of the movie, but suffice to say the monsters go up against an even larger crisis than climate change, an unwinnable one. But when I put Helen to bed that night, tucked her in against the raw chill that had continued into the evening, she recited the four species of fern we’d learned on our walk: oak, marsh, sensitive, and lady. 

Fern photo from Bigstock.

My Mother Taught Me It's Okay to Forget

Kate Whouley lives and writes on Cape Cod, where she also works as an independent consultant in the book industry. She is the author of Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words: Travels With Mom in the Land of Dementia, and Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved. 

We are so many people in our lifetimes.

We are babies, toddlers, children, teenagers. We are young people, flirting with option and opportunity. We explore, winnow, commit, arrive. We settle on an acceptable version of ourselves. For ten, or fifteen, or even twenty years, we believe: I am this person; this person is me. Then one day, we turn up middle-aged. This surprises us. We begin to make adjustments, attempt to match our inner and our outer images. We realize that we’re growing—damnit—old. Soon enough, we are really old, and—if we are lucky—ancient. And yet we don’t feel ancient inside—because all those people we have been—well, they won’t go quietly.

As a writer, I am obsessed with the rag-tag parade that lasts a person’s lifetime. I want to know and memorize all those past, present and future variations—in myself, but especially in others. I love the process of sharing stories, for in stories, we meet the selves we cannot see—lined up single-file, in the lives of new friends. Sharing stories, we remind old friends that we once were young—or at least, younger. Sharing stories, we keep the memories—and all our human variations—alive. If we are doubly blessed, there may be people in the world who can tell us stories of our childhoods, and children in our lives who will one day ask us to tell them about the day they were born.

Still, over-linking our identities to our stories has its downside. What happens when you can’t remember the stories? With the loss of memory, are those versions of ourselves disappeared? 

My mother—who was diagnosed with a combination of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease—taught me that it is possible to forget who we once were—and even to forget who we are now. But while an organic brain disease may prevent the remembering, it doesn’t halt the parade of selves. Even as her disease progressed, my mother emerged anew. For a time, her humor carried an edge. Her moods were volatile, and she was prone to angry outbursts—directed mostly at me. But she could not sustain the anger when she began to forget what—or who—was making her mad. In time, my mother emerged from a chrysalis of fear, confusion and anger to become a chatty, smiling social butterfly. She grew lighter; losing track of her old selves, she was free of bad memories and troubled times. She laughed more often--that same, full-throated, honest laugh she laughed when I was a kid. The laugh I can still hear.

My mother, at that point, could be prompted to recall her early variations, and taking a cue from her forgetting, I told her stories of good times, reminded her of former glories. She would smile, nod, express admiration for her younger self and her achievements, which were not inconsiderable. Remembering is what I did for my mother—not just the big life-event sort of remembering, but the putting-on-a-coat-because-it’s cold outside remembering, too. It’s the second kind of remembering—because of the second kind of forgetting, that is actually harder on everybody.

Early in my mother’s journey into Alzheimer’s, I fought for her memory, concerned with all those past, now-lost versions of the woman I knew. In time, I gained some altitude—a new perspective and a kind of grace. I learned to live life her way: moment to present-moment.

“It’s a blessing,” unthinking, well-meaning people told me, when my mother passed away, “that she died while she still knew you.”  

Really?

I would give up recognition for a living, pain-free, forgetful mother any day. I’d be willing, every day, to spin the yarn of her own life for the woman who always loved a good story.

Like many mother-daughter relationships, ours was complicated. I did not love all the versions of my mother equally; yet I hope to honor all her selves when I remember them. But there’s something else my mother taught me—late in her life: forgetting them is okay too. I need not watch the parade. It feels great to sit with your eyes on the person in front of you. And sitting with my mother, knowing she had lost so many pieces of her life, so many memories of her former selves, I came to believe there is something permanent—or at least something transferable—that we carry with us. Something beyond the memory of our variations, beyond the sum of our experiences, beyond what we can express. Maybe, if we live with care—for ourselves and for others—we might manage to hold onto the metaphor we call our soul. May my mother’s rest in peace.

Obama's Same-Sex Marriage Announcement: A Victory for Religion

Today's post is from Jay Michaelson, author of God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality. Michaelson is a writer, scholar, and activist whose work addresses the intersections of religion, sexuality, spirituality, and law. 

This post originally appeared at Huffington Post. 

I have to tell you that over the course of several years, as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed, monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that "don't ask, don't tell" is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I've just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

Angry voices on the so-called "Christian right" are already screaming about President Obama's "war on religion," but today's announcement regarding same-sex marriage was actually an inspiring religious pronouncement. Why?

First, because it came one day after one of the nastiest, meanest anti-gay votes in recent memory, North Carolina's "no families but mine" Amendment 1. It offers a studied contrast between humanity and dogmatism, inclusion and nastiness. Religious and non-religious people alike can now see two very different ways of approaching how we ought to live with one another, one welcoming and the other cruel, one open to the experience of others and the other with its hands over its ears, one focused on compassion and the other focused on exclusion. Who Would Jesus Discriminate against, anyway?

Second, Obama's statement is a model of religious reasoning. Jesus said in the Sermon of the Mount, "By your fruits, you shall know them" (Matthew 7:16). This, not some obscure lines in Leviticus or Corinthians, is the real religious message regarding gays and lesbians, and it is the way Obama made up his mind on this issue. Over time, he said, he has come to understand the truth of same-sex couples, that they are as capable of commitment, love, and sanctity as opposite-sex couples, and that it is an injustice to deny the benefits of marriage to gay people.

Those are religious values; they are exactly what the Sermon on the Mount preaches, as well. "A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit," Jesus said (Matthew 7:18). Well, let's apply that method to the question of same-sex marriage. Does it produce bad fruit or good fruit? Good fruit, as Obama himself has come to understand. Therefore, it, too, is good.

This process is about the growth of individual conscience: I used to feel one way, but over time, in a careful and long process of discernment, I come to feel a different way. And look at the evidence Obama cited: People on his staff, friends, and family -- these, not abstract principles -- are what shifted his heart and mind. Thinking of his personal responsibility for the lives of soldiers serving our country -- this, not some policy point -- is the data that weighs into questions of right and wrong.

Affirming the equality of LGBT people, including same-sex marriage, is not a choice between religion and some other values, between God and gay. It is, on the contrary, a direct consequence of taking religion seriously. It's easy to sit back comfortably with one's assumptions and prejudices. What's harder, and thus what really counts, religiously speaking, is to be open to what other people and their experiences have to teach us. That's how we can fulfill the injunction of Matthew 7:16, and it's exactly what the president showed us today.

White House photo from Bigstock.

Obama Courts Equality

In the wake of President Obama's "evolution" on marriage equality, we're collecting reactions from our authors. 

Rodger Streitmatter, author of Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples

Obama’s announcement is absolutely huge. I think it will go down in history as an instance when a president had the courage to throw his weight behind an initiative that he believed in—that he wanted to be on the right side of—even if the political consequences were uncertain. It will definitely energize the LGBT community, as well as a lot of young people who are strong supporters of gay marriage. Lots of people are saying, “This is great. The guy I voted for in 2008 is back—somebody who’s committed to change and somebody I can believe in!”       

I think it also will have impact on some people who are still on the fence on the gay marriage issue. Obama’s announcement will nudge them—people who respect him—to commit themselves to this issue.

Read more about Outlaw Marriages.

  

---

Karen Kahn (pictured right with partner and co-author Pat Gozemba)
co-author of Courting Equality: A Documentary History of America's First Legal Same-Sex Marriages 

It is very gratifying to have the president of the United States recognize the full humanity of lesbian and gay Americans. I am not surprised. I am reminded of President Clinton being called “the first black president.” President Obama could be called the “first gay president.” He is slowly dismantling the institutions of discrimination at the federal level. After ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and choosing not to defend DOMA, declaring  his support for full marriage equality seems like the next logical step. We should congratulate our movement—and the bravery of millions of gay and lesbian people who over the last thirty years have chosen to come out and fight for their rights. It is amazing that it has been not quite 20 years since the first court—in Hawaii—declared heterosexual marriage laws discriminatory. We still have a long way to go, as the North Carolina vote indicated on Tuesday. But I think we can all rest assured that when the President supports equality, we are moving toward justice for all. (Photo by Marilyn Humphries.)

Read more about Courting Equality.

Marriage Equality Gets a Nod from Obama

In an interview with ABC News yesterday, President Barack Obama announced his support for marriage equality. Here are a few reactions from our authors:

A landmark day! A joy to tweet/His evolution is complete/Go forth & wed, all "I do's" equal/Don't-ask-don't-tell gets gutsy sequel

— Elinor Lipman (@ElinorLipman) May 10, 2012

Jay Michaelson calls Obama's announcement an "inspiring religious pronouncement":

First, because it came one day after one of the nastiest, meanest anti-gay votes in recent memory, North Carolina's "no families but mine" Amendment 1. It offers a studied contrast between humanity and dogmatism, inclusion and nastiness. Religious and non-religious people alike can now see two very different ways of approaching how we ought to live with one another, one welcoming and the other cruel, one open to the experience of others and the other with its hands over its ears, one focused on compassion and the other focused on exclusion. Who Would Jesus Discriminate against, anyway?

Second, Obama's statement is a model of religious reasoning. Jesus said in the Sermon of the Mount, "By your fruits, you shall know them" (Matthew 7:16). This, not some obscure lines in Leviticus or Corinthians, is the real religious message regarding gays and lesbians, and it is the way Obama made up his mind on this issue. Over time, he said, he has come to understand the truth of same-sex couples, that they are as capable of commitment, love, and sanctity as opposite-sex couples, and that it is an injustice to deny the benefits of marriage to gay people. (Read the rest at Huffington Post)

EJ Graff reflects back on a wedding she attended at the beginning of marriage equality in MA: 

In 2004, I sat in a Unitarian pew while my friends Hillary and Julie Goodridge said their vows. I was absolutely fine with all the lead-up—they'd been together as long as I had been with my beloved partner, and I'd known them before that. Then came the phrase "By the power vested in me by the commonwealth of Massachusetts"—and I was sobbing harder than I knew was possible. So were the hardbitten LGBT activists around me, even those who weren't especially happy about the pursuit of marriage. As we all managed to sit up and dry our eyes, a little embarrassed at how raw the emotion was, one of the latter said, "I guess being ready for something intellectually isn't the same as being ready emotionally." 

There's something very deep about having your government declare you a stranger to its laws, defining your love as outside all respectable recognition. For my president to stand up and say that I should belong fully to my nation, that my wife and I should be considered as fully married as my brother and his wife—well, it reopens and washes out some very deeply incised sense of exclusion, a scar inflicted when, at age 15, I first panicked at the realization that I might be queer. (Read the rest at the American Prospect)

 

Beyond Flowers and Cards: How to Really Appreciate Teachers

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, Beacon Broadside is running a series of posts on educators and education.

Today's post is by William Ayers and Rick Ayers. William Ayers is is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired). He is the founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society. Rick Ayers is a Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He has worked as a Master Teacher for KQED Education Department, on the Teacher Advisory Board for Youth Speaks, and as a core team member of the Berkeley High School Diversity Project. 

They have co-written two books: Teaching the Taboo and Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment, A Handbook for Parents, Students, Educators and Citizens. Separately, they have written numerous books on education, including Bill's Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom and A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, and Rick's Great Books for High School Kids: A Teachers' Guide to Books That Can Change Teens' Lives (co-written with Amy Crawford) and Studs Terkel’s Working, a Teaching Guide.

Teaching involves engaging real students every day, nurturing and challenging the vast range of people who actually appear before us, solving problems, making connections, putting in 70 hour weeks and spending our own money on supplies; and it means listening to every two-bit politician, the bought media, and big money misrepresent what we do and attack us shamelessly every day.

Want to appreciate teachers?

Don't allow education to be defined as an endless Social Darwinist competition: nation against nations, state against state, school against school, classroom against classroom, and child against child. Education, like love, is one of the fundamentals--give it away generously and lose nothing--and school is where we work out the meaning and the texture of democracy-coming together to explore the creation of community, pursuing the hard and challenging questions, and imagining new ways to be in balance with the earth and in harmony with one another. Good teaching deals with the real--honor teachers for that.

Reframe the debate: We are insistently encouraged to think of education as a product like a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver-something bought and sold in the marketplace like any other commodity. The controlling metaphor for the schoolhouse is a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads; it's rather easy to think within this model that "downsizing" the least productive units, "outsourcing" and privatizing a space that was once public is a natural event; that teaching toward a simple standardized metric, and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately-developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the "outcomes," is a rational proxy for learning; that centrally controlled "standards" for curriculum and teaching are commonsensical; that "zero tolerance" for student misbehavior as a stand-in for child development or justice is sane; and that "accountability," that is, a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools-but never on law-makers, foundations, corporations, or high officials-is logical and level-headed. This is in fact what a range of wealthy "reformers," noisy politicians, and their chattering pundits in the bought media call "school reform."

Oppose the "reform" policies that will add up to the end of education in and for democracy: resist replacing the public schools with some sort of privately-controlled administration, sorting the winners relentlessly from the losers-test, test, TEST! (and then punish), and destroying teachers' ability to speak with any sustained and unified voice. The operative image for these moves has by now become quite familiar: education is an individual consumer good, not a public trust or a social good, and certainly not a fundamental human right. Management, inputs and outcomes, efficiency, cost controls, profit and loss-the dominant language of this kind of reform doesn't leave much room for doubt, or much space to breathe.

Note that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions, and that teachers independent and collective voice is essential in determining these conditions.

Fight for smaller class size, limited standardized tests, enhanced arts programs at all levels and in every area, equitable financing, and a strong teachers contract that encourages collegiality and collaboration.

Throw in a note or a flower if you like.

Teaching Students--and the Rest of Us--How to Be Appreciative

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, Beacon Broadside is running a series of posts on educators and education.

Award-winning educator Linda F. Nathan founded the Boston Arts Academy in 1998. She consults and speaks on educational issues nationally and internationally, and teaches a graduate course at Harvard on building democratic schools. Nathan is the author of The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School.

Senior year is by far the most demanding at Boston Arts Academy. Students must truly demonstrate one of our shared values: passion with balance. Their final senior Humanities paper and group project is due. Opening nights for their final arts exhibitions and performances are just around the corner. Many must still scramble to pay for senior dues, prom, and yearbook.

These demands can feel like too much, and adolescents often forget to react to stress with grace. How many adults know how to do this? So today, in our assembly, I reminded our seniors about the importance of showing teachers their appreciation.

If each senior writes one note to one teacher, I would feel I had done my job. I want students to recognize the brilliance and selflessness of so many of their teachers. Sadly, the general public could benefit from this education as well.

I recalled in assembly how each of my staff has done something terrific with kids and with one another as colleagues. In my “Celebrating Another Year Together” presentation each year, I name remarkable things that our faculty has accomplished. I remind us of the various ways teachers took on extra responsibilities, implemented a new curriculum, succeeded with a particular project or simply were present daily for students. If I could, I would reimburse every teacher for the thousands of dollars they have collectively spent on student supplies, taking students to lunch, driving students home, etc...

And finally, if I could, I would put a huge stop sign at the door to prevent high-stakes testing from taking over the curriculum. I would let teachers know that I hold them accountable for high standards, that I trust them to do an excellent job, and that I will not tie their evaluations to test scores.

Alas, it is the letter and my own writing that I know I can deliver. The rest is up to the students I encourage, and to a behavior of appreciation that the community can model for them.

Confessions of a "Failing Teacher"

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, Beacon Broadside is running a series of posts on educators and education. 

Today's post comes from educator David Chura, author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. He has worked with at-risk teenagers for the past 40 years. For 26 of those years, he taught English and creative writing in community based alternative schools and in a county penitentiary. His writings have appeared in the New York Times as well as other scholarly and literary journals. He blogs at http://kidsinthesystem.wordpress.com/. 

Like most teachers I’ve gotten some praise from my high school students over my 26 years of teaching—a lesson “wasn’t bad,” or a particular class was “sorta interesting.” I’ve even been told that I was a “pretty good teacher.” High praise coming from teenagers.

But the truth is I wasn’t a “good teacher.” I was a “failure,” at least according to America’s “education reformers”—that “odd coalition of corporate-friendly Democrats, right-wing Republicans, Tea Party governors, Wall Street executives, and major foundations” as Diane Ravitch aptly defines them—because the kids I taught consistently lagged behind their peers in every measure, performing well below grade level, failing state standardized tests.

Given the present state of teacher evaluations, with a significant portion allotted to student performance on mandated tests, I’d be in big trouble if I hadn’t left teaching recently. I certainly wouldn’t get any bonus pay. If it were up to the Obama Administration I might not even have a job since I would be one of those teachers who, as the President noted in his 2012 State of the Union address, “just aren’t helping kids.” And if I still taught in New York I’d be facing the prospect of having my name and ratings published in newspapers and on the internet if the Legislature gets its way in what the New York State Union of Teachers called the “name/shame/blame game.”

But I know that I wasn’t a “failure,” and more importantly, that the hundreds of kids I’ve taught weren’t either. My students were mostly young people of color, living in neighborhoods and families destroyed by poverty and substance abuse, racism and violence, physical and sexual abuse. Overall, life—shaped by their own mistakes and by conditions they couldn’t control—left them little time for, or interest in education. Frequently that lack of time and interest led to trouble which led to repeated suspensions, expulsions and in some cases, incarceration.  But sometimes trouble translated into being placed in a small community alternative high school or the jailhouse classroom in the county penitentiary, both places I taught in.

By the time they made it to me, my students were pretty damaged. They hated school. They could barely read or do basic math. And forget about writing. “You expect me to write?” more than one teen squawked in horror at me. But eventually they did. They read, piling up grade levels like some Americans pile up debt. They calculated. They even learned the magic of connecting sentences that made sense.

But by the state’s educational rubric, they didn’t cut it. As noteworthy as their successes were—both academically and behaviorally—they were still “failures” and I along with them: success was only validated by passing the standardized tests.

One of the hardest things I had to do was send kids into those tests who weren’t ready. I tried hard beforehand to get them out of it. I’d explain, downright argue at times, with the school administration that although my students had made solid progress it wasn’t enough to tackle the exam and so they should wait and take it next time. It never worked. “It’s the law,” I was told.

Every time I think about Tyler my palms sweat. He was a jailhouse student, lanky, 16, with an Afro picked out to an angel’s halo. But he was no angel, and he had the missing front teeth and two years at the county pen to prove it. When he first came to class he was reading on a second grade level. For some reason he was determined to improve this time round in school. He came every day, took work to his cell every night and returned it completed every morning. Slowly his reading level increased. He was pleased with himself. You could see it in the almost toothless smile he didn’t bother to hide anymore.

But he wasn’t close to test-ready. When I petitioned to delay Tyler’s exam the administrator refused but offered me her idea of comfort, “Look, it’s okay if he fails. Then he’ll be eligible for remediation.” I couldn’t help shooting back, “Sure, send the kid in so he can get shot down one more time.” I prepared Tyler for that test as best as I could. He worked harder than ever. He was psyched. “I’m gonna ace it, Mr. C.”

You know the end of the story. It’s the same for many damaged kids living in poverty and neglect, factors that the pundits say can be overcome by good, dedicated teachers. Once again Tyler “failed.” He never came back to class for remediation.

If Tyler and kids like him are “failures” then I—and all the other teachers who teach in tough places—are too. But I don’t think we should take the rap alone. As long as our educational policies let down students like Tyler in the name of “reform” and “the law,” continuing the “name/shame/blame game” instead of addressing the social conditions that cripple these kids’ lives and learning, then we as a country are failures as well, in need of some serious remediation. 

150 Years After Thoreau: Michael Lanza and Elizabeth Gehrman

May 6, 2012, marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Henry David Thoreau, the father of American nature writing. His influence on contemporary environmental writing is still very significant, and this weekend, we're highlighting that influence on our blog. Today, we hear from Michael Lanza and Elizabeth Gehrman.

Michael Lanza is the creator of TheBigOutside.com and author of Before They’re Gone: A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks, which traces his journey to show his kids iconic national parks that could be altered forever by climate change. 

I would be less than honest to claim that, when I read Thoreau’s classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods, years ago, I couldn’t put it down. To me, it seemed like the book begged to be put down. By modern literary standards, it is not the most accessible read. It probably wasn’t back when it was first published in 1854, either.

I grew up not far from Walden Pond, where, beginning on July 4, 1845, Thoreau lived for two years, two months, and two days alone in a cabin “to front only the essential facts of life, and… suck out all the marrow of life.” That’s heady stuff. I’ve walked the trail around the pond—which can take an hour only if you dawdle—and visited the replica of his tiny cabin that stands there today. In reality, the second-growth forest (less dense than Thoreau’s prose) in which he dwelled just two miles from town probably felt little more isolated back then than it does today, within earshot of a busy highway.

But the degree of Thoreau’s isolation is not what matters; and in an era when so much entertainment delivers an intellectual experience akin to eating apple sauce—no chewing necessary—perhaps we should celebrate writing that requires some brain effort to interpret. Thoreau’s real importance was introducing ideas about returning to nature that were ahead of his time and helped inspire the conservation movement, among other social trends to which he contributed (transcendentalism, abolition, and civil disobedience, to name-drop a few noteworthy examples). His words ring particularly prescient now, when we lament the myriad, tragic consequences of so many children spending so little time outdoors. Certainly, all of us who today write about personal experiences in nature stand on Thoreau’s shoulders.

As no less an authority than the late John Updike once wrote: “A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”

Maybe Thoreau’s classic work should be required reading for all high-school students, or at least any who would aspire to join the long parade of writers walking rocky trails in his footsteps. Those who put in the time and effort might discover the meaning that has stirred so many people. And I doubt we’ll ever have an app for that.

 

Elizabeth Gehrman is a frequent contributor to the Boston Globe Magazine and has written for the New York Times, Archaeology, More, and This Old House. Her new book, Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction, will be published by Beacon in October.

Though I dutifully recorded and often revisited quotes from it — so many I could never choose just one to cite here — what I remember most from my high school English reading of Walden is that it was a bit of a slog. I was no philosopher, and though I grew up on an island, my playgrounds the Niagara River and acres of untamed forest, nature had never really flipped my introspection switch. Maybe, as an only child, I had enough solitude; I was content simply to explore the woods and water without feeling the need to examine myself in the bargain. It wasn’t until college, when I got around to Cape Cod, that I really discovered Thoreau.

Where Walden turns inward, Cape Cod turns outward. Often described as Thoreau’s “happy” book, it is not so much about nature as about people in nature. It tells of those who are drawn to the sea — the oystermen and lighthouse keepers and industrious old women who come to it because of work or circumstance or its inexorable pull on the soul. “Cape Cod is but another name for human culture,” Thoreau writes early on. His initial tale of a horrific shipwreck never strays far from his mind as he recounts the power of the “vast and wild” Atlantic over the lives cast upon its shores with an eye for detail that any journalist would envy.

And that, it seems to me, is more affecting than bean-planting any day.

150 Years After Thoreau: Christine Byl and Brad Tyer

May 6 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Henry David Thoreau, the father of American nature writing. His influence on contemporary environmental writing is still very significant, and this weekend, we're highlighting that influence on our blog. Today, we hear from Christine Byl and Brad Tyer, two forthcoming Beacon authors. 

Christine Byl is the author of Dirt Work, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2013. She lives in a yurt outside of Healy, Alaska with her husband and retired sled dogs. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Sun, Glimmer Train,Broadsided Press, Lumberyard, and others. She worked on trail crews on public lands for 15 years; with her husband she now runs a family business doing trail design and construction.

I had not split firewood or hoed a row of beans when I first read Thoreau in high school English. I lived in urban Michigan, had no experience with subsistence tasks. Yet I loved Thoreau from the first page. Now I live in Interior Alaska, off-the-grid without running water, and daily chores take up much of my time (picking berries, hauling water, cutting wood). But the reasons I was drawn to Thoreau in high school remain consistent now: something about what centered him made sense to me—life connected to a place you lived, and what you did there. I liked how he was humble yet sure of himself. I liked that he admired squirrels.

As a writer, I've respected other things. His cultural critique feels germane 150 years out. He's a dialectical thinker, finding fertile ground between assumed dichotomies. He summons a childlike wonder at the world. He reminds me to laugh, to take words and ideas seriously, but myself less so. Simply put, Thoreau writes with mind, heart and body fully engaged. Among the many writers who've influenced me, Thoreau may best embody Henry James’ famous quote: "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost."

The conventional way to write off Thoreau is on his so-called inconsistencies (Walden wasn't wild, it was a mile from Concord!), but Thoreau's wisdom is that he never claimed a deliberate life had to happen in the middle of nowhere. An authentic life isn't an escape: it has less to do with location than attentiveness to it.

Despite the solitude he was best known for, I think Thoreau would make good company. (I feel so friendly toward him that I refer to him in my mind by the pet nickname, HDT.) I can imagine working in the woods with him, tossing 8-foot logs into the truckbed, making him blush at a bawdy joke. After, in the cool spring evening I'd pour us hot cocoa (mine with whiskey, his without.) I can see myself leaning on the axe near the splitting stump while HDT quotes himself from Walden, "Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection." Yep, HDT, and every woman, too.

 

Brad Tyer is the author of Opportunity Montana, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2013. He is a journalist whose work has appeared in Outside magazine, High Country News, the Texas Observer, and many other newspapers and magazines.

I grew up the child of a first-generation middle-class family for whom a motorboat and a weekend place on a lake defined the lap of suburban luxury. My parents were just a generation removed from fishing for food and rural isolation as facts of life; to transform those memories of need into leisure marked their triumph over circumstance. They’d escaped. To prove it, they bought a place to escape to.

I’d never heard of Thoreau, but it was our Walden. Like Henry’s cabin, adjusted for interstates and dams, it was just north of town (Houston) on a reservoir (Lake Conroe). Curb to gate, we could drive there from home on the other side of the city in about as long as it took HDT to walk into Concord and bum a beer from Emerson. We called our place Hard Times, with the reflexive self-deprecation of insecure East Texas arrivistes.

At the other end of Lake Conroe was the only Walden I knew of: a lakefront development of condos clustered around a marina full of boats at the western end of what had once been the San Jacinto River. Walden had a golf course and tennis courts. Walden had a shop on a pier selling gasoline and life jackets and bait and polo shirts embroidered with the resort logo. Walden was the rich end of the lake.

It was years before I read Thoreau’s Walden and understood the references and aspirations playing out at the rich end of the lake—and, acknowledged or not, at our end too.

What I remember of Walden is the occasional diamond clarity of its sentences, and Thoreau’s constitutional contrariness. I don’t remember his celebrations of nature so much as his condemnations of so-called civilization. 

To realize that developers were repackaging that contrary clarity as a hive of internal combustion, on a time-share basis no less, marked maybe my first real awareness, in retrospect, of the ways of the commercial world. They’d take a word that meant something—Walden—and turn it upside down. They’d try to fool you. They’d advertise one thing and sell you another. Your parents could do the same thing: Hard Times my ass...

Words can serve truth, or they can serve their speakers. That’s an awareness—call it a bias; fair enough—that I’ve carried through 20 years of journalism aimed, when I could see, at clarifying that which has been obfuscated. It’s a bias that informs Opportunity, Montana pretty deeply. As influences go, it’s indirect, but that’s the note Thoreau sings for me.

150 Years After Thoreau: How the Cabin at Walden Gave a 21st Century Father Cabin Fever

May 6, 2012 is the 150^th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s death. Thoreau is viewed by many as the father of American nature writing, and his significant influence continues. In the passage below Tom Montgomery Fate describes his own “cabin experience” in southwest Michigan and reflects on Thoreau’s continuing relevance.

You can listen to Tom Montgomery Fate on this weekend's episode of PRI's To the Best of Our Knowledge.

A More Deliberate Life

(excerpted from the Introduction to Cabin Fever)

One sunny afternoon a few years ago I drove to southwest Michigan to build a cabin in the woods. It was spring break and I had just reread Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s nineteenth century account of his life in the woods at Walden Pond. The famous hermit-philosopher had again inspired me, but it was different from the first time I read it. I was not an idealistic 19-year-old college freshman, but a harried and married 46 year-old father of three in suburban Chicago. Different things mattered. The book called me with more urgency––from my distracted middle-class, middle-aged life into the wild solitude it conjured.

That same morning, before leaving, I discussed the weekend with my wife, Carol, packed food and clothes, and then went to the garage to look for tools. When I pushed the remote, and the garage door hummed open, I abruptly recognized my life: a wild tangle of bicycles and strollers and grilling utensils and patio furniture and wet cardboard boxes full of moldy books and kids’ clothes. Amid the clutter I found an old spade, two saw horses, a metal tool box, and a post hole digger, all of which I tossed into the back of our minivan. On the two-hour drive to Michigan that day I recited Thoreau’s mantra–– Simplify, Simplify­­––as a kind of prayer, thinking it might offer me some guidance.

It didn’t. We finished the cabin in two years, or at least stopped working on it. Cobbled together with the help of family and friends, and with more patience than expertise, we built it on a fifty acre plot of woods and meadow that we own and share with six other families, friends from our old church. They bought the land cheap thirty years ago––a farm abandoned after a fire. It has since been slowly restored: the stone farmhouse rebuilt, thousands of pines and oaks planted, a large garden dug. And we maintain a network of walking trails that wind throughout the property.

Were he alive today, Thoreau might have little interest in our experiment in Michigan. But he might be a bit curious. He did, after all, anticipate those readers who would naively aspire to his ideals. In the first chapter of Walden he addresses the relevance of his stint in the woods for the interested novice: “I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living…but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursuehis own way.”[i]

Even when no one would buy his books, and long before there were Thoreau “wannabes,” he advised readers to listen for their own drummer, and find their own way through the forest. Walden’s continued appeal is partly due to a romantic longing to “get back to nature.” And while Henry himself is also deeply romanticized, his commitment to the environment, his material self-sufficiency, and his “less is more” economics could not be more relevant.

Such ideas resonate in a high tech, high speed culture, which excels at making waste and war. We have bi-focal contacts and laser eye surgery but still struggle to see in the way Thoreau imagined––to find the essential balance of the I and eye, of self and world. This is why despite the vast distances of time and culture, I can’t help but read Thoreau’s artful interrogation of his life at Walden Pond as both a critique of my own and as an invitation to a new kind of vision, to the joy of enough in a culture of more, to a deliberate life.

That’s what I’m seeking: a more deliberate life. But deliberate doesn’t just mean intentional or careful; it means balanced. The word is tied to libra––the two pan scale of justice—which is for weighing and balancing things—ideas, fears, love. Or maybe garlic: I saw such a scale once at a market in a tiny French village. The farmer put a 100 gram weight in one silver pan and a handful of garlic in the other. The standard, or known weight, was balanced against the unknown. In this case the garlic was too heavy so the pans didn’t level. But the vendor gave it to me anyway, balancing the scale with his generosity. Deliberation is a creative act, an art.

My 7-year-old son, Bennett, sometimes tries to balance himself on the creaky iron fulcrum of a wooden teeter totter at the playground. He jumps up on the heavy plank and puts one foot on each side of the center. Then he shifts his weight, pushing one end of the plank down, causing the other end to rise. He tries to stay balanced and level but can’t for more than a few seconds. One side always starts to teeter up or totter down. He doesn’t stay centered, but neither does he ever fall off. This struggle for balance, the rising and falling between the earth and sky, gives him great joy. And he gives that joy to me, if I’m paying attention.

To put it plainly, a deliberate life is a search for balance—in mind and body and spirit—amid our daily lives. And while some might like to do that searching all alone in the woods, few can. Other “natural” commitments conflict: children, a partner, a job or two. Most readers who admire Thoreau’s ideas don’t have the freedom or desire to live a solitary life in the woods. Still, what many of us do want, and what this book is about, is finding a deeper connection to Nature in our ordinary lives—by seeking relationship and refuge wherever we find ourselves––whether it be on a walk through a forest preserve, on a family camping trip, or catching grasshoppers in the backyard.

“I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” Thoreau famously wrote. For him travel writing was nature writing, and it was local. His search for the Wild was on home ground: an outward physical journey and inward spiritual journey conducted not in pristine isolation, but on the humble Concord woodlot available to him.[ii]

This is vital for those who seek a more deliberate life today. Because since Thoreau’s invention of the nature memoir 150 years ago, much of the natural environment itself has been destroyed. So the task is no longer to discover and record the rare, but to recover and nurture the ravaged—to try to restore some balance where we live. This is particularly true here, amid the Midwest’s decimated woodlands and farms and sprawling suburbs, where developers and nature often collide.

Everyday I see these collisions––the imbalance––between humanity and the other animals who live here. Herons nest on our E.coli choked river. Coyotes hunt on the runways of O’Hare Internatonal airport while roaring jets are trying to land. A Canada goose gets trapped in the entryway of my office building. Rabbits nest in wood chips beneath a metal slide on a suburban playground. A wild cougar is gunned down in an alley by a Chicago policeman. Who belongs where? Who will take care of whom on this shrinking planet? How will we find the balance we seek?

These are the kinds of questions that Thoreau is still opening for me, and that I continue to live in.

Watch the book trailer for Cabin Fever on YouTube

---

[i] Henry David Thoreau. Walden, A Fully Annotated Edition. Ed. Jeffrey Cramer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. P.86

[ii] Ibid. p. 170. The land around Walden Pond was not “wilderness,” but a conventional woodlot when purchased by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau himself writes “The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale…”

Interfaith Work is the Antidote to Atheist Islamophobia

Today's post is from Chris Stedman, author of the forthcoming book Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious. He is the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University, the emeritus managing director of State of Formation at the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, and the founder of the first blog dedicated to exploring atheist-interfaith engagement, NonProphet Status. Stedman writes for the Huffington Post, the Washington Post's On Faith blog, and Religion Dispatches.

Sam Harris--I know you're a busy man, but I'd like to ask you out. Will you go to mosque with me?

I'm not trying to convert you to Islam. Like you, I'm not a Muslim. Like you, I don't believe in any gods. I'm happily, openly atheist. A queer atheist, even. Like you, I have many significant concerns about Islamic beliefs and practices. But still, I want to visit a mosque with you.

We don't have to go alone--we could go with Mustafa Abdullah, a young community organizer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina who is currently campaigning against the state's proposed anti-gay Amendment One. We could attend with Najeeba Syeed-Miller, a teacher and activist who has dedicated her life to peacebuilding initiatives. Or we could go with Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, who is committed to promoting pluralism and opposing bigotry, and who regularly speaks up for atheists as a religious minority in the United States.

Why am I inviting you to visit a mosque with me and my friends? Since I'm asking you publicly (I couldn't find your phone number anywhere and I'm pretty sure this MySpace page isn't really you), I should probably give some context.

A few weeks ago I saw you speak at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia. Before I go on, I need to confess: your remarks blew me away. In a weekend full of incredible intellects, your frank, contemplative, eloquent speech on death, grief, and mindfulness was easily my favorite. So I was not prepared for the crushing disappointment I felt when, just a few weeks later, you published a piece called "In Defense of Profiling" in which you unequivocally stated: "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."

Never mind that your argument doesn't hold water--to quote my friend Hind Makki: "What does a Muslim look like? The 9/11 hijackers didn't have beards and 'dressed Western.' The shoe bomber wasn't Arab or South Asian. Sikhs wear turbans. The majority of American Muslim women don't wear hijab. The majority of Arab Americans are Christian--though they often share the same names as their Muslim counterparts. Perhaps Harris would support an initiative that required all Muslims to sew a crescent and star onto our clothes. It would make his airport security time a more pleasant experience. (Though, I suppose, it wouldn't have stopped McVeigh or Breivik.)" Though as a frequent traveler I share your frustrations with the TSA, profiling doesn't make sense as a solution to its problems.

Instead, while we're en route to mosque, I'd like to talk to you about something else. As I read your piece, which (along with the clarifying addendum you tacked on a few days later) failed to explain how you would determine who "looks... Muslim," I thought back to another moment at the Global Atheist Convention a few weeks ago. As you were speaking, rumors began to fly that a group of extremist Muslims would be protesting the convention. Sure enough, a group of less than a dozen appeared just a short while later, holding signs that said "Atheists go to hell" and shouting horrible things. But to my dismay, their hate was mirrored by hundreds of conference attendees, some of whom shouted things like "go back to the middle east, you pedophiles," tweeting "maybe the Muslim protesters [are] gay so [they] don't have wives? ... A lot are/were camel shaggers," and wearing shirts that said "Too stupid for science? Try religion." Watching the scene unfold, I was reminded of how much work there is to be done in combating prejudice between the religious and the nonreligious.

I'm not sure you share my concerns about this divide. In fact, last year you wrote this about the 2011 attacks orchestrated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway that resulted in the deaths of over 70 people:

One can only hope that the horror and outrage provoked by Breivik's behavior will temper the growing enthusiasm for right-wing, racist nationalism in Europe. However, one now fears the swing of another pendulum: We are bound to hear a lot of deluded talk about the dangers of "Islamophobia" and about the need to address the threat of "terrorism" in purely generic terms.

In the wake of an atrocity of unimaginable proportions--one perpetrated by an anti-Muslim terrorist who was influenced by anti-Muslim writers--I could not believe that you decided to write a blog suggesting that the real problem is the fight against Islamophobia. 

Whether you think so or not, Sam, Islamophobia is quite real. The American Muslim community experiences disproportionately high rates of discrimination and violence, and Islamophobic rhetoric has a significant bearing on this. This from a detailed report on the network of Islamophobia in America: "According to former CIA officer and terrorism consultant Marc Sageman, just as religious extremism 'is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged,' the writings of these anti-Muslim misinformation experts are 'the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.'"

As a society, we need to acknowledge the reality of the consequences of Islamophobia. As one Norwegian Muslim recently said:

"I think it is good and healthy that this comes out," he told AFP in a telephone interview, arguing that Breivik built his ideology largely on the basis of Islam-critical writings in the media and online and rumors he has heard about violent Muslims. "This should help show people that this kind of rhetoric can be very, very dangerous. It is a wake-up call, and I think many people will moderate the way they talk about these things."

We desperately need to discuss these things. An argument I frequently hear from atheists is that if moderate Muslims really exist, they need to speak out more. The problem is that Muslims are speaking out against extremists who cite Islam as their inspiration. Need some examples? There. Are. So. Many. That.I. Can't. Link. To. Them. All. (But those eleven are a good start.)

The real problem is the Islamophobic misinformation machine, supported by our conflict-driven media. Stories of Muslims engaging in peaceful faith-inspired endeavors don't sell nearly as well as stories of attempted Times Square bombings. Yet even coverage of violent stories is skewed against Muslims: for example, the mainstream media largely ignores violence against Muslims, such as when a mosque in Florida was bombed. (Just imagine the media frenzy if that had been a Muslim bombing a church.) The press also ignores stories of Muslim heroism, such as the fact that the man who stopped the Times Square bomber was himself a Muslim. Perhaps we perceive Islam as inherently violent, and imagine that an "Islam versus the West" clash of civilizations is inevitable, because our perspective is shaped by the warped way the media reports on Islam.

The feeling that we need to profile "Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim," as you wrote--that Muslim Americans are dangerous and should be viewed with suspicion--is an outgrowth of the Islamophobic misinformation that proliferates our culture. I'm proud to say that nontheist organizations like the Center for Inquiry, the American Humanist Association, and the Institute for Science and Human Values recognize this, which is why just last week they signed on to a letter (alongside many interfaith and religious organizations) decrying racial and religious profiling.

The idea that we should single out Muslims is a misguided and damaging one, and it has serious ramifications for the Muslim community. After the thwarted "Christmas tree" bombing by a young Muslim in Portland, OR, Eboo Patel wrote:

It would be perfectly understandable if, in this time of Muslim terrorism and Islamophobia, everyday Muslims tried to slink into the shadows, to hide in the mosque. But it would be a huge mistake. Now more than ever, we need Muslim community leaders to be loud and proud about Islam's glories, to inspire a new generation to follow in the footsteps of the Muslim heroes who bent the arc of the universe towards justice.

As Muslims become more and more marginalized, that will be increasingly difficult. When I posted a link to Patel's column on my Facebook page, a friend commented on the FBI's involvement in the Portland incident, and a subsequent arson attack on a Portland-area mosque: "I'm starting to wonder how any of this makes our country more secure or keeps our citizens safe. It certainly made things more dangerous for Muslims in Corvallis."

I look around and I see a country deeply divided over the place of Muslims in America's civic landscape--a nation roiling with fear and uncertainty, where hundreds of people will crowd outside of a benefit for a Muslim relief organization and scream things like "go home" and "terrorist" while waving American flags. That despicable display of anti-Muslim hate didn't really make the news either, by the way.

Profiling feeds this fear and paranoia, and it plays right into the notion held by the tiny percentage of Muslims who are extremists that all Muslims are under attack and need to be defended. It is truly dangerous territory, and not just for Muslims--the recent congressional "Muslim radicalization" hearings in the U.S. echo the anti-gay "lavender scare" and the explicitly anti-atheist undertones of the "red scare" in the 1950s. As a gay atheist, I recognize that it could just as easily be me who is targeted.

But I do have hope, Sam. I'm currently reading a wonderful book called The Young Atheist's Handbook by Alom Shaha--I could lend it to you after our mosque visit. In the book, Shaha writes about growing up Muslim and later becoming an atheist. In the fourth chapter of the book, he touches on the tragedy in Norway and delves into a lengthy, must-read exposition of the ugly reality of Islamophobia in the U.K., Australia, and the United States. In it, he points to the major role the media has played in guiding the narrative that says that Muslims are a monolithic, loathsome bloc--or as Shaha wrote, a perspective that "see[s] all Muslims as the same, and completely fail[s] to acknowledge the diversity and differences in values that are held by the millions of Muslims in the world." Shaha goes on to write:

You may wonder why, if I no longer identify as Muslim, I care so deeply about this... Although I am an atheist, I nevertheless find it distressing that people can be contemptuous of all Muslims based on their own prejudices about what it means to be Muslim. Some atheists are guilty of this ideological categorization, too, and it bothers me that some of those who really should know better feel that Muslims and non-Muslims cannot, by definition, get along. I suspect this is a point on which I differ from more-hardline atheists, but perhaps my own experience of being judged for my skin colour has made me acutely sensitive to such judgments being exercised upon others.

Shaha is definitely on to something. Over the last few years, I've watched with despair as an increasing, increasingly-less-subtle xenophobic anti-Muslim undercurrent has spread throughout the atheist movement, cloaked by intellectual arguments against Islam's metaphysical claims and practices and rallying cries in defense of free speech. Though it has been spreading throughout our broader culture, I'm especially disheartened to see it among my fellow atheists. At my first American Atheists conference, for example, I witnessed a crowd of people shout things like "show us some ankle" at three women wearing burkas for a satirical musical performance. It's one thing to critique Islam; but the glee I saw in some of their faces as people whistled and shouted "take it off" was something else. 

Writing about an incident where an American Atheists State Director posted an Islamophobic rant to their official Facebook page, atheist blogger Hemant Mehta said:

It's always a touchy subject when atheists go after Islam... because people have to be very careful that they don't stereotype all followers of Islam as if they're all extremists. Our society does a terrible job of this. Atheists, especially when they're 'leaders' among us, ought to know better than to fall into that trap.

You ought to know better, Sam. Your insistence that Islamophobia isn't a problem and your willingness to play into the irrational anxieties of those who fear Muslims is irresponsible and dangerous. With your great reach, you have the opportunity to build bridges of understanding--instead, you have chosen to make the dividing lines that keep our communities apart that much thicker.

My invitation to visit a mosque isn't an argument for "political correctness." Like you, I find efforts to wallpaper over our differences abhorrent; like you, I have considerable disagreements with many tenets of Islam. You may have visited a mosque before, but I invite you to join me for a different kind of conversation--to spend some time talking to Muslims about their experiences, and working alongside them in their efforts to promote pluralism and equality in their community and in ours.

In a 2010 New York Times article about the Park51 (or "Ground Zero Mosque") controversy, one man said of the growing protests at mosques around the United States: "they have fear because they don't know [Muslims]." As someone who grew up gay in a fundamentalist Christian community, and as an atheist in a largely religious culture, I know how it feels to be reviled by people who don't understand me and who see our differences as irreconcilable. This is why I promote interfaith work--because giving people the opportunity to get to know others who belong to different communities erodes distrust and suspicion and builds cooperation and respect.

Before I got to know some people who identify as Muslim, I was hugely suspicious of all Muslims. As a college student, I was an atheist and a religious studies major--I studied Islam in the classroom, but I knew very little about Muslims. It wasn't until I started to build relationships of trust and mutuality with members of the American Muslim community that I learned about their experiences and had a change of heart.

What should happen when a Muslim walks into an airport? Your answer is extremely troubling, Sam. So I return to my original question: What could happen if two atheists were to walk into a mosque? What could we learn from one another? In what ways could we work alongside Muslims to build a world that values pluralism and compassion, critical thinking and cooperation? Let me know if you want to find out.