by Rishidev Chaudhuri

A recent study on the relationship between positive emotions, social connectedness and a measure of heart health has been getting a lot of attention in the popular media. ¹ It's an interesting addition to the emerging scientific literature on the uses and effects of meditative practices and on the mechanism of the placebo effect (which seems to be shorthand for a wide variety of fascinating and under-studied phenomena)². These are both compelling topics, and perhaps good subjects for a future blog post, but the study was also interesting because it's one of a growing minority of studies that look at compassion meditations rather than concentration or mindfulness meditations.

Compassion meditations, roughly, are a family of exercises where you try to practice compassion by cultivating love and good wishes towards other people³. One way of doing this is to picture a series of people and wish them well in turn (taking your time over each and, typically, moving from yourself to people you like, then to people you are indifferent to and then to people you dislike). Another practice is to look at people as you make your way in the world and, for each person, say to yourself, “Like me, this person wants to be happy and avoid suffering”. Yet another is, in the midst of encountering another person, to every so often ask yourself “What is preventing me from being present with this person?”

Over the last few years, there's been a gradual increase in the number of scientific studies looking at compassion meditations. This is promising, not because these practices should be entirely understood by their effects on physiology, nor because the scientific lens is necessarily the best way to see them, but because it points to greater visibility and more general interest.

It's easy to see why scientists would be reluctant to study these practices; despite their age, they can seem like fluffy New Age exhortations, akin to telling someone, “Now let's all love each other.” When I was first introduced to these techniques, about a decade ago, I remember thinking they were silly. Mindfulness meditation, where you attempt to become aware of your thoughts and feelings as they happen, seemed like an intriguing way of probing at the structure of subjective experience; it could be criticized methodologically for being unverifiable, ungeneralizable and so on, but it seemed to have intellectually sound goals. Similarly, concentration meditation, where you train one-pointed focus, seemed like a useful training regimen: everyone wishes they could concentrate better. But compassion meditations seemed like an exercise in unfounded benevolence for people who couldn't be bothered to think carefully about ethics.

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Actions always planned are never completed.
……………………… —Democritus

Carpenter's Shoes

Yesterday I told myself I’d finish on Sunday
the project I started two years ago
but I can never trust myself to carry through
when it comes to carpentry, so
I swore an oath this time and pricked my thumb
and smeared a blood spot on my forehead like a tilak,
faced the four cardinal directions in turn bowing,
crossed myself, right fingers first to blood,
then chest, left shoulder first then right
like the kid I once was, almost devout
but not quite convinced hammer and nails
were enough to coax the angels out

………………….
Jim Culleny
April 2009

by Dave Maier

An earlier post of mine in this space divides readings of Nietzsche's views on truth and knowledge into three kinds: a) relativist rejection of truth and knowledge; b) empiricist/naturalist restriction of Nietzsche's criticism to specifically transcendent truth and knowledge of same, leaving empirical knowledge untouched, if tentative; and c) my preferred option, a more forceful criticism of the Platonic picture of metaphysical objectivity, applicable as well to the Cartesian aspects of modernity, including those still present in naturalism.

I recently read about a most interesting variation on the naturalist view – a turn to ancient skepticism. Jessica Berry is the author of Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition, which I have not read, as it costs sixty-five dollars. However, Richard Marshall of 3AM magazine has kindly interviewed her for us, and she gives there an admirably clear and forceful summary of her main points. If I misrepresent her views here due to my ignorance, then I humbly apologize in advance.

According to Berry, the “central preoccupation” of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the problem of nihilism. Values Nietzsche calls “ascetic” are self-denying and will result in nihilism if unchecked. The particular problem with ascetic value systems is the pernicious interaction of a) their self-denying content, and b) the view that “the values to which they subscribe are universal, necessary, categorical.” I emphasize the interaction of these elements, of which more below, because at first it might seem that the problem with the latter aspect of these systems is simply that if they are thought to be universal and necessary, then we can never come up with any alternative to them. And if it's their way or the highway, then nihilism is inevitable: their way squeezes all life from our valuations, eventually resulting in nihilism; and the “highway” is pure nihilism itself. This is what gives Nietzsche's writing its characteristic urgency: the death of God is like an anchor thrown overboard with a rapidly uncoiling rope tied to our feet. If we don't remove it, it will drag us under; but we are afraid to remove it, as we have been conditioned to believe that to do so is to sin against our very essence as rational creatures.

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by James McGirk

“BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.” It was a horrid thought, but Shashank Tripathi’s (i.e. Comfortablysmug’s) infamous Hurricane Sandy tweet had panache.

Tripathi mimicked the style of a breaking news tweet perfectly. The image of water sluicing into the New York Stock Exchange was too good to be true. An irresistible nugget of news distilling the potent emotions stirred by the storm: Sorrow for afflicted New Yorkers, fear for the future, the thrill of seeing history unspool in real time, and a dose of snickering glee at the idea of cuff-linked financiers wading through filthy water.

The cruelty and incendiary media appeal of Tripathi’s tweet was reminiscent of another notorious prank: the attack on the Epilepsy Foundation. On March 22, 2008, a horde of eBaum’s World users (a community devoted to online humor) logged onto the Epilepsy Foundation’s online forums, and plastered its pages with blinking graphics.

As despicable as deliberately triggering thousands of epileptic fits or enflaming a vulnerable community during a catastrophe may be, consider how hard it is to shock a contemporary audience with a piece of art or literature. As subversive texts go, these are arguably genuine artistic achievements, thrilling to witness in real time or read about afterwards.

It’s an aesthetic experience Sherrod DeGrippo, an information security expert who founded two of the world’s preeminent repositories of Internet drama, Encyclopedia Dramatica and OhInternet.com, compares to watching reality television. “I think that a lot of what is attractive about Internet drama is the combination of schadenfreude and superiority people feel when looking at it,” says DeGrippo. “Reality TV inspires a lot of the same feelings. The viewer thinks of himself as superior, but when examined, the viewer is obsessively voyeuristic.”

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by Maniza Naqvi

A soft thud, outside, beyond the door, followed by a steady chiir-chiir. Then, commotion: the sound of running feet—children shrieked, a woman calling out to them—wait—stop! A few minutes later the sound of a whistle–a siren—shoon-shoon. An orange fire, the shape of a disk, rising beyond, the window. Green parrots, arrived with little red beaks, gleaming, alighting on the electric wiring, between the apartment buildings. Then: another and more, two—three-four. She counted at least eight—the excited debate—-tain-tain. She picked up a green chili pepper from the stainless steel bowl–and with the small cutting knife, now too blunt and in need of sharpening, she chopped up the green treat. She opened the kitchen window and set it out in pieces strewn on the window pane for the parrots. That done, she undid the lid on the Tapal tea plastic jar, her fingers fished out the plastic spoon from within to measure a single heaped spoon of tea leaves into the two cup chipped teapot. She poured the scalding water from the whistling kettle into the tea pot—she noted the line of tiny red ants streaming from the sugar jar to a tiny hole in the wall. She covered the teapot with the velvet and mirror worked tea cozy. Looking out she mused, if not a ball of fire, an egg perfectly, served up—yes that’s how she always thought of it—each day break there it was a giant orange blazing egg yolk in the whitish haze in the distance. She watched the orderly line of thousands of geese in a drowsy winter sky making their way to the islands to lay their eggs. She thought about the Cheel, she hardly saw them anymore—the first ones to grab the bread—hardly any left. She had heard, God only knew from where,–that in Bombay, the Parsies had started cremating their dead—because the Cheel had all disappeared, poisoned by the chemical additives in the offal thrown out in the open by butchers which the birds fed on. She worried: was it the same here? Where would life go if not to the birds? There they were—the orderly Vee formation of thousands of geese in a drowsy winter sky making their way to the mangroves just nearby to lay their eggs. Here to escape, the cold, when earth froze over there, to renew life here, then returning to warmer weather and huntsmen. She saw them at ponds when she visited her daughter: Her daughter has a good job there with a company making helicopters for the miitary. She thought she heard popping sounds in the distance. She pried open the Cadbury Chocolates tin box—from it she took out one rusk and place it on a small plate. She poured a tea jug’s worth of milk from the Haleeb cardboard pack from the fridge into the pan and set it on the stove burner on a low fire. Then she headed for the front door. By the time she got back it would be just getting ready to boil over. She made her way slowly to the entrance of the apartment, DAWN lay at her threshold: Another headline of children killed by a drone attack. The arthritis in her knee –made its unwelcome appearance as it always did at this time of the year. But she didn’t want to move away from being so close to the sea. On the balcony where she had placed the torn up pieces of dried roti, the sounds of contentment grew now, the katr-patr, katr patr—of the Myna—yellow beaked. Then came the caw-caw, yes the bullying crows had spotted the roti; the Myna, naturally, had taken flight. As she closed in to the door, she heard, the sound of the jahrtoo as the sweeper moved dust around on the landing, while keeping up a steady chatter with the ayah who squatted in the doorway of the apartment next door fixing herself a paan laced with tambakoo, as she took a breather after having just dispatched her young charges with the usual shouting in their chaotic wake—You forgot your water bottle—Come back you forgot your pencil box–Arey homework—homework!!! Come back! She listened to this calling out, the woman at sixes and sevens with the children. Hers too would be home soon, with her grandchildren, like the geese that came back, only at this time, every year from colder climes.

More writings by Maniza Naqvi

by Kevin S. Baldwin

Shopping in general and shopping at malls in particular, especially during the holidays is one of my least favorite activities. Despite this predilection, a few a years ago, I found myself at the Circle Centre Mall in Indianapolis on the Winter Solstice.

The mall's name is descriptive. At its center there is a circular atrium that is several stories high. As I surveyed the structure from the top level, I could see it was crowded and loud, with thousands of people moving about on the various levels. There was not a smile to be seen anywhere. So much for the joy of the season (and one of the reasons I tend to avoid malls between Halloween and New Year's). My Christian friends are quick to remind me that I would be more likely to experience joy in other places (like their congregation). I don't doubt them, but when I look at the time and energy devoted to shopping during the holiday season and the accompanying misery at the individual and planetary levels, I can't help but think we as a culture need to rethink our priorities.

The space got a little busier and noisier. Several school buses full of what looked like junior high and high school students had disgorged themselves into the mall. A church youth group, judging by the number of Christian-themed T-shirts. “Lord's Gym: Bench Press This!”, “this” being the sins of the world in the form of a cross, with Jesus struggling to lift it, was especially popular. Wrong holiday, I thought: Easter isn't for a few months yet (technically, I suppose the shirts actually represented Good Friday). Another popular one showed a bloody hand nailed to a cross emblazoned with “His pain, your gain.” Why the obsession with how Jesus died rather than how he lived and taught us to live? Again, priorities,…

Suddenly, this scene seemed oddly familiar: Throngs of unhappy people milling about in concentric multi-tiered circles. I had unwittingly stumbled into the 21st century version of Dante's Inferno! I began imagining who was on what level and what stores would be where in this mall. Should “Victoria's Secret” be on the upper or lower level? Should food courts that supersize meals be near the bottom? What did you have to do to move between levels, and so on. You get the idea.

Situations like this play out every year and I struggle to keep my inner Grinch at bay especially when I'm out with my kids. For me the holidays are about being at home with good food, family, friends and despite my atheism, good holiday music. The chorale at my college recently rendered an astonishingly transcendent “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” Who cannot be moved by Handel's “Messiah?” My latest discovery/ear-worm is Haydn's “The Creation,” another fabulous Biblically-inspired oratorio. What better way to relax on this, the shortest day of the year, listening to these glorious sounds while pondering the triumphs and travails of the past year and hopes for the one that lies ahead? I marvel that we are improbably careening around the universe on a wet rock and that the sun's rays, which are now streaming in practically horizontally through south-facing windows, will once again begin to tilt towards vertical in the days and months ahead.

by Akim Reinhardt

I have very fond memories from the 1990s of listening to a friend’s Gujarati Indian immigrant family butcher Christmas carols.

It was an annual Christmas Eve tradition for these religious Hindus. Each year, with women on one side of the room and men on the other, the genders separated by the large, decorated tree, they joyously worked their way through about a half-dozen classics. Sometimes they sang in unison, and sometimes they traded parts while they consulted xeroxed lyric sheets. When it came to “Deck the Halls,” everyone always got a chuckle out of the men warbling “Fa la la la, La la la la!”

For me, an American Jew then in my mid-20s, it was a liberating experience.

Christmas might not be everyone’s favorite holiday, but there’s no denying that here in the United States, it is THE holiday. None of the others can really compete. It is front and center in the cultural consciousness for no less then a month, beginning its inexorable, swelling crescendo the minute Thanksgiving ends in late November.

The din of Christmas music, a parade of TV specials, holiday parties one after the next, wrangling a tree, shopping for gifts, writing and reading year-in-review cards from friends and family, and a dozen other tasks and signposts: the United States is consumed by Christmas for roughly four weeks every year. And it doesn’t even end on the 26th. Rather, that merely kicks off a week’s worth of giddy de-escalation, the Christmas season not finally relinquishing its hold on society until the New Year’s arrival.

If you have overwrought memories of and expectations for Christmas, it can be quite stressful. If you’ve become jaded about the holiday’s commercialism and relentlessness, it can be incessantly annoying. But if you’re Jewish, and thus imbued from an early age with a uniquely difficult relationship to Christianity, then it can be downright oppressive and wrought with the a deep sense of inner conflict that tears at you from every direction.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

There was recently mention in the media of a religious extremist in Egypt calling for the destruction of the pyramids. I first heard talk of this last summer– around the time that the shrines in Timbuktu were destroyed.

Holy hoax or not, I could not help but think of Bamiyan.

I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the moment I learned that the Taliban had blown up the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan.

Sitting in the backseat of a car in Los Angeles in 2001, we were stopped at a traffic light. The radio news mentioned it, but conversation in the car continued on– I don't think anyone noticed or was really listening.

Despite the fact that they had been firing rockets at the statues for months, still it was a shock to hear that the statues had been completely destroyed– and that these 1400 year old statues no longer existed.

How could they actually have gone through with it? I thought.

Although their destruction came as a shock, in fact the two statues had been practically tortured to death after months of rocket fire, canon fire, machine gun volleys and weeks of dynamiting.

The Japanese had been working furiously behind the scenes when the Taliban first made their intentions known to the world. Working with UNESCO and several Islamic governments, even their concentrated efforts could not stop what was to be. Years later, my Japanese friends still bring it up.

You see, the Japanese are sometimes called the world's great antiquarians. And they can trace their own tradition of Buddhist sculpture back to Bamiyan. So they –like many people– find it nearly impossible to grasp why anyone would have wanted to destroy those precious 55 meter and 38 meter-tall statues, which for so long had towered up against the sandstone cliffs in what is called one of the world's most beautiful high-altitude valleys.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

After the tragic events at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, we as a nation have come to a crossroads.

No longer can we abide the excuses of gun control advocates, whose policies make us vulnerable to murder and assassination. This is a stark and incontrovertible fact: if only one of those dead 6-year-olds had come to their kindergarten class armed with a high-powered Glock with a magazine of at least 50 rounds, this tragedy could have been averted. Instead of the gunman spraying defenseless children in a hail of bullets, one single 6-year-old could have taken him out in a fatal miasma of deadly homicidal metal.

And today all those dead children could have been tucked away by their grateful parents as lively youngsters sleeping contented in their peaceful little bunk beds. Alive and thriving, they could have gone on to the good life in America, the best country in the world, where everyone is guaranteed a fair shot at the American Dream, as long as you're born fairly well-off to start with.

And if all twenty of these 6-year-olds had been armed, they could've have riddled the gunman till kingdom come, his body a mess of dismembered bits of mangled bullet-puckered tissue with little pieces of brain matter leaking out of his ears.

It is incumbent upon our weapons manufacturers to come up with new child-friendly designs: smaller gun handles that can fit comfortably into a 6-year-old fist, with hair triggers that respond immediately and sensitively to the slight pressure of a 6-year-old trigger finger.

It is also incumbent upon all kindergartens and elementary schools to immediately devote the greater part of their daytime teaching to gun practice, and to turn their corridors into shooting galleries.

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by S. Abbas Raza

Like many if not most of you, I'm sure, I spent much of the weekend reading various articles about gun control and signing various petitions about it. By Sunday night I just became depressed: while it is clear to me that the existence and easy availability of hundreds of millions of guns to the citizens of America is responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year, it is also seems that there is very little hope of passing any meaningful gun control legislation in this country. So what to do? In my confusion I put up the following on Facebook last night where it generated quite a few comments, so I am now throwing it up here too (it is not a well thought-out essay, just a goad to discussion):

Friends, help me think this out, will you? I am a little confused by everything I have been reading about gun-control in the last couple of days. I'll appreciate your thoughts and comments but, because this is an extremely emotional issue and all of us are rightly outraged by the Newtown shooting, I will be grateful if the tone of all comments can be kept respectful of other points of view.

Here is some of what I have gathered:

1) There is a very large number of people in America who are very attached to the idea of gun ownership. To dismiss these people with condescension is at worst irresponsible and undemocratic and, at best, just silly in pragmatic terms. No drastic measure such as a repeal of the 2nd amendment or some other sort of ban or severe restriction on gun ownership is going to happen for decades in this country no matter how devoutly I or my lefty friends wish it. Even laws limiting purchase of guns to one a month are impossible to get enacted, given the current state of electoral politics!

2) There is an extremely large number of guns out there in America already and it would not be an easy thing to get people to turn them in even if one could pass legislation limiting new gun purchases in a meaningful way, which one probably can't. (For many different sorts of reasons.)

3) No legislation that could realistically pass at this point would have kept Adam Lanza from having access to the guns he had access to. This is not to say that such legislation would not prevent other tragedies from occuring, just that it would not have prevented this one.

4) The NRA spends over ten times the amount on keeping guns unrestricted as all forces calling for restrictions on guns combined.

5) Unlimited access to guns has become a signature emotional issue for the beleaguered right in America and this is not going to go away. Guns are a part of American culture in a way that they are not part of Japanese or English culture. And though I am convinced that the existence of a huge number of guns in private hands in America (close to 300 million by some estimates) is responsible for the disgraceful fact that that while a handful of people die by gun-shot every year in countries like Japan and the UK, in America that number is in the tens of thousands, I don't see any way of changing this anytime soon.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

In many ways, Jung has aged worse than Papa Freud. His world now seems quaint and naïve in its lack of suspicion and irony, in its insistence on treating symbols as universal, in its belief that all peoples are telling the same stories and meaning much the same things, albeit with slightly different flourishes. And his view of the self (part romantic, part enthusiastic humanist) as the mediator between the everyday world and a trans-personal inner world of archetypes is foreign to us, with our unstable selves that are constantly emerging from, being reproduced by and disappearing into the particular contextual forces that surround us. And even the ultimate benevolence of the collective unconscious (so that in the last instance the archetypes are leading us towards meaning and a more complete self) can seem excessively optimistic to us, used to uncaring worlds and unconsciousnesses that are actively trying to strangle us.

And yet there is much grandeur and richness in his world. Few thinkers have given such a central place to creativity and the imaginative life. And his pantheon of symbols, at their best, allow us a polytheism of the world and of the self, allowing us to honor ambiguity, allowing a personality to speak through a multitude of voices and in a multitude of ways, and permitting a playful approach to symbols that enriches the world. His is a worldview extraordinarily sympathetic to meaning-making and narrative-construction, to framing the world in terms of journey and discovery and the reenchantment of life, which is a useful contrast for us, who so often seem to oscillate between attempting to master a world of ever better understood and yet more indifferent matter and the paralysis that comes with the recognition of the contingency of meaning and of the opacity of the selves we cobble together. And Jungian thought has a friendliness and openness to chance and coincidence and the possibilities they allow, made palatable to the rational mind by telling us that it is simply the unconscious expressing itself; that when we flip over a tarot card or open the I Ching to plan for the future we are expanding the space of possibility and that what we find is not random but is allowing a space for the unconscious to speak. And in doing so it allows for the irrational and the differently rational to sweep through and enchant us in their passing.

Active Imagination is a Jungian practice that embodies this richness and openness to symbolic possibility. It's a form of imaginative storytelling used to enter into a dialogue with the unconscious. You center a session around an initial image or figure (often from a dream or myth) and then leave yourself open to how it evolves, and to the related images and figures that drift into consciousness. A session might start with you shutting your eyes (or not), and waiting for a mental image to appear. Perhaps you see yourself walking in a forest. And then you let it unfold, so that perhaps you follow a winding path between the trees, and in the distance you see a hunched figure, and you follow and you try to get closer but the figure keep shuffling away, and you see it turn off the path and enter a house, and you follow it into the house, and it turns out to be an old woman who has laid out a plate of bread and cheese for you. And you start to talk to her. And so on and so forth. It's a meditative process, one where you bracket out the discursive mind and try to simply let yourself be lead along by your imaginings. It's a bit like an interactive process of free association, but you don't just let yourself jump from subject to subject; for example, if you suddenly get distracted by what you plan to have for breakfast, you'd let that go and bring yourself back to the fantasy. As a practice it's actively creative and not just a “quiet-watching” meditative practice.

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who gets the thing that makes you tick

The world goes round. One day
you find someone who knows—
who gets the thing that makes you tick
gets it right and gets it quick

No words can tell the joy in this
You might as well be mute before a fire,
rapt in its flame—

Enjoy its heat
Listen to its embers hiss

.

by Jim Culleny
from Blink
11/28/12

By Liam Heneghan

Every time I extricate a tick from near my groin I recall with fondness a trip I took with a small group of youthful botanists to the west coast of Ireland in 1984. I tagged along with third year undergraduates on the annual University College Dublin Botany Department’s field trip to the Burren in Co Clare. The trip was designed to help these naturalists hone their plant identification skills, since the Burren – a grassland on karst topography — has a truly exceptional flora. One finds botanical treasures there not readily found elsewhere. I was a third-year zoology major and at that time my passion was for chrysomelid beetles with their shimmering metallic elytra and chironomid flies, the males of which family have those marvelous antennae that perch like out-sized Christmas trees upon their heads. I mention here, merely as a grateful aside, that my mentor for beetle work was Jimmy O’Connor for Dublin’s “Dead Zoo” (National Museum of Ireland, Natural History) and for flies it was Declan Murray from UCD. I am indebted greatly to both these excellent men.

We crossed through the Midlands early in the month of June stopping off at the Bog of Allen, a fine though now of course greatly diminished raised bog, which generation after generation of Irish folks have burned as peat to heat their damp and somewhat chilly homes. And as we approached our destination we stopped several times at sites of scientific interest. As groups of hushed botanists whisperingly conferred over the relative hairiness of sepals, the flexuousness of petals, the lanceoloation of leaves and so forth, I swept the margins of small steams with my net with giddy abandon. The art of sticking one’s head into a net of agitated insects to retrieve one’s prizes, and to transfer them to a small vial of ethanol, has not received its due attention, but we shall have to reserve that meditation for another time. Once back on the mini-bus I’d stow the net under the bus seat and we’d be off to the next venue.

As we approached Co Clare a mild clamor emerged from the botanists, upon whose finely pubescent legs — need I point to the genderlessness of this observation? — ticks were now promenading. By the time my net was recognized as the tick delivery mechanism, the little blighters has already made their greedy ascent to the humid and agreeable habitat of the nether-regions that seem to be their preference. The ticks were painstakingly removed that evening, a process, the self-administration of which I can admit to having a certain fondness. The trick here is patience, a steady hand, and the graduated amplification of pulling force. Ticks relent.

Now, a point I want to make here is metaphorically a rather small one. Ticks, not always noticed when in the field become a nuisance when they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had inadvertently transported these ticks from their point of immediate origin, and their impact was uncomfortably felt in a manner that demanded attention. These ticks that so afflicted my botanists were not, of course, themselves invasive species, nevertheless they can serve to illustrate the rudiments of invasive species biology. Invasive species are those spread by human agency outside their typical range and have an impact in the host location significant enough to warrant management action. Setting aside, for now, the terminological skirmishes over distinctions between non-natives, exotics, invasives and so on, I simply ask you to bear in mind as important the factors of transportation between locations and an impact in a new range that is assessed as consequential.

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by Quinn O'Neill

I’m getting fed up with all the potentially disease-causing crap in my food. Every day there are new reports in the media linking various food additives, components, and contaminants to diseases. The list is of suspects is long: acrylamide, arsenic, aspartame, bisphenol A, carrageenan, pesticides, artifical dyes, and high-fructose corn syrup, just to name a few. There are even naturally occurring compounds that may have cancer causing potential. Basil, for example, contains a number of alkenyl compounds, like estragole and isoeugenol, that appear to have carcinogenic effects in animals.

To be clear, I’m not saying that each or any of these compounds is necessarily harmful. Certainly, most of the media reports are sensational and unreliable. If you go straight to the scientific literature to do your own investigation, you’ll generally find this: some papers will claim that the substance is perfectly safe and some will suggest that it may cause a variety of undesirable health effects. Many of the papers suggesting safety will have been done by industry-funded researchers and there’ll probably be a few reviews that purport to consider all of the studies and conclude with a statement like this: “When all the research on aspartame, including evaluations in both the premarketing and postmarketing periods, is examined as a whole, it is clear that aspartame is safe, and there are no unresolved questions regarding its safety under conditions of intended use.”

Well, I think there are still a few unresolved questions, like can the NutraSweet company be trusted to evaluate the safety of a substance that makes them megabucks? And can we trust our regulating agencies to look out for us while they employ people with ties to industry? I’d say no and no to those questions, and maybe I’m a bit neurotic, but if there’s any doubt about the safety of a particular substance I’d rather not eat it. The most obvious alternative would be to buy organic, but this is a pricey option and there may be residues of potentially harmful pesticides, like copper sulfate, in organic food too.

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by Misha Lepetic

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have
a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
~William James

I recently went to a food security panel held by Columbia University’s Earth Institute. There was, as is customary with the Earth Institute, both much to celebrate – such as a nuanced understanding of climate change and its responses – and bemoan – such as the casual dismissal of organic agriculture and a whole-hearted endorsement of GMO crops. While the subject was the very real phenomenon of food insecurity of the developing world, I became curious about how our perceptions of food security in the developed world – and what constitutes a desirable food system – inform our views of the developing world. One small detail from the afternoon, concerning a specific kind of fragility, was especially striking, and forms a convenient basis for the following critique of certain institutional worldviews.

How quickly can a system crumble under pressure? The idea of fragility in food systems can be characterized in many ways, such as crop vulnerability to weather shocks, or falling yields due to environmental degradation or ever-more resistant pests. Fragility can also be more formally defined as the way in which a system is – oftentimes endogenously – vulnerable to disruption or outright breakdown, as defined by Charles Perrow’s important work on complex technological systems. But it was economic fragility that was the focus of the following chart, shared by the Earth Institute’s Jessica Fanzo, from FAO’s “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011” (p14):

Although this is only the lowest quintile of the population for each country, it makes clear the extent to which financial fragility is a determinant of food security. Any increase in food prices requires a significant additional portion of a family’s income in these countries, if they are to maintain the same level of caloric intake, let alone nutrition. More frequently, families are not able to spend more money on food, and must employ other strategies to make ends meet: fewer meals; less caloric or nutritional value in each meal; the reallocation of meals away from members who are not income earners; taking children out of schools when a family must choose between education and food (i.e., as a result of school fees); the preferencing of employment for children over education, etc.

This kind of anxiety is inherently difficult for people in the U.S. to envision. Just how foreign is the concept of food security is to us? Simply put, the United States’ citizens spend less of their income per capita on food than any other nation. Setting aside the arguments that have been amply made elsewhere about the fact that we as end-consumers do not pay for the “true cost” of food, there are three things worth pointing out: how little we pay; the consistency with which we pay so little; and the further invariability of how we spend our food money.

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