RJ – Page 34 – Brimmings: up from the well

A favorite poem: William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All”

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast–a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen.

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leaflets vines–

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches–

They enter the new world naked
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind–

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curls of wildcdarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined–
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance–Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken.

I’ve always liked the poetry of William Carlos Williams. I like how he doesn’t put on airs, uses everyday vernacular, is strident for justice and filled with compassion.

Is he a romantic. I can’t answer that. Wallace Stevens said he was. Williams, however, said no.

I do know that I cherish his imagistic prowess and his maxim, “No ideas, but in things.” Accordingly, his poems sparkle with the presence of everyday objects like even a red wheelbarrow unlikely to attract our attention.

Reticent in symbolism, his poems nonetheless are latent with nuance and ultimately translate the local into the universal.

I haven’t done a post on poetry in recent days, but it’s springtime now, bringing with it thoughts of one of my favorite Williams’ poems: “Spring and All.”

It belongs to a genre tracing back to the 13th century called “Reverie,” or poetry celebrating spring.

I think of spring as the moodiest season of the year, sometimes stormy; other times, gentle. Often it takes its time to make an appearance, stubborn, cross, and perverse. Were it a psychological client, one might suspect borderline personality disorder.

Williams takes all of this in quite well when he likens a landscape adjacent to a road that leads to a “contagious hospital” (a facility for diseases like tuberculosis) as analogous to the hospital, or replete with putrefaction and contagion, hinting at malady and death: trees and bushes splotchy with red and purplish hue.

It’s Williams’ ingenuity, however, to undermine our usual negative take on “contagion” into just its opposite: if there is contagion, then it’s not that of mortality, despite the ” dead, brown leaves under them/leaflets vines–”

In short, the small buds of reddish hue tell of spring’s incipient quickening of landscape as it makes its “sluggish,” “dazed” approach.

In essence, William draws on the archetype of rebirth and restoration. Spring emerges, inexorably, reversing winter’s tenacious sovereignty of the poem’s initial three stanzas.

They enter (i.e., the red buds) the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All around them
the cold familiar wind–

Now the grass, tomorrow,
the stiff curls of wildcdarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined–
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf.

Williams’ poem isn’t simply a listing poem of quick observations. If you look carefully, you’ll find it’s carefully structured as dialectic, or into an antithesis of life and death, with the former achieving the new synthesis.

Dialectic informs the very imagery in its couplings of stillness vs. motion and of sky with earth in the initial stanza.

Appearance with its mortality nuances gets routed by spring’s slow, dazed, but inevitable entrance.

…now the stark dignity of
entrance–Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken.

Addressing the human context, which Williams never neglects in any of this poems, the poem mirrors the continuity of life and hints of human resolve in spite of the ambience of mortality as a universal tenet.

I read somewhere, I think in the New York Times, that many critics regard “Spring and All” as one the last century’s greatest poems. You’ll get no argument from me.

–rj

The war on cancer: New treatments lock-out most of us

trials Death has many doorways, none of them particularly pleasant, but some downright gruesome, cancer for instance.

My father died from lung cancer at age 79. That’s a generous portion of life, when you consider the mean is several years less. Nonetheless, I remember his final hours at the Veterans’ hospital in Chelsea, MA, strapped to his narrow bed, and the moaning that even massive morphine couldn’t assuage.

And then there was my brother, Donald, so full of life, with robust talent and zeal to harness success. I had been doing a seminar at Claremont Graduate School in California that summer in 1979. Weekends I’d spend with him and his lovely wife, Barbe. Six months later, the devastating news of brain cancer, immediate surgery that made him no longer Donald, and death seven months after–cruelly, on his birthday. He had turned 47.

Then there’s my niece, Denise. She passed away several months ago from myeloma dysplasia (considered a blood cancer malady). I had spoken with her on the phone several months earlier. She’d been eagerly looking forward to her upcoming bone marrow transplant from brother, Richard. Initially, it went well, then relapse. She was 57.

Two of my siblings survived cancer. Ruth was experiencing intestinal distress suggestive of colon cancer, but doctors at the local hospital failed to find anything wrong after administering a CT. Thanks to my niece’s insistence on a second opinion, doctors at Massachusetts General, doing their own CT, found a baseball size tumor, diagnosed as Stage 3 cancer. They seem to have got it all in the surgery the very next day.

My brother David received chemotherapy and radiation for his colon cancer, following surgery. Proving the cure can be as devastating as the disease, radiation destroyed his digestive capacity, subjecting him to a hugely diminished quality of life.

I realize this is painful reading, but cancer insidiously invades our life premises in one way or another despite our efforts to wall it out. We get nowhere “crossing the street” to ignore it.

One thing about cancer is it is impartiality. It respects neither age, wealth, nor origin; the pious or the amoral.

One of its monstrous cruelties is when it ravages children. It’s what the Jimmy Fund is all about.

I remember how, in 1971, President Nixon, meaning well, declared war on cancer. Now, forty-five years later, it continues to assault many millions. Recently President Obama renewed that war in this year’s State of the Union address, pledging $1 billion for new research.

Each year, more than 500,000 Americans succumb to cancer.

That surpasses by more than 100 million the toll of American deaths in all of WWII!

In this year, 2016, an estimated 595,690 deaths will occur.

Even more ghastly, 14 million Americans have the disease right now!

But there’s good news to be had as well: a 21 percent drop in cancer mortality from 1991 to the present.

This may result from a more knowledgeable public, making lifestyle changes that include giving-up smoking, exercising more, eating healthier foods, undergoing yearly physicals, and taking advantage of screening venues that include colonoscopies and mammograms.

What’s more, there’s a plethora of new drugs along with innovative trial therapies that utilize one’s immune system, potentially bypassing radiation and chemotherapy protocols with their often serious side effects. In early phase 1 trials, we’ve seen B-cell leukemias and lymphomas disappear.

The problem is that these trials are often highly specialized, focusing on rare, sub-category cancers.

Additionally, there are all too few trials available even for those who qualify.

Frequently, doctors contribute to the dilemma, refusing to recommend patients for inclusion in a trial or committing to a new approach until the traditional cancer options of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery have proven ineffectual. In short, it’s imperative we advocate for ourselves, keeping aware of new methodologies and of doctors and cancer centers on the cutting edge.

Former president Jimmy Carter, however, lucked-out. On August 20, 2015, he made public that he had melanoma induced cancer that had metastasized to his brain. With a 3-5 pound tumor, experts gave him only several months to live.

Along with radiation, his treatment protocol included infusion of pembrolizumab (keytruda), one of several of the new immunotherapy drugs employing the immune system and endorsed by the FDA for those having exhausted other therapies.

On December 6, 2015, Carter shared the good news that his recent brain scans were negative for cancer.

This would seem to bode well for the rest of us that the day may be coming when we’ll see the scourge of cancer pushed back, sparing ourselves and our loved ones.

But keytruda doesn’t come cheap at $150,000 for a year of treatment. For seniors, the most prone to cancer, Medicare, which won’t even pay for your glasses, hearing aids, etc., isn’t likely to cough up money for your treatment any time soon. Same story with private or employee insurance.

Fame and fortune access, as always, the best medical care. The poor and minorities needn’t apply.

But let me add another caveat to all of this: immunotherapy, while promising, is hardly around the corner as a standard protocol any time soon. Was Carter actually cured, or is this simply cancer’s quirky finesse to tease with remission rather than resolution?

Beware media hype! In the trials for keytruda, 76% of 173 patients receiving the drug didn’t see their tumors shrink.

In the follow-up on those who did experience tumor shrinkage, the time element was a paltry 8.5 months. Normally, we’d like to view things in a five-year context.

As I see it, however, it’s the prohibitive cost factor that largely hinders the delivery of effective cancer treatment, delaying the finding of a cure.

In summing up, though life and death are inextricably bound together, we prefer avoiding any discussion of death and do our best to masquerade its occurrence. On the other hand, when we confront our mortality we enter into the larger, more important question as to how then ought we to live?

We may not have an an answer to the riddle of cancer in our lifetime, but we can defy it with courage and living out our destiny with human sympathy and loving kindness, indulging in each new day as unique in its capacity to enthrall with the cornocupia of life.

–rj

On finding a new booklist quarry

I confess I’m addicted to booklists. No sooner do I finish one book, but I’m into another.

What surprises me is that I can’t remember anyone in my family serving as a role model when I was a child, either reading to me or picking-up a book for themselves, with the exception of the late intervention of my eldest brother, David, recently discharged from the army after WWII and anticipating college under the newly inaugurated GI Bill.

One night before David left for the University of Miami, he gave me my first book, Huckleberry Finn. I still remember the occasion–eight years old, sprawled out on the floor of our Philly tenement, absorbed so fully in this really good book that it muffled the adjacent Front Street el with its interminable trains, dutifully groaning past our rattling windows every fifteen minutes.

Soon I discovered the Montgomery County Library. I didn’t mind walking the two miles, knowing what lay up ahead. It was one of those supreme pleasures like feasting on a well-stacked hoagie or downing a cold strawberry ice cream soda on humid summer Philly nights; maybe I even liked it as much as playing stick ball every day against the factory facades lining our streets.

Books gave me refuge in a home torn apart by alcohol. I became aware of a larger world, where good really did exist, and people could be kind and often courageous. I found heroes like Lincoln, Gandhi, and Gehrig that would become staples in my life. Books transported me to far away places—Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific.

Nearly as important as the library was a humble bookstore on Girard Avenue that I often passed on my way home from Chandler Elementary, filled with used paperbacks. What got my attention were two cardboard boxes piled high with comic books. I gravitated to the one filled with Classic Comics with their graphic renditions and abridged texts of literary fare. The price, five cents, sealed the bargain! I’d “picture” my way through, say, Les Miserables or Treasure Island, then pick-up the hardback version at the library. By the time I was 13, I had read many of the classics, including War and Peace, Moby Dick, and Silas Marner.

As for the many booklists I’ve ransacked through the years to feed my addiction, I’ll just say my favorite has been Brain Pickings, whose cerebral fiber fences it off from the traffic lane of your typical booklist..

For the most part, I shun the New York Times best seller lists, annoyed by their often fad offerings of dubious value other than to entertain or tell how you, too, can cash in and grow healthy, wealthy and wise. A few weeks later, I’d find these books either gone awol or sunk to near oblivion.

Before the Internet opened up our information corridors, I’d reminisce earlier times venturing into a library, losing myself in its stacks, often looking for one book, but emerging with another. Call it serendipity, but the chance encounters I’ve had with library books have often proved fortuitous with surprising consequences.

Take, for instance, one chance venture when I pulled a book off the shelf by an author I’d never heard of. Lucky draw, it turned out to be Thomas Wolfe and his Look Homeward Angel. I was 17 at the time, a homesick GI in Korea resorting to the humble base library to annul slow time. Hooked, in subsequent years I rampaged all of his novels, ultimately enrolling at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Pulpit Hill of Look Homeward Angel.

Books often haunt my mind, ghosts of delightful company with motley heroes, or of vistas spinning new threads of excitement, belief, and desire in conspiracy against the old.

But I’ve found that even the Internet can surprise me. Several days ago, for example, I stumbled upon an extended New York Times Style Magazine series, “My 10 Favorite Books,” edited by Aaron Hicklin.

Hicklin edits a magazine called Out and recently opened up a bookstore called One Grand Books in Narrowsburg, NY. In a clever ploy to attract readers, he’s come up with the idea of asking well-regarded people from various walks of life what ten books they’d want to have with them were they marooned on a desert island. Each listing would feature annotated entries explaining their choices or how these books came to shape their lives.

Hicklin doesn’t want just another bookshop, a dubious business venture in this age of online behemoths like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but a resource for discriminating readers to find books of substance readily.

As I write, contributors to “My 10 Favorite Books” include, among many others,

What’s nifty here is how when you select a contributor you get a cascading menu of ten annotated preferences. In short, each menu constitutes a sub-booklist in the series. Amazingly, very little overlap occurs among contributor choices, yet each listing is profoundly discriminating.

Absent from the list are two writers I’m unfamiliar who intrigue me for their choices, since they complement my own interests–artist Terence Koh and author, Brett Easton Ellis–the former for his love of Eastern thought with its subdued nuances in a sound byte world; the latter, in sharing tastebuds with me for writers like Tolstoy and Flaubert.

Hicklin, by the way, keeps an online blog, onegrandbooks, that provides you with an archive of previous contributors and a weekly focus on a current contributor, sparing you the cumbersome difficulty of finding each series individually online. You can even sign-up for his weekly newsletter and have your purchased item shipped conveniently to your doorstep.

I hope Hicklin’s venture succeeds. It’s a brave new world out there

Meanwhile, I’m on safari, exploring panoramas of infinite sweep_better because unanticipated, by way of my new booklist quarry.

–rj

Apple vs. the FBI: How Money May Decide the Issue

Things are really heating up these days in the ongoing dispute between Apple and the FBI.

In December, fourteen people were killed by ISIL sympathizers Farook Malik and his wife Taskeen, in San Bernardino, CA. In the aftermath, the FBI has been investigating the possibility they may have had accomplices. Backed by a court order, the FBI has requested Apple remove the security blocks on Farook’s iPhone.

CEO Tim Cook, speaking for Apple, refuses to comply, contending it would compromise the privacy of its smartphone users.

I’m not taking sides on the controversy here. The issue is as heated as it is complicated, with the country divided in its opinion and perhaps SCOTUS inevitably having to make the call.

What does concern me is Apple’s new strategy to move the matter to the Congress for adjudication. (Hearings begin next Tuesday.)

Fact is, the Congress is hardly the right party to decide the issue, given the systemic corruption fostered by business conglomerates soliciting favors through huge sums of money donated to its members.

We see this, for example, with regard to the National Rifle Association (NRA), successfully preempting responsible gun legislation, despite myriad mass shootings like those in San Bernardino,.

In 2014, NRA contributions to members of Congress amounted to $984,152 with an additional $3,360,000 for lobbying.

What really fries my brain is that it spent a whopping $28, 212,718 in outside spending!

Apple, as such, is being disingenuous in attempting to shift the scenario to the Congress, having demonstrated a lengthy penchant, like its fellow high tech icons, in substantially contributing to the Congressional feedbag, their mission to deter any regulatory legislation that would rein them in. In other words, a good many Congressional members owe them favors and now’s an opportune time to collect and circumvent the courts.

Since 1990, Apple has contributed $1,902,870 and spent $27,083,008 on lobbying.

Bernie Sanders was right when he denounced PAC money contributions as undermining our democratic franchise: “People aren’t dumb.” These donors don’t give willy-nilly, but expect something in return.

On the other hand, even Bernie has had his hand in the till, ranking second among senators in receiving money from Apple and its employees.

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Now let’s see how the system filters out elsewhere. The most prominent Democrat opposing Apple on the issue is Diane Feinstein. Guess what? You’ll find her absent from the list of top recipients of money from Apple and its allies that include Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. These conglomerates are not about to waste their money on those opposing their interests.

In third world countries, we’d call it bribery.

In the U. S. Congress, many are willing to take the bribe.

–rj

Bibliography:

OpenSecrets.org

IVN

Brimmings: Five Years and Counting

journaling I’ve been keeping my blog, Brimmings, for five years now, never realizing when I began that I would pursue it for so long, initially undertaking it to assuage my wrestlings with serious illness at the time, or as diversion from anxious self-preoccupation, for liberating reflection of a wider scope. When we let loose our moorings, we sail into discovery.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised I’ve persisted beyond that troubled time, now seemingly in remission, enjoying new strength, gathered insight and, undoubtedly, an incipient awareness of life’s essentials in foraging out its meaning.

There has been the joy of Nowness, enriched by moments of solitude, yielding an increased awareness of how interconnected all of us are, bundled in impermanence, and more: of a wider empathy gleaned from that solitude affordng reflection, assuring me that it isn’t how long we live, but how well.

As for the writing, like music and painting, there exists that longevity beyond ourselves that with good fortune we may share with others in another time and place, perhaps bringing not only sobered reflection, but comfort and healing as well.

It doesn’t matter to me how many read Brimmings. If nothing else, it has taken on the hue of an inner dialogue, often between mind and heart, with no clear winner.

And so I continue.

Peace.

–rj

Macdonald’s H is for Hawks: Finding Passage

The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade turning up things you had forgotten, surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.
–Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald with her goshawk, Mabel, near Cambridge, England, 2007

I’ve finished reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and want to weigh in on it like someone who’s just dined gourmet and relishing the deed, must boast his good fortune.

I was attracted to Macdonald’s memoir because of its critical esteem in those bastions of literary prowess like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, which often ration praise and, even then, not without censure.

H is for Hawk has won two prestigious book awards as well: The Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction and Costa Book Award for best book in any genre.

This is Macdonald’s fifth book.

She teaches and does research at Cambridge University. Her interests include not only falconry, but history and poetry (3 published collections).

Macdonald’s memoir tells the story of her depression following the unexpected death of her father, Alistair MacDonald (2007), a longtime photographer and journalist for the Daily Mirror, and her resorting to falconry to relieve her grief.

This isn’t the first occasion we’ve seen a book testifying to the ability of animals to uplift troubled humans, but may well be among the best. In venturing into the first several pages, I knew immediately I’d be keeping company with a masterpiece.

Macdonald’s training of a goshawk provided a means of continuity with her father, an ardent plane spotter and bird enthusiast, who also taught her patience, a primary motif contributing to her healing and integral to harvesting nature’s plenitude::

My father’s talk of patience had held within it all the magic that is waiting and looking up at the moving sky.

But Macdonald’s memoir is not your romp into a Wordsworthian nature, benevolent and moral. Mabel kills her prey, suddenly and savagely, or like those artifacts of the human world, airplanes, which link the human and the natural; and yet, even then, there is a vital difference separating the two, with the balance favoring nature:

In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.

The writing itself is magnificent in its artfully composed sentences resonant with observation and chiseled detail of landscape and of her travails in training her goshawk, Mabel, and, most of all, in its poignant psychological journey of retreat from the human community and, ultimately, return to its renewed embrace.

Her memoir is also interlaced with T. H. White’s works, renowned for their Arthurian themes and with his The Goshawk (1951) in particular.

White, who lacked experience, had earlier attempted to train a goshawk, only to fail. Macdonald, however, didn’t suddenly take up the hobby or, more precisely, being an austringer (i.e., a hawk trainer), having previously trained peregrines, merlins, and kestrels:

While the steps were familiar, the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life.

Although MacDonald identifies in many ways with White, who becomes a projection and touchstone of her own anguished struggle to evade life’s seemingly malevolent caprice, she fortunately finds her way past his psychological morass.

As I grew happier his presence receded, his world more and more distant from mine.

Like White I wanted to cut loose from the world, and shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.

Unlike White, she learns that “hands are for other human hands to hold. The wild is not a panacea for the human soul. Too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.”

–rj

My first attempts at meditation

RELAX
Recently I completed a 28-day online course in Zen meditation from a Buddhist source, not that I’m thinking of becoming a Buddhist, but because I’m drawn to its spirituality, virtually absent in current secular approaches such as the wildly popular Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBDT) approaches.

I think meditation doesn’t have to be a long, drawn out affair to reap its many benefits. After all, everyday people have been doing it in varied formats across a myriad of traditions and cultures for some 2500 years.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Like playing a musical instrument or learning a new language, you can get to the rudiments fairly quickly, but doing well at it takes practice.

I struggle with my rebellious mind, as we all do with meditation, and its serpentine twists that take me anywhere and everywhere,

It helps, however, that Zen teaches me to be self-forgiving. It’s not really a matter of emptying my mind, but more of allowing it to have its say without imposing judgment or indulging it, conjuring up regrets about the past or anxieties about the future.

When I do this, meditation liberates me from the burden of my attempts to impose control. I see more objectively and don’t personalize disappointment or hurt. I know that my thoughts aren’t really me and that like the clouds, they come and go. I won’t let them chart my course.

When I meditate, I don’t sit cross-legged on a floor or on a bench, The edge of my bed does just fine in the early morning darkness, my back and neck straight, leaning slightly forward.

If my mind wanders, as it always does, I simply return to my breathing, sometimes counting my breaths.

I’m far from being where I want to be, but it’s become easier than when I began, and feeling more relaxed, I’m more eager to continue.

It’s been five weeks now and I’ve not missed a day, though for even better results, I need to do it twice daily for at least 20-minutes a session.

I like it that I can take mindfulness with me throughout my day, practicing awareness in my eating, or sensing my body rhythms; observing the details that compose those I encounter and listening to them acutely; and best of all, in a cosmos often replete with suffering, gaining an empathy for others–not just for humanity–but for the whole sentient world.

Zen informs me of the interconnectedness of all things in a temporal context; consequently, the imperative of my seizing the moment and extracting its goodness. It cautions me about the unhappiness that comes from my cravings.

Meditation has become a game-changer for me; and if it can work for me, bent over with worry in a world I can’t control, then just maybe it will work for you.

–rj

Saving Spring’s Envoys: Our Vanishing Birds

migratorybirds We take for granted that birds in the millions returning from their winter feeding grounds in Central and South America will make it back to nest and mate in our yards each spring.

The rude reality, however, paints a scenario of thinning numbers as their habitat continues to give way to human incursion; wetlands get drained; toxic sprays are employed; and GMO agriculture reduces the insects on which many birds feed. Lamentably, up to 4 billion birds are killed by outdoor cats annually. (No typo here.)

And then there’s climate change.

If this scenario continues, we may well see a world devoid of birds and with their disappearance, our own.

Birds do a lot for us:

pollinate plants
disperse seed
consume carrion
recycle nutrients
control insect numbers

Birds do all of this and more, along with providing many of us city folk with a rare contact with nature.

Sadly, fewer of them are completing their already perilous journey, often of several thousand miles, transversing oceans and mountains, to keep company with us every spring.

In one of nature’s greatest marvels, birds don’t require a compass to make their way to where they were born or to their winter habitat.

Guided by the stars, they know North from South. Alert to the sun’s position in daylight, they can discern East from West.

They also intuit the distance they must fly.

Appropriately, migratory birds fly mostly at night, keeping their bodies cool, since their tiny hearts, beating 500 times per minute, generate heat.

Regrettably, their indwelling “magnetic compass” doesn’t always serve them well in a modern world with its tapestry of burgeoning cities filled with light that produces a celestial jamming resulting in their disorientation, exhaustion and death as they unwittingly fly into multi-story buildings, leaving a deadly debris come morning.

With urban sprawl come media towers, like buildings, illuminated nightly to pre-empt airplane collisions. Each year, some 6.8 million birds perish in collision with cell and radio towers and their guy lines.

In a recent summation of studies, researchers found that 63% of bird casualties in the U. S. and Canada are small birds of 156 species, some on the endangered list.

If this isn’t enough, our bird friends face other ominous threats to their survival from our newer technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels integral to our need for renewable, clean energy resources.

This led to the Obama administration, normally on cue with environmental priorities, initiating a federal “permission slip” allowing for wind farms to kill up to 30 bald and golden eagles annually under 30-year permits, despite it’s being against existing law protecting these species, one of which is our national icon.

As I write, I’m happy to learn that our government’s connivance didn’t sit well in a California court, which demanded an impact study. Two weeks ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service dropped its appeal to reinstate the policy.

How bad can wind farms be for birds? A recent California study estimated that up to 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats are killed annually in thar state alone!

Wind turbines now account for 5% of our energy and continue to proliferate, with more than 15,000 presently in service. The death toll must be staggering!

But solar farms also pose another lethal threat to birds, singing, crippling and killing them. Unfortunately, birds often mistake reflective panels for water bodies. Some of these solar farms can be gargantuan in their expanse, with one solar farm in Riverside County, California occupying 4400 acres.

We’re unsure just how many birds solar farms kill, but we believe it to be a considerable number. In a recent investigation, the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory recovered 233 birds from three California desert facilities. Many birds literally catch fire on contact with solar panels.

The problem is complex with the need to find new energy sources that don’t pollute and are renewable and yet protect our birds. But we can do more to assure their well-being by demanding impact studies before wind turbines and solar panels come on line.

We can also advocate they not be located in migratory pathways.

We can power down our city lights. A lighted New York City skyline may be spectacular viewing late at night, but it’s a death threat to birds. Cities like Toronto, one of North America’s most progressive cities, supported by the public, has been doing so for years.

We can support preservation of bird habitat such as wetlands and creation of new ones.

I like how Peter Dunne, the director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, has put it: “Without birds, nature would lose its most engaging envoys,” to which I would add that their demise would seal not only their fate, but ours.

–rj

Good News for Elephants!

ele542106059-1024x683 CNN reported yesterday that Hong Kong, the world’s largest retail market for ivory, will phase out ivory sales over the next eighteen months and impose severe penalties on those engaging in smuggling and trading of endangered species.

Certainly this is good news! Chinese demand for ivory has long been the primary stimulus to the slaughtering of African elephants, presently an estimated 30,000 annually.

It’s so bad that poaching even outstrips the numbers of elephants being born, which if it continues over the next several decades, will result in these intelligent and emotional creatures vanishing forever.

As just one example, in 1970 Kenya counted 70,000 elephants. That number has dwindled to 38,000.

In 2013, 20,000 elephants were killed across Africa, either through poaching or trophy enthusiasts.

Exacerbating the crisis threatening not only elephants but other exotic wildlife that includes lions and rhinos has been the rise of warlords and terrorists such as the Lord’s Resistance Army and Boku Haram who wantonly prey upon wildlife to finance still more weapon purchases with which to terrorize their fellow Africans.

In all of of this, America is not without blame. The truth is that we are up to our neck in the ivory trade, or second to China in ivory imports, abetted by U.S. law that allows ivory into the country for non-commercial use.

Big game hunters like the dentist who killed Cecil, the Zimbabwe lion, receive fervent support from the powerful NRA, which constitutes one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies. The NRA also backs the large trade in guns with ivory-inlaid stocks.

If the United States along with China, including Hong Kong, were to shut their doors to ivory imports, then our elephant friends would indeed face much better odds.

To bring this about, you and I must never give-up the struggle, converting words into deeds such as liaising with members of Congress, writing op-eds, encouraging corporate giving, and not least, opening up our wallets as well as our hearts to donating what we can to support those frontline organizations (e.g., African Wildlife Foundation and World Wildlife Federation) attempting to bring this cruel carnage to its rightful end.

–rj

Why I Relish Going to the Gym

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For many of us, throwing off the blankets and crawling out of bed on cold winter mornings to go to the gym seems pretty dumb.

I felt that way too until my pre-diabetic diagnosis several years ago which meant that if I didn’t do something about it, I might well succumb to full-blown diabetes with its many lethal complications that include heart disease, kidney failure, blindness and even limb amputation.

Still, I didn’t do anything about it until a chiropractor friend had me do a full blood workup that showed I had moved even closer to diabetes with an A1c of 5.9 and ominous glucose average of 123. If you get to 125, you’ve got the disease, for which there’s no cure, only management.

Now, fifteen month later, I’ve gotten the A1c down to 5.2. The A1c tests your blood for glucose management over the previous two to three months. The pre-diabetic range is 5.7-6.4. In short, I’m no longer pre-diabetic.

How did I do it? Quite plainly, by cutting carbs and exercising regularly.

Exercise is good for you no matter what ails you or–if you’re an outlier–from nothing at all, promoting good health, better sleep, stress reduction, more energy, and self-esteem. What’s nicer than people commenting on how good you look?

But let me add to these verities several other reasons exercise has become a mainstay of my daily regimen.

Personally, I can wax euphoric at the gym like this morning walking my fourteen laps (2 miles), with Herbie Hancock’s pulsating jazz rhythms funneling into my ears via my wireless headset, making me pump my arms still more vigorously.

I like, too, the camaraderie going to the gym gives me, a sense of being part of a group. I see many of these people regularly, of both sexes and of all ages and body types. On occasion, we say our hellos or share smiles and sometimes conversation. Call it tribalism. I like the feeling.

I admire many I see at the gym for the obviously hard work they put into their workouts, whether pumping weights, walking raised treadmills or elliptical machines, or doing stair-steppers, etc. I see the payoffs in their lithe bodies with muscular arms, wide shoulders, and developed pecs. I know it didn’t come easily. Many of them exercise before going to work. No wonder they inspire me.

But I also get a sense of personal satisfaction, or of time well spent. Call it a relish in self-discipline: I haven’t surrendered to the couch or big screen TV. I take pride in that, knowing my former tendency to both procrastinate and be downright lazy.

Every session becomes a moral lesson, and I remember what my high school track coach told me: “We all get stiches in our side. The good runner, win or lose, ignores the stich, holding out for the second wind that propels him to the finish line.” Today, I resisted cutting my four sets of curls to three. I like to think such lessons learned at the gym can help me better cope with life at large.

And then there’s that sense of jubilation in sharing my good news with my dear wife that today I did 70 sit-ups. Just a few months ago, I could barely do 25!

The Chinese have this wonderful saying that “the longest journey begins with the first step.” In going to the gym, I’ve taken more than one step now and I’m eager to do infinitely more in the climb to good health and the contentment it confers.

–rj

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