A study reported on by two University of Toronto researchers suggests that while hearing news about an organic or environmentally-friendly  product may lead consumers to act more altruistically, actually purchasing them is associated with more subsequent cheating and stealing and environmental bad-behavior than the purchase of conventional products.

Based on two experiments and a survey of recent literature on the subject, Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong conclude  "...that virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviors".  They say.".. our studies suggest that social and ethical acts may contribute to a more general sense of moral self than previously thought, licensing socially undesirable behaviors in distant domains."

I interpret this as meaning that if I buy a green product, I subconsciously do a mental calculation that says I've built up moral credit and can "spend" it on some form of self-indulgence or cheating at a later time, including increasing my carbon footprint or otherwise polluting. At best, each green purchase includes an added incentive to laziness; at worst, it encourages environmental "sins".

Georges Monbiot, writing in the Guardian has read the study and  concludes that plain old fashioned guilt-tripping may do more actual environmental good than the feel-good approach used in much green marketing. He thinks, and I have to agree, that collective action through government (or possibly mass civil disobedience) is necessary, and that consumer choice by itself will not have a net positive effect on CO2 emmissions or related sustainability issues.

My radio station requires me to give "public service announcements" (PSAs) every hour, and most of the ones available in the studio are provided by industry groups promoting their pet nonprofit projects in order to boost their public image or their bottom line. The environmental messages tend to urge us to buy efficient lightbulbs, recycle plastic, buy new more-efficient cars, etc. If all this consumerism is worse than useless, and if what is really needed is concerted efforts to force government action, we would have to write and record the PSAs ourselves, because the well-funded industry lobbies have no intention of getting that message out. Maybe I should produce some... hmmm.

Tags: co2, green marketing, morality, public service announcements
Current Music: John Kirkpatrick - George Fox - John Kirkpatrick | Powered by Last.fm

Some friends of Arnie Alpert mixed sound from the recording I posted earlier with photos from the book and made a nice YouTube video that summarizes Claudette Colvin's story.

Tags: afsc, civil rights, claudette colvin

At the weekly peace vigil in Peterborough NH, on October 24, 2009, I set up a little exhibition about the need to get the atmosphere down to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide, as part of http://www.350.org 's International Day of Climate Action.
I posted it as a video at Youtube
The music is a shortened version of the song "Have a Global Warming Day" from the freely-reusable song archive "Ourmedia" at archive .org (http://www.archive.org/details/Have_A_Global_Warming_Day) . We wrote the numerals "350" using 350 pennies.( Read more... )

Tags: 350, 350.org, global warming, international day of climate action

My cousin Paul Dayton of San Diego and his nephew Peter from Colorado visited briefly and helped me sort out some of the bins of old papers from the attic. We found some of my mother's original notes and transcriptions from her Yaqui Myths and Legends project in the 1930's and some evidence Paul wants to use to prove that my father's theory about the "Old Whaling Culture" was correct (there is apparently some unbelievably mean "debunking" being done these days, in which young archaeologists are calling him a liar, and Paul, having been present at some of the discoveries in question was looking for evidence to counter this). We also found a lot of other stuff, including [my mother] Bets's diary from April to June 1946, which is sort of a "prequel" to the McKenzie River diary I have been transcribing elsewhere in this LiveJournal blog. Some of this will be sposted in coming days/weeks, but to start off with, here is a photo of Dad (J. Louis Giddings) seated by a pile of mammoth bones, probably taken in 1949 in the vicinity of Cape Denbeigh, Alaska. I guess that makes him a mammoth hunter, since he was hunting for the remains of the mammoths and their human killers a few millenia after they died.

Tags: alaska, archaeology, family photos
Current Music: Josephine Foster - Trust In The Unexpected | Powered by Last.fm

The BBC recently published an article entitled What Happened to Global Warming?

The article discusses the paradoxical fact the 1998, not last year, was the warmest year on record. The article attributes this fact to the complexity of the earth's climatic system, in which some long-term cycles in solar radiation and oceanic circulation are leading to cooling while other long-term trends (including CO2 pollution) are leading to heating. Meteorology is complex, but emphasizing these countervailing trends in the mass media at this time in history is potentially very harmful, because most of us are not climate scientists and there is a powerful political/economic interest group trying to convince us that global warming is not happening or is not caused by human actions and therefore should not be combatted by reducing the burning of CO2-emitting fuels. All the article really says is that there are countervailing trends, and that for a couple of decades the undeniable warming trends may (may, not will) be masked by them.


The vast majority of the world's scientists now agree that the carbon-dioxide content of the earth's atmosphere is steadily increasing, year after year, that the human emission of CO2 is the dominant cause of the increase (the increase, not all of it), and that dramatic effects are already being felt. There is agreement that a 4 degree celsius (seven plus degree fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures can be expected by 2060, and that the effects of this will mean the loss of most glaciers and the flooding of many densely-populated coastal regions, not to mention changes in meteorological patterns that humans have depended on for centuries. The United States Congress and the nations that will gather in Copenhagen must not use this kind of popular science reporting to delay urgently-needed action on climate change.

I urge us all to read the valuable and inspiring messages coming from all over the world at 350.0rg
and to remember to take the advice of the coal and oil barons with considerably more than a grain of salt. Let's get the Earth's carbon burden back below 350 parts per million before this powerful trend becomes irreversible.

Tags: 350.org, blogactionday, global warming

On Saturday night, Denise and I joined a large (for New Hampshire) crowd at the American Friends Service Committe's New Hampshire Celebration of Youth Activism. It was an inspiring event and, with the help of Steve Diamond of WSCA., I obtained recordings of all the speakers. The theme of the gathering was that young activists can and do make a difference, and to prove the point, the Committee invited Claudette Colvin, a 70-year-old woman who, as a teenaged high school student changed the world by taking a courageous spontaneous action to end Jim Crow segregation on the bus system of Montgomery, Alabama. You may say, "...but that was Rosa Parks, not some kid named Claudette Colvin. I've never heard of her before."

Rosa Parks' action in refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white person was anything but spontaneous. Parks was a practical activist who planned her action months in advance in collaboration with lots of other committed adults. Claudette, on the other hand, was a black high-school student who had been studying history and understood first-hand the twin weights of Jim Crow segregation and patriarchy that black girls faced every day in the US South in the 1950s. Hers was a split-second decision to defy the establishment alone. She said she felt the weight of Sojourner Truth pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman pushing down on the other, keeping her in that seat when a young white woman approached to take it.

Along with Colvin, Phillip Hoose, author of a powerful biography of Colvin, had been  invited to introduce her and give some of the background. I recommend listening to both these talks. I have posted them at  communications.uml.edu/connections/ , where you can listen to and/or download all the audio from the conference.


In this blog, I also want to talk about my subconscious reaction to the talk. I dreamed that Colvin had attended the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where I work, and that I had been asked to drive her to the airport. In the dream, I was driving her in a large black car which she had once owned. and while we rode together, she carried on an amazing conversation (which I have forgotten unfortunately) that left me with the impression that she was one of the great artists, thinkers and poets of our time, even though only a few friends knew her and shared discourse with her. I think my right brain was trying to tell me that this encounter was important - that it must not be forgotten. My impression in the dream was that she had gone on to be a scholar

Reading from Hoose's book the following day, I learned that she had worked as a nurse's aide in New York City until she retired. The reason her name did not become prominent in history books was seemingly that, shortly after her civil disobedience, she became pregnant by a light-skinned black man who did not marry her. The pregnancy and the light-skinned baby made her a kind of "kryptonite" to the civil rights movement leaders, who were exceedingly concerned with appearing unimpeachably pure. She did later sign on, at the urging of those same leaders, as a plaintiff in the court case that ultimately led to desegregation of all bus systems in the  US.

________
A related post is at www.the-savvy-sista.com/2009/02/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette.html
________
PS, I can also highly recommend Hoose's thoughtful, funny book for young people on the subject of violence and oppression Hey Little Ant

Tags: civl rights, claudette colvin, feminism, nonviolence, phillip hoose
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The show before mine on WUML, the Wednesday edition of "The Morning Driveby", specializes in conspiracy theories, but during October it takes a detour into the world of monsters, and this morning's topic was zombies. The show's co-hosts invited me to sit in on the discussion. I said I don't know anything about zombies, but they said that was all right.

After a brief discussion of zombie taxonomy (running zombies versus walking zombies: I said that rigor mortis would make it hard for zombies to run or walk and that they probably floated above the ground without moving any appendages), the discussion turned to the literary genre of the "zombie apocalypse" in which zombies are in the process of taking over the world by converitng all human beings into zombies. The show's co-hosts started talking about how they would protect themselves from zombies in such a situation, tjheir ideas ranging from barricading themselves in the dorm to obtaining medieval armaments. I asked if, since zombies are already dead, they can ever be stopped, and they told me that everybody knows a zombie can only be killed by removing its brain from its body.

"How do people become zombies?" I asked. Zombism is actually a virus, as everybody but me seems to know. Since viruses mutate, one can expect the form of zombies to be ever-changing. After they read two public-service announcements, about H1N1 flu and poverty, I posed the question whether there might be a good side to zombism; perhaps it is a cure for poverty, since once a person becomes a zombie he or she doesn't have to eat anymore and is perfectly happy to live outdoors. In fact, I speculated that zombies might be truly happy since they didn't have needs, goals or aspirations anymore. The others agreed, "Maybe being a zombie is like being in Heaven!" Maybe the Bible talks about zombies... was Lazarus a zombie? What about Jesus? Both came back from the dead.

And why are you always assuming you want to fight zombies and zombism to the bitter end? Maybe the best response to a zombie apocalypse is to walk calmly out among the zombies and accept your fate. Or maybe passing for a zombie would work? Why all the violence and defensiveness?

If zombies die when they can't feed on brains of living human victims, and this seems to be the case in most zombie apocalypses that get very far, zombism is not sustainable; it fouls its own nest and uses up its only food source. I said that vampirism seemed more sustainable, with vampires being careful to keep an adequate blood supply around. The main disadvantage of being a vampire would seem to be having to do harm to fellow creatures in a state of full (or heightened) consciousness, unlike the  mindless zombie whose behavior stems from the microorganism that has taken over his/her body. When I contrast the state of being immortal but completely dependent on consciously causing suffering to others with that of being mindlessly destructive and invincible, I might choose the latter.

In fact, I don't choose either. How does it happen that the fantasy life of so many people in our culture runs to this kind of paradoxical dead end, fighting valiantly to the end against insuperable odds against evil and  invincible foes that do not fear death.
 

Tags: apocalypse, radio, zombies

It's been a fairly stressful week, with the release of the new version of the "Weave" software. There were constant demands on time and blows to ego (not soul-blows, but fairly painful nonetheless). When I woke up this morning and remembered a dream, the awareness suddenly dawned that I have not remembered one for at least a month.

I was at the Sells (Arizona) powow on the Papago reservation with Denise. There was a fiddler playing a one-stringed fiddle. There was a ride on a ferris wheel,  then we were testing out a new model of compact porta-potty that folds up into a 2x2x2 foot cube. There were maybe seven of them lined up behind our car, and we needed to unfold each one, step inside it, and then fold it back up. While we were doing that three kids, two girls and a boy, crept into our car and pretended to be driving it. When they noticed us, they asked us to take them home, somewhere nearby, not far. We agreed, and when we got to the house, we were greeted by a loud-voiced woman who seemed to be the children's mother. We asked her how her kids got to be so brave and she took us out-back and showed us a fireplace. She said she hated to do them any harm, but she had built a magical fire and had the kids walk through it. It made them fearless. She said all kids must be fearless now, because there are so many frightening things they will see.

Last Wednesday I and my Salvadoran radio co-host received loud angry (male-voiced, untraceable) telephone death threats, were cursed at ,and were called terrorists for advocating positions that I think are relatively mild and rational: things like advocating pension reform to restore the benefits that were lost to US workers with the Reagan-era attack on defined-benefit plans, and saying that the US military presence in Afghanistan is counterproductive and should be ended. Similarly loud and angry threats have been made routinely by right-wing opponents of health insurance reform in the last few weeks. It made me think about free speech, who has it and how much.

Code Pink had announced that it planned radical and creative protests outside the G20 talks in Pittsburgh, while the world was watching. THe ACLU sued and won their right to be there. Then it seemed as if the world stopped watching. I became very curious about what's going on in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on the perimiters of the G20 meeting, and finally got an eyewitness report from singer-songwriter and activist Dave Rovics who was on the scene. Since he encourages us to repost it, I'm taking him up on his offer. Yesterday, I heard that similar high-intensity noise weapons were being used in both Pittsburgh and Honduras and saw some intriguing video of people running down the street with their hands over their ears.

Well, here's an eyewitness report from the American martial law zone:

Note: Please feel free to post and distribute this essay wherever you see fit. No permission needed.

The Police Are Rioting
Reflections on Pittsburgh
by David Rovics

If any elements of the corporate media have been paying any attention to what's been happening on the streets of Pittsburgh over the past few days I haven't noticed, so I thought I'd write my own account.

There is a popular assumption asserted ad nauseum by our leaders in government, by our school text books and by our “mainstream” media that although many other countries don't have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly – such as Iran or China – we do, and it's what makes us so great. Anybody who has spent much time trying to exercise their First Amendment rights in the US now or at any other time since 1776 knows first-hand that the First Amendment looks good on paper but has little to do with reality.
( Read more... )

Tags: economic policy, free speech, g20, police, politics, us

The Brandywine tomato crop at our CSA farm didn't make it this year, due to the "Irish Potato Famine" blight and the unusually soggy Summer, but on Sunday, someone brought a basket full of them to Meeting to share. I confess I ate a little more than my fair share. When I took this picture, there were still a few left.


This is a time of year to savor, and it is such a shame that my (and everybody's around me) work life insists that we stay inside and worry in front of a computer screen instead of going out and sitting under a tree to eat a ripe tomato and feel the wind on our skin.


( Video and more pictures below )

Tags: autumn, basket, quaker, tomato
Current Location: New Hampshire
Current Music: The Apple Bough