Please call 413.650.3915 or email me at info@biocitizen.org, if you have any questions about our summer camp. I’ll be checking in daily.

Matane!
(“see you”)

An excellent article in the New York Times explains:

In a recent study, Marc Berman, a researcher in cognitive psychology and industrial engineering at the University of Michigan, …. validate[d] attention-restoration theory (A.R.T.), a 20-year-old idea that posits a stark difference in the ability of natural and urban settings to improve cognition. Nature, A.R.T. holds, increases focus and memory because it is filled with “soft fascinations” (rustling trees, bubbling water) that give those high-level functions the leisure to replenish, whereas urban life is filled with harsh stimuli (car horns, billboards) that can cause a kind of cognitive overload. In Berman’s study, the nature-walkers showed a dramatic improvement while the city-walkers did not, demonstrating nature’s significant restorative effects on cognition.

Thinking Outside

Take a look at our teaching philosophy and you’ll see: we do exactly what the article describes.

After fifteen years of teaching outdoors, I can assure you Dr. Berman is correct. After five days of learning environmental history in the field, your child will experience **significant restorative effects** in their cognitive abilities.

Perhaps you are keeping your thermostat down in an effort to save some $$. This change in your “inhabitation” reduces the pollution you make. It also causes your body to adapt to the cold, forcing blood into the capillaries just below your skin’s surface. This, in turn, makes you more comfortable when you’re outside in the cold; you can handle it.

I’ve been thinking about this, in part, because I’ve been watching lots of Japanese movies in preparation for a research trip to Kyoto I’ll be undertaking in March. (I’m really interested in Shintoism.) In all those great Kurosawa movies, like Yojimbo and Ran, you see how simple and clean—and cold—their inhabitations were. Before WWII, Japanese homes were built with little insulation; yet, in all the research I’ve done, I haven’t found any record of Japanese people complaining about the cold. It makes me wonder if coldness is a cultural construction.

The Yahgan people of the Cape Horn region of Chile used to live naked along the shores of the Beagle Channel, for example. Now that’s a kind of inhabitation worth pondering—and proof that coldness is determined, largely, by one’s culture.

I wrote this post to get you pondering; check Lloyd’s blog to see the many ways that we inhabit the earth.

living with paper walls

The industrial meat-producing techniques used by factory-farms are accelerating evolutionary transformations in sickness-causing bacteria and viruses: think Swine Flu. The more the factory-farms use pharmaceutical drugs to prevent disease outbreaks, the more drug-resistant bacteria and viruses are being generated:

Pressure rises to stop antibiotics in agriculture

E. coli-tainted beef infects 21 people in 16 states

As the AP article reports, Europe is once again ahead of the US in preventing the poisoning of consumers and the generation of pandemics: “The European Union and other developed countries have adopted strong limits against antibiotics. Russia recently banned pork imports from two U.S. plants after detecting levels of tetracycline that the USDA said met American standards.”

And the reason Europeans are protected is because, in keeping with the precautionary principle, they value human health over pecuniary profit.

Since we in the US value “free market principles” over our health, we have supermarkets stocked with meats that can kill us. And if we do get sick because we ate a cheeseburger, it is our privilege to sue the meat-producer and “prove harm”:

Paralyzed Woman Sues Cargill in E. coli Lawsuit for $100,000,000

Perhaps a rational New Years’ resolution might be: until the FDA and USDA show they are capable of regulating industrial meat-producers, we will avoid factory-farm meat?

After all, if nobody is looking out for you and your loved-one’s health, you have to look out for yourselves:

“Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.”

July
5-9 high schoolers
12-16 high schoolers
19-23 middle schoolers
26-30 high schoolers

Aug
2-6 high schoolers
9-13 high schoolers
16-20 middle schoolers
23-27 high schoolers

Students carry backpacks with reading and writing materials, appropriate clothing, food and a water bottle.

Day One: Walking Westhampton
- introduction to Thoreau’s essay Walking
- streamwalking
- the colonial roads of Mt. Tob

Day Two: Southern Nonotuck
- the dinosaurs of Holyoke
- the microclimates, and unique ecological communities, of Mt. Tom
- the view from Mt. Nonotuck

Day Three: Into the Western Hills
- visiting the William Cullen Bryant homestead and recovering the first American poem, Thanatopsis
- riverwalking

Day Four: Environmental Aesthetics
- discovering Thomas Cole’s The Ox-Bow from the top of Mt. Skinner
- riverwalking
- the open fields of Hadley

Day Five: Northern Nonotuck
- walking the Robert Frost trail to the top of Mt. Toby

Each day, time is set aside for journal writing. Journal entries are shared by students during impromptu, low-pressure group readings, Writers hear their own words, perceive the effect they have on listeners, and develop their style and voice. In the week after camp, students assemble a portfolio of writing the instructor reviews and comments upon.

During this five-day experiential learning adventure students are introduced to:

—fundamental concepts in ecology, including identification of terrestrial and aquatic flora and fauna, bioclimatology, watershed- and soil- systems, and

—landscape aesthetics, focusing those expressed by 19th century writer Henry David Thoreau and artist Thomas Cole, and by contemporary architecture critic James Kunstler

—field journal writing techniques

Our Food and Drug Administration allows cosmetics to be sold and consumed that are not tested for toxicity. In the FDA’s own words:

FDA’s legal authority over cosmetics is different from other products regulated by the agency, such as drugs, biologics, and medical devices. Cosmetic products and ingredients are not subject to FDA premarket approval authority, with the exception of color additives. However, FDA may pursue enforcement action against violative products, or against firms or individuals who violate the law.

Because cosmetic corporations don’t have to get FDA approval to sell their products, “89 percent of all ingredients in cosmetics have not been evaluated for safety by any publicly accountable institution,” says the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

In 2007, the CSC reported that popular lipsticks contain lead. The FDA did its own study and “found lead in all 20 lipsticks it tested, at levels ranging from 0.09 parts per million (ppm) to 3.06 ppm – more than four times higher than the highest lead level of 0.65 reported in the 2007 CSC study.” The CSC’s own research pointed to “L’Oreal, Maybelline and Cover Girl” brands as being the most lead-filled.

Lead is a neurotoxin. Does it belong on your lips?

Why it is there—well, that has to do with our political culture. Cosmetic companies can put toxins into their products with impunity because a product is assumed to be safe until it is proven otherwise. If a person becomes poisoned by the product, it is their burden to prove they have been harmed.

In contrast to our “prove harm” culture, Europeans abide by the “precautionary principle.” The principle is this:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

Their laws and regulations are based on this principle, which is actually an ethic: a recognition of the limits of human powers and (based on that recognition) a self-imposed restraint on behavior. Europeans don’t allow cosmetic makers to put toxins into their products because they value long-term health over short-term profits, says Mark Schapiro, author of “Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power:

the European Union … has actually decided to ban a whole array of these substances, things that cause cancer, mutation of human genes, reproductive damage. So the reason I even know what kind of material is in cosmetics is not because the FDA has told us; it’s actually because the European Union has taken the action to remove that stuff, and they have a list.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the stuff?
MARK SCHAPIRO: The stuff is an array of ingredients that cause—that are determined to cause cancer, that are determined to cause reproductive damage, and that are determined to cause mutation of human genes. They’re called CMRs.
So the European Union actually looked at cosmetics, determined what kind of ingredients are being used, which of them cause—are potential contributors to—it’s important to remember that when I say “caused” because people need to understand how, like, chemicals work. It’s complicated. It’s not like you put lipstick on, and you’re going to get sick. That is not how it works. But we’re talking about an accumulation over life, over the course of your life, over years and years, multiple times repeated, very, very minute amounts over the course of many years. And that’s where the concern lies in many of these substances.

Thanks to an EU law called REACH, American cosmetic manufacturers who want to sell their products in Europe are being forced to account for the toxins in them. If their products are determined to be poisonous by EU standards they will not be sold in Europe.

But why wait for American companies to remove poisons from their beauty ointments. Abide by the precautionary principle—use European or organic cosmetics.

What is the most valuable part of the prairie? The fat black soil, the chernozem. Who built the chernozem? The black prairie was built by prairie plants, a hundred distinctive species of grasses, herbs, and shrubs; by the prairie fungi, insects, and bacteria; by the prairie animals and birds, all interlocked in one humming community of co- operations and competitions, one biota. This biota, through ten thousand years of living and dying, burning and growing, preying and fleeing, freezing and thawing, built that dark and bloody ground we call prairie.

Aldo Leopold, The Round River,
A Sand County Almanac 1949

Last night, I asked my daughters if there is a Greek Myth that accords with Winter Solstice. “Pluto and Persephone!” was the answer my 13-year old gave, after a moment of eye-scrunching agony.

Yes, indeed. Our frigid, whitewashed world appears to be dead—but down there beneath our feet, there is life.

Tomorrow, winter. No turning back.