Iguana Journal

Composting to Lighten our Carbon Footprint

2011-12-30T14:24:00.000-05:00

There are a variety of ways to calculate your carbon footprint. Online calculators ask you for all kinds of information about your household, flights and car use. On carbonfootprint.com they even ask you about food preferences and how much of your waste is recycled. Composting is mentioned in one of the recycling options. However, I think it deserves more prominence if we want to make decisions about how to tread lighter.

I looked around the Internet to find out how much organic waste people produce on average and I found very little information. One survey reported that “households taking part in the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District's Bin & Cone Pilot diverted an average of 345kg (760 lbs.) of food scraps per year,” while the Austrialian government reports that Australians generate an estimated 361 kilograms (794 lbs.) of food waste per person per year or approximately 936 kilograms (2059 lbs.) per household per year. The Environmental Protection Agency in the US asserts that North Americans throw away an average of 214 kg. (474 lbs.) of food scraps per family per year.

In summary:

	Household Food Waste Generation per Year
Source 1: Central Vermont	345 kg.
Source 2: Australia	936 kg.
Source 3: EPA (USA)	214 kg.

These figures are wildly inconsistent, they come from developed nations and I don’t trust surveys about kitchen waste production. Think about it, if somebody asked you how much your daily compostable kitchen waste weighs, what would you say? So, I decided to find out for myself.

I did what any respectable scientist would do: I weighed our compost before taking it to the compost pile every day for six months (May to November, 2011). Here are the results:

	Scoggin Household Food Waste Generation
Average per day	2.64 kg.
Average per week	18.36 kg.
Total for the year	954.80 kg.

Pretty high, no doubt. Six people live in this house, similar to the average Ecuadorian household. Also, I am vegetarian, and we consume a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables. Further, our maid composts all leftovers, and they tend to be pretty heavy. When I say that these figures are high, I am not only comparing them to the reported results from other countries, but also to our neighbors who participate in our community composting project. Based on daily observations, my household contributes approximately one third of all compost to the project, even though seven families participate.

Why are these results significant? According to Wikipedia, Ecuadorians emit 3,090 kg. (6,800 lbs.) of carbon per capita per year, considering all sources of carbon emission (compared to 22,182 kg. per American!) Also, each kilogram of food waste emits the equivalent of 6 kilograms of CO2 in a landfill, under anaerobic conditions, and 0 when it is composted in aerobic conditions.

This means that taking into account only CO2 emissions from food waste, my family saves 5728.80 kg. of equivalent CO2 emissions per year, or 955 kg. per person per year. In other words, my family saves 31% of the average CO2 emissions for Ecuadorians only by composting.

Of course the average Ecuadorian household would save considerably less by composting because of the average diet composition and how much food is consumed at home. But even if it turns out to be 20% or even 15%, the effect of composting on greenhouse gas emissions would still be significant.

The fact that my family saves nearly one third of the average CO2 emissions only by composting deserves attention by any authority keen on making this country greener.

Las Iguanas Landfill

2011-08-13T23:44:00.001-05:00

Recently I took a tour of our local landfill, expecting to find a complete disaster of a place like I saw while I lived in Cali, Colombia. Guayaquil’s landfill, however, is better organized and run than most any other local or national government agency! I couldn’t believe it. I am not going to get into specifics about the landfill in this post, but suffice it to say that I was very surprised at what I saw. Everything in the following video is true!

I learned a lot through the visit. For example, here in Guayaquil recycling is strictly prohibited because there are no recycling trucks, so it makes garbage trucks fall behind their schedules and because informal recyclers make a mess of curbside garbage after rummaging through it all and leaving what they can’t use all over the sidewalk. So, everything goes to a single landfill.

The landfill struggles with two big problems on site. First, is the huge quantities of methane that escapes from the garbage. To deal with this properly, tubes are installed to channel the methane out into the atmosphere because otherwise it accumulates underground and becomes quite explosive.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Significant methane production typically begins after approximately one year of disposal and continues from 10 to 60 years.1 Landfills are the largest source of U.S. methane emissions and emitted ... 37% of total U.S. emissions in 1997 (EPA, 1999).

The other major problem is leachate. This is a liquid produced when rain falls on and moves through garbage and drains off extremely contaminated. It is also produced without rain when organic waste decomposes anaerobically, as you can see whenever you take the garbage out and there is some liquid left at the bottom of your garbage can.

Through a series of pipes and drainage areas made with thick plastic liner, the leachate is channeled to an evaporation pond like the one above where it is supposed to evaporate. Much of the leachate is pumped back up and sprayed over the garbage so that it will evaporate in that process. There is no other way to get rid of it. If it is not collected in this way, it will find its way down into the groundwater and contaminate it at lightening speed. This stuff is so toxic that the guide told me of the hives that broke out all over one worker that accidentally touched it once. This makes me wonder about the composition of the rain that comes out of the clouds formed though its evaporation.

What stayed with me the most is that both of these problems originate either exclusively or mostly from food scraps. Diverting food scraps from landfills would resolve the methane issue completely and reduce leachate production significantly. There are many, many other benefits from doing this that I will look at in depth in later posts.

In “developed” or industrialized countries, food scraps make up approximately 30% of all municipal waste by weight, although in the United States it is much lower at 14.1% as shown in the following figure.

However, in “developing” countries the percentage of landfill made up of food scraps is much higher, making up approximately 60% of all municipal waste. This is true for our local landfill where 56% of the landfill is organic matter.

This makes recycling food scraps a much more significant issue for developing countries like Ecuador. This is one of the reasons that I will now embark on a series of posts about how I have taken steps to contribute to resolving this problem in Guayaquil.

1. http://www.iowadnr.gov/portals/idnr/uploads/waste/ecosec7.pdf

Our Third Harvest!

2011-06-12T19:44:00.001-05:00

I haven't needed to harvest bin 3 until now but it worked out fine because I was able to confirm a hypothesis of mine. I had put too many leaves in to make sure there would be no odors, and that just made everything decompose slower. So, letting it sit longer, I assumed would produce dark, rich humus unlike what we got from previous harvests. We let the first bin sit for 19 weeks, and the second for 20 weeks, while this one had been sitting for 35 weeks since it was filled. It worked! We got loads of perfect humus.

Also, as you will see in the pictures below, we sifted the compost finer this time, which gave us better final results too.

So, the lesson is put fewer leaves in the mix and you won't have to let the compost sit so long. If you put too many leaves in, then let it sit longer. Simple.

Here are some pictures from today's harvest.

Community Composting One Year On

2011-05-24T09:17:00.001-05:00

Our little recycling project has completed its first year of life. It has been the subject of a two-page article in a local newspaper, the topic of a small project for some Master degree students in a local university and the object of two talks to environmental education classes in a local high school. Conversely, it has survived workers stealing the bamboo infraestructure, smear campaigns from neighbors, being associated with an infestation of rats and a long, wet rainy season. After all of this, it seems to be emerging stronger than ever, ready to prosper and grow.

The project languished for about two months when many neighbors associated it with the infestation of rats and as the rains kept the whole place wet and somewhat muddy. During that time, only two families contributed regularly, down from seven during the rest of the year. Then, it occurred to me that instead of fighting their erroneous notion about the rats, it would be better to solve it beyond any doubt and allay their fears.

On the Internet you can find lots of compost projects, but they are all either for one family (in an enclosed bin) or huge, industrial deals inside large areas. Very few are outside, and those are mostly for leaves, cut grass and small branches, with very little kitchen waste. Putting the whole operation within an enclosed area would be too much work and expense. So, I figured that rats only like the fresh stuff and if we could decompose the fresh waste in a closed environment, then they would have no reason to come around. Once it gets hot enough and the waste decomposes beyond recognition, then it can be poured out into the open air bins to be finished.

So, we bought several new garbage bins and drilled holes all around them. The procedure is to fill up one bin with waste and leaves and once it is full (which takes 1 to 3 days), then put the top on it tightly and start filling up the next bin. Once they are all full, then the first one is emptied and it is ready to be filled again. Because there are 7 families participating and we only have 4 bins, each bin stays full for a little over a week until it has to be dumped into the outside compost area. Of course, one week is not quite enough for the kitchen waste to become unrecognizable, so we need more bins. However, during that week, the waste inside each enclosed bin really heats up and the volume is reduced by approximately 30%, so a lot of action takes place in there.

The bins in the back are full and so are waiting their turn to be emptied and filled again.
The grey bin in the foreground is getting filled up.

Here are the 4 spaces for compost.
The second one, where the rake is, is currently being filled up.

This is how the garden area looks now.

This has convinced some of the sceptical neighbors and they are participating once again! With this resolved, I see no reason the project can’t start growing considerably. For this second year, I would like to double the number of families participating (from 7 to 14) and double the amount of kitchen waste and leaves we recycle this year (from 320 to 640 bins). Further, I would like to consider this as a model method for enclosed housing developments around the city and the country. If this idea comes to fruition, I would like to make an introductory video in Spanish, put it up on youtube, and use it to see if other housing developments would be interested in starting small projects. Of course, this is just an idea, we will have to see how things unfold this coming year.

Soon, I will post news about our third compost harvest, about the little vegetable garden that has been started up with our soil and some amazing statistics that I have been compiling about how much kitchen waste is produced in a typical house around here each week and month.

Our First Harvest!

2010-12-03T23:42:00.001-05:00

Aerial view of the project

Lots of exciting things have been happening with our community compost project recently. First among them was that a local newspaper published a two page article about it, detailing how it is a great way to combat contamination and bring neighbors together. I doubt if any of the neighbors read it because very few people read that paper, but I printed a pdf version and spread it around. The neighbors loved it. Then about a week later, our neighborhood got suddenly invaded by rats, big, ugly ones, and everybody jumped to the conclusion that the compost project was to blame! Never mind that the project has been functioning for six months with nary a rat in site. A bunch of neighbors went to the housing development administrator and demanded that he take the whole compost project away immediately and so he hired a truck and the project was doomed! I didn’t even find out about this until the truck was already hired! Of course I called him as soon as I found out and explained to him that the sudden invasion was due to a hole the rats had dug under the wall protecting the housing development and that he had better not take the project away without making a bit more inquiry into the matter. With a little poison the rats disappeared and then I had to win back participants who had jumped ship!

Then a week later we harvested for the first time. We got 14 bins of sifted dirt from the 84 bins of kitchen waste and leaves that went into this first section of the project, which means that the whole deal was reduced by 83% in the process. It really puzzled me that there was no humus, no rich, black dirt. It just looked like a pile of decomposed leaves. This pile had been sitting for 19 weeks, which seems like it should be enough time for humus to form. I think that the mix had too many leaves, too much carbon content, which slows its decomposition time. I admit that I cover the kitchen waste with quite a few leaves every day to make sure the pile is well aerated and clean-smelling. A longer decomposition time is a fair price to pay to make sure the pile smells good. I would not want to give the neighbors any more reasons to complain! In any case, I will try to reduce the waste - leaves ratio as much as possible to get some humus for the next harvest.

When we harvested, we took the dirt around to the participants and gave each one a full bin or two for their potted plants or ornament garden. They loved it and could not believe that their kitchen waste had transformed so much. We even gave some to the lady who led the commission to denounce and eliminate the project, and she gladly accepted it! The whole neighborhood was outside painting the curbs and the driveways, so we really got some positive public relations in right when we needed it most. I hope this will encourage more people to participate.

The next harvest will be put into starting a small community garden, and I am sure that will get more people involved too. So far we have recycled 282 bins of kitchen waste and leaves, which seems like a good start.

Our Community Garden

2010-06-20T20:10:00.000-05:00

Many months ago I mentioned to some of our retired neighbors that they should take advantage of an empty space in the park at the end of our street to start a community garden. They finally hooked a hose up to the faucet there and started planting decorative and fruit-bearing trees pretty randomly around the garden space. When they mentioned that they would soon need planting soil if they wanted to grow vegetables, we devised a composting scheme.

So, we set up a compost area and then put these two bins near it. Kitchen waste gets dumped in the blue bin and then covered by some scoops of dried leaves from the red bin. Once a day I empty the blue bin into the compost area shown below. This photo represents approximately 5 weeks worth of composting.

The sticks you see on top of the compost are dead vines from my maracuya (passion fruit) plant that I put as a first layer to aerate the mix. On top goes the kitchen waste which is then covered with a layer of dry leaves.

The neighbors have done a nice job recruiting other neighbors to recycle their kitchen waste so now there are 7 families participating. Our goal is for ten families to participate so that we can learn how much waste a typical family collects per day, how often they dump their waste and how much that adds up to in all (measured in bins per day). We also have to learn how many dried leaves we can get the housing development gardeners (they prune people’s yards and trees and collect fallen leaves) to take to our garden as they can’t imagine why we would want such "garbage" and so they don’t collaborate very easily. After a few months we hope to have a better idea how it will work so we can get more families involved.

The garden looks like this right now, which is a huge improvement over the gravel-covered barren land that characterizes the rest of the park as you can see in the foreground.

Disintegration

2010-01-04T23:19:00.007-05:00

I took the following pictures to chronicle a physical process that can be highly allegorical. If you look at it from the ocean's perspective, you can see how powerful waves are and how interrelated the sea is with human life. I like to look at it from the boat's perspective, in which a decent boat motor malfunctioned one day and the fishermen had no way to prevent the boat from capsizing. Once it capsized, the fishermen abandoned it completely, leaving it to be beaten by the relentless waves. Sometimes I feel that our sanity is like this. It goes for a minute and people get labeled and abandoned to slowly disintegrate.

Enjoy the pictures, even if you don't feel like interpreting anything beyond what is visible. The original album can be found here.

Tragedy of the Commons (No More)

2009-12-29T10:17:00.012-05:00

Garrett Hardin introduced the concept of Tragedy of the Commons 40 years ago, but it is more relevant now than ever in light of the multiple challenges faced in the recent climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

"Fishing is a classic example of a tragedy of the commons problem. The fish are a common resource, so [from a business perspective] it makes sense to catch as many fish as you can. If you don't, someone else will. As a result, we run out of fish. Everyone makes a rational decision but in the end we all lose."¹

Viewed from an economic perspective, "the individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers."² Of course, the benefits gained by the individual are bittersweet as they lead to problems for the broader community from which that same individual cannot escape.

"Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase [his activity] without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."³

The problems caused by current climate are widely regarded to be among the hardest the world has ever had to confront in large part because they aren’t confined to a place that can be fenced off, nor can they be treated as a regional problem to be solved by a handful of nations. Nor is there a clear technical solution that can be addressed by the natural sciences. Rather, the issue is so complex because it requires a complete rethinking of the two major concepts central to all tragedy of the commons situations: freedom and public administration.

Freedom

Collective temperance, especially if it is mutually agreed upon by the majority of people, has long been considered necessary to generate harmony in society. Temperance comes from understanding a problem and its consequences and voluntarily restraining from an action that may give benefits to the individual, but will harm the collectivity. So, raising consciousness that restricting one’s own freedom will lead to collective well-being seems to be one of the solutions to the tragedy of the commons.

Mr. Hardin argues, however, that this apparent solution will never work. Elaborating on the “Pathogenic Effects of Conscience”, he argues that “appealing to conscious creates a double-bind because people are asked to behave in a way that benefits the collective whole, but condemns them as simpletons who lose out while everybody else ignores their conscious and exploits the use of the commons.”⁴ In other words, if others are over-fishing or polluting, then why shouldn’t I?

“We are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free enterprisers."⁵

Mr. Hardin was right to claim that people will not change their behavior through simple appeals to their conscious. However, what Mr. Hardin did not comprehend is that people will change their behavior once they see how mutualism characterizes the relationship between the individual and the collectivity. In this light, the only benefit for the individual is that which provides maximum benefit for the collectivity.

The philosophical foundation of this concept does not come from any political, economic or technical strand of thought. Rather it originates in a deceptively simple phrase:

"O people of the world, ye are all the fruit of one tree and the leaves of one branch. Walk with perfect charity, concord, affection, and agreement.”⁶

Implications of this statement are profound:

The bedrock of a strategy that can engage the world's population in assuming responsibility for its collective destiny must be the consciousness of the oneness of humankind. … In a letter addressed to Queen Victoria over a century ago, and employing an analogy that points to the one model holding convincing promise for the organization of a planetary society, Bahá'u'lláh compared the world to the human body. There is, indeed, no other model in phenomenal existence to which we can reasonably look. Human society is composed not of a mass of merely differentiated cells but of associations of individuals, each one of whom is endowed with intelligence and will; nevertheless, the modes of operation that characterize man's biological nature illustrate fundamental principles of existence. Chief among these is that of unity in diversity. Paradoxically, it is precisely the wholeness and complexity of the order constituting the human body -- and the perfect integration into it of the body's cells -- that permit the full realization of the distinctive capacities inherent in each of these component elements. No cell lives apart from the body, whether in contributing to its functioning or in deriving its share from the well-being of the whole. The physical well-being thus achieved finds its purpose in making possible the expression of human consciousness; that is to say, the purpose of biological development transcends the mere existence of the body and its parts.⁷

Human consciousness can only be expressed as a result of collective social harmony, not through empty appeals to a higher good. Freedom for a cell in a healthy human body has quite a different meaning than it does for somebody who considers overfishing or polluting rational behavior. Freedom in a commons provides benefits for a collectivity working only within this context.

Public Administration

Because appeals to individual conscious aimed at changing people’s behavior have largely failed due to the lack of a proper philosophical foundation, it has been widely assumed that “the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated.”⁸ Although this may be true in principal within nations able to legislate and enforce rule of law, it has proven false when dealing with climate change and other global issues basically because no effective form of international governance is in place.

Relative failure at the Copenhagen negotiations will directly lead to intolerable human suffering for far too many of the world’s citizens. The fact that the present structure of international law is incapable of preventing such suffering is proof sufficient of its obsoleteness. The current international political structure represents “but a passing phase in the process of human evolution -- a social evolution ‘that has had its earliest beginnings in the birth of family life, its subsequent development in the achievement of tribal solidarity, leading in turn to the constitution of the city-state, and expanding later into the institution of independent and sovereign nations.’" Increasingly frequent attempts at tackling global issues have caused a partial elimination of the national sovereignty of States and “accordingly, humankind appears to be moving towards the establishment of a world commonwealth consisting of: (a) a true world legislature; (b) a binding world tribunal; (c) an effective world executive.”⁹

Humankind is at present living at a special time -- a time of the incubation of a world commonwealth that has as its main purpose the safeguarding of the well-being of all humankind. Such a world commonwealth represents the next step in the evolution of civilization in general, and of international law in particular.¹⁰

“The formation of a future commonwealth will, first of all, require a profound consciousness of the indisputable interdependence of all the nations of the world and the oneness of humankind. Subsequently, a strong, universal animus will be required to act upon this consciousness in order to bring humanity to its next evolutionary stage.”¹¹ The struggle to prevent further global warming, and mitigate its current effects provide a golden opportunity to deepen our understanding of the oneness of humankind and activate this universal animus.

The principle of the oneness of humankind ‘calls for no less than the reconstruction ... of the whole civilized world’ and the recognition of the concept of world citizenship. This pivotal principle does not, however, ‘ignore, nor does it attempt to suppress, the diversity of ethnic origins, of climate, of history, of language and tradition, of thought and habit, that differentiate the peoples and nations of the world. It calls for a wider loyalty, for a larger aspiration than any that has animated the human race. It insists upon the subordination of national impulses and interests to the imperative claims of a unified world ... Its watchword is unity in diversity.¹²

Conclusion

“Because the relationship between the individual and society is a reciprocal one, the transformation now required [to properly deal with global issues] must occur simultaneously within human consciousness and the structure of social institutions. It is in the opportunities afforded by this twofold process of change that a strategy of global development will find its purpose. At this crucial stage of history, that purpose must be to establish enduring foundations on which planetary civilization can gradually take shape.”¹³

"Only through the dawning consciousness that they constitute a single people will the inhabitants of the planet be enabled to turn away from the patterns of conflict that have dominated social organization in the past and begin to learn the ways of collaboration and conciliation. 'The well-being of mankind,' Bahá'u'lláh writes, 'its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.'"¹⁴

In this way, freedom in a commons does not have to bring ruin to all. In fact, properly exercising freedom as would a cell within a healthy body, for a commons that is administered as patrimony of the entire human race, should prevent further tragedy from taking place.

References
1. NPR story "Climate Change is Victim of 'Tragedy of the Commons'
2. The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Abdu'l-Baha, A Traveller's Narrative, p. 42, quoting Baha'u'llah
7. Baha'i International Community, 1995 Mar 03, The Prosperity of Humankind
8. The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin
9. Baha'i International Community, 1990 Feb 27, Protection of Minorities

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Baha'i International Community, 1995 Mar 03, The Prosperity of Humankind
14. Ibid.

Top 20 Albums of the '00 Decade

2009-12-21T17:49:00.000-05:00

I distinctly remember sitting with my mother in our living room in Taipei in late 1979 listening to the top 40 songs countdown of the 1970's. I was amazed at how great "Bridge Over Troubled Water" sounded at #2 and how truly awful it was that "You Light up My Life" beat it out for the #1 song of that decade. That was back when pop songs still had some remnant of art in them, and the top 40 still had some meaning.

I have since realized how phenomenal the 1970's were for music and I have also since then loved looking over and listening to lists of top songs or albums for each passing decade. So to commemorate another great decade in music, I decided to make my own list.

Bear in mind that I am not a rock mogul with a team of reviewers sifting through hundreds of albums issued over the past 10 years. Putting this list together has actually made me realize just how much music I missed, as it has made my "Must Buy CD" list grow immensely. I am sure this list will continue to grow and change as I get an opportunity to listen to albums on other people's lists.

Here is it, enjoy and please comment!

20. D'Angelo - Voodoo

This album is just so smooth. I could definitely do without the occasional dirty word, which is probably why there aren't more rap albums on this list, but they can be overlooked to get at the heart of this great effort.

19. John Legend - Get Uplifted

A very apropos title indeed! Uplifting, joyful, soulful and often danceable. Highly recommended. The highlight is "I Can Change".

18. Nikka Costa - Pebble to a Pearl

This is a solid effort all the way through. Earthy, funky, jazzy and amazingly soulful, this veteran singer has outdone even herself. The highlight is the enigmatic "Bullets in the Sky".

17. Decemberists - The Crane Wife

Gorgeous and lush. Intelligent lyrics, a great story. The only remnant of prog rock on this list and worth every minute.

16. Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica

This album mixes experimental sounds with pop quite attractively. Beautiful and challenging through and through.

15. The National - Boxer

A beautifully contemplative album. Everything here is rich - the voice, the jangly guitar, horns and the piano. I can't bring myself to not synch it to my Ipod despite having listened to it far too many times. It may take a few listens to grow on you, but it will. The highlight here is "Start a War".

14. Beth Orton - Daybreaker

Contemplative and thoroughly pleasing. This album is just full of great songs, one after the other. Again, nothing rocks here as anybody familiar with her work will tell you, and that is just fine with me. This is a very personal record fueled by the passing of her mother. This is the best folk music the '00 decade has to offer. The highlight here is "Paris Train".

13. Minus the Bear - Menos el Oso

I have to quote Mark Prindle to give you a good idea about this album: "An absolute 10, Menos El Oso features the band's strongest production, most memorable melodies, most diverse guitarwork and most passable synth lines yet. The axemen are of course still all over the 'interplay' tip, but instead of relying on the old "tapping vs. arpeggiating" gag, they're coming up with strange, bizarre chord conglomerations and note combinations, then mixing them with weird rhythmic guitar noises -- backwards high-pitched 'fweets!,' speed-manipulated call-and-response licks, insanely high plucked passages that sound like electronic pulses, sick bendy chords created either by tremelo bar abuse or infinite delay silliness, purposely ugly too-high-on-the-neck picking of palm-muted strings and lots of just odd-sounding guitar sounds created by fiddling around with the knobs on the delay pedal. This isn't random fooling around though; these are extremely smart and disciplined guitarists manipulating their equipment to compose and perfect sad, dark songs that sound unlike any you've ever heard before."

A collection of fantastic songs. The highlight here is "Hooray".

12. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

This is a brilliant debut album from these British post-punk, indie rock band. This is fast and funky, and so innovative that many were saying this this album really reinvented the rock sound from the ground up. Worth every minute.

11. Richard Thompson - Sweet Warrior

I just can't understand why this is not on any of the top albums of the decade lists I have read so far. As always, the writing is impeccable as is his guitar work. "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" is the most scathing and intelligent commentary on the war in Iraq from any artist. Literate and challenging, this adds to his legendary collection of albums.

10. New Pornographers - Mass Romantic

The name of the band and the cover of this album are meant to throw off the light of heart, not to represent the music. I am usually not much of a power pop fan, but this is the best power pop album ever issued bar none. This music is just really fun and catchy and just gives me faith in pop music again, not that any of these songs would ever get played on a pop radio station, heaven forbid! The highlight here is "Mass Romantic".

9. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion

This is such a revolutionary sound that it just can't be adequately explained in words. This isn't exactly electronic music because it is so melodious, but it isn't exactly rock either. This has a lot of base, a lot of beat and most of all an absolutely incredible use of vocal harmonies, not seen since "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys so many years ago. They go 'round and 'round and the sound just engulfs you completely until you lose track of time and become one with the sound. An absolute masterpiece. The highlight here is "Bluish".

8. Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple

Unlike anything you have heard before, this album will make you laugh and sit up and think. This has rap and dance influences, not to mention just about any other genre you can think of, all wrapped into a brilliantly warped package. The highlight here is one of the top 5 songs of the decade: "Who's Gonna Save My Soul?"

7. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Whispy, simply folkish, graceful and fun, this is an excellent listen. Consistently great, this deserves a place on all of the end of the decade lists without any doubt.

6. TV on the Radio - Dear Science,

TVOTR is one of the most creative and exciting bands making music today. I really enjoyed "Return to Cookie Mountain" but this is more accessible and better. It is a dark album, with multi-layer production and heavy, polyrhythmic beats. The horn section adds real grit to the mix. The lyrics are beautiful too, but I keep going back to this album because the songs are incredibly catchy. People categorize this as indie rock just because it can't fit into any other category; it bends genres better than any other this decade. The highlight here is "Red Dress".

5. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black

Ignore the messenger, and a good portion of the message and just get caught up in the music and the stunning vocal delivery. This is an absolutely brilliant soul album from start to finish like none other released this decade. Soul, that is, with a punk attitude. It has such an authentic sound, both because Winehouse understands the genre perfectly and because she writes from the hip. "Back to Black" is a perfect example, and the highlight here.

4. Arcade Fire - Funeral

This is pretty much on top of everybody's end of the decade lists for a very good reason. I have read reviews about this album that I haven't seen for anything since "Sgt. Pepper", basically saying that it is a perfect album. One commentary that really caught my attention was that it was really the last attempt by an indie rock band to make a cohesive album in the traditional sense of a thematic story line that connects the effort like a book. One reviewer describes this music as "near-cinematic, folk-influenced chamber pop" which gives an accurate idea of how this sounds.

Apart from all of the hype, this is an undeniably a great album. Every song builds up to an emotional crescendo that is focused on enjoying life, and encouraging listeners to waste no time in following their dreams.

3. Radiohead - Kid A

Abandoning straight ahead rock to create panoramic electronic soundscapes threw all fans for a loop, until we got it. This is an absolutely sublime opening to the new century, foreshadowing the direction rock will probably take over the next few decades. This is deliberate, often eerie, pulsating and utterly creative. There is no better vocal delivery on any album this decade as Mr. Yorke's vocals perfectly enhance the music. The highlight here is one of the best songs ever: "The National Anthem".

2. Erykah Badu - Mama's Gun

I cannot get enough of this album. Topping the list of albums released in a new genre called Nusoul, this is just about as soulful, jazzy and funky as albums come. Most of the disc is smooth soul with Badu's voice just rolling over delicate rhythms, luring you into her personal space she creates through the music. The highlight here is "Bag Lady".

1. Los Lobos - The Town & the City

The album from this decade that I keep going back to is The Town and the City by Los Lobos. I was turned on to this through a review by Dave Marsh in the Rock Rap Confidential who said that it is a harrowing first-hand account of illegal immigration. It is impeccably arranged, features lyrics that are as authentic as they are poetic (hold on, hold on to every breath, and if I make it to the sunlight, I'll do it all over again) and is firmly grounded in the best roots rock tradition. I am eternally amazed that these guys aren't much more widely known than they are. The highlight here is "The Town".

Complacency Kills

2009-10-17T21:44:00.005-05:00

Mountains Beyond Mountains, the quest of Dr. Paul Farmer to cure the world has given me a deeper understanding of the following quote from the writings of Baha'u'llah:

"The whole duty of man in this Day is to attain that share of the flood of grace which God poureth forth for him. Let none, therefore, consider the largeness or smallness of the receptacle. The portion of some might lie in the palm of a man's hand, the portion of others might fill a cup, and of others even a gallon-measure." (Gleanings, p. 8)

Dr. Farmer is someone who benefits from not considering the size of his receptacle. Rather he informs his entire life with what he calls O for the P, option for the poor, disregarding all of the barriers people like me set up for ourselves either by considering that we know the size of our receptacle or making excuses for not pushing ourselves to discover the limits of our capacities. The first is the cause of complacency and the second its consequence.

Dr. Farmer is an American doctor who dedicates all of his considerable talent to providing high-quality health care to those who most need it in Haiti. His field work contributes to constant research and publishing about the connections between poverty and disease and how public health policy marginalizes the poorest groups throughout the world. These challenges to the status quo have led to significant contributions to making world-wide public health policy more comprehensive and inclusive. His home though, remains with those who work in his clinic in rural Haiti even as many policy makers clamor for him to leave the field to direct policy efforts from first world offices.

I think this account has moved me so much because I believe that I am like Dr. Farmer in that I have the drive and mission to "attain that share of the flood of grace which God poureth forth...". However, deep in the recesses of my mind, in moments of private meditation, I know that I am not using my capacities to the fullest. I usually assuage my guilt pains by believing that I have to work to support my family and so I do my best to make sure my work does not deviate too far from my life-work, my vocation. Have I created this work - vocation dualism to justify my own mediocrity? Further, I am complacent with sporadic and slow spiritual growth when I could be more disciplined with my prayers, my character and my service projects. I have even been complacent with the spiritual education of my children, which seems to come from the venomous clutches of apathy.

Looking at how focused Dr. Farmer is makes me feel like I have made an option for badminton, or for twittering instead of for education for the poor, my true life-work. My blog is such a hodgepodge of do-goodiness that it gives the impression that my life-work is being an overall good person, which does not sit well with me. It all just seems so pathetic from this perspective.

I have become increasingly intolerant of mediocrity and of the parasitic nature of the great majority of human endeavor in which people just move with the current, washing from one pointless activity to the next. Motivated by increasingly fruitless and short-term prizes like wealth, public recognition or just getting by, people lose site of what matters. However, I am just as guilty as the next guy. Reading this book has made that ever so evident and has increased my intolerance of my own mediocrity.

I am determined to focus this healthy intolerance towards productive action that will give me the sense of achievement that I find in Dr. Farmer's work. I have specific service-oriented educational projects that need to be revived and expanded. However, some questions remain:

What have I achieved and why can't I find significance in this as easily as I can in Dr. Farmer's achievements? What exactly will give me the feeling of achievement I am looking for? Is it fair compare myself with Dr. Farmer? How can I learn to focus myself and my actions as he does? Or is that amount of focus incompatible with my roles of father and husband?

Overcoming complacency seems to require being present at all times to what matters and how to achieve that, cutting out all distractions. I don't know how large my spiritual receptacle is, but I aim to fill it far more than I have up to now.

Ecological Disasters I See on my way to Work (for Blog Action Day)

2009-10-14T20:04:00.009-05:00

A Photo Post for Blog Action Day

Guayaquil, Ecuador

On the days that I take the bus to work, I am confronted with a crude ecological reality. The following pictures that I took this week are a clear expression of a profound self - earth duality that permeates Ecuadorian culture. All of the following pictures were taken at the bus stops or from the bus itself.

Here are some pictures of the second bus stop.

The next two pictures show how agriculture is practiced with a cut and burn mentality. This hillside was once a tropical dry forest and now it has been burned to the ground to prepare it for sowing crops.

The following pictures show how dead trees are left standing for years and years in the divide between highway lanes.

This crooked picture shows where all of the landfill for the area comes from to the detriment of this beautiful mountain.

This landfill-covered area was a beautiful swamp up until about 6 months ago. Now all of those plants and animals that love the water are gone.

Why were these beautiful trees treated this way? I can't even imagine.

This is a particular favorite. It is a lone surviving ceibos tree just out of reach of the bulldozers that raze the forest to the ground. Its days are surely numbered.

This last picture demonstrates another kind of ecological disaster. Just beyond the road you can appreciate a hillside packed full of houses. The trees, other plants and animals been replaced by houses and concrete. People wonder why violence is more prevalent in areas such as these but looking at it from this perspective makes it clear that it is like a chicken farm where they put many chickens in small cages. They start pecking at one another because they are so stressed and cannot perform their normal biological functions. Forcing people to live so close to one another is an ecological disaster in a broader sense of the term some call human ecology.

To finish, I recommend reading these other posts in this blog about ecology and global warming:

Waste caused by "democratic" elections
Dangerous UV levels over Ecuador
Non-existence of the concept of waste in nature (a story)
Carbon credit offset project in Ecuador
Is the revolution green or spiritual?
Rethinking the Purpose of Cows
Call to Action: Compost for Life
THE Personal Lifestyle Choice (diet and meat consumption)
Pathogenic Organisms (global warming)
True Beauty (garbage and the Wartville Wizard)

Intercourse Analogies both Spiritual and Sexual

2009-08-01T20:26:00.004-05:00

[THE SABBATH BRIDE by Janet and Emmanuel Snitkovsky]

An enlightening talk I recently heard about the nature of the soul helped me make a connection that I had long sought after between two most mysterious aspects of life. It is often said that sexual intercourse has a mystical beauty beyond the act itself. However much this may be true, it seems that this beauty serves best as an analogy to give us insights into the truly mystical and beautiful intercourse the soul enters into upon searching for meaning and transcendence.

In this material world anything that grows organically begins its existence as a seed. The seed germinates, eventually matures into an adult plant and there comes a time in the life of this tree when it must give its fruit. When this happens, it has fulfilled itself because its ultimate purpose is to produce its own seed. However, a tree cannot produce another tree by itself, it needs to be pollinated from an external source in the same way that a woman cannot reproduce by herself. She needs to have a relationship with a male in order to conceive a child.

The soul functions in much the same way. Acting as a female it eventually reaches a state of maturity in which it too seeks to fulfill itself by producing its own fruit. It can turn wherever it likes to be fertilized, although it will only work with its own spiritual species. It enters into intimacy with the influences of the Manifestation of God (the Prophets and Founders of the great Religions) and opens itself to the power of the Revelation of Baha'u'llah (the Manifestation of God for this time). In this way it establishes mystical, spiritual intercourse with these forces which are then released within to impregnate it.

What is the child that is conceived from this mystical intercourse? It is the spirit of faith. This spirit of faith owes its existence to the Manifestation of God and to the soul itself, just as a parent. Here are some quotes to help define the spirit of faith:

The human spirit which distinguishes man from the animal is the rational soul; and these two names -- the human spirit and the rational soul -- designate one thing. This spirit ... embraces all beings, and as far as human ability permits discovers the realities of things and becomes cognizant of their peculiarities and effects, and of the qualities and properties of beings. But the human spirit, unless assisted by the spirit of faith, does not become acquainted with the divine secrets and the heavenly realities. It is like a mirror which, although clear, polished, and brilliant, is still in need of light. Until a ray of the sun reflects upon it, it cannot discover the heavenly secrets.1

This is the fruit of the tree of creation - to be freed from the darkness of the planet in order to enter the worlds of light. This is the object of existence; this is the fruit of the tree of humanity.2

It is the power which makes the earthly man heavenly, and the imperfect man perfect. It makes the impure to be pure, the silent eloquent; it purifies and sanctifies those made captive by carnal desires; it makes the ignorant wise.3

All spiritual realities have a counterpart in the material world which is why studying nature can be so illuminating. For example, comprehending the the difference in station between animals and humans gives us insights into the difference between humans and the Manifestation of God. Understanding the process through which we nourish our bodies gives us valuable insights into the nature of prayer. Grasping the transitory nature of the embryo gives us valuable insights into the journey of the soul through this life and into the next.

If we do not study nature with this frame of reference, though, we run the danger of appreciating the lesser beauty in and of itself thus missing the analogy that gives us insights into transcendence. This is where our society has gone wrong. We are incessantly taught through all types of mass media that sexual relationships are the real prize we are after, the golden fruit that satisfies our deepest desires. Jumping from one golden fruit to the next, as is all too often the custom, is not a justification of our media's message but rather an indication that people are seeking meaning in the symbolic fruit and not in the fruit itself.

The union created between partners through the sexual act is analogous to the union our soul yearns for with the Manifestation of God in the same way that the vastness of the ocean is a mere symbol of the truly breathtaking depth of wisdom and beauty contained in the Holy Books of all great religions.

Spiritual intercourse with the Manifestation of God shows us a door to true freedom, to our maturity and fulfillment both as an individual and as a society. This is the golden fruit.

------

1. Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i World Faith - Abdu'l-Baha Section, p. 316
2. Abdu'l-Baha, Divine Philosophy, p. 121
3. Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, p. 144

Searching for Truth

2009-06-21T22:52:00.003-05:00

The events over the past week in Iran have caused great commotion within me. Even though I am on the other side of the world it was thrilling to participate in the first few days of community building after the announcement of the fraudulent election results. Twitter allowed thousands of us to go beyond informing through our blogs, or protesting at the nearest Iranian embassy to feel that we could directly contribute to the networking and mobilizing necessary to build a movement around people inside and outside of Iran who were not willing to swallow such a lie.

Many people criticize Twitter because there are so many false leads and false identities, making it difficult to find the truth and to move forward. This is true, but the alternative is watching television which is more often than not one big ideological commercial. Watching something that never even intends to find the truth is far more humiliating than taking a small portion of people-generated messages with a grain of salt.

The beauty of the Twitter generated movement, at least in this case, is that it is driven by an innate desire to know the truth and to contribute towards its establishment. I am teaching a class about this very subject now and I am encountering university students who do not want to know what they are really eating, who do not want to know that we were created inherently noble and not sinners and who do not want to know that service to others brings true happiness. However, these people are increasingly falling into the minority because a growing number of us are no longer willing to be fed lies and manipulated.

I would like to share a quote about this subject that goes to the heart of the current revolution in social media:

"The greatest cause of bereavement and disheartening in the world of humanity is ignorance based upon blind imitation. ...Man is not intended to see through the eyes of another, hear through another's ears nor comprehend with another's brain. Each human creature has individual endowment, power and responsibility in the creative plan of God." - Abdu'l-Baha.

The following video provides a brilliant analysis of how social media is taking center stage in our collective desire to know the truth. Power is truly derived from the grassroots, and social media are increasingly allowing for this power base to broaden and deepen. We build networks because we care that the truth be told. The Internet is constantly evolving to respond to our need to show how important this issue is for a unified and just world. It allows us to collaborate and to learn from each other, possibly the most fundamental step we can take to continue human evolution.

Murder with Impunity

2009-06-21T22:06:00.004-05:00

Everybody should watch this video to understand the situation of Iran's largest religious minority, the Baha'i Faith. Although this persecution has intensified since the 1979 revolution, it has been continually carried out for over 150 years. It has taken all possible forms and its only boundaries are set by a thin veil of shame generated by constant U.N. resolutions of condemnation.

This video is the winner of a recent video contest about the plight of the Baha'is in Iran.

A Total Waste of Everything

2009-04-27T14:53:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I sat at a voting table receiving ballots for Ecuador's latest elections. This was the first time that foreign residents were asked to sit at tables and were allowed to vote, so it was all new for me and many others. I know this may sound pre-historic to many of you, but I actually debated whether to vote or not. All of the incumbents were overwhelming favorites and the media teams up with parties to smear, defame and otherwise debunk all other candidates. It is so childish that it makes me want to give democracy a swift kick towards its long overdue upgrade so that it follows along with humanity's constant evolution.

However this is not a rant about democracy. No, this is an ecological rant. You see, people had to elect so many candidates that they were given six different ballots to fill out. Two of them had over 200 candidates each from which people had to elect 14 and 17 of them respectively, each ballot a meter long. I did a little experiment and put all of the ballots end to end and they measured over three meters in length! A ballot package was prepared for each of the 10,529,765 eligible voters, which means that a whopping (approx) 31,589,295 meters of colored paper was printed and used for the ballots!

That is not all. We had to count the 147 votes left at our table and put the results in the minutes. We had to fill in rough drafts and then double copies of the results from each ballot and then fill in summary reports of each. To make a long story short, I counted the papers and there were over 300 sheets for each polling station meant to receive 200 voters. We counted votes and filled in these minutes for 5 full hours!

So, if we add another half meter of paper to each eligible voter, this comes out to 36.854.177.5 meters of colored paper printed for one day of democracy in a banana republic! Just to have some fun with these numbers, that is 92% of the circumference of the earth, or merely 3220 kilometers short of circuling the entire world!

So, in the end we exercised our right to vote. And we wasted a lot of time, money, resources and trees! Democracy needs to evolve now!

Creating a Social Business

2009-04-10T17:27:00.003-05:00

I am starting up a business selling granola that I make. I have thought about this quite a bit and although it started as a response to a need to compliment our falling salaries, I really want it to have some sort of social purpose. The world is largely as it is because people like me have felt the need to make more money and have started profit maximizing businesses (PMB's) irregardless if that meant underpaying or cheating employees, damaging the environment, producing low quality products or using deceptive advertising. By publicly selling shares in the company they have even created a legal obligation to maximize profits for the shareholders.

Of course there have been noble attempts to assuage the guilt some feel for having done this by creating foundations that push corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially when educated consumers avoid patronizing companies that harm society. Unfortunately CSR is an inadequate response to this problem because in the end the company must turn a specific profit: this is the bottom line and any socially responsible action will never amount to more than window-dressing.

So, I'd like my granola selling business to be what Muhammad Yunus calls a social business. In short, it is a business with the explicit objective of creating "social benefits for those whose lives it touches." It is cause driven instead of profit driven. As a business it should earn a profit, although any surplus is reinvested in the business to be "passed on to the target group of beneficiaries in such forms as lower prices, better service, and greater accessibility." Turning a profit also assures sustainability for the pursuit of long term social goals.

As I see it, then, I have basically two options:

1. Compete in the luxury market and channel a percentage of earnings to an NGO that works to truly alleviate poverty. I am on the board of directors of a Grameen replica credit and loan cooperative (La Cooperativa DeTodas) and the money my business would send their way would be used as loans for poor women to start or strengthen their small businesses.

2. Target the granola to these same low-income women and their children and together with some yogurt producing friends of mine, offer nutritious, filling and cheap breakfast and school lunch food.

Of course I could do both as they don't seem mutually exclusive. Maybe I could start with option 1 and develop option 2 as circumstances permit.

So, I would like to do some crowdsourcing here. What do you all think? Which option is better? How should I set this up so that I don't lose track of the social goals while complimenting my income? Ideas are welcome!

A Very Bad Night

2009-04-10T16:34:00.006-05:00

Last Wednesday I woke up with a man standing over me swearing, thrusting a screwdriver into my left eye and covering my mouth. Now, a couple of days later, the rope marks have disappeared from my wrists and ankles although my right thumb still lacks all sensation. Later they tied my wife up too, thrusting cloth into our mouths and leaving us helpless. After we were sure they had left I was able to call our oldest son so he could get a knife and cut us loose. I didn't want to do that as he will probably never dispel that memory from his mind, but there was no other way. It is truly miraculous that none of our three children woke up during the whole episode as God only knows what the thieves would have done to a screaming child.

As you all can imagine, we are totally shocked. We live in a closed housing development and this is the first break-in since it was built four years ago. We are sure they targeted our house thinking that an American must have lots of money or jewels. They were wrong of course but they made a pretty good haul, taking our computers, ipods, cameras, dvd players and even clothes.

Since then we have been running around doing all of the legal work and patronizing the security industry more than I would like to. Getting the police and the legal authorities to do their job is almost as costly as losing our stuff, but if we don't do all of this we will have no hope of ever bringing these guys to justice.

Speaking of the thieves, they were pretty ignorant. Of course, they got what they came for, which requires at least some brains, but they did not know what our credit or debit cards were used for, nor what the portable dvd player my wife had could do. They asked many questions that you would not expect a thief to ask. They also asked for our forgiveness, and explained that the crisis has really hit them hard and how they felt really bad about buglarizing our home. Haha, apparently not bad enough!

I had a pillow over my head the whole time, so I could not see the guys. My wife gave them a full tour of the house. She was very, very valient and mature the whole time they were there.I still can't decide if my decision to not resist the thieves was intelligent or cowardly, or both. Not resisting gave the thieves liberty to do what they wished with my wife and children, which made this choice excruciatingly difficult. But, I hoped that it would considerably raise the possibility that they would leave us all unharmed. It worked out that way, but that doesn't relieve my feelings of cowardliness.

Our oldest son commented out of the blue that at least this happened to us and not to our neighbors because the thieves might have hurt them. He named each of the kids that live near us and stressed how awful that would have been for them. He is such a special kid, and this type of thing really brings it out in him.

Even though this was really traumatic for us, I'd like to put it in perspective. That very evening I was writing in this blog and I noticed some news on my twitter feed that only now can I begin to understand. Apparently just the previous evening a mob attacked six Baha'i homes in the town of Showranyiah, Egypt, burning them all and forcing the Baha'is to flee. Click here to see more details. Although we lost many valuabe things, we were able to wake our children up the next morning and continue with our lives. Those Egyptian Baha'is have to remake their lives completely and continue living in fear. My heart goes out for them.

The Joys of Twittering

2009-04-02T00:35:00.002-05:00

This is a twitter joke, for the twitter folk. If you don't get it, then you should begin twittering soon.

I have just started twittering but I am amazed by this new tool. I had heard that it helps get news out quicker than any other medium during disasters and now I see why. It is an instant network as opposed to a facebook-type network.

My tech-savvy friend Vahid disdains twitter as a source of incoherent and superficial noise. Much of it is, but you can ignore this if you choose and participate in its more interesting aspects. Here are just a few:

Crowdsourcing - Twitter has started leading this important trend. Similar processes include a recent nation-wide town hall meeting-style conference on YouTube in which people vote for the questions to ask the President. Decision-making is going horizontal and it is only a matter of time before this practice radically improves our political processes and structures.

Human-processed searches - Searching on twitter will produce human generated results from real people gathering the best information from their lives and from the Internet. Google is cool, but a twitter search guarantees fascinating, updated and personalized results.

Taking part in Discourse - Taking part in a discourse on a specific topic, like micro-finance, social action, public health or any other requires being in communication with those who are at the forefront of their field, acting on what we learn from them and contributing our two cents worth to building specific knowledge. Staying abreast of the solutions found to local problems and the processes used to arrive at those solutions keep one in the mix. Of course, blogs have filled this niche beautifully for several years now, and because as any blogger knows it isn't easy to get people to comment on your blog, I see twitter as an essential compliment to these. It is a more agile, faster and synthesized version of blogs that, when combined with them, raises their value considerably. Sites like twitterfall can be customized to your exact needs to follow and take part in any discourse you choose.

Micro-blogging - My blog tends to be kind of ... em deep. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that everything I want to share fits into this category. Twitter gives me a platform to share important thoughts and events that I don't want to make into full blog posts. They are quick, short and effective at getting your point across. They are easy to answer and re-post and really get you in closer contact with those who are moving and shaking in your fields of interest.

Teaching - Learning - As an educator I am amazed at some of the ideas of fellow teachers who are using twitter in the classroom, and the results they are getting. Any tool a teacher can use to enhance learning is very welcome, and this is proving to be one of the best. If you doubt what I am saying, check this resource out. I will be using these soon in my classrooms!

These five good reasons to check twitter out point to the fact that twitter is opening the future to us in a variety of ways. There are many more reasons to start twittering, like small business networking, that I am sure others have explained much better than I ever could. In sum, if you don't like the superficial noise on twitter, then don't follow those who generate it! There are thousands of other fish in the sea! If you want to know more, click here.

Scroll down a bit or click here to check out my twitter feed and don't be shy to get your feet wet!

Biology of the Spirit

2009-03-21T19:52:00.010-05:00

My first reaction to the above phrase, I admit, was rejection. It seems that my mind naturally selects duality over unity to conserve some semblance of convenience and order. Fortunately, my spirit kicked in at this point to redirect my mind towards unity even if this step led into murky waters.

The interview with this title turned out to be much more challenging and rewarding than I had initially imagined. Sherwin Nuland, interviewed on Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett, shares his ideas about the relationship between the body and the human spirit from his perspective as a clinical surgeon. Bear with me on the following quotes from the interview as they are powerful:

"Notwithstanding the tragedies that humankind has visited on itself individually and collectively, and the havoc we have wreaked on our planet, we have become endowed nevertheless with a transcendent quality that expands generation upon generation, overcoming even our tendency to self-destruction. That quality, which I call spirit, has permeated our civilization and created the moral and aesthetic nutriment by which we are sustained.

As I define it, the human spirit is a quality of human life, the result of living, nature-driven forces of discovery and creativeness; the human spirit is a quality that Homo sapiens by trial and error gradually found within itself over the course of millennia and bequeathed to each succeeding generation, fashioning it and refashioning it — strengthened ever anew — from the organic structure into which our species evolved so many thousands of years ago. It lives while we live; it dies while we die. It is neither soul nor shade. It is the essence of human life.

There is a word that the neuroscientists use when talking about why a certain series of circuits or group of circuits in the brain is activated. The word is value. There are pathways of the brain that have survival value. So when a stimulus comes in and the brain has 50,000 different ways of responding to it, some of those are useful for survival and some of those will either prevent survival or mar survival, and the human brain, in classical evolutionary pattern, will pick the one that is healthiest, that gives greatest pleasure. What gives greater pleasure than a spiritual sense? So I think of this as natural selection in a form, in an emotional form, and I think it is almost like choice because when you're talking about selection in the brain, there are processes of choice. The brain has a way of evaluating what is best for the organism. And what is best for the organism is not just survival and reproduction but beauty, but an aesthetic sense.

The human spirit can be the high road to the fulfillment of my greatest hopes, but it can be the grim pathway to my self-destruction. Either way, it is the transcendent product of my body and its wisdom and of the most complex structure on the human planet, the three pounds of human brain."

I can imagine that many of you are reacting similarly to how I reacted when I first listened to this. Dr. Nuland anticipates this and responds by speaking of the origin of human spirit in this way:

"So if all Homo sapiens share it, one of two things has to be true: either God gave it to everybody, or it's a universal within our — on some level of awareness or it's in our DNA or something of this. I choose to think it's biological."

Concluding this discussion by recognizing that this whole matter boils down to a personal choice about the origin of the human spirit would miss the point entirely and would be too simplistic given the challenging issues Dr. Nuland raises. For example, what is the role of natural selection in the emergence of our spiritual capacities? What role does the brain play in this process? Is the brain's natural inclination toward beauty the prime mover behind both material and spiritual evolution?

To begin answering these questions the following quote by 'Abdu'l-Baha beautifully explains the brain's relationship with the our spirit:

"The human spirit which distinguishes man from the animal is the rational soul; and these two names -- the human spirit and the rational soul -- designate one thing. But the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit. Mind is the perfection of the spirit, and is its essential quality, as the sun's rays are the essential necessity of the sun."

The brain decides to express spiritual capacities built by our spirit. This expression and the confirmations received upon doing it, refine and mature the spirit providing further impetus for the brain to continue on this path. As beauty is found on this path the spirit and the mind cooperate to feel the joy of approaching it. This is natural selection and can also be seen as an essential interaction between religion and nature.

"[T]he Bahá'í concept of the world is at its core both organic and evolutionary. Nature and religion are defined in virtually identical terms in the Bahá'í Writings as 'the essential connection' inherent in 'the realities of things.' So the two 'books' (of nature and revelation) and are both inextricable parts of a single evolutionary story which begins with the first primitive cell and culminates with the emergence of global consciousness."

Even though we may not agree with Dr. Nuland on the origin of the human spirit and how its special relationship with the human body began, his assertion that "the human spirit is a quality that Homo sapiens by trial and error gradually found within itself", that its growth process is so intertwined with the evolving mind that they are like tree and fruit to each other, provides us with powerful evidence that religion and science are much less distinguishable than we had previously imagined.

----------------

All quotes taken from:

1. Biology of the Spirit , Inverview of Dr. Nuland on Speaking of Faith
2. Perspective: Crossing the divide between science and religion: a view on evolution

In the Toaster

2009-02-28T16:24:00.002-05:00

The Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency recently issued a report stating that Colombia, Ecuador and Peru receive the highest Ultra Violet (UV) dose on the planet. This may not cause too much surprise among those who know that UV levels are highest in the tropics where the Ozone layer continues to be depleted at approximately 4% per decade. Just for the curious, the ozone hole formed over the poles and for a while the destruction rate was higher than in the tropics, but it seems to be decreasing now.

The World Health Organization came up with the following Global Solar UV Index (UVI) to alert population centers when UV levels become dangerous:

UV Index	Description	Media Graphic Color	Recommended Protection
0–2	No danger to the average person	Green	Wear sunglasses; use sunscreen if there is snow on the ground, which reflects UV radiation, or if you have particularly fair skin.
3–5	Little risk of harm from unprotected sun exposure	Yellow	Wear sunglasses and use sunscreen, cover the body with clothing and a hat, and seek shade around midday when the sun is most intense.
6–7	High risk of harm from unprotected sun exposure	Orange	Wear sunglasses and use sunscreen having SPF 15 or higher, cover the body with sun protective clothing and a wide-brim hat, and reduce time in the sun from two hours before to three hours after solar noon (roughly 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM during summer in zones that observe daylight saving time).
8–10	Very high risk of harm from unprotected sun exposure	Red	Wear sunscreen, a shirt, sunglasses, and a hat. Do not stay out in the sun for too long.
11+	Extreme risk of harm from unprotected sun exposure	Violet	Take all precautions, including: wear sunglasses and use sunscreen, cover the body with a long-sleeve shirt and trousers, wear a very broad hat, and avoid the sun from two hours before to three hours after solar noon.

^[6]

As you can see, level 11 represents an extreme risk to skin cancer and eye damage from UV radiation exposure. For this reason, the current levels in Guayaquil and Quito are downright scary: Over the past month, the UV index (UVI) has been up to 14 in Guayaquil and up to 24 in Quito! If 11 represents extreme risk, then 24 means you are in the toaster.

A 2005 IPCC summary of ozone issues observed that observations and model calculations suggest that the global average amount of ozone depletion has now approximately stabilized. This is great for the polar regions, but the Montreal Protocol seems to be too little too late for Ecuador.

My family spent this last week at the beach, and despite liberally lathering ourselves with sun block, we are all burned in one place or another. This usually wouldn't bother me too much, but I just checked the UV levels for today , at it was 13.6, and as you can imagine we did not take all precautions as the graph recommends.

I don't buy Styrofoam, spray cans or ammonia and I use as little air conditioning and electricity as possible. There are more actions individuals can take to help reduce ozone layer depletion , so I encourage you all to think about your friends in the tropics and do your part to help save our skin!

The Sesame Street Sermon

2009-02-24T17:48:00.001-05:00

Did you know that the BBC did not buy the rights to broadcast Sesame Street in the 1970's because they thought that is was too moralist, telling kids how to think and act? My kids and I read Sesame Street books and watch their podcasts and programs all of the time and I have only felt grateful that healthy ideas are introduced to my kids in such an enjoyable way. The concepts promoted by the furry friends - appreciation for diversity, honesty, sharing, caring for others, kindness to animals, etc... - aren't exactly controversial, but there are those who believe that children will best become mature, healthy members of society by exposing them to a wide variety of content and ideas so they can build the cultural constructs that best suit themselves and those near to them. Showing children a message - even if it is about the concepts mentioned above - closes their minds, makes them judgmental, impedes their capacity to think freely and make sound decisions.

This same mentality reigns at my University where teachers are encouraged not to present content in courses like "Society and the Role of the Individual" in which students are supposed to contemplate relationships between the individual and the collective whole. Rather, teachers should lead students to become more reflective and informed of historical tendencies, theories and future possibilities.

It is difficult to disagree that cultural sermonizing requires ignoring that the learner has the capacity to make healthy decisions. If we really believe in capacity building and learner autonomy, then learners need to make their own decisions, especially ones that involve moral dilemmas. However, the opposite of sermonizing requires believing that there is no right or wrong beyond what benefits the learner at the particular moment in time that he or she is confronted with a moral dilemma. This moral relativism is one of the main philosophical foundations of our current global society of individuals and institutions that act uncannily like cancerous cells, boosting selfish aims at the expense of most others. The mantra of doing whatever you want as long as it doesn't harm others is precisely the cancer that is devouring the entire organism, cancer and all.

To begin resolving this issue, it must first be established that moral neutrality, the very concept upon which defenders of this laissez faire attitude towards education pride themselves, is illusory. Eliminating content in the name of a neutral process is in itself a moral decision with clear moral consequences. When graduates of this educational system don’t see enough wrong with opulence and misery living side by side to do anything about it, when they elevate both white and blue collar thieves to hero status, when they create “needs” within children even though they clearly cause irreparable physical or emotional damage, then the moral neutrality that justifies their actions becomes an exact opposite and an equally damaging approach as sermonizing.

This dichotomy is further resolved by defining the purpose of education beyond preparing individuals for successful insertion into the current job market. If most jobs aim exclusively towards increasing profit margin, defined in narrow economic terms, then directing education to provide students with the necessary tools to compete within this context only serves to legitimate it. Even if these tools are otherwise desirable traits and skills - creativity, administrative and investigative capacity, entrepreneurial leadership, etc… - the end towards which they are used strips them of any worth they might otherwise have. We can, rather, define our purpose for educating as building capacity for youth to become protagonists of their own community development, considering individuals and institutions as vital and interdependent actors within the community.

Of course, taking this path requires having the courage to face the daunting and inherently subjective task of defining development. Addressing faulty assumptions that the global development enterprise has had about such fundamental concepts as “the nature of man, the purpose of individual and collective life, the meaning of participation, the goal of development and the role of knowledge in social transformation” so that they serve an educational process that “empowers individuals and communities to engage in the generation and application of knowledge as protagonists in a materially and spiritually prosperous world civilization” requires taking a clear stand on such issues.

Further, although there are pedagogical advantages to providing the proper tools and context for learners to discover knowledge and thus take ownership of the decisions they make, there is no reason we should expect individual learners to rediscover all of the painful lessons humanity has slowly learned throughout its existence. Beyond those mentioned in the previous paragraph, one of these great lessons is that education should seek to channel the powers of the human soul into humble service to humanity, both on professional and personal levels. This is the primary context within which the individual may develop the necessary qualities and capabilities to become a protagonist in his or her spiritual and intellectual growth and thus contribute towards the transformation of society.

These and related lessons point us towards what we can call a pedagogy of moral empowerment. It is an approach that has emerged from an action-research process conducted by FUNDAEC in an effort to provide world-class tutorial secondary education that truly builds local capacity to generate prosperity. This process began in Colombia and later spread throughout most of the world.

In the end it is our individual and collective sense of justice that provides meaning for every action we undertake, whether that action is meant to be as objective as possible, or whether it is deliberately subjective. It is also this sense of justice that will enable us to establish the foundations upon which the oneness of humanity will ultimately be established. Although they don’t go too deep into the broader issues mentioned here, our furry friends at Sesame Street provide a good head start for all children in their search for justice, which will provide meaning and guidance in such a confusing world.

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All quotes taken from "Preparation for Social Action: Education for Development"

Word Cloud for Iguanajournal

2009-02-04T21:50:00.006-05:00

A Wordle word cloud for this blog!

People is the most mentioned word in this blog, and money is in second place. Hmmm, well, money needs to be talked about! Prosperity is third so that makes up for it. Enjoy!

We Lost Our Garbage

2008-12-20T19:06:00.007-05:00

Our mayor has done some really outlandish things, but the craziest idea he ever had was to take away all public garbage cans and residential garbage collectors and trucks. The city dump had begun to overflow and the incinerator had burned out so instead of making new places for all of the garbage, he shut them all down!

You can imagine what happened around here. People didn't know what to do with all of their junk so they started throwing it in the street and there were protests pretty much all over. Some of us were afraid that diseases would break out because rats multiplied and the stench was absolutely unbearable everywhere you went.

The mayor just ignored the protests and went about his business as usual.

After about three weeks, though, some amazing things started happening. When businesses realized that people stopped buying stuff that had lots of packaging they scrambled to offer their goods and services with less wrapping. Everybody started returning their junk mail and the post office became totally inundated with it until the post office decided not to deliver it anymore.

Also, people started figuring out ways to recycle almost everything and things slowly started cleaning up. Recycling companies offered their services door to door, compost classes became popular and whole neighborhoods began organizing themselves as garbage free zones. Even large international companies began competing among themselves for consumer attention by offering to receive and in some cases buy back their products once they were no longer useful. They would recycle them, refurbish them, reuse them, anything to avoid creating garbage. Small second hand stores sprang up all over and people started renting things they really didn't need to buy. Fix-it guys became the most important job around here and they were actually able to make a living wage!

The mayor sent all of the garbage collectors and trucks to work for recycling companies, which gave them quite a boost. With a glut of recyclable material, it became cheaper than virgin material in most cases so business picked up even further.

Now that some time has passed, people see garbage in a totally new light. In fact, the idea is almost completely absurd and it seems that is what the mayor wanted to get across. People lose sight of the fact that we are part of the earth's natural cycles once we see ourselves as something separate from all other living and inert things. That line of thought progresses to the point that we feel we can throw something where we no longer have to deal with it. This becomes a blind spot that bothers our intuition in the best of cases and just becomes a non reality for everybody else.

Our mayor hit us over the head with our blind spot and helped us become more integrated with the Earth's natural cycles. The concept of garbage no longer exists here to the extent that we can reject wasteful products from other cities. Industries haven't changed as much as we would like because they depend on distant markets and can't really treat our town as a special case. Recently the mayor has contracted companies to turn organic and body waste into bio-fuels for all government vehicles, so we are pretty excited about that. We are hopeful, though, that our culture of integration and garbage-less waste will be contagious to nearby towns and cities so our region can be greener and more beautiful.

Carbon Credit Offset Project in Ecuador

2008-12-07T20:22:00.005-05:00

My wife made this video for Piqqo, a European company that provides exposure for emissions trading projects that need funding. End-users of Piqqo buy carbon credits to offset emissions from their business or lifestyle.

She really enjoyed producing this video and we learned a lot about certificates awarded by the U.N. for important environmentally friendly projects.

We don't buy sugar, though. We only consume sugar-cane in the house because it is a lot healthier. So, this sugar production plant may be energetically self-sufficient, but it would provide even more benefit to the community if it stopped processing sugar-cane into sugar.

Enjoy the video!

Is the Revolution Green or Spiritual?

2008-11-30T00:11:00.003-05:00

No serious survey of our economic reality can challenge the fact that the current crisis has laid to rest the myth that our financial institutions are sound. In a recent article, David Korten explains that “The financial meltdown pulled away the curtain to reveal a corrupt system that runs on speculation, the stripping of corporate assets, predatory lending, and asset bubbles like the real estate and dot-com ‘booms.’” When articles of real value are created as by-products of the quest for speculative gain, you know the system is poorly designed.

Two of my favorite proponents of change, Thomas Friedman and David Korten, are leading advocates for a green revolution that will align our economy with human needs and the natural environment. Of course, I agree with this perspective. And although many of the critical problems we currently face will be resolved by setting in motion the changes they suggest, we cannot overlook the fact that their proposal leaves the most entrenched and damaging element of the story told by the gurus of economic witchcraft unquestioned: the framework remains within a world view that can be accurately described as dogmatic materialism. This framework wants us to believe on the one hand that a process of trial and error aimed at social re-engineering will eventually lead humanity to material prosperity and on the other hand that any mention of spirituality (or worse religion) in this process will only deviate the search and postpone the desired outcome.

Rejecting the consumer culture,"today's inheritor by default of materialism's gospel of human betterment", and attracted by the spiritual terminology and principles that tout harmony and unity as fundamental to human prosperity, the green revolution has attracted many of our leading minds to its cause. An increasing number of people turn their efforts towards it and set hopes on it as a panacea that will somehow bring both material and spiritual prosperity.

Far from being a signal of a maturing humanity, this trend rather clearly shows how people have failed to learn the fundamental lesson that the global effort towards social and economic development has taught us: "The fate of what the world has learned to call social and economic development has left no doubt that not even the most idealistic motives can correct materialism's fundamental flaws. ... Fifty years later, while acknowledging the impressive benefits development has brought, the enterprise must be adjudged, by its own standards, a disheartening failure. Far from narrowing the gap between the well-being of the small segment of the human family who enjoy the benefits of modernity and the condition of the vast populations mired in hopeless want, the collective effort that began with such high hopes has seen the gap widen into an abyss."

Harmony and unity are, of course, spiritual principles, and although they are beautifully exemplified in the earth's natural processes, their source lies beyond the earth. Establishing an intimate connection with the source inspires people to exemplify these same principles by transcending their current condition for one which is inherently spiritual in nature. This spiritual condition is found in every human being in a state of potentiality that awaits development as a seed yearns for the nutritious soil, sun and water in just the right proportion.

Material development is a fundamental aspect of true prosperity, and thus should be vigorously pursued. Dogmatic materialism, however, by defining this search in purely material terms and imposing a fear of sounding naive upon any challenger, has succeeded in alienating or at least confusing the great majority of the human population for whom religion is still the main guiding force in their lives.

As many traditional religions ever less clearly reflect the noble truths in their original writings, the frustration for those who want to pattern their lives by these traditions grows daily. On the one hand, little truth can be found in social and economic development as it is currently conceived because it does not allow people to incorporate spiritual truths, while at the same time the social and moral guidance people relentlessly search for in traditional faiths are mired in dogmas and, well, traditions and thus the little guidance offered has become increasingly irrelevant. Growing numbers of the world's people find themselves alone rowing in a sea of religious confusion.

Proponents of the green revolution point to this situation and rightly name it for what it is: a deviation in our search for prosperity, a veil that motivates some to search beyond religion for meaning and others to sink into the dogmas and traditions in hopes of finding some acceptance and tranquility.

Critical to this exploration, as explained in the following paragraph, is the fact that religion when properly conceived can offer and has done so throughout history, what a green revolution can never provide:

Throughout history, the primary agents of spiritual development have been the great religions. For the majority of the earth's people, the scriptures of each of these systems of belief have served, in Bahá’u’lláh's words, as 'the City of God', a source of a knowledge that totally embraces consciousness, one so compelling as to endow the sincere with 'a new eye, a new ear, a new heart, and a new mind'. A vast literature, to which all religious cultures have contributed, records the experience of transcendence reported by generations of seekers. Down the millennia, the lives of those who responded to intimations of the Divine have inspired breathtaking achievements in music, architecture, and the other arts, endlessly replicating the soul's experience for millions of their fellow believers. No other force in existence has been able to elicit from people comparable qualities of heroism, self-sacrifice and self-discipline. At the social level, the resulting moral principles have repeatedly translated themselves into universal codes of law, regulating and elevating human relationships. Viewed in perspective, the major religions emerge as the primary driving forces of the civilizing process. To argue otherwise is surely to ignore the evidence of history.

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All quotes taken from "One Common Faith", written by the Baha'i World Centre and published in 2005.
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In a future post, I will attempt to explore the question that naturally comes to mind upon reading this last paragraph:

"Why, then, does this immensely rich heritage not serve as the central stage for today's
reawakening of spiritual quest?"

Financial Meltdown

2008-11-20T22:25:00.004-05:00

The current financial crisis is not what it seems. However, because it seems like, well just about any number of things, most of us don't feel that we have much choice but to trust that the people that got us into this mess in the first place will somehow get us out. Even more frustrating is that this is exactly the attitude that those people need for us to have in order for the show to continue as scripted.

These gurus of economic witchcraft feed us a story that goes something like this:

A doctoral degree in economics or any related field, from Yale or Princeton or some similar institution qualifies certain people to understand the intricate and extremely complex inner-workings of the economic and financial instruments that have evolved over approximately 250 years to their nearly perfect current status. The prevailing crisis has occurred because many of our vital institutions have had the poor fortune of being controlled by unscrupulous and selfish individuals. The common citizen should feel assured that our leaders have learned from this crisis and will make the necessary adjustments to the system so that consumer confidence grows, private investments become more financially stable and most importantly the Gross Domestic Product and the Dow Jones Industrial Average begin rising again, so that life can go back to normal.

This sounds so plausible, neutral and reassuring that it almost makes sense. Although it may sound reassuring to some, it is neither plausible nor neutral. In fact, a carefully crafted ideology provides the underlying assumptions that have become so ubiquitous that they gain a status that sets them beyond critical examination for fear of sounding un-American. Bearing such a risk in mind, this crisis provides us with a perfect opportunity to do just that: critically examine such assumptions and look at alternative views so that we can direct our efforts towards supporting initiatives that will truly build prosperity.

With a nearly infinite number of topics at our disposal for exploration, we will look at just two. We will first turn our gaze towards a specific aspect our financial institutions, currency issuance, and subsequently explore the dizzying possibilities of breaking free from the dogmatic materialistic framework in which the above story is set.

I. Debt-Free Money

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are aspects of our financial structure that are portrayed as having survived the ordeal of natural selection not unlike Darwin’s turtles on the Galapagos Islands, rendering them the gospel truth. However, as several elements of the current paradigm have been dethroned lately, we should take the opportunity afforded to dig deep into some others.

An element that we would be wise to pry into is the way we create money. Put in the simplest terms, “One key to Wall Street’s power and to the inherent instability of the financial system is the current practice of private banks creating money with a simple bookkeeping entry each time they make a loan. Because the bookkeeping entry creates only the principal, but not the interest, unless the economy grows fast enough to generate sufficient demand for loans to create the new money required to make the interest payments on the previous loans, debts go into default and the financial system and the economy collapse. The demand for repayment with interest of nearly every dollar in circulation virtually assures the economy will fail unless GDP and inequality are constantly growing.” (David Korten)

This growth imperative puts us in a bind by making us decide to either use natural resources unsustainably or default on our debt. So, the question arises, does money need to be issued as interest-earning debt? Common sense tells us that we can, and indeed must, use our natural resources sustainably, and that this principle seems much more important than servicing man-made debt. As we haven't been inventive or courageous enough to permit this common sense to see reality, we have given the power of issuing money over to private banks, which charge us for this service in the form of interest on every loan.

However, are banks really providing a service worth charging interest for? First, banks don’t really provide society with any notable service because they create money out of nothing while making it appear to be created by government. As Ellen Brown so clearly explains, “This devious scheme was revealed by Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England and the second richest man in Britain in the 1920s. Speaking at the University of Texas in 1927, he dropped this bombshell:

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . . . . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. . . . Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. . . . But, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.

“Professor Henry C. K. Liu is an economist who graduated from Harvard and chaired a graduate department at UCLA before becoming an investment adviser for developing countries. He calls the current monetary scheme a 'cruel hoax.' When we wake up to that fact, he says, our entire economic world view will need to be reordered, "just as physics was subject to reordering when man's world view changed with the realization that the earth is not stationary nor is it the center of the universe." The hoax is that there is virtually no 'real' money in the system, only debts. Except for coins, which are issued by the government and make up only about one one-thousandth of the money supply, the entire U.S. money supply now consists of debt to private banks, for money they created with accounting entries on their books. It is all done by sleight of hand; and like a magician's trick, we have to see it many times before we realize what is going on. But when we do, it changes everything.”

Second, even though interest has come to be regarded as a natural and fair element of a healthy economy, it creates the growth imperative mentioned above. As David Korten puts it, “Privately issued debt-money … bears major responsibility for environmental destruction because it requires infinite growth, extreme inequality because it assures an upward flow of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street, and economic instability because issuing loans to fuel reckless speculation generates handsome short-term bank profits” at the expense of failing small businesses and home foreclosures. For this reason, Mr. Korten suggests that one of the most important elements of an agenda for a new economy is converting to debt-free money.

The story woven by the gurus of economic witchcraft suddenly becomes vulnerable. These are things we can all understand. Surely any product of evolution would not cause environmental destruction and widen the gulf between rich and poor as our current banking institutions do. Self-indulgent individuals at the helm of these institutions are the product and not the cause of a larger crisis in which private institutions are allowed to create money out of nothing by sleight of hand. Has measuring human prosperity and the health of our earth through the GDP and the Dow Jones index set us on a path towards anything resembling prosperity or health?

Lastly, and most importantly, these and similar insights have empowered ordinary people to stand up and have a say in how our money is issued. We now have evidence that our banking institutions are much more vulnerable than we previously imagined.

Further exploring this necessary paradigm shift, as I will do in subsequent posts, is crucial if we want to shake our current boom-bust mentality and if we want to see how material prosperity can match its spiritual counterpart.

Give W His Due

2008-11-06T19:50:00.005-05:00

The utter joy exhibited by such large numbers of Americans with the election of Barak Obama to the office of President was truly inspirational.

Internationally there may have been just as much joy that evening for the possibilities people see in having at least a symbolic representative of themselves in the White House.

"For Obama to overcome what people consider to be synonymous with America -- race -- it's unimaginable,'' said Eric Shepherd, a professor at City University in London. "It's given the world a lot more faith in America. America has become a place that does deliver on its promises. People can achieve anything.''

"Martin Luther King's dream has been realized by Barack Obama.''

Thomas Friedman even called this the end of the Civil War after 147 years.

He goes on to quote Michael Sandel thus, “This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service — in the military, in the Peace Corps or in the community. Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.”

We must, however great the current enthusiasm, recognize the critical role W played in these accomplishments, even if he didn't mean to. The W years can be seen as necessary to provoke such a sea change in American politics.

We have learned, for example, that turning our collective backs on a city destroyed by a hurricane tears the whole nation apart and exposes institutionalized racism.
We have learned that fabricating tales of nation-building in the Middle East sets several nations up for failure, including our own.
We have learned that "making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry", as Maureed Dowd so aptly puts it, provides evidence of how such an evolved democracy can be corrupted by misuse.
We have learned that completely deregulating and letting "wild law" reign over the market causes financial crises possibly beyond our capacity for reparation.
We have learned that pitting a conventional army against a network of underground guerrillas in the vast Middle East is like eliminating malaria one mosquito at a time.
We have learned that not building a coalition of nations to fight against rebel states destroys legitimacy of the mission and undermines moral authority.
We have learned that responding to a terrorist attack on innocent civilians by asking people to go shopping belies deep ignorance and callousness.
We have learned that putting all of our proverbial eggs into economic growth irregardless of the web of life that such growth ultimately depends on, only raises within us a greater yearning to reconnect with this web of life even if this means reconsidering the growth imperative.

Perhaps the greatest lesson we have learned through the W years, at least from my perspective, stems from the fact that America's collective lifestyle choices and the policies designed to uphold that lifestyle have offended large numbers of people because they are largely materialistic, selfish and conflictive. America is not always right, and whether you interpret 9-11 as a manifestation of this sentiment or not, insisting that it is has made America much more the aggressor than the victim. The lesson is that America, as any other nation, has its strengths and weaknesses and will only be able to establish its ideals at home to the extent that it supports other nations in doing the same.

Why was it necessary to endure eight years of selfish mediocrity to arrive at this point? Well, why do many people need to suffer a heart attack in order to realize that their lifestyle is killing them? Why do we need to miss someone in order to realize how much we lover him/her?

On an individual scale these questions don't seem so transcendental, but collectively they take on greater significance because learning is more unwieldy, messy and painfully slow. However, W's legacy is that he sped up our collective learning process to hitherto unknown heights. To see an inversely proportional relationship between W's blunders and greater consciousness gained by the American public about the founding ideals, about the necessity to take care of people and not turn our backs on extreme wealth disparities is testimony to the resilience and vision this nation's people have.

This does not happen here in Ecuador. Even if the depths of suffering are greater in general here, it is translated into learning over what seems like generations, not over a presidential term or two. For this reason among others the world looks to America for leadership, and the time has come for that role to be properly fulfilled.

The wave of global goodwill that poured from all corners of the earth with the news that Barak Obama was elected to the American presidency is extremely encouraging. My hope is that this wave will grow as America applies a leadership style characterized by innovation and example that empowers other nations and peoples as partners, far from the bullying practiced during this past administration.

Siddhartha - Gautama - Buddha

2008-10-29T10:52:00.012-05:00

The other day I heard an interview with Deepak Chopra about his recent book Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment. In the end he piqued my curiosity enough for me to read the book, but maybe not for the right reason. Describing Buddhism, he said that it is a secular spirituality, not a religion in the Judeo-Christian sense. While it is true that Buddhism stands apart from the Westernized faith traditions in several fundamental ways, it horrified me to qualify it as secular spirituality. Now that I have read Mr. Chopra's book, and now that I have reread Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and looked into the matter at least enough to understand what that statement could mean, I'd like to share my conclusions in hopes that this exercise will help those thoughts to continue evolving.

Both books repeatedly mention the "gods" in a way that we today speak of luck as that which helps you do something surprisingly effective. Both books make it clear that at the time it was common belief that people could become gods through an ascetic and holy life. In the same way, both speak of demons as the opposite force, and Mr. Chopra's book personifies a demon as one of the main characters who eventually provokes the final battle that leads Gautama to enlightenment. If this understanding of gods and demons is historically accurate, then Buddha would logically avoid confusing people further by centering his teachings on an Absolute, or God as we understand the concept. His focus on right view, aim, speech, action, living, effort, mindfulness and contemplation were surely the proper medicine that provoked the spiritual and material transformation necessary at that moment in time.

"The following is the Buddha's description of [the Absolute] in the famous Udana passage in the Khuddaka Nikaya: 'There is, O monks, an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. Were there not, O monks, this Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed, there would be no escape from the world of the born, originated, created, formed. Since, O monks, there is an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed, therefore is there an escape from the born, originated, created, formed. What is dependent, that also moves; what is independent does not move' (Udana 8:3). Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, argues from this passage that without the acceptance of an Ultimate Reality (Paramartha) there can be no deliverance (nirvana) (Madhyamika Karikas, cited in Murti 235)."

If you think about it, no Founder of any religion has ever encouraged his followers to dwell on the concept of God beyond basic concepts of uniqueness and certain qualities that God embodies. "Baha'u'llah similarly speaks of an entity, an Unknowable Essence, of which nothing can be predicated: 'To every discerning and illumined heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress . . . He standeth exalted beyond and above all separation and union, all proximity and remoteness. No sign can indicate His presence or His absence' (KI 98). It is simply not spiritually profitable to spend too much time trying to gain further comprehension of God's essence.

If we qualified Islam, Christianity or the Baha'i Faith as secular spirituality, we would surely rob each of them of their essence. So, why should Buddhism be any different? It is saddening that Buddhism seems to have gained much popularity over the past few decades because of this fundamental misunderstanding of Buddha's message.

Another key concept in both books, although more implicit than explicit, is that of reincarnation. Contemplating this has led me to conclude that reincarnation exists in the story of the Buddha, which especially as presented by Mr. Chopra, is the story of each and every human being. He grows up as Siddhartha and upon maturing beyond that role, transforms into Gautama in search of true meaning. This search leads him to again transform, this time into the Buddha when he discovers the reality behind suffering, time and all of creation. This enlightened state provides an unimaginably powerful vehicle for him to generate the same transformational process in others.

In a very real sense, Siddhartha died in order for Gautama to be born and Buddha was born from Gautama's ashes. Thus the same fundamental person was reincarnated twice in order to escape the wheel of suffering. All true change of the order presented in the movement from Siddhartha to Buddha implies death as well as birth. Embracing both as a single forward flowing journey opens us to constant evolution, a maturation process that can eventually induce enlightenment.

Moving beyond the illusion of duality is the single most important concept explored in both books, and they both do it brilliantly. In Mr. Chopra's rendition, Buddha becomes the elements around him, perceives the innermost sensations of others and is able to touch and heal them. In Mr. Hesse's rendition, this vision is personified in the river by which Siddhartha makes his final home. "He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this? He did not understand it; he was only aware of a dim suspicion, a faint memory, divine voices."

Visudeva, Siddhartha's greatest teacher explains that "the river knows everything; one can learn everything from it." On this occasion, Siddhartha learned "that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek depths." He also grows to learn that the present only exists for the river, "not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future." Thus, "Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man, were only separated by shadows, not through reality." Which also clearly implies that all sorrow, self-torment, fear, difficulties and evil happen in time and are thus conquered as soon as time is dispelled.

The river has many voices, in fact the voice of all living creatures are in its voice, as all living creatures come to the river for both physical and spiritual nourishment. This nourishment becomes those creatures, and their voice and their life and death.

"Siddhartha saw the river hasten, made up of himself and his relatives and all the people he had ever seen. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and all goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew."

"Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. ... He had often heard all of this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices - the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great sound of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - perfection."

This poetic description of the river, and the transformation into enlightenment resonates deep within me. I have felt this flow not in a river as the rivers near here don't flow too well, but in compost, of all places! The life-decay-life process that eventually becomes the source of nourishment as healthy, teeming, fertile soil attracts me like a magnet. All of our mineral, plant, animal and human ancestors are there, present, becoming nourishment. I have always felt that it is a terrible injustice to throw away kitchen waste because it interrupts this life-giving process. I tend to this process in my house, and I sit and listen to it, and watch it and work with it just to learn its lessons in my effort to become spiritual nourishment for others. Just as the river, humus carries a wisdom far beyond my current grasp.

So, beyond highly recommending both of the books under review, I hope that reading them leads the reader to such contemplation of our potential as spiritual beings as I have been provoked to undertake.

Cognitive Surplus

2008-10-22T01:23:00.007-05:00

a screen that ships without a mouse, ships broken...

Watch this video. It is really worth it. It provides an extremely insightful analysis of social evolution and the power of Web 2.0 applications in reconceptualizing mass media to provide opportunities for everybody not only to consume but also produce and share.

Spending four formative years in countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Egypt, where tv was mostly just plain bad and more often than not spoken in a language I could not understand, got me away from tv and into activities like sports and games and just enjoying simpler things. Of course upon returning to the US I watched my fair share of MASH reruns, but I escaped getting hooked to the boobtube like most of my schoolmates.

What puzzles me now is how we feel that we need to turn our brain off in order to shed and get over financial stress or other types of stress caused from having to work too long or too hard in a job that is more often than not quite meaningless. If you want to escape from something too meaningless to bear, then why do something even more meaningless? In this sense tv serves the same purpose as alcohol and other recreative drugs. True, sometimes we identify with Giligan or Samantha or the guy on CSI and we like to feel that we can be like them. However, more often than not, as Mr. Shirky says in the video, we just aren't sure what else to do with our time. This is partly because before Web 2.0 applications like blogs and social networking and podcasting, watching tv (and of course listening to the radio) was basically our only opportunity to be part of popular culture through mass media. For decades this reinforced the messages from tv adds encouraging us to become net consumers.

The cognitive surplus created from becoming such consumers needs to be looked upon as an opportunity. Having enough time to watch trillions of hours of tv while our social and spiritual fabric comes undone at the seems provides us with one of the greatest opportunities available to humanity at present. Mr. Shirky would have us believe that it is better to do something, anything, as long as it implies being an active participant and not a passive consumer. As insightful as this talk is, I just can't agree that we need to set the bar of expectation so low because doing just anything won't get us very far from our tv set.

This concept elevated to principle in the video arises from a misunderstanding of the potentiality of human capacity.

"Man is called today to the attainment of that station to which he was destined from the 'Beginning which has no beginning.' This, then, is why 'Abdu'l-Bahá so exalted the station of Servitude. This is why He intimated that man accepting any station lower than this, any putting of self before service to others, qualifies himself as of the animal, the bestial nature, and places himself outside the pale of real manhood. It is because the definition of Man is altered. That which has been hinted in the past as a possible goal is now a requisite. Man's dreams, his highest dreams, must now be realized. And the path to that realization is the path of Service; its Goal the attainment to the station of pure Servitude.

"'The sweetness of servitude is the food of my spirit.' These words of the Master indicate the source of His power. His was a vastly higher quality of service than even that of my fanciful imagination... It went far deeper; it rose to far greater heights. It was a quality inherent in His deepest being, and manifested itself in every look, gesture, deed, ... in every breath He drew." (Howard Colby Ives)

If our essential humanity means attaining to an exalted station of servitude to others, then building the capacity necessary to make that service an efficient and effective contribution to helping our society reflect spiritual values held in common by all of humanity becomes top priority. Building and applying such capacities is the true source of power, of a nurtured spirit, the means by which our highest dreams will be realized, the sweetness that cannot be equalled. Further, it provides our life with the meaning that can dissipate stress on a magnitude that tv will never hope to attain.

If this weren't the case, then doing just about anything that implies participation would be a healthy social goal. However, in light of our essential nature, and the source of our true joy, it would be foolish to not push ourselved to greater heights. Of couse, Web 2.0 applications will play an important role in deploying the current massive cognitive surplus in the right direction, but there are such a variety of avenues leading to the station of servitute that we should be constantly exploring as many as we can find.

Double-Edged Prices

2008-10-19T23:27:00.002-05:00

'There is nothing in the pot. We have no food for a meal. Often a pot is put on the fire so children think a meal is being prepared. It gives them hope. If we told them there was no food they would start crying and there would be nothing we could do. This way they just go to sleep quietly.' – Aliou, a mother from a rural village in Mauritania

Not that the current financial meltdown isn't important - it is mostly for the failed mentality that it represents - but let's not let it distract us from what is urgent. This is admittedly difficult when anti-interventionist governments move astronomical sums to prop up their banking systems while ignoring their own commitments to curb world hunger. "...in stark contrast with the response to the current financial crisis, where huge financial resources have been mobilised by the international community in a matter of days... countries suffering from the food crisis received promises of just $12.3bn at the Rome FAO conference in June 2008, well short of UN estimates of the $25bn–$40bn needed (and five months on, little more than $1bn has been disbursed)."

Oxfam International just published a briefing paper aimed at bringing us back to this reality. It is called "Double-Edged Prices, Lessons from the food price crisis: 10 actions developing countries should take". Basic staple prices have recently risen and this should have been wonderful news for countries with economies focused on agriculture, and for the small farmers themselves. However, as the report states, "decades of misguided policies by developing country governments on agriculture, trade, and domestic markets – often promoted by international financial institutions and supported by donor countries – have prevented poor farmers and rural workers from reaping the benefits of higher commodity prices. As a result, the crisis is hurting poor producers and consumers alike, threatening to reverse recent progress on poverty reduction in many countries. To help farmers get out of poverty while protecting poor consumers, developing country governments, with the support of donors, should invest now into smallholder agriculture and social protection."

During the last year, the price in staple foods around the world have risen from 30 to 150%. Even before the current food crisis, over 850 million people lived in hunger and approximately 30,000 children died daily from related causes. The title of the Oxfam report refers to the false dilemma created when donor institutions ask themselves whether they should support consumers by lowering prices or producers by raising them. This leads to food donations from rich countries on one hand, and on the other, structural adjustments to economic policies aimed at directing the agricultural sector of a nation towards producing what can be sold on the international market, even if it can't be eaten by local communities. For example, cacao prices have increased dramatically since this crisis began (people eat more chocolate in times of anxiety), so Ecuador is expanding cacao production as well as other similar products like flowers, bananas and shrimp and seeking to open new export markets. Meanwhile staple food prices in Ecuadorian markets have risen 8% over the past year. In these cases, people buy cheaper foods, that usually have less nutritional value, rather than buying less food.

Higher fuel prices have led to increases in critical agricultural inputs like nitrogen-based fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides and seeds. In fact, Monsanto, the world's largest seed (genetically modified) and agrochemical company has seen a 26% increase in revenue during the past year. Vanity Fair recently carried a major feature article on the mafia-like tactics of Monsanto in its pursuit of total domination of various facets of agribusiness aimed at consolidating corporate power even in the face of increasing food shortages.

The report concludes that in general, "those countries that have invested in smallholder agriculture and social protection policies have proved to be more resilient to the crisis. Conversely, where countries have opened their markets too widely or too rapidly to food imports and have failed to invest robustly in their agricultural sectors, they have fared far worse." Mexico is a perfect case in point.

"In the 1980s, Mexico was reeling under massive foreign debt. In 1988, interest payments made up 57 per cent of federal expenditure and, following World Bank and IMF recommendations, the country set about reducing public spending and dismantling a system under which the State subsidised agricultural inputs, provided loans and technical assistance, regulated imports, set guaranteed prices for producers, and subsidised the price of tortilla.

"State marketing committees and the National Company for Popular Subsistence (CONASUPO, a body which retained 15–20 per cent of production for distribution to remote areas) were also eliminated. Control of the market was usurped by a handful of agribusinesses and intermediary companies. Currently, Cargill, Maseca, ADM, Minsa, Arancia Corn Products, and Agroinsa among them control 70 per cent of Mexico’s corn imports and exports.

"A further blow to domestic agriculture came with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, under which Mexico agreed to liberalise its corn sector. Subsidised US corn began to flood the market and the price of corn in Mexico fell by more than 70 per cent in real terms, pushing thousands of corn farmers out of production and reducing overall output. After more than 4,000 years, Mexico became a net importer of corn."

The report provides a general action guide in the form of 10 recommendations. They are well thought out from the perspective of the more vulnerable countries. However, it gives too much importance to the IMF and the World Bank, which simply need to cease to exist or be completely transformed into institutions that are democratically accountable and which move resources to mitigate the effects of and ultimately eliminate poverty and wealth extremes.

This report succeeds at providing a timely and clear analysis of the current food crisis that it hopes will make a "difference to the millions of poor people hit by the current crisis, and build resilience to future shocks."

Currency, Debt and Poverty (for Blog Action Day)

2008-10-14T18:59:00.008-05:00

This week one of my favorite blogs, Dot Earth, posted a fabulous and timely reflection called "Growth Economics on a Finite Planet". The post quotes an article written my Dr. Herman Daly, specialist in "ecological economics". The article speaks about something that many of us have been thinking for years, that speculative finance is not economy at all but a sophisticated way of gambling that only distracts our attention from the real economy of producing for real needs. "To Dr. Daly, the implosion after the burst of trading and investment in high-concept paper offerings was inevitable, and simply a reorientation of the market toward the only real economy — the one grounded in actual assets. In the end, the only economy that can’t be gamed is one that is grounded in the way the Earth works. That is where 'real wealth,' and real limits, lie, he says."

"High-concept paper offerings" (reminds me of "edible foodlike substances...") really represent the tip of the iceberg. The larger, submerged base is made of money, the principle instrument that financial institutions and corporations use in their effort to create a consumer culture. Later in the above-mentioned article Dr. Daly lists the factors that allowed financial assets to become so disconnected from real assets, and the first point in this list is especially interesting: "...the fact that we have fiat money, not commodity money". Currency systems created by fiat work when the authority issuing the currency (government) guarantees the value of the currency although it's value is not referenced by any commodity. The idea is to ground the value of money to what is produced in that country, but this connection has deteriorated over time. So, paradoxically the connection between the value of money and real assets has weakened and at the same time high-concept paper offerings and money itself have became confused with real economy and real wealth. To understand this confusion, it is necessary to briefly explore the nature of money.

Over the past century the purpose, use, issuance and meaning of money have undergone a profound transformation that has allowed it to be used towards the construction and maintenance of the globalization process. Without delving too deep into the evolution of the concept of money, let it suffice to state that money served humanity principally as a means of exchange until the globalizing, and especially the speculative, process gave it new roles to play.

For many years money was generally issued by local banks at rates necessary to facilitate exchange. However, "…with problems caused by over-issuance and speculation, governments stepped in to regulate the issuing of money, creating the first central banks and issuing money … by printing it, selling government bonds to commercial banks and the public, [and] by borrowing it from the bank at interest. Thus, in order to ensure an expanding money supply, money is issued as interest-bearing debt."

As time passed, governments discovered that a particular difficulty with this system existed because "at any given moment in time, the total amount of debt in a conventional money system always exceeds the total amount of money available in the system. The money needed to pay the interest over these loans can only come from some other similar circuits, i.e. money issued by some other borrower. If that happens, the second borrower will not be able to earn back enough money to pay his debt. In order to prevent economic stagnation, the money supply must be continuously expanded: there is need of a perpetual borrower that can never go bankrupt despite the fact that he never pays his debt. Since the 1950s, governments have assumed this role. In order to stay above this debt, economic growth must exceed the growth of debt. However, in reality the global economy is not catching up with the exponential growth of interest bearing debt."

Scarcity is then a central component of the current economic system. This brings up several issues each of which merits attention. Scarcity of money has a double effect. First, it motivates people to work harder to earn money out of fear of falling into poverty. This is a key source of society’s deterioration as people are driven towards a profit motive and are frequently forced to work for unsatisfying and often socially and ecologically destructive jobs. Second, since money is put into circulation by creating principal, but not the interest owed on the principal, people and corporations must compete to obtain the scarce money to pay the interest. If the total money supply does not increase at least by the amount owed on interest, some necessarily go further into debt and even bankrupt. However, because interest is calculated to expand exponentially, it is at odds with the impossibility of producing and consuming goods or services at an exponentially growing rate.

Both commodity backed and fiat currencies are used as a store of value. "Using currency as a store of value, to generate interest or for expected profits at a later time" encourages hoarding and therefore competition. While money is stored "others cannot use it as a medium of exchange, which works against the interests of the economy" as fewer transactions can take place causing a downturn in the economy. Of course, when signs of recession appear, more money is issued or interest rates are lowered, enabling more transactions to take place. This give and take of the money supply keeps people fluctuating with the system, a perpetual scarcity-abundance, boom-bust uncertainty. "Providing incentives to ensure that the medium of exchange does not also incorporate the store of value function would therefore automatically dampen this boom-bust tendency of the current system."

Giving money the function of a store of value also motivates people to search for short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth, creating conflicting moral and economic incentives. "Consider as metaphor, for example, the life of a tree (or any other living resource). Because of interest, the net present value of any income far away in the future is negligible. So, it literally pays to cut down a tree and put the proceeds in a savings account instead of letting it grow for another decade or century. Similarly, the only types of trees worth planting commercially are the fastest-growing varieties such as pine. (Nobody plants redwoods for commercial reasons.) So even when we plant trees, we are systematically losing biodiversity."

As we have recently been reminded, another detrimental use of money is speculation. Over the last five or six decades money increasingly developed into a tool for speculative profit until it became the dominant use for money. "Today more than 95% of all currency transactions are motivated by speculation; less than 5% are for trades of goods and services." Able to generate spectacular profits within increasingly short periods of time, money acquired a new purpose: to merely reproduce itself. Investors search for schemes that will offer the largest profits within the shortest amount of time, essentially blind to real human needs and ecological concerns.

In the meantime, money has become confused with wealth. "Wealth is something that has real value in meeting our needs and fulfilling our wants. Modern money is only a number on a piece of paper or an electronic trace in a computer that by social convention gives its holder a claim on real wealth. In our confusion we concentrate on the money to the neglect of those things that actually sustain a good life." Even those who understand the difference between money and wealth are often forced to participate in unsatisfying or damaging means of acquiring money in order to maintain a dignified style of life.

For these reasons, and I am sure there are many more, we have put ourselves in the particularly malevolent quandary of needing to produce and consume as fast as our debt multiplies or invent "high-concept paper offerings" that dupe people into believing that real wealth is being produced. It all adds up to a negative sum game that as more people and businesses lose we slowly conclude that this system is making losers of all of us.

To round out this post on a more positive note, many people are realizing that national currencies "have been designed for specific purposes only, and cannot fulfill certain social objectives (such as fostering trade and cooperation, or ecological sustainability). Some currencies already operational today or being proposed for the future are designed to fulfill such objectives, and operate best when they are used in tandem with the national currencies." Because these complimentary currencies do not bear interest, they

"promote longer-term planning by encouraging participants to invest in productive assets rather than hoarding currency; and
encourage trade and cooperation, because the money is in sufficient supply."

These new currencies open exciting possibilities for a healthy economy in which poverty is no longer seen as an inevitable and is rather viewed as the anomaly it really is.

Spiritual Beings having a Human Experience

2008-09-29T11:37:00.005-05:00

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience ... We are spiritual beings having a human experience." - Teilhard de Chardan

Human beings consider a spiritual experience an extraordinary event to be savored and contemplated. Time and space are considered normal and a timeless or placeless experience can be life-changing as it provides a glimpse into infinity and into that which doesn't perish as the following quote testifies:

"Our souls were so assured and uplifted that we, His hearers, did not have to imagine forthcoming events. Rather, we found ourselves experiencing all the bountiful happenings of the future. The eternal glory and ultimate successes of the Cause of God were so vividly portrayed by Him that the passage of time was irrelevant, for we saw the past, present and the future at the same time." (Adib Taherzadeh)

Without these kinds of experiences, or not allowing them to effect deep change in our outlook, it is easy to conclude that this material world is the beginning and end of existence. However, "The idea that existence is restricted to this perishable world, and the denial of the existence of divine worlds, originally proceeded from the imaginations of certain believers in reincarnation; but the divine worlds are infinite. If the divine worlds culminated in this material world, creation would be futile: nay, existence would be pure child's play." (Abdu'l-Baha)

Growth, however, is a function of time and thus the soul becomes associated with a body and enters into this soul school we call life on earth. "In this material world time has cycles; places change through alternating seasons, and for souls there are progress, retrogression and education." (Abdu'l-Baha)

Thus the purpose of time and space is to allow and measure growth. The spiritual being considers this an extraordinary experience to be savored and contemplated as time and space are not of the soul, they are not "normal". In a very real sense, the past, present and future happen simultaneously, and none of them restrict or bound the others. The following quote explains this idea.

"Consider thy state when asleep. Verily, I say, this phenomenon is the most mysterious of the signs of God amongst men, were they to ponder it in their hearts. Behold how the thing which thou hast seen in thy dream is, after a considerable lapse of time, fully realized. Had the world in which thou didst find thyself in thy dream been identical with the world in which thou livest, it would have been necessary for the event occurring in that dream to have transpired in this world at the very moment of its occurrence. Were it so, you yourself would have borne witness unto it. This being not the case, however, it must necessarily follow that the world in which thou livest is different and apart from that which thou hast experienced in thy dream. This latter world hath neither beginning nor end. It would be true if thou wert to contend that this same world is, as decreed by the All-Glorious and Almighty God, within thy proper self and is wrapped up within thee. It would equally be true to maintain that thy spirit, having transcended the limitations of sleep and having stripped itself of all earthly attachment, hath, by the act of God, been made to traverse a realm which lieth hidden in the innermost reality of this world." (Baha'u'llah)

Thinking that we are human beings having spiritual visions only traps us in temporariness, in suffering and ultimately death. It cannot be overstated, therefore, how important it is to transcend this by maintaining a clear vision that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Exploring the implications and consequences of this vision becomes our life work.

The Left, the Right and the Spiritual Path

2008-09-16T18:47:00.007-05:00

The simultaneous election euphoria in Ecuador and the United States accompanied by a fortuitous encounter with a highly recommend podcast ("Living Dialogues" hosted by Duncan Cambell) has inspired me to share some thoughts about the nature of our democracies, our political parties and the world view they stem from.

Episode 63 of the above podcast is part two of an interview with author George Lakoff called The Evolutionary Challenge of the 21st Century for the Political Mind. Among the many interesting points he brings up, one really stood out for me. Here he explains why people favor conservatism or liberalism:

"Our first experience with governance is in our family. And so we recognize family members and we also experience being governed. And that over and over is raised to a metaphor that a governing institution is a family. ... Now, that’s important because in this country, we have two very different understandings of what families are. Strict father families (SFF) and nurturing parent families (NPF). And the SFF has a motive thought and a morality that goes with it. It says that you have a mother and a father. The father is head of the family, he’s there to protect the family, mommy can’t do it, to support the family, mommy can’t do it, and kids are born bad. They just want to do what they want and they don’t know right from wrong, the good strict father knows right from wrong, and it’s his job to punish the child when they do wrong, so that the punishment will be painful enough so the child will do right and not wrong and therefore develop discipline. Discipline [leads people] to be moral and with that discipline they can go out into the market and become prosperous. So if someone is not disciplined, [he or she] is not going to be prosperous. And so if you see someone who is not prosperous, it means they are not disciplined. If they’re not disciplined, they can’t be moral. And if they’re not moral, they deserve their poverty."

This model of family is then projected on to our political, religious and even business leaders. Think of the mostly absent father that lets the political or religious system or the market take its course - read: let the disciplined and obedient float and the inordinate and miscreant sink - until some people need correcting so they may develop discipline. Love through fear and a paternalist sense of respect. This family model developed during humanity's collective childhood while strict father figures that made all of the decisions were in all likelihood quite necessary.

However, as humanity has slowly matured, a different family model has become more prominent. Mr. Lakoff continues, "And similarly, you have a progressive view (based on a Nurturing Parent Family) where empathy is central and not just feeling empathy but acting on it. Being responsible, being strong, being resolute, having good judgment. That is what is required for a true nurturer. And what you do in such a family is you raise your children to be nurturers of others, to empathize, to be responsible for yourself, to be responsible for others. It is the opposite of indulgence. And what that means is a parent is there for the protection of a child and the empowerment of the child. That’s what government is about in progressive thought. It says you start with people caring about each other. The government is the instrument of that. How does it work? The government protects and empowers. It’s not just military and police protection; it is environmental protection, worker protection, consumer protection, safety nets, health care. And empowerment is not just roads and communication systems, it’s educational systems, it’s the banking system, the energy system. It’s the stock market, the SEC upholds it. It’s the court system for contracts."

This model seems to allow for a growing group of mature people to work together towards solutions that satisfy everybody involved. However attractive this description may make it seem, its not accidental marriage of convenience with laissez-fair capitalism and moral relativism has clearly demonstrated it to be riddled with essentially the same pitfalls as the first model. Thus, democracy, one of the crowning achievements of human evolution, is currently "defined as the dividing of people according to interest, talent and ideology, who then 'negotiate' decisions... The purpose of each component group is to win. The means to this end are economic advantage and the mobilization of support to overwhelm the opponent." (Arbab, 215) Both family models actively uphold this form of democracy.

A new family and administrative model is currently emerging from our collective, nascent spiritual consciousness. A basic principle enunciated by Baha'u'llah, the Founder of the Baha'i Faith, is that "Religion alone can, in the last resort, bring in man's nature such a fundamental change as to enable him to adjust the economic relationships of society." Especially in light of the almost inviolable separation of church and state, comprehension of the significance and implications of this concept are crucial at this point in time as the world's citizens search for permanent solutions to the multifaceted problems that envelop all of humanity.

All of the problems that humanity suffers are essentially spiritual in nature. In other words, even the most perfect administrative and economic structures, either at the macro or micro level, would in time deteriorate if they were not based upon fundamental spiritual truths that inspire individuals to act selflessly. Any transformation of society and its structures must be accompanied by a simultaneous transformation in the individuals that make up this society, otherwise this process will not be complete nor will it last. Although the following quote by 'Abdu'l-Bahá focuses more on the economic side of the issue, it helps illuminate this idea:

"The fundamentals of the whole economic condition are divine in nature and are associated with the world of the heart and the spirit. ... Manifest true economics to the people. Show what love is, what kindness is, what true severance is and generosity. ... Economic questions will not attract hearts. The love of God alone will attract them."

Central to the mission of any administrative institution therefore, would be identifying the spiritual framework within which individuals can serve their true purpose. Generosity, solidarity, broadening loyalties, engaging in a productive livelihood, eliminating extreme poverty and wealth through justice, properly assessing and rewarding currently undervalued contributions to society like that of women and farmers, serving others, and cooperation are just a few examples of the spiritual qualities that underlie a healthy society. Effective means to educate the populace about the nature and importance of these principles, as well as actively creating channels through which they could be expressed at the individual, community and institutional levels would give genuine meaning to interaction.

Two principle characteristics would define this new family model and the institutions that represent it. First, the primary posture of these institutions would be that of learning. Second, they would necessarily rest on the organizing principle that each human being must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family.

Decisions motivated by partisanship, by a desire to maintain economic or political power or by special-interest groups, widen the gulf between the benefits society offers to the laborer and the capitalist. When one sector of society benefits at the expense of another, the entire society suffers as a consequence of the conflict that is inevitably generated. If, however, policies are made by a diverse body of informed citizens whose interest is the general welfare of the region, and the general electorate is educated to understand that criticizing these policies will only result in further disunion, traditional concepts of power and authority will be transformed into a genuine posture of learning.

Thus proper governance at all levels should be viewed as "the collective investigation of reality and the rational analysis of options." (Arbab, 215). A sincere search for truth and a dispassionate, flexible collective decision-making process meets success to the extent that a posture of learning is adopted. Sincerity and detachment are only two of the many spiritual qualities that members of these institutions (as well as the members of society at large) would necessarily acquire and deepen to ensure this process does not degenerate into "conflict and power play."

My point in delving into a more spiritual "family" model is that nurture and empathy, although a significant step in the right direction, do not resolve the basic issues that keep our democracy within its current adversarial framework. Nor will they help us rise above bipartisanship as conservatives will continue to react to, what is for them, the incomprehensible motherly nature it offers as a governing pattern and liberals will continue to react similarly to what they see as paternalistic and authoritarian leadership styles. The only way to transcend bipartisanship is to explore and gradually build upon the spiritual foundations of human relationships.

The First Mystery: Stuff of Life, Part II

2008-08-30T23:40:00.006-05:00

As we saw in Part I of this post, the body is nothing more than a riverbed, or maybe even a river itself, through which flows a host of compounds in such a way as to provide an illusion of relative material permanence. The gene, which we may have considered the basic building block for material existence "is also abstract as a pattern, independent of the atoms that implement it in any given moment, a meeting point between matter and energy, a message that moves in a wave of meaning through life, an acorn harboring an oak, an egg containing feathers, menu, songs and a map of stars."

In one of his many talks to youth, Krishnamurti exalts us not to fear this same flow of life, not to seek permanence where none exists. Paraphrasing him, he says that seeking permanence means desiring the pleasure of indefinite continuity and having everything that does not bring us pleasure to end immediately. For this we have built a society that guarantees permanence of property, names and fame. But life is not like that. In reality, life is like a river that moves and is eternally swirling, exploring, pushing and bouncing off its banks. Our mind, however, perceives this as dangerous, risky, unstable, insecure and so it builds a wall, a wall of tradition, organized religion, political and social theories. The gods within these walls are false gods; they are projections of our own desires and their writings and their philosophy are unfounded because life penetrates the walls and tears them down.

Only the mind without walls, without established position, without barriers, without resting places, that freely moves with life, beyond time, pushing and exploring, only this mind can be happy, eternally new because it is in itself creative.

This brings us back to the First Mystery of Life as Murchie corroborates with Krishnamurti by establishing that "an independent 'I' bounded by life and death is an absurdity..."

"...we are in the same hard-to-visualize field Einstein explored when working out his relativity theory along with its contingent concept that every individual's personal orbit through life is representable as a 'world line' framed in the common four-dimensional crystalline coordinates of space-time. And in case you didn't notice it, a prime philosophical deduction from world lines is that, if relativity be true, an independent 'I' bounded by birth and death is an absurdity, since ... the field concept now so well established as a foundation for relativity implies continuums in virtually everything, including space-time and most certainly its best-known derivative: life. In my view, furthermore, the key to comprehending space-time is the obvious (to me) fact that space is the relationship between things and other things while time is the relationship between things and themselves. The time relation thus requires some establishment of identity (between things and themselves) seeing as identity is indispensable in temporal continuity. But if identity is of the essence of time, it follows that when a human being gives himself to a cause, letting his identity be absorbed in something larger than himself, he is proportionately liberating himself from the field of time. Which tells us something about the relation between mortality and immortality and between life and death, for it presumes that, as one's self is swallowed by universality, to a comparable degree one becomes immortal."

So, it seems prudent to ask at this point, do only certain causes qualify as immortality generators? I can only guess that any cause that seeks permanence would not. However, I'd like to differentiate between seeking meaning, perhaps the most fundamental human impulse, and seeking permanence. Finding meaning or purpose in something sticks us in the middle of the raging river of life and frees us from the clutching, limited mind, only if this meaning does not need to be held up or justified by any of the barriers mentioned by Krishnamurti. True meaning opens us to further learning, is inclusive and universal, builds unity and justice and above all implies attitudinal and behavioral change as it leads us closer to living a life with fuller purpose. In this sense, meaning is life, which is what the 'I' not bounded by life or death seeks fervently.

Thus, giving oneself to a worthy cause, to meaning, through a circle of action-reflection, transcends the "I" over time, gently sets one in the torrent of life, and permits the seeker to comprehend both the abstract nature of body and soul and their mystical, impermanent fusion. The following quote from 'Abdu'l-Baha, explained brilliantly in the video below, perfectly captures the spirit of this conclusion:

"Meditation is the key for opening the doors of mysteries. In that state man abstracts himself: in that state man withdraws himself from all outside objects; in that subjective mood he is immersed in the ocean of spiritual life and can unfold the secrets of things-in-themselves."

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Guy Murchie - The Seven Mysteries of Life
Krishnamurti - The River of Life
'Abdu'l-Baha - Paris Talks

The First Mystery: Stuff of Life, Part I

2008-08-27T23:48:00.012-05:00

Which came first: the hen or the egg? If you consider this question as classic and unanswerable, then your knowledge of science needs brushing up! Of course, the egg is easily proclaimed the winner by half a billion years as the hen has only been here for fifty million years.

This is just one of the lighter gems found in one of the most wonderful books ever written: The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie. Here, a look at the first mystery which he calls The Abstract Nature of the Universe. Murchie's writing is so insightful and provocative that any summary or analysis runs the risk of extending beyond the length of an accessible blog post, so I will procure brevity.

"... this is the world where objects, without much plausible reason, shrink with distance, where thrushes pull up worms to turn them into songs, where an acorn becomes a giant oak in a century because it was forgotten by a squirrel. In other words, there is ... something fundamentally and profoundly abstract" about this world which in turn is so importantly mysterious that it almost unavoidably falls into place as the first of the Seven Mysteries of Life.

"Consciousness implies an appreciable awareness (and control) of matter, an interaction involving both the developing body and the emerging mind that is at once abstract and close to the quick of life. Indeed the fact that you can move your legs and walk, or your tongue and talk, makes you alive. And so does the fact that you can control the engine and wings and tail of your airplane when you fly. You may object that the airplane is not really alive because it is not a natural organism but only man-made and artificial. But I reply that so is a bird's nest artificial for it is bird-made and not strictly a part of the bird's body. And so too is coral artificial in the sense that it is made (or excreted) by the coral polyps. And so is the oyster's shell built of calcareous substances out of the sea. And so also are the shells of bird's eggs and a bird's feathers made of things the bird eats. And so are even your teeth and bones and your fingernails and hair, in fact your whole body. There is no definite line, you see, where artificiality begins. And there is no absolute boundary between life and the world. ... Just as your house is your shell and your coat your pelt, in effect, so does your consciousness form your aura of personal life..."

Perhaps the least abstract thing we can imagine is our body for it allows us contact with other material substances. However, "the reason a living body can be made of such everyday stuff" as water, fat, carbon, phosphorus, magnesium, etc... "of course is that it is complex and flowing and the stuff is not really the body but only what passes through it, borrowed in the same sense that an ocean wave borrows the water it sweeps over." In this sense, if we could ignore time then a wave could be considered material, but as we cannot ignore time it can only be considered abstract as "science knows a wave to be made not of matter at all but purely of energy, which is an abstraction."

"...reflecting on it at length and in the full context of time, the body progressively becomes as abstract as a melody - a melody one may with reason call the melody of life. ...although I had intuitively assumed life itself abstract, the physical body had always seemed simply material and I did not see how it could be otherwise. Then I tried to define the physical boundaries of the body and began to realize they are virtually indefinable, for the air around any air-breathing creature from a weed to a whale is obviously a vital part of it even while it is also part of other creatures. The atmosphere in fact binds together all life on Earth, including life in the deep sea, which 'breathes' oxygen (and some air) constantly. And the water of the sea is another of life's common denominators noticeable in the salty flavor of blood, sweat and tears, as are the solid Earth and its molecules present in our protoplasm compounded of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and a dozen lesser elements."

"... practically all of our material selves is replaced within a year" and if we consider even the most stubborn atom of iron in hemoglobin and even the bones which are continually dissolving and reforming, after five years one can presumably consider one's physical body completely new down to the very last atom. "Assuming this is approximately so, then of what does the body really consist? For a while I thought the body's essence might somehow lurk in the nucleus of each cell where the genes physically direct growth and development. ... Essentially no single atom or molecule or combination of them can be indispensable to a body for they are all dispensed by it. It is only the pattern with its message that proves really vital to life. On the ocean one could make the analogy that it is not the saltwater but the abstract energy that shapes and powers the wave. Likewise it is not the atoms in the DNA but their geometric relation that makes the gene. And it is not the paper and ink but the words and meanings that compose the book."

"The point is that it is the pattern of design itself that is the indispensable thing, and not just its representation on paper or in bricks and mortar. Of course the design is not really a thing in the material sense for it is abstract. Indeed it is a kind of intangible essence, something like Lao-tzu's best knot which, as he explained, was tied without rope. ... Thus our very bodies that we always thought were material ... turn out to be essentially only waves of energy, graphs of probability, nodes of melody being mysteriously played in our time."

As logical as this sounds, it is still challenging to grasp and its implications seem way beyond my current understanding. Our bodies are supposed to be material and the mysterious union formed with the soul is the necessary arena in which the soul can be tried, tested and matured. But, if the body is essentially abstract, then exactly what is the "material" context in which the soul progresses? Must this context be, as we seem to have conceived so far, such a concrete thing or is the illusion of tangibility enough to do the trick? Is the illusion of solidity what differentiates this earthly plane from such purely spiritual realms characterized by immortality and similar limitlessness?

Exploring these mysteries even further in this same post would reveal the feebleness of my attempts at brevity and so they will be taken up in Part II of this topic. Stay tuned.

Bending the Rules of Capitalism

2008-08-18T20:42:00.007-05:00

“When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.”

I have been stricken even more than usual lately by the consequences of how our current economic model overlooks in far too many areas of human endeavor that which makes us happy and healthy in favor of that which makes at least some among us rich.

I read an interview with a medical doctor who was prohibited from practicing in her native Spain because she publicly decried how her fellow practitioners honored corporate agreements to dispense certain drugs instead of prescribing in response to real patient needs. Another example is how our food producers have spent the last 40 years selecting strains of crops based on their shelf life irregardless of how that renders most of them completely void of all nutritional value. Unlike doctors, leaders of the food industry have no commitment to anybody’s happiness or health.

This brings to mind a talk I heard the other day by the man in charge of corporate responsibility at McDonald’s (believe it or not!) who stated clearly in his talk and repeated during the question and answer period how McDonald’s would really like to make important reforms in the meat and dairy processing industries by buying grass-fed cows or “free-range” eggs for example, but that they don’t have enough clout to make any difference. Now, this guy is practically painting a target on his chest by saying this but I don’t think we gain anything by attacking or even analyzing such morally defunct fodder.

If we make an effort to try and understand where this guy is coming from, we can understand him better. Buying grass-fed cows or free-range eggs brings no benefit to McDonald’s unless it raises its profit margin, which it would not. It has no commitment that would lead us to expect anything more. Of course, sometime in the future when enough McDonald’s customers demand these changes, they will suddenly become profitable and surely then the food industry will make the necessary changes. Until then, don’t expect any miracles.

It is precisely this logic that Muhammad Yunus takes aim at in his book “Creating a World Without Poverty.” “Unfettered markets in their current form are not meant to solve social problems and instead may actually exacerbate poverty, disease, pollution, corruption, crime, and inequality.” … “I believe in free markets as sources of inspiration and freedom for all, not as architects of decadence for a small elite. … My experience has shown me that the free market – powerful and useful as it is – could address problems like global poverty and environmental degradation, but not if it must cater solely and relentlessly to the financial goals of its richest shareholders.”

He thus proposes a new type of business – one that “is totally dedicated to solving social and environmental problems. … In its organizational structure, this new business is basically the same as the existing profit-maximizing business. … But its underlying objective – and the criterion by which it should be evaluated – is to create social benefits for those whose lives it touches. … A social business is a company that is cause-driven rather than profit-driven, with the potential to act as a change agent for the world.”

He gives some interesting hypothetical examples before dedicating the rest of the book to chronicling his own existing social businesses: “A social business that designs and markets health insurance policies that provide affordable medical care to the poor.” As I have always felt that the insurance business was antithetical to happiness and health, this sounds really interesting.

This brief treatment of the urgent need for and the exciting possibility opened by social businesses leaves many questions unanswered, reason for which I suggest you pick up the book if this idea intrigues you as it does me. The more effort we spend trying to make food production, environmental stewardship, quality health care, education and equality responsive to both current market forces and basic human desires for health and happiness, the longer we will delay our date with social justice.

Rethinking the Purpose of Cows

2008-08-15T23:23:00.006-05:00

“Food must not only be good to eat, but also be good to think.”

The ethics of food arises from the fact that we are omnivores which, unlike squirrels, rabbits and lions, obligates us to choose what to eat. Few among us actually fulfill that obligation preferring to leave such hard work to our mothers and marketing strategists. The highly paid strategists at McDonald’s know that we will return to those few familiar dishes we grow to love as children which is why this blue blooded institution is one of the world’s top toy distributors.

This is but one of the many provocative and insightful ideas to be found among Michael Pollan’s writings and talks. I highly recommend listening to or watching his presentation at the “Food, Ethics and Environment” conference held at Princeton University in 2006 (found on iTunes U) at which time he had not yet published his wonderful book “In Defense of Food”.

Of course the above statements rest on the assumption that we are indeed omnivores. Admittedly most people don’t need to be convinced of this, but because he was talking to the type of people who would attend such a conference, he makes a compelling argument while addressing the issue of how to decide between an omnivorous or vegetarian diet.

We have, he states, a widely held, basic misunderstanding of domestication. “The animals on our farms, if you take an evolutionary view, are not figures of oppression or exploitation necessarily. Most of them have evolved in a specific direction to in effect trade their independence, their wildness, for protection, food and the life that you can have under the roof of human culture. This is not a consensual thing in any kind of moral philosophical framework; it’s simply an evolutionary thing. Many animals and plants have refused to be domesticated. For some of them, strictly by trial and error, no strategy, no intention involved, no consent, have found that this life provided for their interests in a Darwinian sense, which is to say more copies of themselves, more habitat, more of their genes sent into the future. So for these farm animals … the good life depends on the good farm. Far too few of them have the good farm as their habitat and less now than ever before. But these are animals that when they do live on the good farm and have a humane life there, are realizing what they are on this planet to realize. Of course, animals will only be on farms to the extent that we eat them. From everything I have been able to learn … it will be very hard to create a truly sustainable agriculture without animals.”

The basic claim is that if we didn’t eat cows they would not receive our protection and, unable to fend for themselves, would disappear, become extinct, reducing biodiversity and important food chain elements.

This is the first time that I have seen a provocative and more academic version of the typical “…but if we didn’t eat cows, then what are they here for?” argument. I see several problems with this logic.

First, claiming that the purpose of the cow is to be eaten by humans begs the question about other animals. If you argue, for example, that the purpose of the gazelle is to be hunted and eaten by the lion, then what is the purpose of the lion? What is the purpose of the shark or the crocodile? Is it not enough that dogs are companions for humans, should we give them an even higher purpose by making them part of our diet? Of course, cows are domesticated and pretty defenseless while lions and sharks are not but just because humans have exploited willing partners such as the cow for many years does not imply that this is the most natural or ethical action. Custom is not the mother of ethics.

Second, is it impossible for us to concede intrinsic value to a cow? Who are we to decide what the purpose of a cow is? We have enough trouble figuring out what our own purpose is, so why waste good paper speculating about the purpose of cows? If there is one lesson we can take from the ecological disasters that we have caused, it is that regarding stewardship, nature is much more intelligent than we have so far proven to be. Speculating on this matter and getting the answer wrong is much more disastrous than focusing our minds on something more constructive and urgent like feeding the world’s poor.

Lastly, if we do the thought experiment, as Mr. Pollan would say, of imagining what would happen to cows if our diets suddenly excluded them, we are confronted with a situation similar to that of many other species for which we have become stewards. Bald eagles, many types of whales (including the killer whale), seals, turtles, many types of bats, bears, mountain lions, grey wolves, alligators, boa constrictors, foxes, jaguars, kangaroos, otters, clams, snails, insects and even a long list of plants receive special stewardship for being on the Endangered Species Act list. If cow populations became drastically reduced as a result of eliminating them from our diet, would there be one good reason that we couldn’t protect the cow as we do with all of the above plants and animals?

I agree with him that animals are essential elements to healthy farms although I don’t see how that implies making them part of our diet.

Despite several similarly unfounded and self-serving ideas in his books and talks, I definitely recommend reading what he writes, especially “In Defense of Food”, which will teach even the most indoctrinated a thing or two about the history, nature and consequences of “nutritionism” and our current food production system.

Time for Change

2008-05-29T23:09:00.007-05:00

How do you know that time is passing? Clocks don't help much, nor does the sun. Our bodies fall into rhythm with the seasons which provide tactile, visible and psychological routines that our minds register for reference. Think about your own memories. Are they connected with time, days, nights or seasons? Mine are all associated with either summer, fall, spring or to a much lesser extent winter. Although very few specific spring memories stick out, one feeling dominates them all: the renewal of all creation as life and color burst through the gray veneer of winter. This is when you know a year has passed, not at New Years which, on psychological and biological levels, indicates neither new nor year.

Thus my utter and desperate feeling of timelessness living on the Equator where spring never comes and months fade into years like the drain sucks dirty old water into some unexplored void. I started taking large quantities of pictures a few years ago when I realized that I don't remember things anymore and if I don't have at least a photographic record of my children's childhood, it too will become a confusing blur. There is nothing to stick events and feeling to here, there is no good moment to write off a bad stretch and make resolutions.

Life is totally unrecognizable without "time" and it's child: memories. On an individual level, events lose importance and efforts towards transcendence imply escaping the mundane merry-go-round of days and months. Everything can wait until tomorrow even though everything happens here and now and bears little relation to what may have already taken place. On a collective level, societies build identity around current public debates, fashion and trends. Cohesiveness and commonality depend on the constant ebb and flow of issues and often the interplay between tragedies and momentaneous victories. Struggle and hope are possibly the only constants.

Perhaps for this reason people cling so fiercely to small group identities like political parties, football teams, regionalisms, race and above all class. These provide identity, and memories on the one hand, and on the other, render the great majority incapable of the impartiality required for effective and inclusive collective decision-making processes. The "other" is practically invisible when your whole world revolves around the battle raging between your groups and the ignorant enemies lurking outside.

The only moments that I am struck by the passage of time are when I see what was once a child who has transformed into a youth. If he has changed so much, that must mean that I am that much older too. So, on the Equator because time passes by inference and not by natural psychological or biological rhythms, the material world that can be felt and seen here and now gains special importance. Any spiritually oriented meaning for life and self-identity, divorced from dogmas and blind imitations, must be forged with supreme effort by creating spiritual time, time that measures and compares one's currently manifested grades of patience, generosity and love against those demonstrated in the past. Collective spiritual identity can similarly be measured by the caliber of spiritual maturity society displays now in it's reaction to the "other" compared with how people previously struggled against exclusion and selfishness. It is precisely this spiritual time that provides clear understanding of the past and a vision for the future. Hope, optimism and even will to action depend entirely on success in this supreme effort. Only then can Spring come.

Stages of Growth

2008-05-17T19:27:00.006-05:00

A series of teaching challenges for both community leaders and university students has lead me to think deeply about how to help students discover that humanity is evolving towards spiritual maturity and how this implies that the role of the individual is to actively contribute towards building a society that reflects the next step in this evolution. Upon thinking about how to go about accomplishing this, I recalled reading a chapter from “The Post Corporate World” by David Korten in which he describes in lay terms the emotional characteristics of a person in different stages of growth. Although it sounds perfectly logical that the development field would think about our stages of growth enough to describe them in detail, this task has been delegated to psychologists while development normally concerns itself with other pressing matters.

It seems to me, however, that only by clearly visualizing both our collective history and future as a series of stages in human growth leading us towards maturity analogous to those through which an individual passes throughout his/her life, can we hope to rid anybody of the apathy that has so firmly gripped many of our fellow human beings. Concentrating on the complexity and apparent enormity of problems any one society faces is so daunting to most that will to action is easily paralyzed. Under these circumstances, development comes to mean physical infrastructure building and thus loses much of its meaning. If, however, humanity itself is understood as an organic, evolving whole, and development means building capacity and vision to activate both individual and collective transformation from one stage of growth to the next, then will to action, and passion to serve others emerge naturally from deep within human nature.

With this as a broad learning objective, I became inspired by parts of Korten’s text to create this growth chart. After having students work with the descriptions by classifying them into the correct stages, I hand out the whole sheet and the class starts thinking about where each one of us is on the continuum, where our local and national culture is and finally where the global community can be classified. Students have no difficulty agreeing that as a whole, we are in the Adolescent stage, although discussion is a little more challenging for the class to decide that humanity as a whole is moving towards maturity. Once that is accomplished, though, many important implications start seeping naturally into class discussions, and thus into consciousness, such as the true nature of leadership, characteristics of a consultative decision-making process and our responsibilities towards less fortunate people and whole segments of society. Students can then clearly envision how our current legal, economic and political systems were born during our collective childhood and how they no longer respond to the needs of a more mature humanity and how building new institutions that respond to our emotional and spiritual need for inclusion and community building is foremost among the responsibilities of each individual.

I realize now that this chart describes individual growth stages, and that it would be useful to do the same exercise with both institutions and the community, the other two main actors in society building. I also realize now that it would be useful to make a second chart focusing. spiritual stages of growth to compliment the emotional characteristics on this chart.

In any case, I can see that this instrument has guided my students and me towards achieving the ambitious learning objective that I set. Seeing students eager to start serving others and reflecting on that service in terms of the unity and justice they are contributing towards, has brought both me and many of my students great satisfaction.

Children in China

2008-05-15T09:11:00.006-05:00

Being desensitized by so many stories about natural disasters and suffering should not happen, but it does. Every once in a while, though, a story comes along that really hits home. This week I have been totally demoralized by the collapse of approximately 6,900 schools in China, and the loss of so many children. To think that the great majority of them are only children, without brothers or sisters, and that in certain villages this means the loss of an entire generation, is too much for me to grasp. My friend Lily in China has told me that many of the surviving parents will be allowed to have another child, but that won't bring back a lost generation. I am sure the government never foresaw a situation like this when it implemented such strict family planning policies, and even though I know most people favor these policies, it is times like these that they only compound misery.

Here in Ecuador children are overabundant and can be seen and felt everywhere in great moving masses. Although I often wish I could stop them from growing up so fast so that somebody could provide better care and education for so many of them, seeing their laughing faces as they move to and from school still brings a sense of security and joy. Not being able to see or feel hardly any of them while in China caused a lasting impression on me. The society felt all grown up and mature on one hand and futureless and somber on the other. This must make the current tragedy all the more unbearable.

My condolences and prayers for the departed and the survivors.

How to Choose a Microcredit Organization

2008-03-20T17:08:00.007-05:00

Over the past few years an indisputably positive trend has been gaining strength in the United States and other rich nations as more and more people become aware of how powerful microcredit is as a poverty fighting tool. Support for microcredit initiatives carried out in poorer areas of the world through organizations like Kiva and Grameen Foundation has risen dramatically and in general everybody benefits from this.

There are, however, some things potential donors and loaners should consider before choosing the partner organization that will act as an intermediary between you and the direct recipient of the donation or loan.

In his book Creating a World Without Poverty, Professor Yunus feels the need to identify and describe various types of micro-credit programs that have sprung up. This variety has made the word micro-credit to mean a number of things, some of which are at odds with one another. To clear up any confusion caused by this, he states “Microcredit is supposed to describe loans offered with no collateral to support income-generating businesses aimed at lifting the poor out of poverty.” He goes on to describe programs called microcredit that offer loans to different target populations, with different purposes that require collateral and are used for consumption. Some programs even charge interest rates similar to those of the loan sharks, indicating their profit motive.

To provide further clarity, he proposes classifying microcredit programs into two categories which I transcribe here:

Type 1: Poverty-Focused Microcredit Programs

These are poverty-focused, collateral-free, low-interest microcredit programs. Grameen Bank was created to provide this type of microcredit. Type 1 programs charge interest rates that fit into one of two zones: the Green Zone, which equals the cost of funds at the market rate plus up to 10 percent, and the Yellow Zone, which equals the cost of funds at the market rate plus 10 to 15 percent.

Type 2: Profit-Maximizing Microcredit Programs

These are programs that charge an interest rate higher than the Yellow Zone. They operate in the Red Zone, which is moneylender’s territory. Because of the high interest rates they charge, these programs cannot be viewed as poverty-focused but rather are commercial enterprises whose main objective appears to be earning large profits for shareholders or other investors.

There are even microcredit programs here in Ecuador that use bullhorns to publicly shame a defaulting borrower into paying, often requiring her to sacrifice schooling or food for her children to do so. If that doesn’t produce the desired effect, they will take the roof off of her house, which is their collateral as they financed it. They then audaciously pronounce their payback rate to be over 98%!

Professor Yunus suggests that the Microcredit Summit Campaign, which maintains a database of all microcredit programs, should “include only Type 1 programs, since only these contribute to the campaign’s goal of using microcredit to help eliminate poverty.” Type 2 programs have their proper place targeting the lower middle class and above as they can provide effective capital-building support so important for this segment of the population. His message to these programs is clear: “Make all the profit you want from your middle-class customers! Feel free to take advantage of your financial position, if you can! But don’t apply the same thinking to the poor. If you lend to the poor, do it without concern for profit, so that they can have the maximum help in climbing out of poverty. Once they’ve completed the climb, then treat them like every other customer – but not till then.”

I work with a savings and loan Cooperative. We at the Cooperativa Detodas find this analysis quite enlightening and encouraging. We would like our borrowers, supporters, readers and friends to know that we clearly fit into the Type 1 category for the following reasons:

We charge Green Zone interest rates on all of our loans
We do not require collateral
We target the poorest segments of the population
The only objective for the program is to support our borrowers in their drive towards prosperity

We do not coerce our borrowers to pay back their loans. Rather, we support them by seeing that the group they belong to comes to their aid to help resolve the problem that caused the borrower to fall behind, and by renegotiating their loan in comfortable payments if need be.

All of this leads me to suggest to those of you who support microcredit organizations or are considering doing so, to do some digging in order to choose one that satisfies your social concerns. Specifically,

Find out what the cost of funds at market rate are in the country where the microcredit organization functions, and what interest rates it charges.
Ask if it requires collateral for loans.
Ask for a description of its target population. People who earn less than $1 a day are the primary target for microcredit organizations, although $2 is also common. Many organizations also consider living conditions, credit history and land ownership as indicators.
Inquire into its methodology just enough to understand how loans are disbursed and paid back.
Ask for basic health indicators such as number of borrowers and growth rates.
Finally, read its mission. If the mission is written clearly and truthfully, it should reflect the answers to the above questions. The degree to which the mission differs from the answers to the above questions should indicate if the organization focuses on a profit motive or works towards building capacity and prosperity.

Call to Action: Compost for Life

2008-03-17T08:39:00.007-05:00

It is beyond doubt that future historians will look back on our generation and the multiple water shortage and contamination problems we currently suffer from, and wonder how Western “civilization” could have advocated urinating and defecating into what little purified drinking water we have left. I apologize to the light-hearted among my readers for touching on such an apparently foul subject, but the growing global water and health crises stand in such stark contrast with current waste-management procedures, that it requires our urgent attention.

If you don’t already think that the world is nearly completely upside down and backwards, then imagine a civilization that considers those who don’t deposit their feces into a bowl of drinking water on a regular basis as miscreants, uncivilized, dirty or poverty stricken. Of course this practice is convenient for taking such refuse to wastewater treatment plants where it is processed and eventually returned to the environment, albeit in some cases considerably more contaminated with “excessive levels of nitrates, chlorine, pharmaceutical drugs, industrial chemicals, detergents, and other pollutants” than before.

This would all be fine except for three factors: water shortages, diseases borne from water contamination and fertilizer needs for boosting agricultural production. Although these are all complex and important topics deserving much more in-depth analysis, I will only briefly outline each one.

Water shortage

Currently, United Nations estimates that 1.2 billion in a world of just over 6 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. More specifically, in developing countries, 21% of all people do not have access to safe drinking water, and in rural areas the figure jumps to 30%.
67% of the world’s households must fetch water from outside their homes.
Between 1990 and 1995, global water consumption rose sixfold, which is more than double the rate of population growth.
Increasing industrialization is creating a lion’s share of the problem: it takes 300 litres of water to produce 1 kilogram of paper, and 215,000 litres to produce 1 metric ton of steel. Changes in our diet are also driving water consumption; it takes 15,000 tons of water to produce a ton of beef, while it only requires 1,000 tons of water for a ton of grain.
China has approximately 21 per cent of the global population, but access to only 7 per cent of the planet’s freshwater.

Water borne diseases

42% of the world’s population does not have access to a latrine or other proper means of sanitation.
“In the developing countries, 80 per cent of illnesses are water-related. Due to the shortage of safe drinking water in much of the world, there are 3.3 million deaths every year from diarrheal diseases caused by E. coli, salmonella and cholera bacterial infections, and from parasites like giardia and cryptosporidium, as well as viral pathogens like rotavirus. In fact, between 1990 and 2000, more children died of diarrhea than all the people killed in armed conflicts since the Second World War.”
Those of us who are considered to have access to safe drinking water should consider that approximately 10 million people in the US have access to water that is not in compliance with federal standards for removal of microorganisms, and approximately 7 million Americans get sick annually from contaminated drinking water.

Waste Management and topsoil

Sending human excrements to waste management plants infers that they are in fact waste. Waste is any material with no inherent value that is discarded and has no further use, a completely inaccurate description of human refuse which only becomes waste upon being discarded.
Byproducts of our digestive system, or any other digestive system for that matter, are in fact a valuable organic resource material rich in soil nutrients. It comes from the soil in the form of vegetables, fruit, nuts, or grains (and even meat), is naturally processed in the body, and then can be returned to the soil in the form of humus after careful composting to provide the highest quality soil additive.
Returning all organic residues resulting from crop production to the soil, including animal and human residues, should be axiomatic to organic agriculture, although it is not. The profound ignorance that surrounds this topic is causing major agricultural and health problems throughout the world.
For example, not having enough natural fertilizers has given rise to a gigantic synthetic fertilizer industry. These petro-chemical products deplete non-renewable fossil fuels, cause crop dependence, promote dangerous single crop practices, and once in the human body “interfere with the body’s normal functioning, … damage human chromosomes and cause cancer and numerous other diseases. … For example, human mother’s milk has consistently shown contamination from synthetic organic chemicals since 1951, and the incidence of human breast cancer has risen dramatically since then.”

2005 – 2015 has been denominated the International Decade for Action: Water for Life. At its launch, the UN issued a useful document entitled Water for Life: Making it Happen. In it, they dramatically emphasize the importance of improved water and sanitation services:

“Improved water and sanitation will speed the achievement of all eight MDGs, helping to:

· eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;

· achieve universal primary education;

· promote gender equality and empower women;

· reduce child mortality; improve maternal health;

· combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;

· ensure environmental sustainability; and

· develop a global partnership for development.”

Given this emerging reality, it is little wonder that water has been described as “the oil of the twenty-first century”, a scarce commodity that will be a source of conflict between peoples and nations. This is fine but oil shortages can be resolved by developing alternative energy sources, while the water supply cannot be increased other than by desalinization, a costly and complex process.

The United Nations proposes a complex set of interrelated actions to combat this crisis. A major limitation in advocating flush toilet systems for everybody, besides those mentioned above, is their prohibitive cost for nearly every country around the globe. Because of this, and because this is considered the only civilized solution, governments simply leave the problem unresolved, leaving 90 per cent of sewage and 70 per cent of industrial wastes in developing countries to be discharged into water courses without treatment.

However, in his insightful book “The Humanure Handbook”, Joseph Jenkins clearly demonstrates that composting humanure as he denominates it, is the most accessible, viable and expeditious option for resolving the sanitation quandary and its host of accompanying problems. His many years of personal experience and research indicate that although raw humanure “carries with it a significant potential for danger in the form of disease pathogens,” … they are completely destroyed by composting when the retention time is adequate or when the composting process generates enough internal, biological heat. Both of these conditions are easily met when the compost heap is properly managed.

Spreading the resulting humus over his garden for 25 years has also proven that the product is an effective source of fertilizer for agriculture destined to human consumption. In fact, it may be useful to provide just a short list of the benefits of the humus that results from compost: enriches soil, prevents pollution, fights existing pollution, restores land, destroys pathogens and saves money. I am an avid composter (although admittedly not of my humanure) and would like to add here that perhaps the most beneficial aspect of compost is the sense of self worth and satisfaction one feels when helping organic elements complete their natural cycle and become dirt again.

Of course setting up composting systems that can meet sanitation needs for the 1.2 billion excluded human beings (and eventually the rest of the entire human population), especially in urban settings, would be a daunting task to say the least. However, the progress made towards providing safe water supplies and sanitation services for the world’s poor over the past decade or two (according to the UN, 83 per cent of the world's population used improved drinking water sources in 2002, up from an estimated 79 per cent in 1990) pales shamelessly with the overwhelming and ever increasing need.

All true change comes hard. Changes of this magnitude, requiring rethinking such deeply entrenched ideas about civilization, come even harder than normal. However, we can resist our intuition and permit nearly half of the world’s population to live in conditions that anybody reading this would consider horrifying, or we can explore thorny but promising paths towards true sustainability and dignity. If doing this single action well helps us make huge strides towards attaining all eight Millennium Development Goals, and thus bringing prosperity to the world’s people, I suggest we explore that path without further adieu.

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Jenkins, Joseph. The Humanure Handbook. Jenkins Publishing, PO Box 607, Grove City, PA 16127.

http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/factsheet.html

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/monitoring/jmp2005/en/index.html

The Personal Lifestyle Choice

2008-02-05T17:47:00.000-05:00

We hear way too much about factories and industries and changing light bulbs and such regarding global warming. Not that these aren’t important, but on one extreme the average citizen can’t really have any important impact, and on the other we can do tiny but benevolent acts that make us feel good if nothing else. To avoid paralysis of action, we have to look at a third way in which individuals can make a big impact by making a personal lifestyle choice.

Perhaps THE personal lifestyle choice, the one that dictates all others, is diet. As our bodies change we are literally eaten by the earth and in exchange we get to choose how we would like to eat it. Of course, much of our diet choice is culturally influenced and most people don’t ever get beyond what they are sold by their local marketing strategists and fed by their mothers. However, diet is ultimately a personal choice that is possibly the most intimate way of establishing a relationship with our Earth. Living as part of our Earth is an important spiritual lifestyle choice and this spiritual development refines the balance we need between us as individuals and the rest of life. “The more spiritually evolved we become, the more we are aware that we are also a part of everything outside and beyond ourselves; we are just a tiny piece to a greater whole. We become more selfless.” (Balance Point: Searching for a Spiritual Missing Link)

Just as important is the practical side to all of this. According to the UN/FAO’s report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” It contributes over 18% of all greenhouse gasses, more than transport. These are emitted in the form of Co² and other more destructive gasses such as methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia. The report suggests a series of solutions including cover crops, manure management, forestation, reforestation, developing methodologies for soil carbon sequestration, and above all, improving livestock diets.

Regarding effects of the industry on water, the report states the following:

· The livestock sector is a significant source of overgrazing, compaction, erosion, acid rain, acidification of ecosystems

· The livestock sector is a key player in increasing water use, accounting for over 8 percent of global human water use…

· It is probably the largest sectoral source of water pollution, contributing to eutrophication, “dead” zones in coastal areas, degradation of coral reefs, human health problems, emergence of antibiotic resistance and many others.

· The major sources of pollution are from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and pesticides used for feedcrops, and sediments from eroded pastures.

· Livestock also affect the replenishment of freshwater by compacting soil, reducing infiltration, degrading the banks of watercourses, drying up floodplains and lowering water tables.

It is also a leading contributor to the destruction of biodiversity. “Indeed, the livestock sector may well be the leading player in the reduction of biodiversity, since it is the major driver of deforestation, as well as one of the leading drivers of land degradation, pollution, climate change, overfishing, sedimentation of coastal areas and facilitation of invasions by alien species.”

As the topic here is climate change, I thought about saving a discussion about health issues for later. However, can we really consider ourselves and our health separate from our environment? We can consider obesity, numerous types of cancer, hypertension and a variety of other meat-intake related diseases as part of our current environmental disaster if we consider ourselves as part of the environment, which is only logical.

Both environmental and health disasters are a logical consequence of deviating from our natural diet on such a large and now nearly uncontrollable scale. Medical science is gradually demonstrating that our natural diet consists of that which grows out of the ground. Realizing this, wouldn’t it make more sense to start making significant changes to OUR diet instead of pouring large amounts of unavailable energy and time into changing livestock diet? Gradually adopting a grain, vegetable, nut and fruit-based diet could possibly be the most accessible and powerful change possible for each individual who is concerned about the future of our planet.

Talks Given by Dr. Muhammad Yunus

2007-12-08T21:58:00.000-05:00

The other day I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Muhammad Yunus speak twice. In the afternoon I attended a semi-intimate gathering with him and then in the evening I saw him speak in a large auditorium along with about 3,000 others.

I really enjoyed hearing him speak and I would like to share some highlights and reflections.

On both occasions he emphasized that poverty is imposed upon people and does not come from within them. Difficulty in genuinely understanding this comes from an academic or as he put it, birds-eye view of economics. This vantage point provides some distinct advantages for the economist, especially to decipher production, marketing and consumption patterns. However, the problems that people below are perceived to have cannot be clearly understood and what is not understood is invented to fit into seemingly harmonious theories and formulas. Without gaining a “worm’s-eye” view in which one can clearly understand problems faced, solutions will be misguided at best and damaging at worst. Gaining on the ground vision often leads to solutions which are completely opposite to and even inconceivable for the bird’s-eye economist, of which the Grameen bank is a perfect example. All of the economists and bankers told Mr. Yunus that he would never see the money he loaned to the very poor again because the poor are not creditworthy. Of course the very poor are not creditworthy for sizeable consumption loans, but manageable, productive loans can actually increase their creditworthiness by giving them the means to successfully pay back their loans.

This analysis got my mind wandering from the talk to Dr. Jeffry Sach’s book “The End of Poverty”, which takes a distinctively bird’s-eye view of economics and the history of development. What is most interesting to me is that both Sachs and Yunus aim towards basically the same end goal: eradicating extreme poverty. Sachs has gathered the world’s best minds in the field, galvanized a global Millennium Project and set in motion important initiatives upon which he draws to enrich his analysis. He puts his eggs in the basket of trade based, technology driven growth. However, he recognizes that along with financing humanitarian emergencies and public investments, official development assistance needs to be channeled to finance private small businesses and farm improvements “through microfinance programs and other schemes” (246). This would be aimed at raising household incomes, which seems to concur nicely with the micro-finance model created through the Grameen Bank.

However, the talk I heard the other night leads me to believe that even though they use the same vocabulary to name a key poverty eradication strategy, their visions differ in fundamental ways. The essence of Dr. Yunus’ vision is that typical business strategies aimed at accumulating capital and inserting people into the dominant production model, make them into drones, money mongering drones no less. Making money should be appreciated for just that, and not to be confused with the joy that comes from using our knowledge and talents to serve others. Recognizing that one’s prosperity depends on the prosperity of the rest of the surrounding community requires constantly contributing to that community welfare through actions that are aimed at only that and don’t have hidden agendas.

For a micro-credit program directed at the very poor, this means creating social enterprises in which money is made and communities are benefited. Capital is accumulated for the purpose of benefiting the community although the individual and her family are the most obvious beneficiaries.

Clearly, both visions are valid and complimentary as Dr. Sachs lobbies for creating “a global network of connections that reach from impoverished communities to the very centers of world power and wealth and back again” (242), an important element not present in the vision laid out by Dr. Yunus in these talks.

Wishing to illustrate the point that poverty is imposed upon people in a more colorful way, Dr. Yunus compared poor people to bonsai trees. Bonsai trees don’t use bonsai seeds. They come from full stature trees, but are planted within pots that don’t allow their roots to sustain any further growth. Anybody who has his/her “roots” constantly clipped has no opportunity to reach his/her full potential. Although the effects are permanent in some ways, transferring a bonsai tree to a space in which it can develop its roots will allow it to grow to previously unimagined heights. Micro-credit directed towards creating social enterprises has this very purpose and the testimonies he gave indicate that they fulfill this purpose more frequently than not.

As readers of this blog know, I am on the Board of Directors of a Grameen replica bank in Guayaquil where I live. It is a volunteer position, and as volunteers, all of us on the Board have a hard time finding the time we need to dedicate to the Bank to improve its performance and help achieve its objectives better. I am the only man on the Board and almost all of the other members are clients, very poor women who run subsistent oriented small businesses. The Board has formally asked me to redesign and lead the Bank’s client training efforts, in initiating participation in the Bank, in small business management and in human development. I have been seriously considering accepting this challenge even though I apparently don’t have the time it would require, and these talks have motivated me more than before. This is such a key aspect to micro-credit and to the prosperity of the bank and its clients that I think I need to look for ways to rearrange by schedule and activities to contribute to this noble cause. Well, I will keep you all posted!

Pathogenic Organisms

2007-11-25T00:28:00.000-05:00

I had the fortune of recently running across a great little book that although published in 1999, offers an insightful view of global warming that I haven’t seen in recent literature (not that I have exactly read much of the recent literature, mind you). In chapter one “Crap Happens: something’s about to hit the fan”, Joseph Jenkins waxes thus: “When viewed at the next quantum level of perspective, from which the Earth is seen as an organism and humans are seen as microorganisms, the human species looks like a menace to the planet. In fact, the human race is looking a lot like a disease-causing pathogen, which is an organism excessively multiplying, consuming, and producing harmful waste, with no regard for the health and well-being of its host – in this case, the planet Earth.”

Pathogenic organisms behave like cancerous cells which act on their own behalf to the detriment of even their host, which may sound pretty ridiculous as it seemingly threatens their own survival. However, if we consider just a few of the ridiculous things we do, like steadily replacing real food with “edible food-like substances” that cause our own destruction, then the analogy is not too far fetched.

We all know what a host organism does once it detects pathogenic life forms in its midst: it fights back. Can the earth really defend itself? Well, think about what we do when we become infected. Our body raises its temperature which “not only inhibits the growth of the infecting pathogen, but also greatly enhances the disease fighting capability within the body.” With a raised temperature, many antibodies can be readily deployed to defend against the disease. This is, of course, an emergency response as it cannot be sustained for too long without causing further damage to the body.

Does this ring as eerily familiar to you as it does to me? “Global warming may be the Earth’s way of inducing a fever – as a reaction to human pollution of the atmosphere and human over-consumption of fossil fuels.” Antibodies aren’t too difficult to identify either: “insect population booms, new strains of deadly bacteria, viruses, and algae particularly toxic to humans.” The unbelievable proliferation of all sorts of cancers since our ridiculous behavior began, intimately linked to the production of synthetic organic chemicals, fits into this scheme as well.

However, we are liberating excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so how does this fit in? Well, it seems that improper use of any organic material causes chemical imbalances in the soil, water and atmosphere, sending a clear message to the perpetrator that goes something like this: change your behavior or die. This quickly discourages the pathogenic behavior and corrects the balance.

The Earth will not allow us to continue to destroy forests, deplete water reservoirs, collapse fisheries, erode farmland, dry up rivers, fill wetlands and cause species extinction. Nor will it allow us to overpopulate our living spaces or worse carelessly produce and dump toxic chemicals into the environment.

Just reflect on how despicable cancerous cells are: maniacally selfish, pathogenic, multiplying machines bent on total domination. Can that really be us?

Our spiritual heritage opens us to understanding the one conceptual and practical tool we need to combat our own base behavior, and this is the organic unity we experience in moments of emotion, either sorrow or joy, not only with the entire human race, but with every living being. Cultivating this will allow us to see our planet and our neighbors for who they really are, for they are us, and we are they.

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All quotes taken from: Jenkins, J. The Humanure Handbook, second edition, Jenkins Publishing, Grove City, PA, 1999, pages 15 – 19.

Leaves in a Rainforest

2007-11-19T21:53:00.000-05:00

In the forest:

“The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

We spent this past weekend in the Rio Palenque Science Center. My wife is shooting a promotional video for the foundation that owns this forest so I took the kids to enjoy it in the meanwhile.

We hiked several of the trails that criss-cross the area, leading up hills, through streams, over decaying trunks and over animal dens and tracks. I was especially amazed by the leaves. You can stand in any place and just watch the leaves fall, hundreds of them. Most of them don’t reach the ground immediately as they get caught in the vines and overly lush underbrush. Some of the leaves were literally bigger than me and all of the trees are covered with vines whose leaves get bigger the higher up they go.

One of the biggest trees I have ever seen had recently broken in half because of the weight of the vines. 30 meters had broken off, leaving a whopping 45 meters of massive tree.

This is on the coast of Ecuador, not on the Amazon Basin side of the Andes. There are very few primary forests still standing in this part of the country, so exploring this was a real treat. As you can imagine, there is an amazing wealth of diversity there, both flora and fauna. According to their literature, there are 1,216 species of plants, 360 species of birds, and 350 unique species of butterflies, among others.

Only scientists or people doing scientific tourism can stay at the lodge, although many school children visit the area for field trips. We saw a party of such tourists there and they were birdwatching. There, you can see the Harpy Eagle, Gray-backed Hawk, Rose-faced Parrot, Ecuadorian Trogon, Chocó Toucan, Scarlet-backed and Lita woodpeckers, and Scarlet-browed and Scarlet-and-white tanagers, Gray Hawk, Laughing falcon, Rufous-headed Chachalaca, Ecuadorian Ground dove, Maroon-tailed Parakeet, blue headed parrot, Bronzy, Stripe-throated, and Baron's hermits, Guira tanagers.

Although we didn’t get to see one, several types of “glass frogs” live in the Science Center. This picture gives you a good idea of what they look like. Wouldn’t it be fun if we were “glass people”?

All of the surrounding area is used for plantations such as this one. They plant palm trees, pineapple or papaya but either way, it is all monoculture, heavily dependent on fertilizers and pesticides. The river is quite contaminated from runoff. I couldn’t help but imagine how this area must have looked 50 years ago, completely covered with lush tropical forest.

Walking through a rain forest is one of the most moving experiences a person can have. It is life in its fullest. Life explodes and comes and goes and the noise made by the bugs and birds will deafen anybody. I felt like an outsider, an intruder and at the same time I felt at home like I had been there before and needed to stay there.

Two Sides of Oil clash in Ecuador

2007-10-18T22:46:00.000-05:00

First the bad times. Part of the precious rainforest in Ecuador has been declared one of the 30 most polluted places on the entire earth. Here is an extract from the 2007 Blacksmith Institute Report providing details:

"Oriente, Ecuador
Potentially Affected People: 30,000

Type of Pollutant: Oil and toxic waste
Source of Pollution: Oil exploration

The Problem: From 1964 to 1992, Texaco (now Chevron) built and operated oil exploration and production facilities in the northern region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, known as the
"Oriente". After three decades of activity, the company left behind 600 open waste pits and allegedly dumped 18.5 billion gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador's rainforest. Crude oil dumped in open waterways is allegedly some 30 times worse
than the Exxon Valdez spill.

This toxic dumping is reported to affect not only an indigenous population of 30,000 people but also 2.5 million acres of rain forest.

Health Impacts: Increased cancer incidence, reproductive problems and birth defects are the major health effects. Water used by local residents for drinking and bathing contains nearly 150 times the safe exposure levels to hydrocarbons.

Status of Clean-Up Activity: Texaco is facing a billion dollar legal battle for polluting significant portions of the Ecuadorean Amazon. The company has vehemently denied the accusations and insisted that local authorities have absolved it of any guilt."

The other side of oil reared an unexpected and most welcome head a few days ago when President Rafael Correa made a major announcement about oil exploration in the Yasuni National Park, the most precious and important reserve in the country. Here is a public service announcement narrated by Martin Sheen I recommend watching. Here is an extract of the People & Planet article:

"Ecuador promises to leave biggest oilfield untouched

In an unprecedented initiative, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has told the UN summit on climate change, now meeting in New York, that his country proposes to leave its largest oil reserve untouched and avoid all oil extraction activities in the Yasuni National Park, where it is located.

Though not an entirely new idea, he presented the Yasuní-ITT Initiative to world leaders today as a contribution to the reduction of global greenhouse gases and to initiate Ecuador’s transition toward the world’s first truly sustainable economy.

A key part of this initiative is to avoid oil extraction activities in Yasuni National Park, home to at least two indigenous tribes that live in voluntary isolation and one of the most biodiverse places on earth.

Ecuador proposes to leave the nearly one billion barrel ITT oilfield unexploited in order to preserve Yasuni’s astounding biodiversity, ecosystem services, and the cultural integrity of its indigenous inhabitants.

Ecuador says it is proposing to forgo the revenue from oil production because it believes the value of avoiding climate change and deforestation is of greater value to Ecuador and the planet as a whole.

Ecuador, whose historic carbon dioxide emissions amount to less than 0.5 per cent, has now offered to keep nearly 436 million tons of carbon dioxide permanently sequestered in the ground, as a voluntary contribtiung to global climate change mitigation.

Commentators point out that it is the first time that a country dependent on oil exports for one third of its income has proposed forgoing oil extraction to support global sustainability objectives, and while inviting the world to help Ecuador achieve its goal of transitioning toward a new green economy."

First I really hope Mr. Correa survives what is surely coming his way after such a bold stand against big oil. Second, I would really like to believe that Mr. Correa is sincere in his desire to steward such a vital resource for life. Stewardship normally happens, however, as compensation efforts by transnational corporations or piecemeal agreements to appease affected populations. And it almost never happens at the expense of unexplored oil fields. This kind of sacrifice would put Ecuador on the map, and for good reason this time.

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Oil pictures taken from: http://www.chevrontoxico.com/index.php
Pictures of Yasuni National Park taken from: http://www.ecuador-travel.net/biodiversity.parks.yasuni.htm

iguanajournal interviews Ahmadi-Nejad

2007-09-30T09:58:00.000-05:00

“The Government of Iran considers Baha’is to be apostates (apostasy, specifically conversion from Islam, is punishable by death) and defines the Baha’i faith as a political ‘sect.’ The Ministry of Justice states that Baha’is are permitted to enrol in schools only if they do not identify themselves as Baha’is…”*

Regarding Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the country’s president, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times called him a ‘fruitbat’ and a ‘doofus’. I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side! Name-calling aside, there are certain things we all need to know about him and his government’s policies.

Being the media mogul that it is, iguanajournal obtained an exclusive interview with Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president of Iran. He blocked out an hour in his busy agenda for this interview on the Latin American leg of his tour to meet with Morales and Chavez. However, as you shall see in the following transcript, the interview didn’t last that long. Here is the transcript:

Iguanajournal – It is our pleasure to converse with you and in this way help bridge cultural, political and religious gaps between Westerners and Iranians.

Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad – (silent)

Iguanajournal – Ok, so we would like to get into some thorny issues that are on our reader’s minds. Foremost among them are the accusations coming from some quarters about a “widespread and calculated effort by the government to maintain and gradually intensify the persecution of Iranian Baha’is,” a growing community of between 300,000 and 350,000 members. There are several specific issues related to this, and one of the main concerns regards “incidents of abuse and discrimination directed at Baha’i students and children.” Is it true Mr. President, that these innocent children and youth are denied proper education because of their religious beliefs?

Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad – (silent)

Iguanajournal – I see, um, we have obtained an official government document, a “2 November 2006 letter from the headquarters of Payame Noor University to its regional branches, [which] states that it is government policy that Baha’i students ‘cannot enroll’ in Iranian universities and that if they are already enrolled, ‘they should be expelled.’” This seems to contradict the fact that “Iran claims that it has finally opened the doors to Baha’i students, after some 25 years of keeping them out of public and private universities in Iran,” Would you care to explain this?

Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad – (silent)

Iguanajournal – Sir, this is an interview. We would appreciate hearing your perspective on these important matters. (Waits 45 seconds). Ok, it also seems that the government has ordered a series of arrests and releases on specific groups of Baha’is around the country, demanded large bonds for their release, and ransacked their homes while in prison. Some of these people arrested in Tehran and Sanandaj are still in jail. We are sure you are aware that violating human rights in this way is against international law and is a disgrace to your noble Persian heritage. Could you help us understand this behavior?

Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad – (silent)

Iguanajournal – Well, um, maybe one final question. We have obtained these photographs, let’s see, here they are.

Destroying Baha'i cemeteries is quite … provocative. This is a grave human rights violation, and to be honest with you Mr. President, quite cowardly. We know that in recent months, the Iranian authorities have been “carrying out a widespread crackdown on civil society, targeting academics, women's rights activists, students, and journalists.” Although not alone, the Baha’i community is symbolic of your attitude towards fundamental issues of dignity, freedom and honor. Obviously the Baha’is, as well as other groups, represent some sort of threat to your government, but we can’t figure out what that could be as they have consistently obeyed instructions over the years by their supreme body in words similar to the following: “With an illumined conscience, with a world-embracing vision, with no partisan political agenda, and with due regard for law and order, strive for the regeneration of your country. By your deeds and services, attract the hearts of those around you, even win the esteem of your avowed enemies.”

The international community gazes sternly upon your regime, and although the nuclear development issue has dominated headlines, what goes on behind the scenes is even more newsworthy.

If you haven’t anything to say for yourself, then this interview need continue no further.

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I’d like to finish this blog extending my most heartfelt love for the Baha’is of Iran, express my awe at their spiritual strength and loyalty, and offer my best wishes that their situation improves soon.

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*http://bahais-of-iran.blogspot.com/

NYT quotes from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/opinion/26dowd.html?hp

All other quotes taken from: http://news.bahai.org/