The First Mystery: Stuff of Life, Part II

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

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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.