Category: Awareness & Education

Nature Deficit Disorder

On the first of this month, The New York Times published a piece by Nicholas Kristof called, “How to Lick a Slug”. In it, he talks about how children today are not in tune with the outdoors, unlike children from previous generations beginning with . . .  well, beginning with the beginning.

I used to spend much more time outdoors, and regret that I don’t make the effort to do so more often. Much of my youth was filled with traversing creeks and playing in state parks. I used to love just standing ankle deep in a cold stream, letting the water – and the life it contains – rush by. Hopefully that will change soon. My wife and I have two “outdoorsy” adventures planned in the next month and I hope to do more, especially in the fall when the heat in Missouri has broken.

To appreciate nature I don’t believe people have to “rough” it, they just have to get the hell out of their houses and into the woods. The woods don’t even have to be natural woods for crying out loud. Taking time to navigate man-made parks or local preserves is enough to get in tune with the great outdoors. These types of outings can be a catalyst for more formal trips that require planning, packing and a small shovel. Of course graduating to that level of immersion is not even necessary.

I remember biking the Stinging Nettle trail with some friends in high school through Castlewood State Park just outside of St. Louis. Man alive did we get muddy. The water had risen on the Meramac River and we weren’t even supposed to be in the park. The roads had been closed and we snuck in through an adjoining neighborhood. I’m not sure if it was that time or another I took some pictures of the river. The trees looked like bushes, popping up out of the water. I lost that roll of film before it was ever developed. I guess it’s like writing a poem and then tearing it up. Or not, since I just told you about it.

You’re only hurting yourself by not experiencing what nature has to offer. I’m getting excited about our trips. Staring at a computer all day takes its toll. Hopefully the house we’re renting has the Internet.

Transportation Technology Awareness

On the same day the Missouri legislature debates funding a gap in St. Louis transit agency Metro’s budget, I had the opportunity to hop on my soapbox for a bit during a business lunch. We were talking about housing, but the conversation meandered – as it does so often these days – to the economy. A less logical jump was somehow made to hybrid vehicles, where it stayed for a bit.

One of the guests at lunch mentioned he’d recently driven a hybrid (Prius) for the first time, and while he found the car novel, he would never purchase one. His stated reason was that it is too small. But elements of his comments, along with those of the other people at lunch, showed the lack of awareness among even people of higher education and higher means about transportation technology.

I carry the burden and relief associated with being motivated by issues green, and specifically those surrounding transit. As a society addicted to personal mobility, we constantly struggle between funding public transit and subsidizing our addiction to combustion engines through the construction and reconstruction of poor quality roads and car-oriented development, not to mention the billions handed out to oil companies. After the man’s comment, I made sure to point out that my wife and I own a Ford Escape Hybrid and that we loved it.

At that point I began to talk about a speech Robert F. Kennedy made recently in St. Louis, which my wife and I attended. While the event covered all sorts of environmental topics, a good amount of time was spent on personal mobility and the efforts of Better Place, a company currently working to convert Israel into an electric car country. I also brought up Tesla Motors and discussed the technology of electric cars. People seemed genuinely interested and asked questions, but they were never truly engaged. This may have something to do with my inability to capture an audience but I’ve tested that skill repeatedly to better results. I’m fairly certain the issue was the subject at hand.

What’s frightening is the lack of enthusiasm among people who have the means to make a difference. The general feeling after the discussion seemed to be one of, “well that was interesting, back to reality”. But people, this is reality. How do we get people to learn about electric cars, which undoubtedly are the future of personal mobility? Similarly, how do we get people to learn about other environmental issues that effect them so dramatically, but often so indirectly?

If you have an answer, please tell me. You can have all the credit, and all the resources I can spare to help spread the word.

Promiscuous Teleology. Say What?

I recently became a fan of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on Facebook. If you don’t know anything about the FSM please visit the link. The story is an amazing one, and involves one man’s fight against the Kansas School Board on its consideration of teaching “Intelligent Design” in public schools. An old college buddy of mine commented on my fandom by saying he preferred to keep faith in the ID, or Idiot Designer, claiming the drawings of the FSM were too elementary to be taken seriously. There’s some truth to that claim, and possibly some sarcasm as well, but the point of the FSM is much deeper and more humorous.

Coincidence, or the meddling of the FSM, the ID or some other power, delivered a related article to my Inbox this morning. The piece claims that promiscuous teleology, a type of erroneous thinking, may be a reason separate from religion which explains why people buy into the concepts of creationism or intelligent design. The article’s discussion of these two topics is general and not necessarily in reference to the Christian versions. So, what’s the problem?

“The very fact of belief in purpose itself might lead you to favour intelligent design,” says Deborah Kelemen, a psychologist at Boston University, who led the study.

Kelemen has documented the same kind of erroneous thinking – called promiscuous teleology – in young children. Seven and eight-year olds agree with teleological statements such as “Rocks are jagged so animals can scratch themselves” and “Birds exist to make nice music”. These mistakes diminish as kids take more science classes and learn causal explanations for natural events.

Diminish, not disappear. Just because something has a use doesn’t mean it exists for that use. Damn.

People continued to agree with false teleological statements, particularly those that endorsed an Earth intended for life. But non-believers were just as likely to make these errors as religious students, they found.

Education goes only so far in extinguishing mistaken beliefs about the physical world, Keleman says. “It suggests that we’re quite explicitly failing in science education, certainly with these undergraduates.”

Good thing our schools are on the way up. I don’t believe in either creationism or intelligent design but will gladly admit to being a victim of promiscuous teleology; I am human after all. The larger issue here is that this type of thinking makes us vulnerable to falsities in all aspects of life, not just with the spiritual.

For this reason, it’s not surprising that non-religious, college-educated adults fall back on purpose-seeking explanations. Many people have little understanding of evolution and instead view it as a cultural belief, thinking: “‘I’m a good secular liberal, I’m no yokel, I believe in Darwin,’” Bloom says.

Evolution as a cultural belief? We’re in trouble.

He also wonders if extensive science education could blunt the tendency to fall back on teleological explanations. “It might turn out that if you put Richard Dawkins or Einstein or whomever [to the test], no matter how expert or educated they are, they might still make these mistakes.”

Indeed, Kelemen is running similar experiments on volunteers with stronger science backgrounds to see if they, too, fall back on such childlike reasoning.

Our inability to combat promiscuous teleology with a more thorough use of logic and reasoning is disconcerting. One of the other major conclusions drawn in this study is that promiscuous teleology increases in pressure situations. “A first round of experiments suggested that adults make more teleological mistakes when pressed for time than when not.” What or how do we need to teach our children to mute this type of thinking?

Stem Cell Spinal Study Announced – Hooray!

While approval of a new stem cell study and Barack Obama’s accession to the presidency are completely unrelated, the announcement that the first-ever human trials of stem cell therapy is monumental. Beginning this summer, a U.S. biotechnology company is going to test the safety and efficacy of stem cells on newly paralyzed people. The patients will be paraplegics and must have fresh injuries – less than two weeks old. Given that timeline, the math tells me that people walking around right now, none the wiser, will end up being the test subjects for this trial. Sorry about your misfortune in advance.

The old administration’s strict guidelines on federally-funded stem cell research essentially froze research in the U.S. in place while other countries advanced their own. Not cool. While stem cell research itself is not illegal in the U.S., not nearly enough private money exists to mount a legitimate research effort without federal funds. Obama has promised to loosen these guidelines and hopefully allow the flow of more federal dollars to these research projects.

Coincidental to this recent announcement, last week my wife and I went to the screening of a movie called “The Accidental Advocate“. While I’ve been a member of the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures for some time, seeing the film was my first detailed exposure to all of the issues surrounding this controversial research. The documentary only screened in 13 cities nationwide, and St. Louis was fortunate to be one of them. Admittedly, the film is very pro stem cell research, and in my opinion, rightfully so.

My opinion is that destroying stem cells in the hopes of finding therapies and cures for those suffering extremely debilitating conditions is more advantageous to humankind than the potential “evil” caused by the destruction of these cells, most of which are destined to become medical waste if they go unused.

Even if you are currently against stem cell research, you should make an effort to see this film.  At worst, you become educated on the position of those in favor of the research, but in the end, hold firm to your current beliefs. No harm, no foul. At best, you change your mind or relax your opposition after actually learning about the issue in its entirety.

If your only guide to date has been spirituality, I’m not saying it shouldn’t remain an influence in your life. What am I saying is that once you learn about the science behind stem cell research, you will see that destroying stem cells for research is not a blatant disregard for human life. You will also see that you can remain confident in your spiritual beliefs while understanding that allowing this research to continue may alleviate massive human suffering, and doing so is a basic tenet of virtually every life philosophy, spiritual and secular.

Your God’s Cool Too

Today is a reminder that while there are plenty of religious nutjobs in America, we’re pretty lucky all things considered. Israel bombed Gaza today and Pakistan is mobilizing troops away from Afghanistan (WTF?) and towards India. But, an op-ed article published in The New York Times today called, “Heaven for the Godless?“, not only bodes well for me (oh, the irony) but offers a sense of temperance among believers in the U.S.; all this much to the chagrin of evangelists, which is awesome.

The author, Charles Blow, references a couple of recent studies by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life which conclude that somewhere between 65% and 70% of Americans believe “religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life”. The piece also says the studies concluded that, “Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go”.

Other tidbits from the article in relation to Christianity include:

  • only 39 percent of Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God;
  • only 18 percent think that it’s just a book written by men and not the word of God at all;
  • only 1 percent of Christians, when asked what it would take to achieve eternal life, said living life in accordance with the Bible.

These conclusions clearly speak toward tolerance. I believe the isolationist society we’ve built, and continue to embrace, contributes to these figures, even though they were surprisingly low to me. Blow posits that just being a decent human being is good enough in the eyes of many to achieve eternal life:

One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus.

The commonality in all religions is common sense, and never has a war started over common sense. It’s when reasonable men start believing unreasonable things that they start battling.

The world has been offering up some pretty depressing news lately. The results of this study reinforced an idea I’ve held for some time, and that’s that if we continue to raise awareness and educate people, the need to defend the lunacy of religions will fade and the ability of all people to get along will be unavoidable.

Two Broken Ankles

AP: Eight Belles was trying to become just the fourth filly to win the Kentucky Derby.William C. Rhoden begins his piece in this Sunday’s The New York Times by asking, “Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? Is it the tradition? The millions upon millions invested in the betting?” I’m going to go with the millions upon millions.

For those of you paying attention to the annual series of barbaric horse races, yesterday’s Kentucky Derby further highlighted the idiocy of the “sport”. The horse that finished second had to be euthanized immediately after the race because it broke both of its first legs trying to slow down. Supporters of the “sport” claim instances like this are rare. This claim is as true as is it ignorance.

In the upper eschalon of racing horses surely only a very horses are so tragically injured that they must be put to sleep, you know, instead of trying rehabilitate them as they’ve made people millions of dollars. The ignorance in the aformentioned claim arises from the fact that thousands upon thousands of horses you never see on televison on race day are abused on a daily basis.

Rhoden professes, “The sport is at least as inhumane as greyhound racing and only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting.” While horses aren’t trained to kill each other, that these animals are stressed beyond their natural limits to do things only man wants them to do makes this statement true. Anything for a dollar.

The more philosophical issue at hand here is that fact that we are selectively compassionate. People only object to something when it behooves them. People rationalize the extreme stupidity of group behavior because they could get paid at the end of the day.

A tragic ending to a horse race is only as rare as a hungry movie star. If we only examine the extremes of society, we will find it difficult to find relative atrocities. The truth, on the other hand, is that race horses aren’t the only horses that exist, and movie stars aren’t the only people that exist. Horses all over the world that never make the national broadcasts are abused and killed every day, and people who never make the national broadcasts die of hunger every day. 100 to 1 odds on the long shot makes these truths easy to ignore and keep us from evolving as a society.

School Lunches

A short article by Carolyn Tuft published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch yesterday highlights the inadequacy of school lunches offered in many major cities in the U.S. I’ve reproduced the entire article here, without permission, since it would take longer to load it than read it:

St. Louis public schools have the worst nutritional value in school lunches than anywhere in the nation’s 22 largest school districts that the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine studied, a report released today shows.

“If your family lives in San Diego; Fairfax, Virginia; Charlotte, North Carolina or Pinellas County, Florida, your child will find healthy vegetarian options most days of the week,” said Dulcie Ward, a dietitian for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

“But, if your home is in Atlanta; St. Louis; Omaha, Nebraska; or Anchorage, Alaska, your child may have a tough time finding healthy food.”

The group, founded in 1985, is a nonprofit health organization that promotes preventative medicine. It conducts “clinical research studies, opposes unethical human experimentation, and promotes alternatives to animal research.”

The study showed that even though the country is experiencing an outbreak in childhood obesity, school lunches still feature menus that “are packed with such unhealthy options as foot-long hot dogs and ‘Colossal Burgers,’ and are short on nutritious vegetarian dishes.”

Not good for the Lou, or a seemingly random assortment of other cities. The interesting thing about the short lists provided for good and bad cities in regards to public school lunches is that neither list fits a particular stereotype or demographic. That ridiculous amounts of preventable medical expenses are related to all the fat people shaking the ground in this country is no secret. It stands to reason then that nipping the problem in the bud would make sense, and that a more concerted effort would be made to offer healthy food to children at a young enough age that would enable some positive habit-forming. Clearly not the case. Vegetarianism aside, offering cheap food school lunches high in calories and fat and low in nutrition can not continue. Society is ignorantly planting seeds that will without a doubt grow into disproportionately high resource consuming citizens. We’ve already planted so many bad seeds that have grown into ideas, people, and institutions take their toll on this country’s infrastructure, systems and population.

Why do we continue to turn our backs on the future of this country? Bad food for kids leads to unhealthy kids with bad habits and more problems than they deserve. Allow them to function in a failing healthcare system and you get all of the ingredients for a giant freakin’ mess.  The mind boggles.

An aside: The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is a swell organization! I don’t know if I’ve ever come across them but I’m glad I finally did. Good people, good mission. Go common sense!

Update: International Symposium on Energy and Environment

Just two posts ago I wrote about an upcoming conference at Washington University in St. Louis. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had an update in today’s paper called, “Universities see green at forum“, detailing some of the outcomes of the Symposium.

  • Washington U. Chancellor Mark Wrighton said he plans to name a sustainability officer, put more resources toward bioenergy and clean combustion research, and make the environment a curriculum focus.
  • The president of Fudan University in Shanghai, China, said he will speed the process of making its department of environmental science a full-fledged school.
  • The head of National Taiwan University said he will quicken the pace to start an energy research institute.
  • The leader of Yonsei University said he would redouble efforts to conserve energy and resources, pointing out that his school is one of the largest consumers of electricity and water in Seoul, Korea.

Those are just four of the many conclusions of the meeting of 20 Asian and Middle Eastern universities, including 12 university presidents. Chancellor Wrighton’s plan to name a sustainability officer for Washington University is great news. Every major institution, public or private, for-profit or not-for-profit, should have one. I see Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) becoming the new senior executive position at the world’s largest organizations. Just at Chief Technology Officers became prevalent in the late 1990′s, CSOs will help guide companies as the world demands more responsibility from corporations and institutions.

I commend Washington University for choosing to appoint someone as a sustainability officer. I hope the person is empowered to make real change at the University. I also hope increased sustainability leads to increased efficiency. The latter is seemingly inherent in the definition of the first but universities are notoriously “fat” institutions. Environmental sustainability will hopefully lead to cost savings that can be passed down to the students, who already overpay dramatically for education in the United States.

International Symposium on Energy and Environment

Back in October of last year (think St. Louis Cardinals World Series Championship) I wrote a piece called, Environmentally Friendly Universities, that focused the energy-related efforts of Washington University in St. Louis, one of my alma maters. Well, now the University is hosting the International Symposium on Energy and Environment.

The Symposium, which will be held May 4-7 at Washington University, will be the first of its kind in the U.S.  At the Symposium, the “leaders of 12 premier universities in Asia and the Middle East, along with Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton, will discuss ways their institutions are addressing global energy and environmental concerns. These institutions include Fudan, National Taiwan, Tsinghua and Yonsei universities and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.” That’s some heavy firepower. The specific goals of the Symposium are to:

  • identify specific areas of research and education of global importance in energy and environment;
  • communicate areas of strength at each partner university;
  • develop ideas for future collaboration that builds on the synergies at each university.

This level of teamwork, if fruitful, has the potential to yield tremendous progress. I’m also surprised its taken so long for the heads of international universities to come together. Hell, if oil companies can be calling for caps on carbon emissions and major universities have yet to open their mouths you know something is wrong. The world has been spinning backward since November of 2000 but last time I checked hadn’t entered another dimension.

“A novel concept of collecting educational materials from the 20 Partner Universities is being planned. In addition to compiling such information — much of which is available at eeed.wustl.edu — the McDonnell Academy will explore technological tools that will allow faculty at the Partner Universities to communicate more easily with each other.”

I checked out the site and the list of courses offered are impressive. The site says all the information will be available to anyone and everyone free of charge but I couldn’t access anything yet. Perhaps everything will be uploaded post Symposium.

I hope this meeting of the minds will lead to some innovative ideas which are practical, affordable and easy to implement. It’s time for tangible solutions to the world’s energy and environmental problems and higher education needs to play its part.

Responsible MBAs

For most of America’s history political parties have been divided by business. As a candidate or as a voter you were either pro-business or you weren’t – and for the most part people still are. We have a tendency to draw very definitive lines in this country, and the line we’ve drawn regarding politics and business is one of the most misplaced.

A recent article entitled, “The MBAs who changed the world?“1 discusses the efforts of students at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis*. The students, in a projected sponsored by the non-profit World Agricultural Forum, examined the possibility “of using alternative fuels such as ethanol or soy biodiesel in developing countries.”

The point of this story is that there is ample opportunity to bring social awareness to corporate undertakings. Whether through the non-profit or for-profit worlds, there is value to be added by including social, economic and environmental responsibility in corporate decision making processes. Business schools are a good place to encourage this type of thinking, and the project discussed in the aforementioned article is a perfect example. Many schools are starting to even create degree programs around sustainable capitalism.

In one of my classes last semester I explored the possibility of launching an online retailer of socially, economically and environmentally friendly goods. A previous post of mine also discusses the World Trade Organization’s impact on sustainable development. I alone have explored numerous ways to bring equality and fairness to the global economic system. Based on my experiences it’s hard for me not to believe that better options exist somewhere out there, either in the mind of some passionate human or on paper in an academic journal or corporate newsletter.

The long-term goal of what I’m talking about it is to raise awareness among global actors, no matter how small, and catalyze action by showing people that living in a bubble is ignorant and harmful to others. I dream of a day where social entrepreneurship is a fundamental part of every corporation, and that balance sheets and company valuations are redefined to mandate corporations and their leaders take responsibility for their actions.

* For the sake of full disclosure, please note that I’m currently an MBA student at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis