Noelle Swan

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Winter storm Nemo: Take the kids out, charge their creativity

In Science Education on February 8, 2013 at 5:07 pm

This blog post was first published on Modern Parenthood, a CS Monitor blog on February 8, 2013.

file0001668013836Winter storm Nemo threatens to bury the Northeast in two feet of snow this weekend, initiating the obligatory pre-blizzard blitz on the grocery store as families scramble to stock up on cases of toilet paper, gallons of milk, and snacking provisions before schools close on Friday. The storm is likely to shut down much of New England, however for families, being snowed in does not have to mean the family has to be trapped inside.

It may seem like a distant memory for many New Englanders, but walking in a winter wonderland is what the Northeast is all about. So this weekend, as the snow piles up, bundle up the family, head outside and have a snowball fight, build a snowman, or just take a walk and enjoy the hush that freshly fallen snow brings. The kids may grumble at first, but in the end, you will all be surprised at how much fun they have. Beyond that, recent studies suggest they will learn a lot too.

In December, researchers from the University of Utahoffered up a study that says spending time in nature and away from electronic tethers to the civilized world actually boosts people’s ability to solve problems creatively.

The study’s psychologists took adults backpacking into the Utah canyons for four days without their electronics. At the end of the trip, the participants actually scored higher on tests designed to measure their creative problem solving skills than they did before starting their hike. While this study focused on adults, there is good reason to believe that quality time outside could provide a similar benefit to children.

In the age of electronics, kids have access to more information than ever before. They can look up photos, articles, and videos about any topic that interests them. However, this often obsessive pursuit takes away much of the need for creative thinking. Want to build a fort? No problem. Google will readily supply tried and true schematics. Want to tweak the flavor of a recipe? No problem. Extensive recipe sites offer endless variations

These vast stores of information can be extremely valuable. On the other hand, such access reduces the need for creative problem solving. Why try to work out a solution by trial and error when you can just look up the answer?

In the non-virtual world (aka the real world!)  kids are likely to face many problems that don’t have concrete answers. Navigating the complex social tangles of adolescence while juggling academic and extracurricular responsibilities requires a strong set of creative problem solving skills.

So how does spending time in nature help?

A big part of the equation is likely removing the distractions of smartphones, electronic tablets, and televisions.

But there’s probably more to it than that.

Study authors speculate that the effect may be linked to attention restoration theory, the idea that spending time away from the noisy distractions of everyday life and experiencing nature. Spending time away from the noise of traffic and the bustling pace of everyday life promotes a sense of calm and mindfulness.

Families do not have to completely disconnect themselves from civilization for days at a time to benefit from experiencing nature. Spending an hour strolling along a river’s edge, an afternoon hiking through the woods, or even a few minutes playing tag in a field may help families to connect with each other and the natural world.

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Holiday feasts: A time for families to talk about reducing food waste

In Food Security on December 18, 2012 at 5:51 pm

 

This blog post first was published by The Christian Science Monitor as part of the blog, Modern Parenthood on December 18, 2012.

6394414243_8c65d5467b_zFamilies are finalizing plans for December holiday celebrations, even as kids are scraping the very bottom of their Halloween candy buckets and last month’s Thanksgiving turkey has roosted on parents’ backsides. And this is only the beginning.

The month of December is often a blur of latke platters,Christmas cookies, and endless feasting. While many families stuff themselves until they cannot eat another bite, others struggle to put food on the table.

While the disparities of those with excess and those in need becomes more pronounced during the holidays, the problems of hunger and waste are systemic and persist throughout the year.

On average, American families throw away a quarter of the food they purchase, 50 percent more than their 1970’s counterparts. For a family of four, that can mean that $2,000 worth of food ends up in the trash every year.

According to a recent study from the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) , 40 percent of food produced in America never makes it to the table. At the same time, 47 million Americans depend on government assistance to put food on the table, according to August data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As the NRDC report points out, agriculture and food production are resource-intensive enterprises, taking up half of all US land, accounting for 80 percent of the nation’s freshwater consumption, and representing 10 percent of the country’s entire energy budget.

Food lost at the consumer level represents an even greater waste of energy resources because it has been through all the links of the food chain from field, to processing facility, to truck, to store, to family minivan, burning through fossil fuels at every step of the way.

Families interested in reducing their waste stream can examine their shopping, cooking, and eating habits. Some families purchase more than they can eat and it spoils before cooking. Others pile too much food on their plates and scrape leftovers down the garbage disposal. Most families likely fall into both categories.

Once families start to pay attention when they waste food, they can make small changes in their habits that can lead to less waste in the trashcan and more money in the bank.

Getting kids on board, however, can take some careful planning.

With produce racks overflowing with food, and grocery aisles filled with disposable versions of pretty much all household goods, it can be difficult for kids to comprehend the value of food.

By starting a discussion about waste, parents can help to place value on food and start to provide some context for understanding hunger.

Many parents remember staying behind at their childhood dinner table until they had cleaned their plates because, “there are children starving in China that would be glad to eat that food.”

Today, parents are more likely to encourage children to listen to their bodies and avoid overeating. That’s an important message, especially in the midst of the current obesity epidemic. However, on its own, it can inadvertently promote food waste.

Parents can encourage children to start with smaller servings and assure them that if they want more they can come back for more. Some parents may find it useful to resurrect the clean plate rule, but with the message that kids should eat what they take, rather than eat everything parents serve up.

Taking the kids to hand out bowls at a soup kitchen or deliver food to a food pantry can help give the idea of hunger some context.

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New Autism Insurance Law Offers Some Financial Relief

In Healthcare on December 11, 2012 at 4:40 pm

This article first was published by WDDE.org on December 11, 2012.

autismMany Delaware parents of children with autism have been drowning in medical bills as they struggle to pay out-of-pocket for services not covered by their health insurance. Delaware’s new autism insurance law, which goes into effect today, promises to ease the burden for some but will likely not cover everyone.

While most second graders worry about fractions, vocabulary words, and cooties, Gabe Otinsky of Middletown, Del. spent second grade repeatedly getting suspended from school and dreaming nightly that his father was dying. When he started telling his parents that he would rather be dead than alive, they decided to pull him out of public school and educate him at home.

In many ways, Gabe is a lot like his peers. He loves playing video games, building with Legos, and playing the guitar.

But he is also autistic and has difficulty processing sensory input. That means that things like flushing toilets, hairdryers, and scratchy clothes, which would be minor distractions to most kids, are extremely upsetting for Gabe, explains his mother Kathleen Otinsky.

Today, Gabe is ten-years-old, the nightmares have stopped, and he has been able to focus on his schoolwork away from the distractions of the classroom.

“School was just too noisy and too bright for him to be able to sit still and that whole social aspect was really making him uncomfortable,” Otinsky said.

Otinsky would like to enroll Gabe in both sensory integration therapy, to help him learn to cope with overstimulation, and social skills therapy, so he can develop skills to interact with peers. However, she says the family’s health insurance does not cover therapies related to autism. She and her husband Howie have had to choose between the two, focusing on whichever seemed to be more immediately needed at the time.

The financial struggle to pay for autism related services is a familiar one for many families in Delaware and around the country.

In recent years, the number of children receiving autism spectrum diagnoses has exploded reaching a rate of 1 in 88 children nationwide, according to estimates from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nearly nearly 1000 public school children in Delaware have been classified as having autism by the Department of Education. However, that figure only counts children that qualify for educational accommodations and does not include higher functioning children that are able to manage on their own in school, but still need additional services.

Currently, there is no statewide data for the number of children with a medical diagnosis for autism. Like the Otinskys, many of those families struggle to pay for services not covered by health insurance. 

Thanks to a new law in Delaware known as the Autism Insurance Reform law, many families will now be able to bill their insurance companies for autism services for the first time.

The law, which the governor signed in August, requires that all state-regulated insurance companies insert coverage for screening, diagnosis, and treatment relating to autism into every policy issued or renewed after the law goes into effect today.

It is important to note that the new coverage will not go into effect for each family until their next individual renewal date, says Kim Siegel, policy director for Autism Delaware, a statewide advocacy organization that provides referrals, connects mentors, and offers education to Delaware families dealing with autism.

Delaware is the 32nd state to pass autism insurance reform. Indiana passed the first of such laws in 2001 and many states have followed suit in the past five years.

Legislative sponsors from both sides of the aisle introduced the bill to the legislature, where it passed without any opposition.

Rep. S. Quinton Johnson (D-Middletown) cosponsored the bill with retired Sen. Liane Sorenson (R-Hockessin).

Johnson has a child with a different disability and wrote in an email interview that he chose to sponsor the bill because he knows how challenging it can be to find the right services, even without having to worry about how to pay for it.

“Imagine the feeling a parent would have knowing that there is a proven therapy that could significantly help their child and they can’t get that therapy for their child because they cannot afford it,” Johnson wrote.

Later he added that he hopes that this law will allow for earlier access to therapy and ultimately reduce the amount of support that individuals with autism need in their adult lives.

However, as Kathleen Otinsky recently learned, the law will not necessarily extend coverage to all families in Delaware.

After helping to lobby for the bill and celebrating its passage earlier this year, Otinsky learned just last week that the new law might not apply to her family.

Only health insurance plans that are bought and sold within the state of Delaware are subject to state regulation and the new law. Otinsky’s husband Howie manages a power plant owned by a large multistate corporation. Many multistate corporations and unions opt to “self-insure” employees rather than manage separate policies in different states that each have their own regulations. They may hire a health insurance company to process the paperwork, but do not actually purchase health insurance. The federal government regulates those plans under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). Federal employee insurance plans also fall under these regulations.

Currently, no federal mandate specifically addresses autism coverage. However, two of the ten essential health benefits outlined by the Affordable Care Act, behavioral health treatments and debilitative care, could be interpreted to include autism related care, says Judith Ursitti, director of state government affairs for Autism Speaks, the nation’s largest autism advocacy organization.

Recently, Autism Speaks has been lobbying the federal Department of Health and Human Services to add language to clearly define those sections with reference to autism treatment.

In the meantime, Ursitti says that some ERISA plans have voluntarily started to cover treatments relating to autism.

“One of our big efforts after we pass a law in a state, [is to then] focus on a lot of self funded companies that are based in that state. Right now, we’ve seen about 30% of self-funded companies start provide coverage for Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapy and other autism related treatment,” Ursitti said.

That could be good news for the Otinskys if their provider opts to add coverage on its own, but for now Gabe’s access to therapies remains uncertain.

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Underwater robots track sand tiger sharks

In Wildlife and Ecology on November 25, 2012 at 12:56 pm

This article first was published by WDDE.org, Delaware’s NPR News Station on November 25, 2012.

Photo Credit: Tim Sackton

The sand tiger shark’s telltale silhouette and jagged rows of teeth may strike fear into the hearts of aquarium visitors, but Delaware State University fisheries biologist Dewayne Fox thinks this large gray fish with reddish-brown spots on its back is “just absolutely awesome.”

Fox started studying sand tiger sharks in the Delaware Bay in 2006, in an effort to understand why their numbers have declined between 70 and 95 percent in recent years.

This fall, thanks to some high tech support from researchers at the University of Delaware, Fox got his first real-time glimpse of the migration patterns and environmental preferences of these elusive sharks – information that may help him find answers to the shark’s dwindling presence.

Continuing a longtime partnership between Delaware’s two land-grant universities, Fox called upon University of Delaware assistant professor of oceanography Matt Oliver to convert a remote-controlled underwater glider used to monitor water conditions into a satellite receiver and transmitter.

Over the last six years, Fox has tagged more than 500 sand tiger sharks with acoustic transmitters that send radio signals to an array of 70 receivers positioned along the Atlantic coastline as the sharks swim by them.

By combining data gathered through those acoustic transmitters with sightings reported by marine biologists in other coastal states, Fox has started to piece together an outline of the sand tiger shark’s migration habits.

Mother sand tiger sharks seem to prefer to give birth off the coast of the Carolinas. Young pups spend their summers in Cape Cod before graduating to Delaware Bay, Fox said. Both young and adult sand tigers spend the winters in the warmer waters of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

“One of the things we have been able to figure out is that the Delaware Bay probably has the largest concentrations of sand tiger sharks in the summer,” Fox said.

The sand tiger sharks likely fill a vital ecological niche at the top of the bay’s food chain, Fox said. Should their numbers continue to decline, he said he worries that the ecosystem as a whole could suffer.

This wouldn’t be the first time the declining shark populations rippled down to impact neighboring species, Fox said. The decline of sand bar sharks in the Chesapeake Bay led to an explosion of cownose rays that in turn decimated the bay’s oyster population, and fractured Maryland’s oyster industry.

While Fox’s acoustic transmitters have provided a rough sketch of the sand tiger sharks’ migration path, many questions linger about what environmental cues might trigger migration and reproduction, Fox said.

That’s where Oliver’s suped-up glider comes in.

Known as OTIS, short for Oceanographic Telemetry Information Sensors, the glider resembles a bright yellow rocket with fins and houses multiple sensors capable of measuring temperature, salinity, oxygen levels, and chlorophyll concentrations in the water.s

Oliver’s adaptation can also pick up signals given off by special Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags attached to marine animals, alter its course to follow those animals, and head to the surface to place a satellite telephone call to Oliver’s lab with information about which animals it has encountered and the corresponding environmental conditions.

“The idea is to actually get the data that shows what types of water conditions sharks are using so that you can eventually build a model and make predictions based on water parameters,” Oliver said.

University of Delaware graduate student of oceanography Danielle Haulsee also helped to broaden the kind of information available to Fox by internally implanting sand tiger sharks with VEMCO mobile transceivers (VMTs).

These high-tech tags are capable of not only transmitting their location but also of receiving information from other VMTs implanted in other marine life, such as other sharks, striped bass, or sturgeon.

“[I]f anything with a [VMT] tag swims by a shark, it can pick that up and tell us about it. By looking at the data that comes from those tags, you can start to see not only where the shark goes but what else is around that shark,” Haulsee said.

Haulsee received special training from marine veterinarians from the Georgia Aquarium to surgically implant VMT tags into sand tiger sharks. This summer, she, Fox, and Oliver headed out into the bay fishing for sharks.

The three drew sand tiger sharks alongside the boat, one at a time, in a kind of underwater stretcher that folds around the animal and holds it in place just under the surface of the water. Haulsee made a small incision in the abdomens of 20 sand tiger sharks, placing tags in the body cavity, before stitching them back up and sending them on their way.

Fox hopes that gathering diverse data about sand tiger sharks from OTIS and the VMT tags could not only expand knowledge about sand tiger shark behaviors and habits, but also lead to the identification and reduction of factors that might be contributing to their decline.

However, because sand tiger sharks have one of the lowest reproductive growth rates of all sharks, recovery likely will be slow.

Female sand tiger sharks do not fully mature until their teens and typically only live until they are around 25 years old. Sand tiger embryos begin learning to hunt in the womb, first eating unfertilized eggs, and then their would-be siblings until only one remains. Females give birth to a single pup every two years or more. That means a single female probably will only have four pups in her lifetime.

“This is an animal that even if everything is right, it’s going to take a long time for them to come back,” Fox said.

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Are Female Veterans Being Left Out In The Cold?

In Poverty, Social Issues on November 16, 2012 at 9:40 am

This article first was published by Spare Change News on November 16, 2012.

Photo Credit: Richard VanHouten, Veteran’s Support Organization

After leaving the U.S. Air Force, Staff Sergeant Barbara Barnes spent years living in fear of stray shadows and sudden noises that could trigger flashbacks to trauma from her days of military service.

Barnes never served abroad or saw combat. She served as an administrative officer from 1984 to 1990, processing legal documents on military bases in Louisiana and Kansas.

The trauma began in 1985, she says, when a commanding officer sexually assaulted her. She reported the attack to his superiors but felt too embarrassed to seek counseling. She said that the officer was reassigned to another unit, but for her, the trauma remained.

“I thought that I would just never get over that stuff, that it would just haunt me for the rest of my life,” Barnes said.

She turned to alcohol and started to abuse prescription drugs. She struggled with addiction, lost contact with her three children, and landed on the streets of Charleston, S.C. And during her long downward spiral, it never occurred to her to ask for help as a military veteran.

She wasn’t the only vet to descend into this particular nightmare.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that 6,500 female veterans are homeless and that as many as 20 percent of them were sexually assaulted while in the service. The department has declared military sexual trauma “an epidemic” and a major risk factor for post-service homelessness.

Women are four times more likely to become homeless after leaving the service than their male counterparts, according to the VA.

While homelessness among all veterans has declined in recent years, the number of homeless female veterans doubled between 2006 and 2011, according to a report earlier this year by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

In 2011, the federal Veteran’s Health Administration responded to the crisis by establishing a National Call Center for Women Veterans.

This year, the VA’s Women Veterans’ Task Force highlighted homelessness as one of the key issues facing female veterans in a draft of its “Strategies for Serving Women Veterans” report, which the VA has submitted for public comment.

Wearing a badge with her rank and service information, Barnes sat in a conference room at the New England Center for Homeless Veterans (NECHV) and recalled trying to drown her traumatic memories in alcohol.

“I hit the bottom. When you get to the bottom of the wine bottle, there’s still a hole left. There’s not enough wine in the world to take care of that,” she said.

Barnes says she had been in her share of rehabilitation programs, but it was not until she connected with the VA that she was able to access comprehensive services that met all of her needs.

She didn’t even think of herself a veteran until 2006, when a woman approached her at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and told her that the VA had programs to help people like her.

As the prevalence of homelessness among female veterans has become apparent over the last few years, state and federal agencies have taken steps to connect veterans with services they need.

“We know that women veterans are at risk for homlessness at a higher rate than their male counterparts. We know that their needs are often diffferent. But at the same time, it’s more common for them to not necessarily identify themselves as veterans,” said Interagency Council on Housing and Homelessness (ICHH) director Elizabeth Rogers.

The ICHH and the Women’s Veteran’s Network, a state agency that serves as a central resource for female veterans across the state, are working together to reach out to those who are experiencing or on the verge of homelessness.

“[T]here is a need for finding creative ideas for reaching people in the community before they become homeless,” said Rogers. Outreach efforts could occur at the welfare department, at programs distributing emergency food resources, or even through local school systems, she said.

Another NECHV resident, Buck Sergeant Jane Garrow, never considered herself a veteran either, despite having served three years in the air force. By the time someone suggested she seek veterans’ services—23 years after her honorable discharge—she already had spent two years living on the streets.

“Not a lot of women serve overseas in wartime, so we didn’t think we qualified as veterans,” said Garrow, who served as a jet engine mechanic in California from 1978 to 1981.

Garrow recalls meeting many social service providers over the years as she struggled with alcoholism and homelessness, but she did not recognize that she qualified for veterans’ services.

“It wasn’t just us that didn’t realize that we were vets, it was the people trying to help us,” Garrow said, adding with a hint of frustration, “I would go into detox every once in a while, but nobody told me about the VA.”

Garrow says she joined the air force because she had grown bored with working on an assembly line building missiles for the military contractor Raytheon. She recalls hearing the Village People song “In The Navy” night after night, promising pleasure, treasure, and the opportunity to learn science and technology.

In 1978, she enlisted in the air force with hope of gaining new skills that would translate to a better job when she later returned to civilian life.

During her service, she says, she worked her way up to become a jet engine mechanic, served as the first woman to work in the maintenance hangars in California, and graduated to senior airman.

Upon her discharge, however, she learned that her military training did not count toward certification to work on civilian aircraft. She returned to her native Cape Cod where she struggled for years with alcoholism and ended up on the streets.

Today she has secured a housing voucher with the help of the housing program at NECHV and is in the process of looking for an apartment.

The New England Center for Homeless Veterans first started seeing women seeking services in the mid-1990s, said NECHV director of community affairs Stephen Cunniff. In 1996, the shelter added a separate and secure women’s residence with 16 beds, a private TV room, and two showers for women awaiting permanent housing.

“There’s nothing that we need that we can’t get from here,” Garrow said. “They may not offer it here, but they know who to call to get it.”

Any woman with an honorable discharge from any branch of the U.S. military can access a case manager and can participate in shelter programs, including housing assistance, employment training, legal services, medical care, and meals, says Helen Wooten, NECHV director of case management.

Wooten adds that NECHV’s reputation for extensive services and rapid housing placement has prompted many out-of-state organizations to refer veterans to Boston.

Barnes says that a case manager at the VA in New York City suggested that she move to Boston and see if NECHV could help her.

For the past couple months, Barnes has been sleeping at a transitional shelter in Jamaica Plain and commuting to NECHV for additional services. She has entered counseling, which she says has helped her deal with her military sexual trauma. She reconnected with her children with the help of the Boston VA and is currently in the process securing her own subsidized apartment with the help of her case manager.

Barnes credits NECHV with providing her with the tools and resources to help herself.

“I know every time I walk through that front door that I’ll never leave the same again. I’ll be a changed woman. I’ll be an empowered woman.”

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Honeybee experts worry uptick in urban beekeeping could compromise health of honeybee populations

In Honeybees, Wildlife and Ecology on October 25, 2012 at 9:47 am

This article first was published by ExploreUtahScience.org under the title Explosion in Urban Beekeeping Raises Concerns for Honeybee Population on October 25, 2012.

Photo Credit: FLICKR/dni777

Millions of buzzing residents have moved into Utah, as the number of new beekeepers registering with the state has increased eightfold since 2006.

That’s good news for local farmers and gardeners who depend on honeybees to pollinate their crops. The bad news is that the new arrivals could be bringing with them a rash of problems.

Several honeybee experts worry that in the hands of novice beekeepers, all those hives could become incubators for viruses and pests ready to hitch a ride to any of the thousands of commercial hives around the state.

Clint Burfitt suggests that this concern has been fueled by a fundamental shift in the scale of risk that face beekeepers today. “In the past, a [commercial] beekeeper could keep 1000 hives and might lose a few [to disease], but now a commercial beekeeper can have losses of 60 percent.” Burfitt is a state entomologist at the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food.

Colony Collapse Disorder, the nationwide phenomenon that first hit the news in 2006, contributes to these losses. By some estimates, the disorder is blamed for killing one quarter of the nation’s bees, resulting in a $12 billion loss to the agricultural economy.

Some beekeepers fear that should pest and viral infection spread to commercial apiaries, the results could be similarly devastating. “If one person isn’t knowledgeable or just doesn’t understand how to recognize or treat for [pests and pathogens], that jeopardizes everybody in that system,” says Burfitt.

The greatest opportunity for contamination comes when honeybees rob nectar from each others’ hives, inadvertently taking fungal spores, mites, and viruses with them. The varroa mite, the most common problem facing beekeepers, introduces viruses and bacteria directly into the bloodstream of bees. A rarer threat, the American foulbrood turns normally glistening, white honeybee larva into brownish goo that smells like dirty socks

“People get all fired up about [starting their new hives]. It goes pretty well at first, but summer gets busy and they let it languish. If it craps out, this time of year, robbers come looking for weak hives. Robber bees come in, pests jump ship and join the new hives,” says Chris Rodesch, Salt Lake County bee inspector. This activity can initiate a cycle that quickly infects an entire neighborhood of hives.

However, Rodesch maintains that commercial bees experience more risk of exposure when they are rented to farmers to pollinate crops, a common and lucrative practice. They are often trucked long distances and forage alongside bees from other parts of the country.

Should an outbreak of a particularly pernicious virus occur, the Department of Agriculture and Food is equipped to notify registered beekeepers and offer advice on symptoms and treatment. The Utah Bee Inspection Act mandates that all beekeepers register their hives with the department within 15 days of setting them up.

Nevertheless, there are shortcomings to the system. The inspection act does not require beekeepers to submit notification of hive losses. Such a requirement could make a big difference in identifying pests and pathogens before they reach the level of outbreak.

Further, many of the state’s beekeepers are either unaware of the registration requirement or unwilling to register their hives. Rodesch says that only half of the hives that he visits are registered with the state.

“Unless you see a lot of hives it’s hard to know if what’s happening in yours is normal or something that needs to be addressed,” says Rodesch. “That’s why the [beekeeping] clubs are really important.”

Cory Stanley, an entomology professor and honeybee specialist with Utah State University gives live demonstrations of various hive management techniques throughout the state, “I think that it is important to let the young beekeepers know the value of asking questions.”

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Where Waste Meets Want

In Food Security on October 22, 2012 at 9:30 am

This article first was published in print and online by Spare Change News on October 19, 2012.

  The first time Ashley Stanley walked into the back room of her local grocery store in search of discarded food, she found towers of eggplants, tomatoes, and potatoes rising up around her. The produce was not spoiled or rotten; it simply no longer fit on the display shelves and had been moved off the floor to make room for fresher shipments. Dumbfounded, she asked if she could have the food. She loaded up her car with as many vegetables as she could and drove to Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston.

A week earlier, Stanley had been out for lunch with her mother. She had no idea that a new career would be on the menu. “I guess you could call it an‘aha moment,’ although I hate that term,” Stanley said, recalling how she came to start Lovin’ Spoonfuls, a food rescue program based in Brookline. It was December 2009.

“Everything you hear around the holidays is such a concentrated message around hunger. ‘There’s not enough to go around.’ ‘Give what you can give.’ We were being inundated with it,” she said. “But there we were at lunch, with all this food that I knew we weren’t going to be able to finish. I just had this moment with a little bit of electricity that said, ‘We can’t be the only ones looking at [leftover] plates of food.’ I thought, ‘Maybe the message that there’s not enough isn’t the right message.’ ”

A recent study from the Natural Resources Defense Council lends credibility to Stanley’s suspicion that the country is not experiencing a lack of food. Nearly half of the food produced in the United States never makes it to the table, according to the study released in August 2012. Food goes to waste at every link in the food chain. Farmers plow unharvested crops into the ground, grocers discard unsold food by the caseload, and restaurants pour mountains of leftovers into dumpsters. In total, Americans throw away $165 billion worth of food every year, 40 percent of all the food produced in the nation.

At the same time, 1 in 5 Americans was unable to pay for food at some point in the last year, according to a recent Gallup poll. Forty-seven million Americans participate in the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps). In Massachusetts, more than 870,000 people relied on SNAP benefits to purchase groceries in 2011. Many SNAP recipients count on food pantries, soup kitchens, and school lunch programs to make those benefits last through the month.

When Stanley first showed up at the door to Pine Street Inn with her arms full of vegetables, she said the staff seemed shocked to see her. “They looked at me like, ‘Where did you get all that food?’ I just blurted out, ‘There is enough food out there. We have to go get it,’ ” Stanley recalled.

Since then, the former corporate luxury retailer has redistributed more than 150,000 pounds of food to area homeless shelters, domestic abuse safe houses, and food pantries. She started out delivering food in her own car while seeking donations and grants. Today, she has three employees, two trucks, and a waiting list on both sides of the equation.

Lovin’ Spoonfuls is just one of a handful of food rescue organizations in the Boston area. While Lovin’ Spoonfuls focuses on diverting the stream of food waste at the retail level, Boston Area Gleaners in Waltham has found a bounty waiting to be picked in the fields.

Farmers rely on a fair amount of guesswork when planning their crops, explains Laurie “Duck” Caldwell, executive director of Boston Area Gleaners, a nonprofit organization based in Waltham that started gathering crops left in the fields after primary harvest in 2004 and incorporated in 2007. Farmers often plant more than they need in case they lose a portion of the crop, and then they end up with more produce than they can move. Farmers also try to lengthen the harvest season of a crop by planting rows two weeks apart in succession. A particularly hot summer, however, could cause the entire crop to ripen simultaneously. That is exactly what happened with much of the area’s corn crop this summer, Caldwell says, making it a boon season for gleaning.

In addition to surplus crops, farmers often pass over crops that do not fit the homogenous shape or color that grocery stores demand. Caldwell says that while some of the fruits and vegetables they pick do not look as perfect as what is found in the store, they have the same nutritional value. She adds that she tells her volunteer gleaners only to pick what they would eat themselves. “People who utilize the emergency food system have enough going on in their lives. They don’t need to have the fact that they are getting leftovers thrown in their face.”

Last year, Boston Area Gleaners collected 45,000 pounds of produce. It distributes about half of what it gathered to food pantries in Boston-area towns, including Lexington, Waltham, Medford, Arlington, and Belmont. The other half of the gleaned produce goes to Food For Free in Cambridge, which distributes it to 80 shelters, pantries, and meal programs in Boston, Cambridge, Medford, Peabody, Chelsea, and Somerville.

Food For Free has been a fixture of the local emergency food system in the Boston area for more than 30 years. In addition to food donated by the Boston Area Gleaners, Food For Free’s produce rescue program collects leftover produce from local grocery stores, the Chelsea Produce Market, and 10 area farmers’ markets.

Recently appointed director Sasha Purpura explains that Food For Free aims not only to bridge the gap between waste and want but also to help bring healthy choices to those in need.

“The people eating from pantries are just like everybody else,” she notes. “They want the same food. These are normal people that often just a few weeks ago shopped at the same grocery stores you and I do.” Through donations from farmers’ markets and Boston Area Gleaners, Food For Free is able to provide extremely fresh and healthy food. She says that much of the produce makes it from farm to pantry shelf within 48 hours.

Sarah and Ryan Voiland of Red Fire Farms welcome gleaners onto their diversified organic farm in Granby to pick what the farm cannot use. The company also donates leftover produce from its community supported agriculture (CSA) program to Food Not Bombs, a meal program run by volunteers. Sarah Voiland says that they have donated $95,000 worth of produce simply because they do not want the food to go to waste. “We need somewhere to send this produce to. We do not want it to be going to a dumpster; we want it to be going somewhere we can use it. We put a lot of energy into growing the food. Having it go to waste would be very sad.”

Every Sunday, volunteers from Food Not Bombs pick up fresh produce from the Voilands when they come into Jamaica Plain to deliver food to their (CSA) members. They cook up a simple hot meal in a donated kitchen in Allston, strap it to a bike-cart that resembles a ladder with training wheels, and ride it across the river into Central Square, where they set up on the Carl Barron Plaza. They pop up a table, pull on disposable gloves, and start serving meals to whoever comes by until they run out of food, usually for about two hours.

Lily Sturman of Allston signs up to cook and serve meals for Food Not Bombs whenever she can. “It’s really important to help feed who we can, but also to give some degree of visibility to the problems of food waste and hunger.”

The people that pick up a bowl of food do not know that they are eating organic vegetables that were just picked the day before. What they do know is that they will not go hungry that night.

Correction Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Boston Area Gleaners incorporated in 2001. They incorporated in 2007.

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Orionid Meteor Shower: Wake the kids, make a memory

In Science Education on October 20, 2012 at 9:43 am

This blog post first was published by The Christian Science Monitor as part of the blog, Modern Parenthood on October 20, 2012.

Photo Credit: NASA’s Marshal Space Flight Center

This weekend astronomers at NASA have promised Americans a rare glimpse of a heavenly event – the Orionid meteor shower – and with it, the opportunity for parents to join their children in a sense of wonder they may not have experienced since their own childhoods.

Some parents undoubtedly remember, as kids, waking up in the middle of the night, stepping outside into the forbidden dark, wrapped in robes and blankets for a once-in-a-lifetime view of Halley’s Comet passing across the sky. That was 1986 and Halley’s Comet won’t be visible from earth again for 50 years.

However, this week, fragments of the famed comet have started to splash across the night sky. They started appearing on Oct.17, but are expected to peak tonight and early into Sunday morning dropping as many as 60 visible meteors an hour (visibility, of course, depends on weather).

For families, the shower brings a chance to break from routine and share a profound experience.

It does not matter if parents know that the shooting stars are chunks of frozen rock that originated somewhere past the distant star Betelgeuse as part of the annual phenomenon called the Orionids.

Kids always ask questions – that’s what children do. While adults frequently feel that they should be ready with answers, sometimes a simple “I don’t know,” can be just as instructional as a researched response.

The admission of ignorance from a respected adult can be liberating for children who spend a large portion of their day memorizing facts. Those three little words, “I don’t know,” are a reminder that the world as a whole is unknowable. While children easily learn to regurgitate facts that have been handed to them in neat little packages, true learning, and ultimately understanding, is a process that begins with inquiry.

Happenings in the night sky have piqued human curiosity for centuries, providing our ancestors with temporal scaffolding and a celestial backdrop for ritual and religion.

Today, however, in a world where it seems that the answer to everything lies at the end of a Google search, the heavens have receded into the distance. The pinpoints of light shed by stars pale in comparison with the lure of the glowing screens of televisions, laptops, and cell phones.

Tonight, parents have a chance to recapture their children’s attention.

Because light from the moon makes it difficult to see the meteors, the best view will be after the moon sets around 11 p.m. EST; a time children rarely get to see. Waking them up in the middle of the night in and of itself creates a tone for the event, setting the stage for a magical moment that will probably last their lifetimes.

That moment, however brief, when parent and child gaze in awe as remnants of a distant world cross over into theirs, sharing gasps, locking astonished eyes, squeezing hands in exhilaration, that is the stuff that memories are made of.

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Climate Change: The Latest Tax on the Poor

In Civil Rights, Climate Change, Food Security, Poverty, Social Issues on October 19, 2012 at 9:29 am

This article first was published in print and online by Spare Change News on October 19, 2012.

Photo Credit: 350.org, Nancy Battaglia

“Poor people are not something that we talk about too much or pay much attention to in our world,” Bill McKibben said, sipping a glass of sparkling water to nurse a throat hoarse from a weekend of meetings and rallies.

McKibben knows something about poverty. In the early 1980s he helped to start a 15-bed homeless shelter at The Riverside Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He spent several months living in the shelter system himself and wrote about his experiences for The New Yorker in hopes of shocking the public into action.

In recent years he stepped out from behind the reporter’s role as an observer and became a leading participant in what he calls the greatest battle the world has ever seen, the fight to halt climate change.

“There’s nothing we’ve figured out how to do that makes life harder for the poorest people on this planet than climate change, and the great irony is that those people have had nothing to do with creating the problem,” McKibben said, hunched over in a rattan chair before a fundraiser at a private home in Newton.

He draws a contrast between the industrialized countries that produce the greenhouse gasses linked to climate change and the developing countries that suffer the effects.

Rapidly industrializing China contributes more carbon dioxide than any other country, largely because of its population size. With less than a quarter of China’s population, the United States comes in a close second with more carbon emissions than India, Russia, and Japan combined. Americans contribute more carbon dioxide per capita to the atmosphere than most people on the planet, second only to Australians.

The developing world has experienced the first effects of climate change, McKibben said, citing outbreaks of dengue fever linked to increasing flooding in Bangladesh, diminished glacial water supplies in Peru, and territorial loss due to sea level rise in the island nation of Maldives. Those countries rank 55th, 61st, and 161st in carbon emissions.

He adds that this years’ widespread drought in the United States, which he attributes to climate change and has led to a 50 percent increase in the global price of corn, has directly affected poor families around the world.

Later, leaning casually against a wall, with hands thrust deep into his pockets and sneaker-clad feet crossed at the ankles, he addressed a small crowd of about 50 environmental activists, professors, and potential donors.

“All over the world, there are people that right now are scrambling around to find enough coins to buy enough corn meal to make dinner for their families tonight,” he told group crowded into the living room and perched on couches, radiators, and the floor.

While the scientific community debates what role climate change may or may not have played in the recent drought, a consensus among climatologists are clear that climate change certainly will bring more extreme weather conditions such as drought in years to come.

McKibben has been warning of the dangers of climate change since he published his first book, The End of Nature, in 1989. He worries that time is running out. Small changes in lifestyle such installing energy-efficient light bulbs and toting reusable bags to the grocery store will not be sufficient to halt or even slow climate change, he said.

McKibben aims to take on oil and gas giants where they will feel it, by going after their stockholders.

His latest campaign calls on universities, institutions, and churches to sell their stock holdings in fossil fuel companies, in a collaboration among 350.org, 350 Massachusetts, and The Better Future Project, an environmental advocacy group that seeks a transition to renewable energy.

McKibben scoffs at the idea that Americans are addicted to fossil fuels and suggests that the average American would be just as happy to use energy derived from the sun and the wind as from oil, gas, and coal.

Instead, he charges that the fossil fuel industry is addicted to huge profits, which it has invested in lobbying against policies favoring a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

“They intimidate everybody in Washington. The fossil fuel industry is spending more money on this election than anybody else. Nobody dares offend them and as a result the planet is silently melting,” he said quietly as guests fist started to arrive.

Trying to get politicians to listen to concerns about climate change is like waiting on hold for customer service, he later half-joked with the crowd. Listening to the music for 20 minutes is one thing, he said, but after 20 years, it is time to hang up the phone.

McKibben and 350.org earned a temporary victory in Washington last year after staging one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in the nation’s history. Police arrested more than 1,200 people surrounding the White House during a 15-day-long protest of Keystone XL, an oil pipeline designed to carry oil drained from the Canadian Tar Sands in Alberta to Texas refineries.

President Barack Obama backed off of the project soon after, and The Boston Globe declared McKibben “the man who crushed Keystone XL.” However, both before the event and while addressing the crowd, McKibben voiced suspicion that once the election is out of the way, the President, either Obama or Romney, will push forward with the project.

“We are not going to stop global warming one pipeline at a time. There’s just too many oil wells and coal mines and pipelines.” Later he added, “We’re going to have to [attack] more at the center of the whole problem, which is the fossil fuel industry.”

This November, starting the day after the election, McKibben and his supporters will board a bus in Seattle and begin a nationwide tour of 25 cities in 25 days, designed to bring public attention and pressure to his call to universities, churches, and institutions to unload their holdings in fossil fuel companies.

McKibben modeled his new campaign after the campaigns of the 1980s that called on organizations to divest from corporations supporting the apartheid government in South Africa. The movement was not widely successful in getting organizations to participate in divestiture, he noted. “But it was everywhere successful in bringing the issue straight to the heart of the discussion,” he added, pointing out that more than 200 colleges and churches around the country did change their investment practices.

McKibben reminded the group that the first calls for divestment from the apartheid regime came from the United Nations in the 1960s. It took more than 20 years for that action to gain sustained momentum. He worries that this time, the world might not have that long.

“If we don’t do this relatively quickly, in fact quite quickly, then it’s not worth doing, because there won’t be the intact planet to deal with,” he said.

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Strike Up The Chorus

In Social Issues, Uncategorized on September 21, 2012 at 3:35 pm

This article was first published in print and online by Spare Change News on September 21, 2012.

Photo Credit: FLICKR/Very Quiet

“Who wants to read a poem?” Saul Williams asked the audience.
The crowd gathered at the Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., was small, just a couple hundred people, but it appeared to be made up of devout fans. Many people clutched dog-eared copies of Williams’ books of poetry to their chests.

The audience froze for the smallest fraction of a second; was that a rhetorical question? Suddenly, a man sprung three feet into the air from the front row, like the first popcorn kernel to break free from its casing, and landed in a squat on the stage. Quickly, as if Williams might withdraw the offer, more poets joined him; six at first, then more as a dozen or so young people popped onto the stage.

Saul Stacey Williams was born in 1972 when his mother was rushed to the hospital from a James Brown concert in upstate New York, as he tells it in his song “Elohim 1972.” The singer, musician, poet, and actor is known for esoteric rhymes, sharp social criticism, and deeply resonant voice. This was his second performance at Brighton Music Hall this year. This past winter, he came accompanied by a band to promote his album, Volcanic Sunlight. This time around, he came without instruments or entourage.

As the young poets lined up nervously along the back of the small stage, Williams explained to the audience that his latest project, a poetry anthology entitled Chorus, aimed to amplify the voices of rising poets. “This is the first book I’ve ever put out that I didn’t write,” he told the audience. He explained that the title refers to the Greek chorus, which answered and criticized the artist rather than the modern musical chorus, which supports and reiterates the performer. He put out a call for submissions on several social media websites. Williams received over 8000 entries, which he whittled down to 100 poems from 100 poets from all over the world. He wallpapered his home in Paris with those poems and spent six months rearranging them so that they flowed together, in what he calls, “a literary mix tape.”

Backstage, after the show, Williams discussed his motivations for the book. “I encounter so much amazing talent and so many well intentioned voices who don’t have the avenue of expression or the doors open to them that have been open for me.” He added that Chorus represented a chance to hold the door open behind him, however briefly. He felt that inviting members of the audience to recite their poetry during his shows was the next logical step. The crowd at Brighton Music Hall literally jumped on his offer.

As each poet recited a poem either from memory, a slip of wadded up paper, or a smart phone notepad, Williams listened thoughtfully, sitting on the floor the stage, his long arms draped around equally lanky legs. Most of the poets never mentioned their names, simply content to add their voices to the chorus. One young man, who did not have any of his own poetry ready, read from one of Williams’ books, just so he could share the stage with his idol.

Williams does not wear words like idol comfortably.

His first taste of fame came in 1998, after the release of the independent film Slam, produced by Trimark Pictures. He co-starred with Sonja Sohn, Bonz Malone and Lawrence Wilson. He played an incarcerated rapper that latched onto poetry as a means to reflect on the culture of violence in the housing project where he grew up in Washington DC. The film won a Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Williams soon developed a cult following among slam poets and a relatively obscure segment of the hip-hop community looking to counter the “gangsta rap” scene that had dominated the ‘80s and ‘90s.

After spending five years regularly participating in poetry slams, he said that, after the release of Slam, his presence became disruptive. “Suddenly people would change the poem they were going to read because they wanted to read something that I had inspired.” What’s more, he began to hear his own influence in the work of others, which he found surreal and bizarre.

He withdrew from the slam scene and focused on his music. Since, he has tried to find other ways to engage young poets and break that invisible fourth wall separating the artist from his audience. During spoken word shows, he frequently calls for houselights and opens the floor up for discussion in an effort to “break the mold of celebrity.” However, he feels that his fans continue to push him back onto a pedestal, expecting him to have the answers to the social ailments, such as racism, misogyny, and religious strife that he explores in his poetry and lyrics.

When a woman in the audience at the Brighton Music Hall asked him if the nation was ready for a post-race society, he blurted out. “No. I think America is obsessed with race.” He tried to go on, stammering for a moment before throwing up his hands. “Look, I really don’t have the answers. I just have the frustration, and the poems to prove it.” In the greenroom before the show, Williams vented some of that frustration with what he sees as an American fixation on race to a half dozen fellow poets, friends, and fans over a pre-show beer and pizza.

As he talked about moving to Paris with his girlfriend and two children, a friend asked him if he had connected with African-American expatriate community. He laughed, “I didn’t move to Paris to join a gang,” he said. He added that while Parisians are by no means color blind, they do not seem to have the same need to transpose it onto every discussion. However, he said that when his American friends come to visit, the conversation inevitably turns to race. “At first, my girlfriend and I thought it was the couch,” he joked.

Onstage, he approached the issue with solemnity. “Look, if a stick is bent in one direction, you can’t just push it towards the center. You have to push it all the way in the other direction before it can rest at the center.” He added the culture of racial injustice that permeated American history necessitated a violent reaction. The Black Panthers, the Harlem Renaissance, and the reclamation of the word “nigga” served a vital purpose in the evolution of the American perception of race, especially for African-Americans. “I think the phases are necessary, but I think it is also necessary to not rest in those phases and keep moving.” After a moment, he added, “We need to just get over ourselves.”

Several times before, during, and after the show, Williams returned to the idea that enforcement of free labor and control of women lie at the root of not just racial tension, but many of the world’s inequalities. Much of his work highlights the concept of the feminine, which he believes has been demonized by social convention, religion, and culture. As a child, he said he openly challenged his prominent Baptist preacher father’s cronies’ refusal to allow a woman to preach from their pulpits. What Williams saw as the subjugation of women in the church became a recurring discussion between him and Rev. Saul S. Williams.

Williams opened up that discussion publicly in his debut hip-hop album, Amethyst Rock Star, released in 2001 by American Recordings. In the album’s final track, Williams lay down a recording of his father’s sermon. Back in the greenroom, he recalled attending his father’s church one Father’s day when the minister gave a sermon on the importance of the father. “For me, it was ironic because the church was always filled with women and children.” Williams said he stole the recording of that sermon from his father’s office and added a subtle beat around it. At the end of the minister’s sermon, Williams calmly stepped in with his own response.

Our father which art in St. Frances Hospital for hypertension,

Our father which art in jumpsuits and prisons, federal detention,

Our father which art in dark bars and alleys, lethal injection,

Our father which art in denial and delusion,

This cannot happen again.

The beat swelled to a crescendo as Williams chanted the chorus in a throbbing monotone.

Dear Goddess,
We made this break beat just for you,
As an offering.
Can you hear us now?
Dear Goddess,
We made this break beat just for you,
As an offering.
Can you hear us now?

When asked if this was a source of tension between him and his father, Williams replied that the minister had called it beautiful. “I caught him listening to it more than once,” he said with a smile. While his father believed strongly in his convictions and his calling to be a minister, he said that the minister always encouraged rigorous discussion. Williams describes his upbringing as culturally middle class. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had a lot of books; and we had a lot of discussion.” He recalled challenging his father’s beliefs right up through his eulogy at his funeral.

Williams continued those discussions throughout his life, by participating on the speech team as a child, studying philosophy as an undergraduate student at Morehouse College, a predominantly black, men’s school in Atlanta, and for the past decade, he has shared his thoughts and opinions with his fans through spoken word and music. With Chorus, he reminds his fans that his voice does not stand alone. He has used the book and the accompanying tour to encourage his fans to take part in the discussion, and strike up the chorus.