Pulp Nonfiction

Forests, where sustainability meets the sandwich

Ducere, Usere, Cyclere

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 6/4/08

Most people have no problem thinking of some forest products as items that belong in a pantry - like maple syrup or paper towels. However, it's not likely people think that part of the soft wood load on the back of a logging truck rolling down a muddy mountain road could end up in their salad dressing, cheese or ice cream.

I've had the pleasure to watch the harvesting of 80-foot conifers close up, and nothing in the blue-sweet smell of chainsaw exhaust, splintered pine and diesel fumes makes me think of food. Until recently I probably would have dismissed the claim that fir and pine doesn't just serve for newsprint and lumber but is also served up in many of our snacks and processed foods - even foods labeled "organic."

In investigating Oregon's forests and looking into the question of genetically modified and "Roundup® resistant" trees that are researched and developed at Oregon State University and then planted throughout the Pacific Northwest, I came across references to pulp mills and the production of cellulose for use as a food ingredient.

Disturbingly, modified and pesticide-resistant trees can be certified under the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, as the regulations allow each petitioner to define what factors in timber growth and harvesting should be considered in the certification process. Because SFI certification is marketed as the forestry equivalent of "organic," and because of how the key word "sustainable" has been branded in our cultural vocabulary, the public can often remain ignorant to the fact that an SFI-certified forest could likely be a pesticide-heavy tree farm.

Fast growing trees with a high survival rate are key to both timber and to pulp mills, and if GM trees are fed into pulp mills, then GM cellulose will be the product at the consumer end. But it is an invisible and USDA certifiably "organic" route for GMOs and arguably synthetic ingredients to enter our food.

Wood is used as a source for cellulose because wood is 50 percent cellulose. And cellulose has many industrial applications as well as dozens of uses as a food ingredient. According to the 2001 Technical Advisory Panel review of cellulose for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Organic Standards Board, "powdered cellulose may be added to bread to provide noncaloric bulk. It is also used in reduced-calorie baked goods to stay moist and fresh longer, and provide an increased content of dietary fiber."

Other very common uses include use as an "anti-caking agent, used in shredded cheese and spices, in frozen products to maintain texture through freeze - thaw cycles, barbecue sauces, frozen cheese lasagna, frozen guacamole, marshmallow topping, liquid diet products, sandwich spreads, [and] low calorie mayonnaise."

Cellulose also "replaces fats and oils" because it thickens food items and provides a "favorable mouth feel" that makes you think you're eating fat because of the improved "adhesion of sauces [and] salad dressings." Processed vegan products sometimes have cellulose in them to help give fuller and more satisfying textures.

These vegan and "organic" labeled products contain cellulose as a food ingredient even though turning a tree into microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) is a highly industrialized process in which "timber is debarked and cut into chips," according to the USDA TAP.

The document further describes how the chips are then "mechanically ground and then digested (cooked) chemically using either a sulfite or alkali process at elevated temperatures in pressure vessels or digesters." Also, "MCC production uses an additional step involving hydrolysis of the purified wood pulp, using hydrochloric acid to reduce the degree of polymerization."

Though this expensive processing is acknowledged in the TAP, cellulose is allowed as an ingredient in foods labeled "organic" for two main reasons:

First, there is no "non-synthetic" method of active cellulose production that can keep up with demand for this ingredient. Cotton can be used, but the infrastructure and processing plants do not exist.

Secondly, the TAP points out that "cellulose, powdered cellulose, and microcrystalline cellulose do not appear in 21CFR [Code of Federal Regulations] as regulated or GRAS [generally recognized as safe]." It's a catch-22, because it is not listed or addressed anywhere - not even on the National List of organic substances - "powdered cellulose is considered to belong in the 'prior sanctioned category' as a food addition in use prior to the passage of the Food Additives Amendment in 1958. It is considered 'grandfathered' and permitted (FDA, 1986)."

The TAP summary recommendation does prohibit synthetic cellulose, as derived from wood, in products labeled as "95 percent organic." However, for "70 percent organic" products, it is fully allowed.

If nothing else, a detailed critique and examination of USDA documents will draw attention to the highly ambiguous nature of the term and label "organic." Aside from the invisible allowance of synthetic cellulose, the National List of "synthetic substances allowed for use in organic crop production" - 7CFR 205.601(i) - lists streptomycin and tetracycline.

Awareness of these allowances should make you less trusting of the organic label. USDA "organic" certification is not a health-based or environmentally based process. It is one of argumentative rhetoric and economics.

The NOSB TAP was conducted not to certify cellulose as itself organic - the process is characterized as having "many environmental concerns" related to "caustics, sulfites, and bleaching agents" - but to demonstrate how it is necessary to allow synthetic cellulose into products labeled organic. A key example is how only cellulose added to shredded cheese will "keep the cheese from compacting into a non-saleable mass."

So on your next trip to the grocery store, check the ingredients of your favorite products for cellulose powder, sodium carboxymethylcellulose or solutions of xanthan or guar. Then thank a logger.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Grinding to a Halt

In Halsey, sustainable practices don't always pay

Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 5/28/08

Earlier this month the Pope and Talbot pulp mill in Halsey, 30 miles north of Eugene, closed suddenly. The mill had been operating since 1968.

Even with rumors of a possible last-minute buyout, about 180 people are now out of work as Chapter 7-bankruptcy liquidation proceedings take place.

This could be an anomaly, or it could be a symptom of recession and a weak U.S. dollar, but whatever the case, it is an example of a failure of an organization that attempted, or so it seems, to make itself a sustainable fixture in a community - socially, financially and environmentally.

It is curious to browse the Pope and Talbot Web site. It has not been updated to reflect the recent closures, so it looks like business as usual. Though most of the information proclaims the vitality of its operations and strategies, it also lists a live feed to the Pope and Talbot stock price - now at $0.03.

It is creepily voyeuristic to read the online remnant of this organization before it is completely mothballed in cyberspace. The corporate Web site praises its pulp business and its production of "bleached kraft pulp for newsprint, writing paper and tissue manufacturers." It goes on to proclaim that its mills "are a vital part of the communities in which we operate, with over 2,500 employees."

It may be just popular rhetoric to publicly posture as being vital to the local community and helping to stabilize the local society with a tax base and jobs, but Oregon has seen decades of reduction in timber-related businesses and jobs that has had a severe impact on communities.

An employer that leaves a small community suddenly will have significant impacts on that community. Pope and Talbot's Web page also describes how the company followed ongoing traditions that "ensure that we serve our customers, communities and shareholders through varying economic and profitability cycles." Financial sustainability is the key factor that allows businesses to remain in a community and to try and help provide the sort of social sustainability that many people are seeking, especially in these days of economic downturn.

As a resource-extraction company, Pope and Talbot also described its environmental philosophy. The Web site describes procedures and measures in forest management and industrial processes that seem to reflect the current atmosphere of concern with all things climate-and-environment-related. The company's short statement outlines how "environmental stewardship is more than a corporate philosophy - it is an operating strategy that extends from the forest to our manufacturing processes. We recognize that our future depends on sustaining and managing the health of the ecosystems supporting productive forest lands, as well as on utilizing environmentally responsible manufacturing processes in our cycle of success."

In addition to having operated in the Pacific Northwest since 1849, Pope and Talbot seems to have at least made fairly convincing efforts to be portrayed as a socially and environmentally responsible corporate individual. Despite this, and because timber jobs often get the short end of the stick in discussions about environmental conservation and ways in which human societies can exist without degrading ecosystems, it is easier to let timber jobs go.

There was recently a debate here at the University about whether or not the Holy Cow Café in the Erb Memorial Building should be awarded a new lease. The initial decision was one largely based on financial sustainability - the space was awarded to a business that was seen as better suited to be financially successful. However, given public sentiment and pressure, Laughing Planet Café turned down the lease, leaving Holy Cow the opportunity to add a revitalized financial performance to its credentials as a socially and environmentally sustainable business.

Maybe 30 miles is too far away for University students and Eugene residents to rally for the Halsey mill workers. But failing to recognize that the local mill helped provide our "newsprint, writing paper and tissue," as well as stable and sustainable jobs, would be a shame.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

It All Flows Downhill

Don't let our rivers become our waste deposits

Ducere, Usere, Cyclere

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 5/21/08

I grew up about 30 miles from the crest of the Continental Divide in Western Montana. The way the land divided the waters and assigned each drop a destination to either the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico fascinated my young mind.

One of my earliest memories is actually riding in the family car down the Columbia Gorge on one of those summer days when the stone walls magnify the heat like an oven. On that same trip we crossed the bridge at Astoria and I saw the end of the river where snow and rain near my home eventually flowed into the brine.

But these Columbian and Pacific waters were the waters from the other side of the mountain, as it were, because my hometown sat high in the east flank of the Rockies. The waters of the Boulder River, which flow through my hometown, follow a channel to the Jefferson, to the Missouri and on to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.

In Montana there's a social and geographic division between east and west, and though I lived firmly in the state's west, there was another social and geographic subdivision - "west of the divide" and "east of the divide."

In a place where the weather comes from the north and west, and the precipitation comes from the west, to be east of the divide meant to get only what could make it over the pass without first falling on the other side.

In the winter when I would petition the air for more snow, or in the summer when I would dream of rain, I would often stare longingly at the weather map and to points west adorned with cartoon snowflakes and raindrops.

At the same time I learned to appreciate what we did get. Though some years, like 1988, saw severe droughts, the 10 to 20 inches of precipitation each year kept us from being classified as a desert region in the almanacs.

By fishing and collecting berries and mushrooms I also realized that the water falling from the sky was the life of the place where I lived, and "just east of the divide" was still a really good place to be.

When I finally moved west of the divide, along the bank of the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, I also realized that being right up at the top of a watershed is a privileged location. The Clark Fork at Missoula is only about 120 river miles from its Continental Divide headwaters, but that entire length represents the largest superfund site in the United States.

Over a century of mining and smelting in Butte and Anaconda has polluted the entire river, and a recent removal of the Milltown Dam just outside of Missoula has temporarily increased the level of toxic metals flowing downstream.

Of course the Columbia is not the only river, even regionally, that carries the residue of industry in it. This last weekend thousands of us living on the banks of the Willamette River went out to our river to take in the hot sunshine and the cool water.

It's times like that when we can almost ignore the fact that a six mile stretch of the river, near Portland, is designated as a superfund site. But on my float from Alton Baker to the Beltline overpass I was reminded several times that the river is not just a place of recreation for humans or of habitat for non-humans, but also serves as an active and passive gravity-powered conveyor of waste.

We cannot see the industrial and agricultural wastes in the water, but at least three empty bottles floated past my kayak - not even a message in the bottles - and then at the takeout point I had to consider that it is not just the irresponsible tossing of trash into our streams that endangers our rivers and our health, but also even the most responsible disposal of our human wastes.

Just before the Beltline Bridge over the Willamette, there's the wastewater discharge for Eugene/Springfield Regional Water Pollution Facility. Here the air, and the water, smells like the sewage waste of about 215,000 people, and let me tell you, it smells like shit.

Like I said, this is a relatively responsible disposal of our wastes, as the wastewater division has a great facility and puts forth the energy to make sure the environmental impact of all our flushed crap is minimized, but when it goes back into the river it is still has a noticeable impact.

We all live downstream from someone else, and with this in mind, we should not accept crap in our rivers and continue to view rivers as our waste-conveyors. Advanced wastewater reclamation and recycling technologies are at our disposal, and we must work to make these the new standard.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

The political climate is roasting McCain

Oregon has its first awkward meeting with McCain

In My Opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 5/14/08

What do you do when that guy who nobody invited shows up to the party? This past Monday that guy was Sen. John McCain and that party was the climate change hobbyhorse - dominated by Democrats.

McCain showed up in Portland to unveil his climate initiative, just as his rivals - Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - continued their assault on Oregon's voters. It's no mystery why Oregon is garnering so much attention from all three front-running candidates these days. Or maybe it is.

The knock-down drag-out race between Clinton and Obama has come down to Oregon's paltry 52 delegates carrying disproportionate symbolic and real political value, so we see why they are stirring up support in many of our bustling urban centers. But McCain, the "presumptive" Republican nominee, could really not care less about what Oregon's Republicans do with their primary vote.

McCain is here in Oregon not to stir up voter support, but to, as it were, "stir the turd" when it comes down to who can stand on the environmental plank in their platform come November.

Oregon's population has a reputation for taking pride in trying to hammer out a balance between economic, industrial, social and environmental needs. If you're going to say you stand for something, you'd best go to the place that embodies that concept in people's minds to make your declaration.

So, Oregon, meet Sen. McCain, rising environmental advocate, and Mr. McCain, meet Oregon, a place and collection of people who log, fish, farm, recreate, advocate and at times commit arson as part of their performance in what it means to be both socially and environmentally responsive. Regardless of what their beliefs may be, a lot of Oregonians think they own the truth, or at least one part of it, when it comes to sustainable living.

It was an awkward meeting, but one that was long overdue. In the formalities, between the lines, without asking directly, by insinuating himself, McCain is raising the question of who can not only take a stand on environmental and climate change issues, but who can "own" it.

None of us were born environmentalists. None of us have genetic codes that predispose us to giving a crap if we have clean water, healthy food and a stable place to call home. These are all concerns that develop in us as we are trained to react to our surroundings and as we learn to rationalize what may or may not be a logical and realistic connection between causes and effects.

McCain's leaf-turning performance, however, has put him into a position to rile up those activists who saw the connections between human activity and the environment some time before yesterday. To proclaim a concern for climate change so suddenly, then to present a plan that looks like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a greenhouse gas emissions limitation and reduction plan smacks of opportunism.

So we've got a situation here where the New-Kids-on-the-Block in the climate change scene may be pulling a Milli Vanilli - peace be unto them. However, if McCain chooses to dance the populist dance, isn't that what we all want anyhow? How many times do environmental activists thrust themselves upon the mantra that it takes all of us to make a real difference and that we all have to take responsibility and change our policies and behaviors?

Well McCain, and if we are lucky, the Republican Party as a whole, will actually make the move.

When a movement gains strength and momentum because it has a rhetorical "other" against which to define itself and to demonstrate moral and ethical integrity, it feels like a defeat when that other decides to join the winning team.

If nobody in the U.S. openly proclaims that climate change has no human caused component and we need not make any adjustments, then where could environmental activists put their energy? Well, into solutions of course.

So, Sen. McCain, you may be lipsynching to get voters in the November election, but I'm going to interpret your moves as sincere, and more importantly as a massive success of climate change activists. The "there is no climate change" boat has sunk, and I am honored and excited to welcome you and all of your supporters aboard.

You may not have my vote, but in joining a rational and sustainable approach to our environmental challenges you certainly do have my support.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

AstroTurf green: nuclear power

Nuclear power's promises have history of imploding

Ducere, Usere, Cyclere

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/30/08

Twenty years ago environmental activists were fighting nuclear energy tooth-and-nail. Now, according to surveys by Treehugger.com, and Grist, an online environmental journal, more than half of their readers favor giving fission another chance. What was recently the bane of a clean, safe and livable environment now represents salvation from global climate change.

The argument in favor of building new nuclear power reactors is simple, arguably effective and definitely well-publicized. If we had a nearly limitless, well-developed, greenhouse-gas-emissions-free power source, why would we not use it? The pre-packaged answer is that of course we have to. Logic demands it, because if you'd rather burn coal then the evildoers have already won.

What is left out of the sales pitch is any acknowledgment that the long industrialized road from uranium ore to controlled fission is one long story: material that is deadly to human life, that neighbors to reactors, like Chernobyl, risk catastrophe from fairly minor accidents, that the life span of a reactor facility is a matter of short decades and that the "spent fuel" will be extremely dangerous for 10,000 years after it's powered our flat screen TV and, if things go right, charged our mystical electric vehicles.

Yet fickle and conflicted average people are jumping on the nuclear bandwagon, as are many self-proclaimed environmentalists. Deluded by a fast-talking "solution" to the greenhouse gas emissions problem, it is akin to signing an adjustable rate sub-prime mortgage on our sky-domed home in the hopes that we'll find a solution to the stop-gap after this crisis passes.

The problem with problematic solutions is that over time they lose their solution-like characteristics and become simply problematic. We should not be willing to accept more nuclear-powered facilities as a solution to our energy and climate crises because they represent a short-term benefit with a long-term liability. We should not hold at the core of our electrified society a power source that is deadly and dangerous.

Such residual problematic qualities were evident in a decision earlier this month by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. They ruled in favor of the plaintiff in a case that claims radiation from Hanford facilities in south-central Washington caused cancer in employees and nearby residents. Hanford produced plutonium for weapons for more than 40 years, and Washington's only commercial reactor, Columbia Generating Station, is in the same neighborhood.

Even though the nuclear industry claims that processes are better and safer, the fact remains radioactive material is extremely deadly, expensive to work with and the lifespan of the waste dwarfs the lifespan of any facility. Despite this, the federal government supports the nuclear solution and is processing applications for new reactors to add to the more than 100 nuclear reactor facilities already in the U.S. As a solution to the waste issue, there is the plan to neatly centralize "all" radioactive wastes at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

It sounds neat on paper, but in practice it is much messier.

Oregon's ill-fated Trojan facility was killed in 1992, about twenty years before its projected life span due to the release of radioactive steam. With Trojan came a total construction-demolition cost of about $900 million. Its core was sent to Hanford, the tower imploded, yet its spent fuel rods are still on the banks of the Columbia waiting in a pool of water for what may come next, be that Yucca, erosion or nothing.

Such messiness has the likes of Warren Buffet scrapping plans to back a new facility that had been planned near the Oregon-Idaho border. However, show me someone who holds contracts to store radioactive waste and I'll show you someone who knows how to leverage long-term investment against public health and public sentiment - and who supports more nuclear power facilities.

Because Oregon has a law that the public must approve new reactors, though two research reactors still operate in the state - at Oregon State University and at Reed College - and given the regional reliance on hydropower and a sentiment toward wind and solar power, there is little likelihood that we will have a new nuclear power plant in our state.

However, Eugene does draw some power from the Columbia Generating Station, and if an expansion occurred there, we would "benefit" from that. Also, plans for a new facility outside Boise would have regional implications if it were actually built.

Given the push to expand nuclear power's role in our energy spectrum, and given its apparent "emissions-free" status and our willingness to flip on the switch no matter where the electricity comes from or what wastes are made, it is a real possibility that nuclear power will effectively take up the "environmentally friendly" banner that most rationally thinking environmental activists would reserve for solar, wind and perhaps hydro-electric power.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Nuclear renaissance blows (up the spot)

Those of you who recall the 1980s will no doubt remember not just the horrible day glow fashion and hideous hair but also the international specter of radiation that overshadowed daily life. Ionizing radiation, from a theorized nuclear holocaust or nuclear power reactor accidents, was at the top of media reports and at the top of public fears.

However, radiation, in and of itself, was neither a new nor unnatural phenomenon. Also, the life cycle of radioactive elements is not confined to the narrow sphere of weapons or energy and they continue to pervade our everyday lives – in manufacturing processes, in health care and even in your living room smoke detector.

In these ways, radiation is far from just an inconvenient environmental and social liability, it is part of our convenient modernity in which we seek to eradicate human suffering through a domination of nature, including the nature of the atom. Along the path from uranium ore to industrially, medically or militarily useful materials to radioactive waste, there is a dynamic mix of benefits, liabilities and economic opportunities.

The common perception is that if we avoid nuclear power facilities and research and testing sites that we’re generally safe from exposure to radiation. The reality is that we are all exposed to ration on an ongoing basis. Just by being on Earth, we come into contact with a certain level of ionizing radiation. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has even put together a system of radiation risk assessment that breaks conveniently allows people 360 millirems per year, or about one a day.

Twenty-six of those come naturally from cosmic sources and another 23 to 90, again without human cause, from the ground you walk on. You are also expected to ingest about 40 millirems of radiation from your food and water and calculated to breathe in an astounding 200 millirems from the alpha particles from radon gas. If you get medical x-rays you can expect to absorb about another 70 millirems annually. There are also a whole range of lifestyle factors that you may not expect to affect your millirem exposure, like porcelain crowns or false teeth, the mantels of gas lanterns and living in a stone, brick or concrete building.

The one that we all fear and had 80’s nightmares about – reactor meltdowns and fallout from the more than 500 above ground nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1990 – gives us only one millirem a year. That is about the same as the LCD display wrist watch that you wear.

This is not to say that certain locations and events, such as the 26 April 1986 accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine or the attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, have not resulted in irrevocable and incomprehensible death, suffering and disfigurement. However, the environmental and social fallout from these events has not precluded the continuation, and even proliferation of nuclear and radiation technologies.

In many ways the first decade of this century is a renaissance for nuclear development, both as rumors of the United States’ efforts to develop small scale “bunker buster” nuclear weapons and as North Korea seems to have brushed the United States off its back with its combination of long range missiles and a demonstrated nuclear weapon test in October 2006. Also, Russia is helping Iran build a nuclear reactor as it continues with the development of its nuclear capabilities, whether those be aimed at electricity or weapons production and last August the United States signed a bilateral agreement with India regarding India’s “civilian” nuclear technology. And in the United States 17 companies are laying the groundwork to build 33 new nuclear reactors – possibly just the right solution for energy in a market in which oil will probably not see the low side of $100 a barrel ever again and biofuels continue to conflict with food markets.

If the question is “How do we ensure our military capabilities and our energy needs?” then the answer, for many, seems to be the same as last century – go nuclear.

In the shadow of this answer, we may also renew our nightmare scenarios, though they will now be lined with advanced radiation technologies like praseodymium-147 to measure the thickness of our textiles, americium-241 to detect smoke in our homes, californium-252 to measure moisture content in the fields where our food grows and iodine-131 for radiation therapy.

Further down the half life of these military, industrial, political and medical innovations, there are results both more curious and more sinister.

In Washington state, in the US, courts have ruled in favor of those exposed to radiation as a result of working at or living near the Hanford Nuclear Site, which produced plutonium for much of the US arsenal. Such a ruling opens the way for further “downwinder” cases related to nuclear weapons production and testing in the United States.

Radioactive waste dumps and tailings from uranium mining and processing are also a huge issue related to our dependence on radiation. The waste is often a fiscal liability and this translates into an environmental liability as well, as it has been dumped and abandoned around the world, from South Africa to Central Asia and the Sea of Japan.

Abandoned uranium mines, in Boulder and Basin, Montana, US and Bad Gastein Austria, have actually capitalized on the excess of radon gas and converted the liability to a part of their tourist economies as people come there for natural radiation treatments that are claimed to cure arthritis and other ailments.

However, the renewed proliferation of fission and fissile materials as solutions for political, energy, industrial and military predicaments will outstretch their useful lifespan. We’ll still be stuck with the deadly half-lives of these “advancements,” as more nuclear activity moves deeper into our communities, farmland, industry and foreign policy, and the only recourse will be to recalculate the recommended daily dosage of millirems: a 21^st century version of “day glow” fashion.

PETA chews the fat

PETA's meat support a hard change to swallow

Duceré Useré Clycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/23/08

It's official - the coldest day in hell since Charlton Heston made good on his promise to deliver a firearm in his cold dead hands: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced it supports "meat."

Far from just supporting meat, PETA is promoting a $1 million prize for any organization that can produce and market volumes of in vitro meat by June 2012. In vitro meat is meat tissue grown in culture in a controlled environment rather than in an animal body in a pasture, lot, sty or cage.

The echoes of Heston and "soylent green" are creepily present in the challenge to produce the nondescript tissue mass, though we are told that the cultures will be bred from stem cells of animals that we already traditionally eat, like chickens, cattle and swine.

The New York Times reported that PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk has been "hoping to get the organization involved in advancing in vitro meat technology for at least a decade." However, the announcement has shocked PETA to its core as the "meat is murder" mantra will now be complicated by the idea that meat without skeletal, circulatory and nervous systems may not exactly be in a position to be murdered.

The Times further reported that Newkirk understands the move has initiated a "civil war" within PETA, with one PETA Vice President, Lisa Lange, maintaining the philosophy that "animals are not ours to eat," while Newkirk defends the support of body-less meat tissue in terms of actions that will lead to conditions in which "fewer animals suffer."

I am at once pleased, shocked and appalled by the announcement and the implications of separating our meat production from animals' bodies. The decision of what to eat has social, economic and environmental repercussions that need to be addressed. We have to consider the question of whether or not we should support further industrialization of meat-type food products, because in the answer we will at once betray and realize a belief in either pastoral or industrial narratives of utopian ideals.

PETA's problematic move only further complicates this discussion. In order to try to make itself relevant again, PETA has imposed its argumentative claim of animal ethics and rights directly into the midst of dialogue on livestock production's role in global climate change. Earlier this month there was an inaugural in-vitro meat symposium in Norway. The press surrounding this event seems to have provided the right conditions for PETA to impose itself in such a fashion and, in effect, attempt to hijack collective concern about climate change.

This is moxie beyond what I've come to expect from PETA, as they seem to have realized there's only so far that nearly naked models and undergrads - always women by the way, but that's a question for another time - can move PETA's social message of ethics. All such discussions always have to move into the marketplace and faux-meat has a relevance to the masses and the market that faux-fur can never garner.

The sheer brilliance of re-founding PETA upon such a paradox strikes fear deep into my heart.

My first fear is that environmental reactionaries could actually think that this is a good idea and that we should further isolate human existence and sustenance within an illusion that modern industrial utopia can be achieved. There is precedence for markets, activists and consumers to all jump on alternatives with a rapacity that outpaces logical thought - biofuels is the best current example, in the context of its unintended impacts on food supplies and prices.

My second fear is exactly the same market function that I often put forth in this column as an integral element in the success of an overall sustainable market, economy, society and environment. I fear that people will buy this stuff. No doubt they will.

There is already an appetite for mechanically separated, chopped and pressed meat tissue products, and this in vitro meat tissue could easily fill that processed food market. As far as bone-in products marbled with fat like my two favorite cuts of dead cow - the New York strip and rib-eye steaks - how to produce these without the mess, disease and emissions of the rest of the cow is a challenge that attendees to the Norway symposium have been discussing how to overcome.

At this point we're back to the urban myth that there are vats of chicken breasts somewhere in the mid-west, growing without the rest of the chicken. Given that utopia, or dystopia given your ideals, it's time to pick a side and, as always, vote with your dollar. On the one hand you can throw your faith in a pastoral ideal in which local and ethically slaughtered meats can serve as an answer to problems of unsustainable environmental, social and economic practices. On the other hand, you can decide that, given Earth's human population, further industrialization of meat tissue is a logical, even desirable step.

The philosophy embodied in either position, unlike Newkirk's meat tissue, cannot be separated from your personal behavior and choices and, subsequently, the future that we collectively realize. Like Newkirk says, in ethics and philosophy, this is war.

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Let's start with the lawyers

'Green' ambitions change lawyer stereotype

Duceré Useré Clycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/16/08

As stereotypes go, lawyers run at a deficit when it comes to empathy and morals. They're generally lampooned as being at the same level as used car salespeople - forked-tongue devils whose interest is more in winning or selling than in ethical responsibility.

However, students at the University of Oregon's School of Law are trying to level those interests as they promote the idea of making money through environmental law and sustainable business law. Last Friday the Law Students for Sustainable Business held the first Sustainable Business Symposium, focusing on renewable energy, carbon policy and sustainable development and investment.

By promoting a hybrid of environmental law and sustainable entrepreneurship, the LSSB envisions an environment in which lawyers champion sustainable policy and locally owned used car lots sell zero-emissions vehicles. This idea will be awkward for some, as we can hardly imagine a world in which the stereotypes of lawyers and salespeople that we make fun of open their mouths and start speaking of environmental and social responsibility rather than slick rhetoric and half-truth pitches.

While the LSSB's efforts are positioned to be extremely successful, as policy and investment are core driving factors to any economy, this movement will encounter resistance from within another branch of the sustainability movement, which holds fast to the mantra that lawyers and people with products to sell or money to invest cannot be trusted, or even considered by some to be the manifestation of pure evil.

What is required to overcome this combative atmosphere is a hybrid. "Green" activists need to merge with the green of capital investment. Isolationist activism in and of itself is not sustainable, as it in the end needs to have energy, products, modes of transportation and places to live like everyone else. The principle, then, must be one of growing, one of falling dominoes and world domination of sustainable economies and business practices.

Sustainability activists should actually consider this move by the LSSB, or even just the existence of the LSSB, as a huge success as social activism is helping inform business models. Sustainable ideals require a partnership with sustainable materiality, and co-opting the business world as it is already structured is much more efficient than creating a parallel economy that would seek to destroy and replace the old order. Reduce, reuse, recycle - stick to the basic principles.

In the end, or at this point anyhow, it comes down to a question of motivation. We are becoming more motivated through negative re-enforcement - that is we are told that if we do not change our lifestyle and sources of that lifestyle that we will die. However, we need to encourage good old positive re-enforcement of cash and material benefit. This is what "the masses" respond to and this is what business responds to as well. This is the hybrid motivation - good for our environment and good for the bottom line - that necessitates and implies a hybrid between ideological hippie crunchies and entrepreneurial suits.

Selling this idea itself is going to be the first step. Trust has to be realized in the no-man's land between conservationists and developers. The suits will have little trouble, once old streams dry up, adapting to new cash-flow streams and rivers of capital. A basic business principle is that one grows or dies, and if sustainable markets, manufacturing and marketing represent the new streams, capitalist boats will put afloat in them.

This may strike some idealists as shameless opportunism and trigger accusations of "greenwashing" in order to move the same old products. Those who advocate individually isolationist sustainability over mass-marketed sustainability may hold an ideal in which invasive barges of capitalist exploitation and extraction are banned from trafficking the idealistic streams of sustainability. This ideal is as unsustainable and outdated as the petrol-heavy import-export model that they are critiquing.

Not only accepting, but deliberately pirating and exploiting the willingness of capital ventures to populate new areas of the economy is the hybrid model that sustainability advocates have to embrace.

The movement of goods and services will not stop and isolationist pockets of sustainability are futile in a reality in which the action of the world's masses determines global fate. World economy and world conquest needs to be the ultimate goal for the sustainability movement, whether the agents are crunchy idealists or business suits.

The world will go "green" when the best and most affordable products and services are sustainable and activists should try on this perspective where the market drives the movement rather than the movement tries to derail the market. So co-opt the market, give it good returns, and in the spirit of this move, let's hear it for the lawyers.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

From crap to artifact in only 14,300 years

Fossil find reignites continuing debate over origin

Ducere Usere Cyclere

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/9/08

It's true. I usually write about local crap. But not like this.

Last week a team of international scientists, including UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History senior archeologist Dennis Jenkins, published findings about some crap they found in the Paisley Caves in Central Oregon. In a way this is just ordinary crap that we flush every day - some human took a dump in a cave.

Looking at it from another perspective, however, this team of academics studied the six pieces of poop - also known as coprolites - and determined that these feces-cum-artifacts are actually 14,300-year-old evidence of human inhabitance of the Americas. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis provides the basis for the team to make claims that this is the oldest DNA evidence found in the "New World," and that its genetic path leads back to Siberia or Asia. This in itself may be just another load of crap to some researchers.

A DNA study published in mid-March on the online journal PLoS One claims that most Native Americans can trace their ancestry to six women, and that those six "apparently did not live in Asia because the DNA signatures they left behind aren't found there." Instead the researchers claim that they probably migrated 20,000 years ago from "Beringia," which is now under the waters of the Bering Strait.

So this story of local crap found in a cave may be the evidence of what humans were eating and doing here in what we call Oregon; or it may be a story of what we as contemporary people are wondering about ourselves. The connection of our existence and our DNA to humans of one or two millennia past may belie the facts of who we are, or the ways in which we ask where we came from.

My students and I are carrying on a three-week discussion about origins in the composition class I teach at the University. On Monday I asked my students whether or not there is a direct connection between our individual bodies and the terrestrial body of Earth, in the context of whether actions we take that impact the Earth results in impacts upon ourselves.

There was a general silence.

I don't know if this was a result of the 9 a.m. class time, general disinterest, or if the question came across as rhetorical. After another prompt they voiced a concurrence on the reality of the concept that our world and existence is not a compartmentalization of human and nonhuman, unnatural and natural, but one continuous interwoven chain of reactions.

We went on to discuss, in short form, the idea that testing nuclear weapons in Utah and Nevada could result in parallel effects in both Earth's environment and Earth's self-righteous inhabitants; or if humans could cause the release of radiation yet remain insulated from atmospheric fallout and resultant cancer. If a team of scientists 14,000 years from now finds some crap from the 1950s, they will probably try to ask the same questions about origin, continuity and the relevance of what is present in the coprolite, be it digested plant matter, DNA or radiation.

In a world in which truth of human origin and existence is claimed and determined by science as a way to address our own contemporary situations, we may be overlooking more mundane universalities. Despite all the time that has passed since the theorized land mass of Beringia, we still do so many of the same things. We eat, we look for shelter, we exist between our origin and our destination and we poop.

So, if so much has stayed the same, what is the core of what has changed? The implied and touted progress of modernity has been promoting egalitarian society, humanity free from poverty and injustice of other humans, and nature at work for humans, human nature in tune with itself.

However, we seem to be stuck with the paradox that human nature is perhaps the most unnatural "thing" of all, as we consider the anonymous cave pooper of 12,292 BCE more natural than the hypothetical Utah pooper of 1950 with Uranium 238 in his crap. Both are leaving evidence of their world, evidence of themselves, and as such the pooper of 1950 leaves evidence of humankind's attempt to dominate the "nature" of the atomic structure.

In the tale of these two poops there is no physical separation between humans and "nature," because the concept of humans being apart from the rest of existence is a cognitive invention. We are evidence of our environment as much as we are evidence of our actions.

That is why the coprolite team can determine what that human ate and what grew in that environment before it became the desert it is today. And that is also why, as we examine that old crap, we should consider the questions we assume we're asking, and see if there is evidence of what we are in the fresh crap we flush every day. We will never definitively determine our origin, but in asking, we need to consider why it is more interesting - and safer perhaps - to wonder where we came from than where we are.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Ousource yourself.

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Economy says: “Outlook not so good, seek something overseas.” Thursday, 03 April 2008

It’s a wide world of work out there. In an employment environment where people are lamenting the loss of jobs outsourced overseas, the best move may be to get ahead of the curve and outsource yourself. If you’re planning on graduating from college — which, chances are, if you’re in school that is part of your plan — then you’ll have to face the eventual question of what you’ll do next. Despite repeated reassurances that our country is not heading into a recession — or even worse, a depression-scale economic meltdown — even President Bush has admitted that our “economy obviously is going through a tough time." And Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson had to commit about $30 billion to “maintain the stability of our financial system” through this “tough time.” In light of this situation, you may be experiencing a sinking sensation, in which case you should seriously consider folding your degree into a life raft and making for elsewhere. This can be done in two main fashions. Either you can keep close ties with Uncle Sam and work for the US Government in some other country, or you can choose to cut the cord with the Uncle and become a bonafide free-market ex-patriot. For those of you who can’t make up your mind, there’s always the Peace Corps, which gives you the feel-good satisfaction of living at the host country’s poverty level and feeling completely detached from the US while also providing you with the opportunity to partake in the bureaucratic circus and possibly take advantage of government-provided mental health care at the end of your service. The Peace Corps is actually celebrating its 47th year, after more than 190,000 volunteers have answered John F. Kennedy’s 1960 call to University of Michigan students to “make the greatest possible difference” in the world. Though the origin and mystique of the organization may sound like the epitome of strange bed fellows — humanitarian endeavor and aggressive patriotism — many returning volunteers actually report that it has a lot more to do with sex, drinking, drugs and crapping in your pants than with lofty ideals and accomplishments. A Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras summed up this universal Peace Corps experience in a message posted on the Peace Corps’ forum. He writes, “Well, I am officially a Peace Corps volunteer as I swore in on August 25 (and officially shit my pants on September 13).” And he doesn’t mean that he was metaphorically scared or surprised about something. He pooped in his pants. Ask a returned volunteer about his or her official moment. Of course, a lot of you will want to work overseas in a situation in which you are not likely to have semi-chunky diarrhea inconveniently running out of your ass. Cross the Peace Corps off your list, bone up on your language skills, and try to avoid working for the government all together. Teaching English and nursing are two hot areas to get you abroad. In the case of teaching, you will need to plan to get certified to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) and in many cases also get ready to live where two-ply toilet paper may be in short supply, though it is possible to land a gig in France and other countries that may seem closer to home. For you nursing students who want to change the world, you’re in luck. Pretty much anywhere you can speak a local language and stab someone with a needle, you can get yourself a position. And you business and information technology folks may want to forget global investment firms like Bear Stearns join the rest of us who want to get out in the world in a first rate manner with salary and full benefits. To do this, just follow the money — $340 million a day doesn’t just disappear into our war efforts, it shows up in the pockets of workers who have followed the trend overseas. There’s an opportunity for just about anyone. If you can dream up a skill set or a job description, Halliburton is waiting for your resume, with 277 job openings in over 50 countries. And if contractor’s pay is what you want, there’s well over 200 organizations that have federal contracts to do everything from delivering jet fuel to managing computer networks to shooting at security threats, all overseas. For some of you, however, the only worthwhile place to combine your patriotism, salary requirements and appetite for adventure is literally on the front lines — accepting the paradox that there is little that resembles a front line of conflict any more — and again the US Government has no shortage of opportunities for you to turn your degree into an overseas career. You could enlist in the Army or Marines and spend the rest of your life overseas, working up from where your BA would start you at $21,006 a year. Or if you would rather develop your diplomatic skills more than your trigger finger, the State Department could have you participating in foreign affairs for around $40,000 a year to start. On the other hand, if you would like to put your communication and persuasion skills to use in a field that actually requires you to carry a handgun and will politely allow you to interview people with a bucket of water and the back of your hand, the CIA is always taking applications, bonus if you already speak a foreign language and know how to manipulate ambiguous situations. Pack extra briefs, though, because I also hear you’re not a real intelligence officer until you crap your pants in a third world country. So there’s something for everyone out there — though most of it involves compromised hygiene — and if things ever look up back here, you can paddle on home and find work at a Starbucks.

Pave the Town 'Green'

University's push for 'green' Trials just a facade

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Clycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/2/08

The road to sustainability is paved with green intentions. In the case of the upcoming Olympic Track Trials, known as "Eugene 08," that road has been paved over with good old-fashioned black tar.

The conflicting goals and ideals embodied by the track trials, in the end, will not produce a "zero waste" or fully sustainable event because in the flurry of activity surrounding the event, short term profit is placed before the long term philosophical and social goals of sustainability.

This does not mean that there are no sustainable efforts, or that the efforts of those involved in those efforts are meaningless; however, those efforts are overshadowed by the unrelenting and all-invasive need for profit in a capitalist system.

The excitement about the "green" and "sustainable" aspects of Eugene 08 have given way to more practical concerns about making money. The peak of green energy seems to have waned near the end of last year. In November 2007 KLCC broadcast a report about sustainable efforts that are part of the Olympic event.

A critical fact given in the report is that the Sustainability Committee does not have a dedicated budget and must rely upon volunteer efforts. In other words, a failure to dedicate funds to a sustainability effort is a conscious decision to give lip service to a lot of the sustainable catchphrases, hoping that people's passion will be cheap investment capitol where cash can be spent elsewhere.

One place the University put some resources to support Eugene 08 was directly into the sustainable image-building that many have become familiar with over the last several months. Last year the University's Event Management Research Team, on behalf of the 2008 Olympic Track & Field Sustainability Committee, conducted research to find out what logos would best represent "the sustainability aspects of community events," specifically Eugene 08, and how it may be portrayed to relate to sustainable policies in "transportation, energy, water, waste management, social justice, labor, purchasing and community legacy."

In the story reported by KLCC, Sustainability Chair Alex Cuyler explained how many of the sustainable aspects, those that focus on environmental, social and economic sustainability, are engineered deep into the planning, along with how fans and athletes will arrive to Hayward Field by shuttle or bike, eat organic food with compostable utensils, presort their recyclables and trash, refill their water bottles, and drop off their old shoes to be turned into track surfaces.

Of all these "sustainable" aspects, the conflicted ideology is most apparent in the last - that being the idea that fans should fly or drive old shoes to Eugene and leave them to be transported to another location and reused as track surfacing. It seems the idea is that this feel-good publicity event will help "save our planet." The reality is more along the lines that fans are expected to go to the local Nike store and buy a new pair of made-in-Taiwan shoes. This feel-good ideology further breaks down when you realize that Nike is moving its store from Eugene's ailing downtown to Oakway Center, which relies more on vehicle traffic than pedestrian or bike-riding shoppers.

A truly laudable effort, however, are those made in remodeling Hayward Field using recycled materials and economic design, especially in regards to the new lighting systems. Eugene 08 is also attempting to use only "green power" for the three-by-one block area of the event.

In spite of all the "green" energy behind Eugene 08, the ideological conflicts can be crystallized in the Sustainability Committee's efforts to have fans buy carbon offset credits to make up for the "carbon footprint" of their flights to Eugene. This desperate attempt to "greenify" everything with a sort of Green Giant Midas Touch is more embarrassing and painful than laughable. While "greenies" attack air traffic as a cause of global climate change, local investors understand it is this same air traffic that is key to local economic and social sustainability.

On March 30, the Register-Guard published a small piece on new air services to Eugene - United 737 flights. The story reports that, according to airport manager Tim Doll, the renewed service "will be a boon for the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials this summer." This may be an indicator that Eugene is on the path to revitalizing its local economy by luring in investors, visitors and new residents who can help reverse the sort of decay that is epitomized by the gaping holes in Eugene's downtown area.

It also demonstrates the hyper-ambivalence of our catchphrase and logo-heavy sustainability movement. So in the midst of this rush to cash in on the trials, and the conflicts between environmental, social and economic sustainability, we may all be telling the environment "Just Screw It," while we wear our sustainable logo T-shirts, sport our new imported Nike shoes, and get ready to fly back home and tell everyone how they should catch a comfortable 737 flight to Eugene and make some carbon footprints in America's number one Green City.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Beer too expensive? Toke up for change

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Thursday, 27 March 2008

This is a global issue. People don’t treat it with the level of concern that they regard climate change, economic collapse and war; however the rising price of beer may very well be interconnected with all of these. Additionally, with the skyrocketing prices of key beer ingredients like hops, barley and malt, we are realizing that we can no longer be dependent on an international brewing materials market. A possible solution? Domestic, local, organic, renewable marijuana. Beer is itself a key ingredient in social life and national identity, but with the price of hops increasing from averages of $3-$5 a pound a year ago to as much as $35-$40 a pound in early 2008, breweries and pubs from England to the United States to Amsterdam must face the reality that they may not be able to survive. Barley costs have also increased about 30 percent over the last year and combined with the increase in distribution costs because of the all-time high price of oil, craft brewers and pubs have to face tough decisions on whether they can salvage very small profit margins — usually about 9 percent for brewers — by cutting back in other areas, or if they have to raise prices at the tap. Average price increases of one to two dollars a six pack may in fact drive beer drinkers toward larger brands like Anheuser-Busch, Coors and Femsa who have the clout to buy up hops supplies and the deep pockets to shave a profit margin but expand market share at the same time. All these factors reveal that though many brands and craft brewers manufacture a regional image or a national identity, they do so only through international trade of hops and grains. Your favorite import that demonstrates your refined tastes may very well get that hoppy bite from Tasmania or Washington state in the US. Likewise, your favorite US domestic may depend on imported hops varieties to give it its characteristic bite and flourish. Add to this the concern of all the pesticides used to cultivate and all the fossil fuels used to transport beer materials to breweries and then package and ship it to the consumer. Some even argue that higher beer prices are in part due to the amount of corn diverted to ethanol production, which then pits brewers, bakers and livestock growers against each other for the shrinking supply of grains. Enter marijuana. Many people, worldwide already enjoy pot as one of the top four recreational substances — the others being alcohol, nicotine and caffeine — and there are several reasons why it is poised to come to the rescue of beer connoisseurs who long for the aroma of a pungent flower. Hops, the beer ingredient that gives it its bitterness, high points and aroma, is actually the flower of the hop plant, and its pungent aroma itself can be as enticingly intoxicating as that of the flowering bud of a marijuana plant. For the beer drinker who enjoys a bit of hoppy skunkiness in his or her drink, the shift to some dank bud will probably be an easy one. Despite the huge and obvious drawback to marijuana’s illicit status in many places around the globe, that it is so popular and available does make it an economical replacement for craft beer. If you spend $30 to get a bit of a buzz on one night a week at the bar, you may be saving a lot of green if you’d just switch to weed. Many times you can get 3.5 grams (1/8 of an ouce) of fairly locally-grown pot for around $50 — or less if you make the right connection — and instead of blowing it all in a night, you can smoke up your crew and yourself for a couple days, or even a week if you’re stingy, for that half-a-Benjamin. Also, if you do shop around, you can be sure to support local organic farming — or grow a plant or two yourself — and keep your money in the local economy, thereby cutting back on all sorts of problems associated with international import-export and petroleum-based transportation. Sure, it is illegal, and many people would argue that such black market activity contributes to an unsafe society, reckless behavior and, in this case, undermines the craft brewing industry that already faces huge hurdles in the current economy. However, this change should be seriously considered. We’re at the point where our old ways have led us to two terms with a President whose policies and actions have led us to many of our current troubles with the economy, foreign policy and the environment. Yes, a loss of craft brewers would be a devastating shock to national and regional identity, but a change to more marijuana recreation in its place could change illicit drug laws — remember the US prohibition of 1920-1933? — and bring about a growth in legal craft farmers. You may have to wait until November to vote on the president, but you vote every day with your dollar, and where you choose to spend it can change the world.

Spring Break for the Soldiers: A Four Day Break from War

Written by Josh Grenzsund

Thursday, 20 March 2008

Doha, the capital of Qatar, where those serving in the Middle East can go for a four-day spring break. It's the time of year for college students to relax (or get wasted) over spring break. World Writer Joshua Grenzsund discusses the difference between a spring break from college and a spring break from serving in the Middle East. College is stressful, no doubt about it, and spring break is a chance to escape the normal pressure of school for a few days. Some of us will either sleep for a week straight to make up for lost time, or drink and screw and save all the sleeping for when class is back in session. But this year, the few days away from lectures and exams has me thinking about those serving in our combat zones and how badly they may need a break from the business of killing and staying alive. Not long after Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom were rolling across Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon recognized the need to give people a few days’ break in order to keep them motivated, productive and—in many cases—sane. They selected the United States base As-Sayliyah near Doha in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar to serve as their year-round Central Command spring break. Most troops on a 12- to 18-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa get at least one four-day rest-and-recuperation pass. Many of them elect to spend it on a military-sponsored trip to Qatar rather than stay locally in their post or a nearby base. I made one of those trips myself, in October 2004, on break from duty with the Army in Afghanistan, though I got out altogether in 2005. For me, the choice to spend two miserable days of traveling in the back of a C-130—one each way from Bagram, Afghanistan to Doha, Qatar—was hinged on two key factors. First, there would be no chance of running into unstable colleagues still carrying their weapons and live ammo, and more importantly, there was a 100 percent chance I would be able to get my hands on a real beer—three beers a day to be exact. Despite these factors, you have to consider nothing in the military is done without its extra layers of bureaucratic fun-sucking. And in the words of one Lieutenant Colonel who made notes of his trip to Qatar, once you arrive, you have to expect to “be processed like beef cattle at the slaughterhouse and move from one room to the next and one briefing to the next, 'Do this, don't do that, watch out for this, look out for that.'” The adventures with Vorpal Bunny, his human counterpart and others provide good examples of how the average person gets cycled through the on-post fast food shops and swimming pool, and the off-post chaperoned trips to play golf, go dune busting, walk thought the mall with an indoor ice rink, and for some reason go to see a 20 foot statue of a clam pearl. I saw the clam statue myself, but the whole point of this trip was not so much tour Qatari culture, but to be re-oriented to the shocking concept that there was a peaceful and functioning modern world out there, outside the combat zones. CW2 Bert Stover wrote a blog for The Washington Post and in one of his postings he described sitting down to watch TV in civilian clothes, drinking a beer and how “memories of life in the U.S. came back instantly. I forgot everything about being in Iraq: the flying, the heat, the people, all of it.” When I got my pass to Qatar, I had been in Afghanistan for nearly six months without a day off, working 14-hour days in old Soviet buildings with dust blowing through cracks in the walls, or in mud Afghan huts with rotted corrugated tin ceilings, making decisions about people’s lives and probable deaths each day. My pass had been revoked once before, and I was aching to escape for even just a couple hours of mindless solitude. My moment of personal escape to the reassurance of the westernized world came on my first full day in Qatar when I found an ex-pat sponsor to take me out on the town. It was the second full day of Ramadan, and there had been mild threats towards U.S. personnel, so many of the usual outings had been canceled. Instead of going to the dunes or the Qatari markets he took me to an ordinary western-style grocery store. I spent the better part of an hour walking up and down the clean brightly-lit and colorfully-stocked isles, just touching things, buying things, lost in the marvelous experience of not carrying a gun, knowing nobody’s life was in the balance, and just shopping. A guy blogging on Going Down Range wrote about other startlingly pleasant experiences that civilians don’t know how to fully appreciate, like when he could “sleep in without the fear of a rocket attack, use real toilets and take a nice long hot shower.” Coconut Commando posted a thorough account of his trip to Qatar on his blog. Though he recognized the artificiality of the oasis of U.S. fast food in the desert, he also pointed out the genuine contrast of being on R&R and life in a combat zone that most service members take notice of. “I sat on a berm for about two hours, and just listened to the wind blow," he wrote. "I know it’s the simple things in life that have the most impact.” In the end, there can really be no comparison between taking a spring break from school and a four day pass from war. If anything though, looking at what we give to and expect from our service members—especially on this fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq—it helps put our academic lives in perspective. As university students, we take our few days of getting wasted and then get back to the task of earning a degree. The guy blogging at Going Down Range, however, sums up the difference of responsibility and expectations. “It was nice to relax for a few days,” he wrote. “Now it is back to the task to helping Afghanistan to join the 21st century.”

Forget Tibet: the bullshit factor

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Monday, 10 March 2008

Earlier this month Icelandic musician Björk grabbed headlines for herself and for the world’s pet cause as she shouted " Tibet! Tibet!" after her song “Declare Independence” at a concert in Shanghai, China, earlier ths month. No doubt many will applaud her move as the most meaningful and provocative statement by a musician since Ireland's Sinéad O'Connor had her way with the Pope’s picture in 1992. However, the more interesting story lies not in what human rights injustices may be exposed in Tibet, but rather in what can be overlooked and ignored while people chant, cheer, and hang flags on their front porches for that sparsely populated region of Asia. “Freedom” is a rallying cry for just about any political cause you might choose to pick up. You might want to “free Iraq” with 140,000 US troops and a five-year occupation during “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Or you may prefer a slightly more justified cause and support a “free Afghanistan” with NATO and “Operation Enduring Freedom,” now nearing its seventh full year. But if you think military intervention is, well, passé and overall just bad for karma, then you’re probably one of the many who want to “Free Tibet” with bumper stickers and prayer flags. The problem with all of these freedom movements is the heavy bullshit factor that each of their supporters try to overlook in order to foreground the feel-good factor. The Western movement to liberate Tibet, a.k.a. the Xizang Autonomous Region of China, tops the list. Sure, there are plenty of feel good reasons to support a “free Tibet.” China did conduct a violent take-over the country, ending in 1959; Tibetans’ traditional lifestyle and religion are increasingly threatened in their own homeland; and they do subscribe to a belief system that condemns violence and sounds like it could really help people live overall harmonious and peaceful lives. But a layman’s way into the underlying bullshit here is actually through Showtime’ program "Bullshit" in which the co-hosts Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller examine the Dalai Lama’s back story. They claim the Dalai Lama's apparent benevolence doesn't address the reality of a traditionally class-based society in which the peasant class in Tibet was little more than a population of slave labor. China’s official position mirrors this. Penn and Teller do concede, however, that Communist China’s policies may not be much better for the two million Tibetans who still live there. So while this image of peaceful enlightenment draws hordes of international supporters for “freedom” in Tibet, the truth behind Tibet’s domestic tradition of governance is second to the duplicity of the Tibetan resistance with the United State’s CIA — an organization certainly known not for peaceful humanitarianism but rather its government-sanctioned “subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements.” Several books and declassified documents detail a history of the CIA helping the Dalai Lama’s retreat into exile and Tibetan fighters training with the CIA in Colorado. Few Hollywood stars and average US peaceniks would slap a CIA sticker next to their Tibet paraphernalia, so this inconvenient history is largely ignored in favor of the robes, smiles and karmic promises. But aside from situational awareness, none of that is even worth dwelling on in the discussion of why US liberals’ ego-stroking love affair with Tibet’s ostensible freedom movement is problematic. While the world demonstrates their humanistic awareness by cheering for Tibet, sitting on that autonomous region’s northern border is another separatist situation — much more significant and almost entirely invisible to the world’s do-gooders. Uighurstan — a.k.a. Xinjiang, a.k.a. East Turkestan — makes up a full 20% of China’s land mass and has a native Uighur population of about seven million, which is about three times that of Tibet’s native Tibetan population. They also face displacement by Han Chinese and a loss of traditional lifestyle, language and religion. However, where Tibet was annexed in 1959, Uighurstan was fully absorbed in 1949. Where Tibet has mountains and the headwaters to China’s great rivers, Uighurstan has minerals, fossil fuels and access to the markets and resources of Russia and the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia. In short, Uighurstan is under a “harsh illegal colonial rule” that would be a wet dream for peace and freedom activists to rally around — except you've never heard about it. Oh, and one more thing: Uighurs are traditionally Muslim and as a result of their geographical location the separatist activities of their independence movement organizations tend to be tied to and lumped with what the US generally characterizes as unsavory “Islamic extremists.” Not many tie-dye Euro-Americans tend to pick up Islam as a fashion statement the way they do with Buddhism. But there's a more basic reason for the lack of attention. In the December 2002 Congressional Research Service report titled “China ’s Relations with Central Asian States and Problems with Terrorism” the CRS summed up the main reason you never heard of Uighurstan is because the “Uighur community lacks a single charismatic leader like Tibet’s Dalai Lama.” No superstar, no superstar attention. But you may hear more of them in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. As Tibet had hoped to send athletes, Beijing authorities are instead expecting more terrorists or, as it were, freedom fighters from Uighurstan, as they claim to have recently stopped a Uighur “terror plot targeting the Beijing Olympics.” So after all this, iyou can see that all this attention on freeing Tibet pretty much takes up all our karmic energy and small bills for colorful flags — there’s nothing left for supporting a free Uighrustan, much less anything left for looking a little closer to home for people who have had their land forcibly occupied and their lifestyles, languages and religions nearly erased. If, however, you do genuinely care about these humanitarian concerns and are not just concerned with massaging your ego and throwing up a façade of peace and compassion to fit into co-opted neo-liberal norms, think about the dozens of Native American Nations in North America, the war, violence, 500 years of injustice; put your energy and karma into a "Free America" campaign. Otherwise, change your “hippie” into just plain “hypocrite” and keep your fashion politics to yourself.