Lift Up Your Hearts!

They don't come any more enthusiastic about public transportation than us, so we were thrilled when SunRail brought a commuter train to Central Florida.  There were many disappointments, such as learning that the engines are diesel instead of electric, and most especially with the schedule:  the trains do not run on the weekend.  During the week, the best frequency is every 30 minutes during rush hour, and midday the trains are one, two, or even three hours apart.  What's more, the last train leaves downtown Orlando at 9:30 at night, making it completely useless for anyone planning an evening in town.  This is not the way to win a very skeptical population to mass transit.  But, we figured, it's a start.  If SunRail can prove itself useful for commuters, perhaps it can grow into a real train for the rest of us.

On Friday we decided to check it out.  I adore train travel.  My life is full of positive emotional associations with trains, from commuting to my first job on the Philadelphia Main Line run, to a luxurious ride from Rochester, New York to Springfield, Massachusetts early in our marriage, to my unplanned "rest and recovery" trip from Florida to Connecticut on September 13, 2001, to the easy and relaxing tourist travel in cities at home and abroad.  I planned to love the experience, sitting with Porter and a friend at one of the table seats, watching the world pass by out the window.  It was a glorious day, too:  sunny and dry, with temperatures in the low 70's.

Alas, it was not to be.  Porter described our experience in his subsequent e-mail to SunRail:

Sun Railers,

Well, I need to rail against you concerning your system.

I decided to take my elderly neighbor for a ride on the system to introduce her to it, and get her familiar with it as she doesn't drive anymore and wanted someone to go with her the first time she used it so she would get familiar with the stops and how to use it.

I was appalled!

It is as though you didn't study any train systems anywhere in the world!

We tried to board at the Altamonte Springs station going south on the 10:53.  We picked this time as it was a middle-of-the-day train and we would not be competing with commuters for space.  No luck, the train was full, and there was no additional train coming; the next train would be 2 1/2 hours later.  I felt like I was back in 1869 waiting for the train to Promontory Point.

However, the unboardable train was just the icing on the cake.  Your design was clearly a disaster even before the train arrived.

There is a long, 40 yard unbroken stretch of mulched landscaping between the parking lot area and the seats and vending machines, drinking fountain and "tap post."  One must detour far left or far right to get around this barrier.  However, I am sure that the plantings near the "tap station"—which is in the middle of this landscaping—will be trampled soon enough.  The other two "tap stations" are only marginally closer to the actual places one is supposed to walk to enter or exit the station.

Where else is this brain dead "tap station" system in use?  I have used public transport in DC, Boston, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Atlanta, London, Zurich, Paris, Kofu, Amsterdam, Arnhem, Lucerne, Basel, and Bangkok—among other places, and never have I seen such an inconvenient method of egress.  [The way payment works is that you buy a ticket and "tap" it at one of three kiosks at the station, both before boarding the train and after disembarking.  I will be very interested in seeing the system in action sometime; what I envision is long lines at the kiosks and people forgetting to "tap off" or giving up in disgust.]

You have nice electronic signs that are capable of giving messages in multiple languages—but the messages shown were generic and mostly useless.  There was actually one that said the train that was coming was full—but it did not specify whether or not another train had been added to pick up the extra riders.  Also, the sign did not say when the train would actually arrive.  This is the 21st century—you don't even need sensors in the tracks to make this calculation; with GPS technology you could easily provide this information.

Your connection with Lynx [our bus system] didn't work out.  The bus arrived about 2 minutes before the scheduled time of arrival of the train—however, it just looped the lot and left before the train actually arrived.  We waited about five or six minutes after the train arrived to see if enough people would exit so we could board.  Then it took us another five minutes to return to our car as we had our elderly neighbor with us.  In all this time no other Lynx bus arrived.  So, for those folks who did exit from the train, they had no bus to connect with.

When the door on the train opened (yes, singular door, all the doors did not open simultaneously to let people disembark, but rather one at a time, opened by hand, from the outside, by a conductor with a key) it was clear that the architects had muffed the egress design yet again.  There are two LARGE steps that need to be negotiated.  With all the time that you had to design this, there is no excuse for not having a level surface where train car floor matches the height of the train platform.  Even Bangkok's system does this.  The last one I was on that did not was Dacca, Bangladesh, 1974.  Don't tell me you went there to get the latest ideas for mass transit.

I had so hoped that you would succeed.  I hoped that you would be so successful that you could grow from simply commuter rail to real public transport usable at anytime for people to get into and out of Orlando.  But with all the avoidable mistakes you have made—obvious with just one visit to your system—I think you are doomed.

I was at least as upset as he was, though I still retain hope.  No trip that got us outside on such a beautiful day can be said to have been wasted; my sorrow and anger were because so many people here have no use for public transit, and I had so hoped SunRail would win some (many) converts.  But public transit must be reliable if it is to succeed.  We didn't hang around or return later to try another train because we didn't want to risk being stranded downtown and having to take an expensive taxi home.  Who is going to risk being that late for work?

The SunRail news is not all bad.  Businesses near the train stations have been thrilled to see their customer base expand significantly.  SunRail is working to iron out kinks and amend their mistakes.  It's just such a shame we are all so bad at learning from other people's mistakes—and more importantly, from their successes.

Our local Winter Park Honey folks posted this video.  I figure the grandkids, at least, would enjoy watching the bees.  The bee activity is a little slow at first, but be patient; it gets fascinating.

From the Department of I-Could-Have-Told-You-That:  The air is cleaner than it used to be.

From a University of Rochester study in Greenland:

A first-ever study of air trapped in the deep snowpack of Greenland shows that atmospheric levels of carbon monoxide (CO) in the 1950s were actually slightly higher than what we have today. This is a surprise because current computer models predict much higher CO concentrations over Greenland today than in 1950. Now it appears the opposite is in fact true.

Mind you, it's nice to have it scientifically established that atmospheric levels of at least one worrisome pollutant are lower than they were in the 1950's, even though anyone who breathed back in the 60's and 70's could tell you that we've made huge strides in cleaning up the air.  I'm not saying that levels of carbon dioxide are not important, but it's nice to have some documentation beyond my own memory that our efforts to control toxic emissions have born significant fruit.  And that computer models can be wrong.

We interrupt the Life with Joseph series to bring you this very important post from the Occasional CEO:  Lowell on the Yangtze.

Whenever I read about the Industrial Revolution—or watch a movie like How Green Was My Valley, I can't help thinking that it could have been done better.  Couldn't we have had automation and factories without all that dislocation, degradation and filth?

Of course we could have.  Raping the landscape, tearing families apart, and keeping workers in virtual slavery are not essential to production—if businesses are willing to take a little less profit, and consumers to pay a little more for the product.  But that's not how it happened.

The horrors of the Industrial Revolution are not safely tucked away in history books, a sad time in our past that we are happy to have outgrown.  They are very much Real and Now, from the illegal immigration in America that traps and abuses the workers who put food on our tables, to the "company town" factories in China that trap and abuse the workers who put iPhones in our pockets.

I don't know what the answer is, and neither does the Occasional CEO, but I know for sure we won't find it by accepting the situation as it is, just because we, as stockholders, want our companies to make a lot of money for us, and because we, as consumers, want inexpensive food and ever-better, ever-cheaper electronic gadgets.

There's no easy solution, and in casting around for one we just may make situations worse.  As one African leader is reported to have said, "Our people were so poor and hungry they were eating grass.  A big American company came and set up a factory, providing jobs for our people.  The work was long and hard, but our children had food.  But then some other Americans came and looked at the factory, called it a 'sweat shop,' and forced the company to close it down.  Now we have no jobs and no food.  Our children are dying again."

One thing I know:  Nothing will get better if we don't think about it, talk about it, care about it.  Thanks, Eric, for speaking out.

If the workers were slaves we'd be outraged. Yet, when a laborer is simply trapped, used and abused—and not owned—it's easier to overlook the inconvenient truth.

This I believe: When conditions involve loss of human dignity, eventually something gives.  We can hope it’s the emergence of enlightened management, sound government and maybe even a rising middle class.  We can hope it happens sooner rather than later, and we can sometimes even help make it happen.

But it’s hard to think that treating workers like production units—which might yield momentarily breathtaking results—constitutes anything like a long-term national competitive advantage.  It didn’t in Lowell [Massachusetts].  I doubt it will in China, either.

I'm still working on Hawaii, Day 2, so today you get to see the souvenir we brought home—for the worms.

It's billed as a compostable cup, and was of excellent quailty for drinking.  According the the manufacturer,

Please note that composting is required for biodegradation. These cups will biodegrade within 180 days in a commercial composting facility but can take up to a year or more to biodegrade in a home composting system.

We will see what the worms make of it.  I suspect it will take quite a while for them to have an impact on the cup:  they prefer their food in small pieces, preferably soft.  They will eat the mushier parts first, leaving harder pieces until bugs and microbes have degraded them somewhat—see the piece of corn cob to the right of the cup.

When I was young there was no such thing as recycling, per se.  We still produced a whole lot less trash than the average family today, because we had a whole lot less stuff, and what we had was often reused (e.g. milk bottles).  Food scraps went, not into the trash or down the sink, but into a compost pile in the back yard, where hardworking worms and bugs and microbes recycled it their own way into fertile soil.

Times changed.  Almost without being aware of it we had become a disposable society, and our piles of trash grew.  And grew.  Newspapers could be recycled—indeed, one could make good money by collecting people’s old papers and taking them to the paper plant.  But metal, glass, and the ubiquitous varieties of plastic went straight to the landfill.

Finally, cans and bottles began to be recycled, but one had to be committed to the cause to drive one’s accumulation to a place that would accept it.

Today we have two recycling bins in our garage, one for newspapers, magazines, and cardboard; the other for steel cans, aluminum cans, glass, and all forms of plastic with a recycling number.  Once a week a special truck comes right to our driveway and empties them.  At the grocery store I can easily recycle plastic bags and Styrofoam.  Other cities collect office paper.  Auto parts stores will accept used motor oil.

Recycling is no longer a money-making proposition, at least not for most individual citizens, but curbside collection has greatly improved community involvement.  We may never reach the remarkable Swiss compliance rate (81% for PETE plastic, 91% for aluminum cans, 60-80% for other forms of aluminum, 94.6% for glass bottles and containers) but it’s certainly better than it was 40 years ago.

We’ve always recycled whenever we could (and try to reuse, and use less, as well), but I’m thankful for community-based recycling, both for the convenience and for the way it encourages widespread participation.

It’s quite possible that the environment we live in is in worse shape now than 50 years ago, especially in places like China and Africa.  But here, now, it looks, tastes, and smells a lot better.  And not just because fewer people are smoking.

I remember when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, and when it was said you could develop film in the Genesee downstream from the Kodak factory.  My father worked for General Electric in Schenectady, and used to say that they returned the water to the Mohawk cleaner than it was when they took it out, which was no doubt true but should not be taken as an endorsement of the effluent.

The air in Pittsburgh was so full of smoke and particulates that when the Church of the Ascension expanded, they used black stone in order to match the soot-darkened original.

Automobile exhaust was something awful.  It’s not nice even now to walk or bike along a road full of cars, but nothing like what it was before pollution controls.

I even remember when the Freihofer bread delivery truck was horse-drawn, and you can guess what that did to the streets.  (But I loved to sit on our porch and watch it pass by!)

Environmentally, this is not a secure time to be living.   What’s more, I know that the improvements to our air and water quality are only partly because of pollution control laws.  Pittsburgh is a clean, breathable city because they no longer make steel in the home of the Steelers.  We have outsourced and off-shored our pollution as well as our jobs.

But when it comes to breathing and drinking, I’m thankful for today.

This post could also be viewed as a mere excuse for sharing my favorite Tom Lehrer song of that era.

Thinking in Pictures:  And Other Reports from My Life with Autism, by Temple Grandin (Vintage, 2006) (Expanded from the original 1995 version)

I’ve already written about Temple Grandin, the movie, which was the inspiration for getting this book from the library.  It’s well worth reading, and the only reason I’m sending back unread the two other books of hers I picked up at the same time is that I realized I must put the brakes on my reading for a while.  At the very least I need to substitute books I won’t be tempted to review. 

Thinking in Pictures would have convinced me, if Grandin’s own commentary on the DVD had not, that the movie is an accurate, if not perfect, portrayal of her life.  It’s fascinating to read about autism from the inside out, as it were, and also interesting to note her opinion that for all the advances we have made in understanding autism and Asperger’s syndrome, as a child in the 1950’s she had a few advantages over today’s children.  School classrooms were well-ordered and quiet; the noise and chaos often seen classrooms now would have been impossible for her to handle.  Parents, teachers, and other adults worked hard to instill good manners and polite behavior into children; these are difficult but essential skills for autistic children to learn, but they are sadly neglected today.  Finally, there were no video games then, which encourage solitary activity; she was forced to interact directly with other children through board games, outdoor play, and other normal, 1950’s-era activities.

Of even more interest to me is her theory that whatever causes autism spectrum disorders, it is closely linked to brilliant, creative thinking.  Too much of whatever it is deprives a person of the ability to function in this world, but a little bit makes for the kind of folks we cannot do without.  Not only are our potential Einsteins being shunted into special education classes instead of the gifted classes where they belong, but if genetic testing someday allows us to screen for risk of autism, we may never see another Bill Gates.

On the sensory sensitivities of someone with autism spectrum disorder:

Washing my hair and dressing to go to church were two things I hated as a child….  [S]hampooing actually hurt my scalp….  Scratchy petticoats were like sandpaper scraping away at raw nerve endings.

I can relate to that!

When I was a child, I was expected to sit through formal Sunday dinners and behave.  Most of the time I did.  Rudeness was not tolerated and I was taught to say please and thank you.  Normal family activities provided structured opportunities to learn social skills.  Sit-down meals and activities such as playing cards and board games like Chinese checkers taught turn-taking and patience. …Today many children lack this structure.  Video games and time on the computer are spent solo.  Many of my favorite childhood activities required participation with another child.  … Even the normal children today are growing up with more social problems.  Later on they do not know how to behave at work.

I can drive because the operation of the car, steering and braking, has become a fully automatic skill.  Research has shown that when a motor skill is first being learned, one has to consciously think about it.  When the skill becomes fully learned, the frontal cortex is no longer activated and only the motor parts of the brain are turned on.  I learned to drive on ranch roads in Arizona and I did not drive on the freeway or in heavy traffic for a full year.  This avoided the multitasking issue because when I finally started driving in traffic, my frontal cortex was able to devote all its processor space to watching traffic.  I recommend that people on the [autism] spectrum who are learning to drive spend up to a year driving on easy roads until steering, braking, and other car operations can be done without conscious thought.

That might have saved me the debilitating car-phobia I had for many years.  It took me much longer than most people to reach the “automatic” point, and until then, every second behind the wheel was torture.

In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive.  After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear.  It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire.  Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.

It is likely that genius is an abnormality.  If the genes that cause autism and other disorders such as manic-depression were eliminated, the world might be left to boring conformists with few creative ideas.

Three things that occur more frequently in people with high mathematical ability than in the population at large are left-handedness, allergies, and nearsightedness.  Both learning disability in mathematics and math talent are associated with left-handedness.  Young children who show very high ability in verbal reasoning and mathematics are twice as likely to have allergies as the rest of the population.  Students with extremely high ability are also more likely to be nearsighted. The old stereotype of a little genius with thick glasses may be true.

During my career, I have met many brilliant visual thinkers working in the maintenance departments of meat plants.  Some of these people are great designers and invent all kinds of innovative equipment, but they were disillusioned and frustrated at school.  Our educational system weeds these people out of the system instead of turning them into world-class scientists.

On her vocation in the livestock industry:

I do not believe that my profession is morally wrong.  Slaughtering is not wrong, but I do feel very strongly about treating animals humanely and with respect.  I’ve devoted my life to reforming and improving the livestock industry.  Still, it’s a sobering experience to have designed one of the world’s most efficient killing machines.  Most people don’t realize that the slaughter plant is much gentler than nature.  Animals in the wild die from starvation, predators, or exposure.  If I had a choice, I would rather go through a slaughter system than have my guts ripped out by coyotes or lions while I was still conscious.  Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death.

Temple Grandin (HBO, NR)

Why are you reading this post when you could be rushing to your nearest video store (is that phrase as passé as "dialing a phone number"?) and grabbing a copy of Temple Grandin?  It would be trite to say that this is one of the most amazing and inspiring movies I have ever seen, though it is.  It would be understatement to say that Temple Grandin is an incredibly amazing and inspiring person.

"Highly functioning autistic" doesn't begin to describe this brilliant visual thinker—and university professor—whose humane designs have revolutionized livestock handling.  My introduction to Temple Grandin was through her TED lecture, The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.  That's a good place to start, but don't miss the movie.  (As far as I can recall it is completely grandchild safe.)

Normally I don't care for the DVD special features that make you watch the entire movie again to hear the commentary; I love learning about how the movie was made, but prefer it in condensed form.  Here it's well worthwhile taking the extra time, because unlike many DVD commentaries, there's very little inanity—and most of all because one of the commentators is Temple Grandin herself.

It was a little disconcerting to note how well I understood some of her problems; enough so that I took this autism spectrum self-test I found in Wired.  The results were as I suspected:  I'm not close to the diagnostic level, but well above average.

I'm looking forward to reading some of Grandin's books, having ordered The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's, and Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals from our library.

Fruitless Fall:  The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, by Rowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury, New York, 2008)

Fruitless Fall had been my "to read" list since mid-2009 and, thanks to generous family, on our bookshelves since Christmas.  I loved Jacobsen's Chocolate Unwrapped, so why it took so long to begin this book is beyond me.  Once begun, however, I couldn't stop, and finished it the same day.  There are a few compensations for being sick and not having the energy to tackle much of anything else.

Speaking of feeling sick ... Fruitless Fall is scarier than The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food, Inc., and Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal combined.  Or perhaps the effect is cumulative.

That's not to say the book isn't a delight to read, doing for honey and beekeeping what John McPhee's Oranges did for the citrus industry many long years ago.  (I wish someone would write an update, as McPhee's book ends when frozen concentrate was king.)  The overall theme is the recent precipitous and inexplicable decline of bees and beekeepers, with many side notes (some delightful, some frightening) along the way.

Did you know that bees make great minesweepers?  They can be trained in two days, can cover vastly more territory than dogs, are as accurate as humans, and don't get themselves blown up.  This may not be the most important reason for us to worry about their health and safety, but I find it incredibly cool.

Bees, and consequently beekeepers, have faced a daunting couple of decades, especially in Europe and the Americas.  Loss of habitat, savage mites, virulent viruses, the stress of industrial agriculture, widespread pesticide and antibiotic use, and the still unexplained Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), have dealt a near-fatal blow to bees and the crops that depend on them for pollination.

It's a terrifying story, but maybe too much to take in all at once, especially when food is still plentiful on the grocery store shelves.  Here's something more immediate (and familiar) to make you think twice before buying your kids Honey Nut Cheerios.

[I]f you asked [beekeepers] to list the biggest challenges they face, development wouldn't even make the top three.  CCD wouldn't necessarily be number one, either.  That honor would go to China and its deluge of honey—real and otherwise. ... Almost 70 percent of the honey consumed in the United States is imported, with China the top source. ... And Chinese honey producers sell cheap.

That's "cheap" as in about half what it costs to produce honey in the U.S.  Lest you think that this bad news for American beekeepers is good news for American shoppers,

A powerful drug used to treat anthrax and other severe infections, chloramphenicol is banned for agricultural use in the United States, Canada, and Europe to prevent bacteria from developing resistance to it.  It also can cause deadly aplastic anemia—bone marrow failure—in people. ...  Between August 2002 and February 2003, FDA agents seized massive amounts of chloramphenicol-contaminated Chinese honey from several importers....

A February 2003 raid is particularly distressing.  Back on August 19, 2002, the FDA had informed the packer that its honey might be contaminated with antibiotics.  But the packer continued to sell the honey, including 155,000 pounds to Sara Lee, which put that honey into five hundred thousand loaves of bread that were sold to consumers before Sara Lee finally stopped using the honey ten days later.  On September 18, 2002, the FDA informed the packer that its honey was indeed contaminated with antibiotics.  Why it then took the FDA five months to seize the honey, and how much was used in the meantime, is unclear.

A tariff, and a temporary ban on Chinese honey, allowed the price to rise some, but "honey laundering"—sending Chinese honey to the U.S. through other countries—was rampant.  Then, on the strength of a Chinese promise (will we never learn?) to stop using chloramphenicol, the ban on Chinese honey was lifted.  And a loophole was found to circumvent the tariff.

[T]he honey packers, the middlemen, resolved that they would never again be caught short.  Honey ... can stay good for decades.  So now we have walls of Chinese honey in Florida and warehouse after warehouse of clover honey in the Dakotas, ensuring that whatever happens on the world market, industrial honey in the United States will remain cheap.

You may not want to eat it, however. ... In January 2006, [a leading food safety lab] analyzed a random sample of Chinese honey, taken from a Florida honey packer, and found 48 parts per billion ciprofloxacin in it.  Yes, Cipro, the last-defense, über-antibiotic used to treat the anthrax attacks in 2001.  [The top German food safety lab] has found Cipro in numerous batches of Chinese honey.  [That honey, rejected by the EU, eventually came to the U.S.] Apparently Chinese beekeepers are tossing it into their hives to deal with the raging bacterial chaos simmering in a country with rampant pollution, spotty sewage treatment, and few agricultural standards.

An estimated 70 percent of Chinese beekeepers use antibiotics.  One entrepreneur leased a nature preserve of acacia trees from the Chinese government and recruited forty-five beekeepers who agreed to make honey in the reserve without antibiotics and without metal storage containers, which can contaminate honey with iron and lead.  For his troubles, he was ambushed by fifteen other local beekeepers who didn't like the competition, beaten, and left with a concussion.

Does this next situation sound eerily familiar?  It should, because it was just such a situation with home mortgages that precipitated the recent financial crash-and-burn.

Of course, on an ingredients label for honey-mustard dressing or honey-baked ham, you have no way of knowing who made the honey.  Thanks to the international shell games, neither do the food manufacturers.

It gets worse.

[The product] may not even be honey.  Honey is expensive to produce, while corn syrup is cheaper than dirt.  Honey producers in the 1900s got rich cutting honey with corn syrup ... but methods for detecting it soon developed.  Then the adulterators got better. ... [In 1998 American honey buyers received an offer from] a company in India to supply "honey analog" by the ton.  This analog, made from corn or rice syrup, was "enzymatically processed" to resemble honey, physically and chemically.  The company assured buyers that the syrup would pass any test for natural honey....

Sometimes the fraud is chemical, as when rice syrup is doctored to resemble honey, and sometimes it's ontological.  For instance, what is honey?  If you answered something like "a syrup made entirely out of nectar by bees," then consider yourself hopelessly out of date.  Let me introduce you to "Packer's Blend," the latest offering from China.  It appeared on the market in 2006, shortly after the [tariff] loophole was closed by Congress.  Chinese honey may be subject to tariffs, but if a product is less than 50 percent honey, it isn't covered by the law.  This "funny honey," as beekeepers call it, is between 40 and 49 percent honey.  The rest is syrup:  corn syrup, but also rice syrup, lactose syrup—whatever's on hand and cheap.  The importers who bring in these blends may sell them to manufacturers as blends or as pure honey, adding some nice American or Canadian clover honey to give the blend a semblance of the real thing and get it past the manufacturers.

Packer's Blend sells for forty cents a pound and may be in more foods than any of us realize.  You won't see "Packer's Blend" on an ingredients label.  You may see "rice syrup" and "honey," listed separately, or you may just see "honey."  Do food manufacturers understand what they're getting when they buy Packer's Blend?  Are they being told it's honey?  Do they know they're using Chinese honey that may be contaminated?

We can't say for sure.  But what we can say is that American beekeepers can't compete.

The price for industrial-grade honey remains depressed, and one reason ... is that honey laundering is out of control.  Millions of pounds of illegal Chinese honey continue to enter the United States.  The honey is first shipped to the Philippines, Thailand, Russia, India, Australia, and other countries, where papers are forged falsifying the country of origin.  Then the honey is shipped to the United States.  Some of the smugglers know it is contaminated with outlawed antibiotics.  "There is definitely this problem," one Chinese shipper wrote to his U.S. importers.  "I'm worried whether the FDA or USDA may get involved.  Our future shipments will definitely have this fluoroquinolones, and it may take a couple of years to improve."  The honey was sold to major U.S. food companies.  So far, the USDA has made a few arrests, but not enough to staunch the flow of illegal honey.

Nor is our own government squeaky-clean:

[Florida's state apiarist decided]   to quarantine any Australian colonies coming into Florida until he got a cycle of brood out of them, just to be safe.  He was told that if he did that he'd be sued by the government for disrupting international trade.  Somebody really wanted those bees here.

I can't end on such a depressing note.  Much as Polyface Farms is the bright jewel of hope in The Omnivore's Dilemma, Kirk Webster's apiary in the Champlain Valley of Vermont is the sun and air of this otherwise dark story.  As Joel Salatin's Christian faith infuses his farming practices, so Webster's Buddhism led him to conform his practices to nature, rather than the other way around.

[Webster writing] "In my own search for a healthy beekeeping future, I have found the World of Nature herself, the old beekeeping books and journals, and the original accounts of the pioneers of modern organic farming to be far more helpful and inspiring than most of what has been published, talked about and done by the beekeeping community during the last 8 or 10 years.  Here were people who worked hard to solve their own problems in a creative way, often with very few resources.  They looked deeply into the world of Nature searching for examples of balance and stability, and always gave their crops and livestock the last word."

[Sir Albert Howard, father of the modern organic movement, believed] successful farming and food production—healthy plants, animals, and people—required balance.  Any agricultural enterprise must achieve a state of equilibrium that mimics nature if it is to survive and prosper. ... When an imbalance took hold, Howard believed, nature let you know.  The heralds of this imbalance were often pests and disease, which could get a foothold only if something was out of whack in the system.  In this way, pests and disease are not the enemies of the farmer; they are actually allies, helping to illuminate weaknesses in the system before irrevocable damage—exhausted soil, genetically weak crops or animals—is introduced.

In 1998 [Webster] decided to stop fighting the mites and instead see what he could learn from them.  By his own admission, he might not have done it if an easier solution had presented itself. ... "I decided this whole thing was a freight train heading for a wreck, and that I was going to go through the wreck early.  And hopefully recover early."

Recover he did.  The years of letting nature take its course and in the process breeding more robust bees were years of poverty, and even now, with a healthy, prospering, sustainable apiary of mite-resistant bees, he's not going to get rich.  Fortunately, he doesn't want to.

For decades ... honey bees have been selected for traits that had little to do with resilience.  Maximum honey production tops the charts, with maximum bee production closely linked to that.  Gentleness is essential.  Qualities that contribute to self-reliance—resistance to pests and disease, overwintering ability, frugality—are less valued because it's more efficient to rely on petrochemicals to solve such problems.  Who needs bees that can overwinter when it's cheap to truck them down to Florida for the cold months?  Who needs to worry about self-reliant bees when it's more cost-effective to buy new [bees] from Southern breeders or Australia in the early spring?  Why find forage for bees when high-fructose corn syrup is cheap and plentiful?  Why spend years breeding mite- and disease-resistant bees when the chemical conglomerates have all these miticides, fungicides, and antibiotics available right now?

You can manipulate a natural system into doing things it wasn't designed for, but you're always running the risk of collapse.

[Webster again] "Beekeeping now has the dubious honor of becoming the first part of our system of industrial agriculture to actually fall apart.  Let's stop pretending that something else is going on.  We no longer have enough bees to pollinate our crops.  Each time the bees go through a downturn, we respond by making things more stressful for them, rather than less—we move them around more often, expose them to still more toxic substances, or fill the equipment up again with more untested and poorly adapted stock.  We blame the weather, the mites, the markets, new diseases, consumers, the Chinese, the Germans, the (fill in your favorite scapegoat), other beekeepers, the packers, the scientific community, the price of gas, global warming—anything rather than face up to what's happening.  We are losing the ability to take care of living things.  Why?"

Did I say that the decline of bees was the overall theme of Fruitless Fall?  Perhaps it is.  But there's a supertext also:  We need to stop working against our environment and start working with it; to observe carefully and take heed to the ways of the natural world, rather than assuming we always know best and can run roughshod over it with impunity; and to recognize that Creation is not a commodity, but a community.  Joel Salatin would call this "honoring the bee-ness of the bee."

Micro Mobility Systems makes classy scooters, and look what I discovered when I ventured onto their website from a FRK article:

I like to take the bus to the airport, but the mile and a half walk to the bus stop is hard on luggage wheels.  They're not designed to take long distances on concrete.  But this is!  It's a scooter, zipping one to the bus stop and then folding to cabin-baggage size.

On second thought, it wouldn't really solve my problem, as cabin-baggage isn't that hard to haul to the bus; my real problem comes whenever I have to bring a bag big enough to check—the weight is much greater and the wheels no better.   With Lufthansa having an 18-pound carry-on weight limit, the scooter part probably adds an unreasonable amount of overhead, anyway.  But it's still a cool idea.

Micro Mobility's scooters in general look pretty classy.  They might make a nice addition to bicycles and trams in the Swiss commuting arsenal.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal:  War Stories from the Local Food Front. by Joel Salatin (Polyface Inc., Swoope, Virginia, 2007)

Until now, I've written more about Joel Salatin than I've read by him:  almost a year ago in Strange Bedfellows?  Not Really, and three months later in my review of The Omnivore's Dilemma.  Wanting to correct that sin of omission, I grabbed the only one of his books available in our local library:  Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.

On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system.  And it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical and free societies.  How a culture deals with its misfits reveals its strength.  The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe.  The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.  When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol. — Joel Salatin

Salatin wants to opt out of a little more of the system than I do, but I hear his cry.  You could call him bitter, but if you consider the miracle that is Polyface Farms, you have to wonder why our government is working so hard to stamp out such elegant, inexpensive, healthy, delicious, and truly "green" (in a conservationist sense) endeavors.

There's another whole blog post in the answer to that—involving sustainable agriculture, home education, midwives, family businesses, free-range kids, raw milk, and even the Duggar family—so for now I'll move on to the quotation section of this review. Otherwise I'll never get it back to the library tomorrow today, when it's due.

The quotes are selected from collection of pink sticky notes bristling from pages all over the book, as I marked passages I found especially interesting.  Unfortunately, they're rather random, and generally miss the most important thrust of the book, which is that

• Both governmental regulations and societal expectations (i.e. the belief that governmental regulations guarantee safe food) have devasted small, local, sustainable agriculture, because they greatly favor large corporations and factory farming.
• Governmental regulations and inspections do not, in fact, promote a healthier food supply, because the big guys (from Archer-Daniels-Midland to Wal-Mart) can afford high-powered attorneys and lobbyists, and because too many bureaucrats are more concerned with healthy paperwork than with healthy food.  (When you read about what the bureaucrats and  big companies did to the very word "Organic," you will no longer be so happy in that section of your grocery store.)
• Small, local, sustainable agriculture is our best hope for producing safe (from salmonella to bioterrorism threats), healthy food.  And taste!  Don't forget about taste!

When it comes to trying to protect our food system, both from internal carelessness and external attack,

[T]he things we're moving heaven and hell to stop are not the things we need to be concerned about.  The stuff that we turn a blind eye to and don't even care about is the bigger problem.  We really do worry about the wrong things.  And we devote precious resources inspecting, measuring, and vilifying the antidote to the wrong things.

Did you really think food regulations were all about ... food safety?

I spoke with an attorney who represents one of the largest food businesses in the world.  He came to the farm for a visit, a delightful gentleman. ... He said he would put it to me straight, "People don't trust the large corporations.  If you're a large corporation, you need that trust to survive.  How do you get that trust?  You create a system that makes it look like you care.  People want to see you doing something that protects them. ... But, and here's the other part of the equation, if you're the chief executive of a large business, you don't want to pay for it.  Instead, you wine and dine politicians to convince them that they will curry favor with their constituents if they demand this program.  Now you have people's faith without having to pay for it."

 And what did you think an ambassador's job was supposed to be?

Allan Nation, editor of Stockman Grass Farmer magazine ... took a group of American grass farmers to Argentina to tour the world's best grass-based farms and ranches.  When the American ambassador found out a group of American farmers and ranchers was in town, he invited them over to the Embassy for refreshments.

"What are you all doing in Argentina?"  he asked.

"We're here to study grass-based agriculture and see firsthand how to finish beef on grass instead of in feedlots," replied Nation.

At that point, Nation said the ambassador nearly kicked them out of the embassy, proclaiming, "Don't you understand why I am here?  I am here to make Argentina quit grass-finishing beef and begin using corn in a feedlot."  There's the good o' USA, friend of environmental agriculture, respecter of other cultures.  Yessireee.

Salatin may be strident at times, but he's not a conspiracy theorist.

At the risk of sounding completely naïve, I will say flat out that I do not sense a conspiracy behind this effort.  Like so many other government plans, this is another well-intentioned idea with incredibly terrible consequences.  I happen to believe that when the food police say raw milk will kill you, they actually believe it.  When they say my outdoor chickens are dangerous to the Tyson houses, they sincerely believe it.  When they say consumers are too stupid to make food choices, they actually believe it.  I think people sincerely believe a lot of stupid things.  This is just stupidity, not conspiracy.  It's a fraternity of stupidity, to be sure, but we need not label it a conspiracy.

I've never worried much about eggs and salmonella—always let the kids lick the cake bowl and eat raw cookie dough, if they beat me to it.  But I'm less worried about the eggs I scooped from under the hen myself at a local farm than about the free box of factory-farmed eggs I picked up at Target.  The recent salmonella outbreak, due to tainted eggs from large, federally regulated egg farms, makes even more significant the following story of Salatin's encounter with a health department representative who had accused his unwashed eggs of carrying salmonella:

Although she admitted that the regulations did not require washing, she simply sniffed and said, "An unwashed egg is inedible."  Then I told her we did in fact culture the eggs, including the manure, and they were clean.  It was like talking to a fence post:  "An unwashed egg is inedible."  End of discussion.

I hung up and immediately the phone rang, even before I could take my hand off the receiver.  I answered and it was Allan Nation. ...  He and his wife, Carolyn, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Europe, with a heavy emphasis on range poultry in France.  Without any prompting from me, he started the conversation with, "Hey, guess what?  In France, you can't sell a washed egg.  If it has to be washed, it must go into a pasteurized product in liquid form.  Only unwashed eggs are legal to sell as shell eggs."

More about eggs in Europe:

I was showing my eggs to a chef once and he wanted to buy them right away.  To be perfectly transparent, I warned him that in the winter they wouldn't be as deeply orange as they are in the green grass season. ... He immediately cut in.  "Oh, that's no problem.  In chef's school in Switzerland we had recipes for March eggs, recipes for June eggs, and other recipes for October eggs in order to accentuate the nuances of that particular season's eggs."

Of animals, people, and politics.  One reason I like Salatin is his rejection of the political boundary lines that are hardening like arteries in our society and constricting the healthy flow of ideas:  Republicans and Democrats are both helpful—and hurtful—to his cause.  His views land him squarely on both the Left and the Right.

When the only interaction between people and animals is in a pet situation, it jaundices the historical and natural relationship between the two. 

Amazingly, the [animal rights activists who object to] abortions in the third-trimester of a bovine pregnancy tend to support that action in humans. ...

... It's as inconsistent as the pro-lifers eating disrespected, factory farmed meat out of Costco ... The people who should be most concerned about respecting and honoring animals are the members of the religious right.  Instead these folks defend the right to abuse animals, to disrespect their chickeness and pigness.  And they even applaud their own ability to find the cheapest food.  I wonder if they think the best church comes from hiring the cheapest pastor.

What good is the freedom to worship, the right to keep and bear arms, and the freedom of the press if we don't have the freedom to choose what to feed our bodies so we can go sing, shoot, and speak?  The only reason the founding fathers did not grant the freedom to choose our food was because it was such a basic, fundamental personal right that they could not conceive that special protection would be needed.  Granting citizens the right to choose their food would have been similar to granting them the right to see the sun rise, or to breathe.

We believe that our pluralistic society is stronger for allowing home schooling and private schooling alongside public schooling.  Our culture is stronger by letting people buy different kinds of cars or none at all; have health insurance or none at all; build a house or none at all.  The freedom to opt out of the mainstream paradigm is the cornerstone that preserves the minority view, differentiating between top-down societies and bottom-up societies.  Our opponents favor coercing consumers to buy only government-approved food, thereby denying opt-out freedoms.

[Modern society thinks] we can save things from the top down ... but ... the only safety comes in our communities, our homes, our families, from the bottom up. And these institutions must be free to experiment, to innovate.  I confess that I do not hold optimism for our culture as a whole.  Indeed, we are destroying agrarianism and seeing the same political graft and moral debauchery that brought the Roman culture to ruins.  I am, however, optimistic about the power of one.  The strength of you and me and others, touching our spheres of influence, taking individual responsibility.

And finally, this is a minor side story, but I love it:

I have a friend who at 13 decided he wanted to cut firewood for a living.  His family had an old 1965 International loadstar dump truck with a two-speed rear axle.  A little big for his age, he began cutting firewood—yes, with a chain saw.  He could drive that truck as well as any adult, and delivered a load to a customer in Waynesboro about 15 miles away.

A neighbor saw the load being dumped and walked over to ask for one himself.  The boy said he'd be there the following Saturday with the load.  He cut the wood after school and in a week had another dump truck load.  He arrived at the man's house on schedule.  The customer was dubious about the boy's ability to back the truck around a crooked driveway, swing set, picnic area, and dump it onto a concrete pad in the corner of the back yard.

The boy assured the customer that it was no problem and proceeded to back the truck expertly right up to the pad.  He dumped the load and pulled out.  What I didn't tell you was that this man happened to be a city policeman, and this week happened to be in uniform because he was getting ready to go to work.  When he got ready to pay the boy, he asked him:  "Son, how old are you?"

My friend, who confesses that his heart skipped a beat when he pulled in and realized he was delivering wood to a policeman's house, just looked down from the cab and confidently but with a mischievous grin responded, "How old do you want me to be?"

Taken aback, the policeman asked him, "Do you have a license?"

To which the 13-year-old replied, "I have a couple, but I'm not sure I have the one you're interested in."

Completely enthralled by the whimsical youngster, the policeman said, "Listen son, I'll follow you to the edge of the city limits.  And please, please don't drive that truck back into this city."

Two weeks later, the boy had another load to deliver to Waynesboro.  As luck would have it, when he entered the city, there on routine traffic patrol was his firewood customer friend.  They locked eyes, and the policeman just shook his head, took off his hat, and covered his eyes.  Now there is a true public servant.  That boy could drive that truck as expertly as any adult.  Ho could anyone deny this self-motivated, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed boy his firewood business?  To be honest with you, I wouldn't let my 13-year-old do this.  And it probably wasn't the wisest thing to do.

But for crying out loud, must we criminalize everything we don't think is wise?

Maybe this post should be "readjustments," since I'm now home and experiencing reverse culture shock, but it's still worth talking about transportation.

Basel is a city, albeit one of the nicest cities I know.  It's the third largest in Switzerland, a little smaller in population than Providence, Rhode Island or Tallahassee, Florida, but a lot more dense.  I'm not fond of cities, in general, but if you wanted to design a situation that is perfect for public transit, walking, and biking, you could hardly do better—and Basel made a conscious choice, back in the 1970's, to encourage those modes of transport.

Trams and buses   The best I've ever experienced.  Clean, quiet, frequent, dependable, on time.  You can count on the schedule—for a tram to be late by three minutes is shocking—and at most times, if you miss a tram, there's another coming in just a few minutes.  I love their innovative approach to ticketing, too.  You must have a ticket—which you can buy and punch at the tram stop if you don't have a pass—but don't expect someone to collect it.  You simply hop on the tram or bus, ride it to your destination, and hop off.  (I only wish you could by your ticket on the tram.  It's frustrating to miss your ride because you're still fighting with the ticket machine.)

Do some people ride without buying a ticket?  Sure.  But the penalty, if you're caught, is stiff enough to encourage good behavior.  Rarely—but you never know when—the tram police (in plain clothes, so you get no warning) block all the exits and ask to see everyone's tickets.  If you don't have one, the fine is 80 francs (about $80), and it goes to 100 francs if you don't pay right then and there.  The system works because it is consistently enforced—and not sabotaged by lawsuits, which is what I suspect would happen in this country.

Biking  Trams are great, especially in inclement weather or if you're carrying bulky packages, but they're not as fast as biking from A to B.  Bikers are everywhere, and are accommodated with ramps like the one to the left, and plenty of parking places.  This is one reason backpacks are so popular.  One of my favorite memories is of a nattily-attired man biking along in a business suit, with proper tie—and bright orange backpack.  In the U.S., bikes and backpacks for anything other than recreational purposes are too often associated with children—or losers who have had their drivers licenses revoked.  Switzerland wins this one big time in my book.

(That said, the only way businessmen could reasonably bike to work here in Florida would be if their place of employment provided showers—and in that case, they wouldn't be wearing their suits.)

Bikers are second only to trams and pedestrians when it comes to right-of-way on the road, and drivers are much more aware of their presence than in America.  Still, I wish more of them would wear helmets.  (Kudos to our son-in-law for setting a good example.)

Walking  I walked nearly everywhere I wanted to go in Basel during my visit:  to the grocery store(s), the post office, the train station, the organic farm delivery stop, school, church, the park, and a lot more.  I thought I was getting a lot of exercise tramping all over the city, but a few calculations showed the shocking truth.  Walking distances from home to:

• the corner store:  about 350 feet
• the tram stop:  0.2 miles
• the train station:  0.3 miles
• the big grocery store:  0.5 miles
• the Basel Hilton:  0.5 miles
• Barfüsserplatz: 1.0 miles
• Marktplatz: 1.1 miles
• church: 1.5 miles
• all the way across the Rhine to Claraplatz:  1.7 miles

By contrast, back in Florida, it takes 0.8 miles just to get out of our neighborhood, which is nothing fancy at all, I would say a pretty average middle class neighborhood with comparatively small lots.  We also live in a city, though a small one—the population is a quarter that of Basel.  Walking distances from our house to:

• the bike trail:  0.8 miles
• the playground:  0.8 miles
• Best Buy:  1.3 miles
• the bus stop:  1.4 miles
• the post office:  1.5 miles
• the park:  1.6 miles
• the grocery story:  1.6 miles
• Office Max:  1.7 miles
• the mall:  2.7 miles
• the library:  5.5 miles

Claraplatz seems far away from Janet's home, because it's clear on the other side of the city.  Office Max I consider very close, "just down the street."  Yet they are the same distance.  Blows my mind.  The effect is probably because I go by Office Max more often by car than on foot.

What really makes walking nice in Basel is the traffic lights.  First of all, if there is no light, a pedestrian in any crosswalk has the right of way over anything except a tram.  (That doesn't mean it isn't sometimes necessary to stare down the approaching cars, and it's always important to look before stepping into the intersection, as non-resident drivers do not always know they are expected to stop if they see you at the curb.)  If there is a light, the pedestrian must stop, but the great thing is that the wait is always short.  The cycles are designed to keep pedestrian traffic flowing, unlike the walk lights here, at which a five-minute wait is not unheard of.

Car sharing  By car is not the nicest way to get around Basel—parking is a big problem, for one thing—but there are times when you need one.  For this you can take advantage of a car sharing system, sort of like a short-term rental.  It works quite well, at least if you don't mind driving a stick.

I'd love to import Basel's transit system here, but—as I keep telling European friends who think the only reason the U.S. doesn't have such a system is that we're all a bunch of lazy SUV-lovers—it's not that simple.  What I think could and should be imported is the farsightedness and strength of will that made Basel decide, some 35 years ago, to turn away from the more cars / more and bigger roads transit model, and commit to a cleaner and friendlier path.

With all the fuss lately about illness caused by salmonella in eggs from factory farms with highly dubious practices, it was especially delightful to take a trip—farther than the grocery store, but closer than our church—to Lake Meadow Naturals farm.  They have a pick-your-own program on Saturday mornings, and we did just that, reaching under the hens to retrieve a dozen warm-from-the-hen eggs, at a price of $3.50.

Unlike many of that designation, these hens really are free-range:  they were ranging all over the yard when we arrived, along with several other types of fowl, including guinea hens, which are the pest control service, being voracious eaters of ticks and other nasty bugs.

I really liked the look of the place, and the friendliness, and hope to return many times for wonderful, fresh eggs.  I'm a little disappointed that the yolks are not the deep orange color of the eggs Heather gets from her farming friends, and of the eggs we ate at the bed and breakfast in the Ticino part of Switzerland.  But there's no doubt these chickens are healthy, free-range, and lovingly cared for, so I'll be happy with that.  Maybe when their less-common breeds are laying I'll notice more of a difference.

We also bought two duck eggs, which were good, but not sufficiently discernable from chicken eggs to encourage a wholesale switch, since we paid $1 each for them.  Maybe next time we'll try the guinea hen eggs.  :)

I like the trash collection system here in Basel:  You buy special blue garbage bags, each 35 liters in size (about 9 gallons), which is considerably smaller than an American "large kitchen trash bag."  They are, however, much tougher, and can be well-stuffed without ripping.  You pack your trash as efficiently as possible into as many bags as you need, and put them out in the street at the appropriate time for collection.

That's it.  The cost of trash collection is included in the cost of the bags, and thus you pay proportionately for the amount of trash you produce.  There is significant incentive to minimize your waste, yet the capacity to dispose of more is there if you need it.  Ideally, you would pay by weight rather than volume, but the system is so easy, it is a worthwhile compromise.  I think of a friend's complaint that she can't help feeling annoyed at seeing her neighbor's routine weekly pile of 10 or more large bags as she makes her own family's one-small-bag contribution to the landfill collection; she would welcome such a system in her town.  As would I.

Recycling is different here, too, though I haven't decided if it's better or worse.  Plastics and metals must be taken to a recycling station instead of being picked up at the curb as I'm accustomed to, but such stations are only an easy walk away.  Only one type of plastic is recycled ("PET," known in the U.S. as PETE or #1); our county recycles any type of plastic as long as it has a number code.  On the other hand, paper is picked up at the curb, and they recycle all sorts of paper, including office paper, which our county excludes.  Not worse, not better, just different—and not any more different than the variability from community to community in the U.S., as we discovered in moving among New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Florida.