We All Have Our Worries

Storm gathers

When I learned last Monday that the Tucson Festival of Books had been cancelled, following the pull-out of a hundred rationally (at this time) flight-phobic authors who were to have been featured guests, I was disappointed. The Artist was relieved. He was worried about my presence in those big crowds, even though the book fair is an outdoor event. That was Monday. On Friday I got word that my part-time job as a volunteer reading tutor at Willcox Elementary School had also been suspended. School is on spring break this week, but even if the students go back next week we tutors won’t be there, and I’ll miss the little kids, but given the age of our tutor pool and added vulnerabilities of some of us, I have to admit that precautions are only sensible.

Note that I don’t ask if my readers have kept abreast of developments in the coronavirus story, since there is little else on the news these days as the number of reported cases and the number of countries with cases continues to rise. Events cancelled, schools closed or closing, everyone avoiding crowds, until it becomes difficult to imagine anyone, sick or not, who will remain unaffected financially. Not everyone — not even all office workers — can work from home. Many will not be needed if their places of employment are closed. Retail and restaurant employees, bus and cab and Uber drivers, actors and musicians (Broadway dark!), and domestic service workers. For many people, not working means no income.

Suddenly we have a whole new vocabulary, and self-quarantine is a star in that list, with Americans admonished not to panic, not to hoard, but to make sure they have enough food and other supplies on hand to get through two weeks of isolation, if need be. Paper products, hand sanitizer, and soap are vanishing from store shelves.

But why do I write these things that everyone who’s not in a coma has heard hundreds of times a day by now? Young or old, working or not, there is no one in the world without a corona virus-related worry list. Will it bring us together in resolve and commonsense, or will it fuel fear of the Other? I wonder.  

Although I’m more than one decade (never mind how many) older than I can quite believe, it did not occur to me immediately that I was part of a “vulnerable” group, simply by virtue of my age. Then there is what one doctor diagnosed as “cold asthma,” an affliction that had become terrible during Michigan winters but something I am able to forget (and then gratefully realize I have been forgetting) out here in the Arizona sun. Besides that, the younger and stronger, even if I were among that group, are in danger themselves — the danger of transmitting the virus to older and weaker friends, relatives, and strangers.

Darkness moves in

Even when neighbors gather, there are no “large crowds” in a ghost town, but people here still have their worries. Surgeries postponed, ongoing cancer treatments, auto-immune issues, necessary travel, falling stock values, lost earned income. No one is untouched.

For myself, I admit the worries were slow in coming, but they have arrived now. Will we be able to leave the ghost town on our scheduled departure date and reach Michigan again safely? What will virus statistics look like a month and a half from now? Will I be able to re-open my bookstore on schedule? Proceed with my Thursday Evening Author events? Will I have any customers — any income — at all? In time, of course, the crisis will pass, but how much time? Every independent bookstore exists on a narrow margin, hanging on, when possible at all, by its metaphorical fingernails through seasons and years of financial drought, and an artist’s earnings are similarly uncertain.

One ray of hope comes more as optimistic speculation than confident prediction, and that’s the idea that as spring proceeds and warmer weather arrives, the virus will die down. In childhood, when I begged my mother for something I desperately wanted (say, a kitten or a puppy), the parental reply I most dreaded was “We’ll see.” There was cause for joy in “Yes,” and “No” could be argued against, but the dreaded “We’ll see” left me hanging in limbo, especially when my mother added, as she usually did, “Keep pestering me about it, and the answer will be no!” Hope with no certainty: that was the torment of “We’ll see.” But “We’ll see,” I’ve learned as an adult, is the human condition.

Should worst come to worst in the high desert, should the Artist and I be compelled to remain within the confines of our rented cabin walls and the immediate outdoors surrounding, we will be able to stretch our food supply to the requisite two weeks. Maybe, however, ordering another delivery of propane would be prudent. One thing is certain: we have enough reading material to last out a quarantine period. We’ll never exhaust books-not-yet-read, and if we did, we are both happy re-readers of our favorites. 

The other night, in fact, for some reason I pulled from the shelf Barbara Kingsolver’s book of essays entitled High Tide in Tucson, and re-reading those essays last night and this morning has been sheer delight. May I say, very good medicine -- something we all need right now. 

What a stroke of luck. What a singular brute feat of outrageous fortune: to be born to citizenship in the Animal Kingdom. 

Indeed. For all the slings and arrows life aims at us, who would be anything else than living and choose anywhere in the Universe to live other than on this brown, green, tan, black, red, yellow, blue, and beautiful earth? The worries of the present historical moment, however, are very real. If you have friends or family members working in health care in areas that the virus has reached, you know it's worse than what we hear on the news. So please, be very careful out there, friends. I won't tell you what measures you take. You already know.

Where Do You Get Your News – and What News Do You Get?

Always informative, always relevant

Today's post isn’t about books, but it is about reading, and some of what you’ll read here, if you are persistent enough and read far enough, may surprise you, but if you’d rather just have pictures, see Wednesday’s world of glittering frost over on my photo blog.

“Where do I get my news?”

That’s the question on my mind this week, as I’ve been reflecting on sources I trust to tell me what’s going on in the world. What about you? Are you a newspaper reader, radio listener, TV watcher, Internet viewer, or some combination of different sources in different percentages?

My obvious #1 source in terms of exposure time is National Public Radio. We have it on every morning and every evening at home, and I’d listen at my bookstore if I got a good signal there. “What would we do without NPR?” is a rhetorical question often voiced in our house. Interlochen is our nearest station, with CMU in second place. “All Things Considered” is always interesting, and we value Diane Rehm and Terri Gross for range of topics and depth of coverage in politics, environment, and the arts. Aaron Stander’s local “Michigan Writers” program is also excellent. What would we do without any of these?

We haven’t had television in our home for years now, and the only newspaper I read on a regular basis is our county weekly, but every now and then I splurge on a New York Times or Detroit Free Press or, more often, a Traverse City Record-Eagle.

(I’m hardly what anyone would call a news junkie, but I was shocked to hear that one local man admitted he was unfamiliar with a name that’s been in our local newspaper, week after week, for quite a few years. Do we live in the same planet?)

*  *  *

I come back a day later to make amends for an omission in my original post by inserting this important paragraph. When it comes to news of publishing and bookselling, my trusted daily source is Shelf Awareness, delivering national and international stories from the book world, as well as regional bookstore news that would not reach me otherwise. I cannot say enough good things about Shelf Awareness and recommend it to all who care about the future of independent writers, publishers, and bookstores.

*  *  *

As I reflected further on “where I get my news,” however, I realized that the issues most important to me – and those I feel are most urgent to the future of the world – are only rarely addressed by dailies or weeklies, and seldom are they examined in much detail or depth. I’d love to hear more about them on the radio, but the usual silence there, other than occasional, topic-limited “stories,” is deafening, too. I want more than an occasional “story” about global finance, international trade agreements, genetically modified organisms, farm and food regulation, food and farm safety, farmland ownership and subsidies, hydraulic fracturing, and natural resources in general. What I want is ongoing, nonstop coverage. 

Where do I get it? Mainly from two sources: “Nation of Change” and a magazine called AcresUSA, “The Voice of Eco-Agriculture.” 

The Acres folks have been around since 1970, and the history of the magazine is worth reading about. (How did I miss it back in the 1970s when gardening and rural life informed all my dreams?) These days there are plenty of new rural periodicals, but far too many of them are superficial and “cute,” their content -- intended mostly for hobbyists --  driven by (as is common on the newsstand) by corporate advertising of the worst kind. Acres is different. Every month’s “Eco-Update” and “Industrial Ag Watch” cover the latest, most important studies and legislation affecting not only organic growers but every single American. The magazine’s editorial and opinion pieces are knowledgeable and hard-hitting, their features long on specifics and experience, and the interviews are with experts whose voices deserve a national hearing.

We all eat. We all need to know where our food comes from. Agriculture news shouldn’t be just for farmers.

A 2012 Stanford University meta-study (study of results of other studies) that got a lot of attention in the national media purported to show no nutritional difference between organic and nonorganic food. Imagine two apples analyzed in a laboratory and found to be “nutritionally” equivalent. How much did the study really show?

It did not ask these questions:

Ø  What toxins are present in various nonorganic products that are not present in organic products?

Ø  Which toxins from nonorganic products may remain and accumulate in the human body?

Ø  Of nutrients found in organic and nonorganic products, what are the differences in the body’s ability to access and utilize these nutrients?

Ø  What long-term dangers to health result from toxin accumulation?

Ø  What long-term effects on food prices result from escalating immunity to agricultural chemicals?

Ø  What long-term effects on health care costs will result from continued and escalating reliance on agricultural chemicals?

Ø  What is the truth of studies purporting to show safety of GMO crops? (Find someone who's studied the question seriously here. I learned about her work through an Acres interview.)

Etc.

Sigh! Journalists sometimes make me think of lemmings. One particular story of the day or week, one temporary world “hot spot,” and there they run, en masse; meanwhile, ongoing economic, environmental, and political events continue to unroll, unreported, throughout the world. During the Clinton presidency, for example, reporters and news junkies did a lot of jumping up and down and worrying and shouting and rib-jabbing about President Clinton’s marital indiscretions. I couldn’t care less, then or now. It was NAFTA that took away any enchantment I had with Clinton. And here’s what the current Acres Opinion of Judith McGeary has to say this month about NAFTA:

...Instead of the hundreds of thousands of new American jobs that were promised, a recent report estimates that the United States lost over 1 million jobs. Our trade partners have suffered just as badly. Mexican farmers, in particular, have been some of the greatest losers under NAFTA as subsidized corn from the United States undercut local production and drove Mexican farmers off their land. The “free trade” approach has not simply shifted wealth from American workers to foreign workers – it has shifted wealth from workers of all the countries involved to the large corporations.

Is that news to you? And what about the latest “free trade” agreement, now being negotiated, is the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama Administration initiative begun under George W. Bush? While NAFTA was ramrodded through Congress under Clinton’s guidance, the substance of TPP is being kept ultra-confidential. Over 600 corporate “trade advisors” are in the know, but the few members of Congress who have seen the text have been sworn to secrecy. Why, if this agreement would be beneficial to our country, are American taxpayers and voters being kept in the dark? That’s what Elizabeth Warren asked, and her question deserves an answer. McGeary warns that a bill to “fast track” TPP and other trade agreements “would empower the Administration to negotiate ... without input from Congress,” which she calls “an abdication of Congress’ constitutional duty to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”

AcresUSA is where I get my most important news.

Along with articles on poultry-raising and bee-friendly farming, the March 2014 issue of Acres features a lengthy, in-depth interview with Margaret Mellon, senior scientist with the Food and Agriculture Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an authority on biotechnology and on environmental law. Mellon was interviewed on the subject of herbicide-resistant weeds. “Roundup Ready” corn and soybeans and cotton, she said, were embraced by farmers who were promised they could lower inputs (costs) by applying only a low dose of a single herbicide, but here’s what happened:

At the beginning the company claimed this was lowering herbicide use while increasing farmer incomes, and they were right. As time goes on, though, the weeds started developing resistance, as they will. ... [Now Roundup Ready seeds are] driving big increases in herbicide use and some people think that in four or five years we’re going to have double the herbicide use that we have right now, and it will be because the glyphosate isn’t working....

Farmers become dependent, and weeds become immune. After an initial drop, costs – and therefore prices – rise. One might draw a parallel in human health and disease, with the enormous increase of antiobiotic prescribing and antibacterial cleaning products and the subsequent increase in deadly resistant bacteria.

But there is more than a parallel between problems confronting farms and hospitals, and there is important news to be found in what at first glance look like mere foodie-health-and-cosmetic sources. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, has made antibiotics resistance a top agency priority for 2014, says an article in this month’s Prevention magazine, where I read the story told in numbers.

Every year 2 million people in the United States get infections that are resistant to antibiotics, and at least 23,000 people die as a result. Dozens of new, virulent bacteria have emerged over the years, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which causes more than 11,000 deaths in the United States each year, and resistant strains of E. coli that can turn a run-of-the-mill urinary tract infection into a trip to the emergency room.

Antibiotics, remember, are given to livestock (in heavy doses) as well as to humans, and on-farm use does as much to encourage resistant strains as overprescription by family doctors. According to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council,

The FDA buried research revealing that 18 types of antibiotics currently in use on farms are considered high risk for increasing antibiotic-resistant bacteria outbreaks in humans. In total, 30 drugs did not meet the FDA’s own safety standards. (Prevention, March 2014, “Special Food Report: Cleaning Up the Farm”)

Health magazines can be important sources for all kinds of important global news stories. I would not have thought to look up the CDC home page if not for the story in Prevention magazine. When one news source leads us to others, our available information is multiplied.

Then the other day David brought home a couple copies of Rolling Stone, where we were both astonished to find important, in-depth features on the banking industry (February 27, 2014, “The Vampire Squid Strikes Again,” by Matt Taibbi) and, in another issue, American energy capture and use, as distinguished from official green “talk” (January 2, 2014, “Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story,” by Bill McKibben). Did you have any idea that investment banks are now buying up entire industries, as well as the natural mineral resources needed to sustain them? Do you believe our country is moving away from dependence on oil and gas? Rolling Stone is a lot more than a rock-n-roll rag.

If I had my way, major U.S. newspapers would carry daily features like “Eco-Update” and “Industrial Ag Watch,” and radio news would cover every day whatever could be uncovered relative to the shenanigans of politicians in bed with corporations and the ramifications of that nonstop fornication for the immediate and long-term future of American farms, food supply, fuel prices, land ownership, workers’ wages, and the health of soil and air and water. But doing so necessitates news sources going up against the biggest money in the corporate world.

Many issues affect the lives of residents of Planet Earth, but agricultural and economic issues affect us all, and if we’re not informed about what’s going on relative to those issues, we have no chance to determine our own future.

What news sources do you trust to tell you what you really need to know?

It's still very cold, but the sun is shining, and we're here now, we're here now, we're here now....