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Archive for the ‘planetary health’ Category
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Now there are going to be millions who refuse to believe that there were any intentions other than the public’s best interest behind the World Health Organization’s calling the H1N1 (swine) flu a PANDEMIC. Americans don’t like being deceived, lied to, and put in danger, so we scream, ”Say it isn’t so.”
German epidemiologist and chair of the health committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg has watched closely the evolution of the H1N1 virus since its “introduction” last March. The motion on the EU’s agenda for an urgent degate on “Faked Pandemics–a Threat to Health” was signed by 14 members from ten countries represented on the Health Committee.
Redefining “Pandemic”
The Europeans are angry that governments have spent scarce resources on a contrived pandemic, accusing makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the WHO’s decision to declare a pandemic. There are two kickers here–before the safety and effectiveness of vaccines are even considered.
First, governments have contracts in place with pharmaceutical companies to produce vaccines should any government agency claim”pandemic”. In the U.S. these contracts also shield the drug companies from liability should the vaccines cause harm (the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program). And due to the urgent nature, they’re rarely tested adequately and often do have dire consequences.
Second–the clincher–is that the WHO changed its definition of pandemic in May 2009 when the body count from the new flu wasn’t happening. A pandemic has always been commonly understood to mean heavy loss of life. Since that wasn’t happening, the WHO dropped six words from the definition: enormous numbers of deaths and illness. Now all that it took for a pandemic was a virus spreading across borders to which people had no immunity. (Question–wouldn’t a measure of immunity be the number of deaths and infections?)
CDC halts tracking H1N1 cases
Two months later, in July 2009, our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knew that there was no pandemic and advised the state health officials to stop testing patients for H1N1 and to stop counting cases of the influenza. When CBS News asked the CDC to explain this, there was no response. CBS checked with state health officials directly and learned that the cases of H1N1 were one or two percent of the flu cases tested. Regardless, the vaccines had been ordered, so roll up those sleves for the fall flu season!
But with WHO yelling, “Pandemic!” the floodgates were opened for the drug companies to open those sealed contracts and start cranking out vaccines (even bringing out stored Tamiflu and Relenza–and extending their expiration dates!) and raking in the mega bucks and euros. Who was behind this decision at WHO is what the Europeans will be asking.
The motion brought to the full Parliament reads:
“In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and offical agencies responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made (governments) squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.
“The ‘birds-flu’ campaign (2005/06) combined with the ’swine-flu’ campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health budgets, but also to the credibility and accountability of important international health agencies.”
Needless to say, the WHO response is, basically, ”irresponsible hogwash”. But the committee hasn’t even raised the question of the origin of the hybrid virus that has elements of strains of varied viruses that have never formed in nature. So, if it’s not found in nature, it was most likely generated in a laboratory. Being a very unstable virus that could unravel and mutate in any host body, the effects of this hybrid virus on the populace’s health is unknown.
We’ll watch what happens in Europe. In the U.S. only the Iowa state senator Chuck Grassley is asking federal authorities questions about the H1N1 vaccine. Americans really don’t cope with lies and deceit from our government–point of fact, half of Americans believe (erroneously) that we DID find WMD in Iraq, the reason we were led into war.
Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in Politics and Medicine, US healthcare system, Uncategorized, economics of medicine, ethics of medicine, global health, medicial science, planetary health, science, technology and health | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
In the first days of 2010, the U.S. media has swamped us with predictions and prophecies of the world to come in this new decade. Specifically, all attention is on post-2012.
The first time I heard of the Mayan calendar, and its ending date of 2012, was at the Kitt Peak Observatory about 90 miles from Tucson, in winter 2004. Several American universities have their telescopes aimed at the stars on the top of Kitt Peak in this isolated Sonoran desert location, but the park guide was telling us what was happening on earth with the Mayan calendar in stone on the ground before us. He smiled and claimed, “We don’t know why it ends in 2012.”
Not many were paying attention in 2004, but it turns out several ancient civilizations marked 2012 as a date of significant change on planet earth. What will be the event that turns the earth into the next phase? Scientists, authors, seers, and prophets predict calamitous events including an asteroid hitting earth, global warming bringing on another ice age (after this week’s weather across the U.S. and Europe, this is altogether plausible), the earth tilting on its axis, etc. Take your pick.
Skills required for survival, useful anytime
Humanity survived the last ice age 10,000 years ago, and if the species is to survive the predicted calamity of 2012, we will have to revert to our agrarian, self-sufficient habits and skills that have been fairly forgotten in just the last 50 years–in the U.S. particularly.
One of the programs in the History Channel’s week of the apocalypse concerned how the individual family would survive. In brief, forget about driving our SUVs (the oil companies are gone) and forget about telecommunications other than ham (amateur) radio. No more internet surfing. Our driving is reduced to driving the horse pulling the plow so we can plant the only food we’ll be eating. And there’s no Novartis or Bayer corporation to manufacture the medicines we’ve become dependent upon. In fact, a lead character in the program dies from infection caused by a small cut on the hand.
In the U.S, unless your “tribe” of survivors includes recent immigrants who know herbal treatments from their homeland, Americans are doomed. The expert quoted on the show was totally unaware of traditional herbal medicine which would be all that’s available in such a scenario. Americans will be more likely than any other nationality to become extinct. If this had been filmed in Europe, Africa, any area of Asia, or any other country in the Western Hemisphere, there is widespread, common knowledge of the medicinal use of botanicals. Canadians will do well (though it might be colder!).
We will be on a path of simpler times. This website was launched with the inspiration of the role of women in carrying the herbal medicine bowl. For thousands of years women’s role has been that of healer, and that meant learning and passing down the generations knowledge of medicinal herbs.
A friend of mine, who immigrated from Hungary in 1937, told the story of her father (in the homeland) cutting a gash in his hand, and “he went into the garden and pulled a leaf off a plant, wrapped the leaf tightly over the wound, and in a few days it was healed.” No rush to the ER, no antibiotics, no stitches. It is possible to take care of ourselves.
We’d better learn what plant that was. Ironically, or by design, many of the medicinal botanicals have been labeled “weeds” by the chemical corporations and the “modern” farmers they have spawned. My mother laughed uproariously when I told her that I used burdock root to help overcome pneumonia. “When I was a kid I earned 25-cents a day to hoe down burdock.” Milk thistle is another “weed” in the American farmland, but in Turkey I saw acres of this beautiful purple bloom grown for the herbal industry; it’s a healing botanical for the liver.
Self-sufficiency has been strong trait of the American character since the earliest settlers began moving West. In the 1830s homeopathic kits and first-aid guidebooks were best-sellers as we migrated West from the Eastern seaboard. Herbal medicine and homeopathic remedies (made from medicinal plants) were our medicines. We need to reconnect with Mother Earth and become reacquainted with our roots–physically and spiritually.
Happy New Year! Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in Uncategorized, economics of medicine, ethics of medicine, food supply, media and health, planetary health, science, spirituality, technology and health | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
It was when the banana liquified inside its skin and oozed a pale slime out onto the fruit basket that I decided it was time to look for organic vegetables and fruits. But this banana had traveled from Central America to Dubai where I was living. Standards for what is “organic” aren’t consistently defined in the U.S.–forget about it internationally!
Giving up bananas was my only option, and I always selected produce that had traveled the shortest distances, vegetables and fruits from Jordan, Syria, and Iran were preferable to U.S., European or Australian imports. (This is a desert nation where virtually all food is imported.) The conditions of the soils and use of chemicals in growing food in other nations was unknown, but in the “processed” department the foreign operations were far superior to American. Fruit juice contained–vola! the fruit–only! No high fructose corn syrup to sweeten it up and fatten us up.
High fructose corn syrup–everywhere!
Barbara Kingsolver writes in Animal,Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life that the average American daily diet has an extra 700 calories through the addition of high fructose corn syrup into many processed food products. Is it any wonder that the whole nation has pudged up with the dominance of prepared and processed foods on our plates?
We easily understand the relation between nutrient content of the vegetables and fruits and the soils they’re grown in, but it takes another mental leap to realize that the nutrient content of the animal products we eat is determined by what the chickens and cows are fed and their living conditions! A chicken that’s spent its entire life in a cage has stress hormones that effect the eggs it lays and the meat we roast.
This isn’t the place for a treatise on soils, but I recommend the book Secrets of the Soil by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird . The updated edition in 1998 reports the alarming statistics on the use chemical fertilizers worldwide. In the 1930s, a University of Missouri soil scientist said, “The wealth of a nation is determined by its top six inches of soil.” This is an eternal truth, for the soil grows the nation’s food, which determines our health. An unhealthy nation doesn’t prosper–we have plenty of examples worldwide.
Before chemical fertilizers were manufactured (beginning in the 1950s) the soil on family farms was tended and supported by rotating crops and using the livestock manure. It was the natural cycle of decomposition, renewal, and life. Now with huge corporate farms growing single crops (70 percent of U.S. farmland is in corn and soy beans–as Kingsolver says, “we’re one pathogen away from famine”) and heavy use of synthetic fertilizers the soil can’t support the life of organisms in the soil. The result is nutrient-poor soil.
Nutrients of 1950s produce and today’s
Donald R. Davis, Ph.D., at the Biochemical Institute of University of Texas-Austin, compared the data of nutrients in vegetables and fruits collected by the USDA in 1950 and again in 1999. Six out of 13 nutrients had declined, and seven showed no significant reliable change. As reported in a 2005 issue of Food Technology, the minerals phosphorus, iron and calcium declined between 9-16 percent. Protein was down 6%, riboflavin 38%, and ascorbic acid down 15%.
What does this mean to you and me? Well, you’d have to eat half a dozen peaches today to gain the nutrient content of ONE 1950 peach! Revitalizing the soils is the only solution, and family run farms are trying to do this. Growing evidence links organic production with higher levels of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. A study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2007) reported a 10-year study comparing organic tomatoes with conventional tomatoes. As organic matter accumulated in the plots, the nutrients in the organic produce rose to 79% higher levels of quercetin and 97% higher level of kaempferol, on average, above the conventionally grown crop.
The eggs in my refrigerator now are from hens raised without hormones and free-range (no cages), fed grains with no animal by-products. Their shells are thin, irregular in shape and color, but they have 25% less cholesterol than caged fowl, and they taste better! Organic milk misses the traces of 200 antibiotics found in ordinary milk. Even M.D.s are advising that if you buy only one item ORGANIC, make it milk. Meat and milk from pasture-raised, grass-fed animals cotain greater levels of beneificial fatty acids including omega-3, alpha-linolenic acid, and conjugated linoleic acid. The animals live better, and so do we!
Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Tags: fruit nutrition facts, nutrition, nutrition facts, why is nutrition important
Posted in Uncategorized, food supply, nutrition and politics, organic food, planetary health, science, technology and health | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
In Washington’s culture of revolving doors, Michael R. Taylor has rotated between employment at the FDA and Monsanto since beginning his career in 1976. Until President Obama appointed him the new “food safety czar” he was most recently the vice president for public policy at Monsanto.
Maybe the President’s decision on this appointment was effected by eating too many chemically-sprayed vegetables before the crop came up in Michele’s organic garden, which a Monsanto spokesman actually claimed was “dangerous and irresponsible”. Yes, organic gardening and farming, Monsanto claims, is dangerous–those pests and fungi could run rampant, though they already are rampant despite the chemical companies’ efforts for decades.
Revolving doors–FDA to Monsanto and back
Taylor’s major contributions to FDA policies/Monsanto’s interests include getting bovine growth hormone approved for use in the dairy industry. The rBGH hormone is suspected of fostering cancerous tumors but what is certain, is that safety tests haven’t been done, and the nation’s general health is declining. Many organic food activists consider Taylor the FDA administrator most responsible for FDA approval of the genetically modified rBGH–and, incidentally, it’s made by Monsanto.
Then as attorney for Monsanto–the doors revolved again–Taylor advised Monsanto on suing states or companies that wanted to tell the public that their products were free of Monsanto’s drug. He has, however, reversed his earlier stance regarding genetically-modified seeds and foods; Taylor now admits that genetically engineered foods should be labeled and go through safety testing. Now there’s a point for public safety.
In his duties in the new position–now back at the FDA–Taylor will be planning implementation of new food safety legislation. God help us–the fox is in charge of the henhouse.
Imminent threat to food safety
One has to wonder who–really–is drafting the legislation effecting our food supply. Quite possibly staffers from Monsanto, Con Agra, Dow Chemical and similar corporations wrote House bill 2749 and found a “receptive” representative in Congress to sponsor it.
HR2749 gives the FDA tremendous power in dictating every aspect of growing food in American (HR875 reported April 2009 in this blog appears to have stalled in committee, but never mind, HR2749 has similar tyranical coverage of our food supply). The bill doesn’t address underlying causes of food safety problems, but it gives the FDA sweeping powers to tell small farmers how to raise and harvest crops, and diminishes existing judicial restraints on FDA actions.
Threats to Organic Farming
The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 will treat family farms the same as multinational corporations, giving the FDA the power to
- Quarantine and halt all movement of food in a geographic area,
- Regulate how crops are raised and harvested –could this mean requiring use of GMO seeds and requiring chemicals in soils and on plants?
- Oversee on-farm production activities
- Search business records without a warrant
- Force farmers to use a costly tracing system
- Impose criminal and civil penalties and a $500 annual registration fee
Swept through the House like a tornado
The bill, HR2749, was a stealth bill brought into the House of Representatives just before the August recess and voted by oral call, usually reserved for noncontroversial bills. Three versions of the bill were introduced on Wednesday, July 29 at 12:15 am, 9:36am and 10:50am, and a vote requiring a two-thirds majority didn’t pass on the 29th. But the next day, House Resolution 691 dispensed with reading HR2749, limited debate to one hour, granted an opportunity for one amendment to the bill (was offered by ONE representative who’d actually read the bill, but no action taken). On 30 July by a SIMPLE MAJORITY, the bill passed 283 to 142.
What was the rush? The bill was pushed through like a farmer trying to bring in the crop with a storm on the horizon. The BigAg lobbyists have a stronghold on our Congressional reprentatives, and now their man is leading the FDA’s office of food safety. There is a storm on the horizon. Monsanto intends to rid the White House of Michele’s organic garden.
What you can do
To tell your Senator to READ this bill and to protest this stanglehold on the nation’s food supply, visit the website of Farmer-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, www.ftcldf.org and sign their petition. Buy locally grown foods, which is more nutritious for you and puts seven times the money into your local economy by supporting area farmers instead of international shippers/marketers.
Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in CODEX, Uncategorized, food supply, nutrition and politics, planetary health, science, technology and health | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
Bills in Congressional committees now (HR 875, S425) are politely packaged as a “Food Safety Modernization Act,” and the giant chemical-agribusiness companies behind the bills are hoping the Congressional reps don’t bother to read the document (which often is the case).
The bills are on the docket in the name of “food safety”, according to the definitions of Monsanto, Tysons, ADM and several other chemical companies that–and this is revealing of the state of our food supply–control agribusiness in the U.S. The sponsors’ goal is to push these two bills through simultaneously and urgently and limit debate. In other words, we won’t know what hit us until they’ve been passed.
Essentially the law would put severe controls on farms and the production of all food–yes, including your backyard garden. All farmers would be dictated what to feed their animals, and farmers would be required to buy chemicals for their crops and drugs for their animals. It will put organic farmers out of business because they wouldn’t comply with these regulations under principle, and the penalty is $500,000. So everyone’s health is harmed, and the corporations make profits.
Read the bills here–they’re not too long:
HR 875 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c111:1:./temp/~c1112RD9bb:e11439:
S 425 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:s425:
Phone Your Reps in DC or Get out your Pitchforks
Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of democracy is eternal vigilance,” and as our government seems to be increasingly directed by special interest groups, Jefferson’s adage was never more true. But what has happened to the American spirit to change this?
Last night Jon Stewart (The Daily Show on Comedy Central) commented that while other nations take to the streets in protest, Americans send emails IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Is this as pro-active as we can get anymore? A call for a demonstration against the health insurance companies meetings in Washington, DC, earlier in March brought out to the streets maybe 200 to protest against the prices and practices of the health insurance industry. That’s it? That’s all? When one in six of us have no health insurance at all, often due to the industry itself.
Where’s our Will to Govern Ourselves?
The insurers were meeting in Washington to caucus about health care reform. Yea, right. They want to appear as part of the solution, not the major problem that they are. But the insurors did promise not to charge the uninsured more than everybody else, as has been their practice. There should have been thousands RAGING in the streets, but a very polite 200 were there instead. Are the rest of us too ill or too spiritually defeated to protest?
Here’s a very thoughtful blog on the current CODEX onslaught and what you can do about it. It’s either call your Congressional reps now or arm yourselves with pitchforks and guns (some are already calling for this)–or we can all eat diets of chemical contaminated foods and be too ill to protest.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=12671
Since the net is ever-changing, if this doesn’t open do a search for a blog by Lydia Scott: HR 875, the Food Police, Criminalizing Organic Farming and Violation of the 10th Amendment.
Salud!
Beverly A Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in CODEX, Uncategorized, food supply, nutrition and politics, planetary health, science, technology and health | 2 Comments »
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
This blog and the WomensMedicineBowl website are dedicated to health, but our personal and collective health are greatly impacted by many factors beyond personal choices.
I’m reminded of one parent’s comment during heightened tensions in the Cold War: What difference does it make what toothpaste our kids are using when we’re in danger of nuclear annihilation? Many Boomers who waited until their thirties to have children questioned the wisdom of bringing children into this world due to the Cold War between the US and Russia.
At the beginning of the 21st century, with random acts of terrorism occuring in many nations the Cold War seems almost simple. The adversaries were known, specific, and contained. Now any individual can and does wreck havoc and horror.
Economic stranglehold on Palestine
The front pages of my local newspaper this week have been large photos of the carnage in Gaza. Earlier in December I was working in the West Bank. Over breakfast I listened to development consultants from around the globe talk about their travels around Israel. The Israelis have set up so many checkpoints that the effect is an economic stranglehold on the Palestinian territories. “International intervention is needed to end this (excluding the US),†was the consensus.
This was two weeks before Israel effectively declared war on Gaza—with armaments supplied by the US. Always, in my many years living abroad, American ex-pats have been told in foreign locales, “We hate the American government—but not the American people.â€
Hatred abroad extends to American people
In Ramallah in 2008, a colleague told me she’s now hearing people say they hate the American people. This is, indeed, a very sad state of affairs, but for how many decades can a population not be held accountable for the actions of its government? (Just as the Gazans are now being killed for the occasional rocket lobbed into Israel by their leaders—death toll this week: 400 Gazans, 4 Israelis.)
When visiting the US I’m always stunned by the slant of the news regarding Israel—it’s way off the mark from what I know from living and working in the Middle East. When I was a child I remember my dad making the comment, “Israel is our 49th state.†Dad, a Minnesota farmer and no politico, died in 1961. Two books by eminent scholars were published in 2006 on how the Jewish lobby influences and directs our foreign policy; still, nothing changes.
Support of Israel threatens US national security
The US reigning in Israel is a matter of US national security. The fury many Muslims feel over the injustices toward Palestine is directed towards the US. Will it take a dirty bomb in an American city to get the public’s attention? US support of Palestine would defuse Al Qaeda and most Muslim fury globally.
Here’s an alternative, more peaceful scenario:
US support of Israel is recognized as a threat to national security, and support is dramatically reduced.
The US develops its first national energy policy—and converts 18-wheelers and mass transit to natural gas, making the US fairly independent of Mideast oil.
Palestine is recognized as an independent state, and Israeli interference ends.
Palestine and Israel cooperate and live in peace.
The Arab nations do business with Israel as with everyone else. Iran is left alone, puzzled, that everyone else’s fury has dissipated and peace reigns in the Holy Land. The ayatollahs decide to focus on economic development, too.
Creating peace with collective consciousness
Last night celebrations of the New Year were canceled in Dubai. No extravaganzas in hotels, fireworks put away. More than 1,000 gathered on a beach in a peace vigil. This is how peace will be created in the Holy Land—by the prayers and intervention of those outside the conflict holding a consciousness of peace. The hatred and fury has gone on too long and runs too deep for those engaged in Israel and Palestine to create peace by themselves.
As individuals and collectively we experience whatever we prepare for. We have a Secretary of War, and so we find or start wars to engage in. What the US needs is a Secretary of Peace—let’s prepare for peace in 2009!
Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in US foreign policy, Uncategorized, parenting, planetary health, spirituality | Comments Off
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Just last March (2007) the city of Sydney, Australia, launched Earth Hour, an hour in which residences and businesses turned off all unnecessary lights. Last week another 24 cities around the globe participated and turned off primarily llights that make our cities’ buildings and bridges look glamorous but aren’t really necessary for safety.
In Sydney, 2.2 milion residents and 21,000 businesses switched off unnecessary lighting, and the savings was a 10.2 percent reduction in electrical output according to the Earth Hour organization’s website. In Dubai, electricity usage dropped by 100,000 kilowatt hours when lights were turned off the Burg Al Arab Hotel and the city’s other architectural landmarks.
The significance of turning off unnecessary lighting and reducing electrical usage is that about half of the carbon emissions put into the atmosphere and causing global warming is due to coal-fired electrical generation. In Dubai alone the reduction in carbon emissions for the one-hour voluntary brown-out was estimated by the electricity agency to be 60,000kg.
Government Must Take Lead
While individuals can–and must–keep off unneeded lights and appliances, it is government agencies that must reduce use of lighting in public places where it’s decorative but unnecessary for safety. And businesses must turn off the lighting in buildings when it’s unoccupied.
In the early 1970s, when I was writing on environmental issues, it took more electricity to turn flourescent lights back on than to leave them on continuously. The technology has improved in 30 some years, and the real estate managers must turn off the lights, even use less during the day (it’s bad for our health anyway, but that’s another blog).
Raise Prices of Electricity
It’s unlikely the price of oil or a tank of gas is going to go back down substantially due to increasing demand from the giant economies of China and India. And the cost of food is rising and unlikely to return to earlier lower prices. One sure way to reduce electrical usage is to increase the cost of electricity for all of us–now when it might still make a difference in the planet’s condition.
Old-Fashioned Conservation
Maybe it was living in rural America, maybe it was having parents who had been children during the 1930s economic depression, maybe it was the semi-arid land the family was farming, maybe it was their frugal, conservation values applied (in child rearing) through the 1950s and 60s. Whatever the reason, the generation of Boomers was raised to turn off the light when you left the room and not to waste water under any circumstances. When did we forget to teach our children to turn off the lights?
Now there are energy-saving bulbs that give 75 watts of light for the energy usage of 25 watts. Don’t leave computers running (another health hazard, too). Appliances (TVs, etc) don’t have to left on standby. Sit on the porch and visit with neighbors (or gather at the neighborhood park or lake in the evening) instead of using air conditioning. Be inventive on alternative activities that free us of electrical appliances.
From Earth Day to Earth Hour
The launching of Earth Day on April 22, 1970, made a huge impact on bringing together groups, organizations, and individuals who were concerned about the polluted environment industry was causing. Twenty million Americans rallied that first Earth Day. Earth Day 2007 saw an estimated one billion people in 184 countries participate in save-the-earth activities.
That we have moved from Earth Day to an Earth Hour activity is symbolic of the urgency of the planet’s condition. Earth Day activities became year-round, continuous endeavors to take care of the planet. The voluntary brown-out of Earth Hour needs to be adapted as a way of life before it’s no longer voluntary.
Sobering Images
The photographs of the cityscape of Sydney and of the Sydney Harbor Bridge before the Earth Hour at 8pm and during the hour were sobering. The nighttime cityscapes we’re used to are brightly lit buildings and bridges. Sydney was much darker, and the Burg Al Arab lost much of its glamour without the colored spotlights.
But if we don’t keep the lights off, here are more sobering visuals:
A chunk of Greenland the size of Rhode Island, it was reported this week, is breaking away from the mainland.
If the planet heats up 6-degrees, we’ll experience another ice age (with changes in ocean currents due to melting polar ice caps).
The shocking image of Manhattan half submerged in water and ice in the final scene of Artificial Intelligence.
Tell your children (and practice it yourself)–When you leave the room, turn off the lights (and all electronics)!
Salud!
Beverly Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in Uncategorized, parenting, planetary health, science, technology and health | Comments Off
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
Whatever our spiritual beliefs, whether practiced consciously or unconsiously, most of us do something in celebration of a brand new year that is spiritually based.
At the center of many of the world’s traditions regarding a new year’s beginning are rituals and celebrations for cleansing and purifying, for bringing in goodness and chasing out bad spirits. The earth’s elements of Fire and Water are a part of many of our traditions. And meditation and introspection are part of most of the world’s celebrations.
What I’ve enjoyed most about New Year’s celebrations, especially living in multi-cultural Seattle and being a part of the Persian community, was the on-going choices for many months.
World-wide hour of meditation
A network of Seattle houses of worship (all faiths) launched a world-wide hour of meditation and prayer on Dec. 30 beginning in the late ’80s. I’ve always felt a new year should be brought in quietly, burning the “old ideas” and “old experiences” in the brass bowl and in meditation.
Then a month later there’s the Chinese New Year, Feb. 7th this year. 2008 is the year of the Rat–my year! The Chinese celebrations frighten away the old year’s evils with lots of loud noise, music, and fireworks. And red is the lucky color–red envelopes for gifts of money, red streamers by entrances to ward off evil spirits.
On March 5 and continuing for three days, Bali celebrates Nyepi. More fire and cleansing–and meditation. Effigies of monsters are burned, homes are cleaned out for the new year, and on the last day nobody moves from the house. March 8 is reserved for meditation and reflection.
Persian Noruz
My personal favorite in the Persian New Year, which begins on the Spring Equinox, but celebrations continue for nearly two weeks. Noruz begins with cleansing or purifying by major cleaning of the home, and strings of lights set up. It’s a season of festivity comparable to the West’s Christmas season with much (ritualized) visiting, gift-giving, and new clothes.
A week before the festival begins, a table is set up with seven (a sacred number) objects which names begin with the letter s or sin. The table includes a tray of wheat or lential sprouts (symbolic of rebirth), and items symbolizing affluence, love, medicine, beauty & health, sunrise, age & patience.
My favorite activity of the Persian New Year is a Zorastrian tradition of jumping over a (camp) fire to purge the old year’s “stuff” and thus have a fresh start in the new year. That was my “take” on the activity. The holiday is of Zorastrian tradition, some scholars tracing it back 15,000 years to the mythical Persian king Jamshid. The formal explanation of the fire-jumping is the light (goodness) winning over the darkness. Being able to build a fire in rainy Seattle in March was reason enough for celebration–light was beating out darkness!
This past March my youngest daughter was in India at the time of the Indian New Year or Holi festival also about the time of the spring equinox. In the state of Tamilnadu, where she was living, they called in Poli. Many photos were sent of everyone dressed in brightly colored saris–and faces painted pink! I particularly liked the bright festive decorations on the cows! It’s a celebration of spring, new beginnings and hope.
I’ve always thought spring was a more logical time to celebrate the beginning of a New Year–and the Persian and Indian civilizations do just that.
Water is a key element in the Buddhist Theravadin tradition. For three days after the first full moon in April in Thailand and other areas with the Theravadin tradition, the new year is welcomed with much cleansing. Buddha statues are washed with scented water, and the cleaning work is followed by water play in the streets.
The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, begins at sundown Sept. 29 this year. This two-day festival is the first of the High Holidays and is a time for introspection, too. It’s celebrated quietly with symbolic foods.
Hindu Diwali festival
The Hindu festival of Lights, Diwali, in late October is a time for new beginnings. One of the largest Hindu festivals, this five-day event is a time to complete projects, pay off debts and close accounts, in other words, tidying up affairs. It’s also a festival of gift giving, buying new clothes, and happy family gatherings. The exteriors and interiors are lit up with strands of colorful lights and candles. On the third day candles are lit throughout the home and divine blessings are asked of the Goddess of Wealth. Living in a region with a large Indian population, I enjoy Diwali each fall.
What are your favorite New Year’s celebrations or rituals? How do you or your family usher in the New Year? Write and tell us. and…
Happy New Year!
Beverly Jensen, Ph.D.
www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in Uncategorized, planetary health, spirituality, travel health | 4 Comments »
Saturday, December 15th, 2007
It was a silly childhood ditty that we all heard. We used it to defend ourselves when being bullied: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
That little ditty is oh-so-wrong! Words can slay the soul. Bones will mend themselves, but restoring the soul takes conscious effort, and most of us hardly recover. I am now working in a culture where children are shamed, and effects are life-long.
Words that nourish the soul are rarely heard anymore. In our media-rushed, sound-byte, txt msg world it’s rare that we truly listen, acknowledge, and honor each other. And it’s attention to the soul that shapes our inner being and collectively shapes our world.
A program that was created 20 years ago this spring, The Virtues Project, and is now taught in some 90 countries, attends to the soul and goes a long way in creating true “peace on earth.”
The creative and spiritual genius of psychologists Dan Popov and Linda Kavelin Popov and Linda’s brother, John Kavelin, The Virtues Project employs five strategies to create more peaceful societies–one person at a time. At the core of the Project is re-learning the language of the virtues, concepts such as tolerance, courage, patience, kindness–how is the virtue expressed, and then acknowledging that virtue in others when they show success in demonstrating it.
Between learning the language of the virtues and acknowledging it in others, is the strategy of listening. Listening! We so take it for granted, but the Virtues Project trains us in cup-emptying listening, framing questions so the individual “empties their cup” of emotions.
I was honored to be among the first trained in The Virtues Project in Seattle in the late ’80s. Individuals in our group were taking these strategies back to their corporations, schools, churches, and the Seattle police department. My young daughters had my foremost attention.
The eldest daughter came home from kindergarten shortly after my training, and declared she hated school and she was never going back. Leila was a strong-willed child on a good day, and this was not a good day. Asking cup-emptying questions was the only possible resolution for what could only be (another) war of wills. Thinking like an adult, I speculated that the problem at school was social–she wasn’t making friends–or academic–the program was too structured (that would be in first grade!).
When I used the listening/questioning strategy of The Virtues Project, my five-year-old told me she got too hungry before lunch! That was why she hated school. I had repeatedly asked her if she didn’t need an extra snack for the mornings, and she’d always declined. But, then, I was asking when she’d just had breakfast, and a young child’s “future needs” are about one minute out.
What Peace on Earth Feels Like
Since creation of The Virtues Project it has grown as a grass-roots program with facilitators all over the world. The program has been delivered in Canada’s First Nations communities; in prisons in Australia; in US and Canadian communities that have suffered trauma; in schools in America, Canada, and throughout New Zealand; in South Pacific Island states, just to name a few.
As I watched emails flying between facilitators in the weeks and months following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, as they supported each other, I saw a hundred candle lights of hope and love in the scores of message flags. This, I thought, is what peace on earth feels like. Give yourself, your family, your company, your community a gift of peace this season by visiting www.VirtuesProject.com. Buy the books to nurture yourself and then your loved ones. Put a poster on the refrigerator so everyone is reminded of the virtue of the week–hourly. You’ll be truly creating peace on earth, one person at a time.
Peace & Compassion,
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in Uncategorized, parenting, planetary health, spirituality | Comments Off
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
It’s interesting to watch how many businesses have decided, finally, to “go greenâ€, i.e. to adopt more environmentally protective policies and practices. They’re tripping over each other in positioning themselves as “green†companies.
The tragedy is that they’re pledging to (try to) save the planet when all the money in the world may not change this trajectory we’re on. The millions of dollars the oil companies spent to obfuscate the global warming danger has had its effect.
Big Oil Clouded the Issue
For nearly two decades the oil companies paid scientists to write articles to raise doubts and confusion about whether the planet’s temperatures were rising, and when that data could no longer be denied Big Oil argued that the rising temperatures were due to natural cycles of the planet, not to use of fossil fuels.
With the convening of the world’s scientists in Paris this past April, the evidence from the varied disciplines made the evidence and conclusion irrefutable. Only those in an illogical, delusional state of denial would still dispute the planet’s distress. (Still, not giving up, Big Oil is still offering $10k to scientists to put their name on such articles according to US News & World Report.)
The importance of our personal health fades to a shadow when Mother Earth is imperiled. And our planet is in grave danger.
Perhaps it was growing up a farmer’s daughter in an arid Western state (Colorado) and on an island that depended totally upon monsoon rains that were too brief one season (Okinawa), but “conservation†was a household word growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Now it would be called living “greenâ€. It means, in everyday life:
• Turning off lights whenever you leave a room (and using energy-saving bulbs)
• Never leaving the faucet running (keeping your hand on the faucet when brushing teeth, too)
• Buying products with less packaging when shopping and bringing your own reusable bags
• Food shopping—buying locally grown food—it’s more nutritious because it’s not been shipped and stored, and you’re reducing fuel consumption by not using shipping
For decades there have been a sizeable number of us conservationists/environmentalists/ecologists/green thinkers who have been reporting dangers to our planet and proposing alternatives to the course we were on.
In 1970, a health magazine reported the dangers to our nation’s water supply; now antibiotics added to most household products are in our ground water, in addition to fertilizer run-off (from lawns, more than farms). One of my first magazine articles in 1972 was on environmental education, but I quickly decided specializing in environmental topics would leave me a starving artist.
We tried to sell solar energy and wind energy in the 1970s. Now one-half of the carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere and causing the planet to heat up is from the generation of electricity using fossil fuel, particularly coal.
Lobby for Renewable Energy Generation
While every “green†habit we adopt is helpful, one citizen who worked in government 40 years, advises—and I think wisely—that the most important action each of us can take is to gather our friends and neighbors and visit your local or state legislators to tell them what you want done in shifting the community’s power generation to renewable energy.
If the legislator isn’t in that hour, their staff will listen carefully. This government veteran advises that legislators listen carefully to constituents who speak quietly, confidently and politely and without media fanfare. This approach bespeaks power, and the legislator’s foremost interest is re-election.
Quickly ending this source of greenhouse gas won’t stop global warming, but it would slow it down and give us more time to lessen the disaster. Scientists report worldwide emissions need to be reduced to less than one tenth of what they are now. Does humanity have the will to make these changes? Corporate profits won’t matter without our planet’s health.
I don’t know how to tell my daughters that my generation has failed to preserve Mother Earth, our only home. But I raised them to be conservationists, and I know something about farming and living off the grid.
Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in Uncategorized, planetary health, spirituality, technology and health | Comments Off
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