Letters

To Poughkeepsie Journal, Re: Public Breastfeeding

June 21, 2005
By
Abridged version published in the June 26, 2005 issue

On June 19, 2005, the Poughkeepsie Journal published a column, reproduced below. In response, Mark S. Meritt responded with one of dozen of letters. The Journal published a number of them over several days, including an abridged version of Mark’s letter, reproduced here in full.

The Letter

I was disheartened to see Jonna M. Spilbor’s diatribe against public breastfeeding, particularly since it was published on Father’s Day, a day meant to celebrate parenting. I’m sure many will respond with justified dismay. Rather than reiterate arguments many will likely make, I want to get to the heart of the matter.

Everything that has ever lived has succeeded by pursuing what is healthful for it. So often, though, we deny ourselves those things that are good for us and even convince ourselves that they are bad. When people embrace what is healthful for themselves and others, they tap into the processes that foster life on this planet and contribute to fundamentally positive change in the world. When people spend their time and effort railing against what they perceive to be wrong with the world and demanding that their way hold for all, they merely ensure that the objects of their complaints will never go away.

It is well worth pointing out, though, that this applies not only to Spilbor’s criticism of public breastfeeders but to many people’s criticism of people like Spilbor. Whatever side of whatever issue we may be on, the fact remains, as Daniel Quinn so wisely said, “When you defeat a thousand opponents, you still have a thousand opponents. When you change a thousand minds, you have a thousand allies.” Here’s to generating good things for people by meeting them where they stand instead of perpetuating fruitless battles by remaining apart from them.


Sorry, mother’s milk belongs under wraps

By JONNA SPILBOR

If I could be a cop for just one day, I wouldn’t arrest people for minor infractions like rolling through traffic lights at desolate, late-night intersections. Instead, I would drive around in a paddy wagon, filling it up with people who engage in activities that are perfectly legal, but so utterly annoying they ought to be outlawed.

For example, there ought to be a law against making noise while chewing soft foods, holding up a grocery line because you forgot the milk and reclining your seat on trains and planes, unless the person directly behind you is either (1) a stuffed animal or (2) completely invisible.

Yet, it’s simply a fact of life that humans will engage in a long list of legal yet torturous behavior, leaving the rest of us little choice but to scowl and bear it.

I’m here to say unequivocally, wholeheartedly, and with every ounce of maternal instinct washing over my being like a prickly rash — breast-feeding in public should not be one of them.

Bloated bosoms took to the streets of Manhattan en masse recently when 200 lactating women, calling themselves “lactivists” collected their hungry infants and staged a “nurse-in” in front of ABC’s television studios to protest a passing comment made by famed journalist Barbara Walters.

Walters, while chatting with her coffee klatch on her daytime talk show, “The View,” casually mentioned how she felt “uncomfortable” on a recent flight, having been seated next to a woman who was nursing a baby at her seat.

Other than cashing in her first-class ticket, there wasn’t a darn thing Babs could do about it. Federal law, as well as laws in at least 35 states, allow nursing mothers to breast-feed wherever they are otherwise lawfully situated. Restaurants, retail stores and yes, airplane seats included.

Public suckling may be perfectly legal, but should it be?

In New York, for instance, which happens to be a very breast-friendly state, exposure laws make it a crime for a woman to bare that portion of her breast that is “below the top of the areola” unless she is exposed for the purpose of breast-feeding.

The implied expectation of the law is this: The public has every right to be uncomfortable, indignant and even call the police at the sight of a bare-breasted woman basking in her bareness. But once a woman adorns the same bare breast with a 10 pound hungry person, the rest of us must gushingly accommodate her, or get the hell out of the way.

Just because you give a boob a job doesn’t magically change society’s long-ingrained attitudes about public nudity. Why then, does the law — and nursing mothers — expect the rest of us to embrace a stranger’s desire to express milk from her bosom while seated six inches from our burrito?

I know what you’re going to say. A baby’s gotta eat. Sure. But until your child can chew, he doesn’t need to eat with the rest of us.

Look, I’m no prude, but I do think there are certain, perfectly healthy activities that are simply too private for public consumption. Pap smears do a lot of good too, but you won’t catch me having one in Macy’s window.

One “lactivist” in attendance at the protest was quoted as saying, “People don’t want to see it because they feel uncomfortable with it, and they feel uncomfortable with it because they don’t see it.”

Apparently, circular reasoning is the one negative side effect of breast-feeding that “lactivists” don’t talk about much. Personally, I no sooner want to observe a woman breast-feeding her baby in public, than I would want to witness her conceiving her baby in public. Forcing me into becoming an audience to a public showing for which I didn’t buy tickets, is an invasion of my rights — is it not?

Perhaps baby isn’t too happy about it either. I imagine the bond between mother and child, especially during the first year of life, is a beautiful, magical force like none other.

If breast-feeding contributes to that bond, why would a mother want to detract from the experience by doing it while walking the dog or having her hair done? Just because the law allows you to, bonding with baby is not something that should be multitasked.

Jonna M. Spilbor is a Rhinecliff-based attorney. Write her in care of: Poughkeepsie Journal Opinion Page, P.O. Box 1231, Poughkeepsie, NY, 12602-1231. Or in care of: letterstoeditor@poughkeepsiejournal.com

To Poughkeepsie Journal, Re: Local Names

April 2, 2004
By
Abridged version published in the April 8, 2004 issue

On April 2, 2004, the Poughkeepsie Journal published a letter to the editor, reproduced below. In response, Mark S. Meritt responded with his own. It turned out to be one of more than two dozen responses, of which the Journal published a handful, including an abridged version of Mark’s letter, reproduced here in full.

The Letter

I was reading the Journal today and was appalled by the ignorance a letter writer showed for the names of many local places.

Wallkill, Beaverkill, Spackenkill, Fishkill, Casperkill, Plattekill, Peekskill, Catskill: all based on the Dutch word “kill” which means “creek.” I was very disappointed that the writer had to ignore the etymology of all those words.

And how can you enforce anti-smoking laws in a town called Marlboro or Kent? The same way you do in any town. And why hold the names of countless towns, institutions, families and even honored fictional characters like Clark Kent against cigarette companies?

Or how does a child feel when he gets to high school or college and has to tell people he went to Gayhead Elementary? No worse than anybody who isn’t homophobic.

The Town of Red Hook is named after a bend in the Hudson River which was beautifully colored with autumnal red leaves.

Who wants to raise children on a street called Hooker Avenue? Anyone who doesn’t mind their street being named for a word with many meanings, including one who sews, and a type of ship. How could her husband ever feel comfortable living on Balding Avenue? He might if he wasn’t so obsessed with what other people think of his looks. How could her son ever grow up on Weed Street? The same way he would on any other street that surely has no more than an average amount of marijuana or unwanted plants.

If she is so concerned about names, she ought to change her own, because Leah means “weary,” and how can anyone go through life saddled with such a depressing name?

If this person was really raising her children free of shame, then none of these names would be a problem for her. Her concern over these names is evidence that she is raising her children full of, not free from, shame.

This person will eventually promote more dangerous ignorance, by foolishly imagining that place names will promote dangerous and illegal activity. A movement should sweep the world to better understand language, history, and the true causes of dangerous and illegal activity so those of us raising our sons and daughters free of ignorance can read any newspaper and not be subject to these idiotic thoughts. Our children will thank us later.

The inciting letter, headlined “Many local names in dire need of change”

I was traveling through Dutchess County with my son last week and was appalled by all the kill, kill, killing going on there. I was so very disturbed at the names of towns we passed, I had to try to divert my son’s attention as we drove.

Wallkill, Beaverkill, Spackenkill, Fishkill, Casperkill, Plattekill, Peekskill, Catskill: I was very disappointed that my son had to see all those words along the roadside.

And how can you enforce anti-smoking laws in a town called Marlboro or Kent?

Or how does a child feel when he gets to high school or college and has to tell people he went to Gayhead Elementary?

The Town of Red Hook logo reminded us of a bloody fish hook.

Some of the streets should be renamed as well. Who wants to raise children on a street called Hooker Avenue? Or how could my husband ever feel comfortable living on Balding Avenue? Or how could my son ever grow up on Weed Street?

These names all will eventually promote more dangerous and illegal activity. A committee should be assembled to think up new names so those of us raising our sons and daughters free of shame can ride down any street and not be subjected to these dangerous words and signs. Our children will thank us later.

Leah M. Thompson, Fulton

To Mother Earth News, Re: Population and Construction

January 24, 2004
By
Abridged version published in the April/May 2004 issue

I was recently given a gift subscription to Mother Earth News. I read my first issue (December/January 2004) from cover to cover and found it to be a fantastic publication. I look forward to being a longtime reader.

I have, however, what I feel to be important comments about two of your articles.

In “Growing… Growing… GONE?,” Lester R. Brown makes many excellent arguments, but one key element keeps him from being on the true forefront of the new sustainable paradigm. When Brown says that it is “more difficult to expand food production fast enough to keep up with demand,” he demonstrates ignorance of a basic ecological fact that is absolutely crucial to understanding our global culture’s unsustainable growth: population size changes in relation to the amount of food available. Thus, attempting to address hunger by increasing food production only ensures that there will be more hungry people later on — and a maximum possible number of hungry people around when food production reaches a level at which it crashes. I look forward to the next parts of his series of articles, but if they reflect the content of his book “Eco-Economy,” which expands on the mistaken notion he mentioned in this introductory article of his, then Brown and Mother Earth will simply not be making a fundamentally valuable contribution to the public’s understanding of these issues. Increasing food production to feed the hungry while instituting wide scale fertility-reducing measures are twin notions that lie squarely within business as usual, Plan A, the control-and-manage paradigm that we’re trying to overturn. Far better to simply acknowledge that our “food race” parallels the arms race, and that escalation on one side simply leads to escalation on the other, and that the only solution is to stop escalating — and that population will stabilize on its own, automatically, as soon as we do so. For more information, I refer you to:

–Human population numbers as a function of food supply, by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel, Environment, Development and Sustainability 3: 1-15, 2001. A copy is currently online at http://www.ku.edu/~hazards/foodpop.pdf

–My own award-winning masters thesis, The Unsustainability and Origins of Socioeconomic Increase, available online at http://potluck.com/2001/01/the-unsustainability-and-origins-of-socioeconomic-increase/.

“Our Solar SunHawk” paints an incredibly interesting picture. But I wonder: what was the per-square-foot cost? I’d dare say far too high for the average person to afford their own similar construction. Further, the size of the home — the 2,900 square feet that the plan was scaled *down* to — is completely unrealisitic as a model for the general population. The technology may be worth understanding and emulating, but it is absurd to imagine that the cost and size of SunHawk actually embody an ecologically friendly, sustainable paradigm.

Count on me in the future to call into question those elements in your magazine which betray your own ideals :)

To Natural History, Re: Population Ecology

October 12, 2003
By

Cheers to Katharine Milton (“Something to Howl About,” 10/03) for illuminating the importance of two critical facts about population ecology — that “prudent” parasites do not kill their hosts, and that population size fluctuates in response to the availability of food.

Jeers to Marc J. Cohen (“Crop Circles”, 10/03) and Laurence A. Marschall (Review, “Space, the Final Frontier?”, 10/03), who, in the very same issue as Milton’s piece, both overlook those important ideas and whose book reviews suffer as a result. Had they been aware of these ecological facts, surely they would have cut to the chase on their respective topics:

GM food may remain ethically ambiguous, but the simple fact is that, GM or organic or anywhere in between, it is the very act of increasing the volume of food production that increases the human population. Combined with the inegalitarian social structures that pervade our global society (and that are themselves related in part to population growth), this ensures that hunger will continue. GM food may not be the ultimate evil some make it out to be, but it can never solve hunger.

Technology for space travel may evolve, but, even if perfected, the simple fact is that colonizing space would require people en route to live in ecological balance within their spacecraft. If such knowledge were available, then it could instead be applied on Earth itself. Thus, space would not need to be used as a “safety valve for a planet threatened by pollution and overpopulation” — and thus the trip would not be necessary.

To Scientific American, Re: Contradictory Stance

September 17, 2003
By

Your recent special issue on neuroscience (September 2003) shows, unsurprisingly and with few exceptions, a striking uniformtiy of voice and vision about the topic. The cover declares the issue to be about “Better Brains: How Neuroscience Will Enhance You” (emphasis added). The articles adopt your usual tone of inevitability and mostly-desirability, and the culmination is a piece (“Is Better Best?”) by a “noted ethicist” who “argues in favor of brain enhancement.” Despite a few nods, so little of the possible “improvement” is truly questioned.

Are these technological developments inevitable? Is “the essence of humanness to try to improve the world and oneself” as Arthur L. Caplan claims? Does every religion on the planet see “the improvement of oneself and one’s children as a moral obligation,” as Caplan also claims? Hardly. These questions are answered in the affirmative not by the laws of nature or by anthropological reality but by the culture of global civilization, a culture that is driving itself into the ground through its ceaseless pursuit of “development,” justified by its looking narcissistically (and falsely) at itself as the torch bearer of the very condition of humanity.

Nobody should be surprised to see these assumptions unquestioned in your publication, a publication that is more often than not about technology boosterism far more than science. Nobody should be surprised to find that an ethicist who makes such conclusion is the kind of ethicist who would become “noted” within our culture. And nobody should be surprised to hear the best conclusion to be the usual, ages-old rhetoric about making sure that improvements aren’t banned yet that access is also ensured for all. Sadly, the very pursuit of growth and development creates social structures in which it is impossible to grant access to all. This is the heart of civilization’s problems, and it makes all the rhetoric rather empty.

Mind you, I’m no Luddite. Like Caplan, “I see little wrong with trying to enhance and optimize our brains” — or in pursuing countless other technologies. The problem is that our culture puts faith in the idea of economic and technological improvement as the solution to all our problems, when so much of that very improvement yields the very causes of so many of our problems. The pursuit of improvement is not evil, but adopting its ceaseless pursuit as the very basis for organizing our societies ironically ensures that no fundamental improvements can ever occur. Further, putting faith in anything is hardly true to science.

It is a nice coincidence that this special issue, an extreme example of your publication’s touting of technology and improvement, includes the concluding part of Michael Shermer’s piece on the “noble savage” (“The Domesticated Savage”). Shermer has always struck me as an incredibly thoughtful and levelheaded guy. Yet here even he, one of the ultimate skeptics, falls prey to our culture’s pervading ideology. Instead of acknowledging that the human brain has evolved to best cope with relatively small social structures, he suggests that we must continually “expand the circle of whom we consider to be members of our in-group.” This may seem merely a comment in favor of expanding human rights, but it also smacks of globalization, world-statism and utopian (read impossible) brotherhood-of-man wishes — all ideals that, again, ironically subvert any possibility of good things for all people.

For three years, I’ve read your magazine from cover to cover. And in that time, I’ve found myself continually frustrated at your publication’s habit of speaking out of both ends of its mouth without even realizing it. The simple fact is that you can’t properly promote science the skeptical method as long as you insist on devoting so much effort to promoting science the overblown enterprise that is subservient to growth economics. If Scientific American were to take this idea seriously, the resulting content could change the world in ways that all the neuroscientists and nanotechnologists can’t even begin to imagine. As long as Scientific American doesn’t take this idea seriously, its contribution toward fundamentally “improving” the world — and toward the pursuit of genuine science itself — will remain hopelessly limited.

My subscription expires this coming December, and I believe I will let it lapse.

To Scientific American, Re: Technological Fixes

March 25, 2003
By
Abridged version published in the A ugust 2003 issue

On the whole, your balanced view of technology (SA Perspectives “Get Real,” 4/03) seems appropriate. However, when you suggest that to stop research is to give up trying to make the world a better place, you tend toward your own dangerous extreme. Far more often than not in our global culture, technology is used to “fix” a problem that is really just a symptom of a more fundamental systemic dysfunction. The very prevalance of technology tends to keep us in that pound-of-cure mindset without realizing it. Worse, due to the complexities of human and ecological systems, the fixes often have unintended negative consequences. Unfortunately, those consequences are usually met by the prevalent mindset with merely another technofix. Technology may provide useful tools, but it is simply not the ultimate answer to making the world a better place. For that, we require a paradigm shift into a systems- and complexity-science-based way of thinking.

To Scientific American, Re: Biodiversity

November 9, 2001
By
Abridged version published in the March 2002 issue

If a human population’s death rate or a nation’s commercial bankruptcy rate increased 17 times, it would be considered an unparalleled disaster. To consider this extreme-low-end estimate of the increase in the current extinction rate — not to mention larger increases — to be anything less is insanity.

More importantly, the truth about biodiversity ["On the Termination of Species," by W. Wayt Gibbs] has nothing to do with accurately measuring extinction rates or numbers of species. As long as the extinction rate exceeds that of species generation, biodiversity will decrease, eventually destroying the ecosystems on which people depend — and us along with them. It is not a question of if — merely when.

As David S. Woodruff says in your article, the key is to save the process of evolution itself. As Edward O. Wilson says in your article, improvements won’t happen until the human population stops growing. But there are two crucial clarifications that must be made here. First, our real impact is based on the ever-growing overall human economy, based not only on our global population size but our average resource usage rate per capita. Thus, even at a stable population level, the economy can continue to grow and threaten our ecological underpinnings. Second, a point which far too many fail to understand: the human population increases as a result of increases in food production. Until we grasp — and act on — this ecological fact, anyone who predicts a leveling off of the human population based on standard models of population growth must be understood to be misapplying the model.

Which brings us to the real truth about biodiversity. Growth is limited here on Earth — and thus, by definition, unsustainable. Growth threatens species, including ourselves, and in many more persistent ways beyond simply the possibility of extinction in the future. As long as we pursue growth, we simply deepen the hole out of which we must climb. Land and species cannot be successfully set aside and kept pristine, since no place is immune to the flow of toxic substances through the air and the water table. Such attempts at conservation, along with improved measuring or modeling, will always fail to help us out of our hole.

But as soon as we give up growth in favor of dynamic equilibrium as the hallmark of economic strength, everything from biodiversity to humanity’s social ills will come to take care of themselves automatically and over the geological long-term — making measurements, computer models and even active efforts toward conservation unnecessary. People, businesses and the non-human world will work synergistically and all will be the better for it.

To Scientific American, Re: Earth’s Orbit

June 6, 2001
By

In addition to the potential problems noted for the idea of using gravitationally slingshot asteroids to shift Earth’s orbit and thereby foster life in the face of the sun’s increasing luminosity (“Save the Earth,” June 2001), Kepler’s third law ensures that the length of Earth’s year will increase along with the distance from Earth to sun. Both the lengthening itself and the consequent distortions of the seasons will wreak havoc on the life cycles of countless living things — not to mention man-made calendar systems and annual schedules.

More importantly, though, our growth-oriented global civilization is unsustainable, degrading the ecosystems on which it depends, making it possible that the human species itself may become extinct along with this way of life. Whether civilization collapses during this century or a thousand years from now, it will be, to put it mildly, long before the sun makes life itself impossible. Given the present age of the genus Homo, to worry about our fate a billion years from now when we already face the possibility of our imminent (evolutionarily speaking) extinction is like a month-old baby so sick that it may not survive the day nevertheless worrying about death from a different disease at age 80.

The cosmos is a fascinating and worthwhile field of study, but sometimes people just need to get their heads down to Earth. Only by pursuing sustainable ways of living will we have even a remote chance of seeing a billion years pass. The eventual fate of the sun is among the lowest priorities for life on Earth today.

To Scientific American, Re: Population and Food

May 18, 2001
By

A well established principle of population ecology is that an increase in food availability generates an increase in population, as surely in a lynx population which finds an abundance of hares as in a human population that purposefully increases food production. This fact is used as the basis for numerous (if not most) discussions of the rise of civilization and is overtly acknowledged by reputable scientists even outside the field of ecology, including anthropologist Peter Farb and evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge.

Try as we might, no human endeavor can succeed if it contradicts a scientific principle. In Sandra Postel’s “Growing More Food with Less Water,” though, you put at center stage the ideal of avoiding hunger in a growing population. Such a pursuit flies directly in the face of science. As Eldredge says, growing more food, the great technofix for the hunger faced by an ever-growing number of people, is the engine that itself drives population growth, “the very heart of the problem for which we need a real fix” (“Dominion,” 1995, p. 155).

In the previous issue of your publication, the editors recommended Vaclav Smil’s “Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century,” in which the author sees “no insurmountable biophysical reasons why we could not feed humanity in decades to come while at the same time easing the burden that modern agriculture puts on the biosphere.” I agree with this statement, but such an achievement can only be made possible by abandoning growth. If we continue to pursue growth, Smil’s prediction that “humanity will not double in number again” can only come true if we reaches our maximum possible global carrying capacity prior to another doubling, at which point we would become the victims of a monumental ecological disaster.

There is, of course, a third possible path, which is that this maximum carrying capacity is a long way off, in which case we could, in fact, continue to double our population before eventually hitting that disaster (that people like Paul Ehrlich can be proved wrong because their timelines are misguided, as pointed out in Edward Sieber’s letter to you, does not disprove the general logic behind their claims). Thus, while I agree with both Smil’s claim and his optimism, the review does not make clear whether or not Smil has growth in mind, so it is possible that his optimism may be unfounded.

While technologies may be developed to mitigate our need for certain resources, and those technologies should certainly be encouraged, growth can only contribute to ever-greater stresses, both directly and indirectly, on clean water and all other resources. But growth is not our only option, and a denial of growth does not have to be the pessimistic attitude it is so typically thought to be. Indeed, it is only by abandoning growth that we can, as Smil hopes, ease our burden on the biosphere.

Science show us how things work, and so through science we can learn how to make our society work. This is a vastly preferable alternative to the continued pursuit of so-called solutions which may contradict science and/or simply strive at not failing rather than actually succeeding. In a society that understood population ecology, for example, large-scale population control measures would be no more desirable or necessary than increased food production would be in achieving a stable, healthy population. The easing of our burden on the biosphere would not require laws that prohibit people from doing things they want to do; instead, human activity would become consistent with the health of the non-human world.

It would be impossible to fully elaborate on this in a letter to the editor. What is certain, though, is that only when “Scientific American” acknowledges one of the fundamental principles of the life sciences — that food makes population — could it begin to make genuine contributions toward solving humanity’s greatest problems, from hunger to ecological degradation and beyond.

To Scientific American, Re: Human Exceptionalism

February 12, 2001
By

Tearing down the wall of human exceptionalism, a set of false conceits that inhibits us from genuinely understanding our place in the world, has always strengthened the pursuit of natural truth. In “The Culture of Chimpanzees,” authors Andrew Whiten and Christophe Boesch seem to contribute toward dispelling this arrogance and making real progress in the science of life. A close reading, though, proves their achievement to be ambiguous.

They freely admit that the chimpanzee is “humankind’s nearest relative” and that their culture is “second in complexity only to human traditions.” However, they also say that the cultural richness of chimpanzees “is far in excess of anything known for any other species of animal.” What a misstatement — humans, of course, are animal.

Later, the authors suggest that the discovery of chimpanzee cultures should not threaten us since, rather than blurring the difference between humans and other species, its low degree of variation simply brings the uniqueness of humanity’s greater variation into sharper focus.

It is both possible and necessary to uphold our own uniqueness while simultaneously tearing down barriers. Only through the lens of human exceptionalism can someone see a threat in non-human culture. Affirming the separation of humanity from other species in more than one way, the authors reveal themselves to be the ones who feel threatened.

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