Tag Archives: book

Bill McKibben’s Resistance Reading

by WoodrowGibb Posted on April 22, 2017

Mother Jones

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We asked a range of authors, artists, and poets to name books that bring solace or understanding in this age of rancor. Two dozen or so responded. Here are picks from the prolific author, environmental crusader, and longtime Mother Jones contributor Bill McKibben.

Latest book: Oil and Honey
Also known for: The End of Nature
Reading recommendations: We’re in an age of protest. So people should read Rules for Revolutionaries, by Becky Bond and Zack Exley, who spearheaded Bernie’s distributed organizing team. They understand the tools that work right now for big change. And for a slightly more timeless take, This Is an Uprising, by Paul and Mark Engler, is the best summary of all that the last 75 years has taught us about nonviolent organizing. It’s the book I wish I’d had a decade ago, because it would have saved a lot of trial-and-error experimentation as we got 350.org up and running.
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So far in this series: Kwame Alexander, Margaret Atwood, W. Kamau Bell, Jeff Chang, T Cooper, Dave Eggers, Reza Farazmand, Piper Kerman, Bill McKibben, Karen Russell, Tracy K. Smith. (New posts daily.)

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Bill McKibben’s Resistance Reading

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Thanks For Everything, President Obama. We’re Going to Miss You.

by GarryKellogg Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s less than 24 hours until Barack Obama leaves the White House. In eight years, here’s my top ten list of what he accomplished:

  1. Affordable Care Act
  2. Stimulus package
  3. Climate actions: Paris agreement, EPA power plant standards, auto mileage standards, etc.
  4. Dodd-Frank financial reform
  5. Iran nuclear treaty
  6. Killed Osama bin Laden
  7. Allowed gays to serve openly in the military
  8. New START treaty
  9. Delivered 74 consecutive months of job growth
  10. Declined to get seriously involved in Syria

I’m keenly aware of all the criticisms you can make of this list: the stimulus wasn’t big enough; Dodd-Frank didn’t go far enough; Obamacare doesn’t have a public option; cap-and-trade failed; the surveillance state became permanent; there was no help for underwater homeowners; there are still troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and so forth. These are all legit. Nonetheless, if you compare this list to other presidents of the past century, there aren’t more than three or four who can match it. Here in the real world, that’s pretty good.

On foreign affairs, Obama got better as he spent more time in office. In 2009 he approved a huge surge of troops into a hopeless fight in Afghanistan. In 2011, he resisted intervening in Libya but eventually agreed to a middling-size offensive. Finally, by 2013, he had learned his lesson and simply refused to allow more than a modest bit of engagement in Syria. And thank God for that. If we had committed seriously to Syria, we’d be fighting a massive two-front war there to this day. Anybody who thinks otherwise is just not paying attention.

In the end, Obama wasn’t a transformative president. But that’s a high bar: in my book, FDR and Reagan are the only presidents of the past century who qualify. Still, Obama turned the battleship a few degrees more than most presidents, and we’re all better off for it. He also brought a certain amount of grace and civility to the White House, as well as a genuine willingness to work across the aisle. In the event, that turned out to be futile, because Republicans had already decided to oppose everything he did sight unseen. But he did try.

I don’t know how much of his legacy will survive. A fair amount, I think, since repealing things like Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and the Iran treaty are harder than they look. But some of it will fade or evaporate in the Trump era. And Obama was never able to make any headway against the anger that festers in the hearts of so many Americans toward the poor, the non-white, the non-male, the non-straight, and the non-Christian. Now this anger will guide our next four years. I miss him already, the best president of my lifetime.

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Thanks For Everything, President Obama. We’re Going to Miss You.

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Michael Eric Dyson Wants White People to Step Up and Actually Do Something About Racism

by DarwinMcintire Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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St. Martin’s Press

The election of Donald Trump sent things spinning in America and got people talking about “whiteness.” Did Democrats ignore the white working class? Was Trump making a legitimate appeal to rural America, or was his rhetoric a thinly masked courtship of white racists? If progressives want to win the next presidential election, do they need to abandon identity politics?

As befuddling as it all seems, the author Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University sociology professor and Baptist minister, has a pretty simple message: If America is to improve racial harmony, then white people—all of them—will need to get on board.

In Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, out this week, Dyson doesn’t sugarcoat what he expects from “white brothers and sisters.” He demands action, not just empathy. The book calls on all whites, urban and rural, to get involved, and Dyson even offers a list of ways to do so. You might start reading notable black authors (James Baldwin is a favorite), create an “individual reparations account,” or find another way to pay a “secular tithe” that helps young black people in your neighborhood. He even calls on whites with social-media savvy to use their resources for good: If young whites were to tweet, for example, every time a cop let them off the hook for a minor infraction that a minority kid might have been punished for, it might help highlight policing disparities.

Not everyone, as Dyson is well aware, will be receptive to his ideas—in fact, he might just piss some people off. But minority voices in America can’t be buried, Dyson writes, least of all during a Trump administration

Mother Jones: Tell me a little bit about your childhood in Detroit.

Michael Eric Dyson: I grew up on the West Side—the “near West Side,” as they say—in what would be considered now the inner city. I had an exciting, interesting childhood, to be sure, with all of the challenges that ghetto life provides—but had loving parents. I was born in ’58, so the riot in Detroit in 1967 was a memorable introduction to the issue of race and how race made a difference in American society. And then the next year, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. And the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series. All of that made a huge impression on my growing mind.

MJ: Why the World Series?

MED: It introduced me for the first time to a team with a lot of black players. Detroit had about three of them: I think it was Willie Horton, Gates Brown, and Earl Wilson—might have been one or two more in ’68. But the St. Louis Cardinals, the team we were facing and eventually beat in a seven-games series, had Lou Brock and Bob Gibson, who just mowed down 17 batters in that first game and made me want to become a pitcher. To see all those beautiful black ballplayers in one place and thriving and doing so well made a huge impression on me.

MJ: So you were a good student? A big reader?

MED: Yep.

MJ: You have a great list of black authors at the end of your book. When did you start reading their books?

MED: Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular “Little Brown Baby.” She introduced us to these authors early on and taught us that their literature is important. Langston Hughes—we read his poetry. We studied who W.E.B DuBois was. And so she whetted our appetites.

And then I went to the library and began to read some of this stuff on my own. My discovery of James Baldwin was life-changing. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain first, and that was hugely impactful. The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one’s identity in the bosom of a complicated black community that was both bulwark to the larger white society as well as a threshing ground, so to speak, to hash out the differences that black people have among ourselves.

MJ: You were ordained as a minister pretty young, right?

MED: Yeah, I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids. We began to connect literacy and learning and the lively effects of biblical knowledge and preaching pretty early. That was a tremendous impact. When I was 12 years old, my pastor came to the church: Dr. Fredrick Samson. And that was revolutionary because he mentored me and I got a chance to see up close the impact of a rhetorical genius. I received my calling and accepted it at around 18. I went to school four years later than most people because I was a teen father, hustled on the streets, worked, lived on welfare and the like, and didn’t get to college until almost 21. That’s when I officially got licensed and ordained, right after that.

MJ: You note in this book that you felt a sermon coming—as opposed to a sociological work.

MED: I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed. I’ve written a lot of other books and this book was different. I couldn’t just say what I wanted to say in the same style that I said it in those other books. I felt compelled to preach.

MJ: You also write that Trump’s victory was America’s response to eight years of Barack Obama. In terms of racial attitudes, do you think his victory uncovered something new—or merely revived things that never went away, but that many of us had forgotten?

MED: I think it’s both. When people are not sure about their future, when their economies are suffering, when their personal fortunes are flagging, we have often in this country turned to nativism and xenophobia and racism and anti-immigrant sensibilities and passions to express our sense of outrage at what we can’t control—and to forge a kind of fitful solidarity that turns out to be rather insular—we look inward and not outward.

As a result, the demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity—and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity politics. What the left ends up missing is that politics have always been at the heart of American culture; it’s been a white identity that’s been rendered invisible and neutral because it’s seen as objective and universal. As a result, we don’t pay attention to how whiteness is one among many racial identities, and that identity politics have been here since the get-go. But they only become noticeable when the dominant form gets challenged—when the invisible is made visible, when the universal is seen as particular. That’s what people of color do when they challenge white privilege and unconscious bias. In that sense, it’s an ongoing process.

MJ: One line that really stuck with me came when you were talking about urban white people looking down on rural whites as “poor white trash.” You write, “In the end, it only makes the slaughter of our people worse to know that your disapproval of those white folks has spared your reputations but not our lives.” Are you basically saying to the “good” white people who didn’t vote for Trump that not being racist isn’t enough?

MED: Right. It’s not enough to be against something. What are you for? It may be, to a degree, consoling that white brothers and sisters did not vote for Trump, and do not participate in that brand of animus, that gas-bagging of enormous bigotry. But the problem is we are left only with empathy—which is critical, if it can be developed—without substantive manifestations of that empathy. It’s one thing to attain it intellectually, but it’s another thing to do something about it. To challenge norms, presuppositions, practices in communities across this country—where the unconscious valorization and celebration of whiteness and conscious resistance to trying to grapple with black and brown and other peoples of color’s ideas and identities—makes a huge difference.

MJ: So you would say that’s one of the more important roles for an enlightened white person?

MED: Yeah, that kind of peer learning, that peer teaching, that peer evaluation, and then administration of insight. That is an extremely important role: how white brothers and sisters laterally spread knowledge, insight, and challenge in a way that white brothers and sisters will not hear it from a person like me, necessarily. I hope they read this book and engage with it, but other white people have a better chance of speaking more directly to the white folk they know, because they’re less likely to be subject to ridicule. They’re insiders, so to speak.

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Michael Eric Dyson Wants White People to Step Up and Actually Do Something About Racism

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Was Emmett Till’s Father Lynched, Too?

by KrystalThrossell Posted on November 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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The author John Edgar Wideman was 14 years old and living in Pittsburgh when a horrific photo began making the rounds back in 1955. It depicted the mangled corpse of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black kid from Chicago who was lynched—supposedly for flirting with a white woman—while visiting relatives down in Mississippi. Till was brutally beaten and shot. His partially decomposed body was recovered later from a nearby river, his face half bashed in. Till’s distraught mother famously insisted on an open-casket funeral, “so the world can see what they did to my boy.”

Wideman saw what they did. “It just scared the shit out of me,” he recalls.

Now 75, Wideman is a professor at Brown University. He’s built a distinguished career in academia and literature, with some 20 works of fiction and nonfiction under his belt. Among other honors, Wideman won the Pen/Falkner award in 1987 for the novel Sent for You Yesterday, and again in 1991 for Philadelphia Fire. His 1994 memoir, Fatheralong, was a National Book Award finalist. His trophy case also includes an O. Henry Award (for his short story “Weight”), a James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction (for his 1997 novel, The Cattle Killing), and a MacArthur Fellowship—a.k.a. “genius grant.”

But the Till photo remained with him all these years. His captivating new book, Writing to Save a Life, tackles the Till family saga—and Wideman’s own—through a lens of history, mystery, memoir, and fiction. In the book, which comes out next week, readers are introduced to different versions of Louis Till, Emmett’s father, who was charged with rape and murder while stationed in Italy during World War II, and then court-martialed and hanged by the US military. Wideman struggles to make sense of old documents from the proceedings (obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request), as well as the parallels between the Till family and his own.

In the process, Wideman revives an incredibly disturbing but largely forgotten detail from the Emmett Till affair. After the white racists accused of killing Till were acquitted of murder in a farcical trial, a grand jury was convened to consider kidnapping charges against the men. That’s when portions of Louis Till’s military file were abruptly declassified and leaked to the local press. The victim’s family was thus sullied, and the kidnapping charges, for whatever reason, never came to pass.

John Edgar Wideman Jean-Christian Bourcart

Mother Jones: I’ll begin with a not-so-serious question. Why don’t you use question marks?

John Edgar Wideman: I’ll give you a serious answer. I don’t like the way they look. They’re really ugly. They look like blots. At some other point in my life, I might have disliked them because I never knew how to properly apply them. Also commas, and whether they were outside the quote or inside the quote—that all seemed like an unnecessary pain in the ass.

I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography—in his work particularly—and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I’m a bit of a maverick now. I’m always trying to push the medium.

MJ: As a reader, I particularly enjoy the way you get distracted in the telling of one story, and suddenly we’re off in some other direction—it’s Joycean, I suppose, like we’re riding your daydreams. Louis Till’s military file finally comes in the mail, you put it aside, and a few minutes later you start thinking about turkey. Before long, we’re back at your family Thanksgiving table.

JW: Remember that a book is many drafts—mine certainly are. It’s improvisation. It’s as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing. When you’re at the basketball court watching a game, one person may be talking about a fight he had with his wife, another is talking about the last hard-on he got, someone else is talking about the presidential election. The language and the tone and the voice—I’d love to be able to capture that spontaneity.

MJ: There’s a fine line with the improvisation, though. I mean, there were definitely places I had to work hard to puzzle out who’s talking, or from whose perspective a particular passage is written.

JW: I don’t mind that. As a reader, Mike, I do not like to have everything handed to me. Because after a while it gets formulaic and I’m thinking, “If this is so thought through, then why do I need to read it. It’s done!” It becomes a beach book at a certain point.

MJ: Writing to Save a Life is stylistically unusual. It’s often hard to tell what’s real and what’s made up. Is there a precedent?

JW: There are plenty. I read all the time, and lots of European fiction. Sometimes it’s not a question of reading contemporaries: You read Moby-Dick again, Melville again, and it had those same kinds of issues with style, trying to accommodate this new American language with traditional style. I really dislike it when people talk about “experimental,” because any good writer is experimental. As a writer, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You’re just doing it. You hope it works out well. I’ve been experimenting with these things myself in my own books.

MJ: At one point you put yourself and Louis Till in a boat full of slaves and Confederate officers—back in 1861!

JW: You think that’s fiction? Laughs.

MJ: Until I read your book, I was unaware that Emmett Till’s killers had escaped kidnapping charges after details from Louis Till’s military trial were leaked. It made the news back in 1955. But have Americans of your generation buried that part of the Emmett Till story?

JW: I’m almost positive they have. Christopher Hitchens, who died a few years back, and who was a radical journalist in certain ways and kind of a pain in the ass in other ways, was a tremendously well-read guy who liked to be ahead of everybody else. He included an essay I wrote about Till “Fatheralong” in The Best American Essays 2010 and he said he could not believe that he’d never heard this story. I’ve had that response many times from individuals.

MJ: Now, you’d originally planned to write a fictional work about Emmett Till. What happened?

JW: It got put on the back burner. I got very interested in Frantz Fanon and Martinique. And I wanted to write stories about my own family and background. I started to do research in South Carolina on our family history. All that stuff, without my knowing it, kept leading back to Emmett Till. But I had to do something about him, because I never got over seeing that photo.

MJ: Tell me more about your reaction to seeing Emmett Till’s corpse.

JW: It was incomprehensible. I could not understand what had happened to this kid. It was too horrible. I literally could not look at it. I had a young person’s ambitions and dreams. I thought, “Hell, I’m going to play pro basketball. I’m going to maybe be famous. I’m going to write books.” And then this face is looking at me: Here’s another thing that could happen to you, son.

My grandfather had asked me many times whether I’d like to come to South Carolina with him. He wanted to introduce me to our people down there and I didn’t want to go. In those days, the South was still a place where black kids were lynched. Something horrible could happen to you. I’ve had that feeling my whole life. Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious. So I had a deep prejudice against the South. It’s taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful. The Till stuff brought all that up.

MJ: There’s a parallel to all of this in the book. Mamie Till is nostalgic about the South while her husband, from Missouri, is scornful of the South. I don’t know how much of that is real.

JW: Louis Till’s internal monologues are my invention. But he is based on many people I knew, including my father, who shared that deep ambivalence about the South and their own identity. And this goes along with color. You know, Michael Jordan was a hero of mine. But what nobody ever talked about at the time he was becoming world-famous, and it always struck me, is that in many circles of black people he wouldn’t have been acceptable. He was too dark. He had that Southern look. He was from the Deep South, and even for African Americans in the North, the South still represented something vestigial, something primitive, and Jordan was the wrong color. There were fraternities and sororities where he wouldn’t be all that welcome. Some of us have transitioned out of that kind of stuff, but my grandmother, if Jordan had walked in the door, she wouldn’t have been impolite, but she would have treated him like she treated my other grandfather, whom she always called “Mr. Wideman” and kept her distance from him because he was Deep South and she was very fair-skinned.

MJ: In what ways were your father and Emmett Till’s father alike?

JW: Well, they both liked to box. And they were both survivors. To be a survivor as an African American man—maybe any man—you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that’s what we all understand. You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that’s kind of exacerbated for men of color.

My father was also quite patriotic—he rooted for the Yankees when no one else did because they were “America’s team.” He made us stand up when the national anthem was on when there was a ball game on the radio, and later TV—you couldn’t sit! My father was also a loner, like Till. He could be very loving, but he was also capable of looking out for himself, for doing what he wanted to do. He combined many of the elements that were feared in the culture, but also he was a warm figure, a figure we needed. We depended on him to give us a little bit of strength and courage. My mother loved my father. From my view, she let him get away with too much. It broke my heart to see him in an old people’s home and stop being strong and lose his voice. He was a very articulate guy and he told good stories. Much of what I think about in Louis Till I project from my own father.

MJ: Your dad related to you how his own black military regiment in the South would get hauled out on Sunday mornings and made to do hard labor. Yet he remained a patriot?

JW: Oh, yes. That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We’ve learned to cover them up and live with them and pretend that deep cleavage is not there. We all bear that illness.

MJ: The file on Louis Till’s court-martial is a central character in the book, and one with which you have a tortured interaction. When it arrives, you are filled with fear and suspicion. What were you were afraid of?

JW: I’m not a fearful person, but I’m a pretty pessimistic person. So some of my best times are waiting, anticipating. That’s the way it always has been with me, whether anticipating a ball game, anticipating a relationship. Things seem to fall apart inevitably. I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event. When I’m writing, I’m thinking, “Well, this might be a book that I’ll always be happy with, and certainly readers will be happy with.” But another part of me knows that when I’m past the stage of writing, the book is gonna have good things about it, bad things about it—probably more bad than good. I just know that. That’s who I am.

MJ: My sense is that you had hoped to find yet another moral outrage in that file, another lynching, but it turned out to be complicated.

JW: I didn’t find an open-and-shut case. I didn’t find one more lynch-law shooting in the street, and villains—good guys, bad guys. Reading the Till file, I hoped, would clarify some of my pessimism about my country, about myself, about my family, about the Tills. But in another way I knew it wouldn’t. So the file sat there as a sort of challenge before I even opened it.

MJ: Like a forensic defense attorney, you interrogated the file from every possible angle: the questions not asked, the abridged statements and translations, the mystery of Louis Till’s silence about his own guilt or innocence.

JW: I started out to solve a puzzle that bothered me very deeply. The file was what I thought might be my means for solving it, but I was asking an awful lot of a bunch of old papers. I found not the solution to a puzzle, but many puzzles. There was the old paper, the file itself, which was a couple hundred pages, but then there were files inside of files inside of files, and the process never ended. It still hasn’t.

MJ: What’s your theory about why Louis Till never gave a statement to his accusers?

JW: Well, he sort of understood the way things worked. He came into the world an orphan, and when you’re an orphan you don’t have a daddy to appeal to. I guess maybe you could become religious and have a Heavenly Father to appeal to, but he had to learn to find the answers to problems and issues on his own. That’s quite a burden.

MJ: You write, “Not even truth is close to truth. So we create fiction.” Talk about that.

JW: Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they’re trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there’s always that gap. We’re dreamers and—since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble—we’re very intense dreamers. That’s the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that’s all it ever is. There is no American history. There is no French history. There is no John Wideman. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don’t think the stars pay much attention.

MJ: I sense that this book was a struggle for you.

JW: Yes, absolutely. To write a story about Louis Till puts me on trial. If I have objections to the way that he was treated, I certainly don’t want the way I treat him, or the way I treat myself in this book, to mirror what I think of as unfair or unjust. I want to give the evidence in a way that is convincing, but I don’t want to cheat. You can say, “Has this guy done a Till story any justice? Has he done America any justice?” You can make your own choice.

MJ: Shame comes up a lot in this book—for making a scene at your first haircut, for being caught spying on your mom in the bath, for your tryst with Latreesha. These little moments from the past still haunt you. Where did this deep propensity for shame come from?

JW: I have continued, throughout my life, to commit the same kinds of transgressions. I’m still vulnerable and still weak. I’m still divided in my principles and what I think is right and what I’m actually able to do, whether talking about writing or being a citizen or being a husband or being a father. And I’m trying to get better. I can’t pretend that I did one really awful thing—I took a bite out of the apple but now I’m never going to sin again. I believe—what did Faulkner say? “The past is not even past.”

JW: I’m really struck by your willingness to put your vulnerabilities on paper, even when they might be embarrassing or politically incorrect. Do you feel any qualms about sharing so much of your internal life?

JW: If I felt too apprehensive, I would declare the Fifth. I don’t tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don’t.

MJ: In Brothers and Keepers, you wrote of being the academic success while your kid brother went to prison as an accomplice to murder. Today you have a daughter playing pro basketball while your son has been incarcerated for a killing. I don’t quite know how to put this, but the irony of that situation…

JW: I don’t know how to put it either. Maybe that’s why I write books. Books are an attempt to control something that’s uncontrollable. That’s one of the beauties, I think, of African American life. There was this thing called slavery and adjustments were made. It literally destroyed millions, but it didn’t destroy everybody and it didn’t destroy the inner lives of all the people who experienced it. There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don’t have to succumb totally. If I had only a negative side of things to present, I think I would have much less of a drive to do it. Because what would be the point?

MJ: You visited a cemetery plot in Italy where the US military buried in numbered graves the remains of 96 American soldiers executed during World War II—83 of them were black men. Louis Till was number 73. What did you hope to find there?

JW: I wasn’t sure. I was just amazed that this history that had preoccupied me for so many years actually had a kind of physical environment that I could touch and see. That was the attraction.

MJ: The fact that 86 percent of those executed were black, at a time and place where blacks made up less than 10 percent of American soldiers: That alone seems to cast doubt on the fairness of Louis Till’s prosecution.

JW: Well, clearly his prosecution did not begin after the alleged crime of murder and rape. The persecution and prosecution of Till began a long time before that, and I really want the book to point that out. There’s a kind of a puzzle at the end: Well, did he do it or didn’t he? I was more interested in the long view. What is all this? What’s happened to cause this situation? What happened to make this cemetery real?

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Was Emmett Till’s Father Lynched, Too?

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5 Reasons to Kick Factory Farmed Meats Off Your Plate

by HungHolub80 Posted on October 8, 2016

These days, just about everything is mass-produced, including our food, with large, factory-style farms churning out a seemingly endless supply ofmeat, chickens,eggsanddairy products. All that mass production equals abundance and lower prices, but if those factory-farmed products are eroding your health, is the savings really worth it? Not in my book. Heres whats really going on with mass-produced meats and why you should steer clear:

1. Factory-farmed animals eat crap. Literally.

To keep production costs low, animals raised in factory farms are fed the cheapest possible grains and feeds containing among other things, by-product feedstuff, which begs the question, whats feedstuff? Its a nausea-inducing assortment of disturbing ingredients, including municipal garbage, stale cookies, poultry manure, chicken feathers, bubble gum and even restaurant waste. So, when you eat factory-farmed animals, youre also getting an unintentional serving of feedstuff.

In short, their bad diet becomes your bad diet which is counter-productive to your health.

2. Bad diets make for sick animals and people too.

Cud-chewing critters such as cattle, dairy cows, goats, bison and sheep were designed to eat fibrous grasses, plants, and shrubsnot starchy, low-fiber grains and feedstuffs. When these animals are switched from pasture greenery to grains, many wind up suffering from a number of disorders and painful conditions. The sickened animals are then given chemical additives, plus constant, low-level doses of antibiotics.

Their drugs in turn enter your system when you eat antibiotic-treated animals, settingthe stage for drug-resistance in your body, particularly if youre a heavy-duty carnivore.

3. Lousy ingredients wont create a nutritious product.

It should come as no surprise that animals fed a crappy diet will make for a less nutritious meal. Compared to grass-fed, factory-farmed, grain-fed meats have less vitamin E, beta-carotene, and little of the two health-promoting fats called omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA.

So whats the end-result of the feed-em-fast-and-cheap factory farmed method? Inferior food with negligible nutrients and more of the unhealthy fats. Small wonder the stuff is so much cheaper than grass-fed.

4. Stress hurts everyone.

If your goal is to sustain wellness, factory-farmed products just dont deliver thenutritionalgoods. In factory farms, chickens, turkeys, and pigs are typically raised in inhumane conditions, tightly packed into cages and pens, unable to practice normal behaviors, such as rooting, grazing, and roosting.

In these conditions, the animals get stressed and wind up producing products that are lower in a number of key vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids talk about empty calories!

5. Factory farming pollutes the earth.

In a conventional feedlot operation, for example, confined cattle deposit large amounts of manure in a small amount of space. The manure must be collected and removed. As it costs money to haul it away, the manure is often dumped nearby, close to the feedlot. As a result, the surrounding soil gets over-saturated with the stuff, resulting in ground and water pollution. But when animals are raised on pasture, their manure is a welcome source of organic fertilizer, not a waste management problem.

Bottom line: raising animals on pasture is kinder to the environment.

In short, though factory farming enables us to have plenty of cheap and convenient food, its food with little nutritional benefit, that can increase your resistance to antibiotics as it pollutes your air, land and water. With so little going for it, doesnt it seem slightly crazy to eat factory-farmed meats? It certainly does to me which is why I strongly suggest that if youre going to eat meat, buy the good stuff, even if it means having to pay a bit more or buy less of it. Choose grass-fed beef, lamb, bison and poultry, to insure that youre eating nutritious and healthy meats, as nature intended.

This article originally appeared onDrFrankLipman.com, and reposted with permission from Naturally Savvy.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Reasons to Kick Factory Farmed Meats Off Your Plate

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The Uncomfortable Truth About Children’s Books

by MaynardMcnutt Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Shannon Wright

One afternoon last fall, I found myself reading my picture book The Sea Serpent and Me to a group of schoolchildren in the island nation of Grenada. The story is about a little girl who befriends a tiny serpent that falls out of her bathroom faucet. I had thought it would appeal to children who lived by the sea, but as I looked at their uncomprehending faces, I realized how wrong I was. It wasn’t just my American accent and unfamiliar vocabulary, but the story’s central dilemma: The girl wants to keep the serpent at home with her, but as each day passes, he grows larger and larger.

“What do you think she should do?” I asked, holding up an illustration of the serpent’s coils spilling out of the bathtub.

“Kill him and cook him,” one kid suggested.

It took me a few seconds to understand that he wasn’t joking. If an enormous sea creature presented itself to you, of course you’d eat it! Talk about first-world problems.

I think of that kid from time to time when I need to remind myself that my worldview is pretty limited. Within five years, more than half of America’s children and teenagers will have at least one nonwhite parent. But when the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at 3,200 children’s books published in the United States last year, it found that only 14 percent had black, Latino, Asian, or Native American main characters. Meanwhile, industry data collected by publisher Lee & Low and others suggest that roughly 80 percent of the children’s book world—authors and illustrators, editors, execs, marketers, and reviewers—is white, like me.

Writers and scholars have bemoaned the whiteness of children’s books for decades, but the topic took on new life in 2014, when the influential black author Walter Dean Myers and his son, the author and illustrator Christopher Myers, wrote companion pieces in the New York Times‘ Sunday Review asking, “Where are the people of color in children’s books?” A month later, unwittingly twisting the knife, the industry convention BookCon featured an all-white, all-male panel of “superstar” children’s book authors. Novelist Ellen Oh and like-minded literary types responded with a Twitter campaign—#WeNeedDiverseBooks—that spawned more than 100,000 tweets.

Most hashtag campaigns go nowhere, but Oh managed to harness the momentum. We Need Diverse Books is now a nonprofit that offers awards, grants, and mentorships for authors, internships aimed at making the industry more inclusive, and tools for promoting diverse books. Among the first batch of grant recipients was A.C. Thomas, a former teen rapper who sold her young-adult Black Lives Matter narrative in a 13-house auction. (A feature film is already in the works.)

Problem solved? Not so fast. For years, well-meaning people up and down the publishing food chain agreed that diverse books are nice and all, but—and here voices were lowered to just-between-us volume—they don’t sell. People of color, it was said, simply don’t purchase enough children’s books. But after studying the market last year, the consumer research firm Nielsen urged publishers to embrace “multicultural characters and content.” Nielsen found that even though 77 percent of children’s book buyers were white, ethnic minorities purchased more than their populations would predict—Hispanics, for example, were 27 percent more likely than the average American bookworm to take home a kids’ book. Yet the market for diverse books “can’t just be people of color,” says Phoebe Yeh, the Chinese American VP and publisher at Crown Books for Young Readers. “It has to be everyone.”

In an essay this spring, the book-review journal Kirkus revealed that its reviewers had started mentioning the race of main characters in young-adult and children’s books. The goal, its editor wrote, was to help librarians, bookstores, and parents find stories with diverse characters—and to challenge the notion of white as the default. Many applauded the move, but others were incensed, among them author Christine Taylor-Butler. For The Lost Tribes, her book about a kid who discovers his parents are aliens, she and her editor consciously chose not to reveal upfront that her main character (like her) is black. Highlighting the race of a nonwhite protagonist, she believes, will lead many buyers to conclude that the book isn’t for them—or the children they cater to.

Last year, after Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover won the Newbery Medal and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming was selected as one of the two runners-up, a white school librarian named Amy Koester blogged about the sotto voce grumbling she heard from other librarians who felt these books, with their black protagonists, would be a “hard sell” in their white districts. “If we argue that only black youth will want to read about black youth,” Koester countered, “we are really saying that the experiences of black youth have no relevance or meaning to youth of any other race.”

Color-coding our bookshelves doesn’t just shortchange the black kids. It is well established that reading literary fiction enhances our empathy and our ability to gauge the emotions of others, so what happens to white kids who are raised solely on stories about white kids? Economists note that the ability to grasp the perspectives of people who don’t look like us is increasingly crucial in a nation riven by race and growing more heterogeneous by the day. In a recent TEDx Talk, Chinese American author Grace Lin recalled hearing from a school librarian whose students stopped teasing an Asian classmate after they read Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Lin’s adventure story starring a Chinese girl named Minli. The book, Lin said, had made being Asian “kind of cool.”

Ellen Oh, the Korean American founder of We Need Diverse Books, points out that librarians don’t fret over whether kids will relate to a title like The One and Only Ivan, told from a gorilla’s perspective, yet faced with a book about a Chinese kid, the literary gatekeepers—from agents all the way down to parents­—may balk. “Some of our most popular books deal with worlds that aren’t Earth and people who aren’t human,” Oh says. “But the people you walk beside on this Earth have stories too.” To complicate matters, a shrinking publishing world has consolidated its marketing budgets. “Readers are led by publishers into fewer and fewer books,” observes Kevin Lewis, a black picture-book author who spent 23 years as an editor at major publishing houses. The result, he says, is that publishers often use a single narrative to represent an entire group’s experience.

A page from A Fine Dessert by Emily Jenkins, illustrated by Sophie Blackall

This puts intense pressure on authors to get it exactly right, even though nobody can quite agree what that means. Over the past year, the creators of two picture books were harshly criticized for their failure to convey the grim brutality of slavery. A Fine Dessert, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Sophie Blackall, both white, showed the same dessert (blackberry fool) being made at different times in history. The book received standout reviews, but after it was eviscerated on social media for its portrayal of a slave woman and her daughter serving the dessert on a South Carolina plantation, a contrite Jenkins donated her writing fee to We Need Diverse Books. (Blackall stood by her work.)

Scholastic recalled this picture book amid criticism that it glossed over the horrors of slavery.

A Birthday Cake for George Washington—written by Ramin Ganeshram and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, both women of color—told the story of Hercules, the late president’s enslaved household cook, but glossed over the horrors of captivity and consigned to an author’s note the fact that Hercules eventually ran away (on Washington’s birthday, no less). In the face of internet outrage (#SlaveryWithASmile), Scholastic made the controversial choice to recall the picture book, because “without more historical background on the evils of slavery than this book for younger children can provide, the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves.”

(Since this article went to press, two more books—by award-winning children’s authors—have been subject to allegations of racial insensitivity. Lane Smith’s There Was a Tribe of Kids was viewed by some observers as demeaning to Native Americans. The other title, When We Was Fierce, by e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, initially drew high praise, only to have its publication date pushed back indefinitely in response to online outcry.)

Some diversity advocates fear that the vitriol of the internet attacks will give pause to skittish writers and publishers. “For me, the biggest issue is the chill on diversity that is happening because of the feeling that it is okay to destroy people on social media,” Taylor-Butler told me. “We have lost the perspective that these are books and they are going to be imperfect.”

The questions roiling the children’s publishing world are among the pressing cultural questions of our time: Whose story gets told, and who gets to tell it? How do you acknowledge oppression without being defined by it? And to what extent should writers bow to popular opinion? There are no simple answers. But what seems clear to me, as a writer struggling to find the best way to tell stories to kids, is that my inevitable mistakes are well worth making. Children, it turns out, are the best critics of all. They read carefully and passionately, and when they sense you have missed an essential aspect of the story, they will be more than happy to point it out to you.

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The Uncomfortable Truth About Children’s Books

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The Science of What to Feed Your Kids

by anunturigratuiteonlinebucuresti Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

Almost eight months into my parenting adventure, I’ve developed a tolerance for dirty diapers, sleepless nights, and countless rounds of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Here’s what I still can’t stomach: the mommy blogosphere clickbait slideshows that keep appearing on my Facebook feed. I’ve been treated to no shortage of grammatically and factually wanting roundups of foods my kid (and I) should “never” eat. So junky are these pieces that I refuse to dignify them with a link.

So imagine my delight when Bite co-host Maddie Oatman and I interviewed a pair of parenting experts whose opinions on kids’ food is backed up by actual science. How refreshing! Journalists Tara Haelle and Emily Willingham, are the authors of The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your First Four Years. The book covers many of the most controversial aspects of child-rearing, from sleep training to spanking, but we at Bite, of course, were interested in food. Below are Haelle and Willingham’s thoughts on a few hot topics.

On drinking the occasional glass of wine during pregnancy: “We will never know precisely how much alcohol may or may not affect a particular embryo or fetus because there are genetic markers that will determine that, and you won’t know in advance what your embryo or fetus’ genetic makeup is or which genes are flipped on or off in certain ways. It will also depend on your own metabolism.

However, I will say in the in vitro studies, where you’re looking at the impact of alcohol on embryos in petri dishes, where you see what alcohol does to those developing cells and then you imagine that any alcohol you consume goes straight through the placenta to the fetus—there’s no barrier there—it could be diluted to the point where it doesn’t have any affect, or it could be right at the moment where this crucial group of cells is turning into this other crucial group of cells, and we don’t have any way of knowing that. At the same time, I would say that women who have had several drinks and then find out they’re pregnant should not freak out, because the odds are still in their favor that there are not going to be any serious issues.

But I think we need to avoid the complacency of saying, ‘Oh a few drinks here, a few drinks there, no big deal’…There is no good evidence that even a small amount of alcohol is okay, and there is adequate in vitro evidence to suggest that even small amounts could have adverse effects, and it’s not possible to know how or when those effects will occur.”—Tara Haelle

On eating your baby’s placenta because of its supposed health benefits: “Right now, we can say, if you want to eat your placenta, be safe about it. Follow food-handling guidelines. But don’t expect that it’s going to have anything more than a placebo effect. The one thing I will say that’s very serious: If you are trying to eat your placenta or take placenta pills to ward off postpartum depression, the risk in that is that you might not notice when you are experiencing postpartum symptoms that need to be addressed. Beyond that, we can’t say it does or doesn’t help you.”—Tara Haelle

On whether it’s worth it to shell out for organics for your kid: “In my opinion, no. It’s kind of a luxury that lacks a solid evidence base. The science seems to come down on the really important factor: to make sure that they get foods that are high in nutrients that children need. And whether they’re conventionally or organically grown doesn’t seem to affect the nutrient profile in any way that’s significant. I think it places pressure on parents to spend more than they have, and it’s more important to focus on a variety of colors and a variety of foods that are fresh and as little processed as possible than whether they are conventionally or organically grown.”—Emily Willingham

Hear more fascinating facts—how what you eat during pregnancy can shape your kids’ tastes, the link between screen time and obesity, how long to breastfeed—in the full episode.

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The Science of What to Feed Your Kids

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Technological Innovation Doesn’t Have to Make Us Less Human

by AdelaidaR31 Posted on September 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a world where personal information is ubiquitous and accessible, shouldn’t you have the right to be forgotten? How should we deal with traces of our online selves? These are just two of many questions and issues explored in Sheila Jasanoff’s new book, The Ethics of Invention, which published this week. Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, explores ethical issues that have been created by technological advances—from how we should deal with large-scale disasters such as Bhopal or Chernobyl to the more hidden conundrums of data collection, privacy, and our relationship with tech giants like Facebook and Google.

Jasanoff believes we don’t sufficiently acknowledge how much power we’ve handed over to technology, which, she writes, “rules us as much as laws do.” What we need, she says, is far more reflection on the role that tech plays in our lives now and what role we want it to play in the future. One of her hopes in writing this book was to explore the “need to strengthen our deliberative institutions to rethink things,” so that “people will recognize that this is a democratic obligation every bit as much as elections.” She sees that putting “a technology into place is like putting a political leader into place, and we should take political responsibility for the consequences of technology in the same way that we at least try to take political responsibility for who we elect.”

I talked to Jasanoff about the different ways we should approach tech, whether we can rightly predict what will happen in the future, and if there’s hope for us before we all become controlled by robots or a version of the rolling, chubby humans in Wall-E.

Mother Jones: You start your book by discussing a lot of the different ways people have approached and thought about technology, including theories around determinism. Why do you reject those ideas and say we have to recognize our human influence and values in technology and our agency over it?

Sheila Jasanoff: Well, first of all, I’m delighted to see that you’ve picked up one of the major messages of the book so clearly. The question why it’s important for us to come to grips with our own agency and our involvement in putting science and technology into our lives—it’s in a way obvious, because otherwise we take something that we human beings have created and raise it to a pedestal where we think that the technology determines for itself how humans’ future ought to evolve. I think that’s a risky proposition for many, many reasons. First of all, it makes us less careful about the harmful dimensions of technological design, which undoubtedly exist. But secondly, it also makes us less sensitive to the inequalities involved in allowing technologies to develop in particular ways, and this is something I think is really important to put front and center as we become more and more dependent on technology in every dimension of our lives.

MJ: Can you elaborate a little more on the inequalities that you just mentioned?

SJ: Let me begin with the best-known historical example, because that is tied up with these myths that need to be revisited and rethought: the idea of the Luddite. The Luddites were a group of people who have become proverbial as anti-technology because these were British weavers who, in the early days in the introduction of the mechanical loom, went about and broke the looms.

Historically, the idea that you take something novel and you break it has been seen as the ultimate rejection of Enlightenment values, of progress, of civilization—because how could you possibly move forward if you break technology? I think that that misses the point, that if you introduce any kind of technology, what you’re introducing is a new way of living and the consequences of that new way of living for people who were enmeshed in a different way of living need to be thought through.

So I think there’s a direct comparison between that and today’s GMO protests. This is the area in contemporary science and technology where there’s been the most concentrated protests, and one type of protest has been to go to field sites, where GMOs of all sorts have been experimentally planted, and local farmers and activists have gone there and ripped up these plants. And again, scientists and many policymakers see this as a form of Luddism. But that keeps us from recognizing that farming is a very complicated way of living…and by introducing a different kind of more industrialized, more standardized agriculture, we’re actually interfering with long-standing patterns. This may be better or this may be for the worse, but that is something that we need to debate. But to not debate it, to just decide that just because it is a technological new thing, therefore it has to be propagated as fast as possible, as widely as possible, that seems to be a mistake, in ethical terms and in terms of democratic politics as well.

MJ: It’s interesting that you bring up the GMO protests and the resistance to new technologies, because it seems as if some technologies are more acceptable than others. We seem to be more okay with mobile phones but we’re resistant to other things. Why are some technologies and inventions more accepted than others?

SJ: In general, people feel that technologies they perceive as liberating are easier to accept than ones that they feel are imposing controls on them, so something like the mobile phone, which allows you to do the same functionalities as an old landline did, only from different places and in different contexts, is seen as more liberating than the stay-in-one place phone. Whereas a technological development that actually is perceived as a form of control—so, for instance, GMOs that have been made sterile into the next season so that you can’t save the seeds as your parents and grandparents may have done for eons—that will come across to farmers as a kind of imposed technology and not a liberating technology.

W.W. Norton

But I would caution against thinking that acceptance itself should be seen as an indicator that this is a good thing. With data in particular, we may be okay with it, but it’s related to the argument about GMOs. Many people have said, “Look, Americans have accepted the introduction of GMOs into agriculture, and 300 million who are okay with it can’t be wrong, therefore why shouldn’t everybody in the world accept it?” I think that whether we’ve accepted it in a deliberative way, aware of all the problems, or whether we’ve accepted it because we just didn’t know, or nobody gave enough time to think. I’m trying to make people more alert that mere acceptance isn’t a good enough indicator that something is ethical. You actually need to stop and think. Acceptance on the basis of ignorance or deceit is not the same thing as the acceptance on the basis of ongoing vigorous democratic debate.

MJ: You said it’s hard to predict what will happen with technology. One interesting example where people have been trying to predict what’s going to happen—or what technology is going to cost society—is around automation and self-driving cars. Even some tech companies say this is the next frontier and people will lose jobs. What do you think about that debate?

SJ: It’s not just about self-driving cars, but it’s about robotics and automation in general. I think there are certain things people would recognize as having benefits. For instance, there’s a huge consensus that life-prolonging drugs are a good thing, but that debate has happened independently of the moral and philosophical debate about the kind of quality of life that we’re buying for individuals with these additional 10, 20, 30 years we might be giving them.

My view of the right kind of debate would be that we should not decouple them. We should not decouple the discussions of who the losers are and what will happen to them from who the winners are and whether it will be beneficial. I’m all in favor of being able to imagine new frontiers with the aid of technologies, but I want a more compassionate approach that also recognizes that every time you’re talking about new frontiers, there will be certain kinds of costs attached. There will be people who don’t quite understand how to handle email who will decide to have private servers and then not know how to excuse themselves when it may be something as simple-minded as they were a little too far along in their lives to really figure out how to go back and forth between two different accounts. I’ve known cases of high-up government officials who preferred to use their personal laptops instead of the highly secured ones that their jobs required of them. Not because they weren’t smart, not because they weren’t good public servants, but because they simply were a little less skillful than maybe their grandchildren would have been in this case.

MJ: This sounds as if technological development is actually very Darwinian. Is it?

SJ: I want a society in which we don’t throw things and people away with quite the abandon we do, especially people. This is why the idea of disruptive technologies is quite dangerous, because you ought to be asking ourselves, what exactly are we disrupting? We should be disrupting structures that are unjust, we should be disrupting structures that were put into place without us ever having bought into them. We seem to buy into the rush into progress or what is imagined to be progress, without asking the questions: So what happens to the fact that not everybody is going to agree to this form of progress, and not everyone is going to have access to this form of progress, and not everybody is going to think that they want to give up their present way of living for the sake of achieving this particular kind of progress?

MJ: We talked about responsibility and asking more questions in general. Where do you think responsibilities lie: the individual, or the government?

SJ: Or maybe neither. My profession is usually described as an educator, so I do think that institutions like mine have a huge responsibility, and over the years I’ve become more committed to that. We need to make new kinds of citizens who reflect on the way in which technology enables and empowers things in their lives in the same way that citizens are trained to think about how law, politics, and government play a role in their lives. Ultimately, I am kind of a sucker for democracy, so I do think that what kinds of citizens we have in our societies are more foundational than what kinds of governments we have, and that the responsibility for self-government is ultimately with us. But we also have learned through a couple thousand years of democracy that democracies are only as good as people’s capacity to reflect on those questions. Then you cycle back to educational institutions and what they’re teaching and how they’re training people to think about their own condition. So I would put an enormous amount of responsibility on all the institutions that are responsible for making our thinking public. Of course, government has its role to play as well, but not in the form of risk regulator, more in the form of a public space where the right kinds of deliberative possibilities are created and fostered.

MJ: How do you think technology or how we think about technology will progress in the next few years or decades? Are you optimistic? Are you worried?

SJ: I think that we’ve made a lot of really fundamental discoveries and I think that frontiers we didn’t think we were going to be able to crack are, in different ways, in view. I don’t think we’re quite at the threshold of immortality yet, but we have to ask ourselves what we want out of immortality. Does it mean that the generation that achieves immortality just sits there forever, and we never propagate anymore or there’s nothing new that ever happens to the world ever again? One has to allow oneself a little time to reflect on those kinds of things. I don’t see the technological frontier as receding. I don’t see science as stopping, nor would I want it to—it’s a kind of creativity that I’m totally in favor of. But I also think that with all of that comes a huge potential for scaling things up too fast or heedlessly, not even because we failed to predict it. Climate change is there as a reminder that we can get richer and safer societies that are also consuming more and more to the point where the stability of Earth’s systems is being challenged at potentially catastrophic levels. I don’t think we can stop that. Just the very same worries I have about prediction on the positive progressive side—I mean, predictions that say we’ll be great, we’ll be fine—also apply to predictions that are too catastrophic. I’m not sure we get those predictions right either.

What I’ve advocated is just a more humble and self-aware approach to the ways in which we use technology, a wider diffusion of responsibility. Scientists not saying, “Oh, all we’re doing is the science and the regulators will pick it up”; lawyers not saying, “Oh the scientists will tell us the facts and we will make the decisions on the basis of those facts.” But a more widely shared burden on the part of society to keep asking, “What are our collective values, what kind of world do we want to bequeath to our children, and to what extent are these particular technological developments helping us go in those directions? I think that corporations, every bit as much as governments, social movements, and universities—we all have a role to play in asking those questions. I don’t think anybody should have a monopoly on that responsibility.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Technological Innovation Doesn’t Have to Make Us Less Human

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What’s the Best Way to Purify Water When Camping?

by FletaSWTvba Posted on August 12, 2016

If you’re going camping or backpacking, you’re going to need water. How much? Plan onaround a gallon a day for drinking, especially if you’re doing a lot of hiking or climbing, plus as much as 1/2 gallon for cooking, and another quart or so for some personal hygiene, like washing your hands and face and brushing your teeth.

If you’re not at a campsite that offers purified water, you’ll have to treat whatever the available water source is yourself. As delightful as a fresh mountain stream or lake might look, it’s never a good idea to drink the water you find in the wild without taking precautions. Rivers, streams and lakes in all likelihood contain microscopic pathogens that could cause severe diarrhea, cramps, vomiting and fever.

These pathogens could include parasites and viruses from human or animal feces, and bacteria like E.coli. They could make you sick during your trip, and hang on long after.

To stay safe, here are some ways to filter or purify your water.

Boiling

Boiling is probably the tried and true method for purifying water. However, boiling requires a heat source, which means either a camp stove or fire, and it doesn’t necessarily filter out any particles in the water. If you’re hiking along and run out of water, it’s tedious to boil and cool water on the trail. Plus, whatever fuel you use for boiling water you won’t be able to use for cooking food. Given the many alternatives there are for purifying water, boiling shouldn’t be on the top of your list. But if you do need to boil water, pour it through a coffee filter or cheese cloth to strain out mud, stones and other particles before you boil and drink it.

Chemicals

Iodine or chlorine dioxide tablets or solution will kill harmful bacteria, though again, they don’t filter gunk out of the water. The upside is that they’re inexpensive and effective. The downside is that you need to wait 30 minutes for the chemicalsto work, and iodine in particular leaves the water with a terrible taste. I trekked 150 miles through the Himalayas and past the Mt. Everest base camp drinking water I purified using only iodine tablets and never got sick once. But I’d probably try chlorine dioxide if I went again. NOTE: Iodine is not effective against Cryptosporidium; chlorine dioxide is. Also, do not use iodine tablets if you’re pregnant or have a thyroid condition.

Filters

Filters strain water through an internal element that captures protozoa and bacteria as well as fine particles. They’re not effective at isolating viruses, but that’s less a problem in North America than in developing countries. A filter may operate either by pumping, squeezing the bottle or sipping water through a filter component in a bottle, or via gravity. The GravityWorks filter won high marks from Outdoor Gear lab because it is fast, light, can filter a lot of water at one time and requires very little maintenance. The much smaller Sawyer Miniis anotherexcellent option, but is less efficient. LifeStraw offers an actual straw filter that the company says you can use to suck water directly out of its source. The company also sells the LifeStraw mission, a water bag you fill and then connect to the straw purifier to remove all contaminants.

Purifiers

Purifiers function very much like filters, though some purifiers add a chemical component to their system. The water purifier that seems to get the best reviews across the board is the MSR Guardian Purifier. Though it’s also the most expensive purifier, the MSR rates particularly highly because it doesn’t clog up the way some other filters and purifiers do. Reports Backpacker.com, if you needto clean “bottle after bottle of the world’s gunkiest water, this is your filter.”

UV Purifiers

These purifiers expose water to ultraviolet light and can tackle protozoa, bacteria and viruses. They can work as quickly as 90 seconds to purify 32 fl. oz. of water. One big downside is that they’re not as effective in dirty or murky water, so you’ll have to filter the water before you treat it with UV.

REI offers and excellent overview of various water filter options here.

Gear Finder by Backpacker reviews specific products here.

Related:

Drink From Your Book With This New Water Purifier
Why Tap Water is Best

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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What’s the Best Way to Purify Water When Camping?

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Check Out This Good Read About Bad Sex

by WandaRoygqir Posted on July 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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We all know that a “sex object” is an old, degrading stereotype of a woman as nothing more than an objectified plaything for randy men. So why would Jessica Valenti—a feminist blogger and social commentator—choose Sex Object as the title of her troubling new memoir?

One reason is that Valenti has endured a lot of bad sex—the just-get-it-over-with sex, the drunk sex, the unsatisfying hand jobs—and she shares every demeaning detail. When it’s not bad sex, it’s the boldest kind of sexual harassment. A stranger on the subway cums on the back of Valenti’s jeans. Another stranger in a car asks for directions and grabs Valenti’s shoulder while shaking his dick at her. Like an index of trolling, back pages of the book list the vile insults strangers on the internet launched from the safe anonymity of their screens.

This all makes for exhausting reading. How is it possible that Valenti could experience one more miserable episode of violation? The answer is that she can, when she goes to bed with another selfish guy who treats her like a sex object and ignores any desires she might have. And on. And on.

And yet, just when you start rolling your eyes and wondering why she keeps getting herself into these situations, you realize that all the repetition actually makes an important point: This dreary and repetitive sex is what life is actually like for lots of women. Valenti doesn’t sugarcoat—she’s not here to make you feel better—because this is a book that isn’t just for her core audience of women.

“I do hope that more men read it,” Valenti tells Mother Jones. “I’ve heard from men, progressive-minded guys, ‘I understood this on a logical level, but I didn’t necessarily understand how unrelenting it all felt,’ which is a big part of the way that sexism impacts our lives. It’s about that cumulative impact; it’s about that no escape from it.”

For Valenti, who has more than 117,000 Twitter followers and writes about modern feminism for the Guardian, the harassment comes 24/7. When asked how she deals with the constant flow of abuse online—the cutting tweets, the hate-filled emails, the comments sections that debate her attractiveness—she laughs. “Xanex, mostly,” she jokes. But, of course, it’s not that simple.

“I’m forever changed by it, I’m fucked up by it, I’m not coping in the most extraordinary way, because I can’t imagine that any person could or would,” she says. “It’s a really strange and terrible thing to deal with.”

The sheer amount of nastiness and vitriol does sometimes make her want to simply quit logging on, Valenti says. But the more serious consequence is how the fear of harassment discourages young writers from diverse backgrounds from contributing online. “I can’t tell them, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, do it anyway, it’s fine.’ But I feel like we’re losing out on this whole generation of writers from marginalized communities because they don’t want to put up with the harassment and threats, and I can’t blame them,” she says. “But it means that the art that’s out in the world, the culture that we’re creating, is limited because of that.””

The good news is that at the same time, the web provides an expansive outlet for the feminist movement. Valenti herself is a co-founder of the blog Feministing, and she’s optimistic about the explosion of women’s personal stories online. “When men write about their personal lives, and especially their sex lives, it’s brave and amazing and an objective tale of a universal human experience, but when women do it, it’s navel-gazing or it’s frivolous or silly or not real writing—not worthy in any way, which I think obviously has a lot to do with misogyny,” she said. “But I think, being an optimist, that it’s turning around a little bit. Online feminism…really started with women’s personal stories—LiveJournals, Tumblrs. That’s very much the heart of what’s happening right now.”

But Sex Object isn’t all hard truths men need to hear. Valenti examines her feelings about motherhood in a gut-wrenchingly honest, complex way. She writes about both of her abortions, her PTSD after a complicated and dangerous labor that resulted in the premature birth of her daughter, and her feelings of guilt as her young daughter wrestled with selective mutism—a childhood anxiety disorder in which her daughter would only speak in certain situations and with select people.

“My daughter is now five, and I continue to be interested in the way becoming a mother also lends itself to feeling dehumanized or objectified in a weird way,” Valenti said. “The cultural expectations around motherhood…feel like you need to be a mother first before you’re a human being. The idea around selflessness is a nice idea, and of course you want to be selfless, but it does sort of indicate this lack of sense of self that I think is troubling.”

Original source – 

Check Out This Good Read About Bad Sex

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