it's the food chain, stupid.

from today's washington post:

Overfishing of powerful sharks--a top predator in the ocean--may endanger bay scallops, a gourmet delicacy.

With fewer sharks to devour them, skates and rays have increased sharply along the East Coast and they are gobbling up shellfish, particularly bay scallops, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Ecologists have known that reducing key species on land can affect an entire ecosystem, but this study provides hard data for the same thing in the ocean, said lead author Charles H. Peterson of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina. . . .

"We were able to show why these top predators matter," Peterson said. "We knew the answer right there, that there was a consequence."

[insert sound of head banging on cheap formica desktop]

i'm sorry, i'm currently suffering a pamela-isley-esque fit of antihuman rage and would like to wash the majority of folks right out of the planet's hair and repopulate the world with vines and reeds. i know that isn't nice, but sometimes i simply can not control my despair. did someone think the sharks didn't matter? did some ecologist somewhere think that the ocean was immune to the laws governing the rest of the natural world? is no common sense being exercised by anyone anywhere at all? why do we have to work so hard to convince people that there are consequences? WHY DOES NO ONE CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES UNTIL THEY CUT INTO THE SUPPLY OF FRESH SHELLFISH???

despair, i say, and i'm going home to tend to my lilies. enjoy your scallops while they last, fools, and please, please, do not decide the solution is to take out the skates and rays. or do, i don't care; maybe it will be the thing that finally puts the plants in the lead.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

after a boston-area woman was shot in the head and killed by a stray bullet while leaving an acquaintance's home around 4 AM this past saturday, boston's mayor menino demanded an immediate end to--what? can you guess? not gun sales, not gang violence . . .

late-night parties. these, according to menino, are the root of all of the crime and assorted evils taking place in the commonwealth of massachusetts. and this most recent call to arms is simply icing on the mayor's fold-up-the-streets-at-dusk cake: in january the city instituted a mandatory 11 PM stop time on all events allowing the attendance of people under the age of twenty-one, a move the mayor and his staff have offered zero concrete data in support of and which strikes me as arbitrary, knee-jerk, and poorly informed. i've been going to clubs and concerts since i was fifteen, and from what i've seen it's never the people under twenty-one who are causing problems; the troublemakers on the streets are generally drunks of legal age who just happen to be idiots and/or assholes, and while boston's done its best to keep them in line with a hopelessly insufficient late-night public transportation system (i'm still not sure if city officials are trying to keep people from going out or to effect some sort of darwinian drunk-driving-induced thinning of the herd), that particular crowd will not be stopped by any such measure.

i used to think menino was a bit of a magoo--well-intentioned, if somewhat bumbling and slightly socially oblivious--but now i'm under the impression that he is, at his heart, a crotchety, delusional old coot. forget the fact that saturday's gunfire was apparently entirely unrelated to the party the victim was leaving and was initiated by individuals who had not been in attendance; forget the fact that the victim was doing nothing more rowdy or rebellious than walking from a house to a car in front of that house; forget, too, that even if she was minding her own business, she was on the street in the middle of the night in a known high-crime neighborhood: ALL PARTYING AFTER MIDNIGHT DRAWS THE DEVIL. in menino's own words, "we know all those parties bring bad events in our city." not the weapons or the potentially inadequate law enforcement--the parties. THE PARTIES.

do you think those puritans would ever have braved the open seas and colonized this forbidding wilderness if they had known that in only a few short centuries it would be the hedonistic free-for-all it's become? you night owls have dedicated your bacchanalian lives to disgracing an entire state and its honorable legacy, and now your revelry has claimed another victim. for shame.

grunge gone green

could pearl jam be any cooler? not only have they produced consistently stellar tunes since almost single-handedly saving the world from cheesy metal bands and rallied for political righteousness every chance they've gotten, they've also put together a carbon portfolio strategy, which comprises nine environmental organizations the band has deemed most worthy of backing, and included it on their web site, right next to the merch table. from the band's "activism" page:

The Carbon Portfolio Strategy is the newest component of our ongoing efforts to advance clean renewable energy and carbon mitigation. Through this Strategy, we will donate a total of $100,000 to nine organizations doing innovative work around climate change, renewable energy, and the environment.

We hope that by highlighting and creating a commons for these groups, we can advance preservation of existing ecosystems, restoration of degraded environments, and continued investment in clean, renewable energy technologies. Furthermore, by working with these groups and others to mitigate our own carbon emissions, we ultimately hope to get Pearl Jam at 0% net emissions for our tours and businesses.

i can't tell you how warm and fuzzy it is to know that musicians i've loved as long and hard as i've loved pearl jam are every bit as dedicated to the earth as they are to their fans. and they are exceptionally dedicated to those fans: when i was in their fan club, in the early 90s, i was able to score pre-sale tickets to all of their concerts--a perk they still offer. in tenth grade, my best friend wrote a letter to the band's drummer, inviting him (largely, but not entirely, jokingly) to our class ring dance. when he got the letter he called her house and talked to her for about an hour. the dance had come and gone, but to prove how flattered he was by the request he set her up with seven floor-seat tickets for the band's next show in the area. that's some serious fan appreciation. everyone said i would regret having "pj" etched onto the inside of my high school class ring, but i still don't believe it. these guys just get better and better. while none of their t-shirts are made from organic cotton (yet), they are running their tour bus on biodiesel, and the truth of the matter is that using their status to promote environmental and political awareness as ardently as they have will likely have a far greater impact than switching up their fabrics ever could--not that they shouldn't consider doing it anyway (hint, hint, boys). rock stars are heroes to a lot of people, some of them still young and malleable, and their actions--whether they're smashing instruments on stage or protesting strip mining--can have significant and lasting influence. eddie vedder has said that continuing to play an activist role has helped to make him feel eternally young; the fact that he and his bandmates are still inspiring and motivating me sixteen years after i first heard of them makes me a lot less concerned about getting old.

overheard in the office: the tragicomic banter of boston's finest

"i like ellen--as long as she keeps the gay stuff out of it, i like her fine. i don't care for the gay stuff. i'm an old-fashioned girl, and i say she needs to get back into the closet where she belongs. narrow-minded of me, i know, but i don't care. i'm trying to be a better person, but it isn't working."

oh, honey, we know you're trying. you're trying so hard it hurts. of course, it mostly hurts me, but still . . .

the blue-chip blues

since last summer, when i sat in on my first-ever 401k meeting and was told that if i had any brains i'd start building a diversified portfolio that included some top-notch, dependable corporations like wal-mart and philip morris right that second, i have wondered how i will survive once i turn 65. i do not want to invest in wal-mart. i do not want to support philip morris. i have no interest in funding or benefiting from any business i am not a contented consumer of. but where does that leave me? the most successful businesses, to the best of my knowledge, are almost never the most planet or people friendly, and the trend seems to be for the big, bad companies to get bigger and badder and the earnest, kindhearted endeavors to be mushed into so much opaque goo like fruitflies on a countertop. i feel bad enough about where my paycheck is coming from—ever since sonia shah enlightened me about american pharmaceutical companies' tendency to conduct dubious clinical trials overseas, unfettered by the burdens of informed consent or structured oversight, i have scanned every medical study submitted for publication with a squeamish, twitching eye—and i'm generally quite careful about where i spend it, though i accept that there's no such thing as a perfect business. but if investing turns out to be as essential to my future financial well-being as everyone keeps insisting it is, will my sentimental pinkoism be an option? is this why activism is predominantly a youth-centric phenomenon? is my choice doomed, in the end, to be between my soul and my savings?

at the time of the meeting, my decision was to not devote any time to anwering those questions and to instead go on putting my money into a bank account like i've always done, because i'm relatively young and don't intend to bring any dependents into the world, and at this point even surviving to 65 is a notion i'm fairly ambivalent about. so i'll never retire early and spend my golden years learning how to play the piano and speak perfectly accented gaelic; so what? i'll have done what i believed was right—or at least, i'll not have done some things i was pretty certain were wrong—and that'll be just fine.

but once i turned 28 i found i was unable to stop thinking of myself as 30, and 30 kind of looks like 40, and when i'm 40 my parents will be getting ready to retire, and god knows they're not holding significant stock in coca-cola, or anything at all, and they're still paying off the second mortgage they took out to remodel the kitchen, which isn't quite halfway remodeled, and someday someone will have to take care of them, and it won't be my sister because even though she's finally moved into her own apartment she still stops by my parents' house once a week to demand cash for gas and cigarettes, so it'll probably be me, but if i pay off my car loan just so i can take out a new loan for a condo and never manage to put more than $200 a month into that savings account with its 4.5 percent apr, how will i make sure that they never have to sell that house, which they've dedicated all that time and labor to remodeling, because they can't afford the heating bills anymore? what if someone gets sick? what if a satellite crashes through the roof? what if i have a near-death experience at 43 and decide i must spend at least a year in the rainforest canopy of madagascar documenting the mating rituals of ring-tailed lemurs? how will i afford to pay someone to water my plants while i'm gone?

*sigh* it seemed i would have to start feathering the nest after all, even if only because i am neurotic and plagued by obsessive guilt and an overbearing tendency toward fix-it-ness. knowing i wouldn't be able to wring any satisfactory advice from my coworkers, i turned to other venues. the search yielded both good news and bad, and i would prefer to get the bad out of the way. so.

some of you may already be familiar with the vice fund, a mutual fund that invests exclusively in industries considered immoral, unhealthy, or otherwise distasteful, and which are thus guaranteed to be profitable until the rapture and beyond (the web site refers to them as "recession-proof"—essentially the same thing, but slightly more inviting). it specializes in tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and, curiously, aerospace and defense. i say curiously not because i think the u.s. aerospace and defense programs are spectacular or spectacularly moral—i do not—but because even i would never have thought to categorize them as a vice. a waste of money, maybe, or a national penile implant . . . leave it to the experts, i suppose, to remind me that a vice is simply an unnecessary, self-interested, often misguided indulgence that does the indulger little to no net good, whether that indulger is an individual or country. the fund was started in 2002 and has provided average returns of nearly 19 percent to antihumanitarians devoid of any semblance of a social conscience for the past three years. i had the heartbreaking misfortune to catch charles norton, the vice fund's portfolio manager, speaking to debbie elliott on a recent npr broadcast. if i had to pick one favorite quote, i guess it would be this one:

one of the most important things that we like about these is that the government is a large beneficiary, uh, particularly in gaming and tobacco. what that means is that the government has a financial incentive to, uh, make sure that these industries flourish. . . . we don't perceive socially responsible funds as our competitors; socially responsible funds need to do what's in the best interests of their shareholders, which is all we try to do as well.

well, we already knew that the government *hearts* tobacco, didn't we? and i hope you weren't kidding yourself about how it honestly felt about you. "but," debbie wants to know, "don't you ever feel bad or even guilty about investing in products that do take such a toll on society and, in the case of tobacco, even kill people?" i bet maybe some of you are curious, too; well, mr. norton? don't you?

no, because when you're a serious investor, you have to check your emotions at the door. emotions are the enemy when it comes to making sound investment decisions, so we don't come at this with any personal biases. we come at this just as a purely objective analyst, and in our perspective, those types of judgments have no place in the investment process.

well, i thought, that settles it: i am not cut out for serious investing. i'll have to make one final investment in a new mattress big enough to hide all my money in and/or under, because my emotions refuse to be left anywhere, regardless of the circumstances, and now i'm all worried about what sort of bedevilment my bank might be up to. sorry, mom; i know we grew up in that house and all of our childhood pets are buried next to the deck, but one of us will probably have a pet when you move to your economy retirement village, so we can bury something there, too. dad, you'd better lay off either the beer or the burgers, because i'm not going to be able to help you out with hospital bills for liver and heart problems; you pick one or the other and commit to it. if you need me, i'll be in a fetal position on the floor of my closet, whimpering and cursing the free market. sometimes when i do that i don't hear the phone right away, so go ahead and leave a message, and yes, i am getting enough calcium. oh, woe and anguish, oh sadness and despair, oh world where a successful portfolio manager's number one rule is "don't sample the merchandise."

but you remember, don't you, when i said there would be good news?

socially conscious, or "virtue," funds have been around for years—longer than the vice fund—and while they do pretty well and certainly make investments worthy of their title, most of the funds are affiliated with specific religions. i am not affiliated with a specific religion, and while i feel fine about all of the religions out there, i wasn't sure about throwing my lot in with one i wasn't a part of just to make a few bucks. it seemed, well, sinful. in addition, it's rare to find a virtue fund that's truly virtuous across the board; an environmentally focused fund might look the other way if a company with a strong record of conservation and minimal pollution exercised poor corporate governance, for example, and vice versa. you are forced, effectively, to choose your poison and either inject it into the veins of the working class or dump it into a river. this may be a preferable alternative to zero-conscience investing, but it didn't exactly ring my bell.

well, a few days ago i discovered the blue fund, which offers two diversified mutual funds based on "core progressive values like environmental sustainability, community participation and respect for human rights." companies included in the portfolios are routinely investigated to ensure their commitment to these values—all of them—is sincere and ongoing; they're also required to have made the majority of any corporate political donations to democratic candidates or organizations. while i'm iffy on the political mandate, there is, as i said, no such thing as a perfect business, and since i can't remember the last time i backed a candidate who wasn't a democrat it's not the end of the world for me. and even if i were a republican, if i still felt as strongly about all of those other issues as i do i'd probably be willing to accept the trade-off. this being the wonderfully free country that it is, conservatives are more than welcome to do their best to organize a red fund that accomplishes all of the same goals for the other side. the blue fund portfolios are still peppered with pharmaceutical companies and retail monoliths, but at least they are being watched by people who appear to have clutched their emotions to their chests and barreled right through the door with them. take that, charles norton.

probably, in the end, the ideal approach for me would be to build my own portfolio one fastidiously researched company at a time; but given my utter dearth of investment savvy and the degree to which i overanalyze the merit and morality of EVERY SINGLE FREAKING LITTLE THING, that task is a bit more than i could accomplish right now. at this point i am simply relieved to know that i am not alone in my desire to back things i'm actually happy to stand behind, and that more motivated people who share that desire have created some options for me. it's such a relief, in fact, that it's almost like being 28 again. that means i can wait to fill out that ira paperwork until next year, by which time i'm certain the stock market will be dominated by wind farms, electric cars, and cradle-to-cradle computer manufacturers, making the whole process that much easier. i may get to keep my soul—in all of its pink, blue, and green glory—after all.

tuesday picture-round blogging

the photo above depicts:

a) a serious policy discussion taking place between two high-ranking british officials regarding plans for aggressive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

b) a pivotal scene in the new bbc docudrama, coming out of the cabinet: the secret lives of the downing street elite.

c) a surprisingly bawdy tony blair telling environment secretary david miliband that if he's "interested in warm globes, i've got a pair you might like to explore."

d) all of the above.

friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear ralph nader,

my articles editor told me this week that he was a year behind you in college at princeton and was very impressed by your investigations into the goings-on in the campus kitchen. he didn't mention your attempts to reveal the chilling impact of ddt; i suppose he wasn't aware of them, seeing as how you were laughed out of the campus newspaper office when you spoke up about your ideas. anyhow, this means that i am now separated from jon stewart by only two degrees, and this makes me very happy. i'm sorry so many americans still blame you for making bush president instead of blaming themselves for having hard-ons for tax breaks, and i hope people are saying lots of nice things about your movie.

buckle up,

juniper

let your lite (brite) shine down

berdovsky and stevens, guerilla advertisers for hire and enemies of the state, went quietly and peacefully to court today to face the ham-handed, farcical charges of placement of a hoax device and disorderly conduct and were sent away sans resolution, their hearing having been continued to march 30. i can only hope that this means the charges will be quietly and sensibly dropped in a closed-door discussion on a day when people will not be camped out waiting for a verdict, allowing city officials to do the right thing while scraping the dried, crusty egg off their faces in a slightly more private fashion.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

here's ann coulter being ann coulter, an act that warrants some distaste at its best and makes me choke back vomit and tears of fury at its nadir:



note the reaction of her audience, which transitions smoothly from "oooooh, you rake!" sounds of faux shock to indulgent applause. she was following mitt romney, who is now the stepford wife of the hard right but who pretended to forgive abortion and care about civil rights while he was working in massachusetts. he lied to us, people, and he will lie to you. i'm sure you're proud of him now for tying himself up in knots to make sure gay marriage was as difficult to come by as possible in the state in which he was governor even after the populace had voted to make it readily obtainable, but the truth is he's only out for himself. and ann coulter. and that's a bad thing.

tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé

i'm sure that by now you've heard about the mysterious and massive drop in the honeybee population that has occurred over the last six or so months. the source is an undefined ailment being referred to, in the gently sterile and simplistic manner in which so many conditions are now discussed, as "colony collapse disorder." the problem was first reported on by bee experts at penn state, who were notified last november by dave hackenberg, a pennsylvania-based beekeeper who lost close to two-thirds of his bee colonies in about three months for no readily discernible reason. along with deaths and disappearances, the "disorder" appears to cause behavioral changes in the bees that amount to a sort of dementia--the bees don't care for their young or tend to the hive the way they typically would, they seem reluctant to eat their own honey stores or offered food, and queens have been seen ambling around outside their hives. while similar events have occurred in a more limited fashion in american bee populations in the past, ccd has reached pandemic proportions in past months and is leaving workers in both the apicultural and agricultural industries chewing their lips and furrowing their brows. professionally maintained honeybee colonies are responsible for close to a third of commercial plant pollination, and decreases in the population as significant as those being reported across the country right now could have serious impacts on produce yields, which could potentially shake up the economy in a big way. bugs matter, apparently. i can't help but think i've heard someone say that before . . .

in an ironic, unfortunate, and perhaps poetic-justice-infused turn, there's a chance that the industry may have, at least in part, brought this upon itself. postmortem examinations of afflicted bees have revealed signs of severely weakened immune systems, including high rates of fungal and bacterial infections. some showed evidence of the honeybee equivalent of kidney disease, with tubule inflammation and pyloric scarring apparent in up to 45 percent of the samples studied. the digestive tracts of dead bees contained pollen grains that seemed intact or undigested, an entirely abnormal finding. one theory is that immunosuppression could have been brought on by stress caused by things like frequent hive relocation (many beekeepers are migrant and move bees from location to location depending on which crops are currently flowering and/or in need of pollination) or hive splitting, an intrusive but fairly routine procedure in which ill or weakened colonies are physically merged with healthier colonies or given a new queen. hive splitting can also increase the rate of infestation or disease spread; if the beekeepers don't recognize the symptoms before they attempt to replenish the hive, they could be infecting an otherwise healthy colony and then moving it across state lines. in some cases, drought, hive overcrowding, or forced pollination of crops with minimal nutritional value for the bees led to diminished bee health, which would have left them more vulnerable to microbial or parasitic infestation. by treating their charges as a commodity rather than as living creatures with health requirements, even the most knowledgeable and seasoned beekeepers may be inducing their own losses. in the past these losses have been manageable and generally compensated for, but everything catches up with everyone eventually.

another theory, widely posited but difficult to prove, is that pesticides and insecticides used in commercial agriculture are responsible for the die-outs. the ccd working group has zeroed in specifically on neonicotinoids, a relatively new class of pesticides that the epa has classified as highly toxic to honeybees in cases of acute exposure. in combination with certain fungicides, the toxicity of neonicotinoids displays a thousand-fold increase. both neonicotinoids and the fungicides in question are widely used, particularly in corn and sunflower production. imidacloprid, a chemical in the neonicotinide family whose use in agriculture has recently increased, has also been shown to impair the memory and brain metabolism of bees, which would explain ccd-stricken bees' reported tendency to disappear from the hive or behave in a generally addled manner. unfortunately, there is little documentation of the pesticide's long-term or cumulative effect on bees, and it can be almost impossible to verify an entire colony's pollen sources. investigations into the levels and types of pesticide residues in affected hives are ongoing, but the lack of official proof to date hasn't led most researchers to cross it off their list of likely causes. the mites, viruses, and fungi affecting honeybees now have been common for decades and have never led to colony deaths on the current scale; something has to have changed.

i am, as you could probably have guessed, deeply saddened and more than a little frightened by the bee plague. i'm also terribly disappointed, as a lack of human foresight on at least one front is probably at its root. what has to happen before we learn to explore an action's consequences beyond its immediate impact on our finances? why would any farm that depended on honeybees to pollinate its crops use a pesticide that was proven to be dangerous to honeybees? a single night of frost in california makes network news broadcasts everywhere, leading every fruit-consuming individual in the continental united states to groan and whine for days about how much more they'll have to pay for orange juice, but a 50 percent reduction in an essential link of the food chain responsible for $14 billion worth of crop production warrants zero public discussion? nobody thinks they'll miss the bees, i guess, but we are, on the whole, not very smart about deciding what we do and don't want.

well, i love you, bees. i love you and i'm rooting for you, and i hope that all of you who have wandered away from your hives have banded together and formed a brave new colony in some bee shangri-la that no human can reach or pollute, and if you must remain there giggling and buzzing while we all kick ourselves for not treating you right while we had the chance, i won't hold it against you. if, on the other hand, you are in need of a place to hang your hats, you are always welcome in my mother's compost bin, no matter how many rude things my father mutters at you on his way past. ignore him. he doesn't understand.