By Gretchen Gibbs

While my health today is excellent, five years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer, a potentially life-threatening experience that also made me feel like a fool. I had the estrogen-positive variety of the disease, meaning it had been stoked by estrogen, prescribed by my gynecologist. This is a familiar story, how estrogen was regarded by the medical profession as a way to lessen the chances of breast cancer, but when the “best science” study was conducted, it was discovered actually to increase rates of the illness.

For the past few years I have been taking the standard post-treatment for my kind of breast cancer, a drug which counteracts the effects of whatever estrogen the body is still producing, and leads to some nasty side effects including severe arthritis, hot flashes, and depression. In the past weeks I have found new articles in the Times and Wall Street Journal showing how in some conditions estrogen does reduce the likelihood of breast cancer.

What’s a person to do? New directives from medical science are always contradicting the old ones. Don’t eat eggs. It’s OK to eat eggs. Eat margarine, not butter. Eat butter, not margarine. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Don’t bother. Most of these changes are laughable, but the breast cancer example, at least for me, is not.

I was educated to believe in scientific progress. Medicine might make mistakes, but these would be corrected with time, and eventually we would understand almost everything about how the body works, just as we would understand the workings of the atom and the universe. A recent article in the New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer about the scientific method questions this premise. Entitled “The Truth Wears Off,” the article describes the “decline effect,” the phenomenon that, over time, “truths” in science become less able to be proved. Second generation anti-psychotic drugs, for instance, once provided dramatic improvement for patients compared to their functioning under the older class of drugs. Today, studies are concluding that the old drugs are cheaper and just as good. Lehrer describes a number of similar declines in what we have regarded as scientific truths, in the social and physical sciences.

The possible reasons he describes for the “decline effect” are several. Unless the study is a clear double blind, with neither experimenter nor subject aware of which is the experimental and which the control condition, biases from both participants can affect the result. Significant experimental findings are sometimes a consequence of unusual variation in scores, which will diminish on retest, a phenomenon called regression to the mean. Journals are only likely to accept significant findings, so that negative findings languish in the experimenter’s desk drawer. Granting agencies and pharmaceutical companies do not want to submit negative findings to journals. All of these factors contribute to a spate of positive findings in our scientific journals which do not hold up well on retest.

While Lehrer is not attacking the fundamentals of the scientific method themselves, he is implying that science, as it is practiced, is not likely to arrive at enduring truths. He concludes that once the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. This is a troubling notion, since neither Lehrer nor anyone else has come up with criteria to help us choose. The danger is that science will be rejected altogether, with a kind of New Age arbitrariness, leaving us victim to charlatans and quacks. While there may be other avenues to truth, rejection of science seems to me dangerous.

I would like to come up with some criteria to help us choose what to believe. I would like to find some way to reassure myself and others that science is the right path. All I can say is that I think medical science played a role in causing my breast cancer, since I had few risk factors other than taking estrogen. Yet I know that the next time I’m ill, I’ll go to the doctor, not the shaman, and see what’s prescribed. I may not take it though.
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Gretchen Gibbs is a clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is currently writing, and working at a domestic violence agency. Reach her at guestwriter@zestoforange.com.

In our culture, “dirt” is a derogatory term, like “dirt poor,” “dirty,” or “soiled.” Yet, we need only look back a few years to the 1930s Dust Bowl to see how important dirt really is. In the 1930s, the prairie grasses were plowed under to grow crops. After several years of intense drought, the soils dried out and no crops or native grasses survived to hold the topsoil in place. Winds whipped the topsoil into huge dust storms, causing many families to become refugees, and the loss of more than 5 inches of topsoil from almost 10 million acres, according to the United Nations.

Five inches may not sound like much, but it takes nature up to 500 years to produce 1 inch of topsoil. We are depleting our topsoil at a rate 10 times greater than nature can replenish it, according to several studies. Topsoil loss is three times worse in more populated countries like China and Africa. Chinese topsoil can be found in Hawaii during the spring planting season, blown in the wind to the islands from tilling. African topsoil can be found in Brazil and Florida, according to a USDA report. American topsoil often winds up in our rivers and streams as silt. Many rivers are now brown from topsoil erosion such as the Wallkill River and parts of the Hudson.

Our diet and farming practices are the main culprits behind topsoil erosion. Corn is one of the most environmentally-devastating crops to grow. The soil must be tilled, keeping it loose and dry, and vulnerable to erosion. Most of this corn is fed to animals or shipped overseas. For every pound of beef (fed with corn) we lose 5 pounds of fertile topsoil, according to a Harvard School of Public Health study. This adds up to more than 2 million acres of topsoil lost every year. On top of this, we lose another million acres to urban sprawl.

“Land degradation and desertification may be regarded as the silent crisis of the world, a genuine threat to the future of humankind,” says Andres Arnalds, assistant director of the Icelandic Soil Conservation Service. “Soil and vegetation is being lost at an alarming rate around the globe, which in turn has devastating effects on food production and accelerates climate change.”

A highly effective tool to conserve topsoil is the Conservation Reserve Program, according to Lester Brown of the Earth Policies Institute. Under the program, farmers were paid to plant trees or “cover crops,” such as clover, on highly erodible farmland. Reducing tillage was also encouraged. These techniques in combination reduced U.S. topsoil loss from 3.1 billion tons in 1982 to 1.9 billion tons in 1997.

Here are a few things you can do to reduce top soil loss:

– Compost fall leaves and vegetable trimmings. Use the compost to enrich the soil in your yard or garden.

– Eat only pasture-raised local meats and avoid corn-fed factory farmed meats.

– Don’t buy or support biofuels made from corn.

Lavendar Field

A year or so ago, I bought a painting by Patrice Lynne Young, a Georgia artist whose work I love. It was a painting of lavender fields rolling off to mountains in the background. I loved the painting and still do, and I look at it every day and appreciate it.

A year or so ago, in my show at the Wallkill River School, Shawn Dell Joyce and I demonstrated our painting techniques. I demonstrated palette-knife painting, using Patrice’s painting for inspiration.

The painting here is the painting I started during that demo.

I began it and then invited people watching to participate, and lo and behold, they did! They all had fun, and for the most part, made marks that made sense in terms of the painting. A couple really didn’t, and so I never finished the painting, never knew what to do with it.

But it has intrigued me for a year, and I have looked at it for a year, and so, one day last week, I pulled it out and went to town.

I guess it’s fair to say that this is my painting – but it is my painting based on a painting by an artist whose work I love, and a painting informed and helped along by friends and strangers. And so, it is very much like life.

My show this year at the Wallkill River School – titled Rough at Hand, from a poem by Robert Hegge – is Saturday, Feb. 5.

Please save the date, and please come to the opening from 5-7 p.m. I will have new work, small work, big work, and exciting work! I think you will love seeing it in person, so please come, say hi, and let me thank you in person for your support.

The Wallkill River School is at 232 Ward St., (Route 17K), in Montgomery.

Rough at Hand

Love is like a landscape which doth stand,

Smooth at a distance, rough at hand.

– Robert Hegge

By Michael Kaufman

From Michael Sweeton, Warwick Town supervisor, to Mario Cuomo, our new state governor, to Barack Obama himself, elected officials across the country are taking aim at government workers and public school teachers as if they, their unions, and their pension plans are responsible for the current economic crisis. In a New Years eve reflection published in the weekly Warwick Advertiser, Sweeton noted that 2010 had been the most “challenging year” in recent memory. “A shrinking economy, stressed pension plans, and an uncertain future combined to affect us all,” said Sweeton.

Cuomo, upon taking office, immediately announced he would set an example by cutting his own salary by 5 percent….and freezing the salaries of state workers. As I read an editorial in the Times Herald-Record lauding the governor’s actions, I thought of the words of Anatole France: “The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Cuomo’s symbolic salary cut will have no impact on his lavish lifestyle. The salary freeze on state workers will hurt a lot of people.  As even the editorial writer admitted, these actions will have no impact on the state’s huge budget deficit.  Nevertheless, they said, they “set the right tone.”

President Obama has made similar noises about salary freezes and has thus far refused to speak out forthrightly against cuts in Social Security and other vital social programs, even as economic conditions force more Americans into joblessness and poverty. 

And fresh from their electoral victory in November, the Republicans who now control the House of Representatives are preparing to “return government back to the people”—in the words of new speaker John Boehner—by repealing health care reform, making permanent the Bush tax cuts for the rich, and loosening the recently enacted financial regulations aimed at protecting citizens from avaricious practices of financial institutions.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in 10 states intend to introduce bills that would make union dues optional for members, reports Steven Greenhill of The New York Times. Wisconsin’s governor wants to bar state workers from forming unions altogether. Ohio’s governor is launching the biggest assault on unions, says Greenhill, seeking to outlaw strikes by school teachers, prevent child care and home care workers from unionizing, and end a rule that non-union construction workers on public contracts be paid union-scale wages.

Just how much public support exists for the draconian measures advocated by corporate media outlets and local, state, and national politicians is debatable. According to a just-released 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, most Americans think the United States should raise taxes for the rich to balance the budget.  While Congressional Republicans are demanding spending cuts to curb the $1.3 trillion deficit, 61 percent of Americans polled would rather see taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to tackling the deficit, the poll showed. The next most popular way—chosen by 20 percent—was to cut defense spending.

Only four percent would cut the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly, and just three percent would cut the Social Security retirement program, the poll showed.  Asked which part of the world they would fix first, the largest proportion of respondents—36 percent –chose Washington, compared with 23 percent who picked the Middle East and 14 percent who chose Haiti.

The poll included a random sample of 1,067 adults across the U.S. from Nov. 29 to Dec. 2 and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus three percentage points, 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair said.

And in a fine column Jan. 5 in the Times Herald-Record, Meghan Murphy debunks the myth that public employees and their unions are to blame for the rising cost of government. She cites a study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research that found that government workers make four percent less than comparable private-sector workers. As for “those cushy benefits packages,” the report found “only a slight advantage for government workers, which balanced out the lower pay.”

And Murphy does not stop there.  After acknowledging that private-sector employees suffered losses during the recession, including wage freezes, furloughs, and closing of pension plans, she writes, “Does that mean we should scrape away the benefits that public workers retained through union contracts?

“Not if you think about a recent study by the Center for Labor Market Studies. The report says corporations used the recession to squeeze private-sector workers, laying people off and cutting pay as profits increased.”

She also gives the lie to the hype that labor unions wield undue influence in Albany. “This election cycle, 8.5 percent of campaign donations came from unions, according to an analysis by the New York Public Interest Research Group. About 27 percent of donations came from businesses, and about 25 percent came from just 169 individuals. Among those top check-writers—two hedge fund managers, two real estate investors, and a for-profit chatter school leader.”

Think about those numbers next time you hear a local, state, or national politician (Democrat or Republican) or one of the millionaire blowhards on talk radio or Fox News, railing against “stressed pension plans” of government employees and school teachers.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

Storm!

A big storm blew in, the day after Christmas, and for a stretch, the world was filled with wind and sky and the howling power of nature. The next day, you’d not have known such violence existed.

In the blanket of calm that came after the storm, I walked through our quiet, white yard, and felt like the only person in the word. My footsteps broke the surface, and I was the adventurer.

In the branches overhead, swaying in a sudden burst of wind, a hawk alighted and hung on. I stared up at him and he hesitated, spread his wings and glided off, an impossibly large creature wending through branches I’d not have thought a sparrow could fit through.

I love the violence of the storm, and the bout of peace that follows. Like waking and sleeping, breathing in and breathing out, it defines and sustains us all at once.

This was the fifth Christmas I’ve lived through without my mother, and the first I’ve gotten through without being swept by sadness. Time might not heal, but it covers the wind and the rage and the storming pain with something quiet and tender and not unlike the snow.

This painting is 36×48, oil on canvas. Please email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for price and delivery information.

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Our buildings account for more than half of our carbon emissions and three-quarters of the existing buildings will need to be renovated or remodeled in the next twenty years. We also have a small army of unemployed and underemployed contractors with tools just itching for something to do. What if these ingenious folks were put to work retrofitting existing buildings with energy efficient upgrades?

Cambridge, Mass. is doing just that, and setting an example for municipalities across the nation. Cambridge set the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 20 percent, and drawing 20 percent of municipal power from renewable sources. To meet these ambitious goals, a nonprofit, city-sponsored group was formed to create green collar jobs and increase building efficiency. The Cambridge Energy Alliance connects local business owners with energy efficiency experts and bankers willing to loan them the money for these upgrades. The Alliance generally reduces a business’ energy use 15-30 percent. The loans they help to secure are low interest and can be paid by the savings from the business’s utility bill. Retrofitting thousands of old buildings has helped to stimulate a “green collar” job market in Cambridge.

Green collar jobs that are generated by encouraging energy efficiency would include jobs like home energy auditors, insulation installers, weatherization workers, retrofitters for buildings, and solar installers for electricity and solar hot water systems, among other jobs. According to Van Jones, from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Oakland, CA’s Apollo Alliance, green collar jobs are manual-labor jobs that can’t be outsourced.

“You can’t take a building you want to weatherize, put it on a ship to China and then have them do it and send it back,” said Jones in a recent NY Times interview. “So we are going to have to put people to work in this country — weatherizing millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms. Those green-collar jobs can provide a pathway out of poverty for someone who has not gone to college.”

Picture this, your child graduates from high school and has the option of going away to college, or enrolling in a local trade school, which now includes green alternatives. Let’s say that young Sally, might have opted for “beautician” as the only viable local career last year, can now choose from a $12/hour job weatherizing senior housing, with potential to grow to $40/hour as a certified home energy auditor. Or perhaps your fledgling will start with $18/hour working as a solar technician, and work his way up to $50 per hour as a certified solar installer.

“If we can get these youth in on the ground floor of the solar industry now, where they can be installers today, they’ll become managers in five years and owners in 10. And then they become inventors,” said Jones to the NY Times. “The green economy has the power to deliver new sources of work, wealth and health to low-income people — while honoring the Earth. If you can do that, you just wiped out a whole bunch of problems.”

Photography By Rich Gigli

Great Falls, Paterson N.J.

Fire and Ice –
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great, and would suffice.
Robert Frost

By Jeffrey Page

I studiously avoid the state lottery. Except when I don’t. Once a year or so, I’ll buy a ticket that guarantees $50,000 a year for life. A modest sum in Lottery Land.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday afternoon I stopped in at a gas station for a roll of Tums and noticed the handwritten sign taped to the door. Top prize in the Mega Millions game was up to $332 million.

It was like the Sirens singing to Odysseus and his crew. I went inside and found myself staring in quiet contemplation at another sign taped to the Lottery ticket machine. Tums in one hand, five-dollar bill in the other, I couldn’t move.

“Going to do it?” the fellow behind the counter asked. Friendly guy.

“I don’t really approve and anyway it’s like running your money through a paper shredder,” I said.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said. Friendly.

I thought about all I could do with $332 million. Start a foundation whose mission would be to figure out how to re-take America from the extreme right. I would issue college scholarships, donate large sums to certain green organizations I admire. I would send hefty checks to some food banks I’ve helped far more modestly in the past.

I wouldn’t embarrass members of my family by asking if they needed some help. But if any of them, asked me, I’d write a check. No question.

Oh, and I’d buy a modest place to spend the winter, somewhere where it doesn’t snow. I’d buy a lot of music, and a subscription to the opera. Good seat in the orchestra.

Hey, you know, this millionaire business could be a lot of fun. I bought a ticket. “I knew you’d do the right thing,” he said, laughing.

I just bought that one ticket and had very serious second thoughts as I walked back to my car knowing the lottery is wrong. But then I wondered how high a stack $332 million would be in all $20 bills. Pretty high, I thought. (I discovered later that it would be almost 6,000 feet high; you could look it up and do the math.) I was impressed, quickly forgot about my misgivings, concentrated on three-hundred-thirty-two-million dollars, and was happy as I drove home.

I looked at the numbers on my ticket: 1-7-9-10-19-6. All low numbers. Can’t be good. Wait, this time it’ll be good because think of all the people I’d make happy with some of my $332 million. They say that winners of huge lottery prizes often wind up miserable, despised by their friends and family. Not in my case, of course.

I checked the paper on Wednesday morning. 4-8-15-25-47-42. The winning numbers seemed about as far away from my crummy numbers as you could get. Goodbye, opera.

But today I am an unmiserable man. My dollar’s gone. But I am once again moral. I again think that dangling big money before the public isn’t an ethical way to run government. But see me in a few months when the top prize again goes astronomical. Maybe we’ll have to talk about morals again.

What about you? Do you approve of the lottery as a revenue raiser, especially now in these hard times? Tell Zest of Orange. Oh yes, and what would you do if you won a nine-digit jackpot?

Reach Jeffrey at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.