Spring green...

…and gold and red and pink and purple…

This is not going to be on an environmental topic. At least, not directly. This is going to be about spring, my favorite season. There is the long slow awakening of nature, daffodil spears pushing up out of the earth, snowdrops defying the snow cover, purple crocuses daring to show color after the white winter. On a more mundane note, as a forerunner of the season there are the tulips for sale in the grocery stores right after Christmas. White, red, yellow, pink, and one that is pink and yellow combined. Some sort of tulip is on sale every week, and I buy whatever it is. Last week it was a fabulous bunch of double tulips in red, yellow and pink, a veritable fiesta, which explodes slowly as the week goes on. The stems grow and the flowers get larger and begin to reach out sideways. I love that.

Then comes the day when the tulips on my balcony bloom. White and yellow they are, and when it is as warm and sunny as it has been this year, the petals of the white ones spread out into huge discs with yellow in the center and black stamens. The yellow blossoms are tinged with green when they first come into bud and then each petal is thinly outlined in red. Seeing them up close every day is to appreciate each nuance as they develop.

This year I had two pots of grape hyacinths, one of my favorite flowers. They were all the rage in the florists’ a couple of years ago, usually grown in gray baskets. Beautiful! I planted mine in a gray box planter that fits nicely on the windowsill.

The miracle of plenteous growth also takes place on my balcony when the clematis sends up tiny shoots from the dead-looking cut back stems. These shoots grow rapidly, and soon have to be tied up to keep them upright. They will reach up, up, up to the ceiling and will have to be trained on wires across the wall. The leaves make a carpet of green and then will come the small purple bells, perfect for the small setting of a balcony. Out in nature the tiny new leaves are now appearing on the trees as exquisite green lace. The contrast between this delicacy and the great spread of trees full of its magnificence is perhaps the very definition of spring and announces the coming of summer, when the trees will cast welcome shade.

Best of all, perhaps, is the warmth of the sun after a cold winter. The balcony is perfect at this time of year, being on the south side and protected from breezes. I have brought the rug up from the cellar and taken out the table where I eat and work on my computer. There is room for a comfortable chair so that I can read and look up from time to time to appreciate whatever is in bloom. It is this continuous change and the coming of new blossoms that makes it all so alive.

Alive and hopeful, for there is winter in all aspects of life as well. To trust that spring will come in a difficult situation, after a painful loss or when inspiration has gotten lost in dullness is to trust in life itself.    

Eat, drink and be merry...

For tomorrow you may pay the penalty

A few days ago a friend said that she thought people who have

unhealthy life styles should not have their medical costs covered by insurance. Health insurance rates are sky-high, and it is unfair that people who live healthily have to pay for other people’s bad choices. While I see her point, loud inner voices were clamoring against this point of view, so I decided to check out some of the facts and look into the arguments for punitive measures and against them.

The facts are indeed shocking. Something like 20% of US health care costs are spent on obesity-related problems. Alcohol abuse costs the US economy more than $200 billion a year. Tobacco, drug addiction and risky behavior all take a toll as well, although smokers in the US apparently pay higher health insurance rates than do non-smokers.

Most of these costs are paid for by society, not only in high insurance premiums but also government health care and disability benefits. These are only the direct costs, with time lost from work, prevention campaigns etc. also adding up to hefty indirect expenditures.

In favor:

In light of these figures, it is understandable that there are several arguments in favor of making people with unhealthy life styles pay the costs of their choices. Lowering tariffs for the rest of the population is the most obvious. In addition, one argument goes, knowing that they would be out of pocket were they to end up in the doctor’s office or in hospital would have a motivating effect on getting these people to live more healthily. Most often encountered is the argument for moral individual responsibility. These people living carelessly are doing something wrong and they should pay for it.

Against:

There are, surprisingly, more arguments on the other side, i.e. that

everybody should be treated equally. Solidarity, for example, which is of course the philosophy behind insurance. Then there is the question of people who are addicted, who cannot be said to be choosing an unhealthy lifestyle, as do people engaging in risky sports, for example. From the practical point of view, people who give up unhealthy behaviors will probably live longer, thus costing society more in the long run when they reach old age.

Social inequality is cited as a reason against making people pay the costs of their unhealthy choices, for such costs would bite far more heavily into the budgets of the poor than of the rich. This argument is applied to the effect of indirect penalties such as higher cigarette taxes as well. Addicts barely managing financially will have to choose between their drug and having enough food, for example. For an addict, it is unlikely that higher taxes will have the desired effect, in any case.

From the purely practical point of view, it is often impossible to

prove that a particular individual’s medical problem stems from bad lifestyle choices. One envisions doctors having to make difficult judgment calls and court cases as a result, perhaps leading to the setting of arbitrary limits, for example the number of cigarettes smoked per day that divide the good from the bad. “Health police” would be a part of our vocabulary.

In thinking about “lifestyle choices” one sees a difference between those that are unhealthy and those that are risky. For someone in the ICU with concussion and multiple fractures after a parachuting accident, cause and effect are pretty obvious. But should parachuting therefore be classified as “risky behavior”? Boxing? Playing football or ice hockey? Bungee jumping? Even here categorization is difficult and would end up being judgmental.

It is perhaps just the judgmental, moralistic and socially unfair attitudes that rub us the wrong way. Insurance, based on solidarity, has been around for a long time and enjoys widespread acceptance. Perhaps we have to realize that those who live riskily or unhealthily are apt to suffer physically, mentally and emotionally at some point from their lifestyles, and that is punishment enough.

Let's eat....good food

In his book “Food Rules”, Michael Pollan sets out a number of rules to help one negotiate the myriad choices, good and bad, in the eating arena. He begins by saying “Eat Food”, which sounds obvious until he outlines the pretend food, junk food, additives etc. that masquerade as real food.

So what is real food? It runs a whole gamut, from the wild, the unwashed, and the uncooked  - berries picked from the vine on a walk - to the sophisticated creations of the cook’s kitchen. What one realizes when one starts thinking about real food is that it is often associated with memories that flavor it with nostalgia. Let’s take other wild foods, for instance. There are dandelion greens that I remember my mother gathering and cooking, the woodruff she put in white wine and that I have put in a Bowle, mushrooms that one gathers with a group in the woods, the plentiful wild garlic perfuming the woods here in Switzerland.

Then there are the old-fashioned sounding purslane, dock and sorrel, as well as linden, hickory nuts, watercress and wild game of all sorts. I remember homemade elderberry wine in Sweden, and wild strawberries remind me of jars of jam on a windowsill, with the light dazzling through the wonderful red color. Then there is the handsome wintergreen shrub and myriad fish, from crayfish on up to salmon.

Our ancestors ate all of the above, and at some point someone got the idea of domesticating some of these wild plants in a kitchen garden. Certainly easier to gather, so that one has time to do a bit of home processing, making the likes of chutneys, applesauce and pesto. A friend and I trade chutneys, hers made from her abundant figs, mine from the last of the green tomatoes in the fall. Applesauce and its further processing into cake belonged to my childhood. Little jars of homemade pesto nestle in my freezer for winter meals.

The kitchen garden spread out to the Saturday farmer’s market and then came its big brother, the supermarket, with its association with processed food. Not that processed food got its start there, basic processed food is as old as humanity. One thinks of flour, sugar and molasses, yogurt, cheese, dried fruits and legumes, cider, wine and beer, dried and smoked meat and fish, coffee and tea, soy sauce and tofu, sauerkraut and kimchi, all aimed at longevity not possible with fresh food.

Why, then, is the term “processed food” a bugaboo among those who want to eat healthily? What is the difference between these foods made by ancient processes and those lining the supermarket shelves? The most outstanding difference is that most of these old-time foods are made long lasting by such age-old processes as smoking, drying, the action of bacteria, fermenting, grinding; the foods themselves are still quite recognizable as their original selves.

But wait, what about soups and stews and casseroles, bread and baked desserts? Processed, right? Yes, by cooking, the application of heat, and now true domestic food is making its appearance. None of these common kitchen creations are long-lasting; they are meant to be eaten quickly. “Eat foods that will eventually rot”, as Pollan says!

Now let’s leave the wild, the kitchen garden, the age-old processed

food and the home kitchen and peruse the supermarket shelves. Here is rice, pasta, rolled oats – processed, therefore baddies? No, Pollan is helpful here when he says avoid food with ingredients you wouldn’t keep in your kitchen, “foodish” products like processed cheese and foods pretending to be something they are not.  I remember a breakfast at a friend’s that would fall into that last category. There was margarine and an artificial cream substitute that had never seen a cow, a vaguely orange-tasting chemical drink, dry cereal with so many ingredients that the grain – what was it? – got lost among the additives.

It is additives that are the less-than-healthy culprits in true processed foods. Most of them are unpronounceable, which is as good a way as any to identify them on the ingredient list. Azodicarbonamide, for instance, found in something like 500 bread products sold in the US, including “healthy” breads, has been linked to health issues. Tartrazine, a yellow dye, has been recently removed from a popular brand’s macaroni and cheese after buyers complained.

Then let’s consider propyl gallate, an estrogen antagonist, widely used to keep fatty foods from oxidizing. As most prepared food is either loaded with fat or with sugar, propyl gallate is to be found everywhere on supermarket shelves, even in mayonnaise. Strangely enough, the mayonnaise in my fridge, the product of a major Swiss company, contains no propyl gallate, and it keeps just fine.

Pollan’s food rules are simple; you don’t need to hunt through the 20 ingredients in a product to see if a no-no chemical is present, for example. Just give a glance at the number of ingredients, and do a quick scan to see how many of them are actual foodstuffs. My purchased mayonnaise, for instance, contains sunflower oil, vinegar, salt, mustard, egg yolk and a spice extract. All except the last would be ingredients in homemade mayonnaise.

By contrast, an instant pea soup with croutons has 21 ingredients, plus “natural aromas”. Of the 21, 8 would not be homemade pea soup with croutons. One is an antioxidation substance, the addition of which is probably responsible for the fact that this soup has a shelf life of a year. Is this necessary? Only if one is living in the wilds of Alaska or the back of beyond in Europe, it seems to me. The rest of us shop frequently. So who is really benefitting from these long-life foods on the shelves? The supermarket, maybe.

Writing about this has made me hungry for the fruits and veggies –

additive free - sold at the outdoor market in a nearby town; it will start up again in April. Of the variety on offer, the best are the seasonal produce, berries for instance, chanterelles, apricots. Or asparagus in May, locally grown. The seasonal treats that are the very opposite of stuff on the shelves that lasts approximately forever. I am counting the days.

Bringing Back the Wolf

Ever since I read the book “Never Cry Wolf” by Farley Mowat, wolves have fascinated me. In this book, Mowat describes his work for the Canadian government on a project to determine the feeding habits of wolves in the wild. Caribou hunters had accused the wolves of decimating caribou herds, but Mowat found that in fact the wolves subsisted largely on small mammals, like mice. He tests the hypothesis that an animal the size of a wolf could exist solely on these rodents by limiting his own diet to mice, developing recipes like “Souris à la Crème”.

Wolves have always had a reputation as savage killers; chasing sleighs in rural Russia and eating the riders, for instance. The modern day equivalent of this drama is the attack by wolves on domestic livestock like sheep. After wolves had become an endangered species in the American west, largely because of loss of habitat and extermination measures, they were reintroduced in 1995, and sheep farmers have been up in arms ever since. Wolves are coming back naturally in Europe, and sheep farmers on this continent are similarly unhappy.

In a world in which wild and domestic animals generally inhabit separate territories, it is of course chilling to imagine one’s sheep herd as targeted prey to these wild animals. Why then reintroduce or encourage the wolf?

To answer this question one must consider the wolf’s effect on its environment in the wild. After its reintroduction in Yellowstone Park, the entire park ecosystem thrived. Greatly increased deer populations had decimated vegetation, and within a few years after reintroduction of the wolf, vegetation grew back again. This was, to be sure, partly the result of the wolves feeding on the deer, but was also a matter of the deer avoiding those parts of the park with the largest wolf populations.

With increased vegetation came flocks of birds, and beavers returned to build dams, thus benefitting both the groundwater supply and aquatic animals like waterfowl. Populations of rabbits, hawks, foxes and bald eagles grew. Because wolves are able to prey on large mammals, the increased supply of carcasses brought back scavengers such as the raven, the bear and the coyote. Herds of deer became healthier, as the wolves culled the weak and the sick. Within a few years, it was noted that because of the increased vegetation, riverbanks were less apt to erode and wash away.

The wolf is thus a keystone species, one defined as having a disproportionate impact on its environment relative to its abundance. This is, of course, small comfort to a sheep farmer who finds several dead animals in his flock, as wolves do leave the woods and venture into civilization. How then to reconcile the needs of an ecosystem such as a national park with the needs of livestock owners on private land?

Whereas ecosystem needs can be met using natural measures,

the needs of human beings and domestic animals often require ingenious human solutions. Trained dogs have been herding sheep since biblical times and are effective, but not ideal, wolf alarms. Dogs scare hikers, and recently it has been found that a hiker-friendlier animal, the llama, is a good guard animal for sheep. The llama is alert, good at herding animals and leading them away from predators, sounding an alarm when a wolf appears and chasing it away. Other solutions being tested are better fencing for the sheep and collars that sound a warning when a wolf appears.

There is no perfect answer. We see here a microcosm of the whole human situation, caught between cooperation and coexistence with the wild, on the one hand, and the satisfaction of the needs of civilization on the other. These needs include, however, the acquisition of knowledge and the use of imagination and ingenuity, all of which are most helpful in working out the problems of coexistence with our wilder fellow beings.

Collision of Values?

CERN, the atomic research facility in Switzerland/France, recently announced plans to build a circular particle collider much larger than its collider that was used to discover the Higgs particle last year. The cost of the new facility will be in the 2-figure billions of francs; the cost of the Higgs particle project was ca. CHF 4-5 billion. At the time that plans for researching the Higgs particle were announced, a friend wrote an essay asking if such a costly project was ethical, considering the number of starving children in the world.

This is a worthwhile question; given the fact that in West Africa alone, something like 1 million children are starving. It raises a host of other questions as well, questions about other huge expenditures in the world and why, in a world with enough food, people are starving. Let’s look at some of the answers to these two questions, starting with the causes of starvation.

First, there is the enormous problem of food waste. Something like 40% of the world’s food is wasted before it gets to the table. In developing countries, home to the majority of the world’s starving children, most of this waste occurs in the field because of the lack of efficient harvesting techniques, adequate storage and transportation. Globalization contributes as well, as too many people in developing countries are growing cash crops rather than food for themselves.

Two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, famine and war, ride roughshod over large areas of the world, leaving starving populations in their wake. Then there is extreme poverty, and rapidly rising food prices in the wake of speculation that sees food as just another commodity. Global warming means more crop shortages due to inclement weather and droughts. Another example of the law of ecology that says everything is connected to everything else.

We know about these problems; we read about them in the newspaper and see pictures of pitiful children with the swollen bellies of severe malnutrition and stick arms and legs. We know that various organizations are on hand with food distribution in crises, teaching programs for farmers, and Fair Trade implementations. Greater investment in infrastructure and transportation are needed. On a larger scale, peacekeeping missions and measures to slow global warming mean, among other things, less hunger in the world. All of these programs are very, very costly.

So here we have an enormous humanitarian problem in need of a lot of money, on the one hand, and a huge scientific project that will use a lot of money, on the other. Seems imbalanced. But wait; there are other sinks for huge amounts of money in the world:

Military spending: In 2013, the United States had a military budget of $682 billion, 39% of the world’s total.

Fossil fuel subsidies: These are estimated to be close to $2 trillion a year. In the developed world subsidies are mostly indirect, in the form of a dearth of responsibility on the part of the fossil fuel companies for the havoc wrecked by global warming, the negative health effects of burning fossil fuels etc. Direct subsidies in the developing world have contributed to a raised standard of living but created problems for the future (global warming, the negative health effects of burning fossil fuels etc.) Given the fact that fossil fuel companies are the most successful companies of all time, raking in enormous profits, one questions why such subsidies are given at all.

Bailing out Greece: The EU rescued Greece from financial meltdown at a total cost of €240 billion in two loans. The CERN project costs peanuts by comparison.

Super-high salaries: Small in scale compared to military spending and fossil fuel subsidies, these salaries are so out of proportion that they raise a moral question:

-Bankers’ boni: in the EU these are supposed to be capped at 100% of the salaries of top officers, but a loophole may make possible boni of up to 250%. Needless to say, the salaries themselves are out of sight.

-CEO, sports figures and entertainers’ earnings: the 2013 pay to Bob Iger, CEO of Walt Disney, was $37.1 million, an increase of 18% over his 2012 salary. Golf pro Tiger Woods made $78 million and tennis star Roger Federer $71.5 million. Madonna was the highest paid figure in the entertainment industry, with $125 million for the year.

I would say that most of these examples are of inflated spending, money not spent wisely. And the CERN project? It concerns our most fundamental understanding of the structure of our world. In addition, basic scientific discoveries often lead to useful applications in the most diverse fields. Einstein’s discovery of the photoelectric effect made possible solar power, for example. The World Wide Web got its start at CERN. One can’t get much more basic than the discovery of the electron in 1897, and that has become the basis for all of our electronics.

 Let’s not forget that doing and analyzing the experiment are only the final steps in what is essentially a huge construction project, providing jobs for thousands of people, new techniques and smaller discoveries along the way. That part of the project money paid for these things gets plowed back into the economy.

Even with all the technical challenges, building the new collider will

be a lot easier than solving the problem of starvation in the world. Spending money on the latter can alleviate hunger but will not keep countries from going to war, nor make the weather less fickle or globalization less damaging. It is basically a human problem, not a financial one.

Believe It or Not

A friend with whom I was discussing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vs climate deniers mentioned that one is always hearing conflicting “scientific” evidence in various fields. She commented that in the changing nutritional landscape, for example, where whole grains are the panacea one year and omega-3 fats the next, the great importance of vitamins has remained constant for ages, but just what vitamin is the answer to a nutritionist’s prayer varies considerably. Vitamin C ranked first for a long time, then it was E, then D, B12, folic acid….

In a day and age that prides itself on its scientific competence, how can this be? Can’t one do a big study once and for all and get the answer? Conversely, should we be as skeptical of the information in the IPCC’s reports as we apparently need to be in the field of experiments involving vitamins?

Let’s look at the process of experimentation itself as applied first to vitamins for human beings and second to the many aspects of climate change.

I. There are a number of scientific protocols that can be used in experimentation in both fields. Some are more expensive to use than others, more time-consuming, more difficult. Some are more accurate than others. In addition, there are various types of statistical analysis, and the laws of statistical analysis as applied to large samples are complex.

II. Then we have the subjects themselves. Mice are frequently

used to test substances that are given to humans, and one would think one could control their lives rigidly. But only in the last few years has it been found that the temperature at which the mice are kept and the design of their cages have appreciable effects on the outcome of experiments. If studying mice is complex, consider studies done on people. The lives of the people taking part in a study cannot be controlled; we are not kept in cages in a laboratory. There is much reliance on the answers of the participants themselves, not always as accurate as one would like. It is know, for example, that study participants’ estimates of the amount of exercise they get in a week is usually exaggerated. In addition, the human body is so much more complex than, say, an iceberg, that it is difficult to use the scientific method, in which only one variable changes. To be sure, there are factorial experiments, involving more than one variable, but one must know what they are, not always the case in human beings.

Now let’s consider the subjects used for climate change research. Atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, sources of greenhouse gases, sea level rise, degree of melting of arctic ice etc. also involve enormous quantities of data, but they are much more straightforward and controllable than are people.

There is another complication in experiments involving people, that of ethics and legality. One is not worried about an iceberg’s rights or perhaps harming it during the experiment.

III. The experimenters: It is not only the subjects in experiments on people who are human, those sponsoring the testing are, too. In the case of vitamins, the sponsors are often pharmaceutical companies, with a vested interest in the outcome. It is easy enough to manipulate the experiment itself, the analysis thereof or the reporting so as to present a result favorable to the company. Most notable in this regard are probably experiments done in another area, that of the effect of smoking on one’s health. It is know that tobacco companies skewed their research results for years so as to present their products as harmless.

By contrast, those doing research cited by the IPCC’s fifth report are mostly at universities and research institutes. They are not in the business of selling anything. Anyone getting grant money is under scrutiny and must publish all the data if he wants to be taken seriously as a researcher.

IV. Money: And then there is money. Experiments are extremely

expensive, and who has the money to experiment on vitamins? Pharmaceutical companies. Who is paying for climate research? Government and university laboratories, without the vested interests of corporations. Businesses are not interested. An exception here is renewable energy companies, but they are still very small, and focused further down the line; convincing homeowners to buy their products, for example. They assume climate change, they don’t investigate it.

Returning to my friend’s question, it appears that there are a number of differences in research on vitamins, on the one hand, and research on climate change on the other. The IPCC goes yet further in adding up the results of many, many experiments done in a great many different university and government laboratories. It looks as if we can believe their conclusions.

The Heart of the Matter

Last week I was getting my blog post for the week together when I

realized that I was having an atrial fibrillation. This is a cardiac arrhythmia in which the heart beats too fast and irregularly. Unlike a ventricular arrhythmia, it is not dangerous in itself, as the blood continues to circulate, sort of, albeit in a reduced fashion. A problem arises if the fibrillation continues for some time, however, as eddies of blood move within the heart chambers and blood clots are formed that can leave the heart and travel to the brain, causing stroke. It is said that those of us with atrial fibrillation risk having a stroke at five times the rate of the general populace. In addition, long fibrillations mean that the heart is beating too fast for a prolonged period, and eventually it gets worn out, leading to cardiac insufficiency.

All this went through my mind as I marked off the hours during the evening; 4 and counting. Then I slept, hoping it would be gone like magic when I awoke, the usual case with me. No such luck, and when an early morning dose of medicine had not helped, I went to the emergency room. Surely I would be home in a few hours, I told myself, as I would be given medication to add to that I had already taken. Just in case, I packed my toothbrush.

Thus began what would become a four-day odyssey through the emergency room and then onto a ward. Dozing and then staring at the curtain in the little emergency room cubicle, I had plenty of time to reflect on why this had happened. Not in the “why me” sense, but understanding a bit about the emotional component of a fibrillation. I had this condition for years before it occurred to me that there was an emotional component. I began to understand that a fibrillation is a panic attack of the heart, really, in response to a particular emotional constellation. I began to converse with my heart, which proved very difficult at first. It is so easy to take it for granted, as it usually just quietly beats on and on. Not for it the more excited reactions of the gut, for instance. Its very dependability and regularity make it ho-hum. Only when I was able to compare the strength and rhythm of the beat with the hop, skip and jump or rapid but weak pitter-patter of a fibrillation could I see it as a bulwark and a protector that is also a partner in feeling: “matters of the heart”.

Three days of treatment with three different medications slowed the heart rate but did nothing to alleviate the irregularity. Finally came the welcome news that I would have a type of cardioversion, an electric shock to the heart that almost always restores normal rhythm. One is put to sleep for 2 minutes with an injection into the port of one’s IV drip, so one doesn’t even feel the needle. With such a short anesthesia one has few aftereffects. The worst part of the whole procedure was filling out the lengthy form for the anesthesiologist, probably the same form one fills out if one is having a far larger op.

To shock the heart sounds, well, heartless. What a way to treat the organ of love and feeling! But then one remembers that it is electric impulses that make the heart beat, and Eros shoots his arrows into the heart. Deep feeling is not namby-pamby. Neither was my feeling when I awoke and saw the lovely regular pattern of the EKG. It worked!

My regularly beating heart and I are now home, and I have a greater appreciation of this steady companion. We’re conversing regularly, and I hope that it will have little further need of panicking and fibrillating.

What I love

Last year I wrote about effective presentation in a post entitled Many are the Ways, and one of the websites I included is called “What I Love”, www.whatilove.org, created by The Climate Reality Project.

The name of this website alone conjures up emotion and individuality. It is not surprising that the site presents a multitude of possible answers to the question “What can’t you live without?” and great variation. There are the expected basics of nature: forests, mountains, the ocean; there are cities, beverages, foodstuffs, sports, hobbies, animals, people and values, all portrayed with lively pictures.

Why did The Climate Reality Project create this website? The expected future effects of global warming on each category are presented, most of them very threatening. For example, one of the items in the natural category is water. Just water, not rivers or the ocean. To be sure water is a very basic necessity of life, but as something to love? Maybe if one is an avid swimmer or sailor, sure, but…wait a minute, how about the bracing shower in the morning, the cooling shower after exercise on a hot day, the cold glass of water when one is very thirsty. Ah yes, one can have feelings about water. If one doesn’t, reading about the expected water shortages of the future and the wars that will be fought over water rights awakens plenty of emotion.

The cities category includes New York. Do I love New York? I wouldn’t go that far, but there is the experience of walking up Fifth Avenue on a crisp fall day, taking the ferry to Staten Island and admiring the skyline, lunching in Chinatown or shopping for lekvar in the German-Hungarian section of the city. Again, reading about the expected sea level rise and imagining the East River overflowing into the streets of the east side brings feelings of both doom and increased appreciation of the unique aspects of this great city.

Everyone loves certain items in the food category: cherries, for instance, chocolate, or how about maple syrup? The mouth waters, and then one thinks of the dying bee population, without which there may very well be no more cherries, or one is more aware of the rising temps that threaten maple trees and cocoa beans.

Those of us who live in CH are well aware of global warming and its threat to the ski areas, where already 40% of the snow is artificially made. The days when I would drive up to Horgenberg to ski cross-country on the prepared track for 45 minutes at lunchtime and then return to my computer are long gone. No more prepared track, for there is too little snow for it to be worthwhile. Not into active sports? Photography and gardening more your style? You’ll see changes every year through the lens of your camera and you’ll spend more time fighting insect pests in your garden.

Perhaps you have a dog or cat or ride a horse? Horses, the site tells us, are especially susceptible to heat exhaustion and dehydration. More than 400,000 pets were displaced during hurricane Katrina, and few were reunited with their people. Dogs are especially vulnerable to heat strokes.

Now we come to what are the most important categories for us human beings: people and values. Family, partners, friends. What do these have to do with global warming? The site points out how many people will die during extreme heat waves and violent storms, and we have only to think back to hurricane Katrina to recognize the truth of this statement. Such threats to life and limb are accompanied by threats to faith and hope, freedom and equality, particularly in poor countries, for they are more threatened by environmental disaster.

Because this is a site about what people love, it includes helpful and fun info as well. The best places in the world for chocolate, for instance (Zurich is one, naturally!) or how to handle your hedges if you are into gardening. Horses breathe 4 times a minute when at rest, we are told, dogs have 3 eyelids, a cat’s brain is more similar to man’s than is that of a dog.

No matter what you love, global warming is going to impinge on it in some way. It seems to me that one has only to think of the children in one’s life: one’s own, or one’s grandchildren, nieces and nephews, godchildren or stepchildren to want them to grow up and grow old in an intact world. What you love as an individual connects you to all of humanity.

Comeback

You’ve probably never heard of the town of Kivalina. It had only 374 residents as of the 2010 census and is located on a remote Alaskan island. But in 2008 Kivalina made history when it sued the Exxon Mobil Corporation and eight other oil companies, 14 power companies and one coal company in federal court. Threatened by coastal erosion and rising sea levels, the town plans to relocate, at a cost of between $95 and $400 million. In its suit the town claims that the defendants emitted sizeable amounts of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, which is causing rising sea levels. The suit went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided not to hear the case, thus effectively ending the town’s claim. The courts had already decided, in the 2011 case American Electric Power vs. Connecticut, that climate change damage is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of the government, not for the courts.

Was Kivalina’s court case thus simply another claim in the litigation-happy United States? Can one in fact pinpoint polluters and assess their individual contributions to global warming? Thanks to research published recently in the journal Climatic Change, we now have the calculations that show that only 90 companies, most of them fossil-fuel producers, have caused two thirds of all the man-made global warming emissions since the start of the industrial age. Half of these gases have been emitted in the last 25 years. We’ve known about climate change for longer than that. It could thus be argued that these companies have acted irresponsibly and should be fined or their activities stopped; not by bringing suit in federal court, but by act of Congress or by the EPA.

It is thought that the situation may be different in state courts, or in other countries with different legal systems. Suing the polluters might be possible there. As more and more companies are busy suing governments for lost earnings due to environmental regulations, they would get a taste of their own medicine.

Of course there is a catch here. Who has bought the fossil fuels produced by these polluting companies? You and I and the next-door neighbor. It can certainly be argued that Exxon Mobil and other oil companies would not be the giants they are, in both production and pollution figures, if everyone with an oil furnace and a car did not buy their products. Thinking in terms of court cases is perhaps not the point here. It is rather that these companies have lobbied and spent millions of dollars limiting our choices where energy is concerned. It is the consciousness-raising, the concrete evidence of just how gigantic these companies are and the dire necessity of getting away from fossil fuels that should motivate us. A David and Goliath story in which Goliath is pointed out as the bully he is.

And let’s not forget that David won.