My favorite weed

Around here, blackberry bushes run rampant. They're everywhere that's even remotely neglected: a little patch of grass next to the train tracks, and certainly all over the woods (which, despite this being the Netherlands, there are actually lots of, just in patches).

They've got a little ways to go, about three more weeks, before the berries will be ready for the picking. I've got my bucket already.

For those of us into natural food, or free food, it really doesn't get any better than this. Just walk into the woods with a bucket, and a few hours later, you've got enough jam to last you until the next season. Spring for a little winemaker's yeast, and you can easily pick enough to make enough wine to sip over Christmas.

The one thing you do want to be aware of when you're picking your own produce from the wild is where you're picking from. The side of the road? Probably not so hot. And certainly, by all means, stay as far away from golf courses as you can get. You want to step around places that are heavily treated with pesticides and herbicides, or exposed to industrial waste.

It used to be that foraging for good eats was our main source of food. These days, we're lucky enough to be able to go to stores and pick out what we want. It always surprises me that, whenever I do go out berry-picking, I never see anybody else picking them--given what blackberries cost and the notorious Dutch stinginess (which I've yet to encounter), surprises me. It makes me wonder how it is that we're so far divorced from what real food looks like that we can't recognize it when it's growing in front of us.

Why the little things matter, or the paradox of green

Who hasn't bought a cup of coffee on their way to somewhere, only to feel a little twinge of guilt when it comes time to toss the cup? Of course, some people do bring their own coffee mugs--but I don't buy coffee nearly often enough to justify lugging a thermos around. It's a rare morning that I need an extra boost.

OK, so it's one little cup. Big deal. Right?

One little cup.

It matters because nobody makes one little cup at a time. Companies buy huge stacks of (hopefully recycled) paper and roll, glue, and print hundreds of thousands of these at a time. You'd have to swear off paper cups for the rest of your life in order to make any sort of dent in their profits--and they probably wouldn't even notice.

This is why everybody has to do something to help the cause, whatever that may be. One vegetarian meal a week. Bringing your own mug to Starbucks--if there's still one around. Buying something organic once a week.

But the paradox is--the easier you make it for people to go green, the harder it is for society as a whole to become green. Someone may decide that once a week, they'll have a vegetarian meal. Which is a great start--I'm not questioning that. But what if they decide, too, that that's the end?

We make a big deal of little changes--it's hard for people to change dramatically, if you make them feel guilty about it they'll just turn away. This is true. But we also have to realize that when it comes to environmental impact, scale matters. One person committing himself to an lacto-ovo vegetarian lifestyle removes meat from fourteen meals a week (assuming that two meals a day have some kind of dead animal tissue in it). It would take fourteen people to commit themselves to one vegetarian meal a week to make that same impact. Has anybody done the math to see just how many partial-vegetarians it would take to equal the effect of one vegetarian? Because I'm almost certain that the number is higher than we would like to think it is...

Little things matter, but do they also make it more difficult for society as a whole to become more green? We'd have to slash emssions by 80% to keep the atmosphere below 450 ppb CO2. I'm sorry, but you're not slashing emissions 80% by turning your lights off, or even by hypermiling your car (unless you're insanely good at it). Yet we keep hearing that such things are enough, that if enough people could do just that one thing, it'll be okay.

Simple, Green, Food

Don't eat factory-farmed meat. Wait--free-range food isn't what it's cracked up to be, either. Buy organic--or not. Local is greener. Except when it isn't.

To green, or not to green, that is the question--and how. Take any statement that sounds good and someone somewhere will prove it false (like I do, with GMOs). The fact that nobody has a clear environmental agenda only adds to this dilemma. It doesn't help that sometimes what's clear from an environmental point of view clashes with the morals of the matter. For instance, organically raised beef is better for the environment--at least, until you consider the massive increase in acreage involved.

But fear not, gentle readers! I offer you one key to all of your greening dilemmas--at least, when it comes to food:

Don't eat what you wouldn't kill.

In my mind, it essentially amounts to cowardice to do otherwise. Of course, most of us don't raise our own meat. So most of us don't know what it's like to kill something. For most of us, the idea never even crosses our minds, unless we get it vicariously from watching crime shows.

But ask yourself, what would you happily kill for dinner? I'm not talking about survival situations, where you're stuck in a deathscape with no chance of life unless you kill Fluffy (actually, if it gets to that point, Fluffy's probably killed you first). I'm talking about your everyday meals. Could you catch a chicken and lop off its head for lunch on Sunday? Would you butcher a pig so that you can enjoy a hot dog?

Summer lovin'

It's finally gotten hot in the Netherlands, by which I mean, "I occasionally break a sweat when running around while wearing jeans." Summers in the Netherlands are mild, generally, and so the full power of the following drink is probably lost here. Nevertheless, it is delicious, refreshing, and you can make it as healthy or unhealthy as you'd like.

Basil Lemonade

~ 1 C of basil leaves, chopped fine
Sugar (at least 1/2 C is recommended)
3-4 lemons
Cold water
Sieve
Pitcher
A refrigerator
A few hours

Mix the chopped basil leaves with the sugar, bruising the leaves.

Squeeze the juice out of the lemons. If you're using one of those citrus juicers that can cut into the rind, make sure you don't cut into the pith.

Mix the sugar/basil mix with the lemon juice. Let it sit for ~10 minutes. This allows the essence of the basil to be captured by the acid of the lemon juice. It goes without saying that you should not let this sit in an aluminum bowl. Use glass or ceramic. A cereal bowl works really well.

Seive the sugar/lemon juice/basil mix into the pitcher. Pour water through the sieve to fill up the pitcher. Chill. Drink.

Makes ~1 qt.

Meet Virginia

Some time ago I heard the astounding statistic that every DAY in Brazil, an area the size of Virginia was being cleared of trees. Virginia is not Texas, to be sure, but it's still an entire state and of course I was outraged and probably wrote a letter to the mayor or something (it was that long ago).

Of course, what I failed to appreciate at that time was that Brazil is big. Very big. You could probably cram two thousand Virginias into it. Although it doesn't ameliorate the budding panic I feel every time I think of a massive tree getting sawn down (I don't mean to be overly sentimental, but it doesn't take a math genius to figure out that if you're cutting down huge trees much faster than they can grow soon you won't have any huge trees, or any trees at all--just ask the Easter Islanders) for the sake of making a cabinet, or someone's slash-and-burn field, it does make the cavalier attitude about the rain forest a little easier to understand: if you're in the jungle, it's massive. During the right seasons, you can stand on one bank of the Amazon, and not see the other side. We see the rainforest as a precious resource. To the folks who live there, it's something that gets in the way of making a living.

Two factors mitigate the difficulty of preservation efforts. First is a vacuum of land use laws concerning the jungle, and second is poverty. According to the latest issue of The Economist, the jungle is taken over on a first-come, first-served basis. Stake your claim, shoot those who contest it, and when you've finished with it, sell to the highest bidder.

The solution seems simple--a bigger carrot. Commercialization of products derived from the rain forest, eco-tourism, and flat-out bribery (technically it's known as "subsidization for not cutting down trees") are all incentives to leave the forest be.

Well, maybe not. Eco-tourism, for instance, requires you to go into the forest with your group of tourists, show them around a bit, and then get them back out. Getting, say, exotic nuts or plants from the forest requires the same thing. Bribery--well, that works. The first two require roads. But it's been shown that roadways into the jungle are potentially more devastating than just cutting down a swath of trees.

But none of this will matter without Brazilian law extending its reach. Carrots are all very well and good, but without a suitable stick, there won't be enough incentive for people to change. Free market theory suggests that this will never work. The government, corrupt as it is (or will be, once enough money is involved) will somehow endeavor to screw it up.

I'm not sure I buy the idea that the best way to go about fixing the economy is necessarily to give people a stake in keeping the environment intact. People are notoriously bad at making decisions that involve delayed gratification (witness the credit crunch) and investment, and that is doubly true when there's no obvious benefit--for them--to keep the trees alive.

Ed-ja-ma-whuh?

This photograph was taken off the coast of North Berwick, a little seaside town in Scotland that boasts the Scottish Seabird Center which was (apparently) built at the behest of HRH the Prince of Wales. The gannets in this photograph are fairly common. The colony on Bass Rock numbers 120,000, and it only stands to reason that other improbably large colonies are scattered elsewhere on impossibly small rocks in the North Atlantic. So, you might wonder, why the hell did I have to go all the way to Scotland to see them?

One of the long-running themes of the Science-Based Medicine blog (on which I sometimes comment) is the despair at how seemingly intelligent people fall for things like homeopathy (which =/= herbal medicines, and that's a whole 'nuther game entirely) and the Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy. The writers on that blog especially bemoan the influence of idiots like Jenny McCarthy for their refusal to believe that vaccines are safe (barring rare genetic conditions), do not cause autism--and their refusal to shut the f*ck up already.

There's a connection between these two. I promise.

The McCarthy campaign* was fed by the rise in autism cases, an "epidemic", as the fear mongers like to call it. I have no idea how they picked vaccines to blame it on, since it's become apparent that it's genetics--but anyway: the point is that autism is only reliably diagnosed at around age 2, the age that coincides quite happily with the recommended age of administration of the MMR vaccine. For your average parent, who doesn't have access to neuroscience textbooks and Piaget's work, it's a simple cause-and-effect. If enough parents--just one other one will do--have similar experiences, you start to wonder if you've missed something. And if someone fakes research telling you that your experiences have been scientifically validated, well, there you have it! Proof that vaccines cause autism!

Both of these illustrations point to the importance of education through experience. In the first case, until I saw the birds for myself, I was inclined to think that these were rare. The second case demonstrates how even nominally intelligent people allow personal experiences to trump their better judgment (although the truly intelligent know when to back down in the face of irrefutable evidence). It's very hard to unlearn something that has a deep emotional significance (i.e., validation that your whack-job theory was right)--the corollary is, it's very easy to learn something that does.

So my interest in environmentalism arose largely because when I was 7, one of my mother's friends gave me, as a Christmas present, a little suction-cup-on-the-window bird feeder that came with a little book showing all the pretty birds I could see. It may surprise you to know that I never saw anything more interesting than a crow, but for some reason I got hooked on birdwatching. I'm the person who will stand and scan every last Canada goose in a flock in the hopes of seeing something different--something new. And I did, often enough to make me realize that birds were interesting creatures which in turn sparked even more interest in how to keep them around.

This is probably the main reason why most people just don't care about the environment to the extent that Greens do. In the suburbs of carefully tended lawns and decor-only plants, they don't hear the awesome chirping of a thousand frogs (or one massive bullfrog). The artificial environs mean that most of the smaller songbirds have to find homes elsewhere, so "wildlife" means robins and the occasional fight with the raccoon over the garbage. To enjoy the "outdoors", you drive to a park, where the wildest thing you'll encounter is a fairly tame mallard. If this is the sum of your wildlife experience, of course you won't feel it's worth protecting.

It's all very well and good to point to rising lines on graphs, but to paraphrase the Governator, we have to make Green connect with people like Coke and Pepsi have done with their legions of fans, and you cannot make a solid connection with guilt. Nobody ever got addicted to guilt. They get hooked by "cool!"

Next: Behavioral modification

*Isn't it ironic that Joseph McCarthy did the same thing in the 1950s? Coincidence? If Jenny McCarthy (their names both begin with "J"!) can ask us to believe that vaccines cause autism, then surely my indulging in some little fantasy connecting her, the Communist Party, and eventual world takeover by China is harmless. Right?

Other factors (part 3 of 3)

Perhaps one of the hardest things to do as an owner of a cat with renal failure is not to get too invested in the Numbers (Blood Urea Nitrogen, Creatinine, Phosphorous). The Numbers are an indicator of renal function--i.e., lower is better, because lower means that the kidneys are taking the stuff out--and, as such, it is often recommended that they be tested frequently. The Tweeb has an appointment with the much-dreaded vet about 3 times a year (evidenced by the pee stain on our couch), but depending on the severity of the case it can be as often as once a month.

But going strictly by the Numbers ignores the cat. The fact that the BUN and Creatinine have gone down slightly from the last visit sounds like a cause for relief, if not celebration. But if the cat is so miserable from the change in food and starts wasting away because it won't eat--well, that could also contribute to the decrease in BUN and creatinine, and it's probably not nearly so worthwhile.

I won't presume to make an assertion as to what's worse: starve the cat to death, or let it eat itself to death. Every cat is different, and every owner likewise. The point is that there is still a lot we don't know about cats, and even more we don't know about renal failure, and to treat by the Numbers alone is to ignore the overall status of the cat: is it still reasonably healthy? Does she still play? Has her personality changed? The gestalt often tells a more complete tale of how the therapy is working than just the Numbers.

We've recently started the Tweeb on a prescription diet (Science Diet), as her Numbers have been elevated for two tests in a row. Fortunately, she seems to love the stuff more than life itself (as does Shadow, who most emphatically does not have renal failure) and it seems to agree with her, though her coat is somewhat more scruffy than it had been. We've agreed to take her in about four months later to see how she's doing.

Four months is a long time. I've had the Tweeb for two years now--that makes almost two and a half years as a CRF kitty for her. They don't call it "chronic" for nothing, and that's the thing. It may seem like a hopeless fight--after all, it starts badly and can only get worse--but keep in mind that if it is indeed the chronic, idiopathic kind of renal failure, proper care can keep a cat going for years. The moment of diagnosis is not the moment to consider euthanasia, but a moment to seriously re-evaluate your commitment to your cat--the whole Cat.

The Great Protein Debate (Part 2 of 3)

The usual treatment for renal failure is a low-protein diet. This makes sense: proteins are the main source of nitrogen (vitamins contribute a negligible amount), and there is no urea or creatinine without nitrogen, so on a low-protein diet the levels of of these two compounds go down, meaning that (hopefully) the body is not poisoning itself as much. Even in a diet completely devoid of protein (not recommended), though, there will always be some protein breakdown as a part of "business as usual".

Unless you're a cat. If you're a cat, your metabolism, unlike those of your human slave-monkeys, is so attuned to the life of a carnivore that its preferred fuel source is not carbohydrates, but proteins. This means that for cats, protein is not just something that builds muscles and makes them strong--protein is also their main source of energy. To a cat, substituting protein with carbohydrates is like trying to run a diesel truck on jet fuel. It'll go--most likely with an explosive bang.

I realize that this doesn't really make sense--cats need to break down protein in order to build up carbohydrates so that their bodies can be properly fueled. Note the word "properly". Because cats are also extremely efficient at utilizing carbohydrates. Too efficient--the energy they cull from carbohydrates, if it's not burned off, is usually stored as fat. Even skinny cats may have a larger percentage of body fat than is strictly good for them.

For a cat with renal failure, then, protein is not the bane it is in the human counterpart of the disease. Protein is the fuel on which their bodies run most efficiently, meaning that there's less waste for the kidneys to filter, and giving them more energy to fight the disease. A diet high in carbohydrates, on the other hand, jacks everything up to hi-speed, too high--generating lots of waste and putting lots of stress on the kidneys.

So goes the theory, anyway. The reality is: it's complicated.

It's complicated because kidneys are complicated, and kidney failure even more so. It's not just the loss of filtering ability or concentrating urine. Kidneys generate erythropoietin, which stimulate the production of red blood cells. They regulate blood pressure--25% of the body's blood volume passes through the kidneys every minute. They regulate blood pH, calcium levels, sodium and potassium. Since renal failure isn't obvious until 70% of kidney function is lost, maintaining whatever kidney function is left becomes critical.

And it could very well be that decreasing azotemia at any cost may be the best course of action for this. I theorize that it has to do with the stage of the disease. If you caught it early--as I did (so early that the vet had to do a urinalysis to be sure)--then perhaps a diet of high-quality protein might buy you more time. As the disease progresses, perhaps low quantities of protein will be more important.

I'm not a vet. What I write is based entirely on my understanding of metabolism and biochemistry from my few years in medical school. Your vet will most likely think that my advocating a raw diet--which is not actually a high-protein diet, as meat is only about 20% protein--is heresy to begin with, and doubly so for a sick cat.

Yet the Tweeb is doing well. Questioning dogma is something I do regularly anyway, not necessarily with concrete evidence. To have a living, breathing, healthy counterpoint to accepted practice merely enforces what some might consider a bad habit.

Sick cat, raw food (part 1 of 3)

When I adopted the Tweeb as a companion to Shadow (my other black cat), there was no reason to think that she had renal failure--a slowly progressive disease that is fairly common amongst elderly cats. Now, I knew she was old, as she'd been in "foster care" for six years. But she was healthy, for all her physical shortcomings--she has had no less than five broken bones in her little tough life, and most of them healed at odd angles, giving her the appearance of a Cubists' cat.

I'd been feeding Shadow a raw diet. Shadow was doing incredibly well on it, growing in leaps and bounds, and miraculously not getting fat despite my studio apartment being barely big enough for the two of us. The Tweeb took to raw instantly, too, much to my relief, chowing down enthusiastically on her bloody morass of ground chicken and organ meat.

But she was still drinking water.

That was the key: had she remained on her kibble diet, I would have thought nothing of the Tweeb drinking water, and would never have brought her in for the tests. Had she remained on kibble, I would not have realized that something was wrong until much, much later--possibly too late, when the sole choice remaining to me was not if euthanasia, but when.

Now, two years post-diagnosis, the Tweeb is doing quite well. She is energetic--perhaps even more so than Shadow, trotting after us when we go to the kitchen in hopes of begging a morsel out of us, and skittering through the apartment in a bout of the cat-crazies--and her appetite is undiminished. Far from losing weight, she's actually gained a significant amount of muscle and fat (not so much as to be anywhere near obese, but she's no longer the skin-and-bone kitty she used to be). She's quite personable, too, loving nothing better than to curl up on me when I sleep. You'd be hard-pressed to believe that she has renal failure, unless you were at the vet's with us.

I do not attribute this entirely to the raw food. Renal failure progresses differently in every cat, and it could simply be that she had the fortune to get the long-term variety. At the same time, though, it's hard not to believe that a diet of easily-synthesized protein, minimal carbohydrates, and plenty of water (in the form of meat and canned food) has nothing to do with her good health. I realize that the disease is progressive--that eventually we will have to give her more intensive care, along the lines of subcutaneous fluids and medications, and may even have to make that hardest of decisions concerning a rainbow bridge--but for now her renal failure seems to have been beaten into a sort of remission.

Next: the Great Protein Debate

Can't miss what you never had

"What have you given up due to the recession?"

That was the question posed by MSN's Smart Spending blog--an interesting smorgasbord of tips and tricks to help you pinch pennies, and one that I read for handy how-tos like cleaning your windows with newspaper (most of the tips and tricks are also green).

And oh, the litanies of responses--soda, manicures, dinners out! Paper towels! Watering the juice! No more season tickets! No more *gasp* cable TV! Brand names!

When I read lists like that, I tend to fluctuate between "smug" and "disbelief". Smug because I would never consider a manicure a necessity, much less something I'd have to give up. Disbelief that there are people who do.

And, after a while, a little sadness--sadness for everybody who is so out of touch with their wants and needs that they have soda to give up. Giving up something implies that economic necessity has driven you to stop doing something you'd normally do. And it surprises me how many people drink soda regularly enough to say that they've given it up.

It's not so much that I'm anti-consumerist--even I buy an occasional half-liter of Diet Coke for those aspartame cravings--but that such levels of consumerism obscure the meaning of living well, providing an artificial measure of happiness that can be measured by the numbers of labels plastered all over one's pantry.

No two people are made happy by the same thing. My boyfriend and I are a case in point--we love each other, but I can't persuade him to come birdwatching with me, and he can't stoke my interest in brewing mead (though he does pick my brain about keeping yeast happy). Finding your own internal happiness and using that as a guide for one's purchases, rather than the other way around, is the key to living well. And maybe it does involve a ton of stuff, but it usually doesn't.

And in the end, that's what living naturally is all about. We're all different, we've all got different lifestyles, different environments, but we all want to be happy. But we've forgotten, or never thought to ask, what it is that makes us happy. If you keep that in mind, you'll never have to give up soda, because it'll never be around.