_Who among you think it’s absurd, almost embarrassing, that the entire country is screaming about the lack of jobs and money therefrom while throwing out 4.5 pounds of garbage per person per day? Raise your hands. Not many hands are going up right now because few people think a used Starbucks papercup is anything but trash. But if you rinsed it out carefully that cup would probably work for another dozen or so trips to the lips before giving up the ghost. For that matter, did anyone know that the annoying little cups take-out restaurants use for sauces and salad dressings clean up like new and can be reused for the same purposes in brown bag lunches? Few people outside Ed Begley Jr. and NBN know recycling can be so rewarding because our culture has instilled in us that it’s better to work 60-hours a week to buy stuff and throw it out than it is to not make the money and conserve. For most of us recycling is a pain. When you look at it from more extreme perspectives it’s un-American. Today we want to look at it from the trash picker’s perspective.

_While it may be beneath Americans to pick through their garbage, folks in other countries are more than happy to get a little dirty mining what we pay no mind. The real beauty of trash picking in other countries is it’s largely left to private enterprise. NBN found this study (you have to check out the charts in it) which provided this amazing excerpt: “More than 80,000 people and their families are responsible for recycling about three million tons per year of waste in the six study cities. Due to the recycling efforts of the waste pickers, these cities do not have to spend as much on waste collection and disposal: realizing a combined costs savings of around 38.2 million Euros per year.” That means those 80,000 trash pickers are saving their governments some $650 each per year while earning money to feed their families. The real beauty of this is they are cleaning up the planet at the same time. Where are the six cities? Egypt, Romania, The Philippines, Peru, Zambia and India, not countries famed for their progressive policies.

_The point is a trash picker doesn’t have to be some Somalian six-year-old wading through mountains of toxic and septic waste hoping to mine enough discarded tin to trade for a falafel. In the U.S. that trash picker, they are called Zabaleen, could retire in Somalia after just a few weeks rummaging through the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.  We might be exaggerating, but not by much. The U.S. trash stream, by Third World standards has got to be a gold mine. Why should it be viewed any different in this country? It’s possible that part of that answer, as we discuss in Recycling News this week, is that powerful interests don’t want to see robust recycling programs put into place because those interests make more money in their absence. The more we clean and segregate our trash the more valuable it becomes. Outside of vanity, what’s to stop every American from becoming a trash picker in our own homes: meticulously separating, cleaning and storing the trash we create until enough piles up that we can turn those little sauce and salad dressing cups into a recycling center for cash?

_What’s stopping us is infrastructure. There’s no place to turn those little plastic salad cups in. Most recycling centers are miles from anywhere anybody in this country wants to live Still, if we did purify our trash before putting it out for collection it might be interesting to see what happens. Might entrepreneurial U.S. Zabaleen start collecting the stuff and find ways to cash it in before the garbage men haul it off to who knows where? Toward that end, and at the possible expense of domestic harmony, we’re launching the Great NBN Home-Groan Source Separation Event. Forget about that co-mingled recycling bin/swimming pool we wheel out to the curb every week, we’ve set aside two basement shelves where we’re going to try, to the best of our ability, to clean, segregate and stack our recyclables. We're talking real OCD stuff here, like tearing the cellophane windows from our bill envelopes. As this stuff is accumulating in the basement the search will be on for the highest price such a highly sanitized and purified raw product can produce and the results will be reported here. 

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In this article Thomas Friedman wastes an excellent opportunity to send a badly needed message to NY Times readers, opting instead to beat the drum of George W. Bush’s blown opportunity to restore this nation to greatness following the 9.11 attacks. Mr. Friedman, anyone reading your column knows Bush blew it when, after the attacks, he directed this nation down a ruinous path of self indulgence when the nation should have girded its loins and reduced its dependence on finished goods and energy imports from abroad. Your readers also know well the resulting decade-long frenzy of burrowing, spending, and discarding planted this nation in a hole that can only be climbed out of through another decade of much less of all three. What we don’t know, and Mr. Friedman you only touch on it in your column, is the American people, including your readers share a lot of the blame.

For years Friedman fans and their ilk, NBN definitely among them, left largely unchallenged G.W. Bush’s suggestion that driving a car that gets 15 mpg in deference to another that gets 40 mpg is somehow the American Way. We preferred not to question the absurdity of paving over acre after acre of places like Florida’s Lake Kisamee watershed to build thousands of homes now going vacant there and across the country. We were too busy reveling in our own homes appreciating at 25 percent year after year. Now that those fortunes have turned, what Mr. Friedman should really be asking in his column is this: at what point do his readers start asking those fighting passionately to bring back G.W. Bush's vision of America: Are you out of your minds?

What more proof do we need than Rick Perry’s popularity that a massive chunk of the US believes in the Bush ideals elaborated above, if not in the man himself? Yet, according to the latest poll numbers American’s in unprecedented numbers blame Congress for the hole this country is in. NBN thinks Congress is doing a fine job representing a US citizenry that’s not been this ideologically divided since the Civil War. The gridlock isn’t in Congress, it’s in the minds of the American people, and after spending the past five minutes thinking it over, NBN has no idea how to remove it. Maybe we should ask our fellow American’s, the ones who don’t read Friedman. So, flag down the next Hummer you see and ask the driver why he is driving such a ridiculous car. But do it nicely. With gas prices where they are and home prices where they are, that Hummer driver is likely to be a little touchy. And according to this Rolling stone article there are a lot of powerful people out there telling that Hummer driver he has every right to be angry and that you’re the reason why the country is in such a mess. We want civil discourse, not civil war.

These recreational fishermen could become a valuable commercial resource to the boat captains, who in turn can provide some fun possibly even income to folks like those in the picture at left. Along the way an incredibly destructive and wasteful fishing industry is reduced in size. As fish populations rebounded this new breed of commercial fishing captain might one day become as productive as the old. You can find all sorts of reasons why this won't work, like getting fishermen to come out in rough weather or winter. But judging by this article, it seems NBN might be onto something here. Maybe these converted trawl captains can teach this new breed of recreational fishermen how to properly treat their catch. Unlike the folks in the video above who are letting their catch bake in the sun, ruining what looks like one of the best eating fish in the ocean: red snapper. Oy Vey

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Rather, we want to look at the disinformation campaign Coburn’s so-called study has spawned in the light of another tax-payer funded MIT-study looking at short term color memory in monkeys. Sen. Coburn! How could your researchers have failed to mention this little beauty in your study? What senior fearing for the security of his quarterly IV antibiotic regime could possibly give a lab-rat’s petoot, about the ability of monkeys to remember colors? What’s that you say? This study discovered striking similarities between human and ape memory using scientific techniques that could not be used on human subjects? And those similarities are providing crucial insight into security and safety technologies--like air traffic controllers—that are dependent on human short–term memory capacity? (Here is another classic example of how Coburn distorts reality in his study.)

Why are we taking more sarcastic shots at Sen. I-Hate-Science Coburn? Because he’s supposed to have been a doctor yet he boosts his political career by pandering to the very thing that's killing this country: ignorance. It’s regrettable that ignorance is a staple in the diet of somewhere near half the country, but a lot of these folks can be forgiven because they simply don’t have the time needed to better understand the science that Coburn decries as a waste of time. Coburn on the other hand has an entire staff to do this research for him. Instead he deliberately distorts this utility of NSF projects to cater to a large deluded political movement which feds on and promotes ignorance in this country.  In our eyes it’s unforgivable that a fellow like Coburn, whose pre-political career was quite obviously heavily dependent on science, should take the political stances he takes. His campaign against science now, in the guise of fighting government spending, means he’s either a profound hypocrite or he was studying Dale Carnegie instead of Gray’s Anatomy at medical school.

You can argue that NBN, and the rest of the country, shouldn’t care about the enthusiasm with which folks like Coburn distort the truth to further their own ambitions in the middle of a political climate in upheaval. This blemish on the behind of civilization is increasingly looking to be short lived. One need only look at the Middle East to see that the science these folks are fighting to stop is taking this country and the world in a path no amount of political pandering or brute force can stop. However, these jokers can slow it down dramatically and appear hell-bent on doing so. So, we keep writing. We hope you keep reading. Everything you can get your hands on.

For those quaking in their boots over the economic might of China and its 1.3 billion people, this New York Times article is for you. To selectively quote the first paragraph: “A chronic drought is ravaging farmland...The Yellow River is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill.” These people are screwed, folks. Yeah, it may be dispiriting to see everything we own emblazoned with “Made in China,” but that economic success is coming at what NBN predicts will be horrendous cost that will once again have America in the driver’s seat.

We like to think of China today as America was about 50 years ago: a manufacturing superpower devouring unimpeded by government restrictions natural resources held in over abundance. America cashed in those natural resources--and others imported from abroad—for economic might that catapulted us to global preeminence. Fortunately for us, we have a Democracy so the few forward thinking folks among us able to recognize the damage we were doing to these natural resources started applying the regulatory breaks 30 years ago. Now our rivers and streams, our air and that oh-so-precious groundwater, while heavily contaminated, are not beyond repair. These vital natural resources are getting cleaner, not dirtier, despite those now desperately trying to take our political foot off the regulatory breaks. See photo.

China, on the other hand, while benefiting from vastly improved technology than was available in 1960s America, is charging ahead with the same economic model America once embraced: aggressively converting a finite supply of natural resources into refined products that catapult the country into global preeminence fueled largely by a consumer driven economy. Only it’s 2011. Global natural resources are dwindling and China’s domestic supplies, while nothing to sneeze at, do not match this country’s in two very important ways farmable land and drinkable water. And, they are ruining both at a rampant rate as the NYT article above shows. At the same time, the one resource that seems to be favoring them so much now, an unlimited and largely disposable workforce, could well turn into an enormous liability. Those people will need edible food and drinkable water, two resources this country, thanks to regulatory practices in place for 30 years, has in growing abundance. Check out this photo essay on Chinese pollution to see what we’re talking about.

Loving Living Forever
Trying  a Little  Harder to Live a lot Longer 05.31.11

Look at this list of the leading causes of death, most are related to gumming up the internal workings of our bodies with toxins absorbed from the outside world. But, hey, if we can’t enjoy/exploit these highly innervated bodies we’ve been given, what good are they. In the old days our bodied insured our survival. These days, our bodies seem to be little more than a source of entertainment while our brains do the heavy lifting. The problem is all those amusements tend to come at a cost. Those costs start to pile up, and when you reach the age of the old man in the article you’ve got to pay the piper, or reaper. As you think this column is wandering dangerously deep into “No kidding, Sherlock” country, (see image at right) here’s the twist. What if we lived all our life avoiding those temptations that might shorten it and embracing those behaviors that won’t? How old would we live to? One more thought: In his seminal book on the human condition "Born to Run" author Christopher McDougall says human bodies are engineered to have very high metabolism because we used to run, a lot!. Check out this video for more detail. These days humans sit in front of computers all day.

Would he be any less pathetic if he was 100 years old and running five miles every day, maybe even still having a sex life? An even better question to ask, on this Memorial Day week, will we get kids to risk their lives in wars if we all held life as dear as the old man in the article. Let's hope not.

Unpaid jobs: The new normal? This  hyperlink sounds like something between a misnomer and oxymoron. Yet this writer thinks it’s the wave of the future and NBN agrees. In this case job means internship, under the auspices of a job-like setting in an office somewhere with—gulp, shudder, wipe the brow—a boss. What about another kind of unpaid job where you hire yourself. Kind of like NBNpress. Some 2.5 years ago we uploaded our first story about northern right whales going extinct and looked on in astonishment as our first hyperlink worked like a whistle to further illustrate the murky point made in the piece we’d prepared.

Two-plus years later we find NBN staffers have devoted an estimated 2,500 hours to this website without a nickel in compensation. However, the website is a far cry from what was published in January 9, 2009. Wouldn’t you agree? Along the way we’ve learned an enormous amount about publishing online and a lot of other stuff. It’s been a humbling experience. So often something that on its face can seem like an obvious argument—so much so that that we happily ridicule opposing views—often turns out upon further research to have much more merit. If for that lesson alone, we can’t bring ourselves to stop publishing NBN because it’s making us better, more valuable people than if we’d spent the time watching Family Feud.

Which brings us back to the unpaid jobs and the internet. What if you can’t get one of those internships mentioned above? What if you’re 55 and have spent the past 30 years earning good money building homes or working for a newspaper. How do you muster the humility to ask a website design company, a pharmaceutical R&D firm or a wastewater engineering business if they could use your help, for free? Worse yet, you get turned down. No one wants to face up to the prospect of being that worthless.

So we find a job with our old skills paying next to nothing and sit at home watching TV, blaming unions, politicians, bankers, and bad luck for our ill-fate. All while we could be learning stuff for free, at no expense to our egos, on the internet. (PDF) It’s not such a stretch to think a plumber can learn an awful lot if he spends his three hours of television time on the internet instead, researching solid waste aeration systems and bacterial digesters. There are all kinds of jobs in wastewater management. Let’s take it to the absurd: an electrician spends his three-hours of TV time learning all he can about bioelectronics and then starts calling university labs specializing in the subject. There are reasons you don’t need a college degree in aerospace engineering to be a carpenter. That doesn’t mean a carpenter can’t make himself useful to an aerospace engineer, even if he isn’t paid his first day on the job, someday he will be.

Amorous Amphibians
and the Folks Who Love Them  03.22.11

Which might explain the vernal pond email groups springing up across the country posting local intel on what species are out an about on any given night. Below are some of the emails that have been landing in NBN’s mailbox. You can almost feel the excitement build to Big Night. If you’ve actually experienced a big Big Night then you understand what these folks are so excited about. If it sounds a little cultish, it’s because it almost is.

“Just want to personally thank everyone who responded to my plea for help in organizing my first Big Night here on Long Island NY!  I have a local boy scout troop ready to pounce at a moments notice, the local police precinct has offered to send an officer to slow traffic, and about 8 more volunteers willing to help if they are free. Mostly I am excited to say I have a neighborhood meeting to inform all the local residents about what we are doing on Sunday March 13. After all, it is THEIR vernal pond and they are key to future protection of the pond and its critters. And lastly, with that little bit of rain we had last night...we had 2 wood frogs and a TIGER SALAMANDER cross into the pond. I suspect the rain storm slated for Thursday night will bring the majority of frogs and sallies into the pond...a few days BEFORE my big neighborhood meeting....” Eric, Leaders in Environmental Education  

“I put a lot of energy and anxiety into getting people out for a spectacular event, when I know that it's maybe a 1 in 10 year thing to get a big hit (after supper and before bed time, naturally).  Of course, the people that you have to drag out are usually a little less hard-core, may be less understanding of the nuances of the phenomenon, and not interested in a phone call at 2am to get boots and rain gear.” Matt of the Vernal Pool Association

“Fairy Shrimp, Wood Frog Chorusing, Garter snakes and a bit of spermatophore observed in and around the pools yesterday afternoon and today!” -Ale. Natural Resources Specialist, DCR

Last night did a quick road run (rain stopped around 3pm and roads fairly dry at 8:00 pm) and saw a few small wood frogs hopping across the road.  This afternoon in the town forest (around 2:30 pm) heard my first tenative wood frogs calling....A modest but much appreciated effort.”
Janet, Holbrook, MA 

“A friend called at 2:00 pm (1:00 pm EST) to say she was hearing woodfrogs chorusing in the woods behind her house here in Marion, MA...temps hit 61 today. Tonight I heard my first spring peepers singing this year....” Mike, Marion, MA

“I saw three wood frogs at a vernal pool at Wile Forest in Westborough, MA at 3:00 this fternoon. No chorusing. Presumably they are males who arrived early and are now wondering where the rest of the party is. I also saw half-inch long fairy shrimp in this pool.”
Scott, Professor of Biology Wheaton College

“Still a fair amount of ice on most of our ponds, even after another pretty warm day. Tony A. heard wood frogs in the South End of Rockport.  So things are starting to wake up.
Keep watching your emails.” Rick, Cape Ann Vernal Pond Team

Rock songs always make such nice analogies of life. So we offer up Sitting on the Dock of the Bay and The Pretender to illustrate what’s missing from this otherwise very good Wall Street Journal piece on this country’s and the world’s employment future. The piece is missing a conclusion so we offer off these two anthems to dramatically different lifestyle choices that unbeknownst to the rest of the world we are all facing right now. The article quite accurately outlines scads of jobs that technology is eliminating, what it doesn’t mention is what jobs will replace them. NBN says no jobs will replace them. Think about it. A farmer today can produce food enough to feed tens of thousands of people. A computer programmer can write code that manages documents faster and more efficiently than a roomful of municipal clerks. A 10-acre fish farm can produce high quality protein sufficient to feed what a 1,000 acre cattle ranch can’t. One computer search company can deliver the communications content dozens of television and radio networks now provide with 10-times the work force.

Think about it. A farmer today can produce enough to feed tens of thousands of people. A computer programmer can write code that manages documents faster and more efficiently than a roomful of municipal clerks. A 10-acre fish farm can produce high quality protein sufficient to feed what a 1,000-acre cattle ranch can’t. One computer search company can deliver the communications content dozens of television and radio networks now provide with 10-times the work force. Here’s what NBN thinks will happen, and we’ve said it before. People will have to start working fewer hours and earning less money. At the same time our cost of living will plummet through all the technological efficiencies putting us out of work. It’s inevitable and it seems to us there are two ways to respond. Either, we all slug it out for the few remaining jobs and the world slides permanently into 19th century as we all struggle to maintain our present consumption-driven standard of living. Or we all work four hours a day and get rid of our jet skies, yachts, Hummers, single malt scotch and meat with every meal.

That way the folks still meeting the reduced demand for consumer goods will still be making enough to enjoy life a little despite the drastically reduced work hours, while those folks willing to cash in their lives in pursuit of material wealth can still do so. Otis Redding got it right. The Gordon Gekkos will be, if they aren't already,  unhappy idiots.

Below we have a guest piece from a fellow who has devoted the past 30 years to making great music in small venues. An old-schooler, who believes firmly in art for art’s sake. He, like so many other American artisans—count journalist, writers, editors and photographers among them—is paying a price for his belief as technology recasts the world’s demand for it. Below is his account of how society increasingly favors predictability over originality thanks to the sheer mass of information and recreation competing for our increasingly limited attention. Caution, for nostalgics, it’s sad. But it has a happy ending, sort of. It’s the last of a decade’s worth of weekly invitation sent to about 100 NYC music lovers to attend the Uptown Jam.

OriginalNBN has to add a little perspective as fellow victims of an equally noble industry in upheaval: journalism. Imagine being a photographer for the Boston Globe for 21 years, only to accept a nominal buyout offer for fear another one won’t be made as freelancer reporters do your job for a 10th of your old salary. More and more stuff is being crammed into smaller and smaller spaces at the expense of excellence and experience. Whether it’s the annual $1,000 per-minute Lady Gaga Monster’s Ball at the expense of the $100 per-hour weekly Uptown Jam or a $.10 per-word freelanced local school budget story at the expense of $1 per word regional education expose, quantity increasingly trumps quality in the race for our attention. It’s the downside of the digital age NBN spends so much time praising. It’s working wonders for science and technology, it’s killing our culture and it’s no surprise folks this guy are terrified of it. Ah, well. The moral of the story is the Tuesday night Up-Town jam was brought back only it’s now on Monday Night, the anti-Saturday night. But they are still bucking the trend. Good luck guys and gals.

We here at NBN believe sarcasm, not laughter, is the best medicine. It’s more instructive. Sadly, remarks made about global warming by the incoming GOP congress leaves little room for sarcasm. When you look past the inherent absurdity here, there is something sinister going on and it's nothing to laugh about. Take this gem of a quote from John Boehner, of Ohio, the new House Speaker, on his party’s plans to address climate change: “The idea that carbon dioxide… is harmful to our environment, is almost comical.” That about trillions of tons of carbon dioxide?

Wait, there's more. A lot more. At a congressional hearing in 2009, Illinois Republican John Shimkus, a member of the house subcommittee on energy and power, dismissed the dangers of climate change by quoting Genesis 8:22: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” He added, “I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for His creation.” Got to wonder how this fellow fared in high school earth science class.

Joining Shimkus on the same subcommittee is Republican Joe Barton, of Texas, one of the House’s top recipients of contributions from the oil-and-coal industry. He argues that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with climate change, and in any event, people will just adapt. “When it rains, we find shelter,” he has said. “When it’s hot, we get shade. When it’s cold, we find a warm place to stay.” And when Galvaston is under 10 feet of water from rising tides, we’ll just find a new place to refine our oil. (Barton is perhaps best known for the apology he offered, last June, to the C.E.O. of BP, Tony Hayward, for what he described as a “shakedown” of the company by the Obama Administration.)

We ripped off all these quotes from this great New Yorker article, but also found this from Tea Party caucus leader Michele Bachmann, GOP from MN: "Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural; it is not harmful....We're being told we have to reduce this natural substance to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the earth." Asbestos is also naturally occurring on earth, Ms. Bachmann. NBN can forgive ignorance, even willing. But there's something worse going on here. We stumbled upon this piece which says GOP Rep. Wayne Gilchrest was denied a seat on the house Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming by Boehner because Gilchrest refused to say that humans have not contributed to global warming. The article also argues Boehner denied former GOP research scientists Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) and Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), seats on the same committee for fear they might inject a more reasoned approach to global warming policy debate.

How can all this be happening in the face of all the science saying it’s wrong, even dangerous? Never one to walk away from a good conspiracy theory, NBN thinks we can thank a sad collusion between the Koch brothers and the current economic climate. The Koch brothers are the muscle behind the TEA Party. Their money turned American's anger into a potent political force that has leveraged the current economic crisis into a bludgeon to use on anyone or anything that might hamper economic growth in this country. And make no mistake, fixing global warming will cost a fortune with no immediate return but enormous promise. Eventually, renewable energy could end the world’s addiction to fossil fuels bringing unprecedented economic opportunity and international stability with it. But it would also end profits for the Koch brothers, who refine the bulk of this country’s oil. When it comes to this country's response to global warming in the next decade or so, these two fellows didn’t just pay off a few congressmen in hopes of influencing energy policy. They conducted a hostile take-over of the entire House of Representatives via the TEA Party and are now going to dictate energy policy. Talk about unprecedented.

It always stinks to discover you are not first to arrive at a great idea, but in this case it's kind of cool. Last issue, in Good News, when we talked about unemployed plumber's and such recasting their careers to fit into strange places like science labs, we thought we were on to something new. Then this New York Times article appears last week, describing a half dozen websites devoted to the very same idea, with a twist.

The Times article talks about scientists involved in enormous amounts of tedious research setting up websites that allow anybody to logon and help out. Should those amateur data miners uncover any thing of use to the scientists, they forward those to the guys making the big bucks. The article belabors the problems inherent in relying on a faceless mob to produce information useful to exacting science experiments, something NBN would like to call the Wikipedia syndrome. They end up spending so much time wading through trash reports from inexperienced, or even subversive, "researcher assistants" you wonder if the scientists wouldn't be better off just doing work themselves. This is where NBN would like to offer its own life experience. Warning! Personal anecdote approaching.

For reasons known perhaps only to Prof. Robert Rosellini at SUNY Albany, in 1982 I was invited to drop my tiling tools and join his esoteric research into what was loosely called the Learned Helplessness Theory of Depression.  My work for Bob covered tuition for the school’s PhD program in animal behavior for which I'd swapped my successful career as a ceramic tile subcontractor. Talk about a transformation. I went from sticking tiles to walls to shocking the sense out of lab rats and measuring how depressed they got along the way. Alas, graduate statistics proved my undoing and I got the boot from the program. I missed the required grade by one-tenth of one percent and Bob, in his wisdom, realized I was miserable there but too stubborn to admit it. However, several years later Bob’s lab partner, Joe DeCola, said the lab was still singing my praises over these mini torture chambers I wired up for them. They looked a lot like these things here. In the course of one year, a ceramic tile setter very nearly became a scientist, and if I wanted to pursue these interests in a less demanding setting, I would have.  Warning! Tangential digression approaching.

The quote from the study sounds like something only the authors can understand. Those same authors may take issue with NBN's translation, but after a year figuring it out, we stand by it. In reality  Bob's lab wasn't some mysterious warren of test-tubes, tables and chalk boards scribbled with Greek symbols.  It was two chain-smoking Italians in a cramped basement testing a very mechanical answer to a simple, yet heart-rending problem that even a construction worker could understand and contribute to. And, please, don’t get Joe and Bob wrong. You can question their methods all you want, but these are two, deeply caring wonderful individuals. Thank you Bob and Joe for changing my life.

The point is: this ain't rocket science, although it looks and sounds a lot like it. Here is a quote from a related study DeCola and Rosellini worked on: “Learned helplessness theory predicts that animals exposed to inescapable shock acquire an expectancy of response-reinforcer independence, which proactively interferes with learning of response-reinforcer dependence …. These results support the prediction that uncontrollable aversive events can increase an animal's sensitivity to noncontingent response-reinforcer relationships. NBN’s Translation? Learned helplessness theory says unavoidable pain can make you believe you have no control over your life and you get bummed out...This study confirmed that.

We're not saying a carpenter can walk onto the SUNY Albany campus and do Bob's job tomorrow. Far, far from it. What we are saying is a tile setter could walk onto the campus and make a valuable contribution. I didn't just wire the cages. I conducted the experiments and fed and weighed the animals. Grunt work, but it was science! That's the point of the NYTimes article linked atop. There are literally tens of thousands of science labs, grinding away in the basements of universities like SUNY that can make ready use of  the roughly 30,000,000 Americans now looking for a job. Of course the pay will be pathetic, if you get anything at all.  But you will get training. and exposure to a whole new world. Is that any worse than spending days looking for jobs gone for good from this country and spending evenings watching reality TV and hoping things get better? An electrician who worked on the offices of NBN recently , has moved his family in with his cousin and is scrounging what work he can while waiting for the building industry to improve. When I e-mailed him an article about the Massachusetts secretary of energy starting up a home energy auditing business, the electrician's reply was: “Great!, I hope they start by contacting me first to get this thing going!” Don’t you think he should be the one doing the outreach? Or call Bob. Maybe he has some wiring for him to do, or experiments to conduct.

Are we being unfair to say that Kathy Frederick is what is wrong with America? She’s funny,  attractive,  ambitious, smart and a great writer. Before Jan. 30, 2010, NBN might have said she’s what’s right with America. But on that day she posted this blog accompanied with this video that, we strongly suspect, helped lead to this recent announcement that Frito Lay is pulling its new biodegradable Sun Chip bag off store shelves in favor of the plastic bags with a landfill half-life to rival uranium. What drives us crazy is Fredrick is laughing as she deliberately mauls the bag to demonstrate how noisy it is. Fredrick wasn’t the only one to milk this story for a few laughs. So did ABC, The Washington Post, and The Seattle Times.

At NBN, we try to have a few laughs as well. But we have a problem that borders on a disorder when it comes to plastic pollution. It’s not just because the stuff is used to package everything we eat. It’s because we’re also eating the packages. Unbeknownst to Frederick and her readers, plastics breaks down into particles small enough to have pretty much soaked into the entire ecological fabric of the earth. It’s not the “plastic” in plastic that’s so bad: that’s basically chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms linked together. That’s essentially what oil is. The problem with plastic is all that other stuff, like chlorine and sulfur, that readily bond with those oily chains of carbon and hydrogen and atoms to make plastic do all the different things it can do. What it can't do is feed us.

Yet, we’re eating it. So are the fish, birds, barnacles, clams, turtles and just about anything else that spends time in the sea. Take this paragraph from this NYTimes piece last year. The researchers say that when a predator — a larger fish or a person — eats the fish that eats the plastic, that predator may be transferring toxins to its own tissues, and in greater concentrations since toxins from multiple food sources can accumulate in the body. Are we having fun yet, Ms. Frederick? No? Then let’s take this one step further.

Since no one has ever asked, NBN thought it’s time to offer its vision of how to save America and, by extension, the planet. It starts with the recognition that we are the most wasteful country in the world. Wait! That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can look at our insane excesses in production and consumption over the past half-century as self indulgence born of America’s stranglehold on oil power. Or you can look at it as money in the bank. A lot of money!

Let’s start with this country’s incomprehensible amount of vacant inner-city office and industrial space. The increasing ease of working at home will mean these vacancies will only go up, probably dramatically. Why not start a comprehensive program to convert these vacant buildings into energy efficient homes? High capacity utility lines are already in these buildings, heating costs are much lower than single-family homes and there’s always public transportation nearby. The cost of living in this country will plummet as we work and live in the same space.  Commuting to work will be a thing of the past. However, you’ll also have little reason to leave your home. That’s where NBN’s In-home Fitness Centers/Alternative Energy Program comes in.

Let’s outfit each of these new urban homes with mini-gyms hooked up to generators. This NYTimes article shows a single treadmill can power a half a houseful of electronic gizmos. However, the article points out that you have to keep peddling/running/climbing or rowing to keep your home energized. Not if the whole family helps out. That should keep the fridge going all night and make serious inroads into the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic. Still, you’re going to want to get out of town every once in a while. That’s where NBN’s New Transportation Program comes in.

Sadly, the president has just pumped billions more into road and bridge repairs when the money should be going to building high speed rail lines across the country. Trains are about 10 times more fuel efficient than cars. And they are getting fast enough to compete with planes. Why not build electric car depots at our  brand new high speed train stations with solar panels atop each depot to insure these publicly available vehicles are ready to go on demand? How to finance this insanely expensive idea? That’s where NBN’s Energy Program comes in.

Every roof in the country is outfitted with solar panels and every basement has lithium batteries and a Smartgrid converter box. When the batteries are charged, excess power is dumped into the gird for those that can’t work at home. Offshore, prairie and mountaintop wind farms will make up the difference on cloudy days. Existing nuclear and clean-coal power plants will be used for emergencies. The SmartGrid keeps the electricity flowing back and forth and tallies a bill at the end of the month. Here’s the kicker. A $2 per-gallon gas tax and similar levies on public power will pay for it all. That should put a dent in our $300 billion foreign oil bill while still allowing folks to drive ridiculous cars like this should they be so determined. More important, the world's environments won’t have to continue  to pay the price for such excesses, which is where NBN’s Resource Recovery Program comes in.

Every manufacturer has to included in the price of their products the costs involved in completely recycling them. No more $2.50, 24-count cases of bottle water at the supermarket because each bottle carries a $.25 deposit to cover the cost of converting it back into the purified plastic product it came from. The same applies for all our electronics. That way people won’t be leaving perfectly good televisions at the curb, because the new 3-D, plasma screens they’ve been eyeing will cost 50 percent more to cover the cost of recycling all the metals, glass and plastics they contain.

If all these programs are starting to sound like a Pogrom that will cement the country’s economic growth somewhere south of .5 percent by 2025, we agree. However, the technology exists  right now to have all this in place in 2025. In the interim we’ll see extravagant growth in nascent industries not saddled with the absurd labor liabilities that have shipped tens of millions of jobs to China and India. Along the way, the country can cash in all the extravagances over the past half century--oil, food and construction chief among them--for efficiencies that will eliminate the need for such growth for the foreseeable future. To you it may sound like Utopia. To NBN, it’s just common sense: lowering expenses is a real nice consolation prize to increasing income, and it's quite possible we all won't have to work such long hours. Which brings us to this country's/planet's greatest wasted resource: Time. We'll let you work out a program for that one.

The world can be a confusing place before you've had the morning coffee. When NBN tried this week to reconcile this article on electronics recycling with this article on Frankenfish, with the latest Republican “Pledge to America”, we put on another pot.  The Frankenfish article says a Massachusetts company is just a few kinks away from doubling production of farmed salmon in plants that can be built anywhere. That last part is key, because it means the salmon farms can be built in places like Kansas. They no longer need to pollute our shorelines and threaten our native stocks of salmon.

Those should be two powerful arguments in favor of these new Frankenfish farms. Instead, we have people protesting the idea. One critic in particular is saying if we just halted an Alaska mining project called Pebble Mine, we’d save as many wild salmon as the new farms would produce. We’ll leave for a moment the calculations relied on to make that statement and focus on Pebble Mine itself.

Part of the reason Pebble Mine needs to be so large is the ore to be excavated contains so little of the copper, gold and molybdenum thought to be underground there. It’s an economy-of-scale thing in the heart of a pristine Alaska watershed, shown here, nurturing one of the world’s largest wild salmon fisheries.  This is where the electronics  recycling comes in. When you need to excavate mountains of earth to glean enough metal to make a buck, you have to start looking for other less destructive sources for these metals.

In weighing the wisdom of Pebble Mine, let’s consider this NYTimes editorial talking about electronics recycling. Thanks to generous US government grants this company can now extract plastic from old electronics at one-tenth the cost of producing new plastic. Yet this company’s best markets, and hundreds of its jobs, are now in other countries which require manufacturers to cover recycling costs for their discarded electronics. That includes the copper, gold and molybdenum in these devices.

The US has no such laws and if the proposed “Pledge to America” comes to fruition it won’t anytime soon. Moreover, if the Pledge becomes policy there won’t be any of the grants that helped the company find this economical method of recycling. So we’ll need more messy mines like Pebble Mine. Then we’ll need more salmon to replace those lost in Bristol Bay. This is where a little schizophrenia helps this argument make more sense.

Less government cuts both ways. Theoretically, the Pledge to American means fewer government regulations for both the messy mines and the clean fish farms. But can we leave to free market vagaries the potential disasters either Pebble Mine or mass production of Frankenfish can produce? Also, wouldn’t a law compelling US electronics makers, and maybe even bottled water producers, to cover the recycling costs for their products make a lot more sense than turning Alaska’s Bristol Bay into a mine tailings pit like the one shown here. And if we’re going to put the onus on private business to provide disposal options for their products don’t government grants help helps those businesses with that burden. Is that being unfriendly to business or wasteful of tax money?Don’t we want this kind of government involvement?

Clearly not everybody. People living in less populated areas where pollution is arguably much less prominent may feel a little freer when it comes to Frankenfish farms and messy mines. We enter into evidence People's Exhibits Nos. 1 and 2: the population density map show here and the 2008 presidential election map below. Is it just a coincidence those willing to accept more government meddling in their lives have crowded into our older urban coastlines while those advocates of free enterprise have more elbow room?

Today we have a little civics lesson vis-à-vis small-town corruption and big-time erosion on Long Island’s East End in New York. We pick it apart here because it so neatly illustrates how morals and well meaning can get muddied when people work local political connections and preexisting problems against government agencies that must yield to both. Is there a conspiratorial element in this story? Heck yeah. Did innocent people get screwed in the process? Heck yeah. Did anyone do anything really wrong? That’s harder to tell. The story starts with this boat basin below that will remain anonymous with the exception of this Google Earth image. If you can find it on Google Earth, good luck. The jetty sticking out from the boat basin is the issue. NBN got a call this week from a local home owner who told us this very disturbing story.

Once-upon-a-time, the boat basin was dry land, excavated from a low lying area by a surrounding property owner to provide safe harbor for his boats and those of his friends. No Army Corp of Engineers, no state or local environmental agencies, no local planning board. Just a buddy with a backhoe and a coupla cases of beers. We over simplify, but you get the idea. Nobody was looking back then because nobody cared. The place wasn’t chock-a-block with million-dollar homes. People care today. The run-down wooden jetty in this old photo was replaced with a new fiberglass structure that’s creating what’s alleged to be one of the worst erosion problems in the state. In the entire state! So much so, that the properties on the left no longer have beaches. The heir to the boat basin property, on the other hand, doesn’t have to dredge the inlet every year to get boats in and out. This same person also happens to be a real estate broker and a prominent member of the local Republican Party, the dominant party in town. Well, you can guess the rest but construction of this new jetty is supposed to have involved a favorable ruling by a prominent GOP judge on Long Island. It also involves poorly executed lawsuits and a tangle of local, state and federal regulatory officials that have only made prospects of ripping out this destructive jetty all but impossible.

Yet, all those calling themselves “real conservatives” these days only want to conserve the profligate life style that got us into this mess. They too, disdain efficiency and economy. In fairness to Reagan and his modern day disciples, the nation’s hands-off approach to its hyper-competitive business model has produced some startling economic results. Even with the recent economic downturn, our standard of living and amassed wealth eclipse anything even modern day China can aspire to. Our fear is the Reagan revolution now being revived by the TEA Party’s “real conservatives” ignores completely the role cheap energy played in making the country so great.

Oil is energy, folks. It builds stuff. Cheap oil is like cheap labor. The dirt cheap oil prices we’ve enjoyed for the past century are not vastly different from the free labor the country enjoyed during the slavery days. (Slaves do have to be fed, sheltered, and cared for, just ask the NBN staff.) America was first on the oil energy bandwagon and has held onto high teat for the past century. We’ve used every manner of guile, greed and aggression, to keep the spigots open. When our supply ran dry, we moved over to the Middle East and ran up a tab that stands to strangle us if we continue.

Is it unreasonable to assume the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, either directly or indirectly, are partial payment on that tab? More troubling still: is Global Warming the credit card bill we can never catch up with? Is it safe to assume untapped American oil resources can never wean us of foreign oil? Is it also safe to say the age of cheap oil is over with the economic emergence of China and India?

I hated Hummers. Not just for the awful gas mileage they get, it's what they represented to me: showing people you having enough money to waste it. But NBN is all about telling both sides of the story and sadly, there’s a rationale hard to ignore with the Hummer and it kills me now to have to explain it. Let’s start with the commercials. Madison Avenue pushed the self indulgence/independence angle so hard it’s almost embarrassing to watch in these now, in more austere times. So, Hummer drivers, NBN is going to rub your nose in it a bit.

So, do we bury the past and forever forget that in the middle of the Bush years, Americans were being sold 40,000 Hummers a year with plenty of encouragement from the White House? Like we said last week in Biodiversity News, it seems like this country is turning a corner. Natural resources, and we’re talking the Earth as a whole and not just fossil fuels, seem to be something to value, not exploit these days. The question we have to ask now is: could the tide ever turn back? Could we again someday be convinced or coerced into believing resources are to be exhausted not sustained. Kind of hard to see that happening in a global warming world. We’ll get our answer thou, this November. Let me go on the record right now: gullibility is not necessarily stupidity. Put another way, wanting to believe something, is not the same as being too stupid to know any better.

From this picture, one might reasonably assume this is a broken air conditioner, yielding its windowsill to the fan right above it. What if it’s your assumption that is broken? It just might be possible the owner of this air conditioner had his conscious bothered over all the troubles the nation’s power companies had during last week’s heat wave and decided to do his part to help those wonderful utility companies along. So, he took the air conditioner out and put the fan in. Before you ponder what bonehead sacrifices creature comfort for the benefit of ConEd and National Grid, NBN has it on very good authority this 20-year-old air conditioner works fine, although it uses more electricity than your average aluminum smelter. The reasons it sits unused below this anemic fan as temperatures inside this office reached triple digits are a little more complex. Yes, it has something to do with easing a conscious crowded by global warning, air and water pollution concerns and over-dependence on foreign oil. But that’s not enough to pull the plug on the AC in these hot days, even in these green offices. No, there’s something self-serving at work here.

What if the fellow who yanked this AC unit was actually doing himself a favor by sweating it out beside this $15 fan? Word has it, Mr. second-thoughts-with-the-air-conditioner also leaves the thermostat in this office at 58 degrees in the winter. Come December, his fingers get so cold it slows his typing. However, a funny thing happens as January roles into February, his fingers speed up again. He starts to get accustomed to the cold, just as he now gets accustomed to the heat. After a few days, a fan works fine. If you’re not moving around too much, even 100 degrees can be quite tolerable with a fan blowing directly on you. It’s that old: what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger mentality and NBN would now like to argue it goes farther than the potential personality disorders of cheap, neurotic writers working from their home offices.

Let’s take this study on the prevalence of antibiotics contributing to increased incidence of autoimmune disease. It’s nearly impossible to read the study, with the exception of these two key sentences at the top. (That’s where even the most scientific writers are forced to produce clearer copy.) With the help of some very heavy editing, NBN came up with this transcription of those two sentences: “Western countries are being confronted with a disturbing increase in the incidence of most immune disorders…evidence indicates that this increase is linked to improvement of the socio-economic level of these countries…clinical data support the hygiene hypothesis according to which the decrease of infections observed over the last three decades is the main cause of the incessant increase in immune disorders.”

Read another way: the cleaner we are the sicker we tend to get. Rest assured the wife of the owner of this air conditioner on occasion feels otherwise about her spouse. But NBN would like to argue that, as a nation, we are too clean, and we are too cool and we’re too hot. The study linked above quickly wades into talk of T-cells and immune system suppression, but the point is clear as day: our high standard of living may be killing us. Then there’s this story this past winter that says living in cooler surroundings helps your body produce more of the good, brown fat. We also know that folks who live in hotter climates develop  thinner blood, which helps them acclimate. And the health benefits of sweating seem to be accepted science.

Time for a little logical leap of faith. They say drinking the water in third world countries is dangerous, yet the natives guzzle the stuff like, well…water. Is it possible then, that your immune system can overcome Montezuma’s Revenge? Does the same immune system argument apply to our allergies? Some people think so. There’s an interesting theme emerging here. It seems the more hardship our body endures the stronger it becomes. It suggests our cardio/respiratory system is not the only such system we can tune up. Clearly, our immune system, metabolism and possibly allergic responses can benefit from a little work out.

Increasingly it seems the good life may be bad for you and we’re not even talking about what we eat and drink—hey, there’s just so much sacrifice that makes sense. But the good life has been a huge selling point for stuff that maybe now we can do with a little less of, like air conditioners, antibiotics, and handiwipes. Is it possible we could now be seeing commerce take advantage of this selling point. These folks are so sold on the idea that too much clean is bad for kids that they’ve launched a businesses on it. Might other businesses spring up to help us maintain peak thermo-regulation and ideal respiration? Until they do, maybe pulling out our air conditioners this summer and turning the thermostat down this winter isn’t so crazy. Here's an article in this Sunday's NYTimes that illustrates further this idea. Can you imagine your husbands feces used as an inoculation?

In these pages I've often harped on the advantages of weaning this nation from corporate-owned power sources and getting our electricity instead from consumer-generated utilities like solar panels and wind turbines fixed to our home rooftops. It took a city-wide blackout a few weeks ago for me to experience what I can only call a moment of clarity. It was as if the Hand of God reached down and threw some unknown switch that wiped “Google News” from my computer monitor at 6 am that morning. My pre-programmed coffee maker stopped dripping and my laptop batteries needed charging. I found myself adrift in a sea of blank computer screens: automation interruptus. So, I headed over to the neighborhood Starbucks which, for unknown reasons, was up and running. I bought a Grande-latte and a Sunday New York Times, a former weekend ritual not observed in almost two years. The Starbucks was a warm glow of friendly chatter over the blackout and other local happenings, the coffee a little better than my own. A distant sense of familiar comfort settled on the morning as I folded myself into my living room couch and unfolded Page 1 of the Times in my lap: An increasingly rare recreation binding the 20th and 21st centuries, fallen victim like so many others to the age of the internet.

That blackout was a catharsis of sorts; the morning’s immersion into virtual reality yanked like a needle from the arm of an addict, the void filled by once closely-held comforts returning to me that morning like a favorite childhood dog. If I had solar panels or a wind turbine fixed to my roof, I might never have emerged from my computerized cocoon. Thanks to the operational vagaries of a company called National Grid I was forced back into a routine that was once a sanctuary. I left it to latter to ponder the virtues of a future of self sufficiency against the familiar routines of decades of corporate dependency. Thank you National Grid, for opening my eyes. Maybe you can have just one more blackout before I buy those solar panels and rooftop wind turbine, just for old times sake.

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As another $50b in new Stimulus spending appears DOA in Congress, NBN was none too surprised to find a fresh crop of stories slamming the old Stimulus plan as wasteful. First, we have this article which cites a year-old study by that paragon of fiscal prudence Sen. Tom Coburn. Slightly fresher research is available in this article which cites another giant of monetary morality, Sen. Charles Grassley. Both single out spending in the Stimulus plan that's so absurd you start to wonder if you're getting the whole story. To illustrate our point, NBN did an audit of Coburn's audit with a little of our own absurdity perspective added. Below are all items Coburn described as wasteful Stimulus spending in his study.

• $1.3 billion for Amtrak. What could we possibly need trains for, we've got SUVs.
• $290 million for flood prevention activities. What's the matter, you can't swim?
• $50 million for watershed rehabilitation. Watersheds? Oh, you mean rivers! Why do we need those?
• $1.4 billion for wastewater disposal programs. Why do we need sewers? We have rivers.
• $1 billion for the 2010 Census. We think it's high time the government stop asking so many questions about where we're all from, except in Arizona.
• $200 million for public computer centers at community colleges and libraries. Why do we need computers, we have books?
• $830 million for NOAA research and facilities. More money for science? Don't we know enuf already?

We're making light of a very serious matter; clearly there is a lot of taxpayer money in the Stimulus plan being poorly accounted for. However, even Sen. Grassley above says it will amount to $50b. As enormous as that sounds, it's just a nickle out of every dollar spent and even that money is being doled out to domestic projects. Does anyone really doubt government waste in Iraq eclipses that figure? NBN thinks there's something else going on here. We can't help but notice almost all the items the two senators single out are either good for science, good for the environment or both.

As stewards of same, NBN feels it's time to dive into some pretty tricky political waters, here. Like we noted in Popular Wisdom on June 6 there seems to be a deliberate dumbing down going on in this country. It started with Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads and really gained steam with Sarah Palin's Joe Sixpack and John McCain's Joe the plumber. Which brings us to this week's logical leap of faith: is being wasteful stupid? If you say yes, read on. With political expedience trumping public service ever more with every election cycle, the hard decisions about our extraordinarily wasteful standard of living are not just being avoided, they are being ridiculed. Telling people already stressed over losing their jobs that they should take a hard look at their Hummers before complaining about Stimulus spending on alternative energy programs will not get you elected in November. Hell, this gal pictured here might shoot you. So, this fall we'll get derisive comments about government science projects and heartfelt appeals to protect roughnecks working on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

This appeal to the average American and status quo comes at a time when technology and world competition will not tolerate either. Joe the plumber had better find a new trade because there are billions of people in other countries willing to do his job for a tenth his salary. Joe Sixpack...well, do we really need to point out his problems. These are not people to be admired. Yet, the last election placed these folks on a pedestal when we should have been sending them back to school. NBN knows this is Utopian thinking. How do we send an oil rig worker supporting three kids back to school? We don't know. But telling him everything is going to be just the way it was is a greater disservice because it will take down the rest of the cuntry at the same time. There will be a huge political effort this fall to appeal to the average American at a time when American's can least afford to be average.

These are certified organic bananas. They look pretty darn good, don’t they? And good for you, right? Surprise! Just because something is organic doesn’t mean it’s not treated with chemicals. It means they are treated with certain kinds of chemicals deemed organic in this 50-page law that reads like a product manual for a pharmaceutical company. It begs the question: what sort of chemicals do we eat under an “organic” label. Rather than just rely on a bunch of scary chemical-sounding names yanked from that law to make our case, we dug a little deeper into the USDA's website of approved synthetic chemicals used in organic farming. All kinds of chlorine-based goodies are permitted, like Calcium hypochlorite and sodium hypochlorite. There are also all kinds of conditions allowing for the use of more serious stuff like copper sulfate which is used to grow organic rice: limit one application every two years; and ammonium carbonate—for use as bait in insect traps only, no direct contact with crop or soil. Then you've got more friendly sounding stuff like: Streptomycin, arsenic, strychnine and tobacco dust which can also be used under an organic label.

That doesn’t even address enforcement of the organic laws by the 57 agencies authorized to certify something as organic. Let's hope they do a better job than Wall Street bond rating agencies. Now, let's take a look at what isn't organic, like these raspberries. They’re both beautiful and delicious. They were picked in California and purchased in a Massachusetts supermarket. You have to wonder what sort of chemicals it took to keep these berries in this condition until they could make it into a breakfast cereal bowl. Then you have to wonder if those chemicals are that much worse than copper sulfate. This is a  tough issue and it’s doubtless FDA’s organic label means that such foods have fewer chemicals than these berries here. But is it enough to go through all this trouble? Should you want to eat only organic, what about organic produce grown outside of the United States? Over the winter most of us eat pounds of produce grown in places Chile. How closely are FDA’s bewildering organic laws, and all the conditions there of, followed in Santiago. Do you just send up a prayer each morning that the berries on your cereal weren't surreptitiously treated with dibromochloropropane. Yet, we can't just eat fresh, organic produce grown in the States. We'll be breaking out the can opener at some point and those cans are coated with Bisphenol A. Are you beginning to see why NBN is making such a fuss over this? Chemicals are everywhere. What does NBN recommend? First we recommend that you read Down on the Farm and Biodiversity News for 6.15. Then we recommend you think about it and do a little research on your own, find out more great information and post it on our comments page linked below.

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