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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Is it just us, or has there been a weird change going on over at the TV channels that were once the exclusive realm of science-mad documentary devotees like NBN. The Discovery Channel is now Discovery. The National Geographic Channel is now Nat Geo; and The History Channel, is now just called History. The nano-names they’ve adopted seem to coincide with a disturbing embrace of James Watt's philosophy that human civilization is measured to the extent we can usurp and/or conquer the world and it's resources.

This subtle shift really gained traction with The Deadliest Catch. There's something disturbingly addictive about watching a trap full of hapless creatures being hauled from their homes and converted into commodities by a gleefully cursing crew. Somehow, this show takes guys who smoke, drink, curse and hit and hug each other with frenetic frequency and turns them into lovable just-plain-folks pursuing life’s highest calling. Cue the ballad of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This is not The Discovery Channel the BBC brought to this country some 20 years that aired painstakingly prepared documentaries on army ants rampaging across rain forest floors and costly super-slow-motion footage of a lioness tackling and eviscerating adorable baby gazelles. This is more like shelling out $1,500 for a cameraman to go fishing with a bunch of guys who view the lens as a stepping stone off the boat and into the next Survivor series.

Then History upped the ante with Ice Road Truckers. This was a sleeper. You had to watch an episode or two before you realized these truckers risk life and limb driving across frozen lakes and ice covered roads to deliver frozen Big Mac patties to Nome, AK. If these big rigs go off the ice road apparently they are screwed because they can never get the trucks moving again and it's usually cold enough to freeze spit in mid-air. All this angst brings us to view these ice road trucker who smoke, drink, curse and hit and hug each other with frenetic frequency as ordinary folks achieving the extraordinary by prevailing in another of nature’s most forbidding landscapes. This formula appears to be a hit because it has spawned Ax Men, Man Vs. Wild, Verminators, Swamp Loggers, Shark Catcher, Monster Fish of the Amazon, Monster Fish of the Congo, and Monster Fish of the Mekong.

Starting to sense a theme here? Is Cable television making ordinary people extraordinary by reverting to that longstanding measure revered in our history books: conquering nature? The burning question now is: how long will we watch this stuff. Given a choice between watching someone chow down on insect larvae the size of cocktail franks and actually doing so themselves, most of opt for the former. Ditto for our career choices. We may admire the men on board the Cornelia Marie but we don't want their jobs. We seem to be admiring more each day those we increasingly choose not to emulate. Which brings us to this week's logical leap that we'd really like to think is common sense. Could it be these channels are deliberately playing to our timeless yearning for the good old days, a yearning becoming all the more acute as it becomes all the more obvious we can't possibly have them back. At the same time, production costs of these sur-reality TV shows might be much less and big-money brands like Budweiser, Ford and Old Spice are suddenly buying airtime on what was once a nerd-only channel?

The sad thing about this addiction to outdoor reality TV is there's nothing real about it. We love to see these folks go out and pit their wits against nature and succeed but the fact is man has conquered nature. A little too effectively, as it's turning out. When they offload the latest deadly “catch”, do the cameras go into the boat's hold to help count the crabs crushed under the weight of 30,000 of their cousins fortunate enough to be caught later in the trip? How much time is spent discussing disposal of bycatch in "Swords, Life on the Line." And just how dangerous can it really be for that guy running around in the wilderness supposedly at the mercy of the elements but with a production crew by his side. One of those people has to be carrying a first aid kit. And did the cameras zoom in on the  turtles, snakes and other swamp wildlife squished in Episode 8 of Swamp Logger when: “Bobby brought the innovative technique of laying down a 'skid road' to his home state of North Carolina after watching it done in Georgia.” Up in New England we call swamps wetlands and you get raked over the coals if you so much as dump grass clipping in them. Maybe that’s why we flock more and more to such programming. We're frustrated with a planet that can no longer support such lifestyles and we're annoyed by a growing army of government regulators is telling us what to do when we head outdoors. What do you think?