Oxford University Press's Blog, page 493

Pushing Limits: Disability as an Unexpected Gift

This year, a San Francisco Bay Area radio station, KPFA, will offer a scholarly book as a gift in its July 2016 pledge drive. Sure, these pleas for listener contributions often give away books, along with the iconic tote bags and baseball caps. But this particular book is not the usual token of appreciation.

Ironically, Paul K. Longmore’s, Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity exposes the problematic history of fundraising and charitable giving. In fact, the book–and the gift– push us to look at the real damage that’s done when pathetic and tragic images of disabled people are used to raise money.

A film such as the recently-released “Me Before You” that celebrates a disabled man taking his life to unburden his non-disabled personal care assistant isn’t about someone’s choice to end his life; it’s actually an example of having too few choices for how to think about disability. We’ve been brainwashed by programs such as the pity-inducing telethons which, because of their monopoly for over a half-century, eclipsed other stories, other images, other possibilities for living as a person with a disability.

In their heyday, everyone knew of the telethons that dominated American television for a half century. Over the years, they slowly faded away from popular culture until the last one aired with barely a whimper in 2015.

A portmanteau of “television” and “marathon,” telethons first took root in the 1950s, primarily to raise money for disability-related charities. Initially, these over-the-top, cheesy variety shows were local and lasted just a few hours. But quickly they grew into a national phenomenon that sometimes ran nonstop for over 40 hours (remember, only a few channels and no Internet!).

Despite kitschy programming, telethons were serious (big) business for disability-related charities such as March of Dimes, American Arthritis Foundation, United Cerebral Palsy (UCP), Easter Seals, and Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). Among other things, they influenced how Americans thought about generosity, corporations, healthcare, and disability.

To be sure, thanks to the billions of dollars they raised, telethons genuinely helped some people. For example, they made it possible for someone to get a wheelchair when they couldn’t afford one, attend summer camp, and of course, helped fund medical research. And they put people with disabilities, long hidden away at home, in public in ways unprecedented in history. Indeed, thanks to the programs, many people with disabilities discovered other people like them for the first time.

But the good was far outweighed by the toll it took on disabled people. The organizations raised this badly needed money by playing on viewer’s emotions to show disability as horrific and creepy, as in this video where a man plays the part of a stalker. Meanwhile, people with disabilities were cast as helpless and pathetic victims of tragedy. Taking a page right out of Victorian sentimental literature (think Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and other tales of woeful afflictions), children and their families made desperate pleas to viewers. Or they were heroic, brave overcomers who did everything they could to prove they weren’t really disabled. Whether victims or heroes, people with disabilities had no voice other than to reinforce messages of the able-bodied hosts and celebrities who depended upon disabled people to be victims of tragedy.

Since viewers never got to meet disabled people who thrived and actually lived full lives, it seemed perfectly okay to help fund medical research that would eliminate them, all of them. Equally problematic was the unrealistic goal of curing all disability, and the reality that people with disabilities would always be part of even the most modern societies. Put another way, the programs left little room for disabled people who would go on living, often even happy with their lives.

Indeed, watching the programs you’d wonder if many disabled people ever grew up. This was because disabled children proved effective fundraising tools, to the point that they became part of the entertainment as they struggled to walk across the stage to much applause. Years later, some recalled their crutches being taken away so that their struggles appeared even harder to the spell-bound audiences. Many remembered hosts smiling down on them as they heard parents and others exclaim how hard they made life for everyone.

The issue of course isn’t that people need help that generous souls can and do provide—it’s more how that help is awakened, what images media trot out to reinforce existing prejudices against disabled people. Without positive examples of individuals thriving and shaping their world, little wonder that the protagonist in “Me Before You” would decide to end his life and that viewers would applaud this as death with dignity.

But change is in the air. Even if mainstream media continues to promote films like “Me Before You”, social media offers more options. Campaigns such as “This is What Disability Looks Like” on Facebook and #SayTheWord on twitter promote complex, interesting, unexpected views of disabled people from a disability perspective. Meanwhile, university programs and courses and grassroots film festivals question how people with disabilities have been and can be represented. There are also calls for seeing disabled people as a political constituency as well as Crip the Vote.

The pledge gift of a book about telethons from KPFA offers an example of this new thinking pushing through and pushing back. What sweet irony to learn a book that exposes how people with disabilities are exploited for fundraising will help keep “Pushing Limits,” a radio show run by and for people with disabilities, on the air. In this knowing wink among fighters for social justice there’s something much bigger: it’s a fiendishly subversive protest not with bullhorns and signs, but with lifted finger at a whole system that sacrificed dignity in the name of charity.

Featured Image: “Colorful Telephones” by Mark Fischer. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Dental caries – what is it, and why is it important?

Dental caries, more widely known as tooth decay, is the most prevalent disease in man. It is currently the main reason for tooth loss. Essentially, it involves the breakdown of teeth due to bacterial activity (from simple sugars that we eat in our food), and if not controlled – will continue to develop and progress for a patient’s entire life.

Despite this, dental caries is easily controllable. Such methods include cleaning your teeth regularly with toothpaste containing fluoride, and eating a diet low in sugar. Even with these simple control measures, few people understand the true implications of tooth decay, and what we can do to stop it. With this in mind, we spoke with the authors of Essentials of Dental Caries, Edwina Kidd and Ole Fejerskov, to get to the root of the issue. They filled us in on what can be done to tackle the disease, how they got into dentistry – and why people are still so scared of going to the dentist!

Let’s start at the very beginning, what exactly is dental caries?

Edwina and Ole – Teeth are covered by a ‘biofilm’ which is a community of microorganisms. These live in our mouths and the film forms constantly. We disturb it when we brush our teeth. When we eat sugar, these microorganisms eat the sugar and make acid. It is this acid that can, in time, make holes in our teeth. However this does not have to happen, it can be controlled by tooth brushing and sensible diet.

Image Credit: ‘Putting toothpaste on a toothbrush’ by Thegreenj. CC BY SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

What made you become a dentist?

Edwina – I was influenced by my mother, a hygienist in the 1930s. Her job was to go into very poor houses in the East End of London to educate people about tooth brushing, often in homes where the tap was floors away, and there was no money for brushes or toothpaste. My school friends said I should be a teacher, and what happened? I taught dentistry!

Ole – I became a dentist by mere chance!

Why are you so passionate about teaching dentistry?

Edwina – Teaching is such a privilege, the chance to educate and inspire. I passionately believe in disease control (i.e. preventing tooth decay) and the chance to teach that within the discipline of restorative dentistry was a challenge. The important factor is not the restoration but the caries control treatment to prevent the problem recurring. As a child I loved drama and lecturing is pure theatre, or it should be! To do this is tremendous, self-indulgent, fun. Similarly, to write simply and to hold the reader’s attention is a challenge. I was paid a lot of money to enjoy myself. Having said this, what has been achieved in the UK? Not enough! Dentists in some parts of UK are still not paid to prevent disease; they are paid to ‘treat’ it by placing fillings. The treatment of caries is the simple control measures. Fillings are a part of plaque control, because they mend a hole in a tooth so it can be cleaned again.

So, if you had limitless money and resources, how would you solve tooth decay?

Edwina and Ole – Our solution does not involve more money, but a redistribution of what is available. Dental caries is controllable by relatively simple means – all publicly available and comprehensible. The structure of the dental profession needs to change, so that there is more of a focus on public health and prevention, as opposed to fillings which in a way close the stable door after the horse has bolted. Caries control is not about expensive restorative dentistry, but about personal oral hygiene, sugar restrictions in diet, changing social deprivation, and reaching the community.

Do you think there is currently enough being done to tackle the issue, and how far should the state be involved?

Image Credit: ‘Dentist, Dental, Clinic’ by Unsplash. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

Edina and Ole – Governments should certainly be involved in the personal health of the people. Many diseases are controllable by public health measures, and these measures should aim to make healthy choices the easy choices. A good example is banning smoking in public places. Even more fundamental than this, are policies to produce clean water. Does taxing a harmful product, such as sugar (e.g. George Osborne’s recent sugar tax) and tobacco, have a useful effect? We are unsure, but it displays an awareness of a problem, in turn, raising awareness amongst the population.

Finally, why do you think people are still so scared of going to the dentist?

Edwina – The mouth is a very intimate and sensitive area. Those who first meet a dentist when they have disease / pain may have an unpleasant experience that will put them off. The time to meet dental personnel is when you are healthy and happy, to be taught how to maintain health.

I cared for many nervous patients, but they told me they began to look forward to visits. I listened a lot and we talked about how to achieve their wish for healthy, pretty, teeth. It is important to realize this is time consuming and worthy of payment. If operating, I could give a totally painless local anaesthetic, and use of a rubber sheet (called a rubber dam) separated their mouth from me. This worked so well that patients often fell asleep – a bit of a nuisance as their mouths closed!

Ole – Children irrespective of age should be cared for and learn the importance of looking after their teeth – thus preventing decay. If this is done properly, and from a young age, people can avoid dental pain and traumatic experiences with dentists such as drilling, and much worse, general anaesthesia.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Toy, Mouth, Teeth’ by bebeplace, CC0 Public Domain, via Pixabay.

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The case of BHS and change on the UK High Street

BHS is, or perhaps that should read was, a familiar presence to shoppers across the UK, with over 160 stores in high streets and shopping centres. The general merchandise retailer combining clothing and home products had traded for nearly 90 years before it was placed into administration in April 2016. A buyer for the total business could not be found and the stores will progressively close, while the BHS name itself will disappear. This is the biggest collapse of a UK retailer since Woolworths (800 stores and 30,000 employees) collapsed in 2008. There have been several other significant collapses of smaller specialist chains in the intervening years, including Focus DIY (home improvement, 175 stores), Jane Norman (fashion, 200+ stores), Past Times (Gifts, 51 stores), JJB Sports (sports goods, 160 stores), Comet (consumer electricals, 236 stores), Barratts (shoes, 190+ stores) and Blockbuster (video rental, 264 stores).

The UK government regulators are keenly interested to understand the reasons for the collapse of BHS, amidst suggestions of poor governance and corporate behaviour. Inquiries will take place and explanations will be sought. But what cannot be in doubt is that, at a trading level, BHS had long since ceased to be relevant to many of the people that were formerly its shoppers. As a general merchandise retailer, BHS faced intense competition from many quarters, including specialist clothing retailers with a much stronger low price positioning (such as Primark); others with more fashionable offers (such as Next and TopShop); from the main UK supermarket food retailers expanding into general merchandise, and from a growing presence of online retailers. BHS entered a spiral of decline from which very few retailers are able to emerge: merchandise is dull, shoppers stop shopping there, stores are under-invested in and become tired, promotions are rife in order to try to stimulate sales but profits suffer in consequence. Add all that up and the result is predictable: there is little money to invest in a business that desperately needed investment if it is to have any chance of becoming relevant again to shoppers.

Oxford Street Shoppers by Gary J Wood. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

All this was happening to BHS at a time when its shoppers – as well as its competition – were changing in fundamental ways too. The UK shopping landscape looks very different to what it was even 10 years ago. A growing proportion of shoppers simply do not see shopping as necessarily a store-based activity at all. Busy lives, the proliferation of mobile devices, and reliable high speed internet access means that online shopping is much the fastest growing part of the UK’s retail market. Yet BHS had little capability to develop and service this part of the market by comparison with retailers, such as the John Lewis department store business which has invested very heavily in all of the logistics and technology infrastructure needed to support a properly integrated operation that combines physical stores with an online presence.

Other retailers in the UK have flourished over the same period that BHS has foundered and ultimately perished. Shop Direct is a case in point. This retailer has quickly transformed a number of tired retail businesses (most notably the old Littlewoods department store and catalogue retailing business) into a very effective, growing, and profitable online only retail business. It’s a form of retailing aligned to the needs of a growing proportion of shoppers and it doesn’t involve any physical shops at all.

The collapse of BHS serves as a sad illustration of a number of fundamental truths about the nature of the UK retailing industry in 2016. This is a hugely important sector in terms of its contribution to the economy, to jobs, and to the physical fabric of the country. But it is a sector undergoing profound and far-reaching changes both in terms of the competitive landscape and also the ways in which shoppers want to, well, shop. The relentless nature of change and the need to invest heavily in order to reinvent puts tremendous pressure on even the most established and recognisable high street names. The price for failing to adapt sufficiently and with sufficient speed and decisiveness may not just be business under-performance, it may well be corporate collapse.

Headline Image credit: End of an era: BHS, Swansea by Jeremy Sergrott. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Urbanization, climate change, and peri-urban water security

Urbanization processes in South Asia have resulted in the growth of peri-urban  spaces. These are intermediary zones between rural areas and urban centres that reveal some features of both; mixed and changing land use, social and economic heterogeneity, and a wide diversity of occupational activities and interests. Land and water use patterns undergo a transformation as land uses change from agricultural to industrial and urban. The process of the growth of modern cities leads to the appropriation of land and water from peri-urban spaces.

There are many different ways in which peri-urban communities in South Asia have lost access to water sources as a consequence of urbanization processes. These include the filling up of water bodies for urban expansion and infrastructure; the physical flows of water from rural to urban areas, for instance, through tankers; the extraction of groundwater by industry and the affluent urban elite; the dumping of urban and industrial waste in peri-urban  water sources and the acquisition of land for urban expansion, on account of which water sources located on those lands may also be lost.

The impacts of these changes have further been aggravated by climatic changes such as those in the frequency, seasonal distribution and timing of rainfall, changes in temperature and evapotranspiration, and incidence of extreme events. Rainfall and urban flooding have also become common. Together these changes have impacted the water security of peri-urban communities in South Asian cities such as Gurgaon and Hyderabad in India, Kathmandu in Nepal, and Khulna in Bangladesh.

While much research over recent years has focused on vulnerability in purely agrarian or urban contexts, peri-urban contexts need special attention

While much research over recent years has focused on vulnerability in purely agrarian or urban contexts, peri-urban contexts need special attention. Policy-makers and planners focus attention on meeting the water supply and infrastructure needs of growing cities, while neglecting the peri-urban spaces from where such water is often diverted. There is also a need to understand the differential vulnerabilities of people inhabiting peri-urban spaces – different groups, men and women. Urbanization and climate change represent a compounding of stresses; at the same time, the intersection of various identities such as those of caste, class, gender and ethnicity shapes the differential vulnerabilities of peri-urban communities.

A wide variety of approaches is needed to address this situation. Advocacy – based on scientific research – to protect urban water bodies could prevent a further loss of the urban commons. Land acquisition and climate change present threats to peri-urban agriculture; building human capital to promote livelihood diversification could serve as a cushion and promote livelihood diversification. Since peri-urban spaces are in transition, social capital can be weak. Interventions that provide forums for civic engagement can improve state accountability to peri-urban communities.

With the advent of urbanization processes, as competing pressures on land and water resources from rural and urban uses increase, there could be an increase in the potential for land and water conflicts. Thus interventions may be needed to balance competing interests; though local power differences may still have a role to play. At the same time, there is a need to understand new and emerging forms of co-operation that may evolve during times of scarcity; or to understand emerging institutional arrangements that promote co-operation. These can provide a base for capacity-building to further strengthen the resilience of communities.

Featured image credit: ‘Newah wash’, Nepal Water Project, by JumHolmes/AusAID. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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From Ebola to Zika

When we were finalizing our book for publication, the West African Ebola epidemic was emerging (we hadn’t picked Ebola as one of our case studies), and our publishers asked if we could include some information about it in the book. Knowing that epidemic threats keep coming — some such as SARS apparently receding into the background, and others such as HIV staying with us as part of the infectious disease landscape — we wrote:

At the time of writing it is difficult to predict the trajectory of the Ebola epidemic. However, by the time this book is in the hands of a reader, it seems virtually inevitable that yet another infectious disease will be emerging.

Now, as we guessed, something else has come along — the Zika virus. While we are biologists with a general interest in infectious diseases, and not Zika specialists (i.e., please don’t treat this blog post as medical advice!), we have been following the news with our usual fascination, and of course concern for those affected. As frequently happens, the initial reports seem to have been slightly exaggerated, but there is no question that Zika is a big deal, and some researchers are predicting that it will establish and persist in the US mainland. The spread of Zika has prompted the World Health Organisation to declare a global emergency, and Brazil has warned pregnant women to stay away from this summer’s Olympic games. One of the biological details that interested us most about Zika is its ability to transmit sexually as well as through mosquito vectors. (This was one of the major factors in the recent decision to move major-league baseball games out of Puerto Rico, where Zika virus is spreading — baseball players, many of whom are heterosexual males with partners of child-bearing age, were concerned about catching Zika and spreading it to their partners.)

We know of plenty of parasites that spread by more than one mode of transmission — HIV, notoriously, has spread through needle-sharing, sexual contact, and transfusions. Even the next-most-recent epidemic threat, Ebola, is known to transmit sexually as well as by more casual contact with infected fluids. It isn’t surprising that a virus could spread sexually — next to direct injection into the bloodstream (whether naturally through mosquito mouthparts or artificially through needles), intercourse can be one of the most direct modes of contact between organisms, offering few physiological barriers to pathogen transmission. However, we don’t know of any other vector-borne diseases that can also spread through sexual contact: when a US virologist transmitted Zika to his wife after contracting it in Africa in 2008, he stated that at that time “human sexual transmission of an arbovirus [i.e., a virus spread by arthropods such as mosquitoes] has not been documented.”

On the other hand, our ignorance of arboviruses’ ability to transmit sexually could just be another aspect of our overwhelming ignorance of infectious diseases. When disease is endemic (persistent in a population) or rapidly spreading via mosquito bites, it’s hard to tell whether it also spreads sexually, because anyone who has had sex with an infected partner has probably also been bitten by lots of infected mosquitoes. It’s only (as in the case of the American scientist mentioned above, and in recent sexually transmitted Ebola and Zika cases) when people are infected in epidemic areas, travel home to non-epidemic areas, and then infect their partners that we can be fairly sure that sexual transmission has occurred. Even then, we have to rule out the possibility that after they returned home, travelers were bitten by mosquitoes that became infected and went on to infect their partners.

Views of the sugar loaf by ASSY. Public domain via Pixabay.

Sexual transmission is making headlines in Western media (we mostly follow North American media, but note that the first documented sexual transmission during the current epidemic was to a French woman whose partner was infected in Brazil) because it is the most likely way that people who don’t live in or travel to tropical areas could be exposed to Zika. It’s also possible, although in our opinion very unlikely, that sexual transmission coupled with virus evolution could eventually create a local transmission pathway that could keep Zika endemic in non-tropical areas. We really have no idea at this point how much sexual transmission could add to the R0 of Zika (which has been estimated very crudely as between 3 and 6 in Colombia, and is certainly much less in cooler regions and places with more air conditioning and insect screens). The contribution of transmission via sexual intercourse will probably be very small — an infected person would typically have at most one sexual partner during the week or so they are infectious, and the probability of transmission per sexual event is unknown, but probably low. In principle, though, adding sexual to vector-borne transmission could make Zika harder to contain, prolonging the sputtering outbreaks that occur in diseases where R0 is close to 1, large enough for dozens of cases but not for a full-fledged epidemic. We need to know more about actual rates of sexual transmission to predict the actual magnitude of the risk. More generally we wonder: is sexual transmission of arboviruses indeed rare, or simply undetected? If it is rare, then why is Zika sexually transmissible when its close relatives, Dengue and Yellow Fever, are (apparently) not?

 Featured Image credit: Mygg / Mosquito by Erik F. Brandsborg. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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What does assisted suicide have to do with gay marriage?

When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, finding a constitutional right to gay marriage, advocates of physician-assisted suicide had almost as much reason to celebrate as gay citizens who had been longing to marry. Physician-assisted suicide, or aid in dying, is the option currently available in five states for competent terminally ill people with less than six months to live to obtain lethal medications from physicians in order to choose the time and manner of their deaths. The New Mexico Supreme Court is expected to decide soon whether the state constitution provides a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill New Mexicans. Odd as it may seem, the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell may well have helped advocates of the right to physician-assisted suicide.

Even stranger are the bedfellows created by this case: supporters of aid in dying may cheer Justice Roberts’ dissent in Obergefell because of his uncompromising stance that the majority’s analysis supporting a right to gay marriage necessarily overrules the framework of a decision almost twenty years earlier finding no constitutional right to assisted suicide.

In 1997, the Supreme Court held that there was no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide in Washington v. Glucksberg. The proponents of the right to physician-assisted suicide argued that the right to liberty included the right of terminally ill people to choose the time and manner of their death. Justice Rehnquist reframed this as a right to commit suicide, and held that no such right existed because suicide had been rejected by the “history and tradition” of the United States. Essentially, the Court held that constitutional due process rights could only exist if they were part of the long-standing history and tradition of American society. It does not take a keen legal mind to see how awkward this analysis might be for proponents of a constitutional right to gay marriage. Homosexual activity remained criminalized long after criminal penalties for suicide and attempted suicide.

Supreme Court of the United States ends marriage discrimination – Obergefell vs Hodges. On the morning of June 26, 2015 outside the Supreme Court, the crowd reacts to the Court’s decision. Photo by Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

So how to constitutionalize the right to gay marriage while maintaining the due process analysis of Glucksberg, which leaned so heavily on public attitudes throughout history? Justice Kennedy’s efforts to distinguish Glucksberg were pretty weak. He conceded that “Glucksberg did insist that liberty under the Due Process Clause must be defined in a most circumscribed manner, with central reference to specific historical practices.”  But, he insisted, “…while that approach may have been appropriate for the asserted right there involved (physician-assisted suicide), it is inconsistent with the approach this Court has used in discussing other fundamental rights, including marriage and intimacy.”

This is skating pretty close to adopting different due process approaches depending on a Justice’s policy preferences, and Justice Roberts would have none of it. He asserted that Obergefell amounts to a reversal of the analysis (and thus possibly the result) of Glucksberg.

This was not just a lofty hypothetical argument about due process theory. Less than three months later, the New Mexico Appellate Court, facing an argument that the state constitution supports a right to physician-assisted suicide, spent a significant proportion of its decision parsing how Obergefell affected the right to physician-assisted suicide. In Morris v. Brandenberg, the majority rejected the argument that Obergefell overruled Glucksberg; Judges Garcia and Hanisee were content to take Justice Kennedy at his word without too much explanation. Dissenting Judge Vanzi, however, spent eight pages meticulously demonstrating how the due process analysis of Obergefell—that rights evolve, and are not limited by history and tradition—must necessarily support the claim of a right to choose the time and manner of one’s death.

Morris v. Brandenberg is now before the New Mexico Supreme Court, which recognized a state constitutional right to gay marriage in 2013, Griego v. Oliver. The likelihood is that this court will become the first state Supreme Court to find a right to physician-assisted suicide, and if it does, you can bet that this case will contain numerous citations to the US Supreme Court’s recognition of a constitutional right to gay marriage.

Featured image credit: Pills by kev-shine. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

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“An Idea Whose Time Had Come”: The National Organization for Women at its Half-Century Mark

Fifty years ago this month, twenty-eight women came together to create what they described as “a civil rights movement to speak for women.” “How did we know each other?” author Betty Friedan asked of the self-described “rabble-rousers” who broke away from the gathering of state Commissions on the Status of Women to form the National Organization for Women (NOW). “We recognized the honest fire.” Within a few months, NOW had three hundred members; by the end of the decade, three thousand. The Strike for Women’s Equality, a string of protests that marked the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage in 1970, added thousands more to NOW’s ranks. As the feminist historian Elizabeth Balanoff reflected, NOW was “an idea whose time had come.”

In the decades that followed, NOW became the largest explicitly feminist membership organization in American history. Women and men nationwide projected their own visions of feminism onto NOW, and national leaders responded by constructing a grassroots-driven structure that put local chapters in the driver’s seat. NOW also became a sophisticated lobby group that pursued feminist aims at the national policy level. While it is best remembered for its vigorous, but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, NOW targeted a stunning array of American institutions: the workplace, the media, the insurance industry, and much more. According to its third president Wilma Scott Heide, NOW was “interested and active in just about everything that affects and/or would substantially improve the status of women.”

Friedan, Betty; Rawalt, Marguerite 1895; Ireton, Barbara; National Organization for Women; Federal Bar Association. Smithsonian Institution from United States. Uploaded by Magnus Manske. Public Domain from Flickr’s The Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

NOW may be the best example of a grassroots association established in the 1960s that remained relevant into the 2000s. Throughout its history, NOW grappled with questions that continue to inspire and challenge feminists today. How can an inclusive agenda avoid papering over members’ disparate identities and ideologies? To what extent does creating sex equality require denying differences between the sexes—whether essential or socially constructed—and should law and culture ever account for those differences? Does feminism require separating from men?  Can it coexist with capitalism? Along the way, NOW developed strategies that built undeniable momentum and made feminism mainstream. These accomplishments were made possible by the expansive and open-ended blueprint its founders drafted. NOW’s ambiguity was thus its greatest strength, as successive feminist generations remade it to suit their own climate.

Scholars tend to agree that NOW was significant, but none has yet written its comprehensive history. Instead, in histories of American feminism, NOW often serves as a moderate backdrop for more dramatic, and allegedly more radical, forms of activism. Reflecting the broader fragmentation of women’s and gender history, the scholars who have written on NOW have tended to tackle its size and complexity in pieces, analyzing its founding moment or tracing the development of single chapters, issues or campaigns. While these accounts illuminate key aspects of NOW’s past, its broader history remains an underdeveloped mosaic.  As I worked on other projects related to feminism in NOW’s most active years, I longed to consult a more synthetic history of that organization.  Since such a book does not exist, I decided to write it myself.

As former NOW Vice President for Action Mary Jean Collins told me, “It’s a broader organization than it’s remembered, [and] it had more aspects to it than people know.” Many scholars and NOW veterans have shined spotlights on portions of NOW’s past. Now, as the organization passes the half-century mark, it is time to turn on the floodlights.

Featured image: Newly enfranchised women voting in the recall election of Hiram Gill as mayor of Seattle, Washington, February 1911. PD-US via Wikimedia Commons.

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Sampling reptiles in the Anthropocene

According to the Reptile Database, more than 10,200 non-avian reptile species have been described (6,175 lizards and amphisbaenians; 3,496 snakes; 341 turtles; 25 crocodilians; 1 tuatara), with new taxa being recognized nearly every day. Reptiles are not on the mind of most people in the so-called “developed” world, but they play a major role in the ecology of many regions as predators and prey, particularly in tropical and subtropical humid forests and deserts. Although charismatic mammals and birds have received more attention because of declining populations and shrinking habitats, reptile species throughout the world are also declining in the Age of Man, the Anthropocene.

As with other taxa, habitat loss is still the greatest threat to most species, especially coupled with fragmentation that isolates populations that manage to survive the development, agriculture, and transportation corridors that pattern human landscapes. Significant other threats come from emerging infectious diseases, for example, ranavirus (affecting land turtles), fibropapillomatosis (affecting sea turtles), and snake fungal disease (particularly in eastern North America). Collection for food or leather, vandalism and malicious killing, and the lethal and sublethal effects of toxic and endocrine-disrupting chemicals also contribute to declines. Because the sex ratio of many reptiles, particularly turtles and crocodilians, is determined by the nest temperature during egg development, there has been growing concern about the effects of increasing temperatures associated with climate change on reproduction and distribution patterns. A recent assessment of the status of the world’s reptiles concluded that 20% were in danger of extinction, and that another 20% were so “data deficient” that we simply do not know how to assess their prospects for survival.

The life histories and conservation status of most of these species are imperfectly understood or completely unknown except for a few of the more charismatic or popular larger species. A surprising amount of what we do know about reptiles is based on a relatively few species, and even then long-term studies are available for only a minute percentage of known species. This is a particularly vexing problem when dealing with species that may not reach sexual maturity for decades (for example, some sea turtles and the tuatara); as might be anticipated, species with long lives and delayed maturity are among the most imperiled species. Even for common species, good population data over long time periods is usually lacking for more than a few locations, and we know little of how populations vary in numbers (what is “natural” variation?), the influences of subtle changes in a species’ community, or the effects of stochastic or periodic disturbances (for example, drought, floods, fire, storms) on population recovery and persistence.

Crocodile alligator dangerous by Eelffica. Public domain via Pixabay.

Another problem is our own human short attention span. We tend not to think in evolutionary time (1000s of years) and we tend to follow the “shifting baseline syndrome,” whereby each human generation becomes accustomed to a slightly more impoverished natural biodiversity. Thus, there is an urgent need for field research on reptiles and their community interactions, and to recognize our own inherent biases in perception and research.

Today, scientists do not just catch snakes, lizards, and turtles to do their research. They employ rather detailed protocols for setting research questions and objectives, and now have an array of sophisticated methods to target critical sampling areas, to identify, collect, and track animals, and to analyze and archive the resulting data. Foremost concerns are to collect data as humanely as possible and to try to minimize sampling biases that have been inherent in many studies, where opportunism seemed to play an all-important role. For most studies, animals are no longer sacrificed to provide data on diet (for example, by using stomach flushing or stable isotopes), reproduction (radiographs, ultrasound), or tissue analysis (blood collection, biopsies for small amounts of tissue). Even detecting the presence of some species might be facilitated by sampling environmental DNA (eDNA), thus minimizing financial expense, difficult logistics, and habitat disturbance when looking for rare or secretive species.

Simply put, reptile ecologists want animals alive in nature in order to follow populations through time. To do this, animals need to be marked so that they can be identified in the future, whether in hand or at some distance. Some animals can be permanently marked by shell notching or scale clipping without causing undue stress (which can be assessed by sampling blood for stress hormones), tagged with Passive Integrated Transponders (PIT tags), or even identified using unique scale or color patterns compared to a digitally assembled computer database. Specialized paints using coded numbers or spots, and even fluorescent powder, can be used to see reptiles (especially lizards and turtles) at a distance without repeatedly disturbing them. Movements are tracked using ever-smaller radio, acoustic, and even satellite transmitters. One of the more exciting recent acoustic discoveries is that hatchling turtles in the Amazon actually use sound to follow adults to feeding grounds.

Analyzing capture data from mark-recapture studies also has become much more rigorous. Reptile ecologists and conservation biologists have moved beyond the notion of simple probability statistics, although they are still useful if understood correctly, to information theoretic approaches that allow more interpretive flexibility to generate testable hypotheses. Reptile scientists now incorporate detection probabilities into assessments of abundance, allowing them a more detailed prediction of abundance and trends in life history parameters, such as population growth rates, recruitment, and survivorship. Multi-state and multi-scale occupancy models allow assessments of status and trends over substantial areas in addition to more localized patterns of extinction and recolonization. Such models let researchers examine factors affecting the presence or absence of a species in a region while accounting for imperfect detection, an important consideration when sampling. GIS and other landscape-scale modelling tools further allow researchers to target areas for surveys and protection. In essence, rapidly-evolving mathematical approaches give researchers tools for assessing the past and predicting the effects of current activities, and for managing for change in the future.

The techniques scientists use to study reptile biology, determine species status and trends, and plans for conservation have moved beyond the simple act of catching an animal. They involve the entire realm of modern science technology, from molecular biology to global modeling. And it all begins with the question of sampling, since unbiased sampling forms the basis for how scientists understand and interpret their data. We appreciate sampling as an integral part of our science, rather than just a means of capturing animals; it is the how and the why and the ‘what does it mean’ foundation of twenty-first-century natural history research.

Featured image credit: Snake Green Mamba by Foto-Rabe. Public domain via Pixabay.

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The Paradoxical Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali’s funeral and memorial service brought together a seemingly incongruous cast of characters, once again spotlighting the many contradictions that have made it so difficult for commentators and biographers to extract a realistic assessment of his life. Even with a staggering amount written about him, Ali leaves behind a contested image largely characterized by misinterpretation.

Any analysis of Ali must take into account that his malleability made him supremely resistant to categorization. Reductionism obscures the complexity of his legacy without shedding any new light. Exaggerations about Ali’s political efficacy from the left no less egregiously whitewash his image than those from the right that brand him as having transcended race.

These typical perspectives fail to nail down Ali’s essence, which continues after his death to be as difficult to catch cleanly as he was during his early years as a ring professional. Whether he is cast primarily as a heroic symbol of Third World resistance or a humanist envoy of universal values, the portrayal misses the mark.

Ali’s outspoken draft resistance certainly inspired progressives and people of color, sending clear anticolonial signals that invigorated freedom struggles at home and abroad. His influence on the activists that formed the backbone of the civil rights movement was undeniable.

Muhammad Ali. Image by jondmac. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

It is likely more accurate, however, to compare Ali to Mother Theresa than Martin Luther King, Jr. He emerged as a worldwide symbol of peace, a great humanitarian who spent his days raising money and awareness for a staggering range of causes. Nobody has done more to draw attention to Parkinson’s disease, for example, or to bridge perceived gaps between Islamic values and Western ones in post-9/11 America. Ali renounced his most exclusionary stances decades ago. Long gone is talk of white devils or the lynching of interracial couples, which he never meant literally, anyway.

Despite the best intentions of those who wish to portray him as such, Ali was no revolutionary. Often he went firmly in the other direction. He chose Elijah Muhammad over Malcolm X, helped enrich dictators Mobutu Sese Seko and Ferdinand Marcos, endorsed Ronald Reagan for president, and almost fought in apartheid Sun City.

Ali was no conservative, either. Race always mattered to him. He emphasized that African American history and culture—key to the identity politics loathed by the right—were always at the heart of his worldview. He relentlessly asserted that his being black and Muslim meant something different than being white and Christian or Jewish.

What people construe as Ali acting out of character was actually his testing the limits of his capabilities. Those who express disappointment about certain elements of Ali’s biography while celebrating others simply do not accept who he was. The counterpoints spurred his growth—he was always trying to improve, whether as a boxer or a man, and spent the last thirty years of his life trying to get into heaven. At the core were his efforts to give voice to the underrepresented.

Muhammad Ali signing autographs for Volendam girls. Nationaal Archief, March 1976, Netherlands. CC SA 3.0 Netherlands via Wikimedia Commons.

To understand Ali, start with the irreconcilabilities, and know that his underlying desire in life, to paraphrase, was the freedom to be what he wanted to be. His funeral and memorial service, done according to his wishes, were final reminders of that insistence, where Bill Clinton and Orrin Hatch took the dais, Jesse Jackson did not, and a rabbi spoke about Palestinian liberation.

It was a fitting sendoff for Ali, who for years was simultaneously the most loved and hated man in America, one who could earnestly endorse racial separation even as some of his closest associates were white, and who began his career as the fastest heavyweight champion of all time but ended it as the toughest.

Those who try to capture the man’s meaning without embracing his inconsistencies will wind up like so many of his opponents: either swinging at the air or finding their best shots absorbed, all the while coming no closer to solving the riddle that was Muhammad Ali.

Headline image credit: Muhammad Ali, 1966. CC SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Brexit wrecks it for science

We are all reeling from the vote for Brexit. No one in my scientific circle was for exit. Now all are heavily lamenting it. Even cursing it on Facebook. Scientists voted to stay. Seems the entire science sector was pro-Europe and for many good reasons. Many of the best UK science labs are filled with brilliant researchers from across the EU.

The best science is done when there are no barriers to free thought, open working or collaboration. The closing of borders lessens the potential movement of scientists to the best places for them to work.

In a letter to The Times, Stephen Hawking. three Nobel laureates, the Astronomer Royal and 150 of their colleagues from the Royal Society cursed Brexit as a “disaster for UK science”. Again, recruitment of talent was cited as a major loss. The LA Times weighed in with an article entitled “British Scientists are Freaking Out about Brexit too.”

It is clear on all fronts these are dark days for science.

EU funding encouraged collaboration of scientists across Europe and it is hard to imagine the United Kingdom now being cut out of this collaborative circle and the ability to exchange ideas with long-standing European colleagues.

How many UK researchers, especially those at the start of their careers, are now stranded with soon to be illegal alien status in European countries? Just as exchange was beginning to ramp up between countries, it is cut without further notice. What about those who will soon have to leave the United Kingdom without the legal right to stay?

The funding chasm that will open in the wake of Brexit is one that has long existed when it comes to collaborating with colleagues in the USA or farther afield. Yes, there are small pots of money that allow the exchange of personnel, short visits, or bespoke projects on specific topics to specific countries (Brazil, India and China are top of the lists), but in general it is very different to get funding to work together across the pond or beyond. Now the gulf has widened.

Nigel Farage, by Dweller. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

My life was transformed by EU funding.

One of so many grants given to bring together researchers across Europe into large collaborative undertakings, we had funding to research marine microbes. As part of this project we launched Ocean Sampling Day (OSD). No one country could have undertaken this project – it required as many researchers as possible to take ocean samples on the same day at the same time around the world. The consortium was global. We wanted to look at global distributions of microbes and understand what drives their distributions and diversity. The great day of sampling occurred on the solstice and would have been the sole topic of this article had Brexit not occurred. As such, it is now a lament of things lost. (A huge congratulations to all who took part in OSD 2016!)

Luckily, OSD is largely crowd-funded by the scientific community. Researchers as far away as Tahiti have all come together to contribute expertise, time, money and scientific infrastructure to take part. As a result, among other findings, more than three million genes new to science have been found.

This year Chris Mason’s group, who famously sampled the microbes of the New York Subway, joined to add an urban ‘swabathon’ to the solstice festivities.

OSD shows us what could happen if we had science-without-borders. And how science goes forward only with suitable funding. With dedicated funding the German sampling activity exploded in 2016 as can be seen on this map as sampling work headed to inland freshwater sites.

The breakdown of UK scientific links to the continent through Brexit reminds us that we should be thinking about how to encourage global funding of science. We have one Earth and many topics would benefit from global funding. Some advances are being made. Some philanthropic foundations fund without borders, but primarily focus on a specific country still, namely their home country. Some scientific initiatives like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) work globally to catalogue distributions of species through a collaboration of governments. Collaborative funding like the Belmont Forum works at the international level to tackle climate change and sustainable development.

Still, we ideally need a lot more international and cross-borders funding.

With more and more billionaires funding research would it be too outlandish to see a group come together to truly change science? To go where governmental funding bodies can’t go? To do what is best for humankind? To have a vision of the future? Perhaps this is just crazy talk brought on by the anguish of Brexit, but perhaps it is exactly such tragedies that help bring out transformative actions.

One can only hope. From all the worst disasters, all one can do is try to forge silver linings through imagination and change.

Projects like Ocean Sampling Day should ideally have recourse to funding that could be spread to all participating countries. It could be used to fund boat time, participation in meetings, extra analysis and the development of novel approaches where speciality expertise resides at different, geographically dispersed laboratories. This is a future model of science that is most cost effective, productive, and useful to humanity.

Establishing global science funding infrastructure is far above the issue of Brexit, but Brexit highlights it yet again.

Featured image credit: Brexit in flags, by Vexels Groovy Graphics. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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