Oxford University Press's Blog, page 819

Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) and spelling reform

By Anatoly Liberman

Henry Bradley, while writing his paper (see the previous post), must have looked upon Skeat as his main opponent. This becomes immediately clear from the details. For instance, Skeat lamented the use of the letter c in scissors and Bradley defended it. He even noted, in the supplement to the paper devoted to Spelling Reform, that, all Skeat’s ardor and arguments notwithstanding, in his publications and personal letters he stuck to traditional spelling. This mild taunt was beside the point. Why should Skeat have adopted reformed or simplified spelling before it became the norm?

Skeat’s program paper was delivered in 1906. In modern times, the proposal for simplified spelling was first made in 1881, and the decade before the First World War witnessed an unprecedented and never to be repeated splash of interest in this matter. In the United States, some linguistic journals agreed to print papers with the words having the appearance favored by the reformers. George O. Curme, a distinguished American linguist, published a scholarly article in a leading German periodical using “new orthography” (1914). I needn’t remind anyone that this was the epoch of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, hence the numerous cartoons connecting him and the Reform. In 1910 George B. Shaw believed that England would move toward phonetic spelling in the foreseeable future. Foreign scholars, especially in Sweden and the Netherlands, clamored for action, and offered recipes. English, they pointed out, had become an international language and its written form was the greatest handicap to those who wished to learn it.

The most timid attempt at Spelling Reform

The war made all such problems irrelevant. Then came the Bolsheviks and the Nazis and another war. In later times, the Chomskyan revolution did a lot of harm to the “cause.” Chomsky’s emphasis on the historical logic of English spelling contributed to the loss of the little enthusiasm scholars might have for Spelling Reform. He taught that one has to distinguish between underlying forms and surface realizations. Archaic English spelling provided Chomsky and his closest ally Morris Halle with a treasure trove of “underlying forms” (for example, we spell take, and the underlying form has “long a,” that is, the vowel of Modern Engl. spa, father, etc., and it is exactly this vowel from which the modern diphthong developed). In that academic battle, Bradley won a decisive victory, a fact to be regretted.

Skeat’s paper runs to eighteen pages. His main point, so cleverly contested by Bradley, is predictable: letters should represent sounds, but English spelling fails to do so. Very funny from our perspective is his suggestion for explaining to boys (naturally!) the true value of English vowels. The English should give up their habit of Anglicizing Latin pronunciation, and, once the boys begin to read Latin approximately as they would read Italian, they will understand the nature of sound change, and it will be easier to explain the correlation between letters and sounds, a major prerequisite for the success of the Reform. Alas and alack, today this recommendation has little value: our “boys” no longer study Latin for six years.

Help from Abroad

One of the pioneers of Spelling Reform was the great philologist Henry Sweet, and Skeat supported his ideas. These are the spellings both of them advocated: hav, liv, abov; agreev, aproov, solv, freez, etc. (in the e-less category, only adz and ax gained a foothold, and only in American English); jepardy, bredth; acheev, beleev; cumfort, tuch, cuzin; flurish; batl, ketl, writn; lam, num; lookt, puld; honor, labor (once again the last words will not offend the American eye). Skeat referred to two great gains the Reform would have. The first strikes me as almost humorous, even though offered in dead earnest, the second as vital.

“The first is that those partial reforms would necessarily involve the disuse of a large number of useless letters. In this way more matter would be got into a page, and some labour in the compositions of the type would be saved; and as this would happen in every case, …it might very easily save every printer and publisher a considerable sum of money. It would not be surprising if the aggregate savings, in the course of a year, throughout the British Empire, were to amount to a considerable sum of money. [He projected the economy of thousands of pounds.]… The second is that the task of learning to read would be considerably simplified, and the time taken to achieve that task would be considerably shortened…. In this case there can be no doubt at all that the sums thus saved would be very considerable.”

He devoted several paragraphs to beating this willing horse.

Skeat summarized the situation quite convincingly: English words have turned into hieroglyphs that have to be learned mechanically. With this spelling we are not quite in China (figuratively speaking), because many words are still spelled phonetically, but we are halfway through (I am paraphrasing, not quoting Skeat). Close to the end of the paper he admitted that since 1881 absolutely no progress had been made in reforming English spelling. Publishers and journalists crushed every attempt to tamper with the existing system (“I speak it to our utter shame,” he added). But his explanation of the reasons for the failure is probably wrong. He ascribed the public’s near universal resistance to its ignorance of the most basic facts of linguistics. The obtuseness and ignorance of his countrymen was one of Skeat’s favorite subjects; he had no patience with human stupidity.

However, in this case, it was probably not only ignorance that killed the Reform. We should rather consider the natural wish of human beings to protect their riches, be it material possessions or spiritual property. Someone who has learned the spelling of the noun occurrence (very few have, as far as I can judge), has perhaps been whipped, rapped over the knuckles, or received bad grades for spelling it with -ance or with one r (or one c), will cling to the hard-obtained treasure like grim death. To waste years on such terrible words and give up their spelling? No! Besides, in England honor, labor, ax, and their likes had the stigma of being Americanisms. Who would fall so low as to imitate the Americans? Even after 1918 British periodicals carried blood curdling letters to the editor about the corrupting influence of Americanisms on pure English.

From this point of view, it is curious to read the concluding paragraph of Skeat’s paper.

“If, however, it should come to pass that a real Spelling Reform should previously be effected in America, it may quite possibly be a gain to us; because the history of our language is there more generally known. I lately met with the President of an American university, who said to me (I have no doubt with perfect truth) ‘In our universities English takes the first place’. This is one of those facts of which the ordinary Englishman is entirely ignorant; indeed, it is almost impossible for him to imagine how such a state of things can be possible. I recommend the contemplation of this astounding fact to your serious consideration.”

I am a great fan of Walter Skeat’s and often try to placate his irascible shadow. This time I hasten to reassure the great man that English no longer takes the first place in American universities; at all stages, we teach concepts and critical thinking, not facts. We despise memorization and encourage discussion, ideally group discussion following a PowerPoint presentation. One semester of the history of English is rarely required even of English majors, and for spelling we have spellcheckers. However, it is not good to finish even a grim comedy (that is, a drama in which the protagonists don’t die) on a gloomy note. Perhaps indeed, the stimulus to reform English spelling will come from America; we’ll see. The past is hard to reconstruct, but the future is even harder to predict.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via email or RSS.

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Image credits: (1) Printed in 1911 in the American Transactions of the Philological Association (part of the article by Charles P.G. Scott “Bogus and his Crew”; Scott was the etymologist for The Century Dictionary). (2) A sample of what the Swedes suggested (the Anglic Fund, Uppsala). Both images courtesy of Anatoly Liberman.

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Developing a module for Oxford Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) launched in 2003 with 700 titles. Now, on its tenth birthday, it’s the online home of over 9,000 titles from Oxford University Press’s distinguished academic list, and part of University Press Scholarship Online. To celebrate OSO turning ten, we’ve invited a host of people to reflect on the past ten years of online academic publishing, and what the next ten might bring.

By Nicola Wilson

When I was invited to develop two lists for Oxford Scholarship Online, I jumped at the chance. From the perspective of a commissioning editor, digital publishing has extended the “life” of our copyrights indefinitely, and we no longer need to hold a book in physical print for it to continue to be available to our readers.

The first module that I developed was “Public Health and Epidemiology,” back in 2008. The books contained in the module have been published by our medical department over the course of three decades, and many are now considered public health classics, such as Michael Marmot’s Social Determinants of Health, and Geoffrey Rose’s The Strategy of Preventative Medicine.

The books that we chose to include on Oxford Scholarship Online present research and analysis of global health issues, and insight into the impact of diseases and conditions on populations. Several of the projects in the module have directly influenced policy planning and clinical attitudes to disease prevention and management, transforming scientific investigation methods and treatment approaches worldwide.

The biggest challenge in developing the module was the time that it took to clear permission to reproduce the material online. Many of the contracts and agreements that we held for our older books long pre-dated electronic resources, and we had to ask the authors and editors to sign contract addendums to allow us to proceed with publishing the books online. In some instances, authors had died since the book was published with us, so we needed to contact authors’ estates and ask surviving relatives to grant us permission to reproduce the material online.

In other cases, we needed to trace the ownership of third-party copyrighted material which was included in the books, so I became a detective, trying to identify the current owners of defunct publishers, some of which had changed their ownership through multiple company mergers over a thirty-year period. What naively started out as a few hours of looking through dusty hard-copy records in our basement, turned into a few months of internet heavy investigation and phone calls to numerous publishers’ Rights departments.

The amount of work that clearing permissions created turned it into an “all hands on deck during evenings and weekends” project. Over half of the medical department pitched in extra hours over a four-month period to ensure that we hit the launch deadline that we had been set. (Never underestimate the power of food to complete a project on schedule.)

The trickiest book that we worked on was Nutrition for Developing Countries, which was originally published in 1993 before our copyright clearance rules were defined. It’s full of unique hand drawn illustrations of Tanzanian families, different types of food, and easy-to-read graphs. It was specifically presented in such a way that could be used as a “show and tell” book by doctors working with non-literate families in Africa. For example, they could point at the illustrations of healthy foods in the book and explain to nursing mothers how eating those foods would help their babies to grow strong and remain healthy.

However, our challenge was trying to find out who had drawn the pictures, and subsequently who owned the copyright for them. Many of the illustrations had been drawn by a friend of one of the editors, and given to the editor as a wedding present. Did this mean that the copyright was held by the editor, or was it held by the artist? No copyright permission had ever been signed to state either way, and we had no contact details for the artist to enquire with them directly. We contacted the book editor, but they were often working in areas of Africa where Internet access was non-existent, so it took around four months to liaise with the editor and the artist (whom the editor contacted on our behalf), and acquire permission from both of them (to cover all legal bases) to use the illustrations in a digital form.

A major benefit of putting books online is the global availability of the information they contain; practitioners and academics can access and use these books online wherever they are in world. It’s wonderful that public health and epidemiology books attract a global readership, and through their availability online, they will have an even broader reach, and continue to help develop and improve research and treatment for many years to come.

Nicola Wilson is Senior Commissioning Editor for Palliative Medicine and Public Health and Epidemiology at Oxford University Press.

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Searching for more legal certainty in bitcoins and mobile payments

By Niels Vandezande

In the last few months, international media have reported extensively on the latest developments in the online economy. These reports have focused mostly on the rise of so-called cryptocurrencies, with bitcoin being the most well-known example. Such cryptocurrencies are characterized by their decentralized nature, meaning that they aren’t controlled by a central government. As such, their emission is controlled by an algorithm rather than by economic imperatives. While originally used by only a small group of enthusiasts, bitcoin has now captured the attention of the global economy and lawmakers. It has given impulse to the creation of several other cryptocurrencies, some of which are known for their community efforts — such as dogecoin — and others which are known for being named after a celebrity — which isn’t always appreciated.

While this rise of cryptocurrencies certainly has economic potential — with bitcoin alone having a current market capitalization estimated at over USD 5 billon — the last few months have also exposed a number of the less pleasant issues. These issue range between its role in, for instance, an online black market, theft, and money-laundering. One of the important contributing factors in this, is that cryptocurrencies have for long operated within a legal gray zone. From the beginning, it was unclear whether — and if so, which — existing regulation could be applied to this phenomenon. But for as long as this development played only a marginal societal role, specific legislative initiative attempting to regulate this matter wasn’t seriously considered.

This position of laissez-faire seems to be changing now. Just last week, for instance, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released a notice in which it holds that cryptocurrencies should be considered as property for taxation purposes. Other governments have also tried their hand at finding a legal basis for the use of cryptocurrencies. However, in most of such discussions, lawmakers’ and governments’ efforts remain mostly limited to providing for the taxation of gains made from transactions involving cryptocurrencies.

This is why the European Commission’s proposal for a review of the Payment Services Directive (Directive 2007/64/EC) could have been a great opportunity to explore the possibilities for a more fundamental overhaul of the legal framework regulating most of today’s online payments. Online payments focus more and more on mobile technologies, and now also include the use of non-governmental currencies. However, the currently existing framework set by the Payment Services Directive and its close companion the E-money Directive (Directive 2009/110/EC) isn’t suited to extend to the complete field of online payments.

A new proposal in this matter could have merged the closely related matters of payment services and e-money. It could have expanded the scope to emerging technologies. It could have taken a more direct approach in addressing non-governmental currencies. All of such approaches could have provided the user of mobile payment technologies and cryptocurrencies with more legal certainty regarding the protection that is — or isn’t — offered to him by the law.

The European Commission’s proposal, however, takes a different approach. First, it was decided that due to the late implementation of the E-money Directive, there wasn’t sufficient practical experience with this framework to allow for a review. As a result, payment services and e-money will for the time being remain subject to separate legal instruments. Second, the proposed new Payment Services Directive doesn’t deviate much from its predecessor. It still aims to cover a broad definition of ‘payment services’, with a wide range of exemptions from that scope. The scope has been somewhat enlarged, now also covering ‘payment information services’ and ‘payment initiation services’. These are both services aimed at providing access to a user’s payment account at another service, thus not disposing of the funds moved on said account.

Under the original Payment Services Directive, the unclear formulation of the scope exemptions has resulted in different interpretations between EU Member States. Moreover, it was found that this uncertainty allowed market players to adapt their business models in order for them to fall into the negative scope of the directive, thus being exempt from having to comply with this legal framework. The new proposal aims to tighten the scope of the exemptions mostly by introducing new terminology. Such terminology — including formulations as ‘precise needs’, ‘specific instruments’, and ‘used in a limited way’ — hasn’t been properly defined in itself, thus leaving room for even more broad and divergent interpretations. Only the so-called ‘added value’ exemption has been made more clear due to the addition of a value limitation. As a result, this scope exemption will only apply to single transactions of maximum EUR 50 and cumulative transactions of maximum EUR 200 per billing month.

While the proposed review of the Payment Services Directive does include a few good points — such as the inclusion of additional service providers, new measures aimed at raising security and transparency, and the inclusion of a value limitation in one of its scope exemptions — the overall feeling remains that good opportunities have been left unused. As the online economy continues to grow in the direction of mobile payment solutions and the use of cryptocurrencies, the legal questions underlying these matters are becoming increasingly urgent. For the time being, it is clear that the answer won’t be found in the EU’s regulation of payment services and e-money.

Niels Vandezande is a legal researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for law & ICT (ICRI) — iMinds at the KU Leuven – University of Leuven, Belgium. A more in-depth analysis of the issues touched upon in this post can be found in his article “Between Bitcoins and mobile payments: will the European Commission’s new proposal provide more legal certainty?”, published in the International Journal of Law and Information. Follow him on Twitter @NielsVandezande.

The International Journal of Law and Information Technology provides cutting edge and comprehensive analysis of Information Technology, communications and cyberspace law as well as the issues arising from applying Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to legal practice.

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Image credit: Physical Bitcoins by CASASCIUS. Work released into public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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                Related StoriesWhy are money market funds safer than the Bitcoin?Are you a tax expert?New sodium intake research and the response of health organizations 

Why are money market funds safer than the Bitcoin?

Few realise that Brazil was the birthplace of the money market fund. Since their inception money market funds have grown and spread globally. However, they have often eluded a firm definition. In this series of podcasts Viktoria Baklanova, Chief Credit Officer of Acacia Capital (New York), describes the genesis of money market funds, explains what they are, and gives insight to the size of the industry and the major players within it. As well as providing an overview to money market funds Baklanova discusses their possible regulation. In response to the recent popularity of the Bitcoin, Baklanova describes what the Bitcoin is, why it is popular, and what dangers it poses. In doing so she provides a comparison between the Bitcoin and money market funds, explaining why the latter is safer.

What are money market funds and what is the size of the industry?


[See post to listen to audio]

Who are the major players?


[See post to listen to audio]

Where and how did money market fund originate?


[See post to listen to audio]

Why are money market funds safer than the Bitcoin?


[See post to listen to audio]

How should money market funds be regulated?


[See post to listen to audio]

What is the future of money market funds?


[See post to listen to audio]

Victoria Baklanova is Chief Credit Officer at Acacia Capital, New York. She is the co-author of Money Market Funds in the EU and the US.

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Image credit: Bitcoin. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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New sodium intake research and the response of health organizations

The American Journal of Hypertension (AJH) recently published the findings of a comprehensive meta-analysis monitoring health outcomes for individuals based on their daily sodium intake. The results were controversial, seemingly confirming what many notable hypertension experts have begun to suspect in recent years: that levels of daily sodium intake recommended by governmental agencies like the CDC are far too low, perhaps dangerously so.

Media outlets were quick to broadcast the findings, and the response from the CDC and organizations like the American Heart Association were much the same as in the past, dismissing the analysis, without pointing to specifics, as relying on “faulty methodology” and “flawed data.”

We recently spoke to Dr. Niels Graudal, lead author of the meta-analysis published in AJH, to understand, among other things, the details of his research and his opinion on the reaction of governmental health agencies to new findings on sodium intake.

Could you start by talking to us about the nature of a meta-analysis? What about your meta-analysis makes its findings more valid than, say, a single, localized study?

Population studies are accepted in health science as a means to define associations between health-factors. For instance, the associations between blood pressure, cholesterol, and mortality have been defined by such studies. Meta-analyses integrate the results from many individual studies to provide an average of the association of the “risk factor” to outcome. Such analyses help to reach a consensus, and constitute the core of the Cochrane Collaboration, which systematically organizes medical research information on the basis of scientific evidence.

Was there a common methodology among the studies included in your meta-analysis?

In population studies on sodium intake, the individually-measured sodium intake is used to categorize the participants in groups of low, intermediate, and high sodium intake. The groups are followed for years, while mortality (death rate) and morbidity (disease rate) in the different groups are recorded. Successively, the association between sodium intake and mortality/morbidity is calculated.

What are some possible obstacles encountered in population studies like this?

There are factors which could bias the result in a wrong direction, so-called “confounders.” For instance, sodium intake typically increases with energy intake. Sick participants with a low energy intake may therefore eat less sodium than healthy people, and overweight participants predisposed to diabetes and cardiovascular disease may eat more sodium than healthy people. Therefore, the energy intake is a confounder, which could explain a potential increased mortality in participants with a low and a high sodium intake. However, there are statistical methods that allow us to correct for such confounders in order to ensure for accurate findings; such methods are used in almost all such studies, and have been for many years.

What were the specific findings of your meta-analysis on sodium intake?

Perhaps most importantly, the implications of these findings are that the present recommendation from the CDC that individuals should reduce sodium intake to below 2300 mg/day is too restrictive, and that the majority (about 95%) of the global population presently eat sodium within the safest range (2,645-4,945 mg/day) and therefore have no need to alter their intake.Our present analysis showed that both high sodium intake and low sodium intake were associated with increased mortality when compared with the present usual sodium intake of most individuals worldwide, which is between 2,645 and 4,945 mg per day. In spite of the fact that sodium intake is somewhat difficult to measure precisely, the signal from the nearly 275,000 participants we looked at was abundantly clear.

Perhaps most importantly, the implications of these findings are that the present recommendation from the CDC that individuals should reduce sodium intake to below 2300 mg/day is too restrictive, and that the majority (about 95%) of the global population presently eat sodium within the safest range (2,645-4,945 mg/day) and therefore have no need to alter their intake.

How did you account for those participants in your analysis that were already suffering from, say, hypertension or obesity? Might they have affected the findings in some way?

When we excluded groups of populations with diseases from our analysis and only included healthy populations, which were random samples of the general population and within which multiple statistical adjustments for confounders had been performed, the results concerning low sodium intake were even more significant, indicating that confounders could not have affected the outcome of our analysis.

Is your meta-analysis the first scientific research to suggest that extremely low levels of sodium intake like those promoted by the CDC may actually be associated with negative health outcomes?

Actually, a 1984 paper published in the journal Science questioned the wisdom of population-wide sodium intake reduction on the basis of an investigation of about 10,000 participants. The FDA immediately published a high-profile response in The New York Times, claiming that the findings were likely the result of a statistical fluke or “something wrong with the analysis.” This immediate move to quell any dissenting evidence seems to have governed the debate ever since.

More recently, though, a population study published while our meta-analysis was under review showed results very similar to ours. Two of the individual studies (1, 2) included in our analysis also concluded that there was a “U” shaped correlation between sodium intake and mortality (increased risks at very low and high doses). For the record, excluding these two studies from our analysis did not change our results. In the past year, then, four recent studies have independently confirmed increased risks associated with both high and low sodium intakes, and suggest that the present recommendation of less than 2,300 mg/day is in conflict with available science.

What are the arguments against research like this?

Often, health organizations will attempt to call into question researchers’ objectivity by labeling them biased agents of the food industry. In a recent response to a paper showing that the majority of the world’s populations had a salt intake significantly above the recommended 2,300 mg/day, representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Action on Salt and Health (WASH) accusatorily asked, “why has the food and beverage industry mounted yet another campaign to try to resist beneficial changes, either directly or indirectly through their academic voices?”

Sometimes agencies will willfully misinterpret findings. In a short commentary to the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on sodium intake in populations, nine CDC employees quoted the IOM report as follows: “When it comes to sodium intake levels

Often, they claim that our data and methods are somehow flawed, though they rarely cite specific instances. In a response to our present meta-analysis, the American Heart Association (AHA) stated that the analysis relied on “flawed data and should not change the way anyone looks at sodium.” They went on to say that:

“…those studies were poorly designed to examine the relationship between sodium intake and mortality, and the findings fail to take into account well-established evidence about sodium intake. Other problems with the new study included unreliable measurements of sodium intake and an overemphasis on studying sick people rather than the general population.”

This is a small selection of the arguments which have been raised for years by representatives of public institutions (WHO, FDA, NIH, CDC, AHA) in response to scientific investigations that don’t agree with their population-wide sodium reduction agenda.

So that we can avoid generalizations, what are the specific studies these organizations usually cite in support of population-wide sodium reduction, and what do you think are their flaws?

The rebuttals of health organizations are almost invariably propped up by vague references to an “immense” – usually unspecified – body of research which “proves” the beneficial effects of sodium reduction for the general population. If they do cite specific studies, it’s usually either

A group of randomized trials in which the baseline blood pressure of participants was actually much higher than the average 71 mmHg of the general population: 80-89 mmHg, 83-89 mmHg, borderline hypertensives and hypertensives, and hypertensives (>90 mmHg). Though these studies are obviously not useful for general population policymaking, they are, nonetheless, used to bolster the population-wide sodium reduction agenda of health organizations.

A meta-analysis (which, ironically, would have the same hypothetical methodological weaknesses the AHA and CDC supposedly see in ours) that finds increased risk of stroke in individuals consuming more than 4,945 mg/day. The results don’t conflict with our findings (our healthy range is 2,645 – 4,945 mg/day), but also don’t examine negative outcomes for low sodium intake, so are irrelevant to debate around determining an intake range.

Follow-ups (1, 2) of two older studies, pooling and analyzing their data with cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality and all-cause mortality (ACM) as outcomes. These showed no significant difference between the low sodium group (ACM = 2.3%) and the normal sodium group (ACM = 2.6 %) (p = 0.58), thus confirming that sodium reduction may have no effect. The authors did, however, on several occasions, dissect the results by means of multiple adjustments, and did succeed in finding a few marginal or borderline significant results in favor of sodium reduction. The analyses behind these results, though, were not predefined in a protocol and should therefore be considered as having an extremely high risk of bias.

These flawed or irrelevant studies tell us that, concerning the general population, the blood pressure surrogate link between sodium intake and mortality is unreliable. As a matter of fact, the blood pressure surrogate link has been opposed by a meta-analysis that accounted for the full range of global population blood pressure and showed negative side effects for sodium reduction.

Where does this leave us?

As blood pressure is obviously not a reliable link between sodium intake and mortality, the conclusion of the aforementioned 2013 IOM report based on evidence from population studies is the best we have. This report was conducted by independent researchers and sponsored by the CDC, who, for less-than-transparent reasons, chose to follow the example of the AHA by rejecting their own report. As previously mentioned, this report found no evidence to establish whether reducing sodium intake below 2,300 mg/day either decreases or increases CVD risk in the general population. It also found no evidence in support of recommending different sodium intakes to diseased and normal groups, and did find evidence for potential harm in a sodium intake below 1,500 mg. However, the report failed to specify the dimensions of a safe sodium intake zone, but, by implication, indicated that such a safe zone does exist, consistent with the experience of all other essential nutrients.

In your opinion, what should organizations like the CDC and AHA, who control the development and implementation of public health policy, be doing now, in light of this new research?

Any policy like the current one that would aim to have 95% of the world’s population drastically alter their diet ought to be based upon strong, irrefutable scientific evidence. I think that, instead of immediately moving to accuse dissenting scientists of economic and intellectual corruption, it may be more appropriate for powerful health organizations to ask what scientific mind would buy a theory as simplistic as the one currently governing sodium intake policy (sodium intake leads to high blood pressure, which leads to death) without a modicum of skepticism? Would it be so unreasonable for these groups to at least take our skepticism seriously, instead of reflexively attempting to explain away the results?

Our study provides evidence that a U/J shaped curve exists for the association between sodium intake and health outcome, as it does with all other nutrients. I will be the first to admit that this evidence is based on observational population studies, which are inevitably subject to flaws caused by imprecise measurements and confounders. These flaws, though, are greatly mitigated by the inclusion of a large number of participants, by statistical adjustments, by sensitivity analyses of subgroups, and by consistency in results between several independent studies.

There can never be any scientific guarantee that these safeguards eliminate all flaws; on the other hand, though, in the absence of a conflicting body of data, the IOM report and our analysis should be included in the determination of public policy, not ignored. Any policy like the current one that would aim to have 95% of the world’s population drastically alter their diet ought to be based upon strong, irrefutable scientific evidence.

Niels Graudal, MD, DMsc, is the lead author of “Compared With Usual Sodium Intake, Low- and Excessive-Sodium Diets Are Associated With Increased Mortality: A Meta-Analysis” (available to read for free for a limited time) with Gesche Jürgens, Bo Baslund1 and Michael H. Alderman in the American Journal of Hypertension. He is a chief consultant at the Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet, Denmark and is mainly treating patients with systemic inflammatory diseases. He has a special interest in meta-analyses

The American Journal of Hypertension is a monthly, peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for scientific inquiry of the highest standards in the field of hypertension and related cardiovascular disease. The journal publishes high-quality original research and review articles on basic sciences, molecular biology, clinical and experimental hypertension, cardiology, epidemiology, pediatric hypertension, endocrinology, neurophysiology, and nephrology.

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Earth Day, 44 years on

By Ellen Wohl

The 1960s are famous for many reasons: the civil rights movement, the first moon walk, the Cuban missile crisis, rock and roll. The 1960s were also a period when awareness of environmental degradation spread to society at large. Events such as the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s expose of pesticides, the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, and the regular occurrence of smog in many of the world’s large cities helped to convince people that pollution and environmental degradation were pervasive and needed to be addressed.

John McConnell proposed a day to honor Earth at a UNESCO conference in 1969, and the first Earth Day was celebrated on 21 March 1970, the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. This was definitely an idea whose time had come. A month later, another Earth Day was started by US Senator Gaylord Nelson. The second Earth Day took the form of a teach-in first held on 22 April 1970. Earth Day went international in 1990 when US Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes organized activities in 141 countries. Nearly 200 countries now celebrate Earth Day, and some have expanded the observance to Earth Week. Thinking of this makes me want to paraphrase the standard answer parents give to children when they ask why we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but no children’s day: Every day is (or should be) Earth Day.

Earth Day has without question helped to increase visibility of environmental issues and promote governmental and citizen responses to these issues. One indication of this response is the increasing breadth and depth of Environmental Science. Environmental science means different things to different people. Some interpret it as the systematic study of the total environment, a broadly interdisciplinary approach that draws on knowledge from diverse disciplines. Others interpret environmental science as a collection of subdisciplines that explicitly focus on the environmental component within their discipline, typically in an attempt to minimize environmental impacts. Environmental architecture, for example, focuses on green building technology using recycled and sustainable building materials and reduced energy use within buildings. Environmental history examines the development of societies within the context of environmental constraints imposed on human actions and human attitudes toward the environment. The commonality among diverse approaches to environmental science is an explicit recognition that individuals and societies exist within an environmental context defined by the weather, topography, soils, water, and plant and animal communities that interact to create an ecosystem.

Loch Vale. Photo by Ellen Wohl. Used with permission.

Environmental degradation was pervasive and obvious during the early observances of Earth Day. Publication of the now-famous Blue Marble photograph of Earth taken during the 1972 Apollo mission created a stunning reminder of the limited area of the universe habitable by life. More than 40 years on, many of the issues that environmental science addresses today are much less obvious, and may therefore be more difficult to bring to public attention. One of my personal reminders of this is Loch Vale, a stunningly beautiful, high-elevation lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Visitors to the national park have to work to reach Loch Vale. The trail to the lake winds over 5.7 miles and gains more than a thousand feet in elevation. When you arrive, you feel that you have reached someplace special, a pristine mountain lake far from the noise and crowding of the urban areas at the base of the mountains. Yet, research by many scientists over the past two decades indicates that the soil and waters of the lake ecosystem are becoming acidic, largely as the result of atmospheric nitrate deposition. These nitrates originate from the feedlots and agricultural lands, industries, and tailpipes of the millions of people living at the base of the mountains, who are out of sight at Loch Vale, but not out of reach. Without the dedicated, ongoing efforts of environmental scientists such as Jill Baron of the US Geological Survey, who has led much of the research at Loch Vale, we would never be aware of the invisible but continuing acidification of this ecosystem.

For me, the lessons of Loch Vale are threefold. First, there is more to environmental degradation than meets the eye. Some of the most thorough and persistent changes are largely hidden from casual view. Second, the efforts of environmental scientists are critical to documenting environmental changes. We can only act to mitigate environmental degradation if we are aware of it. And third, we need Earth Day more than ever. Whatever form your observance of this day takes, I hope that it includes the recognition that every day is lived on Earth.

Ellen Wohl is Professor of Geology in the Department of Geosciences at Colorado State University. She is Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Environmental Science, Associate Editor of Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America. She has published several books on rivers and environmental issues, including Virtual Rivers, Disconnected Rivers, A World of Rivers, Island of Grass, Of Rock and Rivers, and Wide Rivers Crossed.

Developed cooperatively with scholars worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

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The Compleat Earth Day

First published by Izaak Walton in 1653, The Compleat Angler remains one of the most original and influential books about the environment ever written in the English language. Walton’s narrative depicts a group of urbanites whose appreciation of the natural world deepens as they go fishing in the countryside north of London. In honor of Earth Day, here are some interesting facts about The Compleat Angler as an environmental text.

By Marjorie Swann

(1)   Before The Compleat Angler, fishermen were regarded as loners, but Walton’s book transformed angling into a sociable activity that draws men together through their shared experiences of the natural world.

(2)   Walton champions core principles of wildlife management, including closed seasons, size limits, and restrictions on fishing methods.

(3)   For Walton, outdoor recreation enhances spirituality:

“So when I would beget content, and increase confidence in the Power, and Wisdom, and Providence of Almighty God, I will walk the Meadows by some gliding stream, and there contemplate the Lillies that take no care, and those very many other various little living creatures, that are not only created but fed (man knows not how) by the goodness of the God of Nature, and therefore trust in him.”

(4)   Walton was an early advocate of food security. Without environmental laws to guarantee sustainable food production, Walton argues, fish stocks will drop so precipitously that the population of England “will be forced to eat flesh.”

(5)   As Londoners visiting rural Hertfordshire, Walton’s anglers are exemplary ecotourists. They treat the natural environment they visit respectfully and take care to compensate fairly the local inhabitants who provide their food and lodging.

Otter in Southwold, Suffolk, England. By Catherine Trigg (Flickr) via Wikimedia Commons.

(6)   Walton censures “conservators of the waters”—officials charged with overseeing rivers and their fisheries—who turn a blind eye to illegal (and environmentally harmful) fishing practices.

(7)   Walton’s anglers practice environmental justice by giving financial donations and most of the fish they catch to poor residents of the countryside.

(8)   Reading The Compleat Angler can also help us to appreciate how our attitudes toward the environment have changed over time. Walton regarded otters as pests that should be controlled in order to protect fish populations and in The Compleat Angler, Walton’s fishermen join an otter hunt at Amwell Hill in Hertfordshire. Otters became extinct in Hertfordshire in the 1970s, but in the 1990s, the Otter Trust successfully reintroduced otters to the Amwell Nature Reserve. The Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust is now working to improve otter habitat in the Amwell Nature Reserve by creating “fish refuges.”

(9)   In the 1890s, the Pullman Company created a special railway car for American sportsmen called the “Izaak Walton.” Staffed by both a cook and a waiter, the car could hold twelve passengers and was fitted out with dog kennels, gun racks, an ammunition room, an ice-chest for game, and a wine closet.

(10)   Walton’s depiction of a “brotherhood” of environmentally-conscious anglers inspired the creation of the Izaak Walton League of America, a mass-membership conservation organization founded in 1922 that now has more than 43,000 members in the United States and Britain.

Marjorie Swann, Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, is the author of Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England. She has edited a new edition of The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton for Oxford World’s Classics and is now writing a book about Walton’s Angler and its post-seventeenth-century afterlives.

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The politics of green shopping

By Thomas Jundt

On this day forty-four years ago, some 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and lecture halls for an event billed as a national environmental teach-in—Earth Day.

When he announced plans for the event, Wisconsin Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson, a longtime conservationist, hoped it would gather enough attention to pressure his colleagues into passing environmental legislation that he had been struggling to push through Congress. It did. President Nixon and policymakers responded to the growing environmental fervor with some of the most significant environmental laws in the nation’s history. Although Nixon once called environmental issues “just crap,” he was a savvy politician who understood that the public mood required some sort of action.

On 1 January 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law. The National Environmental Education Act, which mandated environmental education in public schools, was signed into law in October. By President Nixon’s executive order the Environmental Protection Agency came into being two months later, charged with overseeing the enforcement of federal environmental policies. The Marine Mammal Protection Act followed in 1972.

Girl Scout in canoe, picking trash out of the Potomac River during Earth Week. Photo by Thomas J. O’Halloran, 22 April 1970. Courtesy of Library of Congress

Environmentalists had urged such action for decades. The brutal light of atomic bomb flashes revealed a vulnerable planet, and key intellectuals soon recognized other ways that humans might destroy the earth. The head of the New York Zoological Society, Fairfield Osborn, warned of “man’s conflict with nature” in his 1948 bestselling book, Our Plundered Planet. Among the many planetary threats he addressed was the chemical DDT, made public shortly after the war. “The new chemical is deadly on many kinds of insects—no doubt about that,” he conceded. “But what of the ultimate and net result to the life scheme of earth?”

Big business was at the epicenter of this threat. “One of the most ruinous limiting factors is the capitalistic system,” William Vogt emphasized in his own 1948 bestseller, Road to Survival. “Free enterprise—divorced from biophysical understanding and social responsibility… must bear a large share of the responsibility for devastated forests, vanishing wildlife, crippled ranges, a gullied continent, and roaring flood crests.” Desire for stronger federal environmental regulations had been building long before Earth Day, and years before Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring in 1962.

The Earth Day era’s reforms proved inadequate. Rules and regulations that worked well initially were often less effective once corporate lawyers went to work figuring out how they could be exploited, and corporate lobbyists aimed their skills at softening their impact. As Denis Hayes, hired by Senator Nelson to organize Earth Day, said years later, the new laws looked good so long as you ignored things like “graft, corruption, huge campaign contributions, friendships forged on golf links, and all of the other stickiness in the system.”

The real world bore little resemblance to a political-science text. Indeed, in 1972 Nixon moved to undermine his own EPA. The president told his aid, John Ehrlichman, to have the EPA “say a number of things designed to shock the consumer that the cost of the environment will be very high and that the air quality laws are very impractical.” The EPA complied, shaking the public’s confidence enough to reduce or delay a number of antipollution regulations opposed by the automobile industry. “Whether it’s the environment or pollution or Naderism or consumerism,” President Nixon assured a gathering of Ford Motor Company executives, “we are extremely pro-business.”

None of this would have surprised many of the Americans who turned out for Earth Day. As ecologist Kenneth Watt observed in a speech at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, “More and more people are giving up on the system. This isn’t just the young people, or the poor, or the black people. I’ve been startled to discover the extent to which white, middle-class, suburban housewives have become so frustrated and are so full of despair about the ability to have any effect on the system that they’ve given up on it.” Mary Humphrey, of the activist group Ecology Action, at an EcoFair near Los Angeles concurred: “I don’t think you’ll find anyone who really thinks the government will do something.”

Perhaps the most telling admission that the political system was not up to the task was made by prominent Senate Democrat and conservationist Edmund Muskie of Maine. “The power of the people is in the cash register,” he proclaimed in an Earth Day speech. He was right.

In a study that asked those who attended Earth Day events in 1970 what actions they would take to help the environment, the plan most frequently cited, by 40% of Earth Day attendees polled, was to change their “consumer behaviors.” In comparison, only about 8% mentioned changes in activities such as joining others to take action.

For critics, this is a troubling example of businesses’ ability to co-opt the ideals of reformers and sell them back to them as organic soy lattes. They charge those who practice personal politics through consumption with avoiding the more difficult work required to organize for traditional politics.

But the retreat to eco-consumerism is understandable. Lacking political solutions, with a two-party system beholden to the very corporations pillaging the planet, citizens concerned about the environment have turned to alternative green consumption. They are not lazy or indifferent, and they are certainly not ignorant. The fact is policy and enforcement favor business at the expense of citizens and the environment.

Organics and other products believed to be environmentally friendly exploded in popularity as producers recognized a ready market in the millions who turned out for Earth Day events across the nation. Today, nearly all consumer products seem to offer a choice of greener alternatives, and for most Americans, consumer choice remains the most popular, if ironic, expression of environmental concern.

During the Cold War Americans heard about citizens in the Soviet Union who coveted Beatles records and blue jeans. Although it might have been a desperate and limited response, we comprehended that type of counterculture consumption as an under-standable reaction to political conditions Soviet citizens felt powerless to change. Green consumption is similar, limited yet understandable. With government in thrall to corporations and chamber of commerce ideologues, as we watch the seas rise, buying a Prius seems like the only game in town.

Thomas Jundt is a visiting assistant professor of history at Brown University, and author of Greening the Red, White, and Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar America.

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Global responsibility, differentiation, and an environmental rule of law?

By Duncan French and Lavanya Rajamani

As we celebrate Earth Day this year, it is timely to reflect on the international community’s commitment to halting serious environmental harm. The idea that all States have a ‘common interest’ in promoting global environmental responsibility — as evidenced most clearly through their active participation in multilateral environmental agreements — has been a cornerstone of international environmental policy for the last few decades. At the heart of this responsibility is the recognition that sovereign self-interest is enhanced, rather than compromised, through collective responses to matters of global concern. And that universal participation of diverse states in pursuit of common objectives is best secured through differential treatment of states tailored to their responsibilities and capabilities.

But this ideal of responsibility — common but differentiated responsibility — is facing serious challenge. In particular, the increasing questioning of differential treatment as a valuable tool in achieving common objectives has highlighted — if nothing else — a breakdown of previous certainties, however fragile the consensus ultimately was.

Since the 1990 London Amendments to the 1987 Montreal Ozone Protocol, differentiation in commitments and obligations of financial and technological support towards developing countries has characterised, and partially defined, international environmental law. Even among multilateral environmental agreements, the climate change regime is distinctive for the nature and extent of differential treatment it contains in favour of developing countries. The extent of this differential treatment, however, has proven deeply contentious over the years.

Indeed, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, while representing the high-water mark of differential treatment in international environmental law, is set, to come to an end in 2020. This is partly due to the deep divisions concerning the differential treatment it contains. The latest round of negotiations, under the auspices of the Ad Hoc Group on the Durban Platform (ADP) and which are to conclude in 2015, has been mandated to produce an outcome that is ‘applicable to all’. Although, ‘applicable to all’ implies universality rather than uniformity of application, the use of the term, given the political context of the negotiations, is suggestive of a shift towards greater symmetry and more nuanced differentiation between Parties. The battle over differentiation — the existence, nature and extent of it — is raging in the ongoing climate negotiations, and will no doubt prove to be one of the final issues to be resolved in Paris, 2015.

It could of course be argued that such a shift in the climate regime is but a function of larger geo-political shifts that have occurred in international relations in the past two decades; differentiation as it was originally conceived being an artifact of the period in which it was negotiated. Traditional North-South dichotomies have since disintegrated in the face of economic growth in some developing countries and the shrinking of some first world economies. Such differential treatment in favour of developing countries, especially those that are today in the middle income or higher income brackets, is an anachronism, and thus the move towards greater symmetry, it might be argued, is both natural and politically necessary. Moreover, some developed countries have become disenchanted with differentiation over time, particularly when it is rigidly structured and increasingly viewed as artificial, particularly since the global economic collapse of 2007 and the challenges faced by many ‘developed’ economies.

Whether this move in international environmental law towards greater symmetry and more nuanced differentiation in obligations for Parties, albeit with greater deference to national circumstances, is likely to either result in a more efficient approach, which in turn will promote more ambitious legal outcomes or be sufficient to appease the majority of the global South remains uncertain. Undoubtedly there appears to be a systematic dismantling of a pervasive architecture of differentiation that had assumed a stronghold in international environmental law in the past three decades.

Does this matter; should not international environmental law reflect changing political and economic realities? Should not a regime be negotiated in a manner that seeks to include as many countries as possible? And where a regime such as Kyoto has become so contested, is it not better to seek an alternative that more States can endorse?

While these are valid arguments, they do not account for the fact that differentiation was not adopted merely to improve treaty compliance or prevent a zero-sum outcome in participation. Differentiation reflected a broader ambition; that environmental obligations should be fair and equitable as well as effective. That the international community should not be allowed to neglect historic injustices, enduring differences and considerable disparities in wealth when responding to the environmental challenges. Of course, differentiation can be achieved in many different ways and with greater or more limited financial and technological assistance attached thereto. But the bedrock of differentiation — and even stringent versions of it — had seemingly been accepted. Should this now be disregarded?

There are perhaps equally valid perspectives on this matter that transcend both politics and law. But some queries do arise in this context. If the international community is a community of law, bound within a legal framework, should such a framework to be with or without a moral core? And if the former, what role does equity play and what weight should be placed on it as a characteristic of any legal system? The parties to the climate regime might be right to reconsider their approach to differentiation; but in doing so, equity must still be a valid consideration.

Duncan French is Professor of International Law and Head of the University of Lincoln Law School, UK. He was previously co-rapporteur of the International Law Association’s Committee of International Law on Sustainable Development and is presently Chair of its Study Group on Due Diligence in International Law. Lavanya Rajamani is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. She writes, teaches and consults on international environmental law, in particular international climate change law. Her current work is in the field of treaty law (negotiation, design, architecture and interpretation), legal principles and models of differentiation in international agreements.

In recognition of Earth Day this year, we have looked across Law, History, Economics, Literature, Life Science, and Social Sciences to identify key articles in environmental studies, all made freely available.

The Journal of Environmental Law has established an international reputation as a lively and authoritative source of informed analysis for all those active in examining evolving legal responses to environmental problems in national and international jurisdictions.

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Shakespeare and the music of William Walton

By Bethan Greenaway

On 23 April 2014 we celebrate the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. Nearly 400 years after his death he is still a source of inspiration for countless authors, composers, and artists all over the world. His plays are performed again and again in hundreds of languages, and have been the inspiration for numerous operas, ballets, and films. The most well-known and highly acclaimed Shakespeare films are the trilogy made in the 1940s and 50s, starring Sir Laurence Olivier and featuring music written by a famous William of the twentieth century — William Walton.

Walton and Olivier had met in 1936 on the set of As You Like It (another Shakespearean film featuring music by Walton) and again at a BBC recording of Christopher Columbus. By 1944, when he was approached to write the film score for Henry V, Walton had already made a name for himself with his ceremonial and dramatic music (including Crown Imperial March for the coronation of George IV in 1937), and music to accompany various patriotic films during World War II. Olivier and Walton were to work together on three films: Hamlet (1948), Richard III (1955), and their most successful partnership, Henry V (1944).

All three film scores where highly acclaimed in their day, Henry V and Hamlet attracting Oscar nominations. What made them so very successful was Walton’s unerring ability to reflect the nature of each play in his music; he knew exactly how and when to heighten emotions, create tension, and provide moments of light relief. The scores for both Richard III and Henry V rely heavily on pastiches of “Shakespearean-style” music, including folk songs (at the suggestion of another OUP composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams), brass-heavy battle fanfares, and the use of the harpsichord, whilst Hamlet has a darker, motif-led, more brooding score, again reflecting the mood of the play.

Hamlet, by William Walton

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Henry V, by William Walton

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Richard III, by William Walton

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The original film score of Henry V was arranged into two suites; in 1945 by Malcolm Sargent and again in 1963 by Muir Mathieson (the conductor on the original film soundtrack). Henry V remains not only Walton’s most well-known film score but also one of his most popular orchestral works. In fact, in an interview given to the BBC in 1977, Laurence Olivier himself remarked that the film would have been “terribly dull” without the music. High praise indeed.

In March 2014 Oxford University Press published the final volume in its magnificent William Walton Edition. Walton’s entire output, including his film music, is now available to scholars and performers in a definitive and fully practical edition. Oxford Sheet Music is distributed in the USA by Peters Edition.

Bethan Greenaway is Production Controller for Printed Music at Oxford University Press.

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