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You can take Molly Steinwald out of the city, but you’re never, ever going to get the city out of Molly Steinwald.

Trust me. She’s tried.

Steinwald grew up a free-school-lunch kid on the outskirts of the old mill town of Manchester, N.H. She came from a large, religious family. Her mom died when she was young. “I didn’t do the skiing and mountain climbing thing,” she says. If you’d told her she’d grow up to raise a ruckus in the nature-education world she probably would have thought you were nuts.

Still, Steinwald found solace watching ants parade across the sidewalk, or tracing the intricate lines on a leaf. And when she graduated from high school, she went as far as she could from those gritty streets. She earned a degree in biology and studied Western gulls on Alcatraz Island. She earned her master’s degree researching kangaroo rats in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, fitting the rodents with tiny spools of thread that unwound as they made their nightly rounds, leaving a Hansel-and-Gretel-like record of their forays.

But the city always tugged at her. “I was really excited about big nature,” Steinwald says. “But every time I was working out in the desert, I’d find myself thinking, ‘I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.’ I kept coming back to small-scale, mundane nature that I knew as a kid: ‘I need to get back to help people who never see this stuff.’”

Today, Steinwald is doing just that as director of science education at the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, where she has been charged with reimagining urban environmental education and revamping the venerable institution’s outreach programs for at-risk youth.

Steinwald’s basic assumption is this: You don’t have to go to a national park, or even a city park, to connect with the natural world. It’s crawling past you on the sidewalk or drifting through the air right under your nose. That, she says, is where city kids can make a lasting connection with nature — if they’re paying attention.

To get kids to tune in, Steinwald arms them (and groups of teachers) with digital cameras and challenges them to take pictures of the fragments of nature they find on the streets. (Partway through her scientific career, she discovered she had a gift for photography, and her images of urban, “mundane nature” have since been featured at the Sundance Film Festival and the World Wilderness Conference, among other places.) The approach is a departure from recent thinking on kids and nature, including the writing of Richard Louv, which generally defines “nature” as parks or green spaces — places apart from our everyday lives.

Not content to watch kids marvel at the nature they’ve newly found around them, Steinwald is studying the impact of these experiences over time as a part of a PhD in environmental psychology. She is also working with teachers, training science PhD students in photography skills as a means of communicating their work, and developing an environmental education and psychology research program and collaborations with universities.

Lisa Graumlich, dean of the University of Washington School of the Environment, says Steinwald is making waves in environmental education circles: “She was an urban kid. She brings the voice of people from a different economic class to the table in a way that creates space for a conversation about how these equity issues play out.”

Graumlich says it makes intuitive sense that connecting to street-level nature will help build a lasting bond with the natural world. The next challenge is figuring out how to provide kids with more of these experiences: “It may be as simple as a mom walking home from the bus stop with three bags of groceries and two children in tow, feeling like she has time to look at a sidewalk crack.”

Seems simple enough, but it’s harder if you’re that mom – particularly if you’ve always been told that nature is “out there,” beyond the city limits.

“A lot of nature in the city is really small,” Steinwald says. “But I want to show these kids that even if their nature is small, it’s still darned good nature.”

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The brazen lies of the Romney/Ryan campaign — on full display in Paul Ryan’s spectacularly dishonest speech at the Republican National Convention — have political pundits at a loss. Here’s Kevin Drum:

I struggle to describe [the attack on Obama's selectively edited quote "you didn't build that"]. It’s not worse than past attacks, but it is different. In the past, you felt that maybe campaigns were at least a little bit embarrassed about this kind of thing. They’d blame it on someone else. They’d try to produce some lame defense. They’d haul out some fake white paper to give themselves cover. They’d do something. The Romney campaign just doesn’t seem to care. If it works, they use it. It’s like the campaign is being run by cyborgs.

I dunno. What’s the right word to describe this?

Ooh, ooh, call on me!

The right term is “post-truth politics.” What Kevin is struggling to describe is that Romney’s campaign is not contesting the truth value of its assertions so much as contesting whether truth value itself is relevant.

One effect of the radicalization of the right over the last few decades has been the discovery of just how much our politics is held together by norms rather than rules. There’s no rule you can’t filibuster every bill in the Senate by default; there’s no rule you can’t interrupt a president’s State of the Union; there’s no rule you can’t hold the routine debt-ceiling vote hostage. It simply wasn’t done. But if you shrug off the norm and do it anyway, there’s nothing to stop you.

Similarly, it seems that the lip service given to truth in politics is but a norm itself, one with increasingly tenuous hold. Political campaigns have always lied and stretched the truth, but when caught in a lie, would typically defend themselves (claim it was actually true), retract, or at the very least stop repeating the lie. Either way, the presumption was that truth-telling had some moral force; one ought to tell the truth, even if that commandment was often honored in the breach.

What’s creepy about the Romney crew is that they don’t do any of those things. They don’t deny, they don’t stop, they just don’t care at all. What they’ve realized is that, given today’s hyper-polarization and fragmented media, there’s no practical risk to lying. It doesn’t hurt them, in terms of getting votes, so why shouldn’t they do it?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post that, as far as I’ve been able to tell, coined the term post-truth politics. I also wrote a couple of follow-ups, here and here. After that, economist Paul Krugman adopted the term and it started bouncing around more and more. In just the past few weeks, it’s really taken off.

(My authorship of the term seems to have been lost to history; such are the wages of being an obscure niche blogger. Thanks to Alec MacGillis, at least, for giving me a shout-out!)

Regardless, I don’t care about ownership, I’m just happy that journalists and pundits are starting to seriously grapple with the issue itself. For some recent thoughts on what the post-truth era means and how to deal with it, see James Fallows of The Atlantic, Michael Scherer of Time, Greg Sargent of The Washington Post, MacGillis and Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic, Ezra Klein at The Washington Post, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, press critic Jay Rosen, and Brendan Nyhan at Columbia Journalism Review.

When I originally wrote about post-truth politics, I was focused on how Obama should operate within it. But most of the recent discussion has been about how journalists should operate within it. They face two basic problems.

David Bernstein of The Boston Phoenix gets at the first in this tweet:

Dear media critics: OK, entire news media called Romney’s welfare attack a lie. Campaign still pushing it. Now what?

Fair question! The political media, at least certain quarters of it, has become more forthright about calling out lies and deceptions lately. (For some reason, the welfare attack in particular has fired them up.) But the Romney campaign doesn’t give a damn. As their pollster said the other day, “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” A key feature of the post-truth political landscape is that there are no longer universally recognized arbiters or referees of fact. The right has their own media ecosystem. Why should they care what journos outside it say?

So what’s a journalist to do when she calls a lie a lie … and then the candidate keeps repeating it? One of the great demands of daily journalism is novelty. Reporters are supposed to write about what happened today, what’s new. Pundits and analysts hate debunking the same lie over and over again; it bores them and their readers. But if a candidate or campaign just bulls through the initial round of scolding and keeps on telling the lie, what then? The whole enterprise can seem futile, especially when none of it seems to reach or budge undecided voters.

So that’s one problem. The other one is well-captured by Ezra Klein’s tortured admission yesterday that, after trying and trying to be even-handed with Ryan, he has to admit: His speech was full of lies! Ezra is extremely concerned with being intellectually honest. He wants people in D.C., even people he disagrees with, to know that he’ll treat them fairly and engage their best arguments. (It’s not shtick, either — he’s really like that!) But an honest appraisal of the Romney/Ryan campaign is what it is:

Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation. …

I don’t like that conclusion. It doesn’t look “fair” when you say that. We’ve been conditioned to want to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame, and the fact of the matter is, I would like to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame. I’d personally feel better if our coverage didn’t look so lopsided. But first the campaigns have to be relatively equal. So far in this campaign, you can look fair, or you can be fair, but you can’t be both. [my emphasis]

That’s the root of it: Campaign reporters have deeply internalized the need to appear fair, to be above mere partisanship, to criticize or praise both sides in equal measure. The GOP is acutely aware of this dynamic and for years has used it to their advantage. But real fairness is geared to the facts, not to appearances, and today’s right simply lies more, misleads more, and denies established facts more. That is the conclusion a fair-minded appraisal yields. Empirics have a liberal bias, to paraphrase Colbert.

So what do journos do? Do they call them as they see them and get labeled “biased” and “partisan”? Or do they follow the lead of The Washington Post‘s The Fix and cover politics like a theater critic assessing performances? That’s been the default mode for Politico-style journalists (like, say, Mark Halperin) for a long time. It’s safe and comfortable. There’s rarely any penalty for getting things wrong. You can rise quite high among the ranks of Very Serious People in that mode. But for those like Ezra, rankled by facts, irritated by conscience, it’s not a very attractive route.

I don’t have a good answer. But I might as well share my experience/perspective, for what it’s worth (very little).

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I have no training in journalism. I was never taught to be even-handed or “neutral.” What training I have for what I do came from two places. The first was a whole lot of time spent with a large extended family in the South (Georgia, mostly) filled with raucous, hyper-verbal drunks with highly sensitive bullsh*t detectors and razor-sharp senses of humor. The second was grad school in philosophy.

In both places, I learned to love arguing, the mechanics of stringing facts and evidence together to reach conclusions. But I also learned that in real-life situations, the technically superior argument does not always carry the day. In real-life situations, the one that wins is the one with wit and timing, the one with the ability to employ mockery, flattery, flirting, storytelling, peer pressure, guile, and the whole array of other non-factual, non-logical communicative tools available to the human animal.

Traditional journalism, particularly in its post-war American variety, has purposefully denuded itself of most of those tools. The idea is “just the facts.” That can inform an argument, but it can’t win one. Journalists do not like to think of themselves as in an argument, as competing with, say, a campaign to convince the public of something. They still think of themselves as neutral arbiters of truth. But neither the campaigns nor the public view them that way any more.

What would it look like if journalists tried to win an argument with a campaign — an argument over, say, what Obama has done with state welfare waivers? For one thing, they wouldn’t just string together correct facts once and call it good. They would do it repeatedly. They would call out the campaign explicitly as acting in bad faith. They would mock and shame the campaign for its behavior.

This would be a serious departure for U.S. journalists. It would put them in an explicitly adversarial role with political operators — not the same operators all the time, not the same party every time, maybe, but not “neutral.” More like prosecutors working on behalf of the truth.

Let’s be real, though: Journalists fear making those kinds of choices for good reason. It’s absolutely verboten for a Very Serious Person in D.C. to behave this way. They rightly sense that it will limit their careers and their access to the halls of power. As a person of, ahem, modest ambition, I don’t mind all that much. But for ambitious journos in D.C., there are real perils to calling a spade a spade.

So what’s the answer? Lemme know what you think.

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Viridian Energy & Environmental/Norwalk, CT (New York, NY)

Sustainable Design/LEED Consultant – We are seeking an architecture or interior design graduate for an entry level position with a top tier sustainable design consulting firm. Positions are available in our Norwalk, CT office. You will assist design and construction teams to improve their buildings and to make them more sustainable. Communication skills are essential. Knowledge of LEED a plus. This is not a design position.

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Make no mistake: Processed food is out to get you. “No!” you can say. “I only want to eat whole foods! Just leave me alone!” But does processed food listen? No. It just kicks back and laughs. “Just try to get away from me,” processed food says. “I’m everywhere you look. I’m at the convenience store. I’m in your favorite restaurant order. I’m lurking in your pantry right now. That ‘natural’ box of cereal you bought? Full of high-fructose corn syrup! Bwahahahaha!”

It’s true. Processed food is a mighty foe. But, as I’m finding out, there are strategies we all can use to cut back. In my last post, I laid out a five-point challenge for rooting processed food out of my diet under the toughest of circumstances. Today, I tackle my first — and live to eat another day.

The challenge: dinner party

I love going over to my friends’ houses for dinner. I savor the laughter and the precious moments, sure, and also the fact that I didn’t have to buy, cook, or serve a single item on the table for once. (The key here is to always jump in with an “I’ll bring wine!” before your friend asks you to julienne anything.) But the hidden downside of the dinner party is that you’re at the mercy of your host when it comes to what’s on your plate. Is it healthy? Is it organic? Most importantly for this challenge, is it unprocessed? (Before you call me lazy, remember that I also do my share of entertaining.)

I stepped into these turbulent waters a few nights ago at my friend Evelyn’s potluck barbecue. The situation was fraught with tension — this was a summer barbecue, after all, dominion of the Oscar Mayer wiener (corn syrup and a slew of other additives, I’m afraid), packaged potato salad (is that xanthan gum I’m tasting?), and yes, the dreaded Dorito. At past barbecues, temptation and lack of other options have led me to gorge on potato chips, dry Chips Ahoy! cookies, and those so-called fruit salads that serve mainly as a vehicle for stuffing lots of mini marshmallows down your gullet. Hey, processed foods wouldn’t be such a megahit with the American populace if they didn’t go right for the caveman part of the brain with their salt-fat-sugar triple play.

To hedge my bets, I borrowed a classic move from the restricted-diet playbook and made a big batch of something I knew I could eat all by itself if worst came to worst. My offering: summer edamame salad, a yummy montage of soybeans, veggies, and oil-and-vinegar dressing. (I’ve included the recipe below.)

As I cleared a place for my bowl on the picnic table, I checked out the other guests’ handiwork. There were a few packaged side dishes in deli containers — steer clear, just to be safe, I told myself — but fresh fruit, grilled chicken breasts, gourmet cheese, and all manner of homemade dips, slaws, and salads dominated the buffet. Sure, it all looked good … but what kinds of additives and preservatives might be lurking here? Was the barbecue sauce really that color, or was I looking at the dastardly work of Red No. 40? I’d better figure it out soon, ‘cause I was hungry.

Ooh, a fresh-looking white dip with pita wedges! It looked innocent, but I had to be sure. “What is this? It looks delicious!” I diplomatically asked the man who brought it. “It’s tzatziki,” he told me. “I grilled a cucumber from my garden for it.” While I groped for a non-weird way to ask him to list the ingredients for me, he’d already moved on to asking me polite, get-to-know-you questions. I grabbed a pita wedge (whole wheat, natch) and dug in. It was indeed delicious (and likely contained approved items like Greek yogurt, lemon juice, fresh dill, and garlic, I discovered to my relief when I Googled recipes later).

The rest of the party went much the same way. Grilled whole carrots? Safe. Crackers with cheese? Totally cool. (I surreptitiously checked the label on the cracker box under the guise of refilling the plate.) Watermelon salad, sans dressing? Obvi. Then Evelyn’s boyfriend, Will, set down a bowl brimming with purple-red cabbage slaw. “I pulled this out of the ground this morning,” he told us with pride. A question about whether his dressing contained mayonnaise or any other bottled condiment died in my throat. This guy made the slaw himself, I thought. He grew the cabbage in his backyard! Six miles from here! Are you seriously contemplating not eating it on a technicality? What kind of jackass are you? I shut up and served myself a giant scoop.

The moral of this story is: Hang out with crunchy people. They make it a lot easier to eat right.

No, seriously, I got lucky. There weren’t many taboo items on the table, except those packaged salads, and maybe the tortilla chips (I didn’t get close enough to inspect them for fake lime powder). I’ve certainly been to much more challenging cookouts. On those occasions, the old BYO strategy would have been much more important.

Failing that, I have another idea: Give yourself a pass. Do as one reader suggested on my post last week and employ a “permanent guest exemption when it comes to processed food in other people’s bags.” Hey, if you strive for whole foods in your own home and eat most of your meals in your own kitchen, even a Dorito now and then won’t kill you. Because no matter how nicely you say, “Sorry, I don’t eat processed foods,” your host is likely to hear, “Let a crumb of that swill you people call food cross my lips? Never!” And then they’ll make fun of you when to excuse yourself for the bathroom.

Summer edamame salad

16-18 oz. fresh soybeans
1.5 cups mini heirloom tomatoes or cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
1.5 cups celery slices
Sliced fresh basil to taste
Pink Himalayan salt (or regular old salt)
Pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil
Balsamic vinegar

Throw all the veggies into a bowl. Top with salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar. Serves 4-6.

Next up: The knotty challenges of unprocessed desserts, road-trip snacking, restaurant meals, and backpacking food.

Filed under: Food, Living

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iSolar/San Jose, CA (San Francisco Bay Area)

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-Established Inside Sales Representatives are encouraged to take ownership of approved marketing campaigns and community outreach events and receive compensation on all subsequent sales.

-Outside Sales Opportunities are available to the most qualified Inside Sales Representatives after a period of 1 year.

Qualifications:
-Excellent customer service and communication skills
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-One of those personality things

Please send a resume to isolarcareers@gmail.com with “Inside Sales†and your name in the subject line.

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We read the whole 62-page Republican platform so you don’t have to. No need to thank us. Well, actually, you really should thank us. Thank us profusely, please.

Here are the good bits, by which we mean the bad bits.

Climate change gets a mention

Only in a mocking way, within a section entitled “A Failed National Security Strategy.” But still, a mention.

The current Administration’s most recent National Security Strategy … subordinates our national security interests to environmental, energy, and international health issues, and elevates “climate change” to the level of a “severe threat” equivalent to foreign aggression. The word “climate,” in fact, appears in the current President’s strategy more often than Al Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, radical Islam, or weapons of mass destruction.

Interesting that Republicans think it’s a wise strategy to discuss frequency of use of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction.”

Republicans are for property rights, except when they’re against them

The GOP platform is clear in upholding the Fifth Amendment:

[W]ithout property rights, individual rights are diminished. That is why we deplore the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. New London decision, allowing local governments to seize a person’s home or land, not for vital public use, but for transfer to private developers.

Except when the private developers that want to seize a citizen’s land are planning to build a big tar-sands oil pipeline on it — then it’s just fine.

We are committed to approving the Keystone XL Pipeline and to streamlining permitting for the development of other oil and natural gas pipelines.

Coal is cool

The dirtiest of all fossil fuels is the first energy source highlighted in the platform’s energy and environment section.

We look toward the private sector’s development of new, state-of-the-art coal-fired plants that will be low-cost, environmentally responsible, and efficient.

And we look toward the day when each American child will get a pony of his or her own.

Oil and gas are cool

We support opening the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) for energy exploration and development and ending the current Administration’s moratorium on permitting; opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for exploration and production of oil and natural gas; and allowing for more oil and natural gas exploration on federally owned and controlled land.

Fracking is cool

We will respect the States’ proven ability to regulate the use of hydraulic fracturing, continue development of oil and gas resources in places like the Bakken formation and Marcellus Shale, and review the environmental laws that often thwart new energy exploration and production.

Nuclear is cool

Nuclear energy … must be expanded.

Renewables are somewhat less cool

We encourage the cost-effective development of renewable energy, but the taxpayers should not serve as venture capitalists for risky endeavors.

Cap-and-trade totally sucks

In case you weren’t sure where the party stands:

[W]e oppose any and all cap and trade legislation.

EPA’s push to curb CO2 emissions totally sucks

We also call on Congress to take quick action to prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations that will harm the nation’s economy and threaten millions of jobs over the next quarter century.

In fact, the entire EPA completely, absolutely, utterly sucks

The platform has a section devoted to “Reining in the EPA,” but the EPA hatred is so intense that it overflows into other sections.  A portion of the platform focused on “The Restoration of Constitutional Government” accuses the Obama administration of “encouraging illegal actions by … the EPA.” And there’s more:

We will end the EPA’s war on coal …

We stand with growers and producers in defense of their water rights against attempts by the EPA … to expand jurisdiction over water, including water that is clearly not navigable.

no peril justifies the regulatory impact of … the EPA’s … overreaching regulation agenda.

Obama wants to make everyone live in studio apartments in grimy cities with nowhere to park

The current Administration [is pursuing] an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.

We should chop down more trees

Timber is a renewable natural resource, which provides jobs to thousands of Americans. All efforts should be made to make federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service available for harvesting.

We should be fretting about fertilizer

Not about the fact that it’s devastating our fisheries and aquatic zones. Rather, about the fact that we’re increasingly importing it instead of producing it right here in the USofA.

Our dependence on foreign imports of fertilizer could threaten our food supply, and we support the development of domestic production of fertilizer.

Brad Plumer lists the goal of ending our dependence on foreign fertilizer as one of “The 10 oddest items in the GOP platform.” For background, read up on peak phosphorus.

Gibson Guitars should not be oppressed

Here’s an odd one Plumer missed: the veiled defense of the Gibson Guitar Corp. for illegally using endangered hardwoods.

The Lacey Act of 1900, designed to protect endangered wildlife in interstate commerce, is now applied worldwide, making it a crime to use, in our domestic industries, any product illegally obtained in the country of origin, whether or not the user had anything to do with its harvesting. This unreasonable extension of the Act not only hurts American businesses and American jobs, but also subordinates our own rule of law to the legal codes of 195 other governments. It must be changed.

Last year, the feds caught Gibson making guitars out of illegally logged wood. Read: How Gibson Guitars made illegal logging a conservative cause célèbre and Gibson Guitars’ noble stand against the government ends with admission of wrong-doing.

The U.N. is out to get us

[Congress should] reject agreements whose long-range impact on the American family is ominous or unclear. These include … the various declarations from the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development [aka the Rio Earth Summit]. Because of our concern for American sovereignty, domestic management of our fisheries, and our country’s long-term energy needs, we have deep reservations about the regulatory, legal, and tax regimes inherent in the Law of the Sea Treaty … We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty

That’s not the wholesale smackdown of Agenda 21 that the Republican National Committee had recommended earlier this year, but mentioning the (non)issue at all moves the GOP platform one step closer to the tinfoil-hat zone. As does violent opposition to the just-not-very-threatening Law of the Sea Treaty.

Fie on population control and high-speed rail

What do these two things have in common? They’re both big wastes of money. From the section “Reining in Out-of-Control Spending, Balancing the Budget, and Ensuring Sound Monetary Policy”:

We suggest a tripartite test for every federal activity. … Against those standards we will measure programs from international population control to California’s federally subsidized high-speed train to nowhere, and terminate programs that don’t measure up.

More dissing of rail follows a few pages later:

Amtrak continues to be, for the taxpayers, an extremely expensive railroad. The public has to subsidize every ticket nearly $50. It is long past time for the federal government to get out of way and allow private ventures to provide passenger service to the northeast corridor. The same holds true with regard to high-speed and intercity rail across the country.

Teenagers don’t need to know about birth control

We renew our call for replacing “family planning” programs for teens with abstinence education which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and respected standard of behavior.

The most powerful environmental policy is liberty

That’s a direct quote, actually.

The most powerful environmental policy is liberty, the central organizing principle of the American Republic and its people. Liberty alone fosters scientific inquiry, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and information exchange. Liberty must remain the core energy behind America’s environmental improvement.

In case you couldn’t tell after reading everything above, Republicans loooove sustainability and conservation

We are the party of sustainable jobs and economic growth — through American energy, agriculture, and environmental policy. … We are as well the party of traditional conservation: the wise development of resources that keeps in mind both the sacrifices of past generations to secure that bounty and our responsibility to preserve it for future generations.

Good to know.

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George Monbiot has a new piece in the Guardian titled “The day the world went mad,” which looks at the underwhelming reaction in the press and political sphere to the Aug. 27 announcement of record Arctic ice melt.

As Arctic sea ice faces a death spiral due to human-caused global warming, Monbiot points to the complete lack of attention: Instead of focusing on the Arctic, a British parliament committee on climate change debated building new runways for Heathrow Airport; meanwhile in the U.S., the Republicans were holding a convention celebrating fossil fuels and the party’s active denial of climate change:

I wonder whether we could be seeing a form of reactive denial at work: people proving to themselves that there cannot be a problem if they can continue to discuss the issues in these terms … When your children ask how and why it all went so wrong, point them to yesterday’s date, and explain that the world is not led by rational people.

Well, not everyone was ignoring the insanity of the situation. Speaking on Current TV’s coverage of the National Republican Convention, Al Gore had some strong words for the press:

The whole North polar ice cap is disappearing in  front of our eyes. Twelve massive million-dollar-plus climate-related disasters … and they keep coming … Just as [the media] did not report the truth about the proposal to invade Iraq, we are not getting the accurate impression about this challenge that we have to face. To stop putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution up into the atmosphere every single day … They aren’t only doing nothing about it, there’s hardly any discussion about it. It drives me crazy.

Watch it:

Here’s the full transcript:

When the Senate voted to go to war in Iraq, 77 percent of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attack. And yes, the administration put that impression out there, but where was the news media? Where were the responsible members of the Republican party in the House and Senate, and why weren’t more Democrats standing up to that upright falsehood?

The underlying point I’m making is we have serious problems in our democracy and all of the blame put on George W. Bush — I’m not defending him in any way, believe me — but I think sometimes that misses the larger point that our democracy is indeed in trouble. And all of us have an obligation to try to fix it … Global warming is real. And they refuse to connect those dots … We have the whole country suffering from this massive drought. West Nile virus is directly connected to the conditions that global warming has made worse. The whole North polar ice cap is disappearing in  front of our eyes. Twelve massive million-dollar-plus climate-related disasters … and they keep coming.

Just as they did not report the truth about the proposal to invade Iraq, we are not getting the accurate impression about this challenge that we have to face. To stop putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution up into the atmosphere every single day … They aren’t only doing nothing about it, there’s hardly any discussion about it. It drives me crazy.

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Audubon International/Selkirk, NY

Position Description: Audubon International seeks a highly-qualified and enthusiastic individual to serve as Program Manager of its Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program (ACSP). In the course of administering these programs, the incumbent will work as part of a collaborative team of dedicated staff members, directly engage a wide range of stakeholders (property managers, cooperative extension, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions, private sector firms, etc.), and report directly to the Director of ACSP to meet annual member growth, retention, and service goals.

Organization Overview: Audubon International is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to delivering high-quality environmental education and using incentive-based approaches to implement sustainable natural resource management in all places people live, work, and play.

Audubon International presently has approximately 12 staff members and is headquartered near Albany, NY.

The organization, which has been in existence for over 25 years, works with a wide range of interested partners, including golf courses, developers, agriculture producers, small businesses, large corporations, academic institutions, fellow not-for-profits, community associations, local governments, and state and federal agencies. Through education, technical assistance, certification, and recognition, Audubon International facilitates the implementation of natural resource management practices that ensure land, water, wildlife, and other natural resources are sustainably used and conserved. Utilizing a set of award-winning environmental education and certification programs, Audubon International is able to positively impact environmental health at multiple geographic scales, including individual properties, communities, and ecoregions.

The ACSP is an education and certification program that helps organizations and businesses protect our environment while enhancing their bottom line. The "plan-do-check-act" approach of the program offers information and guidance to implement an environmental management plan that improves efficiency, conserves resources, and promotes conservation efforts. Audubon International awards certification to publicly recognize and reward the environmental achievements and leadership of ACSP members.

The ACSP for Golf Courses is a widely recognized and highly-regarded education and certification program that helps protect our environment and preserve the natural heritage of the game of golf. The program serves as a valuable resource for golf courses by facilitating the conservation and restoration of wildlife habitat, enhancing environmental health, improving economic efficiency by reducing operating costs, minimizing potentially harmful impacts of golf course operations, and providing courses with valuable communications and marketing tools.

Specific Duties & Responsibilities:
Administrative
-Work with the Director of ACSP to develop and implement yearly goals, objectives, strategies, and budget proposals for the ACSP program in conjunction with other programs being implemented by the organization.
-Maintain up-to-date information in the organization’s comprehensive member database.
-Participate in organization- and program-level strategic planning efforts.

Program Member Service
-Assist ACSP members in the development of management plans and other technical documents required as a component of the Audubon International’s rigorous education and certification process.
-Serve members via requests for information through timely in-person, written, telephone, and email communication.
-Conduct periodic site visits to assist members with ongoing environmental planning and management activities.
-Cooperate with Audubon International’s network of partners to ensure that ACSP program materials are up-to-date and being disseminated to appropriate audiences.

Outreach & Education
-Develop and conduct seminars, presentations, and informational briefings to help educate ACSP members (active and prospective) about the benefits of sustainable natural resource management and the efficacy of Audubon International’s approach to environmental stewardship.
-Promote all Audubon International programs via stakeholder meetings, media interviews, newsletters, and participation in various industry and environmental working groups.
-Play a leading role in the growth program membership and the development of relationships with other public and private sector organizations (i.e., GCSAA and USGA) interested in partnering with Audubon International in the delivery of the ACSP program.

Minimum Qualifications:
-A bachelor’s degree in an appropriate field of study (i.e., environmental studies, natural resource management, wildlife ecology, conservation biology) and at least 3 years of related professional experience, OR a master’s degree in an appropriate field of study (i.e., environmental studies, natural resource management, wildlife ecology, conservation biology) and at least 1 year of related professional experience.
-Must be dedicated to educating and encouraging landowners and land managers on all types of properties to become actively involved in environmental stewardship projects
-Familiarity with wildlife and ecosystems of North America
-Excellent interpersonal communication skills and experience working with diverse constituencies and membership demographics.
-Ability to excel both by working independently and as part of a collaborative team.
-Strong technical and persuasive writing skills.
-Computer proficiency (i.e., Microsoft Office suite, database management, internet-based research, professional applications of social media)
-Experience using GIS is desirable

Compensation: This is a full-time, permanent position. Audubon International offers a mission-driven work environment that promotes continued employee growth and development. The organization offers its employees a strong compensation package, including competitive salary, excellent health benefits, retirement benefits, and generous vacation. Diversity is highly valued.

Deadline for Application: September 21, 2012

How to Apply:
Submitted applications will be reviewed upon receipt and must include the following:
-Cover letter summarizing the candidate’s qualifications for the position, including a description of how prior educational training, experience and skills prepare the candidate to fulfill the job responsibilities detailed above
-Curriculum vitae or resume
-Contact information (name, job title, phone and email) for 3-5 professional references
-Writing sample (5 pages maximum) which demonstrates analytical reasoning skills and ability to communicate technical concepts or analysis to a non-technical audience
-Application materials should be submitted via e-mail with the job title and your name in the subject line (i.e., ACSP Manager – Jane Smith)

Audubon International is an equal opportunity employer committed to practices that ensure employees and applicants for employment are provided with equal opportunities without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, age, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information or any other factor that is not related to the position.

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Like the speakers at the ongoing Republican National Convention, I communicate the “hard truths.” Here’s one for today: No one likes a party pooper.

I’m inspired by a recent poll conducted by The New York Times which found 60 percent of New York City residents oppose Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban on sodas larger than 16 ounces.

His constituents’ opposition, which other polls have documented at lower levels, isn’t stopping Bloomberg, however. It’s still full steam ahead on the ban, which only requires a vote by his hand-picked Board of Health to become the law of the land.

Of course, as the Wall Street Journal reported in June, just because Bloomberg says it’s the law doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay the law. He’s out of office come January. According to the WSJ, one of the leading candidates for New York City Mayor, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, is skeptical of the ban; she observed that a “future mayor ‘should certainly think about’ reversing the ban.” Her opposition is grounded in a misconception — that the ban will somehow limit people’s right to drink as much soda as they want, when in fact anyone intent on drinking mass quantities of soda will be free to buy it.

As I argued when the ban was first announced, Bloomberg and his public health team are instead banking on the documented psychological phenomenon that limiting serving sizes limits the desire to consume more. Indeed, the New Yorker’s influential financial writer James Surowiecki recently endorsed this view (and the ban itself) from an economist’s perspective.

Perhaps a more common reaction to the ban is what one might charitably call the “constitutional argument,” which was expressed by what the Wall Street Journal declared a “slender” occasional soda drinker: “If I want a soda one day I have that right,” she said. “If one day I want to buy a five-gallon pail of soda, I should be able to.” That’s totally covered by the Ninth Amendment, am I right?

I mean, come on! This is America, dammit! If we want to drown ourselves in liquid candy, we should be able to! After all, the supersizing of fountain soda is one of the few good deals Americans have enjoyed over the past several decades. Good jobs, good wages, good health care and good government? Not so much. But as much soda as you can drink? American progress at its best! It’s understandable that many people would be reluctant to give up the last great benefit of living in America.

In all seriousness, there is a huge leap from the first part of that interviewee’s statement to the second. Bloomberg’s proposal isn’t an outright ban. And New Yorkers will still be able to buy unlimited numbers of two-liter bottles (as well as Big Gulps, since 7-Elevens will be exempt from the ban). But I have no doubt that the American Beverage Association, which is fighting the ban, wants New Yorkers to think the way that she does.

It’s definitely a fair question to ask how people will react to the ban, however. A recent study by researchers from Emory University suggests that more and more people, and more and more children, will switch to diet soda — which is not covered by the Bloomberg ban. To an extent, that’s already happening. The study, which appeared in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that diet beverage consumption has doubled among kids over the last decade.

You can argue that this is a good thing. Kids are drinking less sugar! But the study observes that the effects of low-calorie sweeteners (LCS) on kids aren’t well understood:

The effects of these sugar alternatives have not been well studied, and both short- and long-term effects have yet to be determined …

… Recent human and animal studies have shown that LCSs may affect glucose metabolism, satiety, and vascular function, despite their inherent lack of energy. A growing body of evidence suggests that repeated exposure to sweet substances may lead to the development of preferences for highly sweet foods and beverages. This is particularly concerning in young children, among whom early exposure to highly sweet substances can lead to the development of dietary patterns replete with highly caloric foods, typically lacking in nutritional value.

That last point is key. There’s growing evidence that sugar is addictive, but what if it’s as much the sweetness as anything that causes that addiction? In other words, drinking diet soda might still program young brains to prefer and seek out other “highly caloric foods.” It could be a “win the battle, lose the war” sort of thing.

Let’s be clear: The jury is very much out on all this. As Barry Popkin, a top researcher on the public health effects of diet and soda consumption, told NPR recently, “we still have no evidence of any toxicological or negative health effect of diet sweetener intake.”

NPR noted that the European Union is still going ahead with a scientific review of the safety of aspartame, one of the leading artificial sweeteners (if you want to read about aspartame’s controversial route to FDA approval under President Ronald Reagan, Tom Philpott dug into it for Grist).

There is some indirect evidence of the dangers of diet sweetener intake, however. A study quoted in Mother Jones found that “people who drink at least one diet soda a day are 43 percent more likely to experience a ‘vascular event’ — i.e., strokes and heart attacks — than people who drink none.” That risk is present even after researchers accounted for other metabolic and health factors like obesity, diabetes, or hypertension.

I know this is a sensitive area for a lot of people — and the research is merely suggestive and quite thin (though I will bet that beverage companies have piles of data on the health effects of low-calorie sweeteners that they’re keeping to themselves).

Clearly, Americans hate to be told what to do, even when their health is on the line. Smoking bans in restaurants and nightclubs weren’t popular at first either. But no one that I know of has gotten booted from elected office for supporting smoking bans. The New York City soda ban isn’t popular in polls at the moment, but the ban, once implemented with non-world-ending consequences, will likely soon become a minor irritant.

But all of this points to a larger problem. If we’re programming ourselves to seek out high-calorie foods no matter what kind of sweetener we use, we are and will remain our own worst enemies. If that’s the case, it will take far more than supersized soda bans to change our deep and abiding affection for sugar.

Filed under: Food

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