TheMillerCircle.org

The death of Howard Zinn two weeks ago stirred a controversy that ruptured into a fault line running through academics, historians and intellectuals about history and scholarship, in a way that perhaps only Zinn could truly appreciate.  Controversial as a historian, Zinn’s death evoked a skirmish that revealed something more fundamental about our country than it did about Howard Zinn and his work. It all started when Allison Keyes of NPR, on the radio show “All Things Considered,” recruited a small group to comment on Zinn’s life and work and serve as a broadcast  obituary.  Many news sources have obituaries pre-written for famous people before they die, but apparently NPR either doesn’t practice that behavior or at least hadn’t done so for Howard Zinn, though perhaps that’s the difference between radio and newsprint.  Noam Chomsky spoke briefly. He was an obvious choice, a good friend of Zinn’s and was very knowledgeable about his work. Former Civil Rights leader Julian Bond was a second choice and was also  appropriate given Zinn’s activist role in a career of issues, including civil rights and the Vietnam war. However, the flip side of the short NPR segment consisted of comments by David Horowitz, the former liberal turned conservative noise maker, race-baiter and vocational Muslim-hater, who has nothing of substance to his resume, except he comes with a loud voice box. It was not even clear that he had read Zinn’s work or if he got his information by listening to Faux News. Horowitz tried to summarize Zinn’s work by stating “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect,” and “A People’s History of the United States is a travesty.”  Zinn’s colleagues reacted quickly to Horowitz’s comments, not because he said anything new or unexpected, but questions were raised about duplicitous behavior on the part of NPR.  Colleagues of Zinn’s questioned why Horowitz had been invited to comment at all. One blogger stated “When I heard that historian and activist Howard Zinn died on Wednesday, I wondered how (or even if) NPR would cover his death. They have quite a track record of glorifying some of the vilest characters of the right (e.g. torture apologist and dictator loving Jeanne Kirkpatrick, economist Milton Friedman, and Jerry Falwell) when their lives come to an end, so I wondered how an avowedly leftist person such as Zinn would fare.” NPR lived up to expectations.

The day after the NPR airing appeared,  FAIR posted an alert that expressed outrage at the segment and emphasized how, when William Buckley died in 2008, NPR aired no less than six segments, all of which featured glowing tributes to him, despite the fact that he accomplished little of intellectual significance. So, the argument goes, if NPR arranged things so that Buckley received only positive eulogies from his friends and admirers, why should Zinn be given the bipolar treatment? The FAIR article evoked many responses that were quickly posted and led to a general expression of outrage by his friends, colleagues, liberals and progressives: in other words, most of the good people left in the country were pissed.

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While the new swine flu epidemic is causing an appropriate level of alarm, more subtle aspects of environmental failure are beginning to surface, that, in the long run, will pose a more serious problem to our food supply and very likely escalate the cost of food. Europe is far more advanced than the United States in regulating the chemical industry and several herbicides that are toxic, such as Atrazine, have been banned from use in Europe, but are still used  widely in the United States. It’s ironic that the research showing Atrazine’s toxicity (it gets in the ground water and causes feminization of male frogs–if it does that to frogs what does it do to our own reproductive functions?) was done here in the United States. But, under the Bush administration, the EPA approved the use of Atrazine for United States agriculture.
As I was scanning the paper this morning, mostly focusing on reports about swine flu, I came across a more obscure but troubling article. A report in the New York Times today points out that Europe, like the United States, has a major bee problem. The currently high level of bee mortality in Europe could permanently wipe out bees in that region within 8-10 years, according to Apimondia, an international bee organization. Last year alone about 30%, or more than 13 million of Europe’s bee hives died out. The loss of bee hives was much higher in some regions, reaching 80% in southwest Germany. This problem is potentially far more serious than swine flu, since about 35% of Europe’s food supply depends on pollination and no one pollinates as effectively as bees.
We have already heard about the bee crisis in the United States where mobile bee hives have been used for farm pollination for many years. In this brave new world of our farm economy, farmers pay for massive numbers of bees brought to their farms in trucks, where they are released, sting a few people, and then serve as pollinators for the region for a set period of time before the bee keeper moves on to his next contract.  The near complete absence of local bees makes this arrangement a necessity. No magic bullet seems to explain the mounting decline of bee hives, either in Europe or the United States.  The cumulative effects of mite infestation, pesticides and herbicides have been blamed for this crisis, but no simple solution or cure is available. The bees leave the hives to forage and pollinate, but they don’t come back. A colleague of mine working on the problem of bee vitality  here at the University of Minnesota has concluded that the bees are simply stressed by too many excesses and over stimulation from their environment. One popular idea is that the stimulation by the chemical environment leads them to spend too much energy reliably identifying their to and from path and this stress leads to infestation with mites and an early death. But, stress is one thing, early death is another.

It is alarming to see that Europe is suffering from the same problem that we have here in the United States, since they have been better about regulating their chemical industry. Indeed representatives from Europe have appeared in this country giving lectures to major manufacturing establishments to tell them what chemicals they can and cannot use if they expect to export their products to Europe. And, they are all taking careful notes, because they can’t lobby their way into avoidance, like they do here. Fortunately for us, we are still enjoying benefits of a free market economy approach to the chemical industry–if it doesn’t smell too bad, go ahead and use it. I suppose what we need are large numbers of robotic bee colonies that only have to come back to their hives to get their little lithium batteries recharged.  Would a robotic bee project be a suitable challenge for the summer students at MIT? Or, should we take a stab at a biological approach? Where is the genome of the  honey bee when you need it most?

RFM

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Not long after the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed by Congress in 1973, the Republicans began to oppose the act and reduce its impact: ESA became  part of the Republican deregulatory mania. The ESA requires that Federal agencies must consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, before proposing regulations that could affect the environment or further threaten identified species. Fish, wildlife and plants are specifically listed for protection  in the ESA. In some cases, like the Spotted Owl controversy, which played out under the Reagan administration, the ESA  led to hardened opinions over things like  logging rights and land development vs animal and environmental protection.

When Newt Gingrich took control of Congress in the 1990s, he tried to gut the ESA, but the popularity of the law insured its survival. G.W. Bush used his self-appointed executive powers to make the ESA irrelevant by eliminating the normal consultative process between Federal agencies. His elimination of the ESA was one reason why he was able to put vast land tracts in Utah up for oil and gas leases in December 2008, without any environmental or species impact studies. That process would normally have taken years to complete and seems ideally suited for environmental protection by preventing impulsive, destructive behavior: who was more impulsive than G.W. Bush?

Obama’s executive memorandum to restore the ESA has delighted environmentalists throughout the world, since the United States had once established itself as the international leader in environmental protection, going back to the 1960s and 1970s. An increased public awareness of environmental issues was first stimulated by Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring, which pointed out the dangers of excessive application of the insecticide DDT (You can read a more detailed, prior comment on this early history here).  The aroused public and sensitized Congress passed many environmental protection laws such as the ESA and the Clean Air Act, while Richard Nixon was president. He and Gerald Ford were the last Republicans that were willing Republican participants in  support of environmental protection laws. Ronald Reagan began the Republican opposition to these Federal regulations through his “starve the beast” policies and Bush as “the decider” effectively gutted them through an administrative regulatory fiat. Thus, Obama has applied another erasure to some of the Bush legacy on environmental policy changes. What’s next–the Clean Air Act?

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