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Water and Health

The New York Academy of Sciences recently published a multimedia report on a meeting they hosted with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health focusing on a range of issues at the intersection of water quality and health. Talks spanned global social, economic, and political trends, all the way down to the individual human cell. Topics discussed included the role of climate change in exacerbating cholera epidemics, threats to the U.S. water supply, high- and low-tech inventions for water treatment, and the implications of water shortages for economic development worldwide.

Perhaps the most gripping talk came from Erik Peterson at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. His refrain throughout his talk was “In effect, we are on countdown.” As population rises, water reserves dry up, climate change proceeds, and progress on sanitation is slow in many parts of the world, all signs point to a crisis in many places in this century. This is not only a humanitarian issue, but could affect political stability, as populations will increasingly have few choices but to pursue water access aggressively. Currently, he argued, insufficient attention is being given to this issue at the policy level, either in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world. And these issues will not go away.

The eBriefing is now available on the New York Academy of Sciences website. I wrote the meeting summary, and you can also see a video interview I conducted with Peter Agre, in which he talks about several troubling examples of problems around the world related to water access. Audio and slides are also available from all of the talks, including Peterson's. It's really worth a look. See the eBriefing here.

The Glass Bees Featured in Sheepshead Bay Blog

Thank you to Samantha LoSapio and all of the folks at Sheepshead Bites for this review! This gives me increased confidence that we're onto something here. See the full article.

If you thought traffic was bad at the Sheepshead Bay Road bus stop, teeming with Kingsborough students late for their 9 a.m. class and exasperated espresso fiends tweeting about their frustration, wait until you have to push your way off the back of a gondola.

Oh, you heard right; we said gondola.

New York City’s own Atlantean harbingers in their own right, Christopher Williams and Jason Das of experimental musical project known as the Glass Bees, recently embarked on a morning-long acquisition of a variety of media taken or inspired by the southeastern coast of Brooklyn, including our very own Sheepshead Bay, to form a multimedia experience called Venice, Brooklyn...> Read more.

Also, as a side note, the New York Academy of Sciences has announced that they will be holding an event on December 2 looking at the findings of the New York Panel on Climate Change. Modeled on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NPCC is looking closely at the potential implications of climate change for New York City and the region. The report will also be published as a volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

A Covey of Credos

A good friend wrote to me recently to point me toward the website for Credo, a wireless expansion of the Working Assets telephone program. Credo sets aside a percentage of all of its fees to support nonprofit organizations of its customers’ choosing. According to its website, Credo gives you an opportunity to “choose the mobile company that supports your beliefs.” At the same time, “You’ll get competitive rates, nationwide all-digital coverage, helpful customer service, great phones, and a variety of plans to choose from.” This best of all possible worlds has undoubtedly produced significant support for some worthy progressive organizations, and is a fine example of good corporate citizenship, I thought. Still, I wondered, how much can something like this actually accomplish?

The problem with this type of political action began to come into focus the next day as I read Lawrence Weschler’s absolutely wonderful book Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences. The collection grew from a regular column the author contributed to McSweeney’s Quarterly, and from other publications, in which he traces provocative connections between iconic images from the history of visual culture. Many of Weschler’s convergences begin with playful observations about similar compositional approaches in painting, graphic design, photography, television, and advertising, and grow in layers of resonance through the power of his imagination, some startling research, and his will to extract and articulate meaning from these seeming coincidences.

In Weschler’s world, however, little is pure coincidence. If Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic seem to share a similarly sculpted doughy visage, it becomes an occasion to contemplate the “fundamentalist, cynical, and manipulative” similarities between the Contract With America and the regime that launched ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko begin to share a sublime sense of human insignificance within the vast cosmological and metaphysical void that surrounds us when seen in the context of images of galaxies and moonscapes published in magazines during the years of their greatest productivity. And the chance fact that Vaclav Havel was photographed wearing a jacket created for the film Awakenings brings an uncanny authority to Weschler’s reading of Oliver Sacks’s tale of “frozen” patients in a Bronx hospital; they become more than allegory for Eastern Europe under Soviet communism, sharing a podium at the prow of a revolution. Weschler’s insights are often startling, and invite a more careful attention to the images surrounding us than we typically maintain.

His speculations also begin to become practical tools in essays like one near the middle of the collection (also published previously here) in which he considers the graphic design of the Solidarity movement in 1980-1981. Solidarity’s posters were an integral part of a potent propaganda campaign to rally Polish nationalist sentiment behind a difficult and often bloody struggle for workers’ rights under Soviet occupation. Weschler points out that the simplicity of images like this one were packed with latent meaning, drawing on a rich trove of images and other materials from national history while making oblique references to contemporary popular culture. He points out that it was often enough for Solidarity’s graphic activists simply to juxtapose bold images with dates of important uprisings in the Polish struggle for self-determination, because supporters of the movement would immediately recognize them. They were willfully cryptic, though not for the sake of obfuscation, and successful because of the issues at stake for Solidarity and the public’s investment in the movement, witnessed in the hunger they endured to support it.

Weschler contrasts the vitality of the Polish images with American political graphic design in the same era, and finds at least one example—for a 1981 march on Washington for labor rights—to be sorely lacking in comparison. Though titled Solidarity Day, the poster projects a mishmash of vague agendas, reflecting a lack of cohesion and determination in the movement itself in the blank stares of the citizens looking out of the poster. In Weschler’s analysis, the posters of Solidarity were not successful only because they relied on a pastiche approach to recycling images and identified with a relevant history, but because there was a clear goal and a strong movement behind them.

Though the essay was written in 1983, what Weschler says could just as easily apply—perhaps even more so—to the situation in which left-spectrum Americans find ourselves now. Weschler’s reading reminded me of a gathering in Washington Square Park held on the occasion of the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center—one of the few dates that actually has resonance for Americans today (although this past year witnessed the stirrings of a purposeful forgetting). Organized by the coalition Not In Our Name, the ostensible purpose was to remember the victims of the disaster and to protest the Bush administration’s already apparent agenda of using it to manipulate public opinion. Over the course of the event, however, we heard speeches protesting American imperialism, meddling in Central America, and failure to support the Palestinian cause. Important problems all, and probably even related to the big picture of which 9/11 and its aftermath form the foreground, but I left confused and wishing that someone with a clear vision and the authority to articulate a limited set of pressing demands had been in charge.

An article that ran in Adbusters last year hit the nail on the head in its parody:

Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal—the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.

The diffuseness of the movement would seep into view again and again. A radio report on a February 2003 protest that ran on NPR during the run-up to the Iraq war featured a chorus of women singing John Lennon’s mantra, “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” as if this articulated any kind of relevant agenda. A March 2004 protest march in New York City trickled out once again into Washington Square Park, with the most audible statements coming from a small group of communists who had seized a patch of pavement near the fountain. Whether you agree with their historical analysis or not is not the issue; it was beside the point of the gathering. The numbers of people who turned out for the event made it clear that there were large segments of the public who opposed the war, but there was still no clear catalyst that could synthesize and channel this expression into any coherent tangible action. The Democrats ignored it until much too late, and even the New York Times, which has been otherwise commendable in its recording of the Bush administration’s failures, has seemed content to report on public protests at arm’s length, a symptom of the inability of the march’s leaders to articulate a lasting vision that sticks.

The final chapter of Everything that Rises can offer a way to think about why public opposition has been ineffective in opposing an obviously and astonishingly inept government in the past many years. In an essay (perhaps in another sign of the Weschler-ness of experience) also titled “Credo,” the author posits his method as a negotiation between two kinds of seeing.

The history of thinking about vision is in fact a history of a continual rejiggering of the relative importance of those two vectors: is it that light rays enter the eye through the corneal lens (whereupon they get sprayed onto a sort of tabula rasa screen at the back of the eye)—or rather, in some sense, that the brain’s or the mind’s, or anyway the self’s attention courses out to the world through that lens (actively grasping and even shaping what it sees, or rather looks at, or rather chooses to tend to)?

For Weschler, seeing what is in front of us and creating a compelling narrative that gives a form to the world are intertwined activities, though it is the latter that makes his writing so compelling. It is his creative repurposing of the raw material on which his essays are based that brings a focus to our sense of things we might otherwise ignore, and that might even suggest a method of extracting a meaning from history. Such is perhaps the case in any good critical writing, but Weschler’s “credo” also hints at a way of existing in the world; it is a philosophy of a creative life.

A hypothesis: Credo as phone company, at least as professed in its undoubtedly focus-group generated promotional copy, is the opposite of this. As effective as it might be in raising funds for organizations worth supporting, such an automated form of feel-good, multifaceted (and therefore utterly without focus), ersatz activism will never engage participants to the point of feeling truly invested in the causes they believe in. Although it helps fund activists who are dedicated and working to effect change, for the broader public this is politics as unconscious abstraction, as convenience, as reduction to fundraising campaigns. It serves as an umbrella to an overstocked supermarket of “causes” that showcases the competing fight for the attention of the left-of-center electorate. It is a sign that, unlike Solidarity, many feel alienated even from the agendas they support, and of the desperate need for a more persuasive lens to focus the public’s attention.

Your Brain in Aspen

When the wealthy, the famous, and the beautiful weren’t listening to Bill Clinton and Karl Rove at the Aspen Ideas Festival two weekends ago, they were treated to a set of symposia featuring some top-flight neuroscientists and neuro-dilettantes. The goal of the sessions was to explore recent developments in our understanding of how the brain works, how differences in brain development make each of us unique, and the potential social ramifications of the increasingly undeniable realization that everything we experience happens in the chemical and electrical reactions taking place in the three pounds of wrinkled meat in our heads.

There seemed to be general consensus that the highpoint of the sessions was a presentation by Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist now based at Duke University who has conducted some truly remarkable experiments to understand how the brain controls our physical movements. He and his colleagues have devised an interface that translates the firing of configurations of neurons in the monkey’s brain into physical motion. In a series of experiments, he first taught a monkey to play a simple video game using a joystick to move a cursor around a screen. By implanting a set of sensors in the monkey’s brain, he could determine which neurons fired as it performed various tasks. Next, he took the joystick away from the monkey, but connected the sensors to a robotic arm that held the joystick. When he put the monkey in front of the game again, the firing patterns in its brain were the same, enabling it to learn to manipulate the cursor and the robotic arm merely through its “thoughts.” Nicolelis’s discovery of how to create such an interface has enormous potential for everything from new types of prosthetic limbs, to robotics, to (I would imagine) defense industry technologies. His work is the stuff that cyborgs are made of.

The lecture series also featured two presentations discussing the potential ramifications of neuroscience for the practice of the law. As brain research and genetics increasingly show that there is a purely biological component to many of our thoughts and actions, it presents some difficult questions of personal responsibility. If it is discovered that particular types of development in the brain increase the likelihood of antisocial behavior, should an individual still be held responsible for his actions? If a brain scan can predict the possibility that an individual would be more likely than others to commit a crime, is it right to take preventative actions against him?

According to legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen, who published an article on the subject in a March 2007 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, such questions are already being raised in the courtroom, and judges are increasingly being put in the uncomfortable position of needing to decide on scientific issues. Rosen argued for the pressing need for a public dialogue to reach a consensus on how best to reconcile neuroscience with constitutional law and legal precedent.  Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world’s most prominent cognitive neuroscientists, took up similar topics on Sunday. He recounted scientific findings showing the existence of a gap in mental processing between the moment when the brain commits to a decision and the moment when we become conscious of that decision. Such a construct could call into question the existence of the free will on which so much legal theory is based. Gazzaniga argued that even if neuroscience does produce the ability to predict whether a person is likely to commit a crime, however, the question of personal responsibility is ultimately a social, not a biological, one, meaning that, at least for the time being, it wouldn’t be correct to rely too heavily on the brain when making legal judgments.

I was also intrigued by a presentation from Marcus Raichle. Raichle is one of the most important researchers in the field of neuroimaging, and contributed to the invention of positron emission tomography. Following a general introduction to explain the history of brain imaging and how current methods work, he talked about the importance of studying the “intrinsic” functional activity of the brain instead of the “evoked” responses so often analyzed in neuroimaging. He likened the intrinsic activity to the large portion of an iceberg that floats below the ocean surface. Whereas much current practice is good at identifying the changes in brain activity associated with specific events, he proposed that researchers should be attending to the vast, unknown activity in the brain that remains constant, or that constitutes the noise in measured brain signals. His ideas point to the critical importance of a vast, complex world.

At the Academy we’ll be publishing an eBriefing on the conference soon, hopefully in August sometime, featuring a detailed meeting report, video, and recordings of all of the talks. Stay tuned. Thanks to the Academy and the Haseltine Foundation for allowing me to attend the festival, and to all of the speakers for being so friendly and helpful.

21st-Century Cold War

Nature magazine reported Friday that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has agreed to donate $37.5 million to a project undertaken by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the United Nations Foundation. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is planned as a central repository to preserve the genetic diversity of 21 essential food crops needed to sustain humanity. In the event of catastrophic natural disaster, nuclear war, or plant epidemic, the vault, dug into the side of a mountain in the far north of Norway, would serve as a “last-resort depository of agricultural diversity,” a “doomsday” seed bank including a database of genetic information and a library of seed samples preserved at low temperatures.

One can only applaud the foresight of those responsible for such an undertaking, although in the light of recent forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and this UN Foundation scientific panel, not to mention the continuing proliferation of nuclear technology, it’s chilling to consider the need for it. Architectural renderings (here and here) on the GCDT website depict a facility bearing a startling resemblance to the North American Aerospace Defense Command headquarters in the hills above Colorado Springs. NORAD was a colossal undertaking built in a remote location to prepare for the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States and Canada. The BBC has reported that the security needs of the Global Seed Vault have also been taken into consideration. One shudders to speculate about what the vault might need to defend itself against.

John Philip Sousa Returns to Broadway

According to a recent New York Times article, the Broadway theater community is struggling with increasing pressure to use software packages such as Notion, Sinfonia, OrchExtra, and InstrumentalEase as supplements to pit orchestras. These programs are designed not purely as Karaoke arrangements for live singers, but as customizable tools giving conductors the ability to mix an available retinue of live musicians with the accompaniment necessary to simulate the sound of a larger orchestra. In practice, these platforms provide theater companies with limited funding, manpower, or space with the ability to replicate the fuller sound of orchestras unbound by lack of means.

The dispute, of course, arises because if you can replace three of your violinists with tracks on a laptop computer, why not replace them all? And the rest of the band, too? A machine is cheaper, more reliable, less cranky, easier to carry, and takes up less space than your average musician, offering many ways to boost a company’s bottom line. The musicians’ union has opposed the introduction of such digital music into the concert hall since it could touch off a slide down a slippery slope. In part, the rhetoric is that the theatergoer is paying to hear live music, and the introduction of computers into the theater will lead to a gradual degeneration of musical skill and appreciation. Of course, the primary goal is to defend musicians from their own anachronism.

John Philip Sousa would not have been surprised by this turn of affairs. In 1906 he wrote a polemic against the infiltration of Victorian-era mechanical music like nickelodeons, player pianos, and the phonograph into spaces formerly reserved as the province of musicians. Though his argument is for the protection of the composer’s copyright, he sensed that the age had placed traditional means of music creation on shaky footing.

I foresee a marked deterioration in American Music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines. When I add to this that I myself and every other popular composer are victims of a serious infringement on our clear moral rights in our own work, I but offer a second reason why the facts and conditions should be made clear to everyone, alike in the interest of musical art and of fair play.

The first half of Sousa’s treatise argues that machines undermine the traditional participatory nature of musical production, threatening to open an unbridgeable void between the musically illiterate and the professional. By the time one finishes his essay, however, one senses that Sousa’s primary fear is a change in the economics of music production and consumption. In his 1977 critique of the political economy of music, Jacques Attali expounded upon the shift in musical culture from one based on community and participation to one of commodity and consumption. Mechanization of music in the late nineteenth century played a critical role in this turn of affairs, and today our ravenous tendency to "stockpile" CDs and mp3s bears witness to the transformation of music from experience to be enjoyed into object to be owned.

Broadway musicals exist somewhere in the gap between experience and object, since the experience of the theatrical spectacle is itself an object to be consumed. We buy entertainment when we go to the theater. We purchase the experience of traveling to Midtown, knowing that we are witnessing BROADWAY, an avenue of dreams that in our collective imagination transcends any physical location on a map. When Broadway goes on the road, the ersatz experience of New York City is the allure, with all of its populist glitz and glamour. When high school students develop their own productions of Broadway standards, they participate in and recreate the dream.

Though a part of making that experience, and despite the undeniable talent that musicians bring to it, it is not music but the flawless spectacle of the production that draws an audience to Broadway. Burying the contributions of individual musicians in an anonymous “pit,” the spectacle of the Broadway show depersonalizes sound even in the most musician-friendly productions, often technologically amplifying their performance through modern electronic sound systems. Mediated in this way, the sound is more like film, television, or other media that conceal the performance of music. Broadway focuses attention on stage actors and singers, unlike purely instrumental orchestral music, which foregrounds the orchestra itself as the star of the show. I cannot prove it, but perhaps the musical is more popular than pure instrumental music because the focus of our attention is on the actors on the stage, and we sympathize with their presence and the immediacy of their voices. Even this component of the show, however, is often processed through a p.a. system, on which the spectacle of Broadway seems to depend these days.

Obviously, musical technology was anything but a fad. And one cannot help but feel sympathy for talented and dedicated artists whose livelihood could end up being under threat in the same way that craftsmen, autoworkers, and New York City subway token clerks have watched their jobs outsourced to machines. One even hopes that they will win. There is some irony, though, in the aesthetic argument that adding a few tracks of recorded music to a live musical performance removes some indispensable element from the Broadway experience. Most of our experience with popular music today is with recordings built of individual tracks, assembled together to present the illusion of an idealized human performance. As perhaps the most elaborate expression of American popular music, the Broadway musical may finally be catching up to the world it helped create.