Ode Magazine

Aimee Mullins sees opportunity in adversity

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:22:04 EST

Aimee Mullins

Photo:Schatz/Ornstein Photography

Aimee Mullins was born without fibula bones in her legs, which were amputated below the knees when she was an infant. A lot of people would consider that condition, occurring so young in life, a pretty big disadvantage. But Mullins likes to think of adversity simply as change to which we haven’t yet adapted. "For most people, adversity is a setback that signals something they have to overcome," she says. "I prefer to see it as an opportunity to use it to discover potential, develop skills and create something new."

Mullins, 33, has become a kind of expert at creating something new, starting with herself. She’s been an intelligence analyst at the Pentagon and a world-record-breaking athlete—with the help of a dazzling collection of prosthetic legs—as well as a fashion model, a motivational speaker and an actress. Her latest creation: activist dedicated to altering perceptions of disability. Mullins recently looked up the word "disabled" in the dictionary and was disturbed by its synonyms: helpless, useless, wrecked, maimed, lame... "It was so shocking," she says, pointing out that with modern prosthetics, losing a limb doesn’t have to represent a "loss" anymore. "Instead, it can be whatever we want it to be." Many people respond to her prosthetics by presuming "a lot about this person’s quality of life," Mullins says. "We do others a great service by not presuming anything. Teenagers don’t even see my legs as abnormal. They recognize them from the video games. They see the potential."

Issue: June/July 2009

Book Review: Crime and punishment, by Paul Butler

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Let's Get Free

Photo: The New Press

The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners; a prison opens in the country every week. Yet this doesn’t make Americans any safer, writes former federal prosecutor Paul Butler in Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. He argues that crime increases when an extraordinarily high number of people is incarcerated as is the case in the U.S. Why? Because petty offenders pick up more serious crime techniques from fellow inmates; because so many prisoners are unemployable on release; because kids with a parent locked up are seven times more likely to get locked up.

Butler, a professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., outlines a better way. His most controversial idea is advocating jury nullification, a juror’s right to disregard the evidence and vote "not guilty" if prosecution seems unfair. Used strategically, Butler says, this act of civil disobedience will send the message that the U.S. has gone too far in its "lock ’em up culture." In Butler’s words, The freedom we save will be our own."

Issue: June/July 2009

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Dave Eggers inspires youth to express themselves through storytelling

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Bestselling author Dave Eggers believes helping young people learn to express themselves can make all the difference in the world.

Dave Eggers

Photo: McSweeney's

Halfway through our interview, Dave Eggers jumps up from the sofa, flips open his laptop, which is buried under a pile of magazines and newspapers, and retrieves an email from Valentino Achak Deng, the Sudanese refugee whose harrowing experiences during his country’s civil war and bizarre entry into the U.S. were chronicled by Eggers in What Is the What. The proceeds from that book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006, go to Deng’s foundation , which is helping reconstruct Sudan. The email contains photos showing what has been done so far with the money: pictures of a recently opened school building in Marial Bai, Deng’s native village. "Isn’t it beautiful?" Eggers says.

Call it "trickle-down eggersnomics"—ever since his immensely successful 2000 debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has used his royalties to help others. He devoted some of that money to 826 Valencia, which helps children in poor neighborhoods of San Francisco with their writing skills and homework. Meanwhile, he runs McSweeney’s, a publishing house that offers a platform for unknown writers and brings out a series of books in which those on the margins of society—such as prisoners and undocumented immigrants—get the chance to tell their stories. Eggers is using his Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Prize—a $100,000 award given by the TED arts and ideas conference that grants the recipient "one wish to change the world"—to inspire people to put time and energy into helping inner city kids in public schools. "You do what you can," Eggers says.

Eggers is preparing to promote his new book, Zeitoun, due out in July. It’s about Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant who paddled around in a canoe in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, helping friends and neighbors in New Orleans. During his rescue efforts, he was thrown in jail on suspicion of terrorism. "If you hear about the sacrifices immigrant families make only to get a small piece of the pie, it’s incumbent on us to help them get a fraction of what we enjoy just by birth," Eggers says. "I could’ve been born in some other part of the world, so I feel that I have no more right to the bounty of this land than an immigrant from Sudan, Syria, Mexico or anywhere else. Immigrants who sacrifice to get here and work here are the bravest people in the world. So I prefer to tell their stories, to help understanding and empathy."

Although in many ways his more recent work is a sharp departure from his earlier books—gone is the self-assured, funny tone and the stylistic pranks—the book fits seamlessly with what Eggers, 39, has done all along: encourage others to tell their stories, especially those others to whom we so rarely listen. "We all long for ways to engage with people and we don’t always know how to do it," he says. "I just assume that anybody sitting next to me could be a close friend, and would have been in a twist of events or circumstance. It’s human. There’s something very powerful within people that yearns to reach out to others."

In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers described in a strikingly good-humored way how, as a 21-year-old student, he lost both parents to cancer within a few weeks of each other. He then decided to move with his 8-year-old brother from Chicago to Berkeley, California. The book made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Eggers considered it a logical choice to spend the royalties from his memoir on a good cause. "My parents didn’t save any money, and I too would rather keep the money in circulation than sit on it. I could never be one of those guys who accumulate vast wealth and then donate $100 million when they die. For me, it’s painful to think about what all that money could have done while I was still alive."

In 2002, Eggers set up 826 Valencia, a writing lab for youth between the ages of 8 and 18 in San Francisco’s Mission District, where half the population is Latin American. The non-profit organization publishes booklets and newspapers and, because the place needed something out of the ordinary to attract visitors and kids, operates a store with pirate supplies. (You can get the city’s best deals on eye patches and wooden legs right here.) "If you can learn how to write well, you can start expressing yourself," Eggers says. "You’ll be able to bring order to a chaotic world that seems beyond your control. You’ll have power when you’re able to explain clearly what you need, what your dreams are, how you can overcome the problems in your community. If you can write extremely well, many doors will be opened so you can succeed in school, in life." Eggers cites Barack Obama as a case in point: "By writing two autobiographies, Obama wrote himself into existence. He is where he is primarily because of his ability to write. He is the best evidence that you don’t need anything but a pen and paper."

Doing good with money has always been important to Eggers—so important that it was one of the subjects of his second book, You Shall Know Our Velocity. Two childhood friends mourning the death of one of their buddies make a hectic, seven-day trip around the world to give away tens of thousands of dollars, discovering in the process that it isn’t easy. How do you decide who gets money and who doesn’t? And not everyone wants a piece of the pie.

"It’s clear that I’m confused by people who need money," says Eggers, who declined a seven-figure advance for You Shall Know Our Velocity to distribute the book through McSweeney’s independent bookstore channels. "Encountering beggars is so bewildering and confusing, because it jams up your cognitive system. Our natural reaction is, ‘Here, take anything.’ That’s what seems to me the most human, honest and logical thing to do. But then we always start thinking, ‘Wait, that’s not right,’ and that totally goes against our instincts."

But is giving money away such a good thing after all? In a 2006 Ode interview, Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of microcredit, was sharply critical of charity—whether it involved giving change to a homeless person on a street corner in India or welfare benefits to jobless people in Indiana. Yunus compared the recipients of charity to animals in a zoo: They’re given meals at set times but never challenged to follow their instincts to hunt. As a result, Yunus argued, they lose their ingenuity, just as a beggar in Bangalore and a guy on benefits in Berkeley are both deprived of their humanity.

Eggers considers for a moment, expresses his admiration for Yunus ("He’s awesome"), then goes on to explain how what he’s doing is different. "Microcredit doesn’t reach a remote village in Sudan like Marial Bai, where there are no phones, no Internet, not even roads. What they need is a school. Whose responsibility is it to build a school? The government’s, but that’s one of the reasons Sudan has a modern history of civil wars—the government wasn’t building any of these schools. So we need local community members like Valentino, who got the means somewhere else, to build a school so people can empower themselves.

"Building a school is different from giving money," he continues. "In a way, it is a loan. It will be paid back by a country that is safer, because the more people are educated, the less likely they are to go back to war. If we invest a little bit in education in developing countries, that’s an investment that pays great dividends."

The Marial Bai Secondary School in southern Sudan was funded by proceeds from Eggers’ book What Is The What.

Photo: David Levenson/Getty Images

Eggers speaks softly as we sit in the pleasant offices of McSweeney’s. Newspaper pages hang on the walls. The editorial staff of McSweeney’s literary magazine, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (published about four times a year with a circulation of 17,000), is working on an issue about how to keep newspapers alive. "Or, actually," Eggers corrects himself, "not just how to keep them alive, but how to make them thrive. It should be a business model from the ground up. It’s silly to put so much faith in advertising, so we need to put some control and some ownership in the hands of subscribers. You need to involve them, which will partly solve the cost problem."

Maybe newspapers can learn something from McSweeney’s. Thanks to what Eggers calls "a sometimes painfully realistic, not to say pessimistic, business model," the publisher has managed to survive and thrive despite the economic crisis. "We’ve never taken unnecessary risks, so we’ve always grown within our means," Eggers says. "I think more companies will start doing that, as I think that is what we need to learn from the crisis. It doesn’t mean you can’t take risks or try to grow, because you should. But it can be done smarter, more organically. When some of these giant newspapers die, we might find smaller, more nimble and more responsive media outlets. After all, whenever dinosaurs die out, new life forms that are smaller, quicker, more agile and better able to adapt flourish."

Eggers says the economy hasn’t really affected McSweeney’s "because we risk nothing. It dips a little bit. Some independent bookstores have a hard time. But some are woven very well into the community, with workshops and authors coming in. When things get rough, some people get even more involved."

And Eggers is eager to get more people involved—specifically, as part of his TED wish, in public schools. Students need "your open minds and your open ears and boundless compassion," he said in his TED acceptance speech. "Some of these kids just don’t know how good they are, how smart, how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them."

By giving kids extra attention, Eggers hopes to keep their optimism and idealism alive. There are a million ways to get involved, Eggers believes—from donating materials to helping out with homework. "Kids don’t often get that kind of attention," he says. "There’s something life-changing about it. What are these kids learning about society when random adults show interest in what they have to say?"

Eggers is convinced this type of one-on-one help is the way to bring about change—and the good news is, most people can fit it easily into their lives. "That’s the thought that keeps me sane and allows me to stave off the despair about the problems that still need fixing. You can’t despair that there are so many problems and we can’t address them all. Be glad about the work you’re able to do. When the idea of writing What Is the What arose, I didn’t think I would solve Sudan’s problems. But I thought, ‘All right, I have a little bit of the ability to address this issue by writing this one book, and that’s what I’ll do.’ And look, now there’s the school in Marial Bai."

Marco Visscher, Ode’s managing editor, buys all his eye patches and wooden legs from the pirate store at 826 Valencia.

Issue: June/July 2009

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Video: Dave Eggers wish to creatively engage inner-city students

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own tutoring centers.

Issue: June/July 2009

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Eco fashion resources

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Magazines and blogs

Eco Fashion World

A web magazine and comprehensive guide to eco fashion, edited by fashion researcher Kim Poldner

Style Will Save Us

London-based digital style magazine covering all things "super stylish and ethical"

In the Loop

Green fashion experts review products and the latest eco-fashion events

Eco Fabulous

Blogger Zem Joaquin has the scoop on sustainable style

Boho Magazine

A new magazine for green fashion

Books

Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys by Kate Fletcher

Style, Naturally: The Savvy Shopping Guide to Sustainable Fashion and Beauty by Summer Rayne Oakes

Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough

Eco-chic: The Fashion Paradox by Sandy Black

Online Boutiques

Etsy

Online marketplace for small, independent (and often green) designers

Planet Threads

Diverse selection of eco-friendly clothing in a moderate price range

Envi

Features a variety of brands and provides detailed background information on the companies

Jute & Jackfruit

Shana Yansen runs this online shop and blog to promote ethical companies that are creating sustainable livliehoods for artisans around the world

Equita

Focused on fair trade products, this shop has fashion, accesories and more

Ecofashion Organizations

Ethical Fashion Forum

UK-based consortium of industry leaders, designers, and fashion experts

Organic Exchange

Organization dedicated to supporting the use of organic fibers

Clean Clothes Campaign

A network of European organizations focused on labor rights and poverty reduction

Aid to Artisans

This group helps artisans around the world develop and distribute marketable products

Issue: June/July 2009

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Educating for change

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

How schools are offering paths for personal and social growth.

Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont

Photo: Goddard College

When Barack Obama won the U.S. presidency on the platform of change, it signaled how potent the notion of transformation could be: People in the U.S. and abroad itched for something new, an overhaul of business and government that could herald a sustainable 21st-century world. The question now is how to get there. That question has sparked a trend in academic institutions toward educating for change. Universities around the globe have proven eager to integrate sustainability into their curricula.

A recent survey in The Chronicle of Higher Education found that substantially more professors are interested in transforming their students into "agents of social change" than in teaching the Western classics. Increasingly, colleges are focusing on social activism and business schools on social innovation. The biennial survey Beyond Grey Pinstripes, performed by the New York-based Aspen Institute Center for Business Education, reveals that business schools are determined to emphasize ethics, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

At the same time, transformational learning (also known as the Integral or holistic education movement) continues to blossom. The idea is to approach all subjects from a variety of perspectives so education can better reflect the interconnectedness of the modern world. Couple this with the rising tide of life coaches who work with individuals and corporations to inspire more meaningful ways of living, and you arrive at a compelling portrait of how critical change is to education in the 21st century.

Business schools

With the global economy in tatters, the business sector is under fire for short-sightedness and exploitation of the public good. Injecting more transparency into the system, along with increased regulation and emphasis on social and environmental return, now seems critical for future success. Business schools have taken the lead in preparing their students for such challenges. Many have started programs geared toward sustainability and reform.

Saïd Business School, Oxford, U.K.

Photo: Saïd Business School

Norwich Business School in the U.K. has launched an MBA program in strategic carbon management. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based Brandeis University International Business School recently announced a "Global Green MBA" to teach students to build sustainable businesses in a global marketplace. The Saïd Business School at Oxford University in the U.K. has welcomed the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship into its fold. INSEAD in Fontainbleau, France, the Ngee Ann Polytechnic School in Singapore and Keio University in Japan have followed suit with social-education centers.

With the slogan, "Change lives. Change organizations. Change the world," the Stanford School of Business in Palo Alto, California, perennially ranks as the most sustainably oriented MBA program in the U.S. Its Center for Social Innovation (CSI) focuses on how business can drive public benefit and redress global problems. The school enables students to take summer internships with social purpose, runs a popular Board Fellows program to match students with leading San Francisco Bay Area non-profits and in 2009 introduced a Social Innovation Fellowship that will provide financial and strategic support to students launching social-interest ventures.

Kriss Deiglmeier, executive director of operations at CSI, says even before the economic crisis, students were increasingly interested in aligning personal ethics with professional goals. Ninety percent of the student body now takes at least one course at the Center, and 20 percent graduates with certificates in corporate responsibility. "The world has changed," says Deiglmeier. "We have global problems that need to be addressed, and MBA programs have the responsibility to educate leaders so that they can be. Stanford is trying to lead the way."

Launched in 2003, The Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, California, has distinguished itself for its MBA in Sustainable Management. Here the emphasis is on teaching business with an eye to all forms of capital: human, natural and financial. Students learn about the "integrated bottom line," which incorporates issues like climate change, energy efficiency and social good into traditional subjects. The School offers both full- and part-time MBAs, as well as a five-month Executive Program that exposes executives to the field of sustainability and encourages them to rethink their assumptions. In all programs, teachers integrate traditional classroom lectures with innovative online learning tools.

"The reality is that issues like climate change, energy efficiency, social responsibility... these are things that every business has to navigate now, and those that understand it are at a great competitive advantage," says Diane Mailey, senior vice president for business development and planning. "Our curriculum is designed to prepare our students to be leaders for these 21st-century challenges."

Undergraduate programs

The New School, New York City

Photo: Grant Hutchinson

Liberal arts education provides students with a framework for understanding the breadth of the modern world and how to go about positively impacting it. History, philosophy, literature, music—all can both illuminate the past and enlighten one’s path into the future. Still, the notion of going out and making a positive change in the world can be ambiguous. These days some undergraduate programs are going a step further to make the idea of change concrete.

The New School in New York City, perhaps best known for its fashion design school, Parsons, aims to inspire its students "to bring actual, positive change into the world." In the case of the Eugene Lang College, that means preparing students for lives of social activism, whether they be political, artistic, academic or otherwise. The college emphasizes both the rigor of a classical education—as Dean Neil Gordan puts it, "I like to tell my students the most radical thing they can do is go into the classroom and read Homer"—and the importance of getting out and learning in the modern world.

The college runs a program in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where students volunteer in an orphanage while learning from a Eugene Lang professor about the history of the Khmer Rouge. Other examples include working with the homeless in New York while studying the economics of homelessness or with local synagogues while studying the history of anti-Semitism. "The tools of literacy, of writing, of communication, of historical awareness, of erudition, all of that is really important," says Gordan. "But that’s the theory; now the question is, What’s the practice? That’s why we put such an emphasis on education through civic engagement."

The School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., was founded by Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s to encourage students to think beyond the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and become a force for positive change in the world. The college continues to thrive. Each year, 1,500 undergraduates enroll in a school intended to prepare them for a career in international service, whether it be in the public, private or nonprofit sector. All subjects are taught through a multi-disciplinary approach. Virtually every student on campus spends time abroad and has command of at least two languages.

Louis Goodman, the School’s dean, says, "This concept of change is something that’s always been attractive to students that come to our school. The difference is that there are many, many more students who are explicitly interested in what we’re doing each year. I like to call this new generation ‘pragmatic idealists.’ They are people who want to change the world but want to be pragmatic in their approach. It’s our job to show them how." In addition to its offerings at the bachelor’s level, the School of International Service has renowned master’s and doctoral programs.

The United States Institute of Peace works to promote international peace-building and conflict resolution in the U.S. and abroad, particularly in schools. The Institute has partnered with universities in Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq to create safe places for debate that model a peaceful society. At the University of Kabul, the Institute has sponsored Afghanistan’s first international peer review journal. In the U.S., the Institute works with universities and high schools to craft a strategy for teaching peace-building and conflict resolution. A major focus is community colleges, where 48 percent of American undergraduates receive their higher education, and where, thanks to the Institute, peace studies programs are blossoming.

"If you really want to create a culture of peace in this society, and you really want to change people’s attitudes, you should be going to a community college," says David Smith, senior program officer at the Institute’s Education and Training Center. "You shouldn’t just be focusing on people going into law and medicine. Teaching peace to the people going out as construction workers and mechanics and police officers and nurses, that’s how you’re going to change society, and community colleges are picking up on that."

Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, California

Photo: Institute of Transpersonal PPsychology

Transformational education

The practice of teaching personal transformation while exploring the mind, body and spirit used to be associated with crystal balls and incense. Now it’s a serious field. Think tanks and universities have injected academic rigor into an approach that merges East and West, the cerebral with the corporal. California is a hub of the movement. The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto uses integrative, whole-person learning to train clinicians, spiritual guides, wellness caregivers and consultants. Nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Sacramento, California, Ananda College offers students a liberal arts education with an emphasis in fields like living wisdom and yoga philosophy. Alternative energy and sustainable living are also part of the curriculum.

Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco offers master’s and doctoral degrees in humanistic psychology, as well as concentrations in humanistic and transpersonal psychology, consciousness and spirituality and social transformation. The Great School of Natural Science in Stockton, California, instructs students in the natural science and philosophy of an individual life, based on the texts of John Richardson, distilled from Eastern and mystical philosophies. And for those interested in online degrees, the California-accredited Hawthorn University uses online resources and a full-time faculty to train students in holistic nutrition.

Outside of California, Colorado’s Integral Institute is a think tank where teachers cultivate solutions to distinctly 21st-century problems—like global warming and culture wars in political, religious and scientific domains—solutions that hinge on an integrated, post-disciplinary approach. At Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, students are encouraged to explore intellectual enlightenment without the pressure of grades. The school offers graduate-level concentrations in consciousness studies and transformative language arts, as well as undergraduate degrees in sustainable business and interdisciplinary arts. This September, the school will sponsor the Power of Words Conference, where leading thinkers explore how written, spoken and sung words can deepen healing and foster transformation. Organized by the Transformative Language Network, the conference will include Dovie Thomason, an award-winning Native American storyteller, and John Fox, the founder of Poetic Medicine.

In South Florida, the Barbara Brennan School of Healing teaches students the art of hands-on energy healing and personal transformation. Students can earn a Bachelor of Science degree or a diploma in Brennan Healing Science. In Warren, Vermont, the Yestermorrow Design/Build School aims to inspire practicing professionals and students in architecture to transform the world through better, more sustainable building. Classes aim to demystify design and construction so architects and builders can create more cohesive, inspired structures.

More untraditional are the Dance of the Deer Foundation, Star’s Edge International and the Celebrant USA Foundation. Dance of the Deer Foundation is a center for shamanic studies that leads participants on retreats and seminars around the world for lessons in healing prayers of the Huichol Indians. Star’s Edge International, based in Altamonte Springs, Florida, trains students in a self-discovery course dubbed "Avatar," a series of exercises that enable students to align their consciousness with what they want to achieve. Finally, the Celebrant USA Foundation in Montclair, New Jersey, trains students in the art of celebration. Certified "Life-Cycle Celebrants" use ceremony to mark the milestones and transitions in the lives of individuals, families, communities and organizations.

The California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, California, is a university that aims to connect the spiritual and practical dimensions of intellectual life. That means grounding the mind, body and spirit in scholarship, research and knowledge. The Institute trains the largest number of marriage and family therapists in the country and offers doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees in counseling psychology, transformative education, integral health and more. Regardless of subject matter, the emphasis is on post-disciplinary education: removing traditional academic pursuits from their silos and teaching them in the context of a complex, interconnected world.

Thus at the Institute, in place of the traditional English or history departments, one finds a department of philosophy, cosmology and consciousness and another in writing, consciousness and creative inquiry. "Our education is transformative," says the president of the Institute, Joseph Subbiondo. "It’s about changing yourself and changing the world through post-disciplinary study. We want to educate the whole person, and believe this sort of education is critical in the modern world."

Similarly, The Big Mind Western Zen Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, uses a blend of Zen Buddhist meditation and Western psychotherapy techniques to help students more deeply understand and appreciate their lives, the world and the relationships they pursue. Zen Master Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi, a New York City native, heads the program and orchestrates one- to two-day workshops as well as weekly sessions known as the Big Mind Big Heart approach to life. The goal is to teach students how to transform their lives and attain inner peace and heightened life wisdom. Big Mind Big Heart can also be used at home by way of DVDs, audio CDs, books and Zen Eye, an online download service that allows students to follow Genpo Roshi’s live lecture sessions on Zen, Big Mind, koans and meditation.

Nestled on 200 acres near the Hudson River in Rhinebeck, New York, the Omega Institute is one of the nation’s premier sources for wellness and personal-growth training. Each year more than 23,000 people venture to Rhinebeck for the institute’s workshops, conferences and retreats. A non-profit organization, Omega aims to inspire people to live healthier, happier, more meaningful lives. Attendees are encouraged to integrate body, mind and spirit, to listen to the needs of each and act in a way that begets wholeness and balance. The institute was founded in the late 1970s and has helped usher the integrative-health movement—and the ideas of personal transformation and individual consciousness—from the fringes to the mainstream. The faculty still includes co-founders Elizabeth Lesser, who wrote The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure, and Stephan Rechtschaffen, author of Timeshifting: Creating More Time to Enjoy Your Life.

Life coaches

Like transformation education, life coaching has boomed in recent years. The practice aims to transform individuals and corporations into harmonious, inspired beings. The International Coach Federation (ICF) represents more than 8,000 professional coaches in 30 countries. More than 250 coaching schools have cropped up around the world, 44 of which are accredited by the ICF. One of the most popular is iPEC Coaching based in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, which offers classes in most major U.S. cities and teaches coaches how to unlock human potential through the Core Energy Coaching process.

Success Unlimited Network, or SUN, is a network of life coaches who help clients identify and pursue their life purposes. Clients are introduced to various games—like the Results Game, which helps them track their daily purposefulness, and the Well-Being Game, which introduces them to a simple process for monitoring fulfillment and satisfaction—that over the course of five-month programs help them transform their lives. Started in London in 1981, SUN is one of the oldest life coach programs around. In the U.S. since 1987, it offers face-to-face programs as well as phone coaching and cybercoaching. The Network also runs the SUN Coach Training and Certification program for aspiring coaches.

The Coaches Training Institute in San Rafael, California, has a similar emphasis on personal transformation. As the world’s largest life coaching school, it has trained more than 20,000 coaches, including many former entrepreneurs and educators. Many graduates go on to executive coaching, working with corporations to make employees more content and productive. Others work with individuals, many of whom are looking to break free of the corporate mold.

Carrie Radovich, a life coach in San Francisco, tries to empower both. A former marketing and sales manager with Leo Burnett Advertising in Chicago and Fortune magazine in San Francisco, she got burned out in the wake of the dot-com boom and realized she was more interested in developing people than companies. Now she coaches firms like American Express, Gap and Merrill Lynch as well as individuals searching for more meaningful lives. "This idea of people from an early age having an awareness that they want to be of service and don’t want to be a cog in the wheel, I’m amazed by it," says Radovich. "It’s typically the older generations, those in their thirties, forties and fifties, who feel stuck in corporate America. Even if they yearn for that same sense of purpose, they need coaching on how to get there."

Issue: June/July 2009

Fat is where it's at

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

For decades, fat has been blamed for everything from heart disease to obesity to cancer. But new research shows that fat can be good for you.

Photo: Pieter de Swart

Jenny Matthau stands in front of hundreds of students at the Natural Gourmet School and speaks heresy. The New York City culinary program specializes in "health-supportive, whole-foods cuisine" with a "plant-based curriculum." Beef and pork aren’t on the syllabus, to say nothing of veal—and the school’s alumni run kitchens at health spas and work in restaurants with names like Organic Planet. So when Matthau, who’s president of the school and teaches the core nutrition class, delivers her lecture in praise of fat, students are often surprised.

"A lot of students expect to hear just what the government is saying: You have your good fats and your bad fats, and you should try to eat a very low-fat diet," Matthau says. "And we don’t agree."

Instead, Matthau’s lecture includes a long section on why we need fats of all kinds in our diets, much more than we’ve been led to believe. She points out societies like the Maasai, a Kenyan tribe that counts meat, blood and whole milk among its dietary staples, yet has low rates of heart disease and obesity. She praises fat’s capacity to add flavor to a dish and make people feel full. "Fat makes things taste great, period," Matthau says. "I’m a big fan." Even so, sometimes it feels like a losing battle. "Students still want alternatives to butter."

For more than three decades, we’ve been told that fatty foods are deadly, to blame for a full menu of health hazards, from heart disease to obesity to cancer. Regularly described as the nutritional equivalent of cigarettes, fat has been the target of public-service campaigns and municipal bans aimed at keeping us slender and healthy. But a growing body of international research suggests our obsessive fear of fat may be misplaced. A high-fat diet won’t necessarily make us sick or fat; a low-fat diet may not make us healthy or slim.

Even the American Heart Association (AHA), a leader in the campaign against dietary fat, recently revised its nutritional guidelines, increasing the daily recommendations for fat. "The science just wasn’t there," acknowledges Robert Eckel, president of the AHA and a professor of endocrinology, metabolism and diabetes at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

Photo: istockphoto.com/juanmonino

Not only that, but our myopic aversion to fat may be doing more damage than an order of steak frites ever could. In our effort to avoid the demon lipids at all costs, we’re forever tinkering with our diets—substituting Snackwells for Oreos, dry toast and a glass of orange juice for a plate of bacon and eggs—in hopes it will keep us skinny almost effortlessly. But these dietary contortions often have unintended consequences. They inspire us to eat more food, for starters. And the food we eat more of? It contains more chemicals, starches and sugar. These ingredients "are more harmful than the much-feared animal fats," says Irina Baumbach, secretary of the Association for Nutritional Medicine and Dietetics in Aachen, Germany.

It’s a shame, really. Because as it happens, experts now recognize fat can be good for you. Aside from the beneficial effects some fats can have on cholesterol—unsaturated fats, like olive oil, tend to raise levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of the bad stuff—fats help deliver vitamins, build cells and regulate hormones. Unsaturated fat also has antioxidant properties, which may help fight cancer; so does meat from grass-fed animals. The oft-repeated hypothesis that links a high-fat diet to breast cancer has never been proved. And when it comes to appetite, hunger and obesity, fats—along with protein, green vegetables and whole grains—take more time to digest, making people feel full longer.

Even critics of high-fat diets acknowledge that people on them tend to eat less because they aren’t as hungry. And according to studies published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), many people even have a type of fat—known as brown adipose tissue, or brown fat—that burns calories rather than piling them on.

Photo: istockphoto.com/emyerson

Finally, fatty food appears to be shedding its stigma. Restaurants are featuring ever-fattier cuts of meat; cookbooks extol the virtues of lard. And the more scientists and nutritionists learn, the more they’re willing to concede that vilifying fat isn’t the solution. Says Jennifer Lovejoy, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington School of Public Health: "When people are eating whole food, real food diets, obesity is not a problem."

At a time when weight loss has become prime-time entertainment, a civic responsibility and a multibillion-dollar global industry, it’s easy to forget that for centuries, doctors worried about malnutrition, starvation and underweight children, points out Gary Taubes. A science journalist, Taubes has been beating the drum in favor of fat for almost a decade. His book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage), spends 500 pages dismantling the prevailing ideas about fat, weight gain and health. It hasn’t made him popular.

There was a time, though, when a low-fat diet was just as controversial. Fat—on the plate or the hips—didn’t trigger health concerns until the late 20th century. As recently as the 1970s, dietary guidelines included plenty of fats and protein, because they helped people feel sated, preventing overeating. And obesity wasn’t considered a serious problem in Europe or the U.S.; high-carbohydrate meals were associated with weight gain, and academic articles linked obesity in Africa and the Caribbean with starchy diets.

But heart disease was a growing public health concern. By the mid-1900s, it was a leading cause of death in the U.S., with the rest of the West catching up quickly. Led by University of Minnesota physiologist Ancel Keys, scientists linked heart disease to cholesterol, and made the leap to fatty foods. While critics of Keys’ research abounded, the U.S. Congress wasn’t among them. In the late 1970s, a Senate committee issued broad dietary guidelines encouraging Americans to eat less fat. Today, we take it for granted that one too many bacon double-cheeseburgers will give us a heart attack for sure.

It’s hardly that simple. While the West started avoiding fats at all costs, researchers continued to study what causes heart disease. As they discovered more about the effects of different kinds of fats—saturated, trans, mono- and poly-unsaturated—on different kinds of cholesterol—HDL ("good") and LDL ("bad")—the weaker the link between dietary fats and heart disease became. Unsaturated fats, like those in nuts, fish, olive oil and avocado, are fluid at room temperature; they reduce LDL, which causes buildup in the arteries. Saturated fats, found in meat and dairy, chocolate and palm oil are solid at room temperature and their effects on cholesterol is more complicated. Coconut oil, for example, has been shown to raise both good and bad cholesterol levels, whereas some of the fats in dark chocolate and beef have a neutral effect.

In other words, as Taubes puts it, when it comes to cholesterol, food high in saturated fats may be, at worst, a wash. "If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease," he wrote in 2002. These days, he says he sees evidence of the conventional wisdom everywhere, from low-fat products on the shelves to the customers at his local bagel shop ordering soy cream cheese and skim lattes. "I always want to ask them why," he says. "There’s this overarching idea that fat is bad for you—that something has to be the problem with our diets, because we die of heart disease and we get fat."

Increasingly, researchers and nutrition experts are starting to come around. "I have been in this business for 35 years and I have never been one of those who maintain that fat is bad," says Daan Kromhout, a professor of public health at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. "We don’t even know whether the two things—fat and [being] overweight—have anything to do with each other. The fat issue is much more complicated than it was once thought to be." Moreover, Kromhout says, stating only the amount of fat in a food product is misleading, since "you have to specify what type of fat is included—saturated, unsaturated, trans-fat—because if you don’t, people will just cut down on all fats, the good ones included."

Photo: istockphoto.com/redmonkey8

Dutch pediatricians were so alarmed by the low-fat trend that they urged parents to ensure that their children receive the essential nutrients only fat can bring. "Children under the age of 6 need fat," said Elise Buiting, president of the Dutch Youth Service Medical Association, in an interview with a Dutch newspaper this year. "We recommend full-fat margarine with unsaturated fatty acids, for example. Children who are given the same ‘light’ products as their parents do not get enough."

As for the connection between fatty foods and weight, it’s controversial as well. Obesity was never the target of Congress’ efforts, although the low-fat recommendations were instituted to help people manage their weight. They haven’t. Since the guidelines were adopted, Americans have indisputably gotten fatter. "In the early 1990s, we ate low-fat everything and we didn’t get thinner," says Alice Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. "There’s your proof."

In the 1960s and ’70s, roughly 14 percent of Americans was obese. Today, more than 30 percent is, with another 30 percent classified as "overweight." Same goes in Europe, where consumption of fat has dropped and obesity rates have risen. In the U.K., obesity rates have tripled since 1980. In the Netherlands, the percentage of moderately overweight adults increased from 28 in 1981 to almost 36 in 2008, according to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics. The percentage of obese people more than doubled, from 5.1 percent to 11.2 percent, in the same period. According to the Society for the Study of Obesity, roughly half the population of the European Union is overweight or obese.

In three decades, while scientists have learned more about what eating fat will and won’t do, consumers have wholeheartedly embraced the "low-fat" doctrine. In the 1990s, more than 1,000 reduced- or low-fat foods were introduced each year, according to the AHA. By the end of the decade, more than 90 percent of the population reported consuming low-fat products. According to one survey, two out of three adults believed "a need exists for food ingredients that can replace the fat in food products," and one out of every two saw the appeal in food advertised as "reduced in both fat and calories." In other words, given the chance to replace fat with something else, we opened wide.

So given the blanket condemnation of fat, what did we eat instead? If we cut fat out of our diets, we have to get calories from somewhere. When food companies offer reduced-fat versions of cookies, salad dressings and sauces, sugar and carbohydrates generally make up the difference. When we consciously reduce the fat in our diets, we don’t typically eat fewer calories; we eat more rice and pasta, according to a survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And low-fat products have their own problems. "If you reduce the fat, you have to replace it with something," says Samuel Klein, a professor of medicine and nutrition in the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. "So it’s sugar." It’s true: Either for taste, or to replace fat’s richness and moistness, the food industry began using sugar.

But as researchers studied fat and weight, they learned more about the effects of sugar, which as it turns out may inspire more weight gain than fat does. When we eat sugar—or refined carbohydrates, which break down into sugar—the body produces insulin to transport the sugar to the muscles and organs that burn it as fuel. Insulin, though, also regulates fat metabolism, and when insulin levels are high, the body stores fat rather than burning it. The issues and consequences of producing too much insulin are still open to debate, but many researchers believe that replacing fats with sugars and carbohydrates has the potential to wreak havoc on your metabolism. And ironically, even sugar substitutes, like aspartame, the sweetener in NutraSweet and Equal, have been linked to weight gain. Scientists aren’t sure why, but they seem to encourage people to eat more, or disrupt energy expenditures.

Sugar substitutes work well for baked goods, salad dressings and processed meats. But they can’t be fried, making them useless in potato chips, which account for 35 percent of the $46 billion global market for savory snacks, according to the research firm Datamonitor. So food scientists developed an indigestible fat, sucrose polyester—more commonly known by its brand name, Olestra. Researchers found Olestra inhibits the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and other important nutrients.

Overall, as Americans replaced regular foods with low-fat products, nutrition sometimes suffered. One study found that women who used fat-modified products weren’t getting enough vitamin E or zinc, prompting the authors to recommend "additional dietary guidance."

Photo: istockphoto.com/karcich

Study after study found that people who said they ate low-fat diets didn’t eat any less than people who kept eating fat. The government’s message had perhaps worked too well. People thought fat, not quantity or quality of food, was the villain. The Food Marketing Institute in Virginia reported that buying food products labeled "low-fat" was the most common way people improved their diets. According to Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink, marketing professors at INSEAD in France and New York’s Cornell University respectively, subsequent studies showed that "low-fat labels lead all consumers—particularly those who are overweight—to overeat snack foods." After all, a reduced-fat version of a cookie often has just as many calories as its "original" counterpart (not to mention more sugar). Chandon and Wansink extended their theory to fast-food restaurants that claim to be healthy. When foods are perceived to be good for you people eat too much of them.

Fortunately, the tyranny of the low-fat diet seems to be waning. Three years ago, Toronto-based chef and food writer Jennifer McLagan struggled to drum up interest for her idea for a cookbook about animal fat. Her 2005 effort, Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore, had won a James Beard Award, annually conferred on the best chefs, cookbook authors and restaurateurs in North America. Even with that pedigree, fat, apparently, was pushing it. Polite publishers told her the concept was too contrarian. Others flat-out called it "disgusting."

She eventually found a taker, and her book, Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, with Recipes, is unapologetic. It’s adamant in its defense of fat’s benefits; the cooking instructions range from how to render your own pork fat to recipes for Brown Butter Ice Cream and Bacon Baklava. And McLagan is winning followers. Pork belly and marrow are common on menus; barbeque has gathered legions of fans outside its native South; it seems in every major city you can find at least one restaurant willing to roast a whole pig for a hungry party. And guess what? In May, Fat too won a James Beard Award.

As the obesity epidemic was later to arrive in Europe, the pro-fat backlash isn’t yet in full swing there, but signs are emerging. A recent study in the NEJM fingering total calories, not fats or carbs, as responsible for weight loss, made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. And anecdotes abound. British celebrity chef Anthony Worrall Thompson has been blatant about using lard in his restaurants. In Norway, sausage consumption is up.

Even mainstream nutritional experts have recanted. The blanket message that "fat is bad for you" has few remaining adherents. The AHA, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the American Council on Science and Health have all modified the message, from their original admission that unsaturated fats are good for you to the grudging acknowledgement that even trans fats may not be as bad as they’ve been portrayed to be. "We should apologize for making people think about ‘percentage of calories,’" says the AHA’s Eckel, adding that the focus should be on total calories. "You want to eat steak? That’s fine. Just make it six ounces rather than 16."

To undo decades of fat-phobia, it’s going to take a more rousing endorsement. And for that, it’s necessary to leave the realm of science and enter the kitchen, where it’s easier to consider the possibilities. Take guacamole, or the pat of butter that finishes a risotto or a chocolate pudding. McLagan includes fat in everything from salad to dessert, with recipes for grilled steak and red wine sauce topped with bone marrow. For a sweet, try salty bacon brittle with pork cracklings. These are beyond rich—the animal fats give the dishes depth and an almost medieval earthiness—and they’re delicious, enough to make even confirmed skeptics salivate.

"Go ahead," McLagan says. "It won’t kill you."

Janet Paskin, who wrote about social stock markets in the May issue, gained three pounds reporting this story. This story has reporting by Ursula Sautter.

Issue: June/July 2009

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James Maskalyk's experience as a doctor in Sudan

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Canadian physician James Maskalyk on why he left a comfortable teaching job to work for Médecins Sans Frontières in Sudan.

In Sudan, Maskalyk took a special interest in the fate of this little girl, whom he helped recover from tuberculosis.

Photo: James Maskalyk

James Maskalyk has been working to improve public health in developing countries ever since he was a medical student at the University of Calgary in the 1990s. He made his first trip to Chile in 1997, to impress his girlfriend, he says. But it was Maskalyk who returned impressed. Angered by the way poverty inevitably seemed to lead to poor health, he became determined to do what he could to make things better. That’s why in 2007, Maskalyk decided to take a break from his position as assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Toronto to work for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) for six months in Sudan.

Sudan was (and is) plagued by ethnic and religious conflict between Muslim Arabs in the north and Christian Africans in the south. In Darfur, pro-government Arab militias are accused of killing more than 200,000 people as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign against non-Arabs. Maskalyk was posted to Abyei, a town that straddles the northern and southern parts of the country, where tensions were high because the oil-rich area falls under a special administrative status that neither north nor south favors.

Maskalyk wrote a blog while he was in Abyei (msf.ca/blogs/jamesm), which was expanded into a book, Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-Torn Village (out in May from Spiegel & Grau). He spoke to Ode about his experiences in Sudan and his motivation for volunteering.

"I would have gone anywhere, really. It didn’t matter. Working in Sudan wasn’t far off from what I imagined. I was working in a small hospital. I stayed in a hut. But I do think I had expected a more idyllic kind of existence. I didn’t think it was going to be so crowded. There was so much noise constantly.

"Only days after I arrived in Sudan, there was a measles outbreak. A lot of children were dying and I didn’t know what to do. Or I did, actually, but it wasn’t enough. So I thought, Should I go to bed now and do the same thing again tomorrow? I think I was emotionally and spiritually bankrupt.

"There was a little girl, Aweil (not her real name), whom I became fond of. Her father was a soldier and her mother had died in the hospital. Aweil, 7 months old and abandoned, was brought into the hospital by a neighbor. When I checked her and listened to her heart, I noticed she was so thirsty that she started to suck on my stethoscope. I treated her for dehydration and diarrhea. She got a bit better, but she never fully recovered.

Photo: James Maskalyk

"As she was developing her own personality, I also got interested in her as a human being. There was something unique about her, something that was maybe similar to my spirit. After a month, I started treating her for tuberculosis. I found something to cure her, and I found a woman to feed her and look after her. She started to get better and then learned how to talk and walk. And then I flew away and left her at the hospital. I hope she’s alive; I don’t know.

"It was such a privilege to be able to see Aweil transform from being sick, sad and orphaned to being well, fed and happy. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen. I thought about caring for her, but I don’t think I can at this point in my life.

"I care about the people of Sudan. I have developed a fondness for them. That’s why I can’t really say I left Sudan behind. It’s great to be able to see my friends here in Toronto, and be able to sleep again. But I still find that some of my happiness depends on that place. If Sudan goes through a difficult time, my mood gets affected.

"Recently, the situation in Sudan got a lot worse. Some people got kidnapped, [Sudanese President] Omar al-Bashir kicked MSF out of the country. My only compulsion after hearing such news is, How can I get back there? How can I continue doing this work? And rather than finding the answer to the question of how I can fit this kind of work into my life, I realize the real question has become, How can I fit a life into this kind of work?

"I’ve now been asked by the University of Toronto to develop a training program for emergency medicine in Ethiopia. That’s a great endeavor, and very different from the work of MSF. It’s the difference between relief and development. I value MSF’s work because it’s fundamental care, and it’s focused on the immediate relief of suffering of people who might be victims of inequality or injustice. That’s what I’m most passionate about. Yet the project in Ethiopia is purely educational and institutional. The effect will be a lasting one, both for the patients and for the country. The highest level of achievement as a doctor is your own obsolescence. You want to work yourself out of work as soon as you can. What a wonderful thing if Ethiopians don’t need the help of foreign doctors at all.

"Was it dangerous in Sudan? Well, I never really felt unsafe, but that might be my naiveté. If you sign up with MSF, you accept the risk of working in a place with a conflict. There was a shooting at the hospital, and a lot of alcohol and guns. Yet the most dangerous thing in a country like Sudan isn’t that you get shot, but that you get meningitis or tuberculosis. And those in the most danger are the people of Sudan.

James Maskalyk

Photo: Michael Banasiak

"While I was working in Sudan, Elsa Serfass was killed. She was working for MSF in the Central African Republic. When I heard the news about Elsa, it didn’t make me worry so much about myself as much as about her family, and how tragic the circumstances are. It made me more convinced of the injustices of what is happening in this part of Africa that enables these kinds of tragedies. It made me realize how remarkable my colleagues at MSF were that in the pursuit of peace they were willing to risk their own lives. It made me understand that there’s great worth in this work.

"Many times I’ve thought, Why do people want to do this work? I’ve looked into evolutionary biology and genetic explanations of altruism to discover why I do this work. Do I want to impress someone? Do I just like the adventure? Why is it worth our time, worth the life of someone like Elsa? One way to look at it is to see ourselves as a collection of genes, aiming to reproduce. In that view, it makes genetic sense to throw myself at a grenade in a crowded room if I know there will be more copies of my specific genetic code that are likely to be reproduced in my cousins. For a rationalist, this makes sense, but such a mathematical look at reality doesn’t fit in my view of the world—and it surely doesn’t explain why someone like Elsa died, someone who was working for people who could not be more distant cousins. We can’t explain the good work she was doing by reducing our acts of humanity as if they have to do with reproducing. Once you experience doing such work, you can see it goes beyond all rational explanation, and that it’s just what you’re compelled to do.

"Suppose you’re walking the streets of a poor country with a treatment for malaria in your pocket—you don’t have malaria—and you pass someone on the side of the road who has malaria and who’s feverish. Would you give him that treatment? I think for most people the answer is yes. We’re just part of that greater thing that is life, and all life wants is to go on. Life wants to explore this ecological niche on Earth; it wants us to take care of each other; it wants us to make sure life goes on. This is life caring for itself, and that’s why we do it."

Interview by Marco Visscher, who is too busy as Ode’s managing editor to take six months off.

Issue: June/July 2009

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Book Excerpt: Six Months in Sudan

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Ode presents an exclusive book excerpt from Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-Torn Village, by Dr. James Maskalyk.

"What's his hemoglobin?" I ask.

"Six," Mohamed says.

"Six? Shit."

I look down at Manut. His eyes are wide and worried. Today is the day we have to change the dressing on his leg. We've done it every couple of days since the grenade accident earlier this month. I was hoping that we could do this one under general anesthesia, using ketamine, so I could fully explore his wound, dissect some of the torn muscle away and see if his bone is intact.

A hemoglobin of 6 is too low for me. If he vomits and inhales it, or if he gets laryngospasm from the ketamine, a rare complication, the oxygen level in his blood will fall, and there's not a lot of hemoglobin in him to keep it up. We had tested his mother as a possible blood donor shortly after he arrived. She has hepatitis C. We tested Manut too. I looked at his result and could see a few clumps of antibodies near the margins of the test's blue circle. Weakly positive. He likely received the virus from her during delivery.

I asked his mother if she knew of anyone nearby who would be able to donate. She did not. The boy's father is far away, and she tried to send a message to him, but heard nothing. No one else in Abyei was willing. People here fear giving blood, believing that once it is given, it is gone forever. I explain that it will grow back, that it is like their hair, but cannot convince them.

She wanted to go and find his father herself, but had no money. She tried for days to borrow some but could not. Finally, Mohamed gave her the dinars she needed. She said she would be back in two days. She has been gone for five. Traditional beliefs here are strong, and we struggle for legitimacy.

There are two health providers in town, both competing for patients with our hospital. One is a medical assistant who charges patients for his services, which, regardless of the problem, include an intramuscular injection of benzathine penicillin, one of quinine, and an infusion of normal saline. Patients believe that intramuscular injections are superseded only by intravenous ones in their potency and are often unhappy when they receive pills from us, and completely dissatisfied if they receive nothing at all.

The other show in town is a traditional healer. I haven't taken the time to meet him yet. I would like to. It would be better to have a relationship with him so he knows when to send people to the hospital. As it is, frustrated mothers leave the feeding center because of the slow growth of their children and visit his tukul. He either blesses them and sends them on their way delighted, or keeps them until they fall more and more sick. Near death, they come to the hospital and die, sullying further our reputation.

"Well, I guess we'll have to do it with local. You want to grab him, Mohamed? I'll open the theater."

Mohamed lifts Manut up from under his arms. The boy whimpers, terrified.

I open the lock to the operating theater and lay a plastic sheet on the operating table. Mohamed enters behind me and sits Manut on top of it. He starts to cry.

"Nonononono . . ."

He wasn't this upset last time. Mohamed tries to comfort him in Arabic, then shakes his head. Manut speaks only Dinka. I leave the room to find Alfred. He is sitting at the front desk, arms folded, eyes closed. I tap him on the foot and he starts awake. He follows me into the theater.

"Alfred, explain to him that we need to look at his leg, and we will be as gentle as we can. Okay?"

Alfred speaks to the boy softly.

"Nonononononono . . ."

Mohamed and I prepare the necessary dressings and syringes full of local anesthetic.

"Mohamed, do you know the maximum dose of lidocaine? It's 5 milligrams per kilogram. This boy is 20 kilograms, so 100 milligrams, right? Ten cc's. Shit. Is that right?" It doesn't seem like very much.

We try to get Manut to lie down. He refuses, wailing.

"Alfred, tell him there is no choice. You know what, just hold him. Yeah, like that."

I remove the splint from his leg and Mohamed pours some sterile water over it, loosening the caked dressing. More crying.

"What is he saying?" I ask Alfred.

"Nonsense," he says.

I glance through the open mesh window into the feeding center. A feeding center mother is peering through, concerned.

"Shut that, will you, Alfred?"

Mohamed starts unwrapping the dressing. The boy sits up, trying to stop him. Alfred thrusts him down.

"Tell him he is being very brave. Brave like a man."

Mohamed has unwrapped nearly all of the dressing. The last bit remains adhered to Manut's flesh. Mohamed rips it away. Scream. I look at his wound. A hole the size of a golf ball in the anterolateral part of his shin, rimmed with brown, rotting tissue, and at its base, gleaming splinters of bone.

Mohamed starts injecting lidocaine through the periphery of the wound.

"Maybe if this doesn't work, we can try a Bier's block," I say.

The 10 cc's are quickly used. I try to lift Manut's leg by his toe. It bends at the wound like a tape measure stretched too long. He screams. Completely broken. No union.

"Well, he probably needs an amputation. We can transfer him if his mother ever comes back."

Mohamed and I set about trying to clean the dead tissue from the wound, but the lidocaine is not effective. Manut begs us to stop in a language Alfred is not bothering to translate. It is clear to all of us. We're almost finished. Manut sits up with tears in his eyes, his hands in praying position.

"All right. That's enough. That's enough." Mohamed tries to wiggle free an ochre fragment of bone. Scream.

"Tell him it's over, Alfred." I walk around the end of the bed so I am close to his face. I look him in his eyes. "You are a very brave boy. When your father comes I am going to tell him how strong you were."

Manut's lips quiver as Alfred translates. He looks away.

"Alfred, if you can help Mohamed finish the dressing, I'm going to make a phone call."

I leave the operating room and hurry from the hospital towards the compound. The wind gusts dust in swirls. I clang through the gate, duck into the admin tukul. Tim is sitting at his desk.

"Hey, do you have the sat phone?" I ask.

"Yup. Here. Who are you calling? I need to write it down."

"Your girlfriend."

"Oh. Say hello for me."

"I'm calling our new medco. He's supposed to be in Khartoum this week. Finally. And he has tons of tropical health experience. I'm psyched."

I punch the numbers into the sat phone. It's my first time using it. We are allowed a free ten- minute call on our arrival in the field, but I haven't taken it yet.

"Hello. Hello? Hey, this is James, the doctor in Abyei. How are you? What is Khartoum like these days? Uh-huh... Uh-huh... Ha. So not much has changed. Hey, you have someone new in the office now, the medco from Geneva, right? Is he in? Can I talk to him? Great."

I move underneath the tamarind tree. Scattered empty pods crunch under my feet.

"Hello, Paul! Welcome to Sudan! It's James, the doctor from Abyei. Thank you. Trying my best. Listen, I have a question for you. Sorry to hit you with business right away. I just finished debriding the wound of a young boy who probably needs general anesthesia for me to do a proper job. In fact, he probably needs internal fixation or an amputation. Grenade wound. Yeah. Long story short, he's very anemic. We've looked for donors, but the usual, no one will give except his mom. But she has hep C. And so does he weakly positive. Uh- huh. So, my question. My assumption is that he got it from her. Yeah, no scars or anything. If I give him her blood, is it possible that she has a higher viral load or something, or if he contracted it elsewhere, might I be giving him a more virulent strain? Could I be making him worse? You know, 'First, do no harm.'"

The generator roars to a start. I glare at the guard and move farther away.

"Okay . . . right. That makes sense. They're both in their latent phase. Cool. Okay. I'll do it if necessary. Well, I must say, it's good to have you here. I've been figuring stuff out with textbooks, or by contacting Geneva. They've been trying, but they have so many different countries and . . . What's that? Oh. Really. No way. Shit. Well, I guess you have to do what you have to do. Uh- huh. Well, thanks for talking to me. Okay. Good luck to you too. Bye."

I duck into Tim's tukul and plug the phone back in.

"Was it good for her too?" he asks.

"The medco just told me he's leaving."

"What? Why?"

"I don't know. Something about the office being a mess, no records. Whatever."

"Man. That sucks."

"Tell me about it."

He holds up his hand and counts on his fingers. "No medco, no logco, no head of mission, no logistician . . . um . . ."

"No admin," I say.

"No doctor."

We shake our heads.

"What are we doing here again?" I ask.

"Sometimes I don't know."

"I mean, why not two hundred kilometers . . . that way." I point over my shoulder. "There's probably a hospital just like this one, maybe even worse."

Tim shrugs, turns back to his payroll sheets. I leave his tukul and pass under the tamarind tree. The generator shakes noisily behind me and from it, the thick smell of oil. Each week we get an email from Geneva with vacant positions around the world. There are always several in Sudan, and lately, many in Abyei. I don't know why. Perhaps experienced people are fatigued from the long civil conflict, maybe most of them have already worked in the country and know how difficult it is. Or they know something else I don't.

I pass through the compound's open gate and walk back to the hospital. I don't want the work to be easy. I would feel I was in the wrong place if it was. I just want to know that of the many fights out there, this is a good one.

Issue: June/July 2009

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Lester Brown's plan to stop climate change

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:12:00 EST

Pioneering environmentalist Lester Brown has a plan to stop climate change, and save civilization in the process.

Lester Brown

Photo: Worldwatch Institute

Lester Brown has always been skilled at taking the lay of the land. As a teenager, he grew tomatoes in New Jersey and went on to earn a degree in agricultural science, which he put to use by becoming an analyst with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1974, Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute, a research center aimed at promoting "ideas that empower decision-makers to build an ecologically sustainable society." Brown has led the debate on everything from deforestation to food shortages through the Worldwatch Institute’s annual State of the World reports. In 2001, he founded the Earth Policy Institute to provide a practical vision of a sustainable future. He has written many books, most recently Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition .

You started publishing the State of the World reports in the 1970s. So what’s the state of the world today?

"We’re seeing eroding soils, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, expanding deserts and deteriorating grasslands. We’re also seeing rising temperatures, which affect crop yields and lead to rising sea levels and an accelerated melting of the glaciers in the mountains—particularly in the mountains of Asia and on the Tibetan plateau. If we lose those glaciers, major river systems and irrigation systems will become disrupted and the harvest of wheat and rice in countries like India and China will be reduced. Such trends come on top of a new trend: the growing number of hungry and malnourished people. For most of our lifetimes, that number was declining, but now it’s going up. That’s the most disturbing socio-economic trend in the world. We may be in an economic crisis that has resulted from the breakdown of the financial system, but we’re heading for a much more serious crisis as a result of the breakdown of the economy’s natural support systems."

What are the potential political consequences of such a crisis?

"With the dramatic rise in wheat, rice, corn and soybean prices in the last few years, we’re already seeing more political instability in a number of countries and a growing global sense of food insecurity in the importing countries. Because the food sector is the one most affected by the deterioration of the natural support systems, we’ll see more of this. Since there will be more failing states as a result of food scarcity, the question arises: How long will it take before we have a failing civilization?"

The end of civilization? Sounds extreme.

"I often read the latest reports and journal articles on earlier civilizations that declined and collapsed to try to better understand how it happened. More often than not, it was food shortages that brought down the earlier civilizations whose archaeological sites we study. We can now see the same thing again. It’s hard to grasp because throughout our lifetimes we have lived in a world where, on average, food production has always been increasing. And let’s not forget the likelihood that peak oil is on our doorsteps. Suddenly, we’re going to live in a world where both food production and oil production are declining—and it’s going to be a very different world. No country can get more food or oil unless another gets less."

How do we avoid that scenario?

"You don’t have to be a genius to understand that if these negative environmental trends continue, and we go on with business as usual, we’re toast. The energy guru Amory Lovins [chairman of the Rocky Mountains Institute] was once asked about how to think outside the box, and he said, ‘There is no box.’ That’s exactly the thinking we need to deal with these new problems. The kind of thinking that got us into the mess we are in is not the kind of thinking that is going to get us out. The exciting thing is that we are beginning to see people think about renewable sources of energy on a scale that we have never seen before. I find that very exciting."

Can you give an example?

"Texas, which for the last century has been the leading source of oil in the U.S., is now our leading generator of electricity from wind. What we have in operation, under construction and under development is at least 45,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity. Think 45 coal-fired power plants. I mean, this is huge. We’ve never seen thinking on this scale before in either the fossil fuels or with nuclear power. When these wind farms are finished, they will produce more energy than the 24 million people in Texas can consume. Soon, Texas will be exporting wind-generated electricity. Just years ago, this was unthinkable."

You mean, change is accelerating.

"Yes, and we know so much more. Hardly a month goes by that we don’t discover a new effect of climate change or find evidence that some things we could see only vaguely in the past are becoming much clearer. Take rising sea levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of a couple years ago mentioned that during this century, sea levels would rise by something like a foot and a half. The most recent reports are saying it could be five feet by the end of this century. There’s a big difference in how you think about a problem. With each new report, it seems the problem is more serious and more threatening than we realize. So we need a continual updating of how serious the problems are, and of how we are addressing them. Ultimately, we need to be focusing on solutions so we can provide people with a sense of what can be done."

If you could introduce one piece of worldwide legislation, what would it be?

"It would be a restructuring of tax systems—not a change in the amount of tax, but a reduction of income taxes combined with a rise in the carbon tax. By doing that, we would tell the market the environmental truth. After all, the costs of climate change, of burning fossil fuels, of damage from acid rain, of breathing polluted air on health care and so forth would be reflected in the increase in the carbon tax. That’s crucial. I think it was Oystein Dahle, a former vice-president of Exxon in Norway, who once said that socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth and that capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth. In that pithy statement, he summed up a key issue we’re facing in the world today."

State of the World Forum

Lester Brown, together with other leading thinkers and innovators, will speak at the State of the World Forum, a three-day conference taking place from November 12th to 14th in Washington, D.C. The State of the World Forum was established in 1995 to create a global leadership network committed to discerning and implementing those principles, values and actions necessary to guide humanity wisely as it gives shape to an increasingly global and interdependent world. In Washington, the Forum will launch a 10-year Global Transition Initiative to green the global economy. Over the next few months, Ode will profile some of the 2009 Forum participants. For our profile of Ken Wilber, another Forum speaker, go to odemagazine.com/wilber. To find out more about the State of the World Forum, go to worldforum.org.

Interview by Marco Visscher, Ode’s managing editor.

Issue: June/July 2009

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Book Excerpt: The Compassionate Life, by Marc Barasch

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Ode presents an exclusive book excerpt from The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), by Marc Ian Barasch.

Chapter 5: The Good Eye

Whenever catching sight of others
Look on them with an open, loving heart. —Patrul Rinpoche

The great nineteenth-century Jewish mystic Levi Yitzchok, the Rabbi of Berditchev, was known throughout Europe as the Master of the Good Eye. It was said that he could see nothing of people's sins, only their virtues. He'd roust the local drunk from his stupor on High Holy Days, seat him at the head of the table, and respectfully ask for his wisdom. He'd noodge a man who'd publicly flouted the Sabbath by praising him as the only one in the village who wasn't a hypocrite. He extended his caring to all, whether powerful or impoverished, scholarly or simple, righteous or reprobate.

The rabbi's inspiration was a Talmud passage that calls for everyone to be weighed “on the scales of merit” (zechut, from the Hebrew zach or “purity”). The meaning of zechut, explains one scholar, is “to intentionally focus on what is most pure in each person—to see their highest and holiest potential.” It is a reminder that compassion is not just a gift but a path. The Good Eye is a shift of perception, a transformative art that takes some practice.

My friend Rhonda, a nurse by trade and by calling, is something of a zechut artist. When she is warm to you (and she is to most everybody), you feel like a rare edition of yourself. I've followed her on rounds, watching the crankiest patients brighten at her approach, seeing even the most needle-phobic relax and smile, as if her IV were an act of bestowal. She's another of those people who coaxes your petals open. Rhonda learned at the feet of a great teacher—her grandmother, Margaret, also a nurse.

One night Grandma Margaret was summoned to the obstetrics ward of her Arizona hospital. A Down syndrome child had just been born, unpredicted in those pre-amniocentesis days, and the distraught mother was threatening to kill herself rather than keep the baby. When Margaret saw the child, she made an impossible leap of faith. “I'll take that baby home,” she announced, “and I'll love her.” True to her word, she raised a foster daughter who bloomed into a high-functioning young adult. “I didn't see any defects,” she told Rhonda. “I saw a blueprint for perfection.” Grandma Margaret once confided her greatest secret: “When I look at people, I see only the best part of them.”

I used to think that people who regarded everyone benignly were a mite simple or oblivious or just plain lax—until I tried it myself. Then I realized that they made it only look easy. Even the Berditchever Rebbe, revered as a man who could strike a rock and bring forth a stream, was continually honing his intentions. “Until I remove the thread of hatred from my heart,” he said of his daily meditations, “I am, in my own eyes, as if I did not exist.”

He was a man who didn't take the Good Eye for granted. He believed in tending the heart, watering its roots, pulling ego's fibrous, prickly weeds by hand. The distinction between our ordinary eye and the Good Eye is, as is the one between ordinary sight and insight, a quotient of conscious cultivation. It is the gist of the scriptural predicament You have eyes, but you see not. We have the necessary parts, but as the label on the shipping carton says, “Some assembly may be required.” Luckily, all spiritual traditions concur that it doesn't take a lightning bolt on the road to Damascus or a blast of enlightenment under the bodhi tree. The soul is educable. Life off ers up its own daily catechism, even if it's just seeing people in a little better light. Why not just resolve to give everyone the benefit of the doubt? “If we treat people as if they were what they ought to be,” said the poet Goethe, almost nailing it, “we help them become what they are capable of becoming.” Or, more to the point: Treat them as they already are, if we but had the Good Eye to see it.

Once, at a conference, I noticed a man striding toward me, his face alight. He seemed really happy to see me. When he got closer, he pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, peered at my face, looked down at my nametag, and took a step back. “I'm so sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “You looked just like a friend I haven't seen for years. You even have the same fi rst name...” He trailed off ; the eff usive warmth seeped away. I told him it was fi ne. His Good Eye had enveloped me in a gaze of anticipatory delight that made me feel golden. We wound up having lunch. He told me about his research (which coincidentally dovetailed with my own); he talked about the happiness and the sorrows of raising a young daughter with multiple sclerosis (for everyone is fi ghting a great battle). We still stay in touch.

Maybe we should all take off our glasses and hope for more cases of mistaken identity. For that matter, it might be unmistaken. Why not welcome everyone as some long-lost cousin, sprung from our African mother, bumping into each other again aft er a fifty-thousand-year separation. Wonderful to see you aft er all this time—you look great!

A friend of mine, a psychologist, works at Arkansas' infamous Tucker Max Prison. She's well aware that most people look at her prisoner clients and see only dregs—“ugly toothless hulks,” as she puts it—but she claims she can see only “radiant bulbs with these big lampshades blocking the light. I know they're supposed to be ‘untreatable psychopaths,' but I feel like, Oh, take that fright-mask off !” She's remarkably successful. Around her, tough nuts crack open; even wary, death-row guards have been known to cry. “It's like there's this horribly thick suit of armor,” she explains, trying to make me see it through her eyes, “and I know someone's trapped inside, so how do we get them out?” I ask her why she even bothers. “The joy!” she says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. “Just the joy of being with people when they show up as they really are.”

If we can't see who people really are, say possessors of the Good Eye, it's just our ordinary eye playing tricks on us, focusing on diff erences and defects, blind to deeper connection. If we mistake each other for strangers, it's just blurry vision. The Good Eye is the corrective to Einstein's “optical delusion of consciousness.” As with the rearview mirror that cautions “Objects may be closer than they appear,” we might be much closer than we think. Sixteenth-century Tibetan meditation master Wang-ch'ug Dorje recommended a practice he called “the Activity of Being in Crowds.” Walking through a throng, he said, is a “good opportunity to check your progress and examine the delusions, attachments, and aversions that arise.” A bustling mall is an especially good place to check my Good Eye for jaundice. With everything winking merrily, beckoning with come-ons for instant gratifi cation, I go into a sort of trance. The mind itself gets into the spirit of things, hawking its tawdrier wares; my fi nicky responses to the goods on display merge with my reactions to the people I pass—little covetous twinges, subtle fl ickers of attitude, petty judgments on how people walk, talk, dress, and chew gum. Here a surge of superiority; there a defl ating thought of inadequacy. Here a lurch of desire for a sleek, well turned-out woman; there a picador's lance of envy at her undeserving boyfriend in the slobby polo shirt.

The Koran describes envy as a veil that beclouds the eye of the heart. It's one of Saint Augustine's seven deadly sins (which I interpret as “biggest obstacles to selfl ess love”). Envy turns other people into sources of resentment: If I had what you have, I would be happy. It tints everyone in bilious shades of green. It's a zero-sum game. Envy's only hope is that the other person will be diminished, as if that would free up proportionately more for itself. (It extends all the way to that uniquely German coinage, schadenfreude, gloating over another's misfortune, the Good Eye turned into the Evil Eye itself.)

But just as there are emotional toxins, there are also antidotes and remedies—what the apothecaries of yore called “specifics.” In Buddhism the supreme medicine for envy is said to be mudita, or “sympathetic joy,” which calls on us to feel happy about another's success. Easy enough when it comes to rejoicing for those we really care about: Every parent kvells over his or her kid's triumphs; a teacher exults when her favorite student aces the math exam. But to expand this feeling from a narrow circle to a wider arena is like pulling wisdom teeth.

I once witnessed an exchange between a Tibetan lama and a questioner on this subject. “Rinpoche,” inquired a pleasant middleaged man in a checked sport shirt, “my son is a linebacker for his high school football team. I find myself rooting for him to cream the opposing quarterback. Is there anything wrong with that?” “Of course not,” the lama replied. “You love your son, and you want his happiness, and he's happy when he beats the other team. This is only natural.”

There was an audible sigh of relief in the room. The spiritual path may be challenging, but it's not unreasonable.

The man smiled. “Thank you, Rinpoche,” he said, making a brisk, reverent folding gesture with his hands.

The lama laughed sharply. “I was only joking! Actually, this is not at all the right attitude. In fact,” he said, glancing at the man mischievously, “a good practice for you would be to root for the other team. See them winning, see them happy, see their parents overjoyed. That is more the bodhisattva way.”

I have a wildly successful acquaintance who's in my field. I've seen him on magazine covers, a smug, airbrushed grin on his face. I've been training myself, as an antidote to a fulminating case of green-eye, that whenever I feel that little twitch of envy, I wish for more bluebirds of happiness to come sit on his eaves. “Don't you mean,” asks a cynical friend, “come shit on his sleeves?” But the fact is, my good wishes provide an unexpected sense of relief. It's an unknotting, expansive feeling, as if what's his and what's mine suddenly, metaphysically, belong to both of us and to neither. (I recently came across a line from Yoko Ono: “Transform [jealousy] to admiration / And what you admire / Will become part of your life.” )

Try it for yourself. Root for the other team. Visualize someone who makes you envious. Think of them in all their irritating splendor, enjoying the perks and accolades you no doubt deserve. Then wish sincerely that they get even more goodies.

Isn't this the mortal sin of “low self-esteem”? Well, not exactly; it's more like a metaphysical jujitsu. In rooting for someone else's happiness, we tune to a different wavelength. We feel more benefi cent, less deprived, more capable of giving. The focus on another person's satisfaction becomes a lodestone that paradoxically draws us closer to our own. (And isn't most envy just our own potential disowned?) Seeing the world through another's eyes (you in me, me in you) makes one feel there's at least twice as much to go around; not more money or fame or square footage but the foundation of the whole pursuit: love.

It could be argued that this approach might work in a monastery or on a mountaintop, but not in real life, where the game is tooth-and-nail and rooting for your own team is what keeps the opposition from eating you alive. I recently saw a quote from megamogul and master of the Squinty Eye, Donald Trump, extolling the benefi ts of pure paranoia: “People you think are your friends in business will take your money, your wife, your pets... Life's a vicious place. No different than a jungle.” Yet there are people who swim in the piranha-infested corporate waters for whom the Good Eye has not only been good karma but good business. A t the incandescent turn of the century, when every tech stock was a fireworks display and bubbles popped only in champagne flutes, Ricardo Levy's star shone bright over Silicon Valley. The son of a Jewish father who had fl ed Nazi Germany to settle in Ecuador, Ricardo was CEO of a bricks-and-mortar company selling real goods amid the valley's vaporware vendors. In the 1970s his startup had been an entrepreneurial shot in the dark, but Ricardo had parlayed a newly minted doctorate, a knack for discovery, and a drive to excel into what he calls “a nonstop adventure of continuous transformation.” Soon his company was racking up a half billion dollars in annual sales.

His product was literally transformative: The company designed and produced essential industrial catalysts. Ricardo can discourse happily about them for hours, sounding more like an alchemist than a chemical engineer—how they enable magical conversions of materials, serving as facilitators (or, as he calls them, “midwives”) for disparate substances to join together and give birth to something new. Business was good, and, as a bonus, the company did some good in the world. Ricardo felt proud to have patented a process that produced more energy with minimal pollution, a happy union of the bottom line and his environmental concerns. But by 2000 he found himself stretched to the breaking point. Through a series of acquisitions, his company had turned from a midsized shop into a lurching industrial titan. “I was trained as a researcher to discover things,” he says, “not to manage thousands of people.” He decided he needed guidance.

There is no shortage of advice for the entrepreneurially perplexed. Stacks of business bibles reveal how to turn companies into lean, mean, no-fixed-limit cash machines; armies of consultants feed CEOs' obsessive drive to play king of the mountain. But Ricardo was after something else. “I'd always been a seeker of depth, not height,” he says in his lightly accented English. “I'd seen enough to be suspicious of the shadow side of power. I knew some of those Enron guys.”

He turned to an old friend, Andre Delbecq, a legendary management consultant who also taught at a Jesuit college. Andre had recently gone on his own quest, taking a sabbatical at the height of the Silicon Valley's giddy ascendance to pore over the world's spiritual teachings, seeking “that paradox of perfect humility and perfect hope” that he believed was the hallmark of true leadership. Aft er returning from sailing the Turkish coast, Andre invited Ricardo and a select group of CEOs to hear a presentation of his findings, promising them a management course that would change their lives as well as their business practices.

It was certainly unorthodox. If most executive training is a regimen of psychological power-lifting and ego steroids, Andre replaced yes-I-can with not-so-fast and no-you-don't: Don't be enslaved by your own ambitions; don't think only of the bottom line; don't, for a while, think at all—especially about yourself. He scoured the world's religious practices, in the end deciding to teach his students the Buddhist meditation of tonglen—an imaginative exercise that calls for breathing in others' suffering and breathing out lovingkindness. “There was no other discipline I'd found,” he told me, “that enabled people to immediately grasp openness and humility for themselves.” Ricardo found the practice edifying, even elating.

Andre gave his students assignments that plunged them into places they feared, having them spend time with Alzheimer's patients, prisoners, or the homeless in what he called “I-Th ou encounters, just listening to and learning from, not judging anyone's value or worthiness.”

Andre had the executives tell one another their personal stories, asking if anyone in their own family was struggling with disease, drugs, or mental illness or had found themselves on the wrong side of the law. The Titanium Men of Silicon Valley were astonished to discover that their most formidable colleagues and competitors were grappling with the same mortal complement of weal and woe. Andre became a sort of heart-coach, urging them to widen their sympathies by considering how each of their employees faced similar diffi culties. He assured them that if they entered their workplace with what he called “compassionate presence,” they'd discover the hidden life of their company.

To put that vulnerability into practice in the business world, where dog really does eat dog and big fish swallow little fi sh and pick their teeth with the bones, had seemed like folly. But Ricardo tackled it with his usual full-on commitment. At the time, the fate of his entire company balanced on a single excruciating choice point. He had been negotiating to take over a large pharmaceutical company when discussions had turned hostile, finally reaching a bitter impasse. He put the talks on mental pause. “I decided I had to try to feel empathy for all parties, including the other side, the adversary. I needed an inner answer, not a spreadsheet answer.”

He had a realization that shocked him: “I saw it would be better for them to take us over.

“This would be traumatic for me because I'd be disassembling the business I'd built over decades. But when I put myself aside and considered everyone else involved—our shareholders and employees, the other company's shareholders and employees—I knew it was right.” The decision was pure intuition, he says. People inside and outside the organization thought he'd gone crazy. In 2000 his company's financial bellwethers were surreally bright; every indicator pointed due north. But three months aft er the deal closed, the tech economy went south, and as Ricardo says dryly, “It turned out in retrospect the direction I chose had been to everyone's benefit.” Ricardo found that his practice led him to more-generous policies for his employees. He backed benefits packages that cut into his profits because it seemed to him the right thing to do only to find that it also made the company stronger. Tonglen was, he realized, the spiritual equivalent of the catalysis at the very heart of his business. “You take in suffering, transform it to positive energy, and then offer that out into the world.”

I happened to be present one of the first times Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa sprang this bizarresounding practice on an unsuspecting Western audience. One student of yoga had raised his hand and asked, with some bewilderment, why it wouldn't be better to imagine breathing in love and light and breathing out all negative impurities. Ricardo, the creator of environmentally benign industrial processes, would have appreciated Trungpa's unhesitating reply: “Well, then you'd just be like a polluting factory, taking in all these good resources and spewing out your gray cloud on everyone else.”

The practice is decidedly counterintuitive. Sometimes when I begin tonglen meditation, I feel a wild surge of resistance, a fear of (there is no other way to put this) contamination. The unhappiness of others feels contagious: I don't want to inhale their cooties. But when it “works,” the practice is so rewarding that I'm ready to throw myself in again. To stop dodging people's misery and discord, to discover that I can give of myself with each breath and not feel depleted (in fact, to feel oddly nourished) is a revelation. When I can stay with it, I notice I don't feel so guarded; my borders seem more porous. I'm less inclined to hold people at arms' length. I admit to sometimes finding tonglen a challenge that I don't have the spiritual chutzpah to meet. But at best I find the technique radically simple and simply radical: an imaginative leap into otherness. There's a through-the-looking-glass moment, an almost audible pop, as I seem to find myself looking at the world through different eyes. It enhances what some psychologists refer to as “intersubjectivity” —a shared space of experience. If our usual ego-identity is maintained by keeping the good and estimable stuff in here and the yucky stuff out there, tonglen dissolves some of the rigidity of selfhood.

When my mind has some downtime that I'd normally fi ll by gossiping idly to myself, I try to remember to do tonglen. It's my mental screensaver. On the highway the other day, a college kid whizzed past at one and a half times the speed limit in a silver Hummer, honking wildly, blaring hip-hop from every window of his gas-hog, giving me the finger for good measure. I could feel my temper about to flare like a bottle rocket, my accelerator foot begin to twitch. Instead, I zeroed in on the back of his fastreceding head, breathing in his rage and frustration (which surely wasn't personal). I could almost feel his emotional claustrophobia, his agitated need for speed. I remembered being nineteen, riding the testosterone express.

What amazed me was that I didn't feel anger but some actual sympathy for the guy—along with a whoosh of inner freedom. Normally, when I feel hurt or aff ronted, my emotional choices seem to narrow. I can either absorb the blow and feel wretched or deflect it back to the other person (or later on some hapless bystander): It's like a choice between suicide or murder. With tonglen, I get to choose life.

Shambhala Mountain Center, an ink-brush painting of scrub pine hills, chattering magpies, and skittish prairie dogs near the Colorado-Wyoming border, has for decades been my place of retreat. It is dominated by the astonishing Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, a ten-story shrine whose gold-leaf spire suggests some unregulated spiritual broadcasting tower. Chögyam Trungpa, whose relics it houses, would have found it wondrous and maybe a bit absurd: an ornate memorial to his teachings about the simplicity of the present moment; a soaring monument to the enlightenment that's right under your nose.

On a recent visit, making my way down the hill after meditating before the stupa's gargantuan, faintly smiling Buddha statue, I fell in stride with an athletic-looking woman in khaki shorts, hurrying down the path. When I mentioned my writing topic, she slowed down to talk. She had a story, she said—a simple one about meditation and compassion.

“I fi rst started to meditate when my boyfriend dumped me,” she said as I huffed along beside her in the thin mountain air. “I needed to sort through all the bad feelings, but I was afraid that I'd look inside and find out one thing: that I basically sucked. Gradually, though, I found it didn't matter if I thought I was horrible or if I thought I was great: I could drop my whole story and just breathe. It was a chance not only to explore myself but to get over myself. Meditation became this tool to not react in my usual way.”

She was a ski bum, she told me, the “rabble-rouser and hellraiser” in a family of perfectionists. Her older sister was the one with the high-powered, big-city job and the fantastic two-career marriage, the one who would come to her house and “just criticize everything about me right down to the stinky sponges in the sink. She'd drive me crazy until wham! I'd get combative and we'd have some huge, screaming fight.”

During one of her sister's visits, they set out on a scenic drive. “Well, soon it was the usual: ‘You're driving too fast! There's a beer can on the floor; the car is filthy!' And I noticed my habitual response coming up inside: Who the hell are you to tell me how to live? Back off! But this time the words didn't come out of my mouth. For once I was able to just notice her, notice my own feelings, and breathe.

“When I didn't react, it made her even madder. She upped the ante. There was this onslaught of everything she could throw at me: ‘I make all the money in the family; it's me who'd have to scrape you up if anything bad ever happened to you,' blah, blah, blah. But even though I heard her anger and anxiety, I was able to slow down; and instead of getting defensive and lashing out, I just asked her, ‘Are you okay, Carol?' And I meant it. I wanted to know.

“Well, she was so caught off guard, she didn't even have a retort. Instead she started to blurt out everything about the screwed-up place her life had come to—how she was going to leave her husband, how she'd be alone in the city, how she was afraid she'd never have children—and then she just broke down sobbing! And all the snotty comebacks I'd stored up just evaporated. I could feel the whole burden of my personality, her personality, our history, fall away, and like some beautiful plant springing up out of nowhere, there was just compassion.”

Her story, like Ricardo's, confi rmed for me a spiritual insight— call it, To Find Your Heart, Lose Your Head—that's as close to a universal principle as you can extract from the mystical traditions. The ego is really a sort of trance state from which it is possible to awaken. And beneath its incessant inner commentary, behind the persuasive story lines and the beliefs that spawn them, beyond the passions that give those beliefs their emotional clout, there is a wellspring of pure compassion.

The great Hasidic rabbi known as the Maggid told his disciples that the best way to realize the love at the heart of the Torah is to “cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear which hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, you must stop.” The Buddha, in a radical act of reflection, suggested we disbelieve our thought process entirely.

Easier said than done, of course. If you want a little aperçu on that subject, try sitting stock-still for a while on a cushion or a chair; just sit there, observing the old inhale and exhale, trying not to get carried away by those broken-record thoughts yakking in the background; just sit, dangling from a rope of breath above the morass of your charming personality, and you will soon be at one with a hundredfold generations of meditators who have discovered self-delusion's ripeness.

In seeking what Buddhism calls Big Mind, I confess I sometimes look inward and fi nd new vistas of smallness. But my practice, such as it is, hasn't been all eddies and doldrums. Sometimes I can forsake the drone of internal gossip, opt for the unadorned Now. Then I find myself gazing into a void where, moments before, the bustling manufacturing hub of selfhood had been on track to fulfi ll its daily quota. I get acquainted with my mental habits— tics, really. I start fi nding my neuroses less dramatic than tedious; enough to tell them, when I'm really not in the mood for entertaining, to just buzz off. Once, at a seminar, I heard a Westernized lama say that a meditator's state of mind should be like that of a hotel doorman. A doorman lets the guests in, but he doesn't follow them up to their rooms. He lets them out, but he doesn't walk into the street with them to their next appointment. He greets them all, then lets them go on about their business. Meditation is, in its initial stages, simply accustoming oneself to letting thoughts come and go without grasping at their sleeves or putting up a velvet rope to keep them out.

Similarly, Sufi teachings specify that a certain impartiality is required to mount the “thrones of compassion.” It is said one must remove the veil of wahm (“opinion” or “conjecture”). “The real heart,” said the Islamic sage known as the Prince of the Illumined, “is that heart which is neither on the right nor on the left , neither above nor below, neither far nor near” —that is, beyond ordinary cognition and its incessant parsing of differences.*

No one would claim it's not tricky business. Such work, the alchemists used to say, is opus contra naturum—work against our natural tendencies—here the mind's impulse to classify this person as near, that one as far; this one a beloved, that one a rival. Various traditions call for cultivating detachment from the potent cues presented by the outer world (or, for that matter, the inner one): Do you feel distaste when you see a particular person coming toward you on the street? If so, regard that distaste as a thing apart, disconnected from its object, generated in your own heart and mind. By the same token, don't just swoon over the feeling that refl exively arises when someone fl ashes her most attractive smile.

*A friend told me of visiting the Dalai Lama in India and asking him for a succinct definition of compassion. She prefaced her question by describing how heart-stricken she'd felt when, earlier that day, she'd seen a man in the street beating a mangy stray dog with a stick. “Compassion,” the Dalai Lama told her, “is when you feel as sorry for the man as you do for the dog.”

Both are (in this practice, at least) obstacles, obscurations; they get in the way of a lovingkindness beyond mere personal preference. It's not unlike the Christian practice of “discernment,” which a theologian once described to me as “learning to see in a way that is consonant with God's way of seeing. As long as there's ego-attachment,” she said, “we're seeing other people in a funhouse mirror. As long as our eyes are clouded by longing, needing other people to be this way or that for us, there's no such thing as compassion.” I'd always admired Christianity's emphasis on doing good, but here was a practice of seeing good that resembled Eastern-style meditation. I had always wondered about the relationship between this inner Christianity and more churchly forms of worship. If I wanted to get a real insight, I was told, I should talk to Father Thomas Keating, the monk who had almost singlehandedly revived the contemplative method of realizing God's illimitable love.

To get to Father Keating's monastery, you must pass, as all pilgrims must do, through a vale of temptation, in this case the Gulch of Glitz known as Aspen. I manage to ignore all its allurements (save a real New York–style Reuben with meltingly tender pastrami), heading out past the private airport where sleek personal jets take off and land with a purling roar.

All's quiet a few miles down a dirt road at Saint Benedict's Monastery, its soaring, carved wood architecture at once a psalm to the earth and a paean to whatever lies beyond. Father Keating emerges to greet me. An eighty-one-year-old man in a plaid wool shirt, watchcap plunked on his bald head, he could be an ancient mariner home from the sea or some ex-stevedore hired as keeper of the bell tower. For him, God's love calls for workmanlike practice. “Jesus had a formula,” he tells me as we sit practically knee to knee in his cramped office. “In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, ‘Pray to your Father, your Abba, your Daddy, in secret.' Go into your inner room at the center of your being. Close the door, not just to the external noise and distraction but to the inner dialogue too.”

Keating speaks in lovely, loping, run-on sentences. When I close my eye, his deep, creaky voice conjures some old cricket sachem, sawing a rhythmic evensong on long bowstring legs. “You have to silence the emotional programs that sustain who you think you are,” he says, “allow the ego's self-reflective apparatus to fade out, put aside that false self based on childhood emotions—the reaching out for happiness, security, approval, affection, esteem, all those exaggerated needs we impose on others—and just do nothing. “But not just nothing. Rather nothing of our own but everything of what God proposes we do. God prefers this kind of love—not what you're willing to do but what you're willing to receive. Our lack of confidence in his great love is the only problem.” Although this isn't a particularly funny remark, he smiles with such gentle irony that I can't help but burst out laughing, feeling some perfusion of high seriousness and puckish joy.

“We say that when you enter prayer, nothing is worth thinking about,” he says, peering out through his enormous round glasses, “whether it's a sense perception, memory, plan, concept, or image. It doesn't mean no thoughts but to disregard them. They're placed in the ‘cloud of forgetting,' which contains the ultimate knowledge of what is but which is unknown to the intellect.”

I suggest that it must be hard for someone who is so clearly an intellectual to relinquish all thought and center himself in the heart. Father Keating smiles. “All you need is a willingness to suffer and a willingness to love.” All the rest of it, he stresses, is the false self and its gnat cloud of petty thinking that obscures love's ultimate Source. So far as he's concerned, organized religion has too often swarmed with the gnats instead of soared with the angels. “Such a shame what we've done to the Mystery,” he murmurs with a sigh, “with all our naive loyalties!”

The history of religion is not an uninterrupted purview of the Good Eye. Alongside its numberless good deeds are uncounted (and unaccountably) bad ones. It's tragicomic to hear, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, imams promising Paradise to infidelslayers, pastors invoking a Prince of Peace who sounds more like Rambo, rabbis sanctifying biblical land-grabs, Buddhist priests blessing military juntas. (I recently heard a cleric, who surely spoke for sectarians everywhere, decree from the pulpit, “Everyone is created by God, but not everyone is a child of God.”) A good organizational consultant would counsel the world's major faiths to reexamine their original mission statements: The core business of Jesus Inc. or Allah Ltd. or Moses Corp. or Buddha LLC is surely not to sell tickets to heaven or peddle get-out-of-hell-free cards but to distribute every kernel of wisdom from their ancient storehouses that might help us love one another.

We are slowly emerging from millennia of holy know-it-alls beaning each other with their Infallible Books, passing judgment with their Divine Laws, and trying to enforce competing copyrights on Ultimate Truth. The God of our times is no longer some Big Eye in the Sky but the Good Eye itself. He is turning into what Friedrich Nietzsche, who preferred deities of blood and thunder, once sneeringly called a “changed god...Now he counsels ‘peace of soul,' hate-no-more, forbearance, even ‘love' of friend and enemy... Now he is merely the good god.”

I'll take him. So will, it seems, a lot of other people. In churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques around the world, there has been a quiet revival of the inner traditions for transforming the heart. Just as the formula for baking a loaf of bread is similar across cultures, the same techniques for compassion seem to crop up everywhere: loosen the bonds of discursive thought, extend the circle of caring, cease armoring against suff ering, wish for others the same happiness you wish for yourself.

“Religious stories are training,” a rabbi once told me, “not just rulebooks.” At their best the practices we call spiritual are triedand-true ways to unplug from the ego's matrix and awaken from delusory life, to shut the biased and nearsighted Squinty Eye and open the Good Eye wide. The Little Prince said it as well as anybody: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.”

Such seeing, however, may require deliberately redirecting the gaze. Awhile back I decided to unplug my television. I wanted to clear my head of mass culture with its endless parade of imaginary characters who not only clutter the mind but, I began to think, subtly sidetrack the heart. In my TV's old corner, I've created a small shrine, an experimental compassion lab. Arrayed among the candles, incense, and homemade icons are photos of friends and loved ones, little endorphin triggers, jump-starts for the heart. There's also a photo of Juan, the seven-year-old Salvadoran I've started sponsoring through an international aid agency. Th is little boy, in his faded Spiderman T-shirt and dirty blue pants, has become part of my orbit of caring, a link to the larger human family. I've also included some pictures of people I really don't like. I try to breathe in their suffering and breathe out my goodness. I remind myself I don't need to reserve a stash of happiness for my exclusive use. Like digital data, infi nitely replicable because it has no substance or extrinsic cost, I can aff ord to give it away, even to those whom I deem undeserving. There's more where that came from.

To all this, you might well say, “So what?” Don't just sit there, do something. The world is on fire, or it's drowning. Too many people are tragically dying, too many lucklessly born. And it's true: The Good Eye should guide the Good Hand, set the Good Feet in motion. But I believe that old existentialist Albert Camus had it right: “We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.” Inner transformation doesn't supplant outward action but nourishes it. I project less on others of my own need for redemption. Do-gooding becomes more alloyed with be-gooding. The Good Eye is not merely a gaze but a creative force, like the penetrating sunlight that quickens a buried seed. Am I getting anywhere? Is there anywhere to get? These days I can feel unexpectedly pierced by something I hear, something I see, some stray thread of feeling I might have overlooked. I've placed a few eye drops in the Good Eye. I'll sometimes feel a soft explosion of warmth or ache in my chest and think that it's my heart shaking off its torpor. I hear it murmuring; maybe someday it will shout.

Reprinted with permission from Berrett-Koehler

Issue: June/July 2009

Ode interviews author Marc Ian Barasch on compassion

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Marc Ian Barasch

Photo: Larry Laszlo

Ode met up with Marc Ian Barasch, author of The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness. In his newly released book, Barasch—editor, writer, filmmaker and founder of the Green World Campaign—explores how we can open our hearts to others and to the world at large.

Can compassion and kindness survive a recession?

"Compassion isn’t just a smiley-face emotion that blooms in giddy times when everything’s coming up roses. The literal meaning of the word comes from the Latin compatior—to suffer with, to feel with. It’s about removing that clanking suit of armor that keeps us from being touched, that blocks our authentic responses. I’m not sure people were more compassionate in the so-called successful economy. All those Darwinian TV shows: You’re fired! Get off the island! Triumph doesn’t necessarily make individuals kinder. But when things go downhill, community becomes less dispensable. If everyone’s feeling vulnerable, it can restore that feeling of ‘We’re in this together.’ Compassion grows out of a willingness to share the human condition, not just the pursuit of happiness."

How can we create a compassionate world?

"We have to transform an unsustainable global system—it’s not compassionate to grind up our planet for disposable consumer goods, or ignore human misery. But we might also transform ourselves. The inner traditions advise us to pop out of that stream of discursive thought that characterizes everyday mind, and encounter each other without preconceptions. I’m a lifelong student of Buddhism, but even the esoteric doctrines come down to this: Stay awake and be kind."

You talk about "green compassion." What is that?

"It’s environmentalism as if people mattered. ‘Green’ is not just saving biodiversity and boosting clean tech, but supporting sustainable rural economies, rights of women, indigenous culture. In my work with Green World Campaign, we help villages on degraded land on three continents by fostering the ancient symbiosis between humans and nature. Agroforestry, for example, is a method dating back to prehistory that integrates trees and food crops, restoring productive soil and natural ecology. And more healthy trees means less CO2, which mitigates climate change. We need to do things that serve both people and planet."

Issue: June/July 2009

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My country, boom or bust

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:41:58 EST

Why economic nationalism is unpatriotic.

Illustration: Dave Cutler

As the world economy plunges into recession, globalization is going into reverse. A virtuous circle of rising trade and booming economic growth has turned into a vicious spiral of plunging demand and collapsing trade. Faced with the most severe downturn since the Great Depression, governments promise not to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s. At the G-20 summit in Washington, D.C., last November, leaders of 22 of the world’s major economies pledged to reject protectionism. Yet they aren’t living up to their commitments.

Around the world, economic nationalism has surged in finance, trade, investment and the labor market. Government-supported banks are being directed to keep their lending national. Politicians are urging us to keep spending local; the U.S. fiscal stimulus package contains explicit "Buy American" provisions. Asian countries are responding in kind. Mexico has announced trade sanctions against a variety of U.S. imports in retaliation against Congress’ move to keep Mexican trucks off American roads. Russia has raised a host of import tariffs. India has banned Chinese toys for six months. Immigration rules are being tightened, and foreign workers urged to leave. European Union (EU) members are falling out among themselves. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has called on French carmakers to "repatriate" their production from East European assembly plants. In Britain, strikes against foreign workers have targeted EU laborers who have the right to work there freely.

The logic behind this economic nationalism is simple but misguided: If the economic pie has shrunk, all the more reason to ensure that what remains goes to hungry local workers and businesses. But if everyone fights to keep more of the scraps, there will be even less to go around. Why? Because protectionism is a tax on trade, which depresses global demand further. Raising the cost of imports reduces people’s purchasing power, hitting the poor hardest. And since one country’s imports are another’s exports, demand for traded goods drops. Higher taxes and lower exports are a surefire way of deepening the recession. While governments everywhere are boosting spending and cutting taxes to stimulate the economy, protectionism behaves like the opposite of a fiscal stimulus.

Because protectionism depresses demand, it also costs jobs. For every job preserved in arenas that compete with imports, others are lost. Making U.S. steel more expensive, for instance, may protect some jobs in that industry at the expense of others in viable companies such as Caterpillar that rely on affordable steel. Likewise, making it harder for foreigners to work in a country—or worse, expelling those already employed there—reduces demand for the goods and services they consume and reduces employment for those who make them. Fewer foreign construction workers mean fewer jobs for local people selling building supplies and for interior designers, not to mention those who meet their basic-living needs.

Protectionism doesn’t just reduce demand, it adds to the economy’s dislocation. The last thing a high-tech company that’s already starved of credit needs is to be deprived of valuable foreign workers too—especially since their brainpower will help drive the eventual recovery.

It’s sometimes claimed that "temporary" protectionism would offer breathing space for firms and workers to reinvent themselves. But protectionism doesn’t provide the right incentives for it. Companies that have a captive local market tend to milk it, rather than seeking more competitive markets overseas—especially if prevented from doing so by others’ protectionism. And while protectionism may start off as "temporary," companies that benefit have every incentive to find new reasons to maintain it. Just look at the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, originally designed to prevent Europeans from starving; its lavish subsidies and high tariffs now keep out non-EU food. Protectionism obstructs the world economy’s ability to adjust, rather than encouraging it.

The way to break the destructive spiral is through coordinated fiscal and monetary action to boost global demand, and by nationalizing and restructuring the zombie banks dragging the economy down. Employment could be supported with big cuts in payroll taxes, along with aid to help workers retrain and find new jobs. Economic nationalism comes at the risk of turning this nasty recession into a depression. There is a better way.

Philippe Legrain is the author of Open World: The Truth About Globalization and Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. His new book is about the future of globalization. Read more at www.philippelegrain.com.

Issue: June/July 2009

Normal food is crazy enough

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:40:16 EST

Jurriaan Kamp, Editor-in-Chief.

Photo: Dean Bentley

There’s an old Dutch expression that says, “Act normal; that’s crazy enough!” I’m not a big fan of this proverb, so characteristic of the modern mentality in my homeland, where anything different, creative or fun tends to be disparaged. But when it comes to eating, I’m all for it. In the past century, processing food has turned into an industry. Cooking has become much less laborious. It used to take all day to make supper; now you can have it on the table in the blink of an eye. That’s the good news.

Slowly but surely, however, the corporate food giants started to add and subtract all kinds of things. This led to confusion at the supermarket. Sugar was considered bad, so sugar-free products were invented (even as fluoride was added to toothpaste to protect our teeth). Alcohol and caffeine were undesirable components of beer and coffee, so we came up with alternatives. Carbohydrates were cast as too much of a good thing; thus, we were presented with low-carb products. Fat was no good either because it led to high cholesterol, which was tied to coronary artery disease, hence the proliferation of low-fat items. These “smart” products were hugely profitable but haven’t made us healthier. Obesity is rampant, the incidence of diabetes is exploding and these trends go hand-in-hand with our changing eating habits.

It’s better not to manipulate food. It’s healthier to eat it as it is, without additions or subtractions, without artificial ingredients, colors or other craziness. Tomatoes are healthier than ketchup; sugar—in moderation—is better than the substitute aspartame, which has been linked to cancer. Flour, too, is better the less it’s refined; it’s more nutritious with vitamins and minerals intact. Even fat isn’t as bad as we’ve been told, which our cover story makes clear. We need fat, the good old-fashioned stuff we’ve been eating for centuries, not the manipulated variety. Ordinary fat (again, in moderation) is healthy.

The simple message is: Stick as closely as possible to the original food. That means no chemicals, such as fertilizers or pesticides. It doesn’t mean there’s no place for convenience. You can make a pizza without odd ingredients; check out your natural foods store. The trick is to eat “normally”- which is crazy enough.

Issue: June/July 2009

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Passive House Resources

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:48:48 EST

Passive houses are leading the way toward a carbon-neutral future by producing more energy than they use and drastically reducing fuel bills and C02 emmissions. To find out more about passive houses, architect Rolf Disch and how to make your house a passive house take a look at our passive house resources.

The Passive House Institute: The Passive House Institute US (PHIUS) is a consulting and research firm working to further the implementation of passive house standards and techniques nationwide. Click here for the The Passive House Institute of Germany.

Environmental architect Rolf Disch: To save energy, to make use of solar power and thereby improve one´s quality of life - these are the maxims of Rolf Disch. His architecture stands for the combination of functional, ecological and aesthetic aspects.

Among experts, his projects have the reputation of being the thing of the future. The architectural office has been given many prizes and awards for its innovative work.

Promotion of European Passive Houses Consortium: Cost efficient passive houses as European standards. CEPHEUS is a project involving the construction and scientific evaluation of 250 housing units built to passive house standards in five European countries.

Issue: June/July 2009

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Passive House: Super energy efficient housing

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:20:56 EST

How a new kind of home which produces more energy than it consumes, can drastically reduce fuel bills and CO2 emissions.

The Smith House, in Urbana, Illinois, “has a simple, compact shape that conserves energy,” says its architect, Katrin Klingenberg.

Photo: Passive House Institute US

Governments around the world are scrambling to address the twin crises of our times—the recession and climate change—by investing in infrastructure and green energy projects. The Obama administration’s stimulus package, for example, contains billions in incentives for alternative power sources and energy-efficiency increases affecting millions of homes. The question is how to identify "shovel-ready" projects that can quickly deliver the economic boost and CO2 reductions we so urgently need. Rolf Disch, an architect and environmentalist in Freiburg, Germany, has an answer: houses that produce more energy than they consume.

"What if each house became a power plant, if it created even more energy than it used internally?" Disch, 65, first asked himself 15 years ago. To design that home, he built on the ideas of the "passive house" movement that started in Europe in the early 1990s. Instead of relying on the electricity grid for power, a passive house taps available energy sources—sunlight, the body heat of occupants, even the thermal gains created by ordinary domestic activities such as cooking, bathing and using electrical appliances. The building is well-insulated and airtight so it retains most of this energy and, through highly efficient heat-exchange ventilation technology, uses it to cool itself in summer and heat itself in winter. The houses are called "passive" because most of the power consumed is collected from ambient energy in the environment. When extra juice is needed, renewable power units supply it, like the solar array on the roof of the residential and commercial complex Disch built in Freiburg in 2004.

"I only ever had to switch on the heating once," says Stefan Sattler, a 32-year-old lawyer who has rented a penthouse in the Disch-designed complex since October of 2007. Even then, Sattler only needed the extra heat—purchased from the local heating grid—for two or three hours. Since he and his fellow residents sell the surplus energy produced by the building’s solar panels back to the city’s utility provider at a profit, Sattler is one of the few people who opens his utility bills with real glee. He’s earning money from solar power rather than paying for oil or gas. The average unit in the Freiburg complex earns $5,075 a year this way instead of spending $4,625.

Passive homes can save consumers a bundle in fuel bills—and the planet even more in CO2 emissions. According to the German Passive House Institute (PHI), founded by physicist Wolfgang Feist, who co-created the passive house concept, energy consumption can be reduced by up to 90 percent compared to average homes, up to 75 percent compared to newer buildings. While an existing home uses some 160 kilowatt-hours in heating energy per square meter of living space (kwH/m2) annually, residences built to the passive house standard use a maximum 15 kwH/m2.

Insulation is crucial to making these houses work. The walls in Disch’s complex, which comprises a 50-unit housing estate as well as a five-story commercial center (with Sattler’s penthouse on top), have "extra-thick insulating layers and are almost free of ‘thermal bridges,’" he says, referring to poorly insulated areas where heat gets lost. "The windows have infra-red-reflecting, vacuum-sealed triple glazing that allows lots of solar rays to enter but like the walls, prevents the resulting warmth from escaping again." Each roof has an awning constructed at such an angle that it shields the interior from the high summer sun but lets the low winter sun permeate the dwelling. The panels on the roof generate electricity. All this, says Disch, "enables the structure to produce energy, use it intelligently, and retain it." Five other German towns and cities are planning similar complexes.

Some worry that living in one of these novel houses might be too much like living in a thermos. Yes, your fuel bills are lower, but what if you felt like leaving the front door open on a summer evening? According to Sattler, that’s not a problem: "There is a popular prejudice that these houses have to be kept tightly shut so that no energy is lost, but that’s not true. You can open the windows like in any normal building. "

Even with the doors and windows closed, the heat-exchange ventilation systems creates a pleasant, healthy indoor climate. Temperatures typically hover around 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius), whether it’s a December morning or a July afternoon. A 2005 report by the Austrian Ecology Institute found that the "more effective air exchange" in passive houses meant the concentration of pollutants "was markedly lower than in houses without ventilation systems where the same construction materials had been used." The study also found that levels of dust, pollen, microbes and radon—an odorless, colorless gas associated with lung cancer—were all lower than in ordinary buildings.

All this energy-efficiency does, however, come at a price. A passive house can cost 10 to 15 percent more than a conventional home. Still, these costs are typically recouped over the lifetime of the building through reduced energy bills and lower maintenance expenditures. According to eco-house specialist Uwe Kettner, based in Saxony, Germany, a passive house with 1,500 square feet (140 square meters) of living space will save about $1,595 each year in winter fuel and hot water heating.

So far, some 15,000 passive homes have been built around the world, most of them in German-speaking countries and Scandinavia. "There’s only a handful of them in the U.S. at the moment," says Bronwyn Barry of the Berkeley, California-based Quantum Builders, which is about to launch passive homes, called Q+, that produce more energy than they use. The number "will grow exponentially in the very near future," Barry believes, in part because of proofs of concept like the Smith House in Urbana, Illinois.

Built in 2003, the Smith House is a two-bedroom, single-family residence with a finished floor area of 1,200 square feet (110 square meters) on two stories. The house "has a simple, compact shape that conserves energy," says Katrin Klingenberg, the German-born architect who designed it, "because it results in the smallest possible surface-to-volume ratio. The smaller the ratio, the less heat is lost through the roof and walls." Design principles like these mean passive houses can be built in places where fierce winters require reliable heating. The Waldsee BioHaus, built in 2006 in Bemidji in northern Minnesota, where winter temperatures can reach -2 degrees Fahrenheit (-19 degrees Celsius) keeps its heat thanks to extra-thick exterior walls made of insulated concrete blocks. Like the Smith House, the BioHaus is made from resources that are renewable, recycled or recyclable.

Existing homes can be retrofitted to become passive houses too, a potentially crucial component of any energy-efficient housing drive. Some 43 percent of U.S. carbon emissions comes from operating buildings, with homes constructed before 1939 consuming about 50 percent more energy per unit than those built in 2000. Architect Nabih Tahan practically rebuilt his 100-plus-year-old Berkeley, California, home, adding insulation and dual-paned windows and a heat- recovery ventilation system. Having lived in the revamped building for a year, Tahan is starting a consulting firm to assist in passive home design. He’s also hoping to start a pre-fabrication plant to manufacture wall, floor and roof panels.

This century-old home in Berkeley, California, has been retrofitted to approach passive house standards.

Photo: Nabih Tahan

With houses like Klingenberg’s and Tahan’s becoming more numerous and better known, "the critical mass has finally been reached and enough people in America are aware of the technology and its advantages," Barry says. What’s needed now, she argues, are "financial incentives such as tax cuts or government subsidies" similar to the ones available in the European Union. "That would go a long way toward getting the show on the road."

New construction "can come as a detached or semi-detached home, as a terraced house or interconnected row of houses," Disch says. "It can be used for groups of houses or an entire housing estate like the one in Freiburg." The buildings can also be built using local materials and in local architectural styles.

The biggest drawback is lack of sunlight. Homes in cloudy climes have more insulation and more efficient windows and heat-exchange systems to compensate. Larger buildings require larger solar arrays, so experts are creating a photovoltaic foil that can be applied to facades or windows, turning structures into solar power plants.

Sattler, for one, is happy with his energy-thrifty home. "An ordinary house or one like this?" he asks. "There is simply no contest."

Ursula Sautter, who will be using her wood stove more often, wrote about hypnosis in the December 2008 issue.

Issue: June/July 2009

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Six eco-trends reshaping the fashion industry

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:13:27 EST

Major brands and young, globally minded designers alike are asking the question: How do you come up with a garment that is sustainable, that can stand on its own and not rob from the future? Here are six trends that eco-designers are currently following.

Slow designers like Natalie Chanin make handcrafted garments, like this camisole dress, rooted in traditions of craftsmanship and quality.

Photo: Alabama Chanin

Designer Natalie Chanin remembers the exact moment her fashion paradigm shifted. "I was standing on a street corner in the [New York City] Garment District holding this old T-shirt that I had ripped apart and sewn back together myself," she says. A 20-year veteran of fashion and costume design, she’d spent the day meeting with manufacturers, asking them to do a hand-sewn line of her reconstituted T-shirts. People kept giving her "a cockeyed look, like I was from outer space," she recalls. Standing at the corner of 37th and 8th after one meeting, Chanin realized she was finished with New York and with the industry status quo of fast and cheap production. "I looked at the stitching I was using and it looked like quilting stitches. That’s when I realized I should go back home."

Chanin’s hometown is Florence, Alabama, once known as the T-shirt capital of the world for all the cotton milling, weaving and T-shirt production that went on there. When she returned in 2000 after her epiphany at 37th and 8th, the town was still adjusting to the sudden loss of 5,000 textile jobs as a result of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Seeing the vacuum left behind in her community, Chanin questioned a business model that treats people like commodities, as disposable as the cheap garments it produces. Soon she started her own company, called Alabama Chanin, which operates on a more sustainable model, employing local sewers, creating hand-finished garments built to last, and striving to run a zero-waste operation by "upcycling" (i.e., re-using) production leftovers.

Chanin isn’t alone in her ambition to radically rethink fashion. Since the early 2000s, a growing number of designers and apparel companies have embraced ethical alternatives to the industry’s resource-intensive and wasteful practices. And it’s not just diehard Al Gore fans making hemp yoga clothes. Fashion shows in major cities have started to include sustainable designs from major labels, and hundreds of new eco-fashion companies have come onto the scene. The last time eco was this chic, back in the early 1990s, the focus was on materials, like unbleached organic cotton. Today’s ethical trends reflect a deeper commitment to make the entire production process more sustainable.

In the early 1990s, the first eco-fashion line from a major label was Esprit’s Ecollection, designed by Lynda Grose, who today teaches sustainable design at the California College of the Arts. At the time, Grose says, it was hard to get management even to understand the value of organic cotton; today, many big-league retail brands not only offer organic cotton lines but have taken giant steps to address labor issues, pollution, recycling and sourcing of raw materials. "This is a long-term trend that will continue to grow," says Grose, citing the collaboration of clothing companies Gap and H&M with the Cleaner Cotton Initiative; the improved labor standards of Levi Strauss & Co. and Nike; and the investment of upmarket U.K. department store Marks & Spencer in fair trade.

In 2005, Nike started assessing all design decisions through the lens of sustainability in a program called Considered Design. The goal: to reduce waste and increase the use of environmentally safe materials by 2020. The firm gives designers instant reporting on the environmental cost of their decisions so they can find cleaner ways of doing things right from the drawing board. "Nike is trying to move as quickly as we can to reduce our environmental impact, and the best way to do that is to include the designers in the process," says Lorrie Vogel, general manager of Considered Design. "They’re our visionaries."

Despite progress like this, industry leaders are well aware that there’s still more to do. "When you start accounting for the full cost of production," says Jill Dumain, outdoor apparel company Patagonia’s director of environmental analysis, "the question becomes, How do you really come up with something that is sustainable, that can stand on its own and is not robbing from the future?"

Luckily, major established brands and young, globally minded designers alike are coming up with answers to exactly that question. Here’s a look at six trends that are bursting the seams of fashion’s old business model and creating a more sustainable future.

1) Know your supplier

These 1970s-inspired “Volley” sneakers from the french-brazilian Veja company are made from organic cotton grown by cooperatives of small farmers in brazil.

Photo: Veja

Any idea you might have that ethical fashion is for dour do-gooders disappear when you see the French-Brazilian company Veja’s line of 1970s-inspired sneakers. "The main reason ethical fashion wasn’t selling was it didn’t have a sexy image," explains Elizabeth Laskar of the Ethical Fashion Forum, a network of designers and fashion industry leaders in London. Veja shoes are sexy and chic enough to be an impulse buy, but they’re also the product of a meticulously cultivated supply chain from farmer to seamstress to salesperson to consumer. "We wanted to start from scratch," says Sébastien Kopp, who co-founded the company with François-Ghislain Morillon in 2005.

When Kopp started looking for growers in Brazil who could consistently produce the materials he needed—organic cotton, wild-harvested rubber and vegetable-tanned leather—he found many farmers cultivating less than an acre of cotton and rubber harvesters who had no business know-how. Working with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), he helped organize and train the farmers in the Ceará region, developing the market for cotton. "It’s a global fight to work with very small producers," he says. "They’re far away from communication links and roads. You have to know them, know their challenges and know the paradoxes in the field. But it has a long-term benefit for everybody." Kopp is convinced that relationship-based supply chains are scalable; his company is growing fast, without advertising, and demand is strong on five continents. "If two crazy French guys did it, it’s possible," he quips.

2) Just say no to waste

The Zero messenger Bag from Rickshaw Bagworks is made from a single roll of cloth, with not a scrap wasted.

Photo: Rickshaw Bagworks

When he founded Rickshaw Bagworks, Mark Dwight was frustrated with the wasteful cycle of seasonal forecasting and overproduction common in the accessories industry. "I started looking just at the engineering part of this problem," he says. "How do I get rid of waste in manufacturing?" His answer: a modular design concept featuring a classic bag interior and trend-driven fabrics on the exterior flaps. Since the interior remains the same, and can be updated with seasonal fabric styles, Dwight doesn’t stockpile unsold finished goods that need to be dumped at season’s end. He has also created the Zero Bag, made from a single piece of nylon, with not a scrap wasted. "Mother Nature has a certain healing capacity and we’ve exceeded that capacity, so now we’re starting to live in our own waste," Dwight says. "As a species, we’re smart enough to solve just about any problem. Now is the time."

3) Close the loop

When you wear out a Patagonia garment, you don’t have to feel guilty about disposing of it. Just take it to a Patagonia location and it’ll be recycled into something new. "When you look at this raw material, which is in essence the same raw material as the end product, reusing it makes sense," says Patagonia’s Dumain. The company’s directors are working to make all products recyclable by 2010. The firm has already seen energy and carbon emissions reductions as a result. "The more we learn about how much energy it takes to grow, extract or mine raw material, the more we’re convinced that closed-loop cycles make sense," says Dumain. Adds the California College of the Arts’ Grose: "The old model was linear; you make it, sell it and dispose of it. The new model is cyclical."

Designs like this one by Mia Nisbet are made from castoff clothes, in this case purchased in African markets.

Photo: Mia Nisbet

4) Start upcycling

With millions of tons of perfectly usable clothes thrown away every year, designers have started tapping into this waste stream for raw material and inspiration. Britain’s Junky Styling and Canada’s Preloved brands have both made fresh "upcycled" designs constructed from clothes that would otherwise end up in the landfill. U.K.-based designer Mia Nisbet has gone a step further. In her fashion studies at the Glasgow School of Art, Nisbet discovered one of the disturbing side effects of fashion’s fast-consumption model is that old clothes get dumped on markets in Africa. "When these clothes are exported to African countries, it can be devastating to the fashion economy," she says.

To turn this situation around, she started a business based in Malawi. She purchases castoff clothes from street markets and hires local tailors to construct her creative designs, which mix Western styles and locally produced traditional Malawian textiles. Her clothes, sold in boutiques in London and Los Angeles, bring lost fashion wages back to Malawi’s economy. Nisbet hopes her initiative will inspire consumers to look at their own closets differently. "The way the disposable fast fashion market is going these days, it’s important to take stock of what we’ve already got. People don’t realize what they’ve already got in their wardrobe may have the potential to be something different."

5) Go global

Designer Samant Chauhan supports weavers in India, preserving local traditions of silk production—not to mention the silkworms—to create couture garments like this dress from his latest collection.

Photo: Samant Chauhan

It used to be that designers in Paris, New York and Milan would send out their concepts to be produced by cheap labor in the rest of the world. But fashion shows and shops increasingly showcase designers from developing economies like South Africa, Brazil and India. Tamsin Lejeune, director of London’s Ethical Fashion Forum, says this will support the evolution of an increasingly equitable marketplace. "For emerging economies, fashion is an inspirational way they can access more trade," she says. "It’s a more sustainable model, which isn’t exclusively about businesses in the West sourcing [in the developing world.]"

Many of these designers are also attuned to environmental and social issues. Samant Chauhan, from Bihar, India, has created a widely acclaimed line of couture silk garments made entirely from silk harvested without killing the silkworm. Chauhan aims to preserve the age-old spinning and weaving techniques in his native village, Bhagalpur. "This was my hometown but I was not aware of this silk," he says. "When I was in fashion school, I came to know this is something very unique." Now he works with a local NGO to organize craftspeople to negotiate with buyers from the apparel and home décor industries.

6) Take it slow

Natalie Chanin may run Alabama Chanin from an abandoned T-shirt mill in her hometown of Florence, Alabama, but her business model is radically different from those mass production days. Chanin takes a "slow" approach to fashion. Slow design focuses on quality and on "an awareness of the materials and the people making them," says Kate Fletcher, a U.K.-based fashion consultant, credited with applying the concept to fashion.

Chanin draws inspiration from the days of Alabama’s quilting bees, when women would gather to hand-stitch quilts, and from her grandparents, who lived simply and grew their own food. "It seemed to me my grandparents actually had it right," Chanin says. "They lived with respect for everything around them." Chanin’s garments are created with that same respect for quality and craftsmanship. They are handpainted and embroidered by local craftswomen. "How much better would it be," she muses "if we only bought things that we love so much we never want them to leave our life?" Chanin also sells patterns and raw materials for those who want to try making their own.

Chanin’s company may be small but it’s leading a new trend, in which style is defined not only by the cut of the cloth, but by the integrity of the business model.

Carmel Wroth is a writer whose latest ambition is to learn to sew.

Issue: June/July 2009

TED Talks to focus on sights unseen

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:05:41 EST

TED Europe director Giussani says the Oxford event will “explore what’s hidden.”

Photo: TED

TED Talks, the presentation series given at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, is the haiku of the international lecture circuit. Instead of the 17 syllables a poet has to work with in the short Japanese verses, TED speakers have 18 minutes—no more, no less—to give "the talk of their lives," as the organizers put it. TED has been held annually in California since 1984. Four years ago, TED Global was launched in Oxford in the U.K., and in July it’s back, with speakers that include No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs author Naomi Klein and innovation consultant Janine Benyus. The theme of this year’s event is "The Substance of Things Not Seen."

Says Bruno Giussani, TED’s European director: "The conference will explore what’s hidden or not yet understood, but what still has an important influence on our lives. We don’t see the infrastructure around our cities, or what’s inside our computers, or how our brains work. Our speakers will be delving into these matters, in an original and inspirational way." Topics range from design and architecture to science and economics and everything—seen and unseen—in between.

Check out TED Talks online at ted.com/talks.

Issue: June/July 2009

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