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Intermediair

Anqélique de Vries: 'Filosofeer niet, doe het maar gewoon'
10 03 2010 Angélique de Vries is managing director van softwareleverancier SAP Nederland. Nadat ze genezen was van schildklierkanker, werd ze zich heel bewust van de keuzes die ze maakte.

Twitteren volgens de regels van je baas
10 03 2010 Steeds meer bedrijven ontwikkelen een social media-beleid waarin ze uiteenzetten hoe werknemers zich dienen te gedragen op sociale netwerken. Vijf vragen (en antwoorden)

Hoe mijn vriendin PVV-raadslid werd
10 03 2010 Daniëlle de Winter is 22, mooi, blond en intelligent en wordt beëdigd als raadslid voor de PVV in Den Haag. Waarom ging ze de politiek in, waarom juist voor díe partij? Journaliste Tamar Stelling, een van haar beste vriendinnen, zocht antwoorden.

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Vrij Nederland

Partij van de Arrebeid
10 03 2010 In de hoop zich van hun rivalen te onderscheiden schieten politici in verkiezingstijd al gauw in oude reflexen.

Schrijer speelt hoog spel
10 03 2010 Het lijkt of de Partij van de Arbeid de landelijke strijd tegen de PVV van Wilders in Rotterdam wil beginnen. Het stemadvies dat Wilders aan de Rotterdammers gaf voor de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen, ‘stem Leefbaar’, en de voortdurende kritiek die Leefbaar de afgelopen tijd op burgemeester Aboutaleb had, lijkt de partij van Pastors nu te moeten bezuren. Die is echter hoopvol: ‘De hertelling van donderdag kan in ons voordeel uitpakken’, zegt Pastors.

Jack heeft berouw
10 03 2010 Dinsdag was er in Nieuwspoort een debat. De aanleiding: het verschijnen van ‘U draait en u bent niet eerlijk’, een boekje over spindoctoring in politiek Den Haag. Aanwezig was ook de man die door velen beschouwd wordt als de enige echte spindoctor van het Binnenhof: Jack de Vries.

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De Groene Amsterdammer

De zwijgende orde
10 03 2010 De geestelijken die kinderen misbruikten waren geen 'noodhomo's' maar machtswellustelingen. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat gebrek aan openheid en verantwoordingsplicht tot het wezen van de roomse kerk behoort.

DOOR Aart Brouwer

Links, rechts of radicaal rechts
10 03 2010 De uitslag van de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen bevestigt dat politiek Nederland is versnipperd. Toch gaat het bij de stembusgang in juni om het kiezen uit drie hoofdstromingen. Dat kan de kiezer helpen bij zijn keuze: in wat voor land wil ik leven?

DOOR Aukje van Roessel

Democratie! En dan?
10 03 2010

DOOR H.J.A. Hofland

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Adformatie | Achtergrond

Netwerkbureaus positiever gestemd
11 03 2010 Nederlandse netwerkbureaus delen voorzichtig het optimisme van de holdings WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic en Havas over het herstel van de reclamemarkt in 2010. BUREAUS

Scepsis over communicatieonderzoek
05 03 2010 Communicatieonderzoek kan beter worden ingezet, wijst onderzoek uit.

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Ode Magazine

The joy of dirt
11 03 2010 Soil is as essential a natural resource as air and water. Yet we’re running out of healthy, fertile dirt at an alarming rate. One man’s odyssey to retrace and reduce his soil footprint.

At his farm in Willits, California, John Jeavons teaches the next generation to grow soil.

Photo: Cynthia Raiser Jeavons

John Jeavons is saving the planet one scoop of applesauce at a time. Jeavons stands at the front of the classroom at Ecology Action, the experimental farm he founded on the side of a mountain above Willits, in Northern California’s Mendocino County. For every tablespoon of food he sucks down his gullet, he scoops up six spoonfuls of dirt, one at a time for dramatic effect, and dumps them into another bowl. It’s a stark message he’s trying to get across to the 35 people who have come from around the country to get a tour of his farm—simplified, to be sure, but comprehensible: For every unit of food we consume, using the conventional agricultural methods employed in the U.S., six times that amount of topsoil is lost. Since, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the average person eats a ton of food each year, that works out to 12,000 pounds (5,443 kilograms) of topsoil. John Jeavons estimates that using current farming practices we have 40 to 80 years of arable soil left. If you don’t already know the bad news, I’ll make it quick and dirty: We’re running out of soil. As with other prominent resources that have accumulated over millions of years, we, the people of planet Earth, have been churning through the stuff that feeds us since the first Neolithic farmer broke the ground with his crude plow. The rate varies, the methods vary, but the results are eventually the same. Books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse and David Montgomery’s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations lay out in painful detail the historic connections between soil depletion and the demise of those societies that undermined the ground beneath their feet. According to the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC), as of 1991, human activity has brought about the degradation of 7.5 million square miles (19.5 million square kilometers) of land, the equivalent of Europe twice over. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. has estimated that the value of lost soil nutrition in South Asia amounts to some $10 billion a year. Each year, says Montgomery, the world loses 83 billion tons of soil. Still, these abstract facts have a way of eluding our comprehension. When we put a human face on them they begin to sink home. The U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has estimated that desertification in Sub-Saharan Africa will drive 60 million people from their homes in the next 20 years. While agriculture has thus far been able to keep pace with growing demand, it has done so by borrowing soil fertility from the future. But whether a global crisis is 20, 50 or 200 years away, the point remains the same: We as a species would be wise to take better care of our dirt. In the hyper-abstracted economics of today, it is easy to forget that land is one of the irreducible foundations of all economies. As the world economy has deflated in the last year, it has driven many people all over the world back to earth, if only to grow a few tomatoes in their backyards. In 2009, the Associated Press reported a 19 percent increase in residential seed sales in the U.S., a bump known in the business as “recession gardening.” When the Obamas planted a garden on the White House lawn, it was at once an economic, environmental and spiritual gesture—a nod, if nothing else, to the primacy of dirt. Like most everybody else on our little planet, save for a few hunter-gatherers and breatharians, I have been a silent accomplice in this process. So I have decided to take matters into my own hands, largely figuratively and more than a little bit literally, and see what I can do to minimize my soil footprint. In the course of this exploration, I will follow my interaction with dirt as it moves in a cycle, through the food I eat, as that food leaves my body, and, ultimately, as I myself leave my body. With this in mind, I made the pilgrimage up from San Francisco to sit at the feet of John Jeavons, who has probably spent as much of his life thinking about building soil as anyone who has ever lived. Jeavons started his career in the 1960s as a systems analyst at Stanford University. When the spirit moved him to pursue agriculture as a vocation, he brought that kind of analytical thinking with him. These are the questions that drove him: How many calories does a person need to survive? What is the smallest plot of land needed to grow those calories for one person for one year? How much land do we need to feed all the people on the planet? Jeavons has devoted his career to answering these questions and spreading that information around the globe. A small but significant chunk of that learning can be found in his book How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, first published in 1974, which has sold half a million copies and gone through multiple editions. The premise from which Jeavons operates is that nearly all farming on the planet, be it organic or conventional, First World or Third, takes more than it gives. Most organic farming, for example, borrows soil nutrition, in the form of compost or manure that has been generated elsewhere. Jeavons’ standard for sustainable land stewardship proposes a very simple, obvious benchmark: It must generate at least as much topsoil as it uses. And as the world grows smaller and each scrap of arable land becomes less expendable, borrowing nutrition from some other piece of land is not solving the problem, he argues, but simply moving it around. You can get much of this out of his books, but to get a direct transmission it helps to visit the farm when it is operating in full force. Ecology Action sits 700 feet (213 meters) up on the edge of a ridge, with a sumptuous view of the Willits Valley. There are many reasons Jeavons ended up on this particular plot of land, but none has to do with the quality of the soil, which was judged marginally acceptable for grazing when he picked it up in 1982. He enjoys working with the challenges of sub-optimal soil and limited sunlight, and is up-front about the fact that, by the standards of Grow Biointensive, as he calls his system, the gardens here are only moderately productive. By the standards of the average visitor, however, the garden is exploding with life. Rye grass and Jerusalem artichoke wave across at beds of quinoa and amaranth. What looks like a casual paradise is actually a closely monitored science project. Every leaf that leaves the premises is weighed and recorded. Interns from around the world buzz through like bees, tending beds and fruit trees. The catch, if indeed it is a catch, is that Jeavons’ methods work best on a small scale, on relatively small plots of land, executed by people who are paying attention and care enough to expend the necessary labor. And while he believes his methods can be scaled up, his philosophy in general is that civilization needs to scale down, localize, put more elbow grease and less fossil fuel into the food chain. At the heart of Jeavons’ system is a maniacal focus on composting. Now, when he uses the term he is not merely referring to the quaint re-circulation of leftover bits of lunch. Jeavons recommends that a gardener devote a full 60 percent of planting space to growing crops the principal purpose of which is to add biomass to compost piles. Cereal grains, giant overgrown daikon gone to seed and six-foot-tall (two-meter-tall) cardoons are among the many plants born to die and rot un-tasted, cut down and fed through the system, capturing more carbon with each generation. On average, around the world, it takes 500 years for nature to produce an inch of topsoil. Number crunchers claim modern farming techniques increase erosion at 10 to 40 times the rate of nature. When his system is operating at peak productivity, Jeavons can grow food and increase topsoil at 60 times the rate of nature. After I left Ecology Action, I began to see soil nutrition everywhere. The stalks of feral fennel growing in the middle of the road, the otherwise-useless clumps of bamboo decorating my front yard: All started looking like more carbon sources for my compost pile. A bushy tomato planted too late to fruit, a radish gone to seed—what I used to see as gardening failures, I now see as dinner for the next generation of plants. At 7:42 a.m. on Friday, in Vacaville, California, Truck No. 17246 backs onto the ramp at Jepson Prairie Organics and regurgitates its contents into a massive heap. The sight of a 24-ton trailer tilted up on end, spewing rotten vegetables, cardboard and yard trimmings into a small hill stirs me on many levels: mechanical, biological and olfactory. This is the first of some 400 tons of organic material hauled out from San Francisco each day and put through the composting mill. At the end of 60 days, most of the resultant matter will be trucked to vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties. Some small percentage of it will make it to organic farms in the area.

The Jepson Prairie Organics’ compost process: Organic material such as food scraps and yard trimmings (1) is processed and fed into a grinder (2), where it is mixed and made ready for microbial decomposition. The blended material (3) is pushed into a composting system of plastic pods with feedstock, where it remains for 60 days. The compost is then placed in windrows so it can age. Larger pieces (4) are separated from the compost, which is mixed again (5). The end result: nitrogen-rich compost (6), ready to be shipped to customers.

Photo: NorCal Waste Systems, Inc.

Jepson is a subsidiary of Recology, the waste management company that hauls away my trash in San Francisco. The folks at the composting facility have worked too long tweaking their system to turn their secrets over to their competitors, so they’re cagey about revealing the details of their process. All you and I need know is that they sort, they grind and they blow the green waste into long windrows, which they aerate each day with a huge industrial windrow-turner. The combination of central valley sunshine and bacterial action helps get the row hot enough to break down in 30 days. The compost is given another month to cool and age before it is carted to its next destination. Walking through the massive windrows, I get a chance to talk to Bob Shaffer, a composting guru who works as a consultant to both Jepson and the wineries who use its product. He’s been a student of the soil since he began gardening for himself 35 years ago. Shaffer explains it is not simply the sheer volume of soil that is at issue, but the quality of that soil. He gives me a quick lesson in soil mechanics: “Plants, in conjunction with microbes in soil, produce what are called polysaccharides. These polysaccharides can loosely be called gums, glues and gels. They stick the soil together, make it harder for water and wind to blow it away.” The hidden story in farming, says Shaffer, is the decline of soil health in general. “It adds up over years and ends up in soil erosion,” he says, “kind of like the buildup to the dust-bowl. As the humus level—the amount of the degraded organic material in the soil—drops and drops, the polysaccharide content drops and drops, and finally the soil loses its ability to adhere and stay in place even if we have mulches and ongoing measures to prevent it.” When I hear “dustbowl,” I tend to think of a past problem, sepia tints of Okies squinting in the wind. But China has been working on its own massive dustbowl for years, overgrazing and over-farming in fragile grasslands resulting in the displacement of millions of people and in annual dust storms that blow through Beijing like a plague. Before things get to that point, Shafer says, more communities need to start closing the loop, to bring as much organic material as possible back to the farms. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly a quarter of all municipal waste comes from food scraps and yard trimmings. (Organics buried in landfills also generate methane, which is 23 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.) “It’s not the whole solution,” he says, “but it’s a start.”

Nigel Walker of Eatwell Farm, happy consumer of Jepson Prairie Organics’ compost.

Photo: NorCal Waste Systems, Inc.

Borders usually get fuzzier the closer you get to them, but in this case the contrast couldn’t be more stark. I am ambling around the perimeter of Nigel Walker’s humble organic spread in Dixon, California, also known as Eatwell Farm. The fields of sunflowers that lie to the north unfold in perfect rows, not a single weed in evidence, on a laser-leveled flat that stretches as far as the eye can see. While the immaculateness of this conventionally grown field holds some initial allure, the effect gradually begins to feel spooky, manifesting a degree of order not found in the rest of nature. Things are wilder on Walker’s side of the line: pigweed and lamb’s quarter competing with cabbage and potatoes and onions. Eatwell’s acreage is subdivided into six fields, each growing a variety of crops, divided by windbreaks of tall poplars. “I am a soil custodian on your behalf,” says Walker. “A steward of this 105-acre piece of California.” Eatwell Farm has been providing my wife and me with a weekly box of produce for seven years, but this was my first chance to set foot on the land. I had read that small, organic farms tended to be more soil-friendly than big, conventional farms, but I wanted to find out from Walker exactly what he was doing in this regard. Walker takes a few minutes out of his insanely busy day to walk around the farm with me. The issues of soil and water are inextricably entwined, he explains. “When I first took over the land in 1999, it was a plain, brown field. When the winter rains came, the water ran off, and it was brown, and it collected in a catchment pond. And when the pond was full it was pumped into a drainage ditch, and it eventually ended up in San Francisco Bay.” This is erosion at its most conspicuous, the physical transportation of earth via wind or water. Farming on hillsides, logging and road building all minimize the land’s ability to hold moisture, and when the water runs off it takes the land with it on a one-way slide downstream. In his book The Food Revolution, John Robbins calculates that every year, the equivalent of 165,000 Mississippi River barges full of soil is flushed out of Iowa alone. “When you see that the bay is brown,” says Walker, “that’s your soil, and your grandchildren’s soil, being washed out to sea.” What he has been doing to prevent this is textbook organic farming: planting cover crops, avoiding compacting the soil with heavy equipment, rotating chickens through the fields. The deeper he can keep the structure of the topsoil, the more roots he can extend into the ground, the more water the land will hold and the less of it there is to run away with his soil. “Since that first year, not a drop of water has rolled off this land,” he boasts. Nevertheless, Walker still has to import soil nutrition in the form of compost to make up for the tons of nutrition that he exports weekly as fruits and vegetables. As it happens, the farm lies just 15 miles (some 25 kilometers) up the road from Jepson, and receives some 400 tons of its product every year, so theoretically some atoms from my hedge trimmings and dead flowers come back to me as tomatoes and swiss chard. The hole in the loop, he points out, is the digested remains of all that good food he sends away. “I should make you show up with a bucket of waste each week you pick up your box.” He’s joking, but only kind of. Organic certification standards prevent him from doing anything of the sort, but it’s one of the ways we deplete the soil each year. As it turns out, it’s one avenue in which I can make the biggest difference. I climb out of bed at 6 a.m. on a Sunday. The air is still and cool, two desirable attributes when you’ve got a smelly project in your backyard and don’t want the neighbors to get a whiff of it. I have eight buckets filled mostly with ground coconut hulls, buried in which is also a month’s worth of human excretion from my household. I crack the lids on the buckets one at a time and quickly dump the contents into the nest of straw I have constructed inside a steel cage. Within two minutes, the offending material is transferred and buried under a layer of soil and straw, the cloud of stink dissipated, the cage closed and no one the wiser.

A humanure composting toilet can help fight soil depletion.

Photo: Wessel Kok

Yes, you read that correctly. I have been composting my own dung in my backyard. Like many advances in human technology, the hegemony of the flush toilet is not forever, and as the planet has grown increasingly crowded, more people are reevaluating its merits. Every day, millions of tons of potential soil nutrition are sent downstream to treatment plants, where they are mixed with industrial effluent and spent pharmaceuticals, chlorinated, dechlorinated and condensed into a material that the industry likes to call “bio-solids,” but everyone else prefers to call by its old name: “sludge.” Most of this sludge ends up covering over the layers of garbage in landfills, contributing to the aforementioned methane problem. Then there is the dubious practice of soiling and cleaning our drinking water in an increasingly thirsty world. On top of this, the nutrients contained therein are effectively lost forever. According to John Jeavons, all but a tiny percentage of the minerals necessary to produce a year’s worth of food for one person can be found in a year’s worth of that person’s waste. My first step was to get a copy of The Humanure Handbook, published in 1995 by Joseph Jenkins, a slate roofer in western Pennsylvania. The Jenkins method is the model of simplicity. One merely expresses oneself into a bucket and covers it over with a carbonaceous material such as sawdust or rice hulls or ground coconut hulls or even finely ground leaves. Each bucket is then added to a compost heap, which is monitored with a thermometer to see that the pile generates enough heat to destroy any pathogens. After a year, the pile is closed down and a new one started, and after the second year the first year’s contents are ready to feed to plants. I won’t lie to you: It took some skill and some tools to build my rodent-proof urban composting cage. Nor will I pretend that maintaining the system is as easy as pushing a little lever. There is significant hauling of buckets in and out of my house these days. I had to find straw to line the cage and I may spend the rest of my life on the prowl for suitable carbon-heavy cover materials. The latter is crucial to the process for two reasons. First, its small particles cover your effusions, all but eliminating the stink factor. Then, when they are dumped into the compost pile, the dry carbonaceous stuff balances the wet nitrogenous stuff that comes out of your body, creating the ideal environment for the thermophilic bacteria already present in your gut to thrive. The fury of bacterial activity drives the temperature of the pile high enough to kill off pathogens. It takes 24 hours at 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) to kill all the bad bugs. At 115 degrees Fahrenheit, 46 Celsius, it takes a week. The path of humanure is not one of instant gratification. Jenkins recommends you wait two years before feeding your plants, three if your pile did not get hot enough for long enough. For the time being, my reward came when I uncovered mine after a few weeks and discovered that every last vestige of stink had been gobbled up. What remained was the benign, earthy smell of a forest floor in spring. It will be years before the contents return as apples or tomatoes, so until then, this will have to do.

The woodland burial area of Carlisle Cemetery in the U.K., where bodies are interred without embalming, is the first of its kind.

Photo: Val Corbett

Outside of fission and collapsing stars, it is impossible to create or destroy atoms. So on one level, no matter how my body is disposed of, there will be no getting rid of me. The typical burial in the U.S. tries to slow down the inevitable with embalming fluids, concrete vaults and thick caskets. Cremation, with its energy usage and its air pollution, is differently indefensible. “Green burial,” which has been around for some time but has started to catch on in mainstream circles, speeds the process, using shrouds, biodegradable caskets and memorial parks that serve as land trusts. After I shed this mortal coil, I would like to get back into the mix as directly as possible. I call Cynthia Beal, who runs a company called Natural Burial that sells products and services to assist in the effort to reintegrate with the planet in a more orderly fashion. “It’s all about dinner,” she says. “In this case, you’re what’s for dinner. You will be the life of the party—literally.” She says the fastest way to dispose of your body is not to bury it at all, although for obvious reasons she is not recommending this. Next best is a shallow grave, 20 to 24 inches (a little more than 50 centimeters) deep, since this is where many of the organisms that will be eating you are living. The rest you are already carrying around with you in your gut. In Germany, for example, it is the custom to use the earth to “clean the bones,” as it were. Bodies are buried for 15 to 20 years, during which time the decomposition process breaks down all but the skeleton, which can be returned to the family of the deceased and the plot resold to the next customers. Driven by economic forces more than anything else, a number of small farms in the U.K. have taken to selling burial plots. Beal is working with some small farmers in Oregon to bring this phenomenon to the U.S. I ran the idea past Walker at Eatwell, who was daunted by the bureaucratic implications of securing approval from the authorities. “And I don’t think we have enough land to offer this service to all our subscribers,” he said. Still, he thought it was a great idea, one that he personally hopes to employ for his own disposal. “With all the time I’ve put into this place, I would love to be pushing up figs when I’m done.” As I have no immediate plans to die, I figure this gives Walker some time to work out the details. Remember, man, that I am dirt, and unto dirt I shall return. Larry Gallagher is a journalist who in more than 20 years of magazine writing has never written a dirtier piece. Issue: March 2010 Related Reading Project of chicken
Cogeneration: Recycling waste to generate power
Down and dirty
Fee for carrier bags

Five freedoms for all
11 03 2010 How the 2048 movement is helping “me” and “we” to work together.

Photo: istockphoto.com/arissanjay

2048 is a plan to prevent future wars, eliminate poverty and create the conditions necessary for a sustainable existence on our planet. These ends can be achieved through a written agreement to live together that is enforceable in the courts of all countries. This movement began with the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a set of fundamental human rights for all people, which was adopted unanimously in 1948 by all countries in the UN. This movement can be completed by the year 2048, the 100th anniversary of the Universal Declaration. The way to accomplish this is first, by educating all people, including students, in all countries about the human rights they all share; and second, by drafting a document, an international bill of rights, that embodies humanity’s agreement to live together and that is enforceable in the courts of all countries. This document is called an International Convention on Human Rights because a convention is a treaty that can be agreed to by all countries. These two steps, to educate people in all countries while working together to draft an international convention, are complementary and interrelated. They are good news. The worn-out story that war and poverty are just the way things are so we should keep spending trillions of dollars perpetuating them is giving way to a new story, a new narrative that says peace and prosperity are attainable if we have a plan and we are willing to challenge those who keep propagating the same old myths. 2048 dispels myths. One of the most pernicious myths is that peace and prosperity are hopelessly complicated and unattainable. This is untrue. Peace and prosperity can be attained through the realization of five basic fundamental freedoms, for all people, everywhere in the world. They are: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom for the environment and freedom from fear. Of course, other rights are needed too, but these five fundamental freedoms establish a framework within which other rights can flourish. If our international community remembers these Five Freedoms, and if they become a regular part of our daily lives, then collectively we will carry the core of 2048 in our minds and it will become our way of life. Please look at your hand for a moment. Hold it up, palm facing you. We all have five fingers, but the first we call a thumb. It looks different. It stands out. And it is strong. It represents freedom of speech, the idea that stands out, that stands up to dishonesty and corruption. Next, look at your index finger. We point with this one. It gives us direction. It represents freedom of religion. Each of us is free to choose our own direction, with or without God, and for those who decide that God is their guide, then they are free to have their own relationship with God without the state telling them what that relationship must be. Interference by the state pollutes the relationship with God. Third is the middle finger, the longest of all. It represents freedom from want, the long road of existence and the certainty that there will be food, water, education and health care for every one of us no matter where we may be on that road. Next, for many of us, is the marriage ring finger, either the right or the left hand, and for all of us, a finger with a direct link to our nervous system. It represents freedom for the environment. Life. We all have a direct link to the Earth and the ecosystem of which we are a part. When the life of the Earth is spoiled, our lives are spoiled. Finally, there is our “little finger,” shorter and smaller than the rest. It represents freedom from fear. It’s the “finale” of our hand, our reward. All the others lead to this one. As you take a look at your hand and recount the Five Freedoms, remember that you didn’t ask for that hand, you were born with it. So, too, you do not have to ask for the Five Freedoms, you were born with them. They are five freedoms for all! Four of these Five Freedoms originated with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. He stated the following, in his State of the Union address to the U.S. Congress in January 1941: “We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms: The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—everywhere in the world.” The beauty of these Four Freedoms is that they are an outline of an agreement for humanity. They are a social formula. When we, the people of our international community, have created a social order whereby all people enjoy the first three freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom from want—then we will have created a society that allows us to share in the fourth freedom, freedom from fear. This formula was not just born out of a desire to end World War II, but, as President Roosevelt said, “to end the beginning of all wars.” This quote and the Four Freedoms are a guiding light for 2048. Roosevelt saw the Four Freedoms as achievable within a generation. Commenting on his speech, he said, “It is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” Perhaps he was overly optimistic about the speed at which the Four Freedoms could be achieved everywhere in the world, but steady, immediate action is the message; we can’t put these rights off forever. The Four Freedoms are the essence of a good life for all. They ensure the following: We can think freely, say and write what we want and peacefully organize to protest; we can have a relationship with a god of our choosing, without interference by the state; we can live in security, knowing that education and health care will always be available regardless of circumstance; and finally we can live in peace, without fear of rampant crime and continuing war. In short, the Four Freedoms are the core of our social contract—our agreement about how we will live together. President Roosevelt’s recitation of the phrase “everywhere in the world” at the end of each freedom is key. In effect, the Four Freedoms were a New Deal for the world. Roosevelt had long been a champion of the common man in America. Through the New Deal, Roosevelt took the hard edges off capitalism. He made sure that working people were not left destitute while wealth and power were consolidated into the hands of a few. With the Four Freedoms, he was expanding his gaze to all men and women, in all nations, to ensure that destitution did not befall anyone, for in destitution he saw the seeds of war. While the Four Freedoms ensure dignity and cover most of our social contract among ourselves and our government, we need a fifth freedom to preserve our planet, including the ecosystem that provides joy and beauty, and also sustains us: freedom for the environment. Just as our human DNA is 98.5 percent the same for all people in all countries, so too our well-being is intertwined with our physical environment. Equally important, as we have learned from global warming, the health of our environment affects us all, everywhere, and therefore, as with the first Four Freedoms, freedom for the environment must also apply “everywhere in the world.” The demise of our planet’s ecosystem teaches us the folly of only working on local environmental issues while dramatic degradation takes place worldwide. Furthermore, it’s time to discard the myth that we must be willing to sacrifice the environment for the sake of economic competition. What is needed is uniform, international regulation of the type that an international convention would provide. Without an international approach, there will always be pressures for some countries to sacrifice the environment to gain market advantage. Capitalism works well, but it tends to create a race to the bottom when it comes to environmental protection. Creating a fifth freedom for the environment is harmonious with the other four freedoms. Often, destruction of the environment results from the actions of impoverished people who are struggling to survive, whether by cutting down their local forest to an extent that it does not grow back, for example, or overfishing until fish stocks do not come back. The lack of the first three freedoms, particularly freedom from want, can thus lead to the destruction of the environment. As we reach an agreement regarding the first four freedoms, we provide well-being for all; the result, then, is that the need to sacrifice the environment to survive is reduced. In this way, the Five Freedoms are intertwined and the success of each bolsters the others. Given the strength and well-being each of us will gain from five universal freedoms, it is time to dispel another myth—that there is not enough to go around. We pay dearly for the myth that we can’t afford to have health care and education for all, and the myth that environmental protection is too costly. These myths are untrue. For example, studies have conclusively shown that not only will global warming cause serious suffering and diminishment of our daily lives, but it will cost us more to pick up the pieces after hurricanes, droughts and flooding than it will cost to avoid these calamities. Similarly, while education may cost more initially, it creates good jobs to construct schools and results in highly productive workers. So in addition to generating fulfilling lives, implementing 2048 would deliver financial savings. Americans, on the whole, like people in all other countries, are fundamentally good and generous souls with whom you can sit and talk at the kitchen table. Many do not know that their government gives less than one-fifth of one percent to foreign aid and is at the bottom for giving among developed countries. They probably also don’t know that the U.S. spends more on its military than all other countries combined. Part of the role of 2048 is to help spread awareness. When people know the truth, they support reallocation of resources as part of the agreement to live together, in keeping with their self-interest and morals. Awareness can be created with a small percentage of people. Just as it will only take 1 percent of the GNP for the realization of education and health care for all, so too it will only take 1 percent of humanity to share the news of 2048. Word of mouth, spurred by our innate desire to live in peace and security instead of war and want, will spread the word. This 1 percent of humanity already exists within the arts and media, our non-profit and for-profit businesses, our places of worship, our universities and even our governments; now the Internet and 2048 are bringing all these communities together. Knowledge of the Five Freedoms is essential to achieve this 1 percent “tipping point” for the success of 2048. Students and the public generally need to be able to recall the Five Freedoms just as easily as they can count the five fingers on their hands. As they learn their rights, they come to expect them, both from one another and from their governments. What they expect today, they will demand tomorrow. The Five Freedoms are deeply held cultural values that lead to lasting results. The 2048 Project is an affiliation of educational institutions, human rights centers, non-governmental organizations, businesses and foundations collaborating to educate students and the public about the evolution of human rights and to provide a process to draft an international framework for enforceable human rights that can be in place by the year 2048, the 100th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is an edited excerpt from 2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together by Kirk Boyd, published by Berrett-Koehler. Issue: March 2010 Related Reading Movie tip! The world according to Monsanto
XO Earth
The Plastic Bag: No Longer South Africa
Peace begins at home

Don't forget to breathe
11 03 2010 Breathetext.com reminds you to take a deep breath, via text.

Photo: istockphoto.com/martinedoucet

Do you sometimes feel a little over-whelmed by life’s pace and uncertainties? Steve St. Clair has an answer: Pause and take a few deep breaths. And because that can be easy to forget, he created a text message service that reminds you of this simple act. St. Clair, a meditation teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah, believes conscious breathing can “be calming and have great value. In general, we as a society have become disconnected from our breath, as evidenced by the shallowness of our breathing, no doubt due to the stress in our daily lives.” Last year, St. Clair co-founded breathetext.com, a “global community of breathing together.” You can join by texting the word “breathe” to 313131. You’ll get one free text message per day alerting you to take a few deep, cleansing breaths. You can also follow @Breathetext on Twitter. St. Clair stresses that many centuries-old teachings about breath require discipline, time and dedication to make the intake of oxygen something profound and life-changing. He thinks it’s more feasible today to practice something a little bit easier. “Simple as this may sound, such a fundamental form of breathing has the capacity to reconnect individuals to their hearts and cores, thereby creating profound changes in them. And because we are breathing synchronistically, individuals unite with one another and with the larger collective forces at play.” Issue: March 2010 Related Reading How many servings are on your plate?
When you just don’t feel like working out
What's your walk score?
You are what you think, you are what you believe

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Elsevier | Commentaren

Hans van Mierlo was geen ziener maar een zoeker
12 03 2010 Hans van Mierlo, 43 jaar lang het gezicht van D66, was helemaal niet de visionair zoals hij na zijn overlijden wordt voorgesteld. Van Mierlo worstelde juist met waar het heen moest. En wat hij wel wilde, daar kwam het niet van

Pers moet nooit geld van overheid aannemen
11 03 2010 Bijna alle kranten en weekbladen (niet Elsevier, wees gerust) gaan gebruikmaken van overheidssubsidie om jonge journalisten aan het werk te stellen. Daar gaat hun onafhankelijkheid

Zwalkende Aboutaleb mist stuurmanskunst
10 03 2010 Anders dan zijn voorgangers had Ahmed Aboutaleb relatief weinig ervaring in het openbaar bestuur toen hij burgemeester werd van Rotterdam. Dat tekort is de PvdA-er in hoog tempo aan het goed maken. Vorig jaar ‘Hoek van Holland’, nu de chaos bij de lokale verkiezingen: Aboutaleb heeft het in zijn eerste jaar als burgemeester stevig voor de kiezen gehad

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