August 4, 2007 by Ben.

Wow. Been a little while since I’ve blogged. Time to hop back on here. It was a real scorcher here in Concord, NH today - the mercury hit 100. It’s no wonder water seems to keep rearing its head as an issue. Today was spent mostly holed up at a Panera Bread trying to get wi-fi, cell service, and dodge the heat. However, this evening we had a wonderful interview with Dana Bisbee, a lawyer in NH who’s worked on environmental issues both in government and in the private sector for the last several decades. Good stuff. Yesterday we interviewed Jim Wilfong, a groundwater rights expert who used to work for Clinton, and later we listened to Amy Goodman’s recent piece on the brewing backlash against bottled water. We’ve had a heady couple of days…”water water everywhere.” Oh, we also summited Mount Washington yesterday (albeit, in Rachel - sadly, time constraints forced us to use the road which felt like a carbon-intensive cop-out, but at least now we know we’ll make it over the Rockies). The weather at the top was surprisingly benign given that the peak is known for having the world’s worst weather - an all-time top sustained windspeed of 231mph. It’s easy to spot the shack that the scientists huddled in to measure that windspeed as it’s chained to the ground. It’d be a great place for wind turbines on crack.

Incidentally, Maine was pretty darn cool. As was Massachusetts. And Rhode Island. But it’s late now and I’m getting “the eye”, so I’ll have to blog retroactively about those states later in between planning and editing. Waaaaahhhhh….

And now, a limerick:

There once was a boy from Maine
Who fished near a papermill drain
He believed that dioxin was hardly a toxin
But these days he’s got water on the brain

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August 4, 2007 by Mark.

The lab results came back a couple days ago. Heres what the Imugen lab attendant said: Your tick is a deer tick nymph (most common Lyme disease carrier), it was not carrying Babesia (a parasite), it was not engorged, but it was carrying Lyme disease.

Woah.

Flash back one week: In my previous “Tick in Time” blog entry, I wrote about my latest encounter with nature– a little freeloader attached at the hip. Literally. Ixodes Scapularis. Friends and family contacted me with all sorts of thoughtful words of wisdom. Everything from “donít worry about it,” to “get pre-emptive antibiotics just in case.” And online I found no end of conflicting advice:

“It won’t transmit disease for 24 hours.”
“36 hours.”
“48 hours.”
“Save the tick and watch for symptoms.”
“There’s a good chance that youíll have no immediate symptoms.”
“Get the tick tested.”
“Lyme disease is no big deal. Treat it if you get it.”

I tried fruitlessly to blend the advice into a cohesive medical plan, but there were too many contradictory information fragments, so I decided to contact a local doctor’s office in Rhode Island that specializes in tick-related illness. They said something like this:

“There have been so many cases of Lyme disease in the Rhode Island area this year that we just prescribe a two week course of antibiotics for anybody who shows up with a tick bite.”

Hmmm. I called my doctor back in CA and he recommended that I simply save the tick and watch for symptoms. Who did I trust? I chose to trust the specialist and asked my doctor for a prescription for 14 days of the antibiotic named “doxycycline.” He agreed and wrote a prescription for me, but I checked the recommendation once more with the pharmacist before popping my very first pre-emptive antibiotic pill. Considering my present lack of symptoms, the drug seems to have done the job– if I ever even caught anything in the first place. Now to address my conscience…

I really hate the idea of taking pre-emptive antibiotics. Even if I actually need the medicine to fight an infection, I still give a little thanks to the universe that antibiotics still exist and are mostly functional. Considering the rampant over-use in hand soap and feed lots, it seems that our antibiotics’ days are numbered. All of that medicine is washed out into rivers and streams and out where the little bacteria live– where they learn to happily co-exist. And for what? So that weak bacteria are killed on our hands, only to leave room for more resistant bacteria? So that we can mess with the diets and lifestyles of animals so that they need the stuff just to survive?

I’d love it if my guestimate above was wrong. In fact, if you know better, please share! I’d feel better about the state of the universe if our casual use of antibiotics made more sense.

So then I must consider how I can justify pre-emptive doxycycline. After preparing for a year for this YERT adventure, the last thing I want to do is get sidelined after the first couple weeks by a 10-day fever, or an advanced case of Lyme’s disease requiring a month of intravenous antibiotics. Could I schedule periodic antibiotic injections without even knowing the city and state that contained my next meal? Doubtful. I don’t have the time for that. So I opted for the pre-emptive antibiotics. But are pre-emptive antibiotics in the same loathsome category as antibiotic hand soaps? Was I risking the accelerated demise of functional antibiotics for the sake of my own convenience? Or is this whole process simply self-indulgently excessive reflection?

Ultimately, I think that it is always difficult to reconcile the way things should be with the things really are today. If I can accomplish anything by this guilt-ridden rant, it would be that you think twice — no, think thrice about your antibiotic hand-soap. But if you still don’t care, read this.

Acknowledging that Mother Nature rules. Literally.

Mark

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August 4, 2007 by Julie.

all they are saying is… give peace a chance.

I don’t believe much in coincidences, as a rule, so when our 3 proffered places to stay in Maine came from complete strangers, and turned out to be a church and the beautiful, simple homes of peace activists trying to live together in harmony not just with other people but with every living thing on this planet, I felt it worth noting.

Our first welcome came from Judy and Scott outside Ogunquit. Judy runs an international network of social service volunteers called Volunteers For Peace, and gave me a pen with a pullout illustration of how many federal tax dollars are spent on defense vs home issues like health and education. (It is unbelievable and frankly, sickening.) Our second was from Rev. Ben at St. Luke’s in Portland, and our third roost was at an “intentional community” called the Addams-Mellman house, where we met MaryBeth, Karen, Bruce, Peg and Eli, who bought the house together with the express intention of living together as a community, supporting peace and sustainability (and each other), and working to make a better, safer, fairer world for all its people.

Admittedly, YERT has been focusing so hard on local American communities that global issues have fallen somewhat off our radar on this trip. Our first night at the house, Karen charged us with the daunting task of gluing the rift between the environmental movement and the peace movement. I thought about it, then said that we were trying to be single-minded in our push for awareness. At which point, Peg, 97 years young, asked us plainly if YERT avoids politics in our campaign for the environment because “it’s easy.”

oof, said my heart.

I explained that we are trying to find a common ground - protecting the one thing that belongs to and directly affects all of us, no matter our party or political leanings - and that we hope that sparking dialogue might facilitate open-mindedness in other facets… I felt semi-satisfied with my answer but the girls had planted a seed and by my next morning’s walk to the local coffee shop in Bath, i was considering that the price of War is not just societal and cultural devastation but environmental destruction as well.

If nearly all of our nation’s capital is going towards war and “defense,” we certainly won’t be allocating money to fund new research in renewable energy. We still aren’t feeding all our hungry or providing health care to those not fortunate enough to afford private medical insurance. And how can people be expected to care for the planet when they are really worried about how to pay rent, where the next meal is coming from, how to pay rampant and ridiculous hospital bills, and, on top of all that, how to protect ourselves from obliteration by “outside forces?”

MaryBeth and I remembered how Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the Whitehouse and then Ronald Reagan tore them down. We found ourselves amazed by the thought of how different things could have been if the country had followed Jimmy Carter’s lead! Maybe there would be solar panels on half of the houses in America by now. Maybe we wouldn’t be a nation addicted to oil by now. Maybe we wouldn’t be occupying so many other countries bc of our interests in their oil?

Then I found this ridiculous website titled “global warming facts.” The site is called heartland global warming, and contains a link to “the newly launched Science and Public Policy Institute,” which is even more frustrating, as it has a tab called “worse than warming,” which basically takes us to a page of possible Al Quaida projected attacks on the USA. What??? really? Global warming naysayers are pointing people to fear of hostile takeover to take the issue of climate change off the radar. Why, I want to know. MaryBeth would say that the war machine feeds on fear, and that if we want to really be free, America needs to become of aware of its insatiable appetite and say “no more.”

I think that we cannot truly preserve our planet and learn to live sustainably while we are constantly making wars to “fight for freedom.” YERT will still be focused on how America is learning to live sustainably but all three of us will be hoping for and praying for peace on this planet. Without it, the environment doesn’t make all that much difference.

I’ll close with a quote from the Nuremberg trials, from 1945. I’ve gotten this one before but one of my friends just forwarded it to me again, so in the spirit of serendipity, here it is. Sad how relevant it remains:

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”

– Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

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