healthcare (8) On reading the Nat. Geo. Mag.

A visit to my periodontist could be a pleasure considering the basket overflowing with National Geographic Magazines. Unfortunately waiting times are short, yet of most issues there are several copies and, having been recognized as a reader (the dentist is a former student of mine), I can take one home. Today it was the issue for October 2006, which was dedicated to saving National Parks here and around the globe.

It took a while for me to remember that 2006 was a year in the "Bush Administration" and that as of 2009 there's a good chance that the National Parks will be save for a while, except for their very popularity. Last night, our local PBS' Nature program showed Yellowstone at Christmas. The voice over was glossing over the realities by stating that the Park today was like it had been 2000 years ago. Not much could be farther from the truth as we noticed on our visit last year. Even at the end of May there already were traffic jams where bears were sighted and waiting time in the restaurants. And the TV program showed snowmobilers in search of nature. No parks are like they were when established and every year they will become more like parks than wilderness, not in the least because the Park Service handed the visitor concessions over to private companies that want to accommodate as many people as possible and thus expand, some already look like resorts. Even the Park's camping places have become parking lots. We had an old bird finding book in which several camping areas were singled out for the presence of Yellowstone birds. We drove around 2 of the "birdiest" and stopped frequently and although many sites were unoccupied, the silence of the birds was eerie.

We stayed outside the park as most lodgings had already been reserved and others were to expensive. Even the towns near the park were expanding to benefit from the growing influx of visitors. It may sound unduly alarmist to worry about the Nat. Parks "being loved to death" (like much of Yosemite), but the ever growing number of people are symptomatic of the fact that even the remote areas of the country may be producing enough green house gasses to fill the absorption capacity of the forests there so that they cannot help reduce those blown from elsewhere. We need open spaces not merely for the contemplation of their beauty, to commune with nature or simply to experience silence, but for the health of our bodies.

Recently the NGO Health Effects Institute issued a report on the dangers of car exhausts to people who live close to roads and in cities. It brought to mind the smog reports of Los Angeles as well as the (industrial)ones of London in the 1950s. Obviously the traffic in Yellowstone and many other Nat. Parks isn't that heavy, but the report is an alert. I'm living in what was exurban Philadelphia and already in the l980s, by the end of the summer, the leaves of my trees were covered with a sticky layer of tar from the morning rush hour traffic (12 school buses and hundreds of cars that lined up in files of 50 or more as they waited for stoplights to change (those leaves can't make a very good compost, I think). I have a dream that in metropolitan congregations such as the Boston- Washington DC or the Chicago-St. Louis corridor, there should be at least 1/2 acre of open space in addition to the housing lots for every family; these 1/2 acres should be combined in inner city parks (ah! but for Wm Penn's "green country towne") and open spaces near by; parks as woods rather than lawns surrounded by asphalt walk and bike paths

Actually, my dream has historical roots, in addition to William Penn's city planning. Old maps of sixteenth century towns show them surrounded by orchards and market gardens outside the walls, as well as gardens behind the larger town houses (these still exist for some of the canal houses in Amsterdam as fancily designed pleasure gardens). Those who besieged a town often laid waste to such gardens. And of course, even in crowded Holland there was lots of open space between the towns, for example in the region where I grew up. Spaces were large and communication so difficult that in the absence of a Paul Revere warnings were flashed from Church steeple to Church steeple, especially when a storm threatened to break through a dyke and flood the land.

During my youth, voices were raised to preserve open spaces as the Dutch population exploded and after Worls War II, new couples had to wait for years before they could find a home. These voices were inspired by such people as Jac. P. Thijsse, for example in his many essays in De Levende Natuur [Living Nature] of which he was a founder (in1897) and long time editor. My mother occasionally gave me little books he wrote, with Eli Heimans (whom she said had been one of her grade school teachers) about the natural diversity in various landscape types. He was my childhood hero and even now among my favorite nature writers. I met him, a few years before his death (l945) and remember him exactly as on the frontispiece of a collection of his essays, an old gentleman, imposing like my own Headmaster, with a kindly smile under a walrus moustache. One of those essays, "Wildernis" from 1937, is a plea for the preservation of open spaces in addition to nature preserves and culturally valuable landscape types. He begins with a quote from the 1854 Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Sozialpolitik advocating, in spite of hard opposition, "to persist and fight for the rights of wilderness." The concept of a "right of nature" has been revived in the 1980s and is still rejected by the conservative Establishment.

Penn wanted open spaces so the wind would clean out the city and prevent epidemics and each home was to have a vegetable garden and a small orchard. Later New York had its Central Park and Philadelphia its Fairmount Park, but that were 19th century realisations; ideals abandoned in the 20th century, in particular after WW II in the USA when the "Levitt town" ideal was developed (and borrowed by other countries to replace more spacious planning). My grade school was in a development in the northern area of Amsterdam, created after WW I. It was called Tuindorp Oostzaan [Garden Village [near] Oostzaan]; single family row houses each with a little square garden in front and back, on tree lined streets, with public squares and small green parks, places for Eur. Blackbirds, woodwarblers, Eur. Robins and other songbirds. There was also a very large area of allotments for villagers who wanted to have larger garden places.

The preservation of open spaces has become public policy. For example, Pennsylvania already has such a program and the farm adjacent to our woods is subject to that program's restrictions on development in exchange for a favorable tax regulation. It would be nice if all the open land in the northern border states remained open (their climate may help) and there should be at least 10 acres for every inhabitant combined into the largest possible tracts in the Western and South Western States, many of which are already there, to remain undeveloped. Much of such a program, for example in Pennsylvania, can be achieved by the maintenance of State Game Preserves, Scenic River designations and the like.

The gardening function of the allotments of my youth could today have a bad effect on the environment if the gardeners resorted to artificial fertilizers and pesticides, but the gardening aspect is important as the reason for the open space. My maternal grandparents and an aunt each had a municipal allotment on the northwestern side of Amsterdam, lodged between a fork of the railroad system. I can't remember their having jars or boxes of artificial fertilizers and what have you, all that didn't come until after WW II. What I do remember is the open space. My teen-age brother and I would spent the afternoon of Sunday visits lying in the grass watching trains go by or we would fish for stickle backs and hunt for salamanders. On a sunny weekday, when my mother would take me there (sometimes taking me out of school on Wednesdays when there was school only in the morning), she would go to her parents place, which had a little cabin and two fruit trees overhanging the small canals that separated each garden, by way of other gardens that held specific floral attractions for her. It was my earliest education in "nature" (however cultivated), helped by one of the Thijsse and Heimans' books called In sloot en plas [In Canal and Pool]. The allotments on the edge of Tuindorp were also a place for Sunday walks and, incidentally, the infusion of a competitive spirit as we would evaluate which plot had the best roses, cauliflowers or Brussels prouts. But for the gardeners themselves there was the pleasure of spending the day off from work in the open, away from the hustle of the daily street scene, the satisfaction of growing a bouquet of flowers or a meal of vegetables, of saving money. While in College, my daughter became involved in establishing a community garden at an old folks' home, and a friend of mine was active in encouraging community gardens in vacant lots in Philadelphia. The NYT (1-17-10) has an article on people promoting backyard vegetable gardens in minority neighborhoods in San Jose, Cal. where the financial incentive is of obvious importance. But there's also the simple fact than a garden is a more lovely prospect than a place where the remnants of a life of poverty are dumped.

The importance of open spaces for the well being of people, especially those landscapes that we grew up with and may be in the process of being altered by industrial development, which may create a feeling of malaise, even a dulling of the emotions, is the subject of the recently developed field of "ecopsychology" and is taken seriously enough to have become established in academia. Interestinly, the 74 year old Thijsse wrote a letter to his colleague in the Assoc. for the Preservation of Nature, in which he argued strongly that any congegration of homes, even villages, need spaces for walking:"The need exists not only for those who are overworked, for the ill or the depressed . . . the protection of nature is necessary for the entire people, for public health . . . education and the development of ethics." That was in 1939.

This National Geographic issue also featured an article on "The Chemicals Within Us" (in addition to several of those arrogant ads for medical drugs), that I found as I paged towards the end of the magazine. It's the sort of stuff that Nicholas Kristof has begun to publicize in his NYT columns: chemical poisoning as a result of the good things brought to us by CHEMISTRY, fragrant shampoos, nonstick pans, water-resistant and fire-safe materials, food wraps and plastics. The author had himself tested for more chemicals than I had known existed in goods we use everyday. He had a battery of blood and urine tests done; the results are harrowing (p. 126). He was tested for 28 pesticides that may be sprayed or present in our, organically modified, food and of the 28 for which he was tested, 16 were found, one of which a breakdown product of DDT that lingers in the body, apparently for years. That's bad enough, but the table also shows that for some poisons in his body the Center for Disease Control had not (yet?) established acceptable levels. Then there's the little observation that his blood level of toxic metals more than doubled after eating two meals of swordfish and halibut. Duncan grew up in rural Kansas along a river that carried the waste of nearby industries.

So much for my visit to the periodontist. But the article made me look up some clippings from the NYT, one of which about the benefits of fish oil supplements as a source for omega-3 acids, the oil mostly being obtained from a non-endangered fish: the menhaden, which as a result will soon become endangered. There are several books that detail the effect of increasing fish consumption on the bio-diversity of the oceans and if, as we do, one often spends time in fishing ports, it is quickly evident that the problems of overfishing are a major concern. One of these problems was the decline of schools of herrings that are not only favored by people (like my late father, who could not pass a herring vendor's stall in the streets of Amsterdam without swallowing a whole pickled raw one - he would have liked sushi - dipped in raw onions). Herring, like its relative the menhaden, in the various stages of its life is a food fish for many other fish, the cod family or swordfish and stripers, all of them increasingly in short supply. Menhaden, like the wasteful by catch of commercial fisheries, are made into food for farm raised fish, like salmon; for one pound of such salmon two pounds of ground up menhaden are used.

The NYT article is not very original as it relies mostly on one book, Howard Bruce Franklin's 2007 The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America. It may even rely mostly on an extensive review of Franklin that's available (among many - all positive - reviews) on Amazon's website. We have been familiar with menhaden, under the local name of porgies, for the many years that we spent part of our summers near the Damariscotta in Maine. Two years ago the Animal World TV channel had one or two hours of "daybreak" programs, one of which was about early morning on the Damariscotta River. It showed nervous schools of menhaden pressing on near the threshold that separates the river from the lake. It's the obstacle for which the river, the lake and the town are named and that the fish have to overcome in order to reach the watershed in which they spawn. The menhaden (or porgies, or alewives) used to be scooped up by the cartload to be used as fertilizer, first by the Indians and later by the colonists. They were also used to obtain oil for lubrication and lamps, eventually replacing that of the whale. Aware of their value for what we now call the "food chain," Maine was among the first states to ban the menhaden based industry. Now they attract flocks of Cormorants, Laughing Gulls as well as an occasional Osprey. They also attract numerous anglers that fish from the bridge for striped bass or bluefish that seem to make the menhaden's attempt to get into the freshwater lake more frantic.

In the early 70s we rented a cottage on the river at Poole's Landing that stood on a 20 ft high rocky bank. Sometimes we could see the menhaden being hunted by a school bluefish. These hunters attack from many sides thus forcing the Menhaden to form so close a circle, known as a "boil" that some are forced to jump out of the water. Bluefish appear to go berserk and rather than eat a fish they bite pieces out of any in reach leaving them to die. Some become the food of crabs or gulls, many are carried by the tide ashore where they soon foul the air (which was reflected in the title "These little stinkers" of one of the reviews).

One August, when we rented on Southport Island, a pretty large school of bluefish chased the porgies into the bay near the Boothbay Yachtclub and thousands of them ended up on the rocky coast, obviously even above the high tide line for they lay there for several days before crews came to clean them away. One might think that they would have been more useful had they been scooped up by the nets of the Omega Protein fleet and made onto Omega 3 oil and fish food. But apparently the stocks have now become low enough to raise the alert because their depletion means a hole in the lower links of the ocean's food chain and thus threaten commercial catches of such valuable food sources as cod, haddock, stripers, swordfish, tuna and others that are already endangered by overfishing in any case.

We are therefore faced with the dilemma of finishing off the bottled omega 3 oil supply or having to get the omega 3 directly from the fish we eat at the table. Either way it's obvious that the health of the environment is directly related to our own.