Trash Nature, Trash Ourselves

pond

Near my daughter’s apartment in the Midd Cities, Texas, there is a small pond next to a highway. It is the only place to walk in an unconstrained natural landscape, though the pond has the feel of a very damaged place. There are few waterfowl to be found on the water, though I saw a beautiful bluebird (sialia sialis) in a tree the other day. The flora is the sort that propagates in disturbed habitats: a couple of black willows, Roosevelt Weed (bacchais neglecta), common sunflowers, asters, goldenrod, and a field of Silver Nightshade (solanum elaegnifolium), their silvery stems now carrying tiny tomato-like seeds.

Towering over the southeast corner is an immense Lotto/Power Ball billboard (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-the-lottery/2019/12/27/742b9662-2664-11ea-ad73-2fd294520e97_story.html ) that announces in huge letters the money to be won; the numbers increase daily. Below, the still lovely landscape is polluted by trash, some tossed from cars, some left by the fishermen who use the pond for occasional recreation.

There is no signage anywhere, and as the property appears neither connected to the neighboring apartment complex nor to the golf course across the street, it is fair game for trashing. In this place, at this time in history, to most people this small piece of the Earth-unappropriated, unowned, and unprotected- is unconnected to them, so they feel free to dump on it. (This is a problem for the whole area. Tarrant County is attempting to control it with citizens’ help: https://access.tarrantcounty.com/en/transportation/environmental/illegal-dumping.html)

I have been cleaning up the trash since I began using the walk around the pond for exercise and started using the leaf piles for clandestine composting of my kitchen scraps. It is clear that the majority of garbage is from food and drink containers: soda cans, plastic juice bottles, liquor bottles, styrofoam dishes, plastic silverware, Starbuck cups, plastic bags of every size, most advertising some sort of fast food: chicken wings, fries, burgers, tacos, etc. And while this pollution is degrading the landscape, it has already done the damage to the people who have bought and eaten this cheap and unwholesome food (diabetes and obesity are diet related and increasing in Texas: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Obesity/state/TX)!

This is my point: every one of us, every human being is an integral part of the environment in which we are embedded. Our own personal environment is as susceptible as the greater enveloping environment to being exploited and ruined, and by the same forces of greed and ignorance.

A society like the one here in Texas which denies climate change and supports the exploitation of the land is the same one that sees people as being only a means to make money, without taking responsibility for the destruction of people’s health or well being.

Without a connection to the natural world, without an understanding of the laws of Nature, how do we instill in ourselves, our society, and our culture a love and care for the natural world and for our bodies which are just an extension of that world?! To be blind to the interdependence of the land, the air, the water, the insects, the birds, the plants, the microbes, and ourselves is to be blind to the reality of life itself!

Art & Climate Change

‘Tropical Diversity’ ink collage on paper © J.Hart 2019 4″ x 10″

As some of my readers may know, I’m an artist (www.jhart-artist.com), and I write a blog from my website as well as from www.realmofcolor.wordpress.com. Ever since my graduation from Rhode Island School of Design, a lifetime ago, I have been haunted by the question of how art, and I as an artist, could respond authentically and adequately to what I witness both in every day life and read in books about the unfolding catastrophe that is climate change (the most recent book I read is David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo, which is a great read on how extinction works and the scientists who study and theorize about it).

The question has a number of facets: firstly, there is the issue of content. Do I use figurative imagery to express my moral ideas as someone like Kara Walker or Banksey does? Or do I avoid the whole dilemma by making abstract art like Thomas Nozkowski or Howard Hodgkin, both of whom I admire.

Then there is the relationship of art to the environment. Ever since I was trained as a painter, the understanding within the art world is that a serious, professional artist would, of course, make large pieces of art, and lots and lots of them (even Hodgkin, at the end of his life, succumbed to this pressure!). The issues of use of the Earth’s resources, storage, and pollution are ignored within the same rationale that is used to justify abstraction: art is essentially good and operates outside real world norms.

And finally there is the most difficult of problems: the way art is and has been my whole life tied to runaway capitalism and the superwealthy. I went to a Saatchi Other Art Fair recently here in Dallas, and I was appalled by the banality of the work and the sheer commercialism of it all. The works, mainly paintings, were of the Zombie Formalism or Zombie Abstraction variety (https://news.artnet.com/opinion/history-zombie-formalism-1318352). The work was overwhelmingly decorative, which is to say without content at all (and especially nothing, God forbid, of a political nature). I found the only paintings with a heart or soul were those of Jammie Holmes (www.jammieholmes.com); his were also one of the few booths showing figurative art.

So, presently, I have decided certain things about how I will make art in this fraught time. First, and foremost, I am working small. My most recent pieces are 4 inches by 10 inches!

Secondly, I am working with inexpensive materials: collage using paint chips from paint stores; ink on paper; and whatever art supplies I have on hand. This latter category is rarely talked about, but, in a consumer society, we artists are encouraged to buy a lot of art supplies, and to spend a lot of money framing our art as an expression of its value and our professionalism.

Thirdly, I am offering my work in multiples online and in book formats which are more accessible. Any large work I do will be ‘in situ’; murals are a good way to display art publicly and live with it privately without framing or storage.

And, finally, I am continuing to alternate between figurative and abstract work. This is a conscious political choice to avoid that recent most pernicious expectation that we are all in the business of working on our ‘brand.’ My work does not represent a brand! And, as a thinking, feeling artist, if my need for different formal means for different projects messes up the marketing of my art, well, I think I can live with that!

Perhaps all of these seem like small choices, but they are, for me, better choices, and more in keeping with the Earth first values that I am attempting to live. I would love to hear how you have resolved the dilemmas between your work and your life in the time of climate change…please drop me a comment!

12 Tips for Healthy Sleep

Charlotte asleep for Better Choices copy — Baby deep asleep! watercolor pencils & gouache on paper copyright J.Hart

Living with a newborn in the house, I have been thinking about sleep a lot lately! I follow Dr. Peter Attia, https://peterattiamd.com/ a doctor who focuses on longevity and health. In his toolkit for longevity, https://peterattiamd.com/the-5-tactics-in-the-longevity-toolkit/, sleep is up there with nutrition and exercise!

So I went to the library to get a book he suggested: Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. Dr. Walker (whom you can hear in this podcast too https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker1/) gives a deep dive into what good sleep is and why it is essential for good health, as well as explaining all sorts of interesting sleep mysteries: why my grandchild won’t sleep through the night: why my elderly friend has insomnia: and whether sleeping pills are really as benign as they are promoted to be (they are not!).

The easiest take aways from his book are the NIH tips (Appendix pages 341-342) for a healthy sleep:

Stick to the same sleep schedule, every day of the week & weekend. Set an alarm for bedtime! Create a very stable sleep pattern of eight (8) hours a night.
Exercise every day but no later than two (2) hours before bedtime.
Avoid caffeine (coffee, colas, teas, & chocolate), which can take as long as eight hours to wear off, and, of course, nicotine.
Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed.
Avoid large meals & drinks late at night.
Avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep (check with your doctor or pharmacist about these).
Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. (but do take a nap earlier/ page 70 on biphasic sleep).
Relax before bed (read or listen to music in a low lit room).
Take a hot bath before bed.
Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom (avoid blue lights from TVs, computers, iPads, Kindle, etc.).
Natural sunlight exposure, thirty minutes every day.
Don’t lie in bed awake getting anxious about not sleeping; get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy.

Sleep is a health topic that is never dealt with in the media, in spite of sleep deprivation being responsible for more car crashes than alcohol and drugs combined! So we are forced, once again, to resist the ideas and habits of the dominant culture and to create for ourselves and our families healthier routines of sleeping, eating, and living.

Sleep well and deeply!

Baby’s Food!

Charlotte on bottle — Charlotte enjoying her bottle! Watercolor pencils on paper. copyright J.Hart

Food, as I have mentioned in past posts, is one of our most fraught choices in the present climate. Most of us are eating foods created by the industrial agriculture corporations, with little governmental oversight here in the States and less transparency of what is in these foods. The majority of doctors are clueless (or worse, misinformed) about what constitutes healthy eating as many of them have had almost no training in nutrition! So that leaves us on our own about the best choices to make about what to eat.

For my family, with a newborn in our home, the question of what to eat has become particularly important! My daughter is breast feeding, but she goes back to work shortly and needs to supplement the baby’s diet with formula. I have been eating a mainly organic low carb & high fat diet for the past three months (more on that in a future post) so we have organic produce and pasture raised meat & eggs in the house, but the question of what to get for formula has been more challenging.

We bought a supposedly organic formula as our first choice, and upon checking the ingredients, found that corn syrup was the first (and therefore main) ingredient, so that went back to the store! Next we went for HIIP, a cow’s milk formulation for newborns, which is imported from Europe where the governmental oversight is more rigorous than here in the U.S.

Unfortunately the baby began to fuss and to have reflux, so we switched to a goat’s milk formula, which she tolerated better. However, it was not specifically for newborns, so our pediatrician sent us home from our doctor’s visit with a corporate popular brand which was designed to help reflux in newborns and had, yet again, corn syrup as the main ingredient! She also suggested that if the baby continues to have reflux, we should give her antacid medication ranitidine, so much easier than struggling to find the best nutrition (sic).

Now, just to be clear, I trust this pediatrician to give the baby medicine and her shots. I am not an anti vaxxer. The science has shown that vaccines do not cause autism. However, there seems to be a strong correlation between the increase of autism in children and the increased use of glyphosate (Monsanto’s Roundup) in our food supply, which is why getting an organic formula is so important! https://www.drperlmutter.com/gmo-and-autism/

We are also in the middle of an epidemic of childhood diabetes and obesity, and I can’t help but wonder why a pediatrician would encourage parents to use a formula in which corn syrup is the first ingredient?! Of course, as Dr. Robert Lustig has written and shown, sugar acts as a natural pain killer, so it would make sense to put it in baby formula to help “relax” a fussy baby, wouldn’t it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxyxcTZccsE&t=1637s

Anyway, we came home from the pediatrician’s still without a good idea about what to feed the baby. We needed to find some reliable information so I, of course, went on the internet, which brings me to our basic problem in trying to get accurate information: whom can we trust and what information is unbiased by the profit motive?

You can think of information as a continuum: at one end is the corporate media that supports corporate agriculture, pharmaceuticals, mainstream nutritionists, etc. Any information from this source is going to be hopelessly simplified and distorted. At the other end of the spectrum are the single issue groups using emotion, morality, and shallow correlation to support their ideas about what is healthy (and what is not). Vegans, Seventh Day Adventists, Paleo dieters, etc. would be my examples.

Somewhere in the middle are the folks I find more trustworthy: Functional Medicine doctors (Dr. Atkins, Dr. Hyman, Dr. Perlmutter, et al) and the citizen scientists and journalists who have done the heavy lifting of learning the new theories or resurrecting forgotten useful ones, and reading all the papers on the relevant clinical trials unbiased by corporate money. In this group belongs Ivor Cummings, Gary Taube, and Nina Teicholz.

So with these criteria in mind, I found a resource that inspires confidence. It is Dr. Bridget Young’s https://babyformulaexpert.com/ Dr. Young is a specialist in baby nutrition who gives parents the information and tools to make their own informed decisions. She explains things like what is the difference between whey and casein and why the percentage of each is important; and which are the healthiest added fats and why (good discussion about palm oil). She does make recommendations, but with the caveat that parents should do their own research and check with their own pediatrician before deciding, though Dr. Young provides summaries for harried new parents!

We chose an organic formula after studying her site, and baby seems to be having less reflux (fingers crossed!) drinking it!

The take away, for me, is that if we want to make better choices about our children’s health and especially their food, we will need to understand the science behind eating, and what our options for healthy food are in this difficult time!