Carbon Neutral? Probing Carbon Offsets

It seems like such a good idea. When you produce pollution, you buy an offset to balance it out, leading to a ‘carbon neutral’ lifestyle, where the emissions you contribute to are countered by carbon sinks intended to help address climate change by slowing the release of carbon into the atmosphere. More and more products are sold with carbon neutral labeling, consumers are invited to buy offsets with the purchase of plane tickets, you can even buy them when you purchase a new car.

They’re the next iteration of greenwashing, yet another example of how activism can be commodified and turned into a product. Resistance and environmental advocacy twist around each other into something that can be bought and sold, thereby allowing companies to profit. Consumers of the product think they’re helping the environment and rest on their laurels, satisfied that they’re doing the right thing, doing something good, making the world a better place. And yet, the environmental problems persist, because the offsets don’t address the underlying problem. Instead, they create a layer of mythology that consumers buy into in their desire to be ecologically conscious.

The primary issue with carbon offsets is that they represent a redistribution of responsibility, not an actual attempt to address rising carbon dioxide levels. When you buy offsets, you aren’t reducing the amount you pollute, you’re just trying to mitigate it. Mitigation should be a last resort approach to environmental pollution, rather than a normalised and widely praised first step. Each time you fly in an aircraft, that plane is producing emissions, and that’s something you can’t avoid. What you can do is look for other ways to reduce your carbon use; if you have to fly for work, perhaps you can afford to buy locally produced produce, for example. Instead of having your vegetables flown to you, you can purchase them from someone local who doesn’t travel far to deliver them.

When the buck is passed with a carbon offset, the consumer forgets about personal responsibility. It’s rare indeed to see me discussing personal responsibility here, I know, but this is a case where consumers are, yes, directly responsible for deciding how much carbon they want to contribute to the environment. They are also surrounded by a culture that puts tremendous pressure on them that may influence their choices or actively force them to use more carbon than they might otherwise choose.

People who choose to fly for vacations, for instance, are making a conscious decision. Someone who’s obliged to fly to work is also making a choice, but it’s a more complex one. The job may offer a number of benefits beyond simple survival on the wages or salary provided. People who choose to buy a lot of goods for their homes are, again, loading up on their carbon footprint and making a choice, but again, that choice isn’t always simple. These choices, though, should be actively discussed, to encourage people to think about what they consume and how they consume it, and to provide information about alternatives.

Buying carbon offsets isn’t necessarily inherently a bad thing, especially for someone who is also actively trying to reduce the pollution produced in the first place, but it should be a secondary thing. And in the process of buying them, people ought to think carefully about their nature and source. One problem with a lot of offsets is lack of accountability. Is the money really going to a concrete example of an offset that will genuinely trap carbon and slow the rate of CO2 into the atmosphere? How is it being used? Is the company selling the offset taking advantage of proceeds for administrative costs, rather than actual implementation of offsets? Are you actually helping to protect forests or plant trees or promote ecologically-friendly activities, or are you really just buying a metaphorical indulgence for your sins, appeasing your guilt with a cash payment?

Nature is not a petulant child to be bribed with candy brought back from a business trip. Offsets don’t address the fundamental underlying problem, the fact that countries like the United States produce very high carbon emissions and these need to be reduced. Not countered, but actively reduced. Offsets are a bandaid and a feel-good measure, not necessarily a meaningful or useful activity.

One of the most common offsets is tree-planting, which is something worth examining in more detail. If an offset is simply being used to create a tree farm for logging, it’s not very productive. When offsets replace downed trees, there’s no net gain there; trees were removed and now they’re being replaced, but nothing has really changed. Plantations also tend to be grown as monocultures, which makes them susceptible to disease, and doesn’t make them into complex, rich habitats for plants and animals. That means they’re not offering as much environmental benefit, and that includes undermining their carbon trapping ability. There’s a reason the soil in old growth forests is so rich and complicated. It’s not just because there are trees, but because there have been trees living in a complex ecosystem with plants and animals for hundreds or thousands of years, creating layers and layers of organic material that build up into a fantastic soil that supports life.

A tree farm isn’t equivalent to that, and can’t be. It may require substantial water and maintenance, could be sprayed with harmful chemicals to address concerns about disease, and might be logged once the trees are mature enough, which means those offsets basically did nothing. Those trees would have been planted anyway, grown to maturity, and then cut down; essentially, companies profit twice from the same plot because they can sell the trees as offsets and again as valuable board feet of timber.

Looking beneath the surface of so many ‘environmentally friendly measures’ reveals something that doesn’t even begin to faintly resemble something that’s good for the environment, yet so many consumers are unwilling to do that. A lack of desire to look behind the curtain and see how the sausage is made? An insistence that if you ignore the truth, it doesn’t affect you?

31 December, 2012 – 10:10 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues |

Book Review: A Great and Terrible Beauty, by Libba Bray

I picked this book up after seeing it recommended by Lauren DeStefano, who is a great person to follow just in general because she’s funny and posts lots of cat pictures, but also for her book recommendations—this isn’t the first thing I’ve read solely because she recommended it, and thus far I have to say her recommendations have been spot on. I have yet to be disappointed. While this book was published almost ten years ago, so it’s not exactly new and hot, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading, and the plus side of picking it up this long after publication is that I don’t have to wait impatiently for the sequel.

The narrative opens in Colonial India with the violent death of the narrator’s mother, an event which leads to her being packed off to England for boarding school so she can become a neatly polished young lady, packaged and ready for marriage. Finally, she gets her dream of going to England, but it’s not what she expected, and it turns out that her mother isn’t quite who she expected either. Gemma Doyle enters a murky world of magic, other worlds, and the tensions of female friendships, and struggles to find her footing while she adjusts to a world without her mother.

This could easily turn into a very cliched book. It has all the makings of one what with the whole family-tragedy-in-India-and-then-sent-to-boarding-school-plus-mean-girls thing, but Bray manages to take what would be very troped elements and do fun things with them, which is an illustration that even tropes can find new uses, and a skilled author can create something fascinating with existing tools in addition to new ones. A Great and Terrible Beauty is compellingly told, the kind of book you find yourself urgently needing to keep reading because you want to know what happens next, and it’s a story that, in the telling, has some fascinating embedded things beyond the story itself.

Gemma is a bit of an outsider, unfamiliar with much of the culture of the school around her, and she struggles to fit. Despite that, though, she’s good at reading the popular girls and figuring out how to work them, avoiding total outsider status and worming her way into their social group. It helps that she has some blackmail material as well, of course, since that gives her leverage in a world where the primary role of girls and women is as pawns and playthings intended as wives for rich old men, not as individuals.

A Great and Terrible Beauty definitely has Gothic elements going for it; it’s atmospheric and dark and tangled. It’s also a great commentary on the roles of women and how they were forced to make terrible choices to stay alive during this period and history (and still are today). Most of the characters fully know and understand their projected roles in their world, and they’re also bitterly unhappy about them. They don’t want to be what the people around them want to force them to become, and some are willing to go to great lengths to avoid the inevitable, whether it be marriage to save the family fortune or a career in service because you’re not wealthy and don’t carry an enticing title.

Ann, the girl who dreams of something better, is a particularly tragic figure in many ways because her schoolgirl fantasies seem all the more acute when you consider her likely future. She wants desperately to be someone else, and dreams of nothing more than being taken away from the inevitable. As she reads melodramatic books about girls just like her swept away to a life of leisure, she entertains dreams that life will turn out differently from her, that she will transcend her status as a scholarship student and find something better…but she still envisions marriage as the path to freedom.

Women fought against very real confines like these in the era the book is set in, and they struggled with the same choices made by the characters. Unlike Gemma and her friends, thought, they didn’t have the option of retreating to a magical world to ease their stress and fear, and they couldn’t carry magic back into the world with them to change the way it behaved, but Bray did illustrate what powerless people can do with power when they’re presented with it: abuse it. They use the magic they find for frivolous purposes even though it comes with great cost, and ultimately the lure of power becomes too much for one of the girls.

What happens when you spend your entire life being crammed into a box and told how to be? When your whole existence is reduced to a very narrow band of value, and you’re repeatedly told you need to learn to be a certain kind of person or you’re useless? When you’re not even sure what kind of person you want to be, but this is the option you’re given, to become a nice well-trained wife or die? When you’re presented with the potential for tremendous power and the chance to totally change your world, what would you do?

The girls of A Great and Terrible Beauty explore this with immense consequences, in a book that manages to be mysterious, thrilling, fantastical, and original all at once. I can’t wait to read the rest of the series, and I’m so very grateful I don’t have to wait a year for the next one; this whole ‘finding books years after they were published’ thing might actually have some merit.

30 December, 2012 – 10:43 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in reviews | Tagged , , |

Stories

The rocking chair at the far end of the porch is hers. In the afternoons, the golden light warms the wood and makes it look like liquid honey, softening the sharp lines and angles and bouncing off the porch railing to fill the air with a light so dense that it almost seems palpable. She settles into the chair as the evening is starting to arrive, allowing the heat of the day to seep into her bones and watching the stars come out one by one in a clear sky, blanket wrapped over her lap.

She is tiny and frail, and it is hard to see the traces of the large, robust woman she once was. Birdlike hands lie quietly on the blanket and her face is quiet and still, thin hair braided back to expose her sharp face. Her collarbones jut from her chest, lifting the fabric of the blouses she wears and making it look like something is hidden underneath, while her fragile feet are encased in sheepskin slippers that scuff and shuffle on the ground as she walks.

If you wait very patiently, and ask very nicely, she will tell you a fairy tale. Her voice is low and scratchy and you will need to lean in close to hear, to concentrate over her accent, betraying her time raised in a place far away. She tells stories in stillness and quiet, without moving her arms, but sometimes she will slyly dart her eyes over to see how her listener responds, waiting for the nod or the gasp or the sudden jump before she continues. She ends each story on a lilting note, challenging the listener to ask for another story.

She knows the power of the narrative, the strength of the rhythm. She is patient and graceful, knowing just when to spring on the listeners. She weaves a dreamworld around them and slowly pulls it tightly in around them, making them feel wrapped in fantasy and legends of long ago and far away. Once her spell is cast, it is hard to break, and even the fireflies settle into stillness out of fascination. In another time, she might have been accused of witchcraft.

When it gets very late indeed and she is caught in dark thoughts, she tells ghost stories instead. Those come on warm summer nights when you can bear to be outdoors even though the sun is long gone, and the stars watch quietly overhead while insects mutter amongst themselves. An orchestra of crickets produces a swell of sound and them calms, while the very grass and trees and soil seem to breathe, waiting. Rustlings and creakings become magnified in the sluggish warmth, and acquire new meaning as she tells her stories.

They are told with skill and quiet authority; the posturings and dramatic voices are not for her. She prefers to terrify her audience instead with quiet, measured words, supported by her utter conviction. These tales she believes to be fact, and she relates the story much as someone else would talk about running into an old friend at the post office. It adds a layer of chilling veracity to each story, and she weaves her tales with skill, drops the shocking moment at the best possible time, makes the audience open-mouthed in astonishment, leaves people with lingering thoughts that weave into their dreams that evening and leave them tossing and turning until morning, wondering if there is more to ghosts than they thought.

The little boy likes to perch on the stairs, listening. He is afraid of being caught up past his bedtime so he hides behind the railing, but he doesn’t know the adults see him there and decide not to care, because it’s summer and the days are long and childhood is short. He curls up with a cold soda pulled from the icebox and listens to her, feeling chills go down his spine and wondering if they are from the drink or the story. He likes the ghost stories most of all, thinks the fairy tales are mostly kind of boring, but sometimes she tells stories about adventurers with heroes and swords and he likes those.

He is young enough to retain his sense of wonder and take the stories at face value, unlike the adults, who gather around the storyteller because she is old and they think they should respect her. And he is young enough, too, that he doesn’t treat her with disdain and boredom, like the older children do. He is fascinated by her, wants to touch her long, white hair, wants to feel the fabric of her quilt, wants to see her eyes up close, wants her to weave him into one of the stories about ghosts that send dreams or tap on the walls with hammers or watch over heroes while they complete their journeys.

He believes with the fervour of someone who has not yet been taught not to, and takes her stories as truths, history. He soaks them up like a sponge and wonders why they aren’t shouted from the rooftops and included in his history class at school; he tells the story of the noisy earthworm in science class and doesn’t understand why the other students laugh at him, because he is a dreamer and a wanderer who knows something they do not.

The child who sits at the stairs to listen to the storyteller knows that all stories have their own truth.

29 December, 2012 – 10:51 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in fiction |

Opt In, Opt Out, and When the Private Goes Public

Social media creates a strange environment for many of us. Even as we are broadcasting information to the world, we seem to forget, sometimes, that this means the world can read it. If you say something on the Internet, theoretically anyone can find it, especially when it is attached to identifying information like your name, your face, where you live. People attempting to fly under the radar may obscure this information, but it is still difficult to remain completely invisible on the Internet; if you want to share aspects of your life with the world around you, people you aren’t expecting can read their way into your life.

This was brought home with a Wall Street Journal article earlier this year on the illusion of control, the idea that people think they control what they put out there, and thus take more risks when they post status updates, blog, and participate in social media. If you think you’re in control of the environment, how your content is used, and who sees it, you think you’re more secure; think of wandering around naked in your house because you think the blinds are closed, only to discover that someone came through and opened them all without your awareness or consent.

In fact, that’s a good analogy for the handling of privacy on a lot of social media platforms, because they thrive on lack of privacy. They feed on the overshare; it’s what drives user participation, and it’s also what drives advertisers and investors. The more information a platform has about its users, and the more it forces people to live in the public eye, the more data it can build up, and the more users is can woo. Hence, slippery privacy policies and imprecise implementations of privacy settings.

Like the ability to be added to a Facebook group with a name that exposes a part of your life you might prefer remain private, with no control over being added and choosing who gets to see that information. Services like Facebook, Google, and Twitter offer advanced privacy settings intended to effectively lock your account, but that doesn’t mean you’re entirely safe. You’re not safe from other users republishing your content, for example, and you’re not safe from inadvertently not using the settings correctly, especially when they’re so byzantine that it’s extremely hard to tell how to set them up to protect yourself.

And you’re really not safe from changes at the site itself that affect the way your information is displayed. Google and Facebook are both infamous for opt-out settings, rather than opt-in options which force people to decide whether they want information exposed. The end result is being left standing naked in your living room, being told that you can always just lower the blinds if you want them open. There’s no remorse there, let alone critical thinking about how exposing users might be a problem, and how users might be driven away by feeling like their supposedly locked and protected accounts are not, in fact, as safe as they think they are.

At the same time that users are worried about privacy, they’re also sharing, and sometimes those who are the most worried are the ones sharing the most. They’re the ones concerned about privacy in the first place who think they have the controls locked down and can talk freely, or they’re the ones who realise that disclosing intimate information could put them at risk, so they take the time to implement the best privacy controls they can find. The people who are most vulnerable to safety breaches are acutely aware of that in many cases, and yet, they’re still not being served by the sites they belong to.

Herein exists a tension between users, advertisers, site owners; the user is the product, and the health and safety of individual products is not of significant concern to the owner. Facebook doesn’t care if a gay teen is outed because it doesn’t affect their larger bottom line. At most, there will be a brief media furore and the teen might leave the site, possibly taking some friends, possibly not. Google doesn’t care if it exposes a list of someone’s contacts to the world at large, because memories are short and it’s one customer among scores, a drop in the bucket compared to the bigger picture, especially when you consider the fact that social media exists to collate data about people.

The more people, the more data, and the more control the site, not the user, has over the data, the better the position for the company. These sites don’t have a vested interest in protecting their users although they may pay lip service to the idea, especially when confronted with breaches and challenged to do better. Their engineers aren’t thinking about how to make sure their services are safe and comfortable to use, they’re thinking about how to streamline information gathering, processing, and display. And many of them aren’t approaching development from the perspective of privacy advocates, of people concerned about issues like stalking, abusive ex-partners, and other safety threats that could be an issue for users who want to be able to interact without endangering themselves.

The illusion of control becomes dangerous, leading people to believe both that they are protecting themselves and that the site they belong to is interested in protecting them and creating a safe user experience. They let down their guard because they believe they have reason to trust, and in doing so, expose themselves to significant risks. The cycle of private going public repeats itself, and with each iteration, companies assure users they’re reforming, which only serves to reinforce the illusion of control. You’ll be fine, we really learned from that experience. Stay with us.

28 December, 2012 – 10:33 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in technology | Tagged , , , |

Why Is Food Security So Difficult?

The amber waves of grain in the US Midwest may be referred to as ‘the bread basket of America,’ but a whole of people are going hungry right now, more than ever before. With the crash of the economy has come skyrocketing rates of food insecurity, and a host of other issues along with limited access to food. We are living in a culture where people are going hungry, and hunger is not always readily apparent, and this raises larger questions about why we are failing so intensely when it comes to food security and protecting our population from hunger.

Food insecurity isn’t always about obvious hunger; the issue isn’t necessarily that you can’t afford to eat at all, but that you are not getting enough food, or that you are not getting the right kind of food. For example, in urban areas, plentiful food may be available, but people can still be missing key nutrients because they don’t have access to a balance of foods. This is not as simple as how many calories people are consuming. You can eat a high calorie diet and still not be getting adequate nutrition, and that’s going to have an impact on your health.

In the midst of scaremongering over the ‘obesity epidemic’ in the United States, there’s a lot of very simplistic language about food and calories in, calories out. Much of this doesn’t acknowledge the fact that you can be fat and hungry, that you can be fat and nutritionally deficient, that in focusing solely on how fat is bad and evil and wrong, we miss the larger picture of what hunger really is, and what kind of nutrition people need to survive. This is an especially acute issue with children. Fat kids have been vilified in the US media, which relishes stories about how they’re what’s wrong with the US, but what those fat kids need isn’t shaming and hatred.

Children are especially nutritionally sensitive because they’re still developing physically, cognitively, and emotionally. When they don’t get the nutrients they need, they can experience problems with development that will have long-term impacts; their bones may be damaged, for example, or they can experience cognitive delays that make it hard to succeed in school. Nutritional deficiency cannot be measured by size alone. While the classic image of hunger and food insecurity is of a gaunt person with projecting bones and sunken eyes, fat people can be hungry too, and can experience a variety of physical and cognitive problems related to lack of nutritional support.

Addressing hunger shouldn’t be difficult in the United States. While the country has a large population, it also has a lot of farmland, and a high amount of food in production. That food is going somewhere, but the paths it takes often wind far from the stomachs of the people who need it. Many of the cereal crops grown in the US, for example, are going to feedlot livestock and to fuel production; ethanol corn production has spiked, which means there’s less corn for people (and animals) to eat. Meat is getting expensive because of the rise in cost for grain production, limiting access to one form of protein, while produce isn’t reaching many communities, and when it does, it is sometimes of poor quality and in bad condition.

While we have a network which allows for the rapid distribution of a wide range of products and services, we cannot seem to achieve market penetration with fresh foods, like the fruits and vegetables that would provide the nutrients people need to survive. The industrial agriculture lobby is pushing its own agenda, promoting the production of packaged food products, which sell at a higher price-point, but don’t necessarily offer needed nutrition. What they do offer is convenience, which could easily be structured into the preparation and packaging of fresh food, but isn’t.

In a classic example, an experiment with premixed salad greens and prechopped vegetables in corner stores went over like gangbusters in urban areas where people lacked access to fresh food. People wanted these products but hadn’t had access both to the food and the time needed to prepare it. When it was made available, they seized the opportunity. Yet, because fresh food requires more careful handling and has a shorter shelf life, it’s not as profitable, so industrial agriculture isn’t heavily invested in producing and promoting it. Consequently, the people it’s supposed to be serving with food are missing out on opportunities.

Yet, it’s individuals who are vilified for not ‘eating right,’ for having health problems related to nutritional deficiencies and lack of access to a stable, safe, and diverse food supply. Children are going to school hungry because their parents have no money, and their parents are blamed for being poor parents. Fat folks are struggling to access foods that make their bodies feel good, and they’re told that they should just eat less/exercise more/get surgery to be less fat, when that’s not actually the underlying problem.

The problem for so many is food insecurity, and uncertainty about where the next meal is coming from and whether it will contain what they need. This is not an issue that can be fixed by blaming individuals for systemic institutional problems; the people at fault here are those in a position of power structuring the policy and creating the products that contribute to what people can buy, where, and when. Why is it so difficult for the government to step back and take a holistic approach to food security than includes promotion of better access to food when people are clamouring for it, but don’t have the clout to influence the corporations that ultimately decide their menus?

27 December, 2012 – 10:58 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in social justice | Tagged , , |

Capitalism Wins Again: Hating Strikers, Not Their Employers

This has been a year of increased visibility of strikes in the media, by both public and private sector workers in a range of industries. From teachers to telecommunications professionals, workers are getting angry, they’re organising, and they’re taking their work to the streets when negotiation in other venues doesn’t work, not just in the United States but across the world. The response to that hasn’t been unilaterally supportive, though, and it illustrates the insidious way in which capitalism shapes so much of public thinking.

The response to strikes is often frustration and irritation, not with employers, but with strikers themselves. People complain about service interruptions and viciously attack people on the picket line for causing an inconvenience. They blame the strikers for poor conditions, including their own work environment, and seem enraged that people would have the audacity to protest when they aren’t satisfied with their treatment in the workplace. There is a sense that people on strike are being uppity and unreasonable, that they somehow owe everyone their labour in any conditions and should stop being so demanding; they are not entitled to safe, healthy, congenial workplaces, or if they are, they need to work that out on their own time.

This ignores the complex series of events that leads to a strike. Workers don’t wake up one day and decide to go on strike on a whim. First, they struggle with poor conditions in the workplace. They may try to address issues as individuals before slowly starting to band together. They work with union representatives. They push for contract negotiations. The union may meet with representatives of their employer multiple times in an attempt to hammer out the details of a contract that will satisfy the needs of both parties. Workers are willing to negotiate a deal; they don’t fixate on a list of demands and refuse to budge at any cost. They structure leeway and breathing room into what they want and prioritise the list of issues they’re concerned about to make sure the most important thing gets settled first.

If all of this fails, if the company doesn’t negotiate, refuses to come to the table, offers ridiculous terms, attempts to muscle the workers around, then they warn that they may strike to resolve the situation. It’s not coming as a surprise when workers finally do vote to strike, organise a picket line and start protesting their employer. The employer has had ample warning and has allowed the condition to deteriorate to the point where striking is the only option for workers, because there’s nothing else, and now they have to see it through to push for the concessions they want and need.

The thing is that people on strike would prefer to be working. Being on strike is stressful, especially if you don’t have the protection of a union to help cover expenses. You’re losing income, and if you’re passionate about your job, you’re not able to do what you love. Teachers, for example, love working with students and want to educate people. They know that time lost in school is tough, and they are just as unhappy about having to be on strike as students, parents, and members of the general public are about there being a strike. People don’t want to be on strike, but they know it’s their only option in the face of a situation that has built to a head and apparently cannot be resolved any other way.

They worry about the things piling up while they’re gone, literally and figuratively. When garbage collectors go on strike, they know that neighbourhoods are quickly going to acquire a buildup of garbage that will begin to smell and present public health problems. When nurses go on strike, they worry about their patients and the paperwork and procedures they’ll need to follow when they get back on the job. Telecommunications workers are concerned about routine maintenance and a backlog of work they’ll need to do when they return to work. All of these people want to be back at work, want to be doing their jobs, want to be helping the members of the public they serve.

But they still want fair working conditions. They still want to be safe at work, they want to be respected by their employers, they want to have benefits and pensions and reasonable wages. They don’t want to be exploited, and they want members of the public to understand what they do, and at what cost. It’s important to them that the general population understands what it is buying with a service, or products bought from a particular firm. They want people to know what public employees do and how they play an important role in society, and sometimes they only way to educate people is to show them what happens when the workers go away and services go undone.

And that is hard, and it is annoying. But the people to be angry at aren’t the workers asking for better conditions. Anger would be better directed at the employers who allowed poor conditions to persist and refused to negotiate when workers provided an opportunity to do so. People should be asking why employers were unwilling to flex, and why they were abusing their labour in the first place, what it is that makes companies think they are entitled to use people like disposable machinery rather than human beings.

Instead, the blame is turned on the workers, who have more in common with the people yelling at them than their employers. It’s a brilliant triumph of capitalism, to turn the lens away from the people responsible for perpetrating the conditions that lead to strikes and onto the people asking for better treatment. The fact that many people continue to buy into these myths, that public employees are the enemy, that people on strike are unreasonable and ridiculous, that complaining about strikers will make a strike end, is a telling illustration of how pervasive capitalist thought is in this society.

26 December, 2012 – 10:45 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , , |

One of These Things Is Just Not the Same: Lumping Kids With Different Needs Together

Being a teacher right now is tough work. Your funding is being cut, your classroom sizes are going up, the bureaucracy is breathing down your back, the general public hates you because you’re a public employee, and you’re being reminded at every turn that you, personally, are what’s wrong with the youth in this country today. You’re being burdened with a lot of things, many of which aren’t your responsibility or your fault, but someone is certainly eager to make it seem that way in order to deflect from the real issues. Meanwhile, you’re trying to do something you’re passionate about: teach children, raise the next generation, build a community of learners and seekers and leaders who could go on to do great things.

One issue that a lot of teachers of my acquaintance have been discussing more and more lately is the tendency to lump children with wildly different needs together in the same classroom, creating a situation where the teacher is struggling with competing requirements and all the kids lose out. This tends to happen to disabled students, ESL students, and students with ‘behavioural issues’ in low-income schools in particular, and it does a huge disservice to both children and educators. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of traction on doing something about it.

Talking to an ESL teacher recently, I was horrified to learn that while her classes primarily include ESL students, as they should, they also include some learning disabled students who were shunted into her classes because they had language difficulties. The problems that kids have with disabilities like autism, though, are not the same as those experienced by ESL students. If you have, say, an auditory processing disorder, being placed in an ESL class is not going to help you. Conversely, of course, an ESL student wouldn’t do well in a special education environment because that student doesn’t need an IEP and a disability-focused curriculum.

For her ESL students, having disabled students in the class is a disruption. Not necessarily for behavioural reasons, although that can be an issue, but because the teacher needs to adjust her style to accommodate those students and make sure they get a fighting chance to learn. Instead of focusing on ESL subjects and making sure her students improve their English skills so they can progress into the mainstream classroom, she’s having to balance the needs of the two student populations. The teacher must consider how and where to direct her attention to get the best return, while balancing a large class size and external pressures like demands for her students to test well.

Meanwhile, the disabled students aren’t having a great time in that setting either. ESL teachers are not given disability-specific training and lack the skills and experience necessary to work with disabled students, which means they might not be able to deliver the best education possible to their disabled students. Instead, they’re struggling to mentor their students as best they can, cobbling together experience, any extra training they’ve been able to get, advice from other teachers, and help from aides and other support staff. While some techniques used in ESL instruction might be helpful for disabled students, that’s not unilaterally the case, and it doesn’t address disability-specific issues that may need to be resolved so those students can mainstream, which is the ultimate goal.

In that environment, those students may not progress, not through any fault of the teacher, but through the fault of an administration that hears ‘language difficulties’ and thinks ‘ESL,’ assuming that all these students can be shunted together in a single classroom and it will work out. This is obviously not going to be effective, yet it’s the teacher who will be blamed for poor student performance under metrics that focus on ‘teacher accountability’ rather than looking holistically at the classroom environment, the school, the administration, and all the other factors that can go into student success. A teacher is only one part of the puzzle, and needs the support of a larger system to do the best job possible.

Needs can vary between disabled students themselves, which is one reason special education can be so fraught. If you stick all the disabled students in one classroom, some of them are going to do well because the teacher’s style and the environment works for them. Others are going to do poorly because their learning style doesn’t mesh with the classroom experience, because underlying issues aren’t being identified and addressed, because other students bully them, and for any number of other reasons. Just like students in mainstream classrooms experience variable performance depending on who they are as people.

There’s a strong desire to standardise education in the United States, to make it one-size-fits-all, to promote a single unified theory of educational experience and methodology, and it just doesn’t work. Different student needs are not a bad thing, something to be punished, something to medicate students for in order to force them to conform. They’re just needs, and they need to be identified and addressed rather than shoved under the table and ignored. In a school system truly focused on improving opportunities for students and addressing educational disparities, we wouldn’t be glomming students in large, amorphous groups and then being surprised when many of them don’t perform well.

Individual attention costs more money, requires more staff and space and a fundamental rethinking of how education works and who should be in charge. These aren’t necessarily bad things; the US doesn’t spend enough on schools, and it keeps slashing school budgets as though this will somehow solve our huge educational problems. What a different world we could live in if education were truly prioritised, and if all students had their needs met in inclusive schools and classroom environments dedicated to students, not to enforcing factorylike conformity.

25 December, 2012 – 10:08 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , , , |

Countering Disposable Culture, One Repair At A Time

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend arising over the last few months, and it’s one that gives me a small grain of hope for our future. It started in the pages of alternative weeklies, and slowly spread to more mainstream media sources, and began to be picked up on websites that collate news of note for people interested in environmental issues. It’s the rise, or really the return, of repair shops.

There was a time when repairshops were ubiquitous; you could get typewriters serviced, shoes re-soled, electronics fixed, clothes mended. The fees were often small unless it was a complex or rush job, and the people who did the work often had years of experience in the trade, and a knack for making anything functional again even if you thought it was irreparably broken.

The last time I had one of my typewriters serviced was in 1997, right before the last place in town that even did that closed, and he oiled the works and got everything working smoothly and perfectly and made something that was close to 100 years old work like new again. That same typewriter is in bad need of a servicing today, but it can’t get one, because there’s no one to do it here (that I know of); it’s a skill that’s been lost.

My typewriters are relics of a larger era when people bought things with the intent not of throwing them away when they started to show signs of wear, but of fixing them, repairing them, and nursing them along to keep them functional. Items were designed to be replaced only when you absolutely had to, and they were built with long life and servicing in mind. They were easier to service, but they also had sturdy casings and components to ensure they would stand up over time, rather than failing and requiring replacement within a few scant years.

I don’t want to sound utterly nostalgic here, but there is something to be said for a time when things were built solid and built to last. There’s a reason antiques from 100 years ago are still usable and functional, why furniture that looks delicate is surprisingly robust, why we keep using and treasuring things that are old. Those things come with history, which makes them precious, but they also come with craft, which makes them extremely valuable and extremely unlike many of the disposable things we’re surrounded by today.

Which is why I got intrigued when I read a profile of two men starting an electronics repair shop in a city I’ve forgotten the name of, now. And about a man in San Francisco who mends clothes. And about the resurgence of cobbling in one of the Southern states. All of these things point to some very interesting social and ecological trends that have me excited as an advocate for turning away from disposable culture, for changing the nature of consumerism to make it something more sustainable and functional in the long term, even though in the short term, corporations don’t benefit from it.

People are starting repair businesses because there’s a demand for it, and they’re having to relearn some skills in the process. Some are wisely turning to an older generation of people, those who ran the shops that closed when everyone became obsessed with always buying the latest and greatest. Others are blazing their own trail, some of them learning the hard way that experience actually can be incredibly useful for avoiding common pitfalls and mistakes. In all cases, these shops are starting, and thriving, because people want them and are using them and are excited about the possibility of getting items repaired.

Obviously, one factor in that is the economy. When the cost of living is rising while wages fall or remain steady, people need to be more thrifty about the items they have, and they cannot afford to hastily get rid of them. Hence, there’s much more interest in learning how to stretch them further and working on ways to extend their usable lifetime. Instead of throwing out a pair of boots when the soles start to go, you take them to a cobbler and have the soles replaced. While you’re at it, you might have the cobbler condition the leather and tighten the grommets to make sure the boots look good and stay in good shape. You have an incentive to care for these items because they’re expensive to replace.

And it’s possible that people are also responding to growing concerns about the nature of consumer culture and the rise of disposable products. If they are, that’s a good sign, because it shows that they might be breaking free of marketing and striking out on their own path, which is no mean feat. When you’re surrounded by cultural feedback telling you to buy disposable items and to think of products as things that should be easily thrown away when they start to break down, instead of being repaired, you definitely tend to internalise that, even if you have a stated claim of caring about the environment. When you decide to go a different route and repair items rather than tossing them, you’re thumbing your nose at a huge industry with a massive marketing juggernaut behind it.

Are there more repair shops than before, or are they just getting more prominent? Are people who were struggling to keep their shops open having an easier time of it now that there’s more interest in repair, or I am viewing a selective and biased media sample that doesn’t reflect the real state of affairs in this country? It’s hard to tell, but I will note that this is the kind of economic growth politicians should be promoting, because it’s one that creates a sense of longevity, history, and community alongside, of course, jobs.

24 December, 2012 – 10:55 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues | Tagged , , |

Book Review: White Cat, by Holly Black

I am reviewing this book approximately eight million years after it first came out, for which I apologise. I have a long backlog of reading and some books slip through the cracks while others filter up. Sometimes it seems like after catching up on newly-released fiction and finishing my other work and writing, I don’t have any more time for anything, let alone reading more books, which makes me immensely sad, because I deeply love reading. After having this and the rest of the Curseworkers series recommended to me repeatedly, I finally gave in and moved it up the priority list so I’d finally get it read.

In Holly Black’s carefully constructed world, some of the population is born with magic, with different strengths in different areas, depending on the individual. Some people can create luck, others can alter memories, others still can transform objects and living beings. The nonmagical community is terrified of the Curseworkers, as they’re known, and there’s a prohibition on the use of magic, along with, of course, a thriving black market which provides magic for sale to those who can pay for it, although the efficacy and safety of those spells isn’t always guaranteed.

Black’s world is complete with a magical mob of powerful Curseworking families who not only have magic of their own, but also work to control magic. In a world where magic is highly stigmatised, children who demonstrate magical tendencies may be thrown out of their homes and ostracised by their families, which creates a vulnerable population for the mafia to prey on, while families known to participate in Curseworking are feared and viewed as highly suspect.

One thing I love about Black’s world is how carefully she created the backstory, culture, and society. Everyone wears gloves to avoid touching anyone with their bare hands, in the interest of protecting themselves from magic, for example. Black also managed to tie in real history, sometimes with some stretching, to create a rich backstory for Curseworkers. I like it when authors work with real-world events, terminology, and beliefs when they create a world similar to, though not quite the same as, our own. It adds a layer of veracity and a connection for me as a reader, and it also creates a world of tantalising possibility. What if the hedge witches and other supposedly magical people of the past really were magical, and not just hated and feared for being outsiders?

Our hero is in a private school while his mother’s in prison for Working, as it’s known, and he doesn’t fit in anywhere. He’s the nonmagical member of his family, but everyone at school is suspicious of him because of his family origins. When he sleepwalks after dreaming of a white cat, his whole world starts to fall apart, and he finds himself at the middle of a curse, a mystery, and a whole lot of betrayal. It’s a tightly-woven and suspenseful plot with a fair amount of whiplash for the reader, although some of it is also very predictable.

Predictability is often cited as a problem with a story, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Yes, we as readers know what is going to happen or can easily guess, but the protagonist does not, and that creates tension in the story; we start to feel omniscient, and we start to wonder why he’s not seeing the obvious, and to start thinking about how he’s going to deal with it when reality explodes over him and he’s forced to confront it. Knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t necessarily detract from the pleasure of watching it unfold over the course of the story, and seeing how the author deals with it.

In White Cat, there are a lot of great questions about family and friendship, as well as layers of lies and deception. Can someone skilled at the art of the con drop his barriers long enough to make friends? Can he use his skills for good purposes as well as bad ones? And when you’re used to living in a web of lies, who exactly can you trust, and how far are you willing to trust them? With your life?

There’s also a fascinating and chilling undertone in the book as Black explores the uses and abuses of magic, and the commonalities between a family of con artists and a family of magic workers; when you’re one and the same, you have a mutual contempt for nonmagical people as well as marks. I thought it was an interesting take to explore, because there is a sense in a lot of YA fiction of this nature that magical people are better, special, unique. In Black’s world, they can be vicious and cruel and have no qualms when it comes to abusing not just nonmagical people, but also each other, to get what they want. It seems like a more accurate depiction of how people really operate, even if it’s simultaneously disheartening at times.

Black’s text explores what happens when you criminalise a basic aspect of people’s identity, trying to suppress magic by outlawing it, and how that can feed a dark underworld that only grows with efforts to bring it under control. Even our hero is not entirely innocent here, and with the shifting sands of loyalty and deception, it’s sometimes hard to know who to like, or to trust.

23 December, 2012 – 10:15 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in reviews | Tagged , , , |

The Normative Gaze In Fiction

In October, I attended the fabulous Sirens Conference in Stevenson, Washington, which consisted of two amazing days of programming with all sorts of interesting panelists and a lot of great discussions. Both inside specific programming and in casual conversations in the lobby and elsewhere about the lodge where we stayed, I came away with a lot of food for thought; it was great to be in a place where I could talk with like-minded people about a whole range of topics that fascinated me, and where we could have critical, in-depth discussions about complicated and sometimes nuanced subjects.

One of the more interesting panels I attended (and really, it’s hard to choose which was the most interesting) was one on the female gaze, featuring Kate Elliot, Malinda Lo, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Nalo Hopkinson. The women talked about how fiction is primarily written through the lens of the male gaze, by both female and male writers, and how this can affect the way readers interact with fiction, right down to confusing the gender of characters because they’re not used to encountering texts written from the perspective of the female gaze. The male gaze is one that becomes very normative, so standardised that people don’t even consciously realise that they’ve come to expect it and find it jarring when it’s not there.

Elliot briefly covered some definitions at the start of the panel to avoid confusion, and she made the important distinction between point of view and gaze; a story can have a female narrator or protagonist and still be written with the male gaze in mind, for example. The male gaze is a specific way of seeing and framing the environment, and one doesn’t need to be male as an author, narrator, or character to engage in it. Certain expectations and underlying beliefs come along with the male gaze; think, for example, of the idea that female bodies are there for the observing and taking.

When a book is written from the perspective of the female gaze, especially the queer female gaze, as Hopkinson and Lo pointed out, it becomes more textually complex. Readers may be forced to adapt to a shift in narrative that they aren’t accustomed to or ready for, one that they may not be expecting. Authors can sometimes use that to their advantage, as in a case where they want to create a nebulous framing that leaves certain aspects of the story ambiguous, making them more shocking when they’re unveiled.

Over the course of the panel, I started thinking more generally about the normative gaze, not just the male gaze; they didn’t have time to plunge into the fact that people assume the gaze is not just male but also white, nondisabled, fitting in with other groups in positions of power in society. The panel unfortunately didn’t have time to address this because it’s a complex subject and they only had an hour to talk, and as it was, we were running over, but it’s something that could definitely benefit from another assembly of smart, incisive women to expand the conversation about gazes and narrative.

What happens when you write from the perspective of the disabled gaze, for instance? How does this radically change the framing of a story? The nondisabled gaze is such an invisible part of our society that most people don’t even find it remarkable; it’s the thing that exploits disabled bodies, viewing them as freakish horror shows and figures of fascination. It’s the thing that fetishises cures and seeks ways to minimise and hide disability. How would a book’s treatment of disability, and thus the reader’s interpretation, change if the author made a conscious choice to write in the disabled gaze? How would we relate differently to characters with disabilities, including narrators and protagonists?

And what about racialised gazes? How does fiction shift as we force readers away from the white gaze? This came up at Sirens as well, the fact that many readers assume characters are white unless it is explicitly stated, and if a character’s race is ambiguous or unclear in Western fiction, readers will automatically assign whiteness. This can occur across the board with people of all races because the white gaze is so normalised, and because some people of colour and nonwhite people may be so unaccustomed to seeing themselves in Western fiction and thus unused to reading themselves into it, unlike white people, who rest in confident assurance that if a character’s race is not known, that character must be one of them.

Discussions of race can change radically in fiction when the author makes a conscious choice to shift away from the white gaze, but these waters can also be muddy. White people might mistakenly think they can successfully explore the subject, but they would do well to act carefully, because they could create a muddled mess in an attempt to create a diverse or innovative text. Authors of colour and nonwhite authors, meanwhile, can push at the boundaries of what white people expect from fiction and challenge assumptions and beliefs in their narratives by flipping the gaze, forcing the reader to move beyond the normative gaze.

A theme that came up in the female gaze panel is that the female gaze makes many readers uncomfortable. They don’t like having their norms and standards upended and they want stability in their fiction. The same holds true for other nonnormative gazes; readers in positions of dominance in particular want to stay in a world where they retain their dominance and unquestioned position as not just the tellers of tales, but the shapers of the lenses through which we see the world. Texts pushing at this dynamic fascinate me, and they’re tragically hard to find.

22 December, 2012 – 10:01 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in pop culture | Tagged , , , |