Ask Umbra on engagement rings, straws, and napkins

USDA makes the right call on school meat safety, animal tracking

Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on Valentine’s Day

Maybe American urban planners are better at keeping it real, or maybe the real estate market isn’t allowing many such ambitious projects, but shiny New Urbanist developments didn’t get a lot of attention. Instead, discussions kept returning to a recurring problem: Americans live too damn far from where they work.

Decades of bad development policy have left homes isolated from workplaces, stores, and civic centers. As a consequence, we lose time at home, exercise less, breathe dirtier air, spend more on fuel, release more greenhouse gases, and require more foreign oil.

It’s a drag on our businesses too, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Shaun Donovan said on Thursday evening. “The impact of this mismatch goes straight to the competitiveness of our economy,” he said. “Businesses can’t compete in the global economy without a workforce that can afford to live near them.”

He blamed the real estate industry for encouraging homebuyers to move further and further into the exurbs in search of cheap homes. “Lenders bought into the ‘drive to qualify’ myth as well, giving easy credit to homebuyers without accounting for how much it might cost families to live in these areas,” he said.

Donovan was at the conference with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus (filling in for Administrator Lisa Jackson) to announce the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, a new initiative of the three agencies. Donovan and LaHood owned up to the damage their departments have caused in the past—federally funded freeways that divided urban neighborhoods, federally funded housing projects far away from transit hubs. Maybe accepting “blame” for previous administrations is disingenuous, but it was also remarkable to hear them speaking with enthusiasm for walkable, human-scale communities.

“For the first time, the federal government has embraced these principles of smart growth. The Obama Administration recognizes that making urban, suburban and rural communities more livable is essential to our nation’s shared economic future,” Donovan, LaHood, and Jackson wrote in an op-ed Thursday.

The solution favored by most of the planners, architects, HUD and EPA officials, and local office-holders at the conference is mixed land use, quite possibly the least evocative name imaginable. But as poverty and justice advocates remind us, it doesn’t hold the same appeal for everyone.

When people talked about walking, though, they seemed to meet almost instinctively on the same page. There wasn’t a big focus on how walkable neighborhoods are a benefit to the climate, public health, and public safety. Everyone here seemed to understand that already. Instead, people talked about how they simply liked being in places that were built to the scale of people, not autos.

The EPA’s Stanislaus held up a T-shirt that said, “The pedestrian is the indicator species of a healthier community,” and drew big applause.

Walkability “guru” Dan Burden attracted fans (and groupies?) around the conference hall.

A woman in a video about Chicago’s economically diverse, award-winning Parkside of Old Town neighborhood said, “I feel more alive just being outside here.”

People don’t tend to say that about parking lots. Walkers signal something about what human spaces are supposed to be. They suggest a functioning civilization. You don’t have to make a lot of arguments for that.

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At first blush this seems like more teabagging—appealing to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins. If you check in the comments under the video, that perspective is well represented. Says Metallicafan6611, “You guys all laugh. But this is really going to happen. Wake up people! Stop being sheep!” Enviros are predictably steamed (see, e.g., Adam Siegel).

The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more the teabaggy interpretation just doesn’t quite fit. The thrill at the end, when the guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police—not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you’re looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that? Why offer escape from a moral dilemma your audience doesn’t acknowledge exists?

The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police—people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.

Now go back through the ad. Notice that everyone who gets busted is a man. There are lots more urban and suburban professional males in Audi’s target market than there are teabaggers.

To scratch one layer deeper: what is Audi’s message to these guys who want to be good but find the effort anxious-making? Here’s a way to meet your green obligations and still have a bad-ass car!  The Audi A3 is both green and desirable—indeed more desirable because it’s green. Buried deep in this ad, in other words, is a bright green message: prosperity, pleasure, and sustainability can be achieved together.

Anyway, not to overthink it (ahem), but the ad is not just another pot shot at greens. It’s an appeal to a new and growing demographic that isn’t hard-core environmentalist—and doesn’t particularly like hard-core environmentalists—but that basically wants to do the right thing. Audi’s effort to reach them, however clumsy, is actually a bit ahead of the curve.

———

UPDATE: I’ve been getting some ... colorful emails about this post. Some excerpts, and a response, here.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

My boyfriendand I are talking seriously about marriage, and he knows I don’t want a diamondring (at least not a new one) because of the social and environmentalimpacts. You addressed this topic in 2003, saying the only good options were no ringor a used ring. I’m wondering if, in the past seven years of “green”innovation, there might be other options to consider.

Thanks,SarahWashington,D.C.

A. Dearest Sarah,

You know, I just can’t get that song out of my head. If you liked it then you shoulda put a ringon it/If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it ... OK, that’sactually the only part I know, so it’s just running on a mental loop as I writethis.

Obviously, your boyfriend cares a great deal about your finger becausehe does, in fact, want to adorn it with a ring. And while, sure, the most eco-friendlyoptions may be to have no ring at all or opt for a second-hand band, theyaren’t the only ways to celebrate your engagement in a socially andenvironmentally responsible fashion. Maybe it’s just because I smell Valentine’sDay in the air, but I think there’s something lovely about what the ringrepresents, despite its roots as a sort of down payment.

A couple of things to look for if you’re going the new ring route:recycled metals and responsible diamond sourcing. I won’t take you through thewhole depressing diatribe—check out No Dirty Gold’s site or DiamondFacts.org for more info. But I will say mining metals is a dirty business; it takes 20tons of mining waste to produce just one gold band. And the cyanide used toextract gold from ore is highly toxic. Plus, the unethical treatment of diamondmine workers, as well as the horror of conflictor blood diamonds, is a major issue. You need to get the real down-low on whereyour diamond is sourced—take a look at BrilliantEarth’s Conflict Free Diamond Buying Guide, which includes a handy list of questionsto ask a jeweler. Other companies known for adhering to ethical social andenvironmental standards include GreenKarat and Ingle & Rhode.

You could always go a completelyuntraditional route with a woodenring made from salvaged wood, a tattooed band, or perhaps a ChiaPet-esque ring, though a moss-growing ring probably won’t last as long asyour love.

Matrimonially,Umbra

P.S. When it comes time to plan your wedding, check out our how-to guide for no-(or low-) impact nuptials.

Q. Dear Umbra,

I enjoydrinking out of straws. Is this putting me at risk for BPA contamination? Howawful of a habit is this for the environment? Are straws recyclable?

Thank you,WMPortland,Ore.

A. Dearest WM,

Don’t be ashamed—I also enjoy drinking straws. But plain and simple:Plastic straws suck.

While they’re not likely to leach toxic chemicals like BPA and may berecyclable (check with your local recycling program to find out), mostdisposable straws are made from polypropylene—a product of the nastypetrochemical industry. And the plastic from the thousands of straws litteringlandfills will never fully break down, so ask yourself: Is it worth it to enjoydrinking one beverage from a plastic straw, knowing that the plastic will infact outlive us all? Kind of dramatic, no?

The best solution is, of course, no straw at all—just suck it up,tilt that glass, and pour the beverage directly into your mouth. Did that bringa little tear to your eye? There, there. Don’t cry. The good news is that youdon’t have to forgo the simplepleasure of consuming a cold beverage through a straw in order to honor yourcommitment to the planet. Try opting for a reusable straw made from stainlesssteel or glass instead.Just imagine how impressed your dinner date will be when you turn down thewaiter’s disposable straw and whip out your own shiny reusable one. The answeris very.

Slurpily,Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I have twosmall children, who tend to go through a lot of napkins at meal time. Is itbetter to use recycled paper napkins, or to switch to cloth napkins that I canwash with the rest of their never-ending laundry? They typically go through 1–2napkins at each meal and snack time—so about 5–10 each per day. Thanks!

Lucy M.Round Rock,Texas

A. Dearest Lucy,

Questions like this really do warm my heart. Granted, this falls underthe small choices category, one I often tell people not to sweat. But you’reessentially asking: Should I opt for the green choice or the green one?

The fact is either way you go—recycled or reusable—you’re being a moreconscious consumer by taking a big step up from choosing disposable napkins.Disposables are made from virgin fiber and bleached with chlorine (whichreleases carcinogenic dioxins during manufacture—ick). Why buy bright whitenapkins when your kids are going to soil them soon anyway? If every householdin the United States replaced just one package of virgin fiber napkins with100% recycled ones, we could keep 1 million trees standing.

That said, let’s take a look at reusable cloth napkins—the optimalchoice, in my opinion, if you pick the right ones and care for them in the mosteco-friendly fashion. Opting for secondhand napkins or ones made from reclaimedmaterial—or getting crafty and makingyour own—conserves new resources. If you’d rather buy new ones, choose organiccotton or hemp.

Odds are that your kids will get multiple uses out of one cloth napkinbefore it’s washed, so you won’t be adding mountains of dirty laundry. When itis time for a cleaning, launder the napkins in cold water and NPE-free detergent, and skipthe dryer sheets. Skipthe dryer, for that matter, and hang your napkins on a clothesline or indoordrying rack. And cut your spaghetti sauce servings down to once a week.

Wipily,Umbra

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Sometimes when I’m down in the stacks researching answers toyour latest dilemmas, I enjoy taking a stroll down Ask Umbra archives lane. Hereare some sparkly tidbits I culled from my past advice on lessening your impact onthat sweet little romantic holiday, Valentine’s Day. Have any of your ownsustainable loving tips or stories? Let me know in the comments section belowor shoot me an email.

Lovingly,Umbra

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To eat fish, or not? If you’re pregnant, nursing, or even thinking about becoming pregnant, it’s a Catch-22. Seafood is the best possible source of the long-chain omega-3 fatty acid DHA, which is critical for a baby’s brain and eye development, both in utero and in the “fourth trimester,” while the baby is nursing and the brain is still developing. But there’s a catch: seafood contains contaminants that can be harmful to babies—particularly methylmercury, which can harm the developing nervous system, causing subtle deficits in language, memory, motor skills, perception, and behavior.So for a pregnant woman, the decision whether to eat fish is now freighted with consequences.  Eat fish, and you’re putting your baby’s brain at risk of from toxic contaminants.  Skip fish, and you’re denying your baby’s brain of crucial nourishment. 

Pregnant and nursing women never asked to make this choice. 

Mercury is everywhere, even in the air we breathe.  It comes from a variety of sources, but the largest in the US are coal-fired power plants, which exhale elemental mercury in the fumes of coal smoke.  The mercury drifts around on air currents, and eventually settles into water bodies, where bacteria convertit into a far more troublesome form called methylmercury.  Methylmercury binds to protein,  and accumulates in every-higher concentrations at every step of the food chain.  It’s poison. It hurts babies’ brains. All fish contain some methylmercury, and some fish species contain enough that doctors recommend that expectant mothers avoid eating them completely.

And that’s a shame, since there’s s no better source of DHAs than fish.  DHAs build brain connectors while a baby’s body isdeveloping in the womb. 

So, there, in a nutshell, is the dilemma.  As a community, we’ve allowed one of the most healthful foods for pregnant mothers to become contaminated with a compound that can harm developing babies’ nervous systems.  We’ve given polluters free rein; but left thetough choices to women, and the hardships to the children they bringinto the world.

What’s the right choice for an expecting mother? Well, as a fisherman’s daughter, a former Puget Sound gillnetter myself, andproud resident of “Salmon Nation,” I believe in the power offish—particularly salmon—as a super food. And the more I read, the moreI believe it’s also super brain food. My favorite book about nutrition during pregnancy and early childhood,Nina Planck’s Real Food for Mother and Baby, goes so far as to say thatyour baby’s brain is “made of fish.”

But that decision—“Yes, I’ll eat fish”—prompts one question more:  How much fish is safe?

Well, it depends on the type of fish. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental ProtectionAgency (EPA) officially advise women who “may become pregnant, pregnantwomen, nursing mothers, and young children” to limit consumption certain fish andshellfish to 12 ounces a week, and to avoid shark,swordfish, king mackerel, and Tilefish completely. (Drat—I’vealways loved swordfish!)  EPA says that, and I quote: “By following these recommendations for selectingand eating fish or shellfish, women and young children will receive thebenefits of eating fish and shellfish and be confident that they havereduced their exposure to the harmful effects of mercury.”  In addiiton, each state has its own advisories about fish consumption as well.

Generally speaking, the fish to avoid are large predators.  Peak predators act as concentrators for bioaccumulative toxics: their bodies absorb the methylmercury from their prey, which, in turn,have absorbed methylmercury from living things lower on the foodchain.  And the bigger thepredator fish, the more fish it eats. Larger fish also tend to livelonger than smaller fish, so there’s simply more time for mercury tobuild up in their bodies.

But just as some fish contain high levels of mercury, others contain less.  Five of the most commonly eaten fish that areconsidered “low in mercury” are shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon,pollock, and catfish. Albacore (“white”)tuna, another commonly eaten fish, has more mercury than canned light tuna. So when choosing yourtwo meals of fish and shellfish per week, the EPA/FDA recommendations suggest you limit yourself to up to 6 ounces (one average meal) ofalbacore tuna per week.

But how confident can you be, really, that fish are actually a healthy, safe food for you and your kids? Studies are mixed. Planck points to a few that indicate more fish isbetter. In 2005, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health announced that the government mercury warnings could cause pregnantwomen to eat too little fish to nourish her baby’s brain. In 2007, Joseph Hibbeln, an expert on omega-3 fats at the NationalInstitutes of Health, published a study of more than eleven thousandpregnant women near Bristol, England. The womenconsumed varying degrees of seafood each week: none at all, around therecommended portions, or more than 12 ounces (at least 3 servings aweek.) Researchers later assessed the women’s children, aged six monthsto eight years, for various measures of mental and social development.Even after accounting for about two dozen confounding factors—socialdisadvantage, perinatal health, diet, etc.—the children of women eatingless than two servings of fish per week had lower verbal, fine motor,and social skills than the children of the fish-eating mothers. Thelower the seafood intake, the higher the chances of poor development.Some health researchers have even begun to wonder whether fish oilsmight even protect against toxic methylmercury. Biologist Sandra Steingraber in her book Having Faith, An Ecologist’sJourney to Motherhood, on the other hand,cites a bunch of studies that strike fear in any mother-to-be. A studyin the Faroe Islands, for example, carried out by Danish researcherPhilippe Grandjean, looked at 1,022 babies born in 1986-87 to women whoate fish and high-mercury content whale meat while pregnant.When they were seven years old, the children were evaluated on theircognitive and motor skills. The results were sobering. Deficiencieswere found in memory, learning and attention that were proportional tothe level of mercury that had been recorded in their umbilical cordblood and maternal hair. “These children were not actually sick. Theywere just slower in solving riddles and other puzzles.” In the 1970s, agroup of mothers in Iraq unknowingly ate flour milled frommercury-dressed wheat. At high concentration levels of mercury, theirchildren developed progressive retardation and paralysis. In 2000, the National Academy of Sciences released a report thatconcluded that each year in the United States, as many as 60,000children are born at risk for neurodevelopmental problems owing toprenatal exposure to mercury—these are kids that the report describedas “struggling to keep up in school and who might require remedialclasses or special education.” Steingraber points out that “Big Fish”—fisheries industry lobbiesequivalent to “Big Oil”—have stood side-by-side with utility companies to fight tighter standards for mercury. If this kind of pressure wins out, itmeans that levels of the metal could keep rising to the point where thechoice would be all too clear: forego brain-nurturing fish altogether.(As I mentioned recently, the US hastaken some baby steps towards curbing mercury pollution.) In my own deliberations, I’ve erred on the side of fish. Seafood issimply the best way to get the DHA my baby needs. Salmon is among thesafer seafood choices and it’s a personal favorite. A 3.5-ounce portionof wild sockeye salmon contains more than 1,200 milligrams of omega-3fats—and it’s a yummy delivery system. I’ve eaten it a couple times aweek during my pregnancy and now that I’m in the heavy-dutybrain-development stage (third trimester), I’m trying to eat even more.And even though every bite (while delicious) reminds me of the seriousconsequences I’m toying with, I will continue to do so when I startbreastfeeding.

That’s the gamble I’m taking with my own baby. I’ll also continue towork toward climate and energy policy that frees us from the shacklesof dirty energy—because the pollution from coal plants not onlythreatens the climate, but byproducts like mercury are also hurting all ourkids.

What’s your fish story? Did you eat fish during pregnancy? And how didyou sort out all the conflicting information? What can moms do toinsist on better standards for mercury pollution? 

Images courtesy: JG in SF and Manuel W,  Flickr.com.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

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Mom-powered politics

Getting to the airport from Seattle’s north side—its wealthier, whiterhalf—on public transit first involves a bus ride downtown. From there, as of twomonths ago, you can take a newlight-rail line, instead of another bus, to Sea-Tac Airport.This north-side resident found the light rail underwhelming—the train chugsalong at street level at a modest speed, stopping 10 times, even stopping attimes for traffic lights. It’s still faster to take the express bus fromdowntown.

So it was interesting to hear a south-sidecommunity organizer speak Wednesday about working during the light-rail planningprocess to get precisely the things that annoyed me. “We [told transitplanners] we wanted more stops and we don’t want intersections cut off,” said Yolanda Sinde,who was speaking at the NewPartners for Smart Growth conference in Seattle.

I wasn’t blind to the fact that people live alongthe route, or that a new transit service could be disruptive. But Sinde’scomments were a reminder that low-carbon development in cities—oranywhere—isn’t always equally beneficial to all communities.

It was a message driven home by others at theurban-planning event: the principles of Smart Growth may be climate-friendly, but they haven’t always benefittedlow-income and minority neighborhoods.

“What is the difference between Smart Growth andgentrification? This is a big question,” said Deeohn Ferris, anenvironmental-health lawyer, consultant, and former official at the EPA andNational Wildlife Federation.

She questioned the myth that revitalizing poorneighborhoods requires outside residents, outside role models, and outsidebusinesses. This attitude fails to appreciate the social networks andentrepreneurship potential already in those places, she said.

Urban planners often look to build newdevelopments on abandoned lots and industrial sites—but that strategy isn’tnecessarily popular with locals.  “Formany, ‘Smart Growth’ means fancy infill from outside people,” Ferris said.“‘Infill’ is a scary word to many communities.”

The environmental and social benefits of buildingbetter cities coincide with each other much more than they conflict (I lookforward to learning more about this at this week’s conference). But enthusiastsof Smart Growth/New Urbanism/happy-walkable-what-have-you design would do wellto work with environmental-justice leaders like Sinde and Ferris, who havedecades’ worth of knowledge about what poorly crafted development can do toneighborhoods.

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HeidiGarrett-Peltier and Robert Pollin at The Political Economy and ResearchInstitute of the University of Massachusetts report the following numbers forjobs created per dollar of investment.

Tosummarize, reforestation and restoration outperforms even the second-mostjobs-intense activity analyzed by 74 percent, and conservation exceeds othermajor jobs alternatives, including especially new highway construction, WallStreet, and conventional energy sources like oil and nuclear.

See full jobs table here [pdf].

Thismeans that if the government is serious about creating jobs, it’s got to passclean energy and climate legislation and a new jobs bill that includes powerfulincentives for reforestation, revegetation, sustainable forest management, andconservation.

Thislegislation can perform the equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corps, theextremely popular New Deal program that put millions of people to work inforestry and conservation.

Whyare forest investments such good job generators? Restoring forests (as well as rivers,wetlands, peat bogs, and prairies), requires people, which means jobs: soilscientists, tree planters, equipment operators, water engineers, and people tonurture the trees over time.

Conservation—investing in, for instance, the expansion of National Parks and other local,state, and federal recreation areas through, for instance, the Land and WaterConservation Fund—isn’t too far behind. Some of the direct jobs in thissector include park rangers, park transportation workers, and other parkpersonnel.

Relativeto other spending options, investments in forests and parks tend to go towardswages rather than capital investments—providing the greatest benefit tocommunities, especially in economically difficult times (since Nature largelyprovides the materials that go into making a tree or a prairie grow for free,you don’t need the same kind of capital as you do for, say, building ahighway).

Theactual jobs impact of forest investment is actually significantly greater thanwhat’s represented in the above table. A variety of other studies have analyzedjob creation through conservation and found dramatic indirect effects. Expand anational park, national forest, river or local recreation area, and spending onand employment in outdoor recreation—everything from birdwatching and hikingto fishing and hunting - is dramatically increased.

A 2006 report for the OutdoorIndustry Association found that the availability of active outdoorrecreation generated $289 billion in retail sales and services across theUnited States, with a total of 6.5 million jobs supported by the recreationeconomy overall. Other reports focusing on roadlessareas, nationalforests, and privately-owned forests have found similar results: the NationalAlliance of Forest Owners [pdf] reports that every hundred acres ofprivately owned forests supports eight jobs and the FAO reported lastyear that investing in sustainable forestry management could create ten millionnew, good-paying jobs worldwide. 

Ofcourse, jobs aren’t the only reason restoration and conservation are a goodidea: forests and other wildlands suck pollution out of the air, providewildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities—allowing America to putpeople back to work, and giving them somewhere beautiful to go when they’redone.  

Olivier Jarda, apolicy associate at the Center for International Policy, assisted with theresearch for this post.

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Messaging that can save the clean energy bill

How, then, do I talk to my children—five and nine—about the state of the planet, about hope? The question is worth asking, and revisiting, not only for the sake of the children and the future they will both inherit and create, but also because thinking about things in ways that children can understand can open up a new clarity for ourselves, as well.

I recently hosted an afternoon of readings and discussions on the themes of poetry and ecology. Poets, scientists, and activists spoke about their work and about how different forms of imagination can help us reorient ourselves in the world. The room was filled to capacity and there were many families with young children; I felt proud to have gotten an intergenerational audience, until the final speaker’s remarks.

An eighty-two year old poet, anthropologist, and environmentalist, he began by saying that he was going to tell us the truth.  He had been hopeful, he said, for nearly eighty years.  Now, however, when he looks at the state of the world, he no longer believes that hope is possible.

I could see the heads of many in the audience nodding: yes, he’s spoken the unspeakable truth, we need to continue, yes, but without hope, with a bitter, existential realism; and part of me was nodding too. But another part of me cringed. I didn’t want my children to hear this message, and I felt bad that so many other children were in the room.

Was it naïve to have invited families? Is bringing children to an event on poetry and ecology now like bringing them to an event on sex trafficking? Last year a friend’s eight-year-old had trouble falling asleep for several months because he was worried that global warming would flood his city and his house and that everyone would drown. Nothing could reassure him. Was I going to be getting angry calls at one a.m. from friends who had brought their children—who would no longer sleep—to my event?

I didn’t get any of those calls, but the poet’s remarks about hope continued to unsettle me. In the weeks since, as I have watched my children play and move through their days, as I have seen them struggle and learn, it has become increasingly clear to me that the reasons a message of hopelessness is not good for children remind us what is wrong with it for adults as well.

It is, of course, not when things are going well, but in the face of adversity that hope is most important. Recently a close family friend died of cancer. My son was very upset. What I said to him is what I have come to believe: Giving up on hope is always wrong, even in the face of what we can calculate to be certain destruction, because it cuts us off from ourselves and our own humanity, privileging the head over the heart, the mind over the body.  In one sense, this is exactly what we humans have done in our interactions with the natural world (and it is partly because we have done this—because we have poisoned our waters and our land—that there is a cancer epidemic).  We have cut ourselves off from the rest of nature.  But reconnecting with that world is the key to a more sustainable future, just as reconnecting with our hearts is the key to a sustainable existence.

Children, or at least children who still get outside sometimes, intrinsically place themselves in relation to the world around them (another reason it’s so important that children do spend time in the natural world). My friend’s global warming-obsessed son was finally able to sleep again only after he read that scientists had predicted sea levels would rise about a meter in his lifetime, and therefore would not cover his own nose. This makes much less sense than the many ways in which his parents tried to reassure him that things would be all right. But it makes a kind of poetic sense: the boy was imagining his own body in relation to the natural world around him.

“Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words./ And never stops at all,” Emily Dickinson wrote in 1861, the first year of the Civil War. More than 600,000 young men would die in the next four years. For those young men and their families, as Dickinson well knew, hope must have been nearly silenced—and yet she imagines a bird perpetually singing.

Sometimes watching my children squabbling or running around our small apartment in the middle of winter, I feel like I am watching—and hearing—cackling crows or mangy city pigeons. But mostly, I feel like I am living with birds who cannot stop singing, who remind me that hope is an essential part of ourselves, and who remind me of the fullness of being alive.

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