The law ignores the Constitutional ban on “unreasonable search” and protecting personal documents. It also seeks to establish state-level control over an area of law that is the domain of the federal government. There is, for instance, no Arizona customs service or national border service. The border is a federal category, and immigration is controlled, by law, by various federal agencies and the jurisprudence of federal law. There is language in the law that is reportedly designed to prevent the federal government from interfering with state enforcement.

In unmistakably relevant and meaningful language, the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The president announced before the law was even signed by Arizona’s governor that he has directed the Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate whether or not specific provisions of the Arizona law would violate federal or Constitutional civil rights protections. Numerous rights groups have said they plan to mount one or more legal challenges to the law. Constitutional scholars have begun to weigh in and some Arizona law enforcement officials have said they think it will place an unfair burden on police, and possibly take them outside their real scope of legal authority.

According to the New York Times:

Hispanics, in particular, who were not long ago courted by the Republican Party as a swing voting bloc, railed against the law as a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling. “Governor Brewer caved to the radical fringe,” a statement by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, predicting that the law would create “a spiral of pervasive fear, community distrust, increased crime and costly litigation, with nationwide repercussions.”

While police demands of documents are common on subways, highways and in public places in some countries, including France, Arizona is the first state to demand that immigrants meet federal requirements to carry identity documents legitimizing their presence on American soil.

For Americans who grew up during the Cold War era, the specter of totalitarian dictatorship was often represented, even in children’s cartoons, by the scene in which policemen stop people going about their daily routines, demanding “Your papers please!” There are organizing efforts going on to stage massive protests against the law, and to pressure other states to pledge not to take such action. The Miami Herald reports that a loose association of truckers traveling into or out of Arizona are planning to stage a trade boycott of the entire state.

There is also a spreading effort, across Arizona and other states, to mount a political challenge to the Republican domination of state politics, with nearly 30% of the population of Arizona being of Hispanic descent. NPR correspondent Ted Robbins reports that:

The things that are circumstantial are the fact that a larger than general portion of the Hispanic population in Arizona is under 18. So, of course, they can’t vote. And then there’s also a lot of folks who are in the country either legally or not legally, but they can’t vote because they’re not citizens yet. So, if you pair them away, what you have is 17 percent of eligible voters are Hispanic. That’s of the whole population. So they don’t, you can see that that halves the number of total Hispanics in the state. So the numbers belie their electoral power.

There is some question as to whether this law is taking place specifically because Republican party leaders in the state do not believe there is any substantial electoral risk from alienating the Hispanic voting population, which tends to lean Democratic to begin with. Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) has sought to frame the legislation as an effort to fight back against “the murderous greed of drug cartels”, even as some fear the militant bandwagoning of prominent figures like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has called for the deployment of thousands of US military personnel to the Mexican border.

The law is in some ways an expression of deep cultural paradoxes running through the rightward shift of the Republican party nationally. The anti-tax “tea party” movement has spent the better part of a year trying to oppose Pres. Obama and his agenda as a “socialist” takeover in which the government will take an egregiously authoritarian role in the private lives and economic choices of individuals, with little hint of any such possibility. But the same militant conservatism appears to be the impetus for this law, which establishes an unprecedented right for law enforcement to involve itself in people’s daily routines, with almost no adherence to Constitutional principles of due process.

That psychological conflict, inherent in the apparent radicalization of the Republican party and its public policy agenda, may ultimately be a serious problem for the party in terms of the arithmetic of general elections and of elections of national scope. It may also allow the Democratic party to rouse an under-involved political constituency whose personal, family and community interests, not to mention a committed belief in the value of American Constitutional ideals, and motivate a wave vote against such measures.

The legal challenge will likely come from three fronts. There will likely be a federal response, at least insofar as the Justice Department will seek to instruct Arizona state and municipal law enforcement that the jurisdictional scope of this legislation is, due to Constitutional provisions, far narrower than the governor and the law’s backers would like. There will also be a civil rights response, coming from one or more prominent and community-based organizations. And there may be a citizen-based response, in which individuals targeted by the law, or who fear they may be targeted for unequal treatment, will sue the state or law enforcement.

The LA Times reports:

Obama signaled that a legal showdown might be possible and that his administration would “examine the civil rights and other implications” of the law. Department of Justice officials said they “were reviewing the bill” but declined to discuss the legislation further. Immigrant rights groups have vowed a court fight, arguing that regulating immigration is a federal matter.

[...] Hundreds of high school students left classes this week in protest, pouring into the plaza outside the state Capitol and urging a veto. Religious leaders and police chiefs — and thousands of callers to the governor’s office — pressed for Brewer to reject the bill. Some Arizona officials argued it would stigmatize the state much as its past refusal to honor the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. U.S. Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, a Democrat who represents southern Arizona, called for a convention boycott of his own state.

The measure not only sets up a serious showdown over the nature of long-standing civil rights protections, and a genuine national crisis of identity over the degree to which police action and the daily activities of citizens might be in conflict, but it also challenges the historic openness of American society. The ideological movement behind this legislation favors sealing the southern border of the United States militarily, and the official establishment of what has been called in the past the “Fortress America” model of immigration enforcement.

This confrontational model is tempting to those who believe it will bring added security, especially in communities where a rise in levels of chronic poverty or violent crime appears to be associated with the black market in human smuggling. But there is little evidence that such measures would address that problem. The most likely practical outcome is the widespread, institutionalized harassment of individuals, even US citizens, most of whom are in no way violating any law, even up to and including immigration law.

The immigrant identification law has been compared to the beginnings of apartheid, in which the status of individuals had to be officially determined and classified, ostensibly in the interests of “security”. And while the specific provisions of the law would erode individual liberties in serious ways — allowing law enforcement to demand proof of residency at any moment, for virtually any reason, and possibly subjecting citizens and policemen to legal penalty for not collaborating — it contains no specific provisions that would directly impact the activities of violent smuggling cartels.

The book, bound pages imprinted with text in one form or another, is one of the oldest continuously used and still highly relevant technologies, and for good reason. Paper is both a simple and a complicated tool, requiring large amounts of industry and energy to produce, yet is produced in massive quantities and seems endlessly available. Staining it in a way that allows a visual rendering of a given code (a language and its preferred alphabet) allows us to create a record of ideas and thought patterns that holds up remarkably well against time and can be accessed with no technology aside from our own senses and knowledge of the code in question.

Fortunately, the human brain seems to be organically structured to deal fluidly with language as a framework for thought and communication, and acquiring knowledge of an as-yet unlearned language is not too daunting a task. And we have translators for when it is. Language interacts with the human mind in a highly permissive and constructive way, and even seems to provide the brain with structural clues that permit us to acquire knowledge more rapidly than deliberate intention would allow, at least at the earliest stages.

The book is designed to help language do its job, of affording us a more expansive communicative landscape than we could otherwise access, and expand the scope of our intellect and our ability to imagine and to achieve. In the age of digital media, when electronic text is all the rage, and really does offer some major improvements on the static page, it’s worth taking note of the staying power of paper and ink. Having a way to not only access and to share knowledge, but to believe in its consistency, is central to being able to build a society with persistent opportunities to live and enact its ideals.

While the absolute long-term preservation of certain fragile documents, like the original Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States, requires advanced scientific measures to achieve a hermetically sealed environment, such safe conditions have been achieved by less complex methods, as in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book is a lightweight, portable, personable and everywhere accessible (“always on”) rendition of the graven-in-stone paradigm we find with Hammurabi’s Code or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. It gives us the constant reference and the confidence of a verifiable authoritative version.

The nature of the digital medium is such that one has a very difficult time checking the authenticity of “original” texts, without a paper original on hand. (This is the logic of the movement for a voter-verifiable paper trail in electronic voting processes in the United States, where accurately registering the “intent of the voter” is mandated by law.) We have to recognize the power of digital technologies, and their ability to liberate us and expand our communicative and productive reach, but we also need to understand the complete story and the genius of the hard copy bound volumes on which all digital publishing is ultimately based.

Can electronic paper replace the paper copy? In many ways, it can… it can give us mobility and freedom of selection, allow us to carry thousands of volumes with us, in an object that weighs less and is far less cumbersome than even one volume of a thousand pages. It can allow us to access huge reserves of text from almost anywhere (Amazon’s ‘Whispernet’ service, for instance, via the Kindle devices). It might even allow us to create distinct, parallel reading environments. And it can certainly keep a book looking “new” and undiminished by overuse.

But then, for those who love reading, isn’t the physical experience of the page part of the enjoyment? Isn’t the physical page’s mortality, its vulnerability, its susceptibility to wear and tear, part of what endears us to a given book, makes us believe we have participated in its ongoing life and that it has infiltrated into ours? Electronic paper does not allow for that kind of organic experience with the written word. And it is not as stable as the printed page.

Ultimately, the book is a powerful technology for delivering information that works without a device or service provider. It can be owned and kept in an intimate setting, without requiring a charge of electricity from a wide-ranging grid. It allows for intimate moments in which writers have succeeded in realizing something uniquely human to interact directly with intimate moments in which readers are realizing something uniquely human. And that, after all, is what we celebrate when we celebrate the book, the literary arts, the dream and daring of what writing is for the human species.

The discussion opened with comments on statistical analysis of proress toward the goal of achieving 50/50 parity. With a 7% improvement since Beijing, the discussion moved quickly toward the question of how to accelerate the rise of women in decision-making and leadership roles.

With not enough parliamentary-level attention focused on women’s issues or the specific virtues of achieving parity in representation, local government emerged as a potential area of strategic focus, in relation to promoting women’s access to positions of leadership and decision-making. Quotas were raised as a potential policy lever by which to promote parity. Revai Mekanje suggested working to adopt a “more catalystic” approach to fostering support networks and the cultural underpinnings for women to take leadership positions and influence policy.

Leadership, as such, was the next topic: women need access to leadership positions, and women too often do not see themselves as right for leadership positions. These cultural and psychological barriers to accumulating political capital need to be addressed. Francisco Cos-Montiel noted that in studies of Indian political participation, it was clear that women who were able to achieve leadership or decision-making roles, in politics or in the private sector, were almost uniformly from a societal and cultural elite. Similar trends were seen across South America, highlighting the need to build the political capital of women from marginalized communities.

Norah Matovu-Winyi viewed this as the challenge of “decolonization of the mind”, which was then framed by the group as a project of “depatriarchalization”. Matovu-Winyi explained that this problem relates to a psychological colonization, because it involves the ceding of authority to a traditionally or systemically more powerful other who, it is supposed, “knows more than we do”. Personal or community agency is excluded by the prejudice that leadership entails a special inborn quality or elevated worth. In order to counter this surrender of selfhood to disinterested traditional elites, Matovu-Winyi proposed a deliberate effort to “demystify leadership”.

Marren Akatsa-Bukachi suggested this project must also apply to positions of influence in the private sector. Enterprise and community leadership roles, outside of elective political office, can wield significant influence that determines numerous factors of the quality of life for women, girls and whole communities. Without access to leadership roles in the private sector, women are less able to influence policy locally or decide how resources and opportunity are distributed in relation to their communities.

Akatsa-Bukachi also noted the pervasive custom of how even food is distributed among men and women, and linked this to the problem of the colonization of the mind by a systemic prejudice that favors patriarchy. Women are often left only the toes of the chicken, for example, while men enjoy the thigh and breast-meat. This inequity is not only a household custom or a commentary on private relationship dynamics, but is in many ways politically relevant. It illustrates the distance at which women are kept from positions of leadership and decision-making, even in such intimate details of daily life.

Jennifer Lewis, the event’s discussion facilitator, noted this male-female relationship dynamic shows the need to “make the political personal”. Matovu-Winyi noted it’s vital to promote “democracy as a way of life” — without genuine equality in everyday relationship dynamics, the political landscape cannot be authentically democratic.

Lewis also moved the discussion toward the specific question of how to get beyond the numbers. There was consensus among all participants that outreach and support-building efforts need to be “more deliberate”. Cos-Montiel said there needs to be more focus on “strategic” thinking about how to both relay the message that will best build toward parity, but also about how to help women build the cultural capital that will allow them to access the political arena or move into decision-making roles.

Akatsa-Bukachi suggested women need to move away from “staccato involvements”, occasional interactions with the systems, networks and privileges that allow women to take on leadership roles. Women cannot just come to the table “at the last minute”, when a viable female candidate for office gains traction, or a specific issue of controversy comes to prominence, because that temporary support-base will dissolve as soon as the trend shifts.

There is a measurable need for women to build sustained, comprehensive networks of involvement in matters of policy, writing opinion articles, talking about and promoting real change for women, including the rise of strong candidates who will be able to capitalize on this more sustained support.

The “loneliness of leadership” experienced by women was raised as a significant factor contributing to the difficulty of building an sustained base of positions in political and private leadership. Actual efforts to measure such deficits and to explore ways to foster such sustained support communities could help to advance the cause of parity in leadership and to provide young women with a culturally more favorable environment in which their abilities and ambitions will be more directly sought and expected.

Social media may be integral to building the necessary sustained support networks. Examples of how social media and community media can come together to empower women and combat injustice have peppered the discussions of these first days of the CSW. Gender Links is using the UN gathering to cultivate a global debate about what role media play in fostering understanding and progress with respect to the treatment of women.

Lewis asked the discussion participants to propose their main priorities in relation to expanding the role of women in governance. Quotas and the need to transform political parties from within were the first two priorities suggested. Akatsa-Bukachi said the 50/50 goal is a “solemn declaration” that needs to be repeated until it saturates the conversation. She also noted the need to reach out to men, to involve them and make them aware of the real need to improve society by achieving parity. An extension of this priority, she said, is the need to overcome the problem of “feminist faces with patriarchal minds”, while keeping in mind the goal of building a broader long-term alliance for equality that includes both men and women.

Matovu-Winyi said existing systems need to be employed and improved, to make as much headway as possible in the elections —local and national, across Africa and beyond— of the first three years of this decade. She also noted that “no politician just appears on the scene” and called for the creation of substantive institutional supports for women to get involved in public life. She called for “more research” across the spectrum of issues related to why women are or are not empowered to access decision-making roles.

Cos-Montiel called for the inclusion of “women from the margins”, a strategic approach to building cultural and political capital for women, and close scrutiny of what role religious institutions play in sustaining the dominance of a patriarchal narrative or mindset. He noted the combination of hierarchy and patriarchy in the structure of the Catholic church, observing that such institutional structures effect extreme symbolic and socio-psychological influence, which can limit women’s readiness or willingness to push for greater access to decision-making roles in the community, at work or in the political sphere.

The dialogue closed after 44 minutes of lively and engaged discussion, with Norah Matovu-Winyi remarking that political supports for women will be “more authentic” when the narrative driving those social mechanisms is not focused only on the concept of rights for women as inherently virtuous, but deliberately integrates that foundational idea into a more dynamic discourse that gets closer to the daily needs and interests of non-activist women and the communities in which they live.

• Originally published by GenderLinks
• Republished at CafeSentido.com

As social networking technologies have evolved, they have become not just user-friendly in the extreme, but have created a global forum through which individuals and communities, organizations and governments, can work to build connectivity among people, and share information in a way that promotes opportunity, liberty and stability for women in even remote corners of the world. Social networking tools decentralize the flow of information, allowing for a more flexible, dynamic application of global communications platforms, handing the control of access and information to the people who seek or require it.

The central thrust of the event was cogently distilled in Gloria Feldt’s call for women to “employ every medium”, take advantage of any communicative vehicle, using all the tools available, to achieve the most comprehensive and dynamic delivery of the message. But the discussion drew from a diverse range of experience and focus, bridging the distance between the strictly technological approach to social media, questions of Jungian psychoanalysis and cultural consciousness, and the community fabric as it is affected by banking and lending practices.

Olivia Calderón, California Legislative Director for the New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program, brought this last point forward, discussing community outreach efforts designed to ensure predatory lending practices don’t undermine individuals’, families’ or communities’ ability to build value and lay the groundwork for a stable, prosperous future. These programs require a communicative engagement and benefit from a social media outreach and decentralizing philosophy that privileges acting locally.

Feldt also suggested the need to act locally, explaining that while women complain of not being published as much as men in major newspapers, the most likely explanation is that they in fact submit a far smaller number of articles; she called on women to write to their newspapers, and to write for them, to publish and to create a base of discursive support for women and for women’s issues. Specifically, women could tap into grassroots networks with the aim of submitting at least 25 letters the to editor in support of every article published.

Tae Yoo, a Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs for Cisco Systems, works on her company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, building “public-private partnerships to create positive, sustainable change in education/capacity development and economic development”. She said the internet is “the most ubiquitous” mode of inclusive communication, where “groups can find each other, because they have common interests and strategies”.

Yoo also said new developments in technology and decentralized grassroots organization are “raising the bar for social media” in a way that can “empower women around the world” by promoting education, leadership, the building of constructive alliances and partnerships, as well as support networks fed by the technical resources of sometimes geographically remote individuals or organizations. The Cisco Networking Program, for example, now operates in 160 countries, though Cisco Systems itself is only physically located in 70.

Cisco opened the first Network Academies at Kabul University. As a result, women are able to learn that it doesn’t matter where one is, so long as one has acces to the infrastructure that allows for communication across borders. The use of social networking tools to provide access to a global network of potential collaborators, educators and sources of information, makes it possible to rapidly expand the resources available to remote communities, far beyond the limits imposed by geography and local economic and social trends.

Clare Winterton, Executive Director of the International Museum of Women, explained how her organization views “art as a winning strategy for gender equity”. The online museum uses thematically driven art exhibits to promote gender issues, educate people around the world and connect women and organizations that can play a productive role in driving progress toward gender equality and social justice.

Winterton framed “art as an entry point” for allowing women to learn more about their world, about the world beyond their own experience, and about their role, or potential role, in that wider society. A key question, she said, is how do we use art to bring new people to the table? “Women and men need different entry points and different touchpoints to really get inspired … and to take action”.

She went on to say that “the way we communicate, whether that be through art, or through marketing … is something we really need to invest in as a movement … to create a bridge to action, to connect men and women around the world”. In a review of reaction to the use of social media to inspire action, she reported that over 70% of people said they experienced three personal changes, while more than 6o% said they’d taken three steps toward action, as a result of the experience of gender-relevant online artwork and social networking.

Like Tae Yoo’s work at Cisco, to foster education and empowerment of women and girls in Afghanistan and elsehwere, Winterton’s work explores the connection between economic standing and women’s rights and potential for decision-making and free exercise of personal agency. Olivia Calderón’s work for the New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program, in California, also demonstrates the strong current running between economic degradation, social connectivity and women’s access to opportunity and security.

Calderón explained how her father and mother came to the US from El Salvador and Mexico, respectively, in hopes of building an asset base on which they could create a world of possibilities for their family. She said she learned from their experience how policy shapes the environment in which individuals, families and communities can build assets and translate their work into a more stable future. Public policy that allows for abusive lending practices undermines the freedom of individuals to tap their own talent and build a sustainable asset-base.

In Sacramento, she has worked to establish an college-savings account for all children, so that educational opportunity will not be determined by geography or socio-economic status. She also spoke of the ongoing work to create a portable IRA, allowing people to build a life-long pension they can carry from job to job, so their security in retirement need not be put at risk by one employer’s fortunes or misfortunes.

Key to understanding the role of banking policy and community asset-building was the fact that “the financial market of the 21st century has two faces”. For higher income families, financial services outlets “trip over themselves” to offer quality services and financial security, while for lower income families, the picture is very different: predatory lending, unstable mortgages, check-cashing counters and abusive pay-day lenders.

Projects designed to counter the corrosive effects of predatory mortgage lending, credit card abuses and pay-day lenders, both require and help to protect community organization. They are designed to foster not just the building of personal assets, but also of value in the community and a connective frame of mind, where collaborative action allows for a more cohesive planning that protects individuals, families and the fabric of human talent and trust around them.

Jean Shinoda Bolen spoke of the need to integrate issues of gender equality into a conceptualization of social interaction in light of the circle, which is to say, not linear power dynamics or the convenient geometry of hierarchical structures. The circle prizes parity, symmetry, and connectivity, and allows for communication to occur across a more constructive non-vertical network of relationships.

In light of the circle effect, Shinoda Bolen said that when women begin talking to each other, “the world changes for them”. They are awakened to the possibility of expanding the reach of their individual agency, building toward adopting spontaneous leadership roles and engaging in decision-making for a community broader than what they had previously understood as their own domain.

She also spoke of “putting a spiritual center in that circle”, coming to accept that in a sense, communicative expansion of one’s physical and psychological field of engagement equates to an “energy field”. Every circle formed is informed by circles that came before and will influence circles that come afterward. Communicative purpose, direction and intensity remains, and establishes a guide for future activity.

The Honorable Jackie K. Weatherspoon, who served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives for six years, explained that “New England has been the only region in the country that actually did an assessment of the platform for action for Beijing”. She also noted that as the people with the most knowledge, commitment and social capital, age, it becomes increasingly necessary involve young people, to inspire the same passion for a cause that brought the progress to date.

To engage young people, she spoke of events designed to function in a “cafe style”, with intimate, informal conversation, but in which the young people change location or groups every 15 minutes or so, to keep them engaged and expand their pool of shared interest. While teenage girls are experiencing real difficulties in their high-connectivity, media-intensive social environment —with cyber-bullying, depression, suicides, self-image crises, and the sometimes demeaning portrayal of women and girls in mainstream media—, social media offer one of the best means for young women to cultivate their own discretionary and leadership abilities, to find a place of meaning, and to inspire others to advance the cause of equality.

Elahe Amani, of the Women’s News Network, highlighted not only the effectiveness of social media in fostering awareness and by extension, social action, but the ways in which social media can provide women and girls with a greater sense of self-determination and courage, to allow them to speak out, to protest, to organize.

That cultivation of courage, that encouragement of the expansion of the reach of an individual’s voice, is one of the main attractions of social media generally, and a driving factor in the relationship of social media to inspiring and organizing social action and substantive change. Understanding the relevance of social media to the personal and social development of women of all ages can, or should, lead to a deliberate and coordinated effort to inform and reform the real-world experience of women and girls across the world.

The relief effort needs to deliver as much fresh medicine —already in chronic shortage in Haiti before the quake—, clean drinking water, safe blood for transfusions, food aid and temporary shelter, to the victims of the quake, as soon as possible. The logistical complications are extreme, as no stable means exists of locating and reaching each of the victims. Time is, however, of the essence, because quick delivery of medical assistance can help prevent non-lethal injuries from becoming fatal.

As time passes, water, food and medicine remain scarce, and dead bodies continue to accumulate in public areas, in the street, in building entrances, near water flows —established or spontaneous—, the risk of infection can escalate exponentially. Concerns about cholera, malaria, dysentery and other water-borne and communicable diseases, are dire, widespread and worsening.

Haiti already had the highest rates of infant, under-five and maternal (childbirth) mortality, in the western hemisphere, meaning the collapse of health services in the midst of the disaster, with all its attendant increased threats, means young children and pregnant women are particularly at risk, even if they are not yet injured or suffering ill health.

It is estimated that as much as 60% of the population of Haiti lacks access to even basic health services. HIV/AIDS is the nation’s leading contagious cause of death, and tuberculosis, which is more prevalent in Haiti than in any other country in the Americas, is second. UNICEF reports that: “It is estimated that about 5.6 per cent of people aged 15-49 years old in Haiti are living with HIV/AIDS. This includes about 19,000 children. Antiretroviral drugs are extremely scarce.”

And a report from EmaxHealth reads:

High rates of disease associated with intestinal worms, such as ascaris, trichuris, and hookworm, also plague Haiti. These worms cause anemia, stunted growth, malnutrition, and impaired physical and cognitive development. The dire state of the water and sanitation infrastructure in Haiti are a main cause of these diseases, which prompted a recent effort to tackle these problems using grants by Spain and the Inter-American Development Bank, according to a news release from the latter in October 2009.

The widespread public health crisis that already afflicted Haiti before the quake means the nation is particularly at risk for epidemic outbreaks of infection in the aftermath of such a natural disaster. The extreme depletion of basic resources, like shelter and sources of food and water, due to the destruction of the built environment, means those in need of treatment may be harder to locate, and may fail to access treatment, even as aid flows in.

Doctors without Borders (MSF) is reported to have found at least two hospitals in the quake zone that are in good working condition, and is working to set up ongoing emergency treatment facilities there. But the clock is ticking, and two hospitals are just the smallest start on what could be a population of millions in need of varying degrees of emergency aid and medical attention.

Due to the chronic shortage of fully functioning hospitals, medical infrastructure and medicines, a proliferation of free clinics, run by charities or by local physicians, have come to be increasingly important in Haiti’s sporadic and unreliable health services delivery system. Over the last two days, such clinics have been overwhelmed with unprecedented numbers of patients seeking treatment, and according to some media reports, in some cases have been forced to start laying dead bodies outside, to reduce the risk to the health of those inside.

The ICRC is possibly the world’s most experienced and far-reaching blood-distribution system, and as of this writing reports it “is meeting any requests for blood due to this tragedy through current supplies”, but urges those who wish to donate, especially type O-negative or type B-negative (always in short supply), to make an appointment with a Red Cross blood donation center. There is a proper procedure for preparing to donate blood and for donating, which is laid out on the Red Cross website, and which urges donors to hydrate after donation and avoid heavy lifting or strenuous activity after giving blood.

ABC News is reporting the Obama administration’s text-to-donate program for the Red Cross’ Haiti relief mobilization has raised $5 million in just 2 days. According to their report:

The Obama administration’s program to raise money for the Red Cross’s relief for survivors of the earthquake in Haiti through text messaging has raised $5 million in just over two days, administration sources tell ABC News.

By texting HAITI to 90999 through their cell phones, donors give $10 to the Red Cross, a charge that will appear on their bills.

The Red Cross is donating in excess of $10 million to provide emergency relief for Haiti, but will also mobilize people and resources. Foreign teams are entering the country, joining a 15-person in-country staff aided by thousands of Haitian volunteers. A news release from the organization specifies:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is helping to reconnect separated families within the country. They have established a special Web site, enabling persons in Haiti and abroad to search for and register the names of relatives missing since the earthquake: www.icrc.org/familylinks. An ICRC plane carrying 40 tons of supplies — mainly medical items — is expected to leave Geneva today. Included are specialized kits to help treat the wounded, basic medicines and chlorine for water treatment. Other Red Cross partners have deployed a mobile hospital as well as medical teams to support it as well as more than 40 others who can coordinate the relief activities, including sheltering, water, sanitation and telecommunications.

The Red Cross provided blood and blood products to the US Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida. That blood, requested by the US Navy, was shipped by the US Navy to their facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in support of Haitian evacuees and patients. In addition, the American Red Cross sent a shipment of blood products to the United Nations Mission in Haiti. To date, the Red Cross has sent more than 100 units of blood and blood products to Haiti and Guantanamo Bay. The American Red Cross is meeting the needs of this tragedy through current supplies. At this time we do not anticipate the need for a special donor appeal to support our efforts. As always, blood donors are encouraged to call 1-800-RED CROSS or visit us online at www.redcrossblood.org to make an appointment.

Two days into the earthquake aftermath, the scarcity of safe drinking water is now becoming a much more immediate concern. Security and public health concerns converge, as lack of shelter, panic, grief and repeated aftershocks, prevent people from sleeping, which together with potentially severe dehydration, not only diminishes the body’s defenses, but also inspires desperation. If illness and infection take hold among those already grieving and/or wounded, the situation could seriously deteriorate and more deaths will be likely.

The next 24 hours will be crucial in terms of getting aid delivery centers and health treatment facilities set up. Aid workers and government officials will need to be able to move out into the field, to search for survivors, especially the vulnerable or immobilized. The equation for sustaining the population through the next phase of disaster relief will boil down to: medicine, water, blood, food and shelter, assuming the logistical challenges are overcome, and help can get through.

Links to Haiti earthquake relief campaigns:

• Red Cross (ICRC) relief & rescue efforts in Haiti
• Haïti : le CICR intensifie ses efforts pour venir en aide aux victimes du séisme
• UNICEF Emergency Relief Effort for Haiti
• L’UNICEF déploie son aide d’urgence après le tremblement de terre
• Doctors without Borders: Setting up clinics to serve the wounded
• MSF: Haïti: des centaines de blessés reçoivent les premiers soins
• USAID Haiti Earthquake Disaster Response
• Clinton Foundation: Haiti Earthquake Relief
• Oxfam: Preparing response for victims of Haitian quake
• Radio Soleil: Broadcasting in New York
• CNN.com/IMPACT: Links to Reliable Agencies Providing Relief
• Catholic Relief Services: Haiti Relief Effort
• World Food Programme: Mobilizing Food Aid to Haiti Quake Zone
• Programme alimentaire mondial (PAM) mobilise aide alimentaire pour Haïti
• Habitat for Humanity: Haiti Earthquake Disaster Response
• U.S. Dept. of State: Effort to Locate Relatives of Americans in Haiti
• Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts in Haiti
• Private aid donations page from CIDI (Center for International Disaster Information)

UPDATES / IN THE NEWS:

• UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Press Conference on Haiti
• UNESCO Director-General appeals for emergency aid for Haiti
• UNDP: Search-and-rescue operations continue in Haiti
• Red Cross Blood Donation Process & Guidelines
• UNICEF: Aid begins to arrive in Haiti for earthquake survivors in dire need
• Haiti: disaster beyond magnitude (historical context)
• US response swift, generous, amid deep public sympathy for Haiti
• Thousands seek missing loved ones in Haiti
• Disaster Response for Haiti Earthquake — A New Paradigm? (discussion)

2010 promises to be a year of historical landmarks, with important breakthroughs in ecological science, collaborative diplomacy and key international negotiations on economics, arms reduction, democratization and security. Efforts to reform the financial system in the US, Europe and Asia, to prevent the kind of abuses seen during the sub-prime lending bubble, will bring a new focus on corporate ethics and sustainable banking practices. Micro-lending, small-business resilience and consumer protection, may gain unprecedented and concerted momentum around the world, likely in connection with rapid investment in clean energy technologies.

The coming decade will see key improvements to the interactive quality of human relations around the world, and an increased role for populations in shaping the policies of their governments and the major economic forces that determine their access to wellbeing, freedom and security. We examine here, in broad strokes, the following topics: green tech, denuclearization, cooperation and connectivity, gender equality, food security, counter-extremism, particle physics, media freedom and global consumer protection.

Green Tech

The United States is now seeing the beginnings of an historic investment in electric vehicle (EV) transportation infrastructure and cutting-edge high-speed regional rail services. By the end of 2010, the process of forging a stable, long-term EV infrastructure should be in full swing, and recognizable across much of the nation. The coming decade may see a near total shift toward EV, away from internal combustion engines for automotive transport, in new vehicles. Retrofitting will also become key to the overhaul of the US transportation infrastructure, and such initiatives will be closely linked to economic recovery.

Efforts to green the energy economy will mean direct competition against parallel negotiations on binding targets for cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The political and the technological responses will vie for prevalence throughout the decade, with both political and technological advances in GHG reduction helping to steer both investment and economic prosperity to centers of economic activity around the world. This new flourishing of economic dynamism will be key to how global political trends shape up over the coming decade.

By the end of the 2010s, the standard for new energy and transport technologies should be decidedly focused on a new zero-combustion paradigm. A number of already existing technologies will compete for prominence in this new energy economy, but we should also expect to see dramatic innovations as yet never produced, which will help to drive the transition to a zero-combustion energy and transport economy.

Denuclearization

And as the new decade dawns, North Korea has expressed its wish to bring an end to hostile relations with the United States and to comprehensively denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. While it is too soon to celebrate this New Year’s statement as a sign of any lasting peace, it affords serious consideration of the possibility that Pyongyang will now rejoin the six-party negotiations on denuclearizing, and possibly usher in a new era in east Asian security politics and global nuclear diplomacy.

Pres. Barack Obama’s initiative for a nuclear-free world has already made great strides in 2009, with the US and the Russian Federation about to sign a major new strategic arms reduction treaty, to halve the number of their most destructive nuclear warheads. This leadership, by Presidents Obama and Medvedev, is steering the international community toward a new paradigm for international security cooperation.

All five permanent members of the UN Security Council —all nuclear powers— voted this year to move global nuclear policy, through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), toward Pres. Obama’s stated goal of a “world without nuclear weapons”. The decade of the twenty-tens should, as a result, see the most important progress toward denuclearization since nuclear weapons were first tested and deployed, during World War II.

If significant progress toward sustained diplomatic cooperation is made among the world’s leading nuclear powers, the polarization problem that has plagued global politics since the onset of the Cold War more than six decades ago, could be lessened. Nations seeking to compete for defensive security with the world’s most powerful states could see the promise of nuclear weapons research diminish, as the world unites to treat all nuclear weapons as an unacceptable and immoral threat to human civilization.

Cooperation & Connectivity

But the hallmark of the tens is likely to be enhanced diplomatic cooperation as such. Key developments of the first decade of the 21st century, like the Iraq war, have shown the pitfalls of unilateral action. The trend in climate-policy talks has been mounting global pressure, from the grassroots through the level of government for far-ranging international cooperation and consensus. The economic crisis of 2008-2009 has led to unprecedented concerted efforts to shore up the banking system and prevent long-term collapse.

Connectivity may be the key word to describe the coming decade. As governments lean toward cooperation, economies integrate not through harsh bilateral trade agreements, but framework negotiations aimed at sustainability and quality of life, and security talks privilege political stability and human rights above unilateral security policy, media technologies will provide for the most comprehensive interconnectedness yet seen between populations around the world.

Both the “digital divide”, the problem of low ease of access for poor populations to the world wide web, and freedom of information —press freedom, net neutrality and communicational freedom— will be constantly at issue in nations both large and small that are emerging into more regular relations with an international community centered on democratic principles and universal rights. China, India, Pakistan and Indonesia, four of the world’s most populous nations, need to grapple with the problem of balancing severe economic stress with large populations and persistent factionalism.

Democratization in this environment will depend less on the will of political leaders than on the actual use by ordinary people of information technology and the degree to which such technologies allow for more open media environments that help to create a sense of sustainable balance between diversity and unity. The vanguard of open media will gain significant political and economic clout in such nations, helping to shift the paradigm for exercise of power in complex populous nations.

Mexico, Nigeria and Bangladesh, also among the world’s most populous nations, will have to grapple with the same problems of socio-economic degradation and factionalism, while facing the problem of imminent mass migration due to climate change. Each of these nations will face desperate and heated negotiations with neighboring countries over water resources, arable land and food security. One of the most persistent security threats will be the correlation between military exercises along borders and resource scarcity.

Gender Equality

Why gender equality? Women constitute more than half the world’s population, but in nearly every country in the world, including the US and even the Scandinavian countries, they still experience a disadvantage in earning and advancement in the workplace. It is likely today’s generation of university students will see true equity in many advanced industrial countries, where women’s rights have a long history of progress. But across the developing world, discrimination against women has a very direct impact on quality of life, access to food and other basic resources, and on the ability of a political order to maintain peace.

Women have shown themselves to be integral in efforts to provide micro-lending opportunities to the poor. The Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh, discovered this early on: women are more reliable in repaying micro-loans and more disciplined in running the localized everyday businesses they are able to finance with such schemes. Closer bonds to children and family, as well as less tendency to expensive vices, are thought to explain this tendency. It is now widely known that women’s role in developing families and communities, as well as in raising children and providing food and shelter, is key to creating an atmosphere of political stability and peace.

The US Department of Defense has taken direct interest in the status of women’s rights around the world, especially in conflict zones, and is collaborating with the Obama administration’s initiative to promote the rights of women and girls. Pres. Obama has established a panel on which every Cabinet-level department head must report on the status of women and girls as relating to their purview. And women’s rights in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other key nations, is now a focus of Sec. of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertive “3D diplomacy”: diplomacy, development, defense.

Promoting the rights and the needs of women and girls will help to create a more educated, more civil and cooperative population, and should help to speed development to remote areas where improvements to basic infrastructure and economic cohesion cannot take root without active, sustained participation, and even leadership, on the part of women. More secure family environments and more advanced educational resources should also mean a reduced risk of armed conflict, factionalism and the collapse of basic services. The rights of women and girls are linked to all efforts to prevent or to combat the proliferation of failed states.

Food Security

There are growing risks of a partial or total collapse of the human food supply in corners of every continent. Arable land is being eroded, split up, sold off and industrialized. Desertification is taking increasing amounts of land south of the Sahara and across northwestern China. Glacial reserves of fresh water are being lost in the Himalayas and in the heart of Africa. At least 3 billion people live in regions where access to arable land is under severe threat, given demographic trends.

World grain harvests have failed to meet global demand for several consecutive years, meaning world grain stores are being depleted, prices are being pushed up, and the most fundamental element of economic stability —the availability of affordable nutrients— is under threat. With irrigation schemes expanding rapidly across much of the developing world, the Nile River, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and other major rivers upon whose flow of fresh water billions of people depend for their sustenance, are becoming threatened rivers.

The extinction of fresh water systems is fast becoming the single most urgent international resource crisis. Negotiations related to resource scarcity, fresh water depletion and threats to the food supply, are now central to regional economic and military collaboration around the world. Democratic governments and authoritarian regimes alike face the possibility of rising extremism and instability due to the risk of long-term deprivation facing increasing numbers of people within and along their borders.

The politics and economics of the coming decade will be heavily and persistently affected by a wide array of issues relating to the security and stability of the human food supply. There will be increasing pressure to reach binding agreements related to cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as the effects of climate destabilization more severely impact the global food supply. Neighboring states, like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and China, or Chad and Sudan, or the US and Mexico, will be faced with opting between mounting hostility or committed collaboration, to secure needed resources.

A paradigm-shift favoring broader international cooperation to help secure and restore resource-generating ecosystems and slow the spread of climate-related environmental degradation should help to move most of these cross-border resource crises in the direction of committed collaboration. Efforts to prevent the collapse of troubled states and impede the spread of armed conflict will be vital to international peace and security and the resilience of increasingly interdependent economic relationships.

Counter-extremism

The 2000s has been a troubled decade, marked by rising economic inequality, expanding scarcity and an explosion of armed conflict around the world. Hate-speech has infiltrated the relationships between nations, with the presidents of Iran and Venezuela referring to the American president as “Satan” or “the Devil” and factionalism and racist violence spreading in tribal regions of many countries, including Sudan, Chad, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Militant Islamist factions, more closely linked to political violence than to any of the fundamental teachings of Islam, have sought to exploit widespread suffering and deprivation in many countries, in hopes of driving desperate young people to devote their lives to armed struggle. The killing of innocent people has proliferated across the world, and has been justified by one after another political movement or government, even as the international community seeks to prevent such killing of innocents.

In the United States, the political discourse is increasingly poisoned by radical hate-speech, either thinly veiled or overt, with radical ultra-conservatives calling for armed rebellion, bringing loaded weapons to political rallies and threatening the life of the president. Such extremism is a threat to the civic order and to the peaceful practice of democratic process and enlightened public policy. The security of political systems and of populations around the world depends on efforts to counter and to eradicate violent extremism.

Counter-terrorism is a key tactical tool in armed struggle against militants. But counter-extremism, the sincere effort to heal deep political wounds, eliminate hate and secure educated and open populations against the rise of radical militia, requires an intensely complex process of education, development, and collaborative diplomacy. The deployment of advanced diplomatic resources, including highly trained cultural liaisons and media technologies designed to open traditionally closed societies, will be integrated into standard global diplomatic efforts.

The UN system, including a vast reservoir of talent and informational resources linked to non-governmental organizations (NGO), will likely gain influence, as increasing democratization and the specific goal of countering hate-speech and violent extremism demand both the commitment of sustained human effort and highly informed charitable outreach infrastructure. Counter-extremism will be both a political ethic and a strategic necessity in both the wealthiest and the poorest of the world’s nations.

Particle Physics

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN —Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—, outside of Geneva near the French-Swiss border, is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the most complex machine ever created, and designed to smash subatomic particles together at rates of speed high enough to mimic the kind of physics that existed nanoseconds after the Big Bang, from which our universe is believed to have emerged.

The big game is the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to lend mass to all other particles, and which possibly exists only briefly for this purpose. The Higgs boson, also popularly known as the “God particle”, for its capacity to generate mass for other particles, has never been observed. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is believed to be powerful enough to actually generate, and record, information about the behavior of the elusive Higgs boson.

This breakthrough would confirm vital aspects of the cosmological model of supersymmetry and bring together, for the first time in the history of human science, a comprehensive model of the known universe. Another elusive gap in the standard model —which integrates Einstein’s theory of relativity with the advanced discoveries of quantum physics— that could be tested and demonstrated by the LHC, is quantum gravity.

In December, the LHC achieved a world record for high-energy particle acceleration, reaching 2.36 trillion electron volts (TeV). That threshold moves the LHC closer than any other experiment in human history to being able to reproduce and observe conditions similar to those that would have existed nanoseconds after the Big Bang, when key elements of the physical dynamics of our universe were brought into being and set in motion.

It is also believed the Higgs boson gives rise to dark matter, the theoretical substance which contains the majority of the mass in the universe and which is clustered around galaxies. Discovering the physics of that process and possibly observing the early physics of the birth of star systems, galaxies and star-forming regions, could help to reorganize our understanding of matter, energy and the universe itself, in ways as yet unprecedented in the history of science.

Media Freedom & Decentralization

The coming decade is already poised to see major breakthroughs in low-energy, high-capacity integrated communications technologies. The complex computational technology that goes into encrypting, sending, decrypting and storing, digitized messages, including text, voice, imagery and video, is increasingly light-weight, efficient and inexpensive. Handheld phones are increasingly powerful and integrated into the world wide web. Some now use remote IP connections to provide voice services.

Social networking is the new standard for high-intensity information exchange online, with global conversations building up around issues of major controversy. The post-election demonstrations in Iran this past summer were one example, where information was shared and testimony published and proliferated around the world, despite extreme measures used to curtail open communications within the nation itself. The Copenhagen Conference on climate policy gave rise to the most extensive global policy debate ever seen, from the government level through the grassroots.

Even as economic policy and environmental science drive a more global view of human activity, the rapid expansion of dispersed information-sharing technologies and the world wide web are helping to create a climate in which a decentralized grassroots conversation emerges around any issue of major import, stripping political leaders of centralized power and requiring them to respond to more diverse views from a more informed public.

The key paradigm-shift involved in the decentralized information-freedom revolution is the decentralized and decentralizing aspect of it. Individuals can join a wide array of networks, for varying purposes, in order to build up and maintain significant relationships in their personal and professional lives. Deprivation of resources within borders can be alleviated through those relationships, and vital information about political leadership, public controversies or events, can be delivered from sources outside the country who also have sources within the country.

Global Consumer Protection

The financial crisis of 2008 occurred at a uniquely pivotal moment in economic history. As the failings of the “globalization” process reached critical mass —a severe widening of the gap between rich and poor, the undermining of labor rights across the world, and perilous lack of transparency and provenance for tracking money flows—, massive systemic manipulations in the financial world were revealed, as trillions of dollars in reported “wealth” evaporated almost overnight.

An integrated global fabric of economic activity and banking relations meant the freeze in lending in the US and other wealthy nations would serve as a contagion of economic stagnation in poorer nations. A global response was needed, and in April, Pres. Obama succeeded in persuading the G20 nations to agree to a global financial rescue process. The IMF would create a $500 billion fund, with $100 billion put up by the United States, over several years, to ensure malfeasance or a risky economic climate would not lead to a contagion of banking collapses around the world.

That agreement was one of the most important economic achievements of 2009, because it allowed two important things to happen: 1) there would be a means of rescuing banking systems on the verge of collapse, around the world, to prevent a deepening of the global financial crisis; and 2) nations that have never had solid records of financial transparency would be incentivized to sign up to a new regime of banking transparency and financial ethics, further shoring up the global financial system against potential abuses.

Issues related to the security of fresh water resources, the human food supply and climate stability, have led to a significant increase in overall international economic negotiation. The virtues of pragmatic shared-interest negotiations have become apparent, and economic incentivization is now part of many crisis-level negotiations. The crisis regarding Iran’s nuclear program, for instance, involves a triangular proposal that would allow Iran’s enrichment process to involve both Russia and France, providing economic benefits to all three nations, but denying Tehran the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

Job creation is increasingly dependent on global flows of financial and natural resources. China’s enormous consumption of mineral resources has built up its economic clout, and lowered the cost of its massive nationwide industrialization and construction process, but it has also deprived other nations, as well as multinational conglomerate corporations, of the ability to do business in a dependable way trading certain mineral resources, like copper and iron ore.

China is consuming cropland in Africa, in an effort to provide for the basic sustenance of its people, and world grain reserves are being depleted in line with the depletion of fossil aquifers around the planet. These patterns of global economic impact are more than just wave trends; they are part of a new way of negotiating for the sustained prosperity of local populations. The state of California, for instance, the world’s 5th largest economy, negotiates parallel agreements, not waiting for the US to make trade deals to help shore up the California economy.

But consumer protection is the missing component whose underdevelopment in global policy has made globalization a less flexible process, too heavily oriented toward guaranteed windfalls for big investors. The 2008 global financial crisis, rooted in financial abuses, a property-price inflation bubble and the credit markets, made clear this shortcoming of global economic policy. Transparency is one of the responses, but global consumer protection must be another.

It is now likely that over the next decade, negotiations to provide for consumer protection across borders, and to ensure consumers have the ability to distinguish between businesses that negotiate fairly with workers and those that use sweatshops and abusive labor conditions to pad their profits, will provide real opportunities to integrate into the fabric of global commerce a more responsible human-centered model of trade, if the details of this crisis are not discounted. Improvements to global economic ethics will come from enhanced consumer protection guarantees and a more global awareness of economic activity.

Conclusion

These are just nine fronts on which major paradigm-shifts are either already underway or are likely to occur in the coming decade. The details of each of these nine areas of focus provide extensive room for overlap, and touch on literally thousands of other details of personal quality of life, political and economic stability and human potential.

One of the most critical, and perhaps underreported, aspects of the social networking revolution, is the technological capability of spontaneous alliances of thoughtful individuals to locate information, fashion reports and instigate a culture of vigilance, on virtually any issue, at any time.

There are major political and economic implications tied to this trend, and local and international institutions and governments of nation states, will have to think ahead about how to integrate genuine ethical protections into the fast-changing environment of global policy. New media connectivity and decentralized civic infrastructure have allowed for a kind of de-formalization of policy-shaping events and communications between local communities and world leaders.

There is a “bubbling-up” effect that takes place, where large numbers of people can quickly band together to act as conscience to the broader world and exert pressure on leaders; international development and crisis negotiations will take this into account, as part of a new ‘transactional’ cosmology, in which leadership is always under scrutiny and the facts of human life do actually matter.

Habitat is something we tend to associate with non-human animal life. Most species are evolved to function in highly specialized habitats, and complications common in neighboring natural environments can pose a direct threat to the fragile natural systems on whose balance a sustainable habitat depends. Human beings, however, like mountain lions, ants and a number of bird species, have shown near universal adaptability in terms of diverse range of climates. But the human habitat is more than temperature and precipitation: it’s sustainable agriculture.

The breakdown of global climate systems means a much less certain probability of being able to intelligently select good arable land, and little likelihood of being able to expect it will remain so. When agriculture breaks down, human civilization itself is under threat. Chronic food scarcity logically provokes mass migration, armed conflict, the scrambling of political borders and political systems, something very different from what we expect of the organized structures of human society.

But long before we need to talk about the total collapse of global human civilization, we can talk very really and very much in the present, about the direct and immediate threat to food supplies on which hundreds of millions depend for sustenance. As the Himalayan glaciers retreat, they first create untimely excessive flooding, then prolonged drought, draining entire river systems and threatening all of southeast Asia with chronic drought.

Rising sea levels then reclaim low-lying land from humanity, putting as much as 20% of Bangladesh’s land-area at risk over the next few decades. The resulting loss of cropland could deprive up to 2 billion people of a sustainable, affordable supply of life-sustaining nutrients. And the lesson of Hurricane Katrina must be taken into account: deny human beings the basic needs to sustain life —like food, water, shelter and basic communal security— and the normal order of society quickly breaks down.

The collapse of specific river systems and the cropland they feed, coupled with the disappearance of some of the most fertile land in Asia under the waves, will cause a mass migration of unprecedented proportions. Demographers and economists speculate the effect could make political borders throughout the region virtually meaningless for an indefinite period of time, as hundreds of millions seek shelter and sustenance.

For most of the last decade, the world stores of surplus grain have been depleted, as demand far outstrips supply, and major grain producers like China have gone from being vital net exporters to significant net importers of grain. The situation has been gravely exacerbated by the global financial crisis and the paralyzation of credit across the world.

Writing for Nigeria’s Daily Champion newspaper, Chima Obbuji reports:

Amid global concern over food insecurity situation, which continues to impose serious threat for humanity, the world leaders have designed a summit to stem the tide of the insecurity. With food prices remaining stubbornly high in developing countries, the number of people suffering from hunger has been growing relentlessly in recent years.

The global economic crisis is aggravating the situation by affecting jobs and deepening poverty. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that the number of hungry people could increase by more than 100 million in 2009 and will surpass the one billion mark.

With chronic shortages of safe drinking water on the rise, and more than one-third of the world’s population lacking dependable access to safe drinking water, there are concerns the crisis in food security could begin to spiral. If water supplies continue to be depleted, and warming trends continue to rob the world of arable land and reliable annual harvests, the food crisis could become a global economic catastrophe.

The FAO estimates that 923 million people around the world suffered persistent hunger due to extreme poverty during 2007, while a further two billion slip in and out of chronic hunger due to less severe, but persistent poverty. In total, more than half the world’s population could experience some period of food shortage this year. Even in the United States, the most agriculturally productive nation in history, often called “breadbasket to the world”, one in eight are going hungry.

World grain stocks are now at their lowest level in thirty years. The human population now consumes more food than farmers can produce. Sea-borne food like fish are now produced primarily by way of industrial aquaculture, with oceanic fisheries across the world in collapse. Europe has had to mandate a freeze on fishing for certain species in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, in hopes the natural fish stocks can replenish themselves.

The rate of increase in farming productivity by way of hybridization and other growing techniques or chemical treatments has slowed, so the hugely successful “green revolution” of the 1960s, which deployed new strains of rice, wheat and maize, to stave of famine and save hundreds of millions of lives across India, is unlikely to be repeated. Genetic modification may pose dangers to both human health, to the long-term sustainability of specific crop varieties, and to ecosystems verging on the land where GM seeds are planted.

Environmental factors that erode the supply of productive arable land and deplete natural resources like fresh water, fertile soil and specific species of animal life —like bees that pollinate crops—, are making the global food supply less sustainable. That mounting insecurity in the food supply is fast becoming the most immediate and comprehensive challenge facing nations around the world, and so will be instrumental in deciding the approach to climate danger response that will emerge from Copenhagen.

Calls to Sen. Reid and Sen. Lieberman’s offices suggest the plan is little more than a framework proposal and is not yet written into any specific legislative language. Sen. Reid (D-NV) offers no comment on whether he favors this plan, and Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) continues to refuse to say whether he will support healthcare reform legislation, even with this compromise included. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) is said to be considering the plan, her support being necessary to get at least one Republican vote.

In order to help keep costs down and bring us closer to universal coverage, the plan is said to include a lowering of the Medicare eligibility age to 55, which would entail younger participants paying money directly into Medicare, instead of to private insurers, ostensibly to help keep Medicare solvent and lower costs for a high-risk age-group.

If the non-profit, private-run plan is included, it must meet the following criteria:

1. It must be low-cost and it must benefit from subsidies to those who cannot afford it otherwise;
2. It can never deny coverage for pre-existing conditions;
3. It can not refuse access based on income, geography, age or health status;
4. It cannot in any way interfere with doctors’ and patients’ shared choices on health treatment;
5. It cannot pay anything below what Medicare pays for treatment;
6. It must be accepted everywhere, by every doctor and hospital;
7. It must be regulated, so that insurers cannot institute a “medical-loss ratio” analysis intended to reduce access to care;
8. It must be part of an overall reform that brings us to near 100% coverage…

Unless the plan meets these criteria, the entire health reform bill will fail to achieve the two main goals of opening access to health insurance to all Americans (so that people do not suffer deteriorating health and even death, due to non-coverage) and lowering costs across the board (so that families, doctors and hospitals do not face the threat of bankruptcy due to the idiosyncrasies of insurance reimbursement).

If we don’t fix those two fundamental crises in our healthcare system, we face the near certainty that our entire economy will continue to suffer intense pressure from the out-of-control and still rapidly escalating costs of the current healthcare system. One possible safeguard would be to allow policy-holders to have a role in setting policy for the non-profit plan, so that it has some of the virtues of a cooperative and the added market “efficiency” of consumers spelling out clearly what works for them.

• Stakeholders Should Form Non-profit Grassroots Health Co-ops Now
• Healthcare Reform Explained
• Health Reform Requires Full-menu Insurance Exchange, including Low-cost

Doing so requires an aggressive and coordinated effort by governments across the region, in concert with world health experts, the UN’s WHO, aid organizations and local communities. Malaria, originally named “the bad air” because it was thought to be airborne, is actually a water and blood-borne disease, transmitted by a particular variety of mosquito. The scarcity of safe drinking water across much of the region leads to ill-advised practices like leaving whatever standing water one can find at hand for human consumption.

This allows mosquitoes to breed and proliferate. Advanced plumbing, with enclosed water systems, could help prevent the constant rampant spread of the disease, but other measures need to be taken first in order to secure the region’s water resources and ensure equitable distribution, to prevent water-linked trade and military conflicts and the further deterioration of troubled civil infrastructure, the collapse of which favors contagion.

Water-related conflict is an increasing threat to political stability across Africa, and ongoing “low-intensity” conflicts, including some that are taking thousands of lives, undermine basic pillars of organized society, like sustained agriculture, water quality, transport infrastructure, communications infrastructure, electricity and public health contact points. Populations deprived of one or more of these basic services are more likely to suffer from epidemic contagion.

Malaria is a disease that “comes back to visit”, according to Dr. Maghan Keita, of Villanova University, who addressed a gathering hosted by the Blood:Water Mission charity organization, on 19 November 2009, on Villanova’s campus. The Blood:Water Mission event was held to highlight both the gravity of the malaria pandemic, including the millions of deaths, but also to report on promising successes in spreading awareness and prevention to some of the most affected populations.

Dr. Keita, a leading Africana studies scholar who has studied epidemiology and migration in Africa, says sickle-cell anemia and other responses and after-effects of malaria infection can migrate in the blood of people never exposed directly to malaria itself, causing debilitating conditions and even death for some people. The malaria patient can also experience the direct return of the infection, even after it is treated, so prevention is the single most necessary mode of combating the disease in human beings.

LLIN (also known as long-lasting insecticidal nets) and other ITN (insecticide-treated nets) are now the front-line preventive measure of choice across sub-Saharan Africa. They can be up to 100% effective in mitigating the threat of mosquito-borne infection during sleep, not only due to the protective barrier they provide, but also as a result of being infused with insecticidal chemicals that can kills mosquitoes on contact, without endangering the health of human beings using them.

A UNICEF report on the subject notes the need to ensure the pesticides are safe for deployment in such proximity to human beings:

• In all cases, national governments must approve the use of insecticides prior to importing them into the country.
• ITNs, LLINs and insecticide treatment kits are for domestic use and can be handled by family members.
• It is advisable to order untreated nets set-packed with an insecticide treatment kit so that the net can be treated prior to use. It is also important that the user is made aware from the beginning that the net needs re-treatment.
• Each insecticide treatment kit is for the treatment of one ITN and consists of a measured dose of insecticide, a measuring bag, protective gloves and instructions on how to impregnate one net.
• The insecticide is public health grade and WHOPES (World Health Organization Pesticide Evaluation Scheme) approved.

The plant variety artemisia annua, a Chinese wormwood, has been found to have strong anti-malarial properties, and is being planted in Africa in hopes it will take to the sub-Saharan climate, and help produce a potent, locally grown pharmaceutical treatment to prevent or treat malaria. According to USAID:

The fight against malaria increasingly uses Chinese sweet wormwood, but demands for the plant have exhausted supplies, leading USAID to promote new plantings in East Africa.

The Agency is working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to transplant the ancient Chinese remedy to Africa, where the soil and climate are suitable. Artemisinin is the extract of wormwood that is useful against malaria.

Planting of 450 hectares of Artemisia annua began in Kenya in January 2005. In spring 2005, 450 hectares will be planted in Tanzania.

“By this time next year, we will be looking at the extraction of 20 metric tons of artemisinin,” said Dr. Dennis Carroll, malaria expert with the Bureau for Global Health (GH). Malaria kills more than one million people each year.

The artemisia annua shrub appears to have been found to also work against certain parasitic worms that can infect human beings leading to a number of disease symptoms. As reported on the Science and Development Network:

Different forms of bilharzia — also known as schistosomiasis — occur throughout the tropics. Together, they kill 15,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization.

The disease is caused by five species of worm that enter humans through their skin as juveniles, then mature and reproduce in the blood vessels. The worm eggs are usually evacuated from the body in urine or stools but some remain in the body leading to disease symptoms, which include damage to the kidneys, spleen and bladder.

The plant produces extracts that might be able to help combat parasites that are developing a dangerous resistance to current modes of treatment. The hope is that use of the artemisia extract to fight malaria and/or parasitic worms, could also lead to new research as to how to target and eventually eradicate such disease agents.

It is estimated that as many as 15 million cases of malaria infection were treated by way of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACT), a “cocktail” of drugs that work in sequence and in concert to destroy the parasites that cause the disease. The WHO reported that by the end of 2006, demand had risen to 150 million cases.

Logistical challenges related to treating 150 million to 200 million cases across dozens of countries are one of the chief remaining obstacles to effective global prevention and eradication of malaria. In many countries the response is fourfold: nets, chemical treatments, drugs and landfill, to eliminate standing water. Only nets are minimally problematic in terms of side-effects and environmental fallout.

Writing teaches a person about language, in a very deep and sensory way, but language also teaches a person about existence in the human sense, existing as a human being, as an individual who is capable of not only perceiving and manifesting, but also articulating an identity. That, to some extent, is our most recurring, most insistent, most necessary and yet problematic, reason for engaging in serious explorations of language usage: how to articulate the untestable reality that is the human self.

It is an art of complex, but not always conscious, strategic engagement, to conjure up, locate and arrange the words necessary to any linguistic task. Assembling words is, to some extent, the fundamentally human undertaking that puts us both at odds with our surroundings and in touch with deeply useful means of reaching out to them, understanding them, bringing them into the folds of our awareness. To breathe a word is to make a claim on the nature of the universe, and our claims are contagious, so getting it right helps us to define the space of our agency, our selfhood.

In simpler terms, what the art of assembling words and their meanings teaches, as one learns what it is to forge new territory, to construct a landscape, to admire and to fear the rules that govern such activity, to honor and to evade those rules, what the whole process teaches is that experience happens in much the same way as language happens. There is a point of contact (a moment in time, a location in space, a ‘situation’ unique in itself) where experience happens, where it is gained, where we participate in its construction and it comes into being, and meaning accrues and something is stated, however quietly.

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such, the dignity of the human intellectual organism, as individual and of value in each case.

I could write a barrage of symphonic lunatic musings, trouble the world with my troubles, obsess, come apart at the seams, but instead, I will have breakfast and read a preferred selection with a soothing lilt, wake and exist and put myself to bed at night with an electrical hum, the din of an untroubled world, penetrating where I dwell and possess myself in solitude. From there, from that integral engagement, through choice and sublime expression and endeavor, I reach out, make contact, and we bridge the distance between us.

The choices we make in our experience have in many ways the consistency of the written word: they persist in their meaning insofar as we ask them to, and they fade away from the initial intent as we lose touch with that part of ourselves responsible for bringing them into our biography. Whether the mind engages its own work with a spirit of dissatisfaction or of pleasure, the experience of engaging the mind as such, of taking note of one’s internal existence, is akin to the expressive moment.

Contemplation becomes language as the individual seeks to emerge from the wells of the internal unknown, and to put a shape and a face on what was found. Everything, in the writerly/readerly moments when such tensions become apparent, is like medicine, for better or for worse. The medicine stays with us, changes our line of sight, molds our favorite haunting, guides us to water, dips us clean, refurbishes us in the tattered elegance of our everyday living.

The changing and refurbishing of one’s private world, even as it is the public face of that private self that is designed or reconfigured, is an intimate description of the process by which every intellect acquires knowledge. Accepting that experience and imagination come together on a plane between the two, and that there, in that landscape of intersection and semiotic contagion, of knowledge transfer and moral support, a vision of reality or of an individual’s experience thereof is formulated by the coming together of experience and imagination… that is recognition of what knowledge is, how it works, and why it must evolve if it is to be honest.

The honesty of knowledge, as opposed to its imagined truth, is a topic for another time, but it ties into the medicinal uses of writing and naming. Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be —we need every skill and angle of dreaming to make the world that encompasses and gives place to our pursuits, our claims on the universe, our attempts at selfhood, sovereignty and interconnection—, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters.

And that can benefit any human being. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. It is the inherently, unavoidably, persistently semi-distant nature of all individual experience —sensorial, intellectual, emotional, spiritual— which writing not only addresses but reiterates and re-presents, thus serving as a means for understanding more deeply, and reinterpreting the difficulties and the joys of, what occurs in the endless flux of daily… temporal… human… existence.

These thoughts are just a beginning of the example of writing as medicinal naming, so I will offer a few examples. I pick up a newspaper, and side by side am able to witness Europe naming its first full-time president, and the president of the United States engaged in an important and never easy diplomatic dance in Asia. Asia, Europe, United States: each of these words gives us a world to mull over and to be filled with.

In Africa, we read of malaria, and ambitious efforts at prevention. The “bad air”, old prejudices, confusion, and the new world of possibility. We read that life finds a way, without saying that life finds a way. A windmill, no longer a quixotic phantasm, can help prevent the Maldives from being washed under by out-of-place glacial tides. To say “no, we cannot”, is a kind of obstruction, an effort at contributing to the chaos; the world is coming together, or it isn’t, we are responible, or we are not.

Each of these complex realities, indulged or anointed, or fostered or projected, through language, is a way of approaching the problem of selfhood, the problem of the in-here versus the out-there, of how can we know what lies beyond the all-too-near far edge of our perception? How can we understand the other, if the other is always on the other side of a divide? We fashion channels to relay meaning; we build civilizations of discourse; we cut back the rampant vegetation of incoherence and use language to say that one self might have something to do with another.

Medicine. There is “good medicine”, in the Native American sense, a healing spirit, in the work of language, if we understand that it can be that. We cannot really test our knowledge, or challenge it, or open it up and expand it, without language. Instruments of all kinds, from telescopes to laptops to mirrors to particle accelerators, cannot give us the metrics for judging our surroundings, if we don’t base what they are and what they do on an implied linguistic terra firma.

We name the universe, not so we can classify and forget it, but so we can move out into it with some confidence, so we can test our apprehensions and forge new terrain for experience, not only the conceptual terrain we need to understand ourselves and our role in the world, but the actual terrain which we will feel less comfortable venturing into if we have no way to talk about it, to make guesses about it, to advance our hopes and test our aspirations.

While science and literature are rarely considered parallel pursuits in the way of the same problem, science understands this problem of naming and its connection to knowledge. What, for instance, is a disease? It is a lack of ease, something contrary to discomfort… but what makes it different than discomfort? In Spanish, malestar has both a clinical and an emotional meaning: it can be a state of physical discomfort, severe illness or an emotional malaise.

A syndrome is widely considered to be different from a disease in that it is not a specific entity with a proven cause-effect dynamic: it is more an array of symptoms, or a recurring constellation of particulars, not always the same, which seem to fit a pattern. If we take apart the language, syndrome is a more clinical, more scientifically specific term than disease, but in practice, the reverse is true.

We could say the same of astronomy: asteroids are supposed to be “like stars”, and different from planets, but like planets, they orbit stars, and in fact, gaseous planets such as Jupiter, Saturn or Neptune, can be more like stars in a mechanical, structural sense, than are asteroids. But we use the word in the way that works, and we assign meaning based on experience.

The writer must grapple with these digressions and underminings of purpose in language; the writer must, whether knowing or not, engage in a constant hermeneutic struggle —interpretive interpretation, in relation to meaning intended or accrued— in order to make language what it aspires to be, what we need it to be. The writer is not so much a priest as a pioneer, not so much an entrepreneur as a watchdog.

To make life into something with life of its own —Life is hard… Life is opportunity… Life is too short… Life finds a way…— requires an approach to meaning that is both rigorous and adventurous, and the good writer, whether an amateur writing a memo to a friend or colleague, a single ephemeral composition, or a professional who spends many hours a day wrestling with the merciless bulk of the whole language and its attendant (unspoken) implications, the good writer must manifest that intertwining of rigor and adventure in a way that is credible, sublime and impressive.

Because we all understand the demand, even where it is unconscious, that writing be an advanced example of the process of naming our experience, in the interests of securing and conveying knowledge, in a way that is medicinal, a help to the human being generally and specifically. Every word is an expression of the case-by-case process by which writing makes language —the stuff of our attempts to turn the world into decipherable sounds— into something new, a new terrain, a new chance at seeing, a healing experiment.

That experiment is universally demanded, implicitly or explicitly, by human interaction, because we all need to map out the spaces and parameters of the self, the sometimes complex distinctions between aspiration and action, known and unknown, viable and perilously fragile. We write in order to play out the shape and spirit of the language, to give it human specificity, to make it relevant to not just our past but our future experience.

Writing and naming are intertwined; every use of every word is a new naming of a new iteration of something either very much like or very much unlike what came before. It is by this process that we can speak about what is known or unknown, knowable or unknowable, and that we can find a way to make the amorphous, ever-evolving life of the universe of experience, into something our own, something malleable, something that reinforces our dignity as human beings. The medicine of language is the medicine of acquiring knowledge, a trick of consciousness, but a trick that points us to the truth, to ways of approximating, testing and relaying, the truth that gives us meaning and humanity.