Progressive Wednesday

The little “Plumpy’nut” that could.

I subscribe to more magazines than my eyes, noggin, and free time can handle, but subscribe to them I do. Often, this leads to a lot of skimming, looking for articles about topics I’m hungry to learn more about, looking for articles that might be pertinent to Progressive Wednesday.

A recent piece in the January/February 2007 issue of Business 2.0 couldn’t be ignored. According to an article by Carleen Hawn, close to a billion people in the world live hungry. And then I read this:

Malnutrition kills more people annually than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, [and] the United Nations says a child dies from the complications of malnutrition every five seconds.

The average person reads 250-350 words per minute, which means that by the time you read the end of this post, approximately 30 children will have died from a lack of food.

All hope ain’t lost, though. There are many fantastic organizations out there battling this exact problem: World Food Programme, Unicef, America’s Second Harvest, Meds & Food For Kids, and Oxfam, amongst several others (all of which would graciously accept your donations).

But, once again, there’s a way to make money and make the lives of those suffering better. Nutriset, a French business that describes itself as a “company fully dedicated to humanitarian and social programs,” has developed a new product called “Plumpy’nut” (I gotta say, I would have come up with a less, I don’t know, goofy name). They doled out 500,000 of these über-nutritious bars last year. Each bar contains 500 calories, ground peanuts, whey protein, vitamins, and minerals. One of the most important features of this product is that it isn’t perishable.

Plumpy’nut succeeds where powdered milk fails because it doesn’t require clean drinking water. In Darfur alone, this product has cut malnutrition in half. And according a piece in the N.Y. Times, Plumpy’nut can even be fed to babies to help jump-start growth.

Here’s the amazing part for the company: they sold $25 million last year alone by saving people’s lives. And what do they do with that money? They reinvest 80 percent of their profits into research and development.

So here’s a business with a heart the size of a home, making money while helping to end malnutrition. I believe this drives home the point (without making a quick pit stop at 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp) we’re always trying to make at Progressive Wednesday: Baby, the end of big problems starts with small solutions.

Silly rabbit (owner)

While this week's Wednesday topic concentrates on those animals living south of sea level, but with Easter Sunday less than two weeks away I need to refocus just a “hare–   (sorry, couldn't help it) on some of our dryer companions. I speak, of course, about rabbits.

Every year about this time many parents surprise little Johnnie and Suzie with a bunny for Easter. They think it'll be cute to have a little “Peter Cottontail– hippity-hopping around the house while the kids are looking behind lamp shades for those plastic eggs filled with candy.  They're right. As an owner of two of these lagomorphs I can attest, they're adorable. Our long-eared nose nibblers are well cared for; they even have an in-house vet. Unfortunately, this is the exception, not the rule.

Countless rabbits are abandoned to shelters each year about a month or two after Easter. When the novelty wears off, the rabbit gets ignored. Most people have no idea how high-maintenance and high-cost Sir Hops-a-lot can be:

During a rabbit’s lifespan of up to 12 years, you can expect care costs of between $3,000 and $4,000 — which includes an initial $200 in one-time costs for a habitat, spaying/neutering, litter box, care book, dishes, brush, water bottle, etc., and yearly costs of approximately $300 for food, annual veterinary visits, and white wood shavings.

The Columbus House Rabbit Society has created the “Make Mine Chocolate– campaign.
It's mission:

To break the cycle of acquisition and relinquishment by educating the public about the responsibilities involved in keeping a companion rabbit before a rabbit is brought home.

Rabbit.org also has great information on rabbit care, do's and don'ts, as well as a list of rabbit rescue shelters to go to for adoption. So if you're tempted by that twitchy nose and those long ears, count to ten. Then be sure to give these sites a visit. Sometimes the best progress is made by not doing what we know to be wrong.

The TGIF Movie Review: Stranger Than Fiction

Will Ferrell stars in Stranger Than Fiction, and before any of your assumptions about him kick in, this isn’t your typical (and utterly gut-busting) Anchorman, Old School, or Wedding Crashers kind of Will Ferrell turn. This is more like the Ferrell in Elf, only more delicate, more controlled, and even more sincere.

And this isn't the like the serious dramatic roles taken by the likes of Robin Williams and Jim Carey. That pair of actors can sometimes pick flicks that are so filled with syrupy-sap they make you look for a stack of flapjacks. (I might be exaggerating there, but I just wanted to write that sentence so badly.) So far, it appears as though Ferrell has chosen wisely, my Friday-loving friends.

Stranger Than Fiction is the story of Harold Crick (Ferrell), an IRS auditor who lives a life filled with banal routine, solitude, and safety. His life changes rather suddenly when he starts hearing a woman with a British accent (Emma Thompson as author Karen Eiffel), narrating his life as it happens. At first, Crick is slightly confused. Then he's exasperated. Then he's fearful.

He seeks out a psychiatrist and tells her that he can't be schizophrenic because the narrator “[is] telling me what I've already done, accurately and with a better vocabulary.– Then he seeks out a literary theorist, Professor Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman. Hilbert has better advice, suggesting that Crick take notes about what's happening to better understand if the story he appears to be in — in other words, his life — is a tragedy or a comedy. At the same time, Crick starts auditing a baker played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and soon feels himself, for the first time, falling for someone — hard. But the narrator has “let him know– that his death is drastically, unavoidably immanent, and Crick is understandably equal parts terrified and enraged.

I'd rather not give away any more of the plot, because unlike a 14th seed in the NCAA Basketball Tournament, I don't want to be a spoiler. Let's just say, as bizarre as the movie is as I've already described it, it gets more bizarre. But here's the thing: you believe in it. Much like other recent movies set in a world of the unthinkable — Magnolia, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I [Heart] Huckabees — the movie doesn't try to make excuses for it's oddities. It successfully plays them off like they are just as believable as breathing.

Besides an engaging story and top-notch acting (and a soundtrack that reminded me of my iTunes catalogue), the movie's filled with funny one- and two-liners:

“I don't need a nicotine patch, Penny. I smoke cigarettes.–

* * *

“Mr. Crick, you're staring at my [breasts].–

“If I was, I can assure you it was as a representative of the United States government.–

* * *

“And I suppose you smoked all these cigarettes.–

“No. They came pre-smoked.–

* * *

But this isn't just a funny movie. It's a flick about rule-makers vs. rule-breakers, about fate vs. free will, about waiting vs. actively living. The film teaches us one important lesson above all others: we couldn't have thought up the lives we have, because our lives are too weird to believe.

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God willing, we're nearing the end of a dark, dark tunnel.

According to a recent article posted on the website for Channel 11 out of Atlanta, there might be some very strong hope for the future of an AIDS vaccine:

The world could have a new vaccine designed to kill the AIDS virus in as little as three to four years according to an Atlanta-based group working on the vaccine.

It is a scientific advance that could save tens of millions of lives, and it is being developed on the campus of Emory University.

I’m a bit confused about how this vaccine works, but you need to bear in mind that I really have no idea how a smoke detector, my microwave, or aspirin works. I don’t even know how the next tissue pops up out of a box of Klennex when you grab one to blow your nose.

But apparently, the vaccine employs a “decoy virus” which contains minuscule amounts of HIV, amounts so small no one would actually get AIDS from the injection. This sets up “memory cells,” which would attack the actual virus should you become exposed. In a scientific nutshell:

The vaccine works using a one-two pharmaceutical punch to prime the body then kill the virus.

“It raises both antibodies that can block the virus and it raises white blood cells called t cells that can kill the virus infected cells,– said [Dr. Harriet Robinson, Ph. D., of the Emory Vaccine Center].

I hate to build up false hope, but steps like this on a small level (according to the article the lab where this powerful work is getting done is smaller than my garage), where progress, at times surprisingly, seems to be made.

How important could this next step in defending and treating AIDS be? Well, according to ADVERT, an international AIDS charity, “the UNAIDS/WHO AIDS Epidemic Update [estimates] around 37.2 million adults and 2.3 million children were living with HIV at the end of 2006.” Combined that would be like every single person in California having HIV. Or everyone in Canada and New Zeland put together. Or all of Spain.

Let’s hope, and pray, and hope some more that there’s an end in sight.

To keep yourself informed about HIV and AIDS, just click the red ribbon. Remember, friends, knowledge is progress.

The urologist with the biggest set of…

Here’s video of Commander Richard Jadick on The Daily Show talking about his new book On Call In Hell, which details his experience as a marine doctor during the War in Iraq. It’s easy to forget that, among all the other soldiers redefining courage every day, there are doctors saving life after life after life. It takes a different kind of strength, I’d imagine, to heal when surrounded by destruction, to be faced with injuries no med school can prepare you for handling.

One of the major values in medical ethics is “First, do no harm.” These doctors, very literally, undo harm. We owe them, just as we owe our soldiers, more than we can repay them. So check out this video. Learn a bit. Appreciate. Admire. Applaud.

Editor’s note: We’ve been having a wee bit o’ trouble with this video player. Our advice is to click the play button, then pause the sucker. Wait a minute. Think about how much you love us. Then hit play again. You might still have to wait a few seconds. If that doesn’t do the trick, click this sentence to go to the website where the video is hosted. Thank ya. Oh, and the video contains some graphic language and descriptions. Consider yourself “warned.”

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This Wednesday: Coral Relief

Problem:

One of the places that I desperately want to visit before I “become one with nature– is the Great Barrier Reef. A series of over 3,400 individual reefs and 900 islands along the east coast of Australia, it covers a distance longer than the west coast of the United States. That's over 2,000 kilometers for those of you keeping score at home. It's the world’s largest coral reef system. You can see it from space. Even “outer space.– It's big, and beautiful. It's one of the seven natural wonders of the world. And it's dying.

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Make Progress:

Coral reefs all over the world are disappearing at an alarming rate. Over a quarter of the worlds reef systems have died or been severely damaged, and many scientists say that the remaining 75% will be gone in the next 30-50 years. Most of this destruction is human-related. That's the bad news. The good news is that we can do something about it.

• Learn
• Watch
• Write
• Join & Donate
• Change

Coral Relief: Learn

A bit of “founding fatherly– wisdom from James Madison:

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

In that spirit we've compiled a list of facts (the cold, hard kind) about what corals are and how they are beneficial. So arm yourselves with this good knowledge:

• Contrary to popular belief, corals are actually animals. They are made up of tiny polyps that live symbiotically with zooxanthellae algae that grow within the coral's own tissue. This algae provides the coral with food and is what gives it color. These individual corals reproduce both sexually and asexually to form reefs.
• Reefs are home to 25 percent of all marine life equaling over two million different species.
• Ten percent of the world's diet comes from reef fish and many poor and developing countries rely on local reefs for more than a quarter of their protein.
• Coral reefs are an enormous part of local and global economies. In the state of Florida alone coral-related tourism generated $4.4 billion, while creating over 70,000 jobs in a single year.
• Coral reef species are being used to create new antibiotics and antiviral medicines, as well as bone grafts. They also show promise for treating leukemia, skin, and other kinds of cancer.
• Large reefs protect shorelines from excessive wave action, violent storms and floods, helping to prevent death, erosion, and property loss.

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And here are some of the not-so-smiley causes of destruction:

• Dynamite and cyanide fishing: Yes, people use these two things to catch fish on the reefs. Their destructive impact should be obvious.
• Overfishing: The loss of a particular type of fish to the seafood trade can harm the ecological balance and be devastating to a coral reef.
• Runoff: Sediment from nearby development can get into the water and quickly destroy entire reef systems.
• Collection: Fish are caught and corals are harvested for the aquarium trade, calcium supplements, mortar and souvenirs.
• Global warming: A biggie. While many coral species are physically very hardy, a rise in ocean temperatures of only one or two degrees can cause massive coral bleaching, a condition where the algae dies off and the corals turn white and often die. In addition, warmer waters mean bigger hurricanes, which can pound coastal regions and do enormous damage to reefs.

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So now you know a little about these underwater paradises and their frailty, but to quote Goethe: “Knowing is not enough; we must apply!”