1) Name two motivations for being green?

I have always loved Canada and the fact that there is forest, mountains, ocean, etc. all around us. I want my children to grow up to appreciate nature as much as I do and I want it to be there for them to appreciate. So many people don’t realize what an impact we have on everything around us.

Also, I enjoy living simpler and trying to live in harmony with everything around us. It’s cheaper, often easier, cleaner, healthier… It just makes more sense to me!

2) Name 2 eco-UNfriendly items you refuse to give up?

My dryer. I’ve lived without one and it wasn’t the end of the world, but since I have one, I won’t not use it.

Our computers. We have three of them, one of which is never off (it’s our server) and the other two are on a lot during the day.

3) Are you at peace with or do you feel guilty about number 2?

I’m at peace with it. I have experimented with our dryer settings and we dry most things at low heat for a short amount of time. Diapers are often still a bit damp at the end and I hang them to dry them the rest of the way. Most of my clothes I hang to dry anyway because it’s better for the clothes. So it’s not like I’m setting everything on hot for the maximum length of time. One day maybe I’ll have an outside line, but right now I just don’t see that being realistic for us.

As for the computers, we actually tried to sell one of them and were going to live with just 2 (the server and one other), but it didn’t sell and I’m kind of glad. Sometimes when Meredith is sleeping/napping we each will go on one and it’s nice to have that option. I’d love to get a laptop instead of my desktop. We’ve been talking about getting rid of our server and hosting our websites on another server though.

4) What are you willing to change but feel unable to/stuck with/unsure how to go about it?

I would love to start gardening more and growing our own produce. I am not a gardener though and my yard is tiny (I want there to be some left for Meredith to play in!). I feel like I don’t have the knowledge, skill, or time to actually make that happen.

5) Do you know your carbon footprint for your home? If so, is it larger/smaller than your national average?

I’m not sure offhand, but I know it’s a lot smaller than the national average, especially since we just got rid of our car and don’t plan to buy another for at least a few months, if not longer. We turn off lights when we’re not in a room and turn off power bars on things that we’re not using.

6) What’s eco-frustrating and/or eco-fantastic about where you live?

Fantastic:

I can think of a few things. We’re near a grocery store so can walk for groceries. The bus system is decent. This city has a great soft plastic recycling program. We live on a green belt and have tons of pathways and forested area to walk along. And the car co-op is way up there too of course.

Frustrating:

Our windows suck and I’m sure it means the heat is on a lot more than it really needs to be, even though we actually keep our place fairly cool and wear layers. I have the same beef about sidewalks as Annie does: there really aren’t enough of them here and it makes some places hard to walk to safely, especially with children.

7) Do you eat local/organic/vegetarian/forage/grow your own?

I would love to grow my own, but it hasn’t happened yet. We do try and eat local and organic as much as possible, and eat seasonally as well. One bad thing about not having a car is it’s going to be a lot harder to get to the local food co-ops and farmer’s markets.

What do you personally find the most challenging in being green?

Um, the rest of the world? It’s hard sometimes to be green when companies are packaging everything in plastic, greener options are often more expensive (especially if you don’t know about things like how easy it is to make your own cleaners), and there’s still not a lot of support or understanding in a lot of the general population. The world is getting better, but being green is almost becoming a fad now, which has good and bad points. Companies are trying to profit off of it and I think people don’t realize that many things that seem like good, green ideas actually aren’t so much when you take into account things like production or shipping.

9) Do you have a green confession?

While I do believe humans have an impact on the environment and the world around us, I don’t really believe in anthropogenic global warming as such and I think Al Gore is a hypocrit and definitely someone who has cashed in on the green fad.

10) Do you have the support of family and/or friends?

I think so. Some of my family thinks we’re odd/strange for some of the things we do (like making our own cleaners), but none of them try and change our minds or anything. Most of my friends have very similar values to us about things like that too, so they are supportive.

The Guidelines:

1. Link to Green Meme Bloggers

2.Link to whoever tagged you

3.Include meme number

4.Include these guidelines in your post

5.Answer questions (erm – that bit’s quite important)

6.Tag 3 other green bloggers.

I tag:

Alice

Sarah

Amanda (whose blog I just started reading but am enjoying it so far!)

Related posts:

1. Green Meme #2
2. Moving
3. Getting into shape

When you get past the fear mongering about the diseases and the vaccines, you can look at the real root of the issue.  Do vaccines work?  Are they necessary?  Are they responsible for the abolishment of polio, small pox, etc?  Are the diseases they’re meant to prevent really as bad as Merck et al would have you believe?  Are the vaccines as bad as the anti-vaccine enthusiasts would have you believe?  I do have a bias, as I am one of those anti-vaccine enthusiasts, but we did a lot of reading, researching, and soul searching before we came to our decision.  It wasn’t made lightly, and we believe we are doing the best thing for our daughter to help her develop a healthy immune system.  We also have a naturopath, three chiropractors, and our GP (yes, an MD), who all not only support the decision, but most (if not all) of them would not or have not vaccinated their own children.

That being said, please don’t take this post as a recommendation from me.  It is a personal decision not to be made lightly, and parents need to make a decision they can live with.  That is to say, if something goes wrong, will you forever be blaming yourself and others, or will you know you did what you thought best.  Really, years could be spent studying vaccines, their effects, how they work, etc.  There is so much information already out there.  I’m just going to touch on some of the things that helped Kris and I come to our decision.  I could write pages on this one subject, so I’m just going to be doing posts that cover one aspect at a time.  I am not writing this to spur a vaccine debate, but to share some thoughts and links for those who may be doing their own research or anyone who is interested in another point of view.

First, some links.  A friend recently linked this article to me, A Shot in the Dark, which makes for an interesting read and approaches the issue a little differently than other posts about vaccines I’ve read.  Here is the transcript for the meeting she mentions in which one of the immunologists comments he didn’t want his grandson to get thimerosol-containing vaccines.  This is another interesting article about tactics the CDC uses to try and scare a population into vaccinating.

For Kris and I, the key question was not, “Are vaccines effective?”.  I know people who don’t believe they are, but the reality is that scientific evidence supports the fact that vaccines are effective.  Here’s an interesting article with a great discussion on how pharmaceutical companies use semantics to make drugs sound more effective than they are.

There are many other tricks to make that effectiveness of drugs sound impressive. If you take alendronate (Fosamax), the most frequently prescribed drug for osteoporosis, you can be excused for thinking it lowered your risk of a hip fracture by 50 percent. That’s what the ads targeted to doctors claimed. Fifty percent is a most impressive claim, which means that half the women taking it will benefit. One in two. Not bad, eh?

If you look closer at the actual study, you find that for women on placebo, two women out of a hundred had a hip fracture (two percent). In the women on Fosamax, one woman out a hundred (one percent) had a hip fracture. In other words, you can lower your risk of hip fracture from two percent to one percent, an impressive 50 percent reduction. But 50 percent sounds impressive even though it is really only a one percent difference; that is, only one woman out of a hundred taking the drug saw any benefit. The company can promote this drug legally as being “significant” and “effective,” when, in fact, 99 percent of the women who took that drug had no effect whatsoever. They wasted their money, exposed themselves to the adverse effects of the drug and saw no benefit.

No, for us, the question was more like: “Are they necessary?” Questions that followed this one were: “Are vaccines responsible for wiping out disease?” “Even if so, is that necessarily a good thing?” “Are the diseases as bad as we’re told?” “Are vaccines safe?”

Reading through the CDC website for information for this post has been interesting for me.  There are all sorts of broad, sweeping statements disguised as “facts”, lots of fear mongering… Statements like disease can cause death and vaccines are generally safe.  They don’t say that vaccines can cause death and diseases are generally safe too.  (But I’ll go more into that in the future.)  For now, let’s take this statement from their website:

Perhaps the greatest success story in public health is the reduction of infectious diseases resulting from the use of vaccines. Routine immunization has eradicated smallpox from the globe and led to the near elimination of wild polio virus. Vaccines have reduced some preventable infectious diseases to an all-time low, and now few people experience the devastating effects of measles, pertussis, and other illnesses.

Let’s take a look at their evidence for this. This graph shows a sharp decline in measles after the introduction of the vaccine in 1963, and we are now at an all-time low.  It looks very impressive.  Until we look at a graph over a longer time period.

This graph shows a completely different picture, that deaths from measles were already on the decline long before the vaccine was introduced.

The same could be shown for most of the vaccine-preventable diseases. By not showing the complete picture, it’s easy to see why most people believe vaccines responsible for eradicating diseases. (Note: This is the same trick Al Gore uses in his movie when he shows graphs.) I do want to point out that the CDC one refers to cases of measles, while the others refer to deaths by the diseases. I tried to find a CDC one to show deaths or an over-time one to show cases, but came up short.  Honestly, I didn’t search that hard.  I was reading a direct comparison that showed a table with cases and deaths on it, but I can’t find it now.  When I have a moment I’ll search my history and put it here. The best I could find right now is an explanation, not a pretty graph, but it is on the vaccination news website.  There are more graphs and charts on the Vaccination Liberation site as well. Regardless, the graph does show that death from measles had dropped to near zero before the vaccine was even introduced.  When this is pointed out to the CDC, they plot another graph, for one disease only, and for cases only 10 years previous to the vaccine.

Another thing the CDC points out is that small pox vaccination programs eradicated the disease.  This has been shown again and again to be untrue, due to the fact that pockets of the population where vaccines were limited or nonexistent experienced a decrease in small pox outbreaks at the same rate as everywhere else.

Parenthetically, the average person today believes that mass smallpox vaccines were responsible for eradicating smallpox from the world. This is not so, for the simple reason that mass vaccination programs did not take place in many areas. In some third world countries 10% or less of the populations were immunized against smallpox due to financial and other limitations.

A couple more quotes from the same site.  Check out the site for references and lots more information.

However, vaccine proponents would have us believe that vaccines have been largely responsible for controlling virtually all of the former epidemics of killer diseases in the U.S.A. With the exceptions cited above, the facts do not bear this out.

According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, from 1911 to 1935 the four leading causes of childhood deaths from infectious diseases in the U.S.A. were diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), scarlet fever, and measles. However, by 1945 the combined death rates from these causes had declined by 95% before the implementation of mass vaccine programs. Other statistical information provided much the same pattern. According to a report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, July 30, 1999, improvements in sanitation, water quality, hygiene, and the introduction of antibiotics have been the most important factors in control of infectious diseases in the past century. Although vaccines were mentioned, they were not included among the major factors.

An example of this process is provided in the text, Vaccination, l00 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault on the Immune System, by Vera Scheibner, Ph.D., in which the author reviews the Swedish experience with whooping cough (pertussis) and the pertussis vaccine. In 1979 Sweden banned the pertussis vaccine because of a return of the disease in fully vaccinated children and also because of side effects which they considered unacceptable, including brain damage. In spite of this ban, which remains in effect today, the infant mortality in Sweden from pertussis is no greater than in fully vaccinated populations.

Another interesting thing to note is that once a child is vaccinated, doctors stop looking for that disease as a cause of illness.  This results in diseases potentially being misdiagnosed as something that there is no vaccine for.  It’s impossible to know for sure how often this happens, but it is definitely something to take into account when considering the number of cases of the diseases before and after the introduction of a new vaccine.

Even despite all this, there is still the niggling worry.  While I was doing research, someone on a forum I was on (I don’t know who, but whoever they are I’m very grateful) gave me some very sound advice.  She told me to start with the diseases.  After all, we’re vaccinating our child to protect them, right?  So if it turns out that there’s no need to protect them, it should make the decision pretty easy.  I’ll elaborate on my findings and thoughts on this sometime in the future.

Part 2 – Diagnosing VPDs

Related posts:

1. Diagnosing VPDs
2. Animal Vaccinations

When you read news articles/editorials in the paper (or more and more for me at least Digg), you often hear about Consensus.  Maybe its just a consensus of experts (another ambiguous and entirely useless term since an expert could mean anything), or a more specific consensus such as a scientific consensus.  Often these mythical beings of untold knowledge and power are used to lend weight to a specific argument, or more likely as a signal for the reader that they can turn off their brain and just soak in the obvious truths that the author has decided to share.

A specific example is also one of my biggest annoyances in the world today.  The Scientific Consensus on Man Made (anthropogenic) Global Warming.  Sounds pretty impressive I admit, over 2300+ “experts” (there’s that word again) from around the world apparently agree that humans are warming up the planet.  Not that all 2300+ of those scientists actually agree on the conclusions, they just contributed to an assessment report that nobody actually got to see.  This was then “summarized” (aka heavily edited) to create a second much much shorter document without all that silly science stuff and then released to the public as the IPCC Assessment reports summary for policy makers.  Oh yeah, I guess now they’re calling it Climate Change because the global warming thing didn’t happen like predicted…

While I could probably talk and argue for days about this subject specifically (for awhile it was close to an obsession of mine), the point of this post isn’t to debate that theory itself, but to use it as an example of how people stop thinking as soon as someone (or in this case a group of people) with a perceived expertise on a subject divulges a “truth”.  This ties in somewhat to my previous post on paint-by-number parenting.  Some dude writes a book and calls himself a child/parenting expert and for some reason the readers suspend their inherent skepticism (something I think is very important) and take it all at face value.  They may not agree with everything necessarily, but they don’t call BULLSHIT when they should.

My example would be Dr. Richard Ferber (of the famed Ferber method…aka crying it out).  If people had read this dudes research (if you could call it that) and treated him as a stupid and potentially dangerous psychopath instead of as an authority on pediatric sleep disorders (if that isn’t an oxymoron I don’t know what is) maybe we wouldn’t have parents across North America teaching their young babies that nobody is going to come no matter how long or hard they cry.  I don’t care if he has an MD, that’s nothing special.  I’m pretty sure I could have gotten one if I had tried.  So what makes this guy an expert?  As far as I can tell he gave himself that label and nobody questioned him.

This isn’t an isolated event.  If I could jump back to my favorite subject for a minute, we can talk about one of my least favorite people, Al Gore.  Best known for being the VP and an almost president of the USA as well as his joke of a movie (I refuse to call it a documentary) “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore portrays himself as an expert on Anthropogenic Global Warming.  What are his qualifications for this role?  He had a class once in college with a professor that was passionate about the subject.  Otherwise everything is self righteousness and conviction (and a little used car salesman thrown in).  What earthshaking scientific evidence did his movie show that proved beyond a doubt that humans are the single greatest cause of global warming?  A graph that was poorly explained and WASN’T EVEN ACCURATE, as well as a cute graphic of a polar bear sitting on a melting iceberg (incidentally also inaccurate).  And what was his reward for all this self sacrificing work for the good of all mankind?  A Nobel peace prize (which happens to have a multi-million dollar financial component) and further millions in monetary rewards for his talks around the world, books deals and investment in carbon credit companies and role as an advisor to corporations internationally and in the US.  Hmm, sounds pretty selfless doesn’t it (some estimates indicate he’s made over 100 million directly related to Global Warming)?  Not only that, but the jerk doesn’t even practice what he preaches.  His energy bill is over 20 TIMES that of the average US citizen.

So what was the point of all of this?  If we want to move forward as individuals and as a society, people need to stop acting like lemmings and think for themselves.  This starts at home with their parenting, but extends to all parts of life.  Don’t follow the trends just because someone tells you to.  Don’t believe everything you read just because someone labels themselves an expert.  And for Gaia’s sake, don’t believe what you read in a newspaper because those guys are full of shit 9 times out of 10.

Related posts:

1. Go with the flow…
2. Green Meme Blogger #1