As someone who exercises daily, I explored the use of heart rate monitors to get a better workout. I always struggled to get my rate into the max range in interval training.
The standard formula was “220 – the person’s age.” I started playing with heart rate monitors right out of college. Though I did my damnedest to get my heart rate into the 190s, it was near impossible. At 183 beats per minute, I couldn’t talk any more and I could barely breath; it felt like having asthma attack…on purpose. So I gave up on heart rate monitors because the defeated me in every spinning class.
The American Heart Association journal Circulation recently published the findings of a heart rate study, using about 5500 women. Surprise, surprise! Women’s hearts beat to their own drummer, and our maximum heart rate is considerably lower than that of men.
That new formula “206 – (.88*age) is spot on. At 21, my maximum heart rate was 187.5, so it’s no wonder I was struggling so much. I had moved into my real heart rate peak range, though science hadn’t yet acknowledged it.
Me thinks it is time to buy some new batteries for my heart rate monitor.
Author and columnist Thomas Friedman, and businessman Dov Seidman opened this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival with a discussion of situational versus sustainable values. Friedman and Seidman argue that over the past decade our culture has lead the business world to relatively consistently [underprice risk, privatize gains, and socialize loss].
Friedman explains that, “if the situation allows me to issue a subprime mortgage to someone to buy a home even if all I’ve asked of them is can you <huff> fog up the knife then I will do it; sustainable values will tell me I shouldn’t. Situationally, I can buy 1000 acres of the Amazon and plant soy beans. Situationally, I can do that; sustainable values would tell me I shouldn’t. . .what we’ve had in the last decade is an explosion of situational thinking and situational values in both the market and mother nature.” Sustainable values are more driven by the long term effects of decisionmaking and making choices that lead to the best possible outcome for ALL involved.
He’s concerned that our current generation of leadership will align with what Kurt Anderson refers to as the Grasshopper Generation. “We ate through it like hungry locusts.”
Instead, he hopes that business, government and thought leaders can drive the “Re-generation.” Accordingly, “the single most important task of the Re-generation is bringing the concept of sustainability, sustainable values, into both the market and mother nature…If we don’t bring sustainability to the market and mother nature, then I believe the next generation will be more unfree than had our parents lost the Cold War. Because the market and mother nature will each impose on us constraints on how we live that will be worse than had the Communists won.”
Friedman breaks down the two key forces driving human trajectory. On the one hand, “Mother nature is just chemistry, biology and physics,” as defined by environmental consultant Rob Watson. “She always bats last, and she always bats 1000. Do not mess with mother nature.” On the flipside, “the market is just greed and fear. Greed and fear…It’s going to do whatever the balance of greed and fear dictate at any given moment. Do not mess with the market. You can’t spin it. You can’t sweet talk it.”
Friedman argues that the only way to wrangle these ‘the two most autistic forces on the planet (autistic in the sense of feeling no emotion whatsoever)” is through sustainable values, which have grown increasingly important because globalization and interdependency of economy has more tightly linked us to the rest of the human race more than ever before. Being aware of the social, environmental and fiscal costs of our decisions cannot be understated in world that experiences the pressure of crisis so often.
As Dov Siedman points out, “Used to be that we had a crisis every 20 years. We’re now so interconnected that crisis every 20 weeks, certainly every 20 months. Lehmen, Toyota, Greece, BP.” The moral and ethical implications of the course corrections our leaders choose in the face of these crises need to be recognized.
“If we are connected, the nature of our connections is exposed. Interconnection leads to moral and ethical interdependence. For the first time, we have to understand what David Hume said. ‘The moral imagination diminishes with distance.’ Where do we go when there’s no more distance?”
The BP oil spill created instant awareness for those hidden costs of being an oil dependent society. Can this travesty provide the collective cognitive liberation needed to begin the transition from the Grasshopper Generation to the Re-generation? At what point does personal consumer sacrifice become less of a cost than a continuation our insatiable razing of the planet we live on?
For those of you who aren’t inclined to read all 688 pages of Rifkin’s sweeping retelling of human history and the role empathy plays in our interpersonal and intercultural affairs, here’s a video providing a brief overview of The Empathic Civilization, which was published earlier this year.
It tends to be assumed that Gen Y is a more colorblind subset of the population. Certainly, for those growing up in areas with more diverse populations, they’re more likely to be exposed to a variety of cultures and races throughout our childhood schooling, which potentially has a mitigating effect on internally-processed race disparities. But kids still pick up subtle cues from their family members and are watching a tremendous amount of television, both of which can mean the introduction of stereotypes and biases depending on the relatives and the programming.
Planet Green’s Chief Ocean correspondent Philippe Cousteau Jr. sat down with Bill Maher on Friday to discuss the seriousness of ocean pollution.
The Florida Keys, third longest barrier reef in the world, is a dead zone. Ninety percent of the big fish, the tuna, the sharks, and other things, are already gone in the oceans. There’s a dead zone in the Gulf Of Mexico every summer the size of New Jersey, where there’s not enough oxygen for things to live. So it’s not a question of ‘Can the oceans take any more?’ The oceans can’t take any more. They couldn’t take any more fifty years ago. The question is, when are we going to stop?
Unsurprisingly, BP’s “Top Kill” maneuver, consisting of plugging the oil gusher with heavy mud and kill shots of shredded tires and golf balls, failed. And now the failed drilling zone is spilling an Exxon Valedez’s worth of oil in the Gulf of Mexico every three and a half days.
There is one upside to this disaster. As more photos (here, here and here) or the environmental impact of this spill makes their way online and into newscasts. The importance of environmental stewardship is, once again, trending as an important environmental issue. Per a new Gallup poll, Americans are realizing the cost of our oil dependency, even in the most superficial manner, and recognizing we actually need a planet to live on.
Unsurprisingly, as Mother Jones points out, self-identified Republicans still overwhelming support sourcing energy over keeping the planet a healthy enough place for the people living on it.
Karp said Florida has the most at stake, facing potential losses of $3 billion alone, including $2.8 billion in tourism, $18 million in commercial fishing and $138 million in recreational fishing…
Louisiana could face economic losses of $948 million, including $880 million in tourism, according to Karp’s estimates. Louisiana’s commercial fishing business stands to lose $31 million, while its recreational fishing industry could lose $37 million, he projects.
And if the drip, drip, drip of information about this spill is anything to go by, the numbers may turn out to be much worse. Christian Science Monitor reporting suggests upwards of 25,000 barrels of oil per day are spewing into the Gulf instead of the 5,000 barrel estimate being used in data crunching, a number which could skew upwards even further if the damaged piping is further compromised by the flow of gritty oil. With that oil pocket rumored to be tens of millions of gallons full, an unplugged flow could spread for months.
Our nation’s top experts are now suggesting “stuffing shredded tires, golf balls and other debris into the well’s failed blowout preventer,” while they work on a differently-shaped dome to repeat their attempts at sealing the leak. Can we really justify offshore drilling if we aren’t truly capable of foreseeing and planning for the consequences that could cause permanent damage to delicate coastal ecosystems and our food chain? Can’t we admit that some technology is still beyond the scope of our knowledge?
And yet politicians seem to be doubling down on their efforts to fill oil coffers, instead of promoting alternative energy sources that could yield new job sectors to partially replace the lost manufacturing jobs of this recession. For instance, Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, who seems to continue jerking further and further right since his election, is pushing to drill off the coast of his state as soon as possible.
Indeed, we need to create a platform for home grown energy, independent of the Middle East, but real leadership on energy would take us to the next generation of energy creation: one that demonstrates that those who grace the top of the food chain have the awareness that environmental stewardship is a necessary factor in moving society and the human race forward in a sustainable manner.
We’re not particularly good stewards of anything when we can’t even acknowledge the boundaries of what we know before aggressively drilling in the abyss.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently surveyed a sampling of American folks on their reactions to a variety of popular buzzwords in the political space of late.
Which came first, the disdain for socialism or the Republican campaign to brand everything Obama proposes as socialist? It’s a bit re-assuring, though, to see that the term “progressive” so well received.
But how strange that Republicans have such a positive opinion of the phrase “civil liberties,” given that Republican leadership is up in arms that alleged, attempted terrorist Faisal Shahzad was read his Miranda Rights, and Faux-publican Joe Lieberman is trying to strip citizenship from people found to be palling around with foreign terrorist organizations. Civil liberties are an all or nothing proposition; you can’t grant them to some but not all.
In January, Washington DC implemented a 5 cent tax on each plastic bag distributed by retailers throughout the city. During a one-week introduction to the new law, a number of grocery chains distributed reusable grocery bags to ensure their branded bags would be seen across the city in the coming months and also served as a way for lower income residents to pick up several of the cost-saving bags at no cost.
As a result of this law, plastic bag use plummeted from 22.5 million bags a month to just 3 million. (Side note: the $150,000 and counting generated by this tax is earmarked to fund Anacostia River clean up.) People increasingly can be seen carrying tote bags of various sizes and shapes when running errands or grocery shopping.
The law brought about an almost instantaneous shift in behavior, which could be as much about peer pressure and status as it is about saving a nickel here and there. A paper in the March issue of the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology reported on a study of factors influencing more environmentally-aware purchasing behavior. “Supporting the notion that altruism signals one’s willingness and ability to incur costs for others’ benefit, status motives increased desire for green products when shopping in public (but not private)…”
It’s not enough to be personally aware of the impact your greener actions have within your community, you’re more apt to make the more pro-environment decision when other people can see you.
Which makes me wonder about corporate America. Given the fundamental lack of transparency that leads to epic crises like the Wall Street melt down and the mine safety debacle in West Virginia, would the same forces at work on individuals work on corporations. Could consumer demand of greater transparency across the providers of goods and services throughout every industry sector, yield more community-centric corporations that consider the social and environmental costs when making business decisions?
This winter there have been a string of reports about retailers that destroy unsold merchandise rather than donating such items to local charities. Brand new clothes from H&M and Wal-Mart wound up slice and diced, then left at the curb for garbage pick up. H&M quickly responded to the attention, promising it would never happen again. Then employees of Borders Books made public the destruction of what totals up to 1 billion unsold books per year when they spoke up about what was to become of leftover books after the closing of 200 Walden Bookstores. (Covers are torn off and returned to the publisher for a refund, while the rest of the tomes are tossed in the trash. Roughly twenty to forty percent of published books wind up dumpstered every year as a standard business practice of publishing houses dating back to the 1930s.)
It’s not as though there is a shortage of alternate disposal methods that could benefit society. Last month, the NYTimes covered the New York Clothing bank, which distributes $10 million worth of clothing donated by retailers and designers each year to over 80,00o needy individuals. Feeding America supplies food banks with grocery overstock. DonorsChoose is one of many nonprofits that could help book retailers and publishers match their unsold stock with underfunded school districts and classrooms, like Ms. P’s, which needs 64 copies of Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Doesn’t it make you wonder how many other businesses are letting perfectly good products go to waste? Excess inventory should never wind up in a dumpster when so many families and children are in need. Thirty-nine percent of children (29 million) live in poverty in the United States and 1 in 8 Americans reach out to food banks to try to keep their families fed.
And you have to wonder how many businesses are changing the protocols for end of season leftovers or irregular products because no one at the company has even decided to question the status quo? It’s just easier to keep on keeping on the way things have always been than to reconsider the current model and possibly create more work in rendering a more equitable and efficient system.
Thus I direct you to a great story about five monkeys; traditions (workplace and otherwise) don’t always serve a meaningful purpose. Sometimes just asking “why” will help move you in a better direction.
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