If you are a scientist, then you know better than to argue with the idea of natural selection. Thanks to the principles of evolution, there are laws that we have documented that underlie human behavior. Thus, the field of psychology does have basic laws. Next time someone tells you that ours is a soft science,...
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Laws of Human Behavior | Psychology Today
In scary and uncertain times, having a stockpile can feel soothing.AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
Stephanie Preston, University of Michigan
The media is replete with COVID-19 stories about people clearing supermarket shelves and the backlash against them. Have people gone mad? How can one individual be overfilling his own cart, while shaming others who are doing the same?
As a behavioral neuroscientist who has studied hoarding behavior for 25 years, I can tell you that this is all normal and expected. People are acting the way evolution has wired them.
The word hoarding might bring to mind relatives or neighbors whose houses are overfilled with junk. A small percentage of people do suffer from what psychologists call hoarding disorder, keeping excessive goods to the point of distress and impairment.
But hoarding is actually a totally normal and adaptive behavior that kicks in any time there is an uneven supply of resources. Everyone hoards, even during the best of times, without even thinking about it. People like to have beans in the pantry, money in savings and chocolates hidden from the children. These are all hoards.
Most Americans have had so much, for so long. People forget that, not so long ago, survival often depended on working tirelessly all year to fill root cellars so a family could last through a long, cold winter and still many died.
Similarly, squirrels work all fall to hide nuts to eat for the rest of the year. Kangaroo rats in the desert hide seeds the few times it rains and then remember where they put them to dig them back up later. A Clarks nutcracker can hoard over 10,000 pine seeds per fall and even remember where it put them.
Similarities between human behavior and these animals are not just analogies. They reflect a deeply ingrained capacity for brains to motivate us to acquire and save resources that may not always be there. Suffering from hoarding disorder, stockpiling in a pandemic or hiding nuts in the fall all of these behaviors are motivated less by logic and more by a deeply felt drive to feel safer.
My colleagues and I have found that stress seems to signal the brain to switch into get hoarding mode. For example, a kangaroo rat will act very lazy if fed regularly. But if its weight starts to drop, its brain signals to release stress hormones that incite the fastidious hiding of seeds all over the cage.
Kangaroo rats will also increase their hoarding if a neighboring animal steals from them. Once, I returned to the lab to find the victim of theft with all his remaining food stuffed into his cheek pouches the only safe place.
People do the same. If in our lab studies my colleagues and I make them feel anxious, our study subjects want to take more stuff home with them afterward.
Demonstrating this shared inheritance, the same brain areas are active when people decide to take home toilet paper, bottled water or granola bars, as when rats store lab chow under their bedding the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, regions that generally help organize goals and motivations to satisfy needs and desires.
Damage to this system can even induce abnormal hoarding. One man who suffered frontal lobe damage had a sudden urge to hoard bullets. Another could not stop borrowing others cars. Brains across species use these ancient neural systems to ensure access to needed items or ones that feel necessary.
So, when the news induces a panic that stores are running out of food, or that residents will be trapped in place for weeks, the brain is programmed to stock up. It makes you feel safer, less stressed, and actually protects you in an emergency.
At the same time theyre organizing their own stockpiles, people get upset about those who are taking too much. That is a legitimate concern; its a version of the tragedy of the commons, wherein a public resource might be sustainable, but peoples tendency to take a little extra for themselves degrades the resource to the point where it can no longer help anyone.
By shaming others on social media, for instance, people exert what little influence they have to ensure cooperation with the group. As a social species, human beings thrive when they work together, and have employed shaming even punishment for millennia to ensure that everyone acts in the best interest of the group.
And it works. Twitter users went after a guy reported to have hoarded 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer in the hopes of turning a profit; he ended up donating all of it and is under investigation for price gouging. Who wouldnt pause before grabbing those last few rolls of TP when the mob is watching?
People will continue to hoard to the extent that they are worried. They will also continue to shame others who take more than what they consider a fair share. Both are normal and adaptive behaviors that evolved to balance one another out, in the long run.
But thats cold comfort for someone on the losing end of a temporary imbalance like a health care worker who did not have protective gear when they encountered a sick patient. The survival of the group hardly matters to the person who dies, or to their parent, child or friend.
One thing to remember is that the news selectively depicts stockpiling stories, presenting audiences with the most shocking cases. Most people are not charging $400 for a mask. Most are just trying to protect themselves and their families, the best way they know how, while also offering aid wherever they can. Thats how the human species evolved, to get through challenges like this together.
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Stephanie Preston, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Your brain evolved to hoard supplies and shame others for doing the same - wausaupilotandreview.com
Honorable Members of The 116th United States Congress:
We are living in a time of unprecedented turmoil resulting from a viral contagion taking the lives of people around the globe including Americans, whom you represent and work for. For context, I am a Christian, I believe in God. I also believe in science. I believe that the role science plays is to investigate what can be understood and explained in the material realm, and that which is unexplainable and unprovable from Mans fragile standpoint is Gods infinite wisdom.
I have voted as a Democrat and have crossed party lines to vote Republican when so required. I was a Management Consultant in NYC and after 9/11 I worked with the creation of the Homeland Security Critical Infrastructure Program in collaboration with Manufacturers, local law enforcement, the FBI and other agencies. I acted as an Advisor in Technology development and Commercialization for NYSERDA, ARPAe, DOE, the Military and several NYC based Centers for Advanced Technologies. I also Lobbied on Capitol Hill on behalf of the Manufacturing and Technology Sectors for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership under the Department of Commerce. I am of African-American heritage and I value the concept of what America could be for everyone if we truly desire to do so without favoritism and a hidden agenda.
We are stewards of the planet; we dont own it, we inhabit it. Those of us among the living are here but for a moment and, upon our demise, we too return to the earth, from which we were made. Essentially, we are intelligent compost. Our job is to preserve the planet for subsequent generations and ensure that the other living species that are part of the ecosystem, the animals, the insects, everything that isnt human is positioned to do what it was intelligently designed to do within the confines of its God-given role.
Corporate greed and our desire to make our lives easier have harmed the planet to an extent that has never been seen since mankind arrived. We are in a climate crisis. The U.N. Report that spoke of this stated: Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earths natural life-support systems, the worlds leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken. The water is polluted, sealife is beaching itself, algae is on the rise and polar bears are emaciated as the polar ice caps are melting (some the size of small states). Bees are dying, which in itself is directly attacking our food supplies and all plant life. One million species are at risk of extinction. The Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service study was compiled over three years by more than 450 scientists and diplomats.
The death of our planet and its ecosystems are affecting our human existence. Our lifestyles have directly contributed to what we face now. Coronavirus is the direct benefactor of what we have done to the planet. Essentially, our destruction of the planet is leading rapidly to our own demise. Human behavior created the Coronavirus, not some secretive lab or a foreign government, and definitely not bats. Every human that contributed to pollution created this. Again, its the science.
Science is facts that cant be denied. You can label the facts as untrue or fake news. Denial, however, is of no consequence in the face of reality. If we continue on this course, our planet, our children, our future will be obliterated by our own hands. Denial, in any formno matter what the motivationwill kill our planet and us in the meantime. Denial doesnt magically make it go away.
Our very own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says Zoonotic spillover is the problem and humans cause that through how we treat the planet.
Andrew Cunningham, Professor of Wildlife Epidemiology at the Zoological Society of London told CNN:
The underlying causes of zoonotic spillover from bats or from other wild species have almost always always been shown to be human behavior . . . Human activities are causing this. . . When a bat is stressed by being hunted, or having its habitat damaged by deforestation its immune system is challenged and finds it harder to cope with pathogens it otherwise took in its stride. . . We believe that the impact of stress on bats would be very much as it would be on people.
Our own NIH has reported, Zoonotic spillover, which is the transmission of a pathogen from a vertebrate animal to a human and presents a global public health burden but is a poorly understood phenomenon. Zoonotic spillover requires several factors to align, including the ecological, epidemiological and behavioral determinants of pathogen exposure, and the within-human factors that affect susceptibility to infection ideally, we are researching this within our own Federal Scientific Agencies, yet we ignore the science, we minimize it and we deny it, like we do the climate change. Deny it all we want, its going to do what it does.
Our own National Treasure Dr. Anthony Fauci said, The virus isnt a mathematical formula. He also states You dont make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline.
This is not hard to understand. Again, deny it if you will; it will still occur without your consent or participation. The virus is in control. No one is immune, everyone is at risk and it doesnt care how much money you have, but due to the policies of our country, the poor and the forgotten among us will die. This is not what a Country does when they start sessions in Congress with prayer.
The earth is protecting itself because we are the parasite. The earth is healing because we as a species are not polluting it. You dont have to believe me, the evidence is everywhere:
I implore our Governors to NOT follow the example and the mixed messages put forth by the administration because our lives are at stake. People will die if we go back too early, and yes, many many wealthy people will lose lots of money during this time, but when do we place people over profit? I know we are a country founded on Capitalism and Wealth first along with profiteering off of the backs of others, but when do we stop, reassess and think about saving the lives of all, not just those 50 and under? This virus is killing Black, White, Latino, Chinese, you name it.it targets us all. You included.
You have the authority to set just policies, laws, and practices that are humane, and that go beyond capitalism. We need to shut the country down now. Our banking system is sound, our financial systems are on par with no one else, but our doctors, nurses, and police officers are ill and dying. They have older relatives and children. What will it take for you to act to ensure the safety of us all?
In order to get through this, we need real leadership. Not leadership that blames or disparages people who are clearly afraid. We need you to soothe us, give us the facts and to cooperate with our scientists, our healthcare workers, and our local elected officials. This is the behavior of caring humans. We soothe each other, yet we give each other the truth.
My letter may mean nothing to you. You may see my sources as fake news, but the people infected arent faking. The people dying arent faking. What we are left with is our media that digs and digs and digs because we cant seem to get the truth, and so yes, they will get some things wrong. But our media, our CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The NY Times, and occasionally FOX News are designed to hold you, our elected officials accountable. Please do not deflect, call questions fake news or outright lie (as so many have done on both sides of the aisle).
I for one am grateful to our free press because they are relentless in finding out what is the truth whether or not that truth is volunteered by our government. I implore you to answer the questions when asked. When you ignore them or placate us at a time when we need your unbiased honesty, we see, we hear. The media can be annoying and yes they will ask you set up questions from time to time, but if youre not lying.that should not be an issue.
The most powerful military nation on the earth is in the process of setting protocols within health care to decide who lives or dies. Its against everything our healthcare professionals believe, its against their oath and they like many warriors who are suffering from PTSD.
We can reverse this. Listen to our scientists, absorb their knowledge and make sound decisions and yes, some of these decisions will involve our economic future. First, however, lets keep everyone alive. Everyone who loses someone will recall the face of a loved one lost or traumatized by this earth-changing event. They will remember when they vote. Americans are not stupid, we are not blind. We have long memories. Do whats right, not whats expedient or easy. Take care of us, this is what you were hired to do.
This quote by Tamer K. Abouelnaga sums up what I and so many Americans want from you:
Corona has proved that everything around us is so temporary. Things our lives revolved aroundwork, gym, malls, movies, society have all gone for a toss as we are learning to live without them. It has taught us that in the end, its your own home and family that keeps you safe.
Franklin Madison
Photo credit: Shutterstock
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An Open Letter to Congress: Our Environment and the Coronavirus - The Good Men Project
SALT LAKE CITY One concern during this pandemic and the subsequent stay-at-home directives is the inevitable conflict that being cooped up together for long periods of time can create.
Too much time and close quarters with anyone, even people we love, will result in getting on each others nerves. It will help if we understand why these conflicts start, what they are really about, and how to navigate out of them and preserve our relationships.
First: It's important to distinguish domestic violence from run-of-the-mill conflict. Officials in some areas have seen an uptick in domestic violence because many businesses are closed, so more families are home now and are facing uncertainty and stress. There are many resources available if you experience abuse or violence in your home. The Utah Domestic Violence Coalition and the National Domestic Violence Hotline along with others online, are here to help.
Next: I want to address why the most common conflicts at home happen and how you can curtail them. When a conflict between two people happens, it usually starts because someone feels offended, either diminished or disregarded in some way, and this triggers their two core fears.
The two core fears, which I believe create all bad human behavior, are:
I have found that we all suffer from both these fears to some degree every day. But I've noticed each person also has one of these two core fears that is their primary bad behavior trigger. If a person ever behaves badly or starts a fight, it is usually their same core fear that has been triggered. I call this your dominant core fear.
It is helpful to understand each family members dominant fear so you can avoid triggering it and understand whats really happening when they get upset. See if you can tell which sounds like you.
A fear-of-failure dominant person:
A fear-of-loss dominant person:
Can you tell which sounds more like you? Your spouse? Each of your kids? We usually marry someone who has the opposite fear we have apparently, opposites do attract. Which means we may marry the person who will be the best teacher for us. They teach us by triggering our fears (pushing our buttons) and bringing them to the surface so we can work on them.
Imagine if Dad were fear-of-loss dominant and Mom were fear-of-failure dominant. Dad could start to feel neglected because he felt that all moms attention was on the children and their needs. He could start to feel mistreated or that he lacks what he needs. Because he is fear-of-loss dominant, he would probably speak up and let her know that hes bothered.
Mom, because she is fear-of-failure dominant, could immediately see this feedback as criticism and even attack. She would be really hurt and upset that he couldnt see how hard she tried to make everyone happy. In this insulted state, Mom wouldnt feel safe with Dad. So, she might pull back and want to spend even less time with him. This would only trigger more fear of loss in Dad and possibly more criticism from him, which would further trigger her. Can you see how this vicious cycle could happen?
This would create a miserable stay at home experience.
The trick to breaking this cycle is to recognize that when someone is upset, one or both of their fears has been triggered. The problem isnt really about you; it is about their own fear issues and their need for something to make them feel safer. Knowing this can be a game-changer. Suddenly, you can see bad behavior and attacks as signs that the person is scared. They are not just a jerk or being mean. Remember, it is often people who are hurting who hurt other people. When you can understand that they don't feel safe in the world (and this is a problem they had long before this situation happened, so they own it) you won't take things as personally and you can respond with what they actually need.
If Mom could recognize that Dads being upset was not about her not being good enough, but about his fear of lack and loss, she could choose to not get offended by it. This is hard and will take some practice, but you can get this mature and not let attacks hurt you. Mom might say, "Honey, what do you feel you are lacking or losing here? What has you feeling unsafe in the world? Tell me how that feels? What can I do to help you feel more secure or loved?
Being able to avoid getting triggered when someone else is upset with you is hard, though. It requires mindfulness, maturity and practice. It helps if you keep reminding yourself of these two things:
These two simple beliefs are the secret to not getting your fear triggered. I try to walk around all day every day with these two thoughts in my mind. If any conflict happens, I quickly remind myself of these two things and they make me feel safe. I no longer need the other person to fix my sense of unsafety. I can do that myself.
When you are bothered with someones behavior and want to speak up for yourself about it, just remember you are not better or more perfect than they are. You both have the same value and you both make mistakes.
Do not talk down to others. See them as equal and talk to them with love and respect. Try to use "I" statements, not "you" statements. "You are making me feel unloved" is an attack; "I am feeling unloved" is the truth.
Talk about your fear issues and feelings, and ask if the other person might be willing to help you by changing some behavior moving forward. Focus totally on the future behavior you want to see, not past behavior that they cannot change.
I realize being this mature and wise is hard, especially when we are all functioning with a terrible fear of loss right now because of the pandemic. But this situation is going to give us some wonderful chances to grow and be better. Be patient with yourself and just keep trying.
You can do this.
Authors note: Master Coach Kimberly Giles is offering a free Zoom call for any who are struggling during this quarantine time or want to spend it doing some personal development. Join her Monday nights at 7p.m. MDT at https://zoom.us/meeting/8187971392, or call #253-215-8782. She will be offering this FREE Coach Kim Clarity Call each week until we are past this challenging time.
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Coach Kim: Is staying at home creating conflict in your family? - KSL.com
When we think of artificial intelligence in education we think of robot teachers, adaptive intelligent tutors and smart essay marking software, and while these developments have significant impacts in the classroom, they are only a small part of the huge potential artificial intelligence has in the future of education.
Perhaps a more significant power that AI brings to education is connecting the way we learn in an intelligent way to make us humans essentially better at learning, whether it be about ourselves, the world, or how we convey this information to others. But the development of AI also has huge capacities in helping us to develop and measure the complexity of human intelligence - something that no AI system could ever match, but by trying to model it, we begin to understand the foundations of decision making done by humans.
These decisions may be small, insignificant ones that we dont notice much in our daily activity, whether it be deciding what to wear for the day, conversing in a foreign language, or even expressing emotions such as joy, sadness or anxiety. It is only when we attempt to compute these human actions that we realize the depth and complexity they hold and just how much intelligence they require.
As with any form of AI, the development of this intelligence comes with its costs. We need to acknowledge the potential threat of such an interconnected intelligence infrastructure if it were ever to be misused or abused. However, if we do get the ethics right, the AI systems will power our learning needs, and completely transform the way we teach younger generations and assess students, instead of focussing on what we teach them.
For example, a school student could explain to a friend how much they understand about a concept they have recently learned. Their explanation can then be captured and analyzed, and the feedback collected can be offered to the student in an immersive augmented reality experience that corrects their mistakes and misconceptions. Their performance can also be relayed to the teacher, who may go over their original explanation and help them identify mistakes. This gives both the teacher and the student a clearer idea of their progress in a current activity, whether it be Maths, English, or any other subject on the curriculum.
How do we build this intelligence infrastructure for education, to be used for more than just effective marking? By utilizing the integration of big data based on human behavior, deep learning, and our own intelligence to understand the algorithms. We are essentially combining the science behind the way we think and make decisions with our knowledge of machine learning and its foundations. Through this close examination of human behavior, we also begin to understand metacognition, where one has an awareness and understanding of their thought processes.
The potential for this technology is immense. We can collate and analyze large sets of data concerning what we say, what we do, how we dress, what problems and questions we can solve. The analysis of this information will holistically look at our progress as humans and the way we think, instead of just monitoring how well we do in a certain subject or if our test scores have improved. It has the capabilities to even improve the way we behave, whether we work well in a team or not, and how resilient, self-aware, motivated and disciplined we are. Yet the capabilities of this technology can only be positively utilized if there are suitable ethics and security precautions put in place.
While we all have imagined a future where we have robots as teachers and invigilators, papers graded by software, we have to expand our horizons to start understanding the complexity of what AI can offer us, not just as a machine that repeats the same monotonous action over and over again, but as an intelligent network that can help us self-evaluate our own personality traits and capabilities, but also understand human intelligence in a way we never have before.
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How AI Can Help Us Understand The Way We Think and Learn - AI Daily
Most plagues in human history were followed by remarkable cultural, economic and social renaissances. The post-Covid-19 era might follow a similar pattern, but only if we are ready and willing to grasp the root causes of the ongoing crisis and act on them.
Lets start by pointing out that US President Donald Trump whose administration is responsible for the rollback of 95 environmental rules has had no qualms about calling Covid-19 the Chinese Virus. This is not only a racist concept and a recipe for xenophobic violence, but also an utterly misleading expression.
The authorities in China, where the virus most likely emerged in the first half of November 2019, initially suppressed information about its discovery. As a result, China bears precise responsibilities for what Italy, Spain and other countries are currently facing. Yet, it would be an illusion to search for the seeds and the essence of Covid-19 in the mistakes made by Beijing in its handling of the crisis.
READ: Coronavirus cases surpass 600,000 globally
Instead, the roots of the pandemic are to be found mainly in the impoverishment of biodiversity. Forests and many now-endangered species served for centuries as natural barriers against epidemics. Historically, the presence of many animal species have forced viruses to face the so-called dilution effect, that is the association between wide species diversity and a reduced risk of disease.
Both forests and species including wild animals, whose consumption and farming are widespread in a number of countries, China and Thailand among them are today at their lowest point in history: 100 million hectares of tropical forest were lost from 1980 to 2000, and about 1 million species are now threatened with extinction.
True, pandemics are not new phenomena. The Black Death in the 1340s, for instance, originated in north-west China and was introduced to Europe via Genoese traders. From what is now Italy, the disease spread across Europe. After killing an estimated 400 million people worldwide, it was followed by an impressive cultural period known as the European Renaissance that erased the remains of feudal society and helped take Europe towards modernity.
Since then, medicine relying mainly on ancient or early modern Indian, Greek, Persian and Arab traditions has made huge leaps forward. And yet, viruses are today unprecedented in their current scale and spread. Plenty of studies have in fact confirmed the increasing frequency of pandemics occurring over the last few decades.
Apart from globalisation and its effects, the reason is once again deeply entrenched within climate change and the impoverishment of biodiversity. It is enough to mention that, since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions have doubled and that about 85 per cent of wetlands the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems present in 1700 had been lost by the year 2000.
This and a wide number of other related phenomena such as a 40 per cent rise in the carbon footprint from tourism between 2009 and 2013 have weakened what for centuries have been the first natural barriers against the spreading of zoonotic diseases, that is any disease that can be passed from animals to humans or vice versa.
READ: Iran can help US fight COVID-19 but we dont need their help, says commander
The solutions implemented by airlines and a wide range of other stakeholders such as Shell, Total and BP consist mainly (although not only) in offsetting their climate polluting activities with tree planting. In truth, their monoculture tree plantations cause havoc to biodiversity, and are aggravating, not improving, the climate and biodiversity crises.
Thanks also to these profitable practices, nature is today declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. This has prompted many to adopt the concept of Anthropocene from the Greek anthropos, man to describe the geological era in which we are living. The term aims to underline the way in which the terrestrial environment, in all its physical, chemical and biological characteristics, is shaped by the effects of human action.
The concept of Anthropocene, however, is not only largely inaccurate, but also unfair. A problem of human behavior is no doubt present, but this is linked to a few societies and certain specific economies, located in particular in Northern Europe, on the Atlantic coast of the United States and in Eastern China. Most of the rest of the world and its inhabitants bear little responsability for the causes and dynamics related to Anthropocene, if not the fact of sharing its dramatic effects.
Although Anthropocene is a largely inaccurate concept, ongoing debates surrounding this term are nonetheless igniting a few positive effects. The most important is the reaffirmation of the centrality of human beings and their actions.
The marginal centrality of our planet and its inhabitants had been confirmed by many discoveries made in modern times. Think about Copernicus, who confirmed that the Earth revolves around the Sun and that therefore the former is not positioned at the centre of our solar system; or Kepler, whose telescopes confirmed for the first time that the Earth is only one planet among billions of others. The same applies to dozens of others scholars and scientists, including Charles Darwin, who contended that monkeys, apes and humans must share a common ancestor and are therefore part of a broader and more complex process connected to life on Earth.
READ: G20 online summit commits to $5 trillion economic boost to combat coronavirus
After many centuries, the concept of Anthropocene is making a decisive contribution towards tackling what has long appeared as an inherent perception of marginality of humanity, giving new strength to the positive and negative impact that we can all exert on our surroundings and planet.
We are back at centre stage: it is up to all of us to question and reshape our way of dealing with the environment and the species which inhabit our planet. If we do not learn the lesson, we must be ready to face plenty of other and possibly more lethal epidemics and natural calamities.
Some might have the impression that the continent which is suffering the most from the current pandemic Europe has indeed learnt the lesson. In fact, the EUs Green Deal, released in December 2019 by the new president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, set out how to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.
To this end, the deal aims to make it mandatory for EU member-states to implement measures to reduce carbon emissions as per the European Green Deal (EGD). It does not, however, tackle many of the main interests at stake, and by itself will not offer in its present form a major contribution to improve the climate and biodiversity crises.
It is enough to mention that the EU governments continue to provide massive, long-term, subsidies to new fossil fuels, and that plenty of natural resources of African countries including cobalt, needed for our tablets and computers are still being syphoned off through offshore companies that, to a large extent, are linked to European (and American) companies and businessmen. As the Panama Papers confirmed, anonymous companies (about 1400 of them) and tax havens are used to exploit the natural wealth of some of the worlds poorest countries.
READ: Its time for Iran to work with world leaders to halt the coronavirus body count
On top of this, Europe is the second largest global producer of plastics (after China), dumping from 150,000 to 500,000 tons of macroplastics in the Mediterranean Sea and other European seas every year.
Last but not least, it is important to keep in mind that the EU is the sum of its member states: dozens of meaningful examples show how single European states think for instance of France, whose arms sales to Egypt jumped from 39.6 million in 2010 to 1.3 billion in 2016 are polluting and acting on a global scale.
It is relatively easy to set medium and long-term strategies in order to clean your own home. Much less so is to counter the structural interests connected to the exploitation of the natural resources of others, and the pollution of their environment.
All of this reminds us that the lesson is still far from being learnt, although some actors and particularly the ones whose policies are affecting the planet the most will continue to portray themselves as more civilised and enlighted than the others.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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A global perspective is needed to act on the root causes of Covid-19 - Middle East Monitor
This article is part of a mini-series featuring the work of journalism students from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) who travelled to Indonesia in November 2019 as part of the Australian government's New Colombo PlanMobility schemeGrace Desoe, Mathew Perry and Yi Peng
Plastic waste is a significant environmental issue in Indonesia, deeply impacting the whole country. Indonesia is second only to China as the worlds largest contributor to ocean plastic pollution. Four of its rivers Brantas, Solo, Serayu and Progo are on a list of the worlds dirtiest rivers, carrying the most waste into our oceans.
A 2016 World Economic Forum report estimated there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050. Experts agree that a global shift toward a circular economy is needed; one that aims to eliminate waste and encourages continual use and re-use of resources.
In September 2018 the Indonesian governmentannounced its plan to be on the front lines of this global shift towards circular models of waste management and to reduce plastic marine debris by 70 percent by 2025.
Deputy for the Coordination of Human Resources, Science and Technology and Maritime Culture Safri Burhanuddin supports this approach, explaining, There is a big opportunity for all communities in Indonesia to implement circular strategies.
If we collect waste properly, we can reuse 60 to 70 per cent of it and it becomes a simple economy, he said.
Currently, it is impossible to reuse all waste simply because a large proportion is contaminated waste. In July 2019, Indonesia returned 49 containers containing toxic waste to their home countries including Australia and the United States.
Most plastic in Indonesia is non-recyclable and it usually ends up in landfill, but a solution for non-recyclable waste that continues to have government support is the option of burning it to produce energy. According to a February 2019 statement from the Energy Ministry, the government plans to have 12 waste-to-energy plants operating by 2022, burning 16,000 tons of waste every day.
Aliansi Zero Waste is an environmental NGO that advocates for better waste management and promotes reducing, reusing and recycling waste. Mbak Daru, spokesperson for Aliansi Zero Waste Indonesiaargues thatgovernment proposals to turn waste to energy are not in keeping with the concept of the circular economy.
When we burn plastic its gone, so it cannot be recycled over and over again. Its against the real circular economy principle.
We have to try as much to give high priority in a reduction of plastic production [and] increase the capacity of recycling by promoting waste segregation by source, she said.
While sustainability initiatives including plastic collection, recycling plastic to make furniture and decorations for example, are spreading through local communities, coordination of these activities faces challenges due not only to the scale of the problem, but also the politics around waste management.
With ocean plastics gathering global attention, foreign investment in waste has grown in recent times. In 2017 Indonesia received a US$11.8 billion trust fund from Denmark to address marine waste. This has been accompanied by an influx of foreign eco-warriors coming to Indonesia with their sights set on sustainable waste management.
United Kingdom-based company Ministry of Waste has been working to establish a pilot project focusing on island circular economy on Nusa Penida, a diving and eco-tourism hub off Balis coast.
The companys strategic plan involves establishing waste management infrastructure in more than 70 locations throughout Indonesia, which involves taking on responsibility for an areas waste management services and ensuring materials are separated appropriately to regain value as raw input for production.
Part of our strategy is to constantly find innovative methods to recycle or re-use usually hard-to-recycle types of waste. This enables us to give more value to a bigger percentage of waste entering our facilities - from Tetrapak packaging to tyres and diapers, CEO and founder of Ministry of Waste, Samanta Skrivere explained. If the project proves successful, Skrivere hopes that similar initiatives can be rolled out across Indonesia as well as to other countries in Southeast Asia and Africa.
Though there are a growing number of both local and international organisations like Ministry of Waste, their effectiveness is limited unless they involve strong collaboration and coordination said Project Coordinator at Greeneration Foundation, an NGO focusing on changing human behavior to implement sustainable consumption and production, Fahrian (Ryan) Yovantra.
There are a number of actions and initiatives that have been done by local NGOs, communities and government, but they are running individually, they are running independently, they are not synergised among one another There is no centralised platform or law governing circular economy.
For an initiative to be effective, all levels of the community need to be consistently engaged and given funding to enable them to change their consumer behaviour. In short, he added, there needs to be strong commitment, collaboration and legal reform.
Some local governments are attempting to turn the tide, such as in Bali, where single use plastic items such as bags, straws and styrofoam were banned in July 2019. In communities that still rely heavily on plastic, this goal is much harder to reach especially in isolated areas and communities where burning plastic is a primary source of energy. In these situations, Ryan believes that to shift the attitudes about plastic use there needs to be top-down change from government and corporations.
The challenges rely on the system in supporting that ecosystem. Shifting their behaviour, the change should not rely on the user but the top level, the producer of the plastic waste, he said.
Daru agreed. We need companies to be held accountable for the plastic waste they produce, especially big, global companies like Unilever, BNG, Nestle, multinational corporations.
If they say they need to provide small packages or sachets to the poor people, they should also consider how the people will manage that waste. Do they have the capacity to treat their waste? If they dont, the company should not provide single waste packaging to that community, she said.
Despite these barriers, Ryan has a positive outlook on the future of the circular economy in Indonesia.
But there needs to be a stronger commitment from government...Firstly, [we need to] increase the education on circular economy... we need strong leadership and committed leadership [and] we need a governing law on circular economy.
Grace Desoe (grace.desoe@gmail.com), Mathew Perry and Yi Peng, journalism students at Queensland University of Technology travelled to Indonesia with the support of the Australian Governments New Colombo Plan Mobility Scheme.
ATLANTA, March 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Created by Solomon Carter, architect of the Performance Improvement Ethics Risk & Communication Enhancement Model known as The PIERCE Model, Carter has migrated many of the core concepts of PIERCE, enhanced and then integrated them into the emergency management and underlying communications requirements needed to surge performance efforts in "bending the curve."
"A surge in infections should be met with a surge in more communication because it is through effective communications that we can bend human behavior the best. If we don't 'bend the behavior,' then we can't 'bend the curve.' And it all starts with communication. It is one of the foundational tenants of PIERCE and why it immediately occurred to me that I had to release the model and create this additional tool, six months early to assist with the COVID-19 pandemic," Carter states.
"The COVID-19 Communications Pallet" streamlines critical data and provides easy to use and easy to understand guidelines to stakeholders on how to marshal local resources and allow other stakeholders in other jurisdictions/states to see and glean from standardized solutions that already work. And then activate those exact same resources in their own respective geographical areas. It helps leaders create and implement a call to action and serves as an idea factory at the same time.
To view "The COVID-19 Communication Pallet for Government Leaders, Policy and Healthcare Professionals," you can go here.
Solomon Carter leads Emory Healthcare's, Physician Group Practices, Patient Financial Services, Office of Professional Development. He also serves as an executive leader with All Power in His Hands Christian Mission which is an aid organization that operates in Haiti. There, Solomon overseas the organization's food distribution and children's medicine programs among other Church mission- based initiatives. Some of his work is created in part, by his work in Haiti during the cholera outbreak. [emailprotected]
SOURCE Solomon Carter
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The "COVID-19 Communications Pallet For Government Leaders, Healthcare And Policy Professionals" Tool Is Launched To Combat The Coronavirus...
Finding out how flight evolved or animals moved onto land is all about a collision of palaeontology and genetics, argue two new books
By Graham Lawton
Phil Degginger/Alamy
Books
IN 1871, a now-obscure biologist called St George Jackson Mivart published On the Genesis of Species. As its title suggests, the book was a riposte to Darwins theory of natural selection, published in 1859. Mivart had been an avid Darwinian, but the more he thought about it, the stronger his doubts
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The evolutionary mystery of flying may finally be cracked by genetics - New Scientist
By Herawati Sudoyo, Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology
To mark Wallacea Week, a series of public lectures and exhibition on the Wallacea region of Indonesia, The Conversation presents a series of analysis on biodiversity and history of science in Indonesia. This is the third and last article of the series.
In Indonesian society, people often use a dichotomy between pribumi or native and pendatang or migrants. Pribumi means the original settlers while pendatang are foreigners. This dichotomy often creates racism and tension between groups in the society.
However, a research on human genome found all Indonesians are migrants. Indonesian people are a mix of different genetic groups of Homo sapiens who travelled from Africa in waves spanning tens of thousands years via different routes to the archipelago.
I study the diversity of genetics of Indonesian people. I work with anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, and computer scientists to reconstruct the history of settlement in the archipelago. In short, I try to learn who are the ancestors of Indonesian people through genetics.
Before our research, there was no available data about the genetics of humans in Indonesia within the worlds human genome research. Scientists have data about human migration through mainland Asia and Australia, but the data from the Indonesian archipelago were missing because they had never been investigated.
There are three genetic markers that can be used to study human migration.
First, the Y chromosome, a protein structure consisting of nucleid acid in sperm cells. Y chromosome inherits DNA from father to children.
Second, genetic materials in mitochondria, also called mitochondrial DNA, inherited by mothers to the children. Mitochondria is a structure in cells that transforms food intake into energy in the body.
Human genome researchers categorise humans into genetic populations called haplogroups by looking at the similarities in their Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA, which are the specific motifs of both DNAs.
The third genetic marker is autosomal DNA, inherited from both parents.
My research colleagues and I in Eijkman Institute collected and analysed around 6,000 samples of DNA from different locations in Indonesia to look at the haplogroups of Indonesian people. We tested more than 3,700 people from 35 ethnic groups for their mitochondrial DNA, and almost 3,000 of them for their chromosome Y.
Using mitocondrial DNA, we found haplogroups M, F, Y2 and B in the western part of Indonesia. The people of these haplogroups are mostly speakers of Austronesia languages, spoken in Southeast Asia, Madagascar and Pacific Islands.
Meanwhile in the eastern part of Indonesia we found haplogroups Q and P. These two haplogroups are unique to people of Papua and Nusa Tenggara. People of haplogroup Q and P are non-Austronesian speakers.
Whats more interesting is Mentawai and Nias, the haplogroup of the people in those islands are grouped with the native people of Formosa, Austronesian speakers who travelled to the south around 5,000 years ago.
Through multidisciplinary research combining genetics research with archaeology and linguistics, we can discover that the ancestors of Indonesian people came in waves.
The history of ancestral migration started 72,000 years ago when a group of Homo sapiens or modern humans travelled south from the African continent to the Arabian peninsula towards India.
The descendants of this first wave of people arrived to what is now the Indonesian archipelago around 50,000 ago. At the time the Malay peninsula, Borneo and Java were still connected as one landmass called Sundaland. Descendants of this group continued to wander to Australia.
Signs that the Indonesian archipelago has been inhabited by modern humans can be seen through archaeological findings. In Sarawak, Malaysias territory of Borneo, scientists found a skull thats around 34,000 to 46,000 years old.
And in the caves of Maros, South Sulawesi, there are 40,000-year-old pre-historic rock arts.
The second migration, around 30,000 years ago, came from the area that is now Vietnam. The third migration is the arrival of Austronesian speakers from Formosa around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.
Lastly, the spread of Hindu and the rise of the Indian empire between the 3rd to 13th century created a variety of haplogroups found in small frequencies in Bali, Java, Borneo, and Sumatra. There was also the spread of Islam from Arabia and the findings of haplogrup O-M7 which is a marker for people from China.
By collecting and analysing the genetics data of Indonesians, we can fill the gap of data about human migration between the Asian mainland and the Pacific Islands.
The genetics of Indonesian people are a mix between different groups of humans. Our genetics data shows that the Indonesian archipelago was once a centre of civilisation.
Our research also has provided us with basic information about mutations of specific diseases such as the inherited blood disease thalasemia. Thalasemia is the main genetic disease in Indonesia.
By having the data about the mutations, diagnosis can be targeted to ethnic groups where the mutations are most present. This will help doctors and patients deal with diseases and improve health care.
These investigations into genetics that reveal the population structure of Indonesian people, match with the research that found the clustering of human pathogens such as Hepatitis B or C as well as dengue. So, having genetic data can help us fight diseases more effectively.
How about autosomal DNA? This helps us predict the chances of someone to contract certain diseases. Its always better to prevent than to cure.
Herawati Sudoyo, Deputy for Fundamental Research of Eijkman Institute., Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Tracing the Origin of Indonesian People Through Genetics - The Good Men Project