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A Bold Proposal for a Suffering Community

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I consider this a manifesto for the ME/CFS community. These are my thoughts, after nearly five years of watching the anguish and the neglect that surrounds this disease. The manifesto states what I think should be done now.

And “now” is an important word.

There is a story that Winston Churchill, when he was very old and sick, summoned the gardener at his beloved country home in Kent, Chartwell, and asked him to plant an oak tree in an open space.

The gardener, looking at his enfeebled employer, swallowed and said, “But, sir, an oak tree takes a hundred years to grow.”

“Then you’d better plant it now, hadn’t you?” said Churchill.

During World War II, Churchill used this same execution imperative approach to work. Churchill used to stick little, pre-printed notes — long before the days of Post-it notes — on his paperwork for staff that read, “Action This Day.”

One of the first things that struck me about ME/CFS, when I started writing and broadcasting on the subject, was how slow the pace of progress was, even as the suffering suggested the need for immediate action. The second was how stingy public and private funding for research was then and is now.

I want my friends and loves, who are in the grip of a relentless affliction, whose days are torn from the calendar of hell, to be cured in my lifetime — and I am 74. I want to be able to hold them as whole happy people; the people they were before they were struck down by an enemy they did not provoke, a monster they do not deserve, an unseen captor, a malicious jailer that takes daily life and makes it into a tool of torture and punishment.

One year, the CFIDS Association of America was able to declare proudly that it had raised $2 million. The National Institutes of Health, a federal agency that should be pushing research, granted a paltry $5 million for ME/CFS in 2013. By comparison, in that same year, I learned that a consortium of foundations was sponsoring a green power marketing initiative at $6 million a year.

I have spent nearly 50 years writing about federal funding for energy, science and technology, and the sums of money spent has been in the tens of billions of dollars. One company gets more than $60 million year-in and year-out for nuclear fusion research — and I see nothing wrong with that.

But when I look at the federal funding for ME/CFS research, I am aghast: It is not funded at a level that can be expected to produce results. It is, to my mind, a crime against the sick; morally, if not criminally, indictable. To allow the scale of suffering that attends ME/CFS, without making research on the disease a national priority, is close to willful neglect; an abrogation of the high purposes of Hippocrates’ calling.

Other governments are not free of guilt for the suffering – and the United Kingdom stands out among the many offenders. These governments have been seduced by the fraudulent blandishments of the psychiatric lobby. If a ME/CFS patient refuses to accept a psychiatric diagnosis, he or she can either be imprisoned or forced to suffer the insinuation that they are not physically sick, even if they cannot get out of bed. There are cases in Europe where patients refusing the prescribed psychiatric treatment have been imprisoned, as happened most recently to Karina Hansen in Denmark.

The United States is experiencing a boom in natural gas production and the deployment of solar panels on rooftops. These successes are the manifestation of substantial research money committed in the 1970s, and sustained since then. Science needs certainty of support, both political and financial, to triumph.

The key is sustained funding; a splash here and a dash there just won’t do — it won’t do anything. ME/CFS researchers need to concentrate on their work, wherever that work takes them, free from the stress of insecure funding.

ME/CFS deserves the level of effort that might lead to success. It is not getting it now, and it never has had it.

It is appalling that Dr. Ian Lipkin, the highly respected virus hunter, is trying to raise $1.27 million through crowdfunding to investigate the role of microbiome in ME/CFS. What we are seeing is a scientist forced to beg. Yet this fundamental research, with application for diseases beyond ME/CFS, is at the frontier of biomedical science.

If we, as a nation, are to believe that we are in the forefront of science, we must be in the forefront of biomedical research as well as the forefront of computers, telecommunications, materials and physics. We almost humbled polio, and developed powerful drug therapies for AIDS. We can transplant vital organs and gave hope to the leper. The advances came neither cheaply nor easily, but they have saved lives beyond counting and eased suffering beyond enumeration. Why not for ME/CFS? Why not?

There is eloquence in the voices of the community. But they are widely distributed and, sadly, they fall mostly on ears of those who already know them — the sick, their families and their advocates.

The voices need to be heard widely, need to be channeled and need to be focused. A million points of light won’t do it. A laser, a great beam, will do it.

There are three principal reasons why these voices are not heard by those who need to hear them:

1. ME/CFS is a hard story for the media to grasp.

2. ME/CFS has no celebrity doing what Elizabeth Taylor did for AIDS, what Jerry Lewis did for Multiple Sclerosis, or what Michael J. Fox is doing for Parkinson’s Disease.

3. ME/CFS has no presence in Washington.

Of the three, the last is the most critical to act on, and it is the one that would produce the most measurable result. Simply stated: Being on the ground in Washington every day is the essential step the community has to take.

To get results in Washington, you need to-see-and-be-seen in the daily life there. Letters and petitions do not have nearly the impact as a Washington denizen talking to a decision-maker in person.

Happily this would amount to one very visible person, who strolls the halls of Congress, lunches at the clubs and restaurants, like the Cosmos or Metropolitan clubs, or the Monocle Restaurant on Capitol Hill. Once, I was mentioned in the Wonkette blog because I was spotted entering Bistro B, a favorite restaurant of the powerful, and those who think they are powerful.

If your children attend one of the power schools, like St. Alban’s or Sidwell Friends, contacts can be made and deals can be done at the events. A friend of mine enlisted President Bill Clinton’s help for a cause because their children went to the same school.

It may strike you as banal, but it is the Washington political game. Learn to play it.

Washington is a society of people who are impressed with each other. It is important to be known. If you are invited to the annual White House Correspondents’ Association or Alfalfa Club dinners, you are known. The next step is to be known for ME/CFS advocacy.

Once known, the perfect advocate/lobbyist will morph into a resource, a voice for others in Washington: a source of information for congressional aides trying to understand the budget requests of agencies, and a source of information for reporters writing about diseases of the immune system.

A voice in Washington puts pressure on government agencies to do the right thing, and on members of Congress to authorize and appropriate money. The advocate/lobbyist can learn, through the hearing process, about the diligence and transparency of the agencies and the quality of their operations; to see if they are doing the job or treading water, to see how transparent their operations are and the quality of professionals operating programs.

Another salutary source of pressure in Washington is the press corps. It covers not just politics but also the functioning of government. The pinnacle of power in the corps are still The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But the news agencies, The Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters, followed by a veritable media army that cover politics and programs, including Politico, The Hill, Roll Call, National Journal, and the specialized medical publications also play important roles.

Fifty years ago, the center of media activity was New York. Now it is Washington. A professional advocate for ME/CFS needs to cultivate the media and to be comfortable with the currency of Washington and to trade in it. That currency is information.

Washington is a great information market. The successful lobbyist/advocate is, by the nature of the city and its functioning, an information broker.

The sums of money that will be needed to accelerate research cannot be calculated and could be very substantial. Research funding, above all, needs to be sustained at predictable levels.

The pharmaceutical industry figures that a new drug can cost upwards of $1.2 billion. I mention it only to hint at the vast amount of money needed for drug research and development.

How much ME/CFS will need and for how long is an existential question. Money stimulates research, attracts new young minds to the field and leads to success. Right now, there is so little money funding so few researchers in ME/CFS.

In the United States, that success may be a long time in coming – too long for those for whom today will be a living hell, as yesterday was and tomorrow will be.

I figure that for as little as $1 million, a start toward a Washington presence can be made. That would cover one advocate/lobbyist, one office and one assistant for one year; not a smidgeon of attention from a giant lobbying firm, but a dedicated ME/CFS standard-bearer. Funding should grow within a year, as the ME/CFS cause comes out of the shadows.

I operated a small business in Washington for 33 years, and I am confident that a new ME/CFS presence there will reverse the disease’s funding fortunes at NIH, increase media awareness, and cause the big foundations to sit up and take notice. It would give ME/CFS the kind of presence that other diseases with active advocates – COPD, ALS, MS and others — have in Washington and the nation.

If this is not done the government will continue to ignore the case for ME/CFS. Worse, the new billionaires who are beginning to throw real money into biomedical research will not know about ME/CFS. It will be hidden in plain sight much as it has been from the wider public.

ME/CFS needs a place on the national agenda if it is to be understood and cured in reasonable time, and if the very best minds are to be attracted to the task and to stay with it. That Churchill oak needs to be planted now, and in sight of the U.S. Capitol.

Llewellyn King is the creator of ME/CFS Alert on YouTube, which he co-hosts with Deborah Waroff. Their video work is being supported through donations on the fundraising Web site GoFundMe.

 

Scotland and England: Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot?

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What looked like a kind of harmless beauty contest, the vote on Scottish independence in September is shaping up to be something quite otherwise: the death struggle for the United Kingdom. The polls are showing a surprising narrowing between those who would vote for Scotland to become an independent country and those who would vote for it to remain part of the United Kingdom, dominated as it is by England.
 
Since the Act of Union in 1707, England and Scotland have been one nation, but with important differences. For a start the Scots have maintained their own distinctive way of speaking, although it is unlikely that the Scots language can be revived or whether it should — you know when you are in Scotland. The country is predominantly Presbyterian with a substantial Catholic minority.
 
Scotland has its own legal system, based on Roman-Dutch law rather than English Common law, and it has kept alive the traditions of Scotland — sometimes enhanced by English commercial interest — such as the marketing of whisky, the celebrating of New Year, and the jokes about haggis.
 
The Scots always had their nationalists, including those who stole the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey on Christmas morning 1950, and took it back to Scotland. The 336-pound stone, according to one Celtic legend, was the pillow upon which the patriarch Jacob rested at Bethel, and for centuries was associated with the crowning of Scottish kings. Four months after the stone was stolen, it was returned to the abbey. And in 1996, the British government returned it to Scotland.
 
But Scottish nationalists have never posed a threat to the union with England; not that the Scots haven't always denigrated those living south of the border as “Sassenachs.”
 
In my experience, as someone brought up to respect Scotland’s traditions (its music, literature, and its brews and distilled spirits) the distinct disinterest of the two peoples in each other is quite dumbfounding.
 
The English will flock to the continent on their vacations, but not to Scotland. Once in Peebles, a town near Edinburgh, a friend asked if I was staying for a local masonic parade and festival. I asked if there would be a lot of English visitors. He replied: “I don't think so; they don't come here. And we're not very nice to them when they do.”
 
When my wife and I were planning our annual trip to Scotland, an otherwise well-traveled and erudite Englishwoman living in London asked us, “Why would you go there?” Think about how Canada is ignored in the United States.
 
Scotland is, in fact, a tourist treasure with great beauty, fabulous vistas and wonderful traditions, even if they get a periodic upgrading from the Scottish Tourist Board.
 
Probably the greatest period of harmony was ushered in by Queen Victoria, who liked Scotland a lot; after the death of her beloved husband, Prince Albert, she spent long periods in Balmoral Castle. Some even suggested she had a romantic relationship with her Highland manservant, John Brown. There are those who have suggested that if Queen Victoria had had the same affection for Ireland, it would not now be a separate country.
 
The present crisis has occurred because of the determination of two men: Scotland's first minister Alex Salmond and former British prime minister Tony Blair. Blair believed in the “devolution” of power to the regions. He was warned against this by his predecessor, John Major, who was appalled at the idea. “Utter folly,” he called it.
 
Salmond believed in independence for Scotland; it had been his life's passion. He was ready and when Scotland was granted a legislature of its own by Blair's Labor government in 1998, he saw the chance and began to push for referendum.
 
Like most divorces this one won't be easy, if it happens. Just a little over 5 million people live in Scotland (64 million live in England), but it occupies one third of the land mass of the United Kingdom.
 
Then there is the question of borders, currency, and the status of the Queen. The Scots want to keep the pound and the Queen. But if Scotland votes to quit the union, England might say no: Our pound, our Queen.
 
The case for Scotland staying in the union is economic, as was the case for them being coerced to join in the first place. The case for separation is nationalistic.
 
The patron saint of Scotland is St. Andrew, and the patron saint of England is St. George. They have stood together in war and peace for 300 of history's most remarkable years – an empire, the Industrial Revolution, and two world wars.
 
Now they stand apart — at the opposite sides of an impending referendum. “Should auld acquaintance be forgot,” as Robert Burns, poet and Scottish nationalist, wrote. The polls are not encouraging for unionists. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Growth of the Tipping Culture and What It Says

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So you think the federal minimum wage is $7.25. Well that is for people who do not get tips, or rather for those who are not recognized to get tips.
 
If you are restaurant waitstaff, your minimum wage is just $2.13. That is because it is assumed tipping will make up the difference.
 
Now if you are tending bar at a top restaurant in a big, prosperous city, that is probably a pretty good deal — so long as you are healthy and can show up to work regularly. Cocktail waitresses in the right establishment can do even better. Gender counts here, and as out-of-town businessmen on expenses enjoy their beers, their affection for waitresses can grow and show itself in lavish tips.
 
That is the high end, where money and booze are at work. Likewise in expensive restaurants, waiters can make a passable living, even a good living, so long as they get to work the hours they want. Breakfast sucks, lunch is not what it used be in the days of three martinis, and dinner is still waiter Eldorado.
 
The rub (isn't it always?) is down the line, where there is less money sloshing about. So-called family restaurants, individually owned, or in chains like Denny's and IHOP, it is a different reality. No one gets rich bringing out the hamburger and fries or French toast.
 
In the world of tipping, taxis are incongruous. If tipping, as allegedly it was defined by the great wordsmith Samuel Johnson, means “to insure prompt service” then taxi drivers should lump it. They drive, you pay and there is no element of special service detectable in most cases. But tips are expected, even if the chap has been on the phone to God-knows-where at the top of his voice for the entire trip. The car is jalopy and he does not know the way. Hand over.
 
Barbers get a little extra and in beauty parlors, tips are very important. On pleasure fishing boats, well, as the sign, says “the mate works for tips.”
 
Not only do a lot of people work for tips, but they are, for the most part, the working poor and frequently the hours are bad.
 
It seems that the number of tipped jobs is growing. Or, to be more correct, the number of jobs where the employees are trying to supplement with tips, appears to be on the rise.
 
In all kinds of places, like bakeries, convenience stores, gas stations, glass jars with improvised signs seek your benevolence. More and more people who serve the public are trying to supplement meager incomes with tips.
 
The French, long ago, institutionalized tipping in restaurants by including it in the bill at 12.5 percent. But in Japan, tipping is not part of the culture. In the United States, 20 percent has become a kind of standard; while New York is higher at 25 percent. When I worked as waiter in Manhattan, the word was that men with brown shoes, and their female equivalents, were from the sticks and expected you to genuflect for 10 percent. Didn't happen.
 
Where the bulk of someone's income is from tips, there has been a transfer of wage responsibility from employers to customers. Some hotels, especially in resort areas, urge you to tip the maid. Of all the tipping, that is the one I do most willingly. Maybe it is because of my own aversion to housework, and especially to making beds, that drives me to open my wallet. It is also that no one who does housekeeping in an hotel is on an upward arc in their lives, methinks.
 
As tipping spreads, as it appears to be, so does the sense that, like much of the Third World, we have become a country that is for sale, one person at a time: low wages, low standards, low expectations. That glass jar on the counter soliciting tips tells a story, and not a pretty one. For “Tips” read, “need.” — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Earth Day 2014: Only Two Cheers, Please

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April 22 is Earth Day and you can look forward to scattered celebrations, warnings about the future and self congratulations. The environmental community regards the first Earth Day as the beginning of the modern environmental movement.
 
But the real birth of modern environmentalism may have come in 1962, with the publication of Rachel Carson's book “Silent Spring.” It was a detonation heard around the world, and it greatly affected the way a whole generation felt about nature. Its central finding was against the use of the powerful pesticide DDT.
 
The first Earth Day was the brainchild of the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.). He provided leadership for a burgeoning environmental movement fed not just by a love of nature, as had earlier movements, but by a deep anger at the trashing of natural systems. DDT was killing off wild birds by altering their metabolism in a way that resulted in thin eggshells; West Virginia, and other parts of Appalachia, were being mutilated to extract coal; and the Cayuga River in Ohio had caught fire many times because it was so choked with pollutants.
 
There was an abundance of anger in the 1970s, most of it inflamed in the 1960s. That troubled decade was not just about drugs and flower power, Woodstock and free love. It was about what had become of America and where was it heading. The movements were for civil rights, against the Vietnam War and for women.
 
An environmental movement in the 1970s fit right in; it was inevitable because it was needed. Some of the anger of the decade that had just finished informed that first Earth Day and all those that followed.
 
Because the modern environmental movement was born in anger, at times it has been unruly and counterproductive. Will we quickly forget the hysteria created by the Natural Resources Defense Council's (NRDC) 1989 report on the use of the pesticide Alar in apples? Or Greenpeace's admission in 1995 that it had bullied European governments into disposing the Shell Brent Spar oil platform and reservoir on dry land when it should have been dropped into the deep ocean? Or the uncritical enthusiasm for wind power without regard to the environmental impact of wind turbines on birds and bats, or the noise they generate. In New England there are claims of adverse health effects from wind turbine, to say nothing of the adverse visual impact.
 
The modern environmental movement differed from previous conservation movements because it knew how to harness the power of the courts. Litigation was the core of this movement, and it remains so. NRDC's Web site boasts the availability of 350 lawyers.
 
The movement that flowed from Rachel Carson's book and the first Earth Day is global; it is as strong in Europe, if not stronger, than in its birthplace, the United States. It is a large part of the political fabric of Germany, and its policies have played a role in leading that country into a dependence on Russian natural gas.
 
Opposition to the Keystone Pipeline may be another error of environmental enthusiasm. No pipe means more trains carrying oil; ergo more accidents and environmental degradation.
 
To my mind the biggest error the environmental community made was the relentless, even pathological, opposition to nuclear power. It has been an act of faith since the first Earth Day and it may be the one most at odds with environmental well-being. The public has been frightened, but the math says it is the safest way to make electricity.
 
Now a new generation of young idealists is beginning to look past the orthodoxies of the anti-nuclear movement. Richard Lester, head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, said this week that many of his students are studying nuclear because of its environmental advantages, and its value in generating electricity without air pollution.
 
The environmental movement of the 1970s has grown old, but it hasn't grown thoughtful. I wish it a happy birthday, but I can only muster two cheers. I hope it enters a period of introspection and comes to realize that its rigidities can be as counterproductive as those of its industrial antagonists. It remains needed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Always His Own Man: a Remembrance of Jim Schlesinger

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James Rodney Schlesinger was assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, secretary of defense, secretary of energy , chairman of The MITRE Corporation, managing director of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., and my friend. He was a colossus in Washington; a great Sequoia who towered in the forest.
 
Schlesinger, who died on Thursday, more than anyone I've known in public life including presidents, prime ministers and industrial savants, knew who he was. From that came a special strength: he didn't care what people thought of him. What he did care about were the great issues of the time.
 
He was a man of granite, steel and titanium and he could take abuse and denunciation – as he did, most especially, as the first secretary of energy. He also had extraordinary intellectual ability. No name, time or date evaded him, and he understood complex issues, from geopolitical balances to the physics of the nuclear stockpile.
 
Les Goldman, a key member of Schlesinger's circle in government and in life, said his genius was in capturing huge quantities of information and synthesizing it into a course of action.
 
He also had phenomenal energy, going to work very early in the morning and staying up late at night. During his tenure at the Department of Energy, he had to testify on Capitol Hill almost daily, so he checked in at 5 a.m. to get the work done. His relaxation was birdwatching.
 
Schlesinger was a great public servant; someone who venerated public service without regard to its rewards. He drove a VW Beetle for years and lived in a modest house in the suburbs. Even as secretary of defense, a post from which he could order up airplanes, ships and limousines, he kept an extraordinary modesty. Pomp was not for him.
 
But he was a tough customer. Schlesinger spared none with his invective and regarded the creation of enemies as part of the normal course of getting things done.
 
And getting things done was what he was good at — rudely awakening somnolent bureaucrats, angering whole industries and unsettling cliques, as he did at the CIA. Wherever he was in charge, he applied his boot to the sensitive hind regions of the complacent, the lazy and the inept. He punctured the egos of the self-regarding and kept military men waiting, tapping their feet and examining their watches.
 
Once at the CIA, Schlesinger and I were engaged in a long conversation about the British Empire – a favorite subject – when his aide, who had been hovering, came back for the second or third time and said, “Sir, the admiral has been waiting for an hour already.” “Good,” said Schlesinger. Then, as an aside to me, he said, “It's good for admirals to wait.”
 
On another occasion, when I was part of a press party traveling with Schlesinger after the opening of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve site in a salt cavern in Louisiana, Schlesinger sent his trusted and well-liked press chief, John Harris, back to the reporters to say that Schlesinger wanted to talk to me.
 
I went forward to the executive cabin, where the secretary of energy was playing the harmonica. “I'm taking requests,” he said. I blurted out the few songs I knew, and he played on — and on and on.
 
After about half an hour, Harris came forward again to say that the other reporters, including Steve Rattner, who was to become a billionaire Wall Street investor, but was then a reporter with The New York Times' Washington bureau, wanted to know why I was getting an exclusive interview.
 
They wouldn't be mollified with the assurance that I was listening to the great man play the harmonica. Rattner in particular, believed that I had some big story that I'd publish in The Energy Daily, the newsletter that I founded and edited, and embarrass him and The Times.
 
The Energy Daily, too, had involved Schlesinger. I reported on nuclear power for the trade publication Nucleonics Week, which is how I had met him at the Atomic Energy Commission. But at night, I worked as an editor at The Washington Post.
 
Quite suddenly, President Richard Nixon nominated Schlesinger to replace Richard Helms as director of the CIA, and The Post op-ed pages were flooded with articles about Helms, but not a word about the new man in Langley.
 
I asked Meg Greenfield, the storied editorial page editor, why she didn't publish something about Schlesinger. No one, she said, knew anything about Schlesinger.
 
I avowed as I did, and the result was a longer-than-usual piece that she published on a Saturday. It became the “go to” archival resource for a generation of journalists writing about Schlesinger. But it cost me my day job, as my editor didn't think I should be writing in The Washington Post. So I started what became The Energy Daily.
 
The trick to friendship with James Schlesinger was disputation. He'd like people he could talk to and especially argue with. I argued — over Scotland's most famous product — about American exceptionalism; the uses of force; the limits to power; the Gulf War; the Saudis; obscure points of grammar, as he was strict grammarian who always found time to telephone me, and later e-mail me, to correct my slippages.
 
We argued for more than 40 years and loved every syllable of it.
 
We also argued vigorously over Bill Clinton. I was Schlesinger's guest at the legendary Alfalfa Club dinner in Washington and I fell into conversion with the president, Bill Clinton. When I returned to the table, looking pleased, Schlesinger exclaimed, “You've been talking to him!” — as though this was some huge betrayal.
 
He also didn't like Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford, the latter having fired him.
 
Schlesinger admired what he called “intellectual structure.” But I could never get him to define it.
 
Close to the end of Schlesinger's life, my wife, Linda Gasparello, and he were engaged in a complicated and loving dispute over Henry II and Eleanor of Provence. He loved that kind of thing.
 
Journalists are ill-advised to care too deeply for the men they write about. Schlesinger was my treasured exception. — For The Energy Daily

The Other Noah: The Man Who Saved 6,000 Wild Animals

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Rupert Fothergill and friend                                     Source: Internet

In the Bible, it was Noah who stuffed the animals into the ark, two by two. Now there is Russell Crowe, whose movie “Noah” went on general release this weekend, and whose animals are almost the backstory compared to Noah's family disputes.

But from 1958-64, on the Zambezi River and in the Zambezi valley between Zimbabwe and Zambia, there was another Noah: a game warden for the colonial government in Southern Rhodesia, who was the nearest thing to the biblical Noah. He led a small band of ingenious men, who between them saved about 6,000 creatures, great and small, from a watery grave.

The man who mounted probably the greatest animal rescue since the captain of the vessel in Genesis was Rupert Fothergill. This quiet “man of the bush” was in his forties when he undertook the rescue of every kind of living creature trapped by rising waters from the giant Kariba hydroelectric dam project, which flooded the Zambezi valley downstream from Victoria Falls.

At the time, the waters behind the dam created the largest man-made lake in the world. Because the governments of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and and the British Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia were primarily concerned with relocating about 57,000 Tonga people from the flood plain, little attention was paid to the density of game that would be drowned.

Enter Fothergill, who orchestrated “Operation Noah.” With few resources, and often no idea how to do it, Fothergill and team went to work, learning as they went along.

As Tim Abbott, an American conservationist, told me, “How do you tranquilize a black rhino?” Well on YouTube, you can watch some amazing footage of the enormous, beautiful beast being secured, fighting back and finally being tied to a giant stretcher that was dragged onto a raft made of oil drums for the journey to her new life on high ground.

As the waters of Lake Kariba rose, islands formed in the flood plain, trapping everything. There is a searing image, recorded in a blog by Abbott, of a giant bull elephant, found by Fothergill's team when it was near death, having swum for five hours, its trunk changing color from the exertion.

Some big game was more or less ridden to safety through the rising water. Small creatures were carried in loving arms onto small boats and taken to safety. There are photographs and there is 16mm film of the rescues, even of Fothergill pampering an antelope calf.

Peter Jones, now 77 and living in Durban, South Africa, was on Fothergill's team. He told me by phone that gradually and with very few resources, they leaned how to save everything from poisonous snakes to the big game — buffaloes, elephants and rhinos; the big antelopes, eland, kudu, sable and wildebeest; cheetahs, leopards and lions; and hyenas.

Fothergill and his men (about seven white Rhodesians and 50 Africans, Jones recalls) had a small flotilla of dinghies with Evinrude outboard motors. There were six or seven of these, but later a larger boat (Jones thinks it was 30- or 35-feet-long and fitted with a diesel engine) was procured and used to tow the other boats with men sitting in them, holding animals in bags and nets and sometimes just in their hands. The boat's name was “The Tuna,” and it had come overland from South Africa — boats were in very short supply in that part of Southern Africa, a largely arid area.

I missed “Operation Noah” by a year. When I was a young reporter (17 years old), I was sent to the Kariba dam site to cover floods that threatened to wash the whole project away. It was just a year before the great animal rescue began but my boss, Eric Robins, a man from whom I learned my trade, was aware of the coming wildlife tragedy. Later, he wrote a book about it called “Animal Dunkirk: The story of Lake Kariba and 'Operation Noah,' greatest animal rescue since the Ark.” It was. It was.

Sadly, “Operation Noah” got lost in the turbulent history of Africa that was to follow and particularly the civil war in Rhodesia, which brought an end to the colonial era and tended to inter its good deeds with the race issues that dominated the politics.


Happily more and more images of “Operation Noah” are being digitized, largely by Fothergill's family, and are making their way onto the Internet. Watch Crowe, marvel at Fothergill.  —  For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate



Obama Scuttles Another Nuclear Waste Solution

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Naked goes the president to the Netherlands.
 
President Obama plans to attend the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague on March 24-25. He has long professed a keen interest in reducing the threat from nuclear weapons. In 2009, in his notable Prague speech, Obama declared, “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the cold war.” He vowed “concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.”
 
Rhetorically, at least, Obama has stayed the course. But some of his actions suggest that, in reality, he is very prepared to alter course for political and budgetary reasons.
 
One of his first actions as president was to start the abandonment of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, in a political nod to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
 
But spent fuel from civilian power reactors does not pose as great a threat of proliferation as plutonium, the man-made fissile metal that is at the heart of a modern thermonuclear weapon. And it is plutonium that worries experts like former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
 
Plutonium is basically forever: it has a half life of 24,100 years. There is a terrifying amount of it in the world, mostly the result of decommissioning warheads. Some of it is stored; some is still in warheads waiting to be decommissioned.
 
The United States and Russia have been working on that problem, in what has been a successful collaboration. Under a treaty signed in 2000, and amended in 2010, the United States and Russia have agreed to get rid of 34 metric tons each of plutonium that has come from a reduction in weapons stockpiles.
 
The United States agreed to do this mostly by burning it as fuel in civilian power reactors, something the French already do. This fuel, known as mixed oxide, or MOX, blends plutonium with uranium to make new fuel for the reactors. The Russians are developing fast neutron reactors to burn up their plutonium.
 
To keep our part of the bargain, a fuel fabrication facility is under construction at the government's Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C. As buildings go, it is a marvel, with concrete walls 5-feet-thick and huge quantities ultra-high-quality steel, welded with the greatest precision. The whole structure could last for thousands of years – just remember that Coliseum in Rome was made of concrete 2,000 years ago.
 
But the project — which has more than 4,000 suppliers in 43 states and 1,800 directly employed workers — is suddenly being put on “cold standby,” a euphemism for abandoned. The explanation from the U.S. Department of Energy is that the project is costing too much.
 
South Carolina is suing the U.S. Department of Energy, claiming the shutdown is unconstitutional because money authorized and appropriated for construction this year will be used to terminate the project. The facility is 60-percent complete and $4.5 billion has been spent; it is estimated that shutdown will cost a further $1 billion.
 
Seven senators — including Mary Landrieu (D-La.), chair of the Senate Energy Committee, and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — have protested the abrupt and unexpected change of policy on plutonium disposal.
 
In the early days of Obama's first term, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told me that the administration was shutting down the Yucca Mountain site for “scientific reasons,” after the expenditure of $18 billion.
 
On March 12, I asked Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top Obama non-proliferation aide, to explain the change of policy on MOX. Echoing Gibbs, she said that the administration was expecting to find better scientific solutions.
 
But what about the joint agreement with the Russians that MOX was the way to go, after considering 40 options? In fact Obama has changed course for budgetary reasons, and possibly to appease anti-nuclear forces in his base.
 
It would seem that when it comes to straightening out the nuclear waste issue, Obama is compromised by his own hand.
 
So what will he say at the summit in the Hague? Will he have the effrontery to commit the United States again to an aggressive anti-proliferation policy? This despite the fact that he scuttled Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository, and now has scuttled the chance of burning up plutonium. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

War on the Roof: Solar Power Is Encroaching

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A warning light is flashing for the nation's electric utilities — and it is getting more persistent.
 
The utilities, big and small, for- and not-for-profit, are facing serious disruptive technology. The old business models are in danger.
 
The unlikely disruptive technology that is causing the trouble is rooftop solar power.
 
Back in the energy turbulent 1970s, solar was a gleam in the eye of environmentalists who dared to dream of renewable energy. It looked like a pipe dream.
 
Very simple solar had been deployed to heat water in desert homes since indoor plumbing became the norm. Making electricity from the sun was many orders of magnitude more complex and it was, anyway, too expensive.
 
The technology of photovoltaic cells, which make electricity directly from the sun, needed work; it needed research, and it needed mass manufacturing. Hundreds of millions of dollars later in research and subsidies, the cost of solar cells has fallen and continues to go down.
 
Today, solar certainly is not a pipe dream: It is looking like a mature industry. It is also a big employer in the installation industry. It is a player, a force in the market.
 
But solar has created a crisis for the utilities.
 
In order to incubate solar, and to satisfy solar advocates, Congress said that these “qualifying facilities” should be able not only to generate electricity for homes when the sun is shining, but also to sell back the excess to the local utility. This is called “net metering” and it is at the center of the crisis today — particularly across the Southwest, where solar installations have multiplied and are being added at a feverish rate.
 
Doyle Beneby, CEO of San Antonio, Texas-based CPS Energy, the largest municipal electric and gas utility in the nation, said, “The homes that are installing solar quickly are the more affluent ones.” The problem here, he explained, is that the utility has to maintain the entire infrastructure of wires and poles and buy back electricity generated by solar in these homes at the highest prevailing rate — often more than power could be bought on the market or generated by the utility.
 
Steve Mitnik, a utility industry consultant, said that 47 percent of the nation's electric market is residential and the larger, affluent homes — which use a lot of electricity, and generally pay more as consumption rises — are a critically important part of it. Yet these are the ones that are turning to solar generation, and expect to make a profit selling excess production to the grid.
 
But who pays for the grid? According to CPS Energy's Beneby, and others in the industry, the burden of keeping the system up and running then falls on those who can least afford it.
 
The self-generating homes still need the grid not only to sell back to but ,more importantly, to buy from when the sun isn't shining and at night.
 
For some in the utility industry, net metering is just the beginning of a series of emerging problems, including:
 
  • Big investments are needed in physical security after the sniper attack last October at PG&E Corp.'s Metcalf transmission substation, which took out 17 huge transformers that provide power to California's Silicon Valley.
 
  • New investment is needed in cybersecurity.
 
  • Improved response to bad weather is a critical issue, especially in some Mid-Atlantic states.
 
Beneby believes the solar incursion into the traditional marketplace might be the beginning of more self-generation — such as home-based, micro-gas turbines — and utilities will and must adjust. He is something of a futurist and points out that in telephones, once a purely utility service, disruption has been hugely creative.
 
Environmentalists are as disturbed as the utilities. Some are calling the imposition of a surcharge on rooftop generators, as in Arizona recently, an attempt by the greedy utilities to stamp out competition. But many are seeking alternative solutions without a war over generating, and without punishing those unable to afford their own generation.
 
Brian Keane, president of SmartPower, a green-marketing group with solar-purchase programs in Arizona and many other states, has looked for cool heads to prevail on both sides of the issue. “I don't have an answer,” he said, calling for dialogue. Also the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group, has been talking with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
 
It isn't your father's electric utility anymore, or your hippie's solar power. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate




 

Forget the Glass Ceiling, What about the Mortar-Board Barrier?

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Every year or so a new study, learned treatise or book comes out which says that we in the United States overdo the college thing; that we are turning out young people with bachelors degrees for jobs that don't require them or that are so poorly paid the luckless worker can't pay off his or her college loans.
 
Yet the pressure to go to college continues. Parents panic that they won't save enough money and high schoolers worry that they'll be judged by which college accepts them.
 
There are only two classes of students who don't worry: those with athletic prowess and those who are so bright that they have their pick of colleges.
 
In his book “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell makes the case against the pressure for a superschool. He tells the story of a gifted, young African- American woman with clear aptitude for science and math. She makes it into Brown, an Ivy League university, and flounders. With the cultural differences and the preponderance of other brainy students, this star student is soon lost. She ends up switching from science to a less-demanding liberal arts major.
 
Top-tier universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT have their own punishments for their graduates. It is a sad syndrome: I went to Harvard (or one of the others), but I didn't do well in my career.
 
I've seen many carry this burden throughout their lives. As Orson Welles said, in an entirely different context, he had started at the top with early success and had nowhere to go.
 
But no punishment metered out by the vagaries of talent and chance compares to the lifelong punishment that a majority of our citizens suffer for not going to college. More than 60 percent of us don't make it into either a two- or four-year college.
 
Although they are a majority, they are treated as second-class, damaged, contaminated, inferior and deserving only of a kind of paternalism, as they paint houses, repair automobiles, bake bread, stock shelves and deliver
parcels. No longer can some of them hope to be lifted into the middle class by union membership. College mania keeps them down.
 
They aren't bumping up against the color bar or the glass ceiling, but they are victims of something as damaging: the mortar-board barrier. Go no further, you have no college degree.
 
I know about the mortar-board barrier: I bumped up against it when I came to the United States 50 years ago.
 
Because I'd left school at 16, I had a jump start in British journalism. When I got to the United States, I thought the fact that I'd been a scriptwriter at the BBC and that I'd been a junior executive on a major newspaper might qualify me for an interview or two. The personnel departments at all three TV networks told me I couldn't be considered because of a lack of college education. At The New York Times I was told that without a college degree, I couldn't be considered as a writer. But as I was leaving, the interviewer actually offered me a job as a copy editor.
 
This reminds me of what I experienced subsequently, when I was flying small airplanes. The most gifted pilot I've ever known – and who saved my life a couple of times in bad weather — hadn't finished college and was repeatedly turned down for an airline job as a result.
 
Then, there was the sad case of the cadaver pilot. There is a cottage industry in flying cadavers, usually through the night, from the place of death to the place of burial. I ran into one such cadaver pilot in the early hours of the morning in Missouri, as he was about to take off into bad weather with his silent passenger — there to remind him of his mortality and danger of flying an old airplane (a Beech 18 with radial engines).
 
Like all pilots, he loved flying, but had given up hope of moving up in aviation because hadn't been to college. Unwisely, he had fallen in love with aviation too young. Just like The New York Times that wouldn't allow a non-college-educated person to try writing for their pages, but would allow that same person to edit its writers, the irony is present in aviation.
 
While airlines and air freight companies insist on a college education, no matter what the proven skill or the number of hours the candidate has flown, air traffic controllers are mostly just high school graduates. College is not a requirement.
 
The college, non-college divide is pernicious and damaging. It is another front in the class war. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Life at the Bottom: the Real Minimum Wage Saga

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I once earned the minimum wage not because I needed an entry-level job, but because I needed the money. It was a minimum-wage job or a begging bowl and the street.
 
While I learned some interesting – and some disagreeable — things about life at the bottom, I never met anyone who was there because they were entering the workforce. Instead they were a community of the hapless; some of them on their way down, but more of them just on their way to nowhere.
 
Each day, they were hired through Manpower and were sent where they were needed, if there was work that day. The hiring hall was not a place of despair but of resignation. If you were considered a good worker you would get a semi-permanent assignment. But as with most temp work, employers were prohibited from offering you a permanent job.
 
It was the winter of 1965, and the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour. By the time deductions were taken, take-home pay was about $1 an hour, which was not enough to support a family, or even to think of little things like vacations or getting one's teeth fixed.
 
Teeth stand out in my memory for two reasons. First, because my co-workers had visibly terrible teeth. Second because I once bussed a table at the Horn & Hardart automat on 42nd Street in New York, and a customer had put her false teeth on a dirty plate and I had whisked it away.
 
About an hour later – people who ate at the automat ate there because you could sit for an hour without being bothered — she discovered her loss. The most awful crying and begging resulted. Over and over, she cried, “I'll never have teeth again. I can't afford new teeth.”
 
I went to the manager, who showed me dumpsters piled high with that day's garbage. He was a decent man and we tried to find the woman's teeth. It was hopeless. Utterly hopeless. Her teeth were irretrievably lost and she went out into the night shrieking. She would never have teeth again.
 
I got back into newspapering and moved on and up. Over the decades, though, I have retained an affinity for those who draw the minimum wage, and a certain knowledge that it needs to be higher and linked to the cost of living.
 
Even so, I think the minimum wage is a two-edged sword. I think in times of near full employment, employers use it to hold down what they otherwise would have to pay. But I also think that without it, there would be terrible exploitation at the bottom – sweatshops and the like.
 
I think the minimum wage is part of the social network where those who have not yet risen and those who have fallen in life can find precarious purchase.
 
Sadly the minimum-wage job is under threat not because the Obama administration wants to raise it to $10.10, but because of the computerization of the workplace. Simply, people will be replaced with computer-driven devices no matter what the minimum wage is.
 
A great gale of change is sweeping through the workplace. We get our money from machines; increasingly, we check ourselves out of the supermarket and the drugstore; we buy our airline and train tickets online.
 
The low-wage job as well as some better ones are going. Fast-food restaurants have introduced computerized ordering. Inexorably, business is committed to replacing workers with automation. That is not new.
 
What is new is that all the jobs in the service industries, which were considered exempt from automation, are now going the way of the coal miner, the stevedore, and more than half the people it used to take to make a car or a steel beam.
 
We are having the wrong discussion over the minimum wage. We need to talk about work; all work, including work for those at the bottom — those who cannot even think about dental work, vacations or college.
 
Raising the minimum wage will not drive employers to replace workers with machines. That has already reached flood stage. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate