HeadCount Blog

Maira Kalman’s latest installment of “And the Pursuit of Happiness,” a New York Times blog, is a reminder that a “green” city is a beautiful city. In this installment she considers the importance of public engagement and the people who help keep New York clean — from the Commissioner of Sanitation to the mayor, his staff, and the woman watering the garden outside the Brooklyn sewage plant. Offering a fresh perspective on sustainability, we see how a sewage plant can be a “revelation” when lit up to resemble a scene out of the Arabian Nights.

“Public support for health reform ended its summer slide, reversed course and moved modestly upwards in September, according to the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll.”

The elderly, fearing reduction of their Medicare Advantage coverage, have been pitted against the young in the seemingly endless debate over health care reform. Politicians have historically treasured older voters, but the most recent election demonstrated a marked increase in the number of younger voters. The so-called “young invincibles,” however, appear to be losing out in the overall story of who the health-care crisis affects the most. Ari A. Matusiak, Matthew Segal, and Hilary Doe offer a corrective in a recent Huffington Post article, “Taking Back the Microphone”:

The narrative is plain wrong. Young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 represent the largest group of uninsured in the country. We have the highest rate of injury-related emergency room visits – seven million in 2005-06 alone. Fifteen percent of us suffer from chronic health problems such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, heart disease and other conditions requiring regular care. And the rising unemployment rate of our demographic, currently standing at 18.5%–the highest since 1948–puts us at an even greater risk for insufficient health care coverage. Only 50% of young Americans receive health care through an employer, compared to 75% of people over 30. Of the young Americans who have been affected by job loss, 46% have seen their health coverage disappear. Another 20% of young adults, who have been forced to take part-time jobs that typically do not offer employees health coverage, will likely also remain uninsured.

“Everybody talks about the 50 percent of American bankruptcies that are from health-care costs. But what about the 50 percent that aren’t?”

The road to apathy is paved with post-election disappointment. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Sunday that closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay “has proven more complicated than anticipated.” An Economist blogger mocks him thusly:

Really? Figuring out what to do with hundreds of people held for years without charge on often flimsy terrorism allegations—not to mention those who almost certainly are terrorists, but who have been implicated by evidence obtained by torture—is complicated? Who could have imagined that?

We expect our leaders to have their eyes on the big picture, but they all too often seem focused on the day-to-day. Take the run-up to Iraq, for example. Or the housing bubble. The anonymous Economist writer also cites General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan, who, when asked about the resurgent Taliban, said just last week, “The geographic spread of violence is a little more than I would have gathered.” Maybe I’m in the wrong business, because I’ve been reading about that for months.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

I promise this will cheer you up.

“Q I’m hosting a dinner party next week, and I’ll be serving both beer and wine alongside the meal. Which has the lower carbon footprint?” The Washington Post’s “Green Lantern” column delivers a remarkably detailed overview of the the environmental consequences of drinking. Asked to decide whether beer or wine leaves a smaller carbon footprint, Nina Shen Rastogi decides that all things considered (i.e., manufacture, distribution, packaging, storage, etc.), it’s more or less a toss-up – although locally brewed tap beer is probably your cleanest bet. But I liked this:

A recent carbon footprint analysis of Fat Tire amber ale highlights a few other areas that deserve attention. Producing and assembling the ingredients — malt, hops and water — created 678 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, or about 21 percent of the total footprint for a bottled six-pack. A chunk of that, 244 grams, comes from the production of synthetic fertilizers for the barley and related soil emissions, so the authors suggest that switching to organic barley could make a considerable impact.

Volunteerism has its perks, at least when Phish’s WaterWheel Foundation is encouraging it. Everyone who puts in at least eight hours at a local nonprofit becomes eligible for prizes at Festival 8. So go for it:

Join The WaterWheel Foundation in attaining at total of 8,000 hours of volunteer service and be entered to win some great prizes at Festival 8.

It’s easy, just choose to volunteer for a total of 8 hours at a non-profit in your community before the start of the festival. That can mean joining a beach or park clean up for a day, spending a few hours on the weekend lending a hand at your local school, youth club or library, or spending a few afternoons at your local food bank. It’s your choice. Then all you have to do is download the official form and fill it out.

Present the form at The WaterWheel tent at Festival 8 and receive a scoop of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food, a download code for a LivePhish.com summer sampler and more. You will also be entered to win any of a number of daily drawings for the Joy Box, event merchandise, a years subscription to Relix, a year’s supply of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food, a Magic Hat Cruiser Bike and other Grand Prizes including autographed event posters and tickets to future Phish concerts.

On Saturday nine HeadCount San Francisco Team volunteers participated in the 25th annual California Coastal Cleanup Day by picking up litter at one of the state’s 800 cleanup locations. We joined the Candlestick Park Cleanup in South San Francisco.

According to the California Coastal Commission:

When combined with the International Coastal Cleanup, organized by The Ocean Conservancy and taking place on the same day, California Coastal Cleanup Day becomes part of one of the largest volunteer events of the year. It has been hailed by the Guinness Book of World Records as “the largest garbage collection” (1993). Since the program started in 1985, over 800,000 Californians have removed more than 13 million pounds of debris from our state’s shorelines and coast. In 2008, more than 70,000 volunteers worked together to collect more than 1,600,000 pounds of trash and recyclables from our beaches, lakes, and waterways.

Our cleanup site was coordinated by the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization Save The Bay, in partnership with Literacy for Environmental Justice. During the onsite volunteer orientation we learned that the site we were about to clean up, located adjacent to the 49ers’ football stadium, was one of the San Francisco area’s top ten hot spots. We would be collecting trash for few hours alongside a hundred enthusiastic elementary-school students and parents from the San Francisco Unified School District.

We picked up a large assortment of trash including shoes, cigarette butts, rusty pipes, plastic bags, and tiny bits of styrofoam. Our youngest HeadCount volunteer, 20-month-old Luisito, did a great job helping us pick up bottle caps! Our site was also covered by the San Francisco Chronicle. See more photos after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently attended a talk by New York University professor Philip Alston, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings. While his stories were horrifyingly compelling, and his experiences important, I was left truly disheartened about the inability of the UN (or any other international body for that matter) to stop

1. Extrajudicial Killings: When tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people are being killed in a country – often by armed forces and police – and the government turns a blind eye to these events, this is a violation of human rights. And it’s happening around the world, in countries including Kenya, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan.

2. The United Nations is supposed to stop any and all human-rights violations. However, the United Nations is not allowed to overstep a country’s sovereignty. Indeed, the UN has always walked this tightrope—it’s actually in the charter.

3. UN Special Rapporteur Alston, deemed the expert on extrajudicial killings, is supposed to contact a country when he is notified of these events. He often makes country visits to investigate and speak with officials to end the murders.

4. Alston has very few resources (in fact, he is unpaid!) and an extremely small staff.

The UN Rapporteur can visit countries, speak with leaders, and direct them to end the violence—but all it amounts to is a slap on the wrist. Kenya’s President responded to Alston’s report by denouncing both him and the UN. And since his visit there, persons he interviewed for his investigations have been murdered.

Alston described some successes. But was in Colombia did the killings end because of UN pressure or because the government had to clean up its act in order to stay on the good side of the United States? Bilateral action with the United States and other influential countries might have more of an impact. Could US threats to cut off aid force Afghani officials to start prosecuting men committing “honor killings”?

Philip Alston does amazing work as he courageously faces some of the more hostile public officials around the world. Unfortunately, he can only draw attention to events and hope that public pressure will force governments to act. If the United Nations can’t do it, the question remains, how can we end these horrendous human-rights violations?