It’s Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation Day.

It’s not okay because “it’s their culture.”

It’s not okay because “women there defend it.”

It’s not okay because “we shouldn’t interfere.”

It’s not okay. It’s not remotely, marginally, or even conditionally okay.

Tolerance isn’t good just because it’s tolerant.

This isn’t something I thought I’d ever have to blog on, but having followed a news story to the Huffington Post and seeing the some of the muddled comments there, I think it’s worth explaining. Why? ‘Cuz it’s crucially important–both to understanding historical populations and to understanding what’s happening now in many developed countries.

The environmentalist dogma that more people are bad, period, has seemed to make these simple facts no longer politically correct. Instead, there’s an irrational neo-Malthusian 1970s-ish fear of constant, exponentially increasing human population sending the world into a post-apocalyptic future. (The population is going to level off fairly soon. FYI. And then there will most likely be a natural decline. Why? I’ll explain that, too!)

As a result of this careful whitewashing of the humanities, people graduate from high school and even college without having even encountered the term “demographic collapse”, much less understanding why certain countries are beginning to panic about their shrinking populations. Particularly indoctrinated yet ignorant individuals even make nasty comments about people who have more than two children or claim that their childlessness is some sort of virtuous choice for society–not even the planet, which might be argued with some validity, but for human society.

I was given this line in school, too. I realized that it didn’t actually fit with all the history I was learning, though–the actual cold, hard facts about what happened to civilizations that came before ours.

Too many people–I won’t get into what “too many” is, but no matter what you criteria are, they depend heavily on technological level–could, of course, be bad in an ecological sense. People can (and have) sabotage their resources. There is competition among people and between people and other organisms for resources that are finite, even if they can be vastly increased through technology, and this could begin to cause serious suffering. As in everything else, though, there is a balance. I won’t say “moderation” because that implies something “in the middle” (middle of what???), but a balance, absolutely.

Demographic collapses result in the intensification of whatever problem caused the collapse in the first place, leading to further collapse, leading to… Well, you get the picture. It can be interrupted. It can, less frequently, be reversed. But demographic collapse is, itself, never, ever good for an even semi-healthy society. At best, it causes the kinds of economic impacts that lead to out of control inflation/monetary debasement, mass unemployment and unrest, and a whole lot of collateral economic damage while it is occurring, with an overall rise in standard of living for the very poor after–and the best-case only occurs when the regional Malthusian limits are reached within a stagnant technological framework. (I can only think of one historical demographic collapse that meets these criteria–the Black Death. Our modern, first-world definition of “poor” doesn’t come close to the kind of poverty I mean here–you’d have to see mass starvation for this to be a benefit. And even with the Black Death, though the diets of the poor improved according to the surviving wage records, and though marginal lands were abandoned in favor of richer areas, the situation remained dire enough to keep reproduction depressed for about 200 years, which wouldn’t have happened if the poor had been suddenly dramatically better off.) At worst, it spells the end of a society–and the second rather frequently.

But, hey, the whales are happy, right?

Nope. Not even right about that, because in times of economic distress, people are way more worried about whether they’ll have enough to eat than whether or not the meat on the table comes from a highly endangered lemur. That’s why loss of habitat and widespread killings of endangered animals go hand-in-hand with wars in Africa, for instance. When economies are interrupted, people turn to any resource at hand.

Demographic collapses occur when the death rate is higher than the birthrate over a generation or more. The population shrinks, and nasty things happen like empires imploding or being devastated by waves of invaders. Most people know about some triggers for demographic collapse. For example, we’ve all learned about the Black Death in high school. And we’ve all learned about the results of small pox on Amerindian societies.

But there are a lot of other things that can cause demographic collapses. War is one, of course. Sufficient unrest can be enough to make people a bit chary of marrying and having babies, even before birth control. High taxes. Weak government. Reoccurring bad harvests. A bad economy. All these things cause birthrates to drop. A society that requires that couples be self-sufficient before starting families (rather than breeding on the expectation of inheritance) cause birthrates to be lower. Scarcity of resources–employment, capital, etc.–lowers birthrates. Societies in which children are a financial asset raise birthrates, while societies in which children are a financial drain lower them. Socioreligious obligations–to provide an heir, to have the youngest child be male, to provide dowries for all daughters, etc.–can also raise or lower birthrates, as well.

A demographic collapse is only rarely the result of a single event. Usually, it’s a combination of things. You can think of population growth as being a kind of tug-of-war between various factors. When things get slanted heavily in a way that encourages growth, you get a boom. When things slant the other way, you get a collapse. Booms aren’t bad in themselves, typically, but they often breed the kinds of conditions that lead to a later collapse.

Food pressures are hardly an issue in highly developed countries, but a number of other things are. The fact that children, in post-industrial countries, are a cost and not a financial benefit is a biggie. The sheer cost of raising a child in a developed country is a major deterrent to having children. Another issue is the very high rates of taxation in many countries suffering from a demographic winter–that is, a slowing of expansion or an early, pre-collapse contraction. Unemployment in Europe is a perennial problem, European economic policy constantly driving levels upward until they reach levels well above 10% (then followed by a political backlash that only temporarily corrects the problem). A new socioreligious attitude condemning those with “too many” children is also an issue.

Think this has nothing to do with us? Think that American have way too many kids, as it is? Well, even the United States now usually relies upon immigration to maintain a positive population growth. (We’re at replacement now. I can’t say where it will go next.)

A particularly interesting aspect of demographic change–THE most interesting one, to me!–is something that I haven’t mentioned yet. It’s the paradox of urbanization. Urban centers have always had negative natural population growth rates. Whether you are discussing ancient Rome or medieval London or modern New York, cities have never been able to sustain themselves.

It makes sense when you’re talking about pre-1900 cities. After all, that’s where the risk of illness was greatest. You had the least access to pure foods. You had the most dangerous jobs. You had exposure to all kinds of contamination, and the air and water pollution wasn’t to be believed.

But the non-replacement birthrate of cities is as true for 21st century first-world cities as it was for ancient ones. Cities have always relied upon immigration from the countryside and smaller towns to sustain themselves and grow. They have always been a population sinkhole, even as they are the most concentrated center of economic activity and wealth. There are reasons for this that are built into the very nature of cities themselves. No amount of economic policy can change these traits of cities, and as the first world becomes urbanized to an unprecedented degree, we’re seeing the results.

The overall problem is this: it’s hard to raise kids in cities. It was hard a century ago, it was hard a millennium ago, and it’s hard now. Cities are, by their nature, short on space. They’re short on space for living and playing, both. Cities are dangerous places for kids, and that makes parents nervous. Cities are really expensive places to have kids, too. Urban children require enormous investments compared to their country counterparts.

Modern, post-industrial life, though, is incredibly urban. And therein lies another part of the paradox–the very wealthiest countries, by their very structure, discourage their own continuation. This is also why, BTW, we don’t have to worry about population increasing out of control. Only a first-world country can sustain the kinds of population concentrations that would pose a tangible threat to the global environment, but every first-world country will, due to urbanization, not have a population that expands rapidly, if at all.

For an interesting exploration of the possible relationships between demographic change and society, do a search on medieval European populations. The Byzantine Empire would be even more interesting, but it isn’t all that well studied. The population in the Western European Middle Ages is, however, and there are lots of really interesting online discussions.

I’ve taken a lot of flak for saying that while plagiarism is wrong, the plagiarist isn’t necessarily evil and irredeemable and that the plagiarist’s entire career, whatever it is, should not always be instantly destroyed. The fact is that most people like to see the world in black and white. There are bad guys and good guys, and plagiarists are bad guys.

Even a quite intelligent novelist has declared that plagiarists deserve not a lick of forgiveness because when she was plagiarized, it hurt her very deeply. Not to trivialize personal pain, but this is one of the worst reasons ever to want to ostracize the plagiarist–”you hurt me, so you should be hurt, too.”

But few people will be convinced by theoretical arguments. More will be persuaded by this simple fact: Martin Luther King, Jr., was a plagiarist. His plagiarism was egregious and stunning and should have caused a revocation of his doctorate–an entire order of magnitude worse than any recent fiction scandal coming from a context in which he had been explicitly taught about citing sources. (The Wikipedia article is quite generous and downplays the extent to which the ideas and language of his papers were simply lifted from others. If he had been an ordinary graduate, he certainly would have had his doctorate removed.)

AND YET Dr. King was a great man–an inspiration to generations, a figure of unity rather than divisiveness, of hope and vision whose incredible integrity of purpose is beyond question and beyond reproach. He was not a man whose future should have been thrown away because of his, yes, intellectual thefts. He was worthwhile in every sense of the word and in every area of his life.

I’ve made other arguments, based on reason, based on logic. There has been so much intransigence on this topic–a failure to recognize that just about every single writer plagiarizes at some point in their development, a pretense that there is always a clear standard for every genre of writing that absolutely everyone knows, etc., etc. I plagiarized as a child–accidentally, and to my intense frustration, but I did it. Derivativeness itself is on the continuity between originality and plagiarism, and any number of *published* authors simply rewrite the works of others endlessly, incapable of creating their own books. To my amusement, some of the absolute worst offenders at, say, rewriting Putneys are always some of the loudest to declare that plagiarists should be hanged, drawn, and quartered. As an adult, I’ve been imitated and outright plagiarized, both. My hurt feelings–or simply being pissed off–have nothing to do with the matter. It’s an issue that’s as old as authorship itself, and it will never go away, it will never be black and white, and plagiarists will not become the scum of the earth, without exception, just because we want everything to be easy.

Of course, legal action is completely justified and in fact an imperative against certain types of plagiarism. And plagiarism is bad. (Heck, I think the standards for derivativeness are way too loose–part of my protest is people getting up in arms over infractions I find far less egregious that the wholesale copying of another author! “Oh, but I don’t use her WORDS!”–because trying to steal her identity is so morally superior????) PLEASE don’t think that I’m defending plagiarism. Plagiarism shouldn’t be tolerated, but then again, neither is it a capital offense. Plagiarism being wrong doesn’t make the plagiarist more than, well, a plagiarist–no matter how badly one feels betrayed. We want our heroes perfect and our villains purely evil. But wishing can’t make it so.

Life isn’t like that. It’s messy and difficult and complicated–and so are real people. So was Dr. King. A great man. A mortal and flawed man. But still a great one–even though he was, yes, a plagiarist.

Honestly, I’ve stayed away from the global warming nonsense this year. I didn’t want to hear people being convinced that anthropogenic global warming was a hoax because this year is fricking cold because it would piss me off almost as much as the people declaring that anthropogenic global warming was totally true and happening RIGHT NOW AND WE ARE AT A CRISIS, I TELL YOU, A CRISIS two years ago when the East Coast was warm even as I was getting buried under snowstorm after snowstorm in New Mexico. (*Almost* as much because there’s nothing like being told that it’s really warm when you’re snowed in for the fourth time in a winter to tick you off….)

But I got curious. And stupid, I guess. And I stuck my nose out.

I predicted most of the responses–the smugness of those who doubted all along, the sense of betrayal of those who had been convinced by local short term data who are now unconvinced by local short term data, the declarations of stupidity of everyone else from those who have never wavered in their belief, etc., etc. I even predicted two of the major response of the scientific establishment. Climate scientists have been making completely baseless and ridiculous predictions–unfortunately, the hit rate of year-ahead predictions has always been rotten, the scientific models about equaled by the Farmer’s Almanac, but this didn’t deter climatologists from trying to outdo one another with predictions of incredible warming for the next few years–and now there are various forms of ferocious back-pedaling, the most common of which is the contemptuous comment that they really didn’t say any such thing and that the public was just too stupid to understand them. (You know, it’s actually pretty hard to misunderstand a guy, even if he’s wearing a bad suit and has a lot of degrees, when he says that the next few years are going to be warmer than we’ve ever seen before….) The other response has been increasing noise about “climate change.” See, it isn’t “anthropogenic global warming” anymore. It’s “climate change.” This new word keeps these serious scientists from being burdened by trivial things like making predictions that can be disproven, which may have appearance of a handicap of going against one of the major tests of whether a given assertion is a scientific theory but has the benefit of them never having to be wrong because no matter what happens, climate’s gonna change, and they could say that the aliens are doing it an no one could show otherwise.

But one response I didn’t expect really had me laughing. Some major guru climatologist was quoted as sneering that this winter really isn’t cold. See, we. the common folk, just think it is, and we’re stupid, because we can’t remember back very far. If this winter happened in the 1980s, we would know it was actually a WARM winter. We’re just all confused because the last couple of winters have been so warm that it has overloaded our little brains. We should listen to the scientists. They’ll tell us whether it’s hot or cold, and we shouldn’t worry our little heads about it.

This leaves me wondering if he’s really that stupid or if he thinks that we are. Funnily enough, I think most people where it normally never snows really are bright enough to tell whether or not it’s snowing outside. And I think ranchers desperately trying to keep their cattle from freezing to death can distinctly remember NOT doing this in 1985. And I think that gardeners here whose camellias are freezing (dammit) know full well that the last time that happened was in the 70’s. It’s funny how people really can tell when their 20+-year-old oleander or orange tree up and dies. It’s not exactly the kind of think you get confused about. And yet that’s exactly one of the lines that NOAA is trying to pull right now.

Come ON, people. No one’s THAT stupid.

But then again, a warm year–even a not-very-cold-winter–is what the land data are saying. So what else can they do but stand by it? Many people who have come to doubt anthropogenic global warming have begun with questions about these data, wondering about the effects of urbanization, the placement of instrumentation, and the discontinuance of rural weather stations on the data set, among other things. So when the American scientific establishment has thrown its weight so unreservedly behind the accuracy of the measurements, I suppose it feels it has no choice but to back them up even when they are patently ridiculous.

This cold winter tells us jack about long term climate change, of course. Even the weather of five or ten years, despite the silly claims of some, can tell us very, very little. But when the instruments that a theory relies upon tell us that cold is actually really warm, and more faith is put on these instruments than the evidence…..

By the way, you ranchers in Montana? You just think that your great-grandfathers were ranchers, too. Well, they couldn’t have been, because our data shows that the cattle would have all been dead.

Wait. What’s science supposed to be again? I seem to keep forgetting….

I am reminded of an exceptionally nerdy moment of my youth, and I wish to say:

THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

There’s an interesting article in the NYT on recycling here. It’s not wrong. Even if you think every effort is worth it to preserve the environment, a rational person will recognize that resources are finite and so should be directed to the most efficacious action. I do think some of the content is excessively bleak–for example, most metal recycling is good, and paper recycling is generally cost-saving as well. But most Americans are so trained with the idea that recycling is Good that you need a strong tone to counteract that.

But the existence of a disposable society itself is something that the article doesn’t examine and that few people think about. It’s actually something that’s pretty new in civilization–that is, cultures that have cities, writing, and farming.

Now, hunting and gathering cultures generally have a lot of waste, per capita, compared to, say ancient Rome or early modern London. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard the nonsense about how the American Indians used every part of the buffalo–but that’s all it really is: nonsense. The truth is that the tribes that hunted buffalo (a much smaller subset of Amerindians than the sweeping statement usually credits) used as much as the buffalo as they had a use for. If hunting was easy, they ate the yummiest bits and left the rest to rot. If buffalo were scarce, then they ate what was edible, used whatever other bits they needed…and left the rest to rot.

Remember the hunts that involved chasing migrating buffalo off cliffs by the dozens, if not hundreds? The same textbook that spouted the Indian-as-nature’s-child propaganda probably talked about those, too. The waste involved in such hunting practices was appalling to the Europeans who first witnessed it–in highly agricultural areas, like western Europe, meat was too expensive and involved to much work to waste it so freely. (Somehow, this impossibility of reconciling the fake Indian who has a deep reverence for the sacredness of nature and makes propitiatory prayers to the spirit of every animal he killed with the Indian who drives herds off cliffs never bothers textbook writers. This is, of course, because the Indian of one’s textbooks isn’t a person at all but a symbol that was first co-opted by romantic Victorians and then by the environmental movement.)

This example can be generalized to the statement that people in hunter-gatherer/hunter-farmer pre-urban societies typically used whatever they had a use for (animal or otherwise) and ditched the rest. Let’s take our pre-Columbian plains Indian again–this time a real one. Yes, you could make containers from the intestines, clothes and shelter from the hide, needles from the bones, etc. But you only have a use for a certain number of containers, and there are a lot more bones than you need for needle-making. These societies generally had limited trade. Luxuries could be traded hundreds of miles, even thousands at times. Culture-critical objects, such as flint, would be traded long distances, too. But there was no trade of ordinary, commodity-type goods. You don’t see the Irquois loading up caravans of corn and taking back stacks of buffalo hide. So whatever couldn’t be used in the place it originated was, essentially, thrown away. Buffalo might make the best needles on the continent, but you’re not going to see a buffalo-bone-needle-making industry buying up all the unused buffalo bones to export them across North America. There isn’t a sufficient population density to create a market, and there isn’t a sufficient consistent surplus of food to allow this kind of specialization, either.

Once you start getting cities, though, you start getting a population that specializes occupationally and that engages in increasingly complex trade routes among various sufficiently populous markets. So suddenly the intrinsic value of buffalo bones for needles could, theoretically, launch a real industry. Not only can almost everything potentially have a use, but there is now a market for those uses.

There is almost no such thing as garbage in such a society. In pre-industrial societies objects are generally little chemically changed from their original states unless burnt or eaten, which makes them very easy to reuse. Metal can be reshaped. Wood can be reused until it is reduced to fuel. Ashes and manure–include human–enrich the fields. Clothing could be shredded and reused in clothing or, later, paper. Bones made glue. Even dog poop had its uses in tanning, and human urine was used in a number of different processes. There was almost nothing that wasn’t either biodegradable or reusable–or both.

This isn’t to say that pre-industrial civilizations are ecologically morally superior to modern society. Soot from cities could blight the plants and even change the weather in an area. Rivers were more polluted that we can really understand today. Farming practices permanently damaged the fertility of the earth–and much of this even happened pre-civilization and continued long into urban ages. (Most of Greece’s topsoil is now at the bottom of the Aegean, while Britain’s moors are damaged land caused by massive loss of fertile topsoil after severe deforestation in the bronze age.) Systematic efforts to exterminate undesirable animals were undertaken, and great areas of forest were clearcut in efforts to improve the land for human habitation. But despite this, the level of recycling was nearly complete. Baskets and ceramics were fairly disposable, but few other things didn’t continue to have a value that entire groups of people took advantage of.

As I’ve already mentioned, the ease of reuse is one part of the equation. The existence of markets was another. There’s a third, though, and it’s the relationship between the value of human labor and the value of material goods. Compared to human labor, pre-industrial goods are very expensive. This means that it was worth the time of the rag-and-bone man to not only collect various bits of recyclable trash but to go to the trade entrance, knock on the door, wait for a servant to answer, come in to see what the household had to offer, negotiate a price for it, and then haul it away. This also meant that the base price for things was so expensive that they had to be made to really last or they would be prohibitively expensive to buy in the first place!

The life of a fine 16th-century coat might look like this:

-First, it was made for a gentleman as his finest coat for a sum of 1L, 5s, who wore it for ten years, until his death.
-It was willed to his son, valued at 1L, who wore it for a further ten years, and then passed it on to his manservant after removing the gold buttons and any other valuable bits, at this point valued at 3s.
-The manservant used it for fifteen more years. Finally, it was too worn to be considered suitable to his station, and so it was cut down for his eldest son, the scraps being used for cleaning or sold as rags.
-His sons wore it in succession for six years, until even the youngest hung two inches out of the sleeves, and so it was sold to an old-clothes dealer.
-It continued to be bought by housewives for their children, made over, and resold to old-clothes dealers for another 20 years, until it was either so small or so worn out that even the poorest couldn’t find a use for it, and it went to the bone-and-rag man.

Most of the wool that left the stream of use was literally worn away over time by its wearers.

But all this changed with industrialization. Gradually, goods became cheap compared to labor. This meant that the value of used goods plummeted, while goods were made of flimsier materials to make them even cheaper so that their design could follow the most rapidly fluctuating trends of fashion. This further reduced their resale value, as goods simply did not last as long anymore. Old-clothes men complained that readymade clothing was as cheap as anything they could sell, while old clothing just couldn’t hold together well enough to be attractive to buyers, and men who repaired the woven seats of chairs bemoaned the fact that a whole new chair costs little more than their services.

This changeover is marked particularly in the works of Mayhew and his near-contemporaries. Probably one of the most remarkable changes was in the services of the ash-men, or garbage collectors. At the time that Victoria took the throne, companies competed to give the highest bids for the privilege of collecting the trash of various London districts. Teams of women and children sifted through the piles, separating the various components for sale, while the bulk was sold to farmers who were engaged in land reclamation projects in the fens. Fifty years later, they were competing, not to pay for the trash but to be paid for removing it. The demand had collapsed, and disposing of the waste had become a matter of cost, not profit. Though the factors at play were independent of most of the issues causing the increase in throwing goods away, the result was typical of what was happening in dozens of areas of life at the same time. In the 1830s, England was a society with very high rates of reuse. By the 1880s, fashion had become democratized, a new standard of durability was accepted, and the disposable society was very much the rule. America and other Western nations soon followed suit. It is the silent birth of consumer culture and disposability that is so often missed in studies of the Victorian era simply because most of us cannot understand the existence of a society that is not like that. But today’s situation is actually the exception in civilized societies, not the rule–which might explain some of the anxiety that we have about our trash and the irrationality that we approach it with. Our waste is, really, a kind of bizarre quirk of history, and we may be responding to it in the context of the rest of human history without even being fully aware of it.

The labor/goods cost ratio is even lower today than it was in the late 1800s. Additionally, today, many of our manufactured goods are either made of materials that are hard to reuse or made of a complicated set of materials that are too hard to separate even though the elements might be usable. Working against this, though, are issue of scale, population density, and convenience of markets, which mean that, paradoxically, it is we who use practically every part of the cow to an extent that the plains Indians of 600 years ago could not have conceived.

I love several of Apple’s products. But this? This is hilarious.

BTW, I have a laptop now, so I should be online for real now!

Two preliminary notes: First, my internet connection is down because of a loooong, frustrating, and complicated bunch of nonsense. (I swear, if companies mess up the average person’s billing at the rate they do mine, they must be burning TRILLIONS a year from poor management.) Second, I have tons of comments to go through and approve (or deny–that means you, Russian hotties) but am posting on the charity of the neighbors and will get to that soon. But THANK YOU to everyone who posted on Stinky’s birth! Sitting in my lap right now, she says”thank you,” too. Actually, she says “uh,uh, waah!” but that counts, doesn’t it?

I choose my myths of history not because I want to point a finger and go “You all get this wrong!” but because these are things that I, too, believed before I found out what’s really true. Sometimes, there are silly make-believe histories that we unthinkingly buy into. Other times, we make assuptions about the past being too much like the present. Medieval dungeons are a bit of both.

The word dungeon comes from a word for the medieval keep itself–that is, the tall, tower-like central fortress of a castle. Prisoners were certainly kept there, but rare was a place that could afford to have a dedicated prison. Most would have been thrown in a ground-level storage room–keeping in mind that the main entrance and great hall was typically on the American second floor, while the ground floor had no windows to make attack harder. For ordinary offenders, prison was just the room you were stuck in before you could be tried. Punishment after a conviction tended to be swift and of short duration. So you’d be convicted then fined, held up for public humiliation, or publicly punished (and possibly maimed) and set free–or executed.

Real prisons certainly existed. Every king needed one or two, and big cities or really powerful lords would have them, too. But if you lived in a small village and you got in a fight with someone, causing serious bodily harm, you’d be more likely to wait upon the slow wheels of justice in our baron’s cheese room or wood shed as anywhere else.

There really wasn’t any desire to have you hanging about in some cell, eating the lord’s food. That’s because even the most basic of diets was really expensive by today’s standards, and pre-modern societies just couldn’t afford to use their precious food stores on a bunch of convicts. Food was scarce enough, at times, for most law-abiding citizens! Imprisonment represented a vast squandering of resources that they just didn’t have.

Now, there were times when long-term imprisonment was used. Usually, it was reserved for those who were too embarrassing to bring to trial or for those too important or useful to execute. The embarrassing but unimportant tended to disappear rapidly, often enough because their jailers “forgot” to give them things like food and water or “forgot” to not have then garroted in the night. The important, on the other hand, could be imprisoned for months or years–with their eventual fate depending upon the political circumstances. But these didn’t stay in “dungeons,” either. It is this sort for whom entire castles or islands were made long-term prisons, and they were generally kept in relative comfort though considerable constant danger. Imprisonment almost never followed a conviction, though–it preceded it. The imprisoned were being kept in reserve, so to speak. No writs of habeas corpus then!

What of the stories of torturers and the like? Well, torture was considered a perfectly acceptable way of gaining a confession and finding out co-conspirators, but it was torture for a purpose, not a general whip-the-prisoners sort of thing. The best advice for avoiding torture is to not get involved in treason or heresy. You were pretty safe from it if you just brained a guy with a mug of ale.

Torture continued to be used in England to secure confessions through Elizabeth’s reign. I think–but am not entirely sure–that it was ended toward the final stage of her reign (because of popular disgust) and was not revived again, officially, in that country. (I’m running out of time, so I am not looking any of this up but an writing from memory.) It was never a legally sanctioned way of obtaining confessions or information in America, either pre- or post-Revolution.

So we got to go home 22 hours after Stinkerbell was born. She had not yet figured out that the rest of the people in the world were not insane ax murderers, and the learning process was fraught with tears. It took several days for her to get used to DH and my mom–and longer for her to get used to the Bear!

The Bear absolutely adores her, and if there is any jealousy, he’s jealous of the adults who aren’t giving him enough time with Stinky. He’ll hold her as much as she’ll tolerate, and with her temper…well, it’s not that much! He’s so egocentric that it hasn’t occurred to him that Stinkerbell could be a threat to his place in the world, which is awesome. He’s full of the lists of things that he’ll teach her, and rather than being disappointed that she mostly lies there and waves her arms and legs, he’s busy interpreting every twitch as signs of her wonderfulness.

He’s trying to set up a system of communication with her. He tried to get her to talk to him first, but soon changed that to nodding and shaking her head. Now he says things like “Do you like this? If you don’t cry, that means yes,” and (my favorite!) “Do you want me to hold you? Just lying there means yes.”

Stinkerbell is coming along noticeably in the language department. She figured out her receptive first word in the hospital. DH began saying things like, “Do you want BOOBIE? Look, Stinkerbell, BOOBIE!” After the first night, I realized that Stinky would stop crying and start sucking her fingers or going all fish-mouthed at the word “boobie.” I quickly had images of my child as an eight-month-old screaming “BOOBIE!” at the top of her lungs in the supermarket. No. Way. (I believe that 95% of good parenting consists of being able to fast forward a few months or years and work out the consequences of a present action. Not having an infant screaming “BOOBIE!” in public places is good parenting.)

So “boobie” soon became “food.” MUCH better. Now she knows “eat” and “milk,” too. Much more socially appropriate! (She knows what “diaper,” “mommy,” and “hug” mean, as well. Communication with her is now very binary. If she’s fussy and you guess right, you get rewarded with eager baby sounds for up to 15 second while she waits for you to give her what she wants. If you guess wrong, you get screams. She’s quite definite, which helps!)

I’ve decided to give sign language a shot with this kiddo. The Bear said his first word at 7 months despite his weird auditory issues, his first 2-word phrase at 10 months, and began speaking in sentences regularly at about 13 months. So I wondered if it was really worth it to try signs since most babies start signing at about the same age that the Bear was talking! But because Stinky was so alert and made strong eye contact right away (she does have the “infant jerks” at the very edges of her range, though), I didn’t feel like an idiot trying to sign to her, especially since she is developing receptive language so fast. I started with “eat,” “milk,” “hug,” “mommy,” “daddy,” “more,” and “I love you.” I’m going to add “diaper,” “burp,” “music,” “sleep,” and “bath” next. She started doing “eat” almost right away because it was a very small modification of the hand-chewing hungry “Stinky sign language” she’d already been doing in response to the question, “Do you want food? Do you want to eat milk?” She seems to be working on “milk,” too, extending her left hand and wiggling her fingers in a new way in response to my sign after the first several times. (She definitely gets ticked off rapidly after doing this if I don’t make with the milk already, especially if I keep doing the “milk” sign.) She’s been doing this just about every time she’s hungry and awake for two days now. She *may* have given me one “hug” sign today, too. It’ll take a number of repetitions of this to make sure, though.

Back to my baby-narrative:

The second night with Stinkerbell was interesting. Most newborns have a getting-upset process that goes something like this:

Huh. What? What’s that? Something is not right. Something is definitely not right. I think I’m…unhappy. Yes, that’s it. Unhappy. I’m going to cry. Definitely going to cry, now! Crying! You hear me? Crying! CRYING!

Stinkerbell’s could be summed up as:

MAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MADMADMADMADMAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU WILL PAY! ALL OF YOU MORTALS WILL PAY!!!!!!

That night, I slept in the queen-sized guest bed with my mom because DH was going back to work the next day. (A DH who has been at work all day is happy to be tossed a baby when he gets home. A DH who is bored and cooped up in the house isn’t happy at any time. It’s much better to send the DH to work ASAP….) I SWEAR Grandma went from sound asleep to levitating 18 inches off the bed in panic without covering the intervening space at Stinkerbell’s sudden, gut-wrenching, dingoes-are-eating-the-baby howl. Not one time, mind you, but at least five times that night.

By the third night, Grandma grunted slightly in her sleep at the same sound. This, little Stinkerbell, is the result of “crying wolf.”

She got rapidly better, though, once she realized that the Owner of the Boobie was not deaf and would, in fact, respond to a very moderate rooting combined with eager baby noises. Then she decided that the screaming-as-if-being-dismembered should be saved for true emergencies, such as being set down, being buckled into the car seat, and baths.

Real conversation with my dad:

Dad: Is that Stinkerbell crying in the background?

Me: Why, yes, it is.

Dad: Why is she crying?

Me: I had to scrub the poop out of her cute little outfit after she had a third-degree splody diaper all over it. This meant I had to set her down.

(”Splody diaper” is a technical term around here.)

Dad: Wow. She’s really mad.

Me: No, she’s mildly irritated. Perhaps moderately peeved.

(Crying changes from a typical newbord “Waah, waah, waah” to a much lustier “WAAAAAaaaaah!…….WAAAAAAAAaaaah!….WAAAAAaaaaah!” which starts at the top of her lungs and fades as she runs completely out of air, separated by a dreadful silence as she takes in the next breath to continue her game effort at blowing out your eardrums through volume and raw hate. At birth, she’d go hoarse after just a minute of this. Now she can do it for a good ten minutes.)

Me: NOW she’s mad.

Dad, rather muted: Wow……

I’ve always felt that’s it’s a good thing that babies don’t have psychic powers. If they did, they’d blow all our brains to tiny fragments within days of birth with their hate.

Stinky has since perfected the targeted cry. The Bear, who is generally an easy-going, affable sort, has very rarely used this childhood trick, but it consists of staring at the perpetrator of whatever terrible deed has been visited upon the baby/child with a look of fury, loathing, and hatred while crying loudly *at* them in hopes that this can serve as some sort of punishment. Stinky had this down by week two, and such treatment is generally triggered by 1) not picking her up fast enough after she starts crying, 2) having cold hands while changing her clothes, 3) not getting her out of the car fast enough after it stops, or 4) bathing her. The peculiar feature of this kind of crying is that there’s a break a between it and the true upset cry. The upset cry ends as soon as the direct cause of discomfort is removed. Then there is a pause, during which she looks you in the eyes and frowns ferociously. And then there is the second explosion, not of unhappiness or discomfort but of fury.

“YOU! You did this to me! OFF WITH YOUR HEAD!”

Ah. My baby. She’d committed one of the seven deadly sins before she was even a week old.

She’s working on a second, too: Gluttony. This baby gained 15 oz between her lowest recorded weight and her 2-week checkup. Seriously, now–I think she’s trying to average a pound a week. The Bear ate constantly for weeks, but that was because he was a poor, skinny preemie. Stinky, though, has a definite third chin and is working on the fat rolls on her thighs. She spits up more than he did, too, and every episode is a Mortal Offense to Her Dignity. How dare the milk come up again after she has swallowed it! How dare it!

For a baby who is so focused on eating, one would think she’d be better at it. How wrong you’d be, though! If you read your pregnancy books, they claim that the nipple area darkens and the areola widens to give babies a visual “target.” The broad side of a barn would be too small for this kid. I still have to turn on the light and aim her at night when her brother was a heat-seeking missile from the first night in the hospital. She’ll be whacking herself on the nose with my nipple, and still she’ll hunt frantically around. “Where is it? WHERE IS IT????”

She also swallows air constantly, too–I had to force her to stop at first to make her burp, or otherwise, she’d go right on eating even as she fussed miserably. She still chokes herself (I hope bacterial pneumonia from the aspiration of breast milk is rare!), and her latch is pretty pathetic.

Kid, if you ever read this: As a baby, you were book smart but boob dumb.

Her manual dexterity is very high, and it means that she’s started one embarrassing behavior early. If I don’t respond fast enough to her hunger signals, she’ll try diligently and very unsubtly to rip all my clothes off. Thanks, Stinky. (I should probably say something about horny frat boys here, but I never let a horny frat boy get that close to me! *g*)

She never had the newborn clenched-fist posture, and her fingers are incredibly long. Seven people have commented on it so far. Six have said, “Oh, she’ll be a great pianist!” The seventh said, “Oh, she’ll be a great hand model!” That, or she could be the first kid to actually touch her brain through her nose! COOL!

She was able to hold a pacifier in her mouth at a day old, which is GREAT. But she can use that same hand to knock an unwanted pacified halfway across the kitchen. And her rather weak sucking reflex means that she doesn’t suck on it just because you put it in her mouth, even with the reverse-psychology trick of pretending to pull it out.

Fabulous, kid.

She can bat at objects when she cares to, which isn’t often once she figured out how. Watching her figure it out was hilarious, though. She was in her little bouncer chair, which has a giraffe flanked by two elephants dangling from it. Her eyes intensely focused on the giraffe, she reached out with her right hand….and batted the elephant. She frowned, stared harder, and reached out again. Again the elephant foiled her desires! So she tried the left hand. Elephants everywhere! Those devious fiends! Her face set now in an expression of constipated concentration, she tried both hands, reached very hard, and…scored a direct hit on the giraffe! She had triumphed over the bouncy chair! And there was much rejoicing, which involved hitting the giraffe several more times.

Our other nicknames for her have expanded rapidly. After Stinkerbell came Anger Ball, then Gruntilda, Snorky, and Yoda (which, as she filled out, became Jabba…). When she has a splody diaper, she is, of course, Your Daughter. Her real name, though, is that of a Shakespearean heroine (and not one of those annoying, whiny kinds, either).

Coming in the next installment–more pictures and the Tale of Woe (AKA, bath time). Right now, though, I have to stop because she grabbed a fistful of my hair and is busy gnawing it.

Introducing Stinkerbell!

Look at her photos on Flickr.

So after scaring me half to death way too many times–and after worrying the doctor (who feared intrauterine growth restriction) enough to send me back to my perinatalogist, Stinkerbell was born at term on Oct 21 and at the beautiful weight of 7 lbs 3 oz.

She’s more high maintenance than the Bear was, so this has been my first chance with both hands free to post PICTURES and full-ish, if rather censored, details.

I’d been having hours and hours of contractions just about every stinking night. You know how they’re supposed to stop when you lie down on your side? Uh-huh. Lying down was the trigger for them to BEGIN. On good nights, they’d be spaced as far as 30 minutes apart, and only half at an intensity to make me uncomfortable enough to wake up. On bad nights, they’d be 5 minutes apart and each and every one would make me miserable. At times, I’d have to answer the question “Are you in labor?” with “I don’t know. I’ll tell you if the baby crowns.” Apparently, these contractions get worse with ever subsequent pregnancy. Since I had five weeks of this, I might go mad if we decide to try again and end up with another keeper!

So around 1 AM-ish on the 21st they start in again at enough intensity to bother me. I ignore them for three hours or so, then decide that they might really be the real thing. So I go back to sleep. (This is about the 6th time I’ve been convinced of this, and if they ARE the real thing, for REAL, they’ll get a lot worse, and I’ll need the sleep anyway. Right? Right.) Around 7:30, I decide to give the hubby a heads up. Then I sleep fitfully until 9:30. When I get up, I’ve decided that there’s at least an 85% chance that this won’t stop just to mess with my head, so DH and I get the bags, get in the car, and go. I make it to labor and delivery triage at about 10. After being hooked up to the contract-o-meter for a while, my cervix was checked. 6 CM was announced, and I was to be given a room. As soon as one was available, of course. In the meantime, I got to sit out in the hall, lolling amongst my pillows and luggage like a beached whale.

Okay. Everyone tells me that I was small. Fine. But when you’re 8 months pregnant, you do NOT FEEL SMALL. And this was also a LOT more pregnant that I’d ever been. The Bear was quite early. This one was scaring me because I could tellt hat she was a heck of a lot bigger than he was, and I’m a small woman, and I tore a bit with him, so I didn’t appreciate being told how tiny my baby must be. (The perinatologist’s sonographer must have mismeasured, too, because she’d put the baby a hefty 5.5 lbs at 32 weeks–hefty for 32 weeks, that is.)

We got a room around noon. My exercise-induced anaphylaxis scared the nurse into trying to bully me into an IV. I could not convince here that there are DEGREES of anaphylaxis, and that every anaphylactic episode isn’t anaphylactic shock. *rolls eyes* She kept saying, “Anaphylaxisis is anaphylaxis, and it’s the most severe…” blahblahblah. No, it isn’t. I’ve had allergists. Yes, I should be carrying an epi-pen (speaking of that–I need a new allergist!) but that’s for my allergy to hymenoptera venom–bees, etc. (I have never gone into shock there, either, but I’ve had increasingly severe systemic reactions to my three stings, indicating a reasonable future likelihood of shock.) As far as the allergies went, my last allergist said I was handling everything sensibly and that the big thing to look out for was cold water–a polar bear swim is my greatest chance of going into shock. I’ve learned to control my exercise level to prevent or lessen an attack, and I can guarantee that labor is NOT the kind of thing that would trigger it–it’s just not sudden enough–and even if it did, vasodilators and oxygen would be plenty to bring it under sufficient control. I typically have 120% of the lung capacity of someone my weight, height, and age–an attack brings it down to 95%. Not exactly endangering me or the baby. But the nurse had never heard of or encountered it before. I don’t know why–it is NOT that rare. Probably 3 or 4 out of every 1000 people have it, though fewer than 1 in 1000 are diagnosed.

(I just realized now what the biggest trigger is for me besides cold–NSAIDs! No wonder I’ve had so few attacks in the past few years! And now I know–NO cardio for me while on NSAIDs. Could someone please tell me why I can’t have something normal wrong with me for once???? Then again, I much, much prefer the exercise-induced anaphylaxis over a peanut allergy. Now, if someone could give me a surefire way to beat the hives that I get a lot more often than vasoconstriction, I’d love ‘em forever. It takes a lot of will power not to scratch the skin off my legs when I exercise in the winter.)

I really, really didn’t care about arguing with the nurse then, so I let her have her way. But I got her even more agitated when she asked if there’s any condition that I might have that could cause complications with anesthesia.

Me: “Um. You mean like malignant hyperthermia, right?”

Her: “That’s exactly what I mean.”

Me: “Er. Yes. Well, I have something even weirder than the exercise-induced anaphylaxis. It’s a variant of myotonia congenita, and NO, it doesn’t affect my ability to give birth vaginally, but it means I could die if I’m given certain types of muscle paralysis medication…but these kinds are rarely used anymore in the US, so the biggest deal is that I’m going to need more drugs than most people post-partum, plus heat, or otherwise, I’ll be hitting at least a seven on the pain scale.”

That didn’t go over too well, either. At least she didn’t ask about ask about blood clotting disorders. Then I’d have tot tell her about my great-grandfather, who died of a blood clotting disorder that no one knew he had after an operation.

Wretched woman did pump me full of fluids because she didn’t like my blood pressure. I am NOT DEHYDRATED unless my blood pressure is NOTABLY below 90/60. Sheesh. I made her turn down the drip–if she hadn’t agreed, I’d have pulled the dang thing out because it was chilling me (the single WORST thing for my anaphylaxis, of course!) and I had to pee between every contraction.

My big discovery of this very tedious period was that the monitor in the room showed the contractions and heart rates of everyone in labor. I instantly named it the Screen of Pain and for a while amused myself by comparing my contractions to everyone else’s.

Anyhow, ’round about 1:45, after a whole lot of nothing to speak of, I hit transition. I made DH turn on the TV. The first station had a documentary about inventions going that was just perfect–there was no thread of plot to lose, and the info was interesting enough to distract me except during the worst. At 2, this changed to a documentary about Osama bin Laden, which the same nurse deeply disapproved of to have as TV to birth to, but I didn’t give a damn. I had the Bear to CNN. A documentary on a terrorist was fine by me–same deal, interesting enough to keep me distracted and without a plot, which is all I cared about. They could have been talking about cheese processing by that point, and the baby WON’T CARE.

As for the actual, you know, birth: Stinkerbell was born at 2:28, after two small pushes that I was really trying not to do because, after that lengthy stage 1, I still wasn’t fully dilated. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! Those and the two proceeding I-am-not-pushing-but-I-WANT-to contractions were the worst, bar ONE. The doctor did arrive in time, and four contractions later, Stinkerbell was born.

Things I learned:

1) Apparently, you’re not supposed to start blacking out during a push. Um. Oh. I’m a lot more muscular than most women due to my weird muscle disorder–hence going from nothing to crowning in a push and a quarter–but I guess this uses up the oxygen a lot faster than most women do, so my push lasts for less than a third of a contraction before the world gets dark and grainy and I lose the push and pant frantically for air while wanting desperately to still be pushing. Not being able to push during a full-on contraction SUCKS.

2) Apparently, when you nearly black out, this causes the baby’s oxygen and therefore heartrate to dip, too. This worries OB/GYNs, who then go for a quick delivery, especially when there’s meconium in the amniotic fluid (what can I say? my kids are precocious poopers!), which then causes you to tear.

Ow.

3) I love the oxygen mask. The oxygen mask is my friend. I don’t start to black out with an oxygen mask. I will never have a delivery without one again.

4) Endorphin trips are unpredictable. Last time, endorphins caused me to lose my ability to speak (bad), made me miserably queasy (also bad), and killed a decent amount of the pain (good!). This time, endorphins made my hands shake so badly I couldn’t grasp anything and couldn’t take any delivery position except semi-reclining because it shot my balance to pieces (bad, bad, bad), made me desperately, desperately tired–such that if I’d had more that a minute and a half between contractions that I’d have fallen asleep–(bad), and did, oh, almost JACK for the pain (BAD!!!!). That is officially a bad trip. My body gets a big fat FAIL for that one.

5) I bleed like a stuck pig, apparently. I didn’t get to hold Stinkerbell right away, but it was me and not her. The neonatologist was there to make sure Stinkerbell didn’t need resuscitation, and despite the meconium and the chord wrapped twice around her body (oh, I didn’t tell you about that part? That went, “Okay, the head’s free. Now, slowly…. Whoops. Chord’s wrapped!”–followed by a yank. Ouch, indeed.), she did great. I had a minor tear and what is charmingly called a “skidmark,” and the OB/GYN sized it up with a “Good. Four stitches here, one there, and you’ll be done.”

Not exactly. Three packages of thread-and-needle later, with the interim filled with a lot of frowning and muttering about how I won’t stop bleeding–and my tentative volunteering of the information that the local painkiller seemed to be WEARING OFF–and I was finally pronounced done. I don’t know what it looked like, except that there were a lot of bloody blue and white “napkins” whisked away, but DH’s face was a rather dreadful shade of gray, and he didn’t leave my side–or, uh, knee, as the case may be–until the doctor was finished. That took longer than the pushing, actually.

I couldn’t hold the baby for several more minutes after that because my hands were STILL shaking uncontrollably, but I did get my first prescription-strength Motrin and Percocet right away, to head off the dreadful muscle pain that was coming. DH spent the time looking at his new daughter, who, the instant she was left alone on the warming table, immediately jammed her fingers in her mouth to comfort herself. The Bear’s initial cry had been said, lonely, and rather pathetic. Stinkerbell’s was MAD. MAD, MAD, MAD.

That’s my girl, all right.

She had big, dark eyes that looked everywhere, a cap of dark hair–hair! the Bear had been bald for months and months!–and she knew right where her hands were. I laughed when I saw it, over the head of the OB/GYN, because she’d been sucking on her fingers since she had them. The sonogram at 13 weeks showed her with her hand in her mouth, then with a startle-like movement away. At 20 weeks, she’d had her fingers crammed halfway down her throat, and at 32, it had been hard to get her to move her hands long enough to get a decent picture.

Perhaps because of this, she never habitually curled her fingers into fists the way most newborns do and at less than 2 weeks old could grab something and, if its weight was supported, bring it to her mouth to gnaw on.

She was also chubbier than the Bear. Down right huge compared to him, in fact. It was a strange experience, her being so tiny but SO much bigger than her bother. He’d been right at 5lbs 3oz. She was 7lbs 3oz. Two pounds makes a big difference! She was also nearly 4 inches longer, too, at 19.8″.

I tried to feed her right away but was rather puzzled by the fact that she didn’t lunge at my chest the way the Bear did. The Bear needed no help. He’d apparently known what nipples were for since conception and not only went for it with great gusto but achieved a perfect latch first time. Stinkerbell had managed to give herself a good case of nipple confusion in the womb with all that finger sucking! She had to be coaxed onto the breast the first time, and even now, I have to turn the light on to feed her at night.

We stayed in the labor, delivery, recovery, and postpartum room for a few hours. I called my mother as soon as things settled down, and she came with the Bear and, I’m ashamed to say, Taco Bell. I haven’t had Taco Bell in years, but apparently, it’s what I crave postpartum because I made DH get me it after the Bear, too. (Yes, a hospital lunch was brought. None of us could figure out what the meat was even after tasting it. I think that about covers it!)

The Bear was fascinated and somewhat bewildered. Grandma was proud. Many photos were taken. I satisfied the nurse that I could go to the bathroom just fine, thanyouverymuch, ditched the IV bag, got dressed, got my ice bag, was generally restless and irritated, and was finally allowed to go to my real room on the next floor. Some of this postpartum stuff is fuzzy–those dratted endorphins, kicking in too late to do any good. Gee, thanks.

I had to go in a wheelchair–they didn’t want me out of the stupid gown yet *sigh.* I would have gone in a wheelchair, anyway, because that’s the only way I would have been allowed to carry Stinkerbell, and at that point, I would have bitten the arm off a nurse who tried to carry her. Not that I was feeling a wee bit protective or anything.

As soon as I got to the room, I grabbed real clothes and felt SO much better. Got the needle out of my arm, too. And then it was time to settle down for recovery. So I unpacked my bags, nosed around the room, and arranged things to my liking. Then I had DH get me a horribly unhealthy chocolate chocolate chip muffin from the “nourishment” room because there was still no way I was letting go of the baby long enough to get food.

That’s settling down, yes?

Stinkerbell was darling. And a total PITA. She conked out in her bassinet for four hours. I napped a bit during this time, and, unfortunately, this was also when newborn pictures were taken. I dressed her up in a gorgeous little dress, but at this point, she was virtually unrousable, and her bruises from her precipitous birth were turning quite livid, so the results were dreadful. However, I was on Percocet, and I bought the photographer’s assurances that the pics would airbrush her into adorability. So I paid for a package. When they arrived at the house four days later, I sent them back, they were so appallingly awful. You can’t airbrush a toad. But I did laugh so hard that I cried, so that was good!

I got more and more restless, but there was no way I was leaving my baby long enough to take a walk, and I could only take a walk with Stinkerbell with her in the bassinet. And after that first, blissful sleep, she rejected the bassinet with fervor and screamed and screamed if you tried to put her in it. She was mostly comforted by nursing. After the first couple of recorded feedings, I stopped writing them down. As I said to the pediatrician the next day, “Could I just record when I’m NOT feeding her? It would take less time.”

So…I’m cosleeping again. From the first night again.

This baby added a twist to the Bear’s rejection of the crib. From less than an hour old, she rejected everyone except ME. I guess she recognized my voice and my smell–babies learn their mother’s scents from the amniotic fluid. She’d be okay with someone else for a short period, but after a couple of minutes, it was back to mom or it was screaming time. And she could scream a whole lot louder than the Bear could!

DH’s reaction was pretty much, “What’s wrong with this one? Is it broken?” *g*

She did adjust to other people in the following days, but during my first shower postpartum, while DH was holding her, she screamed and screamed and screamed.

The first night I slept fitfully (adrenaline had me pretty messed up), took pain meds, got hot pads, changed cold packs, ate an obscene number of muffins, got my vitals measured, watched the baby’s vitals measured, and watched lots of TV. The nurse would have objected to those shows, too, for it was mostly Law & Order and true crime shows, with a smattering of Discovery Health and other documentaries. The nurses who checked me were amazed that my ankles had absolutely no swelling. They didn’t realize how often I was on my feet.

I was informed that we were candidates for early discharge the next day,a nd I said “YES!!!!” We ended up leaving the hospital 22 hours after the baby was born. I could go for walks outside, enjoy my own house, get clean in my own shower, and have my son near the baby but not desperately bored and on top of me. It was awesome.

And my baby girl? Awesome beyond description!

I’ve had more than a small bitter laugh recently over the results of a decision to dramatically lower the minimum dioxin output of pulp mills in the United States. It comes of refusing to see the complexities of the issues at hand–and the result has been job losses and a heavy environmental toll.

Pulp plants use chlorine to bleach pulp white. This creates dioxins. Some amount of those dioxins escape into the environment. Some dioxins are bad. They can cause cancer in certain concentrations. How bad they are, exactly, isn’t known, but it’s better to be safe than sorry…as long as “safe” is reasonable.

In Mobile, AL, the large pulp plant accounted for less than 20% of the dioxin released. This is because many other industrial processes produce dioxin. A chemical plant was also responsible for an even smaller amount, but over 50% of the total dioxin released was created by the wastewater treatment plant. All water treatment plants produce dioxin–enough to make the sum total produced by all the pulp plants in the US look like a joke.

So the EPA knows that dioxin is bad. They have several choices: 1) They can determine whether the current levels in the environment are dangerous and change guidelines either nationwide or on a case-by-case basis as a result of this study, or 2) they can be proactive and begin tightening restrictions on dioxins due to a possible danger. They choose #2. All right, that’s well and good, but what is the most logical target? The process that creates the most doixin in the US, right?

Nope. See, making wastewater treatment plants cleaner is very expensive, and it’s an expense that would fall on almost every community in the US. And those communities would demand to know on what basis they were having to institute incredibly expensive dioxin-control measures. Instead, the EPA went after a much smaller target–really, in the scheme of things, no more than a symbolic target: the pulp plants. The choice is stupid for actually lowering environmental dioxin, since the total output of all pulp plants is so insignificant compared to wastewater treatment facilities. But is shows that EPA is Doing Something about dioxin in a way that won’t come back to bite them too much, and it makes good headlines. The environmental community as a whole hates paper plants and logging (more on why this is a mistake later), so the EPA “cracking down” on this eeeevil industry gets good press. The fact that is would be largely ineffectual in making any kind of appreciable difference in dioxin exposure wasn’t, apparently, much of a concern.

So new guidelines were instituted–guidelines that required changes that were so expensive that most domestic pulp mills, including the pulp mill in Mobile, AL, decided to close, instead, and to make paper by importing bales of pulp from other sources.

The results of this were many. First, domestic dioxin output was lowered marginally. Second, thousands of people lost their jobs for the sake of a political move. Third, the import of foreign-produced pulp was raised significantly. Fourth, thousands of acres of forests used for tree harvesting are no longer needed for pulp production.

The first two points are self-explanatory. The third needs some explaining, though. Foreign pulp sources are largely second- and third-world countries where trees are harvested using poor forestry practices, causing mass deforestation and endangerment of animals and plants alike, and pulp is processed with little to no regard to environmental impact. (Pulp creation *can* be a very environmentally damaging process. There is a potential for a lot of very nutrient-rich wastewater, as well as the possibility of releasing high levels of various chemicals–such as very strong acids, bleaches, and, yes, LOTS of dioxin rather than just a little bit into the environment.) But that’s okay because it’s not happening in the US, so no bad press for the EPA! The companies that used to make their own pulp are to blame because they’re evil and greedy and aren’t vetting their suppliers properly. Because what a sane company would do would be to get specially certified pulp that would triple their production costs compared to Canada, right?

The fourth also needs some explaining. The forestry industry in the US keeps millions of acres of woodlands from being turned to other economic uses. Clear-cut logging provides less than 38% of the domestic supply of wood products now, and the replanting requirements–combined with common sense–keep the impact quite low. Roughly 10 million acres of forest are harvested a year–out of a total national supply of roughly 749 acres, as of 2000. This is not a frighteningly decreasing number. On the contrary, the low point was in 1920, at 735 million acres, and the acreage has remained largely static, with only slight fluctuations since 1900, while non-clear cut methods are continuing to reduce the impact on the areas that are harvested. Now companies are in it for the long haul, and while they are not keeping forests in a state that is as natural as primary growth forests, they still serve as a great habitat for the vast majority of forest species. In fact, is it because of the modern forestry industry that we have so much woods–forestry needs forests, and the economic demand for tree products makes sure that land isn’t turned to other economic endeavors. The same can’t be said for most other land uses–crops, development, etc. So by driving down demand for forest products, we are threatening the supply, the forests themselves. The housing boom of the early 2000s has kept up the demand so far, but as this evaporates, we will see whether companies begin to sell off their forest acreage because there isn’t as much need for trees. So ironically, another long-term effect of the EPA’s decision to restrict the pulp plants might be a long-term lost of forest.

Environmental organizations cheered when the pulp mills began to close, lauding the EPA. And they vilified the paper companies for importing pulp from countries without high forestry standards. I’m sure it’s the companies that will be blamed again if we lose tens of millions of acres of forest because it’s more lucrative to put them to other uses, too.

Why wouldn’t the EPA behave as it does? After all, it can’t lose. It’s only the taxpayers who will suffer, and the EPA thinks they’re too dumb to place the blame where it belongs.