I used to live on 8 acres at the end of half a mile of private dirt road in the Santa Monica Mountains outside of Los Angeles. It wasn’t particularly isolated; about a dozen families lived along the narrow one-lane road that ran alongside a little creek. Many of us had dogs.

Because it was a private road (named Paradise Lane, of all things) we were able to informally agree to forego the leash laws and allow our dogs to run free. Our three-house property was home to three families and five dogs. There were about a half a dozen other dogs scattered along the lane, and all were free to come and go as they pleased, even though, most of the time, they stayed close to their own homes and humans. These dozen or so dogs self-organized into a set of about four packs with surprisingly rigid boundaries and identities.

Flora drinks from the creek. Courtesy of Nesdon Booth.

All of the dogs we had in these days, as well as the ones we knew from our neighbors, tended to be extremely healthy and long lived, most of them surpassing 20 years of age. In those years, before the drought, they were also able to drink freely from the creek, leading some of our friends, who envied the longevity of our dogs, to claim that the creek was a canine fountain of youth, and call our little valley Dog Heaven, as it probably was.

Ever since I moved away from that valley, I haven’t really been able to abide the thought of the life a dog might have in a house or apartment. After my sister, who lived and then died in one of the houses on our property, was gone, I took one of her dogs, a huge powerful Akita mix, to live with me in a shared house in Berkeley. He was not as lonely as most urban dogs might be, but still, I had to sometimes leave him home alone, where he would become anxious and chew adorable little round holes all over my bedding. Knowing the life he had had on Paradise, despite the great comfort he was to me during my grieving, I could not bear to keep him away from that life, and so returned him to live out his days in joy in dog heaven on Paradise Lane.

I have misgivings about how pets, especially well-trained ones, are essentially enslaved by their human masters. I have had dogs all my life and find enormous comfort in their company. They are so eager and willing to be with us it used to feel as if we were not really violating their sovereignty when we collar, leash, and confine them. My experience living in the Santa Monica mountains with dogs who were able to live so freely and closer to the way humans and dogs may have lived together, without fences or leashes, for the thousands of years that we co-evolved to develop the special bond we share, changed the way I feel about owning a pet. Dogs are, in fact, sovereign beings, with their own needs and desires, and some right to live their lives on their own terms. I do not now have a dog, despite having a little granddaughter whom I would so love to expose to the ecstatic and overwhelming love of a puppy, something that was one of the greatest joys of my childhood. I’m not completely tainted by the knowledge of how divine a dog’s life might be, even as a pet, and may yet rescue a puppy to live here with us in our suburban backyard. But neither am I as cavalier as I once was about dominating the life of a dog.

—Nesdon Booth

After participating in our conversation about improving farmworkers’ health, I had some further thoughts about how we should take bold action to fix the problem.

Farmworkers are essential workers. But more than that, they’re the critical lifeblood of our agricultural economy. Yet, in addition to farmworkers being denied many of the same benefits workers in other industries cherish, the communities where they live often lack the amenities found elsewhere—sidewalks, clean water, schools that are not located near pesticide spraying, green canopies, parks, transportation, and medical care. This is a discrepancy that works against some of the hardest working people in the country.

What it means is that the people who grow the food that you eat live not only as second class non-citizens, but with far worse health—virtually by design.

If you care about the environment or your own health it’s easy to see that this is blasphemy!

The short list of what farmworkers should receive is:
1. Health insurance
2. Paid Sick leave
3. Retirement
4. Higher rates for any incentive for the conversion to Greener living (solar, electric vehicles, charging at home infrastructure, electric lawnmowers, LED lighting, help converting from natural gas to electricity, etc.)
5. Dignified and affordable housing opportunities
6. Access to health and social service resources in their communities.
7. Ongoing job skills development opportunities in green and other rising renewable technology industries
8. Citizenship!

This would result in the economic development of the neighborhoods and cities where the farmworkers reside. Healthy places provide for healthy people and a strong economy! Let’s make sure that all developments are designed for long term resiliency and sustainability. 

A rise in the tide lifts all boats!

—Rey Leon, Mayor of Huron, California

As I sit here in my 12th-floor apartment in Toronto, thousands of miles away from my beloved homeland India, I read Mark Paul’s letter from his garden and my thoughts flew homeward to Dehradun, a beautiful, once-sleepy town situated on the foothills of the Himalayas.

Living in an apartment is new to me. I have a beautiful view of Lake Ontario from this beautiful and bright apartment, but I miss the warmth of my cozy and welcoming cottage at home, with the pretty lace curtains gently blowing in the wind, shooing away the bees and wasps that seek the cool interiors.

This is the middle of April and my garden must be a riot of colors. The roses, dianthus, pansies, petunias, and poppies must be in their brilliant and best attire coaxing the honeybees to visit them. My lychee trees must be loaded with green fruit which will soon turn to red as they ripen and put forth plump and juicy lychees (a fruit that grows in abundance in the Doon Valley). My mango trees must be festooned in blossoms promising a generous crop of the sweetest Dussehri mangoes that are native to the place. I’m not there and I long for these blessings or luxuries.

My mind wanders to the bare Gul Mohr tree where the parrots, a brilliant green in relief to the brown branches, gather—hundreds of them—each evening to chatter and shriek. They are discussing the events of the day. I could almost read what they were saying. And then, as if by some unseen signal, they would all fly away in different directions to their nests and perhaps to their nestlings, to settle in for the night.

The sound of birdsong that woke me every morning is now replaced by the banging and clattering of the garbage trucks in the lot downstairs. I long for the day when I return home again and sit on my veranda, my faithful dogs beside me, a mug of coffee in hand watching the dawn of a newborn day, looking at my vegetable patch and pondering what to get my cook to make for my lunch. The luxury of having garden fresh organically grown vegetables is now a distant dream.

I wonder if my ‘monkey brigade’ still visits my garden. Led by a fierce and aggressive male, this band of monkeys would come over the wall and into my garden every morning looking for fruit to eat. This brings to mind an incident. One day when the ‘visitors’ arrived they set upon a bush of bright red very pungent chili peppers in the garden. They happily surrounded the bush and began plucking the chilies and when they tasted the chilies all hell broke loose. They went on the rampage and uprooted all the chili plants in my garden. I never planted chilies again.

Homesick and lonely, I pray that this deadly virus that has robbed me and the world at large of the few joys of life will be defeated—never to return again.

—Alicia Mayer

With my friend and colleague Chandra Murkerji, I revisited the argument in the essay I wrote for Zócalo on Einstein’s Brain. We can now offer some observations on the perennial controversy concerning the role of Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, in his achievements. Marić was a Serbian physicist and mathematician, and the only woman in Einstein’s class at Zurich’s Polytechnic. She was the second woman to complete the program of study in the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the Polytechnic. 

We now have a new way to evaluate her contributions to Einstein’s thinking. Among the historical reasons for considering her influence are the facts that her handwriting is on some of Einstein’s early manuscripts, and she helped him with his math. But if we consider that from the perspective that “Einstein’s Genius Wasn’t In His Brain; It Was In His Friends” we see that Mileva was one of those in his social network whose shoulders he stood on; in other words, she was very much a part of his social brain. We are not dealing here with the question of whether or not she was his intellectual equal. The classical way of considering the extent of her influence (based on the myth of individualism) was to look for direct, physically visible signs of influence. We suggest the revision of the “Giants” metaphor to read “Standing on the Shoulders of Social Networks” means that Mileva was part of Einstein’s social brain. We don’t have all the data needed to establish the precise content of her contributions but there can be no question that she contributed to his thinking. Women have not been standing behind their men; they have literally been in their heads.

—Sal Restivo and Chandra Murkerji, Professor Emerita, UC San Diego