Last night, United States Poet Laureate emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, poet and author Inez Tan, and Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Ríos visited Zócalo to speak about reading and writing poetry. The conversation, which asked “What can poetry offer us in distressing times?,” was moderated by Carla Hall, Los Angeles Times editorial board member, and aired on Zócalo’s YouTube channel.

The event sparked a lively conversation between the panelists and audience members, who wrote in via a live chat. Just like a poem, a conversation like this one has no real ending, and this morning Inez Tan wrote to share the two poems that she read during the evening to further the dialogue.

To share your favorite poems, please write us a “Letter to Zócalo,” or let us know on social media at @ThePublicSquare. You can also read more from Juan Felipe Herrera, Inez Tan, and Alberto Ríos, and moderator Carla Hall in our virtual Green Room.

Sitting in the Rubble
by Inez Tan

Still, outwardly,
I go to work, I cook my meals,
I do my laundry, as though
my life consisted of acts like these.
Six of my friends lose a child,
three get into car accidents,
two survive shootings,
and only one says,
“It’s not a competition,” meaning
we shouldn’t believe we have to win
as if only the winner gets to grieve
while the rest of us bleed empathy.
Through it all, I think of you.
Every day, I miss you.
Happy are the brokenhearted,
for they do not condemn
what they have come to understand.

A Quiet Night Alone
by Inez Tan

Tonight, let others consume themselves
in a panic of meteor dust. This evening
the owls have no quarrel with the stars.
A quiet night alone is like a secret mission
to restore a hidden weft of heirloom threads.
Endless summer, lights at sea, a cream quilt
when the wind sifts the soft offerings
of the unhurried earth. Linger over
second supper, butter the bread, pour another
glass of wine or cup of wild chamomile.
Forget everything as you read but the pleasure
of reading itself. In the gentle glow of such solitude,
shadows are only shadows, thoughts are only thoughts.
How strong you are to sustain this stillness,
the hours slow, the phones dead and the wolves
a quiet curve on the threshold.

Want more poetry? Also check out Inez Tan’s own “Letter to Zócalo,” which lists 10 of her favorite poems for being present and 10 of her favorite poems for dwelling “elsewhere.”

The post Poetry’s Unique Power to Change Its Readers and Sustain Them Too appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the country’s remarkable run could be stymied if businesses can’t figure out ways to stoke productivity anew, said The Economist political editor Adrian Wooldridge during “How Has America Survived Two Centuries of Capitalism?” a Zócalo/KCRW “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney” event at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles.

Wooldridge, a historian and journalist who has worked for the The Economist in Washington and in Los Angeles, today writes the Bagehot column, which focuses on British life and politics. He’s written or co-written 10 books, including 2018’s Capitalism in America: A History, a collaboration with former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan.

Before an overflow audience, Wooldridge told Olney, host of KCRW’s “To The Point,” that he began with a “thought experiment.” What if the world’s most important people in 1690 had gathered for their own Davos and asked themselves, “Who will dominate the world?”

Back then, in the late 17th century, China would have had a good case in its favor, Wooldridge argued, as might have Turkey, Spain, and even Britain. “But nobody in this imaginary conversation would ever mention the United States. It was an afterthought … it just didn’t matter that much,” he noted.

Today it’s a different story. The U.S.’s 5 percent of the world’s population produces 25 percent of the world’s GDP. America has the most forward-looking industries and the largest concentration of great universities.

“The rise of the U.S. in the last four centuries is the most important story of the last four centuries,” Wooldridge said.

Wooldridge pointed to several factors that made this unexpected economic dominance possible. Crucially, he said, Americans are better than most at “creative destruction,” a term coined by the German economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 to refer to the “relentless process of shifting activity to create more productive environments … going from horse buggies to automobiles, and from iron to steel.”

It’s a difficult process, he said, but Americans have excelled at it. In their book, Wooldridge and Greenspan credit this to the sheer size of the country, which makes it easier for people to move from place to place, abandoning old systems and institutions, for maximum economic gain.

“Britain is a small country, you tend to be conservative about moving people,” Wooldridge told the Zócalo audience. “Americans are careless, they uproot. You get the Rust Belt decaying and the Sun Belt rising.”

America is also a new country, forged at a time when capitalism was on the rise. The Revolutionary War took place the year after the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Wooldridge noted. The U.S. was not shackled by old aristocratic ideas.

America’s constitution, too, made it nimbler, preventing the rise of a “massive and interventionist state” that might get in the way of innovation.

The moderator Olney asked Wooldridge about American entrepreneurs of the late 19th century—the “Robber Barons”—who Wooldridge and Greenspan call the “Titans”.

Wooldridge said that American entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford were key drivers of American success, because they had “imperialism of the soul”—a desire to create boundless business empires.

Their ascendance a century ago—and our era’s rise of Silicon Valley leaders like Steve Jobs and even Mark Zuckerberg—is uniquely American, he argued. “If you’re French you want to sit in a café. If you’re British you want land and horses. If you’re German you want to be a scholar. If you’re American, you want to be an entrepreneur.”

These Titans, of both the industrial and information ages, amassed power by forming huge corporations, which provided a competitive advantage for the U.S., Wooldridge said. There were times when the Titans’ projects caused pain for workers—driving smaller competitors out of business, eliminating jobs and depressing wages—but Americans have usually bounced back.

Whether they’ll be able to do so again may be another story, Wooldridge added. A big question is whether the U.S. can restore productivity growth that it has lost, especially in the decade since the Financial Crisis of 2008.

When Olney suggested that Wooldridge was exploring how to “Make America Great Again,” the audience laughed. But Wooldridge agreed, noting that economic “stagnation is what lies behind a lot of America’s problems,” including weak wage growth, slower company creation, and economic inactivity.

“Is America past its peak?” he asked rhetorically, and suggested that the answer is no: that it was bad economic policies, rather than bad fundamentals, that were holding back growth. “We’re in an iron cage of our own making—all we need to do is turn the key and we get out of it.”

Audience members wanted to know how better antitrust laws might promote innovation (Wooldridge said research into the matter had been launched by the Obama White House but had since been stopped), and what slavery had to do American capitalism’s triumph. His answer: plenty. Slavery is “obviously an appalling stain on America,” Wooldridge said, that created “a lot of money for a lot of people.”

The conversation shifted briefly to Europe. Olney asked: “What about Brexit? What the hell is going on?”

“I have no idea,” Wooldridge said, suggesting that if the separation from the European Union was again presented to British voters in a referendum, “it will tear the country apart. There will be riots in the street. It would be appalling for democracy.”

“But I’m in favor of it,” he wryly noted, as the least terrible option.

Asked by an audience member about France’s yellow vest protesters, Wooldridge criticized President Emmanuel Macron’s approach to worker protests as “insensitive”—and saw a lesson that applies in the U.S. and the U.K. as well.

“I think one of the big dynamics we have in the world right now is a sort of wall—a metaphorical wall—between the skilled elite and everyone else. It creates a lot of tension. We need the cognitive elite to be less arrogant and supercilious.”

And if the middle class is “hollowed out” by technology’s newest wave of innovation, he said, things could get a whole lot worse. But higher corporate taxes won’t fix that. “I don’t think it addresses the problem of productivity,” he said. “There are other things we need to do.”

The post America Takes a Capitalist Licking and Keeps on Ticking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the same scholars warned that the court’s conservative majority, reinforced by the recent appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, also could grant greater power to corporations and curtail affirmative action, reproductive rights, and protections for immigrants and LGBT people.

The scholars—law professors with expertise in areas from guns to government regulation to education—were addressing the central question of the event, “How Will the New Supreme Court Change America?” at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles. But they offered their predictions with caution and caveats, with one panelist, UCLA Law School’s Adam Winkler, noting that law professors have poor records of prognostication.

The moderator, The Wall Street Journal Supreme Court correspondent Jess Bravin, noted in his opening that the court is unique in that “it’s only answerable to itself.” And so despite the justices’ general respect for precedent, the court can break new ground. Bravin pressed the panelists on where they think that ground might lie.

Beth Colgan, a UCLA School of Law professor who teaches and researches criminal procedure and juvenile justice, pointed to the new questions technology is raising about privacy. Recent cases, including one that limited law enforcement’s use of cell phone data, and some words from the relatively new Justice Neil Gorsuch, suggest that the court is skeptical of the power that technology gives the police to gather information on our lives.

She said future cases could look at automatic license plate readers used by police and examine surveillance tactics in Baltimore, where planes fly over the city to record and store everything taking place, so that police can use it later. “I always tell my students that I fear our future robot overlords, but I think the court does too,” she said.

Winkler of UCLA School of Law, a specialist in constitutional law who has written about gun rights and corporate rights, said the newer justices—Gorsuch and Kavanaugh—seem likely to curtail the ability of administrative agencies in the government to regulate corporations. He also asked whether the logic of a recent decision, in Janus v. AFSCME, which prohibited public employee unions from collecting fees from non-union employees they represent, might be applied to challenge union prerogatives in private employment.

“If that’s the case, it’s hard to see how unions can survive even in the private workplace,” he said.

When Bravin pressed for other areas where the court could make big shifts, Winkler cited reproductive rights, which he argued have already been reduced by state laws that have forced the closing of clinics that provided abortions.

“The only question is whether the court will overturn Roe v. Wade,” Winkler said. “And I think undoubtedly that it will,” he added, to gasps from some audience members.

Justin Driver, a University of Chicago Law School professor who clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, said he too saw change coming in reproductive rights. He noted that some justices seemed to be avoiding the mention of important abortions rights precedents in their decisions, a sign that they may be preparing to overturn those precedents.

Driver, author of the new book The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind, also predicted that race-conscious college admissions and other forms of affirmative action “may be on their way out.” And he expressed concern that if states pass laws taking away public benefits from undocumented immigrants—including the right to attend public school—the current court might back the states.

Driver pointedly challenged the conventional wisdom that the U.S. Supreme Court tends to reflect the views of American society at large. He said that far more important than public opinion are the views of particular people on the Supreme Court. He suggested that if same-sex couples had not fought for marriage rights while a sympathetic Justice Anthony Kennedy was on the court—and instead waited for the current court—those rights might have not been vindicated by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision in 2015.

Indeed, Driver and Winkler both expressed concern that the current court’s inclination to protect the religious rights of businesses to refuse to serve LGBT customers—as in a recent case in which the court sided with a Colorado cake shop that wouldn’t bake a wedding cake for a gay couple—might portend more decisions unfavorable to gay rights. Driver said that, while Republican-appointed justices of previous generations sometimes drifted left while on the court, that seems less likely to happen with the younger GOP-appointed justices, who all had worked in the executive branch under Republican presidents.

Colgan, though, pointed out that, while the U.S. Supreme Court “sets a floor” for the law, state supreme courts and state legislatures have the ability to push forward into new legal frontiers. She expected states might be willing to lead in reform in the criminal justice arena that would go beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court could do. “Oftentimes, we put the Supreme Court on a pedestal, but it’s not the only place where we get to change the law,” she said.

During the question-and-answer session, one audience member said she found the discussion “incredibly depressing” and asked, when it comes to the Supreme Court, “what do we have to look forward to?”

Driver answered that he saw potential for progress if liberals and libertarians find common ground in advancing the law in creative ways. He thought they could succeed, for instance, in eliminating corporal punishment in schools at last. Colgan said she thought the court might rule in ways that would protect Americans against excessive fines and financial penalties—as when police seize the cars of defendants accused of low-level drug dealing.

Bravin, the moderator and veteran Supreme Court reporter, closed by urging people to go to the Supreme Court web site and listen to audio of the oral arguments. He said that while Americans are not terribly impressed by the oratory and thinking they see in Congress, Supreme Court justices do handle difficult questions thoughtfully and seriously.

“I’ve found that almost anyone who actually comes to watch a Supreme Court argument walks away having their expectations exceeded,” said Bravin, adding that people may be impressed even when they “listen to the justices that you expect to disagree with.”

The post The Supreme Court Gets Ready to Remake America, But How? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But how, then, does one explain the Bogles, a Texas-Tennessee clan that has been running afoul of the law across multiple generations going back to the Civil War? This one single family, Butterfield discovered, had been responsible for stealing cars and brewing moonshine, burglaries and bombings, manslaughters and murders. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles all had taken part in the wayward family business.

And Butterfield’s research would reveal that the Bogles weren’t a statistical exception. Multiple studies have shown that only about 5 percent of all families account for fully half of all crime in the United States, and 10 percent account for two out of every three crimes committed here. Could genetics be a determining factor in why people break the law?

That troubling, counter-intuitive question runs through Butterfield’s new book, In My Father’s House: A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family. It also underscored the Zócalo/KCRW “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney” event, titled “Do Americans Misunderstand the Roots of Crime?” at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.

In the discussion, moderated by Olney, the venerable host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” Butterfield explained how he’d stumbled onto a family whose members have spent much of their lives shuttling in and out of prisons.

The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the waning years of the U.S.-Indochina war before taking up crime reporting, already had written a highly praised book about an African American family that fell into crime, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (1995).

Butterfield had been searching for a white crime family to profile when a friend in Oregon put him in touch with the Bogles, 60 of whose members have served prison time. The patriarch, Rooster Bogle, had spread what his kinfolk called “the family curse” to his own nine offspring and two wives. He would take his kids out with him on crime sprees, from a young age. Occasionally, he would point out the local penitentiary and tell his progeny to take a good look because that’s where they, too, were going to end up later in life.

Being born a Bogle was like being served a guilty verdict in the maternity ward, being handed down a fate through your bloodlines. As one of Rooster’s sons told Butterfield, “What you’re raised with you grow to become. There’s no escape.”

Sensing the packed audience’s growing unease and astonishment at this information, Olney commented, “If you think this sounds like a series from Netflix or HBO, you’re absolutely right.”

Indeed, though the Bogles may have been uneducated and poor, their lore is rich with improbable stories and details that a novelist might shun because they strain credibility. The family forebears got their start brewing up moonshine in a Southern hamlet, then later tried to gain a federal government pension for a relative who claimed to have been a captain in the Union Army. (He wasn’t.)

From what might euphemistically be called white-collar crimes, the family graduated to more serious fare. Rooster and his siblings didn’t go to school, but they did get to meet Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, while their parents kept food on the table by working in a traveling carnival and hawking moonshine on the side.

When Rooster turned 16 his entire family took part in a burglary at a local grocery store that netted about $20,000. Although his mother had masterminded the heist, Rooster pleaded guilty when the police came calling, sparing his mother and launching his own long career as a cellblock resident.

Asked by Olney how he’d managed to get these confessional stories, Butterfield replied that some family members had been reluctant at first, but eventually cooperated because they’d actually read Butterfield’s earlier book, and somehow reckoned that he might turn the Bogle family into celebrities if he wrote about them.

Butterfield was able to validate much of what the Bogles told him through police and court reports. He also encountered a judge in Salem, Oregon who over time had had four generations of Bogles appear before his bench. “It was a family value being passed down,” Butterfield said. “When we talk about family values being passed down, we usually mean good family values, but they can be rotten family values, too.”

The same judge told Butterfield that he’d dealt with four other families that spanned four generations of criminals. From that experience, the judge had concluded that simply locking people up doesn’t work; criminal family members needed to be separated, the judge reasoned.

But asserting that crime may be caused, even partially, by genetics, can be a controversial and, some experts would argue, a racist and discriminatory claim. Such genetically based arguments have lost favor over the decades because of their association with 19th-century junk science, and with the Nazis’ criminal experiments in the concentration camps. Civil rights and African American organizations also have strongly challenged and criticized the idea that genetics—rather than institutionalized racism and social inequality—could account for the disproportionate number of incarcerated men of color, said Butterfield, who added pointedly that white Americans still commit the majority of crimes. “People tend to forget that,” he said.

And yet the grim destiny of the Bogle family may indicate that criminal behavior can get programmed into certain groups of people. Although one Bogle female acquired religion and managed to shake free of her home, Butterfield said, “It’s not easy making it out of there. She made it out, but her younger sister didn’t.”

So what, Olney asked, is the way to solve this?

Butterfield said that we need better ways to get information about peoples’ family histories of incarceration—not in order to stigmatize the family, but so as to get them help. In the same way that doctors ask patients about their families’ medical histories of diabetes and high blood pressure, we should be asking people who commit crimes about their family’s criminal records.

One outcome of gathering such useful information is that a judge then would be able to give the family of a troubled kid the option of having what’s called a “multi-systemic therapy” team of therapists, social workers, and other medical professionals who actually move into the family home. Living at close quarters allows the team to closely observe and monitor the family, analyze how it works, and turn its younger members toward better role models. Such teams of professionals have treated thousands of families and are showing “pretty good results,” Butterfield said. But these studies still are in their infancy, he added.

Another approach is to move criminals away from the communities where their bad behavior took root. Butterfield said the power of moving was observed in the case of Louisiana state prisoners from New Orleans who relocated to Texas after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the Crescent City in 2005. Setting down roots in a new state broke the criminals’ social networks, giving them a better shot at starting over fresh.

This is important because people who spend a lot of time in jails and prisons become institutionalized to living there. Butterfield said he has seen fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, who share the same prison cell, an arrangement that reinforces anti-social behaviors and leaves people more dependent on their blood relatives and less able to cope when they’re released back into society.

Fielding questions from the audience, Butterfield was asked if he knew of any studies of crime rates in Australia, some of whose early immigrant population comprised inmates banished by the British to the Empire’s farthest reaches. Given that background, one might expect Oz to have high crime rates, the questioner said. Butterfield replied that he couldn’t speak specifically to Australia’s case, but said that the United States has had very high violent crime rates since the 18th century, especially homicides.

Another audience member asked how the relatively small budgets for rehabilitation contribute to recidivism among criminals, including criminal families. Butterfield agreed that prisons spend most of their funds on housing and guards, and suggested that more money could be better spent on programs like court-ordered multi-systemic family therapy.

Ultimately, nature and nurture work together and complement each other, Butterfield said, assigning some people normal lives, and others lives of violence, punishment, and isolation. “I don’t think you can separate the two,” he said.

The post Can Criminals Be Genetically Determined? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I’m going to start out by saying a resounding ‘no,’” Haile said, opening the discussion at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in Exposition Park. “We are all on occupied indigenous lands.”

And yet ethnicity and economics, power and privilege, do influence the way that we think about the natural world, and how that world is experienced and interpreted by different people. The fences and toll booths that set the boundaries of our national parks, like the hiking trails that wind through the Hollywood Hills, or the number of campsites at Joshua Tree, are the products of policies and political struggles that may end up favoring one group and excluding another.

At the museum, a panel of three experts joined Haile in unpacking these issues before a packed and appreciative audience. They were Myrian Solis Coronel, an REI marketing executive; Myron Floyd, a North Carolina State University environmental sociologist; and José González, founder of Latino Outdoors. Their lively exchange unfolded in a long, wood-paneled gallery lined with elaborately painted habitat dioramas displaying mounted North American mammals.

The panelists quickly agreed that new narratives are needed for how we experience nature today, along with fresh analytical tools that can help us find (or rediscover) the neglected voices and overlooked presence in nature of black, Latino, LGBTQ people, and those with different physical abilities.

One way to look at nature, Floyd pointed out, is as a social construction that can be dominated by one or another ethnic or social group. “Nature has been solely the territory of white America,” Floyd said. “But we have more diverse users of our public spaces who are defining it in their own terms.” Often, the burden for getting more people of different backgrounds to use recreational areas has been placed on those people themselves, Floyd said, but some of the burden of recruiting users could be shifted to federal, state, and local agencies in charge of public sites. “This is a central issue that, if we don’t deal with it, it will not be good for our country and not be good for our environment,” he said.

González picked up on that theme, noting that as the United States continues to evolve demographically, the users of America’s parks and outdoor areas will change, and the physical infrastructure around those areas will change, too.

“You’ll hear people say that nature embraces and treats everybody the same,” González observed. But when humans interact with nature, that truism can fall apart. Some people, seeking to get away from the trauma and stress of urban life by going camping or fishing, may wind up triggering even more stress, González said. That could be especially true for a person who, for example, has an unpleasant encounter with a park ranger that echoes a previous brush with a police officer back home. “You have to recognize that people are coming to the same experience [of nature] from a different background, a different lived experience,” González said.

Most Americans’ perceptions of nature, and who belongs in it (or doesn’t), are heavily influenced by advertising and popular culture representations. Solis Coronel said that REI has invested heavily in research about how white and non-white millennials are experiencing nature, and in reflecting diversity and inclusiveness in the company’s policies, content, and marketing campaigns.

Solis Coronel, who also serves on the California State Park and Recreation Commission, talked about new approaches, like recruiting state-park ranger teams that reflect California’s ethnic makeup. One way to do this is, she said, is simply by making the application process shorter and easier, so that job-hungry applicants can find out more quickly whether they’re even being considered for employment. REI also doesn’t hire professional models to appear in its advertisements; the company uses real people who convey the diversity of its customers.

“It’s about having a balance and being relevant and being truly reflective of your members, and our members continue to change,” Solis Coronel said.

Haile pointed out that nature is a political space, not a pristine realm beyond human affairs. Different people want different things from nature, but there are some common desires that span our divisions.

Nature areas and historic sites are places where people can “seek out their heritage, seek out their common history,” Floyd observed, while also enjoying the outdoors at the same time. His own research has shown that non-whites were camping in national parks at the turn of the previous century, Floyd said, and thus “do have a part in this history, as recreationists—not as laborers, not as servants.”

With all due respect to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, communing with nature needn’t entail escaping into a solitary wilderness for weeks or months at a stretch. Haile said that we need to better frame the range of activities that can be seen as outdoor recreation. We tend to construe nature as something harsh and grueling: “It’s very rarely said, ‘I’m going to grill in the park with my family,’ or ‘I’m going to go fish in a river,’” Haile said. “When I tell people in my social circle that I’m going hiking, they think I’m going to climb Kilimanjaro!”

What will the future hold for the interaction of nature and humans? Global warming is unbalancing that entire equation, Haile pointed out, and the time to correct it is slipping away fast. Humanity is tending to disconnect from nature, said Solis Coronel, as we hunker down in our cars and barricade ourselves in artificial environments.

“If we don’t have a connection to nature, that means we won’t have an appreciation of nature,” she lamented. Indeed, González added, there’s a term to describe our contemporary affliction: “nature deficit disorder.”

But what sustains nature is also what may save humanity, he suggested: diversity.

“We value diversity in the natural world,” González said. “Few people say, ‘That’s a beautiful mono-cultural forest.’ Unless they want to cut it down.”

The post Nature Needs Greater Diversity—In Its Human Visitors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Author and journalist Lisa Margonelli made her best case for the lowly and unsightly, yet ubiquitous and highly successful arthropods at a Zócalo discussion titled “What Can Termites Teach Us About the Future of Technology?”

Margonelli, deputy editor at Zócalo Public Square, is an unabashed fan of what she affectionately calls “Underbug”—which also happens to be the title of her just-published book, subtitled “An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology.” The event, at the RedZone at Gensler in downtown Los Angeles, drew an enthusiastic and inquisitive crowd.

Moderator Warren Olney, host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” had no trouble coaxing Margonelli to extol the virtues of her chosen research subjects. Where some people might see a destructive pest that’s slowly devouring their craftsman bungalow, Margonelli sees an industrious and disciplined six-legged worker operating in a tightly controlled caste system, “the poster bug for the twenty-first century—a little guide to really big ideas,” as she writes in her book.

Still, Margonelli acknowledged at the outset that termites—which evolved from cockroaches, but are stunted and blind to boot—aren’t generally thought of as endearing. “Termites are cute if you get right up into them, but the popular conception of them is not cute,” she said, adding that half of all scientific papers about termites are about annihilating them. “If you see a picture of a termite it’s on the side of an exterminator’s van, and if you see a picture of an ant they’re adorable and it’s from Pixar.”

Indeed, Margonelli said, termites “are just kind of little and weird.” For one thing, only the king and queen of a nest evolve into sexually reproductive adults; the great mass of termites remain stuck in a kind of perpetual pre-adolescence. Because of their arrested development, they’re oddly translucent: their exoskeletons never harden and darken. Yet they possess some remarkable attributes: pressure-packed mandibles, sophisticated antennae, and guts filled with some 500 different microbes that allow them to eat wood, chip apart cellulose, and release the sugars inside it.

Margonelli said that her fixation with termites—there are at least 3,000 named kinds—stemmed from an incident a few years back in a rented house in Berkeley, where one night she realized that termites had gnawed through a good chunk of her ceiling, and the whole thing might collapse on her.

“These termites risked your life. Were you able to forgive them?” Olney asked.

“The weird thing is I was just totally fascinated,” Margonelli replied. “I wasn’t a homeowner, I had a landlord who had to pay for it.” From that point on, it was “almost like the termites have sort of gotten in my head.” They’ve also gotten into her mouth, more or less; she has eaten a few (as many people do in various parts of the world), and shared with her audience their nutty, crunchy flavor profile.

Margonelli’s quest eventually consumed eight years of her life and took her across multiple continents (Antarctica is virtually the only land mass where the critters don’t thrive). During her odyssey, she sought out not only termites, but also scientists who study them. Among these are roboticists, who plumb how a simple-minded insect is able to carry out sophisticated feats of engineering (such as 17-foot-tall “communes” that resemble miniature Burj Khalifa’s); and microbial biologists, who spend their days scouring termite guts to better understand how wood and grass might be converted into cheap gasoline substitutes.

Termites, it turns out, have brains, but we don’t really know how complex they are, Margonelli said. Their sense of who they are appears to fluctuate, depending on the size of the group. But we haven’t yet fathomed the feedback mechanisms that enable thousands of individual termites to function as a single orchestrated unit. And although they appear to follow rules, we haven’t comprehended what those rules are, the author continued.

Not surprisingly, humans are constantly making anthropomorphic analogies with termite colonies. Sometimes they’ve been viewed as utopian models of collective action. Conversely, they’ve been seen as factories teeming with mindless drudges.

“Humans really look at insects as little humans in bug suits,” Margonelli observed.

Although much of the conversation revolved around biology, Margonelli also took a number of thoughtful swipes at troubling ethical questions about how Big Science, corporations, and the military are hoping to make use of the know-how we might gain from studying termites, and not always for benevolent ends.

Already, termites have furnished useful clues for furthering the development of autonomous military drones, Margonelli suggested. Scientists dream of being able to send termite-inspired robots into a crippled nuclear power plant to build walls that would seal off radioactive wastes—without humans having to tell the robots exactly how to build such a wall. Futurists and fantasists speculate about a day when a termite-derived technology, if not termites themselves, could be blasted off to Mars to gulp down Martian soil, mix it with saliva (or something similar), and start disgorging sandbag-like structures.

More alarmingly, Margonelli cited ongoing military research into the development of sophisticated robots that could fly or autonomously build. Perhaps someday swarms of tiny, termite-imitative robots will be dropped from military planes to scope out swaths of Yemen or Afghanistan and bring back reports. Or even be outfitted as tiny assassin drones that would land on an enemy’s head and deliver a death blow.

More likely in the short term, though, is that this type of technology will be used for cleaning swimming pool filters, Margonelli said.

Some audience members reiterated these queasy philosophical musings during the question-and-answer period. One asked: How close are we to developing these miniature killer drones? “The big drone stuff is already happening,” Margonelli said, pointing out that the number of Predator drones patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border has more than tripled in the last few years.

Another audience member, from Silver Lake, asked how much termites fight and how territorial they are. Margonelli replied that even within the same species of termite, each nest creates a signature hydrocarbon that gives its residents a particular smell, and designates them as a possible foe. But Margonelli said her research hadn’t focused specifically on that question; she joked she might turn to it in her “next 10 years” of investigations.

Above all, what studying termites gives us is “an evolving sense of how complexity is built in nature,” Margonelli said. Everybody is trying to understand how you can have simple instructions and a complex whole; how you can have small actions that are taken locally, but are replicated on a global scale. “They reveal how little we understand about this changing world and how it really works underneath.”

For her own part, Margonelli seems committed to keep peering deeply into obscure and misunderstood corners, where the small is no less complex or sublime than the great. She now possesses a terrarium with termites, given to her by an acquaintance. Occasionally she even sees termites in her dreams.

“I don’t know how the world works,” she said. “I should pay more attention.”

The post Why Termites Are Giving Humans a Lot to Chew On appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But did either of these women, or a handful of other formidable females whose exploits were recorded by history, ever actually rule the world? That topic took center-stage before an overflow audience at a Zócalo/Getty panel discussion that roamed from pharaonic Egypt to the court of Queen Elizabeth I to the White House.

Moderated by Bettany Hughes, a historian and documentary filmmaker, the conversation drew on the expertise of UCLA archaeologist Kara Cooney, author of The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, and University of Manchester Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, author of Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt.

After confessing to her “enormous girl crush” on Cooney and Tyldesley for their exemplary scholarship, Hughes drove right into what she ironically called the “completely uncomplicated and uncontroversial question” of whether women, in fact, ever have ruled the world.

For feminists, the answer wasn’t encouraging.

“I don’t know,” Tyldesley replied. “It was always, I think, unusual for a woman to take a position of power.”

Cooney concurred definitively, “the answer is no.”

But even if there is “no mythical matriarchy to which we can return,” as one panelist put it, history offers some instructive examples of women who were able to take and hold power through a combination of brilliance, bravery, guile, beauty, gender-bending self-reinvention, and—perhaps most importantly—the ability to control and manipulate their own image.

In ancient times, as now, women seeking to rule had to contend with the constraints imposed by existing cultural traditions, political structures, patriarchal hierarchies, and male-driven religions. While earth-mother goddesses and fertility deities abounded in the ancient world, aspiring women rulers had to push back against spiritual systems dominated by male gods and male priestly castes. That may have been even truer under the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam than it was in pagan cultures. “Monotheism usually doesn’t do anybody any favors, particularly women,” Cooney observed.

Tyldesley cautioned that historians of the ancient world, like herself, must be very careful about making assumptions that often have to be based on fragmentary evidence and scraps of records.

But one powerful woman who history definitely shows to have been in charge was Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. This remarkable ruler helped establish trade networks and was a prolific builder of temples and other public works. An inscription on her tomb described her as “Mistress of Two Lands,” the type of homage that Egypt’s mightiest male potentates typically showered on themselves.

“In a way, it speaks to how the Egyptian culture allowed a female to take all those claims as her own and feminize them,” Cooney said.

Indeed, Tyldesley chimed in, the concept of “king” in ancient Egypt wasn’t necessarily gender-linked; it was quite possible for a woman to take on that role, although usually the title was bestowed on males. Over the course of her career and reign (circa 1478–1458 B.C.), Hatshepsut controlled her image in strategic ways that underscored the changing nature of her power.

To wit, early on, she was represented in a nubile, eroticized, traditionally feminine style. But as her reign progressed, she adopted a more masculine public persona and custom of dress. In one of her best-known images, a statue in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she registers as an almost androgynous being; in other representations, she’s buff and muscled like a man.

Hatshepsut’s fluid style of self-representation was matched by her flexible style of power-wielding, Tyldesley suggested. Instead of subjugating conquered peoples to try to make them part of the Egyptian empire, she preferred to engage them through trade.

“I think if you’re a woman in the ancient world, Egypt is the place to be,” Tyldesley concluded.

Cooney agreed that it may have been easier for a woman to take power in Egypt, “an authoritarian, tightly controlled society” ruled by dynasty, as opposed to democratic Greece or republican Rome. Cooney drew a parallel to Hillary Clinton, speculating about whether we associate the former Secretary of State and one-time First Lady with dynastic power, rather than judging her on the basis of her own merits.

Taking up the point, Tyldesley noted that there are examples of ancient queens who temporarily filled in as rulers for husbands who had died or were away in battle. These women often ruled on behalf of their infant sons until their offspring were old enough to assume the throne, at which point their mothers stepped back from power.

Do women rule differently from men? It’s a question that haunts Cooney, who said that, although she wavers on an answer, “the older I get, the more I read, the more I live in Trump’s America, [I believe] that women do rule differently.”

Both today and throughout the centuries, powerful women often have aroused a deep ambivalence. Hughes noted that while a goddess like Venus is generally depicted as a creature of pure, unadulterated beauty and sensuality—fairly harmless, apart from her role in starting the Trojan War—some of Venus’s counterparts, like Isis, are represented in more complex ways. They’re fighters as well as lovers, “bringers of death as well as bringers of life.”

What’s more, Cooney said, there’s “a great disconnect” between the way that some societies worshipped man-eating, ferocious goddesses while remaining deeply sexist and segregated. “That fierceness, that PMS-ing b!$©h” quality is something that certain societies had to harness and tame, and put to use in more socially acceptable ways, like protecting the king.

Perhaps few rulers embody the contradictory demands placed on women more than Nefertiti, who appears to have followed a singular trajectory from queen to co-ruler to solo ruler. In the world’s imagination, she’s the glamorous woman immortalized in a famous bust that sits in a Berlin museum. But according to Tyldesley, “We don’t even know if she was beautiful. We have this one bust and from that, this whole mythology has developed.”

Similarly, much of what we think we know about Cleopatra—from her putative powers of seduction to the manner of her suicide—comes from the writings of Roman authors, filtered through the plays of Shakespeare. Another powerful woman whose name gets short shrift and whose remarkable deeds have been obscured by time is the 6th-century empress Theodora, a humble exotic dancer who became a powerful and revered ruler-reformer—a sort of Byzantine Eva Perón.

Although the evening was devoted to examining female rulers of the pre-Christian world, one audience member during the question period raised the example of Queen Elizabeth I. The panelists agreed that she should be on the list of the world’s 10 most powerful female rulers of all time. Another audience member proposed Margaret Thatcher, the long-serving British prime minister known as the “Iron Lady” for her take-no-prisoners economic policies and steely response to Argentina’s attempted takeover of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1982.

Hughes replied that although Thatcher still divides Britain as deeply as Marmite, “she definitely taught me that women can be in power.”

“Whether you like her policies or not,” Tyldesley said that Mrs. T ensured that, “girls don’t grow up in England thinking, ‘I can’t be the prime minister.’”

But, in the end, it may not be possible to assess how much women like Thatcher, Clinton, and Angela Merkel owe to their ancient female political forebears.

“I think we’re missing a whole host of powerful women,” Tyldesley said, “simply because there wasn’t someone to write down what they do.”

The post Women Rocked the Ancient World—But Ruling It Was Harder appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now the 14th Amendment is again embroiled in a bitter debate, in a divided nation, over who can be a legal U.S. citizen—and who can be arrested, locked up in a cage in a Texas shopping mall, or deported. A Zócalo/Daniel K. Inouye Institute event took up the tortuous history of the 14th Amendment’s passage, and also pondered the question, “How Can Americans Defend the 14th Amendment When the Government Won’t?”

The discussion, at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles, brought together Johns Hopkins University historian Martha S. Jones, constitutional law scholar Garrett Epps, National Immigration Forum executive director Ali Noorani, and Mitchell Maki, President and CEO of the Go for Broke National Education Center.

Before their exchange got underway, the evening’s theme was underscored by an emotionally resonant reading by Irene Hirano Inouye, former president and founding chief executive officer of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. She recited three excerpts from her late husband U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye’s keynote address to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in which Sen. Inouye stressed the rights of all Americans, the duties of citizenship, and the importance of community—at a moment when national leaders were being assassinated, the Vietnam War was splitting the country apart, and cops were clubbing protestors outside the convention hall.

Then moderator Madeleine Brand, host of radio station KCRW’s “Press Play,” opened the conversation by asking the panelists about the historical context in which the amendment came about, and whether its guarantee of “birthright citizenship” had effectively settled the question of whether former slaves were to be treated as U.S. citizens. Indeed, the 13th Amendment had abolished slavery, but after the Civil War the citizenship status of former slaves still was an “open question,” as Jones, the historian, pointed out.

The 14th Amendment arose during the turmoil of Reconstruction, in the face of furious opposition from the Southern former states of the defeated Confederacy, said Epps, who also covers the Supreme Court for The Atlantic. Among its most virulent opponents was President Andrew Johnson, a Southerner who’d succeeded the murdered Abraham Lincoln. How close did the amendment come to not passing?, Brand asked. “The answer is, incredibly close,” replied Epps who, as a native of Richmond, Virginia, was raised with an awareness that many Southerners still hadn’t accepted the amendment, decades later. “I grew up in a place and time when my teachers told me the 14th Amendment had never been validly adopted.”

The struggle to get it passed, Epps added, “is one of the most suspenseful stories in American history” and has many parallels with today’s heated Washington polemics over immigration policy, national security, and policing of the border. Epps said there also are several commonalities between Andrew Johnson—whom he described as a racist and, euphemistically, an “eccentric”—and the current commander in chief.

But President Johnson and his white-supremacist Southern supporters ultimately lost the battle, and the 14th Amendment in subsequent rulings “remodeled” the Constitution, Epps said. In the same way that the bulk of Western philosophy is simply a footnote to Plato, Epps said, “most of our constitutional law in the 20th century was footnotes to the 14th Amendment.”

Fast-forwarding to the present, Brand asked how the amendment applies to the current legal mayhem at the southern border. “What we’re seeing now is a de-humanization of immigrants,” said Noorani, of the National Immigration Forum. “There’s almost … gradations of access to due process, depending on who you are, where you were born, and what your immigration status is.”

Historical parallels and past U.S. mistakes loomed large in the discussion, none larger than the example of Fred Korematsu, the American civil rights activist who helped lead the outcry against the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, and later became a fugitive himself.

During that ignoble chapter of national history, “Due process went out the window, equal protection under the law went out the window,” said panelist Maki of Go For Broke. The Supreme Court upheld the internment policy, and showed considerable deference to President Franklin D. Roosevelt—much as the current high court has deferred to President Trump on his bitterly controversial travel ban, the panelists observed.

Maki noted that this August 10 will mark the 30th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which, among other provisions, earmarked thousands of dollars in individual payments to Japanese-American survivors of the internment camps.

Today, as in the 1940s, a harsh crackdown on immigration has been justified by claims that U.S. security is at risk. Today, as then, a presidential administration has treated some immigrants differently from other Americans by making claims that rested on dubious evidence, or that were outright contradicted by the available evidence, the panelists said.

For example, Noorani pointed out that, in February 2017 remarks, President Trump suggested that immigrants were more likely than other Americans to be terrorists. A recent letter issued by Trump’s own Justice Department declared there was no evidence that this is true. “It’s that same twisted logic that exists today that existed 75 years ago,” Maki said.

Picking up the theme, Jones said that, in fact, “There hasn’t been a time in America when citizenship and the rights of citizenship hasn’t been a debate.”

Epps agreed. “This is a cyclical debate that goes on and on, there are no new tropes,” he said. “We just keep having to fight the same battles over and over.”

During the question-and-answer period, an audience member from Redondo Beach asked whether any laws are being broken at the border, given there’ve been increasing reports of immigrants, including children, suffering emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Noorani replied that these questions still are under legal review and are the subjects of active debate. But even if technically no laws are being broken, as the administration asserts, “They are certainly interpreting laws in a very awful way,” Noorani said.

Another audience member asked how Americans can try to make sense of these complex interpretive questions of constitutional law—particularly given the Trump administration’s attacks on the media and attempts to treat any negative coverage of its immigration policy as “fake news.”

“We’re in a moment where we have to educate ourselves,” Jones replied. “We have to ferret out those sources that we trust.”

More broadly, the panelists concurred, supporters of the 14th Amendment’s enduring legacy must find stories that illustrate its power and importance. Of course it’s necessary to win legal arguments, Noorani said, but it’s equally necessary to tell a compelling national story about why equal rights and protection for all Americans matters, and why they must be defended.

“I think our bigger challenge,” Noorani said, “is to take these bedrock principles of our nation and help the American public to understand why they are bedrock principles.”

The post Why America Keeps Battling to Live Up to the 14th Amendment appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those timely, troubling questions, among many others, confronted panelists Tuesday evening at a Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event titled, “What Are the Social Consequences of Racist Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric?” The discussion took place as verbal attacks on Mexican immigrants and Muslims by President Trump and nativist pundits have escalated relentlessly. Meanwhile, media, academic, and law enforcement reports reveal sharp rises in racist verbal attacks against immigrants from the United States to Italy, and from Britain to Burma.

In a wide-ranging conversation before an overflow audience at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo, UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dean Hansell, and the UCLA School of Medicine’s David Hayes-Bautista examined a wide variety of negative consequences, from stressed-out immigrant children, to nasty divorce/child custody cases, the construction of detention camps, and ramped-up threats—as well as acts—of violence.

Responding to an opening question about past anti-immigrant episodes from moderator Simon Romero, a national correspondent for The New York Times, Hayes-Bautista, who directs the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA School of Medicine, noted that anti-immigrant rhetoric and discrimination has been a recurring theme of U.S. history.

Hayes-Bautista explained that, when much of the present-day Southwestern United States was part of Mexico in the early 1800s, slavery was abolished, non-whites were allowed to hold citizenship, and married women had some property rights. Time after time, Hayes-Bautista indicated, the extension of immigrant rights has gone hand-in-glove with the expansion of other forms of individual freedom. When the Southwest territories were absorbed into the growing United States, they virtually overnight enshrined laws enforcing race-based discrimination. For example, the defenders of the Alamo, popularly portrayed as heroic freedom fighters, were actually mainly Southern whites bent on extending slavery into Texas.

But, every 20 years or so, there has been a backlash against immigrant rights, including the mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, and the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, which prohibited undocumented immigrants in California from using non-emergency health care, public education and other social services.

“It’s really nothing new, it’s just U.S. tradition,” Hayes-Bautista said.

Turning the discussion toward a more immediate example, Romero asked Greenfield, the UCLA psychologist, what effect xenophobic rhetoric is having on children and young people. Greenfield responded by citing a research study that tracked attitudes among a range of sociological groups before Trump’s election in 2016, and in the months following his inauguration.

The results were striking. One subject feared that more Americans would feel they had a greenlight to echo racist statements. A gay respondent expressed anxiety that it would be open-season politically on LGBT people. Yet another, a Latino respondent worried about being targeted as a minority, and worried that one of his parents might be deported. An African-American woman voiced concern that she, too, might face intensified discrimination.

Romero, the moderator, who did a stint as a foreign correspondent in Venezuela some years ago, noted that under that South American country’s authoritarian regime, judicial independence has all but disappeared. The question was put to Judge Hansell: Is the independence of America’s judicial system beginning to erode under pressure from growing partisan rhetoric?

Hansell first noted that certain protocols prevent judges like himself from speaking publicly about politics—which, he said, underscores the importance of keeping the judiciary free of the taint of partisanship. That has become a critical and difficult challenge for local and state court systems in border states like California, where many people who appear before judges may themselves be immigrants or have relatives who are, Hansell suggested. Judges in many types of courts (family courts, for example) don’t inquire about the immigration status of those who come before the bench, which can complicate child custody and other types of cases in which one parent might be facing the possibility of deportation.

Romero mentioned that, in countries such as Brazil and Germany there are severe legal penalties for using overtly racist rhetoric. Is it time, he asked the panel, for the United States “to have a discussion” about First Amendment free speech rights that protect even the most virulent forms of hate speech? In response, Hansell noted that many of our most cherished free speech protections arose from cases defending highly objectionable speech, by neo-Nazis and others.

Romero then asked about the example being set by the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, who regularly disparages entire immigrant groups.

Greenfield cited another research study, of first-generation, first-year Latino UCLA students, 98 percent of whom had at least one parent born in a foreign country. The study, which required students to write about their families and take what Greenfield described as “a simple cognitive test,” revealed that students who took part in the study after Trump became president had lower powers of concentration, and performed worse on the test than students who participated before Trump’s ascendancy.

Romero acknowledged that he and many other U.S. journalists currently are wrestling daily with how to characterize the speech of Trump and other politicians. Is it fair to label it flat-out as “racist?” Can the case be made that such a label, rather than passing judgement on intent, is simply being factually correct?

Greenfield had no such hesitations, suggesting that such behavior should be called out in no uncertain terms. She described Trump as a “dictator” who has run roughshod over our constitutional checks and balances, and she validated the view of those who believe that Trump suffers from a range of personality disorders. “It’s so clear that he’s mentally ill in so many different ways,” she said.

During the question-and-answer period, a community organizer from Long Beach asked, “Where do we go from here? How do we change the narrative” about immigrants? Hayes-Bautista recommended using factual data to refute false narratives, and to demonstrate the benefits that accrue from immigration. For example, data shows that California, one of the nation’s most ethnically diverse states, also is the second-healthiest state, after Hawaii—which is even more diverse.

Another audience member asked Hayes-Bautista whether there were any identifiable social forces that have fed these 20-year cycles of backlash against immigrants. Hayes-Bautista said they seem to recur at times when surging immigration coincides with an economic recession. But neither of those things is happening right now, he observed; undocumented immigration levels have been declining, and the economy is booming, to most appearances.

As for Hayes-Bautista, a feisty eighth-generation Mexican American, he professed no fears of becoming a target.

“Try to deport me,” he said. “I’ll duke it out.”

The post When Racist Language Spreads, Immigrants Suffer—and the Social Fabric Frays appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That idea forms the core of a new book, The Green Bundle: Pairing the Market with the Planet, co-written by Magali Delmas, an economist at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. It also was at the heart of a Zócalo/UCLA Anderson event headlined by Delmas, titled “Does Environmentalism Need to Make Peace with Capitalism?”

Delmas, who is the director of the UCLA Center for Corporate Environmental Performance, focuses her current research on strategies that promote conservation-minded behavior and the development of green markets. But while ostensibly “environmentally friendly” businesses have sprouted like weeds in recent decades, many of these companies “have failed to translate green into gold” because they haven’t been able to persuade enough consumers that they can reap personal rewards—including enhanced social status, better health, and cost savings—by shopping and buying “green,” Delmas has written.

“We need to bundle the environment with the private benefit,” she commented early in the evening.

Moderator Warren Olney, host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” had begun the conversation at the RedZone at Gensler by asking Delmas how she became interested in studying the environment from, essentially, a corporate point of view.

Delmas, a native of Paris with a lingering French accent and a champagne-dry wit, replied that she had worked for a corporation some time ago, and realized that most people there had little understanding of the environment. Then she worked in government, in Brussels, and realized that most bureaucrats don’t know much about corporations.

From these dueling experiences, she theorized that there could be a way for the two different mindsets to push and profitably influence each other. “I’ve been working and trying to find these win-win solutions, because businesses really aren’t going to change if they can’t get some profits out of this,” she said.

The way for businesses to create these favorable outcomes, as Delmas and her co-author David Colgan elaborate in their book, is through the green bundle—that is, by bundling environmentally beneficial consumption with certain private benefits that can accrue to individual consumers.

There are five categories of these personal incentives: increased quality, which encourages consumers to pay a premium for, say, an expensive but eco-friendly cleaning product; products that leverage peer pressure, for example, by using Hollywood stars to promote the Toyota Prius at the Academy Awards; linking a product with personal health benefits; showing how using a product can result in either short- or long-term monetary savings; and by crafting marketing narratives that stimulate empathy and persuade a consumer that her or his personal choices will make a tangible difference to the environment.

But how much has this level of environmental-consumption awareness penetrated the general public? In response to Olney’s probing questioning, Delmas acknowledged that, as one example, the organic movement hasn’t reached the majority of consumers. She said that when she and her colleagues have conducted consumer surveys, 70 percent of respondents say they want to do something to help the environment. But other research reveals that only about 10 percent of consumers will opt to buy a green product when shopping at their local market. Most of us still are what she calls “environmentalists of convenience.”

This is where green bundling strategies can be effective in shifting consumer behavior, albeit often subtly and over significant stretches of time. Delmas offered up the example of a study involving some UCLA students, who were supplied by research teams with reams of information about the type and amount of their individual energy consumption—but who didn’t immediately change their habits one iota.

But when the students were publicly awarded red (bad) and green (good) dots to show how much more or less they were consuming compared on average to their classmates, many of them began to ratchet down their energy usage. Peer pressure, and perceptions of social status, were able to sway the students’ habits.

Delmas said she thinks that health concerns are the single most important driver of the bundle. “The organic movement has been so successful because people make this connection between eating well and their health,” she said.

Delmas said that she personally has adjusted her behavior in response to green bundling strategies. For instance, now that supermarkets have begun charging customers a few cents for shopping bags, she has become more conscientious about bringing her own bags with her on supermarket trips. And now a major coffee chain is considering charging customers a small fee for its paper cups.

“They’re going to see how this changes our behavior—we’re all going to bring our cup,” Delmas said.

Still, Olney pointed out, some companies don’t care at all about encouraging environmentally friendly consumer behavior. How can they be made to fall in line?

Delmas said that even if these companies may not care about their environmental impact, some of their investors likely will. Many investors now screen companies based on their environmental records, and have sophisticated metrics to measure this, she said. Knowledgeable consumers also are increasingly likely to screen companies on these grounds.

That means that companies can’t win consumers’ trust and cooperation simply by spinning beautiful marketing pitches, Delmas said. Corporate America must provide information to consumers that is transparent, accurate, and standardized, so that customers can make the best, and most responsible, buying decisions.

But how far should we be prepared to go in using some of these green bundle methods? During the question-and-answer period, one audience member from Long Beach asked about China’s new green awareness initiative, which uses public shaming to pressure individual citizens to toe the government’s environmental line.

“I don’t think we want to live in a society like that,” said Delmas. “There is a danger there.”

Another audience member, Michael Alexander, asked how we can weigh the greater amount of energy that may be required to manufacture a more environmentally friendly product like an electric car, versus that vehicle’s long-term energy-conserving benefits.

“There’s no perfect solution,” Delmas replied. “There has to be some kind of balance. We need to look at these in context and do a full life-cycle assessment, from cradle to grave.”

Yet another audience member asked about how it might be possible to create affordability for every consumer, from a social-justice standpoint. Delmas concurred that “there’s a question” as to whether green-friendly consumer policies are going to serve only the “happy few” who can afford to drop hundreds of dollars per week at Whole Foods.

“In 20 years, I think we will all have a lot of information about what we consume,” Delmas had said earlier in the evening. “When we have that information, what will we do with it? We can’t change our behavior if we don’t know our impact.”

The post Helping the Environment Is Nice. Helping Yourself Is OK, Too. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.