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The Global Is Local

Oct 18
0

The Architecture of Our Psychological Health

By | Health, The Global Is Local | 4 Comments

“A beautiful old mansion would be easier to redevelop than a home where someone was murdered.”

This week’s post by Lindsey Davis spurred me to think again about how our environment influences the way we experience the world around us, and the impact it has on our lives. Lindsey points out the balance that is struck when planners and city leaders determine that a neighborhood or area of the city would be better demolished than repaired.

Perhaps, she argues, these parts of the city should start a new story, free from the architecture that haunts their past.

I think she is probably right. Their present is the part that I have been thinking about, though, and the impact that living with a history and an environment may have upon the residents in any neighborhood. Each of us experiences Baltimore in a different way, and so that architectural impact is different for all of us, depending on our habits and our pre-existing constitution. Many of us cut a fairly narrow slice of the Baltimore pie (or whichever city or pastry you live in), because of where we work, study, play, or live, and the locations and routes between these activities vary for all of us.

This past weekend, the Baltimore Marathon (which I watched, but did not run) wound it’s way through much of the city, hitting the Inner Harbor, Druid Hill, Waverly, and many miles in between. The Baltimore Bike Party often has a similarly winding route, and I appreciate that both attempt to expose both residents and guests to parts of the city that typically do not get seen by tourists, commuters, and — more often than not — white people like myself.

There is no way to understand the city from the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, or from the Inner Harbor, or from the Under Armor headquarters. The particular portions of the city that Lindsey makes reference to are not pretty, and in fact may be derelict or downright abandoned, but are integral to understanding what makes this place. Neighborhoods stricken by urban blight have an enormous impact on the financial, social, and psychological health of the city.

From a public health standpoint (which, I have argued before, is perhaps the best lens through which to analyse a human population), there are a number of concerns that urban blight brings up, including correlation with poverty, high disease burden, low literacy rates, crime and violence incidence, access to food and services.. the list goes on, of course. However, an issue that is harder to quantify is the psychological impact of a blighted neighborhood.

A 2002 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry linked found statistically significant associations between the built environment and rates of depression. Another study published in 2002, this one in the Journal of Social Science & Medicine,  found that “neighborhood disadvantage was associated with higher rates of major depression and substance abuse disorder” among other negative psycho-social conditions.

This is not surprising. Think about your own home, and your favorite room or space in it. What are a few of the things that you like about it? Pick two or three of them and then meet me at the next paragraph…

Hi, welcome back. Although I can’t be sure, I strongly suspect that the things you like about your favorite room in your house have to do with beauty, comfort, positive memories or associations, or attractiveness. Now reverse that scenario, imagine your least favorite part of your home, and I would again be willing to bet a bowl of freshly roasted pumpkin seeds that the space you just identified has negative connotations, gives you feelings of dread, disappointment, or even disgust (if you’re struggling to get your walls out of the 1970s, I hear wood paneling looks great with a coat of white paint). Now scale these impressions to a street or a neighborhood, and the correlation with psycho-sociological outcomes starts to make a lot of sense.

It all comes back to the poverty/wealth disparity, in my opinion. Will money make you happy? Certainly not in isolation, but if it buys/rents you a decent place on an attractive street in a part of the city with strong civic engagement, then you’ve probably got a head-start on happiness compared to someone who lives sandwiched between abandoned buildings, has to rely on an unpredictable bus system to get to their job, and lives in one of only a half dozen occupied homes in a three block radius. Besides, once you’re in that nice neighborhood, there’s a good chance that grocery stores will be easier to get to, crime rates will drop, and transportation options will be better (well, maybe that last one is a stretch…).

The question that lingers for me is one that Lindsey also raised — is there a point where the “institutional memory” of a place is so malign that the only recourse is to remove the architecture of those memories? According to Lindsey, that may be the case. The individuals who collectively hold and live these institutional memories may be the most compelling reasons of all, however. Preserving a neighborhood of decay and bad memories is no way to effectively raise morale and standard of living. Instead, city planners may hope to cause social change through infrastructure improvements, a tired, but tried and true strategy that has had positive results in the past.

Oct 07
0

Baltimore’s Queen of Bioethical Conundrums

By | ChangeEngine, Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

Hi, one baby please. We’d like a boy who will grow up to be 6’2″, play the piano, graduate from Harvard Law School, and dance a mean Polka. Actually, make it two, we might want to enroll them in tennis camp together.

The designer baby patent, as it is now known in the media, was recently granted to a company called 23andMe, which has made several splashes in the past few years as they released in-home genetic testing kits and other products. This has caused a lot of consternation among the public as well as the scientific community. I spend a lot of words in these posts declaring my lack of expertise on things, so let me carry on the tradition: I am not a geneticist, an expert in in-vitro fertilization, or a father, any of which might help me to help you understand this issue better, but I will carry on regardless.

One of the primary concerns for technology of this type is, of course, the potential for abusive use of screening technology. At one end of the spectrum are some generally acceptable uses of this kind of thing — screenings for congenital disease that would lead to an early death amid suffering, for instance. At the other end, I think we can agree, are the designer children I described in my intro. Press one if you would like a baseball team full of babies with extreme athletic ability, press six for the next Mozart.

This weekend was also the third annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. For those of you who have not read Rebecca Skloot’s blockbuster non-fiction book about Henrietta, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, heard her interviews on NPR, or seen her on the Colbert Report AND live in Baltimore, please try to find one of those things right now and come back. The short version, however: Henrietta was born in Virginia, married, and eventually moved to Baltimore in order for her husband to work in the steel industry. In 1951 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, a condition that led quickly to her death. During her treatment, a sample of her tumor was collected without her knowledge or consent, cultured, and propagated successfully — the first time human cells were successfully cultured. Since then, more than 60,000 scientific articles have been published on research involving HeLa cells; they were used to make the Polio vaccine, and they have traveled into space, among thousands of other applications.

The lecture was largely intended to memorialize Mrs. Lacks and acknowledge her contribution to science and humanity, through the distribution of scholarships for a high school student in the sciences and technology as well as for community college students. In addition, a long hoped for plaque was put up at the end of the day on the former home of Mrs. Lacks, commemorating the site.

The last hundred years have seen a remarkable span of growth in our awareness of bio-ethical issues, which has included the Nuremberg trials, the Tuskegee experiments, the Belmont Report, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and others. The rate of informed legislation and rulings on bio-ethical issues is surpassed by the rate of innovation, as with all types of technological advancement, and so a greater burden must fall to us as citizens to act as monitors. There are promising strategies that emerge regularly, but these should not sacrifice the patients involved.

As I say, the past century has seen a dramatic and sometimes shocking number of ethical lapses in the medical and scientific community, particulary pertaining to the use of human subjects. This is one reason that stories like the recent patent granted to 23andMe give us cause for concern. We worry that we (or our brothers and sisters in the human race) will be treated poorly, abused, or taken advantage of.

In fact, this is the position that the Lacks family has been struggling with for over 50 years. At some points they have tried litigation to gain control over the use of the HeLa cell line, or at least share in the massive money-tree that their matriarch begat, or sue Johns Hopkins for their unethical (although at the time, legal) behavior. It is interesting how time and circumstance can change paradigms. The descendants of Mrs. Lacks are not so different from the majority of Baltimore residents. Like their mother/grandmother/great grandmother, many of them are still poor, still in a struggling neighborhood, still in the black majority that is treated like a minority. A process that began 20 years after Henrietta’s death — as researchers began trying to learn more about the cell line — has finally yielded results. David, Henrietta’s grandson, sits on a committee that helps to determine how the full genome of Henrietta Lacks will be used in research around the world. Rebecca Skloot’s book provided insight into the wishes of Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah. And Henrietta herself is remembered as a giving, charitable, loving person who shared and gave freely for the benefit of her community.

How can Henrietta help us to understand? A Baltimorean lady unknowingly at the forefront of a scientific revolution, she could not have guessed at what might come next.

The patent for testing for specific traits is only the beginning of a process that is almost certain to continue. Increased consumer access to previously Ivory-Tower-style scientific advancement is nothing new; in fact, it is something old. It is exactly how diffusion of innovative technologies always works, for better or worse [author’s note: except in the health care system, which is a discussion for a different day]. We are still struggling to determine how best to regulate the cell phone, which just had it’s 40th birthday, so even if we are concerned that drive-thru babies are about to ruin our world, something like that idea is eventually coming, in one form or another, and a better strategy than stopping it would be to make sure it happens with ethical oversight, by entities who have committed themselves to the public good. We shall see if 23andMe lives up to that challenge.

Sep 19
0

Obamacare? Isn’t That Socialized Medicine?

By | Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

A recent trip up the East Coast to visit family and friends presented a brief but intense glimpse into the debate that still rages around the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, now often referred to as Obamacare, even by the President himself.

Some aunts were very enthusiastic, some suspicious, some entirely opposed, and everyone confused. Many people I talked to — friends, family, and brief acquaintances — had some facts that they were holding onto firmly, which often informed their overall opinion. Some facts were more factual than others, but given the scope of the legislation and the broader health care debate, this is hardly surprising. A representative of the Kaiser Family Foundation health news branch was on NPR this morning, and she pointed out that many of those that the law is likely to benefit most don’t even know that they will soon be eligible for coverage.

If you have concerns about your own eligibility and how to move forward, I recommend Leanne’s post, A Guide to Shopping for Health Exchange Insurance Plans, that ChangeEngine published earlier this week. She links to several other resources that could also help further your understanding. But a more cerebral question has now been kicking around in my head for the past 48 hours: if clever, well educated people with lots of resources have a hard time grasping the basic elements of this law, and the implications that will soon be forthcoming, how on earth will someone who has a limited social support network, perhaps limited internet access, and other limitations fare?

I believe that the roll-out of the ACA will have a net societal benefit, but on the individual level, many questions remain. Questions of access, for instance, as I just mentioned, or of equity for those caught in between economic categories: too ‘wealthy’ to qualify for Medicaid, too ‘poor’ to access high quality insurance products. There are answers out there to these questions, and I plan to devote myself to finding as many of them as I can between now and the beginning of October, when the open enrollment begins on state exchanges and Healthcare.gov, the federal portal.

If you have burning questions that you would like to have answered, please put them into the comments section at the bottom of this post. If there are a sufficient number of questions to warrant it, the next edition of this column will be devoted to answering them. If not, I will endeavor to answer the most pressing concerns that I have heard from friends and family over the past week, since I am confident they will apply to just about all of us.

In the meantime, please stay healthy!

Sep 06
0

Choo Choo ChangeEngine?

By | Health, The Global Is Local | 3 Comments

Our ability to get to our places of employment is one of the greatest contributing factors to health and wealth. I and other ChangeEngine bloggers have made this connection a number of times over the past year. Without access to sufficient capital (i.e. wages), your ability to access adequate and sufficient food, shelter, and services is extremely limited. It is no coincidence that high-income neighborhoods have transportation flexibility and even redundancy — train, bus, (perhaps multiple) reliable cars, bikes, and pedestrian options may all be available.

This week, Governor O’Malley and a group of local and state officials including Mayor Rawlings-Blake came together at the the West Baltimore MARC station to announce a number of major investments in transportation projects for the city. The headline item is of course the Red Line, a Light Rail line that will be intended to travel East-West from Woodlawn through to the Hopkins Bayview campus — two major employment hubs, while intersecting with existing rail and bus routes on the way.

Many Baltimoreans already have a sense of eye-rolling weariness about the Red line, and justifiably so. It has been a long time in the planning phase, and is not anticipated to start carrying riders until 2021, far too far into the future for us to think seriously about it on a regular basis, at least until construction begins. However, the frustration citizens currently feel with the protracted planning process is nothing to how they will feel after six or more years of major construction.

I must advocate for patience and acceptance, however. Rail networks are an essential component of modern cities, and without it, Baltimore will lag behind its neighbors. As I have said in previous columns, Baltimore’s anemic public transit system contributes to health and wealth inequalities, and perpetuates deeply entrenched racial divisions throughout the city. An expansion on the scale of the Red Line project has the potential to demolish some of those boundaries, although 2021 is a long time to wait. Construction and transit system jobs will increase, however, and many of those jobs will likely be filled by locals.

What concerns me, of course, is the broader transportation landscape around this massive infrastructure effort. Living in Pittsburgh for the past few years, we lived with an ongoing light rail project the entire time. The North Shore Connector cost half a billion dollars and connects two points that are about a mile apart — although it has to go under the river to get there, which IS pretty cool. The problem there, and potentially here, is that there was not a holistic approach to the project: no similarly herculean effort put toward making it easy to get to the station, no bike-share program implemented simultaneously, and no broad improvement of pedestrian walkways outside the immediate station entrance. Sidewalks a quarter mile away that were previously (virtually) inaccessible to wheelchairs or mobility-limited individuals got no attention, and the city busses or disability-access vans remained an essential tool for all those who used them in the past.

There is still lots of time for Maryland to steer this transportation initiative. The Governor announced $1.5 billion in funding for Baltimore area projects, but the overall Transportation Infrastructure Investment Act allocates $4.4 billion over the next six years. The most expensive parts of these projects involve major construction efforts, but many comparatively inexpensive additions could be made as well, such as pedestrian services, bike-shares, and downtown greening.

Although not the biggest part of the announcement, the first change we will see is weekend MARC train service finally being offered between Baltimore and Washington D.C., beginning in December. Personally, I am very excited about this, as I will be able to get down to the Capital on my day off without needing to know where to park or how to navigate the city.

Weekend MARC service has the (probably unintended) potential to provide access to higher wage jobs for those who work in the service and retail sector. Restaurants, stores, hotels, and hospitals do not maintain the five day work week, and opening up a relatively inexpensive route to D.C. on the weekends means that Baltimore residents have greater choice and earning potential in those sectors. It remains to be seen how popular this option is, of course, but tracking the results over time will be very interesting.

My hope is that the Governor’s announcement will address the needs of the community — improving our ability to get to work, make a decent living, and support our families and communities.

Aug 22
0

We Just Keep Doing Dumb Stuff

By | Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

Do you ever wonder if we are a species of idiots?

I generally don’t feel that way, actually, but sometimes it seems like the only viable hypothesis. It explains SO many things about our behaviors.

This afternoon I read that lots of young women in this country think that exposing themselves to harmful radiation on a regular basis for the purpose of slightly changing the color of their skin is a good idea.

Question: Is this dumb, or smart?

Answer: Dumb. The increase in risk level for skin cancer as a result of using a tanning bed is 100 percent for those younger than 25, and 75 percent for those under 35.

Don’t worry, lots of guys are dumb too, as are almost all groups of people, divided any way you like — age, gender, race, geographical origin, religion, cultural heritage, etc. All groups do things that are bad for us, more often than not with a pretty good grasp of the facts about what makes the practice dumb.

I won’t bother to list examples beyond tanning and smoking, though, because despite the fact that culturally ingrained practices are dumb, they are often passionately defended by their practitioners. And, let’s face it, there’s just not enough space here for equal opportunity mockery of all of our traditions, so if your family or friends love to eat fried food, binge drink, self-flagellate, do drugs, run marathons, drive fast, or listen to terrible, terrible music (Bieber, Public Health Enemy No. 468), I am not going to take you to task at the moment. Rest easy, your practice is safe from my attention, but be aware that you are probably doing something dumb on a regular basis.

Smoking is one of my favorite examples, but not for the general populace, although I think we can agree that most smokers know that their habit is harmful. What really amazes me are the health care workers who I see at the side entrance of hospitals or long term care facilities, taking their smoke break. There are few people out there who have a clearer idea of the harm they are inflicting on themselves.

Obviously I don’t have any suggestions about how to alter the fact that we all do things that are bad for us. If I did, clearly I would have applied for my grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, hired a staff of investigators, and maybe patented something.

The obvious solution — more education — has a fatal flaw, exemplified by the smoking nurses: it doesn’t work. People who know better just do it anyway. This isn’t true of all behaviors, or all groups — harm reduction strategies in Baltimore and elsewhere involving educating IV drug users about needle re-use have been quite effective over the past 30 years, leading to lower infection rates for HIV, Hepatitis C, and other diseases.

Maybe the true problem is that education efforts are ineffective. Some are unfortunately ineffective because they operate based on incorrect assumptions, such as those with a strong basis in religious or cultural opinion rather than fact, like abstinence-only pregnancy prevention programs or vaccine avoidance. However, there are lots of hours and dollars spent on methods that are scientifically validated, and yet many long term, population level problems persist. According to a 2012 publication from the World Health Organization, effective health education requires interventions at individual, local, regional, and state and/or national levels. This requires comprehensive policy guidance that presupposes informed, or at least engaged politicians and leaders, which is not always the case.

Money is a factor as well, of course, both in the form of raw capital needed to produce materials and pay salaries, but also in terms of competing interests. Often the things we do that we know we shouldn’t have a strong economic interest behind them, and so those who try to counteract the negative effects of the behaviors are working against vested interests as well as their clients/friends/family members.

In the meantime, remember that family and peers have the greatest level of influence on behavior, so be an advocate for the well-being of those around you.

Aug 08
0

Let Us Eat Lettuce

By | Health, The Global Is Local | One Comment

Don’t forget to bust some silos! And let us know how you’re doing it!

And now…. Lettuce!

So, as you may have guessed, the title of this piece has both a global and a local angle, as is the norm for this column. First, of course, is the global (or at least hemispheric) — the recent cyclospora outbreak plaguing Texas, Nebraska and Iowa predominantly, but scattered other cases as well. The outbreak seems to be tied to lettuce served in some chain restaurants, although that assessment is so far limited to the cases in Nebraska and Iowa. The source of this lettuce is a company in Mexico, and highlights the impact that a global food chain can have far from the growing site.

In the meantime, we have moved past lettuce season at the local Farmer’s Markets in Baltimore, not because there is no longer lettuce available, but because so many other things are! I still buy lettuce every week (since I keep forgetting to reseed my own after the last batch got fried to a toasty, lettucy crisp in that one week of terrible heat), but it doesn’t excite me in the same way it did in May. It’s the same as the leaves on the trees, isn’t it?

May: “Oh wow, stop the car, everybody pause, look, a leaf-colored thing!”

July: “If there weren’t so many leaves, it might not be so humid. When is Fall starting?”

Anyway, lettuce is still great, but there are also fresh peaches, tomatoes, beets, string beans, and corn, so you’ll have to excuse me if lettuce is no longer as exciting. Still love it, less excited. Don’t be mad, lettuce.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The FDA and the CDC are in the midst of working out the route of transmission of this outbreak, but it’s more than likely that this episode is now in the past for those who were infected (although several dozen needed to be hospitalized). If they are lucky, they may be able to trace it back to a single worker in the facility in question, but again, this is already moving toward Old News, and by the time that information comes out, even the folks infected with the parasite will have begun to put the experience behind them. Probably.

Cyclospora causes a pretty unpleasant condition with symptoms that include the full range of gastrointestinal ickiness, as well as some flu-like fatigue and aches. Washing pre-bagged greens goes a long way toward preventing infection, though.

My thoughts about the global food/local food issues this story raises fall into a couple categories.

1. Local vegetables may sometimes be more expensive, but they also support your neighbor, so that’s good.

2. Scale is important in this issue. The scale of global food producers demands an amazing amount of labor and process, and that means that despite careful systemic controls, there are simply more cooks in the kitchen, so to speak, and any one of thousands of workers could potentially introduce a parasite into the process. Local, small scale farms may not be able to address the needs of a national or international restaurant chain (in the current model of doing things, anyway. Check out Big City Farms for an example of small scale local ‘industrial’ farming that supplies restaurants, or Farm Alliance for a farmer’s collective model), but the owners are often the workers, drivers, and bookkeepers, or share the responsibilities with a very small group of coworkers. This doesn’t prevent the possibility of infection, but it does mean that one or two people can know just about everything about the entire product cycle, from dirt to dinner table.

3. The global food chain is an essential component to almost all of us, especially in intensely urban or suburban regions. On the East coast, it’s pretty challenging to grow, hunt, and wildcraft all the food you need for your family, and if you do, it’s not an option for everyone. In fact, sub/urban resources would tap out very fast if more than a fraction of a percent of the population followed such practices. A safer, more accountable global food chain is something that society is struggling with right now. Perhaps this is due to cost?

4. Cost. You know that cheap, fast, good tri-chotomy? It can’t be all three, and maybe can’t even be two out of three. Maybe global food has been cheap, and gets to us fast, but continued examples of preventable food-borne illness should cause us to question if it is still good. If global food is to continue to fill the vital role it holds at the moment, it will need to continue to be fast (lettuce doesn’t have a long shelf life, and Mexico to Maryland is a long trip). We want it to be good (I have no desire to have two months of diarrhea for the sake of some inexpensive arugula). Maybe it’s time to consider that it should not be quite so cheap. The cost of transport has gone up significantly in the past decade, and we don’t pay full price for that increase. Corners get cut elsewhere to maintain profits, and bam, Red Lobster is on the news.

5. (Last one, I promise) Finding a balance in this context should be a food system that is healthy, economically viable, and safe. Local producers should be given incentives that would allow them to play a greater role in their local food economy, and international producers should be rewarded for delivering goods that are safe and nutritious.

No problem, right? Any ideas?

Jul 26
0

Summer: Sun, Humidity, and Hurricanes

By | Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

Remember Sandy? She (or he) was barreling down on us not so long ago. There were recommendations to stockpile water for three to five days, BGE was pre-emptively cutting tree limbs that threatened wires, and I’m sure there was a run on Old Bay and Natty Boh in the supermarkets.

Image credit: USGS

The reason Sandy is now just a memory of a disaster that could have been (for most of us in Baltimore City, anyway) is that things turned out very differently than they could have. The storm turned away from us and instead focused it’s attention on our neighbors to the north.

What I heard most often in the days afterwards were variations on “We were so lucky!” Homes and lives were destroyed in New York and New Jersey. Entire hospitals were evacuated. Billions of dollars in damages are still being assessed, repaired, and replaced. Part of the extent of the damage has to do with the sheer density of the regions affected, of course, but Fells Point and Canton aren’t exactly ghost towns, and the Inner Harbor is far from a dilapidated dump that can be written off for the insurance money.

“Lucky” might be a bit of an overstatement, though. It’s certainly good that we didn’t get a direct hit, of course, but there are massive atmospheric forces at work that dictate the speed, direction, and overall countenance of storms.

Last October, I was wondering a couple of things as Sandy traipsed along the coast.

1. Why is everyone in such a tizzy? Doesn’t this happen all the time? We’re right near the coast!

2. What is Natty Boh?

The answer to number two became clear before long, although it has yet to make a substantial impression on me. Cheap beer that isn’t terrible is good to have available, though, so I don’t have any objections.

Number one, regarding tizzies, has only started to make sense in the (almost) year since then. First, Baltimoreans like to have strong reactions to weather, whether it’s complaints about the heat, driving like a fleet of grannies in a quarter inch of snow, or stockpiling for the apocalypse when a big storm approaches. Second, like I said earlier, there are some macro factors that affect the behavior of hurricanes. Atlantic hurricanes that move up the East coast typically follow a consistent, if broad, path that dog-legs North and East as it passes the mid-Atlantic region. This is why there has not yet been a direct hit on the city, despite the storm surge from Isabel that I still hear about sometimes. So although that general pattern was still predicted (see image above), that dog-leg would mostly be over land, and pass right over us, which would be unusual. Needless to say, Sandy decided to follow protocol and headed North and East instead.

Changes in the behavior of the Gulf Stream have the potential for throwing many of our normal prediction models for a loop. Along with hypothesized frigid temperatures in Europe, there are many questions about how future storms will behave, and whether past prediction models are adequate to assess risk in various places. Due to the effects of a little “theory” about global warming, the 100 or 500 year storms are now storms of our time, not of the distant future or past, and their behavior is becoming less predictable. Even a hurricane such as Sandy – large, strong, but not record breaking by most measures — had a storm surge that would have put much of the downtown area underwater including City Hall, the police headquarters, and of course most of Fells Point, Federal Hill, Canton, and Locust Point, among others.

If those aren’t compelling reasons for some serious consideration about how we invest in infrastructure, housing, and tourist destinations in places like the Inner Harbor, I don’t know what would be.

Jul 12
0

Congestion Cycle of Doom

By | Health, Silo-Breakers, The Global Is Local | No Comments

…..But first, a look back at Silos in the ChangeEngine world:

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, either in the comments section of Silos or Silos II, The Power of the Triple-S, in person, or as Michelle and Rodney did, in full fledged posts on ChangeEngine. Excellent discussions have been taking place, and I want to encourage that to continue. Challenge yourself and your colleagues:

What is the box you are in, for better or worse, and how can seeking partnerships or experience outside those parameters benefit your organization AND the community you live in?

Good luck, and keep us all posted! Link back to Silo Breakers as you post about your efforts, use a hashtag (I’ll defer to Hasdai on how to do that), and talk to friends and strangers… (Ed: Thanks Adam. It’s @ChangEngine #breakoutchallenge on Twitter, facebook.com/ChangingMedia, or email hasdai@changingmediagroup.com).

——-

Okay, this week, we touch upon the issues raised in posts about bicycling this past Spring (B’More Bike Friendly, Bikemore in Baltimore, and I Bike, You Bike, We Bike!) but with a wider lens. Although the previous posts brought up the local ramifications of taking cars off the roads, getting more of our community off the couch and out of the drivers seat, and so forth, today we will take a further step back to look at the transportation trends across the country and the world.

As was noted in the recent post by Stu Sirota, Our Trillion Dollar Dirty Little Secret, transportation funding in the United States is hyper-focused on roads and bridges. It’s not an unreasonable priority. The road infrastructure throughout the nation is vast, adding up to just over 2.5 million miles of pavement (not including the quadrillions of acres that make up parking lots and such things). We rely on roads and bridges for transport and economic vitality.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The trouble is that those pesky roads share some unfortunate traits with us — they get stiff in the winter, squishy in the summer, and show the effects of age sooner than they feel like they should (“I swear it was only yesterday that 695 and I were at the prom together, young and fresh, and now look at us, full of potholes and cracks!”). The context in which this massive infrastructure was built was far different, and the maintenance costs increase over time. The current political climate has not been productive for passing thoughtful, long-term legislation of any sort, and future transportation bills may face the same problems.

As Sirota points out in his piece, the network of roads and associated development that have grown out of the national highway building efforts of previous decades have initially eased and then subsequently caused congestion and a need for expansion and development.

Shifts in our expectations about transportation, urbanization, work and play are undergoing a generational shift, however, which may reverse or at least force a reassessment of earlier priorities. New industries and young workers have a greater interest in working and living in urban areas, rather than suburban software parks for instance.

OK, so great, good for U.S.; we’re progressive as hell and living the green dream, right? Well, no, of course not. America will continue to rack up miles on our cars, build roads while others crumble, and generally remain a servant of the internal combustion engine. But things will improve, of course — better gas mileage, improved bike/car education, and pro-environmental youth will vote with their dollars more and more as they join the labor force.

Other places in the world however, are on a different trajectory:

Image credit: European Environment Agency

The developing world has long epitomized a biking culture for decades, and although many people now own Motos (mopeds, scooters, or other low-powered motorbikes) and aspire to own their own car, bikes still fill the streets. India and China in particular are projected to experience a massive increase in car ownership in the coming decades, fueled (ha) in part by their own domestic auto industries.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This trend is going to have a massive impact on vehicle emissions in coming years, but with any luck, the exploding population of car owners will be the proud owners of smaller, more fuel-efficient cars than were typical in the United States — imagine millions upon millions of Cadillac Eldorados cruising the Chinese landscape. At the same time, heavy industry in these countries will likely benefit from a greening culture as well as more efficient technologies, decreasing environmental impact.

This ebb and flow of transportation and urban fashions both here and around the world will have profound and lasting effects on our lives, our economy, our health, and our city. Baltimoreans have a particular responsibility to share innovations, be good ambassadors when traveling or hosting international guests, and break out of our regional and national silos when we engage in the online community.

Baltimore shares many characteristics with cities in the developing world — substantial industry presence, high poverty and disease burden, and vibrant pockets of entrepreneurship and innovation. We must share our lessons learned, reach out to inspire others, learn from disparate cultures with similar characteristics, and change the world.

Jun 27
0

Silos II – The Power of the “Triple-S”

By | Health, Silo-Breakers, The Global Is Local | No Comments

Hopefully by now we have all begun to identify some of the ways in which our silos both benefit and limit our ability to innovate and achieve our goals of lasting, transformative social change. This reflection, for me at least, has led to the following conclusions:

1. The forces that hold us back also thrust us forward. While we may not have impact on a broad spectrum, specialization — focusing on issues within our sphere of influence — concentrates our laser beam of efficacy.

2. Becoming aware of someone else’s silo can make me judgemental, and I think I need to be cautious to avoid that.

3.  Even though last week I was promoting leaving your silo entirely in order to inform the silos of others and vice versa, I have been considering the idea of silo-“smushing” over strict silo-crashing. Smushing similar silos — Triple-S, if you will — would bring the resources and energy of seemingly disparate silos together, not to address a single issue but on the host of interrelated concerns that each silo is generally concerned with.

As usual, my perspective comes through the lens of public health. However, as my friend Michelle Geiss and I recently agreed, public health is a useful perspective to see almost all of our work through. There are some exceptions — the petrochemical industry, maybe, or reality TV — but otherwise almost everything has a public health connection.

I hereby submit public health as our mega-silo. Alternative suggestions are welcome, of course. But consider the impact that a unified public health effort could have in Haiti, where a million different NGOs are doing all their different things. If all of them had to work together, imagine the results. Not only would the output be magnified, each organization would help to keep its partners honest — a perpetual concern particularly in international aid efforts, especially after the publicity of Greg Mortenson of Three Cups of Tea infamy.

Speaking of which, the global polio eradication campaign has run into some serious hurdles in Pakistan and a more holistic strategy — including education, infrastructure improvements, and cultural outreach with vaccination efforts — could potentially help.

Part of the reason I think this would work and should be a priority is that no one can do everything, yet within the mega-silo model, that could not only be a goal but an expectation.

We all bump into barriers that limit our impact, and there is a pattern to that process- awareness, hope for solutions, frustration with lack of progress, development of workarounds, acceptance of limitations, and finally, sometimes, resistance to efforts to change those barriers lest they disturb our projects.

Now deploy the Triple-S, and call in your partners. Smash! Barriers? What barriers? We don’t need no stinking barriers!

So now that you’ve identified your silo, think about who else is in ít (organizations, individuals, funders), and what other silos may be nearby to integrate into a Triple-S mega-silo?

Jun 14
0

Silos

By | Health, Silo-Breakers, The Global Is Local | 3 Comments

Specialization- the process by which we have achieved space flight, agriculture, engineering, science, industry, efficiency, and ninjas.

Although specialization can lead to excellence, it can have unintended consequences or stem from conditions of disparity.

A meandering anecdote now follows: My wife and I took her grandfather to the Museum of Industry a few weeks ago. As a lifelong tinkerer, woodcrafter, history buff, and political activist, it was in many ways an ideal activity for his 91st birthday visit here in Baltimore. If you haven’t been there, I recommend it. The quality of the overall experience was very impressive, including a complimentary docent tour with admission. It was through the docent that we learned about the specialization that took place among the industry workers in Baltimore circa 1900.

Many of the examples of specialization were impressive — for instance, oyster shuckers could move at an amazing pace, as could all the other piece-workers responsible for prepping, canning, and labeling the products moving through the factories. This led to safe, affordable food that could be distributed for hundreds of miles to the significant benefit of the nation and the industries that operated the workshops and factories.

On the other hand, the labor that powered these engines of industry were often entire families, including children. In addition, some of the hardest work was the only work that African Americans could get hired for. Injury and death in turn of the century factories was a fact of life. Also, although useful, mastery of oyster-shuckery has limited transferability, and mobility to other, safer or more lucrative occupations was very difficult.

So, despite the wonderful things that specialization can and does produce, it can be caused by (and reinforce) racism and poverty.

A phrase that gets used a lot in social science, among other disciplines, is silos. The word evokes a stark image in my mind, isolated towers full of a single kind of stuff. Efficient? Yes, of course. But who wants just one kind of stuff? Diversity is essential for a complete experience. Despite my hereditary love of bread, I am certainly not about to limit my diet to strictly bread. [OK, add some cheese, and then maybe….]

Silos are perhaps an effective analogy for the partitioned experiences we have in our day-to-day lives as well. We have our professional personality, colleagues, and activities, and our private versions of the same. Little self-silos if you like. Groups of social contacts broken up by shared experiences and backgrounds — the group you exercise with, the group you party with, the group we have children’s playgroups with.

I’ve been thinking about silos and the efficacy of innovation for a couple weeks. I attended an event recently which brought together social entrepreneurs to problem-solve some issues that a half a dozen organizations brought to the table over a few hours. As is often my experience in Baltimore, there were people from very different backgrounds, different ages, men and women, all with a passion- via their own silo — to effect positive change in their city and the world.

Breaking down the walls of their own pet projects to contribute their energy toward projects outside their silos gave each participant a sense of the universe of other silos outside their own. At the end, however, one bold woman pointed out that the full diversity of the city was not well represented. The targets of many socially beneficial projects in Baltimore are the residents and environments in poor, predominantly African American neighborhoods, and yet members of these communities are very often neglected when the invitations go out. Not by intention, but as a result of the natural process of silos. Specialization, remember, tends to focus similar energy and resources into a self-contained cluster. The organizers, by the way, acknowledged the challenge and committed to a conscious effort toward broadening the population of participants.

I would like to suggest a similar challenge for each of us this week:

First, identify your silos. Where are you most comfortable? Who do you hang out with most often? How do you work toward your ideals?

Next pick one of those silos and break out of it for a day. Remember, you’re reading this because you have at least a passing interest in innovative, transformative social change. Switching brands of jelly does NOT count, even if it was made by a local organic producer. Bring someone into a new social circle; allow their views to inform the activity, conversation, and menu. Get outside your comfort zone, talk to someone you disagree with, and finally, share your experience with others on digital and interpersonal social networks.