William Greaves, "Black Journal" Producer, Documentarian and Pioneering Journalist, Dies at 87

 William Greaves making his experimental and long-neglected 1968 film, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.”   

 Credit John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive — Getty Images

 

By MEL WATKINS

 AUG. 26, 2014

William Greaves, a producer and director who helped bring an African-American perspective to mainstream America as a host of the groundbreaking television news program “Black Journal” and as a documentary filmmaker, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87. His daughter-in-law Bernice Green confirmed his death.

Mr. Greaves was well known for his work as a documentarian focusing on racial issues and black historical figures. In his later years he was equally known for his most uncharacteristic film, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.” Made in 1968, it mixed fact and fiction in a complex film-within-a-film structure that made it a tough sell commercially, and it waited almost four decades for theatrical release. When it finally had one, in 2005, it was warmly praised as ahead of its time.

Mr. Greaves (rhymes with “leaves”) gained national recognition as a co-host and later executive producer of “Black Journal,” a monthly hourlong National Educational Television newsmagazine that made its debut in 1968 in response to a call by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to expand coverage of black affairs. It was the only nationally telecast series devoted to black issues in the 1960s.
 

“By the acid test of professional and perceptive journalism, ‘Black Journal’ has earned its rightful niche as a continuing and absorbing feature of television’s output,” the television critic Jack Gould wrote in The New York Times in 1969. “Mr. Greaves is simply covering a story that should be covered and covering it with distinction.”

In 1970, “Black Journal” won an Emmy in the “magazine-type programming” category. Later that year, Mr. Greaves left the program to pursue projects developed by his own production company. (He was replaced by Tony Brown, and the program was later renamed “Tony Brown’s Journal.”)

“The Fighters,” a feature-length documentary Mr. Greaves produced and directed about the 1971 Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, was released theatrically in 1974. Writing in The Times, Vincent Canby called it “a first-rate film of its unprepossessing kind.”

He went on to write, produce or direct films including the well-received PBS documentaries “Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice” (1989) and “Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey” (2001), as well as explorations of contemporary political and cultural issues like “Black Power in America: Myth or Reality?” (1986) and “That’s Black Entertainment” (1989). His work won awards at numerous festivals.

William Garfield Greaves was born in Harlem on Oct. 8, 1926, one of seven children of Garfield Greaves, a taxi driver and minister, and the former Emily Muir. He won a scholarship to the Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village and later graduated from Stuyvesant High School.

His education continued at the City College of New York. Between 1944 and 1952 he tried his hand at boxing, dancing, songwriting and acting. He joined the American Negro Theater shortly after high school and, for a time, vied for roles with Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.

  

 In this Oct. 6, 2006, file photo, filmmaker William Greaves, left, talks with actor Harry Belafonte at the 80th anniversary celebration of Harlem's Schomburg Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. Greaves, the Emmy-award winning producer and co-host of the groundbreaking television show "Black Journal" was a prolific filmmaker whose subjects ranged from Muhammad Ali to the Harlem Renaissance to the black middle class.

   (AP Photo/Rick Maiman, File)

 He appeared on Broadway in “Finian’s Rainbow” (1947) and “Lost in the Stars” (1949) and in a few movies, among them “The Fight Never Ends” (1948), an independent production starring the boxing champion Joe Louis, and “Lost Boundaries” (1949), a Hollywood film about race relations. In 1948, he was accepted as a member of the Actors Studio, but he decided to forgo a promising acting career and became involved in production.

“I became infuriated by the racially degrading stereotypes that white film producers threw up on American screens,” he wrote in 1969. “It became clear to me that unless we black people began to produce information for screen and television there would always be a distortion of the ‘black image.’ ”

In 1950 he began working with Louis de Rochemont, a noted documentary filmmaker and the producer of “Lost Boundaries.” From 1952 to 1963 he lived in Canada and worked for the National Film Board of Canada as a writer, editor and producer.

He married Louise Archambault in August 1959. She survives him, as do their three children, David, Taiyi and Maiya Greaves; two brothers, Theodore and Donald; a sister, Ruth Evadne Brooks; three grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.

Mr. Greaves produced short films for the United Nations and the United States Information Agency before forming his production company, in 1964. He first attracted attention as a filmmaker with “Still a Brother: Inside the Black Middle Class,” an examination of the barriers facing upwardly mobile blacks, which he produced for National Educational Television in 1968.

Around the same time he wrote, produced, directed and edited

“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.” An experimental layers-of-reality work, it involved two actors performing a scene in Central Park while being filmed by a crew that was itself being filmed by another crew, all of the action presided over by Mr. Greaves himself.

William Greaves, 2nd right, Don Fellows and Patricia Ree Gilbert filming "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One."  
Credit Jerry Pantzer

He was unable to find a distributor, and except for screenings in Paris and New York in 1980 it languished for more than 20 years. It was finally shown at the Brooklyn Museum and the Sundance Film Festival in the ’90s, but it was not seen in movie theaters until it opened, to glowing reviews, in 2005.

Manohla Dargis of The Times, while acknowledging that the film was in some ways dated, called it “highly entertaining and, at moments, revelatory about filmmaking as a site of creative tension between individual vision and collective endeavor.”

Other filmmakers took notice, among them Steven Soderbergh, who as executive producer (with the actor Steve Buscemi) helped Mr. Greaves complete a belated sequel, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 ½” (2005). They are now available as a two-DVD set from the Criterion Collection.

In his later years, when asked about his achievements as a chronicler of black history and black life, Mr. Greaves was proud but modest. “I thought I was going to be a hurricane, but I ended up a becoming merely a single raindrop,” he once said. “Hopefully there are other raindrops of similar mind.”

Peter Keepnews and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Be in the Know- The Latest Conversations About Wealth Inequality

 Grand ambition about inequality … Thomas Piketty.

Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty – review

There has been an intense debate about this surprise bestseller. What is the upshot?

By Stephanie Flanders
The Guardian, Thursday 17 July 2014 02.30 EDT

This is a VIB – very important book. Nearly everyone agrees about that. But the reasons for its importance have changed in the months since it was published. At first it was important because it was a big book on a big subject: a book of grand ambition about inequality, written not by the latest "thinker" but a respected academic economist with real numbers to go with his theory. We hadn't had anything like that in ages. This was the "Piketty as rockstar" phase, when the book was an "improbable hit" and people wrote breathless articles about the modern successor to Marx who could crunch the numbers but also quote Balzac, The Simpsons and The West Wing.

Writing a bestselling economics book is usually a good way to make other economists hate you. But at first even they heaped praise on Thomas Piketty for casting fresh light on inequality – an area where the official statistics are notoriously weak. Say what you like about the theory, the argument went, you had to thank him for the numbers.

At this point you didn't need to read it to have an opinion about it. Indeed for some, not having read it was a badge of pride. Ed Miliband unashamedly told people he hadn't got beyond the first chapter – and kept on saying that for several weeks. Maybe he has now. Or maybe he's just decided that the debate about the book is more important than the book itself. That's certainly the conclusion I have come to, and not just because several of its central arguments have now been questioned.

There are many claims in the 700-odd pages, but let me highlight some of the important ones, before moving on to whether – and why – any of this matters.
Claim one is that income inequality has increased sharply since the late 1970s, with a particularly dramatic rise in the share of total income going to the very highest earners. The most quoted Piketty statistic here is one that no one, to my knowledge, has questioned: that 60% of the increase in US national income in the 30 years after 1977 went to just the top 1% of earners. The only section of the US population that has done better than the top 1% is the top 10th of that 1%. The top 100th of the 1% have done best of all.

These are remarkable numbers. Uncovering and bringing together this data for the US and a handful of other countries using tax returns is a major achievement, which some say merits a Nobel prize on its own. Piketty goes on to show that this dramatic rise in income inequality hasn't happened in all rich economies, and, oddly, does not really have much to do with capital. Even in the US, it has been driven by soaring salaries at the top end of the pay scale, not rising incomes from capital.

That rather large complication to the story does not stop Piketty focusing the rest of the book on capital, which he says has also become more unequally distributed since the 1970s, not just in the US but in Europe too. He believes this trend toward greater wealth inequality is very likely to continue, because the returns from capital are likely to grow faster than the economy itself, and faster than the owners of that wealth are likely to be able to spend it.

This is the "central contradiction of capitalism", which he summarises with a Marxian turn of phrase: "the entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future."

This is where things get tricky, not just for Piketty but for the general reader, who simply wants to know whether he's right. Let me cut to the chase and say that the evidence for rising wealth inequality is not nearly as clear as the evidence for rising inequality of incomes. Further, even some of Piketty's biggest fans in the academic world have their doubts whether the forces pushing the economy in that direction are as strong as he suggests. Most would agree that the developed economies are likely to grow more slowly as their populations get older. This might have the "terrifying" consequences for wealth inequality that he suggests, but it's also possible that slower growth will be as costly to the owners of capital as it is for everyone else. Their share of the total pie might even decrease.

That is actually what has happened in the UK recently. In the boom years after the mid 90s, the owners of capital took a larger share of national income, and the labour share tended to decline. But the trend reversed itself when the economy hit the skids in 2007, and the labour share is back to where it was in the early 70s. Income inequality has also fallen slightly over this period, at least in the UK. So, whatever terrible things have happened to our economy in the past five years, they haven't followed the long-term path sketched out by Piketty. Rather the opposite.

There is some evidence that the top 10% in the US is sitting on a higher share of total wealth now than in the 70s. But it's difficult to draw similar conclusions about Britain or France because the data is so patchy. From what we can tell, the share of total wealth held by the top 1% – and 0.01% – hasn't changed much at all.

Piketty has some interesting analysis demonstrating that wealth begets more wealth: the richer university endowments, for example, tend to earn the highest returns on their investments, not just in absolute but percentage terms. This rings true and also has some economic logic to it. The more money you have to invest, the more – in cash terms – you can afford to spend on finding the best opportunities, without materially cutting into your returns. As a force for rising wealth inequality this makes sense and probably merits a book of its own, given that individuals across the developed world are increasingly having to take greater responsibility for saving for their retirement. It matters if small investors are going to be systematically disadvantaged in making these long-term investments.

But the concentration of wealth at the top doesn't seem as inexorable as all that. As the economist and former US treasury secretary Larry Summers has pointed out, most of the people on the list of 400 wealthiest Americans in 1982 would have had enough to money to qualify in 2012 if they had simply earned a return of 4% a year. But fewer than a 10th actually did so. The proportion of the top 400 who inherited their wealth has actually been falling – not rising, as Piketty's theory would also suggest.

Given what has been happening to incomes at the top, you would expect to have seen more concentration of wealth than we can find in the data. That might be – as Piketty suggests – because rich people are good at hiding their money from the taxman. But it might also be because they are very good at spending their money, and their children even more so. I was at a conference recently for advisers and trustees to family estates, and was amused to hear speaker after speaker assert that the "biggest threat" to a family fortune was "not the taxman or the markets but the family itself".

Say we agree with Piketty, and conclude that wealth has become more concentrated, his own numbers show this is a fairly recent phenomenon. As he admits, the single most important structural change in the distribution of wealth in the past 100 years has been in the other direction. That is the emergence of a new "patrimonial class", somewhere between rich and poor, owning 25%-35% of the nation's wealth.

He describes the emergence of this class in the middle years of the 20th century as a transformation that "deeply altered the social landscape and the political structure of society and helped redefine the terms of distributive conflict". That may well be true. But for me, what's more interesting about this shift is not what it might or might not have done for "the terms of distributive conflict", but what it did for households – and the broader economy. Piketty really doesn't go into that at all, which is a shame because if you don't have a clear understanding of the benefits of broader capital ownership it's difficult to explain why it's so "terrifying" if things are now moving back in the other direction.

The latest official survey of UK household incomes and wealth shows that around a third of all UK households has either negative net worth – debts greater than their assets – or net financial assets worth less than £5,000. I am more worried about that lack of wealth at the bottom and in the middle of the income scale than about the squillions being amassed by a very few.

We know that families with that little to fall back on are much more likely to fall into long-term cycles of dependency and poverty. We also know – and if we didn't know we could learn from reading the Daily Mail that Piketty's "patrimonial middle class" feels more squeezed these days, whatever might have happened to the financial value of their home. He seems to assume that all these things are connected, that the greater income flowing to the 1% is making things worse for everyone else. But he never really makes the case. That is remarkable omission for a book of such magisterial sweep.

When I was first learning economics in the late 80s and 90s, the UK was just getting used to the free-market idea that higher incomes at the top did not have to mean lower incomes at the bottom. To ensure growth in the economy, the message went, you had to give the "wealth creators" the incentive to increase both the pie and their slice of it. Economists still believe that, up to a point. But in the wake of the financial crisis there has been broader acceptance of the view that very high levels of income inequality can increase the risk of such crises, and so hurt the economy. We also have evidence – from the IMF, of all places – that in unequal economies, more redistributive taxes might promote faster growth. As with most things, it's a matter of degree.

This all helps to explain why Piketty's book has been such a smash. Many people are worried about the slow rate of growth in the developed economies since the financial crisis in 2008. Many are also worried about rising inequality. At first glance, Capital seems to offer an elegant way to explain both. But, by his own admission, the world is a lot more complicated than talk of a "central contradiction to capitalism" might suggest. So is the relationship between capital accumulation and growth.

Like Miliband, Piketty sees a clear difference between the wealth creators and the asset strippers – between the fat cat "rentier" capital that devours the future and the more socially useful capital of the entrepreneur. But his own broad definition of capital doesn't really help us draw that kind of distinction.

It's all thrown in together, along with all of our houses, and everything else with a financial value that can be bought or sold. That's a pity because if there's one thing that policymakers around the world are looking for it's a way to channel a bit more money into productive investment – and a bit less into house prices and stocks and shares.

Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth. But when it comes to the forces driving growth and wealth accumulation in our modern economy what he has probably done most to bring out into the open is our collective ignorance and confusion.

• Stephanie Flanders is chief market strategist for Europe, JP Morgan Asset Management.
 

The Women Gather for Humanity's Young~ Sweet Honey in the Rock

For Peace, Let's Try the Lemur Way~

 

  Golden Bamboo Lemur and Baby

A Lemur Rescue Mission in Madagascar

New York Times/Science

AUG. 18, 2014

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

 

Lemurs, which live only on the island nation of Madagascar, are long-tailed, long-legged primates with an astonishingly graceful leap. They are also in serious peril: Of the 103 species of lemur, 90 percent are endangered, critically endangered or threatened, and several are on the brink of extinction, according to the primatologist Patricia C. Wright of Stony Brook University.

Dr. Wright, 69, has long been a leader in the effort to prevent what she calls a “lemur holocaust”; in September, she will receive the $250,000 Indianapolis Prize for conservation; and she is featured in a new 3-D Imax documentary, “Island of Lemurs: Madagascar,” (Click the title to view the film trailer) narrated by Morgan Freeman.

We spoke for two hours recently. Here is an edited and condensed version of the conversation.

Q. Did you always want to be a primatologist?

A. No. That happened in a roundabout way. In the early 1970s, I was a social worker with New York’s welfare department. My former husband and I lived in a small Brooklyn apartment, with a pair of South American owl monkeys we kept as pets. Then, in 1973, our daughter was born. Two weeks later, the monkeys, to our great surprise, also had a baby!

 

 Dr. Patricia C. Wright in Madagascar

Within our human family, I was the one who did the child care. But among the monkeys, it was the father who tended the baby. The mother just sat on the couch and nibbled grapes now and then. As I watched them, I thought: “Wow, they have a great system. Does male care happen often in nature?”

The question changed my life. After the marriage ended in 1977, I went to graduate school and wrote a doctoral dissertation that discussed, among other things, sex-role divisions among owl monkeys.

How did lemurs become your focus?

After graduate school, I got a job at Duke University’s Primate Center. They have a huge colony of lemurs, and I just loved watching them. It turned out that lemurs were matriarchal — females led the group. They intrigued me.

Do lemurs and humans have a common ancestor?

We do. If you go back about 65-70 million years, that’s when the common ancestor lived in Africa. What makes lemurs so special is that they evolved in Madagascar in isolation from monkeys and other primates. Thus, with present-day lemurs, we can see something of what our ancestors must have been like.

So in 1986, when an opportunity came to go to Madagascar, I jumped at the chance. I was tasked with finding out if one species, the greater bamboo lemur, had gone extinct.

At the time, did you understand how endangered all of Madagascar’s lemurs were?

To tell the truth, no one knew. The country had been closed off to Westerners for more than a decade. The economic infrastructure had fallen apart. There were no paved roads. People resorted to slash-and-burn subsistence farming, which meant slashing and burning the rain forest.

My journey was just one disappointment after another, until I came to Ranomafana in the Southeast. I stopped in a village there because it had hot mineral springs and I needed a bath. Later, the villagers guided me into this gorgeous forest, where we camped. And there I spotted something I thought was the animal I’d been searching for. It wasn’t. It was actually a species new to science, the golden bamboo lemur. Not long after that, I did see a greater bamboo lemur. It wasn’t extinct after all.

You were able to get Ranomafana designated as a national park. How does an outsider get to do that?

Well, around 1986, timber exploiters came and offered the villagers money to cut down the forest. I got very upset. I went to the capital, Antananarivo, and spoke to the head of the Department of Water and Forests. He said: “I agree that these animals are very important to Madagascar. We are poor. If you can find the money, I’ll help you make a national park there.”

It seemed to me that the park could only succeed if the villagers benefited from it. I asked them what they needed. They said jobs, health and education. So I began looking for grants and had some success. I received a U.S.A.I.D. grant for nearly $4 million. A couple of years later, I received a MacArthur “genius” grant, so I put that money into local health and education.

How endangered is the lemur today?

The ones at Ranomafana are mostly safe. But 90 percent of the lemur habitat elsewhere on the island has become wasteland. In 2009, there was a coup. Afterward, the central government was very weak and there was a lot of lawlessness. Timber exploiters came in from Asia and started cutting down the northern forests. Then they started demanding meat for dinner. The meat was lemurs.

 

We have one lemur species in the North where there are only 30 individuals left. The greater bamboo lemur, the one that I was sent to search for, we’ve found some more patches of them. Still, there are only about 500 left. That’s not a lot for a primate. The good news is that very recently, the politics have changed. They now have an elected government and there’s a lot of hope that things can be turned around.

Have the investments you’ve made helped the people and animals of Ranomafana?

Oh, definitely. Because there’s a park, 30,000 visitors a year come to Ranomafana. There are now 26 small hotels around the park, locally owned — which means jobs and income.

We made a social contract with the villagers. If they’d stop going into the forest to hunt, we’d make sure they had schools and clinics. And that’s worked well. Right now, we have a problem with people coming from elsewhere to do illegal gold mining in the forest. It’s the villagers who go to the government: “Get these people out of our park.”

How do you stay hopeful?

Oh, I can get angry, sometimes. I certainly get angry when an animal is killed. If something like that happens, I go to the villagers and talk with them. Sometimes, I cry in front of them to show how I feel. There’s a lot of empathy to their culture and they are more than likely to respond to that than if I preached at them. Who am I? It’s their country.

Actually, there’s a lot that can get done in Madagascar. For one thing, reforestation. We could also protect what remains of the rain forest and build corridors between the various national parks so that the wilderness areas aren’t so fragmented.

The matter that originally brought you to Madagascar — sex role divisions among primates: what has observing lemurs taught you?

That this old saw about that male dominance being the natural order of things ought to be more rigorously examined. Among lemurs, females lead. They go into the fruit tree first, and the males must stay out until the females decide they can come in. Interestingly, the female leaders don’t strut around a lot. They work out the relationships in the group peaceably.

That’s made me think it might be time for our species to do things more the lemur way.

J. Cole Releases an Impassioned Song About Michael Brown, ‘Be Free’

A Song Born When Pain Is Still Fresh

By BEN SISARIO

 AUG. 15, 2014

J. Cole, whose song “Be Free” ricocheted around the world in a matter of hours after he posted it on the SoundCloud platform. 

Credit Willie Davis for The New York Times

In 1970, it took a few weeks for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to record and release the song “Ohio” in response to the shooting of unarmed college students at Kent State University.

On Friday, just days after the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo., J. Cole’s somber protest song “Be Free” spread around the world in a matter of hours, fueled by social media and the hip-hop world’s intense online discourse about Mr. Brown, an 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer last Saturday.

Mr. Cole, a 29-year-old rapper from North Carolina, posted the song early Friday to the online audio platform SoundCloud, which lets users upload tracks and easily share them through social media. By late afternoon it had been listened to more than 250,000 times and, with feelings still raw over the situation in Ferguson, it began to quickly ricochet around the Internet.

“All we want to do is take the chains off,” Mr. Cole sings in the track, his voice breaking over mournful keyboards. “All we want to do is be free.”

J. Cole’s “Be Free” was released, publicized and commented on with remarkable speed; according to Billboard, it had become the most talked-about track on Twitter by 10 a.m. Friday, a little more than six hours after it was released. Ann Powers, NPR’s music critic, called it “the first fully formed protest song I’ve heard addressing the death of Mike Brown” and said it was “evocative of Nina Simone.”

Mr. Cole’s song punctuated what was already a strong reaction in hip-hop circles, with artists, fans and critics going online to express themselves and debate the issue. And it followed the hip-hop world’s pitched reaction to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, which drew musical responses by Public Enemy, Dead Prez, Mos Def and others.

“In the many, many instances where tragedies like this have happened,” said Matthew Trammell, an associate editor at The Fader, a music and fashion magazine, “people in hip-hop immediately feel a responsibility to use the platform they have to raise a certain perspective that is not the default.”

On Instagram, the rapper Killer Mike posted a picture of Mr. Brown’s mother and stepfather along with an impassioned note of sympathy that was noted by BuzzFeed, BET and many other outlets. On Tuesday, Wiz Khalifa and Young Jeezy performed in St. Louis wearing “R.I.P. Mike Brown” T-shirts. Young Jeezy also posted a picture of himself at a looted Ferguson convenience store, writing: “The answer is not tearing down our own neighborhoods and communities, the answer is goin to the source of the problem in numbers.”

Tef Poe, a St. Louis rapper, drew wide attention this week for a barrage of online posts, while at the same time thousands of people on Twitter used the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown to criticize the stereotyping of young African-Americans by law enforcement and the news media.

Mr. Brown was an aspiring rapper himself, posting his own songs to SoundCloud, a streaming platform that is popular among young listeners and artists — particularly in dance and hip-hop — for its YouTube-like ease in uploading and sharing audio. Mr. Brown’s songs were even subject to insta-analysis by The Riverfront Times, a St. Louis weekly, which at first characterized his lyrics as “gangster” but later removed that word after criticism.

In a blog post unveiling the track, Mr. Cole wrote candidly about Mr. Brown’s death and the feelings it inspired in him. “That coulda been me, easily,” he wrote. “It could have been my best friend. I’m tired of being desensitized to the murder of black men.”

The lyrics to the song allude to Trayvon Martin’s death, with Mr. Cole singing, “I will stand my ground.” But Mr. Trammell of Fader noted that “Be Free” is not a straightforward protest song, avoiding political commentary in favor of an emotional, “fatigued” response to Mr. Brown’s death and all that it represents.

“For hip-hop artists, a lot of whom have come from places or circumstances where occurrences like this are not uncommon, they feel a very personal reaction to it,” Mr. Trammell said. “It’s not about political affiliations, or thoughts about the police or the president. It’s that these are the same kinds of people in the same kinds of places they grew up in.”

Mr. Cole on Friday declined to be interviewed about “Be Free.”

“He’d like the song to stand on its own,” a spokeswoman said.

Taking Up Arms Where Birds Feast on Buffet of Salmon

AUG. 15, 2014

By FELICITY BARRINGER

  

The Cormorants of East Sand Island

Scientists studying the cormorant colony in Oregon are looking for the best way to remove most of the birds.

Image Credit:

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

ASTORIA, Ore. — The salmon here in the Columbia River, nearly driven to extinction by hydroelectric dams a quarter century ago, have been increasing in number — a fact not lost on the birds that like to eat them. These now flock by the thousands each spring to the river’s mouth, where the salmon have their young, and gorge at leisure.

As a result, those charged with nursing the salmon back to robust health have a new plan to protect them: shoot the birds.

Joyce Casey, chief of the environmental resources branch at the Army Corps of Engineers office in Portland, said that for young salmon headed seaward, the hungry horde of about 30,000 double-crested cormorants on East Sand Island has posed a risk no less serious than that posed by some of the dams her agency built.

Butch Smith, a fisherman, said that killing thousands of the birds “is the one thing out of anything else we can do to recover salmon fastest.”

But Stan Senner of the National Audubon Society argues that to kill off some of the cormorant colony here, which makes up one-quarter of the birds’ western population, “is an extreme measure, totally inappropriate.”

Cormorants on East Sand Island, who gorge

on salmon in the Columbia River.

Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

He said it was possible to shoo them away, noting: “They came from somewhere else. They can go back to somewhere else.”

But efforts to encourage the birds to move have been, at best, inconclusive; the cormorants often return to East Sand Island.

This is not the first time the government has decided to kill a predator or a competitor to protect an endangered species.

Last year the Fish and Wildlife Service began to kill up to 3,900 invasive barred owls, which outcompete endangered spotted owls. Since 2008, about 60 salmon-eating sea lions have been killed near the Bonneville Dam in the Columbia River.

In the Great Lakes, the authorities have shot dead thousands of double-crested cormorants over the last several years.

The wisdom of using lethal means to tinker with the new natural order of things created by human activities provokes sharp debate.

A tern with a salmon. 

Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

This debate is different from ones about killing wolves, coyotes or prairie dogs to protect livestock. Here, both species, the one to be killed and the one to be protected, belong in the wild.

“This is a fascinating issue of how we as a society make choices about how we’re going to use our resources for the benefit of one interest in society to the detriment of another,” Ms. Casey said.

This was true when the Columbia and Snake River dams were built to bring cheap hydropower to the region; it was to the benefit of growing communities, but drastically to the detriment of salmon, whose way to spawning grounds was often impeded by the structures and who were sometimes killed by the dams’ spinning turbines. Thirteen of 19 salmon populations in the Columbia River have been listed either as threatened or endangered.

Ritchie Graves, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that the slow improvement in the abundance of endangered salmon on the Columbia River had helped create the current predicament.

He added that the salmon were responding to the agency’s efforts, and the birds around the region were responding to the improved salmon numbers: “If you’re a predator in California or southern Oregon and you don’t have anything to eat, how many years before you move somewhere else?”

For cormorants around the western United States, “somewhere else” often turned out to be East Sand Island, on the Washington State side of the river and close to the spot where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean.

Ritchie Graves, center, a fisheries biologist. 

A plan to save the salmon involves shooting birds. 

Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The cormorants were not the first fish-eating birds on East Sand Island to get salmon defenders’ attention. The island, which was significantly reinforced by dredging activity years ago, also houses thousands of Caspian terns.

They moved there 15 years ago — prompted by wildlife officials — from islands farther up the Columbia River, where salmon were more of their diet.

Biologists then reduced the terns’ prime nesting area by two-thirds, to 1.6 acres after federal officials decided that the terns’ potential to eat endangered salmon was still too great. Meanwhile, cormorant numbers go up, even though scientists experimentally reduced the available nesting area they could use to four acres from 16.

Most biologists agree that the birds find it hard to beat the ready food available at the mouth of the river. Last year the total of nesting pairs of double-crested cormorants rose to nearly 15,000, up from about 6,500 in 1999. Each pair, on average, raises two chicks.

By 2011, scientists at Oregon State University found, the cormorants each year ate about 20 million juvenile salmon as they headed to sea.

Federal fisheries officials are focused on 2018, the year that represents the end of the current, much-litigated federal plan, called a “biological opinion.” It details the status of endangered salmon stocks, the specifics of how the government plans to restore them over time, and the metrics that will determine if they have succeeded.

Cormorants on East Sand Island, near 

the spot where the Columbia River meets the Pacific.  

Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

As part of the effort to revise this proposal and ensure it passes judicial muster, scientists have recommended that the corps help the salmon by cutting the cormorant population by nearly two-thirds, to a maximum of 5,939 nesting pairs. To do this, the proposed shooting would begin 2015 and end in 2018, leaving 4,000 dead birds a year.

Blaine Parker, a fisheries biologist for the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, likes the plan.

“To continue to allow cormorants to grow unchecked is a serious barrier to salmon recovery,” he said. The tribes, which have treaty rights to the fish, in 2008 signed 10-year accords with the corps and two other federal agencies to help salmon restoration.

Mr. Parker argues that the government and rate payers who buy hydroelectricity “have spent hundreds of millions annually to make the ecosystem more fish-friendly” and do not want to see the fish eaten by birds.

But Mr. Senner of the National Audubon Society said some of the scientific analysis in the corps’ proposal was insufficient. “We’re not persuaded they have fully explored ways of improving habitats elsewhere or other means of dispersing” the cormorants, he said.

Bob Heess, a retired marine biologist, came late last month to an open house in Astoria during which the corps had conversations with the public and took comments on their plan to shoot birds.

His view: “I’ve seen people try to mess with Mother Nature before, and it never works. It goes toward creating more problems.”

Canine Humor

NO KISSES?????

SketchFactor Lost Its Anti-Racial Profiling 'Partner' as Soon as It Launched

Smiling Young White People Make App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods

 

Beloveds, I read this article, and decided against posting it. You know I'm working on NOT being so good at seeing the negative in society. And definately, not infecting your sweet clear thinking, with more disheartening Knewz....But then today, I ran across a follow-up article on this topic, from another source. So here are both of them.  

File this one in: The Way Some People Think folder. I responded to the second article, from my HrtSmiles identity. It's included below.

lovu~Kendke 

Valley Wag

Sam Biddle

Filed to: racism 

8/07/2014

Is there any way to keep white people from using computers, before this whole planet is ruined? I ask because the two enterprising white entrepreneurs above just made yet another app for avoiding non-white areas of your town—and it's really taking off!

Facebook Is Mostly White Dudes

Water is wet, the night is dark, the sugar is sweet, and according to a new internal report, the…Read more

Crain's reports on SketchFactor, a racist app made for avoiding "sketchy" neighborhoods, which is the term young white people use to describe places where they don't feel safe because they watched all five seasons of The Wire:

SketchFactor, the brainchild of co-founders Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington, is a Manhattan-based navigation app that crowdsources user experiences along with publicly available data to rate the relative "sketchiness" of certain areas in major cities. The app will launch on the iTunes on Friday, capping off a big week for the startup, which was named as a finalist in the NYC BigApps competition.

According to Ms. McGuire, a Los Angeles native who lives in the West Village, the impetus behind SketchFactor was her experience as a young woman navigating the streets of Washington, D.C., where she worked at a nonprofit.

[...]

After meeting Mr. Herrington, an electrical engineer who was taken with the SketchFactor idea, the two quit their Washington D.C.-based jobs and decamped to New York City with funding from family and friends.

As one of the finalists in the BigApps competition, SketchFactor is poised to receive more attention when it launches.

With firsthand experience living in Washington, D.C., where white terror is as ubiquitous as tucked-in polo shirts, grinning caucasians Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington should be unstoppable in the field of smartphone race-baiting—they're already finalists in a $20,000 startup contest! But don't worry: they're not racist. It says so right on their blog, which asks people to share "sketchy" stories about strangers they spot:

Who we're not: racists, bigots, sexists. Any discriminatory posts will be deleted.

Oh, well in that case. The app launches tomorrow, so it's probably safest to just stay indoors until then.

To contact the author of this post, write to biddle@gawker.com

SketchFactor Lost Its Anti-Racial Profiling 'Partner' as Soon as It Launched

Arit John

Atlantic Media/Technology
August 15, 2014

A sampling of SketchFactor posts near Union Square in Manhattan.  (SKETCHFACTOR/THE WIRE)

Last week Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington, two white millennials, unveiled SketchFactor, a crowdsourced app that lets people identify (and avoid) places where "sketchy" events have occurred, depending on one's potentially racist idea of what is or isn't sketchy. But when the controversial app was first announced, there was one promising detail that made it seem like this app might not fall into the same trap as its predecessors: its "partnership" with Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, an anti-racial profiling group formed in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. The partnership was promoted on the front page of the SketchFactor website.
But according to Million Hoodies' Deputy Director Dante Berry, that partnership never existed. "We never supported the app," Berry told The Wire this week. Million Hoodies supported the idea of a technology that could be used to document incidences of racial profiling, but he said "we were never partners, and we're not partners."
In fact, Berry said he first realized SketchFactor was claiming the partnership last Thursday, a day before the app launched, while he was on a conference call with SketchFactor co-founder Allison McGuire and The Wire. When The Wire asked Berry this week when he'd learned that SketchFactor has listed Million Hoodies as a partner on its website, he said "right after that call."
During the call, the partnership was mentioned several times and uncontested by Berry, but now all references to Million Hoodies have been removed from the site at the organization's request. SketchFactor also declined to confirm or deny Berry's statements. McGuire said she had no comment when asked about Million Hoodies distancing itself from SketchFactor over the phone.

SkecthFactor was created with good intentions

SketchFactor gained immediate infamy last week after a Crain's New York Business profile depicted McGuire and her co-founder, Daniel Herrington, as smiling, if not oblivious and tone deaf, white millennials. It was panned by several media outlets, though McGuire noted that the press from outlets that interviewed her had been good.
"This is not an app that's created for one type of person to report one type of thing," she said during the conference call. "There's a reason we're called SketchFactor. Everyone experiences sketchiness. We're not SafetyFactor. We're not AvoidBlackPeopleFactor."

SketchFactor near a Manhattan Shake Shack: 4.

Here's how the app works — users document an incident and describe various aspects of sketchiness including:

• Its SketchFactor, ranked 1-5
• Whether you're submitting a "pro-tip," "weird" incident, "dangerous" incident, or "something else"
• How well lit the area was
• What time of day the incident occurred
• Whether it happened "just now" (within the last hour), "recently" (within the last two weeks), or "a long time ago" (within the last year)
• A description of the sketchy incident

You can down vote incidents you don't like and mark them as spam, offensive or not sketchy, and ideally the app's algorithm will keep those kinds of posts out of your feed. Spam and offensive incidents get flagged for review, but the goal is to let people filter through votes. "It doesn't really matter what we individually think is sketchy," McGuire said. "It's not really about us individually, it's about the collective crowd."
During the call, at least, Berry seemed to be on the same page. "It's a way for marginalized communities, and also everyone else, to really talk about the experiences that people go through every day and providing the context," he said. "On our end we're really framing it in a way of how can we create a more safe community for all of us, not just a select few."
But after the conference call, Berry sent a press release to The Wire from Million Hoodies distancing the organization from SketchFactor. According to the release, while Million Hoodies doesn't "object to trying and testing any potential technology that can help empower communities" (emphasis added): 

We do not support nor have we ever supported the language or description of "sketchy" or "sketchfactor" but continued to explore working with the team to possibly license the technology that powered a tool we thought could be useful. As we worked to explore this possibility through a partnership, SketchFactor launched suddenly to the public without any further lead time. 

Million Hoodies now says it was solely a beta tester, though Berry said that he hasn't used the app since it was released and didn't want to comment on the quality of the app now.

The real problem with the app

Berry hasn't used the app since it launched, but we have. And while most the of the backlash against the app has been that it's racist, the truth is it's just spammy. For example:

Exhibit B:

McGuire said that while she fully expected people to abuse the app and possibly post "racist bile," she also expected people to post great tips. "The internet is terrible, but it's also amazing," she said. And based on a day of using the app, there has been some possibly valuable, though unverified, information amid the spam and poop sightings. Example:

And maybe the app will get better. McGuire said that an upcoming version of the app will link people to resources when they report a situation. For example, SketchFactor has been working with the D.C. Forensic Nurse Examiners, a group that helps sexual assault victims. Ideally, when a user reports being sexually assaulted, the app would direct her to information on what to do after an assault.
"So for example, I didn't know this, and I have been sexually assaulted, I didn't know that after one of those incidences occurs, you should not smoke a cigarette, chew gum, change, shower, etc," McGuire said.
The problem is that despite good intentions, one app can't be all things to all people. As McGuire put it, "there's a reason that I find something sketchy and and reason Dante (Berry) finds something sketchy. And everyone cares about sketchiness, it's not a white people problem."
Yes, everyone cares about "sketchiness," even if, like Million Hoodies, that's not the word you'd use. That's why Million Hoodies has looked for apps that allow marginalized communities to document incidences of police misconduct and racial profiling, and why some white people think sites like Ghetto Tracker aka Nice Part of Town are a good idea. But when you try to combine those concerns under the umbrella of a charged word like "sketchy" it doesn't work.

HrtSmiles • 2 minutes ago

This app is based on an idea that is 'wack'*. It is born out of fear-based thinking that is negative, erroneous and unreal. It does nothing to create a positive and wholesome environment in our cities.

When will white people realize, that to the rest of humanity, animals and plants, THEY are the 'sketchiest' creatures on our planet? It's indescribable....this ignorance, arrogance and obliviousness, that characterizes so many of us lacking melanin in skin tone, sensitivity and soul. The inability of some people to see themselves in context with other living creatures (humans, animals and plants), and to attempt to grasp how their presence may be felt and their actions regarded will always be a tremendous threat to harmony.

Whacky, sketchy, STUPID. Change your Heart, your thinking...and your experience and environment WILL reflect that change.
"As a woman/man thinketh....."

*wack:
1) Something that just plain sucks, or isn't cool at all. Lame.
2)To be of low or dubious quality. Origin: comes from 'whacky', which
evolved to 'whacked' or 'whacked out'. Eventually shortened to 'wack'.
3)Something that sucks horribly; stupid; fake; talentless