I apologize for having to bombard your inboxes with notifications, but I have now set up the new blog so that you can subscribe with your email address. Whenever I post on the new blog, you will get an email (but you won’t get any other unwanted emails).

To subscribe, just go to blog.quentinread.com, enter your email into the box at the bottom of the page, click “Subscribe” and confirm your address in the window that pops up. Simple as that! Thanks so much for your support.

I’ll leave you with this selfie I took at the National Portrait Gallery — this great American’s likeness is right between Michelle Obama and LL Cool J.

Greetings from springlike Maryland where it’s the best time of year, pleasant and warm but the humidity and bugs haven’t set in. This weekend I’m definitely going birding to try to see some migrant songbirds! Yeah warblers!

I wanted to let all my subscribers (though there aren’t many of you, Hi Mom & Dad!) know that I’ve decided to split this blog in two. From now on, I am going to do all my “professional” blogging about ecology, environmental science, data, and code at this new site:

blog.quentinread.com

That address is just a pointer that automatically redirects you to qdread.github.io/blog.

If I ever get the urge to post something more personal, I will keep doing it here at this blog. I’ve already transferred over my recent posts on food waste to the new blog.

I’m working on transferring the comment threads and email subscriptions to the new blog, but it’s a steep learning curve. I am switching all my web stuff over to the GitHub site because: (1) it was annoying to have to deal with website builders that have a profit-making business model, where the free version is crappy to work with unless you fork over some $$$, (2) I’m hoping to impress potential employers by doing everything on GitHub which is software for keeping precise track of updates and modifications to code you write, and (3) it’s a fun challenge to write all the code for the website myself — now I have complete control over how everything looks, if I can figure out how to do it!

So that’s the news for today. As I said I’m hoping to keep the email subscriptions in place but you might have to reenter your email on the new site. Check back for updates!

best regards,

Quentin

If you read my previous blog post, you won’t be surprised to find out that a lot of the social media posts about Stop Food Waste Day are encouraging individuals to change their behavior to reduce household food waste. These efforts are crucial. Individual choice can go a long way toward reducing food waste. However, as long as the true price of food is not reflected in what we pay for food, society as a whole will continue to value food too cheaply and continue to waste it at a high rate.

Figure taken from Cities and Circular Economy for Food

What do I mean by the “true price of food?” I mean a price that includes the cost of all the environmental impacts generated in the production and the consumption of that food. A recent report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation suggests that society incurs a cost of $2 for each $1 spent on food. That suggests that food only costs 1/3 as much as it should. Breaking down the $2 in societal cost, about half of that is related to consumption, whether overconsumption (obesity) or underconsumption (hunger). The other half is the impact of production. The foundation report divides this into health, economic, and environmental effects, although the three are interrelated. Environmental scientists and economists use the term “externality” to refer to a cost that is caused by some activity but is paid not by the person who did the activity but by society. In the case of food, a negative externality related to health would be, for example, that the health costs of treating adult-onset diabetes are not paid by the manufacturers of sugary foods that contribute to diabetes. Externalities can also be positive — for example, a fruit orchard could beautify the countryside or provide nectar for bees that pollinate other crops nearby. Unfortunately, however, it appears that in our current food system the negative externalities outweigh the positive.

Our current work is focusing especially on the environmental piece of the pie in the picture above. Piggybacking off work being done at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture, we are working on models that will first determine the environmental impacts caused by the entire food system in the United States. This requires us to look at the externalities at each stage of the food supply chain, from farm to fork. Let’s take greenhouse gas emissions as an example. As food goes through the supply chain, activities involved with producing, processing, distributing, and transporting it release carbon dioxide and other gases that cause global warming into the atmosphere.

Image created by QDR

The image here shows wheat being made into spaghetti as an example. At the agricultural production stage, farm equipment burns fuel and releases greenhouse gas. The factory where the noodles are made releases more carbon dioxide. Distributors release even more when they truck the packaged product to stores, and consumers do too when they transport and cook the food. The total amount of greenhouse gas released increases as the food moves through the supply chain. You could say that spaghetti “virtually” represents a higher and higher amount of environmental impact, the further along the supply chain it progresses. In all cases, the greenhouse gas released is a negative externality because it harms us all by contributing to global warming, but isn’t included in the cost of the noodles. But the good thing is, if we can reduce waste at any one stage of the supply chain, we could get the positive effects of the waste reduction to trickle back up the chain and ultimately reduce the total environmental impact of the whole process.

Image created by QDR, data from FAO

We also need to know how much of the environmental impact caused by the food system can be traced back to food that is ultimately wasted. The rate of waste is different both across the different stages of the process and across different types of food. I made this (cute!) figure using data from a report on food waste from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The steeper the lines go down, the bigger proportion of food is wasted for that stage and for that type of food. We’re going to use those numbers, or similar ones, to determine the overall amount of food currently wasted, which will let us figure out how much of the environmental impact we could potentially reduce by reducing food waste.

Once we have the baseline environmental footprint and the baseline rate of food waste, we are going to develop different scenarios representing different potential actions society could take to reduce waste at different stages of the production and consumption process. For each scenario, we will look at the changes in the environmental footprint for greenhouse gases and a number of other categories. We can use that information to rank different alternative solutions to the food waste problem, which will help guide society to take the correct action.

There’s a surefire way to get people to be more efficient and waste less of the food they buy, and thus a surefire solution to reducing food waste. That is to make food more expensive — to include some of those harmful externalities in its cost. But it is clear that if many people in both developed and developing countries already cannot afford enough to eat or can only afford a poor diet of unhealthy food, we cannot simply increase the cost of food by 200% and direct the surplus toward solving the problems caused by food production and consumption. The FAO, in another recent report called “The future of food and agriculture: Alternative pathways to 2050,” does not dance around that issue. In the report, they state that any pathway to a sustainable food system must be accompanied by a more equitable distribution of income both within individual countries and worldwide. That’s a tough challenge for Stop Food Waste Day and for every day.

Food waste and global warming: two sides of the same wicked coin

It’s impossible to spend much time here at SESYNC without hearing the term “wicked problem.” I wasn’t familiar with the term when I first got here, so I quickly read up on it. Turns out, it is a common term in the environmental literature, coined originally in the 1960s in a Management Science editorial, that refers to problems with a certain set of characteristics. Wicked problems can’t be stated in a simple way. They have no absolute right or wrong solutions, only better or worse ones. There is no way to figure out the solution to a wicked problem by trial and error — every solution you attempt has to count. Wicked problems are all unique, but every wicked problem can be described as an outgrowth of a different unique problem. Global climate change would be the premier example of a wicked problem — it defies every attempt to solve it, there is no agreement on the best approach, and as time runs out the constraints on solving it become ever more difficult. Other examples include pandemics like AIDS, the opioid crisis, and global inequality.

Obviously this discussion is leading to food waste, yet another wicked problem. As I mentioned in my last post, the massive environmental impact of food waste means that it is a huge contributor to the wicked problem of global climate change. The back-of-the-envelope math is eye-popping. Around 1/3 of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by global food production, and around 1/3 of all food is wasted. So 1/3 * 1/3 = 1/9 or roughly 10% of our greenhouse gases are emitted in order to produce food that no one eats! That crude calculation more or less agrees with more sophisticated analyses that have been done. By comparison, around 1/3 of all our greenhouse gas emissions are caused by transportation, so the level of waste would correspond to 1 of every 3 car miles being driven in a circle with no destination. All that is to say that the food waste problem is related to the climate change problem both because food waste contributes to climate change, both are caused by our wasteful culture, and both are wicked problems that are global in scope.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the role of personal responsibility in solving the problem of climate change. A common line of reasoning is that everyone needs to make personal choices that are good for the climate, such as minimizing flying, eating diets low in meat, dairy, and other resource-intensive foods, and taking public transit to work. The rebuttal is that this is a distraction being pushed by neoliberal elites — trivializing the huge problem of climate change and making it into an individual’s problem lets them keep plundering and pillaging the environment behind the scenes. I sympathize with both views. Clearly individual sacrifices will not solve the problem, especially if pro-climate choices are made next to impossible by a system that provides poor to no public transit options, or makes sustainable food options more expensive. However, totally discounting the role of personal responsibility is also a problem. No matter how nefarious or evil we want to think of them, the mega-corporations directly responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions are satisfying demand of individual consumers. One look at the Yellow Vest protests in France is enough to show that this isn’t a matter of a few oligarchs standing in the way of a popular groundswell of will to stop climate change.

Figure from Lancet report showing how changes to agriculture and the food system could lessen the effects of climate change

This tension between personal and collective responsibility also rears its head in the food waste arena. A recent report by the Lancet and a paper in Nature both concluded that (1) global adoption of a “flexitarian” diet — consuming only 1 or 2 servings of meat per week — and (2) reducing food waste by 50% are the two main steps we need to take to make the food system sustainable. Clearly, those two steps will both require top-down policy changes and buy-in from the corporations that are driving and shaping our food choices, as well as bottom-up support from the people actually making the food choices. In a promising development, many corporations have actually voiced their support for food waste reduction and claim to be reducing it in their supply chains. However, they still have a strong financial incentive to sell more product to consumers than they actually need. They accomplish this through numerous overt and subliminal marketing tactics, as I described in my previous post. When consumers do end up overbuying, and some of that food is inevitably wasted, it is no longer the retailer’s responsibility, and that waste does not appear on their balance sheet. The individual is blamed for making poor choices, when in reality the problem is system-wide. Clearly, retailers and processors need to do more than reduce waste in their supply chains. However, the “invisible hand” of the market will not be able to effect the truly needed change, since it goes against the retailers’ interests. This is where the government needs to step in (N.B.: I’m no libertarian!) and regulate to ensure that consumers are not underhandedly persuaded to buy more than they need. However this can’t be successful without also assuming that the culture of abundance and waste needs to change at the individual level — there’s personal responsibility again! Reducing food waste in this way would have the potential to reduce obesity, another wicked problem that is commonly incorrectly blamed on individuals making poor choices, but is truly a collective problem.

Whether food waste or some other global issue, we need to face wicked problems head on both as individuals and as a society if we have any hope of solving them. I hope to follow this post up with more concrete discussion of potential solutions to the food waste problem.

Image credits: plate – mnn.com, sun – maxpixel.net, cartoon – Andrew Baker

Food waste is the trademark problem of our culture of abundance. Pouring huge proportions of our precious land, soil, water, and energy resources into producing food, and inflicting damage on the environment in the process, is necessary to maintain human life. But constructing an inefficient food system that throws out about 40% of the food we produce every day — that is a trademark of our culture of abundance, profligacy, and waste. It’s hard to comprehend the scale of the problem without some comparisons, so here goes:

• Six garbage trucks full of edible food are wasted every second.
• The average American citizen is responsible for roughly his or her own weight in food waste each year.
• Some estimates of global food waste come out to roughly the weight of 10000 aircraft carriers annually — or 2700 Empire State Buildings — or 150 Great Pyramids of Giza — take your pick.

How many garbage trucks full of food waste would it take to fill up the Great Pyramid?

This isn’t just tossing out a Tupperware of spoiled leftovers in your fridge, though that’s part of it. It includes waste from the entire length of the food supply chain: edible produce that does not meet strict cosmetic grading standards, meat that is spoiled in transit to a wholesaler and is trashed straight from the loading dock, or excess retail inventory that reaches its expiration date and has to be dumped. When we waste food, we are throwing out much more than the volume of food that is physically in the Dumpster. Taking a life-cycle perspective, you can see that the sum total of resources involved in producing that food — like fertilizer and land to grow it, fuel to harvest and transport it, and energy to process and cook it — also go to waste.

Everyone should be on board with any plan that could reduce food waste, which would relieve pressure on the environment, save money, and reengineer the very structures that underpin our civilization, making it more sustainable. And it seems like they are — politicians from both sides of the aisle are tripping over each other to set goals and form initiatives to reduce food waste. It’s a difficult problem but one that we might be able to solve. But I’m not sure it’s really as simple as it seems.

In the last few months I’ve begun work on a project that is taking my research in a new direction. From my new base at SESYNC in Annapolis, Maryland, I am working with a group of colleagues on the food waste problem. First, we aim to gather as much data as we can on food waste in the United States. Next, we are calculating its environmental footprint, which includes both the land, water, energy, and chemicals that are contained in wasted food and the pollution and loss of biodiversity it causes. Finally, we are evaluating a number of recently proposed food waste reduction solutions to see which ones are the cheapest to implement and the most effective at reducing the burden of the food system on the environment.

I’m glad to be involved in work on the food system that has the potential to enable a transition to a more sustainable society. Unfortunately, the more I study the problem, the more difficult it looks. Dozens of organizations have proposed solutions for the food waste problem. Many of them assume that we can reach a “win-win” situation by reducing food waste, because reducing waste will increase efficiency and save money at the same time as it saves the environment. That might be true to some extent, but it ignores the issue that there wouldn’t be such a massive amount of waste if there weren’t some serious incentives to generate that waste.

Examples of incentives to create food waste abound. For one, studies of consumer psychology show that we buy more when grocery stores bombard us with textures, colors, and smells. All those groaning shelves of produce and bread just inside the front door of the supermarket, topped up almost around the clock, aren’t all even intended to be sold and eaten. Much of it is just there to lure in shoppers. Farmers also have an incentive to overproduce as insurance that they can fulfill their advance contracts with buyers even if they lose some crop — this results in lots of produce left to rot in the field. Or to bring it to the household level, there is strong cultural pressure to provide abundant food to guests, even if we know there’s no way it will all be eaten. The list goes on. Producers and processors are already motivated by their desire to maximize profit, and consumers are always looking to save a buck. It’s not easy to identify inefficiencies that they haven’t already taken into account.

All of that sounds pessimistic, but I think the first step to solving the problem of perverse incentives is to identify them. We can’t find a cure for this disease without giving it a name. My plan is to use large-scale models of the entire US food system to find sectors of the economy and geographical regions where incentives do exist to reduce food waste, and to determine how we can get producers, processors, and consumers to act in their own best interest by preventing food waste before it occurs. When it comes to food waste, just like all the other wicked problems facing our society, there is no silver bullet but with the right information we can make a difference.

Shame is a good incentive!

I’m hoping that this blog post will be the first in a series. In future posts I will write more about some of the specific solutions that are proposed or already underway to reduce food waste, talk about the results we’re finding, share some new ideas for how we can solve the food waste problem, and provide links to resources to learn more about the organizations dedicated to reducing food waste. Here are a few links for starters:

• ReFED: Rethink food waste through economics and data. This organization has come up with a “road map” to reduce food waste by 20% in the United States. They have a lot of details on different ways to reach that goal.
• World Wildlife Fund: WWF’s initiative on reducing food waste is a great example of how they’ve broadened their focus from protecting specific species to promoting sustainable use of natural resources overall.
• Leanpath: Our SESYNC collaborator Steve Finn works for this company that helps corporations and other institutions reduce their food waste. Check out their food waste blog.

Image credits

• Pile of food waste: By Taz – https://secure.flickr.com/photos/sporkist/126526910/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26750498
• Garbage truck: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=781407
• 1917 poster: By Unknown or not provided – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15855705

The “naive” way of doing this would be to put rbind() into a for-loop. Here I make a dummy data frame into a list by copying it many times to demonstrate.

foo <- data.frame(a = rnorm(100), 
                  b = runif(100), 
                  c = rlnorm(100), 
                  d = rlogis(100))
foolist <- replicate(n = 10000, foo, simplify = FALSE)

Binding these data frames together in a for-loop is really not recommended, because it is both extremely slow and uses a large amount of RAM, because the entire constantly lengthening data frame is read back into the memory with each trip through the loop.

Here is how you would do it, though (I added the system.time() wrapper to show how long it takes):

system.time({
  foo_loop <- foolist[[1]]
  for (i in 2:length(foolist)) {
    foo_loop <- rbind(foo_loop, foolist[[i]])
  }
})

This takes 594 seconds on my machine.

You can use a functional programming trick in R to make this a little bit more efficient. The function do.call() takes a function as its first argument, followed by a list. It constructs a function call with the function from the first argument, and the list as its arguments. As a toy example, do.call('c', list(1, 2, 3)) is equivalent to c(1, 2, 3). Here is how you would use do.call() to bind the list of data frames together.

system.time({
  foo_do_call <- do.call('rbind', foolist)
})

This takes 184 seconds on my machine, and also uses less memory.

However, Hadley Wickham’s tidyverse family of packages, and its workhorse package dplyr, provide an even more efficient solution. The bind_rows() function takes a list of data frames as its argument, and returns identical output to the preceding base-R function calls.

system.time({
  foo_bindrows <- bind_rows(foolist)
})

This takes only 0.03 seconds on my machine. That’s over 6000 times faster than do.call()!

You can confirm that these three methods return the same output by checking with identical(foo_loop, foo_do_call) and identical(foo_loop, foo_bindrows).

Overall, I would recommend using the tidyverse function here. It’s better both in terms of speed and memory usage.

This is your standard camping trip report (I will limit myself to no more than 2 social/environmental critiques). Mary and I spent a long weekend on Manitou Island, ten miles out in the brilliant waters of northern Lake Michigan. The short version: it was one of the most beautiful places we’d ever been.

After over a year living in south-central Michigan without making the trip to the northern part of the state, we finally used my birthday as an excuse to head up there. The trip started with a relatively short drive from Lansing to Leland, near the tip of the Leelanau peninsula, roughly where the tip of the ring finger would be on the mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula. Leland is a touristy fishing village squeezed into a narrow strip of land a few hundred yards wide between Lake Michigan and a smaller body of water. I’m not sure how much of it, if any, is still operational other than as gift shops and quaint restaurants, but the gray, weather-beaten fishing shacks looked authentic enough. We boarded the good ship Mishe-Mokwa, a ferry that took us on the hour-long journey through choppy waters. Mary got a little queasy when we ventured to the upper deck of the lurching boat to get a better view of our approaching destination, North Manitou Island.

Playing cards amid a pile of packs while waiting for the ferry in Leland

The Mishe-Mokwa pulling into the harbor to swap passengers

We boarded and were soon off

Our last close-up view of the mainland

Enjoying(?) the fresh air aboveboard

(Social commentary digression: On the boat, the discrepancy between the demographics of National Park visitors and the racial breakdown of the US population at large was clearly on display. The question is: How do you strike a good balance between these two things: 1- enticing people who don’t traditionally do any backcountry camping into parks while 2- avoiding developing some of the few places that still have a relatively small human footprint on the landscape? I have no idea, but maybe I will muse about it in a future post.)

You can read elsewhere about the history of North and South Manitou Islands. North Manitou was once home to a small community of homesteaders, and later some rich vacationers from Chicago kept summer cottages there. Now the buildings, orchards, and clearings they left behind are abandoned, and the land is managed by the National Park Service. It’s a big destination for backpackers because backcountry camping is allowed anywhere on the island. What’s more, it’s the perfect size–roughly circular and about 5 miles (8 km) in diameter. That’s small enough to explore from end to end in a couple days, but big enough for the ~100 backpackers on the island on a given summer weekend to spread out pretty darn thinly. And of course, the island abounds with natural beauty: dunes clad with thick beech-maple forests, dramatic windswept bluffs overlooking the lake, and beaches of many-hued smooth pebbles washed by bright bluish-green waves. The remoteness of the island means that we had our pick of isolated campsites in the midst of this splendor.

Packs on, we await clearance to hit the trail

An abandoned summer cottage near the dock

Mary tries to preempt blisters by the island graveyard

Humble concrete crosses mark most gravesites

Walking in the maple-beech forest inland

On a perch overlooking the lake near campsite #1

The first evening’s view of South Manitou Island

After we arrived and heard a safety briefing from the NPS ranger, Mary and I took off down the trail. We spent the next two days and nights circling the island, with numerous side detours to see abandoned barns, orchards, and the cemetery where the couple dozen hardy homesteaders are buried (including some who spent their childhood there and returned to their final resting place as recently as 2010). We were constantly serenaded by vireos, redstarts, black-throated green warblers, thrushes, and robins that breed on the island, and scolded by vast numbers of chipmunks. On the second night, we were treated to a show of three otters cavorting about 100 yards out in the waters of the lake! A gull and a tern were angrily harassing them, faking dive-bomb attacks and cawing harshly, but the playful otters did not seem to mind. Unwelcome additions to the fauna were mosquitoes and blackflies, but they were not too bad if you wore long sleeves except in a few marshier spots in the forest.

As for the quality of the camping, it couldn’t be beat. The first night we camped on a high, windy bluff in a grassy clearing overlooking the lake on the west side of the island, where the mid-July weather got downright chilly at night. The high temperature was about 70 F (21 C) each day, with sunny skies. The next night, we pitched our tent in the woods just back from a stunningly picturesque beach on the east side. Mary and I enjoyed a romantic time cooking such delicacies as Zatarain’s mixed with soy sausage and canned corn, carefully rationing a plastic water bottle filled with bourbon, and reading creepy Japanese short fiction from the early 1930s to each other.

Kitchen at campsite #1

Stirring the rice and beans for our first dinner

Sipping an adult beverage from a blue tin cup while reading and watching the sunset = living

It stayed light until around 10 PM

Apple pancakes for breakfast on Day 2: sort of successful on the camping stove

Navigating using the trail map

Swenson’s old barn on the west side of the island

Surveying the trail ahead

Cedar waxwings were eating fruit in an abandoned orchard

The terrain was mostly flat and forested, so the backpacking was pretty easy. Every couple of miles, the woods opened up into large clearings with orchards and the occasional barn, which provided interesting variety. Lake Michigan is so big that the lake at the center of Manitou Island is itself a mile or so long and great for swimming. (Yo, dogg, we heard you liked lakes, so we put a lake in your lake.) Of course, I took a dip in the Big Lake–that’s the Ojibwe meaning of the word Michigan–as well. Wonderfully refreshing.

(Environmental commentary digression: The Great Lakes are a unique and fragile treasure. We Americans, entrusted with 20% of the world’s fresh water shared among five lakes, have really messed them up. One thing we definitely noticed on our trip was the beautiful clear water that for some reason had lots of filmy algae floating around in it. Apparently, zebra mussels, which were introduced from ships discharging ballast water taken on in Eastern Europe, have proliferated, filtered particulates out of the water, making it clearer. This in turn releases algae from light limitation and causes huge booms in their biomass, with all sorts of negative consequences.)

We made a small side hike to gawk at this view on Day 2

One of the many obligatory “pure Michigan” selfies we took

Playing dice on an old truck hood in the middle of a bunch of ancient wrecked logging equipment

Mary ponders where to go next

This is the lake within the lake!

Eating Mary’s delicious homemade granola bars after swimming in Lake Michigan

The beach just next to campsite #2

Cooking Pasta-Roni on the second night

Otters!

We hiked the last couple miles along the shoreline on Day 3

Piping Plover chick!

The dock where the ferry soon came to take us home

I’ll leave you with one final anecdote: On Day 3, which just so happened to be my 30th birthday, we made sure to show up extra early at the dock, not wanting to miss the ferry and be stranded for 24 hours with only a few extra rations of Zatarain’s to tide us over. There, just as we were preparing to head off the island, I started chatting with a Park Service employee who was glassing the beach with binoculars. After asking whether I had a life list, he pointed out four Piping Plover chicks that were foraging in a small puddle on the beach! One of the parents later made an appearance as well. The Piping Plover is an endangered shorebird that only nests on remote, secluded beaches, and North Manitou Island is its biggest stronghold in the Great Lakes region. What a way to end our sojourn on the island–a wonderful weekend in a beautiful place with an amazing wife!

In a (not altogether rare) moment of introspection back in September 2016, Mary and I were talking about our plans for the future. As our careers develop and our lives go on through the stages of adulthood, and possibly in the future parenthood (no guarantees, Mom and Dad), our responsibilities are increasing. I realized that I had a couple of regrets, self-improvement goals that I had always wanted to do but not ever committed the time to. One was that despite being relatively adept at learning languages, I had only learned one fluently (German) and one decently (Spanish). The other was that I had never run a sub-5 minute mile. The closest I came was 5:10 in college. Almost as soon as I had those thoughts, I realized that those two things did not need to be regrets. They were both attainable goals–but both are skills that fade with time, so I immediately began to pursue them. I decided to go for the athletic goal first, followed by the linguistic goal. A few days later, on September 4, 2016, we headed to the running track at Clay High School north of the Notre Dame campus in South Bend where Mary timed me in a mile run.

can you name all of my running idols?

The mile is a very interesting distance for running. It’s one of the few non-metric distances that is still contested internationally–although it’s being replaced by the 1500m or 1600m run. One mile is exactly 1609.344 m, for you metric aficionados. That’s four laps around a standard 400-meter track with a couple extra steps thrown in. It requires a unique balance of aerobic endurance and anaerobic speed. Having neither of those things in sufficient quantity, I painfully eked out a time of 5:53. That marked the first time over the next 10 months that I would wear out Mary’s patience complaining about how slow I was.

Over the next months, including all throughout the Michigan winter, I kept up a steady schedule of training. The nice thing about the mile is that you don’t need to put in hours and hours at a time, as you would for the marathon. I never did any workout longer than about 1 hour, 5 to 6 days a week. The basic plan was to do 1 to 2 track workouts a week, starting with 200 m and 300 m repeats in the first couple months, then eventually 400 m, 600 m, and 800 m repeats. I also ran 5 to 8 miles a few times a week, sometimes doing a few sprints at the end of the run, and every few weeks a tempo run which was roughly a 5K at 6-minute mile pace. At first, running 200 m at “race pace” in 37 seconds felt like a dead sprint, but gradually longer and longer distances felt–not quite comfortable, but manageable.

The original plan was to have the whole thing wrapped up in 2 or 3 months. When that proved to be ludicrously ambitious, I decided to set a deadline of my 30th birthday: July 9, 2017. With support from a loving wife and encouragement from family and friends, my time dropped to 5:33 in October, 5:28 in November, and 5:20 in December. After a weird illness in February, I reeled off 5:15 in March and 5:09 in April. It was really gratifying to see such tangible progress and to feel fitter than at any other time in my life. I knew I could not get much faster by myself on the track so I had my eye on a few local races.

In late May, when we were visiting Mary’s family in Tennessee, they all came out to cheer Mary’s sister Carol and me in a road race. I managed 5:04 that day, followed by 5:01 a few weeks later. Now for the big reveal: On June 29 (with only 10 days to spare until my birthday), Mary and I headed to the “Bring Back The Mile” track meet at Okemos High School, just a few miles south down Hagadorn Rd. from our place in East Lansing. There, I toed the line with some fast dudes, and, the usual pre-race nerves and pessimism notwithstanding, crossed the finish line in 4:59.7! What an absolute feeling!!!

I won’t bore you any more with race report details or other self-aggrandizing minutiae. I don’t often brag on myself but I felt I deserved to just this once. Now on to the next goal, learning some spoken Mandarin–after I shave a few more seconds off my time, that is! See you at the track. (Pictures below)

(*) quote by Sir Roger Bannister

This is a little late to be completely relevant, and any number of scientists and non-scientists have already weighed in on the March for Science, but I decided to add my opinion to the mix. First, I want to express my admiration for all the people who worked so hard to organize the event and who are continuing to promote the values and goals of science.

The crowd in front of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing

Last Saturday, the wife and I headed to the satellite rally of the March for Science being held on the grounds of the State Capitol in Lansing. This was after a brief period of soul-searching on my part. I read some of the arguments (advanced by scientists) both for and against the March for Science, and I found merit in both sides. I strongly support the aims of the March for Science. That includes: maintaining the well-earned privileged status of scientists as voices of expertise to guide important decisions in government and society, making sure that researchers have adequate funds to expand human knowledge and serve applied goals, and mobilizing activists both among professional scientists and the public as a whole, in this time of urgent crisis. On the other hand, I appreciate the argument that the case might be weakened by portraying scientists as activists with a left-wing political bent, because well-paid propagandists have implanted the meme in people’s minds that science is part of a nefarious elite liberal agenda. At first, the latter argument held sway with me. I agreed with the goals of the march, but felt that the march itself would undermine those goals.

A talk I saw by Dr. Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, at Michigan State University ended up pushing me to a solid pro-march stance. Dr. McNutt has a very impressive trailblazing resume, being the first woman to head the U.S. Geological Survey and to be editor-in-chief of Science. The talk she gave, about using science to guide policy decisions, was interesting but left me a little unsatisfied. She repeatedly affirmed that scientists seeking to guide policy should not present any biases or value judgments, but rather stick to “just the facts.” This stance struck me as so extreme that it denies reality. The very act of compiling facts for policymakers is inherently value-driven: one has to decide what facts to present and what topic is even worth studying to assess benefits or harms to society. I know that she had to be diplomatic and stick to a script, but I felt that she went too far. She expressed only the most tepid support for the March for Science for similar reasons: that it would portray scientists as biased. At that point, I was decided: it is not wrong to own the values and beliefs I hold, since it is my strong conviction that scientific decision-making is absolutely critical and will produce the best outcomes for society. Talking it over with my wife and with a good friend helped us to make that decision.

The wife and I with low-budget signs

So the die was cast and we headed to the march. It was time for another critical decision: funny ironic sign or serious boring sign? My agonized vacillating over whether to even attend the march made me stick to a very simple sign, but Mary split the difference by making a funny one. I am also conflicted about the use of humor and irony to achieve serious goals (Megan Garber has written much more eloquently than me about this in The Atlantic.) While many if not most of the signs were at least a little tongue-in-cheek, I think the march struck a decent balance between relatable, down-to-earth humor and serious activism. I would like to write more about that topic, but I’ll save it for another post.

As an R nerd, I couldn’t resist snapping a photo of this sign

To sum up: the march in Lansing had a pretty impressive turnout–I think the papers put it at 2500, which is similar to my eyeballed estimate. I enjoyed seeing colleagues and friends out there, and I hope I get a chance to vote for Abdul Al-Sayed for Michigan governor before I leave this state. Down with Tricky Ricky!

The above-mentioned ironic flag, held by a marcher dressed as Ms. Frizzle

I have two points to make: (1) to remind everyone that the Trump win can’t be easily slotted into a media narrative, and much of the current narrative is wrong, and (2) that I am hoping this moment will be a motivator for myself, and other compassionate people, to leave my enclave of privilege and work harder to positively impact this broken nation and world.

(1) Commentators on the election are describing Trump’s win as a “rebuke to the elites” and a populist victory. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the “popul-” in that particular brand of populism is an incredibly narrowly defined demographic, one that defines huge swaths of the American population as other, as an outgroup to be despised. The implication in calling someone like Trump a populist is that he is appealing to the “real” people rather than minority or niche groups. Needless to say, that is ludicrous. Trump’s success comes from his appeal to a very narrow segment of the population, and we cannot lose sight of that. Not to mention the supreme irony that Trump’s status as an elite and his shameless pandering were seen as genuine by many voters, but Clinton’s less nakedly hypocritical behavior was seen as lying fakery. If anyone thought they were delivering a rebuke to the elites by voting Trump, I have to flatly say they were misguided and wrong.

(2) Speaking from my position as a privileged person, I am pretty insulated from some of the worst potential consequences of the upcoming Trump presidency. At this point, we can only hope that some of the gravest fears and predictions people have made will not come true (though it’s hard to hold out too much hope for healthcare, climate policy, etc.). I want to express my empathy for those I know who aren’t quite so privileged, and hope that things will not change too much for the worse in their lives. I also hope this horrible disaster will be a linchpin that will motivate compassionate people to work harder to make the world the way we want it, rather than relying on electoral politics to do the trick. I reserve the next day or two for moping, but if you see me wallowing in bitterness and cynicism, rather than working to effect change, any time in the next four years, remind me of these words I wrote. Engagement at the local level is what we need now–we’re in this together.