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Testing Evolution’s Role in Finding a Mate
By SARAH ARNQUIST, The New York Times, July 7, 2009
Scientists have long observed that women tend to be pickier than men when choosing a mate. The usual explanation is evolutionary: because women have a bigger investment in reproduction — they are the ones who have to endure pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding — they need to hedge their bets against selecting a dud to be the father.
In recent years, the emergence of speed dating has given psychologists, economists and political scientists new ways to test this and other hypotheses about mating. Because participants can be randomly assigned to groups and have no prior information about other participants, three-minute speed-dating sessions are about as close to a controlled experiment as researchers are likely to get.
Now, two scientists at Northwestern University have published an experiment that challenges the evolutionary hypothesis. The study by Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick was published last month in the journal Psychological Science.The experiment looked at speed-dating sessions to determine whether men or women were choosier. The answer, it turned out, was neither. Regardless of gender, people who were instructed to approach other daters were less selective — that is, they were more likely to ask to meet later for a date.
Dr. Finkel and Mr. Eastwick write that this does not mean men were just as selective as women. But the scientists suggest that the explanation for the gap lies in social conditioning rather than evolution.
By making the first move, a person gains confidence and then finds more people attractive, the theory goes. Culturally, men are expected to approach women more often, which may boost their confidence and make them less selective. Citing what social psychologists call the scarcity principle, Mr. Eastwick and Dr. Finkel write that “individuals tend to place less value on objects or opportunities that are plentiful than those that are rare.” By contrast, they say, women are accustomed to being approached, which may make them feel more desirable and thus more selective.
Scientists have also used speed-dating experiments to examine the tendency for people to mate with people like themselves. A 2006 paper by economists at the University of Essex in England analyzed data from 3,600 male and female speed daters to see if people selected mates with similar traits, like height and education, because that is what they prefer or because they are most likely to encounter them in the dating market.
The economists, Michèle Belot and Marco Francesconi, found that men’s preferences for occupation, height and smoking had little effect on whom they asked out. Those factors also did not matter to women, but age did.
In homogeneous environments, Dr. Belot and Dr. Francesconi wrote, people are more likely to marry others like themselves, while more diverse communities are likely to produce more varied pairings.
“Mating requires meeting,” they wrote. “The pool of potential partners shapes the type of people to whom subjects propose and ultimately with whom they form long-term relationships.”
People narrow their market opportunities, the economists suggested, by selecting for height, weight and age, which tend to be proxies for socioeconomic status.
So how does a person increase the odds of crossing paths with someone who matches his or her preferences? Maybe by tapping into social networks. In “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives,” a book to be published in September, Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, argue that dating is not a random process.
They cite a landmark 1992 Chicago sex survey of 3,432 adults ages 18 to 59, which found that 68 percent of married people in the survey reported meeting their spouse through a friend, family member or other mutual acquaintance.
“If you are single and you know 20 people reasonably well, and if each of them knows 20 other people, and each of them knows 20 other people,” Dr. Christakis and Dr. Fowler write, “then you are connected to 8,000 people who are three degrees away. And one of them is likely to be your future spouse.”
Personal Health: Updating a Standard: Fetal Monitoring
By JANE E. BRODY, The New York Times, July 7, 2009
Electronic fetal monitoring during labor and delivery was introduced into obstetrical practice in the early 1970s in hopes that it would reduce the risk of cerebral palsy and death resulting from inadequate oxygen to the fetal brain.
The monitors continually measure the fetal heart rate and produce tracings on a screen and paper that can alert a doctor to a baby who is doing poorly under the stress of labor. It is up to the doctor to try to alleviate the problem and, if those measures do not help, to decide whether to deliver the baby vaginally with forceps or surgically by Caesarean.
Today, more than 85 percent of the four million babies born alive in this country each year are assessed by electronic fetal monitoring, amid continuing controversy over whether it does more harm than good. New guidelines on fetal monitoring, published this month, aim to bring more consistency to how doctors interpret the results and act on them.
“Honestly, the technology got rolled out before we knew if it worked or not,” Dr. George A. Macones, an obstetrician at Washington University in St. Louis, said in an interview.
Continuous monitoring became a standard obstetrical procedure before studies could show if the benefits outweighed the risks, and without clear-cut guidelines on how doctors should interpret the findings.
But experts report that the use of fetal monitoring has produced both negative and positive results, including these:
Revised Guidelines
Last year a workshop held by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development produced new recommendations that have now been incorporated into revised practice guidelines by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and published in the July issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. Dr. Macones supervised the development of the new guidelines.
The college hopes the revised guidelines will reduce misinterpretations and inconsistencies in the understanding and use of readings on fetal monitors, although experts are not optimistic that the rate of Caesareans will drop.
In cities like New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, as many as 40 percent of babies are delivered by Caesarean. Although it is one of the safest operations, it is not without risk to either mother or baby, and it is far more costly than a natural vaginal delivery.
Nor is it likely that any change in the use of monitors will result in a decrease in babies with cerebral palsy.
As the new practice bulletin explains, monitoring the fetus during labor does not affect the risk of cerebral palsy, because 70 percent of cases occur before labor begins and only 4 percent result solely from a mishap during labor and delivery. The remaining 26 percent of cases can be attributed to a combination of factors that occur before and during labor or after delivery, according to Dr. Macones and other experts who helped develop the guidelines.
Inconsistent Interpretations
How the new guidelines might affect the rate of malpractice cases is unknown. “Lawyers pick through every finding on the tracings and say the doctor should have done a Caesarean here and saved the baby,” Dr. Macones said, “even though that’s seldom the case since most cases of cerebral palsy don’t happen during labor.”
Doctors differ greatly in how they interpret tracings. In a study in which four obstetricians examined 50 fetal heart rate tracings, they agreed in 22 percent of the cases. Two months later, the same four doctors re-evaluated the same 50 tracings and changed their interpretations on nearly one of every five. Furthermore, when the baby’s outcome is already known, interpretation of the tracings is especially unreliable, the guideline report says.
And in more than 99 percent of cases, predictions based on the tracings that the baby would have cerebral palsy have proved wrong.
3 Categories of Tracings
The new guidelines refine the meaning of different readings from the monitors, in the hopes of helping doctors make better decisions during labor about when to intervene and when to let nature take its course.
Previous guidelines divided readings into two categories — reassuring and nonreassuring — and it was up to the doctor to decide whether a nonreassuring reading meant the fetus was at serious risk of oxygen deprivation.
With fear of liability hanging over doctors’ heads, many babies with “nonreassuring” readings who might have done just fine with a natural vaginal delivery are being delivered surgically or with forceps, Dr. Macones said.
The new guidelines divide monitor readings into three categories and help to make “the gray zone of nonreassuring clearer,” Dr. Catherine Y. Spong, chief of the Pregnancy and Perinatology Branch at the child health institute, said in an interview.
In Category I, tracings of the fetal heart rate are normal and no specific action is required.
In Category II, indeterminate tracings require evaluation and continuous surveillance and re-evaluation, the guidelines say. Dr. Spong said that in deciding how serious the tracings are, doctors “need to look at the entire clinical picture, not just the tracing,” and consider factors like the mother’s blood pressure, heart rate and temperature, what medicines she might have been given, the frequency of contractions and how fast labor is progressing.
Depending on what makes the reading Category II, the doctor can take steps to see if the reading will go back to Category I, Dr. Spong said. For example, the doctor might try to stimulate the baby by scratching its scalp or making a loud noise, to see if the heart rate will accelerate naturally and bring the baby back to Category I.
Babies with Category II readings are not considered in danger, she said, “but they have to be watched very closely because they could become compromised.”
In Category III, tracings are clearly abnormal, requiring prompt evaluation and efforts to reverse the abnormal heart rate. That could involve giving the mother oxygen, changing her position, treating her low blood pressure and stopping stimulation of labor if that is being done. If the tracing does not improve with such measures, the new guidelines say that “delivery should be undertaken.”
Further refinements of the guidelines are expected to be released next year.
In Public Housing, Talking Up the Recycling Bin
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, July 4, 2009
Wearing a purple sweatsuit and leaning on a cane, Gloria Allen, 82, was hobbling down a hallway in a public housing project in Morningside Heights, knocking on doors and shouting, “Recycling education!”
There was no answer at the next apartment, but as soon as she detected movement inside, Ms. Allen, a retired printing-company worker, began her pitch.
“Please come out, baby,” she purred. “Please come out so we can educate you on how to recycle.”
The typical neighborhood environmentalist is often pictured as young and affluent, the kind of person who can afford a hybrid car and screen-printed hemp fabrics. But at General Grant Houses, a sprawling public housing development off West 125th Street in Manhattan, the eco-conscious are mainly people like Ms. Allen and Sarah Martin, who as leaders of the residents’ association fret as much about backed-up pipes as they do about recycling.
Proselytizing on the issue in housing projects is an enormous challenge but crucial, environmentalists say, given the incentive to cut back on energy and garbage disposal costs and a housing authority’s power to impose recycling rules building by building.
In New York, the incentive may be greatest of all. Only 17 percent of the city’s household waste makes it into recycling bins, and New York has the largest public housing system in the country, with 2,600 buildings, 174,000 apartments and more than 400,000 residents in five boroughs.
Yet the effort initiated by Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin originated as a grass-roots crusade of their own.
Margarita Lopez, the city housing agency’s environmental coordinator, said that residents who step up and organize the efforts defy cynical clichés about public housing. “There are people who think we’re not able to do this, who look at public housing as second-class citizens,” she said. “People would be surprised about how in tune the residents are.”
Polls show that concern about the environment is sometimes broadest in low-income communities because residents bear the brunt of problems like air pollution.
Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin say they see recycling as a way to address the health and quality-of-life issues associated with trash, including the emissions from abundant garbage-truck pickups.
“If we could reduce the amount of garbage in our community, it would reduce the diesel in the air,” said Ms. Martin, 72, a former medical assistant and school food preparation manager who wears hoop earrings under a baseball cap.
So she and Ms. Allen, who each live alone but have 6 children, 14 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren between them, have taken time from their full plate of tenant complaints to introduce, or reintroduce, the development’s 4,500 denizens to recycling, building by building.
While recycling is required by law, it had failed to take root at General Grant because the bins were not conveniently located and residents found it easy to ignore recycling signs, the women say.
Education is crucial, they insist, so they recruit volunteers and train them in which kinds of metal, glass and plastic items can be recycled. Then they guide them from door to door, distributing color-coded bags as they impart the fundamentals to neighbors who can be welcoming, indifferent or hostile.
“It’s not easy,” Ms. Martin said. “It’s not like you slap a flier on a door and say: ‘Recycle. It’s the law.’ It takes time, patience and energy.”
Some residents refuse to budge when Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin knock. And some object to their campaign. During one of their rounds, they were berated by a neighbor who insisted that recycling bins would attract vermin and should not be placed in front of the buildings.
“People are going to put garbage in there,” the neighbor warned.
But many readily embrace the effort. “This saves public housing work and money and it contributes to the general hygiene,” said Jose Morales, 51, an unemployed plumber and widower with two children who correctly chose a green recycling bag when Ms. Allen tested him with a flattened cereal box.
On other environmental fronts, efforts are under way by the city housing authority to make the apartment units more energy-efficient, using federal stimulus money to replace old boilers, water heaters and appliances. More than two dozen resident “green committees” have also been formed to help with projects like planting trees and recruiting workers for green jobs.
The recycling project at General Grant Houses got under way in 2007 under the auspices of the Morningside Heights/West Harlem Sanitation Coalition, a partnership that was founded in 1994 when residents of Grant and nearby co-ops realized they shared the same problems, from uneven trash collection to substandard grocery stores.
Ms. Martin and Joan Levine, an 80-year-old former teacher from Morningside Gardens, a six-building co-op just across the street on Amsterdam Avenue, are the coalition’s co-chairwomen.
Ms. Levine, who wears her gray hair in a Beatles bob and carries a handbag made of recycled juice box labels, said she was motivated partly by a resolve to confound stereotypes. “I’ve heard comfortable white middle-class people say, ‘Oh, public housing. They’ll never recycle. They don’t care,’ ” she said. “That really galled me because that wasn’t the case.”
Two years into the recycling program, General Grant Houses has five buildings down, one in training and three more to go. It has also evolved from a grass-roots effort into a pilot program with city and state financing that the city housing authority plans to expand to other residential projects.
Ms. Martin and Ms. Allen report promising results in the five buildings that are already recycling. Each now produces at least 10 fewer bags of trash a day, they said. Residents no longer leave mousetraps or car tires in recycling bins, as they did in the past when the city instituted recycling without an education program.
As president and vice president of the residents’ association, the two women also organize collections of electronic waste, from computers to TV sets, and lead workshops on topics like nontoxic cleaning products. Next on their agenda is finding a way to pay a stipend to resident monitors who will make sure that only recyclables go into the bins.
While they have to plead with the city to fix broken door locks and drafty windows, Ms. Martin said, “recycling we can control.”
“We don’t need to have a million dollars to do that and improve our environment,” she said.
Observatory: Warmer Winters and Shrinking Sheep
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, July 7, 2009
On a remote Scottish island, the sheep are shrinking, and the cause appears to be the warming of winter.
The wild Soay sheep that live on the island of Hirta in the North Atlantic have been under careful scientific observation since 1985, partly because the island ecosystem is a simple one consisting of the sheep and the vegetation they eat.
Timothy Coulson, a professor of population biology at Imperial College London, and his colleagues analyzed the sheep data and found that the weight of the average female Soay had decreased about three ounces a year, or about 5 percent over the past quarter-century.
That was somewhat surprising, as larger sheep have better odds of surviving and evolution tends to favor those that are stronger.
But thanks to changing climate, the survival of the fittest has become a bit easier, enabling more of the less fit to survive. Fall now lasts later into the year and spring arrives earlier, and more of the smaller lambs, which once perished in winter, now survive to their first birthday.
“As the winters have become shorter, the strength of selection has been reduced a little bit,” Dr. Coulson said.
The findings were published Thursday by the journal Science on its Web site.
Further research will look at how much of the shrinkage is caused by a shift in sheep genetics and how much is the “young mum” effect in which the lambs of young mothers are smaller because the mothers are not yet fully grown.
By SARAH ARNQUIST, The New York Times, July 7, 2009
Scientists have long observed that women tend to be pickier than men when choosing a mate. The usual explanation is evolutionary: because women have a bigger investment in reproduction — they are the ones who have to endure pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding — they need to hedge their bets against selecting a dud to be the father.
In recent years, the emergence of speed dating has given psychologists, economists and political scientists new ways to test this and other hypotheses about mating. Because participants can be randomly assigned to groups and have no prior information about other participants, three-minute speed-dating sessions are about as close to a controlled experiment as researchers are likely to get.
Now, two scientists at Northwestern University have published an experiment that challenges the evolutionary hypothesis. The study by Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick was published last month in the journal Psychological Science.The experiment looked at speed-dating sessions to determine whether men or women were choosier. The answer, it turned out, was neither. Regardless of gender, people who were instructed to approach other daters were less selective — that is, they were more likely to ask to meet later for a date.
Dr. Finkel and Mr. Eastwick write that this does not mean men were just as selective as women. But the scientists suggest that the explanation for the gap lies in social conditioning rather than evolution.
By making the first move, a person gains confidence and then finds more people attractive, the theory goes. Culturally, men are expected to approach women more often, which may boost their confidence and make them less selective. Citing what social psychologists call the scarcity principle, Mr. Eastwick and Dr. Finkel write that “individuals tend to place less value on objects or opportunities that are plentiful than those that are rare.” By contrast, they say, women are accustomed to being approached, which may make them feel more desirable and thus more selective.
Scientists have also used speed-dating experiments to examine the tendency for people to mate with people like themselves. A 2006 paper by economists at the University of Essex in England analyzed data from 3,600 male and female speed daters to see if people selected mates with similar traits, like height and education, because that is what they prefer or because they are most likely to encounter them in the dating market.
The economists, Michèle Belot and Marco Francesconi, found that men’s preferences for occupation, height and smoking had little effect on whom they asked out. Those factors also did not matter to women, but age did.
In homogeneous environments, Dr. Belot and Dr. Francesconi wrote, people are more likely to marry others like themselves, while more diverse communities are likely to produce more varied pairings.
“Mating requires meeting,” they wrote. “The pool of potential partners shapes the type of people to whom subjects propose and ultimately with whom they form long-term relationships.”
People narrow their market opportunities, the economists suggested, by selecting for height, weight and age, which tend to be proxies for socioeconomic status.
So how does a person increase the odds of crossing paths with someone who matches his or her preferences? Maybe by tapping into social networks. In “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives,” a book to be published in September, Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, argue that dating is not a random process.
They cite a landmark 1992 Chicago sex survey of 3,432 adults ages 18 to 59, which found that 68 percent of married people in the survey reported meeting their spouse through a friend, family member or other mutual acquaintance.
“If you are single and you know 20 people reasonably well, and if each of them knows 20 other people, and each of them knows 20 other people,” Dr. Christakis and Dr. Fowler write, “then you are connected to 8,000 people who are three degrees away. And one of them is likely to be your future spouse.”
Personal Health: Updating a Standard: Fetal Monitoring
By JANE E. BRODY, The New York Times, July 7, 2009
Electronic fetal monitoring during labor and delivery was introduced into obstetrical practice in the early 1970s in hopes that it would reduce the risk of cerebral palsy and death resulting from inadequate oxygen to the fetal brain.
The monitors continually measure the fetal heart rate and produce tracings on a screen and paper that can alert a doctor to a baby who is doing poorly under the stress of labor. It is up to the doctor to try to alleviate the problem and, if those measures do not help, to decide whether to deliver the baby vaginally with forceps or surgically by Caesarean.
Today, more than 85 percent of the four million babies born alive in this country each year are assessed by electronic fetal monitoring, amid continuing controversy over whether it does more harm than good. New guidelines on fetal monitoring, published this month, aim to bring more consistency to how doctors interpret the results and act on them.
“Honestly, the technology got rolled out before we knew if it worked or not,” Dr. George A. Macones, an obstetrician at Washington University in St. Louis, said in an interview.
Continuous monitoring became a standard obstetrical procedure before studies could show if the benefits outweighed the risks, and without clear-cut guidelines on how doctors should interpret the findings.
But experts report that the use of fetal monitoring has produced both negative and positive results, including these:
- Electronic monitoring has led to a significant increase in both Caesarean deliveries and forceps vaginal deliveries.
- Monitoring results are widely used by lawyers to bolster malpractice cases of spurious merit, which has led to soaring costs for malpractice insurance and, in turn, prompted many obstetricians to stop delivering babies.
- Electronic monitoring has not reduced the risk of either cerebral palsy or fetal deaths.
Revised Guidelines
Last year a workshop held by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development produced new recommendations that have now been incorporated into revised practice guidelines by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and published in the July issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. Dr. Macones supervised the development of the new guidelines.
The college hopes the revised guidelines will reduce misinterpretations and inconsistencies in the understanding and use of readings on fetal monitors, although experts are not optimistic that the rate of Caesareans will drop.
In cities like New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, as many as 40 percent of babies are delivered by Caesarean. Although it is one of the safest operations, it is not without risk to either mother or baby, and it is far more costly than a natural vaginal delivery.
Nor is it likely that any change in the use of monitors will result in a decrease in babies with cerebral palsy.
As the new practice bulletin explains, monitoring the fetus during labor does not affect the risk of cerebral palsy, because 70 percent of cases occur before labor begins and only 4 percent result solely from a mishap during labor and delivery. The remaining 26 percent of cases can be attributed to a combination of factors that occur before and during labor or after delivery, according to Dr. Macones and other experts who helped develop the guidelines.
Inconsistent Interpretations
How the new guidelines might affect the rate of malpractice cases is unknown. “Lawyers pick through every finding on the tracings and say the doctor should have done a Caesarean here and saved the baby,” Dr. Macones said, “even though that’s seldom the case since most cases of cerebral palsy don’t happen during labor.”
Doctors differ greatly in how they interpret tracings. In a study in which four obstetricians examined 50 fetal heart rate tracings, they agreed in 22 percent of the cases. Two months later, the same four doctors re-evaluated the same 50 tracings and changed their interpretations on nearly one of every five. Furthermore, when the baby’s outcome is already known, interpretation of the tracings is especially unreliable, the guideline report says.
And in more than 99 percent of cases, predictions based on the tracings that the baby would have cerebral palsy have proved wrong.
3 Categories of Tracings
The new guidelines refine the meaning of different readings from the monitors, in the hopes of helping doctors make better decisions during labor about when to intervene and when to let nature take its course.
Previous guidelines divided readings into two categories — reassuring and nonreassuring — and it was up to the doctor to decide whether a nonreassuring reading meant the fetus was at serious risk of oxygen deprivation.
With fear of liability hanging over doctors’ heads, many babies with “nonreassuring” readings who might have done just fine with a natural vaginal delivery are being delivered surgically or with forceps, Dr. Macones said.
The new guidelines divide monitor readings into three categories and help to make “the gray zone of nonreassuring clearer,” Dr. Catherine Y. Spong, chief of the Pregnancy and Perinatology Branch at the child health institute, said in an interview.
In Category I, tracings of the fetal heart rate are normal and no specific action is required.
In Category II, indeterminate tracings require evaluation and continuous surveillance and re-evaluation, the guidelines say. Dr. Spong said that in deciding how serious the tracings are, doctors “need to look at the entire clinical picture, not just the tracing,” and consider factors like the mother’s blood pressure, heart rate and temperature, what medicines she might have been given, the frequency of contractions and how fast labor is progressing.
Depending on what makes the reading Category II, the doctor can take steps to see if the reading will go back to Category I, Dr. Spong said. For example, the doctor might try to stimulate the baby by scratching its scalp or making a loud noise, to see if the heart rate will accelerate naturally and bring the baby back to Category I.
Babies with Category II readings are not considered in danger, she said, “but they have to be watched very closely because they could become compromised.”
In Category III, tracings are clearly abnormal, requiring prompt evaluation and efforts to reverse the abnormal heart rate. That could involve giving the mother oxygen, changing her position, treating her low blood pressure and stopping stimulation of labor if that is being done. If the tracing does not improve with such measures, the new guidelines say that “delivery should be undertaken.”
Further refinements of the guidelines are expected to be released next year.
In Public Housing, Talking Up the Recycling Bin
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, July 4, 2009
Wearing a purple sweatsuit and leaning on a cane, Gloria Allen, 82, was hobbling down a hallway in a public housing project in Morningside Heights, knocking on doors and shouting, “Recycling education!”
There was no answer at the next apartment, but as soon as she detected movement inside, Ms. Allen, a retired printing-company worker, began her pitch.
“Please come out, baby,” she purred. “Please come out so we can educate you on how to recycle.”
The typical neighborhood environmentalist is often pictured as young and affluent, the kind of person who can afford a hybrid car and screen-printed hemp fabrics. But at General Grant Houses, a sprawling public housing development off West 125th Street in Manhattan, the eco-conscious are mainly people like Ms. Allen and Sarah Martin, who as leaders of the residents’ association fret as much about backed-up pipes as they do about recycling.
Proselytizing on the issue in housing projects is an enormous challenge but crucial, environmentalists say, given the incentive to cut back on energy and garbage disposal costs and a housing authority’s power to impose recycling rules building by building.
In New York, the incentive may be greatest of all. Only 17 percent of the city’s household waste makes it into recycling bins, and New York has the largest public housing system in the country, with 2,600 buildings, 174,000 apartments and more than 400,000 residents in five boroughs.
Yet the effort initiated by Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin originated as a grass-roots crusade of their own.
Margarita Lopez, the city housing agency’s environmental coordinator, said that residents who step up and organize the efforts defy cynical clichés about public housing. “There are people who think we’re not able to do this, who look at public housing as second-class citizens,” she said. “People would be surprised about how in tune the residents are.”
Polls show that concern about the environment is sometimes broadest in low-income communities because residents bear the brunt of problems like air pollution.
Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin say they see recycling as a way to address the health and quality-of-life issues associated with trash, including the emissions from abundant garbage-truck pickups.
“If we could reduce the amount of garbage in our community, it would reduce the diesel in the air,” said Ms. Martin, 72, a former medical assistant and school food preparation manager who wears hoop earrings under a baseball cap.
So she and Ms. Allen, who each live alone but have 6 children, 14 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren between them, have taken time from their full plate of tenant complaints to introduce, or reintroduce, the development’s 4,500 denizens to recycling, building by building.
While recycling is required by law, it had failed to take root at General Grant because the bins were not conveniently located and residents found it easy to ignore recycling signs, the women say.
Education is crucial, they insist, so they recruit volunteers and train them in which kinds of metal, glass and plastic items can be recycled. Then they guide them from door to door, distributing color-coded bags as they impart the fundamentals to neighbors who can be welcoming, indifferent or hostile.
“It’s not easy,” Ms. Martin said. “It’s not like you slap a flier on a door and say: ‘Recycle. It’s the law.’ It takes time, patience and energy.”
Some residents refuse to budge when Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin knock. And some object to their campaign. During one of their rounds, they were berated by a neighbor who insisted that recycling bins would attract vermin and should not be placed in front of the buildings.
“People are going to put garbage in there,” the neighbor warned.
But many readily embrace the effort. “This saves public housing work and money and it contributes to the general hygiene,” said Jose Morales, 51, an unemployed plumber and widower with two children who correctly chose a green recycling bag when Ms. Allen tested him with a flattened cereal box.
On other environmental fronts, efforts are under way by the city housing authority to make the apartment units more energy-efficient, using federal stimulus money to replace old boilers, water heaters and appliances. More than two dozen resident “green committees” have also been formed to help with projects like planting trees and recruiting workers for green jobs.
The recycling project at General Grant Houses got under way in 2007 under the auspices of the Morningside Heights/West Harlem Sanitation Coalition, a partnership that was founded in 1994 when residents of Grant and nearby co-ops realized they shared the same problems, from uneven trash collection to substandard grocery stores.
Ms. Martin and Joan Levine, an 80-year-old former teacher from Morningside Gardens, a six-building co-op just across the street on Amsterdam Avenue, are the coalition’s co-chairwomen.
Ms. Levine, who wears her gray hair in a Beatles bob and carries a handbag made of recycled juice box labels, said she was motivated partly by a resolve to confound stereotypes. “I’ve heard comfortable white middle-class people say, ‘Oh, public housing. They’ll never recycle. They don’t care,’ ” she said. “That really galled me because that wasn’t the case.”
Two years into the recycling program, General Grant Houses has five buildings down, one in training and three more to go. It has also evolved from a grass-roots effort into a pilot program with city and state financing that the city housing authority plans to expand to other residential projects.
Ms. Martin and Ms. Allen report promising results in the five buildings that are already recycling. Each now produces at least 10 fewer bags of trash a day, they said. Residents no longer leave mousetraps or car tires in recycling bins, as they did in the past when the city instituted recycling without an education program.
As president and vice president of the residents’ association, the two women also organize collections of electronic waste, from computers to TV sets, and lead workshops on topics like nontoxic cleaning products. Next on their agenda is finding a way to pay a stipend to resident monitors who will make sure that only recyclables go into the bins.
While they have to plead with the city to fix broken door locks and drafty windows, Ms. Martin said, “recycling we can control.”
“We don’t need to have a million dollars to do that and improve our environment,” she said.
Observatory: Warmer Winters and Shrinking Sheep
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, July 7, 2009
On a remote Scottish island, the sheep are shrinking, and the cause appears to be the warming of winter.
The wild Soay sheep that live on the island of Hirta in the North Atlantic have been under careful scientific observation since 1985, partly because the island ecosystem is a simple one consisting of the sheep and the vegetation they eat.
Timothy Coulson, a professor of population biology at Imperial College London, and his colleagues analyzed the sheep data and found that the weight of the average female Soay had decreased about three ounces a year, or about 5 percent over the past quarter-century.
That was somewhat surprising, as larger sheep have better odds of surviving and evolution tends to favor those that are stronger.
But thanks to changing climate, the survival of the fittest has become a bit easier, enabling more of the less fit to survive. Fall now lasts later into the year and spring arrives earlier, and more of the smaller lambs, which once perished in winter, now survive to their first birthday.
“As the winters have become shorter, the strength of selection has been reduced a little bit,” Dr. Coulson said.
The findings were published Thursday by the journal Science on its Web site.
Further research will look at how much of the shrinkage is caused by a shift in sheep genetics and how much is the “young mum” effect in which the lambs of young mothers are smaller because the mothers are not yet fully grown.
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Date: 2009-07-07 05:02 pm (UTC)