Jolin Tsai: Love Love Love

蔡依林 | Love Love Love | 歌词:歌词:百科

Moyers & Company 042613

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. In the aftermath of the Boston bombings and the massive manhunt which led to the death of one suspect and the arrest of another, both of them Muslims, there have been calls for increased surveillance and scrutiny of the public at large and Muslims in particular.

On Fox News the other day, New York congressman Peter King said: “If you know a threat is coming from a certain community, that's where you have to look." Proceed with caution here, Mr. King. And first take a look at that “Council on Foreign Relations” analysis of an FBI study showing that from 1980 to 2001, around two-thirds of domestic terrorism was carried out by American extremists who were not Muslims. That number actually skyrocketed to 95 percent in the years immediately after 9/11. And the magazine “Mother Jones” found that of the 62 mass shootings in America since 1982 – mass killings defined as four deaths or more – 44 of the killers were white males.

My guest, the journalist and columnist Glenn Greenwald, was flying here from his home in Brazil as events in Boston were unfolding. The investigation once again raised issues of civil liberties in the fight against terrorists. So, we reached out to Glenn Greenwald, who, as a former constitutional and civil rights litigator, keeps his critical and contrarian eye on potential conflicts between national security and individual liberty.

Among his best-selling books: How Would a Patriot Act?And most recently: With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Currently, Glenn Greenwald writes regularly for The Guardian. You can read him on their website. Welcome, Glenn. It's good to see you again.

GLENN GREENWALD: Great to be back.

BILL MOYERS: Was it right, in your opinion, for the suspect in Boston to be charged as a criminal rather than an enemy combatant?

GLENN GREENWALD: Absolutely. There were very few people who even took seriously the idea that he ought to be charged as an enemy combatant for many reasons, including the fact that he's an American citizen on US soil. And if there's one thing we're taught to think about our country, it's that the government can't punish people or put them in cages or threaten them with death without charging them with a crime, giving them a trial with a jury of their peers, and then convicting them beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the broader question is, should we change or radically alter or dismantle our standard protocols of justice in the name of terrorism. That's been the debate we've been having since the September 11th attack. And I'm firmly in the camp that we need not and should not do that. And therefore he should be treated like any other criminal.

BILL MOYERS: If it turns out that he and his brother had some significant contact with a radical organization back in their home country, would that change anything in your mind?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think that the most important thing that we need to start asking and if that were the case, this question would become even more urgent, is why is it that there seem to be so many people from so many different parts of the world willing to risk their lives or their liberty in order to bring violence to the United States, including to random Americans whom they don't know. There has to be something very compelling that drives somebody to do that. And this was the question that was asked in the wake of the 9/11 attack in the form of the sort of iconic question, "Why do they hate us?" And the government needed to answer that question because people were quite rightly asking. And the answer that was fed to them was, "Well, they hate us for our freedom."

And I think ten years, 11 years later, people are very cynical about that answer and realize that's not really the reason. Because what you see is that people from parts of the world that weren't part of 9/11 are now starting to attack the United States as well.

And when they're heard, which is rare, but sometimes they are, about what their motive was, invariably, they cite the fact that they have become so enraged by what Americans are doing to Muslims around the world, to their countries in terms of bombing them, imprisoning them without charges, drone attacking them, interfering in their governments, propping up their dictators that they feel that they have not only the right but the duty to attack America back. And so I think the discourse then ought to really be focused on what is driving this war. How is it that we can do something that will, instead of perpetuating it further and exacerbate it further, start to think about how to undermine and dilute the sentiments that continue to fuel it, you know, 12 years after the 9/11 attacks.

BILL MOYERS: You wrote the other day of America's “invisible victims.” And they are?

GLENN GREENWALD: The invisible victims are the women and children and innocent men who the United States continues to kill in places like tribal regions in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, at times in the Philippines. Places throughout the Muslim world where the United States sends flying robots.

We never hear about who those people are. And you can contrast it with the few instances in which the United States is attacked, we learn the names of the victims, we know their lives, we hear from how their family members are grieving, we never hear any of that in terms of the children, the women, and innocent men whom we kill.

In the Muslim world and it's sort of an "out of sight, out of mind" dynamic whereby not hearing about them, we never think about them. And by not thinking about them, we forget that they exist. And that's when somebody attacks the United States, it leads to this bewilderment, like, "Well, what have we ever done to anybody that would make them want to attack us?"

BILL MOYERS: I think you were traveling when the Boston siege was unfolding. Is that right? When did you--

GLENN GREENWALD: Right.

BILL MOYERS: When did you actually find out that it was happening?

GLENN GREENWALD: What happened was, I was flying overnight to the United States on Thursday night, which is when the shootout took place between the two brothers and the police, in which the older one was killed.

And then Friday morning when I got off the plane at JFK, was really the start of when people woke up and heard that there was this intense manhunt for the younger brother. And because I was traveling, I was generally in public places for the next several days in airports, hotels, restaurants. And what I saw was everybody glued to the television in order to observe and engage with a very political event, which was this manhunt.

And the reason that struck me was because there are very few events that really engage most people in the United States on a political level. Maybe there's one or two events like that every few years, maybe a national presidential election. But this was one of them.

BILL MOYERS: Why do you call it a political event?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it was political because it was infused with all kinds of political messages about Muslims, about radicalism, about what the proper role of the police and the military are in the United States. There were instantly these calls for greater surveillance, there was a lockdown of Boston in a very extraordinary act on a major American city, would be completely locked down. What you could see in how people were observing, what it was that they were watching, was their political impressions about the world, about their government, about political debates being formed, based on the very few incidents that they really pay attention to.

And I think that's the reason why incidents like this are incredibly significant in an enduring way, because it shapes how people who don't pay much attention to politics regularly really think about the world.

BILL MOYERS: And you think viewers, were evaluating this manhunt that was playing out in front of them through a political lens?

GLENN GREENWALD: Absolutely. I mean, it's inherently the case. Because when somebody does something, like detonates two bombs, one of which is placed behind an eight-year-old child, which it kills, and then tears off the limbs of dozens of other people, none of whom are known to the perpetrators, the question naturally arises, why would any human being engage in that behavior? And generally, when the person is a white Christian or a white American, there's an attempt instantly to assure everybody that it's simply kind of a one-off. That it doesn't have a political content, that the person is mentally ill, that they're a lone actor, that they just snap, is usually the jargon, to assure everybody that there's no political conclusions that ought to be drawn. When the person though is Muslim, everything reverses. So there's no consideration to the possibility that they were mentally ill, that they simply snapped, that they were being driven by political considerations of alienation or frustration about things in their lives.

Instead, there's an assumption that this bolsters the idea that we face this grave and potentially even existential threat from radical Muslims against whom we've been fighting this decade-long war. And it really bolsters the premises of that war by ratcheting up the fear levels and by reaffirming the political convictions in which it's grounded.

BILL MOYERS: But you agree that terrorism is a threat and has to be dealt with. Not only in trying to understand what provokes it, but in trying to prevent it.

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure, it's the responsibility of the U.S. government to prevent its citizens from being killed and attacked in the way that they were attacked in Boston. Unfortunately, the answers that are typically offered to that question, of how can the government protect us, usually end up not only not protecting us, but making the threat worse.

So that's the problem, as I see it. Is that the more we react by saying, "Well, we now need to go bomb further with drones, we need to infiltrate and surveil more, we need to put Muslims under more of a microscope and be more aggressive in how we attack them when we think they're a threat," I think the worse this problem becomes. I think that's the problem, is that the policies justified in the name of stopping terrorism have actually done more to exacerbate that threat and to render us unsafe than any other single cause.

BILL MOYERS: That raises the really deep question, the serious question, of how do we thrive as an open society and become the country that we wanted to become, when we are faced with the knowledge that these attacks can come when and where we don't expect them.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, this is the problem, is that the reality is, is that if you have an open society, then you can't prevent attacks like this. You can build enormous structures of security to prevent people from going on airplanes with bombs or guns, but then what do you do about trains or crowded malls or Times Square?

And I think then that really underscores the choice that we have, which is number one, we can do what we've been doing, which is become a more closed society, authorize the government to read our emails, listen in our telephone calls put people in prison without charges, enact laws that make it easier for the government to do those sorts of things.

Or we can try and understand why it is that people want to come here and do that? And so the question then becomes, why are people wanting to attack United States this way, but not dozens and dozens and dozens of countries around the world. And I think we need to get to the bottom of that question in order to figure out how to stop these attacks, is to undermine the motive.

BILL MOYERS: Here in New York City this week, a lot of officials, including the police commissioner, have been saying-- praising surveillance cameras that were so helpful in Boston and saying, "We need far more of those," and are asking for them. Are we moving into an era where the government is going to know more and more about each and every one of us?

GLENN GREENWALD: We are close to that already. There is a Washington Post series in 2010 called Top Secret America, three-part series by Dana Priest and William Arkin. And one of the facts that reported was that the National Security Agency, every day, collects and stores 1.7 billion, that's with a B, billion, emails, telephone calls, and other form of electronic communications by and between American citizens.

And what's amazing is, is that if you look at the case in Boston, the surveillance state, this massive apparatus of monitoring and storing information about us that we've constructed over the last decade that's extremely expensive and invasive really didn't do much. It didn't detect the attack before it started. The attempted Times Square attack in 2010 wasn't stopped because of eavesdropping or government surveillance but because a hot dog vendor noticed something amiss with the bomb that had been left.

So again, the surveillance state doesn't really do much in terms of giving us lots of security. But what it does do, is it destroys the notion of privacy, which is the area in which human creativity and dissent and challenges to orthodoxy all reside. The way things are supposed to work is we're supposed to know everything that the government does with rare exception, that's why they're called the public sector.

And they're supposed to know almost nothing about us, which is why we're private individuals, unless there's evidence that we've committed a crime. This has been completely reversed, so that we know almost nothing about what the government does.

It operates behind this impenetrable wall of secrecy, while they know everything about what it is we're doing, with whom we're speaking and communicating, what we're reading. And this imbalance, this reversal of transparency and secrecy and the way things are supposed to work, has really altered the relationship between the citizenry and the government in very profound ways.

BILL MOYERS: Is it conceivable to you that-- that giving up our privacy and even much of our liberty becomes a way of life in exchange, a trade for security? Tom Brokaw suggested as much the other day. Here he is.

TOM BROKAW on NBC News: Everyone has to understand tonight however that beginning tomorrow morning, early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country. However exhausted we may be by them, we're going to have to learn to live with them and get along and go forward and not let them bring us to our knees. You'll remember last summer how unhappy we were with all the security at the Democratic and Republican convention. Now I don't think that we could raise those complaints after what happened today in Boston.

GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, I think that is, first of all, it's extraordinary that journalists lead the way in encouraging people to accept greater government intrusion into their lives. The media, journalists, are supposed to be adversarial to the government, not encouraging people to submit to greater government authority.

But I think the broader point is that it's that false dichotomy, that the more the government learns about us, the safer we'll be. In part because what history shows is that when governments are able to surveil people in the dark, generally the greatest outcome is that they abuse that power and it becomes tyrannical. If you talk to anybody who came from Eastern Europe, they'll tell you that the reason we left is because society's become deadened and soulless, when citizens have no privacy. And it's a difficult concept to understand, why privacy is so crucial, but people understand it instinctively. They put locks on their bedroom doors, not for security, but for privacy.

They put passwords on their email accounts, because people know that only when you can engage in behavior without being watched is that where you can explore, where you can experiment, where you can engage in creative thinking, in creative behavior. A society that loses that privacy is a society that becomes truly conformist. And I think that's the real danger.

BILL MOYERS: That's what happens to people in power, as you know. Henry Kissinger may have been joking back in 1975 when off the record, although it was later transcribed, he said, "The illegal we can do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer."

GLENN GREENWALD: Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of government power. If people are able to operate in the dark, it is not likely or probable, but inevitable that they will abuse their power. It's just human nature. And that's been understood for as long as politics has existed. That transparency is really the only guarantee that we have for checking those who exercise power.

And that's the reason why the government has progressively destroyed one institution after the next designed to bring transparency, whether it's the media that they turned into the supine creatures or the Congress that does more to empower government secrecy than any other, or the courts that have been incredibly subservient towards sources of government secrecy. One of the only avenues we have left for learning what people in power do are whistleblowers. People who essentially step out and risk their individual liberty, and that's why there's such a war being waged against them.

BILL MOYERS: A war being waged against whistleblowers?

GLENN GREENWALD: There have been more prosecutions of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, which is a 1917 statute under world-- enacted in World War I, designed to enable Woodrow Wilson to punish people who were opposed to the United States involvement in that war. More prosecution of whistleblowers under that statute, under the Obama administration, than all previous administrations combined.

Just in the last four years, double the number, in fact. You've had people who have exposed government deceit and waste and corruption and illegality being systematically prosecuted as criminals in very harsh ways, threatened with decades in prison, being prosecuted as spies, essentially, under espionage statute. Whereas the people on whom they blew the whistle, the actual bad actors in the government, have been shielded and protected.

And what this is designed to do is to send a message as every investigative journalist in the United States will tell you, including ones who work for the most established of newspapers. To send a message to would-be sources and whistleblowers, who want to advise the public about government wrongdoing, that they better think twice because they will be severely punished if they do so.

BILL MOYERS: One of our best journalists, Jonathan Landay of McClatchy has turned up evidence from government documents, that President Obama and his senior aides have not been telling the truth when they claimed to have only deployed drones against known senior leaders of Al Qaeda and their allies. The headline above your column on Jonathan's reporting referred to the Obama administration's “drone lies.” Tough language.

GLENN GREENWALD: McClatchy article included language that the Obama administration at senior levels had misled the country and was deceitful because what these documents showed was that often times, they were? targeting very low level people whose role in these militias were unknown. They had targeted as a favor to the Pakistani government various individuals who posed no threat to the United States, but who Pakistan thought had become extremists. And worst of all the United States government has adopted what are called "signature strikes" which is where even by their own admission, they don't even know the identity of the people they're targeting. And they simply extinguish their lives without knowing who they are. But then justify it to the public by saying, "We're only targeting senior Al Qaeda leaders." And these leaked documents revealed how false those claims were. And again, it underscores how only leaks and whistleblowing, which the Obama administration is trying to criminalize harshly is the way that we learn about what the government does.

BILL MOYERS: You are a lawyer as well as a journalist and an essayist. What's the distinction between death by drones in a tribal area in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what the bombers did in Boston, in your mind?

GLENN GREENWALD: I don't think there is much difference. You could certainly say that one difference, and this is what people would typically say to defend what the United States does and to distinguish it, is that we are not deliberately killing civilians while the people in Boston did. And I'm not sure how true that is. There certainly are cases where the United States has very recklessly killed civilians.

But even the drone program itself, in its normal operating state, consists of a very high level of possibility that innocent people will be killed in places where there hasn't been a declared war, that aren't on a battlefield. In people's homes, in their work places, where they congregate in their villages.

And so at some point, when a government engages in behavior year, after year, after year, after year, that continues to kill innocent people in a very foreseeable way, and continues to do that, in my mind that reaches a level of recklessness that is very similar to intentional killing.

BILL MOYERS: You are contrarian on this, because there's a reputable poll which shows that 65 percent of the American people support drones.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right, I mean, this is what we were going back to a little bit earlier, which is that people have been inculcated to believe those falsehoods that the Obama administration has been propagating about drones, that they only target high-level terrorists.

And when you combine that assumption, that false assumption with the invisibility of the victims, so that Americans never have to think about the human cost, both to the people we're killing and ultimately to themselves from the security threat that it produces, it's very easy to have a warped understanding of the cost of benefits it's deliberately inducing people to view these drone attacks in a much more favorable way than reality would suggest.

BILL MOYERS: So what's playing out here? Is it human nature, media, politics, propaganda, as you say, fear, all of the above?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think it's all of the above. I mean, there have been all kinds of political theorists, statesmen, leaders, philosophers throughout history who have talked about the dangers that come from allowing a government to ratchet up fear levels by continuously focusing on external threats and enemies.

That this is the greatest menace to liberty domestically. I think what ultimately happens, the worst part of it, is that when you continuously induce people to support militarism and aggression and violence by demonizing a foreign other, what you really do is you degrade the population. You transform how it is that they think, the kind of people that they are, the things that they come to expect from life.

You really make it a much more savage and bloodthirsty populace that will then support things that in the absence of that sustained propaganda, they would find horrific. And I think you see lots of examples of that in American discourse.

BILL MOYERS: Do you see long-range implications from what happened in Boston?

GLENN GREENWALD: Absolutely. I mean, one of the most amazing things to me over the last few years was in the aftermath of our killing of Osama bin Laden, there was all kinds of chanting and marching and celebratory dancing taking place in the street, which was striking to me because, even if you believe that the killing of Osama bin Laden was justifiable, any time you're killing somebody and dumping their corpse into the ocean, that should be a cause of somber reflection, even if you believe it was necessary.

And I think you saw much the same thing in Boston. Again, the chanting and the sense of collective self-esteem and the reverence for military and political and police institutions, I think is very disturbing and will really endure.

BILL MOYERS: But Glenn, couldn't it have been just relief? Relief that they had found the other guy? That they didn't have to go to bed that night wondering if another bomb would go off?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I think that relief is a natural reaction, just like I think that relief from the killing of Osama bin Laden is natural. He had been this sort of hovering menace for so long. But the way in which this was all done, both in Boston and then the killing of Osama bin Laden, is something that is a very extreme form of government behavior and of police force and of military power. But ultimately, what I really think more than anything else, and this is, I think, what the most profound point is from all of this, is--I remember the night that Osama bin Laden was killed and President Obama went on television and said, "This shows again that any time America sets its mind to something, our greatness allows us to achieve it.”

And the reason why that was so striking to me was because it used to be the case that as a country, what gave us our sense of nationalistic pride was going to the moon, or discovering new cures for diseases, or investing technologies that elevated the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

And I think that the way in which Americans now relate to their government, that the way in which they get nationalistic pride is through the assertion of this massive, military or police force, and very few other things produce that kind of pride, I think shows a lot about our value system and what the government is failing to do. And that's the way in which this culture becomes coarsened.

BILL MOYERS: Glenn Greenwald, it's been good to see you again and I wish you a safe trip home.

GLENN GREENWALD: Thank you for having me.

BILL MOYERS: Even if the threat of terrorists went away, none of those bold projects Glenn Greenwald described as defining American greatness would happen today. Our government is paralyzed and dysfunctional, and it’s getting worse than ever. Just ask Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, as I’m about to do.

For decades, these two political scientists were on the go-to list for Beltway pundits and reporters seeking wisdom on the curious ways of governance. But then, almost exactly a year ago to this day, they published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post headlined, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” Mann and Ornstein argued that democracy and the economy are in a crash dive, and that congressional gridlock was largely the fault of the Republican Party and its takeover by right wing radicals. What’s more, they said, the mainstream media was adding to the problem by resorting to “false equivalency,” pretending that both parties were equally at fault.

The article was based on their book, It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. A paperback edition, with a new preface and afterword, will be out later this year.

Thomas Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Norman Ornstein is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In their book, It’s Even Worse than It Looks, they predicted, “If President Obama gets reelected but faces either a continuing divided Congress or a Congress with Republicans in charge of both houses, there is little reason to expect a new modus vivendi in which the president and GOP leaders are able to find reasonable compromises in areas like budget policy, health reform and financial regulation.”

Welcome to the both of you.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Great to be with you, Bill.

THOMAS MANN: Thank you, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: Okay, the election's come and gone and the deep dysfunction that has gripped our government for so many years now is still with us. What are you thinking today?

THOMAS MANN: You know, the election was even more stunning, in a way, in its sweep than we might have imagined. So you would have thought things would be different. Maybe in an issue or two, like immigration, it will be. But if you look at the gun issue, the background check, so much of the focus has been on the four Democrat apostates who drifted away from their party.

Forty-one of 45 Republicans voted no. That includes people from states that wouldn't naturally be a part of a big gun culture. What's the reason? It's the tribalism we described in the book that continues. If he's for it, we're against it. We're not going to give him a victory, even if we were for it yesterday. And I'm afraid that pathology is still a driving force, dramatically so in the House; a little bit less in the Senate. But as we saw with background checks, not quite enough.

THOMAS MANN: Sadly, divided party government, which we have because of the Republican House, in a time of extreme partisan polarization, is a formula for inaction and absolutist opposition politics, not for problem solving.

You know, it wasn't that long ago when you could actually get something done under divided government. There'd be enough members of the opposition party who want to legislate, not simply to engage in what we used to call the permanent campaign is now a permanent war. But that doesn't happen anymore now. It's Republicans are unified in their oppositions, or beholden to a "no new tax" pledge that really keeps the country, the Congress, and its political system from dealing honestly and seriously with the problems we face.

BILL MOYERS: Well, take the gun vote again. It occurred to me that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may have made a fatal blunder when he caved earlier in the year and didn't go for the end of the filibuster, as he could have. Do you agree with that?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: I have mixed feelings about that, Bill. The difficulty that Harry Reid faced was to do this would cause a lot of turmoil in the Senate. There are so many other ways that a minority party can bollix up the works. And it's worth a price, if it's going to lead to legislative outcomes. But with a Republican House, all those bills passed would have met a graveyard.

BILL MOYERS: They could have still blocked it over in the…

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Could have still…

BILL MOYERS: Anything that…

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: …blocked it.

BILL MOYERS: …passed in the Senate.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: So he went for a deal with Mitch McConnell which makes it easier, if the two leaders want to do something, to overcome individual rogue senators, like a Ted Cruz or a Rand Paul. But it didn't bank on, he didn't bank on the Republican leader basically going back to where he had been for the first four years of the Obama administration on nominations for judges and top administration officials, and on a whole host of bills, and once again raising the bar to 60 routinely.

BILL MOYERS: You really surprised me last year, because I know how hard you both have worked to be bipartisan and to work with Democrats and Republicans, but you were very blunt in the way you came out and finally, you know.

THOMAS MANN: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: …named names and pointed fingers. You wrote, "The two parties are not equally to blame because the Republicans have become extreme both in," quoting you, "in terms of policy and process." And you're saying here today, a year later, that's still the case?

THOMAS MANN: It's very much the case, Bill. We had no choice but to say it. It was in some ways, it was obvious if you if you look at the situation, and there is a body of scholarly research that has demonstrated this rightward march of the party, both among elected officials, but also rank-and-file Republicans. And the strongest, most extreme of those, the Tea Party people, have pulled the others back toward them. It's a reality, and it's not just ideological difference either. They begin with those differences, but then it's the strategic hyper-partisanship, what Norm referred to earlier: If Barack Obama is for something, we have to be against it because he's not a real American.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Let me just offer a bit of a caveat here on two fronts. First, we're not saying Democrats are angels here. Plenty of flaws there. But I also hold out still some hope for the Senate. You have a number of Republicans in the Senate, and this has less to do with ideology than with focus. Are you there to solve problems, or are you there either to pursue a radical agenda or to gain political advantage? Everybody's going to look for political advantage.

There are problem-solvers in the Senate. They are flawed ones, as we saw with the gun bill. You know, people like Lamar Alexander or Bob Corker, who joined with most of their colleagues. But I've talked to them when it comes to either reforming the nomination process, doing something in a larger fiscal sense that will include revenues, acting on immigration. I think you've got some opportunities here. Those opportunities will go to the House, and the only way they'll pass is with far more Democrats than Republicans. And they may not make it through. But we don't have a lost cause yet in the Senate.

Now, the recent evidence is not great on that front. And the fundamental pathologies that we wrote about and talked about and we just felt an obligation that we'd built up some capital over the years. What's it for if you're not going to spend it now?

BILL MOYERS: You riled the Republicans but you riled the press by talking about false equivalency. Their evenhanded treatment of decidedly uneven behavior on the part of the two parties, the equal treatment for true and false statements by advocates, equal weight to competing spin between opposing politicians and pundits without regard to the accuracy of either. You didn't get invited on the Sunday talk shows after that, did you?

NOMAN ORNSTEIN: And still haven't been.

THOMAS MANN: You noticed that? It's because those programs are predicated upon having spin from one side and then the other side. We're not the first to point out the, this artificial balance. I mean, reporters, good reporters do it partly out of a sense of professionalism, to be fair. To be wary of allowing your own personal political views to influence your writing. All of that is good.

But now it's a safety valve. It keeps you from being charged as a partisan. It satisfies your producers, worried about advertising. And frankly, it's become really quite pernicious. We point out example after example in the book where they treat clearly unequal behavior as equivalent.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: You know it's not even that we weren't invited on the Sunday shows, it's the radio silence on the topic. So you mention “The Washington Post” piece that appeared at right at the time that the book was published. And it just exploded on the scene, frankly; partly because of the title, which was “Let's Just Say It: Republicans Are the Problem”.

You know, within less than 24 hours after it was up unannounced on The Washington Post website, they had 5,000 comments. They stop counting after that. We got over 265,000 Facebook referrals; 1.5 million web his. That weekend it appeared on a Thursday, and then in the paper on Sunday. That weekend, this was the topic of discussion in Washington, there's no doubt about that.

All those Sunday shows have panels, their charge being, let's talk about what people are talking about in Washington. Nothing. You could invite other people on; you may not want to have us for one reason or another. How can you not raise the issue at all? Because it's so uncomfortable for them to even raise the notion that they should focus on the truth rather than this notion of balance no matter what. And that remains the case.

BILL MOYERS: So look what's happening. Senate Republicans are filibustering and blocking scores of executive and judicial nominations, as you point out in your new preface; they're delaying the confirmation of others. They're still willing, as you said last year, to use any tactic, no matter how dangerous and destructive, to damage the President and to force its will on him through a form of policy hostage-taking. You say that this policy hostage-taking was devised by this group, calling itself the “Young Guns.” Who are they?

THOMAS MANN: They are Eric Cantor they are Paul Ryan, and the third is the Republican whip Representative McCarthy of California. They laid out before the election a strategy to take hostage the full faith and credit of the United States by threatening not to raise the debt limit to accommodate previous decisions made by Congress, and signed by the president. It's hard to imagine a more destructive action that could be taken.

We've got problems here, but there is still a flight to the dollar around the world. The one thing we have going for us is people trust the dollar and trust the fact that Treasury will pay its obligations when people buy bonds. But they were going to take that hostage in order to get immediate spending cuts.

BILL MOYERS: There was some compromise in January over the, over the deficit. Were you encouraged by that? Did you get an adrenaline shot when you…

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: No. And unfortunately. And here's the reason why. I mean, first of all, of course, we knew that the leverage was with President Obama in this case, not with people trying to hold something hostage, because inaction here would mean sharp tax increases across the board. And after that, the president can come back and say, "I want to propose the biggest tax cut in history for everybody except those making over $250,000 a year."

So you could, it was clear there would be some kind of a deal that would emerge, whether before or after. One of the things that was discouraging about this is it happened very late in the game, of course, as we know. It was Joe Biden meeting with Mitch McConnell and coming up with a plan.

But here's the plan that gets 89 votes in the Senate, including some of the icons of the conservative wing of the party which is really a radical wing of the party, from Pat Toomey to Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn. And it goes to the House, and John Boehner, who may have the worst job in America could barely get a third of his own party to go along. Now, that's a modest deal. If you can't get more than a third of your House Republicans to support a deal like this, that doesn't speak well for the prospects of change.

BILL MOYERS: And you say that he, that Cantor more than any other politician helped to create the series of fiscal crises that you described just a moment ago?

THOMAS MANN: He really did. He hovered around John Boehner as Boehner was getting into negotiations with the president over the course of 2011 to head off the debt ceiling crisis. Bob Woodward…

BILL MOYERS: The Watergate Bob Woodward.

THOMAS MANN: Yeah.

THOMAS MANN: Watergate Bob Woodward has written…

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Now the post-Watergate Bob Woodward.

THOMAS MANN: …written a book about these negotiations and did a lot of talking to the Republicans. And ended up saying Boehner and Obama reached a deal and Obama walked away from it. Well, Eric Cantor, in his interview with Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker couple of months ago basically corrected him. He said, Well, I talked to Boehner and said it really wouldn't be a good idea to reach a deal now because then the issue evaporates, the president gets the credit, and he has a better chance of being reelected. Better to keep it alive and fight it out in the in the election.

BILL MOYERS: And it didn't pay off for them, did…

THOMAS MANN: It didn't pay off at all.

BILL MOYERS: Except they held the House but it didn't pay off for them in the Senate. He lost two seats in the Senate. Didn't pay off for him in winning the presidency?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: It was a, call it a riverboat gamble, I suppose you could say. Because what Cantor said in that interview was, if we win it all, then we don't have to compromise. They didn't; but the reaction wasn't, all right, now we have to compromise. Instead it was, we're still not going to compromise.

BILL MOYERS: You've said you have some hope for the Senate. There is some seeming to have to someone from afar movement on immigration. Is that must be hopeful to you?

THOMAS MANN: It is, but it's so different than everything else. The reason there is movement on immigration is because Republicans have such a powerful incentive to move on immigration.

BILL MOYERS: Because they lost the Latino vote…politics.

THOMAS MANN: They're on the verge of being marginalized in presidential politics. They are losing overwhelmingly the Latinos, Asian Americans, other immigrant groups the young voters. The growing parts of the electorate are moving away from the Republicans to the Democrats. They have a reason to do it. Hardball politics, not grand, bipartisan consensus. And they've put it together well. It's a group of Republicans and Democrats who are working out this bill. Obama has…

BILL MOYERS: In the Senate, right?

THOMAS MANN: In the Senate. Obama stayed off to the side, as they requested, because it's very hard for Marco Rubio to support anything the president's campaigning for. So his absence is what they needed to move this along.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: But we shouldn't just focus on the members themselves. There are, in the House, at least a few people who'd like to work to solve some of these problems and Boehner among them, I think. And…

BILL MOYERS: You really believe that?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: …some others well, I think, you know, he's sees himself as the Speaker of the House. And some of it is political as well. He's being pushed by other forces. But it's really important that we focus as much on the outside forces as the inside ones.

BILL MOYERS: Such as?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Well, when the fiscal cliff debate came up and we get this bill coming over with 89 votes in the Senate, and you had around that time, before those negotiations, Boehner trying to get a little traction, knowing there would be a tax increase. Coming up with his very poorly named Plan B, you know? I think maybe some of his members rejected it because they thought they didn't want an over-the-counter drug here.

But it was, give me some traction. I'd propose a million dollars as the level here, and then we can negotiate. And some of his members were ready to support him, just to give him that traction. The Club for Growth, Heritage Action step up and basically said, you members, you lift your heads out of that foxhole and support any tax increase, and you've got a target on your backs and millions of dollars in a primary against you.

Some of this is coming from the kinds of people who we're electing to office, through a nominating process that has gotten so skewed to the radical right. But some of it is an electoral magnet that pulls them away from voting for anything that might have a patina of bipartisan support because they'll face extinction.

THOMAS MANN: Bill, this is such an important point. Nowadays, political parties are not organizations, they're networks. We talk sometimes about parties versus outside groups. No, no, no. The outside groups are part of the political parties, and so too are the media outlets. The large funders. It's a broad system. Super PACs don't exist as independent forces. They in fact are run by former party operatives and leaders of one kind or another.

And right now, you have a conjunction of forces that you can see in the conservative media, in the funding organizations, and in the Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers. And it all comes together to provide such overwhelming pressure on individual Republicans to toe the line, to oppose even when they want to engage in problem solving.

BILL MOYERS: So when you mention The Club for Growth, you're talking about essentially Wall Street finance group of private citizens who will take on a Republican in the primary to defeat him if he doesn't toe the line on what the financial interests want?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: And these are financial interests who don't just focus on financial interests. Many of them are themselves radical either libertarians or who have a very strong ideology. And so The Club for Growth will intervene not just on tax issues, but on others. And they're joined by other groups. You know, when Jim DeMint left the Senate

BILL MOYERS: To head The Heritage…

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Head the Heritage Foundation, you know…

BILL MOYERS: Right. A very conservative organization.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Which used to be a think tank. Now, of course, it has a 501(c)4 called Heritage Action. They're raising money. They're aggressively participating in the political debates, and will in campaigns. Because you can have as much impact as Tom said, it's all part of a party apparatus now. From the outside, if you use the leverage of money, and you can also use the leverage of the social media, the talk radio hosts, and others, who have such a dominant impact on the party now, that it takes the problem solvers and puts them in a really, really tricky situation.

BILL MOYERS: You say, in the book, that what we all know: President Obama made great efforts to work cooperatively with the Republicans during his first term. Didn't get him anything in terms of legislation; got him maybe a second term. But in The New York Times this week, Michael Shear and Peter Baker say, call him, "A president who hesitates to twist arms." Can you not be president without twisting arms?

THOMAS MANN: Oh, I think that's a myth.

BILL MOYERS: Do you?

THOMAS MANN: I just think the press is now overrun with President Obama's personal shortcomings. That he doesn't engage, that he doesn't put pressure on members, doesn't tell them what to do. He doesn't give them bourbon and branch water and he and he doesn't raise hell with them. And the reality is that presidential leadership is contextual.

He's operating with a Republican Party that's part of this broad apparatus. What can he do to any one of those Republicans? He can't do anything. He's not in a position to do it. He tried negotiating early, that was his brand, right? The post-partisan President. He realized what he was up against, and then he said, you know, I've got to maneuver, position myself with the Democrats in a way that we can get some things done.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: You know, I would say on the gun issue too we're premature here. It's not only that you can't twist arms in the same way that it might have been available to you before. And the few arms that he could twist on the Democratic side were almost all, with one exception, people who were up for reelection in really tough places. You're always going to tread a little bit more carefully there. And on the Republican side, it's not clear what either schmoozing or arm twisting would do.

But my guess is you're going to see this, the issue of a background check come back. You're also going to see some executive actions, we're already beginning to see them, to make sure that people who shouldn't have access to guns have to go through a process to make it happen. So it's not only that, this meme in the press: "Why can't he be like Lyndon Johnson or like Bill Clinton?" As if all the schmoozing that Bill Clinton did got him a single Republican vote for his economic plan. And it took seven months to get the Democrats helped his health care plan, or kept him from being impeached.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I'm not impressed when people say, well, Barack Obama's not Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson is…

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Today he couldn't be Lyndon Johnson…

BILL MOYERS: Couldn't be Lyndon Johnson.

BILL MOYERS: This is not the 1960s when Congress had a huge bevy, a large bevy of moderate Republicans.

BILL MOYERS: So who wins, and who loses, when we have this deadlock and dysfunction?

THOMAS MANN: Well, first of all, the public and future generations really do lose. We have serious problems, short and long term, in the country. We're going to have to figure out how we can compete in a global economy where not just low value but high value jobs may end up elsewhere. We're going to have a radically different workforce as the population changes, not only in terms of having more African American, Asian American and Hispanic Americans making up a part of that workforce, but as the population gets older and lives longer.

We've got challenges in terms of energy and the environment, how you compete in a globe where the threats are very different ones. If you have a government that can't function, or that gets caught up in a war of the roses where what's most important is doing short-term damage to the other side, shed a little blood so that you can take over and implement a revolution, we're all going to lose.

But I think in political terms, I just don't see a Republican Party that continues down this path. And I'm not alone in that. The Jeb Bushes of the world, and the Haley Barbours of the world, and the Mitch Daniels of the world, and the Chris Christies of the world see it too. If you move off the mainstream and pursue a radical ideology, and if you say, "We're just not going to make any movement at all," in some of these issues, eventually voters are going to say, "Enough of this."

THOMAS MANN: Bill, we've been living through now years of stagnant wages, of high unemployment, of growing economic inequality. So the work of our legislature, our governments makes a big difference. And right now, those issues are not being addressed in any substantial way because of the dysfunctional politics, and because the Republican Party has drifted so far from the mainstream of our politics. If there's optimism, it's one that the old democratic accountability still works.

BILL MOYERS: Small "d" democratic…

THOMAS MANN: Small "d" democratic accountability, that a party that goes so far from the mainstream gets disciplined, gets beaten, gets hit over the head with a two-by-four by the voters. And then other voices can emerge within the party to change things. That's perhaps the most the most important. Over time, though, we've got changes to make. We simply have to increase the size of the electorate in primary elections as well as

BILL MOYERS: Turnout, voters.

THOMAS MANN: Turnout, voters --

BILL MOYERS: You see that as the--

THOMAS MANN: Participation and turnout. It's absolutely key because the smaller the turnout, the more extreme the views. And the more likely they are to appeal to the very people who are who are defending the core values of that party.

BILL MOYERS: Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. Thank you for joining me and thank you for writing this.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Thank you, Bill.

THOMAS MANN: Thank you, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: America lost a happy warrior and I lost a friend this week – Bob Edgar, the president of the citizens’ lobby Common Cause. A fearless advocate for a fair and just America. You will find my eulogy for him – and other tributes – at our website, BillMoyers.com. And there’s more on our Facebook page and our Twitter feed. I’ll see you there, and I’ll see you here, next time.

M&C | Trading Democracy for ‘National Security’ | April 26, 2013 Full Show | vm

Dawkins: At Pennsylvania 031213

Richard Dawkins | at University of Pennsylvania | March 12, 2013 |

Edge: Encapsulated Universes

I'm interested in how the languages we speak shape the way we think. The reason I got interested in this question is that languages differ from one another so much. There are about 7,000 languages around the world, and each one differs from the next in innumerable ways. Obviously, languages have different words, but they also require very different things from their speakers grammatically.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you want to say even the simplest thing, like "Humpty Dumpty sat on a …" Well, even with a snippet of a nursery rhyme, if you try to translate it to other languages, you'd immediately run into trouble. Let's focus on the verb for a moment. Sat. To say this in English, if this was something that happened in the past, then you'd have to say "sat." You wouldn’t say, "will sit" or "sitting." You have to mark tense. In some languages like in Indonesian you couldn't change the verb. The verb would always stay the same regardless of whether this is a past or future event. In some languages, like in Russian, my native language, you would have to change the verb for tense, but you would also have to include gender. So if this was Mrs. Dumpty that sat on the wall, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was Mr. Dumpty.

In Russian, quite inconveniently, you have to mark the verb for whether the event was completed or not. So if Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall for the entire amount of time that he was meant to sit on it, that would be one form of the verb. But if he were to say "have a great fall" that would be a different form of the verb.

In Turkish, and this is one of my favorite examples, you have to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information. If you actually witnessed this event with your own eyes, you were walking along and you saw this chubby, ovoid character sitting on a wall, that would be one form of the verb. But if this was something you just heard about, or you inferred, from say broken Humpty Dumpty pieces, then you would have to use a different form of the verb.

When people have looked at differences like this across languages, one first response has been "Wow, languages really require different things from their speakers, therefore people who speak different languages must think differently." On the other side, people have argued, "Not so fast. Just because languages differ in what their speakers are required to say, doesn't mean that people have to think differently. The differences could be just on the surface, just in how people talk, not in how they think."

Here's an argument that lends that point of view some weight. Whenever we talk, whenever we say anything, we're only reporting a very small proportion of what we know. For example, if you were to say, "It's raining today," you can say that without having to say "It's raining today, but only outside and not inside," even though you very well know that it's only raining outside and not inside. The person hearing you also knows that you know that. You don't have to report everything that you know, and the sentence that you do say contains only a small proportion of the information that you actually know. Some people have argued just because Turkish, Korean, Japanese, and Russian speakers say different stuff and include different information in their sentences, doesn't mean they actually know different stuff. They could know the same things, remember the same things, see the world the same way, and just include different things in their sentences. That is, people could all think the same ways, but talk differently.

This question, often called the Whorfian question after Benjamin Lee Whorf (who was an American linguistic anthropologist) is something people have been speculating about and expressing very strong views on for thousands of years. Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor, said, "to have a second language is to have a second soul." One of his successors, Charles V, said "A man who knows four languages is worth four men." That's a very strong statement about the worth of a language. People have been making these kinds of arguments and making claims about the importance of language for centuries, some coming down on the side of language shaping thought, but others, quite on the opposite side. For example, Shakespeare had Juliette say, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," suggesting that what you call something doesn't matter.

What has lacked up until now, up until quite recently, is actual empirical evidence to answer the question: do speakers of different languages actually think differently? Is it because of the differences in language that these differences arise? Let me give you three of my favorite examples on how speakers of different languages think differently in important ways. I'm going to give you an example from space; how people navigate in space. That ties into how we think about time as well. Second, I'm going to give you an example on color; how we are able to discriminate colors. Lastly, I'm going to give you an example on grammatical gender; how we're able to discriminate objects. And I might throw in an extra example on causality.

Let’s start with one of my favorite examples, this comes from the work of Steve Levinson and John Haviland, who first started describing languages that have the following amazing property: there are some languages that don't use words like "left" and "right." Instead, everything in the language is laid out in absolute space. That means you have to say things like, "There is an ant on your northwest leg," Or "can you move the cup to the south southeast a little bit?" Now to speak a language like this, you have to stay oriented. You have to always know which way you're facing. And it's not just that you have to stay oriented in the moment, all your memories of your past have to be oriented as well, so that you can say things like "Oh, I must have left my glasses to the southwest of the telephone." That is a memory that you have to be able to generate. You have to have represented your experience in absolute space with cardinal directions.

What Steve Levinson and John Haviland found is that folks who speak languages like this indeed stay oriented remarkably well. There are languages like this around the world; they're in Australia, they're in China, they're in South America. Folks who speak these languages, even young kids, are able to orient really well.

I had the opportunity to work with a group like this in Australia in collaboration with Alice Gaby. This was an Aboriginal group, the Kuuk Thaayorre. One of my first experiences there was standing next to a five year old girl. I asked her the same question that I've asked many eminent scientists and professors, rooms full of scholars in America. I ask everyone, "Close your eyes, and now point southeast." When I ask people to do this, usually they laugh because they think, "well, that's a silly question. How am I supposed to know that?" Often a lot of people refuse to point. They don't know which way it is. When people do point, it takes a while, and they point in every possible direction. I usually don't know which way southeast is myself, but that doesn't preclude me from knowing that not all of the possible given answers are correct, because people point in every possible direction.

But here I am standing next to a five year old girl in Pormpuraaw, in this Aboriginal community, and I ask for her to point southeast, and she's able to do it without hesitation, and she's able to do it correctly. That's the case for people who live in this community generally. That's just a normal thing to be able to do. I had to take out a compass to make sure that she was correct, because I couldn't remember.

What I came to this community to find out was whether the way people think about space also affects the way that they think about time. I had done a lot of work trying to understand how we build our representations of time. One consistent claim has been that we build representations of abstract things, like time, out of more concrete things. The way we build complex knowledge is to take simpler building blocks and then use the power of language to combine these building blocks into more and more complex ideas. Time seemed to be an example of that; people take spatial representations, make an analogy or metaphor from space to time, and that gives us more complex ideas of time. But of course, that whole story I just told you about how ideas of space underlie our ideas of time suggests that if people think about space differently, they should also think about time differently. So if you find two cultures that think about space in very different ways, they should also think about time in very different ways.

That's what Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out. I gave people a really simple task. I would give them a set of cards, and the cards might show a temporal progression, like my grandfather at different ages from when he was a boy to when he's an old man. I would shuffle them, give them to the person, and say "Lay these out on the ground so that they're in the correct order." If you ask English speakers to do this, they will lay the cards out from left to right. And it doesn't matter which way the English speaker is facing. So if you're facing north or south or east or west, the cards will always go left to right. Time seems to go from left to right with respect to our bodies. If you ask Hebrew speakers to do this, or Arabic speakers, they're much more likely to lay the cards out from right to left. That suggests that something about the writing direction in a language matters in how we imagine time. But nonetheless, time is laid out with respect to the body.

But these folks, the Kuuk Thaayorre, don't use words like "left" and "right." So what would they do? How will they lay out time? Well, it turns out they do it from East to West. If a person is sitting facing south, they will lay out the cards from left to right. But if they're facing north, they will lay the cards out from right to left. If they're facing east, the cards will come towards them. That's a pattern that we had just never seen with any American. That's a radically different way of organizing time. It's a way of organizing time that's in a different coordinate frame, in an independent coordinate frame from what you see with English speakers or Russian speakers, and so on. That shows a really big difference in cognitive ability, where a five year old in one culture can do something that an eminent professor in another culture cannot do. So that's one of my favorite examples, the way that people organize space and the way they organize time.

There are lots of other wonderful examples also from the domain of time, which seems to be especially flexible. For example, there are cultures that put the past in front and the future behind them. There are folks who organize time from left to right or right to left. Time could also take on a vertical dimension in some cultures. In Mandarin, the past is above and the future is below. You get this incredible variation in how people represent time, with complete reversals, taking on new dimensions, or going in a completely different coordinate frame.

Let me give you another set of examples. This one starts with an observation by Roman Jakobson - a Russian linguist. He was interested in grammatical gender and the ability to translate across languages. In languages that have grammatical gender, all the nouns are assigned to a grammatical category. In the simpler examples it would be masculine and feminine. Sometimes there is a third gender, masculine, feminine and neuter. In more complex cases there can be as many as 16 genders with a special grammatical category for hunting tools or for canines, depending on the language. George Lakoff made famous a grammatical gender category in an Aboriginal language that included women, fire and dangerous things. Those were the things that were all treated grammatically equivalently in this language.

What Jakobson was interested in was, does it matter if a word is assigned a masculine or feminine gender in the language? What if Monday is masculine and Wednesday is feminine? Does that matter for how you think about Monday and Wednesday? Well, one thing he did is he asked students at Moscow University to act out, to personify, days of the week. Act like Monday, or act like Wednesday. What he noticed in these Russian speakers is that when they were acting like Monday, they would act like a man, and when they were acting like Wednesday, they would act like a woman. That is, the way they personified these abstract things depended on the grammatical gender in Russian.

He also made another observation. This was an informal observation about art. He looked at the way artists portray abstract things like justice or death or time or love or charity in paintings and in sculptures, and he asked, how do they decide whether to make death a man or a woman? How do they decide to make truth or time a man or a woman? He noticed, for example, that Russians portrayed death as an old woman, whereas Germans are much more likely to portray death as a man. He again hypothesized that this has to do with grammatical gender.

Recently, a student and I did an analysis of ArtStor, a database with millions of images of art in it, and we went through and analyzed all of the images that were personifications and allegories. For each one, we said what is the gender being depicted in this painting or sculpture? And what is the grammatical gender of that word in the artist's native language? What we found was that Jakobson was right. There's an amazing correlation. Seventy eight percent of the time the grammatical gender of the word predicted the gender that the artist chose for the depiction.

And this surprised us because, of course, artists are supposed to be such idiosyncratic spirits, right? They're supposed to be not showing what the general culture might believe. And of course, one's ideas of love or death are likely to be very idiosyncratic and based on personal experiences. But nonetheless, this little quirk of grammar, whether something got assigned a masculine or a feminine gender in language had really good predictive power for how an artist was going to portray an abstract entity.

Other people have done work looking at how even young kids are affected by these little quirks of grammar. For example, young kids are told, "We're making an animated film and you have to help us figure out what voices to give different characters. So here's a fork, and here is an alarm clock, and here's an accordion. Tell us what voices you would like these characters to have?" Studies by Maria Sera showed that even young kids start assigning voices to objects that are consistent with grammatical gender in their language. Even relatively early, grammatical gender seems to be shaping the way people think about objects.

There's another aspect of gender, of course, and that's how we talk about people, not objects. Some languages mark gender very, very strongly. English is somewhere in the middle. Some languages like Hebrew mark gender all over the place both for people and for objects, and some languages don't mark gender at all. Finnish would be an example of a language with nearly no gender information in it. So you might ask, well is it really even true for how people think about people's gender? Is it possible that if you don't mark gender in a language, that somehow changes how people think about biological gender?

Now I want to put a limit on this. There are some things that we can discover outside of the bounds of language. It's not the case that Finnish speakers are only able to reproduce by virtue of randomly bumping into each other, and then once in awhile a happy miracle occurs. Clearly, Finnish speakers have figured out that there are men and women. But here's an interesting question, how long does it take to figure that out? How long does it take to figure out whether for example you, yourself, are a boy or a girl? There's a wonderful study by Alexander Guiora who looked at kids learning Hebrew, kids learning Finnish, and kids learning English as their first language. He asked all of them, "Are you a boy or a girl?" And he had all kinds of other clever ways of figuring out how aware they were of what gender they were. What he found was that kids in these three groups actually figure it out at different rates. The Hebrew learning kids got it first, and then the English kids, and then the Finnish kids last. Of course eventually everyone figured it out, but there was this difference in the developmental timeline.

In a recent set of studies, another group compared English speakers and Mandarin speakers on their ability to remember and respond to questions about gender in stories that they heard. In this study, you get a story about a bunch of people, and then you’re asked some quick questions. Some of those questions had to do with the gender of the people involved. Mandarin doesn't mark gender nearly as much as English does. What these studies found is that whereas Mandarin speakers were perfectly fast at answering all kinds of other questions, when it came to questions about gender, they were slower than English speakers, suggesting that gender information wasn't as salient, wasn't as important in their minds.

While it isn't the case that language is the only source of our information, clearly we can figure things out outside of language, when something is marked in your language that seems to give you an extra boost. It allows you to figure something out faster. It allows that information to be more salient.

Lastly, how do we think about causality and responsibility? All events that happen around us are quite complicated and require us to construe them. Often when you see something, like an apple falls off a table, it seems, "well, that's a really simple physical event. I should just have a simple way of thinking about it." But actually, we bring a huge amount of knowledge to be able to understand the event, and languages give us lots of tools for interpreting what went on.

When Dick Cheney went hunting with Harry Whittington and had an accident, and accidentally shot Whittington in the face, that was an event that took a split second. It was a really simple physical event, but there are many, many different ways that we could describe it. When the European Herald had to write about it, they wrote "Cheney Bangs Lawyer." Whittington was a lawyer, and so that gives the sense of "Oh, Cheney went out hunting for lawyers, and he got one." Of course, more prosaically we could just say, "Cheney shot Whittington." Or, take Cheney out of it a little bit, so we could say, "Whittington got shot by Cheney." We could take Cheney out of it altogether, and just say "Whittington got shot." We could say something similar to what Texas newspapers said at the time, which was, "Whittington got peppered pretty good."

Listen to what Cheney actually said. He was giving an interview in which he took full responsibility for the event, and he said, "Ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry." Think about how many events there are in that statement. "I'm the guy that pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry." This is a split second event but he's just broken it up into all these different steps. That makes him so far removed from the eventual outcome. Bush actually did one better. Bush said, "He heard a bird flush, and he turned and pulled the trigger, and saw his friend get wounded." Now "saw his friend," that's one sentence in which Cheney transforms from agent to mere witness by the end of the sentence. It is a masterful exculpation.

These examples give you a sense of how many different ways we can frame and construe events in language. What's important is that different languages encourage different ways of framing and construing these events. In English, in fact, the kind of language that Cheney used and Bush used, we find it suspicious, this kind of linguistic wiggling. It sounds like you're trying to get out of something. It sounds evasive. It's the kind of thing that kids say and politicians say when they're trying to get out of something. In English we prefer direct causative statements. Like "He broke the vase."

But in other languages, when something is an accident, when something wasn't intentional, you wouldn't use a phrase like "He broke the vase" or "He lost the book." You would say something more like, "the vase broke" or "the book lost itself to him." Something more indirect. Something where the person involved isn't an agent. English is quite strange in that it doesn't distinguish very strongly between intentional events and accidental events. We're supposed to talk about both of them in the same way, to take responsibility for even accidental events. In some languages you can't say things like "I broke my arm" unless you're crazy and you went out trying to actually break your arm, and so you broke it.

One thing we got interested in, my student Caitlin Fausey and I, is how do the structures in language affect whether you think someone is responsible? Does it matter for whether you even remember who did it? In these studies, we showed people a bunch of videos of intentional and accidental actions, and then later tested their memory for who did it. We compared speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese. English doesn't do a very good job of distinguishing between intentional and accidental actions, in all cases we tend to describe the agent. Whereas in Spanish and Japanese, there's a stronger distinction made between accidents and intentional events. For accidents, Spanish and Japanese are less likely to talk about the agent. What we found was a difference in memory that perfectly mirrored this pattern in language. When it came to intentional events, everyone remembered really well who did it and everyone talked about who did it. But when it came to accidents, a very different pattern emerged. English speakers still remembered really well who did it, whereas speakers of Spanish and Japanese remembered less well. They didn't mention the agent as often, that wouldn't be something they would normally talk about. They also didn't think it was as important to remember who did it. They allocated their attention elsewhere to other aspects of the scene.

One thing you could ask in all of these examples that I've given you is, how do you know that it's really language that's important and not something else? How do you know that speakers of Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, really think differently because of the structures of language and not because of other cultural differences, differences in the environment, because maybe it's something in their past, or maybe it's something in their olive oil? How do you know it isn't something else?

Another way of phrasing that question is, how do you know that it's that language shapes thought and not the other way around? Maybe these folks think differently for whatever reason, and then as a result of that, they speak differently? How do you determine the arrow of causality? Well, the answer to that is to do studies in the lab that are really targeted. We change how people talk and see if that changes how they think. That's what makes it a real experiment. In study after study that's exactly what we've done. We bring people into a lab, and we teach them a new way of talking, and we see if that changes how they think. We find that if you teach people a new way of talking about time, that changes how they think about time. If you get English speakers to talk agentively or non-agentively about events, that will change what they remember about those events. In other labs people have trained people to talk differently about colors, and that changes people's ability to remember and discriminate colors across color boundaries.

In all these studies, what emerges is that language really can have this casual power. It can change the way you think. Now that doesn't mean that the other direction of causation is unimportant. Because sometimes people think, "oh, just because language shapes thought doesn't mean that the other way around isn't also true." That's absolutely right. Language shapes thought and also the way that we think importantly shapes the way we talk, and aspects of culture importantly shape aspects of language. It's a bi-directional cycle. I think that the fact that these two things can influence each other, and can exist in a mutual cycle of influence allows humans to create complex knowledge so quickly and to be so flexible and agile in how we think about the world.

Think about it this way. We have 7,000 languages. Each of these languages encompasses a world-view, encompasses the ideas and predispositions and cognitive tools developed by thousands of years of people in that culture. Each one of those languages offers a whole encapsulated universe. So we have 7,000 parallel universes, some of them are quite similar to one another, and others are a lot more different. The fact that there's this great diversity is a real testament to the flexibility and the ingenuity of the human mind. The fact that we're able to take so many different perspectives and create such an incredibly diverse set of ways of looking at the world, that is something first to be celebrated, but also something to learn from: flexibility and diversity are at the very heart of what makes us human and what makes us so smart. I think the more we understand how people are able to take all these different perspectives, and able to change the way they think, the better we'll understand the nature of being human.

---

I grew up in the former Soviet Union. I mostly lived in Minsk, in Belarus, but I also spent my summers with my grandparents in Ukraine. My first set of linguistic experiences were speaking Russian and hearing a lot of Belarusian and Ukrainian. When my family came over to America, I was 12, and I was of course faced with the project of learning English. In learning to express my ideas and my thoughts in English, I first started noticing just how important connections between words and other elements of language were in creating meaning. One of the first things I got interested in was trying to get rid of those elements of language from thinking. I was very interested in social justice issues and I thought well, if we're really going to get to the bottom of what is truth and what is justice, then we have to get rid of this nuisance of language that seems to be only clouding the way that we think. I would notice how many arguments hinged on particular aspects of language.

I thought the more I studied language the more I'd discover the real truths that language is clouding. And actually exactly the opposite thing happened. I went to college at Northwestern to study cognitive science and started doing research there. I ended up going to graduate school in psychology at Stanford. The more I focused on language and started looking at cross-linguistic differences, the more it became apparent that systems of meaning exist within systems of language. Those interconnections between words are not simply the webbing on top of an otherwise pure logical knowledge system. Rather, in fact, meaning exists in the way that we use words; the patterns of word use create the system of meaning. There's no getting away from language in getting to complex meanings.

Even though I failed at the initial quest I formulated as a teenager to get to the bottom of truth and justice without language, I got very interested in how we create meaning in these complex social networks as we talk to one another. So after I finished my graduate work at Stanford, I went off to MIT, where I was on the faculty in brain and cognitive sciences. I got to do more work looking at cross-linguistic differences and make interesting connections in Indonesia and Australia doing fieldwork. I was then hired back at Stanford where I continued doing more work on complex knowledge and language, and on how language shapes thought.

When I started thinking about the question of language and thought, my first set of thoughts on this was quite naïve. For one thing, I didn't realize how controversial an issue it was. To me, it was just a curiosity and seemed like, "wow, there are so many people who speak different languages and learn different languages, why can't we just find out whether language shapes thought?" It seemed like a perfectly reasonable question. Also from a naive standpoint, it seemed like cognitive psychologists had discovered that all kinds of expertise mattered. If you became a chess expert, you would end up thinking differently, or if you became a doctor you would end up thinking differently, or if you became a master musician, you would end up thinking differently. Language seemed quite similar to that. You would become a master in a particular way of viewing the world, and that would give you the cognitive tools that came with that way of viewing the world.

I also thought, "well it will just be a matter of doing an experiment or two, and then we'll resolve that issue and move on to something else." Well, things didn't quite work out that way. It's an incredibly controversial issue. It's tied in with just about every controversy in cognitive science. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is, it's a really interesting question. There's a lot on the line in how we answer the question about how languages and thinking interact with one another. But the bad thing is that everyone has a stake in it, so the ratio of people who do work on the question to people who express very strong views on it is not very favorable.

The kinds of big questions that this question is tied in with, other than itself, include: are there modules of mind that are separate from one another? Or is the mind more of an interactive system? Is it possible for something like grammar, which some people hypothesize as a separate organ, to influence something like the representation of meaning, or how we make perceptual discriminations? On some theories, that kind of interaction between different aspects of mind should be impossible. Another question that this obviously ties in with is the nature/nurture divide. Where do our ideas come from? To what extent are ideas innate, to what extent are they universal, and to what extent are they learned based on social convention? And that, again, is a huge split. The question of whether language shapes thought lives squarely within that divide.

Another big set of questions that language and thought interacts with are questions about what is involved in understanding language? When you're trying to process sentences and translate sounds into meaning, you’re getting a bunch of air vibrations on your eardrums, and you have to translate those into meaning, what are the set of steps and what kind of meanings do you arrive at? Is the surface structure of the language actually going to make a difference for the underlying meaning structure that you create when you understand the language? The idea that language shapes thought suggests that surface structure, quirks of language, actually can have consequences for how people construct meaning and what kinds of things people notice and encode and think about.

So this is a question that has been incredibly controversial, and every finding in this field has been vigorously debated. This is actually really fun because it means that every aspect of the question gets considered.

Like all great questions in science, it's so interesting because it's not a yes or no question. Often it's phrased as, "Does language shape thought?" Of course there's no chance that we'll come up with an answer like "Yes" or "No" and that will be the end of it. The answer will be, "well here are the mechanisms through which language can shape thought, and here are cases where it does, and here are cases where it doesn't, and here's why." Ultimately what we're trying to figure out is how does the mind work? How do we come to be the incredibly complex and sophisticated creatures that we are?

Wittgenstein clearly made the case that the meanings of words reside in their use and reside in the systems of inter-relationships between word uses. In the “Philosophical Investigations” he disowned his first set of proposals about word meaning that he made in the "Tractatus." In the Investigations he argued that what words mean is the way you use them, and the uses that they have in the system of social interactions. That doesn't mean that you can't study word meaning, but what it does mean is that the system you have to study is bigger and you have to study the whole system. You can't study individual words. You can't study individual people set apart from their social context. In some ways that makes the problem harder, because the things you have to measure are more complicated. But on the other hand, it may actually make the problem solvable, whereas before it wasn't solvable.

I think often in science, what we do is we try to simplify the problem, and we separate and remove elements, because we think that will make it easier for us to solve the problem. In language research for a while one tack was, "let's focus just on syntax. We'll solve syntax. And let's not think about pragmatics. Let's not think about semantics. Let's not think about cross-linguistic differences. Because those will just cloud the picture. We'll take those things entirely out of our space of explanation. We'll just focus on the syntax, and that will be the way forward." It seemed like a logical step to simplify. But it turns out that you can't solve the problems of syntax without letting in information from semantics and from pragmatics and from culture and social context. So instead of simplifying the job, they actually made their job impossible in doing that.

I think the way forward is to consider all the complex contexts that language exists in. Cognitive scientists have to work kind of like spies. We're trying to understand something that's invisible and very complex, and what we have to do is figure out the right set of experiments to get at those hidden truths lurking in patterns under the surface.

As an undergraduate I worked with Dedre Gentner who is a world expert in analogy and relational reasoning. Dedre started me off on the path of research that I ended up on. She had at the time an almost secret interest in whether language shaped thought. She would talk about it in the lab, but then she would warn us, "you know, don't really talk about this outside of the lab, because people think this is kind of crazy stuff." She had a sense of how controversial the issue was. I did not heed her advice, and didn't realize just how controversial the issue was going to be. When I went off to graduate school, my advisor was Gordon Bower, a world expert in memory research. I had been doing some work on metaphor and metaphors between space and time, and I brought Gordon the first draft of the paper that I had written about the work I did. He read it and he said, "You know, this is all fine, but if you're right about this, then it suggests that if people have different metaphors for time, they should think about it differently. And we know that language doesn't shape thought. And so I think you're probably wrong about this. So you might want to go back and reconsider this."

I thought to myself then, well, I could be wrong about this, or, it could be the case that language actually shapes the way we think, and maybe I should just do an experiment on that, and find out. And just around that time Doug Hofstadter was visiting Stanford. My advisor has a very avuncular manner, and he grabbed me at a reception and walked me over to Doug Hofstadter and said "Doug, I want you to meet Lera. Lera, tell Doug about your work." So I stood there and told Doug about what I was working on. He told me about metaphors for time in Mandarin that were different from English (one of his students had worked on that), and he encouraged me to look into it. So I did. And from that first set of studies everything else unfolded. So in some ways it was a very fortunate set of accidents. I first got started in looking at time and metaphors for time in Dedre Gentner's lab, and then I continued doing that in graduate school, and this chance meeting with Doug Hofstadter gave me a specific topic to look into. George Lakoff's ideas were extremely influential in starting the first path of experiments on space and time and trying to understand how the metaphors we use for talking about time shape our understanding of time.

I haven't yet met someone who doesn't care about the question of whether language shapes thought. One reason is that all of us have experiences of trying to convince other people with our words, and either being successful or not being successful. Everyone intuitively thinks about the relationship between language and thought, and how they can use their own language more effectively, or how other people can use their language more effectively to convey thoughts. People also intuitively have a lot of theories about how differences between languages matter. A lot of people are bilingual, and as soon as you start learning another language you start noticing differences and start wondering about how people who speak that language must see the world. The most common reaction I get from the general public is not why would anyone care about this, but rather, why don't we know about this already hundreds of years ago? It seems like such an obvious question to investigate. People seem surprised that this isn't something that has been thoroughly investigated by scientists. That seems to be the main surprise.

---

Edge | A Conversation With Lera Boroditsky | ENCAPSULATED UNIVERSES | Feb 2013 | WS

Moyers & Company 041913

BILL MOYERS: Welcome.This week in the streets of Boston, we were reminded once again that civilization is too often a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart, with those who would commit acts of violence trying to disrupt and even destroy the fragile commons we call society. Fortunately, there are people who will not be deterred from the work of civilization, who will even from time to time go up against authority in peaceful disobedience, taking a nonviolent stand for a greater good. People like Sandra Steingraber, my guest.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Fight! Fight! Fight!

BILL MOYERS: We met for this conversation the day before she was to be sentenced to jail. It's quite a story. At the age of 20, Sandra Steingraber was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Several other family members also had the disease, but it couldn't be genetic because she’s adopted. So Steingraber suspected something toxic in her Illinois hometown’s drinking water and that led to an unusual wager. She talked about it in this 2010 documentary:

SANDRA STEINGRABER in Living Downstream: As a college undergraduate, I made a bet. I bet that my cancer diagnosis had something to do with the environment in which I lived as a child. And I think I was right about this. Ten years ago, in the fall of 1998, I gave birth to a child. I became a cancer patient at twenty and a mother at the brink of forty, which I know isn’t how most people’s lives are ordered, but that’s how mine worked out.

I am betting that in between my children’s adult lives and my own, an environmental human rights movement will arise. It’s one whose seeds have already been sown. I am betting that my children, and the generation of children that they are a part, will by the time they are my age – they’ll consider it unthinkable to allow cancer-causing chemicals to freely circulate in our economy. They will find it unthinkable to assume an attitude of silence and willful ignorance about our ecology.

BILL MOYERS: Sandra Steingraber wouldn't stay silent, today she is at the very heart of the environmental human rights movement that she prophesied. She's fighting to identify and eliminate carcinogens in our air, water and food, and to stop fracking, that controversial extraction of natural gas from deep beneath the earth.

She is one of the Seneca Lake 12, a group of activists who last month blocked the gates of a natural gas storage facility in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York State. On a bitterly cold day in March they were arrested as they demonstrated against the environmental dangers of fracking and the storing of natural gas in nearby abandoned salt mines. For now, New York has declared a moratorium that prohibits fracking in the state while studies are completed, but there’s no guarantee that gas obtained by fracking elsewhere won’t be stored in those salt caverns.

As you can see, for Sandra Steingraber, there is no line between her life and her cause. When her cancer went into remission, she became a biologist and wrote the book “Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment.” Her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, Faith, led to this combination memoir and study of fetal toxicology, “Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood”. And her son’s childhood inspired her latest work, “Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.”

Sandra Steingraber is a visiting scholar at Ithaca College. Welcome.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Thanks for having me Bill.

BILL MOYERS: There were 12 of you arrested, five have already appeared in court and paid a fine of $375. Why don't you pay a fine, go home, and call it a day?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, my feeling about civil disobedience is that it works when not only you oppose something and peacefully object to it, but also if the law itself is unjust. And so in this case, I believe that the laws around trespassing are unjust. And so accepting a jail sentence seems to me, for me the way I can best bear witness to that.

BILL MOYERS: What will your children do while you're in --

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, I have a great marriage. And so as my husband says, "There's a reason, you know, that kids have two parents."

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: And so as I’ve told my children in the days leading up to this that, "If it is ever the case that I can be a better parent to you in jail rather than out of jail, I'm ready to be that parent."

BILL MOYERS: You were arrested, as you say, for trespassing. You broke the law. You knew you were breaking the law. What did you hope would happen?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, the 12 of us blocked a driveway that a company called Inergy, is using to prepare abandoned salt caverns that are underneath the west bank of Seneca Lake. We've been salt mining in the Finger Lakes area of Upstate New York since the 1900s, 1800s, actually. It goes back a long way.

And so there are these abandoned underground chambers that are now being repurposed for the storage of compressed hydrocarbon gasses that are the byproducts of fracking for natural gas. These are things like propane and butane. And so I believe as do many of my colleagues in the sciences that it's not safe to compress explosive gasses and store them underneath and beside a lake that serves as the drinking water for a hundred thousand people.

And so for me to come to this place and with my body block a truck that had a drill head in the back of it from doing its work was a statement that I was making about the nature of trespass. In fact, from my point of view as a biologist and a mother, this out-of-state company that has bought all these hundreds of acres along the west bank of this lake, near which I live, is trespassing in our community.

BILL MOYERS: What did you hope to accomplish by standing in the way of the trucks going into that property?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, I have sort of internal and external goals, I think. First of all, my own son was born just down the road from where I committed this act of civil disobedience.

BILL MOYERS: Elijah?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Elijah. And so returning to the same lakeshore to do something else with my body, to use it as a form of speech, to stand between -- and it was a howling blizzard, you know, the day we did this, so it was also a physically extreme thing to do. I was very cold. But to place my body in between this truck and where this truck wanted to go, to prevent this company from engaging in what I believe is an act of toxic trespass into our community, was spiritually meaningful to me. And I was—

BILL MOYERS: It was also political, wasn’t it?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: And it was also intended to be a political statement.

BILL MOYERS: To say?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: I have worked very hard as a biologist and as a citizen to bring data forward. I have submitted petitions, I have written letters, I have testified about the dangers that this kind of storage of explosive gasses creates when you use salt caverns as the receptacle. And having overturned all stones for redress of grievance, I find that that regulatory system itself is unresponsive and deaf to the petitions of citizens and scientists.

For example, given that this company has already had accidents at this site, given that it is dumping chemicals into the lake, and that there has been no response, it's troubling. It's also troubling to me as a scientist that there's some of the knowledge about the geology of this area is considered now by the company as proprietary business information, which means that citizens and scientists who wish to offer comment to our government about the plans of this company have no access to data and information that we really would help inform our thinking about whether or not we wish this company to be one of our neighbors.

BILL MOYERS: Presumably, the driver of that truck was a hardworking man, a father, perhaps a grandfather himself. Were you comfortable keeping him from doing his day's labor?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: I think if you are preventing someone from getting to their work, your reasons better be good ones.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: And the possibility that the work that he was doing would create a menacing situation leading to the possible catastrophic collapse of one of these salt chambers and the destruction of a lake that provides drinking water to 100,000 people rose to that level. And I feel obligated to protect water not just for me, but for those who come after.

And I'm animated in the feeling not only because I study ecology and I have a kind of long view as an ecologist, but also, I'm aware that I myself as a child drank contaminated water, which may indeed have led to my own cancer diagnosis. And in researching the history of my own hometown, discovered that --

BILL MOYERS: In Illinois.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: In Illinois, right. That decisions were made a hundred years ago, 80 years ago, before I was even born, that were careless, that allowed chemicals to, like a falling curtain, to seep into the drinking water aquifers there. I drank that. Other people drank it. And it raised risks to our health. I'm -- having had bladder cancer at age 20, I'm now 53, I've lived for 33 years as a cancer patient. Of all human cancers, bladder cancer is the one most likely to recur.

So I'm forever in and out of the hospital. And so I'm always aware, as somebody who lives a highly medicalized life, first of all, that there is high economic cost to creating medical problems, chronic medical problems in people.

So we can talk about the economic benefits of fracking, but if we're making people sick and we're giving people cancer, if we're giving people asthma, if we're contributing to preterm birth and so forth, then are we not creating medical costs in addition?

BILL MOYERS: What response have you had from state officials? Because you've been something of a pain in the rear to them.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, I hope I've also provided them some good science.

BILL MOYERS: I saw one exchange where you were very frustrated. You were trying to confront a representative of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Sandra Steingraber with New Yorkers Against Fracking. We are here to – no, I’m not leaving, I’m standing right here, and I’m insisting to you that the people of New York are not going to let their health be held hostage by your review. All of us in the public health community --

MARC GERSTMAN: Ms. Steingraber –

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Yeah. All of us in the public health community –

MARC GERSTMAN: Listen –

SANDRA STEINGRABER: No, I’m not waiting anymore. All of us in the public health community are demanding that we stop this process now until and unless we have a comprehensive health impact assessment with full public participation –

MARC GERSTMAN: Let me speak if you want to have a conversation.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: I have written you so many letters that you have never responded to. The people of New York insist on a comprehensive health impact assessment. We will not settle for anything less. We are going to open this process up because secrecy cannot protect public health.

MARC GERSTMAN: If you want to have a conversation –

SANDRA STEINGRABER: I have tried to have a conversation with you, you don’t answer any letters. So I am using my voice in front of the people of New York to say we are not going to stand –

SECURITY GUARD: Please leave.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: We are not going to stand for a secret health study.

SECURITY GUARD: Please leave. I’m going to ask you again to please leave the hearing.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: It is my right as a New Yorker to be here.

SECURITY GUARD: It will also be your right to be arrested.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: I wasn’t – I didn't start off angry. I had important questions that I wanted to ask. And the frustration that many of us do feel in the scientific community in New York, especially the public health community, is the many questions that we have raised about the public health risk of fracking have gone unanswered.

BILL MOYERS: But here's what the industry says, the American Natural Gas Alliance. "Fracking wells have a smaller surface footprint, therefore requiring half as many wells as was needed 20 years ago. The process is far safer for the environment than other forms of fossil fuel extraction, such as strip mining. The chemicals used in fracking are highly diluted and natural gas is clean and abundant and fracking will provide many needed jobs." That, in a capsule, is their response to you.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Yeah. Well, that's the promotional language that fracking has been unrolled across our nation. But the data tell a different story.

One of my biggest concerns is what fracking does to air quality. We have some new data coming out of Wyoming as well as some of our other Western states like Colorado showing that drilling and fracking operations are almost always accompanied by spikes in ground-level ozone -- smog.

And this kind of air pollution kills. We know that. And so we could through a health impact assessment estimate how much ground-level ozone and air pollution would be created through drilling and fracking operations and all the attendant technology that goes along with it. Compressors, flare stacks, diesel engines and so forth, and run the numbers to see how many more children will have asthma, what will the heart attack and stroke risk be, how many more emergency room visits and so on. And we could even monetize those costs.

But so far, we in the scientific community have been unsuccessful in our petition that this kind of science should go forward as a precondition for making a decision about whether to lift the moratorium here in New York or not. So as a substitute for a comprehensive health impact assessment, instead, our department of conservation asked the Department of Health to review a document that we in the scientific community don't have access to yet.

BILL MOYERS: You were talking about a secret study that they--

SANDRA STEINGRABER: A secret study, right. So I've never heard of this actually, in public health. How can you have a secret public health study? It seems almost a contradiction in terms. So those of us who actually live there, who are parents, who have children there and who are also members of the public health community, who have scientific questions, we feel very frustrated.

I have worked for 20 years on toxic chemicals and what we call toxic trespass. And over and over again, we have brought very good science into the public. We have brought it before presidents, we have brought it before Congress. And over and over again, the regulatory system has proved impervious to our petitions.

It is a broken system. It cannot respond to new science. It can't respond to -- it can't sort of evolve to say, "All right, here's new evidence that this chemical is linked to preterm puberty in girls or early preterm labor in women or to learning disabilities and so forth."

There's nothing in our laws take in that new information and say, "It's time to redesign our economy so it does not have to depend on chemicals that inherently cause childhood developmental problems." So that's one source of frustration for me. At the same time we have climate change, right? And so the way I see this, we have two separate environmental crises.

BILL MOYERS: You call it climate change, I think we can appropriately call it climate chaos.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Or climate instability, yes.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: Go ahead.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: The environmental crisis seems to me like a tree with two trunks. On one of these trunks is toxic trespass. So all of us are—

BILL MOYERS: Toxic trespass?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Toxic trespass--

BILL MOYERS: You've used that several times. What is it?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, it means that chemicals without our consent enter our body sometimes because we inhale them. You know, each of us breathes a pint of atmosphere with every breath. And so that is one way in which toxic air pollutants then enter us, into our bloodstream.

So the other trunk of this tree of crisis is climate instability in which is created of course by the combustion of fossil fuels and their buildup in our atmosphere such that we're trapping heat and that heat is being absorbed by the ocean, warming the ocean, but also acidifying the ocean in ways that are now precipitating mass species' extinctions. And the main actors in the story of climate instability are carbon dioxide and unburned methane. Which is--

BILL MOYERS: And fracking affects those?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: And fracking affects both of those, of course in-- first of all, natural gas is methane. And to blast it out of the bedrock and extract it and put it into pipelines and process it and get it to market so that we can make our tea kettles whistle, much methane is lost to the atmosphere in that, during that time.

Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, more than twenty times more powerful over a 100-year period.

And so as far as I can see then this tree of crisis has a common root, which is a kind of ruinous dependency on fossil fuels.

BILL MOYERS: You are confronting here the current momentum of capitalism, and a hundred-year momentum of capitalism where creating commodities and wealth require the processes that are sometimes dangerous to us, or that provide economic benefits.

I read -- in preparing for this conversation, I read the story of one fellow who's been working at odd jobs, taking welfare when he must, who's now expecting a windfall of up to $300,000 a year for the next decade from a lease he signed for fracking with Chevron. Now do you really expect him to turn that down?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, once they get to the level of -- to the end of the process, where we're asking a desperate farmer to turn away from looking at the bedrock under his feet as a bank account, you know, as a piñata that could be shattered to make money so he could retire, so he can send his children to college -- we've failed, right? We've failed.

And so I'm far more interested in going upstream and looking at this as a design problem. To say, "All right, so we've had our run of fossil fuels. And we've become incredibly dependent on them to make stuff for us, right?" So the vinyl siding on your house is made out of natural gas, right.

And hydrous ammonia, which is used as synthetic fertilizer in our wheat fields and our corn fields, also made out of natural gas. So we have created an agricultural system that rides a tandem bicycle with the fossil fuel industry. We have created a materials economy and surrounds ourselves with material that are essentially fossils that were exhuming from the earth at a way that is not sustainable. They're called nonrenewable for a reason.

And so it’s time to engage human ingenuity to do something entirely different.

And that's where I'm interested in working. Because it seems to me when I look back at history, we have, in the United States, faced other times where our economy was ruinously dependent on some kind of abomination. And of course, slavery would be the one I would use as my example here. Where people had to rise up and say that even though millions of dollars of personal wealth is bound up in slave labor, even though slave labor offered us the lower prices of goods, offered us ability to be competitive in the world market, it's wrong to do that.

And instead of trying to regulate slavery, control slavery emission rates, have state-of-the-art slavery, we decided to take an abolitionist approach to that. So I named my son Elijah, you know, after an abolitionist from my home state of Illinois, Elijah Lovejoy, who--

BILL MOYERS: A great newspaper editor.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: I learned his story when I was growing up.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Every Illinois school child learns the story.

BILL MOYERS: And many in Texas did as well.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, he's he plays a role, of course, not only as an abolitionist but as a defender of our First Amendment rights.

BILL MOYERS: Ultimately killed by a mob.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Ultimately pumped full of five bullets in the free state of Illinois, you know, just down the stream from where I grew up. For daring to write and speak out against slavery. But his-- best friend who was then the President of Illinois College in response to the death of Elijah Lovejoy turned his home into a station in the underground railroad. And his best friend's sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who went on to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, and so--

BILL MOYERS: Unintended consequences of taking a stand.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: Doing the right thing at the right moment.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: And you can't always predict, right, of the power and inspiration that your words will have. Of course, his words affected John Brown, it affected the abolitionists in Boston and so forth. And so when -- I had to pause for a long time, in fact, it took me three long days after Elijah's birth before I actually named him Elijah, after Elijah Lovejoy.

It's a hard thing to name your son after someone who was martyred. But I wanted to, when I say my son's name, I wanted to remember that change is possible. That when you stand up and do the right thing and ask for something to be redesigned, that that's a noble and right thing.

BILL MOYERS: But here's what you're up against. The energy industry very easily got a loophole placed in federal legislation just a few years ago which exempts fracking from many of the country's major--

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: --environmental protection laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act. Is that correct?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: So what does that tell you?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, what it means is that it's an outlaw enterprise. That it has succeeded in exempting itself from our nation's foremost environmental laws so our federal government doesn't have much control or power over this industry.

BILL MOYERS: Here's what I take to be the startling point in your new book Raising Elijah. You say that our chemical regulator system has ground to a halt. "Only 200 of the more than 80,000 synthetic chemicals used in the United States have been tested under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. And exactly none of them are regulated on the basis of their potential to affect infant or child development.”

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Right. So the science moves forward at a much more rapid rate than this law can respond to the science. And so when the Toxic Substances Control Act came into being, we didn't understand, as we do now, that chemicals can enter the story of child development as starting with the embryo, right, as this kind of opera of development begins. And genes are turned on through the actions of hormones.

Our D.N.A. is we now understand more like the keyboard of a piano than it is the master molecule of a cell, right? We used to think that the D.N.A. was just sort of locked in the cell and with the command center that sent out messages for all our bodily functions, new science shows us that environmental signals from the outside world are like the keys to are like the hands of a pianist who depending on what the signals are, of course, you can play jazz or you can play a Bach cantata.

And so our genes are turned on and turned off, they're made to sing more loudly, or the volume of their activity goes down, depending on the environmental signals they receive. So we come to see our genetics and the environment that we have it as partners. And so that's our new scientific understanding. But we don't regulate chemicals on the basis of whether or not they alter the way a brain cell migrates during early infancy which could lead to a learning disability, for example.

BILL MOYERS: One of the most harmful toxins is Atrazine. One of your peers at the University of California Berkeley, Dr. Tyrone Hayes, who is featured in your film Living Downstream, and he says, quote, "There's almost no aquatic environment, including rain water, that's Atrazine free." Here he's speaking about that toxin.

DR. TYRONE HAYES in Living Downstream: So, this is Darnell. Darnell is going to be famous. He's the first genetic male frog that actually completely turned into a female upon exposure to Atrazine. So he's been exposed to Atrazine at one part civilian since tadpole stage. And now he's an adult male that mates with other males and that actually lays eggs. So he's a functional female.

He may very well be a hermaphrodite if we dissect him. But he's a functional female, anyway. And he has now lots of genetic male sons that have also turned into females after exposure to Atrazine. We've also worked in what I call ambient levels of Atrazine. So we've always worked with levels that you would find, you know, in your drinking water, for example.

Effects have been shown in fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. So every vertebrae class has been examined. Atrazine has these endocrine-disrupting effects that include impairment of reproduction or lowering reproductive success and performance […] All those pesticides that run off the crops are in that water destroying immune systems, destroying reproduction, lowering sperm count of frogs. But the first species exposed to those same pesticides are humans. And they're exposed at much, much higher levels.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, Atrazine is one of the weed killers that we use in the United States and it's either the number one or number two weed killer. And interestingly it's banned for use in the European Union. And that's because even though we, of course, don't photosynthesize the way plants do, the weed killer has the power in our bodies to be biologically active.

In a plant, what Atrazine does, it actually halts photosynthesis itself. In us, it has the ability to mimic hormones and alter gene expressions in ways that there is evidence from the laboratory can raise the risk for harm. So the question becomes with a chemical like Atrazine, how much harm and evidence for it do you want before you say, "We're not going to allow this."

So do chemicals, like people are they innocent until proven guilty? Are they allowed on the market first until we can prove by dying or by harmed children that the chemicals should not be on the market? Or are we going to create precondition to say that before a chemical can be marketed you have to demonstrate through careful testing that almost certainly no one is going to get hurt. Most people would agree that the second way of doing things is the ethical, rational way to go forward and a lot of people are surprised to learn that that's not how we do things in the United States.

BILL MOYERS: There's a scene in the film Living Downstream where you go back to your hometown in Illinois to speak to farmers and other town folks at a town hall meeting. Here it is.

SANDRA STEINGRABER in Living Downstream: This is breast milk […] In this jar of milk are all kinds of growth factors whose job it is to stimulate the development of the brain and to stimulate the development of the digestive tract and to stimulate the development of the immune system. Breast-fed infants grow into children who have lower risk for autoimmune problems such as diabetes, Crohn's disease, juvenile arthritis, leukemia, allergies, and eczema.

So now I'm going to talk a little bit about breast milk from a chemical point of view. In this jar is the most highly chemically-contaminated human food on the planet. It has more dioxins, more toilet deodorizers, more mothproofing agents, dry cleaning fluid, pesticides, and P.C.B.'s than any other human food. And they didn't get there on purpose. They were carried to us by ecological forces outside of our individual control. They represent a form of toxic trespass.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Talking about children's wellbeing I think is a good place to begin a conversation about these issues, especially in places that are animated by right to life issues, right? And so I'm not a member of the right to life community and yet having grown up in that community, I do respect those whose paramount concern is the sanctity of fetal life.

I look it as an issue of a woman's reproductive rights. You know, a woman's body is the incubator and the first environment for a child. And that surely the flipside of Planned Parenthood is to be able to plan a parenthood and carry it out without other people's toxic chemicals interfering with it.

But whether like me you're someone who sees this as an issue of women's reproductive rights, or whether like members of my family you see it as an issue of fetal sanctity I think we can have a conversation about what it means for chemicals to cross the placenta and enter the opera of embryonic development in ways that can sabotage pregnancy -- in some cases extinguishing pregnancy itself through miscarriage.

And some of our farm chemicals, some of the chemicals associated with drilling and fracking operations are linked in laboratory studies to those effects. And so I think what we can say is look, any chemical that has the power to extinguish a human pregnancy has no place in our economy. We need to identify these chemicals and phase them out. And so that, I think, a starting point that has the ability to unify a lot of people across political lines.

BILL MOYERS: So talk to me about what you mean with the term in here "the new morbidities of childhood."

SANDRA STEINGRABER: So there have always been chronic illnesses that have affected children. But never as many as there are now. So we see increasing rises in the new morbidities, which include things like asthma. You know, we now have an increasing number of children who are affected by asthma.

BILL MOYERS: One in 11, I think I read--

SANDRA STEINGRABER: One in 11.

BILL MOYERS: --in your book.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Yeah. One in eight children who are affected by preterm birth, preterm birth being the number one cause of infant mortality and the number one cause of disability in this nation. We have increasing numbers of children on the autism spectrum, now one in 110 children are autistic.

BILL MOYERS: Autism, right.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Yes. And we have one in ten girls going -- white girls going into puberty before age eight and an even higher number of black girls.

BILL MOYERS: So what does that mean?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, what that means is that the pathway to sexual maturation is changing. And that has lifetime consequences. First of all, early puberty raises the risk for breast cancer in adulthood. But also when the body of course changes during puberty, but our brain also changes under the guidance of sexual hormones. In fact, you grow a whole new brain during puberty.

The childhood brain, the juvenile brain is actually much better than the adult brain at doing certain tasks. For example, learning a foreign language, learning an athletic skill, and learning music. When you go through puberty, the pattern of your gray matter and white matter actually changes. Old connections are pruned away, new brain connections are made, and that allows for other wonderful things. You learn calculus better after puberty, you know how to think philosophically and how do balance complex moral issues and think abstractly better after puberty.

So there are some things you gain in terms of intellectual prowess, but some things you lose. And so by speeding up the onset of puberty, we're altering the way children learn not only whether or not they appear to be sexual adults or not, right? And so if girls now have one and a half fewer years before puberty, then that raises questions in my mind about what we're robbing them of.

BILL MOYERS: Are you suggesting environmental factors are only causing these things?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: I'm saying environmental factors are contributing to the change. So the same chemicals that can cause a hastening of sexual maturation in lab animals are in the bodies of our children and we know that patterns of the timing and tempo of puberty in our children are changing.

And I think it's a picture that raises ethical questions. I mean, I as a mother have a lot of control over what I feed my children, especially when they were young.

I'm the buyer of the groceries, I'm the family cook, and I get to say what's on the plate. I also get to say whether or not you get to have dessert or whether or not my kitchen's closed and so on, right? However, although I'm a conscientious parent, I'm not a HEPA filter, right?

I can't stand between the bodies of my children and the 207 different brain poisons that are legally allowed to circulate in our economy and find their way into the air, into the water, and into the food. And so rather than trying to turn my own house into a kind of toxic-free bubble, I'm more interested in toxicity not being a consumer choice.

BILL MOYERS: Toxicity not being a consumer choice? What do you mean?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, I mean that as things stand now, if I want to ensure that the objects inside my house don't affect my children's development, I can look up websites, I can do all the research, and so on. And I can buy the, you know, the organic crib mattress and on and on. But I don't have practically have the time as a busy, working mother, to vet every single birthday party goodie bag that comes into my house.

And on a larger level, I think that if we have evidence for harm, then the right response is not, "Well, let's create a website so that certain mothers who have certain educational levels and income can opt out of that." But rather, it becomes our responsibility as a society to say, "Well, wait a minute. Here we have evidence that we are, you know, keeping dandelions out of soccer fields using a chemical that has a link to some problem in child development. Can we solve this problem in another way? And if we can, is it not our moral obligation to insist that this now become the way we do things?"

BILL MOYERS: I think I'm beginning to understand what you mean in here by a well-informed futility syndrome.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Yeah. Well-informed futility is an idea that psychologists hit upon in the 1960s, specifically to explain why the people watching television news about the Vietnam War came to feel more and more futile about it. Whereas people who watched less television felt less futile. So it seemed like a paradox, right? The more informed you are, you think of knowledge as power.

But in fact, there is a way in which knowledge can be incapacitating. And so the psychologists went further and now have applied this to the environmental crisis and point out to us that whenever there's a problem that seems big and overwhelming, climate change would be one, and at the same time, it's not apparent that your own actions have any meaningful agency to solve that problem, you're filled with such a sense of despair or guilt or rage that it becomes unbearable.

And so my response to that is basically what the book Raising Elijah is all about. So I try to take well-informed futility as my starting point and let people know that there is a way out of this. But because we can't -- I can't honestly tell you that the problem is less bad than it is, the response has to be that we scale up our actions. So the problem is huge. And so our actions have to be huge as well.

BILL MOYERS: Is that why you're going to jail?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Yes. I mean, I think what's required -- I don't think you have to go to jail. That's an act of conscience that I chose to take. But I do think that what's required at this moment is heroism. And I'm mindful that when I read books to my children, they love to hear the narrative of heroes.

And heroes that can overcome all kinds of odds when everyone is telling them they can't possibly win, and they do. And I still believe in that very strongly. I was really moved by a conversation I had and I describe this in the book, with a third grade teacher who taught during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early '60s. Her class was so terrified that she had to suspend lessons and just talk to them about it.

And at one point in asking her class questions about the situation she realized how all of them fully expected to die. And so she asked, "Well, how many of you believe that there will be nuclear war within your lifetime?" And every single child's hand went up except for one girl. And so she was wise enough to ask that one girl, "Well, what makes you think that you won't die?"

And the answer was, "Because my parents are peace activists, they're going to stop it." So that made me realize in thinking through the story that my task as a parent is not to come up with the perfect climate change story to tell my children.

It is not to hide the data on my desk when they're old enough to read it because I'm fearful that it will upset them. Instead, my job is to be a hero. My job is to go out there and stop it, to tell my children, "Look, climate change is a serious problem. It's a threat to your future. But Mom is on the job."

That's why I'm up at 3:30 on the morning, pushing the button on the crock pot, "There's your dinner, you're going to have to do your own homework tonight. I'm off to Albany. I'm trying to stop fracking." This is why. And my kids therefore, fully believe that I'm capable of doing this, right?

BILL MOYERS: But Joseph Campbell told me that the hero's journey belongs to every man and woman.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: Everyone has to take her own route into the hero's journey. But every mother can't be a biologist. Every mother can't be going to jail to inform her children that she's out there on duty to make the world better. Can you give me a few practical things that mothers listening to us right now, and fathers I may say, can do to protect their children in this -- what you describe as a relatively hostile environment?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, I see my job, Bill, as not helping people to feel that they can be safe, but rather showing and illuminating people where the paths for activism lie. Because this is how I could sort of conceptualize it, I think. Going back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, people who lived through that time could either build a bomb shelter or they could work on disarmament.

But if you work on building a bomb shelter, then you actually create a sense that this is less unthinkable than it should really be. And so sometimes you need to feel unsafe to feel vulnerable to say, "I'm not going to build a beautifully-appointed, toxic-free bubble for my family, because sooner or later my children have to grow up anyway and enter the world," right?

They going to need some pollinators, they're going to need some coral reefs, they need the ice caps frozen so that the climate remains stable. And so it's my job to address myself to those issues. I can't tell people what they should do because I don't know what skill sets they have. But I can say that it is time now to play the save the world symphony.

I don't know what instrument you hold, but you need to play it as best as you can and find your place in the score. You don't have to play a solo here. But this is our task now. In the same way that my father at age 18 was shipped off to Italy to fight Hitler's army, it was his task of his generation to defeat global fascism. And at the time he was sent it looked like an overwhelming job, right?

I mean, it looked – it was supposed to be the thousand-year reign and it looked -- didn't look good for our side. But nevertheless, that was the right thing to do. And my father, even though he suffered his whole life from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder was never prouder of the role that he played.

And so at this point in our history, it is the environmental crisis that is the great moral crisis of our age. And in that, I don't want to be a good German. I don't want to be so paralyzed by well-informed futility syndrome that I don't look around me and see the signs of harm. I want to be one of the French resistance. One of the people who stand up and say, "This is not right. No matter how difficult this is to change, we're going to have to change it."

BILL MOYERS: Sandra Steingraber, thank you very much for being with me and good lucky to you.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: You're welcome, Bill. Thanks for having me.

BILL MOYERS: On Wednesday, the day after our conversation, the judge sentenced Sandra Steingraber and two other activists to 15 days in jail after they pleaded guilty to trespassing.

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Go out and fight. Write letters to the editor.

BILL MOYERS: She's doing her time as we speak.

BILL MOYERS: The toxic trespassers of which Sandra Steingraber warns afflict all creatures great and small -- from humans to the humblest honeybee. As you may have read, honeybee populations are dying out all over the world and with a serious impact on our food supply. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says a quarter of the American diet, many of our fruits and vegetables especially, rely on pollination by honeybees. But something is killing them at an accelerated pace and it’s getting worse. Forty to fifty percent of the hives have been wiped out.

More and more, the leading suspect is certain pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, singly or in combination, that appear to be slaughtering bees outright or affecting brain and nerve functions. Beekeepers and activist groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency to ban a kind of pesticide known as neonicotinoids.

Not only are we dependent on the honeybee for much of what we eat, there is, of course, a grace and elegance they bring to the natural world that would diminish us all were they to disappear. The environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben narrates this short film by my friend and colleague, Peter Nelson.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Let’s think about bees in a hive, they go out every day when the temperature is high enough. There’re not like other farm animals, they’re this weird wonderful cross between wild and domestic and they head out into the open world and they come back as it were, with reports about that world, you know, what it’s like miles away. So one little bee yard some place is a kind of hub for understanding whole huge swath of territory. Understanding whether it’s been farmed well, or treated as kind of a monoculture; whether it’s being saturated in pesticides or whether it’s producing a wide beautiful variety of flowers of all kinds.

There’re sort of accomplices in figuring how healthy and together our landscapes really are. One of the reasons I like being out with bees is that you do sort of slow down and enter their world a little bit. I think they’re quite beautiful, I like watching -- I confess -- I like watching in early spring the first few days of bees coming back with pollen and just sort of looking at the pollen in their saddle bags as they return and seeing what color it is and figuring out where--what tree it must of come from, or whatever. And there’re beautiful and that you get a sense of indefatigability, I mean, this is an impossible task to, you know, three grains at a time produce enough honey at time to keep the colony alive over the winter, and yet they do it and there is something quite beautiful about that too.

I think most bee keepers are fascinated by bees themselves. This perfect example of the idea that humans could cooperate with another species to both of their mutual benefit we don’t have very many examples of that in our society but that’s what a bee hive is.

I mean honey bees are, like everything else on our planet, under all kinds of duress. I mean, the world in which we jointly inhabit is changing with enormous speed, so none of the patterns that any of us are used to exist in same way anymore. Bees are under treat because landscapes keep changing, we get better at everything that we do and take more cutting of hay, you know, we leave less time for clover to just sit there in the field. Life is speeding up for them just like it is for us and really neither us is coping very well with the results of that.

So, I mean, what we could do to help bees is exactly what we can do to help ourselves, try to slow down the pace of change in the world around us. Human societies aren’t going to be able to cope with rapid climate change and neither can most animal societies, bees included. Human societies can’t cope, turning everything into monoculture, neither can bees, they are a remarkable reminder for the need for a certain kind of stability, in terms of things like climate and the need for a certain kind of variety, in terms of landscape and what’s around us. We need to be making at this point in our society some wise decisions about the years ahead and so we need to be using some of that same focused and determined decision making that bees has successfully employed over a great many millennium.

BILL MOYERS: At our website BillMoyers.com, come take a look at our new and improved "Take Action Page," connecting you to people and organizations working for social justice. There’s also more on fracking and the toxic trespassers that threaten our water, air and food. That’s all at BillMoyers.com. I’ll see you there and I’ll see you here, next time.

M&C | The Toxic Assault on Our Children | April 19, 2013 Full Show | vm