20 years gone...

It's hard to believe it but my father passed away 20 years ago. He was 79 years old, which is pretty good for someone who had cancer in his youth and many other health challenges along the way. This year is the centenary of his birth. Vincent (Vincenzo and sometimes Jimmy) Collura was born August 21st 1913 in Pittston PA the oldest son of Onofrio and Maria (Alba) Collura.

Recently, my cousin sent me links to some wonderful old family photos. Here is my father with his mom and siblings taken in the mid 1930s - his father died in a coal mine accident about 10 years before this photo was taken:

This photo was taken in the same location as one I had restored a while ago. Vincent is on his uncle Jimmy Alba's shoulders.

My dad spent a fair amount of time exercising and trying to keep healthy.

He met my mother in the 1940's. Here is an early photo of them together with my Aunt Teresa:

They were married in 1945:

Vincent worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania when he was young but later became a barber. Here he is in his barber shop in South Fallsburg NY:

Here he is with the heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano:

Here he is towards the end of his life with me:

I guess I will always miss my dad - after 20 years I still think about him a lot. He touched many lives in that barber shop, telling people about healthy eating or selling them vitamins. I hope to post more about my dad as his centenary year continues. Cheers!

I don't toe the line OR why I'm no longer calling myself a vegan

I have gradually come to the realization that I no longer wish to be associated with veganism in its current incarnation. I no longer wish to call myself a vegan, promote veganism or be identified with the vegan movement. As divorces go, this one is pretty much a mutual decision. You see, all I have to do is have a pint of Guinness or eat some bread that contains honey and I'm automatically kicked out of the vegan cult, I mean club, anyway.

I have been a vegetarian my entire life, I stopped eating eggs and dairy products in the 1970s when my mom became active in the vegetarian movement and I will continue to eat a plant-based diet but the word vegan will only be wielded for clarity when ordering food. My decision is mainly due to the attitudes of (some, well many) vegans I have encountered during my vegetarian advocacy. Veganism isn't just about food or buying shoes, it carries with it a whole suite of beliefs and ideas which I do not subscribe to. These include the idea that "speciesism" is an evil on par with racism and sexism, a belief that any kind of animal welfare legislation is counterproductive and an insistence on purity which borders on an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

I don't think vegans have any idea just how ridiculous they sound when they throw out the word speciesist. You don't have to be a biologist to realize that real differences exist in the animal kingdom. The idea that you should ignore these differences doesn't make a lot of sense to most people.

What, really, is the meaning of speciesism? If it means that humans are in any and all cases to be given consideration while non-humans are not than I'm not a speciesist. On the other hand, I do differentiate between species and in this sense I am a speciesist. I can tell the difference between a puppy and a child and between a chicken and a hookworm. I believe that those differences mean that we should treat these animals somewhat differently. Call me crazy, but I don't believe that mosquitos should ever have rights. There is a nice discussion of speciesism here: http://www.carpevegan.com/?p=3449

Not that most people think consistently about their relations with animals - it always amazes me how people can show so much love and affection towards a pet and yet eat animals that are just as intelligent and capable of suffering and feeling pain. But when ethnic hatreds are stirred up people can turn on and kill long-time neighbors so I guess this is just one of the unfortunate aspects of human nature that we have to accept and try to deal with.

A good part of this also has to do with the concept of so-called "abolitionist animal-rights" as espoused by Gary L. Francione and others - http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/. These folks are opposed to any kind of animal welfare legislation saying that the "welfarist approach" has failed and making animal agriculture less cruel will only prolong its use. Using this twisted "logic", abolitionist AR advocates are OK with cruel treatment of farm animals because it advances their ultimate cause. Perhaps it's even useful to have cruel treatment of farm animals alive today to *potentially* have a future where all animal use is abolished. I can't agree with this line of thinking because suffering is what I'm opposed to and why I'm a vegetarian. And how exactly has the abolitionist approach succeeded? Like it or not, Temple Grandin has reduced animal suffering more than any abolitionist vegan and she works for the meat industry!

I have come to believe that differences between individuals who would all love to see a future free of animal cruelty and exploitation comes down less to a difference of tactics and more to differences in personality. It drives me nuts that abolitionist vegans will say things like "it's not about purity" when it so clearly is. However, the idea that you can completely remove any traces of animal products and animal exploitation from your lifestyle is quite frankly wrong. Furthermore, your personal purity, in eating, lifestyle and ideology will turn off many more people than it will inspire.

Veganism has evolved into somewhat of a cult, you are vegan if you follow the rules that are agreed to within the vegan community about what constitutes acceptable foods, purchases etc. If you stray from this ideal people within the community will be offended if you call yourself vegan. Questioning the particular choices which are acceptable and not acceptable is generally frowned upon. It's nice to see that a recent VegNews has done an article about palm oil - a vegan alternative that is very damaging to the environment. I'm sorry but the world is just a lot more complex than the vegan = good and non-vegan = bad worldview tries to encapsulate.

I will continue to think for myself, eat and promote a mainly plant-based diet but I won't be calling myself a vegan.

Transit of Venus 2012

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to see the second transit of Venus this century and the last one for 105 years. This page has my photos from the 2004 transit. Several days ago, looking at the long-term weather forecast, I didn't think I'd be able to see anything. It looked like the entire Northeast was going to be enveloped in rain and clouds for a week. I had wanted to travel to Hawaii to see the transit and when it became clear that that wasn't going to happen I thought about traveling to the West Coast. However, financial circumstances would not allow for a trip of this nature. I did manage to buy a small telescope specifically for the transit. Neither of the telescopes I had had a long enough focal length to get a good view of Venus as it moved cross the face of the sun. I wound up getting an Orion Apex 127mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope and made a custom solar filter with BAADER AstroSolar™ Safety Film.

As the transit approached, I was glued to the weather forecasts trying to see if a break in the clouds might occur someplace close by. Yesterday morning started out gray and cloudy in the Albany area, however, it did seem that to the Northwest there might be some clearing. I decided to try and drive to a location where it might be a little bit more likely to see the sun. I had just been reading about Guillaume Le Gentil, a French astronomer who "spent eight years travelling in an attempt to observe ... the transits (in the 1700's). His unsuccessful journey led to him losing his wife and possessions and being declared dead."

I was a lot more fortunate, I wound up driving to Oswego NY and found clear skies on the shores of Lake Ontario at the SUNY Oswego campus where I'd spent one semester as a freshman in 1978. I met a nice student named Joe who was also down at the lake for the transit and he helped me carry my equipment down to the water's edge. Even though it was very cloudy elsewhere in New York, over the lake it was perfectly clear. I was able to set up the telescope and get everything ready before the transit started. I wound up confusing the location where Venus would first touch the sun but as soon as a little bit of it became visible I was able to get some nice shots.

My setup:

I decided I would head home and try and catch the sun as it set along the highway. It was a bit of a risk as I knew it was cloudy along the drive and there was no guarantee that I would be able to stop and set up my tripod in order to catch the sunset. I kept one eye on my side view mirror as I was driving home and was lucky enough to hit a Thruway rest stop at just the right time with a view of the sunset. I didn't have very long but was able to catch a few shots and a short movie. For the sunset shots I didn't set up the telescope but used my standard 100-400 Canon lens. All the shots of the transit were taken with my Canon T3i.

Here are the locations that the shots were taken:

SUNY Oswego lake shore: 43.455534, -76.544658
Oneida Travel Plaza: 43.12552, -75.41611

Finally a short video taken at sunset.

Cheers!

Should we be concerned about plants?

A recent essay in the New York Times (If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them? by Michael Marder) about the "ethical implications" stemming from research on pea plant "intelligence" prompted me to finish writing this post. This isn't really a new story, as the essay points out, as speculation of this kind has been going on since at least the 1970s. I started the post after an online exchange with someone about virtually the same topic. Not coincidentally, they're both philosophers.

The NYT essay details some recent findings about how plants communicate. The research was done on pea plants and as with most plant communication, involves sending out biochemical signals which other plants respond to. Again, this is not particularly new but as a biologist I am impressed with the complexity of interactions between plants. Indeed, I'm happy go on record conceding that plants are wonderfully complex organisms that are capable of rudimentary communication, biochemical memory etc. - for a review see this. However, it's mystifying to me that anyone who has taken high school biology and can think clearly would believe this raises any kind of ethical issue.

In the first place, we don't kill pea plants to eat them (even though there are some plants that we do consume this way). We cultivate pea plants and then harvest the peas. Peas are how pea plants reproduce - the plants live only one growing season, produce seeds and then die. The seeds are dispersed in the evolutionary hope that some of them will find a suitable location to sprout the following year and complete the cycle. When humans intervene in this process by gathering peas in the summer and then planting a portion of them the following spring we are doing the plants a favor. Their existence as plants is unaltered by our intervention except for the better. We protect them, fertilize them, water them and distribute their seeds widely. I'm not a philosopher, but I don't see any "ethical implications" here.

As it turns out, the vast majority of plant foods that humans eat fall into this or a very similar category. Fruits and vegetables are similarly produced by plants so that animals will be attracted to them and in the process of consuming them will disperse the seeds they contain. All grains, legumes, nuts, fruits and most vegetables that are consumed by people are produced by plants for the purposes of reproduction and don't involve killing the plants. So far, as a vegan, my conscience is pretty clear. Meanwhile, the author of the NYT essay is waxing poetic about how serious this all is - "Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetal beings thus reconceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics." Seriously? Is this the best contemporary philosophy has to offer? Thankfully it isn't as Peter Singer's work demonstrates.

Secondly, even when we consume plants, such as lettuce or other leafy greens, where the whole plant is eaten there is absolutely no indication that plants suffer or feel pain by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. Animals, on the other hand, can show very clear indications of feeling pain and suffering while being raised and killed as "food animals" by humans. At least this is what I thought... During an exchange with someone on Facebook I learned how drastically "contemporary philosophy" and some fuzzy thinking can be used to turn these fairly simple observations around.

It started with one of the many vegetarian/vegan posts that are put up on Facebook (at least when you are friends with as many vegetarian/vegans as I am). I will try to paraphrase the other fellow's stance but it's somewhat difficult as he seemed mainly intent on challenging other peoples' assumptions and justifications rather than clearly setting out his own. He cited similar research on plants to that reported in the NYT essay and indicated that if we were to observe plants using time lapse photography they might seem more animal like in their responses. This seemed to be the basis for a belief that "Life is life" and "If it's wrong to eat a cow, how about an insect? If it's wrong to eat an insect, then how about a piece of fruit?" Really?

It seemed that none of the arguments I made that might differentiate a cow from a lettuce plant were valid. Who knew that the fact that we are so much more closely related evolutionarily to cows than lettuce plants and that humans and cows have such similar nervous systems and physiologies is no basis to believe that they feel pain and suffer like we do? The observation that cows seem to react in a similar way to the same kinds of stimuli that humans would react to is also a completely invalid argument. All those millions of years of evolution developing our "theory of mind" was completely worthless by this line of thinking. Frankly, as a scientist I was a little taken aback by the arrogance of his comments, as if philosophers were the only people who could think clearly about anything. Scientists use methods all the time that are known to potentially give misleading conclusions - statistics comes to mind. We know what the potential flaws are and use other methods to make sure we are not being led astray. The alternative is to throw up your hands and say that we can never know anything, hummmm......

I guess if someone could produce a time lapse video of a lettuce plant "running" away from an approaching hungry vegan I might be a little more convinced (how would a lettuce plant run anyway?). Yet, if we had such a video why would this indicate that plants are experiencing fear when very clear evidence of animals doing this is insufficient for philosophers to accept that animals experience the same emotions as we do? Why the acceptance of potential plant sensitivity and the utter rejection of animal sensitivity? Once again, if this is an example of what contemporary philosophy has to offer, I am not impressed!

Indeed, you might think that people who seem to be so sensitive to the subtle reactions of plants would be constructing a diet that would minimize this kind of trauma - perhaps only eating fruits and seeds, but you'd be wrong. These "concerns" about plants seem to be mainly an attempt to create a false equivalence between plants and animals regarding ethical considerations. But rather than this leading to more ethical eating it seems to lead to a complete abdication of any ethical concerns when it comes to eating - after a long hard day of philosophical consideration of these matters they are free to eat whatever they want. "Yes waiter, I'd like the veal cutlets and some foie gras as an appetizer..."

Even if you believe that plants are capable of all the kinds of responses that animals display this is no justification to eat animals. As I have demonstrated above, most plant foods don't involve killing plants or even disrupting their life cycle (if you are really that concerned) and producing them certainly doesn't involve the kind of pain, suffering and early death that "food" animals endure. I don't know the motives of these people but the fact that these kinds of arguments lead to abandoning ethical behavior when it comes to diet rather than informing it gives me some clue.

However, even though I'm a life-long vegetarian and decades-long vegan I don't believe that my diet is free of any ethical issues. I know about the animals that are killed in industrial monoculture farming - it's still better to eat the corn than feed a whole bunch of it to animals and then eat the animals. I know that people work many backbreaking hours to pick fruits and vegetables so I try to purchase more local and organic foods but I know what I do is not perfect. I feel very lucky that I live at a time that allows me to mainly avoid animal cruelty for my daily sustenance. Further, I don't consider myself morally superior to people around me that choose to eat differently than I do. People make food choices every day and even though I know I can do better I am comfortable with mine. What I'm not concerned about, however, are any "ethical implications" involving eating plant foods - you shouldn't be either.

Cheers!