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OK, so in a weak moment (after several drinks) I was convinced to buy tickets to this group's concert tomorrow night at Waterfront Park. My friends had been raving about them for a while but I'd never heard them myself. I virtually never go to concerts of groups for whom I'm not already a fan. The last time I did it was "Wide Spread Panic" at the Palace. While that was an unforgettable experience I will never-the-less continue to try.
All of my favorite songs have already been written so I don't usually pay much attention to new music. All of my favorite songs tell a story and evoke imagery and emotion. I don't often find that the popular music of today or even that which has been released in the last two decades fulfills these requirements. Except for country music. I think that the country music of today is better than it has ever been at telling a good tale.
Come on, if you haven't listened to Little Big Town's new song "Pontoon" you are missing out. Most songs by Miranda Lambert, Toby Keith, or Brad Paisley speak to the common man and woman about life in a frank and hilarious manner. This younger generation of country singers has been heavily influenced by the rockers of the 70s, 80s, and 90s and their music is full of aggressive guitars, taunt drums, and interesting lyrics. Best of all they sing lyrics you can understand.
To my horror I've discovered that I can not understand the lyrics of Mumford and Sons. My wife picked up their CD and I have been listening to it in the car for weeks now. I really like their musicianship and their lead singer's voice is interesting although obviously contrived. Their songs really do not make much sense to me. I think their lyric writing is either horribly lazy or I am missing something in the translation. I've even read the written lyrics in hopes that seeing the words might help. It did not and after seeing the lyrics I'm convinced these guys are just laughing at us.
I've brought my concerns up to my friends on a couple of occasions. Ok, I've brought them up nearly every time I've seen them for the last month. They too now seem concerned. I've tried working some of the song lyrics into my normal conversation just to see the effect. You know like "if I only had an enemy bigger than my apathy I could have won" or "learn from your mother or else spend your days biting your own neck." They too seem puzzled but not really offended like me by such phrases.
Alas, I've discovered that not everyone is concerned with or even bothers to listen to the lyrics of songs. I wonder how many people go their whole lives thinking that John Fogerty is saying there is "a bathroom on the right" in Bad Moon Rising. You should have seen my wife's face when I explained Jackson Browne's "Rosie" to her. I find it sad really. My friends say I'm over thinking this whole thing. I should just relax. Maybe their right. Maybe I'm just all wrapped up like the biggest douche!


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More than 40,000 visitors came from outside of Germany, an increase of almost 18%
IFAT 2008, held May 5 to 9 in Munich, Germany, posted record attendance—2,560 exhibitors were at the show, and increase of 15%, and more than 120,000 visitors attended, a 10% increase.
"These results mean that IFAT is the world's biggest and most important trade fair for environmental technology and services," said Eugen Egetenmeir, deputy managing director of Messe München GmbH. "Its international reputation is also impressively underlined by the presence of many high-ranking government delegations from all over the world."
More than 40,000 of the 120,000-plus trade visitors came to IFAT from outside of Germany, representing 163 countries. Considering that there was an overall rise of 10% in visitors, this means the increase in visitors from abroad was almost 18%. Foreign visitors made up over one-third of the total number of visitors.
"IFAT has once again done justice to its role as the world's leading trade fair for the sector," Dr. Johannes F. Kirchhoff, chairman of the advisory board of IFAT and managing director of Faun Umwelttechnik, said. "Many trade professionals, above all from international markets, made use of this fair to find out about new innovations. The wonderful setting for this trade fair, and the hospitality afforded to us in this city have contributed to the good mood. For my team and I, IFAT was very successful and it can be described as one of the best trade fairs of all time."
More than 90% of the exhibitors rated the international scope among the visitors as 'good' to 'excellent,' according to a survey of exhibitors conducted by tns infratest. The same percentage—more than 90%—gave this rating also to the quality of trade visitors. In total, 87% of the exhibitors stated they will be taking part in the next IFAT.
"For Veolia, as the world's leading environmental service-provider, taking part in IFAT is a must," said Christophe Hug, management chairman of Veolia Wasser GmbH. "We are very happy with the discussions we had with our business partners and with the international audience. For Veolia the effort was very worthwhile. We will be using IFAT again next time as an international sector meeting place for the water, sewage and waste disposal industry."
In addition, 92% of exhibitors rated the leading trade-fair status of IFAT as "good" to "excellent."
"IFAT is the ideal platform for presenting the entire spectrum of the private water and life-cycle management economy to a broad international trade audience," said Egbert Tölle, chairman of Remondis AG Co. KG. "Nowhere else in the world is there a comparable forum."
And Joachim Foerderer, managing director of Bilfinger Berger Umwelttechnik GmbH and chairman of the German Water Partnership, confirmed: "IFAT is without doubt the leading trade fair for our sector. For Bilfinger Berger Umwelttechnik it is the most important trade fair of all—taking part here is a must. The density of decision-makers and companies from our sector is fantastic."
One of the highlights at IFAT was also the Accompanying Programme, which featured the forums on "Water and Sewage" and "Waste Treatment," and the 14th European Water, Wastewater and Solid Waste Symposium. More than 11,700 trade visitors came to the forums, including to the Country Specials and the Environmental Cluster Bavaria – an increase of more than 70% in comparison to the previous event. The 14th European Water, Wastewater and Solid Waste Symposium, which attracted 1,500 participants, was also successful.
Between May 5 and 9, a total of 2,560 exhibitors from 44 countries presented innovative products and services in the fields of water, sewage, waste and recycling. That is a rise of 15% compared to the previous event. Among the exhibitors, too, there was a high level of international participation, at just over one-third. This breadth was rated highly by the trade visitors—97% of the visitors gave a rating of "good" to "excellent" to the breadth and depth of the range on show at IFAT, and 81% of visitors said they would "probably" or "certainly" recommend IFAT to their business partners and associates.
"IFAT is most certainly the reference fair in the field of the environment," said Victor Garnreiter, management chairman, Eurawasser Aufbereitungs und Entsorgungs GmbH, in the division Suez Environnement. "It offers a shop window for state-of-the-art technology."

subset: commoncrawl


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If you choose to have your movie follow a path, your camera angle and altitude will remain the constant along that path. When you create a placemark, you can create specific 'View' settings that affect the way it will appear in your movie. Mouse over each field in the 'View' tab for explanations of each term, or click Snapshot current view to apply your current view settings to that placemark.
In this way, you can make a more compelling movie that shows dynamic views.


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Former Santorum national campaign manager to set up political consulting firm in Manchester
The campaign manager to Rick Santorum presidential campaign, Mike Biundo, will set up a national political consulting firm in Manchester along with two aides to outgoing U.S. Rep. Frank Guinta, R-Manchester.
Biundo, a veteran of New Hampshire politics for two decades, won 11 states in the Republican presidential primary this year for Santorum, including the key first state of Iowa.
The firm will be named RightON Strategies and will officially launch in January. Joining Biundo will be Guinta staffers Kory Wood and Derek Dufresne. (Biundo managed Guinta's successful races for Manchester mayor in 2005 and 2007 and for Congress in 2010.)
RightON Strategies plans to advise New Hampshire and national campaigns, businesses and nonprofits on grassroots issue advocacy and communications.
Biundo said their focus for now is on 2014 and 2016 campaigns for Congress, U.S. Senate, and for president. It is possible there will be some work on a SuperPAC as well.


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FERC Releases 'Utterly Insufficient Review' for Mountain Valley Pipeline
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released its Final Environmental Impact Statement Friday for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a controversial 303-mile pipeline that would carry two billion cubic feet of fracked gas per day from West Virginia through Virginia.
As has been the pattern at FERC, the review fails to adequately assess whether the pipeline is needed in the first place, while sweeping aside the project's serious threats to water resources, the safety of communities and the climate.
Oil Change International research analyst Kelly Trout had the following response to FERC's deeply flawed climate assessment:
In this utterly insufficient review, FERC ignores both science and economics to sweep aside the Mountain Valley Pipeline's significant climate impact. FERC severely undercounts climate pollution by ignoring methane leakage across the gas supply chain, which makes gas as dirty or dirtier than coal, and by omitting emissions from upstream fracking. FERC also wrongly assumes that gas supplied by the project is likely to replace coal, when it's just as likely to lock out the clean energy and efficiency alternatives we urgently need.
If FERC was doing its job, it would find the Mountain Valley Pipeline will cause an unacceptable increase in climate pollution and reject this dirty project. A proper analysis shows that this pipeline will cause as much climate pollution as 26 coal plants per year. This project is the last thing we need in the face of worsening heatwaves and flooding, and when clean alternatives are readily available now.
Concerned residents continue to fight this dirty pipeline because it's a clear threat to local livelihoods, clean water and our climate. It's time for FERC to completely overhaul its pipeline review process to prioritize the safety of communities and our climate, not the profits of corporate polluters.
In a recent study, Oil Change International found that the Mountain Valley Pipeline will cause nearly 90 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution per year, which is the equivalent of 26 coal plants or 19 million vehicles on the road. The study applied a gas pipeline climate methodology that is based on the latest analysis of the lifecycle pollution of fracked gas from the Appalachian Basin.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
U.S. COVID-19 Death Toll Passes 130,000 Amid Surge in Cases
The official number of people in the U.S. who have lost their lives to the new coronavirus has now passed 130,000, according to tallies from The New York Times, Reuters and Johns Hopkins University.
- The U.S. Isn't in a Second Wave of Coronavirus – The First Wave ... ›
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In a troubling sign for the future of the Italian Alps, the snow and ice in a glacier is turning pink due to the growth of snow-melting algae, according to scientists studying the pink ice phenomenon, as CNN reported.
By Abdullahi Alim
The 2008 financial crisis spurred a number of youth movements including Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. A decade later, this anger resurfaced in a new wave of global protests, from Hong Kong to Beirut to London, only this time driven by the children of the 2008 financial crisis.
1. Learn From the Past
Young people tend to be comfortable with change. Their instant adoption of technology is an example. However, they may lack an understanding of the more permanent realities – requiring patience and stoicism.

This wisdom is typically in the hands of individuals who either work within systems or who have accumulated far more tenure. This was effectively echoed by 13-year old activist, Naomi Wadler who said, "We can educate our youth a lot better. We're not delving deeper into social justice movements from the past."

Youth movements that are informed by the success and pitfalls of prior efforts offer a more promising outcome. Take for example, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, co-founded by a 32-year old Alicia Garza.

Unlike the civil rights movement of the 1960's, BLM lacks central governance. This means that opponents can't attack its leadership as a means to discredit the whole movement. In the 1960's, this is exactly what happened to the civil rights movement, when critics went after Martin Luther King, stalling the collective efforts of the movement.

In fact, King spent his final year mired in public disapproval with over 75% of Americans considering him "irrelevant" including 60% of African Americans.

By studying the legacy of previous efforts, BLM has managed to rally approximately 75% of the American public; a feat that will undeniably ensure the longevity of its cause.

For the youth climate movement, it too must reconcile the long record of activism that predates its tenure. It ought to model itself as an intergenerational movement by giving greater credence to the activists, environmental scientists and indigenous elders that have fought for climate justice before its inception and ultimately signal the nuance and maturity that would activate allies within systems of power.

2. Become Part of Systems Change
From the college campus to the coworking space, you would be hard pressed to avoid the sight of a social impact competition that invites young people to resolve some of the world's most intractable problems.

Unsurprisingly, this often leads to problematic and incomplete solutions. Take, for example, an app for African farmers developed by students who have neither farmed nor been to Africa.

Fortunately, there is a growing shift towards empowering young people to better diagnose the systems that uphold inequality. For example, Oxford University hosts the annual Map the System competition to celebrate some of the most promising youth-led mappings and the World Economic Forum's Global Shapers Community convenes more than 7,000 young people under the age of 30 to address local, regional and global challenges.

To achieve systemic change, young changemakers must first unpack systems into three components; elements, interconnections and functions:

Elements are essentially the key stakeholders in the system. This can include individuals, land or objects.

Interconnections are the laws and social norms that bind the elements together.

Functions are the end-goals.

Take for example, the persistence of sexual harassment in the workplace as a systems issue. The elements in the system would include the victim, perpetrator and other intermediary bodies including line managers and human resource teams. The interconnections could include forced arbitration laws that prohibit employees from seeking public courts and a managerial culture that protects high performing perpetrators and pressures victims into silence. In which case, the ultimate functions (or rather dysfunctions) of the system discourage victims from pursuing action and enable perpetrators and enablers to enjoy the benefits of career progression without due trial.

Systemic change is about redesigning the interconnections (the cultural norms and laws). In the example above, it involves challenging the use of private arbitrary courts and uprooting a toxic work culture. Reclaiming this intuition opens a pandora's box that ultimately allows for any given system to operate more inclusively.

Today, young changemakers can rely on online resources like Systems-Led-Leadership to analyze any given system of inequality and then direct their unique skills and knowledge towards the most effective intervention.

3. Avoid Heropreneurship
Daniela Papi-Thornton first coined the term heropreneurship to describe a growing trend that credits social change to the "founder" of an organization or movement exclusively.

This culture has inspired an entire generation of young change-makers who are swayed by the allure of the "heroic" founder and whose behaviors are validated through youth awards, grants and speaking circuits that glorify a role in the limelight. This pervasive culture undercuts the entire spectrum of actors that really creates social change.

Social change does not necessarily warrant the creation of a new organization or movement. Change-makers should consider the root causes that perpetuate and uphold inequalities and then map the existing players and solutions. This process might point to scaling up the work of an existing organization or helping a local candidate run for office.

For young people who wish to create social change, their efforts – while extremely important – may go unnoticed. This is an expectation that needs to be managed.

4. Know Your Place
In 2016, a political action committee entitled Can You Not emerged with the aim of discouraging white men from running for office in minority districts.

Despite the comical graphics, the campaign highlights an important question for young changemakers, particularly if they advocate for issues that they have not lived: in the quest for social change, can the actions of change-makers unwittingly perpetuate injustices, even as they seek to end them?

In the example above, could the notion of a white man effectively assuming the role of a translator between minority communities and government only reinforce their structural underrepresentation in political decision-making? Could the desire to assume office without lived experience also signal little faith in the leadership of the very communities being served?

A more effective approach to social change may be to encourage such actors to take stock of the unintended consequences of misrepresentation. In doing so, they may come to appreciate the importance of "stepping back" to allow others to "step forward." More concretely, this could result in building trusted relationships with the community and eventually empowering more local voices to consider public leadership.

For young changemakers, it is pivotal that they assess their own standing in a given system and avoid perpetuating the very inequalities they wish to tackle.

Strategic Intelligence: Youth Perspectives. World Economic Forum
A More Targeted, Effective Kind of Activism
Social media has played its critical part in providing young people with a vehicle to advocate for social reform.

Whether it's Greta Thunberg's speech during the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 or Emma Gonzalez rallying crowds for more stringent gun control. younger voices are swaying public opinion and pressuring political systems to operate more inclusively.

The impact of these extraordinary young people is inspiring, but arguably they struggle to provide a course of action for the average young person who is motivated to pursue social change. The inconvenient truth is that social reform is difficult and even more so for a young person who wrestles with challenges related to experience and credibility.

To be more effective, young changemakers must forge greater bonds with late-stage activists as well as potential allies within systems of power. They must also understand the systems that uphold equality and pinpoint the intervention that would most likely inspire systemic change.

Finally, it is pivotal that they invest in a support system and seek to dissolve personal anxieties that may compromise their change-making potential.

It's time for youth activism to grow up.

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Supreme Court Rejects Trump Effort to Greenlight Keystone XL Construction
By Jake Johnson
The Supreme Court late Monday upheld a federal judge's rejection of a crucial permit for Keystone XL and blocked the Trump administration's attempt to greenlight construction of the 1,200-mile crude oil project, the third such blow to the fossil fuel industry in a day—coming just hours after the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the court-ordered shutdown of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
- Construction Begins on Keystone XL Pipeline in Montana - EcoWatch ›
- Trump Approves Keystone XL Pipeline, Groups Vow 'The Fight Is ... ›
- Judge Tosses Major Keystone XL Permit - EcoWatch ›
The Arctic Is on Fire and Warming Twice as Fast as the Rest of the Earth
Once thought too frozen to burn, Siberia is now on fire and spewing carbon after enduring its warmest June ever, according to CNN.
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- 550,000 Acres on Fire in Alaska in Latest Sign of the Climate Crisis ... ›
- 'Unprecedented' Wildfires in Arctic Have Scientists Concerned ... ›
Mexican Communities Are Trying to Protect an Endangered Fir Forest
By Agustín del Castillo
For 20 years, the Colima fir tree (Abies colimensis) has been at the heart of many disputes to conserve the temperate forests of southern Jalisco, a state in central Mexico. Today, the future of this tree rests upon whether the area's avocado crops will advance further and whether neighboring communities will unite to protect it.
The Nevado de Colima volcano stands 4,260 meters (13,976 feet) above sea level. Agustín del Castillo
According to biologist José Villa Castillo, the director of Nevado de Colima National Park and Nevado de Colima Cloud Forest State Park, it is imperative to stop the commercialization of the tree's timber and to create policies that conserve the forests in which it lives. Villa Castillo also supported the inclusion of the tree on the endangered species list.

Villa Castillo acknowledged the enormous challenge of conserving this tree, and he said the pressure to exploit its timber without sustainable management is far from the only problem. The expansion of the nearby avocado industry also threatens its survival.

When allowed to grow, the Colima fir tree can become monumental: It can reach 60 meters (196 feet) in height and 2 m (6.5 ft) in diameter. To protect this giant, specialists and communities often promote ecotourism and conservation projects inside the national and state parks that surround the Nevado de Colima volcano.

Fires That Clear Land for Avocado Crops
In 2012, a group of researchers from the University of Guadalajara proposed to the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) the recognition of the A. colimensis as a unique species to differentiate it from the sacred fir (A. religiosa), which is the dominant fir tree in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, a collection of volcanoes in central Mexico.

The Colima fir tree "has extremely low genetic diversity; it has the lowest known genetic diversity among all the species in the Abies genus in Mesoamerica and one of the lowest among all the species of trees on the planet," according to the authors of the proposal to recognize the tree as an endangered species. The area it occupies "is very limited": just 15,002 hectares (37,071 acres), or 0.007% of the territory of Mexico.

The Nevado de Colima volcano, which stands 4,260 meters (13,976 feet) above sea level, is one of only eight peaks that exceed 4,000 m (13,123 ft) in Mexico. It is only 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Pacific Ocean and is considered an "evolutionary island" because the ecosystems in its high-altitude areas drive unique adaptations in species and are cut off from other ecosystems by hundreds of kilometers. The Colima fir tree is an example of the area's biological differentiation, according to Libertad Arredondo, a researcher and expert on the ecology of high mountains.

The fir forests are mainly located in the middle of slopes or in ravines. Agustín del Castillo
Even though the tree has remained on that "evolutionary island," its situation has become increasingly complicated by the impact of deforestation, which was propelled by the issuance of permits for forest exploitation. Fires, started to convert the land to agriculture or other uses, also present a threat to the ecosystem, according to the experts who suggested the tree should be considered endangered.

The researchers said the tree's future prospects are further complicated by its slow growth rate, its high degree of genetic erosion, the effects of climate change, and the movement of clouds to higher altitudes. The position of clouds is crucial because they act as an essential source of moisture for fir trees.

Villa Castillo, an expert in pine genetics and reproduction, said the Colima fir tree has never been successfully reproduced in nurseries, which would likely make it impossible to conduct reforestation efforts to help repopulate the species.

The forests that contain the Colima fir tree are in cold, humid climates, with very little light reaching the understory, and they're mainly located in the middle of slopes or in ravines. The species thrives when surrounded by oak trees, coniferous trees and other types of vegetation common in mountainous cloud forests. The tree also requires a primary habitat with little disturbance from humans.

According to Villa Castillo, fire kills most Colima fir tree seedlings, as it kills seedlings of other species in the Abies genus. In recent years, more fires have been started in the forest to clear the way for avocado trees.

A tree and other vegetation in the cloud forest surrounding the Nevado de Colima volcano. Agustín del Castillo
Sonia Navarro Pérez, a researcher from the University of Guadalajara who has monitored and conducted biological inventories in the area, has seen firsthand how the growth of the avocado industry has led to the loss of important forested areas.

She described the case of the indigenous community of San José del Carmen, which is in the municipality of Zapotitlán de Vadillo, near one of the patches of forest.

"We were working with them to establish productive alternatives that are good for nature," Navarro Pérez said. "But when the avocado came, it overwhelmed us completely."

Since 2013, the coniferous forests around the Nevado de Colima volcano have lost nearly 6,600 hectares (16,300 acres) due to illegal logging, livestock rearing and intentionally set fires, according to Mexico's deforestation risk index developed by the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change.

A section of cloud forest in San José del Carmen, inside the state park created in 2009. Community members have been protecting the forest voluntarily for over two decades. Agustín del Castillo
"[What was once] an original area of 7,000 hectares [17,300 acres] of fir-specific forest is now cut in half," said Villa Castillo, the director of the Nevado de Colima national and state parks.

The expansion of the avocado crops is the most recent threat in a series of events that have negatively impacted the conservation of the forests in the area.

Between the 1940s and the 1990s, the Atenquique Industrial Company had exclusive rights to use the timber from these forests under a concession from the Mexican government. The result was "that the forests were skimmed — that is, they took the best parts," Villa Castillo said.

When the concession expired in 1995, the forests did not experience a transition to a sustainable timber extraction method. Those who, along with landowners who held small plots, had rights to the shared land were limited to selling the forested areas, at very low prices, to the new logging industries located in Ciudad Guzmán. "Then, there were many abuses against the communities. The money was given to the caciques" — families who have always controlled the shared land — "alms were left for the community, and our forests were very poorly managed," said Rafael González Merín, the former president of Huescalapa, a collective of communally owned farmland known as an ejido.

As a result, many residents of the community believe the solution is to conserve the forests with productive projects.

Communities Pitch in to Save Their Trees
Unlike the communities that have been overtaken by the avocado industry, Huescalapa has largely managed to resist its arrival. The community of shared land, which spans more than 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres), is home to pine and fir trees within its shady temperate forests.

The residents of Huescalapa have also set aside the proposals they've received from the forestry industry, which has expressed interest in buying their trees.

According to Gerardo Bernabé Aguayo, logging activity in this area of Jalisco "has been very negative because the industry has managed delicate areas — with very limited species — poorly, so we are supporting and launching projects with the communities." Bernabé Aguayo is the president of the board of trustees of Nevado de Colima and Adjacent Basins, a civil association created about 20 years ago after being promoted by the government of the state of Jalisco. To support the conservation of the national and state parks, the board has financing from the regional private sector.

The board manages about 6 million pesos ($268,000) contributed by the federal government in 2020. With resources from the private sector, it has been able to access an additional 1.5 million pesos ($67,000).

An area of fir trees that has been destroyed by logging. Agustín del Castillo
Rodrigo Cantera Hernández, the president of the El Alcázar Ecotourism Center, said that in Huescalapa, the caciques removed timber from the fir forests, "but they did not report any money to the other community members, so we fought to eject them and were able to do so a couple of years ago."

In Huescalapa, three main conflicts over timber have taken place in the past 20 years. First, in 1999, a group of community members sold part of the forest to a forestry industry from Ciudad Guzmán. A movement led by citizens put an end to the logging five months later.

Next, in 2012, environmental authorities granted permission for forest exploitation in these areas, so fir trees continued to be cut down. An opinion by the Institute of Environmental Law, a civil society organization, cited scientific evidence that demonstrated the uniqueness of mountain fir trees and forced SEMARNAT to withdraw these permissions.

The citizens of Huescalapa formed a cooperative to launch the El Alcázar Ecotourism Center. El Alcázar Ecotourism Center
Then, in 2015, a federal judge suspended a new authorization to exploit timber in the cloud forest.

For communities like Huescalapa to have economic options that do not involve the use of timber because of the detrimental effects that this may have on the remaining population of Colima fir trees, ecotourism and similar activities are promoted.

According to Bernabé Aguayo, the goal is for the natural forest to be conserved as "a key area for contemplation, enjoyment, the preservation of environmental services, and research."

In 2019, the cooperative in El Alcázar received 1 million pesos ($44,600), which allowed it to have the basic infrastructure for the ecotourism center. The cooperative may receive an additional 3 million pesos ($133,800) in 2020 to purchase more equipment and improve the roads, but support for this funding was blocked in a community assembly. "They have not understood that it is for the benefit of everyone, that it is not money for our pockets," said Cantera Hernández, the president of the cooperative.

In Huescalapa, one of the challenges that interferes with efforts to promote the ecotourism center is the division that exists between community members. Many seek to use the timber, but others are already convinced of the importance of conservation.

Villa Castillo, the director of the Nevado de Colima national and state parks, emphasized that projects similar to the El Alcázar Ecotourism Center are being promoted in San José del Carmen and Zapotitlán de Vadillo, which are very close to the border between the states of Jalisco and Colima.

María de la Luz Cortés Reyes, the leader of the Amixtlán cooperative, which was created in San José del Carmen. Agustín del Castillo
The Amixtlán Ecotourism Center is located in the community of San José del Carmen. A cluster of cabins marks the entrance to the cloud forest, designated a state park since 2009.

"We decided to protect our forest long before they declared the state park, 20 years before then," said María de la Luz Cortés Reyes, a community leader in San José del Carmen. She recalled that when loggers came with offers to buy the forest, members of the community believed that they offered very little payment and that "the damage [that the loggers left] was too much." For that reason, they decided "not to touch the forest, because it produces water for the crops and for our houses."

Cortés Reyes said the community was able to construct the ecotourism center because it had resources managed by the Nevado de Colima Cloud Forest State Park and by the Board of Trustees of Nevado de Colima and Adjacent Basins. However, she said it is important that more promotion is given to the area and that urgent problems, such as those with the water supply system, are resolved.

A view of the Nevado de Colima volcano from the Amixtlán Ecotourism Center in San José del Carmen. Agustín del Castillo
In the community of Zapotitlán de Vadillo, citizens also promoted the Puerta de la Hacienda Ecotourism Center, where administrators support the biocultural production of mezcal, an alcoholic beverage made from agave. The drink is made by two mezcaleros, or people who are experts in creating mezcal: Marcario Partida from Zapotitlán de Vadillo, and Rosario Pineda from Tetapán, a small community in Zapotitlán de Vadillo.

Other productive projects that are promoted in the communities include the organic production of eggs, such as by Efigenia Larios, a small producer from the community of El Tecuán. Additionally, the shared land communities of Zapotitlán de Vadillo, San José del Carmen and Huescalapa are provided with equipment for fire prevention and materials to help restore the forest soil.

Artists have painted murals that shine a spotlight on forest conservation in San José del Carmen and Zapotitlán de Vadillo.

The intention of these efforts is to allow those who own land or have rights on this fragile mountain to "understand that there are other options besides logging, and that they, too, can generate development," said Arredondo, the researcher who specializes in the ecology of high mountains.

Despite the strong pressure for land use changes brought by the avocado agroindustry and fostered by the high level of impunity that often prevails in rural areas, many of the area's landowners continue to search for a model in which their forests can remain standing.

"Many neighbors say that we are foolish for not wanting to sell this beautiful forest that we have, but that money only lasts for a short time," said José Avalo Lino, a farmer in San José del Carmen. "We are so certain of [the importance of] preventing logging that, long before the declaration of the natural protected area, our community assembly had already decided to save this forest. We will continue to be 'foolish' in this decision."

By Jeanette Cwienk
This summer's high street fashions have more in common than styles and colors. From the pink puff-sleeved dream going for just €19.99 ($22.52) at H&M, to Zara's elegant €12.95 ($14.63) halter-neck dress, clothing stores are alive with cheap organic cotton.
"Sustainable" collections with aspirational own-brand names like C&A's "Wear the change," Zara's "join life" or H&M's "CONSCIOUS" are offering cheap fashion and a clean environmental conscience. Such, at least, is the message. But is it really that simple?
Going Green, or Just Greenwashing?
"Fashion brands are capitalizing on the fact that consumers are interested in buying fairly and ecologically produced items," said Katrin Wenz, an expert in agriculture at Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND). "Organic cotton is certainly a step in the right direction, because neither genetic modification nor synthetic pesticides can be used in its production. But these own-brand sustainability labels rarely tell us anything about what happens later on in the production chain."

Viola Wohlgemuth, a textiles expert at Greenpeace, says companies create their sustainability labels and criteria themselves. "Sustainability is not a protected or specific term, which leaves the door wide open for so-called greenwashing," she told DW.

Independent Certifications Trustworthier
Both experts emphasize that independent environmental certifications offer a better indicator of a product's eco credentials, including labor conditions for workers involved in production. Examples include the Global Organic Textile Standard label (GOTS) and the IVN Best certification, which is awarded by the International Association of Natural Textile Industry (IVN).

Heike Hess, head of IVN's Berlin branch, says using organic cotton alone "is not enough to make fashion really sustainable," and that producing clothes involves a more involved production chain. After being grown in the fields, cotton fibers have to be separated from their seeds, spun, dyed, printed and sewn to create finished items of clothing.

"Ecological and social standards are important at every stage of production," Hess said. "That includes minimizing the use of harmful chemicals, managing water usage and waste, limiting CO2 emissions and ensuring human rights, fair wages, protections for workers and much more. Only then can fashion really be called sustainable."

And that comes at a price. Organic cotton summer dresses certified with the GOTS label usually cost somewhere between €60-100 (about $67-113).

Water Polluted and Wasted
Textile production often uses harmful chemicals, especially during the wet processing stage when threads are formed, dyed and woven, says Wohlgemuth. According to the UN Environment Program, around 20% of global wastewater is generated during textile dyeing and processing. Communities and ecosystems in textile producing countries across Asia are worst affected.

Since launching its 'Detox My Fashion' campaign in 2011, Greenpeace has secured commitments from some 80 global companies in the fashion industry to eliminate hazardous chemicals by the end of this year.

But that alone doesn't imply sustainability. Growing cotton also requires a huge amount of water and vast areas of land, says Sabine Ferenschild from the Südwind Institute for Economics and Ecumenism in Bonn.

"Organic cotton is only sustainable when grown in rainy regions such as India, and planted in combination with food crops rather than in competition with them," she said. "But we have seen that cotton farming is increasingly being shifted to desert regions. That can never be sustainable."

Eco Collections Remain a Market Niche
Ferenschild is critical of major fashion brands' attempts to go green with their own criteria and labeling for certain products, while the majority of what they're selling is still produced conventionally.

Germany is pursuing a new approach to green certification with its government-backed 'Green Button' label. A company can only use the label if all its products comply with high environmental and labor standards. These standards are not as strict as those demanded by organic certifiers, but experts say the 'Green Button' label is a step in the right direction, as it prevents producers offloading responsibility to subcontractors in the production chain.

An 'Eco' Dress for €20 ($22.60): Too Good to Be True?
According to the Bremen Cotton Exchange, organic cotton costs between 10 and 50% more than conventional cotton. Premium fibers boost prices the most; the raw material is not necessarily the most important factor in terms of cost.

Global fashion brands like H&M are able to keep their prices down, even for the products in their "sustainable" ranges, due to the huge volume of items they produce, textiles expert Ferenschild told DW.

H&M uses its own "CONSCIOUS" label for products which contain "at least 50 percent sustainable materials, such as organic cotton and recycled polyester." It is not clear to consumers what percentage of organic cotton is used in the items labeled as such. In response to DW's request for clarification, H&M wrote: "Across our entire range, H&M uses 16 percent organic cotton according to our most recent figures."

According to the Bremen Cotton Exchange, just 0.7 percent of the global cotton harvest in the 2017/18 season was organic.

The Real Problem Is One of Quantity

Even if the big fashion brands wanted to move further towards truly sustainable production, current consumption habits would make that almost impossible. The real problem is that far too many clothes are being produced. According to a 2015 Greenpeace study, there are more than five billion items of clothing in German wardrobes alone.

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Kurt Vonnegut's 1987 novel Bluebeard conveys the fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, a character who first appears in Vonnegut's book Breakfast of Champions. Rabo is an abstract expressionist painter and one-eyed World War II veteran whose paintings disintegrate because of the dodgy materials he uses to create them. While Bluebeard vividly describes the eccentric friends and hangers-on who surround Rabo, the heart of the novel is the secret that Rabo keeps hidden in a potato barn on the property he inherited from his deceased wife. The secret, which is revealed toward the end of the book, turns out to be both beautiful and astonishing.
Like Rabo's secret, Indy's newest culinary gem, Bluebeard, is tucked away; it lies on Virginia Avenue in the Holy Rosary neighborhood, just northwest of Fountain Square. Aside from the name of the restaurant being announced on the side of the building, it's not really clear what's at the location unless you already know going in. In addition to housing a restaurant, the building houses a bakery called Amelia's that produces artisanal breads.
Once you enter the restaurant through a courtyard, you're welcomed by rustic yet sophisticated surroundings. Many of the fixtures in the restaurant appear to be re-purposed--the bar stools, for example, look like they were assembled from old grammar school chairs--and the barroom looks like what would happen if one created a mash-up of a novelist's library and a turn-of-the-twentieth-century saloon. The literary artifacts adorning the restaurant--a half-dozen typewriters from various eras and antique editions of books--seem to be a tip of the cap to Vonnegut and Bluebeard the novel, but I can't say for sure.
Bluebeard's cuisine is inventive, locally-sourced, and has several options for vegetarians like me (sorry vegans; you're out of luck here). Over several visits, I've had the Greek beet salad, house bread, pickle assortment, fried green tomatoes, watermelon gazpacho, and chess pie. All were amazing.
And there is Bluebeard's beer selection. Like the food menu, the draft list of ten taps is locally-focused, continuing the trend of excellent restaurants realizing that good food should be accompanied by good beer. We opted for Sun King's fifth edition in its Cream Dream series. I told the rest of the HBG crew that I wished we could do a Cream Dream vertical because it's hard to recall what the previous Cream Dreams tasted like other than generally remembering that they were sweet and particularly citrusy. Cream Dream V fell into the same profile. I don't normally like to use analogues from other brewers, but I'll do it this time because Cream Dream V strikes me as being very close to one of my favorite beers, Dogfish Head's 90 Minute IPA. I initially thought the beer would be comparable to 3 Floyds Alpha King, so Jason suggested that we do a side-by-side comparison since Alpha King was also on tap at Bluebeard. Upon comparison, Cream Dream V was definitely the maltier of the two beers, and I actually liked it better than the much adored Alpha King.
So what to make of the Bluebeard experience? Though I might be accused of exaggerating, I'm going to say that Bluebeard is both beautiful and astonishing. But for many folks, that secret is already out.
Cream Dream V is everything I wanted it to be. Bright, citrusy, hoppy with and equally balanced malt profile. It was a lovely accompaniment to the food and company.
Anybody who is fan of the writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. knows that architects are the greatest beings to have ever walked the earth. And I will prove it momentarily.
If you read the Sun King blog, you will find a fantastic story about the origins of Cream Dream, that it was started as an attempt to win the Alpha King Challenge. And while Cream Dream V (and the versions that came before it) are uniquely different from Alpha King, there is a familiarity with every sip. Golden and topped with a thin white head, it has notes of light, sweet fruits with a bitterness that is neither weak nor over the top. But yet I can't help but compare it to its quasi-father Alpha King. I give the edge to Alpha King, though coming in second to Alpha King is no loss.
Let's get back to the awesomeness that is an architect. Kurt Vonnegut Sr. was an architect and lecturer based in Indianapolis during the first half of the 20th century. He produced several art deco creations, including many of the old Indiana Bell buildings. He also spent time as a faculty member at the Herron School of Art. Many do not know that his son, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., was a somewhat successful writer. I hear that he has a cult following, that some people think his writings are impressive. To those I say: an architect has more creativity in one sperm than most people have in their whole body.
Now supposedly Bluebeard is named in honor of Bubba's works. I can't really speak to that. But the food is really good. And the architecture is fantastic. God bless architects!
Sun King Cream Dream V: I Thought We Were BuddiesGina: 4.00 Mugs | Jim: 4.50 Mugs | Jason: 3.80 Mugs | Rod: 4.00 Mugs | Mike: 4.75 Mugs | Chris: 4.20 Mugs
KOTBR Score: 4.20 Mugs


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1.1) Where the Company and its group of radio stations are engaged in Commercial Activities that sometimes involve the collection of personal and private information from customers, suppliers and the general public; and
1.2) Where the Company and its group of radio stations are sensitive to the collection and use of that information because of its importance to the individual from whom it was collected; and
1.3) Where the Company and its group of radio stations wish to be in compliance with certain federal legislation as it relates to the collection and use of personal private information;
2.1) This policy is intended to address the collection and use of information that is both personal and identifiable to an individual. Personal and Identifiable Information includes personal characteristics such as age, name, home address, telephone number, social insurance number and financial information (herein after referred to as "Personal Information" and/or "Identifiable Information").
2.2) For clarity, this policy is not meant to capture the collection of corporate information from other companies or businesses.
2.3) This policy shall also apply to any consultant such as lawyers and accountants that the Company may engage in the regular course of business.
3.1) The Media Industry is driven primarily by advertising. Private individuals often purchase ad time, which necessitates the collection of contact information and financial information for proper contract maintenance and collection.
3.2) Further, the collection of contact information allows the company to follow up with clients to offer future advertising time as it becomes available.
General Public
3.3) The Radio Business is interactive in nature and engages its audience. As a result, listeners will often be invited to "call-in" for reasons such as contests or making requests.
3.4) The contact information of the caller will be recorded in order to ensure the proper collection of prizes.
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3.6) The Company greatly appreciates its listeners' feedbacks on their experiences with its group of radio stations. We may use these testimonials to provide other listeners and/or clients with promotional materials. Therefore, by providing a testimonial, the listener consents in allowing the Company to publish their testimonial in its Testimonial Section of the respective radio station's website and other relevant productions. The Company does not and will not give any monetary compensation for any and all testimonial(s) submitted. Submitting a testimonial does not guarantee that it will be published. All testimonials will be reviewed and filtered, then be selected to be published at the sole and full discretion of the Company. Please be advised that the Company will make applicable edits to each testimonial for grammar, Personal Information protection, and/or minor modifications to clarify context. We have the highest level of respect for our listeners' privacy, therefore, no testimonial provider's Personal Information will be disclosed, unless otherwise noted.
3.7) Occasionally, listeners may take offence to an item they heard, or thought they heard, on our stations and may file a complaint with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC). Under CBSC guidelines, we are required to respond to the complainant directly and will receive their contact information in order to comply with the regulations.
3.8) Our stations are continuously updating our talent-banks. As a result, we are provided with resumes and demos from members of the public. As a result, we require contact information in order to conduct interviews, etc. Although we do not require certain information, some individuals may also provide us with birthdates and Social Insurance Numbers which are held in the strictest confidence.
Employees/Independent Contractors
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3.10) To ensure the safety of Employees and Contractors, we also collect family information to be used in the case of an emergency which occurs during work hours.
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3.13) In order to ensure the effectiveness of the Co-Op program, the Company will continue to collect personal information such as performance reviews of students throughout the work-term. Students acknowledge the importance of this collection process to the program and understand that it will be shared with their academic institution whatever its content.
4.1) None of the Personal and Identifiable Information collected shall be used for any purpose other than those outlined in this policy.
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7.3) For general inquiries regarding privacy legislation in Canada, please address your questions to: The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Canada 112 Kent Street Ottawa, ON K1A 1H3.


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I think there are a lot of people who will be happy to see the tail end of 2012. For me, I'll say it was a year with dynamic range. On the business side, it's not overstating it to say it was a career year: A New York Times bestseller in Redshirts plus a profile in that same paper, the announcement of Morning Star and The Human Division, Special Guest at ComicCon, Toastmaster and Hugo emcee at Worldcon. They're still working on making the movie for Old Man's War, and I sold tens of thousands of copies of that book via the Humble Bundle. Whatever's viewership grew roughly 50% in a single year.
On the other hand, my wife lost her father, my daughter a grandfather, and I lost a father-in-law. Other personal things are well, and there have been at least a couple of really wonderful moments which I won't go into because, hey, they're personal. But losing Mike was a big hit for all of us.
So: Highs and lows.
I'm glad for the good things, and I'm glad for what remains, and hope 2013 is a good year for us all.
Tell me about your 2012 in the comments and let me know what your plans are for 2013.


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Flood warnings and flash flood watches have been posted for wide areas of Colorado, including Denver and northeastern Colorado.
Slow moving storms, saturated grounds and snow melt in the mountains raise the likelihood of flooding, according to the National Weather Service.
Storms will develop in the mountains and along the northern Front Range Friday, spilling onto the eastern plains in the afternoon.
Heavier storms could produce two inches of rain in an hour and locally heavy amounts are possible, the weather service warns.
A flash flood watch has been posted for portions of north central and northeastern Colorado including the Denver metro area, Boulder, and eastern Larimer, Weld and Morgan counties.
Kieran Nicholson: 303-954-1822, firstname.lastname@example.com or twitter.com/kierannicholson


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From a German border town on the banks of the river Neisse, the anatomist Gunther von Hagens commands a fortress of death. The former textile mill has glorious skylights and a facade of dark red brick, but inside it's faded and forlorn. A spray of Allied bullets left dents in the metalwork, and grenade blasts have chipped the masonry. The end of World War II split the town of Guben right down its gut like a miniature Berlin, a wound from which it never quite recovered, and von Hagens' palace seems to have suffered from its own, more private reconfiguration: Dormant forklifts dot the courtyard next to bits of fencing and piled rebar; water drips from 20-foot ceilings in the dormitories; floral wallpaper sags off yellowed plaster.
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This wilted splendor gives way, in places, to the fundamental work of von Hagens' business—the extraction of body parts and sale of preserved remains. A few years ago, he spent $50 million to turn this run-down site into a global headquarters for his Body Worlds exhibits, fitted out with tanks of acetone (for defatting tissue), high tech freezers, and a morgue. In one corner of the yard, a refrigerated warehouse holds a band saw big enough to rip an elephant in half. In another, the carcass of a giraffe lies at the bottom of a swimming pool, its spots turned pale in a solution of ethanol and water. The animal's tail is tucked between its legs, and its neck lies along the pool's diagonal—the only way it fits. The giraffe is being kept pliable for dissection. But it could just as soon have been frozen whole and sliced into millimeter-thick sheets. Preserved with plastic, these could end up in lecture halls or museum displays, or added to an archive in the rooms upstairs, where parts of animals and people are kept in bins marked brain and foot and scrotum.
The 68-year-old scientist who runs this factory of desiccation and dissection spends his days shuffling through its corridors with his lapdog, Bella. They are often the only living things in sight, and Bella's yaps echo among the carved-up corpses that line the halls in obscene and fabulous poses. One looks like a flayed Harry Potter, riding on a twisted broomstick that is, upon closer examination, his own spinal cord. Another sits with a rod in hand, dangling a fish, while his body has been exploded into parts that hang from a rack on fishing lines. There are horse heads too, their flesh corroded to reveal clouds of blood vessels, and yaks and pigs with their ribs spread out like wings. Von Hagens calls the place his Plastinarium. It's the first permanent display of specimens from his stupendously successful traveling exhibition of flesh preserved with plastic. Body Worlds has made its way to London, Tokyo, Istanbul, Boston, and scores of other cities since the 1990s; it has inspired copycats and lawsuits and sold more than 35 million tickets.
As a young lecturer at the University of Heidelberg in 1977, von Hagens developed a laboratory trick that at first seemed of interest only to a dwindling cadre of macroscopic anatomists: a way to impregnate slices of kidney tissue with plastic. Soon he'd made the process work for whole dissected bodies. He starts with regular embalming—the injection of formaldehyde into femoral arteries—and then submerges the body in acetone, which dissolves its fat and water. After that he drops the corpse into a basin filled with liquid polymer. It's placed inside a vacuum chamber, where the acetone bubbles off as plastic pushes in to take its place.
It took years to get the details right, but eventually von Hagens figured out a way to turn his method into a morbid empire, devoted to the processing of animal and human cadavers, with outposts in Kyrgyzstan and China. At its busiest, the complex in Guben employed 220 people and churned out specimens for exhibition, along with those that could be sold to medical schools around the world—limbs and joints for orthopedics, jaws for dentistry, spinal columns for neurology, and $75,000 plastic-filled corpses for gross anatomy.
But on the morning of December 29, 2010, the anatomist, inventor, and entrepreneur stood at the center of his factory, before his army of employees, and began to cry. The business that he'd worked so hard to build was crumbling. Revenue from Body Worlds had begun to taper off, and sales of body parts to universities had always been propped up by the exhibits. His plastination plant in China was nearly defunct, and his would-be partnership in Siberia had ended in a scandal. Here in Guben, the operation had gotten to the verge of bankruptcy. The staff would have to be cut back, von Hagens said; two-thirds of his employees would be let go.
The doctor too was in decline. "My hand trembles, my language is vague," he stammered. Two years before, he'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and the symptoms had grown so intense, so rapidly, that he could no longer keep them secret. There is no cure for his disorder, no way to prevent his brain from shrinking. With each passing month, von Hagens' limbs will get more rigid and his face more like a mask. After a career spent staving off rot and giving life to stiffened corpses, the man the tabloids call "Dr. Death" faces his own.
Many people expire without a warning; others learn they have just days or weeks to live. Von Hagens' end has been forecast at least three times already, going back to when he was a boy in Greiz. Growing up the middle of five children in the midsize East German town, he learned in grade school that he had a dangerous bleeding disorder. ("I felt sorry for my parents," he recalls.) The bleeding put him in the hospital on more than one occasion, but now he keeps it in check by eating peanuts, which have a coagulant effect. Even so, it seems a major pitfall for a professional dissector who works with sharp tools, and I can't help but worry when von Hagens emerges from his suite of rooms in Guben on the morning of my visit. He's got a fresh and sloppy shave, with scarlet nicks across his chin.
It's been nearly six months since he gave his good-bye speech, and the Parkinson's has left his face both slack and stiff: He has a drooping jaw and arching eyebrows, as if frozen in a moment of profound dismay. Once an enthusiastic and fluid talker, von Hagens now has trouble finishing a sentence. His illness comes in waves that start at his fingertips and work their way up to his throat, until they churn his words in a quicksand of slurs and stutters. "I hope for a successful therapy for Parkinson's!" he bellows at one point, and then explains it's easiest for him to speak in sudden outbursts. "Don't be afraid!" he shouts.
We amble through the Plastinarium, though it would seem more apropos to creep around the place at night like Scooby-Doo, tiptoeing past the potted ficus trees—also plastic, it turns out—and the ropes of human jerky. When von Hagens was in his twenties, he explains, his death was foretold again. This time a doctor colleague gave the sentence: He had an unusual condition that could reduce the flow of blood through his aorta and kill him off before the age of 45. As a connoisseur of body parts, von Hagens knew that the heart is poorly engineered—the layout of the coronary arteries leaves it prone to blockage. The timescale of this second diagnosis was long enough that he could ignore it. (It turned out his colleague had been mistaken.)
As we make our way through the anatomical museum, von Hagens lists some other body parts that are not so well designed. There are major problems with the penis—the prostate gland should not be wrapped so tight around the urethra—and he has a lot to say on the weakness of the knee. But von Hagens doesn't stint on praise for human evolution; he admires many of our features for their complexity and cleverness. Above all he loves the brain. Nothing, he says, is as perfectly constructed.
Now von Hagens' brain is failing him. In 2008 he received his third, and final, mortal diagnosis—an illness of his mind this time, not of his heart; one bound to mangle up that perfect blueprint until it deprives him of his ability to walk and talk and eat and think. He knows his Parkinson's cannot be wished away or cured by eating peanuts. "I am a doctor," he told his friend Stephan Rathgeb, once his director of communications. "I give myself seven more years."
He's more sanguine now: With therapy, the doctor hopes to live as long as most people. (He used to say he'd make it to 100.) And the illness hasn't sapped his drive to cut up corpses. Though he tires easily and his hands have grown too shaky for a scalpel, von Hagens still makes his rounds through the Plastinarium in his trademark zippered vest and black hat, looking over assistants' shoulders and spitting out instructions.
In the body-positioning room, he circles around a female corpse with dyed brown hair. Though the skinless specimens on display can look like plastic toys, this one—still somewhat fresh—looks like someone's aunt or sister. She has a scowl on her face, three piercings in her ear, a roll of belly fat, and one inverted nipple. Von Hagens checks her skin for flaws. Every few minutes, an assistant mists the body with a water bottle so it won't dry out.
Two or three corpses arrive in Guben every week—all come from willing donors—and this is where they're arranged and posed, while some are frozen solid at minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit for passing through the band saw. There's a human leg on a rack with the genitals still attached, as if a man's lower half had been split like a wishbone. Next to that, a set of hard-edged blocks that look like cubes of fatty cold cut or chunks of schweinebraten. They're one of von Hagens' new inventions: a teaching tool for medical students—when stacked together on matching faces, the puzzle pieces form a human pelvis.
The obese woman will be cut in horizontal sections, he declares. A red laser line shows von Hagens' assistants where to place the blade. Watching him at work invites a simple question, one so obvious and yet so personal that at first it's difficult to ask. What will happen when the Parkinson's has run its course? Will von Hagens end up on this table, his tissues pickled in formaldehyde, with metal pins stuck into his face and his feet propped up on blocks of foam? Will someone do to him exactly what he's done to her, and to so many others?
When Dr. Death is dead, what will happen to his remains?
Dead and dying bodies have, in recent times, been discreetly erased from sight. "The natural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting," wrote the aptly named British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer in his 1955 essay "The Pornography of Death." In the 1800s, he said, children and adults alike were routinely confronted with mortality—dead relatives were washed and laid out at home, funerals were extravagant, novelists were preoccupied with deathbed scenes of melancholy. Now such encounters are rare and our experience of death—our engagement with it as a fact and force of nature—has been replaced by a kind of prudery, a sense that expiration is as lewd as sex. "If we dislike the modern pornography of death," Gorer wrote, referring to the gangster movies and horror comics of his time, "then we must give back to death—natural death—its parade and publicity."
In von Hagens' Plastinarium, where dissected heads hang shameless from the walls, Gorer's plea has finally been granted. However else one might describe the Body Worlds exhibits—as science or as flimflam—they have done more than any other modern spectacle to bring the human corpse into view. For the first time in recent memory, tens of millions of people in the developed world have had the chance to see cadavers on parade, to view the lifeless bodies of their fellow beings without the intermediation of fear or shame.
As the architect of this experience, and as its tireless proponent, von Hagens has refigured death for modern sensibilities. A plastinated corpse isn't pickled, like a body in a casket. It doesn't stink, like cadavers at the morgue. It doesn't rot or bloat or molder. To see one doesn't make you sad or sick; it doesn't fill you with anxiety. The experience is something else instead—an encounter with a memento mori that's both dry and durable and can be split and peeled without disgust. It's death denuded of its most gruesome elements, the body as a finely engineered machine.
When von Hagens shipped his first sturdy specimens to Tokyo in September 1995, he tapped into a form of entertainment that had been dormant for a century. In the 1800s, expositions of anatomy were commonplace in the red-light districts of Europe and America. These were galleries of the grotesque, showing waxen models of dissected, naked women, dismembered genitalia, and casts of skin disease or venereal infection. The popular display of body parts—real and fake—arrived in the US in the 1840s and had largely faded out by the 1920s.
From there the anatomical museum, and the lineage that takes us up to Guben, was cleansed of its more salacious trappings and subsumed into the upright field of public health. In 1930, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden displayed its Glass Man—a Bauhaus-inspired life-size figurine with plastic skin, metal bones, and painted wire for its veins and arteries. Pared down to this perfect form, the Glass Man was the iPod of anatomy: an elegant, reproducible commodity that could be shipped around the world. (In the years that followed, the original and its copies turned up in Buffalo, Chicago, and St. Louis, as well as Stockholm, Sweden, and Nagoya, Japan.) As a symbol of eugenics, it would later stand for Nazi racial pride.
By the time the Glass Men marched across the continents, the public display of authentic bodies had all but disappeared. The parade and publicity of death, as Gorer called it, would not be back until von Hagens' first show in Tokyo in 1995—half a million people came to see it.
Von Hagens' plastinates tapped into a latent fascination with corporeality. Centuries of funeral rituals—burning, burying, mummifying, feeding corpses to vultures—attest to our need to take control of death and represent it for the living. Von Hagens rendered this ancient practice in a modern form. Plastination brought death into the light and gave it an aesthetic perfect for our scientific age.
Poking at a piece of tissue, von Hagens seems less a doctor than a master plumber or mechanic, each corpse a set of tubes that must be filled with fluids of the right viscosity. In the early years, when the plastination experiments grew too unwieldy for his lab in Heidelberg, he rented space in a garage. The cluttered workshop is his natural habitat: He's most at home among barrels of chemicals and boxes of stray parts. Among his first tools was a deli meat slicer for cutting human kidneys into even slabs. Later he stretched bits of panty hose to strain out blood clots and plopped brains into pudding molds so they wouldn't get malformed.
Von Hagens lives his life the way he works, without regard for custom or pretense and with a tendency to view his own body in mechanistic, unsentimental terms. To watch him eat is to see a man refuel a vehicle: He's made a habit of going for days on little more than a bowl of berries or a quart of milk, and when dining out he likes to order whichever dish will come out quickest. Each of his essential life functions has been assigned a place in the spartan four-room factory suite where he lives alone, despite being married for 20 years. There's a bed at one end, a small area with exercise equipment in the middle, and then an office with a dine-in kitchen that's stocked with instant soup and crystallized coffee. A large institutional clock hangs from the wall. "The body is like a car or an engine," he says. "You have to rest it, you have to move it, and you have to feed it."
Years ago, von Hagens overhauled his life. He tried to flee from East Germany while in his early twenties but was captured by the Stasi and imprisoned for two years. After making it to West Germany in 1970, he married a woman named Cornelia von Hagens and chose to appropriate her noble-sounding name. (His given name is Liebchen.) They had three children but the marriage soured when von Hagens' experiments with plastination drove the family into debt, and it fell apart when he started seeing someone else—a young woman in his dissection seminar named Andrea Whalley. He and Cornelia divorced, and von Hagen married Whalley three years later, in 1992. At his request, his new wife changed her name to Angelina.
With Angelina's help, von Hagens set out to build his empire. At times he was motivated by a simple need to outdo himself, spending $4 million and 65,000 hours of employee time—and building a warehouse-sized freezer—just to plastinate an elephant. That impulse hasn't faded with his health and business fortunes: Now he says he'd like to do the carcass of a blue whale, and then he'll make the body of a dinosaur from parts of other animals.
In the meantime, those around him do the best they can to manage his expectations. In May of 2012 his son Rurik began managing the company in Guben. Now 32 and a graduate of business school, he's the one who shut down the facility in China and helped orchestrate the layoffs at the Plastinarium. It also falls to him to tell his dad what can and can't be accomplished. Though Rurik wears his hair slicked back and has a B-school tendency to wink while making a point, he can sound like a kid who only just discovered that his father is not a superhero. "For all his life he liked to have a certain degree of stress, because that's what kept him running and gave him ideas," Rurik says. By all accounts, von Hagens spent almost every waking hour in the lab, and in spare moments he would study foreign languages on flash cards or take power naps while sitting at his desk. "That really doesn't work anymore," Rurik says. "But that is how he lived for decades."
Stephan Rathgeb, the former communications director, agrees. "All his life was about efficiency, and then suddenly he is not efficient anymore, I mean, this is his weakest point. This is his personal Chernobyl."
There was a time when the prospect of von Hagens' own dehydration and defatting was among his favorite topics. "We discussed it, even many years ago," Angelina tells me while her husband takes a nap inside his modest suite. She is often on the road but has come to Guben to cohost my visit. "He's about 15 years older than I am, and statistically women live longer than men, so he said, 'You know, you're a lot younger than me ... and I would want you to plastinate me.'"
"I felt shocked," she continues, "and I said, 'No, I never can.' But he insisted, and we sometimes talked about it. He calmed me down: 'You wouldn't have to do it immediately—you could put me in the freezer, but not more than one year because then I'd get those freezer burns.'"
Angelina has taken on the role of company spokesperson since soon after her husband got sick, and she prepares her thoughts behind pursed lips and eyelashes battered with mascara. Whenever they are in the same room, Angelina watches over her husband from a kind of lupine crouch, bounding in when his voice begins to falter or when he starts to stray off message. He'll fumble with a thought, and she'll fill the silence with a sound bite, one of many predigested phrases from his past: The more you think about death, the more normal it becomes. Or: Life is the exception. Or: Everyone dies a double death—a death of your soul and a death of your body. Then he'll turn to me with resignation in his eyes—a sheepish, doleful look—and nod: "My opinions are identical with hers."
Yet these days, on the matter of his death and plastination, von Hagens and his wife disagree. He no longer comforts her with talk of the freezer, and she's not at all resigned to carry out his final wishes. The squabble reemerges when the three of us are touring through his private workshop—a brick-floored space that serves as a makeshift gallery for his latest work. Here's where he keeps his silver-plated cow heart; a table made from giraffe legs wearing glitzy, high-heeled shoes; and skinny slices of a bookshelf, a piano, and a motorcycle.
Von Hagens wants to be slivered into sections too. That way his body can be displayed in different places at the same time. (At one point, he'd planned to plastinate his father and pose the corpse as a patient on a table, then later have his corpse posed beside it, as if at work. But his father is still healthy at 96, tending to his garden and raising chickens.) Angelina, for her part, would rather keep him as a plastinated whole. But when asked, neither dares to make a final judgment. Von Hagens answers first: "My opinion is ... she decides."
"And I've postponed these thoughts," she says in turn. "It's very difficult. I don't know."
Von Hagens peers at her from beneath his leather hat and tries to speak again, but his mouth can only mumble. At last he finds the strength to force out: "It's a strange subject!"
As we near the end of our tour, Bella the dog scampers ahead and across the courtyard to a room where the ceiling is partially caved in and plants, real ones, grow through a pile of rotting timbers. Then she circles back to von Hagens and sniffs around his ankles, as she does for most hours of the day. When we're eating lunch, Bella sits on his lap beneath the table. When she gets excited or upset—at the sight of a plastinated baby chick, or a bucket full of bones—he scoops her up and murmurs into her ears. When she's cold at night, he warms her under his pillow.
"She is easy to hold, you know," he says when we get back into his office and the dog has settled in his lap. His voice grows weak—from disease or emotion, it's hard to tell. He's been talking coolly about what it means to die and what might happen to his corpse, but it's the topic of his dog that chokes him up. "She can always sit beside me," he sputters, and then pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers and begins to weep. We sit in silence while his shoulders shake.
For von Hagens, grief and sorrow are no different from any other defect of the human body that should be amenable to fixing. When his tears subside, he blames them on his disease—a condition I later learn is called pseudobulbar affect, or the involuntary and inappropriate expression of feeling. It was even worse a few years ago, he tells me, before he started treatment: "I was very upset at my uncontrolled emotions. I could not even go to the cinema." He takes off his hat and shows the lumps on his scalp where the leads from brain-stimulating electrodes have irritated the skin. It's the only time I've seen his naked head. He says that he's been better since the treatment. "Just now is the first time for the last week that I cried. So I'm nearly normal now."
Earlier, von Hagens had revealed another of his works in progress, a gruesome scene he calls "Headless Into Death." So far it consists of a smashed-up, '80s-model Volkswagen with a dirty American flag spread across the seat. The car belonged to a Body Worlds donor. When his wife, another donor, succumbed to cancer, the owner of the car committed suicide by driving headlong into a tree.
Von Hagens sawed the vehicle in half, and now he plans to put a section of the driver's headless body in the front seat. The dead wife has already been processed here in Guben, he says. He wants to stand her off to one side, waiting for her husband as a full-body plastinate in silicone. As he explains the scene, it sounds as if he's playing out a fantasy with dolls, a diorama of how he might like to die himself, revving till the very end—not puttering with Parkinson's.
Whatever he decides for this unlucky pair, one thing is clear: They won't have a chance to argue, nor will their next of kin. Donors to the plastination program sign away their right to say how their bodies might be posed. (The consent form does ask if they agree to be "exhibited in public" or "interpreted as anatomical works of art," but it also says their answers to these questions are "recommendations rather than binding terms.") Von Hagens can arrange his corpses in a mock coitus or cast a mold of them to make an ersatz Jesus Christ—both of these are on display in Guben—or he can carve them up and ship the parts for use in classrooms. He can do with them exactly as he pleases.
Many have been willing to supply their flesh. The business staffs a body hotline and the deceased save the cost of interment or cremation. The deal is so appealing, in fact, that the donor database is overflowing. Angelina says they've had to make a waiting list for would-be plastinates. She also tells me that of the people who have enrolled, just one in 10 gives ideas for how they'd like their bodies shown. The rest are OK, or even eager, to leave their fate in von Hagens' hands.
Perhaps they feel the standard rituals of death are not for them. They've chosen to be anointed with acetone and polymer and sliced for public view instead. Administering this strange, newfangled rite has been von Hagens' task for almost 30 years, and he has lived his life the way he treats his bodies—as something manufactured that can be tinkered with to suit his needs. But since his diagnosis, that control has slipped away. This may be the doctor's final lesson: When he dies, he will be plastinated—that much is certain—but the posing of his body will not be up to him. For once, he'll leave the mastery of life and death to someone else.
"Understanding how the world works is a gift for me," he says, holding Bella in his arms. There's something more he wants to say, but he's having trouble speaking. "When I cannot talk anymore, a red light goes on," he mumbles at last. "I think that it goes on now. The red light goes on now."
Daniel Engber (@danengber) writes about science and culture and is a columnist for Slate.