Conversing with the Fringe

Have you read The Travels of a Tee Shirt in a Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli? Whether or not you have, you would’ve enjoyed a presentation given by Rivoli on February 24 at Fuqua School of Business. The author, a business professor at Georgetown University, spoke about free trade after following a tee-shirt from the cotton farms in Lubbock, TX, to Shanghai, China, to Washington, DC, to New York, NY, and finally to Tanzania.

While Rivoli doesn't believe free trade is necessarily a good thing, she points out that Americans have tended to view it favorably. In 2002, at the height of the globalization debate, 78% of Americans believed that international trade was very good or somewhat good for the country.

That statistic has dropped, however. More and more Americans believe that international trade is a “story of destruction”, creating systems that breed inequality and perpetuate hardship in developing countries. People struggling to survive will work for unfair wages or under harsh and unhealthy conditions just to get by.

Rivoli claims that the people who view trade unfavorably are both the “fringe” and now mainstream Americans who had previously turned a deaf ear to the problems of international trade. She argues that we should never dismiss “fringe” sentiments because they are one of the best “crystal balls”. They predict the world in 10 years and their ideas, seen as crazy today, will become standard practice. If you need convincing, look at the World Bank and IMF protestors who called attention to the pitfalls of globalization. Or look at the groups who pressured corporations like GAP and NIKE to change their supply chain management. “Fringe” demands are now the norm.

As an environmentalist who has felt like the “fringe” when arguing for the benefits of recycling or green building, I believe that the environmental message is a “crystal ball”. Environmentalists have recently made large strides in pushing some issues, like energy conservation and climate change, to the forefront of the public agenda.

But it seems that these accomplishments have only been possible in the past several years because conservationists have begun talking to diverse groups of people, namely the business community, which has historically rejected pairing economic growth with conservation.

So perhaps Rivoli’s belief in talking with a diverse set of people is actually a two-way street. It takes initiative from both groups, the business community and the “fringe” to tackle important issues. The environmental movement has certainly benefited from doing this.

Costa Rica Revisted

Its now been ten years. Ten years since I last stepped foot on Costa Rican soil. Fresh out of high school and still trying to find my way in life I somehow drifted down to our continental isthmus. Into a world strange but not unkind.

In one week I'll be heading back down to that lush country, and I could not help but reminisce a little. I admit that I was young and naive when I first found myself in Costa Rica, but that only made my experiences more important. In Costa Rica I learned many life lessons: That I had been a sheltered child, a privileged child, and a child that other people would want to rob, and did. I learned that a human cannot out run a bull. That friends need not speak the same language, and are not permanent. And that Central America has an amazing array of cultural and biological diversity.

I learned these things by leaving behind what I had known and embracing difference, by speaking another language, and absorbing some cultural history found in what we eat.

Being young I traveled the rougher paths, and stayed in the cheaper hostels, and sometimes flirted with danger by drinking... tap water. And rather than other Americans joining me in these enterprises my companions were from Denmark or the British Isles, Korea or Japan. Less often did I meet fellow Americans, and less often did I want to.

Most Americans relish comfort, and it is my fear that when Americans travel in too much comfort, in too much familiarity, that they fail at traveling. Because being in another country should be to push your comfort zone, to rub abrasively against a new language and culture, and in doing so learn something about yourself and the world. Cancun is not traveling. Tijuana is not traveling. Acapulco is not traveling. Resorts, comfort, and familiarity are vacations. Americans need more travel.

Americans are poor global citizens, but I think if we can get out there and meet what's across the border that will change. The next time you travel abroad, push those boundaries, knot your tongue around another language, and I promise I'll do the same. So bring on Costa Rica Round 2. After a ten year hiatus there's nothing I could look forward to more.

Come In, We're Closed

As students of the environment, we are bonded by trying to solve the largest problems of our world. But lurking in our midst, adjacent to our Nicholas School home in the Levine Science Research Center (LSRC), hides a problem of serious waste so easy but yet so difficult to fix: the perpetually shining lights at the Blue Express cafeteria.

Certainly you’ve noticed. Have you been fooled as I have, running to grab a late afternoon bite before class, desperately pulling on the cafeteria door, only to realize that no, it's CLOSED? But wait! That doesn’t make sense! The lights are on!

It is true- the lighting never varies in the Blue Express. Even if you stumble across it at midnight, you would think that it’s open (unless you are me and have learned the hard way). The cafeteria wastes thousands of dollars and contributes to more pollutants into the air by lighting a completely empty space when its closed for business, 16 hours every day. But neither you, nor I, nor anyone can turn the lights off—ever.

What can we do about this frustrating, age-old problem that still seems to plague so many spaces? If a building like the cafeteria can't use conventional light switches, then the space should use automatic motion sensors to control the lights. Bathrooms in the LSRC use motion sensors so that after several minutes of inactivity, lights will automatically turn off. Is there any reason that Duke couldn’t install these in the Blue Express? Do you have an idea that has worked in other cafeterias or open spaces?

Duke’s campus has made great strides in conservation before. The campus has reduced its water consumption through dual-flush toilets in many buildings, allowing people to use less than half the amount of water as a conventional toilet. Let’s push Duke to conserve on basic energy use, too. After all, nobody likes to be fooled by the lights.

Defending Science from “Scientists”

Mankind's discoveries through the years of scientific exploration simply blow my mind. Although a comprehensive list of the most important scientific achievements goes well beyond the scope of a blog post, some of the most memorable moments in the history of science include:

• Identifying the double-helix sequencing of DNA
• Demonstrating that God doesn’t exist
• Describing the basic force of plate tectonics
• Harnessing electricity
• ...wait, what?

My list has been influenced by a recent ad campaign featured on the sides of London buses. The message on the ads is simple: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy life."

The ads came about in large part from the support of Richard Dawkins, a professor of Biology at Oxford University and a world-renowned atheist. Dawkins has expressed many times in interviews and debates (like this one from his website and this one from the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conference) a sentiment along the lines of: "I believe that the existence of a supreme being, a supernatural God, is a scientific hypothesis just like any other."

Far be it for me to contradict an esteemed Oxford professor, but as a student of science I think he's missing the mark. Environmentalists understand only too well the trouble of misrepresented science. Contentious political issues like global warming seem to encourage the misuse of scientific explanations:

• A cold winter day proves that global warming doesn't exist


• Earth history shows that the planet has warmed before, therefore humans are not causing the Earth to warm now


• A 10 parts-per-million increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide cannot possibly do any harm, since 10 is a small number and 1,000,000 is a big number

And, in all fairness, atheist scientists must not receive all of the blame for muddling good science and faith to the detriment of both.

We scientists (and here I mean any student of the scientific process) must fight to protect the legitimacy of the scientific method (and, if we have any time left over, we should still try to discover things). Science deals with all things observable, all things part of nature; in other words, all things natural.

Science cannot see God, whether or not God is there to be seen. So to address the question of God in scientific terms harms scientific integrity. Every time someone tries to back up a non-scientific idea with science, no matter the argument or the purity of their intentions, they harm the credibility of truly scientific explorations.

We, as human beings, have a staggering amount of ideas and opinions. But we must always distinguish between what we have shown to be true and what we believe to be True, no matter how well founded we believe our ideas to be.