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Novelist Alice Walker: “Go To the Places That Scare You” Vagina Monologues’ Eve Ensler: Why Freedom Starts With a “V”
2012
IT’S YOUR BODY HOW TO TAKE CHARGE OF THE THING THAT MATTERS MOST
The Good Food Cure 9 Simple Steps to Better Health (Without Joining a Gym) Helping Doctors Slow Down and Listen Hazards of Manhood
“The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta.� Eduardo Galeano from Walking Words
photo by Moha mm ad Moniruzza m an
THE ISSUE 63 THEME
IT’S YOUR BODY
24 The Mission of YES! is to support you in building a just and sustainable world. In each issue we focus on a different theme through these lenses: NEW VISIONS Solving today’s big problems will take more than a quick fix. These authors offer clarity about the roots of our problems and visions of a better way.
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Guide to the THEME SECTION photo by Richa r d Tibbitts
18 Why Your Health Is Bigger Than Your Body The new science that explains how politics, economics, and ecology can help or hurt our bodies, and how we can fix an unhealthy world. By Claudia Rowe 23 : : Just the Facts: Poverty, obesity, and diabetes
WORLD & COMMUNITY New models that foster justice and real prosperity, and sustain the Earth’s living systems. How can we bring these models to life and put them to work?
THE POWER OF ONE Stories of people who find their courage, open their hearts, and discover what it means to be human in today’s world.
BREAKING OPEN Humor, storytelling, and the arts— taking you into unexpected spaces where business-as-usual breaks open into new possibilities.
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The Good Food Cure
6 Ways Communities Put Health First
What happens when the Motor City transforms itself into the capital of grow-your-own food. By Larry Gabriel
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From play space for kids to AIDS activism: the fight against disease goes grassroots. By Stuart Glascock
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Tribe Revives Traditional Diet
Graceful Exit
In a handful of berries, a reminder of our cultural roots. By Kim Eckart
Breaking the silence about what happens when we’re dying. By Claudia Rowe
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Sins of the Flesh
Your Body, of Water
Theater troupe Sins Invalid celebrates the sensuality of all bodies—not just the “perfect” ones. By Sven Eberlein
A storyteller asks what you’d do if you knew your body was part of the water web. By Jourdan Keith
ISSUE 63
Interviewed by Valerie Schloredt
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Valerie Schloredt: Over the past few days I’ve been immersed in your work, and I’ve been wondering how you do it. Being able to move someone to tears with a few words on a page is extraordinary to me.
lice Walker is a poet, essayist, and commentator, but she’s best known for her prodigious accomplishments as a writer of literary fiction. Her novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983 and quickly became a classic of world literature. Set in an African-American community in the rural South during the decades before World War II, the novel is told in letters written by Celie, a woman who survives oppression and abuse with her spirit not only intact, but transcendent. Walker’s writing is characterized by an everpresent awareness of injustice and inequality. But whether describing political struggle—as in Meridian, which deals with the civil rights movement—or meditating on the human relationship to nature and animals, as in her latest book, The Chicken Chronicles, her work conveys the possibility of change. In Walker’s vision, grace is available through love and a deep connection to the beauty of the world. Walker was born in the segregated South, the eighth child in a family who made their living as sharecroppers in Georgia. She came of age during the civil rights movement, and emerged early in her career as a defining voice in feminism and an advocate for African-American women writers. She is a prominent activist who has worked, marched, traveled, and spoken out to support the causes of justice, peace, and the welfare of the earth. Alice Walker spoke to YES! about the challenges of working for change, and the possibility of living with awareness—and joy. 12
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Alice Walker: I want very much for you to feel for whoever I’m talking about, or whatever I’m talking about. Because it is only by empathy being aroused that we change. That is the power of writing. I’ve experienced exactly what you’re saying, reading other writers. I remember the book I first had that experience with was Jane Eyre, being right there with Jane, and understanding, yes, we have to change these horrible institutions where they abuse children. Today, I’m the supporter of an orphanage in Kenya. And one of the reasons comes from having been so moved by reading about Jane at Lowood. Schloredt: It’s interesting to hear about what you read as a child, because some of your best-known work, like The Color Purple, draws on the stories of your ancestors and your family and aspects of the world you knew as a child. Walker: I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder. We were way out in the country, and why wouldn’t you just absolutely wonder at the splendor of nature? It’s true I had various sufferings, but nothing really compares to understanding that you live in a place that, moment by moment, is incredible. That your mother could say, “I think we’ll have tea tonight,” pull up a sassafras root, take it home, boil it, and you have sassafras tea. I mean, it’s such a miraculous universe. For a child, this magic is something that supports us, even through the hard times. Schloredt: Do you go back to your childhood home? Walker: It doesn’t exist. Schloredt: No? Walker: No. And there were many of them. We lived in shacks. Each year the people who owned the land (that they had stolen from the Indians), after they had taken the labor for the year, forced us to another shack. How could people do that, to people that they recognized as people? They did this to babies, they did this to small children, they could look at the people they were exploiting and actually see that they were working them into ill health and early death. It didn’t stop them. The most beautiful parts of the area that I lived in are now an enclave of upper-class white housing tracts with a huge golf course. They built a road that went right through the front yard of our church. Most of the people moved to cities, they moved to projects. So, it doesn’t exist.
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YES! Interviews
Alice Walker
“The foundation of everything in my life is wonder.�
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ISSUE 63
It’s Your Body
World Body One heretical doctor dares to connect the dots: the human body, the natural world, industrial environment, and socioeconomic class
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Claudia Rowe
alkin g w ith D r. T e d S che ttle r is p ro b ab ly u nl i k e
any con v e rs atio n y o u hav e had w ith y o ur p hy s ician . Raise the topic of breast cancer or diabetes or dementia, and Schettler starts talking about income disparities, industrial farming, and campaign finance reform. The Harvard-educated physician, frustrated by the limitations of science in combating disease, believes that finding answers to the most persistent medical challenges of our time—conditions that now threaten to overwhelm our health care system— depends on understanding the human body as a system nested within a series of other, larger systems: one’s family and community, environment, culture, and socioeconomic class, all of which affect each other. It is a complex, even daunting view—where does one begin when trying to solve problems this way? Schettler is an exceedingly logical thinker, and his vision for a more evolved kind of health care came from the down-to-earth experience of helping to clean clam flats along the St. George River in Maine during the 1980s. “I was living and practicing on the coast there, and working with a local organization to clean up the river because we had these rich clam flats that had been closed for years because of periodic spikes of E. coli. If anyone ate the clams they would get very sick.” Meanwhile, paper mills were dumping dioxins into other rivers nearby, and Schettler learned that fish from those rivers sometimes had even higher chemical levels than fish caught in urban harbors. But factory bosses claimed that regulating waste from the pulp mills would cost community jobs, which prompted dozens of young factory workers to protest. Schettler, despite being steeped in traditional medicine, was unable to ignore these interrelationships: a degraded natural environment, a precarious local economy, and perennially sick people. “These things—the effect of the environment on peoples’ health—were never discussed at the medical conferences,” he said. “So it
caused in me a major re-examination.” Schettler went back to school, earned a master’s degree in public health, and began applying a scientist’s rigor to his wide-ranging pool of interests. Since then, he has researched connections between poverty, iron deficiency, and lead poisoning; insecticide use, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease; income disparities and asthma. He calls this new approach to medicine “the ecological paradigm of health.” “It sounds like tree-huggers or something,” Schettler said in an interview. “But I mean ‘ecological’ in the sense that there are these multiple systems, one within the other—a family within a community, within a society, within a culture—and that’s the way ecologists tend to talk about ecosystems. It’s accepting up front that humans do not stand apart from the environment. We’re a major species, along with the mosquitoes and fish and trees and bacteria. And there are all of these wonderful interrelationships.” Our Health and Ecosystem Health
Currently getting over a case of Lyme disease, Schettler notes that the
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ISSUE 63
It’s Your Body
You are a body of water. If you knew The water in your body is part of the water If you knew this, would you
Human Estuaries Poet and Performance Artist Jourdan Keith
Imagine Your Body as the Environment
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this, would you protect yourself? cycle and connected to every other body of water. want to protect all the bodies of water on the planet? I would ask my father this, if he were still alive, if his internal environment had not been polluted by the tributaries of toxins that flowed into his six-foot frame. Standing in his hospital room, he handed me a note the doctor gave him, a small piece of white paper with the risk factors for his cancer. It was a checklist: saccharin in the products he used because he was a diabetic, asbestos in his childhood home and workplace, the cigarettes he’d quit smoking decades earlier, and the chlorinated tap water he drank for over 40 years. Looking up at him I said, “Well, you didn’t miss a beat.” My father was a body of water. Like the rest of us, he was an estuary. We are 77 percent water at birth, and just as the land delineates the boundaries of the sea, our skin delineates the boundaries of our internal waters. Our bodies are like the planet’s estuaries—the bays, fjords, and sounds where fresh water surrounded by land meets the sea. We can protect what flows into us from the surrounding environment the way we protect the streams that flow into the planet’s estauries. Just as contaminants pass through the soil and enter the water, so the contaminants we put on our skin enter our bloodstream. We know that we should not ingest estrogen-mimicking chemicals like BPA, but are less aware that our body’s largest organ, with its ample blood supply, is remarkably efficient at absorption. Ingesting or inhaling
photo by R icha r d Ti bbi tts
An iron sculpture by British artist Antony Gormley stands in the Water of Leith, Edinburgh. Commissioned by the National Galleries of Scotland, “6 Times” consists of six life-sized figures situated to draw attention to the river: “For me, it’s about using the Water of Leith as a living bloodstream,” Gormley has said.
toxins may produce an acute response, but absorbing the parabens in lotions, hairspray, make-up, shampoo, and cleaning solvents through the skin is often overlooked—until an illness develops. The paper my father handed me was carefully phrased. Risk factors, not causes, were listed for his bladder cancer. No single entity could be pointed to or held liable for his illness. As with the pollution that flows off roadways into our nation’s estuaries from our cars, lawns, and farms, everyone is responsible but no one is culpable. His first risk was when, as a boy with skinned knees and elbows, my father beat the pipes in the basement of his West Philadelphia home to let the powdery asbestos fall on his skin like snow. As a young man he began to smoke long slim cigarettes packaged in a golden wrapper. In the late 1960s the surgeon general’s announcement about the hazards of smoking filled the screen of our black and white TV, the warning repeated as men rocketed to the moon. Lung cancer could kill you. I was five years old, and used my voice to tug at him. “Daddy, if you love us, you’ll quit.” He did, eliminating one location at a time where he allowed himself to smoke, first our house, then the car. The last refuge was his office. My father worked a white-collar job, as a real estate assessor for the city of Philadelphia. In 1986 his office temporarily moved from City Hall’s annex so that asbestos abatement could be done. He had worked for there for decades. By the time my father died from bladder cancer in 1993 he had been a nonsmoker for almost 27 years, but the cigarette smoke and asbestos particles he inhaled had flowed into his blood and urine streams, converging with two toxins he ingested, chlorine and saccharin.
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Photo by Mark MacInn is
Wayne and Myrtle Curtis of Feedom Freedom Growers community garden
The Good Food Cure A host of ailments can be avoided simply with nutritious food, exercise, and fresh air. Detroit’s urban farms offer all that.
photos by shanna m erola
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ISSUE 63 63 ISSUE
It’s Your Body
Why Freedom
phot o s by lan e har tw ell for y es ! m agaz in e
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Starts With a “V” YES! Interviews
Eve Ensler Playwright Eve Ensler talks about what happens when we distance ourselves from our bodies, and the power of rediscovering pleasure
“N
othing prepared me for vaginas,” writes Eve Ensler in her memoir, Insecure At Last. It was curiosity about this single word, rarely uttered in polite conversation, that led Ensler to write The Vagina Monologues, the play that has over the past 15 years become a cultural phenomenon. It began in idle conversation, when a friend disparaged her own vagina, calling it “ugly.” Ensler’s initial shock over the remark turned to fascination as she began to consider how taboo the subject was. Why does the word “vagina” cause more controversy than words like “scud missile” or “plutonium”? What is hidden in our culture’s silence around women’s bodies? She interviewed hundreds of women about their vaginas and drew inspiration from their stories to create a searing and honest portrayal of women’s physical and sexual experiences. yesmagazine . org
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ISSUE 63
It’s Your Body
9 Simple Steps HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH (WITHOUT JOINING A GYM) LAUGH TO YOUR HEART’S DELIGHT “Laughter might be one of the only things in life that can be done outside of moderation and still reap the benefits,” muses Dr. Michael Miller, director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center. If you ever LOL you don’t need proof of the healing powers of a good belly laugh. Dr. Miller’s studies show that laughter expands blood vessels, and endorphins released in response to laughter activate the chemical nitric oxide in the inner lining of our blood vessels to promote vascular health. Seriously. STUDY: “Inverse association between
sense of humor and coronary heart disease”
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AGE ARTFULLY Digging the old paint brush or the dusty guitar out of the closet is always a good idea. However, for aging baby boomers, getting back into the creative swing of the rockin’ ’60s is a matter of health insurance. Research shows that seniors engaged in activities like singing, creative writing, or painting are healthier and happier than those who aren’t. Whether this boost in the immune system is from a heightened sense of personal growth or from feeling more socially engaged, it’s clear that the body likes it when the imagination roams freely. STUDY: “The Creativity and Aging
Study”
Ask a centenarian the secret ingredients to a long and healthy life and you aren’t likely to hear “doctors, drugs, and fad diets.” We all know that there’s more to our overall well-being than treating symptoms or the occasional replacement of a part. The good news is that scientists in various fields are discovering ever more ways we can keep ourselves healthy without expensive medication and complicated workout regimens. Here are nine simple, scientifically proven—and sometimes surprising—ways to empower yourself to make the right choices for your body and health. —Sven Eberlein
WORK WITH FRIENDS When you’re shopping around for a job with great health benefits, pay attention to the office vibe. Israeli researchers found that people who get along with their co-workers in a friendly and supportive work environment live longer. Note: Similar support from the boss had no effect on mortality, so get acquainted with your peers before accepting the job. STUDY: “Work-Based Predictors of
Mortality”
GET A MASSAGE You can never go wrong with a massage, but research shows significant benefits for overall health. Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute says massage therapy slows the heart rate and lowers blood pressure and stress hormones. The decrease in stress hormones increases your body’s natural killer cells, which ward off viruses, bacteria, and cancer cells. “We’re finding biological changes associated with a single massage session,” says Mark Rapaport, Chief of Psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine. Added bonus for massages from loved ones: good for body, mind, relationship, and wallet. STUDY: “A Preliminary Study of
the Effects of a Single Session of Swedish Massage…”
Eat Your Carotenoids It’s no secret that people feel good when they look good. New evidence suggests that fruits and vegetables, in addition to their many other benefits, give our skin a healthful glow. Scottish researchers found that eating lots of carotenoid-rich fruits and veggies like kale, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, or peaches gives our skin a slightly yellower tone, making us look—and feel—healthier and more attractive. If it works for pallid Scots, you know it’ll work for the rest of us. STUDY: “You Are What You Eat”
Sleep MORE Become a dream catcher and stop being a weight watcher. According to researcher William Killgore, when people get less sleep they tend to feel more hungry and to crave carbohydrates, particularly sweets. “If a person feels excessively sleepy,” says Killgore, “it’s likely that they haven’t been getting adequate sleep and may be prone toward eating more than they want to.” If you’re plagued by frequent snack attacks, cure them with a good night’s sleep. STUDY: Preliminary findings,
CHAT WITH THE NEIGHBORS People are healthier when they have a strong, localized community. A 50-year study centered around Roseto, Penn., a close-knit community of Italian-Americans, showed the lowest rates of heart disease in the nation—until the town became more “suburbanized” in the 1960s. Many people living in housing cooperatives report improved emotional and physical health. As social animals, having playmates is part of our survival strategy. STUDY: “The Roseto effect”
Killgore, et al., Harvard Medical School
Scrub WITHOUT TOXICS There are alternatives to toxic household products like bleach. A University of Florida study found that a mixture of vinegar, lemon juice, and baking soda significantly reduces bacteria. Good Housekeeping microbiologist Gina Marino put it to the test and was impressed with how well vinegar worked in fighting germs and mold. Adding a little elbow grease on the tough spots helps keep your gym dues low.
Hope LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT We know enough about anxiety and depression to drag us down for several lifetimes, but a truly uplifting new study by Harvard’s School of Public Health gives reasons to rejoice. “Happy and optimistic people with a purpose in life tend to have a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease,” says researcher Julia K. Boehm. So keep hope alive, but remember that in the words of the late, great Vaclav Havel, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” STUDY: “The Heart’s Content”
STUDY: “Bacterial Reduction Test on
Food Surfaces” Full citations at: yesmagazine.org/63eberlein To order a reprint of this poster: yesmagazine.org/posters ph oto by Moz es Zima nyi , f lickr : mono mo se
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