What I’ve Learned So Far

This post from Good Morning Silicon Valley raises the head-scratching question:  Why don’t more American workers telecommute?  Perhaps one in four could do it easily, yet less than one in ten does it for even a day per week.

I’ve been telecommuting a day or two per week for several years, and I can’t imagine why folks would pass up the opportunity.  If nothing else, it leaves a day per week when it’s convenient to schedule a visit by the plumber or the cable guy, or simply to catch up on the laundry while you do your work.  I always find that I get more done when telecommuting than when I’m in the office, especially because I get to avoid meetings.  Basically, it’s a chance to hunker down and work.

If you’re considering taking up telecommuting, you might start at Gil Gordon’s site.  I find its navigation slightly unhelpful, but he has a lot of interesting information — based on his more than 20 years of work in the field.

Telecommuting boosts productivity, saves money, and helps the environment.  Whether you’re a front-line worker or a manager, give it some thought.

“What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

I held off on reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains beyond Mountains longer than I care to admit. Partly this came from my general habit–a poisonous one shared by most people I know–of putting off some things I know to be needful or important. Partly this came from my knowledge about the book’s subject, Dr. Paul Farmer. I first learned of Farmer in an article that Kidder published several years ago in The New Yorker. Farmer is the sort of person, a genius possessed by a higher vision of human capabilities, who puts the rest of us to shame, not by trying to show anyone up, but merely by being who he is.

Kidder does a fine job of humanizing Farmer, especially by using first-person accounting of his own interactions with and reactions to the doctor. Still, the simple facts of Farmer’s resume are daunting: He is the eldest son of a poor, eccentric family; he was a scholarship student at Duke, then a brilliant medical student at Harvard who earned his M.D. while (a) spending most of his time working in rural health clinics in the poorest parts of Haiti and (b) earning a Ph.D. in anthropology. Farmer is now the guiding force behind Partners in Health, as well as the primary physician of the Zanmi Lasante clinic in Cange in Haiti, as well as an attending physician in infectious disease at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, as well as a professor of medicine and anthropology at Harvard, as well as a prolific author of books and articles and a highly sought speaker and consultant on infectious disease and the medical plight of the poor worldwide. As Kidder makes clear, Farmer also gives lots of his time as a mentor to other physicians. He is a friend to the poor and sick everywhere, and, as icing on the cake, he has a wicked sense of humor. Although Kidder never makes this comparison, it is hard not to compare Farmer to Albert Schweitzer, and indeed I wonder whether Schweitzer doesn’t come off the worse for the comparison.

The book is lovely to read because of Kidder’s great smoothness and punch as a writer. The book is inspiring as it shows the impact that one person–albeit a gifted and driven one–can have in the face of entrenched problems. Farmer treats the patients at his clinic without regard to their ability to pay. Haiti is one of the world’s poorest places, a “fourth world” country as some have called it, and it deserves all the Farmers it can get. The book is sobering, though, inasmuch as it leads me to compare my own efforts to change the world with the good intentions I have long held.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the lives of writer-polymaths–those who led big lives while writing lots of books. But the achievements of Richard Burton or Teddy Roosevelt or Winston Churchill or Bill Buckley are mixed. You can always find something to disagree with, whether in their politics or in their actions. Farmer, although he has a well-articulated political outlook and has imperfections of his own, lives a life of such service that it is hard to find fault with him. (One of the few areas to question–which Kidder does not flinch from discussing–is the small amount of time that Farmer’s overburdened schedule allows him to spend with his wife and daughter in Paris.) No doubt there are epidemiologists who disagree with Farmer’s take on certain issues of patient treatment or health policy, but the outcome of all his work is to help sick people–especially the poorest sick people–to get well. Who can question the merits of that?

Reading Mountains beyond Mountains opened my eyes, not for the first time but with renewed force, to the inequalities embedded in our systems of medical care. In the days after I finished the book, I noticed articles in Foreign Policy and The New York Times on the effects of treatable invectious disease upon the poor. Because I had read Kidder’s book, I took the time to read these articles. Now I find myself pondering how to work the themes of Kidder’s book, and Farmer’s life, into my own scholarship on U.S. foreign policy: treatment of the poor, promotion of quality medical care for all, and especially the systematic–the systemic–mistreatment of Haiti.

This is an important, compelling book. I urge you to read it.

~~~

More on Tracy Kidder and Paul Farmer:

• An interview of Kidder related to Mountains beyond Mountains.
• A short biography of Kidder.
• A few links on Kidder.
• An interview with Farmer related to his book Pathologies of Power.
• Wikipedia entry on Farmer.

Dave Reay’s 2005 book, Climate Change Begins at Home, is an excellent place to start for anyone who wants to understand how their own private choices affect the process of climate change. The text is short, witty, and free of footnotes; Reay, who works as a climate scientist, includes more than a dozen pages of useful references in the back of the book, and peppers his text with simple charts and graphs to illustrate his points.

The book’s key innovation is its clever narrative focus on a fictional Alabama family, the Carbones, who have become concerned about their household’s impact upon the earth’s climate. They take various steps—such as trading down from an SUV and giving more effort to their backyard garden—that reduce their output of greenhouse gases. Reay uses the life of Grandma Carbone to reflect on the growth of Western consumerism since World War II, and a prospective look at the future life of newborn Lucy Carbone to contemplate the climate-influencing choices of future generations. His scenarios make sense, as do the basic steps he suggests taking. (He has taken many of these non-radical actions for his own household in Scotland). Reay’s tone is breezy, but he does not flinch from discussing the current and future bad news that our carbon-heavy ways are bringing to the world.

One note for American readers: Despite its focus on the American Carbones, the book is written primarily for a British audience, so some of Reay’s lingo (e.g. “people mover” instead of “van”) and examples may be unfamiliar. Still, the evidence he marshals is apt, and the actions he recommends are germane for anyone living in the consumerist societies of the highly industrialized world.

Find more information at Dave Reay’s site, GreenHouse Gas Online.

In his July 5 column, Robert Samuelson approaches the issue of global warming with his usual common-sense tone. But in making his argument, his good sense abandons him: Samuelson determines that, until we come up with better answers to the “engineering problem” of climate change, we are “helpless” to do anything about it. His larger point is that Al Gore is misguided in his effort to make global warming into a moral issue. Samuelson is right about our technical challenge to devise new methods of energy generation and new techniques for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. But even given current technology, we’re a long way from helpless.

Samuelson marshals a few good facts on his side. He is quite correct to point out that the Kyoto Protocol, the broadest governmental response so far to the issue of global warming, has failed to stop many industrialized nations such as Japan from increasing their carbon emissions. It certainly has not slowed the emissions of the United States, which has withdrawn its support from the Kyoto pact. Samuelson also sensibly predicts that by 2050, given current practices, rising prosperity, and a world population above nine billion, greenhouse gas emissions will rise substantially.

Yet the very point of a moral crusade to check global warming is to change current practices. Calling for a drastic reduction in emissions need not imply, as Samuelson suggests, that we “condemn the world’s poor to their present poverty—and freeze everyone else’s living standards.” Rather, the challenge for the future is to promote economic growth, as Samuelson rightly says we should, while also reducing greenhouse gases. The fact that we cannot do it now reflects the limitations in our current thinking, not only in terms of our technical ability but in terms of our priorities. We simply have not put as many resources—brains and effort and money and will—into changing our M.O. as we have into preserving it.

Try a crazy thought experiment: What if we discovered today that running our cars and trucks relied—relied indispensably—upon child prostitution? Or slavery? Or slaughtering babies? What would happen then? You know what would happen: The overwhelming majority of decent people in the world would shut off their cars this minute and find some other way to function. This Soylent Green scenario, of course, would create massive upheaval in the way that our society works. Without trucks to supply it or cars to fill its parking lots, Wal-Mart would go bankrupt in weeks. The current troubles of Detroit’s automakers would be forgotten as their entire industry evaporated overnight. Amazon, Lands’ End, Boeing, ExxonMobil . . . just the tip of an iceberg of economic disaster.

Fortunately, the needed changes need not come this way. Individuals and small groups can take pragmatic steps to reduce their own carbon output. In fact, in the absence of adequate government action, the work of private citizens may be the best way to get the ball rolling. But what is it that will convince neighborhoods, church groups, civic clubs, Scout troops, and second-grade classes to take aggressive action? The moral conviction that it is wrong for them to proceed as they have. When enough of these folks come to believe this and act on it, their elected officials will believe it, too.

Until you make climate change a moral issue, you run the risk of letting people think that it is only an engineering problem to be solved someday, somewhere, by someone. This guarantees minimal action. But make it a moral problem and you make it a personal priority to be solved now, here, by you and me—which is exactly what we should be doing.

Everything from the Great Pyramids the Apollo Program reminds us that humans are an ingenious lot. Once we muster the will, we will figure out how to reduce carbon emissions—a lot—by using current technology, while also developing new technologies. Hey, today I rode my bike to work for the first time in more than a year. It was fun and it didn’t kill me, and I got to smirk as I pedaled past the gas station. In comparison to the world’s climate challenges, sure, it’s only a drop in a bucket. But taking any positive action beats believing the lie that we’re “helpless.”