Category: Books

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Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Author: Cat Bohannon

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House

Copyright: 2023

This is not a book for everyone to read as there is a lot of scientific detail, but I think it is important to be aware of some of the author’s main ideas. In this review, I will give the main ideas of each chapter and if you want to know more, you’ll just have to read the book.

I have enjoyed the author’s writing style. Lots of scientific detail, but also analogies that helped me understand what she was writing about. She is also concerned about how long ago many of these characteristics of humans and in particular, women, developed. For me, this was not so important. In my description of each chapter, I have left all of the detail out, and many of the interesting sidetracks that the author takes, and I would really encourage you to read the book if you find that what I have written is interesting. I have used some direct quotes so that you get an idea of the way she writes.

I think the main message that I got from reading this book was the female and male humans are quite different, biologically, and far too seldom our modern society thinks that they are the same. There is a big difference in men and women being treated equally, and expecting men and women to either act the same way or to have the same characteristics. I feel that this book helped me understand these biological differences in a new way.

But first, a little look at the order that things developed in the human body, and the author is primarily concerned with the female body. The author is taken up with how long ago different characteristics in humans first developed. First comes feeding our young with milk, then comes the development of the womb and giving birth to live young. The way we perceive the world, through ears, eyes, and nose changes to reflect the changes in the way we lived. In particular the development of seeing color so that we could see the difference between ripe fruit and the leaves in the trees.

One of the major changes in our body came when we started walking on our “hind” legs and we could run, both to get food and to avoid being eaten. But even here, women and men have developed differently, with different muscle types. As humans evolved, they developed larger brains which we used to devise tools and language. Women developed menopause and societies developed rules for sexual relationships.

Introduction

Cat Bohannon is the mother of two children and is concerned that in health and medical research, most of the research is done with the male of the species, whether it is human or non-human. Dealing with the female of the species is just too complicated, according to the researchers. Unfortunately this leads to results that just don’t fit women, whether it is medication or diagnostics. In this book, the author puts together a lot of the most recent research results on how the female human body has evolved and how it works. She feels that the research into the female body has not been getting enough attention and this book is a result of her concerns – “how female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman” (page 17).

How is the book organized? “Each trait will appear in the book in roughly the same order it first appeared in our evolutionary lineage. As such, each chapter builds on the last, moving forward in time and consequence, just as our bodies built later models of themselves on previous incarnations.” (page 20)

Chapter 1: Milk

“Women have breasts because we make milk” (page 31), which is essential for the survival of our babies. “Newborn animals face four essential dangers: desiccation, predation, starvation and disease” (page 32). When a mother feeds her newborn with her own milk she is preventing the baby from getting dried out (desiccation or dehydration). This is the first need of any living thing – water, which a mother’s milk provides.

But milk isn’t just water, it also has other things in it. Water carries disease and therefore a baby shouldn’t drink water until it is several months old. Babies are still developing their immune system so it is important to get their mother’s help through her milk.

“For the first few days after a woman gives birth, her milk is incredibly special – a hot shot of immune system for her newborn baby.” (page 35) This is called colostrum but after a few days the mother will produce something that looks a lot more like what we think of as breast milk. This colostrum helps the newborn resist disease, and help them get the good, friendly bacteria they need to digest the fat-rich milk that comes later.

To get their milk, babies suckle and they can do that because women have nipples (page 42). The author describes how a baby actually gets its “milk” from its mother’s breast. I found it fascinating to read and to get a better understanding of how everything actually works, with the baby sucking and the mother producing. She also includes a description of some of the problems that baby or mother may experience.

Chapter 2: Womb

“The majority of multicellular animals lay a clutch of eggs… Laying eggs is normal. What’s not normal is letting eggs incubate and hatch inside your body, where they can do all kinds of catastrophic damage.” (page 75) Giving birth to live young is something that mammals, including humans do. This has influenced the lives of women as “most women have periods, get pregnant and give birth.” (page 76)

This chapter explains how the uterus and vagina have been formed, but also how the placenta, which joins the mother and the baby, creates all sorts of problems, many of which she explains. When you read her explanations, it seems extraordinary how for most women things go right. Growing your baby inside of you is a dangerous project.

The author also compares humans to other mammals and explains what the risks are. She also explains the advantages. Given that we live in a world with an expanding population, birthing live young is more successful than one might have thought. Changes in how the female body is built, both placement of organs and the muscles surrounding them and supporting them, play an important role in the survival of women.

Why do women menstruate? The author explains the process and some possible reasons for why it is important. Some cultural taboos are also mentioned, but mostly she sticks to why menstruation is important for the uterus. But once a woman is pregnant, “the uterus and its temporary passenger are, in fact, in conflict: the uterus evolving to protect the mother’s body from its semi-native invader, and the fetus and placenta evolving to try to work around the uterine safety measures.” (page 100)

Though most pregnancies go fine, being pregnant can also make a woman deeply unwell. One common problem is preeclampsia where spikes in blood pressure affect the woman. Thankfully modern medicine can help many women who are experiencing problems.

Chapter 3: Perception

This chapter looks at several of our sensory inputs and looks at the changes between us and other animals. As humans developed to live in the trees, so the body needed to develop the sensory organs needed to live there. “We needed eyes that could see when fruits were ripening and distinguish when leaves were young and nutritious and tender. We needed ears that could hear our children in a loud, leafy landscape high about the ground… We needed noses that could handle a sex life in the canopy.” (page 122)

Ears – In order to handle communication in the noise of the forest, “the aural part of your sensory array is going to have to be adept at separating important noises from non-important noises.” (page 122) Primates are able to hear and produce much lower frequencies than many other mammals and they found ways to get louder. There also seems to be a difference in what males can “hear” and what females can “hear”. “Female-typical ears seem to be specially tuned to the range of frequencies that correspond to baby cries.” (page 125) The author also goes on to discuss hearing loss as we grow older, with men more likely to suffer hearing loss than women. But women will feel more distressed by loud environments. “Men can function more happily in noisier environments than women can.” (page 129)

Nose – Smell and taste, or olfaction, is “our ability to sense chemical gradients”. (page 131) Olfaction involves molecules and about a third of the volume of our face is used for olfaction. The importance of the nose is to tell you where it is safe and where it is not, what’s good to eat and what’s poison, who is nice to have sex with and who might kill you instead (page 133) and these skills influence your behavior. In addition, “a woman’s sense of smell is more sensitive than a man’s”. (page 137) This can explain part of why pregnant women are prone to food cravings and food aversions. (page 140)

Eyes – We have two eyes that face forward, which allows us to better able calculate how far away something is. Parallax is the overlap between the vision in the right eye and the left eye and makes it easier to see how far away something is. (page 144) This was important for finding food. Originally, humans may have been nocturnal, but as we changed our diets from eating insects to eating plants, we also changed our time of day when we were active. As we became more active in the daytime, our eyes developed the ability to see color, especially the difference between red and green (which is something color-blind people cannot do).

As these sensors in our body changed, the brain also had to change to accommodate the need to process all these sensory inputs. This is where the difference between what we “see” and what we “perceive” comes in. “The social context of our perceived worlds influences how we interpret and act on the signals brought to us through our sensory array.” (page 154)

Chapter 4: Legs

At some point in the development of humans, we moved from living in the trees, to walking and running in the savanna, perhaps because the forests were shrinking. Walking on our hind legs, freed up the hands and arms for grabbing and carrying things, such as food. This change resulted in a lot of physical stress on feet, knees and hips, not to mention the spine, as the center of gravity changed. Pregnant women also experience physical stresses, primarily on the spine, as the baby increases in size.

Bunions are discussed at length as it affects primarily women and comes from the weight of our bodies being put on our feet. In addition, the wear and tear on knees is also discussed. “Women’s femurs come into the knee joint at an angle… so our knees are closer together to help balance that differing center of gravity.” (page 162) This results in more knee replacements done on women than on men.

But most of this chapter discusses how the muscles in our body are both different between men and women and how these muscles work. Of the three different kinds of muscles in our bodies, striated skeletal muscle is what we use to move our bones around. As our bones grow so do the muscles that are attached to them, so exercising the muscles strengthens the attachments to the bones. (page 171) We have retained the brachiating shoulders that allow us to move our arms in ways that a dog never could. But again, “somewhere in puberty, men’s and women’s average body plans diverge, with men’s shoulders and chests broadening and bulking up, while women’s hips widen and their breasts develop.” (page 172)

In addition, there is the difference between being a good sprinter (often men) and being a good endurance runner (often women). “Women of reproductive age may be better at utilizing that metabolic switch. They’re not only better at getting to their second wind, but once they’re there, they last longer than men do.” (page 174) The author also discusses the way our skeletal muscles are built, some are fast-twitch which contract very quickly and generate a lot of power, and some are slow-twitch which contract more slowly, but are much slower to tire. (page 181)

Chapter 5: Tools

This chapter isn’t really about what one is expecting, if one is expecting stone axes and spears. It is about the tools that women use to survive childbirth. The best way to survive a pregnancy is to not get pregnant. The next best way is to have a woman or group of woman who support you through your pregnancy and help with the childbirth. Then there is bringing up the child until it can produce its own children. Women have it tough and this is dangerous work. On the other hand, there are now over 8 billion of us on the planet, so something is going well, though it is only in the last 60 years or so that the population on the planet has exploded.

To make stone tools, humans had to work together, to cooperate, and pass the knowledge down from one generation to the next. Using tools is a set of behaviors, rather than something biological, but it is an important part of our relationship with the world around us. “Tool use is fundamentally about solving problems.” (page 200) The problems in the past would have included hunger, predators, disease and despair. In addition our babies are very vulnerable and are needy for an extraordinarily long time. “Some kind of cultural revolution around child care must have occurred.” (page 200)

The author discusses childbirth, improving fertility and preventing the conception of children. She uses the term “gynecology” for this body of medical knowledge and practices which are found around the world. Many women have continuing health problems six months after giving birth. Midwifery was an important tool that helped both a woman to survive and the newborn child to survive.

People have migrated, when an environment gets too tough to survive in, and adapted to the new environment. Creating enough children for the population to survive and grow in a new location is not always successful. Building what’s called a minimum viable population (page 217) is necessary to have a chance of survival and this means that the group needs to produce babies, and babies that survive and produce their own babies.

Chapter 6: Brain

The brain is used to solve problems, whether it is to find food, protect oneself from predators or protect one’s young. Human brains are very large so we have a great capacity for solving problems, but also becoming more social. Why have we developed such a big brain, which is costly both to grow and to maintain? It is what most people think of that makes humans different than others in the animal world. We use our “brains to survive just about anywhere, at any temperature, in any environment.” (page 258)

The author admits to finding this chapter difficult to write as she wanted to show the difference between male and female, and the research so far shows that “the female human brain doesn’t seem to be all that functionally different from the male.” (page 239) She compares humans and many animals where there are significant sex differences. The discussion covers mental disorders, including depression, anxiety and bipolar; what being “smart” means, including IQ, testing, math skills, and language skills. She looks at some of the stereotypes and looks at what the research has shown so far.

We use our “brains to survive just about anywhere, at any temperature, in any environment.” (page 258) The planet we live on has changed many times in the millions of years that have elapsed, and humans have adapted along with the changes and can be found in every type of environment on the earth. Being omnivorous helps us adapt, so that if one particular food disappears, it isn’t going to kill us. (page 260)

There is also a considerable amount of space used to explain how our brain develops. Though a lot develops in the womb, most of the development of the brain happens after birth, with a “newborn drinking 16% of their weight in milk every day for the first six months of their life.” (page 261) Our brains reach 80 percent of their adult size by the age of two and then we use a long time to “build” the rest of it. It seems that at this point there are some differences between the sexes. In addition to the “hardware” development of the brain itself, there is also the learning of one’s role in the social environment that one lives in. These roles can change as one grows older. (page 264)

Pregnancy will affect how a woman’s brain develops. I found this part especially interesting as women who give birth will have different developments in their brain, than either men or women who have not given birth. All those hormones do affect how we develop, even as adults. “Human women’s brains seem to have evolved a process, unique to pregnant women and new mothers, that helps them adapt to the deeply ancient, ever challenging sociality that comes with human motherhood, and that this process is neurologically violent.” (page 270)

The author also discusses the topic of “girlhood” which is the way a girl learns her role in a “sexist environment”. (page 276)

Chapter 7: Voice

Humans have language and can talk to each other. By using our voice, we can tell stories and instruct others on how to do things. Humans have also learned to write so that what has been said, or thought, can be kept for later generations. The author is interested in how males and females use their “voices” differently, both in what is said and when it is said.

The way the human larynx and vocal chords are formed are a prerequisite for the way humans form words and sentences, not just sounds. There are differences between males and females. Males have longer and thicker vocal chords, deeper voices, larger lungs and a larger chest for resonance. Females’ voices are higher pitched and don’t have the same lung capacity for volume. Women strain their vocal chords more than men do. (page 297)

The author thinks that language was first used as a way for a mother to communicate with her child, and it developed from there. Talking at any age is hard work and requires breath control, so it takes a long time for young children to start talking and to have the breath control needed to talk for long periods.

“Exactly zero human babies are born with the ability to speak, but most are language ready. Our human genes have preprogrammed our brains to be capable, hungry even, for learning language. But learning to speak involves a lot of data. It involves a lot of rules. It requires an incredible amount of highly specific, lightning-fast problem solving… Human beings have learned how to speak primarily by interacting with their mothers.” (page 306) “When babies babble, they are testing out their vocal apparatus to see what sound they can make.” (page 307)

Motherese, the way that a mother talks to her newborn baby, is universal and independent of the actual language that is spoken. It has been proven that this way of speaking helps a child learn their first language. (page 313)

“Everything humans care about is possible because we have language. The same sorts of logic paths that rule language, that combine known things into new ideas, that puzzle out the code of others’ communication into knowable thoughts and desires, also write stories and build meaning and tease out the finest, strangest features of the universe. They make us what we are. That’s why grammar is one of the most important things your mother ever helped you learn.” (page 316)

Chapter 8: Menopause

Why do women have menopause, where she stops producing eggs and becomes infertile? After a description of what menopause entails, most of the chapter discusses why menopause may have developed and the effects on the social community of having older women who are not producing their own children. The first hypothesis, the grandmother hypothesis, is that older women help look after their grandchildren.

A second hypothesis is that “mammalian eggs may have an expiration date” (page 334) and therefore a woman will not produce eggs once she has gotten to a certain age. Old eggs would be susceptible to genetic damage.

A third hypothesis is that older women are wise and can remember things that happened many years ago. So in a crisis, they can come up with solutions, something that has been done before and worked.

The author then goes on to discuss what it means to be elderly. Having a longer life span, means avoiding death. Statistics show that women are better at avoiding death than men. “Throughout the world, women are simply better at not dying than men are. so long as we manage to survive the ridiculous death ride our reproductive system takes us on, we usually live longer, healthier lives than men do.” (page 345) The author continues with a discussion of what kills us (cancer, cardiovascular disease and lung disease) and shows how the female body is better at outrunning these diseases. (page 348)

Chapter 9: Love

The last chapter is about bonding, or not bonding between the sexes. The author discusses matriarchies and patriarchies. There are definitely biological differences between the female and the male human bodies. The female body takes the burden of reproduction, both with a gestation period of nine months and up to several years of breast-feeding. “There’s something distinctive about our species today… It’s the unusual way we love one another: our distinctive, complex, often bizarre and overpowering love bonds, and the way we’re able to extend those love bonds to people we’re not related.” (page 361) In all cultures there are mating strategies. The idea of women is usually connected to the idea of raising children.

“Every human culture is steadfast in feeling that their particular way of dealing with love and sex is right while others are wrong.” (page 362). The author goes on to look at what other primate animals do and to look at the human body to see how it has evolved. Her conclusion is that humans have developed to be mostly monogamous, where one man and one woman join together both in sex and in daily living, bringing up the children which are the product of this union. Advantages for the female include someone who will help her feed her family and defend them from predators. (page 373) Advantages for the male is that he knows who his own children are.

There is also a discussion of “sexism” where men and women are treated differently and the culture expects different behaviors from men and women. “If pregnancies are dangerous and babies are needy, you need work-arounds. For example, birth spacing to control how many of the the girls in your troop are pregnant… You can also create cultural rules around when and where the males get access to female bodies, and then create punishments for those who break the rules.” (page 382) “That’s the core of what sexism is: a massive set of rules that work to control reproduction.” (page 383)

But the author is also concerned about “what happens when a culture’s sex rules start to reduce the overall health, fertility and competitive viability of a population?” (page 386) Problems today include being less healthy (spread of sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies) and reduced access to maternal health care. (page 387) For example the maternal death rate is actually going up in the United States.

Poor health is expensive for everyone and lowers how wealthy a community will be. “How much money a child’s parents have access to shapes not only how much wealth that child is likely to have as an adult but also how likely that child is to reach adulthood with fertility left intact.” (page 394) “The easiest, cheapest, and most reliable way to increase a community’s wealth is to invest in its women and girls.” (page 392) Women are more likely to spend money on food, clothing, health care and children’s education. Men, meanwhile, are more likely to spend money on entertainment, weapons and gambling. (page 395)

Being wise is “your ability to solve problems, … to form deep relationships with other people,… to contribute to your community,… and to keep your kids safe.” (page 397) How smart you are will affect how likely you are to stay alive. Here the author discusses how we become smart, as our brains need a lot of energy to work. So feeding pregnant women and their children once they are born, is very important to their development and their “smartness”. Children also need education about all sorts of things such as keeping healthy, sex education, etc. In many countries, girls are not given very much education, so already the next generation is starting at a disadvantage. “Our societies seem to be at our best… when we’re educating girls.” (page 401)

Some conclusions from the author: “We could use some guidelines. For example, while eradicating sexism seems pretty impossible, we can become more deliberate about the choices we make around sex rules. We can actively choose to create social institution that combat the negative effects of sexism. We can reinforce the need to be more egalitarian. And above all, we can choose to support and defend the advance of gynecology.” (page 406) By gynecology, she is meaning things like safe contraception, abortion and proper prenatal and postnatal care. The author also recommends contributing to children’s hospitals, and research that helps make the world easier for women and girls. (page 410)

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The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast by Andrew Blum

Particularly in the winter months, I am one of those people who are constantly checking the weather forecast. Is it going to snow or rain? How cold will it be? Can I get out for a walk when there is no precipitation? How much clothes do I need to wear? I consult my weather app on my phone daily, if not several times a day. I’ve also noted that the weather forecasts are much more detailed (it will rain for the next 90 minutes and then clear up) and more accurate (it actually does rain for 90 minutes then stop).

I found this book by Andrew Blum very interesting as he goes into the history of weather forecasting and how it has come to the point it is now, with very reliable forecasts for the next 24 hours. If you find this topic interesting, I recommend this book. It is relatively short (about 130 pages of text) and well written. The language is simple so that anyone can understand what he is writing about and he has stories of people which make it easier to connect to the history he is telling. If you don’t like spoilers, you can hop over the rest of this blog. If you want to learn more about the book and its contents, continue reading, as I will summarize the main points of the book. Many of the expressions that I use in my own text are taken from Blum’s book.

Much of the book is about the history of how weather forecasting developed and as a resident of Norway, I found it interesting how much Norway was part of this history. The Prologue gives his reasons for investigating this topic, then the book is divided into four parts:

  • Part I: Calculation – two chapters
  • Part II: Observation – four chapters
  • Part III: Simulation – four chapters
  • Part IV: Preservation – one chapter

Part I: Calculation

The book starts off with a visit to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in Oslo in June 2015. Because Norwegians are at the mercy of the cold and the wind, and is a relatively rich country, forecasting the weather and understanding the mechanics of the atmosphere has had a long tradition in Norway.

With the invention of the telegraph in 1844, communication between various points in a country became much easier and current weather conditions could be compared with places far away. People’s understanding of weather began to develop and it wasn’t just what people were experiencing right then. A map could be made of what the weather looked like. Seeing a map of what was happening allowed people to start thinking about probable changes and therefore how the weather might be in the future.

So the collection of weather observations became part of the weather service. The collection and sharing of this information was the next development. In 1873, the first congress of what later became the International Meteorological Organization took place in Vienna with representatives from twenty governments. Standards, protocols and rules were developed.

By 1895, just the collection of weather observations was not enough, it had to be put into a new system of understanding how the weather worked. Vilhelm Bjerknes, a Norwegian, took this understanding one step farther by suggesting that the weather could be calculated using physics and mathematics, making meteorology a modern science: verifiable, repeatable and mathematical. Bjerknes’ equations weren’t easy to solve, but it was a start towards understanding the connection between the atmosphere and the weather.

This led to the idea of a weather factory where calculations were made, based on weather observations, that could lead to a forecast of what the weather would be like in the future.

Part II: Observation

The first chapter in this part of the book is about how weather observations are made. Some weather stations are manned as there are some observations that only a human can do. Some observations are made on land, some on the sea, some on aircraft and some from satellites. The author decides to visit a manned weather station and visits the island of Utsira off the west coast of Norway, between Bergen and Stavanger. This has been a weather station since the 1860s. Things that Hans Van Kampen must record, several times a day, include type of precipitation, sky height, visibility and cloud type.

The second chapter in this part is how the view of the weather changed, driven by technological developments and military needs, primarily in World War II. Among other developments was the sending up of rockets with cameras mounted on them, taking pictures of the earth that they were leaving. Now came the idea of having instruments up in the atmosphere, above the clouds, to get a larger view of the weather systems. Such was the start of weather satellites that are now used as one type of weather observations. The World Weather Watch was born and was to be used for peaceful purposes only, as the atmosphere is borderless.

The third chapter in this part describes the two types of weather satellites, geostationary orbiters (which appear motionless as they follow the earth’s rotation) and polar orbiters (which fly lower and circle the planet from north to south and from south to north). Most of these satellites are owned by governments. In Europe, EUMETSAT, the European meteorological satellite agency is an independent organization funded and overseen by the meteorological services of thirty nations.

The fourth chapter in this part gives more information about satellites, how they are made and what they do, including a visit to Vandenberg, in California, to see the launch of a satellite.

Part III: Simulation

In the first chapter in this part, the author visits the Mesa Lab, outside Boulder, Colorado, where we are given information about how the weather models work, how the observations are used and turned into a forecast of what most likely will happen in the future. Supercomputers are now used to take the observations and make calculations, and provide reliable forecasts of what will happen in the near future. These weather models are constantly being tweaked to improve them.

In the second chapter of this part, the author travels to the Weather Centre in Reading, England, actually called the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which opened in 1979. (This is also the source of the weather forecasts used in Norway by yr.no.) We are given information about the history of this centre, plus we get insights into how it works. What is impressive is how the model that is being run here becomes more accurate as time goes on. This chapter gives interesting insights into how such a weather center functions and how forecasts are created by supercomputers.

The third chapter of this part discusses how weather forecasts have become available to us users since the first forecast appeared on the internet in 1991. The importance of forecasts is in being able to use them. The introduction of smart phones changed the need to have forecasts available constantly, and not just once a day for the evening news on television.

The four chapter in this part is about what makes a good weather forecast as well as what a weather forecast is good for. The weather forecast is being primarily generated by computers, but humans are still need to get the information out to users, whether it is an individual needing to know whether it’s going to rain, or the media that can warn the general public of a major storm that is coming, or emergency services that have to be prepared for the big storm that creates problems.

Part IV: Preservation

The last chapter of the book is concerned with the future of weather forecasting and who is in control of it. Though forecasting has improved a lot in recent years, there are still a lot of hurdles in the way. One of the concerns is who owns the data that is being generated, whether it is individual observations or observations made by private networks. International cooperation has been the basis of the work so far, but will this cooperation continue into the future?

To quote Blum’s conclusion: “The weather machine is a last bastion of international cooperation. It produces some of the only news that isn’t corrupted by commerce, by advertising, by bias or fake-ness. It is one of the technological wonders of the world. At the beginning of an era when the planet will be wracked by storms, droughts, and floods that will threaten if not shred the global order, the existence of the weather machine is some consolation.”

I really enjoyed this book and I recommend it to all of my readers. Enjoy!

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Book: There’s No Such Thing As Bad Weather (Touchstone, 2017)

My daughter came across this book and I decided to read it. I enjoyed it so much that I want to share some of my ideas after reflecting about the book.

The book was written by a Swedish woman who lives in the United States and has two children. Having grown up in a village in Sweden and surrounded by people who enjoyed being outdoors, she was disappointed that where she was living in Indiana, children had little chance to play outdoors. She took her kids to live in Sweden for six months and wrote about many of the differences between the two countries as relates to bringing up children.

The book is primarily for parents and gives tips on how to raise children in a Scandinavian fashion. Here she includes information from Norway, Denmark and Finland as well as Sweden. I could relate to much of the information that she had gathered about the advantages for children spending at least some time outdoors, every day, no matter the weather.

At the moment of writing this, it is a dark December day in Norway. There are only a few hours of daylight every day, and though I try to go outside most days, some days it is just not appealing to be outdoors. But while reading this book in December it made me think about the importance of being outdoors, not only for children, but for adults.

Summary of the book by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  • Introduction: A Swedish Mother in Rural Indiana
  • Chapter 1: A Right to Nature
  • Chapter 2: Fresh Air is Good for You
  • Chapter 3: Just Let Them Play
  • Chapter 4: We Must All Take Care of Nature
  • Chapter 5: A Little Dirt Won’t Hurt
  • Chapter 6: Freedom with Responsibility
  • Chapter 7: Outside, There is a Better Connection
  • Chapter 8: It Takes a Village

The author starts by explaining the American trend (based on her experiences in Indiana) that parents are concerned that if their children aren’t reading by the age of four, that they will not get anywhere in life. To my mind as a parent, that is not understanding the stages of development that children go through. It is common in Scandinavia that children start school at six or seven years of age (both my children started at seven and they both have master’s degrees ) and they might go to a kindergarten or preschool before that. Both my children started at kindergarten (barnehage) at the age of three.

The author refers to several other authors who have written about different aspects of children and parenting (see the list below) and has found the facts which I will be making references to here. You will need to read the book to get things exactly right. The author is concerned that children need to get “fresh” air every single day. Of course, not all people are lucky enough to live where the outdoor air is actually good for you. But by going to parks and other areas of nature, you can get fresh air into your lungs.

Children do not need to have activities constantly organized for them. One of the things children need to learn is how to organize their time, how to be bored, how to take suitable risks, how to socialize with others. In addition, they need time with adults who actually talk to them, as that is how they build up their vocabulary. Curiosity about the world around us leads children to learn how things work, either through their own investigations or by asking adults appropriate questions.

The author is also concerned that if the next generation is going to learn to take care of nature, they need to come in contact with it and learn to love it. Looking at trees only on a screen does not give the same learning or loving attitude as a walk in a park with tall trees. Children like to investigate things and usually get dirty doing it. Research has been done that indicates that we are too clean now, and we don’t get some of the good bacteria that we need to live a healthy life. Playing in the dirt or sandbox is not a health problem.

Small children need quite a bit of supervision when they are outside. They need to be protected from dangerous situations, for example a car whizzing by on the road, but they also need to learn to take responsibility for themselves, for example, learning to cross roads at crosswalks. As children grow older, the borderlines of where they are allowed to be on their own should expand as they are able to handle longer distances from the house on their own.

It has been shown in many research projects, that being outside in nature is good for mental health, not only in children but in adults.

A Scandinavian Mother’s “Get Up and Go Outside” Manifesto includes the following points (mostly directly quoted from pages 209-211):

1 There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. Whatever the weather, children must be dressed appropriately, whether it is sunshine and warm, rainy and wet, or snow and cold. Learning to dress yourself and your children appropriate to the weather is important for the parent to learn. Make sure footwear is appropriate too. There are, of course, certain types of weather which do not suit outdoor play, such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, or flash floods.

2 Fresh air is actually good for you. It reduces the risk for common infections, near-sightedness, vitamin D deficiency, and obesity. It will also lessen the symptoms of ADHD, anxiety and depression.

3 Unstructured outdoor play has everything kids need for healthy physical, social, and cognitive development in the early years. Older kids need time to play too.

4 Our modern indoor lifestyle has made kids too clean and likely triggered an epidemic of immunological disorders. To bring some beneficial germs back into your child’s life, ditch that hand sanitizer and let him sink his hands deep down in dirt.

5 Kids need risky play to learn how to assess risk and prepare for adulthood. Activities can include climbing trees, sliding on frozen puddles, using real tools and walking to the park without an adult.

6 If we want our kids to keep a foot in the natural world, we need to pry them away from their screens sometimes, and do things outdoors as a family. The adults must leave their screens behind too.

7 Find some like-minded people and figure out how you can get kids back outside in your community. Working with others makes it easier.

8 Children and nature make a really good fit. By immersing kids in the natural world early, we’re increasing the chances of them wanting to take care of it later in life.

References to Other Books

  • Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv. Algonquin Books, 2008.
  • Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children, by Angela Hansom. New Harbinger, 2016
  • Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting, by Carl Honoré. HarperOne, 2009
  • Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education, by David Sobel. Orion Society, 1999.
  • Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World, by B. Brett Finlay and Marie-Claire Arrieta. Algonquin Books, 2016.
  • Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without going Nuts with Worry), by Lenore Skenazy. Jossey-Bass, 2010
  • Unplugged: 15 Steps to Disconnect from Technology and Reconnect with Nature, Yourself, Friends, and Family, by Jason Runkel Sperling. Kindle Edition, 2016.
  • Vitamin N: The Essential Guide to a Nature-Rich Life, by Richard Louv. Algonquin Books, 2016

Personal Thoughts on Being Outdoors

We all have our personal experiences from childhood which will depend a lot on where you actually grew up and how your parents were with you. I was fortunate to grow up in the 1950s and 60s in an urban area where everyone owned their own house and there was a yard at the front of the house, and a yard at the back of the house. Most houses with children would have had at least some grass to play on though we also had vegetables and fruit in our garden at the back. The back yards were usually fenced, so separate from the neighbours and the front yards were usually unfenced. There were a lot of houses with children my age so I had people within easy reach to play with. Particularly in chapter 8, Linda McGurk takes up the situation that for children to play outdoors a lot, it has to be what everyone else is doing too.

The message I remember hearing was “Go out and play”. I was expected to be outside the house and either play by myself or find someone else to play with. If the weather wasn’t that great, I could use blankets under a roof and make myself and my dolls a nice place to play house. When the weather was good, I might play with one of my girl friends out in the sunshine. But I also remember sitting on a blanket in the shade (and having to move as the shade moved) playing with my dolls. I remember climbing trees, using roller skates on the side walk, playing Annie Oakley, riding a tricycle and pulling a wagon, or playing hopscotch marked out on the side walk, all usually with one or more friends.

Elementary school was a five-minute walk from the house and I went home for lunch almost every day, giving me time to stretch my legs as well as get a warm meal in the winter months. The school had a very large outdoor area, with various types of areas to play in, including several areas with a lot of trees, some of which we could climb up a few branches. There were playing fields as well as paved areas for skipping rope and playing hopscotch. The children spread out over the large area giving those who had a need to run around lots of opportunity to do that. Occasionally the weather was so bad (usually heavy rain), that we had to play indoors during recess, in very noisy basement areas that nobody really enjoyed. I think having a long lunch hour and a recess with outdoor play helped us to sit still when we were in the classroom.

My children were primarily brought up in a rural environment, living in a single family dwelling with farm fields beside us and no playmates within easy walking distance. When they were young, I spent time outdoors with them and they were given more freedom to be outside on their own as they grew older. They were both fortunate to have their early years before computers were very common and long before hand-held devices were available. The limits of physical freedom were defined by the size of our lot, which eventually expanded as they were encouraged to walk to a friend’s home or to cycle somewhere on their own. Unfortunately we parents were also obliged to drive them a lot. However, they would be encouraged to play outside even when visiting friends.

Both of my children attended kindergarten from when they were three years old until they began school at the age of seven. Kindergartens in Norway still have several hours of outdoor play, usually in a fenced-in area around the main building. Here they can dig in a sandbox, play on swings, ride tricycles, or make up their own games. They learn to socialize with others their own age. They learn to follow the rules set by the staff. For my children as well, the kindergarten was where they learned Norwegian as we used English at home.

Once my children started school, the elementary school was five kilometers away and they got a bus to school. Catching the school bus was part of the regular routine of learning responsibility for one’s own activities. Even at elementary school, there was always recess with outdoor play, no matter the weather. The children were expected to wear appropriate clothing to school to be outside both during recess and lunch hour. Sometimes adults would organize activities, but mostly they were outside to prevent bad behaviour and to mediate disputes between the children.

As an adult, I like to spend time outdoors. I can get discouraged if the weather does not look good from inside. I don’t like being outside in the dark, which makes limitations on when I can be out in the winter months. We live in a part of Norway where it seldom rains non-stop for hours at a time. It is more likely to be showers on and off all day, so it is easier to get outside while it isn’t raining and even stay outside with whatever I’m working on even if another shower comes along. In the winter, I like shovelling snow off the driveway as it gives me both fresh air and exercise as well as being useful. In the summer, I have a large garden to work with, though it can be discouraging to work when it is pouring with rain, which it often does in the summer. Not all summers here are warm and dry. But that just means that one has to learn how to dress suitably for the weather.

I have always found that going for walks is a good remedy for a bad mood. It gives me time to think through problems. If I am walking through the woods, I have to concentrate on where to put my feet and problems seem to melt away. I have also heard that having trees visible from the windows in your house is good for mental health.

The municipality that I live in has had a summer program called InderøyTurer (Inderøy Walks) where trails are marked in the wild areas. There are usually about 30 different walks and one gets points based on how long the walk is and how difficult a trail it is. There are always some easy walks for those in wheelchairs, so that handicapped people are encouraged to get outside too. I read just recently in the local newspaper that this summer there was a record number of visits to these posts. We use an app on our smartphones and are able to check in using our phones. This is an encouragement to get people out of their houses and take their children with them.

I would like to encourage everyone to spend time outdoors, preferably in nature or near trees, every day. Whether you spend half an hour or several hours, being outdoors will give you fresh air, exercise and time away from the screens in your life. Enjoy!

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To eat or not eat meat

After watching a program from Norwegian television (NRK) called Line fikser maten (Line makes food), I am even more convinced that cutting out meat and fish from our diet is good for both my body and the planet.

I first became aware of the problems caused by the consumption of meat when reading, Diet for a Small Planet, back in the 1970s. The author, Frances Moore Lappé, was concerned that eating meat was not sustainable on our planet and she showed how one could use plant products to supply the protein we humans need to consume. She showed how to combine foods to create good nutrition and give enough protein on a daily basis. She also provided lots of recipes so that one could get started with creating a new healthier diet.

Published by Friends of the Earth and Ballantine Books, New York, 1971. My copy is from the 12th printing in 1974.

Already at that time, I went over to a diet that used proteins from plant products and reduced my intake of meat, fish and poultry. It has since been shown that one doesn’t need to complement foods in the way that Lappé suggested to get adequate protein, though one should still think carefully about which types of foods should be eaten during the day.

In 1980, my husband and I moved to Norway and had very little money to live on. We lived on the coast, so fresh fish was affordable, but meat was not. We rarely ate meat, except for the occasional ground beef. Poultry was also not nearly so common back then and not particularly cheap, at least for our income level. A wide variety of legumes was not available either, so we lived on quite a restricted diet. I never felt that we had poor nutrition though I do remember trying to buy everything on sale, especially canned goods.

Once we started working in Norway, and our income improved we also started eating more meat and poultry. The cost of meat became relatively cheaper and certainly poultry became cheaper and easier to get hold of. Over the last forty years, the availability of a variety of food has improved and imported food has became much more common.

Now we eat a wide variety of legumes, most of which are imported from Asian countries. Though I do prefer to buy vegetables that are grown locally, not everything is in season year round. As an example I was able to buy the first locally produced tomatoes today and they haven’t been available for several months. Much of our fresh produce comes from Spain, Israel or South Africa.

We live in an agricultural area, surrounded by farms. We have an egg farm as one of our nearest neighbors and we walk up there to buy farm fresh eggs. Some of the farms nearby are meat producers, either beef or pork. Potatoes, carrots and other vegetables may come from neighboring communities. But bananas, oranges and grapefruit are still not grown in Norway. However with climate change and the increasing use of greenhouses to produce plants, there may come a change in what is locally grown in the future.

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Virtues

When my children were young, about 10 and 4 years old, I came across a book which fascinated me, “The Virtues Guide: a Family Handbook” by Linda Kavelin Popov and Dan Popov, with illustrations by John Kavelin.  I bought the book and when I got home I started reading and have been a fan of the book ever since.

The book is divided into two major sections.  The first section is a guide for parents and shows some “simple ways to bring out the best in our children and ourselves”. In this section the authors have five basic strategies.

Strategy 1:  Recognize the Teachable Moments – A parent is an educator, a teacher, but you have to look out for the right moments to teach lessons.  There are only certain moments when children are open to learning.

Strategy 2:  Speak the Language of the Virtues – Children need to learn positive actions and what to do.  The virtues in the book gives a vocabulary for what is good behaviour and parents need to use these words in their daily conversations.

Strategy 3:  Set Clear Boundaries –  The parent has to set clear boundaries and ground rules which may vary depending on the age of the children.

Strategy 4:  Honor the Spirit – The parent is a guide to his/her child/ren and needs to share skills, family stories, special rituals, etc.  This is also practicing respect for children who are human beings that need to find their place in the world.

Strategy 5:  Offer the Art of Spiritual Companioning – Children have to learn how to make choices and handle their feelings.  It is important for parents to listen and ask the right sorts of questions to help a child figure things out for themselves.

The second section of the book has 52 virtues, one for each week of the year.  For each virtue there is an explanation of what it is, why you should practice it, how to practice it and signs of success.  This section of the book uses the most pages in the book. Some examples of the virtues are cleanliness, confidence, courage, friendliness, trustworthiness, etc.

In addition there are discussion questions, guidelines on how to use the book and some do’s and don’ts about bringing up children.

The original edition of the book, “The Virtues Guide: A Family Handbook” came out in 1991 and we used the edition that came out in 1993. The current edition of the book is called “The Family Virtues Guide” and was published in 1997.

Why am I writing this, so many years later?  One of the ways of using the virtues in the family is to pick one virtue each week and then practice this virtue during the week and become more aware of it.  My husband and I still continue this practice, choosing each Sunday a virtue from a pack of 100 virtue cards. We then try to practice this virtue during the coming week and discuss what we can do to improve our own behaviour.

The world has changed a lot since the 1990s, but the need for the virtues remains the same.  Today you can access information about The Virtues Project at https://www.virtuesproject.com/ .  I recommend both the book and the website.

The Family Virtues Guide

 

 

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My dream of being a librarian

In my last two years of high school, I belonged to the library club.  This suited me fine.  I took my lunch to the back room, where we were usually several girls.  This small group, instead of a huge number of people in the school’s lunch room, suited me fine. In my senior year at high school, I got more responsibility for both running the library club and the library itself.

At the time, I decided I would like to become a librarian, which required a bachelor’s degree at university plus one specialized year.  So off to UBC to get my bachelor’s degree, eventually focusing on English and foreign languages (French, German and Italian).  In my fourth year at university, I was starting to get tired of going to school.  It was now my sixteenth year of school.  I had planned to take one more year to get my library degree, but then they changed the one year program to two years.  That I couldn’t take.  So I left UBC with a bachelor’s degree, but no library training.

Fast forward a lot of years.  I have moved to Norway and gotten two children.  I have become a teacher at a high school, but because my son has English as a mother language, and not a foreign language, he gets his mother as his English teacher.  We sit in the library at the elementary school.  Often he must just sit and work on lessons preferably without me hovering over him.  I start working with the books on the shelves, getting them in order, straightening them.  I don’t remember now how it happened, but after a bit I have been asked to look after the school library and it moves into a better, newly built room.  Now I not only am a teacher, but a “librarian” for a small elementary school library.

I have no special training, but the public library in our municipality trains me with their computer system and I start working in the main library part time.  In addition I look after the library in another elementary school, one day a week.  I am officially part of the library staff.

I find that I can take some of the library courses needed for library qualifications as part-time correspondence courses (yes, back in the days when everything was sent by post).  I started working on getting my qualifications, course by course.

Through the librarian at the high school I work with, I hear about a part-time library course for those who are already working in libraries.  I sign up and continue getting my qualifications.  I am enjoying working in several small libraries.  I pass my one-year course, but to get the next level of education I must take travel away from home for a year.  That I am not willing to do!

My dream of becoming a librarian, though it has come true, in a very small way, takes a turn at this point.  Having been a teacher for several years, I make more money being a teacher, than being a librarian.  My salary as a teacher is important for my family’s income, so I drop the idea of becoming a qualified librarian.  I continue working in two small elementary school libraries until my younger child finishes elementary school and then I quit that job.

A few years pass and the situation at my high school changes.  The school now has to buy the textbooks and lend them out to the students.  This is a reform that puts a lot of work on the librarian, and he is not willing to do the work.  My hearing disability is causing me to have problems with large classes, so the principal of my school suggests that as I have some library training and experience, I could take over the work with the textbooks and let the librarian continue with the other parts of the library work.  I agree.

The first few years are difficult.  Rebuilding the school takes away the library, which gets packed up into boxes.  The unused textbooks are put into a room in the cellar.  Though most of the work is at the beginning and end of the school year, there is some work to be done during the rest of the year.

Several years go by.  I get a system that sort of works.  Mostly I am down in the cellar in an environment that is not very good.  I think of it as working in a dungeon.  Eventually the library gets built, a lovely open, bright room and I get to work there too.  I have been given some other things to do, spending one day a week in the library and teaching only part time.

Then the librarian at the school retires and the job as librarian is advertised.  Shall I apply for it?  I think carefully through the issue and decide that I would rather be a teacher than a full-time librarian.  It has been fun to do library work part-time but I would not like to do it full-time.  Teaching is much more rewarding.

At home, we have amassed several thousand books over the years we have been in Norway.  Books in English for the children.  Textbooks for courses we have taken or given.  Fiction for relaxation.  Non-fiction to learn more about many subjects.  Chaos on the shelves.  So I buy a small computer program designed for home libraries, and the work starts at entering all the books we have in the system. This takes several years to complete, but it is nice to have a record on my computer of the books on our shelves.  To date we have 3 428 books in the program.

But times have changed. Most of our new reading material is digital, stored somewhere, and I am no longer in charge of the new acquisitions.  I have retired from the job as home librarian as well.

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Thinking and how our brains work

In 1968 I took an introductory psychology course and felt that I got an idea of what the subject was all about.  I went on and studied other things and didn’t follow the developments happening there. Then in the last ten years, I found the field of psychology again and have had more time to read about what the new research has been telling us, including how we make decisions and how our brains work.  I have enjoyed being able to read the authors listed below and have widened my understanding of how human beings work.

I am a retired teacher and first took pedagogy in the mid 1980s.  In 2014, I took a short pedagogy course, designed for teaching mathematics, mostly at elementary or junior high levels.  What I enjoyed most, was reading about everything that was new in pedagogy.  I found out that quite a bit of research had been done in the previous ten years, and things had been discovered that were unknown when I took pedagogy in the 1980s. So this encouraged me to read more about psychology.

In the field of psychology, new methods of “seeing” how the brain works have been found.  A lot of research has been done and I’m finding it interesting to read about the results of this research.  I hope that new teachers will get the benefit of this new research, both in pedagogy and psychology, and be able to help children learn better.  I also hope that the research will continue, both in psychology and pedagogy as there is still a lot more that can be learned. One main reflection I have is that the more science finds out about how humans work, the more complex the systems become.

Here is a list of some of the books that I have read and, in my opinion, the key ideas in each book.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011 – Over many years, Kahnemann and Amos Tversky looked at how people made decisions.  They figured out that we think in two different ways.  We often use heuristics or habit to make quick decisions that require little thinking effort. We use this type of thinking when driving a car and to do things automatically. This way of thinking can often lead to errors, but it is still useful and saves us a lot of effort.  When learning new things, we think slowly, but this requires much more effort. For example, when learning to drive one has to think a lot about how to keep track of both what others are doing and what one is doing oneself with hands and feet.  In addition these two men realized that we most often will try to avoid a loss, rather than make a gain.  I recommend this book highly.

Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly:  Better Thinking, Better Decision, 2011 – Here is a list of the most common heuristics. Dobelli lists 99 of them and gives examples of how these biases mislead us. He also shows us how they are interrelated.  This book is quick to read and a good reminder of how we don’t always think correctly. He also tries to show us how to avoid getting caught in heuristic traps.

Gerd Gigerenzer, Risk Savvy:  How to Make Good Decisions, 2013 and Gut Feelings:  The Intelligence of the Unconscious, 2007 – I found this author very interesting to read.  Our gut feelings are how we use heuristics to make decisions more quickly, instead of reasoning through everything in detail. He also points out that checklists can be crucial in situations where it is easy to hop over a critical step. These two books will help you understand more about how we think, or don’t, and how to be better at making decisions.

Andrew Shtulman, Scienceblind:  Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World are So Often Wrong, 2017 – Shtulman has several examples of how people think wrongly about things that have been proven by science. We develop a view of the world as children and even well-educated people will have the wrong view of the world as adults. It can be very difficult for people to change the way they learned to see the world as children.  It also explains why it can be so hard to convince others of things one feels sure that science has proved. I found this book very interesting to read and made me think about my own views of the way the world works.

Carol S. Dweck, Mindset, How You Can Fulfil Your Potential, 2006 – I found this author difficult to read as she used the word “I” a bit too much.  However, her main idea is important.  The way we think about our abilities, whether they are set for life or whether we have the potential to grow, in other words, our mindset, influences how well we get on in life.  Having a growth mindset allows a person to learn new things and take on new challenges.

Cordelia Fine, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, 2005, David Eagleman, Incognito:  The Secret Lives of the Brain, 2011 and Dean Burnett, The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To, 2016 – These three books show how the brain seems to work, independent of the person that is housing it.  It can be a bit disturbing to find out that you aren’t really in charge of what the brain does.  But I think it is important to realize what our brain is doing for us, both the things we expect it to do, such as keep our heart beating and our lungs breathing, and also making decisions on what we see from the impulses that come in through our eyes.

There are a lot more books available on these topics, but these are the ones that I have read recently and found worthwhile reading.  I think it is useful for us to be more aware of how we think, how we make our decisions and perhaps how we can use our knowledge to do better in our lives and help others.