Category: Health

Posted on

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)

Posted on

Air Pollution

When one lives in a rural area in Norway, one sees people cutting down trees for firewood. It is almost the end of the heating season, but many people still have wood stoves for heating their homes. Those who cut down trees themselves are often out at this time of year to get the wood necessary for the next heating season. Personally I am very glad that we have cut out burning wood inside our house. We’ve removed one old wood stove from our living room. No more bad air there.

I have read quite a bit in recent years about climate change and what we have done right and what still has to be done. I’d like to quote Bjørn H. Samset who writes in The Climate Book (published by Allen Lane in 2022):

“If you light a bonfire and look towards the sky, you will see a rising column of smoke. Spreading upwards and outwards, it twirls and thins until it fades to invisibility. But it’s not gone. Smoke particles – one example of what we call aerosols – can remain airborne for days, and in that time they can travel both far afield and high up in the atmosphere. And while there, they have a strong effect on both the weather and the climate.” (page 57)

Picture taken in Straumen, Inderøy, on 2024.04.03 at 18:55. Smoke stack from a wood-chip burning, central heating system at the busiest intersection in Straumen, our local municipal center.

If I am out walking, I can smell when my neighbors are heating their homes with a wood fire. A lot of the electricity in Norway is made with hydro power and some is made with wind. Neither of these types of energy production pollutes the air, though there may be other disadvantages. In this blog, I’m wanting to mainly focus on air pollution. With the rise of electricity prices in the last year or so, heating homes with wood has again became popular, as people are trying to reduce the cost of heating their homes. Their electricity bill might be lower, but is burning wood a good alternative to using electricity produced by water or air power? Electricity can be used for heating, either using space heaters or a heat pump.

If we look at historical methods of creating energy, burning wood is one of the oldest methods. Open fires inside homes for cooking food was still common in the 19th century. Baking ovens were used, but meat was usually cooked in large fireplaces over an open fire (i.e. roasted). In countries like England, wood became a scarce resource as trees were cut down and not replaced. The discovery of coal made possible the transition to burning coal instead of wood. But coal also pollutes the air when burned and was one of the causes of very bad air in London, England during the 19th century.

When I was small we had a furnace in our house that burned coal in a closed stove in the basement and sent heated air throughout the house. There was a storage space for coal inside the basement. Coal is very dirty to handle and there was an automatic feeder to get the coal into the furnace. This was replaced, probably in about 1966, with a natural gas furnace.

The house I grew up in was built in the 1920s and at that time, the City of Vancouver was piping natural gas to new housing as a cleaner alternative to coal or sawdust. As far back as I can remember, we had a gas stove and oven in the kitchen when I was a child. There was a constant flame, a pilot light, which then lit the burner that one wanted to use. As I think about this now, I am surprised that people accepted an open flame in the kitchen. Though gas is a cleaner burning fuel than either wood or coal, it is still a fossil fuel that creates air pollution.

I have always had a sniffy nose and though I now think of it as primarily a reaction to pollen. As I have been writing this, I have been wondering how much my physical development as a child was affected by the burning of “dirty” fuels in my home. When I was about 10 years old, I suffered a lot from constant coughing. Was it indoor air pollution, or pollen from the fruit trees in our yard?

Looking at Our World in Data, they separate air pollution in two categories, indoor and outdoor. Let’s look at some of the information that they have on these two categories.

Indoor Air Pollution

“Indoor air pollution is caused by burning solid fuel sources – such as firewood, crop waste, and dung – for cooking and heating. Burning such fuels, particularly in poor households, results in air pollution that leads to respiratory diseases, which can result in premature death. The WHO calls indoor air pollution “the world’s largest single environmental health risk.” (from OWID)

Note that indoor air pollution primarily comes from cooking and heating, and its severity would depend on what was actually being burned and how good the ventilation was. There is a distinction between solid fuels, such as dung, wood, charcoal, and coal, and non-solid fuels, such as kerosene, methanol, natural gas and electricity. Access to clean cooking fuels, such as electricity, improve as a family’s income improves and as the standards within a country improve. I see this also in my childhood, where heating was first coal, then natural gas, and cooking was natural gas, then electricity. The change came about as my parents were able to afford a better standard of living in the 1960s than in the early 1950s.

Looking at the charts available at Our World in Data, Europe and North America come out with the least indoor pollution as here there is better access to clean cooking and heating fuels. If you find looking at charts interesting, I suggest you go browse their website.

Outdoor Air Pollution

According to Our World in Data, outdoor air pollution is one of the world’s largest health and environmental problems. Outdoor air pollution is a risk factor for several of the world’s leading causes of death, including stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and respiratory diseases, such as asthma. Is the rise of asthma in European and North American countries attributable to worsening outdoor air pollution? I don’t know the answer, but I imagine there is a connection.

Some of the sources of outdoor air pollution can be:

  • industrial plants that put pollutants in the air
  • burning solid fuels to make electricity
  • vehicles that burn gasoline or diesel
  • wild fires which put a lot of small particles in the air

Many air pollutants contribute to the small particles that float in the air. As we age, our exposure to these types of pollutants accumulate and can affect our health. At the moment I live in an area with relatively low air pollution, so that most of the year I enjoy sleeping with a window open so that I get fresh air while I’m sleeping.

However, there are three types of outdoor air pollution that still affect me.

  • Wood smoke, or the burning of dry grass or refuse. Both of these can be common in a rural area in Norway. In winter, there are people heating their homes with wood fires. In spring, dry grass or garden refuse may be burnt so that it disappears. In summer, there is the burning of charcoal in grills, by people who think that this is a great way to prepare food outdoors.
  • Gases from animal manure, particularly as it is being spread on the fields near me. The older technique was spraying the manure in the air so that it spread over a wide area. This technique was terribly polluting and created bad air for several days, until the field was either plowed or it rained heavily. Fortunately, farmers here have learned new techniques with new equipment, whereby the liquid manure is forced into the ground rather than up in the air. Now there is much less of a smell of manure which I’m sure also means that there is less pollution from it.
  • Pollen, from flowers and trees, can also affect me. I don’t react to everything and how much pollen there is in the air will vary from day to day. Some years can be quite bad and other years I am affected a lot less. Many people have it a lot worse than myself. However I have stopped drying clothes outdoors so that I don’t get pollen on my clothes. Filters on ventilation systems can also improve air quality indoors.

Conclusion

I grew up in a house built about 1926 so the standards that were relevant at that time, have hopefully been improved by 2024. In fact, I have read that Vancouver is no longer allowing natural gas installations in new housing. Heating with coal and cooking with gas should be replaced with cleaner fuels.

I live in a house which was built in 1963 and we have improved it since then. There is more insulation now and better windows with three layers of glass so that we use much less electricity to heat the house now than we did even 10 years ago. We also use electricity to cook, using an induction stove top which uses electricity much more efficiently than older styles of cook tops.

Even though I live in an area with little air pollution, either indoors or outdoors, I can still have problems. How much of my problem is a result of pollution in my childhood I will never know, but I do think it is a possibility. However, every individual has to adapt their living conditions to their own sensitivity to air pollution. Parents also have a responsibility for giving their children a good environment to grow up in. For myself, living in a rural area helps, and getting rid of local polluting devices, such as a wood stove and a diesel car, have improved my living conditions.

Posted on

Spring 2024 walking season has started

I have been quite lazy this winter, doing very little walking outdoors except when going specific places, like the dairy farm or the egg farm. But today, the temperature was finally a bit more comfortable, at 12 degrees centigrade, so my husband and I put on walking trousers, hiking shoes and went for our first walk in the woods.

We have a favorite location that takes us along some gravel roads and a path in the woods. It takes about 20 minutes to get to Bear Cliff (Bjørnbrøttet), where there is a book to write one’s name in and a small shelter to take a short pause. I have written blogs about this walk previously. You might like to contrast today’s walk with the one in 2023 when the weather was quite different.

The view from Bear Cliff taken at 16:31, looking towards the island of Ytterøy with Levanger in the background.

As you can see from the picture, it was cloudy and there had been rain showers earlier in the day. We did not have any rain while we were walking and we were out for about an hour. But shortly after we were home again, there was another short rain shower.

As this was the first time for this walk in 2024, it was interesting to see if there were any changes, either in nature, or to the cabins we walked by. There were a couple of trees that had been blown over, some that had been cut down. There seemed to be more open spaces as if cabin owners wanted more sunshine or a better view. At this time of year I am always looking to see what flowers are out. The two earliest ones here in Inderøy are coltsfoot (which is yellow) and anemone hepatica (which is blue).

Coltsfoot /hestehov) or tussilago farfara. The flowers come out from the rhizome first before any leaves appear. The leaves are very large but disappear during the summer. These flowers like the sunshine and appear first in sheltered, sunny spots and along the roadsides.
The blue anemone, sometimes called liverwort, (hepatica nobilis / blåveis) is a bit hard to see, but they are also very common in Inderøy and one of the signs of spring. They will eventually cover large areas as the days warm up. They are quite small and are often found under trees.
You’ll have to look closely in the photo to see the hepatica / blåveis, but it is in several parts of the photo.

Getting out in the fresh air is important. Getting walking exercise helps keep us in good shape. I was surprised that I was in such good shape as I did not labor up any of the hills. So that is a good sign. I also feel that it is important for our eyes to look far in the distance and not always to be looking at a screen or things close to us, for example, knitting projects.

Looking south-west towards Trondheim, through Norviksund, with Mosvik on the right and Ytterøy on the left. There are rain clouds in the distance but they didn’t get to us until after we were inside again. Looking at the small island on the right, we see that it was relatively low tide.

We live in an area with quite a variation in tides. When this picture was taken (at 16:46), the tide was still going out and low tide was at 18:40 and at 6 cm above the base level. At high tide, later this evening, the water level will be at about 324 cm, so the water level will be more than 3 meters higher than at low tide.

As we came up our own driveway, I looked to see if there was anything flowering yet. I have lots of bulbs, but the ground has been frozen until the last few days. Crocuses are just starting to show some color and only need a few days of sunshine to come out in full bloom.

Not wild flowers, but planted in my garden. Crocuses are the first flowers that bloom in my garden. These need a bit more sunshine before opening out.

I hope you too are able to get out for longer walks out in nature, now that we are in April. Enjoy the nature you have around you.

Posted on

Being an Introvert

This photo was taken during a walk in Mosvik, looking west over Trondheimsfjord.

In 2017, I read a book by Susan Cain, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking”, published in 2012, by Crown Publishing/Random House. I found this book to be excellent because it helped me realize that introverts are probably one-third of the population. There are a lot of people like me, that prefer quiet times to noisy parties. Shortly after I read the book, I wrote a blog about it, which you can read here. I hope I’m not going to repeat myself too much, as this time I would like to write about my world as a 74-year old introvert with a hearing disability.

As my hearing gets worse, and it gets harder to be part of large groups, I find that being an introvert helps me cope with my disability. Hearing aids work to a certain extent, but all of the background noise of the world we live in is also increased in volume, not only the voices of the people that I would like to converse with. This has resulted in several types of changes in my behavior.

In particular, towns and shopping areas have a lot of noise pollution. The other day, I noticed that a neighboring child had an electric motor to his play tractor and I found that noisy too. Walking on gravel is noisy under my feet and can drown out conversation with the person I am walking with. I actually like doing things by myself as then I don’t have to use a hearing aid and I can enjoy the peace around me.

I now avoid almost all activities that include large groups of people in an indoor room. People are always talking, or at least some of them are, and when more than one person is talking, I hear nothing and it becomes very frustrating to not hear what people say. I still enjoy being with people, and enjoy having discussions about serious topics, but maximum four people in the room, with no background noise, is what I manage best.

One activity I really enjoy is walking in nature, either by myself or with someone. I have one girl friend who I walk with regularly. We avoid the places with the most car noises and in the summer months we often take some of the Inderøy walks where one can get points for getting to a particular place. Most of these walks are away from roads with cars on them. I also do a lot of walking with my husband, mostly in the summer months, but also in the winter. The photo above was taken in Mosvik on one of these walks.

As a retired person, I don’t have to go out to work every day, but there are still lots of things to fill my time. I enjoy cooking and often spend one to two hours a day on food preparation. I have to use hearing protection when using noisy kitchen machines, but that is usually just a few minutes of the processing time. I avoid using my hearing aids while working in the kitchen as even chopping vegetables is a noisy activity.

I love knitting and always have one to three projects on the go, plus all the ones that are in the planning stages in my head. Keeping my fingers busy while creating something useful gives me something meaningful to do. Knitting gives me lots of time to think while my fingers keep busy. To cut down on the overload in my head, from thinking, I often read while doing simple knitting.

A recently knit sweater for my husband who loves bright colors.

Reading has always been a favorite activity and I read both fiction and non-fiction. Most books are read on an electronic reader, but I have also started reading a few books on paper. The latter are not so easy to read when knitting, but newer non-fiction books are good for stimulating my mind. This has also been a reason for starting to write a few blogs again, at least until the gardening season starts. I’m currently reading a book about the state of the world, but the blog about it won’t be ready for another week, hence today’s topic.

Gardening is another hobby, which does not require much interaction with other people and which doesn’t require me to hear well either. In fact, with a lot of traffic on a nearby bridge, it is better to not be wearing a hearing-aid while outdoors working. I have a garden that is really far too big to keep in very good condition, but I have the rule, “what gets done, gets done” and I don’t worry about what doesn’t get done.

One of my favorite plants is the rhododendron.

Shopping is a necessity, but I choose to do my shopping when there are relatively few people in the stores, either in the morning, or the evening. It pays to learn when there are fewer people in the stores that one uses a lot. I started this in particular during the pandemic, but have found that whether I’m buying food, building supplies or yarn, the time of day, and the day of the week makes a big difference to how many people are in the stores.

Being an introvert has made reducing group activities easy for me. Contact with others is still important, but the situation has to be something I can handle. There are lots of meaningful activities for introverts and for those with a hearing disability. Life is for living and I hope to have many years yet.

Posted on

Gapminder.org

When I think of the changes that have happened in my lifetime, I often think of television, jet planes, computers, the Internet and electric cars. These are the things that have affected my life the most. However, when we think about how others’ lives have changed in the last 70 years, there are more important topics to think about. For example, what is the life expectancy of people living in India? How many children are vaccinated against common childhood diseases, such as measles? How have these figures changed in your lifetime and in mine?

I first came across Hans Rosling (1948-2017) a Swedish statistician and doctor, when I was teaching high-school English in Norway. He has made several videos that help explain how inadequate our view of living conditions in other countries is. I think the most important thing I have learned from watching his videos is that we have come a long way in solving some of the largest problems in the world. His statistics encourage optimism that we can make the world a better place.

Gapminder was founded in Stockholm in 2005 by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Hans Rosling. They developed interesting ways to visualize statistics and make it easier to understand the statistics and how they have changed over the years. Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious, or economic affiliations.

This video illustrates how we often get the facts wrong. The link is to a Gapminder video and a TedTalk from 2014 held in Berlin: How not to be ignorant about the world, is about 19 minutes and features both Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling. Please note that this video is now almost 10 years old, so the numbers will have changed and things will have improved even more since then.

Another example: the book I wrote about last, Limitarianism, was concerned about the differences between the rich and the poor, but what is your understanding about how many rich there really are in the world. Look at this short video at the Gapminder website and see how Hans Rosling explains it. I find that he is very good at explaining things that we might not have understood correctly. Had you understood that most people have an income in the middle range? There are some extremely poor, and some extremely rich, but most aren’t.

Gapminder’s mission is to “fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based world view everyone can understand.”

Now look at a third video about how income relates to life expectancy and enjoy the bubble diagrams that Gapminder is known for.

Gapminder’s Projects

Gapminder has three main projects. The first one (“Find your misconceptions”) is to help educate people so that their knowledge is kept up-to-date. If you are reading this, you have lived a few years and things have changed since you went to school. Depending on your age and how long it is since you went to school, your knowledge about the world may be out of date.

Their second main project (“Understand a changing world”) show how the numbers have changed over time. In general, things improve. Humans are good at making things better.

Their third main project (“See the reality behind the data”) or “Dollar Street” is a large collection of pictures to show what the terms extreme poverty and poverty mean and what the differences are. We often understand things better with pictures.

Using their three projects, I would like to encourage you to explore the Gapminder.org website. I especially recommend looking at “Dollar Street”.

What would you like to learn about today?

Posted on

The Climate Book – An Overview

Created by Greta Thunberg and published by Allen Lane /Penguin Books in November 2022.

Greta Thunberg was born in 2003 in Sweden. In 2018 she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. Since then she has traveled to many places in the world and spoken at many gatherings. She is a person that cares about the planet Earth.

The book is divided into five parts. Greta Thunberg writes an introduction to each part and some comments in between. All her articles are written on blue paper which is to symbolize the blue planet that we live on. In addition there are many experts in various fields to write articles about the science involved in this problem. There is a lot of information in this book which has 446 pages. The main purpose, in my opinion, is to get the reader to think about their own lifestyle, to acquire some knowledge of the problems and perhaps make changes in their own life.

In this first blog I am going to give an overview of what the book covers. In later blogs I will be going into some of the issues that are taken up in this book.

I recommend reading this book, though it can be a bit heavy reading. I am reading it in very small doses and so it is taking several months to get through it. Perhaps it is best this way as then I have time to reflect on the different topics as they are taken up.

Part One How Climate Works

The science of how our climate works is explained in this part. The fact that our climate is changing, and that our weather is getting more extreme, is not debatable. But do you understand how it all fits together? This part of the book is to help the reader get a basic understanding of the science behind it all.

Greta Thunberg has written three articles for this part:

  • To solve this problem, we need to understand it
  • The science is as solid as it gets
  • This is the biggest story in the world

In addition there are six articles:

  • The Deep History of Carbon Dioxide by Peter Brannen
  • Our Evolutionary Impact by Beth Shapiro
  • Civilization and Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
  • The Discovery of Climate Change by Michael Oppenheimer
  • Why Didn’t They Act? by Naomi Oreskes
  • Tipping Points and Feedback Loops by Johan Rockström

Part Two How our Planet is Changing

The science behind the changing climate has been known for a long time. I live in a place where most people think that it is fine if the weather was a bit warmer. But warming is not the problem everywhere. More extreme weather which causes storms and floods, rising sea levels and air pollution are all part of the problem. I found these articles interesting as they explain problems that other parts of the world are experiencing.

Greta Thunberg has written three articles for this part:

  • The weather seems to be on steroids
  • The snowball has been set in motion
  • It is much closer to home than we think

There are 21 articles in this part, most of them are quite short, about two pages, though some are longer. These are experts in their fields giving information on what is actually happening.

  • Heat, by Katharine Hayhoe
  • Methane and Other Gases by Zeke Hausfather
  • Air Pollution and Aerosols by Bjørn H. Samset
  • Clouds by Paulo Coppi
  • Arctic Warming and the Jet Stream by Jennifer Francis
  • Dangerous Weather by Friederike Otto
  • Drought and Floods by Kare Marvel
  • Ice Sheets, Shelves and Glaciers by Ricarda Winkelmann
  • Warming Oceans and Rising Seas by Stefan Rahmstorf
  • Acidification and Marine Ecosystems by Hans-Otto Pörtner
  • Microplastics by Karin Kvale
  • Fresh Water by Peter H. Gleick
  • Wildfires by Joëlle Gergis
  • The Amazon by Carlos Nobre, Julia Arieira and Nathália Nascimento
  • Boreal and Temperate Forests by Beverly Law
  • Terrestrial Biodiversity by Andy Purvis and Adriana De Palma
  • Insects by Dave Goulson
  • Nature’s Calendar by Keith W. LArson
  • Soil by Jennifer L. Soong
  • Permafrost by Ôrjan Gustafsson
  • What Happens at 1.5, 2 and 4 degrees C of Warming? by Tamsin Edwards

Part Three How It Affects Us

When the climate changes, it can affect our water and food supplies. It can affect our health. We are not all equally affected but usually the poor are hit hardest. This part helped me better understand how others are being affected, those who live in other parts of the world.

The three articles by Greta Thunberg are:

  • The world has a fever
  • We are not all in the same boat
  • Enormous challenges are waiting

In addition there are 17 articles:

  • Health and Climate by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
  • Heat and Illness by Ana M. Vicedo-Cabrera
  • Air Pollution by Drew Shindell
  • Vector-borne Diseases by Felipe J. Colón-González
  • Antibiotic Resistance by John Brownstein, Derek MacFadden, Sarah McGough and Maruicio Sentilland
  • Food and Nutrition by Samuel S. Myers
  • Life at 1.1 degrees C
  • Environmental Racism by Jacqueline Patterson
  • Climate Refugees by Abrahm Lustfarten
  • Sea-level Rise and Small Islands by Michael Taylor
  • Rain in the Sahel by Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim
  • Winter in Sápmi by Elin Anna Labba
  • Fighting for the Forest by Sonia Guajajara
  • Warming and Inequality by Solomon Hsiang
  • Water Shortages by Taikan Oki
  • Climate Conflicts by Marshall Burke
  • The True Cost of Climate Change by Eugene Linden

Part Four What We’ve Done About It

It has been quite depressing reading about what has actually been done, as it is so little. Emissions are increasing. Governments and businesses are avoiding the changes that are necessary. Some of these articles are about some of the fancy ideas that are being tried, but aren’t necessarily working.

The five articles by Greta Thunberg are:

  • How can we undo our failures if we are unable to admit that we have failed?
  • We are not moving in the right direction
  • A whole new way of thinking
  • They keep saying one thing while doing another
  • This is where we draw the line

In addition there are 22 articles:

  • The New Denialism by Kevin Anderson
  • The Truth about Government Climate Targets by Alexandra Urisman Otto
  • The Persistence of Fossil Fuels by Bill McKibben
  • The Rise of Renewables by Glen Peters
  • How Can Forests Help Us? by Karl-Heinz Erb and Simone Gingrich
  • What about Geoengineering? by Niclas Hällström, Jennie C. Stephens and Isak Stoddard
  • Drawdown Technologies by Rob Jackson
  • Our Imprint on the Land by Alexander Popp
  • The Calorie Question by Michael Clark
  • Designing New Food Systems by Sonja Vermeulen
  • Mapping Emission in an Industrial World by John Barrett and Alice Garvey
  • The Technical Hitch by Ketan Joshi
  • The Challenge of Transport by Alice Larkin
  • Is the Future Electric? by Jillian Anable and Christian Brand
  • The Cost of Consumerism by Annie Lowrey
  • How (Not) to Buy by Mike Berners-Lee
  • Waste around the World by Silpa Kaza
  • The Myth of Recycling by Nina Schrank
  • Emissions and Growth by Nicholas Stern
  • Equity by Sunita Narain
  • Degrowth by Jason Hickel
  • The Perception Gap by Amitav Ghosh

Part Five What We Must Do Now

If we are to prevent the earth becoming severely affected, we have to do an awful lot more than is being done. There are still too many people in places of power who are not doing what it takes to prevent global warming on a significant scale.

There are four articles by Greta Thunberg:

  • The most effective way to get out of this mess is to educate ourselves
  • We now have to do the seemingly impossible
  • Honesty, solidarity, integrity and climate justice
  • Hope is something you have to earn

In addition there are 17 articles:

  • Individual Action, Social Transformation by Stuart Capstick and Lorraine Whitmarsh
  • Towards 1.5 Degrees C Lifestyles by Kate Raworth
  • Overcoming Climate Apathy by Per Espen Stoknes
  • Changing Our Diets by Godon Eshel
  • Remembering the Ocean by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
  • Rewilding by George Monbiot and Rebecca Wrigley
  • Practical Utopias by Margaret Atwood
  • People Power by Erica Chenoweth
  • Changing the Media Narrative by George Monbiot
  • Resisting the New Denialism by Michael E. Mann
  • A Genuine Emergency Response by Seth Klein
  • Lessons from the Pandemic by David Wallace-Wells
  • A Just Transition by Naomi Klein
  • What Does Equity Mean to You by Nicki Becker, Disha A. Ravi, Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, Laura Verónica Muñoz, Ina Maria Shikongo, Ayisha Siddiqa and Mitzi Jonelle Tan
  • Women and the Climate Crisis by Wanjora Mathai
  • Decarbonization Requires Redistribution by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty
  • Climate Reparations by Olúféemi O. Tálwò
  • Mending Our Relationship with the Earth by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I have a paper copy of the book which uses 446 pages to share these articles, some pictures and graphs and an index. There is a web site for looking up where the references come from.

At the moment I am reading Part Four and will share my reactions and more detailed comments about each part of the book in future blogs. I am enjoying the book and it is making me think about the conditions in the world. We are all very quick to criticize what others do, but I want to work out what I can do in my life. I cannot change other people, but I can change the way I live and what I do.

I hope you will also read this book and work out ways that you too can be part of the solution and not just part of the problem.

Posted on

Having a hearing disability

I have been using two hearing aids (one in each ear) for over 27 years and my hearing will not get any better. In fact it gets worse as time goes on. The range of sound that I have lost includes the human voice, which makes having spoken conversations with people very difficult and tiring. I have just recently gotten a new hearing aid, which helps, but hearing aids do not replace good ears, they just help make difficult situations better, perhaps.

My newest pair of hearing aids. They now come with a case that holds them both and they get recharged while in the case. The case needs to be plugged in about every three days.

Having a hearing disability is a handicap. I often get very frustrated with trying to follow what other people are talking about. Different people have different qualities to their voices, some are easier for me to hear than other ones. Background noises also influence how much of a conversation I can hear. For example, if more than one conversation is going on in a room where I am, I will probably not be able to hear any of them.

Let me give an example from a television program that I have just been watching. There were several people explaining a subject. The main host had a very soft voice that was very difficult to hear. I turn up the sound to hear him. The first guest was a woman with a very sharp voice that was easy for me to hear. I turn the sound down to normal. But what was very irritating for me was the applause as that sound level hurt my ears and made me turn down the sound level even more. In the end I spend my time reading the subtitles as it became too complex to adjust my hearing aids to the differences in sound level, in the same program.

A hearing aid is a wonderful, technical aid for those with hearing disabilities. However, my experience (based on almost three decades and several hearing aids) is that they amplify all the noises around me, even the ones I don’t want to hear – car traffic, cutlery rattling in the drawer, power saws, rustling clothing, etc. I often enjoy walking on my own, just because I then don’t have to wear a hearing aid and not get all of those other noises amplified.

Another problem that I have is that my level of tolerance of loud noises is much lower, even without wearing hearing aids. Sound intensity levels are measured in decibels. For example, 20 decibels is 10 times as loud as 10 decibels. Most people will find that 60 decibels is an okay level of noise to tolerate, and at 80 decibels the sound level is unpleasant. Hearing protection should be used if you are exposed to high levels of decibels over longer periods of time, for example, for several hours in a working situation. I will generally find that sound at 80 decibels is painful for my ears and that 70 decibels is the maximum I want to experience.

Now that I am no longer working outside the house, I do not wear my hearing aids constantly. I put them on when I am with others so that I can hear what they say, but I avoid wearing them when I am alone or doing noisy activities. But this can cause problems too. I don’t hear the tap running in the kitchen and forget to turn it off. I don’t hear someone approaching me and I jump when I become aware of them. I don’t mind not hearing the seagulls in the summer, nor the traffic on the bridge near us.

Situations I find difficult

There are quite a few situations that happen on a regular basis where people try to give me messages or information, but I am just not able to understand what is being said to me. It is important that I am aware that someone is speaking to me. I may not be listening all of the time

I have tried to teach the people that live with me to make sure I am wearing my hearing aids when they want to say things to me. However, if I am working in the kitchen, chopping vegetables (a very noisy job), I may have my hearing aids on “mute” and don’t either hear someone approaching me or hear what they say to me. Washing dishes is a similarly noisy job that is louder than normal conversation.

Using the vacuum cleaner is a noisy chore, though necessary. When the children were small, they would disappear very quickly when I turned on the vacuum cleaner. This is the sort of sound that I do not need to have amplified with a hearing aid. Thankfully, we now have a central vacuum cleaner and the machine itself is tucked away in a cupboard on the lower floor of the house. However there is still the noise of the suction which can be at my limits of toleration.

Walking outdoors near traffic can cause problems hearing a conversation. For me, all types of mechanical noise will always be louder than human conversation.

Large groups of people create a lot of noise. For a while I was enjoying attending a knitting cafe for two hours every two weeks. Fifteen to twenty ladies would get together, pack themselves into a small room and begin talking to each other. My guess would be that at least half of them were talking at the same time. After an hour, my ability to concentrate was used up, and I sometimes had to flee the room to regain my sanity. Sometimes I even went outside with the smokers as it was so quiet with them. So now I avoid this type of social activity as it is just too tiring for me.

Things to do when talking to someone with a hearing disability

  • Look at the person you want to talk to and make sure they have understood that you are going to say something. You can start by saying their name, so that they know that you are wanting to talk to them. If you don’t get a reaction, maybe they need to turn on the hearing aid.
  • Stand close enough that what you are saying will be heard. How close you need to stand depends on the person and the level of background noise.
  • Make sure you speak distinctly and don’t mumble or swallow your words. Many people start a sentence distinctly, but the ending disappears.
  • If you are giving important information, check that the message has been understood, perhaps by asking a question.
  • When you are pointing to something, make sure you are still facing the person you are talking to and not facing what you are pointing to.

Things NOT to do when talking to someone with a hearing disability

  • Don’t start talking to someone until you know that you have their attention.
  • Don’t turn away from someone that you are talking to.
  • Don’t walk away from someone as you are talking to them.
  • Don’t try to compete with a lot of background noise, such as water running, traffic noise, or background music.
  • Don’t assume that because you see a hearing aid in the ear, that it is actually turned on.

Like everything else in life, we learn to adapt to situations. The person with a hearing disability has to learn to live with the handicap and figure out what is important to hear and what can be ignored. People talking to a person with a hearing disability have to learn how to talk to them so that they are heard and understood.

Loosing one’s hearing is common as one gets older. Some of us started the process when we were younger. The degree of loss will influence a person’s ability to adapt to social situations. I now find social situations difficult when there are more than about four people. Please be considerate when you are in a social situation with a person who has a hearing disability.

Posted on

2021 – A Summary

The second year of the Covid-19 pandemic is coming to a close and I would like to make a short summary of how the year 2021 has been for me. I always have a problem with the dark time of the year and thinking about the summer and the bright time of the year helps me get through the winter months.

Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced a lot of the year 2021, putting restrictions on out-of-the-country travel as well as how much contact we have with others. My husband and I got our first two vaccines in April and May, and a booster vaccine in December. My son has also received his two vaccines. My husband and I have also received the regular flu vaccine, which we get every year in the fall. As a result, we have not been sick in 2021.

My son started a new job in January 2021, but as home office was required at the beginning of the year, he has had his home office at our house most of the year. From August to November he commuted to his job in Oslo but also had some business trips to other cities in Norway. At the end of 2021, there is again a requirement of home office where possible so he will be staying with us into 2022.

With both my husband and I in a high-risk group (over 65 years of age), we have reduced the amount of contact we have with others and have been avoiding large gatherings. We have social contact outdoors (in the summer months), restrict the number of people we meet regularly, and enjoy our own company. My husband, who is a lot more social than me, will also join online meetings and has contact by phone with those living in other parts of the world.

Crafts

I always have more than one project on the go and I have been good at finishing the projects that get started. Though I may have a few projects in my head that never get off the designing paper, most projects get carried through to completion.

Sewing projects include 2 shirts for my son, 4 shirts for my husband, 2 nightdresses for myself, 5 tops for myself, curtains for the house, pillow cases and a long patchwork runner for the bedroom.

Two covers for bedside tables. There was also a long runner, with the same basic pattern made to protect the tops of the dressers. Project was completed in October 2021.
A shirt made for my husband who likes bright colours and patterns in his clothing. I originally started making shirts for him as the sleeves were never long enough. I have now been making him all his shirts for many years.

Knitting projects include two sweaters for my son, a toque, scarf and mitts set for my son, at least 6 pairs of socks for my husband, 2 pairs of socks for a friend, several children’s sized socks to be given away, one sweater and trousers outfit for a three-year old, a sweater for a five-year old, a sweater for myself and a baby blanket that was given away. Some of these projects were designed to use up yarn that had been sitting around for quite a while.

I like making sweaters and this one is a typical Norwegian pattern. This was made for someone turning 70 years old and given away as a birthday present.
Knitting socks are easy and don’t take nearly as long as a sweater. These ones were for my husband. This yarn comes with the stripes in it, so it is just knitting round in circles and measuring to get the right length. Once the first one is knit, I make sure that the second (or third or fourth) one has the stripes in the same place.

Walks

Walking is the type of exercise that I enjoy best. I no longer spend a lot of time walking in shopping centres as my need to buy things is reduced. I have a house full of things that are not used and try to restrict my purchases to things that are going to be used. So the walking that I prefer is out in nature. Thankfully, the municipality of Inderøy has many well-marked trails. Each year new ones are marketed through the program “Inderøytur”. I go on walks that I have enjoyed before, and find new ones that get added to my “like-to-do-again” list. I have one girl-friend that I go walking with quite regularly and I also go for walks with my husband and my son. I like walking by myself, and I enjoy walking with others.

All the walks have a designated parking area and the trails are marked so that it is easy to find where one is going. I went to 32 of the walks in 2021, some of them more than once. The one that is closest to home I went to 27 times. We took these walks between the 9th of May and the middle of October.
View from Storlia, in Mosvik. This picture was taken 2021.06.27. This is a walk that I like to do at least once a year and in 2021 I actually did it twice as I took my daughter on this walk in November when she was visiting. It is a steep climb and must be done on a clear day as the views are spectacular from this height.

Food preparation

I make dinner almost every day. There are occasions when someone else does the cooking, but we eat out very little. I enjoy making meals and I enjoy baking. Food preparation is a meaningful activity every day of the year. I try to plan a variety of meals and also try to restrict the use of salt and sugar in my food preparation. This results in my baking almost all of our bread products (reduced salt content important here). I bake a lot less cakes and cookies than I used to and try to make healthier desserts than I might have a few decades ago. I also prioritize non-meat meals about twice a week. We use dairy and egg products so are not vegetarians at all, though I love my vegetables.

Gardening

I enjoy being outdoors, particularly from April to October, and I have a large garden that is never as well looked after as I would really like. I’ve always had the attitude, “what gets done, gets done” and try not to worry about what doesn’t get done. As I age, I find I have limits to the energy that can be used on gardening which is a very labour-intensive activity.

This year I had new planters on the terraces. I lined them with appropriate cloth, then filled them with dirt and plants. I was very pleased with the results.

I used a lot of yellow pansies in my planters this summer. They continued to flower until the snow came in November, then they got eaten by the deer. Lobelia and geraniums gave a variety of colours, but they do not last as long. The key to pansies is to not let them go to seed by cutting off the flowers that are finished and making sure they don’t dry out.

During the summer of 2021, my son took on the responsibility for improving the lawn, digging up a large section of mostly weeds, putting down new dirt and seeding with lawn seed. He has put in a lot of work and the lawn has seen great improvements the two summers that he has been living here.

Painting

I enjoy painting things, though I am not artistic in that way. It tends to be walls or furniture that gets painted. Outdoor painting is restricted to when the temperature is above +10 degrees Celsius, but there were several things that were done in 2021. One outside wall of the house was painted and the new trellis at ground level was painted. There were also some small outdoor painting projects completed. There was little indoor painting done during 2021.

Both the wall on the upper floor was painted and the trellis at this level was new and painted. You can also see some of the garden in this picture.

Reading

I read a lot, mostly when knitting. This year it has been mostly fictional romances, often set in the early 1800s but by modern authors. I record new books read on www.goodreads.com, where I have recorded 78 new books read in 2021, but I also reread favourite books by authors I have read over decades and these would be in addition to what has been recorded online.

Travelling

Travel in 2021 has been restricted by the pandemic. I am actually not nearly as interested in travelling long distances as I was when I was younger. The major trip taken this year, was a one-day car trip to Trondheim and then coming home through Selbu. I have written a separate blog about that trip. In addition we took a day’s drive to the western end of route 755 (the main road that passes near us and crosses Skarnsund Bridge) making a lot of stops along the way. You can read about both of these trips on previous blogs (Selbu, Route 755).

However, we were fortunate to receive a two-week visit from my daughter in November. She was on her way to a business meeting in London, and was able to visit us on the way. She normally lives in San Francisco, California, USA. It was nice to have both children home at the same time and the siblings were able to have time together on their own. Though my daughter had to work while she was here (“home office” with online meetings with people in many places in the world), we were able to go for walks and spend precious social time together.

Otherwise, travel has been by watching television shows and documentaries at home. No fuss, no insects, no unwelcome heat or humidity, just the comfort of our own living room. One can see a lot of different places this way, one hour at a time, and avoid all the inconveniences of international travel.

Writing blogs

I am not much of a writer, but I have undertaken to write a few blogs in 2021, mostly about the walks I have taken in Inderøy. I like to include a lot of pictures as I feel that they illustrate what I have been doing better than using a lot of words. All pictures that I use in the blogs are taken on my cellphone. Any exceptions to this will include an acknowledgment of photographer. So far I have published 36 blogs in 2021 and this one will make number 37.

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.