Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Celebrants Offering More Meaningful Funerals

July 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Diane Meily planned her own funeral as she lay dying of cancer. She met with the mortician at her bedside, chose her own casket and videotaped a farewell message. She was a high school teacher; it was meant to be an inspiration for her students. She envisioned a personal, uplifting service to convey the spirit of her life, capped by the playing of her favorite song, Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up." But Meily's pastor of 15 years had his own ideas about her funeral. In a call with the family following her death, he turned down several of her last requests, including the song. Meily's family ... Read More

Can Cigarette Butts Be Recycled?

June 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Nearly 2 billion pounds of trash is thrown on the ground every year in the form of cigarette butts — 4.5 trillion cigarette butts, composed largely of filters made from cellulose acetate, a non-biodegradable plastic. But what if all these cigarette butts had a value? What if you could trade them in for cash? Would they then disappear from streets, beaches and parks? Curtis Baffico, a San Diego stock trader who moonlights as an environmentalist, asked himself these questions and decided to create a recycling system to try to answer them. Baffico raises money on his website, Ripplelife.org, ... Read More

Pol Pot’s Legacy: Cambodian Refugees in Poor Health

June 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Sobin weeps and curls tightly into herself, as if she's trying to disappear into the folds of her overstuffed sofa. Moments later, scowling, she plants her feet and shouts in Khmer. She shakes her fist at someone who isn't there. The objects of her fear and rage are the Khmer Rouge soldiers who forced her into slave labor as a child on what was once her family's farm. Convinced that the Khmer Rouge continue to look for her, Sobin, who lives in a small city in the Northeast, asked that her last name not be used in this article. During her captivity in the 1970s, Sobin was surviving on a ... Read More

Save the Birds — With Doppler Radar

April 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Toothache Tree

After slogging through knee-deep water, past palmetto thickets and trumpet vines dangling from the treetops, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Mike Lange stops short. He signals toward a gnarled live oak, straight out of the magical charm of The Shire, its trunk the width of a car. Crumpled resurrection ferns line its branches, waiting to sprout in green abandon with the next rains. Nearby, the trunks of an elm and a water hickory wrap around each other like a sculpture of intertwined lovers. Lange is rightly proud of these woods. Over the past 20 years, he has been largely ... Read More

Can Biosecurity Go Global?

April 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A tall, modest academic with graying temples, Ren Salerno was happily toiling away in obscurity at a small biological threat research program at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., "studying issues nobody really cared about," he recalls. Then the attacks on Sept. 11 burst his academic bubble. As one of the few experts on the security of biological agents, Salerno was called to Washington, where, as soon as he arrived, he met with Deputy Secretary of Agriculture James Moseley, a man with a lot to worry about. Some of the greatest bioterror threats are zoonotic pathogens — ... Read More

The Farm School: Growing Organic Farmers

March 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

No one arrives at The Farm School by accident, because it's not around the corner from, or on the way to, much of anything. You drive increasingly narrow, winding and erratically paved roads through the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts until the only signs are historical markers for battles that old Yankees fought against the British or Native Americans. But Emily DeFeo knows exactly where The Farm School is. "Over the rainbow," she says with a gentle smile. DeFeo is one of 14 students paying for the privilege of spending a year living on and working a 183-acre organic farm. ... Read More

Search Dogs Seeking Fake Disasters to Sniff

February 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Search Dog Founation Bios

Head up, nose twitching, a yellow Labrador named Nino bounded into action, zig-zagging across a jumble of rubble to try and catch the scent of a live human in the air. Following the directional signals of Jim, his handler, Nino headed for a 75-foot-by-25-foot area filled with mounds of debris containing wood, sheet metal, rebar, pipes, a wrecked car, bicycles, a mailbox, the remnants of an old bird pen and a horse trailer, all arranged to evoke the aftermath of homes demolished by a tornado. Nino followed the "cone of the scent," honing in on the area where the smell was the strongest. His ... Read More

Protecting the Child Beggars of Senegal

February 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Emerge from your train, bus or plane in Senegal, and you could see them: the children with big, pleading eyes who approached with hands outstretched and palms upturned, carrying large cans around their necks to collect donations. They lingered at major intersections, bus stops and outside the market. They were boys in dusty clothing, often barefoot and often skinny. And if they happened to pass you, be you foreigner or native, they stopped and held out a hand. Some people ignored them. Some people gave a coin, some powdered milk or a few sugar cubes. I first spied Samba Balde and his buddy, ... Read More

Turning Failed Commercial Properties Into Parks

December 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Miami-Dade Neighborhood Conversion

In the language of urbanism, "greenfields" usually means rural land at the metropolitan edge, where suburbia metastasizes. "Brownfields" are former industrial sites that could be redeveloped once they are cleaned of pollution. "Greyfields" — picture vast empty parking lots — refer to moribund shopping centers. Recently another such locution was coined: "redfields," as in red ink, for underperforming, underwater and foreclosed commercial real estate. Redfields describe a financial condition, not a development type. So brownfields and greyfields are often redfields, as are other ... Read More

Art and Alzheimer’s: Another Way of Remembering

December 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

In 1995, painter Hilda Goldblatt Gorenstein — whose nom d'art was "Hilgos" — was placed in a Chicago-area nursing home because of steadily worsening dementia. Lawrence Lazarus, then a Chicago psychiatrist specializing in treating the elderly, remembers that she was withdrawn and sometimes agitated — so much so that Lazarus, a former president of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, prescribed a mild tranquilizer. She had stopped painting several years earlier, as she entered the great isolation booth that is Alzheimer's. But one day her daughter, Berna Huebner, asked her ... Read More