Meme's

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5. Above-field microphones pick up the sound clearly and provide a real in-the-huddle feel. After Julian Edelman's 5-yard run on third-and-1, in which receiver Danny Amendola did a nice job as a lead blocker of sorts, Amendola was kicked out of the huddle by a fiery Tom Brady. "Get out!" Brady can be heard yelling, as the Patriots called on a power package with offensive tackle Cameron Fleming as a tight end on the next play. I wouldn't read anything more into that than what it is -- Brady in command and making sure the correct personnel is on the field. As receivers have said in the past, you have to have thick skin to play with Brady.

http://espn.go.com/blog/boston/new-england-patriots

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Boston Globe Article

Hiking while black: The untold story
Why is the American story of nature and conservation so white? Carolyn Finney uncovers a complicated history.
By Francie Latour
 |    June 20, 2014

Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images

The Giant Sequoia at Sequoia National Park in California.

Each year, California's Sequoia National Park draws a million people to commune with nature and be dwarfed by some of the largest living things on earth. Visitors pass trees recognizing presidents and heroes of war: Washington, Sherman, Lincoln, Grant. A summit trail bears the name of John Muir, known as the father of our national parks.

But few Americans know the name or story of the man who carved this national park into being: Charles Young, a black Army Captain born into slavery in Mays Lick, Ky. It was Young, with his segregated company and crosscut saws, who transformed Sequoia from an impenetrable wilderness to a tourist mecca. In 1903, with teams of mules hitched to wagons, Young's mountaineers became the first to enter the Giant Forest on four wheels.

When we think of great conservationists, or just ordinary Americans trekking in the outdoors, we don't typically picture black faces. There are reasons for that: Today, more than a century since Young's team opened up Sequoia National Park, blacks are still far less likely to explore its trails. A 2011 survey commissioned by the National Park Service showed that only 7 percent of visitors to the parks system were black. (Blacks make up nearly twice that percentage of the US population.) Latinos were similarly underrepresented.

But if African-Americans don't figure in our notion of America's great outdoors, geographer Carolyn Finney argues, it is also because of how the story has been told, and who has been left out—black pioneers and ordinary folk whose contributions to the land have long gone ignored. Reclaiming those stories, she contends, could have huge implications for protecting our wilderness in the future.

Finney, an assistant professor of environmental science, policy, and management at the University of California at Berkeley, spent years researching African-Americans' connection to natural spaces. In a new book, "Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors," she finds that that connection is rich, but also distinct and fraught—rooted in a history of racial violence and exclusion that sharply limited black engagement with nature. Those barriers, Finney writes, would come to shape our most basic perceptions about who cherishes nature and who belongs in it.

CORBIS

Charles Young of the 10th Cavalry in 1916.

Weaving scholarly analysis with interviews of leading black environmentalists and ordinary Americans, Finney traces the environmental legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, which mapped the wilderness as a terrain of extreme terror and struggle for generations of blacks—as well as a place of refuge.

The book comes as the Park Service and other conservation agencies struggle to respond to America's changing demographics and diversify the ranks of visitors and employees. In doing so, they are increasingly turning to a national movement of black outdoor enthusiasts spearheading initiatives that celebrate African-American connections in nature. But to Finney, who serves as chair of the Relevancy Committee for the National Parks Advisory Board, any serious effort to broaden participation in the parks has to begin with getting the history right.

"There's this prevailing myth of black Americans as alienated from nature, as urban, as deeply unattached. Well, I push back on that, because I think we are actually very attached," said Finney, speaking about her work in 2012. "There are people of color who have invested blood, sweat, and tears into the land whose stories aren't acknowledged at all, let alone being recognized as people who care about the environment."

Finney spoke to Ideas from her home in Berkeley, Calif.

IDEAS: Describe your relationship to nature as an African-American girl growing up in New York.

FINNEY:My parents grew up poor in the South. When my father came back from the Korean War, they decided to move north to New York. His sister was living there and came up with two opportunities: He could be a janitor in Syracuse, or he could be a caretaker living on a wealthy estate just outside the city. That's where he and my mother moved. The estate was 12 acres, with a pond and lots of fish, vegetable gardens, snapping turtles, deer, geese....I can remember finding the strangest worm, knowing it was out of place and wondering how it got there. I had a favorite rock, which was carved out in the middle, and I would ride it like a horse. And of course I watched my parents tend to the land. The first conservationists I ever knew were my parents.

IDEAS: How did those experiences begin to shape your views about the relationship between black Americans and the outdoors?

FINNEY: After my parents left and moved to Virginia, neighbors of the estate would send letters whenever something significant happened. In 2005 or 2006, my father got a letter saying that there had been a conservation easement placed on the property. In perpetuity, nothing could be changed and no new buildings could be added. And they were thanking the new owner for his conservation-mindedness. In reading it, I couldn't help thinking, where was the thanks to my parents, who cared for that land for 50 years? That got me thinking about all the people in our history whose stories are unsung or invisible. We don't hear about them because nobody calls that "conservation." They don't fit into the way we talk about environmentalism in the mainstream. So how do we recognize and honor those other stories?

IDEAS: In your book you talk about the stereotype that blacks don't "do" nature. When did you start to bump up against that?

FINNEY: I think the first thing I came up against was just that black people are different, period—that being black didn't fit into the dominant culture's picture of a lot of things I wanted to do. "Black people don't do" fill-in-the-blank. So it makes sense that that would roll right into ideas about black people and the environment. In the late '80s and early '90s, I spent about five years backpacking around the world. And often times it was the Americans who would ask where I was from. Even though the way I am is very American, and I was dressed in backpacker gear and all that, it really messed with their minds that I could possibly be from the US. My presence, in nature, literally colored the way people were able to see me.

IDEAS: Who were some of the African-Americans environmentalists whose contributions surprised you most?

FINNEY: I interviewed so many people with amazing stories I had never heard of, stories I couldn't believe the mainstream environmental movement hadn't picked up on. Like John Francis, who spent 22 years walking across the US and Latin America to raise awareness about the environment. He did 17 years of that without talking! Or MaVynee Betsch, a black woman who gave away all her wealth, over $750,000, to environmental causes. Or Betty Reid Soskin, who at 92 is the oldest park ranger in the country, and who helped to get the Rosie the Riveter National Park on the books. What all of this says to me is the mainstream still has so much work to do to embrace and engage these stories, not just as black stories but as human stories that we can all relate to at a really basic level.

IDEAS: Your book draws parallels between pivotal moments in environmental history and pivotal moments in black history. How are they related?

FINNEY: Well, for example, the Homestead Act of 1862 made it possible for European immigrants to come here and go out West and grab large tracts of land, literally just by grabbing it before anybody else did. And you could just live on it for five years, and build a home and grow food, and it could be yours. That's amazing. And they were the only ones allowed to participate. That land, we know already, used to belong to Native Americans. And black people weren't allowed to participate at all.

 On the heels of that, you have John Muir talking about preservation of the land and the idea of the national parks as these beautiful spaces that are going to be public treasures for everyone, every American....But meanwhile, enslaved people had just gotten freed, were given land, had that land taken away, and then were living under the threat of Jim Crow segregation for all those years afterward.

 That's a real cognitive dissonance: There were words on paper saying these protected spaces were meant for everyone, but we know they weren't really meant for everyone, because everything else that was going on in the country at the time indicated that.

IDEAS:Your book describes recent efforts by the National Parks Service to broaden participation of African-Americans and other underrepresented groups in recreation and preservation. Why does broadening participation matter?

FINNEY: If you're someone who believes in the protection and preservation of a natural space, who's going to do that? It's going to be people. The changing demographics in this country mean that those people aren't going to look like the people from 60 or 70 years ago who were doing it. If you're going to engage people in terms of stewardship and protecting natural spaces, boy, there has to be a big overhaul. You can't talk about conservation without talking about people and difference and access. And making that connection is part of the big challenge.

NPR Story - Seafood

­
'The Great Fish Swap': How America Is Downgrading Its Seafood Supply

July 01, 2014 1:35 PM ET

Listen to the Story

Fresh Air

36 min 24 sec

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hide captionPaul Greenberg says the decline of local fish markets, and the resulting sequestration of seafood to a corner of our supermarkets, has contributed to "the facelessness and comodification of seafood."

Paul Greenberg says the decline of local fish markets, and the resulting sequestration of seafood to a corner of our supermarkets, has contributed to "the facelessness and comodification of seafood."

What's the most popular seafood in the U.S.? Shrimp. The average American eats more shrimp per capita than tuna and salmon combined. Most of that shrimp comes from Asia, and most of the salmon we eat is also imported. In fact, 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat comes from abroad, but one-third of the seafood Americans catch gets sold to other countries.

Shrimp and salmon are two case studies in the unraveling of America's seafood economy, according to Paul Greenberg, author of the new book American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood. Greenberg tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about what's driving the changes in America's seafood economy and why you should buy wild salmon frozen when its out of season.

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American Catch

The Fight for Our Local Seafood

by Paul Greenberg

Hardcover, 306 pages | purchase

Interview Highlights

On what Greenberg calls "The Great Fish Swap"

What I think we're doing is we're low-grading our seafood supply. In effect what we're doing is we're sending the really great, wild stuff that we harvest here on our shores abroad, and in exchange, we're importing farm stuff that, frankly, is of an increasingly dubious nature.

We export millions of tons of wild, mostly Alaska salmon abroad and import mostly farmed salmon from abroad. So salmon for salmon, we're trading wild for farmed. Another great example of this fish swap is the swapping of Alaska pollack for tilapia and pangasius [catfish]. Alaska pollack is the thing in [McDonald's] Filet-O-Fish sandwich; it's the thing in that fake crab that you find in your California roll. We use a lot of pollack ourselves, but we send 600 million pounds of it abroad every year. And in the other direction, we get a similarly white flaky fish — tilapia or pangasius — coming to us mostly from China and Vietnam. They fill a similar fish niche, but they're very different.

On why the U.S. exports the best-quality fish

We only eat about 15 pounds of seafood per year per capita. That's half of the global average, so there's that. The other thing is that other countries really are hip to seafood. The Chinese love seafood; the Japanese, the Koreans — they love seafood. They're willing to pay top dollar for it. We just aren't willing to do so. We want our food cheap and easy.

All of this fast-food commodification of seafood protein — because that's kind of what it is at this point — adds to that general preference for cheap stuff. Kind of in tandem and in league with that is the American tendency to avoid taste. ... Foodies [talk] about flavor and texture and the food movement and that kind of thing, and that's true of about 5 percent of Americans, but 95 percent of Americans really are not so into flavor. ... If we don't like the flavorsome fish — like bluefish, mackerel, things like oysters, things that really taste of the sea — if we don't like that, then we're going to go for these generic, homogenized, industrialized products.

On sending American salmon to China and back for cheap labor

A certain amount of Alaska salmon gets caught by Americans in Alaska, sent to China, defrosted, filleted, boned, refrozen and sent back to us. How's that for food miles? We don't want to pay the labor involved in boning fish and more and more of that fish that used to go make that round trip is actually staying in China because the Chinese are realizing how good it is, much to our detriment. ...

The labor is so much cheaper that it makes the shipping cost-effective. When you ship things via freighter, frozen, the cost per mile is relatively low compared to, say, air freighting or train travel or truck freighting.

On why you should buy wild salmon frozen, not fresh, if it's out of season

It's going to be frozen anyway. I sometimes will go to a supermarket in January and I'll see fresh, wild Alaska salmon sitting out there on ice and I just shake my head at it because I know that if it's January, there's a very little chance that that fish is fresh.

Nearly all of the salmon, when it comes into the processing plants in Alaska, gets immediately frozen. And that's great because if you freeze a fish right out of the water it will be of the highest quality that you can get out of a frozen product. So when you go to the supermarket in January, don't go to the fresh seafood counter for your salmon; go to the frozen bins and get those nice vacuum-packed Alaska salmon things. They're just going to be of higher quality.

On slave labor and the Thai shrimp industry

The largest shrimp producer for us right now is Thailand. ... It turns out, a certain amount of the shrimp that come to us from Thailand seems to be coming to us in part as the result of slave labor.

Shrimp are fed wild fish ground up and turned into meal — trash fish, they're called, just random fish that are trolled up in the South China Sea. It turns out, a large amount of that fish is being caught by boats in which the labor onboard are slaves and that fish gets ground up and sold to Thai shrimp farms.

On the decline of local fish markets

We don't want fish markets in our view shed. We don't want to smell them. We don't want to look at them. So they really have been banished from the center of our cities and sequestered to a corner of our supermarkets.

This is a process that aids all of the facelessness and commodification of seafood. ... Seafood has been taken out of the hands of the experts and put into the hands of the traders, so people really cannot identify the specificity of fish anymore. Because supermarkets rely on mass distribution systems, often frozen product, it means that the relationship between coastal producers of seafood is broken and so it's much easier for them to deal with the Syscos of the world, or these large purveyors that use these massive shrimp operations in Thailand or China, than it is for them to deal with the kind of knotty nature of local fishermen.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/07/01/327248504/the-great-fish-swap-how-america-is-downgrading-its-seafood-supply