Trichloroethylene Exposure Linked to Parkinson’s

- Adam Clare

Finding the source of Parkinson’s disease has been a challenge for many researchers and this year we’ve gotten a lot closer to figuring it out. There are multiple ways that one can get the neurodegenerative disease with no one factor being the deciding one. This year alone researchers have found common enzymes in people suffering from Parkinson’s and are in the process of generating faster detection methods for people so treatment can start earlier. Just this week it was revealed that a widely used chemical called trichloroethylene (TCE) has a strong association with people who have Parkinson’s- so much so that it looks like exposure to the chemical can actually cause the disease.

The report, published today in JAMA Neurology, involved examining the medical records of tens of thousands of Marine Corps and Navy veterans who trained at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina from 1975 to 1985. Those exposed there to water heavily contaminated with TCE had a 70% higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease decades later compared with similar veterans who trained elsewhere. The Camp Lejeune contingent also had higher rates of symptoms such as erectile dysfunction and loss of smell that are early harbingers of Parkinson’s, which causes tremors; problems with moving, speaking, and balance; and in many cases dementia. Swallowing difficulties often lead to death from pneumonia.

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Humans Should Rank Higher Than Drivers

- Adam Clare

In North American cities the disease known as Car Brain infected urban planners and today we are dealing with the side effects. Cars have been purposefully prioritized over other forms of transportation from walking to gondolas to the point that some people think they “need” cars. What we ought to do in the 21st century is bring rational thinking into urban planning by gibing space to sustainable, future proof forms of urban transportation solutions. For now we need to change the conversation to be about people moving instead of car moving.

In theory, creating alternatives to driving is a win–win situation. The number of cars on the road increases each year, creating more traffic and pollution. Building more lanes for vehicles only makes things worse, while investing in transit and dedicated infrastructure for bicycles improves safety and reduces congestion. Driving makes people miserable, exacerbates climate change, and causes thousands of preventable injuries and deaths each year. While witty replies were piling up under Bennett’s tweet, three people were hit by a car in the Downtown Eastside; days later, a woman was struck at an east Vancouver crosswalk and was critically injured.

The case for modifying roads to encourage other modes of transport makes itself. We should all want fewer cars on the road as well as alternatives to spending hours of our lives (around 144 hours, or six days, each year, according to recent data from TomTom) inching through rush-hour traffic. So why don’t we? Because infrastructure, of all things, elicits not rational responses but deeply emotional ones. Changing our roads, even slightly, feels like an exhortation to change ourselves, because how we get around says a lot about who we think we are.

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Don’t Move to Paradise, Make a Paradise Instead

- Adam Clare

A man in New Zealand thinks it’s better to create your own piece of paradise than to move to a natural one and just taking it over. Back in 1987 Hugh Wilson moved to a neglected part of the country where the natural environment was not doing well and has since turned it into a veritable paradise. He did so by respecting and encouraging native plants and using a permaculture approach to cultivation. It’s great work and very impressive! Not only did he set out to save a small part of the world, he also wants to encourage everyone to make a small piece of natural paradise in their own space too.

The incredible story of how degraded gorse-infested farmland has been regenerated back into beautiful New Zealand native forest over the course of 30 years.

Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve, on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula, and its kaitiaki/manager of 30 years, botanist Hugh Wilson. When, in 1987, Hugh let the local community know of his plans to allow the introduced ‘weed’ gorse to grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate farmland into native forest, people were not only skeptical but outright angry – the plan was the sort to be expected only of “fools and dreamers”.

Now considered a hero locally and across the country, Hugh oversees 1500 hectares resplendent in native forest, where birds and other wildlife are abundant and 47 known waterfalls are in permanent flow. He has proven without doubt that nature knows best – and that he is no fool.

Dads That Stay Home Are Less Sexist

- Adam Clare

beards

Moms and dads both can take parental leave in the majority of countries around the world, and researchers have found in places that men take parental leave that the dads become less sexist. Turns out when dads are the primary caregiver for their children learn more about the gendered roles our society place on people. As dads get exposed to the realities of childrearing and other classic domestic duties they get more understanding. So if you’re thinking about becoming a parent make sure to take as much time as possible to be with your little one.

Research shows that sexist attitudes are deeply ingrained, with adverse consequences in the socioeconomic and political sphere. We argue that parental leave for fathers—a policy reform that disrupts traditional gender roles and promotes less stereotypical ones—has the power to decrease attitudinal gender bias. Contrasting the attitudes of new parents who were (and were not) directly affected by a real-world policy reform that tripled the amount of fathers’ leave, we provide causal evidence that the reform increased gender-egalitarian views in the socioeconomic and political domains among mothers and fathers, and raised support for pro-female policies that potentially displace men among mothers. In contrast, informational, indirect exposure to the reform among the general public produced no attitudinal change. These results show that direct exposure to progressive social policy can weaken sexist attitudes, providing governments with a practical and effective tool to reduce harmful biases.

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Cutting Construction Carbon

- Adam Clare
the suburbs

Building buildings takes a lot of energy and once done the built structure continues to consume energy and have a carbon footprint. Many options exist to reduce the carbon impact of buildings from the point of construction all the way to deconstruction, but the industry still needs to adopt these measures. Things are getting better though as more people in the industry understand how to think about the carbon footprint of the construction industry.

Take Whole Life Carbon Perspective

By plotting the impact of a building over time, we observed the tensions between upfront impact strategies and long-term solutions. Our class first employed a “whole life carbon” approach to assess emissions associated with the construction and performance of a range of façade systems, discovering that the bulk of an enclosure system’s upfront emissions stem from window systems reliant on carbon-intensive framing materials, such as aluminum or polyvinyl chloride. Last fall, we scaled our investigations up to the whole building, finding that the actual operational data uniformly eclipsed modeled emissions, and that the balance between embodied and operational emissions varied significantly across the campus’s buildings.

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