[*Neem Hakeem is an occasional feature on health and the environment. See other Neem Hakeem posts and an explanation of the term here.]

Worshiping outdoors is easier than it is inside a building, and playing outdoors is good for your kids’ eyesight.

What in the world do these two things have to do with each other?

The statement on worship is an experience so common that it’s almost a truism.  And there are some powerful reasons for this, rooted in how God created us, how he reveals himself to us in his created world (see, for example, Psalm 19, Romans 1).  It’s a major reason one of my pet peeves is worship centers that have no windows – we’re trying to worship by cutting ourselves off from one of God’s chosen methods by which he reveals himself to us, which is something like trying to regain health with a diet that eschews all fruits and vegetables. [There's a lot more on this in my book - check it out!.]

However, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that the connection between human beings and the outdoors – read, God’s Creation – is much more than how we worship.  We’re hardwired both to function better and in fact to need time in God’s creation in order to be healthy and even happy.  A must-read on this topic is Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods – every parent and anyone seeking to serve children in any capacity, from teachers to pediatricians to youth leaders should be required to read this book.

And – the main point of this post – the evidence continues to accumulate.  NPR had a story yesterday on myopia – near-sightedness – , that included the following surprising comments on the work of  expert Dr. Don Mutti:

For the past 20 years, Mutti has followed a group — from childhood to adulthood — to see who develops myopia. He found something significant: Time spent outdoors during childhood was important.

“If you have two nearsighted parents and you engage in a low level of outdoor activity, your chances of becoming myopic by the eighth grade are about 60 percent,” he says. “If children engaged in over 14 hours per week of outdoor activity, their chances of becoming nearsighted were now only about 20 percent. So it was quite a dramatic reduction in the risk of becoming myopic.”

The story goes on to eliminate reading or other close-up work and exercise as causes.  The work is on-going, but it appears, again, that we – and importantly, our children – will be healthier, happier, and more in touch with God if we just spend time in his world.

So….

Go on – reach for the power button, turn off this computer, and get yourself outside!  [I'll do the sam........]

Garbage in Senegal (Flickr CC License)

The story out of Senegal is absolutely horrifying. A seven year old boy drowns in a garbage bog – that should be enough, but the story goes on to explain that the boy’s entire neighborhood is built on garbage. A swampy area outside of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, Guédiawaye is pretty much built on garbage from the greater Dakar metropolitan area. It’s not that the rest of the population is using this area as a dump – no, the story is stranger than that. In fact, the residents here actually buy the garbage to use as building material:

Garbage, packed down tight and then covered with a thin layer of sand, is used to raise the floors of houses that flood regularly in the brief but intense summer rainy season, and it is packed into the dusty streets that otherwise become canals. The water lingers for months in the low-lying terrain of this bone-dry country.

Garbage is a surrogate building material, a critical filler to deal with the stagnant water — cheap, instantly accessible and never diminishing. The plastic-laden spillover from these foul-smelling deliveries pokes up through the sandy lots, covers the ground between the crumbling cinder-block houses, becomes grazing ground for goats, playground for barefoot, runny-nosed children and breeding ground for swarms of flies. Disease flourishes here, aid groups say: cholera, malaria, yellow fever and tuberculosis. (NYTimes)

The boy who drowned did so because the garbage he was playing on turned out to be floating in water he couldn’t see.

The obvious question here is, ‘Why???’ Why would people, already desperately poor, pay scarce cash for the questionable privilege of taking possession of a cartload of garbage and using it as material in their homes?

The obvious answer is, they have little choice. Like most human beings, these folks are making a rational choice between several bad options. Surely they know garbage is a poor building material at best. That much of the disease they face regularly comes from – or at least grows worse because of – the garbage in which they live. They almost certainly do not know what toxins from the plastic and other chemicals in the garbage is doing to them and to their children, damage to their bodies that they cannot see, but will experience in cancer and other environmental diseases – if they live long enough.

And that’s the tradeoff: They are choosing to take the risks associated with garbage because these seem less immediate than the risk of living with, or in, the water that floods their neighborhood regularly.

We do the same thing, though. My wife recently had major surgery at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, surely one of the most advanced medical centers in the world. And I was struck almost immediately at how difficult it is to be an environmentalist in a hospital: Everything is disposable, from the IV tubing going into her arm to the plastic and foil that every single pill is packaged in. Energy – a hospital is one enormous energy vacuum. We had no need of radioactive materials for our treatment or diagnosis (I don’t think we did, anyway) but I know there’s plenty of radioactivity in certain parts of this medical complex. Even the cafeteria is drowning in Styrofoam. All of these represent significant hazards and risks – short term in the volume of waste that has to be disposed of every single day, long term in the contribution of this complex, and the thousands of others like it, to climate change, accumulation of hazardous waste, and so on and on and on.

But we put it up with it. Why? For the same reason that the residents of Guédiawaye purchase garbage: The perceived benefits (controlling infection with disposable tubing, for example) seem greater than the possible risks. It’s a short term solution that, unfortunately, is no more sustainable than the choices being made in that slum in Senegal.

What might this have to do with “God-centered and green”? Honestly, I’m not sure. Except that the choices we have to make between risk now and risk later, or benefits now and risk later, or some other combination are so complicated and difficult that I can’t see how we can make these choices without God’s help. Ultimately, of course, the solution is to work our way – okay, pray our way – toward a world in which such choices aren’t necessary. A world in which even the poorest in the world will be able to have, or to build houses that are clean and safe and healthy. A world in which there is a lot less garbage because we have learned how to make stuff that can be remade without generating waste. And yes, a world in which a hospital is in fact a healthy place that not only offers the benefits of healing our diseases, but does so in a way that actually heals the land and the community in which it is placed.

This is a tall order, and as much as anything else you could dedicate your life to, it would truly be serving the Lord to be involved in creating such a world. Let’s do it together!

[Cross-posted at http://sustainlane.com)

[Almost anyone who has spent time in Pakistan or parts of India recognizes the term 'neem hakeem' - means a doctor who isn't quite up to par.  Thus one of the most popular folk proverbs in the area:  A 'neem hakeem' is a danger to your life...]

Today’s ‘Neem Hakeem’ lesson is via a story on NPR over the weekend.  People are dying – literally – because of their headphones.

Strangled by the cords as they doze in class, maybe?  Victims of brain cancer because of electromagnetic radiation?  No – run over by buses, trains and other large and noisy vehicles:

Lisa Carolyn Moran, 20, a University of North Carolina exchange student from Scotland, was listening to an iPod while jogging when she stepped into the path of a bus in Chapel Hill last May. Joshua Phillips White, 16, was wearing earphones and walking on a train track in Cramerton, N.C., last November when a freight train hit him from behind, killing him; police said he apparently didn’t hear the locomotive approaching. Alan Eaton-Chandler, 17, was killed under the same circumstances just last Tuesday when he was hit by an Amtrak train in Comstock Township, Mich. And Vicky Baker, 39, was talking on her cell phone when she was struck and killed by a train in Albertville, Ala., in December.

There’s more than one lesson here:

First, the obvious:  If we want to live, turn down the volume!  Although Beethoven is not the worst thing to be listening to when your time comes (so an ad campaign in San Francisco on this topic) one doesn’t really want Beethoven to be hastening one’s time.

No, there’s a more important, deeper lesson here, and it comes from the humble Twinkie, that iconic symbol of junk food.  Few would argue that Twinkies and the like are bad for your health.  But how are they bad?  Two ways:

First, the stuff that they are made of – preservatives that allow them to “last” for months and years – isn’t very good for you.  In fact, it’s probably terrible for you.  Put it this way, the ingredients that kill the bugs that would ‘spoil’ the product and shorten its shelf-life do so because they are poisons for the bugs:  Are they going to do anything to extend your own life.

But there’s a more insidious effect of Twinkies:  They represent ‘empty calories’.  Your body thinks they are food, and makes you feel full.  Every poison-filled – excuse me, ‘preservative laden’ Twinkie that you eat means there is a nutritious, healthy, life-extending piece of food that you are not eating.  There’s a lot of research available that suggests that many of our modern health issues (obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure) are due to this substitution of empty calories in place of nutritious food.  [A good source of an overview of this situation is Michael Pollen - 'Omnivore's Dilemma' and 'In Defense of Food'.]

So what’s this got to do with headphones?

The obvious danger is in the NPR story – not paying attention can get you killed.  Just like the preservatives in the Twinkie can do unknown damage to your body.

The less obvious danger is the equivalent of those empty calories.  If I spend my entire day listening to my own soundtrack, think of all the things I’m not listening to (besides the buses and trains trying to run me down):  Birds, wind in the trees, other people walking beside me.  We need to be in touch with God’s creation – its part of what makes us human.

So listen to the Neem Hakeem:  Turn off the music for a while and listen to the music of God’s world.  You’ll be just amazed… !