Deforestation

Cultural practice involving removal of forest vegetation by cutting and burning to provide land for agriculture, grazing, settlement, industry, commerce, roads, etc., or by harvesting timber for building materials or fuel, usually in the form of charcoal. Loss of topsoil, braided streams choked with rocks and debris, habitat destruction, the systematic extermination of wildlife, and catastrophic floods are the inevitable results. In addition, in tropical areas where the above conditions are common, once the vegetative cover and its nutrient supply are removed, the freshly cleared oxisols harden to a rock-like state, making cultivation or re-establishment by natural vegetative all but impossible. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, that process has constituted one of the Earth’s most critical environmental problems. More than half of the rainforests in Africa, 45 percent of those in Asia, and 40 percent in Latin America have disappeared under the onslaught of spreading “civilization.” The rate of forest destruction is nothing short of breathtaking: globally about 55 acres are lost every minute, more than 80,000 acres disappear each day, and 30 million acres are wiped out each year. And those rates are not decreasing. Almost all of that deforestation occurs in the rainforests and open woodlands of the tropics (and certain sub-tropical regions). Not counting a few protected areas within reserves and parks, at the rates listed above all moist tropical forests could be long gone by 2050, except for isolated areas in Amazonia and the Zaire Basin. If no governmental conservation steps are imposed, countries such as Costa Rica, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka are likely to be stripped of all their tropical forests between 2010 and 2015.

Deforestation is brought about by the following activities.

• Clearing of forests and woodlands to provide small-scale agricultural plots by local people, a process variously known as slash and burn, shifting cultivation, or swidden-fallow agriculture.
• Clearing of forests and woodlands to provide large-scale agricultural land for monoculture plantations, a variety of cash crops such as soybeans, or cattle ranching.
• Commercial logging of woods such as meranti, teak, mahogany, and ebony, etc., a process that removes trees, destroys or degrades habitat and ecosystems, and opens up previously forested land for large-scale agriculture or grazing.
• Felling of trees for firewood, charcoal, and building materials; the heavy lopping of foliage for fodder and heavy browsing of saplings by domestic animals like goats.

Tropical forest can contain up to 300 species of trees per hectare and many dozens of other species of herbs, shrubs, lianas, and epiphytes as well as thousands of insect species and many other animals. When the trees are cut all that diversity disappears and will not return. To compound the problem, the infertile soils of the humid tropics can not support agriculture for more than short periods. Consequently, local people engaged in slash and burn agriculture are forced to move on every several years and clear more forests in order to maintain the levels of production needed for survival. It should be noted that the swidden agriculture practiced by indigenous peoples of places like the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazonia is much less destructive than that of more contemporary farmers living at the edge of the forests. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon typically use a rotation system featuring a short cropping period, a long fallow period of ten years or more, and cut only the tallest trees while planting various crops in nearly concentric circles out from the plot’s center. That system may be ideally suited to the tropical environment. But the success of that type of swidden agriculture depends on low population density. When population rises so does food demand. Consequently, the fallow period must be shortened, resulting in eventual destruction of the forest habitat or loss of the soil itself through erosion or ferrallization (accumulation of indissoluble iron and aluminum oxides in the B-horizon). In this case, the environmental degradation blamed on swidden agriculture is thus not a direct result of an inappropriate system, but of overpopulation that leads to overexploitation of the land resources.

In addition, everyone should be aware of the disastrous failures large-scale conventional agriculture and monoculture plantations in Amazonia, such as Fordlándia, the 2.5 million acre rubber project of Henry Ford that never produced a rubber harvest and turned into an absolute fiasco, or Daniel Ludwig’s Jari forestry project, in which hundreds of millions of dollars were thrown away. Much of the soils of Amazonia, the Orinoco River valley, and the Zaire Basin are inherently inappropriate for large-scale agriculture and the monocultures that are typically planted after forest clearing are particularly prone to attack by erosion, insects, pests, plant diseases, or fire.

The inevitable consequences of deforestation include alteration of local, regional, and global climates through disruption of the carbon cycle (it is estimated that deforestation contributes one-third of all CO2 releases to the atmosphere caused by human actions); disruption of the hydrologic cycle through dramatic decreases in the evapotranspiration process, which causes hotter, drier climates; increased soil erosion through loss of protective vegetative cover; silting/choking of rivers, lakes, and impoundments as a result of soil and regolith erosion; flooding as a result of forest clearing, soil erosion, and dramatically increased surface run-off; extinction of native rainforest species through habitat destruction and alteration (between 50 and 100 tropical forest animal and plant species become extinct each day); and the loss of the world’s last surviving intimately resource-based indigenous (tribal) cultures.

Recent research has determined that significant alteration of existing tropical rain forests occurs at the edge in what are called forest fragments. Trees in these fragments, which are positioned in close proximity to cleared land, experience considerably higher stress than their interior counterparts and as a result die at rates up to three times faster. Those trees are replaced with fast-growth, short-lived species having low wood density and directly affects habitat and faunal diversity. In 2005, using 25 years of research conducted by the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, now administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, William F. Laurance and colleagues predicted that as much as 42 percent of forests in the Brazilian Amazon region would be severely degraded or destroyed by 2020. For an informative and directly pertinent read, see Michael A. Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Real World Problem #1: Rainforests are places where certain trees have immense commercial value, either for rubber or as exotic hardwoods on the international lumber and veneer markets. Consequently, when either indigenous people or well-intentioned outsiders attempt to protect the rainforests and local residents from exploitation by the timber industry, grazing interests, or wealthy landowners, violence is a typical result. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chico Mendes (his full name was Francisco Alves Mendes Filho), a Brazilian rubber tapper, union leader, and environmental activist played an important part in the foundation of the National Council of Seringueiros (rubber tappers and extractive laborers). His passion was the creation of extraction preserves that would guarantee sustainable use and integrity of rainforests and also protect the poor seringueiros from ruthless exploitation by landowners. As a labor organizer he achieved international support for the struggle of the seringueiros against wealthy landowners and indirectly against the Brazilian federal government, which was reluctant to act owing to the political pressure brought by the landowners. In 1987 he received the “Global 500” award from the United Nations for his environmental activism. In December 1988, only a few days before Christmas, Chico Mendes was shot and killed in his home in Xapuri, Acre, Brazil, for opposing the destruction of the rainforest by a group of rich and powerful landowners, two of whom were prosecuted for his murder by the Brazilian government and convicted.

Real World Problem #2: In February 2005, Sister Dorothy Stang, a 74-year-old Catholic missionary, was shot to death by two hired gunmen in the Amazon state of Pará, Brazil. A naturalized Brazilian citizen, Strang had spent more than two decades defending the rainforests of Pará State and their desperately poor residents from rich and powerful loggers and ranchers. Lawlessness has long been common in the Amazon River region of central Brazil, where wealthy and politically powerful lumber companies and large-scale ranchers, backed by bands of armed thugs, ensnare poor workers in an endless cycle of debt and wage slavery that is widely practiced today in developing nations.

Real World Problem #3: In June 2014, a group of biologists and other eco-scientists published research (see reference below) that demonstrated that the effects of deforestation include how efficiently aquatic ecosystems function and deliver services that are vital to humans. Those effects in particular concern fish biomass production. Healthy forests produce far more fish while reduced forest cover results in reduced food web productivity. Although people who do not fish might think little of those findings, since many oceanic fish species use deltas, mangroves, brackish coastal lakes, and saltwater marshes as nurseries, those findings are of considerable significance.

Real World Example: Approximately 90 percent of the nation of Haiti was once covered by lush tropical forests. Today, less that two percent of those forests remain. As a result of the large-scale deforestation, torrential rains associated with tropical storms and hurricanes have washed the topsoil downslope into the ocean, leaving the land unsuitable for anything but marginally productive, small-scale agriculture. Much if not most of the western part of the Dominican Republic bordering Haiti and nearly the entire country of Haiti have been denuded of trees and woody plants by desperately poor Haitians, turning the landscape into a virtual desert devoid of topsoil, choking the rivers with soil, rocks, and debris washed from the increasingly bare slopes into the stream channels until the once tropical forest landscape resembles a desert. Worse yet, flooding caused by Hurricane Francis in the late summer of 2004 resulted in the deaths of well more than 2,000 Haitians, destruction of hundreds of settlements, and wide-spread violence as survivors fought each other and armed gangs for scarce food resources and uncontaminated drinking water. For a series of on-the-mark photos of deforestation, see http://www.solcomhouse.com/nasarainforest.htm.

Author’s Note: One recently documented instance of the destruction of an entire civilization because the people systematically deforested their environment was published in 2009 by researchers at the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima, Peru, and the University of Cambridge in England. The researchers found that the Nazca people of western Peru — justly famous for their huge line drawings on an arid plateau that are only completely visible from the air — set the stage for their demise by deforesting the Ica Valley, about 120 miles south of Lima that was once a riverine oasis capable of supporting many people, allowing a huge El Niño-fueled flood to roar down the western slope of the Andes and devastate agriculture and settlement in the Valley about AD 500, a disaster from which the Nazca never recovered.

Reference
Tanentzap, Andrew J. Erik J. Szkokan-Emilson, Brian W. Kielstra, Michael T. Arts, Norman D. Yan, and John M. Gunn. 2014. Forests fuel fish growth in freshwater deltas. Nature Communications 5, 4077 doi:10.1038/ncomms5077; published 11 June 2014. Available at: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140611/ncomms5077/full/ncomms5077.html

Julius Caesar and Modern Politics

Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. Men willingly believe what they want.

Is it any surprise that something Julius Caesar said more than 2,000 years ago resonates today? The above quote is a great example. To put Caesar’s idea another way, people’s beliefs are shaped largely by their mindsets, not by objective facts. Perhaps a more instructive way of looking at what this quote means is through the lens of what has been happening lately in politics: People freely and without question accept lies, half-truths, or intentional misstatements if that accords with their ideology or worldview. Perhaps that explains, at least in part, why conservatives and liberals cannot engage in meaningful dialogue and also why science has taken such a beating from conservatives and some liberals.

To confirm that assessment all you have to do is read the comments following a newspaper article or column that addresses a current political issue. A great example is what people thought of Clint Eastwood’s speech at the last Republican Convention. Conservatives found it energizing and on-target while progressives regarded it as rambling and verging on pathetic. All too few looked at the speech from an objective, analytical view point to identify its weaknesses and strengths in assessing the effectiveness of its message.

If we look at the way science has been buffeted in the past several decades, with conservatives attacking evolution, climate change, and sustainability, the same pattern prevails. Although nearly every single biological research scientist in the world embraces evolution as the most explanatory theory of the historical life development process, conservatives are unrelenting in their opposition. If you don’t believe that statement, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening with regard to the writing and publication of science text books for middle- and secondary schools, and here you better be thinking Texas.

In other words, a great deal of conservative opposition to evolution and climate change is not based on science but on ideology, as Caesar predicted. Not that progressives are blameless in that regard. Noted examples include liberal biases against genetically modified foods, geoengineering as a solution to climate change, and new types of nuclear power (such as thorium).

But, in all honesty, the scales are nowhere close to being close in this matter, despite the biased coverage in news media. Over the past several years numerous social scientists[i] independently analyzed the U.S. conservative movement’s challenges to environmental problems and found that the environmental skepticism controversy stems largely if not entirely from concerted efforts of a powerful political movement composed of right-wing foundations, conservative think tanks, and wealthy right-wingers such as the Koch brothers. No such organized or systematic attacks by liberals on science have been discovered.

It is important to note that the peer-reviewed research by the social scientists mentioned above concluded that the promotion of skepticism and denial as a key tactic of the anti-environmental counter-movement has been coordinated by conservative think tanks and was designed specifically to undermine the environmental movement’s efforts to legitimize its claims via objectively obtained (scientific) evidence.

So, what we have is an innate human weakness that colors how we think, how we react to information, and how we make judgments that has been systematically used by the conservative political movement to bolster support and to attack their liberal opponents. As a result, public understanding of science and scientists has been undermined by intentional misstatements, half-truths, and blatant misrepresentations that constitute the boldest kind of well-organized deception.

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[i] See Boykoff, M. T., & Boykoff, J. M. 2004. "Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the US Prestige Press." Global Environmental Change, 14(2), 125-136; Dunlap, Riley E., Chenyang Xiao, and Aaron M. McCright. 2001. “Politics and Environment in America: Partisan and Ideological Cleavages in Public Support for Environmentalism.” Environmental Politics, 10(4):23-48; Dunlap, Riley E., and Peter J. Jacques. 2013. “Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection.” American Behavioral Scientist, 20, 10: 1-33; Gauchat, Gordon. 2012. “Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.” American Sociological Review 77: 167-187; and Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press among others.

Why Living Responsibly Is Important

For many people the term sustainable is just another buzz word that will soon fall from favor. For some of those who hold conservative political views, it is a liberal-socialist conspiracy sponsored by the U.N. to deny individual American property rights. But on-the-ground evidence argues against both views. The National Security Agency, CIA, and the U.S. Defense Department regard sustainability as a critical national security issue. Consequently, the DoD has directed every branch of the military to actively address those concerns. In addition, over the past several decades, local, state, and federal agencies as well as private businesses have worked independently and often together to shape development patterns, identify constraints and opportunities, and create workable plans to assure critical sustainability needs will be addressed and cities will be able to revitalize themselves in ways that are more environmentally, socially, and economically responsible.

The most common definition of sustainable development is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” That definition was prepared in 1987 by the UN Brundtland Commission and recognizes that continuation of today’s status quo of maximizing economic production and ignoring other critical factors could lead to environmental catastrophe and socioeconomic collapse. The principal insight of the Brundtland Commission was that economic production must be integrated with ecological goals to protect natural environments and equity goals to minimize poverty and injustice. Thus, sustainable development weaves together the three strands of economy, environment, and justice to confront the challenges of out of control growth and unjust social conditions while stabilizing and enhancing the environment on which all life depends.

At first glance, the sustainable development concept seems simple enough. But even people who think sustainability is a good thing do not agree on how it can be transformed into real world actions.

Skeptics like me, who intensely dislike the term sustainable, point out that most advocates for the concept ignore the real and very difficult to resolve conflicts between the three goals: resource conflicts between economic development and environmental protection; property conflicts between social justice and economic development; and economic development conflicts between environmental protection and social justice. They wonder how those conflicts will be resolved in a world where neither species/habitats nor poor people contribute to election campaigns or have seats at the tables where critical political decisions are made. Not to be cynical, but politicians the world over take special care of those who put them in power and slip money into their pockets.

Many activists maintain that the goals of social justice and environment will always be the weak links in the sustainability chain, honored by flowery verbiage but unsupported by meaningful actions. They point out that society has failed in the past to address equality or to protect the environment. And today, millions of political conservatives regard liberty as having far greater moral-ethical value than equality and believe that humans have every reason to exploit nature to the fullest since that is our “God-given” right.

Others, and I count myself in this group, characterize the term as vague rhetoric that can be twisted and molded to meet the needs of powerful groups that hold opposing views of sustainability, such as conservation organizations and natural resource corporations. Still others question inclusion of the environment as a goal of equal standing, demanding to know which environment is indicated: today’s highly damaged, human-modified landscape or some earlier, and presumably more pristine, example? In other words, what is it that gets sustained?

Perhaps one of the sharpest criticisms of sustainability points to the many difficulties of pretending we know what will be important for future generations. After all, did the people living in 1913 know with any certainty the challenges facing people living in 2013? So, how can we say we know what people in 2113 will need to have productive and fulfilling lives? Plus, who knows what marvelous technological innovations lay just over the horizon that could make the lives of future generations easier and more fulfilling than ours. And thus entirely change the meaning of sustainability and making present actions meaningless or, worse, counter-productive.

Despite the many valid criticism of the sustainability concept, we live in a world where species are becoming extinct faster than at any time in recorded history, the warming climate is resulting in drought estimated to last many decades, the oceans are acidifying at truly dizzying rates, and water resources are shrinking while human population is projected to grow to about ten billion by 2100 with concomitant demands on food and energy resources. Therefore, being able to make sure human culture extends into the future has become a challenge people ignore at their peril.

Call it what you wish, only by implementing national policies and enforcing regulations that aggressively address our profligate, consumption-driven way of life that has resulted in widespread pollution (including CO2), sharply reduced natural habitat, and the loss of biodiversity will we have taken steps in the right direction. The time to start those actions was before the turn of the century, but, if we start now and work hard to live responsibly, our Western culture might have a chance of surviving. If we don’t start now, it’s a real crap-shoot.

English Is Soooo Strange

I was born in the City of St. Louis and learned to speak English at my mother's knee. From a very early age I learned to love reading and writing and took to my native tongue as a fish does to water. But, as an adult I came to realize that English is one truly wacky language. I didn't fully realize how wacky until I studied Spanish in college and found out in the first class that each individual letter of the Spanish alphabet is always pronounced the same way. Over the years that observation became increasingly important as I thought more and more about American English.

 As an example, what about the way certain letters, like “i” and “y”, are pronounced: ally, by, lie, and sky? It may be easy for Americans but what about the poor folks learning English as a second language? As soon as they figure out what’s going on someone asks them to pronounce the “y” in actually, crazy, happy, and only. So, why isn’t the “y” in “by” or “sky” pronounced like the “y” in “actually” and “only”? And what about those always strange homonyms like cite (to refer to), sight (vision), site (location) or bough (branch), bow (violin), bow (gesture) or eye, aye (agreement), and I? You can almost hear the desperate cries: “Please, can someone make sense of this dumb shit language?”

That process of reflection eventually led (or is it lead?) me to wonder about strange English words and the way we use them. I’m not talking about obscure words, like rheology or tergiversation. Nor do I mean foreign words that have been bootlegged into English, like hors d'oeuvres or weltschmerz.

I mean words we use in everyday situations but seldom, if ever, consider their essential strangeness. Words like reckless. I mean, what is a reck and how do you do without it to become reckless? That brings to mind another question. If you’ve never had a car accident, does that mean your driving record is wreck-less? And if you are listening to that conversation how are you to know the difference between wreck-less and reckless in terms of driving? And while we're on the topic of pronunciation, why isn't gone pronounced like bone? That’s strange English in action.

Did you ever wonder why Americans say vis-i-ted or start-ed but then say park'd and smil'd? Why do some people say be-lov'd and others be-lov-ed? Which is right and why is the “e” before the “d” silent in so many cases? Confusing is the English word for it. For sake of brevity I’m not even thinking about discussing all those silent letters in English, as in climb, hour, business, and island. That’s another column.

Just about now you may feel nonplussed, which means bewildered and unsure how to respond. That word theoretically comes from “not plussed” although “plussed” itself is not a recognized English word. It's almost enough to make you feel unruly, which means wild or uncontrolled. Supposedly, ruly means neat and orderly but in all my years I've never seen it used that way or spoken in a sentence. “One look at his desk tells you he's a ruly sort.” No way, or as my younger friends would put it, NFW.

If you know someone who's learning English as a second language you've certainly heard the complaint: Does this *&%#$^@ language have rules or do you have to memorize every single blinkety-blank word? But at least one thing's for sure. If my granddaughter's English teacher tells her one more time that it's pronounced drown'd instead of drown-ed I'm going to give him an up close and personal demonstration in the nearest swimming pool.

Legacy of the Founding Presidents

For the purposes of this essay and in recognition of the formative roles they played in American history, let’s call the first five Presidents of the United States the Founding Presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. It may surprise some that John Adams was the only Founding President who never owned human beings. The other four owned slaves before, during, and after they served as President. Of the four, only Washington set his slaves free upon his death, or slightly thereafter in accordance with his will.

It is safe to say that the Founding Presidents personally regarded the “peculiar” institution of slavery as troubling for moral and political reasons. But Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe are thought of by many today as hypocrites because they worshiped at the altar of liberty and equality while owning black people and never publicly acknowledged the humanity of blacks or the immoral contradictions of slavery in a country dedicated to freedom. Although they recognized the conflicts generated by white ownership of black slaves with respect to public/political rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”), they purposely turned their backs on resolving those conflicts. So much for self-evident truths and the courage of their convictions.

For four of the five Founding Presidents the public rights of all to liberty were trumped by individual white property rights, wealth, self-interest, and status. Because the very existence of their world and their personal fortunes depended on enslaving blacks, they elevated money over morality. In contrast to the actions of those four Founding Presidents, John Adams, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Rush, and Aaron Burr were politically very active in creating the new nation, never owned slaves, and opposed slavery.

Monroe, Jefferson, and Madison even favored an “out of sight out of mind” approach of ridding the nation of its moral-political problem through endorsing the shipping of emancipated slaves to Africa. In other words, they wanted emancipation to equal deportation. They most likely missed the irony of “repatriating” people to areas they had never been since by that time all or almost all blacks, slave or free, had been born in America and knew next to nothing about Africa. Those three Presidents may also have missed the hypocrisy of deporting blacks who were legally free while they personally owned slaves.

Today, Americans are faced with a perplexing dilemma. How do we celebrate the many contributions of our Founding Presidents in creating the country in which we now live and fail to acknowledge that their hypocrisy and morally flawed judgment led to enormous social costs, including 625,000 Civil War deaths and the many hundreds of thousand blacks who died enslaved?

Contrary to what some historians today propose in their attempts to gild the Founding Presidents’ reputations, it wasn't enough for them to believe in private that slavery was intrinsically evil. Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison proved thought itself is ineffective by continuing to own slaves until they died and by refusing to free them in their wills. What those Founding Presidents did was to enforce the principle that property rights and self-interest were far more important than morality and human rights. To paraphrase Mathew 7:16: You shall know them by their actions.

America, Land of Immigrants

We had a death in the family this year. My wife’s uncle had been the last of his generation. His death at age 88 made me think about our often tenuous links to the past. That reflection sent me to my file cabinet and a folder labeled Ernst-Cundiff Genealogy.

I found the information sadly incomplete and that day started tracking my family roots. Among the things I found were dates of births, marriages, and deaths. But, thanks to my younger brother, who had done a yeoman’s job tracing the German side of our family tree before he died, I also found some fascinating material.

Our great-great grandparents, George and Franziska Ernst, emigrated to the U.S. from Baden-Baden, Germany, in the mid-1840s. They arrived in St. Louis around 1847. By the 1870s, George’s occupation was listed as laborer and porter. Records show that the couple lived with other German immigrants in the 1300 and 1400 blocks of North 12th Street in various boarding houses that must have been modest indeed. Later U.S. Census Bureau records show that the buildings in that area were without toilets and indoor plumbing. The occupations of their sons were laborer, carpenter, machinist, painter, and barber, indicating those apples did not fall far from the tree.

Those humble beginnings led me to think about the immigrant experience in America. Like nearly all immigrants, my great-great grandparents wanted to improve their lives. They also were brave and adventurous, leaving their homeland for a country where the language was unlike their own, little else was familiar, and no family was around to cushion their falls when they stumbled.

My grandfather told me how difficult life was for our immigrant ancestors, partly because their English was heavily accented and partly because they came to this country with few skills and distinctly minor financial resources. But opportunity was there and make the most of it they did.

The struggle for other immigrants was even harder. Asians were treated very harshly and fought for generations to become accepted. Asian-American students now score so well on ACTs and SATs that annually a lop-sided number qualifies for admission to top-ranked universities. The language and culture of Jewish immigrants in the late 1800s were so foreign to Americans that they were at first thought to be mentally inferior and suffered considerable discrimination. Today, Jewish Americans are disproportionately represented in the ranks of scientists, medical doctors, attorneys, and businessmen.

Although many politicians pander to nativist sentiments, we must never forget that America is a great country solely because of hard working immigrants with names like Hakeem Olajuwon (NBA star born in Nigeria), Cesar Millan (the Dog Whisperer born in Mexico), Madeleine Albright (U.S. Secretary of State born in Czechoslovakia), I. M. Pei (world famous architect born in China), and Subranhmanyan Chandrasekhar (Nobel Prize-winning physicist born in India).

It turns out that my son taught me a great deal about the immigrant experience. He has been in the restaurant business for nearly twenty-five years. Today he is a regional manager for a national restaurant chain. From him I learned all the kitchen workers in restaurants he manages are Hispanic and nearly every one of them works two full-time jobs; several also work additional eight hour shifts on Saturdays and Sundays. Like their brothers and sisters who are migrant farm workers, they work eighty to 100 hours each and every week doing arduous jobs for modest wages. How many natural-born Americans can match that fierce drive to succeed?

Naturally, we want people who emigrate to the U.S. to fulfill the legal requirements. But how do we treat fairly those who came here out of desperation to gain a better life through hard work and determination even though they came illegally? How do we acknowledge their dignity and essential contributions to this country?

My immigrant ancestors fled Germany and Ireland because they were determined to improve their lives. America opened its doors of opportunity to them. Surely, we can find a way to open that door to the current wave of hard-working immigrants and their children, even if they are here illegally.

Paula Deen Is Getting Railroaded

Make no mistake, my spirited defense of Paula Deen has nothing to do with accepting racial or ethnic or sexual pejoratives as appropriate. They obviously are not. Period. My problem is with the questions she was asked and the knee-jerk responses her probably honest replies have generated.

Last month, when questioned under oath by an attorney she was asked if she had used the N-word. “Yes, of course,” Deen replied, and then added, “It's been a very long time.”

Her answer should have been, “Hell, yes!” Could any white or black person over age sixty deny saying the word, nigger? Get real. While in elementary school every one of the kids I knew recited the very same counting rhyme to choose a person to be "it" for games. Please note that the rhyme below is 100 percent accurate.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a nigger by the toe.
If he hollers, make him pay
Fifty dollars every day.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

In high school we were required to read Mark Twain’s, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and were also required to discuss in class his use of the term “nigger Jim” and his liberal use of that heavily freighted word throughout the book. In college English Lit we were required to read Joseph Conrad's, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus': A Tale of the Sea. Think none of us in that class ever said “nigger” aloud during those discussions? And what about reciting your favorite rap lyrics while driving alone in your car? Think the nigger word never appears in those lyrics? Or maybe you've never listened to and discussed with your friends Richard Prior's great records, like That Nigger's Crazy and Bicentennial Nigger, or his stand-up routines in which he used the nigger word countless times. And what about the famous hip-hop, gansta rappers NWA? Don't tell me white persons never said their name: Niggaz Wit Attitudes. Please, please, please don't bullshit a bullshitter.

Deen should have told the lawyer she could not respond to such an obvious and open-ended trap without clarification or without being able to provide context in her answer. How was the word used and when it was used could be of tremendous importance. When she said that it had been “a very long time” did she mean five years or fifty-five years? Context in her case is critical. But not to the attorney who asked the question or to people calling for her head.

I personally do not know if Deen is a closet racist, overt racist, repentant racist, recovering racist, or never was a racist in the first place. And if she is of the repentant variety why is she being persecuted for past sins? Who out there can cast the first stone? Step forward, please. What I do know is she has been shamelessly railroaded.

What most white people have to come to grips with is we all, almost without exception, have been adversely affected by racism. Whether we fell under its pernicious influence or struggled against it throughout our lives is a critical question. It's also a question Deen was never asked and thus was never able to answer.

As an old white guy, I have said the word, nigger, many times in 70 plus years of life in a great many contexts. But never once did I use it to disparage a black person. Never once in my presence have I tolerated its use as a pejorative. I actively detest racial pejoratives in ordinary conversation. But, if I had been asked the same questions as Deen, I might have responded the same way even though the contexts in which the usage occurred were innocent. Should I be condemned for my use of the word?

Paula Deen has been.