Let's Row Together
What is Missing? We contemplate why this matters and what we can do. Thinking about women's health and birds' existence. Why should we drink Bird Friendly coffee?
It’s hard to see what’s missing.
After all, until women started to use their public voices to point out that they had long been missing from medical studies, treatments like prescription drugs and mental health therapies were created with only men in mind. That our symptoms of a heart attack differ from men’s and we menstruate, then move through menopause as we age, were absent from our nation’s publicly funded medical research.
That we’ve been missing matters.
This week neuroscientists finally showed evidence of what women in menopause have been telling their doctors for decades: their brains often feel like fog has settled in. “For decades, some doctors have told women that the brain fog, insomnia and mood swings they experience in midlife are ‘all in their heads.’ Now, emerging brain research shows they’re right — but not because women are imagining it,” observed this story this Washington Post with the headline: ‘Menopause brain’ is real. Here’s how women’s brains change in midlife.”
Another Post story this week told women that they should no longer fear using hormone replacement drugs to ease the symptoms of menopause.
And this same week, 57-year old actress Halle Berry shouted “I’m in menopause” on Capitol Hill as she pleaded for Congress to earmark $125 million toward research on menopause – a natural state of being for women. Yet, as Berry pointed out, many doctors still know little about menopause and won’t speak about with their patients.
It should not surprise any of us that this bill requesting funding for research and education about menopause is backed in the Senate by 17 members, all of whom are women - three Republicans, 13 Democrats, and one independent.
Until my lifetime women were missing from Congress, too.
What is Missing?
Maya Lin’s Fifth and Last Memorial
Maya Lin, luminous artist, architect, sculptor, creator and environmentalist, made visible the truism about us not seeing what is missing in her Earth Day lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in April. I was visiting New York on the Friday afternoon she spoke. After visiting art exhibits with Claudia Wallis, my Time magazine colleague from decades past, she reminded me that Lin would speak soon in a separate wing of the museum.
Claudia was keenly aware of my climate activism when she came across Lin’s lecture on MOMA’s website and flagged it for us to attend. So, off we went, walking around the block to enter through a different MOMA door.
The focus of Lin’s talk, we were told, would be “the increasing challenges of living on a damaged planet and the momentous cultural shifts required by the climate crisis.” Soon after we were seated, Lin’s first image filled the screen and her engrossing show-and-tell presentation was underway. Realizations of her artistic visions came into view as Lin described how nature and life forces inspire and guide her evocative creations that are embedded in and rise out of natural surroundings.
By displaying a microscopic image of bone marrow that inspired her, Lin refreshed how I’ll see the outer shell of this building that I frequently go by in Cambridge, MA.
Maya Lin worked with Toshiko Mori and Cannon Design to create the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Cambridge, MA
“In my work,” Lin wrote in her 2021 essay about how art can lead us to a sustainable future, “I find myself intrigued with trying to forge a connection back to the natural world—to maybe get you to pause and listen and take a closer look at what is all around us, things you may not have looked at or listened to since you were a child.”
As I listened to her speak at MOMA, I thought about how her art, while voicing her hope, also speaks to Lin’s fear of how human actions are endangering our home, the Earth – and have already pushed too many species to extinction.
Ghost Forest, Lin’s 2021 installation in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park. “The trees in Ghost Forest were suffering from of salt water infiltration and were being cleared as part of regeneration efforts in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, an extremely vulnerable site of the Atlantic coastal pine barrens ecosystem which encompasses more than one million acres of Atlantic White Cedar Trees killed by salt water inundation due to climate change. This exhibit is part of Lin’s What is Missing? initiative. Photography: Andy Romer, courtesy Madison Square Park Conservancy
“What is our relationship to nature in the 21st century with climate change being one of the greatest threats that we face, and becoming so much a part of how we see the world?” Lin asked in her 2021 essay, “And how should we be rethinking our relationship to this world?
This core question courses through Lin’s work, though nowhere more directly than in her provocative project “What is Missing?” Lin’s interactive creation – I urge you to spend time here – invites us to explore challenging dimensions of thought before she gives us a way to share what we see as missing. She prompts us to ask “why?” before offering us actions that, if taken, will help us avoid losing what is precious to us and what sustains our lives on Earth.
WHAT IS MISSING? PRESENTS A CONNECTIVE MAP HIGHLIGHTING MEMORY, ACTION, AND HOPE.
Like her natural creations, Lin’s What is Missing? digital exploration is minimalist in design and overflowing with possibilities for thought-changing engagement.
What is What is Missing? Let’s have Lin tell us:
“Imagine a memorial not as a fixed static monument, but as a work that could exist in several mediums and in multiple places simultaneously.
“What is Missing?, my fifth and last memorial, focuses attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime if we do not act to protect them. The project exists formally as both permanent sculptures and as temporary media exhibits; but it also exists virtually— as a website, whatismissing.net, which acts as a nexus for the entire project.
I have known for almost twenty years that I would end the Memorial series with a memorial focused on the environment. Ever since I was a child, the ability of one species, mankind to alter so drastically life on the entire planet has weighed heavily on my thoughts. I cannot think of a greater threat to us and to every other species on this planet than the current crisis we are facing today concerning species and habitat loss and the threat of human-induced climate change."
“What is Missing? is about nature and our relationship to it, in hopes of presenting new ways to see a different outcome for us and for our planet. … The website takes me to the final dematerialization of the form of a monument. From my first Memorial, which I have never seen as an object but rather a pure surface with the names becoming the object, a mirror that gave us darkly a separation between our world, and now the surface of a screen that each person explores privately yet one shares and explores and contributes a memory that you become a part of this growing online collective memorial. And whose goal is to not just make us aware of these losses but to give us direction and hope for what can be done to help.”
It remains her unfinished work. Lin continues to build out this website in ways that her deep research guides her to do.
Sounds from nature accompany our contemplation of What is Missing?
Most notably we hear the sound of birds.
Many birds have been forever quieted due to extinction brought about human actions.
This Wednesday morning a local birder taught me about an easy action that each one of us can take to prevent the extinction of even more birds.
Purchase our coffee that has a Bird Friendly tag. Google to learn where to buy it.
And then ask your local coffee shops and cafés to switch to bird friendly coffee. That’s what I did yesterday
Here’s why: The coffee plant is not native to South or Central America, so birds and animals that are native to this area are not nourished by the coffee plant’s presence. Additionally, as corporations like Starbucks cut down native forest habitats to build coffee plantations, they endanger the lives of migratory birds, among other animals, that eat and live in these forests.
Migratory birds fly to the United States, where we depend on them for the well-being of our agriculture. The work they do in eating insects and bugs is essential. Without these birds, our lives - starting with our food supply – are endangered.
So what’s different about growing bird friendly coffee.
It’s grown in the shade, not in direct sunlight.
Coffee plants are integrated into the natural ecological system.
Research was conducted by Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center Since 1970, bird populations in the U.S. and Canada have declined by 29%, or almost 3 billion birds, and this rapid decline signals a widespread ecological crisis.
What makes a coffee “bird-friendly”? [From the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies]
”Bird-friendly coffee is shade-grown under a multi-layered canopy of trees. Unlike sun-grown coffee, which is cultivated as a monoculture on land that has been cleared, this ensures greater biodiversity and the quality habitat that birds need. It should also be grown without the use of chemical pesticides, as these are harmful to the environment and kill insects that birds eat. In fact, the birds provide natural pest control. A bonus is that coffee aficionados say shade-grown coffee has a better flavor because beans ripen more slowly than sun-grown coffee, resulting in a richer, more complex flavor.”
In mid-May Pope Francis hosts the global summit, "From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience" at the Vatican. Political leaders in my home state, Massachusetts, will be there.
Will yours?
So glad the. It’s friendly info resonated with you. Yesterday I shared the story with a salesman in a backyard grill store on the Cape, and is going to change his own buying habit and talk with people at his coffee place. We can do this by sharing and sharing g this simple story.
Risa, I was amazed by all I learned in Lin's lecture and then got reinforced by what read in the Post, and finally by the birder's talk on Wednesday morning. I love when creativity inspires me to think more deeply as much I love it when people give me actionable things I can do to make our world better. I am glad my learning became yours!