he most recent Dartmouth Free Press article ideas blitz was painful to read. “Quizno’s Closed,” read one article proposal. “Does anyone care? Did anyone go there, ever?”

I went there! I care!

Inexpensive dining options are rare in Hanover. Just a few months ago, there were Quizno’s, Subway, Boloco, and the specials at EBAs to choose from. For a guy on the off-campus meal plan, losing any one of these options hurts, and now we’ve lost two. With DDS prices being what they are, everyone should feel the pinch of a cheap lunch spot that’s suddenly and irreplaceably lost.

I went to Quizno’s only once or twice a month, usually with the same friend. The service was a little slow, true, but the sandwiches were good, especially the hot ones. Plus, my dad likes Quizno’s, so it was a nice reminder of home.

I didn’t know the owners of the place, but friends who went to church with them say they’re nice folks. That certainly doesn’t jive with the way The D presented things, giving the restaurant’s former landlord lots of column space to criticize the way both Quizno’s and the now-defunct Carpaccio’s were run. (Really, buddy? These families lose their businesses and you feel compelled to insult them publicly? You didn’t think the loss of their income was enough for them? Nice, pal. Real nice.)

But none of that is why I care about the loss of Quizno’s. Forget the lack of lunch alternatives; forget the D drama. My real problem is this:

What does it say about our town that a full third of its chain stores are the Gap?

Now, I’ve got nothing against the Gap, but it isn’t exactly Target. Middle America does not do its shopping at the Gap. We all know, of course, that Hanover is not middle America, but I don’t think we’re conscious enough of that fact. A former priest of mine once told me that privilege is not a life of luxury; privilege is merely having the option to opt out of the struggle. Children with distended bellies in the Mississippi Delta were stuck in this struggle, but the Freedom Riders who fought for their parents’ right to vote could have turned around and gone home at any point. That’s privilege.

In the’60s, the Hanover Bubble was an information bubble—as rural as this place may be today, it was even more so before cable news and the Internet. Today, we view it as more of a cultural bubble, with the shops and concert venues of Boston so far away. I agree that the bubble exists, but would implore students to view it as something far more important than a simple limit on our entertainment. The Dartmouth Bubble is one of socio-economics. Living in a town of scholars and retirees, where the college’s food workers are (properly) paid a full living wage with benefits, and where fully half the College’s students manage to make ends meet without financial aid, we easily forget the way most of America lives. The median household income in this country is roughly $50,000, and only a quarter of the population have passports. We all know that life at Dartmouth is privileged and set apart, but I think we sometimes lose sight of how much that is true. That is the real Hanover Bubble.

So please, the next time you’re paying $7 for a Food Court hamburger—or, for that matter, $30 for dinner at the Inn, remember how darn lucky you are, and think about how you can give thanks. In the meantime, I’ll be missing Quizno’s.

t’s a strange testament, maybe, to the progress made by advocates of LGBT rights in the last decade: as the movement’s mainstream pours its energies into an ongoing fight for same-sex marriage, longtime gay rights activist Nancy Polikoff has come to find herself in the unfamiliar position of arguing against something with which she has so long identified. As part of Dartmouth’s PRIDE week, Polikoff, an American University law professor, described her stance on the relationship between law, family structure, and the creeping obsolescence of marriage.

Marriage, according to Polikoff, does not deserve its privileged status under the law. Same-sex partnerships, different-sex partnerships, and co-dependent relationships between family members are best suited to assume the legal position now held by marriage. Same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage are not the central issue here.

The problem: an archaic legal definition and system of social benefits surrounding the institution of marriage itself. It’s a position at once intuitive and strikingly forward, an instance in which history runs headlong into the necessity of change.

Polikoff’s logic draws its impetus from social conservatism and, more distantly, from an understanding of what ritualistic and regulatory function was once implicit in marriage. Historically speaking, the social upheaval of the’60s and 70s led some to view marriage as a problem rather than a solution.

On one hand, the change expanded our dialogue regarding nontraditional family structure, bringing the first tentative recognition to both same-sex couples and non-married different-sex couples. Unfortunately, it also produced a social backlash that, as Polikoff noted, quite disingenuously “appropriated the language of social science” in the defense of traditional marriage.

From this conservative reaction came the “marriage movement,” a force that has since infiltrated public debate and worked to characterize any nontraditional family formation as, to quote Polikoff, “social suicide.” Its proponents link the downfall of marriage to myriad social ills by way of questionable social science “research” (nearly all of it since invalidated), and have long constituted a buffer of pseudo legitimacy between the religious right and the political mainstream.

If figures like Polikoff seem almost viscerally disgusted by the mention of marriage, it is easy to understand why. They’ve been on the defensive, for the past several decades, against those who would poison the term by linking it to the most hostile of social agendas.

Arguably, then, “marriage” is too burdened by political and historical context to shoulder the burden placed on it by our modern legal system. Implicit in Polikoff’s rejection of the word is an argument for simply doing away with it—at least in a legal sense.

Yet this claim has so far held little sway with a frustrated LGBT rights movement, one that finds not only the legality but also (perhaps more importantly) the cultural connotation of marriage at the center of its battle for recognition. While civil unions may confer all the legal benefits of marriage, they nonetheless stand in a sort of separate-but-equal limbo relative to traditional marriage. For many in the queer community, marriage promises a deeply resonant form of social and cultural recognition.

Polikoff counters that we’ve been domesticated by the discourse surrounding marriage—manipulated, really, by a wedge issue. Both marriage and civil unions, she argues, have come to represent a form of imposition, one that necessarily discriminates against those who would otherwise choose not to pursue them but must do so out of legal necessity.

The reality of hospital visitation, legal privacy, the payment of work-related and survivor’s benefits, determinations of housing eligibility—a host of practices whose importance flows from human partnership rather than legal recognition—all revolve around a historical deadweight that gives marriage unnecessary practical weight. It’s an embarrassingly archaic legal model.

Perhaps most interestingly, Polikoff envisions the legal replacement of marriage altogether, bypassing both the gay marriage debate and its accompanying culture war, particularly in states that now have constitutional bans on any legal recognition of same-sex couples. Her approach, after all, is inclusive of homosexual relationships but it does not center the argument around them. To the extent that cultural conservatives may find the redefinition of marriage threatening, they will find poor recourse in arguments demonizing homosexuality.

It’s big news that 49 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll, support gay marriage. We might now predict that homosexuality, and by extension gay marriage, will follow the road traveled by miscegeny: once considered mortally taboo and so profoundly base, interracial relationships are now essentially interwoven with our conception of basic rights.

Yet whether a desperately needed redefinition of marriage will follow from the same point of origin remains to be seen. A shift in societal values, however practical, always seems to grind along oh so slowly—especially when it contends not only with internal division but also with a domestic state of affairs that is, ahem, in the toilet.

Sometimes all we can do is cross our fingers.

he Obama administration is once again showing that its renewed commitment to policy based on legitimate science is not just rhetoric. On April 17, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued two landmark findings, based on climate science, that increase the regulatory scope of the Clean Air Act and provide the justification for further action to curb the production and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The first report, the “Endangerment Finding,” states that greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” This finding is based on scientific evidence that the buildup of six major greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)—in the atmosphere contribute to air pollution that may endanger public health and welfare. The second report entitled “Cause or Contribute Finding” proposes that the combined emissions of CO2, CH4, N2O, and HFCs into the atmosphere from new motor vehicle engines contribute to climate change.

These two proposals are regulated under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (CAA) as a follow-up to the Supreme Court ruling on April 2, 2007, in Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007) that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the CAA. After a petition for rulemaking was filed by more than a dozen environmental, renewable energy, and other organizations, the Supreme Court held that the EPA Administrator must determine whether or not climate science provides reasonable certainty that emissions of greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles contribute to air pollution that may endanger public health or welfare. Under the CAA, “welfare” refers to impacts that include effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, man-made materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, climate, personal property, transportation, economic values, and personal comfort and well-being. The scientific evidence comes primarily from assessments made by the U.S. Climate Science Program, the National Research Council, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The scientific consensus is that record-high atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases cannot be explained by natural variability alone, but are the result of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Warming of the global climate is well-documented through increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, retreating glaciers, and rising global average sea level. The effects of climate change include, but are not limited to, heat waves, wildfires, poor air quality, changes in precipitation that include droughts and floods, sea level rise, water pollution, decline in agricultural productivity in some areas, and species extinction. Even without a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the effects of global warming will most likely increase during the next century and include more extreme weather events such as hurricanes.

The impacts of climate change on public health are causally linked to changes in temperature, declining air quality, and extreme weather events. Unless climate change is mitigated, there will certainly be public health crises related to the warming planet. For example, in 2003, Europe experienced one of the hottest summers on record, leading to the deaths of 15,000 people in France. Changes in air quality due to regional ozone pollution aggravate asthma, increase the risk of respiratory infection and can bring about premature death.

Unpredictable and extreme weather will lead to further health crises. As Hurricane Katrina showed us, the U.S. is certainly not immune to the health impacts of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, and fires. These events are expected to increase during the next century, resulting in poor water quality, the spread of disease, physical injury, and death. These events are likely to displace populations and damage property, which will lead to social instability.

Finally, changes in temperature and precipitation are expanding the potential ranges of organisms like disease-carrying ticks. In December of 2008, Didier Raolt, a professor at the University of Marseille School of Medicine in France, published the results of a study that linked a rise in temperatures to the increased likelihood of dog ticks biting humans instead of dogs.

In addition to public health concerns, the government needs to address the adverse impacts climate change will have on public welfare. Rising sea levels will exacerbate storm surge flooding and shoreline erosion in coastal regions. In the Western U.S., the melting snowpack will limit water availability for agricultural, municipal, industrial, and ecological uses. Water scarcity coupled with rising temperatures may increase the frequency and intensity of forest fires, insect outbreaks, and tree mortality. As temperatures change, many species of animals will be displaced to northern latitudes and to areas of higher elevation. Our oceans serve as a sink for carbon dioxide, but increasing ocean acidification has led to a decline in marine productivity and the loss of vast areas of coral reef. The study also includes the humanitarian, trade, and national security effects of climate change as a threat to international public welfare.

These two findings are significant not only for their inevitable effect on future climate policy but also because they legitimize the idea of sustainability—the ability to meet our current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs—in public policy discourse. They also assert the need for environmental justice and give credence to environmental security concerns. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said that in making these rulings, the agency took into account the disproportionate impact climate change has on the health of the poor, the very young, the elderly, those already in poor health, the disabled, those living alone, minority communities, and indigenous populations.

Incorporating environmental justice concerns into the Clean Air Act recognizes that current environmental protection and land use policies do not equally protect all people and all communities. Dr. Robert Bullard, Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, made national headlines in the late’80s for a study that found that race, more so than other socioeconomic variables, is the determining factor for where toxic facilities such as landfills, chemical plants, and incinerators are located.

In a follow-up study, “Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty:’87-2007,” Bullard found that communities of color are still bearing a disproportionately poisonous burden. For example, when toxins such as mercury enter the environment, they can accumulate in the fatty tissues of animals such as fish that are then consumed by humans. Due to their meat-based diet, the bodies of indigenous people in the Arctic regions have some of the highest concentrations of toxic chemicals ever recorded. The breast milk of women living in Greenland and the high Canadian Arctic should, according to scientific standards, be declared toxic waste. Not only are low-income communities and communities of color experiencing the adverse effects of climate change on their health and welfare more directly, they are the least able to do anything about it; they are often ignored or left behind as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina illustrated.

The EPA also acknowledged the national security implications of climate change. In 2007, eleven retired U.S. generals and admirals from the Center for a New American Security signed a report stating that climate change “presents significant national security challenges for the United States” from the escalation of violence, displacement, and competition that arises
from the increasing scarcity and exploitation of natural resources.

Local and state governments have, thus far, been the leaders in pushing for and creating legislation and regulations that address global warming pollution and climate change. In 2007, the California Air Resources Board filed a request for a waiver from the EPA to implement the California Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards that call for a 30 percent cut of global warming emissions by 2016 from all new motor vehicles produced in the state beginning in model year 2009. The EPA denied the waiver and California, along with fourteen other states, filed a lawsuit against the EPA. The “Cause or Contribute Finding” acknowledges that 24 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from on-road motor vehicles and that such emissions contribute to climate change and are regulated by section 202(a) of the CAA.

These proposed findings now enter a 60-day public comment period before the EPA can issue its final findings. While both findings do not include any proposals for specific regulations, they represent a crucial first step in bringing progressive municipal and state-level policies, such as renewable portfolio standards for utilities and tailpipe emissions standards for motor vehicles, to a national level. These findings also pave the way for more comprehensive climate legislation that President Obama hopes will include some sort of a cap on carbon emissions. Several bills have already been drafted and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a vote on them by Memorial Day.

ow many swine flu jokes have you heard in the past week? How many of your friends had to be convinced that their feeling under the weather was not swine flu? The disease popped up, seemingly from out of nowhere, and ever since, the media has been riveted on reporting every second of the potential pandemic. Constant parallels were made to the’18 flu epidemic that killed millions of people worldwide, and the pandemic protocols put in place under the Bush administration were tested.

In addition to all this, pandemic fears have hit close to home when several Dartmouth students were reported as having “probable” cases, even though we found out that they did not test positive in the end (though we’re still waiting on one). Despite the drama, the outbreak still seemed somewhat remote, not leaving a lasting imprint on the Hanover bubble as of yet.

For some students, however, the experience was much more immediate. A group of Dartmouth students on the Spanish Language Study Abroad program in Cholula, Mexico were eyewitnesses to the swine flu outbreak. I spoke with one of these students, Justin Lee ’11, about his experiences.

Dartmouth Free Press: When did you first realize that you were witnessing a potential pandemic?

Justin Lee: We were actually on an excursion to Cuetzalan when the outbreak first happened. Cuetzalan is a small town with a lot of indigenous people, and we were staying at a hotel run by indigenous women. We’d heard a few rumors floating around about the swine flu, but were just relaxing and walking around, going to waterfalls, and taking in the sights. On the bus ride back to Cholula our professor Francine A’Ness told us that Dartmouth was considering making us stay in Cuetzalan longer, but decided to move us back to Cholula where there was better healthcare and less tourism. Only when I later got on my computer and checked the news did I realize how big of a deal the media was making it out to be.

DFP: Could you describe the experience?

JL: After reading up on the swine flu, to be honest I didn’t really think it was that big of a deal. The first day back in Cholula, nothing really changed. It wasn’t until our prof told us that the president of Mexico was closing all universities for a week that it really impacted us. We also started noticing more masks around, and that night all the restaurants and bars were closed down. It was a little creepy around town with nothing open. Behaviorally, not much changed. People were talking, but no one really seemed all that worried. I remember the taxi drivers in particular were adamant that it wasn’t a big deal. Someone told us the masks weren’t all that effective at preventing the spread of the disease, so few of us bothered with them. I just washed my hands a little more often than usual and that was about it.

DFP: What did you do while waiting for Dartmouth to make a decision when classes were no

longer in session?

JL: I don’t recall the exact timeline, but we had only stayed in Mexico for a day or two after classes were cancelled. We were given work to do, but I spent most of that time Skype-ing people back in the states. Since everything was closed down, the group ended up getting together to watch season 2 of Lost at someone’s house. After that, we flew to Houston and everyone went to their respective homes in the states.

DFP: Was Dartmouth in contact you with throughout the experience?

JL: Yes. We had emails coming at us from our professor, and someone from Dick’s house called us every day the week we came back home to make sure we didn’t have swine flu. We just got word today that we’ll be headed back up to Dartmouth for a two-week “intensive” course in Spanish.

DFP: How did you feel when you were told you had to leave the program? Do you think Dartmouth made the right choice?

JL: I was pretty bummed out about it, but we had a tight group and everyone was trying to make the best of it. But I understand and agree with Dartmouth’s situation. Especially in the early stages when not much was known, I think it was a definite possibility that things could’ve easily escalated and if we’d stayed we could’ve been trapped in Mexico due to border restrictions. That’s ignoring the possibility of one of us getting sick. Also, since Mexico basically shut down, there wouldn’t have been much for us to do if we’d stayed anyway. Dartmouth took really good care of us. They chartered a private plane (since commercial planes are incubators for disease) a day or two after they decided to fly us out, probably at great cost to them and took care of all our flights home.

DFP: What are you going to do now to get credit for the term? Do you think it’s fair to make you finish the LSA coursework in Hanover?

JL: We’re heading back to Hanover for a few weeks of intensive coursework. I think it’s fair, especially since I get no work done at home and would’ve felt gypped by “distance learning.” Dartmouth is also taking care of the flights, so I have no qualms there. Plus, we get to be here for Green Key weekend, and that’s all that really matters.

DFP: Anything else you want to add?

JL: I think the American media blew this thing out of proportion. If you look at it objectively, it really hasn’t infected that many people, and the death rate is on par with the normal flu. Swine flu also responds to antivirals. Shutting down a country’s economy, and some of the stunts other countries have pulled (Egypt killing 300,000 pigs, Russia and China banning pork imports from the Americas, quarantine of hotel in Asia) are absurd. The media coverage when I came back to the states was more dire and extreme than what I saw in Mexico. Sure, it’s better to be safe than sorry, but I think there is a limit to that, and I think a lot of parties involved definitely crossed that line.

I felt like a leper when I came back; I heard that someone sitting next to one of my friends changed seats when they heard my friend had just come back from Mexico. There is an inherent danger to hybrid flues since the general population has no immunity (you should check out Mary Guerinot’s Bio 11 class on Infectious Diseases because it talks very specifically about these types of cases), but people shouldn’t let unjustified fears dictate what they do.

That being said, the general response by the United States, Mexico, and even Dartmouth (excluding the media) was admirable. I feel that we are better prepared now to face these kinds of threats than we’ve ever been before.

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