Eating Meat & Christian Ethics, and BPA is scary

Caricature of me drawn by Emily Ruppel

Two of my latest pieces are... drum roll please...

• The American Scientific Affiliation's First Symposium on Eating Meat and Christian Ethics - I wrote up this summary of a symposium I was so happy to find (given my interest in this topic) after my attendance at my first ASA meeting. I didn't even blog about it did I? Well it was held in Naperville, Illinois, outside Chicago, and was a great conference where I connected with some truly amazing individuals who are world-renowned scientists (at Princeton, MIT, NASA, and more) and also Christians. The article in the newsletter includes a cute caricature of me with braids by Emily Ruppel, the ASA's new Director of Communications and a cool chick!
  
  Here's the first paragraph of the article:
  

  The ASA held its first-ever symposium on the Christian ethics of meat consumption on Saturday of the 2011 conference. As a first-time conference attendee, and as someone who recently committed to avoid factory-farmed meat, I was thrilled and surprised to see this on the agenda at a Christian conference. I had recently published an essay about this very topic, but my editors removed the one paragraph in the essay that discussed the long history of Christian thought on vegetarianism and avoiding meat (and there is one, surprisingly).

  
  
• Prenatal Exposure to BPA and Sexually Selected Traits in Male Mice. Environmental Health Perspectives. Sept 2011.
  
  This was my first article covering bisphenol A (BPA), a polymer that is an endocrine disruptor and used in everything we eat - it lines cans of veggies, it is in cash register receipts that are on that fax-type paper, it is in bottles we drink from... It's in plastic #7 though not all plastic-7 has BPA so it's a bit confusing. Many things will say "BPA free" now because of the scientific evidence showing it causes harm. I disregarded that until I wrote this article. Yikes - scary stuff!! I ended my piece with:
  
  

  “The obvious question is: Does this mean that it could affect gender identity in humans? Admittedly, that is quite a step away, but it does suggest that, at the very least, BPA exposure might make men less ‘manly.’” (says Pat Hunt - who first discovered that her research mice were acting funny after a detergent caused BPA to leach from their cages into their food)

  
  So, ignore BPA warnings at your peril. But I'm not drinking from BPA bottles! And trying to avoid plastic as much as possible.

I'm headed to Costa Rica's Caribbean Coast soon, and will post an update about where and such... all I Can say is I haven't been this excited about a trip in a long time! I went there back in 1999 when I wrote about leatherback sea turtles for Discovery Channel Online, but that was on the Pacific Coast. I want some Lizano salsa!! Mmmm, good.

Wild, Wild Wetlands!

Sunset on the Oregon coast. This is in Florence. Wish I was back there!
Copyright (c) 2011 Wendee Holtcamp

I'd like to say I've been incommunicado because I'm traveling through the jungles of Peru but to be honest, I've been doing routine domestic goddess duties - doling out the kiddos' chores, supervising the carpet cleaner, surviving a visit from my mom and stepdad (no really it was actually fun), dealing with a car losing its AC in 100 degree weather, working out, planning a summer trip with the kids to California (L.A. and San Francisco/Bay Area), and trying desperately to keep up with my work. I finished an article that will appear on Miller-McCune.com in July about Texas' dam plans, and am doing grant writing for the American Scientific Affiliation - a fantastic organization dedicated to MY life mission of reconciliation between science and Christianity. I'm also starting up a new blog that I'll unveil soon - hopefully in the next month before I leave on my trip to Cali. I have intentions of creating at least one or more posts about Oregon - the one where I visited the Outside In shelter for homeless youth and their Virginia Woof Doggie Day Care Center and my visit with my 7th grade BFF Kelli, but... that will have to wait. It's midnight and i just wanted to post a short note with my latest articles! So without further adieu...

• I'm really proud of this article in the 10th annual Water Issue of Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine - Wild, Wild Wetlands. I actually wrote part of this lede back in 2005 while working with Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) but it never saw the light of day, so I combined that past amazing adventure with new info on the incredible wetland restoration project they have going on, since this upper Texas coast is losing wetlands faster than anywhere in the U.S. (along with Louisiana, which is contiguous of course). I reported this trip while traveling with my good friend Cheryl Reifsnyder, and blogged here about the fun adventures we had. Here's an excerpt of my lede:
  

  The moon is full, the night is warm, and I’m sitting in the high seat of an airboat, like a queen on a wetland wildlife safari. I feel like a firsthand witness to the springtime creation of new life.The deep glunk-glunk of a bronze frog, like a banjo, creates the song of the night, and baby marsh birds are everywhere. Two black-necked stilts guide their chicks, beige fuzzballs on stick legs, across a mudflat. A 6-foot gator slithers perilously near as a downy moorhen chick submerges itself, and I gaze in awe at the glowing orange eyes of what seems like a hundred of the reptilian beasts down the watery slough. It is so beautiful and wild that this could be Africa’s Okavanga Delta, only we’re a mere hundred miles east of Houston.



• Almost Meatless: How one woman decided to change what she ate. A different, longer version of the article that appeared at The Daily Climate. This one has totally different quotes, more about Meatless Monday and some animal rights issues that piqued my interest in a way they never before had after reading the amazing book Eating Animals.
  
  
• Louisiana Pine snakes piece in Forests Mag online (pub of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, FSEEE) - reprint of an article from Texas Parks & Wildlife (The Snake Underground). They edited it down quite a bit to fit their format but it's cool to get more mileage (and pay) out of an article. And these very rare snakes need all the coverage they can get!