Six on Geography and Science: Having kids makes you happier, but only when they move out; The Untold Benefits of Climate Change; Massive sea turtle found dead near LI beach; "Shikwah" by Khaled Mattawa; Mat Bors: Greenland’s New Deal; Monsanto's atta
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When it comes to who is happier, people with kids or those without, most research points to the latter. But a new study suggests that parents are happier than non-parents later in life, when their children move out and become sources of social enjoyment rather than stress.
Most surveys of parental happiness have focused on those whose children still live at home. These tend to show that people with kids are less happy than their child-free peers because they have less free time, sleep and money.
Christoph Becker at Heidelberg University in Germany and his colleagues wondered if the story might be different for parents whose kids have left home. To find out, they analysed data from a European survey that asked 55,000 people aged 50 and older about their emotional well-being.
They found that, in this older age group, people with children had greater life satisfaction and fewer symptoms of depression than people without children, but only if their kids had left home.
Returning the favour
This may be because when children grow up and move out, they provide social enrichment to their parents minus the day-to-day stress of looking after them, says Becker. They may also give something back by providing care and financial support to their parents, he says. “Hence, children’s role as caregivers, financial support or simply as social contact might outweigh negative aspects of parenthood,” he says.
The picture is similar in the US, says Nicholas Wolfinger at the University of Utah. He recently analysed 40 years of data from the US General Social Survey and found that empty-nest parents aged 50 to 70 were 5 to 6 per cent more likely to report being very happy than those with kids still at home."
"A massive and rare leatherback sea turtle was found dead near Callahan’s Beach in Fort Salonga on Wednesday morning, authorities said.
The male turtle, nearly 5 feet long, had several deep lacerations on its back consistent with a vessel strike, said officials with the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, a not-for-profit that responds to reports of dead or entangled marine animals in New York State. Authorities buried the animal without weighing it, but similar specimens weighed around 700 pounds, said Robert DiGiovanni Jr., chief scientist for the agency.
“This was probably a young animal, like a teenager,” he said. “It probably spent a number of years wandering around the Atlantic,” ranging as far north as Nova Scotia and as far south as the Caribbean. It might have entered the Sound in search of jellyfish, its preferred food, DiGiovanni said.
Leatherbacks, the largest turtle species, emerged during the time of the dinosaurs but are now listed as endangered by federal wildlife officials."
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Janine Jackson interviewed US Right to Know’s Carey Gillam for the August 16, 2019, episode of CounterSpin, about being targeted by Monsanto. This is a lightly edited transcript 00:00
Janine Jackson: There’s an old saying but true, “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed. All else is advertising.” And while many a reporter would tell you they are telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may, relatively few seem to really tread on toes powerful enough, forcibly enough, to generate a response.
Whitewash, by Carey Gillam
Our next guest is wearing that particular badge of honor at the moment. Carey Gillam is a veteran reporter, covering food and agriculture for Reuters for many years, and is now research director at the group US Right to Know. One thing Gillam thinks we have a right to know about is the impacts of pesticides made by Monsanto, which she explores in her book Whitewash: The Story of a Weedkiller, Cancer and the Corruption of Science; it’s out now from Island Press.
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Who doesn’t want you to know what’s in that book, or take it seriously? Monsanto. And the agrochemical giant, now owned by Bayer
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Carey Gillam: Thank you, thanks for having me.
JJ: I know that you don’t want this to be about you; you’re not Monsanto’s only target. They go after all kinds of critics or questioners: journalists, activists, Neil Young, you know. And there’s no mystery why they’re so aggressive about image management: People have lots of concerns about genetically modified organisms, another product of theirs, and they’re losing lawsuits about the carcinogenic effects of their weedkiller Roundup
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CG: Right. Yeah. I mean, the backlash started, well, more than a decade ago. As far as the book Whitewash, I started calling it The Book Monsanto Doesn’t Want You to Read. They filed a motion in court in one of the lawsuits, one of the big cancer lawsuits, before it went to trial, asking the judge to bar my book from being introduced as evidence.
And what we’ve seen recently is that they had in place a strategic plan, they involved a consulting company from Washington, DC, they had 20 different line items on a spreadsheet, all aimed at discrediting the book before it was released.
But the book is really—I’ve tried to make it very reader-friendly. It’s almost an academic exercise. It’s based on a lot of documents and a lot of data, and tracks the history of the rise of this chemical to become so pervasive in our environment that it’s found in our own bodies, that it’s found in our food and our water, and it’s in the soil and it’s affecting the environment and reducing biodiversity. It really has become, as I’ve said, very pervasive.
And so the book explores how that happened, how Monsanto manipulated and collaborated with regulators
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