This Book Kills

[Hasan Fogg]

Yetcorporations are already planning a life beyond this point. The business models of fossil fuel giants factor in continued profitability in a scenario of a five-degree increase in global temperature. An increase that will kill millions, if not billions.

This is the shocking reality laid bare in a new, hard-hitting book by David Whyte. Ecocide makes clear the problem won't be solved by tinkering around the edges, instead it maps out a plan to end the corporation's death-watch over us.

Preface: from COVID-capitalism to survival of the species

Acknowledgements

Introduction: corporate ecocide

1 What is the corporation?

2 From colonialism to ecocide: capital's insatiable need to destroy

3 Regulation at the end-point of the world

Conclusion: kill the corporation before it kills us

Notes

Progressive overload means making your muscles work harder or more than before to keep stimulating gains. But people assume this automatically means putting more weight on the bar. Not so! Adding weight while doing a similar number of reps is certainly progressive overload, but so is doing more reps per set with the same weight or doing more sets with the same weight for a similar number of reps.

Just like with volume, dedicated lifters are often tempted to go to failure, but be careful. There are drawbacks. Reaching failure causes a lot more central fatigue than stopping just short. Central fatigue has nothing to do with how you feel. It simply means the strength of the excitatory drive the nervous system sends to the muscles to recruit and contract them.

Remember how volume is more important for hypertrophy than strength? Well, load is more important for strength than hypertrophy. But volume still plays a role in strength development (a smaller one), and load still plays a role in hypertrophy (a smaller one).

Essentially, a training cycle (typically 10-12 weeks) will have a gradual increase in volume-load. This can come from an increase in sets, load, or the use of more intense training methods. But you must go from a lower level at the beginning of the cycle (still enough to produce gains) and then increase over the cycle.

When the cycle is over, you deload for 1-2 weeks and start a new one. The new cycle will start again at a lower level of training stress, but slightly higher than the beginning of the previous cycle, and builds up again.

In Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before it Kills Us, David Whyte argues that corporations are a critical yet neglected cause of our global environmental crisis. Accessibly written with excellent examples and case studies of modern business conduct, this bold book will be a valuable addition to reading lists, particularly for those studying political economy and business, recommends Atul K. Shah.

On one of my last days at the University of Washington School of Medicine (UW SOM) before I took a leave of absence that was prompted by one racially violent incident after the other, I sat in class fighting back tears of frustration, humiliation, and anger. As a Black queer non-binary student studying in a predominantly white medical school where racism is prevalent, these emotions were familiar guests of mine.

Since arriving at UW SOM, I have felt the weight of this toxic whiteness keenly. The curriculum from which I am taught often lacks a crucial racial analysis. Diseases and illnesses that are clearly informed by socio-economic factors are taught in a de-contextualized vacuum. In the rare instance that racial justice issues are centered, the teaching is still carried out in a way that is highly aggressive to students of color in the class.

This trend of de-centering and erasing racism-informed historical trauma from the medical school curriculum repeats over and over. As a Black student, I often feel like I am being taught to kill the very patients I came into medicine to serve. To counter this, I have had to fight every day at UW SOM for the type of medicine I want to practice. Class thus becomes a hostile zone for students of color where biases that the medical field already holds against the communities we come from are reinforced.

As students of color at UW SOM become increasingly aware of the ways racist curriculum pushes us to become physicians who keep contributing to the harm patients of color face, we respond in various ways. Some of us disengage from the school, fragmenting and isolating ourselves so we can pass through the system. Others organize and push back for change.

In an amazing example of the school recreating its toxic self, a white physician was appointed to lead this course and it was staffed predominantly with other white leads and facilitators. In my conversations with students of color taking this course, there is still rampant unaddressed macroaggressions. Students of color are thus checking out completely while white students are essentially being mobilized to go out into the physician world to enact their biases.

White administration and faculty are invested in and socialized to protect white comfort. Admin and faculty of color, in attempts to navigate a space that is also toxic to them, invariably gate-keep and uphold the status quo. The overall effect is that students of color are not accounted for at UW SOM. We are daily aggressed and dehumanized yet we are expected to bear with it and be silent for the sake of white comfort and professionalism.

Anne Eacker and Raye Maestas, the deans of student affairs, despite hearing scores of traumatic stories from students of color, still coddle this institution and yet somehow come back to voyeuristically ask students for more stories and more labor about how to improve the learning environment. Michael Ryan, the dean of curriculum, while being in this position for a few years, has somehow remained ignorant of the concerns students have brought up and embodies to a startling degree the institutional amnesia that this school has around its racist practices. Meanwhile in maintaining silence and seeming passivity, Paul Ramsey acts as warden of a medical industrial complex where, instead of guns, students are armed with biases that kill patients of color, especially those who are Black, trans, queer, Indigenous, immigrants, Muslims, and or disabled.

It is unacceptable that our histories and our communities are discounted and marginalized despite the countless hours of labor we spend trying to change this. This school wants us for our bodies and not for our minds. We should be celebrated for our core values, for the experiences we bring, and for the communities we uphold.

Instead, we become numbers that fill up diversity quotas. This dehumanization is unacceptable and I ask members of the community who are invested in the health of marginalized populations to join me in holding this school accountable. I ask the city of Seattle and the Washington State legislature to hold this school accountable. I ask the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Medical Association, and the National Medical Association to hold this school accountable.

I ask the Liaison Committee on Medical Education to hold this school accountable. And finally, I ask those in power at the University of Washington School of Medicine to hold themselves accountable for the pain that students of color endure at this institution. This climate of violence and terror must end.

Thank you for standing up! I was at the UWSOM 35 years ago and it did not seem that racism was a problem since there was only a handful POC in our class. Certainly sexism was. Multiple examples of it.

We had to strip down on the first day of anatomy class so that the prof could show the boys how to listen to the heart of a classmate with large breasts.

I had children while in school and was never given any kind of break, yet Dan Dornick, football player for the Seahawks, was given enormous amounts of free time and extra help.

The men in class threw an all male bachelor party for one of the guys and had underaged strippers present. When we found out the dean simply said boys will be boys.

Two male attendings photographed my underwear in a locker while I was in scrubs and showed it around to other men in my presence.

Many more stories.

The types of behaviors in our academic institutions that perpetrate racism, sexism, or any other biologic prejudices in favor of white males is despicable. I will never give to alumni funding due to my experiences there.

What a load of garbage, and what a pathetic individual! I attended UWSOM, and this is absolutely inaccurate. Talk about overextension of outrage! This guy is going to struggle for the rest of his life, and none of it will be because of true racism or social injustice.

Also, it makes me sad that you have to face aggressive and dismissive attitudes even though this has clearly hurt you. Know that a lot of people are on your side, especially your other UWSOM classmates!

I just wanted to tell you how brave you are to stand up for our communalities. I went to the UW School of Social work and had the same experiences. I also work for the UW system and its the same there. There is a group of us working on this end of the spectrum to address those same things you addressed in your writing.

I know it would be very painful in this process. But it would be very sad if we lose another physician like you in the future. If you want, please talk to people in social work during your break year. Or take classes in social sciences (i.e. research methods). A lot of things need to be changed in medicine, and there are many ways to make the changes. However, quitting may not be an ideal one.

I thought the article was a brilliant analysis of how insidious racism can be in our intellectual communities, and apparently particularly those this community supposedly committed to healing. No concrete examples?! There were multiple examples explicitly detailed. I can imagine being at the celebration and feeling disappointment at it not meeting my expectations, but clearly much more is at stake than celebrating when those who attend that medical school are legitimately not able to share in the celebration. I join with the voice that hopes that your strength and brilliance will carry you through, that you will indeed finish and bless the world with your gifts. You are needed. Carry on..

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