ALSO The Everglades Crisis (One of America’s most diverse biosphere’s is threatened.) IN ANTHRO A study of Steinbeck’s

Modern Paisanos (Realistic Portraits of Povererty or Discriminating Racial Stereotype?) ATTENTION! 10 of America’s most

beloved national parks are in serious trouble. HONORING Carl Sagan. A tribute to his series Cosmos and why his contribu-

tion to the promotion of sciences is unrivaled. AND In Atmos. Images of hauntinglly beautiful forests from all around the world.

CULTURA VOLUME XVI

THE UNSPEAKABLE ODYSSEY OF THE MOTIONLESS BOY / MODERN TECHNOLGY IS ENDING A 15 YEAR SILENCE

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This month in Cultur:

FEATURES

THE UNSPEAKABLE ODYSSEY OF THE MOTIONLESS BOY

CHERNOBYL PROPORTIONS

THE GODFATHER

THE EVERGLADES CRISIS

A boy who has been trapped in his body for 20 years, and how modern science ended his silence.

An over view of the affects this nuclear meltdown has on modern day Russia.

It was a pretty good movie don’t you think?

One of America’s most important natural biospehre is threatened.

4-12 / PAGE I

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7

9

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35

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In this issue of Cultur:

DEPARTMENTS

ATMOS (IMAGES OF THE ATMOSPHERE)

ENVIRO (EARTH HAPPENINGS)

ANTRHO (PEOPLE/PEOPLE)

SOCIUS (UMAN INTERACTIONS)

SOLARIS (PLANETARY PROBLEMS)

ACTIVUS (ATTENTION REQUIRED)

Forests.

The end of the Space Shuttle.

A study of Steinbeck’s Paisanos.

Honoring Carl Sagan

Military vs. Space

The National Parks dilema.

4-12 / PAGE II

AT M O S / images in this atmosphere

B l a c k F o r e s t / G e r man y

Recent S tud ies conc lude tha t the B lack Fores t s o f Germany a re not ac tua l l y a l l b l ack .

A look at forests from around the world.

FORESTS

Gl a c i e r Na t i on a l P a r k / Mon tan a

Glac ie r Nat iona l Pa rk i s my f r i end Evan ’s most ve ry favor i te o f a l l t ime p lace on th i s ea r th

4-12 / PAGE V

We l i ve -b logged

as i t l anded.

L i s ten a t

America's space shuttle program, which saw triumph and tragedy over its 30 years, came to an end this morning when Atlantis and its four-member crew touched down at the Kennedy Space Center

in Florida after nearly 13 days in space. Atlantis landed in the pre-dawn dark just before 5:58 a.m. ET.

E N V I R O / earth happenings

the end of the

SPACE SHUTTLE

Update at 5:41 a.m. ET.

NASA says that “Atlantis is encountering

a plasma of super-heated air as it moves

through the thickening atmosphere.” The

shuttle’s “plasma trail” has been spotted

by the crew high above in the Interna-

tional Space Station, NASA adds.

Update at 5:42 a.m. ET.

Less Than 15 Minutes To Landing.

Update at 5:49 a.m. ET. Over Florida:

Atlantis just crossed over Florida near the

city of Naples on the Gulf Coast.

Update at 5:50 a.m. ET. Two Minutes

“Late?”

It looks like touchdown will be around

5:58 a.m. ET, NASA says. That’s after 200

Earth orbits this mission.

Update at 5:52 a.m. ET. On Camera:

NASA TV now has an image of Atlantis on

its approach.

Update at 5:54 a.m. ET. Sonic Booms:

“Atlantis announces its arrival” with twin

sonic booms, NASA reports.

Update at 5:58 a.m. ET. On The Ground:

And Atlantis has landed.

Update at 6 a.m. ET. Marking The End:

As Atlantis rolled to a stop, NASA marked

the end of the shuttle program with word

that it had “fired the imagination of a

generation.”

4-12 / PAGE VII

A N T R H O / people people

A restrospective analysis of Steinbeck’s controversial novel Tortilla Flat. Who are the so called “paisanos.”

a modern TORTILLA FLAT

How three sinful men, through

contrition, attained peace. How Danny’s

friends swore comradeship.”

Ortego also charged that Mexican Americans do not speak as Steinbeck's characters

do, either in Spanish or English. Arthur C.Pettit was equally clear: "Tortilla Flat stands

as the clearest example in American literature of the Mexican as jolly savage... This is

the book that is most often cited as the prototypical Anglo novel about the Mexican

American..the novel contains characters varying little from the most negative Mexican

stereotypes."In his essay, Steinbeck's Mexican Americans, Charles Metzger largely

defended the writer's views of the paisanos but observed the following: "Steinbeck's

portrayal of paisanos in Tortilla Flat does not purport to do more than present one kind

of Mexican-American, the paisano errant, in one place, Monterey.”

In his first commercially successful novel, Tortilla Flat (1935), John Steinbeck creates

his own modern day version of Camelot and King Arthur’s roundtable; it is “the story

of Danny and Danny’s friends and of Danny’s house”.  Tortilla Flat records semi-mythic

events from the lives of the paisanos from Monterey County.  Episodic in nature, the

tales recount the escapades of Danny and his group of ragged and drunken friends

as they drink, fight, engage in random acts of petty theft and, occasionally, do good

deeds.  Throughout their many adventures and misdeeds, the one thing that remains

as constant as their desire to avoid doing any real work or live respectable lives, is their

loyalty to one another.  Steinbeck creates a story about epic friendship, and yet, just

like the original round table, “this story deals with how the talisman was lost and how

CHAPTER 5 ,

Tort i l l a F la t

4-12 / PAGE IX

ERIK CAN'T MOVE. HE CAN'T BLINK HIS EYES. AND HE

HASN'T SAID A WORD SINCE 1999. BUT NOW, THANKS TO AN

ELECTRODE THAT WAS SURGICALLY IMPLANTED IN HIS

BRAIN AND LINKED TO A COMPUTER, HIS NINE-YEAR

At about nine o’clock in the evening on November 5, 1999, Erik

Ramsey punched out of his after-school job at Arby’s and went

to see The Sixth Sense with a friend. They were driving home on

a two-lane highway in Duluth, Georgia, a suburb about

twenty-five miles northeast of Atlanta, when a minivan tried to

make a U-turn from the oncoming lane. Erik’s friend was

speeding, and they never saw the other vehicle’s headlights.

The collision sent the minivan’s engine flying out of its chas-

sis. The car Erik was in, a late-model Camaro, careened into a

curb and flipped end over end before landing upside down in

a grove of small pine trees. The driver escaped with a chunk of

metal embedded in his skull. Firefighters had to use the Jaws of

Life to extract Erik. He was sixteen.

When Erik’s father, Eddie, arrived at the Gwinnett Medical Cen-

ter, he found his son lying on a table in the emergency room,

screaming and writhing in pain. His first thought was simply, This

is bad. Real bad. Erik’s leg was dangling at a right angle from his

torso. His head was perforated like a pincushion with pine straw.

His spleen had been lacerated, his diaphragm had ruptured,

and his left lung had collapsed. He wasn’t yet under anesthesia,

so the doctor asked Eddie to help keep his son pinned to the

table. Even as he gasped for air, Erik’s six-foot, 180-pound frame

managed to rip free from his father’s grasp.

For the next three weeks, Erik lay in the intensive-care unit,

awake but unresponsive. Once his condition stabilized, a neu-

rologist finally gave Eddie and his wife, Sandra, the diagnosis. A

blood clot had formed in a part of their son’s brain stem called

the pons, causing a stroke right at the juncture where his body

met his mind. Erik was suffering from an extremely rare and per-

manent condition known as locked-in syndrome. “Bottom line

is that he has no control over any of his muscles,” the doctor

told them. “He’ll never move and he’ll never speak.” Other-

wise, the accident had spared virtually all of Erik’s conscious

and unconscious processing systems. His memory, his reason,

and his emotions were all intact. He could see and hear and

feel--and feel pain--but he would never again have any way of

communicating.

Eddie walked into Erik’s hospital room and looked at his son.

Erik’s eyes were wide open. He stared straight back at his father.

The only muscles over which Erik still had any voluntary com-

mand were the ones that control the up-and-down movement

of his eyes. Unlike Jean-Dominique Bauby, the locked-in author

of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Erik couldn’t blink. Even

moving his eyes left and right was beyond his capability.

However, very soon after the accident, a speech therapist

discovered that there remained one peephole in the otherwise

impenetrable wall that kept Erik sequestered in his cell of flesh

and bones. Because he could still look up and down, he could

still say yes and no. “Up for heaven, down for hell,” the thera-

pist told him.

“Erik, are you deaf?”

That was the first question Eddie asked him, because until then

no one was sure. Erik looked down.

4-12 / PAGE XIII

BOTTOM L INE IS HE

HAS NO CONTROL OVER

HIS MUSCLES. HE’S ESSENTIALLY A

PRISONER IN HIS BODY.

IT TOOK 5 YEARS TO

DEVELOP THE TECHNOLOGY

THAT L INKED ERIK’S BRAIN

TO COMPUTERS.

THE FMRI PRODUCED A MAP

GUIDING THEM TO THE

PRECISE AREA OF ERIK’S BRAIN

THAT WAS ACTIVATED WHEN

HE TRIED TO SPEAK.

4-12 / PAGE XV

“ERIK, ARE YOU DEAF?”

HE LOOKED UP AND OPENED HIS

EYES EMPHATICALLY. THAT WAS

NINE YEARS AGO.

The Office of Neural Signals, Inc,. is located in a single-story yellow clapboard building in

a professional park in Duluth, only a few miles from the Ramseys’ home. Three engraved

patents hang on a wall near the door, including US 7275035 B2, “System and Method for

Speech Generation from Brain Activity,” granted September 25, 2007, to Dr. Philip Ken-

nedy, a pioneer in the field of brain-computer interface (BCI) research. On the opposite wall

there is a small poster that reads:

In the largest room of the dark, cluttered office, tables are stacked with computer monitors

and electronics equipment, and a web of cables drapes between dislodged ceiling tiles.

In the center of the room, Erik Ramsey is sitting in his wheelchair, wearing a blue sweat suit

and slippers, with a bundle of wires coming out the back of his head. He’s staring at a wall

onto which Kennedy has projected a matrix of six words: heat, hid, hat, hut, hoot, and hot.

They represent each of the major English vowel sounds. Kennedy, tall and stately at sixty,

asks Erik to think about making the sound uh-ee. As he does, a green cursor jitters across

the wall from hut to heat, and a booming vibrato pours out of the speaker: “uuuhahuuuu-

haheeeeeeee.” The sound is coming straight from Erik’s brain.

Kennedy is trying to help Erik become the first human being ever to have his thoughts

4-12 / PAGE XVII