Michael Pollan's latest NY Times article on sustainability & food.
Our Decrepit Food Factories
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: December 16, 2007
The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”
Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?
To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.
For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.
The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.
Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.” Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.
Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.
As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” — the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. — are in any rush to see happen.
he second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing — going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.
You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures — 80 percent of the world’s crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California’s Central Valley — that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there’s absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren’t in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley — more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all.
They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world’s greatest “pollination event.” (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with “pollen patties” — which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)
In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers — and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel” — a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder — a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)
“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”
We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”
From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” will be published next month.
A Canadian retailer has just banned Nalgene bottles from being sold in its stores until more is known about the effects of a chemical used to make Nalgene plastic are bettern known.
The above link describes exactly what Blackle is, and the following link is the actual website. Check it out! Take a small step and save energy while you search the world wide web. http://www.blackle.com/
It was a nice weekend at K-State with Homecoming and another K-State football victory.
On environmental business, it looks like we have much work to do about getting our campus moving toward "green" and sustainable. As the following article indicates, of 200 US colleges evaluated, K-State rates with a D+. Of interest, SEA is mentioned in the K-State profile. Now is an essential time for students to step forward and make a change for something better on campus.
Daily Grist 10/26/07 Wondering which colleges are greenest? The Sustainable Endowment Institute has released its second College Sustainability Report Card, grading the environmentaliciousness of the 200 U.S. colleges with the largest endowments. Two-thirds of the schools got better grades this time than last; the average overall grade was a C+, and six schools received an overall A- for their efforts -- Carleton College, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Middlebury College, University of Vermont, and University of Washington. The colleges were graded on transportation, administration, climate and energy, food and recycling, green building, and investment priorities, as well as endowment transparency and shareholder engagement (both of which most schools solidly failed). Among the encouraging statistics: Around half of the schools have committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, more than two-thirds have green building policies, and more than 80 percent source at least some cafeteria food locally.
I just came across your blog and website, and first off: impressive site. Pretty spiffy!
I'm a fellow blogger and a young climate activist. I live in Oregon, but I blog on climate change and energy issues regularly at my blog, Watthead and at It's Getting Hot In Here (the youth climate movement's blog). I thought you'all might be interested in a couple of recent posts on the upcoming Power Shift 2007 national youth climate summit, Step it Up 2, and the growing strength of the youth climate movement. Feel free to repost these at your blog. Hopefully I'll see some of you at Power Shift
An activist dubbed one of the most powerful people in the nonprofit sector will be the next Lou Douglas Lectures speaker on Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 7:00 pm in Forum Hall of the K-State Student Union.
Robert Egger, founder and president of the D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington, D.C., which combats hunger and creates jobs for unemployed and homeless men and women will speak on “Our 40 Year Journey from Charity to Change.”. His talk is free and open to the public.
At the D.C. Kitchen, unemployed and homeless men and women learn marketable skills by turning foods donated by restaurants, hotels and caterers into balanced meals and then serving them at the D.C. Central Kitchen. Since opening in 1989, the Kitchen has distributed 17.4 million meals and helped more than 605 men and women gain full-time employment.
Egger is also developing the Campus Kitchens Project, which brings colleges and universities together with student volunteers, dining service workers and community organizations to combat hunger across the country.
Valerie Coltharp Special Projects Coordinator UFM Representative Payee UFM Community Learning Center 1221 Thurston, Manhattan, KS 66502 (785) 539-8763 (785) 539-9460 (fax) Type the rest of your post here.
Green Corps is the non-profit Field School for Environmental Organizing, founded by leading environmentalists in 1992 to train environmental organizers. Our program includes intensive classroom training, hands-on experience running urgent environmental campaigns, and placement in permanent positions with leading environmental and social change groups. Jesse Littlewood Recruitment Director, Green Corps jesse@greencorps.org 617-426-8506 www.greencorps.org Celebrating 15 Years: Green Corps, Field School for Environmental Organizing
** Applications due Oct. 26, 2007 - apply online today at http://www.greencorps.org **
Green Corps is the non-profit Field School for Environmental Organizing, founded by leading environmentalists in 1992 to train environmental organizers. Our program includes intensive classroom training, hands-on experience running urgent environmental campaigns, and placement in permanent positions with leading environmental and social change groups.
Classroom Training. Our intensive classroom training combines issue briefings, workshops and skills trainings to prepare you to run a grassroots campaign. Issue briefings include Clean Cars, Renewable Energy, Forests and Endangered Species. Strategy workshops include The Legislative Process, Social Change Methodology and Effective Media: Messaging and Framing. Finally, hands-on skills trainings include Leadership Development, Training Volunteers and Running Effective Meetings. Training is run by the Green Corps Central Staff, as well as environmental and social change experts such as John Passacantando, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA, Bill McKibben, author and climate change expert, and Wendy Wendlandt, Political Director, U.S. PIRG.
Field Training. Our field training puts you on the front lines of today's most urgent environmental campaigns. With Green Corps, you will work in multiple cities nationwide, chosen for their ability to make an impact on critical environmental problems. Potential locations include, but are not limited to, San Francisco, CA; Chicago, IL; Washington, DC and Boston, MA. You must be willing to relocate during your year with Green Corps.
Dates. The program begins in August 2008 and concludes with graduation in August 2009.
Responsibilities. Plan and implement a series of critical environmental campaigns with groups like Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club and Greenpeace. You will secure media coverage, recruit and manage volunteers, train new leaders, and mobilize grassroots activists.
Career Development. Upon completion of the training program, Green Corps will connect you to organizations that are seeking full-time professional staff. Green Corps graduates hold positions with MoveOn.org, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Global Exchange, Endangered Species Coalition, Global Trade Watch, Corporate Accountability International, ForestEthics, and many other environmental and progressive groups.
Qualifications. Each year we select 35 recent college graduates to join Green Corps. We are looking for people who are serious about saving the planet, have demonstrated leadership experience, and want to work for change over the long haul at the grassroots level.
Salary & Benefits. Salary of $23,750. Optional group health care coverage, paid sick days and holidays, two weeks paid vacation, and a student loan repayment program for qualifying staff.
To Apply. To apply to Green Corps, fill out our online application by the Early Application Deadline of Oct. 26, 2007. Deadlines, 2nd round interview locations and our online application are at http://www.greencorps.org.
Contact. Jesse Littlewood, Recruitment Director, at jobs@greencorps.org, 617-426-8506,
On November 3rd, Americans will demand real leadership on global warming. From coast to coast, we'll rally in our communities and invite our politicians to join us. We'll see who rises to the occasion and who has a real plan to tackle the defining challenge of our time.
With a month to go, people by the thousands have begun inviting presidential candidates and members of Congress to come speak about climate change at Step It Up events on Nov. 3 -- and we've started getting some RSVPs.
Here is a link to Ljworld.com. There is a published chat, "Chat about Lawrence sustainability with Sarah Hill-Nelson," and it talks a little about what Sarah does and some of the pros and cons of 'green tags' and other sustainability issues. Give it a look-see and come to the SEA meeting tonight and she can answer any questions. www2.ljworld.com/chats/2007/may/21/sarah_hillnelson/
This is tomorrow - sorry - but it looks very interesting. 4:00 pm in 201 Trotter Hall A seminar by Craig Beech will be presented in 201 Trotter Hall (at the vet school) on Thursday Sept. 20 at 4 p.m.
The title will be:
Peace Parks, Africa’s great (un)divide: Using international conservation to join regions and peoples Craig Beech is the GIS manager of the Peace Parks Foundation, the people behind the establishment of transfrontier conservation areas in Africa, which joins countries in cross-border conservation efforts. The countries involved include South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Lesotho, Zambia and others. This is a significant development in Africa with far-reaching implications for conservation, land use options, political science and geographic science, international trade, and biosecurity concerns such as possible impacts on important diseases like Foot and Mouth Disease. GIS was and is used throughout the process of transfrontier conservation planning and implementation.
The warming climate is undermining biodiversity by accelerating habitat loss, according to Vital Signs 2007–2008.
Washington, D.C.— Consumption of energy and many other critical resources is consistently breaking records, disrupting the climate and undermining life on the planet, according to the latest Worldwatch Institute report, Vital Signs 2007-2008.
David Orr, a member of the Center for Ecoliteracy board of directors, is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College, and the James Marsh Professor at Large, University of Vermont.
This talk was delivered as the commencement address to the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, on May 14, 2007.
The Designer's Challenge
By David W. Orr .
Dean Hack, distinguished faculty of the School of Design, honored guests, and most important, you the members of the class of 2007: It is a great privilege to stand before you on your graduation day.
As a Penn alumnus I feel a deep sense of affection for this institution and for this place. My own interest in design was kindled here long ago by Ian McHarg, who as much as anyone was the founder of modern landscape design and the larger field of ecological design. His book Design with Nature remains a classic statement of the art of intelligent inhabitation. From its founding, the city of Philadelphia has been home to a great deal of innovative urban design and experimentation now carried on here in the School of Design. You are a part of a great history and have inherited a legacy of which you may be justly proud. But the work of designers is now entering its critical and most important phase.
It is said that we are entitled to hold whatever opinions we choose, but we are not entitled to whatever facts we wish. Whatever opinions you may have, there are four facts that will fundamentally shape the world in which you will live and work.
The first is the fact that we spend upwards of 95 percent of our time in houses, cars, malls, and offices. We are becoming an indoor species increasingly shut off from sky, land, forests, waters, and animals. Nature, as a result, is becoming more and more an abstraction to us. The problem is most severe for children who now spend up to eight hours each day before a television or computer screen and less and less time outdoors in nature. Author Richard Louv describes the results as "nature deficit disorder" — the loss of our sense of rootedness in place and connection to the natural world. In some future time, it is not farfetched to think that disconnected and rootless we would become unhinged in a fundamental way and that is a spiritual crisis for which there is no precedent.
Second, when Benjamin Franklin walked the streets of Philadelphia there were fewer than one billion of us on Earth. The human population is now 6.5 billion and will likely crest at 9 or 10 billion. One-and-a-half billion live in the most abject poverty, while another billion live in considerable wealth. One billion suffer from the afflictions of eating too much while others suffer from malnutrition. When I was a graduate student at Penn the ratio of richest to poorest was said to be 35:1. It is now approaching 100:1 and growing. The problem of a more crowded world is not just about what ecologists call carrying capacity of the Earth. It also a problem of justice with more and more people competing for less and less.
A third fact has been particularly difficult for a society built on the foundation of cheap portable fossil fuels to acknowledge. We are at or near the year of peak oil extraction, the point at which we will have consumed the easy and better half of the accessible oil. The other half is harder to refine, farther out, and deeper down, and mostly located in places where people do not like us. We are not likely to run out of oil or liquid fossil fuels from one source or another, but we are nearing the end of the era of cheap oil. We have known this for decades, but we still have no coherent or farsighted energy policy. In the meantime the penalty for procrastination grows daily along with the risks of supply interruptions and volatile energy prices.
There is a fourth fact. When the University of Pennsylvania was founded the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million. But now the level of all human-generated heat-trapping gases is 430 parts per million CO2 equivalent. We have already warmed the Earth by .8 degrees C and are committed at least to another .6 degrees C. According to the scientists who participated in writing the Fourth Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change we are not just warming the Earth, but destabilizing the entire planet. Climate scientist James Hansen says that we are close to making Earth a different planet and one that we will not much like.
Four facts.
One has to do with the largeness of the human spirit and our capacity to connect to life.
The second has to do with justice, fairness, and decency in a more crowded world.
The third has to do with our wisdom and creativity in the face of limits to the biosphere.
The last is about human survival on a hotter and less stable and predictable planet.
In the face of the remorseless working out of large numbers do you have reason to be optimistic? Frankly, no. Optimism is a prediction that the odds are in your favor — like being a Yankees fan with a one-run lead in the ninth inning and two outs and a two-strike count on a .200 hitter and Mariano Rivera — in his prime — on the mound. You have good reason to believe that you will win the game. That's optimism. The Red Sox fans, on the other hand, believing in the salvation of small percentages, hope for a hit to get the runner home from second base to tie the game. Optimism is a bet that the odds are in your favor; hope is the faith that things will work out whatever the odds. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying the odds or changing the odds. But optimism leans back, puts its feet up, and sports a confident look knowing that the deck is stacked.
If you know enough, you cannot honestly be optimistic. But you have every reason to be hopeful and to act faithfully and competently on that hope. And what does that mean for you as designers?
My message to you is this. As designers you hold the keys to creating a far better world than that in prospect, but only if you respond creatively, smartly, wisely, and quickly to the four facts described above. Your generation does not have a choice to solve one or two of these problems. You must solve them all — rather like solving a quadratic equation. And you have no time to lose. As designers you must design so artfully and carefully as to help reconnect people to nature and to their places. You must design to promote justice in a more crowded world. You must design a world powered by efficiency and sunlight. You do not have the option of maintaining the status quo — a world dependent on ancient sunlight. And since Nature is a ruthless and unforgiving bookkeeper, you must do your work in a way that balances the carbon books. How will you do such things? The answers, fortunately, are many, but the principles of design are few. Let me suggest three.
The first has to do with the scope of your work. You must see design as a large and unifying concept — quite literally the remaking of the human presence on Earth. Design in its largest sense has to do with how we provision ourselves with food, energy, materials, shelter, livelihood, transport, water, and waste cycling. It is the calibration of human intentions with how the world works as a physical system and the awareness of how the world works to inform our intentions. And good design at all times joins our five senses (and perhaps others that we suspect) with the human fabricated world. When designers get it right, they create in ways that reinforce our common humanity at the deepest level.
Ecological design is flourishing in fields as diverse as architecture, landscape architecture, biomimicry, industrial ecology, urban planning, ecological engineering, agriculture, and forestry. It is gathering momentum, driven by necessity, better technology, and economic opportunity. Designers in diverse fields are learning how to
* use nature as the standard, as Ian McHarg proposed; * power the world on current sunlight; * eliminate waste; * pay the full cost of development; * build prosperity on a durable basis.
Design as a large concept means, in Wendell Berry felicitous words, "solving for pattern," creating solutions that solve many problems. When you solve for pattern you will also have created resilience, which is the capacity of systems to persist in a world perturbed by human error, malevolence, and what we call "acts of God." And by solving for pattern you are also likely to learn the virtues of reparability, redundancy, locality, and simplicity.
Here is an example of good design: Last week I took a class to a farm in Virginia in which the farmer raises poultry, cattle, and hogs so artfully that each element enhances the others while improving soil fertility and making a substantial profit by selling directly to a large base of local customers. As a designer, he has designed out chemicals, pollution, genetically modified organisms, pharmaceuticals, and most of the fossil fuels necessary to transport food long distances. The result is health in the large: of land, animals, people, and economy.
As a corollary, you must see yourselves as the designers, not just of buildings, landscapes, and objects, but of the systems in which these are components. That means that you must reckon with economic, political, and social aspects of design. And the hardest but most important object for designers is the design of what Peter Senge calls learning organizations, in which designing ecologically becomes the default setting, not an aberration.
Second, you will need a standard for your work, rather like the Hippocratic Oath or a compass by which you chart a journey. For that I propose that designers should aim to cause no ugliness, human or ecological, somewhere else or at some later time. That standard will cause you to think upstream from the particular design project or object to the wells, mines, forests, farms, and manufacturing establishments from which materials are drawn and crystallized into the particularities of design. It will cause you, as well, to look downstream to the effects of design on climate and health of people and ecosystems. If there is ugliness, human or ecological, at either end you cannot claim success as a designer regardless of the artfulness of what you make.
As a corollary, you, as designers, ought to think of yourselves first as place makers, not merely form makers. The difference is crucial. Form making puts a premium on artistry and sometimes merely fashion. It is mostly indifferent to human and ecological costs incurred elsewhere. The first rule of place making, on the other hand, is to honor and preserve other places, however remote in space and culture. When you become accomplished designers, of course, you will have mastered the integration of both making places and making them beautiful.
Third, as designers, you will need to place your work in a larger historical context — what philosopher Thomas Berry calls, your Great Work. No generation ever asks for its Great Work. The generation of the Civil War certainly did not wish to fight and die at places like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, or the Wilderness. But their Great Work, the end of human bondage, required just that of tens of thousands of them...and they rose to do their Great Work. Those now passing from the scene that Tom Brokaw calls "The Greatest Generation" did not wish to fight and die in places like Iwo Jima or the battlefields of Europe. But their Great Work, the fight against Nazism, required them to do so and they rose to the challenge to do their Great Work as well. Your Great Work, however, is not one of fighting wars, but of extending and speeding a worldwide ecological enlightenment that joins human needs and purposes with the way the world works as a biophysical system.
Your Great Work will be no less demanding and no less complex than that of any previous generation. But in outline it is very simple. Your Great Work as designers is to:
1. Stabilize and reduce all heat trapping gases 2. Make a rapid transition to efficiency and renewable energy 3. Build a world secure by design for everyone...a world in which every child has a decent home, food, water, education, medical care 4. Preserve the best of our history and culture 5. Enable us to see our way forward to a world that is sustainable and spiritually sustaining
This challenge, your Great Work, is neither liberal nor conservative; neither Republican nor Democrat. It is, rather, the recognition that the present generation is a trustee standing midway between a distant past and the horizon of the future. As trustees we are obligated to pass on the best of our civilization and the ecological requisites on which it depends — including a stable climate and biological diversity — to future generations. The idea that we are no more than trustees was proposed long ago by Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism (1790), and by one of the founders of modern revolutionary politics, Thomas Jefferson (1789), as well. It is a perspective that unites us across our present divisions in service to our posterity.
Your Great Work is a sacred trust given only to your generation. If you do not rise to do your Great Work, it will not be done. We know enough now to say what no other generation could rightfully say: the price for that dereliction — not rising to do your Great Work — will be high and perhaps total. Your Great Work as designers is to honor wholeness, health, and the great holy mystery of life. No other generation before you ever had a greater challenge and none more reason to rise to greatness.
My charge to you is to do your work so well that those who will look back on your time — the beneficiaries of your Great Work — will know that this was indeed humankind's finest hour.
Copyright(c) 2007 David W. Orr
David W. Orr, a member of the Center for Ecoliteracy board of directors, is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and the James Marsh Professor at Large, University of Vermont. Nationally recognized as a leader in environmental education, ecological literacy, and environmental design, he is a contributing editor to Conservation Biology, the author of The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror, The Nature of Design, Earth in Mind, and Ecological Literacy, and coeditor of The Global Predicament and The Campus and Environmental Responsibility..
I received my monthly issue of Co-Op America recently, which mainly consists of information concerning investments and ways to cool the earth through them. This month however, there was an interesting article concerning the diet and it's effects on the environment, specifically meat diets. A 2006 study conducted by Drs. Pamela Martin and Gidon Eshel of the University of Chicago, http://geosci.uchicago.edul~gidon/papers/nutri/nutri.html, provided a neat graph that compared different meat (and non-meat) diets with their average annual greenhouse gas emissions. The results: Vegan: 0 tons, Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian: .8 ton, Poultry: .9 ton, Avg. American: 1.485 tons, Fish: 2 tons, Red Meat: 2 tons. These diets are based on a 3,774 calorie diet. All diets including meat are calculated as 72 percent plant-based, 14 percent meat, 14 percent eggs and dairy. The lacto-ovo diet is 90 percent plant based, 10 percent eggs and dairy, reflecting the actual animal product consumption o the average lacto-ovo vegetarian. You might be asking yourself, why such an outrageous amount of calories when the usual average is 2000? Well- this 3,774 number is an "FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) figure that represents the number of calories produced and distributed per person in the US, meaning that while we don't necessarily eat that much on average, we eat or waste that much at grocery stores and at home." This study took into account the entire life cycle of these diets. How much energy it took to grow, harvest , transport , and prepare them. The FAO released a report this past February stating livestock accounts for 18 percent of our world global warming emissions. Switching from a Toyota Camry to a hybrid Toyota Prius would save 1 ton of greenhouse gases annually while making the switch to a vegan diet would save 1.5 tons! After reading this article, it only reaffirms what I heard on Real Time a couple of weeks ago; "One can't be an environmentalist and a meat eater." These words spoken by a representative of PETA. What really surprises me is that the fish diet is equivalent to the red meat diet in avg. annual ghg emmisions. "I am a vegetarian, but I still eat fish" doesn't cut it anymore.
Upcoming Tour of the Underground Railroad by local good guy and director of the Wonder Workshop Richard Pitts. The bus tour is September 16, 2007 from 3-6 p.m.
The Underground Railroad Bus Tour
Lead by Richard Pitts, the author of "A Self-Guided Tour of the Underground Railroad in Kansas" & Executive Producer of the DVD Documentary "The Kansas Underground Railroad"
COST – FREE
Arrive early to get a seat on the bus otherwise you will have to drive your own vehicle
Date: September 16, 2007 Time: 3 – 6 pm, Where: Triangle Park in Aggieville
Co-Sponsored by CCHW at K-STATE & USD 383
The year is 1858. The Fugitive Slave Law was passed just eight years ago; bad news for you and your small group who just managed a narrow escape from slavery's doorsteps in Missouri. Alas, you thought your adventure was over now that you are in Kansas. You now are going to carefully navigate your way through to get your passengers to Canada on the Underground Railroad.
Richard Pitts, Executive Director of the Wonder Workshop, proudly presents a journey back in time to Underground Railroad sites in Riley and Wabaunsee Counties. This tour will travel to various sites within fifteen miles of Manhattan. At each site, (there will be seven stops made on this tour) participants will be presented with information regarding its historical significance. You should plan to spend at least 3 ½ hours to complete the entire route. Travelers will learn about the famous Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, Captain Mitchell, Strong Farm, Reverend Blood, and others who helped to make Kansas a free state! Your group will take part in interactive activities along the way. This adventure will place you in the shoes of enslaved Africans, Slave Owners, and Abolitionists as you learn about the true meaning of strength, courage, and endurance experienced by those early "Human Rights" activists whose broad shoulders we all stand upon!
FAQ
How long is the tour? Between 3 - 5 hours to complete
Fun clip- Aside from West Winger's ignorance of the world as it actually is, the lack of Geography in grade school is unfortunate. Not that Geography is solely maps...
Lecture: Why Are Humans so Willing to Bite the Land that Feeds Them? 5:30 p.m., 2414 Throckmorton Hall. Presented by Ken Warren as a continuation of the Sustainable Dialog
The Irish Cobbler Potatoes should be ready to harvest. Champ, if you want to call me and setup a time to come over with your pitch fork, or just drop it off, that would be great.
Megan: I still have frozen homemade marinara sauce for you. Maybe some tomatoes, plenty of cayenne and jalapeno peppers.
There are plenty of peppers for everyone, so feel free to stop by and just pick some, or come collect some that are in the house.
The heat has really hit the garden, and I'm not sure if either of the cucumber plants, one of the eggplants, and quite a lot of the tomato plants will actually make it. The heat has been intense, and even though I've been watering at night, the heat is too much. We've also had ant problems with the back melon patch. Fortunately, we should have plenty of butternut squash, and if any would like, I could post a very simple butternut squash lasagna recipe that is delicious and filling. The corn seem to be hanging on, and ~ dozen husks are visible. On a bright note, the sun flowers seem to be basking up the sun.
After the garden has stopped producing this year, I'd like to have a workday to try to flatten and better irrigate an area of the yard for next year's garden. This could possibly involve a trip to the dairy farm to apprehend some poo. Trust me, its great fun at 8 o'clock on a saturday morning.
Anyways, I hope everyone is doing well as they get back into town. Stop by and say hi if you haven't in a while :-)
Hello people. Just wanted to post my birthday plans on the blog. Tomorrow night, Thursday the 26th at 10ish (really whenever), it is going to be at Kevin's. There will be libations but you may want to bring your own too. Midnight, I am officially legal to enter official alcohol selling establishments..so at 12 that is what is happening. Hoorayy!!!! Type the rest of your post here.
From the Daily Grist if you missed it... It's official: Nine months after the rumors began, Leonardo DiCaprio has confirmed that he and a partner will give birth to ... a reality series on green building. DiCaprio will executive produce the 13-part Eco-Town on the Discovery Channel's Planet Green arm, launching in 2008. The original notion was to upgrade Anywhere, USA, for a show called E-topia, but the new series will focus on rebuilding a Kansas town that was hit by a tornado in May. The tornado caused 10 deaths, displaced almost all of the town's roughly 1,500 residents, and leveled homes, a hospital, and other buildings. And we're not saying Leo and his peeps are crass, cold-hearted vultures, but how excited do you think they were when Mother Nature wiped out a town called -- wait for it -- Greensburg? "This is not about a TV show and about a cable channel that reaches 50 million homes," says Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav. "We're the number one non-fiction media company in the world, but we also want to make a difference."
I think we've decided on the payment system for the garden: pay $10 and you'll get a portion of the produce for as long as the garden is growing......which, with the tomatoes growing like they are, shouldn't take very long to make this a good deal!
Let me know if you're interested, or if your friends are; we probably can't have more than about 10 or 12 people, and we already have 2 signed up. So either post here, email me, or call me!
The Deuce Gardens finally has some tomatoes! We also have a healthy share of cucumbers, and I think that the garlic and onions are probably ready to be harvested.
So, I haven't firmly said anything about money yet, but here's what I was thinking: Jeffers, Ugolini and I are the only people who have spent any money on the garden (no one else has been asked). Therefore, to make some of the money back, I was thinking about offering the veggies for a discounted price for those who have helped out with the garden (or offering them to everyone, but giving precedence to those who've helped out). I'll check on average prices in the super market, and make sure that we are comparable, if not lower.
Another option would be to make salsa and/or marinara sauce out of the tomatoes, and sell the salsa.....
Anyways, I'm open to options, so let me know what you'd like to do!
As always, we need help weeding this Sunday around 2pm, and we'll be digging and placing some posts.
Chicago Green Festival Attracts Huge Crowds Our first-ever Chicago Green Festival, held over Earth Day weekend, broke records and exceeded all expectations. With more than 30,000 people attending, it was our biggest launch of a new Green Festival yet. Setting an example for other large-scale events, we recovered more than 92 percent of the Green Festival's waste through recycling and composing, and we offset all carbon emissions associated with the festival. Co-op America Quarterly
I must add, some of us SEAers helped accomplish that! Even though Mariel and I couldn't convince a man to buy the "perfect scarf, the only one with just the right amount of orange fabric", all 10 or 12 of us helped out in numerous other ways. Upcoming festivals this year: Washington, DC Oct. 6-7, 2007, San Francisco, CA Nov 9-11, 2007, Seattle, WA April 12-13 2008 (I think the Seattle one is new) and Chicago, IL (TBA).
The garden is in full bloom! Included are some pictures. We need help weeding! On wednesday of this week (the 20th), we'll be tending to the garden, so if you want to help out, please stop by! We probably won't start until about 6:30, and we'll work until sundown.
Andrew Gondzur from St. Louis, MO has installed a kit that added a rechargeable electric motor to his old bike. With the twist of his handlebar he can go from pedaling to a nice boost of "motorized help." "'I can, go farther and faster than I would if I were just pedaling," he says, which is why Andrew now takes his bike, not his car, to the post office, the library, his childrens's schools, and the grocery store. "Why take 5,000 pounds of car and burn expensive gas to get one thing you forgot at the supermarker? Now I leave my car at home." Its the equivalent to a hybrid car, no idling, both pedaling and electric at your fingerprints, literally. Type the rest of your post here.
Earthships offer sustainable housing options. I was down in Taos, NM on a day off from work and visited an Earthship community. These seem to be a very sustainable as well as intriguing housing option. The main issues that emerged when discussing Earthships with my coworkers included modifying city housing restrictions or the Earthships to allow them within city limits, insuring such homes, and getting people to see Earthships not as a housing possibility for hippies but as a plausible housing option. Check out the website and see what you think.
Naturally Attracted... This might be a good documentary film for Movies on the Grass, though it is only 45 minutes long...
I have included some additional information about Michael J. Cohen below. It is from an article called "Maverick Genius at Work." In the 1985 Bureau of Applied Sciences International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology, the so called "Maverick Genius Conference" in England identified Dr. Cohen as a maverick genius because genius has been described as "One who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it."
It has made me curious anyway... What do you think?
Here is a blurb about Michael J. Cohen from "Maverick Genius at Work." Also learn more about Dr. Cohen at: http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html by Mardi Jones, Ph.D.
In 1955 neither an art nor science was available that explained how or why you could make conscious sensory contact with nature and increase mental health, stress relief, learning ability, conflict resolution and personal and environmental wellness. Then, as today, most great thinkers and leaders expounded on what should be done about our important social and environmental problems. However, they seldom offered a tool or process that enabled us to accomplish what their brilliance suggested so these problems persisted.
Dr. Michael J. Cohen's genius is exceptional in this regard. He has not only acknowledged the problems but has, in addition, identified their ordinarily invisible source and created a nature-connecting solution for them. It is doable and available for anybody interested in reaping its benefits.
Throughout his adult life, Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. has devoted his energies to bring into consciousness, identify and think with webstrings, unifying energy substances in nature that are far more common than air. While all species and minerals enjoy webstrings and their benefits, contemporary thinking in its conquest of nature has been taught to ignore, conquer or transform them from their natural status. This has led to the deterioration of natural systems in the environment and people
Cohen has successfully demonstrated the power we have to use unadulterated webstrings to regenerate the purity of nature's balance, beauty and peace around and within us (2). His work is an act of genius for it enables anyone to use webstrings to help resolve "unsolvable" personal, social and environmental problems (1).
Cohen has largely been ignored because contemporary thinking neither believes in nor respects webstrings and their potential for good. To our loss, our history has been to destroy or inadequately substitute for webstring relationships (3). For this reason, webstrings in their pure beneficial form remain foreign to most of us, even though they are right before our eyes. It is similiar to your consciousness registering the words you are now reading but not registering the air that sits between your eyes and this screen at this moment (until you are now reminded of it.)
WEBSTRINGS DESCRIBED: Environmental experts accurately portray webstrings, nature and the web of life by gathering a group of people in a circle. Each person is asked to represent some part of nature, a bird, soil, water, etc. A large ball of string then demonstrates the interconnecting relationships between things in nature. For example, the bird eats insects so the string is passed from the "bird person" to the "insect person." That string represents their connection. The insect lives in a flower, so the string is further unrolled across the circle to the "flower person." Soon a web of string is formed interconnecting all members of the group, from minerals to the solar system, including somebody representing a person. In this model each of the connecting strands is a webstring (4).
Every aspect of the global life community, from the space between sub-atomic particles to weather systems, is part of the web of life. The diversity of natural system webstring interconnections produces nature's regenerative balance that prevents runaway disorders. For this reason, undulterated natural systems neither create garbage nor display our mental health problems or our abusiveness, stress and isolation. Everything that is part of nature, including people, belongs and is supported in nature.
In the web of life activity, dramatically, people pull back, sense, and enjoy how the strings of the web peacefully unite, support and interconnect them and all of life. Then one strand of the web is cut signifying the loss of a species, habitat or natural relationship. Sadly, the weakening effect on all is noted. Another and another string is cut. Soon the web's integrity, unifying ability and power disintegrates along with its spirit. Because this deterioration and loss of support from the wholeness of the web of life reflects the reality of our nature-separated lives, it triggers feelings of hurt, despair and sadness in many activity participants. In reality, Earth and its people increasingly suffer from "cut string" disintegration (5).
With respect to the webstring model, Dr. Cohen asks people if they ever went into a natural area and actually saw strings interconnecting things there. Usually their answer is something like, "No, if I saw them I'd be hallucinating or psychotic." Cohen has responded, "If you see no strings there, what then are the actual strands that hold the natural community together in its perfection and beauty?" It becomes very, very quiet. Too quiet. Are you quiet, too? Pay close attention to this silence. It flags a vital but missing element in our thinking, perceptions and relationships whose loss results in many troubles (6).
Natural beings sustain their own and nature's wellness while in contact with the whole of the web through webstrings. As part of nature, we are born with this ability. Pulitzer-Prize winning sociobiologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard, affirms that nature's web of life holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction (7). Albert Einstein noted that, "Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people....Our task must be to free ourselves from (our) prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty" (8).
Webstrings are part of survival, just as authentic and important as the plants, animals and minerals that they interconnect, including ourselves. The strings are as real and true as 2 + 2 = 4; they are facts as genuine as water or thirst. We ask for our troubles by ignoring them.
Cohen has demonstrated that as part of nature we are born with the natural ability for our mentality to sense, register and respond to at least 53 different webstrings that we need for survival. However, contemporary thinking learns to neither acknowledge nor exercise this ability. Instead, we usually subdue it along with nature. Our troubles and discontents result frojm thinking and relationships based on our use of less than ten, rather than 53 natural webstring senses.
Without seeing, sensing or respecting the webstrings in nature and our inner nature, we break, injure or ignore them so they no longer register in our consciousness and thinking. Their disappearance there produces an unnatural void, a discomforting sensory emptiness in our psyche and spirit that we constantly try to fill. This emotional vacuum prevents us from registering and thinking with attractions that otherwise help us, as part of nature, produce unpolluted balance, wellness and peace. The void prevents the formation of many vital relationships; this causes depression and stress in us; we unnecessarily want, and when we want there is never enough. We become greedy, abusive and reckless while trying to artificially replace our missing 43 webstring fulfillments. This dysfunction places ourselves, others and Earth at risk for with respect to the perfection of the web of life there are few, if any, known substitutes for nature's webstrings that do not produce destructive side effects in people and places (9).
Cohen's quest to understand and utilize webstrings has brought him, for the last 40 years, to live and teach in natural areas year round. This led to his Grand Canyon discovery in 1966 that Planet Earth acted like, and could be related to, as a living organism, a fact substantiated twelve years later by James Lovelock in the Gaia Hypotheses (10). From this realization Cohen personally risked founding the Trailside Country School and National Audubon Society Expedition Institute along with other organic webstring education programs, books, curricula, psychologies, therapies, courses, schools, institutions and processes. These include the Whole Life Factor, Organic Psychology, the Natural Systems Thinking Process and the 9-leg thinking model that helps us offset our addictive, nature-disconnected 5-leg thinking (2, 16). Each or these tools is part of Cohen's nature-reconnecting process that helps us build balanced relationships and wellness. The process provides us with empirical evidence and genuine contact with webstrings in natural areas that express themselves in us as 53 natural attraction senses (17, 11). Each sense gives people a unique means to make more sense and implement their deeper hopes and ideals (15).
Because, on average, over 95% of our time and 99% of our thinking is separated from nature, Cohen demonstrates that the crux of our troubles is that our mind is uprooted from nature's purifying webstring balance around and within us. He says,
"Like a deer severed by the wheels of a train, our extreme separation from nature psychologically severs us from our mentality's sensory connections and support in nature. This hurtful disconnection ungrounds us; it disconnects our thinking from many inherent natural ways of thinking, knowing and relating. This numbs our mentality to most of the sensory connections that produce nature's perfection and recuperative powers in our mind and body. Disconnected from webstrings inside and around us, our stricken psyche thinks that our nature-separated lives are 'normal' so we deny our mental dysfunctions rather than address them as such. Our disconnection is so severe that even though most of us have had wonderful restorative experiences in nature, our thinking negates rather than welcomes exercises that enable us to increase and strengthen these experiences.
Webstring sensory reconnection activities help us reduce our troubles by enabling us, at will, to genuinely connect our thinking with authentic nature, backyard or back country, and use its recuperative powers to restore our sensibilities and wellness. This also helps us strengthen our love of nature which is important because we don't fight to preserve what we don't love."
In the 1985 Bureau of Applied Sciences International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology, the so called "Maverick Genius Conference" in England identified Dr. Cohen as a maverick genius because genius has been described as "One who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it" (13). Dr. Bruce Denness, the conference convener, partially in jest suggested that Cohen, who still today sleeps outdoors year round, might be the reincarnation of Henry David Thoreau as a Psychologist.
If our society was dedicated to living in peace and balance with people and the environment, "genius" would accurately describe Dr. Cohen and his work's contribution, for which he received the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award (12, 14). However, in our nature-conquering society where profit, power and exploiting nature are often rewarded, Cohen's webstring learning and relationship building tools go against the grain. His nature-connecting art makes him a maverick, a genius who tries to teach the science of co-creating with nature to an "anti-nature" society (2, 16). He argues, "With respect to the Web of Life, we are part of the whole; when connected to the whole, webstrings renew themselves and thereby us. In our nature-separated society, a person who succeeds in helping us sustain personal and environmental wellness by genuinely reconnecting injured parts of us with nature must be, by definition, a maverick. It is strange to realize that our thinking is our destiny yet one is a maverick if they recognize that we can't isolate our thinking from nature's perfection and healing powers and not suffer from that loss."
References:
1. Descriptions of genius to which Cohen's work applies:
"When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The principal mark of a genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers." Arthur Koestler
"Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers." Robert Graves
"Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple." C. W. Ceran
"It takes immense genius to represent, simply and sincerely, what we see in front of us." Edmond Duranty
"Genius . . . is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one." Ezra Pound
"A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it." Author unknown
"Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training." Bernard Berenson
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information." Winston Churchill
"Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored." Abraham Lincoln
Creative genius: "Individuals credited with creative ideas or products that have left a large impression on a particular domain of intellectual or aesthetic activity." Author unknown
"Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such they are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature." Pope
"What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - possessing them - that what has been said has still not been said enough." Eugene Delacroix
"Some superior minds are unrecognized because there is no standard by which to weigh them." Joseph Joubert
"A good criteria to determine a genius is to see whether he has caused a paradigm shift in his time." Author unknown
"My father taught me that a symphony was an edifice of sound, and I learned pretty soon that it was built by the same kind of mind in much the same way that a building was built.... Even the very word 'organic' means that nothing is of value except as it is naturally related to the whole in the direction of some living purpose, a true part of entity." -Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing
Genius: "Those individuals that rise to the particular challenges of emerging in a civilization when it is in some way endangered and who make a response to ensure the continuity of the civilization." Arnold Toynbee
"The willingness and ability to challenge conventional wisdom. Perhaps even more importantly, scientific genius depends on an instinct for invention, an ability to focus on the problem at hand, and a determination to pursue that problem to a successful conclusion." Author unknown
"What is called genius is the abundance of life and health." Henry David Thoreau
"A genius adds to every equation our inborn love of nature and its global intelligence." Michael J. Cohen
2. Cohen, M. J. (2003). The Web of Life Imperative, Trafford, Victoria, B.C. Canada and (1997) Reconnecting With Nature, Ecopress, Corvalis, Oregon, and Einstein's World, Project NatureConnect, Friday Harbor, WA. Also see Nature Connected Psychology: creating moments that let Earth teach. Greenwich Journal of Science and Technology, July, 2000. http://www.ecopsych.com/natpsych.html
3. McKibben, W. (1999). The End of Nature Anchor Books/Doubleday.
4. Storer, J. Title: The Web of Life. Devin-Adair 1953.
5. Cohen, M. J. (2000). Einstein's World, Institute of Global Education, Friday Harbor, WA
6. Cohen, M. J. (1997). The Natural Systms Thinking Process, How Applied Ecopsychlogy Brings People to their Senses. PROCEEDINGS, 26th Annual Conference of North American Association For Environmental Education, Vancouver, British Columbia.
7, Wilson (1984). The Biophilia Hypothesis, Harvard Univ Press,
8. Einstein, A. (1997) in Neligh, R.D. The Grand Unification: A Unified Field Theory of Social Order, New Constellation Press
9. Pearce, J. (1980). Magical Child. New York, NY: Bantam.
10. Cohen, M. J.(ed.) and Lovelock, J. (1986). PROCEEDINGS of the 1985 international symposium Is The Earth A Living Organism? Sharon, Connecticut: The National Audubon Society.
11. Cohen, M. J. (2003). The personal page of an innovative scientist-counselor-ecopsychologist http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html
12. Jones, M. A. Genius at Work. http://www.ecopsych.com/think3genius.html
13. Cohen, M. J.(1986). Education as of Nature Mattered: Reaffirming Kinship with the Living Earth. in Denness, B., Editor, PROCEEDINGS of "The Maverick Genius Conference" The International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology. Bureau of Applied Sciences, Isle of Wight, England.
14. Kofalk, H (1995) The Distinguished World Citizen Award, Taproots, Journal of the Coalition for Education in the Out of Doors, Cortland, N.Y. http://www.ecopsych.com/overview.html
15. Evaluation and Testimonials http://www.ecopsych.com/testeval1.html
16. Cohen, M.J. The Stairway to Personal and Global Sanity Institute of Global Education http://www.ecopsych.com/wholeness2.html
17. Cohen, M.J. (2002) Organic Psychology.com The Organic Psychology Revolution: an environmentally friendly, nature-based, therapeutic tool.
18. Cohen, M.J. (1997) Reconnecting With Nature: finding wellness through restoring your bond with the Earth, Eugene OR. Ecopress
INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION
Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council
PROJECT NATURECONNECT Readily available, online, natural science tools for the health of person, planet and spirit
P.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250 360-378-6313 www.ecopsych.com
ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION The Natural Systems Thinking Process
Posted from the NY Times, May 30, 2007 There is a rule for judging solutions to the twin problems of energy dependence and global warming: A policy designed to solve one problem should not make the other worse. But that is a likely outcome of the many “energy independence” bills circulating in Congress that aim to build a whole new generation of coal-to-liquid plants to convert coal into automotive fuel.
These bills have already acquired an enthusiastic constituency and will be offered as amendments to what is now a relatively simple and sound energy bill designed to increase the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks, encourage the production of biofuels and provide research and development money for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
There are, of course, ways to make this bill better. Senator Jeff Bingaman will offer a useful amendment to require utilities to generate a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources like wind. But there are also ways to make the bill a lot worse. One of them is to require the expenditure of billions of dollars in loans, tax incentives and price guarantees to lock in a technology that could end up doing more harm than good.
Coal is far and away America’s most abundant fuel. It provides more than half the country’s electricity. And there is no doubt that it could substitute for foreign oil, although how much and at what price is not clear. In addition, the technology to convert coal into liquid fuels is well established. But it is also true that between the production process and burning it in cars, coal-to-liquid fuel produces more than twice the greenhouse gas emissions as gasoline and nearly twice the emissions of ordinary diesel. These are terrible ratios.
Congressional and industry proponents of coal-to-liquid plants argue that the same technologies that may someday capture and store emissions from coal-fired plants will also be available to coal-to-liquid plants. But that deals with only half of the problem. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, coal-based automobile fuel would still be marginally dirtier than ordinary gasoline and only marginally cleaner than conventional diesel.
What this means is that the country would be investing billions to produce fuels that, from a global warming perspective, leave us at best treading water. That is unacceptable at a time when mainstream scientists are warning that greenhouse gases must be cut by 60 percent or better over the next half-century to avert the worst consequences of global warming.
Researchers at M.I.T. estimate that it will cost $70 billion to build enough coal-to-liquid plants to replace 10 percent of American gasoline consumption. A similar investment in biofuels like cellulosic or sugar-based ethanol — which could yield substantial reductions in greenhouse gases — would seem a lot smarter.
Given the dimensions of our energy problems, new ideas must be explored. But it makes little sense to shackle the country now to a coal-based technology of such uncertain promise.
Interior officials messed with science, say witnesses at House hearing
Posted from the Daily Grist:
Think you've had a rough week? Imagine how the U.S. Interior Department feels. This week saw a heated House hearing in which activists and former officials testified about Interior's nasty habit of meddling with science. "This is an agency that seems focused on one goal: weakening the law by administrative fiat, and it is doing much of the work shrouded from public view," said Natural Resources Committee Chair Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.). Witnesses including former Fish and Wildlife head Jamie Rappaport Clark said politics had led to manipulation of research relating to the Endangered Species Act, but Interior Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett insisted the agency was establishing an accountability board and was shocked, shocked to find politics in its establishment. Amidst the hubbub, the official who inherited Interior's messed-up-beyond-belief oil and gas leases, Johnnie Burton, announced plans to resign. And agency head Dirk Kempthorne was found huddled in a corner, muttering, "TGIF, TGIF."
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Thursday, December 20, 2007
New Forms of Life
Check out the video in this Treehugger post! http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/12/strandbeests_bl.php
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Monday, December 17, 2007
a nice word
Michael Pollan's latest NY Times article on sustainability & food.
The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”
To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.
For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.
The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.
Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.” Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.
Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.
As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” — the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. — are in any rush to see happen.
he second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing — going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.
You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures — 80 percent of the world’s crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California’s Central Valley — that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there’s absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren’t in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley — more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all.
They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world’s greatest “pollination event.” (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with “pollen patties” — which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)
In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers — and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel” — a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder — a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)
“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”
We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”
From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” will be published next month.
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Monday, December 10, 2007
SocialWay
check this website out, a friend told me to take a gander at it and I'm just passing it along.
Social Way
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Labels: sharing, technology, web 2.0
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Sunday, December 09, 2007
Chemical Dangers from Nalgene?
A Canadian retailer has just banned Nalgene bottles from being sold in its stores until more is known about the effects of a chemical used to make Nalgene plastic are bettern known.
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Friday, November 09, 2007
Instead of googling it, blackle it!
http://www.blackle.com/about/
The above link describes exactly what Blackle is, and the following link is the actual website. Check it out! Take a small step and save energy while you search the world wide web.
http://www.blackle.com/
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Monday, October 29, 2007
Colleges Graded on Sustainability
It was a nice weekend at K-State with Homecoming and another K-State football victory.
On environmental business, it looks like we have much work to do about getting our campus moving toward "green" and sustainable.
As the following article indicates, of 200 US colleges evaluated, K-State rates with a D+.
Of interest, SEA is mentioned in the K-State profile. Now is an essential time for students to step forward and make a change for something better on campus.
Daily Grist 10/26/07
Wondering which colleges are greenest? The Sustainable Endowment Institute has released its second College Sustainability Report Card, grading the environmentaliciousness of the 200 U.S. colleges with the largest endowments. Two-thirds of the schools got better grades this time than last; the average overall grade was a C+, and six schools received an overall A- for their efforts -- Carleton College, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Middlebury College, University of Vermont, and University of Washington. The colleges were graded on transportation, administration, climate and energy, food and recycling, green building, and investment priorities, as well as endowment transparency and shareholder engagement (both of which most schools solidly failed). Among the encouraging statistics: Around half of the schools have committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, more than two-thirds have green building policies, and more than 80 percent source at least some cafeteria food locally.
K-State's profile:
http://www.endowmentinstitute.org/report2008/profile90.pdf
sources: The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, PR Newswire
straight to the report: College Sustainability Report Card 2008
see also, in Gristmill: College Sustainability Report Card 2008 released
see also, in Grist: 15 Green Colleges and Universities
see also, in Grist: College and university presidents sign on to climate pledge
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Friday, October 26, 2007
Power Shift 2007
Hi Students for Environmental Action,
I just came across your blog and website, and first off: impressive
site. Pretty spiffy!
I'm a fellow blogger and a young climate activist. I live in Oregon,
but I blog on climate change and energy issues regularly at my blog,
Watthead and at It's Getting Hot In Here (the youth climate
movement's blog). I thought you'all might be interested in a couple
of recent posts on the upcoming Power Shift 2007 national youth
climate summit, Step it Up 2, and the growing strength of the youth
climate movement. Feel free to repost these at your blog. Hopefully
I'll see some of you at Power Shift
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/10/24/watch-out-for-the-echo-boom-
why-politicians-had-better-start-paying-attention-to-the-millennial-
generation/
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/10/22/generation-anything-but-
quiet-just-wait-for-the-noise-at-power-shift-2007/
Also attached is a short news blurb on Power Shift.
Power to the (young) people!
Jesse Jenkins
________________________
WattHead - Energy News and Commentary
http://watthead.blogspot.com
watthead.blog@gmail.com
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Lou Douglass Lecture
An activist dubbed one of the most powerful people in the nonprofit sector will be the next Lou Douglas Lectures speaker on Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 7:00 pm in Forum Hall of the K-State Student Union.
Robert Egger, founder and president of the D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington, D.C., which combats hunger and creates jobs for unemployed and homeless men and women will speak on “Our 40 Year Journey from Charity to Change.”. His talk is free and open to the public.
At the D.C. Kitchen, unemployed and homeless men and women learn marketable skills by turning foods donated by restaurants, hotels and caterers into balanced meals and then serving them at the D.C. Central Kitchen. Since opening in 1989, the Kitchen has distributed 17.4 million meals and helped more than 605 men and women gain full-time employment.
Egger is also developing the Campus Kitchens Project, which brings colleges and universities together with student volunteers, dining service workers and community organizations to combat hunger across the country.
Valerie Coltharp
Special Projects Coordinator
UFM Representative Payee
UFM Community Learning Center
1221 Thurston, Manhattan, KS 66502
(785) 539-8763
(785) 539-9460 (fax)
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Thursday, October 11, 2007
Field School for Environmental Organizing
Green Corps is the non-profit Field School for Environmental Organizing,
founded by leading environmentalists in 1992 to train environmental
organizers. Our program includes intensive classroom training, hands-on
experience running urgent environmental campaigns, and placement in
permanent positions with leading environmental and social change groups.
Jesse Littlewood
Recruitment Director, Green Corps
jesse@greencorps.org
617-426-8506
www.greencorps.org
Celebrating 15 Years: Green Corps, Field School for Environmental
Organizing
** Applications due Oct. 26, 2007 - apply online today at
http://www.greencorps.org **
Green Corps is the non-profit Field School for Environmental Organizing,
founded by leading environmentalists in 1992 to train environmental
organizers. Our program includes intensive classroom training, hands-on
experience running urgent environmental campaigns, and placement in
permanent positions with leading environmental and social change groups.
Classroom Training. Our intensive classroom training combines issue
briefings, workshops and skills trainings to prepare you to run a
grassroots
campaign. Issue briefings include Clean Cars, Renewable Energy, Forests
and
Endangered Species. Strategy workshops include The Legislative Process,
Social Change Methodology and Effective Media: Messaging and Framing.
Finally, hands-on skills trainings include Leadership Development,
Training
Volunteers and Running Effective Meetings. Training is run by the Green
Corps Central Staff, as well as environmental and social change experts
such
as John Passacantando, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA, Bill
McKibben,
author and climate change expert, and Wendy Wendlandt, Political
Director,
U.S. PIRG.
Field Training. Our field training puts you on the front lines of
today's
most urgent environmental campaigns. With Green Corps, you will work in
multiple cities nationwide, chosen for their ability to make an impact
on
critical environmental problems. Potential locations include, but are
not
limited to, San Francisco, CA; Chicago, IL; Washington, DC and Boston,
MA.
You must be willing to relocate during your year with Green Corps.
Dates. The program begins in August 2008 and concludes with graduation
in
August 2009.
Responsibilities. Plan and implement a series of critical environmental
campaigns with groups like Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club and
Greenpeace. You will secure media coverage, recruit and manage
volunteers,
train new leaders, and mobilize grassroots activists.
Career Development. Upon completion of the training program, Green Corps
will connect you to organizations that are seeking full-time
professional
staff. Green Corps graduates hold positions with MoveOn.org, Sierra
Club,
Greenpeace, Global Exchange, Endangered Species Coalition, Global Trade
Watch, Corporate Accountability International, ForestEthics, and many
other
environmental and progressive groups.
Qualifications. Each year we select 35 recent college graduates to join
Green Corps. We are looking for people who are serious about saving the
planet, have demonstrated leadership experience, and want to work for
change
over the long haul at the grassroots level.
Salary & Benefits. Salary of $23,750. Optional group health care
coverage,
paid sick days and holidays, two weeks paid vacation, and a student loan
repayment program for qualifying staff.
To Apply. To apply to Green Corps, fill out our online application by
the
Early Application Deadline of Oct. 26, 2007. Deadlines, 2nd round
interview
locations and our online application are at http://www.greencorps.org.
Contact. Jesse Littlewood, Recruitment Director, at jobs@greencorps.org,
617-426-8506,
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Monday, October 08, 2007
Step It Up 2007 for Climate Change
On November 3rd, Americans will demand real leadership on global warming. From coast to coast, we'll rally in our communities and invite our politicians to join us. We'll see who rises to the occasion and who has a real plan to tackle the defining challenge of our time.
With a month to go, people by the thousands have begun inviting presidential candidates and members of Congress to come speak about climate change at Step It Up events on Nov. 3 -- and we've started getting some RSVPs.
http://www.stepitup2007.org/
Article at Daily Grist...
Step it Up
Bill McKibben is organizing Step It Up 2, a national day of climate action. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He serves on Grist's board of directors.
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Wednesday, October 03, 2007
The Green Bliss Fest
http://www.greenblissfest.org/
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Thursday, September 27, 2007
What do you believe?
Check this out. If you haven't already.
www.mondonation.com
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Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Tonights Speaker: Sarah Hill-Nelson
Here is a link to Ljworld.com. There is a published chat, "Chat about Lawrence sustainability with Sarah Hill-Nelson," and it talks a little about what Sarah does and some of the pros and cons of 'green tags' and other sustainability issues. Give it a look-see and come to the SEA meeting tonight and she can answer any questions.
www2.ljworld.com/chats/2007/may/21/sarah_hillnelson/
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Seminar September 20th
This is tomorrow - sorry - but it looks very interesting. 4:00 pm in 201 Trotter Hall
A seminar by Craig Beech will be presented in 201 Trotter Hall (at the
vet school) on Thursday Sept. 20 at 4 p.m.
The title will be:
Peace Parks, Africa’s great (un)divide: Using international
conservation to join regions and peoples
Craig Beech is the GIS manager of the Peace Parks Foundation, the
people behind the establishment of transfrontier conservation areas in
Africa, which joins countries in cross-border conservation efforts. The
countries involved include South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe,
Namibia, Angola, Lesotho, Zambia and others. This is a significant
development in Africa with far-reaching implications for conservation,
land use options, political science and geographic science,
international trade, and biosecurity concerns such as possible impacts
on important diseases like Foot and Mouth Disease. GIS was and is used
throughout the process of transfrontier conservation planning and
implementation.
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Friday, September 14, 2007
Report from the World Watch Institute
This is a sobering report from the World Watch Institute. See the whole story at: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5340/print
Window to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change Closing; EU Should Press for Immediate U.S. Action
By Worldwatch Institute
Created Sep 13 2007 - 1:00pm
The warming climate is undermining biodiversity by accelerating habitat loss, according to Vital Signs 2007–2008.
Washington, D.C.— Consumption of energy and many other critical resources is consistently breaking records, disrupting the climate and undermining life on the planet, according to the latest Worldwatch Institute report, Vital Signs 2007-2008.
To see the rest of the report:
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5340/print
.
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Thursday, September 13, 2007
The Designer's Challenge
David Orr, a member of the Center for Ecoliteracy board of directors,
is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and
Politics at Oberlin College, and the James Marsh Professor at Large,
University of Vermont.
This talk was delivered as the commencement address to the School of
Design, University of Pennsylvania, on May 14, 2007.
The Designer's Challenge
By David W. Orr
.
Dean Hack, distinguished faculty of the School of Design, honored
guests, and most important, you the members of the class of 2007: It
is a great privilege to stand before you on your graduation day.
As a Penn alumnus I feel a deep sense of affection for this
institution and for this place. My own interest in design was kindled
here long ago by Ian McHarg, who as much as anyone was the founder of
modern landscape design and the larger field of ecological design. His
book Design with Nature remains a classic statement of the art of
intelligent inhabitation. From its founding, the city of Philadelphia
has been home to a great deal of innovative urban design and
experimentation now carried on here in the School of Design. You are a
part of a great history and have inherited a legacy of which you may
be justly proud. But the work of designers is now entering its
critical and most important phase.
It is said that we are entitled to hold whatever opinions we choose,
but we are not entitled to whatever facts we wish. Whatever opinions
you may have, there are four facts that will fundamentally shape the
world in which you will live and work.
The first is the fact that we spend upwards of 95 percent of our time
in houses, cars, malls, and offices. We are becoming an indoor species
increasingly shut off from sky, land, forests, waters, and animals.
Nature, as a result, is becoming more and more an abstraction to us.
The problem is most severe for children who now spend up to eight
hours each day before a television or computer screen and less and
less time outdoors in nature. Author Richard Louv describes the
results as "nature deficit disorder" — the loss of our sense of
rootedness in place and connection to the natural world. In some
future time, it is not farfetched to think that disconnected and
rootless we would become unhinged in a fundamental way and that is a
spiritual crisis for which there is no precedent.
Second, when Benjamin Franklin walked the streets of Philadelphia
there were fewer than one billion of us on Earth. The human population
is now 6.5 billion and will likely crest at 9 or 10 billion.
One-and-a-half billion live in the most abject poverty, while another
billion live in considerable wealth. One billion suffer from the
afflictions of eating too much while others suffer from malnutrition.
When I was a graduate student at Penn the ratio of richest to poorest
was said to be 35:1. It is now approaching 100:1 and growing. The
problem of a more crowded world is not just about what ecologists call
carrying capacity of the Earth. It also a problem of justice with more
and more people competing for less and less.
A third fact has been particularly difficult for a society built on
the foundation of cheap portable fossil fuels to acknowledge. We are
at or near the year of peak oil extraction, the point at which we will
have consumed the easy and better half of the accessible oil. The
other half is harder to refine, farther out, and deeper down, and
mostly located in places where people do not like us. We are not
likely to run out of oil or liquid fossil fuels from one source or
another, but we are nearing the end of the era of cheap oil. We have
known this for decades, but we still have no coherent or farsighted
energy policy. In the meantime the penalty for procrastination grows
daily along with the risks of supply interruptions and volatile energy
prices.
There is a fourth fact. When the University of Pennsylvania was
founded the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per
million. But now the level of all human-generated heat-trapping gases
is 430 parts per million CO2 equivalent. We have already warmed the
Earth by .8 degrees C and are committed at least to another .6 degrees
C. According to the scientists who participated in writing the Fourth
Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change we are not
just warming the Earth, but destabilizing the entire planet. Climate
scientist James Hansen says that we are close to making Earth a
different planet and one that we will not much like.
Four facts.
One has to do with the largeness of the human spirit and our capacity
to connect to life.
The second has to do with justice, fairness, and decency in a more
crowded world.
The third has to do with our wisdom and creativity in the face of
limits to the biosphere.
The last is about human survival on a hotter and less stable and
predictable planet.
In the face of the remorseless working out of large numbers do you
have reason to be optimistic? Frankly, no. Optimism is a prediction
that the odds are in your favor — like being a Yankees fan with a
one-run lead in the ninth inning and two outs and a two-strike count
on a .200 hitter and Mariano Rivera — in his prime — on the mound. You
have good reason to believe that you will win the game. That's
optimism. The Red Sox fans, on the other hand, believing in the
salvation of small percentages, hope for a hit to get the runner home
from second base to tie the game. Optimism is a bet that the odds are
in your favor; hope is the faith that things will work out whatever
the odds. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people
are actively engaged in defying the odds or changing the odds. But
optimism leans back, puts its feet up, and sports a confident look
knowing that the deck is stacked.
If you know enough, you cannot honestly be optimistic. But you have
every reason to be hopeful and to act faithfully and competently on
that hope. And what does that mean for you as designers?
My message to you is this. As designers you hold the keys to creating
a far better world than that in prospect, but only if you respond
creatively, smartly, wisely, and quickly to the four facts described
above. Your generation does not have a choice to solve one or two of
these problems. You must solve them all — rather like solving a
quadratic equation. And you have no time to lose. As designers you
must design so artfully and carefully as to help reconnect people to
nature and to their places. You must design to promote justice in a
more crowded world. You must design a world powered by efficiency and
sunlight. You do not have the option of maintaining the status quo — a
world dependent on ancient sunlight. And since Nature is a ruthless
and unforgiving bookkeeper, you must do your work in a way that
balances the carbon books. How will you do such things? The answers,
fortunately, are many, but the principles of design are few. Let me
suggest three.
The first has to do with the scope of your work. You must see design
as a large and unifying concept — quite literally the remaking of the
human presence on Earth. Design in its largest sense has to do with
how we provision ourselves with food, energy, materials, shelter,
livelihood, transport, water, and waste cycling. It is the calibration
of human intentions with how the world works as a physical system and
the awareness of how the world works to inform our intentions. And
good design at all times joins our five senses (and perhaps others
that we suspect) with the human fabricated world. When designers get
it right, they create in ways that reinforce our common humanity at
the deepest level.
Ecological design is flourishing in fields as diverse as architecture,
landscape architecture, biomimicry, industrial ecology, urban
planning, ecological engineering, agriculture, and forestry. It is
gathering momentum, driven by necessity, better technology, and
economic opportunity. Designers in diverse fields are learning how to
* use nature as the standard, as Ian McHarg proposed;
* power the world on current sunlight;
* eliminate waste;
* pay the full cost of development;
* build prosperity on a durable basis.
Design as a large concept means, in Wendell Berry felicitous words,
"solving for pattern," creating solutions that solve many problems.
When you solve for pattern you will also have created resilience,
which is the capacity of systems to persist in a world perturbed by
human error, malevolence, and what we call "acts of God." And by
solving for pattern you are also likely to learn the virtues of
reparability, redundancy, locality, and simplicity.
Here is an example of good design: Last week I took a class to a farm
in Virginia in which the farmer raises poultry, cattle, and hogs so
artfully that each element enhances the others while improving soil
fertility and making a substantial profit by selling directly to a
large base of local customers. As a designer, he has designed out
chemicals, pollution, genetically modified organisms, pharmaceuticals,
and most of the fossil fuels necessary to transport food long
distances. The result is health in the large: of land, animals,
people, and economy.
As a corollary, you must see yourselves as the designers, not just of
buildings, landscapes, and objects, but of the systems in which these
are components. That means that you must reckon with economic,
political, and social aspects of design. And the hardest but most
important object for designers is the design of what Peter Senge calls
learning organizations, in which designing ecologically becomes the
default setting, not an aberration.
Second, you will need a standard for your work, rather like the
Hippocratic Oath or a compass by which you chart a journey. For that I
propose that designers should aim to cause no ugliness, human or
ecological, somewhere else or at some later time. That standard will
cause you to think upstream from the particular design project or
object to the wells, mines, forests, farms, and manufacturing
establishments from which materials are drawn and crystallized into
the particularities of design. It will cause you, as well, to look
downstream to the effects of design on climate and health of people
and ecosystems. If there is ugliness, human or ecological, at either
end you cannot claim success as a designer regardless of the
artfulness of what you make.
As a corollary, you, as designers, ought to think of yourselves first
as place makers, not merely form makers. The difference is crucial.
Form making puts a premium on artistry and sometimes merely fashion.
It is mostly indifferent to human and ecological costs incurred
elsewhere. The first rule of place making, on the other hand, is to
honor and preserve other places, however remote in space and culture.
When you become accomplished designers, of course, you will have
mastered the integration of both making places and making them
beautiful.
Third, as designers, you will need to place your work in a larger
historical context — what philosopher Thomas Berry calls, your Great
Work. No generation ever asks for its Great Work. The generation of
the Civil War certainly did not wish to fight and die at places like
Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, or the Wilderness. But their Great Work,
the end of human bondage, required just that of tens of thousands of
them...and they rose to do their Great Work. Those now passing from
the scene that Tom Brokaw calls "The Greatest Generation" did not wish
to fight and die in places like Iwo Jima or the battlefields of
Europe. But their Great Work, the fight against Nazism, required them
to do so and they rose to the challenge to do their Great Work as
well. Your Great Work, however, is not one of fighting wars, but of
extending and speeding a worldwide ecological enlightenment that joins
human needs and purposes with the way the world works as a biophysical
system.
Your Great Work will be no less demanding and no less complex than
that of any previous generation. But in outline it is very simple.
Your Great Work as designers is to:
1. Stabilize and reduce all heat trapping gases
2. Make a rapid transition to efficiency and renewable energy
3. Build a world secure by design for everyone...a world in which
every child has a decent home, food, water, education, medical care
4. Preserve the best of our history and culture
5. Enable us to see our way forward to a world that is sustainable
and spiritually sustaining
This challenge, your Great Work, is neither liberal nor conservative;
neither Republican nor Democrat. It is, rather, the recognition that
the present generation is a trustee standing midway between a distant
past and the horizon of the future. As trustees we are obligated to
pass on the best of our civilization and the ecological requisites on
which it depends — including a stable climate and biological diversity
— to future generations. The idea that we are no more than trustees
was proposed long ago by Edmund Burke, the founder of modern
conservatism (1790), and by one of the founders of modern
revolutionary politics, Thomas Jefferson (1789), as well. It is a
perspective that unites us across our present divisions in service to
our posterity.
Your Great Work is a sacred trust given only to your generation. If
you do not rise to do your Great Work, it will not be done. We know
enough now to say what no other generation could rightfully say: the
price for that dereliction — not rising to do your Great Work — will
be high and perhaps total. Your Great Work as designers is to honor
wholeness, health, and the great holy mystery of life. No other
generation before you ever had a greater challenge and none more
reason to rise to greatness.
My charge to you is to do your work so well that those who will look
back on your time — the beneficiaries of your Great Work — will know
that this was indeed humankind's finest hour.
Copyright(c) 2007 David W. Orr
David W. Orr, a member of the Center for Ecoliteracy board of
directors, is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental
Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and the James Marsh Professor
at Large, University of Vermont. Nationally recognized as a leader in
environmental education, ecological literacy, and environmental
design, he is a contributing editor to Conservation Biology, the
author of The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment
in an Age of Terror, The Nature of Design, Earth in Mind, and
Ecological Literacy, and coeditor of The Global Predicament and The
Campus and Environmental Responsibility..
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Monday, September 10, 2007
Your Diet and the Environment
I received my monthly issue of Co-Op America recently, which mainly consists of information concerning investments and ways to cool the earth through them. This month however, there was an interesting article concerning the diet and it's effects on the environment, specifically meat diets. A 2006 study conducted by Drs. Pamela Martin and Gidon Eshel of the University of Chicago, http://geosci.uchicago.edul~gidon/papers/nutri/nutri.html, provided a neat graph that compared different meat (and non-meat) diets with their average annual greenhouse gas emissions. The results: Vegan: 0 tons, Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian: .8 ton, Poultry: .9 ton, Avg. American: 1.485 tons, Fish: 2 tons, Red Meat: 2 tons. These diets are based on a 3,774 calorie diet. All diets including meat are calculated as 72 percent plant-based, 14 percent meat, 14 percent eggs and dairy. The lacto-ovo diet is 90 percent plant based, 10 percent eggs and dairy, reflecting the actual animal product consumption o the average lacto-ovo vegetarian. You might be asking yourself, why such an outrageous amount of calories when the usual average is 2000? Well- this 3,774 number is an "FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) figure that represents the number of calories produced and distributed per person in the US, meaning that while we don't necessarily eat that much on average, we eat or waste that much at grocery stores and at home." This study took into account the entire life cycle of these diets. How much energy it took to grow, harvest , transport , and prepare them. The FAO released a report this past February stating livestock accounts for 18 percent of our world global warming emissions. Switching from a Toyota Camry to a hybrid Toyota Prius would save 1 ton of greenhouse gases annually while making the switch to a vegan diet would save 1.5 tons! After reading this article, it only reaffirms what I heard on Real Time a couple of weeks ago; "One can't be an environmentalist and a meat eater." These words spoken by a representative of PETA. What really surprises me is that the fish diet is equivalent to the red meat diet in avg. annual ghg emmisions. "I am a vegetarian, but I still eat fish" doesn't cut it anymore.
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Thursday, September 06, 2007
The Underground Railroad Bus Tour
Upcoming Tour of the Underground Railroad by local good guy and director of the Wonder Workshop Richard Pitts. The bus tour is September 16, 2007 from 3-6 p.m.
The Underground Railroad Bus Tour
Lead by Richard Pitts, the author of "A Self-Guided Tour of the Underground Railroad in Kansas" & Executive Producer of the DVD Documentary "The Kansas Underground Railroad"
COST – FREE
Arrive early to get a seat on the bus otherwise you will have to drive your own vehicle
Date: September 16, 2007 Time: 3 – 6 pm, Where: Triangle Park in Aggieville
Co-Sponsored by CCHW at K-STATE & USD 383
The year is 1858. The Fugitive Slave Law was passed just eight years ago; bad news for you and your small group who just managed a narrow escape from slavery's doorsteps in Missouri. Alas, you thought your adventure was over now that you are in Kansas. You now are going to carefully navigate your way through to get your passengers to Canada on the Underground Railroad.
Richard Pitts, Executive Director of the Wonder Workshop, proudly presents a journey back in time to Underground Railroad sites in Riley and Wabaunsee Counties. This tour will travel to various sites within fifteen miles of Manhattan. At each site, (there will be seven stops made on this tour) participants will be presented with information regarding its historical significance. You should plan to spend at least 3 ½ hours to complete the entire route. Travelers will learn about the famous Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, Captain Mitchell, Strong Farm, Reverend Blood, and others who helped to make Kansas a free state! Your group will take part in interactive activities along the way. This adventure will place you in the shoes of enslaved Africans, Slave Owners, and Abolitionists as you learn about the true meaning of strength, courage, and endurance experienced by those early "Human Rights" activists whose broad shoulders we all stand upon!
FAQ
How long is the tour? Between 3 - 5 hours to complete
.
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007
How big is Greenland?
Fun clip- Aside from West Winger's ignorance of the world as it actually is, the lack of Geography in grade school is unfortunate. Not that Geography is solely maps...
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Lecture of Interest
Lecture: Why Are Humans so Willing to Bite the Land that Feeds Them? 5:30 p.m., 2414 Throckmorton Hall. Presented by Ken Warren as a continuation of the Sustainable Dialog
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Saturday, August 18, 2007
Irish Cobbler Potatoes and the heat woes of Summer...
The Irish Cobbler Potatoes should be ready to harvest. Champ, if you want to call me and setup a time to come over with your pitch fork, or just drop it off, that would be great.
Megan: I still have frozen homemade marinara sauce for you. Maybe some tomatoes, plenty of cayenne and jalapeno peppers.
There are plenty of peppers for everyone, so feel free to stop by and just pick some, or come collect some that are in the house.
The heat has really hit the garden,
and I'm not sure if either of the cucumber plants, one of the eggplants, and quite a lot of the tomato plants will actually make it. The heat has been intense, and even though I've been watering at night, the heat is too much. We've also had ant problems with the back melon patch. Fortunately, we should have plenty of butternut squash, and if any would like, I could post a very simple butternut squash lasagna recipe that is delicious and filling. The corn seem to be hanging on, and ~ dozen husks are visible. On a bright note, the sun flowers seem to be basking up the sun.
After the garden has stopped producing this year, I'd like to have a workday to try to flatten and better irrigate an area of the yard for next year's garden. This could possibly involve a trip to the dairy farm to apprehend some poo. Trust me, its great fun at 8 o'clock on a saturday morning.
Anyways, I hope everyone is doing well as they get back into town. Stop by and say hi if you haven't in a while :-)
~Sir Knabe
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Birthday Party
Hello people. Just wanted to post my birthday plans on the blog. Tomorrow night, Thursday the 26th at 10ish (really whenever), it is going to be at Kevin's. There will be libations but you may want to bring your own too. Midnight, I am officially legal to enter official alcohol selling establishments..so at 12 that is what is happening. Hoorayy!!!!
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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
DiCaprio-produced series will rebuild tornado-ravaged Kansas town
From the Daily Grist if you missed it...
It's official: Nine months after the rumors began, Leonardo DiCaprio has confirmed that he and a partner will give birth to ... a reality series on green building. DiCaprio will executive produce the 13-part Eco-Town on the Discovery Channel's Planet Green arm, launching in 2008. The original notion was to upgrade Anywhere, USA, for a show called E-topia, but the new series will focus on rebuilding a Kansas town that was hit by a tornado in May.
The tornado caused 10 deaths, displaced almost all of the town's roughly 1,500 residents, and leveled homes, a hospital, and other buildings. And we're not saying Leo and his peeps are crass, cold-hearted vultures, but how excited do you think they were when Mother Nature wiped out a town called -- wait for it -- Greensburg? "This is not about a TV show and about a cable channel that reaches 50 million homes," says Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav. "We're the number one non-fiction media company in the world, but we also want to make a difference."
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Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Deuce update
I think we've decided on the payment system for the garden: pay $10 and you'll get a portion of the produce for as long as the garden is growing......which, with the tomatoes growing like they are, shouldn't take very long to make this a good deal!
Let me know if you're interested, or if your friends are; we probably can't have more than about 10 or 12 people, and we already have 2 signed up. So either post here, email me, or call me!
thanks,
Sir Knabe
kok6785@ksu.edu
317-5007
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Friday, July 13, 2007
Deuce veggies + workday Sunday
Everyone,
The Deuce Gardens finally has some tomatoes! We also have a healthy share of cucumbers, and I think that the garlic and onions are probably ready to be harvested.
So, I haven't firmly said anything about money yet, but here's what I was thinking: Jeffers, Ugolini and I are the only people who have spent any money on the garden (no one else has been asked). Therefore, to make some of the money back, I was thinking about offering the veggies for a discounted price for those who have helped out with the garden (or offering them to everyone, but giving precedence to those who've helped out). I'll check on average prices in the super market, and make sure that we are comparable, if not lower.
Another option would be to make salsa and/or marinara sauce out of the tomatoes, and sell the salsa.....
Anyways, I'm open to options, so let me know what you'd like to do!
As always, we need help weeding this Sunday around 2pm, and we'll be digging and placing some posts.
~Sir Knabe
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Wednesday, July 04, 2007
More Chicago Green Fest News
Chicago Green Festival Attracts Huge Crowds
Our first-ever Chicago Green Festival, held over Earth Day weekend, broke records and exceeded all expectations. With more than 30,000 people attending, it was our biggest launch of a new Green Festival yet. Setting an example for other large-scale events, we recovered more than 92 percent of the Green Festival's waste through recycling and composing, and we offset all carbon emissions associated with the festival.
Co-op America Quarterly
I must add, some of us SEAers helped accomplish that! Even though Mariel and I couldn't convince a man to buy the "perfect scarf, the only one with just the right amount of orange fabric", all 10 or 12 of us helped out in numerous other ways.
Upcoming festivals this year:
Washington, DC Oct. 6-7, 2007, San Francisco, CA Nov 9-11, 2007, Seattle, WA April 12-13 2008 (I think the Seattle one is new) and Chicago, IL (TBA).
I vote our nations capitol this year...
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Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Vertical farming in the big Apple
Is this how farms will look in the future?
Jeremy CookBBC News , New York
Professor Despommier lists many advantages of this revolutionary kind of agriculture. They include:
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Monday, June 18, 2007
Deuce Update
Everyone:
The garden is in full bloom! Included are some pictures. We need help weeding! On wednesday of this week (the 20th), we'll be tending to the garden, so if you want to help out, please stop by! We probably won't start until about 6:30, and we'll work until sundown.
thanks,
Sir Knabe
404 S. 18th St.
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Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Electric Bicycles...
Andrew Gondzur from St. Louis, MO has installed a kit that added a rechargeable electric motor to his old bike. With the twist of his handlebar he can go from pedaling to a nice boost of "motorized help." "'I can, go farther and faster than I would if I were just pedaling," he says, which is why Andrew now takes his bike, not his car, to the post office, the library, his childrens's schools, and the grocery store. "Why take 5,000 pounds of car and burn expensive gas to get one thing you forgot at the supermarker? Now I leave my car at home." Its the equivalent to a hybrid car, no idling, both pedaling and electric at your fingerprints, literally.
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Friday, June 08, 2007
Earthship
Earthships offer sustainable housing options.
I was down in Taos, NM on a day off from work and visited an Earthship community. These seem to be a very sustainable as well as intriguing housing option. The main issues that emerged when discussing Earthships with my coworkers included modifying city housing restrictions or the Earthships to allow them within city limits, insuring such homes, and getting people to see Earthships not as a housing possibility for hippies but as a plausible housing option. Check out the website and see what you think.
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Thursday, May 31, 2007
Naturally Attracted: Connecting with Michael J. Cohen
Naturally Attracted... This might be a good documentary film for Movies on the Grass, though it is only 45 minutes long...
I have included some additional information about Michael J. Cohen below. It is from an article called "Maverick Genius at Work." In the 1985 Bureau of Applied Sciences International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology, the so called "Maverick Genius Conference" in England identified Dr. Cohen as a maverick genius because genius has been described as "One who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it."
It has made me curious anyway... What do you think?
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Labels: ecopsychology, Movies on the Grass, systems theory, webstrings
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Michael J. Cohen: Maverick Genius at Work?
Here is a blurb about Michael J. Cohen from "Maverick Genius at Work." Also learn more about Dr. Cohen at: http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html
www.ecopsych.com
by Mardi Jones, Ph.D.
In 1955 neither an art nor science was available that explained how or why you could make conscious sensory contact with nature and increase mental health, stress relief, learning ability, conflict resolution and personal and environmental wellness. Then, as today, most great thinkers and leaders expounded on what should be done about our important social and environmental problems. However, they seldom offered a tool or process that enabled us to accomplish what their brilliance suggested so these problems persisted.
Dr. Michael J. Cohen's genius is exceptional in this regard. He has not only acknowledged the problems but has, in addition, identified their ordinarily invisible source and created a nature-connecting solution for them. It is doable and available for anybody interested in reaping its benefits.
Throughout his adult life, Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. has devoted his energies to bring into consciousness, identify and think with webstrings, unifying energy substances in nature that are far more common than air. While all species and minerals enjoy webstrings and their benefits, contemporary thinking in its conquest of nature has been taught to ignore, conquer or transform them from their natural status. This has led to the deterioration of natural systems in the environment and people
Cohen has successfully demonstrated the power we have to use unadulterated webstrings to regenerate the purity of nature's balance, beauty and peace around and within us (2). His work is an act of genius for it enables anyone to use webstrings to help resolve "unsolvable" personal, social and environmental problems (1).
Cohen has largely been ignored because contemporary thinking neither believes in nor respects webstrings and their potential for good. To our loss, our history has been to destroy or inadequately substitute for webstring relationships (3). For this reason, webstrings in their pure beneficial form remain foreign to most of us, even though they are right before our eyes. It is similiar to your consciousness registering the words you are now reading but not registering the air that sits between your eyes and this screen at this moment (until you are now reminded of it.)
WEBSTRINGS DESCRIBED:
Environmental experts accurately portray webstrings, nature and the web of life by gathering a group of people in a circle. Each person is asked to represent some part of nature, a bird, soil, water, etc. A large ball of string then demonstrates the interconnecting relationships between things in nature. For example, the bird eats insects so the string is passed from the "bird person" to the "insect person." That string represents their connection. The insect lives in a flower, so the string is further unrolled across the circle to the "flower person." Soon a web of string is formed interconnecting all members of the group, from minerals to the solar system, including somebody representing a person. In this model each of the connecting strands is a webstring (4).
Every aspect of the global life community, from the space between sub-atomic particles to weather systems, is part of the web of life. The diversity of natural system webstring interconnections produces nature's regenerative balance that prevents runaway disorders. For this reason, undulterated natural systems neither create garbage nor display our mental health problems or our abusiveness, stress and isolation. Everything that is part of nature, including people, belongs and is supported in nature.
In the web of life activity, dramatically, people pull back, sense, and enjoy how the strings of the web peacefully unite, support and interconnect them and all of life. Then one strand of the web is cut signifying the loss of a species, habitat or natural relationship. Sadly, the weakening effect on all is noted. Another and another string is cut. Soon the web's integrity, unifying ability and power disintegrates along with its spirit. Because this deterioration and loss of support from the wholeness of the web of life reflects the reality of our nature-separated lives, it triggers feelings of hurt, despair and sadness in many activity participants. In reality, Earth and its people increasingly suffer from "cut string" disintegration (5).
With respect to the webstring model, Dr. Cohen asks people if they ever went into a natural area and actually saw strings interconnecting things there. Usually their answer is something like, "No, if I saw them I'd be hallucinating or psychotic." Cohen has responded, "If you see no strings there, what then are the actual strands that hold the natural community together in its perfection and beauty?"
It becomes very, very quiet.
Too quiet.
Are you quiet, too?
Pay close attention to this silence. It flags a vital but missing element in our thinking, perceptions and relationships whose loss results in many troubles (6).
Natural beings sustain their own and nature's wellness while in contact with the whole of the web through webstrings. As part of nature, we are born with this ability. Pulitzer-Prize winning sociobiologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard, affirms that nature's web of life holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction (7). Albert Einstein noted that, "Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people....Our task must be to free ourselves from (our) prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty" (8).
Webstrings are part of survival, just as authentic and important as the plants, animals and minerals that they interconnect, including ourselves. The strings are as real and true as 2 + 2 = 4; they are facts as genuine as water or thirst. We ask for our troubles by ignoring them.
Cohen has demonstrated that as part of nature we are born with the natural ability for our mentality to sense, register and respond to at least 53 different webstrings that we need for survival. However, contemporary thinking learns to neither acknowledge nor exercise this ability. Instead, we usually subdue it along with nature. Our troubles and discontents result frojm thinking and relationships based on our use of less than ten, rather than 53 natural webstring senses.
Without seeing, sensing or respecting the webstrings in nature and our inner nature, we break, injure or ignore them so they no longer register in our consciousness and thinking. Their disappearance there produces an unnatural void, a discomforting sensory emptiness in our psyche and spirit that we constantly try to fill. This emotional vacuum prevents us from registering and thinking with attractions that otherwise help us, as part of nature, produce unpolluted balance, wellness and peace. The void prevents the formation of many vital relationships; this causes depression and stress in us; we unnecessarily want, and when we want there is never enough. We become greedy, abusive and reckless while trying to artificially replace our missing 43 webstring fulfillments. This dysfunction places ourselves, others and Earth at risk for with respect to the perfection of the web of life there are few, if any, known substitutes for nature's webstrings that do not produce destructive side effects in people and places (9).
Cohen's quest to understand and utilize webstrings has brought him, for the last 40 years, to live and teach in natural areas year round. This led to his Grand Canyon discovery in 1966 that Planet Earth acted like, and could be related to, as a living organism, a fact substantiated twelve years later by James Lovelock in the Gaia Hypotheses (10). From this realization Cohen personally risked founding the Trailside Country School and National Audubon Society Expedition Institute along with other organic webstring education programs, books, curricula, psychologies, therapies, courses, schools, institutions and processes. These include the Whole Life Factor, Organic Psychology, the Natural Systems Thinking Process and the 9-leg thinking model that helps us offset our addictive, nature-disconnected 5-leg thinking (2, 16). Each or these tools is part of Cohen's nature-reconnecting process that helps us build balanced relationships and wellness. The process provides us with empirical evidence and genuine contact with webstrings in natural areas that express themselves in us as 53 natural attraction senses (17, 11). Each sense gives people a unique means to make more sense and implement their deeper hopes and ideals (15).
Because, on average, over 95% of our time and 99% of our thinking is separated from nature, Cohen demonstrates that the crux of our troubles is that our mind is uprooted from nature's purifying webstring balance around and within us. He says,
"Like a deer severed by the wheels of a train, our extreme separation from nature psychologically severs us from our mentality's sensory connections and support in nature. This hurtful disconnection ungrounds us; it disconnects our thinking from many inherent natural ways of thinking, knowing and relating. This numbs our mentality to most of the sensory connections that produce nature's perfection and recuperative powers in our mind and body. Disconnected from webstrings inside and around us, our stricken psyche thinks that our nature-separated lives are 'normal' so we deny our mental dysfunctions rather than address them as such. Our disconnection is so severe that even though most of us have had wonderful restorative experiences in nature, our thinking negates rather than welcomes exercises that enable us to increase and strengthen these experiences.
Webstring sensory reconnection activities help us reduce our troubles by enabling us, at will, to genuinely connect our thinking with authentic nature, backyard or back country, and use its recuperative powers to restore our sensibilities and wellness. This also helps us strengthen our love of nature which is important because we don't fight to preserve what we don't love."
In the 1985 Bureau of Applied Sciences International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology, the so called "Maverick Genius Conference" in England identified Dr. Cohen as a maverick genius because genius has been described as "One who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it" (13). Dr. Bruce Denness, the conference convener, partially in jest suggested that Cohen, who still today sleeps outdoors year round, might be the reincarnation of Henry David Thoreau as a Psychologist.
If our society was dedicated to living in peace and balance with people and the environment, "genius" would accurately describe Dr. Cohen and his work's contribution, for which he received the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award (12, 14). However, in our nature-conquering society where profit, power and exploiting nature are often rewarded, Cohen's webstring learning and relationship building tools go against the grain. His nature-connecting art makes him a maverick, a genius who tries to teach the science of co-creating with nature to an "anti-nature" society (2, 16). He argues, "With respect to the Web of Life, we are part of the whole; when connected to the whole, webstrings renew themselves and thereby us. In our nature-separated society, a person who succeeds in helping us sustain personal and environmental wellness by genuinely reconnecting injured parts of us with nature must be, by definition, a maverick. It is strange to realize that our thinking is our destiny yet one is a maverick if they recognize that we can't isolate our thinking from nature's perfection and healing powers and not suffer from that loss."
References:
1. Descriptions of genius to which Cohen's work applies:
"When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The principal mark of a genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers."
Arthur Koestler
"Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers."
Robert Graves
"Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple."
C. W. Ceran
"It takes immense genius to represent, simply and sincerely, what we see in front of us."
Edmond Duranty
"Genius . . . is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
Ezra Pound
"A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it."
Author unknown
"Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training."
Bernard Berenson
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information."
Winston Churchill
"Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored."
Abraham Lincoln
Creative genius: "Individuals credited with creative ideas or products that have left a large impression on a particular domain of intellectual or aesthetic activity."
Author unknown
"Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such they are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature."
Pope
"What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - possessing them - that what has been said has still not been said enough."
Eugene Delacroix
"Some superior minds are unrecognized because there is no standard by which to weigh them."
Joseph Joubert
"A good criteria to determine a genius is to see whether he has caused a paradigm shift in his time."
Author unknown
"My father taught me that a symphony was an edifice of sound, and I learned pretty soon that it was built by the same kind of mind in much the same way that a building was built.... Even the very word 'organic' means that nothing is of value except as it is naturally related to the whole in the direction of some living purpose, a true part of entity."
-Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing
Genius: "Those individuals that rise to the particular challenges of emerging in a civilization when it is in some way endangered and who make a response to ensure the continuity of the civilization."
Arnold Toynbee
"The willingness and ability to challenge conventional wisdom. Perhaps even more importantly, scientific genius depends on an instinct for invention, an ability to focus on the problem at hand, and a determination to pursue that problem to a successful conclusion."
Author unknown
"What is called genius is the abundance of life and health."
Henry David Thoreau
"A genius adds to every equation our inborn love of nature and its global intelligence."
Michael J. Cohen
2. Cohen, M. J. (2003). The Web of Life Imperative, Trafford, Victoria, B.C. Canada and (1997) Reconnecting With Nature, Ecopress, Corvalis, Oregon, and Einstein's World, Project NatureConnect, Friday Harbor, WA. Also see Nature Connected Psychology: creating moments that let Earth teach. Greenwich Journal of Science and Technology, July, 2000.
http://www.ecopsych.com/natpsych.html
3. McKibben, W. (1999). The End of Nature Anchor Books/Doubleday.
4. Storer, J. Title: The Web of Life. Devin-Adair 1953.
5. Cohen, M. J. (2000). Einstein's World, Institute of Global Education, Friday Harbor, WA
6. Cohen, M. J. (1997). The Natural Systms Thinking Process, How Applied Ecopsychlogy Brings People to their Senses. PROCEEDINGS, 26th Annual Conference of North American Association For Environmental Education, Vancouver, British Columbia.
7, Wilson (1984). The Biophilia Hypothesis, Harvard Univ Press,
8. Einstein, A. (1997) in Neligh, R.D. The Grand Unification: A Unified Field Theory of Social Order, New Constellation Press
9. Pearce, J. (1980). Magical Child. New York, NY: Bantam.
10. Cohen, M. J.(ed.) and Lovelock, J. (1986). PROCEEDINGS of the 1985 international symposium Is The Earth A Living Organism? Sharon, Connecticut: The National Audubon Society.
11. Cohen, M. J. (2003). The personal page of an innovative scientist-counselor-ecopsychologist
http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html
12. Jones, M. A. Genius at Work. http://www.ecopsych.com/think3genius.html
13. Cohen, M. J.(1986). Education as of Nature Mattered: Reaffirming Kinship with the Living Earth. in Denness, B., Editor, PROCEEDINGS of "The Maverick Genius Conference" The International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology. Bureau of Applied Sciences, Isle of Wight, England.
14. Kofalk, H (1995) The Distinguished World Citizen Award, Taproots, Journal of the Coalition for Education in the Out of Doors, Cortland, N.Y.
http://www.ecopsych.com/overview.html
15. Evaluation and Testimonials http://www.ecopsych.com/testeval1.html
16. Cohen, M.J. The Stairway to Personal and Global Sanity Institute of Global Education http://www.ecopsych.com/wholeness2.html
17. Cohen, M.J. (2002) Organic Psychology.com The Organic Psychology Revolution: an environmentally friendly, nature-based, therapeutic tool.
18. Cohen, M.J. (1997) Reconnecting With Nature: finding wellness through restoring your bond with the Earth, Eugene OR. Ecopress
INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION
Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council
PROJECT NATURECONNECT
Readily available, online, natural science tools
for the health of person, planet and spirit
P.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250
360-378-6313
ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION
The Natural Systems Thinking Process
Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director
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Posted by Jeff at 11:33 AM 0 comments
Labels: ecopsychology, systems theory, webstrings
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Wednesday, May 30, 2007
The Coal Trap: NY Times Editorial
Posted from the NY Times, May 30, 2007
There is a rule for judging solutions to the twin problems of energy dependence and global warming: A policy designed to solve one problem should not make the other worse. But that is a likely outcome of the many “energy independence” bills circulating in Congress that aim to build a whole new generation of coal-to-liquid plants to convert coal into automotive fuel.
These bills have already acquired an enthusiastic constituency and will be offered as amendments to what is now a relatively simple and sound energy bill designed to increase the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks, encourage the production of biofuels and provide research and development money for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
There are, of course, ways to make this bill better. Senator Jeff Bingaman will offer a useful amendment to require utilities to generate a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources like wind. But there are also ways to make the bill a lot worse. One of them is to require the expenditure of billions of dollars in loans, tax incentives and price guarantees to lock in a technology that could end up doing more harm than good.
Coal is far and away America’s most abundant fuel. It provides more than half the country’s electricity. And there is no doubt that it could substitute for foreign oil, although how much and at what price is not clear. In addition, the technology to convert coal into liquid fuels is well established. But it is also true that between the production process and burning it in cars, coal-to-liquid fuel produces more than twice the greenhouse gas emissions as gasoline and nearly twice the emissions of ordinary diesel. These are terrible ratios.
Congressional and industry proponents of coal-to-liquid plants argue that the same technologies that may someday capture and store emissions from coal-fired plants will also be available to coal-to-liquid plants. But that deals with only half of the problem. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, coal-based automobile fuel would still be marginally dirtier than ordinary gasoline and only marginally cleaner than conventional diesel.
What this means is that the country would be investing billions to produce fuels that, from a global warming perspective, leave us at best treading water. That is unacceptable at a time when mainstream scientists are warning that greenhouse gases must be cut by 60 percent or better over the next half-century to avert the worst consequences of global warming.
Researchers at M.I.T. estimate that it will cost $70 billion to build enough coal-to-liquid plants to replace 10 percent of American gasoline consumption. A similar investment in biofuels like cellulosic or sugar-based ethanol — which could yield substantial reductions in greenhouse gases — would seem a lot smarter.
Given the dimensions of our energy problems, new ideas must be explored. But it makes little sense to shackle the country now to a coal-based technology of such uncertain promise.
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Posted by Gerry at 8:52 AM 0 comments
Labels: alternative energy, coal, coal to liquid, NY Times
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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
US Dept of Interior Troubles
Interior officials messed with science, say witnesses at House hearing
Posted from the Daily Grist:
Think you've had a rough week? Imagine how the U.S. Interior Department feels. This week saw a heated House hearing in which activists and former officials testified about Interior's nasty habit of meddling with science. "This is an agency that seems focused on one goal: weakening the law by administrative fiat, and it is doing much of the work shrouded from public view," said Natural Resources Committee Chair Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.). Witnesses including former Fish and Wildlife head Jamie Rappaport Clark said politics had led to manipulation of research relating to the Endangered Species Act, but Interior Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett insisted the agency was establishing an accountability board and was shocked, shocked to find politics in its establishment. Amidst the hubbub, the official who inherited Interior's messed-up-beyond-belief oil and gas leases, Johnnie Burton, announced plans to resign. And agency head Dirk Kempthorne was found huddled in a corner, muttering, "TGIF, TGIF."
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Posted by Gerry at 2:22 PM 0 comments
Labels: Environment, Interior Dept., science
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