Deuce Gardens

Everyone,

As most of you already know, I'm starting a garden. We're calling it "Deuce Gardens", and if you don't know why, ask me sometime. We've got about a 22'x22' area, and should have plenty of vegetables for everyone who is willing to help out.

We will be working on fertilizing and fencing this weekend, probably on Sunday. If you're interested, post a reply so that I can know how many people will be helping.

thanks,

Sir Knabe
cell: 317-5007

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A Little Light Music

U.S., E.U. push phaseout of incandescent bulbs, U.K. gets serious about carbon

From the Daily Grist Wednesday, 14 Mar 2007:The world is seeing the energy-efficient light: a U.S. coalition including Philips Lighting and the Natural Resources Defense Council will push to phase out incandescent bulbs by 2016. And following the lead of Australia and California, European Union leaders have proposed ditching the bulbs even sooner, a plan that could reduce E.U. carbon emissions up to 25 million tons a year. E.U. President Angela Merkel, who uses energy-saving bulbs at home, offered her pitch: they're "not quite bright enough, so sometimes when I'm looking for something that's dropped on the carpet I have a bit of a problem." Uh ... moving on. Yesterday, the British government proposed first-of-its-kind legislation to reduce the nation's CO2 emissions 60 percent by 2050 with a series of five-year "carbon budgets." While some wish the target were more ambitious, Prime Minister Tony Blair declared the bill -- which could become law by early next year -- a "revolutionary step" that "sets an example to the rest of the world."


straight to the source: The New York Times, Matthew L. Wald, 14 Mar 2007

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Movies on the Grass Fall 2007

Narrator: Weren't the streetcars making money?
Barney Larrick: Not after I got done chopping heads off, they weren't making money. Reduce service, make it less attractive to the customer, sell off property and holdings, take the money out, raise fares, suck the company dry, pull the company down. That's what we did.
-"Taken for a Ride (1996).
This documentary sounds very similar to "Who Killed the Electric Car", except its "who killed the American rail transit services" which used to be a growing, prosperous endeavor, then immediately taken away, forcing people to shift their ways of life. In the documentary there are people interviewed who were forced to make the change and talk about what there life was like during that time. I think it sounds great, has anyone seen it or heard of it? Anyways I was thinking it could be a great movie for Movies on the Grass this year. If enough people show interest in it and think it would be a good one please comment! Bonnie Lynn-Sherow said she is going to buy it at some point but if we were definitely going to use it she would MAKE SURE she buys it sooner than later. It is 52 minutes, black and white and was rated a 9.2/10 on IMDb by users....

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Something for certain...

Something for Certain~ j. neel

The drums played on
With the primordial bass
Echoing in the background.
The beat was different for some—
the seers, the lovers, the dreamers
And elaborate dances evolved
Emanating from the percussion,
Reverberating into spiraling arms
of resonant beauty.
And there was truth and light
Amongst the music and the masses.
The momentum spread in waves
Growing and touching others—
infinitely expanding,
Until they collapsed on themselves.
And the void was filled without form
But only a brilliant, blinding illumination.

And we knew something for certain….

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24th Water and the Future of Kansas Tomorrow!

The 24th Annual Water & the Future of Kansas Conference will be held tomorrow, March 15, 2007 at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Topeka, KS. The theme for this year's conference is: "From Dust Bowl to Mud Bowl: The Threat of Sedimentation to our Federal Reservoirs." Sedimentation of reservoirs is a hot topic in Kansas and throughout the nation, especially as the country contemplates safe, secure water supplies in a changing environment. Water quantity and quality issues are being addressed throughout the state and watershed restoration and protection efforts are part of these efforts. Professionals, researchers, educators and students working on water issues throughout the state will be in attendence, so don't miss this opporunity to learn more about Kansas' water issues and network with people working on the problems.



Tentative Program Topics

Plenary Sessions

* An Overview of the Current State, Sedimentation Rates, and Future Trends in Federal Reservoirs
Bill Renwick
Miami University of Ohio
Oxford, Ohio


* Major sources of Sediment: Landscapes, Streambanks, and Channels
Andrew Simon
USDA-ARS
Oxford, Mississippi


* Dollars and Sense: What are the Economics of Sediment Management to Sustain Federal Reservoirs?
Waite Osterkamp
USDI-USGS
Tuscon, Arizona


Issue Forums/Panel Discussions

Strategies for Water Resource Protection

* Agricultural Land Management and Water Resource Protection
* Stream Morphology and Water Resource Protection
* The Role of Small Dams in Water Resource Protection
* Strategies for Protecting Groundwater Resources

Concurrent Sessions

* Watershed Management to Protect Federal Reservoirs
* Sedimentation White Papers
* Ground Water Use and Quality
* Improving Quality through Service Learning
* Water Quality Issues

Lunch Speaker
Donnie Blanz

DONNIE BLANZ is an award winning singer/songwriter who has received critical acclaim for his own Western Americana music recordings. His original songs have also been recorded by country music artists Chris LeDoux and Ed Bruce.

In addition, Blanz is an inspirational-motivational speaker and entertainer, traveling the nation with his unique and tailor made programs for associations and corporations. As an actor he has appeared in numerous television commercials, films, and music videos.

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ecopsychology: eight principles

ECOPSYCHOLOGY: EIGHT PRINCIPLES
Theodore Roszak

In The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology, Theodore Roszak sought to formulate some general principles that might guide both environmentalists and therapists in their common project of defining a sane relationship to the world around us. The essay that follows has been adapted from the version that appears in the book.



As we approach the end of the twentieth century, there are scientists who believe we may be within sight of a Grand Unified Theory that will embrace all things, all forces, all time and matter. But will such a theory of everything, if we find it, do justice to the very act of seeking for that theory in the first place?Betty Roszak Will it explain how a supposedly once dead universe gave rise to this single, burning point of conscious curiosity called the human mind? Certainly no scientific theory we inherit from the past has yet found a place for scientists themselves, let alone for artists, visionaries, clowns, myth-makers -- for all those who have built this second nature we call "culture" on at least one planet in the cosmos. Only within the past generation, as we have grasped the historic and evolutionary character of the cosmos, have we begun to give the questing mind a significant status in scientific theory.
What unity ultimately requires is closure. The circle of theory must come round like the alchemical snake to bite its tail. What is must at last be known. Perhaps that is what underlies the eager unfolding of the natural hierarchy from the Big Bang to the human frontier: substance reaching out hungrily toward sentience. Wheeler That is the simple but mighty insight that the physicist John Wheeler sought to capture in this schematic image of a universe that makes a u-turn in time to study itself through the human eye.
Oddly, this unity of the knower and the known seems to have been better appreciated by pre-scientific humans who worked from myth, image, ritual. If ecopsychology has anything to add to the Socratic-Freudian project of self-knowledge, it is to remind us of what our ancestors took to be common knowledge: there is more to know about the self, or rather more self to know, than our personal history reveals. Making a personality, the task that Jung called "individuation," may be the adventure of a lifetime. But every person's lifetime is anchored within a greater, universal lifetime. Each of us shares the whole of life's time on Earth.Ford Salt remnants of ancient oceans flow through our veins, ashes of expired stars rekindle in our genetic chemistry. The oldest of the atoms, hydrogen whose primacy among the elements should have gained it a more poetically resonant name is a cosmic theme; mysteriously elaborated billions-fold, it has created from Nothing the Everything that includes us.
When we look out into the night sky, the stars we see in the chill, receding distance may seem crushingly vast in size and number. How many times have despairing philosophers and common cynics reminded us of how small we are in comparison to the great void of space? It is the great clich‚ of modern times that we are "lost in the stars," a minuscule planet wheeling around a minor star at the outer edge of a galaxy that is only one among billions. But in truth there is no principle in science that can logically judge value by size. Neither big nor small any longer have any limit or meaning in the universe. Wonders and amazements come in all sizes. Is the universe "too big" to provide human meaning? Not at all. It is, in fact, exactly the right size. Modern cosmology teaches us that the swelling emptiness that contains us is, Betty Roszakprecisely by virtue of its magnitude, the physical matrix that makes living intelligence possible. Only a universe of this size and this temperature and this age could have produced life anywhere. Those who once believed we were cradled in the hands of God were not so very wrong after all -- at least metaphorically speaking.
All this, the new place of life in the cosmos, belongs to the principles of ecopsychology, but not in any doctrinaire or purely clinical way. Psychotherapy is best played by ear. It is after all a matter of listening to the whole person, all that is submerged, unborn, in hiding: the infant, the shadow, the savage, the outcast. The list of principles we offer here is merely a guide, suggesting how deep that listening must go to hear the Self that speaks through the self.
1. The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society. Open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity.
2. The contents of the ecological unconscious represent, in some degree, at some level of mentality, the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time. Contemporary studies in the ordered complexity of nature tell us that life and mind emerge from this evolutionary tale as culminating natural systems within the unfolding sequence of physical, biological, mental, and cultural systems we know as "the universe." Ecopsychology draws upon these findings of the new cosmology, striving to make them real to experience.
3. Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the repressed contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the recently created urban psyche and the age-old natural environment.
4. For ecopsychology as for other therapies, the crucial stage of development is the life of the child. The ecological unconscious is regenerated, as if it were a gift, in the newborn's enchanted sense of the world. Ecopsychology seeks to recover the child's innately animistic quality of experience in functionally "sane" adults. To do this, it turns to many sources, among them traditional healing techniques of primary people, nature mysticism as expressed in religion and art, the experience of wilderness, the insights of Deep Ecology. Thus, for example, Wordsworth's hymns to the child's love of nature are basic texts for developmental ecopsychology, a first step toward creating the ecological ego.
5. The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions.
6. Among the therapeutic projects most important to ecopsychology is the re-evaluation of certain compulsively "masculine" character traits that permeate our structures of political power and which drive us to dominate nature as if it were an alien and rightless realm. In this regard, ecopsychology draws significantly on the insights of ecofeminism with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes.
7. Whatever contributes to small scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego. Whatever strives for large-scale domination and the suppression of personhood undermines the ecological ego. Ecopsychology therefore deeply questions the essential sanity of our gargantuan urban-industrial culture, whether capitalistic or collectivistic in its organization. But it does so without necessarily rejecting the technological genius of our species or some life-enhancing measure of the industrial power we have assembled. Ecopsychology is postindustrial not anti-industrial in its social orientation.
8. Ecopsychology holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being. The term "synergy" is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for salvation. The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be: the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet.

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