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swathi20 · 9 months

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WHY ECON?

As much as I am usually hooked on surfing through music channels on the idiot box in my leisure time, I truly admit what really makes me all the more glued to my television set are the business channels. I verily take delight in spending time watching these channels. In fact, I do have a few favourite programs too that I take utmost pleasure in watching being Commodity Champions, India Business Hour, Global Eye of TV 18 and The Money Show of ET Now to name a few.

I guess that is when I became aware of the fact how economics plays an essential role in our daily lives and why everyone must at least know its rudiments. Some students find it a dry subject while some find it challenging as one would have to spend hours reading and learning about concepts, including research techniques and quantitative analysis. However, some take it up for the myriad benefits it offers as a subject, the huge range of skills one might gain from an Econ degree to the exciting types of employment one might be geared for, being a few.

Most economic books carry definitions of "economics" akin to the ones published in the others with the slightest of variations, the primary definition being, "The study of scarcity and how it affects the use of resources, the production of goods and services, the growth of production and well-being over time, and many other important and complicated issues that affect society.", divided generally into two main parts, microeconomics and macroeconomics.

While studying economics makes one ready for a career as an economist, it also assists in nurturing the development of invaluable hard and soft skills, including critical thinking, communication, numeracy, research skills, data analysis, time management, teamwork, problem-solving, computing, and commercial and cultural. Environmental economics is yet another field of study. It is very intriguing as a matter of fact to notice how closely economics and environment are intertwined, something that environmentalists might find enthralling.

Environment and economics are two concepts that go hand in hand. Many renowned economists believe that a better environment helps a lot in strengthening the economy of the country. The environment provides lots of free natural resources to the economy like fossil fuels, ores, minerals, light, air, water, etc. While in return the economy of a country invests a lot in conserving the environment by finding substitutes for natural resources. This gives rise to the notion of sustainable development. There are three pillars of sustainability – economic viability, environmental protection and social equity. Sustainable development is something that has set the internet traffic abuzz, being on everyone's tongue.

So why study economics? The study of economics helps people interpret the world around them. It facilitates one to fathom people, businesses, markets and governments, and thereby better respond to the threats and opportunities that emerge when things change. Concepts such as supply and demand, market demand, willingness of the customer to pay, cognitive biases and key strategies like the Porter's Five Forces, SWOT Analysis and Core Competencies are a must know. Econ might assist one in making the right decisions at times of dearth in resources. All said and done learning about economics helps one understand the major problems facing the world today, prepares one to be a good citizen, and helps one become a well-rounded thinker!

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wyrmeleon · 4 years

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A Second Chance at Starlight (Revised)

A bittersweet story about a resurrected corpse trying to come to terms with who he was in his past and why the world is so much more lifeless than he remembers, with heavy environmentalist themes.

“Society had changed since his past life. It was bright where it had been soothing, pulsing where it had been still, sharp where it had been soft. It was bigger but had less meaning. “

The first thing the corpse was aware of was a bright light that seared his retinas, immediately making him want to retreat to the soothing darkness he’d been thrust from. Instinctively, he tried to wrinkle his brow, but he found that his face was nothing but dead muscle. He had no sensation at all. That was the most unbearable pain, the feeling of paralysis. The more he concentrated, the more unbearable it became. There was a disconnect between his consciousness and the distant sensation of his own body. Was he alive? He wasn’t sure, and that frightened him. He must be, he decided, considering he was thinking that at all. He knew he was a human, a man, but he had no other understanding of what he was doing in this world.

Slowly, he became conscious of another sensation: sound. It was nothing comprehensible, a watery rush all around him that matched the intensity of the light. Certain blips and crescendos tickled at his synapses, but the feeling of recognition was vacant. His eyes assembled the glimpses of shadow and movement into more familiar shapes. Warped faces floated over him, their cheeks flushed and mouths flapping like goldfishes’ without making any sound. He could do nothing but stare with the same blank gaze that he, for all he knew, always had, and submit to the overwhelming wave of sensations and nagging emptiness. A feeling of hot and cold enveloped him all at once and he was jolted back into darkness.

When opened his eyes, a new life had returned to what he recognized as his body. As his attention turned to his senses once more, they awoke to become a clamor. The bright light found its way into his skull and stabbed at his eyes. A door slammed open to his right. He wanted to flinch but could only manage a spasmodic jerk in his subhuman state. The figures rushed to crowd his vision once more. This time he could make them out to be humans of all shapes and sizes. He felt the same sense of empty recognition. He looked around impassively at their staring faces and vaguely wondered what he looked like. They all began to chatter at once. He gradually registered that the sing-song gibberish had some meaning to him, but meaning he did not know how he understood. He felt vaguely that he should be surprised, but he was not. It was a language, naturally. They were speaking words to him, conveying thoughts and ideas.

“It’s me, Erving! Do you know where you are? It’s us, your family! I can’t believe you’re here before our eyes! The wonders of medical science! I wonder if he’s cold? Why has he got that funny look to him?”

These words did confuse the corpse. There seemed to be something very important happening that everyone but him knew about. He felt a question well up in his throat and knew that he should ask them for an answer. When he spoke his voice was garbled and papery from disuse.

“Who am I?”

He watched as most of the gathered people stepped back in horror. Some stayed forward and desperately tried to reach some part of him with their words. He listened, face slack, trying to comprehend but unable to. They explained to him a man they once knew well and dearly missed. A man who, up until a few hours ago, had been dead.

Erving was close to them all - a brother, an uncle, a friend. He chose in his will to be cryogenically frozen when he died, in the hopes that one day medical science would give him a second chance at life. Now that bringing people back was a procedure that was met with a large percentage of success depending on the conditions of death, it was much more popular. That isn’t to say that resurrection wasn’t still a sacred and mysterious thing. The technology to bring back the soul was new and secretive. It was reserved only for the elite, who could pay the hefty price. Thus, the public had many unanswered questions, but the list of wealthy families in line to unfreeze and bring back Gramma or Baba was thousands long regardless. No one knew what happened behind the closed walls of the facility and what to expect afterward, but they were so desperate to get their loved ones back it didn’t matter.

Erving died and his body had been in this facility ever since. None of them knew exactly how or why he died, or even if he took his own life, and had been desperately waiting. Each person hoped to get something from him when he returned to their world: answers, advice, or just to hear his voice again.. The family had waited in line twenty-one years for Erving’s unfreezing, and they all had imagined this grand event very differently. Most of them hardly expected this day to come until the success stories flooded the news. They had waited for such a long time to bring back Erving that although they were devastated by this revelation, they weren’t about to leave him out of their lives. They shoved their disappointment down, refusing to see the husk before them.

So the corpse went home with them, sleeping in a room filled with unrecognizable mementos and unfamiliar smells. He couldn’t touch a thing without experiencing wave after wave of disorienting deja vu. He looked at the photographs on the walls and into the mirror at his empty eyes. It was the same face, and yet it was unrecognizable. It had none of the vitality, only the memories of laugh and worry lines that he hadn’t earned. The family accepted him nonetheless with a sort of sad, resigned determination to cling to whatever shadow they had left. He learned to adjust to their ways, nod in response to their questions and repeat certain actions that made them smile. He wore the clothes in his room, he styled his brittle hair as he saw in photographs, and he answered when they called him Erving. Sometimes they would ask him to say things he didn’t understand, little turns of phrase or odd exclamations or words of encouragement. He complied simply because he saw their misty eyes or bright smiles and knew it was the least he could do. The corpse wasn’t sure why, but he felt a sense of duty to these people who had known him for so long. He wanted so badly to connect to them. He didn’t want to betray the vanished man’s legacy or erase who he once was, but he longed for a sense of his own identity. He felt lost.

He couldn’t tolerate all this noise and light around him. He longed for a sound that didn’t pound into his skull, a light that couldn’t pierce through his eyelids. He desired nothing more than to retreat into the darkness he’d emerged from. It was peaceful there. He began to spend his time seeking out solitude and darkness. The family thought this behavior extremely odd but tried not to be distressed, writing it off as another unexplained side effect of the freezing. As he watched them carry on their lives without the dark silence of nighttime, without ever stopping to soothe their whirring minds, the corpse had the jarring sense that this was not the way it had always been. Everyone seemed busy but nobody was going anywhere. The world was dead and cold and meaningless, just like himself. He saw a sense of peace in the photos he found and wondered what it was like, what had changed. The answers were there, but just beyond his reach.

The months with the family passed at a strained pace, like a forced smile. He truly tried, but he didn’t belong. They worked every day to make him feel at home and act like nothing was wrong, but the connection was simply absent. He wasn’t like the rest of them. Something that made them human no longer lived in his bones or flowed in his blood. All he had was muscle memory and empty recognition. Each movement was a struggle; he lurched when he walked and his expressions were stiff and spasmodic. He lacked the fine motor skills to turn the page of a book or play an instrument or turn the dials on a machine. He listened and reacted slowly, like a video being played slightly out of sync. He lay awake at night, trying to ignore the labored shudder of the breath hissing in and out of his chest. He wondered where Erving went, if everything he once was had vanished into the void. Where did his memories go when he fell into that deep, eternal darkness? What had it left behind?

One day, a strange thing began to happen. The wave of deja vu that washed over him so frequently when exploring the home developed into something new. Visions would flicker in his mind’s eye, memories that were not his. Sensations felt more and more familiar. Steadily, pieces of Erving’s life came back to him. The scraps were brief and faded but had more life than anything he’d seen since his resurrection. He began to seek out different tastes and smells, spending time with the family and touching every memento to see what it brought back. Sometimes the unfamiliar memories came in an overwhelming flood at night, leaving him shaking when he awoke trying to collect himself.

Over the months he learned more about this stranger, Erving. He saw himself as Erving carefully tending to a little window garden. He turned the pages of a book about the planets, his fingers carefully attuning the dials of a telescope. He felt the love for his family, felt the hope of powerful dreams and aspirations. But there was one moment he kept returning to, bringing stinging tears to his eyes for reasons he couldn’t understand.

The memory started in darkness, the feeling of the cool ground behind his head. The only sound was the soft hiss of the grass all around him and the song of crickets. The rush of the city was a distant distraction. It couldn’t reach him here. Then Erving opened his eyes. As they adjusted to the dark, a beautiful scene was revealed. Above was the sprawling night sky, midnight black and dotted with millions of stars. They twinkled like diamonds, friendly and familiar. Their white light was soothing and mysterious. Then Erving sighed, turning his head in the direction of the city. He thought back to the simple town he’d grown up in. The bustling metropolis in the distance seemed completely foreign. He watched it explode into a megacity in less than a decade, and yet it was still ever-evolving, growing, and overflowing. Surrounding its twinkling lights was a halo of orange haze that bled into the darkness. His eye twitched as a floodlight snapped on, illuminating the swarming skyscrapers. A tight sense of defeat gripped his chest, and then he awoke. The corpse lay in bed, replaying the memory. He rose to look out the window, wrinkling his face against the light. The night sky was dull with smog and brightly lit, giving it the dingy color of old paper. The building windows glittered in the palest imitation of stars. He closed his eyes and curled back up in the bed. Society had changed since his past life. It was bright where it had been soothing, pulsing where it had been still, sharp where it had been soft. It was bigger but had less meaning. As this realization became ever clearer, the memories of Erving became tinged with sadness.

He felt the longing of the past. He learned that Erving had been a dreamer with an appreciation for the little things in life, but as he grew older something changed and everything seemed to be falling apart around him. He spent his life gardening and donated much of his wealth to environmental charities, but one day it all stopped. He was an astronomy enthusiast who imagined his whole life of seeing the stars firsthand, but then the news got out of defunding the space programs. There was no point anymore. The world closed in on itself, started its desperate race to nowhere. Nights were eliminated, as they offered no time for productivity. Humanity took and took but never gave back, its toxicity eating into the world it claimed as its own. Erving stopped leaving the house and reading the news. He died, in the end, with bitter regrets and unfollowed dreams. Now, here was the corpse: Erving’s last chance, but his past self had gone and left him with no direction in life. He had no idea what he should be looking for, what small clue could teach him what life here was truly missing.

He was alone in his room at night. Despite the traffic and sirens wailing outside, the sound of the wall clock’s electronic gears grinding and buzzing was painfully loud in his ears. The city lights cut like blades through the seams of his window shades. He sat in his bed, tossing and turning, his eyes refusing to close and his thoughts seeping through his mind like molasses. Finally, he threw off his loose blankets and stumbled out of their embrace, beginning a jerky shuffle around the room. What was he looking for? His mental gridlock was interrupted by a sickening WHACK at his covered window. The corpse slowly looked up, then turned and rushed down the stairs to the outside door as fast as his stiff legs could drag him, gripping the banister like a vice. He braced himself before opening the door, unleashing the rush of sound and light of the outside world. He could hardly see the gray sky past the dancing floodlights, could hardly think with all the clamor. He pulled his collar over his face and clapped his hands over his ears, stumbling behind the building to the street below his window. None of the passersby gave him a second glance. In the back alley, the sounds were somewhat muted but still echoed all around him. The light strobed around the corners at random intervals, lighting up the dingy asphalt and the tiny, ragged bundle lying there. He held his breath to keep out the acrid mist of the city. Crouching, he reached his hand out at the tiny shape.

It was a bird. A tiny, dead sparrow. The only bird, indeed the only wild animal he had seen since his awakening. The poor thing must have flown all this way only to be dazzled by the lights and so confused by the sound that it flew heedlessly into the window. As a tiny flame of sympathy flickered in his chest, he remembered. A distant memory of a sound came back to him, and with it came the realization of what he’d been looking for all this time, what absence had been torturing him.

Birdsong.

Such a simple thing that meant so much. A sign of life. He looked around helplessly as the vague memories returned and a powerful sense of loss and understanding washed over him. He listened to the screaming machinery all around and couldn’t hear the sweet twitter of birds. The sky was a flat, dingy gray, and all around him the world kept rushing and building and decaying. There was no silence or stars. The world had nothing left to nurture it, to let it live and grow. He realized what had broken Erving’s heart, and what he would have wanted him to do.

The corpse looked at the bird. He looked at the building where the family lay asleep. Then he looked up at the stark, oppressive skyscrapers. Finally, with a driving sense of purpose, he pulled his jacket closer around him and stepped into the sidewalk. Instantly he was swept away by the bustling crowd. He held his breath and let the sound and light wash over him. He didn’t know how long he stumbled, retreating into himself, pulled by the current of mindless commuters. He let his feet fall in sequence ahead of him: left, right, left, right. He paid no heed to the bodies jostling around him even when shoving headlong against the rushing wall of humanity. The space between people grew. The crowds dissipated to a random smattering of workers, and the corpse found himself approaching the edge of the city. He never stopped his pilgrimage, making a beeline away from the place he had left until the reach of bright city lights began to fade. He walked and walked and walked for what seemed like days with his eyes tightly shut, the acrid air that sputtered in and out of his lungs gradually becoming fresher and cooler. The clamor of the city faded into a faint whine. The light and noise and smog released its hold on him. What seemed like infinity passed before he finally stopped, his limbs buckling. As he collapsed with exhaustion, he took great gulps of the pure air. The wind whispered in his ears as a cricket started its serenade to the left of his head. Peace and serenity wrapped him in its arms, soothing his battered senses. Shifting onto his back, he lay flat against the ground and opened his dust-gritted eyes. Above him was the stunning universe, stretching on into infinity. The stars twinkled back at him like the laughter of old friends, and the darkness was as soft as the finest black velvet. With the absence of the flashing lights of the city the subtle, deep blues and purples of the sky seemed infinitely more beautiful. The faint lights in the darkness were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. A faint smile crept across the lips of the corpse and somewhere, out in the distant stars, Erving smiled too. For the first time since he awoke, the corpse felt alive.

#nora's writing #a second chance at starlight #creative writing #original writing #environmentalism #noise pollution #light pollution #resurrection #frankenstein #nora's doodles #nora’s doodles

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barbara-costa · 4 years

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2. Fabulations & Trees

What if we could talk to trees?

Reflecting upon the lecture on Fabulation and Design, I realised the word did not mean what I thought it meant - related to fabulous, meaning beautiful or amazing. So I searched for the meaning.

to fabulate: to tell invented stories; create fables or stories filled with fantasy to relate an event as a fable.

Then on Wikipedia, I found the term Fabulation was popularised by Robert Scholes in his work The Fabulators, to describe a style of novel similar to magical realism but that did not fit into the traditional categories of realism or romance.

Interestingly, after having written the first draft of this post I read in the book Critical Fabulations that the writer also chose to describe the meaning of the word at the beginning of the book.

Now I am beginning to understand what our lectures are trying to evoke with the connections between the past and the present and how historical events overlap and connect in so many ways, some of which are not instantly evident.

The forward section of the book spoke to me on so many levels. In the past, Design was about jumping straight into solutions. Nowadays, as we are constantly reminded in the course, we need to understand the user, empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test and repeat the process over and over. This process isn’t linear and designers should move back and forth through the stages as necessary to really understand who the users are, what they do and their needs.

I think that jumping straight into a ‘solution’ or a final ‘idea’ can be quite a natural reaction when faced with a problem to solve, so for our project we are aware of this tendency and have been trying to focus on the process, but every time we meet ideas keep on flowing and we feel excited.

There are 4 of us in the group. A designer/maker, a people-watcher, a word smiths and a coder/hacker. We are so excited!

We have collated our ideas and have been using a colour each to comment on them via Google Docs. At our last meeting we discussed a bit more and decided that we wanted to focus on well-being.

I am a tree lover and one of my ideas was to take ‘tree-hugging’ to another level. Since starting this project, I have found so many interesting websites, articles and books about trees, which I shall continue exploring beyond the course. I believe that technology could enhance the power of trees to help people manage health problems like depression and anxiety, feel more grounded and connect with nature. One website* states that the vibrational properties of trees have many health benefits. So, imagine if technology could enhance this vibration? *http://peacockplume.fr/lifestyle/hugging-trees-good-your-health

Imagine if as you talked to a tree, you heard subtle sounds coming from it? These sounds would match our own tone of voice with a choice of tones controlled by an app or a device on the tree itself, depending on the mood and need of the user. I speculate that having the feedback from the tree would have an effect somewhat similar to talking to a therapist. Usually therapists direct our questions back to ourselves and transform our own statements into questions, for us to answer. We have the answers to our deepest questions, but we do not always listen to ourselves. Talking to trees is a thing nowadays and there is a movement called Forest Bathing*, where people go for guided walks in the woods and are encouraged to talk to a tree of their choice and get to know them.

I feel that these activities have the potential to work because trees can make us look within. It has never been more important to look within than right now, with the increase of social media where many of us expose our lives to the world and find it hard to know when we’ve done too much.

The group thinks trees have a potential for the project. Two members are very keen and have shared materials they have found. I particularly liked the music for trees app at Regents park. See the image below.

A group member shared an essay about the trees that made me reflect on the lecture Fabulation and Design. I wanted to see if I could connect the facts like in the lecture as an experiment with the skill of fabulation.

The essay is called What’s a tree worth? by Jill Jonnes (http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/what-tree-worth). She gives a chronological (1905 to 2006) account of trees becoming important in the infrastructure of cities and well-being of citizens in American cities. She describes the social and economical benefits of having trees in urban spaces, which started by president Theodore Rooselvelt, who was a tree lover and an exception since politicians didn’t, and still many don’t, see much value in trees.

By the 1970’s most Americans lived in cities. Tree lovers watched as trees began to disappear due to the Dutch elm disease, development and shrinking municipal budgets for tree planting. But in 1989, Chicago’s newly appointed mayor, Richard Daley Jr., a self-proclaimed tree hugger, vowed to plant a half-million trees as part of his effort to revive his decaying Rust Belt city.

I found that in 1989 there were major events in the world. A ‘tree revolution’ was about to start in the USA while on the other side of the world revolutions started in Central and Eastern Europe that resulted in the end of the communist rule. In the same year, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed an information management system that initiated the process of creating the World Wide Web, which was the foundation of the internet as we know it now.

Even though these events may not be directly connected, I feel that in some ways they do connect. We wouldn’t be talking about technology enhanced trees if the world had not changed and developed so much that we are now able to know what is going on around the world through the web, and are free to think and progress without worrying about threats from dictatorships in European countries.

For some years after this , trees did not make as many headlines, but times are changing. Now that we don’t need to worry about dictatorships, at least in Europe, and have the incredible World Wide Web at our fingertips, we can focus on planting and protecting trees, which are a priority today, especially with millions of trees being cut down around the world, which is the devastating situation of the Amazon, with a president that have outraged environmentalists and citizens alike when he announced publicly that there is too much ‘free’ land in the Amazon that can be used for farming.

In addition to all of the benefits that trees bring to cities, listed by Jill Jonnes, I’d like to think that ‘Tech-Trees’ would help us connect with our true selves, help us deal with the stresses of living in big cities and motivate more people to plant and protect trees.

To end this post, I attach an extract from the essay which I think is very relevant today.

Caption from bottom to top

1. A tree therapist that listens to people and makes sounds that reassures and empathises with the person who is talking to them.

2. A technology enhanced park with trees that vibrate at the roots so that people feel this subtle vibration to enhance their yoga session.

3. Here trees vibrate on the ground and release an aromatic mist that makes them feel good. The aromas and vibration speed and style can be selected through an app.

4. A smart park with ‘tech-trees’, mediation pods, walking meditation foot path and free fruit to be picked from tress.

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thegreenwolf · 6 years

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In case you didn’t know it, I am a minor-level foodie. I haven’t run around to every single pricey restaurant in Portland, but I am an unabashed locavore who loves to cook. And as an environmentalist I’m keenly aware of where my food comes from.

When I eat, I am not just consuming calories so I don’t die, or eating something I like so that it’s an enjoyable experience. I am consciously mindful of the fact that the animal, plant or fungus I am about to ingest was raised in a particular place and in a specific manner. It lived a life, perhaps a good one, perhaps a bad one, and that life now ends in its physical remains becoming a part of my own still-living body. I am made of molecules that came from around the world, though increasingly from my local region.

Connected to this sense of place is a concept known as terroir, which in French means “soil.” Most commonly encountered in the discussion of wine, terroir describes the qualities of the land and its tending that influence the taste of the food or drink it produces. Some of these factors are climate, weather, soil quality, fertilization and other soil treatments (or lack thereof), food given to animals, stress the living being experienced during life, and even how it was slaughtered or harvested. The reason that a wine expert can tell a wine grown from a particular valley in France is because of the terroir that affects the flavor of the grapes that created it.

I first became aware of terroir through the Slow Food movement founded by Carlo Petrini, a response to the growing influence of fast food and heavy processing in the global food market. Slow Food is about locally grown foods which are carefully prepared and then enjoyed consciously rather than simply inhaled for basic calories. Extra attention is paid to the source of each ingredient, where it was grown and how it was cared for, and even the people who attended to it from life to death. Terroir is how the unique taste of that ingredient reflects on the land it came from. Combine several local ingredients together in a recipe from regional cuisine, and you get a veritable symphony of terroir that may be absolutely unique in the world.

Let me give you a more concrete example. I don’t drink wine often, so I can’t really use that as a viable image, though those of you who are wine lovers may find some of this familiar. However, I use olive oil extensively in my cooking, not just for the health benefits but the flavor as well. Canola oil is just greasy compared to the body of a good olive oil. And I am fortunate in that CostCo carries relatively inexpensive olive oils that have Protected Designation of Origin, meaning that yes, this is pure olive oil of high quality that hasn’t been sitting around in a warehouse for years, and the label tells exactly where it came from.(1)

Most of the olive oil on the market is old or poor quality and has lost much of its flavor; some of it has even been cut with cheaper oils like sunflower. If you taste it and then taste real, fresh, extra virgin olive oil, the latter has a much more vibrant taste. It tastes like olives, rather than sunflower oil mixed with a bit of grass. Different PDO olive oils have their own unique notes, much like wine. That’s the terroir speaking, in which the soil and the sunlight and the care of harvest are all reflected in the final flavor. To me, a good olive oil tastes like the land it came from, and even if I’ve never been there I can still imagine it.

So why is this important to paganism? Well, if you ask a lot of pagans, our spirituality is about the land. Honestly, many pagans celebrate a more abstract conception of land rather than getting down and dirty with the soil they live on; if you’re chanting about Earth, Air, Fire, Water but you don’t know much about your local climate, geology or watershed, you have a lot of opportunities for expanding your nature-based practice.

We also make a lot of talk about harvest festivals in late summer and the first half of autumn, but our ritual feasts are often store-bought breads and imported produce rather than anything we grew or prepared ourselves.(2) If we’re really going to celebrate the harvest, doesn’t it behoove us to not only use local food and drink, but also to familiarize ourselves with when our actual growing and harvest times are, and what’s growing when?

Terroir is an excellent opportunity to root your paganism in the actual land you’re practicing on. You’re literally eating and drinking the land; the molecules in locally-produced food came from the same general area that you are honoring, and they will then be incorporated into your own physical form. By paying attention to the flavors that make this area’s flour unique, or its fish especially tasty, or its vegetables heartier, you are experiencing your land, and by consuming that food you are making the land a part of you. And when you utilize recipes and other elements of cuisine created by people who have lived on that land a while, that gives you even more relationship with place.(3)

In the United States, most ingredients in our food isn’t labeled. In our many processed foods ingredients from countless sources are all blended into one homogenous lump. You won’t know where the wheat, rice or oats in your breakfast cereal came from, or where the sugar cane grew. Meat is no longer labeled with what country it came from or where it was slaughtered. Produce may have a sticker saying what state or country it came from, but no more specific than that; if I buy a Washington or Oregon apple I couldn’t tell you what farm it was from unless I happen to buy it from the farm itself.

To counteract that, I offer this little introduction to terroir. To start, pick a single food item that is produced locally. It can be something straight out of the ground, like a vegetable or fruit, or which requires a little more preparation like meat or cheese. Get some of that local food, and also a few examples of the same food that were produced in other identifiable places but further away–for example, an apple from a local orchard in Washington, and then another from California, and another from Mexico. Or pick something that has a reputation for its terroir–get a piece of real Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese from Parma, and then a “Parmesan” made somewhere in the United States, and maybe some of that powdered stuff in a can. Have a bit of a tasting, where you eat a bit of each one at a time, and pay attention to the differences in flavor and texture with each bite.

Be more mindful of the origin of all your food to the best of your ability. Think about the land it came from, and how it got from there to where you are now.(4) When you celebrate holidays with food, choose those that are made locally or that you create yourself from local ingredients, to the best of your ability and budget, and especially for harvest festivals. When you eat, consider it a communion with the land, not just something tasty. Remember that you carry around bits and pieces of every place that has fed you, and this gives you a deeply intimate and physical connection to those locations. In this way you can deepen your relationship to nature beyond the symbols and rites, and into the core of your very being.

1. Not all of the olive oil that CostCo carries is PDO certified. Generally the big plastic jugs aren’t; look for glass bottles, and especially look for a PDO label and the country of origin somewhere on the label.

2. I totally get that not everyone has the space, money or ability to garden. But if you’re going to pour a bit of money into a seasonal ritual, set some aside to get a locally baked loaf of bread or some apples from a local farmer, or whatever your regional farms are producing.

3. Here in the Pacific Northwest there are a few different local cuisines going on. There are the foodways of indigenous people, some of which have been shared with others. There are the cuisines of the various waves of immigrants over the past couple of centuries which meld local ingredients and far-away traditions. And there is a more self-conscious “modern” Pacific Northwest cuisine which is an attempt to combine all of these to one degree or another, again with a strong emphasis on local ingredients. Please understand that where you are, the local cuisine may not be open to all, especially where indigenous people have been subjected to abuse and oppression and therefore aren’t willing to also open their foodways to the perpetrators thereof.

4. To be brutally honest, the way food often gets to us is fraught with both human and environmental abuses; but that’s a whole other post for another time.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider tipping me on Ko-Fi, becoming my patron on Patreon, or purchasing one of my books! This self-employed author and artist really appreciates your support :)

#pagan #food #nature #foodie #spirituality #mine

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scuttleboat · 7 years

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Can you help me understand American culture bc i am just dumbfounded right now. Why do people think just because it was written that y'all have a right to bear arms 200 yrs ago, when there was completely different tech, that you shouldn't even question it? Like there's a reason you have amendments right? The constitution shouldn't be unquestionable. It seems like nothing at all is happening with regards to these constant shootings.

I’ll give it my best shot as liberal minded-adult female who lives on the West coast, but understand that I can’t explain to you American monoculture because in this area, we don’t have one. If I get anything wrong here on legal stuff, folks educated in the area can feel free to comment and clarify.

The United States of America is a collection of fifty individual states and commonwealths, as well as various territories, all of which have some form of local government that is part of, but not completely submissive to, a central federal government. There actually aren’t that many universal federal laws that we live under because generally our laws are passed locally, state by state, or even city by city, and then federal laws tend to be created when local laws are challenged. The two arguably biggest powers that the Congress (House and Senate) has are

1. to implement the annual federal budget (where our tax dollars go) i.e. determine which programs get funding to be enforced

2. to write laws on anything that has to do with national or inter-state commerce

The second is hugely important because most industries in the 20th and 21st century are massive, with companies that span states and even span countries. Some of the biggest are firearms/munitions, private prisons, and any sub-industries that feed off those. When you have a living industry that generates billions of dollars of profit for many different companies, such as firearms companies, people don’t want to give up their income. So all those companies like to hire lobbyists (truly the scum profession of our generation. and the prior generation.).

Lobbyists basically bribe, manipulate, and maneuver elected lawmakers and appointed officials to either pass or not pass laws that affect things like firearms sale and regulation. There’s also a ton of money being poured into news media and “public awareness” campaigns (read: propoganda) that affects who people vote for. So elected lawmakers are political and economically incentivized to appease gun companies, while simultaneously politically *dis-incentivized* to actually pass laws that would regulate them. Any regulation from the federal or local government is seen as an “attack” on gun companies’ profits, so all the more reason for them to run bad political ads to hurt a candidate, good ads to prop up a candidate that will help them, and also just throw money and political ‘help’ at anything they can.

Add to that the careerism that has eaten the Republican party alive, the timidity of the Democratic party, the way the two-part binary system has spent 2 centuries crushing any third party gains, and we have our current deadlocked government.

Regulation for guns doesn’t require a change to the constitution (which would be near impossible in our current political climate), and in fact most Americans (grater than 70% last I heard) support greater gun control, in various forms. However, the way American political culture works is that it’s a lot more clannish than it is logical: people stand behind a label. Especially politicians, because the label of political identity is huge in American culture. Think of, for example, how much people on Tumblr use labels to define themselves: gender, age, orientation, language, ability, knowledge, fandom. Imagine how obsessed Tumblr culture is with labels, and then imagine there are only TWO you can pick, or you can claim one of the “others” that has a stigma and institutionally very little impact.

So politicians of course epitomize that, it’s the personhood they sell when they campaign for office, and the personhood they rely to be re-elected. Even if that label shifts and gets distorted, and the Right becomes the Far Right becomes the Alt Right, they’re afraid to confront those changes because the alternative is to be labeled a traitor in all those nasty campaign ads and news media propoganda sources–which are backed, of course, by self-serving capitalist companies or by the political parties themselves, in aggregate.

In my personal opinion, the way to control guns in the U.S. is to do it state by state–that is, frustratingly, how the anti-abortion people are doing it. The environmentalist movements are doing it city by city, because that’s all they can get control of politically. Unfortunately, local laws will eventually be challenged in the federal court system, and if the US Supreme Court rules on a gun control regulation, then it could go either way. At the moment, out Supreme Court is as politically divided as our Congress.

I don’t know how to explain to you that people are evil and greedy and that they’ll accept a status quo where others die but not themselves, but that is the world we live in. Our political system is vulnerable to being exploited by evil, greedy, small-minded men, and unfortunately, the voting populace can’t always tell who’s evil and who isn’t.

Corporate money = advertising = propoganda = votes = deregulation + gerrymandering = more corporate money.

If you’re a gun corporation (or any company that lives off the suffering of others) it’s well worth it to invest in the U.S. government. We appear to be here for the taking.

#politics #gun control #us election #us congress

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anniekoh · 7 years

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donna haraway: staying with the trouble & making kin

Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) was recently critiqued by Alyssa Battistoni (review for N+1) and Sophie Lewis (review for Viewpoint Mag). Lewis was especially critical, and describes her intellectual crush on Haraway curdling into “political antagonism” due to the book’s flaws.

Both reviews are far-ranging and thorough in their coverage of Haraway’s previous works and their impact on the writers’ own intellectual development. Both reviewers taught me a lot. But I finished both reviews feeling like I had read a different book than they had. This, I suspect, is very much because of the “material semiotics... situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly” (p. 4). Who I am, where I read the book, what other reading and learning I had/have been doing -- all of these things have effects on what book I read.

Staying with the Trouble is Haraway’s rejection of the two primary responses to the “horrors of the Anthropocene and the Capitolcene” -- “faith in technofixes” or a ‘game over’ attitude of “bitter cynicism” (p. 3). She asks us to forgo “abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference” (p. 4). “Staying with the trouble” requires the practice of mourning loss, and the losses yet to come due to climate change, without succumbing to paralysis. My notes from Haraway’s talk last September echo this: “In the future people need to learn to deal with actual death and actual loss, and do effective kinds of mourning, give presence to those who have gone before, to give heart to those who will go on, in the mode of on-goingness, not in the mode of despair.”

The centrality and potentiality of mourning is where I read a different book than the one that Battistoni critiqued, one in which “Death, meanwhile, occurs on a catastrophic scale but is mentioned only in passing... “ In the final and science fictional chapter “The Camille Stories”, Haraway describes Communities of Compost which have “Speakers for the Dead... tasked with bringing critters who had been irretrievably lost into potent presence.” (p 164). Battistoni argues that the idea of speaking for the dead is “a troublesome place to end up. Although Haraway claims to be developing a politics for a damaged world, what we get feels more like an elegy.”

The book I read was on ways to reconfigure grief as politics of persistence. In Chapter Three “Sympoesis” Haraway gives us an example of a politics for a damaged world. “The idea that disaster will come is not new; disaster, indeed genocide and devastated home places, has already come, decades and centuries ago, and it has not stoped” (p 86). She talks about the retelling of memory through “world games... made with and from indigenous peoples stories and practices.” This is ongoing-ness, the “resurgence of peoples and of places is nurtured with ragged vitality” (p 86). Haraway also cites Thom van Dooren’s phenomenal book Flight Ways (p. 38. emphases added)

Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here. In this context, genuine mourning should open us to an awareness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless others being driven over the edge of extinction… The reality, however, is that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response.

Far from an elegy-as-epitaph, the mourning done in the Communities of Compost is “ask[ing] and respond[ing] to the question of how to live in the ruins that were still inhabited, with ghosts and with the living too” (p. 138). Or, as she argues in Chapter Two “Tentacular Thinking,” “grief is a path to understanding... human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing” (p 39). Shedding the notion that only humans grieve is one step to shedding Anthropocene logics in which “all others are props, ground, plot space, or prey.”

II.

In the same way, I think I read a different book than Sophie Lewis because of our entanglements in particular politics and the inhabiting of certain spaces. Where she (with ongoing research on gestation and reproduction) sees Haraway’s slogan “make kin not babies” as “anti-natalist” arguments that “risk rehabilitating the very eugenic anti-humanism,” I read a rousing call to care for the future that doesn’t depend on assumptions of biological connections to “bring the future into the present.” I agree that many environmentalists do trade in racist Malthusian sentiments when making panicked appeals about the Earth’s carrying capacity.

However, for me, far from giving succor to white fears of a brown planet, "odd kin not god kin” refutes the eugenicist Idiocracy argument that has been made a dozen times to me and my partner: “but you guys are so smart! you have to have kids.” What I am saturated in, as an educated late 30-something North American woman with ovaries, is the profoundly nationalistic and heteronormative discourse of motherhood. I read the book through a lifetime of simmering in pro-natalist politics in the U.S. and South Korea - where the dystopian future of a country overrun by immigrants and robots can be averted through baby-making. Not making babies is unpatriotic, selfish, a clear sign of refusing responsibility. I mean, even when not explicitly nationalistic, caring about the future via climate change activism is still framed in specific maternal/parental terms; the “letters to your children/grandchildren” premise of the DearTomorrow project is only one example.

In addition, to be able to advocate for making a family, making kin, as making “odd kin” is profoundly pro-reproduction in my everyday existence. Lewis points out that Haraway is “far from the first to appreciate the seeming paradox and important truth: that making larger families might result in a smaller total population. That is, family enlargement can be a qualitative rather than quantitative matter.” Clearly I need to read more from this literature, but nonetheless Haraway was my first encounter with this perspective and I reveled in it. We live with our friends, a married couple with a small child. I love being a live-in “aunty.” For weeks if not months after reading Staying with the Trouble, I talked about how it blew my mind to any friend who would listen. To become middle-aged but persist in other household models than the single, the couple or the nuclear family, is liberatory politics for my future.

[IMAGE: Make Kin Not Babies. Sticker, made by Kern Toy, Beth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle and Donna Haraway]

Also, perhaps because of my complete obsession how we forge new subjectivities, I did not read the book as “unconvincing but inoffensive collection of vague, repetitive chapters on various eco-techno-animalian assemblages” (Lewis) but as an imaginative set of suggestions on different ways of being and seeing for the era of climate change-induced extinctions, displacements, and disasters.

Near the end of her review Battistoni writes “But here, kinship is the only model of solidarity on offer. It’s no wonder we’re left generating empathy for other species via genetic modification.” I disagree that Haraway only offers the hybrid human child-Monarch buttery as the path to empathy. For one, in her discussion of the Great Barrier crochet coral reef, she asks us to think about “intimacy without proximity” (p. 79). Staying with the trouble is finding ways to cultivate care that don’t depend on touch, ways to love the glacier without flying to “see it before it melts.”

Infecting each other and anyone who comes into contact with their fibrous critters, the thousands of crafters crochet psychological, material, and social attachments to biological reefs in the oceans, but not by practicing marine field biology or by diving among the reefs or making some other direct contact. Rather, the crafters stitch “intimacy without proximity,” a presence without disturbing the critters that animate the project, but with the potential for being part of work and play for confronting the exterminationist, trashy, greedy practices of global industrial economies and cultures. (p 79)

The projects Haraway offers in Chapter Three as possibilities to transform our sense of what she calls “response-ability.” In this, I agree with Battistoni that “‘Stay with the Trouble’ is a slogan apt less for the work of thinking than that of organizing.”

#donna haraway #climate change #reproduction

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geekade · 7 years

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Anime and the Environment: Princess Mononoke

I love April. It brings warmer days, flowers blooming, and some of our most recognized days for remembering Mother Earth. Celebrating Earth Hour at the end of March, followed by the ever important Earth Day, and quickly into Arbor day, always reminds me of the precious relationship we have with our planet. As a former Biology and Environmental Science teacher, I am always looking for ways to encourage environmental awareness. One of my favorite classroom tools was from my geek toolbox was Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke.

I was the crazy teacher who would show this fantastic film to my students every spring. Princess Mononoke tells the story of man’s struggle between the environment and modern industrialization. Using Japanese fairytale elements, Miyazaki beautifully crafts the struggle between the guardians of the forest and humanity’s intent on conquering them. Many of the humans in the movie are outcasts who are convinced that the nature gods taking the form of giant animals (Wolf, Boar, Gorilla) are standing in their way.

This is a movie about war as well. War between rival humans. War between man and nature. Even the War between the conservationist, represented by San and the animal gods, fighting the humans. War is never pretty. It’s bloody and violent. Miyazaki elegantly captures the struggles and battles in each of these different wars. He succinctly shows that violence only breeds more violence no matter how just you think your cause is. Violence breeds hate that is all-consuming and it will destroy all. Just ask Nago the Boar God, or Ashitaka, or Okkoto. In the end, it’s only nature who wins because no matter what, nature survives. Forms may be new, habitats are changed forever, but life continues on.

Hayao Miyazki mixed fantastical Japanese elements with modern problems and set them in a fantastical medieval Japan. When Disney’s Miramax films looked to adapt the original anime fairytale, they tapped some very talented people to bring this fantasy to English audiences. To help adapt the script, Disney got Neil Gaiman—no wonder I loved it from first viewing. The voice actors are nothing to sneeze at either—Billy Bob Thorton, Billy Crudup, Minnie Driver, Claire Danes, Jada Pinkett Smith and more.

As an environmentalist and an anime lover, this film speaks to me. It received critical acclaim in Japan as well as around the world. However, the broader American audience seemed to have little interest. I’m not sure if it was a lack of understanding of environmental issues, or a lack of patience for the Japanese fairytale elements, but comparatively speaking, few Americans have heard of the film, and fewer yet have seen it. To that I say, if you have an opportunity to watch it, do it (hide your eyes in some of the battle scenes if you are squeamish). You may just learn a better appreciation for life and Mother Earth.

#Movies #articles #anime

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hopefulfestivaltastemaker · 4 years

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July 12, 2020

My weekly review of things I have been reading and thinking about. Topics include social endeavors, software engineering, dealing with being stuck, and banning exercise for the environment.

Social Endeavors

This week I have started a new project, still not very well defined, to quantify the return on social endeavors. For now “social endeavors” is a broad concept, encapsulating things like R&D projects, business ventures, political movements, warfare, and so forth.

My working criteria for what constitutes a social endeavor are as follows.

1) A well-defined, discrete goal. Thus NASA is not a social endeavor, and the Apollo Program is a social endeavor.

2) Continuity of effort over time and agent. The International Space Station is a social endeavor, even though it involves multiple countries, because it is a collaboration. The American and Soviet lunar exploration programs are distinct social endeavors because, even though they worked toward similar goals, there was no collaboration.

3) The goal of the endeavor should be mostly fixed over its execution. If the goal mutates too far from its original conception, it is not the same endeavor.

4) The goal should be bounded and not open-ended, though for now I am unsure how strict to be on this criterion.

We can look at some of the highest rate of return for endeavors in history, at least for which there are reasonably good estimates. Eradication of smallpox and the Human Genome Project would be high on that list, with ROIs well over 100. Public subsidies for stadiums are probably net losers.

I am well aware of the risks associated with such a research project. First is a quantification bias, which will surely discount the value of endeavors with benefits that are real but difficult to quantify, will overvalue endeavors with costs that are real but difficult to quantify, and will also bias in favor of larger endeavors for which data is more readily available. There is probably a survivorship bias in the literature, in that successful endeavors will be better studied and better known than unsuccessful endeavors. I certainly know more about smallpox eradication than I do about unsuccessful attempts to eradicate other diseases.

Since the major motivating factor behind this project is to predict what kind of endeavors will be successful in the future, a second major risk is the cargo cult effect. It is the reasoning, “X was successful before, Y is similar to X, therefore we should do Y”. Such reasoning rarely leads to success because it does not question why X was successful and whether the similarities of Y to X are relevant. This is not to discount the importance of looking to historical precedent in evaluating future policy options, only to do so intelligently.

Understanding the success of social endeavors requires a strong qualitative understanding in addition to quantifiable metrics such as ROI. I am starting with quantitative metrics because I like things that are tangible and they help ground the qualitative work. For qualitative work, this week Andreas Hein put a new paper on the ArXiv drawing a comparison between starship construction and cathedral construction; I recommend it for anyone interested in space colonization or megaprojects more generally.

We’ll see where this project goes, if anywhere. Right now it is in an exploratory phase. The majority of my projects begin and end in the exploratory phase.

Software Engineering

There come several points in all our lives, and for me one such point is now, where we have to put some serious thought into our long-term careers and take action to insure that they are successful. While I enjoy my current role and plan to stay in it for the foreseeable future, it poses a high risk of stagnation and does not offer the security that I need to confidently provide for my family. To that end, I am recommitting to software engineering work.

Programming is a good, general purpose skill. For Urban Cruise Ship, I built the site in Node.js, styled it with Bootstrap, and do data analysis with Python. I recently dusted off my Matplotlib skills to revamp a graphic for the site. I recently learned some basics of React and used it to build a game. I can be confident that, no mater where I go professionally, I will benefit from better programming skills.

I made some major advances in my software skills in 2013-14, a time when I was serious about pursuing a software engineering career route, but since then I have let my skills stagnate while turning to other priorities. Now it is time for more progress.

I am working on a bug tracker app, which I hope to get online in the next week or two. It uses a Node backend; PostgreSQL to store data about users, projects, and issues; a React frontend; and a Bootstrap theme for styling. PostgreSQL is a new tool for me, and I am still shaky with React. The greater challenge is that I have not attempted such a complex combination of technologies before, and so doing is another skill. Deployment will also be a challenge, and I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

Software engineering is a bit like academic research in at least one respect. Every time I learn a new skill, I discover several more that I could learn, and so the frontier is continually expanding.

Dealing with Being Stuck

I think about stagnation a lot on the societal level, and now lately much more on the personal level.

When I have a clear goal that I am motivated to achieve and a clear path for doing so, I work efficiently and effectively and can get it done. When I lack a clear goal or a path for achieving it, I fall into a trap of work avoidance. If you observe heightened activity from me on social media, for instance, that is a symptom of being in such a state. It becomes a vicious circle, where work avoidance causes the obstacles to success to appear amorphous and chronic, leading to more work avoidance. It can lead to pseudowork: activity that vaguely looks like work but is not productive, such as reading news article tangentially related to my work area or engaging in unconstructive social media conversation. It is probably fair to say that this dynamic contributed to the failure of my previous job.

Since I can tell I have fallen into such a state this week with my current job, I am keen on understanding this “stuck” state: specifically how to recognize it early and how to get out. Pseudowork can be a kind of thrashing around, which a trapped animal for instance does when there is no clear path to escape. Maybe that’s actually the best solution in some cases. But I generally think that systematic approaches to problems are better.

In a job, being stuck might be a symptom of one or more of the following:

1) Lack of clarity on project goals. I need to better define the project myself or seek clarity from the manager/client.

2) The project is too difficult. Maybe it can’t be done, or maybe it can be done but I lack the skill to do it. In a work environment, especially when under the gun from management, it is difficult to admit that one is struggling and may seem preferable to do pseudowork to generate the illusion of progress. One needs to renegotiate project scope, or perhaps push harder to upgrade skills.

3) The job itself does not support my life goals. Maybe I am no longer interested in the field, or the job offers no viable paths to advancement, or the workplace is toxic. Then the best solution may be to make a switch.

I try to approach the problem by working backwards. What is my long term goal? What are the major things that need to happen to achieve this goal? How does the project fit into that goal? I won’t say that I have figured this problem out, but I have made some progress.

Banning Exercise for the Environment

The following is a silly thought experiment in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, not a serious idea. Internet culture being what it is, such disclaimers are necessary (though probably still not sufficient).

There are various environmental movements out there that encourage (sometimes with the force of law) people to avoid eating meat*, driving, having children, having pets, using plastic, flying, or engaging in other activities generally regarded as central to modern living (or living at all). But I have never heard anyone argue that we should avoid exercising for the environment. Maybe we should.

About a quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and the vast majority of anthropogenic land use, are related to agriculture. A person with an active lifestyle requires about 25% more calories than a person with a sedentary lifestyle. The greenhouse gas reduction of going from an active to sedentary lifestyle is thus comparable to switching from an internal combustion to electric car, or cutting driving by half, or switching to a vegetarian diet (these are mental, back-of-the envelope estimates, not serious calculations). From a land sparing perspective, television and the Internet might be the best inventions ever, and the gym might be one of the worst.

To my knowledge, the only environmentalist takes on exercise encourage people to go hiking or cycling in natural areas to foster environmental consciousness. I am not aware of anyone who has taken seriously the environmental impact of burning those extra calories. While I don’t think this is a good idea, I also don’t think it is a good idea to discourage people from flying or having children for environmental reasons, as these are valuable, prosocial activities, yet such exhortations are common.

I think we all know that lifestyle politics are generally not about dispassionate cost-benefit analysis. But I probably should understand better what they really are about to engage these issues more seriously.

* I don’t eat meat myself, and I don’t claim to reject all lifestyle environmentalism.

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whatcelebsmeantome · 4 years

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Project Drawdown Book Review

When reading the book and looking into who Paul Hawken was and what he has done as an author and as an environmentalist is amazing. He started the nonprofit Project Drawdown to help talk about how solutions can and have been implanted around the world. He has been a pioneer for sustainability since his 20s which is such a commendable thing. As he is in his 70s he has been an advocate for sustainability for about 50 years and in the 60s and 70s, it was not as huge of a thing to be sustainable unless you were in counter-culture and hippie movement. His voice is an important one for the older and younger generation. I think his perspective is that we need to make a big change in how we live on this planet. Through his book, he discusses many options on how to be more sustainable and big plants on how to reverse or fix global warming. He like so many other people in the world are trying to do so. I think what we have been reading the mainstream news is pretty close to what he says, but we get in-depth analysis and discussion on said ways to fix the issues and how we are slowly starting to get there.

Project Drawdown has an advisor program and learning program called “Drawdown Learn to equip educators and students with information about climate solutions that they can implement in their schools and communities. Project Drawdown will continue to update and expand the scope of its research, and publish and disseminate new content through online platforms, programs, and future publications.” With these programs along with the book and the website, if we implement these programs to help educate people on the severity of climate change and how schools can be more involved in being an advocate for clean energy among other things, we could get there.

Something that amazes me is that my high school in Los Angeles had a BuzzFeed video put up about them and how they are trying to clean up our school and be more efficient on how things are disposed of. Although I did not really like my high school, seeing young people 4 years after I graduated trying to make a difference in the community is important and amazing. We need more young people like them to care about the environment. Even if its just sorting trash into the correct bins it’s still a step in the right direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opoNCFLTtjY

Young people like them all over the world are trying to make a difference in their communities to help save the planet in any way they can. Because of this book and project drawdown and so many like it, young people are more inspired to get involved and do what they can so stop climate change.

From the list of the top 20 solutions, one that I have participated in and I think a lot of young people now are doing more is having a more plant-based diet. It is something that almost anyone can do unless they have health and food restrictions. It’s an important and essay thing to do if able. There are hundreds of vegan celebrities to choose from. But the one that sticks out the most and is the most active in the vegan community in the last few months has Been Joaquin Phoenix. He has been sure in all his award speeches this season to be an advocate for the community and for animals. It is amazing how he uses his voice.

Listening to his Oscar speech is amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87zXvSCmSYk

He is a celebrity with a voice who has an impact on young people. He has a chance and opportunity to really speak to the masses which he does eloquently and wonderfully. He participated among other celebrities in fire drill Friday started by Jane Fonda as an urgency to do something about climate change. He was arrested among others to really put himself out there. I think he is been effective in really allowing a large number of people to understand how veganism is an important step and place to be. Joaquin never shy's away from the truths of how terrible the meat and dairy industries are.

Him talking about him being vegan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCyQFdIu1Bg

I am however not vegan, but my older brother has been vegan since he was a sophomore in high school in 2013. It has been something he is passionate about as well as climate change. Whenever I am with my brother I eat vegan food, there is so much wonderful food that can be made without any animal products. I try to do my part and eat as little red meat as possible and eat a few vegan meals a week if possible. I am trying to my part in any way I can do help the earth.

The project drawdown fellowship programs is a program that “brings together a community of passionate researchers working to help achieve the shared goal of reversing global warming. Located around the world, our researchers work remotely to incorporate new research and data into models that demonstrate progress towards drawdown.” Their main goal is to hire researchers to identify and discuss the most effective paths and solutions to solve climate change.

The fellow I chose was Miranda Gorman who has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. She is an environmental engineer whose research focuses on the sustainability of material resources. Her work in the past has resulted in the “identification of several key limitations and opportunities to improve the circularity of a material resource in the U.S.”

I think what Miranda and others are doing to research on material rescuers is important because what she is looking into is how papers and plastics and how recycling systems can be better. We can all do better at recycling among other things, so her research on how to do better on that is important. We should all be learning about what materials we use and where they go, so it is something that can have an impact.

From the website, Vox.com David Roberts interviews Paul Hawken and talks to him about the book and the 100 solutions. In the article, Roberts said “For all the hand-wringing on climate change over the years, discussion of solutions remains puzzlingly anemic and fractured. A few high-profile approaches, mainly around renewable energy and electric cars, dominate discussion and modeling. Until 2017, there was no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There was no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors.”

I completely agree with Roberts on this because we are getting real solutions like he said that not everyday people are thinking about, but need to. It’s important to bring them up the way Hawken does in his book. We are getting the science and down the nitty-gritty of what we have a plant and people of the Earth need to be doing to really combat and do what we can do reverse or stop climate change from progressing at the rate it is.

I can’t say I am shocked or surprised by any of the solutions on the food. I am honestly happy all of these things are on the list. These are all solutions we need to work greater at achieving and doing better at. There are of course more we need to do better at working at than others. They are all equally important solutions that need to be addressed. I was very happy to see Indigenous Peoples’ Land Management on there though. Big companies are taking or attempting to take over their land and containing to frack and try and take oil from their land. It is something we need to work much better at making it a priority.

The way I am going to implement a lot of these solutions is by being more aware of what I am buying, what packaging it is in. Unplug lights and things from outlets when things are not in use. Turn off lights, save as much electricity in any way possible. Do better at sorting trash to recycling and paper. Although these are all small everyday things, the more we implant these things into our everyday life the better off we will be. It's all about doing your part and doing what you are able to do to make the world a better place. One step at a time. This book has taught me so much about so many additional solutions and ideas that I should be striving to implant into my life on the daily.

As Leo put it during his Oscar-winning speech in 2016 he said:

Sources used in post:

https://www.drawdown.org/frequently-asked-questions

https://www.drawdown.org/fellowship-program

https://www.drawdown.org/learn

https://www.drawdown.org/fellows/miranda-gorman-phd

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/10/15589038/top-100-solutions-climate-change-ranked

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celebritylive · 4 years

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When Richard Ladkani said yes to filming Sea of Shadows with Academy Award-winner Leonardo DiCaprio, exposing how Mexican drug cartels and Chinese traffickers are bringing the rare vaquita porpoise to the brink of extinction, he had no idea it would turn deadly.

Not only did Ladkani and his team get caught up in a riot in Mexico — with bullets flying past and stones being hurled their way — they later became the target of the powerful cartel that was less than pleased with their efforts to expose their illegal exploits. And they were stunned when one of the people they interviewed anonymously in the film ended up murdered.

“People have no idea any of this is happening,” Ladkani tells PEOPLE.

As dangerous as it is, the award-winning Australian director-cinematographer says it’s a story that’s too important not to tell.

“The war is on,” Ladkani says. “We’re losing, but maybe this movie can turn things around. That’s why we are so passionate about this.”

He adds, “People need to see the movie and they need to get angry and rise up and spread the word that this has to end.”

A Life-Changing Call from Leonardo DiCaprio

Ladkani was busy working on a script for a feature film in August 2017 when DiCaprio, one of the world’s foremost environmental champions, called.

The two got to know each other after working on the undercover 2016 Netflix documentary, The Ivory Game, about the gruesome slaughter of elephants in Africa by illegal poachers for their tusks, leading them down the path of extinction as well. (The film led China to ban on the centuries-long sale of ivory in 2017, Deadline reported.)

“He basically asked if I could drop everything and go help save the vaquita,” says Ladkani. “I was like, ‘Excuse me? What animal?’ I had never heard of a vaquita in my life.”

Join the fight for the vaquita. @seaofshadowsSOS exposes and combats the criminal enterprises driving the world's smallest porpoise to extinction. Now playing across the US. Get tickets at https://t.co/n9shIRzh1k. #SeaofShadows #BraceforImpactSOS pic.twitter.com/7bV0Yuc34m

— Leonardo DiCaprio (@LeoDiCaprio) July 12, 2019

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At the time, DiCaprio explained, there were fewer than 30 of the vaquita — a tiny porpoise — in the world.

They die when they get caught in illegal nets in the Sea of Cortez, off the coast of Mexico, where poachers are hunting another large fish — the totoaba.

“I said, ‘What’s a totoaba?'” recalls Ladkani.

Known in Mexico as “the cocaine of the sea,” the totoaba is a large fish whose swim bladders are considered “gold” on the black market in China, where people erroneously believe it can cure everything from cancer to arthritis, says Ladkani.

RELATED: Family Bonding! Leonardo DiCaprio Attends Documentary Premiere with Dad George, 75

“He said, ‘Nobody knows this is going on. We are running out of time to save the vaquita from extinction,'” says Ladkani. “‘We need a big film, but you have to start now because the mission starts October 1st.'”

Five weeks later, Ladkani and his team from Terra Mater were in Mexico.

The result? The heart-pounding, edge-of-your-seat, eye-opening eco-thriller Sea of Shadows, which will make its National Geographic debut on Saturday, at 9 p.m. ET — and will be shown in 172 countries in 42 languages.

With Ladkani as the film’s director and cinematographer and DiCaprio as one of its executive producers, the doc follows a team of “bad-ass” undercover investigators, scientists, environmentalists, and journalists — all of whom do everything they can to save the vaquita, the Earth’s smallest whale, from extinction and bring an international crime syndicate to justice, he says.

“We joined forces because this is so important,” he says.

‘When We Save the Vaquita, We Save Ourselves’

Many may ask: what does the vaquita — the adorable “panda of the sea” that looks like it belongs in a Disney movie — have to do with me?

Everything, says Ladkani.

As more large fish become extinct, the more the food supply, the livelihoods of millions, and the health of the planet are seriously threatened.

“When we save the vaquita, we save ourselves,” he says. “We save the entire ocean and entire communities in Mexico that are dependent on the fishing and this beautiful planet from drug cartels who have taken over.”

The fight is very real.

“We’re down to the end game now,” he says, adding that just yesterday he got a text from the environmentalists working to save the vaquita saying they were being overtaken by 60 different poachers.

With just 15 or so vaquita left on earth, “we have about a year — maybe less — before they are gone forever,” he says. “For me, this is symbolic. This tiny place can be saved. It’s an easy thing to do.”

Scientists, activists, and journalists work to fight drug cartels and traffickers whose poaching threatens to drive the vaquita to extinction. #SeaofShadows premieres commercial-free November 9th on @NatGeoChannel. pic.twitter.com/MQB7G7YfIY

— Sea of Shadows (@seaofshadowsSOS) October 29, 2019

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“But if we can’t save this tiny little area — 20 by 20 miles in the Sea of Cortez where the vaquita live, how can we save anything in this world?” he asks.

“It’s quite a complex issue,” Ladkani says. “But I am optimistic that we can overcome it.”

Fearless Eco-Warriors on the Front Lines

The film starts out showing the intrepid young crew of The Sea Shepherd as they try to catch poachers in the middle of the night with the use of a drone that captures their every illegal move.

“What I really love is that we have these heroes, like Jack Hutton, who are fighting evil,” he says. “He’s 22 years old. He the new future of our planet. For me, he is a superhero. He is an Avenger for the planet — literally out there fighting the cartels right now.

Other heroes in the film: Dr. Cynthia Smith of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, who tries to save the vaquitas in a daring operation, VaquitaCPR.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes comes when she and her team try to help a female vaquita.

“That was very difficult to film,” says Ladkani.

RELATED: Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Blasts World Leaders at the UN: ‘How Dare You!’

The film also follows Mexican investigative journalist Carlos

Loret de Mola, who goes in-depth on the divisive issue.

It also features Andrea Crosta, founder of Earth League International, a group of former intelligence, law enforcement and security professionals who are working to save wildlife, according to its website.

The Sea Shepherd and Earth League International “are our first — and last — line of defense,” he says.

Other groups left because they were afraid, he says. “These two that are still on the front lines are amazing,” he says.

A Mentor of Mentors

When things get hard for Ladkani, he thinks of his mentor, legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, whose own tireless journey to save wildlife inspires him to keep going.

“She taught me that everything in this world is connected to everything else. In the ocean you can’t just have a species disappear and think it’s okay,” says Ladkani.

“We are part of that as well,” he adds. “We can’t ignore that. We have to fight for it.”

In an exclusive clip from the film given to PEOPLE, Goodall says people often ask why it matters if one species dies.

“There are examples where the loss of one seemingly insignificant species eventually, through a ripple effect, can lead an entire ecosystem to collapse,” she says. “We don’t completely understand the interconnectedness of all living things so this little vaquita – so beautiful – I had never heard of it before I was introduced to it in Sea of Shadows – what a charming face. And the fact that they are almost extinct is sad.”

Ladkani hopes people watch the documentary and take action by sharing the film on social media, donating to nonprofit organizations The Sea Shepherd and Earth League International, and signing their petition on their website.

Why? “This story is a symbol of what is happening in the world,” he says. “In the Sea of Cortez, you everything that is wrong with our world.”

“What I get very emotional about is that you have these criminal syndicates that are making millions of dollars by killing endangered species and sending them off to markets — mostly to China,” he says.

“You have the same stories about the black market in the Amazon, with illegal logging; in Africa, with the rhinos; and in Asia, with the tigers,” he says. “These animals are dying at such a fast rate and these criminals are making millions of dollars — and people are not even aware.”

“We can change this.”

from PEOPLE.com https://ift.tt/36L12rf

#Celebrity

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affairsintop · 6 years

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Is Michael Wolff’s Trump the real Trump?

New Post has been published on http://www.anblogger.com/is-michael-wolffs-trump-the-real-trump/

Is Michael Wolff’s Trump the real Trump?

As nearly as I can see, the book Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff (New York: Henry Holt, 2018) is the 17th book “about Donald J. Trump,” but there may soon be many more. It’s hard to believe. But Amazon claims on its book site that this man long associated with downtown NYC is “…the very definition of the American success story….” Testing, and certainly verifying, I discovered after rummaging, that gadgets or play items (whatever one might call them) entirely devoted to Trump—as figure, not necessarily as just President—come to probably about 50—but clever investigation might well uncover far more than that—especially after the monetary success of this book.

The public is making a huge deal out of the publication getting our attention here. (One would think there’s nothing else to focus on “out there.”) The Guardian proclaimed, “Michael Wolff has written a book to shake America to its foundations.” (So there! Maybe that’s so….) Variety headlines for us the Ten Most Explosive things to be found in Wolff’s pages.

I reluctantly admit that at my Oregon home the television screen has been focused on President Trump like a laser for some time now, and I see no chance of that obsession fading away, even with random tuning of news channels! (For this student of American Diplomacy it’s disturbingly necessary! But enough. Let’s get down to producing paragraphs related to a book that will, soon enough, be the focus after the words “President Donald J. Trump” are pronounced.)

What is this astonishing book? The author asserts that he spent three hours “with Trump” and that he conducted “over 200 interviews.” Pretty impressive, that. But do we have to believe him? Ah. Wolff adds that as he sat on White House “sofas,” he had available to him, well, what? Chatter, I guess. Did he have a conversational lunch every day with a civil service or selected employee? If evident in the text, I at least would hesitate to deny that basic claim. As for his explosive quotations (including those perfectly awful ones with three dots) I feel I must be slow to say he has lied about the vast Trumpisms—by and about.

A mere reviewer surely doesn’t have to go in depth into the relationship between Trump as candidate and as beginning president and that scruffy Steve Bannon fellow who is responsible for something I don’t read called Breitbart. I understand that despite major critical words of mutual contempt exchanged between them this holiday season, that man who thinks he’s primarily responsible for the Trump victory (even though totally absent as election day neared), expects good relations between the two of them to prevail again, ’ere long. (Both seem to have a lot to gain.) It is pretty clear that Bannon is going to be featured in a spring book about himself, and somebody (absolutely not me) will have every chance to explore him in detail.

No matter what the President denies, this book seems to be rooted in a bit of contact with Trump and much with a variety of others. Clearly, there were innumerable interviews, many tape recordings are said to exist—far beyond anything normally granted biographers of those previous Presidents who have tried to run this country and the world from an address on Pennsylvania Avenue. The alert reader who has spent years in the archives studying presidents (hopefully meaning me) thinks of what is customarily prerequisite: ten or twenty years elapse after burial, ye historian gets to read tons of Presidential Library files that are finally open (denied the very best stuff); then may come some or many interviews with aides who were “there”; then comes that endless checking of the New York Times. (I removed 500 footnotes to it just to make room, when turning my dissertation into a publishable book!)

There must be many errors in this type of book. And I am quite aware that historians don’t easily forgive “errors.” Maybe we should take the approach of the Trump aide who, confronted with a pretty clearly false statement by the president, said it was just a “flourish.” Reviewing this book, though a bit time and attention consuming, has been fun. Now, if I could use that word flourish henceforth to replace “error” and “mistake” it sounds great to little old me.

This author seems to claim, essentially, that he went within a few yards of where the President “worked,” talked to anybody he felt like, ate lunch with somebody who was willing, created his own tapes (remember LBJ tapes opened for us only eventually), and, bypassing the university press crowd, got a major NYC publisher to say “yes,” maybe instantly. This reader believes Wolff even got to write as he pleased and told his publisher what he wanted! Think about that, fellow historians, you out there who seldom if ever write about “the present” while it’s still the present…. Well, almost never.

I’m not quite sure how important it is that the author did or didn’t get to interview President Trump as mogul, candidate, or Oval Office occupant. At this writing, the President says not; Wolff insists. He may have been “nearby,” but I personally believe there are Trump words in this book spoken exclusively to Mr. Wolff—and used by permission. (When I was well along on my LBJ book, The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, I detoured the opportunity to interview Lady Bird, for I could easily see that she was revealing virtually nothing to those seeking “the Story” about her complex husband. Her book Lady Bird’s Dairy was long and adequate! I am saying that it’s likely a motormouth like Donald said at some point, “Quite Enough, thank you,” and returned to making history without the likes of a clever, headline-alert, income expecting Wolff.

Those scathing comments by so many that the author passes on to us about the President are gems of criticism. (Usually, however, such crude language originates with “enemies,” not friends and chosen appointees.) By now, I would think, readers of this account have read them often enough. I’ll offer a few of the alleged words, then comment centrally: “idiot,” “dumb as S…,” “dope.” (More.)

Thinking about the above: I have personally worked under and around some top-flight figures in world famous places. Take it from me, on some occasion, I’m sure I privately blurted language something like that—behind their back—when not frustrated by Authority. I would HATE to have those words picked out several months or a year later, maybe, and have anybody leave the impression that the epithets were my printable and overall, considered view of that superior. I must have praised those leaders often enough in public and in private; why spread worldwide the single words of scorn I used once when frustrated about something back then?

Like most of you I have been so very excited, gratified even, to read the Bad about this amateur leader of sorts, but, no, I don’t think it either accurate or fair to assemble one-time words sort of out of total context and let them stand as a DEFINITIVE description. Among other things, could a man so described in such words have become rich, powerful, and President? There has to be something positive to counteract brutal negativism, really a lot, more. Right? Here, it’s a trained historian (me) speaking. I just have to admit, here and now however, that I say things like that about Trump almost daily! How to reconcile?

My introduction to the Fire and Fury book came by slowly reading the very long extracts offered several days before publication. What an easy read! How fascinating! What a collection of paragraphs designed to get national attention—and of course sell books. How the serious reader wishes he were in a position to judge whether Wolff has offered a lot of Truth. How much other Truth is missing because this non-scholar author thought it too “dull,” not “vibrant,” just “routine,” and/or revelatory of a tired, unready, President doing his job. Didn’t Donald ever work until tired, get briefed and, listening, change his mind, thank (or not bother to thank) an aide or general for educating him on “something,” tell off a relative with words like “I know better; you didn’t hear the briefing.”

Turning elsewhere, the deadline for this scathing account was, I surmise, November/early December. The time since this book was signed off on has not been kind for the deteriorating Trump image. Each day, nearly, we have the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and later on, sharp MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell—and other worthies unnamed. I have worked long and hard on three presidents, and must say I’ve been conceding a lot to let these brilliant (but clearly Trump-hostile) reporter/authorities both entertain and inform me. Other sources try to own my mind, pro and con. Some like Hannity and Dobbs, I hasten to proclaim and loudly, border on the absurd and silly for any watcher/listeners blessed with heavy duty educations.

Yet it is true enough that a shopping list of changes in the economic sphere may bring additional favorable income benefits to the well-born and lowly alike. My limited stocks are up. Some Americans now have unexpected jobs. Maybe some bad immigrants have been ousted. And so on. But: drilling for oil off all coasts? Kicking environmentalists in the face? Leaving the Government staffed inadequately? Appointing the clearly unqualified. And so on. The stock market number 25,000, now bandied about, is so nice to hear. But the inundated coastlines of the future? Enough. Mr. Wolff certainly had a gold mine of a controversial leader to write a book about.

I’m betting that as relatively unqualified reviewers check in all over the place, once the Wolff book shows up for purchase, we are going to get a lot of prose reflecting a strong distaste for various “Trumps.” There will be quoting of newsy slurs against current presidential character quoted therein. I just noted it in quantity in the Guardian.

Several things bothered me about Fire and Fury’s assembler/writer/judge. One is the plain fact that the author must have known his lucky chance to damn Trump was going to make him rich. The second is the tendency he has when interviewed to accept (apparently with little reservation) his own conversational evidence that seems stacked to document a mentally incompetent Trump, and/or indicate very indirectly that he is on the verge of becoming so. Suddenly that lucky book writer seems to view himself as competent to, yes, shoot his mouth off about a President (over his head) who is trying to perform competently in the White House and, often, overseas.

There are things to read about Trump as businessman, actor, meddler, rich man, professional groom, and father of beautiful, now grown up, children. One to be admired (that is positive throughout) is Time’s high-class paperback publication, Donald Trump: 45th President of the United States (an update of magazine content) which seems to date back to his beginning time in office. (Oddly, it says on the cover, “Display until 2/17/17.”) Gee, one wishes THAT MAN became our president (I just had to write that). What beautiful rendering in photographs of one who, well, apparently never entirely existed. The Wolff book, naturally, got into the hands of the New Yorker’s John Cassidy so he wrote a think piece published January 4, 2018. His space goes, however, to Comey and Mueller, and Bannon and to the many negative descriptions that are now being reprinted coast to coast.

Overall, we are all indebted to Michael Wolff for helping, no matter what, in exposing the fraud and the dangerous reality that has become the strange Presidency of Donald Trump. I mean it. Every little bit of exposure helps to derail two terms. My goal, as I wrote two evaluative pieces about Trump for History News Network in 2017, six months apart, and gave up writing a third effort after two pages, was always to reveal the sad facts I was viewing. It was back then a substandard candidacy, one unsuitable. Help save my native Country! I guess I had no effect at all, for the degradation of the USA, worldwide, is now common knowledge, requiring documentation infinitely less than this book offers.

While I don’t really want to be in the position of touting this book, ostensibly to help its sales especially, I do recommend the reading of at least part—even all—of a library copy, or piecing together Internet extracts as they emerge to comprise most of the text. This book is going to be obsolete soon enough, I surmise, for this NYC tycoon, romancer, showoff, TV clown, persuasive one, sometime leader, and force for both good and evil (not in that order), is one that will attract historians for decades. And why not?

I have decided that my long, yet ordinary enough, review of this one of a kind book should not detour to the subject now so often in the news concerning “the President’s mental fitness.” Others have picked up on this, partly because of the existence of a publication by Yale’s professor Bandy Lee, entitled, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Some in a good position to know have flatly denied charges about D. T.’s repeating things, etcetera. (Pretty dramatic stuff, that.) Especially, we will avoid speculation about atomic buttons and the whole North Korea thing, vitally important though it certainly is. Forgive this reviewer.

When looking forward in his NPR interview to the publication of his book, the author Mr. Wolff predicted the Trump Administration’s future as: “the train will hit the wall.” Part of our upset country hopes for that; part fears it. The worst hasn’t sunk in everywhere. Among old ladies in my retirement home, I’m sorry to say, are some who approve of “President Trump” but don’t seem quite sure why. To me, it seems there is very little indifference on that oh so basic matter for those of us quite well versed about earlier presidents. With a president there is so very much to consider. That is, their caution, leadership, respect for opposition leaders, and deserved exile far away from the Oval Office.

Any readers who absolutely deplore the presidency of Donald J. Trump have in Fire and Fury ample ammunition to go forth and by one means or another hasten his return to Trump Tower and the high life of yesteryear lived by him and his dear ones. Scholars seeking a restful book to read, one that will just plain soothe and relax the reader, should look elsewhere. Information in this book seems to be, here and there and perhaps a bit too often, questionable.

Finally, here is a phenomenon, one unprecedented in my view, a book that will unnerve, upset, apparently inform with new information in quantity, entertain, and provide a puzzle that is likely to last, somewhat at least, for the ages.

Vaughn Davis Bornet’s Ph.D. is from Stanford University (1951), the B.A. and M.A. (1939, 1940) are from Emory University, the year 1941 was at University of Georgia. Author of over a dozen books and scores of articles and essays, he has been writing articles frequently in recent years on the internet’s History News Network. He holds “Distinguished” awards from American Heart Association and Freedoms Foundation. He taught at University of Miami, 1946-48, and Southern Oregon College, 1963-80. He was a staff member of The RAND Corporation in the 1960s. A Commander in the Naval Reserves, his active duty was 1941 to 1946. His 2016 books Lovers in Wartime, 1944 to 1945 and another, Happy Travel Diaries, 1925 to 1933 (both Amazon) are recent. Late last year, just ahead of his 100th birthday, he published, Seeking New Knowledge: A Research Historian’s Rewarding Career. He lives, apparently only semi-retired, in Ashland, Oregon.

This article was originally published at History News Network

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mindcoolness · 7 years

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What Are Your Core Values? (Find Out Here!)

New Post has been published on http://www.mindcoolness.com/blog/find-out-your-core-values/

What Are Your Core Values? (Find Out Here!)

Doing the True Will requires self-knowledge, including an awareness of one’s core values in life. If you are uncertain about what your deepest personal values are, you can take the following quiz.

Identify Your Core Values Now!

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