Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With mounting pressures on schools today, the suggestion that teachers should also be preparing students to address our growing ecological crises might seem ridiculous at best. But what if doing so could boost student achievement?
"We lived in an electric world. We relied on it for everything. And then the power went out… We weren’t prepared."
That little bit of intricate exposition is from the show’s voiceover introduction. And it’s about as gripping as Revolution gets. The upside is we get to hang on those artful words every week.
It is the nature of popular books to inspire people to wildly overstate their importance. The most stunning example is Abraham Lincoln’s statement upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war.” While _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ was an incredibly important book, one that moved many people to shift their sympathies on the subject of slavery, this was, of course, the wildest hyperbole….The single possible exception to the overstatement of the importance of popular books might be the claim that Rachel Carson’s _Silent Spring_ began the environmental movement.
We label as “crazy” those members of the human species whose behavior we find hard to understand, but the cascading crises in contemporary political, economic, and cultural life make a bigger question increasingly hard to ignore: Is the species itself crazy? Has the process of evolution in the hominid line produced a species that is both very clever and very crazy?
What’s the word, I ask the morning, that I should take to the conference?
Open, the day replies mildly, as the horizon stretches in all directions and the clouds move with the wind ever westwards.
This article is an attempt to respond to those who say they see me as a defeatist, a “doomer”, a dogmatically negative person. I have described myself of late as a joyful pessimist, and will try to explain why. This article draws on various theories about complexity, and the phenomenological philosophies of several writers, poets, artists and scientists. But it’s not a work of exposition of theory or of philosophy. It is, I guess, a confession.
-What would British roadsl look like if we treated them the same way we do our cycle lanes?
-Check Out This Great Bike-Sharing ‘How To’ Guide for U.S. Cities!
-Building walkable cities cuts emissions more than fuel taxes, study says
-World’s Coolest Bus Commercial
-What would British roadsl look like if we treated them the same way we do our cycle lanes?
-Check Out This Great Bike-Sharing ‘How To’ Guide for U.S. Cities!
-Building walkable cities cuts emissions more than fuel taxes, study says
-World’s Coolest Bus Commercial
It’s fifteen years after the Great Blackout. The United States, at the very least, is entirely free of electricity for reasons as yet unknown (but it sure smells like, get this, a conspiracy!) Humans have left the cities for the countryside to live in communal villages or prey on one another. The good guys sport henleys and hoes. The bad ones also wear henleys, but they ride horses and carry swords…
As said in the introduction to this lecture held in spring 2011, Christopher Alexander has started a fire that keeps on burning, spread by the “wind” throughout the world. But in the wake of this fire there’s no ash, but only beauty and true living structure. As in the new cosmology of Alexander, matter is not inert anymore — it has spirit, revealed in the field of centers. This means that beauty is seen as a fact of the wholeness found in nature and the universe.
Throughout Japan there exist landscapes called satoyama in which people live and work in harmony with nature by combining traditional wisdom with scientific knowledge to practice agriculture in a manner that nurtures biodiversity. This article complements the video brief that looks at green tea produced in the village of Higashiyama, Kakegawa City, Shizuoka by using grassland resources to protect and augment soil, yielding a high quality product and giving haven to other plants, some of them important to Japanese culture.
Borrowing a phrase from forester Aldo Leopold, changing one word, I invite you “to think like a tree.” Consider this an exercise in critical, creative, innovative, clear thinking about our dwelling here on this one Earth. Allow that which is hidden and concealed to be revealed to you by those of the other-than-human world.
