Envrinonmental Alliances

The U.S.-India climate 'partnership'

Obama is applying his slow-pace strategy to climate change as well--something most people have trouble trusting as a getting-it-done strategy. But, regardless, he is taking strides in becoming involved in initiatives that might be more productive than Copenhagen. This partnership with India is, if nothing else, a good image of the agreement between developed and developing countries to work together and not hold environmental grudges. Working together is clearly the key here and it is nice to see these kinds of alliances being made. The next step is to see if anything comes of them, and if there is enough time for this slow-pace approach, not that there is any other way to do it really...

A day full of...

turkey dinners. But where do all the turkeys come from? I ate with two different families and had nearly identical food at each meal. Not only am I wondering where all the turkeys are coming from, but I am now baffled by the quantities of sweet potatoes, marshmallows, canned pumpkin, instant stuffing and canned cranberries. Where is it all coming from?

Still waiting

on the sun.

Gorilla Gardening

The art of gardening in unexpected places has a certain artistic appeal, much like the postmodern themes we spoke of in class today. Interesting that the postmodern is always associated with the urban and here there is an image of a garden within this old... something. Maybe an old food display case--for baked goods perhaps? I'm not even sure because now it is only a garden. The flowers seem like they are there almost by mistake. I especially like how the contraption is littered with posters and stickers. It seems that much more urban to have become subject to the advertising powers and menaces of the city. I wonder if it just closes up when it gets cold? I wonder who maintains such a lone-standing piece of art? It's very mysterious to me, like a surprise waiting for you on the street corner. Don't walk too fast or you might miss it because it blends in so nicely with newspaper stands and the like. What a brilliant accessory on a gray street corner.

Top 25 Reasons to Give a Damn About Climate Change-- Video

Super Models Take It Off For Climate Change

An interesting marketing scheme. Apparently, sex sells. I wonder what the reactions to this kind of advertising might be. Could this actually make the deniers change their minds? Is sex that persuasive, or is this just a chance for supermodels to get the green on their resume? Frankly I'm a little tired of the green marketing world and I find it to be quite discouraging. I see it as a kind of step down from the true cause, making people believe and act for a interesting interpretation of whatever the truth might be.

Some Food Fiction

A lunch parody

Check this out. Creative. Eerily familiar. The beginning put me in a Gulliverish mindet that I couldn't snap out of. From there it unfolded.

Rainy day poem

Blue slacks on a gray
canvas make the afternoon
pass quite quickly

take a library walk and
we can talk about
the Casablanca paper

look both ways and cross
the street and sneak
through the back yard,
but be sure to take a peak
at the pumpkins

meet me in the lobby
by the sycamore tree,
and don't drag your feet.

Bill McKibben in the news

Is Bill McKibben right to be angry with Obama?

A reaffirmation of the my questioning of McKibben's cause. Yes, I aggree with the bigger picture, but the approach seems a little wobbly. David Roberts, the author of this article gently puts McKibben in his place, who is upset that Health Care reform has been made the first initiave in Congress, by saying that Obama is not where the blame should be. He goes on to point a few fingers, namely democratic senators who are pushing the health care bills. With reform on the horizon, or so the picture has been painted, climate change bills are still getting their feet under them. If McKibben were presented with the option of either providing insurance for how ever many millions of citizens don't have health care or saving the environment, I wonder which he would actually chose? However, the point is that the President, regardless of the title, doens't really get to chose.

Some Yeats for the night

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death I KNOW that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,	5
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,	10
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind	15
In balance with this life, this death.

I think I grew to love this poem today. I can't get beyond the brilliance of the balance.

My apple was too red

I stood at the counter, waiting to check out a few movies, still half an hour to spare until the library closed for the night. I brought the apple in my hand to my mouth and heard a crunch just as I had almost began to walk away before realizing I had left my library card on the front desk.
A man with keys hanging from his pocket pointed to my table and plainly stated, "there's no food in here."
"Oh," I said with a full mouth, "sorry."
"Really?" Sarah said, a hint of attitude in her tone.
"Yup, the sign is right on the door as you're walking in" the man with the keys reassured her.
I shrugged and we turned to leave, shaking off the feeling of the place which was rich with that snappiness of Lake Forest. As we walked out the door I examined the bite in my apple more closely, finally realizing that the things innards were an odd shade of red. The waxy, and apparently painted outside had somehow seeped through the membrane and straight to core. I cracked it open on the top of a fence spike just to be sure the dye had indeed saturated the entire fruit. My snack had been ruined twice over, and in just minutes. What do they paint those things with anyways?

The price of diamonds

Diamonds have proven, time and time again, to be wonderfully lootable resources when the underdogs are looking for a comeback. From the bushwars in Angola, to the rural villages of Sierra Leone, and more recently it is suspected that Al Qaeda has descovered the quick and easy cash they can provide. Throughout Africa secondary diamonds can be found in fairly accessible places. At the bottoms of rivers, the sandy shores of the ocean, just twenty feet underground. Men risk their lives diving into rivers, breathing CO2 through a compressor hose. Thousands of pounds of dirt or sand is removed so seives can do that more particular work. Water tables are exposed and disrupted. Men, and the boys who aren't quite there yet, have dug at gunpoint, or for outrageously low wages, hardly enough to sustain one man, let alone a family. Agricultural fields have turned to dust, worthless in the homogenous economy.

Mountaintop Mining

"And if Appalachia is America under an X-Ray, then mountaintop removal is the centerpiece of that X-Ray. A distillation. A bald apocalyptic vision of what has gone horribly wrong in our culture, but that is in most other contexts more hidden, more subtle. In the obliteration of the Appalachians, the oldest mountain range in the world, we see, concretely, unambiguously, the exposure of profit-making without accountability. Of corporate control over democracy. Of the energy war right here on our own soil, the fallout of our careless overconsumption."
-Ann Pancake, author of Strange as the Weather Has Been, a novel about mountaintop mining in the Appalachians.

It depresses me to think this is a standing issue in North America. Pancake states that many judges are still torn or unsure as to whether it is actually illegal, yet mountaintop mining continues to endanger, if not ruin, the lives of so many people that live in the Appalachians, the oldest mountain range in the world. She has been writing about the issue for ten years and has received nothing but resistance from governments and "disobedient" civilians. Pancake states plainly that in all the struggles she faces trying to make people care about the destruction of the place she calls home, the one thing that gives her optimism is the number of people in their late teens and twenties who have passionately devoted themselves to fighting for more sustainable ways of living. Many of the environmental writers of her generation seem to face this same problem. Why is it that their peers won't take their side for once, and they are forced to find allies among the younger generations, many of whom don't have many resources besides brains, patience and determination.

Geurrilla Gardening

http://www.grist.org/article/the-new-wave-of-urban-farming-how-to-get-fresh-food-from-small-spaces/

So many creative ideas about how to grow your own food. I am so tempted to just go buy a bunch of seeds right now and turn the space in front of my big window into a garden. A trough would be the coolest I think. All I have now is a sad little rasta plant, planted in a mug.

rewrite

tangled waste,
buoyed beyond the current's lines,
wrapped around an invisible pole,
spinning until
it sinks

a gray rainbow with no
sharp corners,
but imperfect edges
that blend

Nonsensical cohesion.

a multimedia junk pile

until the end,
it spins, it spins, it spins.

tangled waste,
buoyed beyond the current's
lines, wrapped around an
invisible pole, spinning until
it sinks

a gray rainbow with no
sharp corners,
but imperfect edges
that blend

It's nonsensical cohesion.

a multimedia junk pile,
acquiring real life in time,
like robots with feelings

it spins until
the end,
it spins, it spins, it spins.

Ecocrticism

An ecocritic, Glen Love, says the problem with environmentalists in the humanities is their lack of understanding in the fields of the sciences. And yet, many will not miss an opportunity to criticize the sciences for being based in reductionism. He encourages the people of the humanities to mingle with their science counterparts of the academy, and assures us they will probably know more about literature than we know about science. Love opposes the worlds of science and the humanities to a somewhat extreme extent in order to make his point about the need for interdiscplinary action for environmental movements. How can we properly perform an ecocrtique without scientific knowledge of the environment within the literature? While the science used to scare me, because I decided long ago I was not "good" at them, I have begun to thoroughly enjoy them because they offer another facet through which to look at things. While I may prefer to qualitatively observe things and write freely about them, there are great rewards in understanding the other side of the story as well. And, as a mostly humantities-driven person, a good grade in a science class is almost more rewarding.

Grand Opening

Downtown Lake Forest has new streets (and sidewalks...)! The citizens of Lake Forest were united today by the grand opening of the new downtown streets. People drove freely through downtown to get to any number of destinations. A DJ and the local country radio station contradicted each other like troubadours on opposing corners. People walked down the new white sidewalks to inspect the job done. Twenty-foot-tall santas flapped before their faces, welcoming cars to their parking spots. I thought the end of construction would make it easier for bike riding downtown but I realize that the street is still out of the question while the signs on the side walk demand bike-walking.

The wave

I walked to the beach today after my only class to give myself a break before a sat down for hours of grueling research. I gather leaves and tried to light a fire in one of the stone fireplaces just to set the mood of my study break. An amiable fire blazed for about a minute before the wind found its way under the logs. The waves proved to be a spectacle worth walking for so I made my way to the waterside. I stood in the sand and sunk in an odd way because of my shoes but ignored the uncanny feeling. I became mesmerized by the spray of the waves on the man-made rock jetty. I fantasized about buying a wetsuit so I could swim in the water all year like the man who swims laps in a black hood through November. He can't be younger than sixty and stands high on my list of respects for pure, untainted athleticism. I wonder the dent one of those suits would put in my grocery money? These are the times I wish bartering were acceptable as an equal means to money. But then, I guess I don't have much to barter with that isn't the dwindling figures in my bank account. I wanted so desperately to remove my socks and shoes and just feel the wet sand that appeared to be sucked dry of water with every recession of a wave. A gust of wind found my wandering mind and lead me back up the hill to the library where I belong.

Hello Sun

When the sun is finally there, I can barely find it. Too many things have bogged down my mind, and deeper, and everything fades to the dull color of winter. A lifetime is ended by one meeting in court and half a semester is reduced to an "exercise." My thoughts have been muddled by distress I can't seem to help. The mornings come sooner and the nights are prolonged by the glare of this screen and that sees what I can't.

link

US vs CHINA

US VS CHINA

I feel like this tug-of-war will never end. Everyday there is a new article from one side or the other. It's just another way to foster competition. When will the competition become productive? When will we compete to be the first ones to make changes.

Until then, apocalypse now.

Nazi Agrarian Ideals

I recently read about an interesting aspect to the Nazi regime that I had never heard or read about prior. Part of the idea behind socialism for Germany was to build a self-sustaining state. Since Germany's food supply was severely tampered with during World War I by the ally forces, they were aiming to become self-sufficient in their food production. As a result, a man named Darre created a new section of government dedicated to created a new "peasant" class in which the term was glorified to ensure the importance of their job. There were a slew of processes a person had to endure to gain this new title, and having a pure bloodline was, needless to say, one of the standards. The rural people who did not recieve this title were maintained their title of farmer. Those people who did gain the title were subject to approximately one new farming standard, or law, every three days in the year of 1934. Agriculture was centralized to the point of inconvenience for farmers who had to sell their crops to government run centers as opposed to selling them to their local markets. The prices of food who controlled instead of allowed the free fluctuations of supply and demand and as a result the urban industrial workers suffered low wages and overpopulation becuase the government couldn't raise their wages, or the price of food would have to change. This problem became more apparent after the amazing agricultural production year or 1935. The country was faced with drought in the following years and productions dropped and the new peasants began to lose faith in this new system as they realized they were getting the short end of the stick.