New Jersey Environmental Federation

Miners die for our sins. That they get paid reasonably well to do this does not disconnect us from our responsibility to them. Miners' lives are cheap, so coal can remain cheap. Cheap as in dollars. Cheap as in life.

We mostly lead cheap lives. If we thought about what we do moment to moment, thought about the consequences to our neighbors, to our babies, to our babies' babies, most of us would stop. The few that wouldn't would go to jail.

Most of us don't think. Most of us. Yesterday I got to meet a hive of activists who know a bit about water and they think about what they know. Even more important, they do something vastly more useful than wringing their hands. They ring doorbells instead.

***

Yesterday I got to talk to a group of aware young adults, canvassers for the New Jersey Environmental Federation--Clean Water Action. I talked to them about clamming, which is dependent on decent water, and while clamming is one of my passions, it's not something most 20somethings spend a lot of time contemplating, but they were polite, and nobody fell asleep.


They work for us and the Earth. They are passionate, knowledgeable, and obviously happy to do the work they do. They do important work, work that matters, and they do it well.

They are not Pollyannas. They make connections. They can see where current cultural practices will lead us. And despite this, they seem, well, happy.

If someone who know a bit about water rings your doorbell, listen to them. Handing them a check for their work keeps them employed, but if you really want to see them glow, listen to what they have to say. They're passionate and knowledgeable, and they believe they can change the world.

And if we pay attention, they will.

Yep, my son is in the picture.

Hello Bonjour

I don’t need a passport to walk on this earth
Anywhere I go ’cause I was made of this earth
I'm born of this earth, I breathe of this earth
And even with the pain I believe in this earth....

'cause every bit of land is a holy land
and every drop of water is a holy water
and every single child is a son or a daughter
of the one earth mama and the one earth papa

Michael Franti, Hello Bonjour below

I got to watch a carpenter bee for a bit this afternoon.

He was patrolling his patch of Earth--he'd hover in one spot, occasionally changing the direction he faced with a curt shift. He has inspected me enough to know I am not a problem. He no longer bumps into me when I wander too close to his post.

(While the males do not sting, it is still unnerving to have an insect bounce off your forehead.)

As other flying critters entered his territory, he would chase them off. Except the lady bug. Lady bugs, at least this one, did not appreciate the ferocity of the big bumble, and went about its business.

***

I grew up hearing various reasons why other beings exist. Bees exist to give us honey. Spiders exist to eat the mosquitoes that plague us. Bacteria exist to help us digest food.

Us....Us....Us....

Not once did I hear a teacher say beings exist because, well, just because. Who knows? I grew up learning about a mechanistic universe that exists to serve humans. What I learned in school did not jive with what I learned outside. If children no longer go outside, how will they come to realize the lies we tell them?

I want to play this for biology class--obviously I cannot, but if anyone can recommend a song with a similar sentiment safe for the classroom, let me know. (The sentiment might not be safe in any guise....)

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

I killed an oyster yesterday. It was on a stone jetty, already half buried in the sand, doomed, as we all are. I wanted to use it for bait, but I knew better. Oysters are too fragile to sit on hooks. Whatever possessed the mariner to slay his albatross possessed me.

Last night I dreamed I was given a big oyster. A huge oyster. 2 feet wide, 4 feet tall. I wandered around town looking for someone to tell me what to do with my oyster, but nobody had a good answer. I woke up before I could return it to the sea.

I killed an oyster yesterday. It was probably several years old. It survived the winter storms. I thought about eating it. I did not.

This is an interesting world, but not a safe one, at least not for individual oysters or individual humans or individual carpenter bees.

It has proven remarkably safe, though, for life. Over 3 billion years worth of lives have survived here, through comets and earthquakes and volcanoes, through cosmic rays and solar flares, through ice ages and past global warmings.

That I get to be even a tiny part of it makes me grin like the Cheshire Cat....

At least someone from Chicago had a clue....

I should say that no subject in itself has a distinct pedagogical value. The value of any subject is in relation to all other subjects.

Colonel Francis W. Parker
Principal of the Cook County Normal School
Report of the Committee of fifteen (1895)

For a variety of good reasons, we are, as a faculty, designing a new environmental science course, integrating traditional divisions into one course. It's exciting designing a course from scratch.

We get to blend our disciplines--biology, physics, chemistry, geoscience--into a year's worth of science aimed at freshmen who do not (yet) plan to nab a Nobel Prize in science.

Specialization in high school science may have made sense in 1895, when the Committee of fifteen developed the class divisions we still use today, before specialization got so, well, specialized.

While it's cute to watch videos of children spout off scientific language, it becomes dangerous when ignorant folks confuse this with knowledge.



Charlie's Playhouse was founded by a Dr. Kate Miller, a scientist who now stays at home to be with her kids. I'm sure her heart's in the right place, and her science is sound. She's not just another huckster exploiting children to sell something.

Still, the video of children sanctimoniously spouting off mostly bad science (with the exception of one child's succinct description of natural selection) illustrates how science evolves into dogma. Using cute kids and bouncy music to sell ideas, even good ones, saddens me.

If we taught science as a discipline, as a way of looking at the world, instead of the fragmented approach we take today, I bet Charlie's Playhouse would thrive without the marketing gurus on their advisory board.

Testing, testing, 1...2...3

What's the point of a microscope if a child does not know that every drop of water in the small pond behind the middle school holds hundreds of critters?

What's the point of looking at pictures beamed from the Hubble Telescope if a child has never gazed at her own stars above a dark meadow on a moonless night?

What's the point of financial literacy if a child does not know that everything essential for life comes from from the grace of an ultimately unknowable universe?

What's the point of education?

Not everything worth knowing is testable, and a lot of testable items are, frankly, not worth knowing. I'm not convinced Mr. Duncan, a graduate of Harvard, grasps this.

***

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard Feynman

The dolphins are back in the Delaware Bay.

They are wild, they are big. You can hear them chirping and clicking if you stick your head in the water, a bit dicey in early spring.

Critters three times my size are swimming just off the beach, that left the land to return to the sea.

How do you teach about the dolphin? How do you describe the swirl of water as a young one dives under your kayak? How do you capture the sound you hear in late August as you bob underwater listening for their chatter?

How can I do better than just point and say look! Look!?

And if I teach a child to look, to learn, to know something by observing, how can that be tested?

It does not matter if a child knows the name Tursiops truncatus. It does not matter if a child can tell me the average weight of an adult male, or how many pound of fish it eats, or where it spends its winter. All of that means nothing, nothing, until the child sees the beast slap its magnificent tail 40 yards off the beach, this wild grinning beast that chose to return to the sea.

That's a RAP

“ I am an Ariel Student. That means that I AM THE BEST. The way that I show that I am the best is through: Good schoolwork, good behavior, good manners, and by being a good friend. That’s what it takes to be an Ariel Student.”

Ariel Community Academy Student Pledge

I left medicine so I could teach public high school.

Arne Duncan left professional basketball so that he could run the Ariel Education Initiative, the philanthropy efforts of a private corporation founded by John. W. Rogers, Jr., that makes money by manipulating money.

Mr. Rogers got stock certificates for Christmas and birthdays. He went to school at the same school as Arne, University of Chicago Lab School. He founded Ariel Investments at age 26.

Ms. Jewel Lafontant, a trustee of the Howard University who sat on the Board of Directors for both Mobil and Revlon, was one of the original investors. She had a lot of friends, friends who invested in Ariel.

Ms. Lafontant was John's mother.

John Rogers, Jr., comes from privilege. Arne Duncan comes from privilege. Their educational philosophy reflects this. Kids from privilege do better, on average, than those who do not.

The obvious, data-driven message? We need more rich and powerful (RAP) mothers. To this end, Arne Duncan and John Rogers are expected to announce the RAP Initiative by the end of this month:

Arne:
Sitting in the basement
At my mother's knee
I learned to spell success as
M-O-N-I-E

John:
Start a new fund
Forget equality
Education starts
With mommy's equity.

Arne and John:
Gotta be prepared
For the new century
Education's creed
In a word: usury

If you want to play, kids
And outcompete each other
Forget about the books, and
Get a RAP mother!

The video on the Ariel Education Initiative's home page focuses exclusively on investing in stocks.
Kids with ties and white shirts speak Wallstreetese. Cute!

John Rogers, Jr., image from Life.

With much nashing of teeth....

I tossed some words up at nashworld--he's busy playing in the sea, so I'm minding the cucumbers this week.

Let it bee....

If you have never stuck your nose completely into a cherry blossom, a blossom that burst open only a few hours ago, you cannot know the intensity of joy possible by bees, by us.

We cannot know what bees know, but we close our minds, our universe, when we presume mechanistic explanations for all animals not human. If I had to choose between words and the inexplicable joy felt when I buried my face in a fresh patch of cherry blossoms, well, I'm throwing away my keyboard and running away with the bees.

***

After giving myself to the first tree, I imagined blending honey and cherries and yeast to make this year's melomel. I saw a young child, no more than 8, pick up her even younger sister, about 2--she was carrying her to the cherry tree, to sniff the flowers. I suspect she saw me doing the same a moment earlier.

The father, smoking a cigarette, barked at her: "There may be bees in those flowers--get away!"

She slinked away, now fearful of bees, and cherry blossoms. Just as well, I suppose--a child in love with flowers and bugs does not work well in cubicles.

Not all things are possible, but these things are:

You can eat bread, real bread, made from flour you ground with your own hands.

You can drink honey wine, made by the yeast you put in a carboy mixed with fruit and honey.

You can watch the tide fall, then rise again.

You can see Orion tonight if the sky is clear.

You can eat pesto made from basil grown in a classroom, fed by light from the sun and the breath of you and your students.

You can bury your face in early April cherry blossoms.

You can rake clams, take their lives, and eat them, no matter what sins you have committed.

What do you tell an 8 year old child holding her very young sister whose just been told by her father that bees are to be feared?

Do you tell her of the honey bee waggle dance? That bees will find her tree, and tell other bees, and that they will all be so intoxicated with the smell of the cherry blossom that she will not be noticed?

Or do you let her Dad stand silently against the tree, puffing on his cigarette, tend to his own children, his own myths, his own ignorance?

***

My Dad is dead. He loved bees.
My Mom is dead. She loved bees.
My sister is dead. She loved bees.
I will someday be dead. I love bees.

Maybe it's the bees that are killing us. Maybe it's not. But if it is, I'd still love the bees.

Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust her tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my nose buried in a blossom, I trust the bees will return the favor.

The last sound I heard my mother make was laughter--she died two days later, while I held her hand.
The last few hours of my Dad's life, he laughed. I heard it, and I held his hand as he died.
I did not hold my sister's hand--she was killed by an errant missionary--but I bet she laughed a few minutes before she died. I know she sang. She always sang. Always. Like a bee humming she sang, sang, sang.

***

It's spring.

The flowers are back. The bees are back. The mystery, too, is back.

We can spend our Januaries pondering the mystery of life, the misery of death, while our brethren sleep through the dark days.

But now it's spring--humans with their electric lights and propane heaters no longer dictate the terms.

Get outside. Breathe. Live.