Ideas + Energy = Change

"There are too many people doing too many good things for me to afford the luxury of being pessimistic." - Utah Phillips 

Have you seen these Do Lectures? They're kind of like the UK version of Ted Talks. The series draws from the idea that people who Do things can inspire the rest of us to go and Do things, too.

I was thinking about the series as I started the reviewing enviro grant applications on behalf of the Nebraska Environmental Trust this week. To be honest I have a hard time sitting still when reviewing the applications. I'm a person who gets stirred by good ideas, and inspired by people willing to get their hands dirty in the hope of making the world better.

There's an inertia to sitting still that I just don't like. It's inspired by a lens that comes pretty readily from all corners that the problems are too big, the forces at work are too daunting to be overcome. 

I fundamentally reject the idea that a person can't examine a problem -- any problem with the environment, or poverty, roads, neighborhoods, or schools... -- and engage in a meaningful, civil fight to resolve it. The Do-er might not win. History could prove the cynic who sat on the sidelines with his or her six good reasons to do so was right all along.

For me, though, it's cold comfort have stayed seated, watched the fight, and in the end say to myself "see, I knew that solution wouldn't work". So I get itchy when I listen to these lectures, or read enviro grant applications sometimes because with all that energy bouncing around it's hard for me to sit still.

Roots & Shoots

Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots Turns 20 from the Jane Goodall Institute on Vimeo.
I thought I'd sponsor a chapter of Roots & Shoots at N's school.Roots & Shoots is a Jane Goodall program that inspires young people to invest in the world around them to make it better. N & I agree: it's good stuff.

Nice To Be Asked

About a month ago I received a mass e-mail from the U.S. Department of  State which encouraged me to:

 "[A]pply your education and professional experience in a global public service career that makes a difference. You can represent the United States as a diplomat with the U.S. Department of State and contribute your diverse backgrounds, linguistic skills, and unique perspectives to this intellectually stimulating and challenging career."

I printed off the email. I keep it tucked away in my purse just in-case I need an ego-boost.

Wangari Maathai (1940-2011)

“We cannot tire or give up. 
We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk!”

Professor Wangari Maathai died yesterday, at the Nairobi Hospital, after a prolonged and bravely borne struggle with cancer. Like the millions of people she never met, Professor Maathai was a source of personal inspiration for me. 

She propelled the Green Belt Movement out of obscurity and called upon women to improve their livelihoods by increasing their access to resources like firewood for cooking and clean water. She blossomed as an advocate for better management of natural resources and for sustainability, equity, and justice. 

By any measure this was an inspiring woman. Her sense of conviction was clear. Her commitment and passion were obvious. I had looked forward to sitting audience to her lecture this Thursday as part of the EN Thompson Lecture Series. Instead of an audience, I suppose the task at hand is to mourn her passing, celebrate her accomplishments, and then put our hands to work creating a world she helped us envision. 

Not Google+

Aside from my blog, I've decided to old school it with my social networking.

Prairie Public Radio

I was online yesterday, logging into my student account, when I found out the University of North Dakota has a phone-in philosophy radio show.  

It’s a coffee house feeling radio conversation about the philosophy of forgiveness, health care, morality, or ecology.  It sort of throws everything into the non-sensational  radio-media mix and I was glad to find the show. My Internet surfing will occasionally inspire moments of serendipity like this. Finding a radio broadcast from North Dakota that dissects both political rhetoric and the every day puzzles.

I chuckled with admiration to find out two small details: first, the show's host sports a goatee, second he points out the irony that “North Dakota exports a philosophy show… while Cambridge, Massachusetts exports Car Talk. Everything is backwards!”

The program is named WHY?  And broadcasts live on Prairie Public Radio the second Sunday of every month at 5 p.m. Central time.

Exploration

We've been watching the HBO series From The Earth To The Moon. Tonight's episode featured Apollo 11's Lunar Landing. Being nine years old this was N's first go around with these events.

N: I think it was good to go to the moon.
Me: Me too.
N: Important, you know?
Me: Yep.
N: Some people disagree.
Me: You think so?
N: Yeh, because they decided the space-race wasn't interesting or important any more. Like we shouldn't need space ships or astronauts or anything. [she looks out the window at the dark sky] I think they're wrong.

Sound Bubble

I sat down on a bench to eat my lunch today. With each grass blade still fat and green in the late summer, and 20 minutes to spare I plopped down and ate my grilled veggie wrap on UNL’s City Campus.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched or listened to a college campus. There was the same rapid pulse, the same sense of movement, that I remember. Heavy, glass doors to each building being flown open or falling shut. The click of somebody’s bike chain setting properly into gear. The woozy feeling of leaves being blown around in the wind.

And then I started glancing at everyone’s hands, the ear buds peaking out of their heads. I realized hardly anybody was listening to or experiencing the same set of sounds. How strange to be occupy the same physical space but never share the same sound table, I thought.  A comfortable setting inside their own noise bubble. It made me think about the art of listening. The way we sort of shout rehearsed monologues or quips at each other in public rather than talk or listen. 

The way even I'll filter out the news I read, the music I hear, the world I experience from the clamor of noise. The underlying assumption is that goodness or good ideas rise up from inside the bubble and it spares us the noise of the Snookis of this world. But the common air space it isn't filled with just Snookis.  I thought about all of the music I’ve come across in public spaces, ideas (good ones sometimes) that didn’t come from inside my bubble that inspired me to expand just a little.  

I can’t say where I landed this noon about the sound bubble. I only had twenty minutes. I was glad to land outside of mine for a little bit.

Jersey Shore

Thank you to A Novel Idea Bookstore for the image!

My Pet Planet

I was watching A Traveler’s Guide to the Planets last month and balked at a commentator that called Neptune a boring planet. They described it as a featureless, nondescript, deep-freeze placeholder planet on the outskirt of our solar system. I might be exaggerating a tiny bit but the sentiment was clear and I’ve been stewing about it ever since. 

I would consider Neptune my pet planet. I think it possess a lovely sense tranquillity and cold. So I came up with a rebuttal list to the notion that Neptune is boring: 

1. Extreme Storm-Chasing Potential. Neptune’s atmosphere is primarily made up of hydrogen and helium with rippling clouds, raging storms and winds that clock the fastest time trials in the solar system. That’s a wind speed of 133,000 miles per hour, but who’s counting? 

2. Fame Grabbing Controversy. Two mathematicians and one Galileo are all credited with “discovering” Neptune. It depends on who you talk to. 

3. Neptune Allows Pluto To Cut In Line. From 1979-1999 Pluto was eighth in the solar system line and in 1999 Pluto resumed its ninth position without so much as an, “excuse me,” or “thanks.” 

4. Funky Chunky Orbital Rings. Ice and space gunk that sticks together and orbits Neptune. 

5. In a word: Triton. The feisty moon that Neptune probably captured as it was floating by. 

6. Seen It. Last month I saw Neptune through a high-power telescope set up at the Nebraska Star Party Observation Field. It was pretty exciting, I must say. It was lovely, cool and serene and not at all boring.

Clean, Green Fighting Machine

I recently happened across a periodic column asking people about the contents of their refrigerator. It was more than a street journalist stopping a random person and asking, "What's in Your Fridge?"

The columnist set up legitimate interviews, but along with the glossy, glam shots of each interviewee was a large portrait of the inside of the person's refrigerator. The interview questions had lead-ins like, "I see a lot of spoiled vegetables in your crisper..." -or- "What's in the pink tupperware container?"

I thought it was pretty cool, actually. A candid interview about a person's life. Nobody has prepared statements about their crisper. Nothing could be rehearsed or too polished in the exchange. And I was surprised how much I could learn about a person based on the contents of their refrigerator. It's a series called the Refrigerator Look Book.

Nobody's come over to the house with a camera curious about my fridge. But I opened the fridge last night and pretended I was being interviewed for the series. I've got your basic veggies and cheese. Some left over brown rice and heirloom beans. The most exciting feature of my refrigerator, actually, is the box itself. It's new. With the help of $250 rebate from Cleaner, Greener Lincoln I sent the ancient semi-reliable kitchen behemoth of an ice-box  packin' off to the recylcer and got this Energy Star fridge. I'm pretty thrilled about it. 

9/12 + 10 yrs

I had only one conversation yesterday remembering 9-11. It was with McK naturally. 

He remembered working a construction job in Iowa and his dad shaking his shoulder to wake him that morning. The fog of sleep with the news of the first plane crashing into the Twin Towers. He remembers being glued to the television thereafter and how his stomach felt like that sickly blue light that comes a tv screen. 

My memory was finding out at work. My cubicle at that point was in the downtown office right next to the break room where the television was on all day long People would wonder down the hallway in a daze to and from the latest news report. Strangely enough from the moment I heard I decided to avoid the press coverage like the plague. We were all in shock. Nobody really knew what was going on but the person with the camera rolling, the microphone in hand, was going to have to say something. At best the words would be wild speculation. At worst the live-television script prompt a frenzy of fear and prejudice. 

No, actually, my worst case was darker than that and pretty clear in my mind. It was of a chatter that swelled to vengeance and contempt and ultimately unlocked the U.S. nuclear arsenal at whomever we could hold responsible. As a child of the Regan-era “evil empire” “leave them in an ash heap of history” “we win they lose” Cold War rhetoric this worst-case wasn't hard to imagine. And I was pretty deliberate about deciding if that was going to be the narrative in this instance...I really, really didn’t want to be anywhere near it. So I stayed at my cubicle all day. I got plenty of details about the day’s events from friends, colleagues and family. Was I stunned? Yes. Forever changed? You betcha. Grieving? Certainly. I just couldn’t watch the news. 

After work I went home to my parents’ house on Touzalin Avenue, called my boyfriend in Iowa, and went to bed. The laundry-soap smell of clean bedsheets couldn’t chase out the stinging, almost metallic fog of fear all around me. 

It wasn't until the next day that I read any headlines or listened to even the smallest bit of the news coverage to get a pulse on the media narrative. I found a country filled with horror, and grief. But the tone wasn’t particularly vengeful and there certainly wasn’t the sound of a battle cry. To say I was relieved is such a massive understatement I can barely stand to type it here. 

I remember more of September 12th and the days afterwards. Nine days after the 12th I discovered I was carrying a super-silent ninja baby. One that had been conceived months earlier but of whom I was unaware. The secret of this baby’s existence was the sandy shore I felt washed up on. I wouldn't feel so lost again in days and weeks that followed.

Spin Cycle

I had a noisy sort of a pleasant morning. I was up early to study for classes. Just as the sun came up I went for a bike ride. It was cloudy and cool outside. Occasionally I’d look at the wet leaves, the vapor of my breath, and feel like the world had been through the spin cycle of a washing machine. That everything was somehow clean and wet and cold. It’s a sensation I like, actually. How the edges of things were sticking to each other.

_________________
Personal Soundtrack: Sweet Melissa by the Allman Brothers

PTF11kly

Gazoontite. I know. But it's actually the super cryptic name of a supernova which continues to brighten in the night sky. Easily visible to backyard astronomers this weekend or so I'm told. I haven't ventured out with my binoculars yet. Peak viewing is sometime around Sept. 9th. 

Here's a video from Berkeley Lab on how to spot PTF11kly. And here's the cheesy tune I've been humming all weekend!

Segway-Lawncare Hybrid

Somebody has already fused the best of both worlds, here. I saw the prototype in action yesterday. I was in awe, and I laughed until I cried.