Between caterpillar and butterfly
Maria Sibylla Merian lived over 300 years ago, in a time when women rarely exposed their minds to the ridicule of men.
Merian went further than studying and painting the natural world she saw in her native Germany.
In 1699, at the age of 52, she left her family and set out on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis in the Amazon.
Planting the future for Kenya
ONE day Wangari Maathai went out with some friends into Nairobi to plant a tree. This was not unusual, given that she has been responsible for planting 30 million trees in Kenya in the past 30 years. But on January 8, 1999, as she raised her hoe to dig a hole for the sapling, she and her friends were attacked by 200 guards armed with machetes, whips, bows and arrows and swords.
“When the blow came,” she writes in her autobiography, Unbowed, “I felt not so much pain as surprise, even though from the beginning the thugs clearly wanted to hurt or even kill us.” She reported the attack to some local police officers and offered to take them to the scene so her assailants could be arrested. Instead, nobody was arrested, and no wonder: that evening she saw TV footage suggesting that the police might have colluded with her attackers.
This was not the first or last time she would be attacked for planting trees.
New NAACP in NC
The first thing, the Rev. William Barber said, is “to say with consistency and clarity what the problems are that face our people.” That’s why a 14-point platform, replete with specific sub-points and “action steps,” took center stage Saturday at the state NAACP’s “HK on J” event in Raleigh.
“HK on J” stood for “Historic Thousands on Jones Street,” where the General Assembly is located. But before the 2,000 who attended marched to Jones Street, they gathered in Memorial Auditorium, 10 blocks away, where Barber and a host of his progressive allies took them through a detailed recitation and explanation of the 14 points.
Christian Permaculture
The very beginnings and base of Permaculture started by observation, observation of nature and its amazing ability to work together to take care of all its basic needs. For a Christian the base of Permaculture has its foundation on what God already created. Understanding and getting to know everything about nature and all its plant life and ways is only just beginning. We have lost so much to extinction and are still losing this diversity without even knowing its reason or uses. …
Chef’s Surprise
It’s always tempting to make a New Year’s resolution about food-eat less, or eat healthier, or take time for breakfast before the daily dash out the door. But Greg Christian, a keen-eyed and clean-shaven professional chef from Oak Park, is going way beyond food for 2007. This New Year he hopes to find students at three Chicago schools not only eating healthier, but thinking smarter, learning better, and living with a greater awareness of the natural world. The schools are guinea pigs in Chef Greg’s latest concoction, The Organic School Project.
Fresh Bucks
Picture yourself sitting down to a restaurant meal made with local fruits, vegetables and meats. Or easily finding food artisans, caterers or shops that sell homegrown Rhode Island foods.
Then, at the end, imagine paying with “Fresh Bucks.”
That could become a reality with the Rhode Island Fresh Network, a new marketing campaign aimed at promoting local chefs and food businesses.
CA Schools make the move
Childhood obesity in the United States has now reached what many are calling epidemic proportions. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 35 percent of all American children are overweight. Many of them will develop diabetes by the time they finish high school. Since many youngsters eat lunch, and sometimes breakfast at school, the city of Berkeley, California, has decided to take action against obesity in its school cafeterias. It has overhauled its entire menu, replacing typical pizza, fried foods, and high calorie items with healthier choices, such as fresh organic fruits and vegetables, and whole grains.
Blog-venting
When Indians blog, they go the whole hog. Consider the 35% of India’s overall Internet population expressing themselves over weblogs. Or the fact that more women in India (51%) create and use blogs to give vent to their pent-up feelings. Also, Indians blog the most in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, more than five times a week. All this when 60% of India’s bloggers are still labelled ‘green’ or nascent bloggers whose overall blogging experience is under a year.
Public health officials, parents at odds over HPV vaccine
Vaccination against a sexually transmitted virus that can cause cervical cancer may become mandatory for girls in Minnesota. Midmorning explores the issues behind the human papilloma virus vaccine.
IA Comment: The stir on this issue may create what we call premature polarization. There ismore going on here than liberals suggest… merely the right-wing trying to preserve biological punishment for sinners in the form of STDs. What is the role of the drug companies in all this; and (hat tip to De) how much of the librul-male chatter on this is more deisgned to ensure greater fukability in women? Before we jump in and take sides on this issue, let’s do a bit more research.
OPEC and NOPEC
Since October 2006 world oil demand, as in previous years since 2002-2003 has fallen away from the Summer Demand Peak. During the July-August 2006 summer peak, world oil demand on a wide all liquids base probably hit at least 87.5 Mbd.
Prices also hit all-time nominal records, around 78 USD/bbl. This was however lower than the absolute purchasing power corrected oil price peak, attained during the 1979-1981 Oil Shock, at about 110 USD/bbl in 2006 dollars. We should note that this only concerned specific and smaller shipments, and at the time no 24-hour world oil market existed.
US military oil pains
As of September 30, 2005 the US Air Force had 5,986 aircraft in service. (1)
At the beginning of 2006 the US Navy had 285 combat and support ships, and around 4,000 operational aircraft (planes and helicopters). (2)
At the end of 2005, the US Army had a combat vehicle fleet of approximately 28,000 armored vehicles (tracked vehicles such as Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles)(3). Besides those the Army and the Marine corps have tactical wheeled vehicles such as 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles. The US Army has also over 4,000 combat helicopters and several hundred fixed wing aircraft.
Six anti-war protester arrested at congressman’s office
Six college students were arrested Friday during an anti-war protest at the local office of a congressman.
The students sat inside the Chapel Hill office of Democratic U.S. Rep. David Price, demanding to speak with Price over the phone. The protesters want Price to vote to cutoff funding for the war in Iraq.
When they refused to leave, Chapel Hill police carried the students out of the office and charged each one with trespassing.
Environmental justice conference set
Nationally recognized scholars on environmental justice will discuss how communities can address issues of pollution and contamination during a free two-day conference at Rutgers University-Camden on Feb. 23 and Feb. 24.
“Common Ground” is presented by the Rutgers-Camden Social Justice Student Alliance.
Growing Debt & War
Our National Debt right now (as of Feb 16, 2007 at 4:37a.m.) is $8,725,892,161,234.89!* 8.7 trillion dollars, is equal to roughly 29,000 dollars per American.* That debt is invariably on the rise, on average it goes up 1.57 billion dollars* a day! Almost a year ago (approximately 11 months) congress raised the federal debt limit to 9 trillion dollars. Now if my math is correct and the 1.57 billion dollars a day rise is a constant, we will hit that debt limit in roughly 191 days.
But it’s not just the federal government having problems, it’s your parents, grandparents, neighbors, aunts, uncles, you get the picture. The average American household (with at least one credit card) is in debt (to credit card companies) $9,200.** Look around your neighborhood. How many houses do you see? In my sect of the neighborhood there are about 20 + homes. That’s a minimum of 184,000, multiply that buy the number of divisions in the entire neighborhood that number more than octuples bring it to around 1.5 million dollars! That’s just one neighborhood, in one town!
Hillary, if you’re in to win, stop the war spin
Activists held banners that bared slogans such as, “Hillary: Be a Woman for Peace” and “It takes an Invasion to Raze a Village,” and donned pink slips with the “Cut the Funding” message. After being forced out of Clinton’s office, six women were arrested while blocking Clinton’s door.
CODEPINK activists converged in the Senate Hart building and dropped a series of pink banners and a giant pink slip that read “Stop Funding War!” from the inner balconies while chanting and successfully garnering attention from Congressional staff and stopping business as usual. After the banner drop, California activists met with legislative aides from the offices of Senators Boxer and Feinstein. Both meetings were so large—greater than 40 people—that the groups had to remain in the atrium of the building. During the meeting with Feinstein’s aides two parents who lost their child in the war spoke, and the group presented the staffers with a pair of children’s shoes tagged with the name of an Iraqi toddler who was killed in the war. It’s up to us to keep bringing the heart into the debate, and to ensure that our elected officials don’t forget the mandate for peace under which many of them were elected in November.
The Lazy Gardener: Novato Charter School students win national organic garden award
“At our school you will find compost and recycling bins in every classroom … Here students have learned to recycle and compost the same way they have learned to jump rope: by practicing a little every day. In the NCS garden we place an emphasis on edible annuals, native perennials, and habitat plants; in short, food and shelter for all beings. We use everything from butterfly and hummingbird plants to a frog habitat to gourd bird feeders to orchard mason bee homes and a barn owl house to invite creatures big and small to our garden. And it works! Class instruction is often interrupted by the welcome appearance of an irresistible bird, bug, or amphibian.
The first grade through the fifth grade all have one class a week for 45 minutes. Our emphasis is on organic gardening techniques, nutrition, botany, social and earth sciences. First and second graders sing about plant parts, decomposition and the water cycle, while fifth graders fill their garden journals with such things as seed biology, studies of the adaptive characteristics of succulents, and compost temperature logs. The third grade social studies farm block is enhanced by the harvest of cotton, flax, and dye plants as well as a farm store to complement their math and money unit (parents pay top dollar for fresh blue-green eggs from the NCS chickens!). The budding fourth grade California historians tend the native plants garden and learn about how our Miwok predecessors used these generous plants. At NCS we are proud of our organic gardening techniques. Each student learns to identify the beneficial insects and plants in our Integrated Pest Management beds.
…Together, we have mulched with three different kinds of donated mulch nearly half an acre of land, moved a five-cubic foot compost pile, built composting and vermiculture bins, scarecrows, brooms from broom corn, bird houses, bird baths, and orchard mason bee homes. Over the past five years we have planted hundreds of seedlings, thousands of seeds, and fifteen sapling trees….
The US as leading currency manipulator
That the United States, by its unilateral trade policies, has really been a nation of protectionists in free-trader clothing was again highlighted by a hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affair on January 31 headed by its new chairman, Senator Christopher J Dodd, whose Democratic Party won control of the Congress in last year’s mid-term elections. The hearing was on the Treasury Department’s Report to Congress on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policy and the US-China Strategic Economic Dialogue. Hank Paulson, the 74th treasury secretary of the nation, was the lead witness.
The target of the hearing was China, which has replaced Japan in recent years in the eyes of the US as prime suspect of being the world’s leading currency manipulator. Yet as Stanford economist Ronald McKinnon argues in an April 24, 2006, op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, China’s motivation for pegging the yuan is to secure monetary stability rather than achieve an undue mercantile advantage in world export markets.
Russia straddles Sunni-Shi’ite divide
“We see that new ‘Berlin Walls’ are being erected. Instead of a common space, what we see is that this ‘Berlin Wall’ is simply being shifted further east and that new bases are being established.” These were Russian President Vladimir Putin’s words in a media interview in Moscow last week.
Never before had Putin come so close to acknowledging that he has heard the drumbeat of the “cold warriors” in the West. That Putin chose an Arab media outlet to make such a stark description should come as no surprise. Of all regions, it is in the Middle East that the tensions that have been accruing in Russia-US relations over recent years have begun outstripping other turfs - the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Caucasus, Central Asia.
Network seeks to bolster community gardens throughout Vermont
It was an odd day to talk about gardening.
People walking into the Rutland Free Library for the Vermont Community Garden Network’s symposium navigated their way around massive snow piles.
“A lot of folks are probably up on the mountain skiing,” said Jim Flint, executive director of the Friends of Burlington Gardens. “We’re here thinking about spring.”
The Vermont Community Garden Network is an outreach program run by Friends of Burlington Gardens. Flint said the event on Saturday, which drew eight people for the morning session, is part of a series to promote community gardens around the state.
The myths about sexual assault
At 10 years old, Iowan Johna Sullivan became one of the 80 percent of child sexual-assault victims in America who are attacked by someone they know and trust.
It happened within her home. Like most victims, she didn’t immediately tell, a fact often used by defense attorneys to undermine the credibility of rape survivors. Like many others, she was afraid of being disbelieved, afraid of what she might have done to cause the assault and afraid of the violence her assailant threatened to commit if she said anything.
Technoloigcal domestic abuse
Nearly one in four teens aged 13-18 in a relationship communicated with their partner via cell phone or text messaging hourly between midnight and five in the morning, the research showed.
One in three teens say that they are text messaged between 10-30 times an hour by a partner inquiring where they are or who they are with. But 67 percent of parents whose kids were going through this are unaware of the situation.
“We had no idea how staggering the results would be when we set out to measure if technology influenced the frequency and severity of teen abuse,” Randel said.
“These really are like electronic leashes,” Dr. Jill Murray, a psychologist with expertise in teen dating violence, said of cell phones and computers. “It is a means for abusers to abuse, intimidate, or threaten their partners all hours of the day.”
Clemson Outrage
On the day before the Martin Luther King holiday, a group of students from Clemson University in South Carolina inadvertently stirred up a controversy that now has the attention of the nation’s media. Reports indicate that the university received complaints concerning a private party with a “gangsta” theme held off campus by primarily white students who dressed like hip-hop gangsters and drank 40s of malt liquor. One student was even reported arriving in blackface.
Once aware of the outrage that the event had caused, party planners issued a letter of apology stating that persons of any race and type were welcome at the social event and that there was no intention for racial harm. They continued by saying that, “We want everyone to know how sorry we are, and that we are willing to do anything to make things right”.
Posted by stan in News