2. 2007 Bay oil spill surprisingly toxic to fish
3. Save the date for Annual Environmental Legislative Symposium, Jan 28
4. Extinction is a natural companion to evolution--but....
5. Move into resilience in 2012/Inquiring into nature of Slow Money
6. Corwin Street Community Garden still needs stewarding
7. Good advice from WH Auden for the new year
8. The breathing life of all reveals itself in the way you live your life
9. Changes in biological communities by 2100
10. Global warming intimidation/Inquisition of Climate Science
11. Loud bar conversation? Birds feel your pain
12. Know where your charitable donations are going
13. 1493: Christopher Columbus or Zheng He?
14. Rilke: Before He Makes Each One
15. Feedback
1. The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars...is sure to be noticed. Soren Kierkegaard
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2. Oil from 2007 spill surprisingly toxic to fish, scientists report
Source: latimes.com
Thick, tarry fuel oil disgorged into San Francisco Bay from a damaged cargo ship in 2007 was surprisingly toxic to fish embryos, devastating the herring population that feeds seabirds, whales and the bay's last commercial fishery, scientists reported Monday.
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3. Planning & Conservation League
The Annual Environmental Legislative Symposium is Saturday, January 28, 2012 at the Sacramento Convention Center. Early bird (discounted) registration is available through December 31. We’ve secured a room block at the Citizen Hotel, room reservations must be made by January 6, 2012.
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4.
Man stalks across the landscape, and desert follows his footsteps.
Herodotus (Fifth Century BCE)
"Extinction is a natural companion to evolution, but mass extinction is a dangerous strategy. Yet humans are unthinkingly obliterating the planet's species at a rate at least 1,000 times faster than normal, unthinking because this obliteration is accompanied by massive ignorance. Around 1.9 million species have been described, but nobody knows whether the world is home to 7 million of them, or 70 million.
This is a challenge that calls for serious science, serious action, and of course, serious money. Will this challenge be met?"
Excerpt, Guardian Weekly editorial 29.10.10
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5.
Ten Actions to Move Into Resilience in 2012 - from Ecology Center (ecologycenter.org)
1. Buy local
2. Source your food at Farmers' markets and CSAs
3. Upgrade your energy efficiency
4. Move your money from the too-big-to-fail
5. Shift your investments - http://www.slowmoney.org/
6. Participate in the Reuse Economy
7. Participate in the sharing economy
8. Put urban land into production
9. Improve your ride
10. Reskill (check ecocalendar on the website)
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Thousands of Americans have begun affirming a new direction for the economy. It’s called Slow Money.
Inspired by the vision of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered, published in 2009, the Slow Money Alliance is bringing people together around a new conversation about money that is too fast, about finance that is disconnected from people and place, about how we can begin fixing our economy from the ground up... starting with food.
“Combine poisonous factory-farm tomatoes with disgraced investment banker Bernard Madoff. Throw in a stock market disaster. You get a public spooked by the dangers of industrial food production and investors wary of risky business. This may be the recipe for a Slow Money revolution.”
– David Gutnick, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
“The Slow Money movement is one of the top five trends in finance for 2011.” – Entrepreneur.com
With trillions of dollars a day accelerating around the globe, invested in securities that no one fully understands, it is time to ask:
** What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our money within 50 miles of where we live?
** What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
** What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?
http://www.slowmoney.org/ - and while you're there, listen to the 55-second video Inspired by Slow Money
"Once in a while, a book comes along that has the potential to change things. This is one such book. It is going to unleash a major movement in this country." – Steve Costa, Point Reyes Books
From Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch
"Civilization is a big idea. So is the idea that as soil goes, so goes civilization. So is the idea that as money goes, so goes the soil.
"We don't need any more big ideas. We need small ideas. Beautiful ideas. Beautiful because they lead to a large number of beautiful, small actions, the kind alluded to by Wendell Berry: 'Soil is not usually lost in slab or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be solved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints.'"
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Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm -- which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems. -Wendell Berry, farmer and author (b. 1934)
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6. Fourteen years ago, Bill Murphy decided to save the Corwin Street Community Garden in San Francisco's Eureka Valley out of the irritated sense that an opportunity was being wasted. Finding a successor is mandatory.
http://www.gardenrant.com/my_weblog/2011/12/the-triumph-of-the-commons-1.html
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7. WH Auden:
"The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me."
We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
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8.
When you want to lay yourself open for the divine,
like a snare that is hollowed out to its depth,
like a canopy that projects a shadow
from the divine heat and light
into your soul,
then go into your inner place physically,
or to that story or symbol that reminds you of the sacred.
Close the door of your awareness to
the public person you think yourself to be.
Pray to the parent of creation, with your inner sense,
the outer senses turned within.
Veiling yourself, the mystery may be unveiled through you.
By opening yourself to the flow of the sacred,
somewhere, resounding in some inner form,
the swell of the divine ocean can move through you.
The breathing life of all reveals itself
in the way you live your life.
~ Neil Douglas-Klotz ~
(Interpretive version of Matthew 6:6 in The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus)
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9. By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth's land surface and will drive the conversion of nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type -- such as forest, grassland or tundra -- toward another, according to a new NASA and university computer modeling study.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111218221321.htm
(JS: Yes, and most plants and animals will no longer be able to migrate from their present places because their corridors have been cut off by cities, developments, highways, dams, and so on...And don't forget that creatures of high peaks such as pikas and marmots, plus the plants they depend on, can't migrate to higher elevations.)
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10.
Global Warming and Political Intimidation, by Raymond S Bradley
The Inquisition of Climate Science, by James Lawrence Powell
As research on climate change has gained momentum in the last decade, scientists have increasingly found themselves in the political hot seat. Two new books give a view from inside science at how politics is affecting research.
Bradley, a climate scientist, offers a personal account of his brush with politics. It started in 1998 when he and his colleagues reported estimates of Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the last 600 years. The data, which formed a curve that became known as the "hockey stick," pointed to a rapid recent increase in global surface temperatures.
In 2000, a few members of Congress began probing what they argued was unsound climate science, eventually demanding from the scientists years of data and financial records. Bradley details the chilling effect such investigations have had on the conduct of science and how politicians have become nonexpert reviewers of science.
Powell's book examines political operators in more depth. As a geologist, college president and museum director, Powell has formed a broad view of how society views and uses science.
Powell points out journalists who publish positions with little or no support in science and scientists who argue beyond their expertise or have allied themselves with interest groups. "We can fault our leaders," Powell writes, "but whether we trust science and act in time to avoid the worst dangers of global warming is really not up to them. It is up to us."
Science News 3 December 2011
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11. Have you ever been at a bar where it was just too loud to hit on anybody? Birds feel your pain.
...Turns out, urban birds like the gray catbird or the robin are singing differently from their country cousins...."Those low-pitch sounds decline in five out of six species that we studied in urban areas," (the researcher) says. "So birds have sort of tried to change their songs to higher-frequency songs or midfrequency songs."
...So if birds from the city can't flirt with birds from the country anymore, "those birds are actually going to be less likely to mate with each other," he says. "I mean, literally they're going to stop being able to speak the same language."
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/24/144102328/to-flirt-in-cities-birds-adjust-their-pitch
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12. Know where your charitable donations are going - charitywatch.org
CharityWatch Calls for Resignation of Greg Mortenson, founder of Central Asia Institute and author of Three Cups of Tea
Here is another:
Charity Navigator accepts no funding from the charities that we evaluate, ensuring that our ratings remain objective. Furthermore, in our commitment to help America's philanthropists of all levels make informed giving decisions, we refuse to charge our users for this trusted data. As a result, Charity Navigator, a non-profit 501 (c) (3) organization itself, depends on support from individuals, corporations and foundations that believe we provide a much-needed service to America's charitable givers.
This is how they arrive at ratings: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=48
http://www.charitynavigator.org/
Name a charity in the search engine
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13.
It could have been different
Robin Blackburn speculates how altered the state of the whole world might have been if China rather than Europe had discovered the Americas first. A lively account of how Columbus's voyage changed history
Looking to the future: the Discoverer's Monument in Lisbon
1493: How the Ecological Collision of Europe and the Americas Gave Rise to the Modern World, by Charles Mann
The first attempts at world history too often had a bland textbook feel, or were bee-in-the-bonnet chronicles that reduced history to the impact of a single factor. Such approaches have been challenged by Niall Ferguson's snappy, opinionated, made-for-TV narratives, in which the rest of the world is taken to task for its tardiness in adopting such western "killer apps" as private property, free trade and scientific method.
Charles Mann's new book, with its ambitious title, is cheerfully eclectic rather than doctrinaire. It has a thankfully modest dose of western hubris. Like Ferguson, Mann starts with an accolade to the western corporation, laissez-faire and the wisdom of Adam Smith. But this is soon qualified as his narrative gets under way.
While over-pitching the "success" of colonial companies – and failing to note that "limited liability" was the key corporate innovation – Mann quickly concedes their role was a chequered one. He could have added that this was because on-the-spot company officials robbed their shareholders in a very modern way. He also pays detailed attention to a triumph of free trade on which Ferguson declines to dwell, the Atlantic slave trade – a "killer app" if ever there was one.
Mann avoids Ferguson's trademark triumphalism by giving an often critical account of his central topic – namely, the free and forced migration of peoples, plants, quadrupeds and parasites in the so-called "Columbian Exchange" inaugurated by the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
...Counter-factuals naturally appeal to those thinking about world history. Mann does not raise it, but what would have happened if the mighty fleet commanded by the 15th-century Chinese commander and explorer Zheng He had decided to sail eastwards, to a "new world", rather than westwards, to Africa? The Chinese imperial authorities, having debauched their paper currency, craved the stability and stimulus of silver. Chinese visitors to Mexico or Peru would have soon become aware of new-world silver and could have acquired it by selling Chinese porcelain and silk. China would also have been able to adopt the remarkable range of high-yield crops – maize, potatoes, etc – that the native peoples of the new world had domesticated. Instead of a Columbian exchange we might have had a Zheng He exchange and China might have developed a capitalism "with Chinese characteristics". Instead of the British forcing opium on China, perhaps a Chinese fleet would have invited the English to smoke tobacco and drink sweetened tea.
The value of 1493 stems from its lively and diligent accounts of the actual course of history – but its subtitle does incite one to speculate how different the course of "life on earth" might have been.
Excerpt from review in Guardian Weekly 09.12.11
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14.
Before He Makes Each One
Before he makes each one
of us, God speaks.
Then, without speaking,
he takes each one
out of the darkness.
And these are the cloudy
words God speaks
before each of us begins:
"You have been sent out
by your senses. Go
to the farthest edge
of desire, and give me
clothing: burn like a great
fire so that the stretched-out
shadows of the things
of the world cover
me completely.
Let everything happen
to you: beauty and terror.
You must just go--
no feeling is the farthest
you can go. Don't let
yourself be separated
from me. The country
called life is close.
By its seriousness,
you will know it.
Give me your hand."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
(Translated by Annie Boutelle, Metamorphoses Fall 2001)
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15. Feedback
Barbara Corf:
Dear Jake,
I just wanted to express my appreciation for your always fascinating and thought provoking newsletter. Wishing you a fulfilling holiday and prosperous 2012.
Thank YOU!
Thank you, Barbara. I'm always curious to know how many people read the newsletters and, especially, how many appreciate them. Thank you for letting me know.
I don’t think folks realize what kind of thought and time go into creating your newsletters. Having spent time as an editor in my college years, I DO appreciate your efforts as well as your sensibilities and sense of purpose!
On Dec 16, 2011, at 4:48 PM, ML Carle wrote:
Re: Emilie du Chatelet
I can hardly wait to read the book if it's written.
Her life seems so interesting, someone should be champing at the bit to write a full-length bio, a docudrama, a play. At the end of the piece on her, didn't the author mention that she deserved more recognition?
Did you see where Bell probably stole the credit for the invention of the phone with an one hundred dollar bribe? How can all that be taken back from the history books and the cultural mindset?
OK, spoiler. Now I suppose you're going to tell me there's no Santa Claus. Seriously, what is the skinny on Bell? You mean it's not true, huh? Educate me.
I heard this the other night on PBS's History Detectives. The narrator said that Bell had bribed someone at the patent office to see an Italian inventor Miucci's patent app. The Italian had submitted his claim ten years before Bell said he had invented it. History Detectives showed drawings made by both inventors, and they seemed similar. So I went online and found that there were many lawsuits against Bell, Miucci being cited as the inventor by Congress in a 2002 Guardian article. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews.
But the more I read the more confusing it got. Depends on whom you believe, I guess.
I've often wondered what good, in an evolutionary sense, it was/is to have a fine mind. Now we have products we use daily - if not incessantly- designed by the highly intelligent which do not seem to improve our evolutionary future. One could argue that we are more helpless and clueless as a result, perhaps destined for the trash heap for species which couldn't adapt. When technology is beyond our capacity to understand it, we can only fail to take control from those who would manipulate us for quick profit. Maybe we are getting dumber because now there is too much to learn. We react defensively, impervious to sophisticated arguments. (Just sit me down with a word problem from the second semester of Algebra 1 and I'll show you how it's done.)
I wonder what an isolated, uneducated farm wife on the 1800s prairie did with her brilliant mind?
Only in recent years have I begun to wonder about such things. My musings began in regard to music. (Rest of my response was posted already to another reader.)
Yes, I should shove these thoughts into the background along with the contemplation of my own death, since I can't do much about either problem. Being a news junkie can be punishing.
I looked up your pianist on you tube and blissed out. She was playing a Chopin something-or-other. On You Tube, I saw a picture of your pianist sitting atop a piano as someone, probably her mother, playing the piano. Perhaps an error? When I was a teenager, I happened on a record entitled Kapell In Memoriam which I played and played and played. While I have been listening to many genres of music over my career as a listener, I am now going to various quartets and trios that play classical music locally. Orchestras overwhelm me. Driving to Yoshi's and all the time and cash involved is also overwhelming.
I saw Almodovar's new movie and heard the amazing vocalist, Concha Buika. Here's a link to you tube where she performs w. Chucho Valdez, a famous Cuban pianist, in case your tastes wander afar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJncnbdjb94&feature=related
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