Persuasive Science Education

. Ecology, Ethics, Psychology

I’ve long believed that America has a serious science literacy problem. Without citizens, parents, politicians and business owners who understand “how the world works” we make decisions without the aid of critical information that could dramatically create better outcomes for all concerned.

Susan Rosegrant, writing for the Institute for Social Research at University of Michigan, reviews Arthur “Skip” Lupia’s research. Communicating science to the public is not an easy task. Lupia describes how scientists could do a far better job of it by understanding how people listen and and learn.

I’m not talking about spin,” he says. “I’m not talking about manipulation. I’m talking about staying true to the science and conveying it more effectively by understanding some things about how persuasion works. ~ Dr. Lupia

Click here for the full article. 

National Wildlife Report: Restoring a Degraded Gulf of Mexico

. Ecology, Environment

<div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/NationalWildlife/restoring-gulf-report&#8221; title=”Restoring a Degraded Gulf of Mexico” target=”_blank”>Restoring a Degraded Gulf of Mexico</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/NationalWildlife&#8221; target=”_blank”>National Wildlife Federation</a></strong> </div>

Power-up Your Ideas

. Uncategorized

When I was a teen, I was outside one night viewing the star-studded night sky. Laying in the aromatic grass of the fresh cut lawn, I sank comfortably in the contour of the earth beneath me. It was in this relaxed state that I observed a meteor streak brightly among the twinkling hordes. It occurred to me that creative thoughts are like that meteor – they suddenly streak into the mind, blazing.

Today we experience a new phenomenon through our virtual webs: crowdfunding great ideas. It is based on simple math. If a whole lot of people give a tiny amount, a lot will result.  It is a participatory style of creation that seems to me perfectly suited to our times. We are more global with ideas being tested in many cultures and persuasions.

Crowdfunding sites are platforms on which anyone can pitch a new idea. It is up to them to make it so compelling that people around the world join in to make it happen. In this milieu, your idea or project much have broad appeal, create social good and be generally thought worthy of investment. It must also be fun, colorful, and entertaining.

Check out this groups presentation.

Here are several sites:

Kickstarter

Petridish

RocketHub

Power up you own idea through crowdfunding!

Close to My Heart

. Uncategorized
I’ve lived through many challenges that at the time appeared to be irreconcilable differences: blacks and whites on equal grounds, interracial marriages and blended children; Muslims in America; gay rights, protection versus exploitation of Earth’s renewing capacities. Democracy works in loud and messy contexts, with one step forward, two steps back, and always the highest court in the land with cool heads to prevail. The discussions in the Supreme Court—respectful, artful arguments—encourage me that our fundamental democratic process does eventually work. Yet it depends on this fragile context: the ability of each of us to tolerate the “other” viewpoint, the “other” lifestyle, each other’s soulfully felt moral imperatives. We exist as a nation on the principle that eventually truth and right will prevail. So  we keep working it looking for what Kermit croons…the Rainbow Connection in which we are all joined. Soapy? Sentimental? Then I confess, I am sappy through and through.

Keystone – A Milestone?

. Climate Change

Greenwire Article Covering Sally Jewel’s Grilling by a Congressional Committee for her nomination to Interior Secretary. Pay attention to Senator Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) remarks. Murkowski revives the “wise use” principles promoted by Gifford Pinchot and through which government regulation of public lands would be diminished.

Update, March 3: See link to announcement of President Obama’s nomination for the new Energy Secretary.

Below is a PDF of the Executive Summary of the Evaluation of Impact of the proposed Keystone Pipeline issued by the U.S. Department of State on Friday March 1, 2013.

Keystone Pipeline – Executive Summary

Be sure to read pages 9-11 which lays out potential impacts on aquifers under America’s Midwest. I suggest taking the time to read the 23-page executive summary.

Several assumptions are implicit: 1) it is a given that increased crude oil production will not be interrupted – if not by pipeline it will be by train or vessel; 2) the temporary economic gains outweigh potential impacts; 3) each part of the ecosystem is handled as separate and disconnected (for example, how aquifers forms through transport of water from rain and snow melt that percolates down from the surface to the aquifer below).

Be sure to carefully study the diagrams of the process of preparing the land and laying the pipe. Again, an assumption that areas of  land, habitats of animals and birds are isolated from all others. Our country, our engineers, politicians and economists are ignorant of how ecosystems work.

This report and acceptable reporting criteria are stark examples of the incremental way we break apart ecosystems, in this case one that contains a major aquifer supporting an important resource for food and livestock production for our country and the world. Analysis is reductionist, separating out elements of natural systems that are intricately linked.

The United States of America has continuously drawn down the renewable qualities of this continent’s natural resources. Just as we think buried radioactive waste will stay put for thousands of years, do we really believe that oil from spills will stick around for technicians to clean it up? Do we really believe we can clean up oil spills after Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon? Are we asleep or so used to bad decisions that we accept expedient solutions masquerading as prudent decisions?

I am currently reading Reinventing Fire – Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era written by Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute. This is a very forward thinking book that gives real examples of businesses and countries that are leading the innovation and new manufacturing for a new energy economy.

The Old Red Barn

. Childhood

cropped-meadow-gate.jpg I remember the old red barn. Its shape undulated with the red earth that held it firmly. There were no cows, pigs or chickens by the time I played there as a child.  Disheveled bales of molding hay, girded by rusting wire and clumps of hay strewn around the ground floor like locks around a barber’s chair were all that was left of a more active time when my grandparents were small farmers and my father was growing up on the edge of a technological revolution.

Remnants of a plow, a baler, garden tools, and automotive parts—skeletal remains lay about in earth tones, the only moving parts in the structure. In what must have been a tool shed affixed to it, my grandfather fashioned a carpenter’s shop where he kept a lathe and wood working tools shining in the light of a single yellow light hanging overhead.  Objects were giant-sized to me and my sisters who watched the hulk of our grandfather working wood. Fresh sawdust spewed into the air and rained to the floor as he planed a desk top or fashioned a clock. The small church at the base of the hill on which the house and barn stood received his beautiful handiwork for the altar and entrances where lacquered grains of walnut or pine shone in white light streaming though colored glass windows.

It felt like living poetry to me even as a child—the spaces for wind, distant bellow of Aunt Kate’s cow, buzzing bees in wooden hives near by—shot through by the high whine of the lathe cutting through the wood, and then the ensuing silence when it ceased.

I remember breathing it all in, the sweetness of living close to the land, like an elixir that healed the raw edges of our vagabond military life. We came and went almost every year of my life until I married and when I returned only twice more.  Touching into where I truly belonged.

We never know what we bring to our own children. Dad brought the world (from which he desperately hoped to escape as a young man hungry for worldly adventures) to us in a new time when the place and his folks revealed their treasures to us. All that was good about Dad drew upon this place in Watauga, Tennessee I came to realize. Here he learned poetry that he recited to us all our lives clear up into our adulthood and now remains as a beautiful rhythm in each of us.

I see him as he was a teenager,  hiking to Bogart’s Knob to look down upon the swiftly running river below the high limestone cliffs that ran on out of his view behind the emerald hills of an American countryside.

But Dad’s eyes were on the horizon and that is where he flew….

 

Gulf Storms

. Nature

Afternoon ReverieThe coastal lands along the Gulf of Mexico are refreshed by violent storms much like certain kinds of forests are renewed by fire. To human inhabitants neither storms nor fires are welcome. Our human habitation can be likened to Tinsel Town—fragile infrastructures in the wake of Earth’s movements and transformations of land, bodies of water, climate and living communities.

Natural storms are “bad enough” from our perspective, yet we fail to realize that we’ve created far greater storms in oil spills, ecological disturbances, and overheating the biosphere. Equally disruptive is the steady depletion of top soil through industrialization of our food supply. One spoonful of topsoil contains millions of creatures and constellations of minerals that in concert allow seeds to germinate. Comparatively gigantic invertebrates move silently through this groundwork under our feet, transforming it, aerating and loosening soil so that probing rootlets can plumb its treasure, drawing life.

Animate Earth…this is the seat of renewal. Under our feet, under roads, under massive buildings and bridges, miles and miles of houses, businesses, playgrounds, and landfills, the earthworks carry on their life-generating web. We build over them, they disappear and we forget the source of life. Small farmers know it; migrants who hand harvest know it; backyard gardeners rediscover it, and food banks appreciate it. Yet governments and chambers of commerce exclude earthworks from their ledgers and blueprints and planning. The ground under our feet – no longer felt between our toes – recedes from our awareness.

Until a storm.

Harbinger of awareness, storms literally tear us from our beds, exposing us to the very smell of earth, the touch of wind and rain – violently thrust upon us like a smack to the cheek: Wake up, Man!

Surely there are gentler ways to learn how to live. But, alas, we require evermore fury to capture our attention in the virtual realities of modernity.

Assignment: I dare you to take off your shoes, go outside and plant them in soil. Introduce or reintroduce your feet to the planet—whichever may be the case. I guarantee it will be amazing. Some of us still remember that day school got out for a long, summer’s vacation (about two and a half months of roaming, lounging, and Bazooka bubble-gum popping) when we ceremoniously removed our shoes to go barefoot for months at a time. That experience for kids in the U.S. A. disappeared about three decades ago. A new generation has never felt soil between their toes. Will they be thinking of mining other planets, interstellar travel, and other-worldly scenarios? Are we on the brink of floating off the planet itself in a cloud of twitter. Well, if we are going to have our “heads in a cloud” we’d better keep our feet on the ground!