Recycled Electrons
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Recycled Electrons
November 2004
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Thanks to Doug Constant, Harmony Fierke-Gmazel, Deanna Rozdilski, Judy Wicks, Marlaina Kreinin, John Porter, Chris Groebel, Tom Atlee, Steve Connor, Benjamin Zander, and Rosamund Stone Zander.
from John Porter
Buddhism provides many useful insights to aide in
personal and community transformation! I've adapted a factsheet John
prepared for the recent Bioneers' Conference.
Liz Harrow, Terry Shaffer, and I have been working a a concept for walking tours -- one route to a walkable, less auto-dependent community. Many others have been working on this goal too!!! For more info, visit www.re-news.net/walk .
from Tom Atlee, Benjamin Zander, and Rosamund Stone Zander
The essay that follows is said to be an excerpt from "The Art of
Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life" by Benjamin
Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander
<http://www.1800ceoread.com/details.asp?productid=0142001104>.
It is
a descriptive exploration of the intelligent entity that I refer to
when I speak of "collective intelligence."
EXCERPT:
http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com/crossroads_dispatches/2004/08/beyond_cluetrai.html
More often than not history is a record of conflict between an Us and
a Them. We see this pattern expressed across a broad spectrum: nation
to nation, among political parties, between labor and management, and
in the most intimate realms of our lives... What can we invent that
will take us from an entrenched posture of hostility to one of
enthusiasm and deep regard?
To begin the inquiry, we have distinguished a new entity that
personifies the "togetherness" of you and me and others. This entity,
the WE, can be found among any two people, in any community or
organization, and it can be thought of, in poetic terms, as a melody
running through the people of the earth. It emerges in the way music
emerges from individual notes when a phrase is played as one long
line, in the way a landscape coalesces out of the multicolored
strokes of an Impressionist painting when you get some distance, and
in the way a "family" comes into being when a first child is born.
The WE appears when, for the moment, we set aside the story of fear,
competition, and struggle and tell ITS story.
The WE story defines a human being in a specific way: It says we are
our central selves seeking to contribute, naturally engaged, forever
in a dance with each other. It points to relationship rather than to
individuals, to communication patterns, gestures, and the IN-BETWEEN.
Like the particle-and-wave nature of light, the WE is both a living
entity and a long line of development unfolding. This new being, the
WE of us, comes into view as we look for it - the vital entity of our
company, or community, or group of two. Then the protagonist of our
story, the entity called WE, steps forward and takes on a life of its
own.
By telling the WE story, an individual becomes a conduit for this new
inclusive entity, wearing its eyes and ears, feeling its heart,
thinking its thoughts, inquiring into what is best for US. This
practice points the way to a kind of leadership based not on
qualifications earned in the field of battle, but on the courage to
speak on behalf of all people and for the long line of human
possibility...
Usually what we mean by the pronoun "we" is "you-plus-I," so the
questions "What shall we do?" or "What will work for us?" generally
refer to a compromise between what you want and what I want...
The practice of the WE offers an approach to conflict based on a
different premise. It assumes there are no fixed wants nor static
desires, while everything each of us thinks and feels has a place in
the dialogue...
Traditional methods of resolving conflict, all the I/You approaches,
tend to increase the level of discord because they attempt to satisfy
the dictotomous positions people take, rather than providing the
means for people to broaden their desires. I/You methods deprive
people of the opportunity to WISH inclusively. They do not give
people the chance to want what the story of the WE says we are
thirsting for: connecting to others through our dreams and visions.
While the WE practice can enhance any aspect of your life, it also
poses a risk. It is not a technique for arriving at a decision based
on known quantities; it's an integrative process that yields the next
step. It asks you to trust that the evolution you set in motion will
serve you over the long line. What happens after that is not in your
control, but springs spontaneously from the WE itself.
Measure your ecological footprint
from Harmony Fierke-Gmazel
The Ecological Footprint estimates how much land and water people need to
support what they use and absorb what they discard. The Footprint Quiz
figures out your footprint, and then lets you compare it to what other
people use and to what is available on this planet.
CAUTION: THIS QUIZ MAY SURPRISE YOU, SHOCK YOU, OR
MAKE YOU THINK. PLEASE REMAIN CALM...BUT NOT TOO CALM!!
- Doug Constant
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~Alvin Toffler
2. The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas. ~Edward de Bono
3. It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. ~Charles Darwin
4. All learning has an emotional base. ~Plato
5. Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it. We
become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate ones, brave by
doing brave ones. ~ Aristotle
6. You are not thinking. You are merely being logical. ~Neils Bohr, physicist
7. Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire
it. ~Albert Einstein
8. Knowledge increases in proportion to its use - that is, the more we teach
the more we learn. ~H. P. Blavatsky
9. The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. ~ Aristotle
10. The basis of creativity has always been a new connection. To make
connections would take hours using words. Your subconscious has to use
pictures. ~William J. J. Gordon
11. You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to
learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as
he lives. ~Clay P. Bedford
12. Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be
a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all
your life. ~Henry L. Doherty
13. I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma. ~Eartha
Kitt
14. It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. ~John Wooden
15. A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.
~Chinese Proverb
16. In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled. ~Paul Eldridge
17. Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own
corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself. ~Vilfredo Pareto
18. When the student is ready, the master appears. ~Buddhist Proverb
19. Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. ~Mark Twain
20. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot
irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but
to question it. ~Jacob Bronowski
21. Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original
dimensions. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
22. You learn something every day if you pay attention. ~Ray LeBlond
23. The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what
is untrue. ~Antisthenes
24. Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they
understand everything too soon. ~Alexander Pope
25. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or
you will learn nothing. ~Thomas Huxley
26. Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate
themselves. ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928
27. I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
~Abraham Lincoln
28. The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
~Mohammed
29. Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. ~Chinese
Proverb
30. I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
~Winston Churchill
31. The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can
continue growing as we continue to live. ~Mortimer Adler
32. There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well
to learn. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
33. I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find
myself unable to learn anything. ~George Herbert Palmer
34. Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds
himself no wiser than before. ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
35. No matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to
learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm as
truly as if he were a child newly born into the world. ~Frances Willard, How
I Learned to Ride the Bicycle
36. Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. ~Henry
Ford
37. If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son,
then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great
deal of time. ~Russell Hoban
38. You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost
something. ~H.G. Wells
39. I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
~Dudley Field Malone
40. Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an
injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are
aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily. ~Thomas Szasz
41. I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a
professor of Greek and a few poets. ~Bernard Keble Sandwell
42. Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy
later. ~Dana Stewart Scott
43. Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and
attended to with diligence. ~Abigail Adams
44. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~Alvin Toffler
45. Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is
perilous. ~Confucius, The Confucian Analects
46. The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition
fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book.
You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the
public library. ~Lesley Conger
47. Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.
~Chinese Proverb
48. We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it
than we do from learning the answer itself. ~Lloyd Alexander
49. You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
~Marvin Minsky
50. That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've
understood all your life, but in a new way. ~Doris Lessing
51. Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles
to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the
intelligence quotient. ~Eugene S. Wilson
52. Whoso neglects learning in his youth, Loses the past and is dead for the
future. Euripides, Phrixus
53. The wisest mind has something yet to learn. ~George Santayana
54. Much learning does not teach understanding. ~Heraclitus, On the Universe
55. Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning
like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours,
but give the time when you are asked. ~Lord Chesterfield
56. What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate
ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers. ~Martina Horner,
President of Radcliffe College
57. Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!'
Then get busy and find out how to do it. ~Theodore Roosevelt (
58. Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. ~W. Edwards Deming
From Marlaina Kreinin
By Anna Lappé and Frances Moore Lappé
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts Several prominent Norwegians have questioned the
Nobel Committee for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Wangari Maathai. Why
honor environmental activism in an era when war, terrorism and nuclear
proliferation are even more urgent problems?
What they miss is Dr. Maathai's special genius.
The first time we met Maathai was four years ago in an airy guesthouse beneath
towering jacaranda trees on the outskirts of Nairobi. At the time, the Green
Belt Movement she had founded nearly 25 years earlier was still struggling
against the ruthless regime of President Daniel arap Moi.
Maathai planted seven trees on Earth Day in 1977 to honor Kenyan women
environmental leaders. Then, recognizing that deforestation could only be
reversed if village women throughout her country became tree planters
themselves, she launched the Green Belt Movement. Government foresters laughed
at her idea of enlisting villagers; it took trained foresters to plant trees,
they told her.
Because Maathai didn't listen, today Kenya has 30 million more trees, all
planted by village women.
Maathai's genius is in recognizing the interrelation of local and global
problems, and the fact that they can only be addressed when citizens find the
voice and courage to act. Maathai saw in the Green Belt Movement both a good
in itself, and a way in which women could discover they were not powerless in
the face of autocratic husbands, village chiefs and a ruthless president.
Through creating their own tree nurseries - at least 6,000 throughout Kenya -
and planting trees, women began to control the supply of their own firewood,
an enormous power shift that also freed up time for other pursuits.
Then, through popular education, village women - who had watched public
forests be used by the Moi regime to grant political favors - began to see
forests differently, as something they, as citizens, had a claim to.
Through the Green Belt Movement, village women also came to see that a narrow
focus on export commodities, such as coffee, at the expense of environmentally
appropriate food crops, was an inheritance of colonialism reinforced by IMF
policies.
That, too, they could change.
Through a village food-security campaign, Green Belt members are learning to
re-establish indigenous crops using organic methods and to reintroduce kitchen
gardens - a skill many had lost in the wake of government-promoted
export-oriented agriculture.
Over the years, Maathai and members of the Movement have been jailed and even
beaten for their protests of government anti-environment actions. One of the
movement's organic-farming educators described to us how he was almost
arrested for promoting sustainable agriculture. The government, it turned out,
had lucrative contracts with major chemical agriculture
companies; the teachers' education posed a serious threat.
Maathai has also become a leader in international debt-relief efforts. By the
time we traveled to Kenya in 2000, the Green Belt Movement had grown into a
major pro-democracy force.
In 2002, Maathai decided to run for a seat in Parliament. She beat her
opponent 50 to 1. Women, we were told, danced in the streets of Nairobi for
joy. A few weeks later, when President arap Moi stepped down after holding
power for more than two decades, Maathai was appointed deputy minister of the
environment.
We last saw Maathai in May this year at a gathering in New York. She said she
was helping write a new constitution for Kenya. "We are working on a Bill of
Rights, only ours," she said, with her irrepressible grin, "will include
rights not only for human beings, but for animals and the environment."
We recalled our time in Kenya where we saw many village women wearing a Green
Belt Movement T-shirt. The T- shirt says simply, "As for me, I've made a
choice." In selecting Dr. Maathai, perhaps the Nobel Committee wants us to
recognize that the real hope for peace, both with each other and with the
earth itself, lies in the choices - individual and collective - of empowered
citizens.
Bringing this insight to life is Wangari Maathai's genius.
-by Brett Dreyfus
E. LANSING, MICHIGAN … After 228 years, the Declaration of Independence has been updated to address a major political crisis in our government. The New Declaration of Independence lists 24 “public charges” against the current administration, and directs readers to take action which will institute a new government “by the people and for the people.” This political document can be viewed and printed at: www.TheNewDeclaration.US
Brett Dreyfus explains why he wrote it:
“Two centuries ago, Americans were confronted with powerful rulers who refused to listen to public outcry about abusive policies and actions, and steadily stripped Americans of basic liberties. In response, Revolutionary patriots published a list of 27 public charges against King George and his self-serving Parliament, and declared themselves independent of their tyrannical government. 228 years later, the regime of King George has been replaced by the administration of President George (Bush). The New Declaration of Independence levies 24 charges against our current leaders in the White House and Congress, and presents a compelling case for undecided or apathetic voters to take action on Election Day.”
Brett Dreyfus, author of The New Declaration of Independence, received a Political Science degree from Michigan State University and has been actively involved in local issues in his community. He is currently a Meridian Township Planning Commissioner.
Rethinking School LunchResponse to the announcement of our Rethinking School Lunch initiative and web resource update has been very positive. Thank you to all who have contacted us and are using the guide. The Center welcomes readers to visit our improved web guide. Additionally, each month we will update Viewpoints, an ongoing series of short articles on the theme “Thinking Outside the Lunchbox.”
Thinking Outside the Lunch Box
This month we are pleased to reprint an essay by Wendell Berry entitled “On the Pleasures of Eating.” In this pivotal essay, Mr. Berry delves deeply into the act of eating – what it represents for people who are close to the land as well as for city dwellers who may only see themselves as “consumers.” His powerful essay provides sage advice and concern as it implores us to consider that “eating is an agricultural act.”
-from Steve Connor
Is this frickin' surprising?
Air fresheners and other household sprays could damage pregnant women and
new-born babies, according to a study linking aerosols with a range of
disorders in mothers and children.
Although the research falls short of proving that fresheners cause ill health,
scientists warn that people should use such sprays with caution.
The researchers found that almost a third more (32 per cent) babies suffered
diarrhoea in homes where air fresheners - including sticks, sprays and
aerosols - were used daily compared with households where they were used no
more than once a week.
Babies in these households also suffered more earache.
Full article can be read at:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=573577
from Deanna Rozdilsky
May today there be peace within. May you trust God that you are exactly
where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that
are born of faith. May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on
the love that has been given to you....May you be content knowing you are a
child of God.... Let this presence settle into our bones, and allow your soul
the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every
one of you.
(excerpt from essay in the Jan 2004 Orion magazine)
-by Judy Wicks
"We have to change our concept about how we measure value in things, and
get
people to be willing to pay more for something that's well made, made
locally, and that they would have for a long time. . . . This is a new way
to operate. It's about stepping outside your business and working
collectively and cooperatively with others to rebuild local economies."
Judy Wicks in her interview with Josh Harkinson for his essay "Profits of
Place" in the January/February 2004 issue of Orion magazine.
In appreciation,
-LeRoy