When I began Eco Child’s Play over a year and a half ago, I pledged to make Kiva loans on behalf of our blog. After making several Kiva loans, I’ve decided it is time to donate to and highlight different organizations helping families and/or the environment around the world. This month, I have made a donation to Women for Women International on behalf of Eco Child’s Play.
These days there is an increasing amount of people who care about the health of the planet, their community, their family, themselves. Where they come from is also increasing in breadth, now including people far beyond the usual suspects, even from 5 years ago. You don’t have to be a Greenpeace activist chaining yourself to ships to make an impact these days. In fact, it seems there’s an overwhelming amount of options, big and small, to make a positive impact. It’s enough to leave anybody dumbfounded as to what to do.
Along comes Be The Change, an environmental leadership program from Silicon Valley based Acterra. They sum it up best when they say:
The program emphasizes building skills that enable people to act within the organizations where they work, live, worship and play to bring about significant changes in how they relate to the natural world.
Awesome.
Until my first daughter Carly was born by an ER-style emergency c-section, I had never been to the hospital except for the couple of times with minor injuries as a small child. The experience was so extraordinarily shocking to my system that it catapulted me into a determination that my next delivery would be VERY different. The birth of Carly, was traumatizing on so many levels. That I was only 21 and relatively immature and inexperienced probably didn’t help. I had wanted her very much and did everything to prepare, but like most of the cliches you hear about becoming a mother for the first time - nothing could have prepared me, especially for the frightening, dangerous, surgical birth.
After going through a rough post-partum depression, my reaction was to get pregnant again pretty quickly and immerse myself in research so that I could be more empowered the next time. I had been shocked into a state of alertness about my body and had a strong intuitive knowledge my next baby and I didn’t need to go through this same situation again.
I had done my homework and knew that what happened with Carly and I was unusual and not likely to repeat itself. I also learned everything I could about VBACs (Vaginal Birth After Cesereans). If my doctor had done a good job of patching me back together, and I believe that she had, my uterus and I stood a good chance of having the strength to give birth naturally.
In my previous posts on sacred places, I have claimed that:
1) Sacred places in our past are crucial for making us appreciate nature and formulate an ecological consciousness. So they are crucial for environmentalism.
2) Sacred places are readily available in our present lives, not isolated to extreme or remote locations. So if we want to save the wilderness/wildness in nature and the wildness in people, then we have to recognize and sanctify the nature in our lives and the nature in ourselves.
Now (for the sake of time), I would like to say a bit about sacred places future.
How can we ensure that our children and those beyond have places that they can hold sacred? Obviously, on a general level we have to continue (increase!) efforts to preserve species, habitats, resources, and overall biological diversity. That goes without saying. I want focus here on how we can ensure that our children will be sensitive to nature–that every future generation can be a Generation W (Wild) filled with lots and lots of little green men and women.
Even as we fall more and more under the tyranny of technology, even as we enter a “brave new world” that is more like the one Huxley envisioned than Shakespeare, there are many possible sacred places for future children. But I think some of the most will be green homes, green schools, and green screens.
Note: This is second part of a two-part series. The first part ended by asking: “just what is the ‘intended effect’ of Inherit the Wind?
The play, as the one professor suggested, is trying to get people to think. It specifically wants them to think about and consider the possibilities of evolution and creationism, even if they are inclined to believe in one more than the other. Personally, I think that this is a great goal. I think that toleration, and perhaps even acceptance of both views is necessary for achieving positive progress in the world and in the sciences. Thus, as this website is named Planetsave, I think it’s necessary that people be able to appreciate both perspectives if we are in fact to save the planet.
An understanding of biology and its essential driver, evolution, is probably a necessary precursor for truly beginning to understand that species and resources are not renewable. The discovery of evolution makes me believe that we can to some extent understand how the world works through science. On the other hand, for me personally, it is utterly arrogant to outrightly deny the possibility of there being a god or some other kind of higher power.
According to No Child Left Inside, “A study found that young people could identify 1000 corporate logos but fewer that 10 plants or animals native to their backyards.”
Note: This is Part 1 of a two part series. Click here to go to Part 2.
Occasionally I receive emails from publishers who are advertising a new academic journal that they think “will be a good match for my interests.” How kind of them to think of me. In one of these recent emails, free preview access was granted to me for several of these new journals. Even though the Annals of Dyslexia was tempting, the one that really tapped into the nerd inside of me is called Evolution: Education and Outreach. After perusing the table of contents, the one article title that stood out was “Inheriting Inherit the Wind: Debating the Play as a Teaching Tool.” I dove in.
Now that Layla is six weeks old, I can see her becoming more aware of her surrounding. It’s fascinating to watch her becoming fixated on colorful things around the room. One of her favorite things to gaze at is our blue and red floral curtain. And when she’s in the stroller, she looks up at the hood but there’s not much there to keep her interest, so I decided to buy her a stroller toy to keep her engaged and nurture her development.
Looking around the Babys R Us, I became dismayed at the cacophony of colors that surrounded me. I come from a family of visual artists and once considered a career in fine arts, so color is not something that I shy away from. However, the amount of color and light in children’s toys nowadays are overpowering to the point I started getting a headache. I walked away from the toy section and researched to find a toy that would not overstimulate her.
I am the mother of two children, ages six and three, as well as a preschool teacher in a small, mountainous community in Northern California. Our family lives off-the-grid producing our own electricity from a micro hydro turbine in our creek. One of our family values is to live a green life, leaving behind the smallest carbon footprint as possible. Sharing our eco-values with our children is a big part of what we feel is our social responsibility as parents. For over a year now, I have been blogging about our experiences and the green products we use. Here are a few ideas I have learned over the years that have helped my kids critically view the mass marketing of goods directed at them, as well as inspire them to think critically of our daily actions in terms of how they affect the planet.
Lev Vygotsky was a Russian pyschologist who believed that knowledge is socially constructed and culturally transmitted. For toddlers and preschoolers, this means that modeling green choices, as well as using language to interact with children around eco ideals, is the most effective way to inspire them. For example, my children are delighted to have their own reusable shopping bags. Inspired by the book My Bag and Me!, I got my children their own bags, which they proudly carry into the store. My three-year-0ld son puts his favorite foods in his bag at the health food store. Children will imitate what they see the adults around them doing, and given the proper tools, they can assimilate this knowledge into their own lives. On more than one occasion I’ve been accused of “walking the talk”, and it definitely pays off when my children evaluate their own lives and choices using our green family values.
Green tourism is a more popular form of tourism. general travel is going more green. But more expert say that the global warming is also caused by travel.
Citing green hotels, coconut oil fuel for airlines and even recyclable golf tees, executives in one of the world’s largest industries say they are urgently trying to shrink tourism’s oversized environmental footprint.
But with global travel projected to keep soaring, and those very leaders still
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| Code Pink would like you to reclaim Mother’s day with ways to donate to suffering mothers and their children in Iraq. | ||
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