Rural Mich. counties turn failing roads to gravel
June 12, 2009 - 4:43 PM
LANSING, Mich. (AP) - Some Michigan counties have turned a few once-paved rural roads back to gravel to save money.
More than 20 of the state's 83 counties have reverted deteriorating paved roads to gravel in the last few years, according to the County Road Association of Michigan. The counties are struggling with their budgets because tax revenues have declined in the lingering recession.
Montcalm County converted nearly 10 miles of primary road to gravel this spring.
The county estimates it takes about $10,000 to grind up a mile of pavement and put down gravel. It takes more than $100,000 to repave a mile of road.
Reverting to gravel has happened in a few other states but it is most typical in Michigan. At least 50 miles have been reverted in the state in the past three years.
6/14/09
6/11/09
6/8/09
6/6/09
6/4/09
6/3/09
6/1/09
A Time Comes...
A Time Comes - the story of the Kingsnorth Six from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.
This caught my eye, mostly because I remember hearing about the lady who's in it. She's a kiwi and is from the city that I lived in while in New Zealand last summer. Pretty cool story of change.
5/31/09
5/28/09
Depression, yoga, food
http://depression.about.com/cs/diet/a/foodallergies.htm more on nutrients and mental health.
http://www.yogashakti.org/ma_yogashakti/article_detail.php?id=26 here's from another cultural metaphore.
http://www.yogashakti.org/ma_yogashakti/article_detail.php?id=26 here's from another cultural metaphore.
5/27/09
Neat things from Matia
I really want everyone to read this one. ~M http://www.wildethics.org/essays/waking_our_animal_senses.html If you like it, explore the site, and follow your curiosity.
And here is a lovely interview of Martin Prechtel: http://www.hiddenwine.com/indexSUN.html
Matia Jones
And here is a lovely interview of Martin Prechtel: http://www.hiddenwine.com/indexSUN.html
Matia Jones
Ducks
A True Duck Story from San Antonio , Texas
Something really cute happened in downtown San Antonio this week. Michael R. is an accounting clerk at Frost Bank and works there in a second story office. Several weeks ago, he watched a mother duck choose the concrete awning outside his window as the unlikely place to build a nest above the sidewalk. The mallard laid ten eggs in a nest in the corner of the planter that is perched over 10 feet in the air. She dutifully kept the eggs warm for weeks, and Monday afternoon all of her ten ducklings hatched.
[cid:2E6D813D-0694-4B85-AD47-130897E7D20E]
Michael worried all night how the momma duck was going to get those babies safely off their perch in a busy, downtown, urban environment to take to water, which typically happens in the first 48 hours of a duck hatching. Tuesday morning, Michael watched the mother duck encourage her babies to the edge of the perch with the intent to show them how to jump off. Office work came to a standstill as everyone gathered to watch.
[cid:46128790-A2BD-415E-9E7F-D5FC0710BD76]
The mother flew down below and started quacking to her babies above. In disbelief Michael watched as the first fuzzy newborn trustingly toddled to the edge and astonishingly leapt into thin air, crashing onto the cement below. Michael couldn't stand to watch this risky effort nine more times! He dashed out of his office and ran down the stairs to the sidewalk where the first obedient duckling, near its mother, was resting in a stupor after the near-fatal fall. Michael stood out of sight under the awning-planter, ready to help.
[cid:7383BE71-F156-4768-B175-E924C93E5CAD]
As the second one took the plunge, Michael jumped forward and caught it with his bare hands before it hit the concrete. Safe and sound, he set it down it by its momma and the other stunned sibling, still recovering from that painful leap. (The momma must have sensed that Michael was trying to help her babies.)
[cid:0FDB6ED7-8E4D-45DA-BD4C-1BF118831DDB]
One by one the babies continued to jump.. Each time Michael hid under the awning just to reach out in the nick of time as the duckling made its free fall. At the scene the busy downtown sidewalk traffic came to a standstill. Time after time, Michael was able to catch the remaining eight and set them by their approving mother.
[cid:F71731B4-D2F3-4FEA-8654-3C4AAF3510DC]
At this point Michael realized the duck family had only made part of its dangerous journey. They had two full blocks to walk across traffic, crosswalks, curbs and past pedestrians to get to the closest open water, the San Antonio River , site of the famed "River Walk." The onlooking office secretaries and several San Antonio police officers joined in. An empty copy-paper box was brought to collect the babies. They carefully corralled them, with the mother's approval, and loaded them in the container.. Michael held the box low enough for the mom to see her brood. He then slowly navigated through the downtown streets toward the San Antonio River . The mother waddled behind and kept her babies in sight, all the way.
[cid:F644291C-20E8-4D5A-BF64-0B5E2FC24459]
As they reached the river, the mother took over and passed him, jumping in the river and quacking loudly. At the water's edge, Michael tipped the box and helped shepherd the babies toward the water and to the waiting mother after their adventurous ride.
[cid:A6D56348-E2AB-4A7E-B116-84CDA2CE6289]
All ten darling ducklings safely made it into the water and paddled up snugly to momma. Michael said the mom swam in circles, looking back toward the beaming bank bookkeeper, and proudly quacking.
[cid:AB75FE02-6DE3-4278-8BE7-7404B99E8491]
At last, all present and accounted for: "We're all together again. We're here! We're here!"
[cid:FF3058E5-A4F5-478A-BEFE-3F1079ACCA60]
And here's a family portrait before they head outward to further adventures...
[cid:3DA0C898-E210-4BE0-992A-60F4378AB504]
Like all of us in the big times of our life, they never could have made it alone without lots of helping hands. I think it gives the name of San Antonio 's famous "River Walk" a whole new meaning! Maybe you will want to share this story with others. Doctor York told me she had forwarded it to 20 people. It's too good to lose!
Live honestly, Love generously, Care deeply, Speak kindly & Leave the rest to God.
Something really cute happened in downtown San Antonio this week. Michael R. is an accounting clerk at Frost Bank and works there in a second story office. Several weeks ago, he watched a mother duck choose the concrete awning outside his window as the unlikely place to build a nest above the sidewalk. The mallard laid ten eggs in a nest in the corner of the planter that is perched over 10 feet in the air. She dutifully kept the eggs warm for weeks, and Monday afternoon all of her ten ducklings hatched.
[cid:2E6D813D-0694-4B85-AD47-130897E7D20E]
Michael worried all night how the momma duck was going to get those babies safely off their perch in a busy, downtown, urban environment to take to water, which typically happens in the first 48 hours of a duck hatching. Tuesday morning, Michael watched the mother duck encourage her babies to the edge of the perch with the intent to show them how to jump off. Office work came to a standstill as everyone gathered to watch.
[cid:46128790-A2BD-415E-9E7F-D5FC0710BD76]
The mother flew down below and started quacking to her babies above. In disbelief Michael watched as the first fuzzy newborn trustingly toddled to the edge and astonishingly leapt into thin air, crashing onto the cement below. Michael couldn't stand to watch this risky effort nine more times! He dashed out of his office and ran down the stairs to the sidewalk where the first obedient duckling, near its mother, was resting in a stupor after the near-fatal fall. Michael stood out of sight under the awning-planter, ready to help.
[cid:7383BE71-F156-4768-B175-E924C93E5CAD]
As the second one took the plunge, Michael jumped forward and caught it with his bare hands before it hit the concrete. Safe and sound, he set it down it by its momma and the other stunned sibling, still recovering from that painful leap. (The momma must have sensed that Michael was trying to help her babies.)
[cid:0FDB6ED7-8E4D-45DA-BD4C-1BF118831DDB]
One by one the babies continued to jump.. Each time Michael hid under the awning just to reach out in the nick of time as the duckling made its free fall. At the scene the busy downtown sidewalk traffic came to a standstill. Time after time, Michael was able to catch the remaining eight and set them by their approving mother.
[cid:F71731B4-D2F3-4FEA-8654-3C4AAF3510DC]
At this point Michael realized the duck family had only made part of its dangerous journey. They had two full blocks to walk across traffic, crosswalks, curbs and past pedestrians to get to the closest open water, the San Antonio River , site of the famed "River Walk." The onlooking office secretaries and several San Antonio police officers joined in. An empty copy-paper box was brought to collect the babies. They carefully corralled them, with the mother's approval, and loaded them in the container.. Michael held the box low enough for the mom to see her brood. He then slowly navigated through the downtown streets toward the San Antonio River . The mother waddled behind and kept her babies in sight, all the way.
[cid:F644291C-20E8-4D5A-BF64-0B5E2FC24459]
As they reached the river, the mother took over and passed him, jumping in the river and quacking loudly. At the water's edge, Michael tipped the box and helped shepherd the babies toward the water and to the waiting mother after their adventurous ride.
[cid:A6D56348-E2AB-4A7E-B116-84CDA2CE6289]
All ten darling ducklings safely made it into the water and paddled up snugly to momma. Michael said the mom swam in circles, looking back toward the beaming bank bookkeeper, and proudly quacking.
[cid:AB75FE02-6DE3-4278-8BE7-7404B99E8491]
At last, all present and accounted for: "We're all together again. We're here! We're here!"
[cid:FF3058E5-A4F5-478A-BEFE-3F1079ACCA60]
And here's a family portrait before they head outward to further adventures...
[cid:3DA0C898-E210-4BE0-992A-60F4378AB504]
Like all of us in the big times of our life, they never could have made it alone without lots of helping hands. I think it gives the name of San Antonio 's famous "River Walk" a whole new meaning! Maybe you will want to share this story with others. Doctor York told me she had forwarded it to 20 people. It's too good to lose!
Live honestly, Love generously, Care deeply, Speak kindly & Leave the rest to God.
5/26/09
5/25/09
5/21/09
Ecological Intelligence
Link to Center for Ecoliteracy Publications
Print this page
Ecological Intelligence
By Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman is the author of Emotional Intelligence, Working with and Social Intelligence.
Ecologists tell us that natural systems operate on multiple scales. At the macro level there are global biogeochemical cycles, like that for the flow of carbon, where shifts in the ratios of elements can be measured not just over the years but over centuries and geologic ages. The ecosystem of a forest balances the entwined interplay of plant, animal, and insect species, down to the bacteria in soil, each finding an ecological niche to exploit, their genes evolving together. At the micro level cycles run their course on a scale of millimeters or microns, in just seconds.
How we perceive and understand all this makes the crucial difference. "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way," wrote the poet William Blake two centuries ago. "Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees."
…Ecological intelligence allows us to comprehend systems in all their complexity, as well as the interplay between the natural and man-made worlds. But that understanding demands a vast store of knowledge, one so huge that no single brain can store it all. Each one of us needs the help of others to navigate the complexities of ecological intelligence. We need to collaborate.
Psychologists conventionally view intelligence as residing within an individual. But the ecological abilities we need in order to survive today must be a collective intelligence, one that we learn and master as a species, and that resides in a distributed fashion among far-flung networks of people. The challenges we face are too varied, too subtle, and too complicated to be understood and overcome by a single person; their recognition and solution require intense efforts by a vastly diverse range of experts, businesspeople, activists — by all of us. As a group we need to learn what dangers we face, what their causes are, and how to render them harmless, on the one hand, and, on the other, to see the new opportunities these solutions offer — and we need the collective determination to do all this.
Evolutionary anthropologists recognize the cognitive abilities required for shared intelligence as a distinctly human ability, one that has been crucial to helping our species survive its earliest phases. The most recent addition to the human brain includes our circuitry for social intelligence, which allowed early humans to use complex collaboration to hunt, parent, and survive. Today we need to make the most of these same capacities for sharing cognition to survive a new set of challenges to our survival.
A collective, distributed intelligence spreads awareness, whether among friends or family, within a company, or through an entire culture. Whenever one person grasps part of this complex web of cause and effect and tells others, that insight becomes part of the group memory, to be called on as needed by any single member. Such shared intelligence grows through the contributions of individuals who advance that understanding and spread it among the rest of us. And so we need scouts, explorers who alert us to ecological truths we have either lost touch with or newly discover.
Large organizations embody such a distributed intelligence. In a hospital a lab technician does one set of jobs well, a surgical nurse another, and a radiologist still another; coordinating all these skills and knowledge allows patients to receive sound care. In a company the sales, marketing, finance, and strategic planning departments each represent unique expertise, the parts operating as a whole via a coordinated, shared understanding.
The shared nature of ecological intelligence makes it synergistic with social intelligence, which gives us the capacity to coordinate and harmonize our efforts. The art of working together effectively, as mastered by a star performing team, combines abilities like empathy and perspective taking, candor and cooperation, to create person-to-person links that let information gain added value as it travels. Collaboration and the exchange of information are vital to amassing the essential ecological insights and necessary database that allow us to act for the greater good.
The way insects swarm suggests another sense in which ecological intelligence can be distributed among us. In an ant colony no single ant grasps the big picture or leads the other ants (the queen just lays eggs); instead each ant follows simple rules of thumb that work together in countless ways to achieve self-organizing goals. Ants find the shortest route to a food source with simple hardwired rules such as following the strongest pheromone trail. Swarm intelligence allows a larger goal to be met by having large numbers of actors follow simple principles. None of the actors needs to direct the group's efforts to achieve the overall goal, nor is there any need for a centralized director.
When it comes to our collective ecological goals, the swarm rules might boil down to:
1. Know your impacts.
2. Favor improvements.
3. Share what you learn.
Such a swarm intelligence would result in an ongoing upgrade to our ecological intelligence through mindfulness of the true consequences of what we do and buy, the resolve to change for the better, and the spreading of what we know so others can do the same. If each of us in the human swarm follows those three simple rules, then together we might create a force that improves our human systems. No one of us needs to have a master plan or grasp all the essential knowledge. All of us will be pushing toward a continuous improvement of the human impact on nature.
Signs of the dawning of this shift in collective consciousness are amply visible globally, from executive teams working to make their companies' operations more sustainable to neighborhood activists distributing reusable cloth shopping bags to replace plastic ones — wherever people are engaged in creating a way of interacting with nature that transforms our propensities for short-term trade-offs into a long-term, saner relationship. High-profile investigations into the innumerable dangers human activity poses to our planet's ecosystems, like the growing study of global warming, are a bare beginning. Such efforts help raise our sense of urgency. But we can"t stop there. We need to gather the on-the-ground, detailed, and sophisticated data that can guide our actions. That takes a thorough and ongoing analysis, determined discipline — and the pursuit of ecological intelligence.
Copyright © 2009 by Daniel Goleman
From the book Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, published by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Reprinted with permission.
Find out more about Ecological Intelligence
Daniel Goleman is the author of Emotional Intelligence, Working with Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence. He was a science reporter for the New York Times, was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and received the American Psychological Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.
No part of this article may be reproduced without permission. Please contact the Center for Ecoliteracy to obtain permission. Read other essays on education for sustainability at www.ecoliteracy.org
Copyright 2009. Center for Ecoliteracy. All rights reserved.
Print this page
Ecological Intelligence
By Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman is the author of Emotional Intelligence, Working with and Social Intelligence.
Ecologists tell us that natural systems operate on multiple scales. At the macro level there are global biogeochemical cycles, like that for the flow of carbon, where shifts in the ratios of elements can be measured not just over the years but over centuries and geologic ages. The ecosystem of a forest balances the entwined interplay of plant, animal, and insect species, down to the bacteria in soil, each finding an ecological niche to exploit, their genes evolving together. At the micro level cycles run their course on a scale of millimeters or microns, in just seconds.
How we perceive and understand all this makes the crucial difference. "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way," wrote the poet William Blake two centuries ago. "Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees."
…Ecological intelligence allows us to comprehend systems in all their complexity, as well as the interplay between the natural and man-made worlds. But that understanding demands a vast store of knowledge, one so huge that no single brain can store it all. Each one of us needs the help of others to navigate the complexities of ecological intelligence. We need to collaborate.
Psychologists conventionally view intelligence as residing within an individual. But the ecological abilities we need in order to survive today must be a collective intelligence, one that we learn and master as a species, and that resides in a distributed fashion among far-flung networks of people. The challenges we face are too varied, too subtle, and too complicated to be understood and overcome by a single person; their recognition and solution require intense efforts by a vastly diverse range of experts, businesspeople, activists — by all of us. As a group we need to learn what dangers we face, what their causes are, and how to render them harmless, on the one hand, and, on the other, to see the new opportunities these solutions offer — and we need the collective determination to do all this.
Evolutionary anthropologists recognize the cognitive abilities required for shared intelligence as a distinctly human ability, one that has been crucial to helping our species survive its earliest phases. The most recent addition to the human brain includes our circuitry for social intelligence, which allowed early humans to use complex collaboration to hunt, parent, and survive. Today we need to make the most of these same capacities for sharing cognition to survive a new set of challenges to our survival.
A collective, distributed intelligence spreads awareness, whether among friends or family, within a company, or through an entire culture. Whenever one person grasps part of this complex web of cause and effect and tells others, that insight becomes part of the group memory, to be called on as needed by any single member. Such shared intelligence grows through the contributions of individuals who advance that understanding and spread it among the rest of us. And so we need scouts, explorers who alert us to ecological truths we have either lost touch with or newly discover.
Large organizations embody such a distributed intelligence. In a hospital a lab technician does one set of jobs well, a surgical nurse another, and a radiologist still another; coordinating all these skills and knowledge allows patients to receive sound care. In a company the sales, marketing, finance, and strategic planning departments each represent unique expertise, the parts operating as a whole via a coordinated, shared understanding.
The shared nature of ecological intelligence makes it synergistic with social intelligence, which gives us the capacity to coordinate and harmonize our efforts. The art of working together effectively, as mastered by a star performing team, combines abilities like empathy and perspective taking, candor and cooperation, to create person-to-person links that let information gain added value as it travels. Collaboration and the exchange of information are vital to amassing the essential ecological insights and necessary database that allow us to act for the greater good.
The way insects swarm suggests another sense in which ecological intelligence can be distributed among us. In an ant colony no single ant grasps the big picture or leads the other ants (the queen just lays eggs); instead each ant follows simple rules of thumb that work together in countless ways to achieve self-organizing goals. Ants find the shortest route to a food source with simple hardwired rules such as following the strongest pheromone trail. Swarm intelligence allows a larger goal to be met by having large numbers of actors follow simple principles. None of the actors needs to direct the group's efforts to achieve the overall goal, nor is there any need for a centralized director.
When it comes to our collective ecological goals, the swarm rules might boil down to:
1. Know your impacts.
2. Favor improvements.
3. Share what you learn.
Such a swarm intelligence would result in an ongoing upgrade to our ecological intelligence through mindfulness of the true consequences of what we do and buy, the resolve to change for the better, and the spreading of what we know so others can do the same. If each of us in the human swarm follows those three simple rules, then together we might create a force that improves our human systems. No one of us needs to have a master plan or grasp all the essential knowledge. All of us will be pushing toward a continuous improvement of the human impact on nature.
Signs of the dawning of this shift in collective consciousness are amply visible globally, from executive teams working to make their companies' operations more sustainable to neighborhood activists distributing reusable cloth shopping bags to replace plastic ones — wherever people are engaged in creating a way of interacting with nature that transforms our propensities for short-term trade-offs into a long-term, saner relationship. High-profile investigations into the innumerable dangers human activity poses to our planet's ecosystems, like the growing study of global warming, are a bare beginning. Such efforts help raise our sense of urgency. But we can"t stop there. We need to gather the on-the-ground, detailed, and sophisticated data that can guide our actions. That takes a thorough and ongoing analysis, determined discipline — and the pursuit of ecological intelligence.
Copyright © 2009 by Daniel Goleman
From the book Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, published by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Reprinted with permission.
Find out more about Ecological Intelligence
Daniel Goleman is the author of Emotional Intelligence, Working with Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence. He was a science reporter for the New York Times, was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and received the American Psychological Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.
No part of this article may be reproduced without permission. Please contact the Center for Ecoliteracy to obtain permission. Read other essays on education for sustainability at www.ecoliteracy.org
Copyright 2009. Center for Ecoliteracy. All rights reserved.
2nd Half of Syllabus
5/14/09 Sensory meandering in the garden- what do you find? What piques your interest? If you find something you are wondering about, bring back a question for a short discussion or an answer.
Meanderings Due- share your exploration with the class.
5/21 ~ Pattern recognition exercise while weeding. Lecture on crop rotations and companion planting. Plant cover crop.
* Companion Play
Sara Rose guest speaker/teaches core strength for gardeners
5/28 Nervous system connections to natural world
* More on autonomic, sympathetic and parasympathetic responses
~ Biorhythms connected to natural surroundings focus on nutrients and talk about what veggies to grow to meet seasonal nutritional needs.
5/31 Bonus class- Guest presenter, Matt Fogarty, leads a sensory exercise without sight. The focus is on developing your root both physically and energetically. Meet in the Outback Sun. am 10:00.
6/4 Presentations- share your community involvement, your final project, your research paper, your collage, painting
Meanderings Due- share your exploration with the class.
5/21 ~ Pattern recognition exercise while weeding. Lecture on crop rotations and companion planting. Plant cover crop.
* Companion Play
Sara Rose guest speaker/teaches core strength for gardeners
5/28 Nervous system connections to natural world
* More on autonomic, sympathetic and parasympathetic responses
~ Biorhythms connected to natural surroundings focus on nutrients and talk about what veggies to grow to meet seasonal nutritional needs.
5/31 Bonus class- Guest presenter, Matt Fogarty, leads a sensory exercise without sight. The focus is on developing your root both physically and energetically. Meet in the Outback Sun. am 10:00.
6/4 Presentations- share your community involvement, your final project, your research paper, your collage, painting
5/20/09
WOW the idea index
http://challenge.bfi.org/ideaindex
Welcome to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index, a database of entries submitted to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge - the winner of the 2009 Challenge will be announced on May 4th. To read a summary of an entry, just click on its title or featured image. We offer this Idea Index as a source of inspiration and hope, as a trimtab in itself. The goal of the Idea Index is to catalyze and facilitate the support needed to implement truly comprehensive solutions
Welcome to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index, a database of entries submitted to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge - the winner of the 2009 Challenge will be announced on May 4th. To read a summary of an entry, just click on its title or featured image. We offer this Idea Index as a source of inspiration and hope, as a trimtab in itself. The goal of the Idea Index is to catalyze and facilitate the support needed to implement truly comprehensive solutions
New
http://1greengeneration.elementsintime.com/?p=1077 Here is a good soil amending list for anyone interested in getting more detailed info. Please keep in mind the transportation distance of some of these. We live in a rich environment full of kelp, shell, urban compost (coffee grounds, leaf litter, nettles, comfrey etc. if you make it from your local environment you are entering into a deeper relationship with the land around you.)
This one is a treasure trove of info- especially relevant to the PNW
http://www.geocities.com/nonamuss/organic_npk.html
If you're following the soil amending links check out the do-it-yourself local calcium amendment - very relevant to OB gardeners or anyone else gardening in heavy clay-rich soils. And if you don't want to take your pH too basic from the oyster shell additions, you can add coffee grounds. Check your acidity levels first.
http://site.cleanairgardening.com/info/using-oyster-shell-as-a-soil-amendment.html
This one is a treasure trove of info- especially relevant to the PNW
http://www.geocities.com/nonamuss/organic_npk.html
If you're following the soil amending links check out the do-it-yourself local calcium amendment - very relevant to OB gardeners or anyone else gardening in heavy clay-rich soils. And if you don't want to take your pH too basic from the oyster shell additions, you can add coffee grounds. Check your acidity levels first.
http://site.cleanairgardening.com/info/using-oyster-shell-as-a-soil-amendment.html
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