Once Upon a College

Friday, September 18, 2015

Common Ground Fair assignment for EII

The fair is an all-around good time, so you should need no incentive to go; however, the following notes are added to help you along:

Note: Regular class is cancelled Friday 25th September.

Assignment instructions:

You are assigned to go to the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association Common Ground Country Fair held Friday through Sunday September 25-27 right here in Unity, and then to complete the response paper detailed below
You may get into the fair for free if you volunteer. Be sure to do so well ahead of time. See the MOFGA webpage for details
If you are a MOFGA member you already get in for free. Check to see if your parents have a family membership
For those of you who were planning to go home, or who cannot attend the fair for any other valid reason, such as work or a medical appointment, your alternative assignment is to visit a local or organic food outlet, such as a farmer's market or food cooperative, or any other food source that seems likely to be able to give you the provenance information that will be needed, and complete the same assignment as the fair-goers (below)

The fair/local/organic food response paper:

Obtain food for a meal at the fair, at some local or organic food outlet, or from a friend's or relative's kitchen garden. Be sure to find out where each ingredient comes from
Make and eat the meal. (If you live in the residence halls and otherwise eat on the meal plan, the meal can just be a snack.)
Describe the meal and track the ingredients geographically and ecologically in a short informal essay. Explain why this was (or was not) a good meal. Humor and/or pathos are optional
Due Friday October 2nd in class via email
This is the first check-in opportunity for me to evaluate your writing and critical thinking skills. Be sure to do your best, or you may find yourself getting unexpected remedial attention!

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Black Earth

There's been a buzz in the papers lately about this fellow Tim Snyder who has written a book, Black Earth, directly comparing the Holocaust to climate change.

Here's a couple examples, the first one, from the NYT, sent in by Jake from our EII class, the other from the Grauniad.

You can find a lot of material in the pages of this blog and annex where I look at climate change through the lens of twentieth century history. WWII is an important comparative case, but so, I tend to think, is the Cold War.

More on this later in class.

Monday, September 14, 2015

North Woods National Park, for ESS

(As an example of macroeconomic arguments for and against environmental action.)

Friday, September 11, 2015

Another great Hans Rosling TED talk

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Refugee crisis material for EII

Guardian article and video:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/05/refugees-and-holidaymakers-in-kos-patrick-kingsley

BBC news clip:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34194298

Also, Jake found the data below about comparative scale:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/5-graphs-that-show-how-the-refugee-crisis-has-got-worse-10483439.html

Monday, September 7, 2015

Fessing up

A French spy has confessed to bombing the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. As a just-starting environmentalist, this was an incident that had a huge effect on me at the time:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/06/french-spy-who-sunk-greenpeace-ship-apologises-for-lethal-bombing

Friday, September 4, 2015

Supply and demand in the ivory trade

http://education.nationalgeographic.com/media/economics-illicit-ivory-trade/

What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.