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Weed Control with Goats

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 11, 2012| 5 Comments »

At some point in my childhood, family friends raised goats. It seemed exotic. The Gordon children drank goat’s milk. And we learned that goats will eat anything when my brother tried to pat a goat and lost his mitten.

In addition to mittens, goats eat weeds, and increasing numbers of individuals and groups are deciding to use goats instead of herbicides to control weeds.

Evan Allen writes in the Boston Globe, “According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the use of goats to control invasive species, already common out West, is becoming more common across the East Coast.

“Goats love woody shrubs and vines, making them ideal weed-whackers. Using goats cuts down on the need for herbicides, and, unlike tractors, goats don’t require diesel fuel to do their job. And nimble goats can easily maneuver across rocky or marshy surfaces that humans and machines can’t safely reach.

“ ‘Folks are looking for long-term means of control,’ said Eric Schrading, private lands coordinator at the Fish and Wildlife Service. ‘As the last 30-plus years have gone by, we’ve started to, maybe not abandon chemical control, but use that as only one tool in the toolbox.’ …

“In Wellesley, the goats were shuttled out to the Boulder Brook Reservation in a bright pink truck driven by a crew from the Goat Girls: Hope Crolius, owner of the Amherst-based business, and two of her goatherds.” Read more here.

For a video about goat weed control, check out this clip from Bear Creek Park in Colorado.

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Grand Opera in a Small Town

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Saturday night we saw a splendid production of Puccini’s opera La Bohème at a $25-a-seat benefit for the Friends of the Performing Arts. Pretty amazing to have fully staged opera professionally sung with orchestra accompaniment someplace other than the big city.

Robin Farnsley, who sang the role of the Bohemian seamstress suffering from tuberculosis, was the heart and soul of the production. I blogged about her before, here. Not only was her singing exquisite, but her acting was unusually sensitive and subtle for opera.

But all the leads were great in this tale of poverty and the artistic spirit: Ray Bauwens as as Mimi’s love, Rodolfo; Tim Wilfong as a delightful Marcello; and Sarah Vincelett as the thoroughly convincing coquette, Musetta. Also worthy of mention were Michael Prichard, Thomas Dawkins, and Miles Rind.

I loved the naturalistic translation, shown in supertitles.

Alan Yost conducted, Kathy Lague was stage director, and Paula Eldridge was chorus master. As far as I know, everyone donated their time to support the performing arts in Concord.

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Tod Machover

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »

We are going to the opera tonight, and I’m remembering the last opera we saw, by MIT Media Lab innovator Tod Machover.

It was called Death and the Powers, and it was about a genius who wanted to live forever and figured out how to convert himself into a sort of computer after death. Given that it had lyrics by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, I thought it would be great, but it was nowhere near as good as Machover’s Resurrection, a Tolstoy story adapted by MIT’s Laura Harrington. (The robots in Death and the Powers were cute anyway.)

Machover is a tremendously interesting and prolific musician. Here he talks about how music can bring back memories, not unlike Proust’s petit madeleine.

Below he explains how his “hyper instruments” have drawn people of all types, including the elementary school classes he visits, into the joy of music making.

 

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Medal of Freedom for Community Organizer, 82

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The president recently handed out the Medal of Freedom awards. Maybe in the excitement around around Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, and John Glenn, you missed that Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, also was honored.

Fox News-Latino wrote, “The White House will present the lifelong unionist and immigrant rights advocate with the Medal of Freedom. …

“Huerta’s sense of justice developed from an early age. Raised in Stockton, Calif., Huerta watched her father work for little pay in the fields, while her mother managed a hotel that often let poor migrants stay for free, according to the Daily Beast.

“Along with César Chávez, Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which later evolved into the United Farm Workers of America. …

“Using strikes, marches, boycotts and hunger strikes, the UFW has defended the interests of farm workers. … Huerta has been arrested 22 times and been beaten for her activism.

Notwithstanding her run-ins with the law, Huerta has been influential in passing far-reaching legislation. Her accomplishments as a labor rights activist include helping pass California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 and helping secure disability insurance for California farmworkers. …

“Huerta launched the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2002, with the mission of supporting community organizers and budding political leaders.” Read more.

Getty Images

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Choreographing the Everyday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 7, 2012| 3 Comments »

I read an article by Rebecca Milzoff in the NY Times recently that got me seeing people on the street in a new way.

Milzoff was interviewing a New York City choreographer about his latest work, and something he said stuck with me.

“ ‘I was assured when I came to live in this space on Broadway between Prince and Spring that SoHo would never come this far,’ David Gordon said, looking out the wall-to-wall windows in his second-floor loft. ‘Instead I now live in the Mall of America.’

“ ‘When I set foot out the door, there are so many people going in different directions,’ he said. ‘The choreography of the street is mind boggling.’ ”

Those words came back to me a couple days later as I waited for the morning train. There’s a point when bells start ringing because the gate is going down, and commuters stream across the parking lot with their briefcases and coffee mugs. On this particular day, they looked to me like dancers in a choreography of the everyday. The flow, the spacing between people suggested dance. The commuters had a special aura, partly because they had no consciousness of being in a dance performance.

I hope to be alert to other such happenings in the future.

It sure jazzes up the commute.

Photograph: Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

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500,000 Lenses in the New $100 Bill

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »

A new $100 bill is in the works. For security, it will have half a million tiny lenses in a special strip, and the lenses will create a particular optical effect as you tip the bill this way and that.  Kind of like a hologram, is my understanding. There will be even more tiny lenses on the Liberty Bell and the numeral 100, and as you tip the bill, the one will turn into the other, thanks to the lenses.

This rather surprising information I learned from a speaker today — Doug Crane, vice president of the family company that has been making America’s currency and some other nations’ currencies since 1801. He makes paper only from cotton (80%) and linen (20%).

There are a lot of interesting old documents about the history of Crane & Co. — and how it overlapped with key events and players in American history — at this blog on WordPress.

More information is on the regular website of the company, which is based in Dalton, Massachusetts, and employs 850 people locally. Among them are the people who make print so tiny you could “print the Bible twice on a dime.” They also employ optical engineers who create the micro lenses and are responsible for Crane’s 80 patents.

Other employees work in Tumba, Sweden, ever since Sweden asked Crane to take over its currency making. At the Tumba site, Crane makes currencies for additional countries.

A paper-making enterprise requires a lot of energy, so Crane is working with numerous alternatives as it moves toward its goal of 100% sustainability. It has   already drastically cut its oil use in a partnership with a steam-producing landfill enterprise. Hydroelectric is proving trickier because there are so many jurisdictions on the Housatonic River to give permission to remove waterfalls.

Perhaps the river could become a Blueway and get everyone working together. (See yesterday’s post.)

Postcard from cranesbond.com

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Transforming the Connecticut River

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

You probably think of the Connecticut River as being in Connecticut. And so it is. But it flows through most of the New England states, so protecting it results in protecting a large chunk of the Northeast. Its 7.2 million acre watershed runs through Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

The Christian Science Monitor recently added to its Change Agent series an article on the U.S. Interior Department’s May 24 designation of the Connecticut River as the first National Blueway.

Correspondent Cathryn J. Prince writes, “Between 40 and 50 local and state entities, both public and private, from four states will work together to preserve the 410-mile-long Connecticut River and its watershed. …

“It took the cooperation of between 40 and 50 local and state, public and private, organizations from four states to make the designation possible. While it doesn’t mean more federal funding, it does mean better coordination between these groups to promote best practices, information sharing, and stewardship.

“National Blueway is more than a label, says Andy Fisk, executive director of the Connecticut River Watershed Council.

“ ‘There are no turf wars here, but there are a lot of folks on the dance floor,’ Mr. Fisk says. ‘It’s important to recognize that this is a new way in how you get things done. It’s not one entity that will get things done, it’s diversity.’ ” Read more here.

Photograph: John Nordell, Christian Science Monitor

The Connecticut River, as photographed from the French King Bridge in Gill, Mass. The river and its watershed have been named the first National Blueway, an effort to coordinate the work of nonprofit groups and governments to protect and wisely use the entire 410-mile river and its 7.2 million acre watershed.

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Cultiver ton jardin

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »

You remember the advice at the end of Voltaire’s Candide? “Il faut cultiver ton jardin”? Increasing numbers of people are finding the advice to cultivate a garden a good idea for our times. But the implication of minding one’s own business is not part of it as people become more neighborly and create better communities through gardening.

“In 2002,” writes Katherine Gustafson at YES! Magazine, “two neighbors armed with spades and seeds changed everything for crime-addled Quesada Avenue in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point area.

“The street had been ground zero for the area’s drug trade and its attendant violence. But when Annette Smith and Karl Paige began planting flowers on a small section of the trash-filled median strip, Quesada Gardens Initiative was born. Over the course of the next decade, the community-enrichment project profoundly altered the face of this once-blighted neighborhood.

“Jeffrey Betcher is the initiative’s unlikely spokesperson. A gay white man driven to the majority-black area by the high cost of housing elsewhere, he moved into a house on Quesada Avenue in 1998 to find drug dealers selling from his front stoop and addicts sleeping beneath his stairs. He told me about the day that he returned home from work to discover that his neighbor Annette had planted a little corner of his yard.

“ ‘Even though there was a throng of people – drug dealers who were carrying guns, pretty scary folks – she had planted flowers on this little strip of dirt by my driveway,’ he told me. ‘I was so moved by that … I thought, that’s what life is about. That’s what community development is about. That’s what’s going to change this block faster than any public investment or outside strategy. And in fact it did.’ ” More here.

If you like this sort of thing, please read a little book called Seedfolks. You will love it.

Photograph: Katherine Gustafson

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Rain and Rivulets

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 3, 2012| 5 Comments »

Looking at streams swollen by yesterday’s rain, I began thinking about Scuffy the Tugboat.

“The water moved in a hurry, as all things move in a hurry when it is Spring. Scuffy was in a hurry, too. ‘Come back little tugboat, come back,’ cried the little boy.”

Remember?

A farmers market in Providence was undaunted by the rain. The farmer at the farmstand here joked that the puddle was just a matter of hydroponic gardening. In other photos, I show peonies and a sign buffeted by the storm — and a rabbit too busy foraging to worry about cameras.

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A Very Young Composer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Did you catch the story today about the young boy whose composition was performed by the New York Philharmonic?

At the National Public Radio site, Jeff Lunden writes: “What would it be like if you were 10 years old and composed a piece of music that was played by the New York Philharmonic? For a few New York City school kids, including one fifth-grader, it’s a dream come true, thanks to the orchestra’s Very Young Composers program.

“Composer Jon Deak, who played bass with the New York Philharmonic for more than 40 years, says the idea for Very Young Composers came when he and conductor Marin Alsop visited an elementary school in Brooklyn several years ago.”

Now every year, “72 lucky kids in six New York area schools participate in this free after-school program. …

” ‘The kids are not chosen for being musical geniuses,’ [the Philharmonic’s director of education, Theodore] Wiprud says. ‘The guidelines we give the schools, in trying to identify some fourth- and fifth-graders for the program, is that they be kids for whom this could make a difference. Whether or not they study an instrument is not necessarily a good predictor of whether they’re going to do something creative in music.’ …

” ‘Some of these kids have trouble locating middle C on a piano,’ Deak says. ‘Does that mean they can’t compose music of depth? No. What do they have to do? They have to hum it for us, sing, whistle, tap the rhythms — even if they can’t notate them — and we get their piece.’

“As [teaching artist and composer Daniel] Felsenfeld puts it, ‘The most important thing about this class is that you never, ever, ever write their music for them — not even a little.’ ”

I’m hearing a refrain from yesterday’s post: all children have music in them and you should just let it flower.

Read more and listen to the performance of young Milo Poniewozik’s composition at NPR.

Photograph of student Milo Poniewozik and the New York Philharmonic: Michael DiVito

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El Sistema

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’ve been meaning to blog about the wildly successful music-education program out of Venezuela, El Sistema.

Here music critic Mark Swed follows the L.A. Philharmonic to Caracas and writes about El Sistema for the Los Angeles Times.

“Musically, Venezuela is like no other place on Earth. Along with baseball and beauty pageants, classical music is one of the country’s greatest passions.

“In the capital, Caracas, superstar Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is mobbed wherever he goes. Classical music teeny-boppers run up to him for autographs when he walks off the podium at concerts. The state-run music education program, which is known as El Sistema and from which Dudamel emerged, is the most extensive, admired and increasingly imitated in the world. One of its nearly 300 music schools for children, or núcleos, is deep in the Venezuelan Amazon, reachable only by boat. …

“The basic tenet of José Antonio Abreu, the revered founder of El Sistema, is the universal aspect of music. He likes to say that music is a human right. That’s an effective, politically expedient slogan. But what he has demonstrated on a greater scale than ever before is that music is not so much a right as a given. El Sistema is not about talent, ingeniously effective system though it may be for discovering and fostering musical talent. The truly revolutionary aspect of El Sistema is its proof that everyone has a capacity for music.”

Read about how El Sistema has spread worldwide in the Los Angeles Times.

Children at La Rinconada in Caracas, Venezuela, Feb. 14, 2012. Gustavo Dudamel, right, among students at a showcase of El Sistema in Caracas, Venezuela, Feb. 15. Photograph: Mark Swed / Los Angeles Times

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Definitely Not Pigeons

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 31, 2012| 2 Comments »

I was in a meeting on the 31st floor a month or so ago, when I saw a bird swoop past the window. That could never be a pigeon up this high, I thought. Could it be a … ?

This week a colleague sent me photos. It turns out that a pair of peregrine falcons had nested several years ago on the 32nd floor outside our president’s office and, after a sojourn at the Custom House, decided to come back this year. The babies have just been tagged, and the tagger took pictures.

I have been reading a novel about Bedouins translated from Arabic. It has numerous passages on Bedouins’ fondness for falcons as hunting birds, so this feels like a coincidence. But the main thing is, they are really cool birds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Taking the Bus: A Fresh Look

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 30, 2012| 2 Comments »

A concept called Rapid Bus Transit is getting increased attention, I hear, even though so far in the United States, having a designated lane doesn’t seem to make much difference. When I take Boston’s Silver Line to go to the SoWa art galleries, it acts like an ordinary bus — stuck in traffic and arriving in clumps. (In NY City, in the old days, we used to say, Why are buses like bananas? Answer: Because they are green and yellow and come in bunches.)

I do like taking the Silver Line to the airport, though.

Will Doig at Salon.com writes: “When it comes to improving mass transit, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit on the humble city bus. The vital connective tissue of multi-modal transit systems, the bus could be an efficient — nay, elegant — solution to cities’ mobility woes if only we made it so. …

“Making people like the bus when not liking the bus is practically an American pastime essentially means making the bus act and feel more like a train. Trains show up roughly when they’re supposed to. Buses take forever, then arrive two at a time. Trains boast better design, speed, shelters, schedules and easier-to-follow routes. When people say they don’t like the bus but they do like the train, what they really mean is they like those perks the train offers. But there’s no reason bus systems can’t simply incorporate most of them. That’s the goal of bus rapid transit.” Doig has more at Salon.

Photograph: Duncan Allen at world.nycsubway.org

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Worthy Needs, Worthy Gifts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 29, 2012| 2 Comments »

I’m fascinated by the many ways the Internet has enabled broader support for worthy causes. I’ve blogged about Kickstarter, for example, “a funding platform for creative projects.” Through Kickstarter, friends and other well-wishers can help fund a documentary, an art installation, or a book publication within a designated time frame. Magic can happen, often with only small donations that add up.

Today OFH_John tweeted about something similar for schools, Donors Choose. Donors Choose calls itself “an online charity connecting you to classrooms in need.” You can search for projects in your local area, projects that have special meaning to you, and projects that might let your company offer special expertise.

John’s company has optical expertise and jumped on a need at a District of Columbia school, where an applied science project on light called for optical gear. Read about that here.

If you are seeking to help impoverished schools in particular, you may look for the “high poverty” rating at Donors Choose. School needs of all sorts are listed here.

Photograph: DonorsChoose.org

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Environmentalists: The Next Generation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I caught Public Radio International’s Living on Earth program Saturday morning and felt reassured to hear about a new generation of environmentalists.

The story that caught my attention was on the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF), which recently “announced the three winning high schools for the Sustainable Energy Award, sponsored by Samsung: Northwest Pennsylvania Collegiate Academy, Erie, Pa.; Boston Latin School, Boston, Mass.; and Secondary Academy for Success, Bothell, Wash.”

The judges found that the three schools “demonstrated a school-wide effort to achieve energy savings through the creative and innovative use of technology. Each school will receive $10,000 to further their initiatives.”

For example, in 2008, an environmental group at Boston Latin “conducted an energy audit of the school with help from the local utility NSTAR. Improving on the score of 59 out of 100 meant a strong energy efficiency initiative. The school turned off the lights in vending machines after school, lowered the hot water temperature, and replaced hundreds of light bulbs in the auditorium ceiling with more energy-efficient bulbs. …

“The school has had two fundraisers that generated more than $12,000 to support their initiative. With help from the Facilities Department of the Boston Public Schools, the school implemented a $75,000 lighting retrofit that saves 200,000 kWh and $33,000 a year. The school also installed a 28-panel PV array on its roof through a partnership with the City of Boston’s energy department and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. The system displays real-time data on electricity generated, and the school is putting this data online for study by other students.”

One thing that stands out is the effort to involve a lot of students, not just a small green group. Making the effort  broader should help it expand. More here.

Photograph: National Environmental Education Foundation

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