In case you just tuned in, this blog was started at the invitation of my daughter, who is the founder of the birthstone-jewelry company Luna & Stella. Sometimes I blog about the jewelry, but Suzanne told me to write about whatever interests me. Already a customer who was previously wary of online purchasing found the blog and wrote Suzanne that it helped her decide that Luna & Stella was good people.
The blog is currently housed at WordPress, which makes life easy for a neophyte like me. One thing that is fun at WordPress is clicking on posts from the other bloggers, posts that are on the Freshly Pressed page or found by clicking on a key word at the Tags page.
Today I got quite interested in an entry from a WordPress blogger in northern England who calls herself Heather Uphillanddowndale. She shows her photographs of a lovely Scottish island and talks about its fight against a major commercial fish farm.
I used to think fish farms made a lot of sense, but lately I have read about possible environmental damage and overcrowding that can spread disease to wild fish.
Heather quotes from a statement by island residents: “Highland Council has recently received an initial application to site a fish farm off the east coast of Eigg, north of Kildonan. The site identified covers an area extending to 20ha (this equates to 28 football pitches) & would consist of 14 x 30m diameter cages which would be serviced by a 10m x 10m permanently sited barge (powered by diesel generator).
“The community has considered this proposal at length. The outcome of the resulting ballot which had an 86% turnout was 97% against the development.
“Eigg lies within the Small Isles National Scenic Area. A large fish farm would have a considerable negative impact on the approach to the island and could also impact negatively on the peace and quiet that visitors seek when they come to the island, as well as on the quality of life of nearby residents.” Read more at Uphilldowndale.
At lunch I went across Fort Point Channel with my colleague Lillian to visit the Children’s Museum. We wanted to see the new exhibit called Boston Black.
It was very nicely done. Lillian was delighted to discover that her AME Zion church was featured in the history part, complete with stained glass Star of David (her church’s building was once a synagogue).
We played all the games but couldn’t seem to operate one that involved connecting circuits — probably because we are not kids. I definitely could have used a kid to remind me how to use the camera on my mobile phone, but Lillian figured out hers and took a photo of the museum’s rendering of her church. (You can’t see the Star of David in her picture, so have a look here at the actual church.)
In addition to the history section, there was a barber shop and hair salon that you could play in, a section on Boston-area Haitians, one on Cape Verdeans, a grocery store with play fruits and vegetables, a magazine stand, quizzes to help you learn about the different cultures, and so on.
One thing we hadn’t realized was that if you come to the Children’s Museum without a child, they hold onto your driver’s license or other picture I.D., and they give you a special pass to wear around your neck in case parents think you seem sketchy. I know I look disreputable, but Lillian is the soul of respectability. 🙂
When Suzanne lived in San Francisco, she told me about a guy in the Tenderloin district who wanted to do something for the homeless people who were his neighbors. He would stop and talk to people, and eventually he decided to hand out new socks, because that was what was needed. Small. Not solving any underlying problems. Just making someone feel noticed.
Recently I did a web search to see if I could figure out who the guy was and write a blog post. I found someone in San Francsico who started doing similar small kindnesses, but I’m not sure it’s the same guy. (If you know, please tell me.)
The person I discovered in my search is the founder of A Good Idea. He and others who have joined him do random things that connect them with strangers in a way that is sometimes greeted with suspicion, sometimes with delight. (It’s San Francisco after all. People are ready to be surprised.) Volunteers may distribute fruit, cookies, hugs, or services.
“Jared Paul’s life changed after he chose meaning over money. He abandoned a successful six-figure sales career and started a nonprofit organization, A Good Idea, in the summer of 2008.
“ ‘In April of 2008, I went through a life transformation: The more money I made, the more stressed I became, the more my passions began to fade, and the more I stopped dreaming,’ says Paul, 33, who had flourished in a variety of sales positions for nearly 10 years.
“Amid dissatisfaction with his job and his personal life, Paul decided to dedicate himself to making a difference. So he reached out to people via Facebook and Craigslist and began an informal discussion group that met at the Red Vic Peace Café in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The meetings led to the birth of A Good Idea (AGI).
“ ‘A Good Idea is a vehicle for social change that connects people in need with people who want to help,’ explains Paul.
“ ‘One of our first events was called Intentional Acts of Kindness, where we would do acts of kindness to complete strangers,’ Paul recalls. ‘When the San Francisco Chronicle decided to do a news piece, we received over 250 e-mails from people who were inspired and wanted to be part of A Good Idea. That’s when things really took off.’ ” Read more.
Dr. Paul Farmer, the subject of a great Tracy Kidder book called Mountains Beyond Mountains, has spent many years delivering medical care — and working to alleviate poverty — in remote areas of Haiti. His nonprofit organization, Partners in Health, takes the word “partners” seriously. The teams do not tell the locals what is good for them but makes a point of learning from them and helping them get what they need.
In recent years, Farmer has been in demand in other countries, too. One focus area has been Rwanda. I liked a recent Boston Globe article on the approach to building a Partners in Health hospital there.
“The designers quickly realized that the challenge was not simply to draw up plans, as they had first thought, but rather to understand the spread of airborne disease and design a building that would combat — and in some cases sidestep — the unhealthy conditions common to so many hospitals.
“Learning from health care workers that hospital hallways were known sites of contagion, poorly ventilated, and clogged with patients and visitors, MASS Design decided that the best solution would be to get rid of the hallways. Taking advantage of Rwanda’s temperate climate, they placed the circulation outdoors, designing open verandas running the lengths of the buildings. …
“When it came to building, MASS Design looked at the Partners in Health model of involving local poor communities in health care, and realized that they could apply the same ideas to the construction process. The hospital was built entirely using local labor, providing food and health care for the workers. Unskilled workers received training that would help them get more work; and skilled laborers, notably the Rwandan masons who built the hospital’s exterior from carefully fitted together local volcanic stone, refined their craft and found themselves in demand all over the country. The construction process also beefed up local infrastructure — new roads and a hydroelectric dam — creating more jobs and literally paving the way for future projects.”
To paraphrase what Farmer often says, the biggest challenge to health is poverty. Read more.
Back before “labor” became a dirty word in the minds of some politicians, “workingmen” were more appreciated.
A corporation might even honor workers in the architecture of a headquarters. (Note the photo taken in Boston’s financial district.)
These days, looking around the subway at the tired bodies heading home at night, I’ve begun to think of almost everyone as the workingman. All but a few folks who are very well off. There is hardly anyone in the middle anymore.
The people slogging back and forth, doing whatever they have to do, are unconscious of a kind of heroic aura that envelops them collectively. You can see it if you look.
John leads the way for the end-of-summer clambake, rallying Suzanne and Erik to go with him first to collect driftwood, then to swim out to where there is good seaweed on the rocks.
It’s an all-day project ultimately involving six adults and one toddler.
Rocks get placed in a pit, wood gets burned on top, wood coals get shoveled out, lobsters, seaweed, potatoes, corn, clams, mussels in cheesecloth, seawater, and more seaweed get dumped on the very hot rocks, a tarpaulin covers everything and is sealed with more rocks so the steam stays in.
After a couple hours, newspaper gets spread for a tablecloth, the neighbors arrive, and the tarp is whipped off.
In the kitchen, Meran has made a salad with her garden’s tomatoes, plus spaghetti with fresh clam sauce. Sandra has brought an assortment of her famed homemade cookies. Patrick has brought extra utensils for cracking open lobster claws.
If you want to learn more, do what John does. He searches the Internet on “how to do a clambake” and reads several websites.
In the NY Times, T. Lynne Pixley writes about Kelly Callahan and other Atlanta residents who forage for food among the many neglected, foreclosed properties in their neighborhoods.
Walking her dog in her neighborhood, Callahan saw “plenty of empty, bank-owned properties for sale.”
She also noticed that the “forlorn yards were peppered with overgrown gardens and big fruit trees, all bulging with the kind of bounty that comes from the high heat and afternoon thunderstorms that have defined Atlanta’s summer. So she began picking. First, there was a load of figs, which she intends to make into jam for a cafe that feeds homeless people. Then, for herself, she got five pounds of tomatoes, two kinds of squash and — the real prize — a Sugar Baby watermelon.” Others have joined in. Read more here.
I was interested to learn about “foraging” in Atlanta because I had recently read about a related activity in Vermont, called “gleaning.” Gleaning is a bit more out in the open. Farmers who are finished harvesting their crops give permission to gleaners, usually volunteers, to pick over what’s left and take it to families in need and to food pantries. One group engaged in this effort is the Addison County Gleaning Program. Read about it here.
It turns out that there is a lot of food that would otherwise go to waste. So it seems good that the food benefits someone.
Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has just published a book recounting his efforts to apply the principals of his discipline to improving urban life.
The book is called The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, and it sounds cool.
Mark Oppenheimer writes in the NY Times:
“For years the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson paid little attention to Binghamton, N.Y., where he lived and taught. ‘I hadn’t joined the PTA,’ he writes, ‘attended council meetings, given blood, or served turkey to the homeless on Thanksgiving.’ …
Photographer: Jonathan Cohen
“Five years ago Mr. Wilson, the author of two popular booksabout Darwin, decided it would be fruitful to apply his training to the (human) animals closer to home. With colleagues at Binghamton University, Mr. Wilson founded the Binghamton Neighborhood Project to use evolutionary theory, along with data collection, to improve the quality of life in his struggling city.”
Although the work is still — evolving — the people he works with make interesting reading as do the experiments.
Oppenheinmer says that the “best chapters describe some of the preliminary work Mr. Wilson’s team has done. For example the Project gave a wide cross section of Binghamton schoolchildren the Development Assessment Profile, a survey that measures sociability, citizenship skills and the conditions that promote such traits. Students rated their agreement with statements like ‘I think it is important to help other people’ and ‘I tell the truth even when it is not easy.’
“The project then figured out where the most trusting, pro-social children lived: which neighborhoods, in other words, seemed to be breeding the most social capital. Using the technology on which Google Earth relies, the project created a krig map — a topographical map representing demographic data — for the city. The valleys showed areas with low social capital, the peaks with high.”
The results have implications for where community-building intiatives might have the most impact. Read the whole review here.
This morning on my walk I noticed a sign about energy-saving LED (light-emitting diode) street lamps. The sign is hard to read here, but it says that the LED lighting was provided by the Friends of Christopher Columbus Park. It also says that “the City of Boston is testing different types of LED lighting systems around the town and wants to know what you think.” Tell the City here.
The main reason I’m interested is that John is in the optics business, and his team is always working on LED, 3-D, and other optical projects beyond my ken. (I blogged about his Eastern European optical engineers here and here. John and Gregg tweet at OFH_John and gfavalora.)
And while we’re on the subject of optics, check out an article about “bizarre optical phenomena, defying the laws of reflection and refraction. …
“Cambridge, Mass. – September 1, 2011 – Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction.” They bend light. Kind of like a fun house mirror.
This is about a Unitarian Universalist minister who decided that community work was more important than having a church building.
As Donald E. Skinner writes of Ron Robinson in UU World, “The particular mission field that the Rev. Ron Robinson has claimed is one of America’s abandoned places.
“Turley, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa, was a thriving place until the 1960s when white flight and the movement of oil industry jobs out of Tulsa began Turley’s long slide into economic and social decline.
“Today many houses in Turley are vacant and abandoned, some boarded up, others open to the elements and slowly falling down. Burned-out structures are nearly hidden by tall weeds and brush. The once robust main street is now down to a gas station, grocery, a pizza place that won’t deliver, self-service laundry, carwash, and a collection of auto repair and salvage businesses.
“Most younger residents have no health insurance and little health care. Most children qualify for free school lunches. Residents live, on average, fourteen fewer years than people five miles south, in midtown Tulsa. Unemployment is twice the national average.
“In the middle of this, Robinson, a Unitarian Universalist minister, has established A Third Place, a community center that includes Turley’s only library, several computers for public use, a free health clinic, food pantry, drop-in living room, and a place to get used clothing and household items.”
Near where I work in Boston, there is something new to see every day.
Here are two shots of the ever picturesque North End.
Here are shots of the harbor post-Irene and the James Hook & Co. golden lobster.
And here are the deep red plants that attracted a hummingbird outside the cafeteria yesterday. He didn’t show up today for his screen test, so I borrowed someone else’s hummingbird.
Manchester (NH) is an official refugee resettlement city. The State Department determines how many refugees the United States will take in each year and works through agencies to ease the transition. A colleague of mine lives in Manchester and was upset to learn about growing hostility to refugee placements.
Kathryn Marchocki writes in TheUnion Leader, “Mayor Ted Gatsas wants a moratorium on new refugee arrivals in Manchester after learning the city will receive a projected 600 refugees over two years, even though it now is the second-largest refugee resettlement community in New England.”
An alternative paper, The Hippo, goes into more depth. Here it quotes refugee supporters.
“ ‘For us, it’s a double-edged sword,’ said New Hampshire Catholic Charities’ Chesley. ‘The conditions they’re leaving are abhorrent. … But when the refugees come to New Hampshire, we witness the difficulty, the challenge. We also witness the evolution of a refugee’s life. The first few months here, they’re struggling. But there are so many wonderful examples of success.’
“There are many who realize just how much these refugees are bringing to the city. … [Rwandan refugee] Ntabaganyimana is one example of refugees’ giving back. He serves on a variety of community boards and organizations.
“The focus is always on challenges facing refugees or how refugees are impacting services. Ntabaganyimana would like a little more emphasis on the benefits of refugees and their successes. Sure, he says, there is an upfront investment in the refugees. But once they’re settled and acclimated, they’re contributing to the fabric of a community just like everyone else.”
Chesley points out that people have been migrating around the world forever. ” ‘That’s not new to New Hampshire. It’s not new to Manchester. The faces just look different and the colors are darker than the French Canadians or the Irish or the Polish, but the issues are still pretty much the same.’
“Refugees are working, and they are paying taxes. Ntabaganyimana guesses the refugees who are working are probably outweighing any impact that comes from refugees who aren’t able to find work quickly.”
The Hippo article also mentions a student from Suzanne’s alma mater, who has made a documentary on the issue. “Brendan Gillett is a student at Pomona College in California. He spent a great deal of time immersed in the refugee community while he filmed his documentary, Our Community. Gillett … suggested implementing a program that would spread responsibility and include not just resettlement organizations but also the general public. He suggested establishing a family sponsorship program in which a native New Hampshire family could work with and provide help (rides to appointments, the grocery store, etc.) to a newly arrived family.”
Suzanne and Erik went to grad school with David O’Halloran, whose consulting company was recently cited in The Irish Times for its focus on sustainable business ventures in Africa.
“For Irish entrepreneur David O’Halloran, adhering to a sustainable business model that helps develop and protect local communities and their environment is the key to enjoying long-term success in Africa’s emerging markets. In late 2006, the Galway man, along with three former colleagues, rejuvenated a business development consultancy called BusinessMinds by turning it into an incubator company that develops, finances and operates sustainable commercial ventures in Africa.
“The idea behind the enterprise is to offer investors a socially responsible approach to doing business on the continent, while also making a profit. ‘Historically, many investors in Africa have used a more short-term, exploitative business model, one which has existed since the days of colonialism,’ O’Halloran says. ‘Unfortunately, for some investors this remains the modus operandi even today. As in, they take what resources they can and then get out without giving much back to the local economies.’
“However, O’Halloran says he believes people are starting to realise that such an approach is inherently unstable and increases risk.” His organization is called BusinessMinds, Africa.
Bill Corcoran wrote the Irish Times article. Read more here.
Blogger Andrew Sullivan is on vacation in Provincetown (uh-oh, hurricane!), but his crack team at the Daily Beast is doing him proud.
I’m so grateful that they clued me in to the delightful Gwarlingo blog. Creator Michelle Aldredge says that her goal with Gwarlingo is to highlight “some of the most inventive work being made today in music, writing, film, performance, and the visual arts.” My first exposure confirms that she’s succeeding.
In this Gwarlingo post, we learn about the fine art of manhole covers in Japan and a book by Remo Camerota on the topic called Drainspotting. Camerota writes, “In the 1980s as communities outside of Japan’s major cities were slated to receive new sewer systems, these public works projects were met with resistance, until one dedicated bureaucrat solved the problem by devising a way to make these mostly invisible systems aesthetically appreciated above ground: customized manhole covers.”
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