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Archives
- September, 2007
Citizen Scientist Programs Threatened – September
25, 2007
What can one say about a government that professes to care about the
issue Canadians care about the most – climate change – and yet
continually erodes the programs and policies and agreements that are
designed to do something about it…even ones that mostly involve
community volunteers and young kids? One could call them stupid,
arrogant, two-faced, deserving to be soundly defeated in the next
election (which I hope they will be arrogant enough to engineer
shortly).
The latest piece of evidence that the Canadian
government doesn’t take global warming seriously is last week’s 80
percent slashing of the budget of Environment Canada’s Ecological
Monitoring and Assessment Network (EMAN). It is a partnership of over
600 organizations (international, national, provincial, territorial,
other federal government departments, universities, intergovernmental
organizations, NGOs, aboriginal groups, community groups) and
individuals who undertake ecological monitoring in
Canada. These groups, in turn, encourage local schools, community groups,
individuals, naturalists, backyard enthusiasts, Scouts and Guides to act
as “citizen scientists”, monitoring soil, air, water, wildflowers,
frogs, ice and worms in order to track the influence of climate change.
The information they collect is then analyzed by EMAN scientists. (Full
disclosure: My youngest daughter Melanie is the very passionate Nova Scotia
coordinator of PlantWatch, as part of her job as conservation
horticulturalist at the Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens at
Acadia University; the funding cuts won’t affect her regular job and
she didn’t ask me to write this.) We published an article describing these programs in
Natural Life magazine’s May/June, 2005 issue.
Actually, this is just one of many slashes, worth
$10 million, that have happened to Environment Canada’s budget over
the past year. Since the Conservative minority government announced just
last month that the budget surplus for the 2007-08 fiscal year will come
in higher than the $3-billion projection made in the federal budget
earlier this year, lack of funds cannot be the reason for these cuts.
Since these programs deal with climate change, the government
explanation that the money is being redirected to climate change
programs cannot be true. If this was a bloated initiative full of
corporate executives billing gigantic fees, rather than a small staff
doing wonders on a miniscule budget and working with hundreds of
volunteers, cutting it might make sense. In fact, this was a very small
investment for a huge return, providing access to a large amount of
timely data at minimal expense. Oh, and there’s the educational value
for all those citizen scientists.
Perhaps Halifax Liberal MP Geoff Regan has a better
explanation for the cuts. He is vice-chairman of the House of Commons
standing committee on the environment and sustainable development, and
in a news release calling on the government to reinstate the funding, he
said, “Perhaps the Conservative government feels that by eliminating
the science, it can somehow erase the issue of global warming and
climate change from the minds of Canadians.”
If that is the aim, it won’t work. Public awareness
of climate change is here to stay. I hope that
the thousands of volunteers involved in the programs run by the EMAN
coordinating office will tell Environment Minister John Baird (by email
or mail: Les Terrasses de la Chaudière, 10 Wellington Street, 28th Floor,
Gatineau, Quebec K1A 0H3) about the importance of those monitoring
programs...and tell him that cutting them is not in the government’s nor the public interest. If you care about wildflowers, frogs, migratory
birds and our climate, send Baird a message. And encourage your Scout
Troop, workplace, non-governmental organization, etc. also to write to
him. You can copy the EMAN coordinating office.
Posted:
2007/09/25 7:25 PM
Breastfeeding is Not Obscene – for the gazillionth
time! – September 12, 2007
I’ve been crazy busy recently getting the November/December issues of
Natural Life and Life Learning ready for the printer and gestating our
third magazine baby Natural Child
Magazine. So even though my brain and
my in-box are brimming with juicy stuff to rant about, I’ve just not
found the time. (I’m also gearing up to take a few days off while our
youngest daughter visits this weekend.) However, an article in today’s
newspaper has skyrocketed blogging to the top of my to-do list. In case
you live in one of the apparently two places on the planet that
haven’t had coverage of the latest
breastfeeding-is-obscene flap, Facebook has messed up big time. It deleted pictures of nursing babies that it
considered obscene content and closed the account of a woman
in Edmonton. The grapevine went into overdrive and a new Facebook group set up to
petition for a change in site policy – called “Hey Facebook,
breastfeeding is not obscene!” if you are a Facebook user and want
to sign up – has grown faster than a gestating magazine. This, of
course, is just one of many instances of stupidity about
breastfeeding. Awhile back, MySpace removed photos of a
Tacoma, Washington woman breastfeeding her baby. And in 2004, a U.S.
natural food store refused to sell an issue of Mothering with a
breastfeeding mother on the cover.
As I
wrote earlier this year, there is no excuse for this Neanderthal
behavior in 2007. It is jaw-droppingly astonishing that some people don’t
understand that feeding children is the purpose of breasts…and
it’s a very sad commentary on our messed up culture that we connect
feeding a child with sex and relegate it the bedroom, or with other
bodily functions and banish it to the bathroom…or remove photos of it
from the Internet because it is obscene. Shame on Facebook. Makes me want to boycott them.
We’re compiling a list of baby- and breastfeeding-friendly
alternatives for posting on the Natural Child Magazine website. Please
send me your favorites.
Posted:
2007/09/12 4:12 PM
Telling Us What We Already Know...Don’t We? –
September 6, 2007
I can’t decide whether I should feel smug, confused, angry or just
cynical. Today, a study published in The Lancet medical journal stated
the obvious: Food additives fuel hyperactivity. In fact, preservatives
and artificial colors have “significantly adverse” effects, British
scientists have found. Um, I thought Dr. Benjamin Feingold figured this
out over three decades ago. Isn’t that why we monitored our
daughters’ consumption of things like Red Dye #3 and Yellow #2 in the
1970s? Or
maybe Red Dye #3 – which was banned in the U.S. in 1990 – just
caused cancer. Silly me.
And yet, a professor of psychology at the
University Southampton was quoted in the press as saying that we now,
for the first time, have clear evidence that mixtures of certain common
food colors and preservatives (namely sodium benzoate) can adversely
influence the behavior of children. Of course, the same guy noted,
simply removing the additives from food would not prevent hyperactivity
in children. Of course not.
So does this mean that industry-sponsored
scientists will now suddenly agree with independent researchers about
something that has long been obvious to observant mothers? Don’t hold
your breath. The new research was apparently greeted with skepticism by the International Food Additives Council, an
Atlanta-based trade association.
Posted:
2007/09/06 8:40 PM
Healing the Ugliness of a Schooled Society –
September 5, 2007
Anyone who has chosen the unschooling path for themselves or their
children has already decided that school is not usually the best
environment for getting an education. Although I like to focus on the
positive, sometimes it’s necessary to explore the negative aspects of
schooling in order to envision a broadly-based education system that has
moved beyond the school model. That’s what I did in my book
Challenging Assumptions in Education, which will soon be going into its
fifth printing. And this week, when most kids are trudging back to
school, seems like a good time to do that.
Any exploration of this sort inevitably pokes
around at the true meaning of education, both for individuals and for
society. And that’s the focus of a number of the articles and columns
in the September/October issue of Life Learning, now on its way to
subscribers.
Gea Bassett – a 29-year-old unschooled mother of
a young child – describes how the time and space she was given as a
child became the path to self-reliant, open-ended thinking. And, she
reasons, that sort of thinking is the key to fixing this broken old
world’s social and environmental perspectives. Dan Grego – director
of a community organization that helps at-risk youth become productive
adults and responsible community members – comes at the problem from a
different perspective but ends up at the same place. Recognizing that
learning isn’t something one switches on and off at certain times or
in certain locations, he suggests that all schools be closed, at least
temporarily. Then, he says, “Without the crutch of the schools to lean
on, everyone in a community would have to reclaim his or her own
responsibility for educating the young.”
Homeschooling author and speaker David Albert makes
some suggestions about how families can do that in the column he writes
with Joyce Reed. Along the way, he describes the soul-destroyingly
ugliness of the schooling experience. He also describes the alternative,
which, of course, is based on our trust in children. David writes, “Our
children have within themselves, or so I am led to believe by my
experience of them, an inner yearning for the beautiful, a potential
wonderment and a delicious longing and love and trembling waiting to be
empowered on its quest.”
David and Dan Grego agree that this yearning is not
likely to be fulfilled in a school or a shopping mall, that we can’t
buy our way to a healthier, saner world; nor can we school our way to
it. But we can get there by creating the environment where happy,
self-reliant, fully engaged, truly well educated children can develop
the ability to heal the problems that previous generations of schooled
adults have created. I hope these three ways of making the same point
encourage you to believe in the beauty of the unschooling path.
Posted:
2007/09/05 9:15 AM
Learning from the Learners – September 2, 2007
The month I graduated from teachers’ college – June, 1969 –
Herbert Kohl’s book The Open Classroom (Random House, 1969) was
published. I read it that summer and perhaps it contributed to the
frustration I felt in my first (and last) few months as a classroom
teacher. In the book, Kohl advocates an organic, realistic and less
patriarchal approach to being a teacher in a public school – something
that I wasn’t able to envision, let
alone implement, so I resigned, never to teach school again. And the rest
of my educational advocacy career is, as they say, history. Kohl’s
output now numbers more than 40 books, including I Won’t Learn From
You (Milkweed Editions, 1991), in which he suggests that learning not to
learn is a difficult, intellectual activity that is a manifestation of
resistance to oppression and a sign of a survivor in a hostile
environment.
I’ve just finished his latest book, a memoir
called Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth (Bloomsbury,
2007). Honestly and humbly, Kohl describes how, late in a productive
life and searching for something new to engage in, he stumbled into a
Chinese painting class…where his fellow students were all young
Chinese children. He writes about studying alongside the children while
reflecting on his life. Painting took on a meditative quality and helped
him come to terms with waning energy and the cancellation of a beloved
university program. But more importantly to me, the supportive
environment and hands-on, noncompetitive learning process he experienced
in the painting classes led him to articulate things he’s danced
around in his long career as writer, educator and social justice
advocate. Kohl’s body of work is focused on helping teachers fit the
square peg of unstructured creative learning into the round hole of
school environments. Learning with children rather than teaching them
has given him a seemingly new perspective. “Children,” he writes,
“when unencumbered by adult demands and channeling educational
structures, are extraordinary watchers and learn through what they see
and experience.”
Posted:
2007/09/02 12:58 PM
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