Cliff Bar 2 Mile Challenge

Did you know that 40% of urban travel is 2 miles or less? Take the Cliff Bar 2 mile challenge and choose how you will help fight global warming http://www.2milechallenge.com/.

Critical Pedagogy & the Arts Committee Blog

We are very excited to present a new blog from the Critical Pedagogy & the Arts Committee. The blog full of great information, discussions from our monthly meetings, and many great resources. Please bookmark the website and check for updates. You can be involved in our critical pedagogy discussions by making comments on the posts and if you have resources to add or any other suggestions do not hesitate to contact us. http://critpedagogy.wordpress.com/

Thank you,

Dr. Aziza Braithwaite Bey
Professor Creative Arts & Learning
Lesley University
29 Everett St.
Camrbidge, MA 02138
617-349-8291

Ann Armbrecht's New Book Thin Places

Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home
By- Ann Armbrecht
December 10, 2008
7pm Harvard Bookstore

Thin Places is an eloquent meditation on what it means to move between cultures and how one might finally come home, a particular paradox in a culture that lacks deep ties to the natural world. During the 1990s, Ann Armbrecht, an American anthropologist, made several trips to northeastern Nepal to research how the Yamphu Rai acquired, farmed, and held onto their land, how they perceived their area's recent designation as a national park and conservation area, and whether—as she believed—they held a wisdom about living on the earth that the industrialized West had forgotten.

What Armbrecht found instead were men and women who shared her restlessness, people also driven by the feeling that there must be more to life than they could find in their village. "We each blamed our dissatisfaction on something in the world," she writes, "not something in ourselves or in the stories we told ourselves about that world. If only we lived elsewhere, then we would be at home."

Charting Armbrecht's travels in the mountains of Nepal and the United States and her disintegrating marriage back home, Thin Places is ultimately an exploration not of the sacred far-off but of the sacredness of places between—between the internal and external landscape, between the self and other, and between the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where you arrive but a way of being in place, wherever that place may be. Along the way Armbrecht explores the disconnections in our most intimate relationships, how they stem from the same disconnections that create our destruction of the land, and how one cannot be healed without attending to the other.

Ann Armbrecht is an anthropologist (Harvard, PhD 1995) and the author of Settlements of Hope: An Account of Tibetan Refugees in Nepal. She is currently co-producing a documentary, Numen: The Nature of Plants. She has taught at Dartmouth College and Harvard University and lives in Montpelier, Vermont with her husband and two children.

Visionaries Who Are Changing The World

Utne Reader named their 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing The World. Check out Ariel Luckey, who is a graduate of the Audubon Expedition Institute.

Cutting Your Carbon Footprint

The Boston Globe recently ran an article on how certain websites are helping people reduce their energy consumption. How much can you cut your carbon footprint? http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2008/11/websites_and_the_challenges_th.html

Foodies

Locavore- someone interested in eating local food that is not shipped long distances to the market. Slowies- those who are part of the Slow Food Movement interested in the culture of food and eating seasonal. Foodshed - the local sphere of land, people and businesses that provides your community with food. It is easy to walk through a grocery store unconsciously making food choices with little thought of where that food comes from. If there is truth in that we are what we eat perhaps we need to wake-up and pay more attention to what we are putting in our shopping carts. Several us in the discussion group this week were taken back and maybe a bit shocked by Michael’s Pollan’s article What’s Eating America http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/presence-jul06.html . It is hard to grasp that our military system pushed the industrialization of our food. Read Pollan’s article and let us know what you think. And, the next time you head to the grocery store and are aimlessly walking the isles think like a locavore, slowie or about your foodshead.

The Politics of Food

Check out Michael Pollan's recently piece Farmer In Chief http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all.

Ecological Footprint

I enjoyed talking about our ecological footprints this past week http://www.myfootprint.org/. Examining ecological footprints can bring up feelings of guilt. That acknowledged, it was a great tool for discussing our consumer and lifestyle habits. Several participants are already composting, recycling, and pretty aware of where their food comes from. Lifestyle changes aren't always easy. It felt good to acknowledge each others commitment to having a lesser impact on the Earth. We encourage others to look at their ecological footprint and think about how we can collectively reduce Lesley's impact. The next discussion October 29th is going to focus on food. Check out Mark Bittman's lecture What's Wrong With What We Eat. It is a good addition to the food discussion. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat.html.

What Is Education For?

Check out this piece by David Orr http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC27/Orr.htm.

Optimistic or Pessimistic

Five of us gathered together this week to begin the sustainability discussion group. The first articles from the Choices For Sustainability Living reader ignited good conversation. (The reader is available at the reserve desk of Ludke library.) James Howard Kunstler’s Making Other Arrangements impacted the group the most. The piece is relevant to what is happening in American presently with the economic recession and urgency to decrease our dependence on foreign oil. We encourage others at Lesley to ready Kunstler’s piece. Let us know what you think. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7/
Paige Manning

Websites

Here are a few interesting websites to check out:

• The Sustainability Report Card- rates colleges and universities on a variety of factors relating to environmental issues http://www.greenreportcard.org/
• National Wildlife Federation Campus Ecology- supplies a variety of resources for student activists www.nwf.org/campusecology
• American College and University President's Climate Commitment http://www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org/

Hope to see you on Oct 15th for Lesley's first in a series of sustainability discussions.

Participants should purchase the Choices For Sustainable Living reader from the Northwest Earth Institute ( http://www.nwei.org) . A copy of the reader will be available for reference at the Ludcke library. If you can’t make all seven meetings please join us even just for one. All can follow along on our blog as we share the insights, suggestions, and resources that come from our weekly discussion.

Meeting #1- A Call To Sustainability
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
12pm-1pm
University Hall 3-083

Meeting #2- Ecological Principles
Thursday, October 23, 2008
12pm-1pm
University Hall 3-083

Meeting #3- Sustainable Food
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
12pm-1pm
University Hall 3-083

Meeting #4- Sustainable Buying
Thursday, November 6, 2008
12pm-1pm
University Hall 3-083

Meeting #5- Sustainable Communities
Wednesday, November 12, 1008
12pm-1pm
University Hall 3-083

Meeting #6- Sustainable Businesses and Economy
Thursday, November 20, 2008
12pm-1pm
University Hall 3-083

Meeting #7- Visions of Sustainability
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
12pm-1pm
University Hall 3-090