Off Topic - Music Post

I've been asked to put up some new music I'm listening to, so here it is via a Grooveshark widget.

Citizens Make the Vision for their Communities

Nice video about people getting active to help their communities. The first section about Make the Road shares the stories of a few individuals working together to make sure that their neighbors have a better, more positive life in the neighborhood where they live. The video is sponsored by Bank of America as part of their Citizen Active series - getting citizens involved in their communities to work for positive change.

Earth Hour brings 100 countries together

Earth Hour is coming up in a few weeks - this year it's on March 27th at 8:30 PM wherever you are. The citizens from 100 participating countries voluntarily turn off their lights for 60-minutes in the world's largest collective event as a symbol that we are ready for action on climate change. The video below explains the event - pretty impressive to see the lights go out around the world, especially the spotlights on the sphinx and pyramids in Egypt.

Personalized Energy Production that Mimics Nature

Anyone working in renewable energy production, international development, or climate change related fields should know the name and ideas of Dan Nocera. Dr. Nocera was a guest lecturer in a course I took last fall, and is possibly one of the sharpest, most intelligent speakers I've ever seen. In his lab at MIT, he's developing a household-sized energy system that collects solar energy, uses the energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is then used as fuel for a hydrogen fuel cell battery. And the battery then produces clean water as its byproduct.

The other cool idea that Nocera addresses is that if you want to take a large, centralized system and make it decentralized (in this case electricity), you can't just take the same machine or method and make it smaller, because the cost will go way up. Instead, you have to redesign the system from scratch with the perspective of making something small and inexepensive.

This is the guy who tells people like Putin and T-Boone Pickins when their numbers are wrong - check it.

Dan Nocera: Personalized Energy from PopTech on Vimeo.

What is the soul of a community?

What do we love most about our communities? Gallup, in collaboration with the Knight Foundation surveyed almost 28,000 Americans to pinpoint what makes a community a great place to live. So what are the top three?

1. Openness
2. Social Offerings
3. Aesthetics


Aesthetics is in the top three! This is huge. The first two speak to the fact that humans are naturally social. Being part of a group has been good to us for thousands of years, and we still look for those connections today. But the third (third!) on the list is about looks -- we love living in a place that looks good. This reaffirms the idea that we are visual creatures; our daily lives are impacted by how things look around us. We make value decisions based on attractive settings, including both natural beauty (mountains, ocean, rivers) and enhanced beauty (art, gardens, trees, parks, architecture).

Philadelphia realized this in the mid 80's and started the Philadelphia Mural Arts Project. While the city wasn't able to change their buildings and infrastructure overnight, they decided to invest significantly to have local artists paint murals around the city - a way of improving local aesthetics and reflecting the community's vision for the future. Now they give city-wide tours of their program, creating a tourist draw, and local jobs. The Village for Arts and Humanities in north Philadelphia also recognized the individual's need to be tied to the aesthetics of their neighborhood through murals and green spaces. There are thousands of examples of this throughout the U.S. but this recent research launches aesthetics onto a new level of importance for successful communities. If we want to make communities where people want to live, then encouraging openness, social offerings, and great aesthetics puts us on that path.




A more detailed explanation of the these findings can be found on the Soul of the Community website and blog.

Armed with Art, Teens Confront Violence

Photo from Peace in Focus flickr site

Peace in Focus works with youth to teach leadership skills and to express their visions of peace and non-violence via photography. Or in their words "Grassroots Peace Photojournalism." The organization works with youth artists in Boston, Birundi, and Liberia to teach photography as a vehicle to share their experiences and perspectives with the rest of the world.

An exhibit of the photos is up at the Harriet Tubman house in Boston & they held the opening event last night, complete with performances, beautiful photographs, and a wonderful community of individuals to support the teens. I was really impressed by the program's ability to train young photographers - it was clear from the quality & composition of the photographs that the programming covers technique, storytelling, and leadership responsiblity. The teens at the event were energetic, passionate, articulate and inspirational, and it was so refreshing to see positive work happening at the local & international level. Great event!

Urbanites "Go Native," Grow Community

Interesting threads on the interwebs:

The Helpsters are Coming! Er, maybe. Interesting if cynical article about hipsters-turn helpsters getting involved in their communities. Shout out to seed bombs noted. Can someone please find them a better name? Article via Huffington Post "Impact"


FEAST - recurring community dinner in Bklyn to fund democratically selected community art projects. Nice.

Seed Bombs (A How-To)
photo by Gina Ferazzi, LA Times

Teaching our Kids about Food & Gardening

Lovely article by Bonnie Hulkower supporting the importance of school gardens for childhood development. This article refutes some contentious points made by a columnist in The Atlantic magazine who thinks that school gardens prohibit minority students from succeeding academically and offends Latino students by involving them in the denigrating labor of growing food (the horror!). In her article, Hulkower makes a good point in asking for some statistical evidence to support such claims. I'd hardly consider growing and cultivating food to be denigrating to my nature, but rather one of the most satisfying, lesson-filled, and amazing activities I've attempted. Why would that be different for a low-income student? Oh wait, I was one. At the most basic level, a school garden teaches urban students about the cyclical patterns of nature, and shows them the tangible vegetables of their labor. The success of a garden is the direct result of effort, reliability, and consistency, and the results are something you can hold and taste, more than just a number score or a letter on a piece of paper. Of course the garden should be integrated into the curriculum, but it is precisely complex systems like growing plants that allow for students to demonstrate analysis and synthesis -- to apply their knowledge across disciplines to solve problems that they haven't seen before, to deal with success and failure, to experience surprises and to be inventive.

I'd also like to mention that it was the farm kids of Pennsylvania who had the best work ethic of any other kids I had met growing up. The last time I checked, farming was a difficult, respectable, and honorable occupation in the U.S. A respect for the effort, patience, and responsibility of growing food is something we could all use more of, and you build respect for growing food through experience.

Worldchanging says Move it or Lose It!

Allex Steffen, editor of Worldchanging.org writes about how it's time to bust a move on changing the U.S.'s dark energy lifestyle. His point is that we can't just keep the same U.S. lifestyle, switch out a few parts, and carry on our way, but that we need to reinvent our lives and our sense of culture in a thoughtful and speedy manner. He also points out that suburbia is bad news bears for climate change emissions, that the way you live, and where you live matters!

Along the same lines, check out the article and sweet graph about how the good life includes lots of walking, strolling, running, biking, people watching, etc. (it's easier to see if you click on the article link right down there vv)

A Message from Copenhagen: Climate Plan Must Include Walkable Urbanism

Image: Jonathan Rose Companies via Richard Layman.

Creative Capital: Kickstart Good Ideas with $$

screenshot of kickstarter.com

Kickstarter.com combines two simple ideas for a fantastic website: 1) Creative projects need exposure for funding, and 2) We like getting something in return for giving our money away. So "creative and ambitious" projects with a specific funding goal -- say $5,000 -- pitch their project to you, and tell you what you'll get in return for different levels of funding. The fun, creative, and entrepreneurial feeling of the site makes you want to jump in and support your local artist, organization, inventor, researcher, or ethical butcher (he's cool!). But you can only donate to your favorite project for a limited time, and it's all or nothing -- if they don't meet their funding goal, all of the pledges are canceled and it's back to square one. Kinda like Kiva for art and innovation.... Go to their site to check it out!

Martin Luther King Day!

Dr. King reflected this amazing vision of America that continues to inspire our vision of the future. There is something about the story of possibility that he brought to our national dialogue, the action, commitment, intelligence, patience, and perseverance in his character that illuminated our collective conscience. If you haven't read his book "Why We Can't Wait" to understand the United States of your parents and grandparents, it's worth a look.

I wonder who will be the Dr. King of our generation? I wonder what Dr. King would be talking about if he were still alive today?

Thank you Dr. King. I thank the Shuttlesworth family, Minniejean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Carlotta Walls, Ernest Green, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas. And I thank the thousands of individual Americans who stood with you at a time when they didn't know for certain if their participation would matter, but became ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things.

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

James Knight Smith - Abstract Photography

James Knight-Smith, My Place 2009

Featured in Visuramagazine.com, Issue 6. Just absolutely stunning, captivating images.

Transit As A Catalyst For Community | Living Climate Change

Transit As A Catalyst For Community | Living Climate Change

Are Creatives Nervous About Creativity?

An interesting blog article by Grant McCracken titled "Creativity's Brief Moment in the Sun" suggests that we are facing the sunset of a creative era. He is concerned that the supply of professional "creatives" is growing so fast that soon no one will want to pay for creative work anymore, because companies will outsource creative work to online artistic hopefuls willing to work for free in exchange for "exposure." This does not seem like a new predicament in the art world.

To me, the growth of creative professionals is a natural progression from the essay, Art Alienated, which argued against the artificial commodification and separation of art from daily life. I hope that we are leaving a time where we depend on an elite to finance and frame our experience with the creative arts. McCracken's article ponders what designers and other professional creative types are supposed to do now that "everybody" is getting more creative. He worries that an oversaturation of dilettante creatives will dilute the market and make it even harder for professional creatives to pay for their health insurance. I say, let's celebrate! Isn't increased awareness and inclusion of creativity in U.S. culture something that we're aiming for? Now that it's happening, let's encourage it -- we have a long way to go before the average U.S. citizen has too much creativity in his daily life.

When we talk about art being expensive and valuable, remember that it's unlikely that the artist herself received worldly comfort in the process of sharing her vision and skill with the world. The more likely story is that the artist traded his or her artworks for doctor's visits and rent, or was perhaps lucky enough to support an art career on the income of a spouse or inheritance. To a certain extent, the production of such fine art is the creation of an artificially scarce supply of "creative products" that further ensure scarcity after the artist's death. These scarce artworks ultimately become a currency by which capital can be traded among a particular group of economic elite. So protecting who counts as an "artist" doesn't solve this payment problem either.

I think it would be great to see designers and artists 1) employed as the resident creative type, or as McCracken has crafted it, the "Chief Culture Officer," to consult in the "non-art" strategic vision of a company to bring creativity and, 2) called on to facilitate and provide a framework by which citizens (not consumers) can experience and develop their own creative side. I imagine that McCracken's book covers the first topic, but I'm interested to see if it also addresses this second point. That is, let's not accept the status quo -- let's move designers, artists, musicians, etc. into a new role, where they craft frameworks and experiental installations, websites, environments, etc. where non-artists can develop and strengthen their own creative practice.

2010: Climbing Mountains

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. - Edmund Hillary

All of the other blogs I read included a reflection about the New Year, so I'm feeling some blog pressure to do the same before I continue adding my mixed & spontaneous posts. I celebrated the New Year with friends in Boston & then traveled with the bf to Vermont to hike my first mountain in the snow. This hike (The Second 40th Annual Harvey S. Ramshackle Assault on Mt. Abe) has been happening at the beginning of every year for two generations and is no afternoon stroll. It was a an inspiring and positive experience to start off the year.

In addition to some personal resolutions for this exciting new decade (2010 yeah!), I'm also writing something about a New Cultural Resolution for the next decade, but in the meantime, I really want to keep posting.

So happy new year! If you're still looking for a resolution or want to add another one, check out 5 Green Resolutions for the New Year from Matt McDermott at Planet Green. And here's to the mountains we will each climb in 2010!


No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. - Buddah