The Journal Safari
This is personal. A journal by definition creates an immediacy between author and experience that cannot be shoe-horned into a multiple-guess structure filled with PSYCHO-metric error. Every week you are expected to respond to readings listed on the EcoText page. The readings include bookstore texts, photocopied classic texts, Intersections essays published in CentralMania.com, and specific sections on my Intersections web site.

You can write or type your responses (typed preferred). If you write please be sure that your writing can be deciphered by more than the sharpest observatory lenses. If you type it, try not to use freaky fonts that look like calligraphic hallucinations. The journal is worth 35 percent of the final grade. If you are relentlessly organized about this, do the readings faithfully, respond specifically, make connections endlessly, intersect infinitely, this experience will really pump up that first semester GPA. A great journal will illustrate concretely that you have interacted eloquently with the readings. And it's on your own time, in your own space, without the pressure of knowing everything for 50 minutes on a Tuesday, midterm week.

So read the weekly assignment listed on the EcoText web page. Respond to each reading by focusing on concepts, ideas, quotations that you think are significant. Respond personally too. Personal examples, experiences, attitudes should intersect with the readings. Otherwise this is just high school and we are just dancing the academic funk. And it's disco... No funky disco!

Learner Observer Interpreter Citizen Consumer

1ST 10,080 Liberating Odyssey Minutes Minus 2880 Minutes"
Read: Aug. 24-29
"Mission and Goals, " in Intersections 2004 3-7.
“Only Connect: The Goals of a Liberal Arts (Liberating Arts) Education,” by William Cronon in Intersections 2004 9-13.

"Thoreau and Concord," by Robert Richardson 12-24. (handout)

"Walden," by Richard Schneider 92-106. (handout)

From Walden- "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," by Henry David Thoreau in Intersections 2004 133-142.

"The World is Places," by Gary Snyder in Intersections 2004 57-58.

Sam Cady
Cronon's Top Ten List: Qualities of a Liberal Arts Education:
It takes a whole community to raise a well-rounded person...

Walt Cannon
"Wild Geese, a place at the table, and an open hand
Announcing your place in a conversation about the liberating arts...the Intersections Convocation..."

Read these three quotations:

The Future of Life
Edward O. Wilson
"The race is now on between the techno-scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. We are inside a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption. If the race is won, humanity can emerge in a far better condition. than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life intact."

Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
"There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings."

Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of our Environmental Future
Mark Hertsgaard
"If poverty is the biggest environmental challenge of our time, however, wealth is the biggest environmental burden. The consumption patterns of the nearly one billion people who live in the affluent world of Europe, North America, and other industrialized countries cause much more environmental damage-more greenhouse gas emissions, more forest cutting, more soil, air, and water pollution-that the strivings of the impoverished human majority. Measured by population, Chinese outnumber Americans nearly five to one. Yet the United States dwarfs China's total environmental impact because Americans consume 53 times as many goods and services per capita."

2nd 10,080 Cast Away & Thoreau Minutes 
Read: Aug. 30-Sept. 5
Cast Away Film Reviews (handout)

 "Seeing," by Annie Dillard From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in Intersections 2004 39-47.

"Neighbor Rosicky," by Willa Cather in Intersections 2004 17-31.

"Seeing Things," by Rebecca Solnit in Intersections 2004 61-62.

Stephen Newman
Henry David Thoreau's Guide to Regression:
Intersections Beyond Walden Pond and a South Seas Island-Fed Ex Keeps Ticking, Ticking, Ticking...

Val Miller
Nature vs. Moocher: The Global Impact on the Human Environment-
So What if the Air, The Water, The Soil Get Contaminated, Polluted, Wiped Out by Ignorance, Greed, and Self Interest... It's Not MY Major, It Doesn't Affect Me: Confronting the Clueless

"I am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. Most people are now fed, clothed, and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility."
-Wendell Berry, In Distrust of Movements Orion

The Anti-Life
Listen to the campus late at night. Conan gaggles with a midnight joke. Video games explode and rip while conversations with a late night pizza and pop buzz with "I can't believe we have to take this Intersections course. Gee whiz, I just don't get it! Why do we get blamed! None of this will ever affect me!"

Marty Feeney
Talk of the Campus: Conversations with Lucy and Henry David Thoreau
A Concord Jam with a Peanut Butter Chaser...
"I was melting this summer. Each day more and more of me escaped into the atmosphere. Vapor became me.

My pants went swimming where my waist once belly-flopped over a belt. I went to a family graduation and 80-year-old Lucy said, "Where's the rest of your face?"

I said, "Lucy, it's hiding in a cloud over Kentucky."

Then I went to Walden Pond. Surprised because I could not find some Disco-Mania-Fast-Food-screeching-overdeveloped-grub-money-schemers trying to crock a buck out of transcendental sight-seekers."

3rd 10,080  Crazy Jon Chenette Minutes
Read: Sept. 6-12
"Broken Ground," by Jon Chenette in Intersections 2004 32-36.

"The Ledge," by Michael Collier in Intersections 2004  37-38.

Waste Management, The Ecological Footprint, Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island
The Sorcerer's Apprentice, The Corporate Cosmology Elixirs of Death, Triumph of Death
Found on the Compost page of this web site.
Compost Page

The Ecological Footprint
"The ecological footprint -the average amount of productive land and shallow sea appropriated by each person in bits and pieces from around the world for food, water, housing, energy, transportation, commerce, and waste absorption-is about one hectare (2.5 acres) in developing nations but about 9.6 hectare (24 acres) in the United States.

The footprint for the total human population is 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres). For every persson in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths. WE have driven atmospheric carbon dioxide to the highest levels in at least 200, 000 years, unbalanced the nitrogen cycle, and contributed to global warming that will ultimately be bad news everywhere."
E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life

Chelsea Sandvik
"Jon Chenette's 'Deformed Ending' Compositions: Spending an Hour With Strange Mixtures of Music and Moo...  Agri-Culture Symphony, a Harvest of Pleasure"

Chelsey Landzky
"The Chenette Convocation: Sound-tracking Farm and Prairie-
Nature As a Way of Redefining Time and Its Swift Passage"

Leanne Townsend
"Artistic Representations: Literary, Musical and Art Gallery Works As Rhetorical Visions:
Harriet Beech"

4th 10,080 Seeing With Annie Dillard Minutes
Read: Sept. 13-19
"No Nature: New and Selected Poems," by Gary Snyder  Intersections 2004 59-60.

"The Sound of Migration," by Sandra Steingraber in Intersections 2004 63-68.

"My Heart Has Reopened to You: The Place Where I Was Born," by Alice Walker in Intersections 2004 49-50.

Read Again:  "Seeing," by Annie Dillard From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in Intersections 2004 39-47.

Mark Hertsgaard
"To the Nuclear Lighthouse," in Earth Odyssey  119-155.  (handout)                              

Student Research Papers
"What Have We Learned After 17 Years From TMI and 10 Years From Chernobyl Accidents: Implications for future Chernobyls" 

Read Patra Shovityakool and Seth Weintraub.
Look at sources.   

5th  FlukeMan Gross Out 10,080 Minutes
Read: Sept. 20-26
Jacques Cousteau web site

Diving into the Unknown 
"Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997) opened up more of the Earth's surface to human endeavor than any other explorer in history. That's a big statement. But the ocean, covering more than three-fifths of the Earth surface, is a big place. Through his books, films, and undersea explorations, the French explorer, inventor, photographer, and filmmaker brought the oceans and all their life into the world's living rooms. He didn't merely go on expeditions; his life was an expedition."
-National Geographic

Brande Hulshizer
Is it a Fluke? Maybe not in Palo, Iowa
Living Near a Nuclear Power Plant in the 21st Century...

Fluke of Nausea
"Yuck, it's so disgusting and disturbing.

The translucent, manlike, conglomeration floats in the tank as the audience looks in suspense at the "flukeman".

Its mouth looked stretched and large which hide the big fang-like teeth. The fangs served to attack and injure its next victims: victims that would inherit a piece of him-the fluke worm.

I have seen the X-Files before, but the shows that I have seen have never been so graphic, disturbing, and related so closely to real life."

Claudia Cauchon
"The Host" is a classic Monster of the Week (MOTW) episode where we are introduced to one of the most memorable MOTW, Flukeman. Along with Flukeman the episode continues with a Scully and Mulder separated theme
and we are introduced to Mr. X. Combine a great MOTW and a bit of the mythology arc and it equals a great episode. When the X-Files is really good this is the kind of tense creepy episode we get.

Sam Cady
Horrible Fears About "Flukes of Nature"
The X-Files, A Giant Worm, the Chernobyl Disaster, and Consequences of the Nuclear Age...
"Will the next nuclear disaster bring about a new species of mutants? Will flukeman rise out of the glowing muck and raise a horrible battle cry to his atomic brothers and destroy us for giving him life? I am no scientist and do not know if the ideas posed in the X-Files about genetic mutation can occur.

But I also know that science is incomplete and there are things that cannot be known or predicted.

Which brings a sense of fear in me that though the radiation kills, it might have the power to breed life. What if a fetus was given a precise amount of radiation at precisely the right time in it's growth to retard or enhance it's growth? Could it bring about a strange creature much like flukeman? While the incidents at Mayak are long over, the radiation remains.

And depending on the half-life of the radioactive substances, will probably remain for hundreds of years."

Jaime Schimelfenig
Who Will Be Left to Fight for the Dying?
Earth Odyssey and The X-Files Track Down Nuclear Nihilism: Morality or Obedience?

The Chelyabinsk Vanishing Act...
"In To the Nuclear Lighthouse, Mark Hertsgaard deals with nuclear explosions, factories, and radiation problems. What happened in Chelyabinsk was compared to what happened at Chernobyl.

It's basically the same story, only Chernobyl got more attention and Chelyabinsk didn't get any. Actually, quite the opposite happened. Nothing was said about Chelyabinsk because it was top secret, even though the results were much more devastating.

Because everything was top secret, the people in the town weren't even told about what happened. They just knew there were now changes. The water turns black, the crops and livestock are failing, and people are getting sick more."

Adam Christian
The Silent Killer: Creating Madness and Killing Millions
Nuclear Power, the Flukeman Legacy and the Future of Life...

A Planetary Narrative of Doom
"In the years following World War II, the race for nuclear arms superiority was in full swing between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.

Scientists worked around the clock to research, create, test, and manufacture weapons that would give their country the upper hand in nuclear technology.

The military wasn't the only group interested in this new technology though, because the civilian world was always looking for a cheaper and more efficient way to produce electricity.

This new technology was so rapidly evolving that very few people paid any attention to the negative side effects of it, especially the potential harm that it posed to the environment and society at large.

After reading the fourth chapter of Earth Odyssey called "To the Nuclear Lighthouse" my eyes were opened to a whole new perspective on the use of nuclear technology."

6th 10,080 Scary Woodsy Detour Minutes
Read: Sept. 27-Oct. 3
"The Memory Place," by Barbara Kingsolver in Intersections 2004 48-55.

"Honor the Earth: Our Native American Legacy," by Winona LaDuke in Intersections 2004 97-100.

"Transfiguration," by Annie Dillard in Intersections 2004 81-82.

Claudia Cauchon
Woodsy Fear and Loathing
"You would think by now Scully would know better than to follow Mulder into the woods. She gets a rifle butt in the face in the pilot episode, she almost gets killed by a bunch of killer bugs in 'Darkness
Falls,' she almost gets killed by some volcano spurs in 'Firewalker,' Queequeq gets killed in the woods of Georgia in 'Quagmire' and now in 'Detour' she almost gets killed by a 450-year-old Treeman (I don't know what else to call them. Dirtmen? Mothmen? Tickmen?). It isn't any wonder that Scully didn't seem too happy throughout the episode with the thought of another trek into the woods with Mulder. 'Detour' is one of those X-Files episodes where Scully and Mulder go out and chase a monster and one of them gets beat up from said monster then in the end they are the only ones left alive, and it almost appears as if they killed the monster.  Remind me to never go into the woods with Scully and Mulder."

Autumn Tysko
Wood Chuck Chuck...
"Thank God for the Mulder/Scully 'Outward Bound' program  because the red-eyed moth/mud/tree boys of Ponce de Leon who  seemed like a cross between 'Predator' and the XF novel 'Goblins' didn't do a whole lot for me. I'm glad to see the monster of  the week back. I'll be even more glad when there is at least a  scary monster instead of a necessary evil."

Amy Lang
Monster Intersection
"I am a fan of Stephen King. His work has always scared and entertained me. I remember reading a short story of his titled 'The Boogey Man.'  It featured well… the boogeyman. This scary entity would hide in people’s closets, waiting to pounce on them and do lord knows what to their bodies. Since then, I have never been able to sleep if my closet door is open, even a crack. My sister told me that one time, I arose from a dream and closed the closet door near my bed, all without waking. (Apparently, even in my dreams, I was scared by a closet door ajar. ) I always check the status of the doors before I get into bed. Of course, I can’t get out of bed to close the closet door if I forget, because whatever is inside there, surely will get me."

Tom Carissimi
Conversation in the Woods
"David Duchovny was believable as the suddenly invigorated Mulder. He must have been practicing with Gillian Anderson, because his facial expressions in 'Detour' were as demonstrative as hers usually are. I thought DD did a nice job playing injured after the attack, and he delivered his one-liners deftly. Even during the Conversation in the Woods, he seemed natural while rebuffing Scully's attempt at serious, meaningful conversation about the meaning of life and death. Mulder may be a smart man, but he's still clueless when it comes to anything more than a deep, abiding respect for and trust in his partner. Gillian Anderson was just as adept at displaying her emotions without speaking. Her parting glance at Mulder as he slipped out the door was priceless, and she displayed a genuine terror after Michele disappeared in the woods."

7th 10,080 Blade Runner Apocalypse Minutes
Read: Oct. 4-10
"Nowhere to Hide: The Global Spread of High-Risk Synthetic Chemicals," by Jennifer Mitchell in Intersections 2004 188-196.

"Elixirs of Death," by Rachel Carson-Silent Spring in Intersections 2004 149-159.

"A Silver-Paper Unicorn," by Rebecca Warner 178-184. (handout)

"Nature's Last Stand," by E. O. Wilson in Intersections 2004 244-261.

Sam Cady
Blade Runner: And You Thought Cleveland was Hell on Earth
Jim Morrison and The Doors Crank the Fires of Industry and the Toxic L.A. Sky

Los Angeles and L.A. Woman...
"The film Blade Runner takes place in the future where the world is a polluted wasteland.
"The setting is Los Angeles which is portrayed as an "urban hell".

The first scene opens with a panoramic of the city aglow with artificial lights and fiery explosions from industrial smokestacks.

There is never any sunlight in this place for the smog has formed a blanket which covers the sky and devours any sunlight that tries to pass through it.

As a consequence the city is always in a state of perpetual darkness. The viewers are never shown a clock or any semblance of time which leads me to believe that these people no longer live by clocks or time for there is no longer day, just horrible oblivious night.

It reminds me of the classic Doors' song L.A. Woman which was written about Los Angeles in the late 1960's. Jim Morrison's lyrics are a kind of strange prelude into the Los Angeles of Blade Runner."

8th 10,080 Replicant Dream Minutes 
Read: Oct. 11-17
"The Next Industrial Revolution," by Ray Anderson in Intersections 2004 265-272.

"A Road Map for Natural Capitalism," by Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, and Anna Lappe in Intersections 2004 325-336.

"The Pleasures of Eating," by Wendell Berry in Intersections 2004  273-278.

"Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time," by Paul Rogat Loeb in Intersections 2004 175-178.

Ray Anderson

Ray Anderson

Ray Anderson
“If we’re successful, we’ll spend the rest of our days harvesting yester year’s carpets and other petro-chemically derived products, and recycling them into new materials; and converting sunlight into energy; with zero scrap going to the landfill and zero emissions into the ecosystem. And we’ll be doing well … very well … by doing good. That’s the vision.”

Ray Anderson
"Indeed, Anderson's success has been marked by a kind of galloping enviro-gluttony. He is the 63-year-old founder and CEO of Interface Inc., an Atlanta-based company with 7,300 employees. Its business: turning petrochemicals into textiles. In 26 factories on four continents, Anderson's looms produce a million pounds of synthetic carpet and fabric every day - along with more than seven tons of air pollutants every year.

Ray Anderson is a certified captain of industrial capitalism. He is also becoming one of the nation's leading environmentalists, a radical who makes the folks from Greenpeace look timid."
-Charles Fishman

Journal Due Tuesday, Oct. 12 in my office 216 Jordan Hall by 5 p.m.

9th 10,080  E Crime Scene Investigator (ECSI) Minutes 
Read: Oct. 18-24
"Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle," by Nicholas Ashford et al. in Intersections 2004
147.

"Perils of Precaution," by Henry Miller and Gregory Conko in Intersections 2004 180-187.

"What Constitutes Sound Science?" by Frederick Kirschenmann in Intersections 2004 165-174.

"Detecting Errors in Environmental and Safety Studies," by Aaron Wildavsky and Robert Owen Rye in Intersections 2004  231-242.

"How to Write an Argument," by Gerald Graff in Intersections 2004 371.

10th 10,080 Geisler Matrix Research Sojourn Minutes
Read: Oct. 25-31
"Animals," by Sandra Steingraber in Intersections 2004 213-230.

Re-read: "Elixirs of Death," by Rachel Carson in Intersections 2004 149-159.

Rachel Carson
Read sections on this web page and follow links.

Wendy Jewell Rachel Carson Web Site
"The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind---that, and anger at the senseless brutish things that were being done. I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could---if I didn't at least try I could never be happy again in nature. But now I can believe I have at least helped a little "-
 -Rachel Carson, letter to a friend.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was a scientist, writer, naturalist and, many say, the mother of the environmental movement. Inspired by an outstanding biology teacher at Pennsylvania College for Women (later Chatham College), Rachel switched her major from English to Biology. While studying at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, she fell in love with the sea. By the age of 28 she was writing science radio scripts for the Bureau of Fisheries, which in 1936 led to a full-time job as a junior aquatic biologist. To make ends meet Rachel wrote feature articles on marine zoology for the "Baltimore Sun." Carson's lyrical style made the scientific facts she penned more accessible. Her eloquent prose led to the publication of her first and favorite book in 1941, Under the Sea-Wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life. By 1949 she had become Chief Editor of Publications in what would become the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

11th 10,080 Poison Toxication Minutes
Read: Nov. 1-7
Film Packet Readings

Re-read: "Nowhere to Hide: The Global Spread of High-Risk Synthetic Chemicals," by Jennifer Mitchell in Intersections 2004 188-196.

"Dude Over Troubled Water," by John Galvin in Intersections 2004 160-164.

Water Rights: The State, the Market, and the Community," by Vandana Shiva in Intersections 2004  204-212.

"Elegy for the Giant Torttoises," by Margaret Atwood in Intersections 2004 148.

Re-read: "Nature's Last Stand," by E. O. Wilson in Intersections 2004 244-261.

Stephen Newman
What is in Your Drinking Water?
Erin Brockovich Communicates More Than All the Environmental Tracts Ever Written and Shoved Down Our Throats...

The Quiet Rhetorical Charge
"Erin Brockovich is not your typical environmental awareness movie. The movie barely touches on the effects of the waste from Pacific Gas & Electric on the environment.

Most of the movie is spent telling the stories of a couple of families who were affected the most by the waste.

This was a good approach for the movie. Most people do not want to be beaten over the head about environmental issues when they go to a movie.

They do not want to hear from a bunch of radicals ranting about pollution and how everything that we do is somehow ruining the environment. There is enough of that in the news."

12th 10,080 Young Chad Pregracke Minutes
Read: Nov. 8-14
Chad Pregracke
"In 1998, he founded Living Lands & Waters, the not-for-profit environmental organization based in East Moline, Illinois. Today, there are ten paid staff members and a fleet of several barges and workboats. Thousands of volunteers have cooperated to help with the community cleanups, Riverbottom Forest Restoration and Adopt-a-Mississippi River Mile programs. Chad's project has been filmed by many of the major networks and featured in numerous national and international magazines. In December of 2001, Biography magazine selected Chad as one of the "Top Ten Future Classics in America” along with Rory Kennedy, Julia Roberts, Tiger Woods and others."

Cleaning up the Mississippi

Speaker Series

Changing Course: One Man and a Wheel Barrel
"PULLING AN OVERSIZED john boat away from the shore, Pregracke cracks the throttle of the 90-horsepower Honda outboard motor. The motor, just as the boat, is donated. For four years in a row, Pregracke is cruising along the river shorelines and islands of the Mississippi. He’s looking for trash, garbage that people have dumped in the river or that flood waters have carried away. When he spots a barrel, an old tire, or just debris, he pulls up to shore. He tears a few large donated plastic bags from a roll and starts picking up trash. He finds aerosol cans, plastic bottles, light bulbs, Styrofoam® - lots of Styrofoam® - cans of pesticides, jugs of anti-freeze. You you name it and Pregracke bags it up and throws it into the boat."
-Lester Graham

"The Irresistible Automobile," by Mark Hertsgaard in Intersections 2004 279-300.

Vandana Shiva Interview
In Motion Magazine: You made the statement in your book on patents that there’s always a connection between ecology and equity. Can you talk about that?

Vandana Shiva: Ecology is about interactions in the natural world, sustainability of resources. Whether you look at water, you look at biodiversity, you look at anything, conservation happens. Environmental sustainability takes place when people have a stake and a share in the rewards of the conserved resource. If people have the ability to drink water from a well, and look after that well, and will suffer the consequences of contamination, they will not contaminate that well. People who pollute a well or a river are the ones who don’t have to drink from it.

Similarly, when it comes to monopolies on intellectual property, conservation is what is sacrificed. It’s the small peasants of the world who have conserved biodiversity. If they have to continue conserving biodiversity, they need to have their rights defended. They need to be able to know that when they plant basmati rice it will be their reward to harvest that basmati. They will not be treated as pieces of RiceTec property. And they need to have a market for their produce.

Intellectual property destabilizes both, and in fact, starts to become an incentive for destruction of biodiversity by pressures of the industry for monocultures, on the one hand, but also by not giving people a chance to protect the resources from which they make a living because they are no more their resources.

That is why ecology goes hand-in-hand with equity.

Biography
"Born on November 5, 1952 in the verdant valley of Dehradun, to a father who was the conservator of Forests and a farmer mother with a deep love for nature, Vandana Shiva received her first lessons on environment protection in the lap of Himalayas. A student of St Mary’s School in Nainital and later of Convent of Jesus and Mary, Dehradun, Vandana Shiva had always aspired to be a scientist since childhood. But particle physics soon raised questions in her mind regarding its Impact on Life and the environment. And thus began Vandana Shiva’s passionate affair with the environment.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is trained as a Physicist and did her Ph.D. on the subject “Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory” from the University of Western Ontario. She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalor."

Battling Coca Cola
"Two years ago, adivasi women in a small hamlet, Plachimada, in Palghat, Kerala started a movement against Coca-Cola. Today, the Coca-Cola plant in Plachimada has been shut down. The victory of the Plachimada movement is major step in reversing corporate hijack of our precious water resources. It provides both inspiration and lessons for building water democracy in other parts of India and in the rest of the world.

The Coca-Cola plant in Plachimada was commissioned in March 2000 to produce 1,224,000 bottles of Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Limca, Thums up, Kinley Soda, Maaza. The Panchayat was issued a conditional license for installing a motor for drawing water. However the company started to illegally extract millions of liters of clean water from more than 6 bore wells installed by it using electric pumps in order to manufacture millions of bottles of soft drink."
-Vandana Shiva

13th 10,080 David Attenborough Mammal Mania Minutes
Read: Nov. 15-22
David Attenborough
Would he have liked to have been someone like Darwin and come back today? "Oh yes, I think so. I mean, one is living an amazingly privileged life. It's only been the last twenty or so years that one could have possibly gone to all the places you and I go to. Very few people in the history of biology could have seen as much of the actual things that I have and the sad thing is that I do so little with it. I'm so busy gobbling it up that I don't sort of digest it.

"But one of the great things, far more exciting than going to the moon, would to have been not Darwin, but Captain Cook. On his first and second voyage, he went round the Pacific and went to Tahiti where he saw a new brand of humanity, and a completely new set of animals and plants. That must have been mind-blowing. The reverse side of the coin in having this extraordinary ability to go anywhere, is that no-one anywhere is remote any more. I just caught the end of it in the mid-fifties. When I was right in the middle of Borneo, you thought you were in a different world. There was no radio, no ways of communicating - but it was nothing compared to what Cook did. I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored." 

Short Biography

Zoo Quest
David Attenborough joined the BBC's fledgling television service in 1952, fronting Zoo Quest, the breakthrough wildlife series that established the international reputation of the BBC Natural History Unit at Bristol. The first of these, Zoo Quest for a Dragon, established Attenborough as an intuitive performer, so prepossessed by his fascination with the subject at hand and unconcerned for his own dignity in front of the camera that he seemed to sweat integrity. A sense of daring has always surrounded him with a glamorous aura: even in this early outing, the massive Komodo Dragon, object of the quest through Borneo, at least looked as ferocious as its name portends, and Attenborough's presence seemed to prove not only the reality and size of his specimens, but a kind of guarantee that we too were part of this far-flung scientific endeavor, the last credible adventure in the period which witnessed the demise of the British Empire.

"Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the Nature Company," by Jennifer Price in Intersections 2004 337-348.

14th 10,080 ECrime SI Solutions And Your Presentation Minutes
Read: Nov. 29-Dec. 5

This is E. O. Wilson Week too. Spend some time reading the interviews. listening to the interviews. Loved the ants interview. Then type out some impressions of Mr. Wilson and his message. Fascinating guy.

The Sanity Clause
"Humans, the Harvard University entomologist Edward O. Wilson has observed, have an innate--or at least extremely ancient--connection to the natural world, and our continued divorce from it has led to the loss of not only 'a vast intellectual legacy born of intimacy' with nature, but also our very sanity. In The Diversity of Life, Wilson takes a sweeping view of our planet's natural richness, remarking on what on the surface seems a paradox: 'almost all the species that ever lived are extinct, and yet more are alive today than at any time in the past.'"
-Gregory McNamee

E. O. Wilson Interview 
on the Paula Gordon Show

Lecture and Slide Presentation

Michael Novacek Profile


Ode To  Ants Interview

John Glassie Salon.com Interview
Future of life Interview

Wave of Extinction

Buy All the Land!

15th 10,080 The Who And Your Presentation Minutes
Read: Dec. 6-12
"Busman's Holiday," by Bill McKibben in Intersections 2004 301-306.

"Taking Off the Cowboy Hat," by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe in Intersections 2004 307-324.

"Meat And Potatoes,' by Eric Schlosser in Intersections 2004 349-367.

Journal Due Final Exam Day

Back to the Surface