Green Education

Dr. Lenny has been known to hug a few trees in his time. This weekend, i attended the Umpqua Watersheds 11th annual banquet and auction. The UW group is our local national environmental organization - big enough to be heard, focused enough to be effective. While the membership doesn't necessarily come with a single minded opinion on how to deal with our wilderness problems, we all recognize that those problems need to be address. The UW enviromental activists of the year, Lois Eagleton of the Friends of Mildred Kanipe Ranch and Robin Wisdom, a former UW staffer are both close friends who share interests and goals. A program called Penny's Pearls has begun - an endowment to allow future work to be done without absolute focus on fund-raising efforts.

But putting conservation into practice is slightly different from advocating environmental concern. Connecting hands-on activities directly to impact is difficult, especially when the hands-on involves impact. One of the teachers i work with suggested that www.yourclassroom.com is allowing her to make her class more green, by using the chalkboard and message system to reduce the need for paper. The students log in to get and turn in their assignments. I am pleased to see that connection, but it wasn't how i envisioned the system to work.

Which is a good thing - doctor lenny is not a see all - know all. He collects information just like everybody else and filters it through the reasonable viewpoint that he has developed over a few years of experience. Supporting chemistry is what he offers - to help people notice how to use what they already know to leverage knowledge and figure howdt the things they don't know. When i role play the doctor lenny character, i slip into a mode where the thrill of the chase science investigation is the end all of end alls. But when i play myself in my own role - i weave much more of the social context into the equation.

This lends credence to my belief system, that other folks individually come up with methods that are variants of design from what i envision. The social acceptance of the current value system should lead to a re-evaluation of the old value system as we morph to where we wish to get to. I like to use symmetry to save time and effort - because the mathematical relationships are the same and you don't have to derive new equations for everything. Sports and science connect in philosophy through the Zone here - sports and religion connect in philosophy at Steve Scott's Pew/Bleacher, thus science and religion connect through a baseball side-channel. There is great beauty in this type of symmetry.

I love Sunni's take on valentine commerce this morning, a 'hallmark holiday' no doubt. The fact that we chose the same passage by bonner this morning is creating more of a believer out of me; this supports hive of humanity theory that parellels us with bees and ants. Making predictions and seeing if they come true is part of the joy of science - being dogmatic and thinking in absolutes is far from the creative world that i live in. Or thought i lived in. Or will live in again soon.

But to live in this world costs, in terms of money or social capital. So i am looking at the work and trying to define how better to capitalize on the services provided, because the costs of being are exceding the ability to get there. Thus the Zone may soon be accepting ad panels - which i already sorta do as the crosslynx. I am thinking on some sort of creative contest that people could enter for a minimal recurring fee, but i think i need to be a bit more creative in approach than the usual current options in the box. I like to think howdtside da baax, yanno.

An example of symmetry - the kaleidopix.