As The World Burns with Lee Van der Voo

Otters

A dear friend writes, from her generous summer home in Northern Michigan: 

Somehow we have OTTERS in Torch Lake this years! They swim by our deck twice a day. In my 60 years I have never seen or even heard of such a thing. Brings me such delight. (The brief video files are too big to send within the email so I'm including them as a google link)

It throws me back instantly to a day long ago. My job in my third year of Peace Corps Service in Central African Republic involved extensive walking in the forest with conservation guards (or rangers) and interpretive guides. Those forests are laced with clear running streams and rivers, and we'd have to walk right through them. That meant all day in wet feet but the joy was the river otters...so graceful and playful! If you planted your feet hip distance or more apart and stood quietly in the water they'd chase each other between your feet, looping back around and through with such grace and delight in their movement that it seemed a gift from the Gods. 

The utterly wonderful Elizabeth Garland (then on a Watson fellowship traveling the conservation world, and about whose current work you can read more on the Verite site) snapped this pic one day, just after we'd wasted time in this stream playing with otters. You can see Maoma, an Aka guide (that ethnonym is one used by forest foragers, often called "pygmies")  still grinning. Jean Fagounda on the other hand, an amazing architect and traditional builder whose very name means "forest tamer" in Sango and who comes from savannas further north, was more task oriented, and wanted us to keep moving and make camp before nightfall! 

Most of us wish we could do/have done more to enjoy and protect and respect the phenomenal gift of all the lives evolving together on this planet. These African forests are too often, today, being plowed under for palm oil plantations, timber concessions and mining (for, among other things, the rare earth minerals to make the kind of laptop on which i'm typing. Sigh). 

Maoma was such a generous teacher, contenting himself with too little in the way of "stuff" but sharing stores of knowledge of the intricate worlds around us. He saved my life more than once. The six years in my twenties I spent learning from and teaching people like Maoma, have shaped my interest in multimodal environmental education tools today. He and his community were representatives of entire nations of people across the Congo Basin without a permanent house, moving through the forest and building temporary shelters from year to year. Can you imagine, in the more and more volatile climate we are making? 

So let me channel that exquisite afternoon, and my friend's Michigan moment, and take a cue from these otters. The reprieve COVID has created, for otters and other life forms, must not be only temporary. It must become a beacon for us to make changes the world can feel, changes that help it heal. 

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga: "What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation mean from Africa"?

UM-trained MIT Prof Clapperton Mavhunga still stirring it up: "I look at science, technology and innovation today and i'm sure you would agree, they are very reductionist. Science is a social activity...and i'm saying this at Google but it's as if technology were just gadgets...is it that obvious? Or could it be that ... in reducing it to gadgets we are missing out on something else? The same with innovation, reduced to a very commercialized idea."

His questions about what makes it into curricula, what is deemed "knowledgeable" in an era of "Africa rising" cannot be urgently enough circulated and contested. His stretch to suture together historical work with these "key words of their time" for a next generation continues to be quite a lift for a young scholar. His interrogation of how heroes are made for Africa, then and now, and the notion of heroism, seems salutary as many of us scholars and teachers scramble after attention from the Africas' and the Americas' wealthiest tech entrepreneurs in ways that make them into de facto heroes (and/or villains) of our era.

Some of his advice?  "The best way to be effective in the world is to be humble before knowledge. Don't act as though you monopolize the space of common sense and reason."   Go blue!

His concerns? Africa has many exquisite critical thinkers and many who get things done in practice. But we need to continue bringing these two together; making those who excel in practice more critically aware, and critics more engaged in actual doing and building of things. Let us keep building the spaces where those twain shall meet. Proud of my UM colleagues doing this now in Ethiopia, Ghana, Gabon, and here at home with our upcoming Galaxy event linking our campus to the social and environmental matrices around us through getting key practices linked with critical concepts and into curricula, both at home and abroad!

Leaders in thought and action

This piece about Thought Leaders is troubling. 

More and more of my students--Europeans, Africans, Americans--fit the description in the last few paragraphs of this piece as new public intellectuals. They are straddling the academy, small businesses, cooperatives, social movements, non-governmental organizations, and other sectors. They know universities may not or cannot extend a secure embrace to them. Yet they cannot bear to participate in business or government as usual. So they are ceaselessly refining a new kind if bricolage, building new forms of economy perhaps even of society. 

They are so vulnerable but also so smart. They work so hard. They are relentlessly engaged, theoretically astute, realists or even cynics yet also able to delight in this world. They give me so much hope. They take so much care--of me, of their environment, of each other. Some days i feel if i did nothing more than support them and serve as a bridge among them i would have lived as i was intended...

IEN: Call to Action - Trump Can’t Build DAPL Without a Fight

 IEN: Call to Action - Trump Can’t Build DAPL Without a Fight

Water Protectors, cold and exhausted, are rallying again. All i have done thus far is send some coats, and forward some posts. But as the veterans and the native americans and the allies of various kinds out there huddled in tents on the Dakota plains rally for a last stand, I want to know what more I can do. Listen to our three part series on the recent history of NODAPL activism on the digital media platform "It's Hot in Here" to get oriented, if you are only now getting involved.

Meanwhile, the term "intersectionality" has worked its way into the activisit lexicon, and the word "nasty" is getting appropriated and ever better defined to mean creative, disruptive, hard hitting--but not hateful nor illegal--actions (embedded in this show is a great discussion of just that term).

Last sunday, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Ann Arbor, from the sanctuary during the sermon I heard a great formulation of the intersectionality question. Actually, I heard it on loudspeakers while sitting in the social hall, typing in information on recommendation letter forms for my students who seek to move on from school and make at least a living wage making the world a better place. This is really not corporate consulting, i fear. Then again, maybe the intersectionality of social movements is like a whole new meaning for "mergers"?

While i pondered this, our interim Minister asked:

"why would we hone in on single issue action? None of us leads single issue lives...."

Amen.

So whether water is your thing, or indigenous rights, or fossil fuel transcendance,  be alert (sooo much nuance to the information out there; so many versions of reality...did anyone hear the BBC interview this morning on Russian domestic politics?) We need critical thinking skills more than ever to discern different vantage points and assess them against evidence. Tune in or turn out. Work on a brief or help out on a blockade. Stay hopeful.

SNRE Campfire Again...

It is that time of year again, and how i love the leaves, the logs, the legacies...

http://biotically.blogspot.com/2012/10/spy-in-house-of-logging.html

Country Bee, City Bee

The way Philippe Huau and Jean Francois Mallein handle bees is mesmerizing. They are methodical, almost meditative. Often the only sound I hear above the hum of buzzing bees in their beeyards is an occasional guttural sigh of regret if ever they crush or damage a bee. Mostly they don't. 

Over years of visiting their collaborative queen rearing operation in southern France, my daughter and i have learned to trust their mostly Buckfast bees, which are among the most docile and productive on the planet. We now work without veils, gloves, or even long pants, enjoying the sunny afternoons in the sunflower-strewn countryside. We can feel the breeze of bees' wings near our ears--or the curious crawl of their feet on our forearms--without any alarm (photo of Jean Francois right, by Austin Martin).

To me, it is a dream come true. The U.S. Peace Corps taught me to keep bees in the region of Bukavu (then Zaire), and deployed me in the Central African Republic, with hundreds of hives of Apis mellifera adansonii to monitor. Those bees are far more defensive. That means you spend more time running crazily through underbrush trying to lose the cloud of them that are after you than you do watching their work or tasting their honey (think winnie the poo...but more deadly). For Peace Corps me, it also meant a lot of fat lips, swollen eyes, and itchy fingers or ankles after evenings out with the bees. They seemed expert at finding ways in around the edges of my veil, gloves, socks and shoes. When i think of all the bees that stung me--each one that died to defend their community from my blundering interest in their inner workings--I feel strangely grateful. 

What i should feel is embarrassed.  I looked like I belonged in a P4 containment lab, or a some NASA craft, with all my light colored protective gear covering every square inch of my flesh. The beekeepers i worked with would bother the bees only to harvest honey, and then shimmy up into trees half naked, moving lighting fast with a burning torch of particular grasses prone to confuse or sedate the bees, but ready to burn them if things got out of hand.  I imagine when they think of me they feel amused, for I was the sting magnet--contrasting with the darkness in my white cotton, slower to move through the landscape, sweaty and scared.  But i was hella good natured about it. You have to hand it to Americans for that. When i think of themi feel awe (and of course, concern...many have had to give honey and other food to militias at gunpoint in recent years, or have had to abandon their bush beekeeping altogether for fear of being kidnapped, or worse--if only Americans weren't implicated in the political economies that have armed so many Africas so disastrously). But I digress. 

Today on It's Hot in Here, we'll be talking about a different kind of beekeeping. Not out in the sudano guinean plateaux, nor in the medieval villages of rural France, but right smack in the middle of downtown Philadelphia, city of brotherly love, and bee lore. We'll be talking to Don Shump, a city guy who has seen his share of country beekeeping in Pennsylvania, too. We want to have a conversation about the different cultures of keeping bees that span farms and towns (Photo of Don, left, from his website Philadelphiabee.com, accessed October 7 2016). 

With the first bees ever making it onto the endangered species list this month, those of us behind the radio show want to keep on having the pollinator conversations; you can find some from our archives about urban beekeeping in Detroit,  and about wild bees on Michigan farms, along with more info about Jean Francois Mallein and Philippe Huau. 

Wish JF and Philippe were here this evening, to sit down with Don around a glass of Pastis. I know we'd talk of the politics of selective breeding in bees...does colony collapse disorder warrant such blatant manipulation of nature? Do farmers who need their crops pollinated see the answer to that differently than the boutique beekeepers of urban parks and rooftop gardens? 

Tune in to learn more, and start your weekend with a little Friday afternoon buzz...stream us live at wcbn.org (or get the fab new app for that from the apple store).