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). 

Environmental justice: are organizations making fair progress? - environmentalresearchweb

And the beat goes on...Alejandro Colsa Perez wrote from London this week,

 with news that people are still thinking through our first flush of questions on how grassroots environmental movements formalize into Environmental Justice Organizations, and what challenges that presents for accountability to their original bases and places.

Great to get science media attention for such social questions. Check out the story here:  Environmental justice: are organizations making fair progress? - environmentalresearchweb

We also found formalization creates opportunities to expand networks, and knowledge bases. This teamwork connects our graduates across their respective work places in upstate New York (Sarah), coastal Michigan (Katie), Washington DC's EPA circles (Bernadette), and European policy Circles (Alejandro). New networks, still being developed and some using the EJOLT atlas and academic partnerships with Barcelona, will connect our new cohort of environmental justice students. Hope they can build on the legacy of this careful work to identify not only organizational trends but also empirical evidence about the top 40 most influential environmental justice cases in the US since the movement's inception.  Stay tuned...

and thanks for your legacy here Alejandro!

Krampus Dance

After doing the rounds of a few earnest and convivial holiday parties in Ann Arbor last Saturday night, I struck out for Ypsilanti's Krampus Ball. From the demon jingle babies in the windows of the Dreamland Theater upon arrival, it was clear this would be a change of pace... 

So many people were doing so much work to make the Krampus magic. Steadfast radio personality Mark Maynard manned the keg, ceaselessly filling cups with cold amber ale. The dj's flung confetti intermittently on the dancers, while feverishly consulting about what tunes to play and pointing the strobe where it most needed to go. The puppeteer climbed up and ensured his characters were dancing to the beat, working both hands as his associates lovingly fed him speared sausage chunks on toothpicks so as not to interrupt the dance of those tiny creatures. 

There had clearly been hours of prep work in some of the costumes, from the elaborate makeup with chiaroscuro effects drawn on the naked torso of the most terrifying and regal Krampus, to the blood smeared dentist elf from rudolf like you have never seen him...





Then again there was the work of WEARING these no doubt unbearably hot and sweaty getups, especially a carpet-like goat costume, or the taped together crutches and stilts of the largest Krampus, whose embrace i won't soon forget. On the dance floor as during the parade he made me feel like beauty, with her beast who lumbered painstakingly, purposefully through the crowds. 

All of this was a labor of love, that had no apparent qualms about being  obvious, messy, collective, boisterous, creative, and self consciously counter-commercial-christmas-culture. It was a night of play but also work, together, to resurrect and celebrate the spirits of christmas that cannot inhabit the bourgeois mantle or hearth; that are anathema  to expensive parcels arranged under glowing trees in grand foyers with the clink of ice cubes that signals the single malt has begun. PBR cans littered the countertops and arms of chairs, and were handed out merrily more or less regardless of participants' ability to pay (thank you, Ypsilanti!). Debauchery never seemed so democratic. 


Switches were wielded with delight, as were dry ice, balloons, beautiful strange puppets,strobes, curtains  (and yes, you can pay attention to the man behind the curtain). The final implements emerged during the parade at the end, which featured electric base and lit torches that brought bar-goers into the streets, woke sleeping dogs and brought residents to their windows (see footage, here). 

The torches, far from being a symbol of those coming to inflict terror and torture on those who might be magical--or even just different-- instead took their place alongside the brightly colored lit wreaths on each lamp post of Michigan Avenue. They marked this season's rituals and helped all of us move through the darkness of these times, together.

A jolt of environmental justice

What are the top forty environmental justice cases in U.S. history in terms of media attention, litigation, policy shifts and public opinion?  

You can read the list and learn about how we made it by reading an article published by Bernadette Grafton, Alejandro Colsa Perez, Katherine Hintzen, Sara Orvis, Paul Mohai and myself in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities available at Taylor & Francis Online.   We produced this recently published work with a diverse team of masters students in deep dialogue with activists and practitioners who have created this field and taken it to where it is today. 

Interested? There are several ways to learn more. Take a look at the website for the pioneering EJOLT project that set us on this path, and look out for a forthcoming article in Environmental Research Letters that goes into more depth on our interviews with leaders in the EJ field.  Or take a look at the start and end of the videos here (and below) from a panel on gender and environmental justice at the Environmental Justice Symposium hosted at Purdue University in April 2014 where I spoke alongside three remarkable experts:  Laura Zanotti, Sharlene Mollett, and Rosemary Ahtuangaruak.    

Following Rosemary's lead in beginning by thinking about our mothers, I reflected on gender inequalities in my own family, and also in field sites and institutions within which  I have learned and worked. Rosemary's words helped me think about the ways our research only scratches the surface of EJ in the USA, in terms of types of conflicts, who studies them, and ways of experiencing them that are mediated by gender and generational issues. More broadly, I argued against the feminization of "applied" versus basic research, and of collaborative versus solo authored work in many fields. 

 

This recent publication affirms the potential of unabashedly "applied" and "collaborative" research, whether in the forests of the Central African Republic with foragers and engaged anthropologists like Melissa Remis and her students, or online with maps and networks about inequality and environmental rights with visionaries like Joan Martinez Alier, Paul Mohai, and these young professionals. These are not just two different "sites" from which my "lab" extracts "data." These are places I where I have apprenticed. Gender specialized labor in forest foraging has taught me much about how to engage in balanced reciprocity in my collaborations with others, and how to navigate the academic forest, with its seasonality, its bounty, and also its dangers.

    

As for current transnational unfurling of the EJ banner, there is a strong need for further research, and it is voiced powerfully by Rosemary, in this earnest question and answer session  on Africa, Amazonia, Panama and the Arctic. The entire group at Purdue's EJ symposium was stellar; you can get a sense by reading the special issue of the journal, or watching the videos, recorded for live feed (or "Boilercast"--no, really...listen to the Q and A sessions and you'll hear how that term rolls off the tongue!) 

Thanks  Boilermakers!

Cage Free...a magic remedy?

Recent news only confirms the continuation of strong consumer preference for cage-free eggs; a few years back, it tipped even fast food giant Macdonald's into making that change in their food supply chain (see the NPR  source for this picture of a cage-free facility in Hershey, PA; see also  Wall Street Journal).

It throws me back to days on friends' farms in recent summers, collecting eggs. My friend Marie until recently ran an egg farm near Montluçon in the heart of the French region known as L'Allier. She was ahead of the current cage-free curve. She kept her hens inside a large stone barn, with a doorway where they could also walk outside into an outdoor pen. Neither space was very large, nor did either boast the newest technologies for what the industry terms "manure removal" from cage free egg production facilities. But it produced lots and lots of tasty fresh eggs, and people came from miles around to pick them up, or met Marie and her partner, Bernard, at local markets to pick up their eggs.

Marie also grew gorgeous vegetables and herbs in and around huge hoop houses full of cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley, verbena. The contrast struck me and my (then) seven year old daughter--such a difference between the sunlight and freshness of the plant production areas, and the dank, feather-strewn muck of the hen house (of course fresh straw went down as often as possible...but let's be honest, chickens are pretty filthy). But it wasn't just muck that struck; there was also the cluck. As we went to collect eggs or scatter grain outside in the  yard for them to eat, we joined many more timid hens in dodging the aggression of the bigger bullies. Many of the hens seemed stressed, racing around noisy and alarmed;  still, none were confined.

Our own quarters that week were the airy rooms of the old farmhouse, renovated for weekend visitors and tourists. The pastel wall paper, original woodwork, and new skylights were completed with en suite showers. In the morning we would creak open the old wooden shutters, then throw the french windows wide to take in the breeze and golden rays of rising sun on the eastern side of the building. At that hour, all was more or less quiet on the western, egg producing front.

But that belies the fact that almost any farm is a mucky, clucky, multi-species system.  In this case, a purebred german shepherd was variously doted upon and chained or reprimanded. His presence helped keep the hens safe from predators, but his purview seemed cruelly restricted...no roaming the hills with sheep for him. And Marie herself was moving slowly, having made a miraculous recovery from a tractor accident that had left her all but brain dead. Bernard had painstakingly stripped and repainted the guest rooms, renovating as she lay in the hospital for nearly a year, telling himself each day that she would again be awake to accompany him in the work, and enjoy the newfound beauty of the historic structure.

One day she did wake up; but this is no fairy tale. Farm life is hard on the humans and animals involved. It is  less amenable to reform and improvement than one might assume, given naive consumer preference for a label like "cage free." I was reflecting on this one evening, as Bernard stood in the historic old farm kitchen making us a spectacular chicken and cured lemon tagine in moroccan earthenware, Marie rolled cigarettes by the hearth, watching him with the German Shepherd at her feet. They spoke of their unhappiness in that life, of the lack of friends and community, the crushing regularity of the daily tasks.

Marie comes from a long line of sheep farmers in that very region. Returning home to her roots she was realizing a dream of having her own farm there. She was raised as the one girl in a family of five or seven strapping boys, but she can shear a herd of sheep faster than any of her brothers.  Bernard's past is far more wide ranging; his talents are many, his parties are legendary (if one can recall anything in detail about them) and his frustrations with closed, normative social worlds--urban or rural--lead him perilously close to rage at times.  To make matters more complicated, Bernard's appetite for talking of sex is insatiable--during my visit I came to think of him as a kind of sexual extension agent amidst the sometimes prudish, often stoic denizens of cage-free countrysides where talk tends more to the weather, or the whereabouts of a missing animal.

I was glad for the language barrier excluding my daughter from the detailed discussions. As she nibbled tender chicken from the bone, Bernard happily crowed from the cookstove where he was already on to his next triumph: a molten chocolate dessert made from loads of eggs and butter. His grey ponytail bobbing up and down as he gesticulated, he told us all about the wealthy girls from Neuilly whom he had made scream for more in their pantries during his younger days as a cook and caterer, working parties in the Paris area. Marie chuckled patiently, until he got so carried away that he burned the chocolate a bit. Cursing, he threw the concoction in the sink and, stopping only to remark briefly on the shapeliness of my knee poking out from under my skirt, dashed out to a local patisserie for an approximation of his intended dessert that nonetheless delighted my daughter.

He and Marie did sell the farm near Montlucon, and instead bought an historic inn closer to the heart of Auvergne, Le Buron de la Coudaire in Renaudie. This spectacular and relatively empty rural region Puy de Dome boasts loads of what the french call "baba cools" or hippies, returning to the land as farmers. Bernard and Marie spent happy years before his death last summer, focused more on producing food for their visitors at the auberge, gathering mushrooms, nuts and plants, and making their own pottery. I like to think it suited them better. I don't know what happened to all their hens, but I also hope the German Shepherd, who went with them, was happier too.


Meanwhile, back in Michigan, Naina and I have found fresh eggs to gather closer to home. The hens on Sandy Acres Farm live in conditions that seem to me much more humane than most...they  have a very large yard in which to roam, and a few of them roam even beyond the fence, which doesn't seem to bother our friends Shelley and Joe, the couple who built and run the farm. "Oh, there is a rogue hen or two, don't worry about them" they said, as they left us to farm sit for a few days this summer (I snapped the photo on the left at a fall harvest event on the farm).


There are turkeys, too, at Sandy Acres, and large families of wild turkeys strutting lazily across the fields where sheep and cattle graze, and gaze quietly at the birds' ceaseless scrabbling for scraps from the huge organic vegetable garden out back. When night falls at Sandy Acres the poultry retreat to a small henhouse they share with some rabbit cages. The rabbits, too, now have an outdoor yard for their daytime pleasure...it has taken years for this farm family to install all the fencing, shedding, and interior space they need. With each passing summer more gets completed, and they breath a sigh of relief at the gradually improving quality of life for themselves and their various animals. I am always mindful of the sweat and tears involved in every single post hole...the farm is made of straw bale adobe construction, and is entirely solar powered, so heavy equipment is limited to a minimum (see photo, by Oliver Uberti, for a feature on the Trumpeys as Homesteaders of the Year in last year's Mother Earth News).

The whole operation is a life dream concocted over ales during a study abroad in Scotland, where Joe and Shelley met. But this is no fairy tale either. The Sandy Acres chickens likely have a richer and more varied diet than almost any on the planet. The chemical free farm has a density and diversity of insect life that has made it a haven for bees when beekeepers for miles around are losing colonies each winter. My daughter and I were delighted by the brilliant yellow yolked fresh eggs for breakfast each morning, but terrorized by the roosters as we collected  eggs each morning. We couldn't help noting with consternation the number of hens missing feathers, or even suffering from lacerations on their backs from the roosters' reproductive attentions. We would always keep an eye on the hoses lying around the farmyard, lest we needed to turn them on those aggressive roosters ourselves. It all brings home the dynamics of aggression that are inherent in much animal life, and that are managed in part through large scale killing of male chicks in favor of females who can produce eggs for human consumption. Guiltily, we often longed ourselves for a barnyard with fewer roosters. 

Robert Paehlke talks in his book Democracy's Dilemma  (MIT Press, from which I borrow this photo) about major historical moments in the evolution of capitalist and democratic systems: agrarian, industrial, and finally today's "electronic capitalism." He notes in his conclusions to that book that in an era of electronic capitalism, the conscience of the system as it struggles with democratic principles and processes will perforce reside with consumer concerns and choices. Such concerns and choices DO drive the mass production of female chicks for the mass production of eggs in massive facilities that are by most metrics inhumane. So, what are the politics of possible futures from the vantage points of producers? where are their voices and visions in the system? What of the fact that more and more of us are trying our hand at production as one step on the path of what indigenous scholarship terms "restoration of right relations"? 

Steps indeed: small increments of movement in the right direction, on long, and perilous paths to change.  So few simple fixes exist for the quality of life of production animals. Incremental improvements are crucial, even if they appear to some as steps backward in terms of the cleanliness or technological sophistication of large scale agriculture. As for any complex system, management measures must be adaptive, and honestly acknowledge big challenges that defy the arrogance of "management." 

When it comes to our food, we must render more visible the various forms of violence, from structural and technological to relational and physical, that have for so long characterized human manipulations of other life forms upon which we rely.  They are, after all, not only about our "dominion" over nature; they are about our destiny as a species in relation to one another.  John Lewis began his graphic novel, March, a chronicle of a formidable career in civil rights and advocacy for democratic process in...the hen house. Growing up on his family's farm, it was grappling with the birds' alertness and vulnerability, their ineluctable fate of becoming and making food, that sensitized him to what justice could mean among men and women. 

Don't Tell Me What I Can and Can't Do, I Can Change the World...

As President Obama touched down in Kenya early on Friday July 24, 2015 Carmella Tal Tomey, Assistant Research Professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, had only recently returned from Nairobi herself. Ella studies complex links between age, place, social and psychological factors, and physical impairment. She has recently expanded from research into what makes for healthy communities here in the U.S. to work within scientific communities overseas. She is developing video and slide materials to complement intimate, face to face workshops where she enables U.S. students and younger scholars to train with their international counterparts for more focused and effective writing, more responsible conduct of research, and more collaborative and productive careers. 

Our interview with co-hosts Jennifer Johnson and Sam Molnar was peppered with upbeat recent Kenyan dance tracks (playlist here), and great stories of her adventures there with colleagues and friends. We honed in on Ella’s collaboration with Professor Jesse Njoka, who directs the Center for Sustainable Dryland Ecosystems and Societies (CSDES) at the University of Nairobi (UoN). Other UoN faculty Judith S. Mbau and Stephen Merithi collaborated with Ella to facilitate the workshop. They are pictured here in a peer review writing exercise they plan to continue using within their own curricula and communities.

UM will host a “Metaworkshop” with African colleagues from Gabon, Kenya, and Ethiopia in October under the auspices of UM’s STEM-Africa initiative (Science, Technology, Environment/Engineering and Medicine/Math), African Studies Center and International Institute, and with support from colleagues at UCLA and Tulane working on a National Science Foundation PIRE grant in equatorial Africa. The meeting will review models for academic bridge building that can offer a next generation of scholars in sustainability and global health fields more integrative and collaborative training from early in their careers.

Previous Afro-optimist broadcasts on our show abound and the playlists range unapologetically across regions and eras. Our STEM Africa Partnerships broadcast starts with complex polyphonic pipe orchestras from Central African Republic, reflecting on the intricacies of African indigenous knowledge and practice. Then it takes us through Gil Scott Heron’s angry “Whitey on the Moon” poem set to rhythm, reflecting on asymmetric access to science within racist U.S. systems. It ends with Naeto MC singing “Things are Not the same…Ten over Ten” announcing positive change from his platform as the Nigerian “only MC with an MSc.”

In terms of talk, that hour we quote from the vision of STEM Africa leaders here on campus, Mechanical Engineer Elijah Kannety Asibu and Mathematician Nkem Nkumba who have engaged African scientists working internationally in considering scientific needs and strengths on the African continent. We also hear from Dr. Heather Eves, founding Director of the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force, who has taught in higher ed settings from the DC metro area to the Caribbean, and mentored many conservation professionals from Cameroon to Kenya. Heather’s persistent constructive engagement parallels the care Ella Tomey takes with her curricular materials. Dr. Eves also address radio as a tool for scientific and policy awareness and debate in African settings, and creative writing as a vehicle for better connections among and between scholars from varied disciplines and the wider publics they seek to engage.

Another Afro-optimist broadcast from 2011 tackled the Africa-Asia Nexus, with a mix of Indian and African music. A lively discussion blazed in studio between Anthropologist Omolade Adunbi about his work on oil extraction where his family and friends live and work in the Niger Delta, Geographer Dr. Bilal Butt working in his native Kenya on pastoralism in national parks, and the School of Information’s Dr. Joyojeet Pal who hails from Mumbai but has worked on installing high speed wifi cables in rural Rwanda, and studying uptake of laptop technology in rural primary schools in India. You think you know the globalized green academy? Think again…

…and again. Just last year, Dr. Pete Larson led us on an audio tour of really heavy metal African rock, while talking about his own metal band and his research on malaria in Kenya. Hot indeed!  We updated that broadcast with this week's where we played more dance tunes from the techno and hip scenes in contemporary Nairobi, including artists like Just a Band and Wangechi, who is, according to recent interviews, completing university level studies in economics so who knows, maybe one day we can workshop with her too!

These days Pete Larson can be found blogging in English about the interfaces of epidemiology, development and culture, and teaching in Japanese as an Assistant Professor at University of Nagasaki, based in their Institute of Tropical Medicine Kenya Field Station. Pete also holds down an Adjunct Professor position right here at the UM’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, mentoring UM masters students like Mike Burbidge, pictured below. Mike and others are seeking better field understandings of pastoralism, wildlife management, and spatial and social aspects of zoonotic disease transmission. They live with families and work with Kenyan field research teams, as pictured below where Pete Larson and Mike Burbidge celebrate eid, the end of the Ramadan period, with neighbors and hosts in Kwale, Kenya.

Pete figured in today’s interview with Ella--especially in her tales of Nairobi nightlife, to which she was introduced right off the plane!  Unlike President Obama, Pete and the Michigan Difference team did not have a heavily armored and defended vehicle. But they did and do make a lot of impact on the lives of students and teachers at UoN (Nairobi), UN (Nagasaki), and UM (that’s right, Michigan). Welcome to the future. The revolution will not be televised. But if Ella Tal Tomey has her way, it will be collaboratively thought out, and carefully written about. Go Blue!

Of Rock and Roll and Revolutions

What timing, on the day the Confederate Flag was at last lowered from the South Carolina State House, we gathered in the studios of WCBN FM Ann Arbor for a broadcast on flags, festivals, and facing change in our nation. 

This photo depicts UM Prof of Music, Theater and Dance Mark Clague, whose work on the history of U.S. patriotic music can be found on his Star Spangled Music website. Here he is eyes closed, listening hard to one of several versions of Jimi Hendrix playing The Star Spangled Banner (or, as he puts it, singing with a guitar...) as UM undergrad student David Clive hosts the show. 

From Sharon Jones singing this land is MY land, to Hendrix's many versions of our national anthem, and finally Barack rocking Amazing Grace, we unpack on mike how symbols and melodies mean so many things to so many Americans. In the expert hand of Hot in Here founder Jennifer Johnson, we get our signature mix of scintillating talk and stone cold grooves for summer's hottest days. 

Listen in on the archive section of our web page to hear more about how music helps mark moments we we can, together, pivot and head in new historical directions...as Clague notes "history is more about the future than it is about the past." Do you agree? comment below, or at www.hotinhere.us.

Let's start...a summer radio show

Summer is starting, and as the waves of teaching work recede, the Blogging can begin again. A summer blog? Slog? No, that sounds too wearying for the way this writing pulls thoughts out to play.

And, of course, given how much i have learned from Central African Republic (but also from Ireland), there is also the primordial importance of the spoken word.

So i'm proud to announce that the people i love to talk and listen with most these days, the production team of It's Hot in Here on WCBNFM Ann Arbor, are joining me in broadcasting every Friday at noon throughout the summer, for the first time since the show's inception in 2008.

And, yes, we'll also keep posting our blogcast archive over the weekend after the live show, giving you more links, videos, bios, and background on the issues discussed.

We're also working this summer to make the show easier for you to subscribe to as a podcast, or write into with your comments and suggestions of themes. Because we are broadcasting from the FM studio like a bunch of DJs, we won't always be able to air your calls like we often do from the Production A studio with its engineering booth.

Still, we want to hear from you! We want to thank our listeners for tuning in, for calling in, for keeping things hot. One of our founders, Jennifer Johnson, will be back in the studio this summer!

Check out our first show from Friday of Memorial Day weekend here.  And check back on that same site soon for the upcoming blogcast from last Friday's show on Food Sovereignty, which got some of the most exciting and excited calls we've had in a while.

Thank you Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and the World.

Happy Summer!

Of Rainbows and Revolutions

Listening to the fireworks of summer independence day festivities always makes me glad not to be hearing gunfire. It also stands as a reminder of the work we are all still doing to live together free of fear. 


On Sunday July 27, 2008, Jim David Adkisson walked into Knoxville’s Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and opened fire on the congregation as they were watching the youth program perform a musical. Two adults died, and seven people were seriously injured trying to protect the children. One of my best friends from high school shattered both kneecaps falling to the floor to shield her two young daughters from the bullets.

Above, the TVUUC church that was built in the shape of a Chalice, which is the symbol of the Unitarian Universalist faith. It was also a good shape to save an ancient tree that was growing on the building site, and whose leaves can be seen above the top of the building (accessed 7/1/13  at www.tvuuc.org).

Adkisson’s shooting spree in Knoxville that hot summer morning was “politically motivated” according to the investigations following the violence, as reported by local media (and wikipedia). A veteran of the U.S. Army, his very vocal hatred of "Democrats," "African Americans," and "Homosexuals" fueled his opposition to TVUUC. Testimonials from those who were in the church at the time of the shooting reflect on why it is a risk and a privilege—apparently one even worth dying for--to be a congregation that welcomes all spiritual beliefs, races and sexualities in today's U.S.:                                                                                                                 
     ...There has been some speculation as to why the shooter did it. Some speculate mental      illness--and anyone who would do something like this has to be at least a bit mentally          ill--but some point out that we may have been targeted because we are a welcoming          congregation…I will say, though, that we'd not long ago put up a banner announcing          the fact that everyone is welcome in our church, regardless of race or sexuality. If this          shooting was politically motivated, well... it wouldn't be the first time we've dealt with          hatred because of our beliefs. Back in the fifties, before we had our own church                    building, many people refused to rent space to us because we had a mixed-race      
     congregation. We're not afraid to do the right thing, and, even after these events, we will      still be unafraid. We are a loving and welcoming congregation, and we are strong.       
     Thanks again to all those who are keeping us in their thoughts and prayers      
     (http://salvador-dalai.livejournal.com/4220.html). 

One congregant looks back on the bravery that limited the death toll to two. In those split seconds, many individuals, acting together, had the instinct to place themselves between Adkinsson and the others in the room:

…thank you to at least three heroes that I know of. Greg McKendry, one of the two who died, apparently blocked the first shot, saving who knows how many people. After the second shot, several members of the congregation charged the shooter. Among them were John Bohstedt, a history professor at UT, and... well, as a parent I know him as "*** Birdwell's father." There were others…the shooter had a lot of ammo. A lot. If he hadn't been stopped, even the 3 minute response time from the police wouldn't have averted an even greater tragedy. Another victim of the TVUUC shootings, Tammy Sommers, spoke publicly about her trauma a few summers ago, in order to express solidarity with victims of a shooting in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in August, 2012. She noted, with a wry sense of disbelief still lingering in her voice:  "He was entering the sanctuary when he opened fire…The toughest memory that I had was I bled on my children in a way a mother would never wanted to."[1]

Today I am a member of a UU congregation that is bigger than the one I recall from East Tennessee, where the man "in the pulpit" (though most UUA congregations have soaring, spare modern rooms for meetings) was former UUA President John Beuhrens. John is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and expert on biblical scripture. My childhood church was one of his first ministries, and he both learned and taught a LOT. He and his wife, an Episcopalian Minister, were beacons to all of us, demonstrating how dual careers of care in the world can work without depleting marriages and families. When he officiated at my wedding in the monument to social justice that is Timothy Dwight chapel on the Yale University campus he offered spare but grave advice to me and my husband: "Take Care of Each Other." In times of trouble, we cleave to that.

The Minister in my new church, First UUAA, did not study scripture for years to get there. As she tells it, she was working as a sorry-for-herself, snowplow-driving dyke in Maine when she found her calling. Later, she gained  wide acclaim for her first sermons, which obtained standing ovations around the country. She spoke with conviction, humor and honesty about her own journey from devouring anger as a marginalized American to a stance of active, transformative love and a generous ministry. 

My new church’s tree is a Downy Hawthorne, documented as the largest of its subspecies in the United States…possibly in all of North America. It stands behind the church on the large parcel of rural land the congregation bought to build on and have preserved as a network of trails and outdoor recreation or meditation sites. My daughter and I often walk out after church to sit under it and pray when we are worried for the health of grandparents, concerned for friends in places torn by contemporary political conflict, or just in need of guidance and peace in our own lives.  Hawthornes are sacred in much of Europe; they provide flowers for Mayday festivals and fertility rites of spring. They are Shakespeare's "fairy groves." I can see why, sitting out there of a Sunday in all seasons.

In front of the church, at the main entrance, flies the Rainbow Flag. My daughter learned this year in her Spiritual Growth class on Sunday mornings about the rainbow as a symbol of the covenant between God and Noah as the floods receded and the earth again became a hospitable place for human (and other species) habitation. She has also learned that the rainbow is our church covenant, as a welcoming and tolerant congregation that believes in embracing the complexity of social identities, of science, of collective action and individual moral stands against the floods of hatred, bigotry, and environmental harm, even in the face of armed anger. 


Places of worship aren't the only targets for armed anger; one thinks of Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords, attacked in a secular site--an Arizona supermarket. Her survival seemed so unlikely, after being shot through the brain by a disaffected and disoriented young man in the parking lot outside the store where she was meeting and greeting constituents in 2011.  Several victims in that shooting died, including a federal judge and a nine year old girl. This photo  depicts Giffords returning to the House Floor, nearly six months after the shooting, triumphant but terribly fragile. Today Gabby and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, are organizing Americans for Responsible Solutions, a broad, non partisan call to action in the face of special interests that dominate gun control discourse about rising death tolls in the U.S. from gun violence.  

But in searching for news archives on the TVUUC story, I found instead articles about a wave of increased gun violence in Knoxville neighborhoods in recent summers, and seminars in the East Tennessee area on “how to survive workplace shootings” as professional training for employees of banks and other likely targets. During a lockdown on my University campus a few years ago, as people sat behind office doors, phones switched to silent, barely daring to breathe, i marveled at how that can be "freedom." 

Such concerns are not limited to college campuses; my daughter began learning tactics for such scenarios in elementary school. One day her after school report over snacks included the comment "I felt so bad for my friend; he thought the drill was real and wet his pants he was so scared." The principal later explained to me when I inquired that realism in such exercises is crucial to their success in preparing students to survive a shooting. Wow. 

Ok maybe if such drills had they been part of our every day church life in Knoxville, they'd have helped Greg McKendry or John Bohstedt in those seconds when they crudely and courageously gave their own lives to save others. All i know is, accepting these as reasonable risks is a glaring symptom of our inability to make social changes at more structural levels that reduce risk and fear in our lives as a society. 

On the 4th of July, U.S. citizens celebrate our country’s victory in a war for Independence. Some also get dressed up and drink a glass of wine or two on July 14 to celebrate France's revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille prison. What we are really celebrating is, at least in part, the distance we have traveled from those original gruesome struggles. Or have we? Back then the political stakes of power sharing seemed clear enough to motivate self sacrifice on a massive scale in the name of transformation. What passes for political motivation behind the violence in our public and sacred places today seems tragically out of step with collective mobilization for positive social change. It comes from mostly mentally ill, tragically alienated Americans. Many of them have been wronged by our society, or just have something that is wrong with them. Too often, they express that pain through murdering those who are living happily in dynamic, changing communities.  

Today's Knoxville TVUUC Minister Chris Buice helped his congregation heal from the shooting. The church moved from annual rituals of rememberance to marking the event once every ten years. TVUUC members consistently reach out to others who are victims of similar violence (such as the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, or the school in Newtown, Massachusetts, or that in Oregon a few years ago, or…). 
Buice notes that one of the hardest things to handle is the forceful hatred--of self and others--that animates the perpetrator. Survivor Tammy Sommers concurs: “It is important to stand on the side of love, peace, and kindness.” It is that simple. 

Many members of Unitarian Churches around the world found their way to it from a life of being bullied and derided as "geeks" or "freaks" or "queers" or "green radicals." They stand on the side of love because they know that asking hard questions about social norms, embracing social difference and protecting nonhuman lives on our planet has historically been punished with stonings, burnings, draggings, and--perhaps increasingly--shootings.  As the water protectors movement gains momentum in the U.S. and beyond, and the stakes in wildlife conservation get starker than ever, these are not just U.S. challenges. All around the world, wealth inequalities that worry us show no signs of abating. There is no clear single new Bastille for us to storm, no single Evil Empire against which to stand. That makes things complicated.

Nonetheless, let us rally: "Vive la Love." Let us not forget those who, unarmed, have bravely given their lives for this principle. Let us honor rather than denigrate those who show up for the marches, and churches, and rallies where they risk being targets for the violence that flows from angry fear of change. Just because some cannot trust diversity, complexity, and equitable representative political process to work for humanity's future does not mean that future is beyond our reach. Sure, we have not yet perfected the practice of these principles. But we owe it to those who brought us this far on that path to continue walking toward it, reaching for it even in the face of fear. 

As we celebrate historic political and social victories in summer’s heat each year, let it renew our vision of human connections in the face of retrenchment, fear, authoritarianism. We cannot be cowed by the "isolated incidents" of murderous anger our society refuses to term "terror." Despite very real fears of being shot for being tolerant and open, members of my childhood church stand on the side of love. For them it is no mere mantra. It is a memory, and a lived commitment that they know is fundamental to a peaceful and prosperous society.