This film about Albert Schweitzer’s life and mission is a rare documentary with opportunities to see Schweitzer in his home town of Gunsbach, Alsace, rare footage of the master playing Bach on the organ at the village of his youth. The film won an Academy Award in 1957 for Best Documentary:
Schweitzer’s life and writings have been a major compass direction for my own life and work. His autobiography, Out of My Life and Thought, is a book I reread every few years. Schweitzer lived out his convictions and all the while searched for the ethical basis for living.
An anthology of journal entries, blogs, and letters from authors exploring the landscape of what it means to be an American.
Published by Blue Heron Book Works, the anthology includes 10 blog posts from WalkEarth.org that are memories of my life in nature, and of the incredible experience of being part of a military family whose nearly annual trek to new assignments led us back and forth across the American landscape.
I am truly honored to be among many fine authors whose life experiences are rich, humorous, poignant, and as varied as the colors of sunrise.
The cries for boots on the ground in Syria, for retribution, and a growing “fear of other” are not new. In fact it is a predictable response to perceived threats to Americans.
I remember so well the face of George W. Bush as he declared “Mission Accomplished” after the first few rounds of that administration’s “Shock and Awe” campaigns. Did it make Iraq safe, did it stamp out terrorism? Is Al Quaeda wiped out?
No, in fact the opposite is true, and many analysts now target the Iraq War as the beginning of the rise of ISIS.
Another pernicious behavior among Americans is the “fear of the other” – of anyone perceived to not look like “us”…us being white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian immigrants. Americans are and never were of that description though the people in power for so long could be described that way. Of course, over nearly 3 centuries of grieving their rights, Americans begrudgingly are accepting that the “face” of the United States is multi-ethnic, and religiously diverse.
Let us not forget these ugly facts that are a part of our history: genocide of Native Americans; enslavement and persecution of African Americans; internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and so on.
Now the cry is to keep out Syrian refugees who might harbor terrorists. The fear is understandable in light of the bombing of a Russian jet, killing all aboard; the Paris shootings and slaughter, and the Beirut attacks on civilians — all claimed by ISIS as retribution for our way of life. This is a threat no doubt. But let it not push away our better angels to respond in an equal force, BECAUSE WE HAVE RECENTLY BEEN REMINDED THAT THE STRATEGY DOES NOT WORK, IN FACT IT CREATES WHAT IT PURPORTS TO STAMP OUT.
This is a time for calm, for prudent decision making and for our humanity to be strengthened. The Syrian refugees are fleeing the forces that have destroyed their homeland. Just as the Irish fled to America under the brutal oppression of the English in the nineteenth century. Our relatives were refugees fleeing from brutal forces, poverty, and oppression. Let us not forget who we are and extend a helping hand to people who are without country, without the basic resources to live.
We can keep our humanity and also keep our country safe.
Please help us build this fund. The first scholarship was awarded to Brittany Piper who is studying for an MA in Exceptional Student Education with an emphasis in Applied Behavior Therapy.
In 2010 my sister Beverly Acierno passed away unexpectedly. She had recently retired from the Escambia County Public School District where she served as a Learning Disabilities teacher (the county’s first) and later helped develop and manage the program. For so many years we heard about her students, about her advocacy for students and their families in court, and the trips and presentations she made on behalf of the ECPSD. My family and I met many colleagues at her funeral and listened as they remembered Beverly’s passion for kids. One said, “It’s an end of an era; they just don’t make them that way anymore.”
My Niece, Jennifer Acierno Theisen, spent many of her schools days in the same school building as her mother. They were a pair. Jenny was an excellent student, eventually graduating from Washington High School. She earned a scholarship to Florida State University to study performance art, and later transferred…
The 40s, when my parents experienced WWII, and the 70s my former husband and I experienced during the Vietnam war, are barely discernible. Each of those wars formulated its own set of military principles, shaped by technology and political realities of the day. Even the era of 911 fades with our increasingly interconnected lives through the Internet and 24/7 communication. Yet each of these periods of history and perhaps others, influence our thoughts and feelings about war.
The popularity among American viewers of British and American war biopics, (my sisters’ and my recent search for photos and memories to recreate our parents lives) are part of a national search for the soul of the nation.
We understand, then forget, that wars are endemic to human culture due to the dark side of the human behavioral continuum. There will always be evil-doers among us, and some gain great political and military power to threaten others.
Every war creates its own rationale for waging violence, destroying each others’ land, and commerce, and optimism–lives and physical and mental wholeness. It’s a pernicious part of our human potential.
Every Veteran’s Day must be to stamp out that part of our psyche, and to cultivate the other potentials of the human accoutrement.
Today I honor my father, my former husband, and all the Veterans of War. But, I will not celebrate the greatness of war. I see each one as a failing of our human potential to love, to befriend, to trust, and to act to strengthen every other nation’s desire to provide its people with the resources and freedom they need to develop their full potential as human beings.
Is an education replete of nature literacy of lesser value than an education which incorporates values and skills that enable a person to live responsibly within nature?
Reflecting on meeting a woman who held a doctoral degree, but who admitted that she was unaware of the annual migration of cranes in her own state, Aldo Leopold questioned whether modern education has “traded for something of lesser value”. He said this in the context of being aware, of paying attention to the goings and comings of wildlife and seasons, and by that, knowing fundamentally where you live and how to live there without destroying it.
This is not an argument for ignorance but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival-the issues now looming so large before us in the twenty-first century. It is not education, but education of a certain kind, that will save us.
Orr points out in this essay that its educated people who are most destructive to the Earth and ecosystems. What went wrong?
What do you think? Should education ensure that all American students will graduate knowing their place within the natural world, and understanding the responsibilities therein? Would you consider that kind of education basic literacy? Higher education? Why or why not?
For more than a decade my peers and I have pondered why response to changes in the natural world go unheeded by the public. We pondered that “biblical floods and storms” are soon forgotten and that no “mountains moved” in our free, democratic society.
I was reminded of a key truth last month by the work of two scientists, Drs. Rick Brusca and Wendy Moore (The University of Arizona, Tucson). In a recently published study they showed that the lower and upper ranges of montane plants (such as coniferous trees) compared to a similar study in the 1960’s showed a dramatic move of plant ranges “up the mountain” – correlated with a decrease in rainfall and increase in average temperatures over the 6 decade interval. (Brusca et al. 2013 Catalinas)
Unless people travelling up Mt. Lemmon in the Catalina Mountain range had been paying attention and making notes, they had no idea that plants were no longer occurring in lower elevations but were found higher and higher up the mountain over just one lifetime. Dr. Moore produced a second study that recorded populations of arthropods (spiders, beetles, bugs, etc.) in the Sky Islands, the same habitat of the montane plant study. She created a baseline measurement similar to the scientist in the 1960s but for arthropods. Without the latter, no comparison could be made in the future to determine change over time.
Why is it important?
Without the long-term “sampling” or observations, humans don’t easily note changes that happen slowly over time. Take some of humankind’s early nature writers who have contributed vital observations that inform us today: Henry David Thoreau recorded in detail the changing of seasons, plants communities, and weather at Walden Pond in the nineteenth century.
For several years, Richard Primack has been prowling Henry David Thoreau’s old haunts in Concord, Mass., chronicling spring’s curtain-raiser, the arrival of leaves and buds. Thoreau carefully recorded the same details a century and a half ago. Primack, a College of Arts & Sciences biology professor, who pioneered the study of the effects of climate change on New England, has used Thoreau’s records to confirm that leaf-out arrives earlier today than it did then—a barometer of global warming. (He also checked photographs of leaf-out going back to the 1800s; those photos’ dates also indicate that spring came later in horse-and-buggy days.) ~ BU Today, Rich Barlow
Another great observer was Aldo Leopold whose records of temperature, blooming, birds, and other indicators are still used as a baseline today in the Wisconsin Sand County where he meticulously made his measurements with a cup of coffee at dawn. Today his daughter keeps track of over 700 indicators (blooming, birds, etc.) over each year cycle.
You do not need to be a scientist as Thoreau proved. You just have to pay attention, write it down, and be regular about it. The record may prove invaluable but in the mean time you will have a glorious time among birds chirping, flowers opening, and the heavens greeting you with a new day dawning!
A very important address by Secretary of State John Kerry in a preliminary meeting leading up to the November 30 opening of the Paris Accord on Climate Change–many experts believe it is humanity’s last chance to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.
By now, readers on this blog know that Aldo Leopold is a guiding light for me in this often confusing time. I seek something he knew from spending a lot of time in nature. See this film snippet shared recently by a guest blogger on the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s Land Ethic Leaders Blog:
During a trip to Washington D.C. Congressman John Mica offered to take our group on a special evening tour of the Capitol Building. He is a real history buff and with 21 years serving in the House of Representatives he has a few good stories…
These photos taken with my smartphone speak for themselves. The quality of workmanship and art in the architecture, paintings and sculpture makes my proud of my government. Washington D. C. has long been my personal inspiration.
The workshop I attended was a special session of Florida State Public Universities. We met with representatives from Department of Defense and major uniform services, and then with staffers from Democratic and Republican representatives with the Florida delegation.
Given the acrimony and loss of the traditions of discussion and respect for disparate viewpoints, many Junior Conservative representatives have never experienced what staffers described as the Regular Order of legislation. They all expressed dismay with ongoing sequestration, little hope of a bipartisan spending bill, and the general loss of appreciation for the 200-year-old process of compromise to pass bills that work for the America Public.
Susan Feathers 