Moving the world: A celebration of writing and community

Parc de la Tête d'Or, Lyon, Sergio Canobbio

Last Wednesday, I was fortunate to attend a significant literary event, called Moving the World: A Celebration of Writing and Community.

Over a three-hour period, I heard essays, letters, poems, and collaborative writing, but also saw drawings and paintings. I got to meet with the artists and to ask them questions about their work. The intellectual and artistic quality as well as the variety of the works were outstanding. The program was beautifully organized by Patrick Berry and Cory Holding.

An event such as this one is not uncommon; what made this one special was that it was held in the chapel of the Danville Correctional Center, and the artists were all inmates. They showed off the work they’ve done through courses offered by the Education Justice Project (EJP), led by Rebecca Ginsburg. EJP is a response to the abundant evidence showing that

College-in-prison programs reduce arrest, conviction, and reincarceration rates among released prisoners. Evidence has also linked the presence of college-in-prison programs to fewer disciplinary incidents within prison, finding that such programs produce safer environments for prisoners and staff alike. College-prison programs also have benefits for inmates’ families and, hence, their communities.

Captured Potential, Larry Brent

The EJP is an outstanding effort to help young men who want to become better family and community members. If you had experienced Moving the World, you’d at least have seen inmate-students focusing their energies on reading and writing, on reflecting about their lives, families, and communities, and perhaps most significantly, engaged in how they can make positive contributions to the world both inside and outside the prison.

As I said, the quality of the writing and the oral performances was superb. I was impressed with nearly all of the works. One, entitled “Progressive tears: A prisoner’s retrospective cry for Dewey’s help,” asked the philosopher John Dewey whether his progressive vision was still relevant today. Do we as a people still believe in equality and justice? Do we still see education as a means for building a better society? One may wonder, since the use of Pell Grants for prisoners was eliminated in 1994, and most prison college programs have closed.

Another essay asserts “We all want the same things.” It shows that both prisoners and ordinary people on the outside want prisoners to turn from crime to productive citizenship. Other works included letters to family members, poems, reflections on life. The painting, “Captured potential,” and its accompanying text, express well both the tragedy of prison and the possibilities. I doubt whether anyone made it through the event with dry eyes.

You can see some of the writing itself in the National Gallery of Writing.

An event like Moving the World makes the drudgery and nonsense of many other parts of life much more bearable. I not only enjoyed it in the sense of savoring, rather than counting, the moments, I was also impressed by the obvious thoughtfulness, organization, and high standards that went into it. I now understand why one instructor said that her participation has raised the standards back at the university.

References

• CBC News (2009, December 17). Inmate deaths from unnatural causes rise.
• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline.

 

Howard Zinn’s “Three Holy Wars”

Howard Zinn spoke at the Progressive magazine’s 100 Anniversary Conference. He makes a persuasive case for questioning even the good wars, such as the “three holy wars” of US history.

It’s worth thinking about Zinn’s argument in light of Obama’s Nobel Prize lecture, in which he says “Still, we are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill. Some will be killed.” Is the war in Afghanistan a more holy war than the ones that Zinn questions?

 

Overconsumption is the problem, not population

http://www.thelightisgreen.com/Overpopulation.jpg

When we watch farmlands or forests being paved over for new housing, or see images of starving children, it’s hard not to think that there may be just too many people, that we have “exponential” population growth. This leads soon to the idea that we need to “do something” about population.

That view has a long history, including Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. There may well be negative effects and ultimate limits, but most of the blame assigned to population today would be better assigned to overconsumption.

How we understand the causes of present problems such as climate change, depletion of natural resources, hunger, and war is important, because different causes call for different remedies. An article by Fred Pearce in New Scientist, via Population: Overconsumption is the real problem – opinion – 27 September 2009, summarizes well the major issues here.

The population “bomb” is fast being defused. Women across the poor world are having dramatically fewer babies than their mothers did – mostly out of choice, not compulsion. Half a century ago, the worldwide average for the number of children a woman had was between five and six. Now she has 2.6. In the face of such a fall it is hard to see what more “doing something” about global population might achieve.

Half the world now has a fertility rate below the replacement level, which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. This includes most of Europe, east Asia, North America and the Caribbean. There are holdouts in a few Muslim countries – but not Iran, where fertility is 1.7 – and many parts of Africa

Thus, even if we have too many people, the rate of growth is decreasing, and all the indicators point to further reductions accompanying development. So, if the problem is not exponential population growth, what is it? Pearce goes on to point out that

the world’s richest half billion people – that’s about 7 per cent of the global population – are responsible for 50 per cent of the world’s emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 per cent are responsible for just 7 per cent of emissions. One American or European is more often than not responsible for more emissions than an entire village of Africans.

Every time those of us in the rich world talk about too many babies in Africa or India, we are denying our own culpability. It is the world’s consumption patterns we need to fix, not its reproductive habits.

Pearce talks mostly about climate change, but his argument holds for other aspects of environmental stress, including the basic issue of hunger. Overconsumption in the rich countries occurs through waste, a diet heavily based on meat, and simply too much eating. A study directed by Timothy Jones at the University of Arizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, indicates that up to fifty per cent of all food ready for harvest in the US never gets eaten. That amount alone is enough to address worldwide hunger needs.

There’s no doubt that we’d do better to balance our population with the available resources, but before we criticize the mote in the eye of starving villagers in Africa, we might well consider the beam in our own.

References

• Connelly, Matthew (2008). Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Jones, Timothy W. (2005). Using contemporary archaeology and applied anthropology to understand food loss in the American food system. Tucson: University of Arizona.
• Pearce, Fred (2009, September 27). Population: Overconsumption is the real problem. New Scientist, Magazine issue 2727.

 

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text’ leak

The Guardian reports that the leak of the “Danish text” has put the Copenhagen climate change summit in “disarray” (see Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text’ leak). Developing countries “reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.” The document apparently sets unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions, allowing people in rich countries to emit nearly twice as much.

Meanwhile, James Hansen, “the scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger of global warming says it would be better for the planet and for future generations” if the talks collapse.

If our children and grandchildren can’t stop us from destroying their world, who will?

 

Rethinking schools

Rethinking Schools began in 1986 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as an effort to address problems such as “basal readers, standardized testing, and textbook-dominated curriculum.”

It’s since become an international publisher of educational materials, with a magazine and books on classroom practice and educational theory, social justice, anti-racism, vouchers and marketplace-oriented reforms, funding equity, and school-to-work. The publications are written by and for teachers, but speaks to students, parents, administrators, researchers, and community members as well.

I like their vision of the common school:

Schools are about more than producing efficient workers or future winners of the Nobel Prize for science. They are the place in this society where children from a variety of backgrounds come together and, at least in theory, learn to talk, play, and work together.

Schools are integral not only to preparing all children to be full participants in society, but also to be full participants in this country’s ever-tenuous experiment in democracy. That this vision has yet to be fully realized does not mean it should be abandoned.

I highly recommend their publications, including the classic, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, which was my introduction. I’ve used several of the books or magazine issues in my own teaching and can say that I’ve learned important things from every one of them.

 

Youth Community Informatics video

This video about Youth Community Informatics is already on the YCI site, but some readers may not have seen it there. It gives the flavor of the project; for more details, please visit the site.

 

John Dewey and Daisaku Ikeda

I attended the 6th Annual Ikeda Forum for Intercultural Dialogue yesterday at the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue in Cambridge. The topic was John Dewey, Daisaku Ikeda, and the Quest for a New Humanism. The occasion was the 150th Anniversary of John Dewey’s birth.

Although Ikeda’s Nichiren Buddhism, a form of Mahayana Buddhism, may at first seem far removed from Dewey’s American pragmatism, the speakers found many areas of consonance between the work of the two. I was pleased to see that Jane Addams was brought into the conversation, too.

Nichiren was a 13th century Buddhist reformer, who based his teachings on the Lotus Sutra and its  message of the dignity of all life. Like Dewey’s pragmatism, Nichiren Buddhism is grounded in the realities of daily life. It promotes “human revolution,” in which individuals take responsibility for their lives and help to build a world in which diverse peoples can live in peace.

Ikeda is the founder of the Soka Gakkai International, a movement characterized by its emphasis on value creation (soka). This implies that each individual needs the opportunity to find value in their unique path while contributing value to humanity. Soka schools have much in common with the kinds of schools Dewey envisaged (but rarely saw enacted).

At the Ikeda Forum discussions focused on connections and divergences between Dewey’s naturalistic humanism and Ikeda’s Buddhist humanism. Presentations examined how their work can be used as resources for individual and social change.

 

How useful is the concept of community?

Miguel de Unamuno says that anyone who invents a concept takes leave of reality. I like that statement both for its literal meaning that reality can nver be fully captured by a single concept, and in the suggestion that concepts imply a kind of madness.

Unamuno’s dictum applies to the question “How useful is the concept of community?”, because community designations betray the individual in two senses. One is that every community designation necessarily strips away the uniqueness of the individuals within. A term such as “immigrants” is clearly impoverished with respect to the many reasons, origins, and experiences of immigrants.

But a community designation can not only strip away individual meaning; it can attach wrong, or even contradictory meanings. For example, if we say that someone is a member of the “elderly community,” we impute a large set of attributes that may be totally off. She might be 90 years old, but rather than suffering “elderly decline,” she might be longing for that iPod we had provided to the “youth community” to share the latest music. There’s even some evidence that the very old are healthier than the somewhat old, because they were the ones who survived past critical health hurdles.

What makes this all even more interesting is that we can’t think without concepts, and we do better when we make use of even faulty information. A member of the “library patron community” may come to the library to get warm, to order some coffee (as at Urbana Free Library), to get a date, to sleep, or a host of other reasons.

Nevertheless, it’s helpful to know that many visitors seek information. Similarly, many immigrants may need help dealing with often absurd regulations that don’t apply to citizens in a country. Many elderly people have special physical or mental challenges well beyond those faced by most younger people.

These thoughts keep bringing me back to the need for dialogue. In so many cases, well-intentioned people make judgments and decisions without really listening to those they’re trying to help. Most examples of community designations betraying the individual, could at least be better addressed by starting with the idea of listening to each others’ experiences first.

References

• De Unamuno, Miguel (1921). Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (The tragic sense of life). New York: Macmillan.

 

Preserving the $ by invading Iraq

This is old news, but I was reminded of it by a discussion on this weekend. It’s worth thinking about again in these parlous economic times.

Sharma, Tracy, and Kumar (2004) talk about one of the major, but little-discussed reasons for invading Iraq. Is militarism the best way to boost our economy?

What prompted the U.S. attack on Iraq, a country under sanctions for 12 years (1991-2003), struggling to obtain clean water and basic medicines? A little discussed factor responsible for the invasion was the desire to preserve “dollar imperialism” as this hegemony began to be challenged by the euro.

References

Caryl, Christian (2009, October 16). Decline of the dollar. Foreign Policy.

Sharma, Sohan; Tracy, Sue; & Kumar, Surinder (2004, February). The Invasion of Iraq: Dollar vs Euro Re-denominating Iraqi oil in U. S. dollars, instead of the euro. Z magazine.

 

Is it good to synchronize traffic signals?

The Champaign County Regional Planning Commission hopes to apply for a $1.94 million federal grant to coordinate the traffic signals at dozens of intersections in the community, covering major corridors such as Neil Street and Prospect, University, Bradley, Mattis and Florida/Kirby avenues.

Champaign-Urbana Urbanized Area Transportation Study…says the proposed “traffic signal energy efficiency and conservation strategy” could reduce the typical motorist’s annual travel times by 20 to 50 percent, cut fuel consumption by 14 percent and reduce carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen dioxide emissions by 13.3 percent.

via The News-Gazette.com: Re-timing of traffic signals could be first stage in overhaul.

Saving energy, reducing pollution, reducing travel time, all sound good. But synchronized signals along University Avenue may have an insidious consequence.

It’s already the case that University Avenue marks and maintains racial divisions in the cities of Champaign and Urbana. Some people south of University, especially whites, view “north of University” as an area they don’t want to be in. And some blacks north of University may view south of University as an unwelcoming place. The busy traffic corridor with miserable access for pedestrians reinforces the view that these two domains are separate, and necessarily so.

As an already busy traffic corridor, University Avenue makes it difficult for alert, athletic adults to cross from one area of town to another on foot or bicycle. It’s positively unsafe for children or anyone without well-honed defensive faculties. Drivers already go too fast and are inattentive to pedestrians and cyclists. This could become worse with synchronization.

Could the street become safer with synchronization? Maybe. But I doubt that will happen if the only concerns considered are overall vehicular traffic flow.

I’m not sure in the final analysis whether the proposed changes should be done or not, but I do believe that we’d be better off if we were to understand better the symbolic and material consequences of slashing through our community.