Friday, November 7
1. Bring environmental instruction to every classroom in every subject - TOMORROW, Saturday 8th
2. Advertising on San Francisco buildings and street furniture
3. Public outcry: Has it defeated the Fisher Museum and other desecrations of Presidio history?
4. John Muir Assn bestows award on GGNRA Endangered Species Big Year
5. Two officially established fact: Caribbean monk seal extinct/temperatures rising in the Antarctic as well as Arctic
6. Letter to soon-to-be Farmer-in-Chief Barack Obama
7. Feedback: The Economist's endorsement of Obama
8. Status of our public educational system - an editorial
9. Why the U.S. will keep backing numbskulls
10. Informed citizens avoid information overload by taking strategic shortcuts before casting their ballots
11. Immigration vs climate warming and water supply
12. Notes & Queries
1. Environmental Futures Contest for Public Schools represents an effort to bring environmental instruction to every classroom in every subject across the United States. We are having a planning meeting this Saturday to discuss what has been done, and what remains to be done to complete our pilot contest in San Francisco. This is a general meeting open to the public. We encourage all who wish to make classroom lessons much more environmental to attend.
Environmental Futures General Meeting
Noon, this Saturday, November 8th
Resource Renewal Institute Library
Building D, Room 290, Second Floor
Fort Mason Center
San Francisco
415 308 0242
Please RSVP via email at jimlecuyer@sbcglobal.net, or by phone at 650 992 4550, or 415 308 0242. Space limited to 25.
(See below for Jim's editorial)
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2. From San Francisco Beautiful
The issue of general advertising on City buildings and street furniture has been continued to November 18th. Thanks to everyone who contacted the S.F. Board of Supervisors asking that they support legislation curbing the blight of general advertising in San Francisco.
Ordinance summary and what happened on Tuesday, November 4th.
Ordinance amending the San Francisco Administrative Code by adding Section 4.20-1 to prohibit any new general advertising signs on street furniture over the number authorized as of January 1, 2008 and to prohibit new general advertising signs visible to the public on the exterior of City-owned buildings as of March 5, 2002; adopting environmental and other findings.
PASSED ON FIRST READING by the following vote:
Ayes: 6 - Ammiano, Maxwell, McGoldrick, Mirkarimi, Peskin, Sandoval
Noes: 5 - Alioto-Pier, Chu, Daly, Dufty, Elsbernd
Supervisor McGoldrick, seconded by Supervisor Sandoval, moved that this Ordinance be CONTINUED to November 18, 2008. The motion carried by the following vote: Ayes: 11 - Alioto-Pier, Ammiano, Chu, Daly, Dufty, Elsbernd, Maxwell, McGoldrick, Mirkarimi, Peskin, Sandoval
A short history of the fight against general advertising in San Francisco:
· In 2002 the voters approved Proposition G, which prohibits new general advertising signs on private property.
· In 2007, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition K that sets forth a Declaration of Policy that the City should not allow any increase in the number of general advertising signs visible to the public on the exterior of City-owned buildings or on street furniture.*
· In 2008 Supervisor Jake McGoldrick introduces legislation that will codify Proposition G's prohibition of new general advertising on the exterior of City-owned buildings and on street furniture.
*Street furniture includes transit shelters, kiosks, benches and newspaper racks. General advertising signs direct attention to a business, commodity, industry or other activity which is sold, offered or conducted elsewhere than on the premises upon which sign is located.
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3. Jake, I wonder if you would be kind enough to mention to your readers that the public meeting of the Board of Directors of the Presidio Trust, to be held at the Hebst International Exhibition Hall, 385 Moraga Ave (near the Officers' Club at the Main Post, The Presidio, has been rescheduled to 9 December at 6:30 p.m. Evidently, the massive public outcry against the proposed 100,000 square-foot contemporary art museum, the 95,000 square-foot hotel, and a three-screen multiplex movie theater to be built on the historic Parade Ground in the Presidio is causing the planners to reconsider the whole development idea. This is good news to those who respect history and tradition, and to those who are concerned about the natural environment in our National Park. But the "Save the Presidio" movement urges us not to let up the pressure now, and to keep writing to the Trust and to our City legislators. And to attend the meeting!. More details may be found at savethepresidio.org. Thank you. Dan Richman
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4.
The GGNRA Endangered Species Big Year has received the Environmental Education Award from the John Muir Association. This award is given for outstanding contributions to environmental education for the year. The awards celebration will be held on Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 6 pm at the Campbell Theatre in Martinez, CA. John Muir Laws will give the keynote presentation, and Amy Meyer, godmother of the GGNRA, will be
presented with the Conservationist of the Year Award. Call Nancy to reserve your tickets at 925-370-7158.
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5. Signs of the times
Extinct Monk Seal Removed From Endangered Species List
Last week, the final bell tragically tolled for the Caribbean monk seal when the National Marine Fisheries Service removed its Endangered Species Act protections -- not because it recovered, but because it's extinct. Last sighted in 1952, the seal was put on the federal endangered species list in 1967 in the hope it would be rediscovered, but to no avail. The species' spiral toward extinction began as far back as 1494, when Columbus noted it was easy prey for hunters seeking food, blubber, and skins.
The Caribbean monk seal is the first seal species to go extinct solely due to human causes -- but if we're not careful, it won't be the last. The endangered Hawaiian and Mediterranean monk seals are both dwindling fast due to global warming, sea-level rise, and other factors. The Center for Biological Diversity is currently working to gain more protected habitat for the Hawaiian monk seal.
From Ian Wilson:
Hi Jake, Here's the first evidence that temperatures are not only rising in the arctic, they're also rising in the antarctic. It seems that one reason there's been so little evidence of antarctic warming up to now is because there are so few measuring stations there. Can't say I blame the climate scientists for this, I wouldn't want to be posted there either. http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKTRE49T81020081030?sp=true
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6. Farmer in Chief
By MICHAEL POLLAN (Published: October 9, 2008)
Dear Mr. President-Elect,
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them.
Excerpt--full article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
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7. Feedback
John Anderson (written before the election):
The Economist endorsed Barack Obama, huh? Remarkable, considering I’ve always regarded the Economist as fairly right-wing. Encouraging- we’ll know by tomorrow.
I totally agree with you on prop. R; it’s a gratuitous insult to a hard-working, effective sewage plant. Most people I’ve talked to seem to agree. I wonder how long it will take to start referring to ill-designed, unreliable devices as “W’s”?
“My e-mail program cost a mint, scrambles any words longer than three syllables, and randomly changes my fonts to Cyrillic- it’s a total W”.
“It may be foolproof, but is it W proof?”
To whatever powers are out there: please, please don’t make us come up with a use for “Palin”.
As always, thanks for the newsletter.
The Economist is definitely not right-wing. It calls itself 'liberal', and it is liberal in the traditional sense of minimum regulation, free markets, open borders, &c. Today the terminology is getting mixed up, as those values are usually appropriated by the right-wing (but only when it's to their advantage). I had expected the journal would support Obama, as he seems more consistent with its expressed philosophy. It carried an opinion piece a few weeks ago about 'where is the real McCain?'. It expressed dismay over McCain's confusing course. Obama appeared more consistent and more able, and I expected that that would appeal to the journal. After all, Obama is moderate-to-conservative, as was FDR in the 1930s. They only seemed liberal or radical at the time.
In principle I am for those free market values too, although for a number of reasons that beautiful theory doesn't work well in the present-day world. We all know what happens in an unregulated economy based on greed; we are living unsustainably, and conspicuous and mindless consumption are destroying our environment and resource base. And no one will do anything about population--therefore, I no longer support free movement of goods and people, even though that is philosophically appealing. My main dissatisfaction with The Economist is that it sticks to that philosophy, even though there is some recognition on its part that it's not working that well in the real world. Another dissatisfaction is that it is weak on environmental issues. I have found its coverage and understanding of environmental issues shallow, and occasionally outright wrong. Remember the name of the magazine: economic and business issues are its roots; it has branched out over the 150+ years of its existence into other fields, but economics and business are its origins.
I find the magazine's writers are very well-grounded in their subjects for the most part, and I value it for giving me background and perspective on issues that have a long history. Its biographies are delightful and rich, and its historical memory give me a foundation for understanding today's events. The greatest value I derive from it is perspective.
Just for clarification: I really like the Economist as a magazine. It covers areas, like 3rd world politics, that most of the media completely ignores, and you're right on target about the accuracy of its reporting (including the weakness on the environment). It’s one of the few publications that I find interesting, even when I disagree with it. Much like your newsletter. I just wish I had more time to read it (the magazine).
Dear Jake, I find it interesting that The Economist magazine did not predict the financial meltdown. It's also ironic that The Economist endorsed Bush in 2000 and has endorsed the very policies that have lead us to this economic abyss. Now, The Economist wants Pres. Obama. Go figure.
Harry Kassakhian, Gallup, New Mexico
Harry: Yes, I was thinking of that very thing when I posted that item, but didn't want to get too far into a complex topic.
Nevertheless, I feel like defending The Economist. Why do I defend them? Obviously, it is fallible, and your question is a good one. For all its erudition and the weight of its historical memory, it was captive of its own world view and ideology. (There is a better word than 'ideology', but I can't think of it at the moment.) I have always been aware of its bias in that regard, and I filter it through my own biases. I have, eg, caught it out on environmental issues, and whenever I sent it an LTE, the response has been weak. There is an intimate link between the financial crisis and the environmental crisis. It has exhibited glimmerings of understanding that connection, but it doesn't fully get it. Alas, they are human also, and I still place a high value on the journal, flawed as it is.
There is a parallel situation with a commentator whose bias is very different than mine: David Brooks of the NY Times. I hear him and Mark Shields weekly on the Lehrer News Hour. Brooks made snide remarks at the time about the Democrats' choice of Nancy Pelosi as leader, saying that showed how out of touch with the nation the party was. He supported Bush initially, and was in favor of invading Iraq. Over the years I noticed his support weakening, his defense of Bush and the war became increasingly lame, until he finally gave it up entirely. It was interesting to watch his evolution over the last six years, and this year he sounded like he had become an enthusiastic Obama fan--in spite of the fact that he was trying to be a detached analyst.
So, Brooks was way behind the curve, as is The Economist. (I know what that's like--I've been there on other issues. In fact, I think my whole life has been spent behind the curve.) Nevertheless, Brooks still has interesting observations to make, and I always benefit from his comments.
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8. Status of our public educational system
(I post this item in its entirety because I think it an accurate depiction of the status of our public educational system, and one reason why our society is in dire shape.)
Jake: Few people except teachers understand why the public school system is producing so many young adults ignorant of our global (and local) environmental needs. If we are to solve our environmental woes (not to mention financial woes), we need an educated public. But why aren't they educated enough to care about what might well be their own coming demise? Why are so many schools and teachers teaching so little? This is a complicated question with clear but expensive solutions.
NeoCons (some call them NeoLiberals) are able to manipulate a great mass of Americans because so many adults are poorly educated. US public schools continue to be structured on 19th Century theories. The schools dealt well with illiteracy in 1900, but, in general their present product is literate but ignorant and angry young adults; this is not to be laid on the heads of teachers, though they are often condemned. Most teachers bleed for their students, but are more than overloaded. Overworked teachers burn out and leave the profession. How many trained professionals would stay in a company that overworked, underpaid and disrespected their employees?
But most of us -- I began teaching English in 1965 -- care somewhat less about the money we earn than about our working conditions. For example, at the secondary level the typical inner-city academic teacher has 150 or more students per day (sometimes as many as 240), divided into five classes. If a History teacher assigns one research paper or one serious written homework assignment a week to 150 students, and it takes ten minutes to read, comment and grade each paper, that can result in 1500 minutes of work outside of class, or 25 hours for just one written homework assignment. Most teachers shy away from this. Only teachers without family or friends are able to keep up with that load, unless they skim through and cheat the student, and pass kids along who don't do the work. Our sons and daughters and grandchildren are not learning to write or do research, or reflect deeply. Many of the best teachers struggle along for a few years, then leave in disgust. Those who stay either give up their personal lives, or give up seriously grading homework assignments, or just accept the monthly pay.
Teaching is not just about classroom teaching and grading either. Every teacher is called upon to help maintain the infrastructure of the school, to supervise games, or participate in PTA or attend after school events... and contact parents. The work is overwhelming if taken seriously, a sixty or eighty hour a week job, with constant anxiety. Are lessons prepared? What haven't I done? I know of few secondary English teachers, for example, who go anywhere without a pile of papers to read, at parties, at dinners, waiting in line at a movie, in the toilet, in bed. By the time they get through the immediate work of the day, one more thing such as a home call to an angry parent who wants to know why his or her daughter is failing is just one more thing than the teacher can handle. Parents may not like it, but that's how it is. It's hard to explain to an angry parent why you haven't got time to give personal attention to her unhappy child.
Interruptions of all kinds reduce the class hour and the school year. One two-day standardized test can disrupt a whole school for a week, with teachers called away from class to proctor make-ups for kids who missed one or more segments of the test. Every assembly, every in-class visit, every interruption of any kind takes minutes out of each hour. Every unruly kid takes time, and when there are twenty-five to thirty-five kids in a class, teaching becomes more crowd control.
The US school system is structured to create such ignorance, which gives birth to a public that votes against their own best interests. Kids feel that what is being offered in school is not relevant to them, and they all too often blame their teachers, and there are many bad teachers. But I don't blame the teachers so much as the working conditions and the irrelevance and even propagandistic perversions of the subject matter -- American History for one glaring example, or the environment. Right now less than 1% of our students actually study environmental issues in class, so we see in our adults the results of a hundred years of indifference to the environment. To change that, or anything, in the public schools will be difficult, but must be done. The schools need to reduce the teacher's work load and focus on relevant, modern subject matter, such as climate change, or Richard Louv's effort to illuminate the loss of Nature in his book, Last Child in the Woods. Or the true and violent history of America. Without academic freedom, a young adult can not find real life truth. How enlightened a vote can you expect from someone who has never studied the issues? And how is America or the world going to find its way to sustainability, or even bare survival, if kids from Kindergarten on are kept from environmental (or any kind of complex) knowledge?
The public schools are not working. Kids are demanding more. No Child Left Behind is a horrible joke, and the charter school movement is mostly destroying what little beneficial infrastructure the public schools have left. There are so many things the public school system has to do before it will function well. The first step is to cut class size in half. That, in itself, will pave the way to a modern, functioning school system with satisfied teachers and students. And it has to be done before other reforms will work! Private schools know what works. Few if any private schools have classes over 15.
The second step is to make the curriculum relevant. We can learn from those schools such as Berkeley High's Ecology and Social Justice Program, or from the one San Francisco high school program dedicated to environmental issues, Galileo's Environmental Studies Program. It has ninety students a year, and they like what they learn.
Why environmentalism, or much else, is not taught is more complicated than what I've laid out here, but these are the basics. No one who has not been a teacher for a number of years can be expected to understand why our public schools do not retain many of the best teachers, why our kids are graduating with a degree that is laughable to developed and developing nations, and, most of all, why Americans seem so ignorant of their own needs and the needs of the rest of the world. Kids all over the world want to learn. Our kids want to learn, but not many can learn much in this system. And we damned well all better learn our environmental lessons fast, or lose our democracy. Jim LeCuyer
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9. Why the US will keep backing numbskulls
Fundamentalist religion and the south's block on threatening ideas have combined to produce an ignorant nation
"The founding fathers were great thinkers. How did their project degenerate into George Bush and Sarah Palin?"
From George Monbiot in Guardian Weekly 07.11.08
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10. Simpleminded Voters (Emphases mine. The rest of the lengthy article explains a complicated research experiment—not easy to summarize.)
Informed citizens avoid information overload by taking strategic shortcuts before casting their ballots
As the 2008 U.S. presidential election approaches, tens of millions of voters have to make up their minds. They face the task of sifting through media reports, televised debates, political advertisements, campaign literature and conversations with family and friends to identify a candidate who best reflects their political views.
That just may be too much to ask, though. As political scientists have long lamented, the general public knows depressingly little about politics. Most Americans can identify the president but barely half know the name of even one cabinet member and only one-third correctly identify their two U.S. senators or their congressional representative. In surveys, roughly half of registered voters display little understanding of how government works or of current political issues.
Even if a voter knew enough to evaluate each presidential candidate’s positions on diverse issues, he or she would still need to tally pros and cons on those issues for each candidate and determine who most deserved support. Decision researchers in various fields have long favored this exhaustive, coldly logical approach, even if only as an ideal that less methodical thinkers should strive for.
Yet according to many psychologists, people will never think that way. We shun rationality and seek as little information as possible when making judgments, the experts assert. Instead, individuals use strategic shortcuts, also known as rules of thumb or heuristics, to decide. The latter term, of Greek origin, means “serving to find out or discover.” Heuristics require minimal mental effort but prompt irrational and biased judgments—or at least so say some psychologists.
Political scientists generally assume just the opposite. They regard heuristics as tools for the average citizen to fashion reasonably accurate political judgments out of sparse civic knowledge.
Excerpt from Science News 5 July 2008
(Can anyone say that they never take these shortcuts? After wading through 12 state propositions and 22 (count 'em) city propositions, most of which they don't understand?)
"Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated." -- Will Rogers
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11. Immigration Exacerbates Global Warming and Overpopulation, and Over-Immigration Threaten Water Supply
CAPS has launched a TV ad campaign in California TV markets. The spots point out that when immigrants settle in the U.S., their energy use quickly becomes Americanized. As a result their carbon emissions skyrocket. The result is a quadrupling of immigrants' carbon footprints compared to the amount of carbon emissions they produced in their home countries.
CAPS' TV campaign is running as America faces the largest population increase in its history. According to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau projections, U.S. population will jump from 305 million today to more than 400 million by 2040. That's a 33 percent increase yielding an additional 100 million more people in just the next thirty years. It’s an increase equivalent to adding another entire Western half of the country. According to Pew Research, 82 percent of that growth will be a result of immigration and births to immigrants.
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12. Notes & Queries, Guardian Weekly
A very crafty strategy
Who is the better strategist: George W Bush or Osama bin Laden?
Bush's cunning plan is to leave the whole sorry mess for someone else to sort out. Osama bin Laden simply can't match Bush's ploy--a masterstroke that marks Bush as the superior strategist.
Jim Dewar. Gosford, NSW, Australia
Bush could never see the wood for the trees, and is now looking at his own timber-r-r-r.
Roger Morrell, Perth, Western Australia
No contest. Osama bin Laden was planning to bring the US to its knees. George W Bush showed him exactly how to do it.
Harvey Mitchell, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia
