2021. Happy Martin Luther King Day
Black are my steps on silver sod;
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;
And tree and house, and hill and lake,
Are frosted like a wedding cake.
–Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94)
"Every day of your life is a special occasion."
-Thomas S. Morison
National Parks are free today to Honor Dr. Martin Luther King
The Booker T. Washington Park in Virginia has a living museum within the well preserver Tobacco Plantations acreage.
https://www.nps.gov/bowa/index.htm
These Build-It-Yourself Paper Toy Kits Will Make You Feel Like a Kid Again
published YESTERDAY
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/cardkits-build-it-yourself-paper-toys-36867612
May we raise children
who love the unloved things-
the dandelion, the worms & spiderlings.
Children who sense
the rose needs the thorn
& run into rainswept days
the same way they turn towards the sun...
And when they're grown & someone has to speak for those
Who have no voice
May they draw upon that wilder bond, those days of tending tender things
and be the ones.
-Nicolette Sowder
To the cold December heaven
Came the pale Moon and the stars,
As the yellow Sun was sinking
Behind the purple bars.
–Charles Dawson Shanly (1811–75)
Word of the day
ubiquitous
adjective
tracking stray dogs may soon be easier thanks to the ubiquitous microchip: omnipresent, ever-present, present everywhere, everywhere, all-over, all over the place, pervasive, all-pervasive, universal, worldwide, global; rife, prevalent, predominant, very common, popular, extensive, wide-ranging, far-reaching, inescapable. ANTONYMS rare, scarce
WE DON'T HAVE THAT KIND OF BRAND AMBASSADOR PROGRAM...
https://www.naturallife.com/?utm_source=chirp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3425_YogaStoryB&obem=CdySKah3EGp5DY1r8IOOwbHCC1wuL0ngr07FAUbvRUw%3D&bc_lcid=t5842776105
People are always writing in to ask if we have a Brand Ambassador program, so we put our heads together and decided to create a program that highlights girls and women who are out in their communities making the world a better place! Nothing motivates us more than hearing your stories about kindness, giving, helping, caring & doing! We will be sharing some of your stories in hopes that they inspire others to think of things they can do to help make the world a better place too!
Making Thoughtful Gifts. Holidays to Valentines
Cookies in a Jar Gifts and More
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/nature/kids-vs-plastic/cookies-in-a-jar/
Kids vs. Plastic
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/nature/kids-vs-plastic/
Plastic pollution
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/nature/kids-vs-plastic/pollution/
10 tips to reduce your plastic use
Help for financial woes in the time of Covid
8 calls that can save money right now
WBUR
Shop Local Artists
BALANCE
Yoga brings palpable rewards
World Bicycle Relief donates bicycles to people in need in rural communities all over the world. With these bicycles, a valuable form of transportation—sometimes the only form—in many communities, people can have access to education, better healthcare, and better livelihoods.
https://www.bicycling.com/news/a34740663/ride-with-rapha-for-world-bicycle-relief-black-friday/
MATH
The longest flight in the world by the numbers.
4 pilots, 16 hours and 58 minutes in the air, Fuel, 238,540 pounds, flight, miles traveled, Nautical 8,984 vs. 10,000 standard, 85% the speed of sound. The aircraft’s cruise speed was Mach 0.85. Compared to other aircraft.
“This is quite fast, actually, on an Airbus aircraft,” Subramaniam says. He notes that an Airbus A330 travels at Mach 0.82 mach, for example; the A330 is another wide-body, twin-engine aircraft. A Boeing 777, he adds, travels at about Mach 0.84. (Like the A350, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner also flies at Mach 0.85.)
Lastly, What do you thing the green glow they saw from the plane was?
SCIENCE
On a cosmic time scale, different stars take turns as our North Star. It turns out that the Earth wobbles slightly as it spins through space, just as a spinning toy top wobbles as it slows down. This means that the axis of the Earth does not always point at Polaris. Over a period of about 26,000 years, the Earth’s axis traces out a huge circle on the sky, and over time it points toward bright stars other than Polaris, as shown on the inset on our map.
- For example, between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago, the Earth’s axis pointed at Thuban, a star in the body of Draco, and so Thuban was then the North Star.
- Looking ahead, about 13,000 years from now, the Earth’s axis will point toward the bright star Vega, which will then be our North Star.
- And in 26,000 years, the axis will once again point at Polaris, making it our North Star once again.
For much of the 26,000-year period, the Earth’s axis points to no bright stars. So, for thousands of years at a time, we have NO North Star at all!
DECEMBER 2020 SKY MAP
Click here or on map below to enlarge (PDF).
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/overview
Sustainable workout gear
Foundations helping others
https://www.cotopaxi.com/pages/foundation
Screen time?
Better than screen time
Best Young Adult Literature, book series
https://www.afar.com/magazine/the-10-best-pedestrian-streets-around-the-world
Something to watch… when you’ve finished watching The Queens Gambit, parental discretion advised.
Movies of chess and strategy
Akeelah and the Bee (2006)
Inspired by the 1994 Scripps National Spelling Bee and perturbed by the notion that most of the young contestants were from affluent socioeconomic backgrounds, writer and director Doug Atchison developed the idea for Akeelah and the Bee over a period of ten years, deciding to focus on a main character of color, 11-year-old Akeelah Anderson (played by Keke Palmer). Atchison wields the film to comment on the portrayal of non-white characters in film, the importance of community and the specific problems that Black communities face, while also criticizing the U.S. public school system and delineating the difference between encouraging children to follow their dreams and relentlessly pressuring them to succeed.
https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/shows-like-the-queens-gambit-what-to-watch-next
And…
A Beautiful Mind (2001)
While it's not necessarily an addiction story, A Beautiful Mind is a story of an exceedingly brilliant person struggling to find a way to live with a mental illness that progressively impacts every part of his life. Starring Russell Crowe as Nobel Laureate mathematician John Nash, the film portrays his struggle with schizophrenia and paranoid delusions even as his incredible genius leads him to develop his revolutionary work on game theory. Like Beth Harmon, Nash's mind is ahead of his time—and also like Beth, he, too, goes up against the Soviets (though those parts of the movie are fabricated from his hallucinations). While the film suffers from some formulaic (whoops) biopic arcs, the performances give nuance and pathos to a story about a family coming to terms with a devastating mental illness.
And..
Geri's Game (1997)
Geri's Game could be written off as a weird, wistful short film about an old man who cheats to win a game of chess, where the stakes are his own dentures, in the park against himself. But this 1997 Oscar-winning short needs to be considered in totality: for the story itself—which is strange, but also a meditative and sublime inquiry into aging, loneliness, and selfhood—for its precedence setting, for its technological breakthroughs. As the first short film in eight years, Geri's Game was Pixar's revival of the form. It conquered new animation techniques to make humans seem, well, human. The figure's depth, range of facial expressions, the movement of Geri's clothes are all momentous details that have influenced everything following. From then on, we expected short films before our Pixar movies. For being two decades old, Geri's Game hasn't befell to the uncanny valley, and remains a master class in just how much one effective character can accomplish.
Magnus (2016)
The pageantry of Beth Harmon's prodigious chess prowess, taking out an entire high school chess team the first time she visits the club, drew in crowds that only grew bigger as her star rose. In real life, Magnus Carlsen, a Norwegian wunderkind nicknamed the Mozart of chess, took down ten of the world's best chess-playing lawyers in a row—blindfolded. That scene would sound fake if not for Benjamin Ree's compelling documentary following Carlsen's trajectory to the top of the world of chess. Like The Queen's Gambit, Magnus turns a seemingly dull event for onlookers into a nail-biting spectator sport and a persona-driven rivalry not seen since Bobby Fischer's reign.
Queen of Katwe (2016)
The true story of 10-year-old chess prodigy Phiona's rise to fame was very close to director Mira Nair's heart: The filmmaker lives near the Ugandan village where the girl's story unfolded. Enlisting Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o as Phiona's fiercely determined mother and assembling a chess team cast of real kids from Katwe, Nair takes us to a vibrant, buzzing town. As Phiona, newcomer Madina Nalwanga works her way toward an improbable dream, learns the pluses and perils of confidence, and pulls off the impossible: turning a chess competition into an electrifying event.
Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)
Before the arrival of The Queen's Gambit, Searching for Bobby Fischer was probably the most ubiquitous chess-adjacent piece of popular culture. Though the title might make you think it's a biopic of the reclusive chess legend Bobby Fisher, the story centers on the childhood of a different childhood prodigy, Joshua Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc), as he learns the intricacies of the game from a strict instructor, played by Ben Kingsley, and a brilliant Washington Square Park hustler, played by Laurence Fishburne. Adapting a memoir by Waitzkin's father, filmmaker Steven Zaillian, the writer of Schindler's List, turns the material into a pleasingly cerebral sports movie, digging into the ethical minefield of nurturing a child's gift without destroying their natural love of the game.
Sport
Seed savers exchange
https://www.seedsavers.org/conference
A newsletter for families.
10 parent buys that made 2020 easier at home
https://www.cubbyathome.com/pandemic-purchases-for-families-80000809
First Reading Rainbow became a tool for Educators and the General public alike.
“There are many apps and shows that focus on the fundamentals of reading, but nothing has stepped into the role that Reading Rainbow played, which was to celebrate and encourage the pure pleasure of reading and to build literacy skills beyond figuring out letters and words,” said Donald K. Boswell, President & CEO of WNED | WBFO. “That need is still there, but we will explore new ways to deliver it in a new media age to a new generation of children.”
https://www.readingrainbow.org
Reading Rainbow timeline:
- Launched in 1983, it was the most-watched PBS program in the classroom featuring a library of over 150 programs.
- In the 2004 PBS Study of Video and Television Use Among K-12 Teachers, Reading Rainbow was the number one most-watched PBS program in classrooms nationwide.
- As of 2005:
- Reading Rainbow was carried on 95% of the Public Television Stations, serving 85% of the DMA.
- Based on carriage reports, an average of 670,000 individuals per week watched Reading Rainbow. However these numbers don’t include the approximately 10 million students who watched RR weekly in school...via broadcast, VHS, DVD or video streaming.
- Over 500,000+ copies of Reading Rainbow episodes have been sold since 1995.
- Each year 40,000+ children K-3rd grade entered the Reading Rainbow Young Writers & Illustrators Contest.
- PBSKIDS.org/readingrainbow (primary audience is children, secondary audience is parents) received an average 1,433,626 page views/month. readingrainbow.org (primary audience is educators) received an average of 90,000 visitors/month who downloaded over 20,000 PDF files.
- In 2006 each week, over 2.1 million children, teachers and parents tuned in to Reading Rainbow.
- August 2009 Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its broadcast run.
- November 2018 Research and Development begins on a new Reading Rainbow program thanks to a $200,000 grant from The John R. Oishei Foundation.
Shearing, Spinning, and Weaving Wool.
LaVar Burton, Renaissance Fair.
Next, LeVar Burton has put together Skybrary, an evolution of his time on Reading Rainbow to bring adapted access to reading comprehension in the classroom and joy of reading through the app.
Hear from LeVar Burton at ASCD’s December 9 Symposium
LeVar Burton will be our keynote speaker at the ASCD Symposium on Student Success in the Early Grades on December 9!
An actor, author, and education advocate who instilled the joy of reading in millions of children as the host of Reading Rainbow, LeVar is also the founder of interactive, award-winning, and ever-expanding digital library Skybrary and Skybrary School. Today, LeVar continues to help parents and teachers engage young learners and foster a lifelong love of learning. See below for a Message from LeVar Burton.
Skybrary.
LeVar Burton’s Skybrary is a carefully curated interactive library of eBooks and real-world video explorations designed to engage young readers and foster a love of reading.
Le Var was a Reading Rainbow
https://www.skybrary.org/skybrary
Of interest.
If you or someone you know is currently watching the Queens Gambit.
Origin, the book.
And inspiration for the interiors of Alma’s house.
Early in episode two, the young Elizabeth (Anya Taylor-Joy) is welcomed into to her new home by her adopted mother, Alma Wheatley (Marielle Heller). “Those are Rosa Bonheur prints,” Wheatley says of the art on the walls, copies of Bonheur’s Shepard in the Pyrenees (1888) and Wild Cat (1850). “Not originals of course. Do you like animals? I do. I love them.”
Learn More
It’s a small detail—but for art history nerds, it actually hints at most of the themes in the series. (The decor comes directly from the description of the Wheatley house in the Tevis book.)
Anna Klumpke, Portrait of Rosa Bonheur (1898). Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Rosa Bonheur,” as Linda Nochlin once wrote in her path-breaking 1971 essay on feminist art history, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” “is a woman artist in whom, partly because of the magnitude of her reputation, all the various conflicts, all the internal and external contradictions and struggles typical of her sex and profession, stand out in sharp relief.”
Bonheur was born in 1822. Her own mother struggled, in the face of an absentee husband, to support the family with piano lessons, and died when Bonheur was a girl. These themes are echoed in The Queen’s Gambit’s relationship between Elizabeth (whose own mother died when she was young) and Alma (a frustrated piano player with an absentee husband).
Bonheur, who got her start copying paintings in the Louvre as a teenager, went on to become one of the most celebrated and successful painters of her epoch, with a focus specifically on animals. She often dressed in men’s clothing to increase her mobility and get close to her subjects. Her painting The Horse Fair (now in the Metropolitan Museum collection) became a sensation in England, and was reproduced all over Europe and the United States. In her native France, she was the first woman to receive the Légion d’Honneur for achievement in the arts, with Empress Eugénie de Montijo famously declaring, upon giving it to her, “Genius has no sex.”
since 2017 has an initiative in France come alive to create a dedicated museum out of Bonheur’s house, the Château de By, notes a recent Smithsonian magazine article. Spearheaded by Katherine Brault, the proposed Musée de l’atelier Rosa Bonheur hopes to bring greater attention to Bonheur’s legacy in France. It received official support from the French government only last year as one of 18 sites targeted for preservation.
This High School Senior Created Dolls to Represent Children With Rare Medical Conditions
The handmade dolls feature birthmarks, surgical scars, jaw alignment issues, and facial and cranial anomalies.
By Hana Hong September 14, 2020
13 Plants you can eat in the wilderness for Survival.
https://www.outdoorlife.com/how-to-find-identify-wild-winter-edible-plants/
Wampanoag History. One of the Massachusetts area indigenous/First Nation tribes
https://www.wbur.org/artery/2020/11/27/smokesygnals-curators-wampanoag
While their work on the Wampanoag story is what they’re most known for at the moment — with work featured in publications around the world, with exhibits in Boston, England, the Netherlands and elsewhere — they have a wider interest in diversity and education. Other efforts include recent work with BrainPop, an educational website that’s used in over 25% of American schools. They’re also consulting for large-scale television productions in Canada and the United States.
Toilet paper roll crafts for people who like sharks, from Who Gives a Crap, toilet tissue service.
https://blog.whogivesacrap.org/home/goodcrafts/shark-week-crafts
And 25 ways rot reuse a jam jar…
https://blog.whogivesacrap.org/home/goodcrafts/jam-jar-reuse
Fight climate change…
Modern day farmers, finding a way to honor their past through Hemp and remember their ancestors into the future.
A.yoni Jeffries wants to make sure the names of her ancestors live on a hundred years from now through the land she works.
It’s one of the reasons she and six others founded Handèwa Farms, an Afro-Indigenous women-led organic hemp farm about 30 minutes north of Durham, North Carolina. Jeffries, a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, says the group got together about a year ago to discuss starting a farm as a way to reconnect with their Indigenous roots. The co-founders wanted to grow food for people who didn’t have easy access to fresh produce in the area. And they figured hemp could be a cash crop that could fund this important work.
“We decided we were going to have a farm that could give back to our community and help the families who live in food deserts in North Carolina,” says Jeffries.
They farmed on about an acre of land this year, gifted by a nearby retreat called Respite in the Round. They grew corn and potatoes and have a goal to eventually produce more than 6,000 pounds of food for those in need.
The word “Handèwa” means “generational” in the Tutelo-Saponi language and the farm’s members are intergenerational.
“It’s beautiful—knowing that I’m working alongside my daughters for a common goal, which is generational sustainability, wealth, as well as history,” she says. “I want to keep that going. I want my children’s children’s children to know for generations to come.”
SCIENCE
How to Talk to Kids about Climate Change and Activities.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/22/772266241/how-to-talk-to-your-kids-about-climate-change
Published March 5th 2018 by New World Library
Give your kids the basic facts
Here's a suggested script, based on conversations with several educators and psychologists, that could be used for kids as young as four or five:
"Humans are burning lots and lots of fossil fuels for energy, in planes, in cars, to light our houses, and that's putting greenhouse gases into the air. Those gases wrap around the planet like a blanket and make everything hotter.
A hotter planet means bigger storms, it melts ice at the poles so oceans will rise, it makes it harder for animals to find places to live.
And it's a really, really big problem, and there are a lot of smart people working hard on it, and there's also lots that we can do as a family to help."
We've written before about learning resources on climate change. If you want to do a deeper dive, watch a movie or read a book together.
You know your kids best, so try to make sure the level of information you're giving them is appropriate and not too graphic or upsetting. But at the same time, we can't always control what they may be hearing elsewhere, so it's good to be proactive with the simple facts.
Focus on Feelings
Amber, in Huntsville, Ala., responded to our callout on childhood anxiety. We're not using her last name because she's sharing information about her daughter's mental health. She says when her daughter was just 3, in preschool, she learned that sea turtles will eat plastic in the ocean and die. To this day, five years later, at the age of 8:
"If she sees litter it's not just enough for her to pick it up and throw it away — which she'll do — but she'll bring up the sea turtles again." With questions like: "'Why would people throw things on the ground? The sea turtles are going to die!' She cannot let it go."
Clinical anxiety affects a small (and growing) percentage of children. But worries about the environment are widespread. In a recent poll in The Washington Post, 7 in 10 teenagers said climate change will harm their generation — that was a bit more than older folks.
Susie Burke is a senior psychologist at the Australian Psychological Society. She's an environmental psychologist, specializing in what's become an emerging field: climate psychology.
The take away.
Find Hope
Emotion-focused coping is about feelings. Problem-focused coping is about action. The third path to coping with a stressor like climate change, Burke says, is meaning-focused coping. This is about thinking: how to frame the problem so that we can continue to hope and not collapse into cynicism, apathy or despair.
She cites Swedish psychologist Maria Ojala, who is looking at how children and teenagers are finding resilience to the threat of climate change. Ojala found one successful strategy was to develop trust that others are working on this problem — to realize none of us are alone. A second was to focus on the many benefits of a sustainable future, like more social justice, stronger communities, better health.
"To be able to keep hope is important," says Burke. And for our kids, reminding them to take breaks and enjoy just being a kid. It's important that they are "still also feeling carefree and joyful and finding things that are wonderful about the world, learning ways that the world is worth living in, even though they're also addressing big life challenges."
DeMocker says parents have a tricky role to play as young activists step up. "We have to partner with them and we have to not abandon them in this crisis and we have to step back at the same time and let them lead."
She compares the balance to parents' job when children are younger and first finding independence.
"So it's this funny dance, which is a lot of what parenting is — whether you have a toddler who wants to put on her shoes herself and then whoops! she trips. So now she actually just needs to be a little kid again and be comforted."
When I think about the options available to me as a mother in 2019 trying to cope with a global crisis while also paying my mortgage and packing lunches, I don't see "hope" as a landing place or a single destination. I see myself facing the facts, taking action, and offering comfort when I feel stronger, and taking breaks, reaching out for support, and looking to others to carry on when I get tired. It's all a cycle, or in DeMocker's words, a dance.
20 overlooked (but super impactful) ways to fight climate change
Look, we’re not going to lie to you. The planet is in pretty bad shape. We don’t have the heart to really get into it right now, but check out this article from New York Magazine if you know someone who needs a kick up the butt about the future of our planet.
We choose to believe it’s not completely hopeless. There’s plenty that we all can do to slow the effects of climate change and, in some cases, even reverse them. These are some of our favourite tips that may not have already occurred to you.
1. Properly dispose of your appliances
We know this seems random, but it’s one of the most impactful things you can do for the environment. ACs and refrigerators run on hydrofluorocarbons, a refrigerant that releases tonnes of carbon dioxide when not properly removed. So don’t leave your old mini fridge on the side of the road… like we did that one time at uni when we didn’t know better.
2. Reuse
Yes, recycling is great. Still, it can be easy to forget that recycling consumes a lot of energy. You know what takes less energy? Washing out that jam jar. Instead of buying reusable containers, consider what you already have lying around your recycling bin.
3. Support women’s education
What does women’s education have to do with the environment? Turns out, a lot! According to Project Drawdown, “Letting more girls continue their education, receive wanted contraception, and space out their youngsters as they’d like could cut around 120 billion tons of greenhouse gases that we'd otherwise emit over the next 30 years.” Wow!
4. Support forest protection organisations
Planting trees is awesome, but it takes decades to foster the biodiversity and complexity that pre-existing forests have. The older the forest, the more it’s able to trap and synthesise carbon dioxide. That’s why it’s so important to invest in protecting the forested lands that are currently in danger. Check out this list of conservation and forestry organisations that need your help.
5. Start a compost
All you need to get started is a bin (or bag) to collect your food scraps. Some bins are so good looking, they could double as countertop decor. Nothing says eco-fabulous quite like a mid-century modern compost bin, right? Sorry, we’ll never say eco-fabulous again.
6. Turn off the lights
We don’t mean to sound like your dad, but turn off the lights when you leave a room, for pete’s sake! On average, we consume 12,000 watts of power per year - that’s 6x more than what environmental scientists recommend. Just being intentional about your energy usage can go a long way to living more efficiently.
7. Do a plastic stocktake
We all know that plastic free and reusable items are better for the environment. Still, we challenge you to look around your house and see how many you’re actually using. If your home’s anything like ours, you’ll be surprised by all of the single use plastic hiding in your bathroom, kitchen and bedside table. Those things may be convenient, but they’re a real hassle for the planet.
8. Shop bamboo
You may already know about our premium 100% bamboo rolls, but bamboo can do a lot more than make incredibly soft toilet paper. It can make furniture, bicycles, boats, baskets, fabric and almost every part of your house. Bamboo is technically grass, so it repopulates quickly, and it's a super sustainable material. In fact, bamboo takes carbon out of the air faster than nearly any other plant. Neat!
9. Go for a walk
If we all travelled by foot instead of by car for just 5% of our outings, we’d save 2.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. That’s over 2 billion metric tons, or the mass of 14 billion elephants!
10. Try solar power
Rooftop solar panels are an incredible way to generate electricity without releasing any greenhouse gasses. Plus, they are much more cost effective than your standard electric grids. If you’re not ready for all of that, solar-powered appliances are a great way to test the waters. IKEA is even coming out with a whole line of solar-powered electronics and phone chargers.
11. Be water conscious
We know, we know. A nice, long shower is, well, nice. But an average 10 minute shower wastes around 75–190 litres of water, so try to keep your lather time to 4 minutes. Unless you spend your days rolling in mud (which actually sounds very fun), you shouldn’t need longer.
12. Take mass transit
Too far to walk? Too rusty on a bike? Take advantage of your city’s public transportation! If mass transit accounted for 40% of urban travel, we’d save 6.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. If a car is truly your only option, try carpooling or using ridesharing apps. Who knows, you might even make a new friend to talk toilet paper with.
13. Vote
Climate change can seem like a problem of personal consumption, but it is important to recognise the structural changes that we need for a healthier planet. Put your money where your recycling bin is and support candidates that share your passion for environmental justice.
14. Be wary of wholesale supermarkets
Stores like Costco offer great deals, but if you’re not actually eating everything you buy, it’s a terrible deal for Mama Earth. We’ve all been guilty of letting lettuce wilt or mold over, but when you throw away uneaten food, you’re also tossing the energy, seeds and water it took to grow it.
15. Eat a plant-rich diet
A study from the Environmental Working Group, shows that red meat is responsible for 10 to 40 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as vegetables and grains. And it’s not just cheeseburgers that are the problem. Just the act of growing the feed for livestock emits a shocking amount of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Eek!
16. Have a conversation
Too many people think that climate change is too big, too far away or too sciencey to understand. Check out this TED Talk to learn more about the importance of chatting about the earth. We recommend having a nice biscuit while you do your chat, but that part is totally up to you.
17. Spend wisely
Your money is a super powerful tool for change. Try to support businesses that are kind to the environment, consider where your superannuation, banking and energy dollars are going, and demand investments into clean energy and away from fossil fuels.
18. Buy less clothing
Worldwide, 80% of used textiles end up in a landfill. Fast fashion is a very real threat to the environment, so try to only buy the things that you truly need and love. Even better, buy second-hand to break the cycle of overconsumption. Afterall, a healthy planet never goes out of style.
19. Cook with in-season veggies
Skip the produce that’s had to be flown halfway across the world. In-season produce tastes so much more delicious anyway. Check out seasonal shopping guides for summer or winter, and think of all of the wonderful fruit pies you could make.
20. Buy eco-friendly toilet paper
You knew we were going to say that, right? Well, it’s important! Each day, 27,000 trees are cut down just to make toilet paper. By making the switch to our TP, which is B corp certified for social and environmental impact, you are helping fight deforestation and reducing CO2 emissions. Nice one!
For even more ways to reverse the effects of climate change, check out Project Drawdown. It’s a super cool organisation that’s listed (and ranked!) the most impactful ways we can fight global warming, based on research from leading researchers and policymakers around the world.
Shop eco-friendly toilet paper
https://blog.whogivesacrap.org/home/gooddeeds/20-ways-to-fight-climate-change
Check out their blog
Support education…
The mission of Drawdown Learn is to engage and inspire broad, public audiences of adults and youth and connect them to the science behind climate solutions.
So many teaching opportunities here for many segments of industry and consumption
From Health Sectiors…
SECTOR SUMMARY
Health and Education
85.42
GIGATONS
CO2 EQUIVALENT
REDUCED / SEQUESTERED
(2020–2050)
Climate and social systems are profoundly connected, and those connections open up solutions that are often overlooked. Some initiatives, designed primarily to ensure rights and foster equality, also have cascading benefits to climate change. They include access to high-quality, voluntary reproductive healthcare and to high-quality, inclusive education, which are fundamental human rights and cornerstones of gender equality.
How many people might call this planet home in 2050 or 2100? That will depend, in large part, on fertility rates and the headway we make on securing gender equality and advancing human well-being. When levels of education rise (in particular for girls and young women), access to reproductive healthcare improves, and women’s political, social, and economic empowerment expand, fertility typically falls. Across the world and over time, this impacts population.
Currently, we humans number 7.7 billion, and the United Nations estimates the human family will grow to between 9.4 billion and 10.1 billion in 2050. As we consider the future of climate solutions, it matters how many people will be eating, moving, plugging in, building, buying, using, wasting, and all the rest. Population interacts with the primary drivers of emissions: production and consumption, largely fossil-fueled.
It’s critical to note the vast disparities in emissions from high-income countries compared to low, and between the wealthiest individuals and those of lesser financial means. For example, almost half of consumption-related emissions are generated by just 10% of people globally. The topic of population also raises the troubling, often racist, classist, and coercive history of population control. People’s choices about how many children to have should be theirs and theirs alone. And those children should inherit a livable planet. It is critical that human rights are always centered, that gender equality is the aim, and that benefits to the planet are understood as positive ripple effects of access and agency.
In its most recent report on “world population prospects,” the United Nations notes that the international community has committed to ensuring that all people have access to family planning, should they wish to use it, and the ability to decide how many children to have and when. That can mean changes in everything from contraception to culture. Living up to those commitments will be a major determinant for which possible trajectory becomes our path forward.
No wind. No Waves. No clouds.
Only the whisper of the tide as it withdrew, stroking the shore,
a lazy drift of gulls overhead,
and tiny points of light
bubbling in the channel.
(From The Wellfleet Whale by Stanley Kunitz)
Check out Life From a Blue Moon, John John Florence. For the soundtrack and cinematography. It is a movie I keep on my computer to watch when I’m feeling claustrophobic, on a plane, or need an escape from the moment.
What life on Lockdown taught the world’s Greatest Surfer.
What John John Florence Has Learned Under Lockdown
Nov 13, 2020
Switching it up was exactly what he needed
It can take about a year to recover from ACL surgery. And only two weeks before the contest, Florence hadn’t been on a shortboard since the injury, which he suffered while competing in Brazil. So he adjusted his mindset. “I just looked at it like, if I don’t qualify for the Olympics, then I have two months off to go and do something else,” he says. “I tried to see it in a positive way.” The waves weren’t ideal, but he remembers thinking, “ ‘Maybe I’ll paddle out for this heat, and if I see a wave I like, I’ll go on it.’ I just went like that through the event: ‘OK, this wave looks pretty good, I’m gonna go.’ ”
Florence surfed well enough at Pipeline to make the quarterfinals, which secured him the Olympic berth. Then, just a few months later, the coronavirus turned the world upside down. Events everywhere were canceled, including the entire 2020 World Surf League season. The Tokyo Olympics were postponed. “It’s unfortunate,” Florence says, “but at the same time, I sat back and was like, This benefits me, in a way. I’m going to focus on slowly recovering and enjoying being at home rather than trying to win another world title and the Olympics. It’s not always a bad thing to slow down. We were all moving pretty fast there. This has halted everything in the world. If you immerse yourself in that, you can reconnect with life and where you’re at.
For Florence, slowing down meant starting a garden. He owns a small chunk of farmland up the road from his house on Oahu’s North Shore, and he planted a section with bananas, pumpkins, kale, tomatoes, and fruit trees.
Making and fixing salt dough ornaments
Festive winter decorations that smell good too
Family reach.
An organization created by a Mom who lost her daughter.
Helping others to navigate cancer with family members
Wbztv.com
R.i.s.e. organization
research, retreats mission, empowering women or their purpose and worth
Reaching into self esteem, house in Stoughton
49 Great winter activities
Easy Blender Eggnog recipe
https://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/eggnog-recipe
Cool idea for a gift. Create.
Draw and color a pre made puzzle, then put in a glass jar.
Or Buy. 800 peice puzzle. A great family project and activity, to be assembled and hung up. For the covid year this is a nice way to connect with Family we can’t be with.
Ways to give back this season
Clean out your closet for the greater good.
Savers.com
too
Salvation Army
Feeding America
I donate where I can these days. I feel Huinger and clothing do the most immediate good right now so I have given to Feeding America a few times since Covid began and hope this gets rescource to where they are needed most. It’s hard to know, but I have faith in the organizations trying to assist others with food and clothing.
https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-blog/gifts-give-back
How the Food Bank was born.
HISTORY
For 40 years, Feeding America has responded to the hunger crisis in America by providing food to people in need through a nationwide network of food banks.
The concept of food banking was developed by John van Hengel in Phoenix, AZ in the late 1960s. Van Hengel, a retired businessman, had been volunteering at a soup kitchen trying to find food to serve the hungry. One day, he met a desperate mother who regularly rummaged through grocery store garbage bins to find food for her children. She suggested that there should be a place where, instead of being thrown out, discarded food could be stored for people to pick up—similar to the way “banks” store money for future use. With that, an industry was born.
Van Hengel established St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix, AZ as the nation’s first food bank. In its initial year, van Hengel and his team of volunteers distributed 275,000 pounds of food to people in need. Word of the food bank’s success quickly spread, and states began to take note. By 1977, food banks had been established in 18 cities across the country.
As the number of food banks began to increase, van Hengel created a national organization for food banks and in 1979 he established Second Harvest, which was later called America’s Second Harvest the Nation’s Food Bank Network. In 2008, the network changed its name to Feeding America to better reflect the mission of the organization.
Today, Feeding America is the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization—a powerful and efficient network of 200 food banks across the country. As food insecurity rates hold steady at the highest levels ever, the Feeding America network of food banks has risen to meet the need. We feed 40 million people at risk of hunger, including 12 million children and 7 million seniors. Learn more about how we get food to people in need in our "How We Work" section. Support Feeding America and help solve hunger. Donate. Volunteer. Advocate. Educate.
Virtual art.
Winter Solstice December 21.20
From the Farmer’s Almanac
Lucy light, Lucy light,
shortest day and longest night.
–Proverb
Inspiration.
A 52 year old man who has just passed in Washington DC from Cirrosis.
His story is something to read for good.
Kindness Vs. Cruelty: Helping Kids Hear The Better Angels Of Their Nature
July 5, 201911:10 AM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
https://chooselovemovement.org
PARENTING: RAISING AWESOME KIDS
Kindness Can Be Taught. Here's How
May 13, 2019 12:01 AM ET
Most kids value success and achievement more than caring for others, according to Harvard's Making Caring Common project. Who is to blame? We are. We talk to Scarlett Lewis of the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement; Jennifer Kotler Clarke, vice president of content research and evaluation at Sesame Workshop; and Thomas Lickona, author of How To Raise Kind Kids, for some ideas on how to do better, and why.
Scarlet Lewis K-12 Program, Choose Love
Stay Calm
Brave poses and Breaths
Courage to be kind, Jesse Lewis, Newtown, offer Comfort. Standing up to someone who is bullying.
I am incredibly entusiastic person, I have always been a very curious and attention span
Discovery and I
Didn’t try and I identify myself and
I have no knowledge of who I am and I am extremely happy.
Dutch/Netherland’s Museum online visits grow, in person visits the fewest since 1964
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/dutch-masters
Winter in Amsterdam
HENDRICK AVERCAMP
FOLLOWING THE FLEMISH MODEL
Avercamp grew up in Kampen in the province of Overijssel, but learned the rudiments of his craft in his native Amsterdam. He probably apprenticed there for some time with the then famous Antwerp landscapist Gillis van Coninxloo. In the years that followed, Avercamp became the first Dutch artist to specialize in painting winter landscapes.
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/dutch-masters/story/hendrick-avercamp-10
Vegetarian
Vegan
thanks for stopping by,
Eliza
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