The Zaballeen

Garbage Dreams, a noteworthy movie screening this winter through Community Cinema, is about a garbage city in Egypt where 80% of the garbage is recycled. The trailer and clips look fascinating. The documentary follows three boys who have grown up as Zaballen or garbage collectors and recyclers and what they learn traveling to other countries. The Cloud Institute: "Garbage Dreams, directed by Mai Iskander, addresses garbage and consumption in an innovative way. In the world's largest garbage village located on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, the Zaballeen (Arabic for garbage people) recycle 80 percent of the trash they collect-far more than other recycling initiatives. Garbage Dreams can be a great resource paired with our Changing Consumption Patterns and Paper Trails curricula, found here.

Questions about Bradbury's classic "The Veldt"

Ray Bradbury's classic short story "The Veldt" was originally published in 1950 as "The World the Children Made." I read the story in high school and never forgot it. That was long before the internet and just moments before the dawn of cable T.V. We got electronically engaged with the first video game "Pong," basically digital ping pong and played Pac Man at aracades when possible. In the early 80's, I liked the story because of its terror more than anything. Now "the Veldt" affects me differently, of course and has inspired the questions below.

This story relies heavily on setting. What specifically are the two principle settings of the story?

Describe how the veldt is described in the story and what it represents first from the point of view of the adults then from the point of view of the children.

Why does the veldt become the setting and vehicle of fear, savagery and death at least from the point of view of the adults?

Do you think the children were calculating in their choice to collectively imagine the veldt? Were they making the world of the veldt in their nursery consciously to challenge and then snare their parents or were their imaginative needs some how mirroring their parents' world?

Is Bradbury yet again pitting technology against nature in a way that romanticizes nature and demonizes technology? Why or why not?

Consider the first title for the story. How does it change your view of the story? Why do you think Bradbury changed the title to "The Veldt"?

Nick Paumgarten on Whole Foods

Sorry to quote The New Yorker yet again-- clearly my free reading time is pretty limited these days. In any case, I really appreciated Paumgarten's insightful article on Whole Foods founder John Mackey. Particularly passages like this one:"Depending on where you are on the spectrum of epicurean cultural politics, you may consider Whole Foods to be a righteous grocer or a cynical con, a prod to self-improvement or a gateway to decadence, a neighborhood boon or a blight, a force for social good or a place to pick up chicks"

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=2#ixzz0bqnBbYV8

Global Warming Fiction

"“capitalism cared more about its children as accessories and demonstrations of earning power than for their future” from Helen Simpson's chilling "Diary of an Interesting Year" in Dec.21 New Yorker. A short story not for kids under 16.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/12/21/091221fi_fiction_simpson#ixzz0brhlnWgW

Adopt a Seed

Adopt a Seed - a donation program through The Royal Kew Gardens.

Ecopoetics

See Laura Elrick's article "Poetry, Ecology and the reappropriation of lived-space" (2006)
I want to check out this The Eco Language Reader when it's published.

Recent Poems of Grief and Love and Nature

Found several maybe relevant poems recently published in the New Yorker like this one by Sara Arvio "Wood". See my earlier post: A Boy Once Told Me.

And this one "Last Day on Planet Earth". This one reminds me of the art I run into a lot among friends in the San Francisco art scene. (eg. Eric Davis' great How I survived the Apocalypse: the Burning Man Opera; my friend Nate's memoir Packing for the Apocalypse.) Apocalypse has been a fascinating humanity it seems since the beginning of history, so I hadn't really taken the recent fad seriously until recently when I've felt its gravity all around me and in a way that deeply bothers me. Will my students, my own boys, my nieces and nephews have children with gadgets implanted in their heads? Will they feel some end more poignantly than we fantasize about now? O.K. so I guess somebody should be asking these questions and romanticizing lonely but liberating space travel. But I'd rather not.

And there's Merwin who thankfully for decades has been writing amazingly beautiful poetry about nature and time and love and memory and self: "Young Man Picking Flowers". My idea for a poem below is in deference to Merwin.

Somewhere between nostalgia and love
and grief and anger and
revision and children
and little hands
and little first words
(Hello Mama)
there are warm days and
warm winter nights
and tomatoes in December
and roses in January
and so many pretty things
flourishing, blossoming, dangling
hypnotically.