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Author Spotlight
Emilia A. Leese is an author, re-wilder, podcast host, public speaker, and magazine editor.
David Fridley is a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.
Gary Belan is the senior director of clean water supply at American Rivers.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer.
Lorraine Chow is the stewardship and outreach coordinator at the Santa Fe Watershed Association.
Guides
This guide will take you through examples of the regenerative, moneyless economy that is sometimes called “collaborative consumption.” The moneyless, sharing-based economy creates the opportunity to opt out of the mentality of disposability and the idea that “more is better,” both of which many of us are bombarded with from birth. The regenerative, moneyless economy provides an avenue for anyone to move away from the hoarding nightmare that has led to over-full garages and seldom-visited storage sheds, continent-sized trash islands, and enormous heaps of human waste. It does this by way of peer-to-peer systems set up for people to rent or borrow goods rather than buy and own them individually. It involves collaborative systems that supply people with the things they need, when they need them.
This guide explores the concept, models, and examples of the peace economy: the giving, sharing, thriving, caring economy without which none of us would be alive. A peace economy is the sharing of resources, a culture of care, and the remembrance that there is enough abundance for all of us on this planet. It is the return to a culture that understands true value and wealth come from nurturing life, love, and joy. We call it a "local" peace economy because it operates at the local level, beginning in the commons. This guide also offers ways to divest from the war economy that is destroying life and well-being on this planet.
With new anthropological, biological and scientific findings, we are increasingly able to trace the outlines and fill in the blanks of our human evolutionary story. This can help us better understand the social and cultural processes that produced the world we live in now. This guide to Human Bridges explores the work of experts from the fields of human biology, human origins, and anthropology who want to contribute their individual expertise to a wider accessible body of information, and enlist in the cause to make this material a staple of education at all stages of life.
Why do some authors pretend to be someone they are not? Why do they claim experiences that they don’t have? What drives them to create texts and claim that they are ancient? By examining some examples of literary fraud from the modern era, we can gain insight not only into a fraudulent writer’s perspective, but also into readers’ expectations, publishing practices, and what kind of story a culture values.
The guide will help readers understand the global plastic crisis from multiple angles, including the impact of plastic on human health, wildlife and the environment, the upstream forces in the lifecycle of plastics, the complex reality of recycling plastic, the unique threat posed by tiny plastic particles called nanoplastics, and how two similar cities have handled the plastic issue in different ways.
New Additions
The attraction to luster is rooted in our evolutionary history and has persisted among prehistoric artifacts, ancient civilizations, and consumer culture.
Political partisanship is predicted by the way our brains process basic political words or concepts.
By Eric Laursen
Area:
Peter Coyote invites you to look at the media, research, and education initiatives related to the Human Bridges Project.
By Peter Coyote
States have powerful legal tools to counter federal environmental rollbacks, from enacting stronger local regulations to forming interstate coalitions that protect natural resources and public health.
By Reynard Loki
Classics
“The Shame of the Cities is a book written by American author Lincoln Steffens. Published in 1904, it is a collection of articles which Steffens had written for McClure’s Magazine. It reports on the workings of corrupt political machines in several major cities in the United States, along with a few efforts to combat them. It is considered one of several early major pieces of muckraking journalism, but Steffens later claimed that the work made him ‘the first muckraker.’” (Source: Wikipedia)
This article on the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (associated with the movement of German idealism) appeared in the Philosophical Review, Volume 16, pp. 488-505, in 1907.
Ellen Bliss Talbot was a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College from 1898 to 1932. From Wikisource:
“According to Dorothy Rogers and Therese B. Dykeman… ‘[Talbot] had a successful academic career, chairing Mount Holyoke’s philosophy department for thirty-two years and teaching part-time for several years after retirement. She published just three books, all on Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1898, 1899, 1906), in addition to her considerable number of articles in the Philosophical Review, Mind, and the American Journal of Psychology. Her commitment to women’s education at Mount Holyoke was unwavering, helping to ensure that the philosophy curriculum met the expectations of her fellow academicians as philosophy established itself as a profession.’ From ‘Introduction: Women in the American Philosophical Tradition 1800–1930,’ in Hypatia 19:2 (Spring 2004): viii-xxxiv.”
From Wikipedia:
- “Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a book by American journalist, editor, and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller. Originally published in July 1843 in The Dial magazine as ‘The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,’ it was later expanded and republished in book form in 1845.”
- “The basis for Fuller’s essay is the idea that man will rightfully inherit the earth when he becomes an elevated being, understanding of divine love. There have been periods in time when the world was more awake to this love, but people are sleeping now; however, everyone has the power to become enlightened. Man cannot now find perfection because he is still burdened with selfish desires, but Fuller is optimistic and says that we are on the verge of a new awakening. She claims that in the past man, like Orpheus for Eurydice, has always called out for woman, but soon will come the time when women will call for men, when they will be equals and share divine love.”
This is a speech by Frederick Douglass given on Monday, July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York. The oration was published as a pamphlet the same year. Annotations were provided by the Wikisource community.
Little is known about American cookbook author Susanna Shanklin Browne, but her motives for writing The Plain Sailing Cook Book are clearly stated in the preface; her inspiration was to write what she believed in 1922 was the first cookbook “successfully adapted to the needs of the person who has never before attempted to cook.” The contents include “the simpler every-day dishes that make up the staple menu of the average American family.” The book’s stated “aim is to provide ‘plain sailing’ for the wholly inexperienced mariner in culinary waters.”
The author expresses empathy for beginner cooks and explains recipes “in such a way as to leave no possible room for doubt or misunderstanding on any point.” “In preparing and arranging each recipe,” she continues, “I have tried to keep continually in mind the person who has never before cooked anything.”
“I have tried to leave nothing to the imagination, nothing to be guessed at, nothing to be decided from previous experience. In a word, I have tried to do as I would be done by, if I were the user of the book instead of the author,” she concludes.
Note: A product of its time, The Plain Sailing Cook Book assumes the reader is “the average housewife” cooking for two. But recipes may be multiplied for larger families, and beginner cooks of all genders and marital statuses will benefit from these basic lessons in cooking.Areas
