Guerilla Library
“The ubiquity of phone booths is interesting because they are completely obsolete, unevenly distributed in outlying neighborhoods and they carry a strong sense of nostalgia with me. They’ve already evolved from their original function as person-to-person communication technology into their second iteration as pedestrian-scaled billboards. I wanted to see if there is a third option in that, yes, they get our eyes for advertising dollars, but they can also give value back to a neighborhood. I was most interested in turning what is perceived as an urban liability into an opportunity.
And what more can you say about books? They’re the greatest things ever, and everyone should have more.”
John Locke, From The Atlantic
Chef Charlie Trotter’s ego drove him to collaborate toward mastery of something new.
“For several years, Michael and Roxanne Klein had been regularly flying from San Francisco to Chicago just to have dinner (my kind of people!) at the restaurant.* Then, in 1999, they began to challenge my culinary abilities by requesting raw-food menus… In those days, fulfilling the demand seemed fairly straightforward: either cut everything thinly, chop it finely, or puree it; add a few herbs, a vinaigrette, maybe a spice mixture, or possibly some chile; and serve it up…
“But like most things that seem simple on the surface, the preparation of raw and living foods isn’t simple at all. It is instead quite complex and requires serious study to learn the basic properties of foods and how foods act when handled in various ways. For instance, when you soak nuts and legumes to sprout them, you not only obtain maximal nutritional value, but you also achieve superior flavor. Or if you marinate certain vegetables for six to eight hours or more, you break down their undesirable starchiness completely…
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Language is like money: Use it wisely, use it sparingly.
This entire show reminded me of how making music with other humans is a non-verbal form of communication which has the potential to transcend a version of the world as divided between “us” and “them”; that making and enjoying food made by and with other humans is a form of the same; and that the “self” is a story. Us/Me and Them becomes We when language is put on the back burner. Or better yet, Radiolab.org and done.
A mainstream IT/financial guy started the Egyptian Revolution with a thought from one photo of another Egyptian tortured by police: we are all this man.
“The last thing a dictator wants is that you expose {his} bad practices to {his} people.”
(photo: Khaled Desouki/Getty Images)
“I believe that engagement is very critical. And a lot of activists end up in their own isolated environment or platform and they don’t communicate with the mainstream. And I thought maybe as someone coming from the mainstream, I’m not an activist, I was never one, I’m just someone who cares and who hates injustice. So by starting the page, I started looking at how can I make sure that more and more people get involved - its not just about me telling everyone, uh, you know, here’s the information, please read it, no, it’s very important to get everyone engaged, and from day one, the page was running with this tile. We were soliciting ideas… looking at different options… surveying people… and when we execute a campaign, everyone is involved, and then we take their contribution and feedback and relay it back to everyone.”
(He used google moderator to send questionnaires to everyone regarding the best way to proceed with what became the Egyptian revolution.)
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Chipotle’s 2 minute 20 second commercial for the Grammy’s (imagine the cost of just the airtime, let alone the production of the stop-motion), set to Willie Nelson’s cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist.”
From OrganicAuthority.com:
Chipotle founder Steve Ells said, “We have always understood the importance of serving food that is raised right, but that is a difficult thing to communicate with the limitations of traditional advertising. ‘Back to the Start’ tells the story of a farmer’s journey from traditional farming to an industrial food production model, then back to his roots of traditional farming again – a story that tracks closely with some of our suppliers and that demonstrates why we think it is so important to serve food made with ingredients from more sustainable sources.”
The Wisdom of the Collective
“Wisdom is not about just a few wise people but about the capacity of human communities to make wise choices and to orient themselves around a living sense of the future that truly matters to them. Wisdom is about connection, connection to one another and to a larger whole. It is an inherently relational concept and founders when we overidentify it with particular people. Wisdom manifests in humility rather than arrogance. It is known by its quiet presence rather than by noisy advocacy for one way. In this sense, collective wisdom is much more about the capacity for learning than about a single brilliant decision.”
Peter Senge, Foreward to “The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly”
The Salome Chamber Orchestra at Bargemusic is revolutionary not just because they performed on a boat, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, overlooking the Manhattan skyline for a non-profit founded by one of the female icons of chamber music (beloved Olga Bloom), but because of this:
“New York City compels young adults to be at once adaptable, optimistic, multi-faceted and resourceful. At Salomé, we feel that the very survival and evolution of classical music within such a fast-paced, cosmopolitan environment requires a dynamic balance of novelty, tradition, and hard work.
It was with this vision in mind that the Salomé Chamber Orchestra, New York City’s electrifying new conductor-less string ensemble, was formed in September 2009. The Orchestra, founded by the Carpenter siblings (violinists Sean and Lauren and violist David), is dedicated to advancing the works of both underappreciated and well-recognized chamber composers alike, and to performing a broad range from Baroque to contemporary repertoire. Salomé’s intelligent, artistic and interdisciplinary approach to music-making produces refreshing and vibrant performances which attest to the wealth of talent that can be found in this great city and in our generation.”
What’s old is new again. The concept of the self-conducted orchestra evolved after the Russian Revolution. The Pervïy Simfonicheskiy Ansambl′ bez Dirizhyora (“First Conductorless Symphony Ensemble”) was developed not only as a way to make rehearsals and performances more efficient, but as a reflection of philosophical ideals of egalitarianism. Performers sat in a circle and took cues from said circle. No one was an exclusive leader or follower.
Now listen, again, to the piece (the movement Air from Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite, Op.40). This music and the design of how it was made - the structure of how it was made - is part of what you hear.
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“A radical paradigm for reaching-in to communities”
These people are creating change.
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“We are a social conscientious, reconnaissance and outreach, community-based, watershed driven organization.
Our overarching goal is; to educate underserved and monolingual (Spanish-speaking) communities about watershed and social justice issues; and provide these with community-building skills, thus empowering them to participate in local and citywide planning as well as playing an active role in city, state and nationwide policies.”
Interdependence
From Wendell Berry’s Introduction to “Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible”:
“The human situation, as understood by both biblical agrarians and contemporary ones, is about as follows…Our relation to our land will always remain, to a significant extent, mysterious. Therefore, our use of it must be determined more by reverence and humility, by local memory, and affection, than by the knowledge that we now call “objective” or “scientific.” Above all, we must not damage it permanently or compromise its natural means of sustaining itself. The best farmers have always accepted this situation as a given, and they have honored the issues of propriety and scale that it urgently raises.
By recognizing our inescapable dependence and our finally insurmountable ignorance, we open the subject of agriculture (as, I think, all other subjects) to questions of every kind.”
Secondary Sustainability: A Byproduct of Military Effectiveness
In researching my panel at GreenGov, I was astonished to learn about the sustainability efforts of the Department of Defense. The institution is one of the 50 largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world and is working diligently to reduce emissions and ramp up renewables for tactical, not ideological reasons. DoD is a stunning example of how we can reframe sustainability, engage deeply held values and achieve bipartisan support.
A rough transcript from my presentation “To Defend and Protect: the National Security Implications of Climate Change” from the International Sustainability Conference is below.
I’d like to discuss my research on energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions reductions as part of sustainability—but not the core part. It is what I call “secondary sustainability.” In my exploration of the US Department of Defense, it is a byproduct of military effectiveness.
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“Context Brings Understanding”
Arlene Birt is a designer/ storyteller dedicated to helping people understand how their individual actions embed them into the bigger picture of sustainability. This is a critical but often overlooked component of engaging people in change. A perfect example of this is climate change. Arlene and I discussed this a few days ago. She is creating a series of infographics on carbon emissions and how they translate into everyday consumption.
Most information is, what I would call, interesting but misguided.
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Neighborland
Candy Chang is rocking my world. R-O-C-K-I-N-G. She is an artist, designer and urban planner who asks people what they want and/ or connects to our deepest longings in engaging and beautiful ways. Everything she does honors the relationship she has with her audience and is reciprocal. It goes back to monk and activist Satish Kumar’s edict, “You are, therefore I am.”
In this moment, I am really connecting to Neighborland, a platform that enables people to state clearly what they want. It’s simple, it’s easy (low barriers to entry) and it gives people a place in which to articulate their needs. I think this is a critical piece of what sustains us and how we need to engage (and is why I love citizen journalism and other participatory media).
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Environmental Engagement: Takes Two, Three and Four
From ecoAmerica: “Major environmental organizations are recognizing they need new, modern strategies for changing public sentiment on the environment. Traditional thinking of having to sell the same lengthy information fact sheets to everyone is being pushed aside; news ideas, such as capitalizing on the younger generation’s hunger to fight for their future and connecting with specific audiences based on their pre-existing passions that relate to the environment, are becoming the light to meaningful change.”
Their American Climate and Environmental Values Survey.
