Ecoblips

Sonicare and Sage

Sonicare and Sage

Good Morning, America!
Wake up with a war burning inside the heart?
It's a collective fire, but oh no, we didn't start it...
Someone else is the gatekeeper in charge of letting the love in
This is the noble war I wage to win
Waking up in America - hey don't steal my cab!
That shit is mine, I've worked my whole life-
but whose keeping score
Just eat your Wheaties and break fast for the door,
when the truth creeps in from its silent core
Lord knows I can't hear a thing, much less 'his' mighty word
'Cause my Sonicare's buzzing straight up to my gums -
the last part of my body that's no longer numb
So I add to that Sonicare recipe - some sage
What, you haven't heard, straight up
Next to pomegranate it's all the rage-
You heard it here first folks, Sonicare and Sage.
'N cause it came straight from my heart,
I've got dibs on that prize
Dream's been driving me for decades -
don't tell me where to fix my eyes
Where's my instant Karma? I ordered the special!
I bought it online - check out my profile, I'm cool.
My fave film's Fast Times at Ridgemont High School
No, that's not me. I see someone, in fact, a devotee!
Of the Sonicare and Sage after-lunch theory.
Gots to brush daily to keep those pearlies white
Got to keep those glasses on
'cause the future shines so bright
Wrapped in the scent of the sacred sage
I'm a Child of the Decade of the Age of Jade
Jaded visions of the wall between us all and this truth,
that burns in the heart of a soul at war,
whose fought from day one for just a little bit more,
and an answer to Why - and a claim for what's mine
a battle I've lost through the passing time.
While the sage burns on, Sonicare buzzes by
At the end of a long day, its the perfect blend -
can't I bottle it up, sell it on eBay and call it the end?
Cha-ching!
This is the end, friend - just as our Elders intended it.
Trust me, it says so on Wikipedia, I updated it!
Gospel. Truth. We didn't start this fire.
The sage's always been burning while our Earth keeps turning
Yet that's not Herstory our grandmother's taught
passed down from generations so that we can sleep tight
as one creation.
It's nighttime now
The only thing left I can do for my country is brush my teeth
Sonicare and Sage
We are One Nation
One Heart
One Love
Coming of Age

When 25, 000 'tourists' all travel to Denmark at the same time, regardless of their agenda, it is fair and balanced to say that the earth is in upheaval. This earth, and its resources live and breathe at a historical cross roads more dire than any Climategate debate or whether one believes the source of global warming is human, alien, corporate or delusion. As members of the ecosystem, as the species that has chosen to dominate this ecoysystem for the latter part of the last gazziliion millenia, now we are in peril.  Unlike the dinosaurs, which have been firmly established to have gone extinct due to cigarette smoking, the state of the human species and how we got here somehow still remains everybody's guess. And given examples like The Situation, a rare breed of our species inhabiting my own native land, the situation's not looking so bright.

In response to the current events underway at Copenhagen, Naomi Klein recently asserted that there's a new breed of anger surfacing among humans of all kinds across all regions of the ecosystem, that a new time of unprecedented response is upon us. Were I in the lab, I would casually observe this behavior as a species and ecosystem that has reached carrying capacity, and log the data until the test subjects ran out of resources and slowly turned on each other.  Yet this is no experiment we are undergoing, and the human species now seems less suited to exist and thrive in its current environmental state than the rats we continue to study in labs. Meanwhile, the real species we could learn most from observing and mastering is ourselves. It would appear that the very survival of our species depends on it. 

The New Urban Ecological Paradigm

More than half of the world's population now lives in cities, ecosystems with limited resources now inhabited by the most hungry and consumption-oriented species this planet has ever seen. So the world is going to hell in a plastic sweat shop made handbasket? Hardly. But a new urban ecological paradigm shift is upon us, and we as a species must react in kind and engage our cities as resources that will enable the entire earth to thrive. Though I'm not so sure the Hopi had this exact vision in mind when they foresaw that 'we are the ones we are waiting for', this is where we're at in the world, literally. And as my great grandma once said "we've made our bed, now we must lie in it." Fortunately, my mother was wiser, for she always said "one can only get stepped on, if they lie down'. 

Actualized in present day context, this means nothing short of the absolute evolution of the human species.  I'm in. I hope you are too, or at the very least, you try to embrace the tiny idea that all our species may depend on it. What will this evolved species look like?  We're looking at it. Sometimes it's downright beautiful. Sometimes it ain't pretty, and we try to look away. Yet this is no experiment. There is no where left in the lab of life to look where our actions as a human species do not impact or touch upon every single last one of us. That's some scary shit. I'm still in. Everywhere I look, everything is in and each and every one of our locales must be the rich environs through which we all contribute to healing the entire ecosystem. 

The creative conversion of the urban space and its inhabitants into a thrivable resource is something all humans living in cities can realize, especially if they engage one another in the process. Unlike creationism, where guilt is at the heart of every transgression and action, there is no right or wrong along evolutionary road. Just like in the lab, we try and we err. We intend to invent ice cream and end up creating crazy glue. Stunningly, our infallibility and our process in creating this forever changing world with this elegant imperfection, is what makes us human and what makes it possible for us to get our world in gear for an overhaul of our species and its tools of creation.

What's your work in progress, sensational creation, or next powerful vehicle for social change that you are introducing to the world? Think of the Comments Section as ripe organic soil, and please plant away with the ideas, ventures and links to what you're up to.

A Place In Space

Finding one's place and space is as much a political and financial stake in the ground as it is an environmental, spiritual and emotional journey that impacts all of humanity. That so many of us, a good half of the world's population, now find their place in space in urban centers, puts the spotlight on the city's powerful potential. Yet most cities are a far cry from the Place in Space Gary Snyder wrote about in his ecological manifesto calling upon each individual to get in ones own skin, reclaim their part of the whole, and revive and thrive as part of the entire encompassing ecosystem. Not only was this call to action proposed as the most beautiful means of survival, it now may be our only path to sustainability and ecological equanimity, as the Earth speaks out with each more powerful hurricane and every inch of rising sea level.

With the blare of the subways and the sirens, its a miracle that anyone in a city like New York can hear the Earth crying out, yet somehow I am able to hear a few words through the rumble that form an unmistakable call to action. What ripples through the concrete and rises above the noise is this inconvenient question 'oh really, is this the best 'yes you can' do?', to which I can hear Mother Earth retorting 'oh yes you can do a hell of a lot more, and you're gonna need to!'. In my ecotopian delusions, Mother Earth speaks with a New York city swagger and resembles Jennifer Holliday in Dreamgirls. 

Regardless of which diva you have playing the role of mother nature in your delusion of a socially and ecological just planet, Mother is always right.

As I walk through the streets of this great city, her words taunt me and it is hard to ignore that my place in space has been forever changed. My urban environs are adapting, undergoing a process of erosion the likes of which the city has never seen. And she will never be the same again. A digital graveyard of New York landmarks is now the hubris and soil for a new generation of inhabitants to claim their places in space.  In some cases, the soil was rather rich, and what is growing out of it is a genetically modified mess, leaving in its wake many transplants and indigeneous species that are slowly vanishing:

In some extreme cases, rare Manhattan species have been replaced by generic chain restaurants, an invasive species that is not native to the East village environs.

  From "Love Saves The Day' to chain restaurant.

I've even heard some of the elders mutter that they miss the old new york, embittered by the impact the laws of nature are having on them:

I hear them. I feel them. I just recently watched the documentary, Schmatta, the story of my chosen people's plight into the garment industry and its ultimate demise due to the very same root reason for why I don't miss the old new york. The very way that the 'old new york' worked, and every old way of doing business as usual are the very reasons we've gotten into this ecological mess to begin with. What we do with our place in space for the future depends on how we choose to reinvent our urban spaces, or our rural landscapes and wherever else our places in space may be.

The New Urban Ecological Paradigm

There isn't a city on the planet that isn't impacted by some crisis, be it financial, environmental, natural or otherwise.  In fact, the very essence of the Earth's natural state is to be in a state of entropy, forever seeking to establish balance. The new urban ecological paradigm calls upon us all to reinvent our places in space, to establish this balance in our urban centers and to become space scientists and change agents, transforming our places in space into the carbon reductive, energy saving and life enhancing ecotopias we can all envision.  Do it now, before the next generic species of chain store moves into your hometown and you have to resort to cooking your own meal, yet all that's left is genetically modified produce brought to you by a lab near you (label reads Macau).

Every one of us possesses the spark to reclaim our place and space and to alter their city and state of affairs for the better. For the greener good, I propose my ecotopian solution: take every single big box retail store that is vacant and convert it into a sustainable community center whose mission is to support the community in its sustainable development process. A decade ago, I read about the outsourcing of the American manufacturer's soul in Naomi Klein's No Logo, while I sat in a cafe in Vientiene, Laos, wearing a brand new Anthropologie skirt that I bought for under a dollar at the 'sale' across the way from a no name factory. Today, I can no longer let this fly in my name, reminisce about the old anything, nor can any of us ignore the reality behind the logo and the role we can all play in becoming spacesavers and changemakers. Today, I took my big box retail store conversion proposal straight to Walmart's International Director of Sustainability, and received word from this guy that they'd get back to me.

I'm not waiting for his response, or for the next genetically modified, nutritionless fast food chain store to open up in my neck of the woods and send the proverbial mom and pop packing. My ecotopian future is far more bright than this, and includes every radical possibility we all can crowdsource and cocreate.  Now make good use of this online place in space's greatest resource, the comments sections, and post your ecotopian solutions so we can start making it our urban reality today.

Just this past week, scientists announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human fossil that hailed on Earth 3.2 million years ago, humans were in the midst of an unknown stage of evolution.  Today, it's safe to say that humanity is undergoing an equally dramatic transformation that even the creationists would call evolution. And for the sake of mother earth and her profound state of current upheaval, we are all fortunate that human evolutionary stages no longer require millions of years to transpire. I'd go so far as to say that the very earth and our survival within in it, now depend on this human dynamism.  So are we really evolving? Will there be some 'tipping point' canary in the mineshaft moment that will shift us as a global populace towards tranformational and systemic positive social change?

Whatever the warning sign, that time in history is most certainly upon us. Let's call that time now.

Ten years ago, I interned at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, witnessing scientists weep in admission that their research was used to support oil corporations' decision to serve the shareholders best interest by not paying the high cost of cleanup fees for these environmental atrocities. During that time, I also conducted research on shore degradation at the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology, profound times I was reminded of during a conference last week of the The Feast Kitchen. Dynamic keynote speaker Diana Ayton-Shenker of Fast Forward Fund told her story of how her youth and young adult research experience one day led her to founding a 'youth investing in youth' organization. When she spoke of discovering a decade later that her research was used as part of a landmark study on the cause, I had a similar 'hair on the back of your neck moment', as I had recently found that that summer of dolphin research ended up generating valuable data that was also put to positive means years after its time.

So what's the point of waxing all nostalgic about the days at my liberal arts college when I 'worked' for college credit, roamed the earth unshaven, and didn't have a true clue about the environmental perils that were boiling over?

Because those days are over. We don't have ten years to kick it until that tide turns, until that research turns into data that informs policy that leads to action. Back then, I was that very snarky Jersey girl who poked my Environmental Modeling professors on the very first day of class over whether we could run a formula to find out when exactly our actions would produce an unlivable atmospheric condition for humanity. 

That number, that time, is upon us.

Now, I don't claim to be an academic know-it-all, knowing visionary or scientist with wisdom of the times to come. Hardly. Moreover, the Hopi Indians, among many other noted wise groups throughout time, had foretold this very period of history as the window or loop of hope of great change. Thousands of years ago, they 'tweeted' about this prophecy of now on caves, depicting this window of hope where humanity collectively steps into itself.

So here were are. Earth in upheaval. And everyone and their brother may or may not have the silver bullet super scalable game changing idea that is going to save the world. Anything may or may not be true. But as an urban planning researcher once told me and forever evangelized me as a result, it's all about the data. The solutions. The problems. The reality. The change in policy. It's all in the data.

At first I was allergic. Hell, I had shots in grade school to prevent me from all allergies, but I soon warmed to it and the dots began to connect. The more I broke down my resistance to data, the more I realized that my true allergy was to the newly emerging concept that was counter-intuitive to everything that I had been trained during my granola days. In this profoundly short decade leading up to the realtime now, a tipping point has occurred in human population and migration. Today, the world's cities are the home of the majority of the world's 6 1/2 billion population.  With over half of the world's population living in cities, the solutions began to surface around one obvious truth, backed by data, supported by the obvious, and almost liberating in its profound implications and hopeful possibilities. The great shift our world is waiting for is going to be spearheaded within cities around the world. When applied to ripple out positively across the globe, the city becomes a beacon of hope instead of a blemish on the natural landscape.

The New Urban Ecological Paradigm

The models and solutions are many. The time is now. There is no space on earth that isn't ripe for change. Urban ecological ideas can turn into tangible realities quickly and have far reaching impact, such as the concepts for Transition Towns built on joint social equity in communities, or strategic urban vertical farms and scaled urban roof top gardens like Sky Vegetables. Future forward ventures impacting the urban space have also arrived, such as Green Spaces, a communal workspace and green business incubator, and initiatives such as Farms Reach, an online platform to connect local farmers to urban vendors. Restaurants such as Gusto Organics offer a prime example of how tasty this deep ecological future can and will be. The city as epicenter for ecological change is witnessing shifts towards complete sustainable development around the world, as documented so effectively by Green Map, an open source mapping resource for user generated green guides to your city. A quick search of urban ecology yields centers with community shaping programs in Boston, San Francisco, and Wisconsin, just to name a few. And let's not forget the new startup, Open Venture Society, the shameless plug for the company I just co-founded ;)

Is this enough to set back the hands of time so as to restore ecological balance here on this great earth? I have no idea. In fact, I'm relieved that I no longer have access to those research and computer modeling programs to map out the flow systems that can generate an exact date for our demise. I don't go there because, contrary to my 'scientific' roots, I know in my heart of hearts that the resilience of Mother Earth and her natural chemical reaction of whole earth renewal has never been witnessed or observed in any laboratory. 

The New Urban Ecological Paradigm marks the new shift in thinking towards riding the wave of the current urban migration into the world cities and coupling it with radically innovative and sustainable initiatives that turn our cities into capacity builders and community resources for positive social change. There's a good 3.5 billion people currently living in the world's cities. The New Urban Ecological Paradigm starts there. With all of us.