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“Unbowed: A Memoir” by Wangari Maathai, pt. 2

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Being a child of the US, I’ve only seen online, rather than face-to-face, the types of deeply vicious and misogynistic attacks which Maathai describes: [C]ertain people were jealous and wanted me to be taught a lesson and put in my place. They took pleasure in what they perceived as my comeuppance. The message was clear:…

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“Unbowed: A Memoir” by Wangari Maathai, pt. 1

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There is a phrase that’s apparently become popular on Twitter conversations where someone wishes to point out unconscious privilege: they state that the issue under discussion is an FWP, or “First World Problem.” Reading Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed: A Memoir, I found myself often reflecting with bleak amusement that all the issues I’ve ever faced —…

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Advanced Research Methodologies journaling

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I dedicated most of this week to (amongst other things) catching up on the readings for this class, so I could start on the required reflection paper as soon as possible. Here are the readings to date for all those intellectual sadists who are following along: Chapter 1 of Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber & Patricia Lina…

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More ecofeminism thoughts

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I think what has astonished me the most this week is how (sometimes unwittingly?) destructive humans are. I had time to muse on this as I was wandering around the yard picking up all the various bits of trash strewn hither and yon. Not only was there an absolutely astonishing amount of garbage — and…

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What is Community? part 4: Lupin Lodge

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I’ve written several posts now on Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, and his vision of cities as mostly-self-sufficient, compact communities instead of sprawling and isolating urban blights that consume and destroy the land they’re on. I’ve also mentioned some of my agreements and doubts with what I saw in Arcosanti (as a concrete entity somewhat separated from…

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What is Community? part 3: Soleri’s definitions

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So does CoH qualify as a community? Does Arcosanti as it stands today, or Lupin Lodge? Paolo Soleri (who is still alive, though I speak of his writing in the past tense) devoted quite a bit of thought to community. According to him, there is a “magic of the big city” (23) as much as…

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What is Community? part 2: City of Heroes

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What causes a feeling of community? What creates a coherent sub-culture? Both my housemates play on the on-line multiple-player game City of Heroes, which is being startlingly abruptly shut down by NCSoft, the Korean company that bought the game some years ago. Watching my housemates, I find myself faintly surprised at the real distress I…

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Planning the Natural Yard

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Okay, this posting is going to be a not-so-quick recap of stuff I want to keep track of for my yard work, and I’ll keep adding to it as I learn more stuff to do. I’ll work more on the compost idea later; for now, some very useful URLs: the National Wildlife Federation’s Garden for…

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More on Griffin’s “Woman & Nature”

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Susan Griffin’s ecofeminist book Woman & Nature: The Roaring Inside Her is considered ground-breaking in the field. Written in 1978 in a poetic and then-uniquely female “voice,” it was one of the first — if not the actual first — text which traced a clear textual-historical connection between patriarchal use/abuse, and conflation, of women and…