Hedge Society

Plastic blight to plastic use.

From Beyond magazine: Issue 14: Possible Words feature And Today  - a roundup of good things happening around the world:

Somalialand, Africa:

In Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, he describes returning to his South African village after years in prison, only to find the water polluted, the buildings run down and “the countryside littered with plastic bags and wrappers. We had not known of plastic when I was a boy, and though it surely improved life in some ways, its presence in Qunu appeared to me to be a kind of blight.”

This plastic blight can be spotted from the coasts of Mexico to the deserts of the Middle East. In the world’s oceans, one of the biggest problems is “nurdles”—a kind of plastic pellet that are both the building blocks and the end of plastic products breaking up under sunlight and water. It is estimated that there are six times as many nurdles as zooplankton in some of the world’s oceans and fish and birds that are autopsied are regularly filled with nurdles.

The government of Somalialand recently banned “the importation, production and use of plastic bags in the country”. The bags, caught in trees and shrubs, are ugly but also dangerous. Wildlife and cattle ingest them. Soil is contaminated as the plastic breaks down and discarded bags fill with rainwater providing a perfect breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitos.

While it remains to be seen whether the leaders of Somalialand will have the political will to follow up the ban, the attempt, the willingness to try, will continue to bring more attention to the problems of plastic.

And from Rocketboom:

Small can be big.

Here at the hedge, we keep an eye out for good things happening all over, and today we came across this Very Good Thing: SmallCanBeBig.org.

Small Can Be Big is a site founded just last year that works a lot like Kiva.org, except they're more locally based, working with needy families in Massachusetts. 100% of every donation goes to help a family at risk of becoming homeless get back on their feet. Families have been screened by reputable local charities, and any size donation is accepted, from $1 to whatever you can afford. All you do is visit the site, read the stories, and then choose to help who you will. I wanted to give some hope to this family: a 16-year old boy who's helping his mom fight cancer. They need help with the rent by March 7th or they'll lose their home and have to go into a shelter.

I am a huge fan of opportunities like this. Awhile back, there was a year or two when I struggled to pay my rent because of a confluence of choices I had made, some good, some bad. What I remember most about that time is lying awake at night worrying, trying not to worry, trying to figure out how things would work out, praying, praying, praying for the problems to be solved, for the chance to figure out how to solve them.

Having gotten past that, I can now say that that was one of the best experiences of my life, because I don't think I would ever have really understood what it's like to lie awake at night worrying about money until it happened to me. It's a desperate feeling - and there were times when something that looked like magic happened - a new opportunity, something in the mail, whatever, that would make me cry because I was so relieved, that made me feel there was something unseen at work in the world. And I've always wondered since then what it's like for all those people who aren't bad off enough to warrant help through the established channels, but who just need a little bit of something to help them through.

I think one of the most beautiful things we can do for each other in this world is to give each other hope, to hold out to each other, as Rumi says, the "secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope." To whisper the fragile belief that things really will be OK. To say along with Julian of Norwich, that in the end, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

You grow, girl

In a 4-minute radio essay, Mary Seton Corboy, an urban gardener in Philadelphia, explains why she believes in physical labor:

 
"A small fortune and a whole lot of time was spent on my education, so I could choose my employment and would never have to resort to picking up a shovel or digging a ditch to make a living. But in spite of the careful planning to ensure me a clean-fingernail future, I find my job, the job I relish on most days, is digging some version of a ditch. Of course, some of these ditches are metaphorical, but others are the old-fashioned move-the-dirt-around kind. And that's alright with me. In fact, it's what I want. I enjoy the ditch-digging part of my work because it's just one component of the how and why and what I do every day. My job calls for a lot of thinking and problem-solving - the how-to of what I do - and an equally heavy dose of community interaction - the why of what I do.

In my life as an urban farmer, it's as if I try to build a well for my neighborhood to draw from, start to finish, every day. There are many people who believe I should figure out how to pay someone to design the ditch, hire someone to dig the channel, and charge the people for the water that comes from the well. And then, having emailed, faxed, Excelled and Powerpointed all day, use the money I made from the well project to hire someone in a leotard to make me push a ball around a gym, and wrap my leg around my head. That would be their idea of success, but not mine.

Simply put, we aim to be too good to do physical labor. The thing is, I want the physical labor. It is an integral part of the process, and I want to be part of the process, the beginning, the middle, and the end...Physical labor creates the elusive bond that moves my work from cerebral and calculating to meaningful and engaged." 

(Photo from WHYY's This I Believe Philadelphia)

23: Friday Roundup: Hope and countries

Let's just pretend it's Friday. I wanted to post this last week but it wasn't quite together. The painting is by the talented Dustin Parker who we found out about via twitter (@dustinparker). Love that twitter.

TED is featuring a meditation on hope by surgeon and writer Sherwin Nuland (12:37 mins). Nuland mentions one of my favorite Vaclav Havel quotes, good for those who think hope mongers do not have a sense of reality -a thing I always find silly as many of the most hopeful people in the world are waist deep in areas that hold incredible suffering while couch ridden cynics press keyboard buttons and call them impractical and naive. Havel says:

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It is hard to do the work of well-researched critique whether it comes in the form of satire, faux news, or in-depth analysis. But critique shouldn't be confused with the kind of off-the-cuff cynicism that is evidence of a shriveled heart. It's okay to hope that someone will be a good leader, will set a higher standard that maybe even he or she can't attain. We aren't being tricked. We aren't looking for a messiah. We're hoping for the best despite our shriveled hearts.

And with our own Canadian government mess coming to the fore as we "un-porogue" things in the upcoming week, I still have hope in spite of all the silly things we do individually and collectively. There's still Neil Young. There's money that may not be worth a lot in other places but it's colorful and displays pond hockey players on its back instead of drawings of guns and tanks. We know enough writers, bloggers, artists, good human beings and citizens of all kinds to believe it's okay to hope. 

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The New York Times has a behind-the-scenes feature on Obama's People, the photo shoot that introduces President Obama's new administration. I like how the photographer mentions that the identical background outlines how different people will occupy spaces. Those of us outside of the American system may want to match people up with "This one would be CJ Cregg, that one would be Josh..."

The BBC has a short piece called Three Generations: Little Rock to Obama.

CBC Radio had Canadians vote on "The Top 49 Songs from North of the 49th Parallel" for Obama's Ipod. Hey, at least we didn't give him hockey skates. Although we are his first visit so there's still time. Here's the list complete with samples.

And you know we're all about the papercraft at the Hedge Society so here's a downloadable paper model of Air Force One  (via Make). And via Cubecraft, a build your own cubed paper Barak.

Book joy

The boy-in-the-hedge twittered a news link about libraries the other day that said Calgary's public library is one of North America's busiest systems. When times get tough, people buy less and borrow more. Think of those millions of books, churning out into the world, then coming back and going out again. Books traveling at home and abroad, visiting houses, condos, bathtubs, bedsides, buses, trains. Books written and read by old people, young people, funny people, sad people. Books that carry our fingerprints on their covers as smudged secret messages to each other. Books reincarnated into used bookstores, waiting to be adopted, waiting to be refound, and to become real again.

  (Photo: one wall inside Shakespeare & Company, a used bookshop in Paris.)

Hope in action.

Lots of people know about Kiva by now - a website that lets you loan small amounts of money (microfinance!) to entrepreneurs in the developing world so they can lift themselves out of poverty. But when it's wintery outside or gray and cloudy inside, I like to visit KivaVision - a page that shows who's making loans on Kiva and where they are on a world map, in real-time. It's like watching hope in action. After a few minutes there, I realize that no matter what the news says, there are all kinds of people all over the world who are trying to help each other, and all of that kindness is unfolding underneath us all the time.

14: Daily

I'm getting ready to put out a big post to follow up F.'s response to people calling all manner of creative things "dead". But it's not quite done yet so I thought I'd post a few things that we either twittered or put up in our delicious links today. There's so many good things going on:

The Printmaking Bible: The Complete Guide to Printing Materials and Techniques

"Perennially popular, printmaking is enjoying a contemporary resurgence—but no comprehensive up-to date manual on the subject exists.

At over 400 pages and packed with 1,000 full-color photos and illustrations, The Printmaking Bible is the definitive resource to the ins-and-outs of every variety of serious printmaking technique practiced today."

PajamaProgram - Delivering Warm Sleepwear and Nurturing Books to Children in Need. (U.S. based - so far only one Canadian office). 

This reminds us of Sleeping Children Around the World. They deliver bedkits to hundreds of thousands of children with the goal of A world in which every child benefits from the comfort of a good night's sleep." One hundred percent of every bedkit donation goes to a child. They operate with zero overhead and this year they will deliver their millionth bedkit.

We have a few foodies as followers on our twitter and we think we'll have to do a foodie roundup one day and ask them some questions. They have great blogs. Here's one for today. Limes & Lycopene by @KathrynElliott of Sydney, Australia. Check out 31 Ways to a Better Diet.