Art, Data, and Environmental Stewardship

Art, Data, and Environmental Stewardship

Parents and teachers who are searching for ways to engage kids with local environmental issues might look to their community parks or science museums for opportunities. But what about art? Environmental issues can often be overwhelming or disheartening for members of the public, and art offers an innovative way to promote interest that can lead to deeper engagement down the line. This approach presents a particular opportunity for younger audiences, combining activities they love – like coloring, building, and crafts – with the basics of environmental issues.

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Ethical Shopping: How Consumers are Driving Change

Melbourne physiotherapist Lauren Dircks and her husband Andrew Casey began their ethical shopping journey when they had their first child nine years ago. The couple had already done a six-month course on sustainable living and saw an opportunity to make food choices that aligned their environmental principles with better health. “It was about making different choices and how you can take little steps to be a better global citizen,” Lauren says.

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Find More Happiness by Spending Money on Buying Time, Not Stuff

Find More Happiness by Spending Money on Buying Time, Not Stuff

Money can’t buy happiness, right? Well, some researchers beg to differ. They say it depends on how you spend it. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that when people spend money on time-saving services such as a house cleaner, lawn care or grocery delivery, it can make them feel a little happier. By comparison, money spent on material purchases — aka things — does not boost positive emotions the way we might expect.

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Siblings Open Zero-Waste Store to Return to Old-Fashioned Values

Siblings Open Zero-Waste Store to Return to Old-Fashioned Values

A brother-sister duo have teamed up to give shoppers on Auckland’s North Shore a taste of nostalgia. Andrea and Robert Watt have opened The Source Bulk Food in Milford, bringing unbranded, bulk food retail to the community in an effort to revitalize old-fashioned grocery shopping. The business stocks more than 400 products from as close to the source as possible, and is committed to being zero-waste, vetoing the use of plastic bags in favor of recyclable paper ones. 

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Simulating the Bodily Pain of Future Climate Change

Simulating the Bodily Pain of Future Climate Change

Why is it easy to imagine sights, sounds and smells in vivid detail, but so much harder to conjure up the suffering you’d feel in intense heat? Blame your brain wiring.
Your ability to sense things just by thinking about them, which neuroscientists call simulation, requires vast networks of interconnected neurons.This neural limitation, I suggest, is a key reason why more people aren’t terrified by climate change. Most of us can easily imagine the sight of polar ice caps melting, and we might feel distressed as we think about coastal cities flooding. But thanks to our brain wiring, few of us can simulate the feeling of blasting heat or the awfulness of other disasters we’d face every day in a warming world.

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How C&A Created the World’s First Cradle to Cradle T-shirt

In June, C&A, the international Dutch chain of retail clothing stores launched a line of T-shirts certified to the Cradle to Cradle standard, meaning that they were designed and manufactured in a way that is benign to the environment and human health, and whose materials can be recirculated safely back into industrial materials or composted into the soil. It represents, in no small measure, the future of product design and manufacturing. Creating a Cradle to Cradle (or C2C) T-shirt — at scale and at an affordable price to the consumer — was no small feat for C&A. It required a board-level commitment, close partnerships with contract manufacturers, an arduous search for replacements for problematic materials and some new messaging to customers.

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Indigenous People Lead the Way in the Fight for Climate Justice

Indigenous People Lead the Way in the Fight for Climate Justice

Many believe the fight to combat climate change hinges on the aligned interests of capital and state. Give the Elon Musks of the world enough time and resources and they will innovate us out of impending climate catastrophe. Get the G20 in a room and they will hammer out a deal and create regulations to enforce it. Or so the thinking in some circles goes. Yet throughout history, the interests of the state have slid into alignment with big oil and big profits rather than lining up with our rivers, our air, our wildlife and our people. But the first people of this land, who often live on the frontlines of our metastasizing climate disaster, remain resolute. It is our sacred responsibility to protect and preserve this planet for future generations.

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Women’s March Organizers “Reclaiming Their Time” at Convention

Women's March Organizers "Reclaiming Their Time"

Back in January, millions of women marched en masse in the nation’s capital and beyond, one day after the inauguration of America’s 45th president, Donald Trump. Now, leaders behind the historic Women’s March have designated “Reclaiming Our Time” as the official theme of its forthcoming Women’s Convention next month in Detroit. The two-day confab, slated for October 27-29 at the Cobo Center in downtown Detroit, is expected to bring together thousands of women, femmes and allies of all backgrounds. The weekend is being billed as one of strategy sessions, workshops, forums and intersectional movement building ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, organizers said.

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Geisha Williams: First Latina CEO of a Fortune 500 Company

Geisha Williams: First Latina CEO of a Fortune 500 Company

After I graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in engineering, I went to work for a local energy company. There, I had the good fortune of working for this person who ended up being a lifelong mentor of mine. He asked me one day, “Geisha, what are your long-term career aspirations?” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’d like to be a manager or a supervisor someday.” He said, “No. I mean long-term.” Well, I was thinking long-term. At that time, women like me didn’t run corporations. Latinas didn’t run corporations. Immigrants didn’t run corporations. But he looked at me and said, “Geisha, somebody has to run this company some day. Why not you?”

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Dance Theater Celebrates Role of Women in Social Movements

Dance Theater Celebrates Role of Women in Social Movements

Social movements — whether they concern race, economic equity or environmental justice — often have one thing in common: They are led and sustained by women. That’s a theme at the core of Ananya Dance Theatre’s latest piece, “Shyamali: Sprouting Words,” which looks at the role of women in fostering dissent, and how protest in turn leads to progress. Dancer Felicia Perry said that throughout the dance, there is an analogy between women who protest and the grass beneath our feet. “Grass can be pretty annoying … in the ways that women are annoying when we speak up and we speak out, but we keep coming back.” “Shyamali” features Ananya Dance Theatre’s signature mix of classical Indian dance, yoga and martial arts. The moves are at times dreamy and sensual, at other times fiercely physical. The dancers are beaten down, and they come back.

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