See what can be done to get a GREAT website!!

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The Free Field Guide to Rewilding

http://www.rewild.info/fieldguide/index.php?title=Main_Page

The Free Field Guide To Rewilding That Anyone Can Edit

Our Mission Statement:

REWILD.info intends to collect and provide free access to knowledge of primitive and/or sustainable living practices through the use of the open source format of a wiki (click here to learn about the wiki). Our elders have long since disappeared. The information they held and the skills they practiced exist now only in pockets--a few books, a few schools--practiced by only a few. This site, while seemingly contradictory in principle (using modern technology to teach primitive technology), does not contradict the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge we all need for such a return to the kind of life our elders knew--any means necessary to rewild. This site forms another means for those who cannot find any other starting places or for those who feel inspired to help those with no other starting places. In time, all of this will fade, but for now we need communication and we need something to stand in for our elders (and/or an oral tradition of knowledge). This site attempts to do just that.

The REWILD.info Field Guide has four major functions:

1. This site exists for you and your community, primarily as a tool to disperse information that will help the future generations--human and other-than-human alike. Many people cannot afford to go to wilderness schools or purchase field guides, but most people can use the internet for free (at a library for example). This site will help unschoolers and low-income people have access to information that they otherwise could not afford.
2. We provide a community, at least in some sense, to those with no local community.
3. We enhance international rewilding communities by providing a space for cross-cultural pollination.
4. We function as a place for people to meet and make plans concerning the crash of civilization (ie, where to go, where to meet, what to avoid, etc.)
5. Lastly we hope to enhance and rewild the use of the English language through the encouragment, but not requirement, of writing articles in e-prime.

http://www.rewild.info/fieldguide/index.php?title=Bow-drill

Canadian University LOCKS OUT FACULTY!!

Canadian university locks out faculty

By our reporter
7 January 2008

St. Thomas University, a liberal arts college in Fredericton, New Brunswick, has locked out its 160 unionized full- and part-time faculty and announced its intention to make use of the province’s reactionary labor laws to force a vote on its “final” contract offer.

The vote, which is to be organized by the New Brunswick Labour Relations Board, will likely be held Friday, January 11.

Never before has a Canadian university imposed such a lockout. Bishop’s University, of Lennoxville, Quebec, did briefly lock out its faculty last summer, but only after the university’s administrative staff, also members of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), had been on strike for several weeks.

St. Thomas’ Board of Governors and management have assumed a provocative, antiunion stance throughout the eleven month-long negotiations. First they tabled a raft of proposals aimed at strengthening management control over hiring and promotion and gravely compromising academic freedom. Then the Board insisted that its modified contract proposal be accepted as the framework for any new agreement and, when this ultimatum was rejected, locked out the faculty, who had yet even to authorize their union to call a strike.

In mid-December, the university announced that the start of the second semester would be delayed by a week and told the CAUT-affiliated Faculty Association of the University of St. Thomas (FAUST) it would force a vote on its “final offer” on January 3rd. This was coupled with the threat that if the offer was rejected the university would immediately impose a lockout.

The university was forced to abandon this plan, because there was insufficient time for the labour relations board to organize the vote for January 3. The Board of Governors then chose to lock out the faculty on December 27, in the middle of the two-week period during which the university is habitually closed for Christmas vacation.

At issue in the dispute are wages, teaching workload and the balance between teaching and research, management’s attempt to increase its power over hiring, the requirements for tenure, and, last but not least, the remuneration and working conditions of part-time instructors.

The faculty at St. Thomas is amongst the most poorly paid in all Canada. This is especially true of part-time instructors. Most are paid less than $5,000 per course, receive no health benefits, and have little seniority protection. The university has rejected the union’s demand that the enrolment cap of 60 students per course for courses taught by full-timers be extended to courses taught by part-time instructors.

The dispute at St. Thomas is rooted in socio-economic trends to be seen across Canada and far beyond the higher-education sector—the increase in hierarchical divisions of the workforce, the proliferation of insecure, part-time, jobs, and ever-increasing management demands.

36 percent of all courses offered at St. Thomas this year are being taught by part-timer instructors. While the public impression may be that these instructors are supplementing their incomes, the vast majority of part-time courses at St. Thomas, as at universities across Canada, are taught by persons—graduate students and Ph.D.’s unable to find full-time jobs—who depend on their teaching-income for their livelihood. 42 percent of the members of FAUST’s part-time bargaining unit are teaching 4 or more courses at St. Thomas in the current academic year.

While full-time faculty are far better paid than their part-time colleagues, they too are facing increasing management demands in regards to teaching, service, and research publication-output.

The dispute at St. Thomas is also ideologically driven. The Board of Governors and administration want to revive the university’s “Catholic identity” and make support for its “Catholic mission” a criterion in hiring and promotion.

St. Thomas was founded, at the beginning of the last century, by a Catholic order at the behest of the Bishop of Chatham, based in northeastern New Brunswick. In the early 1960s, as part of a provincial government reform aimed at improving higher education and broadening access to post-secondary education, St. Thomas was moved to the provincial capital, Fredericton, made a public institution, and effectively secularized.

As older faculty have retired, St. Thomas’ secular character has become more pronounced and for several decades the university has been for all intents and purposes a public, secular institution. The Board, supported by a small cabal of neo-conservatives in the faculty, wants to redefine the university as a Catholic institution.

This too exemplifies a cross-Canada trend. As universities have sought to compensate for declining state support, they have become more dependent on big business in the form of corporate partnerships, commercialized research, and donations. Because of business pressure and more generally the shift to right in the most privileged sections of society, university administrations have become more conservative and have started to redefine the acceptable parameters of academic debate.

While the current Liberal provincial government has said nothing publicly of substance about the contract dispute at St. Thomas, it is currently deliberating on a report it commissioned on the future of the province’s post-secondary education system. That report proposed tailoring the education system even more to the needs of big business, transforming three university campuses into polytechnics, reducing the role of faculty in university governance, and deregulating university tuition fees.

Predictably, the corporate media has echoed and amplified the university administration’s claims that the faculty’s demands will automatically translate into higher tuition fees. The press has also sought to incite the population against the locked out St. Thomas faculty by charging them with selfishly seeking higher pay at a time when the province is being roiled by the crisis in the forest industry.

The reality is that New Brunswick’s economy is dominated by a handful of giant corporations and conglomerates that have no compunction about closing factories and mills that are the mainstay of small communities. For decades these corporations have pressed pro-business Liberal and Conservative governments to lower taxes and starve the province’s education system and other public services of adequate funding

Virtually all the province’s English-language newspapers are owned by the Irving conglomerate, which has diverse holdings, including in oil refining and marketing and in the forest industry. The net worth of the Irvings was recently estimated at more than $10 billion, making them one of the world’s richest families.

The Irving-owned press churns out right-wing, pro-big business propaganda on a daily basis. A comment in the St. John Telegraph Journal last Wednesday advocated that New Brunswick aspire to become “Alabama north.” The comment claimed that the notorious anti-worker, southern US state has become a magnet for investment.

On Friday the Telegraph Journal published a rapidly pro-employer editorial on the St. Thomas University dispute titled “Walk out for what?” Predictably, the Irving-owned paper cast itself as speaking for New Brunswick’s underpaid workers, although it routinely editorializes in favour of the economic agenda—tax and budget cuts, deregulation, privatization and anti-union laws—that has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from working people to the rich and super-rich. The Irving mouthpiece declared, “The majority of New Brunswickers do not understand what faculty members are holding out for, and community feeling is likely to turn against the union if the dispute results in cancelled classes.”

I have nightmares about this ...

May 29, 2007 at 17:08:44 PACIFIC OCEAN PLASTIC STEW ENTERING OUR FOOD SYSTEM by Allen L Roland http://www.opednews.com

See Photo: http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2007/05/29.html

A dead Ocean bird from a dying Pacific Ocean garbage patch that is growing and is now twice the size of Texas ~ and could well be contaminating our food chain : Allen L Roland

This is a must read story for it has dire implications for all human beings and especially mothers and newborn infants.

This story is a wake up call to the world that we must help and cooperate with one another, especially pursuant to polluting our oceans, if we are to survive as a human species.

Next time you look out at this beautiful Pacific ocean, as I often do, realize that there is a garbage patch of discarded plastic twice the size of Texas a few hundred miles away and its growing !

Then we add this stunning announcement last week from The Center for American Progress ~ which should not be a surprise.

ENVIRONMENT / POLLUTERS FLOURISH UNDER THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION:


"Environmental enforcement efforts by the U.S. EPA and the Justice Department have plummeted over the last five years, resulting in a 38 percent decline in criminal fines and a 25 percent drop in civil penalties, according to a new report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP)."

Susan Casey and photographer Gregg Segal will lead you on this journey through a man made hell.

Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2007/05/29.html

Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?

By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal May 11, 2007 - 11:45:03 PM

http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2_printer.shtml

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.

To Captain Charles Moore

Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare.

Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. "The doldrums," sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain.

Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors.

He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the "Eastern Garbage Patch," Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

"Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic." This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune.

Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.

This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. "How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?" he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. "We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump," he says with a shrug. "That’s what we wanted to see."

Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times.

On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton.

There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. "Every one of us has this huge body burden," Moore says. "You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950." The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign:

Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

Plastic never really goes away ~ discover why and what are its effects on humans ~ here's a short trailer before you read on .

Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you’d find a little line of plastic,” he told The Seattle Times last April. “What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves."

Click on for rest of story ~
http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2_printer.shtml

OpEdNews columnist Allen L Roland is available for comments , interviews and speaking engagements ( allen@allenroland.com )

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:

SAVE THE OCEANS

Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

www.allenroland.com

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio www.conscioustalk.net

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