“I first most fully realized that this was unhanselled and ancient Demonic Nature, natura, or whatever man has named it . . . nature primitive—powerful gigantic aweful and beautiful, Untamed for ever.”
Thoreau, Kaatdn — early draft
Rewilding the American Child
Children are much more likely to enjoy outdoor activities—and stick with them—if they start out at the right moment in their physical and cognitive development.
This months Outside contains more than a dozen articles about”Rewilding the American Child” but that is not what this site is about. It’s about cataloging and sharing good resources. It’s definitely not about click bate. I have not read through all of these articles yet. As I do I will be adding links below. My addition of a link only means I have read it and it has something to offer to my larger project. ALL of the articles are available here.
French kids are heading back to school today without their most beloved possessions
On July 30, 2018, the French government passed a law banning the use of phones in primary and middle schools, to come into effect in the beginning of the 2018 school year. The law allows exceptions for disabled children, in cases of emergency, or “within the framework of explicit and specific pedagogical use, supervised by the teachers.” The law also states that high schools can ban cell phones if they choose to, but the decision will be left up to individual establishments (link in French).
The purpose of the law, according to the Ministry of Education, is threefold (link in French). It is meant to help kids’ ”attention, concentration and reflection” in class; encourage kids to actually play with each other, make friends, and exercise during recreation times; and to combat racketeering, theft, online bullying, and harassment in schools, as well as limit young children’s exposure “to shocking, violent, or pornographic images.”
They’ll be fine.
Even Flat Earthers Believe in Climate Change
The Flat Earth Society says it’s “irresponsible to question something with so much overwhelming evidence behind it.”
(Insert facepalm emoji)
Amid opioid crisis, researchers aim to put medical marijuana to the test
Anecdotal and historical accounts of pot’s painkilling properties abound. But so far, scientific evidence that it works better than traditional painkillers is hard to come by.
Because the U.S. government classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug with no medical use — like heroin and cocaine — funding for research is hard to get, scientists say. And as a 2015 article in the journal Current Pain and Headache Reports points out, high-quality clinical studies of pot’s effectiveness — randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled — are limited.
Dr. Jeffrey Chen wants to change that.
YES! RESEARCH!
Why our individualistic culture makes us less happy
A new book entitled The Happiness Fantasy by Carl Cederström, a business professor at Stockholm University, traces our current conception of happiness to its roots in modern psychiatry and the so-called Beat generation of the ‘50s and ‘60s. He argues that the values of the countercultural movement — liberation, freedom, and authenticity — were co-opted by corporations and advertisers, who used them to perpetuate a culture of consumption and production. And that hyper-individualistic culture actually makes us much less happy than we could be.
This has long been an apt criticism of the Human Potential Movement. But I would add it was not the intent of its founders who were interested in social reform.
How America’s ‘most reckless’ billionaire created the fracking boom
You can make an argument that the Federal Reserve is entirely responsible for
the fracking boom,” one private-equity titan told me. That view is echoed by Amir Azar, a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “The real catalyst of the shale revolution was the 2008 financial crisis and the era of unprecedentedly low interest rates it ushered in,” he wrote in a recent report. Another investor put it this way: “If companies were forced to live within the cash flow they produce, US oil would not be a factor in the rest of the world, and would have grown at a quarter to half the rate that it has.”Worries about the financial fragility of the fracking revolution have simmered for some time. John Hempton, who runs the Australia-based hedge fund Bronte Capital, recalls having debates with his partner as the boom was just getting going. “The oil and gas are real,” his partner would say. “Yes,” Hempton would respond, “but the economics don’t work.”
Oh, what could possibly go wrong here?
Does everything in the world boil down to basic units – or can emergence explain how distinctive new things arise?
Emergence was popular in philosophy of science more than a century ago. Reputable figures such as John Stuart Mill, Henri Bergson and C D Broad suggested that chemistry and biology would struggle to account for the origins of life; perhaps life could only be said to ‘emerge’ from these domains, demanding its own special laws and explanations. Beginning in the 1930s, though, advances in quantum chemistry and the discovery of the structure of DNA and RNA showed the potential of atomistic approaches. Soon enough, a cloud of suspicion formed over emergence and its scientific potential.
Nowadays, the concept is often invoked by quantum mystics, believers in souls, and advocates of the inscrutable nature of consciousness. These are the fuzzy approaches to emergence, and we should avoid them. But emergence shouldn’t be judged on the basis of its dubious friends. Long disdained, emergence can still be a valuable addition to our ways of understanding the world. The trick is to capture what is interesting about emergence without lapsing into an attitude of awed mysticism.
I have long been attracted to this idea. It has a powerful explanatory narrative that addresses multiple of metaphysical and epistemological gaps.
If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
Veganism has rocketed in the UK over the past couple of years – from an estimated half a million people in 2016 to more than 3.5 million – 5% of our population – today. Influential documentaries such as Cowspiracy and What the Health have thrown a spotlight on the intensive meat and dairy industry, exposing the impacts on animal and human health and the wider environment.
But calls for us all to switch entirely to plant-based foods ignore one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate these ills: grazing and browsing animals.
Rather than being seduced by exhortations to eat more products made from industrially grown soya, maize and grains, we should be encouraging sustainable forms of meat and dairy production based on traditional rotational systems, permanent pasture and conservation grazing. We should, at the very least, question the ethics of driving up demand for crops that require high inputs of fertiliser, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides, while demonising sustainable forms of livestock farming that can restore soils and biodiversity, and sequester carbon.
Honestly, she had me at cheese. Man oh man, I love cheese. Behold the power of cheese.
Dean’s List 