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Excerpted from "Teaching People to Give," an article by Edgar Carlson.
Contributed and read by Peggy Kugel. Peggy is a wife, mother, attorney, volunteer, organizer, reader, Girl
Scout, crafter, volkswalker, orienteer, and geocacher. She has lived in
Anchorage for 30+ years and donates to the Alaska Run for Women. |
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Edgar M. Carlson was president of Minnesota's Gustavus Adolphus College in the 1960s. His comments apply to all institutions -- not just colleges -- and are just as relevant today.
"If a college has not succeeded in persuading its students to give after four years of experience on its campus, after having been subjected to the whole educational program of the institution, it has failed in its mission. If it trains people to get, but fails to train them to give, it really has no good reason for existence. It must be the hallmark of the alumni of our kind of institution that they are ‘giving' people. That applies to everything about them -- their vocational service, their family life, their church activity, and their community relations. ... It is in teaching people to give -- of themselves, their efforts, their devotion and their means -- that colleges like ours really have their mission."
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From Seven Life Lessons Of Chaos by John Briggs and F. David Peat and published by HarperCollins.
Contributed and read by J. Gwen Kennedy, Ph.D., an organization development consultant with a passion for systems thinking and human systems dynamics. No wonder she enjoys chaos theory and the complexity sciences. Gwen's own website: www.gkennedy.com.
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In Seven Life Lessons Of Chaos, John Briggs and F. David Peat write:
"From the perspective of chaos theory, it is less important to notice how systems are in competition with each other than it is to notice how systems are nested within each other and inextricably linked.
...one of the most exciting sports experiences anyone can have is watching a team catch fire. Perhaps as a basketball game begins, the players of one team seem to be operating independently of one another, ... in effect competing among themselves. Then they suddenly undergo a transformation. One of them makes an inspired play that leads to a basket.... Now the moves the players make seem coupled together, all five team members working like a single organism. ...
Chaos theory tells us competition and cooperation are not either/or ideas. They are complexly interwoven."
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Excerpted from The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, published by Elizabeth Sifton Books, Viking.
Contributed and read by Steve Aufrecht. Steve's blogging: www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com.
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Owning land is so much a part of our culture that we tend to forget the idea of private property is a human invention. In this excerpt from his book, The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin relates a totally different way that humans conceive their relationship to land.
‘Before the whites came, ... no one in Australia was landless, since everyone inherited, as his or her private property, a stretch of the Ancestor's song and the stretch of country over which the song passed. A man's verses were his title deeds to territory. He could lend them to others. He could borrow other verses in return. The one thing he couldn't do was sell or get rid of them.
... A "stop," he said, was the "handover point" where the song passed out of your ownership; where it was no longer yours to look after and no longer yours to lend. You'd sing to the end of your verses, and there lay the boundary.'
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Taken from French Dirt, published by Algonquin Books, and used by permission.
Read by Stephen Nickel: "When I first started to learn the art and science of pruning, I was quite apprehensive, but after much practice and experience, I have come to realize that if you look and listen carefully, the tree will tell you what needs to be pruned. Pruning, when done correctly, is an art that takes the tree's natural shape and enhances its growth in ways that are good for the tree."
Stephen Nickel is the Community Assistance Forester with the Alaska Division of Forestry, Community Forestry Program. He works with communities throughout the state to help them manage the health and safety of community forests by providing training and technical assistance to government agencies, professionals and volunteers. A favorite website link: http://www.treelink.org
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In French Dirt, Richard Goodman describes his earliest experiences with pruning trees:
'"[Ford] snipped and cut our peach tree so deftly and rapidly it frightened me. "Won't that kill the tree if you do that, Ford?" I asked him as he pruned the tree. "No, boy. This is going to help this peach tree." Branches and twigs flew off the tree with a blinding rapidity as his scissors darted here and there and everywhere. ... "But, Ford, how do you know what to cut?" I pleaded. He bent down and cut off a huge branch. He'd cut too much! I squealed and looked down in horror at the large crooked arm, leaves still on it. Ford stood back up. "I just know, boy."
... Ford taught me that life can be enhanced by death, that injury is not necessarily injury in the world of plants.'
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Excerpted from "The Nature of Nature" by Dr. Rebecca Bushnell, part of an ongoing series of 60-second lectures featuring faculty from the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. Used by permission of
the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences and the
author.
Read by Thetus Smith: "When I edited environmental documents for the National Park Service, I became much more aware of the contradictions in Nature." Thetus, an Alaskan for 38 years, is a retired National Park Service - Alaska Region editor who lives in Anchorage. She never tires of seeing the Chugach Mountains in their daily changes of visual grandeur and the wildlife that transits the Chester Creek Trail and Greenbelt while surrounded by the roaring sounds of the city. A favorite web site: Alaska Professional Communicators.
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Dr. Rebecca Bushnell spoke on "The Nature of Nature" as part of an ongoing series of 60-second lectures featuring faculty from the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences.
"So what is nature? One statement about nature always summons up its own contradiction. So, on the one hand, Neil Evernden says where there can be nothing that is not nature, it has no opposite. DDT and a tulip are both made of the elements that constitute nature.
But on the other hand, is there anything that is really purely natural? Some people have defined nature as that which is not interfered with, while culture is the product of interference. But, as C.S. Lewis has observed, in the real world, everything is continuously interfered with by everything else. Nothing is untouched. Everything is thus unnatural.
...
So when we talk about nature, are we always talking about culture as much [as] about what lurks in the woods?"
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