Thoughts

The UW Foundation handles incoming donations, and invests them into a variety of stock. The divestment campaign is asking the UW Foundation to take their money out of stock in fossil fuels.  In 2013, the UW-Madison Faculty Senate Ad Hoc Committee hosted forums for the students and public to participate in a discussion on whether or not the university should divest form fossil fuels. The Senate Committee will be deciding whether or not the faculty will be supporting the University in a move toward divestment. Many professors on the committee are leading climate scientists. This letter was formed from a collaborative effort from a variety of orgs on campus that participate in the Fossil Free UW Coalition, a student movement which strives for a cleaner, greener, UW.  ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dear Members of the Faculty Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Divestment, We are writing to you to thank you for hosting t

In the entire history of humankind, yours is the single most important generation. We as a species have unknowingly and steadfastly marched in the direction of our own destruction since before the dawn of the industrial age. Recent science on climate change has made that abundantly clear.  If there is any room left to right the course of human history, it will be the unique span of your lifetime which will provide that pivotal moment. How strange; how terrible and beautiful that your generation faces such a challenge, and such a special responsibility: It is as if two arcs grew up out of the roots of history and have been bending through time toward one another; preparing to cross at precisely this moment. One arc is our budding understanding of our deeply interconnected role on this planet--how we fit into this complex dance of life-- and the other is our growing awareness that if we continue as we have, our time here will soon come to an end. One has to ask, why have things been

                                                                                                                                      November 8 th , 2013 Members of the EPA panel, During a recent summer vacation I took a trip with my youngest son William, intending to see some of this beautiful country as we made our way toward Madison, Wisconsin. We loaded our car with binoculars, backpacks and peanut-butter and jelly, and left the Oregon coast intending to camp our way back. But the forest fires in Oregon and Northern Idaho blackened the sky overhead. After watching the fire-fighting helicopters swoop down to lower their hoses and suck water from the Clearwater River we’d planned to camp along, we had no choice but to push on, crossing into Montana where I told my son his asthma would get better in “big sky” country. But the smoke and flying ash followed us across the border, and the sun hung alien and red, barely penetrating the haze. Tuning in to local talk-radio produc

I just got back from a student faculty meeting on divestment, and unfortunately I was never called on to talk, but there were so many things I wanted to ask. For those of you that don't know, divestment refers to a movement asking universities and other large bodies to take their investments out of the top 200 fossil fuel companies. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison we are asking our foundation (which is worth 2.3 billion dollars) to take their investment out of fossil fuels (the numbers are not given to the public, but nationally a 3% investment in fossil fuels is assumed. For our university that amounts to 69 million dollars). Our foundation gets a variety of donations and then invests that money into a spread of stocks (risk aversion). As mentioned 3% of those stocks are likely in fossil fuel companies. Today the faculty had a forum on the issue, and whether or not they were going to stand as a body and support divestment or not. In particular, my respected teacher G

I am an atheist. I am a scientific thinker. I do not believe in alternate endings or second chances. I believe the life we have here on this earth is a finite one. When I first came to be atheist, this scared me. Death scared me. The meaning of life scared me. In my fear I frantically grasped for some cold rational meaning to life. Why are we here? Easy, my brain would spit back, because those species whom were motivated to reproduce are still here. But what is the point? I would ask. Easy again, to reproduce. Jesus brain, fine then, what should I find enjoyable about life here? Easy again, all of the things you are prewired to find pleasurable, like eating, sleeping, and sex. From this frustrating loop of logic I came to the melancholy response that the meaning of life was simply to be happy. And one could achieve happiness by living a life our ancestors lived which promotes an increase in serotonin, ending in, voila, feelings of happiness. Now I don't completely disagree with m

Sometimes I want to write a message. I want to write a message with the passion and vulgarity of the best rappers and spoken word artists. I gaze longingly as their flow frosts their tongues, and the words flake off around me like snow on Christmas. Not snow, but flakes reddened from the blood of the twisted and congealed tongues that have been kept voiceless so long. So that when they speak those drops of blood collect on the ground. Beauty in its drippings--its patterns, blood spattered from a crime scene. Evidence of injustice ignored. That cold chill of breath which creeps past lungs twisted by mouths to contort it into a lifetime worth of stories. That cold chill of breath that sat in the air one winter night as her cousin was shot. Blood splattered. Tongue tied. That cold chill of breath that recreates that night, hanging in the air--blood splattering like snow on Christmas. But that is not my story.

Trying to explain why feeling vulnerable is so hard for me. Explaining when I have to stray from my fierce independence and be vulnerable, it's incredibly difficult for me. And when I'm vulnerable and someone doesn't want to be there for me. I crumble, all of the walls of my defenses I've used to deal with people in my life crumble before me. "It's just that, I already have this feeling that I'm a burden" At first just the tightening of the throat happened, and the quiver of tears, but it hit me so suddenly and unexpectedly. Sometimes the faintest words seem so insignificant in your head but when you say them the immensity of their meaning floods over you.  I was embarrassed as my body started trembling and my stomach clenched with tears. "I'm sorry" I said as I shook my hands repeatedly and rapidly to try to relieve the intensity. I realized I kept shaking my hands this way, like someone drying their nails frantically, as if the moti

Had an assignment to thoughtfully analyze the strengths and downfalls of a climate change contrarian argument. The source given was Singer and Avery 2007. I only had three pages, but I had a lot more to say. Their chapter looks like a war zone now that I got done reading it from all the notes and highlights I wrote. I really find it unfathomable that pieces of shit literature like this get published and people take them at face value. Original Source:  Singer,    Avery. 2007. Chapter 3: Shattered Glass in The Greenhouse Theory. In: Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years. Plymoth: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. p 35-44 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shattered Glass Still Traps Heat Taken at face value, climate change contrarian arguments can have a visceral strength to them. They often use rhetoric implying ad hominem such as “climate change alarmists” or “scaremongers”, while referring to themsel

 The reason white people can't use the n word is because it is terribly offensive. I tend to make a cross reference to the word queer when talking about this. 50 years ago the word queer was terribly offensive, but over much work and dedication, the LGBTQ community has reclaimed the word as their own, even dedicating fields to "queer studies" and pins that defiantly say "queer as fuck" which I love. When a community reclaims a word that used to be used against them, it makes the word lose power. A similar reclamation has happened with the n word in African American communities. By calling each other it as a way of saying bro or homie, it makes the word lose it's sting. We as white people sound fundamentally stupid using the n word for a variety of reasons. 1, there is nothing cool about white people using a word that relates to a legacy of slavery and slave violence to people who's great grandparents endured years of terrible indentured servitude. Us cal

Her name was Ashley Atkinson. She held with her the experience of compassion, hardship, and hope of communities in the worst of economic times as she paced in front of the classroom. She had seen families with no access to healthy food. She had shaken the hands of those that worked tirelessly to bring not only food to their communities, but hope and celebration too. She passed her eyes along the classroom as she explained the severity of agricultural uncertainty the future held. She let lose the burdens of her mind; the scarcity of future water, the uncertainty of climate change and drought. “Only one percent of the United States population farms” she said, “and of that one percent, forty percent is fifty five and older”. She looked to us with a half humorous, half melancholy smile and asked “am I scaring you guys yet?” The head of the horticultural department at the college was sitting in the middle of the classroom. She raised her hand and it peaked into the air above the crowd. He

Original Story:  Muhammad Ali's advice to his daughters...Powerful! An incident transpired when Muhammad Ali’s daughters arrived at his home wearing clothes that were quite revealing. Here is the story as told by one of his daughters: “When we finally arri ved, the chauffeur escorted my younger sister, Laila, and me up to my father’s suite. As usual, he was hiding behind the door waiting to scare us. We exchanged many hugs and kisses as we could possibly give in one day. My father took a good look at us. Then he sat me down on his lap and said something that I will never forget. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Hana, everything that God made valuable in the world is covered and hard to get to. Where do you find diamonds? Deep down in the ground, covered and protected. Where do you find pearls? Deep down at the bottom of the ocean, covered up and protected in a beautiful shell. Where do you find gold? Way down in the mine, covered over with layers and layers of rock. Y

This is a short post, it was just a scary comment so I figured I would share. During my urban agriculture capstone class, the heads of various departments sat in. After having a discussion of the future of agriculture, and the uncertainty of the future, the head of the horticulture department at UW Madison admitted "last summer we were told to throw out our books on agriculture, we had literally never seen anything like it before" Take that combined with the fact that only 1% of the population now farms and 40% of farmers are over 55, and knowledge of farming is being lost at an alarming rate. If we are to deal with the problems of drought and climate change, we're going to have to capture that precious knowledge before it disappears forever.

Religion and science must necessarily be seen as two separate entities, for science seeks to understand the technical aspects of the world and religion seeks to understand meaning, it is only when one errs by attempting to be justified by the other that, for me, it loses credibility. Religion will continue to surpass science in giving woman and man meaning of life, and science will continue to surpass religion in cold calculability. It is fallacious for one to attempt to justify religion or science using the other’s presuppositions. (Science’s presuppositions are that the scientific process is a valid and reliable way of understanding the world. Religion’s presuppositions are that life has meaning and there is a way in which one can attain that meaning best) this isn’t to say however that the two paths cannot sometimes unintentionally collide, as happens often with quantum physics and astronomy, but rather that the very process of science or religion loses its core meaning when i

Found this back from high school spanish, when I was in the middle of anxiety. Kind of interesting. My spanish could very well be horrific prewarning.  Emociones Emociones Como unas entidades Separadas, Que duermen en mi cuerpo. No me parecen Que son una parte de mí. En vez, Les susurran a mí De lejos. Escucho sus palabras de sabiduría por mi corazón. Es como una aurora borealis rico con color Encima de mí. Estas emociones, luces lleno de color, recorren por mi cuerpo  pintando emociones para mi. Un pintura de sabiduría. 

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I'd love feedback if anyone is up for giving it. Good or bad. Like a pot boiled, The convection starts to shake Which twitches and rumbles through my hands. Emotions long suffocated, grasping their way With new found energy to the surface The pots convection threatens the emotions downward Suffocating them. Hoping, They will return from the abyss from which they grew But this only causes more energy as it shakes and trembles through Until Little bursts of steam escape, and condense along the edges Rolling past my cheeks The released latent heat cools  The pot calms, And I’m only left with the bittersweet symphony; A memoir of these emotions I seldom admit are so near to my soul

The abortion debate has been irritating me lately. I am often reminded of how abortion is the Christian equivalent of murder. And all these arguments are tacitly about females. Females getting abortions, females murdering children, females taking the morning after pill etc. But what of the role of the male? Do we just deny the immature rebuttle to wear a condom? Are we forgetting the often male induced lust for sex? Are we forgetting the high school pressure and coercion of males? Because all of a sudden, when the women is faced with pregnancy often in part caused by caving from male pressure, all of a sudden she is a virgin mary, and she is the murderer, she is the guilty one, she is the one who must bear the child and the consequences too. And we forget the boyfriend that left when she was in her second trimester and told her he would always be there. We forget the false promises. We have trained women so well to be submissive. To give in to men's desires. To deny sex tacitly, an