Thoughts

            Her name was Ashley Atkinson. She held the experience of compassion, hardship, and hope that communities bared in the worst of economic times as she paced in front of the classroom. She had seen the dogged faces of families who were food insecure. She had shaken the hands of those that worked tirelessly to bring not only produce to their communities, but hope and celebration too. Passing her eyes along the classroom, she explained the severity of agricultural uncertainty. She let loose 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 was sitting in the middle of the room. She raised her hand a...

Terms and use of text: Text can be used to email the Wisconsin Board of Comissioners of Public Land. It must be kept in entirety or taken by paragraph. It must keep the same tone and if not, it must be quoted. Hate speech of any kind cannot be incorporated into this text.  ___________________________________________________________________________  As a resident I want to express that I am disappointed that the Board of Commissioners of Public Land has decided to ban work and discussion on climate change. First and foremost, I am disappointed that the board is justifying it's actions as banning 'political' activity. Which rests on the assumption that the topic of climate change is political. The topic of climate change is no more political than the theory of relativity, or gravity. It should be delegated to the realm of fact, and current phenomena. It would be insidious to ban the discussion of upcoming major storms or wildfires, or worse yet, the farmers alma...

When someone you love is struggling with an episode of mental illness, it can be hard to know what to do. Here are some things that most people in an episode like this will appreciate. And moreover, it will remind them that they have people that are wonderful and beautiful in their lives who care about them. 1. Remind them that you love them, exactly as they are in this moment. And you think that they are brave, courageous, and you think more of them for having the willpower to struggle through it. When an episode hits, we don't feel like ourselves. We feel broken, and that makes us want to change it even more. But the more you struggle to change how you feel, the more trapped you become. Accepting yourself exactly how you are is so important for coping with an episode of depression or anxiety. The best thing you can tell them is that you think the world of them for going through it and you love them for who they are, and having an episode doesn't change that. 2. Make the...

(This is my original work) Abstract: This paper seeks to discover how the use of heterosexual hierarchical masculinity as a tool for domination might affect younger players’ abilities to learn in Team Fortress Two, and what implications these barriers to learning might have in school settings. Game interactions were observed using YouTube clips, noting in particular the use of satire and ostracism by older members against younger members as an attempt to eliminate younger players from the game space. Results indicated that older adolescents utilize heterosexual masculinity to ostracize younger players from the game space, often by feminizing the victim based on childlike appearances, and asserting their own heterosexuality and dominance by undermining the masculinity of younger players. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) are onlin...

When one broadly skims the literature on environmentalism and the poor, one of the common themes is the idea that the world’s poor simply cannot care for the environment as their poverty prevents it. It is thought that the world’s poor must degrade their environment in an unsustainable way because they are fighting to live day to day, and cannot think about the future and thus cannot practically be sustainable. So we have come to think of the environment and the poor as living in a direct relationship; that environmental degradation comes with poverty. Moreover there is the implicit assumption that the causality lies in the poor needing to destroy the environment because they are poor.  From this assumption emerges a second assumption. To help the worlds poor live sustainably, it is necessary and ethical to allow a certain amount of development, so that they can do so. The argument goes, if we are to save the environment from the poor, we have to bring these people out of po...