In Europe, companies have traditionally turned to requiring that their employees take shorter workweeks, longer vacations and more time off when faced with an economic downturn... which is of course, very divergent from the United States model of cost-cutting. Even when not faced with a recession, France has a standard 35 hour workweek and Britain offers 6 weeks of paid vacation per year. However, if you are reading this from the U.S., I'm going to guess that you personally know someone who worked well over 40 hours per week but has now been laid off--and I'm sure you have seen the damage that it causes. But is one work environment intrinsically better than the other?
Did you know that the airlines, hoteliers and other business that make up the travel industry check blogs to see what you think of their services? It's true, and recently some businesses are changing their practices in response to negative reviews that appear online. So, next time you travel, be sure to let people know if you have a great experience... or a horrible one.
2. Keep ANYONE on their toes... or just make them angry.
In addition to blogging your opinions about your most recent vacation, you can also rate and review pretty much any business in your local community via websites like yelp.com. While some businesses become quite upset when they receive negative reviews from yelp users, Pizzaria Delfina in San Francisco has 'taken back' the insults and hurled them right back at their customers in a comedic use of irony.
This last summer, I traveled to Alaska to research resource management in three distinct locations: Denali, Wrangell-St. Elias, and Kenai Fjords National Parks. Of course, the scenery was incredible (Denali (Mt. McKinley) is the tallest peak in the North America), the wildlife amazing (I saw about 3-4 bears per day) and the experience exhilarating-- but when the research was over, I was ready to get back home.
Some background: Alaska's Aleutian Islands are an extremely volcanic region, formed by the convergence of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. In this case, the convergence is known as a subduction zone, meaning that one plate is pushed under another, usually resulting in seismic and volcanic activity.
Tasha Kiemel teaches 4th grade at Discovery Elementary School in
Sammamish, Washington, and she serves on the National Environmental
Education Week (EE Week) Teachers Advisory Committee. EE Week promotes
understanding and protection of the natural world by actively engaging
K-12th grade students and educators in an inspired week of
environmental learning before Earth Day. This year's EE Week
celebration occurs April 12-18, 2009, and the theme is Be Water Wise!
To learn more or get involved, visit www.eeweek.org.
Wondrous Wetlands Wetlands can provide all sorts of learning opportunities for young learners. From practicing observation skills, identifying native plants and animals, and monitoring water sources, the wetland behind Discovery Elementary School in Sammamish, WA, is a true outdoor science classroom.
The most recent project underway in the wetland involves streambed restoration. Several years ago, the city put in a boardwalk along the southern border of the wetland, causing extreme damage to a natural streambed. Up until this past fall, the streambed was not flowing naturally and relied on the assistance of a tarp. Amphibians and other water life could not make a home in this type of unnatural habitat. It was a call to action.
From March 11- 22, Washington D.C. is hosting the 17th annual Environmental Film Festival, which showcases a wide range of films that "capture the majesty of our world and address the ever-increasing threats to life on earth." The focus of this year's festival is the oceans (seems like a hot topic this month!): "the final frontier, source of all life, covering nearly three quarters of the globe but less known than the surface of the moon."
Movies are a great way to inspire people and mobilize them to action. In the case of environmental films, this is especially true. I would like to share five favorite films, some that were featured in this year's festival as well as a few that I have personally been inspired by.
1. Baraka
While this film was not featured in the festival this year, it remains one of my favorite environmental films of all time, and for good reason. Despite lacking a vocal narrative or traditional linear structure, the film speaks volumes about the relationship between mankind and the eternal. I would attempt to describe it in greater detail, but the film defies explanation, and in this sense must be seen to be understood.
It has recently been remastered using the Blu-Ray format, with Roger Ebert describing it as, "the finest video disc I have ever viewed or ever imagined."
2. WALL-E March 21 2 PM @ the National Geographic Society 17th & M ST NW
I'm not normally one to go see animated features (read: cartoons), even if they are Pixar films. Reasons being: I don't have a kid and I don't want to be surrounded by 400 kids while watching a movie. However, while doing research in Alaska this summer, I found myself at the movie theatre with no definitive choice of what to watch. WALL-E was one of my options, and seeing as how it was early in the day, I figured I would be spared from the legion of children.
I made a great decision: this movie is simply amazing. With astonishing graphics, a terrific story and a strong message, WALL-E transcends the realm of "kids' movie." Incendiary in its condemnation of pollution and consumption, the film makes a bold statement that, frankly, the world needs to see.
If anyone was listening to NPR this morning, they heard Steve Inskeep remark, "It is famously said that most people do not know their geography." In this case, "most people" was a reference to Brazil's Ministry of Education.
In a new geography textbook just released to 6th grade students, a map featuring South America contained more than a few blunders:
Paraguay was switched with Uruguay
A second "Paraguay" was situated on the coast at the Southern tip of Brazil
Ecuador doesn't even appear on the map
While hilarious, it is shockingly disheartening to discover that top education officials were so oblivious to their own continent's geography that this map wasn't caught in the editorial process. This story, of course, highlights just one of the many reasons why geography is important-- knowledge of your surroundings.
Let's hope that one day a map of the United States doesn't get published that shows New York where Florida should be and Oklahoma cryptically missing from the country.
But if it does, you'll hear about it here ...and I know each and every one of you will send a thoughtful letter to Washington.
Inside: A Huge "THANK YOU" to All Who Wrote Congress GeoFeature: A Whale of a Time Geography in the News: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Blog: National Geographic's Greatest Ocean Adventurers
Today, much of the world will, in one form or another, celebrate St. Patrick's Day. The wearing of green, drinking of Irish beverages and the occasional dying of a river (try Chicago's) mark some of the traditions associated with the holiday. Historically, it is a Catholic holiday celebrating the introduction of the religion to the Ireland by St. Patrick-- but these days it also has a large secular following. However, it is the holiday's roots in Catholicism that play a major role in what residents of Ireland refer to as "The Troubles."
Thanks to MWW reader Connie Walker for sharing this information about the GLOBE at Night Campaign, which is currently underway.My Wonderful Worldis an ardent supporter of citizen science initiatives like GLOBE, whichwe featured during last year's inventory here on the blog.So get out and get stargazing--tonight!
Map of 2008 observations courtesy GLOBE at Night
SHED LIGHT ON LIGHT POLLUTION!
Be part of the "GLOBE at Night" citizen-science campaign and
make a world of difference! The GLOBE at Night campaign runs March 16-28, 2009.
Help preserve our natural heritage for generations to come.
More than one-fifth of the world population, two-thirds of
the United States
population and one half of the European Union population are unable to see the
stars in our Milky Way galaxy arch across a pristinely dark sky. With half the
world's population now living in cities, this problem is only getting worse.
Yet you can easily be part of a local solution to a global problem.
Robert Ballard, who is perhaps best known for discovering the Titanic in 1985, has forged a career of exploration, innovation and discovery. He is currently working on the JASON project, which invites students from all over the world to "take part" in explorations via online learning and use of interactive multimedia software. Using these tools, people are able to immerse themselves in Ballard's expeditions and most importantly, communicate back with Ballard and his teams. Be sure to check out his TED talk, his National Geographic profile and the JASON project website via the links below.
2. David de Rothschild Famed arctic explorer David De Rothschild has trekked across Antarctica via the South Pole and set a speed record crossing the Greenland ice cap. After founding Adventure Ecology, an education program that uses the thrill of adventure to raise environmental awareness, he set out on Mission 1 for the program: dog-sledding from Russia to Canada via the North Pole.
These days, he has his sights set on an even more ambitious project dubbed "Plastiki": he and a crew will sail from San Francisco through the North Pacific Gyre and on to Australia--all in a boat made almost entirely of discarded plastic bottles. With this mission, David hopes "not only to encourage the world to reduce, reuse and recycle more of its natural resources, but fundamentally to "Re-Think" waste as a resource." Below are links to his NG profile, the Adventure Ecology website and a recent CNN article detailing the upcoming voyage of the Plastiki.
When I wake up in the morning, my usual routine is this: shower, brush teeth, get dressed... all while listening to NPR. I like to listen to NPR in the morning because I don't have to deal with commercials (like television) and it's a pretty good source for coverage of current events. Lately though, all of the news seems to deal with how the world's economy is tanking, and frankly, it is getting to be depressingly repetitive. Two of the big issues that come up time and time again are unemployment rates (which are at a 25 year high right now) and the home foreclosure trend.
A sobering image of the tanking economy and foreclosure
Being a geographer I decided that, before reaching for the Prozac, maybe I should take a look at a few maps of these phenomena to see if maybe there was a relationship between the two. One would assume that as people lose their jobs that they would also lose the ability to pay for their homes. What I would expect is that the places in the country that show the highest rates of unemployment would also show the highest rates of foreclosures.
Keep reading to view the maps that I am comparing:
Yesterday, President Obama announced a plan to revamp the
nation's education system in a speech before the United States Hispanic Chamber
of Commerce--a group afflicted by historically low educational achievement
levels among minority youth.
While many are focusing on the president's calls to expand investment
in charter schools and performance pay for teachers, plans that have met with
opposition from some teachers' unions and public schools advocates, I'm
choosing to highlight--you guessed it--geographic elements of the proposal.
Obama's language was replete with references to the global
economy and nationalistic appeals to prepare students for competitive success. He
stipulated the specific goal of leading the world in graduation rates by 2020,
citing this attainment as critical in a 21st century environment where
the growth in communications tools like the internet has brought opportunity to
many and helped level the playing field.
"Let there be no doubt," Mr. Obama said. "The future belongs
to the nation that best educates its citizens -- and my fellow Americans, we
have everything we need to be that nation (as quoted in the NY Times)."
Plastics that originate on land oftentimes end up at sea
Did you know that there is a pile of garbage about the size of Texas floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Yea... I didn't until recently. However, if you just booted up Google Earth and are trying to find it, you won't. The reason for this lies mainly in the description: many online articles describe this phenomena as a "floating island" of garbage, others claim that it is at least "twice the size of Texas." While these descriptors aren't flat-out deceptive, they present a visual that is not entirely accurate. First off, the mass of garbage, which is primarily comprised of plastic, is not floating in the sense that a boat does: instead, it is suspended in the ocean much like those little exfoliating beads in bottles of boutique hand soap. This means that the garbage extends from the surface of the water all the way down to the bottom... as a suspension of plastic and other nasty things. Second, because of its three dimensional nature and the fact that it is constantly shifting location, it is difficult to ascertain how large it actually is.
A sea turtle cavorts in the open sea... along side a few plastic shopping bags
March is Women's History Month, and we here at My Wonderful World would like to talk about five women who have made significant advancements in the world. The Library of Congress has designated the theme of this year's Woman's History Month "women taking the lead to save our planet," which of course dovetails nicely with our overall themes of geographic and environmental awareness here at MWW.
1. Sylvia Earle
Called "Her Deepness" by the New Yorker and the New York Times, "Living Legend" by the Library of Congress, and the first "Hero for the Planet," Sylvia is an oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer with experience as a field research scientist. As the first female chief scientist at NOAA, she pioneered many firsts in the world of oceanography. Recently, she released Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas along with Linda K. Glover, which showcases the 70% of the planet that people don't tend to think about--the ocean.
2. Rachel Carson Perhaps best known for her groundbreaking 1962 publication Silent Spring, Rachel Carson forever changed the way we view the world. She stressed that humans are but just one part of the world's ecosystem, and that we must learn to live in harmony with the rest of nature. Her life's work helped catalyze the Congressional ban on the toxic pesticide DDT and, eventually, the cessation of its use worldwide.
I don't watch much TV, so you can imagine my dismay that Top Chef, one of the only shows I tune in to on a semi-regular basis, caps off season five tonight with the "reunion special."
I like Top Chef for a number of reasons, the top two being (1) the creativity of the challenges, matched only by the skill of the chefs, and, of course, (2) the food (Note: Do not watch Top Chef, or any other culinary show, on an empty stomach: grumble)!
Contestants Hosea Rosenberg traveled cross country from Boulder, Colorado, having spent the recent years of his career working in a seafood restaurant--interesting, as Colorado is one of the most landlocked U.S. states, with at least two states separating it from the ocean in any direction. For his final meal of the season, Hosea went with "flesh" selections reflecting both his culinary experience and his upbringing in the American West: seafood and venison.
On March 3, 1931, the Star-Spangled Banner was signed into law as the official national anthem of the United States. While our national anthem is essentially a battle hymn, that is not the case for many countries in the world.
This weekend, the East Coast was pummeled by a vicious winter storm. The disturbance began in the Southeastern U.S. yesterday, dropping as much as 8 inches of snow in states that traditionally do not see much if any at all. On Sunday, Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport in South Carolina and Richmond International Airport in Virginia were closed for snow removal from runways. Atlanta also received roughly six inches of snow.
This is the blog for the My Wonderful World Campaign, a National
Geographic-led initiative to expand geographic learning in school, at
home, and in communities.
About Our Bloggers
Sarah Jane is manager of social media for National Geographic Education more..
Julia graduated from the University of Kansas with a major in geography and a minor in business more..
In Europe, companies have traditionally turned to requiring that their employees take shorter workweeks, longer vacations and more time off when faced with an economic downturn... which is of course, very divergent from the United States model of cost-cutting. Even when not faced with a recession, France has a standard 35 hour workweek and Britain offers 6 weeks of paid vacation per year. However, if you are reading this from the U.S., I'm going to guess that you personally know someone who worked well over 40 hours per week but has now been laid off--and I'm sure you have seen the damage that it causes. But is one work environment intrinsically better than the other?
Recent Comments