Monday, November 21, 2011

Sustainability Polls and End of the Semester Iterations

It's the end of the semester and my dutiful students are crafting their final research papers analyzing behavior and environment. Supposedly all eyes are trained on how students' chosen environments might be made better, maybe even "sustainable" (for whatever that word means now and in the future). To that end I came across this article in the Oregonian and am wondering what thoughts may be.

I like it because of the slouching toward social science inquiry (our final course unit). There's a poll to assess the effectiveness of the Rose City's sustainability efforts...some of my students have used similar survey methodologies themselves and I'm interested in their comments.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Some Impromptu Iterations on Eco-Spirituality

Eco-spirituality is a problematic moniker. It's construction intimates a (false) partition between spirituality and the environment...which, to me, seems quite bogus. I would assert that for any spirituality to be viable, just, and essentially "good" it must include (maybe even privilege) the ecological/environment.