Who couldn’t use some healing? And a chance to reconnect through the land? And gather strength through the shared experience of a positive approach to health and well-being?
The new Oppenheimer Park Medicine Wheel Healing Garden is holding its Grand Opening Wednesday, May 29, at Oppenheimer Park, and you’re invited!
Interesting article from the New York Times on “fruit activists” blending art and politics and trees in urban centres.
High concept or low impact? Who cares? You still get the fruit. And the community gets some great trees and another portal into the living world beyond the screen. Go fruit crusaders!
‘Fruit Activists’ Take Urban Gardens in a New Direction – NYTimes.com.
Does the prospect of genetically modified food creep you out?
The mass experiment producing new lab-generated life forms is hardly slowing down. Here’s a take from Mercola (never heard of it before but it calls itself “the world’s #1 natural health website) on the efforts to “improve” what you might have thought was doing pretty well already without interference from scientists or corporate profiteers: the forest.
Why Genetically Engineer Trees?.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w437uQf_A7c&feature=player_embedded
One more clipping from the press glut on Earth Day about the TreeKeepers program that’s ramping up this week.
This one is from the Vancouver Province. One of the city’s two dailies. Not long after this story ran, a leaked memo from the new publisher of the Sun and the Province told staff the mainstream newspaper business may not be sustainable, and they should ask themselves if they’re really meant to be there, because if they didn’t have creative solutions maybe they were part of the problem.
Ouch! Hope this article wasn’t the back-breaking straw.
More on the TreeKeepers program helping people grow the urban forest in Vancouver.
This clipping is from Vancouver 24 Hours, one of the daily giveaways that are crowding out the old traditional newspapers.
Did you get your tree yet? The choices are fabulous and the prices can’t be beat. Also, we’re giving away free cars.
Wait what? The car thing didn’t work out? OK never mind that part. But you can still get a tree if you hurry. Link to the TreeKeepers page is here.
Vancouver sells affordable trees to residents | Local | News | Vancouver 24 hrs.
Thanks Darah Hansen and the Vancouver Sun for the shout out on the TreeKeepers program.
Ball’s in your court, Vancouver residents (in our six pilot neighbourhoods). If you want to help grow the urban forest, and get a great deal on a fine tree at the same time, go here now.
Treekeepers program encourages Vancouver residents to help grow urban forest.
You heard all about the Arab Spring that toppled dictators, right? Maybe it’s Malaysia’s turn.
A friend sent a link to this pleasant video of Malaysians planting “flowers” for “peace” and “hope” and the “underdog” and such.
Turns out to be heavier than that. Some of the people behind the video are already being investigated by the Malaysian authorities. When a government comes down on people for doing nice things, you can imagine there’s some serious sub-text there.
One of the planters, Nurul Izzah, in the lavender scarf, is the daughter of Anwar Ibrahim, former deputy prime minister ousted and jailed on dubious charges.
Come for the lessons on community-based agriculture and field education in international food justice, stay because they’re held in… Peru.
The eight-week Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture starts June 24. Applications due May 17.
Looks like a great way to get your head and hands into some worthy stuff. I’d go in a flash if only etc., etc.
Details and such here.
When Canada finally got around to choosing its first Poet Laureate, they skipped right past the high-falutin’ Ontario crowd and the Quebec other-solitude cadres to select one of us, BC’s own George Bowering.
He’s written dozens of books, not just poetry but also novels and non-fiction. He’s also taught thousands of writers at SFU and elsewhere. I’ve been a fan ever since he was kind (or dazed) enough to agree to appear as a guest on an early livestreaming show I hosted called The WritingLife. We filmed at 6am on Saturdays on a floating “cyber den” in Coal Harbour. I’m sure it was the novelty of livestreaming around the world that got guests out of bed; today I can’t even imagine having the gall to ask.
Bowering was an excellent guest. He’d just been named Poet Laureate, and when I asked him how he felt when he heard about the honour, he held up a clipping from a headline about a war tactic then being applied in Iraq: “Shock and Awe.”
One thing I didn’t ask him which always puzzled me was, as a good Canadian boy, why the big love for baseball? His autobiographical book Pinboy helps explain. Here’s my review of it for the British Columbian Quarterly.
Great TED talk with Ron Finley on guerrilla gardening in South Central L.A.
Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA | Video on TED.com.
