Summer Solstice 2010

Due to my commitment to lecturing at San Jose State University for the past 10 months, this blog has been reduced, for the time being, to a semi-annual salute to Earth's position in its annual cycle around the sun - the midway points of extreme posture toward our life-giving sun, days we call the Solstice. On this Solstice, in the northern hemisphere of the planet, the days are the longest, in the southern half of the Earth, the nights are the longest. On these days, Earthlings everywhere gather, as we complement each other with the same honoring ceremonies across the planet. It's a good time to remember and honor our Mother planet, who holds all our ancestors before us. We also celebrate the commonality of all peoples and all life on the planet.

These ceremonies predate what we call civilization, as people studied the stars for at least a millennium before science ever began to evolve in human consciousness and give us understanding of planetary physics and celestial movement. Today we can enjoy visualizing the entire universe through YouTube or any medium available for watching spectacular graphics and knowledge packaged by the best videographers available.

That wouldn't be me, with my 10-year old Olympus digital camera, but I will share some of the Summer Solstice ceremony in which I had the honor to attend, hosted and produced by Sergio Martinez and Angelica del Gato this past Sunday. They live along Coyote Creek also, about 300 feet upstream, on the bank next to the William St. bridge. Their home is the farmhouse where the Ferrari family lived and tended the orchard, which was here before becoming 8 duplexes. I'm in great awe and appreciate the great deal of work to organize and prepare their yard and the food for all the celebrants lucky enough to join them in this celebration of life at this significant place on our planet's journey around the sun.




The shaman for part of the ceremony spoke of the Aztec calendar and counting system based on 2o instead of 10, as most of the modern world uses for metrics of time and space, except for astrophysicists, who use light-years. My reading of Mayan and Aztec culture's had informed me that these cultures used 20 instead of 10 for the simple reason that we have 20 fingers AND toes, and they're what we first used to count with. And coincidentally, this year in the world's business calendar, it happens to be the year we call 2010. Sounds like a perfect year to bring together the old mezzo-American calendar and the modern world we are living in today.

For a great ride through time and space. I recommend viewing a segment of the series from the National Geographic Channel called Birth of the Universe We are truly star dust in awe of stardust.
Blessed Be!

Rounding Out the Circle of the Solar Trip we call 2009

Hello my fellow Earthship mates.

I have been so absent from blogger land these past four months because I can only do so much key board time until repetitive motion cripples my upper right side. All I need is a good voice command typing program under my solstice bush.

But I have been on my keyboard a great deal during the last four months in order to create 27 seventy-five minute multimedia presentations for the class I taught last semester at San Jose State University. The course was titled Water Policy in The Western United States and was taught in the Environmental Studies Department and known through the SJSU catalog as EnvS 129. All the lecture notes, course syllabus (called greensheets, even though they're not when they are printed on paper), quizzes & the final exam are published in this google-powered web site for the world to use as it will: http://sites.google.com/site/envs129/

I have received much encouragement from friends, colleagues and the students themselves in regard to my teaching this past semester. I am also honored and challenged to teach a second course in the Spring 2010 semester on the more numeric side of water resources called MANAGEMENT. This course is listed as EnvS 128 and requires prerequisites of Statistics and basic Chemistry. I consider that the students will arrive with brains exposed to the type of discipline required in those courses.The web site for EnvS 128 is now "under construction" with as minimal of a footprint that I can MANAGE


But I am not there to teach students to be engineers. There is another college a few feet (and clicks) away which trains minds to conduct water engineering work. Most of the students come to the these courses in the College of Social Science to learn how they can help in building a sustainable future, but they certainly won't be ALL part of an engineering team to physically build parts of a water system.

Every student does, however, participate in using and paying for the water infrastructure components that are proposed and built by engineers and marketed and funded with the great influence of business and government. What they need to know is the language of the engineers, so they can engage in critical thinking and PARTICIPATE competently during the public review process, where many powerful self-interests are often poised and ready to override the public good and public trust of the environment and build some public (WATER) work that is going to have serious negative impacts and , in the long run, threaten our species and the sustainability of the ecosystem, which weaves together all our species.

My deepest ethics about water resources are succinctly expressed in this seven-minute student video, titled Rain Dance The film maker is named Amanda Levensohn and she certainly would have received an A+ if she were doing this work in one of my classes.