Iceland’s drafting a new constitution. To make it more transparent and involve the citizenry, they made the draft available online and used social media, like Facebook, to get comments. The Constitutional Council even broadcast their weekly meetings on YouTube.
Suggestions from the public that have been added thus far include livestock protection and a clause that specifies who owns the country’s natural resources (the nation), …
I’ve been having my students write their classroom constitution on our Wiki. It’s great for transparency and collaborative writing, but usually very few students are interested in looking beyond the section they write. The Iceland experiment is apparently running into a slightly different problem; well-wishers are clogging up the social media sites.
Cynical, but, if you consider the current “kinetic military action” in Libya, way to close to reality. Indeed, this highlights the question: When does it become too easy to go to war?
American planes are taking off, they are entering Libyan air space, they are locating targets, they are dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and injuring people and destroying things. It is war. Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad war, but surely it is a war.
Nonetheless, the Obama administration insists it is not a war. Why?
…, the balance of forces is so lopsided in favour of the United States that no Americans are dying or are threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die. When only they, the Libyans, die, it is something else …
Styrofoam cup collected from the beach of Deer Island. The city of Biloxi sits in the background.
65 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth just off the Yucatan Penninsula, kicking up enough dust in to the atmosphere (and perhaps setting off supervolcanos) to lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Geologists mark this mass extinction event as the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary; it’s called the K-T boundary. Paleontologists see a rapid change in the forms of life fossilized in the rocks above and below the boundary. The element iridium, which is relatively common on asteroids, but rare on Earth, can be found in a thin layer of the fallout from the asteroid impact all around the world.
The Chicxulub Crater, believed to be the location of the K-T asteriod impact. Image from NASA: Short (2010)
Well, the Earth’s going through another mass extinction event right now. In fact, even if humans were to go extinct right now, the remains of our cities and our impact on the global chemical cycles, will leave a distinct signature that geologists millions of years from now will be able to detect.
Geologists refer to the last 10,000 years, the period starting when the Earth warmed after the last glacial maximum, as the Holocene. This time period saw the emergence of agriculture, the rise of human civilization, cities, nuclear weapons, the internet. Now, given the enormous environmental changes we’re wrecking on the planet, some say we’ve entered a new geologic epoch that they’re calling the Anthropocene.
The question is: How long will it last?
Regardless of your philosophy, the recognition that we have entered a geologic age of humanity raises the obvious question of just how long such an age will last.
In the infamous KT boundary geologists can see evidence for a rather short-lived event that also reshaped the planet. Sixty five million years ago an asteroid struck the Earth, driving one of only five mass extinctions in the planet’s history. The loss of the dinosaurs turned out to be an opportunity for our mammal ancestors and led directly to our own age.
Since the Anthropocene appears to mark a sixth great extinction, one has to wonder what it will take for us to make it out of own era with civilization intact.
Paths of hurricanes in 2010. The North Atlantic hurricane season was the 3rd most active on record. Visualization from NOAA's excellent Historical Hurricane Tracks interactive map. Forest fires in the Amazon. Image from NASA.
Jeff Masters has an impressively detailed post laying out the argument that 2010, with its record setting snowstorms, droughts, heatwaves, flooding, hurricanes, etc, had the most extreme weather since 1816, the year without a summer.
Looking back through the 1800s, which was a very cool period, I can’t find any years that had more exceptional global extremes in weather than 2010, until I reach 1816. That was the year of the devastating “Year Without a Summer”–caused by the massive climate-altering 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora, the largest volcanic eruption since at least 536 A.D. It is quite possible that 2010 was the most extreme weather year globally since 1816.
In 1900 fish stocks in the North Atlantic looked like this:
Biomass of Popularly Eaten Fish in 1900. Design: David McCandless // Map render Gregor Aisch. Source: Hundred year decline of North Atlantic predatory fishes, V.Christensen et al., 2003. From Information is Beautiful , via the Guardian.
IN the year 2000, fish stocks looked like this:
Biomass of Popularly Eaten Fish in 2000. Design: David McCandless // Map render Gregor Aisch. Source: Hundred year decline of North Atlantic predatory fishes, V.Christensen et al., 2003. From Information is Beautiful , via the Guardian.
There are more data and visualizations on the European Ocean2012.eu site.
We were there to collect garbage, but we found lots of life on the Deer Island part of our adventure trip to the gulf.
Ecotones, the boundaries between different environments tend to be rich in biological diversity.Hermit crabs were everywhere.Comb jelly in the hand.Ospreys nest on the island.Barnicles on a stick.Tiny crab.There were fewer actual snails than there were hermit crabs.Dolphin in the boat's wake.
The Fund for Peace has been doing a lot of thinking about what it takes for a country to be considered peaceful, and what it takes for a state to fail. For the last seven years they’ve been putting together maps of the world with an index of how stable different countries are.
Finland - the most sustainable state, at least according to the Failed State Index.
While it’s pretty in-depth and makes for rather sobering reading, it’s worth taking a look at the criteria they’ve come up with to determine a country’s stability. It may be useful to include some of this information in the cycle where we focus on peace.
Amount of refugees and internally displaced peoples (refugees are people who’ve crossed international borders). Both leaving or entering refugees can undermine stability.
Historical Injustice – communities can have an understandably hard time forgetting the past, just look at Isreal/Palestine.
Brain Drain – when countries start to fail, the first to leave are the ones who can afford to. Yet these intellectuals and professionals, with their college degree are vital for creating a stable and prosperous country.
Inequality – especially when driven by active discrimination (wealth inequality is something to watch out for).
Economic decline – pushes trade into the black market and increases criminality and corruption.
Illegitimacy of the state – if people don’t believe the people in government have everyone in the country’s best interests at heart, and are only looking out for themselves and their friends, then there’s probably going to be trouble.
Public Services go kaput – It’s a really bad sign when the government can meet people’s basic needs – like picking up the garbage.
The Rule of Law goes kaput – when you’re ruled by the caprice of men, and your rights under the law are not respected, you may begin to consider and agitate for other options for government.
Personal Armies – forces that are tied to individual leaders, like private militias or super-secret police for example, are very damaging to a country’s cohesion.
Fighting elites – healthy countries need robust arguments in their political class – think checks and balances – but it can go too far and lead to things like extreme nationalism and ethnic cleansing.
Invasion – both overt invasion and covert meddling in the affairs of a country are unhealthy for that state’s stability.
It’s also very nice that you can download their index data as a MS Excel spreadsheet, which you can let students analyze to answer their own research questions. For example, I was wondering what was the difference between the best, the worst and the USA, so I plotted this graph.
Comparing the best (Finland), worst (Somalia) and the USA using the Fund for Peace's Failed State Indicies.
The USA is much closer to Finland than Somalia, thank goodness, but should probably watch out for that Uneven Development (wealth inequality).
I think something like this would make a good experiential exercise for the science of geography.
A beautiful loaf, nested in a hand-made bread bag.
Our bread-baking enterprise was quite popular last year. In the afternoons, just as the loaves were about to come out of the ovens, we’d get the occasional visitor poking their head into our room for “aromatherapy”.
Consumption in progress.
Students also liked the freshly baked bread. Some favored the crust while others liked the insides; which worked out quite nicely most of the time, but I did on occasion come across the forlorn shell of crust, and once, a naked loaf with the crust all gone.
We’d made loaves two at a time. They were big loaves, and that was as much as the students could comfortably kneed.
Equipment for making bread.
Small equipment:
Big mixing bowls: For mixing and kneeding the bread. We used metal ones from the restaurant supply store.
Quart sized mason jars: For collecting all the liquid ingredients (honey, milk, water and butter). These can go in the microwave (take the metal lids off) to quickly melt the butter and warm the liquids for the yeast.
Bread load pans: I prefer glass because, with metal the bottoms tend to burn in our toaster ovens. We can fit two pans per oven.
Two cup measuring cup: For measuring milk and water.
One cup measuring cup: For measuring honey. There probably is an easier way of doing this but we have not come up with it yet.
Dry measuring cup: One cup size.
Measuring spoons: You’ll need the tablespoon, teaspoon and half-teaspoon.
Butter knife: For cutting butter.
Small, sealable, plastic cups (optional): For collecting and storing enough yeast (4.5 teaspoons) for one batch of bread.
Large plastic containers (optional): For storing dry ingredients (flour and salt). They need to be big enough to hold seven cups of flour.
Capital Equipment:
Microwave oven: Necessary for quickly warming the liquids (for the yeast to make the dough rise).
Oven: We used table-top, toaster ovens. If the loaves rose well, they’d get too large and get burned by the top of the oven. We probably could reduce the recipe to prevent this. The ovens were not always reliable, and we had to do a regular calibration to make sure the set temperatures were accurate.
Recipe
The simple ingredients can be bought in bulk. This recipe makes two loaves.
Making the Dough
Dry ingredients: These can be combined ahead of time and stored in a large plastic container. When you’re ready to make the bread just dump them into a large mixing bowl.
Bread flour: 7 cups
Salt: 4 teaspoons
Wet ingredients: Combine these in a mason jar. They can be kept in the refrigerator for about a week.
Honey: 6 tablespoons.
Butter: 4 tablespoons.
Milk: 2 cups
Students put together the wet ingredients in the mason jars. The butter is sliced into smaller pieces and put in first (lower right), then the milk is added (left) and finally the honey (middle).
Microwave: Usually, we microwave the mason jar for about two minutes, which melts the butter nicely but gets the jar a little warmer than is good for the yeast. This is usually a good time to talk about density and stratification, because the honey sits at the bottom, the milk above it, and the butter floating at the top.
Cooling it down: So to make the yeast happy, we usually add some cold (tap) water to the mason jar with the other wet ingredients.
Water: two thirds (2/3) of a cup (cold from the tap).
Once everything is well mixed and the liquid mixture in the mason jar is at or just above body temperature, add the yeast.
Yeast: 4.5 teaspoons (which is equivalent to two of the small packets you buy from the store).
Yeast is much, much cheaper if you buy it in bulk. Even the small, 4 ounce jars at the supermarket are around $4, while a 1 pound bag is about $7. We get ours from Sam’s Club, and store the yeast we have not used yet in a mason jar in the refrigerator.
Stir the yeast in well. Don’t stress if there are still some small clumps.
Combine wet and dry: Dump the contents of the mason jar into the large mixing bowl with the dry ingredients. Do it quickly, otherwise the yeast will settle to the bottom of the jar and not all come out.
A hand shaped lake in a land of flour.
Now, kneed the dough. We usually use our hands and kneed in the mixing bowls. You may need to add a little more flour as you’re kneeding it if the dough is too sticky. Alternatively, you can add a bit of water if it’s too dry, but I’ve found it much easier to start with the dough too wet and add flour than doing it the other way around.
You can tell when the moisture is right, and the dough is ready, when it stops sticking to your fingers.
This dough seems a little too wet. They'll sprinkle a little flour on the top and kneed it in. When the dough is ready, it won't stick to your fingers. The last time I said something about their dough needing a bit of flour, the student told me that they knew very well and I should go away because I was just causing trouble. I consider this a success.
I’ve not had any student who was unable to manage the dough, but the quality of the end result depends on the amount of care and effort the students put into it. Unsurprisingly, the more tactile oriented students tend to produce some magnificent dough.
The kneeding is done, and the dough is ready to rise.
Rising and Baking
Once you have a nice dough, it needs to rise for about an hour, although we’ve found that 45 minutes works better since we prefer slightly smaller loaves. Drape a damp towel over it to keep it moist. Use a big enough towel, because if you’ve done everything right, and the yeast is happy, the dough should double in size.
If the dough is left too long it will expand to fill the entire bowl and begin to collapse in on itself.
After it’s risen, punch the dough down, split it into two, roll each piece into the shape of a loaf, and place them into loaf pans.
Now let it rise again for another hour, or 45 minutes in our case (don’t forget the damp towel).
After the second rise (in the pans), place the loaves into the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes. It usually takes the ovens about 10 minutes to preheat to the correct temperature.
And then, you’re done. Enjoy.
Hot out of the oven, a loaf of bread with the school logo. We set an aluminum foil cutout of the logo on top of the bread while it was baking to imprint the shapes in the crust.
Time
Managed well the entire process can fit nicely into the afternoon schedule. We mixed and kneeded the bread during the half hour of Personal World just after lunch (around 12:30).
With the dry and wet ingredients already measured out ahead of time (once a week during the Student Run Business period) our expert bakers could kneed the dough and clean up after themselves in less than 15 minutes.
Then, all that’s left is to transfer the dough to the bread pans, which takes about 5 minutes (including washing up); put the bread in the ovens an hour later (1 minute); and then taking them out of the oven and washing the big mixing bowl (another 5 minutes). Timed right, the bread is finished just in time for everyone to get to their classroom jobs. It helps that everything, except the mixing bowls, can go into the dishwasher.
