Category: environment

community · environment · health

Healing Honey And The Beekeeping Craze : NPR

Beth Kelley

I’m far from home right now, and feeling it. I could use a touch of home…and for some reason honey seems very homey to me. Especially when it’s made at home! Don’t laugh, urban bee-keeping is becoming a big thing, as part of the local-vore, grow-your-own-food movement.

Beekeeping classes from Medina, Ohio, to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and New York are seeing an unexpected shift in enrollment. Numbers are way up as thousands of novices take up the hobby. And who are these new beekeepers? Increasingly, they’re women.

“The surge has really been with younger, urban women,” explains longtime instructor Kim Flottum, who teaches beekeeping in Medina.

Flottum estimates that there are about 100,000 backyard beekeepers across the United States. Exact numbers are hard to pin down. But subscriptions to the publication Bee Culture are on the rise. And when Flottum published a how-to book — An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden — 60,000 people snapped up copies. The book is aimed at making the hobby easier and using more lightweight equipment.

more via Healing Honey And The Beekeeping Craze : NPR.

anthropology · architecture · community · creativity · culture · design · environment · happiness

The Most Colorful Cities In The World

Beth Kelley

Living in the Pacific Northwest I can definitely appreciate the idea of adding more color to one’s life! Interestingly, it tends to be warmer climates that have the more colorful buildings, although Denmark and Finland has some of the most colorful interiors (and now exteriors) I’ve seen. Color has an amazing effect on human mental health and mood. People often talk about getting back into nature to see all the colors. Now, the colors can come to you (unless you live in a community with a rule against bright colors).

Urban life doesn’t have to be bleak and gray — in fact, many of the world’s cities pride themselves upon the bright palettes used to liven up their architecture. From the garish blue-walled buildings of Jodhpur, India, to the gentler pastels of Charleston, S.C., these cities are far from monotonous.

Charleston, SC
Charleston, SC
Nyhavn, Denmark
Buenos Aires, Argentina

More of The Most Colorful Cities In The World: Pics, Videos, Links, News.

Related Articles
education · environment

Defending sloths, frogs, and other animals

Beth Kelley

First, happy Veteran’s Day. Thanks to all the veterans for defending us.

Speaking of defending, I’d like to introduce the Amphibian Avenger:

Not only did she fall in love with amphibians, she fell in love with sloths. And apparently the world did too!

The world’s gone bonkers for sloths. It seems my little video featuring the sleepy residents of the world’s only sloth orphanage is the equivalent of grade A cute crack for millions of LOL squee loving junkies. It’s been watched by nearly 2 million people around the world from Greece (one of the first countries where the clip went viral – but then they needed a laugh that week what with the small matter of total economic meltdown) to Guam (66 Guamians have now watched which is presumably the entire population).

The sloths are now more famous than Jesus having been featured in Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, the Approval Matrix in the New York magazine and on CNN all in the space of a week. Everyone is jumping on the sloth bandwagon – I hear that Madonna is adopting one, Jordan is attempting to marry one and Obama is considering using the sloths to help negotiate a peace agreement with North Korea.

Read more about it.

anthropology · behavior · community · disease · education · environment · health · mental health · Social

How the places we live could heal us | Grist

Beth Kelley

This is an interesting follow-up/add-on to the RadioLab “Cities” episode I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. The Healing Cities Working Group of planners and health professionals in Vancouver, BC is working to create healthy environments in urban areas, particularly focusing on food and food sources.

It’s possible to interest public officials in the health impact of the built environment because Canada has nationalized health care.

“When you have a public health care system like we have in Canada, we all collectively pay the end-of-pipe costs,” said Holland. “So anything we have in our society that makes us unhealthy, we end up paying for it.” Of course, that’s true in the United States as well, but there is much less transparency and awareness of those costs because of the way our system is set up.

In Canada, Holland hopes to be able to involve doctors and public health authorities in the fight against sprawl and for more walkable and transit-oriented neighborhoods. Among the Healing Cities Working Group’s many planned initiatives is a partnership with health officials to advocate for more health-enhancing infrastructure and development at the local level.

via How the places we live make us sick, and how they could heal us instead | Grist.

Other studies have found that greener neighborhoods also decrease stress and make people more likely to walk or bike places. Where you live, what have you found works best for you personally to motivate you to get you outside, moving, and buying less insta-food?

behavior · brain · children · community · creativity · education · environment · health · learning · mental health · technology

Let’s hear it for being a kid

Beth Kelley

I’ve been reading some very depressing stuff today – about one school that doesn’t allow anyone over the age of 6 to have recess, kids not feeling protected from their tormentors, and so on – so I needed a pep talk.

Adora Svitak’s TED talk did just the trick.

 

anthropology · behavior · community · creativity · environment · play · Social

Games in Real Life

Beth Kelley
Drawing of ancient Indian board game with piec...
Game board from India; looks kind of like a city grid. Image via Wikipedia

An article featured on the O’Reilly Radar last month that interviews Kevin Slavin, managing director of Area/Code, who is currently working with Frank Lantz to integrate gameplay into the fabric of reality, or what he calls “Big Games.”

Big games are “games that take place using some elements from the game system and some elements of the real world. Something Frank Lantz had worked on with Katie Salen and Nick Fortugno was called the Big Urban Game. It involved transforming the city of Minneapolis into a game board. They did that by using huge inflatable game pieces, about 25-feet high. The players, among other things, were moving these huge pieces around the city.”

“There’s a few of us who have been thinking about how “play” and the “city” were going to combine. We’ve been drinking the same Kool-Aid from the same cooler for quite a while.”

The way Slavin’s describing his vision reminds me a lot of parkour. Interesting ideas.

Read the full interview (highly recommended).

Related Articles
behavior · environment · Social · technology · youtube

YouTube – RSA Animate – The Secret Powers of Time

Beth Kelley
Description unavailable
Philip Zimbardo. Image by Kanaka Menehune via Flickr

Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Zimbardo argues in this lecture that time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.

I love the Silician Poet’s comment. I’d also be interested to hear what people’s thoughts are, especially if they speak the Sicilian dialect.

via YouTube – RSA Animate – The Secret Powers of Time.

 

community · environment · Nature

Reclaiming urban space for community use

Beth Kelley
The recently restored Seward Park Inn, Seward ...
The recently restored Seward Park Inn, Seattle, WA. Image via Wikipedia

I love hearing about citizens taking the initiative to clean up parks, fix up land, and give places names as a sign of ownership for the land, not as in a “I OWN YOU” kind of ownership, but a “I am responsible for you” kind of way.

A group of park-lovers in Seattle took it upon themselves to clean up Seward Park and give the different trails and landmark names.

Knute Berger of blog Crosscut writes that he and a bunch of his friends “floated the idea of naming many of citys unnamed features, including alleys, street ends, trails, and other urban features that are yet unnamed on maps.

“There are many reasons to do this. One is reclaiming urban spaces, like alley ways; another is recognizing more than a centurys worth of life and accomplishment of Seattleites in the years since the streets were named. Yet another is to take the opportunity to include more indigenous names for natural and city features.

“A naming project is currently underway at Seward …”

more via The Crosscut Blog.

environment · happiness · health

The last word: The secret to living past 100 – The Week

Beth Kelley

My grandma and I had a pact that we’d both do our best to live to be 100. She died at 85 after a long, happy life, married to her best friend since 1st grade. Go Mommo! But I’m still in the running, so I’m always interested in how Centenarians live it up. And it seems to boil down to two things: luck, and keeping a good attitude about life. 

Israeli physician Nir Barzilai and his staff at the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have asked hundreds of centenarians hundreds of questions, including details of their living circumstances, nutrition, alcohol consumption, smoking, physical activity, sleep, education, status, and spirituality — all in the hope of finding commonalities.

The results are sobering: “There is no pattern,” says Barzilai, 54. “The usual recommendations for a healthy life — not smoking, not drinking, plenty of exercise, a well-balanced diet, keeping your weight down — they apply to us average people, but not to them. Centenarians are in a class of their own.” He pulls spreadsheets out of a drawer, adjusts his glasses, and reads aloud: “At the age of 70, a total of 37 percent of our subjects were, according to their own statements, overweight; 37 percent were smokers, on average for 31 years; 44 percent said that they exercised only moderately; 20 percent never exercised.”

More at The last word: The secret to living past 100 – The Week.

The women in my family tend to live a long time, although I don’t think anyone has made it to 100 yet. What is your family’s pattern for longevity? Were people healthy right before they died, or did they linger with illness?

community · environment · psychology

Communities and Brains

Beth Kelley

This was interesting article about how living in larger households, or in this specific study living as a couple versus living separately after a divorce, consumes less resources overall and is better for the environment. Communes for the environment!

Speaking of groups, I found this an interesting use of group loyalty and playing with America’s usual perceptions of two supposedly polar opposite institutions, or just a cheap way for the military to get some publicity: Miss Utah, who is also an active member of the military, will be competing for the title of Miss America. What’s interesting is the military is actually paying for her training and travel to the competition.

On to brains.

One study has found that a high fever ( > 100.4) reduces symptoms of autism in children. Apparently the fever connects or stimulates nerve cells in the child’s brain. I’m curious why they only studied children (2-18) and not grown-ups. Perhaps because grown-ups don’t go to the hospital when they have a high fever.

And finally, 5-year-old chimps have better short term memories than college students, according to one study series done by researchers at Kyoto University. What was amazing to me was that the chimps were memorizing things in less than 3/10 of a second sometimes. That seems a) impossible for a human brain, and b) an adaptation to living in a setting of constant potential predation (baby chimps are tasty!). However, and even the researchers admit this, the real test would be to see how the young chimps fare against human kids.