A short clip from our 2005 interview with Richard Manning, author of "Grassland" (1997), "Against The Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization" (2004), and "Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape" (2009).
This is raw footage from the feature length documentary, What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, produced by Sally Erickson and Timothy Scott Bennett. Please visit http://www.whatawaytogomovie.com/ to purchase a copy and support the filmmakers. And visit http://bluehagbooks.com/ to learn about Bennett's new novel, All of the Above. Thanks!
In this interview we discuss the current reality of capitalism and urban agriculture, and what’s one the horizon for each. Specifically:
-His latest book, Entropy of Capitalism
-The Policy of Urban Agriculture
-The Current Food Crisis
Robert Silbey is an old hand at teaching chemistry (40 years and counting), yet each time he turns to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, he’s “always very nervous.” From this panel of educators, we get a sense of how challenging a classroom subject the Second Law can be.
Joseph Smith notes that the teaching approach “depends on the application,” and applications are both theoretical and practical. Students must first ask what is entropy, and why is it needed, says Smith. He focuses on “idealizations that often get ignored,” such as isolation, equilibrium and system boundaries. “If we don’t get those straight in the beginning student’s mind, then there’s a lot of confusion.”
To Howard Butler’s way of thinking, “teaching the Second Law is much more difficult and challenging a task than teaching Newton’s Second Law of Motion,” both because the concepts involved are so much more complex and abstract, and because the Second Law takes on very different forms depending on which thermodynamic domain is being considered.”
Andrew Foley “tries not to worry too much about what entropy is.” Instead, he handles the whole concept as if it were an accounting problem: “money being moved through a mint.” We can “shove the property of energy instead of money, and produce a form of accounting for energy equations.” Says Foley, “First Law, Second Law -- it’s all accounting.”
As engineering and biology converge, “it’s important that students understand the thermodynamics of biological molecules,” says Kim Hamad- Schifferli. She demonstrates the Boltzmann distribution with such biological examples as the coiling of DNA from its double-stranded to single-stranded form. Hamad- Schifferli acknowledges that entropy is very difficult for students to grasp viscerally, and that “one thing that helps greatly is the lattice model -- the entropy of mixing two gases, for example.”
Bernhardt Trout also invokes Boltzmann, “who believed in atoms vehemently, without substantive proof.” This is because “he didn’t want to believe in the soul, he wanted to believe we are nothing but matter and motion.” Trout says that while we can get a more accurate, mathematical description of atoms, “we owe it to our students to teach them about these most fundamental issues to try to reengage the original questions in the original context in which they existed.”
Jeffery Lewins reminisces about being “Keenanized” during his college years. He notes that “in the great book, Professor Keenan uses the energy-entropy volume space quite late to discuss equilibrium.” Lewins suggests that more can be made of this space in teaching.
Enzo Zanchini discusses “a rigorous definition of entropy valid also for nonequilibrium states.” He considers closed systems, and lays out a thorough set of basic definitions, going over the First Law and energy, and the Second Law and entropy.
“There are so many textbooks on thermodynamics, so many schools of thought, says Michael von Spakovsky because “there is not a whole lot of agreement on a lot of things.” He recounts how a unified theory developed at MIT helped resolve key issues in thermodynamics, by proposing “a broader, self-consistent quantum kinematics and dynamics. … Entropy becomes an intrinsic property of matter, including single particles.”
Eduardo Galeano: "El mundo se divide en indignos e indignados"
The Crime of Ecocide
http://www.pollyhiggins.com/
"... move away from property laws to trusteeship laws, so rather than I own, to I owe. I owe a duty of care to this planet."
12-year old Victoria Grant explains why Canada (her homeland) and most of the world, is in debt.
"How the Media Frames Political Issues" by Scott London
In The Emergence of American Political Issues (1977) McCombs and Shaw state that the most important effect of the mass media is "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."[13] The presidential observer Theodore White corroborates this conclusion in The Making of a President (1972):
The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about - an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.[14]
McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."[15] http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html
I am just an anonymous citizen who firmly believes that we are the ones we are always waiting for. No saviors, heroes, leaders, gurus, or superior or inferior, we are all equals, and we need to think and behave as if it matters.
