Tag Archives: side

Mar 23

Why I’m fasting with @eqat against mountaintop mining

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On March 22nd, I joined the fast against moun­tain­top coal min­ing called by the Earth Quaker Action Team.

“Old Zinc Fac­tory; Palmer­ton” by road_less_trvled on Flickr (cre­ative com­mons license)

When I was grow­ing up we’d make the trip from Philadel­phia to my grandmother’s house a cou­ple of times a year. As we headed north, the high­way threaded across farm fields and through rock cuts in the hills. About an hour in, we’d start notic­ing the thin blue band on the hori­zon. It would slowly get larger and larger until Blue Moun­tain loomed in front of us and we whooshed into Lehigh Tunnel.

My Nana lived on the other side of that moun­tain. On this side the moun­tain­side was red. The forests that car­peted the rest of the thousand-mile ridge had been ripped up by the decades of chem­i­cals pour­ing out if the smoke­stacks of the giant zinc pro­cess­ing fac­to­ries that book­ended the town of Palmerton.

When con­ver­sa­tion turned to adult mat­ters, I’d wan­der to the back porch and count the dirt bike trails going up the bar­ren moun­tain. When I tired of that I’d play in the stones of my grandmother’s back­yard. Even grass didn’t grow in this town. Ambi­tious home­own­ers would some­times make rock gar­dens for the space in front of each house that had been designed for marigolds, but most of the town had got­ten used to the absence of green. When the EPA finally got around to declar­ing the moun­tain a super­fund site we all snorted dis­mis­sively. My grand­mother was actu­ally offended, hav­ing long ago con­vinced her­self that the fac­tory effu­sions must be healthy.

The Palmer­ton fac­to­ries were funded by New York bankers. Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity got mul­ti­ple multimillion-dollar bequests in the wills of the founders of the zinc com­pany. I’m sure there are still a few resid­ual trust funds pay­ing out dividends.

Today we have Philadel­phia and Pitts­burgh bankers orches­trat­ing the removal of the moun­tain­tops in West Vir­ginia. As our tech­nol­ogy has improved so has our capac­ity for ill-considered mass destruc­tion of our nat­ural surroundings.

All liv­ing crea­tures have an impact on their sur­round­ings. My com­forts rely on the coal, oil, and nat­ural gas that are brought into our cities and towns. But I do know we can do bet­ter. I’m opti­mistic enough to can find ways to live together on this Earth that don’t break our moun­tains or poi­son our neighbors.

Photo: “Old Zinc Fac­tory; Palmer­ton” by road_less_trvled on Flickr (cre­ative com­mons license)

Aug 02

Spiritual Biodiversity and Religious Inevitability

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Emi­grants from the Irish potato famine, via Wikipedia

Peo­ple some­times get pretty worked up about con­vinc­ing each other of an mat­ter of press­ing impor­tance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat our­selves loud enough and often enough the obvi­ous­ness of our posi­tion will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we hap­pen to wear down the oppo­si­tion so much that they with­draw from our com­pan­ion­ship or fel­low­ship, all the bet­ter, as we’ve achieved a patina of unity. Reli­gious lib­er­als are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the val­ues we hold when talk­ing about the nat­ural world. There we talk about bio­di­ver­sity. We don’t cheer when a species mal­adapted to the human-driven Anthro­pocene dis­ap­pears into extinc­tion. Just because a plant or ani­mal from the other side of the world has no nat­ural preda­tors doesn’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Sci­en­tists tell us that bio­di­ver­sity is not just a kind of do-unto-others value that sat­is­fies our sense of nos­tal­gia; hav­ing wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adap­ta­tion is needed in response to mas­sive habi­tat stress. Monocrops are good for the annual har­vest but leave us espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble when phy­toph­thora infes­tans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups to have dif­fer­ent val­ues, both from us us and from one another. There are pres­sures in today’s cul­ture to level all of our dis­tinc­tives down so that we have no unique iden­tity. Some cheer this monocrop­ping of spir­i­tu­al­ity, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our reli­gious val­ues are some­how truer or more valu­able than those of other peo­ple, then they will even­tu­ally spread themselves–not by push­ing other bod­ies to be like us, but by attract­ing the mem­bers of the other bod­ies to join with us.

God may have pur­pose in fel­low­ships that act dif­fer­ently that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitabil­ity that we for­get to share our­selves with those with whom we differ.

Nov 23

Focused blogs and side trips

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Over on Eileen Flanagan’s Imper­fect Seren­ity, there’s an inter­est­ing post on blog pub­lic­ity, “Blog­ging dilem­mas,” inspired in part by Robin M“‘s recent “How did you get here?” post. Both bring up inter­est­ing ques­tions about the role of blogs in com­mu­nity build­ing and the loca­tion of that line that sep­a­rates good blog­ging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Read­ers will prob­a­bly be unsur­prised to learn that I use Tech­no­rati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blo­gos­phere. I act as a kind of com­mu­nity orga­nizer and my searches are for inter­est­ing posts talk­ing about Quak­ers (until read­ing Eileen’s post I hadn’t check my Tech­no­rati “rank” in months). Many people’s first intro­duc­tion to Quak​erQuaker​.org is get­ting linked from it, and I sus­pect I’ve acci­den­tally outed a few begin­ning blog­gers who hadn’t told any­one of their new blog!

I have a pro­fes­sional blog on web design and ana­lyt­ics (with a some­what off-topic but sat­is­fy­ing post on top at the moment) and sep­a­rat­ing that out has allowed me to use this per­sonal blog, Quak­er­Ran­ter, for what­ever I like. Most reg­u­larly read­ers would say it focuses on Quak­erism and cute kid pic­tures and while those are the most com­mon posts, the most read posts are the minor fas­ci­na­tions I indulge myself with occa­sion­ally. Quaker plain dress is some­thing I prac­tice but don’t think about most of the time (806 read­ers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpop­u­lar baby names (627 vis­its). I’ve also detailed some out­ings to semi-legendary South Jer­sey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The con­ven­tional wis­dom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would prob­a­bly say these off-topic posts are dis­tract­ing my core audi­ence. Per­haps, but they’re infre­quent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps peo­ple to know I’m not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real com­mu­nity means know­ing each other in all of our quirks. I’m more ten­der and for­giv­ing of other Quaker blog­gers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a con­text that makes it sound more lived, less ide­o­log­i­cal. There’s cer­tainly good rea­sons for tightly-focused pro­fes­sional blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started post­ing kids pic­tures!), but as more peo­ple read posts through feeds and aggre­ga­tors I won­der if there’s going to be as much pres­sure for per­sonal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky inter­ests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pan­der to par­tic­u­lar audi­ences and boy, are they bor­ing! A cer­tain degree of idio­syn­crasy and sub­jec­tive orner­i­ness is prob­a­bly essen­tial. Per­son­al­ity is at least as impor­tant as focus.

PS: I’m also inter­ested in mak­ing sure I don’t loose the core audi­ence with all my side trips, hence the “lat­est Quaker posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will even­tu­ally get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen’s is Avin­ish Kaushik’s Blog Met­rics: Six rec­om­men­da­tions for mea­sur­ing your suc­cess. Parts of it are prob­a­bly a bit tech­ni­cal for most QR read­ers but it’s use­ful for think­ing about blogs as outreach.