The Elephant Project Comes to Boston University

Tomorrow night (Thursday April 19), Ecofest has a special public program featuring Miranda Loud.

I first met Miranda several years ago when she put on a program in Cambridge called “The Soul of the Night,” which interweaved readings from Chet Raymo’s book of essays, also called, “The Soul of the Night,” with projections from the Hubble Telescope and music for mezzo-soprano and baritone by Debussy, Schumann, Brahms and other composers. What a great idea, I thought. And a great program. The Boston Globe recently hailed her efforts as “the invention of a whole new genre.”


In fact, this was just after she founded Naturestage in 2006. NatureStage is a non-profit arts organization whose mission is to use the metaphorical and emotional power of the performing arts and film to explore our relationship with other species and inspire action to become global stewards.

For a project called “Reaching for the Light: Music and Images of Flowers, Plants and Spring,” former poet laureate Louise Gluck wrote a series of six poems that Loud set to music and premiered. In the “Buccaneers of Buzz: Celebrating the Honeybee,” music for voice, marimba and dance accompanied experimental video and a series of interviews with beekeepers from around the U.S. The latter won an award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which called it “a work of innovation and excellence in the arts, humanities and interpretive sciences, and which fosters community engagement.”

One of her present projects is called Park Dreams which has her recording people in different city parks sharing their visions – how to improve education in your neighborhood, how to foster empathy for each other and for other species, the role of the arts in society. About it, she says, Everyone’s dream matters, you know.”

Tomorrow night (Thursday April 19), Miranda comes to BU to tell us about another of her engaging present works, The Elephant Project. In March of 2011, she traveled with a cinematographer to Thailand to document the plight of the endangered Asian elephant and highlight our many similarities with elephants. She uses the plight of elephants and our long history with them to explore our relationship with other species, the essence of human nature, and how we can be better global stewards.

Location: KCB 101 (565 Commonwealth Avenue)

Time: 6pm. 

Open to the public and free for all.

We hope you can join us. 

Here's a printer friendly form of the flyer: 

Boston University's Earth Week

Lots of great events this week!

Ecofest is also going to BU's Earth Day.


Here's our poster, with information about our upcoming events, including a lunch seminar Wednesday
and evening presentation this Thursday.

Don't miss this great seminar on Thursday:

Eco-Poetry Slam This Monday

Please help me welcome former national poetry slam champion

Regie Gibson to Boston University this Monday for his feature

set in our Eco-Slam, part of Ecofest. Regie is an award-winning poet, spoken word artist, songwriter, actor and workshop facilitator. His 1997 film, "Love Jones", loosely based on his life about a young poet growing up in Chicago, is credited with sparking worldwide interest in poetry performances and competitive poetry "slam" events. He has lectured and performed widely in the US, Cuba and Europe and we're

lucky he's able to join our event at BU this Monday.  Feel free to bring a friend.

Here is a clip from Regie at Hampshire College in 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKsp7YPfzxE

Regie's envirnomentally-themed set will be followed by members of BU's Speak for Yourself slam team and an open mic for a great night of eco-poetry. There will be door prizes as
well as prizes for the poets so come help cheer the poets on.
7pm at BU Central, this Monday.

This is an Ecofest event. All are welcome.

You can also sign up for Ecofest at www.bu.edu/ecofest (for which your attendance will on Monday will also gain you points towards cool eco-prizes). It would be great to see you on Monday night and at other Ecofest events (www.bu.edu/ecofest/calendar).

Comfortably Unaware

We've all heard about "sustainability" but what about "global depletion"? This is the term Dr. Richard Oppenlander uses in his book, Comfortably Unaware: Global Depletion and Food Choice Responsibility, which has been endorsed as a “must-read” by Ellen DeGeneres, Jane Goodall and Neal Barnard, M.D., among others.  Dr. Oppenlander is a sustainability and wellness advocate, writer, and speaker committed to improving the health of our planet. And he'll be appearing at BU next week in a talk sponsored by the BU Vegetarian Society. (Location and time: Sargent College on April 18^th at 7 pm at 635 Commonwealth Ave, Boston MA, in room 102. Students, faculty, and guests are all welcome to attend.)


I saw him speak at the Boston Vegetarian Festival in November and he's a dynamic speaker who comes out swinging. In one of his first slides, he mentioned that there are 7 billion people on the planet and 70 billion animals raised to feed them. Think of all the land that has to be cleared to raise these animals, all the crops required to feed them, all the waste generated and so on. No, he says, we don't want to think about it, we'd rather be comfortably unaware. Some numbers from his book: 70 percent of our rainforests have been slashed and burned to raise livestock; more than 70 percent of the grain in the US is fed to livestock; while it takes 10-20 gallons of water to produce one pound of vegetables, fruit, soybeans or grain, it takes over 5000 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat, which is not as healthy for you; an acre of land devoted to plant-based protein (vegetables, grains and/or legumes) produces 10-15 times more protein than if devoted to meat production.

Given that land conversion for agriculture is one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss, these are compelling numbers. Next week, in conjunction with Boston University’s Earth Week, Dr. Oppenlander will be presenting a three-pronged approach to the ways in which our food choices are affecting human health, the planet's health and the welfare of the animals, while discussing why sustainability initiatives would benefit from including food choice as a relevant topic in curbing global depletion. He is president and founder of an organic vegan food production and education business, an animal rescue operation, and has given hundreds of lectures, presentations, and open discussions on the topic of food choice.

Come and check him out!

We also remind you that eating less meat is one of our events at Ecofest  and you can signup for this and
other events, which run April 15-22, today. Get your green on! We've got prizes like DVDs of Planet Earth, gift certificates for restaurants that serve local food, an Ecosphere, and artistic prints of endangered and extinct species. Sign up today!

Facing up to the Extinction Crisis

This is the time of year I start going a little crazy. It has nothing to do with doing my taxes, which I did remarkably early this year, or any crazy weather phenomena. It has everything to do with our upcoming Ecofest (signup starts on Monday) and whether we’re going to finally start taking the crisis in species loss seriously enough to do something about it.

As I research topics to blog about, including news items this week like Whole Foods finally agreeing to stop selling overfished species, pesticides being linked to honeybee decline (bees pollinate one third of the food we eat such as tomatoes, beans, apples and strawberries, so their decline has a huge effect on our food supply), and the Koch brothers, starring in the new documentary, Koch Brothers Exposed (stay tuned for a screening on campus), funding climate change denialism (I’m late to the party here, Greenpeace reported this in 2010), I keep coming back to endangered and extinct species.

It’s a bewildering crisis, with the dubious distinction that many of the species that populated our picture books when we were kids and ultimately fired our imaginations and dreams are suffering enormous declines due to habitat loss, pollution, introduction of invasive species, over-exploitation and climate change. These are all human-induced causes yet we live our lives as if this is someone else’s problem. Ultimately, we are impoverishing not only our wellbeing, because we rely on ecosystem services (with the ecosystem’s resident species) for clean water and filtering the air, we are impoverishing our imaginations and the imaginations of future generations by allowing so many species under our stewardship to go extinct. In addition, apart from whatever benefit we may enjoy from sharing the planet with so many diverse species, each species has its own inherent right to exist.

What drives me crazy is how little attention we’re paying to it. Clean/alternative/green energy has been soaking up more than its fair share of the environmental news pie but the reality is that if we were to develop an eco-friendly fuel to power our homes, cars, businesses and so on today we would still have the problem of over-consumption of natural resources, deforestation and the main drivers of species loss. We need to show more imagination in understanding and solving our environmental problems. 

(I think what also drives me a little crazy is that we don't yet have a proper way to grieve for the species that we know we've lost. Since I heard the story of the golden toad on a trip to Costa Rica, I've been haunted by it: brilliantly colored males seen mating with females in temporary pools in the mountains of Monteverde for a few weeks in the spring... discovered in the 1960's, not seen outside the mating period, hundreds seen in the late 1980's, then only a few, then one year, only one golden toad searching in vain for a mate.)

This week in the New York Times, Thomas Lovejoy reported on the Planet Under Pressure conference in London. The upshot is that we’re failing to act with the scale and urgency needed. We spend our days worrying about the financial system, when really, we should be devoting our energies to understanding the workings of earth’s biological systems and making sure that they remain fully functioning. As Aldo Leopold wrote, “the number one rule of intelligent tinkering is saving all the parts”.

As always, the first step is to educate ourselves. Here at BU, you can check out the screening of the documentary Call of Life, at Rich Hall this Sunday at 7pm or at the Core House on Monday night (also at 7pm). We’ll provide the eco-friendly pizza. 

Ecofest 2012 Events

The Call of Life

We are gearing up for this year's Ecofest (formerly the Ecolympics!), with the main events running from April 15 to April 22. We have a whole bunch of events that will help tune us in to our own ecological footprint on the environment and the consequent species loss. Sign up for our individual events (take a shorter shower, eat
less meat, bring your cup around to coffee, recycle, and more!) beginning on April 1.

April 8: A screening of the Call of Life, a documentary film about the present mass extinction. This screening will be at 7pm in the Rich Hall cinema room (not Danielsen, as previously advertised). All are welcome. Eco-Pizza provided.

April 16: 7pm @BU Central. Eco-Slam -- an environmental poetry slam and open mic. Come cheer on our eco-poets as they vie for eco-sustainability in our first-ever Eco-Slam. Featuring former National Slam Champion Regie Gibson in a special performance. Bring a poem for the open mic. Win a door prize. Become eco-inspired. All are welcome.

April 18: 12pm. Fred Wasserman from BU's Biology department presents a lunch-time seminar on "What is ethology?" Come and find out! Lunch will be provided. RSVP to core@bu.edu. Location: STH 406 (Classics Library, 745 Commonwealth Avenue). All are welcome.

April 19: 6pm. Musician and artist Miranda Loud from Naturestage presents her acclaimed multi-media lecture, Saving the Elephants, Saving Ourselves: The Role of the Arts in Social Change, that demonstrates how artists are using their art to draw attention to the plight of elephants, and shows how art can awaken empathy and kinship with other species.
Location: Kenmore Classroom Building 101 (KCB 101, 565 Commonwealth Avenue). All are welcome.

April 24: 6pm. Darra Goldstein, founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, and Russian professor from Williams College presents a seminar on What we Talk About When We Talk About Food. All are welcome. Location: Barrister's Hall, BU Law School (765 Commonwealth Avenue).

We are also working on some eco-excursions. Stay tuned for those.