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Category Archives: Enviro-Literacy

LLED 565 D – Assignment #3

Here it is, the project I have probably spent too long making, and only covered three of the songs on Mother Mother’s excellent 2012 album, The Sticks. The whole concept of this album is about the desire to leave behind the busy-ness of urban life and go into the wild, or rather the sticks. When I was reading the Ernest Callenbach novel Ecotopia last summer, this became the soundtrack to the groundbreaking environmental message: the old world can be ripped apart to make one of the most awesome and ecologically-sound countries in the world (combining Northern California, Oregon and Washington state – plus British Columbia would have made it Cascadia!). Unfortunately, no feature filmmaker adapted this fictional tale, but if I could have had it my way, it would have resembled one of the best movies of the 21st century, Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Here is a sample of what is to come:


Omen Saito

The process of taking someone else’s creativity and making it into something new seems to belie creativity – others might argue it is genius. If I had the huge budget Nolan earned from directing a few Batman movies for Warner Brothers, I could make my own Ecotopia movie, perhaps even get a hip edgy band like Mother Mother to score the film with original music. I started work in the film industry around the same time as Nolan made his first feature film, the shoestring-budgeted The Following in 1998 (interestingly the main character share the same name and occupation as the theif Dom Cobb in the later film Inception). Obviously Nolan and I took different paths in life, and I sometimes wish I could be on the same sets and getting such amazing movies produced. Instead, I found that the remixing via YouTube, iMovie and other digital tools gets me closer to what I really want to see: a complex storytelling that contrasts familiar sounds and images. Here is the second video based off the track listing on The Sticks:


The Sticks Robert

Each song matches up to one of the characters in this fascinating, mind-bending movie. If I had the time and the computer storage space, I would have got the entire album covered. Instead, I have to work “bit by bit” and will not be able to get to that song until later on in August. It will be matched up with the character Browning, the elderly businessman seen at the beginning of “The Sticks Robert” video above. Next up is perhaps the most familiar track on the album (the one that had the most radio play, in any case) “Let’s Fall in Love” dedicated to Mrs. Cobb, what seems like an anti-love song. It’s not, really, and hopefully the video captures some of the emotional roller-coaster-ness of the original sources.


Let’s Fall in Love Mal

Next, in honour of Kedrick’s choice words for our friends at Sauder, here is the fourth track listing, and perhaps the one that could get me in trouble with the law-abiding citizens these students purport to be. Yes, there is something inherently underhanded about what I am doing to the music and movie, and if I didn’t post the Copyright Act disclaimer on each of the YouTube uploaded video, they would be muted or taken down in the blink of an eye. I object to this irreligious piety towards restrictions on materials meant to be shared digitally. I point to masters of remix like the Gregory Brothers, Daft Punk or even Bob Dylan (see genius link above), and really hope to make something as new and catchy with this recycled material for this project.


Business Man Projections

Every really good movie has that one character who stands out from the others, not necessarily the protagonist, but the one who seems to be the most fun. Like how every kid playing Star Wars in the 1980s wanted to be Han Solo instead of Luke Skywalker – admit it, adults who never watched the series, you had the unwanted good guy role thrust upon you by more calculting schoolyard friends. If there is any song on this great album that matches Inception‘s trickster character, it is the ominous-sounding “Dread in My Heart” – apologies in advance for the inventively obscene language.

As wonderfully complex as the movie is, there is only so much material to be mined. Nolan is not so fond of releasing outtakes or alternate endings on DVD releases of his films, so no way that I will have access to a stash of Michael Caine as Miles footage, and as he is only in three key scenes, I have to find other ways to include these characters in more environmental ways – also fitting seeing as this blog post is for environmental literacy. You can follow this link to see what I have already posted for my current number one hit off the album, “Infinitesimal” but in the spirit of the completionist ethos I set out to achieve in this project, had to come up with something creative. Hope this works…

Stop me if this whole project seems a bit too hipsterish. Seriously, write a comment and send it to me saying STOP (you would probably be doing me a big favour so I can focus more of my attention on comps and grant applications). It goes against every fibre of being a hipster, even explicitly condemned in the handbook only a few of us are cool enough to know about have read. If you are ready to press on, you’ll next see the origin of this whole project, the one song that got me thinking about how Mother Mother and Inception could, nay must, be mashed up together. But first, here’s another version of “Happy” – yeah, not the Pharrell Williams one that has been done to death.

More to be posted soon 🙂

LLED 565 D – Day 12

Back at one of my favourite places on campus. After walking in the woods with the class and so close to my home, I return to the Mac lab in the Scarfe building— one of the quietest rooms I have been in class plus there’s lots of computers to use! During my BEd and my masters, I could spend hours working on videos and other projects on Mac12 which is tucked far enough in the back so that I can peek out the windows. It seems like a poor trade-off, being able to walk around in the woods compared to be stuck in a stuffy computer lab, but I got used to it. I hope that I can be equally fascinated by the outdoors as well as the digital environment. At any rate, I have got one of my videos completed, and I might be able to finish off another two before tomorrow’s class. And who knows how many rainy August afternoons I will be in here to complete the rest of the album.

When I started my PhD, I had one of the coolest jobs in this building: AV Services. Not only did I have to help students and faculty with their powerpoint/projector problems, but had access to all the digital equipment stored in room one – now locked up for good. At AV Services, we had access to the latest apps and equipment, now that it is shut down and I am out of this job, we have to wait for someone from Technical Services to come from wherever they are on campus to deal with a problem easily solved with the proper password nobody in this building seems to have! Even the computers in the Mac lab, with all their storage space, prevent me from copying files created on the computer onto my hard drive. I will have to hurry to post all the videos from Mother Mother’s album The Sticks onto YouTube, since anything saved on each of computers will be wiped by August 18th.

The thing I like most about this online technology, however, is that there are creative ways to get around locked out and copyrighted material. For the Inception/Sticks project, I found a way to record from my iPad onto the computer using iMovie’s voiceover recording. Necessity being the nature of this business, I will have to see how long my first video survives on YouTube before it is taken down or mutated again. I figure by the time I finish the album I will have amassed a bucketload of tricks for uses previously recorded material. Right now those greedy Google people have tracked down that I am using a previously recorded song, and are threatening to post ads in the bottom of the screen unless it is removed. Thankfully my iPhone and iPad don’t seem to be having this issue – let’s see what happens tomorrow!


Video One: Omen Saito

LLED 565 D – Day 11

Landa talks rats and squirrels

The non-human animals get a lot of attention today as the hairless apes in the classroom discuss many of our conflicted attitudes towards the co-inhabitants of our many environments. Usually the scary stories of mistreatment and abuse, or bizarre notions that pop into the heads of unfortunate tourists who see this pride of lions or that formerly hibernating bear would make for an awesome family photo. Kedrick shared a heartwarming story of a backyard rat who who playfully greeted him each day, and his conflicted attitude towards the neighbour’s cat for doing what cats have been doing for millennia. Some animals, particularly horses, made the perhaps unwise despising to get to know humans a bit better, and so much of our civilization has been established by riding them to an early grave (and by grave, read processing factory). Kind of glad we didn’t get in to the Beatty Biodiversity Museum today, not sure I wanted to see every former living species on display.

Johnson and Okamoto try to empirically research the NHA and human connection, but it has always been an unfair comparison: the creatures that most resemble us get spare (unless too many of their chromosomes resemble ours, and then it is off to the laboratory they go) and those scary, non-human things get what they deserve. That’ll teach them for not evolving thumbs or grooming themselves in a more humane manner. Perhaps if I never got around to reading Timothy Findley’s The Wars, I could be a bit more positive in my outlook towards human/non-human interaction, but I am glad that we started to open up class discussion to include a more spiritual element. Without getting into a big debate about the transmigration of the soul, the fact that so many species have been ground between the teeth of unthankful human seems like karmic proof that most “decent” people will reincarnate as a cow. And the cats will soon be running the Internet.
Until then, enjoy this brief glimpse of caged animals let loose in the pre-CGI enviro-movie, Twelve Monkeys:

We did it!

LLED 565 D – Day 10

Academic writing has really done a number on me, and it is only this summer session that I am figuring out how it works. From 11:30 until 2:30 each day, I take an LLED course on this very topic, learning how the social practice of getting my ideas published in journals and presented at conferences isn’t rocket science (as Dr. John Robinson was won’t to say) but certainly requires an amount of skill. First, being able to identify what counts as research instead than the wishful output of corporate thinktanks takes some getting used to: both Apple and Mircosoft would like academics to believe that their view of digital literacy, for instance, aligns perfectly with research produced at top universities. Their reasons are quite obvious, as it is better for their bottom line if the ivory tower elite institutions buy into their research. But all of this supposes that there is pure source of scholarly articles on digital literacy, and it is just a matter of finding it.

Where does one look? Cambridge University Press seems to have made it their business to keep tab on the various forms of legitimate (ie. non-commercial) research. Earlier today, I was tracing down an article my advisor co-wrote on digital literacy, and found it in the reference section of the Education Library, the Cambridge Handbook of Literacy – a book so high-stakes that the university cannot let you leave the library with a copy. I might as well post again from the library for the amount of time it will take to sit down with the book (yeah, I could photocopy it, but that is more paper an ink I’d have to store somewhere, while the digital copy (PDF) could just as easily be uploaded onto my iPad within seconds. So what sort of deal does Cambridge UP have with UBC? Would the situation be different if I had gone to Cambridge as a grad student?

Of course, Timothy Clark’s book on ecocriticism is an introduction to the environment and literature, not a more prestigious-sounding “handbook on” this topic (Cambridge has such a handbook on learning sciences, but none exclusively on environmental literacy). Clark’s criticism of standard social science method (SSSM) was my entry point into his evolutionary view of this uniquely human habit of storing our collective knowledge in publications and libraries. And it only seems to confuse readers and academics into narrow categories: are we looking at Darwin’s theory or Social Darwinism, two very different concepts spawned from his “survival of the fittest” understanding. Ideas will continue to evolve, and the only thing we can say with certainty about a play by Sophocles or Shakespeare is that the word are somewhat in the order the author intended, but thanks to SSSM, meaning can be all over the map. Thankfully there are handbooks and institutions to straighten all of us out, but then adds to the possibility of misunderstandings and sometimes disastrous decisions that effect the plants, animals and non-living inhabitants of our ecosystems. But at least we still have tonnes of books in libraries, that ought to keep the bookworms happy! :-S

LLED 565 D – Day 9

Before posting my reflection on today’s studies, I must go back a couple of days to some discoveries I made in the weekend. First was Dr. Michio Kaku’s discussion of dark matter in our universe:

Not only is it fascinating that 80% of everything that ever was and ever will be is a literal unknown element physicists can only describe as the opposite of everything that we know about the universe, based upon the four fundamental forces derived from light. It oddly ties together with last summer’s blockbuster Thor: The Dark World where the universe was threatened by being reset, as this opening scene mysteriously sets up:

It is a bit of a stretch, but my experiences today prove that imagination is perhaps the only way to know the unknown matter in the universe, “such stuff” Prospero claims “as dreams are made on.” (Tempest, VI.i)

<p>There were two worlds that I visited today that brought home how intricately connected each are to a multiverse of other imaginary worlds: UBC’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability and Bard on the Beach. Very interesting that I got to visit both on the same day, and make the discovery that there are perhaps infinite spaces, each as unique as the individuals who work, study and entertain themselves at these places. Dr John Robinson was my guide is afternoon through CIRS, and while there is so much potential for world-changing design being tangled in red tape, the last thing that me mentioned was the most exciting. Here is the note I jotted down:

Sustainability in an imagined world

next big project

Richard Rorty: Redemptive truths

“World is fictional all the way down.”

That Dr. Robinson revealed that his centre received funding for a three year project by referring to Rorty’s rise of literary culture AND that the social scientists and humanities are just as key to a well rounded educational program as the highly touted STEM subjects is more than just coincidence. I was meant to be in that room to hear this information, so closely tied to one of my proposed research topics: narrative inquiry into imaginary space. He needs someone like me on his well funded team, and here’s why: I have got connections to a huge resource, that other world I mentioned above, Bard on the Beach.

As a loyal patron of Vancouver’s summer Shakespeare festival since 1996, it was seeing the plays performed live that really got me interested in the imaginary spaces these plays present (n.b., not a representation of reality, but a presentation of reality on stage). In 2004, I took my interest in these plays a step further, first by volunteering and that same season employed as the Boutique (gift shop) Manager. Since then I have been on friendly terms with Bard staff, and more importantly they have been friendly with me. Even tonight, attending Paul Budra&#39;s lecture on A Midsummer’s Night Dream, I was greeted by the educational administrator and I hadn’t seen in her in months. Bard on the Beach is now in its 25th season, a great example of sustainability in the otherwise hit-and-miss world of independent theatre companies. If I could map out my post-PhD career, I would be teaching anywhere in the world (preferably Japan) eight months of the year &nbsp;so that I could return to Vancouver each summer to be employed as a Bard educator. As Cleopatra says &quot;It&rsquo;s past the size of dreaming” (Antony & Cleopatra V.ii) but not impossible. 🙂

Anyhow, the connection both have to imaginary space is the way that Dr. Budra referred to three different worlds in AMND: “There is the real world, and the dramatic world and then the imaginative world of fairies” that are all on stage throughout this play (and in many ways combined in every other play). The character of Bottom, the Athenian tradesperson who seems more at home in the Guilds of Early Modern London than Ancient Greece, is the only one to experience all three: his everyday bumbling activities as a “rude mechanical”, his dramatic embodiment of the tragic Pyramis, and his stint as a donkey-headed fairy’s lover. When looking for the place of the natural world in this play, one would expect to find it in the real world of star-cross’d lovers and cruel Athenian laws against Hermia or offending noble playgoers. Instead, as Dr. Budra eloquently pointed out, there are more references to the flowers and trees of Shakespeare’s England in the fairies’ speeches than there are in all of the other Dreamers. What do you think, Dr. Robinson? Don’t you need someone like me (and Dr. Budra if he is on my committee) on your well-funded research team?

Yep, the same Dr. B on lead guitar for the Dadolescents!

LLED 565D – Day 8

1. Home Here

Your Dad was into Thoreau
And there was the Natural History Club
In our neck of the woods
Back in the day before the blue-box rules
And the balloon-nosed alcy
Incautiously turning junk into money
Makes strange cents and leads
You to strange corners outside of
Natural History.

Virginia tobacco in an Arabian desert
And the uneducated shaman
With their budza sawing pranks
Covering your hands with sweet sap
As you reach in close to the fire
Ovens within ovens for ripening
Those toxic weeds and then
You are off to the auction
A couple hundred, a thousand?

After Greece and Israel and parts
Of Africa and the mango milk
Where will this farmer go?
Acres and acres of farmland in Surrey
Reurbanized, deargicized
You settle in an Okanagan roost
To wage a war for wine but
Lose the bottle-making battle
To the logs collecting round your vines.

It was on that hike through
Mushroom spouting stumps
You saw a mountain lion with
A tail as ling as your arm
She lets out a house at purr
And later that night by the fire
A blood-curdling hunter scream
That shook the whole bio region
And opened your mind to the pool.

Just a water hole with the power
To transport you to the other side
Out of body and beyond time
Infecting your later life as you
Catch yourself in a mid-campus dash
Diving back into the spaceless void
Wrestling with the complexities of
Coupland’s last generation to die
And this was the start of your
Ecoliterate life.

2. Mindset Change

Rich man in a rich land
Not much care for the ground
Until Wayne of the wooly socks
Took us out past Duffy Lake
The fallen friend point the way
To the fabulous glacier
And winter’s first snow
Caught us out in our shorts
At the age of thirteen
Sky opening up to give
Back the calm that nature had
For original movers and shakers
On the ever-changing land

A decade or so later
When the enviro-club began
And I could not get that
Cloud-opening moment
Out of my head

3. Tranquility in May

My dad would getaway to climb
South Korean frozen waterfalls
Frames placed on our walls
My little boots would dangle down
From the camper trailer bumper
As the rickety summer family trips
Would start on the last day of school

The classroom windows facing Jasper
Would call out to me adventure
But reports and reflections got in the way
Until I was called to the coast
Although I couldn’t Tofino, not yet
But found my way to Long Beach
And he Rocky Mountain shaped waves

4. Constance Islander

Remember me back in Germany
In the year I grew up there
Stuttgart to Munich ain’t no thing
But boating way the best way to go
All the animals helped me find my place
Walking the dog down to the Danube
And the cat in my Canadian room
Recreates the alpine home
Where bakers closed on Sundays
And nothing would open for 24 hours

5. What Environment There?

Ontario was where she began
Moving out to Saudi Arabia
Can you find your mom’s burka?
Will Santa make it to the compound?

She made it back to the cabin-filled land
Such an opportunity not to be missed
The huge green forest and lots of green
To canoe and to camel in her childhood

6. From NGO to NGO

He followed his parents when they went
From Egypt to Nairobi and into Sudan
With the Disneyness holidays in
Lush Kenyan grasslands
The haboob were hilarious
As they blocked out the sun
Clogged up the lungs
And brought tears to the eyes

Each lagoon had a shark
And the rain produced frogs
For the snake wranglers to collect
And feed their money-making scheme
Five dollars on the viper
Come see its teeth
The anaconda just got way
During the matinee
He made his own
Intermission with
Ant vs. grasshopper.

7. The Edge of the Cut

It all began on the mountain
Green means you’re good
But blue makes it better
During a post-lesson run
Off just beyond the edge
Where the city spreads out
You could fall off and die
But was anyone screaming

All those other skiers came
Back from somewhere below
They have to fill the chairs
And teeter in the t-bars

But the city, shining through
The white wisps of clouds
Were the only edge between
A place on the slope and home

Each mound rolled out anew
The closer you get to the end
So when the clouds clear
There is no natural boundary

8. A Typology for New Trails

A Seattle scientist sets up home
On the Sammamish plateau
And establishes the original
Hillside home and hikes its trails
His Winnipeg roots cannot provide
Yet his daughter goes back
To waterski with aunts and uncles
She sets up a way to track trails
Each time she is in a new place
When she is in the race, getting lost
Going out of her head
Victoria trails have bunnies
London parks are manicured
Barcelona grow the wild palms
All helping her cross the country
Sketching a place for her discoveries

9. Levelling Out

From Toronto Tarantah
Kids kept away from TV
Had biking and climbing
Skiing or playing tag
Going up or gliding down
Each place as an adult
Had the up-and-down feel
Osaka is a concrete basin
Kyoto had shrine-filled hills
And now here in Vancouver
We get trapped inside
Yet just a kilometre away
The beach waits with inner peace.

10. Another Tale

Ontario has some dangerous environments
You heard me, there is so much waste!
The negativity of Scarborough will get in your face
And my grandfather’s island swarmed with horseflies
Even a swim in the lake was like tea-coloured swill
Had me wishing for the tiled grid of my pool
These outdoors were like shock therapy
Driving me away to he oil-producing desert
No threshold between our place and the cockroach
While scorpions took heir babies into my sink
And the cat chews on another chameleon
While tarantulas hid in lawnmowers shed
At last in BC nature seems more natural

11. School Meant LAC

My Mom thought it was the ADHD
And sent me to the cram schools
When what I had was visual-tactileness
My only escape was the week or so
Outdoors at the school where
Nature surround me with play
And songs like Johnny Appleseed
It would lead to a life of horse vaulting
And digging up clay for my glaze
That were skills I picked up
After my CBC schoolmates went
To Sauder and I to Emily Carr
And that made all the difference.

12. North Van and Spiralling Out

A huge forest playground
Summer, after school, weekend
Camping under the star
And next to the bunnies

That trip to Edmonton cut short
So the boyfriends could back
To their computers and culture
You didn’t even have a cel phone
Breaking up and moving on
To be a rock star teacher
In a Burmese haunted land
Away from the microchip’s grasp

There were only so many dishes
And princely proposals you could take
Before you came back here
To reconnect with your land

LLED 565 D – Day 7

Local environment trashed, community gardeners outraged, will the youth of today get away with it?

Shocking news to be reporting in my blog, but as one who feels we are no closer to resolving huge issues like global warming, loss of marine life and overpopulation of humans (the most dangerous species on the planet), without addressing the local issues first.

My original plan was to wander out to the University Golf Club, where “Everyone’s Welcome” – not being ironic, just reporting what the sign says outside the clubhouse. Of course, a public access course is not exactly de rigueur, and more often than not these expansive green spaces are for the private use of what Veblen calls the “Leisure Class.” When I went to the VanVR (Virtual Reality) Meetup last month, I met some developer who want to recreate the game of golf in Unity, the game-design program preferred by virtual realist. At first, it almost seen as ridiculous: what serious golf would give up being out in nature to put uncomfortable googles on their heads and swing their motion-captured arms at a white object that is not really there? Now that I think more ecologically about it, such a move into the virtual world would free up so many places around the developed world, maybe even make place for the displaced species and not-so leisurely class. Of course, Veblen writes how difficult it will be to tear away from our “pecuniary standard of living” but as this video clip shows, it is only just a matter of time for all of us:

LLED 565 D – Day 6

What? The video I shot and posted yesterday, silent?? But but… I said so many cool things about Marshall McLuhan and now, like tears in the rain… Thanks for nothing, YouTube! Just to get back at screwTube, you faceless copyright-abiding sell-out, here is my next video:

I’d like to see you try to silence me. Oh, who am I kidding, YouTube, can’t we just be friends? Because of your file sharing, I now know who Matthew Silver is, and how he uses Hans Zimmer’s music in his posts too:

ps. Hey kids who trashed our community garden: save your sorries until you grow back the beets and carrots you untimely ripped from various garden plots. Parents who let their children run so unsupervised, make sure your kids pay back for what they ruined.

LLED 565 D – Day 5

On the way to classes, not enough time to sit down to write a reflection, so I shot this video instead:

Now that I have had time to edit and reflect on my commentary, of course I messed up with guessing that Linux was created at MIT’s famous Building 20, but the hacker culture known as Tech Model Railway Club that would have opened the door for Linus Torvalds in Finland (sigh, way off). The conversation with Chris F. about the rapid changes in game and fanboy culture led him to forward me this Kids React… video, mention in my reflection. Should have started recording the conversation with Chris, but might have needed BREB clearance!

Today’s class had us back outside, doing graffiti with a moss compound that we painted onto the parking lot wall, and some photos of our eco-friendly mischief:

LLED 565 D – Assignment 1

Here are the parts to my presentation:

Haiku Deck

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