andrewfrank.ca

Feel Good Click of the Day: 5000 Emails for 5000 Caribou

That’s what a new online campaign I’m helping to promote is hoping to achieve in Ontario by December 31, 2009.

The same Woodland Caribou that appears on the quarter in your pocket is quickly disappearing from the southern Boreal Forest of Ontario (just 5000 remaining), despite a promise from Premier McGuinty, over two years ago, to protect the animal’s habitat.

Don’t Be Shallow

Social media is often accused of being shallow and all about self-affirmation, well why not go deep and affirm the right of Ontario’s Woodland caribou to survive by sending an email to Premier McGuinty today, directly from the petition page (www.savethebou.ca) before joining our Facebook community at www.facebook/savethebou and tweeting your good deed (there’s the self-affirmation part!) and hopefully re-tweeting the campaign’s feed at www.twitter.com/savethebou.

Remember to invite interested friends to become fans of the FB page.

Save Caribou and Protect Our Climate

Canada’s Boreal Forest is the largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon on earth, making it a vital regulator of global climate. When caribou habitat is logged, carbon is released into the atmosphere. When caribou habitat is preserved, trees and soil can absorb more carbon and keep it in the ground where it belongs. A 50% reduction in logging in the Boreal would reduce global warming pollution equivalent to taking all the passenger cars in Canada off the road.

An Early Christmas Present For Ontario’s Caribou?

With only 5000 caribou left, and 76 days remaining before the end of 2009, every day that passes without a credible caribou conservation strategy means another flip of the coin for the survival of Ontario’s caribou. If Premier McGuinty isn’t persuaded to do the right thing by Dec. 31st, new logging plans for caribou habitat will be drafted in the new year and that means more logging and fewer caribou by this time next year. 

Give these critters an early Christmas present.

Every little click helps!

Since revamping my site and choosing to publish content on a more frequent basis, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the value of social media…actually that’s not true…I’ve spent more time feeling about the value of social media. Seeing folks visit from across the country, sparking conversations and building new understandings and a sense of community with old friends and acquaintances, using posts to organize and test out thoughts and feelings about life stories, questions, news, “art” and whatever else tickles my fancy (apologies for that expression) – all of it has been an exercise in feeling.

One of the biggest criticisms of blogs and other forms of social media is that everything they do is “meta,” that is, after the fact, or in abstraction to some primary piece of news or information. Because of this initial modus operandi (historically and today a lot of blogs still rely on mainstream news to spark their conversations), the mainstream media like to claim (especially when their own relevance is questioned) to be the lifeblood of the “bloggosphere.” They caution that the death of newspapers and traditional media outlets will cause social media to dry-up. I’m not sure that’s true.

I think we all have some sense that mainstream news is often vacuous – a race to report every societal “car crash” in the most graphic terms as quickly as possible before finding the next one, first. Ambulance chasers etc. A quick example: Yesterday I was on the bus and one of the local news radio stations had a story about 7 people being found dead in a mobile home in the southern U.S. state of Georgia. No context, nothing. Great. Thank you. My life and understanding of the world has been greatly enriched. Now I know it’s possible for 7 people to be found dead in a mobile home, in the state of Georgia. God forbid we should actually connect any dots, attempting to explain why this happened. The same holds true for that recent story about the reality TV show participant who murdered his ex-wife before hanging himself in a hotel room in B.C. Any chance the mainstream media entertained a conversation about mental health, or obsessional jealousy? It’s not in their DNA to do so (and while there’s an argument that perhaps it doesn’t need to be, the fact that their license to operate depends on access to public airwaves points to the possibility that as a society we could ask for something more), but that’s also why they’re becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Reflection has become an end in itself. Demand is at an all time high. As an end in itself, the primary news on which it is predicated is far less important. Fodder for reflection can come from first person experience, second-hand anecdotes, stories from organizations and businesses dealing directly with social issues and transactions, and various other forms of media and sources of information. We don’t lack primary news as a society…it’s happening all the time, it’s what life is. What we’re lacking is the means to reflect, to not just make sense of our world, but to make new meaning that makes the world a better place. That’s where the feeling part of social media comes in, and that’s where I see its value.

The loss of traditional media reporting should concern us as much as the loss of any other stream of social information, but it’s not critical.

I’ll try and offer more reflection as I continue to feel my way through this new medium.

This post’s title is the literal reverse of Andrew Biro’s “Denaturalizing Ecological Politics” but I believe it’s written at least partly in the same spirit as his work (though I’m just starting his book), namely the effort to make ecological politics accessible to as wide a swath of the world as possible and to reframe society’s alienation from nature. Read the rest of this entry »

The title is meant to provoke, but there’s a serious point to be made.

With the recent political events here in Canada and the almost certain prospect of a coalition government, a national first of sorts, political talk is rife. One concern I’ve heard expressed by progressive folks, and often the root of their unease or even opposition to the idea of a coalition government, is the need for “stability” in the face of an economic recession.  Read the rest of this entry »

To be sure, awareness is the prerequisite for informed action, but it’s not an end in itself (or at least not a very productive one).

Yesterday’s municipal election outcome was something to celebrate: The first two pledges out of our new mayor’s mouth were to end homelessness and to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world.  Read the rest of this entry »

That’s the name for the new progressive political force behind the Obama phenomenon, or so says David Eaves, a guy I’ve had the pleasure of playing a hand or two of poker with in the past (I won’t comment on David’s playing style, except to say he’s an “all in” kind of guy). Read the rest of this entry »