Daily Archives: July 10, 2013

Family, Our Land and Home

Chainsaw

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Summer                                                                           First Harvest Moon

Tomorrow is chainsaw time.  Gotta get firewood cut for the big Woolly fire on Monday.  Weather says thunderstorms possible, but I’m going to proceed as if they were not.  Can’t hurt to have too much firewood.  There’s always Samain.

Got word from brother Mark that he is in Indianapolis, getting more and more work done on his visa.  Physicals, FBI check, that sort of thing.  He plans a trip to Alexandria (our hometown) soon.  It will be his first time back in a very long time.

Kate’s set aside the pots and pans today to work with needles and thread.  She finished one quilt for Sarah, our housecleaner’s daughter and has begun one for Margaret Levin, both of whom have due dates in the near future.  Margaret is the executive director of the Northstar Sierra Club.

 

Great Work, US History

American Prairie Reserve and its conceptual partners

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Summer                                                             First Harvest Moon

Make no little plans.  Daniel Burnham

The American Prairie Reserve fits Burnham, a macro-thinking architect of Chicago.  This is a plan to knit together lands under public management by a private foundation’s purchase of lands from willing sellers.  The goal:  an intact grasslands eco-system, 3,000,000 acres in size, the size conservation biologists estimate is necessary to preserve what was once a dominant ecology in the middle and western U.S.

They’re well on their way as the maps below can show.

A similar idea that I recall from a NYT magazine article years ago is the Buffalo Commons. And the wikipedia information. Apparently it still has some life, too.  It was in part a response to the unsustainable agricultural practices in the mapped area.

And, there’s one I hadn’t heard about, the Western Wildway.  See maps below.

IMAGINE

a grassland reserve of THREE-MILLION acres – a wildlife spectacle that rivals the Serengeti and an AWE-INSPIRING place for you and your children to explore.

Imagine helping to
build a national treasure.

Two maps, the bottom map is current.

 

GeekWorld, World History

Fire-Burning Celestial Lightning God

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Summer                                                         First Harvest Moon

Tom Crane, Mark Odegard and I passed over $13.00 each for a senior citizen ticket to the show Maya! at the Science Museum.  This show offers a thoughtful approach to this complex and still often misunderstood culture, especially its classic and post-classic periods.  The show combines technology from a tabletop computer to a museum goer manipulable microscope to excellent effect.

With areas on astronomy, the underworld, making a living, the ball game, architecture, religion and daily life the exhibition offers up to date scholarship in a diverse number of areas.  Sprinkled throughout the exhibit are actual artifacts, plaster   replicas and photographs to supplement the label copy.

In fact my only criticism of the show is the display of the artifacts. They are often set back in a case with a lot of shadow making the artwork difficult to see.  Also, not all of the artifacts seem carefully selected.  But this is a trivial point.

New information to me was the impact of enemy civilizations on the decline of the Maya. I had known before about crop failure, drought and environmental degradation.  Although, come to think of it, I do recall an argument about rebellion by peoples selected for slavery and ritual sacrifice.

Maya culture is not dead; it lives on in Central America and the Yucatan.  There is today a revival of interest in Mayan culture among Mayans.  This is good to see and receives some treatment in the show.

I’d say 4 stars.