Exciting news, friends! In the Spring of 2017, The Lou Frey Institute (LFI) and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida (BGCCF) established a partnership, designed to help implement and support the creation of a Civic Action Project (CAP) Program in BGCCF’s After School Zone for middle school students. This program was adapted for middle schools and after-school environments from the original Civics Action Project first developed by the Constitutional Rights Foundation. Since the launch of this effort, over 100 middle school students have participated in the CAP program, where they identify a community issue or problem of interest to them, research it, and propose a detailed plan for how to address it. In support of these students and their facilitators is the Institute’s Civics Instructional Specialist, Chris Spinale. Participating students attend a Civic Education Showcase on the UCF campus where they present their projects and findings to community stakeholders and policy makers.
Because of the hard work of BGCCF staff, site facilitators, CAP teachers, and their club members, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida’s Civic Action Project Program for the After School Zone was named the recipient of the 2020 Best Overall Program Impact Excellence Award for the State of Florida by the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) and Florida Area Council.
CAP took home the prize for the State of Florida as the overall standout program among all the Boys & Girls Club programs in the state. Kelvin Curry, Director of Middle School Programs for BGCCF, thanked LFI for its partnership and all it has afforded their club members.
Both LFI and BGCCF are committed to continuing the hard work of cultivating a citizenry that is informed, engaged, and active. Questions about the program can be directed to LFI Interim Director Steve Masyada (Stephen.masyada@ucf.edu) or Civics Instructional Specialist Chris Spinale (Christopher.spinale@ucf.edu).
Good morning, friends in Civics! As you likely know if you are at all familiar with our work, the Lou Frey Institute is constantly looking to improve our work and ensure that our resources are the best that they can be. As the state has begun introducing new/revised benchmarks for K-12 civics (to be released for public comment soon) and ELA (the BEST Standards), we want to start revisions on existing materials and the development of new materials sooner rather than later. However, we want to prioritize what teachers feel they need most, and in pursuit of that, we have crafted a short survey for elementary grade band teachers to help us in our initial stages. This survey will simply ask you to prioritize the types of resources you would like us to address at the K-5 level, and also asks whether you might be interested in a compensated opportunity to be involved in the work. So if you have a few minutes and teach K-5 in Florida, please let us know how we can help you. Complete our short survey, and share with others who might have interest.
If you’re a good ancestor of the Enlightenment, you probably believe that “nature” is something entirely separate from us. We moderns live at a sanitized distance from messy biophysical realities, after all. Lately, this casual premise of ours has been taking some serious hits, however, with the acceleration of climate change, species extinctions, collapsing coral reefs, cataclysmic weather events, and more.
In recent weeks, I've noticed a big uptick in the number of creative overtures to the realm previously known as nature (a term that implies that humanity and nature are separate). I decided to bring together some of the more imaginative gambits that I've encountered.
What underlies each example, it seems, is our aspiration to treat “nature” as a living system of diverse elements, each with its own agency and imperatives. Or as Oren Lyons, a Native American Faithkeeper of the Seneca Nation, put it years ago: “What you people call your natural resources, our people call our relatives.”
So how do we get better acquainted with our nonhuman relatives?
A New Pronoun for the Natural World
Robin Wall Kimmerer, the celebrated author of Braiding Sweetgrass, suggests we should start with the idea of using a new pronoun when referring to nature. In a recent essay in The Ecologist magazine, she urges us to avoid the use of the pronoun “it” in such circumstances:
“Objectification of the natural world reinforces the notion that our species is somehow more deserving of the gifts of the world than the other 8.7 million species with whom we share the planet. Using 'it' absolves us of moral responsibility and opens the door to exploitation. When Sugar Maple is an 'it' we give ourselves permission to pick up the saw. 'It' means it doesn't matter….
"Singing whales, talking trees, dancing bees, birds who make art, fish who navigate, plants who learn and remember. We are surrounded by intelligences other than our own, by feathered people and people with leaves. But we’ve forgotten. There are many forces arrayed to help us forget – even the language we speak….
"In indigenous ways of knowing, other species are recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility.
Kimmerer informs us that the proper Anishinaabe word for beings of the living earth is Bemaadiziiaaki. Since that's a mouthful for we English speakers, she suggests shortening it to “ki” or “kin.” “Might the path to sustainability be marked by grammar?” asks Kimmerer.
Eco-co-operativess called Zoöp
In the same vein as a new pronoun for nature, a Dutch webpage called Zoöpis calling for a new type legal entity that recognizes collaboration between human organizations and multispecies ecological communities. The term “Zoöp” is short for “zoöperation,” which itself is a combination of the word “co-op” (short for “co-operation") and “zoë” (Greek for "life").
The zoöp concept is based on the idea that the profit-maximizing greed of capitalism is overriding most human and nonhuman lives, so a different organizational form is needed. The stated goal of Zoöp is to “strengthen the position of nonhumans within human societies,” to “contribute to ecological regeneration in a way that resists extractivist dynamics,” and to apply the Zoöp model “to a wide variety of organizations.” A Dutch law firm is “critically assessing the zoöp legal structure and developing the charters and documents required to establish actual zoöps,” the group’s website notes. I'm curious about how the self-imposed criteria are to be enforced.
The project explains that “its key methods were developed in a public research trajectory of Het Nieuwe Instituut that took place during the Terraforming Earth Labs (2018), the Neuhausacademy for more-than-human knowledge (2019), and the Venice Exploratorium (2020).”
The Idt Suffix as an Alternative to Inc. or Ltd.
In yet another innovation along these lines, the Community Economics Research Network – an international group of activist-minded academics with new visions for economic life – has proposed a new suffix to identify an organization as committed to interdependence. Businesses often have “Inc.,” “Ltd.” or “LLC” at the end of their names.
A CERN project called “The Interdependence” proposes that organizations add an "idt" to the end of their name if they “cultivate economic principles and practices that recognize our universal responsibility of mutual care, and strive to bring that understanding into the practice of everyday life.” The acronym idt would signal that the organization intends “to explore, experiment, share and learn together how to create ethical relations of interdependence.”
Already there are a number of enterprises that use the idt tag: Company Drinks idt., a UK community space and social enterprise; Brave New Alps idt., a participatory research project in the Italian Alps; Cube Cola idt., an open source soft drink in Bristol, England; and Trajna idt., a design collective that explores sustainable production in Slovenia that “works towards supporting multispecies livelihoods.” More about idt. in an Idt Charta statement.
Assigning Legal Personhood to Nature
Years ago the impulse to affirm our kinship with nature has manifested in the “rights of nature” movement. The tactic here is to assign legal personhood to mountains, rivers, and forests, and other elements of the Earth so that they can be properly “represented” in courts and legislatures. The states of Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, and India have already enacted laws giving specific legal rights to nature.
But now this bold move in jurisprudence have found a footing in North American law. In February 2019, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, approved Lake Erie Bill of Rights Charter Amendment, which authorizes people to sue polluters on behalf of Lake Erie.
Self-Owning Trees
While nature’s rights as a legal doctrine is fairly new, the idea that nature is alive and sovereign has a long history, even in pockets of western culture. In Athens, Georgia, local lore celebrated the “Tree That Owns Itself for more than a century.
There is a huge white oak tree at the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens that is said to have legal ownership of itself. A gentleman who lived across the street from the tree, William H. Jackson, bequeathed the eight-foot-wide tree to itself, circa 1832, with this legal statement: “For and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree and the great desire I have for its protection for all time, I convey entire possession of itself and all land within eight feet of the tree on all sides.”
The Tree That Owns Itself, Athens, Georgia
As recounted by Wikipedia, “The original tree, thought to have started life between the mid-16th and late 18th century, fell in 1942, but a new tree was grown from one of its accords and planted in the same location. The current tree is sometimes referred to as the ‘Son of the Tree That Owns Itself.’” The tree is recognized by National Register of Historic Places 1975, but almost certainly not by any court of law. (More about the tree here.)
Did law scholar Christopher Stone have this tree in mind when he wrote his famous 1972 law review called “Should Trees Have Standing?” His point – written in the fevered early days of the modern environmental movement – was to suggest that courts should recognize the rights of nonhuman beings in western courtrooms.
The Embassy of the North Sea
Another creative idea is to give distinct elements of nature political representation. Some folks in The Hague, The Netherlands, founded “The Embassy of the North Sea” in 2018 as a way for the sea to own itself. As the “About” section on its website explains:
“Diversity is in the interest of all life. Therefore, direct political representation of the sea and the life within it is necessary. The Embassy of the North Sea was founded on the principle that the North Sea owns itself. Here, the voices of plants, animals, microbes, and people in and around the North Sea are listened to and involved….
“The Embassy researches how non-humans, from phytoplankton to ship wrecks and cod fish – can become full-fledged members of society. We have plotted a route through to 2030, firstly learning to listen to the sea before we learn to speak with it. Finally, we will negotiate on behalf of the North Sea and all the life that it encapsulates.”
The Self-Owning Forest (via Digital Technology)
Even techno-solutionists seem to be jumping on the idea of sovereign nature, albeit through the narrow lens of their own high-tech vision. A Silicon Valley-inspired project called terra0 is proposing that blockchain software, artificial intelligence, and remote sensors be used to enable a forest to self-govern itself. In the capitalist/libertarian mindset, this means that the forest should have the capacity to manage itself as a business. Using a high-tech system (devised by humans presumably), the forest could selectively choose which of its trees are suitable to cut for timber, and then self-authorize the sale of those trees, based on algorithms that some programmer would write.
The idea is that the forest’s selective monetization of itself would allow it to "self-own" itself as a “digital autonomous organization” (or DAO). This is an idealized but elusive organizational form that many self-styled tech visionaries are striving to create. The “forest as a DAO” would ostensibly give it sovereignty over its future and even (if terra0 gets its way) generate a universal basic income for everyone. Terra0 describes itself as
“a group of developers, theorists, and researchers exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere. Driven by a keen interest in remote sensing, machine learning, and distributed ledger technology, we develop tools for the management of natural ecosystems and resources via the creation of meshes of interacting decentralized autonomous organisations. We believe that these key technologies give us the opportunity to rethink existing and ineffective governance and regulatory structures and that they will play a crucial role in creating a sustainable, resilient, and biodiverse future.”
In more technical terms, terra0 describes the forest-as-DAO idea as “a scalable framework built on the Ethereum network that provides automated resilience systems for ecosystems.” For more, see also this TEDx Amstelveen video by Hilde Latourvideo by Hilde Latour(at 8 minute timemark).
Personally, I find the vision set forth by terra0 rather monstrous: a world “where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.”
How do machines confer loving grace on us? And who oversees the designers as they presume to re-program forests as business-like DAOs? There are surely many kinks to work out in humanity's laudable efforts to sync with the more-than-human world.
If you’re a good ancestor of the Enlightenment, you probably believe that “nature” is something entirely separate from us. We moderns live at a sanitized distance from messy biophysical realities, after all. Lately, this casual premise of ours has been taking some serious hits, however, with the acceleration of climate change, species extinctions, collapsing coral reefs, cataclysmic weather events, and more.
In recent weeks, I've noticed a big uptick in the number of creative overtures to the realm previously known as nature (a term that implies that humanity and nature are separate). I decided to bring together some of the more imaginative gambits that I've encountered.
What underlies each example, it seems, is our aspiration to treat “nature” as a living system of diverse elements, each with its own agency and imperatives. Or as Oren Lyons, a Native American Faithkeeper of the Seneca Nation, put it years ago: “What you people call your natural resources, our people call our relatives.”
So how do we get better acquainted with our nonhuman relatives?
A New Pronoun for the Natural World
Robin Wall Kimmerer, the celebrated author of Braiding Sweetgrass, suggests we should start with the idea of using a new pronoun when referring to nature. In a recent essay in The Ecologist magazine, she urges us to avoid the use of the pronoun “it” in such circumstances:
“Objectification of the natural world reinforces the notion that our species is somehow more deserving of the gifts of the world than the other 8.7 million species with whom we share the planet. Using 'it' absolves us of moral responsibility and opens the door to exploitation. When Sugar Maple is an 'it' we give ourselves permission to pick up the saw. 'It' means it doesn't matter….
"Singing whales, talking trees, dancing bees, birds who make art, fish who navigate, plants who learn and remember. We are surrounded by intelligences other than our own, by feathered people and people with leaves. But we’ve forgotten. There are many forces arrayed to help us forget – even the language we speak….
"In indigenous ways of knowing, other species are recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility.
Kimmerer informs us that the proper Anishinaabe word for beings of the living earth is Bemaadiziiaaki. Since that's a mouthful for we English speakers, she suggests shortening it to “ki” or “kin.” “Might the path to sustainability be marked by grammar?” asks Kimmerer.
Eco-co-operativess called Zoöp
In the same vein as a new pronoun for nature, a Dutch webpage called Zoöpis calling for a new type legal entity that recognizes collaboration between human organizations and multispecies ecological communities. The term “Zoöp” is short for “zoöperation,” which itself is a combination of the word “co-op” (short for “co-operation") and “zoë” (Greek for "life").
The zoöp concept is based on the idea that the profit-maximizing greed of capitalism is overriding most human and nonhuman lives, so a different organizational form is needed. The stated goal of Zoöp is to “strengthen the position of nonhumans within human societies,” to “contribute to ecological regeneration in a way that resists extractivist dynamics,” and to apply the Zoöp model “to a wide variety of organizations.” A Dutch law firm is “critically assessing the zoöp legal structure and developing the charters and documents required to establish actual zoöps,” the group’s website notes. I'm curious about how the self-imposed criteria are to be enforced.
The project explains that “its key methods were developed in a public research trajectory of Het Nieuwe Instituut that took place during the Terraforming Earth Labs (2018), the Neuhausacademy for more-than-human knowledge (2019), and the Venice Exploratorium (2020).”
The Idt Suffix as an Alternative to Inc. or Ltd.
In yet another innovation along these lines, the Community Economics Research Network – an international group of activist-minded academics with new visions for economic life – has proposed a new suffix to identify an organization as committed to interdependence. Businesses often have “Inc.,” “Ltd.” or “LLC” at the end of their names.
A CERN project called “The Interdependence” proposes that organizations add an "idt" to the end of their name if they “cultivate economic principles and practices that recognize our universal responsibility of mutual care, and strive to bring that understanding into the practice of everyday life.” The acronym idt would signal that the organization intends “to explore, experiment, share and learn together how to create ethical relations of interdependence.”
Already there are a number of enterprises that use the idt tag: Company Drinks idt., a UK community space and social enterprise; Brave New Alps idt., a participatory research project in the Italian Alps; Cube Cola idt., an open source soft drink in Bristol, England; and Trajna idt., a design collective that explores sustainable production in Slovenia that “works towards supporting multispecies livelihoods.” More about idt. in an Idt Charta statement.
Assigning Legal Personhood to Nature
Years ago the impulse to affirm our kinship with nature has manifested in the “rights of nature” movement. The tactic here is to assign legal personhood to mountains, rivers, and forests, and other elements of the Earth so that they can be properly “represented” in courts and legislatures. The states of Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, and India have already enacted laws giving specific legal rights to nature.
But now this bold move in jurisprudence have found a footing in North American law. In February 2019, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, approved Lake Erie Bill of Rights Charter Amendment, which authorizes people to sue polluters on behalf of Lake Erie.
Self-Owning Trees
While nature’s rights as a legal doctrine is fairly new, the idea that nature is alive and sovereign has a long history, even in pockets of western culture. In Athens, Georgia, local lore celebrated the “Tree That Owns Itself for more than a century.
There is a huge white oak tree at the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens that is said to have legal ownership of itself. A gentleman who lived across the street from the tree, William H. Jackson, bequeathed the eight-foot-wide tree to itself, circa 1832, with this legal statement: “For and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree and the great desire I have for its protection for all time, I convey entire possession of itself and all land within eight feet of the tree on all sides.”
The Tree That Owns Itself, Athens, Georgia
As recounted by Wikipedia, “The original tree, thought to have started life between the mid-16th and late 18th century, fell in 1942, but a new tree was grown from one of its accords and planted in the same location. The current tree is sometimes referred to as the ‘Son of the Tree That Owns Itself.’” The tree is recognized by National Register of Historic Places 1975, but almost certainly not by any court of law. (More about the tree here.)
Did law scholar Christopher Stone have this tree in mind when he wrote his famous 1972 law review called “Should Trees Have Standing?” His point – written in the fevered early days of the modern environmental movement – was to suggest that courts should recognize the rights of nonhuman beings in western courtrooms.
The Embassy of the North Sea
Another creative idea is to give distinct elements of nature political representation. Some folks in The Hague, The Netherlands, founded “The Embassy of the North Sea” in 2018 as a way for the sea to own itself. As the “About” section on its website explains:
“Diversity is in the interest of all life. Therefore, direct political representation of the sea and the life within it is necessary. The Embassy of the North Sea was founded on the principle that the North Sea owns itself. Here, the voices of plants, animals, microbes, and people in and around the North Sea are listened to and involved….
“The Embassy researches how non-humans, from phytoplankton to ship wrecks and cod fish – can become full-fledged members of society. We have plotted a route through to 2030, firstly learning to listen to the sea before we learn to speak with it. Finally, we will negotiate on behalf of the North Sea and all the life that it encapsulates.”
The Self-Owning Forest (via Digital Technology)
Even techno-solutionists seem to be jumping on the idea of sovereign nature, albeit through the narrow lens of their own high-tech vision. A Silicon Valley-inspired project called terra0 is proposing that blockchain software, artificial intelligence, and remote sensors be used to enable a forest to self-govern itself. In the capitalist/libertarian mindset, this means that the forest should have the capacity to manage itself as a business. Using a high-tech system (devised by humans presumably), the forest could selectively choose which of its trees are suitable to cut for timber, and then self-authorize the sale of those trees, based on algorithms that some programmer would write.
The idea is that the forest’s selective monetization of itself would allow it to "self-own" itself as a “digital autonomous organization” (or DAO). This is an idealized but elusive organizational form that many self-styled tech visionaries are striving to create. The “forest as a DAO” would ostensibly give it sovereignty over its future and even (if terra0 gets its way) generate a universal basic income for everyone. Terra0 describes itself as
“a group of developers, theorists, and researchers exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere. Driven by a keen interest in remote sensing, machine learning, and distributed ledger technology, we develop tools for the management of natural ecosystems and resources via the creation of meshes of interacting decentralized autonomous organisations. We believe that these key technologies give us the opportunity to rethink existing and ineffective governance and regulatory structures and that they will play a crucial role in creating a sustainable, resilient, and biodiverse future.”
In more technical terms, terra0 describes the forest-as-DAO idea as “a scalable framework built on the Ethereum network that provides automated resilience systems for ecosystems.” For more, see also this TEDx Amstelveen video by Hilde Latourvideo by Hilde Latour(at 8 minute timemark).
Personally, I find the vision set forth by terra0 rather monstrous: a world “where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.”
How do machines confer loving grace on us? And who oversees the designers as they presume to re-program forests as business-like DAOs? There are surely many kinks to work out in humanity's laudable efforts to sync with the more-than-human world.
If you’re a good ancestor of the Enlightenment, you probably believe that “nature” is something entirely separate from us. We moderns live at a sanitized distance from messy biophysical realities, after all. Lately, this casual premise of ours has been taking some serious hits, however, with the acceleration of climate change, species extinctions, collapsing coral reefs, cataclysmic weather events, and more.
In recent weeks, I've noticed a big uptick in the number of creative overtures to the realm previously known as nature (a term that implies that humanity and nature are separate). I decided to bring together some of the more imaginative gambits that I've encountered.
What underlies each example, it seems, is our aspiration to treat “nature” as a living system of diverse elements, each with its own agency and imperatives. Or as Oren Lyons, a Native American Faithkeeper of the Seneca Nation, put it years ago: “What you people call your natural resources, our people call our relatives.”
So how do we get better acquainted with our nonhuman relatives?
A New Pronoun for the Natural World
Robin Wall Kimmerer, the celebrated author of Braiding Sweetgrass, suggests we should start with the idea of using a new pronoun when referring to nature. In a recent essay in The Ecologist magazine, she urges us to avoid the use of the pronoun “it” in such circumstances:
“Objectification of the natural world reinforces the notion that our species is somehow more deserving of the gifts of the world than the other 8.7 million species with whom we share the planet. Using 'it' absolves us of moral responsibility and opens the door to exploitation. When Sugar Maple is an 'it' we give ourselves permission to pick up the saw. 'It' means it doesn't matter….
"Singing whales, talking trees, dancing bees, birds who make art, fish who navigate, plants who learn and remember. We are surrounded by intelligences other than our own, by feathered people and people with leaves. But we’ve forgotten. There are many forces arrayed to help us forget – even the language we speak….
"In indigenous ways of knowing, other species are recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility.
Kimmerer informs us that the proper Anishinaabe word for beings of the living earth is Bemaadiziiaaki. Since that's a mouthful for we English speakers, she suggests shortening it to “ki” or “kin.” “Might the path to sustainability be marked by grammar?” asks Kimmerer.
Eco-co-operativess called Zoöp
In the same vein as a new pronoun for nature, a Dutch webpage called Zoöpis calling for a new type legal entity that recognizes collaboration between human organizations and multispecies ecological communities. The term “Zoöp” is short for “zoöperation,” which itself is a combination of the word “co-op” (short for “co-operation") and “zoë” (Greek for "life").
The zoöp concept is based on the idea that the profit-maximizing greed of capitalism is overriding most human and nonhuman lives, so a different organizational form is needed. The stated goal of Zoöp is to “strengthen the position of nonhumans within human societies,” to “contribute to ecological regeneration in a way that resists extractivist dynamics,” and to apply the Zoöp model “to a wide variety of organizations.” A Dutch law firm is “critically assessing the zoöp legal structure and developing the charters and documents required to establish actual zoöps,” the group’s website notes. I'm curious about how the self-imposed criteria are to be enforced.
The project explains that “its key methods were developed in a public research trajectory of Het Nieuwe Instituut that took place during the Terraforming Earth Labs (2018), the Neuhausacademy for more-than-human knowledge (2019), and the Venice Exploratorium (2020).”
The Idt Suffix as an Alternative to Inc. or Ltd.
In yet another innovation along these lines, the Community Economics Research Network – an international group of activist-minded academics with new visions for economic life – has proposed a new suffix to identify an organization as committed to interdependence. Businesses often have “Inc.,” “Ltd.” or “LLC” at the end of their names.
A CERN project called “The Interdependence” proposes that organizations add an "idt" to the end of their name if they “cultivate economic principles and practices that recognize our universal responsibility of mutual care, and strive to bring that understanding into the practice of everyday life.” The acronym idt would signal that the organization intends “to explore, experiment, share and learn together how to create ethical relations of interdependence.”
Already there are a number of enterprises that use the idt tag: Company Drinks idt., a UK community space and social enterprise; Brave New Alps idt., a participatory research project in the Italian Alps; Cube Cola idt., an open source soft drink in Bristol, England; and Trajna idt., a design collective that explores sustainable production in Slovenia that “works towards supporting multispecies livelihoods.” More about idt. in an Idt Charta statement.
Assigning Legal Personhood to Nature
Years ago the impulse to affirm our kinship with nature has manifested in the “rights of nature” movement. The tactic here is to assign legal personhood to mountains, rivers, and forests, and other elements of the Earth so that they can be properly “represented” in courts and legislatures. The states of Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, and India have already enacted laws giving specific legal rights to nature.
But now this bold move in jurisprudence have found a footing in North American law. In February 2019, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, approved Lake Erie Bill of Rights Charter Amendment, which authorizes people to sue polluters on behalf of Lake Erie.
Self-Owning Trees
While nature’s rights as a legal doctrine is fairly new, the idea that nature is alive and sovereign has a long history, even in pockets of western culture. In Athens, Georgia, local lore celebrated the “Tree That Owns Itself for more than a century.
There is a huge white oak tree at the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens that is said to have legal ownership of itself. A gentleman who lived across the street from the tree, William H. Jackson, bequeathed the eight-foot-wide tree to itself, circa 1832, with this legal statement: “For and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree and the great desire I have for its protection for all time, I convey entire possession of itself and all land within eight feet of the tree on all sides.”
The Tree That Owns Itself, Athens, Georgia
As recounted by Wikipedia, “The original tree, thought to have started life between the mid-16th and late 18th century, fell in 1942, but a new tree was grown from one of its accords and planted in the same location. The current tree is sometimes referred to as the ‘Son of the Tree That Owns Itself.’” The tree is recognized by National Register of Historic Places 1975, but almost certainly not by any court of law. (More about the tree here.)
Did law scholar Christopher Stone have this tree in mind when he wrote his famous 1972 law review called “Should Trees Have Standing?” His point – written in the fevered early days of the modern environmental movement – was to suggest that courts should recognize the rights of nonhuman beings in western courtrooms.
The Embassy of the North Sea
Another creative idea is to give distinct elements of nature political representation. Some folks in The Hague, The Netherlands, founded “The Embassy of the North Sea” in 2018 as a way for the sea to own itself. As the “About” section on its website explains:
“Diversity is in the interest of all life. Therefore, direct political representation of the sea and the life within it is necessary. The Embassy of the North Sea was founded on the principle that the North Sea owns itself. Here, the voices of plants, animals, microbes, and people in and around the North Sea are listened to and involved….
“The Embassy researches how non-humans, from phytoplankton to ship wrecks and cod fish – can become full-fledged members of society. We have plotted a route through to 2030, firstly learning to listen to the sea before we learn to speak with it. Finally, we will negotiate on behalf of the North Sea and all the life that it encapsulates.”
The Self-Owning Forest (via Digital Technology)
Even techno-solutionists seem to be jumping on the idea of sovereign nature, albeit through the narrow lens of their own high-tech vision. A Silicon Valley-inspired project called terra0 is proposing that blockchain software, artificial intelligence, and remote sensors be used to enable a forest to self-govern itself. In the capitalist/libertarian mindset, this means that the forest should have the capacity to manage itself as a business. Using a high-tech system (devised by humans presumably), the forest could selectively choose which of its trees are suitable to cut for timber, and then self-authorize the sale of those trees, based on algorithms that some programmer would write.
The idea is that the forest’s selective monetization of itself would allow it to "self-own" itself as a “digital autonomous organization” (or DAO). This is an idealized but elusive organizational form that many self-styled tech visionaries are striving to create. The “forest as a DAO” would ostensibly give it sovereignty over its future and even (if terra0 gets its way) generate a universal basic income for everyone. Terra0 describes itself as
“a group of developers, theorists, and researchers exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere. Driven by a keen interest in remote sensing, machine learning, and distributed ledger technology, we develop tools for the management of natural ecosystems and resources via the creation of meshes of interacting decentralized autonomous organisations. We believe that these key technologies give us the opportunity to rethink existing and ineffective governance and regulatory structures and that they will play a crucial role in creating a sustainable, resilient, and biodiverse future.”
In more technical terms, terra0 describes the forest-as-DAO idea as “a scalable framework built on the Ethereum network that provides automated resilience systems for ecosystems.” For more, see also this TEDx Amstelveen video by Hilde Latourvideo by Hilde Latour(at 8 minute timemark).
Personally, I find the vision set forth by terra0 rather monstrous: a world “where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.”
How do machines confer loving grace on us? And who oversees the designers as they presume to re-program forests as business-like DAOs? There are surely many kinks to work out in humanity's laudable efforts to sync with the more-than-human world.
On February 17th NCDD held our first call of 2021. This all-network call asked participants to share where they are putting energy into their work this year. They proposed topics they would like to discuss with others, and we had about 6-7 active sessions going on simultaneously. It was a great networking event!
Topics mainly focused in a few areas:
Online engagement, including expanding participation, access, and inclusion
Diversity, equity, and inclusion
Building others skills and increasing the value of good process
In the wrap-up of the event, the groups shared highlights from the conversations, and plans to continue talking or explore further. It was an inspiring session, and it helped NCDD learn more about what we can help support through programming in 2021.
If you would like to see the introduction and the wrap-up, check out the call recording here. Half of the event took place in breakouts, so the recording only captures the main room conversation, which provides a good recap of what happened in each room.
The topics were proposed in a spreadsheet which can be accessed here. Those who proposed the topic and others interested shared names and contact information. Some groups even shared link to their notes! If there is a topic of interest, feel free to connect with those who said they are interested.
Is there a topic we missed? Feel free to share it in the comments!
The Educating for American Democracy (EAD) Roadmap and related materials are now public on an interactive website. This has been my top extracurricular priority for the past year and a half (working along with many wonderful colleagues), and I’m excited it’s out.
There will be a free national forum to discuss it later today, and you can register to attend here.
In The Wall Street Journal, six former U.S. education secretaries (Lamar Alexander, Arne Duncan, John King, Rod Paige, Richard Riley and Margaret Spellings) write together:
Despite our differences on policy and priorities, we believe that the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy provides a promising path. The project is the result of a 19-month collaboration among more than 300 scholars, educators, practitioners and students from diverse backgrounds. The ambition of this plan is to re-establish civics and American history as essential components of education.
Or, Be Nice, Not Machiavellian, in Professional Networking
Today, I led a discussion for the department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation’s Lunch & Connect series, which we run to keep people connected despite the pandemic. My meeting was titled: “Prepare to Act Naturally! … Or, Be Nice, Not Machiavellian, in Professional Networking.”
For the talk, I created a handout, which is available here: etw.li/networking.
We recorded today’s talk, which you can watch here:
If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader or email, then click here.
If you enjoyed this video, consider sharing it with anyone looking for thoughts about professional networking in higher education.
In the video, Dr. Kelly Bradley mentioned a resource that I may get ahold of and be able to share with you here, updating this post.
It’s that time of year again, where we start preparing our kids for the upcoming Civics End of Course Assessment here in Florida. So here are some decent resources from across the internet that you might find useful. Of course, we must always keep in mind that any review should begin with making sure your kids are familiar with the Civics Test Item Specifications, because it tells you, and them, exactly what they need to know.
Civics360 is a free, interactive civics review tool to help Florida students improve their understanding of civics. It provides a flexible approach to instruction and review, and features:
Narrated Students Friendly Videos review the important content for most benchmarks
Viewing guides for each video
Student Friendly Readings for each Benchmark Clarification, available in English, Haitian-Creole, and Spanish
Vocabulary activities
End-of-Course Assessment-style guided review questions for each benchmark
End-of-Course Assessment practice tests
Additional Civics Resources to Facilitate Learning and Review
We have written about these tutorials before, and they are the first resource I recommend for both instruction and review. They are excellent for a flipped classroom model as well. If you are planning on using them as a review resource, I recommend assigning students only the parts of the tutorials they need, and it would be more effective to perhaps set these up in learning stations across the classroom. You could require that students screen-capture or write down responses to the assessment elements in order to ensure completion and comprehension. (Please note that the site initially loads slowly for some reason!)
The recorded review sessions, available for free at the bottom of the FLVS page, do a good job covering elements of each of the four reporting categories that will be assessed on the EOC. Because they are about 2 hours long, you will want to preview each one and determine where you might want students to focus their attention. They may also provide you with a model for your own approach to classroom-based reviews. I especially appreciate how an effort is made to integrate assessment elements.
You will also want to check out the FLVS Civics EOC Practice test, which may be of use to you, though as with anything, you should decided how effective or appropriate it will be for your kids. Again, however, this shouldn’t be the first time that students are being exposed to these types and styles of items. Answers to the practice test items are available here. Note that answers are actually explained as well, which is an excellent element of review. I would suggest actually having students explain WRONG answers. If they can tell you why an answer is wrong, they should have a much easier time of figuring out why an answer might be right!
We wrote about this review model before, and it may be one that you find useful as well. It worked well for Randall Middle School, and it is a positive way to mix things up a little for both you and your students. We explored this model in great detail in this post, and I encourage you to take a look and see if it is something you might like to do.
Mr. Kula, social studies teacher at Westpine Middle School in Broward County, has compiled a number of quality content rich and illustrated study guides for the Civics EOC that could be useful for you. While they don’t cover every benchmark, what IS there is effective, and broken down by topic. These would be appropriate for students to use in conjunction with a written review or in small groups using an ‘expert group’ teaching model.
Ruckel Middle School, in Okaloosa County, has developed a tool using Quizlet that provides students with flashcards for review. These might be useful as a bellringer or exit slip activity as you wrap up content this year and start to transition to in depth review.
These are just a few of the quality review resources that you might find beneficial. If you have any additional resources to share, please shoot me an email or leave it in the comments! And don’t forget that we continue to offer our teacher professional development series on the ins and outs of civics instruction and effective classrooms!
When I met Andreas Weber ten years ago, I was amazed at his audacity in challenging the orthodoxies of Darwinism and conventional biology. Only later did I realize how much his thinking about living biological organisms has to say about the commons. Andreas is a theoretical biologist and ecophilosopher based in Berlin, Germany, who proposes that science study a mostly unexplained and radical phenomenon -- aliveness!
Andreas is my guest on the latest episode (#12) of my Frontiers of Commoning podcast this month. It’s a provocative 45-minute conversation that may have you re-considering some the nature of life, biological processes, and evolution.
Weber rejects the neoDarwinian account of life as a collection of sophisticated, evolving machines, each fiercely competing with maximum efficiency to be the fittest in the laissez-faire market known as “nature.” Instead, Weber outlines a different story of evolution, one in which living organisms are inherently creative and expressive in their struggles to thrive. This struggle is not just about competition, but about symbiotic, enduring cooperation.
This re-framing of the evolution story not only forces us to rethink how life emerges and evolves, but how our entrenched categories of thought about the political economy – nature as the template for our nasty, brutish free-market economy – is simply wrong.
For Weber, life and evolution cannot really be discussed without talking about the “subjectivity” and creative agency of all living organisms. That’s because life is not a collection of fighting machines; it’s a dynamic web of living organisms engaged in a creative drama of interdependency. The heart of the evolutionary drama, Weber insists, is the quest of all living systems to express what they feel and experience, and in so doing, adapt to the world and change it.
If I may crudely summarize Andreas’ thinking in a sentence or two: relationality, aliveness, subjectivity, and wholeness are central to the functioning of healthy living systems. But western, modern Enlightenment thinking (including conventional science) and capitalism don't get it. They are determined to disassemble wholes into their component parts, regard causation in fairly simple, mechanical terms, and to objectify life and assign it essential traits.
Andreas argues that this mindset is far too parochial. It helps explain why modern societies have failed to deal effectively with the pandemic, climate change, and other ecological crises. In a recent lengthy essay, Sharing Life: The Ecopolitics of Reciprocity, https://in.boell.org/en/2020/09/10/sharing-life-ecopolitics-reciprocity Weber – taking a cue from indigenous cultures – explains how a “new animism” could help reorient our perspectives in constructive ways. We might begin to see that we need to enter into the relationality of the world as active participants, and not presume, as scientists do, that we can truly be neutral, “objective” observers.
Weber’s essay proposes animism as a strategy to readjust humanities’ relationship to earth – the shared life of human and nonhuman beings. He argues that “the insistence of western culture to rely only on a material science and to declare aliveness an illusion is a colonization of the living cosmos, which severs humans from their aliveness and destroys the lives of other beings – humans and non-humans alike.” Animistic cultures, then, can help guide us through a process of “western self-decolonization” and a realization of a new conceptualization of the Anthropocene, in which human and non-human agency working together contribute to “a fecund earth.”
