Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Meeting Sustainable Development Goals in Medellin

This is our first attempt to publish google slides to the web and then embed the code in the blog. And below is our first attempt to publish a Cesium-ion story map:


Tuesday, April 18, 2023

In defense of rethinking subdivisions and fragmentation -- using Blender 3d to teach urban ecology

 Chapter ?:  In defense of Subdivisions and Fragmentation


We’ve been taught, as environmentalists, to eschew “subdivisions” and fight “fragmentation”.  We learn in biology about how “habitat fragmentation” is the nemesis of conservation, understanding how the “edge effect” leads to erosion of any given conservation area.  We use the idea of an ice cube -  plop a big hunk of ice down on the table and it will slowly melt.  Chop it up into small fragments with a radically increased surface area to volume ratio and you can watch it melt away in real-time.  It is chilling (if you will excuse the backwards pun).
But is this the way landscapes hosting wildlife really operate? Is this the way the other ANIMALS and plants (and fungi and microbes) see it (or “experience it”)?

There is also the idea in biology that “MOSAIC” landscapes support more biodiversity.  Permaculture teaches us how to USE the edge effect to increase the niche space of an landscape.  By contouring an environment with berms and swales, with patches of forest and savannah, wetland  lowlands and dryland uplands, we can radically increase the amount of habitat for both crops and wildlife. The increased surface area can be everything from a marvelous location for microbiome/biofilm formation to new nesting sites and shelters for all kinds of critters.

So, should we be in praise of and defense of fragmentation and subdivisions too?

I think one of the big problems lies in the monolithic way we think of landscapes and the usual villain is the concept of heroes and villains, wildlife and humans, wilderness and the built environment, black and white, BINARY ways of thinking.
If we see “wilderness” as a big hunk of ice that is under siege by the melting effects of chainsaws and un-managed fires and impermeable paving over and cookie cutter housing construction and shopping mall development (And don’t forget the parking lots, Reg.  Yeah, the parking lots.), well then, of course fragmentation is a threat.  If we see the wilderness as a monolithic thing, as a virgin, inviolate in principle, ruined when deflowered figuratively and literally, then of course its invasion by “development” is a tragedy.  We use the words of the jealous patriarchy:  virgin forest, untrammeled, unspoiled wilderness.  This was the point made so eloquently by William Cronin in “Uncommon Ground” subtitled “Getting Back to the Wrong Wilderness”.  He and the authors in that landmark edited volume took pains to point out that what conservationists saw as “wilderness”, particularly our majestic national parks, were really gardens managed by native americans gardens that flourished with biodiversity precisely because their indigenous stewards managed the landscape with prescribed burns and culling and pruning and influencing species composition. 21st century science has shown us that the more predators in a mature and complex environment, the more prey species.  Today’s archeology, documented and  explained in “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and Wengrow, shows that the native peoples of Tampa and Lousiana actually INCREASED the abundance and biodiversity of shellfish beyond what natural systems devoid of human presence could have done.   Humans can be VERY good IF we have the right ethics.

Imagine, our built environment, our buildings and the fences that subdivide the land COULD (theoretically) IMPROVE the prospects for wildlife survival. We could make them THRIVE. We could create a true ZOOTOPIA.

But we need to change our paradigm. And we need to rethink sprawl – what we sprawl, how we sprawl, WHY we sprawl.

Supposing we look at fragmentation and subdivision in a new way.
Blender 3D may help us visualize this “new look” (after all, it is visualization software).

Let’s start with a plane.  A nice green plane:


What could we grow on a simple plane?
Well, clearly we can grow grass.  A Florida man’s dream: a monocrop of St. Augustine which we can mow and blow and weed and spray with biocides.

This is what an unfragmented plane looks like with no subdivisions on it.  Because of the way Blender 3D and other spatial geometry program works, there really isn’t much we CAN put in that plane.  I mean, we could substitute the grass picture with another picture that has a little more diversity in it, but it would be an illusion – the plain plane geometry doesn’t have any SPACE for more than one object.



Here is what it looks like with a picture of a lawn that has a few more species on it:



But all I can put on that single, untrammeled plane of plain geometry is ONE single image.  I certainly can’t put any flowers on it, or any critters.  To do that I would have to ADD geometry.
How do we do that?
By SUBDIVIDING THE LAND.

Yup, we create a subdivision:

Here is the plane without subdivision:


And here is the plane plainly subdivided into “four lots”:


Now I can QUADRUPLE the amount of biodiversity on this landscape:



I was able to subdivide the plane into four lots and create 4 new materials with image textures and assign each different plant species to a different plot.  I’ve multiplied the amount of possible biodiversity.

So now logic suggests that, up to a limit (depending on available resources and the needs of different species) I can keep subdividing the land and adding new organisms, creating vastly more niche space with each subdivision.  It is a lot like the keyhole garden I built at Rosebud out of cinder blocks, each a microhabitat for a different plant.



3D artists get it.  Developers don’t.
The problem is that 3D artists are subdividing to make things MORE COMPLEX while developers are subdividing to make things simpler.  Developers, as Yale professor James C. Scott points out in “Seeing Like a State: How Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have FAILED”, (which all of us in graduate school in Urban Planning cut our teeth on)  are trying to “dummify” the population and render landscapes more “legible” by the most myopic of humans. They are looking to create, as one HOA board member in the sprawl that surrounds Rosebud Continuum wrote to me, “UNIFORMITY and CONFORMITY”.  He wrote to me in our facebook group “Hale No! The Citizens Coalition for Responsible Development” as if it should be obvious that such uniformity and conformity were virtues worth defending. He really meant he has fantasies of control and wants to “retain resale value” to other possible home owners who harbor such fantasies.  He likes cookie cutter homes with nondescript lawns because of their sheer simplicity.


So let’s push back. 

Let’s change the paradigm and challenge the developers and commissioners and planners using the deeper understanding we get from our studies.  They are using the notion of “subdivisions” all wrong. They are applying the idea of “fragmentation” spuriously.

These are the mental transformations that occur to those of us who work in 3D/5D visualization; we begin to see how people are misusing terminology and abusing possibility management.

Here is my Blender plane subdivided into 16 lots, each with a different material assignment:



As you can see above, because I have designated a new material space to each subdivision, I can now go into the Shader Menu and add at Texture Coordinate Node and a Mapping Node to the Image and Principled BSDF and the Material Output and add a Florida Panther.  The image came in far too large for the actual square, so I’ve made these modifications (connecting the UV of the Texture Coordinate to the Vector of the Mapping Node and connecting its mapping node to the Mapping Node of the image), modifications which are metaphorically akin to what a zoo or wildlife park would have to do, feeding and taking care of the panther whose real range outside the zoo is thousands of kilometers – no, you can’t really fit panthers into a zoo exhibit.
But these are the sacrifices we make when we subdivide.


At least we can put a white tailed deer in the landscape to sustain the panther – it comes in too big, of course, for the square size we assigned it, so we have to modify the scale:




The point should not be lost on you though – if we didn’t subdivide the landscape and all it had on it was grass, neither panther nor deer could survive at all.  A monolithic landscape contains too few “textures”.  It becomes obvious if you think of a texture as a niche space.  An ecosystem is made up of a huge variety of overlapping niches. It is a food web, enormously complex. 
To model it properly you can’t use a two dimensional plane or any rigid geometric volume. 
Cubes don’t work, Cones and Pyramids and Spheres don’t work – the biosphere isn’t a sphere at all, there is nothing “smooth about it”.

Yet we insist on building cubes and rectangular boxes to live in.



Blender shows us, however, that when we further subdivide the world in 3 dimensions, adding a vertical component, we can radically increase the biodiversity – the cube that stands in for our house or building has a roof space amenable to rooftop gardens, if only we would elevate biodiversity in both physical space and in our esteem and importance.
The side walls receiving sunlight (east, south, and west in the northern hemisphere) are now amenable to the wall gardens made famous in Madrid.  And this is a mere box – imagine if we were to subdivide the space further, like the Empire State building – why we could create a modern analog of the hanging gardens of Babylon!

From the perspective of wildlife, every surface, every crenulation, every crevisse and abutment screams out “niche space available FOR RENT”.  The problem isn’t fragmentation or subdivision, it is UNIFORMITY AND CONFORMITY.  It is a LACK OF SUBDIVISION, a lack of true space – niche space – which is the thing that, from an animal or algae or fungus or microbes or plants perspective, is what really counts.

We need more subdivisions – planned well, to maximize biodiversity.  The rest will take care of itself, if only we allow it!


Saturday, April 15, 2023

AD Heroes of the Year

 




To listen to the news, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that garbage was some kind of insoluble “wicked problem” – methane from your food waste is said to be the third largest contributor to the greenhouse gasses causing global warming-induced climate change, macro-plastics and micro-plastics in our oceans are said to be soon more numerous than fish – and it is all true.  Yet to listen to the cheerful awardees and speakers and vendors at the “AD (Anaerobic Digestion) and Biogas Industry Awards” conference sponsored by ADBA (Anaerobic Digestion & Bioresources Association) and WBA (World Biogas Association)  in Birmingham, England, which I attended a couple of weeks ago, you would be hard-pressed not to believe that humanity was joyfully in control of and basically done with the garbage problem – “consider it solved”!


And that is all true too.
In certain places.


I know it for a fact – I live and teach several of these paradigm-shifting solutions at home every day – and because of that fact, I was one of those cheerful, optimistic awardees, nominated for and ultimately receiving and taking home the “AD Hero of the Year” award for 2023.  


Since I moved to Egypt in 2003 to work on my Ph.D. in the Environmental Analysis and Policy field, specializing in Urban Planning and Urban Ecology,  I have devoted the last two decades  to studying and helping solve the global garbage crisis. 


The Awards Ceremony in Birmingham brought me and my team from our NGO “Solar C³ITIES” (“Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Solutions”) not just to receive accolades for our work in zero-waste education over the past decade and a half but to participate in a conference whose stakeholders are unabashedly enthusiastic about sensible and often simple technologies and the policies emerging around them which we are, as scientists and engineers, educators and businesses and policymakers, uncharacteristically confident can eliminate all of the problems associated with “production and consumption residuals” – valuable resources that people outside our industry erroneously consider “waste”.








Our Solar CITIES team members were recognized with 6 finalist nominations and  4 awards in three categories:






I gratefully received “AD Hero of the Year”.  Our Solar C³ITIES co-founder and my former student Kathy Puffer received the “Women in Biogas” Award, and our other co-founder and Solar C³ITIES CEO Janice Kelsey was short-listed as a ”Women in Biogas” finalist. 


Solar C³ITIES was short-listed for “Education Campaign of the Year,” while Kathy Puffer’s online “Biogas Education Hub,” which grew out of our applied STEM curriculum development work together in New York and Haiti, received “Highly Commended”.  Janice was brought up on stage to accept the winning  Education Campaign Award for our Solar C³ITIES  colleague Boma Mohammed Chi who took his own training with Janice and Solar CITIES. He has since become a world-renowned trainer-of-trainers, founding the “Common Initiative Group / RRECAM Group”, teaching small-scale biogas in his native Cameroon. 












The recognition our work received last month speaks to an old adage that has become a  “lived truth” that we have “life-tested” every day since I first incorporated Solar C³ITIES  in  Cairo, Egypt, in 2006 while living and working with the Zabaleen trash-recycling community:

  “One man’s trash is another’s treasure”. 


We have been teaching our own applications of these ideas in our international Solar C³ITIES network for the last 17 years. For 15 of them, we have been building our own household and community-scale biodigesters, teaching others around the world how to build and operate their own, too, so as to eliminate 100% of so-called “organic waste” at the point of generation and rendering the rest of the “trash” amenable to efficient and cost-effective recycling – even ‘upcycling’ . We learned from the Zabaleen – and quickly realized when we applied their paradigm to our own homes and communities  – that once you have removed or washed out the organic part of the ‘waste stream,’ (usually using it as a valuable input to a biodigester)  what remains behind (clean plastic, cardboard, paper, metal, glass) is now easy to shred, grind, granulate, crush and store. Because it no longer contains any material that would otherwise rot and stink and attract vermin, we can (and do!) easily transform it into value. 


 My wife and I stopped “taking out the garbage” five years ago. We turn all of our organics into clean fuel and fertilizer, as we have for the past 15 years, but are now selling or building with everything left over.  We will NEVER give away our “trash” to the municipality again!  


Transformed into slurries and powders and granules and fuel and fertilizer through our community scale home biogas systems and food grinders and shredders and hammer mills and other pieces of simple technology, 100% of our “garbage” is now valuable.   Even our #7 (“other” and supposedly “non-recyclable”)  plastic is now super useful (combined by us and our students with our crushed-glass-sand to make beautiful sculptures for the Florida Wildlife Corridor Curriculum Project at Rosebud Continuum Eco-Science Center).  We are an Education Hub in the “Precious Plastics Movement”.

Consider it solved; consider it done.

Likewise, the market-led and policy-driven ideas we are championing in our Solar CITIES PCGS think-tank/do-tank sustainability education approaches, ideas that were being lauded and celebrated at this international conference in England, are the result of people “seeing for themselves” what we know:  that forward-thinking municipalities now have the know-how, the knowledge base, the lived experience and ALL of the technology necessary to end the scourge of wasted resources once and for all. 


Educator-practitioners like me and our team and allies, who share our findings and experiences through open-source platforms like our “Solar C³ITIES Biogas Innoventors and Practitioners” Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/methanogens), where experiences and ideas and technologies are being shared daily by over 15,300 active members, and our blogs, like http://zabaleen.blogspot.com/, that teach everyone with an interest everything they need to know about “the gold in that there garbage” (ideas  I learned when doing my doctorate living with the Zabaleen people and other trash recyclers) are filled with hope because in our little corners of the world, most waste no longer exists. 


 These are messages I have been sharing and teaching in my work at the Patel College of Global Sustainability here at USF for the last 7 years in my “Food-Energy-Water Nexus” and “Climate Mitigation and Adaptation” and “Envisioning Sustainability” and “Waste Not Want Not: Repurposing Refuse as Resource” classes which are all extensions and complements to the Systems Thinking and Food, Energy and Water and Policy concentration and core courses taught in our college. 


In Systems Thinking, students learn that “transcending paradigms” usually has greater leverage than a mere change in the material or physical domains; we follow the work of Donella Meadows (Limits to Growth) and teach that the act of moving from “things-to-processes-to-goals-to-paradigms”  is often less effective than starting with a broader vision of sustainability and applying systemic change through improved intent, a change in the way we THINK of things. To end the wasteful scourge of “garbage,” we have to remove the metaphorical trash can in people’s heads, not just put more recycle bins at the curbside.

Critics of programs that rely on “technical fixes” to big problems will, of course, speak of “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” – they rightly tell us it doesn’t matter how nice or efficient the chairs are or how many recycle bins you have on deck,  or how comfortably positioned they are or how efficient the trash collection processes are if the entire ship is going down or if the garbage is being dumped overboard in the end. Nonetheless, when you find the right technologies and processes, such as we saw in action in England, you can’t help but leverage their existence into improved goals and paradigms. You can’t unsee the technical solutions once your mind is trained to see how they apply to the broader problems.  At some point, we all start to see the world through the lens of the Zabaleen, whose lived experience as entrepreneurial recyclers over the past century has taught them, and through them taught me, that there is “no such thing as waste”, that “waste” should never be used as a noun, but should always be a verb or adjective: folks, we are “wasting resources”, we are “wasting time”, all of those production and consumption residuals are marvelous and precious materials, valuable assets and resources, being “WASTED”.


A conference like the one surrounding the AD Industry Awards Ceremony in England is one that brings together systems thinkers, professional and academic,  who each are working in different domains, from the relational (transcending paradigms) to the material (changing techniques and creating more efficient technologies).  By moving through “intent”, “design”, “natural capital,” and “processes,” the paradigm of the World Biogas Council (which emphasizes a “win-win-win-win-win” approach to materials management)  shows its power for rapid true systemic change and explains the palpable sense of hope we all experienced in England and that made the awards, we can now leverage toward that change feel meaningful. 


We got to interact with the Dutch company Mavitec (https://mavitecgreenenergy.com/)

 with their mixed-municipal-waste solving “paddle mills”and micro-plastic elimination depacking equipment,  and with Kinetic Biofuels (https://kineticbiofuel.com/) with their surface-area-enhancing straw briquette system that eliminates the burning of agricultural residues;  we got to have long and inspiring talks with Thomas Runde of  Germany’s Tietjen GmbH (https://www.tietjen-original.com/produkte/schnelllaeufermuehlen/) whose all-purpose hammer mills and waste-to-value-chain processing equipment is being applied to developing countries that are too often on the receiving end of “first world” garbage dumping, and Germany’s Biotec ( https://www.biotec.de/)  whose slogan is “This is not a material problem, this is a behavioral problem”; we met with England’s Strategic and Technical Directors Ian Cain and Ian Sawle of  Ekogea (https://www.ekogea.co.uk/ ), who created a company to  make allies of bacteria and harness the magic of the microbiome to tackle climate change through a ‘Circular Farm Economy’; we chatted with the folks from  Ulster (https://ulstershredders.com/) and learned about their dual access industrial shredders that end the need for scarce landfills in island economies, PRM Waste Systems (https://www.prmwastesystems.com/), proving their “enviable reputation for cost-effective solutions to industrial waste and recycling problems”  and Atlantic Slurry Pumps (https://atlanticpumps.co.uk/), with a robust peristaltic design that enables the most caustic and abrasive materials to be moved to the right place in an industrial ecology. We talked with  India’s Rotopump company (https://rotopumps.com/)  with its superbly designed Progressive Cavity Pumps and their game-changing “durable single helix shaft in a replaceable double helix cavity” designs that reduce energy needs and O&M costs and move heavy sludges from where they are a burden to where they are a valued commodity.  We learned from  Spain’s Ferrobio (https://ferrobiogroup.com/en/home-2/) about their desulfurization and crop-enhancing iron hydroxide solutions, met with Brazil’s Mulheres Do Biogas (https://mulheresdobiogas.org)

, with their gender-empowering policy and education network, and visited hundreds of other solution providers. During those two days of presentations, workshops, and vendor meet-ups, we once again saw that everywhere out there is a vital piece of the paradigm-changing puzzle,  simply waiting for us to connect the dots.

Of course, this is where our NGO, Solar C³ITIES (https://solarcities.solutions/) , has always operated and what my teaching at PCGS (https://www.usf.edu/pcgs/about/th-culhane.aspx ) has always focused on: connect those community catalysts, inspire others to see things through the circular economy and zero-waste lens, and apply hands-on training and life-tested experience to eliminating “waste” wherever we go. 


 It is our dedication to this mission that brought us to the world stage at the ADBA Awards last month.  It is our continued focus on this very realistic goal that will drive our problem-solving work into the future, a future where we know there is only one place for humanity to put and keep its “garbage”: in the past!




_________________________________________________________________________

Photos for illustration can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set?vanity=thculhane&set=a.10167764961185551


Tuesday, February 21, 2023

The Culhane Instructor Presence Plan

MODULE 1: INSTRUCTOR PRESENCE PLAN 

First Day of the Semester:

First Day Attendance & Learner Introductions

Introduce Yourself

Tell Us About Your Vision!


Abstract:

In brief:  Introduce yourself within this discussion board. Let us know who you are, where you're from, and what you're looking to get out of this course, and what you hope to contribute to envisioning sustainability. Feel free to also respond and interact with your peers. 

(Note that you don't have to necessarily use writing for your introduction to you and your vision; you can use any communication tools available.  I am passionate about video production myself. )

This video introduction talks about my own journey toward Zero Waste:



This one talks about my family's commitment to sustainability at home: 


This one talks about political values as they relate to sustainability and climate change:
https://youtu.be/_oMejbF-7bI



 Now you know a bit about me.  Let's talk about YOU!

In detail:

FIRST WEEK ATTENDANCE POLICY

Being attentive to climate change mitigation and adaptation; preparing to model alternative futures, communicate best practices, and create action and hope-inspiring narratives.

Are you PRESENT?

Like, really present?

USF Policy asks us to submit your "attendance" the first day of class, but in a course about climate change mitigation and adaptation, attendance is far more than just a human gluteus maximus seated in a chair in a classroom or in front of a computer screen. 

We want to know "what were you attending to while we gathered today to share our mutual interests in perpetuating a healthy world?" What were you paying attention to?  What did you see, hear, experience, learn, say, contribute? What went on during the time we had together?

Therefore... to be marked "present" we need some record of our presence -- not just your "body" but your entire mind-body-spirit complex.  What were you thinking about tonight? How does what we discussed in class connect with YOUR life, your feelings, your ambitions, hopes and dreams, fears and reservations and concerns, your state of BEING (which the German philosophers, like Hegel and Heidegger called your "Dasein")?

For this assignment, assignment number one, write a relational summary (minimum one page, at least three paragraphs) that introduces you to the class and lets us know how your presence on this earth since your arrival and your presence in class this first day is/was connected to the course topics that we are here to talk about. 

Turn it in and you will be considered to have been PRESENT and in ATTENDANCE!

PLEASE NOTE THAT A RELATIONAL SUMMARY NEED NOT BE WRITTEN.
VIDEOS INTRODUCING  YOURSELVES AND RELATING YOUR LIFE EXPERIENCE AND EXPECTATIONS TO THE TOPIC ARE ENCOURAGED!!

After these are submitted, you will have a chance to PEER REVIEW each other's relational summaries so that you can get to know each other better right out of the gate!  In the peer review, comment on what the other person shared about their experience and relationship to the class topic and connect.  Each person gets three peer reviewers. This helps you not only build community and end anonymity but gives you a chance to get to know the peer review process that makes science one of the most powerful and important disciplines in democratic decision making.

The peer process will win you extra points!

SPECIAL CLARIFICATION:
The rubric asks you to include at least three ideas/quotes/comments from OTHER STUDENTS in the class each time you do a relational summary, as a way of creating a group discussion, creating a community, sharing experience, being attentive to one another and supportive of one another along the journey to erudition.

Obviously, if you are one of the first three students you couldn't possibly comment on student work that hasn't been submitted!  So what to do?
Well, the answer is simple -- the first few students to submit a relational summary or "attentive to the nexus" document gets BONUS POINTS.  
If you are the first you get 5 bonus points. If you are the second or third you get 3 bonus points, plus you can earn another 2 bonus points for including information from the first or second student's document.  This way you can not lose!

But wait! There's more!

In Culhane classes, you can ALWAYS GO BACK AND REVISE and EARN MORE POINTS.

My father was a professional writer for film and television and magazines and an author of books.  He told me "Son, the trick to writing is REWRITING".  Every draft was an improvement on a previous draft.  So I carry that philosophy into my assessment in education: everything you do can be rewritten, added to, appended, updated, and the more you do the more you earn. The trick to getting points is to make valid points about a subject -- to have something to say and then refining it so you have even more to say. So if you didn't get points because you had no other student's work to reflect upon today, you could always check back tomorrow or next week or ANYTIME during the semester and keep adding to your document, and let us know and ask for MORE POINTS.

Capice?

The more you learn the more you earn. The more you do the more you get.  Think of everything you do in our classes as a work in progress, as an evolving document, as a chance to up your game, to level up, to get better and better.  

Regarding "due dates":

I set "deadlines" as suggestions for when things SHOULD BE DUE to help keep us all on track and to help you manage and budget your time.  But I never close the assignments/discussions and you are encouraged to always go back and reexamine what you wrote and improve and add more as you learn more. Your documents, like you, are precious testimony to the time you spent on this earth, and are how you present your best self to the rest of us.  See your work as a piece of you that is always growing.  Keep copies of what you did and who you were, for the sake of understanding your journey, but know that in the end what counts is not where you were, but where you end up relative to where you were! And note that NOBODY IS PENALIZED OR LOSES POINTS FOR BEING "LATE".  I would like you to set your own schedules and be responsible for getting things done in a timely fashion so that we can respect each other's time and the need for people to get feedback and interact.  But we are all adults now and we understand that people sometimes can't get to things within the ideal time frame.  What we have as members of a class is a relationship and when what we are doing or can't do impacts other's schedules we simply need to communicate. 

We are all "works in progress" and we are here to help each other, and our world, be the best that it can be."


Thanks,

Your Captain, on the voyage to Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

First Week:

Hi "team sustainabilitist envisioneers",

Believe me, we get it: You're BUSY. 
Often overwhelmed. 
Even though it's only the first week.
But we got your back. 
As your instructor I got your back.
To succeed in this world of multiple overlapping crises and opportunities we always need to hit the ground running, don't we? We are racing the "climate change clock". That is true.
But this isn't a race against anyone, and it certainly isn't a competition.  We need to solve the problems you came here to study by solving them together.  Because we are all in this together.  All in the same life boat.
Our goal this first week, out the gate then, is  to get to know one another and start understanding the possible problem solving  synergies that will emerge if we work as a close-knit team.
 The best way to keep on track as we dash toward 11th hour implementation of the important sustainability solutions we study, is to understand what motivates each of us and what demotivates us so that we can harness the best of each of us.  

My goal is to create an "instructor presence" that gives you confidence that EVERYTHING YOU DO can be a net contribution and ally to sustainability and your own and our collective success -- in school, out of school, on planet earth, off planet earth...
As sustainabilitist envisioneers in training we need to figure out ways to turn waste into value (even supposedly "wasted time") and liabilities into assets. 
So before we plunge into the science and policy content of our course,  let's look at the diagram of "instructor presence" (which should really be "instructor and student presence" in my opinion) and discuss the PSYCHOLOGY of learning and applying vital knowledge so we can
1) Enhance our "degrees of availability" for one another
2) Increase our "level of responsiveness" to one another
3) Engage with and help any one of us who is struggling (eco-anxiety is a real thing as is school anxiety)
4) Engage with "procrastinators" and help us manage our own "procrastination" 
5) BUILD A COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS and
6) Improve the overall connections that we create here this semester




How much easier it would be to build that community and achieve these goals and truly be PRESENT for one another if we could meet face to face.
Alas, we are in an asynchronous on-line environment, so we need to work together with every PRESENTATION tool and technique available to increase our PRESENCE so it FEELS like we are really together, activating those atavistic properties of the human psyche that create a feeling of motivated tribal belonging.

As I and all of our faculty at USF  continue our training in On-Line Education (at USF we are all going "back to school" and take a 4 week course in advanced on-line course design for a new state level re-certification) I ponder (and would like your feedback on) how to more effectively engage those who are said to be "procrastinators" and those who are "struggling". 

First off, I want you to know that I am steeped in my decades long studies of Environmental Psychology and Environmental Sustainability and Justice and approach this from the angle that if any of you are struggling, we should be able to find a course design and delivery system that ends that struggle and makes you feel energized and confident. 

But we need YOU to let us know your learning style, your challenges, your schedule and your possible conflicts so we can CUSTOMIZE this semester's experience to YOUR needs.  That is our first week task. That way nobody risks stumbling.  Since we aren't in a competition we need to eliminate anxiety about "falling behind".  There is no "ahead" or "behind", there is only, as Yoda famously said, "Do, or do not do".  You are in an asynchronous online course because, assumedly, you like to learn at your own pace.
We also want you to be able to learn in YOUR OWN WAY. So you will have to TELL US what that feels like and how we can accommodate one another through our diversity and multiple intelligences.

A course without coercion

Since I subscribe to McGregor's Theory Y and Ouchi's Theory Z and eschew Theory X entirely, there is no way that I am ever going to use force or intimidation or power differential or threats to try and extrinsically motivate. That isn't a sustainable or just psychology.

What I am thinking about now and want to work on with you this first week and throughout the semester is how to create an ECOSYSTEM of performance engagement that works like a rainforest or coral reef (utilizing metaphoric biomimicry). 
 
The idea is this:

An earthworm (Annelidae) and a bee (Hymenopterae) and an ant and Gopher Tortoise and a tree all perform vital functions for the ecosystem, but none of them need to be "coerced" to do their part; they contribute merely by "being", by "living", by following their own self interest.

Adam Smith famously thought that we humans could do the same too (as explained in his famous treatise "The Wealth of Nations") but so far, since scholars and teachers and businesses and politicians failed to utilize his "Theory of Moral Sentiments"  his optimizing "invisible hand" has yet to manifest in a sustainable or just fashion.

I'm inclined to believe that we haven't been able to achieve our putative democratic free-thinking free-market ideals because we almost never get to practice them in school. If we did, then, I submit, we would see the flourishing of a free society.

To prove this hypothesis I am employing, as you will discover in all my courses, Plato's Maieutic Method.  It is a gentler variant of the Socratic Method (Socratic Dialog, the "dialectic" can become too combative when people focus more on debate than co-creation; maieutic is Greek for "midwife" and involves each of us shepherding or stewarding ideas and projects into fruition rather than ranking them in a Darwinian fashion.)
We are striving to create an Instructor and Student Presence that is responsive to and accommodating to ALL student needs and capabilities.

The question I want to pose to you this week (with relevance to the question of how entire cities, like Medellin, Colombia, can climb out of poverty and crime and environmental injustice) is "how can we design our courses so that you can get meaningful credit, like the otherwise blind earthworm, by simply BEING YOURSELF?

In other words, how can we "harvest" your activities -- the ones that come natural to YOU, the ones you are intrinsically motivated to do without any cajoling -- so that you can perform academically at a dignified respectful and professional and productive level that can help you become a true asset to society and be rewarded with the value that will make your life joyful?

Is there a way to eliminate the "struggle" and the tendency to "procrastinate"?  What would it look like if a course, instead of trying to externally "motivate you", instead took advantage of the MOTIONS you are already going through?  You are all already motivated by something and are moving toward some personal goals.  How do we ALIGN what you are naturally doing or are interested in doing with the goals of our courses?
That is the challenge I would like to solve with you in order to make sure NOBODY falls short.

A word on procrastination and struggle:

The word "procrastinate" is fascinating in the context of Sustainability and Justice:

"pro- ‘forward’ + crastinus ‘belonging to tomorrow’ (from cras ‘tomorrow’)."

By calling students who "put off until tomorrow what they could (or should?) be doing today" "PROCRASTINATORS"  I submit that we are passing an unfair judgement.

Miriam Webster says, "The word means moving or acting slowly so as to fall behind, and it implies blameworthy delay especially through laziness or apathy."

But this is judgmental and comparative in debilitating rather than motivating ways!

First of all, we should never DEFINE people using nouns that fix their identities -- any child psychologist can tell you this. You don't say, "You are bad" you say "you are BEHAVING badly", lest you stigmatize a child.

You need to use, as many indigenous groups do, the -ING form of a word, the present participle or gerund. It suggests a verb in action, in motion, and this motion can be turned in a different direction.
A noun just sits there, like a rock, inert. Dead. Unfeeling, unthinking, un-motivatable.
"You are a procrastinator, right?"
"Yes sir, so it is useless trying to motivate or change me. I yam what I yam."

But what if we pro-crastinate in order to do BETTER tomorrow?
What if we actually have faith in tomorrow and know that we will be more capable the more that time passes?
Is it possible to reward students for allowing their best work to "BELONG TO TOMORROW"?
If that is the case and there are no "procrastinators" but merely people who don't wish to be judged while in an unfinished state, surely we can find ways to reward progress, to reward motion. We don't have to motivate, we merely have to observe the motions you are already making and align ourselves with them. With you, as you progress toward a better tomorrow.
There should be NO struggle and certainly no "struggling students". Do you struggle as you walk when you are moving where you want to go?
Only if people put barriers in your path.
What if we REMOVE ALL BARRIERS?
When we say "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and stop passing judgement, are you not then eager to experiment, knowing there is no "failure"?
And can't we reward you for those experiments all along so that you never have to put things off to tomorrow?
Please, sustainabilist envisioneers, DON'T LET THE PERFECT BE THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD!
Please internalize that message this first week of class, and start EXPERIMENTING. Start creating and SHARING. 

What are your unfinished thoughts about this?



Every Day:

The reach for "perfection" is a HABIT.  You shoot for the stratosphere, you often fall to the earth. You shoot for the moon you may make it to the stratosphere or even the Exosphere. You shoot for the stars you may make it to Mars.  
Whatever your goal is, you have to make the striving for it a daily practice, a routine. We never get off the ground by merely staring at the sky and dreaming. Dreaming is mandatory and vitally important, but so is doing the leg work and the handwork and the wing-work.  

Every day in this class I would like you to try to make at least 4 points and try to do so for 5 days out of the week consistently. 
You can think of "making points" as taking notes relevant the course material, engaging in a discussion/conversation about the course material or beginning to write up your thoughts/summarize the material and try to relate to it.  Making points should ultimately come to feel easy if you make it habitual. If you think of points as dots that make up a line and lines as "thread like"  things that make up bigger figures to put together a larger coherent picture, then making or adding points to the thread of  a discussion isn't such a big deal.  The thing is that in our classes you can trade in  the  points  you think fit the bigger picture  for credit points. If you "fail to get your point across" you simply try to make it again, just as, if you were adding points to an image that don't seem to work with the big picture, you would move those points or try to make them again within the lines of the picture you are co-creating with others.

Your goal  -- to perform at what commensurate institutions of higher learning would consider A-level work -- is to make roughly 20 points a week, to contribute roughly 20 points per week.  That can involve putting the points together into a larger picture, which is much more fulfilling, but it doesn't need to.
What we know from working with "point clouds" in the field of Photogrammetry and computer mesh modelling for 3D and XR applications (something I teach in my courses) is that every point can be useful whether you are the person rendering the larger mesh result or not!

There really is "no point in putting off until tomorrow what you can do today" (i.e. no need to "procrastinate") because you really won't be "better off" tomorrow than than today since "getting better all the time" (as the Beatles sang) involves those habits, that practice, that wing-work. 
Make a habit of making points, of adding points and watch how the points add up!

Think of it like doing chin ups or push ups.  

If you do 4 chinups or four pushups  a day you will get much stronger much faster than if you wait until the end of the week and try to do 20.  Let's face it -- when it comes to chinups I'm betting most of you can't.  Well... I can't (the most I've ever done at one session is 10 in a row!).   
Procrastination is self-defeating, and since nobody is judging you in my courses, there really is no advantage to putting things off.  

 We don't "struggle" in my classes any more than most of  you would struggle to do four pushups each day rather than 20 once a week. But if you are really out of shape, let's use time rather than numbers -- if you spend 11/2 to 2 hours per day on each of your courses -- attending class, attending events, working on projects,  reading, researching, studying,  writing, creating, discussing, sharing - you won't burn out and you will be working at A-level performance. It's like those gamified self-paced language courses: If you study a language for 15 minutes a day you get fluent faster than if you put an hour in every week.  There doesn't have to be any struggle at all.  
If you do falter or slack off, you will have to invest more time in building that mental muscle but we want to encourage you NOT to cram!
My courses have no "quizzes" or "exams" or "tests" (unless you WANT them and DEMAND them! That is up to you) and no surprises.  Actually we ask YOU to surprise us -- we want you to be looking every day for something you find interesting that you want to share with the class. 
We want you to "make a point" by pointing out interesting information, problems and solutions in the sustainability space!
Try to do that every day, at least once a day, including around four points that you find worth sharing.
That is an easy route to an A!

Every Week:

We've found over three decades of experimentation with this Theory X and Z driven Platonic  "Maieutic Method" that either making an average of 20 points a week or investing 9-10 hours per week and documenting that journey is sustainable and can be anxiety and struggle free while still building your mental muscles and skillsets in ways that make put you in the top tier of performance when you bring your gifts to the so-called "outside world".

Our course is "gamified" and works a lot like one of those frequent flyer miles and more cards. We ask you to make 20 points a week so you can accumulate 320 points over the 16 weeks of the course. 
You can then trade those points for your "grade".  320 nets you an A plus, 90% of 320 an A-.  80% a B-, 70 % a C-.  You can choose your own grade just as you can choose how to spend your airline mileage points.  You are responsible for your final destination.

It takes about a paragraph for most human beings to make a valid point (that is why we have paragraphs in the first place, right? Each paragraph presents and supports  a single idea) so we are basically encouraging you, if you are writing, to create about 20 paragraphs of course related material per week. That is the equivalent of a 4 to 6  page paper single spaced per week.  If you are like me, you may prefer to make your points in notes and conversations each day and then string them together in a coherent "relational summary" paper or essay each week.  

If you are doing creative multi-media work then you string those notes and discussion/conversation results together into a larger creative project and you can also "bill us" for the time you invested, just like real artists do in the "gig economy" when figuring out the value of "piece work".
Simply try to produce some deliverable to share every week.

In my courses, if you work with other members of your team (which we highly highly encourage!) your "point cloud", added to that of others, will create emergent properties that should end up engaging you ever more deeply, just as when you start working on a jigsaw puzzle together with others you get more and more excited the more puzzle pieces are put in place and the big picture really starts to manifest!

Make a habit of checking in with all of us at least once a week to see that "big picture" and dip into the well of knowledge for sustenance and social support.  You should find the "struggle" vanishes and the collective consciousness takes over and taps into your ancient cooperative capabilities to be a creative and productive member of a community!

Just as many people go to church or temple or mosque or ashram each week to rejuvenate their spirit and community connections, think of checking in with everyone here each week to get that sustenance, feedback and support.

Semester Milestones:

Every 4 weeks (roughly once a month) you should post your "progress report" to the class on Canvas as a summary "bill with evidence" stating what you have been working on and linking us to your deliverables. They don't need to be "finished products"; we are interested in sharing the JOURNEY with one another.  
At the "midterm" we want to see how close each of us has gotten to making and sharing 160 points and to see HOW each of us chose to use those points creatively.  We want to share our essays and videos and artwork and music and poetry and 3d models and landscapes and games and research reports in a festival like atmosphere to draw inspiration from one another.

You are encouraged to work together in groups or teams; it is highly suggested, but in our courses we don't "mandate" or force anything. We model and encourage and let each of us use our free thinking intuition to guide our choices. In fact much of the course objectives to create a more sustainable and just world is to provide an environment of freedom and consensus building that is non-coercive, creating curricula "of the students and teachers, by the students and teachers, for the students and teachers!"

By the end of the semester we will have another "milestone" festival of sharing our creations.  There should be no anxiety, it is simply a chance to share your creativity and acumen with an attentive audience.  You can and do  make more points by participating but you never LOSE points -- however you make your points you trade them in for a grade so the choice of HOW to participate is yours.

Much like the practice of many indigenous peoples who figured out sustainability and justice long long ago we rely on "social suasion" to bring us all together for the sake of the team but wield no hierarchical "Discipline and Punish" prison power (see the work of French post-modernist philosopher Foucault for more on that!).

So that's it -- that is the Culhane "Instructor and Student Presence Plan".  We are here for each other and happy to elaborate.

Remember, you can reach me by email, by text message and personally during my office hours, but since we are sure that most of the questions you have will be somewhat generic and will have answers that could benefit EVERYONE in the course we ask you to ask your questions in our public discussion forums on Canvas, on Perusall and in our facebook groups. That way everyone can joyfully participate whatever tweaking or problem solving we need to do to make our presence in each others' lives as we work to solve the real existential problems of the world a joyous experience.  
Getting through the late anthropocene era and the earth's sixth and largest extinction crisis, with climate change and habitat loss casting dark shadows over all our futures is the real struggle.  When it comes to that struggle, we simply CAN NOT procrastinate!

But of course you all know that. That is why you came to study at the Patel College of Global Sustainability in the first place.  So let's get started.
We got each others' back!