A Künstlerroman
An impactful video called “The Minature Earth” asks just that question, examining what the world would look like if we could turn the entire human population into a small community of 100 people, but keeping the same proportions we have today. Check it out here:
Kind of an exciting time for one of my articles over at Ecoworldly. The article, titled “11 Extinct Animals That Have Been Photographed Alive“, has gone absolutely ballistic. It has somehow attracted well over 230,000 viewers since being posted, so I thought it’d be worth referring from here. Crazy!
If the content sounds depressing to you, wait until you get to many of the comments. You may find some cynical amusement in reading them. The internet is an amazing thing, but it sure can be a compository for idiocy too. Ah well. Check out the article!
The picture above shows the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, one of the 11 featured in the article.
The Guardian published another of my articles from Green Options Media, titled, “Can Bamboo Save Our Forests and Help End Poverty?“.
For future reference, you can succinctly keep updated with all of my articles with Green Options Media at my author profile here.
An article I wrote for EcoWorldly was just syndicated by The Guardian. If you check out the front page of their ‘Environment’ section, you can find my article there under ‘Comment & Analysis’. You can link directly to the article here, titled “Japan Airlines trial biofuels on 747 flights“.
You can also check out the original article here, which was titled, “Japan Airlines’ 747 Flies More Efficiently with Biofuels than with Jet-A Fuel“.
And make sure to keep up with all of my articles over at EcoWorldly and around the Green Options Media network.
I just began a new job doing green journalism writing for Green Options Media, a network of environmental blogs aimed at giving green news and sustainable choices to the inner tree hugger in all of us.
I’m beginning as a writer on one of their blogs, EcoWorldly, which is part of the Guardian Environment Network, and which offers news on sustainability and ecological successes and failures from around the world, to offer advice to those with a green and innovative conscience here in America.
My first blog was just posted, and it would help out a lot if you clicked on this link and checked it out (the more hits I get, the more success I’ll have blogging there): Caterpillars Devour 45 Towns in Liberia: Climate Change Possibly to Blame.
Also, bookmark the site or subscribe to their feeds, and help me out with further posts too. I’ll be posting there pretty regularly.
A few weeks before the holidays I was able to attend a Wend Magazine issue release party, wherein a presentation was being given by one of Wend’s writer-ambassadors, Liz Clark.
Liz was able to secure the funding and sponsorships necessary to purchase and maintain her own sailboat, which she wittily christened Swell, and has already sailed down the West Coast of Central America and out across the Pacific into Oceania, on her way around the world. One of the central themes of her journey is to do it slowly; there’s no rush. She’s a surfer and the voyage is, symbolically as well as literally, an exploration of the world’s waves and swells. She also writes delightfully well, and you can read her updates at the iWend blog.
A few things resonated from her presentation. First of all, I really wish I was on that boat! The themes of her journey embody how I think people ought to live, and she’s definitely not wasting any of the incredible opportunities that life has handed her.
Most of all though, I was overcome with a great sense of peace and freedom while imagining her voyage. There’s got to be a feeling of emancipation you can get from sailing around the world that you can’t get any other way. Bobbing out there, in international waters, left entirely responsible for one’s own existence, you’re your own navigator and you’ve got to be intimately in touch with how the crescendos of the world undulate all around you.
I realized, living vicariously through her many photographs, just how jealous I was for that. Perhaps for some it’d be seen as a frightening and ragged abandon, but for me it’d be all too easy. For me the sensation is more of a vulnerable competency, an amplified uprising desire that surges and yanks at my diaphragm in a profound, primal way that’s been impossible to shake off since the presentation.
If I’m being honest, her story made me ask of myself what any truly good piece of music or writing will implore of its audience: While the world swells, how much longer can I stand to linger, stick around and feign?
Happy New Years to all, whether you’re burying an old year or ringing in the new, whether with nostalgia, angst, or optimism… Auld lang syne!
As previously promised, the second edition of my short series on thinkers who understood inner travel has now been published over at Brave New Traveler. Predictably, it’s titled, “Five Eastern Thinkers Who Understood Inner Travel.”
Although as a fair warning, I’m quite discouraged by how it has been edited. My piece was the first article edited by their new editor, and the changes that were made by the editor were unnecessary, and they make the piece more simplistic and bland than it was originally written. Furthermore, there are a couple of grammatical typos which were actually edited in– not my doing (I wrote with a complaint and the errors still haven’t been corrected). So I apologize if it seems like the wit is ill-timed, or the paragraph transitions are awkward. Maybe you won’t notice because you didn’t see the original, but I wasn’t happy with it.
Nonetheless, you can check it out now and tell me what you think of the list. Who would you have listed? Oh, and I’m regretful to report, for those that took notice before, that it was more difficult to include female thinkers on an Eastern list than it was with the Western one, but I did look for them– I promise!
Continuing my escapades into travel writing, I’ve got a couple of articles posted over at the Australia Travel Guide at WhyGo.com.
Both of the articles are up there as features right now. One is titled “Hiking Uluru, and Why You Probably Shouldn’t“, and the other is titled Australia’s Rainforests: Daintree National Park“.
The idea behind WhyGo.com is to offer guides that go beyond just the How to’s of travel; but to answer the Why’s too, to inspire travel. That makes writing for them particularly enjoyable. I get to write passionately about the places and the adventures I’ve lived and loved.
For those that don’t know, I studied abroad and lived in Australia for a time, and I’ll be continuing duties at the site as a regular writer and guide for Australian travel. I’ve had an itch to get back to Oz since the day I left, but writing these articles is making it downright irresistible. Unfortunately a ticket to Sydney is just not practical right now, but at least the writing offers some consolation to my needy imagination.
Check out the articles, there will be more on the way. And wander the site for some inspiration on wherever you want to go next.
