The Utne Reader, long the aggregator of choice for news on a wide variety of topics from a wide variety of sources, has a great new life on the internet: bigger, better, faster. An item currently on their website (click the image above to go there) is worth a look because of the provocatively obvious (to anyone living in a location where water scarcity is already an issue) opening line:

It’s time to confront our long-held, deeply ingrained belief that water should be forever free, Cynthia Barnett contends in her new book Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis, which recently came out on Beacon Press.

And it continues with promise:

“The tradition of free water has been fundamental since ancient times—as absolute as free air, or the right to take in mountain vistas,” she writes. But this notion has finally run up against finite supplies and a hard reality: free water encourages waste, in part because, well, it’s free. Agriculture, businesses, governments, and individuals alike have little incentive to cut down on their use. Barnett suggests that “it’s time to at least listen to what the economists have to say,” but don’t expect politicians to lead the charge:

Politicians steer clear of economists … because their answer to water woes is usually “Raise prices,” which voters don’t want to hear. … There is another group of people who don’t like what economists have to say. The idea of putting a price on water is anathema to many environmentalists and human rights activists who feel strongly that water should be free.

At first glance, we want to go there.  Is it somewhere in the southwest of the United States, or maybe those amazing mountains in Jordan where the dwellings of Petra might be just around the corner?

Herds of Elephant – “It was a shocking experience at this close range.”

Nilgiri Langur- “It was so funny to see this macaque jumping from one tree to another.”

Malabar Giant Squirrel- “This was a lovely sight of a sleeping squirrel.”

But for many of the same factors (growth of internet research and eBooks) as well as due to progress itself, there are specific books that become obsolete almost as soon as they are moved from press to shelves.  Encyclopedias, Road Atlases and Medical Journals are good examples.  So what, then, is to become of those weighty tomes that a generation or two ago held pride of place in every household?

Atlanta based artist Brian Dettmer has taken a creative approach to the recycling of these out of date volumes by going back to his childhood process of carving out books to create secret hiding places.

The artist first sets the book in place with glues and varnishes, and then begins a process he calls ”excavation”, using tweezers, scalpels and other surgical tools he cuts away at the pages like an archeologist, without really knowing what words or images will lie ahead.

“I don’t move or add anything, so the final piece is a collaboration between the existing material and my intervention.”

From road atlas pages carved into enticing geodes, to journals of anatomy that suddenly have the same 3 dimensionality of the bodies they describe, Dettmer’s work metaphorically links the revelation of the printing press to a sculptor releasing imprisoned figures from  stone.

Facing off with the edge of the world, where the gray and blustery waters of the Southern Ocean meet the rocks of Curio Bay, in the Catlins (New Zealand). Photo by Geoff Green.

Today, a post on the Smithsonian blog (sub-blog?) called “off the road” catches our attention.  The photograph on its own would be enough to catch the eye, but reading this fellow’s several paragraphs about a place called the Catlins is enough to get on the raft and start paddling to New Zealand (if, like us, you like faraway places):

A main claim to fame of the Catlins is the area’s high latitude. Slope Point is the southernmost spot of land on the South Island, at 46 degrees, 40 minutes south. Oh, come on, now. Don’t raise your eyebrows and whistle like that. Seattle, for example, boasts a latitude of 47 degrees, and Glasgow goes just under 56 degrees. Yet I’ll grant that the Catlins are farther south than Tasmania, than Cape Town and than most cities in South America. This is, indeed, among the southernmost settled areas on the planet.

It gets better:

I rode my bike to Kaka Point one afternoon to collect mussels at low tide, and in a deeper pool, as I looked for abalone, I saw the tail of a large fish nestled in a crevice. A moment later, lying on my belly, I had it pinned and spent about 60 seconds with both arms in the water, my head half submerged, skirmishing with the struggling animal to get a grip in its mouth. Finally, I emerged with a thrashing fish nearly two feet long with a head like a toad’s and vacant eyes as black as a Patagonian toothfish‘s. I flipped through my New Zealand ocean regulations booklet; the fish, near as I could deem, was a legal catch, so I dispatched it. On my way home, I stopped at Hause Made so Muggeridge could have a look. “It’s what we call ‘rock cod’,” he said—though we failed later that night through Internet searches to pinpoint the creature’s Latin name, which is what really counts in the murky seafood world of “cod,” “sea bass,” “snapper,” and so much other generic nomenclature.

The Blood Flower (Asclepias curassavica) is one of the food plants for the many butterflies which can be seen in and around the Western Ghats. In our butterfly garden it attracts the Plain Tiger butterfly and bees, among other nectar feeding insects. Monarch butterflies will lay eggs on it, and their caterpillars will feed on its leaves. The flower blooms throughout the year.

I think the next 10 years will be the decade of social entrepreneurs. I see lots of talented people who want to solve social problems making serious career changes. Some mainstream design firms have actually set up a whole branch around social innovation. Consulting companies are looking at hybrid models of social change. Increasingly, companies are saying it’s no longer possible to look at customers just as consumers. More and more people understand that social change is no longer a marginal activity. The opportunity is huge to solve problems and to come up with interesting commercial models that can be sustainable.

We have previously linked to articles from the website of another university that writes about issues and ideas that interest us here.  Our interns and contributors have overwhelmingly been students and graduates of universities whose curriculum and extracurricular programming encourage thinking outside the box on community, collaboration and conservation.  We appreciate the broadening boundaries of all these universities.

Photo: T.J. Varghese