sustainable art teacher

My art room is an eco-chick nightmare. Full of non-recycled drawing paper, paper towels, markers, paint etc. They just don't sell many recycled art papers, sure I save the marked on one side ones for scratch work and have even started saving dried out markers to make something or other.

My latest eco art room nightmare is the acrylic paint. I'm teaching middle school painting and it is such a blast! The kids are making groovy, colorful canvases and I love it. But at the end of class there are all these dirty palettes. Now I used to use paper plates for palettes and throw them away but I decided that was too wasteful so now we wash them and by we I mean ME. So all this paint is going down the drain, that can't be good! My latest system is to use wax paper over the palette and throw that away...then wash the palette if there is paint on it. Meanwhile I have a pile of painty palettes on my counter that haunts my middle of the night thoughts.

greenland and me

This morning I stumbled into the kitchen and glanced at the paper. The first words to catch my eye Greenland melting at a much faster rate than predicted. Now they can grow broccoli there for the first time but the sled dogs are suffering, and then I read about a huge plastic gyre in the ocean. Twice the size of Texas. What a way to start the day when what I wanted to write about today was the seven sixth grade girls that came into my art room at lunch yesterday to make posters for the environmental club. How their excited listing of tasks we could try to tackle made me feel hopeful and grateful. They even made up a little recycling song to sing at town hall, and I do feel charmed and happy about their growing awareness and involvement but when I think of that gyre of plastic swirling away in the salt I want to open my mouth and howl like an out of work Greenland dog.

hockey

Today in the Chronicle there was an article about a hockey playing kid we know. My son, J., went to school with him and when J. was in second grade he played a lot with Louie who was in 5th. They were both athletic and outgoing and the age difference seemed to matter less at the tiny school they attended. J. looked up to Louie for his atheletic prowess as well as his warmth and friendliness. I felt a lot of mixed emotions reading this article which describes how Louie is flying back and forth to L.A. every weekend to play hockey. The same mixed emotions I feel about my son's hockey commitments, three practices a week, sometimes three games in a weekend and tournaments that require getting on a plane. He's in 6th grade and could have played at this level a few years ago but we held off as long as we could. Even this year we had many discussions about the stress and the overall toll on our family. Still if we had let him he would have gone to hockey camp all summer and played on the best team he could and gone to as many tournaments as he could. He totally and completely loves the game and has from his first time out on the ice at age 4. So I feel a twinge of guilt that we have held him back from his passion...but HOCKEY?? A sport that requires an incredible amount of electricity to produce the ice and incredible amounts of gasoline to travel to the games. I mean it's pretty much the most environmentally unfriendly sport for a Californian to play. So I feel a huge pile of, not exactly guilt but confusion. Such are the contradictions faced by a green mom in 2007. One small consolation, at least our Oakland ice rink has solar panels....

book meme

Wow my friend and blogger extraordinaire Susan has tagged me to do this.

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why? Truth is I read a lot of magazines...are they paperbacks?

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…hmmm don't know but it would have art, artists books and comfy couchs, oh and magazines.

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…"Be here now" from Be here now by Ram Dass.

4. The author (alive or diseased) I would love to have lunch with would be ….ok I copied this directly from the website and I'm picturing myself having lunch with an author with leprosy ooooooh alive or diseased.....ok alive, not diseased, amazing Lynda Barry.

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…I don't know but Susan's description of Little, Big made me think I should read that one right away. The truth, the complete New Yorker.

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that….would stop time while I was reading so that I could read as much as I want to and don't have time to.

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of….my mortality.

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be….Jo in Little Women or Marlys in Ernie Pooks Comeek.

9. The most overestimated book of all times is….gotta be the Bible.

10. I hate it when a book….has mistakes in it that I can catch.

Happy Indigenous People's Day

The above images are by Mark Brest van Kempen . You can see this one and others in person at the Green City Gallery. He has taken cityspaces and made images of what they looked like in 1701. They create a time machine effect. Answer the questiong I often ask around town what was it like "before"? When the land was unspoiled. My son is reading Ishi in two worlds for school right now. These images and that story create such longing for an imagined past...a human time of learned balance with all the other elements of nature. I dream of it, as I type these links and fling them into the ether...

floods

Today I read about the floods in India. 4000 people are dead and the severity is being attributed to climate change. It made me think of this poem that I heard on the radio by Kay Ryan.
The Fabric of Life

It is very stretchy.
We know that, even if
many details remain
sketchy. It is complexly
woven. That much too
has pretty well been
proven. We are loath
to continue our lessons
which consist of slaps
as sharp and dispersed
as bee stings from
a smashed nest
when any strand snaps—
hurts working far past
the locus of rupture,
attacking threads
far beyond anything
we would have said
connects.