Friday Harbor, WA – Registration for the Spring Marine Naturalist Training Program, presented by The Whale Museum, is available now. The programs dates are April 25, May 2, 9, 16, 23, and 24. The object of this program is to provide a learning experience that assists adult graduates in becoming qualified regionally as professional or volunteer naturalists.
The Year Ahead
by Neil Gaiman
Learn about the origins of the crisis…how the credit crunch led to increasing losses and general panic…what we learned or thought we learned from our experiences during the great depression…if our conventional policy tools will even stem this tide…and then participate in the discussion of these topics and in considering potential solutions.
LOPEZ Island
These days everywhere I go I hear parents, caregivers, and others crying out “Good Job!” to children of all ages. Tiny babies are praised for reaching for a toy or clapping their hands; preschoolers are told “Good Job” when they put on their own shoes or jackets; elementary aged kids are praised for reading aloud or solving a problem; and teens are told “Good Job!” when they do their homework or get themselves off to the school bus on time. Just as books and articles have convinced parents not to spank children or isolate them in “time out” for problematic behavior, the downside of praise is now being examined. Alfie Kohn, author of eight books on the education of children, wrote an interesting article titled FIVE REASONS TO STOP SAYING GOOD JOB! which was published in the journal Young Children. Of course, it’s important to support and encourage children, to love them and show them affection, and to be excited about what they are learning. Let’s think about Kohn’s five reasons not to praise.
Lopez Island
Originally from Los Angeles, Laura Adams came with her husband Steven and their first child (then an infant) to Lopez Island, over twenty five years ago. Like many of us she wanted to raise her family in an environment that was based on values of health, simplicity and community. What she didn’t express, but what was gathered from an interview with her on a rainy Thursday morning in her wood shop, the last value on that list was creativity.
We had just arrived in Milan, on a 12 day trip to Italy.
Bee Callahan lives in a bucolic setting in the Shark Reef area of Lopez Island, amidst ponds, fruit trees, gardens, and chickens. There are plants in every room of her house; especially hoyas which grow up the walls and across the ceiling. Like many Lopezians, she loves to garden and has had a particular passion for tomato plants her whole life. Bee says her first memory is of planting tomato plants with her mother when she was 3 ½ years old.
Farming has been a way of life in the San Juan Islands for a long time: perhaps as long as 2,500 years! Like peasant communities in Europe, native Coast Salish peoples of the islands not only fished, but also raised crops and livestock. Early European explorers observed cultivated fields and flocks of “woolly dogs,” but by the late 19th century, when serious study of Coast Salish languages and cultures began, native peoples had lost most of their land, and exchanged their traditional crops and dogs for potatoes and sheep.