Ride for Reading

Bringing books to kids in poor neighborhoods.  Doing it on bicycles. Read all about it. 

Free speakers on campus!

Take a look at the speakers coming to Huxley College in the next few weeks.  First one is this Thursday!

Winter Quarter 2013

	Date/Time	Speaker	Talk Title	Location
	1/16/14, 4pm	Jill MacIntyre Witt	"Climate Reality and Divestment"	CF 125
	1/22/14, 5pm	David Maisel	"Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime"	AW 210
	1/23/14, 4pm	Emma Norman	"Indigenous Coalition Building and Transboundary Water Governance"	CF 125
	1/30/14, 4pm	Yoram Bauman	“The Stand-Up Economist: How Carbon Taxes Can Save the World”	CF 125

Natural Hazards Observer

Welcome back to the winter quarter!  I hope you are staying warm and dry.

Something interesting popped up in my email this morning: the January issue of the Natural Hazards Observer, a free newsletter from the Natural Hazards Center.  This issue has a lot about flu, Typhoon, Haiyan, and sea level rise, but most interesting to us is probably the 1-page article "Pacific Northwest Quake Could Trigger Giant Landslides."  Something to think about!

Kathleen Dean Moore: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

In case you missed this in November, the video of Kathleen Dean Moore's talk at the Whatcom Museum as part of the Vanishing Ice speaker series is now online and totally worth watching. First, she is wonderfully introduced by Western's very own Professor John Miles, and then what follows is a really awesome and inspiring talk about climate change, what people can do, and how to make your life into a work of art by living your values. I have always been a fan of Kathleen Dean Moore's writing, and now I am even more so after watching this. (Also, if you want to read some of her work yourself, check out Western Libraries holdings by searching under her name.)

Biking for Libraries

I was looking for a video on unconferences.  Couldn't find the one I remembered but I stumbled on something better.  A hundred librarians from around the world held an unconference on bicycles, pedaling from Denmark to Germany, and conversing about the future of libraries every evening.  Is that cool, or what?  

Green Libraries are more than just buildings

I happened to take a look at the latest issue of Electronic Green Journal and found this article with the title above.  George J. Aulisio argues, among other things, that a library can itself be a teaching tool.  That's part of what we are trying to accomplish at Western.

Climate Change Haiku

Checkout this Sightline Daily post about  Northwest oceanographer Dr. Gregory Johnson who translated the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report into a series of haiku with lovely illustrations, making some aspects of this complex information attractive and accessible. This is a great example of how science and literary art are not mutually exclusive! As the Sightline article states, Johnson "proves that scientists can also be poets."