Homes bedecked with jewels and painted flowers. Whimsical garages with yawning mouths, and lampposts adorned with cast-metal birds. A road cobbled to look like a snake. This is a magical neighborhood, but it’s also a real place. This is the amazing, child-and-adult-designed community of Coriandoline.

Coriandoline was conceptually born in 1990, when a construction co-op in the northern Italian town of Correggio made an amazing decision to become “for inhabitants,” rather than “for habitations,” reports Landscape Architecture. Fulfilling the new ethos meant getting input about housing development design from all members of the community—including children. In 1995, two psychologists started collecting ideas from 700 local children, and fanciful, functional, playful Coriandoline began to take shape. Turning inspiration into brick-and-mortar doesn’t happen overnight: The first residents moved into their new homes, of which there are 20, in 2006.

So, here’s the deal: The article in Landscape Architecture originally was an episode of the Radio Netherlands program The State We’re In. The article isn’t online yet at LA’s website, but you can read a transcript of the broadcast over at Twin Cities Streets for People. What you should absolutely, do, however, is explore Coriandoline’s beautiful, whimsical website. This is one case where a photo truly is worth 1,000 words.

Sources: Landscape Architecture, Twin Cities Streets for People

Image by gurms, licensed under Creative Commons.

Let’s go out on a limb, but not too far, and assume that most people want to behave ethically. Bringing those ethical intentions to fruition is more difficult than you might anticipate, reports The Chronicle Review (subscription required). “To do good, individuals must go through a series of steps, and unless all of those steps are completed, people are not likely to behave ethically, regardless of the ethics training or moral education they have received,” writes psychologist and educator Robert J. Sternberg.

Sternberg’s steps include stages such as recognizing that there is an event to react to, defining the event as having an ethical dimension, and then deciding that the ethical dimension is significant. From there, it’s a matter of taking responsibility, seeking an ethical solution, and, of course, acting on it. There are pitfalls at every phase: finding a way, for example, to avoid taking responsibility (it’s not really my business), or rationalizing away the significance of unethical conduct (it was only a few dollars).

In other news: The Chronicle Review is part of the splendid Chronicle of Higher Education, a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for best writing.

Source: The Chronicle Review

Like the McDonalds of tourism, the proliferation of Lonely Planet has branded and shaped our interaction with the world.  In the winter issue of Geist, Stephen Henighan compares international travel before and after the popular guide book series took root.  He considers early travel narratives by Harry Franck and A.F. Tschiffely, Americans whose journeys favored rough improvisation over guided plans, relying instead on advice from locals and their own observational knowledge.  In contrast, Lonely Planet has effectively homogenized how people think about travel, reducing the experience to a predictable set of outcomes.        

“The company’s formula, laying its easy-to-consult categories over each destination like a grid, has not only charted the world: it has changed it,” writes Henighan.  “By assuring almost everyone that they can travel to faraway places and find familiar comforts and attitudes, Lonely Planet, along with its competitors, has acted as a catalyst in installing cheap hotels, transportation links and English-speaking personnel in locations where otherwise they might not exist.”       

Henighan acknowledges that Lonely Planet has also helped democratize travel through both its mass appeal and its nod to specific groups, such as women, people of color, and the LGBT community.  No small feat, considering that experiences like Franck and Tschiffely’s were once limited to a privileged few.

Source: Geist

Image by The Wandering Angel, licensed under Creative Commons

For most Americans of a certain age, learning how to tie their shoes was a milestone of childhood.  For today’s children this is increasingly not the case, as Velcro closures and slip-ons render shoelaces nearly obsolete.  Sandra Steingraber thinks the loss of shoelace tying as a developmental benchmark illustrates a larger societal shift away from self-sufficiency.

In the Jan/Feb issue of Orion, Steingraber quotes a recent Fortune article which, in analyzing the impact of the decline in oil production, advises: “Learn to garden, and buy some comfortable walking shoes.”  While movements toward community gardening, home cooking, and even a return to farming have taken root, Steingraber notes the lack of such awareness in mainstream parenting literature. 

“The same day Fortune told me to grow my own dinner,” she writes, “my local newspaper advised me on how to help my children build a competitive résumé for college applications...Of the many items on the list of leadership-building activities, all would necessitate me driving someplace in a car.”

Steingraber asks parents to consider the make up of many popular shoes “that derive from barrels of oil and are assembled in faraway lands.”  Furthermore, she wonders how well our society is preparing children to live in “a world more economically and ecologically unreliable” than in the past.  

“What does it mean,” she asks, “at this moment in history, to ‘teach your children well’?”

Sources: Orion

  Image by aussiegall, licensed under Creative Commons

“Suppose you spent 1 million dollars every single day starting from the day Jesus was born, and kept spending through today…You would still have spent less money than Congress just spent.” This comparison opens an anti-stimulus package television ad launched today by the conservative American Issues Project.

By invoking Jesus’ name, the ad suggests that he too would have been opposed to the stimulus plan. It is jarring to think of Jesus—who wasn’t a huge proponent of storing up treasures on earth—spending one million dollars every single day. (Are we to assume that Jesus would have spent nearly all of one day’s million-dollar allowance on this ad?)

What’s odd is that the ad says nothing substantive about Jesus’ views on money. Instead, it manipulates people by referencing Jesus in an ad that’s really about objections to economic policy; it’s a classic example of the unlikely marriage between fiscal conservatives and conservative Christians.

It’s hard to know whether or not the stimulus package will work, let alone what Jesus would have thought of it.

Maybe he would have said something like, “Sell all you possess and distribute it to the poor,” or “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Or he could have looked to Jerusalem’s history for past leaders’ responses to crises. Like when King Jehoash hired carpenters and masons to repair the temple after a period of civil turmoil, or when Nehemiah ended exploitative lending practices and returned peoples’ mortgaged land to them during a famine.

In the latest issue of Tikkun, Josephine Donovan illuminates animal ethics through a feminist lens.  Developed in the 1980s largely in response to books like Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights, the feminist approach to animal care interrogates systems that govern human interaction with animals, such as hierarchical dualism, which values humans over animals.  Donovan questions Singer and Regan’s utilization of natural rights theory to justify their arguments, since it assumes an inherent similarity between humans and animals in order to defend the individual rights of animals.  She calls for an animal care ethic that instead recognizes the differences between humans and animals without privileging one over the other.  In this way feminist engagement with animal care theory attends to both the suffering of individual animals and the political and economic systems which support that suffering.

It should be interesting to note how evolving language around the ethical treatment of animals will infuse related issues, such as sustainable agriculture and global food supply.

Source: Tikkun

In the Fall 2008 issue of Tricycle—an independent magazine that excels at illuminating Buddhist thought for Western readers—Noelle Oxenhandler has a hopeful essay about dementia and the benefits of meditation.

“Already there is compelling evidence that the regular practice of meditation can ease the early symptoms of dementia,” Oxenhandler writes. But keeping your gray matter limber—tapping into the recent craze for brain fitness—is only one of the compelling reasons to practice mindfulness. Meditation also awakens the mind.

“If, as they say in Zen, the rain falls equally on all things,” Oxenhandler writes, “then doesn’t it follow that the bodhi mind—the awakened mind—is bright and vast enough to encompass the fog, despair, and disruption of dementia? … What is mindfulness if not the practice of brining the mind to those places it goes missing?”

A simple example of how mindfulness might benefit those with dementia is kindness practice. Paranoia is dementia’s common, understandable companion. It’s also a frustrating wedge between caregivers and the people they wish to help—injecting that relationship with suspicion, anxiety, even fear. Kindness practice, however, could “make us more resistant to paranoia,” in effect training the mind to open “the door to the unknown with a trusting and welcoming heart.”

“In a dharma talk, I once heard a meditation teacher recount a story about a longtime family friend who was suffering from dementia,” Oxenhandler writes. “Before his illness, this friend had been a highly intelligent and successful man, and he had always been very kind. When the teacher and her husband arrived for a visit, he threw open the door and exclaimed: ‘I have no idea who you are, but do come in and make yourselves at home!’ ”

Image by Gio JL, licensed under Creative Commons.

The simple act of laughing can make people healthier and happier. “Smiling is not just a result of happiness," Michael Castleman writes for Utne Reader’s sister publication Mother Earth News. “It also causes happiness.” According to the article, laughter lowers blood pressure, releases endorphins, and increases the oxygen in people’s blood streams by helping with respiration. And laughter is good exercise, too. One psychiatrist mentioned in the article suggests that people who are unable to exercise should laugh instead. 

Buddhist practitioners also experiment with laughter as a mindfulness exercise. Hasya Yoga, also known as Laughter Yoga, uses group laughing sessions as a breathing exercises to increase mindfulness. Laughter Yoga International now claims 6,000 laughter clubs in 60 countries.

You can watch a video of former Monty Python member John Cleese at a laughter club in India below:

Image by  Yogi , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Researchers have found that sad people watch significantly more television than happy people, Matt Palmquist reports on the Miller McCune blog, though it’s unclear whether sadness causes more TV watching, or more TV watching leads to sadness. The study, based on the General Society Survey conducted from 1975 to 2006, concluded that “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged, with TV becoming an opiate.” Happy people, according to Palmquist, “were more socially and religiously active, voted frequently, and read more newspapers.”

Clutter detracts from our ability to function, tangling our physical spaces and muddling our minds. Streamlining can be a relief, even a rush, but then there are those pesky boxes of unwanted stuff. In the Sept.-Oct. 2008 issue of Natural Home, Utne Reader’s sister publication, editor Robyn Griggs Lawrence suggests a top-notch idea for how to dispose of clutter—and serve the greater good.

Griggs Lawrence hails from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and traveled there this summer to visit family during the aftermath of the floods. She was in the midst of working on her magazine’s Sept.-Oct. issue, which contains advice on how to declutter kitchen space. “While I’m sure it’s little solace to the folks who lost everything, seeing all that stuff lining the streets of Cedar Rapids was a heartbreaking reminder of how lucky I am to be contemplating my own clutter,” she writes in her editor’s note (article not available online).

“When I returned home to Boulder, it was much easier to clear out unnecessary items from my kitchen cupboards. I would love to send them directly to the folks in Cedar Rapids, but wooden cake plates and food processors probably aren’t their most pressing needs right now.”

Isn’t that always the rub? From kitchen appliances and electronic gadgets to appliquéd shrugs and china figurines, most “clutter” doesn’t go far in alleviating those pressing needs Griggs Lawrence saw in Iowa. Not deterred, she decided to take her castoffs to a consignment store and allocate the proceeds for the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation’s Flood 2008 Fund. As September draws near, brining with it the annual migration of college students, I frankly can’t think of a better way to bring “a whole new dimension” to cleaning out closets and bedrooms.

Photo by  sindesign , licensed under  Creative Commons .