If you read this before December 21, good luck to you. Rest assured my wife and I will be preparing for the catastrophe of epic proportions predicted to unfold on that fateful day. In other words, we’ll probably be jockeying for position at the bathroom sink getting ready for work.

I’ve never been one to take end-of-the-world predictions very seriously, mostly because, well, they’ve only been unequivocally wrong 100 percent of the time. One thing I’ve always wondered is what’s the point of trying to be the person who correctly predicts the end of the world? If you’re right, who’s left to give you any credit?

When it comes to the Mayans, scholars much more familiar with their culture than conspiracy theorists and Hollywood writers are have long ago dispelled the notion that the now infamous Long Count Calendar predicts a sudden global demise. Unfortunately, it’s yet another example of conjecture making the news while actual science waits to be considered sexy enough to pay attention to.

While everyone has been distracted by mystical messages hidden in an ancient calendar, we’ve neglected a different Mayan warning that’s actually very real. As environmental analyst and 1995 Utne Visionary Lester Brown reminds us in his new book Full Planet, Empty Plates (read an excerpt) the Mayans precipitated their demise by undermining their food supply, specifically through activities that created catastrophic soil erosion. As Brown puts it, “they moved onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable.” He goes on to connect the dots to contemporary humankind, and—you guessed it—clearly shows that we’re headed down the same environmentally unsustainable path as the Mayans.

So right now, considering that we’re damaging our soil through factory farming and overdevelopment, misusing our natural resources by turning nearly half of the corn we grow into inefficient fuel for our cars, and all the while continuing to contribute in countless ways to climate change, I think it’s good to be reminded of the Mayans. Of course, whether or not we heed the warning their demise represents remains to be seen.

Take the loaded question, “can we feed the world?” The knee-jerk response to this is “no,” but that’s the wrong answer. In a traveling lecture that directly addresses the question, farmer/author Joel Salatin offers some surprising statistics to illustrate just how inefficient we’ve become with food and land use. Aside from the fact that for the first time in human history we’re not eating 50 percent of the food we produce, Salatin points out that a staggering 40 million acres in the United States are tied up in lawn turf, while another 36 million acres are devoted to recreational horses.

My takeaway is that we have the space and capacity to feed the world, but we simply choose not to. We’d rather consume, waste, and consume some more. The culprit, I believe, is a flat-out inhumane obsession with development and progress no matter what the cost. We continue to tolerate and encourage policies and practices that reward greed and neglect human decency. From paving over our world’s most fertile soil to the commoditization of food we’re simply not taking care of the planet, which ultimately means we’re not taking care of each other. 

While we’ll never know exactly what the details were regarding the ancient Mayan civilization’s collapse, the indication is that they weren’t responsible stewards of their natural resources, and the earth stopped giving them what they needed. Maybe they didn’t understand the limits of this planet and humankind’s role in maintaining it, but we do. Here’s hoping the real Mayan warning doesn’t fall on deaf ears.

Follow Utne Reader Editor in Chief Christian Williams on Twitter: @cwwilliams 

Image by cjuneau, licensed under Creative Commons.  

David Wish is the founder and executive director of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides music education for students in disadvantaged public schools. Since 2002, Little Kids Rock has provided meaningful music education to more than 200,000 students nationwide thanks to the support of teachers, volunteers, and music icons such as B.B. King and Paul Simon. David Wish is a 2012 Utne Visionary; below is our email interview with Wish from September 2012.   

Christian Williams: Where were you teaching when you decided to start the after-school lessons and develop the program?
David Wish: I was a first-grade teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area and was very upset that my students were not receiving music education. So I took matters into my own hands and started giving free classes after school for my class. More and more kids wanted to get in on the fun so I kept offering more and more classes. It got to the point where I had to start turning kids away which broke my heart. So that's when I started reaching out to other teachers I knew to enlist their help. Not only did I no longer need to turn kids away, I found their were tons of teachers who wanted to help.

CW: Little Kids Rock has been around for 10 years now. Did you expect this kind of longevity and success when you started?
DW: Time flies when you are having fun! I really can't believe that ten years have passed. I have never pursued success; I have pursued fulfillment. It brings me such joy and satisfaction to watch a young person's life transformed by music. That's where I still keep my focus: reaching kids and making a difference in their lives. That's something we can all do every day of our lives: do something for other people. I don't expect success, I expect impact.

CW: What were your initial goals or measures for success in the beginning?
DW: When I first started, I just wanted to bring music into the lives of thirty first graders. That seemed a big enough goal. Then my goal became reaching another group of thirty, then another. I could see the impact immediately in the way the kids carried themselves, the ways that they expressed themselves and the ways that they connected to school. That's what motivated me. Today, in year 10, over 1,300 public school teachers have decided that they feel the same way and have brought Little Kids Rock programming to over 200,000 kids.

CW: What has surprised you most about the program and how it’s been received by kids and teachers alike?
DW: What has surprised me the most is watching the impact that our teaching methodology and training has on the teachers. I have seen teachers weeping during our trainings because they themselves had internalized negative messages about their own creativity. Our pedagogy validates and elevates them. They say things like, "This has changed me entire view of myself as a creative person," or "I learned more from two days of training here than I did in all my years at the conservatory." That's powerful stuff

CW: Your approach to teaching music differs from the traditional approach in that you emphasize performance and composition over reading notes. When did you realize that kids might be more attracted to learning music this way?
DW: To people who do not make music themselves, this may seem mysterious. However, music is a language and like all languages, we learn to speak them before we learn to read them. We all learned to speak before we went to school. And what did we speak about? Things that interested us. We teach kids to play the music that interests them and we approach it non-notationally, at least at first. When you teach people to play by reading music, it is a mathematical approach. In math, there is usually one right answer and an infinite number of wrong answers. However, when you teach music as a language, there are many, many right answers and making music becomes easier and less intimidating. That was the way that got me hooked. Like so many other people from my generation, I did have music as a kid but the classes I took did not speak to me and yet I loved music. I learned music from my friends, from records and from the street. It became a passion and an obsession but one that developed outside of the academy. Little Kids Rock is my attempt to reconcile this approach with the academy and, in so doing, rock the lives of a lot of kids.

CW: How were you originally able to get celebrity sponsors like B.B. King and John Lee Hooker involved?
DW: Our appeal to celebrities has always been very grassroots and organic. In the early days I would send tapes of our students' original compositions to artists and ask if they'd like to get involved. Upon hearing our kids, people wanted to get involved. I know that sounds so simple but it's true. Once artists come out to see our kids, once they got to see the joy in their faces first hand, once they got to play with them and make music, they tell their other musician friends and our artist outreach is all word of mouth.

CW: Anything else you like to add?
DW: Yes. If you love music then you are innately musical and a music maker. Anyone who ever told you otherwise was lying. 

"Beyond Baby Mozart, Students Who Rock,"New York Times, September 8, 2011

Main site: LittleKidsRock.org

 

Newspapers are being written off by scores of pundits like Clay Shirky, but author, McSweeney’s publisher, and Utne Visionary Dave Eggers is standing up for them. In an interview with Salon, Eggers says the young people he teaches in his 826 Valencia writing program give him hope:

“I think there’s a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues. I think right now everyone’s assuming it’s a zero-sum situation, and I just don’t see it that way.

“Our students at 826 Valencia still have a newspaper class, where we print an actual newspaper, and we do magazine classes and anthologies where they’re all printed on paper. That’s the main way we get them motivated, that they know it’s going to be in print. It’s much harder for us to motivate the students when they think it’s only going to be on the Web.

  “The vast majority of students we work with read newspapers and books, more so than I did at their age. And I don’t see that dropping off. If anything the lack of faith comes from people our age, where we just assume that it’s dead or dying. I think we’ve given up a little too soon.”

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Image by Erik Charlton, licensed under Creative Commons.