Emerging Ideas Roundup

Staff Utne.com

Political Pom-Poms

Lake Worth, Florida, voters have elected the anarchist cofounder of the Radical Cheerleaders to serve as a city commissioner. Even though her Republican opponent outspent her three to one, 29-year-old Cara Jennings' environmental ethic and social justice agenda (along with a lot of door-knocking) carried the day, according to In These Times (June 2006).

Back in 1996, Jennings and her two sisters, frustrated with the boring chants at male-dominated progressive rallies, hit on the idea of Radical Cheerleaders-rabble rousers with plastic-bag pom-poms and chants like 'Shoot the Rapist.' The idea took off, and today there are Radical Cheerleaders all over the world.

Politics' Consolidation Round

Advocates of instant runoff voting (IRV) are claiming victory in Burlington, Vermont, where voters used the system in a 'flawless' mayoral election, reports YES! (Summer 2006). To settle close elections, IRV lets citizens rank multiple candidates and tallies the second choices of voters whose top pick finished third or worse. In Burlington, Progressive Party candidate Bob Kiss initially won just 39 percent of the vote, while a Democrat took 31 percent and a Republican and two independents split the difference. When second choices were tallied, however, Kiss came out a winner and credited his victory in part to the Republican who endorsed the Progressive as his personal second choice.

Gandhi's 9/11

On September 11, we will reflect on the terrorist attacks that forever changed our country's collective memory. For 95 years before that fateful day in 2001, the anniversary many associated with 9/11 was the launch, in 1906, of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to British imperialism. New Yorkers for a Department of Peace, an organization that promotes nonviolence, is planning a citywide 100th celebration of Gandhi's courage and foresight. 'Our aim is to remind people that since this country's founding, peace has been an organizing principle,' says Liz Graydon, the group's state coordinator. Events include a theatrical re-release of Richard Attenborough's 1982 film biography of the Indian nationalist leader. For more information, see www.nyc-dop.com.

Pol tagging

Potential presidential contenders Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Russ Feingold, and others have all been slapped recently with the tag 'p2008.' And no, we don't mean graffiti artists are spray-painting their campaign buses. In cyberspace, 'tagging' refers to websites that let users attach their own descriptive keywords to images, videos, links, blog posts, and articles-harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to classify and organize information. The practice has even given rise to tagging campaigns. For example, the folks at E-Democracy.org, a clearinghouse of online political information, are urging netizens to apply the 'p2008' tag to anything related to the presidential race.

Surfing for a Cause

Social networking software on the Internet helps the lovelorn find their soul mates, allows those with the most arcane of obsessions to find a friend, and now helps progressives connect with causes worth fighting for. Online startups like Care2.com and GoodStorm.com are using matchmaking technology to fight global warming, media consolidation, arctic drilling, and other ills. GoodStorm provides services for progressive organizations to make and sell T-shirts, returning 70 percent of the profit to the groups, and to share information among nonprofit organizers. Care2, with 5.5 million members, features many of the same features found on sites like MySpace, giving users a place to post photos of their pets, search for romance, or swap recipes. But the emphasis is on connecting users who want to spread the word about social causes and support one another in action.

Bang! Bang! You're Informed

The ancient stories tell of the elfin high priestess Tyrande Whisperwind and her triumph over the demon invaders of the forests of Ashenvale. Now Whisperwind and thousands of other characters from the online role-playing game World of Warcraft have a new enemy to vanquish: Internet censorship. In one of the more creative end runs around Google's notorious 'China syndrome,' members of FreeCulture.org are hatching a plot to pass live information among the anonymous online players of the game.

Google launched a version of its search engine for China in January, minus any information that riled government censors. In response, a number of groups are using technology to move data into less-than-free cultures like China's, according to This Magazine (May/June 2006). The World of Warcraft plan would allow players, anonymous but for their characters' names, to pass around censored information secretly within the game environment. Other plans include the distribution of software applications that allow users to foil snooping government spooks.

Bargain Basement Brains

If you wanted to learn about the latest research in, say, neuroscience, you could subscribe to Brain Research, a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal that contains frontline reports from the world's leading researchers. But you'd have to pony up $23,617 (that includes postage) for the subscription. Prices like these dam the free flow of information, says Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, so the cancer doc is promoting 'open-access' science as an antidote, reports Wired (June 2006). In the three years since he and other like-minded scientists introduced a set of free online journals, their reputations have soared and they've been cross-referenced at a higher rate than pricey print competitors.

Arctic Slang

In their quest to unlock the mysteries of arctic climate change, polar researchers are looking beyond pure science to Inuit traditional knowledge. But in talks with unilingual Inuit elders, researchers found that many of the terms associated with climate change were either a new phenomenon in Inuit culture or such an intrinsic part of life that they were never given an Inuktitut name.

To help bridge the communication gap, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and the territorial government of Nunavut, Canada, cohosted a terminology workshop, bringing together more than 20 Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun interpreters and elders from each of the main dialect groups in Nunavut. When the workshop ended, they had added 131 new words to the Inuit lexicon. Here's a sampling:

Arctic: Ukiuqtaqtuq
Climate Change: Hilaup Aalannguqtirninga
Extinction: Nunguttut
Global Warming: Hilaup Uunnakpallianinga
Weather: Hila

Reprinted from Up Here (April 2006). Subscriptions: outside Canada $39.97, Canadian/yr. (8 issues), in Canada $29.97 from Box 1350,Yellowknife, NT X1A 2N9, Canada; www.uphere.ca.

Clink Ka-Ching

Changes to immigration laws under presidents Clinton and Bush have sent unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants to jail-and the private prison industry couldn't be happier about it. The number of immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) shot from 7,444 in 1994 to 23,000 in early 2006, according to the Texas Observer (May 5, 2006), and that's not counting thousands more held by the U.S. Marshals. Halliburton subsidiary KBR and other corporations are scrambling to get a piece of the action. In addition to making money on multi-million-dollar construction contracts-like the $100 million 'superjail' near Laredo, Texas, that will house 2,800 prisoners and is currently out on bid-prison corporations stand to earn a bounty on every detainee. In Texas, that equates to between $35 and $65 per person per day in gross profit.

Protecting the Border

An overlooked casualty of recent immigration policy is the fragile ecosystem of the U.S.-Mexican border, reports Tucson Weekly (May 11, 2006). Endangered species like the Sonoran pronghorn are threatened by thousands of illegal immigrants, chased by four-wheeling border agents, trekking through protected lands. Border policy has pushed illegals out of urban areas and into sensitive desert ecosystems like Arizona's Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, which has become choked with trash discarded by migrants and rutted by off-road vehicles, reports Grist Magazine (June 6, 2006).

That's bad news for the pronghorn, considered the world's second-fastest land mammal. Populations of the shy antelope have plummeted by nearly 80 percent in recent years. Environmentalists are taking note-but that's about all they can do. Recent antiterrorist laws exempt the Department of Homeland Security from virtually all laws, including environmental legislation, leaving open the question of whether there will be a border left to defend.

Wooden It Be Nice?

Two programs in the northeastern United States are finding uses for waste wood. CitiLog, a New Jersey-based company, salvages urban and suburban trees that are being cut because of age or disease, or to make room for development, and ships them to Amish carpenters in Pennsylvania, according to AMC Outdoors (March 2006). The woodworkers turn the trees, which would otherwise be chipped or burned, into lumber and furniture. The magazine reports in its April issue that a higher-tech solution comes from SUNY-Syracuse researchers, who have discovered a way to turn the sugars produced (and tossed out) by paper mills into fuel-grade ethanol-a source that could meet 80 percent of current demand for the fuel. A for-profit refinery is now under construction in upstate New York.

Working Mothers

Quick: What do Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, Lesotho, Australia, and the United States have in common? According to Harvard researcher Jody Heymann, they are the only five countries that offer no paid leave to new mothers. As is increasingly the case, the states are stepping in where the federal government fails: According to the Christian Science Monitor (May 15, 2006), 26 states last year considered legislation that would make some form of paid leave a requirement. But that piecemeal action would still leave us well behind the 27 countries that offer at least three months paid leave for new fathers.

Easy Riders

If you pine for the days when kids rode their bikes to school, try fixing the sidewalks. That's the conclusion of a California study described in Landscape Architecture (May 2006). Overall, not even 16 percent of U.S. students ages 5 to 15 hoof it to school-one-third the percentage who biked three decades ago. In areas where municipalities installed curb cuts, traffic lights, and other pedestrian-friendly changes, however, researchers saw a 15 percent increase in walking or biking among schoolchildren.

Beam Me Down an Education

Many schools in the remote African interior are missing an essential item: current textbooks. A Swiss company hopes to help by using a pair of commercial satellites to beam curricula into Palm Pilot-like receivers, reports Technology Review (May/June 2006). Promoters say the little screens, which have been tested in Kenya, will be less expensive than replacing old textbooks (assuming the schools have any in the first place) and can be updated easily.