8 Resources for Good Living and Giving in 2012

New Year's Resolutions for conscious consumption, giving, generosity, focusing on what matters? If so, check out this quick list on a new site I'm developing - Building a Better World: The Pedagogy and Practice of Global Service-Learning. It's a site to go along with a book I'm completing with Richard Kiely, Christopher Boettcher, and Jessica Friedrichs - all good old friends.


We'd love your feedback on the site and whether you find the links useful before we go 'totally live' with it. This new site will let me blog on all things global service-learning over there - and go off about good clean livin', politics, travel, and pick-up trucks full of social justice, here.

Please take a look at the 8 Resources for Good Living and Giving in 2012 and - via comments there, personal email, or comments here, let me know how you like the site.

International Arm Chair Travel - Living the Dream Vicariously

Across the Americas, around the world, continuous motion, living, and learning through travel. Ongoing movement is tantalizing - and it can be informative and liberating. Pico Iyer captures it beautifully in Why We Travel:


So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed.  


I've had the good fortune to meet with and learn from many, many continuous travelers over the past decade. Some of these individuals keep great websites, tweet regularly, and stay up to date on their storytelling via photos and video. I'm going to share a few favorites here, and would love to hear about others engaged in ceaseless international travel, which so many people do rightfully feel is part of building peace by pieces (when done conscientiously and considerately).

I have to begin with two wonderful individuals I bumped into first in Cochabamba, Bolivia and later in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (randomly, and yes, that's amazing). They are Daniel Noll and Audrey Scott, a traveling couple who continue to post at UncorneredMarket.com. They proclaim themselves driven by curiosity and guided by respect - and they're currently in Iran!

Dan and Audrey have developed substantial engaging content in their last 1800 days on the road. Check them out. 

Additionally, you likely have seen this video (Where the Hell is Matt?) below many times already, but it must be mentioned in this blog post. And YouTube only records 40 million+ views of it, so many more billions have yet to see it. Take a quick, inspiring look: 

And in this adventurous spirit, a few guys from Australia made three very short and compelling (1 minute each) films. Move: 

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Learn:

LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

And Eat:

EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Please let me know if you have any favorites of this kind (please share!), please remember Amizade is a great way to engage in ethical short-term international volunteering and service, and please - through videos, books,  blogs, or going yourself - keep finding ways to live your dreams!

What is a Social Justice Song? - Dylan's Hard Rain?

Justly complaining? Proposing? Moving others to action? Raging? What makes something a social justice song? As I move (ever so slowly) to pulling together the songs I've posted here and the tracks that others have nominated, the question becomes more important. One day, we'll vote. First, any additional songs suggestions or arguments for what makes an excellent social justice song are very much appreciated!

Recent Comer to Social Justice Songs: Kurt Vile, Puppet to the Man

Thanks to a loyal reader for this recent social justice song nomination. Dark, brooding: I can dig it. I'll organize a social justice song vote soon. Please send any suggestions my way or share your favorites below!

News: Be Optimistic = Live Long, Justice via Consumption?, The Education "Debate," Higher Education Relevance?

Particularly interesting articles today:

• Want to Live to 100? Try to Bounce Back from Stress on NPR adds credence to my long-standing theory that vigorous living, engaged living, and maybe even sometimes excessive living might just in its own ways also contribute to a good life lived long. OK, that's not really the article. But it does help explain why my Great Aunt Helen lived to 100 and also managed a whiskey or two every single night.  
• No Need to Volunteer or Engage - Just Buy is a book review in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The book takes up the important question of the limits of the "conscious consumption will change the world" - story. I haven't yet read the book.  
• Speaking of higher education and markets, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert has an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal today suggesting that instead of the conventional university model most students should be taught how to run a business. It is one of the most popular articles on the WSJ's most-emailed list right now, second only to "Obama Puts Taxes on Table," which of course is always going to be a #1 question among WSJ readers. I find it important because it calls attention to one of the many ways in which much of the general public seems to be currently dissatisfied with higher education. 
• And this brief editorial in the (sadly, no longer completely free) New York Times calls attention to something else I plan to write on soon: The Deadlocked Debate over Education Reform.  
• Finally, the 4th Annual Amizade Water Walks for Women's Rights in Pittsburgh and Morgantown were great successes this weekend, and got some excellent coverage in local press: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette front page and Faithburgh blog, The Daily Athenaeum (WVU), and the main Morgantown TV Station.  

From the WSJ article / Dilbert-creator column: