Himalayan Master’s Students Complete Residential in Arunachal Pradesh, India
The Himalayan cohort of the Class of 2017 Master of Arts in Applied Community Change just completed their Term III residential experience in Arunachal Pradesh, India between March 17-27, 2017. Their site visits were facilitated and organized by Nawang Gurung, Regional Academic Director, with help from Future Generations Arunachal, current students who reside in the area, and other local partners.
Students were able to interact with a number of diverse projects and programs ranging from a school working to increase access to high quality, affordable education to vulnerable children to a program demonstrating the benefits of intercropping to increase income and also health outcomes.
The main learning and excitement for the group was focused on learning about examples and opportunities for promoting environmental protection, economic opportunities, and community health in tandem. Using human energy and building on local successes and assets, communities have been able to show substantial behavior changes within short spans of time and have been able to be sustain impacts over time.
Programme in China Wins 2016 Top Cummins Global Environmental Challenge Award
Cummins is a powerful global leader that designs, manufactures, sells and services diesel and alternative fuel engines. In order to reach its vision of “Making people’s lives better by unleashing the Power of Cummins” and to foster global environment improvement, Cummins initiated an annual competition from 2009 named as Global Environmental Challenge.
The top winner of 2016 Global Environmental Challenge was a water management programme in China that is being implemented by Beijing Foton Cummins Engine Co., Ltd (BFCEC) and Academy of Fuqun Environment. One of the Future Generations alumni from the MA class of 2015, Yu Xianrong, is the Programme Director at the Academy of Fuqun Environment and affiliated with Future Generations China.
The Programme, named as Source of Life—River Eco-restoration of Shang Zhuang Village (a village 60 km to Beijing city center), aims to realize sustainable watershed protection in Beijing suburb through a comprehensive multi-stakeholder approach on pollution control, ecological restoration, water source protection by action, environmental training and community participation. The programme duration is three years while 2016 is the first year.
Based on solid Need Assessment by using tools including Six Sigma and Participatory Rural Assessment, Academy of Fuqun Environment developed and implemented concrete need-based activities. Six workshops on water safety, health and zero waste were provided with active engagement from both the community and the corporate. A total of 202 Cummins employees volunteered 808 hours in testing polluted water quality, strengthening flood-control dam and clearing up garbage in the river way. Villagers’ domestic waste was reduced by 20% on average. The water quality in river way was improved as ammonia nitrogen was reduced by 26% while total phosphorus decreased by 50%.
Moreover, Academy of Fuqun Environment has fostered the development of village rule “no dumping garbage into the river”, and “rewards and punishment mechanism”. Another policy proposal – to collect domestic wastewater into a treatment plant, will be implemented in 2017 which will means 43,200 tons of wastewater will be safely treatment before discharging to the environment.
This programme has honored Cummins’ pledge that everything they do leads to a cleaner, healthier, safer environment in 2016. There is more to be expected in term of water resources conservation and community development.
Voices of Future Generations: Swami
“God is your soul and you’re always with your soul, right? Without your soul you wouldn’t be alive!”
A young child’s enthusiasm for God is infectious in this clip from Canada. He flips back and forth between chanting and explaining his god – his best friend.
This is the final track in the Voices series. To hear them all, visit our site on SoundCloud.
Voices of Future Generations: Penpal in the Outback
“Where you live, I think, it actually changes your opinion on quite a lot of things.”
Words of wisdom from a child living in the Blue Mountains of Australia.
This episode of Voices is about a fourteen year old girl in Sydney and her penpal – only 70 km away, but in a different world. She talks about what it’s like for her, an urban teen, to learn about life from someone her own age but living a wildly different life. But not so different in some ways as well.
“I suppose that where you live is what you make of it. It’s all about the people and the things that you love,” she concludes.
Musings of a Naturalist, Part 1
All of us are immersed in the natural world. We might reside near a park and be roused in the morning by a singing bird, or awaken on the 26th floor in a structure built of concrete and steel where we are be surrounded by designs and colors inspired by nature. Pictures on the wall inside might harken to the world outside.
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| Blue monkey at the rim of the Ngorogor Crater in Tanzania |
When one notices the natural world, whether in one’s own compound or further afield, it triggers curiosity. A fleeting glimpse of a flower or catching a snatch of bird song can raise the question: what is that flower, or what bird sings? After repeatedly noticing and recognizing individuals, it is natural that one puzzles over the question: how does such a flower or bird comes to be present here? Then, as a familiarity with nature increases, one’s thinking may expand to consider the framework, the bigger picture, of how several species interacting together form a community and what environmental factors govern such groupings.
An interest in nature, once started, is an ever-expanding realm of discovery – whether it be in nearby parks or exploring in distant lands. Travel is one vehicle that broadens horizons, takes us out of the familiar, and gives us the opportunity to connect with other people and to encounter new species. Thinking about nature around the world may lead to the realization that we all live in one biosphere on this one rather small globe in which the parameters for our survival are remarkably narrow. Thus for the sake of that flower or that bird, or indeed our own futures, we need to be caretakers of our environment. It is no accident that Future Generations University offers a master’s degree in Applied Community Change with Conservation. If we are to leave a better world for future generations, stewardship of our natural world is essential.
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| Gull on the Oregon coast |
Some thoughts on the usage of the term “natural history”:
At the present time the use of “natural history” has fallen out of favor. The term is very old fashioned. Very 1800s. The American Museum of Natural History, for example, was founded in NYC in 1869 and the British Museum (Natural History) in London in 1881. These days one does not study natural history but majors in fields such as ecology, biogeography, ethology, zoology, plant genetics, or other disciplines.
Yet “natural history” is a useful term and I find it hard to locate a suitable replacement, an umbrella that connotes an all-encompassing look at our world. One might use the terms nature, nature conservation, the natural world, or the world’s flora and fauna. Nothing, though, quite replaces natural history and I have circled back to using this as a good way to indicate an overall summary of our natural world.
Dr. Robert Fleming is a Professor of Natural History at Future Generations University. This is his first in a series of articles about the natural world.