Saving Whales: It's Not Just Whales

I heard Dr. Paul Watson talk this past week at the California Academy of Sciences. For over thirty years, he has been at the helm of the world's most active marine protection Sea Shepherd Conservation Society His real passion? Saving whales.

Originally from Canada, he says with force, "I'm not here to watch whales getting killed, I'm here to save him. I'm here to bankrupt and sink the Japanese whaling fleet." He reinforces how serious the state of our oceans are in and reminds us that if our oceans die, we die.

Paul worries that we're going to destroy the diversity in our oceans and one of these days, we're going to pull one too many and we won't survive it.

Listen to a man with conviction and heart below. Part II of the video I shot can be found here.

Part II of his story.

TEDX Berkeley: Inspiration, Music & Form Under the Wheeler Roof

TEDX held their first Berkeley event, with curators Jessica Mah and Kai Chang behind its organization together with dozens of other co-organizers and volunteers. Held in Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium, I ran into TEDsters I've known for years, but the event also drew a number of students who heard loud and clear: Anything is Possible. Find Your Purpose. Follow your Dream.

Psychologist Dacher Keltner who focuses on the biological and evolutionary origins of human emotion, talked to us about the idea of compassion and sympathy breakthroughs. He used the example of Miklos Nyiszli, where 75% of soldiers refused to shoot the enemy.

To give us some background on others who have given this topic some thought, he also brought up Alfred Russel Wallace who believed that something as 'raw' as cmpassion and sympathy couldn't be formed by evolution.

Let's face it. Compassion is highly contageous. Human goodness has to be viral. We've all seen example after example where gratitude has spread through networks. Keltner shows us an unfortunate and yet not surprising chart on sympathy and compassion across about a dozen countries, which ranked U.S. children close to the bottom, only to be surpassed by the Brits. (the chart was referred to as A Compassion Deficit, sadly appropriate I thought).

Another favorite on the TEDXB stage was an overview of the latest research and unveilings of David Ewing Duncan, who wrote a book I'm eager to read called "Experimental Man: What One Man's Body Reveals about His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World.

From mercury and obesity to lifestyle and chemicals in our environment, we explore what we can do from what we learn through very early testing and what is simply beyond our control.

He gives us examples of what cutting-edge medical technology can and cannot tell us about our future health and what the implications are, including Orwellian possibilities. He talks about four of them:

1. Big Brother - we have to be careful about what we learn and where our medical records end up.

2. The Obama Effect - things are changing but we still have a long way to go.

3. Discrimination

4. Genetic thrallism (Gattaca)

David also shows us some frightening results of mercury from fish and discusses anxiety and fear factors - how and where they come into play.

Physician Daniel Kraft gives us a future glimpse of medicine, with so many examples that it was overwhelming - so many implications. Fascinating and yet scary innovations that are within our grasp today and more coming within the next decade, shared a common theme: it's all going digital. There's an increasing integration of IT, devices and the web.

We look at new 'creations' of wearable devices, which are continuously shrinking in size. Seniors can now wear attachable and embedded devices which means that loved ones can monitor their health and changes from miles away. Wearable devices are turning up trends we've never been able to discover before.

Robotic surgery will enable surgeons to be 'super-enabled,' by adding layers of augmented reality and augmented decision support in real-time. With brain-computer interfaces (BCI), you can use thought to control things you couldn't in the past. Minute robots will be able to move through your colon and perform surgery. Chips can turn into microscopes. Microbots will clean out our arteries after gobbling down a heavy-cheese layered pizza.

Other speakers included Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek, inspired by the personality shift and decline of his grandfather's brain from Parkinsons, TED prize winner Jill Tarter from SETI who reminded us that we are all made of stardust and come from the same source, and Diane Benscoter who talked about how her brain was affected by her time spent with the Moonies.

Eric Cheng encouraged us to save our oceans, Amit Deutsch shared his experience about a trip taken with Palestians in an effort to move closer to understanding and further away from hatred and Gerver Tulley, who I heard speak at TED several years ago, showed examples of students who learn in an exciting, dynamic way at the Tinkering School.

Amit Deutsch

Bradley Voytek

Drue Kataoka

Eric Cheng

Eric Gradman

UC Men's Octet

Gerver Tully

SETI's Jill Tarter

Curator Jessica Mah

UC Men's Octet

TED Berkeley's recap here.

Sarah Palin: the Dangerous Airhead

This past week in the Huffington Post, Mona Gable writes an amusing but scary account of Palin's most recent examples of her ongoing hunger to become a celebrity and folksy hero, regardless what it takes.

Her first example is Palin's documentary deal on Alaska she struck with The Discovery Channel.

Gable writes: "beyond semantics, what were the folks at Discovery Channel thinking? Did anyone there consider the irony of hiring a woman to host a "nature" show who disdains nature? I mean, before she fleeced you for more than $1 million an episode, (for that matter, John McPhee would have been excellent, and I'm sure he'd have done it for much less), that maybe it wasn't the smartest choice given her strange relationship to the truth and her polarizing politics? Did you forget that in her brief and erratic tenure as governor, Palin had a dreadful environmental record, championing such animal-friendly policies as the aerial shooting of wolves? Or refusing to give protected status to such endangered species as the beluga whale? Even now, Palin proudly and avidly flaunts her ignorance about climate change."

The essence of Gable's piece however is about her "refusal to take responsibility for stirring up violence on the right with her incendiary rhetoric."

She writes about Palin's suggestion that Obama was "paling around with terrorists" when she was running for vice president. Mona also reminds us of her other vocal assertions, when she "claimed that the president had inserted "death panels" in the health care bill, precisely so they could kill her Down syndrome infant and her aging parents."

Read more, including her final plea for someone to hold Palin accountable and set things straight.

Economic Slump: Time to Tap into Nature's Ancient Wisdom

Ever notice that when you stop writing for awhile, writer's block takes over and cripples you? I've known for awhile that I needed to take a couple months off from blogging and from the web in general, but not because I grew tired of writing or new stuff. Disconnect from the web and new media when its your bread-and-butter? You must be mad I can hear you say.

When I was in Africa late last year through early 2009, I had laptop in hand and blogged but not nearly as much as I expected. Nor was I connected as much as I expected I'd be.

I've lived in Africa three times, so its not as if I didn't know what to expect and yet somehow I figured I'd be so inspired since it had been awhile since my last visit, I wouldn't stop writing. Blog posts would be pouring out of me.

But no. Not even close. Notice the break in between my last South African blog post and the most recent ones. The closer I got to nature -- on a regular basis -- the more disconnected I felt from the blog. It was all about immersion.

Think about it: all of the best coaches in the world pitch immersion and language courses based on immersion or living in the country are the best way to go. That's what off-site business retreats are based on and one of the reasons why the Aspen Institute and Renaissance weekends are so insightful and inspiring.

We're human. We need immersion or as the Aussies put it: walkabout time. Frankly, most of us don't get enough of it. I read a Brad Feld tweet recently that updated us on his run in the mountains behind his house and that because of it, he was "completely and totally broken."

Of course he was. Bravo. Nature does that to people, particularly when you're really present with it. It's our roots - all of us regardless of what continent we were born on or connect to.

There was something about being so close to the African earth, particularly in the parts of the continent where humanity began, that begged me to listen to its silence. Over and over again. Listening to its silence calls for a dismissal of machines, at least it was the case for me. As much as I was inspired to write, I couldn't do so on a "machine." It would have disrupted the silence. And so, I took it all in, digested it and secretly hoped it was getting 'baked' into my DNA so I wouldn't ever lose the feeling.

I felt the same way in the Israeli desert, the Arizona desert and when I drove across country a few years back. I thought I'd blog about the whole trip and instead, took notes along the way and blogged after the fact.

The downside of the latter is that the posts ended up reading like a travel log rather than the richness you get from live-blogging. I'm a fan of the latter but when I'm that close to dirt, flowers and trees, its as if the force of Mother Nature herself pulls me away from anything that has a power cord or battery.

Isn't it a great time to reconnect with nature, in an era where you've either been laid off, your contracts are smaller than they've been in years or you have a full time job but most of your budgets have been slashed by ten?

When I was 21, I traveled around the world with my 32 year old British boyfriend, who was at the time a marketing rockstar in the London scene where we were living at the time. He took nearly two years off if I recall correctly, but not without thought. Would he be able to slot back in after being intimately plugged into every thread and conversation twenty four months later? After all, he was a 32, not 22. Unforgiveable? Perhaps, but certainly not traditional. We returned, he got a job and life carried on.

Years later, I did the same thing. I took off for a few years - Africa, Europe, you name it. I'll never forget an experience I had a month or so after my return.

I used to do PR for Computerworld so there were a ton of old copies of the magazine in my grandparents basement where we stored everything at the time. The industry stories hadn't changed all that much and while there were new versions, new companies and new solutions, I couldn't believe how easy it was to slot back into the industry without being connected with anyone for a few years. It took me three long days of reading to get back up to speed.

Today, the story may be a little different. With countless examples of Kurzweil's Singularity coming into play, everything is moving at a much faster pace and jumping out of the game and back in a couple of years later may be tougher. Perhaps true, perhaps not.

This much I know. Despite all the articles and blog posts I've read that traditional media and PR is dead, Jeff Jarvis' WWGD book tells me that the middle men are dead and that the economic recession means marketers will starve for quite awhile, there are always opportunities.

Remember Helen Keller's famous quote, something I remind myself of often: "When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we don't see the one opening before us." Newspapers have been doing this for years, Hollywood too.

Wherever there are threats, there are opportunities; it just may mean taking a step back (for awhile), taking less money (for awhile) and looking at the world a little differently (for awhile). Reinventing oneself or simply a role can be magical and rewarding.

If you're good at what you do and you listen and think strategically, there will be a need for your skills even if they get used in a way you never imagined. And trust me, if you're in marketing or communications, they will.

Ignite the universe, spend a little time with the trees and ask them for ancient wisdom. Ask them what your "real value" is. And then listen. In that silence, you may just learn something very powerful about yourself and about what is happening around us.

Remember that not just the industry is seeing a significant shift, but the world is undergoing a dramatic change as well and if you're not tapping into that energy source too, you're missing the mark (we just elected a black president baby and money is getting pumped into energy at home and countless other things.....)

While it may sound like a flighty "new age" solution to the changes we're undergoing, I'm not suggesting that asking the ancient skies and trees for guidance is all you do. I'm simply suggesting that you do it.

Bay Communion

Jack Gescheidt's Tree Spirit Project series of photos always amaze me. An example or for the whole series, click here where you can also order various sizes of prints. This is called Bay Communion.