Media Recognition for Polar Cities Idea is Hard to Come By

A reporter for a major news wire service tells me today:

Hi Danny

I appreciate the originality of your idea of polar cities, and your enthusiasm, and your independence. I really do. But unless you are a scientist or engineer, or your idea has gotten some serious traction somewhere, I cannot justify doing a separate piece on you and your work. But I have made a note of your website and your work, and if the opportunity arises for me to allude to them, I will get back in touch. Honestly.

Interesting coincidence: I spent an hour in conversation with Dr. Lovelock yesterday.

Signed

_________ ______________

James Lovelock's Accidental Student: Danny Bloom on Polar Cities to House "Breeding Pairs in the Arctic" in the Far Distant Future

James Lovelock's Accidental Student: Danny Bloom on Polar Cities to House "Breeding Pairs in the Arctic" in the Far Distant Future

Question: How did you come to be "James Lovelock's Accidental Student"?

DANNY BLOOM: Two years ago I read Fiona Harvey's wonderful lunchtime
interview in the Financial Times in the UK with Dr Lovelock over
some good wine they were sharing in London, and in the interview, and
in other places, Lovelock talked about his vision
of the far distant future being a place in northern regions where the
only survivors left on Earth, perhaps just 200,000 people,
would be "breeding pairs in the Arctic". This hit me hard, right in
the gut and right in the center of my brain, too. I kept thinking
about those words for a few days and finally I asked myself, where
will these "breeding pairs" live, I mean, what kind of settlements
will they be housed in, and where will these settlements be located?
And also: who will govern these settlements, and who will be
allowed in, or who will get in, and will they survive the long long
Long Emergency that will be happeneing then -- an event I now call The
Great Interruption -- and so one afternoon after waking up from a nap
in my cave in Taiwan I envisioned something like "polar cities" for
these breeding pairs in Lovelock's Arctic. That's how the term polar
cities was born. And that is how I became James Lovelock's Accidental
Student. This was also around the same time as the IPCC report was
coming out in February 2007 to great media fanfare and there were
headlines every day in my local English newspaper in Taiwan, so I was
obsessing with the issues of climate change and global warming for the
first time in my life. Just two years ago. Before that, I was not
involved in this activism or visionary thinking at all.

Question: How did you find an artist to illustrate your viision of a
polar city to house Lovelock's "breeding pairs in the Arctic"?

BLOOM: I knew I needed to put this idea of polar cities for breeding
pairs into some kind of visual showcase, because when I first started
blogging about my polar cities idea, the response was basically no
response at all. The words themselves -- polar cities for survivors of
global warming in the year 2500 or so -- just did not wake people up
and attract interest from readers or reporters or bloggers. So I knew
I needed some kind of visual to show what I was talking about.

Near my home in Taiwan, there was a small advertising agency run by a
pontailed man named Deng Cheng-hong. I rode my bicycle over to his
shop one Sunday afternoon and asked him if he could illustrate my
polar cities idea with some hand-drawn art or some computer-generated
work. He also had never really thought about global warming in a very
deep way, either, but he understand what I was talkingh about, even
though he did not speak English and I do not speak Chinese, but we
communicated and I showed him some very rough sketches I had done up
at my home in pencil and crayon on paper. He took these sketches and 8
weeks later came back with these wonderful, color illustrastions of
his artistic view of what a polar city blueprint might look like. I
knew this was it. He had given life to my vision, which I gotten from
Dr Lovelock's interviews and books and speeches. Dr Lovelock is my
mentor in all this.

When I showed Mr Deng's images to reporters in the USA -- and to Dr
Lovelock himself in the UK by email -- the response was very positive.
The New York Times blog Dot Earth, written by veteran science reporter
Andrew C. Revkin, wrote about polar cities, with Deng's images printed
on the blog as well, on March 29, 2008. The response was immediate,
both pro and con. I have not stopped promoting polar cities since that
day. The New York Times gave me the greenlight and I decided to spend
the rest of my life promoting and talking about, both pro and con,
polar cities. But this was not part of my life plan before 2006. I am
a writer, an editor, a poet, a dreamer. But after I read Lovelock's
words about "breeding pairs in the Arctic" I became haunted, obsessed,
with those words. And here I am, age 60, James Lovelock's Accidental
Student. I have no PHD, no academic sponors, no credibility at all. I
am nobody. I am nothing. AndI love this work. This is my life's work
now. A few more years here on Planet Earth and then I'm gone. I care
about the future. Deeply. I care about what life will be like on Earth
30 generations down the road, in 2500 or so. Polar cities might save
us from extinction.

QUESTION: Have you ever met or spoken with Dr Lovelock?

BLOOM: Never. But I did email his office one time, and showed him
Deng's images and my website about polar cities for his breeding pairs
in the Arctic to live in and he replied: "Thanks, Danny, for showing
me those images. It may very well happen, and soon!"

QUESTON: What's next for you?

BLOOM: More of the same. Promoting the concept of polar cities, what I
also call climate retreats for climate refugees, for the rest of my
life. These polar cities will be not be at the poles per se. They will
be in northern and southern regions of the world, from Tasmania and
New Zealand and Patagonia and Antarctica in the southern hemisphere to
Alaska and Canada and Russia and Greenland and Iceland and Norway in
the north. These polar cities are where Lovelock's breeding pairs will
live. We need to think hard about who will get in, who will govern
them, who will administer them, and what life inside will be like.
That's my brief.

QUESTION: Who gave you this brief?

BLOOM: Lovelock gave it to me. He does not know it, but he gave it to
me. I am just following in his footsteps. Using my visionary skills
and out-of-the-box thinking and global PR skills to create an important
discussion, both pro and con, online, in print and in classrooms, too. Who gave me this brief? I gave it to
myself. I am James Lovelock's Accidental Student. It's energizing. I enjoy this work.
It's my 24/7 obsession, but a healthy, productive, creative obsession. Thank you, James Lovelock! But all this is not something that makes me happy, and it's not a pretty picture. We are talking about some very dark times coming down the road in 30 generations or so. I don't get enjoyment out of this work. But I do get a sense of doing something positive and important. And I remain an optimist, despite what it might seem. I am an eternal optimist. That is why I envisioned polar cities to save humanity from extinction in some future time when global warming's major impact events have reduced the human tribe to just 200,000 men, women and children barely surviving -- but surviving, yes! -- in polar cities scattered around the world. The Earth's populations of humans will have dropped by then from 25 billion to just 200,000 souls. I am ready to talk about this. Who wants to join me in this important scientific and spiritual discussion? I think there are lots of people who understand exactly what I am saying, and thanks to Dr Lovelock, am trying to promote as an important idea for the future.

--
POLAR CITIES:
http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

Lite'N Up! -- Laugh Yourself Skinny with Samara Q. Klein

BOOKED:

Lite'N Up! -- Laugh Yourself Skinny with Samara Q. Klein

by Diet Ggiirrgll

March 15, 2009



SAN FRANCISCO -- This is my kind of book, for two
reasons. One, I need to go on a diet, and the
sooner the better. And two, because I love humour. As author Samara Q.
Klein says, and I quite agree, dieting should be neither too serious
nor too lacking in humour. If that is how you feel about your body and
your life, then this book is for you.

Klein, a marketing consultant in New York, still in her 20s, says that
being obsessed with losing weight is a sure prescription for disaster.
We end up anxious all the time and then reach for a bag of fried chips
to pacify our anxiety, which causes us to feel badly about ourselves
and then we reach for a pint of double-chocolate fudge ice cream in
which to drown our sorrows. Where have I seen that kind of behavior
before? In my own San Francisco apartment, that's where. I plead
guilty on all counts.

Still, the only way to lose weight is to diet, Klein writes. All diets
remove the junk from our trunks, as she puts it, but it's not the diet
that's difficult, it's the sticking to it thats seemingly impossible.

"We start off strong, full of resolve and determination, only to lose
our conviction three days later," Klein writes. "A favorite desert on
the menu, a bag of cookies after a hard day at work, PMS cravings --
these are the situations that doom us to failure."

But this is exactly where her book, titled "Lite'n Up" comes into
play. It pairs two seemingly contradictory positions -- chilling out
and maintaining resolve -- in hysterically funny reminders. "After
all, it's hard to stuff your face when you're laughing," the born
funnylady writes.


On an accompanying blog for her book website, Klein gives some good,
free advice as well.

"Do not be fooled! Those people who can eat and eat and eat and never
gain a pound are imposters," she says. "They may eat in front of you,
and then not eat for days to make up for it. Or they may have a
tapeworm. Yes, there are a handful of women that can eat and eat and
eat, but they will gain a pound; just wait a few years and then check
in with them. That fabulous metabolism they once had will have
disappeared, but their hips and thighs will not have."

So what's the lesson, the take-home message? "The lesson is: Do not
give up your diet by saying, Some are naturally thin and I am not;
what's the use? Remember: inside every thin person is a fat person
waiting to get out and ruin her life."

ADD ON: ------------------------------------------ADDED ON:

LOSE WEIGHT WITH HUMOR? YES......!

A new TRIED BUT TRUE -- and HUMOROUS! -- new take on the diet scene by
a 20 something New Yorker

NEW YORK -- Samara Q. Klein once lost 40 pounds and never found them
again. Now she's written a book about how to lose weight with humor,
yes humor, and this new, novel take on losing weight is full of
Klein's godo sense of humor. Titled "Lite'N Up!: Laugh Yourself
Skinny", the paperback from Plain White Press in New York is coming
out in February, and while there will be no book tour to promote the
book, the twentysomething Klein says she will use the Internet and the
blogosphere to attract readers.

A natural-born humorist, Klein has come up with some pithy soundbites about how to lose weight
using humor: among them, "The 11th Commandment: thou shall not weigh
more than thy refrigerator"and
"It's a bit confusing but true: to have a French woman's body, you
must not eat French bread, French toast, or French fries."

Klein, who lives in Brooklyn and works in New York in marketing,
firmly believes that dieting in America shouldn't be so serious and
humorless! She also firmly believes that being obsessed with losing
weight is a sure prescription for disaster. She thinks losing weight
should be fun. Fun every day!

Her sassy humor is the perfect meal ticket for people who want to lose
weight in a relaxing, natural way, and she likes to tell people who
really want to shed some pounds: "Remeber, today is the first day of
the rest of your hips."

Impacts/Responses to Global Warming At the National Forum on U.S. Public Mental Health

At the National Forum on U.S. Public Mental Health
Impacts/Responses Global Warming
March 19, 2009
National Wildlife Federation
in Washington DC

among those attending the meeting and speaking are:



William Becker

Executive Director

Presidential Climate Action Project


Peter G. Bourne, MD, MA

Visiting Scholar, Green College, Oxford


James H. Bray, Ph.D.

President, American Psychological Association


Gillian Caldwell, JD
Campaign Director, 1Sky


Eric Chivian, MD

Founder and Director, Center for Health and the Global Environment,
and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School


Robert W. Corell, PhD
Vice President for Programs H.J.
Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment


Kevin Coyle, JD

Vice President for Education and

Training, National Wildlife Federation


Spencer Eth, MD
Vice-Chairman and Medical Director Psychiatry and
Behavioral Health

Services, Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers


Sherri Goodman, JD
Executive Director, Military Advisory Board, National Security and the
Threat of Climate Change project


Jeffrey T. Kiehl, PhD

Senior Scientist, Climate Change Research, National Center for
Atmospheric Research




Douglas LaBier, PhD
Founder and Director
Center for Adult Development


Andrew Light, PhD

Director, Center for Global Ethics

George Mason University


George Luber, PhD National
Center for Environmental Health CDC


Edward W. Maibach, PhD Director,
Center for Climate Change Communication
George Mason University


H. Steven Moffic, MD

Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, Medical
College of Wisconsin


Dan Raviv (Moderator)

CBS Correspondent and Host, CBS News Weekly Round-up


Jerilyn Ross, M.A., L.I.C.S.W.
President and CEO, Anxiety Disorders Association of America


Steven Shapiro, PhD
Clinical Supervisor and Counseling Psychologist Community Psychiatry

Program, Johns Hopkins University


Patrice L. Simms, JD

Senior Project Attorney

Natural Resources Defense Council

Washington, DC


Eliot Sorel, MD, DFAPA
Clinical Professor Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Departments of
Global Health and Center for Global Health, George Washington
University


Lise Van Susteren, MD
Forensic Psychiatrist & Member, Board of
Directors, National

Wildlife Federation

=

Dear Panelists:

As promised earlier today, I am now sending the agenda, working paper
and list of participants for the March 19 conference.

Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely yours,

Devon Frederick Harvey

Devon Frederick Harvey
Office Manager for Education
Phone: 703-438-6055 | HarveyD@nwf.org
National Wildlife Federation
11100 Wildlife Center Drive
Reston, VA 20190-5362
www.nwf.org

NWF's mission is to inspire Americans to protect wildlife for our
children's future.
"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength
that will endure as long as life lasts."Rachel Carson (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson )

'The History of Now' is a novel to savor: Daniel Klein does it again!

'The History of Now' is a novel to savor

by "Massachusetts Slim" (pen name)

SAN FRANCISCO -- He's written books about Elvis Presley,
Plato and even Waldo. But now, at age 70,
in the prime of his writing life, New Jersey native and longtime
Massachusetts resident Daniel Klein has written his best
book ever.

Klein's new novel, "The History of Now", is an ingenious
philosophical examination of cause and effect and, at the same time,
an engaging story of a small-town family in America. Klein manages to
execute both premises successfully, and it's an impressive
achievement. It's the kind of book you can't put down, not because
it's a page-turner so much as because it's a book to savor as you slowly
turn the pages.

Klein lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, high in the Berkshire
Mountains of the western part of the state and the New England village
of Grandville that he sets the story in looks
very much like the place the author calls home now. But this is not a
roman de clef, Klein
insists, and any connection to people living or dead is purely
coincidental. Klein the writer is
writing about the world around him, and posing some very good
questions about the meaning of life and whys and wherefores of life,
but this is not an autobiographical novel at all. It is
America writ large. It is America as Klein imagines it, all 296 pages of it.

Publishers Weekly, the book industry trade magazine, called the book
"a charming philosophical lesson in this story of destiny and history
colliding in a fictional New England town."

The plot? Well, there's Wendell deVries, a solitary man with a
dog-like dedication to familiarity, who operates the film projection
booth inside the Phoenix movie theater in town, and there's Franny,
his 37-year-old daughter, who holds drama club meetings at the theater
as well.

There's also a set of characters, from Babs Dowd, a well-known New
York designer, to Franny's daughter Lila, who make the novel one to
savor, as I did on over a recent weekend here in San Francisco. Having
spent my teenage summers in the Berkshires, I could really feel the
tug of emotions that set this book on fire, and it is a volume I
recommend highly.

Klein, by the way, is the co-author of the whimsical bestseller "Plato
and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar", which came out in 2008. In "A History
of Now", he channels his inner Thornton Wilder, says one critic, and
combines "the family-album features of 'Our Town' with the
inconclusive fatalism of 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey'". A reader today
could not ask for a better diversion than this
well-written and crafty novel.

As a portrayal of small town life, "The History of Now" is American
storytelling at its best. Klein's plot settings ring true, his
dialogue glitters with big ideas, and well-crafted storylines create a
picture perfect book of one small place on the East Coast ineluctably
connected to all places north, south, east and west. This is a novel
for now.


Publisher: Permanent Press
pub date: March 1, 2009
List Price: US$28 plus deep discount via Internet order sites and KINDLE, too!
Pages: 296 pages

Are you 'reading' this oped on paper, or are you "screening" it online? And do you kindle?

Are you 'reading' this oped on paper,
or are you 'screening' it online?

By Danny Bloom
Special to the Blogosphere


If you are reading this oped commentary in the printed version of a
newspaper, you are "reading" it, of course. But if you are reading
this article online, on this
website, are you "reading" it or "screening" it?


Although the word does not exist yet with this new defintion, one
could conjecture that what we do online is not
reading per se, but "screening." When we read news online we read a
text printed digitally on a computer screen.
Perhaps we need a new word to describe this phenomenon.

When I asked a senior computer industry reporter at the New York Times, John
Markoff, about this new term, he answered in a one-word email
reply:"Hmmmmmmm."

I think he didn't quite cottoned to the new term.
But at least he was listening.

Can anyone just coin a new word and make it stick? No, but
new words are coined everyday, and some stick and some don't. Time
will tell whether or not "screening" (meaning "reading information on
a computer screen, as distinct from reading a print newspaper or
magazine or book") will stay with us or not. For now, though, the new word has
been accepted and listed by the editors at an online dictionary in
California called The Urban Dictionary.

Screening is defined there as: "To read text on a computer screen,
cellphonescreen, Kindle screen or PDA screen or BlackBerry screen;
replaces the term "reading" which now only refers to reading print
text on paper."

Example: "I hate reading print newspapers now. I do all my screening online."

The word is so new that most readers -- and "screeners" -- have never
heard of it.
James Fallows, an editor for the Atlantic Monthly now living in
Beijing, told me that word was "interesting" but that he was "not likely
to be an early
adopter of it."

What's your take on this new word? Are you a reader or a screener, or both?

And speaking of reading on a screen, the new Amazon Kindle e-reader that is
for sale now in the U.S. has spawned a new verb about reading on a
screen as well.
Kindle users often refer to their reading a book on the Kindle screen
as "kindling", and
they sometimes write on their blogs that they "like to kindle
bestsellers" in their Kindles.

And this word, to kindle, as a verb, has also been accepted by the
editors at the Urban Dictionary in California. Go figure.

"Home Energy Fraud" - Green Building Movement - Greenhouse Gas Emissions - Bruce Wingfield

A man in the USA tells me: "I have a manuscript I have started titled,
"Home Energy Fraud."

I am looking for a
reporter to cover this

However this may be problematic in that the story is negative towards
the Green Building Movement and the Greenhouse Gas Emissions crowd.

Don't get me wrong I am strongly supportive of Energy Efficiency and
the Environment, however will not support lies, fraud, and deceptions
by home builders, non-profits corporations and the federal government.

If you are of equal mind-set, please let me know. The story is still
unfolding, but I have enough information that it can become public.

Bruce Wingfield says

He adds: "Home Energy Fraud"

The October 2008 issue of Consumer Reports Magazine ran a three page
extremely critical story on the problems with refrigerators and the
Energy Star program. A French manufacturer of refrigerators had found
a way to cheat the program because of the inspection process and poor
inspectors.

This is a true story of Fraud regarding this same Energy Star program
and this time it is more than just a small appliance in the home, it
is the entire home itself. Imagine if the majority of the 120,000
homes labeled Energy Star every year are NOT very energy efficient!

Currently I have a good story to tell a reporter, including 86 color
pictures. Many of these pictures are thermal images taken by infrared
camera. The story is still developing and will continue to gain
attention. A web site has been built and will be launched soon at
www.EnergyFraud.com

I fully intend to litigate the energy issues of my home with the home
builder in a court of law. There are even implications that could
send people to federal prison courtesy of the Internal Revenue
Service.

As such the market potential is huge with this type of publicity.
Home builders, code officials, energy inspectors, and of course home
owners will want to read the book to learn how to save money on their
energy bills. This book ridicules the efforts of the GREENHOUSE Gas
Emissions crowd and proves that this is a paper process and not real
world. Liberals will not like this book, conservatives will love it.
Controversy should help sales, not hurt it. The EPA will hate it,
because it exposes their incompetence and efforts to sweep this
problem under the rug.

My name is Bruce Wingfield and I am fully qualified to write this
book. My expertise is in construction
Please contact me at in USA at area code (614)-891-2151 or email at
wingmb@sbcglobal.net