Tag Archives: community

Give a Hoot! And a Thanks!

17 Feb

I was the perfect age to appreciate Woodsy Owl when he was introduced in 1971. Along with Smokey the Bear, Woodsy helped reinforce my love for nature and the world around me. He also instilled a deep disdain for littering. I was taught that littering was wrong from a very young age and for my entire life it’s been perhaps my greatest pet peeve. I simply cannot stand litter. I cannot stand people littering. I cannot begin to understand and/or fathom how anyone does it.

In his book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger writes about littering as a sign of disconnectedness. He quotes Dr. Rachel Yehuda, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience of Trauma at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who says littering is “the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society.” She says, “It’s a horrible thing to see because it sort of encapsulates this idea that you’re in it alone, that there isn’t a shared ethos of trying to protect something shared. It’s the embodiment of every man for himself. It’s the opposite of the military.”

Junger goes on to add, “In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors – or somebody else’s friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially.”

When I read this, several years ago now, it was the first time I’d ever read anything that better explained my thoughts and feelings on the subject. I’ve never forgotten it.

Fast forward to this week – this morning, even. I’m taking part in the current Medical Library Association’s “MLA Reads” virtual book club. We’re reading and discussing Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s book, What the Eyes Don’t See. Dr. Mona was a keynote speaker at MLA’s annual meeting last May. She was engaging and inspiring in her talk with us, and reading her book is the perfect opportunity to spend more time being engaged and inspired. In brief, Dr. Mona is the pediatrician who led the research and the fight to bring the Flint, MI water crisis to light. It’s an excellent book. I highly recommend it.

But back to this morning’s discussion, we started with an icebreaker where we each shared a Rose (a little something positive), a Thorn (a frustration or struggle), and a Bud (something to look forward to and/or pursue). When it came my turn, I shared something that happened this week. It was about litter and trash, something I’ve thought about a lot while reading and discussing the book.

Earlier in the week, I was walking my dog through Beaver Brook Park in my neighborhood in Worcester, MA. I like to think of this park as a small gem in the city, complete with ball fields, a street hockey rink, playgrounds, and a dog park. I love to walk there in the mornings. For many years, city workers tended to the park each day, emptying the trash bins, caring for the grounds, keeping things fairly clean for a city park, but those workers retired more than a year ago now and they’ve not been replaced. Slowly, the park is falling into a state that is so disheartening. So much trash, so many examples of people unattached from any sense of our community and this particular shared space. Even as they enjoy using it.

So I took pictures. Pictures of a mattress on the ground, a recliner and end table tossed down the side alley, trash piled high in the dugouts of the off-season Little League fields. And I emailed them all, along with a note, to the mayor, my city council representative, the parks department, and the 311 complaint line. THORN

Later in the day, I received a very thoughtful reply from Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, sharing my frustrations and letting me know some of the efforts she’s backing and/or initiating around the issue. One of these is a Community Clean Up day on April 1, led by the Worcester Clean Corps. I was thrilled to hear of this and plan to be there, to share cleaning up with my community. If you happen to be local, consider joining, too. BUD

Finally, this morning as Bayer and I turned the corner to the park, we noticed straight away that the mattress, after months sitting beside the Youth Center, was GONE! We also noticed the other furniture has been removed and the dugouts cleaned up. There’s still a lot left to do, but this start to my day was one heckuva ROSE.

Along with sending my email, I also groused publicly, via social media, about the state of the park. I tagged the city. It was a low point. So here I want to publicly say, “Thank you!” to those who received my complaint and took action. And made my day.

Thank you!

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Towards WE, Away from ME

1 Sep

I was speaking with my boss, the associate director of my library, today about an upcoming supervisors retreat we’re planning. Earlier she asked those of us attending for comments and suggestions to help plan the day – to make it a day we’d feel invested in. The deadline was yesterday and before the day ended, I sent her a note saying I wasn’t ignoring her request, but that I honestly had nothing. Nothing to offer. Nothing to add. No fun or engaging exercises I hoped we could do together. I’m usually very good at this kind of thing. I like retreats to spark and reinvigorate work. But I can think of nothing right now.

Perhaps I’m tired. Perhaps everyone is. The world seems tired to me. If you read or listen to the news, there’s so much anger and meanness, bickering and selfishness, war and strife, and a pandemic that simply won’t quit – or at least one that has left us with so many signals that things will never be what they once were. It makes me weary.

It also makes me sad. My boss said this morning, “It’s a kind of an ennui we’re experiencing.” She said, “ennui” but I heard, “un-we.” And I said, “That’s exactly what it is. UN-WE.” We’re a very productive library, ticking off boxes and accomplishing projects and providing services, but the further we get from March 13, 2020, the further we get from the collective sense of team – of “WE” – that I once took for granted. Our virtual and hybrid working worlds have not and do not take away from productivity, but they have taken something – something that’s not easy to log in the reference services database.

A few weeks ago I attended the annual Boston Library Consortium Forum. Once called “Networking Day,” this year’s Forum was the first held in person (with a virtual component) since 2019. Per the BLC’s announcement, it was a day “dedicated to uplifting and celebrating our community” and being together in person at the University of Connecticut did much to achieve this goal. The keynote speaker was Charles Vogl, the author of “The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging” among other works. He is a sought-after speaker on the practice of bringing people together; helping people to not feel disconnected and alone in life.

His talk was virtual (hmmm…) but engaging and insightful and funny. He also led us through some activities that helped people share honestly and openly about times we’ve felt alone, and during the Q&A time, he asked individuals to volunteer to share their stories and experiences with the larger audience. It was an excellent talk and the activities were helpful, personally. However, when I asked Vogl his thoughts on how we can rebuild community at work, I was sad to hear him jokingly say, “No one really wants to be friends with the people that they work with.” People laughed, but to me it was disappointing. It’s a serious question. Maybe we don’t look to find our best friends at work, but given the amount of time we spend working, it sure seems to me that we’d benefit from being a community. If community is about belonging, I believe we do better when we feel we belong at work.

I’ve heard from a number of people – from friends and colleagues in my profession, as well as friends who do very different work – that it seems there’s a trend where we’re all doing our own thing. Plenty of times we’re doing the things that we do well, but we’re doing them in our own silos, our own homes, our own pods. We’ve lost some of that collaborative spirit among colleagues.

I’m at a loss for what to offer for retreat planning, but I hope some of our work together helps us come up with some ideas and actions to address this. COVID affected and exposed so much in our societies. I imagine we’ll experience the fall-out for years to come.

Vermont farm with silos. Image by David from Pixabay

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Sustainability: It Means More than “Tit for Tat”

19 Nov

Two innovative and inspired doctoral students at my University saw a problem and decided to do something about it. There is too often a disconnect between scientists and the public. The public struggles to understand what scientists are doing and unfortunately relies too often upon unreliable and unfounded sources for explanations. Scientists, for their part, do a fairly poor job of communicating what they do in a manner that makes sense to the average person on the street. To help address this gap here in our community of Worcester, these students secured sponsorship from NOVA and last summer started Science Cafe Woo. Their tagline? “Come listen to what scientists do while having a fun evening too!”

For the past several months, I have taken in the fun, sitting in the booths at the Nu Cafe in Worcester and listening to scientists from our local universities tell fascinating tales of how they spend their days. It is a wonderful opportunity for the community to gather in a non-academic setting, a non-research environment, to listen to, ask questions of, discuss with, and even debate people who often do work on the community’s dime (lots of government-funded research happens in our community). At the same time, the scientists get the chance to share their work with the community; to take on the challenge of explaining it in a way that non-scientists will get. It’s truly a win-win. AND it’s incredibly popular. I’ve arrived on more than one night to find it standing room only. For me, the entire experience – from the students’ initiative to start the Cafe, to the researchers’ willingness to talk, to the community’s positive response – has been a joy to observe and take part in.

This month, the featured speaker was Dr. John Baker, Associate Research Professor in Biology at Clark University. Dr. Baker teaches in the Environmental Science major at Clark, a nationally-recognized program that produces graduates who are “working is such wide range of areas as environmental regulations of pollution, water and wetlands conservation, clean technology, hazardous waste cleanup, public health protection, environmental planning, field and laboratory studies of endangered species and conservation planning.” (program website) His talk was called, “Ecology, Evolution, and the Most Misunderstood Word in the World.” The word? Sustainable 

This file is in the public domain because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted".

This file is in the public domain because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that “NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted”.

Sustainable forestry. Sustainable design. Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable energy. The word appears in many places and many contexts, and is generally accepted as the behavior where you consciously replace what you use as you use it, so that whatever it is that you’ve used can continue. Cut down a tree, plant a tree. Even Steven. Tit for tat. Except, according to Dr. Baker’s argument (and a pretty darned persuasive one, in my opinion), such behavior is not sustainable. It is not “sustainability” as sustainability is defined. 

One example that he provided made his point clear to me; when you cut down a tree in a forest, you take much more than the mere carbon-offset that it provided. Replace the tree with another and yes, you replace its role here, but what you don’t – what you can’t – replace are all of the other disturbances that occur in the ecosystem by removing that tree. Dr. Baker explained that when a tree naturally dies, it falls to the ground where, over time, it decays and is reabsorbed into the soil, giving to the soil the nutrients it requires to really keep the forest sustainable. Disturbing the ecosystem of the forest is what cutting trees does. It changes the system entirely. Maybe we won’t see these changes for tens of thousands of millions of years, but to suggest that our practice of replacing trees is really a practice of sustainability, Dr. Baker argued, is false. 

“I’m not a fatalist, I’m a realist,” he said. It may well be a hopeless endeavor that we’re attempting, this whole “save the planet” venture, but the professor’s point – the one that I took from his lecture, anyway – was that we don’t do ourselves any good by lying to ourselves through talk and behavior(s) that claim we’re doing something that we are really not doing at all.

In my experience as an embedded librarian, I hear a lot of talk and questions regarding the sustainability of this kind of work. I couldn’t help but think about this tonight as I took in what Dr. Baker was saying. I wonder if the role is being seen akin to a tree in our library forests – send us out and replace us with another librarian in the library. Even Steven. Give us one new job, take away one we used to do. Tit for tat. But just like the trees and the forest described above, is this really addressing the issue of sustainability? Other staff may well provide the librarian equivalent of carbon-offsets (on paper), but in the ecology of the library, is that all that needs to be replaced? I find the questions fascinating. I’m not sure if the forest metaphor applies to the library, but I do think that thinking of the bigger system – the ecology of the library – is a worthwhile pursuit. It may yield some insight and answers for us as we try to move forward in this arena.

Similarly, it’s interesting to think about this in the context of how the librarian and libraries have been replaced in our educational and healthcare systems, overall. What have we been replaced with? Open databases, journal articles at the desktop, Google (I’m positive that someone is thinking “Google”) and gadgets. Is it an even swap? Does the overarching goal of solid biomedical research and safe healthcare practice suffer in these trades or do they disturb something bigger in the evolution and ecology of our “environment”? What do you think? Can we make a stronger argument for our value when we think of the bigger picture? I’d love to hear what others have to say. I hope you’ll comment below.

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