in:geniusissue #1

Welcome to in:geniusin:genius was born from a desire to mesh the the best of a blog—timely articles and short lengths—with the thoughtfulness of a magazine.

in:genius is dedicated to sharing ideas, learning and culture with its readers. in:genius believes that culture, language and distance shouldn’t separate great learning from inquisitive minds, and strives with each issue to bring the best ideas from every corner of the globe to its readers.

in:genius’ articles are for any reader who expects writing that pushes boundaries and challenges the status quo.

In every issue...Five words. Five writers. Five inspirations.

imagination humanityn a t u r eimpossibleidentity

Amy Ernst graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Psychology, before working as a Rape Crisis Counselor and Medical Advocate with the YWCA in Chicago. After hearing about the rampant sexual violence in Eastern Congo,

she relocated to the Lubero region of North Kivu and has been working with COPERMA, a Congolese organization, helping the endless victims of the on-going war. To see more of Amy’s stories, visit her blog, thekingeffect.blogspot.com. She has also been working as a guest writer for Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times. Her guest blogs for The New York Times can be found at http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/author/amy-ernst/

in:geniusCOntrIBUtOrs | IssUE 1

LAUrEn AndErsOn is an Innovation strategist and project manager for CC Lab. She played an instrumental role in building the Collaborative Consumption brand and the growing movement. Lauren has worked with a range of cutting-edge

organizations, including the Australian Social Innovation Exchange, Project Australia and the Brightest Young Minds Foundation.

Lauren writes on how people are using Collaborative Consumption to enhance their daily lives. Her work has appeared on Shareable.net, Plywood People and in:genius.

GLEnn ALBrECht is Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth Western Australia. He is a transdisciplinary philosopher with a focus on the intersection of ecosystem and human health.

Glenn has become internationally known for creating the concept of ‘solastalgia,’ defined as the distress and loss of solace connected to a person’s lived experience of the chronic desolation of a loved home environment by transformational agents such as mining and climate change. Solastalgia is now widely applied in academic contexts and has also inspired creativity in art, literature and music.

LEEnA JOsEph is a Psychology graduate and has been an active volunteer with orphanages, old age homes, HIV institutes and government schools.

Leena initiated the school feeding program in 2003 by serving 100,000 children

in the city of Hyderabad. Knowing the status of malnutrition in the country, she concentrated on expanding the program to rural and tribal areas to deliver hot cooked meals to schoolchildren in far flung and tough terrain locations. Currently she is feeding more than a million children every schoolday across 5 states (Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa and Chhattisgarh).

rOBErt L. hAsh is an author, freelance writer and the editor-in-chief of in:genius. In 2010 he independently published Modern Day Serf, a must-read for anyone who follows the rules, but can’t seem to get ahead. For those buried in consumer and student debt without the tools

to dig themselves out. For those that are stuck in an office all day watching their most productive hours go to someone else. And, for those simply looking for fresh commentary on American culture and society.

Robert received a BA in History from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He lives in Florence, Italy with his wife Kate. They blog about their Italian adventures at La vita è bella.

ImpOssIBLEby Amy Ernst

“We were studying together in the village when two men came in,” says Deborrah, a seventeen-year-old girl in a faded blue dress with white flowers on it. “They raped us.”

I’m in a typically dark and small concrete room at one of the girl-mother centers in North Kivu, a province in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I’ve grown accustomed to this darkness and these conversations. I speak with girls between the ages of twelve to seventy-five every week. All have been victims of the rampant sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Who was with you, Deborrah?” I ask.

Deborrah nods towards the door without hesitation.

“My twin sister,” she says. “She’s outside waiting to speak with you.”

I look in the direction of the door but see only the shadows of the endless women and girls waiting to speak with me. I can’t do much for them. In my notes I highlight girls who still have pain in their abdomens or who never went to a Doctor after their rapes. Many of these girls are raped and give birth to their rapist’s child, without ever seeing a Doctor. Deborrah’s daughter, Kasoki, is now two years old and Deborrah has never been to a hospital.

“Do you want [your sister] to come in and you can speak with me together?”

Deborrah gets up from the small wooden bench and walks to the door. There’s a bent nail acting as a lock, which she rotates upwards and allows the door to swing forward. At the front of the line is a small girl who looks almost exactly like Deborrah. They could be twins except that Deborrah is at least a foot taller than her sister, who tells me that her name is Eileen.

Eileen has a daughter named Sagesse, meaning wisdom, in French. Both Sagesse and Kasoki are the same age, as their mothers were raped side by side, both at the age of fourteen.

“Was it soldiers?” I ask, thinking I know the answer.

“No,” says Eileen, looking to Deborrah for support. “It was two papas from the village.”

My eyes drop to the wooden table in front of me; I hate that answer more than any other answer. The scariest thing about this war is the way it is seeping into the culture. Ending a war in which rape is a weapon is one thing; eradicating the effects that the culture of violent rape has had on the civilian population is daunting, unnerving and terrifying. I’ve heard of every possible scenario. I’ve met the victims of young boys and village leaders alike who perpetrate sexual violence. There is no judicial system - civilians

pay the village Mayor a few dollars and go to market the next day -and the chaos of a war that has lasted over a decade makes anything seem okay.

Deborrah and Eileen are both kind and friendly. Eileen, though smaller, is more outspoken and forward than Deborrah. They did not deserve this, but the rest of the world has decided that these girls don’t matter.

ImpOssIBLE

To see more of Amy’s stories, visit her blog, thekingeffect.blogspot.com. She has also been working as a guest writer for Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times. Her guest blogs for The New York Times can be found at kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/author/amy-ernst/

ImAGInAtIOnby Lauren Anderson

When Logan Green, former Sustainability Coordinator at University of California, and John Zimmer, an ex-Lehman Brothers analyst, initially approached Californian universities to pitch their ride-sharing platform Zimride, they started with the basic premise that ‘carpooling sucks’. But what if, they wondered, they offered a ride-matching service between friends, colleagues and fellow students who are regularly going to and from the same place? By tapping into these common connections, people could more easily trust each other from the outset, leading to a change in the perception of carpooling. Now with over 300,000 Zimride members across the United States, it seems the value of the ‘trust factor’ was widely shared.

With more than 70% of people in the US driving to work or university by themselves, the benefits of Zimride, and other similar platforms like nuride and GoLoco, might seem as simple as helping people get from A to B, but

the motivation of the founders is much deeper than seat efficiency. For Zimmer, it is about “bringing back meaningful physical interaction and dialogue. Virtual communities have become the norm, and (these virtual communities) now enable Zimriders to meet, feel comfortable and have highly meaningful interactions.” In essence, online tools are being leveraged in ways never possible before to create meaningful real-world experiences.

Zimride’s success is an example of the rise of Collaborative Consumption: a rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before. Driven by pressing environmental concerns, the global economic crisis, a resurgence in community and the growing number of networked technologies, Collaborative Consumption is giving rise to a new wave of

opportunities for social entrepreneurs around the world. When the founders of Zimride identified the ‘idling capacity’ of thousands of car seats everyday, they took an imaginative approach to a flawed and stigmatized solution like car-pooling, utilizing the ubiquitous nature of social networks to create a seamless and trusted ride-sharing platform.

Collaborative Consumption works beyond car-pooling, though. In every sector, social entrepreneurs are tapping into emerging opportunities in existing markets through the lens of Collaborative Consumption as society rallies against the status quo, or ‘business as usual’. Collaborative Consumption can be organized into three clear systems. Product Service Systems such as Zipcar, Avelle or borrowing schemes like Neighborgoods enable people to use an item without needing to own it outright. Redistribution Markets like Swap.com, craigslist, Freecycle and thredUP move things

from where they’re not needed to somewhere they are. Collaborative Lifestyles look beyond physical goods to enable people to share time, skills, money and space, whether it’s peer-to-peer lending markets such as Lending Club, exchange networks like Bartercard or garden matching platforms like YardShare. Whether they focus on material possessions or more intangible items, Collaborative Consumption entrepreneurs are reconnecting us with the value and values of the things we have around us. And in the process, they are changing the practices and values of business for the better.

To find out more about collaborative consumption, visit www.collaborativecon-sumption.com. Also, Lauren blogs about CC at www.collaborativeconsumption.com/blog-and-writings

ImAGInAtIOn

nAtUrEby Glen AlbrechtThere is a real need for new concepts in the English language that help us understand the vital relationship between our physical environment and our mental states. We need a new conceptual ecology to remember and reunite that which we have almost forgotten.

Our appreciation of nature, for many city-based and urban citizens, is now so digitally fractured and digitally enhanced, that people have E-experiences of E-nature via films such as Avatar. We have obliterated much of the ecology of external reality, only to have it re-arranged for us as entertainment within an internal digital unreality.

Our conceptual ecology must be re-started, much the same way that contemporary composers like Phillip Glass restarted classical music after the cacophony and atonality of Schoenberg and other twentieth century composers of the abstract music schools. Glass recommenced music with the simplest of musical form (minimalism) which then allowed music to expand once again with creative organic growth and ecological inspiration.

As a baby boomer, I have a lived experience of extensive change to my local, regional, continental and global sense of place. My ‘home’, including the whole earth and its climate, has been transformed by forces seemingly well beyond my control. For me, the loss of my endemic sense of place has been met with sadness and distress and I have sensed the same sadness and sense of loss in others as they grapple with the forces of open-pit mining, oil spills, development pressures and land clearing and now, global warming and changing climes.

Our language lacked a concept to adequately describe this lived experience of negative environmental change, so I created the concept of ‘solastalgia’ to give expression to it. Solastalgia is an existential melancholia generated by the chronic desolation of a loved home environment at any scale of human experience.

Solastalgia is a sign, in specific parts of the world, that in some important respect, humans have failed to take care of their environment. This failure of caretaking of the natural and built environment

nAtUrEhas its correlates in the caretaking of the mind. Our mental health is tightly woven into the fabric of our physical home and when the home is desolated, so too is our psyche.

In order to counter solastalgia and other earth-related or ‘psychoterratic’ mental health problems, I have created positive concepts that will assist in the positive care of the earth and the mind. The concept of soliphilia, or the solidarity and affiliation needed between people to heal and repair the earth is a political and cultural addition to our psychoterratic language. To resist those forces that are desolating the earth and its life we need new concepts that unite us in ways that go beyond the traditional political contest over who owns the earth or the industries and technologies that transform it. In our common humanity and our one earth we have the foundations to be genuinely sustainable.

The emotional experience of ‘eutierria’ or that feeling of organic oneness with the earth is another concept in our language that is strangely missing.

The feeling of total harmony with our place and the naive loss of ego we often felt as children has become rare in this period of what Richard Louv calls ‘nature deficit disorder’. With eutierria I have put back into our language an earthly equivalent of ‘that oceanic’ or spiritual feeling of oneness with our home.

To be good caretakers of the earth, our home, we need to firstly become aware that it is our conceptual landscape that generates environmental desolation. Restoration of external desolation requires a conceptual restoration project inside our heads.

You can find more of Glenn’s fascinating research at http://www.istp.murdoch.edu.au/dirs/74994.html Glenn was also a speaker at TEDxSydney. Hear him speak about Solastalgia at http://bit.ly/bTAXra

hUmAnItyby Leena Joseph

While I was volunteering with Naandi Foundation and looking after the education program in government schools, I found that 50% of the children who went to government schools did so on an empty stomach. It is impossible for a child to learn when he or she is hungry. After conducting a health check up in these schools it was found that many children had deficiency diseases, which they themselves were not aware off. I had to direct them to various specialists for treatment. This inspired me to start a feeding program on a small scale in a few schools of Hyderabad city with support from some corporate sponsors.

It was during this time that the Supreme Court of India gave orders to provide hot cooked meals to all the children attending public schools (Government schools). The District Administration knew about the work I was doing and approached me with a request to do the program in all the schools of Hyderabad

District. After that we never looked back. We designed a state-of-the art centralized kitchen as a sustainable solution to address the challenge of malnutrition. In this way, Naandi was begun.

Naandi’s centralized kitchen solution to fight against malnutrition is an amalgamation of technologies derived from the rice mill industry, hospitality industry and the pharmaceutical industry, which was almost uniquely put to use for the first time for a social cause. Most of the technology used in this approach is available in the marketplace. However Naandi customized and adopted it to meet specific requirements.

Since these meals are served to a large number of children who are from the poorest families and would never have access to healthy food, it made immense sense for us to fortify the meals. The meals served to children are fortified with Iron, Zinc and Folic Acid. Dal is fortified with Soya Dal Analogue. Wheat is fortified

hUmAnItywith premix in order to attain desired levels of micronutrients. Along with fortified meals, we also provide add-ons such as boiled egg, seasonal fruits, candies and fortified biscuits. By providing healthy and wholesome meals to these children on such a large scale, I am ensuring that the future adults of this country are healthier and therefore contribute to the growth of the nation. My interest in this initiative has made me reach out to the tough terrains of the tribal areas where malnutrition and hunger has not been addressed.

“On the day of Diwali (An Indian festival), I got a phone call from a government school teacher from the remotest part of Rajasthan. He said ‘Madam, today is Diwali and who else could I remember and wish other than you on this lovely day for feeding so many poor children. God bless you.’ What more do I need than this blessing?”

Today I am proud to say that I take the responsibility of feeding more than a million children with hot cooked, hygienic and nutritious meals through 22 centralized kitchens located in urban, semi urban, rural and tribal areas across the country every school day.

Naandi, which means “new beginning” in Sanskrit, was founded in 1998 to promote the rights of children, safe drinking water and sustainable livelihoods. Naandi can be found on the web at http://www.naandi.org.

The Midday Meal Program is helping to fight the urgent problem of hunger in India, which has more malnourished children than Sub-Saharan Africa.

IdEntItyby robert hashThe middle class needs a new economic model, and the only way we will find a new one is by understanding that we are serfs in the current one.

Nearly every media outlet has run a story about America’s disappearing middle class. And nearly every pundit has a silver-bullet reason for its demise. But it is only by looking at the middle class as it is, as a whole, that we will begin to understand what went wrong. And when you look at it as a whole you realize that we were modern day serfs all along.

Looking at the situation holistically, as serfdom, is useful for at least two reasons. One, the middle class will need to replace the old system with something, and a series of “anti- [insert silver-bullet cause here]” movements will get the former middle class nowhere fast. Only a comprehensive approach will prevent this from becoming a tar-and-feather-the-reason-du-jour frenzy. Second, by defining the problem as serfdom you can

systematically identify what went wrong with the old system in order to create a new and better one.

This is the job of the middle class today. The middle class serfs of today are the people with dysentery you left behind on your Oregon Trail game as a kid. We may not like to admit it but our crippling debt, distracting consumerism and mindless careerism has reached epidemic levels. As a result, the economy has left us behind to fend for ourselves – and we’re not prepared.

Now it is up to us to reinvent ourselves. We need to choose to not be serfs and to develop a new way to survive. We need a path out of serfdom. There will be a post-middle class, post-serf world, but the extent to which we’ll be successful in it will be tied to the value of the thinking that went into how we reinvented ourselves.

Robert is the editor of in:genius, and author of Modern Day Serf. Read more about his book at www.moderndayserf.com.

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