PseudoBlog Post

from my questions, option #4.

here is my rhetorical situation: i am a contributor to an enviromental-issue blog, maybe something like an offshoot of NPR or the Huffington Post. bascially, a blog with an aware, empathetic, and liberal readership. as a contributor, i envisioned myself as a girl who cares about these issues but with no real training, no real authority, and no real agenda. I was simply struck by the potential for One Laptop per Child on the push for education about environmental issues and inspired to write...

It is simple: provide one laptop per child; one rugged, durable, wireless-ready, energy-efficient laptop to kids in some of the world’s poorest places. From Birmingham, Alabama to Ulaanbaatar Mongolia, school-aged children are being provided access to knowledge previously unknown and inaccessible to them. And what may come from this knowledge? This connection to the world?

Well, from an environmentalist perspective, the potential that these children have with the knowledge they are poised to gain from becoming inter-connected with the world could mean the difference between that spark of genius and empathy being ignited in the next Edward Abbey or Rachel Carson or that talent remaining latent or, worse, lost.

The children that OLPC serves are children who still depend on the land to nourish them, physically and in some parts of the world, spiritually. In Ferreñafe, Peru the school children are learning about their sacred Pómac Forest from their village elders as well as the World Wide Web. They are given the opportunity to walk the ancient trails and witness the brilliance of their ancestral Sican irrigation system and then go to class the next day and view these same trails and irrigation lines from space using Goggle Maps. Essentially, these children are applying an epistemology of environmental learning not seen in most modern, developed countries; an epistemology that privileges synthesis of old and new, of concrete and abstract, and of a connectedness to the earth that transcends subsistence.

OLPC has a mission: to educate. Go to their website (http://laptop.org/en/) for more info, to make a donation, or to link with your own blog. We need to start thinking environmentally beyond ourselves to those human beings who will have the power to continue spreading our world-health message. This is one initiative with massive potential.