AS OF JUNE 2011 THIS WEBSITE WILL NO LONGER BE UPDATED - Visit me at Saint Mary's University in Halifax starting in September 2011

I welcome suggestions and comments, so please feel free to email me.

I hope my teaching reflects the following:  "Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand." (Confucius, 450 B.C., Chinese Proverb)

EVENTS/NOTICE

Okanagan Institute, http://www.okanaganinstitute.com/ Check out their website for special and weekly events at the Bohemian Cafe, Bernard St., downtown Kelowna every Thursday at 5 p.m., $2

temporarily on hiatus - Sunday Sociologist: An Intellectual's Cafe, Sundays 5 p.m.:  The purpose of these meetings is to bring existent sociological questions (that we all ask) into dialogue with others in an effort to promote a public sociology. These meetings are unstructured and informal. In general, we converse about ideas, topics, beliefs, opinions, etc., that everyone already has about the social world that we inhabit. No preperation necessary!  Bean Scene Coffee House, Bernard St., downtown Kelowna, for more info http://www.sundaysociologist.com/  This is being replaced by UBCO's Public Sociology class where everyone is welcome, you do not have to be registered in the course:  see http://www.sundaysociologist.com/ubcpublicsociology.htm for a list of the weekly speakers, taking place every Tuesday 4-7 p.m., ASC Room 130, 3333 University Way.

Green Drinks anyone?  A monthly gathering of anyone interested in 'green'. Green Drinkers are from all ages, backgrounds and groups - non-profit organizations, academia, government, small business, big business, self-employed, volunteers, students, concerned citizens...and everything in between.

Every 1st Thursday of the month, Doc Willoughby's (back room or upstairs, depending on numbers), 5:30 PM until 7:30-ish, CONTACT: email info@okanagangreens.ca.

Some interesting talks/videos to check out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-J91SwP8w&feature=player_embedded A 5 minute animated documentary about the history of fossil fuels

http://www.storyofstuff.com/ The Story of Stuff

Some issues I am working on, interested in ...

“A truly free university would not celebrate obedience, for obedience is what has enabled governments to send young men by millions to die in war.  It would celebrate resistance and disobedience, because the world, so full of authoritarianism, so full of policemen, so racked with injustice and violence, needs rebels badly.  It would admire not that technical intellectual efficiency which ignores the fate of human beings far away or near, but that combination of sense and sensibility one finds in good people everywhere, educated or not.  It would understand that the most important thing about the university is not its programs or curricula or any of the accoutrements of the upward-striving educator, but its soul.”

Howard Zinn, Silber, the University, and the Marines, 1972

           Labour Mobility Agreement), Canadian European Trade Agreement (CETA)

Some quotes I find particularly enlightening during these times:  

"Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents.  It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety on the streets, for childcare, for social welfare, for rape crisis clinics, women's refuges, reforms in the law.  If someone says, "Oh, I'm not a feminist!" I ask, "Why? What's your problem?"

Dale Spender

"P.S. It is my observation that too many of us are spending money we haven't earned to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like"

H. Jackson Brown's mother (from P.S. I Love  You)

"The earth does not belong to humans." - Arne Naess, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p.74.

"As deep ecology supporters see it, we share this planet with other life forms, including all animal life, on a basis of equality. There is no hierarchy of life forms where humans are on top of an evolutionary pyramid, free to do whatever they want with the rest of the natural world."

"If you want the trees to stand, you have to stand with the trees."- Friends of Clayoquot Sound
 

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin US Statesman 1706-1790

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." 

Gandhi

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience... Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That's our problem."                              Howard Zinn

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."                  Dwight D Eisenhower

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."                                                                                                                                           Margaret Mead

"This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."                                                                                             Albert Einstein, Monthly Review, 1949

"The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power". Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

"The price good people pay for their indifference to public office is to be ruled by evil men" ... Plato

"Fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power"... Benito Mussolini

"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me." -Pastor Martin Niemoller, 1945, Germany

So what are you doing to make this world a more peaceful place?

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Copyright © 2001 by [E.W.> van der Veen]. All rights reserved.
Revised: 24 Jun 2011 21:50:22 -0700.

Note: I apologize to those people or organizations where I have used their information to compile what I am presenting and have neglected to cite them as a source.