And here I am again

It's been a few weeks since I've posted anything. A thousand pardons: I've been out of state, out of town, and just generally busy. Not a terrible lot has happened worth posting anyway.

One quick thing: 365 Urban Species is complete. I have tremendous respect for the project (the Urban Pantheist picked a living thing you can find around Boston and described their natural history each day for 2006), and it really demonstrates what I think makes for effective environmental education. It's well-written and interesting with an accessible topic, and it's done by someone who obviously appreciates what he's writing about. It's very thorough, covering everything from omnipresent herring gulls to witch's butter (I won't pretend I'd heard of that one). And it doesn't try to be a big Event -- I've seen too much science media where you really have to dig past a fancy gimmicky interface or cute anthropomorphic animal narration or what-have-you before you actually get to anything interesting.

That is actually something that really annoys me, when something assumes that people won't listen to something that's interesting or useful unless it's also fun and exciting, and then skimp on the stuff that's actually interesting or useful. Most people want to understand the world around them, and all you need to do is A. give them new information to think about, and B. not waste their time. If the first thing you do is put them into a passive "entertain me" mode, it might not be boring but you'll never actively engage them in your topic -- and worse, you encourage them to go straight into that mode, making it harder for others to engage them in the future. I don't get the sense that people realize how unnatural it is for a human being to be in that state permanently. Anyway, that's my un-fun and un-exciting spiel for the night.