This week on The Sunny Way, we’ve been discussing how science fiction creates the future. By planting seeds of what we and our world and our lifestyles might look like someday soon, sci-fi draws the reader into the future, as surely as the possibility of being an oak tree draws an acorn into its own potential.

While rifling through my newsreader today, I came across a link (via Worldchanging) to a blog post on Futurismic, a site focused on near-future science fiction. Writer James Boone Dryden writes that current sci-fi focuses too much on technological breakthrough:

Read more...

With life and the world around us changing faster and faster, something is stirring in us individually and in the collective, both conscious and unconscious. The very planet we are living on and the things we are inventing on it are changing rapidly and might do so beyond recognition. There isn’t a lot we can or have to take for granted. It is challenging to get one’s head around that, to make room for that much complexity, uncertainty and change.

This in an invitation to invent our future in writing, to participate in creating a vision, through a story, together. To let ourselves go and go for it. Stories are powerful, and often reality will arise out of our imagination as much as reality is shaping it, and if those stories arise out of a collective, they will carry even more power and conviction.

Read more...

Tonight’s Greendrinks event is being held at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. I will be giving a 2 minute pitch about The Sunny Way, and Victoria has made delicious cookies to share, so please come by and say hi and meet tons of awesome people working on building that nice future we’ve been talking so much about!

I never considered myself to be a fan of science fiction. But the more I thought about writing this piece, the more I realized that that isn’t exactly true. Ever since I remember one of my eyes was firmly on the future. Watching those first episodes of Star Trek on the hand-me down black and white television with my brother and sister in Germany had a very different effect and importance than watching, say, Heidi or Flipper. There was something in those movies that I was looking to for clues about what was possible, about who we are, and about where we were going as human beings.

And it wasn’t just me. We, humans, as I came to understand, seem to be creatures of the future. As much as we are shaped by the past we are always planning, hoping for, looking forward to, dreading or dreaming the future.

Read more...

As my three year old is fond of saying, I’m feeling crabby right now. I’m just being honest. It’s been a long week and I really didn’t want to deal with the garden tonight, but I knew I had to. I left the house after dinner armed with my gardening tools and my kneeling pad and set off for the garden. I consoled myself with thoughts of women in WWII tending their victory gardens while their husbands were away at war. At least my husband was just sitting at home nursing a stomachache and watching our kids. Sometimes it helps me to think about how much harder life would be for me if I were born pretty much anywhere else or at any other time in history. Sometimes. Sometimes it just makes me feel like a weakling and exacerbates my crabby mood. Luckily tonight it helped.

Read more...

When you were growing up, your entire family probably had less technology in the house than you currently own as an individual. I could sit here and detail the carbon footprint of a family from the 1950s or 60s versus a family of this century, but ultimately the conclusion would be: With technological advancement comes adoption, and we are total tech whores.

But now we know that our precious devices, the ones we can’t live without, suck up energy, and we have to make an effort to live green. So how do we reconcile the two?

Read more...

I spent most of the last week hosting a house guest and traveling, so I did a lot more eating out than usual. I don’t feel particularly good about this, though I did have some great meals, including my favorite salad—grilled halloumi cheese with fruit and greens—at Gypsy Cafe, the amazing restaurant run by my brother and sister-in-law in Pittsburgh. But I ate too much, and not as healthily as I’d like.

Usually I eat very simply at home—lots of fruit, salads, soups, and omelets. But when someone is visiting me, I feel a little inferior about serving these plain meals. Also, when people come to New York, they don’t want to necessarily sit in my apartment and eat beans—they want to get out and sample what the city has to offer.

Read more...

Are you aware of what a school lunch these days consists of? In most public schools, lunch is not the only meal being served. Breakfast and snacks are served year round as well. For some students, the meals they eat at school provide nearly all of their daily requirements for major nutrients, vitamins, and minerals.

I am a substitute teacher in the NYC public schools. Every time I deliver a class to the lunchroom, I glance at the food being served. Meals seem to vary in likability with the students. There’s also a big gap between what is being served and what is actually eaten.

Read more...