Film maker Wes Skiles, who entertained Gainesville Environmental Film Festival attendees with his films, tales and wit last March, died while diving off Boynton Beach, Florida, on Wednesday. Skiles’ death is a great loss, and our thoughts are with his family.

“Photographer and Florida springs advocate Wes Skiles died Wednesday while filming off the coast of Palm Beach County, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday.

Based in High Springs with Karst Productions, Skiles, 52, was a former member of the Florida Springs Task Force. During the past 15 years, Skiles produced and directed over a dozen major films on adventure and science. His work included most recently the IMAX film “Journey into Amazing Caves” and a film for National Geographic in Antarctica on exploring the largest iceberg in recorded history. He shot the August National Geographic cover photo of caves in the Bahamas.

via FloridaEnvironments.com: Cave explorer, springs advocate Wes Skiles dies while diving.

See also National Geographic blog posting: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2010/07/national-geographic-photographer-wes-skiles-dies.html

“Columbia University has quietly suspended research at a nationally prominent brain-imaging center and reassigned its top managers after federal investigators found that it had routinely injected mental patients with drugs that contained potentially dangerous impurities.”

via Brain Center at Columbia Gave Patients Impure Drugs – NYTimes.com.

The Downtown Farmer’s Garden’s purpose is to provide food and inspire citizens to substitute purely ornamental plants with an edible landscapes. …growing more fruits and vegetables locally reduces energy consumption and increases the area’s self sufficiency. Growing food is a critical part of building a resource efficient Alachua County.

via Details Alachua County Florida -.

Learn more about the multiple pathways to “Green” certification, including LEED, Energy Star, FL Water Star, FL Green Building Coalition, and more. Featuring a wide cross-section of green building experts from a variety of organizations.

Continuing Education credits are being sought for LEED APs who attend this session. Continental breakfast and lunch will be provided.

Kanapaha Botanical Gardens

4700 SW 58th Drive, Gainesville, FL

Wednesday, July 14, 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Registration: $125

Register online at www.usgbcheartfl.org

Students at Loga Springs International Academy on Northeast 16th Avenue showed off the fruits of their labors this week during a Sustainability Fair, highlighted by a wind turbine they built, along with solar-powered cookers for hot dogs and cornbread.

Last year, the students built the turbine as part of their physics lesson, with help from engineering students at the University of Florida. It can power a laptop, a blow dryer or other small appliances and can be integrated with a solar panel for more power.

“I would say, as a parent, that Loga Springs is a place where students are actually doing, not just being taught,” said Susan Littell, whose two sons have attended Loga Springs for three years and worked extensively on the turbine. “And the sustainability fair was just one example of that.”

Thursday’s fair also featured demonstrations of biodiesel, an electric go-kart partially built by Loga students and visitors from Florida Organic Growers, and the Edible Plant Project.

Read the rest at Private school shows off students’ sustainability knowledge with fair – Gainesville Sun

US public education has been retreating into an ever-narrower curriculum for several decades, and the early casualties have been programs that involve kinesthetic experiences and the manipulation of materials: arts, physical education, music, and particularly crafts like woodworking, nutrition and food preparation, drafting, sewing, and metalworking.

Not that many of these terminated programs were all that terrific, mind you. There was often a tendency to drain the arts of emotional content; turn music into memorization; and compartmentalize crafts as “vocational education,” where skills were taught in isolation, devoid of intellectual content and context. When John Dewey called for “learning by doing,” he probably had in mind something more imaginative than seventh graders churning out cookie cutter bookshelves without ever thinking about why we read books, or how trees grow, or our relationship to the natural world.

Read the rest at What I Learned in the Charleston Jail – Energy Bulletin

At this event, we’ll introduce our new Board members, recognize those who have contributed to green building in our region, review our activities thus far in 2010, and discuss what lies ahead.

6:30 – 8:30 p.m., June 14

Sister’s Restaurant, 5212 SW 91 Tr, Haile Plantation Village

$40 Members; $65 Non-Members, includes one-year membership

via U.S. Green Building Council – Heart of Florida Chapter – Calendar of Events.

9 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday
Santa Fe College, 3000 N.W. 83rd St., Gainesville
$5, $4 for children, free for SFC students, staff and ages 3 and younger.
For information, call 352-395-5601

“Without a coastline in sight, the Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo is celebrating World Oceans Day on Saturday and Sunday by showing how landlocked citizens impact the ocean.

“I’d like to inspire conservation action as much as we can because small alterations in our daily lives can have a huge, lasting impact,” says Tarah Jacobs, a conservation education specialist at Santa Fe and coordinator of the World Oceans Day celebration.

Many people don’t realize how their actions affect the ocean. From sprinkling pesticides on their lawn to ordering seafood at dinner, people impact the sea, she says.

Therefore, the Teaching Zoo’s third annual celebration of World Oceans Day, which the United Nations recognized as June 8 in 2008, will focus on such impacts and how visitors can protect the ocean without leaving home.

The event also offers one of the few times during the year that visitors can wander the zoo at their leisure. Unlike the usual guided tours, zookeepers Saturday and Sunday will be stationed at the exhibits so visitors can stroll through the zoo and still have access to detailed information about the animals.

Activities themed to World Ocean Day will include a discussion on sustainable seafood choices. Many types of seafood offered at restaurants are over-fished, and their population can’t keep up with the rate they’re being caught. The Teaching Zoo will give out information based on Seafood Watch, a program started by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, to help visitors choose which fish to order at restaurants.”

Read the rest at World Ocean Day Promotes Conservation – Gainesville.com

United Church of Gainesville

1624 NW 5th Ave.

From Dottie Burham:

“If you are being impacted emotionally, spiritually and/or
economically by these very uncertain times, and if you are
experiencing  deep concern for our beloved Earth and all her critters,
this seminar is for you.  The Transition Movement started in England
when a group of concerned friends got together and asked themselves
the following questions:  “How can we respond in intelligent,
adaptive, resilient ways to the challenges we are likely to face in
the near future?  We see these problems as the end of cheap oil, more
severe weather events, water shortages, unstable world economies and
more human conflict and violence.    Starting with these
conversations, these people founded a social movement,  which has now
become international.  They write books, produce videos and have a
strong on-line presence to help us do the same.  Come learn about what
is happening.”

About Dorothy S. Burnham, BS, MA, D. Min.:

“I am on the board of Sustainable Alachua County, and am the Chair of
the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship’s Ministry to the Earth. I work
with Florida Organic Growers, with their Urban Gardening Group.  I
have a Doctor of Ministry, focusing on earth-based spiritual practices
of world religions.
I moved here from Knoxville, TN, where I produced a local public radio
show entitled “Turning the Tide, Healing Ourselves and the Earth.”  I
lived in a passive solar house which I had built in 1985. A friend and
I designed the house, I did the contracting for the house, and I
brought it in on time and within my budget.  I am a trainer in applied
deep ecology, and in “despair and personal power” workshops. I taught
at the Univ. of Tenn.

Rob Hopkins will help in this seminar.  He is a technical writer
specializing in industrial building trades.  He just wrote a manual on
weatherization and studies all aspects of green building.  He is a
former building tradesman who gardens with me and is a wonderful cook,
focused on eating healthfully and locally.”

Loga Springs Academy will be hosting a Community School and Green Building Sustainability Fair highlighting environmental sustainability and clean energy projects. The academy has recently relocated to a Northeast Gainesville location and has been working hard to convert the historic building into a
sustainable and green school. Engineering students from the University of Florida – Eric Layton and Derek Matteson – will be holding demonstrations on an electric-powered go-cart that was built with the help of students from Loga Springs Academy.  Solar panels are used to recharge the electric cart, allowing students to be transported without burning any fossil fuels. There will be a display showing samples of fuel grade biodiesel, which was made at the academy. The students of Loga Springs Academy will demonstrate a wind turbine that they built over the course of the summer.  This wind turbine is able to power electronic appliances, such as a radio or a laptop computer.

All ages are welcome to come and learn more about clean energy and community sustainability.

For more information, please contact Karen Porter at (352) 337-0686.

For more about Loga Springs Academy, visit their website.