Weekend | China & Elephants | Hardy's Green School | NYC's Blue School

Green Beings

Mass Murder in Africa

Will China’s Love of Ivory Kill All the World’s Elephants? AOC Green Beings

Inspired by Vanity Fair’s excellent Alex Shoumatoff article ‘Agony and Ivory’, we explore the issue of China’s high impact on reversing the trend of not killing elephants for ivory.

Before the Chinese began building the 70-mile-long highway around Amboseli, there was no poaching for 30 years. Since 2009, four of Amboseli’s “magnificent big-tusked bulls have been killed” and now poachers seek to kill the matriarchs — the oldest, wisest female leaders of the elephant herds.

The Chinese are close to creating an “extinction vortex” among elephants in the Amboseli, choosing to slaughter or pay for the slaughter of the largest elephants as trophies.

Ninety percent of the arrests for possession of ivory at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta are Chinese nationals. Half the poaching in Kenya occurs within 20 miles of one of the five massive Chinese road-building projects. Over a million Chinese now live in Africa compared to 700,000 a decade ago.

John Hardy Green School in Bali

Charlotte Bacon - Lessons From a Year in Bali NYTimes

The Green School in BaliAuthor Charlotte Bacon sent us scrambling just now, writing pretty negatively about her time in Bali. Bacon’s husband Brad Choyt was hired as Bali’s Green School’s first Director. The Green School is a project of John and Cynthia Hardy of John Hardy jewelry fame.

It called on the spirit of “Walden,” an intentionality of living, blended with a darker dose of the colonial: I could hire help for very little and not spend all day attached to a sponge. Anything freighted with that much desire and contradiction is bound to fail, and my dream soon did. What’s consoling is that even though I gained little of what I’d hoped for, I was happily changed in ways that I had neither planned nor expected.

We featured John Hardy’s TED video about the Green School in November 2010. It seems that the school is fine, if relations between the Hardys and Bacon-Choyt may not be. Studying the records, it seems that the couple was in Bali for more than a year, but who knows. Perhaps Charlotte Bacon left Bali early and her husband returned later.

What is the point? That John Hardy and his wife are liberal colonialists who have no business trying to start a school in Bali? I’m very confused. To quietly slam the school — causing me to be sure it’s still open — is very unprofessional.

Is it the author’s point that Oprah is a colonialist in South Africa, that we should all stay in our own countries and not comingle? Certainly these projects can be negative and insensitive to local populations? Is that what Bacon is claiming? Or was the fit not just a good one? Such a radical change in lifestyle can be not easy for families.

The NYTimes has a bad habit of not allowing comments on many articles, so there’s no clarification of the author’s true intentions regarding the Green School. They don’t read positive, no doubt about it.

John Hardy’s Green School

Brad Choyt Head of Blue School

Charlotte Bacon, her husband, Brad Choyt, and their children, Thea and Toby, at a Balinese temple. Brad Choyt, Charlotte Bacon and their two children are back in New York, where Choyt is Head of School at Blue School, founded by Matt Goldman, Renee Rolleri, Chris Wink & Jen Wink who started Blue Man Group over 20 years ago.

The Blue School began operating as a tiny nursery located in the East Village in 2006. Today The Blue School has signed an agreement to purchase a 33,000-square-foot, six-story building at 241 Water St. in lower Manhattan.

Anne in Bali:

Totally Exposed by Niskala Spirits in Amankila, Bali

Brainiac

Ken Robinson | ‘Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative’ | The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything AOC Shop

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary has analyzed almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adult, finding that creativity scores rose until 1990. The downward decline of American creativity scores is constant since 1990. Most alarming is the fact that it is the scores of younger children in America — from kindergarten through sixth grade — who are losing the most creativity.

Where Entrepreneurs Go Shopping Newsweek