Month: May 2012

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Pronoiacs Fight to Save Lives

In pronoiac history: A stockbroker named Nicholas Winton brought 669 Czechoslovakian Jewish children to England, saving their lives. He refused to take credit for his deed until his wife found a scrapbook of the children that he saved and gave it to the BBC. He turns 103 this year.

In October 1938, after the ill-fated Munich Agreement between Germany and the Western European powers, the Nazis annexed a large part of western Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Winton was convinced that the German occupation of the rest of the country would soon follow. To him and many others, the outbreak of war seemed inevitable. The news of Kristallnacht, the bloody pogrom (violent attack) against German and Austrian Jews on the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, had reached Prague. Winton decided to take steps.

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Your Minimum Daily Requirement of Beauty

Rosette Nebula: a “stellar nursery” that resembles a flower

Known formally as NGC 2237, the petals of the Rosette Nebula are actually what astronomers refer to as a “stellar nursery,” a massive, energy-rich molecular cloud brimming with nascent celestial bodies. The nebula owes its symmetric shape to the winds and radiation that emanate from its central cluster of young stars — many of which are only a few million years old.

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Pronoiac Beauty Meets Pronoiac Sustainability

Designing the world’s greenest new building standards.

Against the century-old church next door, the modest, modern building that houses the science lab of Seattle’s private Bertschi School could seem out of place. Its metal roof glints in the daylight, a surrounding garden of native grasses rustles in the breeze, and in-ground windows offer a view of the water that flows beneath. Jason F. McLennan remembers when the owners cut the ribbon on this 1,400-square-foot addition.

Then, he recalls, the children started chanting. Not “Bertschi!” but “Liv-ing build-ing! Liv-ing build-ing!” Those elementary-schoolers knew what stood before them—a structure built to have minimal environmental impact, to exist in an almost symbiotic relationship with its surroundings, operating more like an ecosystem, less like a consumer.

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Beauty in Broken Places

Healing war-torn, broken, and economically devastated communities through art.

[Lily] Yeh is the founder of — and force behind — Barefoot Artists, an organization that revitalizes neighborhoods around the globe through the transformative power of art. In Palestine, that meant working with villagers to create a wall mural that Yeh calls “The Palestinian Tree of Life.” In China, it meant transforming a once imposing, prison-like school into a bright and brilliant place for learning. In Rwanda, it meant helping people heal the still-raw wounds left from that country’s genocide with a memorial to the lost.

In each of the locations, Barefoot Artists collaborates with locals, joining with them to create something beautiful or soothing or enlightening. As Yeh sees it, she is igniting the light of creativity that rests in all people.

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Re-Finding Lost Beauty

World’s largest colony of endangered turtles found off west Africa. Discovery of up to 40,000 leatherback sea turtles may see species removed from critically endangered list

The world’s largest colony of leatherback sea turtles has been identified by scientists, raising hopes that the giant creature may not be as endangered as previously thought. A new survey has revealed that Gabon, west Africa, has between 15,730 and 41,373 female turtles using its nesting beaches.