Newly-discovered German Fairytales Teach and Challenge

Although the stories of Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin are best known because of Walt Disney and the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, different versions of these tales were told throughout Europe. What makes the 500 newly found fairytales collected by 19th century historian, Franz Xaver von Schonwerth, different from the way they are interpreted today is his faithful recording of the way stories farmers, servants, and other country folk passed them on by word of mouth.

     In Oberpfalz, Bavaria, where von Schonwerth collected and published local myths, legends, and fairytales in 1857-1859, cultural curator Erika Eichenseer has published a collection of his works. In Munich, Dan Szabo is now translating them into English.

     Eichenseer sees fairytales as a treasure of ancient knowledge and wisdom, a way of helping youngsters understand how virtue, prudence, and courage can overcome dangers and challenges. We might see tales involving evil witches, magic animals, spells, and brave princes as helping children think outside the box. When a maiden is threatened by a witch, for example, she transforms herself into a pond. The witch drinks the pond dry, and the girl kills the witch by cutting herself out of the witch's stomach.

     Using a prince, a bear, and a witch, The Turnip Princess seems to stress the importance of following instructions. When the prince did as the bear directed, pulled a rusty nail out of a cave's wall, and placed it under a turnip, the witch turned into a beautiful, kind girl who married the prince.

     When Szabo's English translations are completed, kids and Disney will have new material to interpret. Meanwhile, children can ask grandparents to tell them the stories they heard when they were youngsters.When I taught, I was surprised to learn that many students had not heard of a Greek slave's Aesop's Fables,  recorded by the 14th century monk, Maximus Planudes. Maybe grandparents will introduce their grandchildren to "The Fox and the Grapes" and "The Lion and the Mouse."

 

Arts and Crafts for Christmas in July

Instead of waiting until December, when the idea of making gifts for friends and relatives competes for time, often unsuccessfully, with holiday recitals, shopping for presents, cookie baking, and parties, now is the time when kids on vacation are looking for things to do. Besides, if a project is messy, this is the season when it can be done outside. Last weekend, for example, my granddaughter and I went to a neighbor's home to do some tie dying in their driveway.

Potato Prints

Potato printing is one project that can produce holiday wrapping paper, gift tags, and cards. When my daughter was only three, I helped her use a big potato, a star cookie cutter, and yellow poster paint in July to turn white tissue paper and blue construction paper into all the items we needed to wrap gifts in December.

     Begin by cutting a potato in half. If you are going to use a cookie cutter for a design, the potato has to be big enough for the cookie cutter to fit on the potato's cross-section. Original designs can be made to fit on any sized potato. For example, you can cut a fir tree out of cardboard to any size. Place it on the exposed half of the potato and cut around it with a knife. A cookie cutter can just be pressed into the potato to make a design.

     The purpose of printing is to be able to repeat a design. Relief-printing uses the raised part of the design, while the area around the design remains white. Consequently, it usually is necessary for an adult to cut away all the potato that is next to the design. Put some paint in a saucer or dish. Carefully dip just the raised part of the potato design into the paint. Stamp it on white paper or another light color. You also can use white paint to create a potato print that will show up on dark paper.

     Hobby stores often sell linoleum blocks, knives, and folded card stock that older children can use to make more intricate designs for holiday cards. Again, the area around the design is removed. Instead of dipping the block into paint or ink, a roller applies paint/ink to the raised design. The card is placed on top of the painted/inked surface and the back of the card is rubbed to transfer the design.

     Kids who learn how to make and use prints, or a master plate known as a matrix, are following a long tradition of those in China, Tibet, and India who first printed multiple copies of Buddhist texts.

Family Tree Scrapbooks

Any relative would appreciate a scrapbook that presented a well-researched, attractive family tree. Begin by collecting pictures of relatives and finding ancestry information from genealogy websites. You might to go to ancestry.com for a free trial to see how much you can discover about your family's background. Once you identify the countries from which relatives emigrated and where relatives live now, you can combine flags, maps, ethnic clothes, and pictures of cities and geographical areas (mountains, rivers, lakes) with photos of relatives and the information learned about births, marriages, children, military service, etc. (The earlier blog posts, "Picture the World," "You Are Here," and "A Salute to Flags," may give you some additional ideas of what to include in a Family Tree Scrapbook.)

Pollution Update

Look around when you attend a music festival, 4th of July celebration, or state fair this summer. Recycling bins, found in schools and at the exits of Target and other stores, have moved outside.

     Paul Abramson, who founded Paolo Verde Consulting, observed that keeping an area clean, especially at potential littering hot spots, during an event eliminates the need for picking up the mess at the end, when everyone is exhausted. He recommends having people (I would suggest cute, smiling teenagers) at bins "making gentle suggestions," such as "You know, that paper plate is recyclable, and we're collecting compost (food scraps) here."

     Abramson also notes that keeping an event site neat appeals to everyone who likes to see immediate results rather than the invisible good their contributions are doing, when they give to the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, or Greenpeace.

     On a larger scale, TIME magazine (June 16, 2014), in an article entitled, "Green Revolution," shows the United States's amazing shift to clean energy in the 21st century. Renewable (water, wind, and solar) power plants went from 682 in 2002 to 1,956 in 2012. While coal plants still provided 39% of U.S. electricity and 75% of emissions from electricity in 2013, cleaner natural gas generated 51% of the electricity added by new plants opened in 2013. Estimates suggest one-fifth of all coal-fired plants have been closed or are scheduled to retire. Although solar and wind power produced only a little more than 5% of U.S. electricity in 2013, they produced 30% of new power added that year and 90% of new power capacity installed in the first quarter of 2014. What is impressive about this added power from wind is the amount by which it decreased carbon emissions, the same effect as taking 20 million cars off the road.

     Even children 6 to 8 years old can learn about the fossil fuel energy cycle from sun to transportation use in Buried Sunlight: How Fossil Fuels Have Changed the Earth by Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm.

     Solar panels, once an exotic that cost $75 per watt generated in 1975, are now available to produce a watt of electricity on home and business rooftops for less than 75 cents. Technology also is meeting the conservation challenge. Products now keep track of individual energy usage and suggest ways to reduce it. Energy efficient LED lightbulbs, compared to incandescent ones, last longer and reduce consumer cost over their lifetimes. It is interesting to note that combined jobs in the solar industry (150,000) and wind industry (50,000) now match the 200,000 in the coal industry.

     Unfortunately, new items, such as plastic bottles and drones, keep multiplying and requiring additional ideas for recycling. According to trendwatching,com, plastic Coca-Cola bottles in Vietnam, and later in Thailand and Indonesia, come with 16 different caps that convert empties into new uses, such as squirt guns, pencil sharpeners, and soap dispensers. Drones also are a new pollution problem. Some have biodegradable wings, but when they crash, their metal pieces and batteries litter the land and oceans.

     Students looking for ways to eliminate pollution and stem climate change can also find a wide variety of suggestions, including the development of bladeless wind turbines, in the earlier blog post, "A Healthy Environment."

   

The Lure of Shale Oil Independence

With oil trading at over $70 a barrel, demand up, and questions about supply from Iran and elsewhere, interest in fracking has rebounded in September, 2018. Soft oil and gas prices in 2015 and 2016 had dampened enthusiasm for investments in shale oil. BHP Billiton, the Australian-based metals and energy company, took a $4.9 billion write-off in January, 2016, on its shale oil investment in the United States. In the short and medium term, BHP saw shale too expensive to compete with traditional oil and gas production.  BHP expected its shale investments to be profitable in the long run, however. As soon as crude edged toward $70 a barrel in early August, 2018, BHP sold its US shale holdings to BP for $10.5 billion.

     What if there is a shale oil deposit under your home? Fracking, which blasts oil and natural gas out of shale rock, has caused countries to ignore serious consequences. (See the earlier post, "North Pole Flag.")

      President Obama favored energy renewables over fracking. At the moment, wind and solar technologies need fossil fuel backups for windless, cloudy days and nighttime, but Bill Gates, who just announced his intention to invest a billion dollars in clean energy, said government investment in innovations research will lead to even more private investment in technologies that will overcome the need for fuels that contribute to greenhouse gases.

     While ignoring private property rights is just one of the problems associated with fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, protesters in England drew attention to the need to consider this fracking drawback by erecting a satiric sign outside the country home of British Prime Minister, David Cameron, this month. The sign apologized for the inconvenience caused by setting up fracking operations under his home without permission.

     With its economy dependent on income from oil and natural gas, Russia is said to be funding anti-fracking groups. While this may or may not be true, there are legitimate reasons for concern about the fracking process. To  release trapped oil and natural gas, at high pressure, companies pump fluid composed of 99% water and sand and 1% chemicals into dense rock formations thousands of feet below ground. Companies, such as Royal Dutch Shell, which has a contract with China's Sinopec Corp. to exploit shale gas deposits in the Sechuan Basin and Ordos, try to reassure people that the wells they drill are far below drinking water supplies and that they isolate water supplies from fracking fluids by inserting concrete and steel barriers into their wells. Considering the shortage of clean water in eight of the 20 countries with the largest shale gas resources, it does not seem wise to base the safety of water supplies on company assurances.

     Although Algeria, for example, is believed to have the world's third or fourth largest recoverable shale gas reserves, protesters are more concerned about potential damage to the delicate aquifer system that furnishes water for people, animals, and crops not only in Algeria, but also in Libya and Tunisia. Fear that Halliburton's $70 billion hydraulic fracking project would pollute ground water and disturb the environment set off a violent protest in Ain Salah, a rural Algerian town in the Sahara Desert. Early in 2015, demonstrations spread to at least three other towns and Algiers. Deep well drilling to increase the amount of water needed for fracking can have an impact on local water sources and a cumulative effect that causes water levels to drop in lakes farther away. Flowback of the water and chemicals used in fracking plus the radioactive materials picked up deep in the earth is stored in plastic-lined open pits at drilling sites. While some of this toxic stew is trucked away and treated to remove toxins, the rest is released into streams and rivers that pollute drinkable water.

    Since companies are not required to disclose what chemicals they are using, there is no way to test the effect they have underground. I am reminded of the birds on an island in the North Pacific Ocean who are dying because of eating debris from humans over 1,250 miles away. Although bottle caps, cigarette lighters, and razor blades thrown into the ocean disappear, they can do plenty of harm.

     The sand drilling companies blast into shale helps hold cracks open to let oil and natural gas flow to the wellhead. Mining this sand brings noise, truck and rail traffic, and fine silica dust pollution to the population in areas where often there are no nonmetallic mining laws to regulate the hours, trucking routes, and other aspects of sand mining operations. People living near (a half mile away or closer) a sand mine have developed asthma and needed to use an inhaler. They cannot open their windows and have to install air filtration systems in their homes. Since signing a contract with a sand mining company can make a landowner wealthy, individuals have an incentive to ignore the disappearing hills, lung damage, and other consequences that can come with sand mining. Product manufacturers and commodity producers, however, that are having shipping delay problems because they are competing for rail capacity with frac sand are beginning to complain.

    Also, sand mines can use between 420,000 and two million gallons of water a day. To remove impurities from the sand, the chemical, polyacrylamide, which has traces of a known carcinogen, can enter surface and ground water at a mine site from wastewater ponds.

     The Food and Water Watch organization, which began sponsoring a Global Frackdown three years ago, opposes UN efforts to include fracking in its Sustainable Energy for All Initiative. The many problems associated with fracking do not justify including the process in the same category as renewable wind and solar energy sources. The organization, Americans Against Fracking, which pulls together groups working to ban fracking helped New York ban the process after a two-year investigation concluded that fracking could not be done safely. A bill now pending in the U.S. Congress would ban fracking on public lands, where it already has begun in Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest, and Virginia has agreed to allow it in the George Washington National Forest.

     Finally, there is concern about the possibility that fracking can cause earthquakes, such as the small ones geologists discovered in Ohio in April, 2014. Clearly, there is a need for tough permit requirements, when a fault already exists near drilling operations.

     As more and more people around the world rely on industrial jobs and demand heat, air conditioning, and cars, care for the environment will come up against pressure to find new sources of oil and natural gas. What projects will students develop to help adults see the unseen effects of dangerous extraction methods?