I finally saw James Cameron’s epic new film Avatar with my father and uncle this afternoon and we found it both visually and thematically striking.  Yes it was just the Pocahontas story only with aliens and explosions, but on the other hand – it was the Pocahontas story with ALIENS and EXPLOSIONS!  Besides, as one of the most expensive movies ever made – don’t you think you should do your part and pitch in?

The story took place in the distant future on a far away planet called Pandora but had everything to do with planet Earth right now. During one tragic scene when the human forces attack ‘Hometree’ (a giant tree the locals live in) in order to access the mineral deposits beneath it, I was reminded of the following words of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, the Son of the Founder of the Baha’i Faith, on the double edged sword of civilization (emphasis mine):

…on the one hand, material achievements and the development of the physical world produce prosperity, which exquisitely manifests its intended aims, on the other hand dangers, severe calamities and violent afflictions are imminent.

Consequently, when thou lookest at the orderly pattern of kingdoms, cities and villages, with the attractiveness of their adornments, the freshness of their natural resources, the refinement of their appliances, the ease of their means of travel, the extent of knowledge available about the world of nature, the great inventions, the colossal enterprises, the noble discoveries and scientific researches, thou wouldst conclude that civilization conduceth to the happiness and the progress of the human world. Yet shouldst thou turn thine eye to the discovery of destructive and infernal machines, to the development of forces of demolition and the invention of fiery implements, which uproot the tree of life, it would become evident and manifest unto thee that civilization is conjoined with barbarism. Progress and barbarism go hand in hand, unless material civilization be confirmed by Divine Guidance, by the revelations of the All-Merciful and by godly virtues, and be reinforced by spiritual conduct, by the ideals of the Kingdom and by the outpourings of the Realm of Might.

[Selections From the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Baha, p. 284]

Ottawa Bahá’ís work to blend ecology into the rhythm of their community life

Children gardening at Ottawa Baha'i Centre - photographer and teacher are Dan Jones

The long-awaited purchasing of a Bahá’í Centre in 2005 has continually given the community opportunities to put its environmental values into action, and this is a process that will surely continue over the years to come.  The building at 211 McArthur Avenue in Vanier was largely chosen for its central location and easy access to public transit and the Rideau River bike path.  Over a series of weekends, dozens of skilled volunteers transformed what was then an Italian restaurant into a community centre, improving the building’s insulation and replacing many windows, installing CFL light bulbs while reusing and recycling material wherever possible.  Dishes are available and users of the centre are asked not to bring in any disposable plates, cups or utensils but rather to use the provided dishes, dishwasher and a three-compartment sink.  The Bahá’í Centre is also equipped to recycle those other materials that do find their way into the building, and environmentally friendly products are used for cleaning.

Participants of International Environment Forum conference

Along with regular activities, the Bahá’í community of Ottawa also aims to engage in environmental discourse through supporting the special events such as the 11th  International Environment Forum conference (subtitled ‘Responding to Climate Change: Scientific Realities, Spiritual Imperatives’) which the community hosted in October 2007.  This conference brought together aboriginal, scientific, religious, political, academic, business, international development, activist and youth voices to address the spiritual implications of the climate crisis.

Yes.  I’m the one with the big hair, the helmet and the engraved hunk of plastic.  Watch it here. I was accepting the hunk of plastic on behalf of the Otesha Project, where I now work.  More on that later.

I have just returned to Ottawa from Madison, Wisconsin by way of Toronto, Buffalo , Chicago and Milwaukee to present another version of my research on hope and faith in environmentalism at the first meeting of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) as well as to a group of keeners at the Madison Baha’i Centre.  The title of the conference was something like “Bonsai Trees: How to Grow Them in Your Hand” (see thier image above) or “Environment: The Interdisciplinary Challenge” – I can’t remember.

The whole thing was really the result of one of the most reckless sequences of events in my short life to date.  When I received the invitation to present my paper back in June or July I could scarcely remember the late night paper-submitting session that must have occurred months earlier.  Did I do that?  Is that my name?  Is that my paper?

More recklessness ensued when I went on to book myself about four days rent on various Amtrak trains.  One highlight of that experience was the following telephone exchange with an Amtrak booking agent:

Me: “So what does that come out to?”
Agent: “About nine hours and forty-five minutes, Sir.”
Me: “Wow… Buffalo and Chicago look so much closer on the map!”
Agent: “Yep…  maps’ll do that… Sir.”

And do that they did – oh, how they did that.  Something about this thing people are calling scale.

Memorial Union building, 1959 - from the University of Wisconsin digital collections on flickr

Some other highlights of the experience include:

• Literally running from the L train station to the Baha’i House of Worship outside Chicago out of excitement to see it again after more than ten years.

• Grabbing my first ever hard copy of the legendary satirical newspaper, the Onion.
• 

  The Yaganagis

  Realizing that my host in Madison is none other than the son and brother of my hosts in Bangalore way back in 2007.

• Getting to the conference to discuss strategies to influence the public to adopt more environmentally sustainable behavior while munching on the provided individually wrapped bags of chips, granola bars, yogurts, cream cheeses spread on bagels over disposable plates and sipping on tiny boxes of soy milk.

• Witnessing several develop major academic crushes as they meet in person with others doing research into the same obscure fields and questions.

• Listening to a Plymouth State University prof describe a recent citizen-science research initiative while the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” thumps outside from a university event.

• The organizer’s fanatical dedication to interdisciplinarity placed me in session with two profs presenting their research on hurricane Katrina.  Putting me, the last presenter, in the position of trying tieing my presentation on the environmental movement on with something I know nothing about.

• Looking forward to my seven hour stopover in Buffalo because at least it was four hours less than the first one.

Baha'i House of Worship by Giant Ginkgo on flickr

To read a very brief summarry of an earlier version of the same presentation, check out this entry from the International Environment Forum 2009 conference blog.  Serious readers are welcome to contact me to have the latest version e-mailed to them.

But you know who does?  Scott Valberg – that’s who.  He understands football so well that he has been playing football for the Queen’s University Gaels for more than five years.  He understands football so well that people who work with his sister will show up to his games and hold banners that say things like “Queen’s is good”, “Go Scott – This could be your last year” and my own “I don’t understand football”.  He understands football so well that those people get photographed by official Queen’s University sports photographers.  I don’t understand football anywhere nearly that well.

In the past 48 hours, I have traveled by bike, hybrid car, regular car, greyhound, subway, train, taxi and foot to get from Tatamagouche, through Amherst, Sackville, Fredericton, Montreal, Ottawa, Montreal (again) and New York City to arrive in Washington, D.C. and attend, speak, blog and mingle at the joint 33rd Annual Association for Baha’i Studies – North America/13th Annual International Environment Forum Conference.

Baha’i geeks from all disciplines generally flock Association for Baha’i Studies (ABS) conferences to bask in each other’s academic geekiness – sharing their research in all aspects of the Baha’i Faith and all aspects of everything else in light of the Baha’i teachings.  While an ABS conference can be heaven on earth for the Baha’i geek, it can also be horribly difficult because they are expected to choose one of many fascinating sessions that will be happening AT THE EXACT SAME TIME.

I delivered one such simultaneous session at the 2007 ABS conference in Mississauga, Ontario and managed to dupe several people into choosing my session thanks entirely to the provocative title of my presentation and to the bribes I gave my friends that were at the conference.  It was called “‘Abdu’l-Baha the Environmentalist” and will probably find its way to this very website at some point in the future for those online who also like to be duped by the titles of things.

This year the theme is Environments, and the International Environment Forum (IEF) decided to invite itself over to have its annual conference in tandem with the ABS.  The IEF is a Baha’i-inspired network of environmental geeks who also tend to be geeky about the Baha’i teachings.

With everyone becoming increasingly concerned with our relationship with the earth and tired of easy answers – it is finally time for the Baha’i environment geeks to shine and present the research they have been doing into these questions and what the Baha’i teachings have to offer.

On Saturday afternoon, I will be presenting my honors thesis “Faith and Hope in Environmentalism in the Face of Climate Change” in the IEF session with my boringly accurate title to be offset by some snazzy slides and not one, but two Star Wars references. That’s right – two.  That’s right, this is the very same honors thesis that kept me up all night on campus all those months ago.

You (yes, you) will be able to follow the IEF section from the comfort of your basement by visiting the IEF’s conference blog – where I will likely do a little guest blogging myself.

]]> http://samuelbenoit.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/abs/feed/ 2 samuelbenoit SB in NYC going to DC for ABS/IEF abs logo I'm probably going to be wearing the exact same outfit. iefblog http://samuelbenoit.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/a-last-night-of-firsts/ http://samuelbenoit.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/a-last-night-of-firsts/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 18:16:30 +0000 samuelbenoit http://samuelbenoit.wordpress.com/?p=254 ]]>

"approaching carleton @ night..." by Flickr user steveleenow

Between the ages of 14 and 17, staying up all night and into the next day was my idea of a great time.  Me and my best friend Seamus McGrath would even boast about it to each other and to other friends.  “So, how much sleep did you get last night?  Oh me?  Hmmm, let me count them out…” then we would count our fingers until abruptly shouting “NONE!”  All-nighters lost their appeal as I got older, but they still do occur in cases of last minute packing and essay writing.  Last last Thursday night, on my last night of my last undergraduate degree, before my last exam, having to finish my last edit of my last assignment, I had a night of firsts.

Thursday afternoon I meet with my thesis supervisor to go over my thesis page by page with his revisions.  He gave me the option to further delay handing it in, but it had gone long enough and I was determined to slay the dragon and move on with my life.  A couple posts ago I called on aliens, vampires, zombies and mothra – this time I want you to picture the hero of a horror movie featuring an ever dwindling group of survivors stuck on a spaceship or remote research station with a bloodthirsty monster of some sort.  The hero has had enough:

Now picture the hero as me, with a giant stack of paper, a red pen and a dwindling supply of snacks.

It was like my whole life of rarely drinking coffee and pop had been preparing me for this moment.  Keeping my tolerance to caffeine strategically low has helped me save the drug as my emergency cheat code for situations like this.  I walked into Rooster’s (our student association-owned coffee shop), approached the counter and confidently said “I guess I’ll have a, like, um, a regular…  coffee?”

I knew that if I were to sit in front of a computer all of the content I had in my head would vaporize into nothingness – so me, my paper, pen and snacks set up in the almost deserted atrium.  During the day, Carleton University’s atrium is normally a hub social and political activity with clubs, recruiters and student politicians competing for your attention as you pass by, but at 10:30 on a Thursday night during exams all you will find there are a few desperate students like myself and teams of desperate design students desperately setting up to exhibit their final projects.

Having a proofreader on the other side of the planet is handy because you can get overnight service – send a draft at night, go to bed, and wake up the next day with a revised draft in the morning.  Chloe was on call in Haifa, Israel to do a final read through, but I realized that there was no more time.  I e-mailed her using my iPod to tell her that at this point, the most helpful thing would be for her to pray that I maintain focus.

Food is normally the variable that draws me back home, and being at home draws me to bed, and going to bed draws me into never graduating from university.  I was only halfway though my task and my snack supply was falling dangerously low just as a guy walks into the atrium with four giant trays of food he had just taken from a function that had just ended somewhere else on campus, rescuing the food from certain death at the hands of the catering company’s clean-up crew.

I was the first person to take him up on his insincere offer to partake, and the other desperate students desperately followed.  These veggies, fruit, brownies and brie were a God-send that told me that I wasn’t to go home that night.  We strangers stood around the trays and talked about how freaking awesome this free food was as others began calling friends that were hiding in far flung corners of the campus cramming to tell them about the discovery.

Having not been on campus so late before, I was blown away by the subculture of students that stay on campus long after the library closes at 2:00am.  Around that time I found a computer lab and began entering the revisions into the soft copy of the paper until all the machines became possessed by some invisible power that logged us out and went into a some sort of maintenance mode.  The Indian guys sitting behind me explained that this was a regular occurrence, and the computers could come back online anytime between five minutes to two hours from them.  They told me all about the life of a university night owl, showering at the gym, eating at the cafeteria and always keeping your toothbrush and a change of underwear.  My Hindi didn’t impress them as much as I had hoped it would, perhaps because they were Pakistani and not Indian.

Given that I had an exam the next day, they advised me to get some sleep, or my brain might go into an indefinite maintenance mode like the computers we were waiting on. The bench I found below a window gave me flashbacks from sleeping on the train in India last winter, only this time I didn’t have the body of a strange man lying next to me to keep me warm.

Halfway through my nap I heard some noises, opened my eyes and saw a girl climbing on top of the soda machines on the other side of the lobby.  I couldn’t imagine how or why she was doing it, and was too exhausted to care.

One of the strangest things about staying up all night is that it merges two days into one, with nothing to mark the end of one and beginning of another.  It was now Friday and everyone came back to campus bathed and wearing different clothes while I was there the whole time, my feet smelling so bad they hurt.  In the end, I finished my last paper and wrote my last exam on Friday night without my brain exploding in the slightest.  The moral of the story is this:  Don’t do what I did by putting it off all year.  Stay on campus all night tonight.

Click on the image above to read the online version of an article I was interviewed for on what is like to practice the Baha’i Faith at Carleton University as a member of Carleton’s Association for Baha’i Studies.  I tried to convey that it really isn’t difficult to carry out the practical aspects of being a Baha’i – except for when you’re fasting – but then that’s supposed to be difficult now isn’t it?

Here is an old artcile from the same paper more focussed on our efforts to defend the rights of young Baha’is in Iran who are being denied access to higher education.  In that regard, I would like to reccomend Iran Press Watch, a relativley new blog that covers the ongoing persecution of the Baha’is in Iran with an incredible breadth and frequency.  I have activated it’s e-mail subscription option to recieve all the previous day’s posts delivered to my inbox.  A great way to get your blood boiling in the morning.

My main-man Ilya Zrudlo on his work in Montreal neighborhoods

Two weeks before Toronto’s Regional Baha’i Conference (one of 41 across the world) , I received an e-mail from Albert Wong asking if I would be a member of the security team, I agreed, and two weeks later I found myself in a meeting room in at a Toronto hotel on the eve of the conference with the rest of the security team.  We were divided into four sub-teams with really cool names like Blue Team One and Green Team Two. I was strategically placed in Blue Team One, which was clearly the most highly specialized team because it also had my friend Marjan Bachelor in it.  We took the role super seriously and expected to be briefed on what to do in case you suspect that one of conference attendees is a shape-shifting alien, a vampire, a zombie or heaven forbid, an alien vampire-zombie.

This is me being ready for alien vampire-zombies, not being one. Subtle difference.

Rather then to run through the protocol of what to do in case of volcanic eruption, giant moth attack or alien vampire-zombie breakout, Albert spent most of the orientation meeting recounting stories from the 1992 Baha’i World Congress when 35,000 Baha’is from around the world descended on New York City to mark the 100th anniversary of the passing of Baha’u'llah.  My sister and I were “too young” at the time so our parents put us on grandparent’s front stoop in Cornwall, Ontario, rang the doorbell and sped off hooting and hollering.  If you were to go to that street now, you will find that the tire marks are still there to this very day.  We spent the four days watching cable TV and eating so many clementines that we both vomited.  Delicious, juicy clementines.

Probably an alien vampire-zombie

Albert’s stories illustrated how the spirit of service and flexibility among the security team and the love and excitement of the Baha’is saw them through several unexpected situations and made it a conference that people were still talking about 17 years later in a meeting room in a Toronto hotel and on the internet on blogs that nobody reads.  Some of these unexpected situations included everyone being booted out of the building they were meeting in, where the Baha’is lined several blocks and naturally broke out into song.  When a pickpocket came, the security team kept an eye on her as the Baha’is taught her the Faith.  The other story was of the old Baha’i from a remote Pacific Island who was separated from his group.  He could not speak any of the many languages that the assembled members of security team could, so they spent the night laughing and simply saying ‘Allah-u-abha!’ (‘God the All-Glorious’) to each other.

Congress Centre staff have a huddle

We donned our tags that read ‘Host/Hostess’ with little red ribbons hanging off of them, and we were as ready as were ever going to be.  While our conference was was not engulfed in lava, attacked by Mothra and no conference participants showed signs of being alien vampire-zombies, we did still have our fair share of unexpected situations.  You could say we had about a thousand of them, because the original expectation was for about 3,000 people to attend and there ended up being way over 4,000.  While the security team had a plan of who was going to be where at what time, I found myself a part of many conversations that went something like this:

“What are you doing right now?  Are you free?”

“Umm, well Elly told me to stay here and-”

“-Follow me!  We need more people managing the lines!  Come on!”

My off-duty times were perhaps more frantic than on.  There were so many people there that I would be lucky to run into an old friend I hadn’t seen in years more than once.  But, that wasn’t really the point of the whole conference, now was it?

The only moments of clarity came to me during the talks delivered by the representatives from the Baha’i World Centre Ms. Uransaikhan Baatar and Mr. Stephen Birkland, who placed into spacial and temporal context the work of each individual, community and institution that has been carrying out the Baha’i and Baha’i inspired activities that they have been witnessing binding their communities and families together.

Click here for my tiny set of photos from the conference.  Seeing jet-setting professional photographer Ryan Lash climbing pillars and light fixtures to get the perfect shot, it was clear that it was covered by far more capable hands and cameras.  For the Baha’i World News Service’s article on the conference with photos and a video, click here.

There was a great musical showcase on the Saturday night that featured songs from across the region that have inspired communities in their work, and below is one of my favorites. It features Kieth Bartlett with his daughters Natania Hatala and Tahirih North singing a traditional Southern American song, and a version of the Baha’i prayer ‘Is there any remover of difficulties’.  It was my first time meeting him after I recently heard about him and how be preformed at my parent’s wedding in Gatineau, Quebec back in 1981.

Faced with the decision to stop over in either London or Bahrain on my way back home, I had to ask myself, as we all do from time to time, what would Samuel Benoit do? Samuel Benoit would go to Bahrain, that’s what he would do, and that’s what he did.  My university friend, oil-brat Lianne Chung, was visiting with her family next door in Qatar, so I invited myself over her place for a week of napping in the belly of the mid-east oil-beast.

A month of service at the House of Worship in Delhi earned me a huge sleep debt, one that I paid off in Qatar by conking out every time I entered a car, sat on a couch, at a table or went to a party.  Lianne’s family is still sure that I was dying of something, which is funny because Lianne and her brother consistently sleep through the first two months of their summers in Qatar because of “jet-lag”.  Funnier still because Lianne doesn’t have her own blog to deny this in.

In this last post chronicling/milking last year I have posted to my flickr page a set of photos from Qatar and one from Bahrain.  Below is a short video from the afternoon we went duning in the desert next to Saudi Arabia.  You might be asking, what is duning?  My understanding is that the term refers to the act of hiring a couple guys to drive like maniacs in the desert and play you their favorite cassette of bad trance music again and again as you bounce around in the back of their giant SUVs .