Here it is...

...the moment you've been waiting for!

Alright, the moment I've been waiting for...but let us be inclusive or die. Seriously, though, I look forward to expanding this site for years to come. I hope eventually it becomes useful enough to make some sort of educational impact on institutions worldwide, helping people and ideas to find one another on this seemingly infinite stage of possibility.

I look forward eagerly to the day when the human/nature binary is complicated beyond meaning, when interdependence and interconnectivity and interrelatedness are axiomatic suppositions. When culture has evolved to understand its mutual dependence with nature to create, extrapolate, or illuminate meaning. I'm perfectly aware of the idealistic vein in this thought pattern, but I can't help it. We will get there.

We will.

In the meantime, be well.

To follow knowledge like a sinking star...

Hello, world.

First of all, thanks to Vin Nardizzi, our latest contributor, who sent his syllabus for a graduate seminar entitled "Eco-Shakespeare." Dr. Nardizzi teaches at the University of British Columbia.

Thanks also to Richard Pickard (University of Victoria) for sitting through the preliminary usability testing. His review blog, Book Addiction, is featured in our weblogs section. Invaluable feedback, as per usual.

Now, to other things.
I'm finding myself caught a bit in deciding layout, here. I look forward (as I've already mentioned) to sitting down with Amy Steen to resolve a series of issues (like making browsing something quick and snappy, rather than mildly onerous). It's a constant learning curve; I find the rhetorical strategies of the web to be somewhat elusive. Like Twitter, which I have admittedly observed rather aloof-ly (yikes) paradoxically from within, I am bemused by the possibilities of the internet.

Memes, for example, seem like a crucial point of communication. There is some hunger that they satiate, some inclination fostered by the lightning, depersonalized communication of the world wide web that I don't see reproduced elsewhere. Granted, they are not strictly tied to the internet, but I feel intuitively that their function is quite distinct -- and, as I said, crucial.

My confusion is compounded by the necessity of communicating to a variety of audiences, and functioning as a filter. I keep being tripped up by my own preferences (read: prejudices) and forgetting to step back and at least feign objectivity. When I notice myself marching blindly into the eye of the storm, I am momentarily nauseated. Effective advertisement or propaganda is even more problematic than the overt, obnoxious kind that revels in its own franchise.

Getting a bit off-topic, I suppose, though I'm not entirely sure what my topic is, other than a general sense of confusion. I suppose maintaining this confusion may help to foster humility in my admittedly grandiose undertakings, though, so it may not be all bad...or even bad at all.

A Work in Progress.

The countdown ensues...only a few days until the official launch of the Ecodemia resource hub. This may only be exciting to me; after all, I've been brainstorming, collecting resources, and generally planning for over a year now (though remarkably little has been done, I'm afraid) for this moment, while the majority of...well, the majority...has no idea that it will even exist. I'm not sure I ever thought that I would wind up being the initial designer, though, and I look forward to the creative input of fabulous web artist Amy Steen to take this site and make it as functional and beautiful as possible.