Introduction

photo by Terril Shorb

Sustainability is a curious creature that displays a variety of characteristics. There is no one model for sustainability. What there is, however, is an ever-expanding garden of sustainable projects and processes and Terril Shorb encourages people to send him brief descriptions of these manifestations of sustainability in action.

Sharing Sources of Useful Knowledge

We live in an age of information. Sometimes it feels like an information avalanche! How do we wend our way through mountains of books and research reports issued by the latest medical association or planning agency? We have the digital world at our fingertips and a search for some subject of interest can yield thousands or hundreds of thousands of results. What to do?

As readers of this website can attest, my own preference is to look to others who I trust for what kind of information they have sought and verified as useful and possessed of some integrity. This is a modern variant of wayfinding in which a group of humans out foraging for food and other needed resources relied on the reports of those who had gone before. Someone may have ventured into a deep, dark woodlands and found both beneficial food plants. And, they also found a place where predators lurked. They could report to those who might follow both opportunity and perils.

Now it may be true that we don’t face the kind of big-toothed beasts that our ancestors did when we search the world wide web for useful information. But there are things for which we need to be cautious—not the least of which is wasting time in a vain effort to pin down some bit of knowledge that we require. Apart from working with our local librarian to be more efficient searchers of information, another thing we can do is to share with each other sources of knowledge that we have spent some time finding and analyzing and comparing it to other sources we trust. So what I invite you to do here is to offer up some sources that you know well. Please send me a brief description of the content area and briefly share your knowledge of any illuminating background on the source of the information. Here is a brief “recipe” that I use to bake up resources that I wish to share with others:

What is the essence of the useful information found in this source? Can I write a clear sentence or two that tells others precisely what the information describes?
What is the context in which the useful information is embedded? One thing I do is to place the information in one of the four realms of the Butterfly Curriculum, saying for example that a certain article on rainwater harvesting is a good step-by-step chronicle of how to set up such a system on a small house. It thus illustrates a good aspect of appropriate technology (second realm of the Butterfly curriculum). Also, this particular article connects to the first realm because it is designed in such a way that the water harvested does not compromise any of nature’s needs, and also some of the stored water is made available for other wild creatures in the form of a shallow pan.
What do I know about the source? I usually like to check two or three other people or books or reviews or websites in which this source has been mentioned, to get a sense of how reliable it is. Scholarly works, of course, get vetted more thoroughly and a check on Google Scholar will show how many times an article, for example, was reviewed. In reading reviews, you get an idea of how well others think this researcher did her or his work. You may also find testimonials to the author of the piece in other venues. And you may find those who are troubled by the person’s lack of care in assembling information.
Finally, I like to offer in a brief review of a source a sense of why I found it useful. This goes beyond the essence of the facts and speaks to how I utilized the knowledge in my own work. That is another way to show the value of a given bit of knowledge because it has been put to work!
So if you wish to share a source, here’s how to submit to this site. Please use this form link.