The modern idea of sustainability education in northern California is also finding a home in the schools of a small ancient culture nestled high in the Himalayas.

Zenobia Barlow is Executive Director of the  Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley. She is also a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute, which is based in Sebastopol. She is seen here with Bhutan's Prime Minister, Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley. Barlow co-founded the Center for Ecoliteracy 20 years ago, and while their principles are gaining ever wider acceptance, she still is often asked to define the term. Here’s her answer.

Under Bhutan’s governance model focused on promoting “gross national happiness,” there are four priorities:  (1) good governance; (2) environmental conservation and preservation; (3) preservation of their ancient Buddhist culture; and (4) a non-destructive economic development strategy. But Barlow observes that it has only been in recent years, as the county slowly opened itself to the west, that Bhutan’s culture and traditions faced any real threats to their preservation.

All the beautiful photographs on this page were taken by Barlow or document her trip. To see more, go here.

There is also a blog entry about her visit on the Post Carbon Institute website.

In addition to the usual parents-plus-kids households, modern families can be cross-generational, or blended in other ways. However these households may be structured, the Sonoma Kinship Family Center exists to provide them with assistance and support.

Morrow adds that, whenever possible, the Kinship Center will extend their efforts to assist individuals who may not be part of the immediate family group, but are still concerned for the welfare of the children involved.

The Center is located at 411 King Street, near downtown Santa Rosa (see map below) and is open M-F, 9-5.  (707) 569-0877.  Their services are also available in Spanish.

The most powerful earthquakes in American history didn’t happen in California or Alaska, but almost 200 years ago in Missouri.

As Santa Rosa novelist Sally Watson set out to research the details and circumstances surrounding the New Madrid Earthquakes, she found an important source and ally at the town museum there.

Reports vary on the number of houses destroyed in the initial quakes, Watson says, as do the accounts of the number of people who fled afterward.

  A more contemporary view of the New Madrid Fault

The winner of the latest “Clo the Cow” billboard slogan contest drew from Dirty Harry to get a happy diary.

Clo the Cow will be featured on the billboard with the winning slogan, of course, but Clover-Stornetta president Marcus Benedetti says the cartoon cow is more than just a pretty face.

Daniel Judd celebrates his contest victory, sharing a high five with Clo the Cow as girlfriend Andrea Duszynski looks on.

The story of German factory owner Oskar Schindler and the hundreds of Jews he shielded from the Nazis has been a successful novel and an award-winning film. Now his actual history is coming to the  Petaluma Museum.

The images below are part of the Leopold Pfeffferberg-Page collection, which he donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, explains Senior Historian Peter Black.  There is also a summary of Schindler's story, provided by the Museum, at the bottom of this page.

Oskar Schindler (third from left) at a party with local SS officials on his 34th birthday. Schindler attempted to use his connections with German officials to obtain information that might protect his Jewish employees. Krakow, Poland, April 28, 1942. —Leopold Page Photographic Collection, courtesy of  U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

At Yad Vashem, the Israeli national institution of Holocaust commemoration, Oskar Schindler stands next to the tree planted in honor of his rescue efforts. Jerusalem, Israel, 1970.
—Leopold Page Photographic Collection, courtesy of  U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Leopold Pfeffferberg was one of the men on Schindler’s famous list, and was also instrumental in interesting writer Thomas Keneally in Schindler’s story. Keneally’s book, originally published as Schindler’s Ark, was a fictionalized account of his story which  won the Booker prize in 1982. But Holocaust Museum historian Peter Black points out there is now a formal biography of the man, too.

In 1939, the year Germany invaded Poland and launched World War II, Oskar Schindler was living in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, a region with a high ethnic German population. He joined the Nazi party on February 10, 1939. He assumed responsibility for a formerly Jewish-owned factory in Poland and eventually established a second under his ownership. The new factory became a haven for its approximately 900 Jewish workers for much of the war.

Although he amassed a fortune exploiting their labor and trading on the black market, he protected them by insisting they be housed at his factory rather than the local labor camp, Plaszów, which was run by a sadistic SS commandant Amon Leopold Göth. In late summer 1944 as the German war effort was collapsing, Schindler, through negotiations and bribes from his wartime profits, secured permission from German Army and SS officers to move his workers and other endangered Jews to Brünnlitz, near his hometown of Zwittau, where he had been assigned to oversee a new munitions factory. Its workers were placed on “Schindler’s List” and were transported to the factory where they remained in relative safety throughout the remainder of the war.

Asked in 1964 why he had intervened on behalf of the Jews, Schindler replied, “The persecution of the Jews in the General Government in Polish territory gradually worsened in its cruelty. In 1939 and 1940 they were forced to wear the Star of David and were herded together and confined in ghettos. In 1941 and 1942 this unadulterated sadism was fully revealed. And then a thinking man, who had overcome his inner cowardice, simply had to help. There was no other choice.”