Simone Crew (left) is now a freshman at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Today’s episode of QUEST-TV includes a 2-minute segment that marks our first collaboration with the San Francisco spoken word presenter Youth Speaks and The Redford Center, based in Provo, Utah. For the past four years, these organizations have been putting on a contest for young spoken word artists who perform poems about environmental themes. In our first installment of QUEST-TV’s Youth Speaks Green feature, 18-year-old San Francisco poet Simone Crew performs excerpts from her poem Yasmeena, which she originally performed at this contest. You can download a copy of the complete poem here.

Through Youth Speaks Green, we’ll explore how young people in the Bay Area view the challenges of becoming green. We’ll be looking beyond clean fuels, efficient vehicles and solar panel rebates and delving instead into the personal. Crew, who is now a freshman at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, wrote the poem when she was 16 and centered it on her experiences with an eight-year-old girl called Yasmeena, whom she had babysat. Through Yasmeena’s insistent questions, Crew began to feel the weight of the responsibility to conserve the natural world for her. In an engaging play of mirrors, we as the audience get to watch Crew observing Yasmeena, as Yasmeena makes sense of the world around her.

Crew will be performing a new environmentally-themed poem at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2010, as part of a Youth Speaks team.

In coming episodes, we hope to present you with the work of other talented young Bay Area poets in our Youth Speaks Green segments.

Watch the Youth Speaks Green television story online.

Architect Nabih Tahan's home in Berkeley was built to Passivhaus
standards. It needs no furnace or air conditioning
and is comfortable year-round.I missed writing my blog entry two weeks ago because I was at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers writing poetry with about 60 poets from around the country. We created community through expressing artfully what is almost impossible to express any other way.

One of the highlights of the week was going on nature walks a few mornings with David Lucas, a naturalist. (He is the author of Wild Birds of California and revised the classic guidebook Sierra Nevada Natural History.) His insights about birds and other life forms found their way into many a poem written that week. Did you know that some bird species have more that 120 distinct tunes that they learn to sing in a certain order? I didn't. The really hot singers can do a shuffle of songs but not miss one of the 120. Just before dawn, neighboring birds duel with one another with song variations. And their brains are so much smaller than ours!

Imagine memorizing 120 poems and being able to recite them all in a row, and then getting up early the next morning for a poetry slam where you mix and match stanzas; starting, for example, with some Wordsworth, then a little T.S. Eliot, mix in some Emily Dickinson, and end with some "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg.

So, What has this to do with green homes? Lucas showed us the force of nature that in all things wants to survive. At Squaw Valley we created poetry that in a short time connected us to one another. That feels to me like surviving in a culture that wants us always competing with each other. Creativity seems as natural as eating, and I think it's how we are going to get out of the present environmental crisis we are in.

This morning I heard about some scientists at MIT who discovered a catalyst that could very well make the conversion of sunlight into hydrogen easy and inexpensive. And a few weeks ago I visited a house in Berkeley built to Passivhaus standards. The standards were developed in Austria but are new to the United States. The architect and occupant of the home I visited in Berkeley, Nabih Tahan, is bringing the concept in this country. A Passivhaus is so well designed that it doesn't need a furnace for heating or an air conditioner for cooling, even in Germany. Because the house is so well sealed, it needs to be ventilated mechanically. That is done through a heat recovery ventilator, a device that pulls up to 80% of the heat from exhaust air and transfers it to the incoming, fresh air. These houses use very little energy.

The poets and the architects are doing it, and the birds are doing it with their tiny birdbrains. We all can learn to adapt creatively to different ways of thinking about our environment, different ways of building buildings, and different ways of living in them.

The universe is made of stories.

The Universe Is Made of Stories
I think the central story of Christianity is not one of the parables of Jesus, or even his death and resurrection, but a simple story of a meal shared with friends. The story goes like this: Jesus took a loaf of bread in his hands, blessed it, broke it, and shared it with those around him. This story tells me how to live a good life. If I take each moment as it comes, if I enter into the moment, if I don't hold back, if I share the moment with those around me, then I am living a good life–solving a problem at my job, sharing the road on my way home, sharing dinner with my wife, reading a good novel while she practices at the piano, making love, taking out the trash, and walking the dog.

Religious people argue with atheists and scientific materialists over the existence of God. Agnostics, people who may have a sense of the sacred in their lives, who claim to be spiritual, but not religious, reject any formal organization of religious thought and practice. There is truth in every perspective, but I want to try to answer the atheists and the agnostics. I'll use poet Muriel Rukeyser in my answer to the atheists. She wrote "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." There are scientific stories, such as the Big Bang theory about the origins of the universe, or Sir Isaac Newton's story of a canon ball's trajectory from the mouth of a canon. And there are religious stories like the one I described above. Scientific stories and religious stories are qualitatively different. Maybe scientific stories tell us how things work and religious stories tell us how to live a good life.

In my answer to the agnostics I will use poetry as well. Poetry is particular. Jane Kenyon wrote a poem about a man in a coffee shop eating yogurt out of a container with a white plastic spoon. She could have written about eating in general, but I don't think it would have made a very interesting poem. Religion is particular and interesting, while spirituality is general and boring. Someone who samples a number of religious traditions is still being religious, I think. They just may be missing the benefit of going deeply into any one tradition.

Religious traditions tell different stories about what it is to be human and what it means to live a good life in a particular culture. I wonder if Catholicism would make more sense in Asian cultures if, instead of using bread in the Mass, we used rice cakes. Christianity took root in Latin America only after the Blessed Mother appeared to Juan Diego, a poor peasant, in the form of a "mestiza," a woman of mixed European and American Indian descent. Buddhism, with its story of Siddhartha finding enlightenment beneath the Bodi tree, seems to make perfect sense to many people in the West, and many people in the West find enlightenment and wisdom through the Sufi poet Rumi, an excellent story teller. The central Jewish story of the exodus from slavery in Egypt has had meaning for other oppressed peoples, especially those in Latin America.

I think the universe is made of stories–scientific and religious types of stories. I could not imagine life without either one of them.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.