Jonathan R. Schmidt

Why do socieities collapse?

I came across Jared Diamond’s online lecture about his book Collapse while searching for his book online for my Masters thesis. The lecture is an excellent summary about why societies collapse due to ecological destruction. Diamond links ecological collapse to total social, economic and cultural collapse. His book Collapse was a best-seller and for good reason. It not only highlights our need to understand our ecological systems, but also how our social and economic systems support an ignorance to the destruction of our ecological systems, which ultimately underpin our whole society.

My Video Resume

After my previous post you’ve probably all been waiting for my own video resume. Well, after compiling a summary of my awards, work experience and creative arts portfolio I have a finished my video resume. The video resume is meant to be a supplement to my paper resume. The video resume does a much better job at  displaying the creativity and innovation from which I work than a paper resume. Additionally, it shows a bit of my personality, including my vision and passion for municipal planning. The intended audience is future employers, mainly in regard to municipal planning related jobs.

To view my video resume go to:
http://www.jon.schmidty.ca/videoresume

How far is your commute? 90km bicycle commuter in Manitoba

I just got finished reading a CBC article about a man who commutes 90km one way by bicycle! Lacking free time to increase his bicycling training he began considering cycling the 90km from Portage la Prairie to his work in Winnipeg. The article states that he began doing this last year once a week and now has bumped it up to twice a week now. This is outstanding! I wonder if he’s calculated how much gas and car emissions he’s saved already. Though one obvious question for this guy would be why he lives so far away from his workplace. It seems that the environment isn’t his first concern if he’s been living that far away from his work for so long. Then again he’s a social worker and perhaps requires the many miles between him and his work.

The story does beg a good question for those people who train long hours in either running or cycling and maintain a day job: ‘Why drive 10-30km back and forth from work and then go for a 30-40km training session when you get home from work? Last summer I was doing some heavy duty running training and I’d wake up at 6am – go out for a 10km run and then jump in my car at 7:30am and drive 35km to work. Granted the distances aren’t the same, but a 35km bike ride is about the training equivalent of 10km run in terms of conditioning. If I woke up and just cycled to work immediately I would’ve been there at the same time and saved the car. The only catch was that I would’ve had to do it again in the evening or catch a car pool to transit and leave my bike at work. In short, bicycles are extremely efficient machines and if our workplaces continue to develop facilities for bike commuters the issue of distance really isn’t the problem. The greater problem with bike commuting is weather and traffic. The man in the article, Mike Caslor, states that once he hits the city he becomes much more weary of traffic because bikes and cars simply don’t get along very well in the city. Someday we will all have to get along, but until then cyclists will rarely trust motorists and motorists will still wonder why someone would get sweaty peddling a bike when you can drive a car.

Wildlife Video

The below video is actually a series of individually taken photos from a wildlife camera project I was working in. The still photos are taken from a motion-sensed camera. The cameras used for this montage were all monochrome cameras. The wind in certain areas was so prevalent that the cameras took pictures every second for sometimes hours. It was due to this phenomenon that the amazing cloud formations at the beginning of the montage were made possible. Essentially this is a summary of every still image taken during four months of data collection. I found it particularly enjoyable to put it together and add some music to spice it up.

On the techy side it wasn’t too difficult. Adobe Premiere allows you to bring in a series of still images if they are numbered stills in a sequence. So all I had to do was go into Adobe Bridge and batch rename the files so that they were all in a sequence. I could then bring them into Premiere as a video sequence and manipulate the speed of sequence and cut and splice. Because I wanted every single still image in the sequence and tried to keep it to 10 minutes the video moves rather quickly. Enjoy

Go West Young Man!

Yesterday I received my acceptance to University of Calgary’s Masters of Environmental Design (Planning) program. This is the last piece of the puzzle for the move out West. Now everything is in place, Darlene has a job, we have a place to live and I have my acceptance to school. It is quite amazing how all things have fallen into place. We feel unbelievably blessed by God’s grace, but we also know that being away from friends and family will have its own challenges. As we move out west you can track our trip across the country at www.jonanddarlene.schmidty.ca