Photo: Tulane Public Relations

In fact, you hold much more influence over your school now then you did when you were a student on campus.

Every college and university wants to keep alumni happy; they’re crucial to building and sustaining a school’s endowment. But even if you’ve never contributed a dime to your alma mater’s annual fund, you can still let them know your future support is dependent upon them demonstrating their commitment to the environment.

Here are five steps you can take as an alum to help your alma mater go green:

1. Request that all communications be paperless.
How many letters do you receive each year asking you for money? Let your alma mater know that you won’t even consider making a contribution if you continue to receive requests through the mail. Call your alumni relations office and request that future communications be sent via email. If you do plan to make a contribution, ask if it’s possible to do so electronically.

2. Designate your contributions for green initiatives.
Most schools permit alumni to designate how their contribution will be earmarked. If you want to send a message about your environmental values to your alma mater, let them know that your contribution should be applied toward the construction of green dorms or a scholarship for a student studying environmental science.

3. Praise positive steps.
University administrators are like anyone else: they like acknowledgment of their good work. If your alma mater, like mine, is really taking the lead on environmental stewardship, send the president a letter and let him or her know how proud you are of their leadership.

4. Offer your skills.
Alumni who want to stay involved in their alma mater often serve on alumni boards, help organize reunions, or maybe even mentor current students. But your involvement doesn’t have to be limited to these activities. If you have a unique skill set, offer it to your school. Know how to install solar panels? Plan and plant a garden? Talk with your alumni office about how you might be able to give back by sharing what you know.

5. Stay in touch.
Keep up with the environmental and sustainability projects your alma mater is implementing. Check your school’s website or alumni magazine or newspaper to learn about current and planned projects.

Community Connection:

Still a student? Check out five ways you can help your school go green here.

LEBUA SEEMS almost like a Steve Wynn casino. They’ve got a bunch of different little restaurants and bars. Each has its own specialty: sushi, oysters, fancy whiskey, cigars or martinis, but all of them share the best view in BKK.

Bangkok is full of some pretty amazing luxury hotels, but for drinking and dining in the cat-bird seat, Lebua’s my number one draft pick.

Sitting atop Bangkok’s second tallest skyscraper, the Sky Bar at Sirocco is the best place in the city for an amazing view and a stiff drink.

The designers were big on light effects when they designed Lebua. The Sky Bar lights up and changes colors constantly. A few floors below at Breeze, Lebua’s seafood restaurant, there’s a glass walkway full of LED lights that takes some courage to walk across.

Looking down on the restaurant, Sirocco features a live jazz band from the US, playing hits from greats like Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone.

A couple floors above the tables at Sirocco sits another bar called Distil. They have an oyster bar, amazing sushi and a kick ass female DJ spinning fun house records.

Sirocco’s a sexy spot for a date because of low tables tucked into corners right at the edge of the glass balcony.

Leaning up against the glass and starring down to the streets below can induce vertigo. Nothing a martini won’t cure!

Disclaimer: Lebua sponsored our trip to come check out their hotels, though our opinions and experiences were all of our own design.

Photo: Ortlieb

Pack your work gear and ride your bike to work with Ortlieb’s Messenger Bag.

If simplicity is your thing, the Ortlieb Messenger Bag might be the perfect bike commuting pack. Designed with the rigorous standards for professional bike messengers, it’s durable enough for any commute.

It features a Velcro roll closure allowing for a flexible packing height. The bag fits closely to the body, and has large reflectors built in on the side and on the straps for early morning and evening commutes.

The bag also comes with optional accessories: cell phone, U-lock, walkie talkie holsters, and a sturdy document organizer.

Did I mention it’s waterproof? Don’t let the rain stop you.

Cost: $140 | Where to buy: Ortlieb

Girlie_in_Sydney

FIONA MILLER posted this on Flickr Blog yesterday and it looks like a good opportunity:

The Flickr Collection on Getty Images has been growing and growing since it launched back in March – with a princely figure of nearly 60,000 images in the collection so far. It’s no secret that there are billions of amazing photographs on Flickr, so it made perfect sense for us to find an easy way for members to suggest their own photos to be considered for the Flickr Collection on Getty Images.

Starting today you can submit a portfolio of 10 images to the Getty Images Call for Artists group, giving you an opportunity to showcase your best shots directly to the editors at Getty Images. The Getty Images creative team will regularly review the photos in the group pool, looking out for images they feel are marketable based on their industry expertise, and inviting new photographers to join the collection.

So, if you think your photos rock and are interested in being considered for the collection, join the Getty Images Call for Artists group and follow the submission guidelines or check out our updated FAQs.

-Posted by Fiona Miller

Photo: fairy_lights336

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

If you’re in the area, here are some more ideas while visiting New York:

7 Ways to Get on the Water in New York City (Besides the Staten Island Ferry)

Hidden Gorges, Gullies and Waterfalls… Upstate New York!

The photo above was selected from the Matador Photography Group at Flickr. Make sure to join us!

Photo: dbdrobot

Little did Ross Borden and Ben Polansky know when they launched Matador in October 2006 that they’d have a staff of more than 30 employees and interns just three years later.

Every day, Matador staff fire up our computers in New York, San Francisco, Mammoth Lakes, Vancouver, Oaxaca, Melbourne, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and points in between to bring you sweet, relevant writing about travel and life on our network of 10 blogs. Working across almost every time zone, we exchange as many as 100 emails a day (102 today at my last count), read a dozen or more submissions each day, moderate comments, plan contests, search through the community for new talent, and respond to readers’ and travelers’ questions.

It’s a big job, one that’s got to be shared among a few dozen brains, hearts, and hands.

We’re stoked to announce that two new folks have joined the Matador team. Candice Walsh and JoAnna Haugen, both students in Matador’s travel writing school, Matador U, have come on board as associate editors. They’ll be working with the team to identify timely story ideas and to continue our tradition of producing the best travel writing online.

Candice and JoAnna each bring a unique voice and set of experiences to the team. Candice will put good time experts Kate Sedgwick and Tom Gates, editors of Matador Nights, to the test. She’s already written a couple articles across the Network, sharing a voice that’s authentic, believable, and always funny.

JoAnna, who’s currently on a press trip in Honduras, is a former Peace Corps member who recently took the plunge into full-time freelance writing. She also embodies the Matador vibe– if you haven’t already read about the fund she set up for Peruvian porters who lead treks to Machu Picchu, you should definitely check that out here.

We welcome both to the team!

Community Connection:

Are you interested in working for Matador? Keep your eyes on our job listings.

Photo: Luis M. Fonseca

Where: Costa do Estoril, Portugal

When: 8-13 November

Total course length: 590 miles

Estimated race duration: 120 hours

Main activities: mountain biking (41%), trekking (39%), kayaking (18%), in-line skating (1%)

Longest section: 99.4 miles (mountain biking)

Shortest section: 3.3 miles (trekking)

Highest elevation: 6,539 feet (Serra da Estrela)

Team size: 4 athletes, at least one of whom must be female

Number of teams: 59

Most-represented country: France (9 teams)

Winners’ prize money: 35,000 USD

Community Connection

Follow race as it unfolds at theARWC website

Photo: Ferne Millen

If you’ve seen the Dalai Lama live, or even online, you can tell right away he’s “real.”

By real I mean he offers no reason to treat him any different than “a simple monk” as he’s fond of saying. His tradition is Buddhism, but his religion is “kindness.”

You’d think his message of universal peace would be enough to warrant his popularity. Yet as Stephen Schettini writes in The Metropolitain, perhaps the real reason for the Dalai Lama’s superstar status is actually: Buddhism.

Visitors to Asia may perceive Buddhism as old-time religion, complete with invisible beings, superstition and intolerance, but scratch beneath the gaudy veneer and you find a thoughtful, healing and wholesome system of thought and daily practice.

In an age when religious faith is on the decline and people are having trouble swallowing its hollow residue, Buddhism offers a spiritual path that’s compatible with scientific enquiry, and perhaps even with twenty-first century realpolitik.

I’m reminded of a recent scene from the awful “Angels and Demons” film – when Ewan McGregor’s priest character is pontificating to the other church clergy about how “science and religion don’t have to fight! They can work together!” However clumsily, the message is meant to answer the age-old dilemma that is suffered by the Abrahamic religions: how do maintain “blind” faith in the age of Reason.

Buddhism, at least in the form popularly adopted by the West, doesn’t have this dilemma. There is no schism between science and religion – and this is key to understanding Buddhism’s popularity. As Stephen Schettini points out:

The Dalai Lama noted three crucial parallels between the Buddhism and modern science. They 1) share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, 2) believe in universal natural laws of cause and effect and 3) depend on an empirical method. You can go a long way on those three premises.

Add to this the Dalai Lama’s brand of inner peace and simple wisdom, and it’s likely he’ll be in the spotlight for some time to come.

As one blogger says “He’s a religious guy who doesn’t support killing or hating people for God. It’s a big improvement.”

Feature Photo: Paul Stevenson Photo: gabyu

There’s plenty of reasoning about why Americans don’t travel abroad. Travel bloggers speculate on whether it’s fear of a big, scary world, or ignorance of other cultures, or short vacation time, or the simple fact that there’s a helluva lot of stuff to do in the U.S alone. It may be all of those factors combined, but that’s not what interests me. What interests me is the assumption behind all this speculation – the assumption that Americans should travel abroad.

At first I wanted to question that assumption, since I’ve met plenty of Americans who could (and happily would) tick off all of the countries they’ve visited, list all of the trials and tribulations and predictable breakthroughs they’ve had, rave about all the artwork and trinkets and objects they’ve bought and swoon over the precious simple authenticity of “the locals,” and I find nothing particularly revolutionary or educational about this at all.

In fact, I think it’s pretty much the same old dynamic between the U.S and the world multiplied once more – simple consumable experiences, the commodification of culture, the seeing-what-we’ve-been-primed-by-the-media-to-see vs. researching-what-is.

But I hope I’m not so cynical or so pompous as to completely disregard the potential of travel abroad – while I don’t see it as the panacea for twisted U.S foreign policy or the distorted views many Americans have of the world, I also think it holds enormous potential to create positive, constructive change. By “change” I mean change in the way Americans think about, say, where their coffee comes from, or change in the way they think about an American food culture that relies on an unhealthy dependence on processed corn and the microwave.

Photo: tiltti

I’ve met plenty of people who have gone through transformations abroad and started, little by little, to see their world and the world overall from different angles. They’ve perhaps started to follow the news about China or Mexico much more carefully and to search out different perspectives. They’ve become aware of the affect of U.S corn subsidies on the people they met and talked to in Southern Mexican villages. They see that wow, I have a lot of stuff in my house and these people, they seem to be doing just fine without having to go to Target every other day for a new something.

This is not, of course, a given. I don’t think anyone has the right to declare what a traveler should or should not learn, should or should not see. But I have met plenty of Americans who have been prying into their own assumptions and accepted ways of understanding the world, taking apart their own cultural perspectives, and coming away with a much more complicated, empathetic understanding of the connections between themselves and the places they’ve visited.

And I think that process, of empathizing with people from vastly different cultural, social and economic perspectives, is at the heart of traveling abroad. That is what often distinguishes travel abroad from domestic travel – travel abroad requires so many more leaps into the unknown.

There are the major unknowns, the unknown languages and cultures and histories, but there are also the smaller unknowns; how rice or sugar cane is made, the herbs people use for medicines, the deserted villages where people have been forced to migrate to other countries. And traveling abroad is the process of excavating these unknowns, of bringing them up to the surface of one’s mind, in the hope of creating some new bridge of empathy and compassion.

So I’m not sure it’s the percentages and the statistics that matter, I’m not sure it’s the act of getting one’s passport stamped – I think it’s the way of seeing and questioning that makes travel abroad different, and that has so many people vehemently defending the act of crossing borders. It’s the push into the unknown, and the coming back humbled, contemplative, vulnerable, and yes, in ways both conscious and vaguely felt, changed.

Community Connection

What do you think, readers? Do you think travel abroad is inherently educational? What have been your experiences overseas? Do you think Americans are afraid of overseas travel?