Dec 2, 2008

Turning dung into fertilizer

It didn't surprise me to see "Sex and the Ivy League" as a first result of my Google search on Graciela Chichilnisky, who gave today's political science seminar. After all, the seminar ended in a sexual joke that can't get out of my head, unfortunately. But I was naturally interested in reading more, finding out about her incredible life story narrated here, from her childhood in Buenos Aires to her lawsuits against Columbia for sexual discrimination, to put it simply (way to simply) and all her academic, business and politic achievements. Her essay is captivating, personal and emotional. Here's the message:

The first reflection is that for a woman to survive and to thrive she must learn to turn negative responses into positive resources. This is a perverse reversal to the Pavlovian response. I call this, for short, ‘turning dung into fertilizer.’

5 comments:

Dany Jaimovich - Bakary Baludin said...

she seems to be very cool:
"I started
working in Argentina part-time—in particular while completing my
PhD in Mathematics I took a job as a Director of Modeling at
Fundacion Bariloche, located in the town of the same name in the
south of Argentina. My job was to create a mathematical model of the
world economy, which was later called the Bariloche Model.... the aim was to rebut the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth vision of a
world in which developing countries could not, and should not, grow because otherwise they would exhaust the Earth’s resources. In the
Bariloche model I created the concept of “development based on the satisfaction of basic needs.”

POWER TO THE SOUTH!!

Dany Jaimovich - Bakary Baludin said...

Nordhaus, also very
supportive, wrote at the time an article that commended the Bariloche
model and its goal of satisfying Basic Needs as a unique combination
of ‘radical thinking with state of the art technical expertise’.

cosimo said...

When she was in high school, she "wanted to do Mathematics that would be applied to resolve social
problems. [She] thought that studying Mathematics first would give [her] a
control of the ‘technology’ that economists use to validate their
theories and their policies". This is not exactly the kind of thoughts I was able to develop in high school...

Pierre-Louis said...

yeah...in High school my thoughts were more like "ok, gotta find a way to get laid before universtiy..."

Laura Z said...

Thanks for sharing this PL! She is amazing..example of determination and capacity...even designed the carbon market! cool.