Trumpet of the Spirit, Bass of Faith: Jazz as a Cold War Spiritual Weapon

This paper explores Jazz music during the Cold War. During the Cold War the U.S. went through a process of becoming more explicitly religious, identifying specifically a Judeo-Christian country. Particularly through foreign policy, the separation between church and state became less and less clear to the point where it seemed as though there was no separation at all. Cold War propaganda engaged religion in a revivalist way and spiritualized innumerable aspects of U.S. secular culture. One concrete example of this transformation is Jazz music. Part of the spiritualization of Jazz into a Cold War weapon entailed fabricating Jazz's spiritual history. But while the spiritual history of jazz might have been made up this does not mean Jazz was not an authentic spiritual praxis, both for the jazz ambassadors who were key US diplomatic figures and for their listening participants. Jazz was more than just a political tool. Overall, Jazz gives us an insight into the nature of religion in Cold War America—it was as much an agenda and diplomatic propaganda as it was an authentic spiritual praxis

Aimee Semple McPherson and Writing the Faith into the Modern World

HST407: Twentieth-Century Intellectual History Europe and the U.S. Since the Late Nineteenth CenturyKeywords: history of religion, los angeles, pentecostalism, performance, foursquare, christianity, wesleyanism, holy spirit, women's history, twentieth century, religious studies, modernization, literature, religion, united states, intellectual history, evangelicalism, writing, american religio

Resilience Challenge 6 : Ecosystem Service Valuation

Summary of findings and recommendations • UBC’s Core Resilience Challenges: • Stormwater management and cliff erosion • Biodiversity protection • Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI) • Carbon sequestration • Health and wellbeing • Brand protection • Use economic models to evaluate the monetary return on these important ecosystem services • Assess methods for managing ecosystem services long-term and compensating for the loss of trees due to campus development • Increase engagement with and awareness of UBC’s urban forest Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”Business, Sauder School ofUnreviewedGraduat

Denser and greener cities: Green interventions to achieve both urban density and nature

Abstract Green spaces in urban areas—like remnant habitat, parks, constructed wetlands, and street trees—supply multiple benefits. Many studies show green spaces in and near urban areas play important roles harbouring biodiversity and promoting human well‐being. On the other hand, evidence suggests that greater human population density enables compact, low‐carbon cities that spare habitat conversion at the fringes of expanding urban areas, while also allowing more walkable and livable cities. How then can urban areas have abundant green spaces as well as density? In this paper, we review the empirical evidence for the relationships between urban density, nature, and sustainability. We also present a quantitative analysis of data on urban tree canopy cover and open space for United States large urbanized areas, as well as an analysis of non‐US Functional Urban Areas in OECD countries. We found that there is a negative correlation between population density and these green spaces. For Functional Urban Areas in the OECD, a 10% increase in density is associated with a 2.9% decline in tree cover. We argue that there are competing trade‐offs between the benefits of density for sustainability and the benefits of nature for human well‐being. Planners must decide an appropriate density by choosing where to be on this trade‐off curve, taking into account city‐specific urban planning goals and context. However, while the negative correlation between population density and tree cover is modest at the level of US urbanized areas (R2 = 0.22), it is weak at the US Census block level (R2 = 0.05), showing that there are significant brightspots, neighbourhoods that manage to have more tree canopy than would be expected based upon their level of density. We then describe techniques for how urban planners and designers can create more brightspots, identifying a typology of urban forms and listing green interventions appropriate for each form. We also analyse policies that enable these green interventions illustrating them with the case studies of Curitiba and Singapore. We conclude that while there are tensions between density and urban green spaces, an urban world that is both green and dense is possible, if society chooses to take advantage of the available green interventions and create it. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog