Elizabeth Lunday's Blog

Fort Worth Botanic Garden’s new website goes live

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the moment an organization completely revamps its website, the clock starts ticking on the need to completely revamp it again. The Fort Worth Botanic Garden recent undertook this huge endeavor, and I pitched in with some new writing and a whole lot of editing.

But the results are fantastic. You can’t capture the real beauty of the Garden on a webpage, but this site comes close!

Rite of Spring advances to second round at Austin Film Festival

I was uncertain if I wanted to attend the Austin Film Festival screenwriting conference–I kinda wanted to go, but you know, there will be people there and people are, frankly, a lot. But I advanced to the second round in the Drama category. So I’m going, people or no!

I found out the same day that that I didn’t make it to the final round for the Nicholl Fellowship. So I can look at this as two contests where I didn’t advance all the way, or I can look at it as two contests were I made it to all but the final round and that’s nothing to sneeze at–especially for my first real script. So I focusing on the positive.

Now for the important question: what am I going to wear?

APPA: Report predicts challenges and opportunities of higher education in 2030

The final APPA Thought Leaders report for 2024 was recently released. This is always a satisfying day, the result of several months of work. This year, 30 higher education experts met in Alexandria, Virginia to discuss the the future of college and university campuses in 2030. They evaluated the implications of new technologies like AI, ongoing institutional transformation, and the outlook of enrollment in higher education. Their goal was to propose strategies to help facilities professionals prepare themselves and their institutions for the future.

My role is to consolidate the discussions at the symposium, research issues in detail and write everything up in a compelling way. This was my 17th Thought Leaders symposium, and every year I learn new things about higher education.

Fort Worth Botanic Garden: Embrace the philosophy of Japanese gardening

The Japanese Garden is one of my favorite locations at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. It’s a magical place, where the city falls away and you enter a space of delicate, timeless beauty.

For the October issue of the Fort Worth Botanic Garden newsletter, I talked to Nick Esthus, the horticultural manager of the Japanese Garden, about the philosophy behind this remarkable space. He also discussed how to apply these principles at home, saying: “The goal is to create a beautiful space that exists in harmony with the surrounding architecture and landscape.”

My family will never stop finding it funny that I write gardening advice–if you could see my back yard you would understand why. But someday, I hope to find the energy and attention to apply some of these ideas.

Read the article here!

Fort Worth Botanic Garden: Enjoy strawberry shortcake, guacamole, chocolate and coffee? Thank a pollinator!

The Fort Worth Botanic Garden celebrates butterflies every spring with the annual Butterflies in the Garden event. For the March newsletter, I wrote about the importance of pollinators including butterflies.

Here’s a great fact: Of the 1,400 or so crop plants grown around the world, 75 to 80 percent require pollination by animals, including insects such as butterflies and bees.

For more information, read the article!

Rite of Spring script advances to semifinal round of 2024 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting

Very excited to receive the announcement today that my screenplay “Rite of Spring” has advanced to the semifinal round of the 2024 Academy Nicholl Fellowship.

It’s so exciting to know people are reading this story and enjoying it. Now I gnaw my fingernails to the bone waiting for the next announcement.

Educational program introduces K-12 students to archaeology

American Archaeology, Fall 2023: “Discover the Past–Shape the Future”

From the article: “Project Archaeology is a national education program designed to develop awareness of archaeological sites, cultivate personal responsibility, and enhance historical literacy and cultural understanding.”

I was happy to get this assignment from American Archaeology, because it seemed so straightforward: a program that provides curricula to K-12 teachers to introduce them to archaeology. What I didn’t expect was for this program to mean so much to so many people. I literally had two people start crying when they described how much this programs means to them. Archaeology really is amazing!

Archaeological field schools transform under pressure to welcome more students to the field

American Archaeology, Summer 2024: “Transformation in the Field”

From the article: “Scholars aim to make field schools for nascent archaeologists more affordable and accessible to help diversify the profession. Current economic conditions create a need for specialized training in CRM archaeology to bridge a labor shortage.”

This article arose directly out of a previous American Archaeology article about changes to the field as a whole. Field schools are required to become an archaeologist at any level, but traditionally these schools have been expensive summer programs close-to-inaccessible to students with disabilities.

But efforts are underway to make field schools more widely available–an essential step toward expanding the discipline.

Remarkable evidence of continuous occupation of Idaho site, going back 16,000 years

American Archaeology, Spring 2023: “Projectiles Point to Earlier Peopling of the Americas”

From the article: “Adding to a growing body of evidence that people settled in North America long before Clovis sites, artifacts found at Cooper’s Ferry indicate humans arrived at least 16,000 years ago.”

One of the first archaeology stories I ever worked on was about the Buttermilk Creek site near Salado, Texas, where scientists had found compelling evidence that humans had arrived in North America earlier than previously believed–the “pre-Clovis” theory. At the the time (2008) this was still a controversial opinion, with archaeologists still looking for definitive proof.

Over the years, the number of pre-Clovis doubters has dwindled to a few die-hards, thanks to the painstaking work of scientists such as Loren Davis. This is one of the most convincing sites, with beautiful evidence that points to continuous occupation of an Idaho riverbank for 16,000.

Just exactly as local Native Americans have always claimed!

Faltering flagship

How best to prop up the companies that power South Korea’s export-driven economy as the rest of the world slows? The government’s previous answer, the so-called “one-shot” bill, aims to help the worst-affected industries to restructure by offering tax breaks for firms that sell subsidiaries and by reducing the red tape around mergers. Parliament approved it in February; it will come into effect in August. But Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s president, thinks more is needed. On June 28th she proposed a stimulus of 20 trillion won ($17 billion).

South Korea’s exports have fallen every month year-on-year since January 2015. In early June the central bank trimmed its benchmark interest rate by 0.25 percentage points, taking it to an all-time low of 1.25%. Nonetheless the government this week revised down its forecast of GDP growth this year from 3.1%, which it predicted in December, to 2.8%. Ms Park said that the economic situation inside and outside the country was “more serious than ever”.

Britain’s recent decision to leave the European Union, South Korea’s fourth-biggest market for exports, has rattled it. But the economy, Asia’s fourth-biggest, has been struggling for some time. Growth has slowed from an average of 4.4% between 2001 and 2011 to 2.8% since then. The slowdown in China, the destination for a quarter of South Korea’s exports, has been especially painful. Low oil prices, meanwhile, have hammered shipbuilders, which build lots of rigs and other equipment for the offshore oil industry.

This week the government said 60,000 people might lose their jobs in the shipbuilding sector, which employs 200,000 in total and accounts for 7.6% of South Korean exports. Earlier in June Ms Park had urged “bone-crushing” efforts to overhaul the industry and prop up its three biggest yards—Hyundai Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering and Samsung Heavy Industries (which last year reported combined annual losses of 6.4 trillion won)—promising to pump 11 trillion won into state-run lenders saddled with loans to them.

All this is expected to weigh on already-feeble consumer spending. The interest-rate cut should help a bit, mostly by lowering households’ high debt-servicing costs. Much of the stimulus will go towards retraining and wage subsidies for the long-term unemployed. Some is also aimed at boosting consumption through tax breaks. Lee Doo-won, an economics professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, the capital, says that if the latest injection is delivered promptly, it could add up to 0.4 percentage points to GDP growth this year.

But the frequency of such packages—three since Ms Park took office in early 2013—suggests that they are hardly cure-alls. A 41 trillion won stimulus in 2014 was followed by another 22 trillion won last July, after an outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome dampened consumption. Given South Korea’s relatively low debt-to-GDP ratio compared with other rich countries, at around 37%, it could afford to make the latest spree three times bigger, says Frederic Neumann of HSBC, a bank. Moreover, the government has not been quite as loose with its money as the occasional splurges suggest: half the latest package will be financed either with money left unspent from last year’s budget or with this year’s higher-than-expected tax receipts.

Mo Jongryn, also at Yonsei University, says the money being used to bail out old manufacturers would be better spent goading under-employed South Koreans, such as women and early retirees, into the workforce. There is also scope for greater investment in services, where the productivity of workers is half that in manufacturing; a more dynamic sector would help to ease the strain on traditional exporters.

In a recent survey of South Koreans by Choson Ilbo, a local newspaper, almost 60% said they expected the economy to be as bad this year as it was in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. South Korea has had the worst consumer-confidence levels in the world for four straight quarters, according to Nielsen, a pollster. Yet household credit grew by 11% in the period from January to March compared with the same period last year, one of the fastest rates in the region, according to HSBC, suggesting South Koreans are borrowing to maintain their standard of living. The “extraordinary” measures for which Ms Park called this week are still needed.