• From Pelicans to Healing - Susan Hirshberg's Unconventional Journey

  • Apr 12 2024
  • Length: 49 mins
  • Podcast

From Pelicans to Healing - Susan Hirshberg's Unconventional Journey

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  • Summary

  • This week, Susan Hirshberg joins the Palm Court Podcast to guide listeners through the twists and turns of her fascinating life story, which she sums up in the most quintessential New College way: "My life journey always made sense to me, even if it's never made sense to everybody else." She opens up about the positive and negative aspects of her New College experience, including her innovative self-designed animal behavior concentration and details of her legendary thesis research observing pelican behavior every day for over a year from the boughs of a tree on the bayfront—extraordinary scholarship that led her to present her findings at a national conference, while still an undergrad facing serious challenges and lack of support from her sponsor. Susan's post NCF life found her continuing her studies at grad school, doing advocacy work on radioactive waste in Los Alamos, New Mexico (where her uncle, physicist Richard Feynman, had worked on the Manhattan Project) and, along the way, finding and marrying her best friend from high school. Susan catches us up on her life after moving to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she has worked in healing as an alternative healthcare practitioner and started an organization, the Joan Feynman Climate Change Fund, to honor her mother, a renowned astrophysicist who cared deeply about climate issues and gender equality. At the end of the episode, Susan reveals that she bought land in rural Nova Scotia to create a healing center and issues an exciting invitation to current New College students to apply to a program she is designing for 4-8 students this summer, exploring embodiment in nature and healing. In closing, Susan discusses her participation in "the Lorax Rebellion" of 1988—which she emphatically cites as "life changing"—a brief teaser for a future episode on this seminal New College protest to save a stand of trees from destruction by SRQ. Notes: The Spring 1988 Nimbus has an article on Hirshberg’s pelican research as well as one on the airport expansion that led, months later, to the Lorax Rebellion. Hirshberg’s pelican thesis and other, less estuarine work can be read here. Cognitive ethology is the study of animal thought processes. Susan Sapoznikoff is a senior attorney at the Florida Public Service Commission. The Joan Feynman Climate Change Fund gives grants “to support innovative, community-based action.” Joan Feynman was a renowned astrophysicist. Of her brother, Richard, she said: “Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said OK! … It was nice of him to give me the aurora and to know that I would think it was wonderful.” In Oppenheimer, Richard was played by Jack Quaid, with bongos. In real life, he was a Manhattan Project group leader, as well as an author and popular lecturer. Runoff from Los Alamos cooling towers was spilled into canyons on San Ildefonso Pueblo land from 1956 to 1972. “Some of the waste offers quite a challenge.” Reiki and craniosacral therapy are complementary therapies using light touch to ease anxiety and pain; treat chronic pain and help in physical therapy.
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