An Angel Passes, by Cynda Valle
A Celebration of Our New Exhibition - 30 Years Behind the Easel
Thoreau Gallery, Thoreau Center for Sustainability
Thursday, August 18, 5:00 to 7:00
Exhibition dates: August 18 through October 14, 2011
30 Years Behind the Easel is an exhibition by two local artists: Cynda Valle and Robert Brokl. The show documents the evolution of their craft over time and the persistence of their vision as they grapple with day jobs, the emotional needs of family, and the many ways life, in general, conspires to prevent most artists from making art all together. As economic hardships persist, nonprofits and agencies that might otherwise support artists instead strive to plug the rent “safety net,” and governmental programs like the New Deal's WPA are lacking. Artistic sustainability over time is a challenging business — and noteworthy when it succeeds. Cynda and Bob believe having fellow travellers helps.
Garden II, by Robert Brokl
Presenter: Darian Rodriguez Heyman, Editor of Nonprofit Management 101
Wednesday, August 17, 12:30 to 2:00
Pacific Room at Tides
RSVP to bruce@thoreau.org
You dream of a strong, vibrant community and have a sense of how to make it real. But how can you rally the funds you need to connect your vision to action? Join the former Craigslist Foundation E.D. and Editor of the newly released handbook, Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals, as he shares practical, tactical solutions from his new book that can and will help you get dollars in the door. Darian will provide concrete tips and tools for individual giving, foundation grants, corporate sponsorship, earned income, and online and peer-to-peer campaigns, plus point you in the right direction for more information.
After five years of service, Darian recently stepped down as Executive Director of Craigslist Foundation. While there, he helped launch Nonprofit Boot Camp, the Environmental Nonprofit Network, and the Next Generation Leadership Forum. His new book, Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals, includes practical tips and tools from 50 recognized experts across 35 topics, and he recently launched a nationwide Social Media for Nonprofits conference series and his Advancing Social Impact blog on Skoll Foundation’s Social Edge. Heyman previously served as a Commissioner for the Environment for the City and County of San Francisco and currently is a public speaker who provides strategy, messaging, and fundraising consulting for nonprofits and green economy organizations.
A few studies and reports of import that caught my eye this week:
The Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy at California State University, Sacramento issued a report this week entitled Consequences of Neglect: Performance Trends in California Higher Education which finds those trends to be in decline. Using national data, "[r]esearchers analyzed California’s postsecondary performance in the categories of preparation, participation, affordability, completion, benefits and finance, and found that the state’s performance is average, at best, and trending downward."
Among the findings:
- California ranks last in total funding per student
- Tuition and fee increases exceed the national average rate
- Each successively younger working-age generation is less highly educated that the one before.
- Black and Latino students continue to lag behind other racial/ethnic groups in levels of college preparation, participation, and completion
A new study from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Physicians for Social Responsibility entitled Toxic Power: How Power Plants Contaminate Our Air and States rates the states with the most toxic air pollution from coal- and oil-fired power plants based on publicly-available data from the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory, a database of emmissions reported by industrial sources. Findings include that power plants are the single largest industrial source of toxic air pollution in 28 states and the District of Columbia. For the full methodology and to find out how your state ranks, see the analysis at: http://docs.nrdc.org/air/air_11072001.asp.
The Environmental Working Group released a study of the varying health, climate, and other environmental impacts of meat and dairy consumption: Meat Eater's Guide to Climate Change and Health. which finds that "that if every person in the US refrained from eating meat or cheese one day a week every week for a year the reduction in emissions would be equivalent of taking 7.6 million cars off the road." Their interactive website includes a handy chart for comparing the consumption of different foods with miles driven. On methodology:
To assess climate impacts, EWG partnered with CleanMetrics, an environmental analysis and consulting firm, to do lifecycle assessments of 20 popular types of meat (including fish), dairy and vegetable proteins. Unlike most studies that focus just on production emissions, our assessment calculates the full “cradle-to-grave” carbon footprint of each food item based on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated before and after the food leaves the farm – from the pesticides and fertilizer used to grow animal feed all the way through the grazing, animal raising, processing, transportation, cooking and, finally, disposal of unused food. The analysis also includes the emissions from producing food that never gets eaten, either because it’s left on the plate or because of spoilage or fat and moisture loss during cooking. About 20 percent of edible meat just gets thrown out.
And a new study published in the July 15 issued of the journal Science from a group of twenty-four researchers - Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth - details how the decline of large apex predators, such as wolves, lions, and sharks, represents one of the most powerful impacts of humanity on the world's ecosystems, as their removal leads to a wider range of ecological disruptions through the processes known as trophic cascades. From the abstract:
Until recently, large apex consumers were ubiquitous across the globe and had been for millions of years. The loss of these animals may be humankind’s most pervasive influence on nature. Although such losses are widely viewed as an ethical and aesthetic problem, recent research reveals extensive cascading effects of their disappearance in marine, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems worldwide. This empirical work supports long-standing theory about the role of top-down forcing in ecosystems but also highlights the unanticipated impacts of trophic cascades on processes as diverse as the dynamics of disease, wildfire, carbon sequestration, invasive species, and biogeochemical cycles. These findings emphasize the urgent need for interdisciplinary research to forecast the effects of trophic downgrading on process, function, and resilience in global ecosystems.
Presenter: Author Richard Heinberg
Thursday, July 28, 12:30 to 1:30
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability.
Join us for a discussion with Richard Heinberg, author of The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality and Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute. We all take economic growth for granted...until it falters, as it did in 2008. But what if the recent meltdown was not just an interruption in the story of continuous economic expansion, but the first intimation of the end of growth as we know it? Will a convergence of financial disruption, resource depletion, and environmental impacts create "Business as Unusual?" We know that traditional economic growth models do not reconcile the best measures of human health and welfare. So how can social change advocates and philanthropists prepare for -- and thrive in -- a future that is not based on assumptions of cheap energy, reckless consumption, and financial speculation? How can we decouple qualitative progress — in education, arts, health, well-being, freedom, happiness -- from ever-expanding consumption and growth?
Health Care Reform - Why Social Justice is the Best Medicine
Presenter: Joe Brenner, EQUAL Health Network of the Center for Policy Analysis
Wednesday, July 20 - 12:30PM to 1:30PM
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center For Sustainability
Joe Brenner of the EQUAL Health Network/Center for Policy Analysis will discuss the latest developments on health care reform and how they affect access to quality, affordable health care in our communities, from Vermont to California.
The EQUAL Health Network brings together partners from public health, women’s health and the public to advocate for Equitable, Quality, Universal, Affordable – EQUAL – health care.
Update: This event has been cancelled and will be rescheduled for a later date. Stay tuned.
Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.
This week's review is very United Nations heavy, with reports on women, energy, technology, and development:
From the newest UN agency - UN Women - The 2011 Progress of the World's Women: In Pursuit of Justice report is a survey of women's legal rights and access to justice worldwide. In examining legislation and its implementation, the agency finds that despite expansion of women's legal rights in recent years, real progress on equality and justice has been elusive. Details of the report include which countries have passed special legislation on women's political rights, economic opportunities, and reproductive health and rights. It looks at which countries have laws against domestic violence, sexual harassment, and marital rape. It also provides data on development indicators related to women, and looks country-by-country at women's participation in politics.
The UN Environment Programme, in conjunction with the Frankfurt School of Finance and Bloomberg New Enerby Finance, issued its latest annual report on renewable energy investment trends: Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2011. It shows a 32% increase in green energy investments worldwide - a total of US$211 billion in renewables, or about one-third more than the US$160 billion invested in 2009, and a 540 percent rise since 2004. Developing economies overtook developed ones for the first time in new investment on utility scale projects, with China being the world leader at US$48.9 billion of new investment. Another significant development was the growth of government research and development 120 percent to over US$5 billion worldwide. Additional drops in costs for solar, wind and other renewable technologies are expected, the report says, presenting a growing threat to the dominance of fossil-fuel generation sources in the next few years.
While in the United States, according to the latest issue of the Monthly Energy Review by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, domestic production of renewable energy is now greater than that of nuclear power. During the first quarter of 2011, energy production from renewable energy sources in 2011 was 5.65 percent more than that from nuclear power, which has remained largely unchanged in recent years. Production of renewable energy has increased by 15.07 percent compared to the first quarter of 2010.
Also from the UN, the Department of Economic and Social Affiars of the United Nation published its World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Transformation which "calls for a complete transformation of technology on which human economic activity is based" in order to combat poverty while protecting the environment:
The "great green technological transformation" that the Survey champions will have to be completed in the next 30 to 40 years, that is, twice as fast as it took to accomplish previous major technological transitions. Because of the limited time frame, Governments will need to play a much more active and stimulating role to accelerate the green energy transformation. The Survey details new policy directions and major investments in developing and scaling up clean energy technologies, sustainable farming and forestry techniques, climate proofing of infrastructure and reducing non-bio-degradable waste production.
Here is this week's highly selective selection of some significant reports, investigations, and studies I encountered this week in the news:
The National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released State of the Climate in 2010, this year's update on 41 worldwide climate indicators, significant climate events, and other climate information. Compiled by 368 scientists from 45 countries, it shows 2010 to be one of the two warmest years on record and an increase in carbon dioxide of 2.60 ppm, more than the average annual increase seen from 1980-2010. Among other findings, global average temperature in 2010 was warmer than the 20th century average for every month in the past quarter century, Arctic sea ice continued to decline, average global sea surface temperature was the third warmest on record, and sea levels continued to rise. The online supplement includes additional data.
San Francisco was named the greenest city in North America in a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit and commissioned by Siemens as part of its ongoing Green City Index project. The report rates 27 cities selected to represent a number of the most populous metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada, and it is based on 31 indicators in nine categories intended to measure "their commitment to reducing their future environmental impacts": CO2 emissions reduction, energy, land use, buildings, transport, water, waste, air, and environmental governance. San Francisco has the top overall score and is in the five top scorers in six categories: air, energy, buildings, transport, waste, and water.
The Center for Park Research of the National Parks Conservation Association released The State of America's National Parks, "the culmination of ten years of research on the condition of natural and cultural resources within America's national parks." The assessment reports on long-standing and more recent threats, including unchecked human development, invasive species, climate change, the failure to protect or catalog millions of artifacts, and a general insufficiency of funding to maintain and to interpret park resources. Also highlighting some success stories within the system, it suggests several recommendations for restoring health.
The National Resources Defense Council released Testing the Waters 2011, its annual survey of water quality and public notification at U.S. beaches. Its findings "confirm that our nation’s beaches continue to experience significant water pollution that puts swimmers and local economies at risk." NRDC recommendations focus on addressing the sources of beachwater pollution, particularly contamination carried by stormwater runoff. State-by-state results are available on the website.
And the Costs of War report of the Eisenhower Study Group at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies is a new effort to document and assess as comprehensively as possible the effects of ten years of the United States' wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The goal of the project has been to bring to light and to develop a broad understanding of the human, economic, social, and political costs of these conflicts in the U.S. and abroad.
Among the findings:
- Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 225,000.
- The current number of war refugees and displaced persons -- 7,800,000 -- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.
- The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad.
- Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.
- Afghanistan and Iraq both continue to rank low in global rankings of political freedom, with warlords continuing to hold power in Afghanistan with US support, and Iraqi communities more segregated today than before by gender and ethnicity as a result of the war.
- Serious and compelling alternatives to war were scarcely considered in the aftermath of 9/11 or in the discussion about war against Iraq. Some of those alternatives are still available to the U.S.
An Angel Passes, by Cynda Valle
Garden II, by Robert Brokl
