Thoreau Center Midday Reels presents Entre Nos

Wednesday, February 16 12:30pm - 2:00 pm Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability

Join us for Midday Reels, featuring the award-winning film Entre Nos. This film traces the story of a family struggling to survive and make a permanent home for themselves in the United States. Despite grueling challenges, this mother’s courage and imagination offer hope. The film is based on a true story and should spark more dialogue about immigration reform. The Center for American Progress, America’s Voice Education Fund, and Reform Immigration for America have all supported this film.

Film Synopsis:

Mariana (Paola Mendoza) is determined to keep her family together. Her children, Gabriel (Sebastian Villada Lopez), 10, and Andrea (Laura Montana Cortez), 6, have grown up in Colombia without their father. He immigrated to the United States years earlier in order to make a better life for his family. Finally after many years of separation the family is reunited in New York City.

After coming home late from work one night Antonio announces he has found work in Miami and will be moving there…alone. He will send for the family when he is settled.

Days go by and Mariana does not hear from him. Worried and desperate, she goes to her only friend’s home only to find out Antonio is not coming back. The rent is due, there is no food on the table and Mariana has fifty dollars to her name. With no one to turn to, she must find a way, in a strange city where she barely speaks the language, to provide for her family, financially and emotionally.

Mariana makes homemade empanadas (meat patties), which she tries to sell on the streets, however this quickly fails. With all options closing in on her, Mariana turns to the city’s trash, collecting cans in order to put food on the table. With Gabriel and Andrea working beside her, the family finds the most stability they have known since their arrival, and it is during these challenging moments that the family triumphs.

In entre nos, Mariana, Gabriel and Andrea take us on a remarkable journey where we bear witness to a family’s commitment to survival and their unrelenting hope for the American dream...one soda can at a time.

Midday Reels 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.

Protecting Biodiversity in a Warming World

Speaker - Mitch Tobin, author of Endangered: Biodiversity on the Brink

Thursday, February 10 12:30pm to 1:30pm

Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability San Francisco


For 15 years, Mitch Tobin has been exploring and writing about the American West and its rapidly changing environment. As a reporter, he won numerous awards for his science writing, explanatory journalism, and breaking news coverage. As a consultant, he has helped some of the nation's leading conservation groups and foundations improve their effectiveness. Mitch's first book, Endangered, examines the human activity that has put so many species at risk of extinction and advocates for policies that will protect biodiversity in a warming world. Using firsthand accounts, he reports from the front lines of Endangered Species Act battles, using America's hottest, driest, fastest-growing region - the Southwest - as a snapshot of the complex and myriad issues confronting imperiled species and US environmental policy.

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.

Thoreau Center Brown Bag: A Strategic Approach to the Fiscal Crisis of California

Presenter: Lenny Goldberg, Executive Director of the California Tax Reform Association (CTRA)
Wednesday, February 2, 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability

Lenny Goldberg will address the ongoing fiscal crisis of the state of California, where the government must operate within the limitations of its existing property tax regime. A major challenge is confronting the irrational and dysfunctional commercial property tax, which costs our cities, counties, and schools billions of dollars each year and makes little sense as law, economics, fiscal policy, or land use. Lenny will describe the California Tax Reform Association's long-term strategy to expose this problem and make it so apparent that a solution can be achieved.

The mission of the CTRA is a fair tax system in California, in order to provide the foundation for a healthy public sector and a successful economy. Founded in 1976, CTRA has been involved as an advocate for fair taxation in virtually every major tax policy debate in the legislature and at the state tax agencies. It has also been involved in many statewide ballot measures involving tax policy, and have provided our expertise in many forums, presentations, articles, and in the media.

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.

New Books - January

Here is a look at some of the books we have added in recent weeks. Also, as you prepare for your spring cleaning or get rid of your old books as you replace them all with ebook copies for the reader you got over the holidays, we'd like to remind you of our relationship with Better World Books, which collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. Those books they can't sell, they recycle. Our last shipment of 223 pounds of books they estimate to have saved three trees, 1,710 gallons of water, and 232 pounds of greenhouse gases. So if you're thinking of getting rid of something they might be able to sell, feel free to drop it off at the library, and we can get a new shipment ready. Thank you.

Jamie Court. The Progressive's Guide to Raising Hell: How to Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws, and Get the Change We Voted For. (2010) “How can progressives get what they believe they voted for?” Jamie Court is president of Consumer Watchdog, an award-winning, nationally recognized consumer-advocacy organization with offices in Santa Monica and Washington DC, and he has a long history of organizing successful ballot campaigns and reform initiatives in California. This book is his guide to using these tools and others for mobilizing public opinion, challenging special interests, and seizing the opportunities for change when elected officials disappoint. His five steps for creating change: Expose, Confront, Wait for the Mistake, Make the Mistake the Issue, and Don't Let Go.

David Abram. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. (2010) A book about exploring our entanglement with the rest of nature and reclaiming our sensual awareness of the whole of the living world around us in order to save it. “This directly experienced terrain, rippling with cricket rhythms and scoured by the tides, is the very realm now most ravaged by the spreading consequences of our disregard. Many-long standing and lousy habits have enabled our callous treatment of surrounding nature, empowering us to clear-cut, dam up, mine, develop, poison, or simply destroy so much of what quietly sustains us. Yet few are as deep-rooted and damaging as the habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space...”

Laurie Garrett. Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. (2000) Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garret's landmark examination of the decline of public health around the world. Through extensively researched and vividly detailed accounts of pubic health failures, she portrays a system that at the dawn of 21st century is incapable of dealing with outbreaks of disease and of providing people with the basic tools of physical well-being.

Peter North. Local Money: How to Make It Happen in Your Community. (2010) For centuries, people have responded to financial crises by creating their own local currencies. The latest crisis, having exposed the vulnerabilities of our financial system on a global scale, has been no different. Local currencies are just one of the tools with which communities are experimenting in order to build deeper local resilience and unleash the potential of their local economies. This book delves into the complicated issues surrounding these currencies and serves as a practical guide for those of you out there thinking about creating your own local money for local people.

Jan Gehl. Cities for People. (2010) In this work, architect Jan Gehl explains the concepts and tools he has used to transform sterile, modernist, and dysfunctional cityscapes around the world into lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy places. For Gehl, cities should be considered through the five senses so that they can be designed on a human scale that takes into account the ways people actually use the spaces where they live, work, and interact. Strengthening walking opportunities, creating inviting spaces to linger, ensuring opportunities for social and cultural diversity are a few of the methods he details, and even if you're not an urban planner, you will learn to look at your urban landscape in new ways. Extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work.

Dave Forman. Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century. (2004) “The central reality of our era is extinction. Nothing is more important. Mass extinction is our legacy as a species so far. No other moral challenge is so great as controlling our destructive power over nature,” writes Dave Forman, director of The Rewilding Institute. But he remains hopeful that the causes of extinction and ecological wounds can be halted. In response to the challenge, he lays out a bold vision and a practical strategy for restoring and reconnecting wilderness areas across North America based on recent insights from conservation biology and the historical experiences of the citizen conservation movement.

Thoreau Center Galleries New Exhibitions

Thoreau Center Galleries Opening Reception
Thursday, January 20
5:00 - 7:00 PM

Two new exhibitions running January 20 to March 18, 2011 in the Thoreau Center.

In the Seed Gallery, photography exhibition Winged Neighbors: Birds of Crissy Field & the San Francisco Marina. Local Photographer Rucha Chitnis explores the diversity of birds that live and play along the shores of the Presidio and Marina, revealing this rich habitat for nearly 200 species of birds. 10% of all photography sales will go to Nature in the City, a local organization that promotes awareness about San Francisco's rich biodiversity, connects people with nature where we live, and restores wild habitats.

And in the Thoreau Gallery, six artists come together to explore physical, biological, psychological, and metaphysical meaning in nature. Artists include Leigh Barbier, Bodil Fox, Sheila Ghidini, Elizabeth Medrano, Elaine Michaud, and Patricia O' Connor.

With a special live performance by the Crank Ensamble.

Thoreau Center Brown Bag: Cancun, Report Back

Wednesday, January 12

12pm - 1pm

Pacific Room at Tides

Climate talks in Cancun reach agreements. What's next? Hear from four organizations who were on the ground in Cancun advocating for change.

Representatives from the International Forum on Globalization, the Ruckus Society, La Via Campesina, and the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative will present their report back with a Q & A to follow.

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.

Craft Fair Winning Books

Thank you to everyone who stopped by the library table last week at the Thoreau Center craft fair and voted with your donations to select new books for the collection. We are happy to announce that enough was raised to acquire two of the books. Congratulations to everyone who wanted one of these books to win, and commiserations to those of you who were rooting for the others. We will look into adding them to the collection in the future.

Also, we're letting you know that the last day the library will be open this year is next Monday, December 20. When we come back next year, however, look forward to extended hours as we change the times we are open to Tuesday through Friday from 11:00 am to 2:00pm.

And without further ado, the winners are...

In first place, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by ecologist and anthropologist David Abram. From the publisher's description:

As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our muscled flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This book subverts that distance, drawing readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.

The shapeshifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram’s investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself—a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.

With the audacity of its vision and the luminosity of its prose, Becoming Animal sets a new benchmark for the human appraisal of our place in the whole.

And in a very close second place, Local Money: How to Make it Happen in Your Community by Peter North, geographer and founding member of Transition South Liverpool. From the publisher's description:

An inspiring yet practical new Transition Book, Local Money helps you understand what money is and what makes good and bad money, and reviews how people around the world and in the past have experimented with new forms of money that they create themselves.

The book draws on the track record of experimentation with local money to show those in the Transition movement and beyond what has been tried, what works, and what to avoid. Different models of alternative currencies are reviewed, from the Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) and TimeBanks, which work within communities, to paper currencies such as Berkshares, German regional currencies and Ithaca ‘hours’, which circulate between local businesses as an alternative to their losing trade to the national chain retailers.

How can local banks and bonds help us move our cities, communities and homes on to a more sustainable footing? The book suggests how groups can create future forms of local money that can deepen local resilience and support the development of more local production of the things we need, such as food and power.