Upcoming forums:
Climate Change Book Forum, 2020
December 2020
“Please come visit us for our monthly virtual Climate Change Forum from OMNI Center, Sunday, December 6 at 1:30. We’ll meet virtually with a Go To Meeting link that will come later. But we want you to know the topics so you can read ahead and participate. Our thoughts for the December Forum will primarily be the Green New Deal and what we can do individually and as a community on a hopefully more positive political stage.
Dick Bennett will present on the Green New Deal, specifically Jane Fonda’s activist account in What Can I do? Dick has also encouraged reading other GND books: Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The (Burning Case of the Green New Deal, Jeremy Rifkin’s The Green New Deal, Aranoff et.al. A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal, and Chomsky and Pollin’s Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, The Political Economy of Saving the Planet.There are two other items we want to touch on. If there is time, Lolly will present a quick summary of Christiana Figueres’, The Future We Choose. She was the UN’s past head of the IPCC and gives a very positive wish list to address climate change.
And then our final activity for the Forum will be to discuss what we can do actively and positively: make lists of specific topics, write letters, decide to whom to send, and who will do the writing. This will take precedence over The Future We Choose.
Please come with ideas we can activate.
Dick Bennet and Fonda’s What Can I Do?
– A call to action from Jane Fonda, one of the most inspiring activists of our time, urging us to wake up to the looming catastrophe of climate change and equipping us with the tools we need to join her in protest
“This is the last possible moment in history when changing course can mean saving lives and species on an unimaginable scale. It’s too late for moderation.”
In the fall of 2019, frustrated with the obvious inaction of politicians and inspired by Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, and student climate strikers, Jane Fonda moved to Washington, D.C., to lead weekly climate change demonstrations on Capitol Hill. On October 11, she launched Fire Drill Fridays, and has since led thousands of people in nonviolent civil disobedience, risking arrest to protest for action. In THEIR STORE Fonda weaves her deeply personal journey as an activist alongside conversations with and speeches by leading climate scientists and inspiring community organizers, and dives deep into the issues, such as water, migration, and human rights, to emphasize what is at stake. Most significantly, Fonda equips us all with the tools we need to join her in protest, so that everyone can work to combat the climate crisis.
No stranger to protest, Fonda’s life has been famously shaped by activism. And now she is once again galvanizing the public to take to the streets. Many are already aware of the looming disaster of climate change and realize that a moral responsibility rests on our shoulders. In 2019, we saw atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases hit the highest level ever recorded in human history, and our window of opportunity to act is quickly closing. We are facing a climate crisis, but we’re also facing an empathy crisis and an inequality crisis. The surge of protests over police violence against black Americans has once again highlighted the links between racism and environmental degradation in our country. It isn’t only earth’s life-support systems that are unraveling. So too is our social fabric. This is going to take an all-out war on drilling and fracking and deregulation and racism and misogyny and colonialism and despair all at the same time.
As Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA and Fonda’s partner in developing Fire Drill Fridays, has declared, “Change is inevitable; by design, or by disaster.” Together, we can commandeer change for the positive–but it will require collective actions taken by social movements on an unprecedented scale. The problems we face now require every one of us to join the fight. The fight for not only our immediate future, but for the future of generations to come.
100% of the author’s net proceeds from What Can I Do? will go to Greenpeace.
(from the Publisher’s description).
On Nov. 16, Barnes and Noble had 11 copies of the book. the store is on N. College just past Joyce on the right.
Lolly and The Future We Choose
Climate change: it is arguably the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced. How we address it in the next thirty years will determine the kind of world we will live in and will bequeath to our children and to theirs.
In The Future We Choose, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac–who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015–have written a cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity.
The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster.”
November 2020
Assessing the Challenges of the Anthropocene
For the virtual November Climate Change Forum. Arlene Hopkins will instigate and moderate a conversation on regenerating our social and ecological systems for wise ways & resilience.
September 6 2020
“Hannah Evans, Communications Director of Population Connection, will talk on the following topic for OMNI’s Climate Change Forum on Sunday, September 6 at 1:30pm. This will be presented virtually, a Go to Meeting link will follow.
The effects of climate change — including sea-level rise, droughts, floods, extreme weather, and decreasing agricultural production, are already being felt throughout the world and will continue to worsen without immediate action. Rapid population growth exacerbates the impacts of climate change by increasing vulnerability and exposing growing numbers of people to climate risk — especially in low-resource regions. This presentation explores the implications of population dynamics on global sustainable development efforts, and argues that high unmet needs for family planning in low-income countries work to compound the impacts of climate change – the effects of which will be most severe for the populations least culpable for the global environmental crisis. Slowing population growth through rights-based approaches, such as increasing access to voluntary family planning, will help address climate change and improve human rights, and should be included in broader strategies for low-carbon and climate-resilient development.”
October 4, 2020
The Climate Change Forum invites all to actively participate in our virtual October 4th presentation.The common theme has to do with “Ideological foundations” that (1) filter all our perceptions about ourselves and others, who I am, what I want and what is mine (2) determine our relationships to Nature, the Natural World, all others and their rights and (3 ) drive policies based on those filters, perceptions and relationships. (1) Shelley will introduce the presentation, deriving from structural and personal racism, and explain the format for dialogue. (2) Lolly will speak on The Rights of Nature (by David R. Boyd) and mention other titles as a bibliography, and (3) Alberto will talk about Piketty (Capital and Ideology) from which we took the phrase “ideological foundations”. The virtual presentation is formatted in the following order: Short introductions to each segment, from personal, to relational, to policy followed by time for reflection and active response from all participants, not just the presenters, on all aspects.”
Before our virtual presentation in October, the following narrative from Shelley offers food for thought for all to help develop your own perspectives on the topics at hand so that you can actively voice your ideas:
“The Underground Narrative in Our Culture and in Ourselves”
The normalized mindset of our culture has too often been the objectification of people, land, water and air as “economic resources”. This cultural mindset in the past has justified slavery, harsh working conditions for children, the poisoning of our planet and extinction of species a thousand times the usual rate.
The civil war freed slaves, but was followed by Black codes and Jim Crow laws. Courageous civil rights workers made demands and sacrifices that brought about civil rights reforms like the Voting Rights Act and school integration. The Nixon Administration countered these lofty victories with the Southern Strategy, a plan to increase political support among white voters in the south by appealing to racism against African Americans. In order to sustain their ability to profit from dwindling “resources”, This political power is used to subsidize fossil fuel and enact policies that benefit the corporate interests that fund resistance to environmental conservation and legislation to slow climate change. Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013, and school integration is being threatened by the corporate support of charter schools.
The cultural mindset of exploitation for the benefit of “me and mine” has again and again gained a foothold in our consciousness. Now, 400 years later, we continue to objectify and exploit and likewise to reap the harvest in the life-erasing consequences of our social and economic inequities and the burning crisis of climate change that is firing up to destroy all life on earth.
As a result of the powerful work by activist groups like Black Lives Matter, numerous organizations, coalitions and legislators are addressing the systemic disparities that are the result of policy choices deliberately designed to deliver the inequitable outcomes in which we live today. Dismantling the big-money opposition to their efforts is a massive undertaking. Surely we are all called upon to support, in every way possible, these heroic activists.
Many of our forebearers seemed to understand as we do now that our own salvation depends on justice for all. The Smithsonian Magazine cites a Quaker meeting in 1738 in which Benjamin Lay proclaimed “Quakers who fail to heed the prophet’s call (to respect all peoples equally) must expect physical, moral and spiritual Death”. He accompanied this statement by stabbing an animal bladder full of bright red poke berry juice, spilling the “blood” on the Quakers who owned slaves. Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), famous for the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, wrote “until we are all free, we are none of us free”.
While it is necessary to acknowledge and respond to the devastating outcomes of exploitation, which we identify as an overriding concern with “me and mine” at the expense of another, we must also identify and understand the source of exploitation. Within our exploitative culture and economy, we continue this rampant theft with impunity. Why do I take from another?
In order to answer, it is crucial to witness the pervasive unfolding of the “me and mine” mindset close up, on a personal level. On the surface, in daily living, I may get a passing grade. The absence of Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” goes unnoticed in our day to day activities. “Me and mine” quietly becomes “I and It” (again, Buber’s). I am challenged to see below the surface of myself, with its manifest forms, to the ingrained structures of thought that generate the invisible underground narrative that justifies “me and mine”. Generations of these same manifold layers of thought structures precede me. Unless seen, I will remain, as did they, passive in front of staggering consequences. I will also lose the possibility of living in awe of the diversity of Creation.
Diversity is not only essential to the health and resistance of every species, but equally essential to the human community and a source for the profound joy of living in a moment of reality. We stand committed to fostering and expanding a more just, equitable and inclusive region for all by purposefully addressing systemic racism in our community. We want to greet each living being and fellow human with a genuine appreciation for their lives.