January 2007
Help make “Bioneers by the Bay” sustainable.
The Marion Institute is very proud to have hosted the First Annual “Bioneers by the Bay: Connecting for Change” Conference. The constant and torrential rainfall, flooded roads and declared ‘State of Emergency’ in Massachusetts could not wash away the enthusiasm shining over this unforgettable weekend. In fact, we experienced an unforgettable downpour of inspiration, hope and restoration. We witnessed visionary and practical models to help heal the planet – and its inhabitants. We connected.
To continue to do so, however, we need your help.
Please help us cover the immense costs of staging this essential gathering by becoming a member of the Marion Institute. Your tax-deductible membership pledge will help us plan and fund next year’s gathering.
If you are already a member, but would like to see us continue holding “Bioneers by the Bay” please send us your donation. Please make your donation online today or mail your check to the “Marion Institute” at 3 Barnabas Road Marion, MA 02738.
Finally, your purchase of a “Bioneers by the Bay” plenary CD’s or commemorative T-shirt via our new online "Bioneers by the Bay" store will also help us make this event sustainable.
Thank you. Your generous support will help us all connect for change.
Listen. Watch. Connect.
CD audio recordings of each of the “Bioneers by the Bay” plenary speakers are on now available at the our online store.
We’ve have also chronicled some of the organic, life-affirming alchemy that took place at this year’s “Bioneers by the Bay.” You can listen to pod-cast interviews with each of our presenters, conducted by Mike Hagan and Metahistory Quest’s Joanna Harcourt-Smith. What’s more, Carola Lott’s web-log, or ‘blog’, details the highlights of this inaugural gathering. We are also posting up photographs and a short film shot during the weekend to help you revisit this most memorable, three-day gathering.
DVD’s of each plenary session are in production and we will send an email announcement to all conference attendees as soon as they are ready. If you did not attend the conference, but would still like to be notified once these DVD’s are available, please email us at info@connectingforchange.org.
'Environmental Conscience' Urges Canadians to Tread Softly
Dr. Suzuki said he used to urge people to think globally, act locally. "That was a mistake," he says today. "When people think globally, they feel helpless." Cornelia Dean writes that Suzuki’s foundation recommends an array of government, business and individual efforts, none of them enormously painful and all of them on a timetable, that would greatly reduce our collective impact on the natural world. [read more]
Blessed Stubbornness
Diane Wilson: a shrimper mom on her own vs. big polluters
Diane Wilson, used to be just a regular old shrimper and mother of five kids, until she accidentally became an activist. Then, all hell broke loose. Molly Ivins believes her book, "An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas," will become a classic – and not just of the environmental movement, but of American literature, as well. [read more]
Save the date.
The Second Annual “Bioneers by the Bay: Connecting for Change” Conference. October 13 – 15, 2006. UMASS Dartmouth, North Dartmouth, MA.
The Time To Act Is Now
The climate crisis and the need for leadership
When Neville Chamberlain tried to wish that threat of looming war away with appeasement, Churchill wrote, "This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste, of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year -- unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we rise again and take our stand for freedom." Sixty years later, Al Gore writes of another gathering storm: the "Category 5" collision between our civilization -- as we currently pursue it -- and the Earth's environment. [read more]
Now They See Us As We Are
“As far as the poor of the world are concerned,” writes Joan Chittister, OSB, the United States is “at the base of their problems. We have become the American Empire, which like the Roman Empire of old, is simply living off their resources, their slave labor, their tribute in cash crops and their future. We are the new economic colonialists who are sucking the economic blood out of them and destroying their cultures.” True or not, the problem is that perception is more powerful than fact. And more than that, perceptions such as these are spawning small anti-U.S. movements all over the world.” [read more]
Exploring the 9th Minute
In just 8 minutes, a team of ocean explorers identified several new species that may hold the cure for cancer or other human ailments, while surveying in 300-feet of water, more than 6 times the depth of conventional scuba. Just imagine what the 9th minute could hold? That’s precisely what Innerspace is doing. [read more]
How Serendipitous
Marion Institute’s “Cambodia School Center” Project
The Marion Institute is helping to facilitate a community project in the village of Ksach Poy in Northwest Cambodia. The project is being run by a local NGO named FEDA [Friends Economic Development Association] and a young English volunteer, Dickon Verey, has organized the fundraising with the help from the Marion Institute’s “Serendipity Project” initiative. In this update, Verey relates the unlikely – yet all to necessary – lesson that the children of Ksach Poy are ready to teach us: that “Every vote counts.” [read more]
Read all about it.
Baker Books, the rather incredible, North Dartmouth. MA, independent bookstore which was a highlight of the Bioneers by the Bay exhibit hall, has placed many of our conference presenters’ work on their website’s "Featured Book List".
Tiny houses.
See how the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company and the Small House Society are researching, designing and developing small houses that foster sustainable living for individuals and communities worldwide.
“You know you have reached perfection of design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.”
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
And the color of the year is…
For so many years the term "green" could never scale. It was trapped in a corner by its opponents, who defined it as "liberal," "tree-hugging," "girly-man," "unpatriotic," "vaguely French." 2006 put an end to that. Thom Friedman explains how. [Read more.]
Fill‘er up.
For all the hype, most people barely know enough about biofuels to drop a line or two at a cocktail party. What is ethanol, and how's it different from biodiesel, and where does fry grease come in? Are there cars that can run on this stuff, and who's making them, and where can they fuel up? This special series by Grist.com on biofuels offers you everything you ever wanted to know about ethanol, biodiesel, and other odd fuels made from recently living organisms. [Learn more].
And by now, we mean now.
The best science tells us we have ten years to fundamentally transform our economy and lead the world in the same direction or else, in the words of NASA’s Jim Hansen, we will face a “totally different planet,” one infinitely sadder and less flourishing. The recent elections have given us an opening, and polling shows most Americans know there’s a problem. But the forces of inertia and business-as-usual are still in control, and only our voices, united and loud, joyful and determined, can change that reality. Bill McKibben asks to step it up in 2007. [Learn more].
The Healthy Farms, Foods and Fuels Act: a new approach to farm and food policy.
Renewal of America's farm and food policies in 2007 creates a rare opportunity to help farmers, consumers and the environment. [Learn more]. The Healthy Farms, Foods and Fuels Act, H.R. 6064, would dramatically expand opportunities for farmers, consumers and the environment. The bipartisan bill, deemed "the most ambitious conservation bill in American history." Send an email to Congress and help reward farmers for conservation.
Growing living economy communities.
BALLE is an international alliance of 39 independently operated local business networks with more than 12,000 members dedicated to building Local Living Economies. BALLE envisions a sustainable global economy made up of Local Living Economies that build long-term economic empowerment and prosperity through local business ownership, economic justice, cultural diversity, and environmental stewardship. BALLE seeks to catalyze, strengthen, and connect these local business networks. [Learn more].
The American way.
Ode Magazine | December 15, 2006
Americans already earn global sympathy for having the least vacation time of any developed nation in the world. But the situation is even worse than previously believed, reports Midwest Living magazine [Oct. 2006]. One-third of Americans do not use all the vacation they are offered, according to a survey by the travel website Expedia.com. That amounts to 574 million vacation days lost each year. In comparison, 45 percent of French citizens take an annual vacation of three weeks. The biggest reasons Americans cited for not taking vacation days was too much work to do and the difficulty of scheduling days off.
Save a tree. Read a PDF.
The Marion Institute is constantly striving to become as sustainable as possible. One way in which we’re working to lessen our impact on the planet is to offer members our signature “Quarterly Mailer” as a PDF or digital document.
Presenting the Quarterly Mailer as a PDF will greatly reduce waste, oil and CO2 emissions not to mention staff time and postage costs. The PDF document offers flexibility: allowing people the option to read the articles online, print only the pieces that are of deep interest, or print the entire Mailer.
If you would like to receive the Quarterly Mailer as a PDF document, please place your full name [and the email address that you wish to receive the Mailer at] in the body of an email and send it to info@marioninstitute.org. We realize the printed Quarterly Mailer is a great tradition of the Institute. For those that are not yet online – or simply wish to continue receiving the hard- copy version of it in the mail – we will honor their desires and will continue to provide other ideas for our members to help heal the planet – and its inhabitants
Community book binding.
The Mastate Charitable Foundation [MCF] is a non-profit in Mastatal, Costa Rica working to advance educational, sustainability, conservation and scientific efforts in and around the small rural community of Mastatal, Costa Rica. One goal for the upcoming year is the construction of community library. The structure will be erected using local labor and resources. It will eventually be home to scores of Spanish books and space where local entrepreneurs can operate small businesses. MCF envisions this location to become the social center of town and a place that all community members can be proud to call their own. The library will demonstrate their dedication to a sustainable way of living and serve as a place to educate both the youth of the surrounding towns and visitors to the community about ways that we must live to improve the well being of our planet and the social fabric of our communities.
Please contact Susan or Desa if you have questions concerning the MCF or if you would like to help fund this initiative.
ZERI Learning gains momentum out West | November 13-17
Following up on a last summer’s successful ZERI Teacher Training Workshops in Southern California, the ZERI Learning team conducted a week-long series of lectures and private consultations with an array of California schools. Gunter Pauli presented the integration of ZERI science curriculum with ZERI architectural technologies and the design of school buildings at a lecture hosted by the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Design. Pauli then presented an evening lecture at Echo Horizon School, attended by approximately eighty architects, teachers, school administrators and parents. The following day Pauli devoted his time to private consultations with schools in Pasadena and Huntington Beach, CA. The ZERI Learning team then traveled to San Diego where Pauli gave a keynote lecture at the Del Mar Fairgrounds Convention Center hosted by Earth Resources on the topic of making waste work and the triple bottom line. Following a private consultation with High Tech High in San Diego, the week ended with an evening lecture at Gillispie School in La Jolla.
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence [and that is] activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form of violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
- Thomas Merton
