1. Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan - Wislawa Szymborska
2. The Secret Life of Fungi - Orinda Oct 24
3. Free workshop for educators Oct 27
4. Blue Greenway Open House Oct 29
5. Make your own slug trap for organic garden
6. Nature Journaling with Jack Laws, Fremont Nov 8-9
7. South SF Weed Warriors Oct 26, 27
8. Sunset sail and plankton expedition to see bioluminescence, Oct 28
9. Radar helps solve butterfly migration mystery
10. Yosemite Restoration Campaign potpourri
11. Oakland Zoo execs violated numerous laws
12. In a Room on a Courtyard in Firenze - Dan Liberthson
13. Save the date for BAEER Fair - Jan 19
14. Alfred Russell Wallace - 28,000 pages of searchable historical documents, and more
15. It is the business of historians to remember what others forget
16. Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor...
1. NOTHING'S A GIFT
Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.
I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.
I'll have to pay for myself
with my self,
give up my life for my life.
Here's how it's arranged:
The heart can be repossessed,
the liver, too,
and each single finger and toe.
Too late to tear up the terms,
my debts will be repaid,
and I'll be fleeced,
or, more precisely, flayed.
I move about the planet
in a crush of other debtors.
some are saddled with the burden
of paying off their wings.
Others must, willy-nilly,
account for every leaf.
Every tissue in us lies
on the debit side.
Not a tenacle or tendril
is for keeps.
The inventory, infinitely detailed,
implies we'll be left
not just empty-handed
but handless too.
I can't remember
where, when, and why
I let someone open
this account in my name.
We call the protest against this
the soul.
And it's the only item
not included on the list.
~ Wislawa Szymborska ~
(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)
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2.
The Secret Life of Fungi
Speaker: John Taylor
Wednesday, October 24, 7:30 pm
Location: Garden Room, Orinda Public Library
Offered by the East Bay Chapter of the California Native Plant Society
Free and open to the public
There are three kingdoms of terrestrial organisms that make multicelled individuals. Everyone knows about animals and plants, but few know much about fungi. In this month’s program, John Taylor will introduce us to that fascinating third kingdom, helping us understand what a fungus is and how it earns its living as well as how fungi have been used to increase our understanding of the process of evolution.
John W. Taylor is Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley and Curator of Mycological Collections at the University Herbarium. He has served as president of the Mycological Society of America and currently is president of the International Mycological Association. He is a fellow of the Mycological Society of America, the California Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Microbiology. He is also a long-time member of the East Bay Chapter of CNPS and husband of East Bay chapter board member Delia Taylor.
East Bay CNPS meetings are free of charge and open to everyone. This month’s meeting takes place in the Garden Room of the Orinda Public Library at 24 Orinda Way (in Orinda Village). The Garden Room is on the second floor of the building, accessible by stairs or an elevator. The Garden Room opens at 7 pm; the meeting begins at 7:30 pm.
More information, including driving directions, at http://ebcnps.org/index.php/meetings/
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3. Free Workshop: Watershed Teaching Tools for San Francisco Educators
Saturday October 27, 9:30 am - 4:00 pm
Alice Fong Yu Elementary School, 1541 12th Ave., San Francisco
Dynamic hands-on science investigation, art, and games that will help teachers and informal educators to bring meaningful environmental education to their students. Develop skills and take home resources for indoor and outdoor activities on local plants and animals, water quality testing, and pollution prevention.
Free e-curriculum aligned with CA State Content Standards and lunch included.
This workshop is targeted to classroom teachers, after-school care providers, home school instructors, and involved parents.
Free, but registration required: Diana@thewatershedproject.org or call (510) 610-5524
Sponsored by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and presented by The Watershed Project.
Visit www.thewatershedproject.org or www.sfwater.org for more information.
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4.
Blue Greenway Open House
Monday, 29 October
6 pm - 8 pm
Mission Bay Conference Center, UCSF
1675 Owens St, San Francisco
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5. Here is a blog that teaches you how to make your own slug trap for an organic garden.
http://kezargardens.com/2012/10/22/around-the-garden-slug-traps-beer/
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6.
Nov 8-9, 2012
Nature Journaling
with John Muir Laws
Coyote Hills Regional Park, Fremont
Learn to improve observation skills, ask relevant scientific questions, and explore the natural world through nature journaling. Two days of sketching, art instruction and nature study could jump start you in keeping your own nature/travel journal or re-inspire you to pick up your sketchbook again. We will examine different ways of keeping journals and develop habits to keep you actively sketching. Learn how to paint a five minute mini-landscape and an animal on the move using graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor, all of which are well suited for easy sketching outdoors. Bring your favorite sketching supplies. Coyote Hills is a wonderful place for observing birds and plants, even in November.
Participants can expect to learn:
• Tricks for drawing plants
• How to draw birds in situ
• To master the mini 5 minute landscape
• How to incorporate sketching into your daily life
Cost: CNPS Members $295; Non-members $320
Register for this workshop online
More Information:
Full Workshop Announcement (PDF 286kb)
Print & Mail Registration:
Download form (PDF 87k)
The full list of CNPS workshops is available at: https://cnps.org/cnps/education/workshops/
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7.
Join the South San Francisco Weed Warriors on San Bruno Mountain
Friday October 26th and
Saturday October 27th
9am to noon
**rain or shine**
Come out Friday or Saturday - or both days! - and help with this critical stewardship work to restore native grasslands that are important butterfly habitat.
• gloves provided
• wear long pants and layers
• wear long-sleeved shirt for protection
• wear sturdy shoes with long socks
• bring water!
Check out the San Bruno Mountain Watch website for all volunteer opportunities in our Stewardship Programs and Upcoming Events
Contact: San Bruno Mountain Watch (415) 467-6631
or email leaders Chuck and Loretta
We focus on the removal of non-native & invasive plant species
Meeting location: behind the Mills Montessori School at 1400 Hillside Blvd in South San Francisco
View Google Map
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8. Stalk the 'Noc
Want to see what's been lighting up the surf at night off Pacifica? It's a marine organism called "noctiluca," a zooplankton which has made a big media splash recently, sending folks running down to the beach to watch the surf bioluminesce after sunset!
And stalking the 'Noc and seafloor-living creatures will be the focus of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary's Sunset Sail! Join naturalists aboard the 82 ft. schooner "Seaward" and tow for plankton and other critters that purify and enrich San Francisco Bay. Lend a hand to the skilled crew from Call of the Sea and help sail the ship! Family-friendly for kids 8+ with parents.
Sunset sail and plankton expedition
Sunday, October 28th, 3:30 to 6:30 pm
Departs from Sausalito
$45/person
Space is limited; pre-registration is required. Contact Erica Warren, 415/ 561-6622 x232, ewarren@farallones.org.
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9. Radar helps solve painted lady migration mystery
The mystery of an annual disappearance of a UK butterfly has been solved, scientists say after tracking the painted lady's migration on radar.
They found that the butterflies do not die in this country at the end of summer, as some believed, but make a high altitude escape south - one leg of a 9,000-mile migration.
...The journey is much longer than that undertaken by the famous Monarch butterfly, which migrates between Mexico and Canada.
"The migration of the monarch in North America is kind of world famous as this of wonder of nature and yet this annual migratory movement that painted ladies are undertaking is even greater," said Mr Fox.
..."This tiny creature weighing less than a gram, with a brain the size of a pin head, and no opportunity to learn from older, experienced individuals, undertake an epic intercontinental migration."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19991550
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10.
A few days ago the San Francisco Examiner reported that the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) was spending federal tax dollars to promote the "Hetch Hetchy brand" in an effort to dissuade voters from approving Proposition F.
What the article did not mention was that 47% of the funds raised by Mayor Lee for the "No on F" campaign came from companies and unions that do business with the city. "Pay-to-Play" politics is alive and well at San Francisco City Hall.
We need your immediate help to counter this blatant manipulation of the political process by city employees. An immediate $250 or $100 contribution will allow us to reach out to 1000 and 400 voters respectively.
With your immediate support we can win this campaign, reform San Francisco's outdated water system and bring the Hetch Hetchy Valley back to life.
Mike Marshall
Executive Director
P.S. Click here to donate $250, $100 or $50 for our voter contact effort.
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City Contractors & City Bureaucracy Gang-Up Against Prop F
Pay-to-play politics used to oppose the Yosemite Restoration Campaign
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 18, 2012 -- San Francisco city contractors and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) have ganged up to defeat Proposition F, the Water Conservation & Yosemite Restoration Initiative, the most recently released campaign finance reports disclosed. According to the reports(1), 47% of funding for the 'No on F' campaign has come from companies currently doing business with San Francisco; companies with past contracts with the City, and labor unions representing contracted workers with the City. In addition, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has spent an undisclosed amount of money entertaining San Francisco community leaders at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, as well as more than $197,000 in federal funds promoting the "Hetch Hetchy Brand" to San Francisco voters.
‘These public records demonstrate that San Francisco City Hall and its employees have arm-twisted city contractors to extract hundreds of thousands of dollars to oppose reform. It's typical ‘pay-to-play’ politics to defend the status quo and fight water conservation," said Mike Marshall, Campaign Director for the Yosemite Restoration Campaign. "It's made that much worse by the improper use of rate-payer and federal funds by the staff of the SFPUC in the run-up to, and during, the campaign.’
Proposition F is the "Water Conservation & Yosemite Restoration Initiative." It requires the City to develop a two-part plan to build San Francisco's local water resources and reverse the damage done to the environment by the current water system over the last 100 years. The plan would need to be approved by voters in 2016 in order to be implemented.
ABOUT THE YOSEMITE RESTORATION CAMPAIGN: The mission of the Yosemite Restoration Campaign is to reform San Francisco's 19th century water system to allow for the restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley and the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park. It is a non-profit, 501(c)(4) organization.www.YosemiteRestoration.org
'No on F' Campaign Finance Fact Sheet
According to campaign finance reports filed on Friday, October 5 the 'No on F' campaign received:
- $131,122 from companies currently doing business with the City and County of San Francisco.
- $69,729 from companies with past contracts with the City and County of San Francisco.
- $43,500 from labor unions representing individuals working on projects for the City and County of San Francisco.
According to public record requests the SFPUC staff has spent:
- $197,000 in federal EPA funds promoting the Hetch Hetchy water brand. The funds were intended to encourage San Francisco residents to call 311 to report water quality problems.(2)
- An undisclosed amount of money organizing eight junkets to Yosemite National Park for local Democratic Club leaders, 'No on F' funders, neighborhood association leaders and gay rights activists. Despite multiple Sunshine Ordinance requests, SFPUC staff have ignored requests asking for a detailed financial accounting of staff time spent organizing these political junkets.
- An undisclosed amount of staff costs collaborating with 'No on F' attorneys to lobby the Ballot Simplification Committee.
(1) http://nf4.netfile.com/pub2/Default.aspx?aid=sfo&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvug-SeFiek&playnext=1&list=PL1CCB2CBC9D71ECB3&feature=results_main
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The No on F campaign sent out a mailer last week claiming:
"Prop F is a $10 billion plan to dismantle and drain Hetch Hetchy, move the dam just a few miles downstream where a beautiful Sierra valley will have to flooded and destroyed."
This is a blatant lie. The California Department of Water Resources report that they reference actually says:
"Removal of the dam could also help restore downstream ecological functions along the nationally designated wild and scenic Tuolumne River.
Prop F requires the City to develop a plan to reform its environmentally destructive water system--in no way does it require San Francisco to wreak more havoc on the Sierra Nevada.
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11. OAKLAND ZOO EXECUTIVES VIOLATED NUMEROUS CAMPAIGN LAWS, MAY HAVE USED TAXPAYER DOLLARS TO FUND CAMPAIGN
—East Bay Express report
The full report is available here: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/92510/archives/2012/10/18/oakland-zoo-operators-violate-election-laws
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12.
In a Room on a Courtyard in Firenze
A giggling of girls swirls up, floats
lightly like a cloud of gnats
into and around the room and then
is gone out the window.
So cruelly mortal, sweetly immortal,
this sound pulls soul from body
as a trout leaps skyward
from a murky lake.
An instant mastering air,
it sees, miraculous fish,
a gyre of blackbirds turn
toward welling sunset,
feels cool air on wet skin,
and lives, this endless moment,
the whole of life everywhere,
with no fear of pain or death.
Re-entering, it becomes again
one with dense, obliviating water,
yet this blindness no longer
obscures all: the memory of seeing
reverberates like widening ripples
of girls’ laughter, fading
yet captured in descent
by concentric circles,
insistent as the call
of a melted bell once flawless,
or a skeletal songbird perched
in past and future, present forever.
Dan Liberthson ©
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13. Bay Area Environmental Education Fair
Save the Date and join us on January 19th for a day of environmental & outdoor education camaraderie at the Bay Area Environmental Education Fair (BAEER Fair)
Event details are available on our website at http://www.baeerfair.org/
Registration is open for exhibitors and proposals for workshop presentations are being accepted.
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14. Alfred Russell Wallace
http://wallace-online.org/
It provides 28,000 pages of searchable historical documents and 22,000 images, and includes the first announcement of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace has long been in the shadow of his more famous contemporary Charles Darwin.
Since the scientist's death 99 years ago, Wallace's complete publications have never been gathered together. The new website is unveiled in time for the centenary celebrations in 2013 that mark the anniversary of Wallace's death in 1913. Back in the 1850s, Wallace independently formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection during a fit of tropical fever. He later sent an outline of the theory - in one of the greatest ironies in history - to Charles Darwin. To avoid a priority dispute, papers by both men were read together at a London scientific meeting in July 1858. The event unleashed the Darwinian revolution whose shockwaves continue to this day.
Wallace's contributions to biodiversity
Wallace spent four years as a collector in Brazil (1848-1853) and eight years in Southeast Asia (1854-1862). In addition to collecting an astonishing 125,000 specimens of insects and birds, Wallace proposed a sharp dividing line between the Asian and Australian animals in the archipelago. This line still bears his name today and is called The Wallace Line.
Despite Wallace's tremendous intellect and contributions to science, his foray into and support of spiritualism, séances, and phrenology tarnished his credibility and standing.There are several good biographies of this most interesting naturalist.
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15. Hobsbawm's history
The work of the renowned Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm ranged across revolutions and the centuries. Here are extracts from his major works on communism, war and jazz (latter two omitted here, JS)
'It is the business of historians to remember what others forget' … Ypres, 1917. Photograph: Frank Hurley
On history
On 28 June 1992 President Mitterrand of France made a sudden, unannounced and unexpected appearance in Sarajevo, already the centre of a Balkan war that was to cost many thousands of lives during the remainder of the year. His object was to remind world opinion of the seriousness of the Bosnian crisis. Indeed, the presence of a distinguished, elderly and visibly frail statesman under small-arms and artillery fire was much remarked on and admired. However, one aspect of M Mitterrand's visit passed virtually without comment, even though it was plainly central to it: the date. Why has the president of France chosen to go to Sarajevo on that particular day? Because 28 June was the anniversary of the assassination, in Sarajevo, in 1914, of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, which led, within a matter of weeks, to the outbreak of the first world war. For any educated European of Mitterrand's age, the connection between date, place and the reminder of a historic catastrophe precipitated by political error and miscalculation leaped to the eye. How better to dramatise the potential implications of the Bosnian crisis than by choosing so symbolic a date? But hardly anyone caught the allusion, except a few professional historians and very senior citizens. The historical memory was no longer alive.
The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forget, more essential at the end of the second millennium than ever before. But for that very reason they must be more than simply chroniclers, remembrancers and compilers, though this is also the historians' necessary function. In 1989 all governments and especially all foreign ministers in the world would have benefited from a seminar on the peace settlements after the two world wars, which most of them had apparently forgotten.
Guardian Weekly 12.10.12
(I occasionally rant about our lack of historical memory. This lack of memory--aka lack of knowledge--may be a natural consequence of our technological/consumer society, or it may result from manipulation by special interests. Whatever the reason, we live in perpetual present, and there is no history or ways of comparing us to other standards. It bothers me a great deal, and should bother anyone who thinks or reflects.
At times today's news, pronouncements, commentary, and punditry remind me of the novel 1984 by George Orwell. For those with even a smidgen of knowledge, the lack of a sense of history is patently obvious and deeply disturbing. JS)
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16.
Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all. ~ Stanley Horowitz
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