We invite you to participate in the launch of the CD ‘Amazon Our Land’ by the young artists from the band ‘Backyard Drums’, from the project Rivers of Meeting, this Saturday from 7pm onwards, in the Afro-Indigenous community of Cabelo Seco, between the Amazonian Rivers Tocantins and Itacaiúnas.
Anyone can participate from a distance, downloading and sharing the 12 songs from the CD which will be posted on YouTube the same night. The complete CD (with a booklet in Portuguese, Spanish and English), will also be available on our site from Saturday, the 27th.

riosdeencontro.wordpress.com

Messages of solidarity for these young musicians who refuse to step onto any stage funded by the multinational mining company Vale, presently devastating the Amazon, are welcome and will strengthen the movement for a living and sustainable Amazon.

Thanks in anticipation for your participation!

Abraços
Dan
Dan Baron
Project ‘Rivers of Meeting’
National awards from Funarte and the Ministry of Cultura Brasil, in 2008, 2010, 2012
Award from Itau-Unicef, 2011

A Letter to the Editor of the Boston Globe newspaper:

Undaunted by horror, heartbreak, and ominous uncertainty, the people of Boston stood strong. In their race against terror, Boston showed us how courage through connection and collaboration can be our most powerful protection. As a nation, as a world, let’s never forget this lesson.

Linda Hartling, Ph.D., Director, Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
Portland, Oregon

Commons Knowledge
The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet
By: Ramez Naam
Published: April 9, 2013
By: UPNE
364 Pages
ISBN: 978-1611682557

The free market is such a powerful catalyst of innovation that we need to be very careful about where we fail to employ it. The inventions of the industrial revolution, telephones, electric light bulbs, cars, airplanes, radio, television, computers, DVDs, iPods, and iPhones are all innovative products, encouraged by the free market, that improve our lives. But we are once again living in the best of times and the worst of times. We are approaching peak oil—the point in time when global oil production will decline forever, food prices doubled between 2002 and 2010, catches of wild fish have plateaued, fresh water shortages are becoming more common, and deforestation continues. Today’s population is consuming 1.5 planets’ worth of natural resources, yet we have only one planet. Resource consumption will continue to get worse, if everyone on earth lived like Americans we’d be using up 4.4 planets’ worth of natural resources.

Perhaps the most ominous warning of all is that our planet is warming. Even former skeptics now recognize that global warming is real. While many factors contribute, it is clear that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are now higher than at any point in the last million years. The warming we are seeing is almost entirely man made. Forecasts now show seas rising three to six feet by the end of this century, enough to displace millions of people from coastal cities and villages. Extreme weather, pressures on agriculture, rapid species extinctions, and ocean acidification are all likely.

The evidence and the consequences are clear. We must find ways to produce food and energy that sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How can free market mechanisms help?

There is a giant loophole in how we apply the free market today, it is called The Commons. The commons refers to those resources used freely by many, yet excluded from typical financial calculations. The oceans, rivers, lakes, and the air we breathe are now available free to any and all comers. This leads to the “Tragedy of the Commons” where waste and distortions occur from overuse of these essential resources. This market error is manifest today as overfishing, many forms of pollution, and the free emission of greenhouse gasses. The market isn’t just neutral to pollution. If polluting saves companies money, the market encourages it.

“The key to that—to all of that—is to make sure the market directly values the natural resources we care about. . . . Pricing carbon isn’t a big-government initiative. It’s a way to improve the market by giving it access to information it doesn’t have—the external costs of carbon emissions.”
The author proposes this simple plan for creating a carbon dividend:

1. Tax carbon. For the first five years the tax is zero.
2. Raise the tax periodically and predictably until the emissions goal is met.
3. Tax imports from countries that don’t have a carbon price, to level the playing field.
4. Give all the money collected back to the taxpayers. This is the direct dividend.

This is a tax on the bad rather than on the good, and it can be tax and revenue neutral. This simple plan provides insurance against the risks of peak oil, rising coal prices, and climate change.

With effective market incentives, innovation can unleash solar energy, desalinization, recycling, and continued increases in efficiency of materials and energy used. Our challenge isn’t that we’re running out of energy, it’s that we’re using the wrong source. To collect enough energy to provide for all of humanity’s current needs, using current consumer-grade solar technology, it would take only 0.6 percent of Earth’s land area. Because of the learning curve, every solar panel built makes solar energy cheaper. Every barrel of oil extracted makes oil more expensive.
This immensely important book is a joy to read. It is innovative, well written, clear, well researched, and scrupulously balanced. The author presents and examines the traditionally conservative viewpoints, the traditionally liberal viewpoints, the big business arguments, and the environmentalist arguments, clearly, factually, fairly, and completely. He embraces capitalism, free markets, nuclear energy, and genetically modified crops, along with government regulations and the imperative to shift to solar energy sources and reduce greenhouse gasses. He particularly courts conservative thinkers with appeals to free markets, highlighting successful ecological actions of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and the opportunity to return money to taxpayers. He identifies the free exploitation of the commons as a form of socialism, rather than an example of free market forces at work.

The author is not only innovative and practical, he is optimistic. Throughout the book he identifies many available alternatives that can improve the lives of all future generations. The last chapter identifies four changes that we as a society need to make:

1. Fix our markets to properly account for the value of the commons.
2. Invest in research and development to fund long-range innovations.
3. Embrace the technologies that stand poised to improve our lives while bettering our planet.
4. Empower each of the billions of minds on this planet, to turn them into assets that can produce new ideas that benefit us all. Add to the Knowledge Commons.

The book ends with two very different tours of the future. One describes affluence and well-being for all, the other is quite grim. The choice is clearly ours, and this book clearly informs our choice.

As seating is limited and we would like to allow as many people to come as possible, please only register for the sessions you plan to attend.

As you know the ALAS team has been very hard at work to make this a success. Our only request is that you circulate the flier and program as much as you possibly can! Let’s make this a great event! And we look forward to seeing you! Browse through the program to read about the variety of events taking pace during the conference. There are still ways to volunteer, so shoot us an email if you want to help out.

For complete program please visit: http://capitalistantirealism.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/programa.pdf

And to register: www.alas-tc.org

Mariana I. Vergara, Executive Director of BRIDGE Model of Transformational Learning, is presenting on Friday, April 19th!
mariana.vergara@bridgeamericaparentcenter.org

Friday April 19 – Saturday April 20, 2013
Teachers College, Columbia University
Joyce Cowin Conference Center | 525 W 120th Street, New York

CONFERENCE DETAILS

The Diversity in Research and Practice Conference (DiRP) is presented annually by the Black Student Network of Teachers College, Columbia University. The conference seeks to advance the discourse on education research and practice. It is free to attend, and open to all interested members of the community. Registration is required and grants full access to all conference workshops and sessions. REGISTRATION: bit.ly/DiRP2013Registration

The Association for Conflict Resolution
of Greater New York and
The CUNY Dispute Resolution Consortium
at John Jay College
present
Monthly NYC-DR Roundtable Breakfast

IDENTIFYING GOOD AND BAD MEDIATION PRACTICE

Professor Elizabeth Stokoe

THURSDAY, APRIL 4, 2013

This workshop, which was postponed in November due to extreme weather, will focus on overcoming barriers to mediation. We will look mostly at the interaction between mediators and potential client in intake calls; that is, the very first conversation between a member of the public and a mediator. We will see how different mediators explain mediation, in ways that work and do not work. We will also examine different ways of constructing solution-focused questions offering mediation and how clients typically respond. Finally, we will scrutinize the notion of impartiality, and look at the ways mediators encourage or discourage potential clients from engaging with mediation. The workshop will provide mediators with a rare opportunity to scrutinize actual mediation practice in fine-grained detail, and to reflect on, and discern, good and bad practice.

PROFESSOR ELIZABETH STOKOE has been involved with UK mediation services since 1997, studying mediation practice via audio-recordings of both intake calls (between members of the public, before they are ‘clients’, and call-takers) as well as recordings of individual and joint mediation meetings themselves. Following this research, she has developed training for mediators, turning research findings into workshops that are based on the real time, anonymized recordings.

Professor Stokoe has developed a Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM) , which involves small-group discussion prompted by recordings. CARM contrasts directly with traditional role-play methods because training participants get to see real mediators doing their work, and reflect on identifiable patterns that demonstrate actual (good and bad) practice. As Professor Stokoe says, “Good and bad practice does not always look like what we might expect!”

If you have any questions, please email us at acrgny_questions[@]acrgny.org or call us at (646) 580-9560.

Best regards,
ACR-GNY

Julie Denny,
Advanced Practitioner-ACR Workplace, Family
President
Resolutions
People talk…people listen…things change.
31 Poe Road
Princeton, NJ 08540
www.resolutionsforyou.com

Lisa DeJong for The Chronicle

Three associate professors at the College of Wooster (from left, Amy Jo Stavnezer, Judith Amburgey-Peters, and Susan Lehman) have formed a support group to help guide one another through the difficult midcareer years.

By Robin Wilson

Seven years after earning tenure at the College of Wooster, Judith C. Amburgey-Peters is still working a “nonstop, crazy schedule on 6,000 different things.” But she is not sure whether the 80 hours a week she spends leading the chemistry department, advising students, and trying to squeeze in time for research will ultimately qualify her for promotion to full professor.

An interdisciplinary group of 22 scientists, combining paleontological evidence with ecological modeling, has concluded that the earth appears headed toward catastrophic and irreversible environmental changes.