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Conservation Conversations, August 2010: Fresh, the Movie
Fresh, the Movie
Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 7:30PM to 9:00 PM
425 N Craig/3875 Bigelow Blvd, Suite 202, Oakland, PA
FRESH is a documentary featuring Michael Pollan, Will Allen and Joel Salatin which celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are working to bring a whole new way of looking at the role of food in our lives. Check out the film’s website. I personally think this is the best one of its kind so far. Very interesting and well done.
We’ll show the movie on our large screen and discuss it and local efforts to implement this kind of fundamental change in the food structure of our society.
We’ll have lemon grass tea with mint, sesame pita chips and olive humus… plus whatever YOU bring! Join us for lively conservation conversations. We’ll talk about the Marcellus shale situation too, if you like.
Donald L. Gibbon
Program Chair, Allegheny Group
dongibbon at earthlink dot net
Monthly Meetings - An Invitation - 2010
Donald L. Gibbon
I’m an avid student of natural history. I love to know what’s going on here in Western Pennsylvania, my “home place,” or what’s become my home place after living all over the world for the first half of my life. I love my Sierra Club job as Program Chair because it gives me the credibility to be able to invite the very best people in the region to bring us their expert knowledge on every field from our energy future to the impact of globalization on resources, from bird migration to updates on watershed planning to the physics of thunder storms. What that means is that I get to have a monthly class is the things that interest me most… and invite YOU to sit in on the class. I hope you’ll join me in this amazing, exciting, interesting feast. We get to learn what’s going on right now, from the most well-informed people on the planet. This is better than having our own little NPR station!
We live in a place that is outstanding in so many ways. For example, did you know that the Nine Mile Run Watershed project has been the largest and one of the most successful urban watershed restoration projects in the entire country? It’s a poster child for the Corps of Engineers when they want to show what can be done – right here in the East End of Pittsburgh – and the project still goes on. We had an outstanding program on the watershed last year.
Joel Tarr, Caligiuri Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University and also affiliated with the Studio for Creative Inquiry (the wild-ideas part of academe!) and with Engineering and Public Policy, came one month and gave us a review of Pittsburgh’s industrial development and how that had controlled the degradation of Pittsburgh’s air and water environment – and its subsequent recovery. He’s actually a specialist in transportation, so the rivers and the history of mass transit in the area are also of great interest to him. This was a fabulously interesting evening.
But we do this all the time. Every meeting is a little gem, full of fascinating stuff. Richard Piacentini, director of the Phipps Conservatory, recently gave us a really compelling review of the development of green building technology at the Phipps. It was the only Sierra Club meeting I’ve ever been to in 40 years where the audience gave the speaker a standing ovation! It made you proud to be a Pittsburgher… you would have been amazed!
We’ve had a review of how sustainable agriculture is advancing in Pennsylvania. We’ve looked at how cooperation between farmers and cooks on a global basis is being developed by Slow Food. Pittsburgh is sending to young farmers to Turino, Italy, to participate in this global conclave. We’ll hear from them when they return and bring us a report (These are Greg Boulos and Jen Montgomery, who run Blackberry Meadows Farm in New Kensington).
With only two newsletters each year, I can’t provide you with an accurate schedule of advanced programming. What I can do is assure you that there will usually be a special event of great current public interest each month, usually on he second Wednesday. We’re now meeting in the Club headquarters, at 425 N. Craig Street in Oakland, on the second floor. So here’s the recommendation: check this web site. I’ll do my very best to make it worth your while. I’ll even give you a money-back guarantee if you come to one of our few paid programs (most are free). You can help by telling me what you’d like to have as programs (Donald L. Gibbon, Program and Environmental Education Chair, dongibbon at earthlink dot net)
The Challenge of Knowing Your Home Place
from “A Sense of Place” by Scott Russell Sanders
This elegant essay was part of the keynote address given by Scott Russell Sanders at the October 2004 Spirit and Nature Conference sponsored by the Sierra Club. We have taken it as the guiding set of principles for the monthly meeting program of the Allegheny Group of the Sierra Club. If you attend those meetings, eventually we will answer all of these questions! (ed. Donald L. Gibbon) Read the essay.
Donald L. Gibbon
Program Chair, Allegheny Group
412-362-8451, dongibbon at earthlink dot net
