Hey there JP Forum members,

We are closing up shop for the summer, in order to take stock of our last season and plan another great one for the fall of 2010!

For now, you can sign up for our email announcements so that you can be the first to know of our fall line-up of events.

See you in a few months,
Liz, Chuck and the JP Forum team

Speaker: John Ross

Author and activist John Ross has spent many years traveling and chronicling struggles for human rights in Mexico. He has written ten books of fiction and non-fiction. His latest volume “El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption in Mexico City”, a street-level peoples’ history of the most polluted, overcrowded, corrupt and crime-ridden megalopolis in the western world.

Covering 4,000,000,000 years of history from the primal broth that first spewed out the monster to the Aztec-Mexica oblivion through centuries of rapine and revolution all the way to the Great Swine Flu Panic of 2009, El Monstruo is a retelling of the story of Mexico City, with which Ross’s own history has become hopelessly entwined. Come join us for a presentation about the political times past and present in Mexico.

Review:

“Vividly impressionistic survey of a fascinating urban panorama,
El Monstruo makes for addictive reading.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“El Monstruo is a valentine to place and useful chronicle of an epoch that has seen Mexico’s people find their voice…
Ross’ quarter-century as witness does us the invaluable service of putting events to come in a context to understand them.”
—Denver Post

John Ross is the author of the acclaimed memoir Murdered by Capitalism, which was praised by Thomas Pynchon and chosen as a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. Based in Mexico City for the last two decades, Ross’s reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation, Texas Observer, and Counterpunch, to name a few. He is the winner of an Upton Sinclair Award and an American Book Award. His books include Rebellion from the Roots, The Annexation of Mexico and the novel Tonatiuh’s People.

Thanks to our co-sponsors

Fred Pearce, Author of When the Rivers Run Dry

For more than two centuries there has been mounting concern that rapidly growing populations are putting an unsustainable strain on the Earth’s resources. However, much has been misunderstood about the current rate of population growth and its effect on the environment. Though the global population is four times what it was a century ago, women in nearly every country are having fewer children, people are living longer thanks to medical and technological advances, and soon global deaths will exceed global births.

In this forum, renowned science writer Fred Pearce will discuss what is in store for our changing planet, and what we can do to help build the foundation for a wiser, kinder, greener world. By exploring the sordid history of population control efforts, and emphasizing the important roles of women’s rights, migration, and conservation, Pearce shifts the argument away from over-population to instead look at the critical global threat of over-consumption.

Reviews:

“The population ‘debate’ is so fraught with the history of colonialism that no one wants to touch it. Thank goodness that Fred Pearce has had the courage to write this informative, timely, and brilliant challenge to the commonly held vision of overwhelming population growth laying waste to the earth. This book is about hope—just in the nick of time.”

—Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water

“What a wonderfully rich and humane book! As a generation of newly empowered women sweeps away our wrongheaded Malthusian nightmare, Fred Pearce demonstrates persuasively that the end of the population surge may well usher in a new era of ethnic tolerance, increased global integration, and a period of kinder and more nurturing governance.”

—Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat Is On and Boiling Point

Fred Pearce is a former news editor at New Scientist. Currently its environmental and development con­sultant, he has also written for Audubon, Popular Sci­ence, Time, the Boston Globe, and Natural History, and writes a regular column for the Guardian. His books include When the Rivers Run Dry (Beacon), With Speed and Violence (Beacon), and Confessions of an Eco-Sinner (Beacon). Pearce lives in England.

Thanks to our co-sponsors

Yoga • Community • Disaster Relief • Humanitarian Aid

A donation-based yoga class. Our proceeds go to the UUSC/UUA Joint Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund.
Our love goes to the people of Haiti. $20 minimum donation for class
Everyone welcome, from newcomers  to experienced yogis! Bring your mat or use one of ours

The Charity: UUSC’s disaster response in Haiti will focus on those survivors less likely to have access to aid, such as child domestic workers (restaviks), women-headed households that work in the informal sector, and people living with HIV/AIDS.

The Teachers: Sarah Jane Shangraw teaches slow flow yoga infused with meditative awareness. Margaret Suby is a teacher in training at The Yoga Studio in Brookline.

Speakers: Suren Moodliar, Paul Shannon and Weimin Tchen

Health care, war, global warming and the economy: These are the greatest problems we’re facing today. The media and our elected officials like to portray them as isolated issues, focusing on blame rather than solutions that are in line with a vast majority of Americans.

The Majority Agenda Project, a new Boston-based initiative, views these issues as profoundly intertwined and, likewise, sees the solutions as interconnected collaborations across labor, peace and climate movements.

Organizers Suren Moodliar, Paul Shannon and Weimin Tchen will lead a discussion on the Majority Agenda Project and offer ways for local people to get involved. They’ll talk about a strategic agenda based on policies that will begin to solve these problems and already have a majority of support among the public.

Thank you to our Sponsors

Majority Agenda Project

What’s a time bank?

A time bank is an organization where members have a bank account of time, and exchange time-based services with other members.  It’s a pool of members, and operates like a circle, not a one-to-one swap or barter.  In  a time  bank, for example, Lara makes a cake for Aldo, Keren gives skiing lessons to David, Dianne gives Carol ride to the airport, Carol paints a painting for Louisa, Krystyna lends her vacation house to Alice, etc. You get time credit for the services you provide, and you can spend that time on services that other members offer.

After the economic crisis, more people are bartering with friends and neighbors and forming time banks to share goods and services locally. Come meet local members of the Time Trade Circle, a Boston-area organization with more than 500 members, to learn how you can start participating in this locally-grown and sustainable economy.

This orientation meeting will be followed by a potluck get-together at 5:00 PM, including JP folks who are already members of the Time Trade Circle. If you wish to stay for the potluck, please bring a dish to share.

To learn more about time banking, please visit www.timetradecircle.org

Thank you to our co-sponsors

Time Trade Cirle

It’s under our feet and under our fingernails, but what is it? And how did it get there? Inspired by William Bryant Logan’s acclaimed book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, find out how industrial farming, mining and urban development have led us toward cataclysmic droughts, starvation, floods and climate change. Dirt is a part of everything we eat, drink and breathe. Which is why we should stop treating it like, well…dirt.

Thanks to our co-sponsor

Raising polutry for eggs, meat and pets used to be a standard practice in America. As we have moved farther away from a local food system, many people are now reclaiming the right to raise chickens in their own backyards. But how can those of us urban dwellers do the same? In this birdkeeping 101 class, Joan Teebagy will share the basic how-tos of safely rearing chickens in urban and suburban environments. She will touch upon the legal side of poultry-rearing, and discuss local city codes and recent citizen-backed changes to ordinances.

About our Speaker

Joan Teebagy is a retired software engineer who lives on a small lot and raises laying chickens, meat chickens and bees as well as vegetables and flowers. She also tends two community garden plots and teaches at Codman Community Farms.  Joan has taught backyard laying chickens and meat chickens as well as a chick breeding, hatching and rearing class for children. She developed  and ran a program at Codman Community farm for community gardeners to raise meat chickens as a cooperative group.

Come meet a cacao farmer and a staff member of CONACADO cacao co-op in the Dominican Republic who will share their history.   In 1988, the cacao industry in the Dominican Republic was dominated by four major exporters. Most Dominican cacao production was low quality, unfermented beans shipped to the United States at low prices.  Seven hundred small-scale farmers came together to form CONACADO with the goal of producing a higher quality cacao, directly accessing new markets, and getting better prices.  Over 20 years later, this small-farmer organization now has 10,000 farmer members who produce approximately 25% of the cacao exported from the Dominican Republic.   The co-operative’s success in quality improvement and marketing means that the majority of their cacao has been sold as high quality fermented beans, primarily to niche markets: Organic, Biodynamic, and Fair Trade.

Ramón Matías Frías González is a cacao producer and Secretary of the Board at CONACADO. Basilio Almonte de los Santos is an agronomist and Technical Director at CONACADO’s office in Santo Domingo. They will be joined by members of Equal Exchange, a local Fair Trade organization and proud partner of CONACADO.

Chocolates and cocoas featuring organic and Fair Trade cacao from CONACADO’s farmers will be served.

Thank you to our co-sponsors

Speaker: Prof. Ruediger Volk

Come learn the inspiring local history of Robert Treat Paine and his work to build affordable housing in the Hyde Square neighborhood. Paine was a prominent business leader and great grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence with the same name. Paine pushed to expand homeownership for working families, organizing alongside the Workingman’s Cooperative Bank.

Thanks to our co-sponsor