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Gemma Tillack and Chelsea Matthews

Rainforest Action Network

Gemma Tillack and Chelsea Matthews

September 15, 2013

The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) conducts campaigns to protect rainforests, their inhabitants, and the natural, life-sustaining systems through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.

For updated information on recent success follow this link: http://www.humanists.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Updated-info.pdf

Gemma Tillack directs RAN’s agribusiness campaign. She will talk about RAN’s newest campaign, Last Stand of the Orangutan. This campaign exposes the dark secret of palm oil usage in the US snack food industry, and its effects on the natural habitat of the Orangutan. The Network calls on companies to commit to purchase only responsibly grown palm oil.

Chelsea Matthews, Forest Program Coordinator at RAN, will talk about RAN’s current campaigns to address the root causes of climate change, deforestation, and the oppression of forest peoples. She will also give an overview of RAN’s success in transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.

Gemma Tillack directs Rainforest Action Network’s Agribusiness campaign which is addressing one of the main drivers of rainforest destruction in Indonesia: industrial palm oil. The campaign is focused on shifting demand away from socially and environmentally irresponsible palm oil, creating incentives for the responsible production of palm oil and transforming global supply chains. RAN’s campaigns create the market leverage necessary to improve both corporate and government policies and practices.

Prior to this position, Tillack worked for 10 years for The Wilderness Society in Australia. Tillack played a key role in the campaigns that contributed to Gunns Limited’s decision to transition out of native forest logging in Tasmania. Gunns Limited was Australia’s largest native forest logging and wood chipping company. For the past two years Tillack has been involved in negotiations that lead to the signing of the $274 million Tasmanian Forest Intergovernmental Agreement (TFIGA). This agreement was reached between environment Non-Government Organizations, the forestry industry and unions and aims to support the protection of important natural forests and a transition to a plantation based forestry sector in Tasmania. Tillack has a background in environmental science and community organizing.

Here are a few links you can share with people who want to learn more about Rainforest Action Network:

http://www.ran.org/our-mission – learn more about Rainforest Action Network and its campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing and non-violent direct action.

http://understory.ran.org/ – read RAN’s blog for breaking stories.

http://www.ran.org/palm-oil – learn about RAN’s campaign to protect rainforests and Indigenous Peoples and rural communities rights from palm oil expansion.

Conflict Palm Oil report: http://www.ran.org/conflict-palm-oil

Petition calling on the Snack Food 20 to cut Conflict Palm Oil from their supply chains: http://act.ran.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=8546

Webpage for donations: https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/6022/t/6444/p/d/rd_ran/donations/public/ran_donate_custom.sjs?donate_page_KEY=7315

http://www.ran.org/take-action-online – find out how you can take action to support RAN’s work.

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The Humanist Community

September 15, 2013

Addendum

Frederic March, a past president of the Humanist Society of New Mexico, has written an essay titled “Utopian Visions and the American Dream” published in Volume 21 (1) 2013 of Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism”. This “Addendum” is an abstract from his essay.

Utopian narratives express a universal yearning for a better human society. In his description of Plato’s ideal social fantasy, Bertrand Russell categorizes its attributes as education, culture/economy, biological control, religion, and justice. Although Frederic March develops all of these attributes in his essay, in this “Addendum” we shall deal primarily with education.

As our nation’s leading advocate for humanism, the AHA helps defend our democracy against breaches in the barriers of church-state separation. It promotes science and evolution teaching unadulterated by theology. It defends freedom of thought and religion.

The AHA recently issued its Ten Commitments: Guiding Principles for Teaching Values in America’s Public Schools:

1. Altruism – Altruism is the unselfish concern for the welfare of others without expectation of reward, recognition or return.

2. Caring for the World Around Us – Everyone can and ought to play a role in caring for the earth and its inhabitants.

3 Critical Thinking – We gain reliable knowledge because we are able to observe, report, experiment, and analyze what goes on around us.

4. Empathy – We human beings are capable of empathy, the ability to understand and enter imaginatively into another living being’s feelings, the sad ones and the happy ones as well.

5. Ethical Development – Questions of fairness, cooperation, and sharing are among the first moral issues we encounter in our ethical development as human beings.

6. Global Awareness – We live in a world that is rich in cultural, social and individual diversity, a world where interdependence is increasing rapidly so that events anywhere are more likely to have consequences everywhere.

7. Human Rights – Human Rights is the idea that people should have rights just because they are human beings.

8. Peace and Social Justice – A curriculum that values and fosters peace education would promote understanding, tolerance, and friendship among nations as well as among cultural and religious or philosophical groups.

9. Responsibility – Our behavior is morally responsible when we tell the truth, help someone in trouble, and live up to promises we’ve made.

10. Service and Participation – Life’s fulfillment can emerge from an individual’s participation in the service of humane ideals.

These Commitments clearly encompass Education for Democracy. The AHA has the capacity to organize and coordinate the resources of many organizations that also seek to educate for a humanist democracy

These addendums are an attempt by Hilton Brown to bring some aspects of Humanist Philosophy to the attention of persons interested in The Humanist Community. The source material for all Addendums is to be found in the lead paragraph of each addendum.

Dr. Roberta Ahlquist

Close Encounters, ‘Take II’ –The Middle East from a Post-colonial Lens

Dr. Roberta Ahlquist

September 8, 2013

This presentation is a broad-brush overview of two months of travel in 2012 to Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE, visiting and speaking in schools, seeing archeological sites, talking with ordinary people on the streets, attending a three-day wedding in Pakistan, meeting Egyptians in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, and visiting Petra in Jordan, among other places.

This presentation is given through the lens of a social justice academic who teaches at San Jose State University in the College of Education. Some of her questions were: What role has ‘Empire’ played in the lives of people in these countries? What kinds of changes have occurred? What kinds of curriculum exist for k-12 students, and for university students? Is it Western or Middle Eastern; Anglocentric, Eurocentric, Egyptian, or?

Professor Ahlquist’s research includes post-colonial studies, indigenous education, and unlearning racism and other forms of bias. She teaches multicultural foundations courses to prospective high school teachers.

Program Addendum

Alistair J. Sinclair is a philosopher residing in Glasgow, Scotland. The source for this “Addendum” is his article “Henry Ford: The Visionary Humanist” published in Volume 20 (2) of “Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism”, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Humanist Association.

“It is a shock when the mind awakens to the fact that not all of humanity is human — that whole groups of people do not regard others with humane feelings.” — Henry Ford (1922)

Dr. Sinclair argues that Henry Ford was a humanist who changed the world for the better. He had a humanist vision of society in which the standard of living of everyone would gradually improve and poverty would be gradually reduced. The humane capitalism which Ford popularized led to more efficient ways of lowering costs in large scale organizations. It also insured that there was a trickle-down effect that benefitted workers and improved industrial relations.

On January 5, 1914 Ford announced that his company would almost double the wages of its car workers and introduced the eight hour day and the five day work week (Previously the norm had been a twelve hour day and a six day week), He also introduced vacations for his hourly paid workers.

Ford was adamant that work should be found for disabled people instead of excluding them from employment because they are disabled. It would be quite outside the spirit of what we are trying to do, to take on men because they were crippled, pay them a lower wage and be content with a lower output.

This “Addendum” is a half-page presentation of a 20 page philosophic article, complete with notes and references. I commend the article to your attention.

Humanist Community Forum (2013-09-08): The Middle East from a Post-colonial Lens (Prof. Roberta Ahlquist) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

TED talk by Alain de Botton

What Do Traditional Religions Get Right?

Arthur Jackson & Paul Gilbert

September 1, 2013

This Forum will begin with a 10-minute video of a TED Talk by Alain de Botton:

“What aspects of religion should atheists (respectfully) adopt? Alain de Botton suggests a “religion for atheists” — call it Atheism 2.0 — that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual and transcendence.”

Through his witty and literate books — and his new School of Life — Alain de Botton helps others find fulfillment in the everyday. If you have the opportunity, this video is worth watching more than once:
http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html

After the video Dan Miller, Arthur and Paul all gave short talks, then there was a lively discussion.

You can read de Botton’s 10 Commandments for atheists at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iv-drip/bring-back-the-goodness-alain-de-bottons-10-commandments-for-atheists-8480128.html

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The following document was also available during this talk to facilitate further discussion of Humanist principles.

Robert D. Finch, a past president of the Humanists of Houston who has served on the AHA’s Board of Directors, has written an essay titled “Evolutionary Ethics and Its Future”, which is published in Volume 21 (1) 2013 of “Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism”. The following is an abstract from “Evolutionary Ethics and Its Future”.

Let us recapitulate some humanist principles:

Truth and Knowledge: We should base our conduct on the best available knowledge of the natural world, in which people and their minds have evolved and of our human-made systems.

Rationality: The systems of the human mind based in the natural world, enable us to think, and be creative agents, and are the source of personal freedom, dignity and responsibility.

Emotions: We have to recognize that emotions are the driving force of our behavior. We need to provide the loving relationships of a family for the security of young and old.

Values: People are able to share emotions and refine their values through the various arts.

Ethics: We should use or emotions, values and rationality in building ethical theories and systems to live by.

Pragmatism: We should uphold the methods of social systems that have proven to be successful in the past, including the law, science and good practice while working for their improvement.

Commitment: We need to belong to the organizations that foster our worldview and enable it to be tested and improved.

Destiny: We believe that Humanism should offer visions of the future which will inspire the individual and guide the policies of society.

Meg Bowman

Courageous Viola Liuzzo – (1926-1965)

Reader’s Theatre by Meg Bowman

August 25, 2013

When Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for people to come to Selma in March, 1965 to support a Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, 25,000 peoples responded.

Two were murdered, both white, both Unitarians. Rev. James Reeb of Boston was beaten to death and Viola was shot in the face by a KKK thug getting paid by the FBI and who never spent a day in jail.

This is a tragic and terrifying story when you realize it happened in the United States in modern times, and that there are more active hate groups now than there were in the late 1960s.

To save face, J. Edgar Hoover led a media smear campaign not only on Viola but also her husband, a union official. The FBI removed the wedding rings from Viola’s body, and refused to return them to the family until 1975 – 10 years later. Learn the full story – as you consider the current U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act.

Written and narrated by Meg Bowman, an HCSV member, with Humanist cast.

For additional thoughts on this subject see the article, Color of Law, in the New Yorker Magazine, July 8, 2013.

Meg has authored a number of books which you can review at: http://www.uuwr.org/new-store/books/174-bowman-books.

Humanist Community Forum (2013-08-25): Courageous Viola Liuzzo – 1926-1965 (Meg Bowman+volunteers) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

Nancy Unger

One Hundred Years of Policing Morality

Nancy Unger

August 18, 2013

In her new book project, Santa Clara University Professor of History Nancy C. Unger asks: Can American morals be legally regulated? Should they be?

In 1910, the Congress of the United States passed the Mann Act—a law hailed by many reformers for its bold attempt to legislate morality. The law prohibited the interstate transport of females for immoral purposes.

In 1913, the sons of two prominent Sacramento families abandoned their wives and children to run off to Reno with two single women. On appeal, the Supreme Court confirmed that consensual extramarital affairs that involved crossing state lines were “immoral sex.” The law was hailed by many reformers for its bold attempt to legislate morality.

Amended in 1978 and 1986, the Mann Act remains in effect and has been used against against non-conformists including Frank Lloyd Wright and Charlie Chaplain, and “uppity” African American men from champion boxer Jack Johnson to rock and roll legend Chuck Berry.

Come join in an illustrated discussion of the landmark 1913 case, which put the federal government in the business of legislating morality.

Nancy Unger earned her BA at Gonzaga University, and her MA and PhD at University of Southern California. She is Professor of History at Santa Clara University and is the author of Fighting Bob La Follette: the Righteous Reformer, andBeyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History.

Click here to view the excellent slides she presented.

View the video:

Humanist Community Forum (2013-08-18): One Hundred Years of Policing Morality (Nancy C. Unger) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.