Friday, March 20, 2015

EVENT: March 24, 2015. Capital Hill. NSF Modeling and predicting severe storms.

Hurricanes, tornadoes and solar eruptions can have profound effects on America's economy, public safety and well-being.

A noon lunch briefing next Tuesday at the Senate Visitor's Center on Capitol Hill, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, will provide an overview of the current state of storm research.

In particular, panelists will discuss work to improve risk assessment and hazard preparedness in order to mitigate vulnerability to storm impacts. 

What:A briefing about severe storms
Featuring:Roger Wakimoto, assistant director for Geosciences, National Science Foundation
Jenni L. Evans, acting director, Institutes of Energy and the Environment, Penn State
Howard B. Bluestein, professor, School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma
Harlan E. Spence, director, Institute for Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire.
Where:Senate Visitor's Center, Room 212-10
When:Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Lunch will be provided.

RSVP: Please contact lisajoy@nsf.gov for more information and/or to reserve a spot.
NOTE: This is a closed event and reservations are required, and must be received by 9 a.m. on Monday, March 23, 2015.
-NSF-

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Volunteer Opportunity. April 2015

CSFI is looking for 15 volunteers to help with basic tasks during the DCOI event being held in DC on April 27-28, 2015: http://www.dcoi.org.il

We need volunteers to help with the following:

Admissions
Seating/Escort if needed
Hand out Agendas
Hold Microphones - Field questions
Advance the slides for speakers (If needed)

Advantages of volunteering:

Free Conference Pass
CSFI Certificate of Appreciation
Experience working at international cyber defense event
Opportunity to support CSFI mission
Lunch included

If interested, send your resume and contact information to: contact@csfi.us

Thank you for your support!

CSFI Management

Saturday, February 28, 2015

New Economy, a call to replace transnational corporate domination with local economies, control, ownership, and self-reliance.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/together-with-earth/replace-the-gospel-of-money-interview-with-david-korten?utm_source=YTW&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20150227





Replace the Gospel of Money: An Interview With David Korten

What if we measured wealth in terms of life, and how well we serve it?

Issue73_KORTEN3392hires.jpg

 

David Korten began his professional life as a professor at the Harvard Business School on a mission to lift struggling people in Third World nations out of poverty by sharing the secrets of U.S. business success. Yet, after a couple of decades in which he applied his organizational development strategies in places as far-flung as Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, Korten underwent a change of heart. In 1995, he wrote the bestseller When Corporations Rule the World, followed by a series of books that helped birth the movement known as the New Economy, a call to replace transnational corporate domination with local economies, control, ownership, and self-reliance.

This month, Korten, who is also the co-founder and board chair of YES!, publishes a new book challenging readers to rethink their relationship with Earth—indeed, with all creation, from the smallest quantum particle to the whole of the universe. The world needs “a new story,” he says. “If most species, including Homo sapiens, are to survive, we must recognize Earth as a living being.” Korten talked about his ongoing metamorphosis with YES! Executive Editor Dean Paton.

Dean Paton: Tell me how somebody who was an organizational management specialist, and then a new-economy thought leader, made this leap into what is as much a spiritual proposition as it is a political one—that Earth is a living organism, that we all are essentially a part of this one big life form.
“It comes back to this: Are we a part of nature? Or apart from nature?”
David Korten: It’s not that hard, actually—once you get into the living-Earth frame—to see that Earth is essentially this organization of living organisms creating and maintaining the conditions essential to life. If you’re an organizational expert, or theorist, that raises a really fascinating question: How do these millions of organisms work in concert to maintain life?
Paton: As if everything has an intelligence and everything has a purpose? How is that relevant to your new book, Change the Story, Change the Future?
Korten: The new book sets up the juxtaposition between the old “Sacred Money and Markets” story and an emerging “Sacred Life and Living Earth” story. They’re two totally different frames that lead to two totally different ways of thinking about organizing society. You either see life as a means to make money, or you see money as simply a number useful for keeping accounts in service to life, but of no value in itself. Buying into the “Sacred Money and Markets” story that money is wealth and the key to happiness locks us into indentured servitude to corporate rule.
Paton: You’re saying it’s the traditional development model, or transnational capitalism, that damages Earth as a living community, including not just humans but all life forms. Yet we all depend on money, on the market economy. Do you really think we can just stop that dependence?
Korten: We will still use money and markets, but strip away Wall Street’s control of money’s creation and allocation. There was a time in the United States when most of our financial institutions were local. Which essentially meant that local communities were able to create their own credit, or their own money, in response to their own needs. We still depended on banks, but it was a much more democratic process.
Paton: Like George Bailey’s building and loan in It’s a Wonderful Life.
“We humans live by stories.”
Korten: Exactly. If more of our money circulated in our communities rather than the Wall Street casino, it would facilitate people organizing locally to meet more of their economic needs with local resources. Control of money is the ultimate mechanism of social control in a society in which most every person depends on money for the basic means of living—food, water, shelter, heat, transportation, entertainment. This leads us into the voluntary simplicity movement: The less I’m dependent on money, the freer I am. Realize that the only legitimate purpose of the economy is to serve life, is to serve us as living beings making our living in co-productive partnership with living Earth.
Paton: How does that translate into actions? If we get a thousand people to say, “I’m a living being born of and nurtured by a living Earth,” how does that stop fracking? How does that stop the Russians from pumping all the oil out of Kazakhstan and selling it around the world?
Korten: It makes very clear that destroying the natural living systems on which our existence depends, in order to get a quick energy fix or a quick profit, is literally insane.
Paton: So if we’re all living beings “born of a living Earth,” as you say, where does that start to show up in our lives?
Korten: A big piece of it has to do with recognizing the implications of our dependence on money. This goes back to development as a process of separating people from their means of subsistence production. The more people become alienated from their self-production, the more they become dependent on money—and the more they become dependent on the people who control the creation and allocation of money.
Paton: You mean when I’m dependent, I accept fracking.
Korten: Yeah, you say, “I need that money. They’re going to pay me to frack my property.”
Paton: Do you really think Americans are going to be able to cast off the belief that money is king?
Korten: I’d say a lot of people are casting it off.
Paton: Most of us respond to a 10-dollar bill. Or a bonus at work. Or a new car.
Korten: But we respond to that because we accept the “Sacred Money and Markets” story that money is wealth, a fabrication that is literally killing us.
Paton: So you say that our choice is between working with Earth and working against her?
Korten: It comes back to this: Are we a part of nature? Or apart from nature?
Paton: Why do you insist we adopt this “Living Earth” story?
Korten: Because we humans live by stories.
Paton: And that means…?
Korten: It means that to organize as ordered societies, we need a shared framework—basic values and assumptions—so that when I relate to you, I’ve got some idea of how you’re going to respond, because we share our basic story.
Paton: Do we have a choice?
Korten: Yeah, change or die. Quite literally. You really can’t grasp the new story—as a society—and continue to live the way we live. First you begin to move toward more voluntary simplicity, which is, literally, reducing your dependence on money. You start doing more things yourself. You pay much more attention to your relationships, to the gift economy. You perhaps get a deeper sense of being part of and a contributor to a living universe evolving toward ever greater complexity, beauty, awareness, and possibility. What would that mean for society, and then what does it mean for how I live? What is my contribution to the change society needs? I have a responsibility to be part of this change—which begins by changing the story.



photo of Abby QuillenDean Paton wrote this article for Together, With Earth, the Spring 2015 issue of YES! Magazine. Dean is executive editor at YES!

Reprints and reposts: YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy stepsCreative Commons License

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Healthcare and Public Health. IPS Newsletter. Cancer Locks a Deadly Grip on Africa.

   2015/2/19

Despite the aggression and abuse she has suffered at the University of El Salvador because she is a trans woman, Daniela Alfaro is determined to graduate with a degree in health education. “There is very little tolerance of us at the university. I thought it would be different from high school, ... MORE > >

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children” – an ancient Indian saying that encapsulates the essence of sustainability as seen by the world’s indigenous people. With their deep and locally-rooted knowledge of the natural world, indigenous peoples have much to ... MORE > >

It is a hot, steamy day in Sri Lanka’s northwestern Mannar District. Mid-day temperatures are reaching 34 degrees Celsius, and the tarred road is practically melting under the sun. Sarojini Tangarasa is finding it hard to walk on her one bare foot. Her hands constantly shake and she has to ... MORE > >

Despite being one of the world's fastest expanding economies, projected to clock seven-percent GDP growth in 2017, India – a nation of 1.2 billion – is trailing behind on many vital social development indices while also hosting one-fourth of the world's poor. While the United Nations prepares to ... MORE > >

Food security has become a key issue of the U.N. climate negotiations this week in Geneva as a number of countries and observers raised concerns that recent advances in Lima are in jeopardy. While food security is a core objective of the U.N. climate convention, it has traditionally been ... MORE > >

In the movie “A Day Without a Mexican“, the mysterious disappearance of all Mexicans brings the state of California to a halt. Would the same thing happen in some Latin American countries if immigrants from neighbouring countries, who suffer the same kind of discrimination, went missing? The ... MORE > >

As the Iranian nuclear talks hurtle towards a Mar. 24 deadline, there is renewed debate among activists about the blatant Western double standards underlying the politically-heated issue, and more importantly, the resurrection of a longstanding proposal for a Middle East free from weapons of mass ... MORE > >

Right now, the United Nations is negotiating one of the world’s potentially most powerful policy documents. It can influence trillions of dollars, pull hundreds of millions out of poverty and hunger, reduce violence and improve education — essentially make the world a better place. But much depends ... MORE > >

On the night of Aug. 14, 2014, 10-year-old Hari Karki woke up to his grandfather’s loud yelling in the family’s home in Paagma, a small village in east Nepal. He was warning Hari’s family to move out of the house immediately because they were getting flooded. It had been raining non-stop for a ... MORE > >

Hidden by the struggles to defeat Ebola, malaria and drug-resistant tuberculosis, a silent killer has been moving across the African continent, superseding infections of HIV and AIDS. World Cancer Day commemorated on Feb. 4 may have come and gone, but the spread of cancer in Africa has been ... MORE > >

World leaders from government, finance, business, science and civil society are attempting to negotiate a legally binding and universal agreement on climate change at the upcoming 21st United Nations Climate Change Conference being convened in Paris in December. If achieved, which appears ... MORE > >

A week of climate negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland Feb. 8-13 are setting the stage for what promises to be a busy year. In order to reach an agreement in Paris by December, negotiators will have to climb a mountain of contentious issues which continue to overshadow the talks. One such issue ... MORE > >

Training Opportunity: BAF. Webinar: Insight into an Academic Career in Hazard and Disaster Mitigation. Thursday, Feb 26th.

 Bill Anderson Fund Webinar – The BAF Student Advisory Council will be hosting Insight into an Academic Career in Hazard and Disaster Mitigation, the second in a 3-part series of professional development webinars. 

This event will take place on Thursday, February 26, 2015 from 2:00pm – 4:00pm EST. Free of charge and open to students and young professionals, interested in emergency preparedness and response, this webinar will take place online, opening the discussion worldwide. The moderator will be Nnenia Campbell, Research Assistant, Natural Hazards Center and Council Liaison/Program Chair of the BAF Student Advisory Council. 

It will focus on careers in academia and will include presentations from respected scholars in the field. Speakers include:
  • Reginald DesRoches, Ph.D., Chair of the Karen and John Huff School and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Kathleen Tierney, Ph.D., Director of the Natural Hazards Center and Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder
  • Ann-Margaret Esnard, Ph.D., Professor at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University
  • Keith Yearwood, Ph.D., Lecturer in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland.
REGISTER HERE TODAY!!

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