Almanacs “PT teachers upset with police search - Pennsylvania Almanac” plus 3 more |
- PT teachers upset with police search - Pennsylvania Almanac
- A winter vacation through the glass - Gloucester Daily Times
- Fifty books to change the world - The Guardian
- What are your top green books? - The Guardian
| PT teachers upset with police search - Pennsylvania Almanac Posted: 27 Jan 2010 05:59 AM PST 
PT teachers upset with police search By Terri T. Johnson Almanac staff writer tjohnson@thealmanac.net When Peters Township School District conducted a search of students' vehicles parked in the high school parking lot on Dec. 9, employees' vehicles were also inspected. The search for drugs and other contraband yielded nothing, but it upset representatives of the teachers union. Paul Sutherland, president of the Peters Township Federation of Teachers, addressed the school board during a meeting Jan. 19 about, what Sutherland called, the illegal search. In addition to human searchers, trained dogs from several surrounding police department were involved. The search was not done in response to any incident. At the time, Shelly Belcher, district spokeswoman, called the event a "proactive approach" to letting the students know illegal items are not acceptable in the schools. During the search, the school was locked down. Sutherland told the board he felt the search was illegal, citing the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and sections of the Pennsylvania Constitution. The Fourth Amendment addresses a person's right to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. An AFT attorney has been notified, Sutherland told the board during the questions and comments period. There was no response to Sutherland's comments by any board member, Superintendent Dr. Nina Zetty, or the board solicitor, Jack Cambest. No audience members commented. Sutherland said the search, that involved not just teachers, but students and all district personnel parked in the lot, was "embarrassing and humiliating" to the teachers. He said teachers were asked to leave the classrooms to speak with police about the search. That, Sutherland said, suggests illegal activity by the teachers and that students "finding fault" with a teacher has become "an intramural activity." Searching teachers' vehicles now makes their jobs "much harder and unnecessarily so," the local union president remarked. The union wants the district to apologize to the teachers and to work to restore the teachers' reputations. Sutherland called the search "foolish" as teachers are well aware of the district's policies regarding contraband, drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
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| A winter vacation through the glass - Gloucester Daily Times Posted: 27 Jan 2010 03:00 AM PST The hard part of winter starts right about now. It's true that we're well beyond the winter solstice and the shortest say of the year (Dec. 22). It's true that, since then, the number of sunlight minutes each day has grown one by one. And yes, the thaw this week of temperature and snow-packed ice along the sidewalks has been noticeable and impressive. But you and I both know that we are not out of the woods yet. February in New England manages, normally, to be both the shortest month (in terms of the number of days) and the longest month, as we face its endurance test of inevitably frigid evenings and even colder early mornings. This year's Farmer's Almanac bodes ill for us as well: a "major snowfall" is predicted for the Northeast in mid-February, bringing possible "blizzard conditions" with it to New England. Time for a contingency plan. Some people find their wintertime escape routes online, through travel sites or airline reservation agents. Me? I find it in my glass. Let me explain. The average daytime temperature for Gloucester for the rest of this week? A brisk 35 degrees. The average daytime temperature for some of my favorite wine-producing regions south of the equator? Western Australia: 86 degrees. Buenos Aires, Argentina: 90 degrees. ValparaÃso, Chile: 75 degrees. You get the idea. Wintertime here means summertime there and drinking the fruits of their vines provides me, however illusory, with a shimmer of sunshine. Wintertime, also, is for me the perfect opportunity to explore drinks other than wine that are in some way transportative, that somehow take me on a mini adventure, and that allow me to experience a place and a taste that are far afield. Take pisco, from Chile. This month, my food and wine book club (which meets the last Friday of the month at Cornerstone bookstore in Salem) is reading Isabel Allende's "My Invented Country: A Memoir" in which she describes pisco this way: "Our pisco (comes) from the muscatel grape: transparent, virtuous, and serene as the angelic force that emanates from the land. Pisco is the prime ingredient of the pisco sour, our sweet and treacherous national drink, which must be drunk with confidence, though the second glass has a kick that can floor the most valiant among us." A transportative drink if ever there was one, I'd say. Or take ratafia, from the Champagne region of France, which is made from Pinot Meunier juice (left over from making Champagne) blended with marc or wine brandy. Ratafia is difficult to find — in the states in general and in Massachusetts in particular — so a friend of mine recently sent me a bottle from France. The remarkably well-engineered package arrived, complete with a bottle of Veuve Doussot Ratafia suspended by so much origami-like cardboard buttresses to protect it from the turbulence of trans-Atlantic travel. The bottle was sealed with a thick red wax that served both a utilitarian function (to secure the cork) and a ceremonial one — a nickel-size red wax seal with the initials VD, in a flourish, punctuates the front label of the bottle like the seals of hand-written parchment letters from long ago. In the glass, this ratafia looks like pale copper, like freshly-made caramel before its sugars have darkened to burnt. It's ratafia's two-year aging requirement in oak barrels, I learned, that lends it this color. I don't know ratafia very well, but I know very quickly that this is a fine and very smooth example of it. My nose finds aromas of citrus and a denser sort of elderflower, while on the palate I find dried fruits but also crystallized fruits, something that for me suggests a certain kind of heat. The ratafia is not fiery, but afterward the pulse of my heart beat travels to my lips, like a band of emergency workers summoned to deter a blaze from flaring. There was no need for such haste. This winter — whether it's for pisco or ratafia or some other far-out drink from a far-off place — I have all the time in the world. Cathy Huyghe is a regular Times columnist. A resident of Manchester, she also coordinates a Web site, 365daysofwine.com, covering food and wine throughout Greater Boston. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Fifty books to change the world - The Guardian Posted: 27 Jan 2010 05:59 AM PST  Heat by George Monbiot made the list of 50 top books on sustainability From an elegy to natural land to a tirade against fast food, a list of the "top" sustainability books is aiming to give a little romance and verve to a category sometimes seen as worthy but dull. The 50 titles range from warnings of destruction - Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and George Monbiot's Heat - to a wide variety of suggested solutions. Some look for understanding in history - Jared Diamond's Collapse – others in philosophy – EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful. But many focus on the capitalist economy, from Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965 to Nicholas Stern's influential report, The Economics of Climate Change, in 2007. The improvements put forward range from modelling the economy on nature - Janine M Benyus's Biomimicry - to using the current economic system to protect the natural world: Jonathon Porritt's Capitalism As If the World Matters. On the way, The Top 50 Sustainability Books pamphlet, published by the University of Cambridge's Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL), tracks different numerous trends in thinking, from Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb to John Elkington's Cannibals With Forks, which argues for a triple bottom-line in business that puts environment and social equality on an equal footing with profit. The growth in concern about climate change is prominent, while Elizabeth C Economy's focuses on China in The River Runs Black. In her introduction, CPSL director Polly Courtice says the list - chosen by their predominantly corporate alumni - is intended be "a collection of some of the world's best analyses of the global social, environmental and ethical challenges we face and the creative solutions needed to tackle them." Inevitably, with any attempt to define a "best of" list, there will be criticisms. Most obviously the titles appear to reflect the alumni - dominated by men from rich northern hemisphere countries with just ten women appearing among 61 authors. Also the selected books mostly advocate reforming or changing the current system, to the exclusion of more imaginative offerings, Voltaire's Candide, for example. Others might argue the list is too modern, with nothing older than Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac in 1949, and no Thomas Malthus or Charles Darwin or that it is too dry, preferring commission reports to, say, the academic passion of EO Wilson or the Romantic poets. Tom Burke, the veteran environmentalist, argues there are a number of important books missing, such as the Only One Earth by Barbara Ward and Renee Dubos. "Others that really mattered are The Global 2000 report, commissioned by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, which makes chilling reading when you realise how much we already understood then," he said. "Ivan Illich is missing completely and was better than Schumacher, so is Barry Commoner who really put technology into the equations for the first time. I would also have included the Blueprint for Survival which really kicked off the whole process of thinking about sustainable development. Jonathan Schell's 'The Fate of the Earth', describing the consequences of nuclear war, should also be on the list, not the least because it was written by someone who could write." But the Skeptical Environmentalist, the critical book by Bjorn Lomborg should "definitely not" be on the list, said Burke. "It is a confidence trick in which none of what he says stands up to informed examination." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| What are your top green books? - The Guardian Posted: 27 Jan 2010 04:05 AM PST  Bicycles parked next to large, promotional book spines at 2008 The Guardian Hay Festival. Photograph: Felix Clay "What's your favourite 'green' book?" I get asked this question quite a bit and I always struggle for an answer. It presents the same problem as when you're asked to name your favourite song of film: the answer tends to change by the hour. It would be much easier to compile a list of the top 50 books, which is exactly what the University of Cambridge's programme for sustainability leadership has just done. It asked its alumni – "around 2,000 senior leaders from around the world who have participated in its sustainability programmes over the past decade or more" – to list some of their favourite "sustainability" books. The result is a pretty comprehensive rundown of the most influential and thought-provoking books of all time. There are many classics – Silent Spring, Fast Food Nation, The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, Small is Beautiful, A Sand County Almanac – but there are also a few omissions, too. Where's Henry David Thoreau's Walden? Where's Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded? Where's Bill McKibben's The End of Nature? And should fiction be allowed onto the list, too? How about Cormac McCarthy's The Road? Or Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang? Of course, there's always that debate about what you mean by the term "sustainability", but let us for the sake of argument say that in this instance it refers to books that make you think long and hard about how best to exist within a fragile biosphere blessed with finite resources. Which books would make your own list? The full list (in alphabetical order)Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the battle Against World Poverty, by Muhammad Yunus1999 Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, by Janine Benyus, 2003 Blueprint for a Green Economy: by David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Edward B. Barbier, 1989 Business as Unusual: My Entrepreneurial Journey, Profits and Principles, by Anita Roddick, 2005 Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business, by John Elkington, 1999 Capitalism as if the World Matters, by Jonathon Porritt, 2005 Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity, by Stuart Hart, 2005 Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment, by Stephan Schmidheiny and WBCSD, 1992 The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads, by Ervin Laszlo, 2006 The Civil Corporation: The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship, by Simon Zadek, 2001 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, by Jared Diamond, 2005 The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, by Joel Bakan, 2005 Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, 2002 The Dream of Earth, by Thomas Berry, 1990 Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, 2000 The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, by Paul Hawken, 1994 The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, by Nicholas Stern, 2007 The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, by Jeffrey Sachs, 2005. Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resources Use-A Report to the Club of Rome, by Ernst Von Weizsäcker, 1998 False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, by John Gray, 2002 Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side on the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser, 2005 A Fate Worse than Debt: The World Financial Crisis and the Poor, by Susan George, 1990 For The Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future, by Herman Daly and John Cobb, 1989 Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, by C.K. Prahalad, 2004 Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, by James Lovelock, 2000 Globalization and its Discontents, by Joseph Stiglitz, 2002 Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, by George Monbiot, 2006 Human-Scale Development: Conception, Application and Further Reflections, by Manfred Max-Neef, 1991 The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism: The Quest for Purpose in the Modern World, by Charles Handy, 1999 An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, by Al Gore, 2006 The Limits to Growth, by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows and Jorgen Randers, 1972 Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, by Ricardo Semler, 1993 The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando De Soto, 2000 Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, 2000 No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, by Naomi Klein, 2002 Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, by George Soros, 2000 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, by Buckminster Fuller, 1969 Our Common Future, by The World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987 The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, 1969 Presence: An Explanation of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society, by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, 2005 The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future, by Elizabeth C. Economy, 2004 Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold, 1949 Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, 1962 The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg, 2001 Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E.F. Schumacher, 1973 Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, by Vandana Shiva, 1989 The Turning Point: Science Society and the Rising Culture, by Fritjof Capra, 1984 Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile, by Ralph Nader, 1965 When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten, 2001 When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When Our Water Runs Out? by Fred Pearce, 2006 Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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