July 8, 2011
Mary Catherine Bateson
Living Longer, Thinking Longer

For most of history, average life expectancy at birth was under forty years. It is now approaching eighty in industrialized nations. This change has occurred through cultural evolution and technology, yet it mirrors the extension of human childhood that made us a species surviving by learned knowledge and flexible behavior, carrying dangers as well as promise. Mary Catherine Bateson will explore some of the implications of increased longevity, emphasizing the reshaping of teaching and learning to link all ages into sustainable societies. She will use examples from the ways in which her parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, thought about education and child rearing. Bateson has been studying the patterns of the human life cycle since the mid-sixties, but her earliest work was on the Middle East and the linguistics of Arabic. She and her husband have been Hancock residents since 1997. Bateson has taught at Harvard, Northeastern, Amherst, George Mason, and Spelman College, as well as overseas in Iran and the Philippines, and is currently a visiting scholar at Boston College. She has authored eleven books, of which the most recent is Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom. A collection of her writings on various topics, ranging from 9/11 to ecological education, Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery, was issued in paperback at the same time.

Official Website: http://www.marycatherinebateson.com/

July 15, 2011
Ambassador George Bruno
Give me your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning
to Breathe Free. . . or Perhaps NOT

Throughout our history, Americans have been ambivalent about immigration. Historically, we have seen our own immigrant forbearers through rose- colored glasses while raising serious concerns about the contributions and burdens
of modern day immigrants. Today, U.S. immigration policy is the subject of an ongoing debate and part of a renewed and still heated partisan divide affecting our country.

Mr. Bruno will talk about our current immigration system which has become ever more cumbersome, expensive and harsh. He will also discuss why leaders are deadlocked and thus unable to fix a broken system and why states like Arizona have gone their own way. He will offer his own views on a way forward.

Former Ambassador Bruno (to Belize) is now a New Hampshire immigration lawyer. In addition to his legal work, he is Managing Director of USA Group International, an international consulting firm based in Manchester. He has also been a consultant on humanitarian and legal projects throughout the world for the State Department, the Pentagon and various international election observer missions. He is the author of numerous articles and commentaries and is the co- author of Democracy, Human Rights and the Rule of Law.

July 22, 2011
Tom Wessels
The Foundational Principals of Sustainability

Life has existed on this planet for 3.8 billion years and during that tenure it has not only sustained itself, it has thrived. Living systems model how we can create sustainable human systems such as an organization, a community, or an economy. The reason that living systems sustain themselves is that they work within the three laws of sustainability: the law of limits to growth, the second law of thermodynamics, and the law of self-organization. This talk will examine how these three laws operate in living systems as a means to inform us how to create sustainable, thriving human systems.

Tom Wessels is an ecologist and founding director of the master’s degree program in Conservation Biology at Antioch University New England where he has taught since 1978. His is chair of the Center for Whole Communities that fosters inclusive communities that are strongly rooted in place and where all people—regardless of income, race, or background—have access to and a healthy relationship with land. He is former chair of
the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation that fosters environmental leadership through graduate fellowships and organizational grants. His books include: Reading the Forested Landscape, The Granite Landscape, Untamed Vermont, The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future, and Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to reading the Forested Landscape.

July 29, 2011
Gary Hirshberg
Inventing a Win-Win-Win-Win-Win Future

Gary Hirshberg is currently the Chairman, President and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farms, the world’s leading organic yogurt producer. He is also the author of Stirring it Up: How to Make Money and Save the World. He will speak to the combined challenges of corporate success while creating a winning formula for all stakeholders: shareholders, employees, farmers, consumers, even livestock.

Since 1983, Mr. Hirshberg has overseen Stonyfield’s phenomenal growth, from its infancy as a seven-cow organic farming school to its current $370 million in annual sales. He serves on several corporate and non- profit boards and is the chairman and co-founder of Stonyfield Café, a natural fast food restaurant company. In addition to receiving eight honorary doctorates, he has won numerous awards for corporate and environmental leadership. He is a frequent speaker on topics including sustainability, climate change, sustainable economic development, organic agriculture, and the profitability of green and socially responsible business.

August 5, 2011
Sabrina Tavernise
Reporting a War

In the past decade, the United States has gone to war in two countries – Afghanistan and Iraq. Sabrina Tavernise has covered both. She will talk about how she has gone about telling the stories of these wars, how she approached them conceptually, and what themes she chose to focus on. She will offer some of her own conclusions about the media’s role in war.

Tavernise has worked for the New York Times since 2000. She began journalism in Russia in the 1990s, after living for two years on that country’s Pacific coast in a city called Magadan. In 2003, she began covering Iraq, a story she pursued until 2007, when she became the Istanbul Bureau Chief. She has covered wars in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza, Georgia and Chechnya. Pakistan was her most recent foreign assignment.

Tavernise has recently returned to the United States and is now assigned to the National Desk, reporting from Washington.

August 12, 2011
Lewis Feldstein
When You Become President of a Foundation, Your IQ Jumps 25 Points,
and You Have Had Your Last Honest Conversation: Reflections on a Quarter Century in Philanthropy

More than any nation on earth the United States entrusts an important portion of its most critical work to
the donated time – and money – of its citizens. And this is even more the case here in New Hampshire with its ‘de minimis’ government, the design of our founders resulting in probably the weakest state government in the nation.

Feldstein will raise the pressing questions: What are the costs, the trade-offs, the consequences of relying so heavily on donated resources to meet the needs of our communities: What are the limits and the strengths, the wisdom and the compassion, the blind spots and biases of relying so heavily on donated capital to meet civil needs? Does this ennoble and empower – or compromise and distort – those who work at the core of this system?

Feldstein served for 24 years as the President of the state’s largest and wealthiest foundation, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. During that time the Foundation’s assets grew from $25million to almost $500 million and it became one of the largest community foundations in the nation. Feldstein was several times selected as one of the ten most influential people in the state, and one of the 50 most important nonprofit leaders in America. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, he played a lead role in building philanthropy throughout Europe, and for 7 years worked on the World Bank leadership team as the Bank invested in, and tested, the role of community foundations and private philanthropy in the developing world.

August 19, 2011
Eliza Griswold
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam

Eliza Griswold, author of the book, The Tenth Parallel, will speak about the encounter between Christianity and Islam between the equator and the line of latitude miles to the north, the tenth parallel. Along this fault line, across much of inland Africa and Southeast Asia, the borders of the two religions overlap. To explore the relationship between religion, resources and violence, Griswold spent seven years investigating this encounter in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. She will speak about her exploration.

Griswold is the author of Wideawake Field, a collection of poems, and The Tenth Parallel, which was recently awarded the 2011 Lukas Prize in non-fiction. A winner of the 2010 Rome Prize, she is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Woodrow Wilson Scholar. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.

Official Website: http://www.elizagriswold.com/