Sunday, February 26, 2012, Film Screening @ 11:30AM The Moviehouse, Millerton, NY

‘Human Terrain’ is an expose of the U.S. effort to enlist America’s best and the brightest in a global struggle for the hearts and minds of its enemies. After winning the short battle of ’shock and awe’ in Iraq, but losing the long war to bring democracy and peace to the Middle East, the U.S. military began a controversial program to ‘operationalize’ culture as an instrument of irregular warfare. With the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ that produced hi-tech, low-casualty victories in Panama, Bosnia, and Kosovo tarnished by long and costly counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army and Marine Corps enlist anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and other academics in ‘Human Terrain Systems’ for the global war on terror.

Filmmakers James Der Derian, David Udris and Michael Udris track this major shift in U.S. military policy as it ripples through American universities and civil society. Simultaneously a road-trip into the heart of the war machine and a critical investigation of academic collaboration with the military, ‘Human Terrain’ traces a new ‘revolution in military affairs’ after U.S. policies based on virtual technologies and virtuous ideologies fail to create peace, and foot soldiers are left to clean up the mess.

Anthony Kronman, Ph.D., Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University, presented a stimulating lecture December, 2, 2011, on disenchantment as defined by Max Weber, the German philospher where scientific understanding is more highly prized than belief. Dr. Kronman pointed out that during the first two hundred years of university education in America students were taught knowledge that had been accumulated in a classical context. The base of that education was religion. In the last hundred years, he said, universities have departed from the ideal of learning the great philosophies of the ages. Instead the emphasis is on finding new knowledge. For example, he pointed to the demand on doctrinal candidates to produce a body of new knowledge based on their research rather than demonstrating their grasp of all that has come before. The problem for students and for society is that striving for secular success leaves the individual with no grounding in the everlasting and no ties with the continuity of a divinity.

7:30PM, Seifert Theater, Salisbury School, Salisbury, CT

Anthony T. Kronman, J.D., Ph.D., Author, Sterling Professor of Law (Yale Law School) Visiting Global Professor (NYU) Teacher in the Directed Studies Program (Yale)

Why are we here? Anthony Kronman says our colleges and universities are ignoring life’s biggest questions and we all pay the price. Students today find an academic environment richer than any have known before. They will find courses devoted to every question under the sun. But the questions that are missing deal with the meaning of life, what one should care about and why and what living is for.

Dr. Kronman says that in a shift of historic importance. America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, he says, “They have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself.”

Our top universities have embraced a research driven ideal, he says. In the process they have badly weakened the humanities, the disciplines with the oldest and deepest connections to this question, leaving them directionless and vulnerable to being hijacked for political ends. “In the sciences the adoption of the research ideal has produced astounding results” he says. “Our knowledge of the natural and social worlds,and ability to control them, is a direct result of the modern system of academic research.”  He describes political correctness as a stifling culture of moral and political uniformity based on progressive ideals. But he says, “Political correctness is only a symptom, a discouraging response to a larger sense of directionlessness in the humanities.”

“America’s entire leadership class now goes to college. Infusing higher education with a new and vibrant humanism will produce benefits not only for the future leaders of business and government but for society at large,” he says. It will give us, he says, ”A richer and more open debate about ultimate values; an electorate less likely to be cowed into thinking that only the faithful have the right to invoke them; a humbler regard for the mystery of life in a world increasingly dominated by technocratic reason.”

At Salisbury Forums experts provide their insight, followed by a question and answer period. All forums are free to the public.

Why reform healthcare? What reforms were passed? How will it help me? To help us better answer these questions, The Salisbury Forum in collaboration with the Foundation for Community Health is excited to announce that Karen Davis, President and CEO of The Commonwealth Fund will be speaking on Friday, May 13th at 7:30 in the Katherine M. Elfers Hall, in the Esther Eastman Music Center at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, CT.

While much has been said and written about the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed last year, the sheer size and complexity of the bill has been a major obstacle to understanding it. On May13th Dr. Davis will provide us with a picture of how the US healthcare system has performed to-date and compare this to the performance of health systems in other developed nations. She will then outline the basic components of the Affordable Care Act and share her thoughts on how the United States can use aspects of this law to set a path to improving the health of the American people as a whole.

Dr. Karen Davis, a health economist, has led the Commonwealth Fund since 1992. The Commonwealth Fund’s mission is to promote a high performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society’s most vulnerable populations. Before joining the Commonwealth Fund, Dr. Davis served as chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she was also a professor of economics.

The Foundation for Community Health invests in people, programs and strategies that promote the health and well being of the residents living in the greater Harlem Valley in New York and the northwest hills of Connecticut.

Salisbury Forum April 8, 2011 at Salisbury School, Seifert Theater at 7:30 pm

“Smile for the camera,” the saying goes. But why does the camera need our smiles? On the evening of April 8th, Robin Kelsey, Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University, will discuss the ways in which photography and its demands have infiltrated and shaped modern life. From the family vacation portrait to the White House photo-op, performing for the camera has become essential to how we represent ourselves to each other and to the world.

In these performances, the captivating vividness, exhilarating freedom, and troubling falseness of modernity, all come to the fore. By examining particular photographs in detail, we will walk through the history of performing for the camera from the earliest days of photography to our own moment, in the midst of the digital age.

Before we begin our Q & A, I want to bring the whole subject of sea life home, home to the USA, and home to New England. The damage to the ocean from pollution and mindless extraction crosses all international boundaries. There is no substitute for international pressure and action. Still, here, at home, we can make our weight felt as citizens. And what we learn here, about what works and what doesn’t, may very well apply elsewhere.

Going back to the beginnings of migration here from Europe, this country, and especially the Northeast, has always relied on the sea. All of the region’s early prosperity came from its connection to the sea. It was our first connection to the world, and, protected us from the world; it was a highway for people and trade; it was food and wealth, when whale oil lit our houses, when the Hudson River Estuary held fully half of the world’s oysters, when lobsters and cod and oysters were the cheapest food for the very poor, when Long Island farmers went fishing on a grand scale to fertilize their fields, when the Dutch settlers found so many fish they’d never seen before in New York harbor alone that they stopped giving them names and just gave them numbers, when there were Connecticut Yankees not just in King Arthur’s court, but in market places all over the world, and when cod were so plentiful in New England that huge specimens, up to a record 160lbs. were stacked like cordwood on New England docks and wharves. Our arts, from Winslow Homer and Herman Melville on, have been marked by the sea. The Gloucester fisherman, the Nantucket and New Bedford whaler, the oystermen of Long Island, the traders of Boston and New York, are all a part of the region’s communal mythology.

Until their recent unrelenting hammering by our technologically impressive, very efficient, very destructive, fishing fleets, and pollution of all kinds, the Grand Banks, the Georges Bank, the tidal estuaries from Maine to New Jersey, had been an inexhaustible cornucopia of sea life for our sustenance, delight, and wonder.

Only very recently has that changed. The depletion of the seas as a source of food local food is not even as old I am. It’s a current event.

Worldwide, there are more fishing boats and fishermen than there are fish to catch, enough to catch the available fish four times over. Many of these fleets are supported by government. The original idea was that tax-payers would pitch in together to keep fish prices within the reach of the most people possible, and encourage the development of a cheap and plentiful source of protein. But now, because all the commercial fisheries in the world are collapsing or have collapsed, our taxes are paying, not for more fish for all, but for the final destruction of the last remains of a resource on which at least a billion people depend. We are subsidizing the race to catch the last fish.

The seas are generous, still, they want to forgive us our past, still. There is a point of no return, but we haven’t quite hit it. Not yet. Not for everything.

The fisheries of the North East, which for many years were regularly cited as a prime example of mismanagement, after years of jaw-boning and law suits, by, among others, Oceana, the Conservation Law Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trust, and the gradual realization by some fishermen themselves, that their way of life was threatened by their own activities, have, in the past two years, shown some encouraging signs of stabilization and recovery. Some fisheries, such as haddock, have begun modestly to rebuild.

But there is tremendous incentive to be impatient, to declare victory and go back to bad old ways. Fishermen and their boats are losing money when they sit in port, the ports themselves suffer, and those stuck on shore suspect that other, less regulated, fleets are poaching what they’re forbidden to catch. People’s livelihoods are at stake, big businesses have large interests to defend, and the pressure on politicians is vocal and hard to resist.

If you’re watching this movie, if you’re listening to me, you’re already interested in seeing good science and common sense prevail. My reason for being here this morning is my hope that today will be the day that your concern will lead to action. Make sure your representatives know where you stand on this. Make sure they know you ‘get it’, that you won’t be fooled by arguments that claim that, the minute any species of fish is doing better than last year, it’s time to quit worrying. Address yourselves to the politicians most susceptible to pressure to ease up, to kick the problem down the road. Write Barney Frank, especially if you approve of him on other issues, and tell him you’re watching what he does and doesn’t do about this. And google Oceana, check out their website. You’ll be impressed. If you are, make Oceana your agent. And if not Oceana, then someone. Make someone your agent. Oceana’s whole and sole business is to preserve, protect, and restore, the oceans. And I mean all the oceans. That’s what they do all day long. While you’re at work, they will work on this for you, if you lend them support.

I’ve brought a bunch of copies of a book, “Five Easy Pieces”, written by a member of Oceana’s board, who’s also my personal hero, Dr. Daniel Pauly, who you’ve just been watching in the film, a pioneer, a rigorous scientist, a great expert on fish, and a great advocate for the life of the sea. If you will join Oceana now, please take a copy home, on me. You’ll instantly become much smarter about the whole subject. No one will be able to befuddle you with pseudo-facts. You’ll know the score. I’m not scientifically gifted, shall we say, and this book is detailed science, but he’s an excellent writer, he uses vivid imagery, he has a high sense of irony, and his humor is there in the science, so that, even for me, the medicine goes down easily.

In the book, Dr. Pauly talks about the ‘shifting baseline’. Those of us who’ve lived in this part of the Northeast for a while, will easily recognize it: we are aware of the changes the years have brought, while a newcomer will be apt to see it as ‘untouched’, just as we saw it when we first looked at it, just as our predecessors saw it before us. So too with the general health of fisheries and sea life. The level of fish stocks observers find when they start looking, whatever they know about the past, becomes their experiential definition of normal. If there are few cod left to catch when you take your first look, if a sixteen pounder is a big one now, even if a cod fish weighing 160 pounds was not unheard of before, for you, that is ‘normal’. If there are more haddock this year than last year, or two years ago, people have a tough time worrying that 50 years ago there were 10 or 100 times as many, and are inclined to say, “They’ve rebuilt! Let’s go catch them!” With only a little restraint, a highly sustainable fishery could be restored, that’d return more fish for fishing effort, employ more people, and feed more people, at more profit and less cost. But we all have short memories and lots of impatience, so people, people such as yourselves, are badly needed who will advocate for reason and patience. We don’t instinctively consider that the rise in one specie’s numbers may be a side-effect of a dangerous depletion of other fish that used to eat them, or compete with them for habitat. There are more shrimp on the Grand Banks than there were when there were lots of cod, who liked to eat them. If you just look at the shrimp haul, things are great. If you think about the fact that the cod are gone forever, things are not so great. People are badly needed who will make sure we look at the whole eco-system. This is where you have a major role to play.

Scallops and shrimp replacing predator fish are an example of another subject Dr. Daniel Pauly talks about in his book: fishing down the food chain. This should get everyone’s attention, because it’s about what could land on your plate as sea food in the not-too-distant future. Briefly, if you fish out the predator fish — which we’re doing systematically everywhere in the world, with technology that leaves no rock anywhere in the ocean for a fish to hide under — the prey fish population explodes, and becomes the top of the food chain. Humans then go to town catching the new species at the top of the chain, setting about to fish them out in their turn. And so on, until you get to the bottom. The end of that line, in some cases, is jellyfish. When he gives a talk, Dr. Pauly often shows a picture of the future in the form of a great big jellyfish taking the place of the old ‘two-all beef patties’ in a Big Mac.

The future isn’t far away. There is a commercial jellyfish fishery in Newfoundland, where the cod fishery used to be. In Commonwealth countries, by law, the word fishsticks has had to be replaced, in some instances, by seafood sticks, or sea food extender, because there isn’t enough actual fish in the stick anymore to justify the use of the word. This may remind you of the suit now underway against Taco Bell over what you can call ‘beef’. Sarimi, the base of ‘imitation crab meat’, while made from fish, is an ersatz food. Even though, in China, jellyfish have been used in human food for more than a thousand years, it’s obvious that fishing down the food chain is a brutal impoverishment of the great, grand, eco-system that is sea life, which accounts for 80% of all the forms of life on the earth.

There are copies outside to take home of Oceana publications, too, also based on hard science. Take one home, show it around, spread the good word. All the beautifully produced and illustrated, easy-to-read, newsletters going back several years are accessible with a click, on Oceana’s website, at oceana.org. Please look in there for what Oceana’s done this year: it’s been a great year for the seas and an awful year, the best of times for preservation and protection, the worst of times for oil spills and the Gulf. For direct talk about what’s landing on your plate when you eat fish, look in there for the interview with the author of “Four Fish”, about cod, salmon, sea bass, and tuna, and the actual state of the seas. As an added attraction, or distraction, January Jones is in there, too, both looking great, and talking about sharks. Google Oceana when you get home. Find out what’s going on, and what you can do to move it along. No matter what, I hope you’ll take your concern home with you and act on it.

The movie you just saw has mostly talked about what we’ve been taking out of the ocean. The other side of the coin is what we’ve been putting in. Until now, the oceans have been an uncomplaining dump. They’ve absorbed our waste, our trash, the effluent from our sewers, and from manufacturing, including chemical plants, from power generation, nuclear waste and oil spills.

The sea life in the ocean, though sometimes becoming less safe for human consumption, has shown phenomenal resilience. But now, we are hitting it where it really hurts, raising the level of acidity of the oceans as a whole, which is directly analogous to making the air harder to breath for ourselves. If we don’t reverse this, if we don’t stop hammering the oceans, sea life, this time, may not recover.

For the last 250 years, the period of our Industrial Revolution and our expanding exploitation of every corner of the planet, the oceans have been a great carbon sink, absorbing 30% of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, moderating and masking its global impact. Please take this fact home with you. The oceans take in 11 billion metric tons of CO2 per year. Each year the amount grows another 3%. The current acidification level, 30% higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution, hasn’t been seen for 20,000 million years, and acidification is coming on hundreds of times faster than ever before. The levels are alarming. The rate of change makes them even scarier: sea creatures don’t have time to adapt.

In contrast to the debate that continues about the causal relationship between this or that weather event and human activity — this drought, that storm, the other temperature rise — the evidence of the oceans is unequivocal. About ocean acidification, there is no debate.  The rise in the carbon dioxide content of the ocean is a man-made event, plain and simple, and the consequences of its continuing uncontrolled will belong squarely to us.  The only discussion now is whether to be concerned or not, and, if we let the course we’re on continue, it will make for some uncomfortable moments around the dinner table when our children and grandchildren ask, “What did you do in the (climate) war, Daddy?”

Please take this fact home with you: the 30% of the carbon dioxide humans release into the air that is absorbed by the seas is serious mischief for all kinds of sea life, beginning with corals, and pteropods, and continuing on through shellfish, clams, oysters, lobsters, mussels, and so on, because it reduces the amount of available carbonate they need to make the structures, the shells, and skeletons, and skins, which support them.  And so a chain reaction begins. Even those creatures whose own structural parts might better survive a decrease in available calcium in sea water, depend to one degree or another on critters with higher sensitivity.  Whales and salmon need pteropods for dinner.  The very tasty and much-prized Alaskan Pink Salmon, likes to make pteropods 45% of its diet, and all kinds of fish need corals for habitat, and corals aren’t just tropical, and the colder the water they live in, the more vulnerable they are to changes in the availability of carbonate.

As with any unwanted chain reaction, the thing to avoid reaching is critical mass, where the problem outruns any effort to control it. This particular chain reaction isn’t getting the right kind of attention.

If we take the warning, the oceans are ready to help. The power in the tides and in the waves is there to tap, and wind power is a technology that’s ready to go to work right now, near the great population centers on our coasts, where it’s most needed.

The sea can be a great new source, not just of renewable energy, but continuous and inexhaustible energy, for our own lives, and the lives of generations to come. Off shore wind farms off the coast from Washington to Eastport could supply the energy needs of all the cities and towns where so many of us in the Northeast still live by sea.

For 800,000 years the seas were a stable solution. For that long and longer, they have been an hospitable solution for all sorts of creatures to live in, and then, when we came along, a generous solution to all sorts of human problems, from food supply to waste disposal. We mustn’t turn them into a toxic cocktail for ourselves who depend on them, and the 80% of the life on the planet that lives in them.

Thanks for coming. There’s lots to talk about. The shortest way to state the problem of the seas is, “We’re taking too much out, and we’re putting too much in.” If you ask me, in the Q & A, there’s plenty more to say about what we’ve been putting in. And there’s lots of encouraging news to share about what’s been accomplished in just the past year, and the hope for the years ahead. Anna and I will be glad to take your questions on these, or any other, subjects you choose.

The Salisbury Forum in collaboration with the FilmWorks Forum of The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY is presenting the documentary film, End of the Line followed by a Q&A with Sam Waterston Actor/Activist on Sunday, February 27th, at 11 a.m.