7:30PM,  The Hotchkiss School, Walker Auditorium, Lakeville, CT.

Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D. Ethnobotanist, Author and President of the Amazon Conservation Team. .

Profile writers compare Mark Plotkin to Indiana Jones and some colleagues call him the Carl Sagan of the rain forest. Plotkin has followed tribal medicine men or shamans into the deep forests to learn about the herbs and vines they use. He has witnessed their amazing cures derived from bark, sap, and trail-side herbs. He is convinced the major threat to our species is from drug resistant bacteria, and that the source of almost all classes of antibiotics has been from natural resources.

Plotkin says we have to protect biodiversity and cultural diversity because we have a lot to learn from the thousands of years of experience passed on by the shamans. He talks about potential pain killers that may be developed from cone snails, snake venom, or frog skin poison, as well as treatments for cancer derived from marine organisms and new antibiotics from natural resources.

Mark Plotkin earned his academic credits at Harvard, Yale and Tufts. His books Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice and Medicine Quest make fascinating reading about the search for new medicines in the jungles, coral reefs, deserts and deep sea vents of the world.

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

The Salisbury Forum continues the fall 2010 season with a fascinating and timely subject, “The U.S. and China – A Question of Our Common Interests”.

Orville Shell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society will speak on Friday, October 15th, 7:30 pm at the Katherine M. Elfers Hall, in the Esther Eastman Music Center at The Hotchkiss School.

Schell, the former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley for eleven years, has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and covered the war in Indochina. He has written widely for many magazines and newspapers, including the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, the China Quarterly, Harpers and the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He has written fourteen books, nine on China, and is at work on an interpretation of the last 100 years of Chinese history.

Professor Schell is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Insititute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is the recipient of many prizes and fellowships.

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

To find out more about forum subjects – The Scoville Memorial Library will provide information and the Salisbury Forum has a website with information and links to issue sites: www.salisburyforum.org

The Salisbury Forum opens its 2010 – 2011th season with “Conflict and Peace – Why Should Women Be at the Table?”

The first forum will be held on Friday, September 24 at 7:30 pm,  at The Salisbury School, Seifert Theater. The featured speaker is Maryam Elahi, Human Rights lawyer and Director of the International Women’s Program, Open Society Institute & Soros Foundations Network.

Ms. Elahi is the chair of the International Human Rights Committee of the American Bar Association and has served on numerous boards including the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, the ACLU of CT and AI’s Policy Board. She has written and lectured on wide-range of human rights issues including women’s rights, U.S. and human rights foreign policy, “U.S. and the war on terror” and Middle East issues.

Prior to OSI, Ms. Elahi was the founding director of the Human Rights Program at Trinity College – the first undergraduate college human rights program in the United States. She taught courses on international human rights law at Trinity, as well as, at the Oxford University Summer International Human Rights Program. She served as the Advocacy Director on the Middle East, North Africa and Europe for Amnesty International in DC from 1990 – 1997. During her ten years at Trinity, she traveled extensively to set up international programs with a human rights focus resulting in the establishment of programs in Cape Town, Santiago, Trinidad and Hong Kong.

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

7:30 p.m. at The Hotchkiss School on Friday, June 4, 2010: Good Books, Quality News: Publishing and Journalism in the Digital Age

Peter Osnos, Founder, PublicAffairs Books; Vice-Chairman, Columbia Journalism Review,  draws on decades of experience as a correspondent, editor, publisher and entrepreneur to survey the ways the internet and mobile reading devices are influencing, for better and for worse, the information we receive. The consumer now has far more choices than ever before and the big question of our age is how best to take advantage of those options to assure that quality has the resources necessary to flourish in the future.

7:30 p.m. at Housatonic Valley Regional High School on Friday, May 14, 2010

Housatonic Valley Regional High School students show documentaries they created as part of a program with Global Village Media in a joint project with the The Connecticut Project for the Constitution, an organization dedicated to improving the quality of public dialogue on issues of constitutional importance. The films – aimed at demonstrating how the Constitution intersects with the students’ own local communities – will be used as a catalyst for discussion between the audience and student film makers about the role and responsibility of public discourse in a Democracy.

Through their film production company, Global Village Media, Catherine Tatge and Dominique Lasseur are partnering with high schools and colleges to educate students in the democratic process and to increase citizen engagement through the use of documentary film production. The student films presented at this Salisbury Forum are the result of that collaboration.

7:30 p.m. at Salisbury School on Friday, April 9, 2010

Returning speakers, Todd Brewster and Akhil Reed Amar present a review of the first 444 days of the Obama Presidency from the perspective of their 2008 Forum, “The Perfect President.”

Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor of Constitutional Law, Yale Law School

Todd Brewster, President, The Connecticut Project For The Constitution and Director, The Center For Oral History/U.S. Military Academy West Point

7:30 p.m. at Housatonic Valley Regional High School on November 6, 2009

Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Senior Fellow of the Migration Policy Institute will speak on “Immigration in America: What’s in Store?”

As a Senior Fellow at MPI, Doris Meissner directs MPI’s work on US immigration policy. She also contributes to the Institute’s work on immigration and national security, the politics of immigration, administering immigration systems and government agencies, and cooperation with other countries.

Ms. Meissner has authored and co-authored numerous reports, articles, and op-eds and is frequently quoted in the media. She recently served as director of MPI’s Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, a bipartisan group of distinguished leaders. The group’s report and recommendations address how to harness the advantages of immigration for a 21st century economy and society.

From 1993 to 2000, she served in the Clinton administration as Commissioner of the INS, then part of the US Department of Justice. Her accomplishments included reforming the nation’s asylum system; creating new strategies for managing US borders; improving services for immigrants; and shaping new responses to migration and humanitarian emergencies. She first joined the Department of Justice in 1973 as a White House Fellow and special assistant to the Attorney General and then served in various senior policy posts at Justice, including acting commissioner and executive associate commissioner of INS.

In 1986, she joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a senior associate. Ms. Meissner created the Endowment’s Immigration Policy Project, which became MPI in 2001.

Ms. Meissner’s board memberships include vice-chair of CARE-USA and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Inter-American Dialogue, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA).

Her most recent awards are the Legacy of Leadership Award given by the White House Fellows Foundation and the UW Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumni Award.

She earned BA and MA degrees at UW-Madison, where she began her professional career as assistant director of student financial aids. She was also the first executive director of the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC).

Suggested Reading

Who Are New England’s Immigrants?
By Mamie Marcuss with Ricardo Borgos
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Fall 2004
http://www.bos.frb.org/commdev/c&b/2004/fall/Immigrants.pdf

Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States
By Aaron Terrazas and Jeanne Batalova
Migration Policy Institute, October 2009
http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=747

Immigrants and Health Care Reform: What’s Really at Stake
By Randy Capps, Marc R. Rosenblum, and Michael Fix
Migration Policy Institute, October 2009
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/healthcare-Oct09.pdf

Migration and the Global Recession: A Report Commissioned by the BBC World Service
By Michael Fix, Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Jeanne Batalova, Aaron Terrazas, Serena Yi-Ying Lin, and Michelle Mittelstadt
Migration Policy Institute, September 2009
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/MPI-BBCreport-Sept09.pdf

Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis: Research Evidence, Policy Challenges, and Implications
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Aaron Terrazas 
Migration Policy Institute, January 2009
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/lmi_recessionJan09.pdf

DHS and Immigration: Taking Stock and Correcting Course
By Doris Meissner and Donald Kerwin
Migration Policy Institute, February 2009
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/DHS_Feb09.pdf

Uneven Progress: The Employment Pathways of Skilled Immigrants in the United States
By Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix with Peter A. Creticos
Migration Policy Institute, October 2008
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/BrainWasteOct08.pdf

Spotlight on Refugees and Asylees in the United States
By Jeanne Batalova
Migration Policy Institute, July 2009
http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=734

Resources

Source US Immigration Policy Resources PDF (222 KB)

MPI Data Hub Connecticut Immigration Statistics PDF (126.5 KB)

MPI Data Hub Massachusetts Immigration Statistics PDF (127.1 KB)

MPI Data Hub United States Immigration Statistics PDF (124.1 KB)

7:30 p.m. at Salisbury School’s Seifert Theater on October 16, 2009

Jeffrey Sachs, renowned author and economist, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, with Bill Blakemore, ABC News correspondent, will speak on 4 Global Crises: Money, Security, Heat &  Psychology.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.

In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007. Sachs lectures constantly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth (Penguin, 2008) and The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University.

Bill Blakemore is an American broadcast journalist. Blakemore has been a reporter for ABC News for more than 35 years, covering a wide variety of stories. He has spearheaded ABC’s coverage of global warming, traveling from the tropics to polar regions to report on the impacts and dangers of climate change, as well as possible solutions for it.

Blakemore helped create ABC’s new multiplatform exploration of global warming in TV, Internet, podcast, radio and print formats. He began focusing on global warming even as he was finishing his 27-year coverage of the entire papacy of Pope John Paul II. Blakemore was part of the ABC News team that won the duPont-Columbia Award for its live coverage in Rome of John Paul’s funeral and his successor’s election.