Check it out!

From a Restore Hetch Hetchy newletter.

A key component of any environmental campaign is the ability to effectively communicate a message. Thanks to a team of volunteers, Restore Hetch Hetchy has a terrific new site with which to educate the public, recruit volunteers and solicit contributions. Check it out!

RHH would like to give special thanks to the team at Load Bearing Creative in Fresno for the many volunteer hours they put in to develop a new, effective website for RHH. Load Bearing Creative is a full service marketing and design studio-we encourage our supporters to consider utilizing their talented services. Special thanks also to RHH board member, Roger Williams, for making it happen.

A Letter From a Poet

Dear Restore Hetch Hetchy:

We have reached a new stage of evolution where human history is the agency of hope. The twentieth century brought in a renewed consciousness of preservation of the earth-keeping what is left. Our century’s work is restoration. It is imaginative work. It needs the poet and the engineer, the lawyer and business leader. It is up to us now to figure out ways in every river valley to rescue rich soil, every mountain and plain, to be restored. We hear of prairies and watershed and mountains and forests, seabeds, coral reefs, being brought back to life with engineering feats and genius of vision. And this is from Emily Dickinson, engineer of “but God be with the Clown, Who ponders this tremendous scene, this whole experiment in green, As if it were his own!” If we consider this very earth our own, claim it as we once claimed land to up-end, take down trees and habitat, dam rivers, flood valleys, and see a new kind of power in owning this earth, we can make it once again tremendous, we can move from the role of fools to the divine work of the visionary who believes in what is possible. This is the point at which a thousand years from now, a child will find history a story of redemption.

Barabara Mossberg 2010

Pacific Grove Library October 7, 2010 7 pm Lecture and Refreshments

“The Power of the Butterfly:” How Books Have Changed Our World–War and Peace, Civil and Human Rights, and Environmental Law

Ink is dripping from the corners of my lips—there is no happiness like mine—I have been eating poetry! That’s Mark Strand in a library, when he was poet laureate of the United States for the Library of Congress, founded by Thomas Jefferson who started it with his own library, and what he called HIS “canine appetite” for reading—arrrgh–and this is Professor Barbara Mossberg, as Pacific Grove’s Poet in Residence, speaking for the Pacific Grove Friends of the Library—I’m giving a Grovian, groovy, dripping and barking lecture called The Power of the Butterfly—how books change the world, October 7, 7pm, at the Library. We know that in history when a group wants to destroy freedom it first bans and burns books—closes libraries—shuts down literacy–writers are banned and burned—what? These marginal wise guys and wild guys and drooping spinsters and scandalous ladies, scratching on clay, trembling in attics, so powerful? Really? That’s my story and I’m sticking to it: October 7! I’m going to talk about books’ role in civil and human rights, environmental laws, and war and peace! It’s a tale of movers and shakers of our world, heroism, courage, heartbreak, inspiration on epic and nano scales, as writers use their moral imaginations to give us a vision of possibility, a brave new world, conscience and consciousness. So bring that canine appetite of yours down to the library. Join me at Pacific Grove Public Library, October 7, 7 pm, it’s free, like the best things of life, there’s food, for thought and literally! I’m Barbara Mossberg, your host of KRXA 540AM’s The Poetry Slow Down, and I’m looking forward to seeing you then, for what’s at stake in libraries for each of us, civic life and death! I’m just sayin. October 7, 7 pm, I’ll see you there!