Category: Forums

Marilyn Barry

August 13, 2017

Permaculture is a creative design process based on whole-systems thinking informed by ethics and design principles that are featured on the following website: www.permacultureprinciples.com. This approach guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics.

By adopting the ethics and applying these principles in our daily life we can make the transition from being dependent consumers to becoming responsible producers. This journey builds skills and resilience at home and in our local communities that will help us prepare for an uncertain future with less available energy.

The techniques and strategies used to apply these principles vary widely depending on the location, climatic conditions and resources that are available. The methods may differ, but the foundations to this holistic approach remain constant. By learning these principles you can acquire valuable thinking tools that help you become more resilient in an era of change.

Marilyn Barry is Business Consultant & Administrative Manager for Barry Consulting. Among other things, she provides business project support for small non-profit and private organizations.

Humanist Community Forum (2017-08-13): Community Building and Resilience via Transition/Permaculture (Marilyn Barry) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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Dr. Frank Heile

July 30, 2017

Dr. Frank Heile, who has physics degrees from Stanford and MIT, will be discussing his upcoming book, “Spirituality Explained – A Model of Consciousness and Spirituality” (https://spiritualityexplained.com/). This explanation of spirituality is completely compatible with the currently known laws of physics and science; thus, there are no “spirits” in this explanation of spirituality!

Humanist Community Forum (2017-07-30): A Scientific Explanation of Spirituality (Dr. Frank Heile) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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Adam Creighton

July 23, 2017

Over one-third of the planet still cooks their food over open fires–at a human health and environmental cost that is staggering, and wholly unsustainable. The health and economic impacts fall hardest on the shoulders of women and young girls, and the paradigm contributes to systemic poverty among the most vulnerable people in the world.

For almost 10 years, the team at InStove (www.instove.org) has been building a movement centered around a technology that could change this paradigm. From unsustainable cooking that kills forests, blackens lungs, and dirties the air, to clean cooking that feeds hundreds at a time, makes hospitals safer, and helps women build their economic assets to escape poverty–for good–InStove has mobilized a sector behind approaches and partnerships that work.

Come see Adam Creighton of InStove discuss their work and the newest applications of their renewable energy technology–a stove which the US EPA has found to be the most efficient in the world.

Humanist Community Forum (2017-07-23): Empowering Women in Ghana with Cookstoves (Adam Creighton) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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Dr. Peter Bishop

July 16, 2017

Dr. Peter Bishop was a very important and very generous member of the Humanist Community in the 1980’s and up until a few years ago, when he and his family moved to the East Coast.  Here is a summary of his talk that Dr. Bishop provided:

Natural Transcendentalism is a philosophy that ties together everything that I have been discovering from a philosophical point of view, and published in my first peer-reviewed journal article of the same name in the Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism.

I am continuing to make headway on this work, but I will present the fundamental point of view: starting from the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was interested in the human capacity for intuition and other religious experiences, such as revelations, but looking at this from the 21st century and a 21st century naturalism. There are three major areas of philosophy that are ripe for advance with such a point of view, and I lay out the three areas in my talk.

Humanist Community Forum (2017-07-16): Naturalistic Transcendentalism (Dr. Peter Bishop) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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