Terry Tempest Williams of the activist art installation, Council of Pronghorn, gracefully articulates what changed for her at the 2010 Invoking the Pause Convening.
 
“What has surprised me is the infusion of hope. I did not realize what a deficit I was holding.

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Invoking the Pause was delighted to feature the artistic activism of Nina Wise during the 2010 Convening of Grant Partners.
To compile her brilliant, witty and hilarious improvisational performance, she sat in on the various sessions for the convening as a participant. This fun piece of her work is sure to inspire and tickle you pink at the same time!

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Recently, at the annual The Philanthropy Workshop West alumni conference, I was asked to speak about Invoking The Pause (ITP).  In preparing my remarks and thinking about ways to discuss the impacts and progress of  ITP for the presentation, I realized that I needed to create some new, non-traditional metrics.

So I coined 2 new terms, ROR (Return on Relationship) and Collateral Delight.

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The October 2010 issue of Martha Stewart Magazine featured Windowfarms’ Hydroponic Garden Kits, an exciting advancement in bringing these climate-friendly indoor gardens into the mainstream!
Article excerpt: “There is no substitute for fresh, homegrown produce, but what if you don’t have any outdoor space? Hydroponic gardening is an easy way to grow edible plants in small spaces year round.

“Instead of using soil, roots are suspended in specially formulated clay pellets and are tightly compacted so you can hang dozens in your window. You can either make your own hydroponic garden or you can purchase a kit from Windowfarms.”

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Folklorist Maribel Alvarez and ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan of Taco Diplomacy are giving a lot of thought to the future of a traditional local food, the beef taco. It’s part of their “Flavors Without Borders/Sabores Sin Fronteras” project, which looks at the shared culinary traditions of the Southwest, including Northern Mexico, Southern Arizona and New Mexico.

Click here to read the full article and view the video: Feeding the Future: Smart Ranching and the Southwest Center | The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.

–Taco Diplomacy, a project of Sabores Sin Fronteras, is a 2009 Invoking the Pause Grant Partner.

Within the last decade, tremendous changes have occurred in America’s food production, distribution and consumption. Just take a second to look back to what you ate and what you could not afford to eat at the turn of the millennium, in January of 2000.
Nowhere is this change more evident than in the food- producing landscapes in the Southwestern borderland states of Arizona and New Mexico, where both positive and detrimental changes have occurred. These changes not only affect human health, but the health of land as well.
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Eban Goodstein is the Director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy and Executive Director of C2C and National Teach-In (a 2008 ITP Grant Partner). On November 18, 2010 he was  asked to participate in a press conference announcing a major new green initiative by General Motors.

Chevy’s $40 million project aims to reduce 8 million metric tons of carbon over the next few years through energy efficiency and renewable energy projects in communities across the country.
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Lisa Micheli and Morgan Kennedy of Pepperwood Preserve gave a recent presentation entitled, “Downscaling future climate scenarios to the watershed scale: a North San Francisco Bay Estuary case study” at the California Department of Fish and Game’s recent workshop entitled, “Bridging the Gap: Downscaling Climate Models to Inform Management Actions.”
 

Summary of the presentation:

Analyses from fine-scale modeling on the basis of 4 scenarios indicate:
• Air temperature will increase, precipitation is variable
• Ecosystems will become more stressed due to increased CWD
• Impacts are variable across the region
• Water availability is uncertain across the region
• Local “resilient” areas may maintain vegetation populations despite stresses and declines
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Although Arizona sits in the most arid region in the U.S., it produces a surprisingly low amount of food, from ancient crops like beans and corn, to winter vegetables that show up on dinner tables around the country. A new report shows some cracks in the southwest’s food systems.

Former NAU and current U of A researcher Gary Nabhan edited the study, called the “State of Southwestern Food Sheds.” He told KNAU’s Daniel Kraker that Arizona’s food security has never been more vulnerable and explains the impact this has on our children and future generations.
 
Find out why 25% of America’s ranch and farmland loss in the past 25 years has occurred in the four states bordering Mexico.
 
Click here to listen to the radio interview.