Boston Flora

Tag: Amazon

  • Saturday, September 30, 11:00 am – 11:30 am or 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm- Momentum Dance Series: Continuum Dance Project (Rain Date October 1)

    Join Continuum Dance Project at Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park on The Greenway for their new piece Becoming Water as they express the story and their connection to this location through movement and dance. Register here.

    • Date: Saturday, September 30
    • Morning Performance:11a-11:30a
    • Afternoon Performance: 3p-3:30p
    • Location: Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park
    • Rain Date: Sunday, October 1

    The Momentum Dance Series, presented by Amazon, is a site-responsive dance series presented in collaboration with choreographer Peter DiMuro and four local dance companies: Continuum Dance Project, Jean Appolon Expressions, Public Displays of Motion, and Vimoksha Dance Company. Throughout September, each Saturday features one dance company performing twice per day at their selected locations along The Greenway. This series culminates in the Momentum Dance Festival on October 7. All events are free and open to the public.

    In addition, Experience Chinatown, organized by our partner Pao Arts Center, will also be taking place in the same park between Continuum’s shows at 11am and 3pm. Be sure to stick around and enjoy these amazing live performances!

    Continuum Dance Project (CDP), led by choreographers/co-directors Adriane Brayton and Fernadina Chan, has created its newest work Becoming Water in the Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park on The Greenway. Focusing on the Boston Chinatown community, the company has utilized imagery from Cynthia Yee’s ‘Hudson Street Chronicles’ to create a work that honors the experiences of the people of Chinatown, while celebrating their resilient spirit. Exploring the element water as thematic inspiration, the work strives to illuminate the authentic voice of the residents displaced by urban renewal and share their adaptability and toughness. ‘Becoming Water’ reflects on the universal themes of Love, Family, Food, Work, Struggle and Community while engaging with the history and geography of Boston’s Chinatown.

    This series is made possible by presenting sponsor Amazon, with additional support from the Greenway Business Improvement District (BID), Meet Boston, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

    Learn more at rosekennedygreenway.org/momentum

  • Tuesday, October 18, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – The Deep History of Amazonian Agroecological Urban Forests: Why Do They Matter Today?

    In this Harvard Graduate School of Design talk on October 18 at 6:30 in the Piper Auditorium of Gund Hall in Cambridge, Ana María Durán Calisto will discuss the design principles of ancient Amazonian agroecological urban constellations; the ways in which colonialism disrupted (and continues to disrupt) Amazonian patterns of inhabitation and habitat construction; and the visions Amazonian urban history offers to inform our ability to reimagine future urban ecologies. Free and open to the public.

    Ana María Durán Calisto is an architect, urban planner, environmental designer and scholar from Quito, Ecuador. In 2002, she founded the award-winning design group Estudio A0 with her husband, British-Punjabi architect Jaskran Kalirai. Estudio A0 has designed a diverse array of projects, at all scales, in close collaboration with its clients and community partners. Its building QPH obtained the first Leed Gold of continental Ecuador and was ranked 8th among the 500 best socio-environmental projects in Latin America at the 2015 Latin American Green Awards. In collaboration with Del Hierro AU and L + A Arquitectos, it won the competition for the Ikiam University campus, which eventually was awarded First Prize in the SDSN Amazonia Infrastructure Award, COP 21, in Paris. Its incremental housing scheme received Second Prize in a Social Housing Competition sponsored by UN Habitat. Estudio A0’s projects have been extensively published. Recent features include 30 arquitectos más relevantes de América Latina (Línea Editorial y Lexus Editores, 2020), Office Design (Booq Publishing, 2019), Company Gardens: Green Spaces for Retreat and Inspiration (Braun Publishing, 2019), and International Houses (Taschen, 2018).

    Durán Calisto is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the urban planning department at UCLA. Under the advice of Susanna Hecht, she is writing a dissertation on the urban history of Amazonia, with a focus on indigenous systems of territorial planning and colonial disruptions. She is a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, convened by SDSN & the UN. She co-authored its report ́s chapter on urbanization. In2022, she received the Mark Cousins Theory Award. Durán Calisto is a lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture and has taught research seminars and design studios at FADA-PUCE, the Harvard GSD, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, IAAC, Universidad Católica de Temuco, and UCLA ́s Institute for the Environment and Sustainability. She curated the XV Quito Architecture Biennial: Visible Cities (2006) and was National Curator for the IX BIAU. She co-edited the books Ecological Urbanism in Latin America (2019), Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja (2015), IV Taller Internacional de Vivienda Popular (2007). 

    Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.

  • The Hairbrush and the Shoe

    Our Garden Club of the Back Bay members are a multi-talented bunch. Jeanne Stanton, who has been an active member since 1995, has published an entertaining book entitled The Hairbrush and the Shoe, available in paperback and on Kindle on Amazon.

    When a workman is pushed and hissed at by something invisible on the stairs of her family’s 150-year-old townhouse, Jeanne Stanton must confront the possibility that a ghost inhabits. She proceeds in the way any former Harvard Business School case writer would: she embarks upon a rigorous search for proof of the ghost’s existence and identity, exploring the literature and lore of ghosts; the practices of mediums, psychics, and “ghost busters;” and the various attempts that have been made over the decades to verify ghostly sounds and sights through scientific methods. After visits to a psychic provide insights but not proof, Stanton enters the equally mysterious realms of physics and neurology, hoping science has answers.

    Notables encountered during her research efforts include Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oliver Sacks, and Sigmund Freud, the latter a colleague of her home’s original owner. Wry and witty, Stanton takes time out to laugh at her own futile attempts at ghost detection—spending a sleepless night in an allegedly haunted bedroom, creeping along the edges of rooms in search of cold spots—along the way. Determined to get to the bottom of the ghost business, Stanton wavers between skepticism and belief, searching for definitive evidence—and almost failing to find it. Almost.

    Jeanne hosted our New Members’ Reception a couple of years ago in this very house, so those who attended will find the book especially interesting!

  • The Best Gardening Movies

    Farm Coast Editorial compiled a list of The Best Gardening Movies, not documentaries, on its blog: https://www.farmcoasteditorial.com/blog/gardening-movies The list includes movies that “actually showcase the act of gardening within a movie setting.” Most are available on Netflix, Amazon or Hulu – the Farm Coast Editorial post dates from 2019 so you may have to do a bit of searching. Enjoy!

  • Driving With No Brakes

    Garden Club of the Back Bay member Harriet Lewis, with her husband Alan, published Driving With No Brakes in August, 2010, and we want our web site followers to know all about it.  The book is available through www.amazon.com, and at many local booksellers.

    Driving With No Brakes is a fascinating, inspirational book about how two courageous leaders built a remarkable company that can thrive in change and succeed in an unpredictable world. The book offers important lessons for any business leader trying to create value in the 21st century.

    Alan and Harriet Lewis, owners of Grand Circle Corporation, reflect on the company’s successes and failures and highlight important business strategies that have propelled it to be held by many as the world’s best travel company. Through the lens of Grand Circle, they demonstrate how they were able to achieve sustained business success amidst the tumultuous and highly competitive travel industry by fostering a values-based organization that embraces risk while maintaining focus on people and social mission.

    In 1986, shortly after Alan and Harriet Lewis bought Grand Circle Travel, a competitor remarked that there was no way a bunch of hooligans from Boston could run a worldwide travel business. At the time, Grand Circle was a travel company with one office, $27M in sales, and was losing more than $2 million a year. Twenty-five years later, Grand Circle has grown nearly 20% per year into a highly profitable company with annual sales in excess of $600 million. The company owns or charters 60 ships, operates 80 trips in 100 countries, and employs 2,300 people in more than 30 offices worldwide. With social mission tightly woven into Grand Circle’s business strategy, the company has donated or pledged more than $50 million USD to educational, humanitarian, and cultural organizations worldwide since 1992.

    Grand Circle is beloved by its customers (American travelers), more than 125,000 of whom travel with Grand Circle Travel and its affiliate, Overseas Adventure Travel, each year. The company has served more than 1.5 million travelers over the years and prospered through more than 300 crises, including the 9-11 attacks, the rise of online competitors, and ongoing global political, economic and environmental challenges. Despite it all, Grand Circle continues to increase its profitability and grow at a rate of nearly 20 percent per year.

    It has been a wild ride, and there were times when Alan and Harriet were literally driving with no brakes. This book tells the story of Grand Circle and of a remarkable couple’s dream to build a company that would help change people’s lives and of the long, hard, and fun-filled journey they took to get there.

  • Tuesday, May 11, 7:00 pm – Life and Colony Size Among the Ants

    Entomologist, photographer, and intrepid world-traveler Mark Moffett explores the parallel between ant colonies and human societies in his latest book, Adventures with the Ants. From his travels to the Amazon, the Congo, Borneo, Australia, California and elsewhere, Moffett provides fascinating details on how ants live and dominate their ecosystems through strikingly human behaviors: hunting, fighting, building, recycling, and even creating marketplaces.  Mark Moffett — “Dr. Bugs” — grew up in Beloit and graduated from Beloit College in 1979. His explorations of tropical forests and ecology have taken him around the world, from the top of the world’s tallest tree to deep in unexplored caves. He has discovered new plant and animal species while risking life and limb to find stories that make people fall in love with the unexpected in nature.

    Moffett captivates audiences with first-hand stories of tropical ecology, treetop exploration, teamwork and goal accomplishment under extreme conditions, adventures under a rock (wonderful and weird stories of ants and spiders), and the love of nature and conservation. Television’s Stephen Colbert calls him “Ant-Man” and Conan O’Brien calls him a “frog-licker,” but Moffett calls himself a storyteller.

    The lecture, followed by a book signing, will take place Tuesday, May 11, at 7 pm, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street in Cambridge. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information you may call 617-495-3045, or email hmnhpr@oeb.harvard.edu.

    http://www.roychapmanandrews.org//srv/htdocs/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Mark-Moffett-I1.jpg

  • Tuesday, April 27, 7:30 pm – Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connection with Trees

    The UMass Amherst Environmental Lecture Series continues with a free lecture on Tuesday, April 27,  at 7:30 pm in the Bowker Auditorium with Nalini Nadkarni, Professor, Evergreen State College and National Geographic Speaker.  For information and directions, log on to http://www.umass.edu/tei/TEI/LectureSeries.html.

    Nalini Nadkarni has been called “the queen of forest canopy research,” a field that relates directly to three of the most pressing environmental issues of our time: the maintenance of biodiversity, the stability of world climate, and the sustainability of forests.

    She has spent more than two decades climbing the tall trees of Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea, the Amazon, and the Pacific Northwest. In 1994 she realized that there was no central database for storing and analyzing the research she was gathering, so she invented one. This state-of-the-art repository, called the Big Canopy Database, is credited with speeding cross-disciplinary collaboration just as a common database revolutionized the mapping of the human genome.

    Nadkarni is known for using nontraditional pathways to raise awareness of nature’s importance, working with prisoners, artists, dancers, musicians, and even loggers. Her work has been featured in Glamour, National Geographic, on TV, and in a giant-screen film, as well as in traditional science publications.

    In 1994, she co-founded and is President of the International Canopy Network, a non-profit organization that fosters communication among researchers, educators, and conservationists concerned with forest canopies. She spends a great deal of energy on public outreach to the general public, children, and policy-makers on matters concerning forest canopies and forest conservation. She has appeared in numerous television documentaries, and was most recently featured as a canopy scientist in the National Geographic television special on tropical forest canopies, titled “Heroes of the High Frontier”, which won the Emmy Award for Best Documentary Film of 2001. A new project she initiated involves the creation of a multi-disciplinary Forest Canopy Walkway project on The Evergreen State College campus. In 2001, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue her interests in communication of forest canopy research results to non-scientists with collaborations of artists, musicians, physicians, sports figures, and religious leaders.

    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ms2x2NGB824/SZzdfa_L9yI/AAAAAAAAAHY/HI4jA6v3Ajs/s320/nalini+Nadkarni+photo+in+trees.jpg