Join us on November 19 at 6 pm for the Commonwealth Club’s Virtual Gala. Raise your glass to Good Health, as we celebrate the leadership of women in science and medicine. Visit

Join us on November 19 at 6 pm for the Commonwealth Club’s Virtual Gala. Raise your glass to Good Health, as we celebrate the leadership of women in science and medicine. Visit commonwealthclub.org/2021gala to learn more or Text Club2021 to 41444 to register and donate today! Many nations have a national poet, whose poetry helps carve out their own unique cultural niche in human civilization. Italy has enjoyed many literary geniuses for over two millennia, but still looks to one man the most: Dante. Like major poets in other cultures, Dante’s influence on the Italian language can hardly be overstated. The Divine Comedy was the first major work of literature to leave Latin behind in favor of Italian, and it remains the world standard of poetic excellence. Dante’s fertile imagination also inspired artists, writers and theologians, making him almost as influential about the afterlife as he is linguistically. Join Humanities West in person at The Commonwealth Club, or via livestream, to celebrate the 700th Anniversary of Dante’s death—which ironically occurred not that many months after he completed his speculations about post-death possibilities—with a two-hour, three-lecture Dante feast: • Timothy Hampton on "Dante After Dante: the Forms of Memory." Though there were many "in the know" about the achievement of Dante's great poem during his lifetime, his vast influence on Italian poetry and world literature was uneven in the centuries following his death. In some areas of artistic creation—for example, in the painting of Botticelli—Dante was powerfully present. In other areas (poetry, philosophy, literary criticism) his influence was definite, but diffuse and oblique. This lecture will speak about the ways in which Dante's work did and didn't shape Italian and European culture in the early modern period. • Kip Cranna on "Dante at the Opera: From the Divine Comedy to a Comic Puccini Delight." In "The Inferno," part one of The Divine Comedy, Dante introduces the condemned sinner Gianni Schicchi, consigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell along with others guilty of fraud. His crime: impersonating the deceased Buoso Donati to falsify Buoso's will for his own benefit. Dante personally knew the Donatis (he was married to one), and therein lies an intriguing tale of medieval Florentine society. The story of this fraudulent will and the legend surrounding it became the inspiration for the famed composer Giacomo Puccini's only comic opera. After outlining the Dante-Puccini connection, San Francisco Opera's Dramaturg Emeritus Kip Cranna will present brief video highlights from the opera Gianni Schicchi, including the ever-popular aria "O mio babbino caro." • Marisa Galvez on "Dante Before Dante Become Dante." In retrospect it almost seems like Dante invented Italian literary culture, but he arrived on the Italian literary scene as a love poet—an admirer of courtly love and the troubadour traditions which had begun a century earlier in Occitania, and had spread to Italy, Spain and then most of Europe. Dante defined the troubadour lyrics as rhetorical, musical and poetical fiction — which is also a good description of The Divine Comedy. OCTOBER 22, 2021 SPEAKERS Kip Cranna Dramaturg Emeritus, San Francisco Opera Marisa Galvez Professor of French and Italian, and by Courtesy, of German Studies and Comparative Literature; Faculty Director, Structured Liberal Education, Stanford University Timothy Hampton Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature; Director, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley George Hammond —Moderator 💯SUBSCRIBE for more VIDEOS: https://www.youtube.com/user/commonwealthclub 📆 UPCOMING EVENTS: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events 🎉 BECOME a MEMBER: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/membership 💰 DONATE NOW: https://support.commonwealthclub.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=298 📺➕📻 Watch & Listen https://www.commonwealthclub.org/watch-listen CWC Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub/ CWC Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cwclub/ CWC Twitter https://twitter.com/cwclub The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum 📣, bringing together its 20,000 members for more than 400 annual events on topics ranging across politics, culture, society and the economy. Founded in 1903 in San Francisco California 🌉, The Commonwealth Club has played host to a diverse and distinctive array of speakers, from Teddy Roosevelt in 1911 to Hillary Clinton in 2010. Along the way, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have all given landmark speeches at the Club.

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Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture talks about how being organic doesn't automatically mean you are in the camp of sustainability. Greening up what you are doing isn't going far enough and move from concept of steady state to resiliency. We have been drawing upon natures reserves of stored energy (hydrocarbons) and water resources at unsustainable rates, and those finite resources are diminishing rapidly; technology alone, will not provide substitute solutions.

Fred Kirschenmann is a long-time leader in the sustainable agriculture movement, Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and a third-generation farmer (an organic farmer himself).  A record from his talk at the Organicology conference in Portland, Oregon. 

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In this multimedia video produced by the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board, Nina Leopold Bradley recounts how she learned as a child to record first flower blooms and the arrival of birds on her family's land along the Wisconsin River. She introduces the practice of phenology, or the study of the timing of life cycles of plants and animals, and explores evidence of climate change from records her family has kept since 1935.

More info and educational resources available at here.Uploaded on Dec 22, 2010

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The Leopold Education Project (LEP) is an innovative, interdisciplinary, critical thinking, conservation and environmental education curriculum based on the classic writings of the renowned conservationist, Aldo Leopold.The Leopold Education Project teaches the public about humanity's ties to the natural environment in the effort to conserve and protect the earth's natural resources.

Quote from Aldo Leopold( 1887-1948) Sand County Almanac: 

"Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college."

A Sand County Almanac; with essays on conservation from Round River

 

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