What is this Blog?

This a personal opinion blog by Fred Nowak concerning Hartford Audubon. Its main distribution comes from being listed on the Web page of the HASmember website.

 The goal of this blog is to post reasoned, factual, personal opinions on any HAS matter that strikes my fancy.

 The opinions might be rooted in some task I do, however, they do not represent the opinions of the task group. They are most certainly not the opinion of any Board member.

Fred

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Popular posts from this blog

An Ideas List

From the January 2010 issue of The Crest   One of my biggest pleasures in 2009 was seeing that the more information you give members the more they do. In particular, I have in mind Larry Lunden leading the Land Team, Sam Fried researching and documenting our legal and ethical situation with regard to the Niederwerfer house, Chris Fisher building access paths in our East Granby sanctuary and Arnie Cantor bringing a public-address system to our monthly meetings. Another response to new information is members regularly tell me “Hartford Audubon ought to do...……". The result I really like, though, is when a member sees a situation and decides "I can do this, it will be fun, I am going to do it". This presented a challenge – how to change "ought to" comments into "doing it" actions. As I thought about this, and it remains a worthy goal, it occurred to me that we should consider the"ought to" comments to be a valuable resource in their ...
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Keeping Our Word

Posted on HASnotes in March 2011 After struggling with solving the Niederwerfer house problem for two years I have concluded that the way someone implements ethical standards into their decision making process is far and away the most significant influence on the decision they will make. The ethical concern with the disposition of the house centers on the promise we made to the Niederwerfers. More specifically, it is about the importance we attach to keeping our word. The difficulty is that “importance” has a range of possible values. It is not a simple on or off proposition. The good part, though, is that endpoints of the range are easy to identify. Here are the endpoints:  We will not make any decision that we know to be unethical, and  We will only make decisions we know to be ethical. The first endpoint is flexible and relaxed. It grants the freedom to choose from the largest number of options. There is no need to prove what you want to do is ethical. All...
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Looking Toward the Hartford Audubon Future: Ideas to Consider, Revise and Expand

Posted on HASnotes in May 2016 I recently heard someone say we need to develop a plan for disposing of our sanctuaries because if we cannot get someone to be president next year we will be forced to shut down Hartford Audubon. That comment has led me to think about what can be done to make HAS a stronger organization by increasing the pool of people willing to serve as vice president. This is important because traditionally the vice president moves up to president after two years. There are two broad areas we can address: ·        Reduce the vice president’s work load, ·        Increase the number of active participating members. When I was asked to be vice president in February 2007, the first thing I asked is what would I have to do. Since the only thing I knew about the vice president was that they introduced speakers at the meetings, I was bit shocked to hear that I would also have to obtain the speakers, make the r...
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