Announcements from the January 3 General Meeting

Finding Common Ground Presentation
We kicked off 2018 with our first chapter meeting on Wednesday, January 3. Craig Childs, Vice President of the Hill Country Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalist, gave us a one hour version of the talk that he had given at the TMN annual conference: Finding Common Ground a! nd Advancing Positive Conservation Outcomes in Environmental Issues.
There was a good deal of give and take as members questioned how best to present the facts about environmental issues without advocating for a particular position. Craig presented several scenarios where facts and opinion could be talked about and suggested possible outcomes that were consistent with the Texas Master Naturalist code of conduct.
The complete Finding Common Ground presentation is attached here.  Finding_Common_Ground_Presented_1_3_2018

Plant Rescue at Bluestem Nursery
John Snowden’s Bluestem Nursery is going out of business; the land is being sold and will be developed. John has offered the opportunity to non profits to come out to the nursery and remove plants for use in prairie restoration or other native plant uses.
We will go out to the Bluestem Nursery this Sunday, January 7, at 1 p.m. to remove what we can for use at 12 Hills. Contact information and more information from John Snowden is in the announcements.
We have a number of projects that could use these native plants and we should plan several trips to Bluestem Nursery in the next month or so to remove them while the plants are dormant. We need people to step forward and set a time, during the week or on the weekend, to recover these plants for our various projects.
John reports that it is too late to recover seeds from the plants, but we can still recover whole plants.

Mail Chimp
We will begin to use Mail Chimp as we retire the Yahoo! listserv we have used to broadcast NTMN email. We will use the email addresses that have been entered into the VMS profile for each member as the source of our initial list. We will develop additional lists to send out Jim’s This N That, the Dragonflyer newsletter, the 2018 class, and other content. We hope for a better outcome in email delivery than we have had from the Yahoo! Listserv. We will use both systems for a while to make you aware of the transition and so you don’t miss anything. Be patient.

Click here for all announcements: January_2018_Meeting_All_Announcements_V2

Thank you for your participation,
Bruce Stewart
President
North Texas Master Naturalist