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The original extent of American prairie evokes our national spirit: expansive, exhilarating in its abundance, full of life and promise. Today - from the tallgrass prairie east of the Rockies, and westward through mid- and short-grass prairies that stretched to the Pacific coast - our native grassland legacy has been dramatically reduced to scattered remnants of its once vast 160-million-acre domain across North America, and from 15 million acres in Missouri to fewer than 70,000. However, these remnants—from pocket prairies that delight us with their beauty and diversity of plants, insects, birds, and other grassland wildlife—-to the larger tracts that support cattle ranching, antelope, and other large animals—remain vitally important to us in terms of water quality, soil health, carbon storage, drought tolerance, pollinator habitat, and also beauty and spiritual renewal. In her presentation to the Ethical Society, Davit will discuss these diverse values of prairie, and why the act of con-serving original landscapes like prairies is critical to sustaining biological diversity and our well-being.

As the executive director of the Missouri Prairie Foundation, Carol Davit oversees fundraising, strategic planning, communications, advocacy, the Grow Native! program, and administration for the organization, and has edited the Missouri Prairie Journal since 1996. Davit has worked for 20 years in the conservation and environmental fields in communications, development, administration, and leadership capacities in the nonprofit sector and in municipal and state government. Davit serves on the Missouri Monarch and Pollinator Conservation Collaborative, the Missouri Environmental Literacy Advisory Board, and other groups. She has written on natural history topics for the Missouri Conservationist and other publications. Davit has B.A. and M.A. degrees in Inter-disciplinary Studies.

Our Core Value is to “strive” to live our values; we recognize that we will not always succeed in acting in accordance with our highest values. And of course, sometimes we are wrong about what is the right thing to do. But how do we react when others fail to live up to our values or expectations? Especially in this political season, what can we reasonably expect of our political leaders or would-be leaders? How can we judge them fairly?

As Ethical Humanists, we seek to act so as to bring out the best in others, in the hope that will bring out the best in ourselves. But what about those times when we fail, and instead end up bringing out the worst in ourselves and others? How can we come to understand the worst aspects of our character, and what can we learn from them?

Authors, artists, and filmmakers throughout history have tried to imagine the future, and the different visions they have created reveal something about our hopes and fears for humankind. What can we learn from visionary depictions of the human future, from the utopian to the dystopian, and how do you imagine our future?

In a time when humanity is facing its largest environmental crisis since the Ice Age, what attitudes and behaviors are truly “extreme”?

It's uncontroversial to say that we should cherish SOME forms of life: cute kittens and loyal dogs are generally respected and treated well. But cancers are alive, as (some argue) are viruses. Should we cherish those? How far should our respect for other forms of life extend?

In celebration of Women’s History Month, Leader Kate Lovelady shares some of the fearless women who have shaped her life and values.

I’m wondering if you could survive even one week in a Missouri State Prison. The food alone is sometimes unrecognizable, you are placed in a cell with a complete stranger after being stripped searched and having all your possessions taken away. You are instructed not to accept anything from anybody - no help from your fellow inmates. Some of the other inmates will test you to see if they can control you. There’s no one to turn to. People on the out-side won’t listen - they believe you are getting what you deserve.

Karlene ‘Kalen’ McAllister is a Zen Buddhist priest who was ordained in 2008 at Ryumonji Zen Monastery in Iowa. She received dharma transmission and traveled to Japan in 2012. She organized the movement to allow Buddhism inside the Missouri prison system and was a volunteer in over six state prisons. In 2009, she was hired to work as one of 22 state prison chaplains in Missouri. She was the only woman Buddhist Chaplain in Missouri and mostly likely in the United States. After 5 1/2 years she retired and has continued her work with ex-offenders or returning citizens. Most recently she opened the Laughing Bear Bakery that hires ex-offenders. She organized Inside Dharma, which is an active Buddhist outreach organization that works with offenders, ex-offenders, and the homeless. They are responsible for putting out the resource guide StarthereSTL.

In an increasingly polarized political environment, how can we learn from people we strongly disagree with? This Platform will explore the ethical importance of learning from those we dis-agree with, and offer some guidance as to how to do it.

“Naturalism” refers to a general worldview that reality in any useful sense is encompassed by what we can experience with our five senses and understand with relatively objective tools. This talk explains why and how Ethical Humanism uses naturalism as our common ground for ethical discussions, and what this means for how we relate to non-naturalistic arguments.