Events 2007-2008
Convocation
Spoerl Environmental Lecture Series
Convocation
Tuesday Nov 6, 11:10 am – Paul Hawken
Since the age of 20, Paul Hawken has dedicated his life to sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. He has written extensively about the impact of commerce on living systems, served as a consultant to governments and corporations on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy, and has founded and run several ecological businesses.
Hawken has written seven books, which collectively have been published in more than 50 countries in 27 languages and have sold more than 2 million copies. Among them are Growing a Business, which became the basis of a 17-part PBS series that Hawken hosted and produced, and The Ecology of Commerce, which was voted the no. 1 college text on business and the environment in 1998 by professors in more than 60 business schools. His 1999 book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, was hailed by President Bill Clinton as one of the five most important books in the world today. Hawken’s latest book, Blessed Unrest, released in the spring of 2007, examines the history of the environmental and social justice movement in which he estimates as many as two million organizations worldwide have participated.
In addition to his writing, Hawken has founded and run numerous ecological businesses, including Smith & Hawken, the popular garden and catalog retailer, as well as several of the country’s first natural food companies that relied solely on sustainable agricultural methods.
Hawken has served on the board of many environmental organizations, among them Friends of the Earth and the National Audubon Society, and been honored with numerous awards, including the Green Cross Millennium Award for Individual Environmental Leadership presented by Mikhail Gorbachev in 2003. Utne Reader magazine named Hawken one of its “One Hundred Visionaries who could Change our Lives” in 1995.
2007 Spoerl Environmental Lecture Series
Green Cities
MetroGreen: connecting open space in North American cities
Donna Erickson -- October 16th, 7:00 pm, Science Hall 102
Donna Erickson is a land-use and landscape planning consultant in Missoula, Montana with particular expertise in the conservation of open and working land. Prior to establishing her own consultancy agency, Erickson was a professor at the University of Michigan for 17 years. Erickson holds landscape architecture degrees from Wageningen University in The Netherlands and Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. She is the author of MetroGreen: Connecting Open Space in North American Cities, published by Island Press in 2006. Her work has also been published in Landscape and Urban Planning, Land Use Policy, Landscape Architecture, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental Management, among other publications.
What’s a green neighborhood?: challenges faced by green developers in Appleton
Mark Geall – October 23rd, 7:00 pm, Science Hall 102
Mark Geall is the principal developer at Tansey Development, an agency that acquires and redevelops formerly industrial property. Currently, Mark is involved in the development of the brownfield area owned by Kaukauna Utilities just north of the College Avenue bridge. Prior to joining Tanesay Development, Mark was a Senior Director of Brownfields Capital (BC), an investment firm that provides funding for the redevelopment of contaminated sites. Mark also spent seven years as Assistant Regional Counsel at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). While at the EPA, he handled remedial and removal Superfund actions from site assessment to closure. Mark attended Cornell University where he received a Bachelor of Arts in English and History. He was awarded a Juris Doctor from Loyola University Chicago School of Law. He also received a Masters of Business Administration from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
The Geography of Nowhere
James Howard Kunstler – October 30th, 7:00 pm, Wriston Auditorium
James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, "Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work." His next book, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, is a look a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, an inquiry into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America is going to do with it's mutilated cities. His latest book, The Long Emergency, is about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st Century."
Mr. Kunstler graduated from the State University of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. Mr. Kunstler is also the author of eight other novels including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.
