Environmental
Studies Evening Colloquia
Wednesday, February 15
7:00 pm in Olin 1
"Conservation
in the New Millennium: the Economic Link"
Commissioner Patrick McGowan
Maine Department of Conservation
Event sponsored by the ES Program, Goldfarb Center, and the Green
House
Patrick K.
McGowan, Commissioner of the Maine Department of Conservation, will speak to
Conservation in the New Millennium: The Economic Link. Commissioner McGowan
will address the history of land conservation in Maine; the economic impact of
the tourism, recreation and forest products industries; the importance of green
certification in future forestry efforts; and, future of land conservation in
Maine.
Patrick K. McGowan was appointed
Commissioner of the Maine Department of Conservation by Governor John Baldacci
in February 2003. The Department
of Conservation is a natural resource agency whose bureaus oversee the
management and protection of some of Maine's most special places: Seventeen
million acres of forestland, 10.4 million acres of unorganized territory, 47
parks and historic sites and over 500,000 acres of public reserved land. As Commissioner, McGowan has been
focused on Governor Baldacci's pledges to bring renewed cooperation to the management
of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway – the River Drivers Agreement;
promote positive forest management – ban liquidation harvesting and
implement the Maine Forest Certification initiative; and encourage land
conservation and economic development – the Maine Woods Legacy Vision.
McGowan is a graduate of the University of Maine at
Farmington and the former owner of several small businesses including McGowan's
Market and the Canaan Motel. An
avid pilot and fly fisherman, he has three children and lives in Hallowell.
Tuesday,
February 21
7:00 pm in
Olin 1
"Human
Health and Chemical Hazards"
Michael Belliveau
Executive Director, Environmental
Health Strategy Center
Mike Belliveau has more than twenty years of experience as an advocate, organizer, leader and manager in public interest work to prevent environmental health hazards. He grew up in New England and graduated from MIT with a degree in environmental science. Before founding the Environmental Health Strategy Center, he served for three years as the Director of the Toxics and Clean Production Project for the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM), the state's leading environmental advocacy group.
As a
project leader at NRCM, he designed and led winning policy campaigns and
coalitions to eliminate mercury hazards and promote safer alternatives to PVC
plastic, which forms dioxin when it burns. Prior to his tenure with the
Council, he spent eighteen years in California, serving as program director and
executive director of Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) in San
Francisco and Los Angeles. Belliveau built CBE into a powerful voice for
environmental health, justice and industrial pollution prevention with more
than twenty staff working in the two major urban areas of the nation's largest
state.
Tuesday,
March 7
7:00 pm in Olin 1
"Nature
as a Metaphor for Designing Technologies, Institutions, and Social Networks"
Dr. Anil Gupta
Professor, Indian Institute of
Management – Ahmedabad
Event sponsored by the ES Program and the Goldfarb Center
Dr. Anil Gupta is
teaching as a professor at the Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad. He
has distinguished himself through his teaching and research, but he has become
known worldwide for his activism in discovering, encouraging, and supporting
grassroots inventors, as a means of alleviating the huge economic problems of
the poverty-struck Indian countryside. His initiatives have been extremely
successful in India and have transcended its borders, finding positive results
all over the world.
As a researcher, Dr. Anil Gupta has been particularly preoccupied with issues
pertaining to the rights of inventors and innovators. How can the intellectual
property rights of poor, grassroots inventors be protected while also properly
rewarding them and making sure they receive the deserved recognition? Dr. Gupta
has combined his interest in exploring the ethical dilemmas surrounding
inventors' rights with his professional background in agriculture and genetics.
Thus, he has focused on developing strategies meant to allow households
situated in high risk environments (flood or drought prone regions, areas
affected by land slides, etc.) to cope with the natural hazards. Anil Gupta has
envisioned a strong connection between encouraging innovations in the
countryside and achieving the conservation of soil, water, and biodiversity.
Dr. Gupta has thus researched and acted towards the implementation of an
impressive number of projects and strategies with a common focus: finding the
path towards sustainable development.
Anil Gupta is the founder of SRISTI, the Society for Research and Initiatives
for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions. SRISTI is a non-governmental
organization preoccupied with supporting the efforts and creativity of
grassroots innovators committed to conserving biodiversity and developing
eco-friendly solutions to local problems. SRISTI has become famous for its
success in identifying marketable inventions and turning them into a
significant source of revenue for poor communities in the Indian countryside.
As the amplitude of SRISTI's activity grew, Dr. Gupta started the publishing of
HoneyBee, a newsletter documenting and publicizing instances of indigenous
knowledge and the ways of turning them into feasible projects at a macro-scale.
The magazine, which has been published without interruption for the last 15
years, is now translated into many languages. HoneyBee has also
become the name of a significant network of voluntary and informal relations
among inventors, scientists, environmental activists, and policy makers interested
in supporting grassroots innovation. The result: a database containing more
than ten thousand inventions from India and other parts of the world. This
network has a powerful emphasis on conservationism, from innovations in fishery
and pastoralism to others in chemical pest management and farm
machinery.
Tuesday,
March 21
7:00 pm in
Olin 1
"Application
of GIS in Target Marketing - a Case Study"
Tiho Andonov,
Tiho Andonov has been an Analyst with L.L. Bean's Corporate Marketing Department since
Tiho Andonov's previous position was with Wunderman, a New York based advertising agency. During his tenure with the compnay, he has worked on various projects for clients such as Sony, Pepsi, AT&T, AICPA, Pfizer, Kraft, Scotts, Pella, AT&T Wireless, and Cingular Wireless. he had a leading role in the group in applying GIS (Geographic Information Systems) methods both as a tool for effective client presentations and an innovative approach to data analysis.
Tiho Andonov has a Master's degree in Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He resides in Waterville with his wife and two daughters.
Tuesday,
April 4
7:00 pm
in Olin 1
Sustainable
Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice
Julian
Agyeman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts
University
Julian will
argue that environmental justice and sustainability provide new directions and
frameworks for public policy. They are both highly contested concepts that have
tremendous potential to effect long lasting change. Despite the different
historical origins of both concepts, and their attendant movements, there
exists an area of theoretical and practical compatibility between them. In
order for the environmental justice and sustainability movements to develop a
common agenda, changes to both will be required. One change is already
happening within the sustainability paradigm, in part as a result of the
influence of the environmental justice project. It is the emergence of a just
sustainability orientation as a counter to the dominance of environmental
sustainability.
Julian
Agyeman is Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts
University, Boston-Medford. His research interests are in the nexus between
environmental justice and sustainability; the characteristics of sustainable
communities; social marketing and sustainability; community involvement in
local environmental and sustainability policy and education for sustainability.
He is co-founder, and co-editor of the international journal 'Local
Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability.
Tuesday,
April 11
7:00 pm in
Olin 1
"Land Protection in New England
Urban Areas: What is Most Strategic?"
Samuel
Merrill
Voluntary land protection in New
England has seen a meteoric rise in the last 20 years, but the very magnitude
of the effort to conserve land in New England has raised questions about how
strategic decisions are about what land to conserve. Is urban land protection deflecting housing pressure into
outlying, more remote areas? Are biological and other tradeoffs being evaluated
at the landscape scale to avoid patterns of protected land that compromise
healthy, functional landscapes. Ways in which "strategic" land protection can
be defined and implemented will be explored.
Sam is an
Assistant Research Professor at the Muskie School of Public Service, University
of Southern Maine, and Director of the New England Environmental Finance
Center, housed at the Muskie School. He received a Master's and Ph.D. in
Conservation Biology from the University of Minnesota, where he studied forest
songbirds, wolves, and creative uses of GIS. For six years he worked for the
Minnesota Department of Natural Resources as a land manager and research
biologist, during which time he received a military medal for distinguished
public service and many other awards. Before coming to the Muskie School in
2001 he was Executive Director of a land trust on the coast of Maine. Professor
Merrill's research interests include the fiscal and policy connections between
land conservation and development in New England.
Hollis Lecture
Tuesday,
April 18
7:00 pm in
Olin 1
"Hundred-Eyed Giants, Voiceless
Canaries, And Hermaphrodites: Examining The Impact Of Pesticides On
Environmental And Public Health"
Dr. Tyrone
Hayes, Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley
Increasing
evidence demonstrates that many environmental contaminants, including
pesticides, can act as endocrine disruptors. Contaminants can mimic natural
hormones, but our data is showing that some chemicals also alter production of
endogenous (natural) hormones in the body. My research uses amphibians (frogs)
to assess the effects of individual chemicals and chemical mixtures as well as
to monitor potentially contaminated habitats. Most notably, we have shown that
the ubiquitous contaminant atrazine (an herbicide) both chemically castrates
and feminizes exposed amphibians by lowering testosterone levels and increasing
estrogen levels respectively. In frogs, this action results in hermaphroditism
and reproductively impaired animals. These effects occur in other animals as
well (fish, reptiles, and mammals) and have been documented in human cell lines
and tissues. In rodents, this actions results in decreased fertility in males
and prostate and mammary cancer. Atrazine is similarly associated with these
diseases in exposed humans. Further, our research has shown that the effects of
individual pesticides are enhanced when these pesticides are presented as
ecologically relevant mixtures. These pesticide mixtures, which retard
development, growth, and act as immuno-suppressors.
Undergraduate Research Symposium Keynote Address
7:30 pm in Olin 1
Human Rights and the
Politics of Pollution (Sierra Club Books, November 2005) that capture the
voices of frontline warriors who are battling environmental injustice and human
rights abuses at the grassroots level around the world and challenging
government and industry policies and globalization trends that place people of
color and the poor at special risk.
Dr. Robert
D. Bullard is the Ware Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the
Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. Prior to joining the faculty at CAU in
1994, he served as a professor of sociology at the University of California,
Riverside, as well as visiting professor in Center for Afro-American Studies at
UCLA. His scholarship has
distinguished him as one of the leading experts on environmental justice and
race and the environment. He is one of the planners of the First and Second
National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. Dr. Bullard served on
President ClintonÕs Transition Team in the Natural Resources and Environment
Cluster (Department of Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Environmental
Protection Agency). He served on
the U.S. EPA National Environment Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) where he
chaired the Health and Research Subcommittee.
Tuesday, May 9 Students in ES298 (The Environment and Human Health) have been exploring
the local connections between our environment and our health. Come hear
what they have discovered about how your health might be impacted by the
air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the energy you use,
the garbage you generate, and the household products you use, including
pesticides, detergents, cosmetics, and even your Nalgene bottle!
7:00 pm in Olin 1
"Cars, Cosmetics, Cuisine, and Chemicals: An Environmental Health Audit at Colby"
ES298 The Environment and Human Health