   |
|
 
|
|
Hollis Lectures in Environmental Studies Archive The Hollis Lectures were established through the generosity of the Hollis Foundation. The Hollis Lectures bring nationally recognized practitioners and scholars to Colby to present their views on major issues in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies.
Tuesday, March 10, 2010 Steve Coleman has led Washington Parks & People’s award-winning work since it began as a volunteer neighborhood park crime patrol in 1990. In 25 years of non-profit service, he has been a vice president for development and director of research for a national business association working to reverse the arms race, program director of an international environmental advocacy network founded by Ted Turner, staff officer for a national foundation, a fundraising consultant for environmental media initiatives, a lobbyist with the American Friends Service Committee, and an intern reporter for Public Broadcasting’s MacNeil/ Lehrer Report. Steve has been an elected officer of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, Washington Innercity Self Help (WISH), the Reed-Cooke Neighborhood Association, and the city-wide Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners Assembly. An inspiring speaker and consultant on urban park revitalization, Steve has appeared in media stories about the urban parks movement across the U.S. and abroad. His recent writings about city parks have appeared in Places: A Journal of Environmental Design, and Urban Parks Online. Steve is a Trustee of the City Parks Alliance, has served on the faculty of the American Planning Association’s City Parks Forum and the Urban Open Space Leadership Institute, and appeared as a keynote speaker at Great Parks/ Great Cities Conferences in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Portland (Oregon), London, and Barcelona. Born in India, Steve has lived in Adams Morgan for 22 years.
Tuesday, October 27th 7pm in Olin 1 George Lapointe was appointed Commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources in September 1998. George is a veteran state and federal marine fisheries manager. He received his BS in Wildlife Biology from the University of Massachusetts and holds a M.S. in Wildlife from the University of Minnesota. Commissioner Lapointe formerly held the position of Director, Interstate Fisheries Management Program, with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), Washington, D.C. George directed ASMFC's fishery management planning activities; supervised the preparation and implementation of fishery management plans for 19 Atlantic Coast species, seeking state based solutions to fishery management issues; coordinated activities with state marine fisheries agencies, federal agencies, academic and scientific organizations, conservation organizations, and members of the public to promote efficiency, outreach and public participation in the ASMFC fishery process. George will discuss these three important Maine fisheries and contrast their relative success or failure. These fisheries provide a springboard for discussions on the management of common property fisheries in Maine and New England. He will also discuss contemporary marine management issues such as catch share management, marine spatial planning, ocean energy development, and marine protected areas.
Tuesday, March 18, 2009 Professor Isham has collaborated with Middlebury students and others has building the climate movement, as summarized at the What Works project. He currently serve on advisory boards for Focus the Nation, Climate Counts, and the Vermont Governor's Commission on Climate Change. He has co-edited Social Capital, Development, and the Environment with Tom Kelly and Sunder Ramaswamy; published articles in Applied Financial Economic Letters, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of African Economies, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Rural Sociology, Society and Natural Resources, Southern Economic Journal, Social Sciences Quarterly, Vermont Law Review, World Bank Economic Review; and World Development; and published book chapters in volumes from Cambridge University Press, The New England University Press, and Oxford University Press. November 11, 2008 It is easy to define biodiversity conceptually, e.g. "the diversity of all forms of life at all levels of organization," and such definitions clearly imply that biodiversity includes plants, animals, and microbes at the genetic, species, and ecosystem level of classification. Unfortunately attempts to define biodiversity with quantitative indices are not so straightforward and can often lead conservationists into misguided attempts to maximize biodiversity by increasing species richness. The goal of conservationists should be to maintain natural assemblages of species, or in cases where ecosystems have been degraded, to restore natural assemblages of species. But the question remains, how can this be done efficiently.
April 10, 2007 An overview was presented of what impacts Maine is
facing and will likely continue to face due to climate change, and the
importance of mitigating these impacts through implementing effective
policy. RGGI is an example of policy aimed at reducing emissions of
greenhouse gases. Why is climate change a priority issue for The Nature
Conservancy and why is RGGI a priority policy for the organization as well as
for Maine? An overview of the details of the RGGI program
and what particular components of RGGI are priorities for The
Conservancy will be given. The presentation closed with thoughts on how members of
the audience can provide input and assist in the adoption of RGGI.
October 24, 2006 Progress is in trouble. We see hunger amid plenty, mass poverty alongside spectacular wealth, forest losses, species extinction, and climatic changes. These are some of the Achilles heels of the otherwise spectacular 20th century—failings that threaten to unravel the century's impressive gains. Continued human advance in the 21st century require that these fundamental flaws be corrected to created a sustainable progress. A new understanding of progress will require that our economies and societies be rooted in the natural environment. It will also require that the very goals of progress be revamped, to stress well being rather than merely wealth creation. This new progress--sometimes known as sustainable development--would be revolutionary if it weren't so commonsensical--and so deeply rooted in humanity's spiritual and philosophical traditions. This talk will critically examine the progress of the 20th century, then outline exciting possibilities for a new progress this century. It will show how businesses, policymakers, and civil society, including religious groups, are working to forge a new vision of progress--and how to make that vision a reality. As director of research Gary Gardner oversees the research staff at the Institute, providing both intellectual and administrative leadership. Before joining the Institute in 1994, Gary was project manager of the Soviet Nonproliferation Project, a research and training program run by the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. There he authored Nuclear Nonproliferation: A Primer, which is also published in Spanish and Russian. He has developed training materials for the World Bank and for the Millennium Institute in Arlington, VA. Gary holds Master's degrees in Politics from Brandeis University, and in Public Administration from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and a Bachelor's degree from Santa Clara University. April 18th, 2006
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
October 4th, 2005 Dr. Ronald Tilson will talk about his international wildlife research and conservation efforts and how his experiences early in life and as a student led him to become one of the world's foremost authorities on tigers. Dr. Tilson has lived and carried out field work in some of the most remote regions of Asia, Africa, and South America. Author of over 200 popular and scientific articles, he has received numerous honors and awards, including the American Zoo and Aquarium Association's International Award in Conservation and its Significant Achievement Award in Conservation. Ron Tilson grew up camping, fishing and hunting in southern Montana. He went to the University of California at Davis, earning BS and MS degrees in Entomology, and a Ph.D. in Ecology after 3-years of fieldwork in the primitive Mentawai Islands off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Next was a 4-year post-doctorate at the Desert Ecological Research Institute in Namibia. Along the way he served in both the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves and as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malaysia. He has published over 200 popular and scientific articles, given numerous key-note lectures or talks to a cross-section of academia and general public, co-edited Tigers of the World: The Biology, Biopolitics, Management and Conservation of an Endangered Species in 1987, and the Management and Conservation of Captive Tigers in 1994– now translated into the national languages of Thailand, Indonesia, Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese. March 29th, 2005 Recently the Minerals Management Service (MMS), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior, that oversees 1.76 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), marked the 50th anniversary of the first federal offshore lease sale for oil and gas drilling. On this occasion, MMS cited "the ever-increasing demand for wnergy to fuel the lives of a burgeoning middle class, trailblazing regional energy companies purchased their first federal offshore leases in a quest for oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico." Today, there are 4,000 platforms operating in the Gulf of Mexico producing nearly 1.7 million barrels of oil per day and 12.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. Vivian Newman received the John Muir Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Sierra Club, last year. Over the years, armed with documents and a vast network of contacts within government agencies and the scientific community, Newman has quietly worked behind the scenes on some of the nation's biggest environmental battles. Newman's work on the organization's sustainable fisheries policy influenced the development of a similar policy last year at the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. October 21st, 2004 Tom will bring his slide presentation based on his book, "Reading the Forested Landscape, A Natural History of New England ". It introduces people to approaches used to interpret a forest's history while wandering through it. Using evidence such as the shapes of trees, scars on their trunks, the pattern of decay in stumps, the construction of stone walls, and the lay of the land, it is possible to unravel complex stories etched into our forested landscape. This process could easily be called forest forensics, since it is quite similar to interpreting a crime scene. Tom Wessels is the author of "Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England and "The Granite Landscape: A Natural History of America's Mountain Domes, from Acadia to Yosemite". He is professor of Ecology and founding director of the Masters Degree Program in Conservation Biology in the Department of Environmental Studies at Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, New Hampshire. March 9th, 2004 John Grim is a professor in the Department of Religion at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA. His fields of interest are American Indian Religions, Indigenous Religions, Religion and Ecology, and Ritual Studies. As a historian of religions, John undertakes annual field studies in American Indian lifeways among the Apsaalooke/Crow peoples of Montana and the Kettle Falls/Salish peoples of the Columbia River Plateau in eastern Washington. Raised in the Missouri drift prairies of North Dakota, John attended St. John University, Collegeville, MN majoring in history and religion, He did graduate studies with Thomas Berry at Fordham University, New York City. There, he completed a doctoral dissertation on Anishinaabe/Ojibway healing practitioners published in 1983 by the University of Oklahoma Press as The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians. John is the editor of the volume Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The InterBeing of Cosmology and Community published in April 2001. With his wife, Mary Evelyn Tucker, he has co-edited Worldviews and Ecology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1994) a book discussing perspectives on the environmental crisis from world religions and contemporary philosophy. John co-organized, with Mary Evelyn Tucker, a series of thirteen conferences on "Religions of the World and Ecology" held at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) from the Spring of 1996 to the Fall of 1998. The culminating conferences in this series were held at the United Nations on October 20th, and the American Museum of Natural History on October 21st, 1998. The series on "Religions of the World and Ecology" is being published for CSWR by Harvard University Press. Currently, ten volumes are published, namely, Confucianism and Ecology, Buddhism and Ecology, Christianity and Ecology, Hinduism and Ecology, Jainism and Ecology, Daoism and Ecology, Judaism and Ecology, Indigenous Traditions and Ecology, Judaism and Ecology, and Islam and Ecology. The final volumes, Shinto and Ecology and an overview study on Cosmology of Religions will be published in 2004/5. This work continues as the Forum on Religion and Ecology http://environment.harvard.edu/religion John is also president of the American Teilhard Association (www.teilhard.cjb.net) which explores the thought and insights of the French Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in such areas as religion, science, and evolution. November 10th, 2003 One of the well-known characteristics of policy is known as the
"pendulum effect". According to this view policy innovations are
typically underutilized at first and then, once momentum is gained
through familiarity, tend to be accorded too much respect. Has that
happened to market-based environmental policy instruments as they
have moved from the wings to center stage? In this lecture Colby's
own Tom Tietenberg draws upon his thirty years of experience with
designing and evaluating these policies for the United Nations,the
World Bank,the OECD, USAID, the USEPA and several state and foreign
governments to assess the state of the art. His lecture discusses the
evolution of the use of these instruments and what has been learned
from that evolution. Back to Hollis Lecture Events.
|
|
ES Home | Colby College | Search | Contact
© Environmental Studies Program Colby College 5356 Mayflower Hill Drive Waterville, Maine 04901
207-859-5356 escoordinator@colby.edu