Fall Schedule: Workshop on the Global Environment

Please join the Workshop on the Global Environment
for our Autumn Quarter session.
All meetings will take place on the scheduled Wednesdays at 4:30 in Pick 105.

October 7th, Melissa Rosenzweig and Madeleine McLeester
Graduate Students, Department of Anthropology
“Approaching Archaeological Investigations from a Political Ecology Framework”

*Thursday*, October 29th, Susanna Hecht
Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA School of Public Affairs
"The uses of Environmental History in modern Politics and development"

Susanna Hecht is a specialist on tropical development in Latin America, especially the Amazon Basin and Central America. As one of the founders of the analytic approach known as Political Ecology, Professor Hecht has been engaged in understanding the theoretical and institutional dynamics that underpin deforestation and its alternatives. To this end she has integrated macropolitics into an understanding of local outcomes, but also explores the contributions that local processes can make to understanding and developing solution to large scale problems.

November 4th, Jon Geltner
PhD Candidate, Department of English
“Poetry cannot save the earth: the problems and promises of Kenneth White's 'geopoetics'"

The main purpose of this essay is to understand the work of the Franco-Scottish writer Kenneth White. Through a series of close readings from each of the three genres in which White has written (essays, travel, poetry), I explicate White’s ideas and practices, and situate them relative to other approaches to ecological criticism, and other genres of literary interaction with the environment (broadly construed as city, countryside, wilderness, or whatever). Some similarities to Anglo-American environmental literature and criticism will be apparent, but I am arguing for White’s literary merit primarily as a corrective to certain tendencies in the English-speaking world. In particular, I am arguing against the habit of imagining that literature has the capacity to make its readers better stewards of the environment, that it is located in nearly the same part of our culture as, say, environmental policy or the real science of ecology. As our engagement with White will reveal, the writer’s job of work is much older, and much more radically dissenting than such a description of his influence would allow.

*Thursday* November 19th, Reuben Keller
Henry Chandler Cowles Lecturer in Environmental Studies
“Combining Economics and Ecology to Address Invasive Species”

December 2nd, Sola Olopade
Professor of Family Medicine and Medicine Section of Pulmonary and Critical Care
University of Chicago
Clinical Director, Global Health Initiative
“Indoor air pollution from burning biomass: Implications for Maternal and
Child Health in the Developing World”