THE ANTHROPOCENE:
a new era in human-environment relations

2014-2015 Altman Speakers

Julian Agyeman, is a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, Medford, MA. He is an environmental social scientist whose expertise and current research interests are in the complex and embedded relations between humans and the environment, whether mediated by governmental institutions or social movements, and the effects of this on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity. He is co-founder, and Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability. With over 150 publications, his recent books include Cultivating Food Justice : Race, Class and Sustainability (MIT Press 2011), Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice (Zed Books 2013) and Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities (Routledge 2014).
Andrew C. Revkin is an American non-fiction, science, and environmental writer. He has spent a quarter century covering subjects ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon and the troubled relationship of climate science and politics.  A reporter for the New York Times from 1995–2009, Revkin currently writes the Dot Earth environmental blog for The Times‘ Opinion Pages and serves as Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at the Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies at Pace University. He has written books on the Amazon rain forest, global warming and the once and future Arctic. Before joining The Times, Mr. Revkin was a senior editor of Discover, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, and a senior writer at Science Digest. Mr. Revkin has a biology degree from Brown and a Master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. He has taught at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Bard College Center for Environmental Policy.
Dale Jamieson Dale Jamieson is Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, Affiliated Professor of Law, and Director of the Animal Studies Initiative at New York University.  Formerly he was Henry R. Luce Professor in Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carleton College and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of several books and the editor or co-editor of nine books, most recentlyReflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy, 2nd Edition. In addition, he has published more than one hundred articles and book chapters. He is on the editorial boards of several journals, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Smail photo crop Daniel Lord Smail is professor of history at Harvard University, where he works on deep human history and the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600. His current research approaches transformations in the material culture of later medieval Mediterranean Europe using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille. His most recent article asks whether there is a history to the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books include Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (1999); The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (2003); On DeepHistory and the Brain (2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011).
figueroa helland headshot Leonardo E. Figueroa-Helland is an assistant professor of Political Studies at Westminster College (Utah). He specializes in global politics, international relations, political theory, philosophy, and indigenous studies. He conducts trans-disciplinary research in global studies, focusing on themes of diversity, intercultural diplomacy, global justice, ecology, sustainability, Indigeneity, cosmopolitics, critical theory, transnationalism, migrations, and global education. His forthcoming book is titledIndigenous Philosophy and Global Politics. Dr. Figueroa-Helland obtained his doctoral degree with “distinction” from the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. He has taught in institutions in the US and Mexico. He has published in journals across different disciplines such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, the UNESCO Journal of Higher Education and Society, the Journal of Critical Education and Policy Studies, and Alter-Native: an International Journal of Indigenous Peoples.
Ray crop Janisse Ray is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, including Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and a collection of nature poetry. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and is the recipient of several awards, including the American Book Award. Ray has been visiting professor and writer-in-residence at many universities, and she lectures widely on nature, community, agriculture, wildness, sustainability, and the politics of wholeness.
Wes-Jackson-300x300 Wes Jackson is the founder and president of The Land Institute.  Previously, he served as a professor at Kansas Wesleyan and established the Environmental Studies department at California State University, Sacramento. He has published widely on agriculture and the environment, including Nature as Measure (2011) and Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture (2010). His efforts have been featured in The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. Jackson has received the Pew Conservation Scholars award and a MacArthur Fellowship, among other honors.
Claire Kremen is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at University of California, Berkeley, and an Associate Conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. A biologist whose applied research advances the fields of ecology, biodiversity, and agriculture, Kremen currently leads a conservation planning initiative in Madagascar. In other research in the U.S., Kremen explores the behavior of diverse native pollinators, such as bees, and the environments that sustain them. Through new methods that improve the ability to measure, manage, and conserve natural systems domestically and internationally, Kremen demonstrates the dependence of sustainable agroecology on effective environmental preservation.Kremen has been awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and been elected to the California Academy of Sciences.  She co-directs the Center for Diversified Farming Systems and the Berkeley Food Institute at the University of California. Her papers have been published in such journals as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Science, Conservation Biology, and Ecology Letters.
Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist activist. His 1989 bookThe End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He is founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement. The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities. Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and the Boston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.” A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes frequently for a wide variety of publications, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone.
Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the founding and current director of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History and Environment, and is also curator of the UW-Madison’s popular environmental film festival, Tales from Planet Earth. He is currently at work on a multimedia project—a film, book, and public history website—that explores the history and legacy of a 1926 Harvard medical expedition to Liberia and the environmental and social consequences that follow in the expedition’s wake.
Karl Zimmerer is a geographer and environmental scientist whose research and teaching is focused on a group of interconnected topics centered on global human-environmental change. These interests concern the interaction of cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental dynamics in agriculture and resource use of developing and developed countries.Karl is author of numerous articles and chapters, and his books and monographs include four publications, most recently Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation (2006, University of Chicago). He is active in various groups and organizations involved with agricultural, environmental, conservation, and globalization policies, serves as the Head of the Geography Department at the Pennsylvania State University and also edits the Nature-Society section of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.
Stephenie LeMenager is a Moore Endowed Professor of English at the University of Oregon. She has collaborated in international relationships with Stockholm University, where she has taught, and Mid-Sweden University, which will partner with University of Oregon faculty and graduate students to address environmental crises such as climate change from a cultural perspective. She has been an invited steering committee member in the Mellon-sponsored “Humanities for the Environment” (HfE) Observatory administered at Arizona State University, a curatorial consultant at the Blaffer Museum in Houston, Texas, regarding an installation by Zina Saro Wiwa which addresses the legacies of oil and the arts in the Niger Delta, and is a member of the “After Oil” research and public outreach collective, based in Canada. These projects, in addition to her book Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford U Press, 2014), represent her commitment to building out the strengths of my literary-historical scholarship and classroom teaching toward a broader discussion of what it means to be human in the era of climate change.
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