Experts to reflect on changing face of environmentalism

Noted scholars will gather on Earth Day (Friday, April 22) at a symposium at UW–Madison to deliberate on emerging environmental challenges in the age of globalization.

Featuring several speeches, a poster session and a panel discussion, the meeting titled “Earth Day 2005: A Reconsideration of Human and Environmental Vulnerability,” will address the growing complexity of the global environmental movement at a time when degrading natural systems increasingly influence human ways of life.

“Global environmental challenges are reemerging on the global political agenda,” says Clark Miller, an assistant professor at UW–Madison’s LaFollette School of Public Affairs. “There is beginning to be the recognition that people and nature are coupled in a dynamic interaction; this represents a shift in our understanding of the human place in nature.”

The shift also reflects how much the world has changed since the first Earth Day in 1970, says Miller, when environmentalists primarily were mobilizing around the idea that man-made industrial activities were the single largest threat to the fragile, interconnected systems on Earth.

“What we understand now is that the picture is more complicated,” says Miller. “Natural systems have turned out to be very important for making our lives possible. But now with degrading ecosystems come losses in ‘ecosystem services’ such as the lack of clean water and air, emerging infectious diseases and decreasing soil fertility.”

Addressing the escalating decline of ecosystem services will be keynote speaker Walter Reid, head of the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a monumental investigation of ecosystem services worldwide and their relation to human well-being. Reid will announce some of MA’s findings, released in the first of several reports last month.

The UW–Madison meeting also will bring together several global environment researchers who recently have joined university faculty. Among new UW–Madison scholars are Frances Westley, the new director of the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; Jonathan Patz, renowned for work on environmental change and human health; and researchers Samer Alatout and Leila Harris, who both study the geopolitical forces underlying water resources in conflicted territories.

Other visiting speakers include keynote speaker Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long Martello of Harvard University; Leslie Dierauf of the United States Geological Survey; Leonardo Trasande of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine; and Il Chyun Kwak of South Korea’s Kyungwon University.

The Earth Day symposium will take place from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday, April 22, in Room 1100 of Grainger Hall, 975 University Ave. All symposium events are free and open to the public. For more information, call (608) 265-6017.