Future of conservation pondered in Oct. 26 lecture

“The Future of Conservation” will be the topic of a free public lecture by Steven Sanderson at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26, in the Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium, 816 State Street.

Sanderson is president and chief executive officer of the Wildlife Conservation Society, headquartered in New York City. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, has studied the politics of rural poverty, biodiversity conservation, and environmental change, and is a specialist in Latin America.

Part of the Gaylord Nelson Retrospective Lecture Series, honoring the late Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator, his talk is sponsored by the Nelson Institute with support from the Holstrom Environmental Endowment.

For the past 15 years, Sanderson has been deeply involved in organizing scientific cooperation on the environment, through the Social Science Research Council, International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, National Academy of Sciences Oversight Committee on Restoration of the Greater Everglades System, and the Scientific Board of the international Resilience Alliance.

Before 2001, he was dean of Emory College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at Emory University in Atlanta. From 1979 to 1997, he was a professor at the University of Florida, where he directed the Tropical Conservation and Development Program and chaired the Department of Political Science.

In the mid-1980s, Sanderson served as Ford Foundation program officer in Brazil, where he designed and implemented the foundation’s Amazon program.

A former Fulbright Scholar in Mexico, Sanderson also has held fellowships and grants from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution; the Council on Foreign Relations; NASA; and the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller, Tinker, and Heinz foundations. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of Fordham University.

His scholarly publications include books and monographs about Latin American politics and the environment, including “Agrarian Populism and the Mexican State,” “The Transformation of Mexican Agriculture” and “The Politics of Trade in Latin American Development.” He has also written about the politics of conserving wild exploited species and is co-editor of “Parks in Peril: Working with Politics and People to Save Neotropical Biodiversity.”

His most recent publications include “The Future of Conservation,” in Foreign Affairs in 2002; and “Poverty and Conservation: The New Century’s Peasant Question?” in World Development in 2005.