Program Description

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

Using eight familiar objects as guides, Freinkel takes audiences on an eye-opening multimedia journey tracing the rise of plastic and touching on some of its more lasting impacts on the economy, culture, health, and the environment. Focusing on some of the interlocking themes explored in the book — the rise of throwaway culture and its environmental impacts; the new kinds of health risks posed by synthetic chemicals used in plastics, and the politics of regulating them — Freinkel explores both the benefits and problems stemming from our tight embrace of synthetics.

Moreover, Freinkel addresses the problem of plastic waste and pollution and the challenges of dealing with plastics at the end of their useful lives.  And, in doing so, she poses and attempts to answer some of the tougher questions to grow out of this discussion: Is recycling the answer?  Could bioplastics be the materials of the future, and do their benefits outweigh the risks?

Whether or not we as a species can come to grips with our reliance on, and addiction to plastic is a question that will play itself out over the decades to come, but Freinkel’s talk can help audiences better understand our role in perpetuating plastic’s ubiquity, and by the same token, give us the tools to attempt to create a more enlightened consumer future.

The American Chestnut: A Parable of Our Time

In her award-winning book American Chestnut: The Life Death And Rebirth Of A Perfect Tree, Freinkel details one of the worst ecological disasters to ever hit North America: the near extermination of one of the country’s most important forest trees.

Her lecture, based on the book, draws fascinating parallels between this early almost-catastrophe and the ecological problems of invasive species and loss of biodiversity afflicting American landscapes today.  Freinkel tells the story of the chestnuts’ near demise and the decades-long effort of various scientists and amateur botanists to save and restore this beloved tree.  Once one of the most plentiful trees in East Coast forests – source of sustenance for all living beings in its range, from hares to hogs to human and a cultural icon for mountain folk of southern Appalachia — the chestnut was driven to near-extinction by a virulent newly-arrived pathogen

Freinkel discusses the notion that while the natural world is constantly evolving and seeking it’s own equilibrium, we must be more vigilant stewards of our own environment.  If we don’t act responsibly, then we run the risk of setting events in motion that can’t easily be undone.

Bio

A science writer whose work has appeared in a variety of national publications including: Discover, Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian, The New York Times, OnEarth, Health, and Real Simple, Freinkel was awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship in 2005, which allowed her to conduct much of the research for American Chestnut. The book won a 2008 National Outdoor Book Award.

A graduate of Wesleyan University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freinkel began her career as a reporter at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in Wichita, Kansas.  Her interests run wide. She has covered subjects ranging from adoption to weight control, coyote hunts to mad cow disease, new psychiatric treatments to the quest to develop a blue rose — not to mention trees and plastic.

Workman, who served as an advisor shaping national and global policy under US Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Nelson Mandela, addresses this complex riddle in a dramatic and compelling multimedia lecture program.

Program Description

H2Ownership: A Fresh Approach to Unlocking the Three Paradoxes of Water

For all of the loud talk about “efficiency” and “conservation,” natural resource managers are confounded by three profound and deeply entrenched paradoxes when it comes to water: Value, Efficiency, and Monopoly.

Water is priceless in use, and yet worthless in exchange. The more efficiently we use water – drip irrigation, timed sprinklers, low-flush toilets, high-pressure nozzles – the more water we actually use.  And, ironically, saving water eats into utilities’ revenue, forcing them to ‘punish’ conservation by charging more per unit to recover costs.

In his lectures, Workman draws on a decade of experience with the last free Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, who inspired his award-winning book Heart of Dryness, and his new business that translates the Bushmen’s proven coping mechanisms into a Web 2.0, online exchange platform for earning, owning, accumulating and trading water efficiency credits, or EcoShares™.

The resilient Kalahari Bushmen have inspired a bold new approach that is unlocking a more responsible and egalitarian approach to water. H2Ownership replaces top-down rationing and restrictions with secure and equal incentives in which all metered customers can earn, track and exchange water efficiency credits, or EcoShares. This form of creative capitalism can motivate a widespread race to conserve and make today’s vulnerable cities increasingly ‘climate-proof.’

Workman has come to realize that “water scarcity” comes not from a shortage of supply but an excess of demand, and that the real “experts,” the only “water managers” who really matter, are the 6.8 billion untrained end users: the locals – i.e. all of us.

How this works, in practice

Workman anchors water security – and unlocks the paradoxes — via a new yet timeless concept: H2Ownership™. Families and firms no longer must depend on rent-controlled monopolies that unilaterally dictate who deserves how much water for which uses at what rates. Instead, each of us can ‘own’ a virtual and equitably defined and tradable ‘share’ of water. In this way water at last has value in exchange. Efficiency reduces overall use. And scarcity motivates all parties to eliminate waste in a widespread race to conserve.

In pilot demonstration projects in the West, AquaJust™ unlocks water conservation through equitable local ‘click’ markets within a utility’s natural ‘brick-and-mortar’ monopoly. Median accounts who consume all their EcoShares pay nothing; profligates over the threshold pay higher tiered rates. But frugal consumers now earn and accumulate unused shares, tracked on AquaJust, where they can save, donate or sell them to firms or families who want more. The approach replaces rationing and restrictions with fair and voluntary incentives in which all metered customers benefit from choices, conservation incentives, political momentum for raising rates, and AMI technology that can meet their growing demand for real time data and feedback.

Because when we reduce demand we erode revenues needed to improve our water supply. With no choice, competition or incentives to conserve, our ‘natural monopoly’ welcomes overuse yet punishes families and firms who save water. No politician promises voters he’ll deliver higher water, food or energy bills, so we ensure pipes leak and waste worsens. A vicious cycle hardens demand, escalates conflict and erodes trust. Democracy pits water utility vs. customers vs. nature.  This is a battle with no real winners.  A new, enlightened and collaborative solution must be put forward.  With Workman’s example, we may have finally found the answer.

In his lectures, Dr. Ali uses his wide-ranging experience of traveling and researching on six continents to provide real-world examples of how communities and corporations are dealing with the growing problem of resource scarcity, and he provides solutions for reconciling this reality with the equally urgent need for environmental conservation — advocating a practical approach focusing on global development, poverty alleviation and a sustainable future.

Program Descriptions

Constructive Consumption: Greening a Poor Planet

Would the world be a better place if we curbed our desires for material goods? Basing his analysis on the examples laid out in his book, Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future, Dr. Ali’s nuanced conclusion respects the human desire for material goods, but makes the forceful argument for a more ecologically driven economic and social system that helps to reduce global poverty.  Forbes profiled Dr. Ali’s thesis in a special feature.

Eco-peace: Using Environmental Issues to Resolve Global Conflicts

Can environmental issues resolve intractable conflicts?  Dr. Ali’s wide-ranging efforts at peace-building, and his professional training as a mediator at the international level, enables him to outline specific examples of how ecological factors have been able to promote peace, with good leadership, among seemingly irresolvable territorial conflicts. Dr. Ali’s work in this domain has been endorsed by famed ecologist E.O. Wilson and Nobel laureate and founder of the Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus.

Building Peace in the Muslim World

Dr. Ali provides a personal account of his experiences of growing up in both Pakistan and the United States, and how that has provided him with insights into resolving the conflicts between Islam and the West. He also discusses his research on madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) in Pakistan where he has been trying to promote an environmental education curriculum. Dr. Ali’s work on madrassahs has been profiled by the Brookings Institution.

The Science of Stuff: From the Basics of Environmental Science to a Smaller Chemical Footprint

Explaining the basics of environmental science — focusing on how materials flow through our economy and our dependence on “the elements of the earth” — Dr. Ali’s enlightening and entertaining lecture takes audiences through basic chemical processes, then looks at the challenges of developing materials that can have a minimal impact on the environment while meeting societal needs.

Bio

Saleem H. Ali is Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and on the adjunct faculty of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Author of the book Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future, Dr. Ali’s research focuses on the causes and consequences of environmental conflicts and how ecological factors can promote peace. He is on the visiting faculty for the United Nations mandated University for Peace (Costa Rica), where he teaches a course on Indigenous Environment and Development Conflicts.  He is also the editor of the widely acclaimed volume Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution.

Dr. Ali has also been involved in promoting environmental education in madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) and using techniques from environmental planning to study the rise of these institutions in his ethnic homeland of Pakistan.  His book, Islam and Education: Conflict and Conformity in Pakistan’s Madrassahs, grew out of these experiences.  A member of the World Commission on Protected Areas and the IUCN Taskforce on Transboundary Conservation, some of his current research on environmental health perception in mining areas and social responsibility in the mining sector is supported by the Tiffany & Co. Foundation.

A professional mediator, Dr. Ali has conducted workshops on consensus-building for private and public interests, as well as peer review of research publications for the World Bank, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, The Woodrow Wilson Center, the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, the Natural Resources Forum and Yale University Press.  Dr.  Ali received his doctorate in Environmental Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.E.S. in environmental law and policy from Yale University, and his Bachelors in Chemistry from Tufts University (summa cum laude).

Deep in the Mojave Desert sits Las Vegas.  In Sin City, a torrent of water flows freely in massive fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and casinos.  Meanwhile, across the country in places that are not particularly dry or hot, communities, farmers, and factories are struggling to find water, and even running out altogether.  America’s self-inflicted water crisis is spreading, and more quickly than you might think.

In a book that is both frightening and wickedly funny, acclaimed author Robert Glennon captures the tragedy–and irony–of water in America.  From the Vegas Strip to faux snow in Atlanta, from our supersized bathrooms to mega-farms, from billion-dollar water deals to big time politics and personalities, Unquenchable tells the shocking stories of extravagances and waste that are sucking the nation dry.

Our water woes will only grow with new demands for this forgotten resource.  Take Washington’s love affair with biofuels: it will turn to heartbreak once America realizes that thousands of gallons of water are required to produce one gallon of fuel.

Glennon argues that we cannot engineer our way out of the problem with the usual fixes or the zany, but very real, schemes to tow icebergs from Alaska or divert the Mississippi River to Nevada.  America must make hard choices–and Glennon’s answer is a provocative market-based system that values water as a commodity and a fundamental human right.

Bio

A recipient of two National Science Foundation grants, Glennon, the Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Arizona School of Law, serves as Water Policy Advisor to Pima County, Arizona; as a member of American Rivers’ Science and Technical Advisory Comittee;

Glennon’s best-known publication is Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters (Island Press, 2002), which received accolades from Scientific American, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books.

Glennon has contributed commentary and analysis to various television and radio programs, appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Diane Rehm Show, C-SPAN2’s Book TV, and numerous National Public Radio shows.  He is a frequent blogger for the Huffington Post, and his work has also been published in the Washington Post and the Arizona Republic.

Program Description

Back to the Future of Agriculture:
Steps Toward a Robust Food-Economy and a Sustainable Society

In his lectures, Philpott addresses the core economic, political and agricultural issues affecting the current state of food quality, availability and safety in America and throughout the world.  He also makes the case for sustainable methods of farming, processing and manufacturing by drawing on his own experience at Maverick Farms, and presenting examples of individuals, communities and governments who have demonstrated that sustainability can ultimately lead to healthy, cost-effective and profitable solutions.

Philpott details the major environmental and economic effects of industrial agriculture — its destruction of soil, its mammoth effect on climate change, and the way it creates dead zones in coastal ocean areas across the globe. In all of these examples, the way we grow food now threatens our capacity to grow food in the future.  The whole system depends on farmers being able to crank out huge amounts of crops that can be transformed into livestock feed to create cheap meat; into sweeteners for cheap sodas; and into additives for all the convenience fare we find at the supermarket and in the fast-food chains. In this system, farmers don’t grow food for people to eat, they grow industrial inputs that corporations transform into food.

He also argues that by eating and drinking, we literally embody the land by ingesting what grows from it. Since this relationship is so intimate, it isn’t surprising that the health of landscapes and the health of people are directly linked — landscapes such as the vast fields devoted to one crop, dependent on artificial fertilizers and a variety of poisons. Almost completely depopulated and devoid of diversity — indeed, at the whim of entire industries that exist to eradicate their biodiversity — these brutalized landscapes, it can be argued, are brutalizing our bodies in turn.  Healthy, beautiful agricultural landscapes tend to engender healthy, beautiful people. Unhealthy, ugly agricultural landscapes, by contrast, tend to create disease and dysfunction.

So, if food, our daily, inevitable link to the land, can be used to extract wealth from communities and enfeeble bodies – which our giant food-processing and agribusiness companies have certainly demonstrated – can’t it also be used to build wealth and health within communities?

Philpott answers this question and tackles many of the other crises and dilemmas we currently face. The challenge, as he sees it, is to move away from a food-production system designed to deliver minimal nutrition, as cheaply as possible, to a vast low-wage workforce, and to move toward a future where we’re all invested in contributing positively to both the physical and economic health of our country and the rest of the world.

Bio

Before moving to the farm in 2004, Philpott worked as a financial journalist in Mexico City and New York City, most recently holding the title of equity research editor for Reuters, where he wrote daily dispatches on the stock market. His work on food politics has appeared in Gastronomica, The Guardian, Mother Earth News, New Farm, and Sojourners.  Philpott serves of the board of directors of the Boston-based Chef’s Collaborative, a nationwide group that seeks to push the restaurant business in more sustainable directions; and on the board of advisers at the Austin, Texas-based Sustainable Food Center.