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.

Royte shows readers and audiences  how we can all make a difference by learning to recognize our oversized environmental footprint and then taking steps to shrink it — as individuals, community members and voters.  As we continue to exploit and abuse the planet’s precious natural resources, Royte cautions that positive, regenerative change can only be possible if we honestly reassess our relationships with waste, water and our own daily routines.

Program Descriptions

Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water

In Bottelmania, one of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 “Must Read” Nonfiction Books of 2008, Elizabeth Royte ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, to look deep into the source — of Poland Spring water. In this tiny town, and in others like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste.

Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today (you may be surprised), and the social impact of water-hungry multinationals sinking ever more pumps into tiny rural towns.

Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and-in a world of increasing drought and pollution-better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains.

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

Out of sight, out of mind…

Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels … But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away?

In Garbage Land, one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 2005, acclaimed science writer Elizabeth Royte leads us on the wild adventure that begins once our trash hits the bottom of the can. Along the way, we meet an odor chemist who explains why trash smells so bad; garbage fairies and recycling gurus; neighbors of massive waste dumps; CEOs making fortunes by encouraging waste or encouraging recycling–often both at the same time; scientists trying to revive our most polluted places; fertilizer fanatics and adventurers who kayak among sewage; paper people, steel people, aluminum people, plastic people, and even a guy who swears by recycling human waste.

Royte takes us on a bizarre cultural tour through slime, stench, and heat-in other words, through the back end of our ever-more supersized lifestyles. By showing us what really happens to the things we’ve “disposed of,” Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact-and that unless we undertake radical change, the garbage we create will always be with us: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we consume.

Bio

Elizabeth Royte’s writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.  A former Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow and recipient of Bard College’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, Royte is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor for OnEarth, and a correspondent for Outside magazine.  Her work is included in The Best American Science Writing 2004, and her first book, The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2001.