[UCI-Calit2] Sustainability Seminars

Anna Lynn Spitzer aspitzer at calit2.uci.edu
Tue Feb 2 09:46:01 PST 2010


 

CUSA (UCI’s Center for Unconventional Security Affairs) presents the 2010 Sustainability Seminar Series to help foster dialogue between social and natural scientists on the challenges of sustainability in the 21st century. A select group of scholars, researchers, experts and business leaders will present a variety of perspectives on choices and challenges related to sustainability.

 


Tonight:        Bill Tomlinson, associate professor of informatics, Bren School of ICS


Title:             Greening through Information Technology

Time:             7- 8:30 p.m.

Location:        Calit2 Auditorium 

Abstract:         Green IT is a field that explores the juncture between two growing trends - the spread of environmental concern across many human communities, and the rapid adoption of digital tools and techniques for manipulating information. Information technology is transforming societies around the world, affecting many different topics, from communication between people to the workings of international politics. Green IT brings together these two areas, examining the role of information technology in supporting human responses to the world's current environmental issues. Human minds are not well-suited to thinking about problems that occur over long periods of time, large distances and vast complexity; nevertheless, environmental problems often occur on these scales. By helping bridge human scales to environmental scales, information technology can help our civilization launch an appropriate response to these critical concerns. This talk presents a range of Green IT p!
 rojects, some by Tomlinson's research group and others by organizations around the world.

 

 


Next week:   Mark Halle, International Institute for Sustainable Development (Geneva)


Title:             Re‐booting Sustainable Development: Why It Hasn’t Worked and What to Do About It

Time:            7- 8:30 p.m.


Date:            Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010


Location:       Calit2 Auditorium 

Abstract:         The notion of sustainable development was launched two decades ago and quickly attracted a broad following worldwide. It appeared to offer a means to organize economic development in a way that would address the challenges of poverty and social exclusion while ensuring the health of the planet that sustains us, and a great deal of energy and enthusiasm has been invested in it. Despite that, the enterprise has been a failure. Any sober assessment of trends over the past quarter century must conclude not only that we have failed but that we have failed spectacularly. We have made a series of assumptions about our societies, our leaders and our international processes that have proved mistaken. And yet sustainable development remains the only acceptable future for humankind. If we are to reach it, or even advance significantly towards it, we will have to change our approach sharply. We will have to take steps to ensure that economic policy - like trade, invest!
 ment, tax or subsidy policy - offers strong incentives to behave in ways that support sustainability. We will have to change the approach to international consensus‐building. And we will have to accept that sustainability will require not an adaptive set of changes but instead that change will have to be transformative. The combination of the economic crisis and a series of looming environmental crises now make it imperative that we not fail in this endeavor.

 

Sponsored by: the Samueli Foundation, University of California Environment Institute, Calit2, University Extension, Student Affairs, and the Newkirk Center for Science and Society.

 

For more information on the series and future seminar dates, speakers and topics, go to:  http://www.cusa.uci.edu/programs/sustainability_series.html.

 

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