[UCI-Calit2] Ethics and Sustainability -- Tonight

[Anna Lynn Spitzer]

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.

 


Richard Matthew, CUSA director and associate professor of planning, policy and design 


Title:             Ethics and Sustainability

Time:            7- 8:30 p.m.


Date:            Tuesday, Feb. 16, 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.

 

 


Next week:   Lisa Shaffer, executive director, Sustainability Solutions Institute at UC San Diego


Title:             Sustainability and the University

Time:            7- 8:30 p.m.


Date:            Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010


Location:       Calit2 Auditorium 

Abstract:      Universities create the future through discovery, education and example. Campuses throughout the UC system and around the world are developing sustainability programs in response to the challenges facing society, and in recognition of our obligation to contribute to a more sustainable future. Lisa Shaffer will describe some of the experiences, challenges and successes in sustainability programs at UC San Diego and other institutions, from "greening" the campus as a model and living laboratory for its inhabitants, through teaching, research, student engagement and outreach. She will address the challenges of academic culture, the lack of incentives for interdisciplinarity, the tension between research and teaching emphasis, and the need for "boundary organizations" and how hard it is to create them in a university system. 

 

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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