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Dr. Kathryn Fiorella: Environmental Change in Cambodia’s Social-Ecological Food Systems
Social-ecological systems are changing at an unprecedented rate. As our environments are revamped, what does that mean for the people who live and work within these systems? How does it impact their choices about how to use fisheries and their access to biodiversity within them? We will use the case of Cambodia’s social-ecological food systems…
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Dr. Eyal Frank: Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China
How do large disruptions to ecosystems affect human well-being? In 1958, China embarked on the “Four Pests Campaign” that aimed to quickly eradicate flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows nationwide, despite warnings from scientists that sparrows play important roles in pest control. Historians have long suspected that eradicating sparrows, by letting other pest populations grow out…
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Dr. Onja Razafindratsima: Plants on the move: influence of lemur behavior on seed dispersal patterns
This talk will provide an overview of the roles and impacts of lemur frugivores on plant population dynamics and community structure in biodiverse rainforests in Madagascar, where a majority of plants have traits adapted for seed dispersal by animals and highly diverse plant communities are relying on a limited set of frugivore generalist taxa for…
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Dr. Simi Kang: What is Refugee Resilience? Reframing Survival Under Environmental Sacrifice
In this talk, I examine how the political imperative for racialized Louisianians to be resilient to ongoing environmental harm has specifically impacted Vietnamese American families who rely on commercial fishing. This includes thinking about disaster and responses thereto, restoration policy, and, increasingly, calls for structurally vulnerable communities to relocate away from the coast. In so…
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Dr. Erin Sills: Causal Inference, Conservation Science, and Carbon Offsets
Dr. Sills will be discussing causal inference, and how it relates to both conservation science and climate change. Their research interests include markets and payments for non-timber forest benefits; Forest-based livelihoods and economic development (including current project on community forestry in Nepal ); Deforestation and land use in the tropics (including current project on sociohydrology…
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Chief Roland Willson: A Critical Balance
Chief Willson will address cumulative effects on West Moberly First Nations territories, including those stemming from hydroelectric dams, forestry, oil and gas development and now climate change. He will also speak about their path-breaking caribou recovery efforts in light of these cumulative effects.
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Dr. Libby Lunstrum: The Dual Crisis of Conservation: Biodiversity Decline and Conservation’s Dispossessions
Biodiversity conservation is experiencing a dual crisis: the crisis of biodiversity decline coupled with the crisis of dispossession caused by efforts to protect and conserve nature. Each of these trends has emerged as a defining feature of conservation biology and political ecology respectively, two disciplines that often stand in tension with one another. In this…
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Dr. Jesse Popp: Weaving Ways of Knowing Among the Trees
Similar to the way diversity held within a mixed wood forest allows life to flourish; the inclusion of multiple ways of knowing, ways of being, and knowledge systems in the natural sciences and beyond provide holistic understandings that benefit all. From population monitoring to wildlife ecology, Indigenous and Western science can be woven in a…