Fall 2009-Spring 2010
September 17, 2009
Students, Learning and Sustainability: Reflections from a Student Farm
11:30am
Hatfield Room, Mark O. Hatfield Library
Mark Van Horn
Director of Organic Farming at University of California, Davis
Mark Van Horn is director of the UC Davis Student Farm and a lecturer in Plant Sciences. Since 1977, the 20-acre Student Farm has offered diverse programs that focus on sustainable agriculture principles and practices, emphasizing in-field, experience based learning that facilitates student initiative, creativity and exploration. Both the agriculture they pursued and their methods of pursing it were considered “alternative” at the time. We can see that students created and re-created diverse ways of learning and shaping their learning experiences over the years. In an era when society is beginning to recognize the importance of these issues, we can collaborate with students and use this history to help us design and refine ways for them to learn about agriculture, food and sustainability.
Brown Bag Lunch
October 2-3, 2009
Willamette University Sustainability Retreat
"What's Fairness Got To Do With It?
A Conversation About Equity"
Lost Valley Educational Center
This year's Annual Sustainability Retreat is focused on one of the fundamental building blocks of Sustainability at Willamette: Equity. The discussion will revolve around defining, revitalizing, and prioritizing conversation and action on issues related to equity on campus, finding ways to communicate the relationships between equity and sustainability more effectively, and exploring ways in which the Sustainability Council and the Council for Diversity and Social Justice can support each other's work.
For more information, contact:
Robin Morris Collin at rcollin@willamette.edu, Co-Chair, Willamette University Sustainability Council
Wendy Peterson Boring at wpeterse@willamette.edu, Co-Chair, Willamette University Sustainability Council
Charlie Wallace at cwallace@willamette.edu, Chair, Council for Diversity and Social Justice
or visit the website here
October 21, 2009
Campus Sustainability Day
October 29, 2009
Living for Keeps in Willipa and the World
7:00pm
Paulus Lecture Hall, Truman Wesley Collins Legal Center
Robert Michael Pyle
Lepidopterist and Professional Nature Writer
Pyle is a critically acclaimed nature writer. He received the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing in 1987 and was a finalist for the 2008 Washington State Book Award for General Nonfiction. Pyle will present readings from his work, including: Wintergreen, Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place and The First Butterfly Big Year.
A book signing will take place after the reading.
October 30, 2009
Gabrielle Louise's songs are anchored in folk and roots, while her melody and delivery show strong pop sensibilities. Her sound has the earthy feel of early Joni Mitchell while also capturing the emotion and musical adventurism of fellow genre-hopping artist Martin Sexton. Gabrielle is at one moment folkie and ethereal, the next moment a smoky jazz chanteuse. She has 100% independently released four records, Journey (2006), Around in Circles, the E.P. (2007), Cigarettes for Sentiments (2008), and Live in Coal Creek Canyon (2009).
Gabrielle Louise is a performer, who like many other socially-conscious musicians, has made a commitment towards peace and the environment through music. Gabrielle has released a new single, "Save the Arkansas"that seeks to bring awareness to a dire environmental situation that is threatening the health and safety of the Arkansas River Watershed. Having both grown up and worked as a raft guide on the Arkansas, maintaining the purity of its waters is very important to her. She was also recently asked by the Willie Nelson Peace Institute to cover Nelson's "Peaceful Solution."
Recently, Gabrielle is getting really involved in the world of alternative fueling. The band has been touring this year in what's known as a "Veggie Van," using what would be thrown out restaurant grease to fuel the tour van! Originally from Colorado,Gabrielle has also made her home on the East coast, in Boston and New York. She currently resides in Denver, CO.
November 4, 2009
To Save the World: Do We Have any Obligation to the Future?
7:30pm
Paulus Lecture Hall, Truman Wesley Collins Legal Center
Kathleen Dean Moore
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon
In our time, the world has reached its greatest richness of diversity and beauty. I believe that taking whatever we need from the world to support our comfortable lives, and leaving for the future only a ransacked and dangerously unstable world, is not worthy of us as moral beings. We have an affirmative ethical responsibility -- individual and collective -- to leave to the future a world as rich in possibilities as the world we inherited." With stories, readings from her book The Pine Island Paradox, and testimony collected from scientific and moral leaders all around the world, Kathleen Dean Moore will argue that climate change and other environmental disasters are not only scientific or economic issues — they are moral issues.
Moore is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she is the founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. She teaches courses in environmental ethics and a field course in the Philosophy of Nature. Moore lives in Corvallis, Oregon and Chicagof Island, Alaska. Her current work is in the areas of environmental ethics and philosophy and nature, where she has published three award-winning books of essays: The Pine Island Paradox (Milkweed Editions, 2004); Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World (Lyons Press, 1999, 2004); and Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water (Harcourt Brace, 1996). She is co-editor of a forthcoming collection of articles about Rachel Carson's legacy and challenge and the co-editor of How It Is: A Native American Philosophy, the collected papers of the late Viola Cordova.
November 5, 2009
The Work of a Writer in a World of Wounds
11:30am-12:30pm
Cone Chapel, Willamette University
Kathleen Dean Moore
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon
The wounds that our way of life has inflicted on the land, the air, and the great diversity of life on Earth have brought us to a pivotal point in human history. We are called to find new answers to the foundational questions of the human condition: What is a human being? What is the relation of humans to the Earth? How, then, shall we live? The search for a new worldview will be — it must be — the greatest exercise of the human imagination the world has ever seen. What is (and what is not) our work in this time and this place? Using her recent co-authored book, In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens, Kathleen Dean Moore will discuss how the sciences, humanities, and arts can work together to re-imagine the way we live in a world of catastrophe and renewal.
November 9, 2009
Sustainable Equity: Stories of Artisans and Fair Trade
4:00pm
Hatfield Room, Second Floor, Hatfield Library
Doug Dirks
Master Storyteller from Ten Thousand Villages
Considered instrumental within the fair trade industry, Mr. Dirks has been at the forefront of the fair trade mission since its inception and introduction into North American markets. Mr. Dirks works in Public Relations for Ten Thousand Villages, one of the first and largest fair trade purveyors of goods in the U.S. Ten Thousand Villages is a founding member of both the Fair Trade Federation (USA and Canada) and the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO, formerly the International Fair Trade Association or IFAT). Mr. Dirks was board chair for a 2 years term that ended in May 2009.
Prior to his work with TTV, he worked to help develop several businesses in Bangladesh where women who were considered "unemployable" could export to fair trade organizations. Over the years he has worked with TTV, he has traveled to many of the 37 countries where TTV buys products and met the artisans. He is excellent at sharing the stories of the artisans benefited by fair trade and he himself is an engaging proponent of fair trade values and concepts. His talk will speak to sustainability (especially as an equity issue) and also about fair trade and poverty eradication.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Communities, Sustainability Council, ECOS, One Fair World (Salem, OR) and Ten Thousand Village (Akron, PA).
April 1-30, 2010
Willamette University Sustainability Month
April 2010 is Willamette University's 6th annual Sustainability Month, featuring lectures, movies, community service projects, and other fun things highlighting the Four E's of sustainability in our community and beyond. More information about the events will be posted as it becomes available.
To see a calendar of events of 2009 Sustainability month, click here. Further information can be found at the Sustainability Council's homepage.
To see a list of past events look in the Archives