Schatz CenterWe’re excited to welcome Grace Wu (UCSB), Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Bard College), Bill McKibben (350.org), Sam Arons (Lyft), and William Bauer (University of Nevada) this fall for our Sustainable Futures speaker series. Each lecture will be streamed via Zoom, and will be followed by a Q&A discussion period. All events are free and open to the public, and live captioning will be provided for all talks. To request additional support, please contact schatzenergy@humboldt.edu or call 707-826-4345.
We’ll open with a talk by Grace Wu this Thursday (9/23) at 5:30 pm Pacific: Building a net zero energy system that protects biodiversity. Grace Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is broadly interested in the dynamics and drivers of land use change, climate change mitigation, and advancing our ability to plan for sustainable, multi-use landscapes that protect biodiversity and advance climate goals. She uses spatial science approaches to identify and understand the co-benefits and trade-offs between climate solutions and habitat conservation. REGISTER for Grace Wu’s talk or View the flyer for this talk
Next Thursday (9/30) at 5:30 pm Pacific, we’ll be joined by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins who will share insights from her book on Waste siege: the life of infrastructure in Palestine. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College with interests in infrastructure, waste, environment, colonialism, austerity, and platform capitalism. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, 2019), won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award (2020). Her current book, Homing Austerity: Airbnb in Athens (upcoming from Duke University Press) examines how Airbnb is transforming the relationship between subjectivity, real estate, work, and aesthetics. REGISTER for Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ talk
On October 7 @ 4:00 pm Pacific, author and activist Bill McKibben will discuss What can we still do — to slow the rise of temperature, and to find some resilience in our divided societies? Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. He was a 2014 recipient of the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ and the Gandhi Peace Award. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published 30 years ago, and his most recent, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? REGISTER for Bill McKibben’s talk or View the flyer for this talk.
On November 4 @ 5:30 pm, Sam Arons, the Director of Sustainability at Lyft, will describe his vision for The road ahead: shared electric vehicles. Sam joined Lyft in 2018, and in 2020, Lyft made an industry-leading commitment to reach 100% electric vehicles on the Lyft platform by 2030. Prior to Lyft, Sam spent 10 years at Google as Senior Lead for Energy & Infrastructure, where he co-led Google’s achievement of 100% renewable energy in 2017, making Google the largest non-utility purchaser of renewable energy on the planet to-date with over 3 GW of wind & solar energy under contract. Before Google, Sam earned a BA in Physics from Williams College and an MS in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, where his research focused on wind energy and plug-in vehicles, respectively. REGISTER for Sam Arons’ talk or View the flyer for this talk.
Closing out the series on November 18 @ 5:30 pm will be William Bauer, author of We are the land: a history of Native California. More info on this event will be coming soon!
