During this trip, the project team conducted seabird surveys in the vicinity of the station’s LiDAR buoy, which houses oceanic and atmospheric instrumentation along with a stereo thermal imaging camera that detects and tracks birds in flight. The team also flew a drone with known altitude, speed, and size across the camera’s field of view to simulate birds in flight, which will be used for ground-truthing observations.
Altogether, the data collected will be used to validate the stereo thermal camera imagery, and provide information to inform our three-dimensional seabird occurrence model that integrates spatial distributions of seabird density, species composition, and flight height within the Wind Energy Area.
Clearly we’re not going to stop climate change — the last two years have shown us just how much damage has already been done. So what can we do — both 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?
How to attend
We’re holding the fall 2021 series online via Zoom. All events are free and open to the public.
Achieving net zero economy-wide carbon emissions will require the large-scale expansion of low-carbon energy infrastructure at unprecedented rates. Yet we lack an understanding of where that infrastructure may be sited, the scale of the land and ocean area requirements, and its possible conservation impacts. This talk will present results from studies that use highly detailed energy and land use modeling to examine the effect of various levels of environmental protections on the energy infrastructure required for the Western US to achieve ambitious climate targets.
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.
Before joining UCSB, Grace was a Smith Conservation Fellow at The Nature Conservancy and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. She was also a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Muir Institute of the Environment at UC Davis. She holds a BA from Pomona College, MPhil from University of Cambridge, and an MS and PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley.
How to attend
We’re holding the fall 2021 series online via Zoom. All events are free and open to the public.
Reliable infrastructure is core to the functioning of most systems, including water, sanitation, and health. Nexleaf’s project work includes integrating sensor data and the Internet of Things to provide analyses for governments and other stakeholders who design, finance, maintain and scale reliable infrastructure in support of public health in low and middle income countries. In this talk, Nithya Ramanathan will share her experiences in scaling Nexleaf’s ColdTrace solution, which has been deployed in 23 countries and now protects the vaccine supply for 1 in 10 babies born on Earth. She will also explore that critical role that energy plays in public health.
Nithya Ramanathan is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Nexleaf Analytics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving human life and protecting our planet by designing sensor technologies, generating data analytics, and advocating for data-driven solutions to global challenges. Nexleaf focuses on serving low-income countries by protecting temperature-sensitive vaccines for newborns, reducing air pollution through incentivizing adoption of cleaner cooking practices, and increasing the livelihood of smallholder farmers by protecting produce from spoilage.
This talk will explore how conceptualizing love as work can provide a fresh perspective on scholarly concerns about the ethics of a politics rooted in love. Anthropologist Radhika Govindrajan will address this question through an ethnographic exploration of bovine politics in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India. All the actors involved in the social worlds of cow-protection, whether religious gurus or rural women, assert that genuine love for the cow entails a willingness to labor for her. To be a subject in love, for them, is to be a subject who labors. However, they have very different understandings of both the nature of this love and the labors it necessitates. This presentation will examine three distinct kinds of work – protection, service, and care-labor – that these social actors undertake in the pursuit of love. Dr. Govindrajan will trace how these different labors produce a varying set of relationships, affiliations, and obligations that crucially shape the politics of love and its ethical potentialities. Understanding love as labor, she argues, allows us to see that it is the nature of the labor involved in love that conditions its political and ethical possibilities.
Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press and by Penguin India in 2019. She has also published articles in journals such as American Ethnologist, Comparative Study of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. She is currently working on a project that explores scandals around sex, land, and religion in rural Uttarakhand.
Cattle raising is the chief driver of deforestation in many parts of the world, demanding huge amounts of land for both pasture and cultivation of feed. This makes cattle the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in many countries. In Brazil, over 60% of the national emissions come from this one source, and much of the meat and leather is destined for export — thus all the consumers, not just the producers, are implicated. In this talk, Barbara Bramble will describe the current status of cattle industry operations in different regions, and compare the impacts of other commodities that are similarly associated with deforestation and climate change. She will then describe new approaches she and her collaborators are taking to reduce deforestation emissions using science, legislation, communications, and advocacy in both consumer and producer countries.
Barbara Bramble is the Vice President of International Conservation and Corporate Strategies at the National Wildlife Federation. At NWF, she works with the private sector to sever the link between deforestation and agricultural production; she helps global brands and retailers to avoid purchasing agricultural and forest commodities that originate from recently cleared tropical forests and other carbon rich lands, and to implement voluntary certification standards for sustainable products. For over three decades she has directed NWF’s advocacy to improve U.S. international environmental policy with regard to climate change and forest conservation, and the social and environmental policies of multilateral financial institutions.
She is also the Chair of the Board of the Forest Stewardship Council, the preeminent eco-label for wood and paper products from sustainably managed forests, and formerly chaired the Board of Directors of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials, which is the equivalent organization for biofuels and bio-based products. Before joining NWF, she served as legal advisor to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and as an environmental lawyer in private practice.
Despite decades of effort to improve air quality in California, large and systemic racial and ethnic disparities in air pollution exposure still persist. In particular, people of color and members of disadvantaged communities are exposed to higher-than-average concentrations of many health-relevant air pollutants, including particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. Recent advances in measurement and modeling technology — as well as new conceptual frameworks for evaluating environmental injustice — can help us better understand the contours of and possible solutions to this problem. This seminar will present quantitative evidence on environmental inequity in California and the Bay Area using a combination of statewide modeling and intensive measurements using a fleet of Google Street View cars specially equipped to measure air quality. The findings point to possible air pollution control approaches that may be especially impactful in addressing these disparities.
Joshua Apte is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, jointly appointed in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in the School of Public Health. His research focuses on the intersection of air quality, sustainability, and environmental justice, with an emphasis on the development of new methods for quantifying air pollution exposures. His group uses field measurements, air quality models, and satellite remote sensing to to quantify air pollutant emissions and concentrations, and their resulting spatial patterns, human exposures, and public health consequences in US communities and around the world.
Before coming to UC Berkeley, he was previously on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, the inaugural ITRI-Rosenfeld Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He holds MS and PhD degrees from the Energy and Resource Group at UC Berkeley and a ScB in Environmental Science from Brown University.
We’re holding the spring series online via Zoom. All events are free and open to the public.
Accessibility
Live captioning is provided for all talks. To request additional support, please contact info@schatzcenter.org or call 707-826-4345 as early as possible before an event.
This talk will explore two recent, interconnected land struggles in Hawaiʻi — one over the proposed Thirty-Meter Telescope on Maunakea, and the other over a renewable energy project on Oʻahu. In 2019, worldwide attention turned to Native Hawaiian uprisings around the sacred summit of Maunakea. In the islands, the kiaʻi mauna (mountain guardians/protectors) inspired communities across the archipelago to stand against forces of transnational capital and settler state police power, in protection of ancestral lands. The largest number of arrests targeted a Kanaka Maoli and Pacific Islander-led movement against a massive wind farm in the rural community of Kahuku, Oʻahu.
This presentation will situate the Kahuku wind farm issue in a longer history of contention over the “green colonialism” of renewable energy projects that have failed to include predominantly-Indigenous Hawaiian communities in the planning. The Hawaiian cultural concepts of kiaʻi, kūkulu, and aloha ʻāina, as they have informed the practices of protectors, will frame the discussion.
Born and raised on Oʻahu, Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua is a professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she teaches Hawaiian and Indigenous politics. A lifetime student of and participant in Hawaiian movements, Noelani’s research has involved documenting, analyzing and proliferating the ways people are transforming imperial and settler colonial relations through Indigenous political values and initiatives.
We’re holding the spring series online via Zoom. All events are free and open to the public.
Accessibility
Live captioning is provided for all talks. To request additional support, please contact info@schatzcenter.org or call 707-826-4345 as early as possible before an event.
Please note that the time has changed to 7:30 pm (Pacific) on March 25 Register for this talk
The rapid undergoing and coming climatic and ecological change, coupled with rapid acceleration in population growth, raise doubts and concerns regarding the ability of the existing urban systems to adapt to future changes. These changes represent a unique opportunity to use ecologically based architecture and urban design, blending urban systems into natural systems within an integrated ecosystem named the Ecological Superblock. Ecological Superblock provides a breakthrough solution capable of adapting and evolving to change. Its design employs ecological intelligence principles that shift design thinking from the traditional processes of perfecting the single unique design to ecological processes and systems dynamics.
Aiman Tabony is a researcher and an architect with a PhD in architecture, computation, and ecology from the Architectural Association in London. With Enriqueta Llabres he cofounded LlabresTabony Architects in 2017, a London-based multidisciplinary design studio specializing in the fields of architecture, urbanism, geography, ecology, and landscape architecture. The ethos of their practice relies in its critical approach to ecology and its relationship with the built environment.
We’re holding the spring series online via Zoom. All events are free and open to the public.
Accessibility
Zoom captioning is provided for all live talks, and human-generated captions are provided for all video recordings when published online. To request additional support, please contact info@schatzcenter.org or call 707-826-4345 at least one week before an event.
Back in 2005, a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, designed the first ultraviolet water disinfection system for rural households. Part of the team started a nonprofit organization — Cántaro Azul — with the objective of empowering people with appropriate safe water technologies. As Cántaro Azul evaluated the impact of water programs, it developed evidence that health and social benefits produced by the dissemination of such technologies varied across households and communities, highly modulated by existent inequalities. In 2014, Cántaro Azul shifted its work from a technology to a service paradigm that now focuses on strengthening community-based water management organizations (CBWMO). Working in a country with more than 100,000 rural communities without access to safe water, Cántaro Azul realized that directly scaling its services would only reach a fraction of the population and in 2017 began efforts to advocate for local and national public policies that seek to strengthen CBWMOs.
In this talk, Fermín Reygadas will share some of the achievements of Cántaro Azul, including the creation of the first public water institution in México that is governed by CBWMOs, as well as the many challenges that the organization has encountered and that lay ahead in the road towards achieving the human right to water and sanitation in rural Mexico.
Fermín Reygadas is Co-Founder and CEO of Cántaro Azul, the largest water, hygiene, and sanitation organization in Mexico. Since 2006, he has led the design, implementation, and evaluation of technologies, service-delivery models, financing mechanisms, advocacy strategies, and public policies that contribute to expand the human right to water and sanitation. He is an Ashoka Fellow and his work has been recognized by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Big Ideas Competition at Berkeley, the 6th and 8th World Water Forums, and the UBS-Visionaris Social Entrepreneurship Award. He holds a PhD from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.
We’re holding the spring series online via Zoom. All events are free and open to the public.
Accessibility
Zoom captioning is provided for all live talks, and human-generated captions are provided for all video recordings when published online. To request additional support, please contact info@schatzcenter.org or call 707-826-4345 at least one week before an event.
