What Can We Learn from Simple Models
of Human-Environment Sustainability?
February 18, 2020
Bartram Hall 211
3:30 PM
A body of work is emerging wherein simple mathematical models of ecological dynamics are coupled to simple mathematical models of human behavior to examine long-term sustainability of these systems. I will discuss several recent and ongoing studies of ours where we examine widely-ranging contemporary human-environment problems including forest pest control, coral reef endangerment, forest-grassland mosaic sustainability, human disease spread, land-use management, and focus in detail our recent study on climate change mitigation. We will see how studying environmental systems through the lenses of social dynamics including social norms and social learning, can help us find transformational pathways towards desired outcomes.
This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart
February 19, 2020
Ustler Hall Atrium
7 PM
Madhur Anand’s 2015 debut poetry collection A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes was published to international acclaim and was listed by the Canadian Broadcasting Agency as one of ten all-time “trailblazing” poetry collections to read for its blending of art and science. The book was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
Her forthcoming collection of creative nonfiction, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, is an experimental memoir about the Partition of India, immigration, and generational storytelling that weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present.
Anand will read selections from A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes and This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, as well as other published and new poetry and prose.
About the Speaker
Madhur Anand is the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015), This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020), and award-winning poetry and creative nonfiction appearing in such journals as The Puritan, Brick, Longreads.com, The New Quarterly, The Walrus, and This. She has published critical and scholarly work in ecopoetics and as a literary reviewer in The Literary Review of Canada. With Adam Dickinson she is co-editor of Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (2009).
She is co-author of the textbook Climate Change Biology (2011), and over 120 scientific publications in the fields of human-ecological modeling, complex systems, conservation ecology, and sustainability science. She is Professor of Ecology and Sustainability at The University of Guelph, where she is the Inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.
Both events are free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.
Madhur Anand’s lecture and reading are sponsored by the University of Florida Forest Entomology Lab, the Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies Research, the Departments of Biology and English, and Imagining Climate Change.