The Chestertown Spy and Washington College’s Center for the Environment & Society are pleased to present an evening with Dianne Dumanoski on September 23, 2009 at 7:00 PM at the Litrenta Lecture Hall – Toll Science Center on campus. Admission is free but registration is kindly requested.
Dianne Dumanoski is an author and journalist, as well as a pioneer in reporting on such issues as ozone depletion, global warming, and the accelerating loss of species since 1970. Dumanoski has been a Knight Fellow in Science Journalism at MIT (1983–84), a fellow at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism (1993), and a Yale University Poynter Fellow (2002). She is the coauthor of Our Stolen Future, a seminal environmental work.
In a sobering but realistic profile of the humanity’s increasing negative impact on global planetary systems, Dumanoski’s new book, “The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth“, makes a cogent and eloquent argument that “the radical experiment of our modern industrial civilization is now disrupting our planet’s very metabolism.” Climate is changing faster than original scientific models predicted, and in unexpected ways with dangerous feedback loops/ We our poisoning our environment with toxins that impact our own reproductive systems. We are causing irreversible change to soils and water and land that are impacting our ability to grow our food. Given the incresingly short window for action, politicians and the media have done little to heed the warnings and avert crisis. Humanity’s future, Dumanoski argues, will depend on our ability to return to systems based on flexibility, diversity, redundancy, and community and away from current trends that rely on technological fixes, unsustainable economic models of growth, and excessive globalization. This is a work of broad scope and depth, weaving together humanity’s history, science, and culture and ending with a search for honest hope for humanity’s future on a volatile Earth of our own making.
Marty Fujita, Ph.D
Green Editor
Given the limited seating for this free program, we encourage those interested in attending to register in advance:
https://www.eventbrite.com/event/407516894
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