Events

On Earth Day, April 22^nd, the School of Public Policy will be hosting a climate policy panel. Among the panelists are two members of our GES Department! Chris Blume completed his Master of Science degree last year and was an ICARE student. Erle Ellis is a professor in our department, specializing in sustainable landscapes and global change.

The panel will be moderated by Professor Susan Sterett and will be held at noon in The Common’s Lower Flat area (which is indoors on the first floor). All are welcome to attend!

Next Wednesday at noon, the GES Department will be hosting Dr. Alisha Chan for our bi-weekly seminar series. Dr. Chan received her Ph.D. in Chemical and Environmental Engineering from Yale; shortly after, she began working at USGS as part of their Water Resources Mission Area. At her seminar, she will be discussing extensive water shortages in drought-prone communities and the environmental injustices they face.

This event will only be available online. We hope to see you there! Here is the link to the Webex room: https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m50d36238b13388be15cded7a32dbe978

For those who missed our previous two seminars, their recordings are also linked below.

Dr. Karin Burghardt – Ecological Diversity in Human Landscapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_PsjchwLnE&ab_channel=UMBCSocSci

Ron Kobell – What Harriet Left Behind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nK0lM9Gk48&ab_channel=UMBCSocSci

Dr. Holland will be a guest speaker in Nancy McAllister’s GES 120 class for this session. Dr. Holland will cover the basics on how climate change has impacted different places and people around the world, explore how populations adapt, and review the successes and failures of global policy negotiations on climate change.

The GES department invites you to listen in on Autumn Powell’s thesis presentation. A member of the ICARE program, Autumn has investigated the lacking acknowledgement of Indigenous voices in governmental and environmental institutes. The exclusion of Indigenous narratives has allowed a settler mindset to prevail in much of our current environmental policies. It is important that we work alongside native peoples to bring their environmental knowledge into the mainstream conversation.

Autumn will be sharing her research on Wednesday, April 3^rd at 2pm in Sherman Hall room 015. This event will take place in-person and on Webex via the link on this event post. We hope to see you there!

Dr. Francis will discuss recent research on global justice and climate change mitigation. According to data collected by The World Inequality Report, lower and working-class people, living mostly in developed countries, have reduced emissions more over the past 30 years than any other income group. Given that the emissions of the wealthy continue to increase, this seems like an unjust distribution of the burdens of mitigation. Dr. Francis will apply different principles of distributive justice to evaluate whether and when it is just to cut the emissions of those in the global middle class.

The GES Department invites you to our next seminar. This Wednesday at noon, Dr. Karin Burghardt will discuss how ecological principles can help us understand feedbacks between ecology and human modifications in human-dominated spaces. She will touch on redlining policies in Baltimore, tree diversity in managed forested areas, and the impact of yard landscaping on biodiversity. Dr. Burghardt is an Assistant Professor for UMD’s Department of Entomology. We are excited to have her with us!

The seminar will be held Wednesday, April 3^rd at noon in the ITE building, room 229. While in-person attendance is preferred, we will also have a Webex room for virtual attendees, linked below. We hope to see you there!: https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=mdb6255599dfb2985b7342a79ad1b3ac8