Surface mining, road and pipeline construction are destructive

From an Article by Brett Israel, UC Berkeley News, March 29, 2018

Photo: Land degradation, caused by human activities like natural resource extraction and pipeline construction, is a global threat to humans and animals

More than 100 experts from 45 countries have published a three-year study of the Earth’s land degradation, calling the problem “critical” and saying that worsening land conditions undermine the well-being of 3.2 billion people.

The report was published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) on March 26. Providing the best-available evidence for the dangers of land degradation for policymakers, the report draws on more than 3,000 scientific, government, indigenous and local knowledge sources.

Rapid expansion and unsustainable management of croplands and grazing lands is the most extensive cause of land degradation, creating significant loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, which include food security, water purification, energy sources and other contributions essential to people, the report says. The problem is so critical that a co-chair of the report said, “The degradation of the Earth’s land surface through human activities is pushing the planet towards a sixth mass species extinction.”

Land degradation is also an underappreciated factor contributing to global conflict and migration, among other problems, according to study co-author Matthew Potts, UC Berkeley associate professor in forest economics in the College of Natural Resources.

“Land degradation presents unique and persistence challenges to humanity,” Potts said. “This assessment shows that we are at a crossroads and must take urgent action to combat land degradation and restore degraded land if we want to create a happy and healthy planet for all humanity.”

Professor Lawrence Buell of Harvard University

Article by Linda B. Glaser, Cornell Chronicle, April 3, 2018

Scholars in the new interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities argue that climate change, water security, environmental justice and other such challenges can’t be solved purely by economic and scientific solutions: Human culture is implicated in ecological conditions.

The Spring 2018 Environmental Humanities Lecture Series will bring to campus two leading scholars in the field. All talks in the series are free and open to the public.

Lawrence Buell, M.A. ’62, Ph.D. ’66, will speak Thursday, April 12 at 4:30 p.m. in HEC Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, on “Remembering the Future to Keep It from Happening: Environmental Imagination in the Anthropocene.” Buell’s lecture is also the annual Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature, sponsored by the Department of English.

Buell is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. He has written extensively and lectured worldwide on the environmental humanities, and is considered a founder of contemporary ecocriticism. His books include “The Environmental Imagination,” “Writing for an Endangered World” and “The Future of Environmental Criticism.”

In 2007 he received the Modern Language Association’s Jay Hubbell Award for lifetime contributions to American Literature scholarship. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Buell’s current book project is titled “Environmental Memory in Art and Real Life.”

On Tuesday, May 1, Rob Nixon will speak on “Environmental Martyrdom and Defenders of the Forest” at 4:30 p.m. in Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.

Nixon holds the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professorship in Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. His books include “Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy,” and “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” which received the 2012 Sprout Prize for the best book in environmental studies.

Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the London Review of Books and Critical Inquiry.

Stephanie Lemenager’s talk,“Skilling Up for the Anthropocene,” has been rescheduled from March 20 to Sept. 18.

The 2017-18 Environmental Humanities Lecture Series is sponsored by the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Society for the Humanities, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Science and Technology Studies; the Newton C. Farr Chair of American Culture; and the American Studies Program.

>>> Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.