IRES Seminar Series
Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)
Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall
Speakers: RES PhD Candidates Michiko Namazu and Jason Brown
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The Evolution of Carsharing: Heterogeneity in adoption and impacts
Abstract:
Vancouver is a metropolitan hub of the carsharing world. The region holds 4 independent carsharing services (Modo, Zipcar, Car2go and Evo) that offer over 2,000 carsharing vehicles in total. A quarter of Vancouver residents are members of carsharing services, and the carshaing fleet size per capita is the largest in North America. However, even though Vancouver is a leader in carsharing, very few attempts have been made so far to understand the roles and meanings of these services. Do these services contribute to reduce greenhouse gases? How about their effects on vehicle dependency? In my talk, I will present my latest findings about the environmental benefits yielded from carsharing. My talk also covers the macro picture of carsharing – the evolution of carsharing services. Vancouver, a pioneer of carsharing, is an ideal region to explore what benefits carsharing services have provided already, and what benefits these services can provide in the future.
Bio:
Michiko is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are focused around sharing economies, where people share goods rather than own them. She is interested in examining how/whether this shift from ownership to access, enhanced by internet-communication technologies, leads to fewer energy and/or material consumptions. For her Ph.D. thesis, she analyzes carsharing services as an example of a sharing economy. She explores the environmental impacts of carsharing, vehicle ownership reduction by carsharing, characteristics of carsharing users, travel behaviour changes induced by carsharing, etc.
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Dwelling in the Wilderness: A Monastic Spiritual Ecology
What is the relationship between religious belief, embodied experience, and the environment? Spiritual Ecology, an emerging discipline at the nexus of the sciences and the humanities, sometimes referred to as Religion and Ecology, seeks to explore this terrain. Jason’s presentation, a case study in Spiritual Ecology, will focus on the relationship that four monastic communities in the American West have developed with their landscapes including both management practices and spiritual practices, embodied experience and religious belief, their sense of place and their sense of ultimate meaning. It is a contemplative ethnography, a geography of the heart, and a spiritual ecology.
Bio:
Jason was born in Southern California, but since 2001 has lived in many different places including the Dominican Republic, Connecticut, Utah, Oregon and, now Vancouver. His undergraduate work was in anthropology at Brigham Young University, where he studied traditional Guatemalan forestry practices. As a joint Master’s student at Yale he studied forestry and theology, going on to work as a professional forester and adjunct professor of Ethics and Religion in Salt Lake City. He is currently a fourth year PhD Candidate with the Institute for the Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) working with Terre Satterfield. His dissertation research focuses on the spiritual ecology of four Catholic monastic communities in the American West, their land use and management, beliefs, sense of place, and embodied spirituality. He is the Co-Founder of the Salish Sea Spiritual Ecology Alliance, and a Co-Producer of Experiencing the Sacred: Where Spirit Meets World in Vancouver, a weekly radio program on Vancouver Coop Radio CFRO 100.5 FM. His blogs on Patheos.com is called Holyscapes. He recently contributed to a volume entitled Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet.
