» Home » October 19, 2017: IRES Faculty Seminar
Hope in the Anthropocene Series
Speaker: John Reganold

October 19, 2017: IRES Faculty Seminar
Hope in the Anthropocene Series
Speaker: John Reganold

October 19, 2017: IRES Faculty Seminar
Hope in the Anthropocene Series
Speaker: John Reganold

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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What 40 Years of Science Tell Us about Organic Agriculture

Regents Professor of Soil Science & Agroecology

Washington State University

Abstract: Organic agriculture has a history of being contentious and is considered by some as an inefficient approach to food production. Yet organic foods and beverages are a rapidly growing market segment in the global food industry. Here, I discuss the performance of organic farming in light of four key sustainability metrics: productivity, environmental impact, economic viability, and social wellbeing. Organic farming systems produce lower yields compared with conventional agriculture. However, they are more profitable and environmentally friendly, and deliver equally or more nutritious foods that contain less (or no) pesticide residues, compared with conventional farming. Although organic agriculture has an untapped potential role to play in establishing sustainable farming systems, no single approach will safely feed the planet. Rather, a blend of organic and other innovative farming systems is needed for global food and ecosystem security.

 

Bio: Dr. John Reganold has shaped his career by his interest in agriculture and soil science, receiving his Ph.D. in Soil Science from the University of California at Davis. He is currently Regents Professor of Soil Science and Agroecology at Washington State University. He has spent 30-plus years bringing a blend of innovative research and teaching on sustainable farming systems into the mainstream of higher education and food production. Dr. Reganold has close to 200 publications in scientific journals, magazines, and proceedings, including Science, Nature, and Scientific American. His former students are on the front lines of sustainability around the world, bringing food security to sub-Saharan Africa for the U.S. Agency for International Development, adapting quinoa to the salty soils of Utah, working on agroecology for Pacific Foods in Tualatin, Oregon, and turning wastes into resources in Haiti.

John is also speaking at UBC Green College on Wednesday, October 18.  Click here for more information.

 

 

 

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New this year: With humanity’s creation of a new geological era marked by dominant human influences on planetary processes, the Anthropocene seems to offer little hope.

And yet, the same ingenuity that enables human domination over the Earth also allows a certain genius in addressing the many rising environmental and sustainability challenges.

Hope in the Anthropocene will showcase such inspirations and solutions in tackling climate change, harnessing energy, feeding humanity, governing states, and meeting our collective water and sanitation needs all while respecting Indigenous peoples and protecting nature and its benefits for people.

A collaboration between Green College and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Hope in the Anthropocene will feature 6 accomplished speakers from around the world presenting in the IRES Seminar Series.

 

 

Photo Credit: Ashwin Kamath from flickr/ Creative Commons 

November 9, 2017: IRES Student Seminar
Speaker: Ghazal Ebrahimi (RES PhD Candidate)

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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The challenge of delivering high performance buildings

Abstract: Mounting concerns about resource stewardship and environmental quality continue to reshape expectations about buildings and their performance. This has led to more complex building designs, incorporating materials, and technologies, needing to meet myriad standards and rating systems. However, the buildings have failed to deliver on their designers’ intentions, falling far short of their promise.  The gap between design expectations and building performance in practice has been persistent. A leading theory identifies the fractured processes of: designing, building, commissioning and operating a building as the root cause of this challenge.

Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) is a method for delivering building projects through contractual risk sharing among all actors in a building project enforcing collective responsibility for the performance of the projects. Ghazal will discuss the performance of IPD, the experience of industry professionals with this method across the US and Canada, and describe the potential of IPD for addressing the challenge of delivering high performance buildings.

This seminar video will be posted on our website after Ghazal’s research has been published. 

Please check back here at a later date.

Bio: Ghazal is a PhD Candidate, working with Prof. Hadi Dowlatabadi. She got her undergraduate degree in Architecture from Shiraz University, Iran and a Master of Science (MSc) in Renewable Energy and Architecture from the University of Nottingham, UK. Ghazal’s PhD research focuses on examining the effectiveness of Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) in enhancing the practices and project outcomes in the building industry. Before joining the RMES program, Ghazal worked as an architect and a building sustainability consultant. She is currently working as a sustainability consultant for high performance buildings at Lower Mainland Facilities Management, a department that manages the facilities of the four health care organizations in the Lower Mainland, BC.

 

 

Photo Credit: George Rex from flickr/ Creative Commons

IRES has a new Director!

Milind Kandlikar is the new IRES Director.

Milind Kandlikar (PhD Carnegie Mellon) is a Professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. His work focuses on the intersection of technology innovation, human development and the global environment. Dr. Kandlikar’s current projects include the regulation of agricultural biotechnology including implications for food security; air quality in Indian cities; risks and benefits of nanotechnology; solar lighting systems in the developing world; and development and climate change. He has also published extensively on the science and policy of climate change.

Website: https://ires2015.sites.olt.ubc.ca/person/milind-kandlikar/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=aL55yHEAAAAJ&hl=en

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A BIG THANK YOU to Terre Satterfield

for being an amazing Director for IRES the past 5 years!

Terre, thank you very much for your hard work, leadership and dedication to IRES. 

Wishing you the very best in your future adventures!

 

 

Photo credit: Julian S. Yates

November 2, 2017: IRES Faculty Seminar
Speaker: Terre Satterfield

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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From subsistence to sovereignty: On the meaning and measurement of the right to fish for the ‘Namgis First Nation

Terre Satterfield, Professor of Culture, Risk and the Environment, IRES;

Co-authors: Leslie Robertson, Anton Pitts, Nathan Vadeboncoeur, Diane Jacobson

 

Abstract:

The colonial history of First Nations fishing on the British Columbia coast is undeniably a history of dispossession and an often-brutal restructuring of indigenous food regimes. This included but was not limited to the criminalization of acts of fishing (e.g., use of weirs and traps), trade and territorial access; the reduction of all fishing to household need only; and the racial assignation of licenses and fishing permission to non-aboriginal fishers only.  More recently, a series of supreme court decisions have begun to overturn some restrictions, and myriad acts of ‘practicing fishing rights’ are evident on the ground. Going fishing has thus become (with due critical humor): “Ted is out practicing his aboriginal rights [to fish]”.  But, just what the right to fish or harvest other traditional foods might mean is an open question. This collaborative study examines one effort to answer a challenge posed by the ‘Namgis First Nation: What would it take to become food sovereign? By food sovereign, we mean practicing fully the right to feed a community of 1000 through local hunting, fishing, gathering, cultivating and processing primarily traditional foods? What would and could people eat daily? How much is needed and by what logic? Can food be processed, stored and distributed locally? And what other kinds of local food production might also make sense? The answer is varied and often surprising, particularly when considered in juxtaposition to the cost and effort of procuring market foods. Results include discussion of different possible diets, the social life and organization of food, and the potential for a renewed and vital food system. We conclude with a brief set of theoretical challenges to theories of food sovereignty and their meaning in the face of empirical and field-based examinations of the possibilities for becoming food sovereign.

This seminar will not be filmed.

Bio:

Terre Satterfield is an interdisciplinary social scientist; professor of culture, risk and the environment; and (after five years) is outgoing director of the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. Her research concerns sustainable thinking and action in the context of environmental management and decision making. She studies natural resource controversies; cultural risk and cultural ecosystem services; and the perceived risk of new technologies (gene drive and nano-technologies). Recently she has also worked on tensions between indigenous communities and the state and/or regulatory dilemmas regarding First Nations interest and environmental assessment. Her work with co-authors (many of whom are part of IRES) has been published in journals such as: Nature; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Environmental Science and Technology; PLOS One; Global Environmental Change; Ecological Applications, Conservation Biology; Ecology and Society; Journal of Environmental Management; Biosciences; Land Economics; Science and Public Policy; Ecological Economics; and Risk Analysis. Her books include: The Anatomy of a Conflict: Emotion, Knowledge and Identity in Old Growth Forests; What’s Nature Worth? (with Scott Slovic); and The Earthscan Reader in Environmental Values (with Linda Kalof).

 

 

Photo Credit: Adam Bautz from flickr/ Creative Commons 

November 16, 2017: IRES Faculty Seminar
Hope in the Anthropocene Series
Speaker: Jeannette Armstrong

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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Click for PDF poster.

Sustainable Communities of Change: An Indigenous Perspective on Hope.

ABSTRACT

An Indigenous perspective on hope is to understand that hope is an essential element to inspire the courage to do things differently, since doing the same things will only produce the same results. Hope inspires change. Inspirations for sustainability solutions will require opportunities to do things in new and different ways, to make the most impact and the most sense. Unless people can shift themselves away from current models of dependency on the unsustainable practices evident in a system triggering unbridled development some fundamental questions are required.  What does that “dependency” look like if unpacked? What does ecological sustainability mean for everyday working people? Where does “sustainability” begin? If hope to be created, where can solutions that will shift the paradigm best take shape? Solutions may mean actively finding tools for “whole community change.” The seminar will cover some solution-inspired ideas based on several examples providing hope.

 

Photo credit: Laura Sawchuk

BIO

Jeannette Armstrong is Syilx Okanagan, a fluent speaker and teacher of the Nsyilxcn Okanagan language and a traditional knowledge keeper of the Okanagan Nation.  She is a founder of En’owkin, the Okanagan Nsyilxcn language and knowledge institution of higher learning of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.  She currently is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Okanagan Philosophy at UBC Okanagan. She has a Ph.D. in Environmental Ethics and Syilx Indigenous Literatures. She is the recipient of the EcoTrust Buffett Award for Indigenous Leadership and in 2016 the BC George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. She is an author whose published works include poetry, prose and children’s literary titles and academic writing on a wide variety of Indigenous issues.  She currently serves on Canada’s Traditional Knowledge Subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

 

 

Jeannette is also speaking at UBC Green College on Wednesday, November 15.  Click here for more information.

 

New this year: With humanity’s creation of a new geological era marked by dominant human influences on planetary processes, the Anthropocene seems to offer little hope.

And yet, the same ingenuity that enables human domination over the Earth also allows a certain genius in addressing the many rising environmental and sustainability challenges.

Hope in the Anthropocene will showcase such inspirations and solutions in tackling climate change, harnessing energy, feeding humanity, governing states, and meeting our collective water and sanitation needs all while respecting Indigenous peoples and protecting nature and its benefits for people.

A collaboration between Green College and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Hope in the Anthropocene will feature 6 accomplished speakers from around the world presenting in the IRES Seminar Series.

 

 

Photo credit: Robert Hensley from flickr/Creative Commons

October 18, 2017: UBC Green College
Hope in the Anthropocene Series
Speaker: John Reganold

SUSTAINABLE FARMING SYSTEMS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

  • John Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science and Agroecology at Washington State University
    Coach House, Green College, UBC (6201 Cecil Green Park Road)
    Wednesday, October 18, 5-6:30 pm
    in the series
    Hope in the Anthropocene: Sustainability Solutions and Inspirations 
  • Agriculture is at a critical juncture. To feed a growing world population, producing adequate crop yields is vital but only one of four main goals that must be met for agriculture to be sustainable. The other three are enhancing the environment, making farming financially viable, and contributing to the well-being of farmers and their communities. Conventional farming systems have provided increasing supplies of food and other products, but often at the expense of the other three sustainability goals. Alternative systems, such as organic, integrated, and conservation farming, better blend production, environment, and socio-economic objectives. Yet no one of these systems alone will produce enough food to sustainably feed the planet. Rather, a blend of these innovative farming approaches is needed for future global food and ecosystem security.
    John will also be speaking on Thursday, October 19 in the IRES Seminar Series.  Click here for more details. 

    Hope in the Anthropocene is co-sponsored by the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at UBC.

 
Photo credit: StateofIsrael from flickr/Creative Commons

October 12, 2017: IRES Student Seminar
Speakers: Adrian Semmelink and Elaine Hsiao

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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Adrian Semmelink

BIO:

Adrian is currently pursuing a M.Sc. under the guidance of Dr. Kai Chan, Dr. Terre Satterfield and Dr. Deborah Henderson (Kwantlen Polytechnic University). He holds a dual degree with an honours in environmental sciences and a major in sociology from UBC. Adrian has agricultural experience in South Africa and British Columbia. As a research assistant, he has worked on projects including spider socialization, bird song hybridization, and for the CHAN’s Lab reviews of ecosystem services and environmental assessments. Most recently, Adrian worked for the Stewardship Centre for British Columbia profiling farmers who demonstrate excellence in environmental stewardship. 

Click link for Adrian’s bio: https://ires.ubc.ca/person/adrian-semmelink/
There is no video available for this seminar.

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Elaine Hsiao:

 

TALK TITLE:

“Protecting Place, People and Peace: A Critical Socio-Legal Review of Transboundary Protected Areas”

 

ABSTRACT:

Examples of transboundary natural resources governance have been proliferating around the planet as the need to reconcile environmental management across common borders grows more urgent.  At best, they are championed as models of ecological peacebuilding and conflict resolution; at worst, they are criticized for their heavy-handed (top-down, externally-influenced and sometimes coercive) and neoliberal conservation strategies.  Transboundary protected areas (TBPAs) are just one mechanism through which cross-border environmental governance occurs, with only some being officially dedicated to peace.  This study looks at how TBPA legal agreements facilitate peace and conflict transformation, helping to answer the question of whether or not TBPAs are being effectively designed as platforms for peace and conflict resolution.  Initial results based on a survey of TBPA practitioners reflecting their experiences in implementing TBPA agreements and how these instruments can or have not served to facilitate conflict resolution on-the-ground, as well as case studies from three borders of Uganda provide insights into the practice and pragmatics of TBPAs as vehicles for conflict transformation and peace.

 

BIO:

Elaine Hsiao is an interdisciplinary legal scholar, specializing in transboundary conservation, conflict, and environmental peacebuilding. She has worked with transboundary protected areas initiatives and publications, developed a service-learning expedition in Parque Internacional La Amistad, co-directed/produced a documentary film for “Transcending Boundaries,” and passed resolutions on the environment, peace and conflict at IUCN and WILD Congresses. She represented the Permanent Mission of the Union of Comoros at the UN in climate change issues, received a Fulbright to Uganda (2010-2011) and currently, is the Co-Chair of the IUCN CEESP Theme on Environment and Peace. Elaine holds a JD and LLM in International and Environmental Law from Pace Law School, where she remains a Fellow, Specializing in Protected Areas at the Global Center for Environmental Legal Studies.

Click link for Elaine’s bio: https://ires.ubc.ca/person/elaine-hsiao/

 

Video of presentation:

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Chris Luczkow from flickr/ Creative Commons

IRES welcomes new Associate Professor, David Boyd!

A very warm welcome to David Boyd, who will be joining IRES as a new Associate Professor starting July 1, 2017!

To learn more about his profile and research interests, please visit his bio here.

David Boyd will be teaching a course in the upcoming academic year (GPP 507).  For your information, below is an abstract for the course.

GPP 507

Environmental Law and Policy 

Abstract:

This course will provide a practical and lively overview of how environmental law and policy is created, implemented, and enforced at the international, national, and sub-national levels. Students will learn about the evolution of environmental law and policy, legal institutions, and the major areas of law that relate to ecological sustainability (e.g. constitutional law, international law, municipal law, human rights, Indigenous law). The course will examine and critique the substantive laws, principles, and policies dealing with specific issues such as pollution, toxic substances, water, climate change, environmental assessment, and biological diversity. A central theme will be the differences between law and policy on paper and in practice. Students will be expected to engage in critical thinking about the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of laws, policies, and institutions related to environmental protection, while considering the broader ecological, political, social, and economic context.

After actively participating in this course, students will be able to:

  • articulate the role of laws, policies, actors, and institutions in addressing environmental problems;
  • think critically about ways in which environmental law and policy can be used to: solve environmental problems at the least possible cost to society while concurrently alleviating environmental injustices and promoting human rights; identify the barriers that prevent environmental law and policy from achieving sustainable outcomes;
  • conduct comparative analyses of environmental laws from countries all over the world; and
  • participate more effectively in environmental policy-making and decision-making.

 

RES PhD candidate Michael Lathuillière co-authored a new publication!

RES PhD candidate Michael Lathuillière has co-authored a new publication led by Dr. Anne-Marie Boulay entitled “The WULCA consensus characterization model for water scarcity footprints: assessing impacts of water consumption based on available water remaining (AWARE)” in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. The paper constitutes an official recommendation to the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. Congratulations indeed!

The paper can be found here:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-017-1333-8/fulltext.html

cropped-Mike.jpg

Michael Lathuillière

 

Photo credit: Goultard from flickr/Creative Commons

RES MSc student Kalifi Ferretti-Gallon co-authored a new publication!

RES MSc student Kalifi Ferretti-Gallon co-authored a new publication with Dr. Jonah Busch, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. The publication is entitled “What Drives Deforestation and What Stops It? A Meta-Analysis” and published on Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. 

Much congratulations from all of us at IRES!

The article can be found here:

https://academic.oup.com/reep/article/11/1/3/3066302/What-Drives-Deforestation-and-What-Stops-It-A?guestAccessKey=1ae513e9-a7f4-40ca-b37d-4813c2064d0b

Kalifi Ferretti-Gallon