The Department of Romance Languages and Linguistics will hold its 19th Hispanic Forum, “The Green and the Greenest,” on Thursday, Oct. 11 and Friday, Oct. 12. This year’s theme, according to organizers, merges two distant but connected locales, Brazil and UVM: “the world’s strongest sustainable emerging market” and one of the “greenest universities in the U.S.” With the exception of a autumn foliage tour on Thursday at 4 p.m., sessions will be held in the Waterman Memorial Lounge from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Oct. 11 and from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 12. All events are free and open to the public.

Two main ideas will heavily influence the forum schedule – Brazil’s relevance in terms of environmental sustainability and the importance of Portuguese as the third most common language in the western world after Spanish and English, spoken by more than 230 million people (190 million in Brazil). Forum sessions range from a talk by Rubenstein School professor Joshua Farley, “Forests, Ecosystems Services and Small Family Farms: Overcoming Irreconcilable Conflicts in Brazil and Vermont;” a keynote speech by Professor Maria Luci Moreira from the College of Charleston and the Middlebury Summer Language School, “The Importance of Portuguese in the World as a Strategic Language for Global Communication;” and a movie screening of A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil.

For more information and a detailed schedule of events see the forum brochure.