“The Riddle of Sustainability: A Surprisingly Short History of the Future" is topic of Nov. 12 lecture

Renowned writer, scholar, and environmental leader William Cronon will be the featured speaker at this year’s University of Vermont Aiken Lecture Thursday, Nov. 12..

Cronon’s talk, The Riddle of Sustainability: A Surprisingly Short History of the Future,” begins at 5 p.m. at UVM's Ira Allen Chapel.

Cronon is well-known as a writer of “vivid books about how Americans have shaped the land” (New Yorker). A professor of environmental and western history at the University of Wisconsin, he is also a Rhodes Scholar, MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and president of the American Historical Association.

His prize-winning books and writings include: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England; Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West; Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature; and Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past.

Through his popular blog, Scholar as Citizen, Cronon takes a stand on political issues that affect the environment and social justice. After publishing his first blog post in 2011, Cronon became the center of a firestorm after examining the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that writes bills for use by conservative legislators around the country. Cronon argued that the council played a major role in the attacks by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on public employee unions in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republican political operatives, using Wisconsin’s Open Documents Law, demanded all e-mail messages from Cronon’s University of Wisconsin’s email address that mentioned Governor Walker and a wide variety of phrases related to recent struggles over public service unions. This has raised many questions regarding issues of academic freedom vs. the public’s right to information and the intimidation tactics used to release this information.

Cronon’s talk for the Aiken Lecture Series will focus on a major area of his scholarship and research and is highly relevant to UVM’s leadership role in sustainability in Vermont and beyond. Over the past three decades, the concept of sustainability has emerged as a prime focus in environmental politics. In this address, Cronon demonstrates that the word “sustainability” has a much briefer history than we might imagine and that its recent evolution into a centerpiece of environmental politics has a great deal to teach us about the changing nature of environmental ideas.

The lecture, which will be followed by a Q&A, is free and open to the public. Doors will open at 4:30, and seating is general admission. This year’s Aiken Lecture is hosted by the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

For more information and to register, visit http://learn.uvm.edu/aiken.

PUBLISHED

11-05-2015
Erica Houskeeper