Sustainability Seminar Series
2012 Sustainability Seminar Series
Fostering dialogue between social and natural science scholars, researchers, experts, and business leaders on the challenges of sustainability in the 21st century
Global Climate Change on a Human Scale: Potential Savings and Psychological Approaches
January25 - 3:00 - 5:00 pm, Calit2 Auditorium
Global climate change is a human problem, both in terms of its causes and consequences. A closer look at the human scale of climate change can involve examining the potential savings of various approaches, differences and commonalities in climate change beliefs, and responses to messaging and information. This seminar features behavioral scientists discussing these issues and highlighting the importance of approaching climate change at the human scale.
The Long-Term Energy Efficiency Potential: What the Evidence Suggests
Skip Laitner, American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
A report released this month by ACEEE outlines three scenarios under which the U.S. could either continue on its current path or cut energy consumption by the year 2050 almost 60 percent, add nearly two million net jobs and save energy consumers as much as $400 billion per year (the equivalent of $2600 per household) - if we shape a different behavioral response, choose the right policies, and make the critical investments.
Gatekeepers Changing Consumers' Behavior in Energy Consumption
Tommi Laitio , Demos Helsinki, Finland
By looking at lifestyles and focusing on key decision-making moments in terms of consumers' climate impact, we identified a series of “gatekeepers” who can have significant influence on individual energy use. In our three-year research project, Peloton, we designed and successfully tested several methods for leveraging these “gatekeepers” for large-scale energy reductions.
Climate Change and the Human Moral Judgment System
Ezra Markowitz, University of Oregon
Many individuals fail to recognize climate change as a moral imperative. In this talk, I will discuss some of the challenges that climate change presents to the human moral judgment system as well as present some data that explore the implications of these challenges for public engagement with the issue.
The Injustice of Climate Change: Psychological Impacts of Perceiving Harm
Brittany Bloodhart, Pennsylvania State University
An important consideration for those who study Global Climate Change is the harm incurred by people, animals, and the planet via climate change impacts and how people who have the potential to stem climate change perceive, interpret, and become concerned about harm toward these groups. Exposure to harms others experience due to Climate Change may expand our scope of justice or trigger psychological distancing reactions which impact willingness to help others and engage in pro-environmental behavior.
Religious Perspective on Sustainability
February 16- 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Engineering Hall 1200
Nora Davis
Social Ecology Doctoral Program at the University of California, Irvine
Researchers do not commonly characterize the relationship between sustainability and religion as particularly positive; however, closer study reveals a far more complicated relationship between the two. As the specific goal of achieving environmental sustainability is often addressed purely by technological, economic, and efficiency-oriented solutions, this lecture will focus on an area given comparatively little attention: the overlap between religious experiences and environmental sustainability. In solutions-based discussions, this overlap plays are surprisingly small role, especially given the common action item that concludes nearly every environmental conversation: "we need to change people’s values; we need to change culture.” When paired alongside the similarly-common narrative that value-based institutions (religions) are incompatible with environmentalism, we are left with quite a gap to close. This lecture will explore the relationship between sustainability and the history, practices, and sacred texts of major world religions to ask the question: How can these theologies, concepts, and experiences be leveraged to strengthen the relationship between religion and sustainability?
The Psychology of Sustainability
February 23- 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Engineering Hall 1200
Beth Karlin
Social Ecology Doctoral Program at the University of California, Irvine
CUSA Transformational Media Lab
There is growing consensus that environmental, social, and economic sustainability are not possible given current trends and that understanding human interactions with the environment is a key aspect of ameliorating many of these issues. Psychology, as the science of human behavior, is in a prime position to assist with this task. Human interactions with sustainability include human drivers of un-sustainability (e.g. over-use of limited resources), human consequences of instability (e.g. natural and technological disasters), and human responses to a changing environment (e.g. mitigation and adaptation). Although progress is being made in the natural and physical sciences towards technological solutions and in political circles towards more sustainable policies, an understanding of individuals is vital for these new technologies to be adopted and policies supported. This talk will include a discussion of current and pressing issues in the psychology of sustainability and share recent insights in areas such as social norms, risk perception, message framing, and positive psychology that highlight some of the ways that psychology is contributing to these issues.
Climate, Energy and Policy
March 1 - 7:00 - 8:15 pm, Engineering Hall 1200
Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti
UK Climate and Energy Security Envoy
Climate change will act as a risk multiplier, not least in the context of secure, sustainable and affordable supplies of key natural resources (food, water and energy) that are essential for economic prosperity. By virtue of the globalised world that we live in, events many miles away can impact on the interests and security of our nations; therefore, we all need to act to reduce the risks to these key resources. This action will require a strategic approach which looks beyond the normal politica/ planning horizons and will involve all of government, public/ private collaboration and international action. In doing so we should focus on the opportunities, including economic growth.
Legal Perspective on Sustainability
March 1 - 8:30 -9:50 pm, Engineering Hall 1200
Abby ReyesSustainability Researcher, UCI Environment Institute; Board Member, EarthRights International
In the United States, there is no unifying federal law establishing sustainability as an organizing principle in our environmental, social and economic relations. Rather, at present, sustainability makes its way into our legal frameworks outside of the federal legislative process. After touching on innovative municipal and state initiatives, this lecture highlights the unexpected force that indigenous communities and peoples' organizations play, both here and abroad, in driving legal developments in sustainability. Drawing upon Reyes's work with a rural environmental legal assistance center in Palawan, Philippines, the lecture explains a multi-tiered approach to enforcing existing Pilipino sustainability law through legislative advocacy, litigation, popular education, and direct action. Reyes's subsequent work in solidarity with the rural indigenous U'wa community in Colombia demonstrates the limitations of this model when no comparable national sustainability directive exists, and in the context of corporate attempts at extreme energy extraction and civil war. The lecture concludes with an analysis of how some indigenous and rural communities in Burma, Nigeria, Peru, and along the Mekong are using the multi-tiered approach in similarly fraught political climates with greater success by bringing claims of environmental and human rights abuses by energy corporations to the attention of U.S. courts through the federal Alien Tort Statute. The lecture provides a timely overview of the Alien Tort cases as the United States Supreme Court this week hears oral arguments in a case that is widely anticipated to decide whether corporations can indeed be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute. Such cases represent the cutting edge of sustainability law where no meaningful environmental and human rights protections exist.
Political Perspective on Sustainability
March 8 - 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Bren Hall 1100
Richard MatthewProfessor in Planning Policy & Design, and Political Science, UC Irvine
CUSA Director
Families and health, businesses and educational systems, fresh water and clean air- there are a lot of things in our world that we would like to last. They are the material underpinnings of freedom, dignity, comfort and stability. We have come to realize over the last few decades, however, that some of the things we value and depend upon are moving along trajectories that are not sustainable. The costs are mounting and we can imagine a point in the not too distant future when some of these things run out of gas, falter, perhaps collapse. We have also come to realize that many of the things we value are deeply interconnected. Failure in one area can ripple across many other domains, always complicating matters, and, at times, generating complex disasters. These realizations, rooted in scientific enquiry and local knowledge, have generated one of the defining questions of our age: How do we design, promote, manage and measure the sustainability of different things, at different scales and in different contexts? The advanced state of many alarming trends and the complexity involved in transforming vast, interconnected processes can seem inexorably to lead to a simple answer: we can’t. But is this really the best answer? We have unprecedented knowledge and tools that confer unprecedented power. Indeed, we often hear that solutions to many of our most daunting problems exist, but that we lack the political will to implement them. Which suggests we have something important that needs to be introduced, or reintroduced, into politics. Because in a democracy political will, the will to tackle new challenges, is the fruit of political concern and engagement. Politics here and across the world could be-and should be-the realm where we explore the challenging questions of our era from many perspectives, mobilize support for possible solutions, experiment with answers, share resources and lessons learned, and fairly and openly assess the effects of our decisions. Politics at its best allows us to do all this in a context imbued with powerful notions of fairness, dignity, and freedom. A politics of sustainability is not only possible, it is in some sense fundamental. Because in its most elemental form politics is about sustainability-about defining the life we want to lead together, and the conditions under which such life can endure and flourish.
Art and Sustainability
March 15 - 7:00 - 8:00 pm, Lecture - EH 1200
Richard Matthew
CUSA Director, UC Irvine
This lecture explores the innovative and compelling ways in which visual artists have depicted, worked within, and expressed concern about the natural environment. From the legitimization of landscapes as a subject of fine art in the 19th century, through the land altering earthworks projects of the 20th century, to today's aesthetic engagement with sustainability, visual artists have played a major role in nurturing our capacity to see and strengthening our resolve to care. The arts offer a unique and vital perspective on current sustainability challenges, and the most powerful works of recent years combine beauty, passion and technical skill to produce objects, events and experiences that honor the past and yet have no precedent. If sustainability fails in the 21st century, it will be a failure of our collective imagination, a failure to harness the unlimited creativity of humanity to programs of social justice, ecological integrity, and material well-being.
A Sustainable Movement
Performance 8:00 - 8:30pm, Engineering Plaza
Pamela Donohoo
Founding Artist, CUSA Environment Art and Human Security (eARTh) Studio
The intention of my art is to express a story that generates thought, discussion and action in our community- a story that can catalyze the change that we so desperately hunger for.
I like to think about renaissance art. Art that was respected. Art that was so forward looking that it truly gave a voice to progress. In the past art has led us into a new era of human development, thought, science and democracy. We are now at that point again, at a point where the arts have the potential to lead us into new ways of thinking about and caring for our world.
Our world is unsustainable, from our work lives, to our education systems, to how we treat the environment and how we treat one another. In expressing sustainability in our world today I would like to take a moment to think about how art can be a movement and how a movement can create a sustainable future.
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
– Karl Marx
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
-Aristotle
From Crisis to Sustainability
April 12 - 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Lecture - EH 1200
Richard Matthew
CUSA Director, UC Irvine
Media and Sustainability
April 19 - 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Lecture - EH 1200
Beth Karlin
Social Ecology Doctoral Program at the University of California, Irvine
CUSA Transformational Media Lab
Better Living Through Mediatization
Although media has been engaging and inspiring audiences throughout its history, new information and communication technologies have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for media to serve as an agent for social change. Technologies such as online social networks, geospatial information systems, and collaborative content creation are changing our conceptions of both media and social action. Mediatization refers to a social and cultural process of media influencing and being influenced by the individuals, communities, and systems in which it is embedded. In the past decade, we have seen new forms of media creation, distribution, marketing, and engagement. Social action campaigns are utilizing a broad array of strategies to engage the public through media, including action kits, community screenings, school curricula, and extensive use of social media platforms. Transmedia campaigns combine new technologies with traditional movement strategies such as rallies, protests, and lobbying efforts, creating a new form of civic engagement about which little is known. A new form of media is emerging that includes the public as both consumer and producer and has the ability to engage individuals, communities, and societies at a level previously unfathomable. This presentation will explore this new world of media, with a focus on issue-based film, transmedia action campaigns, and participatory movements. Implications for environmental and social justice issues will be addressed.
Water and Sustainability
April 26 - 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Lecture - EH 1200
Richard Matthew
CUSA Director, UC Irvine
Green Buildings
May 3 - 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Lecture - EH 1200
Nora Davis
Social Ecology Doctoral Program at the University of California, Irvine
Jim Brittell
LEED AP, Design & Construction Services at UCI
Of all the solutions presented this quarter, green building may be uniquely be the most popularly advertised yet most under-studied by the average college student, or ‘building user.’ This lecture will present an introduction to the modern conceptualization of green building in terms of foundational concepts, processes and industry standards; an overview of the growth of green building in higher education; and, finally, an in-depth look at green building on UCI’s campus. The goals, policies, and success stories of the campus will be discussed as well as the campus’s historic, current and projected future relationship with green building.
Peace & Conflict
May 17 - 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Lecture - EH 1200
Anne Hammill
International Institute for Sustainable Development (Geneva)
Background on CUSA's Sustainability Seminar Series
While its roots may be traced back decades and even centuries, the concept of sustainable development only became a prominent and perennial feature of world affairs in the late 1980s with the publication of the Brundtland Commission's landmark 1987 report, Our Common Future. Although critics have assailed the concept for being an oxymoron, redundant or vague, it has nonetheless been widely endorsed by political, business and community leaders, and embraced by different cultures and socio-economic classes around the world. Proponents have represented sustainable development as an invaluable approach to designing unified solutions to linked challenges.
The concept of sustainable development acknowledges the urgency of global problems, recognized critical connections between them, and sought to devise a framework for thinking about how they could be jointly addressed. The core elements of this framework are often understood to be economics, environment and equity, and the goal is to balance the requirements of each in a way that satisfies the needs of the present generation without compromising the prospects of future generations. While there is general agreement on the value of the goals of sustainable development, demographic, economic and environmental trends present considerable challenges to particular efforts aimed at improving sustainability.
Creating more sustainable societies will require addressing challenges and will require involving multiple perspective`s from the social and natural sciences, as well as political, community and business leaders. Our sustainability seminar series brings together scholars, researchers, experts, and business leaders to consider a variety of perspectives on choices and challenges related to improving the sustainability of water, energy, food, transportation and security systems.
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Special Thanks
CUSA would like to thank the UCI Environment Institute for their generous support of this seminar series:
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