The John W. Altman program under the Humanities Center will present a lecture series that includes 12 speakers over this academic year. The program is titled, “The Anthropocene: A new era in human-environment relations”. The whole series will be kicked off by the one and only Andrew Revkin.
Mr. Revkin did his undergraduate studies in biology at Brown University, and studied journalism at Columbia. Afterwards he started to work on his career and was Senior Editor and Writer for Discover Magazine and Science Digest before he covered the environment for The New York Times. He was the first Times reporter to write from the north pole and he even published books and inspired movies like “The Burning Season” (1994) with his Times articles.
Now Revkin is the Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University, writes the Dot Earth Blog for the Times and, thanks to the Center of Humanities, takes time to visit our beautiful campus.
“He was chosen for the starter position because of his outstanding work for making environmental issues public, so we believe that he will make his lecture one of the most fun and interesting ones you will hear,” Tim Melley, director of the Humanities Center, said.
People like Revkin call the current epoch the Anthropocene, a term coined by Paul Crutzen. An era in which the earth left the natural flow of things and entered an epoch in which humans are the greatest power and decide what the next step for the planet will be - if things get even worse or if mankind makes a move in the right direction.
The coming lecture series will give everyone that listens different perspectives on the pertinent environmental issues affecting the world, the how far society has come and how far is still left to be traveled.
Written by: Eileen Rintsch
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