May 12, 2005
War and environment is topic of talk
The head of the United Nations Environment Program’s Post-Conflict Assessment Unit and chairman of the unit’s Iraq Task Force will be the featured speaker at a lecture Tuesday evening that caps the UW Program on the Environment’s War and the Environment day.
Pekka Haavisto is a former environment minister for Finland and a member of the Finnish Parliament. He chaired the U.N. Environmental Program’s environmental assessments to Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, Afghanistan and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. He has also chaired the depleted uranium assessments to Kosovo, Serbia-Montenegro and to Bosnia-Herzegovina. He will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday in 220 Kane.
Starting at 10 a.m. that day, there will be continuous showings of the film The Other side of Afghanistan, which chronicles the U.N. mission to Afghanistan to investigate the environmental impact of 23 years of war. The 35-minute documentary will be shown in the commons of Mary Gates Hall.
From 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. the Program on the Environment will sponsor a panel on Global Conflict and its Environmental Consequences, which will feature Haavisto as a special guest. Other panel members include Gad Barzilai from the Jackson School, Nancy Farwell from social work, Danny Hoffman from anthropology, and Bui Thi Thanh Mai, the Packard-Gates Population Leadership Fellow. David Secord, co-director of the Program on the Environment, will moderate. The panel discussion will be in 258 Mary Gates.
