October 27, 2005
Conservation at the UW:Colloquium, possible graduate program bring many fields together
The first all-university colloquium on conservation issues, planned for Nov. 4, will sample what’s happening on campus as 24 faculty take five minutes each to explain their work. Subject areas will include art, psychology and public health as well as more traditional “conservation” disciplines such as forestry, fisheries and biology.
“Conservation: From Anthropology to Zoology,” will intersperse groups of five-minute faculty presentations with 15-minute time slots for questions from the audience, according to aquatic and fishery sciences researcher Tim Essington and public affairs master’s student Corrie Watterson, two of the organizers. The presentations will be from noon to 5 p.m. in the Magnuson/Jackson Room of William Gates Hall. A reception will follow.
The colloquium is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is strongly encouraged; go to http://depts.washington.edu/cbcomm/colloquium/, where one can also find the full agenda.
Included is a talk by the director of the UW’s Institute of Neurotoxicology and Neurological Disorders about bioethics, health and the precautionary principle that says, in part, that when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even in the face of scientific uncertainty.
A philosophy faculty member, with an adjunct appointment in public affairs, will give his answer to the question, “Should we fake nature?” Some environmentalists, he says, claim that efforts to rehabilitate degraded ecosystems just encourage the human hubris that society can always fix whatever damage has been done.
This kind of breadth of presentations is possible because faculty and students on all three campuses and in many departments teach, do research and engage in outreach activities that are relevant to the conservation of living systems. The colloquium seemed needed because, more often than not, the organizers say, these activities are carried out without an understanding of how other disciplines are addressing related issues.
According to the Web site, “We are convening the Conservation Colloquium because we believe that the concept of conservation will influence higher education’s work for decades to come as societies throughout the world grapple with the implications of vital issues such as global warming and climate instability, ecosystem service disruptions, loss of biodiversity, energy and resource depletion, pandemic human health concerns, social justice and the allocation of global resources, and technological changes necessitated by the end of cheap oil.”
Apart from bringing scholars together Nov. 4, a committee is at work trying to integrate a vision of conservation at the UW. The UW Graduate School, Program on the Environment and Earth Initiative convened a committee last April to bring together ideas about a graduate program in conservation biology.
“Certificate? Degree-granting? Self-organized set of motivated students and faculty? We don’t know yet,” says the group’s Web site at http://depts.washington.edu/cbcomm/.
The committee has done a reconnaissance of what other institutions are doing and just finished two sets of interviews with employers about skills that are needed, according to Clare Ryan, associate professor of forest resources, public affairs and marine affairs and a member of the steering committee. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, needs people who can deal both with landscapes and human health; for example what to do when people end up living on contaminated landscapes or face shortages of fresh water.
This fall, the group is meeting Tuesday afternoons from 2 to 3:30 p.m., in 106 Fishery Sciences. All are welcome.
