Past Speakers

Wednesday, Oct. 16th, 2019
Schaefer 106 @ 4:45PM

Species are going extinct at a rate that is unprecedented in the history of planet Earth, yet it remains unclear what the loss of biodiversity means for the goods and services we value as human begins. From microscopic invertebrates to the scale of the entire globe, I demonstrate the key role different aspects of biodiversity play in our oceans, including examples from seagrass, coral, kelp, and rocky reef ecosystems. These results integrate across broad disciplines, including metabolic theory and ecophysiology, behavioral, community and ecosystem ecology, macroecology, and global change biology. An emerging ‘next generation of biodiversity science may provide the tools to better understand the role of diverse life in promoting healthy and productive coastal communities.

Wednesday, September 18th, 2019
Library 321 @ 4:40pm

Dr. Fabricant will discuss the uneven and racialized effects of environmental hazards and toxins in low-income communities of color in South Baltimore and the subsequent forms of organizing for more sustainable futures. She highlights the use of mapping and countermapping as a political arm or weapon of the struggle for communities of color to reclaim land and open spaces for alternative forms of growing, of economic exchange, and of learning.

Nicole Fabricant is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Towson University. She received a BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1999 in urban anthropology and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2009. Dr. Fabricant’s research interests include social movements, cultural politics of resource extraction, urban anthropology, and environmental injustice/toxicity. She is the author of Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land (UNC 2012) and co-author with Bret Gustafson of Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory, and Indigeneity in Plurinational Bolivia. She is currently working on a book entitled Fighting to Breathe in the Black Butterfly: The Struggle for Land in Toxic South Baltimore.

Thursday, April 11th, 2019
Cole Cinema @ 5:30pm

A film that is both celebration and elegy for a place beset with rising sea levels and erosion, pollution and harvest restrictions, and young people seeking opportunities older generations of islanders never dreamed of—all this seen through the lens of the Marshall family of Smith Island, Maryland

Tom Horton is a writer for the Bay Journal. He wrote for the Baltimore Sun on environmental issues from 1972 through 2006. He is author of several books on the Chesapeake Bay, including Bay Country and Island Out of Time, and numerous articles for publications that include National Geographic, Rolling Stone and the New York Times. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University. He teaches writing and environmental topics at Salisbury University.

Wednesday, March 20th, 2019
Schaefer 106 @ 4:45 PM,

We will be welcoming back three alumni to learn how they translated their SMCM science degrees into exciting environmental careers. Carrie Kennedy ’99 is a Coastal Fisheries Program Manager at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Damien Ossi ’97 is a Wildlife Biologist with the Washington DC Department of Energy and the Environment. Matt Robinson ’04 is an Environmental Protection Specialists with the Washington DC Department of Energy and the Environment. All panelists will share what their jobs are like on a daily basis, how their current job connects to what they learned at SMCM, and will share advice that they would have liked to have gotten when they were in college based on what they do now. There will also be plenty of time for questions from the audience.

Thursday, February 7th, 2019
Library Room 321 @ 4:15 PM

Carolyn Finney, Ph.D., is a writer, performer, and cultural geographer. She is deeply interested in issues related to identity, difference, creativity, and resilience. In particular, she explores how issues of difference impacts participation in decisionmaking processes designed to address environmental issues. The aim of her work is to develop greater cultural competency within environmental organizations and institutions, challenge media outlets on their representation of difference, and increase awareness of how privilege shapes who gets to speak to environmental issues and determine policy and action. Carolyn has appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show, MSNBC, NPR and has been interviewed for numerous newspapers and magazines. Her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors was released in 2014 (UNC Press).

Paul Hirt is a historian specializing in the American West, global environmental history, environmental policy and sustainability studies. Professor Hirt is an affiliated faculty member in the School of Sustainability, the Environmental Social Science PhD program of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, and serves on the steering committee of the new PhD program in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University.

Hirt’s publications include a monograph on the history of national forest management since WWII (A Conspiracy of Optimism, 1994), two edited collections of essays on Northwest history (Terra Pacifica, 1998 and Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples, 1999), and two-dozen articles and book chapters on environmental and western history. Hirt’s current research projects include (1) a monograph on the history of electric power in the US Northwest and British Columbia; (2) collaborative interdisciplinary research on water use, urban growth and sustainability in southern Arizona with scholars at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and Decision Center for a Desert City; (3) a public education program on “Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon,” in partnership with the Grand Canyon Association and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities http://www.asu.edu/clas/grandcanyonhistory/ and (4) a multi-university research, teaching and outreach program on the cultural and environmental history of the Sky Islands borderlands region of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua in collaboration with historians, geographers and ecologists at Arizona State University, University of Arizona, University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University. In his private life he is involved with regional conservation organizations and currently serves on the board of directors of the Sky Island Alliance based in Tucson, Arizona: http://www.skyislandalliance.org/

Vic Edgerton is the Director of Investigations for the House Natural Resources Committee.  He was Legislative Director for Congressman Keith Ellison, a Senior Policy Advisor to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Chief of Staff to Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Though his expertise is the intersection of environment and health, he orchestrated the only winning single payer vote in Congress, helped stop the war in Libya, provided funding for permanently ill gulf war veterans when Congress was going to leave them behind, and executed a series of amendments on wage theft that supported a Presidential Executive Order on good federal contractors. For ten years, he implemented and enforced laws designed to protect public health and the environment in the southwest. He has Master of Public Health and Master of Environmental Management from Yale University and a BA in Applied Ecology from University of California, Irvine.

Rachel Fertik is an Environmental Protection Specialist in EPA’s Headquarters Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds in Washington, DC. She’s been there since 2002, working on national water policy.  Her work has included Clean Water Act jurisdiction issues in preparation for, and in response to the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County and Rapanos-Carabell Supreme Court decisions. As part of that work, she played a leadership role on a multi-year effort to develop a scientific synthesis document that served as a key foundation for the current “Waters of the U.S.” rulemaking responding to the Supreme Court decisions.   Most recently, she has provided headquarters support for EPA’s Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment and proposal to protect Bristol Bay, Alaska from the potential effects of the Pebble Mine through the 404(c) “veto” process.  She has a B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.E.M. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Sean Corson currently serves as the Deputy Director of the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office (NCBO). Sean oversees daily operations for the office focusing on native oyster restoration, buoy based observations, environmental education, and ecosystem based fisheries management.  He joined NCBO in 2008 after serving as NOAA’s Deputy Superintendent of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument located in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Sean holds a master’s degree from Yale University in forest science with an emphasis on anadromous fish. Mr. Corson oversees the development and implementation of science, service and stewardship programs for Chesapeake Bay protection and restoration, including research on critical Bay issues.

Mr. Corson is also the Acting Director of the NOAA Fisheries Office of Habitat Conservation, which protects, restores, and promotes stewardship of coastal and marine habitat to support our nation’s fisheries for future generations. His leadership on several fronts supports the agency’s mission: healthy and sustainable habitat that provides a range of benefits for abundant fish and wildlife, commercial and recreational opportunities, and resilient coastal communities that can withstand hurricanes, flooding, and other threats.

Eban S. Goodstein, Director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, is an economist, author, and sustainability educator known for his work in the clean energy movement. In 1999, he founded the Green House Network which spearheaded both the Race to Stop Global Warming, and Focus the Nation. In 2008, he created the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions. His educational campaigns have engaged thousands of schools and universities, civic institutions, faith groups, and communities in solutions-driven dialogues about global warming and global climate change. Since 2009, he has founded and directs two new graduate programs in sustainability at Bard College, an MS Degree in Climate Science and Policy, and an MBA in Sustainability, as well as the C2C Fellows sustainability leadership program.

Goodstein is the author of a college textbook, Economics and the Environment, (2010) now in its sixth edition; Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming (2007); and The Trade-off Myth: Fact and Fiction about Jobs and the Environment. (1999). Articles by Goodstein have appeared in among other outlets, The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, Ecological Economics, and Environmental Management. His research has been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, Time, Chemical and Engineering News, The Economist, USA Today, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He serves on the editorial board of Sustainability: The Journal of Record, and Environment, Workplace and Employment, and is on the Steering Committee of Economics for Equity & the Environment. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Follett Corporation, and is on the advisory committee for Chevrolet’s Clean Energy Initiative.

Mike Branch is an award winning scholar, teacher, and author who teaches American literature, film, and Environmental Studies at University of Nevada, Reno, where he is a Professor of English. A pioneer in environmental humanities, he is a co-founder and past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and he served for sixteen years as the Book Review Editor of the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.  He is a co-founder and series co-editor of the University of Virginia Press book series “Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism,” with twenty-five titles to date.

A prolific author, he has published five books and more than 150 articles, essays, and reviews, and has given more than 200 invited lectures, conference papers, readings, and workshops. He edited and co-edited numerous important anthologies, including The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley (1998); Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment (1998); The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003 (2003); Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden (2004); and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa (2001).

His creative nonfiction includes pieces that have received Honorable Mention for the Pushcart Prize and have been recognized as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays, The Best Creative Nonfiction, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His creative work has appeared in magazines and journals including Utne Reader, Orion, Ecotone, Isotope, Hawk and Handsaw, Places, Whole Terrain, Red Rock Review, Watershed, New South, and Terminus. He also writes a monthly essay called “Rants from the Hill” for High Country News.