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To engage in the work of conservation can be inspiring and
uplifting, especially when the stakes are clear, the issues are close to home
and people come together. Witness the formation of the 5th and Hill Neighborhood Rights campaign, which arose after the discovery of soil
contamination in a Champaign neighborhood, and Stand Up to Coal, which is
organizing the effort to stop a coal mine on the border of Champaign and
Vermilion Counties. Or look at the opposition that’s formed to prevent the
Clinton Landfill from accepting PCBs; everyone from local citizens to U.S.
senators and the entire range of state and local officials has taken up the
banner for protecting the Mahomet Aquifer.
But the work of conservation can also be downright
depressing. There seems to be no end of schemes that put private profits ahead
of public goods. Who would have thought we’d be fighting to keep the
Urbana-Champaign Sanitary District from selling water that supports the life of
our streams to a Tuscola fertilizer factory?[Salt Fork of the Vermilion River, currently threatened by reduced flows from UCSD and pollution by a proposed coal mine. Photo by author.]
And this isn’t even to mention mega challenges like
biodiversity loss and climate change. Maybe to make conservation more effective
we need to rethink our approach from the beginning.
Eric Freyfogle thinks so. He’s a U of I professor of law who
writes extensively about conservation—from a legal perspective, of course, but
also with attention to the cultural and economic underpinnings of our current
environmental plight. Among his books on the subject are titles including Justice and the Earth and Why Conservation is Failing and How It Can
Regain Ground.
Beyond contributing to discussion of these topics among like-minded
scholars, Freyfogle also seeks to call attention to them across the U of I
campus community, as well as among people from the wider world who are
interested in the same questions—and he thinks everyone should be.
Toward that end, he and collaborators Robert McKim, a professor
of religious studies, and yours truly, in my role as a lecturer with the School
of Earth, Society and Environment, coordinate an annual series of talks each
Spring under the title, “The Scholarship of Sustainability.”
The series, which is sponsored in part by Institute for
Sustainability, Energy and Environment, is meant to counter the specialization
that characterizes work within disciplines on campus. And it opens up broad
questions, such as “How should we be living?” and “What would the world look
like if we were living well—that is, if conservation won?”
Many of the speakers in the series teach at the UI, and professor
Freyfogle himself will address one of the more provocative questions of the
series, whether capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with conservation. Other
speakers will be visiting campus. Dale Jamieson, a professor of environmental
studies and philosophy at New York University address the ethics of relationships
between people and other forms of life. His March 6th talk, "Grass Fed Environmentalism: Living Responsibly in the Anthropocene," will also be part of Ethics Awareness Week on campus, an initiative of the National Center for Professional and Research
Ethics here.
[Self promotion alert: I'll be speaking as part of the series myself on March 20th; my talk, "Seeing and Valuing the Natural World," will feature many photographs of east central Illinois wildlife.]
This year’s Scholarship of Sustainability series begins today, so you’ll be hearing this plug too late for the first session. But it runs Thursday afternoons from 4:00 p.m. until 5:30 through April 17 (skipping the week of spring break). Talks are held in Room 149 of the National Soybean Research Center, 1101 West Peabody Drive, Urbana. Further details about the Scholarship of Sustainability Series are available on the homepage of the School of Earth, Society and Environment http://www.earth.illinois.edu/students/courses/sos.html.
[Self promotion alert: I'll be speaking as part of the series myself on March 20th; my talk, "Seeing and Valuing the Natural World," will feature many photographs of east central Illinois wildlife.]
This year’s Scholarship of Sustainability series begins today, so you’ll be hearing this plug too late for the first session. But it runs Thursday afternoons from 4:00 p.m. until 5:30 through April 17 (skipping the week of spring break). Talks are held in Room 149 of the National Soybean Research Center, 1101 West Peabody Drive, Urbana. Further details about the Scholarship of Sustainability Series are available on the homepage of the School of Earth, Society and Environment http://www.earth.illinois.edu/students/courses/sos.html.
