FEATURING AN EXCEPTIONAL SPEAKER LINEUP
from the Vatican, industry, NGOs, governments and academia
Agriculture
Architecture
Biology
Business
Climate
Economics
Engineering
Environmental Studies
Health Sciences
Law
Political Science
Public Administration
Theology.
Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson
Ghanaian cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.
He was president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace from 24 October 2009 to 1 January 2017.
Pope Francis named him the first prefect of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, which began operations on 1 January 2017.
He previously served as Archbishop of Cape Coast.
He was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2003.
Dr. Christoph Stückelberger
FOUNDER
Globethics.net
Cultivate and Conserve
Towards a Sustainable Development Paradigm
Date: January 30, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Sustainable development enables a life in dignity of present generations of human and non-human beings without endangering a life in dignity of future generations of human and non-human beings.
Transformation in the world and inner spiritual transformation have to go hand in hand.
Faith and Spirituality are drivers of transformation
Guillermo Kerber, Ph.D.
Dr. Kerber is originally from Uruguay, engaged in ecumenical institutions for 30 years, coordinated the work on Care for Creation and Climate Justice at the World Council of Churches until 2015. A board member of the Global Call for Climate Action (GCCA-tcktcktck) his passion for eco-theology started in Latin America in the 1980s and led to his doctoral thesis on Ecology and Latin American Theology. An academic and an activist, he has extensively published on the topic and has led WCC delegations to COPs since 2007 to 2015. He presently teaches at the Atelier Œcuménique de Théologie and collaborates with the Formation Service of the Catholic Church in Geneva, Switzerland, where he lives his wife and children.
Cardinal Peter Turkson
Prefect
Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development
The Essential Message of Laudato Si
Date: September 25, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
" We must engage in honest, transparent, constructive dialogue based on the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, working for the common good, universal destination of goods, and preferential option for the poor and for the earth. Particular interests must not hijack the negotiations. We must transcend ourselves in solidarity."
Christoph Stückelberger, Ph.D.
Stückelberger is Founder and Executive Director of the global network on ethics Globethics.net Foundation, based in Geneva/Switzerland. He is part-time Professor of Ethics at the University of Basel. He got his PhD with a doctoral thesis on Peace Ethics and his habilitation (“second thesis”) on Environmental Ethics. He is regularly visiting professor in developing countries (Africa and Asia).
Guilermo Kerber, Ph.D.
Theologian, Uruguay/Switzerland
Atelier Oecuménique de Théologie
Global Call for Climate Action
The Ecumenical Background of
and Reactions to Laudato Si'
Date: October 16, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Laudato Si’ had a strong impact well beyond the Catholic church. At its presentation in the Vatican, a representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople welcomed the encyclical and reminded a long way had been done on the topic by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and his predecessor Dimitrios. The World Council of Churches (WCC), a fellowship of more than 300 Protestant, Orthodox and Pentecostal churches, has, for decades, linked care for creation with justice and peace. While encouraging and supporting member churches to protect the integrity of creation, the WCC has strongly advocated at the United Nations (UN) forums, especially since 1992, the UN Earth Summit and at the Conferences of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
John Dominic Crossan
Professor emeritus at DePaul University
and bestselling author
The Challenge of Jesus
Date: February 6, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Here, then, is our present challenge from Jesus’ vision of God’s Kingdom on earth. A sustainable earth requires many difficult decisions, plans, and actions. But, above all else, a sustainable earth demands a peaceful earth, and a peaceful earth demands a just earth with a fair distribution of all its resources among all its peoples. For we are in the image and likeness of a nonviolent God (Genesis 1:26-27) whose sun rises alike for all and whose rain descends alike on all (Matthew 5:45).
Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist . His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared n 24 languages.
Bill is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.
The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities. Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and the Boston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.”
Andrew Simms
Author, analyst and co-director of the
New Weather Institute
The Possibility of Rapid Transition
Date: February 13, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
We are told that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a change to the current economic system. Yet the lessons of history and current innovation tell a different story. As societies we have repeatedly experienced dramatic, rapid transitions. These have been in response to external shocks and pressures, like economic, environmental and political shocks. But they have also resulted from technological and demographic shifts. What can we learn about the conditions under which rapid, progressive transition can happen in order to make it more likely today? And, can we do so in a way that matches the scale and speed of necessary changes?
Mark Z. Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/ Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment and of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He received degrees in Civil Engineering, Economics, and M.S. Environmental Engineering from Stanford. He received an M.S. and PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from UCLA and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1994. He has published two textbooks and ~150 peer-reviewed journal articles. He received the 2005 AMS Henry G. Houghton Award and the 2013 AGU Ascent Award for his work on black carbon climate impacts and the 2013 Global Green Policy Design Award for developing state and country energy plans. In 2015, he received a Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for his work on the grid integration of 100% wind, water and solar energy systems. He has served on an advisory committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, appeared in a TED talk, appeared on the David Letterman Show to discuss converting the world to clean energy, and cofounded The Solutions Project (www.thesolutionsproject.org).
Stewart Wallis
Chairman
Wellbeing Economy Alliance
A Wellbeing Econony:
Why, What and How To make It Happen
Date: November 27, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Stewart Wallis has long been an advocate for transition to a new economic system. With experience ranging from private industry, the World Bank and Oxfam, he has come out of retirement to voluntarily help to run Wellbeing Economy Alliance. Next week he will talk about how the predominant economic system has become addicted to GDP growth at all costs and has lost sight of the larger goal of sustainable wellbeing, what we need to do and what is being done.
Gernot Wagner is a research associate at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a lecturer on Environmental Science and Public Policy, the executive director of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, an associate at the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, and an associate at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
Gernot wrote Climate Shock, with Harvard’s Martin Weitzman, a Top 15 Financial Times McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015.
Gernot teaches “Climate Policy—Past, Present, and Future” at Harvard College. Previously he taught energy economics at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He served as economist at the Environment Defense Fund.
John Dominic Crossan
Dom is an Irish-American New Testament scholar, historian of early Christianity, and former Catholic priest who has produced both scholarly and popular works. His research has focused on the historical Jesus, on the anthropology of the Ancient Mediterranean and New Testament worlds and on the application of postmodern hermeneutical approaches to the Bible. Crossan emphasizes the historical context of Jesus and of his followers immediately after his death.
Bill McKibben
AUTHOR and Founder of 350.org
Why 350 Is A Magic Number
Date: March 20, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
The battle over carbon emissions has so far been fought mainly between big and powerful players. In countries like Australia, the coal industry has battled environmentalists and taken on solar power entrepreneurs, while on the international stage the major players — the EU, the US, China — have driven the negotiations. Most of the talk has been about what’s preferable from the point of view of the leadership of these strong forces. But the first victims of climate change have become increasingly assertive as their predicament becomes more apparent. Facing climate disaster, African countries are calling for a fast greenhouse gas reduction to 350 parts per million ahead of the global climate protests
Andrew Simms is a political economist, environmentalist, campaigner and co-founder of the New Weather Institute.
Andrew is a research associate at the Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex, and a fellow of the New Economics Foundation (nef), where he was policy director for over a decade. During that time he founded the nef’s work programme on climate change, energy and interdependence; coining the term ‘clone towns’ to describe the homogenisation of high streets by chain stores.
Andrew wrote the book ‘Tescopoly’ on Tesco’s dominance of the grocery market, ‘Ecological Debt’ on framing the transgression of planetary boundaries, and co-authored ‘The New Economics’ and ‘Green New Deal’, devising the concept of ‘ecological debt day.’
Andrew writes often for The Guardian and broadcasts with the BBC World Service. His latest book ‘Cancel the Apocalypse: the New Path to Prosperity’ is manifesto of new economic possibilities.
Mark Z. Jacobson, Ph.D.
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program
Stanford University
Transitioning the world to 100% clean, renewable energy
Date: February 13, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the most significant problems facing the world today. This talk discusses the development of technical and economic plans to convert the energy infrastructure of each of the 50 United States and 139 countries of the world to those powered by 100% wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) for all purposes, namely electricity, transportation, industry, and heating/cooling, after energy efficiency measures have been accounted for. Results showing the ability of the grid to remain stable at low cost under 100%. WWS conditions are also provided.
Stewart Wallis earned degrees in Natural Sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and obtained a MSc in Business and Economics from the London Business School. He spent 1976 to 1983 with the World Bank in Washington, D.C. working on industrial and financial development in East Asia. He joined Oxfam in 1992 as International Director with responsibility, latterly, for 2500 staff in seventy countries and for all Oxfam’s policy, research, development and emergency work worldwide. Stewart joined the New Economics Foundation as Executive Director on 1 November 2003. He is a Trustee of the Overseas Development Institute and Habitat for Humanity. And he is a Fellow of the Club of Rome. Stewart has authored or co-authored several books.
Gernot Wagner, Ph.D.
Financial Times Prize-winning author
Research Associate and lecturer
Environmental Science and Public Policy
Harvard School of Engineering & Science
Climate Shock: It’s not over ‘til the fat tail zings
Date: February 20, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
If you had a 10 percent chance of having a fatal car accident, you’d take necessary precautions. So if we know the world is warming and there’s a 10 percent chance this might eventually lead to a catastrophe beyond anything we could imagine, why aren’t we doing more about climate change right now?
Climate Shock helps readers zero in on the unknown risks that may yet dwarf all else. It also shows how the economic forces that make sensible climate policies difficult to enact can make radical would-be fixes like geoengineering all the more probable.
Sanjoy Mukherjee, Ph.D.
Professor
Sustainability, CSR and Business Ethics
Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management
Sustainability Ethics:
Ecology, Economy & Ethics
Date: t.b.a.
Sustainable Development" is the goal 2015-2030 of the global community of states, adopted by the United Nations. Ecology, economy and ethics are all needed to reach these goals. Understanding a concept like ‘sustainability' requires an understanding not only of what we are seeking to ‘sustain', but also how man's activities and needs are implicated in and can threaten the future of these biological systems. This lecture reflects upon one of the key countries of the world, India, whose population represents almost 20% of the world's population. Questions surrounding economic development and environmental sustainability are fundamental to understanding the country's future, and how it will tackle difficult issues, like the eradication of poverty.
Sanjoy Mukharjee is Professor at the Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Shillong where he is member of the Sustainability, CSR and Ethics Group. A graduate in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, he obtained his Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, and Ph.D from Jadavpur University. He has industrial experience of 7 years. Till 2009 Mukherjee was engaged in research, teaching and consulting on the human dimension of Management with focus on values and culture at the Management Centre for Human, IIM Calcutta. He has been conducting workshops and management development programs on Human Values in Management since 1993.
Dr Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien has 15 years experience in strategic management, corporate sustainability and responsibility, advisory services, microfinance, rural development, project design and implementation, capacity building, enterprise development, and corporate governance spanning the private sector, public sector and civil society in Africa and Europe. As the Chief Strategy Officer of Strategy and Execution Ltd, Dr Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien consulted for the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources on the development of the National Food Security Program (2008-2010). She holds a BSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), a Diploma in Catholic Social Teaching; and undertook her PhD at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, in the area of “Ownership and Management Structures” with a specific focus on the global applicability of “an African Model of Corporate Governance and Sustainability”.
Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien Ph.D.
Award-winning Nigerian social entrepreneur
Corporate sustainability and responsibility
Founder - Growing Businesses Foundation
Bottom of The Pyramid Empowerment
Date: t.b.a
The bottom of the pyramid, bottom of the wealth pyramid or the bottom of the income pyramid is the largest, but poorest socio-economic group. In global terms, this is the 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2.50 a day. To address the need for sustaiable development at the bottom of the pyramid, Nnoli-Edozien founded the Micro-enterprise Development Co-operation. MDC is a platform for evaluating international best practices in micro-finance for building self-reliant and sustainable financial intermediaries that nurture and grow small businesses into viable and socially responsible service providers.
Joseph Romm
Founding Editor, ClimateProgress.org
Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Author, "Climate Change: What Everyone Needs To Know
Climate Change Solutions: What You Thought You Knew Is Obsolete
Date: March 6, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Historically, even the most respected newspapers have fallen into the trap of giving the same credence – and often the same amount of space – to a handful of U.S. scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, as they give to hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists. No surprise that much of the public has ended up with a misimpression about the remarkable strength of our scientific understanding and the need for action. More and more pieces are being written by senior political reporters, who know very little about global warming. Scientists and politicians need to be more effective communicators about climate change.
Joseph J. Romm is an American author, blogger, physicist and climate expert. Romm is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America."
Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he founded their climate blog, Climate Progress, part of their
Think Progress website. In 2008, Time
magazine named Romm's blog one of the "Top 15 Green Websites".
In the 1990s, Romm served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. He has published several books on global warming and energy technology. His 2015 book, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, covers basic climate science in a Q&A format.
Kate Raworth (‘Ray-worth’) is a renegade economist dedicated to making economics fit for the 21st century. Her best-selling book Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist has been translated into eight languages. She teaches at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, and is also a Senior Associate of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and an advisor to the Global Challenges programme of the Stockholm School of Economics.
Over the past two decades Kate has worked as Senior Researcher at Oxfam, as a co-author of the UN’s Human Development Report, and as a Fellow of the Overseas Development Institute based in the villages of Zanzibar. She holds a BA and MSc from Oxford University and an honorary doctorate from Business School Lausanne.
Kate Raworth, Ph.D.
Author
Senior Visiting Research Associate
Environmental Change Institute
University of Oxford
Humanity's Compass for the 21st Century
(or why doughnuts could turn out to be good for us)
Date: March 20, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
At the start of the 21st century, amidst social and ecological crises, humanity urgently needs a radically renewed sense of progress and a compass for charting the journey ahead. The Doughnut of social and ecological boundaries offers such a compass. Kate will introduce the concept and explore its implications for business, for urban design, for economics, and for each of us.
Norman Kurland
Executive Director
Center for Economic & Social Justice
The Just Third Way: Creating Green Growth, Widespread Prosperity, and Global Peace
Date: November 27, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Humanity in the 21st Century conquered the bonds of earth’s gravity and left our footprints on the moon, escaping the bonds of earth’s gravity. We have developed fossil-free energy, manufacturing and communications technologies that would enable us to feed, clothe, shelter, educate and empower every global person.
What’s missing? A paradigm that addresses inequality, poverty, racism, climate change, and war: The Just Third Way (“JTW”) or “Personalism.” Norman will discuss a model to ensure that all people have equal opportunity, full access and full participation in the free market as workers and capital owners.
Marie Venner is Chair of the Climate Change, Energy and Sustainability Subcommittee at the National Academy of Sciences Transportation Research Board. She has done over 45 projects for the National Academies TRB and is a nationally and internationally known researcher and speaker on infrastructure, process improvement, and sustainability. She is a former public manager and public servant who now works with agencies, citizens, and faith communities on how we can make the big transitions that are coming, in a life-giving way for all. She has worked for the International Council of Scientific Unions and as a US expert on European Commission research projects. She is on multiple NAS Transportation Research Board committees, subcommittees, and task forces. She is also on the board or steering group of multiple faith-based organizations.
Norman Kurland heads the interfaith Center for Economic and Social Justice and Equity Expansion International, Inc., an investment banking/consulting company promoting global free enterprise reform through universal access to capital ownership. His philosophy combines “Personalist” ideas of Louis Kelso, Buckminster Fuller, Fr. William Ferree, Martin Luther King, Jr. and “World Citizen” Garry Davis. President Reagan appointed Kurland as deputy chairman of the bipartisan Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice. He co-authored Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen, a blueprint for green economic growth enabling everyone to share private property ownership, profits and governance power. After studying law and economics at the University of Chicago, he became in 1960 a civil rights and anti-poverty lawyer before joining Kelso’s “Just Third Way” peaceful revolution.
Marie Venner
Chair, Transportation Research Board
Climate Change Special Task Force
National Academies of Science & Engineering
What is pro-life and well-being? Surprising recent findings on the health effects of pollution from traffic and fossil fuels
Date: March 26, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
More people die from the air quality effects of traffic every year than from accidents. Now researchers have found that health effects are much worse than previously thought, touch everyone, and permanently impact many people. How shall we respond? Clean air is possible, practical and affordable. The set of health impacts we’ve known about for decades (stroke, early death, asthma, lung disease, emergency room visits) by themselves justify serious action; health savings alone would cover the additional investment that renewable energy used to require. The new set of diseases and impacts that are known make action worthwhile many times over. Alternatives are now available and they are economical, so it is a question of values and priorities.
Mark Campanale
FOUNDER
Carbon Tracker Initiative
Sustainable finance as a driver for the energy transition; what are the risks of investing in the fossil economy?
Date: October 23, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
The Carbon Tracker Initiative is a London-based not-for-profit think tank researching the impact of climate change on financial markets. The Carbon Tracker Initiative popularized the notion of a carbon bubble, which describes the incompatibility between the continued development of fossil fuel projects and combating climate change.
This lecture will look at how the energy transition is disrupting demand for fossil fuels, particularly how electric cars is effecting oil demand and solar & gas the demand for coal in power. It will look at the science of carbon budgets and the need to keep most fossil fuels in the ground to secure the Paris agreement of limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees and preferably 1.5 degrees.
Mark Campanale is the Founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative whose goal is to align capital markets with natural ecological limits to growth. He conceived the ‘unburnable carbon’ capital markets thesis and commissioned and was editor to the ground breaking Unburnable Carbon – Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble? Report. Mark is responsible for management strategy, board matters and developing their capital markets framework analysis.
Prior to forming these groups, Mark had twenty five years experience in sustainable financial markets working for major institutional asset management companies. Mark is a co-founder of some of the first responsible investment funds firstly at Jupiter Asset Management in 1989 with the Ecology Funds, NPI with Global Care, the AMP Capital Sustainable Future Funds, and Henderson Global Investor’s Industries of the Future Funds. Mark has a BA in Politics & Economic History and an M.Sc in Agricultural Economics.
Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal priest, is Executive Director of GreenFaith, an international interfaith environmental organization. He has developed a range of innovative programs to make GreenFaith a global leader in the religious-environmental movement.
In the past four years, Fletcher coordinated the 2015 OurVoices campaign, which mobilized religious support globally for COP 21, led organizing of faith communities for the People’s Climate Marches in NYC and Washington DC, helped lead the faith-based fossil fuel divestment movement, supported the launch of the global Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, and co-founded Shine, a faith-philanthropy-NGO campaign to end energy poverty with renewable energy by 2030. He helps lead GreenFaith’s new local organizing initiative, creating multi-faith GreenFaith Circles in local communities globally. He is an Ashoka Fellow and author of GreenFaith: Mobilizing God’s People to Protect the Earth (Abingdon Press, March 2015).
Rev. Fletcher Harper
Executive Director
Greenfaith
GreenFaith – Belief into Action for the Earth
Date: April 3, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
More than ever before, people of diverse faiths globally are putting their beliefs into action for the Earth, by praying, protesting, marching, and changing their lifestyles. At the same time, the dire urgency of the climate and environmental crises means that action is needed at orders of magnitude greater than presently in place. Addressing this gap with spirituality, joy and conviction is GreenFaith’s mission, and its director, Fletcher Harper, will describe the evolution of the religious environmental movement on an international, multi-faith perspective and introduce two new efforts – a global, multi-faith sustainable living initiative and a local faith-based environmental organizing initiative – designed to meet these challenges.
Richard Wilkinson, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology
University of Nottingham Medical School
Inequality and Dysfunctional Societies
Date: April 10, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
If you look at rich countries and compare life expectancy, mental health, homicide rates, child well-being, teenage birth rates, imprisonment, drug abuse, obesity rates, levels of trust, the educational performance of school children, or the strength of community life, you find that countries which tend to do well on one of these measures tend to do well on all of them, and the ones which do badly, tend to do badly on all of them. What accounts for the difference?
The key seems to be the amount of inequality in each society. The picture is consistent whether we compare rich countries or the 50 states of the USA. The more unequal a society is, the more ill health and social problems it has.
Richard is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at the University of York. His books and research papers have drawn attention to the tendency for societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor to suffer a heavier burden of health and social problems. Two of his books have been the subject of documentary films – The Great Leveller (for the Channel 4 TV’s Equinox series broadcast in 1996) was based on his Unhealthy Societies. The Divide (based on The Spirit Level) was released in April 2016 (available on Netflix). The Spirit Level, written with Kate Pickett is now in 24 languages and has won several awards. His TED talk ‘How economic inequality harms societies’ has been watched over 3 million times. Richard has received Solidar’s Silver Rose Award, the Irish Cancer Society’s Charles Cully Memorial medal, was The Australian Society for Medical Research medallist in 2017.
The Rev. Jerry Cappel is an ordained Episcopal priest currently serving as the Environmental Network Coordinator for Province IV of The Episcopal Church. Jerry’s vocational interests are in adult education, ecology and faith. He is interested in helping faith communities to adopt a “deeper shade of green” in their worship, liturgies, fellowship and practice.
Jerry serves as a member of the Advisory Council on the Stewardship of Creation for The Episcopal Church, and is a fellow with the Center for Religion and the Environment and with GreenFaith. He is a graduate of Harding Graduate School of Religion (M.Div.) in Memphis, TN, and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY (Ph.D.).
You can follow Rev. Cappel on Twitter at RevCappel and visit his website at Deepgreenchurch.org
Rev. Jerry Cappel, Ph.D.
Province IV Environmental Network Coordinator
The Center for Religion and the Environment
University of the South
Fellowship, Reconciliation and Celebration: Restoring Faith as a Foundation of Environmental Action
Date: April 10, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
A key contribution of Laudato Si’ is in how Pope Francis gives voice to the truth that fundamental environmental challenges and solutions stem not only from the sciences, but also in the bible and tradition; not only economics, but faith and faithfulness. The scientific realities of climate change, extinctions and pollutions are pointers that also expose a misfit faith. The facts and figures of consumerism and eco-injustice expose the same. This session will revisit the Christian witness through the voice of Laudato Si’, challenging dualistic and anthropocentric interpretations of the faith and explore a path forward through an integral ecology and a gospel of right relationship with all creation.
Christopher Laszlo, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Fowler Center for Business as Chair, Fowler Professor of Organizational Behavior
Weatherhead School of Management
Case Western Reserve University
Quantum Leadership:
New Consciousness in Business
Date: April 17, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
By the end of the webcast you will be able to understand how transforming consciousness is the highest lever for a new leadership orientation toward prosperity and flourishing. You will explore practices of connectedness for greater personal and professional fulfillment. You will begin to discover your own commitment to positive social impact. What can you do in your lifetime? What do you want your legacy to be? What is the impact that you want to have on the world?
Michael Pirson joined the Gabelli School of Business as an associate professor of management systems in 2008. A scholar of humanistic management, which holds that business and commerce ought to advance human dignity and society, Dr. Pirson helped to establish an undergraduate sustainable-business concentration at Fordham. He teaches courses such as Social Entrepreneurship, Fundamentals of Management and Principles of Management, and his work spans the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Dr. Pirson is the social entrepreneurship track chair for the Oikos-Ashoka Global Case Writing Competition in Social Entrepreneurship. He is also a founding partner of the Humanistic Management Network, an organization that brings together scholars, practitioners and policymakers around the common goal of creating a 'life-conducive' economic system. In that capacity, he is the co-editor of the Humanism in Business book series, published by Palgrave-McMillan.
Dr. Pirson is a research fellow at Harvard University and serves on the board of three social enterprises in the United States.
Amory B. Lovins
Co-founder and Chief Scientist
Rocky Mountain Institute
How Big is the Energy Efficiency Resource?
Date: April 24, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Most economic theorists assume that energy
efficiency is a limited and dwindling resource whose adoption, driven by policy and price, will deplete its potential and raise its cost. Influenced by that model, most traditional analysts and deployers of energy
efficiency see and exploit only a modest fraction of the worthwhile efficiency resource, saving less and paying more than they should.
With energy efficiency as its cornerstone and needing its pace redoubled, climate protection depends critically on seeing and deploying the entire efficiency
resource. This opportunity requires focusing less on individual technologies than on whole systems (buildings, factories, vehicles, and the larger systems embedding them), and replacing theoretical assumptions about efficiency’s diminishing returns with practitioners’ empirical evidence of expanding
returns.
George Marshall is Climate Outreach’s Director of Projects. George has 25 years experience in environmental campaigning and communications including senior campaign positions with Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation International. He has provided consultancy communication advice to organisations including WWF UK, the RSPB, The National Trust and the Welsh Government. He is the author of Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
Jochem Wermuth
FOUNDER Partner and Chief Investment Officer
Wermuth Asset Management GmbH
ASSET ALLOCATION WITH POSITIVE IMPACT IN THE GREEN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Date: October 2, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
How investors can play a key role in slowing climate change while enhancing risk return profiles
Green Industrial Revolution: Moving the trillions needed to stop climate change profitably
The green industrial revolution is here – its turning point has arrived. Emerging markets is where much of the growth will take place. Disruptive technologies mean that even mature markets can sometimes be seen as emerging markets.
Bob Brecha graduated from Wright State University (B.S. in Physics, 1983) and from the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D. in Physics, 1990).
Since 1993 Bob has been at the University of Dayton where he is Professor of Physics and in the Renewable and Clean Energy Program, and was founding coordinator of the Sustainability, Energy and the Environment (SEE) initiative from 2007 - 2015.
Since 2006 Bob has been a regular visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany and is spending 2018 at the Berlin think-tank Climate Analytics.
Bob's research publications focus on energy efficiency in buildings, climate change mitigation strategies, and energy needs for sustainable development.
https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/physics/brecha_bob.php
Chris Laszlo, PhD is the Char and Chuck Fowler Professor of Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management, and serves as the Faculty Executive Director of the Fowler Center. He is the author of Flourishing Enterprise (2014), Embedded Sustainability (2011), and Sustainable Value (2008), all from Stanford University Press. His earlier book, The Sustainable Company (2003, paperback 2005), was published by Island Press. His work over the last decade has helped launch mainstream management approaches to sustainability for value and profit. In 2012, he was selected a “Top 100 Thought Leader in Trustworthy Business Behavior” by Trust Across America™. In 2015, he was elected Fellow of the International Academy of Management.
Michael Pirson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Area Chair (Interim)
Organizational Behavior
Fordham University
Humanistic Management Manifesto
Date: April 17, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
We believe that market economies hold a substantial potential for human development in general. To promote life-conducive market activities, we want to complement the quantitative metrics, which hitherto define managerial and economic success with qualitative evaluation criteria that focus on the human dignity and well-being of every woman and every man.
In business as well as in society, respect for human dignity demands respect for human freedom. Collective decision-making, in corporations just as in governments, should hence be based on free and equal deliberation, participation or representation of all affected parties. Concerns of legitimacy must, in economics like in politics, precede questions of expediency ...
Physicist Amory Lovins has advised major firms and governments worldwide for 40+ years; written 31 books and over 600 papers; and received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, 12 honorary doctorates, the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood, National Design, and World Technology Awards, and Germany’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit. An honorary architect, Swedish engineering academician, and former Oxford don, he has taught at ten universities. In 2009, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers.
George Marshall
C-Founder, Director of Projects
Climate Outreach
Breaking the Silence: Talking about Climate Change with People of Faith
Date: April 3, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Our attitudes to climate change are determined by values, identity and socially-transferred narratives. Faith provides an opportunity for reframing climate change around a set of common ethical values that can be shared across political and cultural boundaries. Along with recognising a common commitment to spiritual values, George will acknowledge the shared values of people of faith and the vital contribution their voice makes to climate change - especially in establishing the moral basis for action.
Jochen Wermuth the Founding Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Wermuth Asset Management GmbH (WAM) and the principal of the Wermuth family office. He serves as a member of the steering committee of the peer-to-peer investor networks “Europeans for Divest-Invest” and “100% Impact Network“ and on the investment committee of the German Government’s new €24.6bn Energy Transition Fund.
WAM is a BaFin regulated investment adviser, committed to alternative and sustainable investments with a positive impact on the environment and fighting corruption. Founded in 1999, it has launched and advised investment funds with peak assets in excess of $1bn.
Previously, Jochen Wermuth was a Director at Deutsche Bank London and an EU-TACIS and World Bank-financed Head of the Economic Expert Group at the Russian Ministry of Finance. Born in 1969, he was educated at Brown and Oxford Universities in Mathematics and Economics. Committee of the newly set up Energy Transition Fund of the German Government, funded with €26.6bn.
Robert Brecha, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Renewable and Clean Energy
University of Dayton
Energy Access and Sustainable Development
Date: October 9, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
The paradox of development has been that wealthy countries used fossil fuels over the past century, but the resulting changes to Earth’s climate threaten mainly the least wealthy parts of the globe. However, many around the world have not yet had access to modern energy systems. Sustainability requires us to consider the interconnectedness of the planet's natural systems and with human societies globally and in the future. One key to enabling sustainable development lies in a dramatic increase in deployment of renewable energy, technologies either currently available or advancing rapidly. This talk will be a presentation of some current realities, as well as very real difficulties in making the transformation to a sustainable world energy system.
Mary Christina Wood, J.D.
Philip H. Knight Professor of Law
University of Oregon School of Law
Atmospheric Trust Litigation Around the World
Date: October 16, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
This presentation will describe the ongoing, youth-led litigation campaign invoking the ancient public trust principle to force governments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions before the planet passes irrevocable climate thresholds into runaway heating. The public trust concept in law parallels covenants of stewardship announced in the major religions of the world and calls for fiduciary care towards common resources, like the air we breathe and the atmosphere that controls our climate system.
David Bollier is Director of the Schumacher Center’s Reinventing the Commons Program. He is an American activist, author, and blogger whose work focuses on the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics, and culture.
David has co-organized a wide variety of pioneering international conferences on the commons, strategy workshops, seminars, and public events, especially in Europe. He also spent many years in various policy positions in Washington, D.C.
He is an author of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons , Patterns of Commoning; The Wealth of the Commons; and has contributed chapters to more than a dozen books .
For twenty-five years, until 2010, David collaborated closely with television producer Norman Lear on a wide variety of non-television public affairs and political projects. In 2012, Bollier received the Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy from the American Academy in Berlin for his work on the commons.
Mary Christina Wood is a Philip H. Knight Professor of Law at the University of Oregon and the Faculty Director of the law school's nationally acclaimed Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center.
Professor Wood's most recent book, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, sets forth a new paradigm of ecological responsibility.
Professor Wood originated the legal theory called Atmospheric Trust Litigation, which seeks to hold governments accountable to reduce carbon pollution within their jurisdictions. Further, her research is being used in cases brought on behalf of youth throughout the world. Professor Wood is a frequent speaker on climate issues and has received national and international attention for her sovereign trust approach to global climate policy.
https://law.uoregon.edu/explore/Mary-Wood
David Bollier
Writer and Activist
Director - Reinventing the Commons Program
Schumacher Center for a New Economics
Reinventing the Commons
Date: October 9, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
One of the most devastating and recurring problems that virtually every commons faces is market enclosure – the privatization and marketization of shared resources by businesses, investors and speculators, often in collusion with government. What's really remarkable is that legislatures and courts so often declare that enclosures are legal because they supposedly contribute to economic growth, progress and freedom.
All of this got me to thinking: What would it look like if commoners could invent their own types of law, consistent with state law, to reliably protect their commons? What if there were a more rigorous Law for the Commons?
Michel Bauwens
Founder - Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives
External expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (2008, 2012)
The role of the Commons
in the Coming Transformation
Date: October 23, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Most approaches for social change are still focusing on re-balancing the market-state dichotomy, but the commons are a vital third sector that is historically linked to situations of ecological overshoot. In this presentation, we will introduce commons-based peer production, the rapid expansion of urban commons in every area of human provisioning, and the necessary adaptation of state forms (public-commons partnerships) and markets (regenerative markets) in a commons-centric political economy, the only one that is capable to drastically diminish human footprints while guaranteeing the equitable predistribution of wealth.
Michel Bauwens is the founder and director of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Michel is also research director of CommonsTransition.org. a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics. He has (co-)published various books and reports in english, dutch and french, such as (with Vasilis Kostakis), ‘Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy’. Michel currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand and last spring, has crafted a Commons Transition Plan for the city of Ghent in Belgium, after a similar project for Ecuador in 2014. Michel now works mostly on realizing value and technology sovereignty, and on institutional design for public-commons partnerships to commonify provisioning systems for territories, so they can function within the carrying capacity of the bioregion and the planet.
Michael Shuman is an economist, attorney, and globally recognized expert on community economics. He’s Director of Local Economy Programs for Telesis Corporation, a nonprofit affordable housing company, and currently an adjunct instructor at Bard Business School in New York City and at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He’s also a Fellow at Cutting Edge Capital and at the Post-Carbon Institute, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). He is one of the architects of the crowdfunding reforms that became the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act), signed into law in April 2012. He is the author of nine books, including Local Dollars: Local Sense, The Small-Mart Revolution, and Going Local. In 2015, Michael published The Local Economy Solution. It presents the stories of 28 “pollinator” enterprises that are nurturing local businesses in self-financing ways. Michael has also advised countless communities on strategies to increase local economic multipliers, and just completed (with Gwen Hallsmith) a handbook on local investment opportunities in Vermont. http://michaelhshuman.com/
Mt. St. Mary College
Thomas Fitzmaurice, Ph.D. - Finance
Michael Fox, J.D. - Business Law
Tracey Niemotko, JD, CPA, CFE - Accounting
Anthony Scardillo, DM, MBA - Marketing
Moira Tolan, Ph.D. - Management
Veronica McMillan, RN, JD - Healthcare Management
Faculty Members from the Mount Saint Mary College
School of Business
Seeing God in the Workplace
How Business Firms Can Elevate Society by Engaging in Sustainable Business Practices
Date: October 30, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Michael Shuman
Author, Professor, Speaker, Advocate
Cutting Edge Capital
Post Carbon Institute
Investing Locally
Date: October 30, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Distributed renewable energy on a sustainable grid may be antithetical to large scale corporate organization. Want to move your money from Wall Street to Main Street?
Michael reviews the latest tools available for investors who want to put their money into local business, for businesses who want to get financed by their customers and neighbors, and for financial professionals who want to start new local-investment institutions. These are the 25 financial tools we will need to accelerate the adoption of cost-competitive renewable energy systems on a sustainable grid.
MBA Program Coordinator Moira Tolan provides an overview and discussed the role that sustainability plays in corporations.
Business Law Professor Michael Fox will talk about Sustainability in Business, Society & Law.
Accounting Professor Tracey Niemotko talks about sustainability in accounting reporting.
Marketing Professor Anthony Scardillo's lecture is titled, I Want Six-Pack Abs: How the Dominican Pillars Can Help Marketers Build Sustainable Practices.
Finance Professor Thomas Fitzmaurice talks about finance services sustainability.
Healthcare Management Professor Veronica McMillan 's lecture is titled, Sustainability is Critical to the Long-Term Health of Healthcare.
John Odhiambo Onyango, Ph.D. is an academic, scholar and is currently an Associate Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame (USA). He has a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Architecture from the University of Glasgow (Scotland, UK); a Master of Architecture degree from University of Notre Dame, (USA); Certificate in Professional Practice & Management in Architecture (RIBA Part 3-Architect's License in the United Kingdom) from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, (England, UK) and a Bachelor of Architecture (honors) degree from University of Nairobi (Kenya).
Current Research Interests:
-
Understanding Energy Use in Traditional Buildings using Simulation and Biomimetic Epidemiology
-
Built Environment and Aging & Wellbeing
https://architecture.nd.edu/faculty/john-onyango/
John Odhiambo Onyango, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Architecture
University of Notre DAME
Climate Change and the Built Environment
Date: December 3, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
John’s research primarily focuses on Sustainability in the broad sense that takes holistic approaches to the creative practices at the building and urban design levels that is both interdisciplinary as well as multidisciplinary in collaboration with other colleagues in the allied fields such as engineering, sociology, healthcare, and IT communications. The CIB working paper for “W108: Climate Change and the Built Environment” suggested future research should focus on two main hazards: floods and heat waves.
Marissa Vertrees
Director of Organizing
Global Catholic Climate Movement
Organizing Locally for Laudato Si'
Date: November 13, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
The Global Catholic Climate Movement is global network of 650+ Catholic organizations in all continents, with a constituency of nearly 1 million
Catholic individuals, working to care for creation by responding to climate change.
GCCM supports the Catholic Church to bring Laudato Si’ to life through their Season of Creation flagship project, the Eco-Parish program to reduce the carbon footprint, the Divest-Reinvest program to shift Catholic financial assets from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewable energy and public advocacy in the halls of power and in the media.
Marissa will talk about how to engage your parish, diocese, and local community in living out Laudato Si’ and identifying places of local change and local advocacy.
https://catholicclimatemovement.global
Marisa Vertrees is the Campaigns Director for the Global Catholic Climate Movement. She was the Social Justice Director at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, where she also assisted the Peace and Justice Commission of the Arlington Diocese. After that, she was an organizer with the U.S. faith community for the ONE Campaign, a global anti-poverty organization. Marissa is passionate about engaging people in social justice and care for creation, and brings over 12 years of organizing work and ministry to the organization. She lives just outside Washington, D.C. with her husband and three children.
Julia M. Puaschunder, Ph.D., an economist from the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the The New School for Social Research in NYC. She has earned Doctoral degrees in Social and Economic Sciences and in Natural Sciences, a Masters degrees in Business, Public Administration, Philosophy and Psychology. Before starting as a Prize Fellow in the Inter-University Consortium of New York at the New School and Columbia University, Julia served at the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences conducting research on intergenerational equity. She is an expert member of the Harvard Law School Law and Mind Sciences Initiative and the Academic Council on the United Nations System. In 2011, she participated in a U.S. White House conference call on environmental justice.
Sylvia Lindinger-Sternart, Ph.D.
Director & Assistant Professor Counseling
M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling
University of Providence
Date: November 6, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Holistic Sustainability
The effect of climate change and increasing societal injustice compels humankind to answer the question what we can do to strengthen sustainability and ethics across the world. What about creating sustainable and ethical communities that can be a household, village, city, nation, or globe. Such a community is creative, compassionate, ecologically wise and spiritually satisfying, with values that leave no one behind and considers all living creatures on this planet. Embracing the interconnection of all living beings will help us to realize that we are all part of a giant living organism. It is only by transforming our own personal living that we can become real change agents. Holistic sustainability must manifest at the physical, mental, social, and spiritual level.
Born on September 11, 1953 in Buenos Aires - Argentina, Héctor Julio Cobello studied at the middle level of the "Dulcísimo Nombre de Jesús" Institute - Ciudad Buenos Aires. He studied Geography at the National University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Hector graduated in Geography and History at the Higher Institute of Teachers "San Agustín", City of Buenos Aires - Argentina. He is a technical specialist in the field of Soil Conservation and Fight against Desertification.
Referent "Common House Care Program" - Social Work of the Church - Project: "My Neighbor the Creek - Water Bioremediation through Fungi", with students of Middle School.
Co-founder of the World Catholic Movement to Combat Desertification, Neutralization of Land Degradation and Poverty (MCMLCDP)
Meg Stapleton Smith
Ph.D. Student
Theological and Social Ethics Program Fordham University
Date: November 20, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
How Catholic universities can implement and embody the central teachings of Laudato Si
Meg is a PhD student in the Theological and Social Ethics program at Fordham University. Her lecture will address how Catholic universities can implement and embody the central teachings of Laudato Si’. Through theological reflection of Laudato Si’ as well as critical analysis of sustainability efforts already in place at Jesuit universities, this paper responds to the following questions: what would the structure of a Catholic university look like if it took Global Climate Change seriously? How do we calibrate our universities toward the global common good? In the absence of leadership from Washington on climate change, how does the mission and task of a Catholic university change? How do students across disciplines work towards liberation for the oppressed, and for the planet?
Julia M. Puaschunder, Ph.D.
Professor of Behavioral Economics
Schwartz Center for Social Research
The New School for Social Research
Date: November 13, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Climate justice and intergenerational solidarity as a pathway to sustainable development
Julia will be presenting a 3-dimensional climate justice approach to fairly sharing the burden of climate change within society. First, climate justice within a country should pay tribute to the fact that low- and high income households share the same burden proportional to their dispensable income, for instance enabled through a progressive carbon taxation. Secondly, fair climate change change burden sharing between countries argues that those countries benefiting more from a warmer climate, should also bear a higher burden of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Thirdly, climate justice over time is proposed in an innovative bonds climate change burden sharing strategy.
Dr. Sylvia Lindinger-Sternart is originally from Austria, engaged in mental health for many years and an academic and activist for health, environmental protection and social justice. Dr. Lindinger-Sternart has taught at Penn State University and serves currently as the program director and core faculty for the M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling (MSC) program at the University of Providence. Dr. Lindinger-Sternart is licensed as a Professional Clinical Counselor in Montana and her clinical experience includes service in inpatient clinics, mental health agencies, and private practice. She emphasizes multicultural competence and loves to engage with other cultures. Her major research interests are mindfulness, trauma, and online counseling, particularly in male populations. Dr. Lindinger-Sternart has presented and published in the counseling field.
Héctor Julio Cobello
Professor of Geography and History
Catholic Movement World of Fight Against Desertification
Of Land Degradation and Poverty (MCMLDP)
Date: November 6, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Laudato Si and Processes of Desertification, Lands Degradation and Poverty
The processes of desertification, land degradation and poverty are advancing at silent steps and in different ways throughout many countries of our planet. Desertification is not an isolated problem, but is fully related to climate changes, the conservation of biodiversity and the need for the sustainable management of natural resources. The problem of desertification is a symptom of a broken balance between the system of natural resources and the socio-economic system that exploits them. This is the spirit in which Laudato Si is written.
Meg Stapleton Smith is a second year doctoral student in Theological and Social Ethics at Fordham University. She graduated from Yale Divinity School in 2016 with a M.A.R. in Ethics, and holds a B.A. in Theology from Boston College with concentrations in Faith, Peace, and Justice Studies and Catholic Studies. While at Boston College, Meg studied abroad in El Salvador with the Casa de la Solidaridad program. After graduating from Boston College, Meg was Director of Campus Ministry and a Theology teacher at Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School in Lawrence, MA.
Meg’s academic interests are wide ranging, but she is principally interested in exploring the contemporary retrieval of virtue ethics from a liberationist perspective. In addition, Meg's work explores how the intersection of these two fields might serve as a challenge for both virtue ethics and liberationist thought, as well as guide how we think about Catholic Social Teaching and Christian Social Ethics today.
For more information, please visit
Fall 2019
Thomas Smith, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in Environmental Geography
London School of Economics
The Hazy Shade of Palm Oil
Date: October 16, 2018 at 1:00pm BST
LIVE from the London School of Economics
Thomas will discuss wildfire driven haze pollution in Southeast Asia; a man-made environmental disaster. Naturally, the tropical rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia are fairly drought-resistant, storing moisture in deep peaty soils. Yet, vast swathes of this unique ecosystem, home to Sumatran tigers and orang-utans, are being badly degraded by unsustainable illegal logging and conversion to plantations by the palm oil and paper industries. The loss of forests and the draining of soils by networks of canals drastically increases landscape susceptibility to fire. During long dry seasons, such as the exceptional dry season of 2015, fires burn and smoulder their way through the exposed peatlands that were once protected by forests. It is these fires that lead to dangerous air quality across the Southeast Asian region.
The talk will explore some of Dr Smith’s personal experiences tracking down fires across Malaysia and Indonesia over the past few years, and investigate links between pollution and intensified unsustainable agriculture in the region.
Dr Thomas Smith is Assistant Professor in Environmental Geography and a member of the Environmental Economics and Policy Cluster, a part of the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He teaches on a number of environmental courses, focussing on innovative technology-enhanced experiential learning and field-based education in geography. Tom is a geographer and environmental scientist, specialising in interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the role of biomass burning (wildfires) in the Earth system. Tom enjoys highly collaborative research focusing on greenhouse gas and reactive emissions from wildland fires in savannas and tropical peatlands. He is particularly interested in complex interactions between agricultural practices, land degradation, fire emissions characteristics and their associated impacts.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/geography-and-environment/people/academic-staff/thomas-smith
David Bollier is Director of the Schumacher Center’s Reinventing the Commons Program. He is an American activist, author, and blogger whose work focuses on the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics, and culture.
David has co-organized a wide variety of pioneering international conferences on the commons, strategy workshops, seminars, and public events, especially in Europe. He also spent many years in various policy positions in Washington, D.C.
He is an author of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons , Patterns of Commoning; The Wealth of the Commons; and has contributed chapters to more than a dozen books .
For twenty-five years, until 2010, David collaborated closely with television producer Norman Lear on a wide variety of non-television public affairs and political projects. In 2012, Bollier received the Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy from the American Academy in Berlin for his work on the commons.
David Bollier
Writer and Activist
Director - Reinventing the Commons Program
Schumacher Center for a New Economics
Reinventing the Commons
Date: October 9, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
One of the most devastating and recurring problems that virtually every commons faces is market enclosure – the privatization and marketization of shared resources by businesses, investors and speculators, often in collusion with government. What's really remarkable is that legislatures and courts so often declare that enclosures are legal because they supposedly contribute to economic growth, progress and freedom.
All of this got me to thinking: What would it look like if commoners could invent their own types of law, consistent with state law, to reliably protect their commons? What if there were a more rigorous Law for the Commons?
Michel Bauwens
Founder - Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives
External expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (2008, 2012)
The role of the Commons
in the Coming Transformation
Date: October 23, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Most approaches for social change are still focusing on re-balancing the market-state dichotomy, but the commons are a vital third sector that is historically linked to situations of ecological overshoot. In this presentation, we will introduce commons-based peer production, the rapid expansion of urban commons in every area of human provisioning, and the necessary adaptation of state forms (public-commons partnerships) and markets (regenerative markets) in a commons-centric political economy, the only one that is capable to drastically diminish human footprints while guaranteeing the equitable predistribution of wealth.
Michel Bauwens is the founder and director of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Michel is also research director of CommonsTransition.org. a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics. He has (co-)published various books and reports in english, dutch and french, such as (with Vasilis Kostakis), ‘Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy’. Michel currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand and last spring, has crafted a Commons Transition Plan for the city of Ghent in Belgium, after a similar project for Ecuador in 2014. Michel now works mostly on realizing value and technology sovereignty, and on institutional design for public-commons partnerships to commonify provisioning systems for territories, so they can function within the carrying capacity of the bioregion and the planet.
Michael Shuman is an economist, attorney, and globally recognized expert on community economics. He’s Director of Local Economy Programs for Telesis Corporation, a nonprofit affordable housing company, and currently an adjunct instructor at Bard Business School in New York City and at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He’s also a Fellow at Cutting Edge Capital and at the Post-Carbon Institute, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). He is one of the architects of the crowdfunding reforms that became the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act), signed into law in April 2012. He is the author of nine books, including Local Dollars: Local Sense, The Small-Mart Revolution, and Going Local. In 2015, Michael published The Local Economy Solution. It presents the stories of 28 “pollinator” enterprises that are nurturing local businesses in self-financing ways. Michael has also advised countless communities on strategies to increase local economic multipliers, and just completed (with Gwen Hallsmith) a handbook on local investment opportunities in Vermont. http://michaelhshuman.com/
Mt. St. Mary College
Thomas Fitzmaurice, Ph.D. - Finance
Michael Fox, J.D. - Business Law
Tracey Niemotko, JD, CPA, CFE - Accounting
Anthony Scardillo, DM, MBA - Marketing
Moira Tolan, Ph.D. - Management
Veronica McMillan, RN, JD - Healthcare Management
Faculty Members from the Mount Saint Mary College
School of Business
Seeing God in the Workplace
How Business Firms Can Elevate Society by Engaging in Sustainable Business Practices
Date: October 30, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Michael Shuman
Author, Professor, Speaker, Advocate
Cutting Edge Capital
Post Carbon Institute
Investing Locally
Date: October 30, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Distributed renewable energy on a sustainable grid may be antithetical to large scale corporate organization. Want to move your money from Wall Street to Main Street?
Michael reviews the latest tools available for investors who want to put their money into local business, for businesses who want to get financed by their customers and neighbors, and for financial professionals who want to start new local-investment institutions. These are the 25 financial tools we will need to accelerate the adoption of cost-competitive renewable energy systems on a sustainable grid.
MBA Program Coordinator Moira Tolan provides an overview and discussed the role that sustainability plays in corporations.
Business Law Professor Michael Fox will talk about Sustainability in Business, Society & Law.
Accounting Professor Tracey Niemotko talks about sustainability in accounting reporting.
Marketing Professor Anthony Scardillo's lecture is titled, I Want Six-Pack Abs: How the Dominican Pillars Can Help Marketers Build Sustainable Practices.
Finance Professor Thomas Fitzmaurice talks about finance services sustainability.
Healthcare Management Professor Veronica McMillan 's lecture is titled, Sustainability is Critical to the Long-Term Health of Healthcare.
John Odhiambo Onyango, Ph.D. is an academic, scholar and is currently an Associate Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame (USA). He has a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Architecture from the University of Glasgow (Scotland, UK); a Master of Architecture degree from University of Notre Dame, (USA); Certificate in Professional Practice & Management in Architecture (RIBA Part 3-Architect's License in the United Kingdom) from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, (England, UK) and a Bachelor of Architecture (honors) degree from University of Nairobi (Kenya).
Current Research Interests:
-
Understanding Energy Use in Traditional Buildings using Simulation and Biomimetic Epidemiology
-
Built Environment and Aging & Wellbeing
https://architecture.nd.edu/faculty/john-onyango/
John Odhiambo Onyango, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Architecture
University of Notre DAME
Climate Change and the Built Environment
Date: December 3, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
John’s research primarily focuses on Sustainability in the broad sense that takes holistic approaches to the creative practices at the building and urban design levels that is both interdisciplinary as well as multidisciplinary in collaboration with other colleagues in the allied fields such as engineering, sociology, healthcare, and IT communications. The CIB working paper for “W108: Climate Change and the Built Environment” suggested future research should focus on two main hazards: floods and heat waves.
Marissa Vertrees
Director of Organizing
Global Catholic Climate Movement
Organizing Locally for Laudato Si'
Date: November 13, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
The Global Catholic Climate Movement is global network of 650+ Catholic organizations in all continents, with a constituency of nearly 1 million
Catholic individuals, working to care for creation by responding to climate change.
GCCM supports the Catholic Church to bring Laudato Si’ to life through their Season of Creation flagship project, the Eco-Parish program to reduce the carbon footprint, the Divest-Reinvest program to shift Catholic financial assets from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewable energy and public advocacy in the halls of power and in the media.
Marissa will talk about how to engage your parish, diocese, and local community in living out Laudato Si’ and identifying places of local change and local advocacy.
https://catholicclimatemovement.global
Marisa Vertrees is the Campaigns Director for the Global Catholic Climate Movement. She was the Social Justice Director at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, where she also assisted the Peace and Justice Commission of the Arlington Diocese. After that, she was an organizer with the U.S. faith community for the ONE Campaign, a global anti-poverty organization. Marissa is passionate about engaging people in social justice and care for creation, and brings over 12 years of organizing work and ministry to the organization. She lives just outside Washington, D.C. with her husband and three children.
Julia M. Puaschunder, Ph.D., an economist from the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the The New School for Social Research in NYC. She has earned Doctoral degrees in Social and Economic Sciences and in Natural Sciences, a Masters degrees in Business, Public Administration, Philosophy and Psychology. Before starting as a Prize Fellow in the Inter-University Consortium of New York at the New School and Columbia University, Julia served at the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences conducting research on intergenerational equity. She is an expert member of the Harvard Law School Law and Mind Sciences Initiative and the Academic Council on the United Nations System. In 2011, she participated in a U.S. White House conference call on environmental justice.
Sylvia Lindinger-Sternart, Ph.D.
Director & Assistant Professor Counseling
M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling
University of Providence
Date: November 6, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Holistic Sustainability
The effect of climate change and increasing societal injustice compels humankind to answer the question what we can do to strengthen sustainability and ethics across the world. What about creating sustainable and ethical communities that can be a household, village, city, nation, or globe. Such a community is creative, compassionate, ecologically wise and spiritually satisfying, with values that leave no one behind and considers all living creatures on this planet. Embracing the interconnection of all living beings will help us to realize that we are all part of a giant living organism. It is only by transforming our own personal living that we can become real change agents. Holistic sustainability must manifest at the physical, mental, social, and spiritual level.
Born on September 11, 1953 in Buenos Aires - Argentina, Héctor Julio Cobello studied at the middle level of the "Dulcísimo Nombre de Jesús" Institute - Ciudad Buenos Aires. He studied Geography at the National University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Hector graduated in Geography and History at the Higher Institute of Teachers "San Agustín", City of Buenos Aires - Argentina. He is a technical specialist in the field of Soil Conservation and Fight against Desertification.
Referent "Common House Care Program" - Social Work of the Church - Project: "My Neighbor the Creek - Water Bioremediation through Fungi", with students of Middle School.
Co-founder of the World Catholic Movement to Combat Desertification, Neutralization of Land Degradation and Poverty (MCMLCDP)
Meg Stapleton Smith
Ph.D. Student
Theological and Social Ethics Program Fordham University
Date: November 20, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
How Catholic universities can implement and embody the central teachings of Laudato Si
Meg is a PhD student in the Theological and Social Ethics program at Fordham University. Her lecture will address how Catholic universities can implement and embody the central teachings of Laudato Si’. Through theological reflection of Laudato Si’ as well as critical analysis of sustainability efforts already in place at Jesuit universities, this paper responds to the following questions: what would the structure of a Catholic university look like if it took Global Climate Change seriously? How do we calibrate our universities toward the global common good? In the absence of leadership from Washington on climate change, how does the mission and task of a Catholic university change? How do students across disciplines work towards liberation for the oppressed, and for the planet?
Julia M. Puaschunder, Ph.D.
Professor of Behavioral Economics
Schwartz Center for Social Research
The New School for Social Research
Date: November 13, 2018 at 1:00pm EST
Climate justice and intergenerational solidarity as a pathway to sustainable development
Julia will be presenting a 3-dimensional climate justice approach to fairly sharing the burden of climate change within society. First, climate justice within a country should pay tribute to the fact that low- and high income households share the same burden proportional to their dispensable income, for instance enabled through a progressive carbon taxation. Secondly, fair climate change change burden sharing between countries argues that those countries benefiting more from a warmer climate, should also bear a higher burden of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Thirdly, climate justice over time is proposed in an innovative bonds climate change burden sharing strategy.
Dr. Sylvia Lindinger-Sternart is originally from Austria, engaged in mental health for many years and an academic and activist for health, environmental protection and social justice. Dr. Lindinger-Sternart has taught at Penn State University and serves currently as the program director and core faculty for the M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling (MSC) program at the University of Providence. Dr. Lindinger-Sternart is licensed as a Professional Clinical Counselor in Montana and her clinical experience includes service in inpatient clinics, mental health agencies, and private practice. She emphasizes multicultural competence and loves to engage with other cultures. Her major research interests are mindfulness, trauma, and online counseling, particularly in male populations. Dr. Lindinger-Sternart has presented and published in the counseling field.
Héctor Julio Cobello
Professor of Geography and History
Catholic Movement World of Fight Against Desertification
Of Land Degradation and Poverty (MCMLDP)
Date: November 6, 2018 at 12:00pm EST
Laudato Si and Processes of Desertification, Lands Degradation and Poverty
The processes of desertification, land degradation and poverty are advancing at silent steps and in different ways throughout many countries of our planet. Desertification is not an isolated problem, but is fully related to climate changes, the conservation of biodiversity and the need for the sustainable management of natural resources. The problem of desertification is a symptom of a broken balance between the system of natural resources and the socio-economic system that exploits them. This is the spirit in which Laudato Si is written.
Meg Stapleton Smith is a second year doctoral student in Theological and Social Ethics at Fordham University. She graduated from Yale Divinity School in 2016 with a M.A.R. in Ethics, and holds a B.A. in Theology from Boston College with concentrations in Faith, Peace, and Justice Studies and Catholic Studies. While at Boston College, Meg studied abroad in El Salvador with the Casa de la Solidaridad program. After graduating from Boston College, Meg was Director of Campus Ministry and a Theology teacher at Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School in Lawrence, MA.
Meg’s academic interests are wide ranging, but she is principally interested in exploring the contemporary retrieval of virtue ethics from a liberationist perspective. In addition, Meg's work explores how the intersection of these two fields might serve as a challenge for both virtue ethics and liberationist thought, as well as guide how we think about Catholic Social Teaching and Christian Social Ethics today.
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