All lectures are presented fully online via Zoom every Friday at 3:30 PM. The link to join the meeting is https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/99623736476
except when otherwise indicated. Brown bag sessions start at noon on
the days there are speakers. Alumni, friends and the public are always
invited to attend.
Spring 2011 Lectures
January 28 - Value, Measurement and Alienation: Making a World of Ecosystem Services
Morgan Robertson
University of Kentucky, Department of Geography
The development of markets in water quality, biodiversity, and carbon
sequestration signals a new intensification and financialization in the
encounter between nature and late capitalism. Following Neil Smith's
observations on this transformation, I argue that the commodification of
such "ecosystem services" is not merely an expansion of capital toward
the acquisition or industrialization of new resources, but the making of
a new social world comparable to the transformation by which individual
human labors became social labor under capitalism. Technologies of
measurement developed by ecosystem scientists describe nature as
exchange values, as something always already encountered in the
commodity form. Examining these developments through specific cases in
US water policy, I propose that examining this transformation can
provide political ecology and the study of "neoliberal natures" with a
thematic unity that has been notably absent. I understand capital's
encounter with nature as a process of creating socially-necessary
abstractions that are adequate to bear value in capitalist circulation.
Political ecologists struggling with the commodification of nature have
tended to overlook the social constitution of nature's value in favor of
explicit or implicit physical theories of value, often as more-or-less
latent realisms. I suggest that critical approaches to nature must
retain and elaborate a critical value theory, to understand both the
imperatives and the silences in the current campaign to define the world
as an immense collection of service commodities.
February 11
Anne Bonds
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Department of Geography
February 25 - Mixing of Species, Self Organization, and Ecological Surprise in Cities and Novel Ecosystems
Ariel Lugo
Director, International Institute of Tropical Forestry USDA Forest Service
We now live in a world dominated by humans (the Homogeocene era). In
this era cities and human-dominated environments are particularly
important to biodiversity. Today, cities contain over half of the
world's population and are the source of many anthropogenic effects on
the world's biota. Simultaneously, the area of pristine environments in
the planet is increasingly smaller. Anthropogenic activities on Earth
are resulting in new habitats and new environmental conditions including
climate change. To many, the Homogeocene is an era of environmental
doom that unless reversed, will result in catastrophic reductions in
biodiversity.
An alternate view is that the biota will adjust to the new environmental
conditions and through processes of species mixing and
self-organization will form sustainable novel communities of organisms.
Close examination of San Juan, Puerto Rico, a tropical city, reveals a
significant green infrastructure. The city contains natural and
human-constructed forests, urban aquatic systems with native and
introduced species, and a thriving and diverse biota adapted to urban
conditions. Using examples from both San Juan and the whole island of
Puerto Rico, I discuss the mechanisms of novel forest formation and how
these types of ecosystems might represent the natural response of the
biota to the Homogeocene. It behooves all ecologists to pay attention to
the biodiversity of urban and other human-dominated environments to
learn lessons about ecological persistence and adaptation to novel
anthropogenic environments.
March 4 - Teaching at a Research University: A Nuisance or a Necessity, OR Reflections of a Biogeographer at Madison
Thomas Vale
UW-Madison Department of Geography, Professor Emeritus
At major research universities, teaching is often seen as a hindrance to
research efforts. In my own career, I found the opposite: Teaching
acted as a stimulus to research and publication. A look backward over my
thirty years as a biogeographer illustrates the links between the two
major responsibilities of a professor. For me, teaching was not only a
welcome part of the academic life but also a vital contributor to the
thinking that is the core of research.
March 25
E. Edna Wangui
Ohio University, Department of Geography
April 1 - Geographies of Justice: Conquest, Human Rights, and the Case of Awas Tingni v. Nicaragua
Joseph H. Bryan
University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Geography
April 8 - Geography Student Symposium
The symposium will kick off at 2pm on Thursday with an opening key note
address by Abigail Neely entitled 'Evaluating the Pholela Community
Health Centre as a "Model for the World"' and close on Friday 8th April
with a key note by former alum and physical geographer, Marie Peppler at
3:30. The symposium will take place in room 444 Science Hall apart from
Marie Peppler's closing key note, which will be in room 180
This symposium will take place April 7 and 8.
Read more about the
closing keynote address
View the
symposium's information poster.
April 22 - Managing climate change impacts on biodiversity - bridging fine and coarse scales
Scott R. Loarie
Stanford University, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution
One of the most fundamental and pervasive challenges in ecology is how
to scale information from very local to very large scales and
vice-versa. Understanding climate change impacts on ecosystems
exemplifies these challenges as most projected future impacts are
derived from global models while most observed impacts and adaptation
strategies occur at the scale of individual land holdings. Drawing from
examples across western North America, I will discuss applications of
remote-sensing and citizen-science to harness datasets that can bridge
this scale mismatch and rigorously inform regional extirpation models.
In particular, I will discuss new partnerships that are transforming
iNaturalist.org - a social-network for naturalists - into a global
citizen-science effort to monitor climate change impacts on
biodiversity.
April
29 - Re-examining the societal implications of spatial technologies:
Privacy, concealment, and revelation through new spatial media
Sarah Elwood
University of Washington, Department of Geography
An ever-expanding range of 'new spatial media' are implicated in a
paradigmatic shift in who makes and uses maps and geographic data, how,
and for what purposes. Our cell phones can add latitude and longitude
coordinates to digital photographs so we can include them in maps. Web
services such as Google's MyMaps allow us to create and share our own
maps. Other websites recruit us to 'crowdsource' geographic information
by adding our own observations into collaboratively-produced data sets.
This paper will examine the fundamental challenges these developments
pose for GIScience as a field, and also present findings from ongoing
research studying one small dimensions of this new environment for
geographic information: its implications for the social nature of
privacy around the world.