9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ?

Speaker:

Andrew Revkin

24 Oct 2011

8:00 PM

Great Hall, Memorial Union

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Andrew Revkin covered global environmental issues for the New York Times for fifteen years and continues to write for their Dot Earth blog. His reports have ranged from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon and the troubled relationship of climate science and politics. He recently became the first two-time winner of the Communication Award bestowed jointly by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. He is also the author of several books, including The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest and Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. Revkin is a senior fellow at Pace University's Academy for Applied Environmental Sciences. He has a biology degree from Brown University and a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia. The 2011 Pesek Colloquium on Sustainable Agriculture.

The planet’s human population – after centuries of explosive growth - is widely seen as cresting within the next couple of generations. A mid-range [url=http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/earth-2050-population-unknowable/]best guess for the peak[/url] remains roughly 9 billion people. There are even signs that resource-sapping activities will hit a peak as well. Lee Schipper’s work on [url=http://www.slideshare.net/EMBARQNetwork/are-we-reaching-a-plateau-or-peak-travel-trends-in-passenger-transport-in-six-industrialized-countries]“peak travel”[/url] offers one glimpse. But there are a host of unanswered questions about how the cresting of the centuries-long wave of growth in human numbers and appetites will play out. Will we overheat or innovate, conserve or despoil, crash or round the curve with a few scrapes? Can we manage our way to "peak us" before we're hit with "peak everything"? Andrew Revkin will reveal paths toward progress that can work even in the face of deep complexity and uncertainty.