Vision for a Plundered Planet – A Public Interview with Environmental Leader & Ecologist George M. Woodwell

April 18, 2017, 7 PM

Kirby Hall of Civil Rights, Lafayette College, Easton, PA

 

Director Emeritus and founder of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC), Dr. George Woodwell will be on campus for a public interview with Professor Kira Lawrence, Geology & Environmental Geosciences, and Professor Benjamin Cohen, Engineering Studies. The Q&A will be held at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, April 18th, in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104. Lawrence worked for Dr. Woodwell as a research assistant at WHRC. Woodwell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences; he has also received several national environmental degrees from numerous institutions, for example the Heinz Environmental Prize. His research focuses on North American forests and estuaries, ecological effects of radiation and pesticides, and biotic interactions due to climate change.

Woodwell is widely acclaimed for being one the first scientists to issue warnings about climate change. He serves on the advisory board of the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment, and on the Board of Trustees for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was formerly the president of the Ecological Society of America and the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund. Dr. Woodwell served on the boards of many other environmental research and non-profit organizations.

He taught at the University of Maine in Orono, as well as within the Biology Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory and as a lecturer in ecology at Yale University. Woodwell founded and became the Director of Ecosystems Center and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, holding multiple positions. He founded the Woods Hole Research Center, an institute for global environmental research, in 1985.

Most recently, Dr. Woodwell published “The Nature of a House: Building a World that Works” in 2009 and “A World to Live in: An Ecologist’s Vision for a Plundered Planet” in 2016. His other four books and over 300 published journal articles discuss biotic impoverishment, global warming, and patterns within the biosphere.