BOOK LAUNCH:Our Once and Future Planet: Restoring the World in the Climate Change Century by Paddy Woodworth

In conjunction with University of Chicago Press we are delighted to host the Chicago launch of Paddy Woodworth’s new book Our Once and Future Planet.

The book contains an impressive synthesis of restoration projects from around the world and puts the work in Chicago alongside work on other continents.  This should give us an important moment for reflection on the past and future of regional restoration.

"The environmental movement is plagued by pessimism. And that’s not unreasonable: with so many complicated, seemingly intractable problems facing the planet, coupled with a need to convince people of the dangers we face, it’s hard not to focus on the negative

But that paints an unbalanced—and overly disheartening—picture of what’s going on with environmental stewardship today. There are success stories, and Our Once and Future Planet delivers a fascinating account of one of the most impressive areas of current environmental experimentation and innovation: ecological restoration. Veteran investigative reporter Paddy Woodworth has spent years traveling the globe and talking with people—scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens—who are working on the front lines of the battle against environmental degradation. At sites ranging from Mexico to New Zealand and Chicago to Cape Town, Woodworth shows us the striking successes (and a few humbling failures) of groups that are attempting to use cutting-edge science to restore blighted, polluted, and otherwise troubled landscapes to states of ecological health—and, in some of the most controversial cases, to particular moments in historical time, before widespread human intervention. His firsthand field reports and interviews with participants reveal the promise, power, and limitations of restoration.

Ecological restoration alone won’t solve the myriad problems facing our environment. But Our Once and Future Planet demonstrates the role it can play, and the hope, inspiration, and new knowledge that can come from saving even one small patch of earth." FROM UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS


When: Oct 14th 2013 6:30 – 8:00

Where: McGowan South 107, 1110 W Belden Ave, Chicago, IL 60614

A panel discussion and a short talk by Paddy will be followed by a reception. Contact: lhenegha@gmail.com

No Jordan and Morton Discussion Tomorrow

Because of some logistical snafus (Heneghan’s) we will not meet tomorrow nor for a few weeks.  

Here’s the plan: We are reading The Sunflower Forest http://www.amazon.com/The-Sunflower-Forest-Ecological-Restoration/dp/0520272706/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334175269&sr=1-3 And

The Ecological Thought http://www.amazon.com/The-Ecological-Thought-Timothy-Morton/dp/0674064224/ref=tmm_pap_title_0 side by side…back to front etc.  

Rather that read small sections at a time I am urging us all the read both thoroughly in April and then we can convene every Thursday morning 11:30 am in McGowan S rm 204 in May.  I shall send us out a reading schedule soon.

Both books are now available in paperback...let Liam know if you care to join us when we reconvene in May. Price of admission is having read the books!

Climbing Down the Mountain and Into the Ruckus – A Newer Environmentalism

This is the first, introductory posting from our new DePaul Institute for Nature and Culture group blog.... click at the end of the page to visit.

Like many environmental researchers I started my career looking for nature in its purest, rawest form.  I thought I had found that in the 1980s in the Irish National Parks: in Killarney, Glenveagh, Wicklow and Connemara.  From the vantage point on these remote, lonely and, yes, very rainy parts of Ireland, all other Irish landscapes looked to be pretty thin ecological broth.  These other places – cities, towns, suburbs, farmland – were not the places in which nature, as I understood that word back then, could thrive; they was certainly not the places where a youngster looking for a experience of the wild should waste his time.

What I found in these National Parks was not, of course, wilderness in an unblemished sense.  Though terms like “pristine wilderness” pepper the promotional literature of the Parks, nevertheless, these are cultural landscapes in which people had lived, lands that previous generations had worked – timber was selectively removed from the forests, there is evidence of small scale mining strewn about the woods in Killarney, livestock was (and in some cases still is) still grazed on the mountainsides.  A walk along the deserted Old Kenmare Road in Killarney National Park is made lonelier and more poignant still by the presence of so-called lazy beds, where potato had been grown before the Irish Great Famine in the 1840s.  This is a park where the ghosts have just recently set aside their implements and they are no less interesting, it seems to me, because of their spectral qualities.

Read on here We plan for this to be an interactive as possible... don't hesitate to comment and join the conversation.