Le Moyne College Calendar

The concept of sustainability has become fundamental to environmental thinking. But making sustainability anything more than a feel-good slogan requires a rigorous examination of what it is and why it will be so hard to achieve. We must begin with 15,000 years of human use of the planet and how humans have created the wealth on which we have built industrial civilization. Can we approach sustainability as a new way for humans to relate to the planet and tap into the wealth of nature? Or will the patterns of millennia make the 21st century a definitive moment in our history, as the costs of our planet’s mismanagement ultimately accumulate to pull down the edifice of industrial civilization?

Presenting this lecture will be Albert Appleton, senior fellow at The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design. He teaches an advanced concepts seminar on the problem of sustainability and its economics and has lectured widely and contributed to publications on topics concerning environmental preservation and sustainable development.

This event is part of the McDevitt Center’s initiative, Sustaining Earth, which is motivated by our sense of urgency of the growing threats to our environment and by our conviction that a full understanding of these threats and effective responses to them must draw upon both scientific and broadly religious insights and perspectives. Through the public events in this initiative, we aim to provide a wide audience of students, faculty and members of the regional community with accurate and up-to-date information about the threats, their causes and measures to meet these threats. We also seek to ground and frame these issues within the context of broadly religious perspectives on our human relation to the environment and our ethical obligations to care for it – all with the intention of helping to foster informed and concerned action to sustain the earth.

This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the McDevitt Center at Le Moyne College. For more information, please contact the McDevitt Center at [email protected] or (315) 445-6200.