ecology

Thursday at 4 p.m.: The unsustainability of ‘Breaking Bad’

Image of Allen MacDuffie 2Allen MacDuffie (pictured), associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of English, will present “Energy, Ecology, and ‘Breaking Bad’s’ Unsustainability” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1, at Ohio State in Columbus.

Admission is free and open to the public.

MacDuffie, who’s the author of Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, will discuss how narratives within the “Breaking Bad” TV series “register the cultural and environmental logic underlying our present moment of ecological crisis,” according to the event listing.

Ohio State’s Environmental Humanities program and Department of English are the event’s co-sponsors.

Details. (Photo: UT Austin.)

Still time to get tickets for Cardinal Turkson’s talk on Monday

Cardinal Peter TurksonA reminder to get tickets while you still can for this Monday’s talk at Ohio State by Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. The title of his presentation is “How Are We to Live in Our Common Home? Reflections on Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ Encyclical on Ecology.” He’s shown holding a copy of the document, whose title means “Praise be to you.” Learn more here. Get tickets here. Read Laudato Si’ here. (Photo: Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.)

Invasive species may be junk food for predators; or, why not gobble gobies?

RoundGoby2If there’s an upshot to the appearance of invasive species, it’s that they might provide an additional food source for the native animals whose territory they are invading.

But a new analysis of scientific studies spanning more than two decades has revealed that predators benefit most from eating invasive prey only if their traditional food sources remain intact — that is, if they are able to maintain their usual diet and eat invaders only as an occasional snack. Continue reading Invasive species may be junk food for predators; or, why not gobble gobies? →

Thursday: ‘The emerging alliance of religion and ecology’

Mary Evelyn Tucker, senior lecturer and research scholar at Yale University, presents “The Emerging Alliance of Religion and Ecology” at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 9, in the spring seminar series by CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. Attend in Columbus or watch in Wooster by video link.

Tucker teaches a joint master’s degree program between Yale’s Divinity School and School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; directs the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale with her husband, John Grim; and served on the Earth Charter International Council. In the video above, she talks about the emergence of an “ecological theology.”

Friday, Saturday: Language meets ecology

“Ecology and Language,” Ohio State’s 9th annual Martin Luther King Day Linguistics Symposium, explores “the interface between ecological and linguistic lines of evidence.” It’s tomorrow and Saturday (Jan. 13-14). Details (pdf), including the topics and speakers (including from Ohio State, the University of Chicago, and the University of Kyiv, to name a few).

Great minds

Bill Mitsch and Rattan Lal, both of our School of Environment and Natural Resources, are two of the nearly dozen keynote speakers set so far for EcoSummit 2012, which takes place just less than a year from now in Columbus. The conference, says its website, “will bring together the world’s most respected minds in ecological science to discuss restoring the planet’s ecosystems.” Harvard’s E.O. Wilson (author of Biophilia and The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, among many) and UCLA’s Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) are also in the lineup. See the full list of speakers and the program.