Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Lecture: Will Globalization Help or Hinder Transition to Sustainable Development?

Robert Kates, professor emeritus at Brown University, will discuss the “The Nexus and the Neem Tree” on Thursday, March 22, at 5 p.m. in Bowers Auditorium, Sage Hall, 205 Prospect St.

The talk, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Centennial Lecture Series on “Globalization and the Environment,” sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

In his lecture, Kates will discuss five critical goals in the areas of population, urbanization, agriculture, energy and materials, and environment that are required to achieve the transition to sustainable development. Sustainable development promotes both human development and environmental regeneration. Kates will also explore how globalization might help or hinder achieving these goals.

“The world of this new century is in transition-becoming more crowded and more consuming, warmer and more stressed, more interconnected, yet diverse and divided,” said Kates. “Can this transition also be a sustainability transition, in which the upwards of nine billion people of the next half century meet their wants and needs in ways that do not further degrade the planet’s life support systems?”

Kates is executive editor of Environment magazine, a distinguished scientist at the George Perkins Marsh Institute of Clark University, a faculty associate of the College of the Atlantic, a visiting scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and Technology at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and chair of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council’s Coordinating Committee for a Transition Toward Sustainability. From 1986-92, Kates directed the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown.

He was awarded the 1991 National Medal of Science by the President of the United States, and he has won a MacArthur Prize Fellowship (1981-85), an honors award from the Association of American Geographers and an honorary degree from Clark University (1993). He holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Chicago and is the author and editor of 20 books and monographs on the environment.