Colloquium focuses on global, local climate changes

09/05/08 - This fall's University of Rhode Island Honors Colloquium, "People and Planet: Global Environmental Change," starts Tuesday with a whole new approach to community education.The content of the series will be focused on climate change to raise awareness of not only global effects of negative human impact on the environment, but also what it would mean for Rhode Island.

"The earth is being changed from human impact at an unprecedented rate," said Arthur Spivack, a professor of oceanography at URI and one of the colloquium's coordinators. "Our goal is to get people to understand some of the aspects of this with somewhat of an emphasis on climate, and have a discussion on what are some of the potential responses."

Another URI oceanography professor, Steven D'Hondt, and communication studies professor Judith Swift are also helping to coordinate the events with Spivack.

"It won't be an indictment of how we got to where we are," said Swift, according to a press release. "Instead, we will look to the future of these issues - what we do know, what do we need to know, what are we going to do to address it and what are the consequences of those choices."

As opposed to last year's "China Rising" format, this year will not be exclusively lectures or discussion panels. Instead, other mediums, including film and theater, will be presented in the hopes of reaching a broader audience.

"We really wanted to approach this in a way that would get the non-specialists or non-experts interested," Spivack said. "I think that a lot of these issues related to global change are not really scientific issues but related to the values that society holds."

Presenters Rebecca Robinson and John Merrill's film analysis on Sept. 16 will use documentary clips to pick apart the theory that global warming is not related to human activity in a discussion called, "The Great Global Warming Hoax?"

URI economics professor and Director of the Honors Program Richard McIntyre said that plans to take the series in a different direction have been on the drawing board for some time, and they just needed the right people to make it happen.

"We've done some different things in the past, but I think this is probably the most innovative series [to date]," McIntyre said. "The idea about not having a lecture every week, but rather mixing it up a little bit, is something we have been talking about for a long time, and this particular group [of coordinators] shared my feeling that this was a good way to go."

McIntyre said this series is also even more unique in the sheer variety of content being presented, including the initiation of book clubs across the state and a map campaign that shows various theories of what would happen to the South Eastern New England coast after drastic climate change, the worst of which being complete polar ice melt.

The finale of the series, entitled "It's a Shore Thing: A Coastal Cabaret," which will be presented on Dec. 9, will use music to take a whimsical, yet satiric view of human impact on the Rhode Island coast. Swift, who was brought into the fold to help the colloquium better reach its audience also produced the cabaret.

"Judith is a wiz at communications in general, theater and all that stuff," McIntyre said. "It will definitely be an interesting experience."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse got himself caught up in the environmental fervor last month as he chaired the Senate Briefing to Discuss Global Warming's Impact on Narragansett Bay on Aug. 21. The briefing was noted to have such a similar agenda to the colloquium, the two organizations teamed up to make it the preview event of the series.

"That was in some ways a coincidence," said McIntyre. "But [Sen. Whitehouse] is still a major player in this debate."

The first event in the series, Historical Background on Global Climate Change, features Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer for The New Yorker, and takes place Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in the Chafee Auditorium.

The major sponsor of the Colloquium this year is the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation.