2018-2019

Is Climate Change the End? And if so, the End of What?

Years ago, Bill McKibben suggested that climate change would be the end of nature. More recently, Elizabeth Kolbert has argued that the Sixth Extinction means the end of nature as we know it. Yet other scholars have argued that the term “nature” is not helpful—humans have always been modifying the world in which we live. And in The Collapse of Western Civilization, Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes argue that liberal democracy is at stake as well. In her talk, Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, explores these issues, and suggest that however we look at it, unless we rapidly address climate change, we will be living in a world that is deeply impoverished, biologically, materially, and politically.

Buddhism and the Natural World: Discerning an Environmental Imperative

In his talk, Mark Blum, Professor and Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair in Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, will first look at traditional views of the natural world in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism, where nonhuman sentient life forms commonly appear as a legitimate voice in the unfolding of truth and the neutral view of nonsentient life and inorganic matter in India takes on greater spiritual significance as one moves eastward in Asia. Then the issue of ecology and environmental ethics will be considered in an attempt to clarify the efforts being made to infer an environmental imperative on the basis of Buddhist values. This event is co-sponsored by the American Buddhist Study Center, Cleveland Buddhist Temple, and the CWRU Department of Religious Studies.

Drawn to Yellowstone: The Role of Art in the Preservation of the American Landscape

Throughout history, art has served as an agent of change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, several artists played significant roles in efforts to preserve the wildness of the American landscape as it was being lost rapidly. The emerging conservation movement of the late 1900’s was strongly influenced by the inspiration and agency of artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church. Specifically, the story of the creation of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, is inextricably rooted in the lives and works of several artists – most notably, William Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran. In his presentation, Robert Petty, MFA, Senior Director of Education, Yellowstone Forever, will explore the essential role that artists and their artwork have played in the preservation of the American landscape and wilderness, with a focus on Yellowstone National Park.

Crooked River Conversation: Cleveland Author Kristin Ohlson

Celebrate 50 years of Cuyahoga River rebirth! Author of the acclaimed The Soil Will Save Us, Kristin combines culinary and science in a tale of farmers and foodies who heal our soil and save our water. Includes riveting short films about family farmers, vintners and ranchers as part of Carbon Nation, the award-winning series by director and University of Arizona professor Peter Byck.

Faculty Work-in-Progress – Daniel Guérin, On-the-Ground Reporter in Nazi Germany

French writer and activist Daniel Guérin was one of many French journalists to travel to Germany in the early 1930s in order to report on the rise of Nazism. His first-person accounts of the months surrounding Hitler’s accession to power, published first in the press and later in book form as The Brown Plague, remain unique in their genre, however. Commissioned in part by French newspaper editor and rising statesman Léon Blum, Guérin rode his bicycle through a Germany in social and political upheaval, making contact with both German resistants and Nazi Party adherents. In this work-in-progress, Christine Cano, Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, considers Guérin’s newspaper articles within the context of the information press of the 1930s and suggests directions for a reception history of The Brown Plague in its multiple book editions and translations.

Economies of Mind: Attention/Distraction/Absorption

Location: Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland, OH 44106

What does it mean to listen, read, or look with attention? What roots can we trace for the modern “crisis of distraction”? And how are theories of focus (and its deficit) tied to wider ideas around creativity, productivity, ethics, and aesthetics? These are some of the questions explored in this mini-symposium, featuring a series of short talks by cognitive scientists, literary critics, neurologists and musicologists.

An informal lunch will be served.

That Complex Whole: Making Sense of Music

Music reflects a multitude of different kinds of influences. These influences include acoustical, biological, sensory, cognitive, attentional, idiomatic, historical, economic, technological, formal, social, cultural, and other factors. This presentation describes a dozen contrasting studies that provide complementary insights into musical organization and behavior.  Huron suggests that no single approach holds the “key” to understanding music, and that music scholarship needs to be even more interdisciplinary and multifaceted than is currently supposed.