The Environmental Science, Policy and Engineering (ESPE) Winter Seminar Series kicks off Wednesday, Jan. 14 with a talk by Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk Community College, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
Mandia’s talk, “Communicating Climate Change: Sometimes It's Not about the Science” is free and open to the public.
Mandia is the co-founder of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, organizations that serve as counters to the organized climate-denial industry.
The series, now in its 18th year, is a focal point of the ESPE program's curriculum.
The theme of this year’s interdisciplinary series is “Building an environmentally literate public: Communication and education in the Anthropocene.” The goal is to present four different viewpoints on these interrelated topics.
Other speakers in the series (all at the Nott, 7:30 p.m.):
Wednesday, Jan. 21: Holly Menninger (director of Public Science for College of Sciences at North Carolina State University). “The Biodiversity in Our Daily Lives: Partnering with the Public to Study the Species Living on Us, In Us, and Around Us.”
Wednesday, Jan. 28: Anthony Leiserowitz (director, Yale Project on Climate Change Communication). Leiserowitz and his project have led some of the most careful studies of public opinion related to climate change science and policy. Their reports on the "Global Warming's Six Americas" have fascinating implications for effective environmental communication.
Wednesday, Feb. 18: Cheryl Charles (co-founder, president and CEO Emerita of the Children & Nature Network (C&NN). Charles has been instrumental in developing the worldwide movement to reconnect children and nature. She is also the former founding national director of Project Learning Tree and Project WILD.
Past speakers in the series have included leading voices in environmental issues such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lonnie Thompson and Bill McKibben.