MSU hosts environmental justice conference

A message from Dave Dempsey, MSU.

As globalization advances and the global character of many environmental problems become more manifest, wider perspectives are stimulated in local environmental traditions. In North America, a burgeoning environmental justice movement makes links between environmental damage, poverty and race that strongly recall longstanding political concerns in Europe and the South. In Western Europe, skepticism and mistrust of GM and other new deep technologies raises questions about the character of nature, long discussed in relation to the American wilderness tradition. About the globe, environmental activists grapple with new problems of human impacts, risk, technology, consumption and just distribution, and articulate new visions of the future.

This conference aims to bring together a range of disparate voices across the globe and the disciplines, broadening these new international discussions by bringing distinctly American traditions of environmental ethics into dialogue with international concerns in environmental politics, philosophy, literature, sociology, history and economics. The conference is organized by the Lyman Briggs School of Science, which has long pioneered research co-operation right across the disciplines between arts and sciences at Michigan State University, the first land-grant University.

A registration fee of US $70 is required, $50 for graduate students, which can be paid by credit card online, by fax or international money order made out to Michigan State University. Registration in the sense of checking in will be on the evening of Thursday 24th August, with the first events beginning the following morning. Workshops will be held from 25th-27th August, with an excursion to a site of interest planned for the morning of Monday 28th August.

Find out more here: http://www.lymanbriggs.msu.edu/geeej/