During the 2006-2007 academic year, CISC partnered with the department of Geography and the Hunter College student group Future Is Green to bring environmental speakers to Hunter College for a seminar series. These lectures drew students and faculty from across Hunter College and generated discussion about topics of urban sustainability.
Listen to the speakers from these events on the CISC Podcast
CISC Podcast Directory
CISC Podcast for iTunes
The Humane Metropolis
Friday May 9th
Four-fifths of Americans now live in the nation's sprawling metropolitan areas, and half of the world's population for the first time is now classified as "urban."As metropolitan regions become the dominant living environment for humans, there is growing concern about how to make such places more habitable, more healthy and safe, more ecological, and more equitable - in short, more "humane".The talk will draw on themes from the 2006 book edited by Dr. Platt: The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st Century City( University of Massachusetts Press and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy). Dr. Platt's work is in part inspired by and a tribute to the work of Distinguished Professor William "Holly" Whyte, a prominent Urban Sociologist and former faculty member of Hunter College . Whyte's famous observations and film analyses of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City made him achampion defender of the value of small public spaces.
Click here [PDF] for more information.
Melting Ice and Rising Tide, What Climate Change Means for the City of New York
April 29th, 2008
What made the location of a city desirable in the past was certainly based on accessibility to water. It is no coincidence that most large cities are--or were--port cities. But today, this same proximity to water is perhaps a cause for concern. We certainly have seen the consequences of such urbanization during both the Tsunami and of course Katrina. But what is the real potential threat of rising tides to New York City? Join the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities and Queens College in welcoming Andrew Revkin of The New York Times, in discussion with a host of Queens College experts to discuss these important issues.
Click here [PDF] for more information.
Jennifer Phillips, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Bard College - May 2007
Invited talk: Climate Risk Management by Hudson Valley Farmers: Applications to Climate Change Adaptation
Jennifer G. Phillips is a Hunter College alum and an Assistant Professor at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy. Her research interests include the impact of climate change and variability on farming systems, communication and perception of climate information for farm management, individual and group process in decision making, and sustainable farming systems. After eight years of research in eastern and southern Africa, she is now working (in collaboration with scientists from Columbia University) with farmers in eastern New York State on climate risk management, adaptation to climate change, and sustainability in the face of extreme climate events.
Andrew Padian, Housing Specialist with Steven Winter Associates - February 2007
Invited talk: The Principles of Green Building Design and Green Retrofit in Relation to the Health and Performance of Buildings
Andy Padian is a Senior Housing Specialist with Steven Winter Associates, one of the nation's leading energy, environmental, and green architecture and engineering firms. He has over 25 years of experience in energy and environmental planning based primarily in NYC. He has performed training in all areas of building energy management to audiences ranging from elected officials, to engineers and architects, to superintendents of low-income multifamily buildings. Andy's area of expertise is high-performance multifamily buildings, and SWA has helped in designing some of the most acclaimed buildings of this type in the country.
Robert Sullivan, Author - September 2006
Invited talk: A Discussion of the New York Times Best-Selling Book "Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants"
Several years ago, Robert Sullivan wrote a book about a Native American tribe's controversial decision to hunt whales off the Pacific Coast after whales were taken off the endangered species list. Environmental activists and organizations flocked to Oregon, where Sullivan lived and wrote at the time, to protest the whaling.
"What was really amazing to me," Sullivan told a crowd of students at Hunter College, "was that people drove [to Oregon] and said, 'You shouldn't hunt whales. You're Native Americans, and you're in touch with nature, and you should know that whales are a part of nature.' And some of the people in the tribe would say, 'We're the Native Americans, and we have a handle on what to do, since we actually are Native Americans.'"
The outpouring of concern and controversy about whale hunting made Sullivan, an unconventional breed of nature writer, think about what he wanted to write about for his next book.
"What's a creature nobody would ever think was natural, and nobody would drive eight hours to save?" Sullivan asked himself. The answer, he realized, was easy: rats.
Sullivan began a year-long study of a colony of rats in a Lower Manhattan alley, near Wall Street, observing behavior and exploring the history of the rats in that single alleyway. What he learned during that year became an intelligent and entertaining critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller called Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.
"Rats turn out to be an indicator species for humans, and as a result, they are a kind of indicator for non-nature," Sullivan said, "though rats are exactly natural."
Sullivan learned that the rats he studied near Wall Street lived on what was, a few hundred years earlier, a shimmering pasture of wheat called Golden Hill. After doing further research, Sullivan learned that Golden Hill was the site of the first bloodshed of the American Revolution, in an event called the Riot of Golden Hill, which is said to have partially inspired the Boston Massacre. The Riot of Golden Hill pitted British soldiers against colonists, and later German mercenaries came to port in Lower Manhattan to aid the colonists in fighting the British.
"The German mercenaries came, and on the ships came what the English named the Norway rat," Sullivan explained. Thus the birth of America, and the coming of rats to the fledgling nation, happened simultaneously.
Sullivan, also the author of The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, visited Hunter College on September 27 by invitation from the Hunter College Department of Geography Speaker Series and the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities. Sullivan, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and a contributing editor at Vogue.
