The Bren School Partnered with the Community Environmental Council and the UCSB Global Warming Series to Present Earth Day 2007

The Bren School joined the Community Environmental Council to host Earth Day 2007 on April 22 in downtown Santa Barbara. Supporting the theme of "Global Warming: Change Begins With Learning" were 125 banners lining streets in the downtown area and featuring the image of a polar foraging for food on an Artic beach nearly devoid of snow. The image was supplied by Bren supporter and nature photographer Howard Ruby. Students and staff volunteered at the Bren booth and elsewhere on a drizzly April day. In addition to a three-part lecture series Global Warming: Science & Society, presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, a UCTV Interview Series, Global Warming Solutions: Change Begins with Learning, and a variety of K-12 outreach efforts and day-of-event activities at Earth Day, the Bren School was proud to participate in UCSB Reads For Earth Day. 

For more information on these events and activities see the Bren School’s News & Events.

Global Solutions Institute
In the past century, awareness of the impacts of human activity on Earth's ecosystems has increased to the point at which the environment is now viewed as one of the most pressing concerns of our time. Sensing this urgency and seizing the opportunities now available in science and technology, a collaborative effort has been initiated to design and prototype a new entity that will have a significant positive impact on the environment: The Global Solutions Institute (GSI).

Once launched, GSI will be hosted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, capitalizing on close ties and shared resources with the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, the Marine Science Institute, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and UCSB's Center for Film, Television and New Media.

GSI's mission will be to integrate and leverage existing knowledge related to environmental and energy problems; create new strategies and solutions to address those problems; and implement the solutions. Serving as a model for policy development, conservation, and resource management, this "science to solution" is undertaken to produce profound changes that will improve the quality of our planetary environment.

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ESA Conference press coverage: Chronicle of Higher Education, BioScience, Santa Barbara News-Press, Idaho Statesman.

Streaming RealPlayer coverage of Bruce Babbitt's keynote speech (also available on UCTV's web site, www.uctv.tv) Remarks of Governor Dirk Kempthorne Table of Contents Conference schedule and speakers

Since being enacted in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has been hailed as a precedent-setting model for the conservation of endangered species worldwide. It has also been criticized as a threat to economic development and private property rights.

In collaboration with Columbia University, the University of Idaho, and UCLA, the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara is convening a multidisciplinary campaign titled "The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Lessons and Prospects."

This project will comprise a comprehensive assessment of the Endangered Species Act to use as a springboard for the most effective strategy to conserve biodiversity. The project will bring together a diverse group of some of the most distinguished academic and leading thinkers in the fields of environmental science, policy, management, and law, and focus their best efforts over a two-year period on the comprehensive examination of one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation ever written. From their areas of expertise they will ask and answer:

• What are we protecting, and why?

• What have we learned from the Act's successes and failures, and what should we do with this knowledge?

• How can we maintain biodiversity in the 21st century?

Experts in natural-resource law, biology, conservation biology, and economics will provide detailed reviews of these questions. Their analyses will be reviewed by a group of legislators, policy makers, natural resource managers, and private landowners.  

Conservation Need: The population of the United States increased from less than 4 million in 1790 to 281 million in 2000. That has been accompanied by an even more dramatic increase in per-capita consumption of natural resources. The combination of population growth and increased consumption has produced substantial environmental impacts, including the loss of wildlife habitat, chemical contamination of food chains, and air and water pollution.

The loss and endangerment of native species has also been significant: more than 500 species are estimated to have become extinct, and 1,812 species are formally listed under the Endangered Species Act as either threatened or endangered. As many as one-third of all native plant and animals are at risk of extinction. The projected 40-percent increase in the U.S. population by 2050 indicates that we are on the verge of an unprecedented loss of biodiversity and the ecosystems that supports it. And not only species at risk —the entire ecological infrastructure of the nation is imperiled.

The societal response to these problems so far has been the enactment of a long list of environmental statutes—none more important than the Endangered Species Act. When President Richard Nixon signed the Act into law in 1973, it was hailed as a precedent-setting model for the conservation of endangered species worldwide. The Act immediately became a political lightning rod following the Supreme Court's decision in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, and nowadays it is virtually impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading about how the Act is in some way affecting someone's life.

Subdivisions in Texas are on hold because of conflicts with golden-cheeked warblers; vernal-pool species stand in the way of building a university campus and extending interstate highways in Southern California; irrigation is halted in Oregon to protect endangered fish in the Klamath Lake; salmon farmers in Maine feel threatened by proposals to list the Atlantic salmon; the timber industry must adapt to the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest and the red-cockaded woodpecker in the Southeast.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the Endangered Species Act has come to be denounced as an un-American threat to traditional lifestyles, a violation of private property rights, and bad science. The Act is condemned for failing both to reverse the accelerating rate of extinctions and recover at-risk species. Advocates of the Act argue that its problems are the result of inadequate funding and undue political influence.

Benefit of Project: The 30th anniversary of the signing of the Endangered Species Act will occur in December 2003. This anniversary provides an opportunity for a comprehensive review of the ethical foundation and scientific basis of the Act, as well as its economic and political implications. These 30 years provide a lengthy record of implementation actions, legal challenges, legislative changes, policy modifications, and species' responses to recovery actions. Studying this data will enable the project team to make critical recommendations about the Act, which will have far-reaching and long-lasting implications for housing, highways, air travel, farming, ranching, and other areas of human life and activity, and will ultimately lead to the recovery of more species.

The team's analyses will be reviewed by a group of legislators, policymakers, natural resource managers, and private landowners. Specific management tools in a final report will assist policymakers and others across the nation to improve the effectiveness of the Act.

Collaborators: In collaboration with the Columbia University Business School and the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology; the University of Idaho's College of Law and College of Natural Resources; UCLA's Environmental Law Center's Evan Frankel Environmental Law & Policy Program; and the United States Geological Services, the Bren School proposes to undertake a comprehensive two-year campaign to review the Act and its context. This fundamental review will engage a diverse group of scholars and leaders from the public and private sectors, who will in turn provide a foundation from which to evaluate the continuing utility of the Act. Such a group will be able to provide the in-depth evaluation of the Act that is necessary to evaluate its place in the developing scientific, legal, and political emphasis on conserving biological diversity.

Organizers:

• Frank Davis, Professor of Environmental Science & Management, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara
  

  Dale D. Goble, Margaret Wilson Schimke Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Idaho College of Law
  

  Geoffrey Heal, Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Business Responsibility and Professor of Economics and Finance, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University
  

• J. Michael Scott, Professor, Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, University of Idaho, Leader of the Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey

Collaborators:

• Michael J. Bean, J.D., Director of Wildlife Program, Environmental Defense
  

  James L. Caswell, Administrator, Office of Species Conservation, State of Idaho
  

  William J. Snape III, Vice President for Law and Litigation, Defenders of Wildlife
  

• Steven P. Quarles, Attorney, Crowell & Mooring, LLP
  

Supporters:

The Bren School is deeply appreciative for gifts of support from the following organizations:

• University of Idaho

  U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

  Defenders of Wildlife

  Turner Endangered Species Fund

  National Wildlife Federation

  National Center for Housing and the Environment

  Dirk Kempthorne, Governor, State of Idaho—Office of Species Conservation

  UCLA Environmental Law Center's Evan Frankel Environmental Law & Policy Program

• The Donald Bren Foundation

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For more information about "The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Lessons and Prospects" and a complete listing of project participants, please contact Jennifer Purcell Deacon, Assistant Dean of Development, 2439 Bren Hall, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5131; jennifer@bren.ucsb.edu; (805) 893-5743.

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Volvo Cars and the Bren School ofEnvironmental Science & Management

Share Research and Experience

Volvo Cars Monitoring and Concept Center (VCMCC) in Camarillo, Calif., and the Bren School continued their four-year tradition of information exchange to advance collective understanding about the Future of Mobility: California Style.

Volvo Car Corporation sells some 400,000 cars every year in more than 100 markets globally. Making cars since 1927 and employing 27,000 people, Volvo Car Corporation is a member of the Ford Premier Automotive Group. Since 2000, Volvo Cars has funded a number of mobility-related activities at the Bren School.

In 2002, Volvo Cars sponsored an international conference on issues such a sustainable mobility, which included surveying consumer attitudes towards using small personal mobility vehicles that indicated large-scale potential acceptance. This year, during four days in May, a U.S. panel of experts and influential international journalists jointly explored visions of future mobility unique to this region. The events provided the journalists with an opportunity to experience the holistic interplay of ideas and passions that sets Southern California apart from the rest of the world.

Central to these conversations were the concepts of individual freedom and style in relation to reverence for the environment. These roundtable discussions illustrated how both the Bren School and VMCC take advantage of convening experts from various disciplines in a creative environment to generate new solution-centered thinking. The discussions also served to identify subjects for further research on sustainable personal mobility.Journalists from Australia, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom gathered at the Bren School to participate and observe the interdisciplinary panel discussions on the Future of Mobility:California Style, and to learn more about some of Volvo Car's new approaches and solutions to California's transportation challenges. Pictured below, journalists from Spain, U.S. panelists, and Bren scholars gather with a model reflecting Volvo technology.

"Bren Hall itself is a great metaphor for what Volvo Cars is trying to achieve with its environmental-care activities because the building is absolutely one of the most environmentally efficient buildings in the United States," says Ichiro Sugioka, science officer at the Volvo monitoring and concept center. "The Bren School showcases the core values of sustainability by minimizing the impact on air, water, and land while highlighting high-performance products and services that efficiently use energy and natural resources in new and creative ways. We are proud to partner with Volvo in creating a forum for dialogue on issues of sustainability. See more information about Volvo Cars.