The Bren School Partnered with the Community Environmental Council and the UCSB Global Warming Series to Present Earth Day 2007
For more information on these events and activities see the Bren School’s News & Events. |
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
GLOBAL SOLUTIONS INSTITUTE
In the last century, awareness of the impacts of human activity on the
Earth's ecosystems has increased to the point that the environment is viewed
as one of the top five 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 and 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 for those problems; and actively implement these solutions. This "science to solution" process will serve as a model for policy development, conservation and resource management, resulting in profound changes that improve the quality of the environment on Earth.
Login for Global Solutions Institute
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On Friday, February 4, 2005 Academy Award-winning director, deep ocean adventurer, and space exploration visionary James Cameron immersed guests in his brand-new Disney 3-D IMAX film, "Aliens of the Deep." This exclusive event, held at the Bacara Resort & Spa, Santa Barbara, CA, was a benefit for the Bren School and Marine Science Institute, and was hosted with support from Microsoft and the Wilczak Family Foundation.
Jim Cameron's very personal involvement in and commitment to this special evening were an outcome of his sincere interest in the work of the Bren School and MSI. It is also a tribute to UC Santa Barbara's Dijanna Figueroa, Mike Henry and Jim Childress of the Marine Science Institute, who represent some of the key research and on-camera talent in the film.
The focus of the film is the hydrothermal vents in the mid-Atlantic and Pacific. Not only are these sites rich in natural resources (highly concentrated poly-metallic sulfide deposits, gold and other minerals) they are very rare ecosystems that are teeming with endemic species and whole families of organisms new to science.
About the Film
"Aliens of the Deep" chronicles the extraordinary two-and-a half mile journeys to the depths of the ocean floor in specially designed submarines, where Cameron and a team of leading-edge scientists-including three UC Santa Barbara researchers-explore the otherworldly habitats, and the extraordinary, unique creatures who inhabit them, created by hydrothermal vents in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Hydrothermal vents-where tectonic plates separate, and magma from the Earth's core bubbles up to the ocean floor-spew constant clouds of super-heated water, made dark as smoke by rich, mineral substances sent up from deep beneath the Earth's crust. The creatures who thrive in this bizarre environment are unique and strange, including six-foot tall worms with blood-red plumes, white crabs, and astonishing biomasses of blind shrimp, all competing to find just the right location in the flow of superheated water-or fry trying.
These creatures give us unprecedented evidence and insight into to what life forms might exist on planets other than Earth, such as Mars and the moons of Jupiter-especially Europa, which shows evidence of life-sustaining water under its icy crust. "They are as close to alien life as anything seen on Earth," says Cameron. "A clue to what might exist elsewhere."
"Aliens of the Deep" combines innovative, daredevil filmmaking and riveting scientific exploration. The vision, passion, and creative expertise of James Cameron, combined with world-class research from UC Santa Barbara brings the deep ocean-deep space connection alive as viewers go on this 3-D adventure into extreme, miraculous environments and return with extraordinary clues about the very substance of life.
We were honored to have the friendship and collaboration of James Cameron in this exciting special project. Stay tuned for other upcoming special projects with James Cameron!
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The
Endangered Species Act at Thirty:
Lessons and Prospects
Conference
for Multidisciplinary Assessment and Recommendations
Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management
University of California, Santa Barbara
November 12-14, 2003
Senate
Briefing December 7, 2004
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Purchase the book The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Renewing the Conservation Promise View segments of the ESA Confernce.
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Order The ESA At Thirty Conference on DVD.
ESA at 30 Briefing on Policy Recommendations for the Endangered Species Act
December 7, 2004
2 - 5 p.m.
Dirksen Senate Building, Room 406
Senate staff
and guests. Please
see agenda for a list of
the participants, panels and the recommendations discussed.
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
Conference
schedule and speakers
Since its enactment 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 Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara is convening a multidisciplinary campaign entitled "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-edge 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. Their final report will have immediate practical application and will assist policymakers and others nationwide to improve the effectiveness of the Act.
Conservation Need: The human population in the United States increased from less than 4 million in 1790 to 281 million in 2000. This increase 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% increase in the human population of the U.S. by 2050 indicates that we are at the front edge of an unprecedented loss of biodiversity and the ecosystems that such diversity produces. It is not only species that are 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 to both 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 Act's ethical foundation, scientific bases, 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, and ranching, and other areas of human life and activity, and will ultimately lead to the recovery of more species. Their analyses will be reviewed by a group of legislators, policy makers, natural resource managers, and private landowners. Specific management tools in a final report will have immediate practical application and will assist policymakers and others nationwide to improve the effectiveness of the Act.
Collaborators: In collaboration with Columbia University's Business School and 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, engaging a diverse set of scholars and leaders from the public and private sectors will 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 and Management, Donald
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's Environmental Law Center's Evan Frankel Environmental Law & Policy Program
- The Donald Bren Foundation
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, Donald 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 Donald Bren School of Environmental Science Management Share Research and Experience |
Volvo
Cars Monitoring and Concept Center (VCMCC) in Camarillo, CA and the
Bren School continued its four-year tradition of information exchange
to advance collective understandings 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, over a series of four days in May, a US panel of experts and invited
influential international journalists jointly explored visions of future mobility unique
to this region. The events provided the journalists 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 the Bren School and VMCC both 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 above are journalists from Spain along with US panelists and
Bren scholars with new 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.
For more information
about Volvo Cars, please visit www.volvocars.com.
Making a Gift