February 25, 2002

Environmental historian William Cronon will give a talk on "Humanist Environmentalism" on March 7, at 4 p.m., in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. The talk, part of the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature and the Environment, is free and open to the public.

Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies American environmental history and the history of the American West. His research concerns the ways human communities modify the landscapes in which they live and how people, in turn, are affected by changing geological, climatological, epidemiologi cal, and ecological conditions.

He is currently exploring the evolving relationship between environmental history and environmentalism and what the two can learn from each other, as well as ways of integrating environmental and social historical methods with nontraditional narrative literary forms.

During the Teale talk, Cronon will argue that environmentalism would benefit from more humanistic and historical approaches to solving environmental problems.

Cronon's books include Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, (1983), Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), and Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995). He is currently working on several other books, including Life on the American Land, an anthology of first-person accounts of past landscapes of the United States and the lives people have lived there.

Cronon attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and earned a doctorate there in 1981; he also earned a Ph.D. in American history from Yale in 1990. He held a John and Catherine MacArthur fellowship in 1985 and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 1995.

He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1999 and of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars in 2000. He has been president of the American Society for Environmental History and a trustee of The Nature Conservancy-Connecticut Chapter.

Cronon is on the editorial board of Environmental History and other journals, and serves on the Governing Council of The Wilderness Society and the Environmental Leadership Program. He has also served in various roles on the National Research Council Committee on the Human Consequences of Global Change, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the Social Science Research Council, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

For information on the talk, call (860) 486-4500.