September 16, 2002

The Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature and the Environment begins its sixth year with a free public lecture on September 23 by William Denevan, a world authority on aboriginal population in the Amazon basin.

The lecture is the first of six talks this year that will bring to UConn the country's leading scientists and scholars to increase awareness of work being done in many fields to address issues and problems facing the environment."

Each starts at 4 p.m. in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

"The Teale Series has been a catalyst for interdisciplinary teaching and research at UConn, and has provided students, faculty, and public the opportunity to learn from some of today's most influential environmental scholars," said Kent Holsinger, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-chair of the Teale series committee.

"It's clear that environmental problems can't be solved by a single discipline," said Holsinger, who has studied threats to native habitats in Connecticut and around the world for nearly two decades. "People from all walks of life make a difference, and many areas of expertise are needed."

The 2002-03 Teale lectures are:

• September 23, "Prehistoric Human Impacts on the Environment of Amazonia, with Emphasis on Anthropogenic Dark Earths," by William Denevan, cultural ecologist and professor emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison, an expert on native agricultural practices and lifeways across the Americas from prehistory to the present. His most recent book is Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes (Oxford University Press: 2002).
  
  
• Oct. 17, "Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making," by Scott Barrett, professor of environmental economics and international political economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and director of the Energy, Environment, Science & Technology Program, at Johns Hopkins University. An expert on international environmental agreements, Barrett is also an advisor to the European Commission, the OECD, the World Bank, and the United Nations.
  
  
• Nov. 14, "Crossing Thresholds: The Environment as Moral Challenge," by Bill McKibben, visiting scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. His book, The End of Nature, published in 20 languages on six continents, sounded one of the earliest alarms about global warming. He has also written The Age of Missing Information, Hope, Human and Wild, Hundred Dollar Holiday, and Maybe One, and writes regularly for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's.
  
  
• Feb. 20, "Estimating Climate and Climatic Change from Lousy Weather-Station Networks," by Cort Willmott, professor of geography, University of Delaware. Willmott's innovative uses of explicitly spatial methods have advanced understanding of climate and climate change. His research has been supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation, among others.
  
  
• March 27, "African Climate Change and Human Evolution," by Peter deMenocal, a paleo-oceanographer and assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University. deMenocal's studies of deep-sea sediments and microfossils are advancing understanding of human evolution, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Office of Naval Research.

The April lecture will be announced later.

The series is sponsored by the Offices of the President, the Chancellor, the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Graduate School, and other academic departments.