Top scholar spent teen years on street, now calls UVic home

Venue: Forum Theatre, Arts West

Presenters: Professor Peter Vitousek

We are living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, when our species shapes many features of how Earth functions. We can show how the ultimate causes of change (growth in size of and resource use by our species) entrain enterprises that directly alter important features of the world, and how those direct changes in turn cause further changes. Many of the direct changes (CO₂ concentrations, land use change) are well advanced and their causes are unequivocal. Moreover, we can follow these changes back into the enterprises that create them and to their ultimate drivers, the growth of the size of and resource use by our population. We can also follow the direct effects forward, to their consequences – which include climate change and the loss of biological diversity. The consequences of these changes necessitate a transition to sustainability – but working on such a transition would be a quixotic effort if the drivers continued to accelerate. However, they are slowing down in some important ways.

This is not the first time human societies have faced the need to become more sustainable. In the Pacific, the Polynesian people discovered and colonized every habitable island over much larger area than US and Canada combined. They arrived on very different islands with a coherent material culture and ideas – but to thrive, they had to adjust to the land, making this an ideal place to understand how humans and land interact. Most developed intensive agriculture and complex societies. They then faced the challenge of dealing with the fact that some pathways of intensive agriculture degrade the resource base, and threaten the persistence of the productive system. Polynesian islands include explicit and straightforward successes in making a transition to sustainability (notably Tikopia), and examples of the consequences of failing to do so (Mangaia, Rapa Nui). A third path is ongoing innovation that got around resource/demographic crunches and continued to do so until contact with the rest of the world (Hawaii).

from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI4OgH29j9w