You are invited to this week’s session of the Political Economy, Technological Innovation and Values Dream Course.  This week we’re welcoming guest lecturer Drew Kershen, OU College of Law emeritus professor.

BENEFITS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FOR SUSTAINABILITY
Wednesday March 13
10:30 a.m. – noon
Price Hall 2030

Human beings depend upon agriculture to produce food, fiber, fuel, and industrial products that humans need for survival and (hopefully) flourishing well-being.  As a consequence, agriculture (like energy) has a major impact on the use of natural resources and upon the planetary environment.  In recent years, there has arisen a wide-spread chorus that agriculture must be sustainable, though precisely what “sustainable” means and how it should be achieved are hotly contested.  The March 13 class will focus on agriculture and the concept of sustainability.  Participants are encouraged to read the assignments and be prepared to engage in discussion about the dilemmas existing in agriculture and sustainability and about the values (explicit and implicit) in the contested visions about agriculture’s future.

ABOUT PROFESSOR KERSHEN:

Professor Drew Kershen, who joined the OU law faculty in 1971, teaches courses on agricultural law, legal history, professional responsibility and water rights. In recent years, Professor Kershen has focused his teaching, research and lecturing on agricultural biotechnology law and policy.

After receiving his juris doctorate in 1968, he joined a private practice in Atlanta. In 1973, he was named a fellow in law and humanities at Harvard University. He has held visiting professorships at the universities of Kansas, Illinois, and Arkansas Little Rock. During the summer terms and semester intersessions, he has taught at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, Oklahoma City University, the University of Texas, and Texas Tech.

Kershen is coauthor of Farm Products Financing and Filing Service, written in 1990 with J. Thomas Hardin. He has authored more than 40 other book chapters, grant reports, and law review articles.

READ-AHEAD MATERIAL:

Instead of a straight lecture, Professor Kershen plans to engage the participants in dialog.  For this dialog to be effective, he has provided some read ahead material, linked below:

Food crisis will prompt GM foods rethink Mar 2013

Contested Vision — Kershen Conf Paper ver 2

Mark Lynas Lecture Dream Course

———–

For Additional Information, visit http://www.ou.edu/content/coe/ame/research/dream_course_2013 or contact Farrokh Mistree at 405.325. 2438 or farrokh.mistree@ou.edu

The lecture is complementary and open to the public. The University of Oklahoma is an equal-opportunity institution. For accommodations on the basis of disability, please contact Sarah Warren at (405) 325-1715.

We hope to see you there!

You are invited to this week’s session of the Political Economy, Technological Innovation and Values Dream Course.  This week we’re welcoming guest lecturer Mark Halle.

Mark Halle is the executive director of the European organization of the International Institute for Sustainable Development. He lectures, writes and publishes frequently on issues relating to sustainable development. He is founder and former Chairman of the Board of the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development. Throughout his career, he has worked with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Wildlife Fund International and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Mark was born in the United States, but grew up in Switzerland. He took a degree in history and French from Tufts University and a postgraduate degree in history from the University of Cambridge.

Mark is scheduled to give two talks.

REBOOTING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT FOR THE 21^st CENTURY

Wednesday March 6, 10:30 a.m. – noon
Price Hall 2030

Nobody actively wants a form of development that carries the seeds of its self-destruction.  Especially since we know how to avoid it.  Yet if sustainable development is widely accepted as a goal we are, as a planet, headed in the opposite direction.  Why that is and what we can do about it is the subject of this lecture.

PUBLIC LECTURE – POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Wednesday March 6, 6:30 p.m.
Devon Energy Hall 120

It is commonplace for our leaders to say one thing and to do something entirely different.  They publicly embrace sustainable development and then give priority to action that undermines sustainability.  The reasons lie not simply with the hypocrisy and short-sightedness of politicians.  There are real and easily identifiable reasons for this.  Unless these are addressed it is hard to see how sustainable development will advance.  Happily, we now have an ever-clearer picture of what the transition will require.

——

For Additional Information, visit http://www.ou.edu/content/coe/ame/research/dream_course_2013 or contact Farrokh Mistree at 405.325. 2438 or farrokh.mistree@ou.edu

Both talks are complementary and open to the public. The University of Oklahoma is an equal-opportunity institution. For accommodations on the basis of disability, please contact Sarah Warren at (405) 325-1715.

We hope to see you there!

You are invited to this week’s session of the Political Economy, Technological Innovation and Values Dream Course.  Our featured speaker is former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope and current principal of Inside Straight Strategies.

Date:  February 27, 2013.
Time:  10:30AM to Noon.
Location:  Price Hall 2030

Title:  Innovation and Rights; Rigged Markets and Sustainability.  The Conflict we Can’t Resolve

Synopsis:  Carl Pope will employ a rights-based frame to the problem of sustainability, pointing out that if we genuinely tried to apply pure free market rules, in which all transaction were voluntarily agreed to by all whose rights are effected, innovation, which by its nature tramples existing rights in unanticipated and involuntary ways, would grind to halt — but sustainability would be ensured as a practical matter, because activities which infringe on the interests of the future invariably have dissenters victims in the present as well.

Date:  February 27, 2013.
Time:  6:30PM.
Location:  Devon Energy Hall 120

Public Lecture:  Extraction vs. Development.  Why technology and innovation make war on property rights and sustainability — and why free market ideology doesn’t help.

Synopsis:  Natural resources, and ecosystem services, pose problems that no version of conventional economics — however Chicago School or Keynsian it might be — has honestly confronted The real conflict is not between development and sustainability.  It’s between extraction and development, and between property rights and innovation.  These conflicts cannot be resolved.  They can only be managed.  Blind faith in free market ideology makes the problem worse.  But taking market principals seriously, and seeing where they take us, opens up some new opportunities.

——

For Additional Information, visit http://www.ou.edu/content/coe/ame/research/dream_course_2013 or contact Farrokh Mistree at 405.325. 2438 or farrokh.mistree@ou.edu

Both talks are complementary and open to the public. The University of Oklahoma is an equal-opportunity institution. For accommodations on the basis of disability, please contact Sarah Warren at (405) 325-1715.

We hope to see you there!

You are invited to this week’s session of the Political Economy, Technological Innovation and Values Dream Course.  Our featured speaker is former United Nations director for the Division of Sustainable Development and lead author on the Nobel Prize-winning panel on climate change, Tariq Banuri, Ph.D.

Professor Banuri is giving two talks:

RESOLVING THE CLIMATE-DEVELOPMENT DILEMMA
Wednesday, Feb. 20, 10:30 a.m. – noon Price Hall 2030

Conventional climate policy has consistently envisaged the threat in terms of what economists call a zero-sum game, to wit, there is a finite atmospheric space available, and the goal of climate agreements is to agree on proportioning it between the North and the South (or further divisions thereof). Not surprisingly, the result has been a total impasse, neither side having enough condign power or moral authority to impose a solution. Admittedly, there is talk of technological alternatives, but these remain on the sidelines, i.e., as options that will emerge once the finite space has been allocated. The argument advanced in the attached paper is that (a) this is not how things work; (b) the better option is to shift the focus from “space allocation” to “technology incentivization”; and (c) here is how it can be done.

EARTHLAND: THE WORLD AS A SINGLE COUNTRY
Wednesday, Feb. 20, 6:30 p.m.   Devon Energy Hall 120

In this talk Professor Banuri will focus on the implications of treating the entire world as the unit of analysis for addressing current and emerging challenges. The talk will bear upon the resolution of current policy dilemmas (including climate, energy, and development) and also help articulate the intricate nexus between politics, economics, and technology.

Dr. Banuri is a professor at the College of Architecture + Planning at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He is the former director of the Division for Sustainable Development of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and served as Head of Office of the Conference Secretary-General for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio20).

Previously he served as a Senior Fellow and Director of Future Sustainability Programme at Stockholm Environment Institute. He was a Coordinating Lead Author on the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

He started his career in the Civil Service of Pakistan and held several key positions including as the founding Executive Director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.

Dr. Banuri received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.

——

For Additional Information, visit http://www.ou.edu/content/coe/ame/research/dream_course_2013 or contact Farrokh Mistree at 405.325. 2438 or farrokh.mistree@ou.edu

Both talks are complementary and open to the public. The University of Oklahoma is an equal-opportunity institution. For accommodations on the basis of disability, please contact Sarah Warren at (405) 325-1715.

We hope to see you there!