Dr. Kevin Anderson from the City of Austin's Center for Environmental Research (http://www.austintexas.gov/cer) will present about:

Resilient Nature: Discordant Harmony and the New Ecology

We now live in an age of global ecological change, in which, it is argued, humans dominate the Earth so completely as to warrant declaring a new geological age, the Anthropocene. The understanding of nature in this new age is built on ideas of “new ecology” where disequilibrium, change, and discordant harmony are more fundamental than integrity, stability, and balance, and, as the German ecologist Ingo Kowarik says, “the reference point is not an original condition of a natural landscape, but rather a condition defined based on the current site potential and the greatest possible degree of self-regulation. From this perspective, therefore, the natural capacity for process is the central point, not a particular, retrospectively determined and often idealized, picture of nature.” Join us as we explore the emergence of the concept of resilient nature and the new ecology of the Anthropocene.