America's environmental past, present to be topic
Skidmore College will welcome Professor Lauret Savoy to campus Thursday, Sept. 27, to give the keynote talk for Skidmore's Environmental Studies Program. Her talk, titled "Restor(y)ing America's Environmental Past and Present," begins at 8 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. The public is welcome. A reception will follow the talk.
Just prior to the talk, from 7 to 8 p.m. in the Palamountain lobby, a number of local and community environmental organizations will staff information tables and answer questions from students who are seeking more details on volunteer or internship opportunities.
Savoy is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College. She has written, " While the types, rates, and degrees of environmental change might be unprecedented in human history, the embedded belief and political-economic systems behind them in the United States?the most energy-consumptive nation?are not. Their long, deep roots have allowed and continue to amplify fragmented ways of seeing, valuing, and using 'nature' and human beings. The factors and economic frames considered to measure the human (or ecological) footprint on Earth, for example, mask how the exploitation of land and of people are interconnected."
A teacher, earth scientist, writer, photographer, and pilot, Savoy is also a woman of mixed African-American, Native American, and Euro-American heritage. Her classes at Mount Holyoke consider how the braided strands of human history and geologic-natural history contribute to the stories we tell of the land's origin and history and to stories we tell of ourselves in the land and of relational identity.
According to Mount Holyoke's web site, "Savoy's interest in human environmental history has led her to dissect distinctly held perspectives on what it means to belong to a place, to be from a place, and to document the blurred lines between family lineage and landscapes of homeland."
Savoy's new book, The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2011, co-edited with Alison Hawthorne Deming), presents a collection of provocative essays that weave diverse experiences of place to create more textured cloth than the largely monochromatic tradition of American nature writing or of the mainstream environmental movement. Booklist calls The Colors of Nature an "unprecedented and invaluable collection." Savoy also co-edited Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology (Trinity University Press, 2006 with Eldridge and Judy Moores), which the Wall Street Journal picked as one of its five best science books.
Savoy joined the Mount Holyoke faculty in 1990. In 2003, she was a recipient of the college's Distinguished Teaching Award. She earned an A.B. degree at Princeton University; an M.S. degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and a Ph.D. degree at Syracuse University.