Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Lightning Talks by IBES Fellows

Once home to a wide variety of wildlife, North China is now home to hundreds of millions of humans and livestock. Apart from a few areas of the high Qinling Mts, there are no wild mammals larger than hares in the region. IBES fellow Brian Lander discusses how the growth and spread of agriculture over the past 8000 years gave humans the ability to create their own ecosystems and thus to rebuild the ecology of North China.
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Unprecedented melting of sea ice and other rapid changes are leading to serious impacts on Arctic peoples and ecosystems. At the same time, these changes are inciting a "race for the North," with a range of industries showing increased interest the Arctic region. In this talk, IBES fellow Amanda Lynch explores how well we understand, observe, and can simulate the changing Arctic system on policy-relevant time scales.
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Lightning Talks by Students & Postdocs

In the face of global environmental change, it is essential that we understand how species respond to major perturbations, explains PhD candidate Courtney Reed. One important consequence of climate change is the disruption of ecological networks, which can be rewired through changes in the interactions between organisms and their environments.
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There is little scientific doubt that, while Hurricane Harvey was in many ways an anomaly, the flooding that Houston, Texas experienced in the summer of 2017 is indeed a terrifying glimpse into the city’s future. Aubrey Calaway '20 discusses Houston's vulnerability, plans for the future, and more using a combination of spatial, rhetorical, and visual analysis.
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In this talk, Alex Daigle '19 describes and analyze the news reports of ecological change, specifically oil disasters, from the website Nola.com. This website is a source of news for the Southeast population of the Gulf Coast community, especially in the Southeastern Louisiana area, which is rapidly eroding due to modern ecological projects.
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Climate change is expected to cause enormous destruction and loss of property value during the 21st century. Therefore, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is already big business, with the potential to be among the world’s largest industries in the near future. Calvin Thompson '19 explains how New York City, the largest urban center in the world’s richest country, is at the forefront of these shifts.
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As climate change drives environmental disaster alongside a growing prison population, Benjamin Cole '20 asks: what are the ethics of prison labor? Using inmate firefighters in California as a case study, Cole's talk interrogates who should be exposed to the inherent risks of disaster relief and how climate rhetoric influences the ethics of inmate labor.
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It is unclear which species traits will favor resistance, resilience, or decline in response to the extremes of the physical environment associated with global climate change. In this talk, recent PhD recipient Robert Lamb explores the wide oceanographic variation and relatively pristine fish communities of the Galapagos Islands as a model system to study the ecological outcomes of variation in environmental stress.
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