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Climate Change In Our Backyard
Dr. William H. Schlesinger
When the discussion turns to climate change, you want to hear from scientists more than politicians, and you want to hear about it in a context that you can comprehend. Dr. William H. Schlesinger, the president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies in Millbrook, will give a free talk entitled “The Impact of Global Warming on New England,” at the the Hotchkiss School in Salisbury on Friday, September 12, at 7:30 PM. The program is sponsored by the Salisbury Forum, a young not-for-profit organization that sponsors public affairs lectures.
Dr. Schlesinger, the former dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Science, has been studying the link between environmental chemistry and global climate change for three decades, and he is a scientist who is keenly aware of the political and philosophical implications of his work. “Many of those who could afford to help believe that some type of divine intervention will carry us through a bottleneck of an exponentially rising human population and its increasing demand for resources on a finite planet,” he has said. “They want no personal sacrifice. Perhaps what we learned best from our early field studies of ecology is that human behavior might not be far removed from that of other organisms. Each squirrel on my bird tray feeds as if tomorrow is simply another day. . . The question we now face is whether we can live the way we aspire to today, without degrading the life support systems of the planet that would sustain us tomorrow. “
The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, which is located on 1,924 acres in Millbrook, has hiking trails and a fern glen that are open to the public from April 1 to October 31.
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