Cancelled: Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series

From Doomsday to Biodiversity: Designing the Ecological Future

Laura J. Martin, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Williams College

Today ecologists are tasked with imagining how to sustain biodiversity in a changed climate. In the 1960s, they were charged with imagining a different future: World War III. Drawing on Martin’s new book, Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration, this talk will uncover the surprising military origins of ecology’s diversity-stability hypothesis, and it will explore how scientists and land managers have sought to reverse seemingly irreversible ecological change. 

Laura J. Martin is a historian and ecologist who studies how people shape the habitats of other species. She is the author of Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration, and more than 20 articles in journals including Environmental History, Nature Sustainability, and Science. Her writing and research have been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and elsewhere. She is an environmental studies professor at Williams College and a former fellow of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, the Stanford Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation.