Office of Public Information and Communications Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 (212) 854-5573
Four well-known figures in science and the humanities will hold a public forum Wednesday, January 17, at Columbia University to discuss earth's capacity to support human life. They are art historian Simon Schama, population biologist Joel E. Cohen and geologists Wallace Broecker and Paul Olsen.
Titled "How Many People Can Earth Support? A Symposium on Earth's Evolution," the forum will begin at 2 P.M. in the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library on Columbia's Morningside Heights campus, Broadway and 116th Street. Admission is free.
The broadly inclusive discussion will range from scientific appraisals by Professor Broecker of the planet's supply of carbon dioxide and its effects on global warming to insights by Professor Schama on the elements of landscape and their relationship to human attitudes and history. Both are Columbia faculty members, Dr. Broecker the Newberry Professor of Geological Sciences and Dr. Schama the Old Dominion Foundation Professor of History. Dr. Schama, who recently became art critic of The New Yorker magazine, is the author of Landscape and Memory, published this year by Knopf.
Dr. Cohen, professor of populations in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and professor of populations and director of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University, will deliver the keynote address at 5 P.M. He is the author of How Many People Can the Earth Support? published this month by W.W. Norton, and an authority on population biology, developmental and molecular biology, the epidemiology of infectious diseases and the sociology of science.
Paul Olsen, also a Columbia geologist and a renowned scientist of earth's long-term fossil record, will discuss how feedbacks between climate and life forms seem to be making earth's climate more stable and so more hospitable to life. He is the Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Geological Sciences at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where Dr. Broecker is also based.
"The probems that will confront us in the next century require us to rethink the way we produce new knowledge," said Michael Crow, Columbia's vice provost and organizer of the event. "This conference will help us shape the kind of science we will need in order to understand the direction both we and the earth are taking."
Answers to the conference's central question have ranged from less than 1 billion to more than 1,000 billion, with the earth's population now at 5.7 billion and adding 90 million a year. In his book, Professor Cohen reviews these predictions and argues that answers will come only when we have fully understood both natural constraints and the human choices available. Choices of local and world economic and political institutions, and choices of how material values are distributed, as well as the levels of those technological and material values, will affect what Professor Cohen calls the earth's carrying capacity.
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:
2 P.M. Michael Crow, Vice Provost: "Welcome and overview"
2:20 P.M. Wallace Broecker, Newberry Professor of Geological Sciences
"The Physical Evolution of Earth"
3:05 P.M. Paul Olsen, Storke Memorial Professor of Geological Sciences
"The Evolution of Life on Earth"
3:50 P.M. Simon Schama, Old Dominion Foundation Professor of History
"Human Interaction with Earth"
5 P.M. Joel E. Cohen, Professor of Populations
"How Many People Can Earth Support?"
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