forklift, wes workers collab on wesworks

WesWorks at Wesleyan University
Wesleyan facilities workers perform during WesWorks, October 14 & 15, 2021.

On October 14 & 15, 2021, Forklift Danceworks presented WesWorks, a performance celebrating the skilled movement and telling the often unheard stories of the people whose work sustains the daily lives of the Wesleyan campus.

WesWorks (2021) featured the movement and stories of Wesleyan U employees as directed by Forklift Danceworks of Austin, Texas, led by Artistic Director Allison Orr, Distinguished Fellow in the College of the Environment and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, with Forklift choreographer and programs manager Gretchen LaMotte ’18.

Read more

levan ’22 indulges appetite for entomophagy

Megan LevanEvery year, the COE awards fellowships to fund summer research opportunities for Wesleyan students across all majors and class years. Megan Levan ’22 is an environmental studies and South Asia studies in a global context (university major) major who was recently elected Wesleyan’s Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Megan’s research this summer centered on how edible insect-based products are being promoted by companies and received by consumers in countries not known for their entomophagic practices. Megan believes diets of the future will need to be supplemented with other available protein sources, and her research explored how insects fit into the picture.

Read more

where on earth are we going: examining glacier-related flood events

The development of glacial lakes from receding glaciers, contained by either terminal moraines or bedrock, is commonly linked with global warming trends that have occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA). Such lakes are prone to sudden and catastrophic drainage, popularly known as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF). Although GLOFs continue to dominate the focus of both peer reviewed and popular media articles alike, a range of other cryospheric processes and hazards exist that are in need of further research attention and mitigation technologies.

Join Alton C. Byers, PhD, the 2021-22 Menakka and Essel Bailey ’66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment and a member of our 2021-22 COE Think Tank, for Recent Glacier-Related Flood Events in High Mountain Environments, a multimedia discussion of englacial conduit floods, periodic and recurrent flooding of lakes created by glacier- or ice-dammed lakes, permafrost-linked rockfall and debris flows, and earthquake-linked glacier floods. This event is the latest in the COE’s annual Where on Earth Are We Going? seminar series, sponsored by the Robert F. Schumann Institute of the College of the Environment. The event is a direct tie-in with this year’s COE Think Tank theme of visualizing environmental change. The event takes place Saturday, October 30, 2021, from 11 am to noon at Exley Science Center (Room 150) on the Wesleyan Campus.

Read more

how to think like an afrofuturist with ingrid lafleur

Ingrid LaFleurOn April 17, 2021, the College of the Environment welcomed Ingrid LaFleur for her lecture “How to Think LIke an Afrofuturist.” LaFleur is the founder of The Afrofuturist Strategies Institute (TASI) and a globally recognized curator, design innovationist, pleasure activist, and Afrofuturist committed to exploring and implementing forward-thinking solutions across multidisciplinary industries including but not limited to art, technology, education, social enterprise, and finance. Her extended biography can be read on her website.

Read more

near-earth space with moriba jah

On April 5, 2021, the College of the Environment welcomed Moriba Jah, associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, to present his lecture Near-Earth Space: The Lost Ecological Pleiad. The Earth has a number of ecosystems we can call an ecological Pleiades. To date, these ecological Pleiades have been constrained to the land, oceans, and air. However, there is an additional ecosystem, near-Earth space, which has yet to be globally acknowledged. To this end, Jah’s lecture focused on near-Earth space as a “lost” ecological Pleiad, comprised of “some abiotic objects such as micrometeoroids, a few humans in the Space Station, and a large number of anthropogenic space objects as a consequence of our technological developments.” In his lecture, Jah explored the known evolution of this Lost Pleiad, and underscored the need for its environmental protection.

Jah opened the lecture by giving context to the sheer number of human-made objects in Earth’s orbit. The assumed population of space objects is roughly half a million, ranging in size from a speck of paint to the International Space Station. Jah stressed that of that assumed half million, we can only measure about 30,000, and the total space population is unmeasurable with the precision of current instruments. He also noted that out of those potential 500,000 objects, only 3,500 are functioning, saying, “Much less than 1 percent of everything up there that we’re responsible for actually serves a purpose.”

Read more

departure gates with asif siddiqi

Wesleyan’s College of the Environment and History Department invited Dr. Asif Siddiqi, Professor of History at Fordham University in New York, to host his talk, Departure Gates: Postcolonial Histories of Space on Earth, on March 2, 2021.

Siddiqi specializes in the history of science and technology, and is the author of The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge, 2010), among other works surrounding the history of Soviet space technology. His current research interests have expanded to include global histories of science and technology, particularly in South Asia and Africa. These themes in Siddiqi’s work are what led him to be invited to campus as a guest of the College of the Environment’s 2021 Think Tank. Associate Professor of History Victoria Smolkin, who introduced Siddiqi, described the focus of this year’s Think Tank as “habitability in a cosmological, planetary, and ethical perspective.”

Read more