“Hidden Energy: Agriculture’s Long-Term Sustainability”
Professor Geoff Cunfer,
University of Saskatchewan
Monday, Oct. 21
3:00 – 4:30 pm
Hill Auditorium, Barrows Hall
For most of human history, farmers were society’s crucial energy suppliers. Agriculture set the limits of economic productivity. This pubic lecture explains how methods from sustainability science can reveal how farmers historically managed energy flows, maintained soil nutrients, and manipulated natural processes for human goals. How sustainable were past farm systems? Does history hold models for long-term agricultural sustainability?
Bio
Environmental historian Geoff Cunfer is founding director of the Historical GIS Lab at University of Saskatchewan. His most recent project involved sustainability scientists and historians in six countries in developing new ways to measure material and energy flows in agriculture, to determine whether historical practices offer models for sustainable agriculture today.
Sponsored by the History Department, Colonel James C. McBride Fund, Climate Change Institute, Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, and School of Economics.
Climate Change Institute
