On February 19 at 7PM in the Overby Center Auditorium, acclaimed photographer James Balog‘s award-winning documentary, Chasing Ice, opens the 2014 Environmental Studies Film and Lecture Series. This film was made by tracking glaciers world-wide through three years of time-lapse photography, and provides vivid evidence of global warming.
The second documentary Last Call at the Oasis, about the world water crisis, will screen on March 19 at 7PM in the Overby Center Auditorium. This powerful documentary opens our eyes to the intensifying, world-wide water shortage.
The Earth Day lecture by University of Wisconsin-Madison Rachel Carson Professor of English Rob Nixon examines Slow Violence, Environmental Activism, and the Arts on April 22 at 7PM in the Overby Center Auditorium.
He writes: “Slow violence is a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. How can we create stories and images adequate to the pervasive but elusive environmental violence of delayed effects?” Rob Nixon will link the emergencies of the long term to artistic efforts to infuse such emergencies with dramatic urgency.
Nixon teaches environmental studies, postcolonial studies, creative nonfiction, African literature, world literature, and twentieth century British literature. He contributes regularly to The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly.
The films and lecture are free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Environmental Studies Minor, College of Liberal Arts, Southern Documentary Project,Office of Sustainability, Croft Institute for International Studies, Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, and the Departments of English and History.
