2025-2026: Taking Place: Land Use and Environmental Impact

Thea Riofrancos

Associate Professor of Political Science, Providence College, Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, Fellow at the Transnational Institute

Public Lecture Title: The Ethics of Extraction: How “Green” is the Energy Transition?”
Thursday, September 11, 2025, 5:10 pm, Stackhouse Theater

This lecture will be livestreamed and recorded.

Riofrancos’ lecture “The Ethics of Extraction: How ‘Green’ is the Energy Transition?” will examine “green” technologies dependent on lithium extraction in Chile. Lithium plays a central role in mitigating climate change, but as Riofrancos will demonstrate, these practices of resource extraction come with deep environmental, human, and political consequences. Her talk will draw from her forthcoming book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025).

• Thea Riofrancos

Edward Burtynsky: Taking Place

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 11, 2025, 6:30 pm, Reeves Museum of Ceramics

World-renowned photographer, Edward Burtynsky, captures the magnitude of lands deeply marked and affected by human industry. The exhibition will be up September 2025-April 2026 in the Gottwald Gallery of the Reeves Museum of Ceramics.

This exhibition is a collaboration between the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics and the W&L Art Museum and Galleries.

Photo credit: Coal Tailings #1, SASOL Synfuels, Secunda, Mpumalanga, South Africa, 2018 (detail) © Edward Burtynsky. Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery.

• Edward Burtynsky: Taking Place

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

Tuesday, September 30, 2025, 7:00 pm, Stackhouse Theater

Viewing of the documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a “cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet.”

• Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

Olatunde Johnson

Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 Professor of Law, Columbia University

Public Lecture Title: Environmental Sacrifice Zones and the Limits of Civil Rights Enforcement
Thursday, October 2, 2025, 5:15 pm, Stackhouse Theater

This lecture will be livestreamed and recorded.

Johnson’s talk will examine how the constitutional and statutory notions of equal protection have failed to attend to geographic spaces in which environmental harms are concentrated, known as environmental sacrifice zones.

• Olatunde Johnson

Benjamin Backer

Executive Chairman and Founder of the American Conservation Coalition

Public Lecture Title: Common Ground, Common Future: Bipartisan Environmentalism
Tuesday, October 28, 2025, 5:10 pm, Stackhouse Theater

This lecture will be livestreamed and recorded.

Backer will explore a timely ethical question: Is it possible to protect the environment in an age of deep political division in America? Drawing on his travels across the country, he’ll share what he’s learned about how culture wars and partisan extremes have taken over the climate conversation—and what it will take to reclaim environmental stewardship as a shared responsibility. Through his new initiative, Nature Is Nonpartisan, and insights from his book The Conservative Environmentalist, Backer will show why bridging divides isn’t just good politics—it’s the right thing to do for our communities and future generations.

• Benjamin Backer

Benjamin Lee

Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania

Public Lecture Title: Toward Sustainable Data Centers for Artificial Intelligence
Thursday, January 22, 2026, 5:10 pm, Stackhouse Theater

This lecture will be livestreamed and recorded.

As the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to proliferate, we must assess and mitigate its energy demands and environmental impact. This talk will survey strategies for mitigating the energy used by AI computation and datacenter infrastructure, drawing on data and experiences from industrial, hyperscale systems. First, we analyze the energy and carbon implications of super-linear AI growth. Second, we re-think datacenter infrastructure and define a solution space for sustainable computation with renewable energy, utility-scale batteries, and job scheduling. Finally, we develop strategies for datacenter demand response, incentivizing computation to modulate power usage in ways that reflect their performance goals. In summary, the talk provides a broad perspective on sustainable computing and outlines the many remaining directions for future work.

• Benjamin Lee

Rewilding Place: Ethical Considerations of Theory and Practice

Thursday, February 12, 2026, 9:00 am-4:00 pm, Hillel 101

A day-long symposium featuring researchers, philosophers, and artists who engage, challenge, and nuance the notion of rewilding, and its associated conservation practices of land preservation, restoration, and rematriation. These perspectives ask us to consider ethical issues related to how we develop and maintain ecological diversity and who has the agency and authority to do so.

• Rewilding Place: Ethical Considerations of Theory and Practice

Daphne Miller

Clinical Professor, University of California San Francisco, Author

Public Lecture Title: Ethical Considerations in Farmacology: The Tangled Web That Connects Soil and Human Health
Thursday, March 19, 2026, 5:10 pm, Stackhouse Theater

This lecture will be livestreamed and recorded.

Photo credit: Kristin Little

• Daphne Miller