Green Lecture Series to present Betsy Hartmann lecture on population, environment Jan. 14

Author and researcher Betsy Hartmann will speak on population and environment at the Green Lecture Thursday, Jan. 14, at Michigan Tech. (Photo courtesy Green Lecture Series)

HOUGHTON -- The Green Lecture Series will present "Rethinking the Links Between Population and Environment: Toward a More Hopeful Future" from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 14, in B002 Hesterberg Hall and Forestry Atrium, in Michigan Tech's Forestry Building.

This event is free and open to the public.

Presenter Betsy Hartmann is professor emerita of development studies and senior policy analyst of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her research, writing, teaching, and lecturing focuses on the intersections between population, migration, environment and security issues. She is widely published in popular, policy, and scholarly venues. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and two political thrillers about the Far Right, The Truth about Fire, set in the Copper Country, and Deadly Election. She is the co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village and co-editor of the anthology Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties.

In spring 2015, Betsy was a Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair in India where she lectured and did research on Indian and international population policy. She has consulted for the United Nations Environment Program and UN Women, and is the recipient of a 2012 Mesa Refuge Writing Residency in Point Reyes, Calif., to write about climate change. A long-standing activist in the international women’s health movement, she is known nationally and internationally for her work to challenge and reform population policy and promote reproductive and environmental justice. She received her B.A. magna cum laude in South Asian Studies from Yale University and her Ph.D. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.

Betsy lives in Amherst, Mass., where she is currently completing a book on apocalyptic thinking in the United States, provisionally titled The America Syndrome: Apocalypse and the Anxieties of Empire. The book will be published in Spring 2017 by Seven Stories Press in New York.

The event is sponsored by the Lake Superior Stewardship Initiative, Michigan Tech Center for Water and Society, Keweenaw Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, the Keweenaw Land Trust, and Michigan Tech's Department of Social Sciences.