Weston Roundtable

media release: SAGE is pleased to announce the return of the Weston Roundtable Lecture Series for the Fall 2022 Semester! Lectures will be held in 1163 Mechanical Engineering from 4:15-5:15 p.m.

After Environmentalism

Speaker: Ted Nordhaus, Founder and Executive Director, The Breakthrough Institute

Modern Environmental thought and action has been built upon pillars of sand —  a series of intuitions and claims about the worlds that are not well supported historically or empirically. Against long-standing environmental claims, wealth and abundance bring lower fertility rates in modern societies, not a population explosion.

Capitalism does not require endless exponential economic growth and economic growth is not inherently energy, resource, or material intensive. The errors of contemporary environmentalism are not purely accidental. They are detritus of a politics and a movement born of the effort to exclude working, non-white, and native people from landscapes that the leisure class wished to claim for itself, that came of age in the post-war years standing athwart industrial modernity and technological society, and that in seeking to speak for nature in politics, has too often instead attempted to naturalize its political claims.

The Weston Roundtable is made possible by a generous donation from Mr. Roy F. Weston, a highly accomplished UW-Madison alumnus. Designed to promote a robust understanding of sustainability science, engineering, and policy, these interactive lectures are co-sponsored by the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Office of Sustainability. These lectures build on the tremendous success in past years of the Weston Distinguished Lecture Series and the SAGE Seminar Series.