The Conversation Project: A New Chautauqua offers Oregon nonprofits free programs that engage community members in thoughtful, challenging conversations about ideas critical to our daily lives and our state's future. Conversations are facilitated by some of Oregon's most respected humanities scholars.
Slow Learners: Two Hundred Years of Unheeded Warnings
Cogent, compelling warnings – that exponential population growth must be stopped, that faith in technology to solve our problems is misplaced, that consumer culture cannot bring satisfaction, that greed and envy are treacherous underpinnings for an economic system, that violence elicits more violence, that nature bats last – have been ignored for more than two centuries. These warnings have come from some of the best minds of their times and have often been endorsed by other respected scientists and thinkers, yet their influence on public policy and individual behavior has been negligible. Oregon State University professor emeritus Richard Clinton will explore some of these early warnings, discuss them, and pose three questions: 1) Why have we largely ignored these urgent warnings? 2) What will it take to make us heed them? 3) What would be required of us if we did take them seriously?
Details
Equipment required: chalk/whiteboard; screen; overhead projector
Program available in Spanish.
Program available through October 2011
- Richard L. Clinton | Corvallis
- richard.clinton@oregonstate.edu
- 541-737-6246
Richard Clinton is professor emeritus of political science at Oregon State University, where he taught international relations, Latin American politics, American foreign policy, and alternative international futures. He currently teaches in the Honors College at OSU. Clinton was twice a Senior Fulbright Scholar-facilitator in Peru and from 1993 until 1995 was the Hanna Distinguished Chair in Latin American Politics at Rollins College in Florida. He is the author of three books and dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and essays; the editor or co-editor of three volumes; and, most recently, the co-author of Environmental Politics and Policy: A Comparative Approach (McGraw Hill, 2002). Educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of North Carolina, Clinton served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and was a loan officer of the First National City Bank of New York in New York City, Peru, and Bolivia.
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