Spring 2021 Events Recap

Our formal events for the semester kicked off with "BIPOC Farmers in Sustainable Agriculture", a panel discussion event that featured representatives from Purdue faculty, Purdue Extension’s Urban Agriculture program, Purdue’s Center for Global Food Security and Indiana’s BIPOC farming community.  We co-sponsored this event with the College of Agriculture and the College of Health & Human Sciences as part of the colleges’ joint observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Diversity Awareness Week. In America and around the world, farmers who are Black, Indigenous and people of color face unique challenges in equitable access to grow food while practicing environmental stewardship.  In this event, the panel focused on issues of policy, history and current opportunities for supported the success of BIPOC farmer in the state. Four Center affiliates participated in the panel as discussants. As noted by Curtis Whittaker, pastor of Progressive Community Church in Gary, Ind.,  “For BIPOC communities, especially African Americans, significant barriers exist to entering agriculture professionally and extend back centuries.” As noted by Center affiliate Ariana Torres, assistant professor of agricultural economics and horticulture and landscape architecture,  “I don’t have one solution because this is a multi-layered issue,” she said. “We do need to work on developing systems and markets that convey food transparencies. Who is producing food and who is consuming it? What are politicians, institutions, governments and non-profits doing to support diversity and how do we create leaders within the community?” 

In February, two Center affiliates, Andrew Whelton, associate professor of civil engineering and environmental and ecological engineering, and Caitlin Proctor, Purdue assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering and environmental and ecological engineering, moderated  an online webinar, Journalism, Science, and Policy: Communicating Risk and Relevance.  The panelists included ProPublica reporter Ken Ward Jr., Pulitzer-prize winning writer Deborah Blum and New York Times bestselling author Seth Siegel. The event was part of Whelton and Proctor’s National Science Foundation grant dedicated to supporting the sharing of knowledge and collaboration of water safety efforts associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversation focused primarily on how journalists and science writers should act as conduits of scientific knowledge.  The panel also discussed how a failure of communication and transparency could dissuade scientists from working with journalists and the media, which can reduce the flow of information concerning critical research to the public. A full recording of the event is available here.

 In March, we continued working with our partners at the Hoosier Environmental Council and White River Alliance to make sure Hoosiers have access to accurate, scientifically sound, information on issues important to the safety of our public health and our environment. Three faculty affiliates in the Center’s Water Challenges area, Sara McMillan, associate professor,  Jane Frankenberger, professor, and Jake Hosen, assistant professor, all in the department of of agricultural and biological engineering, worked with colleagues across the state to organize the event, which attracted over 425 virtual attendees.  Part one of the forum, “The Value of All Wetlands: Indiana Researchers Weigh In,” involved scientists from universities across Indiana who shared their work isolated wetlands, which are vital to the health of Indiana’s ecology, water and people.  Part two of this event, Wetland Protection in Indiana: The Way Forward, included a panel in which speakers from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, Army Corps of Engineers, and an environmental consulting firm discussed how federal and state laws work to protect isolated wetland functions and concluded with possible changes to these policies that were related to SB389 that was being discussed in the 2021 Indiana legislative session and which was eventually amended and signed into law.

In March, the Center welcomed Dr. Frances Colón, science and environmental policy expert and science diplomat during the Obama administration (DoS 2006-2017), and Anne Slaughter Andrew, Former U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica in the Obama Administration (DoS 2008-2013) for the lecture “Science Diplomacy: US and Latin America in a New Era of Cooperation.” Dr. Colón discussed the key role of science and innovation for strengthening diplomacy and development cooperation between the United States and Latin America and was joined by Slaughter Andrew for an open discussion on the topic.

At the end of the March, we led Purdue’s first conference on environmental justice, “Next Steps: Environmental Justice, Climate Change, and Racial Justice,” which featured a keynote lecture by environmental lawyer and new Deputy Assistant Administrator at the EPA, Dr. Carlton Waterhouse. The research symposium, which addressed local to global grand challenges, was organized by the Center and Laura Zanotti, professor of anthropology and served as the center’s inaugural associate director (2019-2020). Participants included artists, anthropologists, toxicologists and policy specialists from Indiana and several other states. The challenges they engaged with included, among others, access to natural resources, the right to live in a clean environment free from toxins, water and land rights as well as addressing historical injustices. As Zanotti said, “One of the goals of this symposium [is] to reignite and sustain environmental justice conversations at Purdue and in the region.”  A complete list of sponsors, speakers, and recorded talks are still available.

The Center’s last event for the semester was a Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture, “Global Soil Biodiversity: Establishing Common Ground for Sustainability,” presented by the Center in conjunction with the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence. The event featuring Dr. Diana Wall, a world-renowned ecologist and the inaugural director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University, who discussed the state of knowledge on the emerging field of soil biodiversity science and implications for sustainability under current and future environmental change. The lecture can be viewed here.

Author: Lynne Dahmen