William Cronon to speak on landscape and environmental change Feb. 13

Feb. 2, 2006 -- Environmental historian William Cronon will speak on "Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Environmental Change" at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 13, for Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

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William Cronon

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The talk — cosponsored by the university's Assembly Series and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts — comes as part of "Unsettled Ground: Nature, Landscape and Ecology Now!" a yearlong series of lectures, panel discussions, artistic interventions and workshops exploring the intersection of contemporary architecture, art, ecology and urban design.

The event is free and open to the public and takes place in the Sam Fox School's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, located in Steinberg Hall, near the intersection of Forsyth and Skinker boulevards. For more information, call (314) 935-9347 or email samfoxschool@wustl.edu.

Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies the history of human interaction with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives; how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work; and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.

His first book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), examined changes in the New England landscape as control of the region shifted from Native Americans to European colonists. His Pulitzer Prize-nominated Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) focused on Chicago's relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the 19th century.

In 1995, Cronon edited Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, an influential essay collection exploring the impact of cultural ideas about nature on modern environmental problems. Current projects include a history of Portage, WI, from the end of the last Ice Age to the present; and Saving Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism, about the evolving relationship between environmental history and environmentalism.

A past president of the American Society for Environmental History, Cronon has served on the Governing Council of The Wilderness Society since 1995, and on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land since 2003. He has been a Rhodes Scholar, a Danforth Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and MacArthur Fellow.

"Unsettled Ground" is co-financed by funds given to Washington University for collaborative, interdisciplinary programming between the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.