School of Natural Resources and Environment

Environmental Justice News & Highlights

Dean Marie Lynn Miranda

Dean Miranda gives seminar at CDC on GIS, diabetes

Marie Lynn Miranda, professor and dean at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, is giving a lecture Thursday, titled "Innovative Use of GIS for a Coordinated Approach to Chronic Disease Surveillance and Prevention." The seminar takes place at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Atlanta campus, but can be viewed live via a webstream (DETAILS BELOW). The Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention and the Division of Diabetes Translation is presenting the seminar.

Sustainable Food Symposium

CAFE presents Second Annual Sustainable Food Careers Symposium Feb. 15

CAFE is hosting a Sustainable Food Careers Symposium Friday, Feb. 15, Room 1040 of the Dana Building. The symposium brings graduate and undergraduate students together with professionals in food careers related to sustainability and the environment. Organizers' goal is to expose students to the wide range of career opportunities in this field. The event will feature panel discussions focused on:

THIS EVENT IS FREE; THE FIRST 100 REGISTRANTS RECEIVE A FREE LUNCH! (REGISTER BELOW)

Dorceta Taylor delivered SNRE’s annual MLK Lecture to a full house.

Food for Thought This MLK Day

Despite the snow and sub-freezing temperatures on Monday, Dr. Dorceta Taylor delivered SNRE’s annual MLK Lecture to a full house of faculty, students, and community members. The talk, entitled “Race, Poverty, and Access to Food in America: Resistance, Survival, and Sustainability,” followed the trajectory of much of Dr. Taylor’s environmental justice scholarship and teaching, using history as a lens to understanding present food disparities.

Three University of Michigan researchers were lead convening authors of chapters in the 1,100-plus-page National Climate Assessment, which was written by a team of more than 240 scientists.

SNRE professors contribute to new National Climate Assessment

In the coming decades, climate change will lead to more frequent and more intense Midwest heat waves while degrading air and water quality and threatening public health. Intense rainstorms and floods will become more common, and existing risks to the Great Lakes will be exacerbated. Those are some of the conclusions contained in the Midwest chapter of a draft report released last week by the federal government that assesses the key impacts of climate change on every region in the country and analyzes its likely effects on human health, water, energy, transportation, agriculture, forests, ecosystems and biodiversity. Three University of Michigan researchers were lead convening authors of chapters in the 1,100-plus-page National Climate Assessment, which was written by a team of more than 240 scientists.

17 SNRE students among 40 in inaugural class of Dow Sustainability Fellows

Forty master's and professional-degree students from eight schools and colleges at the University of Michigan, including 17 from the School of Natural Resources and Environment, are beginning the Dow Sustainability Fellows Program today, marking the first cohort of fellows in the $10 million program launched last spring.

Washington, D.C., United States of America - August 31, 2011: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the edge of the Tidal Basin on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Tourists circle the monument in late summer, less than a week after it opened.

Dorceta Taylor to deliver MLK Lecture Jan. 21 at SNRE

Dorceta Taylor is delivering the annual MLK Lecture at the School of Natural Resources and Environment as part of the school’s Dean's Speaker Series. Taylor is a professor of Environmental Justice at SNRE. She also is founder and director of the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, which aims to increase diversity in environmental organizations as well as the broader environmental movement. It also promotes greater diversity in leadership in the environmental field. Her lecture is titled "Race, Poverty, and Access to Food in America: Resistance, Survival, and Sustainability." It begins at 5 p.m. in Room 1040, Dana Building.

COP18

Climate Change Negotiations: On Metrics of ”˜Success’ and the Definition of Insanity

This past week, my master’s project team attended the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Doha, Qatar. By most accounts, the week was a huge success. We presented a poster at Forest Day, represented Michigan at our booth, made scores of professional connections, and were praised by one organization as being “the most employable people at the conference”—a compliment that went immediately to our heads and into the “W” column against Yale and Duke. I left the conference feeling invigorated, with a stack of business cards in my suitcase and (offset) carbon in my wake. It wasn’t until after I arrived back in Ann Arbor on December 3rd and went for a run outside in shorts and a tank top that I realized our metrics of ”˜success’ for attending the conference might have been a bit distorted.

Master's Project Symposium

Attention SNREds! 

It’s that time of the year; please join the greater SNRE community this Friday, December 7th as three Master’s Project teams present their final reports during the Master’s Project Symposium (1040 Dana).  This is truly an exciting event.  The students involved in these projects have spent countless hours on these intense, interdisciplinary projects, which are the cornerstone of the SNRE professional-school program. Brief descriptions of each of the three projects are below. 

SNRE at COP18

SNRE at Doha Climate Change Conference

We have arrived in Doha, Qatar—a city rising from the desert and, rather ironically, from oil revenue—for the 18th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP18). While expectations for an international climate change agreement are tempered this COP, 2012 is significant in that two of the negotiating tracts—the Kyoto (KP) Track for signatories of that protocol and the Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) Track for developed countries taking “mitigation actions” outside of Kyoto—are expected to close this year.

SNRE's own Sustainability Without Borders develops partnership with NGO in Liberia, More Than Me

This past summer, a group of University of Michigan graduate students from the College of Engineering and the School of Natural Resources and Environment traveled to Liberia, West Africa as members of the student organization Sustainability Without Borders.  Sustainability Without Borders (SWB) is an interdisciplinary organization whose objective is to create a network of sustainability practitioners who develop and implement sustainability projects in rural areas of developing countries.

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