BOULDER – CU-Boulder Professor Emeritus Al Bartlett will give his celebrated talk, "Sustainability 101: Arithmetic, Population and Energy" on Thursday, September 16, 2010, at Fort Lewis College.
Bartlett, of the CU-Boulder physics department, first delivered the lecture in 1969 to explain the arithmetic of steady growth and to alert the public to the consequences of rising human population and of rising rates of consumption of nonrenewable resources. He has been sharing his insights with countless audiences ever since.
His talk begins with a striking observation: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." He cites the first law of sustainability, which states that population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption cannot be sustained.
"The world is full of well-meaning people who work diligently on topics of sustainability without ever getting down to telling people this most obvious and fundamental fact about sustainability," he says.
During the presentation he describes the steady growth in consumption of finite resources such as fossil fuels and shows how when such steady growth occurs, these resources are exhausted at an alarming rate.
Bartlett believes people have missed the warning signs of overpopulation. If humans don't move quickly to solve the problem, nature will, he says.
The presentation is part of “CU in the Community,” a series of lectures by CU-Boulder faculty at Fort Lewis College. The program will begin at 6 p.m. in Chemistry Room 130. Tickets or reservations are not required and the event is free and open to the public.
The series is sponsored by LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu, an online tool developed by CU-Boulder’s Office for University Outreach, which features five videos that localize climate change by pairing interviews with leading scientists and everyday Coloradans to explain how climate change is affecting our state. The site also offers teacher-developed and –tested model lessons for middle and high school students. The lessons are available at LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu by clicking the “For Educators” tab.
The next installment of the series will feature a presentation by Professor Jeff Mitton of the CU-Boulder Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, entitled “Mountain Pine Beetles and Colorado’s Forests,” on Tuesday, September 28, 2010, in Noble Hall, Room 125 at 7 p.m.
For more information about the series, email outreach@colorado.edu.