Green Talks announced for Spring

Sims Library and the Sustainability Center will present a series of Green Talks about timely environmental issues affecting Southeastern Louisiana. The Green Talks series, now in its third year, is part of a campaign to promote ecological awareness at Southeastern.

“The talks will last only 30-minutes, followed by a question and answer session,” said Alejandro Martinez, Sustainability Manager. “We hope this will accommodate Southeastern staff and students who wish to attend.” This year, due to COVID restrictions, all Green Talks are presented via Google Meet. Recordings of the presentations will be available to all who register.

On Monday, March 29 at 3 p.m. -- Clean Energy, Greenwashing, and the Just Transition. Rachel L. B. Stevens, assistant professor at Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law School, will  share some of her case work with environmental justice communities who fight “greenwashing,” where companies support false environmental solutions like waste incineration, factory farm gas, and sewage sludge processing to present an environmentally friendly image. These greenwashing tactics allow companies to take advantage of clean energy programs and subsidies while harming communities. Ms. Stevens will discuss clean energy programs, how to avoid greenwashing, and how the “Just Transition” framework shifts economic and political power from an extractive economy to a regenerative one.
(Click to register)

On Wednesday, April 28 at 1 p.m. -- The 2020 New Orleans Nurdle Spill – Tracking the Path of Hundreds of Millions of Plastic Pellets. In August 2020 a container ship called the MV Bianca was moored in New Orleans. During a storm, it lost four shipping containers. One of those containers was filled with polyethylene resin pellets called nurdles. An estimated 750 million pellets entered the river. Dr. Mark Benfield of LSU’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences will describe the events around the spill, the fate of the nurdles, and the questions that this event raised regarding how we deal with plastic spills. (Click to register)

For more information, contact Angie Balius, Outreach Librarian, at phone (985)-549-3898 or Angie.Balius@Southeastern.edu.

 

Monday, March 22, 2021 10:26:15 AM CDT