Visiting Scholar Fall 2013 Lecture- Professor Philip Fearnside

University of Maryland, College Park

Latin American Studies Center

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Philip Fearnside

Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas de Amazônia (INPA)

National Institute for Research in the Amazon

Threats to Brazil's Amazon Rainforest

October 30

Dr. Fearnside will be in residence for five days. He will lecture publicly and run an intensive workshop for graduate students and faculty. Advanced undergraduates may also attend. These events are free and open to the public.

Lecture: Threats to Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

3202 Knight Hall

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is subject to a suite of often-synergistic forces that threaten both the environmental services of the forest and the livelihoods of its inhabitants. In this talk, Professor Fearnside will discuss deforestation in the Amazon, including the roles of a different types of landholders and business interests, as well as the impacts of planned highways and hydroelectric dams and potential damage from fires and climate change.

Philip Fearnside is a research professor in the Department of Environmental Dynamics at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas de Amazônia (INPA)/National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA)in Manaus, Brazil. He completed his PhD in 1978 in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Fearnside is a permanent resident of the Amazonwhere he has lived for 37 years doing ecological research. Since 1974, his research has been directed at the estimation of human carrying capacity of tropical agro-ecosystems. His work since 1992 has been organized around the objective of converting the environmental services of Amazonian forests into a basis for sustainable development for the rural population of the region, taking the place of the current pattern of forest destruction. He has authored over 450 publications on these and related problems of environment and development. Honors include Brazil's National Ecology Prize, the UN Global 500 award, the Conrad Wessel prize, the Chico Mendes prize, the Scopus prize (from Elsevier & CAPES) and membership in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. In 2006, he was identified by Thompson-ISI as the world’s second most-cited scientist on the subject of global warming.

Those wishing to attend the workshop should RSVP to lasc@umd.edu by Monday, October 28, 2013. Participants in the workshops should be prepared to do a short set of readings which will be provided by email.

For more information about this event, please see the event page or contact the Latin American Studies Center at lasc@umd.edu or 301-405-6459.