This is a blog about sustainability science in the current era of rapid ecological change. Ecological change is accelerating and is driven by human impacts on the biosphere and increasingly by climate change. The 21st Century will be the era in which humanity develops the ability to sustainably align our activities with our planet’s flows of energy and materials or it will be a time when civilization deteriorates and possibly fails.
Stephen Mulkey is an environmental scientist dedicated to developing undergraduate and graduate programming to build society’s capacity for environmental mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. Mulkey was the president of Unity College in Unity, Maine from 2011 through 2015. His leadership and forward-looking vision resulted in Unity College being the first college in the U.S. to divest its endowment from the top 200 fossil fuel companies, and the first college in the U.S. to adopt sustainability science as the framework for all academic programming. Mulkey believes that higher education has an ethical duty to prepare generations of graduates for the extreme sustainability and climate change challenges of this century. During and after earning his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent over twenty years as a tropical forest ecologist affiliated with the Smithsonian. Mulkey has served as tenured faculty at three doctoral granting universities, as science advisor to the state of Florida, and as a program officer at the National Science Foundation.
Contact: shawhan.mulkey [at] gmail.com
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