Speaker: Bill Vitek
Abstract
We live in challenging times, and they are of our own making if we accept recent attempts to name a new geologic time period The Anthropocene. Since the dawn of agriculture 10-12,000 years ago, humans have increasingly altered and adapted Earth for our own benefit, while accelerating the unintended and increasingly unacceptable side effects that now threaten the entire planet and all of its living cycles and inhabitants.
If there is any consolation to this short but impactful journey it might be found in the discoveries emerging in the last two centuries about our origins in a nearly 14-billion-year storyline, from elements to start dust, from minerals to cells, from consciousness to self-consciousness. And not just for humans, but a living, improvisational, process-relational Universe with a mind of its own, and expressed in its every atom and interaction. A perennial imagination that flows through the whole of nature.
Mixing deep history with his own personal journey, philosopher and educator Bill Vitek will map out the perennial imagination, and offer it as a creative path toward reconciliation, resilience and recovery, beginning with how we feed ourselves.
About the Speaker...
A Schenectady native, Bill Vitek is a philosopher, musician, author and educator. For thirty years he has collaborated with Wes Jackson--co-founder and President Emeritus of The Land Institute--on projects of mutual interest, including two co-edited books (Rooted in the Land and The Virtues of Ignorance); and since 2011, an educational framework informed by perennial, regenerative agriculture. Bill is Professor Emeritus at Clarkson University, where he taught for 32-years. He is currently a Scholar in Residence at Middlebury College, and directs the New Perennials Project for Rockefeller Family Fund.