12/05/2000

Global Sustainability Topic of Upcoming Forum

AUBURN, Ala. — Global issue of sustainability will be the theme of this month's meeting of Auburn University Forum on Sustainability and Biocomplexity, a brown-bag luncheon forum to be held Thursday, Dec. 7, from 12 to 1 p.m. in Room 112 of M.White Smith Hall on the Auburn campus.

According to Mark Dubois, faculty advisor for the Forum, this month's presentation will be led by Bill Deutsch, program manager for the Alabama Water Watch project and research fellow in the Auburn University Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures. Deutsch will discuss his work in the Phillippines with a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program that is studying how human land use and environmental quality issues are being managed in rural areas of developing countries.

"USAID funded a consortium of land-grant universities to conduct a 10-year or more research program called the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resources Management, Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP)," explained Deutsch. The SANREM program presently has sites in the Philippines, Ecuador and Mali, where researchers are evaluating how various social, geographic and cultural factors affect efforts of sustainability in these countries.

Deutsch's talk will present findings from his seven years of work with locally-led environmental assessments and watershed management strategies in Mindanao, Philippines. His presentation, entitled "Community-based Watershed Management in the Rural Philippines," will then be the basis of the luncheon's discussion about global issues of sustainability.

"The theme of the presentation is captured by a quote of David Orr: 'Sustainability will not come primarily from a top-down, homogenized approach, but from the careful adaptation of people to particular places...this is as much a process of rediscovery as it is research,'" said Deutsch.

Deutsch holds degrees in zoology, biology, anthropology and aquatic ecology and uses this diverse expertise to manage Alabama Water Watch, a grassroots water quality assessment program. He also has worked on environmentally-related projects of AU's International Center for Aquaculture and Aquatic Environments in the Philippines, Ecuador, China, Brazil and Rwanda. Recently he was appointed by Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman to the Alabama Commission on Environmental Initiatives.

The Forum, which began in September, is organized through AU's School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences and sponsored by the Sustainable Forestry Partnership, The National Science Foundation Biocomplexity consortium and the Center for Forest Sustainability.

The Forum's goal is to promote an interdisciplinary discussion by bringing in experts from a wide range of fields to stimulate dialogues on sustainable forestry, natural resource and agriculture issues and biodiversity.

According to Dubois, the Forums feature faculty from Auburn University and other institutions from a broad range of disciplines such as anthropology, economics, engineering, biological sciences and more.

The forum is free and open to anyone interested in joining the discussion or learning more about these issues. Participants should bring their own brown-bag lunches. Drinks and cookies will be provided. For more information on the forum, contact the organizers at brownbagging@hotmail.com or the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at 334-844-1037.

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Auburn, AL 36849
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Contact Jamie Creamer, 334-844-2783 or jcreamer@auburn.edu
Contact Katie Jackson, 334-844-5886 or smithcl@auburn.edu

12/05/00