Wege Lecture Series

Join us virtually for an engaging conversation with Gina McCarthy, the country’s first National Climate Advisor. As the president's chief advisor on domestic climate policy, McCarthy leads the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy focused on mobilizing a whole-of-government approach to tackling the climate crisis, creating good-paying, union jobs, and securing environmental justice. Having served as the 13th Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and then as President and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), McCarthy is one of the nation’s most trusted and accomplished voices on climate issues—and has been at the forefront of environmental and public health progress in a variety of leading roles for over three decades.

Moderated by Tony Reames, Senior Advisor: Office of Economic Impact and Diversity U.S. Department of Energy, Assistant Professor: U-M School for Environment and Sustainability

Followed by a Q & A with Kyle Whyte, George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at University of Michigan, White House Environmental Advisory Council

**Click HERE to watch the recording.

17th Annual Wege Lecture

When Christiana Figueres became the chief climate change negotiator for the United Nations in 2010, a global climate accord seemed impossible. Five years later, the Paris Climate Agreement was unstoppable: 195 governments unanimously signed on to keep global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius. But according to Figueres, who is often referred to as the architect of the agreement, this was just a staging post in what remains a long, hard process. So what are the next steps in advancing climate solutions, mitigation efforts, and accelerating a clean energy future? Time is running out, and we must act now to raise collective ambition and leadership to protect the most vulnerable. How can we seize this moment to create jobs, ensure energy access, safeguard food and water, improve health, and protect economic and social stability for the future?

Join Christiana Figueres as she shares the inside story behind the Paris Climate Agreement and strategies for accelerating climate action. Christiana, who has been credited with forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy, will discuss how “radical collaboration” between businesses, NGOs, universities, local and state governments, and communities can help advance a carbon-neutral future and address the most pressing issue of our time.

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This Wege Lecture on Sustainability will kick off the 3-day celebration of the Center's 25th Anniversary. 

About Dr. William Clark

Professor Clark is the Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human Development at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.  Trained as an ecologist, his research focuses on sustainability science: understanding the interactions of human and environmental systems with a view toward advancing the goals of sustainable development. He is particularly interested in how institutional arrangements affect the linkage between knowledge and action in the sustainability arena.

About the Lecture

The ultimate determinants of intergenerational well-being should be thought of as the stocks of assets on which people now draw and will draw in the future to subsist and improve their lives – stocks that include natural, social, manufactured, human and knowledge capital.

Managing these assets requires understanding how they interact in highly complex social-environmental systems. It also requires understanding how people, as committed agents of change, can intervene in those systems to move them toward sustainability goals, working collaboratively in governance processes to influence how society takes actions to promote sustainability. While actors from every realm of society can and need to engage in this, innovations from the research and development communities are particularly needed; creating useful knowledge and linking it effectively with decision making is a critical need. This talk explores frameworks and approaches for understanding, analyzing, and effectively engaging in sustainability challenges.

The full talk may be viewed here.

About Janine Benyus

Janine Benyus is a biologist, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. In Biomimicry, she names an emerging discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s designs and processes (for instance, solar cells that mimic leaves).

Since the book’s 1997 release, Janine has evolved the practice of biomimicry, consulting with sustainable businesses and conducting seminars about what we can learn from the genius that surrounds us. Her favorite role is biologist-at-the-design-table, introducing innovators to organisms whose well-adapted designs have been tested over 3.8 billion years.

In 1998, Janine co-founded the Helena, Montana-based Biomimicry Guild with Dr. Dayna Baumeister. The Guild is an innovation consultancy providing biological consulting and research, workshops and field excursions, and a speakers’ bureau. The Guild helps designers learn from and emulate natural models with the goal of developing products, processes, and policies that create conditions conducive to life.

In 2005, Janine founded The Biomimicry Institute (TBI), a nonprofit organization based in Missoula, MT. TBI’s mission is to nurture and grow a global community of people who are learning from, emulating, and conserving life’s genius to create a healthier, more sustainable planet. Programs include the development of biomimicry courses in a range of educational settings from K-12 schools to universities as well as non-formal venues such as zoos, museums and nature centers. TBI also offers biomimicry workshops for designers (engineers, architects, etc.) as well as biologists through the Biologist-at-the-Design-Table training. TBI’s Innovation for Conservation program uses proceeds from bio-inspired products to conserve the habitat of the mentor organisms. In 2008, the TBI launched www.AskNature.org, an open-source database of biological literature organized by design and engineering function. In early 2009, as part of its K-12 educational outreach work, TBI released Ask the Planet, a CD of children’s biomimicry songs, written and composed by Amy Martin featuring numerous celebrity artists including Ani DiFranco, Dar Williams and Bruce Cockburn.

Janine has received several awards including a Time Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment award, the Rachel Carson Environmental Ethics Award, the Lud Browman Award for Science Writing in Society, and the Barrows and Heinz Distinguished Lectureships. In 2009, Janine was honored with a Champion of the Earth award in Science & Innovation from the United Nations Environment Programme. She traveled to Paris to accept the award on Earth Day and then participated in a two-day conference hosted by Business 4 Environment.

An educator at heart, Janine believes that the more people learn from nature’s mentors, the more they’ll want to protect them. This is why she writes, speaks, and revels in describing the wild teachers in our midst.

About the Lecture

Biomimicry is the practice of learning from and then emulating life’s best ideas to create a more sustainable world. By mimicking nature's time-tested strategies, biomimics are learning to capture fog like a desert beetle, preserve vaccines like a resurrection fern, resist bacteria like a shark, and gather energy like a leaf. Based on 3.8 billion of years of R&D, these designs sip energy, shave material use, eliminate toxins, and turn waste into opportunities.

Once a specialty science, Biomimicry has spread virally in the last 15 years. Hundreds of Biomimicry start-ups are making headlines with nature-inspired technologies that solve global challenges and disrupt business as usual. Leading companies such as Natura, Arup, Airbus, Boeing, HOK, IDEO, Interface, Levi’s, and Nike use biomimicry in their labs as well as their boardrooms, finding inspiration for product and management redesign.

Since the publication of her seminal book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus and her colleagues at Biomimicry 3.8 have developed a methodology for bio-inspired design while introducing millions to its potential. They’ve worked with over 250 corporate clients and professors from more than 100 universities to embed biomimicry in both design and decisionmaking. They’ve been “biologists at the design table” with some of the world’s greatest innovators, reimagining everything from solar manufacture to city planning. 

In this talk, Janine will give an insider’s view of the latest biomimicry advances on the drawing board and in the market. She’ll discuss the worldwide spread of the meme, and how it is being heralded as a “one of the top 20 breakthrough business ideas” (Harvard Business Review, HBR List), “a paradigm shift for the world of design” (Smithsonian National Design Awards), and “one of 10 innovations that will change the way you manufacture” (Society of Manufacturing Engineers). At this critical tipping-point for the field, she’ll describe what’s needed to take biomimicry global while cultivating ethical thought leadership that will focus Biomimicry on what’s worth doing.  Come learn what all the excitement is about from the founder of this practical, radical, and powerfully hopeful approach to innovation. Hear what happens when inventors become nature’s apprentices, creating world-changing technologies that create conditions conducive to all Life.

A public reception will follow the talk.

View recorded talk.

Dr. Marie Lynn Miranda, Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment and Director of the Children's Environmental Health Lab, delivers the 11th Annual Peter M. Wege Lecture on Sustainability. The lecture begins at 5:00 p.m. in the Rackham Auditorium, and is followed by a public reception.

Marie Lynn Miranda became dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment, on January 1, 2012. Miranda was previously a faculty member in the Nicholas School of the Environment, the Integrated Toxicology and Environmental Health Program and the Global Health Institute at Duke University. She also was a faculty member in the Department of Pediatrics within Duke Medicine.

The Detroit native has devoted much of her professional career to research directed at improving the health status of disadvantaged populations, particularly children. She is the founding director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative, a research, education and outreach program that fosters environments where all children can prosper. She has held the director post since 1999. CEHI’s peer-reviewed work is cited widely, including in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s current integrated science assessment on revisions to the national ambient air quality standard for lead. CEHI also works closely with a wide range of organizations and non-profits in addressing children’s environmental health issues in the community. In 2008, CEHI won the EPA’s Environmental Justice Achievement Award.

This event was sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Systems, School of Natural Resources and Environment, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Research, School of Public Health, Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases, C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, School of Social Work, and Michigan Radio - Environment Report.

Streaming videos of the 11th Wege Lecture and Q&A session

Dr. John P. Holdren is Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Prior to joining the Obama administration, Dr. Holdren was Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, as well as professor in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Director of the independent, nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center. From 1973 to 1996, he was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he co-founded and co-led the interdisciplinary graduate-degree program in energy and resources.

Dr. Holdren holds advanced degrees in aerospace engineering and theoretical plasma physics from MIT and Stanford and is highly regarded for his work on energy technology and policy, global climate change and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as foreign member of the Royal Society of London. A former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, his awards include a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, the John Heinz Prize in Public Policy, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Volvo Environment Prize. He served from 1991 until 2005 as a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s board of trustees.

During the Clinton administration, Dr. Holdren served as a member of PCAST through both terms and in that capacity chaired studies requested by President Clinton on preventing theft of nuclear materials, disposition of surplus weapon plutonium, the prospects of fusion energy, U.S. energy R&D strategy and international cooperation on energy technology innovation. In December 1995, he gave the acceptance lecture for the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international organization of scientists and public figures in which he held leadership positions from 1982 to 1997.

President Obama nominated Dr. Holdren in December 2008; the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed the nomination March 19, 2009.

Read Dr. Holdren's lecture notes here

View video of the event

Read more about William Clay Ford, Jr.

This lecture paralleled the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth". (2-minute trailer)

Read more about Al Gore

View Dr. Newman's Lecture Notes.

View Dr. Newman's Slide Presentation.

Watch recorded talk.

Read more about Dr. Peter Newman.