| MAY 25, 2012 -- Norfield Grange, along with the Weston Sustainability Committee is hosting a special evening on June 7th with Tom Wessels, Ecologist, author and founding director of the Master's Degree Program in Conservation Biology at Antioch University of New England.
Wessels will be discussing "The Foundational Principles of Sustainability" on Thursday, June 7th, at 7:00 PM, at Norfield Grange Hall, 12 Goodhill Road, Weston, CT. Refreshments will be served and books will be available for purchase.
For 3.5 billion years, life has not only sustained itself, but has thrived on this planet. To create sustainable systems, we don't need to reinvent the wheel, we only need to embrace the foundational scientific principles that govern sustainability in all living systems. This presentation covers three of these foundational principles: the law of list to growth, the second of thermodynamics and its relationship to entropy, and the law of self-organization. Examples of how these laws work in the natural word will be used to show how they can be applied to human systems like a community or an economy.
Mr. Wessels is currently the chair of the The Center for While Communities that fosters inclusive communicates that are strongly rooted in place and where all people - regardless of income, race, or background - have access to and a healthy relationship with land. He is former chair of the RObert and Patricia Switzer foundation that fosters environmental leadership through graduate fellowships and organizational grants. He served as an ecological consultant to the Rain Forest Alliance's SmartWood Green Certification Program. In that capacity, Tom helped draft green certification assessment guidelines for forest operations in the northeastern United States and adjacent Canada. Tom has conducted landscape level workshops throughout the United States for over 30 years.
His books include: Reading the Forested Landscape, The Granite Landscapte, Untamed Vermont, The Myth of Progress and Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape. |
