Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

A body of work is emerging wherein simple mathematical models of ecological dynamics are coupled to simple mathematical models of human behavior to examine long-term sustainability of these systems. Madhur Anand (University of Guelph) will discuss several recent and ongoing studies in which the researchers examine widely-ranging contemporary human-environment problems including forest pest control, coral reef endangerment, forest-grassland mosaic sustainability, human disease spread, land-use management, and focus in detail our recent study on climate change mitigation. Studying environmental systems through the lenses of social dynamics including social norms and social learning can help provide transformational pathways towards desired outcomes.

Madhur Anand is the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015), This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020), and award-winning poetry and creative nonfiction appearing in such journals as The Puritan, Brick, Longreads.com, The New Quarterly, The Walrus, and This. She has published critical and scholarly work in ecopoetics and as a literary reviewer in The Literary Review of Canada. With Adam Dickinson she is co-editor of Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (2009). She is co-author of the textbook Climate Change Biology (2011), and over 120 scientific publications in the fields of human-ecological modeling, complex systems, conservation ecology, and sustainability science. She is Professor of Ecology and Sustainability at The University of Guelph, where she is the Inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.

Sponsored by UF Forest Entomology Lab; Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies Research; Department of Biology; Department of English; and Imagining Climate Change.