featuring
Judith Schwartz
and
Walter Jehne
Sunday, April 22, 2018
Presentation and conversation at 2 pm
Refreshments | Free Admission
Lunch at 12:30 pm | Reservations
We often think of weather as something that “happens” to us. One way to think about weather is as an ongoing conversation among air, water and life. The way we manage our land has an impact on the underlying dynamics that help drive weather and climate. Join us to learn how native plants help generate clouds, the role of forests in determining where rain falls, and why thriving ecosystems make for a more pleasant climate.
– Judith Schwartz
Judith D. Schwartz is a widely published journalist and the author of Cows Save the Planet and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth and Water In Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World. She has a B.A. from Brown University, an M.S.J. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and an M.A. in Counseling from Northwestern. Her husband, Tony Eprile, is an author and photographer originally from South Africa and her son, Brendan, is a singer/songwriter who has just moved to New York City. She likes to cross-country ski in the winter and in the summer she grows things; a new student to karate, she now has a green belt. She speaks nationally and internationally about soil-water-climate connections and solutions, most recently in Mexico, France, Norway and Switzerland. She lives and works on the side of a mountain in southern Vermont.
Walter Jehne is an internationally recognized climate scientist, soil microbiologist and innovation strategist. He has immense field and research experience in forests, grasslands, agriculture and soils at national (CSIRO) and international (UN) level. For the other half of his decades, Walter has worked more broadly beyond science, at Federal Government level, leading transformation in industry. This diversity of experience has given Walter a unique and exceptional capacity to devise solutions – he makes challenges opportunities. Walter has a remarkable ability to explain complex science and economic paths forward in easy to understand ways. This year he was part of an invitation only UN FAO conference in Paris looking at bringing soil into the next IPCC report. Walter’s primary scientific focus is soil biology.