BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - Climate expert James E. Hansen is calling on today’s youth to reign in global warming.
Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen will deliver the address for Illinois Wesleyan University’s annual Founders’ Day Convocation at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 19 in Westbrook Auditorium (1210 N. Park St., Bloomington). The evening event will cap a day of Founders’ Day activities, honoring the University’s founding in 1850, and is free and open to the public.
Hansen’s speech, titled “Climate Tipping Points: The Threat to the Planet,” will address the nature of the global warming problem that he sees as a potential “perfect storm” - an accelerated disaster out of humanity’s control. Hansen believes young people may provide a “tipping point” to draw needed attention to global warming.
One of the nation’s foremost researchers on climate change, Hansen has been called upon to testify before Congress on global warming and has published more than 50 articles in scientific journals and reviews on the subject. For decades, he has advocated an open dialogue on global warming, and been critical of both the Clinton and Bush administrations’ stances on climate changes.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Hansen has twice received the NASA Presidential Rank for Meritorious Executive Award. He has been awarded the John Heinz Environment Award in 2001, the Roger Revelle Medal from the American Geophysical Union in 2002, the Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal from the World Wildlife Fund in 2006 and the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award from the American Physical Society in 2007.
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BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Illinois Wesleyan University’s Marina Balina is forging the way to a rediscovery of children’s literature written in Soviet Russia.
For years, scholars ignored children’s literature written during the Soviet regime as merely a tool of propaganda. “Seventy-five years of Soviet children’s literature should not be dismissed that easily. It’s a shame,” said Balina, the Isaac Funk Professor of Russian Studies at Illinois Wesleyan, who recently co-edited Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (Routlegde, 2007). Almost no books have been written about Soviet children’s literature, and the few that were looked at single authors rather than trying to analyze the complex body of texts written during this time.
With her co-author Larissa Rudova, a professor of Russian at Pomona College in California, Balina is breaking new ground with the book, which is a collection of critical articles about children’s literature in Russia both during and after Soviet rule.
Balina is familiar with the children’s literature both as scholar and from her days growing up in Soviet Russia before immigrating to the United States with her family in 1988. “Soviet Russia was not the best place to have free ideas, in fact it was a challenge to remain a free thinker in that country. But Soviet children’s literature played a unique role in creating free minds, and this fact should not be ignored,” said Balina, who noted that the entertainment value placed on children’s literature gave authors more leeway in their choice of creative expression. “It was a much freer space for Russian writers to use alternative artistic devises, such as playful poetry similar to Dr. Seuss, but their work would still be publishable and considered politically correct.”
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – For Illinois Wesleyan University Professor Irving Epstein, who has studied issues involving street children, child labor and delinquency education, a society can be judged by the welfare of its children.
“Children symbolize the way in which societies interact,” said Epstein. “You can ascertain much about a society by the way its children are treated.”
Epstein enlisted his interest in the welfare of children as the general editor of a new encyclopedia that goes beyond facts and figures. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Children’s Issues Worldwide is a six-volume set that includes essays by 174 contributors covering 126 different countries. Issues including children’s education, child labor, child abuse and neglect, play and recreation and religion are analyzed in each chapter.
“On a global level, children’s lives can be thrown away and neglected. They don’t have political capital in many societies,” said Epstein, an instructor with Illinois Wesleyan since 1996 who teaches a course on international human rights. “Even in our own society, children are the ones who are the casualties of poverty and abuse. There needs to be some accountability for how children are treated.”
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – To prepare millions of students to become leaders in the largest civilizational challenge any generation has faced, an unprecedented educational initiative is about to take place. On Wednesday Jan. 30, and Thursday, Jan. 31, thousands of institutions, mostly colleges and universities, will participate in teach-ins focused on global warming.
Called Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions for America, these teach-ins are designed to engage millions of students and citizens on the issue of climate change, as well as draw the attention of decision makers and political leaders in advance of the November presidential elections. Focus the Nation has organized a model centered on three pillars for today’s youth, aimed to embrace solutions to global warming: education, civic engagement and leadership. Teams of students come from individual colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, places of worship, civic organizations and businesses.
Leslie Morrison, a senior environmental studies major and co-president of the Sierra Student Coalition, a student organization dedicated to environmental sustainability on Illinois Wesleyan’s campus, expresses the importance of understanding global warming, “College students have a responsibility to understand this issue and solutions to this issue because we are the future, and the future looks complicated. It is important for everyone to understand the implications of global climate change and what they can personally do to be a part of the solution,” said Morrison.
On IWU’s campus, the GREENetwork, the Sierra Student Coalition, the Office of Resident Life, and the Environmental Studies Program are involved with the preparation of events. Kicking off the Focus the Nation events, on Tuesday Jan. 29 at 8 p.m., the film An Inconvenient Truth will be shown in the Hansen Student Center (300 Beecher St., Bloomington). On Wednesday Jan. 30, at 7 p.m. a Webcast, 2% Solution will be shown in the Hansen Student Center. The central event is a teach-in that will take place throughout the day on Thursday Jan. 31 and will have five different panels organized around specific themes regarding global warming. Examples of the panels are: “Where Are We and How Did We Get Here,” “What is at Stake With Climate Change,” “What is Our Carbon Footprint,” and “The Moral/Ethical Implications of Climate Change.” Illinois Wesleyan faculty members along with selected staff and students who have diverse experience in these areas will speak and lead panel discussions.
BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Illinois Wesleyan University a $175,000 grant to expand writing-intensive courses.
The New York-based Mellon Foundation, named after businessman, banker, public servant, and philanthropist Andrew W. Mellon, awards more than $200 million in grants annually to build, strengthen and sustain the nation’s educational and cultural institutions. The Foundation’s Liberal Arts Colleges Program provides multi-year grants to liberal arts colleges across the country.
“This grant will help us in our efforts to develop an even stronger writing program at Illinois Wesleyan,” said Frank Boyd, associate dean of faculty and associate professor of political science at Illinois Wesleyan. According to Boyd, the courses will benefit all students, regardless of their major. “No matter what discipline students choose to specialize in, writing is one of the keys to their success when they go on to post-graduate study or take positions with a non-profit organization, in government, or in the private sector. The grant will support our efforts to keep students writing across the entire university curriculum, whether in chemistry, literature or business courses.”