Environmentalists around the globe have taken many developers to task for leaving in their wake groundwater pollution, land degradation, public health hazards, floods and droughts.
"A Mini-Conference on Environmental Politics," the first of three "conversations" exploring the relationship between development and the environment, will be held on Thursday, Nov. 6, 12:30-3:30 p.m. in Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave. It is free and open to the public.
The mini-conference is the first in a series of events being sponsored under the aegis of a project titled "Area Studies and the Interaction Between the Local and the Global," which is located at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and is part of a Ford Foundation initiative on "Revitalizing Area Studies."
The first speaker is James Fairhead, coauthor of "Misreading the African Landscape" and a lecturer in anthropology at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. He will discuss how the impact of local land use changes in west Africa was misdiagnosed on a global level, and the consequences of those changes on environmental management and on the livelihoods of farmers and others who are dependent on the lands of the forest-savannah zones in that region.
Ravi Rajan, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will be the second featured speaker. Using his research on the history of European forestry and the politics of hazardous waste management in India, he will speak on toxic substances, environmental disasters and issues of social justice.
Both speakers will discuss how the common elements of development -- such as large dams, superhighways, industrial complexes, energy parks, free trade zones and dense urban jungles --have given very diverse regions and cultures a common platform on which to compare the outcomes of such projects.
The fall mini-conference on the environment will be followed this spring by a workshop on development, and on the relationship between the environment and development.
For more information or to register, call K. Sivaramakrishnan at 432-5675, or Arun Agrawal at 432-5011.