Forum on Politics of Sustainability 3/31/11
William Shutkin, a global leader in sustainability and social entrepreneurship, will give the second event of the spring series of The University of Montana Natural Resources and Environmental Policy Forum.
Shutkin, who is executive director of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, will present “Collapse, Collective Action, Conundrum: Pursuing Sustainable Communities in the Age of Ideology” at noon Thursday, March 31, in the UM School of Law Castles Center. The forum is free and open to the public.
“For most, creating sustainable communities is about green building standards, caps on greenhouse gas emissions, open-space conservation and incentives for solar energy, among other strategies. But that’s the easy part,” Shutkin said.
“The politics of sustainability and the ideas and mental models that shape it are where things get tough,” he said, “and no community is immune from the eclipsing effect of ideology and people’s infatuation with their own ideas.” He will talk about that tension between ideology and sustainability and how it can be resolved.
Shutkin is a lecturer at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law and a visiting scholar at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a founding partner of Urban Sustainability Associates and the author of the award-winning book “The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century.”
Judy Wahlberg, Neighborhood Advocate Volunteer-University District
