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Past Guth Lectures

• 2023-24 Guth Lecture

  Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer

  Botanist and Author

  "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants"

  (Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy)

  Tuesday, October 10th

  University Center Ballroom

  7:00pm

  Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer

  Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. A MacArthur Fellow and founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, she is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Braiding Sweetgrass is UM's 2023 Griz Read, and Kimmerer will deliver this year's Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy.

• 2022-23 Guth Lecture

  Dr. Jay Famiglietti

  Hydrologist

  "Changing Freshwater Availability as Viewed from Space: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

  (Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy)

  Thursday, February 9, 2023

  7:30pm

  About Jay Famiglietti’

  A professor of hydrology and a Global Futures Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, Jay Famiglietti’s research uses satellites to develop advanced computer models for tracking how freshwater availability is changing around the globe. Dr. Famiglietti is a regular advisor to state, provincial and federal government officials on water availability and water security issues.

• 2021-22 Guth Lecture

  Naomi Oreskes

  Earth scientist, historian, and public speaker

  "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market"

  (Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy)

  February 17, 2022

  About Naomi Oreskes

  Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is an internationally renowned earth scientist, historian, and author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science, including most recently, Why Trust Science? (2019) and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (2021). Her opinion pieces have been published in leading media outlets around the globe, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times (London), and the Frankfurter Allgemeine. In 2015, she wrote the Introduction to the Melville House edition of the Papal Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, Laudato Si.

  Professor Oreskes is a leading voice on the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the history of efforts to undermine climate action. Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (Science 306: 1686) has been widely cited, including in the Royal Society’s publication, “A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change," and in the Academy-award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth.  Her 2010 book with Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, has been translated into nine languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and made into a documentary film. She is an elected fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2018, she became a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2019 was awarded the British Academy Medal for “her commitment to documenting the role of corporations in distorting scientific findings for political ends.” Her new book, with Erik Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loath Government and Love the Free Market, will be published by Bloomsbury Press in 2022. 

• 2019-20 Guth Lecture

  David Abram

  Cultural ecologist and geophilosopher

  "The Commonwealth of Breath: Climate and Consciousness in Animistic Perspective"

  (Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy)

  Monday, March 2, 2020 6:30 p.m. (doors) 7:30 p.m. (lecture)

  Dennison Theatre, UM

  "Magic and the Machine: Technology and Wonder in an Age of Ecological Wipeout"

  Monday, March 2, 2020 3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m

  Gallagher Business Building 123

  About David Abram

  David Abram — cultural ecologist and geophilosopher — is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, and of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, Dr. Abram’s work has helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the broad field of ecopsychology. His books have been translated into many languages, while his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in diverse magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies. A close student of the traditional ecological knowledge systems (TEK) of indigenous cultures around the world, David was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of "animism" as a complexly nuanced and ecologically viable worldview – a broad reappraisal that is now underway in many disciplines. A recipient of the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, David lectures and teaches widely around the world; he recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. David is the creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE); he lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.

• 2018-19 Guth Lecture

  Winona Laduke

  Rural development economist and author

  "Be The Ancestor Your Descendants Would Be Proud Of."

  (Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy)

  7:30 PM Tuesday, February 26, 2019 (Doors open at 6:30)
  The Wilma Theater

  "The Next Energy Economy: Grassroots Strategies to Mitigate Global Climate Change"

  3:30 PM Tuesday, February 26, 2019 (Doors open at 2:30)
  University Center Theater

  About Winona LaDuke

  Winona LaDuke is a rural development economist and author working on issues of Indigenous Economics, Food and Energy Policy. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is the Executive Director of Honor the Earth (HtE). She co-founded HtE with the Indigo Girls, as a platform to raise awareness of and money for indigenous struggles for environmental justice. She works nationally and internationally on the issues of climate change, renewable energy, and environmental justice alongside Indigenous communities. In her own community, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute, and Akiing: 8th Fire Project. She also runs Winona’s Hemp and Heritage Farm. Globally and nationally, Winona is known as a leader in the issues of cultural-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy, and sustainable food systems. She is one of the leaders in the work of protecting Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.

  LaDuke’s work on food systems includes; the creation of Native Harvest, protection of wild rice (manoomin), and the promotion of food sovereignty for reservation communities. On her farm in northern Minnesota, she grows traditional varieties of corn, beans, squash, Jerusalem artichokes, melons, herbs, and tobacco. This work is documented, in part, in the book Food is Medicine, available from Honor the Earth. Work on the restoration of traditional corn varieties has received significant support from the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, and a number of private foundations. In 2015 -2016, LaDuke and Honor the Earth completed a Mille Lacs Band Tribal Food Plan including policy and implementation plans for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.

  LaDuke’s work in renewable energy includes the completion of the White Earth Tribal Energy Plan and support for the installation of solar and wind energy systems on the White Earth reservation. Akiing and Honor the Earth are also collaborating to bring a solar thermal panel manufacturing facility to the White Earth Reservation. Through collaborations between Honor the Earth and Solar Energy International, she has also contributed to installs on the Navajo and Western Shoshone reservations and territories.

  In 2007, LaDuke was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, recognizing her leadership and commitment to her community. In 1994, LaDuke was nominated by Time magazine as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. She has been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, Ms.Woman of the Year (with the Indigo Girls) in l997, and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which in part she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project. The White Earth Land Recovery Project has won many awards- including the prestigious 2003 International Slow Food Award for Biodiversity, recognizing the organization’s work to protect wild rice from patenting and genetic engineering. LaDuke was a co-founder, and Board Co-Chair of the Indigenous Women’s Network for fifteen years, and maintains a significant role in international advocacy for Indigenous people. This has included numerous presentations at United Nations forums, and involvement in opposition to mega projects impacting Indigenous Communities.

  A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues. She also attended the Massachussets Institute of Technology in the Community Fellows Program. The author of six books, including Recovering the Sacred, All our Relations. a novel-Last Standing Woman, and her newest work The Winona LaDuke Chronicles. She is widely recognized for her work on environmental and human rights issues.

• 2017-18 Guth Lecture

  Andrea Wulf

  Best-selling Science and Nature Writer

  "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World "

  (Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy in collaboration with the Flathead Lake Biological Station)

  8:00 PM Wednesday, April 04, 2018
  Dennison Theatre

  "Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Generation "

  3:00 PM Wednesday, April 04, 2018
  GBB 123

• 2016-17 Guth Lecture

  Jedediah Purdy

  Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law

  "Environmental Justice for the Anthropocene"

  (Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy in collaboration with the Environmental Studies Program)

  8:00 PM Friday, April 07, 2017
  Dennison Theatre

  "Ecology and Political Economy in the History of Capitalism"

  3:00 PM Friday, April 07, 2017
  Gallagher Business Building Room 123

  Please join us for a seminar and lecture with Jedediah Purdy. Following his graduation from Yale Law School in 2001, he clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City. Before beginning his teaching career at Duke Law School in 2004, he was a fellow at the New America Foundation and at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He became the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law in 2013. He teaches constitutional, environmental, and property law and writes in all of these areas. His recent courses include: Constitutional Law, Natural Resources Law and Policy, Introduction to Legal Theory, and Past and Future of Capitalist Democracy.

  Professor Purdy has published essays in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Op Ed Page and Book Review, Die Zeit, and Democracy Journal. His legal scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, and Harvard Environmental Law Review, among others. He has published five books:

  • For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today (2000)
  • Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World (2003)
  • A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom (2009)
  • The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination (2010)
  • After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015)

  His books have received national attention, and he has become one of the most important public intellectuals of his generation.

  The seminar and lecture are free and open to the public.

• 2015-16 Guth Lecture

  Vandana Shiva

  Founder and Director, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology and Founder and Managing Trustee, Navdanya Trust, New Delhi, India

  "We Are All Seeds: Food Security and Environmental Sustainability"

  (Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy)

  8:00 PM Wednesday, February 24, 2016

  Dennison Theatre

  "Living Seed, Living Soil, and Earth Democracy"

  3:10 PM Wednesday, February 24, 2016

  Gallagher Business Building 123

  Please join us for a seminar and lecture with Vandana Shiva. She is one of the most prominent radical scientists and environmental activists in the world, with a storied record of opposition to biotechnology, genetic engineering, and other advances resulting from corporate-led globalization. Trained as a physicist at the University of Punjab, she did her Ph.D. work at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Shiva later shifted to interdisciplinary research in science, technology, and environmental policy, which she pursued at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Banglahore, India. In 1982, she founded an independent institute—the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in Dehra Dun—dedicated to the study of ecology and social issues. The Foundation has made a practice of partnering with local communities and social movements. In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement especially concerned about the protection of native seeds and the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. This initiative has resulted in the establishment of sixty seed banks.  In 2004, she started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley, in collaboration with Schumacher College, UK. She is a board member of the International Forum on Globalization. In 1993, she received the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award).

  Dr. Shiva’s more than two dozen books include the following:

  • Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard of the Fight against GMOs and Corporate Agriculture (2016)
  • Ecofeminism: Critique, Influence, Change (2cd ed., 2014)), written with Maria Mies
  • Making Peace with the Earth (2013)
  • Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (2010)
  • Soil not Oil (2008)
  • Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005)
  • Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (2002)
  • Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000)

  Speaking engagements have taken Dr. Shiva all over the world. We are extremely fortunate to have her in Missoula.

  The seminar and lecture are free and open to the public.