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School of Environmental Studies

About Lansdowne Lectures

The Lansdowne Lectures are a longstanding tradition at the University of Victoria, bringing renowned thinkers, researchers and leaders from across the world to our campus. Established in the 1970s, this distinguished lecture series is designed to spark conversation, inspire learning and connect our university community with fresh ideas and global perspectives.

Each year, Lansdowne Lectures feature a diverse line-up of speakers from a wide range of fields—including the sciences, humanities, social sciences and the arts. Open to students, faculty, staff and the broader public, these lectures invite us all to explore current issues and big questions facing our world.

Whether you’re attending in person or watching a recording, the Lansdowne Lectures are an opportunity to learn from and engage with leading experts. We invite you to browse our upcoming events and explore past lectures, which are available to watch online.

Upcoming lectures

Oct 23rd at 5pm in HSD A240

Abstract

Along the Klamath river in Northern CA, USA, tribal-led river restoration efforts are improving habitat conditions and offering new models for river restoration. Karuk Tribe managers and their partners are working to remove dams, reconnect floodplains post-mining, and reintegrate intentional fire regimes to create landscapes resilient to flooding, drought, and catastrophic wildfire. These efforts not only show promise for buffering against extreme events but also are having profound impacts on the river hydrology, for example by increasing dry-season stream flow and benefiting salmonids by sustaining summer cold water refugia.

In this talk, Cleo Woelfle-Hazard will present two Karuk-led river restoration processes: developing for the Karuk Ancestral Territory, along the Klamath River a fire-vegetation-water-fish model; and, a post-mining floodplain reconnection planning project. The talk will explore what shared questions and understandings emerged, where water and fire worlds fundamentally diverge, and present principles to guide future collaborations between modelers, river managers, and place-based communities.

About Cleo Wolfle-Hazard:

Cleo Aster Woelfle-Hazard is a Fire Advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension, working collaboratively with Native nations and communities on climate resilience, cultural burning, and the renewal of ecocultural habitats through fire. Integrating Indigenous and feminist science approaches, Cleo’s research centers justice, sovereignty, and community-led ecological stewardship.

Cleo earned their PhD from UC Berkeley and is the author of Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, exploring how queer and trans perspectives of love, grief, and solidarity can shape more just environmental futures. As a queer, transgender white settler, Cleo is deeply committed to anti-racism, decolonization, and nurturing diverse leadership in natural resource management.

Past lectures

An anthropologist by training and an interdisciplinarian by design, Dr. Terre Satterfield’s work concerns sustainable development and debates about cultural meanings, perceived risk, and ecosystem health.

This talk will explore how people are proposing using the ocean as a solution to climate change. This includes strategies like enhancing oceanic CO2 uptake, converting CO2 into solid rock via seabed basalt, and sinking kelp to decay on the ocean floor. Success hinges on respecting democratic processes and decision-making and the extensive scale of carbon removal needed to meet climate targets.

This lecture will explore the public's mixed reactions to these options, considering ethical dilemmas, perceptions of natural vs. technical solutions, and the social trust needed for governance. It concludes with the challenges and cautious steps forward in urgent times amidst public uncertainty.

Some call them “outlaw emotions”—feelings of eco-anxiety, ecological despair, and environmental grief that are widely felt but rarely talked about. Dr. Elin Kelsey argues that the environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope. Join her for an evidence-based argument and heartfelt conversation about the place of hope in the midst of this planetary emergency. Following the talk there will be climate-friendly refreshments and an opportunity for conversation about how we are feeling, and the role of hope as a bridge between mourning and actionable insights towards a more positive future. Elin Kelsey, is a leading spokesperson, scholar and educator in the area of hope and the environment. As an Adjunct Faculty member in the School of Environmental Studies, she collaborates with faculty and students on a solutions-oriented paradigm for educating environmental and social scientists.

Paul Kane has been rusticating in his fame for some time, a fame that Toronto, Montréal, and London fashioned after his return from travels across the continent to Vancouver Island and Fort Victoria. Who was this “Father of Canadian Art” while he was staying at Victoria and its environs in April and May 1847, and what cultural and other environments did he encounter when Fort Victoria was only four years old?

Aiming for an environmental history of the artist’s travels, one must weigh the published and celebrated Paul Kane with Paolo Canoe, Red Porcupine, and Bushway, identities he gave himself or that others gave while he travelled. This effort emphasizes Kane in the field over Kane in the studio. Thereby, a fresh view of Victoria and its Indigenous peoples emerges. When he is pried away from the polished colonial agent of book and studio, more emerges about the man, people, and places known as Paul Kane.

Professor Ross Thompson is Director, Chair of Water Science and an ARC Future Fellow in the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra. Ross is a freshwater ecologist with interests in the study of biodiversity and the restoration of landscapes. His fundamental research is in food web ecology; seeking the rules that determine how natural communities assemble and persist. His applied research addresses the ways in which food webs can be influenced by anthropogenic factors including urbanisation, land clearance, pharmaceutical contamination, river flow diversion and restoration, and invasion. He has an active research program on aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem function in urban and rural landscapes. Ross has published more than 80 papers, 10 book chapters and more than 200 scientific reports. He sits on the Australian Research Council College of Experts and has recently stepped down from the NZ Marsden Panel. His work has strong links to government and industry, and Ross sits on a number of senior technical advisory panels for local, state and federal research programs.

Sigrid Adriaenssens is a structural engineer specializing in the form finding and optimization of structures. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University. Her long-term research goal is to transform the engineering design framework for a future-oriented built urban environment.

To know what is, you must know what was. This is the simple truth that J.B. MacKinnon explores in his new book The Once and Future World: Nature As It Is, As It Was, As It Could Be. The natural world, he argues, has been lost not only to human rapaciousness, but also through a great forgetting. MacKinnon calls on us to examine the nature of the past in order to “rewild” the earth in the future. “The history of nature is not only a lament,” he writes. “It is also an invitation to envision another world.” MacKinnon is the author or co-author of four books of nonfiction, including The 100-Mile Diet (with Alisa Smith), a bestseller widely recognized as a catalyst of the local foods movement. His writing in print and online has won more than a dozen national and international awards, including Canada’s highest prize for literary nonfiction. MacKinnon lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan is a world renowned ethnobiologist from University of Arizona and prize-winning author of numerous books especially on topics around food. He holds the Kellogg Endowed Chair in Food and Water Security in the Southwest Borderlands. Nabhan is a member of Renewing America’s Food Traditions collaborative. He edited a small book, Renewing Salmon Nation’s Food Traditions, one of a series of regionally focused books featuring endangered foods heritage crops no longer widely grown, and Indigenous foods which few people are consuming, and for which the associated knowledge of use and management is disappearing.

Dr. Simon Levin is the Moffett Professor of Biology and director of the Center for Biocomplexity at Princeton University. Much of Dr. Levin’s work concerns the evolution of diversification, the mechanisms sustaining biological diversity in natural systems, and the implications for ecosystem structure and functioning. Dr. Levin established the field of ‘spatial ecology’ and has long been at the forefront of expanding scientific understanding of the complex processes regulating our biosphere. His work has shown that ecosystems and the biosphere are not super-organisms, as previously suggested, but complex adaptive systems with apparent regularity emerging from self-organization processes. Dr. Levin is among the most prolific (400+ papers and books) and decorated ecologists of our day whose body of work continues to have a profound impact on environmental thinking and has led to new philosophies and methods of environmental protection.

Terry Chapin is an ecosystem ecologist whose research addresses the sustainability of ecosystems and human communities in a rapidly changing planet. This work emphasizes the impacts of climate change on Alaskan ecology, subsistence resources, and Indigenous communities, as a basis for developing climate change adaptation plans.

Ranjay Singh is Senior Scientist at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research at Haryana, India. For many years he has worked as an agroecologist with tribal peoples of the lowland and mountainous regions of the Eastern Himalayas, documenting their knowledge of plants, animals and environments relating to their traditional food and medicine systems. In recent years these knowledge systems have been eroding due to forces of globalization, and Dr. Singh has been assisting in novel projects to highlight and retain valuable local knowledge for survival and resilience.

Harris participates on a myriad of boards and councils, including the Society for Ecological Restoration International, the Journal Restoration Ecology, the NERC Peer Review College, the British Society of Soil Science, and the Environment and Land Use Committee of the Institute of Biology. Natural systems are under considerable stress as shown by climate change, loss of biodiversity, acidification of the oceans and soil degradation. The concept of “peak soil” will be discussed, and how we might reverse this trend by engaging in ecological restoration.

University education over the last half of the twentieth century can be characterized as the age of specialization. However, we find ourselves increasingly confronted by complex problems requiring transdisciplinary perspectives—climate change, sustainable development, public health, impact of information technologies. This talk calls for a revival of university education reminiscent of the earlier liberal arts model brought into the twenty-first century.