"I will never look at the world the same way again," says Colin Hottman about his experience participating in Macalester's annual International Roundtable.
Hottman responded to a paper by Ravi Kanbur on “The Co-Evolution of the Washington Consensus and the Economic Development Discourse.”
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international roundtable 2009
Global Environment: The Eleventh Hour?
October 8–10, 2009
Student Elizabeh Larson '10 was a student repondent during this year's roundtable. She tells us what that was like»
The theme of the 2009 Macalester International Roundtable was “Global Environment: The Eleventh Hour?” Here is how we decided to frame it.
Human life has always been embedded in the material world. But ever since the first morning of human history, our impact on the environment underscores a lasting dialectic: at once of nature and pitted against it. In the case of the first, we are a piece of the physical and biological systems of the planet; on the other hand, our individual and collective survival and reproduction depend on the claims we make on other cohabitating species and the earth’s resources. Over the centuries, the constant interplay between these two dimensions of the condition of our existence has manifested itself in a variety of contexts and guises. Among the great benchmarks are the inventions of agriculture and industrialization.
The continuing accumulation as well as the current pace of human activities, across geographies and cultures, seem to have brought us to a new threshold in our intimacy with nature. From global temperatures, biodiversity, water, air, and energy, to soil and oceans, there is a sense that we have commenced long overdue and high voltage conversations about existing human systems and our relationship with the environment. This, in a nutshell, captures the critical challenge for human civilization in this new century of heightened globalization. For some, there is no doubt that we have already entered a time of imminent ecological catastrophe that demands drastic rethinking and actions; for others, the alarm is an exaggeration—one that shortchanges nature’s rhythm of earth’s consistently changing ecology as well as human organizational and technological ingenuity.
With the above as a backdrop, our discussions will revolve around the following questions:
- What are the main global environmental concerns for the 21st century?
- What are the crucial forces responsible for the making of these issues and why?
- Are there any alternatives to the current trends and, if affirmative, what are they and how might they be brought forward and acted upon?