For 3.5 billion years life has not only sustained itself, but has thrived on this planet. To create sustainable systems we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we only need to embrace the foundational scientific principles that govern sustainability in all living systems. This presentation covers three of these foundational principles: the law of limits to growth, the second law of thermodynamics and its relationship to entropy, and the law of self-organization. Examples of how these laws work in the natural world will be used to show how they can be applied to human systems like a community or an economy.

Tom Wessels is an ecologist and founding director of the master’s degree program in Conservation Biology at Antioch University New England. He is former chair of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation that fosters environmental leadership through graduate fellowships and organizational grants. He serves as an ecological consultant to the Rain Forest Alliance’s SmartWood Green Certification Program. In that capacity Tom helped to draft green certification assessment guidelines for forest operations in the northeastern United States and adjacent Canada. Tom has conducted landscape level workshops throughout the the United States for over 30 years. His books include: “Reading the Forested Landscape”, “The Granite Landscape”, “Untamed Vermont”, “The Myth of Progress”

Co-sponsored with CWI (Community Wilderness Initiative) and The Vermont Wilderness School



TOM WESSELS
“The Scientific Underpinnings of Sustainability”
Wednesday, September 8th
7:00 - 8.30 pm
Putney Public library