ORB coordinates and participates in various events throughout the year, including workshops, courses, and lecture series.
food for thought series | past ORB activities
The Food for Thought Lecture Series brings internationally recognized experts to OSU to speak about biotechnology and sustainable agriculture.
The series is a community outreach program that brings the public inside the scientific community to promote a dialog about biotechnology and complex environmental issues that are often difficult for people to come together around, with the goal of learning how better to find common ground in the future.
These free public lectures are held in the evenings in the LaSells Stewart Center's Construction & Engineering Hall on the OSU campus. Lectures include time for audience discussion. Refreshments are provided.
Press release from the Corvallis Gazette-Times.
Support for Food For Thought comes from the Wait and Lois Rising Lectureship Fund (in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences), the OSU College of Forestry, and the American Society of Plant Biologists.
Streaming video and study guides are available for many of the lectures. Click here for a full list of food for thought study guides.
the banana dead-end
Dan Koeppel
Tuesday, 3 Nov 2009, 7:00p, LaSells Stewart Center, OSU
lecture poster
The 2009/2010 series will kick off with a lecture by Dan Koeppel, author of "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World."
Koeppel explores the banana's history, cultural significance, and endangered future - taking listeners to plantations across the globe that are being destroyed by a fast-moving blight, and to the biotech labs where a race is on to save them.
Koepell is a well-known nature journalist who has written for the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Audubon, Popular Science, and National Geographic Adventure, where he is a contributing editor. He has also appeared on CNN and Good Morning America, and is a former commentator for Public Radio International's Marketplace.
freezing the footprint of agriculture while feeding 9 billion people
Jason Clay
Thursday, 19 Nov 2009, 7:00p, LaSells Stewart Center, OSU
lecture poster
lecture intro, Professor Steve Strauss, OSU
streaming video of lecture
public lecture slides
technical lecture slides
Jason Clay ran a family farm, taught at Harvard and Yale, worked at the US Department of Agriculture and spent more than 25 years working with human rights and environmental organizations before joining the World Wildlife Fund in 1999.
Now, as Senior Vice President of Market Transformation at WWF, Clay influences the way governments, foundations, researchers, and NGOs identify and address risks and opportunities for their work. He brings people together to improve environmentally sensitive practices in agriculture and aquaculture.
In his FFT lecture, Clay focuses on creating global standards for producing and processing raw materials from plants, particularly in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and water use.
the ethics of modern agriculture: organic foods vs. frankenfoods
Robert Paarlberg
Tuesday, 19 Jan 2010, 7:00p, LaSells Stewart Center, OSU
lecture intro, Professor Steve Strauss, OSU
lecture poster
public lecture slides
science lecture slides
essay on ethics of agriculture by R. Paarlberg
Robert Paarlberg is a professor of political science at Wellesley College and an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. His principal research interests are international agricultural and environmental policy. His latest book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought.
In his FFT lecture, Paarlberg discuses why, after embracing agricultural science to become well fed, those in wealthy countries are instructing Africans - on the most dubious grounds - not to do the same.
(not) business as usual: a modest proposal for sustainable agriculture
James E McWilliams
Thursday, 15 Apr 2010, 7:00p, LaSells Stewart Center, OSU
As an associate professor of American colonial and environmental history at Texas State University, Jimmy McWilliams is well aware that there never was a golden age for American agriculture, a time when farmers and farms were sustainable.
McWilliams' FFT lecture takes the current Food Movement to task for indulging in historical romanticism, and advocating that we go back to the past to achieve a sustainable future. He explores six ways that agriculture can strike a balance between small, sustainable farms and large industrial farms in order to create a global system of agriculture that provides an affordable diversity of food in an environmentally responsible way.
food for thought 2008/2009
ronald & adamchack | wu | savage | shellenberger | herring
food for thought 2007/2008
beachy | ankeny | marchant | pilcher | tilman | kevles | shapin
food for thought 2006/2007
hallman | silver | kinney | charles
food for thought 2005/2006
arntzen | barton | newell-mcgloughlin | swords | wolfenbarger | fedoroff | potrykus
For more information, contact Steve Strauss at +1 541 737-6587 or steve.strauss@oregonstate.edu
