Events

1-2:15 pm ET

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For centuries, Christian monks have embraced sustainable forestry practices to protect the land around their monasteries. Today, in the United States and elsewhere, monasteries face challenges to managing their lands similar to those of secular landowners, including feeling pressure to sell their lands and managing for climate change. But monasteries have additional challenges associated with being a religious order, too. Join Jason Brown, author of Dwelling in the Wilderness: Modern Monks in the American West (Trinity University Press, 2023), as he discusses the history of monastic forestry and explores some lessons for our times.

Jason M. Brown studied anthropology and international development as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. He earned joint master’s degrees in forestry and theology from Yale University. He completed his PhD in 2017 from the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, where his dissertation explored the sense of place of contemporary Catholic monks in the American West. As a lecturer at Simon Fraser University, Jason teaches courses in comparative religion and ecological humanities for the department of Global Humanities and occasionally environmental ethics for the School of Resource and Environmental Management.

1-2:15 pm ET

Register HERE

Russia has more than one-fifth of the world’s forest areas, which contain more than 55% of the world’s conifers, and 11% of the world’s biomass. Yet, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, their forests are "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Historian Elena Kochetkova will help us better understand this important part of the Russian economy and the world's ecosystem. Elena will discuss how the Soviet economy developed a unique approach toward forest resources after the Second World War. Looking at the materiality and dreamscape of Soviet industry through forests and wood, my talk will demonstrate how, paradoxically, industrial ecology emerged and developed as a by-product of the Soviet industrialization project, which saw the rise of new industry-ecology paradigms designed by specialists. It will also discuss how the industry neglected socialist experience after the demise of the USSR and has been revived in post-Soviet countries in recent decades. Within the context of the current environmental crisis, the presentation (and book) invites readers to re-evaluate state socialism as a complex phenomenon with sophisticated interactions between nature and industry.

Elena Kochetkova is a historian of the economy, environment, technology, and state socialism at the University of Bergen in Norway. Elena’s new book “The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology”, published with MIT Press in 2024, examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests.