Beyond THIRST: Community Discussion, Can Art Change the World?

Our esteemed panelists will discuss how artists, scientists, writers, and other change agents can help educate and modify behavior in response to climate change. Together we will discuss how we use the arts to command the attention of the public. How do we make complex ideas more understandable?

Lucia Athens–Chief Sustainability Officer with the City of Austin
Juli Berwald Ph.D –Science Writer
Laura Huffman—State Director of the Nature Conservancy
Bruce Melton—Engineer, researcher, and filmmaker

Join us on Thursday, January 16 at 7pm for a panel discussion. We will examine how the arts can be a powerful agent for change. Women & Their Work is proud to present this lively discussion and we welcome audience involvement.

Admission is free at Women & Their Work Gallery, 1710 Lavaca St. Austin 78701, 512-477-1064
http://womenandtheirwork.org http://thirstart.org #THIRSTart

Lucia Athens:
Lucia Athens is the Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Austin. She is a licensed landscape architect as well as author of the book, “Building an Emerald City: A Guide to Creating Green Building Policies,” published in 2010 by Island Press. She began her career in green building in the early 1990’s, working on the development team for the City of Austin’s Green Builder program. Previous to her current role, Ms. Athens spent a decade leading the City of Seattle’s award-winning green building program.

Juli Berwald:
While she is waiting for the ocean to arrive, she lives vicariously in the oceanographic research she writes for Oceanus. She fills her time writing science textbooks and publications for the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas and regaling two small children with ocean lore. She also has contributed to Redbook, Wired.com, and community newspapers.

Laura Huffman:
As state director of The Nature Conservancy in Texas, Laura Huffman heads a statewide team of scientists, conservation experts and support staff whose work supports the Conservancy’s 37 statewide preserves and touches every corner of Texas. She has authored a number of articles and op-ed pieces on a variety of conservation topics, including drought, water scarcity and Gulf of Mexico protection, and emerged as a national thought leader in the wake of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. She advocated tirelessly for passage of the RESTORE Act and succeeded in connecting a diverse coalition of stakeholders around a central idea: that a healthy Gulf of Mexico is vital to America’s success and Texas can be an incubator for best practices in marine science.

Bruce Melton:
I have been to see the “Big Melt” for myself. The scientists there are wide-eyed and talking fast. One of the scientists I met in Ilulissat, Dr. Konrad Steffen (Director of Cires (Cooperative Institute for resaerch in Environmental Studies, University of Colorado Boulder) – possibly the most senior active Greenland climate scientist, has recently stated that climate change is progressing ten times faster than predicted. That’s what it looks like to me. Both from reading the academic papers, and now from seeing it with my own eyes.