2020

Reverend Dr. Bruce Epperly

April 17, 2020-

Spirituality in a Time of Pandemic

Over the past two months, everything in our world has changed. Most of us feel confused, angry, and vulnerable. We wonder when the pandemic will be over. We are concerned with what kind of world we will return to. How can we respond to the current crisis? How might we look creatively beyond the pandemic? Spiritual traditions help us navigate the unexpected challenges of life. They also inspire us to imagine new visions for ourselves and our world. This lecture will explore spiritual resources for responding to the pandemic and invite us to imagine new possibilities beyond the pandemic.

Melanie Yazzie

June 10, 2020-

An Overview of Various Contemporary Indigenous Female Artists

Many of us are familiar with famous male indigenous artists but when people are asked to name three or four contemporary female indigenous artists, they are unsure how to respond. In this lecture, printmaker, sculptor, painter, and art practices and printmaking professor Melanie Yazzie will introduce her audience to several wonderful movers and shakers. The lecture will be filled with Melanie Yazzie’s firsthand stories about her connections with these artists and their work. She will demonstrate how these artists are making a difference in the world.

Melanie Yazzie is informed by the Diné (Navajo) philosophy of hozho —blessings, beauty, and harmony.

Craig Childs

June 30, 2020-

The Animals Around Us: A spoken Word Evening with Craig Childs

The world beyond us is made of tracks and scents on the wind. Skittering, burrowing, and flying things are everywhere. How often do we see them? This evening will be an exploration of the animal world, encounters from bears to mountain lions to ravens. An Arizona native, Craig Childs has published more than a dozen books of adventure, wilderness, and science, including House of Rain, Animal Dialogue, and The Secret Knowledge of Water. His most recent book is Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, and The New York Times, the latter calling him, “ a modern-day desert father.” Childs lives off the grid just outside Norwood, Colorado, at the foot of the San Juan Mountains.

Collegiate Peaks Forum Series presented Craig Childs’s lecture in collaboration with Greater Arkansas River Nature Association (GARNA).

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2019

Dr. Paula Cushing

March 28, 2019- On a Silken Thread: Spider Fact and Fancy.
 

Love them or leave them, but at least learn to respect these top predators of the world of creepy crawlies. Spiders eat 400-800 million tons of insects per year and are thus a fine natural control on insect populations.  Dr. Paula Cushing, Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science since 1998, has been conducting research on spiders for more than 20 years. Since 1999, she has been surveying the spiders of Colorado through the Colorado Spider Survey https://science.dmns.org/colorado-spider-survey/

Join Dr. Cushing to get answers to those pesky spider questions that have plagued you for years, learn just how dangerous the infamous black widow can be, find out why the brown recluse is not a concern here in the West, and impress your friends and influence people with all your newly-gained knowledge about these fascinating creatures.

For more information visit;

http://www.dmns.org/science/museum-scientists/paula-cushing/

Roland McCook

April 25, 2019-Uncompahgre Utes: Then and Now.

Roland McCook is a member and former chair of the Uncompahgre Band of the Northern Ute Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation and a descendant of the historical Ute leaders Chief Ouray and his wife, Chipeta. McCook was raised in the Ute traditional ways and will share his experiences growing up on the Ute Indian Reservation. He has been designated by his tribe as an official historian and will also discuss the history of the Utes in Colorado. He is current chair of Native American Cultural Programs (NACP) in Montrose, Colorado, and is on the Smithsonian Institution’s Native American Repatriation Review Committee, responsible for returning Indian artifacts and human remains to the native peoples of the Americas. He is a gifted powwow dancer and has been a consultant for local powwows.

For more information visit

http://www.eptrail.com/ci_14498983

Pastor John Pavlovitz

May 16, 2019-Cultivating Hope and Creating Community: A Compassionate Guide for Difficult Days

To be compassionate is to bleed, to feel deeply for the damage around you and to be moved to respond to it. This is a beautiful and invaluable instinct, but it is costly, too. There is a toll the trauma of the world takes on us when we seek to step into that dangerous space and to work for healing and justice. In days when so much need is at our doorsteps and on our news feeds, how do we attend to it all without becoming overwhelmed and consumed by it? How can we cultivate hope when it is hard to come by?

John Pavlovitz is author of A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community and Hope and Other Superpowers: A Life-Affirming, Love-Defending, Butt-Kicking, World-Saving Manifesto. Please join us for a time of authentic conversation on how to be safely burdened with the pain of this world and what to do when you have exhausted your resources.

For more information visit; johnpavlovitz.com

2020

Llody Athearn

August 27, 2020-

Colorado’s 14ers: Balancing recreational Use and Environmental Protection on America’s Approachable Everests

Colorado has more than 53 mountains over 14,000 feet in elevation (popularly known as the “14ers”) that draw hikers and climbers from across the globe. These peaks possess rare and fragile alpine tundra ecosystems and unique animals that, while well adapted to these harsh high-altitude peaks, are very susceptible to the impact of hikers. For the past 25 years, the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative has been the primary nonprofit partner of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, building summit hiking trails, restoring damaged alpine terrain, and monitoring hiking use levels and trail conditions, as well as educating hikers about safe and responsible recreational use in these fragile areas. Our audience will achieve a better understanding of why these peaks are so sought-after by hikers and climbers, as well as the complicated balancing of interests between protecting their natural resources and providing recreational opportunities.

Mr. Ben Ehrenreich

September 17, 2020-

The End of Time

With the earth rapidly warming, the oceans rising, disasters spreading, and species after species hurtling towards extinction, it can be hard not to worry that we may be approaching the end of something: of society as we know it and even of time itself. But what would it mean for time to end? What is time anyway? And why do we experience it the way we do? What does it say about us as a society that we have come to understand it as a more or less straight line, infinitely divisible, angled always upwards? Could it be related to the crises that we are facing? Ben Ehrenreich will discuss these questions and his latest book, Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for the End of Time (2020), which “layers climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences into a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time.”

Dr. Jeffery Lockwood

October 22, 2020-

The Epic (and Operatic) Tale of the Rocky Mountain Locust: An Environmental Murder Mystery featuring Locust: The Opera

The story of the Rocky Mountain locust, which blackened the skies of North America for centuries and formed a swarm covering nearly 200,000 square miles in 1875, was ripe for transformation into a commensurately grand form. Perhaps even more remarkable than the breathtaking scale of its outbreaks was its sudden disappearance, with the last living specimen being collected in 1902. 

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2019

Dr. Michael Edwards

June 20, 2019- Understanding your DNA: The Past, Present and Future of Human Genetic Research

Information contained in the ~6 billion bits of code stored in our DNA can be used to trace ancestry across the planet, to convict someone of murder, or to predict the potential for a terminal disease in later life. The cost of determining this genetic code for the average person has previously been prohibitive, but recent scientific advances have now made it feasible for many U.S. citizens to know their genetic makeup.

Dr. Edwards is the founder of the bioinformatics consulting company, Bioinfo Solutions LLC. He is active in teaching science and math at all levels, from instructing high school students in ‘big data’ analysis to holding workshops for clinical oncologists interested in using genomics in their cancer research. This lecture will attempt to summarize the current state of genetic research and to explain how all this information will completely change the way we do science and medicine in the future.

For more information visit; https://www.bioinfosolutions.com/about

Dr. William Anderegg

August 1, 2019- Hot, Dry, and Smoky: What is the future of Colorado’s Forests in a Changing Climate?

The fate of the forests of the western United States in the twenty-first century with rapid human-caused climate change is largely unknown. In the past twenty years or so, climate change-supercharged fires, droughts, and beetle outbreaks have prompted concern that forests might die off en masse across the West. Dr. Anderegg, assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah, grew up in Cortez, Colorado, and still spends his time hiking, backpacking, hunting, and fishing across the Colorado Rockies. His research centers on the intersection of ecosystems and climate change, especially the future of Earth’s forests in a changing climate. He has studied western forests for more than a decade and his investigation seeks to shed light on the future of Colorado’s forests. The aim of his research is to develop predictive tools to help forecast and manage the fate of western forests in this century.  

For more information visit;

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Yq_Ql6gAAAAJ&hl=en

Dr. Arri Eisen

Oct 10, 2019- Biology and Buddhism: What I've Learned about Life during a Decade Teaching Science to the Dalai Lama's Monks and Nuns

The Dalai Lama invited Emory University to shape and lead the first significant change to his monastics’ academic curriculum in six centuries. Little did anyone imagine how profoundly this new direction would affect all involved with these changes! Dr. Eisen, who is the Nat C. Robertson Distinguished Teaching Professor of Science and Society has been teaching in biology, interdisciplinary studies, and the Center for Ethics at Emory for nearly three decades. He has been involved in the Emory Tibet Science Initiative since its inception. He will discuss with the audience unexpected insights gained in the project in relation to science and religion, teaching across cultures, and the process of thinking about and doing science in general. Dr. Eisen is the author, with Yungdrung Konchok, of The Enlightened Gene:  Biology, Buddhism, and the Convergence that Explains the World.

For more information visit;

http://ethics.emory.edu/people/Faculty/Arri_Eisen.html