One of the world's leading experts on climate change visits Elon for a free public event sponsored by the Liberal Arts Forum.
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Tuesday, March 19
Brian Fagan, “Water: Humanity’s Elixir”
Whitley Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.
Admission is free and no ticket is required.
Sponsored by the Liberal Arts Forum
Brian Fagan is a leading authority on the complex relationship between the environment, climate change and human society. He has 46 books under his belt, including eight college textbooks familiar to two generations of archaeology students. For audiences ranging from business executives to high school students, his works position today’s highly publicized climate crisis in a crucial historical context and describes how humans have adapted to environmental changes over the eons.
Elixir: Humans and the History of Water describes the complex, ever-changing relationship between human beings and water over the past 10,000 years. Visiting the brilliant water management of classical Greece, the innovative Roman aqueducts, the magnificent gardens of Islamic engineers, and the challenges of taming Chinese rivers, Elixir tells the story of a world that existed before the technology of the Industrial Revolution turned water into a seemingly limitless resource. From this largely vanished world, Fagan draws timeless lessons about the vital importance of water conservation for our society today.
His latest book, Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean, tackles the enduring mystery of the oceans, the planet’s most forbidding terrain, and vividly explains how our mastery of the oceans has changed history. Beyond the Blue Horizon delves into the very beginnings of humanity’s long and intimate relationship with the sea: from bamboo rafts in the Java Sea to the caravels of the Age of Discovery, he crafts a captivating narrative of humanity’s urge to seek out distant shores, of the daring men and women who did so, and of the mark they have left on civilization.
The Attacking Sea (forthcoming, 2013) will focus on rising global sea levels, showing how societies of the past adapted to rising waters and how the rising sea levels of today impact the lives of millions of city dwellers and farmers around the world.
Fagan is currently Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1967. He was born and educated in England, and spent six years as Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum in Central Africa before relocating to the US. In addition to his books, Fagan has contributed more than 100 papers to scientific journals and has served as an archaeological consultant to the National Geographic Society, Time/Life, Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta.