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From: IAI Listserv Manager <listserv@dir.iai.int>
To: pgb@dir.iai.int
Subject: IAI Listserv: Other Institutions Information
Final Call for Abstracts - Urban/Rural Interfaces Conference
March 2005
This is the Final Call for Abstracts for "Emerging Issues Along Urban/Rural Interfaces: Linking Science and Society," an international conference being held March 13-16, 2005 at the Atlanta Hilton. We have a first-rate line-up of keynote speakers, grant money to support student participation, convenient location (Atlanta, GA), great facilities, and attractive hotel and registration rates; now we need to bring together people with interests in urban/rural interface issues. So please take a look at my overview of the conference (see below), visit our conference website, and consider submitting an abstract. The sooner you do so, the less time you will spend thinking about doing so!
The final date for submission of abstracts is November 15, 2004.
Thanks to an NSF grant, we
have a limited pool of funds to support conference participation by undergraduate/graduate
students; additional support from the Inter-American Institute for Global
Change Research will permit us to provide travel grants to several young
scientists from, or working in, Latin America. The deadline for submission
of travel grant applications also is November 15, 2004.
PURPOSE
Urbanization is driven by a combination of economic and social factors.
The pace and structure of urbanization is affected additionally by political considerations. In turn, urbanization has numerous direct and indirect impacts on environmental ecology. Closing the loop, ecological considerations (e.g., water quality, changing wildlife populations, availability of green space, timber supply) come back and affect urban dwellers. This necessarily means that tackling problems that are thought to be essentially ecological cannot be divorced from economic/social/political considerations. Moreover, the extent to which solutions to a whole host of urban/rural interface issues protect or compromise landowners' private property rights affects landowner incentives, with extraordinarily significant consequences.
To move forward productively and as harmoniously as possible between interest groups with different perspectives, there must be informed discussion of issues, concerns, and (too frequently missing from the discussion) opportunities created along urban/rural interfaces.
Informed discussion requires the ecologists to be talking with the human dimensions people. Historically (and now), this simply has not happened in any significant measure. If we have pressing ecological problems, then proposed solutions had better be economically viable/sustainable or they are politically dead on arrival everywhere around the world. By the same token, pressing ecological problems may offer significant economic opportunities that heretofore have not been appreciated, in part because the two sides have not been talking with each other.
So the overarching theme of our conference is linking human dimensions aspects of urban/rural interfaces with ecological aspects of urban/rural interfaces. We believe that such linkages offer the promise of new, powerful insights for understanding the forces that shape, and are shaped by, urbanization and offer more compelling understanding of the causes and consequences of urbanization-related policies.
We take a broad view of urban/rural interfaces, not just the physical interface between cities and agricultural, timber, or wild land.
Policies enacted by urban
dwellers touch the lives of rural land owners, as well as those whose economic
or private well-being depends, in part, on how that land is used. This
means that there are a lot of people, from diverse backgrounds, who have
meaningful contributions to make to our conference and/or who might benefit
from what conference participants bring to the discussions. We'd like to
attract the interest and participation of both groups.
SPEAKERS
Mr. Joseph Chamie, Director - United Nations Population Division
Dr. Clifford S. Duke - Director of Science Programs, Ecological Society of America
Dr. Peter Groffman - Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Dr. Jianquo (Jack) Liu - Michigan State University
Dr. David N. Wear - Project
Leader, Southern Research Station, USDA Forest Service
COST
We hope to bring people together
and encourage them to interact with each other. Thus, the conference registration
fee ($375 regular; $125 student) covers all meals except dinners. We have
an exceptionally favorable room rate of $99 per night at the downtown Atlanta
Hilton,
which is located just a few blocks from Olympic Park. Consequently, we
hope that such a good rate will encourage conference attendees to stay
at the Hilton, helping us meet our room commitment.
POST-CONFERENCE PUBLICATION
There will be a conference
Proceedings volume published and we are in discussions about the possibility
of developing a (shorter) book of reviewed papers.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION & REGISTRATION
Prospective contributors can submit an abstract electronically (from our website) for inclusion on the program. The web address is:
http://www.sfws.auburn.edu/urbanruralinterfaces/. Information about student/young scientist travel grants also is available on our website.
The conference registration form is available on our website; it must be completed and mailed or Faxed to us for processing. Hotel registration is available through our website, which has a link to the Hilton website.
For more information, please visit our website or contact Dr. David N. Laband, conference coordinator, by phone at (334) 844-1074 or by e-mail at: labandn@auburn.edu.
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Inter-American Institute
for Global Change Research - IAI