Worcester, Mass. - Clark University Professor B.L. Turner II, Director of the School of Geography and Milton P. and Alice C. Higgins Professor of Environment and Society, will present "Toward a Sustainable Land Architecture" at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held Feb. 15 to 19 in San Francisco.
Professor Turner's talk will be among those presented in a special session on Grand Challenges of Sustainability Science session. This session represents various activities underway by an international group of researchers to stake out critical themes underlying the emergence of sustainability science. Professor Turner will address the problems inherent in attempting to design a win-win (environment and society) pattern of land uses that is functional from local to global scales of consideration.
Professor Turner received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He joined Clark University in 1980, subsequently serving as Director of the Graduate School of Geography (1983-88 and 1997-98) and the George Perkins Marsh Institute (1991-1997). His current research involves land-cover and land-use change in the southern Yucatán peninsular region.
Professor Turner's awards and honors include: Guggenheim Fellowship; Fellow of Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences; Distinguished Scholarship Award--Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers; Honors—Association of American Geographers; Centennial Medal (Research)—Royal Scottish Geographical Society; National Academy of Sciences; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the Robert Netting Award, Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group.
He teaches courses in such topics as Earth Transformed by Human Action, and Cultural and Political Economy, and Land Change Science.
The AAAS annual meeting draws hundreds of editors, reporters, and producers from around the world and receives extensive media coverage.