Participants
Keynote
Bill Bunch, Executive Director, Save Our Springs Alliance
Laura Dunn, Producer/Director, The Unforeseen
Thursday, March 27, 2008
5 pm
AVAYA Auditorium, ACES 2.302
Barton Springs – fourth largest in Texas – has long been recognized as the "Soul of Austin." The springs emerge from the karst limestone Edwards Aquifer, the sole source drinking water supply for 1.5 million people, globally recognized as perhaps the world's most biologically diverse underground ecosystem, and recognized by the State as more vulnerable to pollution than any other major aquifer in Texas. The fight for the soul of Texas' capital city reflects the larger struggle of who we are, as a community and as a center of globalization.
Austin documentary filmmaker, Laura Dunn, will show clips of her award winning film, "The Unforeseen," which explores the local struggle to prevent pollution of Barton Springs from unchecked urban development. Film Comment's Gavin Smith called Dunn's film "the best film of the [2007 Sundance Film] festival, hands down." Variety film reviewer Robert Koehler wrote: Observing locally and thinking globally, Laura Dunn's astonishing debut doc feature "The Unforeseen" is the kind of transformative viewing experience that has made the current period a golden age for nonfiction film. . . . As a cinematic contemplation of human activity on the planet, it far surpasses "An Inconvenient Truth" and its more lecture-like message on global warming. See the film trailer and read the reviews.
Executive Director and attorney for Austin's Save Our Springs Alliance, Bill Bunch, will join Ms. Dunn for an update and dialogue on Austin's water wars. (Laura and Bill will also invite everyone to see the film and go for a swim at Barton Springs.)
Participants
Juan Alfaro, President, CEP International Juan Alfaro acquired his expertise in the water field firstly, in his country of origen, Peru; secondly as Head of the Water Sector (Water Supply, Wastewater, Solid Waste and Air) at the Inter American Development Bank (IADB), in Washington D.C for a period of 20 years; and thirdly as an international consultant for the past 10 years working, among other areas, on institutional development, including private sector participation (PSP), for water utilities in Latin America.
Mr. Alfaro is an environmental engineer (MS) with an extensive and successful career in the water sector. Mr. Alfaro has worked in the appraisal of a great number of investment projects as well as in technical cooperation, practically, in all countries of Latin America. In 1999, he wrote another book in Spanish, "Tres Decadas de Saneamiento en Latin America" as homage to the 40th anniversary of the IADB. This is his first book written in English to facilitate a better understanding to the water industry of this country (USA), about the potential to work on the Latin America market.
Patricia Ávila, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
Dr. Ávila works on Political and Social Ecological in the Ecosystems Investigation Center at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Morelia, Michoacán.
Bill Bunch, Executive Director, Save Our Springs Alliance, Austin
A native of San Antonio and Arlington, Bill left Texas to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. Bill returned to Texas to practice environmental law in Austin, first with the law firm founded by Stuart Henry, later as a sole practitioner, and then as chief counsel with the Save Our Springs Alliance. Bill was part of the group that drafted and successfully petitioned for the Save Our Springs Ordinance in 1992. Bill has been executive director since 2000.
Karl Butzer, Raymond Dickson Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts in the Department Of Geography And The Environment, University of Texas at Austin
Karl Butzer's research has focused on the relationships between the environment and prehistoric people or more recent societies. Geomorphology, sedimentology, and fossil soils offer powerful tools to reconstruct environmental and landscape change, while providing micro-stratigraphic frameworks for dating of human evolution and culture. In collaboration with a wide range of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists, he worked at both larger, regional scales and at the site-specific micro-level. He applied his empirical results to examine or model the paleoecology of the African australopithecines and Homo erectus, Neanderthal spatial behavior, and the first appearance of anatomically-modern people. His arguments that Homo sapiens sapiens was first present in South and East Africa during the Early Upper Pleistocene (135,000-65,000 years ago) are supported by the biomolecular evidence (the "Eve hypothesis").
During the second half of his career Karl Butzer turned to more recent, prehistoric and historical time ranges, in order to capture a finer-grained resolution on environment-society relations, especially when they can be informed by written records. His lifelong interest in Ancient Egypt and the skills of Elisabeth Butzer in archival research and interviewing have been key factors in facilitating this change of direction. Karl remains deeply engaged with an interdisciplinary environmental history, critical of the recent turn to a simplistic environmental determinism, and concerned about the prospects of global warming.
His choice of study areas reflects problems of particular interest, and a comparative approach to arid and strongly seasonal environments on four continents.
Gary Cook, US Project Director, Baikal Watch/Earth Island Institute
Gary Cook, director of Earth Island's Baikal Watch project, is fluent in several languages, including Russian, acquired during a childhood spent living abroad. He earned his Ph.D. in Resource Economics. Since 1990, Cook has served as director of Baikal Watch, a project envisioned by Earth Island's founder David Brower after a trip in the late 1980s to what was then the Soviet Union. A current goal for Baikal Watch is the construction of the Great Baikal Trail (GBT), which began in June 2003. When completed, this 1,000-mile path will join three national parks and reserves, connect Russia with Mongolia, and have over 100 campsites along its route.
Ben Crow, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz
Ben Crow specializes in comparative sociology of development, poverty, class and gender; water, land and labor; political economy; sociology of the economy; social studies of technology; peasant studies. Among his projects are an atlas of global inequality, gender and material inequities in the Global South, and the Green Enterprise Inititative.
Laura Dunn, Founder and Executive Director of Two Birds Film, Austin
Laura Dunn holds an MFA in Film from the University of Texas at Austin. Among the films she has directed and produced are The Subtext Of A Yale Education (1999), Baby (1999—college winner in the World Population Film and Video Festival 1999), Green (2000—won the 2001 Academy Award for Best Student Documentary, Global Vision Grand Prize for World Population Film Festival; Best Documentary at the Making Waves National Student Film Festival, NYC; and the Gecko Award at Cinematexas, Austin). Dunn was recently awarded a Rockefeller Media Fellowship for Mai Mayim, a documentary that looks at the Middle East conflict from within the context of the ecological need for water in Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.
David Eaton, UT Austin, LBJ School of Public Policy
David J. Eaton received his Ph.D. in environmental engineering and geography from The Johns Hopkins University. Eaton teaches courses on systems analysis, environmental and energy policy, and nonprofit management in the LBJ School. He has lectured in twenty countries and conducted field research in fifteen nations.
Eaton has written on rural water supply, international water resource conflicts, energy management, environmental problems of industries, management of emergency medical services, applications of mathematical programming to resource problems, insurance, and agriculture. His research focuses on sustainable development in international river basins, evaluation of energy and water conservation programs, and prevention of pollution. Among his recent publications are the NAFTA Handbook for Water Resource Managers and Engineers, Emergency Medical Services in Travis County, Texas and The Impacts of Trade Agreements on State Provincial Laws.
Eaton's current research concerns U.S.-Mexico environmental cooperation, new methods for evaluation of air pollution emissions, joint management by Palestinians and Israelis of shared groundwater, and water conservation in Texas. The Texas Department of Insurance used research on tort reform directed by Eaton as evidence to justify rebates of over $1.3 billion for liability insurance in Texas in 1997-1999.
Tessa Farmer, UT-Austin, Department of Anthropology
Tessa Farmer is currently in her third year of the PhD program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin. Her interests include political economy; the intersection of technology, social relationships, and water/environment; resource distribution; gender; nationalism; Middle East and North Africa. She completed an MA Report on the Amazigh nationalist movements in Morocco, and she has been conducting research on the interaction of the environment and social relationships in the Western Desert of Egypt since 2000. Her future research goals include a project on informal water distribution networks in squatter communities in Cairo, Egypt
Avi Kleinberger, Israel (Producer of Atash)
A native of Tel-Aviv, Avi Kleinberger is a graduate of Economics and Social Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and in Filmmaking Studies at The London Film School. Over the past 25 years, Kleinberger has served as producer, writer, actor, assistant director, and production manager of numerous American and Israeli film productions—several co-produced with Palestinian film makers—including Divine Intervention (dir. Elia Suleiman, 2003), and Atash.
María Mercedes Jaramillo, Director of the City Museums Foundation, Quito, Ecuador
A long-time presence in the artistic and museum spheres of Ecuador and Andean Latin America, María Mercedes Jaramillo was brought in to use her lifetime of expertise in architecture, art, and child development to restructure the Foundation of the City Museums in Quito in order to implement twenty-first century standards of pedaodgy and museum science. Among her accomplishments has been the design and opening of the new, state of the art Yaku Museum of Water, the newest addition to the City Museums Foundation.
Deane McKinney, Department of Civil Architecture and Environmental Engineering
Dr. McKinney's research interests include developing and applying numerical methods for simulation, optimization, and uncertainty analysis of environmental and water resource management problems, and the development of laboratory and field experimental techniques for the characterization and remediation of aquifer and groundwater contamination.
Since 1994, researchers from the Center for Research in Water Resources (CRWR) at The University of Texas at Austin have been engaged in a program of developing water resource allocation tools (optimization-based ) for use in the Aral Sea Basin of Central Asia. This research has been funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Environmental Policy and Technology (EPT) project, USAID Environmental Policies and Institutions for Central Asia (EPIC) Program, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the US National Committee on Scientific Hydrology.
Kathleen O'Reilly, Assistant Professor of Geography, Texas A&M University
Kathleen O'Reilly conducts extended ethnographic research in the areas of critical development geography and political ecology. Since 1997 she has studied development projects operating in northern Rajasthan, India. She is interested in the ways that development interventions restructure social, environmental and spatial relations in communities and implementing organizations. Her research specifically focuses on the community and women's participation components of a drinking water supply project. A National Science Foundation Grant (#0523985) supports current research on constructions of gender inside NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs) and their implications for project outcomes. She aims to contribute to understandings of how global-scale policies and plans are locally transformed and spatialized through the actions of fieldworkers working for NGOs..
James Spencer, University of Hawaii
Beyond Privatization: Urbanization and Community Efforts to Secure Clean Water in Southeast Asia
James H. Spencer, the Principal Investigator of this research project has worked in Viet Nam and the Greater Mekong Sub-region since 1990. His current research focuses on public policy related to economic development and infrastructure provision, and has appeared in Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Policy Studies Review, and the International Development Planning Review. Bunnarith Meng is the former Deputy Director of the Department of Urban Planning at the Cambodian Ministry of Construction and Planning, and PhD candidate in urban and regional planning. Hao Nguyen is a former staff researcher at Viet Nam Academy of Social Sciences‚s Institute of Sociology, and a PhD candidate in urban and regional planning. Craig Guzinsky is a Research Assistant at the Globalization Research Center and an MA candidate in urban and regional planning.
Shiney Varughese, Senior Policy Analyst, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Shiney Varghese leads the IATP's work on global water policy. The current water crisis, its impact on water and food security and possible local solutions that emphasize equity, environmental justice and sustainability concerns are her focus. In her current work she focuses on the implications of GATS/WTO, water sector liberalization, and industrial agriculture for people's access to water. Since 2001 she has been the co-chair of the UNCSD fresh water caucus, the primary civil society voice on water at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. Shiney has been working with IATP since 2001.
Before moving to United States in 1998, she worked in India on social and environmental issues for over a decade with indigenous groups, civil society organizations and international groups such as Oxfam. She has presented and published works on environment, gender, and human rights. Shiney grew up on a farm in South Indian state of Kerala, and after high school moved to Gujarat. She is a graduate of Institute of Rural Management, India, and has a master's in development from the Institute of Social Studies, Netherlands. Shiney was a visiting fellow at the agrarian studies program at Yale University, New Haven in 1997-98.