Sustainable agriculture advocate Wes Jackson will visit the College on Thursday, April 14 to discuss “The Unfinished Work.”
Sponsored by the Environmental Science, Policy, and Engineering Program and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the lecture will take place in the Nott Memorial at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Jackson, president and founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kan., is a leading voice in the sustainable agriculture movement. He describes his work as an attempt “to solve the 10,000 year problem of agriculture.”
For 35 years, Jackson and his team of plant scientists at The Land Institute have sought to create perennial, poly-cultural grain crops that mimic prairie ecosystems. Their results have been published in Science, Nature, and Scientific American, and featured extensively in the media including The Atlantic, Audubon, National Geographic, Time Magazine, "The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour" and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Life Magazine named Jackson one of 18 individuals they predict will be among the 100 "Important Americans of the 20th Century." In the November 2005 issue, Smithsonian named him one of “35 Who Made a Difference” and in March 2009, Jackson was named one of the 100 Agents of Change in Rolling Stone.
Jackson attended Kansas Wesleyan University, the University of Kansas and North Carolina State University. He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan and later established the Environmental Studies Department at California State University, Sacramento. He resigned from the school in 1976.