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News Release

January 18, 2007

Green Party Leader, Renowned Author, Journalists to Speak at U of G

Renowned author and academic Thomas Homer-Dixon, Green Party leader Elizabeth May and Greenpeace Canada executive director Bruce Cox are among the speakers at the 13th annual Environmental Science Symposium being held at the University of Guelph Jan. 27 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Rozanski Hall.

This year’s conference will bring together experts to discuss the relationship between media and the environment. Eleven speakers will examine issues and solutions from political, economic and social perspectives.

Homer-Dixon is director of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and a political science professor at the University of Toronto. He’s the author of The Ingenuity Gap, which won the 2001 Governor General’s Award for non-fiction; Environment, Scarcity and Violence; and Ecoviolence: Links Among Environment, Population and Security.

May has been a leading environmentalist, author, activist and lawyer for more than 30 years. An Officer of the Order of Canada, she is a recipient of the United Nations environment program’s Global 500 Award, a former executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and a former senior policy adviser to the federal environment minister. She is the author of five books, including her most recent, How to Save the World in Your Spare Time, a manual for activists.

Before joining Greenpeace in 2004, Cox spent two decades bringing his passion for the environment to politics by holding positions with the Ontario ministries of Energy and Environment and at Toronto City Hall.

Other presenters include journalists Saul Chernos, Robert Fisher, Rick Searle, Nicola Ross, Barry Zwicker and Alice Hovorka. Chernos is a freelance journalist and member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Fisher is an award-winning broadcast journalist who is the afternoon news editor for CBC Radio in Toronto and a weekly columnist for CBC Windsor’s Early Shift. Searle is a freelance writer, author of Phantom Parks: The Struggle to Save Canada’s National Parks and former co-host of Enviro-Mental! Ross, a U of G graduate, is executive editor of Alternatives Journal, Canada’s magazine of environmental ideas and action. Zwicker is an award-winning Canadian alternative media journalist, documentary producer and left-wing political activist. Hovorka, a U of G geograpy professor, is interested in issues of human-environment interactions in cities with an aim to understanding linkages between ideological discourse, institutional structures, gender power relations, environmental conditions, and the built spatial landscape. She currently runs a research program on gendered urbanization in southern Africa, with a particular focus on Botswana.

The conference is organized by environmental science undergraduate students. Advance tickets are $13 general, $8 for students, and can be purchased at the Information Desk in the University Centre. Tickets will also be available at the door for $15 and $10. For more information and to register, visit www.uoguelph.ca/~envsymp.