College of Arts and Sciences

How was the Cuyahoga River transformed from a health hazard to the centerpiece of a national park? A panel of experts piece together the 100-year story within Cuyahoga Valley using historic photos, archival documents, and personal memories. Come join the discussion.

Doors open at 6 p.m. with drop-in tables about current environmental projects.

This event is sponsored by XTINGUISH, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, West Creek Conservancy, Ohio Humanities and League of Women Voters of the Akron Area.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

Common Cleveland folklore points to the east side as disadvantaged due to a lack of convenient freeway access. But would shaving a few minutes from the daily commute be worth the cost of the Cedar Lee and Larchmere districts, Buckeye neighborhoods, historic homes, and the beloved Shaker Lakes? Re-visit the dramatic defeat of the east side freeways in the 1960’s as Mayor Carl Stokes struggled to govern a hollowing-out city and a fierce grassroots campaign to preserve the Shaker Lakes. A discussion with the film’s director will follow the screening.

This event is sponsored by Cleveland Public Library and is free and open to the public.

Join Judy Semroc, Naturalist, Cleveland Museum of Natural History for beautiful colors, gardening tips and interesting natural history information about the butterflies and moths that can be found in Ohio. Their benefits, from pollination to animal food sources, will encourage you to invite them into your yards and gardens!

This event is co-sponsored by Cuyahoga County Public Library and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Join Judy Semroc, Naturalist, Cleveland Museum of Natural History for gardening tips and interesting natural history information about the butterflies and moths that can be found in Ohio.

Join Judy Semroc, Naturalist, Cleveland Museum of Natural History for beautiful colors, gardening tips and interesting natural history information about the butterflies and moths that can be found in Ohio. Their benefits, from pollination to animal food sources, will encourage you to invite them into your yards and gardens!

This event is co-sponsored by Cuyahoga County Public Library and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

What do you do when the company you work for and live near is making you sick? Company Town is a groundbreaking investigative documentary about environmental injustice, corporate accountability and community action in a rural Arkansas town. This chilling story reveals the egregious businesses practices of a company owned by the billionaire Koch brothers, government negligence and deregulation, and a devastating cancer cluster that galvanized a town to fight back. Janet Fiskio, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, will introduce the film and lead a discussion with Karen B. Mulloy of the Mary Ann Swetland Center for Environmental Health.

Planetary-scaled environmental issues are the frame for environmentalism today.  They imply that we change how we think about politics.  From re-examining extractive fossil fuels, to questioning the economy of animal products, to re-organizing governance of Earth and modifying some of our central moral, spiritual, and political concepts, the politics of Earth is the context for thinking about nature today.

Moderated by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Elmer G. Beamer-Hubert H. Schneider Professor in Ethics, panelists from the environmental humanities will discuss their work and take questions from the audience.

This event is co-sponsored by Holden Forests &

Before digital cameras made it easy to capture a rare bird, the tools of observation were pencils and brushes; before Google Images, scientists and students turned first to the great works of scientific illustrations. Sit back and enjoy this guided tour by Wendy Wasman, Librarian and Archivist of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She will show beautiful examples from some of the most important illustrators of works on natural history, such as John Gould, Edward Lear, and John James Audubon. Examples drawn from the rare book collections of the Kelvin Smith Library and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History will be on hand. 

Years ago, Bill McKibben suggested that climate change would be the end of nature. More recently, Elizabeth Kolbert has argued that the Sixth Extinction means the end of nature as we know it. Yet other scholars have argued that the term “nature” is not helpful—humans have always been modifying the world in which we live. And in The Collapse of Western Civilization, Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes argue that liberal democracy is at stake as well. In her talk, Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, explores these issues, and suggest that however we look at it,

Featuring:  Halida Dinova, is an internationally-touring concert pianist

Dr. Kevin Mueller, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological, Geological, and Environmental Sciences at Cleveland State University

Dr. Alan Tartakoff is a Cell Biologist and Professor of Pathology at Case Western Reserve University.

This event is sponsored by Cleveland State University and is free and open to the public.

Presenters:

John Grabowski, Editor of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
Joe Valencic, President, National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame and Museum

On July 22, 1796, Moses Cleaveland sailed from Lake Erie into the Cuyahoga River and founded a settlement that would bear his name. In the decades that followed others would come by water as migrants or immigrants to Cleveland. The community’s location on the lake at the mouth of the river was its raison’d etre, not only accessible to new arrivals, but a critical catalyst in its economic growth throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

In his talk, Mark Blum, Professor and Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair in Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, will first look at traditional views of the natural world in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism, where nonhuman sentient life forms commonly appear as a legitimate voice in the unfolding of truth and the neutral view of nonsentient life and inorganic matter in India takes on greater spiritual significance as one moves eastward in Asia. Then the issue of ecology and environmental ethics will be considered in an attempt to clarify the efforts being made to infer an environmental imperative on the basis of Buddhist values.

In labs across the country and from the Louisiana bayous to the Illinois River and the streets of Chicago, an all-out war is taking place to halt the advancement of the invasive Asian Carp into the Great Lakes.  Andrew Reeves, author of Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (March 2019) and environmental journalist Elizabeth Miller (IdeaStream) discuss the research, the resources, and the radical scientific and political shift that is needed to protect the Great Lakes and to restore our degraded rivers, streams, and waterways.

This event is sponsored by Cleveland Public Library and is free and open to the public.

Presenters:
Nelli Johnson, JD
Jack McMillan, MSSA

We are all aware of, and deeply troubled by, the dire predictions of looming ecosystems collapse. We often feel powerless in the face of such an enormous crisis, all the while watching our governments continue to do little to address this urgent issue. Is there anything we ourselves can do to significantly mitigate climate change? The good news is yes there is. Animal agriculture is a leading driver behind climate change, biodiversity loss, rainforest destruction, species extinction, ocean depletion and acidification, waterways pollution,

Throughout history, art has served as an agent of change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, several artists played significant roles in efforts to preserve the wildness of the American landscape as it was being lost rapidly. The emerging conservation movement of the late 1900’s was strongly influenced by the inspiration and agency of artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church. Specifically, the story of the creation of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, is inextricably rooted in the lives and works of several artists – most notably, William Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran. In his presentation,

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Humanities Center at Cuyahoga Community College is pleased to welcome a pair of world-class scholars to our Eastern Campus for a dialogue on the question, “Is the natural world all there is?” Dr. Louise Antony, who will defend the affirmative position, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and the author or editor of numerous books and essays, including Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life. Her interlocutor, Dr. Michael Rea,

REPERTOIRE:

• BROUWER Remembrances (1996)
• PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16
• DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World”

PERFORMED BY:

• Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra
• Gerhardt Zimmermann, guest conductor
• Sara Daneshpour, piano, student artist

This event is sponsored by the Cleveland Institute of Music and is free and open to the public.

Join Judy Semroc, Naturalist, Cleveland Museum of Natural History for gardening tips and interesting natural history information about the butterflies and moths that can be found in Ohio.

Join Judy Semroc, Naturalist, Cleveland Museum of Natural History for beautiful colors, gardening tips and interesting natural history information about the butterflies and moths that can be found in Ohio. Their benefits, from pollination to animal food sources, will encourage you to invite them into your yards and gardens!

This event is co-sponsored by Cuyahoga County Public Library and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

This event is free and open to the public.

Celebrate 50 years of Cuyahoga River rebirth! Author of the acclaimed The Soil Will Save Us, Kristin combines culinary and science in a tale of farmers and foodies who heal our soil and save our water. Includes riveting short films about family farmers, vintners and ranchers as part of Carbon Nation, the award-winning series by director and University of Arizona professor Peter Byck.

This event is co-sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, XTINGUISH, and West Creek Conservancy and supported in part by Ohio Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet?   In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries.  Of all the extraordinary and obscure plants that have been fermented and distilled, a few are dangerous, some are downright bizarre, and one is as ancient as dinosaurs—but each represents a unique cultural contribution to our global drinking traditions and our history. 

Philosopher Paul Taylor and naturalist Aldo Leopold have argued against a wholly instrumentalist view of nature, one where the value of nature and its inhabitants is entirely dependent upon nature’s ability to meet human needs and desires. This talk, by Dr. Allyson L. Robichaud, will focus on the works of Taylor and Leopold and the arguments each makes justifying the view that humans bear an ethical obligation to develop and sustain an attitude of respect for nature, and how doing so would promote positive changes for our environment. Attention will be paid to ways of advocating for attitudinal change as well as on the difficulties involved in bringing about change.

Harvey Webster, Chief Wildlife Officer and Museum Ambassador, Cleveland Museum of Natural History. presents this lecture as part of CMNH’s Explorers Series.

The built human landscape presents unique challenges and opportunities for birds. Many species have successfully used building roofs as nesting habitat. Peregrine Falcons use skyscraper ledges and bridges to nest in the heart of our cities. On the other hand, glass and brightly lit buildings kill thousands of birds passing through Ohio every year. This illustrated program will explore the perils and possibilities for birds in the urban environment and how we can create more sustainable cities.

Instructors: Judy Semroc, Larry Rosche, Stanley Stine and Garrett Ormiston

Join Museum naturalists on a survey of wetlands, swamp forests and buttonbush swamps at this new CMNH natural area in Trumbull County. The site boasts of bountiful habitats which could afford us some great looks at aquatic denizens, both plants and animals.

This event is sponsored by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

This is a ticketed event.  Tickets information will be posted soon.