2010 Global Sustainability Summer School

The program in 2010 will look at questions in sustainability more broadly and focus on the interaction between human well-being and the natural and social environment. Issues addressed will include how we can:

• *Control global warming while achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth
• *Achieve economic growth in underdeveloped countries while maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services
• *The efficacy of technological vs. cultural solutions
• *Collective social phenomena such as migration to cities and environmentally caused social unrest, and
• *Methods for bringing about social change to foster sustainability.

The 2010 school builds on the experience of last year’s school and places even more emphasis on interaction between the students and lecturers and on student projects. Students will build tools such as agent-based and systems dynamics models that may have future real-world applications. They will produce a series of student debates during the event that will subsequently be widely distributed on the Web. They will write summaries of the lectures which will be published as a book , and in addition each student will produce an op-ed piece to appear in his/her local media.

Faculty Team

J. Doyne Farmer, Director of the Global Sustainability School, is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has broad interests in complex systems, and has done re- search in dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. At present his main interest is in developing quantitative theories for social evolution, in particular for financial markets (which provide an ac- curate record of decision making in a complex environment) and the evolution of new technologies (whose performance through time provides a quantitative record of human achievement). He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative trading firm that was recently sold to the United Bank of Switzerland, and was their chief scientist from 1991 - 1999. During the 1980’s he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was an Oppenheimer Fellow, founding the Complex Systems Group in the theoretical division.

Doug Arent, Faculty and Advisory Committee Member, is the director of the Strategic Energy Analysis Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. His primary research interests focus on Market aspects of renewable energy-related technologies.

Lisa Curran, Faculty, is the Roger and Cynthia Lang Professor in Environmental Anthropology and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. From 2001-2009, she was Professor of Tropical Resources and John Musser Director of the Tropical Resources Institute at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. From 1996-2001, she held an interdisciplinary faculty position at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, South- east Asian Studies and International Institute and Department of Biology at the University of Michigan. Currently, she is a MacArthur Fellow and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

Dennis Meadows, Faculty, is Emeritus Professor of Systems Management, and former director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research at the University of New Hampshire. He is President of the Laboratory for Interactive Learning and widely known as the co-author of Limits to Growth.

John Shellnhuber, Faculty and Advisory Committee Member, is Founding Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Since 1993 he has been Director of PIK and Professor for Theoretical Physics at Potsdam University. In 2007 Shellnhuber was Chief Government Advisor on Climate & Related Issues for the German G8-EU twin presidency. Currently he is a member of the High-Level Expert Group on Energy & Climate Change advising J.M. Barroso, President of the European Commission.

Jessika Trancik, Faculty and Advisory Committee Member, was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. In January 2010 she joined the Engineering Systems Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trancik is also an Adjunct Associate Research Scholar at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. Trancik’s work focuses on the development of a framework for studying the cost and carbon trajectories for energy technologies, and exploring a portfolio of possible near-zero carbon energy technology options for the coming decades.

Billie L. Turner, Faculty, is Gilbert F. White Professor of Environment and Society at Arizona State University and Research Professor, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University. Turner’s interest in specific impacts of populations and societies on land use change and alter- ations in land cover led to important fieldwork in Central America in the 1990s. Turner is associated with the development of LUCC analysis - Land Use/Cover Change and ways to assess it, as concern grows about tropical deforestation and agricultural expansion.

Geoffrey West, Faculty, is Distinguished Professor at SFI. He is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, espe- cially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. West served as SFI President from July 2005 through July 2009. His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. This research led to the development of quantitative models for the structural and functional design of organisms based on underlying universal principles.