Thinking Ecologically about Our Common Future
Twenty Years On: Revisiting Voices from BIC’s Founding Years
RSVP here
Speaker
Can we protect, restore, and create ecosystems faster than we are building over them?
Harini Nagendra, ecologist and author, returns to BIC nearly two decades after her 2009 talk here, to ask the same question in a city transformed.
In 2009, Nagendra warned that climate change and urbanization together would overwhelm old, top-down models of conservation. Today, protected-area-focused thinking is inadequate for the crisis facing Indian cities. In Bangalore specifically, the starkest change has been the devastation of peri-urban ecology, alongside deepening social inequality and a widening disconnect between people and nature in the city.
This talk is part of a series marking twenty years of BIC, in which speakers and artists from the institution’s early years return to revisit the topics they first addressed. Each session traces what has changed, what has endured, and what to make of the same topics two decades on.
Venue: Seminar Halls
Speaker
Harini Nagendra
Harini Nagendra is Director of School of Climate Change & Sustainability at Azim Premji University. Her work focuses on urban ecology, forest conservation and climate change amongst other themes. She is a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of urban sustainability in India Her books include Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future; Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities; So Many Leaves, and Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities. She also writes the acclaimed Bangalore Detectives Club series, a set of historical mysteries set in 1920s Bangalore.
