WPI Professor to Speak on 'Ecological Democracy' at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Roger S. Gottlieb, professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), will give a lecture titled “Hearing Nature’s Voice: The Possibilities of Ecological Democracy” on Tuesday, Feb. 19 at 7:30 p.m. in Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The event is part of the lectures on Religion and Ecology Series, which is funded by the Barrett Endowment for Ethics Programming. It is free and open to the public.

In his talk, Gottlieb will address the role of religion in modern democracy, some of the radical perspectives of spiritual or religious environmentalism, and an extension of some of the basic concepts of democracy to include the more-than-human world.

Gottlieb, who earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University, has been a member of the faculty at WPI since 1981. As the author and editor of 14 books and more than 100 articles on politics, religion, philosophy and ecology, he has lectured all over the country.

For the past 15 years Gottlieb has concentrated on the political, ethical, and religious dimensions of the environmental crisis publishing books including his anthology, This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (Routledge, 2003), which is known internationally and is the first comprehensive collection on the topic; Oxford Handbook on Religion and Ecology (Oxford University Press 2006); and A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and our Planet's Future (Oxford University Press 2006).

Gottlieb is the editor of six academic book series, book review editor of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology, and contributing editor for the national magazine Tikkun. His writings have graced the pages of top academic journals including Journal of Philosophy, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Ethics; and in popular publications such as The Boston Globe, E Magazine Online, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

He is a member of the International Society for the Study of Environmental Ethics and is co-founder of the Philosophical Society for the Study of Genocide and the Holocaust.