The Less Selfish Gene

 Coming Soon... "The Less Selfish Gene. Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life."

The Luckow Family Lecture, sponsored by VU English, will be delivered by Rob Nixon, Barron Family Professor in Humanities and Environment at Princeton University. The lecture will be delivered on October 27th at 5:30 p.m., via Zoom. Those who wish to attend should register in advance here.

About the event: Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? We are witnessing a surge in public science literature that engages botanical research into forest sentience, forest suffering and the capacity of plants to commune with each other. The contemporary appeal of plant communication is rooted in a quest for alternative models of being, models more accommodating than neoliberalism. This talk will explore an ascendant understanding of forest dynamics, offering a counter-narrative of flourishing, a model of what George Monbiot has called, in another context, “private sufficiency and public wealth.” The talk concludes with a reflection on the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer and allied Indigenous scholars on forest dynamics and plant intelligence.

Rob Nixon holds the Barron Family Professorship in Humanities and Environment at Princeton University. He is the author of a variety of books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, his writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, Outside and elsewhere. His awards include a MacArthur Foundation-SSRC fellowship, a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. For the past twenty-five years his work has been focused on environmental justice, particularly in the global South.

Co-sponsored by:

CPJE, GWS, GIS and GEV