Conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy will be the featured speaker at this year’s Kane Allen Memorial Lectureship at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts at 6 p.m. April 5.
Lovejoy will present the lecture “A Wild Solution for Climate Change.” He has been credited for coining the term “biological diversity” in 1980. Biodiversity refers to the variety of living things on Earth. It is measured by the variation of genetic, ecosystem and species level.
Kane Allen of Dover was 17 and a student at ASMSA when he died in February 2007. Among his many interests, he was concerned about global warming and the environment. His family established the lecture series in his honor through a gift to the school.
The event will be held in the Oaklawn Foundation Community Center in the Creativity and Innovation Complex on the school’s campus. It is free and open to the public.
Lovejoy is a renowned conservation biologist who currently serves as Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and a professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
He served as president of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment from 2002-2008 and was its biodiversity chair from 2008-2013. Lovejoy has also served at the chief biodiversity advisor as well as Lead Specialist for Environment for Latin America and the Caribbean for the World Bank. He also served as senior adviser to the president of the United Nations Foundation and currently serves as Science Envoy for the U.S. Department of State.
Lovejoy has served on science and environmental councils in the administrations of Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton. At the core of the many influential positions in which he has served is Lovejoy’s seminal ideas which have helped form and strengthen the field of conservation biology.
He was the first to use the term “biological diversity.” In 1980 he developed the “debt-for-nature” program in which part of a nation’s debt was forgiven in exchange for adopting certain environmental policies or endowing a government bond in the name of a conservation organization.
He has co-edited two books on biodiversity subjects and recently released a new book titled “Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere” with Lee Hannah, a senior scientist at the Moore Center for Science, Conservation International and an adjunct professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.