New York City Before Europe

Speakers

Speakers

Charles Mann

CHARLES C. MANN’s most recent book, 1491, won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Keck award for the best book of the year. A Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including BioScience, The Boston Globe, Fortune, Geo (Germany), The New York Times (magazine, op-ed, book review), Panorama (Italy), Paris-Match (France), Quark (Japan), Smithsonian, Der Stern (Germany), Technology Review, Vanity Fair and The Washington Post (magazine, op-ed, book review). In addition to 1491, he has co-written four other books: The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1986; rev. ed., 1995); The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition (1991), Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1995), and @ Large: The Strange Case of the Internet’s Biggest Invasion (1998). He has also written for CD-ROMs, HBO, and the television show Law and Order, and was the text editorial coordinator for the internationally best-selling photographic projects Material World (1994), Women in the Material World (1996), and Hungry Planet (2005). A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has received writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Margaret Sanger Foundation and the Lannan Foundation (a 2006 Literary Fellowship). He is now working on a companion volume to 1491; an early excerpt appeared in National Geographic in May 2007.

Eric Sanderson

Wildlife Conservation Society

Eric W. Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City. He is interested in creating sustainable relationships between people and the rest of nature at all scales. He received his Ph.D. in ecosystem and landscape ecology from the University of California, Davis, in 1998, and the same year founded the "Landscape Ecology and Geographic Analysis" program at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Dr. Sanderson and colleagues created the Human Footprint map, the first look at human influence globally at less than 1 square mile resolution, and generated a map of the "Last of the Wild" areas representing the largest remaining wildernesses on Earth. He is also an expert on species conservation planning and has organized planning efforts to save lions, jaguars, bears, gazelles and bison, among other species. Recently he directed the Mannahatta Project, an effort to reconstruct the original ecology of Manhattan Island at the time of European discovery in 1609. Four hundred years later, in 2009, Abrams published his book, “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City,” illustrated by Markley Boyer; he also curated an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009. He also led the team which created themannahattaproject.org, a website which allows New Yorkers to explore the environment of 1609 in terms of the blocks of the city today. In 2009 he was the New York Prize Fellow in Sustainable Cities and Social Science Research at the Van Alen Institute, in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council, exploring possibilities for the next 400 years of Manhattan’s ecological development. His work has been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic Magazine (cover story in September 2009), CNN, NPR, The New Yorker (profile in 2007) and other outlets.

Moderator

Peter Marcotullio

Hunter College, City University of New York

Peter Marcotullio is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Hunter College, City University of New York and Senior Fellow at the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities. Prior to coming to CUNY, Dr. Marcotullio was Adjunct Senior Fellow at the United Nations University, Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS), working from the UNU’s Office at the UN, New York. From 2006-2008 he was Visiting Associate Professor, Urban Planning Program, Columbia University. Between 1999 and 2006, Dr. Marcotullio was also teaching full time, first as a Lecturer and then Professor, in the International Urban and Regional Planning lab, Department of Urban Engineering, University of Tokyo. Dr. Marcotullio’s research interests include urban environmental transition theory, globalization and urban change, ecosystem approaches to urban and regional environmental planning and management and the impacts of urbanization on the environment. He has published over 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals and books. His edited volumes include Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges: From Local to Global and Back (2007), Earthscan, James & James, Pub, with Gordon McGranahan, Towards Sustainable Cities: East Asian, North American, and European Perspectives on Managing Urban Regions (2004), Ashgate Publishing Limited, with Andre Sorenson and Jill Grant, and Globalization and the Sustainability of Cities in the Asia Pacific Region (2001) UNU Press, with Fu-chen Lo.