Peter H. Raven to Present 'Creativity and Sustainability: How to Prepare for the Future' Lecture on Feb. 29

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"Building Construction — Geodesic Dome" (1981), by Buckminster Fuller

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Peter H. Raven will present a lecture at 5 p.m. Monday, Feb. 29, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design lecture series.

Raven is a leading botanist and advocate of conservation and biodiversity, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden and the George Engelmann Professor of Botany emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis.

In this lecture, titled "Creativity and Sustainability: How to Prepare for the Future," Raven will discuss population growth and ways to solve the sustainability issues with the ecosystem. He will speak about Buckminster Fuller's research and how it relates to the current population.

Fuller was a techno-optimist who was one of the first to point out that the modern world is an ecosystem to be reconciled with nature. He was aware of limitations but thought that good design and creative thinking could overcome them. Fuller died in 1983, when the human population was only about 4.7 billion and the world was almost at the sustainability capacity then.

Raven said he wonders what Fuller would have thought today, when the world population stands at about 7.4 billion people and some 250,000 babies net are added each day, and as the world population is expected to climb to nearly 10 billion people by the end of the century. Raven also wonders how Fuller would have suggested reducing the current use of an estimated 156 percent of sustainability productivity, in a world in which a few dozen individuals control half the world's wealth. "We can no longer depend on Buckminster Fuller for creativity and must find a way out of our self-generated problems ourselves," Raven said.

For more than 39 years, Raven was the head of the Missouri Botanical Garden, an institution he nurtured to become a world-class center for botanical research, education, and horticultural display. In 2001, Raven received the National Medal of Science, the highest award for scientific accomplishment in the United States. He has been president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sigma Xi, the American Institute of Biological Sciences and a number of other organizations.

He served for 12 years as Home Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, to which he was elected in 1977. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the academies of science in a number of other countries, including China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Australia. Raven has published a number of texts and other books, including Biology of Plants, which he co-authored with Ray Evert and Susan Eichhorn.

He received a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1960, after completing his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has held both Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships during his career.

This lecture qualifies for AIA Continuing Education System learning units through the American Institute of Architects.

The public is invited to attend. Admission is free, with limited seating. For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu/.