Fall 2025 Lecture Recordings

Presented by Gabi Mocatta, Senior Research Fellow in Climate Science Communication, University of Tasmania, Australia & Fulbright Fellow, University of Colorado, Boulder

Increasing risk from natural hazards under climate change complicates strategic planning across a range of sectors. Global losses from climate-driven hazard events are projected to increase to US $460 billion annually by 2050. In this context, widespread understanding of climate risk and resilience-building are essential. Climate-hazard preparedness and disaster resilience are not only life saving: they also make economic sense, with some research indicating a return of $13 for every dollar invested in disaster preparedness and resilience. This talk provides insights into a project that is using climate models and community workshops to understand future climate-driven hazard risk, and then providing in-depth, tailored hazard information to enable adaptation planning. The Natural Hazards Atlas for Tasmania, a project based in Australia’s island state of Tasmania, and funded by the Australian Government’s Disaster Ready Fund, provides a blueprint for how such work could be undertaken in other locations, to improve planning for a future under climate change.

Presented by Henry Renski, Professor in Regional Planning and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, UMass Amherst & Tosin Bamidele, PhD Student in Regional Planning, UMass Amherst

Renski and Bamidele explore questions about AI and its potential effects on the workforce, particularly within the trucking and transportation industry.

Presented by Seth Borgos, Senior Advisor for Learning and Strategy & Jennifer Wells, Director of the Program on Power Building in the Care Economy, Community Change

This talk will explore the historical impact and future potential of community organizing to build sustainable power for communities afflicted by poverty, racism, and other systems of oppression. The presenters will use examples from their own practice to illuminate the strengths of the organizing tradition as well as the existential challenges that organizers confront today in a climate of radical inequality, social distrust, and the collapse of democratic norms. Issues to be examined include the tension between organizing and mobilization, the definition of authentic community leadership, the role of organizing in policy change, the impact of new technologies on the political ecosystem, and strategies to renew and grow movements for justice in a perilous time. This talk is made possible with support from the UMass-Amherst Community, Democracy, and Dialogue program.

Presented by Zihao Zhang, Assistant Professor and Director of the Landscape Architecture program, City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture

In 1950, when AI research was still in its infancy, Alan Turing posed the now-famous question: “Can machines think?” But since today's large language models like ChatGPT have rendered this question largely obsolete, Zihao Zhang poses another question: Do machines care? This Zube Lecture will begin by exploring the technical and ethical dimensions of this question. Professor Zhang will then introduce solarpunk as a framework to reframe the inquiry through storytelling and speculative narrative. Solarpunk challenges dominant tropes of technological rivalry and dystopia, offering instead visions of co-productive intelligence—imagining machine intelligence not as an adversary, but as a partner in “staying with the trouble.”

Presented by Janet L. Pritchard, Photographer, Professor, and Graduate Advisor at the Department of Art & Art History, University of Connecticut.

Pritchard discusses her work in landscape photography. This talk will focus on her book, More than Scenery: Yellowstone, An American Love Story, an extended project in Yellowstone National Park, and her current project on the Connecticut River titled Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories. Opportunities and limitations of the medium will be discussed throughout.

Presented by Chris Campany, Executive Director of the Windham Regional Commission

Vermont and other New England states are leaders in adopting state policy to reduce climate pollution while experiencing extreme heat, floods, drought, landslides, wildland fire, destructive winter storms, habitat-altering invasive species, and other hazards exacerbated by a warming climate. Each of these risks pose their own hazards, but flooding and fluvial erosion are threatening the livability and, in cases, continued existence of historic settlements around which civic, economic, and social life have revolved since the 1600s. Each state is also experiencing a profound housing affordability and availability crisis. The implications for land use planning and implementation, which in New England are done at a hyperlocal municipal level across several hundred units of government, are profound. Is this governance structure that was born of colonization up to the task of planning and acting for the future? Are disasters pointing to a functional, and existential, need for greater intermunicipal cooperation and regionalization? 

Presented by Dan Pitera, FAIA, NOMA, Hon. FALA, Dean and Professor, University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture + Community Development

"Shaping Change" centers on the premise that built environmental professionals should expand their influence on culture and society. Using Detroit as a case study, the presentation illustrates how to include more people, more programs, and more geographies in the design and building processes. "Shaping Change" explores the position that built environment professionals can be advocates for people who are typically left out of design and place-making decisions. Designers can widen the undertaking beyond some people to include all (or more) people. The lecture also considers the strategic position that people and firms operating in this way are not alternative practices. Instead, they are a part of an ecology that is working to alter how we practice. The talk is grounded in the position that people in the city do not stand in the way; but instead, they are the primary catalysts for urban innovation. 

Presented by Camille Barchers, AICP, Assistant Professor of Regional Planning, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning; Maitreyee Marathe, Lecturer, Electrical and Computer Engineering Program; Regine Spector, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science; Margaret Vickery, Lecturer, Art History Department; and Eve Vogel, Assistant Professor and Geography Program Coordinator, Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences

This multi-disciplinary panel invites UMass Amherst faculty to share their perspectives in examining the interdependencies among energy infrastructure, people, and landscape. It will foreground human- and place-centered approaches to the energy transition, highlighting academic research and creative practices that seek more integrated relationships between infrastructures, the communities they serve, and the environments they shape.