Chestertown, MD, January 9, 2001 — The Historic Avalon Theater in Easton, Md., will host a 2001 Eastern Shore Lecture Series entitled "Journeys Home: People, Nature and Sense of Place." The presentations will explore the value we place on the natural world and give new insights into how those values translate into vibrant, safe and environmentally sound communities.
"Journeys Home" is a subscription lecture series co-sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Horsehead Wetlands Center and the Maryland Center for Agroecology.
The schedule of presenters for 2001 is:
Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Wes Jackson: "The 10,000-Year-Old Problem of Agriculture Can Now Be Solved"
Director and Founder, The Land Institute, Salina, KS. Author of Becoming Native to this Place, sketching his vision for the resettlement of America's rural communities. His most recent work, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, co-edited with William Vitek, was released in 1996.
Tuesday, March 6, 2001
Janisse Ray: "The Country of Longing"
Author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a remarkable first book that juxtaposes growing up as the daughter of a junkyard owner with the ecology of the Georgia longleaf pine ecosystem. Naming the Unseen, her chapbook of poetry about biology and place, won the 1996 Merriam-Frontier Award from the University of Montana.
Wednesday, April 18, 2001
Stephen Kellert: "Values of Nature, Sense of Place, and Human Well-Being"
Professor of Social Ecology, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University. Dr. Kellert was co-author of The Biophilia Hypothesis with E. O. Wilson, a work that explores human values in conservation biology and nature. An earlier work, Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle, highlights his interest in environmental ethics that has made him a major figure in conservation biology.
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
John Hanson Mitchell: "Inventing Place"
Author of Ceremonial Time, Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile, and other books melding history, environment, and place around his home in Massachusetts. Mr. Mitchell freely admits that visits to his Eastern Shore roots were the origin of the values he has developed about people, places, and things environmental.
Wednesday, October 17, 2001
Christopher Tilghman: "The Pull of the Land: Place and Imagination"
Mr. Tilghman’s first book, In a Father’s Place, is a set of stories set against natural landscapes of North America, including Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The novel Mason’s Retreat is about an expatriate Eastern Shore family that, on the eve of World War II, returns to its old estate on Chesapeake Bay. He is noted for being able to set scene after scene with remarkable clarity and sensitivity.
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
Northern Neck Chantey Singers: "Songs of Our Life, Songs of Our Sea"
The series concludes with a live performance of narrative and songs by a troupe of retired menhaden fishermen from Reedville, VA. Their cassette recording, See You When the Sun Goes Down, contains a selection of the chanteys they sing, traditional work songs that all-Black crews sang to coordinate the raising of their fishing nets. Performance organized in cooperation with the Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation, Annapolis.
Ticket prices are $50 for the complete six lectures, $30 for the spring or fall component of three lectures, or $10 per individual lecture. Student tickets are half-priced. All presentations will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Historic Avalon Theatre, Easton. For further information, call Dr. Wayne H. Bell, Director of the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, at 410-810-7171.
