APPLETON, WIS. — Environmental writer Phil McKenna presents “What China is Doing Right Environmentally” Wednesday, Feb. 11 in the final installment of Lawrence University’s four-part Spoerl environmental studies lecture series. The presentation, at 4:30 p.m. in Lawrence’s Science Hall, 102, is free and open to the public.
While China receives its share of environmental criticism, McKenna, a 1999 Lawrence graduate, will discuss three Chinese environmental success stories. His presentation will examine a solar water heating revolution taking place across the country, rain water harvesting in the arid regions of north central China and the protection of a critically endangered monkey species led by Pan Wenshi, China’s founding father of conservation biology.
Operating out of Cambridge, Mass., and Beijing, China, McKenna serves as a correspondent for New Scientist magazine. He also has written for Audubon and National Wildlife magazines as well as the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
After earning a degree in history at Lawrence, McKenna taught English for a year in China’s Sichuan Province and worked as a field biologist on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service California condor reintroduction program in California and Arizona.
He earned a master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a John S. Hennessy Environmental Studies Fellow and served as an environmental journalism fellow at Middlebury College in 2007-08.
The environmental lecture series is sponsored by the Spoerl Lectureship in Science in Society. Established in 1999 by Milwaukee-Downer College graduate Barbara Gray Spoerl and her husband, Edward, the lectureship promotes interest and discussion on the role of science and technology in societies worldwide.
