Wastelands and Wilderness

Time: 8:00pm

Location: Colton Chapel, LaFayette College

The lecture will address the ways one of modernity's most significant technologies, nuclear power, requires us to grapple with the demands of managing radionuclide-filled lands thousands of years into the future. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity - for reasons of sanctification (so-called "wilderness") or despoilment ("wastelands") - redefines a central feature of the human self - our relation to nature - presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible questions about who we are.