By Caitlin Rockett, Boulder Weekly
When seven leading climate experts and conservation visionaries gather at Macky Auditorium on July 25, the ensuing discussion will be 30 years in the making.
According to Amy Lewis of the WILD Foundation — a cosponsor of the panel — the seed for this event was planted in 1987 when John Kineman, the current president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), the second cosponsor of the panel, attended WILD’s annual World Wilderness Congress.
After the Congress, Kineman changed his career path and became an ecologist who has devoted his work life to researching how systems interact with one another. Lewis says when the ISSS annual conference landed in Boulder this year, Kineman came to WILD to ask if they could put together a “sort of star-studded panel for the public that was kind of reminiscent of what we do at the World Wilderness Congress.”