Next TERC talk: Forest is a Verb: A Landscape Lens on Climate

The next UCDavis Tahoe Environmental Center (TERC) Science Speaks Lecture will be on Oct. 24 at 6 p.m. at Sunnyside Resort. The guest speaker will be award-winning author Judith Schwartz and her presentation, Forest is a Verb: A Landscape Lens on Climate.

This will highlight the way understanding how landscapes “work” will help us address the many challenges we face. While discussions of climate focus on CO2, Judith looks at how the planet manages heat points to water: specifically, the phase changes of water from solid to liquid to gas and back, processes that consume or release tremendous amounts of energy. The good news here is that we have ample opportunity to restore the water cycle by how we interact with the land. She calls attention to infiltration, transpiration, and condensation, and why these basic water processes are pivotal to climate. She introduces the biotic pump concept, which demonstrates how forests drive the movement of moisture around the world and how this affects temperature. Finally, she turns to the promise of ecosystem restoration. She’ll offer examples of healed landscapes she encountered in her reporting—from Zimbabwe and Mexico and beyond—to show how working with natural processes improves the water cycle and local cooling.

Judith D. Schwartz is an award-winning author who focuses on nature-inspired solutions to global challenges. Her book Cows Save the Planet helped spur the soil health movement and, more recently, The Reindeer Chronicles introduced readers to the climate-healing potential of ecosystem restoration. She also wrote the essay "Water is a Verb" in the national best-selling anthology All We Can Save. A graduate of Brown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Judith lives and writes on the side of a mountain in southwestern Vermont.

Enjoy dinner at Sunnyside either before or after the lecture where participants will be treated to 20% off their entire meal.

Can't make it in person? Join them on Zoom at the time of the event or watch the recorded presentation later on their YouTube channel.

For more information call 775-881-7560 ext. 7474, or visit https://tahoe.ucdavis.edu/events.