Adaptation

Ellen McMahon is a Professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona interested in the relationship between art, design and the environment. Her work has been widely exhibited, collected, published and cited. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars Grant to work as a designer, writer and visual artist with The Center for the Study of Deserts and Oceans in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico (2007) and a University collaborative research grant from Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry (2010) for a project on water combining art and science. The results of this will be published in the Fall of 2012 under the title, Ground|Water: Interdisciplinary Responses to a Dry River. Her recent series of photographs "Phenotypes: Observable Traits, Strange Strangers" is inspired by the history of taxonomy.

I am interested in how the differing modes of inquiry, and methods of communication used by artists, designers and scientists can compliment each other to address environmental issues. In the last five years, my art and design students have worked on projects with conservationists and research scientists. For instance in 2009 my design students worked with Matthew Sullivan, the UA research coordinator of the international project, “TARA Oceans” to create a series of posters about the role of plankton in the earth’s atmosphere. My current project involves UA faculty and students in Art, Architecture and Creative Writing, UA science advisers and the Rillito River Project. Linking geography, environmental science and its translation, design, installation and performance, the goal is to see how these multiple means of communication and representation will render visible, understandable, and inspiring the critical importance of water to the quality of life in the region. As an educator, my goal is to provide rich dynamic experiential learning opportunities to help prepare future designers and artists to adapt to the rapidly changing world and to lead in meeting the environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

Christopher Cokinos is a nature-and-science writer with strong interests in a variety of topics, including climate change (especially geoengineering), extinction, traditional natural history, space sciences, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and improving science communications.

The winner of a Whiting Award, Christopher Cokinos is the author of two literary nonfiction books, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, both from Tarcher/Penguin.Hope Is the Thing with Feathers won the Glasgow Prize and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. For The Fallen Sky, he was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to participate in a meteorite-hunting expedition in Antarctica, and that book was a finalist for the Saroyan Prize.

His books have been featured and praised in such venues as "All Things Considered", People magazine, the Boston Globe, Nature, Science, Natural History, among others; His poems, reviews, aphorisms and essays have appeared widely in such publications as Poetry, Science, Birder World, Hotel Amerika, Orion, The New York Times and The American Scholar; His essays have won the John Burroughs natural-history essay prize and the FineLine Lyric Prose Prize from Mid-American Review
He contributes to both the Los Angeles Times and High Country News His current book project is a history of the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.  In May 2011 he left Utah State University, where he taught for nine years and founded and edited Isotope magazine, to join the MFA program and the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, where he is an Associate Professor.

My interests lie in the interaction between environmental issues and social sciences, more especially in the modeling and measurement of interregional spillovers. In that purpose I use two of the most popular techniques of regional science, namely spatial econometrics and interregional input-output. While the former allows me to measure statistically the extent to which an event in region i spills over neighboring region j, the latter measures to what extent production (and, for instance, the pollution associated to it) in region i is due to demand by consumers/companies located in region j.