The New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin to speak at ISU Oct. 24

AMES, Iowa - Andrew Revkin, who has written on global environmental issues for The New York Times since 1995, will speak at Iowa State University on Monday, Oct. 24. "9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ?" will be at 8 p.m. in the Memorial Union Great Hall. His talk is part of the 2011 Pesek Colloquium on Sustainable Agriculture. It is free and open to the public.

Within the next couple of generations, the planet's explosive human population is expected to crest at around 9 billion. Questions about how the peak wave of human population growth and human appetites will play out remain unanswered. Will we overheat or innovate? Conserve or despoil? Crash or escape with a few scrapes? Revkin will discuss ways to make progress on these issues, even in the face of deep complexity and uncertainty.

As a journalist, Revkin made three trips to the Arctic to report on climate change and was one of the first to file stories and photos from the North Pole's floating sea ice. After years of covering events and issues ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon and the troubled relationship of climate science and politics, Revkin left the newspaper's staff in 2009 to become a senior fellow at Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies. A pioneer in multimedia journalism, he continues to write The New York Times' Dot Earth blog, (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/).

Revkin previously worked as a senior editor of Discover Magazine and a senior writer at Science Digest. He authored several books, including "The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest" and "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast." And he recently became the first two-time winner of the Communication Award bestowed jointly by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.

Revkin has a biology degree from Brown University and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Pace University.

Revkin's lecture is cosponsored by The Practical Farmers of Iowa; Live Green! Sustainability Series; Bioeconomy Institute; Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture; the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Liberal Arts and Sciences; the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication; Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture, the departments of Agronomy, Ecology Evolution and Organismal Biology, and Natural Resource Ecology and Management; the graduate program in Sustainable Agriculture; and the Committee on Lectures, which is funded by the Government of the Student Body. More information on ISU lectures is available at http://www.lectures.iastate.edu, or by calling 515-294-9935.