MCAD SD faculty member, Krista Leraas, arranged for MCAD’s sustainable design program to sponsor ecological economist, Dr. Nate Hagens, as a guest speaker held at the MCAD Auditorium on July 10, 2014.

Nate is a well-known speaker on the big picture issues facing human society. Until recently he was lead editor of The Oil Drum, one of the most popular and highly-respected websites for analysis and discussion of global energy supplies and the future implications of energy decline. Nate is currently on the Boards of Post Carbon Institute, Bottleneck Foundation, IIER and Institute for the Study of Energy and the Future.

His well–attended talk, The Converging Environmental & Economic Crises: A Pep Talk For Those Paying Attention offered suggestions on how society might better adapt, physically and psychologically, to what’s ahead now that the inexpensive substitution of human labor by fossil fuel and the explosion of available monetary credit are no longer available.

This is the second in a series of talks sponsored in part by MCAD’s Sustainable Design Program. This event was co-sponsored by MN350.

Watch Nate Hagen’s presentation

“One barrel of oil supplants around 11 years of human labor. The average American salary is $44,000 a year. So it’s almost $500,000 [worth] of human labor substituted from this 200 million year old…substance that we’re pulling from the ground.”

Nathan Hagans – MCAD Sustainable Design Program Lecture Series from MCAD on Vimeo.

Learn about sustainability this fall

Krista Leraas will be co-instructing a 15 week course with Joshua Foss this fall entitled, Introduction to Sustainable Design.  It is a fully online course that begins September 2. Registration is open (only a few seats remain!).

Image courtesy of Flickr CC Ryan McFarland