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September 22, 2026
Speaker: Dr. E. Melanie Dupuis
Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Time: 10:20am-11:40am
Location: Rutgers University, Blake Hall, 93 Lipman Dr, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Abstract: Humans have made the world less sustainable. We haven’t been able to fix it. Yet, many people continue to ask, “How do we get there? How do we get to a more sustainable world, despite the obstacles that confront us?” Drawing on my previous work in the history of food reform—Nature’s Perfect Food and Dangerous Digestion—I will argue that sustainable social change requires rejecting the idea of sustainability as a single, perfect vision and embracing, instead, multiple perspectives and ways of knowing. Sustainability, I will argue, is a wicked problem that is too complex for “perfect” solutions. New ways of knowing can provide new ways of acting, of moving beyond current “policy cycle” models to other up new forms of action toward other, more sustainable futures.