Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

The Abrasion of Human and Natural Systems: Fire, Flood, Risk, and Responsibility

Roger Kennedy

At the interface between humanity and nature, fire and flood are telling us that both systems are distempered. The problem is as much civic as biological. We are not doing well in communicating what we know and what we need to know, nor are we tool-makers making full use of the devices at hand, or developing the devices we require, to diminish the likelihood of unnecessary death, pain, and destruction where humans and nature interact. Natural disasters occur, but some may be anticipated and some alleviated once we accept responsibility theologically, historically, and politically. There are good people at work on parts of these interactive and inter-related systems, but there are ways to bring them into better communication, provided with better memory, freed of departmental and bureaucratic inhibitions, and restored to a full sense of what can be done practically and must be done morally. We are the responsible species.

About the Lecturer

From 1993 to 1997, Mr. Kennedy was Director, the U.S. National Park Service. Prior to that he served for thirteen years as Director, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and for the ten years before that at Vice President of the Ford Foundation. He has served six presidents on a variety of boards and commissions, and as Special Assistant successively to the Attorney General, and the Secretaries of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Labor. As a television presenter and producer, he covered the White House for NBC, and appeared on his own radio program on NBC, as well as his own television series on the Discovery Channel. He has also made an appeared in scores of documentaries for public broadcasting. He was a founder (and first chairman) of the Guthrie Theater, and of the Library of America.

His books include: Minnesota Houses, Figures on a Moving Frontier, American Churches, Greek Revival America, Architecture, Men,Women and Money, Orders from France, Rediscovering America, Mission, Hidden Cities, and Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson.

Roger Kennedy