The School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES) is committed to the health and safety of our campus and community. In accordance with CSU policy and in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, this event has been canceled. Go to https://safety.colostate.edu/coronavirus/ for the most recent information about the University’s pandemic response.

A narrated visual journey through our modern world of 7.5 billion people that considers our expanding footprint, rising prosperity, and resulting environmental challenges that call for our attention and response.

Based on his many years as a picture editor and environment editor for National Geographic magazine, Dennis Dimick presents a fast-moving, vivid slide show lecture that explores and explains the modern human era: how we got here, our current prosperity, and what looms on the road ahead. Dimick frames his visual discussion using an emergent idea called the Anthropocene, or Human Age, a new geologic ear proposed by scientists that marks our trajectory and enduring impact on the planet as population rises, and demand for energy and food increases. He addresses accumulating environmental impacts such as pollution and climatic shifts, and how we might productively respond. His goal is to help us appreciate our place in nature and contemplate how we can contribute towards a more balanced future for ourselves and the planet.

The son of fisheries biologists, Dennis Dimick grew up on a sheep and hay farm in the U.S. Pacific Northwest near Portland, Oregon. After completing agriculture and agricultural journalism studies at Oregon State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dennis in 1974 began a four-decade journalism career that included more than 35 years at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., where he served as a photography editor and for a decade as the magazine’s environment editor. With a focus on the collision between human aspiration and the planet, his National Geographic work included orchestrating major magazine projects on energy, climate change, soil conservation, global freshwater, world population, and the future of food security. Dimick lectures on the emerging Human Age or Anthropocene epoch, and his Eyes on Earth project with photographer Jim Richardson emphasizes seeing the Anthropocene and its meaning.