In his two nonfiction books, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, Christopher Cokinos has grappled with the tragedy and inevitability of extinctions. From the cautionary tale of the last known wild passenger pigeon (and how the extinction of that species was human-caused) to the effects of meteorite impacts in the past (and the future), Cokinos frames a discussion of extinction within the contexts of personal responsibility and deep time. Surprisingly, out of literal devastation--such as an impact event 500 million years ago--life can emerge. So our time in the Holocene is, in part, a gift of past extinctions. But how do we live now?

Cokinos is Associate Professor of English and the "Environment and Society" program at Utah State University. Cokinos writes environmental non-fiction and is the editor of Istope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing. He was one of 10 national recipients of the Whiting Writers' Award, given annually to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise. He is also the winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Fine-Line Prize for Lyric Prose (from Mid-American Review), and the Glasgow Prize for an Emerging Writing of Nonfiction. Cokinos is also the winner of fellowships and grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the Utah Arts Council, and the National Science Foundation and as part of his research for The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, he was a member of the 2003-2004 Antarctic Search for Meteorites expedition. His essays, poems and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, High Country News, Ecotone, Orion, Poetry, Western Humanities Review, and Science, among many others.

Thomas Bender is a University Professor of Humanities and History at New York University, and a renowned scholar of urban life, American intellectual history, and the place of the United States in world history. A recipient of the Guggenheim, the Rockefeller, and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he is the author of New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City (1987), Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (1993), The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (2002), and most recently A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006).

Professor Jamieson is Director of the Environmental Studies program at New York University, and a leading figure in environmental ethics. He is the author of Morality's Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford, 2003), A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (Wiley, 2003), Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2008), and numerous articles and book chapters. His research has been funded by both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A symposium on the state of world literature with five international authors: Osman Pontes Conteh
(novelist, Sierra Leone), Fflur Dafydd (novelist, Wales), Soheil Najm (poet, Iraq), Fedosy Santaella (fiction writer, Venezuela), and Lijia Zhang (writer, China).

Barbara Garson is a playwright, author, and public intellectual. She is the author of two classic books about work: The Electronic Sweatshop and All the Livelong Day. The later has several chapters set in and around Portland, Oregon.

Her writing honors include two OBIES, plus MacArthur, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts grants.

Portland’s first international conference of artists, authors, educators, scholars, poets, and dancers sharing visions of a sustainable future.

Paul Collins (author and Professor of English, PSU), Tim DuRoche (artist and Community Programs Manager, Portland Center Stage), John W. Haines (Executive Director, Mercy Corps Northwest), and Ethan Seltzer (Director, School of Urban Studies and Planning, PSU) will lead a public discussion on sustainable housing and public architecture.

The “ecological emergency we have entered is real,” says Morton, au- thor of Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007) and The Ecological Thought (forthcoming). Yet that should not preclude slowing for critical reflection and analysis of this historic moment. To consider ecology “requires us to imagine interconnect- edness and coexistence in a profound and vast way,” a task that ne- cessitates a humanities approach.

Kim Stanley Robinson, award-winning science fiction author, will speak on the benefits of shifting away from a “high carbon- burn lifestyle” to a permaculture model. Robinson will also discuss some of the ideologies expressed in various forms of envi- ronmentalism, capitalism and science.

Robinson, best known for his Mars trilogy—Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars—regularly incorporates themes of sustain- ability and environmental degradation into his work.

damali ayo, artist, author, and activist, will speak on “Creating the First Sliding-Scale Eco-Friendly Clothing Company.” With introductory remarks by Leila Wice, Japanese textile historian and creator of DekoBoko Design.

Bruce Robbins (Ph.D., Harvard) works mainly in the areas of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture. He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics and The Phantom Public Sphere and co-edited Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. He
was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000. He has a book coming out from Princeton University Press on upward mobility stories and is working on another about cosmopolitan fiction.

PSU anthropologist Eric Wynkoop, cross-disciplinary artist and educator Linda K. Johnson, ethical food blogger Lois Leveen, and PSU biologist Lisa Weasel will lead a public discussion on sustainable food production and consumption.

Leo Bersani is the author of Homos (Harvard U. Press, 1995), Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, and Resnais (with U. Dutoit, Harvard U Press, 1993), The Culture of Redemption (Harvard U. Press, 1990), The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (Columbia U. Press, 1986), and The Forms of Violence (with U. Duitoit, Schocken Books, 1985), among others. He is widely published in the areas of modernist art and literature, queer theory, and sexuality studies.

A discussion of controversial pornography that features the fantasy of “barebacking,” sex that intentionally risks the transmission of the HIV virus.

Tim Dean is the author of Beyond Sexuality (2000) and the forthcoming Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and is a Professor of English as well as the Director of the Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. A former British civil servant, Professor Dean was educated at University of East Anglia (BA in Ameri- can Studies), Brandeis University (junior year abroad), and Johns Hopkins University (MA and PhD). His research and teaching interests include Anglo- phone modernism, poetry and poetics, queer theory, gender theory, aesthetic theory, and psychoanalytic theory.