Orin Foster Environmental Lecture Series

Date: September 4, 2026
Time: 2 p.m
Location:  330 Student Union, North Campus

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Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has been widely accused of intentionally and disproportionately damaging Ukraine's environment through acts of war. While Ukrainian law and certain elements of the Geneva Conventions make such actions prosecutable in theory, the reality of doing so has involved significant new approaches to documentation along with a push for new legal avenues to hold the Russian state and individual commanders responsible. In 2025, photojournalist Brendan Hoffman published a major front-page feature article in The New York Times on the topic of ecocide in Ukraine, which he pitched, reported, wrote, and photographed. In this talk, Brendan will discuss the idea of ecocide and share his pictures and reporting on the intersection of war and the environment in Ukraine and beyond.

Brendan Hoffman is an American documentary photographer based in Kyiv, where he has covered Ukraine’s revolutions and war with Russia since 2013. His work explores identity, history, politics, conflict, and the environment, and has appeared in major publications including The New York Times and National Geographic. His photography has been exhibited internationally.

He was a 2018–19 Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine and won the 2018 Philip Jones Griffiths Award for his coverage of the war in the Donbas. He has also received grants from several prominent journalism and documentary organizations.

Date: September 11, 2026
Time: 2 p.m
Location:  240 Capen Hall, North Campus

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When we think about war, we think about what humans leave behind: destroyed buildings, burned vehicles, craters, debris. But what if the landscape itself could testify?

Nataliia’s work had began with a simple idea: if we learn how to read plants, we can learn how to read what happened to a landscape. Through field research in war-affected areas of Ukraine and environmental restoration projects, she uses the tools of plant population ecology based on ontogenetic, gender and vitality parametres of the populations. She asks how populations survive, regenerate, change their structure, and respond to damaged soils, altered water regimes, and other forms of disturbance.

Nataliia will take us into Ukraine’s war-affected landscapes to explore plants as living witnesses of war— organisms that can reveal damage we cannot always see. But the story does not end with destruction. Some of these same plants may also become part of the solution, helping scientists and communities understand where recovery is possible and how damaged landscapes might be restored. 

Dr. Yaroshenko is a Ukrainian ecologist, she holds a PhD in Ecology and studies plant ecology, military-affected landscapes, and ecosystem recovery in Europe and the USA. Her current work explores how plants and ecological change can help us understand, document, and communicate the environmental consequences of war. She is also the creator of enWAR_mental, an environmental communication initiative that uses storytelling and a comic to explain how war affects Ukrainian landscapes and ecosystems, bringing complex environmental science closer to young and non-specialist audiences.

Date: September 18, 2026
Time: 2 p.m
Location:  240 Capen Hall, North Campus

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In 2005, Walmart CEO Lee Scott promised that the Always Low Prices behemoth would sell greener products.  Walmart was the world’s biggest company – the biggest grocer as well as the biggest retailer – so Scott’s promise was stunning.  And it was even more stunning because Walmart was both the most admired and the most hated U.S. corporation.  The company’s fledgling sustainability team soon took unprecedented steps to make Scott’s promise real.  Yet Walmart never aspired to be as green as could be.  Sustainability was a strategy – a way to seek competitive advantage – not a new corporate identity.  The effort to sell greener products had to make business sense.  As a result, executives could justify some initiatives, but not others.  What drove the sustainability effort, and what limited how far Walmart would go?

Date: September 24, 2026
Time: 5:30 p.m (open doors), 6 p.m presentation
Location:  121 Cooke Hall, North Campus

Wild Ones Western New York, in partnership with the Department of Environment and Sustainability, presents a free public educational lecture by Dr. Wayne Gall, one of the foremost naturalists in Western New York. This engaging program explores wetland ecology, glacial history, rare plants, and the remarkable natural history of Western New York’s unique bog ecosystems.

Dr. Gall earned his BA in Biology at SUNY Buffalo; MS in Entomology at University Wisconsin-Madison; and PhD in Zoology at University Toronto. He served on the staff of the Buffalo Museum of Science from 1983-2001, initially as the BMS’ first Administrator-Naturalist of Tifft Nature Preserve, then Curator of Entomology. From 2001-2016 Dr. Gall was Western Regional Entomologist for the NYS Department of Health. From 2016-2023 he was Entomologist for the US Department of Agriculture. 

Date: September 25, 2026

✅ Climate Haven Conversation with Chie

Time: 2pm
Location: Capen 240, North Campus

Faculty expert: Chie Togami
Facilitator: Kacey Stewart, Department of Environment and Sustainability

Join Dr. Chie Togami and Dr. Kacey Stewart for a facilitated conversation about equity, justice, and climate havens.  The discussion will move the conversation from, 'where might migrants go?' to 'climate havens for whom?'.  The event is co-hosted by the Departments of Environment and Sustainability, Theatre and Dance, and the Great Lakes Climate Theater Initiative. 

✅ Seminar

Time: 6 p.m
Location:  210 NSC (Natural Science Complex), North Campus

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Years after the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, made national headlines, lead contamination of drinking water remains a persistent and deeply inequitable public health challenge across the United States. With billions of federal and state dollars now being invested in lead service line replacement (LSLR), important questions remain: Who benefits from these investments? To what extent are communities most affected by lead exposure being prioritized? And where does the lead waste generated through replacement efforts ultimately end up? Drawing on lessons from municipal replacement programs, including recent work in Pittsburgh, PA, this talk explores how decisions about prioritization, implementation, community engagement, and waste management shape both the effectiveness of remediation efforts and their environmental justice implications.

Date: October 23, 2026
Time: 6 p.m
Location:  210 NSC (Natural Science Complex), North Campus

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An essential feature of any society is the capacity of its members to distinguish one another from outsiders and reject outsiders on that basis. In most social insects, and in humans and a few other vertebrates, the membership is anonymous—the animals aren’t required to remember each other as individuals for a society to remain together and stay clearly separated from other such groups. Society members are instead “marked” by shared traits such as a scent in insects and a plethora of characteristics in humans like rituals, clothing, and language. In some species the consistent employment of these markers of identity permit societies to grow enormous—in a tiny minority of species, including our own, without bounds when the conditions permit. I contrast this situation with the societies of most nonhuman vertebrates, which are limited to at most a few hundred by the necessity that each animal recognizes every other member as an individual. Both the “anonymous” and “individual recognition” societies can either be closed or accept outsiders as members, often under stringent conditions, as in humans. How and why anonymous societies emerged in our past is a question of significance for psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and biologists.

Date: November 6, 2026
Time: 2 p.m
Location:  240 Capen Hall, North Campus

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Join us to learn about careers in corporate sustainability. We'll explore what sustainability jobs look like at businesses large and small and share advice for starting a professional journey in this field. 

Working at the intersection of business operations and sustainability, Amanda helps small companies scale resiliently, creating a future where businesses function within planetary boundaries and offer opportunity for team members to have a fulfilling professional experience.

Amanda began her career journey as a sustainability consultant, spending over a decade equipping major organizations like Kimberly-Clark, Tillamook, and The Walt Disney Company with analysis and strategic insights to address their environmental impacts. During this time, she simultaneously laid operational foundations for an international consultancy, steering its growth from an early-stage startup of 20 people to a resilient firm of over 250 change agents.

Transitioning into leadership as COO at a certified B Corp, Amanda ensured that the company’s practices, team development, and financial health were aligned to propel the organization toward its long-term vision while maintaining a thriving workplace culture and doubling the size of the team.

Today, Amanda serves as a strategic partner to visionaries through her own company, Rhythms to Run. She works with small businesses to build operating rhythms that are people-positive and environmentally responsible.

Amanda holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering with a focus in Water Resources. She serves as the President of the Board of Directors for the Western New York Sustainable Business Roundtable and the Vice-President of the Bioregenerative Agriculture Institute.

Date: November 13, 2026
Time: 5:30 p.m (doors open at 5 p.m)
Location:  190 Norton Hall, North Campus

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Safe water requires moving beyond physical displacement to catalytic destruction of PFAS and other persistent contaminants under real-water conditions. Catalysis chemistry provides a powerful means to upgrade impacted water to a quality level that matches its intended use, if materials can be designed for the operational constraints of ambient temperature, atmospheric pressure, and variable water quality. I will describe recent developments stemming from our discovery of room-temperature PFAS-degrading capabilities of boron nitride (BN) under ultraviolet light irradiation. I will explain how BN shows excellent photocatalytic activity due to the presence of structural defects allowing light absorption in the UV-C range, and to the hydrophobic nature of its surface. Catalytic destruction gives hope that PFAS can be permanently removed without resorting to high-temperature incineration.

Date: December 4, 2026
Time: 2 p.m
Location:  240 Capen Hall, North Campus

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Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) is a foundational forest species of the Great Lakes and in Northeast regions of North America. After experiencing a near-extinction event during the Middle Holocene, circa 5500 cal. yr BP (=calendar years Before Present), hemlock recovered to occupy its present-day geographic range. As the species is currently threatened by a number of stressors such as hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) and the effects of rising temperatures due to anthropogenic climate change,  a species distribution modeling (SDM) was used to (1) determine the most important environmental variables associated with historic hemlock distribution in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan (LP), (2) compare these to variable importance estimates for projected late-21st century anthropogenic climate-change scenarios in the LP, and (3) evaluate the effects of spatial scale on model results. Model results indicated spatial scale influences variable importance estimations, with modest changes in hemlock’s range under worst-case climate-change scenarios. The habitat suitability maps created through SDM-based range-shift analysis can be effectively used by land managers and foresters to better assess and allocate resources to specific forest stands containing hemlock.