2023 Cary Environmental Symposium

The Town of Cary, in cooperation with Trees for the Triangle, Inc., will host the first Cary Environmental Symposium on five consecutive weekend evenings beginning on Friday, September 1, 2023.

Tickets to Events
Links to the Town's ticketing service are posted in the descriptions of the presentations.

Musical Performances
Attendees will enter the Arts Center and take their seats to pieces played on the house's Steinway Model B grand piano by a Cary young lady and gentleman of whom it will proudly be said in future years that we heard them here first.

Free Seedlings
Everyone who attends an event will receive a grassy-stage Longleaf pine seedling. [Or two!] — Please Note: The summer has been too hot and Longleaf seedlings are not ready to ship. I expect them in mid- to late-October. So, if you'd like seedlings, please send an email to George@BeautifyCary.org specifying how many seedlings you'd like, and your address, and I'll deliver them when they arrive.

Here are suggestions for planting Longleaf pine grassy-stage seedlings.

Speakers
Four accomplished speakers will present at the Cary Arts Center. Dates and times are listed below.

Film Screening
Cary native Jamie Berger will screen her award-winning documentary film, The Smell of Money, at the Cary Theater on September 29. The trailer for the film is posted below.

The Goal
The goal of the Symposium is to provoke thoughtful and principled civic debate on the challenges facing our air, land, water, and the effects those challenges have on life here in Cary and on earth. After each presentation, there will be an informal and spirited Question-and-Answer session. The presenters are listed below.

Mayor Harold Weinbrecht

Symposium Kickoff Remarks

The Honorable Harold Weinbrecht
Mayor of the Town of Cary

Stock Photo of a Piano

Pianists

Yuanduo Li – solo
Sonata No.2 : First movement [Frédérick Chopin]
Sonata in C Major, Op.33 No.3 : First movement [Muzio Clementi]

Olivia Li and Yuanduo Li – duo
Vocalise [Sergey Rachmaninoff]
La Valse [Maurice Ravel]

Speakers

Richard Carroll

Richard Carroll

SAVING THE SPIRIT OF THE FOREST

Friday, September 1, 2023
Cary Arts Center
7:00 pm

Admission is free but tickets are required.
Seating is General Admission
Get Tickets

Books written by Dr. Richard Carroll:

After through-walking the Appalachian Trail in 1975 [south to north], Richard joined the Peace Corps and was posted to Africa. He stayed in Africa after leaving the Peace Corps and was recruited by the World Wildlife Fund, eventually rising to its vice-presidency. Along the way, he earned his Ph.D. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He retired in 2010 after 30 years of service. During his time in Africa, Richard idealized, planned, and established the Dzanga-Sangha Forest Special Reserve, one of the largest nature-protection areas in the world.

In creating the Reserve, Richard worked closely with the leadership of the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, and Cameroon, the three countries whose land comprised the 2,650 square miles of the Reserve. In his presentation, Richard will take you on a walk through the Congo Basin and the Reserve to see how the people there, like the citizens of Cary, are trying to save the spirit of the forest, and how our cultural, physical, and spiritual lives are dependent on an intact forest.

Donald Addu

Donald Addu

THE ECONOMIC RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Saturday, September 9, 2023
Cary Arts Center
7:00 pm

Admission is free but tickets are required.
Seating is General Admission
Get Tickets

The risks and damage from climate change are being felt by individuals and businesses across the US. Wildfires, floods, sea level rise, and extreme heat now cost the US billions of dollars and hundreds of lives each year. How do we address these new risks? What can governments and businesses do? What technology is needed? And how do we adapt to our new normal? Join climate veteran Donald Addu for an evening of in-depth discussion and leave with a greater understanding of the issue and its solutions.

Donald Addu is a North Carolina native and a graduate of Appalachian State University with a degree in Ecology and Environmental Biology. As an avid outdoorsman, Donald enjoys fishing, hunting, hiking and rock climbing, all of which influences his work to understand climate change and how it impacts folks in North Carolina and across the South. Donald's work with the non-partisan Citizens Climate Lobby, included speaking tours across the South to places like Murfreesboro, TN, Bowling Green, KY, and St. Augustine, FL to help communities understand the risks and opportunities of taking climate action. Now with Climeworks, Donald works with Chief Sustainability Officers and Chief Risk Officers of Fortune 500 companies to understand the complexity of emission reduction and help these companies reach net-zero.

Douglas Tallamy

Douglas Tallamy

NETWORKS FOR LIFE: YOUR ROLE IN STITCHING THE NATURAL WORLD TOGETHER

Friday, September 15, 2023
Cary Arts Center
7:00 pm

Admission is $20. Tickets are required.
Seating is General Admission
Get Tickets

Biodiversity is essential to sustaining human societies because it is other living things that run our ecosystems. Yet throughout the United States, we have fragmented the habitats that support biodiversity by the way we have landscaped our cities, suburbs, and farmland. Isolated habitats cannot support wild populations large enough to survive normal environmental stresses. We can reconnect viable habitats by expanding existing greenways, building riparian corridors, and by changing the landscaping paradigm that dominates our yards and corporate landscapes. Replacing half the area that is now covered in barren lawn with plants that are best at supporting food webs would create over 20 million acres of connectivity and go a long way toward sustaining biodiversity in the future. How we landscape today will determine what life looks like tomorrow.

Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has taught insect taxonomy, behavioral ecology, and other related subjects. Chief among his research goals is to better understand the many ways insects interact with plants and how such interactions determine the diversity of animal communities.

Basil Camu

Basil Camu

PROJECT PANDO – A COMMUNITY-DRIVEN MODEL FOR HELPING TO HEAL LOCAL ECOLOGY

Saturday, September 23, 2023
Cary Arts Center
7:00 pm

Admission is free but tickets are required.
Seating is General Admission
Get Tickets

Our specific reasons may vary, but we all care about this beautiful planet we call home. Sadly, there is a lot changing here on Earth, including a huge loss of non-human life, topsoil, and clean water.

There is good news: trees were – and are – one of Nature’s most powerful tools for creating and maintaining the planet we know and love today. If we plant many new trees and care for the ones we have, we can begin healing our planet. To do this, we need to make a variety of native plants freely and widely available.

Project Pando is a community-driven effort to collect seeds from local, native trees and then raise these seeds into trees to be given away for free.

During this talk, I'll describe how Project Pando works and discuss its top five goals, which are:

  1. Help people fall in love with Nature
  2. Help reforest the planet with native trees
  3. Create an open-source, local pipeline of free trees that are native to the given area
  4. Help people build skills and knowledge for collecting native seeds
  5. Help generate popularity and best practices for planting small trees

Healthy, native trees in abundance create happy people and a vibrant planet!

Film Screening

Jamie Berger

Jamie Berger

THE SMELL OF MONEY

Friday, September 29, 2023
Cary Theater
7:00 pm

Admission is $10. For Cary Theater members, the cost is $8. Tickets are required.
Seating is General Admission
Get Tickets

Jamie Berger is a writer and documentary filmmaker born and raised in North Carolina. Her writing has been featured in Vox, The Guardian, USA Today, NowThis, The News & Observer, and more. Throughout her career, she has used writing and visual storytelling to draw attention to issues ranging from environmental racism to the climate crisis to other injustices wrought against people, animals, and the planet.

The Smell of Money shows how, a century after her grandfather claimed his freedom from slavery and the family land, Elsie Herring and her North Carolina community fight the world's largest pork corporation for their freedom to enjoy fresh air, clean water, and a life without the stench of manure. See the trailer below:

Sponsors of the
2023 Cary Environmental Symposium

Please patronize and support the Symposium's sponsors.