March 9, 2010- The focus of this year’s Stegner Symposium is the challenge of sustainability and how to create a civilization that is both prosperous and environmentally healthy. The Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law will host its 15th Annual Symposium March 12-13, 2010 at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W. Broadway, in Salt Lake City.

The two-day event will include input from scientists, economists, agriculturists, ecologists, architects, attorneys, and policy analysts who will offer perspectives from industry, academia, and non-profit organizations. It will consider the many facets of sustainability-including what it adds to traditional environmental protection, and how refocusing on the challenge of sustainability can help us live in balance with the Earth.

The symposium opens with a keynote lecture by Pam Matson, Dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University. She will address sustainability’s promise in her speech “How We Can Create a Society that Meets the Needs of Both People and the Planet in the 21st Century.”

Other speakers at the symposium will lay the foundation for understanding sustainability’s three pillars of environment, economic development, and equity-as well as its intersection with population and consumption. Participants will also look at sustainability in context, seeing its application by corporations, in transportation, electronic waste, and energy. Friday will close with another keynote lecture by M.A. Sanjayan, lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy.

On Saturday, the symposium will reconvene for a discussion of sustainability in the American West. Talks will center on water, oceans, agriculture, green building and architecture, as well as biodiversity and wildlife corridors. Author, activist, and environmentalist Chip Ward closes the symposium with a final keynote address on charting a path to a sustainable future.

Additional information, including a copy of the symposium brochure, is available on the Stegner Center website www.law.utah.edu/stegner. For more information, or to register, call 801-585-3440.