Environmental Bonds for Equitable Community BenefitsREGISTER HERE Walk-ins Welcome!Join renowned UCLA professor and journalist Jon Christensen todiscuss highlights from his new report “Environmental Bonds Should Equitably
Benefit All Communities: Looking Forward Based on an Analysis of Prop 84.” His
talk–with critical importance during this election season–will be followed by
a panel with other leaders:Panel:Alf Brandt, Senior
Counsel for Assembly Speaker Anthony RendonAlina Bokde, Executive Director, Los Angeles Neighborhood Land TrustAlfredo Gonzalez, Program Officer, Resources Legacy Fund (moderator)There will be refreshments and hors d’oeuvres.Synopsis of paper
“A systematic
analysis of spending under Proposition 84, the last major environmental bond
approved by California voters, which in 2006 authorized $5.4 billion to improve
parks, natural resource protection, and water quality, supply and safety. Most
of that money has been spent. And for the first time ever, we have good enough
data to ask some crucial questions.
Where was that funding spent? Who benefited? And
was the spending prioritized as voters expected? The report analyzed $2
billion spent on 2,174 projects in California communities and found decidedly
mixed results.”About the authorJon Christensen is an
adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and
Sustainability, the Department of History, and the Center for Digital
Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a
journalist-in-residence at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability,
a founder of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) in
the IoES, and a senior fellow in UCLA’s cityLAB. He is a partner and strategic
adviser atStamen Design, an interactive design studio specializing in mapping,
data visualization, and strategic communications. And he is a regular columnist
at LA Observed, a contributor to other newspapers and magazines, and a
commentator on radio and television.
Jon was executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, an
interdisciplinary center for research, teaching, new media, and journalism at
Stanford University before coming to UCLA. He has been an environmental
journalist and science writer for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in The
New York Times, Nature, High Country News, and many other newspapers,
magazines, journals, and radio and television shows. Jon was a Knight
Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002-2003 and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose
State University in 2003-2004, before returning to Stanford to work on a Ph.D.
in environmental history and the history of science. He was editor of Boom:
A Journal of California, a quarterly magazine published by the University
of California Press, from 2013 to 2016.
He is currently finishing a book entitled Critical Habitat: A History of
Thinking with Things in Nature and is engaged in a multidisciplinary
digital environmental humanities research project on nature in cities. And he
was a co-coordinator of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Environmental Humanities:
Emergence and Impacts” at UCLA, which resulted in A Companion to the
Environmental Humanities, an edited volume of essays forthcoming from
Routledge.
