Discarded: Unmasking & Understanding the Waste Stream
2021 Lear-Conant Symposium
Presented by the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment at Connecticut College

Our full day, virtual symposium hosted experts from across the country as they explored the diverse and often unanticipated ways that human-generated wastes impacts local and global ecosystems, as well as human communities. It probed the scale and forms of capitalism’s indelible contributions to the stratigraphic markers of a still-to-be-defined Anthropocene. Drawing from recent research in the natural and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities, it examined the structures, human impacts, ecological outcomes, and long-term implications of waste and discard in the twenty-first century.

A full day of talks, interactive online engagement, and the live streamed waste interactive, Purged Possessions was live streamed around the world.

This symposium was FREE and open to all, thanks to our generous sponsors: The Lear-Conant Symposium, Beaver Brook Endowed Fund, Jean Thomas Lambert Endowed Lecture Fund, Co-sponsored by the Connecticut College Office of Sustainability, the Environmental Studies Program, the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, and the Anthropology Department.