Environmental policy has been a big point of contention between the United States and Europe. How do our perspectives and the implementation of environmental law differ on either side of the Atlantic? Professor Udo Simonis and Professor Alan Schnaiberg will discuss these and other issues.

Udo Simonis has held such diverse positions as Personal Advisor to the President of Zambia; Research Fellow at the Institut for Developing Countries in Tokyo; and Director of the Institut for Housing and City Planning at the Technical University in Berlin. He has been a professor of Economics at the Technical University of Berlin; The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Environmental Policy, Science Center Berlin (WZB); and the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna. Dr. Simonis has been the Director of the International Institut for Environment and Society (IIES), WZB; Chairman of the Committee for Developing Countries, German Economic Association; a member of the Committee for Development Planning of the United Nations; a member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change; Chariman of the Federation of German Scientists; Honorary Member of the Potsdam Institut for Climate Impact Research; and, Co-Chair of the Task Force of Environmental Governance for China.

Alan Schnaiberg is a professor of Sociology at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. His areas of interest include environmental sociology, economy and society, and family. Schnaiberg’s model of the treadmill of production encompassed variations in inequalities and environmental problems across historical periods and across societies. His work is macrostructural, focusing on major economic, political, and social institutions. It is also microstructural, tracing how economic changes have had an impact on family systems. His 2001 book, Urban Recycling and the Search for Sustainable Community Development, involved former IPR fellows on a social and political history of U.S. recycling programs. They traced the programs’ transformation from an environmental and social focus to an economic focus. He is currently working with other Northwestern alumni on a monograph on the evolution of his theory on the treadmill, and a new edition of Schnaiberg and Gould’s (1994, 2000) Society and Environment: The Enduring Conflict.

Recorded Monday, October 08, 2007 at Goethe-Institut Chicago.