Democracy Café

Our intrepid Democracy Cafe advisory board member Peter Schoonmaker, PhD, has spent the better part of the last year in Dubai. Peter, who earned his PhD in biology at Harvard University, is a prominent environmental scientist and founding chair of the MFA program in Collaborative Design and the MA in Design Systems. One of so many things I admire about Peter, and try in my way to emulate, is his great capacity to listen and observe. So it is that when he trekked to the Middle East, his main goal was not to instruct, though heaven knows he has so much to contribute the world over to environmental problems in need of solutions, but to learn -- and in a way that'll enable him, when he returns to the U.S., to bring with him novel ideas and approaches to solving our most intractable and vexing environmental woes. Listen in.