OLLI Nature, Archaeology, Architecture, and Sustainable Solutions in Europe and Australia

Dr. Speer's Sabbatical in 2014, he traveled through 12 countries giving talks on tree-ring research and sustainability at Universities throughout Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. He studied tree rings to reconstruct environmental variable. His wife is an archeologist, so during these travels they visited many archeological sites and he thought about what they were seeing in the context of the lifetime of the trees. He was amazed at the development of culture and language in Mycenae in Greece which was active 3,500 years ago, but then he thought about some individual trees that he worked with that had more than 4,000 rings which put human cultural development in the temporal context of his work. This talk will be a pictorial tour viewing many archeological sites, architecture from some of the major European cities, and nature. From this perspective it seems clear that we need to live in balance with nature and develop more sustainable solutions to the way that we live so he will end with some sustainable solutions that are being promoted in the different countries.