Applied Environmental Studies–19 Aug 2026

Researcher and author Thom Van Dooren has argued that we are living in the midst of an era characterized by ‘the dull edge of extinction’: the unravelling of historically entangled human and non-human lives due to climate change and biodiversity loss. This talk uses ‘the dull edge of extinction’ as a way to think about past lives and livelihoods in London and the Netherlands that depended on the European eel, a species whose populations have declined by more than 90% in recent decades.

Seth Gustafson is currently an associate professor at Cal State Monterey Bay in the Applied Environmental Sciences department. Prior to working here, he worked in England at University College London in the Department of Geography and at the Sustainability Research Center at the University of Bremen in Germany. He completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Georgia. His research and teaching interests are in interdisciplinary environmental scholarship, urban environmental problems and politics, historical environments, and community-based environmental research.