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"The Arctic: A Tale of Three Tragedies"
Wednesdays, 2-4 pm
September 30-November 4 (Fall 2009)
Goldman Theater, David Brower Center 

The petite blonde cyclist rode up to ask if I were waiting for Bev, and with a grin introduced herself as she locked up her bike. In her bicycle gear she could be mistaken for a student, but as soon as the conversation began quite, a different person emerged.
 
Beverly Crawford grew up in Modesto and attended UC Davis and Chapman College for a B.A. in German. She relates that she loved her high school German class so much that she took it for all four years and continued that interest in college.
 
Her love of the language and culture got her a Fulbright Fellowship to Berlin in 1970. During the Vietnam War era, her husband was a conscientious objector. They became involved in a program with other conscientious objectors in Berlin, working with disadvantaged young people. Ironically, her next job was in Heidelberg working for the US Army, preparing young men recently returned from Vietnam to enter college. After her daughter was born in Germany, the family returned to the US, where at Boston University she earned her M.A. in International Relations.
 
Following the completion of her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1982, she began writing and lecturing across the US and Europe on international issues and organizations such as NATO, the European Union, and the IMF. She has given lectures on subjects ranging across many areas of study, including peace in the Middle East, Germany's export policies, the impact of 9/11 on world economy, and the causes of war in Yugoslavia. She has taught at UC Santa Cruz, Bocconi University in Milan, the Free University of Berlin, and the Technical University of Dresden.
 
She is at present Associate Director and Associate Research Political Scientist at the Center for German and European Studies as well as Senior Lecturer on the Political Economy of Industrial Societies at UC Berkeley. Under the auspices of the Institute of International Studies, she maintains close ties with similar organizations in Europe and often travels abroad, especially to Germany. She advises Ph.D. students and has a number of research assistants who are currently investigating material for her next OLLI class.
 
Her teaching experience includes several offerings for OLLI. A recent class was on the issues of the last Presidential election campaign. She says she loves teaching for OLLI because of the give and take with her students and the experience and knowledge her they bring to the sessions.
 
Her class for this fall is The Arctic: A Tale of Three Tragedies. This brings to bear many of her passions: international conflict, politics, ,global resource depletion, Climate Change, and global solutions in the form of global governance. Particularly relevant for this class are the IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report on Climate Change and the US Defense Department's report on the security risk to the US of the changes foreseen as a result of climate change.
 
Some of the issues to be discussed will be:

• The Northwest Passage is open during some months of the year for the first time in recorded human history. Who has sovereignty over those waters? Canada? Russia? Denmark? The United States?
• There have been no new reserves of oil found since 1969. Does the shrinking ice, caused by climate change, provide new grounds for exploration?
• Oil exploration and climate change have many negative impacts on indigenous people of the region. How can these be resolved?