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Wednesday, February 15, 4:45PM
Click here to RVSP to this event.
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Increasingly Maine people are asking important questions about the food system: Is our food safe and healthful? Why does the cost of food always seem to be rising every time I go shopping? Is organic food better for you than food generated by the industrial model? Why do we need to regulate foods grown and raised in Maine? And more. At the “end of the food pipeline,” no state in the lower 48 is as dependent upon food imports from other regions and nations as is Maine. It was not always this way, for historically Maine was an important producer of foodstuffs both from the land and the sea. Today, however, Maine is extremely vulnerable to any disruption in the food system, such as fuel price increases that make transportation more expensive. We are vulnerable in another very important way: Maine is one of the nation’s hungriest states. Today better than one-in-every-five children under the age of 16 lives in a food insecure household and the number of people dependent on food stamps (SNAP) and related programs, as well as food banks and pantries, continues to grow. Can we do anything about this? The answer is an emphatic “yes” assuming that we look at food in a system perspective and we determine to collectively address the issues that confront the Maine food system. Click the link for Mark's latest work, Maine's Food System:An Overview and Assessment, from the Maine Policy Review Winter/Spring 2011. __________________________________________________ Mark B. Lapping is Distinguished University Professor in and Executive Director of the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine (USM) in Portland. Educated at the State University of New York at New Paltz (BS, 1967), MIT (Cert., 1972), Emory University (Ph.D., 1972) and Harvard (Cert., 1986), he has held faculty positions at Virginia Tech and the Universities of Missouri and Vermont, as well as leadership posts at the University of Guelph (Ontario), where he founded the School of Rural Planning and Development, Kansas State University, where he served as Dean of the College of Architecture, Planning and Design, Rutgers University, where he was the founding Dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and the University of Southern Maine, where he completed a six-year term as Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs. In 2005-06, he was the Interim President of Unity College in Unity, Maine, known as “America’s Environmental College.” In 2007-09, USM called him back to serve as Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs. A land use and rural planning specialist, he is the author of well over one hundred and fifty scholarly articles, chapters and monographs, and author, coauthor or editor of seven books including Rural Planning and Development in the United States, The Small Town Planning Handbook, Rural America: Legacy and Change, A Long Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England, The Contested Countryside: Issues in the Rural-Urban Fringe, Big Places, Big Plans: Large-Scale Regional Planning in Rural North America,and most recently, Rural Housing, Exurbanization, and Amenity-based Development: The Haves versus the Have-Nots. Lapping has served on the editorial boards of several journals including The Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Agricultural and Human Values, as well as others. He has been and remains a consultant for a number of federal, state/provincial and local governments, and has worked extensively in the United States, Canada, Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia and in several other nations. He sits on the boards of several non-profits and is active in local affairs in his home community of Cumberland Center, Maine.
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USM Professor Jeffrey Gramlich was appointed the first L.L. Bean/Lee Surace Chair in Accounting in the USM School of Business in 2003. His appointment was made possible by a $1 million gift from L.L. Bean, Inc., its board chair, Leon Gorman, his wife Lisa, Jim and Maureen Gorman, and Tom Gorman, who established the chair in memory of L.L. Bean CFO Lee Surace '73, '81, who died in March of 2001. Surace was chair of the USM School of Business' Advisory Council and was a frequent guest lecturer. The USM School of Business is accredited by the prestigious AACSB International. For students seeking the finest education and companies seeking the highest caliber talent, partnership, and educational opportunities, AACSB International accreditation is one of the most important affirmations of sustained quality in the word. For more information about School of Business programs, call 780-4020. |
M President
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