Dr. Ahmad Sultan to Present “Sustainability as if Land Matters”
Mar 14, 2017
DUBUQUE, Iowa – Dr. Ahmad Sultan, PhD, will present “Sustainability as if Land Matters” on Tuesday, March 21, at 6:00 p.m. in Blades Chapel on the University of Dubuque campus.
The lecture, presented by UD’s Scholar-Leader Honors Program, is free and open to the public.
In his talk, Sultan will draw on Aldo Leopold’s concept of “land community” to look at the deteriorating environmental conditions in the Middle East. He will argue that one of the things that undermines the conservation and sustainability efforts in the region is the dominant conceptual paradigm which privileges human sustainability over other members of the land community.
“Sultan brings a thought-provoking perspective on the connections between sustainability, international relations, and environmental education,” said Christine Darr, director of the Scholar-Leader Honors Program and assistant professor of Christian ethics at UD.
Sultan is listed as a regional education expert by the Arab Gulf Bureau of Education of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Currently, he’s translating into Arabic Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949), with a new preface and introduction to the Arabic edition (forthcoming). He is also writing a proposal for an environmental education program based on Leopold’s concept of “a land ethic” for K-16 education in the Arab Gulf states.
Sultan was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. He holds a doctoral degree in curriculum and instruction and sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s degree in instructional systems technology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Sultan completed a bachelor’s degree in educational psychology and Arabic at King Saud University. He has spent most of his academic career teaching educational communications, technology, and sociology. Sultan has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, University of Queensland (Australia), United Arab Emirates University (The United Arab Emirates), and Madison Area Technical College. He is currently an adjunct instructor at Edgewood College in the Educational Leadership Graduate Program.
