Speaking on the "front lines of climate change" at UMF, Mar. 27

Tomorrow evening, March 27, I'll be the presenter du jour at the University of Maine at Farmington's Spring 2013 University Forum on the State of the Planet.

I'll be speaking on my experiences as a globetrotting science and environment writer, which have taken me to the front lines of climate change: Antarctica and Greenland, the Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia, The Netherlands and Louisiana, the coral reefs of the Caribbean and the hearing rooms of Washington and Augusta.

The presentation is entitled "The Great Meltdown: Tales from the Front Lines of Climate Change," and will begin at 7 p.m. in the Lincoln Auditorium at the Roberts Learning Center. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Personally, it will be fun to be speaking at UMF, as my family lived in a house tucked in the campus when I was a kid, and I spent a fair bit of my spare time as a third and fourth grader devouring books in the Mantor Library -- World War II aircraft and naval history, if you must know, which came in handy in Micronesia -- and hanging out with friends in (what seemed to us to be) the sprawling student center.

For those interested in more tales from my travels, I recommend my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas.