For anyone interested in the environment, today is your day. It is Earth Day.

It is also an opportunity to hear renowned anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson speak at Wichita State. Her second talk on Tuesday will be about Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Bateson is a retired professor of anthropology and English at George Mason University. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College, and she also serves on the advisory boards of the National Science Foundation and the National Center on Atmospheric Research, working on climate change. She is the daughter of the famous social anthropologist Margaret Mead and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson.

Bateson will be giving a lecture, “Earth Our Kin: Climate Change and the Ecological Threat,” which is about the Man vs. Nature relationship of our society and its potential ecological consequences. She argues that the inability to respond to ecological problems results from lack of cooperation. 

“Cooperation is a form of behavior. But in order to make choices of cooperative behavior and mutually supportive behavior, we have to see nature and society as interdependent,” Bateson said. 

The lecture is set for 7:30 p.m. tonight in Lindquist Hall, room 100. 

Her second lecture, “An Anthropologist Looks at the Abrahamic Faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” is about the importance of understanding these three religions as an issue of national significance. It will be held at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, April 23, in Lindquist Hall, room 100.

Bateson reasons that cooperation is vital in making progress on these issues. She said her work as an anthropologist helped her understand the importance of cooperation and learning from other people.

“As an anthropologist, you learn to be a participant-observer. But that doesn’t mean you’re always an observer. I get put into situations where I’m the professor or I’m giving a lecture, but ideally, we should always think of learning as moving in two directions,” she said. “There isn’t a human being on Earth that can’t teach me something I don’t know.”

Bateson will also talk about decreasing violence in society. Last week, she commented about the recent Boston marathon bombing and the daily use of “war” as a metaphor. 

“Even though we are working for something which is socially very positive, we use this metaphor of war. They had the idea that we could declare war on poverty and win, and get rid of it,” she said. “I’m thinking about the explosions in Boston and why there is so much violence in this society, with gun violence and bombs … and because we think that violence is a way of solving problems. Even the good guys, the guys that are supposed to be keeping the peace, are modeling violent messages to do so.”

Earth Day is not just about respecting the planet and its environment. It is also about respecting fellow human beings. 

As it says on Bateson’s website, “We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”