Viveca Morris (Yale University), “The Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative” (Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics)

Speaker/Performer: Viveca Morris, Clinical Lecturer and Research Scholar in Law, and Executive Director of the Law, Ethics and Animals Program at Yale Law School

 

Description: INTERDISCIPLINARY CENTER FOR BIOETHICS: ANIMAL ETHICS STUDY GROUP

 

Launched in 2022, the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative is a research initiative that aims to reduce bird collisions and accelerate the adoption of bird-friendly building design on Yale’s campus and beyond. It is a collaboration of the Law, Ethics & Animals at Yale Law School, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Yale Office of Sustainability, Yale Facilities, and American Bird Conservancy, and is supported by a seed grant from the Yale Planetary Solutions Project. This talk will discuss the initiative’s two major projects: (1) a multi-year project monitoring bird collisions on Yale’s campus and developing an action plan to significantly reduce window collisions at new and existing buildings and (2) a research project on the effectiveness and potential of city bird-friendly building policies.

 

Viveca Morris is a Clinical Lecturer in Law, a Research Scholar in Law, and the Executive Director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School.

 

Morris investigates the impacts of big business on the environment. Her recent research focuses on the role of multinational agribusinesses in the climate crisis, strategies to hold agribusinesses and associated actors accountable for their environmental impacts and externalized costs, and policy reforms needed to make agriculture more sustainable, humane, and resilient.

 

She founded the Law, Ethics & Animals Program, a multidisciplinary initiative dedicated to addressing large-scale industrial abuses of animals and their impacts on the planet, in partnership with Faculty Co-Directors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn. At Yale, she has spearheaded multiple initiatives, including LEAP’s Climate Change & Animal Agriculture Accountability Initiative, which focuses on assessing climate change litigation strategies related to animal agriculture emissions; the Yale Big Ag & Antitrust conference, the first major conference of its kind focused on the role of antitrust laws and competition policy in shaping and transforming the global food system; and the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, a research initiative that aims to reduce bird collisions and accelerate the adoption of bird-friendly building design. Morris co-hosts and produces the Yale University podcast “When We Talk About Animals,” which features in-depth interviews with leading thinkers about animals and the big questions that animals raise about what it means to be human.

 

For more information, please contact animalethics@yale.edu.