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It's time for a Re-hydration Revolution! We can all participate in creating a more water resilient Santa Barbara County. Learn how to sustain our local watersheds in uncertain times with watershed restoration expert Brock Dolman.

Join the SBEE Garden Project for this free evening talk on Friday, June 2nd, at 7:00 pm. Brock Dolman will be sharing his extensive experience working on watershed resilience at the local, regional, and international scales.

Learn how we can begin to restore our watersheds, successfully engage with regulators, and address water insecurity as we continue to experience climate change impacts.

Brock will be highlighting success stories from around the world with practical examples and inspiring stories.

Brock is a wildlife biologist, Permaculture designer and watershed ecologist who has worked as a Permaculture educator and consultant internationally and widely in the U.S.A. Brock Dolman is a co-founder of the Sowing Circle, LLC Intentional Community & Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, where he is a Director of the Permaculture Program, Wildlands Program and the WATER Institute in Sonoma County, California.

This year we will be hosting our celebration of love at the Santa Maria Fairpark on June 10th, 2023. House of Pride and Equality is a local nonprofit organization committed to encouraging Santa Maria to strive for equality for all LGBTQ+ people through social education, visibility, and advocacy. The goal of this event is to celebrate and unite the community through love and human kindness.

The strongest short-term cooling event on Earth over the past 2000 years occurred from 536-550 of the Common Era. Historical accounts of an atmospheric dust veil in AD 536 were reported in many locations throughout the northern hemisphere during this time, including: the Mediterranean basin, the British Isles, and China. Summer crop failures and famine were also widespread during this period, with some scholars suggesting that as many as 50 million fatalities can be traced to this event. Historians have also linked several pivotal world events around this time to the strong 6th century cooling, most notably the first bubonic plague pandemic in Europe (“Plague of Justinian”), a weakening of the eastern Roman Empire, and the rapid ascent of Islam. Although some scientists initially believed that the global cooling might have been caused by a comet or asteroid impact, evidence has emerged over the past decade to implicate a series of strong volcanic eruptions. Evidence from ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica suggest that the three separate eruptions occurred in AD 536, 540, and 547. The second of these was apparently the largest of the three and was of tropical origin. The eruption of Ilopango Volcano in El Salvador is thought to be the AD 540 ‘mystery’ tropical volcano that pushed the planet into a food security crisis during the 6th century. This eruption was a magnitude 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, ranking it as one of the top 10 largest eruptions on Earth over the past 10,000 years.

Join us as we examine the eruption of Ilopango Volcano and explore the regional impacts on Central America during this time, including the suggestion that 250,000+ Maya might have perished as a direct result of scorching pyroclastic flows and thick deposits of ash covering all of El Salvador and adjoining regions of Honduras and Guatemala.


Dr. Robert Dull is the Chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Cal Lutheran. His research seeks to elucidate human-environment relationships over time, with emphases on the Late Prehistoric and Colonial periods in the Americas. Dr. Dull works on topics ranging from deforestation and food production to climate change and natural hazards. He has spent most of his career working in Central America, although he also has ongoing research projects in California. Dull’s work on Ilopango has been featured by many outlets, including Science Magazine, Forbes, New Scientist, and National Geographic. Dr. Dull grew up in Bakersfield, CA and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. Before arriving at CLU in 2019 to Chair the newly formed Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, he held full-time academic appointments at UC Berkeley, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas, Austin.

Johnny Cash was a force in country music. During his nearly half-century of recordings, Cash created a new language for country music, embracing America’s pioneering heritage by exploring its history, culture, folklore, and traditions through music. Beginning as a pioneering rockabilly singer with the legendary Sun label in Memphis, Cash moved on to Columbia Records where he recorded one stunning concept album after another. Across four lectures (summer and fall), we will look at various aspects of Cash’s life and career.

Summer Lectures:

Part 1: Beginnings & Endings - a look at Cash’s early recordings with Sun Records and his final efforts for Rick Rubin’s American label.

Part 2: The Man in Black - we look at Cash’s concept albums during his prime years with Columbia Records

Fall Preview:

Part 1: Live In Prison - A discussion of Cash’s legendary appearances & live recordings at Folsom, San Quentin, and other penal institutions.

Part 2: Storyteller, Activist, Partner - Cash’s recordings of historical events, outlaws, tragedy, and personal stories relating to incidents of his life. Also, his unique performing and personal relationship with June Carter.

Cary Ginell is a Grammy-nominated writer and author of 12 books on American music. After a 30-year career in radio, he has spent the last 20 years as a public speaker, talking about music in classrooms, at conferences, and on cruise ships. Cary brings a lifelong passion for the recording industry to his work and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on his specialty, western swing. Cary previously served as President of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, an international organization of music scholars and world-renowned institutions. He holds a master’s degree in Folklore from UCLA and a bachelor’s in Radio/TV/Film from Cal State University Northridge.

For many, Auschwitz is emblematic of the Holocaust. It signifies terror, atrocity, cruelty, and ultimately death. But like all horrors, it has an origin. More than that, it was a horror created by humanity: it had guards, doctors, and even some prisoners who supported the terror. This two-part lecture will unearth the history of Auschwitz. It will consider the origins of the camp, examine its different subcamps, describe life for the inmates, and attempt to recognize what can happen when racism and hatred are embraced by a society.

Jason Hensley, PhD, teaches religious studies at a private school in Los Angeles. He is a fellow of the Michael LaPrade Holocaust Education Institute of the Anti-Defamation League, a member of Civic Spirit's teacher education cohort, and the award-winning author of 10 books. His work has been featured in The Huffington Post as well as the BBC, and he has served as the historical advisor for a Holocaust documentary.

Inspired by the recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this lecture explores the art of the Tudor Dynasty in England. The Tudors made themselves relevant and powerful with paintings, tapestries, and even clothes. Covering their century-plus reign—118 years, from the ascent of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, the lecture will explore the representations of power and majesty of the Tudor Kings and Queens.

Katherine E. Zoraster is an Art Historian and a Professor of Art History at several local colleges specializing in Western art from the Renaissance to the 20th century. She graduated with a double major in English Literature and Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Following her undergraduate degree, she received a Master’s Degree with Distinction in Art History from the California State University at Northridge.

In addition to the courses Katherine teaches for other lifelong learning programs, she also works as an Adjunct Professor of Art History at Moorpark College and an Art History Instructor for the full-time program at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Arts. Katherine also serves as a commissioner for the Burbank Cultural Arts Commission and volunteers at the Burbank Animal Shelter. In her free time, Katherine is an avid runner and travels extensively.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744) were two of the most important British authors in the early 18th century, known especially for their satires– a literary form that uses humor to critique vice or folly. Swift was the author of Gulliver’s Travels and the infamous essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which he proposed that the poor in Ireland should eat their children to survive the potato famine; Pope authored the mock-epic “The Rape of the Lock” and the poems “An Essay on Criticism” and “An Essay on Man.”

Recent generations of readers/scholars have characterized Swift and Pope as misogynists, as women were often targets of their satiric wit. But during their lifetimes, literacy rates for women were slowly on the rise, especially in the aristocratic classes, and in the 1730s, a pair of “good frienemies,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) and Anne Ingram, Viscountess Irwin (1696-1764), wrote poems mimicking the men’s forms and refuting their critiques, one with sharp humor and the other with powerfully logical argumentation.

In Part I, we will look at Swift’s poem “In a Lady’s Dressing Room” and Montagu’s parodic takedown entitled “The Reasons That Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room.” In Part II we will discuss Pope’s “Epistle 2. To a Lady (Of the Characters of Women” and Irwin’s more earnest and finely crafted response entitled, “An Epistle to Mr. Pope: Occasioned by his ‘Characters of Women.’” Each lecture will briefly introduce the social and political context and relevant biographical details of the respective authors.

Dr. Allix Wee received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota in 2004, specializing in British literature from the Victorian and Modernist periods. A literary historian at heart, Dr. Wee has conducted extensive research in the archives of the British Home Office exploring that government's history of literary censorship, work that encompasses her ongoing commitments to gender and sexuality studies. Her most recent publications focus on teaching literature and gender in the context of the Lutheran educational mission. She has also taught Ancient Greek literature, environmental literature, and young adult literature, and designs all her courses to hone students' critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. Before coming to Cal Lutheran in 2008, Dr. Wee taught at several strong private liberal arts institutions in the Midwest where she grew up, including Carleton College in MN, Denison University in OH, and Grinnell and Luther Colleges in IA.

AI is all over the news today, and its short term impacts have not been trivial. Google rolled out an AI product that made a factual error, and its parent company stock price dropped 9%, temporarily wiping out $100B of market value. And there are a myriad of risks beyond factual errors, with a mix of probability and consequences. Much has been made of the fact that over 100 million people have tried ChatGPT in its first two months of public exposure. And that's just one product, in one branch, of a range of new products called Generative Artificial Intelligence!

So, is it time to crawl under a rock? Will some machine come looking for me one day soon, because I disrespected the potential of AI systems? What are the newly arriving benefits or risks of these technologies? What frameworks can we use, as business and society leaders, to think through the coming tradeoffs? We'll talk about work, jobs, risks, benefits, privacy, security, existential threats, weapons gone rogue, and the like. We'll also talk about regulation, and the proposed 6-month "pause" on new AI development to provide time to get "guardrails" around AI products. And without a doubt, the landscape of what we know and plan for today will be different in August, in June, and likely even tomorrow!

Paul Witman (Ph.D.) is a Professor of Information Technology Management, in California Lutheran University’s School of Management. His research interests include social networking for non-profits, information security, usability, health care information, and electronic banking and finance. Prior to joining Cal Lutheran, Dr. Witman served as Director of Integration Engineering for Digital Insight Corp. and as Director of Global Delivery Systems at Citibank. He earned his Ph.D. in Information Systems and Technology from Claremont Graduate University.

Inspired by the French Art Deco style, the architects and designers of American Art Deco interpreted the style in an exuberant display of stylized geometric and floral elements drawn from sources as varied as the discovery of King Tut’s tomb to innovative modern industrial design. From New York to Los Angeles, the sleek aerodynamic styles of the 1920’s and 1930’s Art Deco era infused modern design with an elegant and sophisticated flair. The course will explore the influential factors and chic forms of Art Deco in architectural design, interior decor, furniture, and decorative objects.

Eleanor Schrader is an award-winning educator, lecturer, and author. She lectures worldwide on art and architectural history, and leads art and architecture tours throughout the world. She has been named a Distinguished Instructor at UCLA Extension, where she teaches history of architecture, interior design, furniture, and decorative arts. She is also Professor Emeritus of Art and Architectural History at Santa Monica College. She has done graduate work in fine and decorative arts at Sotheby's Institute in London and New York. She has served as a Design Review Commissioner for the City of Beverly Hills and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the John Lautner Foundation.

At the start of the 20th century, the art scene in New York severely lagged its European counterpart. Within forty years’ time, New York had become the center of the art world. The crucial event that kickstarted this shift was the 1913 Armory Show, the most important art exhibit in the history of the United States. More than a quarter of a million Americans visited the show and its 1,300 works by avant-garde artists, before the show traveled on to Chicago and Boston. This two-part lecture will take an in depth look at this unprecedented and revolutionary exhibition that changed art in America.

Katherine E. Zoraster is an Art Historian and a Professor of Art History at several local colleges specializing in Western art from the Renaissance to the 20th century. She graduated with a double major in English Literature and Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Following her undergraduate degree, she received a Master’s Degree with Distinction in Art History from the California State University at Northridge.

In addition to the courses Katherine teaches for other lifelong learning programs, she also works as an Adjunct Professor of Art History at Moorpark College and an Art History Instructor for the full-time program at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Arts. Katherine also serves as a commissioner for the Burbank Cultural Arts Commission and volunteers at the Burbank Animal Shelter. In her free time, Katherine is an avid runner and travels extensively.