April 22, 1970, marked the first celebration of Earth Day, and members of the Penn community, including PennDesign Dean Frederick Steiner, were among the key organizers.

This year, Steiner will join fellow PennDesign faculty members Eugenie Birch and Richard Weller in an Earth Day discussion to reflect on the state of the planet, and to unveil a project that Weller and his students have completed to document land use, urbanization, and conservation titled “Atlas for the End of the World.”

The forum will be held at 4 p.m., on Friday, April 21, in the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, located on the 4th floor of the Fisher Fine Arts Building. A reception will follow in Meyerson Plaza beginning at 5:30 p.m. The event is a joint presentation of the Office of the Dean at PennDesign, the Penn Institute for Urban Research (Penn IUR), and the PennDesign Student Council.

As part of the discussion, Steiner will relate personal anecdotes about the origins of Earth Day and observations about evolving relationships between humans and nature. Birch, the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Education and Research and co-director of Penn IUR, will offer her perspective as an adviser to the United Nations on issues of sustainable urban development. And Weller, the Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair of Urbanism and professor and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, will discuss the research that went into the production of the “Atlas” and follow-up actions.

“It should be a wide-ranging conversation about the culture of Earth Day, global policymaking, and the tension between that and addressing local cultures and specificities and details,” says Weller. “We’ll talk about the responsibilities that come with having colonized the planet and the incredible data that is increasingly available to manage the ecosystems upon which our survival depends.”

Weller’s “Atlas” is an attempt to harness and present some of that data in a format that governments, non-governmental organizations, urban planners, and landscape architects can use to enact better conservation and planning on the ground.

The project began as a response to a United Nations biodiversity conservation target that 196 countries agreed to meet by 2020. The goal is to have 17 percent of the world’s terrestrial areas under managed protection. With expertise in mapping techniques and familiarity with global datasets, Weller and his students decided to see how well the signatories were doing in reaching the goal, specifically focusing on ecological hotspots, areas that are unique and ecologically rich.

“These are parts of the world where if you lose species there, they might be gone for good,” Weller says. “For example, if we knock down a forest in Siberia or the United States, we can get that diversity elsewhere on the planet. But if you raze part of the southwestern coast of Australia or parts of South Africa, then they’re just gone forever.”

The project also examined the growth of urban areas, finding that most are on a collision course with hotspots, threatening biodiversity and endangered species.

Though the outlook for the coexistence of people and the rest of life on Earth can seem daunting, Weller hopes that insights from the “Atlas” will inform planning going forward.

“This is laying the groundwork for us to move into some of these cities and get involved with more creative approaches to making future growth sustainable,” Weller says.

The “Atlas for the End of the World” website will launch on Saturday, April 22.