Clarkson University philosophy professor Bill Vitek will be a featured speaker at the Land Institute’s Prairie Festival in Salina, Kan., at the end of September.

Dubbed an “intellectual hootenanny,” the Prairie Festival is a three-day gathering of scientists, farmers, activists, scholars, and a public interested in alternative food systems, Clarkson said.

This year’s Prairie Festival theme centers on the potential of the major religious and philosophical traditions to facilitate a global shift in ecological thinking.

Vitek will deliver the Strachan Donnelley Memorial Lecture on Conservation and Restoration. Titled “The Perennial Imagination,” Vitek’s presentation links the roles of farmers and philosophers in effecting large scale social transformations in history, and focuses on the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose “philosophy of organism” offers a powerful analog to the current ecological restoration and conservation efforts in forestry and agriculture now underway worldwide, according to Clarkson.