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Can We Talk About Cities And Climate Change?

Thompson Room (Barker Center 110)

As the planet becomes increasingly urban, cities will be expected to absorb many of the impacts of climate change. At the same time, there is mounting evidence that compact urbanization is much more environmentally sustainable than car-centric sprawl. In this conversation we will focus on various dilemmas and complex scenarios. We plan to discuss questions like: what are the trade-offs between prioritizing decarbonization versus adaptation and mitigation? How does climate change present urban governance challenges and opportunities? What are the downstream environmental impacts of the overregulation of housing markets in the U.S.? How can we learn from examples elsewhere in the world? How do market-based and state-led approaches to urban sustainability compare? What roles do cultural narratives and imagination play in opening up or foreclosing a sense of possibilities? Join us for a dialogue with renowned urban specialists: Diane Davis, the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism (GSD), and Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and the Chair of the Department of Economics (FAS). Moderated by Bruno Carvalho, co-Chair of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative and Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center.

Event Series Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Animal Stories, in Crisis

Zoom

Across the Indian Ocean world, communities have shared stories while encountering legacies of modern state-centrism, colonial capitalism, post-colonial environmental destruction and religious reform. Muslim communities, among others, have shared stories of religious environments and animals that were inherited, transmitted, and reinterpreted in light of evolving ecological crises. These stories of multispecies ancestors and colonizers, Islamic conceptions of the environment, and narrative traditions of Islamic ecological care have confronted cycles of crises with visions of pasts and futures. In this session, Teren Sevea will discuss the question, “Can listening to these stories compel us to re-evaluate our academic approaches to religion and environments and the relationship of religious pasts and presents, in our time of crisis?”

Salata Institute Climate Research Cluster Info Session I

Salata Institute Conference Room, Floor 3.5, Belfer, Harvard Kennedy School 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, United States

The Salata Institute is committed to supporting research that promises to make a real-world impact on the climate crisis. The Climate Research Clusters Program delivers on that commitment by funding research about complex climate problems that produces useful and practical solutions. Clusters comprise interdisciplinary, cross-School teams of researchers, whose varied expertise is required to address the complexity of the problems that they seek to solve.

Thinking with Plants & Fungi Series: Luis Eduardo Luna

Common Room, Center for the Studies of World Religions 42 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA, United States

In this conversation, we will explore the science and philosophy of plant intelligence. What have cutting-edge experiments and observational research taught us about plants’ intelligence, agency, or even sentience? How do plants help us rethink these categories? What are the criticisms of these findings, and why? How, if at all, can plant science inspire new forms of care, cooperation, and interspecies relations? What do we still have to learn and explore?

Freecycle | February 2024

Smith Campus Center

Due to inclement weather, this event has been rescheduled from Tuesday, February 13 to Tuesday, February 20. -- Come Freecycle with us!  This popular recurring reuse event, the Freecycle, is like a yard sale where everything is free. The Freecycle promotes reuse by giving you a chance to: Donate items you no longer need and pass […]

Young Adult Literature Authors and Climate Justice: Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor

Zoom

Literature can move people of all generations, including students and educators, as well as scientists, policy makers, journalists, and the public. In this program, award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor will converse with “Massachusetts Super Librarian” Liz Phipps-SoeiLiterature can move people of all generations, including students and educators, as well as scientists, policy makers, journalists, and the public. In this program, award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor will converse with “Massachusetts Super Librarian” Liz Phipps-Soeiro on how writing, reading, and teaching books and comics with themes of climate change and climate justice can encourage young people to learn and think about these issues, while demonstrating the powerful impact of the arts and literature in our communities. ro on how writing, reading, and teaching books and comics with themes of climate change and climate justice can encourage young people to learn and think about these issues, while demonstrating the powerful impact of the arts and literature in our communities.

Young Adult Literature Authors and Climate Justice: Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor

Zoom

Literature can move people of all generations, including students and educators, as well as scientists, policy makers, journalists, and the public. In this program, award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor will converse with “Massachusetts Super Librarian” Liz Phipps-Soeiro on how writing, reading, and teaching books and comics with themes of climate change and climate justice can encourage young people to learn and think about these issues, while demonstrating the powerful impact of the arts and literature in our communities.

Environmental Humanities Seminar With Tobias Hrynick

Plimpton Room (Barker 133)

Tobias Hrynick is an environmental and digital historian, who conducted his PhD. training in medieval history at Fordham University. Hrynick specializes in the institutional responses of pre-modern local governments to environmental stress. His previous work has engaged with conflict over hydraulic resources in the thirteenth-century Kingdom of Jerusalem, and with the religious and political rhetoric of landscapes in medieval maps. Hrynick’s current project examines the social responses of medieval wetland communities to successive climate-linked crises, associated with the end of the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Agricultural communities constructed on drained coastal wetlands were some of the densest and most productive rural landscapes in medieval Europe, but their inherent flood-risk and reliance on complex and labor-intensive drainage infrastructure left them acutely vulnerable to the rise in winter storm flooding, and the labor shortage and economic disruptions following the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death. Both in England and in the Low Countries, radical forms of local government were invented to cope with the rising crisis. Hrynick is currently composing a monograph on one particularly distinctive governmental response, in Romney Marsh, Kent, which eventually became the model for wetland drainage throughout England and its empire into the twentieth century.

Lessons from Latin America: Biodiversity & Nature Based Solutions

Wexner W-434 A.B. 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Biodiversity collapse is happening but there is hope. All Harvard affiliates are invited to join for an intimate Q&A where we will delve into the rich biodiversity of Latin America and explore nature-based solutions from the Latin perspective. Speakers will share the latest insights on conservation efforts, sustainable practices, and innovative political strategies to address biodiversity collapse. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from climate leaders in the field.

Event Series Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope

Zoom

Human-caused climate change already contributes to manifold global disasters. As the planet inevitably continues to warm, these disasters will be routine and unrelenting. Addressing the reality of loss must become a basic spiritual task of our climate present and future, along with summoning the resolve to respond to all our losses. In this session, Matthew Ichihashi Potts will consider the apocalyptic roots of the Christian tradition in order both to diagnose how Christianity has contributed to the present crisis, as well as to suggest possibilities for a different way forward. Through particular attention to grief and hope as religious categories, and with specific reference to various moments and movements from within the Christian tradition, Potts will reflect upon the spiritual crisis at the heart of climate catastrophe and suggest the potential for a religious response.

Speaker: Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

How air pollution impacts our brains

Kresge Building 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, United States

The air we breathe has a direct impact on our brain. Mounting evidence links air pollution exposure to increased risk for cognitive decline and neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Poor air quality — both indoors and outdoors — also profoundly impacts our mental health, increasing risk for anxiety and depression. With the World Health Organization estimating that 99% of the global population is exposed to unhealthy levels of tiny and harmful air pollutants, what can be done to improve air quality and brain health? Our expert panel will break down the latest findings and provide recommendations on policy changes for cleaner air.