In this conversation with Gnosologies host Giovanna Parmigiani, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, shows how sentient mountains and lakes (Apus) channeled by Northern Peruvian shamans address the greatest challenges of our current climate crisis: overcoming our anthropocentrism, our sole focus on human welfare, and justice for humans at the expense of the planet. Bacigalupo argues that by healing epistemic fractures between subject and object, matter and spirit, humans and ecosystems, Apus teach us planetary ethics, restoring our belongingness to the earth.
Bacigalupo discusses how Apus also offer a collective vision of humanity’s future as climate change ravages the world. By decentering the human and gaining awareness of the inevitable end of the space-time of modern industrial civilization and humanity—and of a world that will continue to exist without us—Apus inspire us to respond to the climate crisis. When we accept that humanity will ultimately be destroyed by climate change events, Apus reason, we might mitigate our suffering by engaging in ethical, reciprocal, multispecies relationships to postpone the end of humanity and to reimagine our existence as insects and birds in a post-human world.

Bacigalupo asks, “What could be the implications for our climate crises of truly decentering the human? How might sentient landscapes define and advocate for collective ethics and climate justice? And what kinds of postapocalyptic visions could trigger our moral responsibility toward the earth?”

Join the Harvard Food Literacy Project for a special virtual book talk with editor and Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, Emily J.H. Contois. The book, titled, 'Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation,' examines the ways in which we relate to food and how social media -- especially Instagram, and more recently, TikTok -- has influenced that relationship. During the presentation, Dr. Contois will cover a high-level overview of the book, its contributing writers, as well as some discussion about how social media is part of our food lives. About the book: "Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish edit contributions that explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power."
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The African Landscape Architectures conference brings together a wide range of landscape practices from across the continent. This two-day hybrid event highlights the transformative potential of decolonizing design to address social injustices and prepare African cities for the impacts of climate change. Speakers will explore innovative strategies through frameworks such as ecology, adaptation, and materiality that offer alternative futures for African landscapes.

"A Visual Narrative of Labour Migration and the Environment"
In conversation with:
Kate Beaton, Cartoonist; Writer; Illustrator; Author, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.

Katie Mazer, Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies and Environmental and Sustainability Studies, Acadia University.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

To center the Middle East in scholarly discourse on disasters, the Disaster Studies Initiative at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, is pleased to announce an international conference, scheduled to take place from March 28 to 30, 2025. We thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs for their generous support.

In this day and age, under the shadow of debates surrounding the intensifying climate crisis, is it still possible to think of disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fires, and wars as significant events? Are they political events at all? For whom are they non-eventful, and for whom are they still experienced as shocks and ruptures? If they are no longer analytically or politically relevant events, what are we to make of the landscape, trauma, pain, and avenues of desirable change that disasters often generate? How, then, should we deal with disasters—both past and present?

This presentation will examine the impact of climate change on health through patient cases, providing a framework for assessing climate-related health risks and discussing integrative approaches to care. It will also explore how environmental factors influence integrative medicine, including the role of nature-based therapies in supporting patient well-being, focusing on adapting these strategies for low-income communities and urban areas with limited access to green spaces.

Wynne Armand, MD
Associate Director, Mass General Center for the Environment and Health
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School

Barbara Walker, PhD
Integrative Health and Performance Psychologist, University of Cincinnati, College of Medicine

Passing environmental policy is difficult, because of the – reasonable – concern that it will increase costs. But implementation often leads to systemic changes that make environmental regulation cheaper and easier to implement than expected.

In the Energy Policy Seminar, Beth DeSombre will examine domestic and international regulations to protect the ozone layer, and aspects of the U.S. Clean Air Act regulating power plant and automobile emissions, identifying four specific pathways through which system changes contribute to decreasing costs: disruption of standard operating procedures, innovation, increased availability of alternatives, and creation of enabling mechanisms. Understanding how the implementation of regulations can decrease costs can suggest better or worse approaches to crafting and implementing policy.

Join the Weatherhead Center Canada Program for their Canada Seminar featuring Emma Gilheany, William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Canada Program, and Affiliate, Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP).

Abstract: In this talk, I explore an analytic I have developed called cryo nullius—where icy scapes are perceived by settlers as spectacular, vast, and un-peopled. This perception allows for the conditions of infrastructural violence to manifest in the circumpolar north. I focus in particular on Cold War-era US Air Force radar bases that spanned the circumpolar north as well as present-day Inuit environmental practices to avoid toxicity that has seeped into the land and water from these ruins of technological excess. I argue that Nunatsiavummiut reject this colonial perception of and violence on their sovereign land through the specific materiality of the sub-Arctic. This work is a highly collaborative multi-modal anthropology that engages evidence including archaeological survey, ethnographic research, Inuit oral histories, and archives produced by Inuit governments, missionaries, and the USAF. This project foregrounds Nunatsiavummiut future-making to critique erasures of Indigenous politics and specific environmental harms in discourses of the climate crisis and Anthropocene.

Join the Harvard Human Rights Journal and the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic for a talk by Dr. Daniel Gustafson, Special Representative of the Director-General at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), former Deputy Director-General of the Organization, on “Ensuring the Right to Food in the Face of Climate Change: The Role of UN FAO.”

The talk addresses the interrelations between climate change and global hunger from the perspective of the UN FAO, highlighting how climate change exacerbates food insecurity and hinders the full realization of the right to food, while also examining how food systems contribute to climate change and why their transformation seems essential for both food security and climate mitigation. Dr. Gustafson will provide insights on the UN FAO’s role and current activities, recent challenges and initiatives by countries related to climate change and the right to food. He has over 40 years of international experience working on approaches linking science and policy for food security, sustainable agricultural transformation and capacity development, having been the UN FAO’s Country Representative in Kenya, Somalia, India and Bhutan. Moderated by Professor Emily Broad Leib.