Mahindra Humanities Center

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.

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.

In February 2020, a group of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawaiʻi in the late nineteenth century. This article explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically 14 iwi poʻo (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Koʻolau mountain range of Oʻahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, I draw upon theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Drawing upon the Native Hawaiian concept of hoʻopahulu, which encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from over-farming in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language), this article highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, I argue against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geogrpahies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state.

This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability

For full details, visit: https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/environment-forum-hi%E2%80%99ilei-hobart-what-returns-what-remains-story-about-hawaiian