Sustainable Offices

All HGSE students, faculty, and staff interested in making our school healthier and more sustainable are encouraged to join the HGSE Green Team! Come enjoy a (free!) plant-based and planet-friendly lunch and connect with each other to exchange ideas and explore collaborations. Please RSVP for this in-person event by Wednesday, April 2nd for the meeting so we can plan accordingly to avoid food waste. 

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.

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.”
VISIT EXTERNAL LINK

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?”

In this opening program for her Radcliffe exhibition, the artist Alia Farid will discuss her newly commissioned artwork Talismans (Kupol LR 3303). Crafted from petroleum-based plastics and thus freighted with the geopolitical and climate implications of this material’s manufacturing, Talismans (Kupol LR 3303) sets her ancestral stories against the backdrop of global events.

We may not always notice, but our world is rotten. Rot—the process of breaking down once-living materials of our planet—is, in fact, a major part of what makes our world livable. Join environmental educator Britt Crow-Miller for a fun, curiosity-filled and hands-on journey through her book, World of Rot (Storey Publishing, 2024). In this one-hour session, participants will learn the what, where, when, and why of decomposition and get up close to some of the organisms at work in nature’s recycling system. Get ready to meet some hungry fungi, slimy slugs, and wiggly worms–some of these will be alive!

Join the Harvard Office for Sustainability and Harvard Common Spaces for an Earth Day Festival on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 from 12 to 2 pm at the Science Center Plaza!

Attend this talk in which Laura A. Schifter and Jonathan Klein highlight the many ways in which K-12 schools and students have tremendous potential to advance solutions on environmental issues, and they provide frameworks for enacting change, in Students, Schools, and Our Climate Moment. Schifter and Klein demonstrate how the effects of climate change intersect with US public schools on multiple levels—for example, schools must prepare students to face the challenges of an uncertain future, accommodate disruptions brought about by extreme weather conditions, and evaluate their systems’ energy consumption and carbon emissions.

On Wednesday, March 5th, from 1-1:50 PM in FXB G12 or online, please join us for the fourth installment of our Environments for Health and Happiness Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, Chief Science Officer at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child.