Conducting an Environmental Assessment in the Classroom
Sahar Nouredini
Conducting environmental assessments in the classroom can help facilitate discussions about climate change, environmental health and environmental justice. This presentation reviews 5 online tools that allow teachers to integrate an interactive in-class exercise and discussion of environmental health issues/ policies in their curriculum. All resources shared are very easy to use but have more advanced applications that can be utilized depending on the audience.
“Emergent Strategy and the KAN: A Love Letter to the Network”
Sarah Ray
This presentation will describe the impact of participating in the KAN on my thinking and various aspects of my work – including research, service, teaching, but also the immeasurable and uncategorizable stuff – which I now see as all “frontlines” and “fractals” of change, thanks to our time together. As a KAN planning team member, I had the privilege of participating in all four workshops, and gained an enormous amount of knowledge about best practices, learned solutions to commonly-shared problems, cultivated “the muscle of radical imagination” with you all, and built relationships and my own network. The experience emboldened me to more urgently work on projects I suspected were valuable, such as integrating both service learning & community-based education and professionalization into environmental studies curriculum, changing institutional incentives around what “counts” as research in my role as program leader, building courses that serve students’ lives as social change agents, and investing in relationships with my colleagues in other disciplines, units, and institutions.
However, the most valuable lesson for me was what I gained by immersing myself in a book that shaped our workshop process, Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown. Some of you may remember Abby Reyes discussing the book in her facilitation process. This book has helped me acknowledge the value of all those other efforts, rather than feel burnt out or paralyzed in the face of the scale of the world’s problems and institutional barriers to our goals. In this presentation, then, I want discuss how this book helped me see the work of the KAN and the work I do in my daily life in radically new ways. From Emergent Strategy, I propose we approach our work in terms of:
– cultivating community and relations (committing ourselves to span an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around)
– valuing conversation over deliverables
– expanding our notion of what counts as “action,” based on Brown’s nonlinear and iterative view of social change
– shifting toward resilience as a priority over “problem-solving,” in both pedagogy and curriculum development
– increasing appreciation for the theory of the fractal for understanding how change happens and for grasping the power we each all hold
– emphasizing the importance of self-care for ourselves and our students
– shifting curriculum toward affective resilience and emergent strategy as opposed to just content or “marketable skills”
– paying attention to what we want to grow, rather than all the things that are wrong (in life, pedagogy, how we spend our time and attention, in committees and other collaborations, etc.)
– doing work that fuels us.
In what ways might the KAN manifest emergent strategies for the network’s stated goals? How can principles of emergent strategy help us understand our work, both in and outside the KAN?
The Chico 2030 Project: Climate Forecasting for Everyone
Mark Stemen
For most Californians, the climate issue remains geographically distant, so they can easily dismiss it. Faculty reinforce this distance in our classrooms when we describe potential climate impacts that are hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Cal-Adapt has the potential to change that classroom dynamic. The new climate-modeling tool developed by the California Energy Commission (CEC) now allows anyone to model climate in California by zip code.
My presentation will describe how students in GEOG 506: Community Service in Geography used the Cal-Adapt climate tools to forecast the climate in Chico, CA for the period 2030-2050. Students then met, data in hand, with key staff at the City of Chico to catalog potential impacts to the community and City services. Their findings and all research materials were placed on the web to allow others to continue the project.
The CEC developed Cal-Adapt primarily for use by public planners. In my class, however, we discovered the tool is also useful in the fields of public health, criminology and creative writing. Some students used the tool to explore past connections between heat waves and hospital visits and crime rates, while others wrote fictional accounts of the near future using the forecasts available with Cal-Adapt. This presentation will demonstrate how faculty from across the campus can use Cal-Adapt to improve the teaching of climate change in their classes.
Q & A
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Nosce Te Ipsum: Bridging our values and actions in addressing climate change
Ryan Alaniz
Scholarship on anthropogenic causes of climate change has expanded exponentially in the last three decades. Academics are well-versed on the challenges political economy, social values (consumption), and “development” pose to the future of our planet. However, the lens has rarely been flipped. This short presentation discusses how our pontification in research and the classroom may not correlate with our own lifestyles. By developing a self-reflexive approach in our own lives, I argue we will be better suited to not only discuss climatic impacts and the interaction between the micro- and macro-levels, but also positively exemplify concrete strategies in reducing our ecological footprint.
Food waste and Sustainability: Modeling how to bring university initiatives to life in a K-12 setting
Chelsea Arnold
In this talk we will showcase the Zero Waste initiative on the UC Merced campus and how we are working with local K-12 teachers and students to increase awareness of how much trash that goes to landfills can actually be composted, recycled and/or reused. We dive into what it means to go “Zero” waste and some of the challenges of going zero waste on a college campus through a series of hands on activities led by undergraduate students in the CalTeach program. Students investigate the ins and outs of recycling bins, signage and what it really takes to change behavior when it comes to throwing out the trash.
Reducing Carbon Emissions through Middle School Science cCrriculum
Eugene Cordero
Strategies to mitigate climate change often center on clean technologies such as electric vehicles and solar panels, while the mitigation potential of a quality educational experience is rarely discussed. In 2011, I started working with artists and educators to create learning materials that would inspire young people to take action in response to climate change. This work centered around the character and storyline of Green Ninja, a climate-action superhero who helps kids understand what they can do to make a difference. Today we are building on Green Ninja media to create formal middle school science curriculum that satisfies the new standards and inspires youth-action on climate change. This work leverages a number of successful programs that demonstrated reductions in carbon emissions through school-based programs. In this talk, I’ll describe the work we’ve been doing and our plans for integrating technology into our curriculum to monitor and track carbon emissions. I’ll also discuss the important role that collaboration across disciplines has played in the success of Green Ninja, and how important future collaborations will be in demonstrating the environmental benefit of quality education.
The Sustainable City Year Program – Enhancing Sustainable Ideas and Practices through Partnerships Between Campuses and Regional Governing Bodies
Daniel Fernandez
A program to enhance sustainable practices established at the University of Oregon is spreading throughout dozens of campuses nationally and internationally. This program involves formalized yearly partnerships between campuses and regional governing bodies, typically city governments.
Traditionally, city governments and campuses function quite independently from each other. Campuses offer cutting-edge educational opportunities for their students that typically do not address or integrate the needs of their partner cities. Conversely, city governments have enormous responsibilities for maintaining and improving the environment of their residents and often do not have sufficient resources, capital, or access to new and innovative ideas that may enhance policies, practices, procedures and projects that they are responsible for.
Furthermore, city governments, while often theoretically supportive of projects that enhance regional sustainability, often lack the necessary bandwidth to pursue such projects that extend beyond the status quo of regular operations.
Enter the Sustainable City Year Program, a partnership between a campus, such as CSU Monterey Bay, and a partner city, which was the City of Salinas from 2015-2017 and will be the City of Seaside from 2017-2018. Through this program during the 2016-2017 school year, 11 classes across campus participated in the program from disciplines as diverse as teacher education, business, journalism, environmental studies, and statistics. The instructor for each course integrated a sustainability-based project within her/his curriculum based upon the stated needs of the city partner and students within each class generated and followed through on the associated projects. The City provided funding to support each instructor in their efforts.
This program’s benefits are multi-faceted. One clear benefit is that it provides students with relevant learning experiences that directly benefit the regional community/city in some aspect that works toward enhanced sustainability and livability. Another is that it provides the City with support to promote enhanced sustainability within the scope of their operations. It enhances the often rather limited connections between regional governing entities and their neighboring universities. It also opens opportunities for employment for university students and sets up a pipeline of potential hires for the governing bodies, which tend to have an aging workforce. Finally, and perhaps most relevant, it opens the door to sustainable ideas that the city can pursue in its operations that it may not have even considered prior.
Resilience, Justice, and Hope: Foundations and Inspiration for Young People’s Meaningful Involvement in Climate Change
Victoria Derr
A recent report from the American Psychological Association identifies children’s mental health impacts due to climate change and environmental uncertainty. These impacts extend from Inuit and Aboriginal populations to urban children in the U.S. who are profoundly concerned about our planet’s future but do not feel empowered to act. In this presentation, I will explore the foundations that support young people’s meaningful participation, ideas of resilience and constructive hope, and inspiring examples that show a variety of ways positive action can occur.
Envisioning Sustainable Futures and Other Tools of Reflection
Summer Gray (UC) Santa Cruz
In the digital age of corporate capitalism, the tools of representation are no longer monopolized by corporate media, but are at the fingertips of our students. This talk puts forth the concept of “cinematic sociology” and explores some of the creative and emergent ways in which issues of climate change, climate crisis, and climate justice can be infused into a variety of learning environments. The goal of this method is to foster a relational and intersectional understanding of social problems as they relate to the future of the planet.
We Are Wiser Together: Intergenerational Collaboration for the Common Good
David Shaw
How can we work intergenerationally to usher in “The Great Turning” from the industrial growth society towards a life sustaining society? In this presentation I discuss principles for working together across generations, and share examples of intergenerational dialogues I have hosted at UC Santa Cruz, the California Student Sustainability Coalition, and the national Bioneers Conference using the World Cafe methodology. Let’s collaborate across the cycle of life to shape our shared future.
Working for Environmental and Climate Justice: Faculty, Students, and NGOs
David Pellow
The continuing scourge of environmental and climate injustice in communities across the globe requires urgent action and creative solutions. Environmental and climate justice scholarship and movements reveal that communities marginalized by our political, economic, and social systems tend to also face greater threats and challenges associated with environmental and climate disruption. In this talk, I describe cases where university scholars, students, and NGOs came together to address some of these challenges to produce new knowledge in the service of socioenvironmental change.
Climate and Context: Looking at Climate Data in Monterey and across the U.S. High School and Undergraduate Curriculum
Corin Slown
Students use two tools:
1) U.S. Climate Explorer for the Climate Resilience Toolkit – A resource for visualizing and downloading data on climate change for the US. https://toolkit.climate.gov/climate-explorer2/
Using the two resources above students evaluate future changes to temperature, precipitation, and sea level for a location in Monterey County. Students then repeat this analysis for another city in the U.S. (for example, Houston, TX, Miami, FL, Lincoln, NE, or New York, NY). Helping students construct knowledge to discover climate change is only one piece of learning. Creating opportunities to empower students to make positive changes to address climate change is a second, pivotal piece.
Q & A
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Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
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Pedagogies of Empowerment: Teaching Climate Change without Hopeless Despair
Amanda Baugh
When we teach students about climate change and other environmental problems, how can we convey the enormity and urgency of the situation without leaving students in a state of hopeless despair? In this presentation I discuss some strategies I have employed to achieve that goal.
We need to change our diets to save our climate, our health, and our communities
David Cleveland
Our food system, including on our college and university campuses, is dominated by private corporate profit with huge externalized costs – it contributes 25% or more of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, and fuelsan epidemic of noncommunicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancers,with low income communities and POC bearing a disproportionate level of the costs. Diet change is required to successfully tackle the climate-health-justice problem, but is challenged by the political power of the food industry, the institutions it has co-opted, and behavioral inertia. Policies to promote diet change include top down regulation and price adjustments, and activation of values like autonomy and fairness.
Call to Action: Building a Movement for Climate Justice and Sustainable Economies
Rosa RiVera Furumoto
1. Preservation and revitalization of the language, culture, values, and traditions of Chicana/o/Latina/o and Native American community members;
2. Involvement and engagement of multiple generations in the teaching and learning processes including children, parents, grandparents, and other kin and community members;
3. Critical pedagogical practices to promote critical thinking, reflection and action regarding climate change, sustainability, and other social justice issues and;
4. Promoting connection, love, and respect for nature and the environment via outdoors exploration and the establishment of urban gardens and forests.
Digital Environmental Humanities in Chicana/o Communities
Stevie Ruiz
In this talk, I talk about my experience with teaching and research pertaining to the involvement of Chicana/o communities in the great outdoors. I provide some techniques and student driven teaching to engage students using the digital humanities in environmental justice research. I argue that there are significant implications for democratizing the dialogue about climate resilience that takes into consideration Chicana/o engagement with the great outdoors and the types of knowledge that immigrant communities provide that will save our planet from ecological catastrophe.
Epistemological Differences
Valerie Wong and Allison Mattheis
This talk brings together a scholar from the humanities, a social scientist, and a natural scientist to explore our understandings of research approaches and ontological assumptions about data and objectivity. We first present the beliefs that underlie particular modes of inquiry and communication in our distinct fields, and then engage in a collective presentation of how these points of view can expand, rather than create conflict, in discussions of climate change. By uncovering points of difference we also explore areas of convergence in order to advocate for sustainable future practices in our communities.
Q & A
Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
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John Foran is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at UCSB, teaching courses on climate change and climate justice, activism and movements for radical social change, and issues of alternatives to development and globalization beyond capitalism. His books include Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (1993) and Taking Power: On the Origins of Revolutions in the Third World (2005). He has served as UCSB’s Sustainability Champion, works on the UC Carbon Neutrality 2025 effort, and is co-facilitator of this year’s Critical Issues in America series – Climate Futures: This Changes Everything. His research and activism are now centered within the global climate justice movement, and can be found at the Climate Justice Project [www.climatejusticeproject.com] and the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory [www.iicat.org]. He is a member of 350.org, the Green Party of California, and System Change Not Climate Change.
Ken Hiltner (UC) UC Santa Barbara
Ken Hiltner is a Professor of the environmental humanities at UCSB. The Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI), Hiltner has appointments in the English and Environmental Studies Departments. He has published five books, including Milton and Ecology, What Else is Pastoral?, Renaissance Ecology, and Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, as well as a range of environmentally oriented articles. Hiltner has served as Director of UCSB’s Literature & Environment Center, its Early Modern Center, the English Department’s graduate program, and as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. Prior to becoming a professor, for many years he made his living as a furniture maker. A second-generation woodworker, he received commissions from five continents and had collections featured in major metropolitan galleries.
Q & A
Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
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Engaging American Indian students in Earth System Science through a Residential Summer Camp
Julie Ferguson (UC) UC Irvine
Native Americans are one of the most under-represented groups in geoscience despite a critical need for qualified environmental professionals within tribal communities who can help in managing resources and planning for the changes expected as a result of climate change. This talk will describe a 5-year NSF-funded project which brought American Indian high school students to UC Irvine for a 2-week Earth System Science summer camp (AISIESS). Students spend the first week camping at the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians reservation where they participate in hands-on scientific activities with academic staff and the tribal environmental professionals. The second week is spent at UC Irvine where students complete Native Studies classes and work on individual projects related to environmental issues specific to their tribal community. I will describe the aspects of the camp that we felt had the most impact on students, and our ideas for continuing to increase the participation of American Indian students in geoscience and other STEM fields.
Latina Environmentalist Activism in Los Angeles: the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade
Gabriela Nuñez (CSU) CSUF
I build on the work of scholars of the humanities who argue that “the humanities provide an imaginative space and set of critical tools for grappling with issues of power, representation, and materiality. Historical knowledge and interpretive skills help us untangle the oftentimes invisible connections between ordinary structures of feeling, habit, and the political facts of the modern carbon economy that fuels climate change” [Teaching Climate Change in the Environmental Humanities, edited by Stephen Siperstein, Shane Hall, & Stephanie LeMenager (New York: Routledge, 2017), 4]. What role can Chicanx cultural production have in the teaching of climate change and sustainability? My presentation speaks to this question to consider how we can use Chicanx cultural texts in the classroom to teach the vital connections between social justice, feminism, climate change and sustainable ways of living. By focusing on the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade I discuss how this group co-opts the language of fear and history of colonialism to assert themselves as cyclists and activists.
Can the Resilience Commitment be an Effective Step in Transforming our Curriculums, Campuses, and Communities for Climate Justice?
Lily House-Peters
This talk will draw on my firsthand experience implementing the Second Nature Resilience Commitment at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). The Resilience Commitment is a comprehensive 3-year campus planning and community engagement process that aims to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience to future climate impacts. The concept of resilience has been troubled in the academic scholarship, receiving critique from multiple disciplines for its lack of attention to power relations, politics, and social/environmental justice. However, the process of operationalizing the Resilience Commitment at CSULB has sought to thoughtfully engage these critiques and move forward with issues of diversity, power imbalances, and climate justice as core organizing themes. Thus, I will attempt to tackle the question of whether the Resilience Commitment can function as an effective step in transforming our curriculums, campuses, and communities to achieve climate justice goals. I will share our experience with the process, including opportunities and obstacles, and discuss how we are working to infuse resilience into a broad range of campus and community activities.
Teaching professional and leadership skills, sustainability awareness, and self-efficacy through collaborations between university and high school classes
Jessica Pratt
Communication and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and between communities of learning and practice are essential to addressing the myriad conservation and sustainability issues facing our society. One step in achieving this is to foster mutually beneficial relationships between the university and the community to promote positive social and environmental change. A learning objective that educators often have for students is effective communication of course content to broad audiences. Assignments relating to this learning objective typically only require students to interact directly with other students in their classes; where students conduct and present research projects on relevant issues this often means they are “preaching to the choir.” Integrating student-public interactions into courses through community-engaged scholarship and presentation of course projects to audiences outside of the university setting provides students with a more empowering experience that teaches essential professional and leadership skills. In particular, collaborations between university and high school classes on such projects can increase sustainability awareness and self-efficacy for all students. Interaction in such settings allows students to increase the impact of their research, network with important community groups, form mentoring relationships, and contribute to a shared vision for sustainability locally.
Student Experts and Partners: Engaging Student Strengths in the Climate Justice Classroom
Jade Sasser
Students today have access to a broad range of digital platforms, many of which they engage with daily. Drawing on student knowledge and expertise in digital communications and social media platforms repositions them as partners in the classroom and offers strong opportunities for pedagogical innovation. In this talk, Ireview examples of how I have partnered with students to develop lesson plans, interactive assignments, data repositories, and opportunities for creative advocacy and other engagement on gender, justice, and climate change.
“Feeling Funny about Environmental Crisis: How and Why to Teach beyond Gloom and Doom”
Nicole Seymour (CSU) CSUF
I will explain how I teach texts that model a broad range of affective responses to climate change — that is, that move beyond “gloom and doom” to showcase irony, irreverence, and other “inappropriate” feelings. These texts do multifaceted work: first, they identify climate change as an affective (and not just scientific, or even political) issue, they open up discussions with students around their own feelings, and they demonstrate the political contributions of traditions such as parody and satire.
Undergraduate Research: Design as an Umbrella for Examining Sustainability and Addressing the Human-Animal Equation
The Jaguar Umbrella Project is a collaborative and community-engaged research project pairing jaguar conservation with interactive media. Undergraduate research is the linchpin in this interdisciplinary art endeavor, which brings conservation biology to K-12 education and the public through art and design. The Jaguar Umbrella Project partners with conservation biologists, Samia Carrillo-Percastegui and Mathias Tobler, who study jaguars in the Amazon with the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research in Peru. The project relies on the design innovations of CSUSM undergraduate researchers, Kodie Gerritsen and Sarai Silva Carvajal. We discuss an integrated arts and science approach to teaching K-12 students about complex ecosystems and personal responsibility. Through this lens we ponder the role of human beings as planetary actors in the Anthropocene.
Doing History is Climate Action? Collaborating with Non-Profits on Storytelling and Public Education Projects
Kristina Shull
I will discuss how a “Climate Refugees” History methods and writing course I taught in the Winter of 2017 at UCI has become a springboard for producing a collaborative multi-media project that features the stories of migrants in US immigration detention and refugee camps abroad. Collaborators on the project include the non-profit Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), undergraduate and graduate students, UC and CSU professors, and UCI’s Office of Sustainability.
Q & A
Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
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Special Panel: Making Sense of the 2016 Presidential Election
[easy-share buttons=”facebook,twitter,linkedin,mail” counters=0 native=”no” image=https://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/yusuke-asai-waf-1.jpg url=https://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/?p=15122 facebook_text=Share twitter_text=Tweet linkedin_text=Link text=”Making Sense of the 2016 Presidential Election at #ehi16 nearly carbon-neutral conference.”]
Ken Hiltner
Recorded on November 9th, the day after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, event co-organizer Ken Hiltner invites all conference participants to take part in an open discussion of what the election of Donald J. Trump means not just for us today, but also for the world in 2050.
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Scroll down for talk transcript.
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0:00 So, during this Nov. 2016 conference,
0:06 which takes as its theme The World in
0:09 2050, something altogether extraordinary,
0:12 almost unthinkable happened. And that is
0:15 that the world in 2050 changed,
0:17 significantly – and not I fear for the
0:21 better. I know, I am making it sound like
0:25 something out of a sci-fi, or more to the
0:27 point, a cli-fi novel where some event,
0:32 so epically important, that it forever
0:35 changed the timeline so that
0:38 decades later millions, maybe
0:41 billions, of people will be effected.
0:43 But I have to say that I believe that the
0:47 election yesterday of Donald J Trump, the
0:51 2016, November 8th election election of
0:55 Trump, may well be one of the most
0:58 significant events in the early part of the
1:00 twenty-first century. I not really sure
1:03 what would compete with it, maybe
1:05 something like the very
1:07 important agreement coming out of the
1:09 COP21 in December of last year. I
1:13 think that these two events may well be
1:16 forever yoked together in history.
1:20 It’s not just because of what Trump
1:23 may do. For example, regarding the
1:27 COP21, he may renegotiate that agreement.
1:30 But it’s also what he might undo:
1:34 Fifty years of environmental activism &
1:36 legislation, starting in the 1960s and
1:40 ’70s with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water
1:42 Act, Solid Waste Disposal Act, the EPA,
1:46 leading up to and including things
1:51 like the Obama Clean Power Plan, which
1:53 Trump may very early in his
1:55 administration completely rescind.
1:58 It is unclear exactly what will happen,
2:02 but it seems clear that it will
2:07 effect generations out from
2:10 where we are now. So, the organizers of
2:14 this conference, John and I and everyone
2:16 else involved, wanted to take the
2:20 opportunity to give everyone who
2:23 is participating in the conference
2:25 the opportunity to weigh in on this.
2:27 You know, there are some wonderful
2:29 panels going on, some exciting Q&As, and
2:32 I really don’t want to take any
2:33 attention away from those. But,
2:36 given the timing of this event, I thought
2:39 that it would be important
2:44 for us to clear a space for discussion.
2:46 So, that space is below the video you’re
2:50 watching. Feel free to to comment. It
2:53 would be great to get a discussion
2:55 going in order to try to make sense of
2:59 what, for a lot of us, doesn’t make a
3:01 whole lot of sense – and has kind of
3:03 stunned us. So, I will not make you listen
3:07 to me any further, but do please
3:10 comment and let’s try to to think about
3:14 this together. Okay, thanks.
Note that to the right of the video is an unabridged transcript for this talk (scroll down to view).
Q & A
Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
https://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ehi4.png00Ken Hiltner (UC Santa Barbara)https://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ehi4.pngKen Hiltner (UC Santa Barbara)2016-11-09 20:25:552018-05-02 16:21:34
James Beard Award-winning author Anna Lappé explores the connections between what we eat and the fate of the planet: from the climate crisis to the mounting public health epidemic of chronic disease to worsening economic inequality. It’s all connected. But alongside this story of the negative impacts of our food system, Anna delivers a message of hope: All around the world, from the urban farms of Philadelphia to the organic fields of India’s Andra Pradesh, communities are showing the powerful potential of sustainable fair food systems and charting a path to this more ethical way of eating.
Anna Lappé is an internationally recognized expert on food systems and the national bestselling author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. She is a recipient of the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award and a TIME magazine Eco Who’s Who. In 2011, Anna founded Real Food Media, Which works with grassroots partners nationwide to catalyze creative storytelling about food, farming, and sustainability. With her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, she is also the co-founder of the Small Planet Institute and Small Planet Fund, which has raised and given away more than $1 million since it was founded a decade ago. Anna works with other philanthropists to foster food system change and leads The Panta Rhea Foundation Food Program.
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https://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/diet-for-a-hot-planet_cover1-1-e1478731429168.jpg456300Chris Walkerhttps://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ehi4.pngChris Walker2016-11-09 14:47:262018-05-02 16:21:34UCSB Talk: Anna Lappe, “Your Plate and the Planet: The Ethical Implications of our Modern Diet”
In Bruno Latour’s words, people are ill equipped emotionally and mentally to deal with the scale of environmentally destructive events in the Anthropocene. Eco-horror has historically grappled with the terrors of scale, from a classic concern with mutant creatures who teach humanity a lesson about tampering with nature to the contemporary fascination with and dread of nature as an all pervasive, inescapable force that reworks the human body and mind now that we have changed everything by geo-engineering and recomposing the material world from the level of the molecule to the atmosphere.
In an age of supposed technological mastery over nature, an epoch during which humans supposedly exert a total global reach over nature (a feat desired at least since the Enlightenment), how does Eco-Horror capture the way Western culture psychologically processes the “pushing back” of materiality, the sensation of “nature biting back” as mass species extinctions, global climate change, etc.? Eco-horror represents this recalcitrant materiality as collective anxiety and desire. The genre figures our unconscious knowledge that the feeling of domination civilization has given us is a delusion: “Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature” (Joseph Dodds) and our secret “hope that she will [n]ever be entirely subdued to man” (Freud).
Eco-Horror rehearses the communal desire to dominate a feminized nature in order to assert our human subjectivity and rationality. On the other hand, the genre expresses an underlying masochistic impulse to relinquish our autonomy by dissolving in nature’s power and dwelling in the wilds of the leaky id by deploying perceptual (affective) and aesthetic technologies that undo gender, race, and species. As a part of this series, we will consider whether Eco-Horror’s transmission of affect contributes to more destruction, violence, and political apathy? How does the genre update the trope of the feminized nature from early colonial narratives to a newly reanimated corpse-mother aesthetic that represents our collective fear of and desire for this new cyborg-like nature? The goal of the series is to explore how contemporary Eco-Horror cinema rehearses the gender/race/species politics as an incongruity between a faith in human evolution and a fearful sense of wish fulfillment regarding the possibility of human degeneration, thereby bringing to crisis the unconscious guilt and hope that the social and environmental damage is reversible.
[easy-share buttons=”facebook,twitter,linkedin,mail” counters=0 native=”no” image=https://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/yusuke-asai-waf-1.jpg url=https://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/?p=13646 facebook_text=Share twitter_text=Tweet linkedin_text=Link text=”Upcoming UCSB US-China Forum on Climate Change featured in the Santa Barbara Independent.”]
https://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/the-bay.jpeg262193Chris Walkerhttps://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ehi4.pngChris Walker2016-10-28 10:47:352018-05-02 16:21:34Literature & Environment Film Series, “Eco-Horror and the Revenge of Nature” on Nov. 30th
In Bruno Latour’s words, people are ill equipped emotionally and mentally to deal with the scale of environmentally destructive events in the Anthropocene. Eco-horror has historically grappled with the terrors of scale, from a classic concern with mutant creatures who teach humanity a lesson about tampering with nature to the contemporary fascination with and dread of nature as an all pervasive, inescapable force that reworks the human body and mind now that we have changed everything by geo-engineering and recomposing the material world from the level of the molecule to the atmosphere.
In an age of supposed technological mastery over nature, an epoch during which humans supposedly exert a total global reach over nature (a feat desired at least since the Enlightenment), how does Eco-Horror capture the way Western culture psychologically processes the “pushing back” of materiality, the sensation of “nature biting back” as mass species extinctions, global climate change, etc.? Eco-horror represents this recalcitrant materiality as collective anxiety and desire. The genre figures our unconscious knowledge that the feeling of domination civilization has given us is a delusion: “Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature” (Joseph Dodds) and our secret “hope that she will [n]ever be entirely subdued to man” (Freud).
Eco-Horror rehearses the communal desire to dominate a feminized nature in order to assert our human subjectivity and rationality. On the other hand, the genre expresses an underlying masochistic impulse to relinquish our autonomy by dissolving in nature’s power and dwelling in the wilds of the leaky id by deploying perceptual (affective) and aesthetic technologies that undo gender, race, and species. As a part of this series, we will consider whether Eco-Horror’s transmission of affect contributes to more destruction, violence, and political apathy? How does the genre update the trope of the feminized nature from early colonial narratives to a newly reanimated corpse-mother aesthetic that represents our collective fear of and desire for this new cyborg-like nature? The goal of the series is to explore how contemporary Eco-Horror cinema rehearses the gender/race/species politics as an incongruity between a faith in human evolution and a fearful sense of wish fulfillment regarding the possibility of human degeneration, thereby bringing to crisis the unconscious guilt and hope that the social and environmental damage is reversible.
[easy-share buttons=”facebook,twitter,linkedin,mail” counters=0 native=”no” image=https://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/yusuke-asai-waf-1.jpg url=https://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/?p=13646 facebook_text=Share twitter_text=Tweet linkedin_text=Link text=”Upcoming UCSB US-China Forum on Climate Change featured in the Santa Barbara Independent.”]
https://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/the-host-1.jpeg1080719Chris Walkerhttps://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ehi4.pngChris Walker2016-10-28 10:43:332018-05-02 16:21:34Literature & Environment Film Series, “Eco-Horror and the Revenge of Nature” on Nov. 9th
COMMA will be hosting the first event in its 2016-17 series, “Modernist Energies.” On Friday, Oct. 28th at 12:00 in SH 2635 they will screen Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film, Enthusiasm. Vertov’s first sound film tracks the efforts of Ukrainian miners in the Donbass coal mines to fulfill their part of the first five-year plan in only four years. Following the screening, there will be a discussion of the film and two essays by Jonathan Beller and Sergei Tret’iakov. Pizza and drinks will be provided!
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https://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Enthusiasm_MPOTW.jpg497700Chris Walkerhttps://live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ehi4.pngChris Walker2016-10-28 10:23:092018-05-02 16:21:34COMMA film series “Modernist Energies” hosts screening of Vertov’s “Enthusiasm” on Oct. 28
UC-CSU KAN CONFERENCE
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 4: HUMBOLDT AREA TEAM
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Conducting an Environmental Assessment in the Classroom
Sahar Nouredini
Conducting environmental assessments in the classroom can help facilitate discussions about climate change, environmental health and environmental justice. This presentation reviews 5 online tools that allow teachers to integrate an interactive in-class exercise and discussion of environmental health issues/ policies in their curriculum. All resources shared are very easy to use but have more advanced applications that can be utilized depending on the audience.
“Emergent Strategy and the KAN: A Love Letter to the Network”
Sarah Ray
This presentation will describe the impact of participating in the KAN on my thinking and various aspects of my work – including research, service, teaching, but also the immeasurable and uncategorizable stuff – which I now see as all “frontlines” and “fractals” of change, thanks to our time together. As a KAN planning team member, I had the privilege of participating in all four workshops, and gained an enormous amount of knowledge about best practices, learned solutions to commonly-shared problems, cultivated “the muscle of radical imagination” with you all, and built relationships and my own network. The experience emboldened me to more urgently work on projects I suspected were valuable, such as integrating both service learning & community-based education and professionalization into environmental studies curriculum, changing institutional incentives around what “counts” as research in my role as program leader, building courses that serve students’ lives as social change agents, and investing in relationships with my colleagues in other disciplines, units, and institutions.
However, the most valuable lesson for me was what I gained by immersing myself in a book that shaped our workshop process, Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown. Some of you may remember Abby Reyes discussing the book in her facilitation process. This book has helped me acknowledge the value of all those other efforts, rather than feel burnt out or paralyzed in the face of the scale of the world’s problems and institutional barriers to our goals. In this presentation, then, I want discuss how this book helped me see the work of the KAN and the work I do in my daily life in radically new ways. From Emergent Strategy, I propose we approach our work in terms of:
– cultivating community and relations (committing ourselves to span an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around)
– valuing conversation over deliverables
– expanding our notion of what counts as “action,” based on Brown’s nonlinear and iterative view of social change
– shifting toward resilience as a priority over “problem-solving,” in both pedagogy and curriculum development
– increasing appreciation for the theory of the fractal for understanding how change happens and for grasping the power we each all hold
– emphasizing the importance of self-care for ourselves and our students
– shifting curriculum toward affective resilience and emergent strategy as opposed to just content or “marketable skills”
– paying attention to what we want to grow, rather than all the things that are wrong (in life, pedagogy, how we spend our time and attention, in committees and other collaborations, etc.)
– doing work that fuels us.
In what ways might the KAN manifest emergent strategies for the network’s stated goals? How can principles of emergent strategy help us understand our work, both in and outside the KAN?
The Chico 2030 Project: Climate Forecasting for Everyone
Mark Stemen
For most Californians, the climate issue remains geographically distant, so they can easily dismiss it. Faculty reinforce this distance in our classrooms when we describe potential climate impacts that are hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Cal-Adapt has the potential to change that classroom dynamic. The new climate-modeling tool developed by the California Energy Commission (CEC) now allows anyone to model climate in California by zip code.
My presentation will describe how students in GEOG 506: Community Service in Geography used the Cal-Adapt climate tools to forecast the climate in Chico, CA for the period 2030-2050. Students then met, data in hand, with key staff at the City of Chico to catalog potential impacts to the community and City services. Their findings and all research materials were placed on the web to allow others to continue the project.
The CEC developed Cal-Adapt primarily for use by public planners. In my class, however, we discovered the tool is also useful in the fields of public health, criminology and creative writing. Some students used the tool to explore past connections between heat waves and hospital visits and crime rates, while others wrote fictional accounts of the near future using the forecasts available with Cal-Adapt. This presentation will demonstrate how faculty from across the campus can use Cal-Adapt to improve the teaching of climate change in their classes.
Q & A
Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
UC-CSU KAN CONFERENCE
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 3: MONTEREY BAY AREA
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Nosce Te Ipsum: Bridging our values and actions in addressing climate change
Ryan Alaniz
Scholarship on anthropogenic causes of climate change has expanded exponentially in the last three decades. Academics are well-versed on the challenges political economy, social values (consumption), and “development” pose to the future of our planet. However, the lens has rarely been flipped. This short presentation discusses how our pontification in research and the classroom may not correlate with our own lifestyles. By developing a self-reflexive approach in our own lives, I argue we will be better suited to not only discuss climatic impacts and the interaction between the micro- and macro-levels, but also positively exemplify concrete strategies in reducing our ecological footprint.
Food waste and Sustainability: Modeling how to bring university initiatives to life in a K-12 setting
Chelsea Arnold
In this talk we will showcase the Zero Waste initiative on the UC Merced campus and how we are working with local K-12 teachers and students to increase awareness of how much trash that goes to landfills can actually be composted, recycled and/or reused. We dive into what it means to go “Zero” waste and some of the challenges of going zero waste on a college campus through a series of hands on activities led by undergraduate students in the CalTeach program. Students investigate the ins and outs of recycling bins, signage and what it really takes to change behavior when it comes to throwing out the trash.
Reducing Carbon Emissions through Middle School Science cCrriculum
Eugene Cordero
Strategies to mitigate climate change often center on clean technologies such as electric vehicles and solar panels, while the mitigation potential of a quality educational experience is rarely discussed. In 2011, I started working with artists and educators to create learning materials that would inspire young people to take action in response to climate change. This work centered around the character and storyline of Green Ninja, a climate-action superhero who helps kids understand what they can do to make a difference. Today we are building on Green Ninja media to create formal middle school science curriculum that satisfies the new standards and inspires youth-action on climate change. This work leverages a number of successful programs that demonstrated reductions in carbon emissions through school-based programs. In this talk, I’ll describe the work we’ve been doing and our plans for integrating technology into our curriculum to monitor and track carbon emissions. I’ll also discuss the important role that collaboration across disciplines has played in the success of Green Ninja, and how important future collaborations will be in demonstrating the environmental benefit of quality education.
The Sustainable City Year Program – Enhancing Sustainable Ideas and Practices through Partnerships Between Campuses and Regional Governing Bodies
Daniel Fernandez
A program to enhance sustainable practices established at the University of Oregon is spreading throughout dozens of campuses nationally and internationally. This program involves formalized yearly partnerships between campuses and regional governing bodies, typically city governments.
Traditionally, city governments and campuses function quite independently from each other. Campuses offer cutting-edge educational opportunities for their students that typically do not address or integrate the needs of their partner cities. Conversely, city governments have enormous responsibilities for maintaining and improving the environment of their residents and often do not have sufficient resources, capital, or access to new and innovative ideas that may enhance policies, practices, procedures and projects that they are responsible for.
Furthermore, city governments, while often theoretically supportive of projects that enhance regional sustainability, often lack the necessary bandwidth to pursue such projects that extend beyond the status quo of regular operations.
Enter the Sustainable City Year Program, a partnership between a campus, such as CSU Monterey Bay, and a partner city, which was the City of Salinas from 2015-2017 and will be the City of Seaside from 2017-2018. Through this program during the 2016-2017 school year, 11 classes across campus participated in the program from disciplines as diverse as teacher education, business, journalism, environmental studies, and statistics. The instructor for each course integrated a sustainability-based project within her/his curriculum based upon the stated needs of the city partner and students within each class generated and followed through on the associated projects. The City provided funding to support each instructor in their efforts.
This program’s benefits are multi-faceted. One clear benefit is that it provides students with relevant learning experiences that directly benefit the regional community/city in some aspect that works toward enhanced sustainability and livability. Another is that it provides the City with support to promote enhanced sustainability within the scope of their operations. It enhances the often rather limited connections between regional governing entities and their neighboring universities. It also opens opportunities for employment for university students and sets up a pipeline of potential hires for the governing bodies, which tend to have an aging workforce. Finally, and perhaps most relevant, it opens the door to sustainable ideas that the city can pursue in its operations that it may not have even considered prior.
Resilience, Justice, and Hope: Foundations and Inspiration for Young People’s Meaningful Involvement in Climate Change
Victoria Derr
A recent report from the American Psychological Association identifies children’s mental health impacts due to climate change and environmental uncertainty. These impacts extend from Inuit and Aboriginal populations to urban children in the U.S. who are profoundly concerned about our planet’s future but do not feel empowered to act. In this presentation, I will explore the foundations that support young people’s meaningful participation, ideas of resilience and constructive hope, and inspiring examples that show a variety of ways positive action can occur.
Envisioning Sustainable Futures and Other Tools of Reflection
Summer Gray (UC) Santa Cruz
In the digital age of corporate capitalism, the tools of representation are no longer monopolized by corporate media, but are at the fingertips of our students. This talk puts forth the concept of “cinematic sociology” and explores some of the creative and emergent ways in which issues of climate change, climate crisis, and climate justice can be infused into a variety of learning environments. The goal of this method is to foster a relational and intersectional understanding of social problems as they relate to the future of the planet.
We Are Wiser Together: Intergenerational Collaboration for the Common Good
David Shaw
How can we work intergenerationally to usher in “The Great Turning” from the industrial growth society towards a life sustaining society? In this presentation I discuss principles for working together across generations, and share examples of intergenerational dialogues I have hosted at UC Santa Cruz, the California Student Sustainability Coalition, and the national Bioneers Conference using the World Cafe methodology. Let’s collaborate across the cycle of life to shape our shared future.
Working for Environmental and Climate Justice: Faculty, Students, and NGOs
David Pellow
The continuing scourge of environmental and climate injustice in communities across the globe requires urgent action and creative solutions. Environmental and climate justice scholarship and movements reveal that communities marginalized by our political, economic, and social systems tend to also face greater threats and challenges associated with environmental and climate disruption. In this talk, I describe cases where university scholars, students, and NGOs came together to address some of these challenges to produce new knowledge in the service of socioenvironmental change.
Climate and Context: Looking at Climate Data in Monterey and across the U.S. High School and Undergraduate Curriculum
Corin Slown
Students use two tools:
1) U.S. Climate Explorer for the Climate Resilience Toolkit – A resource for visualizing and downloading data on climate change for the US. https://toolkit.climate.gov/climate-explorer2/
2) NOAA Sea Level Rise Map Viewer https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/
Using the two resources above students evaluate future changes to temperature, precipitation, and sea level for a location in Monterey County. Students then repeat this analysis for another city in the U.S. (for example, Houston, TX, Miami, FL, Lincoln, NE, or New York, NY). Helping students construct knowledge to discover climate change is only one piece of learning. Creating opportunities to empower students to make positive changes to address climate change is a second, pivotal piece.
Q & A
Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
UC-CSU KAN CONFERENCE
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 2: NORTHRIDGE AREA TEAM
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Pedagogies of Empowerment: Teaching Climate Change without Hopeless Despair
Amanda Baugh
When we teach students about climate change and other environmental problems, how can we convey the enormity and urgency of the situation without leaving students in a state of hopeless despair? In this presentation I discuss some strategies I have employed to achieve that goal.
We need to change our diets to save our climate, our health, and our communities
David Cleveland
Our food system, including on our college and university campuses, is dominated by private corporate profit with huge externalized costs – it contributes 25% or more of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, and fuelsan epidemic of noncommunicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancers,with low income communities and POC bearing a disproportionate level of the costs. Diet change is required to successfully tackle the climate-health-justice problem, but is challenged by the political power of the food industry, the institutions it has co-opted, and behavioral inertia. Policies to promote diet change include top down regulation and price adjustments, and activation of values like autonomy and fairness.
Call to Action: Building a Movement for Climate Justice and Sustainable Economies
Rosa RiVera Furumoto
1. Preservation and revitalization of the language, culture, values, and traditions of Chicana/o/Latina/o and Native American community members;
2. Involvement and engagement of multiple generations in the teaching and learning processes including children, parents, grandparents, and other kin and community members;
3. Critical pedagogical practices to promote critical thinking, reflection and action regarding climate change, sustainability, and other social justice issues and;
4. Promoting connection, love, and respect for nature and the environment via outdoors exploration and the establishment of urban gardens and forests.
Digital Environmental Humanities in Chicana/o Communities
Stevie Ruiz
In this talk, I talk about my experience with teaching and research pertaining to the involvement of Chicana/o communities in the great outdoors. I provide some techniques and student driven teaching to engage students using the digital humanities in environmental justice research. I argue that there are significant implications for democratizing the dialogue about climate resilience that takes into consideration Chicana/o engagement with the great outdoors and the types of knowledge that immigrant communities provide that will save our planet from ecological catastrophe.
Epistemological Differences
Valerie Wong and Allison Mattheis
This talk brings together a scholar from the humanities, a social scientist, and a natural scientist to explore our understandings of research approaches and ontological assumptions about data and objectivity. We first present the beliefs that underlie particular modes of inquiry and communication in our distinct fields, and then engage in a collective presentation of how these points of view can expand, rather than create conflict, in discussions of climate change. By uncovering points of difference we also explore areas of convergence in order to advocate for sustainable future practices in our communities.
Q & A
Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
UC-CSU KAN CONFERENCE
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 1: OPENING REMARKS
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John Foran (UC) UC Santa Barbara
John Foran is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at UCSB, teaching courses on climate change and climate justice, activism and movements for radical social change, and issues of alternatives to development and globalization beyond capitalism. His books include Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (1993) and Taking Power: On the Origins of Revolutions in the Third World (2005). He has served as UCSB’s Sustainability Champion, works on the UC Carbon Neutrality 2025 effort, and is co-facilitator of this year’s Critical Issues in America series – Climate Futures: This Changes Everything. His research and activism are now centered within the global climate justice movement, and can be found at the Climate Justice Project [www.climatejusticeproject.com] and the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory [www.iicat.org]. He is a member of 350.org, the Green Party of California, and System Change Not Climate Change.
Ken Hiltner (UC) UC Santa Barbara
Ken Hiltner is a Professor of the environmental humanities at UCSB. The Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI), Hiltner has appointments in the English and Environmental Studies Departments. He has published five books, including Milton and Ecology, What Else is Pastoral?, Renaissance Ecology, and Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, as well as a range of environmentally oriented articles. Hiltner has served as Director of UCSB’s Literature & Environment Center, its Early Modern Center, the English Department’s graduate program, and as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. Prior to becoming a professor, for many years he made his living as a furniture maker. A second-generation woodworker, he received commissions from five continents and had collections featured in major metropolitan galleries.
Q & A
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UC-CSU KAN CONFERENCE
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 1: FULLERTON AREA TEAM
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Engaging American Indian students in Earth System Science through a Residential Summer Camp
Julie Ferguson (UC) UC Irvine
Native Americans are one of the most under-represented groups in geoscience despite a critical need for qualified environmental professionals within tribal communities who can help in managing resources and planning for the changes expected as a result of climate change. This talk will describe a 5-year NSF-funded project which brought American Indian high school students to UC Irvine for a 2-week Earth System Science summer camp (AISIESS). Students spend the first week camping at the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians reservation where they participate in hands-on scientific activities with academic staff and the tribal environmental professionals. The second week is spent at UC Irvine where students complete Native Studies classes and work on individual projects related to environmental issues specific to their tribal community. I will describe the aspects of the camp that we felt had the most impact on students, and our ideas for continuing to increase the participation of American Indian students in geoscience and other STEM fields.
Latina Environmentalist Activism in Los Angeles: the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade
Gabriela Nuñez (CSU) CSUF
I build on the work of scholars of the humanities who argue that “the humanities provide an imaginative space and set of critical tools for grappling with issues of power, representation, and materiality. Historical knowledge and interpretive skills help us untangle the oftentimes invisible connections between ordinary structures of feeling, habit, and the political facts of the modern carbon economy that fuels climate change” [Teaching Climate Change in the Environmental Humanities, edited by Stephen Siperstein, Shane Hall, & Stephanie LeMenager (New York: Routledge, 2017), 4]. What role can Chicanx cultural production have in the teaching of climate change and sustainability? My presentation speaks to this question to consider how we can use Chicanx cultural texts in the classroom to teach the vital connections between social justice, feminism, climate change and sustainable ways of living. By focusing on the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade I discuss how this group co-opts the language of fear and history of colonialism to assert themselves as cyclists and activists.
Can the Resilience Commitment be an Effective Step in Transforming our Curriculums, Campuses, and Communities for Climate Justice?
Lily House-Peters
This talk will draw on my firsthand experience implementing the Second Nature Resilience Commitment at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). The Resilience Commitment is a comprehensive 3-year campus planning and community engagement process that aims to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience to future climate impacts. The concept of resilience has been troubled in the academic scholarship, receiving critique from multiple disciplines for its lack of attention to power relations, politics, and social/environmental justice. However, the process of operationalizing the Resilience Commitment at CSULB has sought to thoughtfully engage these critiques and move forward with issues of diversity, power imbalances, and climate justice as core organizing themes. Thus, I will attempt to tackle the question of whether the Resilience Commitment can function as an effective step in transforming our curriculums, campuses, and communities to achieve climate justice goals. I will share our experience with the process, including opportunities and obstacles, and discuss how we are working to infuse resilience into a broad range of campus and community activities.
Teaching professional and leadership skills, sustainability awareness, and self-efficacy through collaborations between university and high school classes
Jessica Pratt
Communication and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and between communities of learning and practice are essential to addressing the myriad conservation and sustainability issues facing our society. One step in achieving this is to foster mutually beneficial relationships between the university and the community to promote positive social and environmental change. A learning objective that educators often have for students is effective communication of course content to broad audiences. Assignments relating to this learning objective typically only require students to interact directly with other students in their classes; where students conduct and present research projects on relevant issues this often means they are “preaching to the choir.” Integrating student-public interactions into courses through community-engaged scholarship and presentation of course projects to audiences outside of the university setting provides students with a more empowering experience that teaches essential professional and leadership skills. In particular, collaborations between university and high school classes on such projects can increase sustainability awareness and self-efficacy for all students. Interaction in such settings allows students to increase the impact of their research, network with important community groups, form mentoring relationships, and contribute to a shared vision for sustainability locally.
Student Experts and Partners: Engaging Student Strengths in the Climate Justice Classroom
Jade Sasser
Students today have access to a broad range of digital platforms, many of which they engage with daily. Drawing on student knowledge and expertise in digital communications and social media platforms repositions them as partners in the classroom and offers strong opportunities for pedagogical innovation. In this talk, Ireview examples of how I have partnered with students to develop lesson plans, interactive assignments, data repositories, and opportunities for creative advocacy and other engagement on gender, justice, and climate change.
“Feeling Funny about Environmental Crisis: How and Why to Teach beyond Gloom and Doom”
Nicole Seymour (CSU) CSUF
I will explain how I teach texts that model a broad range of affective responses to climate change — that is, that move beyond “gloom and doom” to showcase irony, irreverence, and other “inappropriate” feelings. These texts do multifaceted work: first, they identify climate change as an affective (and not just scientific, or even political) issue, they open up discussions with students around their own feelings, and they demonstrate the political contributions of traditions such as parody and satire.
Undergraduate Research: Design as an Umbrella for Examining Sustainability and Addressing the Human-Animal Equation
Lucy HG Solomon, Samia Carrillo-Percastegui, Mathias Tobler, Kodie Gerritsen, Sarai Silva Carvajal
The Jaguar Umbrella Project is a collaborative and community-engaged research project pairing jaguar conservation with interactive media. Undergraduate research is the linchpin in this interdisciplinary art endeavor, which brings conservation biology to K-12 education and the public through art and design. The Jaguar Umbrella Project partners with conservation biologists, Samia Carrillo-Percastegui and Mathias Tobler, who study jaguars in the Amazon with the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research in Peru. The project relies on the design innovations of CSUSM undergraduate researchers, Kodie Gerritsen and Sarai Silva Carvajal. We discuss an integrated arts and science approach to teaching K-12 students about complex ecosystems and personal responsibility. Through this lens we ponder the role of human beings as planetary actors in the Anthropocene.
Doing History is Climate Action? Collaborating with Non-Profits on Storytelling and Public Education Projects
Kristina Shull
I will discuss how a “Climate Refugees” History methods and writing course I taught in the Winter of 2017 at UCI has become a springboard for producing a collaborative multi-media project that features the stories of migrants in US immigration detention and refugee camps abroad. Collaborators on the project include the non-profit Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), undergraduate and graduate students, UC and CSU professors, and UCI’s Office of Sustainability.
Q & A
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Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
THE WORLD IN 2050: CREATING/IMAGINING JUST CLIMATE FUTURES
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Special Panel: Making Sense of the 2016 Presidential Election
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Ken Hiltner
Recorded on November 9th, the day after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, event co-organizer Ken Hiltner invites all conference participants to take part in an open discussion of what the election of Donald J. Trump means not just for us today, but also for the world in 2050.
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Scroll down for talk transcript.
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0:00 So, during this Nov. 2016 conference,
0:06 which takes as its theme The World in
0:09 2050, something altogether extraordinary,
0:12 almost unthinkable happened. And that is
0:15 that the world in 2050 changed,
0:17 significantly – and not I fear for the
0:21 better. I know, I am making it sound like
0:25 something out of a sci-fi, or more to the
0:27 point, a cli-fi novel where some event,
0:32 so epically important, that it forever
0:35 changed the timeline so that
0:38 decades later millions, maybe
0:41 billions, of people will be effected.
0:43 But I have to say that I believe that the
0:47 election yesterday of Donald J Trump, the
0:51 2016, November 8th election election of
0:55 Trump, may well be one of the most
0:58 significant events in the early part of the
1:00 twenty-first century. I not really sure
1:03 what would compete with it, maybe
1:05 something like the very
1:07 important agreement coming out of the
1:09 COP21 in December of last year. I
1:13 think that these two events may well be
1:16 forever yoked together in history.
1:20 It’s not just because of what Trump
1:23 may do. For example, regarding the
1:27 COP21, he may renegotiate that agreement.
1:30 But it’s also what he might undo:
1:34 Fifty years of environmental activism &
1:36 legislation, starting in the 1960s and
1:40 ’70s with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water
1:42 Act, Solid Waste Disposal Act, the EPA,
1:46 leading up to and including things
1:51 like the Obama Clean Power Plan, which
1:53 Trump may very early in his
1:55 administration completely rescind.
1:58 It is unclear exactly what will happen,
2:02 but it seems clear that it will
2:07 effect generations out from
2:10 where we are now. So, the organizers of
2:14 this conference, John and I and everyone
2:16 else involved, wanted to take the
2:20 opportunity to give everyone who
2:23 is participating in the conference
2:25 the opportunity to weigh in on this.
2:27 You know, there are some wonderful
2:29 panels going on, some exciting Q&As, and
2:32 I really don’t want to take any
2:33 attention away from those. But,
2:36 given the timing of this event, I thought
2:39 that it would be important
2:44 for us to clear a space for discussion.
2:46 So, that space is below the video you’re
2:50 watching. Feel free to to comment. It
2:53 would be great to get a discussion
2:55 going in order to try to make sense of
2:59 what, for a lot of us, doesn’t make a
3:01 whole lot of sense – and has kind of
3:03 stunned us. So, I will not make you listen
3:07 to me any further, but do please
3:10 comment and let’s try to to think about
3:14 this together. Okay, thanks.
Note that to the right of the video is an unabridged transcript for this talk (scroll down to view).
Q & A
Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.
UCSB Talk: Anna Lappe, “Your Plate and the Planet: The Ethical Implications of our Modern Diet”
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Literature & Environment Film Series, “Eco-Horror and the Revenge of Nature” on Nov. 30th
/0 Comments/in NewsEvent /by Chris WalkerIn Bruno Latour’s words, people are ill equipped emotionally and mentally to deal with the scale of environmentally destructive events in the Anthropocene. Eco-horror has historically grappled with the terrors of scale, from a classic concern with mutant creatures who teach humanity a lesson about tampering with nature to the contemporary fascination with and dread of nature as an all pervasive, inescapable force that reworks the human body and mind now that we have changed everything by geo-engineering and recomposing the material world from the level of the molecule to the atmosphere.
In an age of supposed technological mastery over nature, an epoch during which humans supposedly exert a total global reach over nature (a feat desired at least since the Enlightenment), how does Eco-Horror capture the way Western culture psychologically processes the “pushing back” of materiality, the sensation of “nature biting back” as mass species extinctions, global climate change, etc.? Eco-horror represents this recalcitrant materiality as collective anxiety and desire. The genre figures our unconscious knowledge that the feeling of domination civilization has given us is a delusion: “Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature” (Joseph Dodds) and our secret “hope that she will [n]ever be entirely subdued to man” (Freud).
Eco-Horror rehearses the communal desire to dominate a feminized nature in order to assert our human subjectivity and rationality. On the other hand, the genre expresses an underlying masochistic impulse to relinquish our autonomy by dissolving in nature’s power and dwelling in the wilds of the leaky id by deploying perceptual (affective) and aesthetic technologies that undo gender, race, and species. As a part of this series, we will consider whether Eco-Horror’s transmission of affect contributes to more destruction, violence, and political apathy? How does the genre update the trope of the feminized nature from early colonial narratives to a newly reanimated corpse-mother aesthetic that represents our collective fear of and desire for this new cyborg-like nature? The goal of the series is to explore how contemporary Eco-Horror cinema rehearses the gender/race/species politics as an incongruity between a faith in human evolution and a fearful sense of wish fulfillment regarding the possibility of human degeneration, thereby bringing to crisis the unconscious guilt and hope that the social and environmental damage is reversible.
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Literature & Environment Film Series, “Eco-Horror and the Revenge of Nature” on Nov. 9th
/0 Comments/in NewsEvent /by Chris WalkerIn Bruno Latour’s words, people are ill equipped emotionally and mentally to deal with the scale of environmentally destructive events in the Anthropocene. Eco-horror has historically grappled with the terrors of scale, from a classic concern with mutant creatures who teach humanity a lesson about tampering with nature to the contemporary fascination with and dread of nature as an all pervasive, inescapable force that reworks the human body and mind now that we have changed everything by geo-engineering and recomposing the material world from the level of the molecule to the atmosphere.
In an age of supposed technological mastery over nature, an epoch during which humans supposedly exert a total global reach over nature (a feat desired at least since the Enlightenment), how does Eco-Horror capture the way Western culture psychologically processes the “pushing back” of materiality, the sensation of “nature biting back” as mass species extinctions, global climate change, etc.? Eco-horror represents this recalcitrant materiality as collective anxiety and desire. The genre figures our unconscious knowledge that the feeling of domination civilization has given us is a delusion: “Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature” (Joseph Dodds) and our secret “hope that she will [n]ever be entirely subdued to man” (Freud).
Eco-Horror rehearses the communal desire to dominate a feminized nature in order to assert our human subjectivity and rationality. On the other hand, the genre expresses an underlying masochistic impulse to relinquish our autonomy by dissolving in nature’s power and dwelling in the wilds of the leaky id by deploying perceptual (affective) and aesthetic technologies that undo gender, race, and species. As a part of this series, we will consider whether Eco-Horror’s transmission of affect contributes to more destruction, violence, and political apathy? How does the genre update the trope of the feminized nature from early colonial narratives to a newly reanimated corpse-mother aesthetic that represents our collective fear of and desire for this new cyborg-like nature? The goal of the series is to explore how contemporary Eco-Horror cinema rehearses the gender/race/species politics as an incongruity between a faith in human evolution and a fearful sense of wish fulfillment regarding the possibility of human degeneration, thereby bringing to crisis the unconscious guilt and hope that the social and environmental damage is reversible.
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COMMA film series “Modernist Energies” hosts screening of Vertov’s “Enthusiasm” on Oct. 28
/0 Comments/in NewsEvent /by Chris WalkerCOMMA will be hosting the first event in its 2016-17 series, “Modernist Energies.” On Friday, Oct. 28th at 12:00 in SH 2635 they will screen Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film, Enthusiasm. Vertov’s first sound film tracks the efforts of Ukrainian miners in the Donbass coal mines to fulfill their part of the first five-year plan in only four years. Following the screening, there will be a discussion of the film and two essays by Jonathan Beller and Sergei Tret’iakov. Pizza and drinks will be provided!
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