Air travel to conferences, talks, and meetings can account for a third or more of the carbon footprint for a typical scholar or university. This event employed a nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference approach that reduced greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 100. For more on “academia’s biggest dirty little secret” and the rationale behind this conference model, as well as details on how to coordinate online events of this sort, see our White Paper / Practical Guide.

This conference, which took place in June of 2019, is now over. However, feel free to view the talks and read the Q&A sessions, as well as to cite both.

Although the scale of the problem demands that academia, the sciences, business, government, and the public quickly begin acting in concert to achieve the best possible outcomes, decades of inaction rooted in interest-driven conflict and disagreements have ushered in a new era of environmental and climate crises.

The range of possible futures includes widely divergent “next Earths” and any number of paths forward.

As educators in climate change, climate justice, critical sustainability, and carbon neutrality, our responsibility could not be greater to our students, for they are the generation that will forge the ideas that will determine which of these next Earths will be our home.

To that end, we would like to bring together critical climate and sustainability educators of every discipline, from the arts and humanities to the human and social sciences and the natural sciences, with a focus on sharing ideas to accelerate climate education and action in California and beyond.

We invite teachers, students, cultural creatives, and people from all walks of life who want to find better ways to enable students and teachers to apply their knowledge in innovative ways to real-world problems and to support each other in our collaborations in an open and wide-ranging project – imagining and creating “just transitions to the next Earth” – by reshaping our relationships with each other and the systems and institutions that determine the quality of life today and tomorrow for our own communities and communities around the world. Given the disparities and injustices that inhere in our global situation where those societies that are the major producers of greenhouse gas emissions are more insulated than others from the effects of climate change, we invite submissions that cultivate interdisciplinary and decolonizing approaches to teaching in this area. We are reaching out to college-level teachers and students in particular, but given the importance of the topic, this conference will be open to contributions that focus on any kind and age level. (Click here to see the original CFP/Click here or on the names below to see a full list of abstracts and participant bios.)

OPENING TALKS

Why the NCN Conference is Important to Teaching, Ken Hiltner

The Climate Crisis: Why It’s the Most Important Thing in the World to be Teaching Right Now, John Foran