Earth Week 2020 Virtual Events
The Tishman Center canceled our extensive in-person Earth Month programming in light of the social distancing measures and our responsibility to provide spaces for the communities we interact with. However, we believe it is crucial to still find creative ways of coming together and sharing perspectives around the moment in time we find ourselves in and how it relates to the underlying injustices that have threatened vulnerable communities before the pandemic and now becoming a threat multiplier.
Instead of gathering in person, the Tishman Center will be hosting and sharing online events during Earth Week that will feature representatives of The New School staff, students, and faculty in dynamic discussions around climate justice, climate resilience, and the global pandemic. We will also be sharing events from other organizations We hope you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy. Please follow the links below to join us at some of these events.
Monday, April 20 | 9AM - 11AM | Online
Building Climate Resilience in Communities; Thinking Globally, Assessing Regionally & Acting Locally
Let’s build on our understanding and act together as a student body to influence critical institutional changes at The New School. Here's how we do it: Thinking local to global perspectives we welcome guest speakers from WEACT, AmeriCorps and Peace Corps, to share and discuss their experience in building climate resilience in their communities.
Assessing where we are now as The New School community; we welcome the student senate, and active student group representatives as we take a quick dive into their efforts and obstacles in building climate resilience within The New School community.. Acting locally, we hand the mic to the students in attendance to create a list of educated recommendations: How should The New School prepare for this climate crisis?
All recommendations will be presented by the student senate in a Memorandum of Understanding and from there to be presented to The New School.
Monday, April, 20 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM | Online
We live in unsettling times of converging environmental and health crises. Globally, from climate change and mass species extinction to the spread of both chronic and communicable diseases—now including COVID-19, we face catastrophes that compel us to rethink life and health as a whole. As ‘modern’ societies grapple with a seemingly ‘unprecedented’ planetary chaos, now preceded by an indefinite suspension of the ‘normal’ way of life (given COVID-19), Indigenous Peoples locate these crises differently, as part of a long sequence of devastating environmental disruptions and pandemics spreading from the onset of violent conquest to the climate and health injustices of globalization’s (neo)colonial and settler colonial present. Being distinctively and particularly impacted all along, Indigenous resistance and resilience find strength in the embodied knowledge that another world is possible outside and beyond the colonial present of environmental and health injustices.
This other, Indigenous world, is rooted in an encircling notion of whole health that has been passed down by Indigenous ancestors through generations of survivance and struggle, even in the face of relentless colonial and patriarchal aggression, including systematic attempts to erase Indigenous cultures, practices and knowledges. While richly diverse, many Indigenous Peoples share a holistic vision of health based on reciprocity and care of the sacred relations among the health of the land, the community (including humans and non-humans), the body and the spirit. From Indigenous knowledges, illness and instability come from imbalances among relations, including among societies and with Mother Earth. As modern societies are forced, however painfully, to pause their frantic pursuit of ‘economic growth’ at all costs (often in ways that aggravate systemic injustices), we must ask not how to ‘restart’ the same system that has been destroying lands and disrupting the climate for centuries while failing to address many of the world’s basic health and nutrition needs. Instead, we must ask; how do we reclaim other visions and knowledges that can guide us to healthier, more just and sustainable futures? In this webinar, Indigenous knowledge-bearers, Martha Many Grey Horses and Marcelo Eduardo Zaiduni Salazar join moderators Mindahi Bastida and Leonardo Figueroa to discuss the challenges to Indigenous health from past to present crises, as well as alternatives based on Indigenous whole health approaches.
Wednesday, April 22 | 1:45PM - 3 PM | Online
Join us for a discussion with our faculty, students and staff to share their experiences with the global pandemic, their thoughts about the interactions of climate change and social justice. This roundtable will be an opportunity to hear and share what we as a community are feeling during these turbulent times. The event will be hosted on Zoom and will feature panelists from all three groups and a Q&A. Register to the left and you will be provided with a link to the roundtable in advance of the event.