A virtual seminar unpacking why present approaches towards combating the climate crisis are failing oppressed individuals across the globe.
About this event
This panel was preceded by Consciousness to Liberation: An Earth Day Teach-in & Discussion hosted by Start:Empowerment, The New School’s BIPOC Earth, and The People’s Forum. This second talk continues Start:Empowerment’s April Series centering BIPOC perspectives this Earth Month in partnership with The New School’s Milano Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management (EPSM) Program.
Indigenous people constitute just 5% of the global population and yet, they safeguard 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. Africa, quietly as it is kept, produces only 4% of global emissions; yet, the continent’s last glaciers will melt by 2040 per the UN. Kept even quieter is the fact that climate change is a symptom of a system that is based on infinite growth in a world with finite resources.
Join us in unpacking these realities in order to uncover the reasons why the current approaches towards battling the climate crisis are failing oppressed peoples the world over, as well as taking on ways to tangibly implement the radical reimaginations from different schools of thought. Grace Lee Boggs famously said, “Many radicals…still believe that all one has to do is eliminate oppressive institutions with one audacious blow and the oppressed masses will automatically change. Many people still continue to believe that human behavior is completely determined by conditions.” Rather than leave off with vague abstractions as to what a new world can look like, our panelists each possess viewpoints, unique to their own experience within the climate space, that speak to climate change and on tangible solutions.
The webinar will highlight the following: 1) what environmental justice looks like from each of the speaker's perspectives and the shortcomings of the current movement and 2) critiques of commonly held assumptions about climate change, as well as critiques on the systems of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism which drive the crisis, and 3) the viewpoints of on subaltern pathways forward with an emphasis on perspectives from the Global South and colonized peoples in the Global North.
The following experts will provide deeper analysis of, and strategies for circumventing the deadly threats of climate change:
Speakers:
Leonardo Figueroa Helland, Associate Professor and Chair of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program at The New School Milano
Max Ajl, author of a People’s Green New Deal
Ogadinma Kingsley “Kings” Okakpu, PhD Biomedical Science student at UC Riverside and A-APRP member
Moderators/Facilitators:
Kier Blake, Start:Empowerment
Kwaku Aurelien (independent organizer)
WEBINAR Co-Hosted by The New School and Start:Empowerment + Organized by Kier Blake and Kwaku Aurelien.
This event is done with the support and collaboration of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program of the Milano School.