View the webinar recording here.
Tuesday, February 2, 2021 10:00 am EST | 7:00 am PST | 15:00 BST | 16:00 CET
Moderator: Milena Buchs; Panelists: Bill McKibben in conversation with Dominic Boyer
This webinar focuses on global cooperation in the movement to take action on climate change. How important will US-EU relations be for meaningful climate action and rapid energy transition in these critical decades to come? Are there particular things happening in Europe now in the area of environmental politics that are especially inspiring or dispiriting? What role do social movements like 350/Sunrise, the organization co-founded by Bill McKibben, and XR/Skolstrejk in Europe play in terms of disrupting the fossil status quo? What are some of the strategies that seem most effective right now for challenging obliviousness in terms of fossil fuel use? How we can build social consensus for revolutionary climate action within nations and between them? Has the COVID pandemic offered any obvious do’s and don’t’s for international cooperation on climate action? Not least, what role can the arts play in fostering environmental awareness and political engagement?
This exciting, interdisciplinary webinar brings together participants from the CES’ growing field of expertise dedicated to issues related to climate change and the environment. CES Executive Committee Member Julia Moses will briefly introduce the session, and Milena Buchs will moderate this exciting conversation between Dominic Boyer and Bill McKibben.
This is part of the CES Insights initiative intended to expand collaboration with scholars and research groups beyond Europe and North America.
Milena Buchs is Associate Professor in Sustainability, Economics and Low Carbon Transitions. Milena specializes in sustainable welfare and wellbeing. Combining theories and methods from ecological economics, social policy and sociology, Milena’s research seeks to contribute to making carbon reduction more equitable and wellbeing-enhancing. She is Co-Investigator in the Centre for Research on Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS), and supervises the EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship ShaRe (Fellow: Dr Diana Ivanova). Recent publications include: Fanning AL, O’Neill DW, Buchs M. 2020. Provisioning systems for a good life within planetary boundaries. Global Environmental Change; and Büchs M, Koch M. 2019. Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing. Futures (Elsevier Atlas Award).
Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. He was a 2014 recipient of the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ and the Gandhi Peace Award. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published 30 years ago, and his most recent, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
Dominic Boyer teaches at Rice University where he also served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013-2019). He is currently pursuing anthropological research with flood victims in Houston, Texas, and on electric futures across the world. His most recent book is Energopolitics (Duke UP, 2019), which is part of a collaborative duograph, “Wind and Power in the Anthropocene,” with Cymene Howe, which studies the politics of wind power development in Southern Mexico. With Howe, he also helped make a documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier (Okjökull) lost to climate change, Not Ok: a little movie about a small glacier at the end of the world (2018). In August 2019, together with Icelandic collaborators they installed a memorial to Okjökull’s passing, an event that attracted media attention from around the world. Has been integral to the work of CES over the years, having served on the CES Executive Committee (2008-2012).
