Care for Our Common Home: Environmental Justice and Sustainability Across Disciplines

Location

Virtual Event via Zoom

Free

Focusing each week on a particular theme – Water, Energy, Food, Extinction – speakers from the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences will reflect on environmental issues of immediate and long-term concern, model diverse approaches to the climate crisis and the urgent challenges it poses to our civilizations, and share ideas on how we can adapt to the changes in an increasingly turbulent world.

The Care for Our Common Home series is held on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. PST starting September 29 - October 20.

Register online at: https://usd-commonhome.eventbrite.com

Discussion Topics

September 29: Water

• High and Dry: Aquatic Organism Adaptations to Life Without Water

• Kate Boersma, PhD | Department of Biology

• The Water-Food-Energy-Climate Nexus

• Andy Tirrell, PhD, JD | Department of Political Science

October 6: Energy

• Energized by Spirit: Indigenous Youth and Environmental Activism

• Meaghan Weatherdon, PhD | Department of Theology and Religious Studies

• Filming the Uncertain Time of Nuclear Energy

• Hannah Holtzman, PhD | Humanities Center
  
  

October 13: Food

• Aaron Gross, PhD | Department of Theology and Religious Studies
• Michel Boudrias, PhD | Department of Environmental and Ocean Sciences
  
  

October 20: Extinction

• Ursula Heise, PhD | Marcia H. Howard Chair in literary studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA
• Jeffrey Stuker, MFA | Artist and Filmmaker

About October 20: Extinction

As part of the Care for Our Common Home series, this talk explores the concept of multispecies justice from Dr. Heise’s book, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016). In the face of a sixth mass extinction of humankind, Heise discusses how biodiversity and extinction are primarily cultural issues and only secondarily issues of science. Stuker is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been shown internationally, from New York and Los Angeles to London, Paris and Berlin. He presents and discusses his short film Mimicry and The Monte Carlo Predator (2019), a close look at butterflies and mimicry as a survival strategy. This work, exhibited at Garden gallery in Los Angeles, has been described in Artforum as a “meditation on the fate of natural history in our current stage of technological reproduction.”