Over at least four decades, Barnard has remained at the forefront of climate action from all angles — being a leading circular campus in the U.S., earning a STARS gold rating, and pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.
This Earth Month, the Office of the Provost hosted its fourth installment of the Barnard Year of Elections Around the World series: “Climate Across Scales: Perspectives on National Politics, Colonial Legacies, and Resilient Communities.” The series, launched last October, has grown successfully through the collaborative efforts of Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Claire Tow Professor of English and Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Alexander Cooley, Vice Provost for Research and Academic Centers and Claire Tow Professor of Political Science, and Melissa Wright, executive director of the Center for Engaged Pedagogy (CEP). It invites College faculty, students, and staff to examine critical issues that shape elections, such as immigration, reproductive rights, and climate change.
“Climate was not by and large one of the major or explicit issues in elections around the world,” said Wright. “The impacts of the climate crisis are implicit in many other issues on voters’ minds — like food insecurity and immigration. As we closed out the series, we wanted to foreground an issue that is often pushed to the back burner.”
The event — which included an audience-interactive Q&A moderated by Sandra Goldmark, Professor of Professional Practice in Theatre and Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Engagement at the Columbia Climate School — brought together different perspectives on climate change and how it shows up as a critical issue for voters.
“The climate crisis touches every aspect of how we live, and that can be overwhelming,” said Goldmark. “However, coming together to grapple with these questions, to talk about them — that too is an act of will, a choice, to believe and to take a step toward collective action.”
Leading up to the event, CEP senior associate director Alex Pittman partnered with Jasmine Gates, a student ambassador of the Community Engagement and Inclusion office, to host “The Talking Table” at the Milstein Center. “It is a strategy to engage the Barnard community on their ideas about the topics that each of the Year of Elections series has highlighted,” said Pittman. “They shared reflections, concerns, and questions about the subject of climate across scales.”
Board of Trustee member Vivien Li ’75 also attended the event. Li’s oral history project, Vivien Li: Environmental Justice and Urban Waterfronts With the Sierra Club and the Boston Harbor Association (2024), details her work on urban environmental issues in Newark, New Jersey, while being a Barnard commuter student; creating public awareness of environmental justice in the 1980s; and focusing public attention on climate action years before superstorm Sandy occurred in 2012. The nationally recognized waterfront and climate expert shared her optimism about the Barnard community’s participation in “asking tough questions. You’re the future. If we came back 10 or 20 years from now, what would you say you have done?”
The panel of speakers included professors Kimberly Marten (political science), who explored energy nationalism; Maricarmen Hernández (sociology), who examined colonial legacies embedded in climate discourse; Anooradha Siddiqi (architecture), who unpacked the politics of resilience; and Elizabeth Cook (environmental science), who looked at nature-based solutions.
Read highlights from their lectures below, edited for length and clarity.
Kimberly Marten, Professor of Political Science, on “Energy Nationalism and Major Polluters”
What do these four leaders — Xi Jinping of China, Donald Trump of the United States, Narendra Modi of India, and Vladimir Putin of Russia — have in common? Each of them believes that the fossil fuels produced inside their countries is what makes their countries powerful and self-sufficient. None of them wants to be dependent on any foreign state for energy imports, because energy can be used as a weapon.
Not only do all four of these men practice energy nationalism, they are also the leaders of the four worst current greenhouse gas producing countries in the world. I wish these leaders understood that for their own populations, controlling greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming, the horrific weather patterns, and massive wildfires it produces is the most important thing they can do for the future security of their own populations. It’s time to redefine energy nationalism — to focus on locally produced solar, wind, nuclear, and some small amount of natural gas as a bridge fuel that outside states could not interfere with. To do so would not even require much change in interest-based politics. Instead, it requires a change in ideology.
Maricarmen Hernández, Professor of Sociology, on “Colonial Legacies and Ecological Debt”
From a climate justice perspective, we know that the effects of climate change are mediated by global inequalities and that countries that have contributed little to such changes often bear the brunt of the climate crisis, [while being] the least prepared to protect their populations. On the flip side, those who have contributed the most to climate change — due to higher emissions, longer industrialization periods, and colonial conquest — are less exposed to its forced effects and have greater capacity to mitigate that impact.
The concept of ecological debt acknowledges the interconnections between society, nature, and the economy. It also brings a historical dimension to discussions of sustainability and climate change, illuminating how present inequalities are derived from long-term processes, and reframes the conversation around cancelling the external debt. [Ecological debt] allows us to see the relationality of wealth and poverty, since the poverty that the majority of the world’s population experiences is the very condition that enables metropolitan others to live well.
Anooradha Siddiqi, Professor of Architecture, on “Reframing Resilience as a Collective Project”
We often hear that a survivor was resilient, that we should build resilient communities, that sustainability is predicated upon resilience. I want us to hear how the word resilience acts as a cipher for responsibility. Instead of asking the term “resilience” to take on so much burden, let us think about how the term “responsibility” might share the load.
For example, what does a refugee camp teach us? Let us think on the multigenerational refugee camps near the town of Dadaab, Kenya, established in 1991 in lands crossing present-day Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia. In an exhibition called “Dadaab Commons” at the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi, a group of us, in an artistic and architectural embrace of Dadaab, move beyond reductive understandings of refugee camps and turn to ways of life and habitation undertaken by people in extraordinary conditions. We hope to find ways of living together and building an intellectual commons. We need to think about how terms like “resilience” place burdens on the people for whom we have responsibility, just as our societies contribute to the things around which they are being asked to be resilient.
Elizabeth Cook, Professor of Environmental Science, on “Nature-Based Solutions Within Informal Communities”
Nature-based solutions are a way to think about how we might use nature as an opportunity to mitigate the impacts of climate change and adapt to climate change. We also [see the] different scales at which nature can be important in thinking about power, and how nature-based solutions might be implemented at different scales — nationally, locally, and at an individual household scale.
Informal communities are in existence across the globe — [they] fall outside the bounds conceptually and are not always legally recognized. There are multiple potential negative benefits and aspects of nature that are associated with this — such as nature-based solutions. We have to think about the characteristics of the community, [their] needs, and how they value nature in order to think about what to suggest as potential solutions in different contexts.
Nature is seen as both an obstacle and a benefit in these cases. Informal communities see nature-based solutions as a placeholder until they can have more formalized gray infrastructure, paved streets, or water systems that move through concrete pipes.They see that as highlighting the economic progress of their communities. There’s a tension between the way that we see nature-based solutions, where they stand in the development, and the potential for them to be a solution to climate change as we move forward.
