This Thursday, March 30, the university’s Center for German and European Studies (CGES) celebrated its 25th anniversary with a conference titled “CGES@25: Beginning to End the Climate Crisis.” The event featured several sessions in Sherman Function Hall from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m.
The conference kicked off with a vegan lunch and opening addresses from Professor Sabine von Mering (ENVS/GRALL), Dean of Arts and Sciences Dorothy Hodgson, Consul General of Germany to the New England States Dr. Sonja Kreibich, Associate Director of the Office of Sustainability Mary Fischer and Professor and Chair of Environmental Studies Colleen Hitchcock (ENVS). Following the lunch, Professor Simon Richter from the University of Pennsylvania gave a keynote speech titled “Plan D: Moving to Germany as the Final Dutch Climate Adaptation Strategy.”
The next section of the conference featured a panel on climate justice. Facilitators for the panel were Professor Toni Shapiro-Phim (CAST) and Liz Sandoval ’25, and the panelists included Barbara Dombrowski, a visual artist and photographer, Professor Prakash Kashwan (ENVS/HS) and Tonny Nowshin, a climate justice activist.
Dombrowski spoke first, explaining the projects that she has completed regarding the disproportionate impacts of climate change on communities around the world. Her photo-art project “Tropic Ice: Dialog between Places Affected by Cimate Change” featured photographs Dombrowski took while staying with indigenous communities on five different continents from 2010 to 2018. These indigenous communities all live in climate vulnerable places, Dombrowski explained, and the effects of nature on the large prints she leaves outside symbolize how we will all be affected by climate change. The main thing that Dombrowski learned from living with indigenous communities around the world was that “we should listen to them and we should learn what they are saying,” in regards to the importance of climate action. Dombrowski then explained her most recent project, “Quo Vadis, Europe?” (Where are you marching, Europe?) which explores how various European communities are dealing with the climate crisis, including the destruction of their villages to make way for fossil fuel mining projects.
Kashwan spoke next, and his talk covered the concept of ecological justice. He explained that carbon offsets represent an incorporation of natural systems into climate policy, and that biodiversity credits or offsets are also starting to be used. However, carbon credit policies can create justice issues when they prevent indigenous communities from managing their land, for example. Similarly, a report published in Nature in 2020 found several global priority areas for ecosystem restoration or rewilding, but the majority of the land marked off in the study was located in poorer nations. For example, 99.6% of the agricultural land in Papua New Guinea was marked as a priority area for rewilding, as Kashwan explained. This is harmful when the country relies on agrifulture to feed its already poor citizens.
Kashwan also discussed the detrimental effects of the prevalence of monocrop lawns in the U.S. As he pointed out, the biggest irrigated crop in the U.S. is turf grass, and it is also the largest user of chemicals and fertilizers. However, lawns are often implemented as an easy way to bring green space to urban areas. To counteract this prevalence of grasses that contribute little to CO2 uptake, Kashwan pointed to local community garden projects like the Boston Food Forest Coalition. The coalition helps communities create land trusts so they can communally own land on which they can farm, and these land trusts are often located in previously redlined areas or urban heat islands, bringing both socioeconomic and climate resilience impacts to communities.
Nowshin was on a train in Germany and had to share her presentation on degrowth and the impact of colonialism virtually. She began by explaining how the countries who have contributed the least to climate change are now the most vulnerable to its effects. She also pointed out how the economic development of the Global North was facilitated through institutions such as the slave trade, and that our current carbon economy was facilitated through colonial resource exploitation. “We can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet,” Nowshin stated, “Growth has failed us.” She advocated for degrowth, a system which she said would promise democracy, redistribution of wealth and individual wellbeing.
The session concluded with the presentation of a video game created by Sandoval as a class project that collaborated with the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA). The game, called “Little Waltham,” emphasizes the importance of collaboration in the future of sustainable communities, as Sandoval explained.
Following the climate justice panel, participants were given time to take a coffee break before the book launch section of the event. The book, titled “Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future,” is an English translation by von Mering of a volume written by Luisa Neubauer, one of the main organizers for Fridays for Future Germany, and Alexander Repenning. The book also has a foreword by Bill McKibben, writer, climate activist and founder of 350.org. Neubauer, Repenning, McKibben and von Mering all spoke at the launch, and the discussion was moderated by Miriam Wasser from WBUR.
The penultimate session in the conference was a charrette titled “Let’s Talk About Climate and What We Can Change,” led by Phoebe Dolan ’20, Co-Director of Maine Youth Power. Brandeis students Rebecca Spinner ’25, Leo Zhang ’25, Kate Danziger ’23, Maggie Del Re ’23, Ellie Greene ’25 and Ana Delfina Mejía Cerdas ’25 co-facilitated the session.
Finally, the conference culminated in a keynote address given by McKibben, and a Q&A session with a student panel. Student panelists included Zev Carlyle ’23, Andie Sheinbaum ’24 and Cerdas. President Ron Liebowitz introduced McKibben, describing how they were both at Middlebury College at the same time.
McKibben began by explaining that although he was a “professional ‘bummer outer’ of people,” he would try not to make his speech too depressing. He praised Brandeis for being “at the center of all kinds of important dialogues,” including climate change with this event. He acknowledged several recent events at the top of his speech, including Donald Trump’s indictment earlier that day, as well as the Boston Red Sox’s loss in their first game of the season.
Another recent event he described was the finding that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in the ocean is slowing down due to melting Arctic ice, as published in a Nature report on March 29. McKibben explained that the AMOC is “one of the single most important features of Earth” in terms of the spread of heat and nutrients in the ocean, and its slowdown is “one more powerful reminder of the fix that we’re in.” The disruption of this ocean current, as well as climate change in general, McKibben said, is “by far the biggest thing that our species has ever done.”
Due to climate change, “we live on a different planet now,” McKibben stated. And although we in the Global North can still afford to live with these changes, “people in Pakistan can’t afford it,” he said. Furthermore, we’re “still fairly near the start” of the impacts of climate change.
However, McKibben told audience members that on the bright side, “we know what to do about this, more or less.” We’re used to thinking about renewable energy as “alternative energy,” the Whole Foods of energy. But now, McKibben argued, it’s more like “the Costco of energy—the cheap stuff.” Renewable energy such as solar and wind power technologies have had around a 90% decrease in price in the last several years, according to McKibben, so “we have lots of reasons to want to end this practice of burning things.”
Another bright spot has been some of the policy that has resulted from activism that McKibben helped start while at Middlebury, he explained. He founded 350.org with the help of seven undergraduate students in 2007, and some of those students went on to found the Sunrise Movement. Sunrise helped propose the Green New Deal, which McKibben argued helped to influence the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the United States’ first climate bill.
“The most important thing an individual can do,” McKibben said, “is to be less of an individual” and join together in collective action. “This is a kind of final exam for human beings,” McKibben described, and he believes those involved should view it as “a tremendous honor and privilege to get to be part of that fight.”
