Dartmouth Events
Is Time Running Out to Stop Climate Change?
Kyle Whyte from Michigan State University highlights the Indigenous climate justice movement and offers an important vision for the future of our relationships to the environment.
Join us for 3:30 for refreshments!
Kyle Whyte, Timnick Chair in the Humanities and Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University
Is Time Running Out to Stop Climate Change? The Problems and Possibilities of Acting "Urgently" in an Unjust World
Description: Recent scientific reports, internationally and in the U.S., send warnings that stronger actions must be taken to address dangerous climate change. Yet what if advocating for urgency is the wrong approach? The Indigenous climate justice movement has called for a different way of framing the risks of climate change. Indigenous peoples emphasize the perils of crisis thinking, and instead offer practical alternatives for action that focus on ethical relationships that are often absent in literature and media on climate change, including consent, reciprocity, accountability, and responsibility. From the reform of climate science to direct actions against dirty energy, this presentation highlights why the Indigenous climate justice movement has mattered and offers an important vision for the future of our relationships to the environment.
Bio: Kyle Whyte is the Timnick Chair in the Humanities and a professor in the departments of Philosophy and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. His research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kyle is involved in a number of projects and organizations that advance Indigenous research methodologies, including the Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup, Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation, Tribal Climate Camp, and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence. He has served as an author on the U.S. National Climate Assessment and is a former member of the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science and the Michigan Environmental Justice Work Group. He is a recipient of the Bunyan Bryant Award for Academic Excellence from Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice.
Free and open to the public.
Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.