Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, 8 Garden St., Cambridge
Join the artist Alia Farid for a tour of Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis and a discussion of the artwork Chibayish, 2023. Chibayish is part of a larger group of works that Farid has developed since 2018, focused on the impact of extractive industries on southern Iraq and Kuwait's ecological and social fabric.
The climate crisis is a matter of environmental as well as historical injustice. Human geographer Garrett Dash Nelson will explore the uneven distributions of harm, responsibility, vulnerability, and power, in both historical and local perspective.
Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet empire, the West faces a new era of East-West tensions. Any vision of a modern Russia integrated into the world economy and aligned in peaceful partnership with a reunited Europe has abruptly vanished. Two opposing narratives vie to explain the strategic future of Europe, one geopolitical and one economic, and both center on the same resource: natural gas. In The Bridge, Thane Gustafson, an expert on Russian oil and gas, argues that the political rivalries that capture the lions share of media attention...
Ancient Maya civilization—known for its cities, monumental architecture, ceramics, hieroglyphic writing, and advanced understanding of mathematics and astronomy—suffered a major demise between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The causes continue to be investigated and debated. Paleoenvironmental research over the past twenty years has revealed that the demise coincided with a prolonged intensive drought that extended across the region, providing compelling evidence that climate change played a key role in the collapse of the Maya.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Stubbins Room 112, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge
Join us for a lecture from Kenneth I. Helphand FASLA, a Philip H. Knight Professor of Landscape Architecture Emeritus at the University of Oregon where he has taught courses in landscape history, theory and design since 1974. He is a graduate of Brandeis University (1968) and Harvard's Graduate School of Design (MLA 1972). Helphand is the recipient of distinguished teaching awards from the University of Oregon and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. He is also the author...
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
As a devastating famine gripped India and Pakistan in 1966, a cargo of hybrid wheat seeds from Mexico arrived one fateful day on India’s coast. The seeds were first planted across the Punjab region using new...