Events

A global perspective on sustainable growth: A Q&A with Mamphela Ramphele

Location:

The Studio at the Harvard Chan School—Online

Mamphela Ramphele, the celebrated activist, physician, businesswoman, and political thinker, envisions a world that is equitable, sustainable, and peaceful. As co-president of The Club of Rome, Ramphele brings together leaders from around the globe to think through the urgent challenges of our day. In this Q&A, she'll discuss her vision, and she'll reflect on lessons learned from her remarkable career.

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Director’s Series | Life: The Arnold Arboretum as an Institution of Public Health

Location:

Arnold Arboretum—Online

The Arnold Arboretum's sesquicentennial Director's Series traces the Arnold’s significance in the landscape architecture movement, value for the people of Boston, and leadership in creating global connections between plants and people.

Panelists include:

Dr. Michelle Kondo, Research Social Scientist, UDSA-Forest Service
Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, Chief of Environment, Energy, and Open Space, City of Boston
Laurence Cotton, Consulting Producer, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing...

Fossil Fuels, Health, and Frontline Indigenous Communities

Location:

Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health—Online

Indigenous communities have a long history of living with and learning from the environment, but the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels near their communities, along with unjust policies, have put their health and the climate at risk and impacted tribal sovereignty. Join us for a discussion of how we can uplift Indigenous voices and curb the impacts of fossil fuel extraction on frontline communities.

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Celebrating a Sesquicentennial: The Founding of the Arnold Arboretum

Location:

Livestreamed or at Weld Hill Research Building, 1300 Centre St., Boston

The Arnold Arboretum was founded on Friday, March 29, 1872. Exactly 150 years later, we invite you to join Lisa Pearson, Head of the Arboretum Library and Archives, for a special sesquicentennial lecture! Pearson will discuss the earliest benefactors of the Arboretum, the events surrounding the founding of the institution, and the busy first two decades during which the infrastructure and living collections were installed on the grounds.

This event will also be livestreamed to YouTube. To sign up for the virtual livestream instead,...

The Climate of Community

Location:

Harvard Divinity School—Online

This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speaker for this community tea ceremony is Brian Kirbis of Theasophie.

Tea Master Brian Kirbis, who will open each of our sessions with a tea pouring to set a tone of well-being and attention, will take us through a formal tea ceremony. As a global community online, we will be able to sit and sip in collective silence to contemplate all we have heard and taken into our minds during these sessions....

The Climate of the Future

Location:

Harvard Divinity School—Online

This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speaker is novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s thriller The Ministry for the Future (2020) is science fiction that reads as hard-edged journalism. With short chapters and a myriad of characters, Robinson creates a kaleidoscope of perspectives on a global climate collapse coming in 2025. Bill McKibben writes “In Kim Stanley Robinson’s anti-dystopian novel, climate change...

The Climate of Relationships and Intersectionality

Location:

Harvard Divinity School—Online

This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speakers are climate activist Morgan Curtis, MDiv '24, and brontë velez, Black-latinx transdisciplinary artist.

Morgan Curtis and brontë velez will discuss the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and climate collapse, and how seeing the world whole through the lens of relationships creates communities of care rather than conflict. They will consider what reparations might look like on behalf...

Spiro Pollalis, “Sustainability and Climate Change: From Science to Design”

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online

The upcoming national investment in infrastructure is most welcomed; it will add jobs and stimulate the economy. However, it is imperative for the infrastructure to be sustainable, resilient, and mitigate climate change. How can that be ensured?

Since its founding in 2008, the research at the Zofnass Program has focused on providing tools for designers and planners to measure the sustainability and resilience of infrastructure. Recently, the focus is on expanding the tools for mitigating climate change. Today, the outcome of the Zofnass Program empowers both sides: the design...

Saving Seahorses to Save Seas

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Amanda Vincent, the 2021 Indianapolis Prize winner, has dedicated her career to understanding and advocating for seahorses, which serve as a flagship species for a wide range of marine conservation issues. She is credited with bringing the world’s attention to the 44 known species of seahorses and with developing a collaborative approach to marine conservation that is also improving the status of many other marine fishes, such as sharks, rays, groupers, and eels. Hear how her determination and optimism is saving not only these iconic sea creatures but also our world’s oceans.

Wild Collection and Propagation of Rare and Endangered Plants

Location:

Arnold Arboretum—Online

In Massachusetts alone, plants make up more than half of the total native species that are officially considered Endangered, Threatened, and Rare. In this talk, we will focus on how ex-situ plant conservation, coordinated plant collection efforts, and plant propagation play vital roles in preserving biodiversity and slowing the deleterious effects of climate change.

We will discuss how collection trips are planned—and how citizen science now plays a role in these efforts—while providing a behind-the-scenes look at the planning process. A large focus will be plant propagation...

Brine to Batteries: The Extractive Frontiers of the Global Energy Transition

Location:

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

Thea Riofrancos’s current project, “Brine to Batteries: The Extractive Frontiers of the Global Energy Transition,” explores the politics of the transition to renewable energy through the lens of one of its key technologies: lithium batteries. Based on multisited fieldwork following lithium’s global supply chains from the point of extraction in the Chilean desert, “Brine to Batteries” will be the first scholarly account of the rapidly moving processes shaping the contours of the next energy system—and those of our planetary future.

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Food Literacy Project Speaker Series: Cool Food with Gerard Pozzi

Location:

Food Literacy Project—Online

Make a difference by eating plant-rich food. Did you know Harvard recently signed the Cool Food Pledge? Learn more about the Cool Food Pledge with speaker, Gerard Pozzi, as he breaks down the impacts of a plant-based diet.

A quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions come from food production. By simply changing what we eat, we can make a difference to our climate. Cool Food (coolfood.org) helps people and organizations reduce the climate impact of their food through shifting towards more plant-rich diets. Climate action has never been so delicious.

Cool Food is an...

Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History

Location:

Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard

As the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, Leslie M. Harris is completing “Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History.” She uses memoir and family, urban, and environmental histories to explore the multiple meanings of New Orleans in the nation, from its founding through its uncertain future amid climate change.

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Kiley Fellow Lecture: Seth Denizen, "Thinking Through Soil: Case Study from the Mezquital Valley"

Location:

Online—Harvard Graduate School of Design

Almost 200,000 acres of land in the fertile Mezquital Valley are irrigated with the untreated sewage of Mexico City. Every drop of rain, urban runoff, industrial effluent, and sewage in Mexico City is sent to the Mezquital Valley through a 60 kilometer pipe. Soils in this valley have been continuously irrigated with urban wastewater since 1901, longer than any other soil in the world. The capacity of these soils to produce conditions in which agriculture can be practiced safely and produce healthy crops depends on a complex negotiation between soil...

Linda Shi, "Green Infrastructure Beyond Flood Risk Reduction"

Location:

Online Event, Graduate School of Design

This lecture explores whether it is possible to achieve both social justice and environmental sustainability in efforts to mitigate urban flood risk. The expanding scale of urban flooding under climate change has renewed interest in large-scale restoration projects that make room for water in metro centers. However, ecologically functioning green infrastructure – unleashed rivers, sprawling wetlands – is inconsistent with the current governance landscape of fragmented local governments seeking to maximize local land values and minimize affordable housing. Moreover, even...

Civilizing the Internet of Things

Location:

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Knafel Center, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge,

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a deeply interconnected ecosystem of billions of devices and systems that are transforming commerce, science, and society. IoT technologies can be used to disrupt, exploit, bias, bully, and intrude as well as to make our lives safer, more efficient, and more convenient. Join Francine Berman, Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in an exploration of the larger social and environmental ecosystem needed to develop an IoT that maximizes benefits, minimizes risk, and promotes individual protections...

Aging in [a] Place: Planning, Design & Spatial Justice in Aging Societies

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Stubbins, Room 112, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge

Today, public discussion and policy focuses on “aging in place” as a way to improve quality of life and reduce costs. However, in part because of socioeconomic differences and structural inequalities, not all older adults can live in or move to age-supportive communities, neighborhoods, or homes that match their values and needs. Differences in access to places to age well can take the form of spatial inequalities, such as inadequate market rate housing for older adults on fixed incomes.

'Co-sponsored by the Harvard Joint Center for...

Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Dilip Da Cunha, “The Invention of Rivers”

Location:

Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

Separating land and water is not just an act of division; it is also an act of creation. It creates land and water from ubiquitous wetness, defining them on either side of a line. It is one of the first acts of design, setting out a ground of habitation with a line that has largely been naturalized in features such as the coastline, the riverbank, and the water’s edge. These features are subjected to artistic representations, scientific inquiry, infrastructural engineering, and landscape design with little awareness of the act that brought them...

Origins of the Green Revolution: Hybrid Seeds, Hunger, and Mexico-India Cooperation

Location:

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...

Anna Heringer, “Architecture is a Tool to Improve Lives”

Location:

HGSD, Gund Hall, Stubbins Room 112, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

“The vision behind, and motivation for my work is to explore and use architecture as a medium to strengthen cultural and individual confidence, to support local economies and to foster the ecological balance. Joyful living is a creative and active process and I am deeply interested in the sustainable development of our society and our built environment. For me, sustainability is a synonym for beauty: a building that is harmonious in its design, structure, technique and use of materials, as well as with the location, the environment, the user, the socio-...

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Cambridge, MA 02138
T (617) 495-1585 | F (617) 495-0754