The Center for Humanities hosted Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author for their last event in their Environmental Humanities Lecture Series with a conversation in the Higgins Welcome Center on Thursday, April 13.
The event started with a welcome speech from Evelyn Sterne, the director of the Center for Humanities. She gave a recap about all the previous events in their series, about who they brought in including literary scholars and writers to give lectures to engage with pressing environmental questions of the day.
“The series has accomplished what we hoped it would do, bringing students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members across disciplinary lines to discuss issues that affect us all,” Sterne said.
Then, she introduced Barbara Wolfe, the provost and executive director vice president of academic affairs to offer a few remarks about the event.
Wolfe thanked the audience for coming to the event. She said the University of Rhode Island gathers together to celebrate the accomplishments in the humanities every April. It reflected helping members of the URI community to understand the past, present and future and how they came together.
“This year’s series has demonstrated important disciplines like English, philosophy and creative writing,” Wolfe said.
Afterward, Wolfe introduced Jennette Riley, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences to distribute the Center of Humanities Student Excellence Awards. There were four awards, two for undergraduates and two for graduates.
The undergraduate winners were Kyle Gunning, a second-year student studying English literature and Jonah Major, a fourth-year student studying film media and Japanese. Gunning won for his contribution as co-editor of the undergraduate “Etherbound” literary magazine. Major won for his contribution as a writer and director for numerous films for the arts and humanities at URI.
The graduate winners were two doctoral students in English, Jerriod Avant and Cherie Rowe. Avant won for his prize-winning poetry and Rowe won for her numerous contributions to URI as an actor and director.
After the awards, Ximena Sevilla, an assistant history professor, introduced Kolbert and facilitator Erik Loomis, a history professor. Sevilla said that Kolbert has engaged with issues regarding global warming and many other subjects as a writer for the New Yorker and author for “Under a White Sky” which is about the nature of the future and the fragility of the planet.
“She writes in a way that will make you want to keep reading as she showcases many experiences for people around the world to preserve and save nature,” Sevilla said.
Then, Kolbert and Loomis walked to the front of the room and began the conversation. Kolbert talked about her book “Under a White Sky” and said she wrote it to explain how to respond to climate change.
Kolbert also said her book is the story of people trying to breed corals that are tough enough to withstand global warming and warmer oceans. She said corals don’t like spikes in water temperature and she started to see the process of changing nature as a pattern which is why she pursued the story.
According to Loomis, one of the main subjects of the book is geoengineering and the nature of climate change. The book states that the Chicago River was the earliest form of geoengineering which drastically transformed the ecosystem of the Midwest.
The television station of Helena, Montana states that geoengineering is a large-scale manipulation process of controlling the earth’s climate.
“I think that one of the real insights of the book is that this is hardly something new,” Loomis said.
When he asked Kolbert to talk more about geoengineering she said this was another topic that prompted the book. In her book, she includes the reversal of the Chicago River flow because of the sewage getting dumped into Lake Michigan which caused a lot of water-borne diseases like cholera.
According to Chicago Line Cruises, the construction started in 1892 and was completed in 1900 and included a sanitary and ship canal in the middle.
“It was an epic project. Seven to eight years was considered the biggest construction project before building the Panama Canal,” Kolbert said.
For his final question, Loomis asked what people can offer or why they are necessary in the struggle against climate change. Kolbert said one of the main problems with scientists is they’re terrible communicators and they speak in jargon that no one can understand.
Kolbert added that her own role is translating that information to the broader public. What society can do is stop and think about what we are really doing here to start climate change.
“I guess this is a role for environmental humanities,” Kolbert said. “We have to see if we can get people to stop and think about how they are hurting our climate.”