The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change
Part of the series “Climate Change Conversations: Taking Action against Shock, Silence, and Stupidity”
This roundtable considers cultural narratives, language, and the imagination as crucial terrains for confronting climate change. How do existing narratives, expectations, and assumptions about our relationships to the earth and to other humans make it difficult to imagine and work toward livable climate futures? What new (or old) ways of thinking might help us to move beyond silence and despair?
Series Description:
This series of events aims to re-energize interdisciplinary conversations at Columbia about the climate emergency, at a moment when confronting the urgent and ever-growing challenges posed by global warming feels extraordinarily difficult. In the context of diminished funding for climate science and other federal actions that aim to roll back or obstruct climate action, it’s easy to be shocked into silence and despair, or to be burned-out to the point of wondering, what’s the point? In this difficult moment, what are we not talking about, and why? Given the scientific consensus about human-caused climate change, this war on climate action seems, at best, extraordinarily stupid. How can we counter arguments that climate concern is “woke” or that climate action is “radical” or economically harmful? What can we learn from previous environmental setbacks? How can we reckon with climate change without being overwhelmed by climate anxiety? What modes of intelligence—in the university and beyond—can help us to counter these tendencies toward silence, stupidity, and despair? How can we forge a new common sense about the necessity and possibility of climate action?
About the speakers
Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence and the author of The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, a finalist for the Penn Libraries Book Prize in Sustainability. Dr. Guenther advises NGOs, corporations, and policymakers on climate disinformation and communication, and her research has appeared in both scholarly journals and media outlets such as Scientific American, The New Republic, WIRED, and The Guardian. She serves as an Expert Reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Barbara Leckie is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. She is the author of Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time (Stanford UP, 2022) and Open Houses: Poverty, the Architectural Idea, and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Britain (U of Penn P, 2018) as well as several articles and edited collections. She is the co-creator and co-host of a SSHRC-funded podcast, Commons Sense: Reclaiming Common Sense for a Livable Future, on the commons, climate change, and public conversation. She’s a founding member of the Carleton Climate Commons, an interdisciplinary working group comprised of students, faculty and administrators at Carleton that focuses on the climate crisis through social science and humanities’ perspectives; and co-academic director of Re.Climate: Centre for Climate Communication and Public Engagement, a national group focused on climate communication and engagement
Lydia Dean Pilcher is a cultural strategist, climate leader, installation artist, and filmmaker of over 40 award-winning feature films & TV series. Her New York based production company, Cine Mosaic, works with partners in Europe, U.S. India, Turkey, Africa, and the Middle East. Pilcher has an extensive track record of creating innovative cross-industry/ multi-stakeholder collaborations to drive narrative change. She works with UN Climate Change, Entertainment and Culture for Climate Action (ECCA), supporting filmmakers in the program, Earth Witness: from Story to Policy; and leads efforts with Hollywood unions, guilds, and studios to promote clean energy and climate storytelling,
At Columbia Climate School, Pilcher designs and teaches a graduate interdisciplinary course, “Climatic Change: Storytelling Arts, Zeitgeist and Our Future,” exploring complexity in systems, culture, and compelling climate solutions in stories for film, TV, and creative writing. She has partnered with Climate School faculty and meteorologist Andrew Kruczkiewicz on the research project, Storming the Apocalypse, bridging the gap between data-driven climate science and low public risk perception. The work explores storytelling arts, popular culture, systems thinking, and environmental humanities to drive values-based decision-making.
In 2024 Pilcher co-founded Global Rise: Stories for the Future, providing training and workshops in climate storytelling for creatives, social amplifiers and community leaders
