Science & Society

When it comes to climate change, much of our cultural imagery is apocalyptic. The result is that most of us can’t imagine, realistically, getting it right. And if we can’t imagine possible climate futures, we can’t create them. Salvage punk artist Olalekan Jeyifous and MoMA curator Paola Antonelli join ecologist, policy expert, and Climate Futurism curator Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson to discuss design’s role in addressing the climate crisis.

In a conversation grappling with how we might envision and achieve a thriving future for coastal cities and all who call them home, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson hosts landscape architect Kate Orff and architect and design justice pioneer Bryan Lee.

The quest for short-term profits has been to the detriment of a habitable planet. Mining, overfishing, and clear cutting have led to pollution, extinctions, and loss of nature. By combusting fossil fuels, we’ve gone beyond changing ecology to changing the very chemistry of the atmosphere and ocean. Extractive capitalism has upended our climate. Yet, might it also, given the power of markets, help us find a way forward? This moment in human history requires nothing less than transformation—of electricity, transportation, agriculture, buildings—of our relationships to nature and to each other. But we actually have most of the solutions we need, from renewable energy to regenerative farming. Can we implement them at scale within a financial system that maximizes quarterly profits? How might banks, insurance companies, corporations, and the like become an intentional and engaged part of the solution? And what is the role of governments? Of communities? Of artists and storytellers? Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson will host journalist and activist Naomi Klein and finance expert Régine Clément, both contributors to the climate anthology All We Can Save, for a conversation grappling with how we might transform our economy in order to address the climate crisis.

We can’t go back to a world free of plastic pollution. We designed a material that essentially lasts forever, and we throw it away, all day, every day. Each year, 270 million metric tons of plastic (and rising) are produced, and 8 million metric tons (and rising) enter the ocean. There are 500 times more pieces of plastic in the ocean than there are stars in our galaxy. It has infiltrated our food chain—there is plastic in our seafood, sea salt, drinking water, and beer. By 2050 there may be more plastic in the ocean than fish. What is this proliferation doing to ecosystems, society, and our bodies? How can we break our addiction to this modern material convenience?

The urgency of the climate crisis has permeated public consciousness. How bad might things get? Our fossil-fuel economy has created a global emergency, and the Green New Deal has thrust the issue, and the magnitude of changes needed, to the political forefront. Where does the latest science point us? What are the most promising solutions? And what does our changing climate mean for New York City? Our guests Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a director at New Consensus and policy lead for the Green New Deal, and Dr. Kate Marvel, climate research scientist at NASA and Columbia University, join series host Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Pioneer Works science scholar and founder of Ocean Collectiv, to grapple with the scientific realities of the cultural, governmental, and corporate shifts needed to mitigate our climate crisis.

Knowledge is power. Power to the people. Knowledge for the people. We live in a world of increasingly digitized, editable, and bifurcating information sources, of exponentially accelerating knowledge production. We live in a world of increasing inequality, and of spin and fabrications finding megaphones so large they spread further than facts. While the terms “open access,” “open source,” and “open data” proliferate, so too do paywalls, patents, and information deemed proprietary. Access to reliable information is fundamental. Experts increasingly find themselves undervalued. The role of libraries is evolving.

We have reached peak fish. Despite fishing farther from shore, in deeper waters, and using ever more high-tech equipment, the global catch has been declining since 1996. Overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution have rendered a once abundant and healthy food depleted and contaminated. Meanwhile, aquaculture production has increased dramatically, from providing 7% of fish for human consumption in 1974 to 53% in 2016. So what could a future of sustainable seafood look like, both wild and farmed, for a human population approaching 8 billion?