Environmental Activist to Speak at Clark About Climate Change

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

GoLocalWorcester Lifestyle Team

The Higgins Schools of Humanities at Clark University will kick off its popular dialogue symposium series with a talk from award-winning writer and environmental activist Rebecca Solnit, on Thursday September 18th at 7:30 pm in Room 320 of the Jefferson Academic Center.

Solnit’s talk – entitled “Stories for Hot Water: In Between Impossible and Easy, Between Despair and Denial” – will focus on the ways society faces up to and addresses climate change.

“Our society has changed astonishingly in the past half-century, and most of what is best about those changes came from grassroots movements, from marginal people, from passionate individuals, and from those moments in which private citizens came into public life and power through civil society,” said Amy Richter, professor of history and director of the Higgins School of Humanities. “But, to change the world, we need to change the story.”

Solnit is the author of 15 books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including “Men Explain Things to Me” (Haymarket Books 2014); “The Faraway Nearby” (Viking 2013); “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster” (Viking 2009); and “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West” (Viking 2003) for which she received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the Mark Lynton History Prize.

Solnit also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan literary fellowship, and two NEA fellowships for Literature. In 2010, the Utne Reader listed her as one of the “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Solnit is a contributing editor to Harper's and a frequent contributor to the political site TomDispatch.com.

The event is free and open to the public and is part of the Council on the Uncertain Human Future initiative. A conversation between the council and Solnit will take place after the talk.

For a complete calendar of Higgins School of the Humanities events, visit: http://www.clarku.edu/higgins-school-of-humanities/