A most innovative conference on Climate Change: Views from the Humanities

Today is the opening of a remarkable and nearly carbon-free conference organized by Ken Hiltner and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The title is Climate Change: Views from the Humanities.

From today until May 31, all of the talks will be available at the conference website. Then, there will be closing events by videoconference on May 31. You may sign up for free to participate in the online question and answer threads.

The keynote talks include noted ethicist Peter Singer, literature professor E. Ann Kaplan, bestselling science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, and English professor Ashley Dawson. Singer's thesis is fierce: "What the rich nations are doing is indefensible."

The breakout session titled "Flying and Focusing on the Everyday" includes climate scientist Peter Kalmus, geographer Joe Nevins, and myself. Peter's talk is a heartfelt, sincere reflection on the personal aspects of being a climate scientist in our surreal times, drawing heavily on a small convenience sample of his colleagues. Joe's offbeat and irreverent talk considers whether non-flying conferences such as this one are "self-referential self-righteous ascetic bullshit," and his rebuttal to this accusation is 100% convincing. I'll embed my own talk below.

Joe and I come from different disciplines, but have become friends in the past year while founding an international campaign to encourage constructive progress by universities and professional associations to change our culture of flying. Our website is flyingless.org, and our Twitter handle is @flyingless. There are links on the website to a general petition, a list of more than 360 academic supporters, and a Frequently Asked Questions page. If you are an academic who wants to support a well-considered and sensible initiative to encourage universities and professional associations to make an essential cultural change -- while maintaining the good that we seek to do through our work -- then please email us at academicflyingpetition@gmail.com.

I have not been so inspired by a conference for many years. There is something liberating and joyous and rebellious in hitting "pause" on the usual dissonant soundtrack of our jet-setting academic lives, and instead actually starting to live the professional practice that we would live in a sane world that takes climate change seriously.