Stoking the Imagination: Learning Climate Care from Indigenous Women
In his book The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh argues that the climate crisis is a crisis of culture and imagination. He roots this argument in the explanation that the development of the carbon economy during the Industrial Revolution hinged on the very absence of its development in British colonies, where raw materials to sustain this revolution were procured. Therefore, the carbon economy was nurtured by the strategic and deliberate exclusion of those people from their share of the benefits of carbon-based economic growth. In his 2021 book A Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh presents one example of how colonisers were able to exploit natural resources in lands where people had lived for millennia. In 1621, under false pretexts, officials of the Dutch East Indies Company perpetrated massacres and forced relocation of the Bandanese people from Selamon, a small village located on one of the Banda islands in the eastern Indian Ocean, in present day Indonesia. On these islands, the Dutch had found the commercially viable nutmeg which they couldn’t trade freely with local presence and control over the island.
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Empowering Youth Voices with CIERP: A Reflection on My Path from Shanghai to Tufts
Shanghai’s air felt comparable to a dizzying combination of dirt, ultra-fine particles, and chemicals prophesizing and fueling the prelude to cataclysm. The daunting overcast backdropped severe pollution and traffic congestion as if people could keep living this way regardless of the cleanliness of the oxygen they breathed. Masking was a diurnal must. Incessant coughing noises from the pedestrians were truly a test of my patience. Fantasizing about pretty skyline sceneries while sitting dully in my first class, I found myself helplessly yearning for something that I had taken for granted. These sceneries of gloominess agitated me. “I wonder how my grandfather managed to get groceries today,” I whispered to myself, “I hope he stayed at home.”
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Why is Climate Change More Drastic in African Countries?
Esther Kiobel is a human rights defender currently in ecological exile. She comes from Ogoni land, a kingdom with a rich reserve of fossil fuels, which has been laid desolate over time due to overexploitation from the oil company Shell Nigeria. Kiobel filed a class action lawsuit against Shell in 2012 due to human rights abuses, but at the heart of the case was the environmental degradation of the Ogoni region of Niger Delta due to the exploitation of oil.
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Celebrating the Legacy of Black History Month
Professor Wangari Maathai, a 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and founder of Green Belt Movement mentioned; “Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist earth to heal her wounds and, in the process, heal our own.” As the first African woman to receive the coveted Nobel Peace prize award, she showed what is possible especially for women and youth from across Africa to raise their voice and take more agency in addressing issues relating to climate change, poverty and hunger.
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Fletcher Deans Talk COP27: Implementation COP, Africa COP or Finance COP?
On November 30, 2022, The Fletcher School at Tufts University hosted a Post COP27 Debrief session with Dean Rachel Kyte, Academic Dean Kelly Sims Gallagher, and student delegates to document successes and failures at COP 27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, at the end of the two-week conference in November 2022.
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