EXPOS 20
Ecological Crisis: Witnessing and Planning in the Age of Climate Change
The news just keeps getting worse. Over the past few months, swathes of Australia, California, Amazonia, and even the Arctic have burned. Jakarta flooded; so did parts of Pakistan, India, and Iowa. In Massachusetts, 2019 brought a respite from the past years’ disasters––Boston and its suburbs experienced two “hundred-year floods” in quick succession in winter 2018––but on the other hand, this winter has been a little too warm for comfort. Against this steady drumbeat of local calamities, our shared global crisis continues to unfold: international agreements are abrogated or ignored, global greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, and geophysical “tipping points” keep getting crossed. It’s hard not to despair. This course will ask you to move beyond despair. We will think seriously about the hard questions climate change poses: how should governments and peoples prepare for, and adapt to, a changing climate? How do we stave off the worst-case scenarios, and how should we mete out responsibility for the damage that’s already certain to occur? How might our society––our politics, our culture, our sense of justice and our narratives of ourselves––transform as climate change continues to unfold? And how can we mobilize people and governments to fight climate change?
"The members of Expos 20: Ecological Crisis – all first-years at Harvard – chose to enroll in an Engaged Scholarship course. That means they volunteered for the extra workload of a course oriented toward the community, including a final capstone project on climate justice in Boston, to be presented to our partners in 350 Massachusetts.
Then came coronavirus. Students were scattered across four continents, placed under quarantine orders, and found themselves in new roles as caretakers, distance learners, and witnesses to history.
While our class continued to study the climate crisis, at home, students recorded their responses to what was unfolding around them. This website collects their testimony and reflections, in lieu of the capstone project that would have been."
