These kinds of events below are happening all over the world every day and most of them, now, are webcast and archived, sometimes even with accurate transcripts. Would be good to have a place that helped people access them. This is a more global version of the local listings I did for about a decade until September 2020 and earlier for a few years in the 1990s.
A more comprehensive global listing service could be developed if there were enough people interested in doing it, if it hasn’t already been done.
If anyone knows of such a global listing of open energy, climate, and other events is available, please put me in contact.
Thanks for reading,
Solar IS Civil Defense,
George Mokray
gmoke@world.std.com
http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com - notes on lectures and books
http://solarray.blogspot.com - renewable energy and efficiency
http://zeronetenrg.blogspot.com - zero net energy links list
http://cityag.blogspot.com - city agriculture links list
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Index
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Thawing Ice, Rising Tensions: Canada’s Arctic Security Challenge
Monday, March 30
10am ET [1 - 2:30 p.m. PT]
UC Berkeley, 223 Philosophy Hall, Berkeley, CA
And online
RSVP at https://events.berkeley.edu/events/event/318353-thawing-ice-rising-tensions-canadas-arctic
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Systemic Risk Management: A Perspective from the Inter-American Development Bank
Monday, March 30
12:00pm to 1:00pm EDT
MIT, Building E40, 496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdQM6e_3kz3A14_EvrO5H1Fq9ewXyhuICu6Syc9G2wH3el9Lw/viewform
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Forging a New Approach to Energy and Climate Policy
Monday, March 30
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Rubenstein 414ab, 79 John F. Kennedy St, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001Th7RIAS&_gl=1*1wt8sqs*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAy*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ0MDkyMDUkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzQ0MDkzNjgkajMwJGwwJGg3MzE2OTc3Nzc.
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When Bioeconomy Meets Carbon Removal: Insights from Integrated Systems Modeling
Monday, March 30
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, 300 Wallace Hall, Princeton. NJ
Online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/when-bioeconomy-meets-carbon-removal-insights-from-integrated-systems-modeling/
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Tracy Palandjian on Investing in Opportunity
Monday, March 30
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-event-tracy-palandjian-on-investing-in-opportunity-tickets-1981350168691
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The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism
Monday, March 30
7:00pm
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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America at 250 and Beyond: Union and Disunion
Monday, March 30
7:00pm EST
Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/@HarvardIOP/streams
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From Learning to Action: Practical Steps Towards Climate Ready Facilities
Tuesday, March 31
5 am to 6 am EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-learning-to-action-practical-steps-towards-climate-ready-facilities-tickets-1982494827396
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Earth and Life: A Four Billion Year Conversation
Tuesday, March 31
6:00pm (doors open at 5:30pm)
Harvard Geological Museum, 100 Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/andrew-h-knoll-at-the-harvard-geological-lecture-hall-tickets-1982828880558
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Ibram X. Kendi, author of Chain of Ideas
Tuesday, March 31
7:00pm (doors at 6:00 pm.)
First Parish Church, 1446 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://portersquarebooks.com/product/event-ticket-includes-book-ibram-x-kendi-first-parish
Cost: $45 (book included)
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Public Health & Collaborative Governance in Extreme Heat Response
Wednesday, April 1
12 pm to 1 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/public-health-collaborative-governance-in-extreme-heat-response-tickets-1981378743158
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Politics and Culture from All Sides: The Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion
Wednesday, April 1
12 – 1:15PM
Tufts, 5 The Green, Medford, MA 02155
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Polarization and International Politics
Wednesday, April 1
12:00pm to 1:30pm EDT
MIT, Building E40, 496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
Livestreamed at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5ooD8Ydk4vd83Ac8VNEoQ
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Innovating with Amazon: CO2 Utilization in the Built Environment
Wednesday, April 1
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Greentown Labs Boston, 444 Somerville Ave, Somerville, MA, 02143
RSVP at https://luma.com/t0mmgaiv?lm_source=embed
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2026 Lemann Dialogue: Six Biomes, Multiple Realities, One Country
Thursday, April 2 – Friday, April 3, 2026
Harvard, CGIS South, Room S020, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
RSVP at https://prod-drclas2.drupalsites.harvard.edu/2026-lemann-dialogue
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Then and Now: How Conservation Careers are Evolving
Thursday, April 2
12 – 1PM
Tufts, 474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
And online
RSVP at https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pkis8_FaSnCqW3M1NB6CKw#/registration
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Data Centers in the AI Age: How To Up Reliability, Sustainability, and Scalable Innovation
Thursday, April 2
12:00 PM (EST)
Online
RSVP at https://trellis.net/webinar/data-centers-in-the-ai-age-how-to-up-reliability-sustainability-and-scalable-innovation/
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Arctic Wildlife, Oil, and the Rule of Law
Thursday, April 2
12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
Harvard Law School, Pound 100 Cahill, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSedp2SWgvysQ0HSiWLnDsRIzRSKGQ1I0hOuR3J6rxEvW0MxTg/viewform
Important: If you are not enrolled as a student, or a staff or faculty member at Harvard please email Lana Nadj at lnadj@law.harvard.edu for access.
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The Political Economy of Energy Transitions in the Middle East
Thursday, April 2
4:30 – 6 p.m.
Online
RSVP at https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/event/political-economy-energy-transitions-middle-east
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How to Disagree Better: The Secret to Less Conflict and More Influence
Thursday, April 2
6:00pm (doors open at 5:30pm)
Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/julia-minson-at-the-cambridge-public-library-tickets-1983580407395
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Leadership in Challenging Times
Thursday, April 2
6:00pm EST
Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/@HarvardIOP/streams
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Science Under Siege
Thursday, April 2
6:00pm - 7:30pm
MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
RSVP at https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/programs/author-talk-science-under-siege-how-to-fight-the-five-most-powerful-forces-that-threaten-our-world
Cost: $5
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Climate Action in Practice: Delivering on MIT’s Climate Goals (Spring Webinar Series)
Friday, April 3
12:00pm to 1:00pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScR3Ij3QkVXkno9d_UPbt9OtUpMT1aI66F6h3GcQljBtkVDCQ/viewform
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"Henry David Thoreau": A Screening and Discussion with the Filmmakers and Scholars
Friday, April 3
2 – 4:30 p.m.
Harvard, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA
And online
RSVP at https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D198264579
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Climate Change Negotiation Challenge
Friday, April 3
3 – 6PM
Tufts, Mugar Hall, 160R Packard Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXBBn9HfOi7Kx0KwmTThbTaOel0PJL-EEZGw6hn8cr3QEWzw/viewform
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Swiftynomics
Friday, April 3
7:00pm
Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Coolidge Corner, Brookline, MA 02446-2908
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/misty-l-heggeness-swiftynomics-tickets-1982906261005
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Forging Just Futures: Solutions-based Science to Address the Climate Gap
Monday, April 6
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Rubenstein 414ab, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, 02138
And online
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001Sl6fIAC&_gl=1*t1fmkr*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAyLjE0NTgwOTk1MjguMTc3NDQwOTk4OC4xNzc0NDA5OTg4*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ0MDkyMDUkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzQ0MTAxMDYkajUzJGwwJGg3MzE2OTc3Nzc.
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Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions are Failing and How to Fix Them
Monday, April 6
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, 300 Wallace Hall
And online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/existential-politics-why-global-climate-institutions-are-failing-and-how-to-fix-them/
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Practice × Theory Sessions: Sonic Ecologies and Climate Change
Monday, April 6
2:15 pm to 5 pm EDT
Harvard, Holden Chapel, Harvard St, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/practice-theory-sessions-sonic-ecologies-and-climate-change-tickets-1983279796259
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War and Justice in the 21st Century: The International Criminal Court in Today's World
Monday, April 6
5:30pm EST
Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/@HarvardIOP/streams
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No!: The Art and Activism of Complaining
Monday, April 6
7:00pm
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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When the Forest Breathes
Monday, April 6
7:00pm
The Museum of Science - Blue Wing, 1 Science Park, Boston, MA 02114
RSVP at https://www.mos.org/events/when-forest-breathes-author-suzanne-simard
Cost: $30 (includes book)
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Activists to Terrorists: How NSPM-7 Targets Non-Profits and Activists
Monday, April 6
7 pm to 8:30 pm
Adler Hall at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W 64th Street, New York, NY 10023
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/activists-to-terrorists-how-nspm-7-targets-non-profits-and-activists-tickets-1985142578892
Cost: $0 - $20
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The Michigan Futures Initiative: A Climate Solutions Accelerator at the University of Michigan
Tuesday, April 7
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
Harvard Kennedy School, Bell Hall (B-500), 79 JFK Street, Cambridge 02138
RSVP at https://web.cvent.com/event/fc5dbb89-632b-4903-bba7-61f79ff3a956/register
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Creating a Culture of Fear: The Intersection of Federal Immigration Enforcement and Free Speech Crackdowns
Tuesday, April 7
12pm to 1:30pm
Boston College, East Wing, 120, Boston College Law School, 885 Centre Street, Newton, MA 02459
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Partitioning of PFAS and Other Organic Contaminants Between Water, Air, and Minerals
Tuesday, April 7
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, Briger Hall Auditorium, 11 Ivy Lane, Princeton, NJ
And online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/hmei-faculty-seminar-by-ian-bourg/
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Age of Uncertainty: Navigating the Complex Global Environment
Tuesday, April 7
5:30 pm to 9 pm
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, 230 Fenway, Boston, MA 02115
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/age-of-uncertainty-navigating-the-complex-global-environment-tickets-1984137747414#location
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Can Democracy Survive the Data Economy?
Tuesday, April 7
6 PM
Online
RSVP at https://wgbh.zoom.us/webinar/register/3317741159289/WN__O9PMGeQSvm-L8QD1kSdHg#/registration
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The Escape Artist Methane & New Tools to Detect the Super-Potent Climate Pollutant
Tuesday, April 7
6-8pm
Last Round Bar & Grille, 908 Purchase Street, New Bedford, MA
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Separation of Powers: How to Preserve Liberty in Troubled Times
Tuesday, April 7
6:30pm - 8:00pm
MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
RSVP at https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/programs/autho-talk-separation-of-powers-how-to-preserve-liberty-in-troubled-times
Cost: $5
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Harvard Divinity School Conference on Truth and Reconciliation Experiences in the U.S.
Wednesday, April 8
9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Harvard, HDS James Room, Swartz Hall, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.hds.harvard.edu/hds-conference-truth-and-reconciliation-experiences-us
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From Climate Challenges to Watershed Solutions
Wednesday, April 8
1 pm to 2 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/from-climate-challenges-to-watershed-solutions-tickets-1985478098440
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Questions of Fascism and Democracy Lecture Series & Democracy and Its Critics Initiative — Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies
Wednesday, April 8
2 – 3:15 p.m.
Harvard, Adolphus Busch Hall at Cabot Way, 27 Kirkland Street, Cambridge
RSVP at https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/events/2026/04/countering-illiberalism-in-liberal-democraciesd-to-populist-support
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Building a Secure Nuclear Future: US-Central Asia Partnership
Thursday, April 9
9 – 10:15 a.m.
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/building-a-secure-nuclear-future-us-central-asia-partnership-tickets-1984985866160
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Beautiful Destruction: The Tar Sands, the Post-Modern Sublime, and the Subsumption of the Earth
Thursday, April 9
Noon - 1:30 p.m.
UC Berkeley, 223 Philosophy Hall, Berkeley, CA
And online
RSVP at https://events.berkeley.edu/events/event/318861-beautiful-destruction-the-tar-sands-the
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Inventing Urban Futures: Lessons from Three Centuries of City-making
Thursday, April 9
12:00 p.m. EST
Harvard, Bloomberg Center for Cities, Taubman Third Floor, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge 02138
And online
RSVP at https://cities.harvard.edu/events/inventing-urban-futures-lessons-from-three-centuries-of-city-making/
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Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement
Thursday, April 9
12 – 1PM
Tufts, Curtis Hall - Multipurpose Room, 474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA
And online
RSVP at https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_a3C0MvLIRd2gtPcaLbOWXQ#/
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Capacity to Measure Progress Toward Sustainability in Global Food Systems
Thursday, April 9
12 – 1:15 p.m.
Online
RSVP at https://www.hks.harvard.edu/events/capacity-measure-progress-toward-sustainability-global-food-systems
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Screen to Table: Food, Culture, and Climate Storytelling
Thursday, April 9
1 pm to 2 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/screen-to-table-food-culture-and-climate-storytelling-webinar-tickets-1985538817051
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Driving Economic Development with Affordable Power
Thursday, April 9
2:00-3:00 p.m. ET
Online
RSVP at https://rmi.org/event/webinar-driving-economic-development-with-affordable-power/
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New World Disorder: What’s the Humanitarian Perspective?
Thursday, April 9
5:00pm to 6:00pm EDT
MIT, Building 45 (MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing), 230, 51 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
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Earth Month Sustainability Networking Event
Thursday, April 9
5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
345 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/earth-month-sustainability-networking-event-tickets-1983971286525
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2026 Goldsmith Awards ft. Jeffrey Goldberg
Thursday, April 9
6 – 7 p.m.
Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, Institute of Politics, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge 02138
RSVP at https://iop.harvard.edu/events/2026-goldsmith-awards-ft-jeffrey-goldberg
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New England Symposium on Graphics
Sunday, April 12
9:15am to 5:00pm EDT
MIT, Building 34, 101, 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
More at https://nesg.graphics/
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Leading the Free World: Freedom and Democracy in US National Security Strategy
Monday, April 13
12:00pm to 1:00pm EDT
MIT, Building E40, 496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetKkV_5yMVqo9ytrXfoJ8WznvsBZQYkJqGxLkE9EA3YgvY1g/viewform
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Are We There Yet? Evaluating the Transition to EVs
Monday, April 13
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Rubenstein 414ab, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001ThnNIAS&_gl=1*xklpz2*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAyLjE0NTgwOTk1MjguMTc3NDQwOTk4OC4xNzc0NDA5OTg4*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ2NDc4MDMkbzQkZzEkdDE3NzQ2NDgzMjYkajYwJGwwJGgxMjE1NjkyMzQy
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Forging Just Futures: Solutions-based Science to Address the Climate Gap
Monday, April 13
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, 300 Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ
And online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/forging-just-futures-solutions-based-science-to-address-the-climate-gap/
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Science and Technology: A Collaboration for Justice
Monday, April 13
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
MIT, Nexus, Hayden Library, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94664936448
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSceuEQwL-Ao5WBJcuDmStjNqXtKbcTyNR5psnU0duDcOBOA_g/viewform?usp=send_form
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Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans
Monday, April 13
6:00pm (doors open at 5:30pm)
Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/robert-j-sampson-at-the-cambridge-public-library-tickets-1984159443307
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Spotlight on Energy: Making 100 per cent renewables a reality
Tuesday, April 14
06:00 - 07:00 EDT
Online
RSVP at https://webinars.businessgreen.com/making-100-per-cent-renewables-a-reality/register
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Circular Design: Fundamentals, Applications, and Emerging Opportunities (Virtual)
Tuesday, April 14
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Online
RSVP at https://bsa.app.neoncrm.com/nx/portal/neonevents/events?path=%2Fportal%2Fevents%2F40095
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Civic Data Theatre and Municipal Climate Action
Tuesday, April 14
12 pm to 1:30 pm
Northeastern, Ryder Hall, 11 Leon Street, Boston, MA 02115
And online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/civic-data-theatre-and-municipal-climate-action-tickets-1985734366946
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The Rule of Law Wars: An Update from the Front
Tuesday, April 14
5 – 6 p.m.
Online
RSVP at https://www.vpal.harvard.edu/event/rule-law-wars-update-front?occ_id=0
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No to Nuclear
Tuesday, April 14
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://secure.everyaction.com/3KtyzJqEEEexTMdkFYIeUA2
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Campus Climate Lab Symposium 2026
Wednesday, April 15
11 am to 2 pm
BU, Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, 610 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/campus-climate-lab-symposium-2026-tickets-1984395171376
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Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate
Wednesday, April 15
12 – 1 p.m.
Harvard, CGIS Knafel, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262), 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
And online
RSVP at https://us-japan.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/shared-prosperity-fractured-world-new-economics-middle-class-global-poor-and-our-climate?occ_id=0
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Against the Enivironmentalism of the Rich
Wednesday, April 15
6:30 – 8 p.m.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nancy-fraser-against-the-environmentalism-of-the-rich-tickets-1981241563851
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2026 Global Health Symposium
Thursday, April 16
9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Online
RSVP at https://globalhealth.harvard.edu/symposium/2026-global-health-symposium/#section-overview
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Drawing on Water Sharing Traditions in a Warming Cairo
Thursday, April 16
12 – 1PM
Tufts, Curtis Hall - Multipurpose Room, 474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA
And online
RSVP at https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_djpFxGHZQAeHU7VW14J7MA#/registration
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The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health
Thursday, April 16
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Central Library in Copley Square, 700 Boylston Street, Boston MA 02116
RSVP at https://bpl.libcal.com/event/15371955
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Climate Power Workshop
Thursday, April 16
7 pm to 8:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/climate-power-workshop-tickets-1985739418054
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Ballot
Friday, April 17
7:00pm
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Smoke & Mirrors: Satellite View On How Pollution Alters Clouds and Climate
Monday, April 20
12 pm to 1 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-mirrors-satellite-view-on-how-pollution-alters-clouds-and-climate-tickets-1984970634602
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Following the Money: Private Sector Climate Investment and the Data Behind It
Monday, April 20
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, 300 Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ
And online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/following-the-money-private-sector-climate-investment-and-the-data-behind-it/
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Trees, Environmental Thought & the American Conservation Movement
Tuesday, April 21
5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EDT
MA Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02215-3695
RSVP at https://18308a.blackbaudhosting.com/18308a/Environmental-History-Seminar-with-Kristan-M-Hanson-and-Sarah-Hastings
And online
RSVP at https://18308a.blackbaudhosting.com/18308a/Environmental-History-Seminar-with-Kristan-M-Hanson-and-Sarah-Hastings---Virtual-Research
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7th Annual Earth Day Climate Change Symposium
Wednesday, April 22
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Online
RSVP at https://www.climate.columbia.edu/events/7th-annual-earth-day-climate-change-symposium
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AI for Good: In Climate, Health and Investing
Wednesday, April 22
1:00 PM PDT
The Commonwealth Club of California, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, 110 The Embarcaadero, San Francisco, CA 94195
And online
RSVP at https://luma.com/3hzitlub
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Great Expectations: Rising Power and the Elusive Pursuit of Absolute Security
Wednesday, April 22
12:00-1:30pm
MIT, E40-496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5ooD8Ydk4vd83Ac8VNEoQ
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Our Queer Planet: Environmental Rights and LGBTIQ+ Defenders
Wednesday, April 22
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM ET
Harvard, CGIS Knafel Building, Room K00A, Concourse Level, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001VASLIA4&_gl=1*1wvxvww*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAyLjE0NTgwOTk1MjguMTc3NDQwOTk4OC4xNzc0NDA5OTg4*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ2NDc4MDMkbzQkZzEkdDE3NzQ2NDg0OTEkajYwJGwwJGgxMjE1NjkyMzQy
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The Best Possible Future: Kim Stanley Robinson in conversation with Scott Snibbe.
Wednesday, April 22
8:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Online
RSVP at https://berkeley.zoom.us/meeting/register/y6Nygt4-Qwuz5z_KADD__g#/registration
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Living Climate Futures Symposium 2026
Thursday, April 23 5:30pm to 8:30pm EDT, Friday, April 24 9:00 AM–8:30 PM, Saturday, April 25 9:00 AM–6:00 PM
https://livingclimatefutures.org/symposium-2026
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Record sea surface temperature jump in 2023–2024
Thursday, April 23
4 am to 4:45 am EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.dk/e/record-sea-surface-temperature-jump-in-20232024-tickets-1980938906595
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Next-gen biotech for a net-zero world
Thursday, April 23
7 am to 8 am EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/next-gen-biotech-for-a-net-zero-world-tickets-1984376170544
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Designing the Hydro-Commons: Strategies for Addressing Complex Contemporary Water Challenges
Thursday, April 23
12 – 1PM
Tufts, Curtis Hall - Multipurpose Room, 474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
And online
RSVP at https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qOictOcSSA-kD9M1j-Dj5A#/registration
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Design Before Disaster Book Talk & Urban Risk Lab Celebration
Friday, April 24
5 pm to 8 pm
MIT Welcome Center, 292 Main Street, E38-195 Cambridge, MA 02142
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/design-before-disaster-book-talk-urban-risk-lab-celebration-tickets-1985215717652
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Nature in Danger: The Destruction Of Nature In Ukraine During The War
Sunday, April 26
1:30 pm to 3:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nature-in-danger-the-destruction-of-nature-in-ukraine-during-the-war-tickets-1852660169439
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Reflections on the State and Design of U.S. Power Markets
Monday, April 27
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Wexner 434ab, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001SiojIAC&_gl=1*1ha0uaz*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAyLjE0NTgwOTk1MjguMTc3NDQwOTk4OC4xNzc0NDA5OTg4*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ2NDc4MDMkbzQkZzEkdDE3NzQ2NDg2ODckajYkbDAkaDEyMTU2OTIzNDI.
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The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie
Monday, April 27
6:00pm(doors open at 5:30pm)
Harvard Science Center, Hall D, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chanda-prescod-weinstein-at-the-harvard-science-center-tickets-1983282603656
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AHA Symposium 2026: Raised by AI?
Tuesday, April 28
8:00am — 5:00pm ET
MIT Media Lab, E14 - 6th floor, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA
And online at https://www.media.mit.edu/events/aha-symposium-raised-by-ai/
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Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat It for Good
Tuesday, April 28
7:00pm
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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To Reflect or Deflect: Assessing Internal Accountability in the U.S. Military
Wednesday, April 29
12:00-1:30pm
MIT, E40-496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5ooD8Ydk4vd83Ac8VNEoQ
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Climate Change and Its Impact on Insects: Pollinators, Beneficial Insects, Pests and Invasive Species.
Wednesday, April 29
9 pm to 10:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/climate-change-and-its-impact-on-insects-tickets-1981395095067
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Events
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Thawing Ice, Rising Tensions: Canada’s Arctic Security Challenge
Monday, March 30
10am ET [1 - 2:30 p.m. PT]
UC Berkeley, 223 Philosophy Hall, Berkeley, CA
And online
RSVP at https://events.berkeley.edu/events/event/318353-thawing-ice-rising-tensions-canadas-arctic
In recent years, climate change has opened up once-inaccessible Arctic regions, leading to a new era of great-power competition. Countries like China, Russia, and the United States are scrambling to claim new shipping routes and untapped natural resources that were once buried under ice. How can Canada, which controls 1/4 of the global Arctic, secure its vast northern regions in the face of increasing pressures from not just longtime rivals, but also traditional allies like the United States? Can it pivot a defense strategy historically reliant on the US to new key allies like the European Union? And how can it most effectively bolster and protect Canadian sovereignty in an era of geopolitical confrontation?
About the Panelists
Alexander Dalziel is a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He has over 20 years of experience working in Canada’s national security, intelligence, and foreign policy communities. He specializes in Arctic geopolitics, including international security cooperation between North America, the Nordic countries, and NATO. He holds an MA in History from Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Dr. Christian Leuprecht is a Class of 1965 Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and a professor in the Department of Political Studies and the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. An expert in security and defense, he has held positions and advised governments in Canada and Europe. He received his PhD in political studies from Queen’s University.
This discussion will be moderated by Professor Michaela Mattes, Travers Department of Political Science.
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Systemic Risk Management: A Perspective from the Inter-American Development Bank
Monday, March 30
12:00pm to 1:00pm EDT
MIT, Building E40, 496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdQM6e_3kz3A14_EvrO5H1Fq9ewXyhuICu6Syc9G2wH3el9Lw/viewform
The risk picture in Latin America is evolving rapidly, with systemic shocks and climate pressures increasingly shaping development outcomes. In such uncertain environments, multilateral development banks play a key role in protecting development gains while mobilizing investment. Their effectiveness depends on proactive and rigorous risk management. Please join us for a timely discussion with the Inter-American Development Bank’s Chief Risk Officer, Søren Elbech, who will share his expertise and insights on the region’s emerging risk trends, the use of forward-looking analysis, financial innovations that can build resilience, and the integration of climate risk into development strategy.
Søren Elbech is the Chief Risk Officer at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). He previously served as Managing Director and Global Head of Supranational Institutions at J.P. Morgan in New York (2019–2023) and was the first Director General/Treasurer of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Beijing (2016–2019). Earlier, he was a Senior Vice President at a global wind-energy firm and served as IDB Treasurer and Chief of the Treasury Division in the Finance Department. He holds Executive MBAs from ESCP Business School (Paris) and BI Norwegian School of Management (Oslo).
This seminar will be held in E40-496 (Pye Room). Lunch will be available. Please RSVP here.
Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.
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Forging a New Approach to Energy and Climate Policy
Monday, March 30
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Rubenstein 414ab, 79 John F. Kennedy St, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001Th7RIAS&_gl=1*1wt8sqs*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAy*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ0MDkyMDUkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzQ0MDkzNjgkajMwJGwwJGg3MzE2OTc3Nzc.
In this Energy Policy Seminar, Aliya Haq, the President of the Clean Economy Project, will reflect on the state of climate change in politics, why environmentalists need to change, and how a new approach to energy policy will accelerate the 21st century economy.
Q&A to follow. Buffet-style lunch will be served.
Registration: RSVP required. A Harvard University ID is required for in-person attendance; all are welcome to attend via Zoom.
Recording: The seminar will be recorded and available to watch on the Belfer Center's YouTube channel.
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When Bioeconomy Meets Carbon Removal: Insights from Integrated Systems Modeling
Monday, March 30
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, 300 Wallace Hall, Princeton. NJ
Online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/when-bioeconomy-meets-carbon-removal-insights-from-integrated-systems-modeling/
Yuan Yao, associate professor of Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Systems for Yale University, will present “When Bioeconomy Meets Carbon Removal: Insights from Integrated Systems Modeling.” This seminar will be held in-person (PUID holders only) and available via livestream (open to all).
The bioeconomy aims to replace fossil-based, non-renewable products with those derived from biological resources and processes. The bioeconomy intersects with carbon dioxide removal (CDR) through nature-based and engineered pathways such as afforestation/reforestation, biochar, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Leveraging the bioeconomy for effective CDR requires a comprehensive understanding of the environmental, economic, and societal impacts of diverse biomass pathways, as well as their CDR effectiveness across different technologies, regions, and timeframes. However, acquiring these insights is challenging due to limited knowledge of system-wide effects and the lack of robust assessment methodologies across spatial and temporal dimensions. This talk will present transdisciplinary, multi-scale systems modeling frameworks developed by Dr. Yao’s research group to address these critical knowledge and methodological gaps. These frameworks systematically integrate industrial ecology approaches, such as life cycle assessment and material flow analysis, with methods from other disciplines, including machine learning, engineering process modeling, and economic-ecological modeling. Through several case studies, the presentation will demonstrate how these integrated frameworks enhance our fundamental understanding of the interconnected ecological, industrial, and economic systems across various scales. Furthermore, the talk will discuss policy implications and illustrate how these frameworks can inform system-level design for a resource-efficient, climate-beneficial bioeconomy that aligns with global sustainability goals.
Yao is an Associate Professor of Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Systems at Yale University. Her research focuses on understanding the potential environmental impacts of emerging technologies and biomass utilization. Dr. Yao received many awards, including the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 35 Under 35 Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the Laudise Medal from the International Society of Industrial Ecology. Dr. Yao is the associate editor for the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling. She served on the provisional committee of the U.S. National Academies to assess current life-cycle analysis methods for low-carbon transportation fuels in the United States. Her research has been published in high-impact journals, such as Science, Nature Sustainability, Nature Chemical Engineering, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University.
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Tracy Palandjian on Investing in Opportunity
Monday, March 30
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-event-tracy-palandjian-on-investing-in-opportunity-tickets-1981350168691
A Conversation with David Rubenstein
RESCHEDULED - New Date: Monday, March 30th
If you previously RSVP'd for the original event date of February 23rd, your registration remains valid and no further action is required.
Join the Stone Social Impact Forum for a timely conversation with Tracy Palandjian, CEO and Co-Founder of Social Finance, on the role of finance in expanding economic opportunity and building pathways to upward mobility.
Over the past fifteen years, Palandjian has been at the forefront of impact investing and cross-sector collaboration, helping to design and scale new models to deliver better outcomes in workforce development, health, housing, and education.
In a fireside conversation moderated by David M. Rubenstein—investor, philanthropist, author and Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of The Carlyle Group—the discussion will explore how we can revitalize the American Dream through new paradigms for education and wealth building.
VIRTUAL ATTENDANCE
This event will be streamed live on the Kennedy Institute YouTube page. To register to receive a reminder with the link, click "Get Tickets" above and select "Virtual Attendee" as your ticket type.
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The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism
Monday, March 30
7:00pm
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
Harvard Book Store welcomes Durba Mitra—Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University and award-winning author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought—for a discussion of her new book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism. She will be joined in conversation by Brandon M. Terry—John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
About The Future That Was
How Third World women seized the means of knowledge production to fight against rising authoritarianism and imagine a future freer than our present.
Beginning in the 1970s, women of the decolonizing world offered new visions of liberation that centered the ideas and lives of women. Galvanized by International Women’s Year in 1975 and the UN’s Decade of Women, Third World women developed novel ideas of equality and self-determination, building a new internationalism in opposition to neocolonialism and postcolonial authoritarianism. In The Future That Was, feminist historian Durba Mitra offers a pathbreaking account of how these women wrote Third World feminism into being, catalyzing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that transformed emancipatory politics across the globe.
Mitra shows how women from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond envisioned a radically just world—and did so by insisting that research on the world’s women lay at the heart of debates about global inequality, development, and human rights. Women gathered at international conferences, wrote reports on the dangers facing women, and took to the streets in protest, building a world of knowledge that contested the devastating effects of patriarchy and colonialism. Yet, despite hundreds of laws, institutions, and publications created through the efforts of these women, the future they imagined was never fully realized. The Future That Was transforms the story of decolonization and its aftermath through the history and ideas of women. By excavating these vital pasts, Mitra shows how we might envision a future of our own that is freer than the present.
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America at 250 and Beyond: Union and Disunion
Monday, March 30
7:00pm EST
Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/@HarvardIOP/streams
Launching our The Consent of the Governed: America at 250 and Beyond series, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg; 28th President of Harvard University Drew Gilpin Faust; and Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University Eddie Glaude will take part in a conversation moderated by Jill Lepore, Professor of American History at Harvard.
Together, they will examine the forces of union and disunion that have both tested and unified our republic over the past 250 years.
Please register with a valid Harvard email address to attend in-person. All JFK Jr. Forums are publicly livestreamed on our YouTube channel.
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From Learning to Action: Practical Steps Towards Climate Ready Facilities
Tuesday, March 31
5 am to 6 am EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-learning-to-action-practical-steps-towards-climate-ready-facilities-tickets-1982494827396
A short, practical webinar for voluntary organisations managing buildings and spaces to consider climate readiness.
A short, practical webinar for voluntary organisations looking to build confidence around climate‑ready facilities. The session shares realistic tips and learning to help you understand your options and take your next steps. Led by Chiara Fingland from the Growing Climate Confidence project.
Many voluntary organisations are thinking about how their buildings and spaces can cope with a changing climate, from rising energy costs to overheating, flooding and extreme weather. This short, practical session focuses on realistic steps towards more climate‑ready, resilient facilities, rooted in the everyday realities of managing voluntary sector buildings.
The webinar brings together recent learning and conversations from across the sector, including the SCVO Gathering, and turns this into clear, tangible top tips that organisations can use to build confidence and take their next steps.
The session also links to the Growing Climate Confidence project, a partnership project supporting voluntary organisations across Scotland to build knowledge, confidence and practical skills to respond to climate change in ways that work for them.
What you’ll gain from this session
By the end of the webinar, you will:
Have a clearer understanding of what climate‑ready facilities mean in practice for voluntary organisations
Take away practical, achievable ideas to improve the resilience of your buildings and spaces
Feel more confident about where to start or what to do next, whatever your size or resources
Be better connected to support, learning and resources available through DTAS and partner projects
Who is it for?
This session is for voluntary and community organisations, including facilities managers, operational staff, managers, trustees and anyone with responsibility for buildings or spaces. You don’t need to have attended any previous events. This is a short, supportive session designed to help you build confidence and take your next steps.
About the speaker
Led by Chiara Fingland, Climate Development Officer, Growing Climate Confidence
Chiara Fingland works with voluntary organisations across Scotland to build confidence and practical skills around climate action as part of the Growing Climate Confidence project.
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Earth and Life: A Four Billion Year Conversation
Tuesday, March 31
6:00pm (doors open at 5:30pm)
Harvard Geological Museum, 100 Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/andrew-h-knoll-at-the-harvard-geological-lecture-hall-tickets-1982828880558
Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome Andrew H. Knoll—Fisher Research Professor of Natural History and Earth and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus, at Harvard University, and author of A Brief History of Earth and Life on a Young Planet—for a discussion of his new book Earth and Life: A Four Billion Year Conversation. This event will take place at the Harvard Geological Museum, 100 Geological Lecture Hall located at 24 Oxford St, Cambridge.
About Earth and Life
From the world-renowned geobiologist and bestselling author of A Brief History of Earth, the epic story of a planetary conversation four billion years in the making.
How did the world as we know it—from the soil beneath our feet to the air we breathe and the life that surrounds us—come to be? Geologists have proposed one set of answers while biologists have proposed another. Earth and Life is the first book to reveal why we need to listen to both voices—the physical and the biological—to understand how we and our planet became possible.
In this captivating book, Andrew Knoll traces how all life is sustained by Earth’s geological and atmospheric dynamics, and how life itself shapes the physical environment. Taking readers on a thrilling journey across four billion years of Earth history, he shows how Earth and life interact to cycle the very elements of life from rocks, water, and air, and how these and related processes control our climate, regulate our atmosphere, and support the diversification of life-forms great and small. Along the way, Knoll explains how we can draw on this history as we navigate the challenges of the Anthropocene, and how it can aid our search for life elsewhere in the universe.
Blending cutting-edge science with illuminating insights from a leading expert, Earth and Life explains how this ongoing interplay holds vital lessons for us today as humanity becomes an increasingly major voice in the conversation.
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Ibram X. Kendi, author of Chain of Ideas
Tuesday, March 31
7:00pm (doors at 6:00 pm.)
First Parish Church, 1446 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://portersquarebooks.com/product/event-ticket-includes-book-ibram-x-kendi-first-parish
Cost: $45 (book included)
ABOUT CHAIN OF IDEAS
The National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginningcharts how “great replacement theory” has become a dominant political idea of our time and ushered in an antidemocratic age.
Recall the words chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia: “You will not replace us!” Recall the string of mass shooters across the globe—in Oslo, Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Pittsburgh—who claimed their crimes were a defense against “White genocide.” Recall business and media figures cultivating anxiety and furor over demographic change. These incidents only scratch the surface: Popular and ruling politicians in every region of the world have expressed some version of great replacement theory, eroding democratic norms in the name of preventing demographic change.
The term was coined in 2011 by a French novelist who argued that Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by shadowy elites to “replace” the White population. From there, politicians and theorists in the United States and elsewhere repackaged it as a story of “globalists” welcoming “migrant criminals” and promoting diversity to take away the jobs, cultures, electoral power, and very lives of White people. Over time, great replacement theory has expanded those under threat to include citizens, men, Jews, Christians, heterosexuals, and ethnic majorities in countries as distinct as Russia, El Salvador, Brazil, Italy, and India, all targeted with the message that they are facing an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent.
In Chain of Ideas, internationally bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age—and how we can free ourselves from it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is one of the world’s foremost historians and leading antiracist scholars. His books have been translated into multiple languages and republished throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Dr. Kendi is Professor of History and the founding director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study, an interdisciplinary research enterprise examining global racism. He is author of many highly acclaimed bestsellers including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He is the author of the international bestseller How to Be an Antiracist. Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.
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Public Health & Collaborative Governance in Extreme Heat Response
Wednesday, April 1
12 pm to 1 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/public-health-collaborative-governance-in-extreme-heat-response-tickets-1981378743158
Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health & Sustainable Care + North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies
Join the Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health & Sustainable Care and the North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (NAO) for our upcoming Climate & Health seminar, Public Health and Collaborative Governance in Extreme Heat Response: Evidence from Canadian Provinces and Urban Centers featuring Dr. Sara Allin, Director of the NAO and Associate Professor of Health Policy, at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, at the University of Toronto.
Description
This presentation will share results from a CIHR-funded project exploring the governance of heat responses in Canada, with two parts: first, a scoping review of the academic and grey literature to characterize the roles of public health authorities in climate action, with a focus on extreme heat in three provinces (British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec); and, second, a qualitative comparative case study with interviews with key stakeholders to identify and assess governance mechanisms supporting collaborative action on extreme heat in three cities (Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal). Implications for public health authorities and their role in climate action, and broader climate resilience, will be discussed.
Speaker
Sara Allin is an Associate Professor of Health Policy at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and Director of the North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (NAO). Her research focuses on comparative health systems, health system resilience, and health equity. At the NAO, she leads research to inform evidence-based policy, including rapid reviews for decision-makers and in-depth studies of health system structures and reforms in Canada and other high-income countries.
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Politics and Culture from All Sides: The Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion
Wednesday, April 1
12 – 1:15PM
Tufts, 5 The Green, Medford, MA 02155
What are the environmental costs of fast fashion?
Hosted by the newly established Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education (CEVIHE) at Tufts University, this weekly series invites Tufts faculty, students, and staff to explore politics and culture by reading controversial books and articles, engaging with faculty discussants and guest speakers, and discussing sensitive political, economic, and social issues with depth, humility, and courage. Each week, participants will encounter sophisticated arguments associated with a diversity of ideological, religious, and cultural worldviews. Lunch will be provided. Please see the workshop schedule here for more details, and please contact us if you want to participate so we can add you to the Canvas site.
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Polarization and International Politics
Wednesday, April 1
12:00pm to 1:30pm EDT
MIT, Building E40, 496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
Livestreamed at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5ooD8Ydk4vd83Ac8VNEoQ
Rachel Myrick from Duke University will give a presentation at the MIT Security Studies Program's Wednesday Seminar.
Summary: Polarization is a defining feature of politics in the United States and many other democracies. Yet although there is much research focusing on the effects of polarization on domestic politics, little is known about how polarization influences international cooperation and conflict. Myrick argues that polarization reshapes the nature of constraints on democratic leaders, which in turn erodes the advantages democracies have in foreign affairs. Drawing on a range of evidence, including cross-national analyses, observational and experimental public opinion research, descriptive data on the behavior of politicians, and interviews with policymakers, Myrick traces the pathways by which polarization undermines each of the democratic advantages. Turning to the case of contemporary US foreign policy, Myrick shows that as its political leaders become less responsive to the public and less accountable to political opposition, the United States loses both reliability as an ally and credibility as an adversary.
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Innovating with Amazon: CO2 Utilization in the Built Environment
Wednesday, April 1
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Greentown Labs Boston, 444 Somerville Ave, Somerville, MA, 02143
RSVP at https://luma.com/t0mmgaiv?lm_source=embed
Join Greentown Labs for a celebration of the kickoff of Go Build 2026, an open-innovation program with Amazon and the Global CO2 Initiative (GCI) at the University of Michigan aimed at accelerating collaborations with startups in the field of CO2 utilization.
The buildings sector contributes 7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions; to change this, we need innovative technologies to build a decarbonized future. At this event, attendees will hear lighting pitches from startup participants working on this challenge, with innovations revolutionizing how buildings are planned, built, retrofitted, and managed.
Learn more and register here
Agenda (in ET):
5:30 - 6:00 p.m. Check-in and networking
6:00 - 6:13 p.m. Opening remarks
Georgina Campbell Flatter, CEO at Greentown Labs
Chris Atkins, Director, Worldwide Operations Sustainability at Amazon
6:13 - 6:30 p.m. Startup introduction and pitches featuring:
Carbon Infuse (Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) develops a novel CO2 mineralization technology that upcycles industrial waste and flue gas into cheaper and cleaner materials for construction and manufacturing.
Carbon Negative Solutions (Portland, Oregon, U.S.) converts any region’s industrial wastes and minerals into carbon-negative cement supplements (SCMs).
Carbon To Stone (Tappan, New York, U.S.) converts industrial residues and CO₂ into lower-carbon construction materials for cement and concrete production.
Low Carbon Materials (Durham, United Kingdom) develops a proprietary range of carbon-sequestering aggregate-like additives for concrete and asphalt.
Neocrete (Auckland, New Zealand) develops an additive that makes low-carbon materials (SCMs) behave like cement, reducing the carbon and cost of concrete while making it more durable.
6:30 - 7:30 p.m. Networking
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2026 Lemann Dialogue: Six Biomes, Multiple Realities, One Country
Thursday, April 2 – Friday, April 3, 2026
Harvard, CGIS South, Room S020, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
RSVP at https://prod-drclas2.drupalsites.harvard.edu/2026-lemann-dialogue
Join us for the Tenth Annual Lemann Dialogue, a two-day panel series dedicated to exploring the complex socio-environmental challenges and opportunities facing Brazil's six biomes: the Amazon, Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, Caatinga, Pantanal, and Pampa. We will delve into the delicate balance between conservation, regeneration, and human as well as economic development specific to each biome, featuring interdisciplinary discussions from diverse experts.
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Then and Now: How Conservation Careers are Evolving
Thursday, April 2
12 – 1PM
Tufts, 474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
And online
RSVP at https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pkis8_FaSnCqW3M1NB6CKw#/registration
The Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) was founded in 1866 to address the loss of Atlantic salmon caused by dams and pollution. Over the last 160 years, MassWildlife has evolved into a modern, multifaceted conservation organization. In its early years, the agency’s work centered on managing game species that could be hunted or fished. Today, MassWildlife’s mission has broadened significantly, with responsibility for conserving all fish and wildlife, including rare plants and animals, and for protecting and restoring the habitats on which they depend. MassWildlife also manages over 235,000 acres for biodiversity conservation and outdoor recreation. To meet these expanding responsibilities, MassWildlife now employs a diverse workforce made up of biologists, foresters, ecologists, educators, communications professionals, and fiscal staff who all play essential roles. This evolution reflects a broader, modern understanding of conservation that integrates science, policy, land management, and public engagement to meet today’s complex environmental challenges.
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Data Centers in the AI Age: How To Up Reliability, Sustainability, and Scalable Innovation
Thursday, April 2
12:00 PM (EST)
Online
RSVP at https://trellis.net/webinar/data-centers-in-the-ai-age-how-to-up-reliability-sustainability-and-scalable-innovation/
AI workloads are fundamentally changing data center requirements. Organizations now need higher performance, faster deployment, and more resilient infrastructure while managing increasingly complex supply chains and compressed timelines.
The challenge extends beyond technical capacity. Data center teams need to coordinate across land acquisition, equipment logistics, power infrastructure, and cooling systems, all while balancing reliability requirements with environmental impact. Traditional fragmented, region-by-region approaches aren’t keeping pace with these demands.
This webinar explores how organizations are building data center strategies that can scale with AI demand. The focus is on moving from reactive, regional planning to integrated approaches that reduce deployment timelines and improve operational resilience.
You’ll learn:
How to balance speed and reliability to improve data center sustainability and financial performance
What’s changing in data center planning as AI workloads scale globally
How to simplify supply chains and deployment models
How to adapt to compressed timelines without sacrificing resilience
If you can’t tune in live, register anyway and we’ll send you the recording. Trouble registering? Try switching your browser and double check that cookies are enabled. If you are still having issues, please contact support@trellis.net.
Speakers
Chris Tiffany, Global Director, Data Center Sector, DP World
Jake Mitchell, Director, Climate Tech Innovation, Trellis Group
Jason Feist, Senior Vice President, Cloud Marketing Seagate
Rob LoBuono, sCritical Facilities Leader
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Arctic Wildlife, Oil, and the Rule of Law
Thursday, April 2
12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
Harvard Law School, Pound 100 Cahill, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSedp2SWgvysQ0HSiWLnDsRIzRSKGQ1I0hOuR3J6rxEvW0MxTg/viewform
Important: If you are not enrolled as a student, or a staff or faculty member at Harvard please email Lana Nadj at lnadj@law.harvard.edu for access.
Speakers: Bridget Psarianos, Staff Attorney at Trustees for Alaska, and Margaret Williams, Senior Fellow, Arctic Initiative, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, HKS
The Arctic is ground zero for the clash between energy extraction and wildlife survival. Join us for a discussion with HKS Arctic expert, Margaret Williams and Bridget Psarianos, a Senior Staff Attorney with Trustees for Alaska, litigator on the front lines of this fight. Psarianos has represented Indigenous-led organizations to protect regions like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and draws on her experience within the U.S. Department of the Interior. In this conversation, our two experts will offer a unique perspective on the legal battles shaping the future of this fragile ecosystem.
A plant-based lunch will be served.
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The Political Economy of Energy Transitions in the Middle East
Thursday, April 2
4:30 – 6 p.m.
Online
RSVP at https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/event/political-economy-energy-transitions-middle-east
SPEAKER(S) Melani Cammet, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government; Director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Ezgi Canpolat, Visiting Scholar, CMES; AI for Social Good and Social Dimensions of Climate Lead, World Bank; Resident Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center.
Jeannie L Sowers, Visiting Scholar, CMES; Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science and International Affairs, University of New Hampshire.
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How to Disagree Better: The Secret to Less Conflict and More Influence
Thursday, April 2
6:00pm (doors open at 5:30pm)
Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/julia-minson-at-the-cambridge-public-library-tickets-1983580407395
Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Julia Minson—behavioral scientist and celebrated professor at the Harvard Kennedy School—for a discussion of her book, How to Disagree Better: The Secret to Less Conflict and More Influence.
About How to Disagree Better
In this "brilliant" (Arthur Brooks) and "both timely and timeless" (Adam Grant) book, pioneering Harvard Kennedy School professor and behavioral scientist Julia Minson reveals the counterintuitive secret to a life of less drama and more impact.
We are in a disagreement crisis. The average person would rather go to the dentist than have a twenty-minute conversation with someone that they strongly disagree with. Yet disagreement is both inevitable and essential for everything from navigating decisions at home to running innovative and agile companies to governing democratic societies.
In How to Disagree Better, Minson brings to bear her decades of research into understanding the psychology of disagreement and its relevance to negotiations, conflict resolution, and decision-making, revealing the hidden skill that all the best mediators and negotiators share: displaying receptiveness to opposing views.
The science shows that receptive individuals don’t just fight less, they also get more done—they are better decision-makers, better peacemakers, and yes, better influencers than the rest of us. Through original research and case studies, How to Disagree Better will show you why traditional persuasion strategies don’t work as well as you think they do, how you can bridge division and reach better outcomes simply by utilizing receptiveness strategies, and that disagreeing better is a skill all of us can learn to apply at home, at work, and with our neighbors.
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Leadership in Challenging Times
Thursday, April 2
6:00pm EST
Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/@HarvardIOP/streams
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General CQ Brown, Jr., joins us for a discussion on leadership and public service, touching on the many challenges facing the United States today, and lessons learned from his extensive military career. Moderating the discussion will be Eric Rosenbach, Director of the Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy Program for the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
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Science Under Siege
Thursday, April 2
6:00pm - 7:30pm
MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
RSVP at https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/programs/author-talk-science-under-siege-how-to-fight-the-five-most-powerful-forces-that-threaten-our-world
Cost: $5
Join us for a timely and compelling book event with Science Under Siege authors Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez, as they discuss how science is being challenged in today’s political and cultural landscape. Moderated by Boston Globe editor Anna Kuchment.
From pandemics to the climate crisis, humanity faces tougher challenges than ever. Whether it’s the health of our people or the health of our planet, we know we are on an unsustainable path. But our efforts to effectively tackle these existential crises are now hampered by a common threat: politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science.
Mann and Hotez have spent the last twenty years on the front lines of the battle to convey accurate, reliable, and trustworthy information about science in the face of determined and nihilistic opposition.
In this powerful manifesto, they reveal the five main forces threatening science: plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press. It is a call to arms and a road map for dismantling the forces of anti-science. Armed with the information in this book, we can be empowered to promote scientific truths, shine light on channels of dark money, dismantle the corporations poisoning the planet, and ultimately avert disaster.
Copies of Science Under Siege will be available for purchase and signing after the talk, courtesy of the MIT Press Bookstore.
A limited number of free tickets are available for full-time students with ID. Please reach out to museumregadmin@mit.edu.
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Climate Action in Practice: Delivering on MIT’s Climate Goals (Spring Webinar Series)
Friday, April 3
12:00pm to 1:00pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScR3Ij3QkVXkno9d_UPbt9OtUpMT1aI66F6h3GcQljBtkVDCQ/viewform
The series explores how collaboration, data, and design are shaping decisions about energy systems, buildings, and food. These choices affect emissions, health and well-being, and everyday life on campus.
Each session features MIT staff and collaborators working at the intersection of operations, planning, and climate action, with time for discussion and Q&A. Additional webinar sessions may be added in the future as the series evolves. Register once to attend one, two, or all three sessions.
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"Henry David Thoreau": A Screening and Discussion with the Filmmakers and Scholars
Friday, April 3
2 – 4:30 p.m.
Harvard, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA
And online
RSVP at https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D198264579
The Center for the Study of World Religions’ Transcendentalism Initiative will host a special screening of Episode 2 of Henry David Thoreau, a new documentary directed by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers and produced by Ken Burns. The film is narrated by George Clooney and features voice performances by Jeff Goldblum, Meryl Streep and Ted Danson. Director Erik Ewers will introduce the film.
The documentary offers a vivid, integrated portrait of Thoreau, bringing together the contemplative naturalist of Walden and the political thinker behind “Civil Disobedience.” It traces a life in which attention to the natural world and a commitment to social justice are presented as intertwined expressions of a single moral vision.
Following the screening, scholars Jeffrey S. Cramer (independent scholar), Rebecca Kneale Gould (Middlebury College), and John Kucich (Bridgewater State University and President of the Thoreau Society) will share brief insights from the vantage of their research. They will then join Erik Ewers, Christopher Loren Ewers, and producer Susan Shumaker for a panel discussion, followed by questions and a conversation with the audience.
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Climate Change Negotiation Challenge
Friday, April 3
3 – 6PM
Tufts, Mugar Hall, 160R Packard Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXBBn9HfOi7Kx0KwmTThbTaOel0PJL-EEZGw6hn8cr3QEWzw/viewform
The Climate Change Negotiation Challenge will be a round-based simulation activity pushing students to improve their negotiations skills while learning about contemporary and emerging environmental and climate change issues.
Join the Fletcher Energy & Environment Club (FLEEC) and the International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (INCR) Club on Friday, April 3, 2026 in Mugar 200 from 3 - 6 p.m. Dinner will be provided. All participants will receive a certificate of participation upon completion of the negotiation challenge.
Registration is free but required: the design of the negotiation is impacted by the number of participants. If you register you confirm that you will be available for the entire duration of the event.
The registration deadline for this event is March 27, 2026 at 12:00 PM ET.
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Swiftynomics
Friday, April 3
7:00pm
Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Coolidge Corner, Brookline, MA 02446-2908
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/misty-l-heggeness-swiftynomics-tickets-1982906261005
Join us at Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the release of Swiftynomics with author Misty L. Heggeness
Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy
A feminist romp through pop culture that illuminates how women influence and shape the economy.
Taylor Swift isn't just a pop megastar. She is a working woman whose astounding accomplishments defy patriarchal norms. And while not all women can be Beyoncé or Dolly Parton or Reese Witherspoon, the successes of these trailblazing stars help us understand the central role of women in today's economy.
Swiftynomics assesses the complex economic lives of everyday American women through the stories of groundbreakers like Taylor Swift, Misty L. Heggeness digs into the data, revealing women's hidden contributions and aspirations—the unexamined value they create by pursuing their own ambitions. She highlights the abundance of productive activity in their daily lives and acknowledges the barriers they still face.
Exploring critical reforms regarding caregiving and gendered labor, this book offers advice for women to thrive in an economy that was not built for them.
Misty L. Heggeness is co-director of the Kansas Population Center, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the University of Kansas, and former Principal Economist and Senior Advisor at the US Census Bureau. She is also creator of The Care Board, a dashboard of economic statistics built by and for caregivers that brings their economic contributions into the fold.
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Forging Just Futures: Solutions-based Science to Address the Climate Gap
Monday, April 6
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Rubenstein 414ab, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, 02138
And online
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001Sl6fIAC&_gl=1*t1fmkr*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAyLjE0NTgwOTk1MjguMTc3NDQwOTk4OC4xNzc0NDA5OTg4*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ0MDkyMDUkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzQ0MTAxMDYkajUzJGwwJGg3MzE2OTc3Nzc.
In this Energy Policy Seminar, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and a 2025-26 Radcliffe-Salata Climate Justice Fellow, will give a talk entitled, "Forging Just Futures: Solutions-based Science to Address the Climate Gap."
Q&A to follow. Buffet-style lunch will be served.
Registration: RSVP required. A Harvard University ID is required for in-person attendance; all are welcome to attend via Zoom.
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Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions are Failing and How to Fix Them
Monday, April 6
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, 300 Wallace Hall
And online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/existential-politics-why-global-climate-institutions-are-failing-and-how-to-fix-them/
Jessica Green, professor of Political Science for University of Toronto, will present “Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions are Failing and How to Fix Them.” This seminar will be held in-person (PUID holders only) and available via livestream (open to all).
Green is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, with cross appointments at the School of Environment and the Munk School of Public Affairs. She holds a PhD in Public Policy from Princeton University and MPA from Columbia University. Her research is focused on climate governance, including carbon markets, the implementation of the Paris Agreement and green industrial policy.
Her first book, Rethinking Private Authority: Agents and Entrepreneurs in Global Environmental Governance challenges the conventional wisdom that nation-states are the only relevant actors in solving collective action problems, instead showing how non-state actors can serve as rulemakers to address global challenges like climate change. It received best book awards from the International Studies Association, the American Political Science Association, and the International Political Science Association. In 2023, she was elected as a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. Her second book, Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions are Failing and How to Fix Them, was published in October 2025 with Princeton University Press.
She publishes regularly in both scholarly journals and popular publications including Nature, Nature Climate Change, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail and The Boston Review.
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Practice × Theory Sessions: Sonic Ecologies and Climate Change
Monday, April 6
2:15 pm to 5 pm EDT
Harvard, Holden Chapel, Harvard St, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/practice-theory-sessions-sonic-ecologies-and-climate-change-tickets-1983279796259
This session brings together musicians, artists, and scholars to explore practice as a mode of research. Particularly centered on sound.
How do sound, listening, and musical practice shape our understanding of ecological crisis? What forms of environmental knowledge emerge through sonic experimentation, immersive storytelling, and attentiveness to more-than-human worlds?
In this session, we gather artists and scholars working at the intersection of sound, ecology, and climate studies to explore how sonic practices can illuminate environmental transformations, histories of extraction, and future imaginaries. Through performance, reflection, and open conversation, we examine how listening becomes an ecological method.
Rather than assuming a fixed boundary between theory and practice, the session treats their interaction as an active site of experimentation. It invites participants to reflect on how practice operates within, alongside, and sometimes against academic structures, and how artistic work can open alternative ways of thinking, teaching, and researching across disciplines.
Guests:
Maarten Stragier, Michelle Agnes, Jacek Smolicki, Kyra Sims
Graduate Student Presenters:
Darcy Copeland, Marisse Cato, Stephen Early
Guest presentations and graduate student presentations will be followed by open conversation with all attendees.
Moderators:
Irene Newman Jimenes, Lucie Bai
Holden Chapel, Harvard University, Harvard St, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
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War and Justice in the 21st Century: The International Criminal Court in Today's World
Monday, April 6
5:30pm EST
Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/@HarvardIOP/streams
What is the role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in today's international landscape? With conflicts ongoing in multiple regions across the globe, Luis Moreno Ocampo, who served as the first prosecutor for the ICC, helps us unpack this timely and critical question.
Moreno Ocampo is the author of "War and Justice in the 21st Century: A Case Study on the International Criminal Court and Its Interaction with the War on Terror." The discussion will be moderated by Professor Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.
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No!: The Art and Activism of Complaining
Monday, April 6
7:00pm
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
Harvard Book Store welcomes Sara Ahmed—independent feminist scholar and author of eleven books, including The Feminist Killjoy Handbook—for a discussion of her new book, No!: The Art and Activism of Complaining. She will be joined in conversation by Durba Mitra—award-winning author of Indian Sex Life and The Future That Was.
About No!
To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Ahmed attunes her “feminist ear” to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work.
Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where—Ahmed’s accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say “No!” and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.
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When the Forest Breathes
Monday, April 6
7:00pm
The Museum of Science - Blue Wing, 1 Science Park, Boston, MA 02114
RSVP at https://www.mos.org/events/when-forest-breathes-author-suzanne-simard
Cost: $30 (includes book)
Join us at the Museum of Science for a captivating conversation with acclaimed forest ecologist and bestselling author Suzanne Simard as she presents her new book, When the Forest Breathes.
Building on the groundbreaking insights of her previous book, the bestseller Finding the Mother Tree, Simard reveals how the deep cycles of renewal in forests hold the key to protecting threatened ecosystems from climate change and human disruption.
Drawing on decades of research in her native British Columbia and collaboration with Indigenous communities, Simard demonstrates how forests thrive through intricate networks of life—from elder trees passing on their genetic knowledge to mushrooms breaking down fallen logs. Her work illuminates how thoughtful stewardship can restore balance to landscapes affected by logging, wildfire, and environmental pressures.
With warmth, wisdom, and a profound reverence for nature, Simard intertwines her scientific discoveries with reflections on life, loss, and renewal, showing how the rhythms of the forest mirror our own journeys. When the Forest Breathes is a hopeful call to action, proving that through care, insight, and community, reversing environmental decline is within our reach.
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Activists to Terrorists: How NSPM-7 Targets Non-Profits and Activists
Monday, April 6
7 pm to 8:30 pm
Adler Hall at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W 64th Street, New York, NY 10023
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/activists-to-terrorists-how-nspm-7-targets-non-profits-and-activists-tickets-1985142578892
Cost: $0 - $20
Learn how to protect each other, protect our civil liberties, and protect our climate in the face of fossil-fueled authoritarianism.
Secret watchlists, digital surveillance, spurious investigations, and the "terrorist" label: The government is using increasingly dangerous tools to intimidate and criminalize activists and organizations President Trump considers "the enemy within"--and the movement for climate justice is next.
Join us to hear from targeted activists facing down these threats, along with legal experts battling the government in court, to learn how we can--and must--work together to protect each other, protect our civil liberties, and protect our climate in the face of fossil-fueled authoritarianism.
SPEAKERS INCLUDE
Steven Donziger - Moderator - Attorney and activist
Dana R. Fisher - Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity and Professor in the School of International Service at American University.
Faiza Patel - Senior Director of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program
Lanessa Owens-Chaplin - Director of the Racial Justice Center, NYCLU
Ronald L. Kuby - Criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, radio talk show host, and television commentator
More TBA!
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The Michigan Futures Initiative: A Climate Solutions Accelerator at the University of Michigan
Tuesday, April 7
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
Harvard Kennedy School, Bell Hall (B-500), 79 JFK Street, Cambridge 02138
RSVP at https://web.cvent.com/event/fc5dbb89-632b-4903-bba7-61f79ff3a956/register
In the speaker series Climate Action Clinic: Where Research meets Practice, we spotlight lessons learned from efforts to link knowledge and action in order to develop and advance durable, effective, and equitable solutions to the climate change and sustainability challenges confronting humanity. In this discussion, the University of Michigan's Vice Provost for Sustainability and Climate Action Shalanda Baker presents an overview of the Michigan Futures Initiative, a framework designed to accelerate research impacts and respond to urgent climate and sustainability issues focusing on: law and policy for equitable climate and energy policy; education innovation for the next generation of climate leaders; economic impact and workforce development fora sustainable economy; industrial transformation; and systems change tackling the interconnected challenges of water, food, and energy systems.
Lunch will be served from 11:30 - 12:00 pm.
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Creating a Culture of Fear: The Intersection of Federal Immigration Enforcement and Free Speech Crackdowns
Tuesday, April 7
12pm to 1:30pm
Boston College, East Wing, 120, Boston College Law School, 885 Centre Street, Newton, MA 02459
The detention of critical voices such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk signals a willingness by the United States government to use of immigration enforcement as political retaliation for student speech on campuses. We are eager to have Mahsa Khanbabai of Khanbabai Immigration Law and Naomi Shatz from Boston’s Zalkind Law firm join us to offer their insights and experiences representing students targeted for their speech and how to navigate this increasing repression.
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Partitioning of PFAS and Other Organic Contaminants Between Water, Air, and Minerals
Tuesday, April 7
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, Briger Hall Auditorium, 11 Ivy Lane, Princeton, NJ
And online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/hmei-faculty-seminar-by-ian-bourg/
HMEI Faculty Seminar SeriesIan Bourg, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, will present “Partitioning of PFAS and Other Organic Contaminants Between Water, Air, and Minerals.” Join us in the Briger Hall Auditorium, 11 Ivy Lane, or stream it live. Bourg is the third speaker in the Spring 2026 HMEI Faculty Seminar Series.
Natural systems hold an increasing variety of anthropogenic microcontaminants and their transformation products. An important set of variables in predicting the behavior of these compounds in the environment is their affinities for different phases including water, air, minerals, and biological systems. Computational chemistry can help predict these affinities and generate information that is often challenging to obtain in the lab.
This seminar is free and open to the public. Lunch will be available in the Briger Atrium at 11:45 a.m., and the lecture will begin in the Auditorium at 12:15 p.m. Click here to stream it live, no registration needed. If you’d like to submit a question for the Q&A, you can do so.
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Age of Uncertainty: Navigating the Complex Global Environment
Tuesday, April 7
5:30 pm to 9 pm
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, 230 Fenway, Boston, MA 02115
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/age-of-uncertainty-navigating-the-complex-global-environment-tickets-1984137747414#location
Join leading minds in business and policy from The Fletcher School to connect, exchange insights and strengthen your professional network.
Geopolitical volatility. Weaponized interdependence. Energy transitions. Technological disruption. These are some of the accelerating uncertainties redefining the requirements for effective leadership in the 21st century. Meeting these challenges demands more than individual expertise; it calls for a connected community of practitioners capable of navigating complexity with clarity, resilience, and shared purpose.
The Fletcher School at Tufts University is delighted to invite you to an evening gathering of Boston’s leading minds in business and policy to exchange insights, connect, and strengthen the professional networks that will define the next era of leadership.
Event Agenda
Panel discussion with Fletcher’s distinguished faculty sharing perspectives on the forces reshaping the global landscape—geopolitical risk, economic security, energy systems, and emerging technologies
Deeper dialogue among participants to help frame the strategic questions facing today’s business leaders
Networking and the exchange of perspectives with other strategic decision makers
This gathering is designed to foster substantive dialogue and strategic relationships among senior decision-makers. Attendance is intentionally limited to ensure meaningful exchange and high-caliber engagement.
Submitting your registration request promptly is highly recommended. You will receive a follow-up email confirming your reservation for attendance.
Thank you for your interest in programming and events from the Office of Strategic Partnerships at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Lineup
Kelly Sims Gallagher, Dean of The Fletcher School and Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy
Daniel Drezner, Academic Dean and Distinguished Professor of International Politics
Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at Fletcher and Executive Director of the Institute for Business in the Global Context
Josephine Wolff, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Cybersecurity Policy
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Can Democracy Survive the Data Economy?
Tuesday, April 7
6 PM
Online
RSVP at https://wgbh.zoom.us/webinar/register/3317741159289/WN__O9PMGeQSvm-L8QD1kSdHg#/registration
“Cause we have a nice little database. And now you’re a domestic terrorist.” On January 23, 2026, in Portland, Maine, that was the response a masked agent gave when a protester asked a simple question: “What are you taking my information down for?” The blunt admission marked a chilling shift in the American public square.
What was once a marketplace for personal information has evolved into a permanent, powerful infrastructure: one that federal agencies, law enforcement, and even the Department of Defense increasingly rely on to monitor, classify, and track people in ways the public rarely sees. At the center of this shift is the data-broker economy, a vast, lightly regulated industry that buys and sells the intimate details of our lives. These datasets now feed into AI systems used for policing, immigration enforcement, and risk assessment. More recently, they have also begun informing the Pentagon’s exploration of autonomous technologies capable of identifying and targeting individuals without direct human oversight.
The implications for democracy are profound. When participation in a protest leads to an entry in a "nice little database," what happens to the right to dissent?
Join Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Kade Crockford, Director of Technology and Justice Programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts, for a timely investigation into how these systems work, who they empower, and what they mean for the future of democratic participation.
Join the conversation.
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The Escape Artist Methane & New Tools to Detect the Super-Potent Climate Pollutant
Tuesday, April 7
6-8pm
Last Round Bar & Grille, 908 Purchase Street, New Bedford, MA
Our speaker Deborah Gordon will discuss "The Escape Artist Methane & New Tools to Detect the Super-Potent Climate Pollutant." Debbie heads the Oil & Gas Solutions Initiative for Rocky Mountain Institute's Climate Intelligence Program and is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Odorless and invisible, methane-the major component of natural gas — "is so light and pressurized, it wants to escape," notes Debbie. This has become a huge global concern given the world's insatiable appetite for oil and gas. When liquefied gas is shipped globally and moves through an expanding maze of complicated equipment systems, methane's escape into the
atmosphere can account for as much climate emissions as coal. On the positive side: "Whereas 20 years ago, there was no way to detect methane on a large scale, now there are new tools and instruments, including methane-detecting satellites, airborne mappers and powerful lasers." Quickly spotting and plugging
point sources is going to be crucial in the next decade.
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Separation of Powers: How to Preserve Liberty in Troubled Times
Tuesday, April 7
6:30pm - 8:00pm
MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
RSVP at https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/programs/autho-talk-separation-of-powers-how-to-preserve-liberty-in-troubled-times
Cost: $5
Join us for an urgent and illuminating conversation with Cass R. Sunstein, Holberg Prize winner, bestselling author, and one of the world’s most influential legal scholars, as he presents his new book, Separation of Powers.
All over the world, people are questioning the separation of powers. They want a strong man, able to do what must be done. But James Madison was right to say this: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
In this essential and immensely timely book, Separation of Powers, Cass Sunstein explains why the separation of powers is necessary for both freedom and self-government. He shows that freedom from fear is a central goal of the system of separation of powers. He also explains why the executive branch is the most dangerous branch, why the idea of presidential immunity is a terrible one, and why an independent judiciary is crucial.
Drawing on his extensive experience in the White House, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security, the author also argues that the separation of powers is, in fact, six separations of powers: (1) The legislature may not exercise the executive power. (2) The legislature may not exercise the judicial power. (3) The executive may not exercise the legislative power. (4) The executive may not exercise the judicial power. (5) The judiciary may not exercise the legislative power. (6) The judiciary may not exercise the executive power. Each of these is essential to liberty under law.
Copies of Separation of Powers will be available for purchase and signing after the talk, courtesy of the MIT Press Bookstore.
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Harvard Divinity School Conference on Truth and Reconciliation Experiences in the U.S.
Wednesday, April 8
9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Harvard, HDS James Room, Swartz Hall, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.hds.harvard.edu/hds-conference-truth-and-reconciliation-experiences-us
Hosted by the Office for Community and Belonging through a restorative, heart-centered approach, this conference will serve as the inaugural public launching of the Harvard Divinity School Truth and Healing Commission. The convening is a call to affirm our common humanity and to advance the vision of a world healed of the harms that separate us from the natural world, from ourselves, and from one another. We are building a new world through a shared value of love.
The conference will highlight the work of Truth and Reconciliation initiatives in the United States and will feature representatives from two foundational initiatives: the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission in North Carolina and the Maine-Wabanaki Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Child Welfare. Members of these commissions will share how they worked to reconcile across differences and engaged in constructive dialogue through truth telling to heal communities after violence and historical harm.
The Commission is dedicated to helping HDS reckon with its role and the role of religion in Harvard's entanglements with slavery, colonization, forced assimilation and religious conversion, and so-called race science. Its goal is to engage our HDS community and African diasporic and Indigenous descendant communities across the Americas in truth-telling, accountability, healing, and repair.
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From Climate Challenges to Watershed Solutions
Wednesday, April 8
1 pm to 2 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/from-climate-challenges-to-watershed-solutions-tickets-1985478098440
Join Sustainable Conservation on April 8 as we kick off the Spring 2026 season of our Voices from the Field webinar series!
California’s water challenges, including groundwater overdraft, community flooding, water quality degradation, and ecosystem loss, are deeply interconnected. Rising temperatures and increasingly variable weather intensify these pressures and expose the limits of managing water, land, and ecosystems in isolation.
Across the state, however, proven solutions are already strengthening watersheds and mitigating climate risks. From groundwater recharge and land repurposing to wetlands restoration and soil health practices, Sustainable Conservation and its partners advance practical strategies that support both people and nature. The question before us is how to scale these solutions fast and wide enough to meet the urgency of climate change.
Join Sustainable Conservation on April 8 as we kick off the Spring 2026 season of our Voices from the Field webinar series! We’ll start with Turning Climate Challenges into Watershed Solutions, a conversation with state leaders on why healthy watersheds – above and below ground – are central to California’s climate future. We’ll explore how climate extremes are reshaping water management, why the San Joaquin Valley is often considered “ground zero” for both the state’s water challenges and opportunities, and how collaborative strategies like groundwater recharge, land repurposing, habitat restoration, and soil health practices can work together to build resilience.
Speakers
Karla Nemeth, Director, California Department of Water Resources
Virginia Jameson, Deputy Secretary for Climate and Working Lands, California Department of Food & Agriculture
Moderated by Dr. Josette Lewis, CEO, Sustainable Conservation
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Questions of Fascism and Democracy Lecture Series & Democracy and Its Critics Initiative — Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies
Wednesday, April 8
2 – 3:15 p.m.
Harvard, Adolphus Busch Hall at Cabot Way, 27 Kirkland Street, Cambridge
RSVP at https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/events/2026/04/countering-illiberalism-in-liberal-democraciesd-to-populist-support
SPEAKER(S) Giovanni Capoccia, Professor of Comparative Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations; Fellow Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford
Steven Levitsky, Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Harvard University
Join us for discussion of Giovanni Capoccia's current project Back from the Brink: Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies examining the conditions under which democrats can successfully counter emerging illiberal challenges and democratic backsliding. Capoccia will focus on the temporal dilemmas democrats face when confronting illiberal executives or rising illiberal oppositions, the trade-offs between early action and effective coordination, and the ways in which information and institutional legacies shape the prospects for democratic resilience over time.
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Building a Secure Nuclear Future: US-Central Asia Partnership
Thursday, April 9
9 – 10:15 a.m.
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/building-a-secure-nuclear-future-us-central-asia-partnership-tickets-1984985866160
SPEAKER(S) Laura S.H. Holgate, President, LSHH International Advisors, Arlington, VA
Aidar Tainov, Senior Program Manager, International Science and Technology Center, Astana, Kazakhstan
Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow and Director, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center
Adam Wozniak, A.M Candidate in Regional Studies- REECA
Central Asia occupies a critical position in global nuclear security and energy development, serving as a major supplier of natural uranium to the United States while maintaining its commitment to a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. As Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan advance their energy programs—including small modular reactor initiatives supported by the U.S. Department of State's FIRST program—cooperation between the U.S. and the region has become increasingly vital. Anchoring this development in robust non-proliferation, safety, and security frameworks is essential for building a sustainable future. To address these opportunities and challenges, the panel will reflect on the history of U.S.-Central Asia cooperation in non-proliferation, assess the current state, and explore the prospects and obstacles ahead in the nuclear energy sector.
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Beautiful Destruction: The Tar Sands, the Post-Modern Sublime, and the Subsumption of the Earth
Thursday, April 9
Noon - 1:30 p.m.
UC Berkeley, 223 Philosophy Hall, Berkeley, CA
And online
RSVP at https://events.berkeley.edu/events/event/318861-beautiful-destruction-the-tar-sands-the
Artists, rather than scholars, were the first ones alive to the fact that something rather unusual was underway in the boreal landscape of northern Alberta. The photography of Louis Helbig and Edward Burtynsky captured the awesome destructive beauty wrought by the tar sands industry, a force capable of reshaping the Earth as if it were a canvas and the industry an abstract expressionist painter. Helbig and Burtynsky’s work evoke the sublime, but this aesthetic seems to bear little relation to the sublime described by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century. It is not the vastness of nature that inspires the sublime, but rather its destruction.
The viewer of such artworks experienced an uncanny dread, without understanding why. Decades of research in ‘energy studies’ have done little to elucidate this problem. Scholars still seem to trail artists in grappling with the profound implications of the transition to non-conventional fossil fuels. This undesired Energiewende has proven much more significant than the shift to wind and solar, allowing the fossil fuel industry to tighten its grip on the planet. This talk will discuss the limits of previous approaches, such as ‘peak oil’ and ‘petro-states’, and instead will apply the Marxist categories of real and formal subsumption to understand the industry’s changing relationship to the Earth’s elementary systems.
Dr. Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley. He researches the transition from conventional to non-conventional fossil fuels, with a focus on the tar sands industry. Dr. Vettese completed his undergraduate education at McGill University. He holds master’s degrees from University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford, and earned his PhD from New York University. Dr. Vettese has held fellowships at Harvard University; the European University Institute; Copenhagen University; and the New Institute, Hamburg. His first book, Half-Earth Socialism (Verso 2022), was co-authored with climate scientist Drew Pendergrass and has been translated into half a dozen languages.
Speaker: Dr. Troy Vettese, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management
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Inventing Urban Futures: Lessons from Three Centuries of City-making
Thursday, April 9
12:00 p.m. EST
Harvard, Bloomberg Center for Cities, Taubman Third Floor, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge 02138
And online
RSVP at https://cities.harvard.edu/events/inventing-urban-futures-lessons-from-three-centuries-of-city-making/
How have bold ideas over the past three centuries influenced modern urban development?
As cities face rapid change and growing uncertainty, questions about how we imagine and plan for the future have taken on renewed urgency. Join the conversation to examine why some urban visions succeed while others fail, how social and environmental realities disrupt even the best-laid plans, and what past experiments in city-making can teach us about building more resilient and prosperous cities today.
Virtual event open to everyone. In-person event open to all Harvard University ID holders. Registration is requested as space is limited.
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Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement
Thursday, April 9
12 – 1PM
Tufts, Curtis Hall - Multipurpose Room, 474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA
And online
RSVP at https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_a3C0MvLIRd2gtPcaLbOWXQ#/
Food justice activists have worked to increase access to healthy food in low-income communities of color across the United States. Yet despite their best intentions, they often perpetuate food access inequalities and racial stereotypes. Hanna Garth shows how the movement has been affected by misconceptions and assumptions about residents, as well as by unclear definitions of justice and what it means to be healthy. Focusing on broad structures and microlevel processes, Garth reveals how power dynamics shape social justice movements in particular ways. Drawing on twelve years of ethnographic research, Garth examines what motivates people from more affluent, majority-white areas of the city to intervene in South Central Los Angeles. She argues that the concepts of "food justice" and "healthy food" operate as racially coded language, reinforcing the idea that health problems in low-income Black and Brown communities can be solved through individual behavior rather than structural change. Food Justice Undone explores the stakes of social justice and the possibility of multiracial coalitions working toward a better future.
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Capacity to Measure Progress Toward Sustainability in Global Food Systems
Thursday, April 9
12 – 1:15 p.m.
Online
RSVP at https://www.hks.harvard.edu/events/capacity-measure-progress-toward-sustainability-global-food-systems
SPEAKER(S) Rachel Gilbert, Policy Researcher, Tufts University
Allison Thomson, Scientific Program Director, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research
Leigh Winowiecki, Global Research Lead, Soil and Land Health, CIFOR-ICRAF
Moderator: Alicia Harley, Senior Research Fellow, Sustainability Science Program, HKS
This webinar is part of the Capacity Building for Sustainable Development (C4SD) seminar series.
Measurement is foundational to the transformation of global food systems toward sustainability, yet building the capacity to measure what matters — across geographies, commodities, and stakeholder interests — remains deeply challenging. This virtual seminar brings together practitioners working at the frontier of this challenge, from soil health to supply chains to diet quality.
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Screen to Table: Food, Culture, and Climate Storytelling
Thursday, April 9
1 pm to 2 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/screen-to-table-food-culture-and-climate-storytelling-webinar-tickets-1985538817051
Join us to hear from leaders discussing plant-forward food systems to change our climate future!
What happens when storytellers, sustainability leaders, and everyday people join forces to reshape the narrative around sustainable food and climate?
What we eat is one of the most powerful climate choices we make — and one of the most personal. Food carries culture, memory, and identity.
This panel brings together voices from entertainment, sports, conservation, and behavioral science to explore how stories on screen, cultural shifts at the table, and subtle changes in how food is presented are transforming food systems and driving global interest in plant-based eating.
Join us for this virtual LA Climate Week event to explore how storytelling and culture are shaping the future of food and climate.
Speakers:
Dotsie Bausch Switch4Good, Cyle Zezo Reality of Change
Carrie Hutchison Re:Wild
Juli Schulz Better Food Foundation
and moderated by Claire Thompson, Associate Editor, Grist. Supported by the Hollywood Climate Summit.
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Driving Economic Development with Affordable Power
Thursday, April 9
2:00-3:00 p.m. ET
Online
RSVP at https://rmi.org/event/webinar-driving-economic-development-with-affordable-power/
MATTHEW LAND, Senior Associate, US Program
JENNIFER MUNDT, Assistant Secretary for Energy & Infrastructure Assistant Secretary for Energy & Infrastructure, North Carolina Department of Commerce
REBECCA STAIR, Director, NM State Energy Office
KASPARAS SPOKAS, Electricity Director, Clean Air Task Force
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New World Disorder: What’s the Humanitarian Perspective?
Thursday, April 9
5:00pm to 6:00pm EDT
MIT, Building 45 (MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing), 230, 51 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
Speaker: David Miliband, president, International Rescue Committee (IRC), and former foreign secretary for the United Kingdom (2007-2010). He oversees the IRC’s operations in more than 40 crisis-affected countries and its refugee resettlement and assistance programs throughout Europe and the Americas. He is a 1987 graduate of Oxford, with a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics, and earned a master’s degree in political science in 1989 from MIT.
Moderator: John Deutch is an American civil servant and physical chemist. He was the United States deputy secretary of defense from 1994 to 1995 and director of Central Intelligence from May 10, 1995, until December 15, 1996. He is an emeritus Institute Professor at MIT.
Free & open to the public.
A recording will be posted on YouTube following the event.
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Earth Month Sustainability Networking Event
Thursday, April 9
5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
345 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/earth-month-sustainability-networking-event-tickets-1983971286525
Come connect, listen, and learn from people driving positive sustainable impact across multiple industries!
Earth Month Sustainability Networking Event
As alumni of the Blekinge Institute of Technology Masters in Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability, we welcome you to join our Earth Month Sustainability Networking Event. We will be holding a panel with guest speakers to discuss positive sustainable impact across different working sectors and the opportunity to chat with Alumni, whose experience ranges from Sustainable Investment to Climate Research, and more! We look forward to having you join us and please feel free to reach out to us at the following email: iansylcox24@gmail.com
Gabriela Boscio Santos is the Associate Director of the Sustainable Solutions Lab (SSL) at UMass Boston, a transdisciplinary research institute focused on climate justice. In her role, she helps craft SSL’s direction, manages projects, and fosters networks. With over 10 years of experience in the climate sector, she brings a multidisciplinary understanding of the complexity of climate change. She has a B.S. in Environmental Studies from Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, and an M.S. in Sustainability Strategy from the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden.
Georges Dyer
Georges Dyer is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Crane Institute of Sustainability, and leads its flagship initiative, the Intentional Endowments Network (IEN), which supports endowments in aligning investment policies with institutional mission, values, and sustainability goals. IEN consists of over 250 members, including leading endowments, foundations, outsourced CIO firms and investment consultants, investment managers, and nonprofit partners. For over 20 years he has been engaged in solutions-based, whole-system approaches to sustainability. From 2006-2014, Georges served in various roles, including Vice President, at Second Nature to develop and support the Presidents’ Climate Leadership Commitment -- a network of more than 500 colleges and universities committed to achieving climate neutrality in campus operations and integrating climate and sustainability into education, research, and community engagement activities. He holds a M.Sc. in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability from the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden, where his thesis research focused on carbon reduction projects under the Kyoto Protocol and EU Emissions Trading Scheme.
Archie Kasnat
Archie is a strategic leader, entrepreneur and team builder. A lifelong learner with a passion for creatively solving entrenched business challenges. He is Founder & President of REGENERATE, LLC, President of StratLeade Sustainability Education, Inc. and is committed to an energy efficient future through brokerage sales at Powertron Global, Inc. Archie identifies and scales net-positive solutions through strategic partnerships, financing, advisory and consulting. He is advisor to the CEO of Strong Water Company.Archie led business development activities including private capital placement, established partnerships and built the analytics and corporate accounts team at Altenex, an Edison Energy Company -- standardizing power purchase agreements with C&I customers. Following his MSc, Archie wrote a position paper on United States energy security/national security and was a contributing author on Healthy Solutions for the Low Carbon Economy published through Harvard Medical School. During his Master's (MSc, MSLS), he worked with Intrawest Corporation’s commercial real estate development business and proposed strategic solutions to embed sustainability into core operations through executive and employee engagement.
The event space is located within an apartment complex on 345 Harrison Ave. On arrival to 345 Harrison Ave, you will enter and see either a concierge/alumni who will guide you to the event space within the building. If there is not an alumni present please inform the concierge that are you are attending the event and they will be able to help. We strongly encourage everyone to show up at 5:30 so we can make use of the full 2 hours!
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2026 Goldsmith Awards ft. Jeffrey Goldberg
Thursday, April 9
6 – 7 p.m.
Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, Institute of Politics, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge 02138
RSVP at https://iop.harvard.edu/events/2026-goldsmith-awards-ft-jeffrey-goldberg
SPEAKER(S) Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic
Nancy Gibbs (Moderator), Director, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy
The annual Goldsmith Awards, presented by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, honors public service journalism that has had an impact on United States public policy and the functioning of government. The 2026 Career Awardee for Excellence in Journalism is Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and moderator of Washington Week With The Atlantic on PBS.
Goldberg is the featured speaker at this year’s ceremony, where he will share his experiences as both a journalist and editorial leader, discuss the news industry’s evolving ethical and editorial challenges, and reflect on the importance of The Atlantic as a critical resource for investigation, analysis, and ideas in a fireside chat with Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs.
Please register with a valid Harvard email address to attend in-person. All JFK Jr. Forums are publicly livestreamed on our YouTube channel.
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New England Symposium on Graphics
Sunday, April 12
9:15am to 5:00pm EDT
MIT, Building 34, 101, 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
More at https://nesg.graphics/
The New England Symposium on Graphics brings the New England computer graphics and vision research community together for a day of networking, technical talks, and exchanging ideas. Outside community members are welcome to attend for a series of broadly-accessible talks and presentations related to visual computing.
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Leading the Free World: Freedom and Democracy in US National Security Strategy
Monday, April 13
12:00pm to 1:00pm EDT
MIT, Building E40, 496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetKkV_5yMVqo9ytrXfoJ8WznvsBZQYkJqGxLkE9EA3YgvY1g/viewform
A recent poll shows that 85% of President Trump’s own voters believe the United States should support freedom and democracy wherever possible in world affairs. But since the late 2000s, American foreign policy has taken a realist turn, and the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy reinforces this trend. How does the American public’s historic support for freedom and democracy fit into the National Security Strategy? Please join us for a timely discussion with Dr. Twining about freedom, democracy, and national security objectives in the emerging world order, through cases including Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, and U.S.-China strategic competition.
Daniel Twining, PhD, is President of the International Republican Institute, one of the National Endowment for Democracy’s core institutes advancing freedom and democracy in more than 100 countries worldwide. Previously, Dr. Twining was Counselor to the President and Director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund; a member of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s Policy Planning Staff handling Asia; and foreign policy advisor to U.S. Senator John McCain. Among his many other roles, he taught at Georgetown University, was an Associate of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, served on the Bush Institute’s Advisory Council and Microsoft’s Human Rights Advisory Council, and was a columnist for Foreign Policy and Nikkei. A graduate of the University of Virginia, he earned his MPhil and DPhil at Oxford University.
This seminar will be held in E40-496 (Pye Room). Lunch will be available. Please RSVP here.
Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.
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Are We There Yet? Evaluating the Transition to EVs
Monday, April 13
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Rubenstein 414ab, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001ThnNIAS&_gl=1*xklpz2*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAyLjE0NTgwOTk1MjguMTc3NDQwOTk4OC4xNzc0NDA5OTg4*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ2NDc4MDMkbzQkZzEkdDE3NzQ2NDgzMjYkajYwJGwwJGgxMjE1NjkyMzQy
In this Energy Policy Seminar, Christian Kaps, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, will give a talk entitled, "Are We There Yet? Evaluating the Transition to EVs." Q&A to follow. Buffet-style lunch will be served.
Registration: RSVP required. A Harvard University ID is required for in-person attendance; all are welcome to attend via Zoom.
Recording: The seminar will be recorded and available to watch on the Belfer Center's YouTube channel.
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Forging Just Futures: Solutions-based Science to Address the Climate Gap
Monday, April 13
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, 300 Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ
And online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/forging-just-futures-solutions-based-science-to-address-the-climate-gap/
Rachel Morello-Frosch, professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management for UC Berkeley, will present “Forging Just Futures: Solutions-based Science to Address the Climate Gap.” This seminar will be held in-person (PUID holders only) and available via livestream (open to all).
Morello-Frosch is an environmental health scientist, epidemiologist, and professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. For over 25 years, her research has examined structural determinants of environmental health and understanding how co-exposures to chemical and non-chemical stressors drive health inequities. Much of her work has examined this question in the context of exposures to ambient air pollution, drinking water contaminants, prenatal environmental chemical exposures, climate change, and effects on perinatal and developmental outcomes. In addition to using community-engaged approaches in her work, she also collaborates with regulatory agencies to develop science-policy tools to assess the cumulative impacts of multiple environmental and social factors to inform regulatory decision-making and advance environmental justice. Morello-Frosch is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, a 2025-26 Radcliffe-Salata Climate Justice Fellow, and served on the Biden Administration’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
She publishes regularly in both scholarly journals and popular publications including Nature, Nature Climate Change, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail and The Boston Review.
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Science and Technology: A Collaboration for Justice
Monday, April 13
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
MIT, Nexus, Hayden Library, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94664936448
RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSceuEQwL-Ao5WBJcuDmStjNqXtKbcTyNR5psnU0duDcOBOA_g/viewform?usp=send_form
Join us on Monday, April 13, 2026, at 4 pm in the Nexus, Hayden Library, for a talk led by Catherine Coleman Flowers, an environmental and climate justice activist bringing attention to the largely invisible problem of inadequate waste and water sanitation infrastructure in rural communities in the United States.
Science and Technology: A Collaboration for Justice
This lecture will explore how partnering science and technology with community engagement can mitigate environmental harms. Using storytelling and citing the space program as an example, one will be challenged to expand the definition of profit to also include community wellbeing.
About Catherine Coleman Flowers
As the founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice(formerly the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise), Flowers builds partnerships–from close neighbors, to local elected officials and regional nonprofits, to federal lawmakers and global organizations–in order to identify and implement solutions to the intersecting challenges of water and sanitation infrastructure, public health, and economic development.
Flowers spearheaded a collaboration with tropical disease researchers focused on intestinal parasitic infections spread by way of insufficient water treatment and waste sanitation. The researchers found that hookworm–long thought to have been eliminated from the South–is in fact prevalent among the residents of Lowndes County, prompting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to undertake a similar, larger study across the rural American South. Flowers’s testimony to the U.S. Congress led to the introduction of legislation in 2019 to address neglected diseases of poverty in the United States.
Flowers is broadening the scope of environmental justice to include issues specific to disenfranchised rural communities and galvanizing policy and research to redress failing infrastructure that perpetuates socioeconomic disparities in rural areas across the United States.
In addition to leading the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Flowers sits on the Board of Directors for the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the American Geophysical Union, as well as serving as a Practitioner in Residence position at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. In 2021, her leadership and fervor in fighting for solutions to these issues led her to one of her most notable appointments yet — Vice Chair of the Biden Administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Previously, Flowers has worked as a high school teacher in Detroit, Michigan, and Washington, D.C. She has published articles in Anglican Theological Review, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, among others, and her first book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, came out in November 2020. Flowers was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship–commonly referred to as the “Genius Grant” –in 2020.
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Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans
Monday, April 13
6:00pm (doors open at 5:30pm)
Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/robert-j-sampson-at-the-cambridge-public-library-tickets-1984159443307
Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Robert J. Sampson—Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University, Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences—for a discussion of his new book Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans. He will be joined in conversation by Robert D. Putnam—Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy, Emeritus at Harvard University and recipient of the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
About Marked By Time
A leading sociologist’s groundbreaking three-decade study challenges outdated views of crime and character, revealing that traditional risk factors alone poorly predict children’s futures.
Between 1970 and 2020, the United States experienced a dramatic rise in crime and incarceration, followed by an unexpected decline. Along with plummeting violence came reductions in substance use, car accidents, child poverty, and lead exposure. By 2020, incarceration rates hit a twenty-five-year low, with African Americans benefiting the most. Yet these positive shifts have not registered in public discourse or policies that continue to rely on outdated studies and reductive narratives of moral character and personal responsibility.
A major reason for this oversight is how social scientists study youth development—typically through single birth-cohort approaches that fail to capture generational change. In a pioneering three-decade study of over 1,000 Chicago children across multiple cohorts, Robert J. Sampson challenges this convention. He finds that children with similar self-control and family backgrounds, born just a decade apart, experienced dramatically different life paths. Strikingly, children born in the mid-1980s faced twice the likelihood of arrest by their mid-twenties than those born ten years later.
This research reframes deeply ingrained assumptions about ongoing social decline and the importance of individual fortitude. Sampson spotlights the role of shifting social conditions and structural change in driving measurable improvements in youth trajectories, along with new risks that threaten these gains.
The era into which a child is born shapes their future as profoundly as race, upbringing, or neighborhood. To rethink progress, inequality, and policy, we must first acknowledge how time itself leaves a transformative mark on individual lives.
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Spotlight on Energy: Making 100 per cent renewables a reality
Tuesday, April 14
06:00 - 07:00 EDT
Online
RSVP at https://webinars.businessgreen.com/making-100-per-cent-renewables-a-reality/register
This interactive webinar will explore the growing trend to decarbonise corporate energy supplies and switch to 100 per cent renewables. It will bring together leading experts to discuss the different approaches for sourcing clean energy and their various pros and cons, while also providing an overview of the best practices that can help companies curb both carbon emissions and energy costs.
Topics to be covered include:
Why have many leading organisations made 100 per cent renewables pledges?
What are the challenges in transitioning to 100 per cent renewables?
What technologies and contracts are available for organisations looking to boost their renewables use?
How can the switch to renewables be harnessed to deliver lower costs?
How to manage rising network costs.
How can a renewables strategy feed into a wider net zero strategy?
PANELLISTS
James Murray, Editor-in-Chief, BusinessGreen
Jack Peck, Head of Renewables, UK, Wattstor
Jess Ralston, Head of Energy, Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit
Sam Kimmins, Director of Energy, Climate Group
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Circular Design: Fundamentals, Applications, and Emerging Opportunities (Virtual)
Tuesday, April 14
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Online
RSVP at https://bsa.app.neoncrm.com/nx/portal/neonevents/events?path=%2Fportal%2Fevents%2F40095
The process of incorporating circular design strategies into buildings and infrastructure contributes to decarbonization across the entire lifecycle of the built environment. Circularity can lower the AEC industry’s carbon footprint, contributes to reductions in greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, and reduce the material waste and extraction that is creating global material scarcity. The ingenuity of circular principles thereby benefits both the health and welfare of not only building occupants but humanity at large.
This presentation will introduce the concept of the “circular economy” (or “circularity”) and explore its growing importance in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry. The presenters will begin by defining the circular economy and outlining how it is shaping sustainable, low-carbon strategies across the sector.
Additionally, the session will cover key regulations—both current and upcoming—that encourage or mandate the adoption of circular design principles by design teams. In the second half of the presentation, the focus will shift to “how” circularity is being applied in practice. The session will conclude by exploring how circularity opens up new opportunities for building design and engineering, and offer insights on the future of this emerging field. Finally, the presenters will discuss how design teams and building owners can position themselves to lead within this framework.
Presenters
Duncan Cox, BA MIEMA Cenv | Director
Rebecca Rahmlow, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP BD+C, CPHC, ENV SP, Fitwel Amb., LFA | Vice President
Bridget Kane, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP | Associate
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Civic Data Theatre and Municipal Climate Action
Tuesday, April 14
12 pm to 1:30 pm
Northeastern, Ryder Hall, 11 Leon Street, Boston, MA 02115
And online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/civic-data-theatre-and-municipal-climate-action-tickets-1985734366946
This panel examines how Civic Data Theatre bridges the gap between quantitative government data and lived community experience.
What if the community meeting was a play? This panel examines how Civic Data Theatre bridges the gap between quantitative government data and lived community experience, using a Boston climate action case study to demonstrate a model for more inclusive democratic participation.
This event will be hybrid.
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The Rule of Law Wars: An Update from the Front
Tuesday, April 14
5 – 6 p.m.
Online
RSVP at https://www.vpal.harvard.edu/event/rule-law-wars-update-front?occ_id=0
SPEAKER(S) Noah Feldman (HLS)
This talk by Noah Feldman offers an overview of current legal and institutional developments in the United States. The discussion will touch on issues involving ICE, recent Supreme Court matters, election integrity debates, and related topics affecting public governance. This session will provide a measured update on these evolving areas of law and public policy.
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No to Nuclear
Tuesday, April 14
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://secure.everyaction.com/3KtyzJqEEEexTMdkFYIeUA2
…Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War
Join us for a discussion of Linda Pentz Gunter’s newly published book No To Nuclear: Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War in a webinar moderated by Chris Nord of the C-10 Research and Education Foundation.
The nuclear power industry wants us to believe that theirs is the only technical fix for our deliverance from the climate crisis. While the public, politicians and the media have been easily swayed, Gunter blasts aside the industry’s claims that it is safe and green. In No to Nuclear, she compellingly argues that nuclear power is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous and too integrally connected to the nuclear weapons complex to serve as a rational energy choice. She reveals how the nuclear sector not only fundamentally harms the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities of color but also devalues nature and the environment. In short, the nuclear power industry is costing us the chance of a genuinely just energy transition.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder and executive director of the US-based non-profit Beyond Nuclear. The organization works to educate the public, media and decision-makers about the necessity to abolish nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the inextricable link between the two. Previously, she was a journalist at USA Network, Reuters, and The Times. She launched, and writes for Beyond Nuclear’s online magazine, Beyond Nuclear International.
Chris Nord is the co-founder and Board member of the C-10 Research and Education Foundation – whose mission includes real-time radiological monitoring near the Seabrook atomic reactor, as well as education the public about safe and sustainable energy a alternatives. He is Vice-President of the Citizens Awareness Network and founding member and non-violence trainer of the Clamshell Alliance. He is the creator of the presentation “Nuclear Spent Fuel and Homeland Security: The Case for Hardened Storage.” and also co-producer of “Circles Around the Fire”, a 30-minute slide/video program on nuclear power in New England.
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Campus Climate Lab Symposium 2026
Wednesday, April 15
11 am to 2 pm
BU, Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, 610 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/campus-climate-lab-symposium-2026-tickets-1984395171376
Celebrate BU student research driving impactful climate action!
Join us for the annual Campus Climate Lab Symposium - a celebration of the research, innovation, and collaboration driving BU's Climate Action Plan forward.
Hear directly from Campus Climate Lab project teams as they share their findings and reflect on what they've learned. The afternoon will also feature a panel of BU alumni, and the CCL Review Committee will announce the winners of the 2026 Janetos Climate Action Prize.
Open to all BU students, faculty, and staff. Vegetarian and vegan lunch will be provided. Registration is required so we can plan accordingly and minimize food waste.
Hosted by BU Sustainability in collaboration with the BU Institute for Global Sustainability and the Office of Research.
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Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate
Wednesday, April 15
12 – 1 p.m.
Harvard, CGIS Knafel, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262), 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
And online
RSVP at https://us-japan.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/shared-prosperity-fractured-world-new-economics-middle-class-global-poor-and-our-climate?occ_id=0
SPEAKER(S) Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
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Against the Enivironmentalism of the Rich
Wednesday, April 15
6:30 – 8 p.m.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nancy-fraser-against-the-environmentalism-of-the-rich-tickets-1981241563851
Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research, and a member of the Editorial Committee of New Left Review. Trained as a philosopher, she specializes in critical social theory and political philosophy.
She is the author of Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022), Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019), The Old is Dying (Verso, 2019), and Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Polity Press, 2018). Fraser’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is the recipient of six honorary degrees, the Alfred Schutz Prize for Social Philosophy, the Nessim Habif World Prize, and the Nonino Prize 2022 “Master of our Time,” and is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division.
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2026 Global Health Symposium
Thursday, April 16
9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Online
RSVP at https://globalhealth.harvard.edu/symposium/2026-global-health-symposium/#section-overview
The 2026 Symposium will feature a keynote address by Dr. Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, whose leadership has advanced vaccine equity, strengthened health systems, and fostered global cooperation in health.
On April 16, 2026, the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) will host its 4th Annual Global Health Symposium, Global Health Forward: Strength Through Innovation and Collective Action. Convening experts from Harvard and around the world, the symposium will examine the most pressing challenges in global health and explore collective, innovative solutions.
Designed for students, faculty, practitioners, policymakers, and global health leaders, the symposium features a full day of keynote remarks and expert-led discussions addressing critical issues such as global health governance, emergency preparedness, and the global health workforce, highlighting regional and institutional perspectives on sustainable, collaborative solutions.
Held in a hybrid format and livestreamed worldwide, the event is free and open to the public. In-person attendance is by invitation only.
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Drawing on Water Sharing Traditions in a Warming Cairo
Thursday, April 16
12 – 1PM
Tufts, Curtis Hall - Multipurpose Room, 474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA
And online
RSVP at https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_djpFxGHZQAeHU7VW14J7MA#/registration
In response to intensifying urban heat, residents of Cairo, Egypt are drawing on a longstanding tradition of gifting water through charitable water fountains (sabils) to sustain the livability of everyday urban spaces. Vernacular sabils reshape the built environment by providing palatable water free of charge to people moving through the “city inside-out” (Bayat 2012) of daily life—shopping, working, and circulating through Cairo’s streets. Their contemporary expansion responds to shifts in the city’s thermal comfort range and the growing difficulty of maintaining viable human bioclimates under conditions of climate change. Although urban sabils do not increase the total supply of potable water, they reconfigure the urban waterscape by relocating access to preferred water forms in convenient, socially meaningful locations, particularly in neighborhoods underserved by municipal infrastructure. As socio-technical and moral objects, vernacular sabils link infrastructure, sociality, and ethical obligation, participating in the ongoing production of viable urban spaces amid climatic stress.
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The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health
Thursday, April 16
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Central Library in Copley Square, 700 Boylston Street, Boston MA 02116
RSVP at https://bpl.libcal.com/event/15371955
Join us for this in-person conversation about the new book, The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health.
Dr. Monica L. Wang will be joined by best selling author, international speaker, and award-winning business strategist Dr. Patti Fletcher in conversation. After the main program, Dr. Wang will sign copies of her book.
About The Collective Cure:
A personable, story-driven explanation of how the systems around us—where we live, work, learn, and connect—shape our health, and how each of us can help create healthier communities
A powerful blend of deeply human stories and rigorous research, The Collective Curereveals how social and structural factors like income, occupation, race and ethnicity, neighborhood conditions, and social connections, profoundly shape our well-being. Dr. Monica Wang, an award-winning public health researcher, educator, and working mother who came of age as an Asian American bussing student, brings a personal lens to these complex issues and shares a hopeful, action-oriented vision for building healthier communities from the ground up.
Through her own personal and professional journey and the lives of 3 extraordinary women across the US, readers are invited to see how health is shaped in everyday spaces.
With clarity, urgency, and optimism, The Collective Cure bridges powerful storytelling with evidence-based solutions. More than a diagnosis, this book is a call to reimagine what’s possible when we invest in people and places.
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Climate Power Workshop
Thursday, April 16
7 pm to 8:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/climate-power-workshop-tickets-1985739418054
Empowering you in ending global warming
Not the usual meeting on climate change; this is a mobilization of power and action. Most people view global warming as something too big and too complex for them to make any real impact in. What if that wasn’t the case? What if you have more power than what you think?
This workshop lives inside the mission of 2030 or Bust, which is to empower ordinary people in ending the climate crisis.
You'll be empowered in a new approach in ending the climate crisis, learning new ways to think and act. Impacting not only the physical element of the situation, but the human element as well. The climate crisis is the humanity crisis. The opportunity to shape a new future for all of life.
The workshop will be led by Laughlin Artz, founder of 2030 or Bust.
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Ballot
Friday, April 17
7:00pm
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
Harvard Book Store welcomes Anjali Enjeti— former attorney, journalist, activist, and election worker, and award-winning author of The Parted Earth and Southbound—for a discussion of her new book, Ballot. She will be joined in conversation by Neema Avasia—acclaimed author of Another Appalachia—and Anjali Mitter Duva—co-founder of Galiot Press, former fiction editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, and author of Faint Promise of Rain.
About Ballot
Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organizer, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one of the most tumultuous political eras in US history, and recounts the astonishing events leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
Enjeti lays out the growing challenges for voters in battleground states, where rightwing legislatures have introduced staggering numbers of voter suppression bills and redrawn district lines, all to disenfranchise as many Black and other marginalized voters as possible. As her account of the history and stakes of election integrity shows, the aftershocks of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021 have manifested most egregiously on the four corners of the ballot.
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Smoke & Mirrors: Satellite View On How Pollution Alters Clouds and Climate
Monday, April 20
12 pm to 1 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-mirrors-satellite-view-on-how-pollution-alters-clouds-and-climate-tickets-1984970634602
Dive into how pollution twists clouds and climate from space—join our online chat, Smoke & Mirrors!
Smoke & Mirrors: Satellite View On How Pollution Alters Clouds and Climate
Dr Adam Povey, School or Physics and Astronomy & Space Park Leicester
The seed for most rain drops are tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere called aerosols. Changing that seed alters where the cloud forms, how long it lasts, and the likelihood of rain. This talk will explain how we use satellites to track releases of aerosols in order to better understand how pollution affects the nature of clouds.
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Following the Money: Private Sector Climate Investment and the Data Behind It
Monday, April 20
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Princeton, 300 Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ
And online
RSVP at https://environment.princeton.edu/event/following-the-money-private-sector-climate-investment-and-the-data-behind-it/
Linda-Eling Lee, founding director and head of the MSCI Institute ( Morgan Stanley Capital Investment), will present “Following the Money: Private Sector Climate Investment and the Data Behind It.” This seminar will be held in-person (PUID holders only) and available via livestream (open to all). It is also a Special Joint Seminar with JRCPPF.
As founding director and head of the MSCI Institute, Lee leads the Institute’s work to advance knowledge that addresses systemic challenges and supports long-term value creation through capital markets. A member of MSCI’s Executive Committee, she previously led global sustainability and climate research at MSCI, where she built one of the world’s top teams of analysts dedicated to understanding long-term drivers of sustainable value. Lee joined MSCI in 2010 following its acquisition of RiskMetrics Group, where she led ESG ratings research and headed consumer sector analysis. She joined RiskMetrics in 2009 through its acquisition of Innovest. Prior to Innovest, Lee was Research Director at the Center for Research on Corporate Performance, developing Harvard Business School academic research into management tools to drive long-term corporate performance.
Earlier in her career she was a strategy consultant with Monitor Group in Europe and Asia, advising Fortune 500 clients in industries ranging from beverages to telecommunications.She currently serves on the Advisory Council of the IFRS Foundation, is a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Seventh Assessment Report (IPCC AR7), and is a fellow of the Finance Leaders Fellowship of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Lee was named one of Barron’s Top 100 Women in Finance in 2019 and 2021, and was voted No. 1 for an Individual Making the Most Positive Overall Contribution to Sustainable Investment/Corporate Governance in 2018 and 2019 by Extel/IRRI. She has published research in both management and investment practitioner journals, as well as in leading peer-reviewed academic publications. She is a frequent media commentator on climate and sustainability investing, including in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNBC. Lee holds a doctorate in organizational behavior from Harvard, a master’s from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College.
She publishes regularly in both scholarly journals and popular publications including Nature, Nature Climate Change, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail and The Boston Review.
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Trees, Environmental Thought & the American Conservation Movement
Tuesday, April 21
5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EDT
MA Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02215-3695
RSVP at https://18308a.blackbaudhosting.com/18308a/Environmental-History-Seminar-with-Kristan-M-Hanson-and-Sarah-Hastings
And online
RSVP at https://18308a.blackbaudhosting.com/18308a/Environmental-History-Seminar-with-Kristan-M-Hanson-and-Sarah-Hastings---Virtual-Research
Kristan M. Hanson, Independent Scholar
Sarah Hastings, Boston University
Comment: Kathryn Morse, Middlebury CollegeThis seminar will workshop a work in progress.
This panel will examine environmental and agricultural thought from the Early American Conversation Movement and beyond.
Kristan M. Hanson’s essay highlights the work of English botanical artist Marianne North. Over fifteen years, North traveled to every continent but Antarctica, producing roughly 830 paintings of plants in their native habitat. North visited California twice, making special excursions to giant sequoia and coastal redwood groves in 1875 and 1881. During both trips, she painted trees enmeshed with the land and documented the impact of extraction capitalism and tourism on old-growth forests. This paper applies an art historical and plant humanities lens to North’s paintings of individual trees to interpret their significance in relation to the American conservation movement and issues of history, place, race, and justice.
Sarah Hastings’s paper the Northern Nut Growers Association (NNGA) in the early to mid-twentieth century. The NNGA advanced perennial nut trees as both practical crops and tools for regional land use and planning in the United States. In contrast to the private, standardized, plantation-style nut industries of the South and West, the NNGA bred diverse native varieties suited to the cooler temperate zones of the northern states with ecological and economic resilience in mind. As they articulated a decentralized agrarian future, their systems were incorporated into early New Deal planning. This paper recovers an overlooked strand of agricultural reform that remains relevant today amid debates over food security, crop breeding, and regional land-use planning.
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7th Annual Earth Day Climate Change Symposium
Wednesday, April 22
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Online
RSVP at https://www.climate.columbia.edu/events/7th-annual-earth-day-climate-change-symposium
The Seventh Annual Earth Day Climate Change Symposium will consider multiple developments relating to climate change, including changing federal policies concerning renewable energy sources, the endangerment finding, and climate science; a sea change in NEPA requirements; and litigation against “Big Oil.”
Faculty
Program Chair: Matthew J. Sinkman, Partner, FBT Gibbons LLP
Moderator: Carl R. Howard, Former Chair, NYSBA Environmental & Energy Law Section (EELS); Co-Chair, NYSBA EELS Global Climate Change Committee; Author, Global Climate Change Blog; Assistant Regional Counsel, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2
Professor Michael Gerrard; Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice; Founder and Faculty Director, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School
Timothy J. Hagerty; Partner, FBT Gibbons LLP
Rachel Maman Kish, Assistant Attorney General, New York State Office of the Attorney General
Professor Katrina Fischer Kuh, Faculty Director of the Environmental Law Program, Pace University
Cullen Howe, Senior Advocate, Sustainable FERC Project, Natural Resources Defense Council
Lauren Kurtz, Executive Director, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund
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AI for Good: In Climate, Health and Investing
Wednesday, April 22
1:00 PM PDT
The Commonwealth Club of California, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, 110 The Embarcaadero, San Francisco, CA 94195
And online
RSVP at https://luma.com/3hzitlub
When should artificial intelligence supplant human intelligence? And when should human intelligence lead? For climate action, for impacts on health, for investing and portfolios, where can AI tools multiply productivity—and what situations cause a quality assurance minefield?
Learn from innovators around the world (from Europe to Oceania to the Americas) when and how AI tools bring new value, expand audiences—and where human intelligence and empathy is still required, and how we all can benefit.
We will delve into how AI can improve the expansion and sustainability of food systems, which can also enhance climate justice, and access to nutrition for low-income communities.
SPEAKERS
Madeleine Evans, Director, Generation Investment Mgt. (UK)—participating remotely
Dr. Ihirangi Heke, Leader, Atua Matua (New Zealand)—participating remotely
R. Paul Herman. CEO, HIP Investor Portfolios (Europe)—participating remotely
Abby Young. Climate Protection Manager, Bay Area Air District
Craig Wichner, Managing Partner, Farmland L.P.
Stacey Lawson, Co-founder, Positive AI Labs, and Benevolent AI Future
Moderator: Amir Khaleghi, Vice President of Products, HIP Investor Ratings LLC
Elizabeth Carney, Executive Producer and Host
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Great Expectations: Rising Power and the Elusive Pursuit of Absolute Security
Wednesday, April 22
12:00-1:30pm
MIT, E40-496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5ooD8Ydk4vd83Ac8VNEoQ
Caleb Pomeroy, University of Toronto
Caleb Pomeroy researches the psychology of power in international relations, notably the effects of relative state power on human thought and behavior. His book project shows that the feeling of power inflates threat perception. His work is published or forthcoming at the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, and Security Studies, among other outlets. In addition to historical research, Professor Pomeroy uses a range of experimental and computational statistical methods. His work received ISA's best security article award and APSA's honorable mention for the best dissertation in international security.
Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University and the Diana Davis Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College. He received his PhD in international relations from Ohio State in 2022
Summary:
States pursue hegemony to achieve security. Does it work? Integrating psychological research on power with classical realist thought on security expectations, Professor Pomeroy will demonstrate in this seminar that rising power increases leaders' expectations of security. These heightened expectations of security make previously tolerable threats feel more existential. Despite material gains in security, the sense of power paradoxically makes leaders feel less secure. Historical evidence from the United States' nineteenth century rise to regional hegemony supports this expectation. Power is useful for many objectives. The sense of security is not one of them.
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Our Queer Planet: Environmental Rights and LGBTIQ+ Defenders
Wednesday, April 22
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM ET
Harvard, CGIS Knafel Building, Room K00A, Concourse Level, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001VASLIA4&_gl=1*1wvxvww*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAyLjE0NTgwOTk1MjguMTc3NDQwOTk4OC4xNzc0NDA5OTg4*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ2NDc4MDMkbzQkZzEkdDE3NzQ2NDg0OTEkajYwJGwwJGgxMjE1NjkyMzQy
The intersection of environmental rights and LGBTIQ+ rights is one of the most urgent and underexplored frontiers in international human rights law. Environmental defenders — people who stand up for communities' rights to clean water, land, air, and a safe climate — already face some of the world's most severe patterns of violence, criminalization, and persecution. LGBTIQ+ defenders carry an added burden: they are targeted not only for their environmental advocacy, but for who they are. This compounded vulnerability demands dedicated attention from the international community.
We are honored to welcome Astrid Puentes Riaño, UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, whose mandate sits at the heart of this conversation. Together, we will explore the emerging jurisprudence and policy frameworks that recognize the distinct risks faced by LGBTIQ+ environmental defenders — and what stronger, more inclusive protections could look like.
More about the speaker: Astrid Puentes is a human rights lawyer with extensive experience in international environmental and human rights law, with a particular focus on Latin America. She was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Environmental Defenders and has developed significant expertise in the structural factors that expose defenders to harm, including gender, identity, and intersectionality.
Moderator: Victor Madrigal-Borloz, UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (2018-2023).
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The Best Possible Future: Kim Stanley Robinson in conversation with Scott Snibbe.
Wednesday, April 22
8:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Online
RSVP at https://berkeley.zoom.us/meeting/register/y6Nygt4-Qwuz5z_KADD__g#/registration
Bestselling novelist Kim Stanley Robinson — author of "The Ministry for the Future", "The High Sierra: A Love Story" and "Shaman"— joins Scott Snibbe, author of "How to Train a Happy Mind", for a wide-ranging conversation on how his works offer hope in the face of the climate crisis. We’ll explore Robinson’s insights on moving beyond climate despair, the restorative power of the Sierra Nevada’s wild landscapes and what these places reveal about our prehistoric bond with nature. Together, we’ll imagine how humanity might reclaim its deep connection to the Earth—and why this matters now more than ever.
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Living Climate Futures Symposium 2026
Thursday, April 23 5:30pm to 8:30pm EDT, Friday, April 24 9:00 AM–8:30 PM, Saturday, April 25 9:00 AM–6:00 PM
https://livingclimatefutures.org/symposium-2026
Join us for our second symposium! The gathering will feature discussions and hands-on sessions with environmental and climate justice leaders from across the United States and beyond to explore the threats posed by climate change and how to respond to them.
Living Climate Futures is an interdisciplinary initiative bringing together twenty MIT faculty and affiliates from across the Institute. LCFL was the recipient of the inaugural Faculty Driven Initiative (FDI) Seed Grant from the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) in spring 2025.
Featuring both returning and new community partner organizations, themes for the 2026 symposium will include: farming and food systems, health impacts of climate change, Indigenous spiritual sovereignty and climate chaos, experiential learning, and more.
This event is free and open to the public, with priority given to the MIT community.
More details coming soon. Please sign up here to be updated when registration opens: https://livingclimatefutures.org/symposium-2026 This event is made possible by funding from MTIHIC.
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Record sea surface temperature jump in 2023–2024
Thursday, April 23
4 am to 4:45 am EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.dk/e/record-sea-surface-temperature-jump-in-20232024-tickets-1980938906595
Unlikely but not unexpected. A climate coffee with Jens Terhaar (UNIBE)
Please join us for this Climate Coffee!
Over the past months, global sea surface temperatures (SSTs) have quietly done something quite important: they have returned to levels below those before the pronounced jump observed in 2023/24 (https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2).
Earlier this year, we published a study in Nature magazine https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08674-z showing that abrupt SST jumps of this magnitude can arise solely from internal climate variability, as climate models can simulate such events without invoking an external shock or a permanent system shift. A key feature of these simulated jumps is that they are transient - temperatures typically relax back to pre-jump levels about two years later.
What is striking is that the real-world evolution has closely followed this pattern. Observed SSTs have now also returned to pre-jump levels, roughly two months later than the model range suggested. Given the small number of simulations with such high jumps (8 models), the range for the return remains uncertain, and a 2-month delay is well within uncertainty. The return of SSTs below pre-jump levels thus adds confidence to the interpretation that the 2023/24 jump may have been driven by internal variability rather than a fundamental reorganisation of the climate system. However, until we have observations over the next few years, we still cannot exclude a fundamental system shift.
At the same time, the relatively late recovery may point toward a climate system that responds more strongly to forcing than many models currently suggest - in other words, a potentially higher equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and stronger underlying warming.
This interpretation aligns with another recent study of ours by Linus Vogt (https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/16/1453/2025), which shows that many climate models simulate too little Antarctic sea ice compared to observations. Because Antarctic sea ice strongly affects how much heat the Southern Ocean absorbs, this bias can lead to an underestimation of ECS.
Taken together, these results highlight an important nuance: short-term climate variability can produce large, temporary excursions, but the climate system's background sensitivity still matters enormously for long-term warming. Understanding both - and not confusing one for the other - is crucial for interpreting recent extremes and for improving future projections. At the same time, recent events are a reminder of how little we still understand about the climate system, and how important it is to keep questioning, testing, and refining our models as new observations emerge.
Publication: Terhaar, J., Burger, F.A., Vogt, L. et al. Record sea surface temperature jump in 2023–2024 unlikely but not unexpected. Nature 639, 942–946 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08674-z
Our speaker
Jens is a senior scientist at the University of Bern. His profile is on Google Scholar
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Next-gen biotech for a net-zero world
Thursday, April 23
7 am to 8 am EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/next-gen-biotech-for-a-net-zero-world-tickets-1984376170544
Biotechnology is unlocking new pathways to decarbonisation across some of the hardest-to-abate sectors
In this session, CEOs of Deep Blue Biotech and NanoPlume, Tim Corcoran and Theresa Hoffmann, will showcase how next-generation biological innovations are enabling low-carbon alternatives and circular solutions at scale. You’ll gain insight into how biotech startups move from lab to market, the challenges of scaling novel technologies, and the role biotech can play in achieving a net-zero future.
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Designing the Hydro-Commons: Strategies for Addressing Complex Contemporary Water Challenges
Thursday, April 23
12 – 1PM
Tufts, Curtis Hall - Multipurpose Room, 474 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
And online
RSVP at https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qOictOcSSA-kD9M1j-Dj5A#/registration
Landscape architecture brings together art and science to address ecological and cultural challenges shaping our environment— from regional scale projects that address issues of climate change, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity loss to small-scale urban projects that interject an artful awareness of ecology and civic vibrancy into the urban fabric. In this lecture, Emily Vogler will discuss how designers navigate complex environmental issues, focusing on her framework of the Hydro Commons to examine how design can strengthen stewardship, resilience, and a sense of place around shared water resources. She will highlight the distinctive approach at RISD, where landscape architecture exists alongside other art and design disciplines with deep relationships to craft and material practices. This material knowledge and culture of critical making inform how the department addresses regional ecological, social, and infrastructural issues at the site and material scale. She will discuss the importance of working across scales, collaborating on interdisciplinary teams, and integrating research and design to meet today’s interconnected social–ecological challenges.
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Design Before Disaster Book Talk & Urban Risk Lab Celebration
Friday, April 24
5 pm to 8 pm
MIT Welcome Center, 292 Main Street, E38-195 Cambridge, MA 02142
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/design-before-disaster-book-talk-urban-risk-lab-celebration-tickets-1985215717652
Celebrating Design Before Disaster: lessons from Japan’s culture of preparedness for climate risk. Talk, discussion, games & reception.
Join us for an evening celebrating our book Design Before Disaster, exploring lessons from Japan's deep-rooted culture of preparedness — and what they mean for communities facing climate risk today. The evening features a presentation and discussion with the author and research team, followed by games and a reception.
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Nature in Danger: The Destruction Of Nature In Ukraine During The War
Sunday, April 26
1:30 pm to 3:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nature-in-danger-the-destruction-of-nature-in-ukraine-during-the-war-tickets-1852660169439
Please join us for a critical discussion on the environmental toll of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the path toward recovery. This session, presented by the nonprofit Ukrainian Jersey City and Penn State University, will explore both the devastating impact of the war on Ukraine’s ecosystems and the urgent efforts underway to restore and protect the country’s natural future. A distinguished group of experts will lead the panel discussions, sharing firsthand insights and solutions. Read more about the impact of war on Ukraine’s ecosystems in The Guardian.
This event is free and open to the public on the worldwide web. Pre-registration is required.
Proceeds from donations raised during this event will support trusted organizations and projects on the ground in Ukraine:
Ecofortress 2.0, UAnimals, Truth Hounds and Forest Release.
What Will You Learn?
How the air, soil, forests, and water of Ukraine are damaged by the war
The importance of nature in Ukrainian culture and cuisine
How Ukrainians are impacted by the war
Efforts being made to restore ecosystems
Moderator:
Catherine Wanner, Penn State University, Pennsylvania
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies
Speakers:
Olia Hercules, London, United Kingdom, Author and Chef
Topic: The Importance of Nature in Ukrainian Culture and Cuisine, Seasonal Ukrainian Cooking, Growing up in Kakhovka, Ukraine, Gardening in Ukraine
Roman Koval, Kyiv, Ukraine, Head of Research, Truth Hounds
Topic: Human Rights Protection and Accountability for Enviormental Harm: The Case of the Kakhovka Dam Explosion and the Contamination of Waterways and the Black Sea
Serhiy Shevchenko, Lviv, Ukraine, PhD in Economics, Associate Professor, Lviv Polytechnic National University and Founder of the NGO 'Generation of Warm Ukraine'
Topic: Contamination of The Soil and Air, Household Plastic Waste Accumulation in Frontline Zones
Brian Roth, Kyiv, Ukraine, Executive Director at Forest Release
Topic: Demining, Forestry Managment in Ukraine
Poets: Kateryna Mihalitsyna, Lviv, Ukraine, Poet
"The Fish Speaks"
"Witnesses Of War Crimes"
Hanna Leliv, Lviv, Ukraine, Translator
Rules to access webinar
Please join 10 min prior to the beginning of the webinar
Agenda
1:30 PM Introduction of Nature in Danger Panel Discussion
1:45 PM Panel Discussion
2:45 - 3:15 PM Questions and Answers
3:15 PM Poetry Reading with Video Presentation
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Reflections on the State and Design of U.S. Power Markets
Monday, April 27
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Wexner 434ab, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
And online
RSVP at https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registration?e=a4oPp000001SiojIAC&_gl=1*1ha0uaz*_gcl_au*MTc4ODQ5MzA4My4xNzc0NDA5MjAyLjE0NTgwOTk1MjguMTc3NDQwOTk4OC4xNzc0NDA5OTg4*_ga*MTI5MTI5MDM4Ny4xNzczNDU2NzA3*_ga_72NC9RC7VN*czE3NzQ2NDc4MDMkbzQkZzEkdDE3NzQ2NDg2ODckajYkbDAkaDEyMTU2OTIzNDI.
In this Energy Policy Seminar, Manu Asthana, Senior Advisor and former President and CEO of PJM Interconnection, will share his reflections on the state and design of U.S. power markets. Q&A to follow. Buffet-style lunch will be served.
Registration: RSVP required. A Harvard University ID is required for in-person attendance; all are welcome to attend via Zoom.
Recording: The seminar will be recorded and available to watch on the Belfer Center's YouTube channel.
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The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie
Monday, April 27
6:00pm(doors open at 5:30pm)
Harvard Science Center, Hall D, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chanda-prescod-weinstein-at-the-harvard-science-center-tickets-1983282603656
Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome Chanda Prescod-Weinstein—prize-winning author of The Disordered Cosmos, and an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire—for a discussion of her new book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. She will be joined in conversation by Evelynn M. Hammonds—the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. This event will take place at the Harvard Science Center, Hall D, located at 1 Oxford St, Cambridge. Following the presentation will be a book signing.
About The Edge of Space-Time
A fresh, charming, socially conscious tour of the mysteries of space-time, from the award-winning author of The Disordered Cosmos.
In her highly acclaimed debut, distinguished cosmologist and particle physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shared with her audience an abiding sense of wonder at the cosmos, while imagining a world without the entrenched injustice that plagues her field. Now, in The Edge of Space-Time, she embraces that cosmic wonder, taking readers on a mind-altering journey to the boundaries of the universe, inviting us to spend time at the edge of what we know about space-time and about ourselves.
Guided by her conviction that for humanity to go forward we must know our cosmic past and drawing on poetry and popular culture—from Langston Hughes, Queen Latifah, and Lewis Carroll, to Big K.R.I.T., Sun Ra, and Star Trek—Prescod-Weinstein renders accessible some of the most abstract concepts of theoretical physics to tell fascinating stories about the history and fundamental nature of our universe. Here we meet the quantum cat that is both dead and alive, learn the difference between dark matter and dark energy, explore the inner workings of black holes, and investigate the possibility of a unified theory of quantum gravity, following our guide out to the far reaches of the cosmic event horizon and down to the tiniest (and queerest) neutrino. Along the way, she calls on us to resist colonial approaches to space exploration and instead imagine a better path forward in our pursuit of humanity’s undeniable connection with the stars.
Through Prescod-Weinstein’s clear-eyed and unique perspective, and informed by her deep knowledge of post-colonial history and Black feminist thought, The Edge of Space-Time argues that physics is an essential way for everyone to look at the universe and presents a compelling case that “the edge” is a powerful vantage point from which to see the big picture.
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AHA Symposium 2026: Raised by AI?
Tuesday, April 28
8:00am — 5:00pm ET
MIT Media Lab, E14 - 6th floor, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA
And online at https://www.media.mit.edu/events/aha-symposium-raised-by-ai/
How do we ensure the first generation growing up with AI thrives?
Every generation is shaped by the technologies of its time. This generation is the first to grow up with AI as a constant presence in their classrooms, their homes, their pockets. What does that mean for who they become, and how do we ensure the best outcomes for the generations ahead? “Raised by AI?” will explore what it means to come of age in the age of AI and how AI might also raise (elevate) us.
Please note: In-person attendance is invite-only
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Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat It for Good
Tuesday, April 28
7:00pm
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
Harvard Book Store welcomes Omer Aziz—journalist, lawyer, former foreign policy advisor, and author of Brown Boy—for a discussion of his new book, Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat It for Good.
About Shadows of the Republic
An unflinching account of the resurgence of American fascism by first-generation scholar, lawyer, and journalist Omer Aziz.
What is driving the rise of fascism--and how can we stop it?
In this singular investigation into the sinister realms of fascism and its many guises, Omer Aziz, author of the acclaimed Brown Boy and contributing writer for The Boston Globe, sets out to answer the question: Why are so many young people like him drifting to the ultranationalist right? Shadows of the Republic offers a haunting portrait of American fascism, how it began, and why it is now focused on immigration, technology, and the purification of society.
Fascism is not coming to America; it has been here for a long time. With astringent clarity, Aziz traces the flaring up of fascist ideas in both American history and our current moment. From the dominance of the KKK, to the Nazi rally in New York in 1939, to the alliances between U.S. elites and European fascists, Aziz examines the long shadows of fascism. Traveling across the United States and Europe, he illuminates connections between street fascists and the ones in suits, between Hitler and the country across the ocean he so admired. Aziz examines culture in Germany and Italy in the 1930s, where propaganda ministers made people believe both everything and nothing, and he examines the apppeal of the far right among the very group it targets. Using interviews with experts and his own experience, he also offers an anti-fascist playbook to reinvigorate democracy and our civic life.
Fascism is a precise term, cheapened by overuse. Yet when a word describes reality, we can't afford to ignore it. From the pulsing power of an ideology of the past to its comeback among even those with the most to lose, Shadows of the Republic offers the definitive story of American fascism--and what we can do to salvage democracy for years to come.
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To Reflect or Deflect: Assessing Internal Accountability in the U.S. Military
Wednesday, April 29
12:00-1:30pm
MIT, E40-496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
And online
Livestream at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5ooD8Ydk4vd83Ac8VNEoQ
Summary:
The U.S. military's approach to accountability overemphasizes individual actions and decisions rather than institutional factors. As a result, this often leads to institutional failures of accountability through an insufficient acknowledgment of the military's role in poor outcomes, an inadequate investigation and assessment of institutional problems, and consequently, too little reform to address these issues. This paper offers a novel framework of institutional accountability and uses that to examine two contemporary cases: the U.S. military's failures in the war in Afghanistan and its struggle to meaningfully combat sexual assault and sexual harassment within the ranks.
Bio:
Dr. Heidi A. Urben is Associate Director of the Security Studies Program and Professor of the Practice in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She also serves as a senior associate (non-resident) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to assuming her current position in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, she served as its Director of External Education and Outreach. From 2021-2022, she served as a Chamberlain Fellow in the political science department at Howard University.
A retired U.S. Army colonel, highlights from her 23-year career on active duty include: commander of a military intelligence brigade at Fort Meade, Maryland; Vice Deputy Director of Current Analysis and Warning in the Joint Staff Directorate for Intelligence; Deputy Director for Intelligence in the Joint Staff’s National Military Command Center; commander of a military intelligence battalion in Hawaii; assistant professor of American Politics, Policy, and Strategy in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; operations officer and executive officer for a counterintelligence battalion; military aide to Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates; and various positions in two light infantry divisions, two deployments to Afghanistan, and a peacekeeping deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Her research interests focus on civil-military relations, military and defense policy, and national security strategy, and her research has been featured in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, NPR, and Politico, as well as in numerous academic journals. Her book entitled, Party, Politics, and the Post-9/11 Army was published with Cambria Press in 2021.
Dr. Urben holds a B.A. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame, an M.S. in National Security Strategy from the National War College, and an M.P.M., M.A., and Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University.
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Climate Change and Its Impact on Insects: Pollinators, Beneficial Insects, Pests and Invasive Species.
Wednesday, April 29
9 pm to 10:30 pm EDT
Online
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/climate-change-and-its-impact-on-insects-tickets-1981395095067
This session will examine how a changing climate affects the range and distribution of insects.
The Grow (Garden-Based Renewal Of Wellness) Project is a Horticultural Therapy program hosted by Unitarians Calgary, with a mandate to sustain and improve the health and wellness of participants through purposeful gardening projects at Unitarian Calgary.
Part of our mandate is to develop an ecologically sound & sustainable gardenscape at Unitarians Calgary, but also to provide educational opportunities for all to learn. We are delighted to be able to offer this 6 part series of talks in 2026!
In this fourth talk, we welcome Ken Fry, Entomology Instructor in the School of Life Sciences & Business at Olds College,shares his knowledge and expertise of insects and the effect of climate change on their range and distribution in Albeta.
Climate Change and Its Impact on Insects: Pollinators, Beneficial Insects, Pests and Invasive Species.
Abstract: This session will examine how a changing climate affects the range and distribution of insects. We will explore the impacts on pollinators and other beneficial insects, current pest insects, and potential invasive species, including the Spongy Moth, Emerald Ash Borer, and Brown Marmorated Stink Bug. Suggestions on how to mitigate the effects will also be discussed.
