The Barnard Center for Engaged Pedagogy held its last event of the “Year of Elections around the World” series, focusing on the intersection between human rights and climate change. 

On Wednesday, April 9, as a part of the final installment of the “Year of Elections around the World” event series, the Barnard Center for Engaged Pedagogy (CEP) held the event “Climate Across Scales.” The event focused on breaking down key terms of “energy nationalism,” “colonial legacies,” and “resilience” in relation to the climate and the way humans interact with it. Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action Sandra Goldmark was joined by professors Kimberly Marten, Maricarmen Hernández, and Anooradha Siddiqi. 

Goldmark opened the event by referencing that although many country elections occurred in 2024, the climate did not seem to be a point of electoral power in any nation. She then discussed Barnard student and faculty environmental activism in 2018, which advertised the goal of keeping the global temperature at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Goldmark raised key questions to analyze throughout the event, which each speaker would touch on. They included “How do we understand history with changes in perspective?” as well as “What lessons can we learn from nature?” 

Before the speakers began, CEP Senior Associate Director Alex Pittman discussed the CEP’s talking table on climate change, which occurred on the first floor of Milstein on Tuesday. Throughout the day, students who stopped at the table were asked about what keywords they were most interested in regarding climate change. Pittman discussed how students with different interests were able to find common topic areas, revealing the intersectionality within the climate movement and discussion. 

The first speaker was Kimberly Marten, a Barnard professor specializing in international relations, international security, Russia, and the global politics of climate change. She opened with a discussion of four key global leaders who have preached about “energy nationalism,” her keyword. The leaders were Narendra Modi of India, Xi Jinping of China, Donald Trump of the US, and Vladimir Putin of Russia. She emphasized how these four countries, which are the top emitters of greenhouse gasses, justify this by claiming they want to remove dependency on global energy sources and thus have all the energy come from their own nation. However, through various statistics, Marten showed how renewable energy sources are not only cheap but easily accessible and can achieve the goal of energy nationalism in a sustainable way. 

The next speaker, Maricarmen Hernández, is an associate professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard specializing in the sociopolitical production of environmental inequalities. Through her keyword, “colonial legacies,” Hernandez discussed how the countries that often contribute the most to climate change and help the least tend to have imperial legacies, while those who bear the most brunt of the climate crisis tend to be postcolonial states. By highlighting this impact, Hernandez demonstrated how colonialism rings through in the daily climate struggle. 

Anooradha Siddiqi, assistant professor of Architecture at Barnard, followed this by unpacking the word “resilience.” She notes that while sustainability is predicated on the resilience of the Earth, humans have a responsibility to help. She dedicated her portion of the presentation to Mahmoud Khalil, Yoon Seo Jung, and the “more than 300 other students who currently must have resilience.” She then discussed the work of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, which put on a mock trial in London of the British East India Company and found them guilty of crimes against the planet. She ended with a discussion of her work with the IFO refugee camp in Dadaab, Nigeria, and what refugee camps can teach us about making a commons and sharing the Earth with those around us. 

Finally, Elizabeth Cook, Associate Professor of Environmental Science at Barnard, shared her keyword: “nature-based solutions.” She discussed how we must analyze the context of communities, locations, and environmental factors when addressing climate change. Rather than there being a one-size-fits-all solution, the specific environmental makeup of a location determines how best to help the communities within it protect themselves from climate change. 

The panel ended with the option for a Q&A from the audience. Most of the questions that were raised concerned the specific relationship between climate change and elections. The overwhelming opinion from the panelists was that while developed nations such as the US may have what are classified as “free and fair elections,” these do not necessarily mean people care about all issues. While there is a formality that comes from elections, individual work that people do transnationally can contribute more to pushing beyond the boundaries of a nation-state to protect the planet for all.

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