“Current Climate Moment: The Movement toward Deep Decarbonization”
[An interview with Professor Daniel Esty introducing the
Yale – Harvard Program]
[This is the first of a series of videos in a “Playlist” assembled by the Yale Alumni Academy and
presented on its Yale Alumni Academy – YouTube Channel]
See related:
Professor Daniel Esty
Global Balliol
as well as:
- Past related webinars from the Yale Alumni Academy
- A Message from Yale School of the Environment’s Dean, Indy Burke
- Climate Change Conversations
- Yale Alumni Academy – YouTube Channel
- Setting the Record Straight: The Depth, Severity and History of the Scientific Evidence on Earth’s Unfolding Climate Catastrophe
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In the future as the Yale Alumni Academy works to expand its outreach, it could choose to draw upon other voices from Yale alumni, current faculty as well as former faculty. This effort might include, for example, the seminal insights of individuals like the Yale graduate, James Gustave (Gus) Speth. Mr. Speth graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1964, attended Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and subsequently graduated from Yale Law School in 1969. After a further series of distinguished achievements both in government and non-governmental organizations in Washington, D. C. Gus Speth returned to Yale as the Dean of the Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Science.
Some of his works could provide extended material for the Yale Alumni Academy in its future initiatives on climate change and the environment. These include, for example:
- Gus Speth – “Warming Warning” (1981)
- Gus Speth & George Woodwell on Carbon Use and the Human Prospect – Thames TV 1981
- Gus Speth delivers the 2016 David Sive Annual Memorial Lecture at Columbia Law School
- Climate Change – Warming Warning – 1981 (Gus Speth, George Woodwell & others)
- Mapping the Next System Webinar – Gus Speth
- Gus Speth at DEMOS: Capitalism, Environment Crisis
- Reimagining America: An Evening with Gus Speth & Juliet Schor
- Dean Gus Speth on Capitalism and the Environment
- Dean Gus Speth on Economic Growth and Disaster
- Rhodes Scholars Warn of Dramatic Transformations Required by Global Climate Crisis
In the same year that Gus Speth graduated from the Yale Law School, another Yale undergraduate, T.C. Weiskel, was elected as a Rhodes Scholar from the Yale Class of 1969. He, too, attended Balliol College in Oxford where he completed degrees in Social Anthropology and Modern History, returning to the United States to teach African History and Anthropology at Williams College and then at Yale until he left for Harvard to pursue research and teaching on environmental ethics and environmental justice.
At Harvard Professor Weiskel founded and directed the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values — the first university-wide inter-faculty initiative designed to expand awareness of environmental ethics at Harvard. In 2001with Professor William Moomaw of Fletcher School at Tufts University he organized The Climate-Talk Project as he taught courses in The Harvard Extension School on environmental ethics, environmental justice and global climate change. To support students in these courses he created the Transition Studies network to assist their research and writing and their promote their efforts to connect with other individuals and organizations working on solving problems of the transition to global sustainability.
From his initial field-work in Africa and from what he as learned from students coming from the Global South in his courses at Harvard, Professor Weiskel has become attentive to the rapid evolution and tragic trajectory of global food and agricultural systems. Climate change has exacerbated underlying weaknesses in these vital systems, established as a legacy of recent colonial control in many places. Scientists are now issuing ever more urgent warning about disturbing trends that are unfolding in global food security as the climate threatens to shift in unpredictable ways in the years and decades ahead.
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Transition Studies 