Climate Change Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

The Garden of Wrath

An excerpt from The Oyster Diaries

March 31, 2026 • by Nancy Lemann

Maybe all families are alike on annual beach vacations. Tense. We used to go on an annual vacation with the in-laws to the Southern coast in August. Our destination was an island off the coast of South Carolina. I-95 was horrendous driving down from Washington on a Friday after work, the ...

Climate & Ecology

Solar Express

In Here Comes the Sun, climate activist and author Bill McKibben experiments with the power of positive thinking

February 26, 2026 • by Shea Dean

What motivates people to work for social change—and work for it fast? In his most recent book, Here Comes the Sun (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025), the veteran climate reporter Bill McKibben tries to answer that question by presenting two truths. The first is that we are now in ...

Climate & Ecology

Love and Theft in a Drowning City

On Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

February 24, 2026 • by Katya Wack

A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), the new novel by Megha Majumdar, unfolds over a single week in a not-so-distant future. Kolkata has been devastated by flooding and famine; Ma, a middle-class shelter manager, is preparing to flee the city with her father and two-year-old daughter to join her ...

Climate & Ecology

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

A city holding its breath

October 14, 2025 • by Uswa Shamail

Environmental crises are often narrated in statistics, satellite images, and policy briefings, but what they obscure are the intimate ways in which ecological collapse infiltrates daily life. In South Asia, climate change is not an abstract future—it is a suffocating present that shapes how parents care for their children, how ...

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

Capitalism

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

May 21, 2025 • by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the ...

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Climate & Ecology

Petro-Capitalist Status Quo

In Overshoot, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton show how governments have failed to stop the fossil fuel industry bulldozing through international emissions thresholds

November 12, 2024 • by Martin Weiner

Andres Malm and Wim Carton’s new book, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024), is a thorough and unsparing account of the recent history and politics of the attempt to mitigate fossil fuels, and the reasons for its significant failure. Both authors teach at Lund University in Sweden. ...

Climate & Ecology

How Can Cities Drive Net-Zero Carbon Goals and Create Vibrant Urban Communities?

Nature-based solutions offer a way forward

March 13, 2024 • by Karen C. Seto

Cities must achieve four goals: minimize greenhouse gas emissions, foster low and net-zero carbon behaviors, minimize changes in land cover that increase local temperatures and exacerbate the urban heat island effect, and create livable and vibrant communities. ...

How Can Cities Drive Net-Zero Carbon Goals and Create Vibrant Urban Communities?

Climate & Ecology

Taking Water for Granted

Modern infrastructure has created the expectation of a continuous, drinkable flow of water

March 5, 2024 • by Oana Filip and Liviu Chelcea

Water use has always been an indicator of social relations. In western societies, most treat drinking water as a simultaneously infinite and hyper-individualized resource. But plastic pollution and the climate emergency are forcing us to question our consumption habits....

The Right

Wildfires, Rhodes, and the Legacies of Fascism

It was a sad irony that the island’s destructive wildfires this summer began in an area intensively reforested under Italian fascist rule

September 25, 2023 • by Pamela Ballinger

Among the cultural patrimony threatened by the wildfires on Rhodes was that left by the Italian fascists....

Wildfires, Rhodes, and the Legacies of Fascism

Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

May 2, 2023 • by Joseph Margulies

We create Guantánamos in those fevered moments when imagined needs enflame ancient hatreds and modern fears, telling ourselves they will keep us safe and forgetting that they never have before. ...

Capitalism

A World to Win

Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her recent book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It

May 1, 2023 • by Nancy Fraser and Claire Potter

Claire Potter sits down with New School for Social Research political theorist Nancy Fraser to discuss her latest book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022)....

Film

Nihilism for the Whole Family!

How Evelyn misinterpreted Waymond’s rebellion in Everything Everywhere All At Once

April 18, 2023 • by Ken Hu

Evelyn’s response to the multiverse reflects an existentialist resolution that builds upon a particular version of nihilism: if the universe is inherently meaningless, then we are at liberty to create our own meanings within it....

Climate Change

The Garden of Wrath

An excerpt from The Oyster Diaries

Solar Express

In Here Comes the Sun, climate activist and author Bill McKibben experiments with the power of positive thinking

Love and Theft in a Drowning City

On Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

A city holding its breath

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

Petro-Capitalist Status Quo

In Overshoot, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton show how governments have failed to stop the fossil fuel industry bulldozing through international emissions thresholds

How Can Cities Drive Net-Zero Carbon Goals and Create Vibrant Urban Communities?

Nature-based solutions offer a way forward

Taking Water for Granted

Modern infrastructure has created the expectation of a continuous, drinkable flow of water

Wildfires, Rhodes, and the Legacies of Fascism

It was a sad irony that the island’s destructive wildfires this summer began in an area intensively reforested under Italian fascist rule

Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

A World to Win

Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her recent book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It

Nihilism for the Whole Family!

How Evelyn misinterpreted Waymond’s rebellion in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Newsletter

Connect With Us