Environmental activist and author Terry Tempest Williams will be the keynote speaker at “Changing Climate, Changing Minds,” a Dartmouth conference taking place April 8 and 9 that will explore the predicted dire effects of human activity on the world’s climate.
“We are faced with a new kind of peril, not a foreign enemy but our way of life,” says Anne Kapuscinski, a professor of environmental studies and the board chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “In this seminar, we call upon sources of social critique to help us reflect on climate change and on society itself: the spiritual, the scientific, the independent thinker and writer. Our goal is to combine insight and creative thought with a third aim: wise action.”
The conference’s speakers include Williams, the author of When Women Were Birds; Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, and other books; Jim McCarthy, a professor of biological oceanography at Harvard University; David Loy, a Zen Buddhist teacher; and the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham, an Episcopalian priest.
The event, which is free and open to the public, will start with a keynote address by Tempest Williams at 7 p.m., Friday, April 8, in Filene Auditorium.