About this Event
If you are a Columbia/Barnard affiliate with campus access, please use your Columbia/Barnard email when registering.
Each attendee must have their OWN registration and email address.
Registration for external guests closes at 4PM on November 30. Registration will automatically close at that time. Columbia/Barnard affiliates may register at the door.
Event Description
This roundtable will feature lawyers and scholars of law and environmental humanities discussing how current law can both facilitate and impede climate action.
Series Description
This series of events aims to re-energize interdisciplinary conversations at Columbia about the climate emergency, at a moment when confronting the urgent and ever-growing challenges posed by global warming feels extraordinarily difficult. In the context of diminished funding for climate science and other federal actions that aim to roll back or obstruct climate action, it’s easy to be shocked into silence and despair, or to be burned-out to the point of wondering, what’s the point? In this difficult moment, what are we not talking about, and why? Given the scientific consensus about human-caused climate change, this war on climate action seems, at best, extraordinarily stupid. How can we counter arguments that climate concern is “woke” or that climate action is “radical” or economically harmful? What can we learn from previous environmental setbacks? How can we reckon with climate change without being overwhelmed by climate anxiety? What modes of intelligence—in the university and beyond—can help us to counter these tendencies toward silence, stupidity, and despair? How can we forge a new common sense about the necessity and possibility of climate action?
About the Speakers
Michael Burger is the Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. He oversees a dynamic team of attorneys working in eight program areas to combat climate change. His research and advocacy focus on legal strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote climate change adaptation through pollution control, resource management, land use planning and green finance. Michael frequently collaborates with researchers across Columbia's Earth Institute, and with local and national environmental groups, government representatives, and international organizations. He is a widely published scholar, a frequent speaker at conferences and symposiums, and a regular source for media outlets, including The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Forbes, The Guardian, Bloomberg, and Vox.com. He has been featured on Science Friday and Living on Earth.
Camila Bustos is Associate Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law, Pace University. Prior to joining Pace, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Trinity College and a Clinical Supervisor in human rights practice at the University Network for Human Rights. Bustos’ writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review, Harvard Environmental Law Review, N.Y.U. Environmental Law Journal, the Connecticut Law Review, and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, among others. Her research and scholarship focuses on human rights and environmental law. She is a frequent presenter on climate displacement, climate law, and environmental justice, and has provided expert testimony before the Canadian Senate and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. She serves as a board member of Law Students for Climate Accountability and Save the Sound.
Michael Gerrard is the founder and faculty director of the groundbreaking Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and one of the foremost environmental lawyers in the nation, Michael Gerrard is an advocate, litigator, teacher, and scholar who has pioneered cutting-edge legal tools and strategies for addressing climate change. He writes and teaches courses on environmental law, climate change law, and energy regulation. He was the chair of the faculty of Columbia University’s renowned Earth Institute from 2015 to 2018 and now holds a joint appointment to the faculty of its successor, the Columbia Climate School. As an environmental lawyer, he tried numerous cases and argued many appeals in federal and state courts and administrative tribunals. He also handled the environmental aspects of diverse transactions and development projects and provided regulatory compliance advice to an array of clients in the private and public sectors. Several publications rated him the leading environmental lawyer in New York and one of the leaders in the world.
Ted Hamilton is an assistant professor of English at Bucknell University where he studies the intersections of law, literature, and the environment. He teaches courses on twentieth- and twenty-first century environmental literature from the United States and Latin America, Indigenous literature, environmental law, and legal and literary studies. His current book project, Imagining a Crisis: Human-Environmental Relations in North and South American Law and Literature, looks at how colonial-Indigenous conflict shapes narratives of ecological crisis and human agency, with a focus on authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Ted is also an attorney in the climate justice movement, and his book Beyond Fossil Law: Climate, Courts, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future (OR Books, 2022) explores how the legal system has failed to address the climate crisis and how activists might turn the law to their favor. Ted's scholarship has appeared in American Literature, Law and Literature, Stanford Environmental Law Journal, and Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, and he has published journalism and essays in The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, Boston Review, and The Daily Beast as well as poetry in Chicago Review.
Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.
Event venue & nearby stays
Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States
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