Conference Aims To Build Ties Between Activists for Climate Change, Environmental Justice

"Environmental (Dis)Locations," a three-day conference aimed at forging new ways for the climate change and environmental justice communities to cooperate, will take place Thursday-Saturday, April 8-10, on campus.

“Environmental (Dis)Locations,” a three-day conference aimed at forging new ways for the climate change and environmental justice communities to cooperate, will take place Thursday-Saturday, April 8-10, on campus.

Scientists, theologians, activists and journalists are among those expected to participate in the conference, which, organizers say, will provide a venue for improving understanding and bettering practical strategies.

“We hope that the sometimes adversarial relationship between folks from each of these perspectives is lessened so that we are able to build effective strategies of human flourishing and the environment,” says Emilie Townes, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at the Divinity School, who conceived of the conference a year ago. “We are attempting to have folks in the climate change movement and the environmental justice movement talk to each other and strategize together through the use of think tanks about ways local communities can address issues of climate change and environmental justice.”

Some scholars have pointed out that while many people of color and low-income communities regard climate change and the environment as priorities, the climate change movement remains highly homogenous — male, white and affluent — in its leadership, conference organizers note.

The conference will include:

• Professor Robert Bullard, founder of Clark Atlanta University’s Environmental Justice Resource Center, and author of “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality,” a standard text in the field of environmental justice.

• Van Jones, a Yale Law School graduate who made national headlines last September when he resigned his position as an environmental adviser to the Obama administration after Republicans called for his ouster based on his prior activist associations. Jones is the author of the best-selling book “The Green-Collar Economy.”

• Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-founder of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale. She holds appointments at the Divinity School, the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

A complete conference schedule can be found online at www.yale.edu/divinity/dislocations.

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