Marshall Ganz, a senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School. “But one thing that movements do is come up with ways to make the important urgent.” Ganz speaks from experience. He left Harvard during his junior year to work with the civil rights movement in Mississippi in 1964. He went on to work with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers for 16 years, before eventually returning to Harvard to complete a Ph.D. in sociology. One of the lessons he draws from his decades working in and studying social movements is that moral urgency— a sense of injustice, or even anger—is often needed to move individuals to act.
This is often accompanied by hope, or the sense of the plausible, the possible. Action of this kind may produce change in the participants themselves, as well as in the world around them. “If you look at the core of any social movement there are highly committed people who are ready to take risks,” he says. “It’s not just about passing a law—at heart they are movements of moral reform. Take the Harvard living wage campaign back in 2001, when the students sat in the president’s office and said, ‘We’re not going to leave until it gets dealt with.’” This had the effect of turning what the students saw as a morally urgent problem into a
Letter from the Director Dear Friends: As another academic year draws to a close, I am delighted to share with you this new edition of our Newsletter. The Harvard environmental community continues to grow, with colleagues from around the University coming together to address some of society’s greatest challenges. Last fall, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, we brought together a group of scholars and environmental leaders to consider Carson’s impact, and how her work might inform our own as we ponder the path forward on current environmental challenges. The overwhelming support for landmark legislation such as the Clean Air Act of 1970, for which many people credit the effectiveness of Carson’s prose in mobilizing public opinion, seems almost unimaginable today in this time of partisanship and political gridlock. And yet there are signs of progress. For the first time in many years, there has been student-led environmental activism on campus. In our cover article, Jonathan Mingle explores this burst of activism focused on divestment from fossil fuel companies, and the question of how social movements fit into the broad array of efforts to accelerate action on climate change. From my perspective, it is wonderful to see such student engagement on environmental issues, even if I disagree with their divestment goal. It is a moment to educate and to learn, and we must seize this opportunity wholeheartedly.
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practically urgent problem for decisionmakers to resolve. “How to make that cosmic sense of urgency immediately felt is one of the challenges of this (climate) movement,” Ganz continues. “That’s where civil disobedience and that kind of activity comes in—it’s a way of saying we’re not going to cooperate until you address this need.” Ganz met recently with a group of law school students seeking advice on the campaign to press Harvard’s administration to divest from fossil fuel companies. He says he supports the students’ efforts on the merits of their moral argument, but also as a means to stir up and “mobilize the kind
As a geologist, I have spent some time thinking about the timescale of climate change. I am struck by how ill-prepared our institutions are for the multiple timescales of climate change, from the tens of thousands of years that carbon dioxide will reside in the atmosphere, to the century (or more) it will take to decarbonize our society. Long-term planning is always difficult, but after our nation spent nearly $100 billion on weather-related disasters during the past year, it seems that now is the time to try. Extreme weather, from the drought of last summer to Superstorm Sandy, reminds us that human society will have to prepare for the Earth’s changing climate, regardless of what we do to prevent such change. A focus on “climate preparedness,” on local actions to protect people, our communities (and perhaps even our ecosystems) by building robustness and resilience, raises an important set of new challenges. How can economic signals, including insurance and disaster relief, be used to encourage the types of investments necessary over the coming decades? What about low-income communities that cannot afford the necessary investments to prepare for more extreme weather? How does preparing for climate change affect public support for policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep the problem from getting worse? These questions and many more require expertise from many disciplines, from the natural sciences and economics, to business, law, political science, history, public policy, public health, urban planning and design, and even the humanities. They are perfect examples of why it is so important for Harvard to bring together the formidable talents of our faculty and students from around the University to address these questions and challenges, as humanity plans for an uncertain future. We have much to do, so it is time to get busy. With best wishes for a productive summer,
Dan Schrag Director, HUCE