CLIMATE CONFERENCE Beginning to End the Climate Crisis conference tackles climate change

■ The event, hosted by the Center for German and European Studies, featured a variety of speakers, panels, and a book launch.

By HEDY YANG JUSTICE STAFF WRITER

On Thursday, March 30, the Center for German and European Studies hosted its Beginning to End the Climate Crisis conference in honor of its 25th anniversary and in coordination with Brandeis’ Year of Climate Action in Sherman Function Hall. The full-day conference included keynote speeches, panel discussions, and an interview with the authors of “Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future.”

The event kicked off with a vegan luncheon and remarks from Prof. Sabine von Mering (GER), Dean of Arts and Sciences Dorothy Hodgson, and Consul General of Germany to the New England States Dr. Sonja Kreibich, among others. Following the luncheon and opening remarks, Simon Richter, professor of German and Dutch culture at the University of Pennsylvania, gave the first keynote address. Richter considers himself a “climate emergency gadfly” at Penn, where he hopes to motivate

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people and institutions to take unprecedented action, such as incorporating the climate emergency as a starting point for all forms of education, to mitigate the climate crisis.

Richter’s keynote speech was followed by a panel on climate justice, which featured climate photographer Barbara Dombrowski, Prof. Prakash Kashwan (ENVS), and social and political organizer Tonny Nowshin.

Dombrowski shared a series of somber photos from her projects “Tropic Ice” and “Quo Vadis, Europe?” which illustrate the effects of climate change on communities around the world. “Tropic Ice” focused on indigenous communities living in climate “tipping points” on five continents, while “Quo Vadis, Europe?” analyzed the “human-nature relationship crisis” of the Anthropocene through images of devastation in Europe resulting from floods, open-pit mining, and more.

Dombrowski explained that through her photography, she hopes to highlight that “man-made climate change is a massive threat not only to nature and ecosystems and biodiversity, but above all to people themselves.” Dombrowski’s work is currently on display in Goldfarb Library.

In his remarks, Prof. Kashwan discussed the idea of ecological justice in the age of the climate crisis. He critiqued the rise of “junk

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carbon offset markets” that were widely popularized after COP13, criticized the global climate change summit held by the United Nations in 2007 and he suggested that poor countries are susceptible to land grabs by rich Western nations seeking to carry out their goals of carbon neutrality. “This essentially asks us to … really think about these things in a more holistic way, and not just what we are doing here in terms of recycling, driving electric vehicles, and so forth,” he stated.

Nowshin attributed capitalism as a root cause of the climate crisis and advocated for the concept of degrowth as a solution. Degrowth seeks to prioritize “social and ecological welfare over production and consumption” and further suggests that capitalist economies’ focus on growth measurements like gross domestic product do not reflect people’s wellbeing and have consistently failed in the past.

Following the climate justice panel, attendees heard from authors Luisa Neubauer and Alex Repenning on their book “Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future.” The discussion celebrated von Mering’s English translation of the book and its launch in the United States.

Neubauer reflected on the process of writing the book and the niche she sought to fill with it, suggesting that most literature about

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