B2ECC : Authors discuss book

CONTINUED FROM 1 of this project. A THIRD. Nearly every major accessibility win in the past five years has been because of and/or funded by students,” Miller said. the climate crisis “seem to put people into more despair than into empowerment.” She explained that this response is often due to the mismatch between the scope of the crisis described and the action people are advised to take. “On hundreds of pages, you’ll find information about environmental crises … and then the last ten pages tell you what you can do as an individual. They say knowledge is power, but with the climate crisis, it’s very easily turned into disempowerment,” Neubauer said.

The lack of accessibility inside and outside Brandeis buildings and facilities, according to Miller, is isolating and further exacerbates the lack of inclusion. Miller hopes to gain more funding through Brandeis Student Accessibility Services for other ramps to be added around campus, such as outside Golding Judaica in the Mandel Humanities Quad, as well as door openers for Sherman Dining Hall.

“The SAS budget is $60,000 a year, which is so small that their own employees don’t get paid out of it. SAS is trying to win a war that they haven’t been given the tools to fight. Senior Brandeis Administration [love] to think of accessibility as either a hypothetical that doesn’t need to be addressed or as some kind of mountain that we would have to move heaven and Earth to accommodate,” Miller said.

Miller’s funding request was successful, and the Student Union’s resolution urged administration to listen to student demands and honor their promise to be inclusive and accessible for all of the Brandeis community. Overall, the funding request and resolution are meant to build greater inclusivity and provide space for those with disabilities to thrive on campus.

The authors concluded on a cautiously optimistic note by reflecting upon the progress the climate movement has made while stressing the need for further action. Repenning suggested that the climate movement has become more broadly accessible and has advanced beyond simply proving the existence of climate change to stopping greenwashing — the act of deceiving consumers into believing a company’s products are more environmentally friendly than they actually are — and ensuring governments and companies follow through with their climate promises. Neubauer added, “Why do we speak about the climate? Why is it [climate action] on the agenda? Why is there this image of people, young people, asking for government accountability? It’s because in the last four years, we changed the perception of what people can achieve together. And it’s never been harder to deny the power of the people.”

The final event of the conference was a keynote address from Bill McKibben, a leading environmental journalist and one of the first individuals to write about the climate crisis in his book “The End of Nature,” published in 1989. In his address, McKibben discussed issues of environmental justice, climate refugees, and the effects of warming in the Arctic. He also spoke extensively about the decreasing price of renewable energy and its role in facilitating the transition away from a fossil-fuel driven economy, which has profound political and ecological implications: “Fossil fuels, autocracy, and fascism are closely linked, because as long as we depend on resources that are only available in a few places, the people who control those few places end up with too much power. We have lots of reasons to want to end this practice of burning things, and now we have the means to do it.”

McKibben also directed part of his comments to the older members of the audience in speaking about Third Act, an organization he founded in 2021 to empower people over sixty to take climate action. On Tuesday, March 21, Third Act held a “Stop Dirty Banks Day of Action” in which senior citizens in rocking chairs blocked entrances to major banks like Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America to protest financial institutions’ ties with the fossil fuel industry.

Through Third Act, McKibben hopes to change the perception that people get more conservative as they age and to capitalize upon the fact that older generations witnessed profound social change like the Civil Rights Movement in their youth and can leverage their skills, structural power, and financial assets to support a better future.

McKibben concluded his speech by echoing earlier sentiments about the importance of collection action, an idea the conference as a whole sought to embrace.“The most important thing an individual can do is be less of an individual and join together with others in the movement,” he stated. “That’s our default … to think about things by ourselves as individuals [in terms of] ‘what can I do,’ but the real way to think about is ‘what can we do.’”