Award-winning US author and mountain researcher Prof Mark Carey in Sydney to discuss politics of ice and climate change
AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM HUMANNATURE TALK SERIES
Professor Mark Carey on the Culture and Politics of Ice – 6pm, 22 October 2019
Anzac Memorial Auditorium, Hyde Park South
16 Sept, 2019. Sydney. In the face of the Amazon burning and ice caps melting, how do we keep hope alive for the state of our planet?
In the second last instalment of the Australian Museum’s popular 2019 HumanNature talk series, award-winning author and environmental historian Professor Mark Carey from the University of Oregon in the US will visit Sydney next month to share his research on the interplay of culture, history and politics in how communities respond to climate change and melting glaciers.
Author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society, Carey said scientists have known about climate warming for over a century. But to understand why glaciers are inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice it was necessary to look at culture, history and power relations.
“Understanding the true effects of climate change requires knowledge of distinct societies, along with their particular governments, institutions, scientific knowledge, religious values, and all the other trappings of life,” he added.
Carey’s talk on 22 October 2019 will be followed in November by the final lecture in the year-long HumanNature series by Australian environmental historian Andrea Gaynor of the University of Western Australia.
Encouraging us to pursue more decisive action through cooperation, collaboration and comprehensive understanding of climate change, Carey and Gaynor will discuss the ethics and social issues of climate breakdown and melting ice.
Andrea Gaynor said that these environmental problems are also profoundly and inescapably social; they are about how we organise our societies and our cities.
“The climate crisis threatens the survival of human civilisation – and we have just a short window of time in which to act,” Gaynor said.
Final two HumanNature lectures:
Professor Mark Carey – The Culture and Politics of Ice
Tuesday 22 October 2019 at 6pm-7.30pm, ANZAC Memorial, Hyde Park, Liverpool St, Sydney
University of Oregon’s Mark Carey explores the fundamental role of glacial ice in global economics and politics and within our imaginative, historical and colonial narratives. Much more than just a barometer for climate change or pristine nature, glacial ice has been an elemental force in human history, fundamental to global politics and central to the quest to make oceans, mountains and the polar regions safe for global markets.
Andrea Gaynor – Armoured histories: radical remembering for the Anthropocene
Tuesday 12 November 2019 at 6pm-7.30pm, ANZAC Memorial, Hyde Park, Liverpool St, Sydney
Hold the past to account with Andrea Gaynor, University of Western Australia as she proposes ‘radical remembering’ to actively confront the challenges of the Anthropocene. Climate breakdown, annihilation of entire species, dwindling topsoil and fresh water, food shocks and plastic oceans led 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg to admonish the assembly of wealthy and powerful at the 2019 World Economic Forum to ‘act as if our house is on fire. Because it is’.
Tickets: General Admission: $25, AM Members $20, Concession: $22. Book at https://australianmuseum.net.au/event/humannature. Tickets at the door subject to availability.
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