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UCLA and the arts: leading the way to address the climate crisis

Raising awareness and creating solutions to the climate emergency

Looking ahead to the Earth Day celebration this Friday, April 22, we’ve collected some of our favorite stories, conversations, and upcoming activities that highlight UCLA arts and humanities’ longstanding commitment to addressing the existential threat of climate change. From a talk with famed oceanographer and explorer Sylvia Earle, to a discussion on Jain principles and actions associated with safeguarding the ecosystem, to a family-friendly cyanotype photogram workshop that explores humankind’s relationship to nature, read on to find creative ways to spark discussions about the environmental imperative to preserve the planet for future generations. 

UPCOMING EVENTS

Sylvia Earle with Laura Dern

In a pre-Earth Day talk on Thursday, April 21 at the Hammer Museum, famed oceanographer and explorer Sylvia Earle shares her journey as a participant in decades of unprecedented ocean discoveries and as a witness to devastating loss, and what actions now can reverse planetary decline. She is joined in conversation by Academy Award-winning actress and activist Laura Dern.

Vital Matters: Applied Jain Ethics for Earth Day

On Friday, April 22—celebrated as Earth Day—communities around the world call particular attention to the imperative to protect the environment and all living organisms. This Fowler Museum program explores Jain principles and actions associated with the vratas or vows that govern pious conduct and considers how these might serve as models for safeguarding the ecosystem and promoting food security, animal rights, and healthy diets. 

Pop-up Studio: Exploring Nature with Photograms

If you could communicate with nature what would you say? Inspired by noé olivas’s installation Let’s Pray, families are invited to join artist and educator Courtney Coles in creating a cyanotype photogram that explores their relationship to nature. This drop-in workshop is designed for families to explore and create art together, and will be held at the Hammer Museum on Saturday, April 23.

This Land Was Made for You and Me?

The #landback movement advocates for the return of U.S. public lands to Indigenous Nations. How does our relationship to the land change when the land is being protected by Indigenous conservationists? This webinar with Diné scholars and activists will center these questions within the collective Indigenous cultural history of the Grand Canyon. This event on Monday, April 25 is co-sponsored by UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center and the Center for Latin American Studies.

Learn more about conversations and creative research tackling the climate crisis at UCLA:

CONVERSATIONS AND CREATIVE RESEARCH

Mapping climate justice in Los Angeles 

This winter quarter, design media arts students researched Los Angeles and its ecologies through the lens of climate change. Department of Design Media Arts professor and vice chair Peter Lunenfeld emphasized the importance of design research in the hybrid seminar/studio course “Introduction to Ecological Art and Justice,” part of a three-quarter sequence. Students conducted original research in order to think through historical and on-going issues of environmental racism in Los Angeles and surrounding areas.

Reconnecting with nature through immersive exhibition “Ritual of Return”

Art and science students at UCLA want you to reconsider the human relationship with nature, even if it means shrinking you down to the size of an insect – or at least creating an immersive environment that helps shift your perspective to the scale of tiny creatures. This past fall, students from the Department of Design Media Arts collaborated with environmental science, biology, and public policy students in the course “Introduction to Ecological Art and Justice.”

FireCity | FireLAnd: New Models of Resilience and Community with UCLA's Hitoshi Abe and Jeffrey Inaba's Research Studios

What does building resiliency look like for urban landscapes? With the effects of climate change increasing, architects, urban planners, and landscape architects must work towards land use design strategies while having humans and nature coexist effectively. Archinect connected with UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design associate adjunct professor Jeffrey Inaba and professor Hitoshi Abe to discuss their collaborative research studios FireCity and FireLAnd.

Unpacking The Plastic Crisis

Watch this dynamic discussion hosted by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance in 2021, exploring how local environmental policies disproportionately impact communities of color, and how a new generation of activists are on the frontline of reimagining environmental justice solutions.

Kian Goh: Urban resilience and climate justice

As cities adapt to climate change, how should urban planning decisions be made? And who gets to make them? Kian Goh is an urban studies and climate justice scholar, an architect, and an assistant professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Goh’s recent research has focused on three cities – Jakarta, Rotterdam and New York – and the pressures – from public officials, community activists or outside bodies – that determine cities’ responses to a warming planet. Goh talked about resilience as part of the UCLA Arts series “10 Questions: Reckoning,” which brings UCLA faculty from across campus together to examine ten essential questions. She also spoke to the UCLA Arts podcast Works In Progress about the power structures that dictate how cities respond to climate change.

“10 Questions: If not now, when?”

Other sessions of “10 Questions” in 2021 addressed climate change and environmental sustainability. “How do we sustain?” featured Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law. “How do we build?” featured Jeffrey Inaba, architect and adjunct professor of architecture, and Eric Hoek, professor of civil and environmental engineering. And “How do we change?” featured V. Kelly Turner, assistant professor of urban planning and geography.

Amazonia in Crisis

Susanna Hecht, professor of urban planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, discusses the severe crisis in the Amazon rainforest in this story. “[I]t’s a kind of arson on a planetary scale driven by terrible policies, land speculation, extensive clandestine economies and economies of simple plunder,” she says. 

Future of the Future: Brazil's Legislation and an Amazon Apocalypse

Under the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Congress has debated a series of laws dubbed by critics the “package of destruction” that pose a grave risk to the Amazon and its Indigenous people. What are the implications of these laws if passed? And what are Indigenous communities, activists and scholars doing to fight back? Susanna Hecht moderated this panel discussion on the crisis in Amazonia and its impact on Indigenous peoples.

Can a story save the planet? Storytelling and global catastrophes

Celebrated writers Scott Z. Burns, Amitav Ghosh, and Elizabeth Kolbert discussed how the art of storytelling has failed to take on the climate crisis and its attendant catastrophes—and how that might change.

Jane Fonda, Laura Flanders & Janet Valenzuela on environmental justice

Actor and activist Jane Fonda recently said: "We are the last generation who can make the difference between life and death of the planet." Fonda's activism has spanned decades and included fights for civil, women's, and environmental rights. She was joined by broadcast journalist Laura Flanders and community organizer Janet Valenzuela to discuss the future of environmental justice.

Naomi Klein: the case for a Green New Deal

Naomi Klein champions a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. One of the foremost chroniclers of the economic war waged on both people and planet, Klein's book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal pairs over a decade of Klein’s impassioned writing with new material on our immediate political and economic choices. Klein argues that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced the crisis. She was joined in conversation by Aquilina Soriano Versoza, executive director of the Pilipino Worker’s Center of Southern California.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

The Sustainable LA Grand Challenge

The Sustainable LA Grand Challenge is an interdisciplinary university-wide initiative aimed at applying UCLA research, expertise and education to help transform Los Angeles into the world’s most sustainable megacity by 2050 — making it the most livable, equitable, resilient, clean and healthy megacity, and an example for the world.

IOES

The UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability moves science to action on the front lines of environmental progress.

Counterforce Lab

Counterforce Lab is a research studio that harnesses the power of art and design to engage with the reality of global ecological crisis and its ties to environmental injustice.

cityLAB

cityLAB is an architecture and urban research think tank situated within UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Design.

UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance: Environmental Toolkit

We've compiled a list of organizations, researchers, activists, artists and concerned citizens who are making a difference in our communities. Dig in to explore how you can take action for proactive solutions, and against environmental policies that disproportionately impact communities of color.

Emmett Institute on the Climate and the Environment

A leading environmental law program at a renowned public university, the Emmett Institute educates future leaders and develops solutions to urgent environmental and environmental justice challenges.

UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions

At C-Solutions, we help protect people and their communities from the harmful health effects of climate change, especially the most vulnerable.

Stories for a Changing Planet

The Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at UCLA is an incubator for new research and collaboration on storytelling, communications, and media in the service of environmental conservation and equity.

Mapping Indigenous LA: Place-Making Through Digital Storytelling

A map of Los Angeles does not tell the story of its people. In a megalopolis like Los Angeles, this is a story that is often invisible to policy makers and even the city’s notion of itself as a global crossroads. This story includes layered, sedimented cultural geographies of Indigenous Los Angeles.

The Project on Resources and Governance

Co-founded by UCLA political science professor Michael Ross, an expert on the fossil fuels industry and author of “The Oil Curse,” this NGO pairs scholars and activists to conduct research and find solutions to governance problems in resource-rich countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

HEADER IMAGE: Work by undergraduate DMA student Hikaru Bakoshi, for Department of Design Media Arts chair and professor Rebeca Méndez's course Junk Battle!