Had the pleasure of participating in this feast of interdiscip-linary work on climate, justice and the Anthropo-cene today. (I spoke about trees, of course, a preview of a talk I'll give at ISSRNC in June.)
There's a lot of work engaging these topics actoss the university so highlights were many. (The live performance of a climate change-inspired jazz album wasn't a New School person but clearly a friend.) I was particularly charmed by the remarks of our climate-focused president, who put New School history to some of the best use I can recall. The founding of the New School, he reflected, wasn't provoked by a single event but by a quarter century's changes which conventional university knowledge wasn't keeping up with. In our last thirty years, human beings have put more carbon in the atmosphere than in all human history before that, fundamentally changing our present and the futures available to us. Don't we need a retooling too?