Watch the lecture on our YouTube channel
Monday, May 5: A public lecture on "Climate Change Causes and Curatives" with Shimon Edelman, Psychology Professor and Cornell on Fire Faculty Fellow. This event was free and open to the public, with over 200 students estimated in attendance alongside several faculty and members of the public.
The lecture began by reviewing the grave evidence for planetary-scale climate catastrophe that spells doom for the industrial civilization, as well as extinction for countless species (possibly including ourselves). The crisis is often described as being of our own making — yet the political-economic order under which the vast majority of people in the modern world toil has never been up to them. Edelman argued that capitalism is the root cause of genocide and ecocide, reviewing the socioeconomic roots of our deadly modernity; the unsustainable growth imperative at its core; and the politics of obfuscation and oppression that preserves the power and privileges of the ruling class. As a case study, he reviewed Cornell University’s own recent “sustainability” efforts, which merely serve to sustain the fossil-fuel status quo. Finally, he concluded with ways to resist the profiteering planet-killers, enact climate justice, and save what can still be saved. He argued that climate despair must be met with climate action: we must engage in organizing and collective action. A general strike is the most powerful tool of resistance: no regime can survive a general strike. A better world is possible if we resolve to work together to build it.
The public lecture began at 2:55 p.m. It was held at 255 Olin Hall and over Zoom.
Bio: Shimon Edelman is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. He holds degrees in electrical engineering and in computer science and has published more than 100 papers and dozens of book chapters on topics ranging from motor control, visual perception, and the evolution and acquisition of language to artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and computational theories of consciousness. His most recent monographs are “Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist’s View of the Human Condition” (2020) and “The Consciousness Revolutions: From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation” (2023). While his present scientific interests focus on evolution and consciousness, his work, and especially teaching, is now motivated by the most urgent challenge that we face collectively as a species: the accelerating climate catastrophe.
This seminar was part of the Spring Cornell Climate Change Seminar Series held most Mondays of the Spring semester. The seminar is organized and sponsored by the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.
