HASTS PhD student
Q: How has research from the HASTS doctoral program shaped your understanding of global climate change and its myriad ecological and social impacts?
A: MIT HASTS alum
Through ethnographic research, Callison shows that although these understandings were grounded in a shared set of facts, each drew from different cultural and ethical frameworks. These variations could silo conversations, even as they illustrated the pluralities of the climate crisis by highlighting different challenges and compelling different actions.
HASTS faculty member and environmental historian
Climate change is not only a scientific and technological matter, but also a social, political, and historical one. It stems from centuries of uneven geographies of energy extraction and distribution; related historical and geographical processes today distribute climate vulnerabilities unevenly across places and people.
The dimensions of today's promising interventions have, in turn, been configured by past funding and research agendas - and the many technologies employed have a wide variety of implications for equity, ethics, and justice. The parameters of public opinion and policy debate on the nature and risks of climate change, as well as its conceivable solutions, are similarly shaped by socio-historical contexts.
A: Renewable energy can sometimes be positioned as immaterial and inherently redistributive. In some sense these characterizations arise from physical qualities: the sun and wind don't require extraction, won't run out, and are distributed across space.
Yet renewable energy must be collected, stored, and transported; it requires financing, metals extraction, and the processing of decommissioned materials. Energy access, mining, and waste deposition are material, geographically situated dynamics. Not everyone stands to benefit equally from renewable energy's financial and environmental potentials, and not everyone will be equally exposed to its socio-environmental impacts.
The distribution of burdens is in some cases already mapping onto existing inequities in power and privilege, disproportionately impacting BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] and low-income individuals, as well as communities in the Global South - often in locales also on the front lines of climate change or other forms of environmental injustice.
None of these challenges should stall renewable energy implementation; renewables are an absolutely crucial part of climate mitigation and can also increase climate resilience and reduce environmental contamination, among other co-benefits.
Moreover, neither the parameters of these challenges nor the potential interventions are clear-cut. Minerals extraction is key for many local economies.
Different metals also have distinct environmental and social footprints. Cobalt mining, which takes place largely in the
Minimizing the localized burdens of renewable energy implementation will be complex. Here at
I'm still in the planning phase of my own research, but I hope it will help surface, and offer tools with which to think through, some of these socio-environmental complexities.
Q: In confronting an issue as formidable as climate change, what gives you hope?
A: In college I did an interview project to learn about collaborations between student environmental groups and a local church to address climate change. Toward the end of each interview, I found myself coming back to the same question: What gives you energy in your work on climate change? What keeps you going?
The question wasn't strictly necessary for my project; I was asking, mostly, for myself. Climate change can be truly overwhelming, in part because it so dramatically dwarfs the scope, in space and in time, of a single human life. It is also complex - intertwined with so many different ways of knowing the world.
My interviewees gave different answers. Some told me they were careful to mentally segment the issue so as to keep 'climate change,' as a paralyzing totality, from sapping a sense of purpose from their daily research or advocacy endeavors. Others I spoke with took the opposite approach, conceptually linking their own efforts - which could feel insufficiently quotidian - to a sense of the broader stakes. But almost everyone I talked to highlighted the importance of being part of a community - of engaging in and through collaborative efforts.
That's what gives me hope as well: people working together to address climate change in ways that attend to both its scientific and its social complexities. Intersections between climate change and social justice like the
Climate-related collaborations are also happening all across
For my part, I've been energized by my involvement in a project led by MIT MLK Scholar
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