On Thursday, March 30, the Center for German and European Studies hosted its Beginning to End the Climate Crisis conference in honor of its 25th anniversary and in coordination with Brandeis’ Year of Climate Action in Sherman Function Hall. The full-day conference included keynote speeches, panel discussions, and an interview with the authors of  “Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future.”

The event kicked off with a vegan luncheon and remarks from Prof. Sabine von Mering (GER), Dean of Arts and Sciences Dorothy Hodgson, and Consul General of Germany to the New England States Dr. Sonja Kreibich, among others.

Following the luncheon and opening remarks, Simon Richter, professor of German and Dutch culture at the University of Pennsylvania, gave the first keynote address. Richter considers himself a “climate emergency gadfly” at Penn, where he hopes to motivate people and institutions to take unprecedented action, such as incorporating the climate emergency as a starting point for all forms of education, to mitigate the climate crisis. 

Richter’s keynote speech was followed by a panel on climate justice, which featured climate photographer Barbara Dombrowski, Prof. Prakash Kashwan (ENVS), and social and political organizer Tonny Nowshin. 

Dombrowski shared a series of somber photos from her projects “Tropic Ice” and “Quo Vadis, Europe?” which illustrate the effects of climate change on communities around the world. “Tropic Ice” focused on indigenous communities living in climate “tipping points” on five continents, while “Quo Vadis, Europe?” analyzed the “human-nature relationship crisis” of the Anthropocene through images of devastation in Europe resulting from floods, open-pit mining, and more. 

Dombrowski explained that through her photography, she hopes to highlight that “man-made climate change is a massive threat not only to nature and ecosystems and biodiversity, but above all to people themselves.” Dombrowski’s work is currently on display in Goldfarb Library.

In his remarks, Prof. Kashwan discussed the idea of ecological justice in the age of the climate crisis. He critiqued the rise of “junk carbon offset markets” that were widely popularized after COP13, criticized the global climate change summit held by the United Nations in 2007 and he suggested that poor countries are susceptible to land grabs by rich Western nations seeking to carry out their goals of carbon neutrality.  “This essentially asks us to … really think about these things in a more holistic way, and not just what we are doing here in terms of recycling, driving electric vehicles, and so forth,” he stated.

Nowshin attributed capitalism as a root cause of the climate crisis and advocated for the concept of degrowth as a solution. Degrowth seeks to prioritize “social and ecological welfare over production and consumption” and further suggests that capitalist economies’ focus on growth measurements like gross domestic product do not reflect people’s wellbeing and have consistently failed in the past.

Following the climate justice panel, attendees heard from authors Luisa Neubauer and Alex Repenning on their book “Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future.” The discussion celebrated von Mering’s English translation of the book and its launch in the United States. 

Neubauer reflected on the process of writing the book and the niche she sought to fill with it, suggesting that most literature about the climate crisis “seem to put people into more despair than into empowerment.” She explained that this response is often due to the mismatch between the scope of the crisis described and the action people are advised to take. “On hundreds of pages, you’ll find information about environmental crises … and then the last ten pages tell you what you can do as an individual. They say knowledge is power, but with the climate crisis, it’s very easily turned into disempowerment,” Neubauer said.

The authors concluded on a cautiously optimistic note by reflecting upon the progress the climate movement has made while stressing the need for further action. Repenning suggested that the climate movement has become more broadly accessible and has advanced beyond simply proving the existence of climate change to stopping greenwashing — the act of deceiving consumers into believing a company’s products are more environmentally friendly than they actually are — and ensuring governments and companies follow through with their climate promises.

Neubauer added, “Why do we speak about the climate? Why is it [climate action] on the agenda? Why is there this image of people, young people, asking for government accountability? It’s because in the last four years, we changed the perception of what people can achieve together. And it’s never been harder to deny the power of the people.”

The final event of the conference was a keynote address from Bill McKibben, a leading environmental journalist and one of the first individuals to write about the climate crisis in his book “The End of Nature,” published in 1989. 

In his address, McKibben discussed issues of environmental justice, climate refugees, and the effects of warming in the Arctic. He also spoke extensively about the decreasing price of renewable energy and its role in facilitating the transition away from a fossil-fuel driven economy, which has profound political and ecological implications: “Fossil fuels, autocracy, and fascism are closely linked, because as long as we depend on resources that are only available in a few places, the people who control those few places end up with too much power. We have lots of reasons to want to end this practice of burning things, and now we have the means to do it.”

McKibben also directed part of his comments to the older members of the audience in speaking about Third Act, an organization he founded in 2021 to empower people over sixty to take climate action. On Tuesday, March 21, Third Act held a “Stop Dirty Banks Day of Action” in which senior citizens in rocking chairs blocked entrances to major banks like Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America to protest financial institutions’ ties with the fossil fuel industry.

Through Third Act, McKibben hopes to change the perception that people get more conservative as they age and to capitalize upon the fact that older generations witnessed profound social change like the Civil Rights Movement in their youth and can leverage their skills, structural power, and financial assets to support a better future. 

McKibben concluded his speech by echoing earlier sentiments about the importance of collection action, an idea the conference as a whole sought to embrace.“The most important thing an individual can do is be less of an individual and join together with others in the movement,” he stated. “That’s our default … to think about things by ourselves as individuals [in terms of] ‘what can I do,’ but the real way to think about is ‘what can we do.’”