First Church

A conference with religious imagination exploring environmental justice and climate change, April 8—12, 2010, at Yale Divinity School & other Yale locations. Register at www.yale.edu/divinity/dislocations/  The conference is free and registration closes March 17th.  The conference brings together advocates for environmental justice and climate change who attempt to address global environmental problems with community-based approaches.  Environmental justice advocates have developed models of resistance to environmental racism and created models for local advocacy and political resistance.  Those working on issues of climate change have advocated for place-based ecological management schemes as a way to produce the social intelligence needed to understand and address complex environmental problems.  Both groups have much to learn from each other’s approaches and this conference brings advocates of both approaches together to focus on how environmental justice communities can develop socially just steps to address climate change.  

This is where the role of religion enters the conference to help participants think about how religious communities can respond to environmental racism while confronting global ecological problems.  

The conference features plenary talks by Carl Anthony, Robert Bullard, Dianne Dumanowski, David Orr and Mary Evelyn Tucker.  The panelists include Anthony Leiserowitz, Nick Robinson and Giovanna Di Chiro.  The think tank sessions, which are the heart of the conference because this is where the participants develop strategies to use in their local settings, include international leaders Desmond D’sa and Felicio Pontes.