2020 Student Awards Update Part 1
The previous semester (Spring ‘20), the Tishman Environment and Design Center created student awards to help support the work of students doing research and projects around environmental and climate justice, which was especially critical during the beginning phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were glad to support fourteen projects which were carried out by twenty-three students from across the university.
This post is part one of three in which we provide excerpts of each project and also link to the longer final reports that give more insight into each project. We would like to thank all the students for their hard work and are proud to see them making a positive difference in the world.
Climate Resource Hub - Topic Area: Food
Genesis Abreu ‘21, Nicole Karsch ‘21, Laura Langner ‘21, Moja Robinson ‘21, Saloni Shah ‘20, Dawa Sherpa ‘20, Anastasia Standrik ‘20, Christian Tandazo ‘20, Andrea Torres ‘20, Kaija Xiao ‘21
The Climate Solutions Collective (CSC) is a student-led collaborative project composed of a diverse group of ten graduate students and alumni from The New School, overseen by Dr. Leonardo Figueroa-Helland from the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management program.
This collective came together because of a shared understanding and common analysis that approaches and solutions to the climate crisis must be led and guided by the knowledge and experiences of frontline, fenceline and marginalized communities who have been at the forefront of climate justice. Through this initiative, we honor the legacy and labor of these communities that have fought for place-based community self-determination, autonomy, and resilience in the face of the climate crisis. READ MORE HERE
Green New Theatre
Anna Lathrop, Transdisciplinary Design MFA, ‘21
When Groundwater Arts originally formed back in 2018, we wanted to help cultural institutions and individual artists evolve in the face of the climate crisis. But how? The issues of climate justice, and its intersections with racial, social, gender, disability, and other facets of justice within the human and social experience are, in a word...complex. We responded with our movement building tool entitled Green New Theatre. It’s a set of actionable principles and strategies that can inform both organizations and individuals that weave climate justice into the foundation of their practices. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced live performing arts to pause for the foreseeable future, we decided to hold a series of public working calls that could help the field strategize our next steps. READ MORE HERE
Bart Orr, Public and Urban Policy, PhD ‘21
In imagining a desirable future for Puerto Rico in a likely scenario of increasing climatic risk, actors involved—including local government, community organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations and philanthropies—have been focused on resilience. In cases of physical infrastructure like the electrical grid, this manifests itself in plans for smaller sections of the grid, from single structures to networks of buildings, to detach themselves and maintain some degree of function when the larger grid system fails. These infrastructural connections are not only physical, however, but are social as well, and some worry that in planning for resilience, the islands existing inequalities will only be exacerbated by plans that provide for contingency for those who can afford it and leave others at the mercy of federal agencies. As one person who attended a post-Maria planning meeting said, “they presented resilience to us as this kind of shiny object, but we need to hear it in terms of rice and beans—what’s it really going to look like?” READ MORE HERE
Hydrodams Advocacy
Dawa Sherpa, Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management, ‘20
A dam is a barrier that stops or restricts the flow of water or underground streams. The world's free-flowing rivers have been destroyed with about 50,000 dams (height of 15 meters or more), and millions of smaller dams that have been built over centuries. While analyzing the process of dam-building, there are two critical aspects to discern: the importance to recognize the cumulative impacts from multiple dams in a river, and to be critical of the numbers in reports, "Who are counted as Project Affected People (PAP)? "
After receiving the Tishman Award for Hydrodams Advocacy Project, I reached out to several organizations working against dam-building in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region. The HKH region accounts for 240 million hill and mountain people across the eight countries sharing the region. The HKH region is the headwaters for major rivers in Asia, supporting 1.65 billion people in the river basins downstream . The region is rich in biodiversity and culture, dominated by 1mountain communities composed of tribal groups, indigenous and ethnic minorities. The geographical terrain of the region is fragile, with a high risk of erosion and landslides, it is also more susceptible to the impacts of climate change. READ MORE HERE