For Our Common Home Lecture Series

Fall 2024

September 4 - Who tells your story? Framing of climate change by women and indigenous peoples at the United Nations

Speaker: Bi Zhao

Date: Wednesday, September 4
Time: 6 pm PT
Location: Hemmingson Auditorium, Gonzaga University and livestreaming online
Free and open to the public

Watch Recording  

Civil society organizations (CSO) have become indispensable actors in global climate governance. Since its founding in 1992, the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have been a central venue for CSOs to define and construct the meaning of climate change. Over the years, many CSOs have framed climate change as a social justice issue that intersects with gender inequality and indigenous peoples' rights violations. In our book, we examine the different ways in which civil society groups advocate for justice at UNFCCC COPs. We focus on two communities, the women's groups and the indigenous peoples, and investigate how each constructs a frame around climate change. We argue that these groups develop frames through two forms of interest representation: self-representation and crossover-representation. We find that women’s groups are self-representative in that they focus on gender framing to lead and shape gender discourse at UNFCCC. This self-representation is motivated by the saturation of gender discourse. By contrast, indigenous framing indicates crossover-representation, where both indigenous peoples’ organizations and other CSOs specialized in issues like forestry and health participate in indigenous peoples’ advocacy. Crossover-representation is motivated by the low density of organizations specialized in indigenous peoples. We adopt a mixed-methods approach to analyze CSOs’ framing efforts. First, we use Twitter (X) data to empirically observe variations in the use of frames among CSOs. We then conduct in-depth interviews with CSOs to learn about their understanding of climate change discourse and the motivation to shape it.

About the speaker: Dr. Bi Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Gonzaga University. Her research interests include non-state actors in global climate change governance and transnational human rights advocacy. In particular, she focuses on the role and participation of historically marginalized peoples in climate change politics and policymaking. She received her PhD in Political Science from Purdue University. Her work was published in the Journal of Human Rights, Environmental Policy and Governance, among others.

September 16 - Democracy in a Hotter Time

Speaker: Dr. David Orr

Date: Monday September 16
Time: 5pm PT
Location: Hemmingson Auditorium, Gonzaga University and livestreaming online
Free and open to the public

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What is at stake in 2024? A large movement threatens to undo our democracy. They have said as much, and we should believe them. But an even larger danger to democracy is on our doorstep: searing heat, massive storms, and flooding in some places, dust, fire, and drought in others. Heat will affect everyone, but those hit hardest will be those least responsible and most vulnerable: the poor, disadvantaged, young, and our grandchildren who bear none of the responsibility. Without fast and systemic action, millions of Americans could become climate refugees forced from their homes by mid-century. Our great work in this election year and beyond is to unite all those who wish to drink clean water, breathe clean air, live in a stable climate, and work in a fair and inclusive economy, and also believe that we the people should have a say in creating our common future.

About the speaker: David Orr is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University and the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor, emeritus, at Oberlin College.

October 2 - Spokane Candidates Climate Change Forum

Date: Wednesday, October 2
Time: 6pm PT
Location: The Globe Room, Gonzaga University and livestreaming.
Free and open to the public

Learn more and watch the recording   

What do local candidates for office think about climate change? How will it affect your vote in November? To aid citizens in their democratic deliberations, Gonzaga’s Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment is proud to host the Spokane Candidates Climate Change Forum on the first Wednesday each October.

October 22 - Rewilding the Urban Frontier: River Conservation in the Anthropocene

Speakers: Greg Gordon PhD, Margo Hill, Heidi Lasher, and Robert L. Bartlett PhD

Date: Tuesday, October 22
Time: 6pm PT
Location: Hemmingson Auditorium, Gonzaga University and livestreaming.
Free and open to the public

Watch recording 

While acknowledging the profound impact our species has had on the natural world, and rivers in particular, Rewilding the Urban Frontier: River Conservation in the Anthropocene argues that this new age in which humans have inexorably modified the planet presents opportunities for rethinking our relationship to the natural world and potentially healing the age-old rift between humans and nature. More than any other ecosystem, urban rivers typify our evolving relationship with nature. Once a necessity for the development of civilization, by the twentieth century, America’s rivers became neglected and abused, channelized, dammed, filled with sewage, and toxic waste. But then, spawned by America’s rising environmental awareness, the Clean Water Act of 1972 initiated a clean-up of the nation’s waterways. Fifty years later, most of America’s rivers are “fishable and swimmable” once again. But along with river revitalization, America has also experienced an explosion in urban growth such that our natural ecosystems are highly fragmented and disappearing under asphalt and concrete. Yet, urban rivers provide crucial wildlife corridors and connectivity to core conservation areas and offer opportunities to connect to the natural environment. Done right, rewilding urban rivers can help forestall biodiversity loss and address environmental and social inequities.

About the speakers:

• Greg Gordon was born at the junction of Cherry Creek and the South Fork of the Platte River and spent much of his adult life living along the Clark Fork and Dearborn rivers. He now lives a short walk from the confluence of Hangman Creek and the Spokane River and is a professor of Environmental Studies at Gonzaga University.
• Margo Hill, JD, MURP, is a Spokane Tribal member and grew up on the Spokane Indian reservation. She serves as the Associate Director of Small, Urban, Rural and Tribal Center on Mobility (SURTCOM). Dr. Hill served as the Spokane Tribal Attorney for 10 years and as a Coeur d’Alene Tribal Court Judge. Ms. Hill earned her Juris Doctorate from Gonzaga School of Law and her Master of Urban and Regional Planning from Eastern Washington University.
• Heidi Lasher, MPA, MFA, spent more than 20 years working as a freelance communications and policy consultant, specializing in global health topics such as safe water, immunization services, vaccine supply chains, and family planning. In 2019, she pivoted from consulting and began writing her own work. Her nonfiction essays have been published in several magazines and literary journals including Orion Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Litro Magazine, Cream City Review, and in Allegory Review’s nonfiction anthology, Allegheny. She is currently working on a collection of essays about time, change, and growing older along the Spokane River.
• Prior to retiring from Eastern Washington University in 2020, Robert L. “Bob” Bartlett spent eighteen years at Gonzaga University where he held a variety of enriching positions. His passion is learning, writing, and storytelling. He continues to consider myself a work in progress--a storytelling who’s learning to write. Now in retirement his professional goals include; sharing the great outdoors with others who look like him, being a fly-fishing educator and instructor, writing a monthly column on wellness in Spokane’s Black Lens newspaper titled, “From the Water’s Edge”, being a member of and serving on the boards of environmentally minded organizations and pursue writing on my obsession for family and rivers.
  
  

November 13-14 - Columbia River Transboundary Water Governance and Ethics Symposium

Date: Wednesday November 13 - Thursday November 14
Time: All Day
Location: Cataldo Hall Globe Room, Gonzaga University Campus
Limited ticket fee waivers are available, see registration site for details

Register to Attend  

Please join us on November 13th - 14th 2024 for a gathering to engage residents of the international Columbia River Basin in public education and dialogue on transboundary issues and public involvement in river governance.

December 3 - Confronting population denial amid unraveling global crises

Speaker: Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director at Population Balance and Senior Lecturer at Antioch University

Date: Tuesday, December 3
Time: 4 pm PT
Location: Zoom
Free and open to the public

Register to attend    

Human population has doubled from 4 billion in 1970 to 8 billion currently, and is expected to grow by another 2.5 billion this century. While leading scientific authorities warn that overpopulation and rampant overconsumption are driving climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity collapse, there is widespread dismissal of the role of population in these crises among journalists, academics, environmental organizations, and policymakers. In this talk, Nandita will discuss the factors behind the silencing of this discourse, namely the growth-biased socio-economic systems, past population policies, pronatalism, and human exceptionalism. She will explain the harmful implications of population denial on the most vulnerable people and ecosystems, how the powerful institutions of the state, the church, the military, and the economy perpetuate and benefit from this denial, and why we must urgently move past it. Strategies on how to hold power accountable, while embracing population and economic degrowth as a means to advance social, reproductive, and ecological justice, will be discussed.

About the speaker: Nandita Bajaj is the Executive Director of Population Balance, a US nonprofit that works to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. She also co-hosts The Overpopulation Podcast, a popular series that delves into the nuances of the drivers and impacts of human expansionism with expert guests. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University, where she teaches about the combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice. In addition to a number of peer-reviewed papers and forthcoming book chapters, her work has appeared in major news outlets including Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Guardian, Newsweek, Ms. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and National Post.