20:15 Uhr: Climate Change And Global Warming – Prof. Dominic Boyer

From 2015 to 2017, the city of Houston was struck by three “500-year-flood” events, culminating in Hurricane Harvey. In this talk, Dominic Boyer explores how Houstonians reacted to this catastrophic flooding and how it impacted their emotional attachments to their homes, neighborhoods, and the city. He shows that Houston – a major port city that has flooded for its entire history – has long had a complicated relationship to water. Yet climate change is now bringing intensities and frequencies of rainfall that are challenging even the most ambitious flood management plans. Houstonians are trying to organize politically to address catastrophic flooding yet the distribution of this civic engagement is uneven, split along class and racial geographies, and mostly concentrated in whiter and wealthier neighborhoods. Their struggle raises the question: Will it be possible to control natural systems through technical expertise and engineering, especially in the context of global warming? Or, could a different, more “amphibious” imagination of Houston be the key to the city’s survival?

Dominic Boyer is a professor of anthropology at Rice University, specialized in the field of energy, climate, politics, and society. In his book Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene from 2019, he points out the influence wind power has, not only on politics but also on social and ecological aspects.



Eintritt frei; Veranstaltungssprache: Englisch

Mit: American Academy in Berlin

Text: Veranstalter

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