NYU Divest for Climate Justice is a coalition of students, faculty, alumni and staff holding NYU to its stated goals of sustainability by emancipating our university from fossil fuels. For 5 years, Divest has mobilized to demand that NYU stop investing in the top 200 publicly traded oil, coal, and gas companies. Our new initiative, Decarbonize NYU, is working to make NYU’s climate action plan democratic, just, and ambitious, and calling on NYU to commit to 100% renewable power, transportation, heating and cooling. We work with other climate justice organizations and experts in NYC, build intersectional coalitions, fight for student power, and create accessible spaces for members of NYU to come together in collective liberation.
Go to their website to learn more.
Statement on Ghost Fishing:
We as a university need to build strong and supportive relationships with local environmental justice organizations, and we as individuals must develop the practice of talking about climate change and ecological crisis in ways that are honest, unique, emotionally sustainable, and human. Ghost Fishing helps us with both. We have assembled, and are showcasing, a powerful group of local and university justice organizations. The exhibition designers have distilled what is essential to environmental humanities: they have joined the regular tending of plants with meditation on poetic vignettes in diverse voices.
NYU Divest-Decarbonize is tending to “To Haiti from Mountain Dell Farm” by Lisa Wujnovich.
Why we chose “To Haiti from Mountain Dell Farm”:
As the movement has taught us, climate denial has many faces– the denial of science, the feeding of doubt, the dazzling and mystification of solution-seekers, the denial of responsibility, and most importantly to us, the denial that another world is possible, that the path to mitigation exists, and that we can live differently. We are told that continued extractive growth is necessary, or inevitable, that the climate debt we are accruing is worthwhile, that we are by nature too isolated and diffuse to respond adequately. These ideas are powerful: we know this because we struggle with them every day. Our university often allows these ideas to breed paralysis and stifle ambition. Yet even when it fails to win divestment, the fossil fuel divestment movement has succeeded to in shifting public consensus on the viability of continued extraction, and on the principles by which capital should be managed. Our new initiative, Decarbonize NYU, will shift public consensus against half-measures once again, educate our community about climate solutions and climate justice, elevate the ambition of NYU’s Climate Action Plan, and animate fellow students out of paralysis.
Ghost Fishing: Eco-Justice Poetry and the Diasporic City 