Ep 9 - "Everything is Connected" with Sheila Watt-Cloutier

GMU Cultural Studies Colloquium

In the ninth episode of the "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Culture" podcast series from GMU Cultural Studies, Christine Rosenfeld talks with Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit advocate who has worked on issues related to climate change and Persistent Organic Pollutants. Watt-Cloutier was a Nobel nominee and has receive the prestigious Right Livelihood Award for her work addressing climate change as a question of collective human rights. Her memoir The Right to Be Cold narrates her life, beginning as a youth in a remote Inuit village.
Watt-Cloutier and Rosenfeld discuss some ways to highlight the cultural and human dimensions of climate change, the value of understanding climate change as an issue of collective human rights, and what will be lost if decisive action is not taken immediately.
This podcast series is associated with George Mason University Cultural Studies' Colloquium Series. This year's series is called "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Culture." The industrial revolution liberated human beings from the cycles of nature — or so it once seemed. It turns out that greenhouse gases, a natural byproduct of coal- and petroleum-burning industries, lead to global warming, and that we are now locked into a long warming trend: a trend that will raise sea levels, enhance the occurrence of extreme weather events, and ultimately could threaten food supplies and other vital supports for modern civilization. This podcast series examines the cultural and political-economic dimensions of our ongoing, slow-moving climate crisis. We engage experts from a variety of fields and disciplines to ask questions about capitalism and the environment. How did we get into this mess? How bad is it? Where do we go from here? What sorts of steps might mitigate the damage — or perhaps someday reverse it? At stake are deep questions about humanity’s place in and relationship to nature — and what our systems of governance, production, and distribution might look like in the future.
Learn more about the Cultural Studies Program at GMU: http://culturalstudies.gmu.edu
Read more on Sheila Watt-Cloutier's Right Livelihood Award profile.

Interview: Christine Rosenfeld
Production and Editing: Richard Todd Stafford
Colloquium Organizer: Roger Lancaster
Music: Kevin MacLeod "Acid Trumpet," used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License