Global Warming and The Sweetness Of Life: A Tar Sands Tale
Matt Hern and Am Johal
Wednesday, 3 April 2019
12:00pm
1 hour
Oxford Martin School: Lecture Theatre
£7 - £12.50
Writers, activists and academics Matt Hern and Am Johal describe the ecological horrors they encountered at the tar sands of northern Alberta and argue that confronting global warming requires a new way of being in the world.
Hern and Johal made a series of road trips to the tar sands of Alberta, one of the world’s largest industrial sites, where oil is extracted from vast reserves. They talked to people whose lives depended on the extraction and to people whose lives were imperilled by it. They argue for a new type of politics they say is based on an ‘understanding of the sweetness of life’.
Hern is a writer and activist who has founded a number of community initiatives and projects. He teaches at many universities and is also author of What a City Is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement. Johal is director of Simon Fraser University’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement and author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene.
Presented by MIT Press.