January 27, 2021

The Harvard Gazette

New Faculty: Sarah Dimick0

By Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite​, The Harvard Gazette 

Sarah Dimick wants to expand our understanding of environmental literature beyond traditional narratives that extol the beauty of the natural world or wallow in apocalypse. In her teaching and research, the assistant professor of English (who joined the department last year) analyzes themes of displacement, resistance, and justice in novels, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir. Dimick spoke to the Gazette about how she got started and the ways that literature can enlighten our understanding of the past, present, and future under climate change.

Q&A with Sarah Dimick

GAZETTE: When did you first become interested in the intersections of environmentalism, climate change, and literature?

DIMICK: Much of my work in this area began when I was an undergraduate student. I spent the summer after my sophomore year in college working as a backpacking guide in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains in Montana. I had a conversation on the trail with a man who had been herding sheep in those mountains for decades, and he explained that the glaciers in that area were receding at an alarming rate. He never used the words climate change, but he was acutely aware that his home landscape was undergoing this dramatic shift. He was concerned about the availability of water.

The following summer, a fellowship allowed me to travel to the Himalayas, working with a women’s collective located near Dharamsala, India. As they embroidered items to sell, the women spoke about how the glacier just up the mountain was receding quite quickly. I was struck by the way these stories emerging in two very different areas of the world were starting to resonate and potentially speak to each other.

GAZETTE: How can literature help us understand the lived realities of climate change?

DIMICK: I have such admiration and respect for my colleagues in climate science, and I think their work, especially right now, is an incredibly brave undertaking. At its best, literature helps us remember that climate change is not simply a change in the composition of our atmosphere. Climate change is also a change in our practices of mourning and remembrance, a change in how we understand our history. It changes the ways that our lives are entangled with the lives of others, particularly as we look ahead to a future of displacement and precarity. These changes alter the ways we locate meaning within our lives, and literature can help us navigate crumbling ideas and imagine routes towards more equitable futures.

GAZETTE: You analyze and teach on these themes in many areas including nonfiction, contemporary and historical fiction, and poetry. Why do you think it’s important to explore these issues across genres?

DIMICK: Often, when I describe what I do, people will say, “Oh, you work on cli-fi,” the shorthand for climate fiction. I do appreciate that emphasis on the speculative [in that genre]. But I think it’s crucial to consider the capacities of other genres and forms: poetry, creative nonfiction, memoir, and realist novels. They open other possibilities and are attuned to different audiences.

Last semester, I was struck by the way that my students gravitated toward climate poetry.  Repetitions and anaphora provided a weight — a certain heaviness — that students felt was necessary as they read through a semester of wildfires and unrest. I also think nonfiction environmental writing is absolutely crucial and understudied. I enjoy teaching “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore” by Elizabeth Rush. It collages voices from coastal communities in the United States, reminding us that the climate crisis is not a futuristic event but something already underway.

GAZETTE: Can you talk about the courses you’ll be teaching this spring?

DIMICK: My lecture course, “Voices of Environmental Justice,” considers the relationship between systems of human injustice and environmental issues. We’ll be looking at literary portrayals of industrial disasters, ocean acidification, and resource extraction. We’re reading Ken Saro-Wiwa’s “A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary.” Saro-Wiwa recounts how he and other Ogoni activists organized a resistance movement against Shell Oil. As Shell and other international oil companies siphoned profits away from the Niger Delta, Saro-Wiwa framed the extinction of human communities as an environmental issue. He was executed for his activism in 1995, but his voice and ideas persist in his writing.

I’m also teaching a seminar called “Resisting Toxicity: Rachel Carson, Dolores Huerta, and Environmental Nonfiction.” Carson wrote “Silent Spring” and Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers. Through their writing and organizing, both of these women campaigned against toxic exposures in the mid-20th century United States, but they are rarely studied together. Carson and Huerta offer us two distinct, but vital examples of environmental rhetoric. Carson crafted a meticulously researched case against the profligate use of DDT, publishing with Houghton Mifflin, while Huerta’s speeches and negotiations built a movement against cancer clusters and pesticide poisonings in California’s farm fields. I think they’re powerful complements and counterpoints to each other, and I’m grateful to have the chance to consider their work and their legacies with my students.

Research Areas: 

• Arts and Humanities

January 21, 2021

Boston Globe

Biden Must Hold Fast on Climate Standards0

By Daniel P. Schrag, HUCE Director

Hours after taking the oath of office, President Biden signed an executive order directing the United States to rejoin the Paris Agreement, making good on one of his many campaign commitments on climate change. But rejoining the agreement by itself does not restore US leadership on climate change. A critical decision will be what kind of commitment the Biden administration will make to emissions reductions, both in the near term and out through 2050.

Each country that signed the Paris accord committed to its own “intended nationally determined contribution” — the amount by which it intended to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 or 2030. The US INDC, prior to Donald Trump’s withdrawal, pledged a 26-28 percent reduction in emissions relative to 2005 by 2025. Barack Obama first announced it as part of a joint statement with China’s President Xi in 2014. At that time, US emissions were already 10 percent below those in 2005, partly because cheap natural gas had displaced coal used in the electricity sector and because Americans were using less petroleum in their vehicles and to heat their buildings after several years of high oil prices.

Since 2014, US emissions continued to decline by an additional 5 percent, down to 15 percent below 2005 at the end of 2019, just before the coronavirus pandemic. (Complete data from 2020 are not yet available, but will be anomalous because of curtailed travel and other impacts of the pandemic.) The reasons for the steady decline in emissions were surprisingly different from the earlier period. After the price of oil dropped in 2014, oil consumption in the United States started to grow; had this been the only change in the US energy system, total carbon dioxide emissions would have increased by 2 percent. But coal consumption over this period fell by 37 percent, more than compensating for the higher oil consumption. And while most of this coal was replaced with natural gas, at least a third of the electricity from coal was replaced by wind and solar power. This highlights the irony that there have been more solar photovoltaic cells installed and almost as large of a reduction in coal consumption during four years of the Trump administration as during all eight years of the Obama administration. Such is the power of markets and technology over politics.

Some have argued that the original US INDC will be impossible to achieve following the rollbacks in regulatory pressure during the Trump administration, and that the Biden administration should set a new INDC, perhaps focused on 2030. But setting a new INDC may send a message that US commitments are unreliable. And delaying our commitments until 2030 passes the major responsibility to future administrations.

Read full article via the Boston Globe >>

Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash

Research Areas: 

• Business, Law and Policy

January 6, 2021

SEAS News

Biomass Production0

By Adam Zewe, SEAS Communications 

When people think of renewable energy, solar panels or windmills are often the first images that come to mind. Yet half of global renewable energy comes from sustainable bioenergy, according to energy policy think tank REN21.

More than 60 percent of that sustainable bioenergy is produced by burning wood pellets, but their potential as a renewable energy source remains limited. Pellets generated from vast, tropical eucalyptus forests are banned in many countries because burning them generates hazardous emissions.

To read the entire article, visit the SEAS Communications page. 

Research Areas: 

• Energy

January 8, 2021

The Harvard Gazette

To Everything There Is a Season0

By Sheryl L. White, Arnold Arboretum Communications

Seasonal exhibitions are not unusual at any art gallery, but at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum in Boston, interpretations of how the seasons transform its landscape provide a standard theme for photographers and fine artists. Currently, the Arboretum offers two unique exhibitions on its website: “Resilience: Art in the time of COVID-19” by Lois Cremmins and “If Winter Comes…The Promise of Each Year in the Paintings of Anthony Apesos.” 

Cremmins’ “Resilience” reflects the artist’s message and personal journey to find a positive, restorative way to move through each day of the COVID-19 health crisis. Visiting the Arboretum over a year of seasons, she was inspired to create exuberant works in watercolor and collage reflective of her experience of the landscape.

“As spring unfolded into summer,” she said, “I could sense that the plants and animals, sun and sky, were carrying on in spite of the pandemic. And I wanted to make artworks as triumphant and defiant in the face of COVID-19 as I felt the entire Arboretum was being.”

Lois Cremmins illustrates the seasons in her pieces “Sprouting With New Life” and “A Place in the Shade.”

As a fitting complement to Cremmins’ theme, her work and recent Arboretum focus came to the attention of staff through a COVID-19 initiative — the Arboretum’s goal to remain open for all and establish visitor information tents at a number of its gates. This welcome outreach beckoned and served many visitors over summer and autumn, including New York transplant Cremmins, and contributed a providential introduction to her art.

Also on view in the virtual realm is a seasonal show by Tony Apesos, a previous exhibitor at the Arboretum. Apesos’ oil paintings of winter invite viewers on a rich, almost spiritual adventure into the collections during this season of sparse, intense beauty. His portrayal of winter has been shaped by his close observations and decades of Arboretum walks. It captures New England with exhilarating moments of golden light or the quiet of blue-shadowed snow.

Apesos — artist, professor, scholar, and art historian ― titled his exhibition “If Winter Comes…The Promise of Each Year in the Paintings of Anthony Apesos.” The title is a paraphrase of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” — “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” As the fates would have it, this theme would resonate meaningfully as we came through 2020.

These exhibitions both provide glimpses of that winter, and perhaps the feeling of spring being within our grasp.

The exhibits can be viewed on the Arboretum website. Apesos’ work will be available through Feb. 7.

Research Areas: 

• Arts and Humanities
• Ecology and Biodiversity