Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series

In this Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series talk students currently enrolled in ENVS 0401 A Community-Engaged Environmental Studies Practicum with present work from their semester long community-engaged projects.

This section of ENVS 401 will examine the “nuts and bolts” of social change: what it is, what it looks like, how it happens, and how to do it. We will focus on diverse efforts in Vermont aimed at building power among ordinary people trying to fight their way out of the everyday crises rendering life precarious. Amid wider initiatives to enact a “just transition” in the state, we’ll explore what kinds of collective capacities may be needed to effectively challenge “business as usual” and interrupt the existing balance of forces sustaining an unsustainable status quo. Students will partner with a range of organizations as they attempt to work out the necessary preconditions for achieving change; to bring together the requisite coalitions of actors who would carry out that change (out of what can be a fractious set of constituencies); and to assemble the various practical building blocks needed for a sufficient and equitable response to the startling task of overhauling “all aspects of society,” as scientific bodies like the IPCC have demanded.