Convocation Speaker, Dr. Bina Venkataraman
The campus-wide Convocation Committee is pleased to announce that Dr. Bina Venkataraman, scientist and author of the best-seller, The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, has been selected as our 2020 Convocation Day speaker. Venkataraman teaches at MIT and has served in the Executive Branch of the U.S. government as a senior advisor for Climate Change.
Convocation 2020 will focus on the vital theme of climate change and how it will likely impact human destiny. We hope that Venkataraman will inspire students and faculty alike to discuss the implications of climate change and how to address them. Please note that Tuesday, April 21, 2020 is Convocation Day, on which no day or evening classes will be held.
More on Dr. Bina Venkataraman
Bina Venkataraman is a writer and leader who works at the intersection of social progress, emerging technology & environmental change. Currently, she teaches in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT and serves as the Director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT. She is also a fellow at New America and a former journalist forthe New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Venkataraman previously served as Senior Advisor for Climate Change Innovation in the Obama White House, where she forged partnerships among communities, companies, and government to combat carbon emissions and prepare for climate disasters. She also advised the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in responding to the Ebola epidemic, promoting patient access to cancer therapies, and reforming public school science education. Her non-fiction book, The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age received a warm review from the New York Times.
Our speaker has worked in India, Alaska, Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, and Guatemala; she grew up in Ohio. Her endeavors abroad and at home have included translating Spanish and English in emergency rooms, teaching writing to Harlem high school students, working the graveyard shift at a hotel in the Arctic wilderness, lobster fishing in Baja California Sur, and cataloguing films for a cinema critic in Havana.
Attention Teaching Faculty: Important information regarding the Convocation Faculty Scholars (CFS) program for teaching faculty will be released shortly. Over 80 teaching faculty members enrolled as CFS in 2019. This program recognizes teaching faculty who actively support student attendance at Convocation Day 2020 through the creation of Convocation-related scholarly activities.
For teaching faculty who wish to read the author’s book, The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age or The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells, and delve into a deep discussion of the issues raised by these works, we plan to offer a 3-hour Convocation Institute on Tuesday January 21, 2020. More details regarding the Convocation Institute for teaching faculty will be released shortly. Keep reading for more details about both book options.
Campus-Wide Convocation Day Committee Members
- Professor I.J. Byrnes (Chair)
- Professor Anne Haner-Uncapher, Health Sciences Division
- Dr. Virginia Shirley, Liberal Arts Division
- Dr. Victor Lamoureux, Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics Division
- Associate Librarian, Dr. Amanda Hollister, Library
- Professor Gian Roma, Business and Professional Studies Division
- Professor Carla Michalak, Liberal Arts Division
More Information about Dr. Venkataraman’s Book
ABOUT THE OPTIMIST’S TELESCOPE
“How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . . She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future: our own, our families’, and our society’s.
Instant gratification is the norm today—in our lives, our culture, our economy, and our politics. Many of us have forgotten (if we ever learned) how to make smart decisions for the long run. Whether it comes to our finances, our health, our communities, or our planet, it’s easy to avoid thinking ahead.
The consequences of this immediacy are stark: Superbugs spawned by the overuse of antibiotics endanger our health. Companies that fail to invest stagnate and fall behind. Hurricanes and wildfires turn deadly for communities that could have taken more precaution. Today more than ever, all of us need to know how we can make better long-term decisions in our lives, businesses, and society.
Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A former journalist and adviser in the Obama administration, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead—and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time. With examples from ancient Pompeii to modern-day Fukushima, she dispels the myth that human nature is impossibly reckless and highlights the surprising practices each of us can adopt in our own lives—and the ones we must fight for as a society. The result is a book brimming with the ideas and insights all of us need in order to forge a better future”. Penguin Random House
More Information about The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace Wells for Convocation Institute 2020
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.
An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.
Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth
“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times
“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist
“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post
“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best-seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
