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    Returning farming to city centers

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    A new class is giving MIT students the opportunity to examine the historical and practical considerations of urban farming while developing a real-world understanding of its value by working alongside a local farm’s community.Course 4.182 (Resilient Urbanism: Green Commons in the City) is taught in two sections by instructors in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the School of Architecture and Planning, in collaboration with The Common Good Co-op in Dorchester.The first section was completed in spring 2025 and the second section is scheduled for spring 2026. The course is taught by STS professor Kate Brown, visiting lecturer Justin Brazier MArch ’24, and Kafi Dixon, lead farmer and executive director of The Common Good.“This project is a way for students to investigate the real political, financial, and socio-ecological phenomena that can help or hinder an urban farm’s success,” says Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science. Brown teaches environmental history, the history of food production, and the history of plants and people. She describes a history of urban farming that centered sustainable practices, financial investment and stability, and lasting connections among participants. Brown says urban farms have sustained cities for decades.“Cities are great places to grow produce,” Brown asserts. “City dwellers produce lots of compostable materials.”Brazier’s research ranges from affordable housing to urban agricultural gardens, exploring topics like sustainable architecture, housing, and food security.“My work designing vacant lots as community gardens offered a link between Kafi’s work with Common Good and my interests in urban design,” Brazier says. “Urban farms offer opportunities to eliminate food deserts in underserved areas while also empowering historically marginalized communities.”Before they agreed to collaborate on the course, Dixon reached out to Brown asking for help with several challenges related to her urban farm including zoning, location, and infrastructure.“As the lead farmer and executive director of Common Good Co-op, I happened upon Kate Brown’s research and work and saw that it aligned with our cooperative model’s intentions,” Dixon says. “I reached out to Kate, and she replied, which humbled and excited me.” “Design itself is a form of communication,” Dixon adds, describing the collaborative nature of farming sustenance and development. “For many under-resourced communities, innovating requires a research-based approach.”The project is among the inaugural cohort of initiatives to receive support from the SHASS Education Innovation Fund, which is administered by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC).Community development, investment, and collaborationThe class’s first section paired students with community members and the City of Boston to change the farm’s zoning status and create a green space for long-term farming and community use. Students spent time at Common Good during the course, including one weekend during which they helped with weeding the garden beds for spring planting.One objective of the class is to help Common Good avoid potential pitfalls associated with gentrification. “A study in Philadelphia showed that gentrification occurs within 1,000 feet of a community garden,” Brown says. “Farms and gardens are a key part of community and public health,” Dixon continues. Students in the second section will design and build infrastructure — including a mobile chicken coop and a pavilion to protect farmers from the elements — for Common Good. The course also aims to secure a green space designation for the farm and ensure it remains an accessible community space. “We want to prevent developers from acquiring the land and displacing the community,” Brown says, avoiding past scenarios in which governments seized inhabitants’ property while offering little or no compensation.Students in the 2025 course also produced a guide on how to navigate the complex rules surrounding zoning and related development. Students in the next STS section will research the history of food sovereignty and Black feminist movements in Dorchester and Roxbury. Using that research, they will construct an exhibit focused on community activism for incorporation into the coop’s facade.Imani Bailey, a second-year master’s student in the Department of Architecture’s MArch program, was among the students in the course’s first section.“By taking this course, I felt empowered to directly engage with the community in a way no other class I have taken so far has afforded me the ability to,” she says.Bailey argues for urban farms’ value as both a financial investment and space for communal interaction, offering opportunities for engagement and the implementation of sustainable practices. “Urban farms are important in the same way a neighbor is,” she adds. “You may not necessarily need them to own your home, but a good one makes your property more valuable, sometimes financially, but most importantly in ways that cannot be assigned a monetary value.”The intersection of agriculture, community, and technologyTechnology, the course’s participants believe, can offer solutions to some of the challenges related to ensuring urban farms’ viability. “Cities like Amsterdam are redesigning themselves to improve walkability, increase the appearance of small gardens in the city, and increase green space,” Brown says. By creating spaces that center community and a collective approach to farming, it’s possible to reduce both greenhouse emissions and impacts related to climate change.Additionally, engineers, scientists, and others can partner with communities to develop solutions to transportation and public health challenges. By redesigning sewer systems, empowering microbiologists to design microbial inoculants that can break down urban food waste at the neighborhood level, and centering agriculture-related transportation in the places being served, it’s possible to sustain community support and related infrastructure.“Community is cultivated, nurtured, and grown from prolonged interaction, sharing ideas, and the creation of place through a shared sense of ownership,” Bailey argues. “Urban farms present the conditions for communities to develop.” Bailey values the course because it leaves the theoretical behind, instead focusing on practical solutions. “We seldom see our design ideas become tangible,” she says. “This class offered an opportunity to design and build for a real client in the real world.”Brazier says the course and its projects prove everyone has something to contribute and can have a voice in what happens with their neighborhoods. “Despite these communities’ distrust of some politicians, we partnered to work on solutions related to zoning,” he says, “and supported community members’ advocacy efforts.” More

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      in Energy

      Where climate meets community

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      The MIT Living Climate Futures Lab (LCFL) centers the human dimensions of climate change, bringing together expertise from across MIT to address one of the world’s biggest challenges.The LCFL has three main goals: “addressing how climate change plays out in everyday life, focusing on community-oriented partnerships, and encouraging cross-disciplinary conversations around climate change on campus,” says Chris Walley, the SHASS Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and head of MIT’s Anthropology Section. “We think this is a crucial direction for MIT and will make a strong statement about the kind of human-centered, interdisciplinary work needed to tackle this issue.”Walley is faculty lead of LCFL, working in collaboration with a group of 19 faculty colleagues and researchers. The LCFL began to coalesce in 2022 when MIT faculty and affiliates already working with communities dealing with climate change issues organized a symposium, inviting urban farmers, place-based environmental groups, and others to MIT. Since then, the lab has consolidated the efforts of faculty and affiliates representing disciplines from across the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and the Institute.Amah Edoh, a cultural anthropologist and managing director of LCFL, says the lab’s collaboration with community organizations and development of experiential learning classes aims to bridge the gap that can exist between the classroom and the real world.“Sometimes we can find ourselves in a bubble where we’re only in conversation with other people from within academia or our own field of practice. There can be a disconnect between what students are learning somewhat abstractly and the ‘real world’ experience of the issues” Edoh says. “By taking up topics from the multidimensional approach that experiential learning makes possible, students learn to take complexity as a given, which can help to foster more critical thinking in them, and inform their future practice in profound ways.”Edoh points out that the effects of climate change play out in a huge array of areas: health, food security, livelihoods, housing, and governance structures, to name a few.“The Living Climate Futures Lab supports MIT researchers in developing the long-term collaborations with community partners that are essential to adequately identifying and responding to the challenges that climate change creates in everyday life,” she says.Manduhai Buyandelger, professor of anthropology and one of the participants in LCFL, developed the class 21A.S01 (Anthro-Engineering: Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale), which has in turn sparked related classes. The goal is “to merge technological innovation with people-centered environments.” Working closely with residents of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Buyandelger and collaborator Mike Short, the Class of 1941 Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, helped develop a molten salt heat bank as a reusable energy source.“My work with Mike Short on energy and alternative heating in Mongolia helps to cultivate a new generation of creative and socially minded engineers who prioritize people in thinking about technical solutions,” Buyandelger says, adding, “In our course, we collaborate on creating interdisciplinary methods where we fuse anthropological methods with engineering innovations so that we can expand and deepen our approach to mitigate climate change.”

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      MIT Living Climate Futures Lab LaunchVideo: MIT Anthropology

      Iselle Barrios ’25, says 21A.S01 was her first anthropology course. She traveled to Mongolia and was able to experience firsthand all the ways in which the air pollution and heating problem was much larger and more complicated than it seemed from MIT’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus.“It was my first exposure to anthropological and STS critiques of science and engineering, as well as international development,” says Barrios, a chemical engineering major. “It fundamentally reshaped the way I see the role of technology and engineers in the broader social context in which they operate. It really helped me learn to think about problems in a more holistic and people-centered way.”LCFL participant Alvin Harvey, a postdoc in the MIT Media Lab’s Space Enabled Research Group and a citizen of the Navajo Nation, works to incorporate traditional knowledge in engineering and science to “support global stewardship of earth and space ecologies.””I envision the Living Climate Futures Lab as a collaborative space that can be an igniter and sustainer of relationships, especially between MIT and those whose have generational and cultural ties to land and space that is being impacted by climate change,” Harvey says. “I think everyone in our lab understands that protecting our climate future is a collective journey.”Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science, is also a participant in LCFL. Her current interest is urban food sovereignty movements, in which working-class city dwellers used waste to create “the most productive agriculture in recorded human history,” Brown says. While pursuing that work, Brown has developed relationships and worked with urban farmers in Mansfield, Ohio, as well as in Washington and Amsterdam.Brown and Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry, teach a class called STS.055 (Living Dangerously: Environmental Programs from 1900 to Today) that presents the environmental problems and solutions of the 20th century, and how some “solutions” created more problems over time. Brown also plans to teach a class on the history of global food production once she gets access to a small plot of land on campus for a lab site.“The Living Climate Futures Lab gives us the structure and flexibility to work with communities that are struggling to find solutions to the problems being created by the climate crisis,” says Brown.Earlier this year, the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) selected the Living Climate Futures Lab as its inaugural Faculty-Driven Initiative (FDI), which comes with a $500,000 seed grant.MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, co-chair of MITHIC, says the LCFL exemplifies how we can confront the climate crisis by working in true partnership with the communities most affected.“By combining scientific insight with cultural understanding and lived experience, this initiative brings a deeper dimension to MIT’s climate efforts — one grounded in collaboration, empathy, and real-world impact,” says Chandrakasan.Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS and co-chair of MITHIC, says the LCFL is precisely the type of interdisciplinary collaboration the FDI program was designed to support.”By bringing together expertise from across MIT, I am confident the Living Climate Futures Lab will make significant contributions in the Institute’s effort to address the climate crisis,” says Rayo.Walley said the seed grant will support a second symposium in 2026 to be co-designed with community groups, a suite of experiential learning classes, workshops, a speaker series, and other programming. Throughout this development phase, the lab will solicit donor support to build it into an ongoing MIT initiative and a leader in the response to climate change. More

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      in Environment

      In a unique research collaboration, students make the case for less e-waste

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      Brought together as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, a community of students known as SERC Scholars is collaborating to examine the most urgent problems humans face in the digital landscape.Each semester, students from all levels from across MIT are invited to join a different topical working group led by a SERC postdoctoral associate. Each group delves into a specific issue — such as surveillance or data ownership — culminating in a final project presented at the end of the term.Typically, students complete the program with hands-on experience conducting research in a new cross-disciplinary field. However, one group of undergraduate and graduate students recently had the unique opportunity to enhance their resume by becoming published authors of a case study about the environmental and climate justice implications of the electronics hardware life cycle.Although it’s not uncommon for graduate students to co-author case studies, it’s unusual for undergraduates to earn this opportunity — and for their audience to be other undergraduates around the world.“Our team was insanely interdisciplinary,” says Anastasia Dunca, a junior studying computer science and one of the co-authors. “I joined the SERC Scholars Program because I liked the idea of being part of a cohort from across MIT working on a project that utilized all of our skillsets. It also helps [undergraduates] learn the ins and outs of computing ethics research.”Case study co-author Jasmin Liu, an MBA student in the MIT Sloan School of Management, sees the program as a platform to learn about the intersection of technology, society, and ethics: “I met team members spanning computer science, urban planning, to art/culture/technology. I was excited to work with a diverse team because I know complex problems must be approached with many different perspectives. Combining my background in humanities and business with the expertise of others allowed us to be more innovative and comprehensive.”Christopher Rabe, a former SERC postdoc who facilitated the group, says, “I let the students take the lead on identifying the topic and conducting the research.” His goal for the group was to challenge students across disciplines to develop a working definition of climate justice.From mining to e-wasteThe SERC Scholars’ case study, “From Mining to E-waste: The Environmental and Climate Justice Implications of the Electronics Hardware Life Cycle,” was published by the MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing.The ongoing case studies series, which releases new issues twice a year on an open-source platform, is enabling undergraduate instructors worldwide to incorporate research-based education materials on computing ethics into their existing class syllabi.This particular case study broke down the electronics life cycle from mining to manufacturing, usage, and disposal. It offered an in-depth look at how this cycle promotes inequity in the Global South. Mining for the average of 60 minerals that power everyday devices lead to illegal deforestation, compromising air quality in the Amazon, and triggering armed conflict in Congo. Manufacturing leads to proven health risks for both formal and informal workers, some of whom are child laborers.Life cycle assessment and circular economy are proposed as mechanisms for analyzing environmental and climate justice issues in the electronics life cycle. Rather than posing solutions, the case study offers readers entry points for further discussion and for assessing their own individual responsibility as producers of e-waste.Crufting and crafting a case studyDunca joined Rabe’s working group, intrigued by the invitation to conduct a rigorous literature review examining issues like data center resource and energy use, manufacturing waste, ethical issues with AI, and climate change. Rabe quickly realized that a common thread among all participants was an interest in understanding and reducing e-waste and its impact on the environment.“I came in with the idea of us co-authoring a case study,” Rabe said. However, the writing-intensive process was initially daunting to those students who were used to conducting applied research. Once Rabe created sub-groups with discrete tasks, the steps for researching, writing, and iterating a case study became more approachable.For Ellie Bultena, an undergraduate student studying linguistics and philosophy and a contributor to the study, that meant conducting field research on the loading dock of MIT’s Stata Center, where students and faculty go “crufting” through piles of clunky printers, broken computers, and used lab equipment discarded by the Institute’s labs, departments, and individual users.Although not a formally sanctioned activity on-campus, “crufting” is the act of gleaning usable parts from these junk piles to be repurposed into new equipment or art. Bultena’s respondents, who opted to be anonymous, said that MIT could do better when it comes to the amount of e-waste generated and suggested that formal strategies could be implemented to encourage community members to repair equipment more easily or recycle more formally.Rabe, now an education program director at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, is hopeful that through the Zero-Carbon Campus Initiative, which commits MIT to eliminating all direct emissions by 2050, MIT will ultimately become a model for other higher education institutions.Although the group lacked the time and resources to travel to communities in the Global South that they profiled in their case study, members leaned into exhaustive secondary research, collecting data on how some countries are irresponsibly dumping e-waste. In contrast, others have developed alternative solutions that can be duplicated elsewhere and scaled.“We source materials, manufacture them, and then throw them away,” Lelia Hampton says. A PhD candidate in electrical engineering and computer science and another co-author, Hampton jumped at the opportunity to serve in a writing role, bringing together the sub-groups research findings. “I’d never written a case study, and it was exciting. Now I want to write 10 more.”The content directly informed Hampton’s dissertation research, which “looks at applying machine learning to climate justice issues such as urban heat islands.” She said that writing a case study that is accessible to general audiences upskilled her for the non-profit organization she’s determined to start. “It’s going to provide communities with free resources and data needed to understand how they are impacted by climate change and begin to advocate against injustice,” Hampton explains.Dunca, Liu, Rabe, Bultena, and Hampton are joined on the case study by fellow authors Mrinalini Singha, a graduate student in the Art, Culture, and Technology program; Sungmoon Lim, a graduate student in urban studies and planning and EECS; Lauren Higgins, an undergraduate majoring in political science; and Madeline Schlegal, a Northeastern University co-op student.Taking the case study to classrooms around the worldAlthough PhD candidates have contributed to previous case studies in the series, this publication is the first to be co-authored with MIT undergraduates. Like any other peer-reviewed journal, before publication, the SERC Scholars’ case study was anonymously reviewed by senior scholars drawn from various fields.The series editor, David Kaiser, also served as one of SERC’s inaugural associate deans and helped shape the program. “The case studies, by design, are short, easy to read, and don’t take up lots of time,” Kaiser explained. “They are gateways for students to explore, and instructors can cover a topic that has likely already been on their mind.” This semester, Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and a professor of physics, is teaching STS.004 (Intersections: Science, Technology, and the World), an undergraduate introduction to the field of science, technology, and society. The last month of the semester has been dedicated wholly to SERC case studies, one of which is: “From Mining to E-Waste.”Hampton was visibly moved to hear that the case study is being used at MIT but also by some of the 250,000 visitors to the SERC platform, many of whom are based in the Global South and directly impacted by the issues she and her cohort researched. “Many students are focused on climate, whether through computer science, data science, or mechanical engineering. I hope that this case study educates them on environmental and climate aspects of e-waste and computing.” More

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      in Environment

      Q&A: The power of tiny gardens and their role in addressing climate change

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      To address the climate crisis, one must understand environmental history. MIT Professor Kate Brown’s research has typically focused on environmental catastrophes. More recently, Brown has been exploring a more hopeful topic: tiny gardens.Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In this Q&A, Brown discusses her research, and how she believes her current project could help put power into the hands of everyday people.This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.Q: You have created an unusual niche for yourself as an historian of environmental catastrophes. What drew you to such a dismal beat?A: Historians often study New York, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, but if you go to these little towns that nobody’s ever heard of, that’s where you see the destruction in the wake of progress. This is likely because I grew up in a manufacturing town in the Midwestern Rust Belt, watching stores go bankrupt and houses sit empty. I became very interested in the people who were the last to turn off the lights.Q: Did this interest in places devastated by technological and economic change eventually lead to your investigation of Chernobyl?A: I first studied the health and environmental consequences of radioactive waste on communities near nuclear weapons facilities in the U.S. and Russia, and then decided to focus on the health and environmental impacts of fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear energy plant disaster. After gaining access to the KGB records in Kiev, I realized that there was a Klondike of records describing what Soviet officials at the time called a “public health disaster.” People on the ground recognized the saturation of radioactivity into environments and food supplies not with any with sensitive devices, but by noticing the changes in ecologies and on human bodies. I documented how Moscow leaders historically and decades later engaged in a coverup, and that even international bodies charged with examining nuclear issues were reluctant to acknowledge this ongoing public health disaster due to liabilities in their own countries from the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.Q: Why did you turn from detailed studies of what you call “modernist wastelands” to the subject of climate change?A: Journalists and scholars have worked hard in the last two decades to get people to understand the scope and the scale and the verisimilitude of climate change. And that’s great, but some of these catastrophic stories we tell don’t make people feel very safe or secure. They have a paralyzing effect on us. Climate change is one of many problems that are too big for any one person to tackle, or any one entity, whether it’s a huge nation like the United States or an international body like the U.N.So I thought I would start to work on something that is very small scale that puts action in the hands of just regular people to try to tell a more hopeful story. I am finishing a new book about working-class people who got pushed off their farms in the 19th century, and ended up in mega cities like London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington D.C., find land on the periphery of the cities. They start digging, growing their own food, cooperating together. They basically recreated forms of the commons in cities. And in so doing, they generate the most productive agriculture in recorded history.Q: What are some highlights of this extraordinary city-based food generation?A: In Paris circa 1900, 5,000 urban farmers grew fruits and vegetables and fresh produce for 2 million Parisians with a surplus left over to sell to London. They would plant three to six crops a year on one tract of land using horse manure to heat up soils from below to push the season and grow spring crops in winter and summer crops in spring.An agricultural economist looked at the inputs and the outputs from these Parisian farms. He found there was no comparison to the Green Revolution fields of the 1970s. These urban gardeners were producing far more per acre, with no petroleum-based fertilizers.Q: What is the connection between little gardens like these and the global climate crisis, where individuals can feel at loss facing the scale of the problems?A: You can think of a tiny city garden like a coral reef, where one little worm comes and builds its cave. And then another one attaches itself to the first, and so on. Pretty soon you have a great coral reef with a platform to support hundreds of different species — a rich biodiversity. Tiny gardens work that way in cities, which is one reason cities are now surprising hotspots of biodiversity.Transforming urban green space into tiny gardens doesn’t take an act of God, the U.N., or the U.S. Congress to make a change. You could just go to your municipality and say, “Listen, right now we have a zoning code that says every time there’s a new condo, you have to have one or two parking spaces, but we’d rather see one or two garden spaces.”And if you don’t want a garden, you’ll have a neighbor who does. So people are outside and they have their hands in the soil and then they start to exchange produce with one another. As they share carrots and zucchini, they exchange soil and human microbes as well. We know that when people share microbiomes, they get along better, have more in common. It comes as no surprise that humans have organized societies around shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, producing food together and sharing meals. That’s what I think we’ve lost in our remote worlds.Q: So can we address or mitigate the impacts of climate change on a community-by-community basis?A: I believe that’s probably the best way to do it. When we think of energy we often imagine deposits of oil or gas, but, as our grad student Turner Adornetto points out, every environment has energy running through it. Every environment has its own best solution. If it’s a community that lives along a river, tap into hydropower; or if it’s a community that has tons of organic waste, maybe you want to use microbial power; and if it’s a community that has lots of sun then use different kinds of solar power. The legacy of midcentury modernism is that engineers came up with one-size-fits-all solutions to plug in anywhere in the world, regardless of local culture, traditions, or environment. That is one of the problems that has gotten us into this fix in the first place.Politically, it’s a good idea to avoid making people feel they’re being pushed around by one set of codes, one set of laws in terms of coming up with solutions that work. There are ways of deriving energy and nutrients that enrich the environment, ways that don’t drain and deplete. You see that so clearly with a plant, which just does nothing but grow and contribute and give, whether it’s in life or in death. It’s just constantly improving its environment.Q: How do you unleash creativity and propagate widespread local responses to climate change?A: One of the important things we are trying to accomplish in the humanities is communicating in the most down-to-earth ways possible to our students and the public so that anybody — from a fourth grader to a retired person — can get engaged.There’s “TECHNOLOGY” in uppercase letters, the kind that is invented and patented in places like MIT. And then there’s technology in lowercase letters, where people are working with things readily at hand. That is the kind of creativity we don’t often pay enough attention to.Keep in mind that at the end of the 19th century, scientists were sure that the earth was cooling and the earth would all under ice by 2020. In the 1950s, many people feared nuclear warfare. In the 1960s the threat was the “population bomb.” Every generation seems to have its apocalyptic sense of doom. It is helpful to take climate change and the Anthropocene and put them in perspective. These are problems we can solve. More

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      in Environment

      Understanding the impacts of mining on local environments and communities

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      Hydrosocial displacement refers to the idea that resolving water conflict in one area can shift the conflict to a different area. The concept was coined by Scott Odell, a visiting researcher in MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). As part of ESI’s Program on Mining and the Circular Economy, Odell researches the impacts of extractive industries on local environments and communities, especially in Latin America. He discovered that hydrosocial displacements are often in regions where the mining industry is vying for use of precious water sources that are already stressed due to climate change.

      Odell is working with John Fernández, ESI director and professor in the Department of Architecture, on a project that is examining the converging impacts of climate change, mining, and agriculture in Chile. The work is funded by a seed grant from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Specifically, the project seeks to answer how the expansion of seawater desalination by the mining industry is affecting local populations, and how climate change and mining affect Andean glaciers and the agricultural communities dependent upon them.By working with communities in mining areas, Odell and Fernández are gaining a sense of the burden that mining minerals needed for the clean energy transition is placing on local populations, and the types of conflicts that arise when water sources become polluted or scarce. This work is of particular importance considering over 100 countries pledged a commitment to the clean energy transition at the recent United Nations climate change conference, known as COP28.

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      J-WAFS Community Spotlight on Scott Odell

      Water, humanity’s lifebloodAt the March 2023 United Nations (U.N.) Water Conference in New York, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned “water is in deep trouble. We are draining humanity’s lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption and unsustainable use and evaporating it through global heating.” A quarter of the world’s population already faces “extremely high water stress,” according to the World Resources Institute. In an effort to raise awareness of major water-related issues and inspire action for innovative solutions, the U.N. created World Water Day, observed every year on March 22. This year’s theme is “Water for Peace,” underscoring the fact that even though water is a basic human right and intrinsic to every aspect of life, it is increasingly fought over as supplies dwindle due to problems including drought, overuse, or mismanagement.  

      The “Water for Peace” theme is exemplified in Fernández and Odell’s J-WAFS project, where findings are intended to inform policies to reduce social and environmental harms inflicted on mining communities and their limited water sources.“Despite broad academic engagement with mining and climate change separately, there has been a lack of analysis of the societal implications of the interactions between mining and climate change,” says Odell. “This project is helping to fill the knowledge gap. Results will be summarized in Spanish and English and distributed to interested and relevant parties in Chile, ensuring that the results can be of benefit to those most impacted by these challenges,” he adds.

      The effects of mining for the clean energy transition

      Global climate change is understood to be the most pressing environmental issue facing humanity today. Mitigating climate change requires reducing carbon emissions by transitioning away from conventional energy derived from burning fossil fuels, to more sustainable energy sources like solar and wind power. Because copper is an excellent conductor of electricity, it will be a crucial element in the clean energy transition, in which more solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles will be manufactured. “We are going to see a major increase in demand for copper due to the clean energy transition,” says Odell.

      In 2021, Chile produced 26 percent of the world’s copper, more than twice as much as any other country, Odell explains. Much of Chile’s mining is concentrated in and around the Atacama Desert — the world’s driest desert. Unfortunately, mining requires large amounts of water for a variety of processes, including controlling dust at the extraction site, cooling machinery, and processing and transporting ore.

      Chile is also one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products. Farmland is typically situated in the valleys downstream of several mines in the high Andes region, meaning mines get first access to water. This can lead to water conflict between mining operations and agricultural communities. Compounding the problem of mining for greener energy materials to combat climate change, are the very effects of climate change. According to the Chilean government, the country has suffered 13 years of the worst drought in history. While this is detrimental to the mining industry, it is also concerning for those working in agriculture, including the Indigenous Atacameño communities that live closest to the Escondida mine, the largest copper mine in the world. “There was never a lot of water to go around, even before the mine,” Odell says. The addition of Escondida stresses an already strained water system, leaving Atacameño farmers and individuals vulnerable to severe water insecurity.

      What’s more, waste from mining, known as tailings, includes minerals and chemicals that can contaminate water in nearby communities if not properly handled and stored. Odell says the secure storage of tailings is a high priority in earthquake-prone Chile. “If an earthquake were to hit and damage a tailings dam, it could mean toxic materials flowing downstream and destroying farms and communities,” he says.

      Chile’s treasured glaciers are another piece of the mining, climate change, and agricultural puzzle. Caroline White-Nockleby, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, is working with Odell and Fernández on the J-WAFS project and leading the research specifically on glaciers. “These may not be the picturesque bright blue glaciers that you might think of, but they are, nonetheless, an important source of water downstream,” says White-Nockleby. She goes on to explain that there are a few different ways that mines can impact glaciers.

      In some cases, mining companies have proposed to move or even destroy glaciers to get at the ore beneath. Other impacts include dust from mining that falls on glaciers. White-Nockleby says, “this makes the glaciers a darker color, so, instead of reflecting the sun’s rays away, [the glacier] may absorb the heat and melt faster.” This shows that even when not directly intervening with glaciers, mining activities can cause glacial decline, adding to the threat glaciers already face due to climate change. She also notes that “glaciers are an important water storage facility,” describing how, on an annual cycle, glaciers freeze and melt, allowing runoff that downstream agricultural communities can utilize. If glaciers suddenly melt too quickly, flooding of downstream communities can occur.

      Desalination offers a possible, but imperfect, solution

      Chile’s extensive coastline makes it uniquely positioned to utilize desalination — the removal of salts from seawater — to address water insecurity. Odell says that “over the last decade or so, there’s been billions of dollars of investments in desalination in Chile.”

      As part of his dissertation work at Clark University, Odell found broad optimism in Chile for solving water issues in the mining industry through desalination. Not only was the mining industry committed to building desalination plants, there was also political support, and support from some community members in highland communities near the mines. Yet, despite the optimism and investment, desalinated water was not replacing the use of continental water. He concluded that “desalination can’t solve water conflict if it doesn’t reduce demand for continental water supplies.”

      However, after publishing those results, Odell learned that new estimates at the national level showed that desalination operations had begun to replace the use of continental water after 2018. In two case studies that he currently focuses on — the Escondida and Los Pelambres copper mines — the mining companies have expanded their desalination objectives in order to reduce extraction from key continental sources. This seems to be due to a variety of factors. For one thing, in 2022, Chile’s water code was reformed to prioritize human water consumption and environmental protection of water during scarcity and in the allocation of future rights. It also shortened the granting of water rights from “in perpetuity” to 30 years. Under this new code, it is possible that the mining industry may have expanded its desalination efforts because it viewed continental water resources as less secure, Odell surmises.

      As part of the J-WAFS project, Odell has found that recent reactions have been mixed when it comes to the rapid increase in the use of desalination. He spent over two months doing fieldwork in Chile by conducting interviews with members of government, industry, and civil society at the Escondida, Los Pelambres, and Andina mining sites, as well as in Chile’s capital city, Santiago. He has spoken to local and national government officials, leaders of fishing unions, representatives of mining and desalination companies, and farmers. He observed that in the communities where the new desalination plants are being built, there have been concerns from community members as to whether they will get access to the desalinated water, or if it will belong solely to the mines.

      Interviews at the Escondida and Los Pelambres sites, in which desalination operations are already in place or under construction, indicate acceptance of the presence of desalination plants combined with apprehension about unknown long-term environmental impacts. At a third mining site, Andina, there have been active protests against a desalination project that would supply water to a neighboring mine, Los Bronces. In that community, there has been a blockade of the desalination operation by the fishing federation. “They were blockading that operation for three months because of concerns over what the desalination plant would do to their fishing grounds,” Odell says. And this is where the idea of hydrosocial displacement comes into the picture, he explains. Even though desalination operations are easing tensions with highland agricultural communities, new issues are arising for the communities on the coast. “We can’t just look to desalination to solve our problems if it’s going to create problems somewhere else” Odell advises.

      Within the process of hydrosocial displacement, interacting geographical, technical, economic, and political factors constrain the range of responses to address the water conflict. For example, communities that have more political and financial power tend to be better equipped to solve water conflict than less powerful communities. In addition, hydrosocial concerns usually follow the flow of water downstream, from the highlands to coastal regions. Odell says that this raises the need to look at water from a broader perspective.

      “We tend to address water concerns one by one and that can, in practice, end up being kind of like whack-a-mole,” says Odell. “When we think of the broader hydrological system, water is very much linked, and we need to look across the watershed. We can’t just be looking at the specific community affected now, but who else is affected downstream, and will be affected in the long term. If we do solve a water issue by moving it somewhere else, like moving a tailings dam somewhere else, or building a desalination plant, resources are needed in the receiving community to respond to that,” suggests Odell.

      The company building the desalination plant and the fishing federation ultimately reached an agreement and the desalination operation will be moving forward. But Odell notes, “the protest highlights concern about the impacts of the operation on local livelihoods and environments within the much larger context of industrial pollution in the area.”

      The power of communities

      The protest by the fishing federation is one example of communities coming together to have their voices heard. Recent proposals by mining companies that would affect glaciers and other water sources used by agriculture communities have led to other protests that resulted in new agreements to protect local water supplies and the withdrawal of some of the mining proposals.Odell observes that communities have also gone to the courts to raise their concerns. The Atacameño communities, for example, have drawn attention to over-extraction of water resources by the Escondida mine. “Community members are also pursuing education in these topics so that there’s not such a power imbalance between mining companies and local communities,” Odell remarks. This demonstrates the power local communities can have to protect continental water resources.The political and social landscape of Chile may also be changing in favor of local communities. Beginning with what is now referred to as the Estallido Social (social outburst) over inequality in 2019, Chile has undergone social upheaval that resulted in voters calling for a new constitution. Gabriel Boric, a progressive candidate, whose top priorities include social and environmental issues, was elected president during this period. These trends have brought major attention to issues of economic inequality, environmental harms of mining, and environmental justice, which is putting pressure on the mining industry to make a case for its operations in the country, and to justify the environmental costs of mining.

      What happens after the mine dries up?

      From his fieldwork interviews, Odell has learned that the development of mines within communities can offer benefits. Mining companies typically invest directly in communities through employment, road construction, and sometimes even by building or investing in schools, stadiums, or health clinics. Indirectly, mines can have spillover effects in the economy since miners might support local restaurants, hotels, or stores. But what happens when the mine closes? As one community member Odell interviewed stated: “When the mine is gone, what are we going to have left besides a big hole in the ground?”

      Odell suggests that a multi-pronged approach should be taken to address the future state of water and mining. First, he says we need to have broader conversations about the nature of our consumption and production at domestic and global scales. “Mining is driven indirectly by our consumption of energy and directly by our consumption of everything from our buildings to devices to cars,” Odell states. “We should be looking for ways to moderate our consumption and consume smarter through both policy and practice so that we don’t solve climate change while creating new environmental harms through mining.”One of the main ways we can do this is by advancing the circular economy by recycling metals already in the system, or even in landfills, to help build our new clean energy infrastructure. Even so, the clean energy transition will still require mining, but according to Odell, that mining can be done better. “Mining companies and government need to do a better job of consulting with communities. We need solid plans and financing for mine closures in place from the beginning of mining operations, so that when the mine dries up, there’s the money needed to secure tailings dams and protect the communities who will be there forever,” Odell concludes.Overall, it will take an engaged society — from the mining industry to government officials to individuals — to think critically about the role we each play in our quest for a more sustainable planet, and what that might mean for the most vulnerable populations among us. More

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      in Environment

      A reciprocal relationship with the land in Hawaiʻi

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      Aja Grande grew up on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu, between the Kona and ʻEwa districts, nurtured by her community and the natural environment. Her family has lived in Hawaiʻi for generations; while she is not “Kanaka ʻŌiwi,” of native Hawaiian descent, she is proud to trace her family’s history to the time of the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 19th century. Grande is now a PhD candidate in MIT’s HASTS (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society) program, and part of her dissertation tracks how Hawaiian culture and people’s relationship with the land has evolved throughout time.

      “The fondest memories I have are camping on the north shore every summer with my friends,” says Grande. “I loved being in ‘ke kai’ (the sea) and ‘ma uka,’ (inland, in the mountains) with my friends when I was younger. It was just pure fun exploring ‘ʻāina’ like that.” “‘Āina” in the Hawaiian language is often defined as “land,” but is understood to the people of Hawaiʻi as “that which feeds.”

      “Now that I’m older,” Grande adds, “I’m connecting the dots and realizing how much knowledge about the complex systems of ‘ahupuaʻa’ [traditional Hawaiian divisions of land that extend from the mountains to the sea], I actually gained through these experiences.”

      Grande recently completed a year of fieldwork in Hawaiʻi where she volunteered with land-based, or ‘āina-based organizations. In the movement to restore ‘āina to “momona,” or  “fertile and abundant lands,” the land and the people who serve as its stewards are of equal importance.

      “I’m looking at how people who are not Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, or native Hawaiian, by descent can participate in this kind of restoration, and what it means for both Kanaka ‘Ōiwi and non-Kanaka ‘Ōiwi to participate in it,” says Grande, who herself descends from immigrants of other island nations. “Some of my ancestors were born and raised in Hawaiʻi before the U.S. subjected Hawaiʻi as a state and territory, meaning that some of them were Hawaiian Kingdom subjects. While, I am not Kanaka ʻŌiwi by lineage, some of my ‘ohana nui (extended family), from these same ancestors, are Kanaka ʻŌiwi. I’m writing about how being Hawaiian, from a Hawaiian sovereignty standpoint, is not just about race and ethnicity. When Hawaiʻi was a sovereign nation, Hawaiian citizenship was never afforded on the basis of race alone. It was also based on your lifelong commitment to ‘āina and the people of Hawaiʻi.”

      The project is personal to Grande, who describes both the content and the process of writing it as part of her healing journey. She hopes to lay the groundwork for others who are “hoaʻāina,” or “those who actively care for ʻāina,” in Hawaiʻi, but not Kanaka ʻŌiwi to better articulate their identities and foster a deeper connection with the ʻāina and the “kaiāulu,” or “community,” they love and actively care for.

      Returning home

      Grande has spent her academic career on the East Coast, first at Brown University, where she received a degree in science, technology, and society, and now at MIT in the HASTS program. She swam competitively through her second year of college, and had earlier represented Hawaiʻi at the 2012 Oceania Games in New Caledonia. Once she stopped swimming, Grande first used her newfound time to travel the world. Tired of this transient lifestyle, she realized she was more interested in exploring her connection to land in a more rooted way.

      “Moving around, especially as a college student, it’s very hard to grow things,” says Grande. “People are a lot like plants. You really just need to let plants do their thing in place. We do really well and we thrive when we can be connected to place.”

      Grande started by founding the Ethnobotany Society at Brown to explore the relationship people have to plants. With the group she organized nature walks, collaborated with local farms, and connected it to the history she was learning in class.

      Still, the East Coast never quite felt like home to Grande. When she started planning for the fieldwork portion of her program, she envisioned spending half the year in New England and half in Hawaiʻi. But she soon realized how important it was for both her research and herself to dedicate everything to Hawai’i.

      “When I came back, it just felt so right to be back home,” says Grande. “The feeling in your naʻau — your ‘gut’ — of knowing that you have to contribute to Hawaiʻi is very powerful, and I think a lot of people here understand what that means. It’s kind of like a calling.”

      Hoaʻāina, community, family

      Once Grande made the decision to return home for her field work, she says everything fell into place.

      “I knew that I wanted to do something close to my heart. It’s a huge privilege because I was able to come home and learn more about myself and my family and how we are connected to Hawaiʻi,” she says.

      During her year of fieldwork, Grande learned how hoaʻāina cultivate spaces where the community can can work alongside one another to plant traditional food and medicinal crops, control invasive species, and more. She wasn’t just an observer, either. As much as Grande learned from an academic perspective, her personal growth has been intertwined with the entire process.

      “The most interesting part was that all the hoaʻāina I volunteered with helped me to understand my place back home,” says Grande. “They were my informants but also — this usually happens with anthropologists — people become your friends. The hoaʻāina I volunteered with treated me like family. They also got to know some of my family members, who joined me to volunteer at different sites. It’s sometimes hard to drop a hard line between what fieldwork is and what your personal life is because when you’re in the field, there’s so many events that are connected to your work. It was so fun and meaningful to write about the ʻāina and people I consider my community and family.”

      The movement doesn’t start or end with Grande’s dissertation. Pursuing this project has given her the language to articulate her own relationship with ‘āina, and she hopes it will empower others to reexamine how they exist in relation to land.

      After completing her program, Grande intends to stay in Hawaiʻi and continue philanthropy work while contributing to the movement of ʻāina momona.

      “We want the land to live and to keep a relationship with the land. That’s the emotional part. I have a ‘kuleana,’ (duty and responsibility) to everything that I learned while growing up, including the ʻāina and ‘kaiāulu,’ (community) who raised me. The more you learn, there’s so much that you want to protect about the culture and this ‘āina.” More

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      in Environment

      Q&A: Steven Gonzalez on Indigenous futurist science fiction

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      Steven Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in the MIT Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), where he researches the environmental impacts of cloud computing and data centers in the United States, Iceland, and Puerto Rico. He is also an author. Writing under the name E.G. Condé, he recently published his first book, “Sordidez.” It’s described as an “Indigenous futurist science fiction novella set in Puerto Rico and the Yucatán.” Set in the near future, it follows the survivors of civil war and climate disaster led by protagonist Vero Diaz, as they reclaim their Indigenous heritage and heal their lands.

      In this Q&A, Gonzalez describes the book’s themes, its inspirations, and its connection to research, people, and classes at MIT.

      Q: Where did the inspiration for this story come from?

      A: I actually began my time at MIT in September of 2017 when Hurricane María struck. It was a really difficult time for me at the Institute, starting a PhD program. And it’s MIT, so there’s a lot of pressure. I was still kind of navigating the new institutional space and trying to understand my place in it. But I had a lot of people at the Institute who were extremely supportive during that time. I had family members in Puerto Rico who were stranded as a result of the hurricane, who I didn’t hear from for a very long time — who I feared dead. It was a very, very chaotic, confusing, and emotionally turbulent time for me, and also incredibly difficult to be trying to be present in a PhD program for the first semester. Karen Gardner, our administrator, was really incredibly supportive in that. Also the folks at the MIT Association of Puerto Ricans, who hosted fundraisers and linked students with counseling resources. But that trauma of the hurricane and the images that I saw of the aftermath of the hurricane, specifically in the town where my grandmother’s house was where I spent time living as a child during the summers, and to me, it was the greenest place that I have ever known. It looked like somebody had torched the entire landscape. It was traumatizing to see that image. But that kind of seeded the idea of, is there a way to burn without fire? There’s climate change, but there’s also climate terror. And so that was sort of one of the premises of the book explores, geoengineering, but also the flip side of geoengineering and terraforming is, of course, climate terror. And in a way, we could frame what’s been happening with the fossil fuel industry as a form of climate terror, as well. So for me, this all began right when I started at MIT, these dual tracks of thought.

      Q: What do you see as the core themes of your novella?

      A: One major theme is rebuilding. As I said, this story was very influenced by the trauma of Hurricane María and the incredibly inspiring accounts from family members, from people in Puerto Rico that I know, of regular people stepping up when the government — both federal and local — essentially abandoned them. There were so many failures of governance. But people stepped up and did what they could to help each other, to help neighbors. Neighbors cleared trees from roads. They banded together to do this. They pooled resources, to run generators so that everyone in the same street could have food that day. They would share medical supplies like insulin and things that were scarce. This was incredibly inspiring for me. And a huge theme of the book is rebuilding in the aftermath of a fictive hurricane, which I call Teddy, named after President Theodore Roosevelt, where Puerto Rico’s journey began as a U.S. commonwealth or a colony.

      Healing is also a huge theme. Healing in the sense of this story was also somewhat critical of Puerto Rican culture. And it’s refracted through my own experience as a queer person navigating the space of Puerto Rico as a very kind of religious and traditional place and a very complex place at that. The main character, Vero, is a trans man. This is a person who’s transitioned and has felt a lot of alienation and as a result of his gender transition, a lot of people don’t accept him and don’t accept his identity or who he is even though he’s incredibly helpful in this rebuilding effort to the point where he’s, in some ways, a leader, if not the leader. And it becomes, in a way, about healing from the trauma of rejection too. And of course, Vero, but other characters who have gone through various traumas that I think are very much shared across Latin America, the Latin American experiences of assimilation, for instance. Latin America is a very complex place. We have Spanish as our language, that is our kind of lingua franca. But there are many Indigenous languages that people speak that have been not valued or people who speak them or use them are actively punished. And there’s this deep trauma of losing language. And in the case of Puerto Rico, the Indigenous language of the Taínos has been destroyed by colonialism. The story is about rebuilding that language and healing and “becoming.” In some ways, it’s about re-indigenization. And then the last part, as I said, healing, reconstruction, but also transformation and metamorphosis. And becoming Taíno. Again, what does that mean? What does it mean to be an Indigenous Caribbean in the future? And so that’s one of the central themes of the story.

      Q: How does the novella intersect with the work you’re doing as a PhD candidate in HASTS?

      A: My research on cloud computing is very much about climate change. It’s pitched within the context of climate change and understanding how our digital ecosystem contributes to not only global warming, but things like desertification. As a social scientist, that’s what I study. My studies of infrastructure are also directly referenced in the book in a lot of ways. For instance, the now collapsed Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory, where some of my pandemic fieldwork occurred, is a setting in the book. And also, I am an anthropologist. I am Puerto Rican. I draw both from my personal experience and my anthropological lens to make a story that I think is very multicultural and multilingual. It’s set in Puerto Rico, but the other half is set in the Yucatán Peninsula in what we’ll call the former Maya world. And there’s a lot of intersections between the two settings. And that goes back to the deeper Indigenous history. Some people are calling this Indigenous futurism because it references the Taínos, who are the Indigenous people of Puerto Rico, but also the Mayas, and many different Maya groups that are throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, but also present-day Guatemala and Honduras. And the story is about exchange between these two worlds. As someone trained as an anthropologist, it’s a really difficult task to kind of pull that off. And I think that my training has really, really helped me achieve that.

      Q: Are there any examples of ways being among the MIT community while writing this book influenced and, in some ways, made this project possible?

      A: I relied on many of my colleagues for support. There’s some sign language in the book. In Puerto Rico, there’s a big tradition of sign language. There’s a version of American sign language called LSPR that’s only found in Puerto Rico. And that’s something I’ve been aware of ever since I was a kid. But I’m not fluent in sign language or deaf communities and their culture. I got a lot of help from Timothy Loh, who’s in the HASTS program, who was extremely helpful to steer me towards sensitivity readers in the deaf community in his networks. My advisor, Stefan Helmreich, is very much a science fiction person in a lot of ways. His research is on the ocean waves, the history and anthropology of biology. He’s done ethnography in deep-sea submersibles. He’s always kind of thinking in a science fictional lens. And he allowed me, for one of my qualifying exam lists, to mesh science fiction with social theory. And that was also a way that I felt very supported by the Institute. In my coursework, I also took a few science fiction courses in other departments. I worked with Shariann Lewitt, who actually read the first version of the story. I workshopped it in her 21W.759 (Writing Science Fiction) class, and got some really amazing feedback that led to what is now a publication and a dream fulfilled in so many ways. She took me under her wing and really believed in this book. More

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      in Environment

      Victor K. McElheny Award in science journalism honors series on poultry farming and the environment

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      The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced that the investigative series “Big Poultry,” published by The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer, has been chosen as the 2023 winner of the Victor K. McElheny Award for local and regional journalism. This series of articles uncovered the wide-ranging, unregulated impact of the poultry industry in North Carolina — from odors to pollution to the predatory nature of poultry contract farming.

      The series draws from more than 130 interviews and involved extensive analysis of satellite imagery, industry finances, and state laws, among other data. It expertly merges personal stories and hard data and creates a cohesive and comprehensive deep dive into an underreported, but pervasive, phenomenon in North Carolina. The series has engaged tens of thousands of readers and sparked a debate about the poultry industry in the state legislature.

      “With remarkable enterprise and persistence, these reporters from the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer penetrated the secrecy that obscures the scope and impact of thousands of industrial-scale poultry production farms in North Carolina, which together generate billions of pounds of unchecked agricultural waste,” a judge said of the series.

      “Big Poultry” was reported and written by Charlotte Observer investigative reporters Gavin Off and Ames Alexander and News & Observer environmental reporter Adam Wagner. The series was edited by McClatchy Southeast Investigations Editor Cathy Clabby and was supported by the work of News & Observer investigative reporters David Raynor and Tyler Dukes, and McClatchy newspapers visual journalists.

      “The Victor K. McElheny award recognizes the remarkable science reporting done at the local level by American journalists, and ‘Big Poultry’ is an outstanding example of that,” says Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. “We are proud to honor this series, which raises such important issues and reminds us of the essential role of journalists in protecting our country by illuminating such problems.”

      The 2023 McElheny Award received a robust and diverse pool of submissions from around the United States. Also on the short list of finalists for the award are four other exceptional journalism projects: “Undermined,” a collaboration between Navajo Times, Santa Fe Reporter, Source New Mexico, Capital & Main, and USA Today that uncovered the link between uranium poisoning and increased vulnerability to the Covid-19 virus in the Navajo Nation; “Fighting for Air,” from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which examines the intersection of asthma with substandard housing and health systems; “When the Heat is Unbearable but There’s Nowhere to Go,” a collaboration between High Country News and Type Investigations, which exposed the impact of extreme heat on the incarcerated population of Washington State; and “There Must be Something in the Water,” published by the Minnesota Reformer, which investigated how the company 3M obscured the impact of chemical contamination in the water of Washington Country, Minnesota, and the ongoing health impacts of said contamination on the population.

      Named after the Knight Science Journalism Program’s founding director, the Victor K. McElheny Award was established to honor outstanding coverage of science, public-health, technology, and environmental issues at the local and regional level. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize. The winners will be honored at the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 40th anniversary celebration on Saturday, April 22.

      The Knight Science Journalism Program extends a special thanks to the 2022 McElheny Award jurors: Jeff DelViscio (senior multimedia editor, Scientific American); Robert Lee Hotz (president, Alicia Patterson Foundation); Brant Houston, (Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting, University of Illinois); Amina Khan (science editor, National Public Radio); and Maya Kapoor (assistant professor of English, North Carolina State University). The program also extends warm appreciation to the award’s screeners: Mary-Rose Abraham, Sebastien Malo, Wojtek Brzezinski, and Kelly Servick.

      The McElheny Award is made possible by generous support from Victor K. McElheny, Ruth McElheny, and the Rita Allen Foundation.

      A complete list of 2023 Victor K. McElheny Award honorees:

      Winner

      “Big Poultry,” by Gavin Off , Ames Alexander, and Adam Wagner (The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer)

      Finalists

      “Undermined,” by Eli Cahan (Navajo Times, Santa Fe Reporter, Source New Mexico, Capital & Main, and USA Today)

      “Fighting for Air,” by Talis Shelbourne (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

      “When the Heat is Unbearable but There’s Nowhere to Go,” by Sarah Sax (High Country News and Type Investigations)

      “There Must be Something in the Water,” by Deena Winter (Minnesota Reformer) More

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      in Environment

      Living Climate Futures initiative showcases holistic approach to the climate crisis

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      The sun shone bright and warm on the Dertouzos Amphitheater at the Stata Center this past Earth Day as a panel of Indigenous leaders from across the country talked about their experiences with climate activism and shared their natural world philosophies — a worldview that sees humanity as one with the rest of the Earth.

      “I was taught the natural world philosophies by those raised by precolonial individuals,” said Jay Julius W’tot Lhem of the Lummi tribe of the Pacific Northwest and founder and president of Se’Si’Le, an organization dedicated to reintroducing Indigenous spiritual law into the mainstream conversation about climate. Since his great-grandmother was born in 1888, he grew up “one hug away from pre-contact,” as he put it.

      Natural world philosophiesNatural world philosophies sit at the center of the Indigenous activism taking place all over the country, and they were a highlight of the Indigenous Earth Day panel — one part of a two-day symposium called Living Climate Futures. The events were hosted by the Anthropology and History sections and the Program on Science, Technology, and Society in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), in collaboration with the MIT Office of Sustainability and Project Indigenous MIT.

      “The Living Climate Futures initiative began from the recognition that the people who are living most closely with climate and environmental struggles and injustices are especially equipped to lead the way toward other ways of living in the world,” says Briana Meier, ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology and an organizer of the event. “While much climate action is based in technology-driven policy, we recognize that solutions to climate change are often embedded within and produced in response to existing social systems of injustice and inequity.”

      On-the-ground experts from around the country spoke in a series of panels and discussions over the two days, sharing their stories and inspiring attendees to think differently about how to address the environmental crisis.

      Gathering experts

      The hope, according to faculty organizers, was that an event centered on such voices could create connections among activists and open the eyes of many to the human element of climate solutions.

      Over the years, many such solutions have overlooked the needs of the communities they are designed to help. Streams in the Pacific Northwest, for example, have been dammed to generate hydroelectric power — promoted as a green alternative to fossil fuel. But these same locations have long been sacred spots for Indigenous swimming rituals, said Ryan Emanuel (Lumbee), associate professor of hydrology at Duke University and a panelist in the Indigenous Earth Day event. Mitigating the environmental damage does not make up for the loss of sacred connection, he emphasized.

      To dig into such nuances, the organizers invited an intergenerational group of panelists to share successes with attendees.

      Transforming urban spaces

      In one panel, for example, urban farmers from Mansfield, Ohio, and Chelsea, Massachusetts, discussed the benefits of growing vegetables in cities.

      “Transforming urban spaces into farms provides not just healthy food, but a visible symbol of hope, a way for people to connect and grow food that reflects their cultures and homes, an economic development opportunity, and even a safe space for teens to hang out,” said Susy Jones, senior sustainability project manager in the MIT Office of Sustainability and an event organizer. “We also heard about the challenges — like the cost of real estate in Massachusetts.”

      Another panel highlighted the determined efforts of a group of students from George Washington High School in Southeast Chicago to derail a project to build a scrap metal recycling plant across the street from their school. “We’re at school eight hours a day,” said Gregory Miller, a junior at the school. “We refuse to live next door to a metals scrapyard.”

      The proposed plant was intended to replace something similar that had been shut down in a predominantly white neighborhood due to its many environmental violations. Southeast Chicago is more culturally diverse and has long suffered from industrial pollution and economic hardship, but the students fought the effort to further pollute their home — and won.

      “It was hard, the campaign,” said Destiny Vasquez. “But it was beautiful because the community came together. There is unity in our struggle.”

      Recovering a common heritage 

      Unity was also at the forefront of the discussion for the Indigenous Earth Day panel in the Stata Amphitheater. This portion of the Living Climate Futures event began with a greeting in the Navajo language from Alvin Harvey, PhD candidate in aeronautics and astronautics (Aero/Astro) and representative of the MIT American Indian Science and Engineering Society and the MIT Native American Student Association. The greeting identified all who came to the event as relatives.

      “Look at the relatives next to you, especially those trees,” he said, gesturing to the budding branches around the amphitheater. “They give you shelter, love … few other beings are willing to do that.”

      According to Julius, such reverence for nature is part of the Indigenous way of life, common across tribal backgrounds — and something all of humanity once had in common. “Somewhere along the line we all had Indigenous philosophies,” he said. “We all need an invitation back to that to understand we’re all part of the whole.”

      Understanding the oneness of all living things on earth helps people of Indigenous nations feel the distress of the earth when it is under attack, speakers said. Donna Chavis, senior climate campaigner for Friends of the Earth and an elder of the Lumbee tribe, discussed the trauma of having forests near her home in the southeastern United States clear-cut to provide wood chips to Europe.

      “They are devastating the lungs of the earth in North Carolina at a rate faster than in the Amazon,” she said. “You can almost hear the pain of the forest.”

      Small pictures of everyday life

      “People are experiencing a climate crisis that is global in really different ways in different places,” says Heather Paxson, head of MIT Anthropology and an event organizer. “What came out of these two days is a real, palpable sense of the power of listening to individual experience. Not because it gives us the big picture, but because it gives us the small picture.”

      Trinity Colón, one of the leaders of the group from George Washington High School, impressed on attendees that environmental justice is much more than an academic pursuit. “We’re not talking about climate change in the sense of statistics, infographics,” she said. “For us this is everyday life … [Future engineers and others training at MIT] should definitely take that into perspective, that these are real people really being affected by these injustices.”

      That call to action has already been felt by many at MIT.

      “I’ve been hearing from grad students lately, in engineering, saying, ‘I like thinking about these problems, but I don’t like where I’m being directed to use my intellectual capital, toward building more corporate wealth,’” said Kate Brown, professor of STS and an event organizer. “As an institution, we could move toward working not for, not to correct, but working with communities.”

      The world is what we’ve gotMIT senior Abdulazeez Mohammed Salim, an Aero/Astro major, says he was inspired by these conversations to get involved in urban farming initiatives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he plans to move after graduation.

      “We have a responsibility as part of the world around us, not as external observers, not as people removed and displaced from the world. And the world is not an experiment or a lab,” he says. “It’s what we’ve got. It’s who we are. It’s all that we’ve been and all we will be. That stuck with me; it resonated very deeply.”

      Salim also appreciated the reality check given by Bianca Bowman from GreenRoots Chelsea, who pointed out that success will not come quickly, and that sustained advocacy is critical.

      “Real, valuable change will not happen overnight, will not happen by just getting together a critical mass of people who are upset and concerned,” he said. “Because what we’re dealing with are large, interconnected, messy systems that will try to fight back and survive regardless of how we force them to adapt. And so, long term is really the only way forward. That’s the way we need to think of these struggles.” More