On college campuses today, students contemplate whether sharing their opinion is worth the consequences. In this essay, I delineate the current state of speech on college campuses and explore the role of no-platforming, social coercion, and social media's impact on this environment. Additionally, I describe how students are stifling the university experience by using a variety of methods to either silence speech or ensure that certain speech receives social punishment. The practice of elevating one's own view by silencing others’ speech is not a new tactic, but is one that persists on college campuses in a variety of forms. To combat the current speech climate on campus, we need to foster a culture that is more curious and inquisitive by providing tools to students at a young age that support their ability to agreeably disagree and thrive in environments of open discourse.

Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from our reliance on epistemic authorities (scientists, historians). Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible, and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of actual experts. This essay considers some possible changes to existing free speech doctrine to remedy the epistemological crisis brought about by the internet.

This essay examines how universities are responding to demands to educate students for climate action. I argue for a whole-of-university approach, in which sustainability becomes part of the mission of the university, and translates into reimagined forms of education, research, outreach, and management of the university operations. This approach runs counter to the most common response of universities, incremental to new demands, and is likely to take place only in institutions with greater capacity for innovation. Strategy and knowledge are key resources to support such innovation, drawing on the comparative analysis of the global experience of higher education, as there are already high rates of institutional innovation globally in educating for climate action.

Rising ocean levels threaten entire communities with relocation. The continued erosion of Arctic coastlines due to melting ice sheets and thawing permafrost has forced Inuit communities to move to more secure locations. Each move dislodges Indigenous peoples and their languages from ancestral landscapes and ways of knowing, obligating communities to adopt colonial or majority languages. Scholars and activists have documented the intersections of climate change and language endangerment, with special focus paid to their compounding consequences. We consider the relationship between language and environmental ideologies, synthesizing previous research on how metaphors and communicative norms in Indigenous and colonial languages and cultures influence environmental beliefs and actions. We note that these academic discourses-as well as similar discourses in nonprofit and policy-making spheres-rightly acknowledge the importance of Indigenous thought to environmental and climate action. Sadly, they often fall short of acknowledging both the colonial drivers of Indigenous language “loss” and Indigenous ownership of Indigenous language and environmental knowledge. We propose alternative framings that emphasize colonial responsibility and Indigenous sovereignty. Finally, we reflect on emergent vitalities and radical hope in Indigenous language movements and climate justice movements.

Climate change and economic insecurity are the two most pressing challenges for modern humanity, and they are intimately linked: climate warming intensifies existing structural inequities, just as economic disparities worsen climate-induced suffering. Yet precisely because this economy-nature interrelationship is institutionalized, there exists an opening for alternative institutional configurations to take root. In this essay, we make the case for that institutional remaking to be biophilic, meaning it supports rather than undermines life and livelihood. This is not speculative thinking: biophilic institutions already exist in the here and now. Their existence provides an opportunity to learn how to remake institutions founded on solidarities of shared aliveness and a shared alliance with life that advance the premise that nature and the economy are not just intertwined but indistinguishable.

Two hundred seventy-four million people-one in thirty people on the planet-are in humanitarian need as of September 2022. 1 More than one hundred million of these individuals are displaced, usually as a result of crisis: conflict, political upheaval, economic meltdown, or climate shocks. 2 In a humanitarian crisis, health is the most urgent and paramount need. But today the system for preventing and addressing humanitarian crisis is failing, and with it, the health needs of millions of vulnerable people are under threat. From treating childhood acute malnutrition to delivering COVID-19 vaccines to ensuring access to sexual, reproductive, maternal, and newborn health, health care in humanitarian contexts requires a dramatic rethink amid growing challenges to access and service delivery.

Except for the military and science, confidence in most American political and non-political institutions has fallen precipitously over the past fifty years. Declines in trust are partly the result of dissatisfaction with governmental and institutional accountability and concomitant skepticism about the competency and responsiveness of institutions. Declines are also the result of a polarization in trust in institutions, as Republicans trust business, the police, religion, and the military much more than Democrats, whose confidence in these institutions, except the military, has fallen. In turn, Democrats trust labor, the press, science, higher education, and public schools much more than Republicans, whose confidence in these institutions has fallen. Declines and polarization in confidence may be traceable to political polarization stemming from increasing income inequality and segregation in America. With polarization and decreasing trust in institutions, it becomes more difficult to fight epidemics, maintain faith in policing, and deal with problems such as climate change.

Religious studies, as taught in American higher education, is in many ways a quintessential instance of the boundlessness of the humanities, since elements of religious traditions and practices are pervasive in literature, history, art, political science, philosophy, law, music, and so on. At the same time, questions about the definition of “religion,” about what constitutes legitimate “religion” protected as such by “religious freedom,” and about what privileges such “freedom” should entail affect many aspects of our lives as a nation, from the home to the workplace and to the public square. Informed and reasoned inquiry into religious traditions, texts, rituals, and practices is an essential component of civic life, on both individual and public levels. This is acutely the case in the present moment, even as religious studies faces significant challenges in the contemporary climate, both in higher education and our wider culture. We urge its protection and support into the future.

This essay argues that while the science of climate change treats the Earth as one, political responses to climate change are marked profoundly by the fact that humanity can never speak as one. Questions of climate justice and sustainable human futures have deepened fractured and contested histories of modernity in which the West/non-West division intersects with emergent distinctions between postcolonial and decolonial approaches. But none of these distinctions are absolute. By discussing the works of Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, I seek to show how traditions of European and non-European thought remain entangled even as we seek, intellectually, to decolonize the world. In a connected world, the not-one-ness of humanity acts as a ground for dissension within the humanities but not for any absolute differences.

Global climate change poses a serious threat to the water supplies of the world's cities. This is perhaps no truer than for Dar es Salaam, the largest city and commercial capital of Tanzania. What was eighty years ago a small town of a mere forty thousand residents is today the world's second-fastest growing city, with a population of more than six million. This growth has come despite a history of racist, colonial urban development and the inadequacy of its formal water supply, which services a fraction of the needs of its residents. This essay examines the development of Dar es Salaam's anthropogenic waterscape, or water infrastructure, and argues that the city's tremendous growth has come despite its inability to provide basic services. In the absence of reliable public water, its residents have adapted creatively, developing their own solutions in a way that has drawn on knowledge and practice from rural areas as well as new urban-centered strategies. This history of creative adaptation, and its benefits and drawbacks, provides a useful framework for thinking about the meaning of resilience in Africa's urban centers in an era of increasing climate uncertainty.

Discussions of climate change and water security in Africa are often simplistic and indeed deterministic. They overlook not only ecological complexities but also the multitude of ways in which various population groups across the continent approach climatological variability, thereby challenging positivist modeling and external adaptation agendas. The current state of affairs for many often-silenced citizens is already one of hunger, uncertainty, and marginalization; the self-appointed lead actors on climate adaptation–states, markets, NGOs–have, from their vantage point, deeply troubling track records of dealing with people and their environments. For plenty of communities around Africa, it might therefore not so much be only the worsening climate that is increasingly exposing people to disease, displacement, and water insecurity, but the very policies adopted in the name of preparing for, and living with, worsening weather. This essay explores how understanding climate adaptation as a fundamentally social and political process points to possibilities for imagining and working toward futures with greater emancipatory potential. There is no scenario in which African societies adapt successfully to climatic change and do not simultaneously radically reimagine both their relationship with the outside world and with each other, including institutions of control and mechanisms of exclusion at home.

This essay counters the growing tendency in current scholarship to attribute nearly all the enduring water scarcity problems to climate change. Focusing on Harare, Zimbabwe's capital city, this essay contends that recurrent water crises can only really be understood within the contentious, long, and complex history of water politics in the capital city from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Although the colonial and postcolonial states in Zimbabwe had very different ideological and racial policies, for various reasons, neither was willing nor able to provide adequate supplies of water to the urban poor even as water was abundant in the city's reservoirs. It posits that while the colonial government racialized access to water by restricting its use by urban Africans, the postcolonial government failed to change the colonial patterns of urban water distribution and did little to increase water supplies to keep pace with a swiftly growing urban population and a geographically expanding city.

This essay explores the multiple ways in which the nexuses between water scarcity and climate change are socially and historically grounded in ordinary people's lived experiences and are embedded in specific fields of power. Here we specifically delineate four critical dimensions in which the water crises confronting the African continent in an age of climate change are clearly expressed: the increasing scarcity, privatization, and commodification of water in urban centers; the impact of large dams on the countryside; the health consequences of water shortages and how they, in turn, affect other aspects of people's experiences, sociopolitical dynamics, and well-being, broadly conceived; and water governance and the politics of water at the local, national, and transnational levels. These overarching themes form the collective basis for the host of essays in this volume that provide rich accounts of conflicts and struggles over water use and how these tensions have been mitigated.

In Ghana, the Pwalugu Dam in the Upper East is in the final planning stage. Whereas promoters of Ghana's first dams emphasized the need for generating electricity to modernize and industrialize the new nation, the planners of Pwalugu have focused on water issues. Due to climate change, droughts have had a devastating impact on local agriculture. The dam's primary purpose is an irrigation scheme and flood control. This essay historicizes these concerns by revisiting the Akosombo Dam, Ghana's largest hydroelectric dam, completed in 1965. The discussion juxtaposes personal recollections of dam-affected communities with reports by administrators, biologists, and social scientists. The essay draws on government records, scientific studies about Volta Lake, and oral histories. Ultimately, it argues, builders and administrators of the Akosombo Dam failed to address most water issues, despite ample knowledge about their existence. One hopes that these shortcomings will not be repeated in the Pwalugu project.

Water is the cornerstone of public health. Yet many people living in Africa's cities face serious challenges obtaining an adequate supply of clean water. This situation, which poses significant public health concerns, promises only to grow in magnitude in the coming years as rapid urbanization and climate change meet head-on to further constrain urban water provision. This essay explores the relationship between water supply and health in urban Africa through the lens of water scarcity and health as political relationships as much as environmental or technical phenomena. By bringing infectious diseases like cholera and chronic ailments like kidney disease into the same frame of analysis, this essay also directs attention beyond the overwhelming public health focus on microbial contamination to emergent forms of water-related illness and injury that proceed unchecked.

Global environmental imaginaries such as “the climate crisis” and “water wars” dominate the discussion on African states and their predicament in the face of global warming and unmet demands for sustainable livelihoods. I argue that the intersecting challenges of water, energy, and food insecurity are providing impetus for the articulation of ambitious state-building projects, in the Nile Basin as elsewhere, that rework regional political geographies and expand “infrastructural power”–the ways in which the state can penetrate society, control its territory, and implement consequential policies. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam should be understood as intending to alter how the state operates, domestically and internationally; how it is seen by its citizens; and how they relate to each other and to their regional neighbors. To legitimize such material and ideational transformations and reposition itself in international politics, the Ethiopian party-state has embedded the dam in a discourse of “environmental justice”: a rectification of historical and geographical ills to which Ethiopia and its impoverished masses were subjected. However, critics have adopted their own environmental justice narratives to denounce the failure of Ethiopia's developmental model and its benefiting of specific ethnolinguistic constituencies at the expense of the broader population.

I came to view my work with Hiroshima survivors in 1962 as not only a scientific study but a form of bearing witness to what the bomb did to human beings in that city. I tried to bring professional knowledge and experience to that effort, to become what I later called a witnessing professional. Nuclear and climate issues interacted in that early study, and have continued to be inseparable for all of us. I draw upon examples of witnessing professionals over the course of our struggles with these two planetary threats. In each case, they had to expose and combat the malignant normality, the dangerous prevailing assumptions and narratives, of their time. In that way, these professionals have contributed to important social movements. They have also deepened–as we too can–the ethical dimensions of professional work.

Professionals have an ethical obligation to bear witness to climate change. They should report, warn, criticize, and lobby to bring attention to the existential threat that climate change poses. But they also have an obligation to respect the knowledge that is the basis of their authority to witness. Witnessing carries risks to this professional authority. Witnessing professionals should avoid letting bias distort their advocacy, simplifying their statements excessively, overplaying the consensus in the field, neglecting their own conflicts of interest, and claiming authority beyond their areas of expertise. To witness ethically, the professional should advocate responsibly.

In the wake of the recent unjustifiable deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and several other African Americans at the hands of police, we have witnessed persistent and widespread protests against systemic racism, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed African Americans and Latinos at two to three times the rate of Whites. Racism is undeniably an evil, pervasive, destructive force in our society, yet it can also be a great motivating force. This essay is a personal story of how being the subject of racism led one person to acquire and leverage his professional privilege to help create and change institutions to act on climate and environmental injustices while countering the systemic racism that he witnessed and experienced in childhood.

The law is the principal mechanism by which society resolves disputes and implements policies. For more than forty years, I have worked to use the law to address environmental problems, initially by trying to stop projects that would increase pollution and harm communities. But there are limits to what the courts can do without explicit direction from legislatures. Climate change is a prime example. Some have seen litigation as a silver bullet, but at least so far that has not been the case. Elections matter more than lawsuits. Until and unless elections bring to power a president, a Congress, and local officials who will take the necessary measures, litigation is needed to inhibit those who will try to move backwards, spur on those with good intentions, help implement the policies set by wise Congresses past, and continue the quest for redress for victims. Well-crafted laws can also lead the way to solutions.