Blog
Welcome to the new Yale Forum Blog!
We will be sharing a variety of original content including interviews, reviews, reports from the field, new and enhanced resources on the Forum website, content from our new video podcast series, FORE Spotlights, and much more.
Check back every Tuesday and Thursday for new content.
On July 28, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution declaring a clean, healthy, sustainable environment a basic human right. This landmark declaration has its roots in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, is largely based on a 2021 statement by the Human Rights Council, and could have profound implications for international and environmental law.
This statement was released by Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General:
The Secretary-...
This week the Inflation Reduction Act was approved by the United States Senate. Among other things, this bill is the most substantial piece of climate legislation in US history. “This is huge,” according to the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe: “The United States is historically responsible for 25% of global carbon emissions and its influence outside its borders on technology, on policy, is enormous.” As former Vice President Al Gore said, “It’s been a long...
We're pleased to bring you the recording of this special climate conversation from earlier this summer between Bill McKibben and our co-founder and co-director, Mary Evelyn Tucker.
About Bill:
Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and...
During the first two years of our Spotlights podcast, one of the topics we have covered is the intersection of art, ecology, and spirituality, featuring interviews with Christina Conklin (episode 1.26), Nicole Dixon (ep. 2.8), and Johnna Arnold (ep. 2.18). In case you missed those episodes, it's never too late to catch up on them. Spotlights will feature more artistic perspectives in the next round of episodes for our third season.
You can watch or listen to the episodes below.
An archive of...
Today, we wanted to provide a little tour of the abundance of video resources available here on the Forum site and on our YouTube channel. We hope these collections will be of use to you in your classes and communities.
The topics in our Video section include:
Religion and Ecology is the largest section in our multimedia offerings with a wealth of content spanning from 2004 to the present. Its subsections include Talks by Mary Evelyn Tucker & John Grim; Tucker/Grim Interviews; Tucker Grim Webinars; talks by...
In this episode of Spotlights, Sam reflects on the another successful season of podcast interviews for the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. We have released nearly 100 episodes, featuring a wide variety of scholars, activists, and artists who engage with the sort of issues addressed by the field and force of religion and ecology. We'll take a short break from new episodes for a few weeks, and we'll be back with more interviews and conversations toward the end of August. In the meantime, we hope that...
Today, we're highlighting some of the environmental podcasts we think will be of interest to Forum readers. Some of these may already be familiar, as we've shared their content before, but they're still doing robust work and featuring interesting interviewees, so we wanted to keep them on your radar. And some we list here are new additions to our lists of resources.
Not all episodes concern the intersection of religion and spirituality with environmental issues, but there are plenty in each series...
This week, Spotlights features a clip from our interview with Jason Wirth, PhD, professor of philosophy at Seattle University, Soto Zen priest, and the founder and co-director of the Seattle University EcoSangha. He discusses his idea of “deep social ecology,” which integrates the insights of two ecological philosophies often considered to be in opposition to one another: deep ecology and social ecology. You can learn more about it be reading his article, “Deep Social Ecology.”
Details for the full...
The images shared this week from the James Webb telescope have captivated the world and deepened our engagement with the cosmos around us. Whether we believe in a universe that is designed or one that is randomly originating out of chaos, we can't fail to be moved by this dramatic experience of worlds and galaxies farther away than any resident of planet Earth has ever before seen. And this is just the beginning–we will be seeing many more images and the...
[image: “Buddha and Shoreline, by Nathan Wirth]
This episode of Spotlights features Jason Wirth, PhD, professor of philosophy at Seattle University, Soto Zen priest, and the founder and co-director of the Seattle University EcoSangha. We talk about his capacious engagements with Continental philosophy, Buddhism, ecological thought, indigenous lifeways, and more. We discuss some of his books, including Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great...