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.
News has been traveling around the globe that Buddhist teacher and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh passed away this week at the age of 95. He touched deeply the lives of so many worldwide, including all of us here at the Forum. We have spent these last days deep in appreciation for all he brought to this world.
His 7-day memorial ceremony is currently underway. The full memorial schedule is here, and portions of it are being live-streamed via the Lang Mai YouTube channel. Photos of the past day's ceremonies can be found...
This week's episode of Spotlights features Johnna Arnold, an artist, photographer, educator, and urban farmer based in Oakland, CA. Her work revolves around human beings, the environments we build, and the ways these systems affect our lives. She discusses her personal and professional journey toward the intersection of art and ecology, including a body of photographic prints that work with used motor oil, expressing the dynamics of the Capitalocene. It is extra special to have her on the podcast, since many of our videos (including...
Last Tuesday, Orion Magazine and Yale hosted the second in a series of author conversations to celebrate their new anthology Old Growth: The Best Writing About Trees from Orion Magazine. Guests included Sumana Roy (How I Became a Tree); Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees), and Jessica J. Lee (Two Trees Make a Forest), and the conversation was skillfully moderated by the Forum's own Mary Evelyn Tucker.
Since only the first thousand of the many thousands registered for the event were able to...
This week, Spotlights features a clip from our episode with Dr. Pankaj Jain, Head of the Department of Humanities & Languages and Chair of The India Centre at FLAME University. We talk about the place of animals in Indian religion, culture, and ecology, including questions about vegetarianism, veganism, agriculture, and animal sanctuaries. Details for the full episode are available here.
You can watch the episode below or listen to it here.
An archive of previous episodes can be found here, with audio versions...
Next week, on January 18 at 7pm EST, the Climate Witness Project will be hosting a discussion with scientist Katherine Hayhoe. This virtual event is free and open to all, but you must pre-register here.
From the event site:
The Climate Witness Project is excited to host Dr. Katharine Hayhoe for a discussion of her new book Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Huddle up with friends and colleagues, fellow climate advocates and...
This week's episode of Spotlights features Pankaj Jain, PhD, an internationally recognized academic leader in sustainability, Jain studies, film studies, and diaspora studies. He is the Head of the Department of Humanities & Languages and Chair of The India Centre at FLAME University. We discuss connections between dharma and ecology in Hinduism and Jainism, with particular attention to three books by Dr. Jain, Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability (Routledge, 2011), Science and Socio-...
As we shared last Thursday, the second event of the popular Orion Magazine series celebrating their new anthology, Old Growth, will take place tomorrow, January 11 at 1:00pm EST. It is free and open to all. You can register here. If you missed the first event of the series on September 18, you can find the recording here.
Last week, we shared some information on the authors who will be in conversation, but we wanted to also share some about each of the books and their perspective on and relationship to the trees, to...
On Tuesday, January 11, 2022 at 1:00pm EST, the Forum will co-host another conversation in the very popular online series, “On Trees.” This event is free and open to all, but pre-registration is required. From the event site: The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment and Orion Magazine present a second event in a series to celebrate Orion’s new anthology, Old Growth. “On Trees” will feature a conversation between Peter Wohlleben, Jessica J. Lee, and Sumana Roy,...
This episode of Spotlights features an audio excerpt from a conversation between Sam Mickey and Mirei Takashima Claremon. They discuss the the meaning of freedom and its relevance to contemporary social and environmental issues, concluding with some speculation about what a a transition to a more sustainable and just world might look like. For more information about Mirei's work, you can find the episode she did for the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology podcast here.
You can watch the episode below or listen to it here...
Last week, we lost some very important figures for our world and work—biologists E. O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy, as well as Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
E. O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy were both integral figures to the work of the Forum. E. O. Wilson was a keen supporter of the Harvard conferences ('96-'98) out of which the Forum was born. He spoke at the Judaism and Ecology conference and at the Culminating Conference at Harvard in 1998 titled “Religion, Ethics, and the Environment: An Interdisciplinary...