The Art of Climate Resilience with Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and Bill McKibben

Acclaimed Marshallese activist and artist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner will feature in the final event of our 2022 Global Shifts Colloquium. Jetn̄il-Kijiner is renowned for writing and performing poetry that raises awareness of her people, their way of life, and now, their plight. At approximately seven feet above sea level at its highest point, her country – the Republic of the Marshall Islands – is one of the world’s most vulnerable to climate change. A Climate Envoy for the Marshall Islands Ministry of Environment, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s art speaks to the resilience, needs, and demands of the Marshallese. In a piece written for her infant daughter, “Dear Matafele Peinem,” she asserts, “We deserve to do more than just survive. We deserve to thrive.”

Join us for a conversation with renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben that gets to the heart of Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poetry – a culture born from and tied to an ocean that may very soon drown it; and a people who do not want to leave their home. How will the Marshallese face down an existential threat of sea level rise? What role can art and poetry play in this fight? Can culture be the force that keeps a people together, even if their lands are lost?

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Speaker

Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner is a Marshallese poet, performance artist, and educator. Since 2019, she has served as a Climate Envoy for the Marshall Islands Ministry of Environment. She received international acclaim through her poetry performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. Her writing and performances have been featured by CNN, Democracy Now, The Huffington Post, NBC News, National Geographic, and more. In February 2017, the University of Arizona Press published her first collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Jetn̄il-Kijiner also co-founded the youth environmentalist non-profit Jo-Jikum, dedicated to empowering Marshallese youth to seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home island. She was selected as one of 13 Climate Warriors by Vogue in 2015 and the Impact Hero of the Year by Earth Company in 2016. She received her Master’s in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Moderator

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 his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal.