The effects of climate change range from nearly imperceptible to immediate and undeniable, though the rapidly increasing pace of those changes means the undeniable effects are more and more common across all human experience, no matter what climate you live in. These immediate effects are being felt most acutely in the most extreme regions of the planet--the melting of ice caps, icebergs, and permafrost at the poles, and the rapid loss of coastline, particularly for low-lying areas, which has been reshaping environments bothy physical and social. In 2016, filmmaker and scholar Christina Gerhardt presented "Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise," a survey of small islands being swallowed up by rising sea levels, and the ways these ecological changes are impacting primarily indigenous peoples, and the methods those peoples are developing in response. Professor Gerhardt's talk examines intersections of race, economics, environmental humanities and justice, and indigeneity, all through the lens of a very real, emergent threat to life on Earth.

From the event description:

In "Let Them Drown," the 2016 London Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein called attention, as Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor had done, to the nexus of climate change, (colonial) racism and poverty. But she shifted the spotlight onto the oft-overlooked low-lying island nations. And their current day situation is dire.In Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise, Professor Christina Gerhardt presents the current climate change induced impacts on low lying islands and the solutions being put forward to them, often by the indigenous inhabitants of the islands themselves.

Christina Gerhardt is Visiting Scholar at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California at Berkeley for the 2017-2018 academic year and Associate Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is author of Screening the Red Army Faction: Cultural and Historical Memory (Bloomsbury, 2018); and co-editor of 1968 and Global Cinema (Wayne State UP, 2018) with Sara Saljoughi; and of Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Sixties (Camden House, 2018) with Marco Abel; and guest editor of 1968 and West German Cinema, a special issue of The Sixties 10 (2017). Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD and Center for Contemporary History Potsdam. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Columbia University, and at the Freie Universität Berlin, and taught previously at UC-Berkeley.